Jacques Derrida. Villanova Conversations.
Jacques Derrida. "Villanova Conversations." in: Villanova University. October 3, 1994. (English).
Translations:
Jacques Derrida. "Villanova Conversations." in: Villanova University. October 3, 1994. (English).
Jacques Derrida. "The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida." in: John D. Caputo (Editor). Deconstruction in a Nutshell. Fordham University Press. January 1, 1996. Paperback, 215 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0823217558. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Question: Perhaps we can start today's discussions by talking about
what we are in fact doing here now at this moment, which is this event being
held to inaugurate an academic program in philosophy. That is a rich event
and it suggests a lot of things and things that in many ways over the years
you have been addressing in your work. Many people whose impression of deconstruction
has come from public media might think that this is an odd thing for you
to do, as in this country one thinks of deconstruction as the end of philosophy
and here we are beginning something new in philosophy, and many associate
deconstruction with a kind of destructive attitude towards texts and traditions
and truth and the most honorable needs of the philosophical heritage. Furthermore,
there are people who might think that deconstruction would be the enemy
of academic progress; that you can't institutionalize deconstruction, that
deconstruction resists the very idea of institutions, is anti-institutional,
that it resists academic programs, it deconstructs them, it knocks them
down, it can't accommodate itself to institutionality. Finally, you have
often spoken about the very notion of the irruption of something new, and
we are trying today to irrupt, and we would be interested to know what your
reflections are on the inaugural moment.
Derrida: Yes...first of all I want to apologize for my awful English. I
have to improvise here and this is a very difficult task for me and I hope
that it passes. Before starting to answer the question I would like to thank
the President and the Dean for their kind words...and to thank all of you
for being present here. Of course it's an honor for me to be part of this
exceptional moment in the history of Villanova University and I'm very proud
of sharing with you this experience, especially because it's the inauguration
of a philosophy program. I think it's very important to try and say something,
some words about what I think this means, but before I do that I would emphasise
the fact that the institution of such a program is not only important for
you and for this university, it is important for the community of philosophers
in this country and even abroad. ...
Space for them is reduced more and more in our, let's say, 'industrial societies',
and I myself in my own appropriate way try as far as I can to struggle in
order to impart a space for philosophy teaching and for philosophical research.
It's important for your university, it's important for the country, it's
important for other philosophical communities in this world first of all
because at this university the philosophers who are running this program
are already well known in this country and in Europe... I assure you that
they are very, let's say, important philosophers for us, very precious thinkers
and the fact that they are running this program is a guarantee for the future
of this program - and we knew this in advance. Then, a moment ago I met
for one hour with many of your students, graduate students, students who
will work within this program, and I will release without any convention
- not out of politeness - I will tell you that they are very bright students
and I was very happy to discuss with them for one hour of intense, intense
philosophical debate. They are very well informed, very organized, and it
makes me very optimistic about the future of this program. So I will attempt
to congratulate you and all of their colleagues who decided to have this
program built and wish you the best.
Of course...hopefully, deconstruction - and I will be very, let us say,
'sketchy', for we don't have time to get into a very detailed analysis -
but deconstruction, what is called deconstruction has never opposed institutions
as such, philosophy as such, discipline as such. Of course, as we rightly
say, it is another thing for me to be doing what I am doing here because
however affirmative deconstruction is, as we recalled a moment ago, it is
affirmative in a way which is not simply positive - that is, it is not simply
conservative, it is not simply a way of repeating the given institution
or the lack of an institution on the part of which we are able to criticize,
to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in
the instituting moment of an institution is that it continues something,
is true to the memory of a past, to a heritage, to something we receive
from the path of the assessors of the culture and so on, but if an institution
is to be an institution it must break with the past and at the same time
keep the memory of the past and inaugurate something absolutely new. So
I am convinced that although this program looks to some extent like other
similar programs there is something absolutely new and the indication of
this can be found not simply in the status of the structural organization
of the program but in the work, in the content of the work of the ones who
will run this program, teach the new themes. The faculty for instance, the
colleagues who inscribe in their programs things such as 'Heidegger and
Deconstruction' or new themes indicate that they are not simply reproducing,
they are trying to open something new and something original, something
which hasn't been done in that way in other similar university programs.
