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  1. On 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida became "irreplaceable" through his death, a gift (don) which was never his either to give or take, as he argues in The Gift of Death, but which nonetheless ensures the self's passage into individuality because of its very irreproducibility. No one but Jacques Derrida could have died Jacques Derrida's death, and even he could only go through this experience once. So definitive is the break Derrida sees between life and death, and so unique does he consider the instant of one's death, that when he reads The Instant of My Death, Blanchot's third-person narrative of his near-execution at the hands of a Nazi Russian firing squad in 1944, in Demeure, Derrida concludes that "when one is dead, it does not happen twice, there are not two deaths even if two die. Consequently, only someone who is dead is immortal--in other words, the immortals are dead" (67). While this conception of death affirms the negative gifts death gives the individual who dies--immortality (the inability to die) and irreplaceability (the impossibility of having an Other fulfill the duties and/or functions of the Self)--Derrida's view of death is also strangely positive: a person's death becomes the most defining aspect of his or her life since that, in its way, can be thought of as a long process of dying the death he or she is going to die eventually. For Derrida, the timing of a person's unique death is extremely important because it cannot be repeated. He considers Blanchot's "life" after the unexperienced experience of his assassination in 1944 as a mere "moratorium of an encounter of the death outside of him with the death that is already dying in him," and continues to affirm that the French writer's death happened at that very instant, despite his un-dying (Demeure 95). The most concrete instance of mortality Derrida reads in Blanchot's brief text is the disappearance of a manuscript that was inside his house at the time of the execution that did not take place. Calling it a "mortal text," Derrida contends that its loss is equivalent to "a death without survivance" (100). In the essay that follows, I look at a different way through which Derrida experienced an encounter of the deaths outside of him with the death that was already dying in him: by mourning his friends, colleagues, and mentors through a public performance of (re)reading their texts after the occasion of their deaths. Because the texts the deceased left behind have not been lost, like Blanchot's fateful manuscript, Derrida gives them, if not his friends, an element of survivance through the concerted act of (re)reading.

  2. Derrida's meditation on the individuating effect of the experience of death in his reading of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History can be interpreted both as an enactment of mourning for Patočka, who died in 1977, and as a recognition of the impossibility of writing about the other's experience of death: "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, 'given,' one can say, by death" (Gift 41). As Derrida points out, the paradox inherent in regarding death itself as a gift, yet not a present (29), lies in its uniqueness and irreproducibility for a given individual--death does not function as currency in a social economy of exchange as Marcel Mauss argues other types of gifts do in Essai sur le don. But by imagining the eventual fulfillment of his own future individuation through the prism of his always already impending death, Derrida takes death on credit, so to speak--he claims the benefits of it by memorializing himself before he has paid the price of ceasing to live.[1]

  3. Two insurmountable aporias separate the potentially replaceable, introspective then-living Jacques Derrida from the now-defunct-but-irreplaceable Jacques Derrida: the metaphysical and the rhetorical. Through his own death, Jacques Derrida forever stops experiencing Jacques Derrida's other deaths: those of his friends. He finally stops carrying out the work of mourning inherently demanded by every relationship, even as his still-living others--his family, his friends, his readers--begin the endless process of mourning (for) him. In (re)reading his various texts on the religious, social, and symbolic functions of death and mourning, we can both duplicate Derrida's performance of the debt of mourning owed to the dead and also begin to appreciate the wholeness of his written oeuvre as a finished work, much as he urges his audiences to do to the oeuvres of the writers he memorializes.

