7
Dis, quand reviendras-tu?
—Barbara
Somewhere in the middle of session 5, almost at the midpoint of the second year of his ten-week seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, which turned out to be his last, Derrida provocatively declares: “if I were to say ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was indeed ‘buried alive,’ he was indeed ‘swallow’d up alive’ you would not believe me” (BSII S5 189/127). He insists that, contrary to what the readers of the novel would claim, “it is true, that really is the story [récit], the story itself, not what it tells [raconte]” (190/128). Robinson Crusoe was indeed buried alive. Derrida here makes a distinction between the conscious phenomenality or representation and the fantasmatic content that “happens, really did happen” (191/128). Using classical phenomenological terminology concerning intentional experiences, he provides a gloss: As if the noematic nucleus or kernel (Kern) of the phantasm “(being buried or swallowed up alive)” happened to him … virtually but irreversibly happened;” as if dying a living death, the material or the logical content, did happen to Robinson.1 Robinson is “afraid of dying a living death, and so he already sees it happening, he is buried or swallowed alive, it’s what he wanted” (191/129). Derrida raises the stakes further by provokingly stating that in fact, in the indicative, “it really did happen to him,” dying a living death did happen to “ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ the narrative [récit] itself” (192/129). When Derrida refers to “Robinson Crusoe,” he further explains, he has been naming a “fictional narrative [récit], that is also a journal, a travel journal, a confession, the fiction of an autobiography, an anthropological treatise, an apprenticeship in Christian prayer,” and so forth (191–192/129). Thus, “the narrative entitled Robinson Crusoe and, within it, the character and the narrator, the author of the journal and the character that the author of the autobiographical journal puts on stage,” are all living dead (192/130). Readers of the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign may already be familiar with this seemingly outrageous declaration. Here I would like to explore a little further some of the consequences arising from Derrida’s comments as well as discuss the intriguing confluence of three terms—the phantasm, dying alive, and survival—which would need to be considered and thought in terms of each other.
Derrida states that not only the narrative, but also the character named Robinson Crusoe, the one who speaks and the one keeping a journal, and so on, “might have desired that the book outlive [survive] them” (193/130). This living on or survival (survie), Derrida tells us, is that of the living dead. That which is living dead lives on, it sur-vives. Like any trace, a book is at once alive and dead, or neither alive nor dead. Thus each time we trace a trace, each time we leave behind a trace, a certain “machinality” or technicality, “the machination of this machine … each turn, each re-turn, each wheel” then “virtually entrusts the trace” to a “sur-vival,” in which the oppositions of life and death, the living and the dead, has no relevance (BSII 193/130). Each time this living-dead machine is “a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like a “geistige Leiblichkeit,” “a body proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality” (193/131).
Before discussing the important notion of survival, what Derrida increasingly refers to as survivance, it is necessary to turn to what he calls the phantasm of living death. Derrida proceeds to clarify his statement about the case of Robinson Crusoe by stating that since “dying a living death, in the present, can never really present itself, as one cannot presently be dead, die, and see oneself die, die alive, as one cannot be both dead and alive, dying a living death can only be a fantasmatic virtuality, a fiction” (BSII 192/130). Dying alive, then, is a phantasm. But what is a phantasm? What is a fantasmatic virtuality and how significant is it that Derrida can later claim that it “organizes and rules over everything we call life and death, lifedeath?” (192/130). Now, in Derrida’s estimation this fantasy of being buried alive or swallowed alive, the terror and the desire of living death, is Robinson’s “great organizing fantasy or phantasm [le grand fantasme organisateur] (terror and desire)” (176/117). To “disappear, leave, decease alive in the unlimited element, in the medium of the other” is the phantasm that animates Robinson (146/94):
Robinson Crusoe’s fundamental fear, the fundamental, foundational fear, the basic fear [peur de fond] from which all other fears are derived and around which everything is organized, is the fear of going to the bottom [fond], precisely, of being “swallow’d up alive.”2 … He is afraid of dying a living death [also “dying alive,” mourir vivant] … thus of sinking alive to the bottom … He is afraid of … being swallowed or devoured into the deep belly of the earth or the sea or some living creature … That is the great phantasm, the fundamental phantasm or the phantasm of the fundamental. (122/77)
Derrida wonders if “the threat” of being eaten and swallowed by the other is “not also nurtured like a promise, and therefore a desire” (122/77). This is why he refers to Robinson’s “terrified desire” as a “double phantasm” (146/93).
The Phantasm
“Dying alive” needs to be thought with the phantasm, as a phantasm. Now, as Derrida reminds us in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, seminar, in Greek phantasma means both “product of the imagination and fantasy [le fantasme] or revenant” (BSII 200/136). The phantasm is a term belonging to the Platonic denunciation of mimesis, where the doubling of the model by the copy, the semblance, the appearance, the simulacrum, the ghost, or the phantom of the thing represents the false and the non-true. Already in Glas (1974), using the terminology of the phantasm, Derrida challenged the determination of difference as opposition or contradiction, which is indispensable to Hegelian discourse. In an interview subsequent to the publication of Glas, he wondered whether one can be satisfied with the common definitions of the phantasm, hinting at his own dissatisfaction with the “confused” and “less than clear or unambiguous” way that the term was being used (Poi 30/22–23). Philosophical discourse, he noted, “can no longer be assured of possessing a philosophical concept of the phantasm,” of having a “knowledge” that “would control [un savoir maîtrisant] what is at issue in this word” (30/23). In his remarks Derrida further pointed out that the phantasm “eludes the philosophical grasp” such that it is “no longer a term in a conceptual opposition that arises from philosophy (originary/derived, real/imaginary, material reality/psychical reality, and so forth).” In more pensive, speculative comments he wondered what would happen if the phantasm were “coextensive with absolute knowledge?” (30/23). In a later interview regarding the phantasm in Paper Machine entitled “Paper or Me, You Know …” Derrida explains: “The word condenses all together [at once, à la fois] the image, spectrality, and the simulacrum—and the weight of desire, the libidinal investment of affect, the notions of an appreciation extended toward that which remains inappropriable” (PM 269/63). In his late seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida states that he is again turning to the notion of the phantasm “to figure or configure” the very “contradictory,” “inconceivable,” or “unthinkable” thing called “living death” (BSII 218/149). He does acknowledge that he finds the thought of “dying alive” an impossible thought, which has no sense, defies sense and good sense, and is thus “unintelligible.”