So the paradox is that the instituting moment in an institution is violent
in a way, violent because it cannot guarantee, although it follows the premises
of a past, it starts on the cusp of the new and this newness is not only
a risk, something risky - it has to be something risky - it's violent because
cannot be governed by any previous rule. So at the same time you have to
follow a rule and to invent a new rule, a new norm, a new criterion, a new
law. That's why the moment of the institution is so dangerous at the same
time.
One should not have an absolute guarantee, an absolute law, we have to invent
the rules and be sure that the responsibility taken by the students implies
that they give themselves the new rules. There is no responsible new decision
without this inauguration, this absolute break. That is what deconstruction
is about - not a mixture but a tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation
of something of something which has been given to us, and at the same time
heterogeneity, something absolutely new. The condition of this performative
success, which is never guaranteed, is the blindness of these two rules.
That's why - I am coming to the question of the program - in France, we
have for a long time been confronted with similar issues... I have at the
same time said two things which sum up the issue. On the one hand, I was
- and I won't hide this here - I was fighting, I was opposing the rigid
definition of programs, disciplines, the borders between disciplines, the
fact that in my country philosophy was taught only at the university or
in the last grade of the high school, so we founded another institution
in 1975, a movement called the Group for the Research of the Teaching of
Philosophy [GREPH, Groupe de recherche sur l'enseignement philosophique]
which opposed the dominant institution, which tried to convince our colleagues
and our presidents that philosophy should be taught earlier than in this
last grade of the high school, that is, earlier than at [a student's] sixteen
or seventeen years, that there should be philosophy across the borders -
not only in philosophy proper, but in all fields such as law, medicine,
so on and so forth. To some extent this struggle was a failure but I am
still convinced that it was right, 'a good war', so to speak. But at the
same time I was emphasizing the necessity of a discipline, that is, of something
specifically philosophical that shouldn't dissolve philosophy in order to...
that we need at the same time the interdisciplinarity, crossing the borders,
establishing new themes, new problems, new ways or new approaches to new
problems but while teaching the history of philosophy, the techniques, the
rigor of the profession, what one calls discipline. I think we shouldn't
choose between the two. We should have philosophers trained as philosophers
as rigorously as possible and at the same time audacious philosophers who
cross the borders and discover new connections, new fields; not only interdisciplinary
research, but [research on] themes that are not even interdisciplinary.
If you allow me to refer to another institution I have been involved with
in France - I mentioned GREPH in '75 - but in '82, some friends and I founded
a new institution called the International College of Philosophy, in which
- and we inaugurated this in 1983 - in which at the same time we tried to
teach philosophy as such, as a discipline, and to discover new themes, new
problems which had had no legitimacy, which were not recognized as such
in the given universities. That was not simply interdisciplinarity because
interdisciplinarity implies that we have given identifiable proper identities
- we had a legal theorist, we had an architect, a philosopher, a literary
critic, and they joined, they worked together on a specific type of academic
object - that's interdisciplinarity. When you discover a new object, an
object which up to now hasn't been identified as such or has no legitimacy
in terms of any academic media or academic field you have to invent a new
campus, a new type of research, a new discipline. The International College
of Philosophy granted a privilege to such new themes, new disciplines which
were not up to then recognized or legitimated in other institutions. So
you see, at the same time I am a very conservative person. I love institutions
and I spend a lot of time, let's say, sharing the interest of my work with
institutions which sometimes do not work and at the same time trying to
dismantle not institutions but some structures in the given institutions
which are too rigid or are dogmatic or which work as an obstacle to any
future research.
Derrida: Thank you. First of all I will say yes, this tension as a tension is characteristic of the work I try to do. Now, at risk of being, let's say, a little oversimplifying - and we have to be simple simply for lack of time - at the risk of being too simple I will say I will take this opportunity to really reject, criticize a commonplace prejudice which has widely surfaced about deconstruction that is not only among journalists, you know, bad journalists, but among, let's say, the people of the academy who behave like... not much like journalists, for I have the deepest respect for good journalists, but like bad journalists, always repeating, repeating stereotypes without reading the texts. That's really something... perhaps we'll come back to this problem later on. This has been from the beginning a terrible problem for me; not only for me - the caricature, the lack of respect for reading and so on and so forth... because as soon as you approach a text - not only mine, but many of the texts of people close to me - you see that of course the respect for these great texts, not only the Greek ones but especially the Greek ones, is the condition of our work. We are constantly trying to read and understand Plato and Aristotle and I have devoted a number of texts to them and...if you will allow me this self-reference, the book which will appear tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in France on friendship is mainly a book on Plato and Aristotle on friendship. So I think we have to read them again and again and I feel however old I am, I feel that I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle. I love them and I feel that I have to start again and again and again; it is something, it is a task which is in front of me, before me.
