6

For a Time: The Time of Survival

les morts vivent

—Cicéron, L’amitié, Laelius de Amicita¹

Les morts ne sont pas morts, ou ne sont pas tout à fait morts

—Paul Valéry, preface to James G. Frazer’s La crainte des morts²

… never forever, but for a long time.

—Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables”

What is the time of “for a time”? How long does survival last? How long is “for a time”? Less than an eternity, but not forever—for a time.

In his comprehensive, instructive, and probing book Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media, Michael Naas patiently and thoughtfully analyzes what he dubs a great philosophical text on religion, namely, Derrida’s essay “Faith and Knowledge” published in 1996.³ Naas’s book, itself a major work on Derrida’s thought, scrupulously guides and informs the reader about the structure and details of the “Faith and Knowledge” essay, which Naas calls “Derrida’s most direct and ambitious attempt to answer the question of the nature of religion in general and its relationship with science and the media.”⁴ Unlike the so-called guides that have proliferated to meet the demands of academic presses, who themselves seem to have almost abandoned the thought of publishing probing intellectual research, Naas’s Miracle and Machine is a genuine guide. Patiently explicated, expertly explained, demystifying without losing any sense of the complexity of Derrida’s thought, Miracle and Machine discusses the structure, architectonics, and typography of “Faith and Knowledge,” skillfully laying bare its why and wherefore, demonstrating how its form, style, and format reflect the theses within it.⁵

With nine chapters, an introduction; a prologue; an epilogue; an analysis of Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld woven in as a subtext, as a supplement; four substantial “Observations” on Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger; and a detailed timeline of Derrida’s publications between 1993 and 1995 at the end of the book, Naas’s Miracle and Machine masterfully brings together a macro- and microscopic reading, proceeding from the conditions and the context of the arguments of the book to the most minute details of its language and writing, in order to demonstrate the very complex stakes involved in the question of “religion.” In addition to explicating an undoubtedly complex Derridean text—complex in its structure and its construction, its language and its thinking—following the logic of exemplarity, Naas’s book also functions as a guide to the intricacies of a deconstructive reading, steering and gently instructing the reader as it carefully proceeds. In its sweep and detail, in the clichéd phrase that I find impossible to avoid here, it is not possible to do this work justice.

Naas shows “Faith and Knowledge” to be an “at once improvised and highly constructed” text full of repetitions, doublings, and moments of duplicity. Demonstrating the duplicity inscribed into the very form of “Faith and Knowledge,” in the two words of the title, naming the two sources of “religion,” the two forms of religion, the dogmatic and the true, the division of the book into two sections (fifty-two sections composed of two sets of twenty-six), the two times and places of its writing: first, its presentation at a small, informal gathering on the island of Capri, Italy, in February 1994 and then, its writing at Laguna Beach, California, in April 1995), the two, at least two, kinds of “writing,” the spoken and the written, the two forms of typescript or font, the further division of the text into the bolded and the nonbolded, Naas also shows that Derrida’s arguments do not proceed in a logical and linear fashion but are scattered throughout, progressing nonetheless by a constant doubling back to its themes and motif.

Even though Derrida’s arguments are not made in a straightforward fashion, it is Naas’s contention that we can isolate three main theses underlying “Faith and Knowledge.” Naas isolates them in a chapter (that he must have had great fun titling) called “Three Theses on the Two Sources and Their One Common Element.” According to Naas, these express: the fundamental duplicity of religion, the fundamental conflict between science and religion, and the fundamental complicity of religion and science (65). While I am not able to pursue the full details of these topics here, I can highlight the focus on elementary trust, reliability, or trustworthiness (fiabilité).

