5
… le fantôme n’étant ni mort ni vivant, ou bien mort-vivant mais sur-vivant …
—Jacques Derrida, “De l’écrit à la parole”
The provocation that has presented itself as “the desire for survival” has garnered much critical attention as of late. Foregrounding a notion of desire in Derrida’s work, Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism has presented his work as describing, representing, or calling for a “desire for survival.”1 Yet it needs to be asked whether what Derrida calls survival, or survivance as he prefers to refer to it in his later work, is something that can be desired. Is not surviving, or survivance, in addition to referring to the finitude of a mortal being also a structural feature of, for example, writing, the date, and the name? In Radical Atheism Hägglund asserts, “Derrida himself did not provide a systematic account of his notion of desire, and it has remained unexplored by his commentators, but I will argue that it is altogether crucial for his thinking” (32). Embarking upon “a sustained attempt to reassess the entire trajectory of Derrida’s work”—no small feat—in Radical Atheism, Hägglund refutes a notion, which Derrida never endorsed or promulgated, of “an ethical or religious ‘turn’ ” in his thinking” (1). Using as his pivot the notion of desire, Hägglund expresses a need for a systematic account in order to provide an inventory of what is and what is not desirable.2 Since what has traditionally been designated as desirable, the absolute being of God or the immutability of the soul, fails to meet Hägglund’s criteria, he provides an alternative: “everything that can be desired is mortal in its essence” (111). Life, on his account, is “essentially mortal, which means that there can be no instance” that is immortal, as immortality is equated with an existence uncontaminated by time (8).3
According to Hägglund, what is desired is in its essence finite, which seems to designate the opposite of infinite and is thus something that terminates, ends, or dies. Employing a Lacanian definition of desire inspired by Plato, Hägglund takes desire to be an attempt to attain fullness. In the account of desire (epithumia) in the Symposium Socrates declares that the desiring subject “desires what it does not have” (Griffith) or “lacks [endeés]” (Lamb) (200b) and wants “to continue to possess in the future what he possesses now” (Griffith) (200d).4 As Diotima tells Socrates, what is mortal tries to be everlasting and immortal. This “love [eros]” with a view to “immortality [athanasias],” also translated as “desire for immortality” (Griffith), is how a mortal being partakes of (Lamb), or tastes (metexei) (Griffith), immortality (208b). For Lacan, the lack of fullness—the fact that desire cannot be fulfilled—is what gives rise to desire. What is ultimately desired, Hägglund reasons, is the desire for survival and not the desire for immortality. Thus the desire to survive is the desire to live on as a mortal being—hence Hägglund’s relentless refutation and refusal of immortality and insistence in favor of a “radical atheism.”
Hägglund approaches his reading of Derrida, which he opposes to those providing a “theological account” of Derrida’s work, from the perspective of the problem of atheism.5 Taking issue with traditional atheism in his crusading fervor and zealous denial of the existence of God and immortality, Hägglund aims to strongly rebuke those critics who write about Derrida from a “religious framework.” Stating that there is nothing beyond mortality and that life is “essentially mortal” (an oft-repeated phrase), Hägglund argues that “the so-called desire for immortality,” displays an “internal contradiction” with a desire that “precedes it and contradicts it from within” (1). In fact, the desire for immortality disguises “a desire for survival” (1).
In Hägglund’s view, the notion of survival defines life as “essentially mortal” (48) and inherently divided by time (33). He defines “to survive” as “to remain after a past that is no longer and to keep the memory of this past for a future that is not yet” (1). (Isn’t this a very classical and conventional definition of “to survive”? Would one need to appeal to Derrida to come up with such a definition?) He argues hyperbolically—although one cannot but think here of the tone of an advertising slogan or a religious exhortation—that “every moment of life is a matter of survival” (1). Hägglund’s notion of “survival” is, at best, a Nietzschean affirmation of mortal being, rejecting the desire for anything that exceeds or transcends finite human life. Life, for Hägglund, is predicated on the idea that it may come to an end at any moment (pathos or panic?). The fact of living should then be an affirmation of finitude. It is hard to see how this account differs from classical existentialism, peddled for decades in American philosophy departments urging young minds to take up the virtues of carpe diem. Why would we need Derrida to tell us what Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others seem to have told us already—unless Derrida is saying something else entirely?
