One of us, one of the two, “will have [aura été] had to remain alone” (“R” 22/140). One of us, doomed to carry the world, the world of the other (le monde de l’autre), will have had to endure the loss of the world (22/140). “The world after the end of the world [le monde après la fin du monde]” (22–23/140). This lone, solitary clause without verb describes not only the condition of the survivor who has to carry the other and the world of the other, but also expresses what death—every death—does to the world. The clause says, declares, a new definition of the world. The other’s death brings to a close the world in the same way that it opens it. Death marks each time the end of the one and only world, the end of the unique world. And the survivor remains alone, “assigned to carry both the other and her world, the other and the world that have disappeared” (23/140). He will have to bear “the end of the world” brought on by the other’s death.
A heartrending, ravaging event in “my” world led me, forced me, in my grief to think about and evaluate several motifs from Derrida’s later writings that he had been developing over a number of publications and that I had been struggling to come to grips with. Over time, it became my conviction that these motifs could not be treated separately or in isolation and required being thought together, with each other. The World after the End of the World is an attempt to think the intricate relation between these tightly knit motifs—world, death, mourning, survival, the end of the world, the phantasm, and the French term salut—each of which would justifiably merit a book-length study.
From 2003 onward the syntagma “the end of the world,” not to be mistaken with the more familiar eschatological, apocalyptic notion, became linked in Derrida’s thought to a thinking of the other’s death. This expression or syntagma arose arguably in part in the context of, and as a reaction to, the publication in English of The Work of Mourning (2001) and its subsequent appearance in French as Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (2003), a collection of pieces penned after the passing away of close friends and colleagues. The polemical preface (“Avant-propos”) to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, and related publications of around the same time, displayed a rethinking or a complete reassessment of the notion of “world” in Derrida’s thinking. It is as if Derrida were asking, “What if there has never been such a thing as ‘the world?’ ” And further, “What becomes of the common notion ‘world’ if one were to proclaim that the world ended?” It is one of my contentions that “the end of the world” puts an end to (a thinking of) the world as we know it.
In the early ’90s, Derrida’s work displays a resistance to a certain rhetoric of globalization in contemporary political discourse and the media. Confronting the dominance of this politics of globalization, founded on a legal, economic, techno-scientific, linguistic-cultural “homo-hegemony,” and observing that the concept of the world gestures toward a history and an Abrahamic filiation, Derrida challenges and deconstructs the common, long-standing definition of “the world.”1 His mournful bearing witness to the death of close friends and colleagues (collected in The Work of Mourning and Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde) coupled with his own avowed obsession with death, is sustained by a non-apocalyptic thinking of “the end of the world.”2 His late texts pursue the link between the end of the world and the death of the other first mentioned in Aporias.3
In “Faith and Knowledge,” his major work on the question of “religion,” and numerous subsequent publications, Derrida linked religion to what, in Monolingualism of the Other (1996), he referred to as “that strange French word le salut” (Mo 56/30, trans. mod.).4
Salut, a rich, multivalent, polysemic, yet “equivocal word,” is pivotal for Derrida’s work on topics such as religion, immunity, health and well-being, security, safety, redemption and salvation. The promise of what is commonly known as “religion”—even though after “Faith and Knowledge” we can no longer innocently operate with a naïve notion of this term—is salvation (salut).5 When used as a performative, salut is part of daily conversation in French uttered as a greeting to say hello or good-bye or as a send-off. When used as a noun or as a substantive, salut means salvation and designates being whole, safe, unscathed, immune, intact, or being restored to this state by being indemnified, saved, redeemed, and made whole. To indemnify is to restore, to restitute in order to render intact. What does this indemnification involve? The desire for indemnity and “immunological salvation” is a wish to protect what is believed to be intact or unharmed (“ICM” 183n/269fn9). A process of immunization and indemnification against what is considered unclean, unhealthy, or unholy, salut is also a desire to restore some thing to a supposedly original or uncompromised state. Thus, it is not only to keep safe and sound, protected and unscathed, but also to heal, to make whole, to restitute, and to restore. In Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy Derrida refers to being safe, searching for immunity, redemption, or salvation as “Christian values” (LT 249). One need only turn to St. Paul’s Letter to Timothy in the New Testament: “God our Savior, who desires that all men be saved” (NRSV 1 Timothy 2: 4).
