Thinking and thanking form an uneasy couplet. As Nietzsche, the great doubter and relentless interrogator of ingratitude, cautions us in Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, “He who gives a great gift encounters no gratitude [findet keine Dankbarkeit]; for the recipient, simply by accepting it, already has too much of a burden [denn der Beschenkte hat schon durch das Annehmen zu viel Last].”1 It is no coincidence, therefore, that Nietzsche later has Zarathustra say: “Great indebtedness does not make men grateful [nicht dankbar], but vengeful [sondern rachsüchtig]; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm [Nage-Wurm].”2 There is a sense in which the thinking of thanking, and the act of thanking for thinking, are fraught with an irreducible overdetermination. The gift for which we are called upon to give thanks places a double burden on us: the fact of its magnitude (which may be out of all proportion to what we were prepared to receive) and the corresponding debt of gratitude that we come to owe to the one from whom we have received the gift. Perhaps we might say, pace Nietzsche, that the “gift,” when thought in the context of thanking, becomes visible in both its English and its German senses—that is, as a present and as a poison. If Nietzsche’s intuition is correct, our indebtedness also occasions something other than gratitude. It evokes resentment and persistent feelings of revenge, gnawing at us like a worm. There is no doubt about the pertinence of Nietzsche’s sentiment. Yet perhaps we should begin by taking a step back to contemplate specific circumstances that will cast the relationship between thinking and thanking into sharper relief. One such circumstance is the pivotal moment in which a thinker, poet, or artist receives the public honor of a prize and responds to this honor with a speech that records, and thinks through, his or her gratitude.
Delivering a public speech to mark such an occasion makes visible the imbrication of the honoree’s own life and thinking with the life and thinking of an other. This being-with is a fundamental dimension of our being in the world. As creatures who dwell in Mitsein, we also think, speak, and write within more or less visible quotation marks. Even the thoughts that we, in moments of egoic grandeur, call our “own” tend to be mere evocations of other voices that participate in a spectral conversation inside of us. As such, the occasion of a prize speech invites the one whose life and work are being honored to reflect upon, and to make public, the traces of those others who have made the honoree’s life and work what they are. Therefore, a prize acceptance speech also calls into presence the inextricable relation between thinking and thanking, which is to say, the relation between the call issued by an other’s thinking and the gratitude that such an inheritance silently demands. This gratitude of and for thinking hardly can be reduced to the currency of an economic transaction, the mere repayment of an outstanding debt, which, once performed, would lift, from the one who has recorded this gratitude, the burden of debt and guilt (two interlaced concepts for which, as Nietzsche himself well knew, German tellingly employs but a single word, Schuld).3 What is it about contemplating the relation between thinking and thanking in the rhetorical contexts of a prize acceptance speech that sheds new light on a thinking life that is both inherited and created for another time, a time to come, a time that is still to be lived? And—from the perspective of the fragility and radical finitude of the life in which thinking and thanking meet—how do thinking and thanking inflect our relation to the idea of damaged life, possible survival, and modes of living on?
Paul Celan’s 1958 “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” bears the visible and invisible scars of a life lived on, a life of Shoah survival, and a life of mourning the loss of others, including the death of his father and mother, at the hands of the Nazis. Thirteen years after the end of World War II, Celan casts his life as “the efforts of someone who, overarced by the stars that are human handiwork, and who shelterless in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality.”4 The poet’s attempts to locate damaged life and its possible futurities in language and in a language to come require a certain vigilant mindfulness and a relentlessly commemorative gratitude. It is not by chance, therefore, that Celan takes the imbrication of thinking and thanking as his point of departure, reminding his listeners in the opening words of his acceptance speech:
Thinking and thanking in our language are words from one and the same source. Whoever follows out their meaning enters the semantic field of: “recollect,” “bear in mind,” “remembrance,” “devotion.” Permit me, from this standpoint, to thank you.5
[Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben Ursprungs. Werihrem Sinn folgt, begibt sich in den Bedeutungsbereich von: “gedenken”, “eingedenk sein”, “Andenken”, “Andacht”. Erlauben Sie mir, Ihnen von hier aus zu danken.]6
Celan emphasizes the topography of thinking and thanking, giving particular thought to the site (“von hier aus”) from which his thanking emanates. It is from this place, from this standpoint, from this poetic hier, that the thinking of thanking issues forth. He speaks of a thinking and thanking that will come to pass in language, a language that is shared by others, and therefore is multiple—not “in meiner Sprache” but always “in unserer Sprache.” For Celan, to speak, to think, and to thank means to speak with, to think with, and to thank many others. He begins to speak by seeking permission from those others (“Erlauben Sie mir,” permit me) to thank them from that particular precarious place where thinking and thanking intersect. His solicitation is necessitated by the fact that the other can be thanked only when the thinking of thanking has emerged as a site in its own right. The gratitude that comes to pass in the act of thanking thereby is staged in and as a certain doubling: as a form of thanking for the thinking that has led to the prize itself and as a form of thanking the other for enabling thinking as the locus (“von hier aus”) from which thanking can occur.
