Prologue: Salut—A Spectro-Poetics?
1. Derrida’s thoughts regarding “the world” cannot be separated from a criticism of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Bound up with a Christian heritage, rooted in Roman Latinity, globalization refers to “a certain oriented history of human brotherhood” that views the “globe” as a marketplace. See Jacques Derrida, “Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, edited and translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 375. A more detailed discussion, which is not possible here, would have to take into consideration Derrida’s use of mondialisation (1993); worldwide-ization, mondialatinisation (1996); and altermondialisation (2004). For cosmopolitanism, see Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée, 1997), translated by Mark Dooley as “On Cosmopolitanism,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2016); Le droit à la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique (Paris: Galilée, 1997). Derrida’s late writings shift emphasis from the universalizing, ontological, cosmological import of “the world” to a thinking of “world” in relation to death and singularity—to the death of the other. Also see Jacques Derrida, Surtout, pas des journalistes! (Paris: Galilée, 2016), originally published in English as “Above All, No Journalists!,” in Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 24/62, 37–38/68–69, 49–50/74–75, 74/90.
2. For Derrida’s remarks on death, see Jacques Derrida, “The Three Ages of Jacques Derrida,” interview with Kristine McKenna, LA Weekly (November 8–14, 2002), and Jacques Derrida [with Maurizio Ferraris], “Il Gusto del Segreto,” edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Rome-Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 1997); A Taste for the Secret, translated by Giacomo Donis (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 88.
3. In Aporias, we note perhaps the first appearance of the phrase “nothing less than the end of the world, with each death” (A 131/75). Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault’s introduction to The Work of Mourning, “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning,” should be credited for anticipating and bringing to our attention this “end of the world.” (No doubt, Derrida picked up on this connection in the French edition, insofar as he chose it for the title of the book.) The death of the friend, they write in the introduction, hits us each time “like the end of the world” (15). Quoting Derrida, the editors remark that Althusser’s death “takes away the world itself” (15). “In ‘each death’ there is an end of the world,” thus, they further note, “the world is lost” (15). “With each first death, the whole world is lost” (15).
4. Derrida refers to salut as a “strange word” also in “TA” 39/xl.
5. As Derrida writes in “Faith and Knowledge,” the history of the word “religion” would in principle forbid every non-Christian from using it (FK 47/36). For a superlative, detailed examination of “Faith and Knowledge,” see Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
6. Jacques Derrida, “. … … ,” Les Cahiers du Grif 3, no. 1 (1997): 131–166, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as “. … … ,” in The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 165–188. This text later appeared in abbreviated form in CFU.
7. In H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … Derrida refers to the two saluts as “the salut that salutes and the salut that saves [le salut qui salue et le salut qui sauve]” (H. C. 67/69). In “How to Name” he describes the relation as “the two saluts salute each other from near or afar, the one as well as the other one operating and co-operating within the other that remains nevertheless apart [le deux saluts se saluent de près ou de loin, l’un comme l’autre, l’un opérant et co-opérant dans l’autre qui reste pourtant à part]” (CN 185/194).
8. I carried out an initial investigation into the relationship between Derrida and Nancy concerning terms related to salut in “Salut-ations” in my Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
9. Jacques Derrida, “Comment nommer,” in Le poète que je cherche à être, edited by Yves Charnet (Paris: La Table Ronde/Belin, 1996), 184, translated by Wilson Baldridge as “How to Name,” in Michel Deguy, Recumbents: Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 194.
10. In “Le temps des adieux,” Derrida refers to salut as a synonym of “the ambiguous word adieu” (“TA” 38/xi).
11. On at least three occasions—in “How to Name” (1996), “A Time for Farewells” (1998), and Rogues (2003)—Derrida expressed his wish to separate and keep dissociated the two senses of salut.
12. Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 105.
13. This modifies slightly Michael Naas’s translation of this passage in Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 272.
14. In “Les temps des adieux,” in which Derrida calls “this ambiguous word ‘adieu’ (synonym of another equivocal word “salut”) (“TA” 38/xl, trans. mod.), he nicely describes the relation between adieu (farewell) and au-revoir (until we meet again) thus: “Always and forever, ‘farewell’ and ‘goodbye, until we meet again [l’adieu et au-revoir]’ will continue to haunt each other [hanter l’un l’autre]. One will always remain the specter of the other, spectrality itself” (45/xlvi, trans. mod.).
15. Using the same language in “Les temps des adieux,” Derrida calls for “an other salut [un autre salut]” (“TA” 27/xxviii, trans. mod.) and “an other form of adieu [une autre forme d’adieu]” (37/xxxviii).
16. A thorough discussion of the phantasm would require another project.
17. I am here using the translation of “How to Name?” provided by Garry Sherbert and Christopher Elson in their admirable In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida, and Salut (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017). Regrettably this remarkable volume, whose editors I salute and whose book I heartily recommend, came to my attention very late in the process of the preparation of my manuscript. “How to Name?” demonstrates the indispensable role of the poetry of Michel Deguy for Derrida’s emphasis on the other salut. Deguy’s poetics is engaged in the reassessment and reconfiguration of the role of the poet. Deguy’s poetics of salut, not satisfied with merely naming and saving but also calling, is assigned to a new task, a new poetic act.
18. For selected examples of this formulation, see “vive-et-morte, survivante [alive-dead, living on]” (Par 200/189) and “mort-vivant-survivant [dead-alive-surviving]” (CN 201/215). In Demeure—Maurice Blanchot the survivor is described as “living-dead [mort-vivant],” while in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say, we encounter “la survie du mort vivant [translated as the afterlife of the living dead]” (H. C. 136/154).
19. This book will not be the book that at one time I had hoped to write. Circumstances changed it into another entity. Its dedicatee deserved the most elegant prose, yet this writer’s anguish forced him to settle for what he could manage.
Chapter 1. The World after the End of the World
1. Portions of this chapter were first presented at the fourth Derrida Today conference held at Fordham University, New York on May 30, 2014.
2. Derrida specifically leaves the last line of Celan’s poem, “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen,” in German. A discussion of this line also appears in the following works of Derrida: Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Béliers. Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003); “Rams,” translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002–2003), edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010); The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 2, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” translated by Rachel Bowlby, in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 180–207; revised English translation as “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” in Sovereignties in Question (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); expanded French version “Poétique et politique du témoignage,” in Derrida, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2004), 521–539; and “Comment ne pas trembler,” Annali della Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Fondation Adami), vol. 2 (Milan: B. Mondadori, 2006).
3. See Ginette Michaud, “Juste le poème, peut-être (Derrida, Celan),” Les Lettres Romanes 64, no. 1–2 (2010): 3–47; 40. This article was collected in Derrida, Celan. Just le poème, peut-être (Paris: Hermann, 2017).
4. See Michael Naas, “Lifelines,” Epoché 10, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 221–236, and Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Rodolphe Gasché, “De-closing the Horizon,” in Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Ginette Michaud, “Singbarer Rest: Friendship, Impossible Mourning (Celan, Blanchot, Derrida),” Oxford Literary Review 31 (July 2009): 79–114, and “Juste le poème, peut-être (Derrida, Celan),” Les Lettres Romanes 64, nos. 1–2 (2010): 3–47, both collected in Derrida, Celan. Just le poème, peut-être (Paris: Hermann, 2017); J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Remains,” in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Peggy Kamuf, “From Now On,” in To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and “Teleiopoetic World,” Sub-Stance 43, no. 2 (2014): 10–19.
5. These must be considered merely as markers, in order not to fall into the trap of a developmental, historical narrative of the world.
6. My “account” is indebted to Rémi Brague, La sagesse du monde. Histoire de l’expérience humaine de l’univers (Paris: Fayard, 1999), translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan as The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
7. Hesiod Theog. 738.
8. Heraclitus DK 22 B1, 7, 53, 64, 66, 80, 90.
9. Empedocles DK 31 B13, 14.
10. Jeremiah 10: 16.
11. Pliny HN 2.3.4.
12. The first Platonic appearance of the word kosmos is in Gorgias 508a3.
13. Before the Timaeus, the term kosmos remained ambiguous and was far from the only one used by Plato to name the world. We find the terms holon (“all”) and ouranos (“heavens”) that are occasionally affirmed as synonyms and employed for one another. For holon, all (Lysis 214b6), ouranos and kosmos are used interchangeably in Statesman 269d, Timaeus 18b3. In the Timaeus itself, all these words are used, with all their ambiguity. To holon appears in 63a5. But does it only mean “the world” or the collection/entirety (ensemble) of things that make up the heavens (63a8)? Kosmos can mean “order” (29e4) or play on the sense of finery, jewelry (40a7). Ouranos can mean the celestial vault in which is contained all that there is. To pan is the most frequent term. It is not clear whether it is a matter of this world, this sky, or still the whole: tode to pan, to pan tode, pan tode, or simply tode (Philebus 28c4. Cf. Aeschylus, Agamemnon v. 160). The latter occurs in Philebus, in which Socrates speaks of peri toude on kosmon legomen, “this thing that we here call cosmos.”