Now, nevertheless, the way that I try to read Plato, Aristotle and others is not a way of, let's say, commending or repeating or conserving this heritage. It is an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or doesn't work, [an analysis] of the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within their own corpus, as well as the law of this self-deconstruction. Deconstruction is not a method or a tool that you apply from the outside to something, deconstruction is something which happens, which happens inside. There is a deconstruction at work within Plato's work, for instance. As my colleagues know, each time I study Plato I find, I try to find some heterogeneity in his own corpus, and to see how, for instance, the Timaeus - within the Timaeus the theme of the chora is incompatible with his so-called 'system'. So to be true to Plato, and that is a sign of love, of respect, I have to analyze the functioning, this functioning of his work, and I would say the same for the whole of Greek philosophy. Now, of course the Greek tradition is essential to philosophy; 'philosophy' is a Greek word and its legacy is reflexive. But as soon as philosophy as such appeared under this name in Greece there was a potential opening, a potential force which was ready to, let's say, cross the borders of Greek language, Greek culture, and I would say the same for democracy, although the concept of democracy is inherent in the Greek heritage.
This heritage is the heritage of a model, not simply a model, but a model which self-deconstructs, deconstructs itself so as to uproot, to become independent of its own ground, so to speak, so that today philosophy is Greek and is not Greek. In this book on friendship I try to analyze what happened to the Greek thought with the Christian event, the Christian happening; it has to do especially with the concept of brotherhood. The way the Christian concept of brotherhood transformed the Greek concept of brotherhood was at the same time something new, an integration, a mutation, a break, but this break at the same time was developing, was something which was potentially inscribed in the Greek tradition. So we have to go back to the Greek origin, not in order to cultivate the origin or in order to protect the etymology, the etymon, the philological purity of the origin, but in order first of all to understand where it comes from and then to analyze the history, the historicity of the breaks which have produced our current world out of Greek tradition, out of Christianity, out of the Greeks meaning out of this origin, and thanking or transforming this origin at the same time. So there it is, this tension. Speaking of or going back to my own, let's say, tendency of taste or idiosyncratic 'style', I love reading Greek. It is difficult, this thing, a very difficult task, and when I read Plato I enjoy it, and I feel, if anything, it's difficult; I think it's an infinite task. The project is not behind me, Plato is in front of me. That's why today among so many stereotypes and prejudices that circulate about deconstruction I feel it's painful to see that many people about the question of the canon think they have to make a choice between reading Plato or the 'great white males' and so on and so forth and reading Black Woman writers. Why should we choose? Even before the question of the canon became so visible, even before then, no one in the university could be simultaneously a great specialist in Plato and in Aristotle and in Shakespeare; the choices have to be made and that is the distinction of our conditions. Nobody can at the same time be an expert in Plato and in Milton, for instance, and we accepted this, it was commonsensical. Why, today, should we choose between 'the great canon', i.e., Plato, Shakespeare or several texts of Shakespeare and Hegel, and others on the other hand?
The academic field is a differential field. Everyone can find his or her way and make choices and a program as such of course can become, let's say, specialized, but this doesn't mean that there cannot be other programs with no exclusivity which would specialize in other fields, and that is why I don't understand what's going on with 'the question of the canon'. At least as regards deconstruction, deconstruction at the same time is interested in what is considered 'the great canon' - the study of great works, western works - and open to new work, new objects, new fields, new cultures, new languages, and I see no reason why we should choose between the two. That is the tension in deconstruction.