Among the discussions that I found illuminating and that I greatly learned from in Miracle and Machine are: the treatment of the question of salut, salut as salvation or as safety (50–52) and mondialisation, the process of becoming worldwide (58) in chapter 2; the discussion of the miracle as being coextensive with elementary faith (93–94) and testimonial faith’s conditioning of every social bond as an interruption, as an interruptive unraveling (94–95, 97–99) in chapter 3; the theme of breath (souffle) (110–114), the connection between the machine (118) and faith, showing that it is the machine that makes possible the faith that opens up a future (120) in chapter 4; the experience of the secret (127), in particular its relation to Christianity as a religion of internalization, of the virtualization and spectralization of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, explaining the divergent uptakes by the Abrahamic religions of what took place and was said between YHWH and Abraham, as well as the specificity of Islam’s attachment to the untranslatable letter and its resistance to mediatization and translation (131) in chapter 5; the penetrating examination of the most desert-like khōra and the rethinking of “religion” itself on the basis of another social bond, the one that first opens up, and interrupts in opening up, every community (195) in chapter 6; the consideration of “the ellipsis of sacrifice” (207) and the discussion of how when the specter of life-death is repressed the phantasm of pure life takes its place (225) in chapter 7—and I haven’t even mentioned yet the grenade and the pomegranate seeds in chapter 8.

Rather than engaging in a mechanical exercise of summary here, I would like to submit to scrutiny Naas’s discussion of an important theme raised at the end of his book, that of survival or living on (survivre). I would like to take the opportunity to think through a most pressing thought invoked in chapter 9, entitled “The Passion of Literature: Genet in Laguna, Gide in Algiers.” There, Naas takes up the unusual juxtaposition of two writers who were important for Derrida during different phases of his life: Gide especially during his youth, and Genet, who played an important role in Derrida’s work, certainly since the composition of Glas. Toward the end of chapter 9, after speculating about the role played by these writers in “Faith and Knowledge” and presenting a hypothesis about their presence at the end of the essay, Naas turns to Derrida’s views regarding death and the acceptance of death.

Examining the notion of “the end” in the Western tradition that Derrida is reading, Naas remarks that in this tradition the end is never quite the end. For there is always something that comes after the end, “something like an afterlife or an afterworld, some kind of life everlasting” (263–264). What about Gide of Fruits of the Earth, the Journals, or even The Immoralist may have appealed to Derrida, Naas writes, is his “unconditional embracing of life in the here and now, on earth and in this world, rather than sacrificing this world and this life to some beyond” (264). Bringing together his discussion of Gide with Derrida’s “final words,” words scribbled on an envelope, as he says, near the end of his life and read aloud by his son, Pierre Alferi, at his gravesite in Ris-Orangis, Naas concludes that in their “emphasis on this world, this finite world,” both Derrida and Gide issue a plea not to sacrifice this world for the promise of another world.

Naas explains that Gide’s reference to the very common expression de l’autre côté, on the other side, very much like Nietzsche’s thought, eschews an otherworldly religion or ethics, for what is promised on the other side of life, and encourages the celebration of the joys and riches of this world. One may wonder how to distinguish a thought embracing the wonders of this life from other competing discourses on finitude such as Nietzschean tragic finitude, or a certain embrace of carpe diem by the existentialists, for whom Gide was a favorite author. Of course, such a belief, as Naas rightly worries, can lead to the neglect of “the ‘other side’ that is to be found on this side, that is of the other world within this world” (267). He will go on to explain what he means by this other side within this world.

Having already referred to the appeal that Derrida makes to the phrase de l’autre côté in chapter 3, Naas writes that for Derrida there is already “another side to this ‘other side,’ not some other world beyond this world but an ‘other side’ or an ‘other world’ within this world” (267). This “other side” is “not some other world to which I might gain entrance after death but [rather] the inner sanctum of the other, to which I can have no access” (267). For this reason, Naas writes, there is “another other world,” but not one “above or beyond this one but another world ‘within’ the world, an infinitely other, nondialectizable, nonsynthesizable world ‘within’ this one” (268). And this thought becomes most poignant with the death of the other.