Through allusion and quotation without quotation marks, Celan records his implicit indebtedness to German mysticism (whose archaic German formulations “Eingedenken” and “eingedenk sein” play a key role in a certain commemorative practice of remembrance and interiorization), to the poetry of Hölderlin (whose 1803 hymn “Andenken” is of special significance to him), as well as to the thinking of Heidegger. By the time Celan delivered his Bremen prize speech, he had been studying Heidegger’s writings, including his lectures on Hölderlin, for several years (at least since 1951, when he read Der Feldweg), and he would continue to read Heidegger’s work, eventually giving a reading in his presence, corresponding with him, engaging in a series of personal meetings with him, and writing a poem, “Taudtnauberg,” about the vicissitudes of a complicated encounter in Heidegger’s Black Forest hut.7 To conjoin thinking and thanking at the outset of his prize speech is also to record, if only through allusion, Celan’s complex debt to a thinker to whom he felt uneasily bound by an opaque and porous band. Throughout his life, Celan felt deeply troubled by Heidegger’s erstwhile alliance with the National Socialist movement and his steadfast refusal to break his silence about it—much less to begin to think through it—after the end of the war. For Celan, the conjunction of thinking and thanking the other is also relevant to a damaged life, whose contours are cast into sharp relief by the poetically and intellectually compelling—even necessary—yet always unsettling gesture of giving thought and giving thanks.
The recalcitrant couplet Denken and Danken, thinking and thanking, evokes a reflection on the life in which the two occur—and other lives that are touched by this life in multiple ways. If Celan’s implicit reference here is to Heidegger’s meditations on what there is to be thought and to be thanked for, the reference is operative on several levels. The two words and concepts, separated only by a vowel, appear as early as Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?,” a lecture that Celan, according to a penciled notation in his amply underlined copy of the book, read in August 1952.8 There, Heidegger thematizes the connection between Denken and Danken in the realm of poetic writing (Dichten), in a way that surely would have caught the attention of a poet. Reflecting on the ways in which being can be thought to be imbricated in the shifting constellation of Dichten, Denken, and Danken, Heidegger suggests that “Danken and Dichten, in different ways, probably stem from primordial thinking, which they require but without being capable of being a Denken in themselves.”9 Heidegger later returns to these concerns in his interpretations of Hölderlin’s poetry, which also are informed by the nexus of Dichten, Denken, and Danken—and which Celan received as a gift from his close friend, the Austrian poet Klaus Demus in 1953—and in the 1951–1952 lecture “What Is Called Thinking?” (“Was heißt Denken?”) that Celan read in 1954.10 In this lecture, Heidegger elaborates on the ways in which Denken and Danken enable each other. He asks: “What is it that is named with the words ‘Denken,’ ‘Gedachtes,’ ‘Gedanke’? Toward what sphere of what is spoken do they point?” Heidegger continues: “Is Denken a Danken? What does Danken mean here? Or does Dank rest in Denken? What does Denken mean here? Is memory no more than a container for the Gedachte of Denken, or does Denken itself reside in Gedächtnis? How does Dank relate to Gedächtnis?”11 By situating thought (der Gedanke) and thanks (der Dank) in the shared etymological ancestor der Gedanc, we also hear echoes of Gedächtnis, or memory, and the Hegelian distinction between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung. The distinction here is between memory as a kind of reflective thinking (a Gedächtnis that relates to Gedanke and Denken) and memory as a nonthinking interiorization (Erinnerung as the mnemonic act of the one who interiorizes, “Er innert”). In Heidegger’s model, Dank is the gift that Denken presents, insofar as something that requires thanks necessarily comes from an other and is given (geben, gegeben) by the other as a gift (Gabe). It is here—in the gift that comes from the other, the gift that reaches us from outside ourselves and requires an acknowledgment of the other—that we are confronted with our own dependence on, and fundamental interrelatedness with, the other. When we experience this thinking form of thanking that the other inspires in us, then—precisely in the act of receiving the other’s gift, the gift that is the other—we also remark upon the ways in which we are called upon by the idea of the other more generally. That is to say, in and through the other we experience our fundamental relatedness to the other as our thinking opens onto the idea of relation itself. In this moment we can begin to think the thanks that are due for the talent with which our existence has been gifted, our personal Begabung that becomes visible in the Gabe when it illuminates the relation of Denken and Danken in the act of Dichten. Heidegger’s reflections on life’s inexorable imbrication of thinking, thanking, writing, and memorializing that dwells in language impose themselves, in an almost spectral way, on Celan as he accepts his prize.
