Discussion Between Jacques Derrida,
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy
(2004)
JACQUES DERRIDA: Just a personal word of introduction before opening our discussion. First to tell you in my own name to what extent an experience like today’s remains and will remain precious, unique, and inaugural. Sometimes at conferences one or two students get to participate, but the floor is usually reserved for the elders, that is, the professors … Today, our conference has been given over entirely to students, who are all doing remarkable work, who have offered up, each in his or her own way, a series of provocative reflections. It’s really quite unheard-of and, in the end, unforgettable. It’s a truly unique opportunity, something extremely rare …
Second, thinking back to the session yesterday at the Kléber Bookstore where someone asked the question of absence and presence, I remember having said “sometimes those who are absent are more present than those present,” that is, sometimes living alongside someone is the best way, or the worst way, of not paying attention to them and not noticing their presence. Now at the moment when the three of us are appearing together at the same table—and this too has rarely happened, maybe never—I was thinking to myself: this friendship that I hold so dear, like the apple of my eye, if I had lived in Strasbourg, if I had seen them every day, I don’t know whether I would be here … I think that a certain distance, the “good distance” we spoke of yesterday, “the distance that is good [la distance bonne],” has kept us and kept our friendship alive. And I’m afraid of what’s now going to happen. All right, so let me yield the floor right away, because I don’t want to be the first to jeopardize …
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE: First, if I understand correctly, it’s best to remain a little absent, a bit distracted … We had agreed to bring to a conclusion both these three days and what took place here today: the four presentations we have just heard and then others that have been handed out, which, unfortunately, we will not be able to discuss because they were not presented. We had thus agreed to start from there and with a few lingering questions. In particular—I spoke of this very briefly with Jean-Luc in private—with regard to the final presentation and a certain impasse in Being and Time that is the result, in Heidegger, of both a political decisionism (a complicated and complex one at that, since the word Entscheidung does indeed mean decision in German—and especially in the German of the times, the German of Kantorowicz and of Junger, the Gérman of a certain extreme right, which one finds everywhere in Carl Schmitt, for example) and a certain impasse regarding the theme of the people. That’s because if there is death, if there is sacrifice, if there is a “chosen death,” that is, a death not only accepted but claimed, it is, as Kantorowicz puts it very well, “dying for one’s country.”
We thus wondered whether we wouldn’t pick up things there in order to speak a bit of a theme that is common to Jacques and Jean-Luc, namely, infinite finitude. So I’m just throwing out these two questions to see what sense we can make of all this.
JEAN-LUC NANCY: I have to jump in here right away because you just said that the theme of infinite finitude is common to Jacques and Jean-Luc—but you’re leaving yourself out …
PL-L: No, no …
J-LN: Yes, but with you it’s finite infinitude.
JD: Okay, here we go …
PL-L: Yes, if you want …
J-LN: Yes, of course that’s right!
PL-L: No, I didn’t mean that … I meant that I never thematized it like that, and, moreover, I was never very receptive to it …
J-LN: I think there is something here, a certain typology, between the three of us. A typology in which you, Philippe, would be on the side of the tragic, Jacques on the side of the undecidable, and I … I don’t know, maybe on the side of anastasis … And the way each of these three postures affects what is called infinite finitude is no doubt a real question.
But before getting into this, I would like to note that the last presentation we heard, which was very interesting and pertinent in its approach, ended by speaking of Geschehen. By ending with Geschehen, this presentation concluded its interpretation of section 65 of Being and Time by making as if, whether this was its intention or not, there were no reference some ten sections later to this sacrificial death for the people.1 A death that has in fact the very remarkable characteristic of being the only death that assures Dasein access to Geschick, to Geschehen become Geschick and Mitgeschick, while—in what I find to be a very surprising way—just before acceding to the Geschick, we learn that Dasein exposed to its solitary death is “only”—I hope I am not the one introducing this “only” into the text, in any case, I have the impression that there is an at least implicit “only” in Heidegger’s writing—“only” Schicksalhaftigkeit, that is, being capable of…, being susceptible to receiving the blows of destiny, of which its death is a part. But at that moment, we also learn that this Schicksalhaftigkeit is not yet Geschicklichkeit, which can take place only in death in battle for the people, the battle being itself for the cause of the people, and so on. Moreover, we find this sacrificial death later, in Heidegger’s commentary on Hölderlin’s Gérmania. There is here, it has to be said, something that must be thought and rethought. In any case, this cannot be done by holding in abeyance the whole affair that comes later or comes back later.
