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Performative Mourning: Remembering Derrida Through (Re)reading
Vivian Nun Halloran
Indiana University, Bloomington
vhallora@indiana.edu
(c) 2005 Vivian Nun Halloran.
All rights reserved.
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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 <#foot1>]
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 <#foot2>] 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 <#foot3>]
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 <#foot4>]
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
<#foot5>] 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.
Comparative Literature Department
Indiana University, Bloomington
vhallora@indiana.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. 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 <#ref2>. 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 <#ref3>. Derrida discusses both the Hebrew Bible and New
Testament references to this Biblical story in Gift of Death 58-115.
4 <#ref4>. 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 <#ref5>. Derrida directly addressed de Man's wartime writings in
"Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul De Man's War."
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Derrida, Jacques. "But, beyond... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock
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