Presenting a purely formal account of Derrida’s work shorn of subtlety, elegance, and complexity, Hägglund, like a good analytic philosopher, points out inconsistencies, incoherences, fallacies, and logical contradictions in Derrida’s readers and interpreters, finding “untenability” and incompatibility everywhere. Providing a systematic account of Derrida’s notion of desire, an account that Derrida himself did not provide, and developing arguments in directions deemed by Hägglund as “crucial” for Derrida’s thinking (82), Hägglund seeks to explicate “the logic of deconstruction” (as if there is such a thing, as if deconstruction is simply a logic, and as if a younger generation, who may have never heard of Gasché and Bennington, who meticulously laid out the logical intricacies and [infra]structural aspects of Derrida’s thought, is in need of being instructed about its logical operations). Hägglund, who seems to mistake deconstruction’s task as simply providing systematic accounts, treats deconstruction, according to Michael Naas, as “a discourse of ontology or epistemology,” restricting deconstruction to merely ontological claims.6
Displaying a dogged attachment to mortal life and a tenacious opposition to all that is immortal or resembles it, Hägglund is adamant that as human beings we live on by remaining “subjected to temporal finitude” (2). His privileging of temporality can be discerned throughout Radical Atheism: for Hägglund, everything in Derrida seems to follow from “the constitution of time” (In what sense of follow? Come after? Logically proceed from? And why just time and not space as well?7 In what sense does “the structure of the trace follow from the constitution of time”? [1]). Hägglund refers to “the trace structure of time” (9), but why is Derrida said to have had an insight simply into “the trace structure” of time? Nothing is exempt from “temporal finitude,” Hägglund argues (2–3), yet all he seems to understand by “the time of mortal life” is the fact that we are “finite,” that is, that we die (2). This is how we are to understand the statement that immortality would annihilate the time of mortal life.8
What is surprising is that in none of Hägglund’s work, whether in Radical Atheism (2008) or in subsequently published texts, is there a mention of the notion of “radical atheism” in Derrida’s own work.9 In “Penser ce qui vient,” a talk initially given at the Sorbonne in 1994 following the publication of Specters of Marx and published a year before Hägglund’s book, during the course of thinking about the event and what comes, Derrida raises the notion of “radical atheism” when he asks himself whether he is an atheist or a radical atheist.10 Derrida broaches the topic of an atheism, not as a personal conviction that can or cannot be shared, but an atheism or a secularism (laïcité) or some kind of “structural agnosticism” that characterizes a priori every relation to what comes and who comes (Pcq 21). Derrida’s atheism differs from Hägglund’s, whose atheism is fervently in opposition to religiosity or any belief that bears a resemblance to it. For Derrida, as he explains in “Penser ce qui vient,” to think the future is to be able to be an atheist. However, even if his atheism is a “structural” atheism, Derrida wonders whether he is not a “singular” atheist “who remembers God and who loves to remember God” (21). In his brief remarks Derrida states that he would like to think further about “a hypermnesic atheism” that brings together the messianic promise, revolutionary spirit, the spirit of justice, and emancipation. For, the concept and thinking of the political is, for Derrida, inseparable from this singular atheism (23).
In what follows, I would like to pursue several elements or themes of Hägglund’s discourse of “radical atheism”—a discourse that has gained in popularity and purportedly represents the new way of reading Derrida—namely, desire, finitude, immortality, and survival, in order to examine in more detail his interpretation of Derrida’s work.
Desire
There are many instances where the word “desire [désir]” appears in Derrida’s texts, but can it be said that desire as such is an “operative concept” in Derrida’s work, as it is, for example, in Lacan? Admittedly, there is no such thing as a “Derridean term,” a term that exclusively belongs to his discourse, as Derrida has revisited certain terms that he originally had put into question (“experience,” would be an example). However, Derrida has resisted returning to certain sedimented concepts belonging to the history of metaphysics in a way that Jean-Luc Nancy has not had the compunction to do.