I don’t want to say this like some kind of schoolmarm. As concerns the inheritance of Heidegger in Derrida, it is clear that the difference between solitary Dasein and Dasein in the Volk cannot but play an enormous role. And that’s because, for you, there is no Volk. Not only is there nothing that resembles this problematic of the people, but you don’t even want to use the word people. It’s one of the words I use, but you—and you’ve told me this more than once—you don’t even want to use it. Just like the word community. The same is true for Philippe, in fact. So from that point of view at least you two are on the same side.
But what I would then wish to add to all of this is the following. Leaving aside the political in the strict sense—even though there is obviously lots of politics, not Nazi politics, in 1927, but far right politics, particularly around this theme of the people and a “sacrificial death for the people”—it could be argued that what guided Heidegger up to this point in his thinking (and, once again, assuming we can separate off an ill-controlled political habitus, that is, as Philippe said earlier, one that remains in a passive attitude, that makes no real decision, that is content just to follow the prevailing current) was the only way he could find to extract the “death of Dasein” from this too possible or too certain impossibility, all the while being still unable to sense it or let it resonate in anything other than a purely negative way. What I mean is this: sensing that if he simply stayed with a Dasein isolated in its being toward death, the whole dimension of history, of the collective, and thus of Geschehen, of Geschick, would vanish, Heidegger, caught up in some sense by the path of his thought, would have been led to think the only possibility capable of propelling Dasein out of its existential solitude, that is, for Heidegger in 1927, a sacrificial death for the people. It would be necessary, obviously, to rethink all of this very carefully. But what I mean here is that if you, Jacques, by insisting on death as you do, by absolutely refusing to think it in any terms that might resemble a “sacrificial death” and thus by not inscribing it in any kind of collective destiny, I wonder if, in so doing, you don’t nonetheless leave open the possibility of another operation, another apprehension, another “modified taking hold,” as Heidegger says, the “modified taking hold” of Uneigentlichkeit [inauthenticity] that would make Eigentlichkeit [authenticity] of this same death. I mean that you always treat it in the same way, as you said earlier, namely, as that of which one must say nothing, of which one can say nothing … And one cannot but agree with you entirely on that. But, at the same time, does not what you call the différance of the instant in the instant and différance in general, and thus the finite character of infinitude (this brings us back to Philippe’s question) make it necessary to think the unthinkable, to think precisely there where one cannot think, namely, that there is something at stake that would have to be distinguished from a dialectical sublation? Something that would have to be distinguished from every kind of resurrection—so, you see, at this point I am willing to sacrifice any anastasis. And this something would have to be distinguished from any tragic possibility, which is really the possibility of still saying something on the basis of …, of still doing something with it … It is the possibility by which philosophy passes into poetry, as Philippe would say. And so, Jacques, is there something for you, at this point, a possibility, or is there nothing?
JD: I don’t know. I find it difficult to answer your question in this form. But let me say two things that will perhaps go in the direction of what you are asking me … The first remark is that, for Heidegger, Dasein is, let’s not forget it, indissociable from Mitdasein, from Mitsein. Indissociable: it’s one and the same breath; it’s two breaths that cannot be dissociated. The question that then arises is the following: How does one dissociate sterben, the dying of Dasein, which is alone in its capacity for authentic being and which is thus, implicitly, the individual, the individual Dasein, from what Montaigne would call comourance [co-dying]? Co-mourants are those who die together, lovers who want to die together. Those who die together and those who die collectively for some cause or other. I don’t know how to treat Heidegger’s discourse on being toward death, his whole description, and then the indissociability of Dasein and Mitsein, and thus the death of the other, whether simultaneous or not, with the problematic of mourning … I just don’t know. What is death for Mitsein, not to mention for the Volk?