In her lecture on the occasion of receiving the Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt on September 11, 2012, Judith Butler performs her own imbrication of thinking and thanking by reminding her audience of the political significance of Adorno’s famous sentence “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” or, in the published English translation, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (not an unproblematic rendition, as we shall see).12 Without making explicit reference to the genealogy of a legacy, she inscribes herself in a tradition of prize speeches—which, in the modern German context includes, among many others, such illustrious examples as Celan’s Bremen and “Meridian” speeches, Hannah Arendt’s Lessing Prize speech, and, more recently, Alexander Kluge’s Schiller Memorial Prize speech—that employ the rhetorical moment of the prize acceptance speech to place the conjunction of thinking and thanking into syntactical relation with a larger reflection on the life in which this conjunction comes to pass. In Butler’s prize speech, Adorno’s dictum about the right life provides an occasion for reflecting on its connection to some of the themes that have occupied her own thinking, such as the concepts of resistance, the grievability or nongrievability of various lives, the distribution of different lives’ vulnerability, and the plural—and therefore always shared—exposure to precarity. She reminds us that Adorno’s concern embodies “a question that takes new form depending on the historical time in which it is formulated,” while the “historical time in which we live” works to “condition and permeate the form of the question itself.”13 Although we cannot follow Butler’s particular concerns in her Adorno Prize lecture through extensive commentary here, for our present purposes we will allow it to set the stage for our own consideration, with regard to the rhetorical and experiential moment that conjoins thinking and thanking—which is to say, the moment that makes them visible once again in their always already shared gestures—in a reflection on the very life in which they occur.
Let us approach this knot of problems through a series of fundamental questions that are provoked by Adorno’s sentence. What is one to do if one has the feeling that the life in which one participates, or that has imposed itself on oneself, is somehow fundamentally wrong and that this falsity cannot merely be accepted, assimilated into one’s psychical economy as natural or self-evident? This falsity could encompass, among other things, the perpetuation of needless suffering; an unjust and unsustainable global political economy such as late techno-finance capitalism; an ideological formation that mistakes its own untruth as corresponding to reality; an institutional crisis in which the very principles on which the institution was supposedly founded are systematically violated; an unthinking comportment toward the lifeworld in which other life-forms are intentionally or casually denigrated through daily ecocides; or, on a more experience-near level, the realization that our relations to others have been tacitly instrumentalized and ossified by the dominant epistemes of our times, in which our relations to others become ever more visible as one of the three major sources of suffering that Freud identifies.14 To evoke Lenin’s old question, what is to be done in such a situation? Should one fight for change or ignore the falsity one has identified? Or are resignation and acceptance more appropriate responses? For the one who requires clarification on the presumed falsity of his or her life, it may seem attractive to heed the well-known advice rendered in a laconically declarative mode and mood by the lyrical voice of Rilke’s “Du mußt Dein Leben ändern”—“You must change your life,” which we already encountered in chapter 6.15 Saturated with both urgency and potentiality, Rilke’s poetic command, one may now add, implies that such change is in fact possible and that the effects of that change could be measured, at least in principle, independently of the general Lebenswelt, to employ Husserl’s old phenomenological term. In other words, a singular life’s change takes place or at least is made an object of reflection and thus of potential change. The trajectories of a particular life and its lifeworld could then be measured in separation from each other, even as they necessarily intersect and serve as the condition of possibility for each other.