14. For further details, the reader is referred to Rémi Brague’s Aristote et la question du monde. Essai sur le contexte cosmologique et anthropologique de l’ontologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), an extremely rich and detailed account and analysis of the notion of the world, from which I have benefited.
15. See Juan Manuel Garrido’s fine article, “Without World,” CR: The Centennial Review 8, 3 (Winter 2008): 119–137; 121, where he wants to consider world “in itself,” preceding all horizon, finitude, selfhood. That is, a “world other with respect to the lived world” (120). Cited further parenthetically in the text.
16. If there has been a contract or an agreement over millennia for there to be a “world,” if there has been a ruse to make as if there is a “world,” perhaps one justification to go along with this ruse—but not in the name of “the world”—would be for the sake of facilitating communication, exchange, economic and social progress for those who would not have access to them, for the sake of supporting institutions resisting a homo-hegemony, for the sake of political interventions beyond the nation-state, or for the sake of juridical reasons such as countering and prosecuting the so-called “crimes against humanity.”
17. Cf. “Before being, I follow you [avant d’être, je te suis]” in Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006); The Animal That Therefore I Am, translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
18. I will discuss portions of this preface in some detail as it still remains officially untranslated and requires in-depth commentary.
19. Rodolphe Gasché, “De-closing the Horizon,” in Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 318.
20. Cf. Gasché, 318.
21. In “Teleiopoetic World” Peggy Kamuf argues that Derrida enlists teleiopoesis “in the deconstruction of the idea of a totalizable, unified world” (15) and eloquently demonstrates that each engagement with Celan’s line “deconstructs the very idea of a unified, totalized, reconciled world” (16). The world, then, is always a “deconstructible world” (14). Kamuf’s rich and perceptive piece concentrates more on a reading of Celan’s line “Die Welt is fort, ich muss dich tragen,” whereas this chapter focuses on “world” and its future.
22. From Of Grammatology (1967) to The Truth in Painting (1978), from Signéponge (1988) to Khôra (1993), from Mal d’Archive (1995) to Artaud le Moma (2002) and his last seminars, Derrida has always been very interested in the thought of the abyss and the mise-en-abîme, placement in the abyss. See, for example, Of Grammatology and The Truth in Painting. A treatment of the notion of abyss (l’abîme) throughout Derrida’s work would require detailed elaboration.
23. The question of ground (Grund) is raised throughout German philosophy from Kant’s reaction to Wolff in the first Critique, to the German Idealism of Fichte and Schelling and to Schopenhauer’s 1813 thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Early on in Being and Time, as Heidegger explicates the components of the term “phenomenology,” he remarks about the second part that “logos as legomenon can also mean ground, ratio” (SZ 34/32). In §58 of Being and Time he writes that Dasein is as thrown ground by projecting itself onto possibilities into which it has been thrown. It has been released (entlassen) from the ground so as to be as the ground (SZ 284). It should be noted that Heidegger displays reservations about viewing being as the ground of beings. The meaning of being, he writes, is not the “supporting ground of beings [‘Grund’ des Seienden].” Ground becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is the abyss (Abgrund) of meaninglessness (SZ §32 152). This view can be supported by referring to Heidegger’s Nietzsche (written in 1939), where he states that Being is the rejection of the role of grounding. Renouncing all grounding, “it is abyssal [ab-gründing]” (NII G 252/niv E 193).
In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928) Heidegger traces the appeal to ground back to Aristotle. In Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Heidegger explains, to “understand” something is to know the grounds for something: “this reason is the aitian, the ground, the cause [Ur-sache] of the thing” (Book I, II, 71, b9ff.). Heidegger further comments that in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (VII, I, 1028a, 36ff.) explanatory knowledge relies on archē, beginning, or departure (GA 26 136/110).
In the thirteenth session of the lecture course entitled The Principle of Reason, Heidegger explains that since Grund is the translation of ratio, this means that ratio has passed over into Grund. In the “Address” appended to this lecture course, Heidegger adds: “being is experienced as ground/reason [Grund],” which is interpreted as ratio, an account (GA 10 210/129). Derrida quotes extensively from this lecture course in the second volume of The Death Penalty seminars. Commenting on Der Satz vom Grund, Derrida writes that Grund can also be translated as “foundation or principle or axiom (Grundsatz)” (DP2 207/152). Derrida notes “the serious play” with Satz, which has several meanings, such as “the proposition that is put forth,” and “the being that is ventured (gesetzt), the being that is posited, wagered, etc.” and “the leap (Satz, also Sprung), discontinuity, the leap from the abyss or into the abyss (Abgrund)” (DP1 207/152). Heidegger, Derrida writes, believes that being should be understood as “ground [fond] and not as ratio or cause (Ursache) or rational grounding (Vernunftgrund) or reason (Vernunft), but as an assembling that lets the things before us be” (207/153). It is “on the basis of a thinking of logos, of legein as gathering” that this is embarked upon (207/153). Heidegger views Western history as that which thinks being as ground, a ground that is not a “causal and objective grounding” but “a ground of the ground, thus a ground without ground, a Grund that is also an Ab-Grund” (208/153). This ground is a ground underlying the ground; it is not a firmament, but rather abyssal. If Being is Reason, Being (Sein) and reason (Grund) are “the Same (das Selbe). Thus, “Being = Ab-Grund, abyss, both reason and without reason” (208/153). Therefore, reason is without reason. “It rests on itself, that is to say, on nothing […]. In so far as it grounds, being has no grounding, it is without ground [sans-fond] (Abgrund)” (208/153). “What grounds [fonde], the grounding [le fondement], is necessarily ungrounded [infondé]” (208/153). Derrida interpolates his own endorsement of this view of foundations when he adds that “the positing (Setzung) of something [a State, of a law, or a constitution] is a leap since it is a matter of positing what was not there” (208/153). Hence there is a “relation of affinity” between Satz as proposition and Satz as leap (208/153). “Being reposes without repose since it rests on nothing that is” (209/154). “It is supported by no foundation, since it is a ground without ground [fondement sans fondement] (both Grund and Abgrund, Abgrund Ab-grund). The foundation founds only by remaining, for its part, unfounded (209/154).
Contributions to Philosophy (written during 1936–1938 but not published until 1989) offers a further glimpse. In Beiträge Heidegger refers to “Beyng [Seyn] as the ground in which all beings first come to their truth” and the ground in which beings are submerged (abyss) (GA 65 77/61). In fact, beyng essentially occurs in the manner of grounding. For Heidegger, the abyssal ground [Ab-grund] is the originary essential occurrence of the ground [Grund] (379/299). Moreover, time-space is grasped as abyssal ground [Ab-grund] (379/299).
24. On ground and the abyss, see my “Dying Alive,” Mosaic 48, no. 3 (September 2015): 15–26, and “Calculus” in Deconstructing the Death Penalty, edited by Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Marie Straub (New York: Fordham University Press): 139–155. What concerns me here is the rethinking of the ground in terms of the abyss.
25. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), where he writes that the abyssal ground is the originary or the first essential occurrence of the ground (GA 65 382/302). In his second major work, Heidegger further notes that the abyss is the originary unity of time and space. Time-space is grasped as abyssal ground (Ab-grund) (379/299). Also, see the discussion of the “abyssal character of Being as appropriating event [die Einzigkeit de Abgründlichkeit des Seyns als Ereignis],” in Besinnung (1938/39) (GA 66 88).
26. “The abyss is not the bottom [le fond], the originary ground (Urgrund), nor the bottomless depth (Ungrund) of some hidden base” (BSI 443/334). “The abyss, if there is an abyss, is that there is more than one ground [plus d’un]” (BSI 443/334). “More than a single single; no more single single [Plus d’un seul seul]” (BSI 443/334).