3rd Question: If I might, I'd like to follow up on the remark you made about international philosophy in the sense of your founding of the International College of Philosophy and also what I take to be in your book Specters of Marx perhaps a new call for a new form of internationalism. Recently a distinguished American historian said apropos of the American motto 'E Pluribus Unum' that today in the United States we have "too much pluribus and not enough unum''. Now I've always considered deconstruction to be on the side of the 'pluribus', that is, as deconstructing totalities, identities in favor of loosening them up in terms of diversity, disruptions, fissures. I think that's a lesson we've all learned from deconstruction. What I'd like to ask regards any deconstructive salvaging of the 'unum'; that is, can the 'pluribus', can the diversity itself become too dangerous? What does deconstruction say, if anything, in favor of the 'unum' of community? Is there a place for unity in deconstruction? What might it look like?
Derrida: Thank you for your question. Let me say a word first about this 'internationality' you referred to at the beginning. The internationality I referred to in this book, it was, since Marx was the main reference of the book - this internationality was supposed to be different from what was called in the Marxist tradition internationality or internationalism. I think that today there are wars through a number of classes in the world upon which the international organizations such as the United Nations for instance have to intervene and cannot intervene in the way they should. That is, international rights, international law - which is a good thing - nevertheless is still on the one hand rooted - in its mission, in its axiom, in its languages - rooted in the western concept of philosophy, the western concept of state, of sovereignty, and this is a limit. That is, we have to deconstruct the foundations of this international law not in order to destroy the international organization - I think it is something good, something perfectible and something necessary - but we have to think, to rethink the foundations, the philosophical foundations of this international law and these international organizations. That's one limit.
The other limit, which is connected to the first one, has to do with the fact that these international organizations are in fact, in fact governed by a number of particular states which are the only which provide these international organizations with the means to intervene - the military power, the economic power - and of course the United States plays a major role in this. Sometimes it's a good thing but it is at the same time a limit. So, that is, the universality of this international law is in fact in the hands of a number of powerful, rich states, and this has to change and it is in the process of changing through a number of disasters, crises, economic inequalities, injustices, so on and so forth. The 'international' I think is looking for its own place, its own figure; it is something which would go beyond the current stage of internationality, perhaps beyond citizenship, beyond the belonging to a state, the belonging to a given nation-state. And I think that today in the world a number of human beings are secretly allying in their suffering against the hegemonic powers which protect what is called 'the new world order'. So that is what I meant by 'the new international', not a new way of, let's say, associating citizens belonging to given nation-states, but a new concept of citizenship, of hospitality, a new concept of a state of democracy - in fact, it's a new concept of democracy, a new determination of the concept, the given concept of democracy in the tradition of the concept of democracy. Now, having said this - again, very simply, in words which are too simple - I think we don't have to choose between unity and multiplicity. Of course, deconstruction - that was its strategy up to now - insisted on not multiplicity for itself but insisted on the, let's say the heterogeneity, the difference, the dissociation which is absolutely necessary for the relation to the other but disrupts the totality.
What disrupts the totality is the condition for the relation to the other. The privilege granted to unity, to totality, to organic ensembles, to community as a homogenized whole - this is the danger for responsibility, for decision, for ethics, for politics. That is why I insisted upon what prevents the unity to close itself, to be closed up. And this is not only a matter of description, of saying what is, the way it is, it's a matter of accounting for the possibility of responsibility, of a decision, of ethical commitment. For this you have to pay attention to what I would call similarity, and similarity is not unity simply, it is not multiplicity. Now this does not mean that we have to destroy unity, all forms of unity wherever they occur. I have never said anything like that. Of course we need unity, some gathering, some configuration and so on and so forth. You see, the pure unity or the pure multiplicity are synonyms of death. There is only death when there is only totality or unity and when there is only multiplicity or dissociation. What interests me is the limit which every attempt to totalize, to gather, versammeln - and I'll come to this German word in a moment because it's important for me - to this unifying, uniting movement, the limit that it had to encounter because the relationship of the unity to itself implies some difference.