Though Derrida uses terms having to do with saving (sauver) in his early writings (for example, in The Truth in Painting [1978]), it is not until the 1990s, in particular in the mid-’90s, starting from “Faith and Knowledge,” that he delves into and explores the various senses of salut (TP 263/229). The semantic series of terms borrowed from Émile Benveniste (heilig, holy, sacré, sain et sauf, indemne, intact, immune) are a common feature of many of his texts. References to the two aspects of salut date back at least to “Avances” (1995), and are further developed in texts since 1996, such as “Faith and Knowledge” (1996), Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1997), Demeure—Maurice Blanchot (1998), and Rogues (2003). In “Avances,” his extended appreciation of Serge Margel’s book on Plato’s Timaeus, Le tombeau du dieu artisan, Derrida makes a passing reference to salut, listing terms whose repetition becomes a familiar feature of his writings on salut: “être sain et sauf, saint et sauf (hieros, hagios, hosios, sacer, sanctus, heilig, holy, sacré, saint, indemne, immun)” (Av 38/47). A year later, in “Faith and Knowledge” (1996), he comments on “a discourse on salvation [salut], that is on the holy, the sacred, the safe and sound, the unscathed, the immune [le sain, le saint, le sacré, le sauf, l’indemne, l’immun] (sacer, sanctus, heilig, holy and their alleged equivalents in so many languages).” Is salut, queries Derrida, “necessarily redemption, before or after evil, fault or sin?” (FK 10/2). In Demeure—Maurice Blanchot, a text in which Derrida explores the rich vocabulary of salut, he describes how the narrator of Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death saves himself without fleeing, “saves himself without saving himself [sauvé sans se sauver],” assures his salvation without having run away (D 100/76). Elsewhere, in a text dedicated to Sarah Kofman, Derrida detects in her work an “absence of salvation [l’absence de salut]” (CFU 136/173) that did not promise either resurrection or redemption (150/181).6 A continued probing of the two irreducibly proximate senses or uses of salut, “two contrary, sometimes contradictory saluts,” at the same time inseparable and inextricable, which operate within one another, haunt each other, yet remain apart, takes place in earnest in the mid-’90s (“TA” 35/xxxvi, second emphasis mine).7
The notion of salut also appears in Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings with greater frequency in the 1990s. We also see in Nancy a resistance to salut as salvation. In The Muses (1994), describing a painting of Caravaggio entitled The Death of the Virgin, where several people have gathered around the reclining body of a woman, Nancy affirms: “There is neither resurrection nor assumption […] there is neither abyss, nor ecstasy, nor salvation [salut]” (Mu 113/65). A bit further on he repeats this claim: “It is not salvation [salut], it is not redemption” (114/66). A few years later, on the back of the jacket of the French edition of La pensée derobée (2001), considering a notion that he explores in the book, Nancy responds to the question that he himself poses, “How to think, how to start again to think nudity?” “No ‘salvation’ [Pas de ‘salut’], no ‘end’ [pas de ‘fin’],” he writes, “but on the contrary, at each moment, a singular opening of the sense of being without end [sens d’être sans fin].” In L’intrus, a meditation on his heart transplant, Nancy wonders about the “proper” life that needs to be “saved [sauver]” (I 27/7).
In his later writings, Nancy’s references are increasingly to salut as salvation, for example, in Dis-Enclosure and Noli me tangere. Nonetheless, salut as a greeting also does appear in his texts, for example, in a chapter of The Muses, “The Vestige of Art,” where employing the word pas, he observes that, for him, invoking the notion of pas is “to salute Blanchot and Derrida” (Mu 156n/98fn19). A bit further on in the same essay on the “remains” of art, Nancy sends out a greeting to a distinguished theorist of art, remarking that “this time the salute goes to Thierry de Duve” (158/99fn22). One of the aims of the present book is to compare the employment of the vocabulary of salut by Derrida and Nancy so as to distinguish Derrida’s work from, the sometimes subtle, differences with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and while doing so, to demarcate their different senses of deconstruction.8
Turning on its head the question that Derrida poses in “Faith and Knowledge” regarding the link between religion and salut, the present book poses the following question: Can a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) be dissociated from a discourse on religion? In a critical essay on naming, calling, and mourning in Michel Deguy’s poetry entitled “How to Name?” Derrida refers to the “singular bivocity” of the two saluts.9 Describing the metonymy of the two meanings of salut as saving and greeting, he calls them a “metonymical doublet” (CN 185/194). “The two saluts,” he writes, “greet each other [se saluent] from near or from afar, one as well as the other [l’un comme l’autre], one operating and co-operating within the other that remains nevertheless apart” (185/194, trans. mod.).
