On Jacques Derrida
October 9, 2004
Judith Butler
"How do you finally respond to your life and your name?"
Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le
Monde,
published in August 18th of this year. If he could apprehend
his
life, he remarks, he would also be obliged to apprehend his
death as
singular and absolute, without resurrection and without
redemption.
At this revealing moment, it is interesting that Derrida the
philosopher should find in Socrates his proper precursor, that
he
should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74,
he still
did not quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks,
come to
terms with one's life without trying to apprehend one's death,
asking,
in effect, how a human lives and dies. Much of Derrida's later
work
is dedicated to mourning, though he offers his acts of public
mourning
as a posthumous gift, for instance, in The Work of Mourning
published
in 2001. There he tries to come to terms with the death of
other
writers and thinkers through reckoning his debt to their
words,
indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of
mourning,
one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us a
way to
begin to mourn this thinker who not only taught us how to read,
but
gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise.
In that
book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes who died in 1980, Paul de
Man,
who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a
host of
others, including Edmund Jabes (1991), Louis Marin (1992),
Sarah
Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-Francois
Lyotard
(1998). The last of the essays, for Lyotard, included in this
book
is written six years before Derrida's own death. It is not,
however,
Derrida's own death that preoccupies him here, but rather his
"debts."
These are authors that he could not do without, ones with whom
and
through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he
reads
only because there are these authors to read time and again. He
"owes" them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because
he
could not write without them; their writing exists as the
precondition
of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which
his own
writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges,
importantly, as an address.
It strikes me as strange that in October of 1993 when I shared
a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a brief,
private
conversation with him that touched upon these issues. As we were
seated at a table together with some other speakers, I could
see in
Derrida a certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who
had
translated him, those who had read him, those who had defended
him in
public debate, and those who has made good use of his thinking
and his
words. I leaned over after one of his several gestures of nearly
inhuman generosity and asked him whether he felt that he had
many
debts to pay. I was hoping, vainly it seemed, to suggest to him
that
he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I did in a perhaps
naively
Nietzschean way that the debt was a form of enslavement, and
that he
did not see that what others offered him, they offered freely.
He
seemed not to be able to hear me in English. And so when I said
"your
debts," he said, "my death?" "No," I reiterated, "your debts!"
and he
said, "my death!?" At this point I could see that there was a
nexus
between the two, one that my efforts at clear pronunciation
could not
quite pierce, but it was not until I read his later work that I
came
to understand how important that nexus really was. He writes,
"There
come moments when, as mourning demands (deuil oblige), one feels
obligated to declare one's debts. We feel it our duty to say
what we
owe to the friend." He cautions against "saying" the debt and
imagining that one might then be done with the debt that way. He
acknowledges instead the "incalculable debt" that one that he
does not
want to pay: "I am conscious of this and want it thus." He ends
his
essay on Lyotard with a direct address: "there it is, Jean
Francois,
this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted to try
and tell
you." There is in that attempt, that essai, a longing that
cannot
reach the one to whom it is addressed, but does not for that
reason
forfeit itself as longing. The act of mourning thus becomes a
continued way of "speaking to" the other who is gone, even
though the
other is gone, in spite of the fact that the other is gone,
precisely
because that other is gone. We now must say "Jacques" to name
the
one we have now lost, and in that sense "Jacques Derrida"
becomes the
name of our loss. And yet we must continue to say his name, not
only
to mark his passing, but precisely as the one whom we continue
to
address, in what we write, because it is, for many of us,
impossible
to write without relying on him, without thinking with and
through
him. "Jacques Derrida," then, as the name for the future of what
we
write.