At this juncture in his chapter, Naas admits that it would be difficult not to want to pose the question, the question that many readers of Derrida may have been wondering about, about whether Derrida himself believed in another world or in an afterlife. Quoting Derrida’s own statements about his own death, for example, the one in A Taste for the Secret when he said, “I do not believe that one lives on post mortem,” Naas says declaratively that “Derrida did not believe that we live on somewhere else or that we live again; he did not believe in another world; in a world ‘on the other side’ of this one” (270). Glossing this further, Naas observes that “while we are not resurrected for another life or in another life, ‘we’ do sur-vive or live on for a time after death through the traces we produce and the marks that make us visible to others. … ‘We’ begin sur-viving or living on from the moment we are born” (270, my emphasis). This surviving is, as Derrida wrote in Archive Fever, “the surviving of an excess of life” over itself (AF 96/60).

While the nouns survie and survivance have existed in the French language since the sixteenth century (n. f. 1544) and the seventeenth century (n. f. 1606) respectively, the use of the verb survivre goes back to the eleventh century (1080). Both nouns refer to the state of the person who survives someone, to living after life, and to the fact of surviving, while the verb survivre signifies “to remain alive after someone; to still exist after someone or something has died or disappeared; to last or to continue longer than; to escape a violent and collective death, to survive a catastrophe; continuing to live after something unbearable.”⁶ A recent text of the French art critic and historian Georges Didi-Huberman, Aperçues provides a very insightful analysis of the use of the words survie and survivance.⁷ Discussing his reference to survivance at an Aby Warburg conference in London, Didi-Huberman notes his preference for survivance, rather than “survival,” as a translation of Warburg’s notion of Nachleben (207).⁸ He refers to the employment of the term “survivals” by social anthropologist Edward B. Tylor (1871) in Primitive Culture. Examining customs and beliefs that maintained their function and meaning, Tylor contrasted them with those that had both lost their usefulness and were not well integrated with the rest of culture. The latter he called survivals. Even though Tylor held a Darwinian evolutionary point of view, in Didi-Huberman’s interpretation of Tylor, what is culturally transmitted is not simply what has subsisted in the tradition, but Nachleben also concerns more discrete and more disruptive objects, more symptomatic of the culture.

Didi-Huberman then points out that the French language introduces a “division [division]” that is “unknown” or “unrecognized” in English (208). In French one only speaks of survie when someone has escaped death, for example, someone who has escaped or survived a massacre, a famine, or an accident. The one who has survived was never dead. He was the most “adapted” (plus “adapté”) and has survived, outlived (survecu). If he were dead and he appeared to us as living, Didi-Huberman points out, we would say that he was ressuscité (resurrected) or rené (reborn), not that he survecu (survived). The word “survivance” is employed for things, ideas, and images—never for beings that may have escaped death or who were resurrected, revived (ressuscité).⁹

The rather mysterious notion of survivre and survivance make an early appearance in Derrida’s work. In one of its first instances, in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” it emerges in relation to writing (l’écriture), which is described as a “surviving trace [trace survivant]” (WD 331/224). Later in “Circumfession” writing is again portrayed as that “intense relation to survivance” (Cir 178/191). In Shibboleth, the 1986 text devoted to Paul Celan, “the signature of the date” is designated as capable of “surviving and calling the disappeared or the deceased [appeler le disparu]” (Sh 59/32), while in Memoires—For Paul de Man, from the same year, we learn that the name “already survives” the name holder, bearing his death each time it is pronounced (MPD 63/49).

Survivre is not survival after death. It is not, as it is commonly defined, to continue or to remain alive after someone or something or to live after and endure the loss of something invaluable and precious. Neither does sur-, as Derrida explains in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, indicate superiority, supremacy, height, altitude, or highness above life. “It does not add something extra to life any more than it cuts something from it” (BSII 194/131). Survivre does not refer to a state of life after demise (“the afterlife”), but to a reprieve, an afterlife that is more than life or more life still. Both more life and no more life, it is itself a life-after-life or life-after-death—a temporal extension of life in the form of a reprieve.

“Des tours de Babel” (1985), Derrida’s contribution to a collection of texts dedicated to Maurice de Gandillac, eminent translator and Derrida’s professor, focuses on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923).¹⁰ In that text, Benjamin uses two words, überleben, in order to refer to life postmortem, and fortleben, to designate the continuation of life and the living on of works of art. The French translation, by Gandillac himself, uses the same word survie to render both words. Derrida writes regarding translation, the focus of Benjamin’s text: “Sur-vival [survie] gives a surplus of life [un plus de vie], more than a surviving [plus qu’une survivance]. The work does not simply live longer, it lives more and better [plus et mieux], beyond its authors means” (214/203). He argues that the work has “a structure” of “survival,” with the translation assuring the survival of a text (217/206).