Chapter 2. Safe, Intact: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity”
1. See recent publications by Jean-Luc Nancy, Tombe de sommeil (Paris: Galilée, 2007), translated by Charlotte Mandell as The Fall of Sleep (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), Identité (Paris: Galilée, 2010); Partir. Le départ (Paris: Bayard, 2011), and most recently Exclu le juif en nous (Paris: Galilée, 2018).
2. Hent de Vries finely distinguishes the differences between Derrida and Nancy, noting “nuances in vocabulary, tonality, and so on” but also “a difference in philosophical and theologico-political temperament” that reveals “a more substantial disagreement” between them about the deconstructibility of concepts and “the possibility of a deconstruction of Christianity.” See Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 205.
3. References to the two aspects of salut in Derrida date back at least to Jacques Derrida, “Avances,” in Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan. Sur Platon (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 11–43, further developed in several texts since 1996. “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida [with Geoffrey Bennington] (Paris: Seuil, 1991, 2008), translated by Geoffrey Bennington as “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Seuil, 1996), translated by Samuel Weber as “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ within the Limits of Mere Reason,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Demeure—Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg as Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), published with a translation of Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death; “Prière d’insérer,” in Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), translated by Christine Irizarry as On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
4. On auto-immunity, see Jacques Derrida and Micaela Henich, “Lignées” (Paris: William Blake & Co., 1996), written in 1991, published in 1996; “Avances,” in Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan. Sur Platon (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 11–43; “Faith and Knowledge”; Spectres de Marx; Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), translated by George Collins as Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 1997); Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le «concept» du 11 septembre. Dialogues à New York (octobre–decembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 144–152, translated by Giovanna Borradori as Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 94–99.
5. The clause “safe, intact” appears twice in Derrida’s “Fors. Les mots anglées de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” in Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), translated by Richard Rand as “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): (1) when he writes that the process of incorporation preserves a certain topography “safe, intact [sauve, intact] untouched by the very relationship with the other” (26/xxii) and (2) where Derrida recalls that an English word—“mortgage”—has not stopped haunting him throughout his reading, “coming back safe, intact [revenant sauf, intact]” (53n/xxxvifn2). The translation reverses the order of the words.
6. See Michael Naas’s exemplary Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
7. Émile Benveniste, “Le sacré,” in Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, tome 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 179–207; 183–184, translated as “The Sacred,” by Elizabeth Palmer, in Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973), 445–469; 448–449.
8. The word “intact” appeared in Derrida’s work from very early on, from Of Grammatology to later texts such as Le toucher. See OG 308/215; WD 298/200; Diss 137/111, 317/259, 360/297; Psy 74/60; PM 107–108, WA 130; LT 92. It has consistently signified what is “whole, complete, unimpaired, without damage.”
9. In Papier machine Derrida describes “this strange word” immune as “synonymous to a certain degree with ‘safe [sauf]’ and ‘unharmed [indemne],’ even with sacred and saintly (helig, holy), to put this argument in an important relation […] with the logic of immunology and auto-immunology [auto-immunitaire].” See Jacques Derrida, Papier machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 183n; Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, edited and translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 269fn9.
10. For informative treatments of Le toucher, see J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 245–305; Geoffrey Bennington, “Handshake,” in Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 65–85; Martin McQuillan, “Toucher I: (The Problem with Self-Touching),” Derrida Today 1, no. 2 (2008): 201–211, and “Toucher II: Keep Your Hands to Yourself Jean-Luc Nancy,” Derrida Today 2, no. 1 (2009): 84–108.
11. See note 14 in this chapter for Nancy’s comments on “the untouchable.”
12. For other discussions of resurrection by Nancy not discussed here, see “Résurrection de Blanchot,” in Déc 135–146/89–97.
13. Nancy refers to Freud’s Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1950), 2: 2, where the principal prohibition is against touching.
14. The Untouchables (Dalit): “ground,” “suppressed,” “crushed,” “broken to pieces” (Sanskrit). First used by Jyotirao Phule in the nineteenth century, historically associated with Hindus, the term Dalit refers to those who pursued activities and held occupations considered as “polluting” and ritually impure among the Hindus, such as those involving butchering and leatherwork, and removal of refuse, animal carcasses, and waste. They were segregated and banned from full participation in Hindu social life and consigned to work as manual laborers cleaning streets, latrines, and sewers. Note Derrida’s disagreement in Le toucher on page 53 (LT 93n).
15. On partance, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Partir—Le départ (Paris: Bayard, 2011).
16. Interestingly, the description that Nancy provides of a dead person uncannily fits Derrida’s description of a specter. At first, Mary Magdalene does not recognize Christ, for, as Nancy explains, a dead person (un mort) “no longer properly appears” (NMT 48/28). It is “the appearing of an appeared and disappeared [l’apparaître d’un apparu et disparu” (48/28). “He is the same without being the same, altered within himself [en lui-même]” (48/28). I discuss Nancy’s reading of Blanchot in my “Thomas the Marvelous: Resurrection and Living-Death in Blanchot and Nancy,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 1–16.
17. Jacques Derrida, “Avant-propos,” in CFU 9–11.
18. On the whole, the appearance of the word “intact” in Nancy’s writing seems to confirm the signification “firm, whole, untouchable.” For example, in “Sur le seuil” in Les muses (1994), discussing Caravaggio’s model for Mary, a woman drowned in the river Tiber, in the painting The Death of the Virgin, Nancy writes: “ce corps est ferme, entier, intact dans son abandon/this body is firm, whole, intact in its abandon” (105/59). In the “Peinture” chapter of Le sens du monde (1993), Nancy associates the untouchable with the intact. He writes that painting separates the space between intactness and touching: “Que la vue touche à la limite, qu’elle touche à sa limite, qu’elle se touche intacte. La peinture est toujours sur le seuil, elle fait seuil de l’intact et du toucher—de l’intact et du toucher de la lumière et de l’ombre … Le clair et l’obscur […] demeurant pourtant infiniment intacts” (131). // “So that the view should touch the limit, that it should touch its limit, that it should touch itself intact. Painting is always on the threshold. It makes up the threshold between intactness and touching—between the intactness and touching of light and shadow. … The clear and the obscure […] nonetheless remain infinitely intact” (131/82). He writes, further, “Dans le toucher, dans toutes les touches du toucher qui ne se touchent pas entre elles […] les deux côtés du sens unique ne cessent de venir l’un à l’autre […] touchant à l’intouchable, intact” // “In touching, in all the touches of touching […] the two sides of the one sense do not cease to come each toward the other […] touching on the untouchable, intact, spacing of sense” (132/83). In Corpus (2000), “intact” is used alongside “untouchable.” Nancy writes that all bodies are caught up in a network of signification and “no ‘free body’ floats beyond sense” but “sense itself will float,” however not “as some unknown, intact, untouchable ‘matter’ [quelle “matière” intacte, intouchable]” (C 24/23). For, as he writes further on, “There is no intact matter [matière intacte]—or else there’d be nothing” (102/117).
The only exception to this way of treating the term “intact” may be in an essay, “Tenue, retenue,” written for the catalogue of Lucile Bernard entitled Lucile Bertrand: Sculptures. There Nancy writes: “Calculation of the measure and the stance [are needed] if what does not need to be saved is to be safeguarded. Save that ‘safe’ here does not mean ‘intact, unharmed, or unscathed.’ ” In other words, the word “safe” in “safeguarded” does not have the signification of “intact, unharmed, or unscathed.” In fact, it seems to have the opposite meaning: “nascent, touched, breached once and for all.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Tenue, retenue,” in Lucile Bertrand: Sculptures (Paris: L’Arbre à Lettres, 1995), unpaginated, translated by Simon Sparks as “Held, Held Back,” in Multiple Arts, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 180.
19. Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Consolation, désolation” first appeared in Magazine littéraire (April 2004): 58–60, and was subsequently collected in La Déclosion. All references are to the first cited article. All translations mine.
20. For “seul” in Derrida, see “R” 23/140, CFU, and BSI.
21. My translation of Sa (unpaginated download).
22. What is immortal is not susceptible to death and is as a result eternal. The English word “immortal” (late Middle English) is derived from L. in (no; opposite of) + mortalis (from mors, death), L. immortalis, deathless, undying (referring to gods), imperishable, not susceptible to death. For “immortality (of the soul),” see Cicero, Tusculan Disputations.
23. “Car il y a déconstruction et déconstruction” (LT 74). Martin McQuillan in his analysis of the relation between Derrida and Nancy in “Toucher I: (The Problem with Self-Touching),” Derrida Today 1, no. 2 (November 2008): 201–211, refers to this phrase.
24. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” translated by Simon Sparks in Religion and Media, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 113; 503–519, in the 1998 edition. This essay subsequently appeared in La Déclosion.
25. In a footnote in Le toucher (LT 273–4n/362fn) on the subject of “deconstruction” and “Christianity,” Derrida refers to the following texts: “Comment ne pas parler,” in Psyché, t. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 1987); Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999), translated by David Wills as The Gift of Death, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); “Passions,” in Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993), translated by David Wood as “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” in On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), translated by John P. Leavey Jr. as “Sauf le nom,” in On the Name, and “Faith and Knowledge” in FK.
26. In Theses 19 and 20 of Heidelberg Disputation (1518), discussing the difference between Aristotelian Scholasticism’s theologia gloriae and Paul’s theologia cruces, Luther translates the Pauline term “destroy [apolo]” from I Corinthians 1 into Latin as destruere, “to pull down, to dismantle, to de-stroy.” Heidegger first used the term Destruktion in his winter semester 1919–1920 lecture course, when referring to Luther’s “destruction” of Aristotle. Also see John van Buren, “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, edited by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 159–174.
27. As a rejoinder, Nancy in Dis-Enclosure calls for a “closer examination” of the uses of destructio in Luther before an eventual revisiting of the employment of the terms Destruktion/Zerstörung/Abbau in Heidegger and of Abbau in Husserl” (Déc 216/189).
Chapter 3. Derrida Is the Death of Death
1. Françoise Dastur, La mort: Essai sur la finitude (Paris: Hatier, 1994), 5; Death: An Essay on Finitude, translated by John Llewelyn (London: Athlone, 1996), 4. The title of this chapter is a sentence borrowed from Geoffrey Bennington’s “R.I.P.,” in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 64.
2. Latin texts of the fifteenth century offer advice on the protocol and procedures of a good death, ars moriendi, the art of dying.
3. As Geoffrey Bennington writes in “R.I.P.,” in Interrupting Derrida, philosophers “philosophise to overcome death” (61).
4. Plato, Phaedrus (233c), translated by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Socrates says about himself that he is not “a being overcome by passion” when lovers praise him beyond due measure, but is “in full control” of himself. Rather than being a victim of love, he is the master of himself. For mastery over himself of the autarkic man, “a man sufficient unto himself,” see Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 238, translated by George Collins as Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 1997), 210. Also, see the relation to itself of the drive to dominate in “Spéculer—sur Freud,” in La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980), 430, translated by Alan Bass as “To Speculate—on Freud,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 403; and for the relation between sovereignty and ipseity, see Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
5. In a discussion of The Epic of Gilgamesh Françoise Dastur notes Gilgamesh’s obsession, after the death of his friend, Enkidu, to search for a remedy for and an escape from death. The relation to death is that of the relation to the death of the other. See The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (London: Penguin, 2000), 54–62.
6. See Michel de Montaigne, “Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir,” in Essais, edited by Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig-Naya, and Alexandre Tarrête (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), translated by Donald M. Frame as “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), Book I, 56–68. In addition to Plato’s Phaedo, Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputatio (45 BC) also served as inspiration for Montaigne. See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, translated by J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), I, 75.
7. Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993), my translation.
8. See entry on “Eros,” in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 143–144.
9. Decease from MF décès, from Latin decessus, departure, death, pp. of decedere, to depart, die, fr. de-+cedere to go, departure (depart, ME departen to divide, to go away, fr. OF departir, fr. de-+partir to divide, fr. L partire, fr. decease), trépas [from trespasser].
10. See Geoffrey Bennington, “Jacques Derrida: … A Life,” in Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
11. Cicero, De Finibus Bonurum, translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
12. See the discussion of “dead—immortal” in chapter 5 of the present volume.
13. “In my heart of heart” is often incorrectly rendered. Contrary to popular belief, Hamlet does not say “in my heart of hearts,” but “in my heart of heart”—that is, at the “heart” (center) of his heart. See Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins The Arden Shakespeare, second series (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1982; rpt. 1997), act 3, scene 2: 71–74. Addressing Horatio, Hamlet says that he reserves this region of his affection, his heart’s core, for men who aren’t slaves to their passion, who are governed by reason:
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. (Act 3, scene 2, 71–74)
Chapter 4. Nancy’s Resurrection
1. The eternal has a relation to time. To be eternal is to be everlasting and have infinite duration. Eternal (Late Middle English) from L. aevum, of an age, lasting, enduring, permanent, enduring, aeternus, Late L. aeternalis, Old French, late fourteenth-century eternel. For eternity, see Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, and Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V. For Kant raising the issue of eternity (Ewig[keit], “for ever”) leads to a discussion of the immortality of the soul. See Immanuel Kant, “The Immortality of the Soul, as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason,” in Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), Ak. 122–124. By existence “continuing ad infinitum [forever],” Kant means “the immortality [Unsterblichkeit] of the soul” (122). The immortality of the soul is propounded as a postulate [an imperative for action] of pure practical reason. It springs from the teleology of moral behavior. In his essay “The End of All Things” (1794), Kant examines the common expression describing a dying person as “going out of time into eternity.” Eternity ought not be conceived as a time proceeding to infinity, Kant writes, for the person would not get outside time, but would progress from one time into another. This expression must mean, Kant suggests, “an end of all time along with the person’s uninterrupted duration” (8: 327). Kant understands this duration as “a magnitude wholly incomparable with time” (8: 327). See Immanuel Kant, “The End of All Things,” trans. Allen W. Wood in Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ak. 221–231.
2. Interestingly, the description of a dead person that Nancy provides uncannily fits Derrida’s description of a specter. At first, Mary Magdalene does not recognize Christ, for, as Nancy explains, a dead person (un mort) “no longer properly appears [proprement n’apparaît plus]” (NMT 48/28). It is, Nancy writes, “the appearing of an appeared and disappeared [l’apparaître d’un apparu et disparu]” (48/28). “He is the same without being the same, altered within himself [en lui-même]” (48/28). In Specters of Marx Derrida describes the specter in a similar fashion: “There is something disappeared, departed [Il y a du disparu] in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed [disparu]” (SM 25/6). What for Derrida is the definition of the (dis) appearing of the specter becomes for Nancy the definition of Christ’s resurrection. See also, Derrida’s reference to Christ as “the most spectral of specters [le plus spectral que le spectral]” (SM 229/144) and “that absolute specter [ce spectre absolu]” (231/145).
3. Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon provides the following translation of anastasis, a raising up of the dead, Aeschylus; a setting up, restoration; a rising again, the Resurrection, NT. The Oxford English Dictionary, resurrection—rising again from the dead; (1320) the rising again of Christ after His death and burial. Etymology OF. resurreccium, -ection, fr. résurrection, fr. resurğere, to resurge; usage in English, general resurrection dates back to at least 1300. Webster’s: anastasis, resurrection, L. to rise again, fr. re- + surgere, to rise; the act of rising from the dead; the rising again to life of all the humankind before the final judgment.
4. See my “Thomas the Marvelous: Resurrection and Living-Death in Blanchot and Nancy,” Mosaic 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 1–16.
5. The original version of Thomas the Obscure, published in 1941, which bore the designation of “novel” on its cover, was until recently only available in a much more truncated form, known as the “new version,” authorized by Blanchot and published in 1950. Thomas l’obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1941). Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, nouvelle version (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). In 2005 the first version was republished as Thomas l’obscur. Première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
6. It is curious that Nancy does make a reference to eternity here.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Consolation, désolation” first appeared in Magazine littéraire, April 2004, 58–60, and was subsequently collected in La Déclosion (Déc 59/101).
8. Blanchot’s quote is taken from the famous Letter to Hulewicz dated November 13, 1925. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus Muzot: 1921 bis 1926 (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1937), 335–338; also in Briefe: Zweiter Band 1914 bis 1926 (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1950); Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910–1926, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1947–1948), 372–376.
9. “La déconstruction du christianisme” was a talk given in 1995, published in Etudes philosophiques 4 (1998): 503–519, and reprinted in La Déclosion.
10. Jean-Luc Nancy, Partir—le départ (Montrouge: Bayard, 2011).
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Lettre à Jean-Pierre Rehm,” Journal FIDMarseille-04.07.05, Festival International du Documentaire, Marseille, 2005, page 2. (This is item 477 in Nancy’s bibliography.)