J-LN: But that’s just it. It seems to me that what Heidegger says of “the sacrificial death for the sake of the people” answers this question without compromising the solitude of Dasein … Because it’s precisely not a co-mourance, as you put it, as Montaigne puts it, because the co- is in some sense dissolved and subsumed in the Volk. That is, Volk is community, but there’s a part of it that is public, common …
JD: But then why—and this is an enormous, eminently political question—why determine Mitsein as people?
PL-L: In fact, there’s not just the people. I am going to say something very simple that informed readers of Heidegger know: there is not only the Volk, there is also, to determine Mitsein, the word generation. A same generation … that of Jean-Luc and me, and that of Jacques, well, there’s a difference. This has always been for me an enigma, namely, that Heidegger can think in terms of generation … Or else, in a very crude way, one would have to apply this term to age groupings or classes—drafts—in an almost “tactico-military” sense of the term: the class of 1960, the class of 1970. This generation might then be related to the word that was used in military campaigns, Gérman as well as French, to designate people of the same “generation”: “conscripts.” This word conscript was used to refer to “conscription,” that is, to people of the same age …
J-LN: … and “conscription” is “co-inscription” …
PL-L: It’s “co-inscription,” yes, that’s what I meant …
JD: But we are obviously not going to be able to think this problematic on the basis of a general mobilization. Especially since the word generation is one of the words that has always seemed untenable to me: we don’t know what a generation is. Who is of the same generation? Let me tell you an anecdote. Recently La Quinzaine Littéraire asked a number of people, including me, to respond to the question “Who do you think you are [pour qui vous prenez-vous]?” and I had the gumption to try to respond. I responded with the title “Survivre, sursaut, sursis” (“Survival, surprise, suspension”). At a certain moment in this text, I said that we are all survivors in reprieve [en sursis]. Some perhaps a little more than others—me, for example, because of what is called age, illness, and so on. And so I accept being called a survivor—as they often write in the newspapers. But what I won’t accept is being called the “last survivor” of a “generation” of philosophers, thinkers, writers, who are all dead: Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, and so on. As if I belonged to the same “generation” or as if we belonged to the same grouping. I find this revolting, not only because of the question of age—since I am, it has to be said, the youngest of this “generation”—but also and especially because it is not a “generation.” Obviously, we have things in common, but there is no “generation.” I thus hate it when one says that I am the “survivor of the generation of the thinkers of ’68.” And the same is true between Philippe, Jean-Luc, and myself; there is a difference in age, among other things, that prevents us from being of the same “generation.” We are not of the same “generation.” They could have been my students. I have students who are now sixty years old …
J-LN: You were a lecturer [assistant] at the Sorbonne when I was a student. But I never had any contact with you, I don’t know why …
JD: Good thing, too! In any case, the concept of “generation” has no philosophical meaning [sens]. It can have a kind of demographic or sociological meaning, but it has no philosophical meaning. The second remark I would like to make—here again, without knowing whether I am answering the question—is that I have a theory about responses. Well, if not a theory, a quip … It’s that, in responding to someone, whenever one responds well, in a just fashion, to the question asked, it’s of absolutely no interest; it’s a programmed response, an expected response, in short. To respond in a just fashion, one has to respond a bit off topic, a bit to the side. Not just to any side, but just to the side. And so in order to respond just to the side, I would say that, unfortunately for me, what I said about mourning, about death, is terrible. These are totally despairing thoughts, but, in the end, they have to be thought. For death obliges us to think. In facing death, we are obliged to think this [ça]. We can go into a cemetery, stand before the casket of someone we loved, and cry … but we know that there is nothing, that nothing comes back or redounds to the other, and that, in the end, all we can do is keep silent … But then, on the contrary, in my anticipation of death, in my relation to a death to come, which I know will annihilate me, obliterate me completely, there is, beneath the surface, testamentary desire, that is, the desire that something survive, be left behind, transmitted—an inheritance or something to which I myself do not aspire, that will not come back to me, that I will not receive, but that, perhaps, will remain … And this [ça] is a feeling that haunts me not only for what are called works and books, but for every banal, everyday gesture that will have been witness to this and that will keep the memory of this when I will no longer be there. Now I said that this was a part not of death, of the impossible experience of death, but of my anticipation of death. And so, for me, this has always taken on an obsessive character, one that concerns not only, once again, things that are in the public domain, writing, but even private things … I always ask myself whenever I leave a piece of paper at home or write something in the margins of a book—an exclamation mark, for example—Who is going to read this? And what will my children get from this, if they ever read this? Or again, about fifty years ago, when I borrowed from the library at the École Normale Supérieure Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, I—this is a bad habit of mine that horrifies my sons—scribbled some things in the margins of that book … And I found that book again one day when I returned to the École. And all of a sudden I saw things that I had written fifty years earlier in the margins of the Kantbuch. And so people are going to come along one day and ask: What is this? Who did this? This is what? Those kinds of thoughts, what I call testamentary thoughts, which I have tried to link to the structure of the trace—all traces are of a testamentary essence2—have always haunted me. Even if it does not take place, even if it is not received, there is a testamentary desire that is part of the experience of death … But I don’t know if I’ve responded to your question.