In an interview given in the mid-’80s Derrida further explains that survivre is not a matter of survival in the sense of posterity.¹¹ Surviving, rather, treats this “strange dimension” of plus de vie, both “more life” and “no more life.”¹² In the interview Derrida uses another expression, plus que vie, more than life, to add to his descriptions of what he means by survie. So, he remarks that for him survivre is a matter of both plus de vie and plus que vie. In response to a question about translation Derrida refers to the relation between the original text and the translated text as an augmentation. Translations, he explains, produce augmentations or new textual bodies. This augmentation is precisely survivance, not in the sense of merely allowing the original to survive but allowing it to have another life, as it were, in another language, a more invigorated, perhaps even richer, life. In Mal d’Archive Derrida describes surviving in a similar way, referring to “the surviving of an excess of life” (AF 96/60).

The most extensive treatment of the originary notion of survie occurs in “Survivre,” which originally made its first appearance in English in 1979 as “Living On: Borderlines,” and was later published in French in Parages (from 1986 again). Just as Aporias is an examination of the question of death and the purported separating-line between life and death, “Survivre” is concerned with the instability of edges, borders, and boundaries that “join: separate” and mark the spacing between. For the most part, a reading of Blanchot’s narrative L’arrêt de mort (both “death sentence” and “suspension of death”)—although such a description would be a simplistic reduction and diminish the complexity and richness of this text—“Survivre” is a rumination on a survival and a ghostly return beyond the straight line of one’s lifeline: “Survival [survivance] and revenance, living on and ghostly returning. Living on [survivre] goes beyond [déborde] both living and dying” (Par 153/134).¹³ Living “beyond” one’s death, sur-vivre is not life after death (a state of life or a continuation of life) but rather sur-viving, more life still. Derrida describes sur-vie, which Michael Naas renders as a “sur-life,” “a surplus of life,” for this “more-than-life [sur-vie]” marks a survival in the time of life (une survie dans le temps de la vie], in the form of a reprieve [sursis]” in which the survivor lives “more than a lifetime [plus qu’une vie)” in the short span of a few moments (Par 168/147, trans. mod.) (214).¹⁴

It is during a roundtable discussion on translation at a colloquium dedicated to two texts by Nietzsche and other related works (“Otobiography, Transference, Translation”) that Derrida raises the notion of survivre in relation to Benjamin’s work once more. There Derrida insists on Benjamin’s statement that “the structure of an original is survival [survie],” what he refers to as überleben. A text is original “insofar as it is a thing, not to be confused with an organic or a physical body [corps organique, un corps physique] but rather a thing, let us say, of the mind [une chose de l’esprit], meant to survive the death of the author or the signatory, and to be above or beyond the physical body of the text, among other things. Benjamin has a certain number of sentences of the Hegelian type, Derrida remarks, to explain that “one must understand life—‘Leben’—not on the basis of [à partir de] what we know in general about organic, biological life, but, on the contrary, on the basis of the life of the mind [la vie de l’esprit], that is, life that rises above nature and is in its essence survival [survie].”¹⁵ “To understand a text as an original it is to understand it independently of its living conditions [conditions de vie] […] and to understand it instead in its surviving structure [structure survivante]” (161/122). Derrida refers to Benjamin’s alternative usage of fortleben and überleben, both translated as survivre in French, and clarifies that überleben means “above life and therefore survival in the sense of rising above life” whereas fortleben indicates “survival in the sense of something prolonging life” (161/122).