Rather than being considered as a phenomenon manqué, the phantasm, as Derrida demonstrates in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … and elsewhere, needs to be interpreted in relation to the event. Rather than repeating the age-old philosophical gesture of being engaged in the partition and separation of the phenomenon from the phantasm, prying apart the phantasmatic from actual or external reality, it should be realized that the thinking of the phantasm each time requires a “thoughtful analysis of what binds and unbinds the appearing of the phenomenon, the phainesthai, insofar as it is indissociable from the phantasma, that is to say, both from the dream and the spectral phantom, of revenance, which phantasma also means” (H. C. 94–95/103). What makes the phantasm “almighty [toute-puissante]” is precisely this indissociability, this undecidability—it is both at once (192/130). The phantasm undoubtedly does not exist, it is not, instead, what must be emphasized is “what happens or arrives with [ce qui arrive avec]” the phantasm (H. C. 73/76). In order to attend to the relation of the phantasm to the event, to the event of the phantasm, which eludes the age-old philosophical distinction between actual or external reality and the phantasm, one must “analyze,” as it will be shown, “the phantasm as much as produce the event, in the same twofold gesture [geste dédoublé]” (95/103).
As Michael Naas—one of the first interpreters to bring to our attention the notion of phantasm and provide a powerful interpretation of it—writes, “what must be emphasized is less the ontological status of the phantasm than its staying power … its regenerative power.”3 As Naas observes in “Comme si, comme ça: Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God,” his article on “the nature of the phantasm in general in Derrida’s work” (187–188), the phantasm should not be understood “in terms of truth and falsity, or image and reality, but in terms of power and affect” (200). What is necessary is “to take into account the force and tenacity” of the phantasm (192).
In “Comme si, comme ça,” which later appeared as a chapter in his Derrida from Now On, Naas while stating that the phantasm belongs to the set of words or quasi-concepts such as specter, ghost, phantom, spectrality, fantomaticity, and haunting, would like to reserve for the phantasm “a rather special use and status in Derrida’s work” (189). Examining three phantasms (which are also forms of sovereignty), those of the self, the nation-state, and God, Naas argues that the “deconstruction of the phantasm nonetheless remains for us an essential task” (188). In fact, he stresses, “deconstruction would thus be, first and foremost, a deconstruction of the phantasm, a deconstruction of any putatively pure origin, indeed, of any phantasm of purity and of any simple, seemingly self-evident or axiomatic origin, any indivisible, inviolable order” (191). During a discussion of the phantasm of sovereignty in Derrida’s text entitled Unconditionality or Sovereignty, Naas adds: “The phantasm needs to be exposed and denounced not because it is untrue, false, or merely apparent but because it is so powerful it threatens the very freedom that makes it possible” (197). That the phantasm of indivisible sovereignty needs to be exposed and denounced there can be no doubt. However, if Naas is suggesting that the phantasm tout court or the phantasm in general needs to be denounced, we would have to ask whether “dying alive” is a phantasm like that of sovereignty, or of a pure origin, ipseity, uncontaminated presence, and the self-coinciding self, which would need to be exposed and denounced? In other words, if deconstruction is, as Naas argues, the deconstruction of the phantasm, would the phantasm of “dying alive” need to be deconstructed too or is the phantasm already deconstructive?4
The Phantasm of Dying Alive
So, in what way is “dying alive” a phantasm? Doubtless, it cannot be taken as describing a true or real occurrence—one cannot really die alive—but this phantasm has a very powerful effect. As Derrida emphasizes, the phantasm, even though it is traditionally opposed to the real, is “really [effectivement] more effective, more powerful, it is really [en effet] more powerful than what is opposed to it, whether good sense, reality or perception of the real, etc.” (BSII 201/137). In fact, the perception of the real has less power or effectiveness than this “quasi-hallucination” (201/137). Robinson’s phantasm is “more real, more effective for him, in its psychic reality, than what is opposed to it by or in the name of a reality principle” (201/137).
What, then, can be said of the phantasm of dying alive? The originary, spectral phantasm of “dying alive” is the contamination of two supposedly contradictory states or conditions. Since life and death as such are not separable as such, in other words, since death, and for that matter, life as such, is not a self-identical notion, the opposition of living and dying can no longer be strictly pertinent. The phantasm resists the “What is?” question regarding its ontological status. This is why the phantasm of dying alive—“to survive death while really dying”—is described by Derrida as unthinkable. Accordingly, a phantasm is described as “a certain ‘as if’ (an ‘as if’ in which one neither believes nor does not believe),” as if, perhaps “something could still happen to the dead one to affect the body” during cremation or the burial (BSII 217/149). Due to this undecidable structure, the only access or approach to the phantasm can be at the level of pathos.