  4. Would-be mourners can negotiate these aporias through performing or carrying out the task that Derrida, convinced of the impossibility of mourning the dead through speaking either about or directly to them, sets for himself in both The Gift of Death and The Work of Mourning: (re)reading the texts of the deceased as a fitting way to honor their memory. Derrida's ethics of mourning-by-(re)reading present a non-violent internalization of the (text of the) other distinct from the "interiority" (Gift 49) that Penelope Deutscher calls his cultural cannibalism, his "eating of the other" (163). Derrida's self-reflexive mourning addresses itself to the other-within-the-self, thereby avoiding falling into cannibalistic narcissism. In his various texts of mourning, Derrida instead assumes the rhetorical stance of the survivor bearing witness who acknowledges the impossibility of ever again addressing himself to the now-dead friend. Instead of speaking for or to the internalized other, he prefers to repeat a previous act of engagement with the written (body of) work of the other. I shall mourn Derrida by analyzing how he defines his own role as an ethical friend-in-mourning through (re)reading, an act which engages him simultaneously in a personal recollection, a private introspection, and a public performance of witnessing and scholarship. I pay particular attention to three texts contained in The Work of Mourning: Derrida's (re)reading of Barthes's theory and performance of mourning-as-grieving through photographs in Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in "The Deaths of Roland Barthes"; his performative (re)reading of de Man's last letter to Derrida, where the former reads his affliction/diagnosis as a death sentence in "In Memoriam: Of the Soul"; and his meditation on the unexpected emotional impact that reading Louis Marin's posthumous book, Des pouvoirs de l'image: Gloses, has on him in "By Force of Mourning." Seizing on repetition as the mimetic model par excellence of carrying out the work of mourning, in this essay I mourn the mourning theorist as well as the theorist of mourning who, in turn, mourned those who had not only enacted mourning themselves through their texts, but who were mourned by the texts themselves in their posthumous publication.

  5. The specificity of the death of the other, the manner through which each meets his or her end and becomes irreplaceable, haunts both The Work of Mourning and The Gift of Death. The editors of each volume seek both to intensify and to remedy this sense of haunting by filling the gap of information left by Derrida's texts of/in mourning. In his "Translator's Preface" to The Gift of Death, David Wills not only informs his readers of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka's role as a contemporary and collaborator with Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek; he also goes so far as to establish the fact of Patočka's death and the manner in which it came to pass: "He died of a brain hemorrhage after eleven hours of police interrogation on 13 March 1977" (vii). In this way, Wills overdetermines the Derridean text that follows his preface as an enactment of mourning, where the living Derrida engages the work of the dead Patočka who wrote on the topic of death. The preface also overdetermines the function of the reader as an a priori mourner for a dead writer from whose works she or he is now forever displaced through and by Derrida's own reading of Patočka's essay on death, "La civilization technique est-elle une civilization de decline, et pourquoi?" No innocent reading of it is possible, just as Derrida's own discussion of Patočka's text is always already unable to engage in a dynamic dialogue with the Czech writer. Precisely because of the death he mourns through writing of his (re)reading, Derrida cannot engage in a textual conversation like the one he carries out with Emmanuel Levinas in his "Violence and Metaphysics" and Levinas's Otherwise than Being.[2] The intertextuality of The Gift of Death can be read as an enactment of mourning through the performance of (re)reading: in this text, Derrida mourns a fellow writer as a writer or, even, as his text, instead of claiming Patočka as an internalized lost friend.

  6. Nowhere in his published letters, eulogies, and memorial speeches does Derrida explicitly address the manner of death of those he mourns--a marked silence, given how much introspection and self-conscious reflection upon mourning goes on within a text that does nothing but mourn the loss of another. The only death Derrida discusses in detail in The Gift of Death does not actually take place: Abraham's would-be murder of his son Isaac.[3] Derrida's delight in analyzing Isaac's unrealized death, as well as his refusal to mention the circumstances surrounding the death of his friends, have the cumulative rhetorical effect of displacing the event of death itself from the occasion for mourning. By invoking Kierkegaard's image of a trembling Abraham disregarding ethics and familial love out of a sense of obedience he owes God, Derrida convincingly demonstrates that the work of mourning begins even before the fact of death has been established. Since Abraham's plight is a direct result of God's expressed desire to test his servant's loyalty, Isaac's looming death never actually enters into the gift economy both Patočka and Derrida invoke. Isaac has no explicit knowledge of the violence that threatens to befall him, so he has no time to interpret his coming death as a potential "gift" to him from God. Abraham pays the emotional toll of being asked to sacrifice his son, but even then what makes him tremble is not the fear of his own death and final judgment, but the guilt of occasioning the death of an/other that weighs him down. Both Kierkegaard and Derrida use kinship as a metaphor through which to investigate the obligation and responsibilities humans owe to God the Father in metaphysical and religious accounts of death within the economy of sacrifice of/for the divine Other.