The usage of the term “desire,” which commonly denotes a wish, a want, or an inclination for what is beneficial, useful, and so on, is very complex in Derrida’s writings and does not lend itself to easy summarizing. When asked about the role of desire in his thought, he disclosed:
What bothers me with the use of the word “desire,” and I have often tried to avoid it, is that where the word appears in writers such as Lacan, and well before him too, it tends to be defined as part of the structure of the subject: of the soul, the psychological or the psychoanalytic subject […]. My concern was to develop a differance whereby desire was not seen as a matter of consciousness. If there is desire, it is because there is difference. This psychologism, this anthropologism bothered me.11
In another interview, entitled “Dialanguages” in Points … , Derrida comes close to providing a description of desire when he tells his interviewer, Anne Berger, “I rarely speak of loss, just as I rarely speak of lack, because these are words that belong to the code of negativity, which is not mine […]. I don’t believe desire has an essential relation to lack. I believe desire is affirmation.”12 In Given Time Derrida comments further on the distinction between desire and need while considering Aristotle’s discussion in Politics of chrematistics and economy, remarking on “the supposed finiteness of need and the presumed infinity of desire” (GT 200/158). In the same text, responding to the question “Why desire [désirer] the gift?”(19/8), he asserts that this would be possible only according to “the measureless measure” of the impossible, as the gift is another name for the impossible (45/29).
In his early writings, Derrida writes about “philosophical desire”—philosophy’s desire (M 321/269) or the desire of metaphysics: references abound to the desire (désir) of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence for the transcendental signified (OG 71/49), the desire (désir) or wish to believe in the remaining of the thing itself (VP 117/89, new trans.), the suspicion of writing as a “perfectly coherent desire [désir]” of ethnocentrism (OG 161/110), and to the desire of and for reason (la raison du désir et le désir de la raison) (in Kant) (TP 45/38). One can also find references to metaphysical desires that Derrida puts into question, such as “the desire for the origin [le désir d’origine]” (OG 345/243), the desire (désir) for presence (OG 206/143), the desire (désir) for the center (411/280), the desire (désir) for a “centered structure” (WD 410/279), “desire of the proper [un désir du propre]”(GT 36/22), “the desire to exclude the stranger [le désir d’exclure l’étranger]” (SM 273/172), as well as the “desire for the archive [désir d’archive]” (AF 38/19) and the “archive’s desire [le désir ou le mal d’archive]” (AF 52/19). Other times, the appearance of the word refers to a concept in a thinker’s writings, for example, the notion of desire in the work of Hegel (Glas 23a, 33a), Nietzsche (Ep 46–48), Levinas (WD 147/xx), or to Fukuyama’s usage of Hegelian desire (SM). Sauf le nom speaks of “the desire of God [le désir de Dieu]” (ON 103/80), the desert as “the proper place” of desire [le propre lieu du désir] (103/80), and characterizes “God as the other name of desire [Dieu comme l’autre nom du désir]” (103/80). In The Beast and the Sovereign, 1, Derrida treats extensively the notion of desire in the writings of several authors: Lacan, Deleuze, Flaubert, Valéry, and D. H. Lawrence. On other occasions, desire is accompanied by another term in a pair, as in the desire and the disorder of the archive (le désir ou le trouble d’archive) in Mal d’Archive (AF 128/81), or the terror and desire of being buried alive in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2. It seems one would be hard-pressed to find many places where Derrida uses the term for his “own” purposes.
While the references in the earlier texts cast a suspicious eye on the notion of desire, in his later works Derrida is more likely to use the term favorably. For example, in Psyché: Invention de l’autre he comments on the desire for invention (Psy 34–35); in Donner le temps he writes of the desire to think and to give the impossible (GT 52/35), in “Faith and Knowledge” he writes of “an invincible desire for justice” (FK 31/18); in Echographies, he refers to what he calls “exappropriation,” where “it is necessary” that I try to make what I desire mine, while it remains other enough for me to desire it (E 125/111); in Sauf le nom he writes of the desire of God (désir de Dieu), double genitive (ON 18–20/37) and the desire of the desert (“the desert as the other name, if not the proper place, of desire”) (ON 103/80); and in The Death Penalty seminar he notes that the death sentence is desired “as desire itself” (DP1 339/249). It would be safe to say that the way desire functions in these Derridean texts does not adhere to any traditional concept of this term, whether Platonic or psychoanalytic, and would have to be assessed contextually and carefully read in relation to a notion of need.