J-LN: You’ve responded perfectly well. I would like, however, to add an additional aspect to the question. Namely, in the word exappropriation, I often, most often, have the impression that what one hears being accentuated is only the ex–, as if it were simply the doublet of expropriation. But, since you created the word exappropriation, it’s clearly not just expropriation that you are thinking about but also propriation. So what you just said is, I think, in line with this propriation. That, in the end, is all that matters to me. For I think that, for you, there is a proper, a propriation ever more buried, ever more abyssal, ever more impossible, and, at the same time, possible in this impossibility. It is not simply the expropriation of an activity …
JD: What I wished to say with exappropriation is that in the gesture of appropriating something for oneself, and thus of being able to keep in one’s name, to mark with one’s name, to leave in one’s name, as a testament or an inheritance, one must expropriate this thing, separate oneself from it. This is what one does when one writes, when one publishes, when one releases something into the public sphere. One separates oneself from it and it lives, so to speak, without us. And thus in order to be able to claim a work, a book, a work of art, or anything else, a political act, a piece of legislation, or any other initiative, in order to appropriate it for oneself, in order to assign it to someone, one has to lose it, abandon it, expropriate it. That is the condition of this terrible ruse: we have to lose what we want to keep and we can keep only on the condition of losing. It’s very painful. The very fact of publishing is painful. It departs, one knows not where, it bears one’s name, and—it’s horrible—one is no longer even capable of reconstituting it oneself, not even of reading it. That’s exappropriation, and it applies not only to those things we speak of with relative ease, that is, literary or philosophical works, but to everything, to capital, to the economy in general.
PL-L: I am haunted by this same thing, I have this same—I’m no longer sure what to call it—testamentary or testimonial haunting. For a very long time now, through things read long ago, a very strong feeling has been inscribed, so to speak, in me: that of leaving something, a trace, and, in the end, to transmit … It is something that struck me in the declaration of someone I like a great deal, and it was considered scandalous by … precisely not by you two. It’s a declaration of Malraux’s. He said: “My ambition was to leave a trace somewhere.” And he did not say what kind of trace. I know, however, that there is a very powerful connection here with the anticipation of death, being haunted by death. So I know very well what you mean. I recognize something in what you are saying, as is so often the case. But at the same time, this haunting—and this is to respond to Jean-Luc—can have the appearance of conservation. One keeps something—I’m right now in the process of moving, I know what it means to have kept tons of things. I keep, I keep, I have all kinds of things in closets, in the bottom of drawers … It can be something completely insignificant, but I cannot refrain from keeping, from conserving, and it’s not in order to appropriate it for myself. Absolutely not. I realize this in an exemplary way: this does not belong to me, this no longer belongs to me. It’s there, it’s put in reserve, and I don’t even know for whom it might be destined. It is, so speak, without a proper telos.
J-LN: First, let me say, just to confirm what you are saying: I once threw away all the letters I had been keeping …
JD: Really …
J-LN: … but you’ll see, I regretted it. It was when I was about thirty, maybe thirty-five. It was piling up, it was monstrous, and then I tried to archive, to number things, to classify them … This was before knowing you, maybe just before. And so one day I got rid of it all, telling myself that it was useless, that it served no purpose … But very soon therefore I deeply regretted it. And now, like you, I don’t throw anything away either. Nothing, I mean nothing. Useless pieces of paper, batteries, chocolates … and I don’t know what to do with it all! … Now, if this were a “TV talk show” I would ask you: How do you both understand Spinoza’s line “We feel and know by experience that we are immortal”?