* * *
It is surely uncontroversial to say that Jacques Derrida was
one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, that his
international reputation far exceeds any French intellectual of
his
generation. More than that, his work fundamentally changed the
way
in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics,
painting,
literature, communication, ethics and politics. His early work
criticized the structuralist presumption that language could be
described as a static set of rules, and he showed how those
rules
admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that
could
undermine their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical
positions
that uncritically subscribed to "totality" or "systematicity" as
values, without first considering the alternatives that were
ruled out
by that preemptive valorization. He insisted that the act of
reading
extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to
popular
culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. The
practice of "reading" insists that our ability to understand
relies on
our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs
come
to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can
constrain
in advance through intention. This does not mean that our
language
always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do
not
fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and
write
(see Limited Inc., 1977). Derridaas work moved from a criticism
of
philosophical presumptions in groundbreaking books such as On
Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967),
Dissemination
(1972), The Post Card (1980), and Spurs (1978), to the question
of how
to theorize the problem of "difference." This term he wrote as
"differance," not only to mark the way that signification works,
with
one term referring to another, always relying on a deferral of
meaning
between signifier and signified, but also to characterize an
ethical
relation, the relation of sexual difference, and the relation to
the
Other. If some readers thought that Derrida was a linguistic
constructivist, they missed the fact that the name we have for
something, for ourselves, for an other, is precisely what fails
to
capture the referent (as opposed to making or constructing that
referent).He clearly drew critically on the work of Emmanuel
Levinas in
order to insist upon the "Other" as one to whom an incalculable
responsibility is owed, one who could never fully be "captured"
through social categories or designative names, one to whom a
certain
response is owed. This framework became the basis of his
strenuous
critique of apartheid in South Africa, his vigilant opposition
to
totalitarian regimes and forms of intellectual censorship, his
theorization of the nation-state beyond the hold of
territoriality,
his opposition to European racism, and his critical relation to
the
discourse of "terror" as it worked to fortify governmental
powers that
undermine basic human rights, in his defense of animal rights,
in his
opposition to the death penalty, and even in his queries about
"being"
Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality to those of
differing
origins and language. One can see these various questions raised
in
The Ear of the Other (1982), The Other Europe, Positions (1972),
For
Nelson Mandela (1986), Given Time (1991) The Gift of Death
(1992), The
Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe (1992), Spectres of
Marx
(1993), Politics of Friendship (1994), The Monolingualism of the
Other
(1996), Philosophy in a Time of Terror (with Jurgen Habermas)
(2002),
and his conversations with Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques
Derrida
as a Young Jewish Saint (2001).
Derrida made clear in his small book on Walter Benjamin, The
Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to
come.
This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in
this
life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only
in
another life. He was clear that there was no other life. It
means
only that, as an ideal, it is that toward which we strive,
without
end. Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully
realized
would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived
at
justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to
fortify
its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed)
and the
second is dogmatism (which he opposed). Derrida kept us alive to
the
practice of criticism, understanding that social and political
transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be
relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life
itself, and with a reading of the rules through which a polity
constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. How is
justice
done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to
act in
the name of justice? These were questions that had to be asked
regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were
often
questions asked when established authorities wished that they
were not.
If his critics worried that, with Derrida, there are no
foundations upon which one could rely, they doubtless were
mistaken in
that view. Derrida relies perhaps most assiduously on Socrates,
on a
mode of philosophical inquiry that took the question as the most
honest and arduous form for thought. "How do you finally respond
to
your life and to your name?" This question is posed by him to
himself, and yet he is, in this interview, a "tu" for himself,
as if
he is a proximate friend, but not quite a "moi." He has taken
himself
as the other, modeling a form of reflexivity, asking whether an
account can be given of this life, and of this death. Is there
justice
to be done to a life? That he asks the question is exemplary,
perhaps
even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life
and
that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless task of honoring what
cannot
be possessed through knowledge, that in a life that exceeds our
grasp.
Indeed, now that Derrida, the person, has died, his writing
makes a
demand upon us, bequeathing his name to us who will continue to
address him. We must address him as he addressed himself, asking
what
it means to know and approach another, to apprehend a life and a
death, to give an account of its meaning, to acknowledge its
binding
ties with others, and to do that justly. In this way, Derrida
has
always been offering us a way to interrogate the very meaning of
our
lives, singly and plurally, returning to the question as the
beginning
of philosophy, but surely also, in his own way, and with several
unpayable debts, beginning philosophy anew.
______________________
Professor Shelley Tremain
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto at Mississauga
Erindale College
3359 Mississauga Road N.
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
L5L 1C6
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