  7. While Derrida's reference to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac contextualizes the discussion of death and mourning within a family setting, his conception of dying-as-a-gift is profoundly personal and individual; he insists on the relational nature of mourning as a process. Derrida's meditation on the importance and relevance of the work of mourning grows out of his discussion of friendship rather than of familial relationships. In The Gift of Death, he confesses,

    as soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. (68)

    Thus Derrida blurs the separation of the private sphere of relational experience, kinship, from the public sphere in which friendship develops from interactions between unrelated human beings and goes on through time. As with Abraham's gift, however, the gift of death Derrida-the-friend seems to offer is that of the death of the self to others, rather than the gift of killing the friend or the self. He avoids the metaphysical implications of this gift exchange by extending the impact and relevance of the story of Isaac's sacrifice to those who are not necessarily believers, but who nonetheless define their own cultural capital as literate and literary: "The sacrifice of Isaac belongs to what one might just dare to call the common treasure, the terrifying secret of the mysterium tremendum that is a property of all three so-called religions of the Book, the religions of the races of Abraham" (Gift 64). As both readers and joint inheritors of this religious/literary tradition, we can learn from the private drama that occurs in Abraham's family as well as from the larger implications of the duty the living owe the dead.

  8. In his performative (re)reading of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Derrida writes of a mourning within the dynamic of kinship. Barthes mourns the death of his mother by discussing an absent photograph, not reproduced nor included among the twenty-five stills he reads in this text. More so than is the case with friendship, the relationship between parent and child is founded upon the expectation that one of them will live to see the other die. The familial bond is both more random and more permanent than the intimacy developed through the fragile and contractual nature of friendship, precisely because it is founded upon this very expectation. Parents see their children enter the world, and expect to have those same children mourn them as they die.

  9. In Camera Lucida, Barthes, like Derrida, (re)reads in order to remember family. In the first sentence of "The Winter Garden Photograph," Barthes situates himself spatially with relation to his mother's death--"There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died"--as well as imaginatively, in the grieving process of mourning-through-rereading: "looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved" (Camera 67). As he mourns, Barthes (re)reads not only the visual texts of the photographs themselves, but also the emotional landscape of a shared life with the mother (re)captured and (re)presented by the photographs as articles that exist in time and are shaped by the passing of time. The death of his mother affects not only Barthes's description of himself in Camera Lucida as someone actively engaged in the act of grieving--of constantly existing in pain--but also colors Derrida's reading of the short time span separating the event of Barthes's mother's death in 1977, the same year as Patočka's demise, from Barthes's own tragic death in 1980, as an in-between period of no life, unlife, or a death-in-life. Although Derrida never knew Barthes's mother in life, the son's (re)reading of the winter garden photograph is so powerful it makes Derrida imagine this woman who "smiles" at both her son and, by extension, at his friend (Work 36). Derrida argues that her dying took a toll on Barthes's "way of life--it was for a short time his, after his mother's death--a life that already resembled death, one death before the other, more than one, which it imitated in advance" (47). By linking Barthes so definitively to the example set by the mother, Derrida suggests that the self is prone to endless duplication and repetition; Barthes may not be able to die his mother's death, but he can die soon after she does, thereby (re)enacting the finality of her death, if not its irreplaceability.