In Politics of Friendship Derrida writes that what is called philia, or friendship, begins with the possibility of survival. Friendship is a relationship that structurally necessitates that the friend “already bear my death and inherit it as the last survivor” (PFr 30/13). The friend bears, carries (porter) my own death (which is expropriated in advance). In a way, she is the only one to bear it. “Surviving [survivre]” would thus be “another name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited,” since mourning, its anguished apprehension, will have begun before death (31/13). One does not survive without mourning—without literally bearing or carrying this grief (porter le deuil) (30/31). For Derrida, survivre is “the essence, the origin, and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship” (31/14). The time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship. Such a time gives itself in withdrawing, it occurs through effacing itself. Its contretemps “disjoins the presence of the present” inscribing “intemporality and untimeliness [intemporalité et intempestivité]” in friendship (31/14). In giving time and taking time friendship “survives the living present” (32/15). For Derrida, this bereaved survivance is to be distinguished from the stability, constancy, or firm permanence of Aristotelian primary friendship (31–32/13). Friendship, as Derrida writes, is promised to “testamentary revenance, the haunting return, of a more (no more) life, of a surviving [la revenance testamentaire d’un plus-de vie, d’un survivre]” (20/3, trans. mod.).

In a late discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in 2004, Derrida describes his feelings regarding the anticipation of his death. In his relation to the death to come, knowing that it will annihilate him, he acknowledges that there is beneath the surface “a testamentary desire” that “something survive, be left, be transmitted—an inheritance” that will not come back to him “but that, perhaps, will remain.”¹⁶ There is a feeling that haunts him about what will remain, not simply things that are in the public domain but also private things. This feeling, which he calls testamentary and is linked to the structure of the trace, is part of the experience of death (93).

In his last years, in published texts, seminars, and interviews Derrida publicly expressed his struggle with his so-called mortality, with the fact that he had come to terms with death or had to “learn how to die.” For Derrida, the fact that he was not able to accept death did not mean that his fatal illness was met by a “refusal” to die, but rather that it caused a thoughtful consideration of how mortality has been defined throughout the philosophical tradition. Perhaps this “refusal” to learn to die, as every philosopher must learn to do in order to properly be a philosopher, was itself a “refusal,” on the part of Derrida, of philosophy as a way of life that leads to the soteria of the soul and as a discipline or practice of and for death (and hence as a discipline for immortality). As demonstrated earlier, Derrida’s thinking of survivance from the very beginning questioned the easy distinction between mortality and immortality. When, in his interview with Jean Birnbaum in 2004, initially published in Le Monde, he said that he was at war with himself or against himself, this was because he could not believe that death was simply an end.¹⁷ If surviving begins before death and not merely after it, as it is commonly thought, then life itself is originarily survival: “life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie].”¹⁸

As we have seen, survivance does not simply refer to what remains and endures for posterity nor does it signify surviving or somehow living on after death in an afterlife or life-everlasting in an afterworld, but the sur- in sur-vivre indicates “more living,” plus de vie, a more than life, plus que la vie, in life.¹⁹ For life and death, which are not separable as such, are themselves both traces of a sur-vie or irreducible survivance that dislocates the self-presence of the living present. The possibility of this sur-vivre does not wait for death “to make life and death indissociable,” it comes in advance before death, to disjoin and dislocate the self-identity of the living present (BSII 176/117). The living present is divided, divides itself, between its life and its survival, bearing death within itself. Survivance, then, is or says the complication, the inextricable alliance of the dead and the living.

In the celebrated essay “La différance,” originally a talk in which Derrida profitably exploited the unheard difference between différence and différance, he explains that “the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive” (M 9/9).²⁰ Différance is “neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice” (9/9). In the talk, Derrida also gives mouvance and résonance as an example to illustrate his point. In an interview with Raoul Mortley, he stresses that “Differance is productive […] it is neither active nor passive. It is more of the order of the middle voice in Greek grammar, neither passive nor active.”²¹ Let us recall that in Positions, in response to a question posed by Julia Kristeva, Derrida says: “The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences.”²² In the conversation with Mortley just cited, Derrida elaborates that the use of the suffix -ance “is a way of forming a noun on the basis of the present participle: mouvance, souffrance, these are neither activities nor passivities.”