Finitude
Throughout his early writings, from an appraisal of “originary” or “primordial” finitude in Husserl in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy (1953–194) (PG 171n91/98n91, 257n8/163n8) and Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962) (OrG 108/105–106; 151n1/138fn164) to an investigation of the thinking of Levinas, Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger in various essays in Writing and Difference, Derrida engaged with the thought of finitude. Yet, given what Rodolphe Gasché in The Tain of the Mirror refers to as “Derrida’s persistent critique of the notion of finitude,” Derrida cannot simply be branded as a thinker of finitude since the latter has meaning only within the philosophy of presence.13 In fact, the very idea of finitude is derived from the movement of supplementarity, Derrida tells us in the essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Writing and Difference (WD 337/228). In Of Grammatology he describes différance as “something other than finitude” (OG 99/68) and in Voice and Phenomenon, published the same year, he informs us that we cannot think différance within the opposition of the finite and the infinite (VP 114/87). As late as Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), a voice in Derrida’s text half-jokingly, some would say sarcastically, refers to Nancy’s notion of touching or le toucher as simply a thought of finitude: “Touching is finitude, period [Le toucher, c’est la finitude, un point c’est tout]” (LT 160).
Thus Derrida’s thinking of différance is not simply a thinking of finitude, whether radical or not, whether temporal or not, but a thinking together of the finite and the infinite. In “Derridabase” Geoffrey Bennington refers to “the inextricable complication of the finite and the infinite that différance gives us to think” while admitting that “the terms ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ function in a disturbing way in Derrida’s texts.”14 Bennington, commenting on the notoriously difficult and misunderstood phrase (what he also refers to as “a line” or “a slogan, a motto, a maxim, a sentence, even perhaps a witticism” [75]) “infinite différance is finite” from Voice and Phenomenon (VP 114/87), observes in Not Half No End that the infinite and the finite are “wrapped in a paradoxical relation.”15 This indicates that the thinking of the infinite and the finite cannot be simply reduced to oppositions and that their complex and intricate relation would have to be carefully unfolded and explained.
Granted, Hägglund may be making efforts in this direction by describing différance as a thought of “infinite finitude” (220fn14). Yet this notion, which is insufficiently developed, combined with his vociferous defense of and emphasis on finitude—however radical—still places the stress on a certain notion of finitude. Perhaps Hägglund’s inspiration comes from Derrida’s tangential question in “Violence and Metaphysics” when he asks, “Can one think ‘spurious infinity’ [le “faux-infini”] as such (time, in a word)”? (ED 176/120, my emphasis). Hägglund appeals to “Violence and Metaphysics” to explain the difference between spurious and positive infinity and to show how différance is a form of nontotalization that contests a notion of positive infinity, as the latter reduces or “sublimates” the trace. Contrary to the Hegelian true or genuine infinity (Unendlichkeit), which is an all-embracing totality, Derrida’s thinking of infinity is non-Hegelian. Even though Derrida’s thinking of the trace, the text, and the infinite substitution of quasi-transcendental terms or nonconcepts have been compared to a form of infinity, Derrida’s infinite is not any form of endlessness.
Here it would be worth briefly referring to some of the central historical sources of the relation between finitude and infinity. The thought of what has been called “positive infinity,” according to Rodolphe Gasché, begins with Plato, culminating via Spinoza in Hegel’s theology of the absolute concept as logos.16 Spinoza rejected the conception of the infinite that represents it as an amount or series that is not completed, while Hegel also argued against spurious infinity for a genuine notion of infinity. For Hegel, the true or genuine infinite, associated with reason, is unconditioned and self-contained whereas the bad infinite, associated with the understanding, is the merely endless. Spurious infinity (das schlechte Unendliche), “the indefinite, a negative form of infinity,” associated with an infinitist metaphysics, is only another form of the finite (ED 175/119). True infinity includes itself and its other. As he writes in the Science of Logic, true infinity must be an infinite that “embraces both itself and finitude—and is therefore the infinite in a different sense from that which the finite regarded as separated and set apart from the infinite.”17
It is true that, for Heidegger, finitude (Endlichkeit) is temporal finitude. Neither infinite nor immortal, Dasein exists as finite, exposed to its end. Dasein does not have an end (Ende), but “exists finitely” (SZ 378/329).18 As Being and Time demonstrates “primordial time is finite” (379/331), while infinite time is derived or secondary. Primordiality, then, is not infinity. It is in his reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that Heidegger demonstrates that man is finite.19 Finitude is the source of the understanding of Being and of all “infinity.”20 Furthermore, from The Concept of Time (1924) to “Time and Being” (1962) Heidegger distinguishes the thinking of time from the thinking of eternity. In contrast to the theological problematic of eternity, to think time is not to think eternity. The finitude of Dasein does not mean that it will die one day, but that it exists as dying. Finitude is connected to the limit, but for Heidegger the limit is not that at which something stops but that from which something begins. An echo of Heidegger’s emphasis on finitude as temporal may be found in Hägglund’s stance. According to Hägglund’s reading of Derrida, with mortality comes temporal finitude, which initiates the desire for “mortal survival.” Thus, the “radical atheist” is driven by the desire for mortal survival.