A powerfully contrapuntal mode of reflection can be found in facets of Adorno’s moral philosophy. As a writer meticulously attuned to the movements of Celan’s prose and poetry and as a thinker whose exchanges with Celan elicited, among other things, the wish to write a book about him (a wish never realized), Adorno produces sentences that often seem marked, even overdetermined, by the concerns with damaged life that permeate Celan’s writing after Auschwitz. Adorno’s apodictic statement occurs at the conclusion of thought-image 18, “Refuge for the Homeless,” in part one of his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (which, as opposed to the published English translation, means something closer to “There is no right life within the false one”).16 To be sure, the immediate context of this part of Minima Moralia, composed in American exile in 1944 (with part two added in 1945 and part three in 1946–1947), is the experience of a world-historical darkness. Celan, in his poem “Death Fugue,” written between 1944 and early 1945, would call this experience the “thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech”—foisted on life by Hitler’s National Socialism. Yet Adorno’s concern with the question of life and living also opens onto a more general and conceptual level, one that transcends the experience of both the particularity of his life and its historical specificity, however much this double situatedness can neither be shucked nor ignored by the thinking that it produces.17 For no matter how much a life may wish to change, no matter how much it may wish to heed Rilke’s command to change, even a transformed life cannot transcend its own falsity, or merely propel itself out of this falsity through an act of determined consciousness, because the larger life or lifeworld in which a single life’s change takes place is still predicated upon a fundamental falsity. From that perspective, life cannot carve out a niche for itself, a niche of rightness or goodness in a sea of falsity, the way a beautiful soul, as Goethe would call it, will not succumb to the post-lapsarian darkness and baseness that seem to have befallen life. Among other things, Adorno’s sentence is meant to caution us against what he rejects as “a tone of fresh and cheerful conviction” according to which “if only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be better. I cannot accept this presupposition.”18 To mistake miniscule, superficial change—a merely reformist adjustment of what is—for an actual transformation of the false whole, can be a way, he seems to suggest, not only of creating the false impression that the iron collar of the currently prevailing conditions in principle could be cast off at will, but also of betraying the possibility of a true transformation to come. Such supposed change therefore deserves to be rejected as a premise for any transformative thought and praxis. Yet if Adorno’s well-known statement about false life can be understood not merely as a form of resignation but, on the contrary, as an implicit call to think the conditions of possibility for a reexamination of that very “false life,” it also points, through the negative dialectic it performs, toward the refractory possibility of a “right life,” which itself, however, is not yet determined but rather remains to be thought. This fragile future-directedness of thinking always also subtends the uncoercive gaze, which will not remain demarcated by the present or the past but always also is attuned to its own possible futurity. To witness Adorno worry about the possible impossibility of a right life within a false life is to be reminded of the affirmative nature of negation, for to write a pessimistic text is a thoroughly optimistic act. It is not coincidental that the Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster quotes Valéry’s dictum “Optimists write badly,” then adds: “But pessimists do not write.”19 Such, we might say, is Adorno’s negatively dialectical perspective on the precariousness of living a life and on casting an uncoercive gaze upon that life.