  10. Derrida himself duplicates and repeats Barthes's gesture of grieving for the m/other through (re)reading when he confesses his own impulse to look at the photographs in Barthes's middle books as a mimetic gesture that allows him to emerge from the abyss of grief to carry out the work of mourning. The unfamiliarity of the absent winter garden photograph as a visual element in Barthes's text prompts Derrida to stop (re)reading Barthes's words and to focus instead on his images: "Having returned from the somewhat insular experience wherein I had secluded myself with the two books, I look today only at the photographs in other books (especially in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) and in newspapers" (Work 63). The photographs in Camera Lucida depict mostly exotic others to whose appearance or affect Barthes responds through analysis and commentary. Those in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes are more personal; they portray Barthes at various stages of his life, and also include images of his relatives and objects of sentimental value to him. Ironically, in returning to the visual image of Barthes duplicated within the pages of the autobiographical text, Derrida affirms the symbolic distance separating his experience of the loss of Barthes-the-friend from the loss of self Barthes confesses to feeling when gazing at his own image in Camera Lucida: "what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case there are so many readings of the same face); but when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person" (14). When Barthes interprets his image as an object synonymous with Death personified, he evinces an understanding of the individuation that Derrida argues death gives us all as a gift. However, since Derrida looks at images of Barthes after the latter has not only become Death, but has also died, the exercise only heightens the perception of these visual texts as the simulacra of the man whose image they represent.

  11. In adding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to his discussion of Barthes's alpha and omega works, Writing Degree Zero and Camera Lucida--Derrida sets it, and through its autobiographical prism, Barthes himself--as the punctum or point through which to view his own understanding of Barthes's implicit theory of grief and mourning. Whereas no one can take or give the gift of a person's death to or from him or her, people can authorize themselves whether or not the author has died a physical death. Barthes explains this in "The Death of the Author," when he acknowledges that "the author still reigns in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, magazine interviews, and in the very consciousness of litterateurs eager to unite, by means of private journals, their person and their work" (50). The very public nature of the document through which he "unites" his "person" and his "work" distinguishes Barthes-the-writer from the "litterateurs" he disparages. As the title of the text clearly indicates, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a self-authorizing document through which the author usurps the generative agency of the Mother. This self-naming gesture becomes doubly significant according to the Derridean deconstruction of reading and writing practices because through appropriating the Lacanian name of the Father, Barthes at once inscribes himself into the Freudian family romance and reduces his public "self" to the limitations of language in its naming capacity.

  12. Roland Barthes claims to have frustrated the Oedipal relationship because of the early death of his father. In a caption printed beneath a photograph of his progenitor, he writes, "The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory--never an oppressive one--merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty" (Roland Barthes 15). Despite this image of benign neglect, or of a complacent emotional distance separating his childhood self from the pain of the loss of his father, Barthes reveals the emotional trauma of being identified as a mourner when he tells an anecdote about one of his schoolteachers:

    At the beginning of the year, he solemnly listed on the blackboard the students' relatives who had "fallen on the field of honor"; uncles abounded, and cousins, but I was the only one who could claim a father. I was embarrassed by this--excessive--differentiation. Yet once the blackboard was erased, nothing was left of this proclaimed mourning--except, in real life, which proclaims nothing, which is always silent, the figure of a home socially adrift: no father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration! (Roland Barthes 44-45)

    The public inscription of the name of the father on the blackboard embarrasses Barthes by the intimacy the relationship implies, even as the lived experience of that intimacy is absent. In his attempt to honor the dead, the teacher draws attention to the young Barthes's status as both a mourner and an orphan, and thereby emphasizes his difference from his peers. By using the plural in the title of his eulogy, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," Derrida avoids repeating the teacher's mistake. Derrida acknowledges that Barthes experienced death in several ways while he was alive, and does not appropriate any one of these for his own grieving.

  13. The editors of The Work of Mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, fill in the gaps left by the deaths of each of Derrida's mourned friends and by Derrida's rhetorical silence concerning the same. In a situation parallel to that occasioned by Wills in his "Translator's Preface" of The Gift of Death, Brault and Naas structurally make mourning possible for the reader of The Work of Mourning by prefacing each essay with a brief biography/thanatography of Derrida's dearly departed colleagues. Given the length and attention to detail of these biographical sketches, we can read them as supplements to Derrida's account of his friendship with each person as chronicled in the essay itself. Since they include important information about the circumstances surrounding the death of each person, the sketches highlight the absence of Derrida's discussion of the death of his friends.