Immortality
Radical Atheism and subsequent publications set up an opposition between mortality and immortality, in which “the desire for immortality” is contrasted with the mortal condition, thoroughly and unapologetically lived in time. What causes Hägglund’s ire and draws his criticism is a conception of immortality, which he associates with religiously inclined interpreters of Derrida, as perfect and indivisible, not situated in time and having no relation to an outside. In contrast, Derrida is portrayed as espousing a thinking of radical finitude. So caught up is Hägglund in opposing or fighting those he sees as conservative religious advocates that he falls back on traditional conceptions of immortality and eternity in the history of Western thought as discrete concepts and neglects to consider how mortality and immortality have been treated in Derrida’s own work. Not only is there no clear-cut opposition or demarcation in Derrida’s writings between immortality and mortality, as Hägglund would like to have it, but also Derrida’s is a thought of the strange, paradoxical imbrication of mortality and immortality. Immortality is not a state reserved for the deathless but rather it is only the dead who become immortal.
However, before turning to his treatment of immortality, it would be helpful to very briefly see how immortality has been treated in the Western tradition. It has been shown by a number of scholars that as early as Heraclitus, mortality and immortality were not considered to be rigorously separated or demarcated from each other. Marcel Conche in his commentary on Heraclitus’s fragment 162 argues that, for Heraclitus, “the mortals [thnetoi]” and “the immortals [athanatoi]” are not treated in separation from or in opposition to each other. In fact, immortality is thought by Heraclitus in relation to mortality.21 There is an undoubted affinity between this fragment and certain mystic doctrines associated with the Orphic or Pythagorean tradition, indications of which may also be found in Empedocles’s Katharmoi or “Purifications.” From Homeric survival where the name and the renown of heroes who had shown valor in battle would be remembered and memorialized, Pericles’s funeral oration bestowing immortality on patriots, the Pindaric threnos or lament for the dead and its related eschatology, to the Empedoclean daimon and the thought of the preexistence of the soul and its transmigration into other beings, and the Orphic and Pythagorean beliefs about asceticism and inner life, notions of immortality in Greek thought are inseparable from the development of a notion of the psuchē or the soul. The Platonic notion, where the soul constitutes one’s real being in the interior recesses of each individual, is a late development in Greek thinking. For Plato, the psuchē is immortal, permanent, and unchanging, detaching itself from the body at death, while the living body is considered to be insubstantial and illusory. It is not until later that the pagan concept of immortality becomes contaminated by the Christian idea of resurrection.
Perhaps the notion of immortality in the Western tradition would best be considered in the context of survival, as a form of survival, as Derrida once did in Aporias (1993) when he referred to “the theme of immortality like that of any form of survival [survie] or return [revenance]” (A 103/55–56). While considering Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s relation to death and assessing the relationship between mortality and immortality in Aporias, Derrida writes that Dasein remains immortal, in other words, “without end [sans fin],” in the sense of verenden, and imperishable in its originary being-to-death. As Dasein, I do not end, I never end (76/40–41). In fact, Derrida will write later on, underscoring the inextricable relationship between mortality and immortality and the necessity of not thinking them in opposition to each other, “only a living-to-death can think, desire, project, indeed ‘live’ immortality as such” (102/55). He adds that in fact one cannot “think being-to-death without starting from immortality” (103/55). More importantly for a consideration of Hägglund’s work, Derrida emphasizes that “the theme of immortality like that of any form of survival or revenance … is not opposed to being-toward-death, it does not contradict it, it is not symmetrical with it, because it is conditioned by being-toward-death and confirms it at every moment” (103/55–56, my emphasis).