Even though he delineates the dual structure of salut and the “duplicity” of the two meanings (CN 185/195), and even though the two senses of salut contaminate and haunt one another, where, in a language hearkening back to Dissemination, there is a passage between the opposing senses or values of the same word, Derrida insists on the absolute heterogeneity and the “irreconcilable difference” between the two saluts, wishing to keep them separate (203/218). As Derrida writes in Rogues, “If, as I have attempted and am still tempted to do elsewhere, one were to separate [dissocie] as irreconcilable the notion of salut as greeting or salutation to the other [salut à l’autre] from every salut as salvation (in the sense of the safe, the immune, health, and security), if one were to consider the greeting or salutation of the other, of what comes, as irreducible and heterogeneous to any seeking of salut as salvation, you can guess into what abysses we would be drawn” (R 160/114). It is one of this book’s goals to explore these abysses mentioned by Derrida. It is crucial to stress that salut in Derrida’s writings operates undecidably, the structural undecidability of salut allowing the tension between salut’s two meanings, as greeting and salvation, to remain suspended.10 The use of the article would allow the reader to know how salut is meant to function (as a noun or as a performative) yet its usage without the article compels the reader to constantly keep the double meaning in mind.
Derrida’s taking up of the notion of “the end of the world,” this book argues, dictates an engagement with the thought of salut, for, if the death of the other—a parting—signifies the end of the world, this departure then necessitates, stressing the performative, a salut-ation. At every end, at every leave-taking, there must be a good-bye, but also a “see you,” “see you later,” or “I will see you again.” I aim to show that this other performative sense of salut, the greeting, the adieu, disturbs, gently troubles, the wish or desire for safety and salvation that is the first sense of salut. How does this seemingly unremarkable gesture, one may ask, endanger or disturb the sense of salut as salvation, the desire for being saved, which as Derrida has diagnosed, is at the root of “religion”?
Just as Derrida wishes to dissociate the two senses of salut, this book will place its emphasis, on the less-discussed aspect of salut—salut as the coming or visitation of the other, an originary greeting, or an originary turn toward or address to the other—acknowledging that it will not be a matter of choice.11 The wager would be to see if this salutation, foreign to the salut of salvation, can prove itself resistant to the economy of salvation. The originary performative greeting of the other would take place on the threshold, “on the forever uncertain border” between salut and salut.12 Only on this threshold can the salut of salutation be dissociated from the salut of “redemptive economy” (Kamuf 105–106). Not redemption (restoration) or indemnity (protection), not remaining intact and unscathed, not being made whole and restored, but salut, if there is any, will have to be un salut sans salut, or as Derrida writes at the end of Le toucher: “Just salut, greeting without salvation; just a salut to come [un salut sans salvation, un salut juste à venir]” (LT 348).13 A new reading of salut as greeting, I suggest, would require “a certain poetics [une certaine poétique]” (R 23/5), a “poetics of salut [poétique du salut]” (CN 185/196)—what in “How to Name” Derrida calls “a spectro-poetics” (CN 201/216)—that can “inflect differently [détourner]” a dominant interpretation, modifying and transforming the common meaning of phrases (R 23/5).
Mourning no longer waits. Discussing his encounter with Hans-Georg Gadamer, in the lecture delivered at Heidelberg University entitled Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities (2003), Derrida writes that from the very first encounter between the two, interruption anticipates death. One the two will have had to carry alone, in himself, the dialogue and the memory of the first interruption. The other, Pleshette DeArmitt, who is named as she is called, “she: […] is the one whose name one must keep. One must recall her name and what she is called. To salute is not only to name, it is to call the other [appeler l’autre]” (CN 184/194, trans. mod.). She is the one “whose name it is necessary to keep through mourning [il faut que le nom soit gardé dans le deuil]” (203/217). In “How to Name?” Derrida writes, “To greet, to salute is to name the other precisely where the other is called, named [s’appelle], that is, called from an other place [depuis un autre lieu] which will have had to be her end [qui aura du être sa fin]” (203/217, trans. mod.). At “the end,” from this place, the “other place” where she may be, this other place from where she is called, where all horizon is lacking, “where the two meanings of salut part [se séparent] and say goodbye or farewell [adieu] to one another,” there is no being saved, no safety, in a survivance that is neither life nor death (203/217, trans. mod.).14
This is where “the ‘singular bivocity’ of the word salut must, as it were, part with itself [se séparer] forever, and that one salut must never be like the other” (CN 203/217–218). Derrida names this “dissociation,” this “absolute heterogeneity, irreconcilable difference [différend]” between the two saluts “Necessity”—fond of capitalizing it “as if it were someone else’s proper name, like Khôra” (203/218). Yet the possibility of “the non-salut of salvation or health” must always “haunt le salut as calling [le salut en appel]” (203/218). For, in order to “be able to call, where saluting is more than naming,” it is essential and necessary that le salut of salvation, health, redemption, and resurrection never be assured, “that it always could be refused, threatened, forbidden, lost, gone” (203/218).