The notion of survivance and its complex temporality need to be thought in relation to restance. What is remaining and what is its relation to surviving? Both remaining and surviving are bound up with a certain spectrality, a ghostly returning (revenance) and haunting. Anterior to life and death, survivance makes life and death possible. Life and death “would themselves be but traces and traces of traces” of a survivance (SM 17–18/xx). Another name for a mourning, survival is never present. It dislocates the living-present, which divides itself, bearing death and what would survive it.

In chapter 9 of Miracle and Machine, “The Passion of Literature: Genet in Laguna, Gide in Algiers,” Naas considers Derrida’s beliefs on the so-called afterlife and survival. By tracing and underscoring Naas’s use of the phrase “for a time” (one of them italicized by him) I would like to further explore the question of survival and its time. I do not claim any expertise in numerology, and in the wake of Naas’s own book that makes a great case for the significance of all kinds of numbers in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge,” I cannot say anything erudite about this number of repetitions—five—except to point out his emphasis on the expression “for a time.” My remarks or questions will have to do with how one is to understand this “for a time.”

Commenting on Derrida’s views about death and what may come after it, Naas stresses that Derrida’s work from the very beginning argued for and demonstrated a logic of survival and living on (survivre), though this should not be mistaken for a belief in an afterlife. “Derrida developed throughout his work,” Naas writes, “a singular thinking of survival or living on, a notion of the trace as what, in principle if not in fact, always survives the one who produced it or received it […]. As soon as I utter or even read a trace, as soon as I make a mark, my death and my survival are implied therein, my death and the trace or mark that can always survive me for a time” (here I note the second appearance of the phrase “for a time”) (271). In other words, the trace survives me: “while every trace—as finite—is threatened by forgetting, erasure, indeed by catastrophe or apocalypse, the trace in principle survives me” (271). However, Naas emphasizes, this powerful thought of survival is “a far cry from any kind of belief in an afterlife or in the immortality of the soul” (271).

“We begin living on already from the beginning, and ‘we’ continue to live on in these signs after our death,” Naas writes (271). But how to understand this living on? When Derrida, in his final note read at his funeral, says, “I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I may be [d’où que je sois],” Naas emphasizes, “we are to understand living on as living on only ‘in’ these words,” in the subjunctive and not in the indicative, as they are repeated or as they remain repeatable in others, for others—and only for a time” (271, author’s italics, the third appearance of the phrase). “Living on ‘in’ these words,” Naas clarifies, “is in the subjunctive, which denotes a mood of verbs expressing what is imagined or wished or possible, rather than in the indicative designating a mood of verbs expressing a simple statement of a fact or making a factual statement.²³ “We,” of course, do not continue to live after death or survive our death, but “we” do live on in the “afterlife” of the words uttered, signs or marks made and traces left. So, only in the time of “for a time.”

Derrida did not believe, Naas continues, in an afterlife or in an eternal or immortal life after death, conventionally understood, but “always only a finite and very mortal survival” (272). Here we could ask what a “finite” and “mortal” survival would be? If Derrida has been rethinking “finitude” from his earliest texts, combining a thinking of finitude with that of the infinite, “finite” and “mortal” cannot be taken as simply the end of a short, death-bound life on this earth, especially since in several other places, such as The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida links finitude with a survivance that is “neither life nor death pure and simple.” There, writing of the alliance of the living and the dead, he states, “this finitude […] is survivance” (BSII 193/130). A thought of survivance would then seem to require that the finite be thought in intricate relation to the infinite, as infinitely finite.

Naas very astutely notes that “it might be thought that this living on is something of a consolation in the face of death, solace in the recognition that, although we are not immortal, the traces we leave live on within the world in the memories of others, in the works available to others to read, hear, or experience, and so on” (272). Yet, Naas explains that Derrida’s survival is, first, anything but a “personal” survival, “for the trace I leave behind is precisely not ‘my own’ ” and second, that “with every death, including my own, there comes the end not of some individual within the world but the end of the world as such” (272). As Naas observes, Derrida rejects the thought that my death can be understood and situated dialectically within the horizon of other deaths. Derrida does not agree with the idea of a common horizon of death, for, death truly is “the end of the world.” This end of the world should, no doubt, be understood in terms of the very notion that Derrida argued for in the preface to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, where he emphatically stated that the death of the other signifies not the end of a world but the end of the world itself.

Since Derrida did not believe that he would be going to another world, Naas writes, “there might be living on for a time, but certainly no afterlife” (272, my emphasis, fourth appearance). For, despite his genuine struggle and constant preoccupation with death, Derrida could not accept death. “He could not accept death,” Naas comments, “because he—like all of us—had a certain preference for life” (273). (But this “preference for life,” as we have seen in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … , where Derrida also finds himself turned toward death, is not without its complications.) He could not accept death because he could not think or assimilate it; he could not accept it because he wished to question and thus rethink the concepts he had inherited from the tradition, in particular, those of redemption and resurrection. What we can say is that what he thought was in the end on the side of life. Derrida “simply could not accept death,” Naas argues, “because to do so would be to accept nothing less than the end of the world” (273). Thus, the acceptance of (his own) death would be tantamount to accepting the end of the world. It is true that Derrida could not accept death in the sense of resigning himself to it. This he could never do, but he did accept death as the end of the world; he did know that death would be the end of the world. I will return to this at the end of the chapter.

Naas then writes that for Derrida there is living on but there would be no resurrection (274). With every breath one is already living on, surviving, not at all immortal but living on as absolutely mortal.²⁴ As Naas shows throughout the book, Derrida’s thinking of the trace was always tied to a reflection on death and mourning, a mourning that starts from the very beginning. “Only insofar as work allows itself to be … uprooted, displaced, and translated, transplanted elsewhere, can it live on for a time” (274, my emphasis, fifth appearance). How do we take this emphasis again on “absolutely mortal”? Surely, this mortality is not that of a dying subjectivity or of a simple finitude. How would we reconcile the relation between mortality and a certain living on, surviving, remaining (restance), ghostly coming back (revenance), that is, a certain immortality? When in one of the first substantial treatments of the notion of survival in “Living On: Borderlines,” Derrida remarks that in L’Arrêt de mort the living on (survivance) of the one who narrates (le récitant), who is a survivor, is also a spectral coming back, a ghostly return (cette survivance est aussi une revenance spectrale), what is the time or duration of this survival (Par 182/159)? Is its time only “for a time”?

Perhaps with his stress on the expression “for a time” Naas is emphasizing the provisional nature of survival and living on, survival for a time, in the same way that he argues in chapter 6, “ ‘Jewgreek is Greekjew’: Messianicity—Khôra—Democracy,” that Derrida was not willing to give up the notion of the messianic “for the moment” (172). Or perhaps Naas wants to say that survival lasts “for a time,” as in the duration of one’s time, one’s epoch. One way of reading the thought that one lives on “for a time” after one’s death would be to say that the memory that others have of oneself lasts only for a time, only for one’s time, for one’s epoch, after which this memory naturally dissipates. In a wonderfully strange text entitled “ ‘Dead Man Running’: Salut, Salut,” written in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Les Temps modernes, Derrida comments on this very thought, on what you might perhaps call Sartre’s overzealous belief in finitude. In this hastily written essay penned in the form of a letter to Claude Lanzmann, Derrida links epochalization, the fact that one’s thought belongs to an epoch, to the process of sanctification, showing an alliance between the concept of epoch and the concept of salvation. For Derrida, this emphasis on epochalization is predetermined and overdetermined by the value of life. So, does memory just endure “for a time,” the time of one’s epoch?