Dead—Immortal
In order to further examine Derrida’s thinking of immortality and its complicated relation to mortality, I would like to turn to one of his texts, Demeure—Maurice Blanchot, in which he pursues a probing, intricate reading of what he names “immortality as death” (D 89/69, author’s emphasis). In the midst of a meticulous and painstakingly close analysis of Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort, the “auto-biographical” account of the narrator’s close call with death, in Demeure, Derrida refers to a stark phrase, what he calls a “sentence without sentence [phrase sans phrase]”: “Dead—Immortal [Mort—immortel]” (86/67). Two words held together and separated by a tiret long, “a sole line [un seul trait]” of “union and separation, a disjunctive link [liaison disjoignante]” spanned by an abyss (86/67). In what follows I would like to comment on Derrida’s description of this phrase and suggest that it can be used as an example of how he treats the question of immortality. Even though it is embedded in a text devoted to a close reading of a narrative, one could argue that Derrida generalizes this notion, as he often does when it comes to something that appears to be absolutely singular (like one’s own language in Monolingualism of the Other, for example), to provide an account of “immortality as death” (my emphasis). It will become clear that Derrida does not ever believe in a clear opposition between immortality and mortality or finitude, and his reading of mortality and immortality does not conform to any traditional definition.
Blanchot’s text L’instant de ma mort ostensibly consists of an account provided by the narrator about a witness, who may be the narrator, involved in certain events leading to the experience of being almost executed. Even though the reader may wish to assume that the text is the account of the narrator-witness—and much of the structure of the text seems to lead one to believe this—it is important to note that, as Derrida writes, there is a “null and uncrossable” distance between the one who says “I” and the “I” of the young man of whom he speaks and who is himself (D 84/65). In other words, the reader must not forget that not only does a distance separate the narrator from the witness and from the signatory of the text but that, more significantly, the aim of Derrida’s text is to show that there is “an essential compossibility” between testimony and fiction” (49/42).22
I would like to focus my attention on a couple of passages in this notoriously elliptical narrative in which the young man, about whom the narrator writes, and the female members of his family are forced by the invading troops to leave their home, preparing to face a firing squad. As the young man pleads to have the members of his family, all female, be spared, he ends the sentence mentioning their long, slow procession suggesting that death had already taken place, that it had already happened. Death has already arrived because it is “inescapable” (D 79/62–63). It is an experience from which one is not “resuscitated … even if one survives it” (79/63). For “one can only survive [this death] without surviving it” (80/63). Yet this survival should not be mistaken for a resurrection. In Derrida’s view, the entire scene mimics and displaces the Passion, the Resurrection, and absolute knowledge. There can be no knowledge, for in “the life without life of this survivance” all knowledge would tremble (80/63).
Blanchot then makes a reference to “the encounter of death with death,” perhaps the encounter between what has already arrived and what is going to come (D 82/64). The two deaths meet, a death that is “both virtual and real,” at the tip of the “instant” (82/64). Death “has come to pass insofar as it comes; it has come as soon as it is going to come” (82–83/65). Death thereby “encounters itself” in this “arrival of death at itself” (83/65). This death that never arrives and never happens to me, Blanchot observes, is the event of an “unexperienced experience [expérience inéprouvée]” (quoted in D 83/65).
Not only is death not an event that can be experienced but also one death cannot replace the other: the one who says “I” cannot take the place of the young man he has been, substitute or speak for him or relive what has been lived, and consequently is not capable of describing this very “odd experience” or what he felt at that moment. Nothing but death separates the two “egological identities” (D 85/66). The young man who is “offered unto death” is described as “Dead—Immortal” (86/67).
Derrida glosses the state of the young man as: “Dead and yet [et cependant] immortal, dead because [parce qu’] immortal, dead insofar as [en tant qu’] immortal (an immortal does not live), immortal from the moment that [dès lors que] and insofar as [en tant que] dead, although and for as long as [tandis que et aussi longtemps que] dead; because once dead one no longer dies … one has become immortal” (D 86/67). This is because, as Derrida explains a little further on, “an immortal is someone who is dead [c’est un mort],” for only “someone who is dead can be immortal” (86/67). What has happened to him is “immortality, with death and as death at the same instant” (86/67). The immortals are dead, but this immortality, Derrida explains, is “not a Platonic or Christian immortality in the moment of death or of the Passion when the soul finally gathers together as it leaves the body, having already been at work there in philosophy according to the ēpimeleia tou thanatou of a pre-Christian Phaedo” (86–87/67). Rather, it is in the instant of death, in death, that “immortality yields to [se livre] an ‘unexperienced experience’ ” (87/67). Death arrives “where one is not yet dead in order to be already dead, at the same instant” (86/67–68). At the same instant, I am dead and not dead. “I am immortal because I am dead: death can no longer happen to me” (87/68).
Blanchot designates this experience as “the happiness of not being immortal or eternal” (quoted in D 89/69). Even though “dead—immortal” may appear to be the reverse of the preceding description, it does not, Derrida notes, in the least signify eternity (89/69). The condition that Derrida describes in Demeure—Maurice Blanchot—that of one who is dead and yet immortal, dead because immortal, and dead insofar as immortal—is far from designating what has been understood as immortality in the Western tradition. “The immortality of death is anything save the eternity of the present” (89/69).23 For what Derrida designates as “abidance [demeurance]” “does not remain [reste] like the permanence of an eternity” but rather “is time itself” (89/69). Not timelessness or eternity of the present, but the time of an interminable lapse (laps) or interval. Not an ongoing or perduring state of timelessness, abidance (demeurance) would be an awaiting, a waiting for, a withstanding, an enduring, a bearing patiently. To abide somewhere is to sojourn or to continue in a place. What Derrida draws out of Blanchot’s text is what he describes as a “non-philosophical and non-religious experience of immortality as death [l’immortalité comme mort]” (89/69). This experience “gives [donne] … the happiness, this time” of being neither immortal nor eternal (89/69). In “the immortality of death,” there is “a bond without bond, the disjointing [désajointement], the disadjusting [désajustement] of a social bond [with other mortals] that binds only … to death, and on condition of death” (89–90/69).
Returning to the narrative of The Instant of My Death we find that “at that instant,” death happened to the young man. But death had already taken place. The moment that the young man had begun to wait for “the final order” of “Fire,” he had left the world, “dying before dying, not for another world, but for a non-world beyond life, not for a transcendent beyond or the beyond that religions and metaphysics tell us about, but for a here-below without world [ici-bas sans monde], for a beyond here-below [un au-delà ici-bas], a without-world [un sans-monde] from which he who is already dead already returns [déjà revient], like a ghost [comme un revenant]” (D 91/70–71). Like a ghost that returns.
The young man who has left the world for a non-world is not beyond this world or transcendent to it. Far from it. He is without world, in this non-world here-below. His being without world signifies that he is already dead. The dead one is not elsewhere but here-below. Rather than a transcendent beyond, the beyond here-below is a beyond here from which the already dead returns. Survival or survivance, then, is a ghostly returning, revenance.
The reference to immortality as death in Demeure—Maurice Blanchot hearkens back to Blanchot’s ruminations on mortality and immortality in “Literature and the Right to Death,” which are taken up again by Derrida in The Death Penalty, 1, seminar of 1999–2000. In the fourth session of that seminar, while discussing the writer’s role and literature’s relation to revolution, Derrida sheds further light on the notion of death as the impossibility of dying or on sur-viving as dying by citing Blanchot’s famous phrase from “Literature and the Right to Death”: “As long as I live, I’m a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man, I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying” (DP1 174/119).24
The Impossibility of Dying
It would be instructive here to look at Blanchot’s early interpretation of Kafka, particularly in the essays “Reading Kafka” (1943), “Literature and the Right to Death” (1948), and “The Language of Fiction” (1949), all published in The Work of Fire (1949), in order to draw out themes from Blanchot’s reading and to show the force that a reading of these essays has exercised on Derrida’s thinking of mortality and immortality. It cannot be underestimated how uncannily consonant Derrida’s terminology—motifs such as “buried alive,” “survival,” among others—and conceptualization are with Blanchot’s. Derrida’s affinity with, and development of, Blanchot’s reading of Kafka would have to be stressed here.