12. “Le long échange que Jacques et moi avions autour de la ‘résurrection’[…] ne s’agissait ni pour lui ni pour moi de croyance fantasmatique dans un retour des morts. Il s’agissait de beaucoup plus: de comprendre ce que nous veut cette éternité dont Spinoza dit que nous la sentons et que nous l’expérimentons comme nôtre. L’éternité, c’est-à-dire le dehors du temps. Non pas ce qui dure toujours, mais justement ce qui ne dure pas du tout. L’instant évanoui dans son évanouissement même—la trace inscrite dans son effacement, comme effacement […] Les grandes pensées de la résurrection ne sont jamais des imaginations de corps revenus à la vie. Ce sont précisément des pensées sans image. Ce qui ressuscite, ce qui se rederesse du corps allongé sous la terre et bientôt mêlé à elle, c’est l’absence d’image” (2). Nancy adds that two terms he used in his exchange with Derrida, “consolation” and “désolation,” share the Latin solor, to soothe (apaiser), to comfort (adoucir), to relieve (soulager).
13. Giorgio Agamben notes on the first page of his Homo Sacer that Aristotle refers to God as having “a more noble and eternal life, zōē aristē kai aidios” (Metaphysics, Book Λ, 7, 1072b280). Aidios has also been translated as “everlasting.” The Loeb edition provides the following translation: the essential actuality of God is life, and “God is life most good and eternal.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by Hugh Tredennic, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). In his discussion of Agamben and Foucault in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida refers to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics: “Christ is the logos of redemption (der Logos der Erlösung), the logos of eternal life [la vie éternelle], the logos of zoē (logos des ewigen Leben, logos zōēs)” (BSII 426–427/321).
14. The first traceable idea of the eternal life is often attributed to Persian, Zoroastrian influence. The importance of resurrection is what distinguishes biblical teaching from Zoroastrian and other religions’ teaching, which have no place for resurrection. In the New Testament, the resurrection is variously understood as a) a vindication of Jesus’s faithfulness (Mark 14: 62), echoing Daniel; b) a fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy (Luke 24: 44–46); c) a new creation through a new Adam (Roman 5: 12–21); and d) a heavenly exaltation (Philippians 2: 9, Ephesians 4: 6–8). See Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, edited by David Noel Freedman (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 429–430.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Chapman, 1994), 226, Catholics are told of “belief in the resurrection of the dead” as “an essential element of Christian faith from its beginnings” (because of Cor. 15: 12–14). Article 12 of the third chapter of the Catechism is entitled “I believe in life everlasting.” In part 1, The Profession of Faith, chapter 2, article 1, The Revelation of God ¶55, we find: “For he wishes to give eternal life to those who seek salvation by patience in well-doing.” See Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1994). Topic 16 of The Apostle’s Creed of the Catholic Church states: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” Also see Wittgenstein’s cryptic description of eternal life as the time of the present: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge, 1961), 6.4311.
15. See “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish” (John 10: 28–30 NIV); “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3: 16 NIV); “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God” (John 17: 3 NIV); “Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who believe in him and receive eternal life” (1 Timothy 1: 16 NIV); “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5: 13 NIV).
16. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, 1) (Paris: Galilée, 2005); “Fin du colloque” in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques (Tours: Editions Farrago/Léo Scheer, 2003), 628. The quotation is from Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 458.
17. No reference to “la vie éternelle” is to be found in Pierre-François Moreau’s six-hundred-page tome, Spinoza: L’expérience et l’éternité. Moreau claims that Spinoza clearly distinguishes between immortality and eternity, never using the former. See Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza: L’expérience et l’éternité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
18. We would have to leave to one side the vexing question of how to adequately translate Spinoza’s mens. The French translations of Spinoza vary, opting for rendering mens as âme (mind in English, emphasizing the intellectual, one of the faculties or activities designated as mental) or esprit (mind or spirit). Martial Gueroult in Spinoza II. L’âme (Ethique, II) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), 9, argues that mens must be translated as âme since Spinoza very rarely uses the word spiritus. In contrast, the most modern French translation of the Ethics by Bernard Pautrat uses esprit. Pautrat, in his “Translator’s Note,” writes that the translation of mens as âme designates a long-standing prejudice, “bathing” the Ethics in a climate of “sacristy” (8). Pautrat’s choice of esprit, he claims, avoids any risk of foundering in (sombrer) “a nebulous atmosphere.” Bernard Pautrat, “Note de traducteur,” in Spinoza, Ethique, new translation by Bernard Pautrat (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 8.
19. See, for example, Bernard Rousset, La perspective finale de “L’Ethique” et le problème de la Cohérence du Spinozisme. L’autonomie comme salut (Paris: Vrin, 1968), whose second part is entitled “La vie éternelle.” He writes that “Spinozism is a philosophy of salvation [salut]” (14).
20. Victor Delbos, La problème morale dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme (Paris: Alcan, 1893; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1988).
21. Ferdinand Alquié, Le rationalisme de Spinoza (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 10–11. Alquié devotes chapter 19 of his book to “L’étérnité de l’homme.” For a discussion of beatitude, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Fin du Colloque,” in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques, edited by Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours: Farrago/Léo Scheer, 2003) and L’adoration (Déconstruction du Christianisme, 2) (Paris: Galilée, 2010).
22. Ferdinand Alquié, “Note sur la vie éternelle selon Spinoza,” Archivio di Filosofia 1 (1959): 183–186.
23. There is “a difference of nature between duration and eternity,” Deleuze explains in Expressionism in Philosophy. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’espression (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 292, translated by Martin Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 313. According to Deleuze, Spinoza avoids using the concept of immortality in the Ethics because it seems to him to involve “the most tiresome confusions” (292/313). Deleuze’s entry for eternity in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy reads: “Eternity is the character of existence insofar as it is enveloped/incorporated [enveloppé] by essence (Ethics I, def. 8, trans. mod.).” See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 100, translated by Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 65. As Deleuze remarks in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza: If we form the idea of ourselves (as it is in God), “to the extent that we form it, to the extent that we have it, we experience that we are eternal (Ethics, v. 23)” (293/315).
24. Pierre Macherey, Introduction à L’Ethique: La cinquieme partie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 118–119, 181. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text.
25. This is also echoed in the demonstration of Proposition 29: “Eternity cannot be explained by duration [aeternitas per durationem explicari nequit].”
26. See Nancy’s comments on the phrase “nous sentons et savons d’expérience que nous sommes éternels” (Ad 135).
27. See Martial Gueroult, “Appendix 17,” in Spinoza II, L’âme (Ethique II) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974). However, in contrast, Edwin Curley renders this phrase as “under a species.” See Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Also, see Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, edited by Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), where Samuel Shirley translates it as (the preferable) “under a form” of eternity.
28. Alexandre Matheron, “La vie éternelle et le corps selon Spinoza,” Revue philosophique de la france et de l’Etranger 184, no. 1 (January–March 1994): 27–40. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text.
29. This Proposition is rendered by Bernard Pautrat as: “Qui a un Corps apte [aptum] a un très grand nombre de choses, a un Esprit [Mentem] dont la plus grande part est éternelle [cujus maxima pars est aeterna]” and by Macherey as “qui a un corps apte au plus grand nombre de choses, celui-là a une âme dont la plus grande partie est éternelle” (182).
30. Lexicon Spinozanum, 2 vols., edited by Emilia Giancotti Boscherini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). See Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, edited by Jonathan Israel, translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
31. Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 48. Subsequent quotations are parenthetically cited in the text.
32. Maimonides, who codified Torah law and Jewish philosophy, compiled what he refers to as the Shloshah Asar Ikkarim, the “Thirteen Fundamental Principles” of the Jewish faith, as derived from the Torah. One of Maimonides’s thirteen principles of the Jewish faith cited a belief in the resurrection of the body after death.
33. Nancy refers to Spinoza several times in Adoration, in one place saying, “The question is finding a new Spinozism” (Ad 132/91). He equates God, that is, “the totality of beings [totalité de l’étant],” with that which consists of “conceiving things under the aspect of eternity” (using the Pautrat translation) (135/94).
34. Ian James, in his book The Fragmentary Demand, notes that, unlike Derrida, “Nancy is happy to be a philosopher of existence, of the material and the concrete.” See Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 148.
35. Juan Manuel Garrido, Chances de la pensée: A partir de Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2011), all translations are my own and quotations from this source are cited parenthetically in the text.