“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” Adorno says. How are we to translate this statement? As we have noted, the standard English translation, by Jephcott, offers: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”20 To be sure, this is one legitimate way of glossing (or perhaps dubbing) this thorny sentence. But Adorno is too exacting a writer for us to remain indifferent to the precision and nuances of his language. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” mobilizes a self-consciously spatial rhetoric (“im,” which is a contraction of the dative form “in dem”) to pursue its thought (“richtiges im falschen”), a rhetoric that is elided in the English translation. After all, at stake in Adorno’s formulation is not simply the possibility of a reversal (according to the terms of which a wrong life could be reversed by being lived rightly) but rather the question of whether, within the context of a larger wrongness or falsehood (what Adorno generally calls life’s Verblendungszusammenhang or broad delusional context), it is possible to demarcate a form of life that differs enough from the wrong life that surrounds and even situates it, to be named a right life at all. It is interesting to note that, for instance, the standard Italian translation of Adorno’s German sentence keeps the philosophical and political emphasis on spatiality alive through the contraction “nella” (“in” plus “la”): “Non si dà vera vita nella falsa.”21 The official Spanish translation, too, maintains the spatial situatedness of Adorno’s reflection: “No cabe la vida justa en la vida falsa.”22 The standard French translation, in turn, is an interesting case because, though it retains Adorno’s “im” by rendering it as “dans,” it is also highly problematic in that it inserts “monde” (world) for “life”: “Il ne peut y avoir de vraie vie dans un monde qui ne l’est pas.” In other words, through its misleading shift from life to world, the French translation acts as if Adorno had written “in einer Welt, die es nicht ist” (“in a world that is not [right or true]”), effectively rendering inoperative the oppositional pair of a right life versus a false life that is so central to Adorno’s argumentation, while introducing another oppositional pair that is not Adorno’s: “vie” versus “monde,” das Leben versus die Welt, life versus world.23
How, then, does Adorno’s “in” come to pass? In what light does the “in” present itself to the uncoercive gaze? Are we to conceive of a particular life (or way of life) that is demarcated from the larger life in which it is nevertheless immersed? What are the contours and conditions of possibility of this demarcation? How would the two lives on each side of this demarcation line, for all their differences, relate to each other? Are the two lives simply at odds with each other, or does each one, through a logic of irreducible supplementarity, stand in need of the other in order to become, precisely through difference, what it “itself” is—so that the “itself” on each side of the divide (and, by extension, “right” and “false”) is no longer only itself? Or would the “in” rather designate a single life, but one that is internally divided into different regions or modes of living? Would Adorno’s “in” imply a previous process of incorporation, the result of which was, precisely, the movement of one life or way of life into another? And if there is no right life “in” the wrong life, as the sentence argues, is there perhaps a right life that is not “in” the wrong life but that relates to the wrong life in a different modality—and therefore ultimately not through the preposition “in” but rather another preposition altogether, yet to be formulated? Why is it that Adorno’s preposition “in” appears to mark the relation between two forms of life at all, rather than a form of life (the right life) in relation to a general falsity, that is not simply identical to a life or a form of life? After all, by simply capitalizing the “f” in the last word of the sentence, the one immediately following the preposition, which would have given us “Falschen” instead of “falschen,” Adorno could have shifted the orientation of the sentence from being a statement about a false life to being a statement about the relationship between a life (the right life) and the general concept or state of falsity as such (“das Falsche”). In other words, he could easily have written “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen” rather than “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” especially since the nominalization of the adjective “falsch” as “das Falsche” is by no means foreign to his critical lexicon. Yet the “in” that Adorno wishes to begin to think calls for a consideration of the relation between (at least) two forms of life, a minimum of two possibilities that, even if only negatively or by way of a negative dialectics, perpetuate the promise of being able to think more than one life at once, more than one way of living a life, more than a mere resignation to (a) false life, which, in order even to become visible as false (rather than as natural, given, and self-evident—and therefore not visible at all), implies the theoretical possibility of a right life, however remote.
One might add that the spatial trope of the “in” lodged within “im falschen” also alludes to the noteworthy spatial trope in the subtitle of the book in which the sentence occurs, namely, “Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben,” which is to say, reflections not on or about damaged life but from or, most literally, out of (“aus”) damaged life. The inverted parallelism between “in” and “aus,” in and out, through which Adorno interlaces his infamous sentence with the book’s title makes itself felt here. What is more, the perspective and directionality of the “aus” suggest a trajectory out of, and therefore potentially away from, that in which the reflections nevertheless always remain situated. Adorno’s “aus” obliquely eschews the position of an implied difference from, or even mastery over something, that the equally idiomatic German preposition “über” (“on” or “over”), which the reader might have expected here, would have denoted.24
One could go further and ask if the “richtige Leben” perhaps is to be understood not as the “right life” but rather as “the good life,” as the Aristotelian tradition might call it.25 Either way, Adorno’s sentence, through its insistence on the “in,” asks us to cast an uncoercive gaze upon it by considering the question as to who or what could possibly make the distinction between a richtiges Leben and a falsches Leben, a right or good life and a wrong life, and according to what criteria. If the sentence “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” originates within the orbit of false life—and how could it not?—what is it that tacitly refuses to render this sentence merely coextensive with the precepts of the wrong life in which it occurs and from which it presumably wishes to depart? Adorno’s apodictic formulation calls upon us to reflect on whether the statement “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen” is true (richtig) or false (falsch) according to the parameters that it itself articulates. For, if it is false, it might be disregarded. Yet if it is true, and if it itself also was articulated within the presumed precincts of false life (das falsche Leben), then it is in principle possible at least to articulate true sentences (richtige Sätze) even within false life. In that case, false life cannot be only or exclusively false.26 What then?