To be more concrete, let's take the example of a person of a culture. We often insist nowadays on cultural identity, for instance national identity, linguistic identity and so on and so forth and sometimes the struggles under the banner of cultural identity, national identity, linguistic identity are noble fights, but at the same time if the people who fight for their identity don't pay attention that the identity is not the self-identity of a thing - a glass for instance, or this microphone - but implies a difference within the identity, that is, the identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself... a culture is different from itself, a language is different from itself, a person is different from itself; once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you refer, you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, it is open to the identity of the other and it prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, ethnocentrism and so on and so forth. That is what I tried to demonstrate in a book called The Other Heading, that the identity in the case of cultures, persons, nations, languages is a set different item, it is identity as différance from itself, that is, within an opening within itself, a gap within itself. That's not only a fact, a structure, but it's a duty, it's an ethical and political duty to take into account this impossibility of unifying, of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak for the other, that I can address the other, which is not a way of avoiding responsibility; on the contrary, it is the only way for me to take responsibility and to make decisions... [One] recurrent critique of deconstructive questions has to do with the privilege Heidegger grants to what he calls, for example, this gathering; gathering is always more powerful than dissociation. I would say exactly the opposite. Once you grant some privilege to gathering and not to dissociating then you leave no room for the other, for the radical otherness of the other, for the radical similarity of the other. I think that separation, dissociation is not an obstacle to society or to community, it is the condition.
This dissociation, the separation is the condition of my relation to the other. I can address the other only to the extent that there is a separation, there is a dissociation, that the other is not the other, that I cannot replace the other and vice versa. That's what some French-speaking philosophers such as Blanchot and Levinas call the rapport sans rapport, relationless relation... that's the structure of my relation to the other; it's a relation without relation - it's a relation in which the other remains absolutely transcendent. I can't reach the other, I cannot know the other from the inside. That is not an obstacle, that is the condition of love, of friendship - of war too - it's a condition of the relation to the other. This dissociation is the condition of community, the condition of any unity as such. So a state - to come back to the state - a state in which there will be only 'unum' will be a terrible catastrophe, and we have unfortunately had a number of such experiences. So a state without 'pluribus', without plurality and the respect for plurality, would be first either a totalitarian state... it's a terrible thing, it doesn't work, we know that it doesn't work, it's a terrible thing and doesn't work; and finally it wouldn't even be a state, it would be like... a what... a stone, if you like, a rock. So a state as such must be attentive as much as possible to the plurality... of what... of people, languages, cultures, ethnic groups, persons and so on and so forth, and that's the condition for a state.
4th Question: I have a very simple question, actually, and it follows somewhat
the remarks you've just made on the nature of community, of the impossibility
of ethical right, the impossibility of justice as being one of the conditions
of justice. In some of your more recent work the topic of justice has certainly
grown more explicitly, more clearly, even though we might argue, one might
argue that it's been there all the time; and I'd like to ask you to elaborate
a bit more on the nature of justice... You speak, for instance in the Marx
book, of a sense of justice that's so strong, so powerful that it shatters
every calculus, every possible economy and can only be described in terms
of the gift. In a number of little texts that you have... Passions,
Sauf le Nom, the Chora text, you say that these texts
together form a sort of essay from you, and then you say that this essay
has been least understood from those other dimensions as political, as truth.
So if you could elaborate a little more on the meaning of this justice that
can only be described as a gift, that can't be linked to any calculus, to
any kind of...no dialectic, no set of exchanges going on, impossibility
of vengeance, of un-punishment, if you could say - and that might be an
impossible question - but if you would say a little bit more about that,
and if you would say something about that in relation to the question of
the name of singularities, the ones you just made a response to in answering
your question.
Derrida: Yes, all right. You see, before I start trying to answer this question
I will again say this, that, as you see, these questions cannot be really
dealt with in such a forum because they are difficult... really, to do justice
to them you have to read texts, to revise a number of conditions, so it's
very imprudent to address this question in such a way and if I were, let's
say, more responsible I would simply say 'No, I won't play this game'. Nevertheless
I think sometimes it's not a bad thing, at least sometimes, if you don't
do that too often, it's not bad that we try to encapsulate 'in a nutshell'
so that, one day, let me try... one day, I was in Cambridge three years
ago. There was this terrible honorary degree crisis in Cambridge and a journalist
said, 'Well, could you tell me, in a nutshell, what is deconstruction?'
So sometimes, of course, I confess, I was able to do that, and sometimes
it may be useful to try 'nutshells'. So what is this problem of justice...'in
a nutshell'? It is true that all of the problem of justice has been all
the time in my mind and in previous texts; its only relation here is that
I address this problem thematically. And it was in a context in which, reading,
at the moment of a conference in a law school on 'Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice' I had to address a text by Benjamin on violence
and I find it, I found it useful to make a distinction between law and justice,
what one calls in French le droit, that is, 'right', or Recht in German,
and Gesetz... in English when you say 'law' you say at the same time 'right'
and 'law', le droit et le loi; in French we distinguish between le droit
et le loi, so there is a distinction between the law - that is, the history
of right or legal systems - and justice.