  14. This omission is especially glaring in the accounts of Sarah Kofman and Gilles Deleuze, two people who literally give themselves death--"se donner la mort" (Gift 10)--by committing suicide. Derrida's silence concerning the circumstances of Kofman's death is stunning; by ignoring the doubling and reversal inherent in Kofman's timing her death to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche's birth (Work 167), Derrida does not acknowledge the performative self-mourning inherent in her violent internalization of the gift of her death. Ironically, in The Gift of Death Derrida already lays out the groundwork through which to interpret suicide as a sacrificial gift to an/other. Derrida claims, "it is the gift of death one makes to the other in putting oneself to death, mortifying oneself in order to make a gift of this death as a sacrificial offering to God" (Gift 69). In this passage the other is God, but in Kofman's case, I would argue, the Other to whom she "gives" her death as a birthday present is Nietzsche. Rather than affirming her own irreplaceability, Kofman forcefully imbricates the event of her self-authorized death with the raison d'être for a large portion (five books) of her distinguished oeuvre on the German philosopher. Deleuze's suicide is less self-consciously theatrical than Kofman's, and so does not warrant as close an analysis.

  15. While Derrida's silence about suicide can be said to mute its impact as a performance, in "In Memoriam: Of the Soul" he quotes from de Man's private writing, his letters to Derrida, to illustrate a willful act of (re)reading his own illness as a double metaphor: de Man reads cancer through Mallarmé as a process, "peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort" (Work 74), but recoils from the implied threat contained within the living symbol of his affliction, "tumeur/tu meurs" (75). By reading the letter as de Man's affirmation of living-in-death instead of interpreting it as a memento mori or even as an "intimation of immortality," Derrida mutes the power of de Man's rhetorical gesture towards a self-authorized (or self-authored) death. Even as he mourns his friend by (re)reading his letter, Derrida's invocation of de Man's pun on his illness keeps him frozen in time, as it were, as a reader reading about his impending death rather than as someone who give himself death through suicide. Derrida tries to evade the responsibility inherent in mourning for de Man by endlessly postponing the moment of mourning until some future time outside the narrative. The essay he writes in memory of Paul de Man and which appears in The Work of Mourning, "In Memoriam: Of the Soul," is a 1986 translated transcription and adaptation of the speech Derrida originally gave at the memorial service held at Yale in 1984 (qtd. in Mourning 72). In its internal displacement from itself, the essay embodies the very postponement it announces: "At a later time, I will try to find better words, and more serene ones, for the friendship that ties me to Paul de Man (it was and remains unique), what I, like so many others, owe to his generosity, to his lucidity, to the ever so gentle force of his thought" (Work 73). Derrida feels weighed down by the outstanding balance of his friendship with de Man, a debt that now can never be repaid. When he writes "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," published in Reading de Man Reading (1989), a volume explicitly dedicated to memorialize the work and thought of de Man, Derrida fulfills the promise he makes in "In Memoriam." However, although he carries out the work of mourning by engaging in a careful (re)reading of de Man's "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," Derrida once more postpones addressing the loss or lack of de Man in the world until another time.

  16. The final structural mechanism through which Derrida postpones the moment of mourning in both of these essays is the juxtaposition of the familial world to that of friendship. In each of these two texts, Derrida triangulates his interaction with de Man through the introduction of a son--Derrida's actual and Cicero's historical offspring--into the dynamic of friendship. These two sons mediate Derrida's interaction with de Man by perpetuating the distance that separates the dead one from the still-living (at that time) other. This gesture is most overt in the opening paragraphs of "Psyche," where Derrida approaches his reading of de Man's essay on allegory through the prism of the "invention" in a discussion of Cicero's dialogue with his son. In between his reading of the Latin pater familias and the Belgian reader of allegory, Derrida speaks a few words of mourning:

    I should like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Paul de Man. Allow me to do so in a very simple way, by trying once more to borrow from him--from among all the things we have received from him--a bit of that serene discretion by which his thought--its force and radiance--was marked. ("Psyche" 26)

    As he writes about de Man here, Derrida distances himself once more from the grief of his mourning by asking his readers to authorize him to write what he is about to say. The analysis that follows this personal irruption in the text is tonally objective and somewhat removed.