JD: For me, Spinoza is someone I have never understood at all. I have taught him, I know something about him, I can give a course on Spinoza. But—even though he was a Portuguese Marrano, like myself—he is a thinker whose philosophical enterprise is to me the most “foreign.” And so, to know by experience that I am immortal, that … I recall having spoken about this once with a friend, someone all three of us know, in fact. I said to him that, in the end, naturally, I don’t believe in immortality. But I know that there is an I, a me, a living being who is related to itself through autoaffection, who might be a bird and who will feel alive like me, and who might thus say, in silence, me, and who will be me! There will be some living being who will continue to say me and this will be a me, this will be me! I could give other examples. But I don’t take much comfort in this.
J-LN: Spinoza’s immortality …
JD: Maybe. When I am dead, there will be a bird, an ant, who will say “me” for me, and when someone says “me” for me, that’s me. But just to pick up on what the two of you were saying about your papers, I once destroyed a correspondence. With a fierce determination: I tried to reduce it to shreds—it didn’t work; I burnt it—that didn’t work … I destroyed a correspondence I should not have destroyed and I will regret it for the rest of my life. As for the rest—and here we are speaking of the problem of the archive—I’ve never lost or destroyed anything. Right down to the little notes that Bourdieu or Balibar would leave on my door when I was a student saying “I’ll come by later” … Or from Bourdieu, “I’ll give you a call,” and I still have these things—I have everything. The most important things and the most apparently insignificant things. Always hoping, of course, that one day—not thanks to immortality but thanks to longevity—I might be able to reread, to recall, to revisit, and, in some way, to reappropriate all of this for myself. And then I had the cruel and bitter experience—now that all of this correspondence has been archived and filed away, for the most part outside my home—that unfortunately I will never reread these things … Sometimes they send me a letter from my family when the signatory has to be identified, and so I reread that letter, but that is just one out of a hundred or a thousand! And so I know that what I kept is, for me, absolutely lost, though I kept this not for others but also for myself, in order to recall, and thus keep my experience, my memory, my past … That’s exappropriation: I wanted to keep everything in order to appropriate for myself, but in order to keep and appropriate it, it was first of all necessary to put it in a safe place [safe in English in original]. And when one puts something in a safe place, it has to be elsewhere, elsewhere than on oneself. And the safe place is always the least safe place; it is always the place where something is objectified, conserved outside, and thus in the end not safe or protected from anything at all. For example, a part of my archives is in a place in the United States where there are earthquakes every ten years and another part is in some miserable shack where there could be a fire. And so there is no shelter, and I am bereft of the very thing I wanted to keep.
Just one more word about testaments, generations, and filiations: the day I decided to entrust these archives to the outside, it was not only because I had been asked to do so (the archives include all my seminars, lectures, and so on), but also because I came to realize that my children would not be able to publish, to concern themselves with, to take on the responsibility of, these archives. I came to realize that, at home—how can I say this without accusing anyone?—everything might be well preserved in the sense of material security but there would not be, so to speak, any readers. Elsewhere, however, there might be readers of certain seminars, of some of my correspondence—there are many insignificant exchanges of letters and then there are some that might be of interest to some people … But when I recognized—for reasons that I accept and that are understandable—that my sons would not be able to be develop an interest in all these things, I said to myself at that moment that it’s better to give it all away.
PL-L: Let me respond just to the question posed by Jean-Luc—since this has turned into a TV talk show: “What do you think of Spinoza’s line?” Okay, I too have a very complicated relationship with Spinoza, as well as with those who claim to follow him. This line has always touched me very deeply, even though the one philosophical phrase that really irks me is the one we have inherited, as you know, from antiquity, that of the immortality of the soul. To be very crude here, it’s a load of metaphysical bullshit. It means nothing. Yet “we feel and know by experience that we are immortal”—that can happen. It happens. And I say this without wanting to explain it; I say it because it has happened to me. It has happened to me—now that we are revealing secrets—in the experience of love, and in a dazzling way. But I am persuaded it can happen in other ways. If I had such a shock when I received the last writing of Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, it was because, all of a sudden, I recognized this in that title and in that text, even if it remains very enigmatic—and Jacques knows this better than I do. I recognized in what Blanchot calls the instant of my death this experience of immortality. I would be interested today not to recount this but to formulate it.