The phantasm of dying alive describes the situation in which one allows oneself to be affected by this intolerable that goes beyond sense. As Derrida notes, “under the sign of this ‘as if,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘I do not know,’ we allow ourselves to have an impression made on us, we allow ourselves to be affected” (BSII 217/149). What Derrida calls dying alive is “an affect, a feeling, a tonality of pathos, [where] we allow ourselves really to be affected by a possibility of the impossible, by a possibility excluded by sense” (217/149). The senses and good sense would indicate that dying alive and its affect or tonality be “excluded by what is often called the reality of the reality principle, i.e. by the impossible possibility that the dead one can be still affected [le mort soit affecté] or that we could still be affected by the dead one” (217–218/149). According to this reality, any “being-affected is interrupted by death”; in other words, there can be no affect without life, without sensibility (217/149).5
Yet, Derrida states,
it is precisely because this certainty [KS: that there can be no life without sensibility] is terrifying and literally intolerable, just as unthinkable […] as the contradiction of the living dead, that what I call this obscure word “phantasm” imposed itself on me. I do not know if this usage of the word “phantasm [fantasme]” is congruent or compatible with any philosophical concept of the phantasma, of fantasy or fantastic imagination, any more than with the psychoanalytic concept of the phantasm [fantasme], supposing, which I do not believe, that there is one, that there is only one, that is clear, univocal, localizable. (BSII 218/149)
At once situated between consciousness and the unconscious, simultaneously inside and outside, the phantasm is thus auto- and hetero-affective. If auto-affection, as Derrida formulates it in Of Grammatology, is a universal structure of experience and associated with life and all living beings, then the experience of the phantasm is simultaneously “auto-hetero-affective” (BSII 130–131/83), where the “nearest and the farthest, the same and the other, touch each other and come into contact” (124/78). For “the phantasmatic nature of what orients our desire and our terror, our experience (let’s call it our Robinsonian experience) of the living dead,” concerns “the simultaneously [à la fois] auto-affective and hetero-affective structure of the phantasm” (224/170). Put otherwise, the auto-affective experience of the phantasm, my phantasm, is irreducibly inhabited by hetero-affection.
So, we have surmised that dying alive is an all-powerful phantasm, but its “fictive or fantasmatic virtuality in no way diminishes the real almightiness [toute-puissance] of what thus presents itself to fantasy” (BSII 192/130). For, as Derrida writes, the phantasm is omnipotent and almighty, an almightiness that “organizes and rules over everything we call life and death, life death [la vie la mort]” (192/130). Derrida further elaborates: “This power of almightiness [puissance de la toute-puissance] belongs to a beyond of the opposition between being or not being, life and death, reality and fiction” (192/130). Then, the only possible access to or presentiment of death can be via or through the phantasm of dying alive since it is not possible to have a direct access to death, to death as such.
Thinking Death
To demonstrate this Derrida will accordingly take a detour through Heidegger’s “The Thing” to show that thinking death as such, as Heidegger would wish, is not possible.6 In session 5 Derrida turns to a “famous passage” in Heidegger’s “The Thing” (BSII 182/121).7 According to Heidegger, man alone dies. Human beings are called mortals (Sterblichen) because they “can die [sterben können]” (171/176). He comments that to die means “to be capable of death as death [Tod als Tod].” This capability, this ability, Vermögen, Derrida adds, is a power. This power is the “power of the as such,” a being capable of the as such (184/122–123). Therefore, “access or relation to death is a being-able, a power (Können, Vermögen)” (183/122). Only man can die because only mortals are capable of death as death. “Such a power or potency defines the mortal, man as mortal,” and “this power to have access to the as such of death … is none other than access to the ontological difference, and thereby to Being as Being [l’être en tant qu’être]” and not to “being as being [l’étant en tant qu’étant]” (BSII 184/123). Heidegger’s aim is to suggest that man must now be defined not simply as a living being but as a mortal. This is why “rational living beings [vernünftigen Lebenwesen] must first become mortals [Sterblichen werden]” (171/176). This is what Derrida calls Heidegger’s great lesson.
Derrida, however, finds himself deaf to this lesson. As he conveys in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, access to death as such, access to dying properly speaking or to death itself, is not possible. We cannot think death as Heidegger believes. What the phantasmatics of living death suggests is that perhaps death as such is not something that can be thought about. If death as such does not appear to us, if our only possible access is not through thinking death, then it is only via a meditation on the phantasmatic that we can have access to it. And, conversely, any reflection on the phantasmatic must pass through the experience of living death, a “living death beyond life” (BSII 186/124). Derrida observes, thus putting into question the supposed difference between thinking and imagining, “perhaps thinking death as such, in the sense that Heidegger wants to give it, is still only imagination. Fantasia, fantastic phantasmatics [fantastique phantasmatique]” (176/117). For, as Robinson knows, “we die alive anyway [de toute façon on meurt vivant]” (176/117).
The Intemporality of the Unconscious
Derrida turns to Freud’s essay “The Unconscious” (“Das Unbewusste” [1915] SE XIV) where he situates the phantasm in “this place without place,” at once “ubiquitous” and “unlocatable” between “the system of the unconscious and the system of conscious perception” (BSII 218–219/150). The phantasm’s liminal location is due to the fact that the concept of each system is “inadequate” to account for it or for what Freud calls “phantasmatic formations [Phantasiebilungen]” (218/150). In section 5 of this essay, entitled “The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs.,” Freud mentions that “the processes of the unconscious system are intemporal (Zeitlos) and are not ordered according to the consecutiveness of the temporal order” (221/151). As Derrida points out, this intemporality is also “an indifference to contradiction” (221/151). If we are to continue to dare to think what “phantasm [‘fantasme’],” dying a “living death or to die in one’s lifetime” means, we have to remember this unlocatability, this intemporality of what is under question (221/151–152).