  17. Derrida describes a similar experience of feeling distanced from de Man during a car ride through the streets of Chicago, when he listens to, but does not join, de Man's conversation with Derrida's son, Pierre, about music and instruments. Although he was not himself a musician, Derrida recognizes the artistry shared by his son and his friend in their proper use of language, "as technicians who know how to call things by their name" (Work 75). He translates this "technical" discussion to the language of images once Derrida learns that "the 'soul' [âme] is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood--always very exposed, very vulnerable--that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards" (75). This definition of the "soul" [âme] of the instruments, rather than giving Derrida greater insight into the conversation his friend and son were having, sends him instead into metaphysical flights of fancy, through which he associates the instruments of the conversation with "the argument of the lyre in the Phaedo" (75). In this mental distancing from the conversation in the car, Derrida exhibits his own status as a rhetorical technician, rather than as a musical one. This recognition of an unbridgeable gap of experience is sparked by Derrida's almost visceral reaction to the word "soul": "I was so strangely moved and unsettled [obscurément bouleversé]" (Work 75). I read Derrida's reaction as a sign of alienation from the two musicians in the car retold as a story to the assembled crowd both to pay tribute to the specialized skills and knowledge of the dead, and to affirm Derrida's own, and the community's, status as living beings who grieve for a common loss.[4]

  18. Unlike Barthes's photograph of his mother in the winter garden, which leads him to discover a truth about his mother, Derrida's image of "soul"/âme emphasizes his own exclusion from the conversation he overhears. He does not know what it means. The conversation teaches him about his son's expertise as well as revealing a previously unknown facet of de Man, but the mental/textual image of the "soul"/âme as an apparatus shows his own distance from the conversation.

  19. While his friendship with de Man may have been unique, it was not exclusive. The reproducibility of a social dynamic--friendship--as well as the inescapable fact of every person's eventual death unites the speaker and the audience in a public expression of mourning that is both reproduced and disseminated through the publication of the anthology of Derrida's writings years later. In "In Memoriam," Derrida uses repetition to convey the cycle of grief and mourning as an experience that brings him closer to the audience of fellow mourners than to the dearly departed de Man: "We are speaking today less in order to say something than to assure ourselves, with voice and with music, that we are together in the same thought" (Work 73).

  20. With the distance of time also comes the burden of responsibility. The communal wound that Derrida chooses not to help heal is the pain occasioned by the revelation of de Man's anti-Semitic writings in Belgium when he was a young man. Derrida's silence about these texts through the various translations and adaptations of these two essays can be read as his attempt not to speak for the other now that there is no chance to obtain a reply.[5] The insurmountable silence of death condemns us all to ignorance regarding de Man's readings of his earlier publications in light of the wisdom he developed as he aged. Derrida's repeated references both to grief and to ignorance of what the future would hold--"How was I to know," "so painfully," "everything is painful, so painful" (Work 75)--give witness to his friendship with de Man as it was at the moment of de Man's death, as yet untainted by the scandal of revelation but always already injured by the existence of the few de Manian texts Derrida is not at pains to (re)read.

  21. Derrida discusses mourning as a process that begins upon the loss of the other, but which had its origins much earlier. The inevitable potential loss of the friend casts a shadow upon the very foundation of friendship, as Derrida argues in other essays in The Work of Mourning. In "The Taste of Tears," Derrida's celebration of his friendship with Jean-Marie Benoist, he explains the expectations of mourning built into the pact of friendship: "To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die" (Work 107). His emphasis on the ocular nature of this contract implicit within friendship is all the more ironic in that Derrida confesses to not having gazed upon the dead friend for quite some time before his or her dying. In his insistence on (re)reading as the proper activity through which to work at mourning, Derrida privileges sight, the process of turning seeing into knowing, over the gaze, the continued and sustained observation of the already familiar image. To succeed at mourning, the surviving friend must be seen to be working at mourning.