JD: Just a word, Jean-Luc, to complicate a bit what I said about immortality. It is true that, in the Spinozistic sense, I never feel immortal. That being said, in the sense in which Freud says that no one believes in his or her own death, that even when one is obsessed with being followed at every instant by mortality, there is something here that I cannot believe. In this sense, I feel immortal, in my naïve and unconscious belief—the unconscious does not know death—and so I say, yes, in this sense, I feel something like: “I cannot die!” But this does not contradict the certainty that, one day, I am going to die.
J-LN: No, there isn’t any contradiction, especially since Freud speaks precisely of a belief. I thus cannot believe because I cannot subscribe to a supposed or presupposed knowledge which I know at the same time cannot become a knowledge for me. In this sense, the statement “I believe that I am not going to die!” would mean that I subscribe immediately, spontaneously, and indefinitely to the most elementary feeling of my own existence. And so long as I live, I cannot but subscribe to this feeling, and even a second before dying, I subscribe to it still. That is the way I understand Freud. But it seems to me that Spinoza is speaking of something else. He speaks of a feeling and of a knowing by experience. I don’t know if you hear it in this way, but I would say: I feel it and experience it as the feeling and experiencing of the limit of all feeling and all experiencing. As a result, this is neither a belief nor a non-belief—it’s situated elsewhere. Perhaps this communicates with something else that could no longer be called faith. But, in any case, something that would first be of the order of affect, of affect at the limit of all possible affection, at the very limit of being-affected. And I would say to you this evening that I have the very strong impression that you are situated precisely at this limit and that, at the same time, you push it away. And so you too begin to insist on exappropriation. In your response, you insisted on loss. “To keep, one must lose.” There, I would say, it’s a question of tone, of accent. You, of course, accentuate “one must lose.” I’m not asking you to accentuate “to keep.” I am not trying to get you to admit that, in the end, you reappropriate everything for yourself. But it’s simply this: we are coming close to something that Heidegger wanted to name with the triplet Er-eignis, Ent-eignis, Zu-eignis. That is to say, the appropriating event, which is the de-propriating event, which is also—we might say—the deviant or deliquating event.
I would like to ask you another question, if you don’t mind. A question that you can answer very quickly. It’s something else entirely, but since you spoke of the bird that you will become, I would nonetheless like to know …
JD: What kind?
J-LN: Well, you didn’t specify. If you want, we can decide … How about a humming bird? One has to be kind …
No, earlier, you spoke many times in favor of animals and against “the animal without world.” 3 You insist on the fact that there are animals that mourn, and so on. Earlier you gave us a very impressive list. You talked about everything: love, work, speech. But in doing this, it seems to me that you are nonetheless reestablishing a scale, for you made it quite clear that the ant, for example, is not the same thing as the chimpanzee …
JD: It’s not a scale, it’s a difference …
J-LN: A difference. But what I wanted to ask you in the end is whether, by blurring the difference between the human and all other living beings, you don’t end up reestablishing a difference?
JD: I never wanted to blur the difference between what is called the human and the animal. I wanted to call into question the linear and oppositional limit between the human and the animal in order, on the contrary, to introduce a greater differentiation. I am not so asinine [bête] as to think that the dog is just as much a philosopher as Heidegger. No, I know that there is a difference, that there are many differences, between humans and between humans and animals. My discourse is thus not against difference; it’s against the oppositional limit that would mark out, on one side of the border, the possibility of speech, laughter, economy, clothing, tears, mourning, death—the animal does not die for Heidegger—and, on the other side, neither “as such” nor mourning nor signification nor response … This word response is the operative term here from Descartes to Lacan. The animal can signify, but its significations are reactions and never responses. Both Descartes and Lacan say this: the animal does not have access to the signifier because it cannot respond. It can only react. On this point, Lacan is profoundly Cartesian. That is what I contest. I don’t contest this in order to say that the animal can also respond like the human can. I contest the certainty that the human can respond without reacting, or that the human’s response is a pure response without reaction. There is some reaction in every response … And so, you see, I find that the concept no longer holds, no longer holds up …4