There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, Blanchot declares in “Reading Kafka.” Such is the truth that Western man has made “a symbol of felicity” (PF 15/8). He has tried to make the fact that there is no end “bearable by bringing out [en dégageant] the positive side, that of immortality, a survival that would compensate for life.” But, rather than compensating for it, “this survival [survivance] is our life itself” (15/8). We do not die but we do not live either, as Blanchot writes. “We are dead as we live [nous sommes mort de notre vivant], we are essentially survivors” (16/8). Even though death “ends our life,” Blanchot stresses, “it does not end our possibility of dying” (PF 16/8). “Dying,” here as well as in Blanchot’s other writings, is understood intransitively as an ongoing process while one is living. It is also worth recalling that in a later text The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot, referring to the “passivity” of dying (Ec 29), describes dying as “without power” (67). In Hegel, death is “at work [à l’oeuvre],” linked with the power of negation (76), whereas for Blanchot, dying is associated with “non-power” (81). Dying “outside of oneself [hors de soi]” (50) is “without goal”—like thinking (67).
In “Literature and the Right to Death” Blanchot observes that when we die, we leave death behind. To die is to be absent from one’s own death. It is the loss of death, “the loss of what in it and for me made it death” (PF 325/337). As alive, I am dying, but “when I die, I cease to be mortal. I am no longer capable of dying” (325/337). My ability or capacity for dying dies or ends with death. After death, dying is no longer possible. Death, then, occasions the impossibility of dying. Certain religions have taken this impossibility of death and have tried to “humanize” it by calling it “immortality” (325/337). This means that by losing the advantage of being mortal, I also lose the possibility of being man. “To be man beyond death” is “to be, in spite of death, still capable of dying, to go on as though nothing happened” (325/337). Other religions call this “the curse of being reborn [la malédiction de renaissance]” (325/337). Blanchot explains: “You die because you have lived badly, you are condemned to live again, and you live again” (325/338). In dying, by being “really dead,” you become “a truly blessed man” (325/337–338). According to Blanchot’s reading, Kafka inherited this idea from the Kabbalah and Eastern traditions. Whether, strictly speaking, it is understood as reincarnation or not, it nevertheless involves a kind of transformation or metamorphosis. Blanchot illustrates this wryly and succinctly with a description that the readers of Kafka would be familiar with: “A man enters the night, but the night ends in awakening [conduit au réveil], and there he is, an insect” (PF 325/337–338).
Blanchot comes back to this idea in “The Language of Fiction” (1949), reiterating that Kafka “probably under the influence of Eastern traditions seems to have recognized in the impossibility of dying the extreme curse of man” (PF 87/81). Since “man cannot escape unhappiness,” by not being able to “escape existence,” it is in vain that he heads toward death because “he dies only to survive. He leaves existence, but only to enter the cycle of metamorphoses” (PF 87/81). Thus, as Blanchot formulates, there can be “no actual death in Kafka, or more exactly, there is never an end” (87/81). This is perhaps because Blanchot, similar to Levinas, believes that one cannot exit existence. The thought of the “impossibility of dying” is derived from the interminability of existence—like the Ancient apeiron existence is without beginning or end. Thus, Blanchot comments, most of “Kafka’s heroes are engaged in an intermediate moment between life and death” (87/81). Blanchot observes that this strange condition of “the dead who do not die” is expressed by Kafka in a couple of stories, “The Hunter Gracchus,” in which the Black Forest Hunter is alive and dead, and “The Guest of the Dead.” Defining ambiguity, wherein “assertion and negation are in continuous threat of reciprocity,” Blanchot describes the ambiguity of the condition that he calls being “buried alive” in the following way: “death that is life, that is death as soon as it survives [dès qu’elle survit]” (89/84). One dies, only to survive. If death is not a possibility, then life can only be described as the ambiguous survival of a “death that is life, that is death.” An examination of Blanchot’s thought has shown that rather than depicting a death-bound finitude, the condition that Blanchot terms “buried alive” or survival speaks of the complex and entwined relation between life and death.
The Desire for Survival?
The survivance that Derrida writes about is far from my desire to survive. As one of the two always survives the other, it could just as easily refer to the survival of those who survive me. This sur-vivance, which will be discussed further in the next chapter, is a “survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple” (BSII 193/130). For, life and death are not proper selfsame structures, but each is haunted by the other. Bound up with spectrality, sur-vivance is an originary trace anterior to the distinction between life and death. An excess, an overabundance, an extravagance, sur-vivance is a “lapse” of time that “lasts” interminably. But this “lapse” is the very structure of what has been called existence, Dasein. Thus, “survival is indeed that of the living dead [mort vivant]” and what survives is a living dead (un mort vivant) (193/130).