TIMELESSNESS IN FREUD’S WRITINGS
Numerous references to timelessness and the unconscious can be found throughout the Freudian corpus. The “Editor’s Introduction” to The Ego and the Id in the Standard Edition provides a very helpful summary of the references to the unconscious in Freud’s writings.8 The unconscious is very briefly mentioned in the early works, such as Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Studies on Hysteria (1895), and The Interpretations of Dreams (1900), chapter 7. Apart from passing allusions in The Interpretations of Dreams and “On Narcissism,” the first explicit mention of the timelessness of the unconscious is in a footnote added in 1907 to the last chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1906): “The unconscious is quite [completely, in general—KS] timeless [Das Unbewusste ist überhaupt zeitlos].”9 In the scientific meeting of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society that took place on November 8, 1911, to discuss “the supposed timelessness of the unconscious,” Freud makes the remark about the unconscious that it “functions without the element of time.”10 He calls it “a system in which the element of time plays no role whatsoever” but displays “something that resembles ‘spatiality’ ” (308). This permits us, he says, to infer “a sort of localization” (308).
The timelessness of the unconscious is further considered in section 2 of Freud’s essay “The Unconscious” (1915): “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless, i.e., they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system Cs.”11 Freud also observes that “all of what is essential from childhood has been retained” in childhood memories (148). Freud describes the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as “the true psychical reality [eigentlich reale Psychische]” because “it is as much unknown [unbekannt] to us as the reality of the external world [das Reale der Außenwelt].”12 Our sense organs are just as incapable as the inadequate presentation of the data of consciousness. Moreover, the logic of temporal reality does not apply to the unconscious. In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” of the same year Freud observes that the unconscious does not believe in its own death: our unconscious “knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does not know its own death.”13 This is because the unconscious cannot acknowledge anything negative and death “has a negative content” (296). The structures of the unconscious are unaffected by the passage of time. All mnemic material (the original impression as well as the material’s subsequent impressions) persists and is preserved.
Freud presents a summary of his views regarding the unconscious in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): “We have learnt that unconscious mental processes [unbewussten Seelenvorgänge] are in themselves ‘timeless [zeitlos].’ This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally [nicht zeitlich geordnet warden], that time does not change them in any way [die Zeit nichts an ihnen verändert] and that the idea of time [Zeitvorstellung] cannot be applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a comparison is made with conscious mental processes.”14 The Ego and the Id (1923) sees the introduction of the term “das Es,” the id, derived from the German psychiatrist Georg Groddeck and adapted by Freud. The reason for resorting to the unconscious is Freud’s belief that the psychology of consciousness is incapable of solving the problems of dreams and hypnosis. The state in which very powerful mental processes or ideas “existed before becoming conscious [Bewusstmachung] is called by us repression [Verdrängung].”15 He makes clear that “all that is repressed is unconscious, but not all that is Ucs. is repressed [es bleibt richtig, dass alles Verdrängte ubw ist, aber nicht alles Ubw ist auch verdrängt]” (287/18). After 1920 the categories of the Freudian theoretical apparatus undergo a change and the main properties of the system Ucs. reappear in the agency of the id. Freud will refrain from using the term “unconscious” in a systematic fashion and will from now on use the id in order to refer to the instinctual life or “the dark, inaccessible [dunkle, unzugängliche] part of our personality.”16 Described as “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations [einen Kessel voll brodelnder Erregungen],” Freud explains, “the logical laws of thought [die logischen Denkgesetze] do not apply in the id,” nor does the law of contradiction (73). “There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time [Zeitvorstellung]; there is no recognition [Anerkennung] of the passage of time [zeitlichen Ablaufs]” and “no alteration in its mental processes [Verdrängung des seelischen Vorgangs] is produced by the passage of time” (511/74). All its processes are dominated by the “economic […] which is intimately linked to the pleasure principle” (74). He notes “the inalterability by time of the repressed” and further refines the descriptions of the id (74). In this paper Freud attributes unconsciousness to other portions of the mind (75). Now the ego is understood as a portion of the id. The unconscious contains more than the repressed; it includes all our memories, thoughts, and wishes, some of which can gain access to the preconscious and consciousness.
We can recapitulate Freud’s views regarding the temporality of the unconscious by saying that there is no such thing as temporal order in the unconscious; the logic of temporal reality does not apply to the unconscious (succession may be replaced by simultaneity), a system in which the element of time plays no role whatsoever; the unconscious is inalterable by time, all mnemic material is preserved, all wishes, instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and attitudes of childhood are not destroyed but merely overlaid and persist; the unconscious believes itself to be immortal and thus fails to acknowledge the passage of time or mortality; and finally the law of non-contradiction does not apply to it.17
TIMELESSNESS IN DERRIDA’S WRITINGS
Derrida’s earliest remarks on timelessness can be traced back to his introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (L’origine de la géometrie). There he writes that the objectivity of a geometrical truth would not be what it is without the pure possibility of an inquiry into a pure language in general. Without this possibility, it would become neither omnitemporal nor intelligible for all. In a note, Derrida explains that “ ‘supratemporality [Überzeitlichkeit]’ and ‘timelessness’ (Zeitlosigkeit) are defined in their transcendence or their negativity only in relation to worldly and factual temporality. Once the latter is reduced, they appear as omnitemporality (Allzeitlichkeit), the concrete mode of temporality in general” (OrG 70n1/77n75). Derrida underscores the relation of timelessness to a common conception of time in his “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” writing that “the timelessness [l’intemporalité] of the unconscious is no doubt determined only in opposition to a common concept of time, a traditional concept, the metaphysical concept: the time of mechanics or the time of consciousness” (WD 318/215). If temporality is the temporality of consciousness, of philosophy, then Zeitlosigkeit can seem to be atemporal and non-linear only from the linear-progressive viewpoint of the time of consciousness. At the end of the passage Derrida adds, “We ought perhaps to read Freud the way Heidegger read Kant: like the cogito [je pense], the unconscious is no doubt timeless [intemporel] only from the standpoint of a certain vulgar conception of time” (WD 318/215).18
In his essay “Differance” in Margins of Philosophy Derrida labels the unconscious a “metaphysical name” because “the unconscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual or potential self-presence. It differs from, and defers itself, which doubtless means that it is woven [se tisse] of differences, and also that it sends out, delegates, representatives, proxies” (M 21/20).19 There is no chance that it “exists,” is “present,” or is “itself” somewhere, and even less chance that it might become conscious. The unconscious is not a “thing” or “a virtual or masked consciousness.” “This radical alterity as concerns every possible mode of presence is marked by the irreducible effects of the après-coup” (21/21, trans. mod.). And, “in order to describe traces,” so as to read “the traces of ‘unconscious’ traces (there are no ‘conscious’ traces), the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate” (21/20–21, trans. mod.).