  22. Furthermore, Derrida assumes that mourning is both a duty--an obligation to be fulfilled by a friend--and an unavoidable burden placed upon the friendship itself. It is incumbent upon the surviving friend to perform or give witness to his or her own "fidelity" (Work 45) to the relationship with the now-dead writer (as it happens, all the people he memorializes in this collection are writers). The death of the friend, then, on the one hand, effectively ends the friendship itself: while he lives, Derrida can remember his friendships with the dead, but he can no longer be the friend to the dead that he was to the living. On the other hand, the death of the friend perpetuates the friendship as it was up-until-the-moment-of-death--with the death of the one friend and the subsequent elimination of the possibility for further interaction, the friendship becomes static, forever frozen as it last stood. The surviving friend may give witness to his or her own fidelity, but he or she may not alter unresolved issues or disappointments that may have occurred in the past. In contrast, Derrida describes the beginning of friendship as an infinitely fluid time. He does so by consciously failing to draw a firm distinction between his role as a reader of the now-dead-writers' texts and his eventual status as the writers' friend. In his letter to Didier Cahen about his reaction to Edmond Jabès's death, Derrida says his relationship with Jabès began before they met--it was an occasion "when friendship begins before friendship" (123). Derrida's friendship for Jabès began when he first read Jabès's The Book of Questions. Here Derrida characterizes the reader-text relationship as a gateway to a possible friendship between reader and writer so long as this possibility is not foreclosed by the death of either party. While friendship is a dynamic system that demands interaction between two parties, mourning may be communal, but it can never be reciprocal.

  23. Derrida's essay on the death of Louis Marin, "By Force of Mourning," begins by negating the very premise of its origin: Derrida announces the absolute lack of a language through which to convey and understand the process of mourning as a work. "There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work" (143). It follows that the work of mourning cannot succeed fully in language. Derrida points out that the posthumous publication of Marin's last book, De pouvoirs de l'image, effectively makes Marin (re)appear in print; he is no longer the friend who can be "followed" by the eyes of the gazing other, but that does not discount the visual presence of the dead-Marin-as-text through his posthumous book. Like the (unseen) photograph of Barthes's mother in "The Winter Garden Photograph" and the (unheard) melody made possible by de Man's and Pierre's "soul"/[âme], Marin haunts Derrida's imagination as the trace of an irreproducible visual image. As a textual portrait of Marin's work on images, the posthumously published Des pouvoirs de l'image fixes him as an eternal revenant, an undead that rises out of the grave with each act of reading. As he does in his earlier reading of Barthes's last book, Camera Lucida, Derrida here privileges the opposite function of the visual image, "the pictorial vocation," of Marin's book "to seize the dead and transfigure them--to resuscitate as having been the one who (singularly, he or she) will have been" (Work 156). Where he sees the textual image of Marin in the book affirming the irreplaceability hard-won through accepting the gift of death, breathing new life into his experience of having-been-in the world, Derrida reads Barthes's gaze upon the picture of the mother as a self-obliterating gesture that erases all difference between the parent and child.

  24. At this nexus where self-confusion intersects with the affirmation of individuality, Derrida theorizes the concept of "grief" in his discussion of mourning, instead of appealing to writing-in-pain as he does in "In Memoriam." In Camera Lucida, Barthes had already noted the co-incidence of grief and mourning as supplementary processes of being-in-relation-to-death. For him, the act of gazing upon "The Winter Garden Photograph" brings about a synaesthetic recognition of a larger truth; the photograph "was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Frühe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death" (Camera 70). Grief as an emotion defines the timelessness of his "mother's being" as well as the abyss of loss Barthes experiences "at her death" and continuously thereafter. For Derrida, the act of reading Des pouvoirs de l'image proves the emotional power inherent of the image of the loyal friend giving witness to a now-lost friendship. Although he does not give it a name, Derrida feels "the emotion of mourning that we all know and recognize, even if it hits us each time in a new and singular way, like the end of the world, an emotion that overwhelms us each time we come across the surviving testimonies of the lost friend, across all the 'images' that the one who has 'passed away' has left or passed on to us" (Work 158). The uniqueness of the grief we feel is only intensified by the encounter with an endless number of texts that are possibly about the lost friend as a friend to others. Rather than diminishing pain, the reproducibility both of the interactive dynamic of friendship in "By Force of Mourning" and of the performance of Schumann music refine the expression of grief to a pure form: being-in-pain. One does not work at grief; one exists within it: I grieve.

  25. If the gift of death is the individuation of the self, and the work of mourning consists in (re)reading the (text of the) other, then the work of death is the silent gaze of the dead on the living. Derrida explains that this work of death is carried out by the internalized image of the dead within the living and, as such, affirms a permanent alterity as it escapes reciprocity:

    However narcissistic it may be, our subjective speculation can no longer seize and appropriate this gaze before which we appear at the moment when, . . . bearing it along with every movement of our bearing or comportment, we can get over our mourning of him only by getting over our mourning, by getting over, by ourselves, the mourning of ourselves, I mean the mourning of our autonomy, of everything that would make us the measure of ourselves. (Work 161)

    Where Marin interprets the gaze of the dead upon the living as part of the power/pouvoir of the (internalized) image, Derrida's experience of it recalls the internalization of power as surveillance in a Foucauldian sense. With the irruption of the friendship occasioned by the death of the friend, the survivor's mourning becomes multiple--for the self, for the defunct friend, and for the other--without being reciprocal. Other than by postponing the moment of mourning infinitely, the only way out of mourning and grief lies through the acceptance of a continued state of living through and under the gaze of the internalized other. As readers who can no longer hope to become Derrida's friends, we can internalize not the image of Derrida's gaze upon ourselves, but the image of his gaze upon the page, and use it to guide us in our grieving.

    26. Comparative Literature Department
    Indiana University, Bloomington
    vhallora@indiana.edu

    Talk Back

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    Notes

    1. Derrida's imagination of his own future death differs from Blanchot's memory and testimony of un-dying at the hands of the Russian execution squad, chronicled in The Instant of My Death, in that the latter experience actually took place, though the writing of it displaces the un-dying to a third-person "young man."

    2. Derrida also carried out his fair share of textual confrontations. Rei Terada discusses his exchanges with John Searle in her book, Feeling in Theory. Another example of Derrida's temper is his "Open Letter" to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon's response to his article "Racism's Last Word," in "Race," Writing, and Difference.

    3. Derrida discusses both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament references to this Biblical story in Gift of Death 58-115.

    4. In Feeling In Theory, Terada reads Derrida's reaction to the word "soul (âme)" as proof of "Derrida's emotion" (151) towards de Man and his son, rather than as a sign of his alienation from them, as I claim. I concede that Derrida's use of the word "soul" conveys emotion, but it can only do so in retrospect, because during the time of the actual car ride all three men were alive. When he invokes this moment in his eulogy for de Man, Derrida does feel the grief of the loss of his friend. I argue that it is his wish to share the grief of the assembled crowd, rather than the closeness of the private friendship he had with de Man, that prompts Derrida to disclose this moment when de Man seems inscrutable, or unreadable, to him.

    5. Derrida directly addressed de Man's wartime writings in "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul De Man's War."

    Works Cited

    Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. 1981. New York: Noonday, 1993.

    ---. "The Death of the Author." The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 49-55.

    ---. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. 1975. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.

    Blanchot, Maurice. The Instant of My Death. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

    Derrida, Jacques. "But, beyond... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)." "Race," Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 354-69.

    ---. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

    ---. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

    ---. "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul De Man's War." Critical Inquiry 14.3 (1988): 590-652.

    ---. "Psyche: Inventions of the Other." Trans. Catherine Porter. Reading de Man Reading. Eds. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 25-65.

    ---. "Violence and Metaphysics." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.

    ---. The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

    Deutscher, Penelope. "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3 (1998): 159-84.

    Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, Or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998 .

    Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton, 1990.

    Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject." Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

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