“One can only call to the other [appeler l’autre], and greet […] as living [vivant], that is to say, as dying [mourant], in her mourance and mine, in a survivance that is neither life nor death,” where there is no longer any “assured salvation, no salvation on the horizon” (CN 203/218, trans. mod.). This salutation “calls out to the other without hope”—not hopelessly, but “without any assurance of salvation” (204/218). Derrida calls this salut-ation to the other “irreducible reference, absolute difference which at once shapes and makes reference possible, and respect for the absolute referent which the other is, whatever happens [quoi qu’il arrive]” (204/218). There “must no longer [il ne doit plus] be” a horizon for this, as the lack of a horizon is “the condition for something, something other [quelque chose d’autre] to happen, some to-come [quelque à-venir] […] absolute surprise, trauma without horizon, without the structure of a horizon” (204/218, trans. mod.). If what is coming appears against the contours of a horizon, it will no longer be an unanticipated surprise. As awaiting of what is already expected, it will be predicted, programmed, and precomprehended. The salut without salvation, salut-ation to the other, “the ferance of absolute difference, that is to say, different, unforeseeable, and heterogeneous reference, the event, the irruptive coming [venue], the arrivance of the other or death,” in contrast, “all presuppose a radical and consistent calling into question” of all that pertains to a horizon (204/218–219). What is called for is “an other discourse on le salut, an other salut,”15 a spectro-poetic discourse that would not only “think justice and the gift otherwise” (CN 213/292) but would also acknowledge, address, reach out to, respond to, greet, welcome, and salute—the other.
While Derrida links the syntagma “the end of the world” with the other’s death and mourning, he also continues a questioning of the notion of death in his last seminars. Derrida, whose preoccupation with the notion of death and whose abiding meditation on the inextricability and contamination of life with death led to their incessant interrogation, in his last seminars, in particular in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, extended his examination of what earlier he had labeled “life death [la vie la mort]” to the notion of “living death [la mort vivant].” In his seminar on Heidegger and Defoe, which displays his dissatisfaction with the Heideggerian approach to the question of death, Derrida has recourse to an entirely new notion of the phantasm in order to think the phantasm of “dying alive.” Since there can be no objective or scientific determination of the state of death, since as Derrida believes, life and death as such are not separable and since it is not possible to have direct access to death as such, living death can only be approached as a phantasm (this, of course, leads to a rethinking of phantasm: to be thought not simply using the Platonic philosophical register of truth/untruth, reality/fantasy, but in relation to the event as the coming or the happening of the event).16 The death of the other and the end of the world, besides urging a thinking of living death as a phantasm, also inevitably set in motion a thinking of survivance. Yet Derrida’s survivance, as this book will demonstrate, is not simply a matter of surviving in general, a continued persistence after an end—the end of the world—or even my own survival, but of an irreducible, originary trace anterior to the distinction between life and death, making both of them possible.
What remains? An address to the singular other, a supplicating address to the other as other, to you; a prayer, devoted to you. A salutation not to save but to greet, to salute from afar, “an utterly close experience of the distant [toute proche expérience du lointain],” a salut, an envoi worlds apart from the usual send-offs, a call, a poem-prayer challenging its constative use (CN 187/272).17 In a living-dying-surviving,18 what remains but to carry you?19
Not simply good-bye, a bidding farewell. Salut! is an address to and by the other, “be well,” “fare well,” wherever you may be, “until we meet again.” A wave of the hand in acknowledgment, in recognition, as when children speaking in French play hide-and-seek and say, “Coucou. Hey there! I see you.”