I cannot bear it. “I don’t have the heart.” To dare to think the “phantasm” of the living-dead courage is needed. I do not have the courage, the courage “to bear the weight of this bearing (BSII 223/153). Should there be any courage, it could only be the courage of my fear.
The Phantasm and the Event
Derrida’s reading of Hélène Cixous in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … urges us to think the relation between the phantasm and the event. Since the phantasm eludes the grasp of the philosophical, it requires being thought at the limits. For Derrida, what is at stake in Cixous’s texts is “a new logic of the phantasm and the event which, inseparable from a poetics of the event, takes into account an unheard-of, performative might, a mighty power of making-say [faire-dire] as making-happen or arrive [faire arrive] of the might [puissance] of the event,” a might that a theory of speech acts cannot subdue or overpower (H. C. 73/77). And this is precisely what Derrida brings to bear on his reading of Cixous, a poetics of the event that “produces magically, miraculously, and quasi-mystically the very thing it nominates” (95/97). For Derrida, and for Cixous, it becomes a matter of “analyz[ing] the phantasm as much as produc[ing] the event, in the same twofold gesture [geste dédoublé]” (95/103). This is precisely what, Derrida believes, Cixous “continually puts to work [fait travailler],” the “production of a living event, which it brings into the world (95/103) … while analyzing it [tout en l’analysant]”—making and interpreting “indissociably” (95/104). There is no other “rule for reading” than, Derrida writes, to at once “make and to interpret while countersigning. If interpretation supposes analysis, that is to say, the analuein of the unbinding [déliaison] that unties, then to make or do, on the contrary, comes down to binding [à lier], to binding oneself [à se lier] and allying oneself [se lier et s’allier], to doing the contrary at the same time” (95/104).
Derrida’s intention, he admits, was to prove that “the apparently subordinated might of the subjunctive was potentially mightier than that of the present indicative of the verb,” that is, of the constative (H. C. 96/104). Here Derrida links a certain omnipotence, which he might be tempted to call “magic,” to the im-possible, unpower, vulnerability, and death (98/107). A certain exploration of the performative force of the writing, Derrida claims, would display “the irrecusable effectiveness” of the phantasmata under consideration (98/108). To be sure, the distinction between the phantasm and the so-called actual or external reality is by no means “discredited” but “one would have to rethink it from this place [repenser depuis ce lieu] where it does not yet take place [n’a pas encore lieu]” (99/108). The border between the real and the phantasmatic, for example, between real seduction and the phantasm of seduction, is not yet secured. Along the same lines, while pursuing a reading of magic, animism, and omnipotence of thoughts in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Derrida complains that Freud places too much faith in the distinction between the real or the actual and the phantasm, acting as if the “effects of the affect” were not real events, as if the “as if” had no real effect (101/111). What Freud is displaying, Derrida believes, is an ignorance or dismissal of “the knowledge and power of language in general” (101/111). He seems unaware, Derrida comments, that “the effect, both affective and effective, of a performative is always magical in appearance. It always operates as if by an enchantment” (101/112). Freud introduces the thought of animism, a theory of being-for-life [Belebtheit] and then says very little about it in terms of anthropo-ethnological experience (Erfahrung). As Derrida recounts, Freud claims that “any people, as a people, any culture known and determined by experience has its own Geistervorstellung, a theory of revenants” (103/113). “There is no culture,” Derrida states, “without unheimlich spectrality, without an organization of haunting” (103/113). Freud speaks of a Belebtheit, of which in Derrida’s assessment, “we can say nothing by anthropological, culturalist, or ethnological experience, and which is not even a philosophical doctrine […] but a quasi-originary Belebtheit that must announce itself to some pre-empirical or pre-positive experience” (103/113–114). According to Derrida, it is this experience that “writes and analyzes itself, maybe experiments itself [s’expérimente] each time that in the life and works of Hélène Cixous the mighty power of the ‘might’ is at work.” This experience “puts this Belebtheit to work,” “by provoking the event, by making-letting it happen [faisant-laissant arriver] before any philosophical, scientific, or cultural thesis on being as life or on the essence of the living” (103/114). “This experience of Belebtheit, which makes and analyzes the phantasm,” is not a stance on the essence of being as life. Not an “entity [étant],” the life of this Belebtheit is rather “a mighty power of the ‘might’ without an other side, without a contrary” (103–104/114). “Death is neither unknown nor denied nor avoided,” Derrida remarks, “it is simply not a contrary and another opposite side of living, a yonder or a beyond” (104/114).