Following Benjamin and at the same time trying to deconstruct Benjamin's
text or to show how Benjamin's text was deconstructing itself I made this
statement 'in a nutshell', that the law could be deconstructed. There is
a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of political laws, and this
history is the history of the transformation of laws. That's why you can
improve law - you can replace laws by other ones, there are constitutions,
there are institutions, this is a history and a history as such can be deconstructed.
Each time you replace a legal system by another one or a law by another
one or you improve... it's a kind of deconstruction, a critical deconstruction.
So the law as such can be deconstructed, it has to be deconstructed; that
is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics and progress.
But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive,
the movement to improve the law - that is, to deconstruct the law. Without
a call for justice we wouldn't find any interest in deconstructing law.
So that's why I said that the condition of possibility for deconstruction
is a call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system
of legal structures. Which means that justice is always unequal to itself,
it's non-coincident with itself.
Then in the book on Marx I went back again to the Greeks, to the word dike,
to the interpretation of this word which is translated by 'justice' and
I protested the interpretation by Heidegger on dikh and injustice and I
tried to show that justice again implied non-gathering dissociation, heterogeneity,
non-identity with itself and, less an adequation, infinite transcendence.
That's why the call for justice is never, never, let's say, fully answered.
That's why no one can say 'I am just'. The one who does you injustice, you
can be sure that he or she is wrong because being just is not a matter of
theoretical determination. I cannot know whether I am just. I can know that
I am right; I can say, well, I act in agreement with norms or with the law;
I stop at a red light, I am right, there is no problem, but this does not
mean that I am just, which is to say that justice is not a matter of knowledge
or theoretical judgement. That's why it's not a matter of calculation. You
can calculate the law, the right; a judge can say, well, this misdeed deserves
according to the code ten years of imprisonment and so on and so forth;
that may be a matter of calculation but the fact that it's rightly calculated
does not mean that it is just. Now a judge if he wants to be just cannot
content himself with applying the law, he has to reinvent the law each time.
That is, if he wants to be responsible, to make a decision, he has to not
simply apply the law as a coded program to a given case but to reinvent
in a singular situation a new judgement relationship. Which means that a
law, that justice cannot be reduced to a calculation of sanctions, punishments
or rewards. That is already right or in concurrence with the law, but it's
not justice.
Justice - if it has to do with the other, the infinite distance of the other
- is always unequal to the other, is always uncalculatable; you cannot calculate
justice. Levinas says something like that - his definition of justice is
a very minimal one which I love, which I think is really rigorous - he says,
'Justice - that is the relation to the other'; that's all. Once you relate
to the other as the other then something incalculable comes in which cannot
be reduced to the law, to the history of the legal structures. And that
is I think what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to
suspect, to criticize the given determinations of a culture, of institutions,
of the legal systems not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them
but to be just, give justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice.
Yes... I missed the last point of your... not only that, but also the last
point of your question about politics. Indeed as you had mentioned I tried
to read in a number of texts - mainly in a text by Plato, the Timaeus, in
which the question of the place, the chora which disturbs and undermines
the whole Platonic system - all the couples or positions which build the
Platonic system - this reflection on chora is part of a political discussion
and I tried to reconstitute this political scenario in order to suggest
- and that's all that I can say here without reopening the text, Plato's,
for instance - in order to suggest that if you take into account this strange
structure of the chora, of the place which is the opening for any inscription,
for any happening, for any event, then you have to not only deconstruct
the traditional concept of politics but to think of another way of interpreting
politics that is the place for the place, the place for hospitality, the
place for the gift, and to think politics otherwise.
So that's part of a number of gestures I've tried in the recent years, to
deconstruct the political tradition not in order to depoliticize but in
order to interpret differently the concept of the political, the concept
of democracy and so on and so forth and to try and articulate this concept
of the political, this concept of democracy with what I said about the gift,
about singularity, a gift. The gift, which is... that's the only thing that
I will say about the gift, this is an enormous problem... but the gift is
precisely - that is what it has in common with justice - something which
cannot be reappropriated; a gift is something which never appears as such
and is never equal to gratitude, to commerce, to compensation, to reward.