Or perhaps, like the Homeric belief in the fame or reputation that outlasts the hero’s lifetime, survival is akin to the living on of memory. This would, then, be something like a living on in posterity, the survival that posterity promises. For Homeric kleos, honor and glory is bestowed upon the hero who has died a glorious death and whose memory will live on. The hero’s desire is to perform great deeds in order to transform his death into eternal glory. In the Iliad Hektor does not intend to die “without a struggle and some glory [akleiōs] or without some great deed” that is to be remembered.²⁵ The beautiful death (kalos thanatos), the glorious death (eukleēs thanatos), in the prime of youth leads to glory, virtually guaranteeing unassailable renown.²⁶ The logic underlying heroic honor is the need to be recognized as supreme, superior in rank, status, and valor and “to be famed ‘among men-to-come [essomenoisi puthesthai; hommes à venir].’ ”²⁷

Heroic striving has its roots in the will to escape aging and death, which amount to amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, and the absence of fame. By welcoming death and confronting it with valor, death is overcome as something to be feared. What matters most is being valued, honored, and recognized and by being glorified in a song of praise the hero is allowed to continue, beyond the reach of death, to be present in the community of the living, his life converted into legend and linked to that of other heroic individuals. In his analysis of “glorious death,” Jean-Pierre Vernant notes that this kleos, of course, assumes the existence of a tradition of oral poetry that serves as a repository of shared culture and as societal memory. The hero who is praised in song is not only committed to memory, memorialized, remaining present in the memory for all “those to come” but also commemorated in the memorial tomb, the raising of a sema.

When Naas writes that accepting death is something Derrida could never do because it would be equivalent to accepting the end of the world, he appeals to Derrida’s words in Learning to Live Finally: “We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve [en sursis]” in order to underscore the temporariness of this “for a time.”²⁸ However, isn’t the reprieve that Derrida is referring to here that of the duration of our life—the duration of our life itself as a reprieve—and not what happens after it? It is our life itself, the life that is riven with death and will live on, that Derrida considers as a temporary reprieve (273). When Naas remarks that in the preface to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde Derrida made it very clear that “death—in this case, the death of the other—must be understood not as an event within the world […] but as the end of the world itself,” he surely intends to be understood that almost every time Derrida wrote about the end of the world, whether it was in The Work of Mourning or in Rams, it was always in relation to the other’s death and with a stress placed on the death of the other, notwithstanding the complications he introduced in Aporias regarding the irrelevance of the primacy of “my death” or “the death of the other” in the polemic between Levinas and Heidegger.

The phrase “for a time” seems to place an emphasis on the finite. It seems to underscore that life is inevitably fleeting, transitory, and short-lived. However, one begins to wonder how one could reconcile this emphasis on a certain mortality and finitude with the thought of spectrality and with the thinker who wrote and kept on writing incisively, perceptively, insistently, and trenchantly in dozens and dozens of places about specters and ghostliness. Could Derrida’s writings on matters of life, death, and spectrality be equated with and be considered on the same level as the stock, mechanical existential response of a certain finitude? Perhaps it is infinite survivance that is finite.

An invocation of faith, Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine has the great virtue of causing the reader to wonder, helping us understand that this is what a marvelous event does. If Naas’s book is miraculous work it is because he shows us that the miracle cannot be understood without a relationship to calculation, programming, and repetition. And the wonder is that to accede to the event of this miracle we have to pass via the machine, via all the repetitions and duplicities recounted and mapped out through the chapters of Miracle and Machine.

The death of the other is each time the end of the world. The other’s death is the end of the world, the world envisioned as something that we commonly share. The death of the other is a reminder that what we call “the world,” the fact that we believe that there is only one world, is the result of a tacit agreement, a shared history. For “the world”—whether the kosmos, the universe, or the globe—does indeed have a history, a history that requires to be told again. With the other’s death so dies a certain concept of the world as one world. Each birth opens up and each death closes a “unique world” (E 138/123). The other’s is “an other world” (138). And each death, each time, signals “another end of the world” (CFU 124/95). With each death the world disappears. Nevertheless, the “world” is “there,” some will claim, assured of its certainty. Yet Derrida believed that what we call “the world” is the “indispensable assumption or presumption” of a “ ‘credible’ gathering” (an act of faith without knowledge), “the gathering of an infinity of worlds, possible and real” (IND 248). “The presumption of a community, of a gathering of this infinite dispersion of worlds,” he stresses, is “faith itself” (IND 248).

How long, then, does survivance last? Who can say how long “for a time”—the time of survival—is?