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We, the Future of Jacques Derrida
Eyal Amiran
Michigan State University
amiran@msu.edu
(c) 2005 Eyal Amiran.
All rights reserved.
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1. 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.
2. 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 Rabate 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?
3. 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.
4. 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."
5. 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.
Department of English
Michigan State University
amiran@msu.edu
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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.
Rabate, Jean-Michel. The Future of Theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell,
2002.