36. These references by Nancy appear in the following texts: to Psyche in Corpus (Paris: Metailié, 1992), to the dead body of the virgin in Caravaggio’s The Death of the Virgin (1605–1606, Louvre Museum) in “Sur le seuil,” in Les Muses (Paris: Galilée, 1994), and to resurrection in Noli me tangere (Paris: Bayard, 2003).
37. Spinoza, Ethics, Part II, Proposition 49, Scholium. Samuel Shirley translates Dei nutu as “God’s command” (151) or “God’s will” (276).
38. Alfonso Cariolato, “Le Geste de Dieu” Sur un lieu de l’Ethique de Spinoza, Marginalia of Jean-Luc Nancy (Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2011), 62. Subsequent quotations from this source are cited parenthetically in the text.
Chapter 5. The Desire for Survival?
1. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). All subsequent page numbers are given within the text. I have benefited from the astute analysis of Hägglund’s work by the following commentators: Michael Naas, “An Atheism That (Dieu merci!) Still Leaves Something to Be Desired,” New Centennial Review 9, no. 1 (2009): 45–68; Jacques de Ville, Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Danielle Sands, Review Article in Parrhesia 6 (2009): 73–78.
2. The notion of desire appears throughout Derrida’s writings. For a random sampling, see La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), translated by Barbara Johnson as Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), especially on the hymen 258–259/xx; Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), translated by Barbara Harlow as Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979); La vérité en peinture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), translated by Ian McLeod as “Khora,” in On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
3. Among those commending Hägglund’s reading of Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, in “Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?,” Diacritics 38, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 180–189, calls Radical Atheism a “substantial contribution” (188), describing Hägglund’s “intellectual project” as “very much valuable” (181). However, he quibbles with Hägglund’s dualistic opposition between mortality and immortality, which in his opinion views mortality as the reversal of immortality, and also questions whether there is “an elaborated theory of desire” in Derrida (182).
4. Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus, translated by Tom Griffith (New York: Everyman’s Library/Knopf, 2000), and Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, translated by W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Lamb renders the latter passage as: “I wish these things now present to be present also in the future.”
5. In two potent criticisms, John D. Caputo in “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 32–125, calls Hägglund’s work “deconstruction as logic not écriture” and “an abridged edition of Derrida cut to fit the new materialism” (33). Caputo also, echoing other critics, disagrees with Hägglund about whether Derrida’s primary interest is in “time” (53). Hägglund, according to Caputo, “flattens the movement of temporality in Derrida by silencing the call which always calls from ‘beyond’ the horizon of expectation” (58). In addition, he diverges from Hägglund about the precedence of the trace in relation to the constitution of time (62) and takes issue with his understanding of “infinite finitude” (60). Caputo’s wide-ranging engagement with Hägglund raises a number of issues, however, it soon becomes clear after making one’s way through his novella-length article (ninety-three pages) that the terms of the debate with Hägglund (atheism/theism) and its entire predeconstructive vocabulary are framed by the metaphysical tradition that both interlocutors are hoping to escape.
It would be hard here not to conceive of Hägglund Enterprises as a one-man marketing cottage industry, a calculated ploy to secure attention through polemical saber-rattling, amassing established figures to have “debates” with, tallying the number of debates on his personal website and using these as means for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. Resembling tired parlor games replete with the jargon of academic business, these “debates” do not succeed in advancing any meaningful understanding of the issues under consideration. But that would be churlish of me to say so.
6. Nass, “An Atheism,” 49. Michael Naas’s article contains the most detailed, minute—surgical even—dissection of Hägglund’s logic, done in the nicest way possible, at times appearing so subtle that his remarks would elude the harried reader. In his review, Naas uses the terms of the very discourse that he is dealing with, in other words, Hägglund’s discourse, such as “the best,” and “the worst” (terms enamored by Hägglund), and, of course, “desire.” For example, Naas argues that “the very worst way to react” to Hägglund’s book “would be simply to praise and affirm it without really engaging it” (46). He calls Radical Atheism “a work that claims to say it all about Derrida, a work that comprehends and explains Derrida’s work from beginning to end without remainder,” but adds a caveat, “insofar as it would leave no future for Derrida scholarship,” it would be “the very worst, the most inaccurate and most unfaithful” (46). The book, then, Naas observes, “leaves something to be desired, indeed … it leaves everything to be desired” (46). Naas who calls his response to Hägglund not a critique but a “friendly supplement,” adds that even if we desire only what is mortal, impure, open to difference, and so on, as Hägglund claims, we still need to give an account of all those things metaphysics claims to desire and their enduring history (46). In assessing Hägglund’s discourse, Naas shows that deconstruction does not operate simply on the level of being, truth, or knowledge, but also as a deconstruction of the discourses of being, truth, and knowledge (49). He notices that in his arguments Hägglund shifts from “the more active notions of refutation and deconstruction” to “more passive notions of self-refutation and self-deconstruction” (50). In analyzing Hägglund’s strategy, Naas explains that the former’s strategy bears a resemblance to “the strategy of metaphysics” itself (50). Even though Hägglund dismisses the normative and prescriptive dimensions of deconstruction, Naas demonstrates the ineluctable necessity of these aspects of deconstruction and “other modalities of thought” (52). Insisting on the logic of the phantasm that “requires other forms of analysis, from linguistics to psychoanalysis,” his argument points to the necessity of using these forms of analysis to question the enduring vestiges of metaphysical thought (54). Naas shows an equivocation on the part of Hägglund regarding desire and what can be desirable. In Naas’s view, Hägglund seems to be saying that metaphysics did not actually or could not possibly have desired the things that it purportedly desired. It is “this more radical version,” Naas perceptively argues, that “allows Hägglund to undercut or undermine the very basis for prescriptive or normative appropriation of deconstruction” (61–62). If Hägglund “wishes to exclude from the deconstructive enterprise any kind of prescription,” then “he must restrict himself to ontological claims” (62). Throughout his article Naas puts forward the notion of the phantasm as a hinge term in order to address what he deems to be lacking in Hägglund’s approach, an approach that simply addresses the being or truth of things. Even though I cannot be in agreement with all the things Naas says about the phantasm—I may agree with the first clause of his last sentence but certainly not the second for reasons I have tried to show in other chapters of this book: “For every absolute is a phantasm and every phantasm a phantasm of the absolute—to be deconstructed”—his argument effectively shows the shortcomings of Hägglund’s approach (63).
7. Hägglund does not pay adequate attention to spacing, even though he mentions its importance on page 72.
8. For two appreciative accounts of Hägglund, see Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Dying from Immortality: Notes for a Discussion with Martin Hägglund,” Derrida Today 6, no. 2 (2013): 169–181, and Henry Staten, “Writing: Empirical, Transcendental, Ultratranscendental,” CR: The New Centennial Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 69–85. Rabaté’s article, which also takes into consideration Hägglund’s second book, Dying for Time (2012), generally praises Hägglund for his interpretation of Derrida, in particular for his renewal of a notion of survival to counterbalance the all-too-religious readings of Derrida. For Rabaté, however, Hägglund holds several unorthodox views about Freud: he categorically denies such a thing as the death-drive (calling it “a pure contradiction”), which Rabaté argues there is a need for, and appealing to the lack of clinical evidence, Hägglund also denies that the unconscious is unaware of time (171). In contrast, Hägglund’s argument for survival maintains that to live on is to be subjected to temporal finitude. Rabaté complains exasperatedly that Hägglund “constantly reiterates that the wish for immortality boils down to a fantasy of a life lived in an endless time” (178), even though Freud, in “On Transcience,” had already rejected the wish for eternity, arguing that the value of life would be enhanced by its fleeting nature. Henry Staten, at the beginning of “Writing: Empirical, Transcendental, Ultratranscendental,” speaks admiringly of Radical Atheism, calling it “the most accurate, insightful, and complete account anyone has produced so far of Derrida’s thought” (69). While he compliments Hägglund’s “flair” and “clarity” (69), his article contends that Hägglund’s book blurs the crucial distinction between arche-writing and empirical writing. Staten is emphatic that this distinction needs to be maintained before going on to explore the ramifications of Derrida’s discussion of the relation of spacing (which he takes to be the “key concept in [Hägglund’s] exposition” (78) to time and what Derrida calls the “outside” with the inside before trailing off into speculative reverie.
9. Derrida mentions “radical atheism” in Sauf le nom (103/80).
10. Jacques Derrida, “Penser ce qui vient,” in Derrida pour les temps à venir, edited by René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007).
11. Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1991), 101.
12. Jacques Derrida, “Dialangues,” in Points de suspension. Entretiens, selected and presented by Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 143, translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. as “Dialanguages,” in Points … Interviews, 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 137.
13. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 317.
14. Geoffrey Bennington, “Derridabase,” in Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), translated by Geoffrey Bennington as “Derridabase,” in Jacques Derrida [With Geoffrey Bennington] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 117 and 115.
15. Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 85.
16. Rodolphe Gasché, “Structural Infinity,” in Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 144.
18. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), 329; Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 378.
19. In a footnote in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida writes that Henri Birault’s study “Heidegger et la pensée de la finitude” shows that the theme of Endlichkeit is progressively abandoned by Heidegger (WD 20 n2/141fn70). Birault claims that Heidegger no longer mentions finitude after Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
20. One could interpret Heidegger’s rethinking of finitude partly as a response to the strong tendency in the philosophical tradition to privilege the finite. For example, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Spinoza all viewed the finite as ontologically secondary in relation to infinity.
21. Héraclite, Fragments, text established, translated, and commented on by Marcel Conche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 369–371. DK frag 162; Frag 106 of the Conche edition.
22. This is pointed out by Ginette Michaud’s incisive analysis in Tenir au secret (Derrida, Blanchot) (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 56. Michaud’s text demonstrates the destabilization between fiction and autobiographical truth in Blanchot’s récit (56–57). Also see René Major, “Faire la verité,” TTR: traduction, témoignage, rédaction 11, no. 2 (1998): 234, and Au commencement. La vie la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999).
23. Derrida defines eternity, the best treatment of which is found in “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” as another name for the presence of the present (M 34/32). In Being and Time Heidegger announces “the determination of the meaning of being as parousia or as ousia, which in the ontologico-temporal order means ‘presence’ (Anwesenheit)” (M 33–34). The ontological project can be understood in relation to time. “The entity is grasped in its being as ‘presence’ (Anwesenheit), that is, it is understood by a reference to a determined mode of time, the present (Gegenwart)” (M 34). In a note, Derrida continues quoting Heidegger from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, who states that metaphysics has understood the Being of the entity as permanence and persistence (Beständigkeit). The project relative to time lies at the basis of the comprehension of Being. Even eternity, taken as nunc stans, the eternal now, is conceivable as “now” and “persistent” only on the basis of time. Being is synonymous with “permanence in presence”(M 33–34/32). In the essay Derrida explains that, for Hegel, everything that receives the predicate of eternity (the Idea, Spirit, the True, etc.) must not be thought outside (or necessarily inside) time (M 50/45). “Eternity as presence is neither temporal nor intemporal. Presence is intemporality in time or time in intemporality” (M 51/45–46). Eternity, then, is another name for the presence of the present. Though, as Derrida notes, Hegel distinguishes this presence from the present as now (M 50–51/45–46).
24. The quote is from “Literature and the Right to Death,” translated by Lydia Davis, which appears in Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 325; The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 337, trans. mod. throughout.
Chapter 6. For a Time: The Time of Survival
1. Cicero, Laelius de Amicitia vii 23; Old Age, Friendship, Divination, translated by W. A. Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 133. This is translated as friends, “though dead, are yet alive.”
2. In Aporias Derrida writes that he recently came upon Paul Valéry’s remarks in his preface to James G. Frazer’s La crainte des morts, who writes of “the Ancient belief that the dead are not dead, are not quite dead [les morts ne sont pas morts, ou ne sont pas tout à fait morts]” (A 112/62, JD’s italics).
3. Portions of this chapter were originally presented at a SPEP session on Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine in Eugene, Oregon, on October 24, 2013, and later published in Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2015): 122–130.
4. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 21. Further citations shall be given parenthetically in the body of the text.
5. Rodolphe Gasché in “In Love of Life: Michael Naas’ Miracle and Machine,” Research in Phenomenology 43 (2013): 73–91, hails Naas’s “extremely rich and highly illuminating reading of Derrida’s complex work that permits us to gauge the stakes of this absolutely unique text in Derrida’s corpus” (73). Gasché describes Miracle and Machine as “an attempt at reading” in the strong sense of the word (75), and extols the book’s “impressive stylistic achievements” (74) and Naas’s attentiveness to the intimate intertwinement of “the text’s argumentative and thetic nature and its formal structure and resources” (75). For Gasché, Naas’s book demonstrates that the biased belief regarding Derrida’s purported nihilistic thinking about death is, in fact, indicative of “a love without reserve for life” (74).
While Agata Bielik-Robson chooses Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine, “among the symphony of Derrida’s commentators,” to navigate the complicated terrain of Derrida’s text, “Faith and Knowledge,” Bielik-Robson’s “The Marrano God: Abstraction, Messianicity, and Retreat in Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ ” Religions 10(1), no. 22 (29 December, 2018): 1–23, an exceptionally detailed and sophisticated examination of Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge,” claims that Derrida “experiments with a new concept of non-Marrano religiosity” (2). In her view “Derrida’s critical treatment of the Hegelian-Kantian model of God’s demise complicates the dualistic picture painted by Hägglund, based on the simple opposition of the God who by definition cannot die, on the one hand, and the radical atheism which accepts the premise that whatever is alive must be mortal, on the other” (10). Bielik-Robson argues that “religious traditions [engage in an error] by staking their survival on averting all dangers of impurity and contamination, which eventually takes over the whole of their actual life, for the sake of an idealized, abstracted, more-than-life, hyper-pure essence of their identity” (13).
Penelope Deutscher’s “Auto-immunity, Sexual Violence, and Reproduction: Response to Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine,” Research in Phenomenology 43 (2013): 108–117, focuses on the question of sexual violence discussed in two chapters of Miracle and Machine pertaining to the singling out of women as victims and in particular the reproductive life of women. Deutscher is particularly concerned with the violence perpetrated against women’s reproductive life, overtly strategic violence “aimed at achieving a dissolution of, or a manipulation of, reproductive futures” (112). She looks at these sexual assaults in the context of ethno-religious conflicts that take on a specific form that she calls genocidal (111). The question she wants to pose regarding “the role of reproductive life in the indemnification of community” is how to think the specific forms of auto-immunity in the contexts where the life of the community is deemed more important than women’s lives (117).
6. The Robert Dictionnaire de la langue française dates the appearance of the feminine noun “survivance” to 1606. The term is said to have belonged to legal terminology since 1521.
7. Georges Didi-Huberman, “La Survivance nous divise-t-elle?,” in Aperçues (Paris: Minuit, 2018), 207–209. Further citations are given parenthetically in the body of the text.
8. Didi-Huberman extensively develops the notion of survivance in L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002).
9. I owe an investigation of the work of Georges Didi-Huberman and his reference to survivance to a recommendation by Ginette Michaud.
10. Jacques Derrida, “Des tours de Babel” (1985) in Psyché, Invention de l’autre, t. 1 (nouvelle édition augmentée) (Paris: Galilée, 1998). Further citations are given parenthetically in the body of the text.
11. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Exchange 17 (Winter 1985): 1–33.
12. This rehearses the argument in “Des tours de Babel” (Psy 214/xx).
13. Interestingly, Derrida makes mention of a “survival movement [mouvement de survie],” in conjunction with the death sentence or stay of death in “+R” in The Truth in Painting (TP 182/160).
14. On survival, see Michael Naas, especially the chapter entitled “The Passion of Literature,” in Miracle and Machine, and Geoffrey Bennington in Not Half No End throughout.
15. Jacques Derrida, L’oreille de l’autre. Otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Texte et debats aved Jacques Derrida, edited by Claude Levesque and Christie V. McDonald (Montreal: VLB Editions, 1982) (EO 161/121–122). Further citations are given parenthetically in the body of the text.
16. “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy,” Rue Descartes 52 (2004): 86–99, 93. Cited further parenthetically in the text.
17. Jacques Derrida, “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même,” Le Monde, October 12, 2004, vi–vii.
18. Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 26; Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 26.
19. It will be recalled that in A Taste for the Secret, a book-length interview with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida noted: “I do not believe that one lives on post mortem,” in Jacques Derrida [with Maurizio Ferraris], A Taste for the Secret, translated by Giacomo Donis (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 88, originally published as “Il Gusto del Segreto,” edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Rome-Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 1997). This book has subsequently appeared in French as Le Goût du secret (Paris: Harmattan, 2018).
20. Among the terms used by Derrida with the intransitive -ance suffix we could name: mouvance (M 9/9), aimance (PFr 23/7, 88/69; 144/123 [translated as “lovence”]); demeurance (D 89/69, 101/77, 108/81); demourance (D 108/81); désistance (“Désistance” in Psy2); destinerrance (Psy 360/351, 369/360); fiance (PFr 31/14, 33/16, 220/194 [translated as “fidence”]); mourance (H. C. 114/127 [translated as “dying”], CN 203/218 [translated as “passing-on”]); pré-férance (A 103/56); revenance (Par 151/140 [translated as “ ‘phantom-like’ revenance”]; PFr 20/3, H. C. 95/103; BSII 46–50), arrestance (Par 200/188); survivance (H. C. 101/111; BSII [rendered as “survivance” and italicized in English] 176/117, 193/130, 194/131; D 80/63, 135/100), and vivance (H. C. 102/112 [translated as lovingness]; DP1 279/376).
21. Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1991), 99.
22. Jacques Derrida, “Sémiologie et grammatologie,” in Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 39, translated by Alan Bass as “Semiology and Grammatology,” in Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27.
23. A mood expresses how the speaker feels about the action, a wish, a suggestion, a command, a condition that is contrary to fact.
24. See “absolute mortality” in Apprendre à vivre, 24.
25. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “La belle mort et le cadavre outrage,” in L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 41; “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, edited by Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 50. The translation from Homer, Iliad (22.304–305), provided here does not match the cited source. Homer, Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
26. Michael Naas, “The Tragedy of Renown: Aeschylus, Nietzsche and the Might Have Been,” Philosophy Today 35, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 277–290.
27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “La belle mort et le cadavre outrage,” in L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 50; “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, edited by Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 55.
28. Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Editions Galilée/Le Monde, 2005), 25; Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 24.
Chapter 7. Dying Alive: The Phantasmatics of Living-Death
1. Phenomenologically, the noematic content differs from the real content of our experiences. The noema is that through which the object is grasped. The object can be destroyed, like Husserl’s famous example of the apple tree, but the noematic content cannot.
2. Derrida takes Robinson’s greatest fear, a fear that is Robinson’s, the fear of dying alive, and makes it into a general structural component of survivance.
3. Michael Naas, “Comme si, comme ça: Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God,” first presented as a keynote speech at the Mosaic conference in 2006, subsequently published in Mosaic and then collected in From Derrida Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 192. Cited further parenthetically.
4. While the set of words or quasi-concepts such as specter, ghost, phantom, spectrality, fantomaticity, and haunting have a similar structure and function, Michael Naas in “Comme si, comme ça” wonders whether these terms are “quasi-synonyms or nonsubstitutable synonyms for the same phenomenon?” (189). He adroitly and persuasively argues for the phantasm as a special case and provides definitions for it. But would it not be possible, perhaps for different reasons, to reserve for other terms, for example, the revenant (revenant) a special status too? Derrida distinguishes “the revenant” from the specter, phantom, or ghost in For What Tomorrow. The revenant would be the ghost or spirit that returns (perhaps from the other world, as entries in French dictionaries suggest). To think the event and haunting together, Derrida remarks in For What Tomorrow, would be to think the revenant rather than the specter or the ghost (FWT 256–257/159). Furthermore, in Echographies Derrida isolates revenance from the series of more or less equivalent words because it does not necessarily have a reference to visibility (E 129/115). There are also frequent places in Derrida’s work where he recites or reels off, as it were, a list of several terms such as images, phantasms, simulacra, and specters using them almost synonymously, as in Archive Fever (“a phantasm or a specter” [xx/95]), Le toucher (“phantasmes, spectres” [66/xx]), and The Beast and the Sovereign, 2 (“the phantasm, the phantasmata, the phantoms and the revenants” [BSII 263/185]), to cite just three examples. In addition, to be able to present a fuller picture of the phantasm we would have to examine its particular function in “Fors.” All of these instances would, it would seem, trouble or disturb the description or definition of the phantasm provided by Naas.
5. In another context, Jean-François Lyotard speaks of an “affection that owes nothing to the sensible.” See Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger et «les juifs» (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 78; Heidegger and “the Jews,” translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 44. Also see especially 34–35/15–17 where Lyotard refers to an “unconscious affect” and its temporality. Daniel Giovannangeli finds this idea problematic for phenomenology, because the latter cannot give an account of it. See his La passion de l’origine. Recherches sur l’esthétique transcendantale et la phénoménologie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).
6. Jacques Derrida, Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996), translated by Thomas Dutoit as Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). The English version is a translation of an article “Apories: Mourir—s’attendre aux limites de la vérité” published in Le passage des frontières. Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1993).
7. Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), 171; translated as “The Thing” by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 176.
8. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id and Other Works in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), SE XIX (1923–1925): 3–11.
9. Sigmund Freud, “Zur Psychopathologie des Altagslebens,” in Gesammelte Werke vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1941, 1990), 305fn, translated as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, SE VI (1901), 275n.
10. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Volume III: 1910–1911, translated by M. Nunberg with the assistance of H. Collins (New York: International Universities Press, 1974), 307, cited further parenthetically. I owe this reference to Kelly Noel-Smith’s Freud on Time and Timelessness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 146.
11. Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbewusste,” in Studienausgabe Bd III “Psychologie des Unbewussten” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1969–1975): [Die Vorgänge des Systems Ubw sind zeitlos, d.h., sie sind nicht zeitlich geordnet, warden durch die verlaufende Zeit nicht abgeändert, haben überhaupt keine Beziehung zur Zeit, Auch die Zeitbeziehung ist an die Arbeit des Bw-Systems geknüpft],” SA III, 145–146; “The Unconscious,” SE XIV, 187.
12. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, SA II: 580; The Interpretation of Dreams, SE V, 613.
13. Sigmund Freud, “Zeitgemässes uber Krieg und Tod,” SA IX: 56; “Thoughts for The Times on War and Death,” SE XIV, 296.
14. Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips in Studienausgabe Bd III “Psychologie des Unbewussten,” 238; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE XVIII: 28.
15. Sigmund Freud, Das Ich und das Es in Studienausgabe Bd III Psychologie des Unbewussten SA 284/14; G.W., 13; The Ego and the Id, SE XIX: 14.
16. Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse in Studienausgabe vol. 1. (SA 511); New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and Other Works, SE XXII, 73. Further quotations are cited parenthetically in the text.
17. See Jean-François Lyotard’s interesting comments regarding the timelessness of “the system of UCS” in Lectures d’enfance, where he writes that the processes of the Ucs are timeless in the sense that time is a chain, that time links. But, he adds, time is also stasis (stase) when it occurs, and at that point there is not yet any time that links. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 51, translated by Christopher Fynsk as “Prescription,” in Toward the Postmodern, edited by Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 187.
18. In a footnote, the translator of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Alan Bass, writes that in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger “deconstructs” Kant’s posited timelessness of the cogito, a position taken over from Descartes, in order to develop an “authentic” temporality. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 215.
19. Derrida’s remarks on the unconscious guard against simplifying it as a mere dimension, a system, or a process.
20. See chapter 4, “The Desire for Survival?,” in this book.
21. Krzysztof Ziarek, examining Heidegger’s use of the noun Geflecht (weave or plait) in the essay “On the Way to Language,” observes that Heidegger later found his choice of this term a poor one and preferred the use of falten (folding). See Krzysztof Ziarek, Language after Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 26.
22. Accentuation translates Tonart, emphasis, intensification, “accentuation” in French, which is rendered as “tonality” in Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
23. The first accentuation understands Leibniz’s maxim as a statement about beings: “every being has a reason,” while the second accentuation reveals the principle of reason as a principle of being.
24. “Being qua being grounds,” writes Heidegger. In other words, Being comes to be as grounding. It is ground-like. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51.
25. On ground, also see my “Calculus,” in Deconstructing the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars, edited by Kelly Oliver and Stephanie Marie Straub (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
26. Jacques Derrida, Demeure—Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998); Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), published with Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. Jacques Derrida, “Avances,” in Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan. Sur Platon (Paris: Minuit, 1995), 11–43; Advances, translated by Philippe Lynes (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
27. Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilee/Le Monde, 2005), translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas as Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007), 32.
28. For a discussion of some of these torsions and the relation between experience and trauma, see Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 6fnn. 5 and 6.
29. The OED dates the adjective “intemporal,” not temporal, to 1656, while the word “timeless” dates back to 1628.
30. One should exercise caution about seeking a location for the unconscious. Resisting a reliance on the predominance of the conscious, the unconscious would be the contamination or haunting of consciousness, its becoming-enigmatic.