Survivance
Let us turn from the deployment “this poetico-performative, the magical might [puissance poetico-performative et magique]” to a number of crucial passages in session 5 of The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, on the question of survivance, in order to show the interrelation of the notions of dying alive, the phantasm, and survivance (H. C. 104/114). My remarks will be in the form of a commentary on these passages. We started out with Derrida’s claim in his discussion of Robinson Crusoe that “a book the text of which is fiction in the first person, inserting into the living narrative quotations, inserts, inscriptions from a journal speaking in the first person,” is both alive and dead. Each time a trace is left behind, whether gestural, verbal, written, and so on, a certain machinality consigns this trace to a sur-vival. Derrida further comments: “The book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the dead and the living” (BSII 193/130). What is most notable in this passage is Derrida’s description of finitude. It has become very popular these days to speak about Derrida’s work as espousing a radical finitude. What the preceding passage and the ones that follow make clear is that finitude is not to be considered as the being-toward-death or mortality of a living being called man or Dasein, but rather involves an alliance of the living and the dead. This thinking of finitude, rather than indicating the limit or termination of mortal life, leads to thinking a certain circle of lifedeath.20 I will briefly turn to this certain circle at the end of this chapter.
Derrida proceeds to provide a further gloss on finitude, elaborating it as survival. This survival, however, despite the grammar of überleben or fortleben, as in the case of Benjamin, for example, discussed in Memoires: For Paul de Man, does not signify something that is “above life” (BSII 193/131). Nor does it “add something extra to life” or “cut something from it” (194/131). It will be also recalled that since the “Différance” essay Derrida has consistently shown a preference for the -ance ending, which marks a suspended status between the active and passive voice. Like différance, revenance, and restance, Derrida expresses that he “prefers ‘survivance’ to the active voice of the active infinitive ‘to survive’ or the substantializing substantive survival” (194/131). Of the relation between finitude and survivance Derrida states: “I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death” (193/130).
Derrida goes on to expound on what he is calling survivance by contrasting it with “lifedeath,” a notion from the 1970s and ’80s, which he discussed in texts on Freud (The Post Card), Nietzsche (The Ear of the Other), and Blanchot (Parages), where he considered and questioned prevalent notions of life and death: “No, the survivance that I am speaking of is something other than life death [la vie la mort] but a groundless ground [un fond sans fond] from which are detached [se découpent], identified, and opposed what we think we can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben)” (BSII 194/131). Survivance is not quite lifedeath then but forms the abyssal base, the almost more “primordial” ground from which life and death arise, as it were. “It [Ça] begins with survival [survie]” (194/131). What Derrida refers to here as ça, besides grammatically designating the third-person, singular neutral pronoun “it,” bears the traces of a reading of the psychoanalytic notion of Ça. Originally the French translation of Freud’s das Es (SE: the id), ça for Lacan was conceived in linguistic terms as the unconscious origin of speech and was later equated with “the subject.” With a nod to psychoanalysis, Derrida is referring to the abyssal ground without ground that is survivance as “it [ça].” Ça is survivance. Survivance, Derrida continues, “is where there is some other that has me at its disposal” (194/131). This other survivance is where the self is defenseless, when I am turned over to the other. I am survived by the other: “That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, structurally my survivor” (194/131). In a subtle rewriting, “the other” here is “the survivor of me,” what is “called to survive me” (194/131).
As Derrida declares, “Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine [machine morte-vivante]” (BSII 194/131). Every trace dies alive, is a living-dead machine that sur-vives. For there is survivance from the very first trace, from the very first breath.
Derrida comments:
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at work. But once again, this is the case not only for books, or for writing, or for the archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience [le tissu de l’expérience vivante], is woven [tissé], through and through. A weave of survival [Tissage de survie], like death in life or life in death, a weave [tissage] that does not come along to clothe a more originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this clothing. (BSII 195/132)
The first thing to recall is that this survivance does not simply concern living experience or simply apply to what is living but is equally at work in writing, the book, the mark, the archive, or wherever there is a trace. We might then ask how to think this weave of survival? This weave is the interweaving of life with death or the intertwining of life and death, a meshwork, the texture of a fabric that would not be like clothing that covers a naked body or soul but that itself constitutes dying alive. Survivance is, Derrida writes, a weave, an interlacing of life and death in which the two can no longer be separable concepts or entities.
The Weave
The consideration of the notion of the weave is a long-standing matter in Derrida’s writings. Recall that texte (derived from the Latin textus, meaning cloth, and from texere, to weave [tisser]) means cloth [tissu]. Rodolphe Gasché in The Tain of the Mirror, referring to “the problem of symplokē,” the weave, as “a major fil conducteur in Derrida’s writings,” contrasts references in Derrida’s work to a textual chain, a tissue of differences, textile, and texture with its classical treatment in Plato’s dialogues, in particular the Statesman (Tain 97).21 In Plato’s dialogue the craftsmanship of the weaver is the leading paradigm for the activity of the true statesman even though the latter is shown to have a much more complicated task. Gasché shows that for Plato dialectics unites and unifies elements that are opposite, tying together strands that are diverse in nature with the aim of forming an organic whole (Tain 95). At the beginning of Dissemination, Derrida makes a reference to “a kingly weaving process (basiliken symplokēn) (306a), the activity of the true statesman (politikon). He notes that symplokē is essentially dialectical when he states: “dialectics is also an act of weaving, a science of symplokē” (Diss 122). In the Sophist Plato goes as far as calling symplokē “the very condition of discourse” (Diss 166). While acknowledging the importance of terms such as Geflecht, Verflechtung, and Verwebung in the works of Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger, Derrida’s notion of the text—what he calls the tissue of differences of force, the system of referrals of difference or chain of differential referrals, the economy of traces, the texture of the text, or the text in general—differs from the classical symplokē in that it is not governed by the values of truth, totality, and unity.
Ground
What is of even greater interest is that Derrida follows the discussion of the weave with the mention of “the groundless ground [le fond sans fond] of this quasi-transcendentality of living to death [vivre à mort] or of death as sur-vivance” (BSII 195/132). The weave constitutes the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility and impossibility of life and death, forming a ground without ground for living death or dying alive. The phantasm of living death then has as its source, ground, or base (but a ground that is abyssal, an originary ground without ground) this tissue of survivance. Here Derrida seems to be pushing the thinking of the second of what, in the Death Penalty, 2, seminar, following Heidegger, he calls the two “accentuations” of the principle of reason, namely, the interpretation of reason that bears on sameness, the Same as Being and Grund.22 It would no longer be a matter of thinking the famous Leibnizian dictum Nihil est sine ratione (Nothing is without reason) in terms of reason, or a thinking of being from beings or from that which is a being, but rather as being, that is, as ground (Grund).23 Heidegger’s interpretation emphasizes a history of Western thinking that thinks being as ground and not as ratio or cause.24 This, for Heidegger, leads to a thinking of a ground of the ground, a ground without ground, a ground that is also an abyss. For, to the extent that being as such grounds, it remains without-ground—the fathomless. Being, then, “is” the abyss. I argue in chapter 1 and elsewhere that in various writings in his last years (i.e., in Rams; Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde; the Death Penalty, 2, seminar; and The Beast and the Sovereign, 1) Derrida furthers an elaboration of this second accentuation as far as possible, developing every other as a ground, whose death inevitably leads to an abyssal loss of ground.25
Following a discussion of the weave of survival at work from the moment of the first trace, Derrida then turns to a consideration of what we may call a “certain circle.” Survivance belongs to this certain circle of lifedeath, a circle that by definition cannot be self-enclosed but rather is in excess of itself. As Derrida remarks in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, seminar: “Living death beyond life, live to death, living death, etc. This is perhaps the same circle [Vivre la mort au-delà de la vie, vivre à mort, mourir vivant, etc. C’est peut-être le même cercle]” (BSII S5 186/124). Derrida immediately poses the question “What is that—the circle?” without providing an obvious answer. In a seminar taken up by the treatment of a series of circles, the details of the circle of dying alive, composed of the interweaving of mourir vivant, survivance, revenance, and arrivance (to which we could also add restance, in addition to demeurance and demourance from Demeure and la mourance from “Avances”), remain unexplored.26 The question before us is this: How are we to think this certain circle—not cycle—if life and death cannot be rigorously separated, if death is not termination, and what is “beyond” life belongs to a returning circle of survivance whose intertwined elements are made up of dying alive, remaining (restance), arriving (arrivance), and ghostly returning (revenance), forming a ground without ground from which life and death are detached?
When Derrida writes in session 4 of The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, of the inseparability and indissociability of life and death, he refers to the logic of survival as “a survival of the remainder, the remains [une survivance du reste, des restes]” (BSII 176/117). Survivance is a remaining but not the remaining of a plenitude or an entity that is fully present and maintains itself. Survivance defies essence and any substantiality. Something remains, but this something is not a portion left over of something larger. It is not even a thing. Something survives in the crepuscular realm between life and death—not life or death themselves but what makes their distinction possible. To survive, to remain, is a spectral “mode of appearing”; it is to come back hauntingly. In Mal d’Archive Derrida recounts Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s praise for Lou Andreas-Salome, who reports to have read in Freud’s Moses a new form of “the return of the repressed.” Yet this time not as “phantoms out of the past” but as, what one can call, “triumph of life.” Survivance no longer means death and the return of the specter, Derrida comments, but the survival of “an excess of life that resists annihilation” (AF 96/60).
Survivance does not await “actual” death, nor does to sur-vive mean to escape death. We are all, structurally speaking, survivors. We die alive. In fact, everything, every trace, dies alive and what dies alive survives. And since we are always leaving traces, this allows something to remain, to live on. It will be recalled that a trace is the minimal structure necessary, or the constituting possibility, for there to be any difference. As soon as there is difference, referral to the other, or experience, there is a trace. Each and every trace dies alive and thus sur-vives. Its very condition is to die alive, to be living dead. Since “dying alive,” by definition, resists the tribunal of truth and reality, in other words, since we cannot really die alive, dying alive can only be a phantasm. And we are affected by this phantasm, this virtuality, a certain impossibility that organizes all that we call life and death. The phantasm of living dead or dying alive, then, calls to be thought with survivance.
As Derrida said in the interview he granted Le Monde in 2004, this sur-vival has nothing to do with one’s will or intention but rather it is structural:
The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.27
One sur-vives one’s own death. One dies alive, since the line between life and death cannot be rigorously demarcated and since the living-present divides itself (se divise)—it divides itself between its life and its survival—its specter leaves it and survives. The living-present bears death within itself and inscribes within its immediacy what would survive it (E 61). This makes each of us a survivor in reprieve (en sursis)—life itself has the temporality of a reprieve.
Perhaps an Other Time, Place, and Logic: Affect, the Phantasm, and the “As If”
We have already established that Derrida’s later seminars mark a return to the notion of the unconscious. The time of “the world,” what we call time, belongs to consciousness—it is the time of consciousness. And consciousness is presumed by life in “this world,” which involves auto-affection. Interrogating phenomenology as a philosophy of life, from very early on, Derrida questioned the enigma of the concept of life and its relation to presence. Leaving aside for another occasion a discussion of the “torsions” and the rewriting that the notion of experience has gone through in Derrida’s work, it can be said that life, conventionally conceived, is also bound up with experience.28 Experience is lived experience, something that the dead cannot partake of. The dead one does not belong to the time of consciousness. What the dead one and the id (ça) share is that they both belong to a realm that is intemporal, that “intemporality” which Freud attributes to the unconscious.29 In The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida comments that besides being intemporal (intemporal), the id is also unlocatable. This unlocatability and this intemporality of what is under question may help us to think what the “phantasm [‘fantasme’]” of dying a “living death or to die in one’s lifetime” might mean (BSII 221/151–152).
In The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, Derrida refers to “the possibility of another so-called logic of the unconscious” (BSI 146/101), while in his previous seminar, The Death Penalty seminar (2000–2001), presented before The Beast and the Sovereign but published subsequently, Derrida touches on another unconscious. In a digression, he takes time to affirm that the “unconditional im-possible (e.g. the gift, the pardon, hospitality, etc.)” does not fall under the purview of consciousness or self-presence and that he has always called attention to
this aneconomy, to an other concept of the unconscious [un autre concept de l’inconscient], one that is precisely not determined through and through by self-preservation, conservation, by keeping [la garde], by memory, the calculation of a repression that never creates or destroys anything (nothing is lost, nothing is created, such would be, on the contrary, the axiom of Freudian conscious that I was calling into question by speaking of the im-possible, the un-conditional, the gift, forgiveness or hospitality; in this way, I was calling into question the logic—one that is, for that matter, incontestable and very powerful (it is the very force and principle of reason, reason since Freud)—of a certain economistic [economiste] concept of the Freudian unconscious that represses but forgets nothing: I was calling it into question in the name, not of a faithful memory, but of a certain radical forgetting [un certain oubli radical] that is no longer even repression. (DP2 232–233/172)
In the previously cited paragraph on the intemporality of the unconscious from the sixth session of The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, seminar, Derrida mentions a certain Erlebnis, “a ‘conscious’ or ‘preconscious’ ‘lived experience’ ” belonging to the unconscious (BSII 220/151). He asks, how can a lived experience also belong to the unconscious? Naturally, such an experience that is “quite unintelligible, impossible even,” defies sense and “logico-philosophical consciousness qua consciousness” (220/151). Derrida labels it “an impossible thought, a thought of the impossible” that would be a contradiction between two systems, one excluding contradiction and the other never hampered by it (220/151).
We need to remember the intemporality and the indifference to contradiction of the unconscious, Derrida says, if we want “to continue to dare to think what ‘phantasm’ seems to mean” (BSII 221/151). Freud situates the phantasm in a liminal position, in a between-place: “this place without place that is ubiquitous and unlocatable” somewhere “between the conscious and consciousness […] between the system of the unconscious and the system of conscious perception” (218/150).30 Appealing to Heidegger’s sentiment already discussed in his seminar, that we should not be afraid of formal contradictions or so-called vicious circles, and also to Hegel, Derrida reminds us that these apparent contradictions augur “the beginning of thought” (221/152). To think the unimaginable and the incongruous and the zone in which this impossible affects us, we must think it as phantasm (217/149). For this thinking of affect requires “a certain ‘as if,’ ” “ ‘as if’ something could still happen to the dead one” (217/149). Derrida further writes about this “impossible feeling”:
under the sign of this “as if,” “perhaps,” “I do not know,” we allow ourselves to have an impression made on us, we allow ourselves to be affected, for this is an affect, a feeling, a tonality of pathos by a possibility of the impossible, by a possibility excluded by sense, by the senses and by good sense, excluded by what is often called the reality of the reality principle, i.e. by the impossible possibility that the dead one can be still affected or that we could still be affected by the dead one him- or herself, by the dead, by the death of the dead one itself, him or herself: just where this affection, this affect, this being-affected, everything seems to tell us, then, with an invincible authority, that this affection, this being-affected of the dead one or by the dead one is, precisely, interrupted, radically, irreversibly interrupted, annihilated, excluded by death, by the very sense of the word “death.” There is no affect without life, no event without life, there is neither affect nor event without sensibility, that power to be affected that is called life. (BSII 217/149)
This is precisely why we have to deal with a phantasm. To attend to this affect, we must begin to think radically anew what is meant by affect, the phantasm, and the “as if.” Is being-affected “excluded by death”? Is there “no affect without life”? For “to transform death into annihilation” would be “to deprive the dead one of everything through which she can still affect, from the outside, from some exteriority, affect our sensibility in the a priori forms of sensibility, as Kant would say, namely time and space” (BSII 242/168, trans. mod., my emphasis). If the dead one is not annihilated, not reduced to nonbeing, as Levinas says, but is what no longer responds, if there is room “for some survival [quelque survie],” how to think this sur-vival, this survivance? (237/164). If we were to follow Derrida’s recommendation, in order to reflect on “the acute specificity of the phantasmatic [fantasmatique]” what needs to take place is to “pass through” the “experience of living death [la mort-vivance] and of affect, imagination and sensibility (space and time) as auto-hetero-affection” (244/170).
Not simply “a commitment […], an oath, a duty” (BSII 357/258), but also a “promise of fidelity” addressed to you (243/169)—“a declaration of love” (357/259).
“[She] preferred … to die while loving, to die while loving life, to die alive … to die in [her] lifetime, to die while preferring life, even to die from loving life” (DP1 374/277–278).
“For she knew these things better than anyone else: pain, anxiety, illness—and death. Art and laughter, when they go together, do not run counter to suffering, they do not ransom or redeem it, but live off it; as for salvation, redemption, and resurrection, the absence of any illusion shines like a ray of living light through all of [her] life and work” (CFU 136/173).