When a gift is given, first of all it cannot be... no gratitude can be proportionate
to it. A gift is something that you cannot thank for. As soon as I say 'thank
you' for a gift I start cancelling the gift, I start destroying the gift
by proposing an equivalence that is a circle and circumscribing the gift
in a movement of reappropriation. So a gift is something that goes beyond
the circle of reappropriation, beyond the circle of gratitude. A gift shouldn't
even be acknowledged as such. As soon as I know that I give something, because
I can say, well, I'm giving you something, I just cancel the gift and I'm
just starting to congratulate myself or to thank myself for giving something
and then the circle has already started to cancel the gift. So a gift should
not be rewarded, should not be reappropriated, and should not even appear
as such. As soon as the gift appears as such then the movement of gratitude
has started to destroy the gift. So a gift - if there is such a thing, I'm
not sure, but is there assurance that there is a gift, that a gift is given?
- If the gift is given then it should not even appear to the one who gives
it and the one who receives it, not appear as such. That is paradoxical
but that's the condition for a gift to be given. So that is the condition
the gift shares with justice. A justice which could be, could appear as
such, that could be calculable, if you can calculate what is just and what
is not just, let's say, well, what has to be given in order to be just and
so on and so forth, it is not justice, it's just social security, it's just
economics, it's just... So justice and gift should go beyond calculation,
which doesn't mean that we shouldn't calculate, we should calculate it as
rigorously as possible but there is a point or a limit beyond which calculation
must fail and we must know it and must fail. And so what I tried to think
or to suggest is a concept of the political and of democracy which would
be compatible, which could be articulated with these impossible notions
of the gift and justice. If a democracy or a political system which would
be simply calculatable without justice and gift could be, it is often this
horrible gift, this terrible thing.
Question: Can we talk a little bit about theology?
Derrida: We have started...
Question: You have written... I don't know how many of us, how many of our
audience know this, but you have written a book called Circumfessions
which is constantly drawing an analogy to St. Augustine's Confessions. You
were raised in the Rue Augustin, and born there, were you not?
Derrida: No, I wasn't born there... three months after I was born I went
back to the house in which was in Algiers, which was on the Rue Augustin.
Question: And so like St. Augustine you were born in North Africa. Circumfessions
draws a constant analogy... and one of the things that appears in the Confessions
that you single out is that like St. Augustine your mother was worried about
you and she thought that you were... she was worried about whether you still
believed in God, you said, and that she wouldn't, she didn't ask you about
it but she was asking -
Derrida: - Never.
Question: - She was afraid to ask you... so she asked everyone else. And
you go on to say that you quite rightly passed for an atheist but that the
constancy of God in your life was called by other names. Now I've always
been interested in the way in which figures like Heidegger... my earliest
work was on the relationship between Heidegger and the religious tradition...
and one of the things that has fascinated me about your work and which comes
back to me again as I listened to your answer to the previous question about
justice is how much what you say about justice reminds me of the Biblical
tradition of justice about singularity rather than the philosophical one
where justice is defined in terms of universality, the blind... the blindness
of justice. Now, the question that interests me, and you come back to this
again in the Marx book where you make a distinction - you talk about the
messianic, all this thematic of 'a venir' , 'viens', all of that is... you
describe it as the impossible future, it is the messianic in which you distinguish
a kind of quasi-atheistic messianic from a more garden variety messianic...
if a messianic can have a garden variety... or the organic messianic. So
here is the question: What does Judaism and the Biblical tradition, the
prophetic tradition of justice, what does that mean for you, for your work,
and how do, how can religion and deconstruction commune with each other?
Could they do each other any good? Are they on talking terms?
Derrida: First of all, I'm really intimidated here not only by this question
but by this reference to St. Augustine. The way that I refer to St. Augustine
is really not very orthodox, not very... it's rather... let's say... it's
a sin. I have to confess that my relation to St. Augustine is something
strange. If I had to summarize what I did with St. Augustine in this text
you refer to, Circumfession, I would say this: on one hand, I played
with some analogies, that is, the fact that he was coming from Algeria,
that his mother died in Europe, and my mother was dying when I was writing
this, my mother was dying and so on and so forth... so I was constantly
playing figures of mine off this and quoting sentences from the Confessions
in Latin, but trying through my love and admiration for St. