Eyal Amiran

Department of English
Michigan State University
amiran@msu.edu

 

This special issue of Postmodern Culture is dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. The issue does not attempt to consider his achievements as a whole or to say what place his work will have in philosophy, literary theory, or literature. What has been apparent for some time during his extraordinarily prolific career, however, is that people who have spent time with his writings and have learned to think with him have been thankful to live and work while he was around. To us it has seemed that Derrida was and will be a major figure in intellectual history. Part of our enjoyment and astonishment may have come from the experience of being in the presence, more or less, of such a phenomenon. Socrates knew he was the talking cure of his age, but probably did not expect to doctor the future; Nietzsche said he was a destiny, but other people did not reflect that knowledge back to him. Derrida, whether in the future we will think of him with them or not, has, to paraphrase Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, always compared himself to them, and seemed to us to be in that company.

 

That sense could not have been easy to live with, and in light of it one of Derrida’s remarkable talents has been his intuition or inclination to do and to be Derrida over the years. With that rhetoric of destiny hovering over him, he collaborated with translators, conference organizers, colleagues and students. He traveled often and far, lectured, taught, lent his name to social causes and to institutions. For example, in 1984 Derrida both wrote and travelled more than he had in a previous year: by his own calculation he lectured in fourteen cities, and published Memoires: for Paul de Man, the important Psyché, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Ulysse Grammophone, which gestures toward his own odysseys, and Schibboleth (Malabou 209, 211). Whatever his sense of destiny, he includes in his writings people who have a claim on his attention. His interlocutors, like Socrates’s, show the social and communal nature of philosophy, especially when it is at its most abstract and may seem to be mostly about itself. It is often remarked how generous and responsive Derrida has been–at lectures people would introduce him as the one to whom we owe debts that cannot be paid, whose gift exceeds our capacity for exchange, etc. That is precisely the rhetoric that does not trip his writings. On the other hand, being so open to others produces a logic of loss too, as David Wills suggests in his essay here: the danger of having no friends because everyone is your friend. Wills cites Derrida’s epigraph, “of doubtful origin,” from The Politics of Friendship: “O my friends, there is no friend,” which can mean, Wills writes, that “he who has (many) friends can have no true friend.” The logic applies to the authenticity of the voice of the one whose work is translated by so many hands: the Derrida most readers know is in English translation, and, as Megan Kerr points out in her essay, there are for that reason many Derridas. When we read Derrida in translation we are actually reading another name, though we call it Derrida. These translators include David B. Allison, Alan Bass, Geoffrey Bennington, Rachel Bowlby, Pascale-Anne Brault, Eduardo Cadava, Mary Ann Caws, George Collins, Mark Dooley, Joseph F. Graham, Barbara Harlow, Michael Hughes, James Hulbert, Barbara Johnson, Peggy Kamuf, John P. Leavey, Jr., Ian McLeod, Jeffrey Mehlman, Patrick Mensah, Eric Prenowitz, Michael Naas, Jan Plug, Mary Quaintance, Richard Rand, Avital Ronell, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Gayatri C. Spivak, Samuel Weber, David Wills, Joshua Wilner, David Wood, and others. Without them we would have a different Derrida, just as without Derrida they and other readers of Derrida too would be different. As Derrida points out, translation does not reproduce or copy an original, does not translate translation, and one cannot translate a name or a signature: for these reasons a translated work “does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond the means of its author” (“Des Tours” 179). Who then is the Derrida whom translators and readers embody, and can there be a Derrida when he is embodied in so very many different ways? Like Elvis, Derrida is a king with many bodies. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has written, Derrida’s circumfessional efforts have multiplied rather than answered the question of his identity (100-1). What does it mean to be Derrida, to keep an intuition of the work and career in the face of its own self-contradictions?

 

Derrida’s intuition allies him with Western philosophical and literary tradition, often overtly, and sometimes less so (as Jan Mieszkowski’s essay argues in relation to Hegel), and is expressed as a fierce social idealism. Derrida’s investment in literary and philosophical traditions lends his work shape and teleology. He rarely writes about little-known or “marginal” intellectual figures. By definition he battles with giants. There is a price for that kind of allegiance: Derrida’s work builds on and values foundational structures as it dismantles them. Building may be a price of doing philosophy–a price even Wittgenstein could not avoid. One such structure is Derrida’s own work, which revisits itself in the late work (as Alex Thomson suggests in his essay), as the visionary short late books of the Hebrew Bible follow upon the long and historical early books. Derrida’s idealism is expressed in his style, the coloring and value of his strokes, as well as in his topics and arguments, and produces an odd kind of perfectionism and qualification in his writing. It is unusual for a perfectionist to write as many works as Derrida has–and to find a form of perfectionism that opposes the idea of perfection and the need for completeness. The desire to be adequate is everywhere in his writing as a desire to do justice to ideas, rather than for example to complete or to perform justly those ideas themselves. The justice is to the impulse, the motive, the desire, which is often represented by the declarations of incompleteness Michael Marder notes in his essay here (if I only had more time for this talk, he often writes). The purity of motive leads to an unfinished project, the sense of being on the way. Hence it is not surprising that JD turns to justice itself as a concept eventually. His later work can be thought of in part as a meditation on the principles that motivate the earlier work, and not on deconstruction as a method which was a subject earlier on.

 

In a late interview (“Je Suis,” quoted in Thomson’s essay), Derrida confesses to two “contradictory feelings” concerning his legacy:

 

on the one hand, to say it smiling and immodestly, I feel that people have not even begun to read me, that if there are very many good readers (a few dozen in the world, perhaps), they will do so only later. On the other hand, I feel that two weeks after my death, nothing at all of my work will be left.

 

It is an odd claim, as though only by standing guard over his own work was Derrida compelling to the many who read and wrote about and with and published and edited his work. It is as though Derrida imagines himself the living consciousness of the world, and that once he is gone a night light would go out and with it the world itself. And yet he knows, as he says, that the future is the future of reading him, that he will be read “only later.” The contradictory sentiments echo Freud’s claim in a 1920 letter to Ernest Jones, a claim Derrida cites in his essay, “Coming Into One’s Own.” Freud rejects the charge that he is an artist, not a scientist: “What the great speculator is saying,” writes Derrida, “is that he is ready to pay for the science [of psychoanalysis] with his own name [payer la science de son propre nom], to pay the insurance premium with his name” (142). “I am sure,” writes Freud, “that in a few decades my name will be wiped away and our results will last.” In Freud’s case especially, Derrida argues, the name and the work are not separable, so that Freud’s idea that he would lose his name to gain the success of his work cannot work (143). “Note,” Derrida adds in a parenthesis, “that he can say ‘we,’ ‘our results,’ and sign all alone” (142). Freud recognizes the plurality of the work but not the plurality of the signatory–for it is “the science of his own name” that “remains to be done” (143). Derrida writes: “There must be a way to link one’s own name, the name of one’s loved ones (for that’s not something you can do alone), to this ruin–a way to speculate on the ruin of one’s name that keeps what it loses.”

 

Derrida in his interview speculates, in effect, that his fate may be Freud’s, to create a system in ruin that relies on others to be and keep itself. His ideas of himself over the years–as a gambler, a rogue, a chance taker, a thief like Genet and also someone who gives it all away–fit this vision of Freud the speculator. If we mourn Derrida by reading, as Vivian Halloran writes in this collection, we also live with Derrida by taking part in a system that he built, the great deconstructionist. “Paying for the science with his own name,” writes Derrida, Freud “was also paying for the science of his own name . . . he was paying (for) himself with a postal money order sent to himself. All that is necessary (!) for this to work is to set up the necessary relay system” (134). We say yes, we reply to and embody the idealism and energy of Derrida as best we can, we think with Derrida here and in the future.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. “Coming Into One’s Own.” Trans. James Hulbert. Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 114-48.
• —. “Des Tours de Babel.” Trans. Joseph F. Graham. Difference in Translation. Ed. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 165-207.
• Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Future of Theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.