In his September 22, 2001, Frankfurt acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Adorno Prize—eleven years before Butler received hers and forty-three years after Celan’s Bremen prize speech that commences with an allusion to Heidegger’s thinking and thanking—Derrida, himself an astute reader of Heidegger, Celan, and Nietzsche, also reveals his debt of gratitude to the thinking of Adorno. He confides:
For decades I have been hearing voices, as they say, in my dreams. They are sometimes friendly voices, sometimes not. They are voices in me. All of them seem to be saying to me: why not recognize, clearly and publicly, once and for all, the affinities between your work and Adorno’s, in truth your debt to Adorno? Aren’t you an heir of the Frankfurt School?27
[Depuis des décennies, j’entends en rêve, comme on dit, des voix. Ce sont parfois des voix amies, parfois non. Ce sont des voix en moi. Toutes elles semblent me dire: pourquoi ne pas reconnaître, clairement et publiquement, une fois pour toutes, les affinités entre ton travail et celui d’Adorno, en vérité ta dette envers Adorno? N’es-tu pas un héritier de l’école de Francfort?]28
Even though the “response to this will always be complicated, of course, and partially virtual,” Derrida continues by evoking his gratitude—“and for this I say ‘thank you’ once again”—for the fact that, because of the Adorno Prize, “I can no longer act as if I were not hearing these voices.”29 He affirms the relation between thinking and thanking Adorno by confirming that “I can and must say ‘yes’ to my debt to Adorno, and on more than one count, even if I am not yet capable of responding adequately to it or taking up its responsibilities.”30 Delivered only days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the speech, entitled “Fichus,” not only engages a lifeworld in which life has become damaged or even extinct; it also reflects on—again through the implicit imbrication of thinking and thanking—the impossible possibilities of a life to come, a life still in the future and yet already touched by finitude. We might say that here, in the particular moment of thinking and thanking that the receiving of a prize calls into presence, the one who speaks feels closer to his own finitude than he ever has before, yet at the same time further away from that finitude than he ever will be again. The book that Derrida dreams of writing about his complicated debt to Adorno and the Frankfurt School would, he imagines, comprise at least seven chapters, with the first chapter, a comparative reading of the French and German legacies of Hegel and Marx, already consisting of “about ten thousand pages [à peu près dix mille pages].”31 Could we, in turn, imagine Derrida, in the course of his hypothetical book on Adorno, also shedding light on the latter’s sentiment that “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”? Could we imagine Derrida, whose gesture of thinking and thanking Adorno already includes commentary on other sentences from Minima Moralia, also gloss—somewhere in the course of the tens of thousands of pages on Adorno that Derrida dreams of writing—this particular one, even if only indirectly?
To be sure, Derrida, who passed away three years after delivering his Adorno Prize speech, never completed such a work. But perhaps one might say that what a preliminary deconstructive thinking of the problem of a false life entails in fact becomes visible across the entire trajectory of Derrida’s corpus. Let us here focus on two salient ideas or representative moments that may help us to begin to conceptualize the problem of living a false or a right life in a Derridean sense: “living on” and “negotiation.”
As Derrida asks repeatedly in his hundred-page essay from 1979, “Living On: Border Lines,” in a phrase that hauntingly imposes itself on his work like a leitmotif or refrain, “But who’s talking about living?”32 His text, already at odds with itself, splits itself into two bands running parallel to each other on every page, with the upper part of the page occupied by the textual band entitled “Living On.” Here, Derrida meditates on the ways in which the life of a text and the text of a life refer primarily to themselves and simultaneously, in a gesture of radical other-directedness, always disconcertingly to other texts and other languages. Placing into syntactical constellation two narratives by Blanchot (La Folie du jour and L’Arrêt de mort) with Shelley’s last major poem, “The Triumph of Life,” Derrida develops, in the course of a highly self-conscious and vigilant argument that interweaves a series of different conceptual and thematic threads, a notion of life as survival. “Several pairs of quotation marks,” Derrida suggests, “may enclose one or two words: ‘living on’ [‘survivre’], ‘on’ living [‘sur’ vivre], ‘on’ ‘living,’ on ‘living,’ producing each time a different . . . effect.” Pointing out that he still has “not exhausted the list,” Derrida asks us to be “alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word: survivre, living on. Following the triumphal procession of an ‘on,’ they trail more than one language behind them.”33 If there is no one language, no single language that could hope to come to terms with what conjoins living and living on, life and (its) survival, it is because the very question as to who or what among the living and the dead has been authorized by the act of living itself to pose questions about life and its survival, its living on, has been posed and momentarily suspended. The question circulates among both the living and the specters—of life itself, of language, but also of history, perpetually returning to haunt them. As Derrida puts it,
“But who’s talking about living?”: in other words, who can really speak about living? Who is in a position to? Who is already on the other side [bord], little enough alive, or alive enough, to dare to speak about living, not about one life, not even about life, but about living, the immediate, present, even impersonal act of living that nevertheless guarantees even the spoken word that it conveys and that it thus defies to speak on living: it is impossible to use living speech to speak of living—unless it is possible only within living speech, which would make the aporia even more paralyzing.34
If living a life, and speaking of and out of this life, always also is to confront the experience of living on, along with the permanent possibility of the termination of that very living on—that is, the interruption, silencing, or even cessation of survival itself—then the question concerning a right or false living would require that it be understood as a potentially right or false mode of life whose value and interpretability cannot be thought, spoken of, and lived in separation from a consideration of how this life resists its own assimilation into a determined meaning. The question of a false life would have to be framed by a thinking of life as surviving, living on, a survival that finds itself inheriting a haunting set of legacies that cannot be fully understood. The inheritance and multiple legacies of living on cannot be separated from a certain fundamental mode of reversal that permeates that inheritance. This relentless unworking of apparently self-identical structures of living and of life is performed in the name of something else, the otherness of a life that is unnamable and nevertheless always yet to come. To think and to thank this otherness we call a life would mean coming to terms with an as-yet-unnamable futurity of living on.
When seen from this perspective, it is perhaps no accident that Derrida, only about a year and half before his own death, returns to the question of living on and its relation to the legacies of finitude one more time. In his final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign,” he speaks of finitude—conceived as an imbrication of the living and the dead—as a kind of “survivance.” If Derrida mobilizes an unusual, even idiosyncratic term here, it is because, in his wish to think “a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative,” he prefers “the middle voice ‘survivance’ to the active voice of the active infinitive ‘to survive’ or the substantializing substantive survival.”35 Survivance, then, should be understood “in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (überleben or fortleben, living on or to survive, survival)” primarily something that is superior or above life or even “something extra” added to life. As Derrida writes,
No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which are detached, identified, and opposed what we think we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to some life properly so-called. It [Ça] begins with survival. And that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal; that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me that is called to survive me and that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor. Not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life.36
According to this logic, the question of my survival or survivance is always also a question posed to, for, and by the other, the other or otherness that outlives me and to which I relate, already before my actual death, as that which will outlive me, survive me—already in life, during my lifetime. Life here is no mere property, no mere possession held by the living or, more precisely, by those who, for the moment, are living on; rather, life unfolds on what may be termed a groundless ground, a treacherous terrain that demarcates life’s radical vulnerability, exposedness, and dependency on an unaccounted-for survivance that is always predicated upon the other as the survivor of me. In this survivance, the other survives me even before my death, and, as such, it is the other that countersigns the very possibility of my living and my life. In fact, it is as though the structure of survivance did not require me to be present for it to be operative—it is at work or sets itself to work, as Derrida reflects, “whether I am there or not.” Survivance makes itself felt; it beckons and is itself called forth. Whatever the question of leading a right life or of living in a right manner may demand of me, it will have been formulated within the experiential and conceptual space of this precarious survivance.37
A complementary perspective on the question of living a life, a life that is survivance, rightly or falsely—and of living on while thinking and thanking this life as survivance—is opened up by Derrida’s insistence, throughout much of his later work, on the significance of the concept and practice of “negotiation.” As becomes evident for instance in a 1987 interview conducted by his then-students at Yale, Deborah Esch and Thomas Keenan, “negotiation” comes from “neg-otium,” meaning not-ease, not-quiet, no leisure, pointing toward a restlessness or unease that will impose itself always one more time.38 If the later Derrida prefers the word “negotiation” to “more noble words,” even though it is “no more perfect and no more univocal out of context than any other” and even though the mobilization and usage of “negotiation” itself demands to be negotiated, it is because there is “always something about negotiation that is a little dirty, that gets one’s hands dirty . . . something is being trafficked, . . . relations of force.”39 To the extent that negotiation refuses to disguise anxiety with nobility, and to the extent that it involves compromise and an equivocal purity-impurity, it can be said simultaneously to be both “more mediocre” and more unexpectedly disclosive than many other terms. When considering the question pertaining to a right or a false life, to a living on and the multiple living legacies that are implied in the question, this living also needs to confront its own “impossibility of stopping, of settling into a position. Whether one wants it or not, one is always working in the mobility between several positions, stations, places, between which a shuttle is needed.”40 If, as Derrida argues, one “must always go from one to the other,” then negotiation is inexorably inscribed in “the impossibility of establishing oneself anywhere.” For him, this negotiation of even the nonnegotiable, which touches, within the precincts of moral philosophy, on the relation between the categorical and the hypothetical imperative, also “is a feeling, an affective relation I have to myself of being someone who cannot stop anywhere.”41 According to this logic, one “cannot separate this concept and this practice of negotiation from the concept of the double bind, that is, of the double duty.” This is so because there is “a negotiation when there are two incompatible imperatives that appear to be incompatible but are equally imperative. One does not negotiate between exchangeable and negotiable things. Rather, one negotiates by engaging the nonnegotiable in negotiation.”42 In other words, negotiation in the strong sense is not oriented toward any means-end calculation, much less an operation performed under the dictates of what Adorno and Horkheimer memorably reject as instrumental reason, in which, under the calculative pull of pure instrumentality, reason itself may emerge as profoundly unreasonable, but precisely, and therefore all the more fatefully, in the name of reason. On the contrary, the without-rest that negotiation names cannot be a program to be followed by the living, a living suspension of certain imperatives and precepts that would allow a thinking of the Husserlian epoché to transform, within the space of a suspension, reflective experience into understanding.
Does not Derrida’s insistence on life as living on and as negotiation also touch upon the status of the “in” or, better, the “within”—the relation of something or someone being both and at the same time with and in an other—housed so precariously and provocatively in Adorno’s “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”? If the possibility of thinking, speaking, or, indeed, dreaming of a richtiges Leben—and of giving thanks for it in the register of philosophical thought or of poetic speech—is not a priori foreclosed by the conditions of the wrong life in which it is articulated, then perhaps the kind of feeling of life, the Lebensgefühl, associated with a thinking that relentlessly confronts its own limits in the name of an unarticulated otherness that is yet to come, is one in which the borders between inside and outside, between the contours of the right life and those of a wrong life, are perpetually negotiated. The challenge then no longer would lie primarily in being able to tell a right life from an ostensibly wrong life, or in ascertaining the impossibility of living a right life within that wrong life, but rather in recognizing and affirming the survival of life itself, of life as life, of living as living on, precisely in the kind of restless and vigilant negotiation that living itself occasions. The question of the right life would then have to be renegotiated and rearticulated with every new historical and personal situation, with every uncoercive gaze cast, and with every new way of feeling life, that is, with every new act of thinking—within damaged life—a thankful yet precarious survival, however improbable.
The question concerning the right life and, indeed, of living as such, always touches upon the question of the prize. The prize celebrates a life and its trajectories thus far, but it also anticipates a mourning to come—a death that is yet to occur yet has already inscribed itself silently into the very commemoration that the bestowing of a prize upon a life occasions. The prize, as a mode of temporary survival that is also a memento mori, interweaves the thinking of life with the thinking of finitude.
The ceaseless negotiation of the right life and its anticipated commemoration, possible only in its impossibility, is the price we are asked to pay, yet also the prize we stand to receive. Is it a mere etymological coincidence that, in both modern German and French, there is only one word for the contemporary English terms “price” and “prize” (der Preis and le prix)? Will not the negotiation of what we call life ultimately have been a matter of thinking, and giving thanks for, this uneasy prix, this unsettling Preis?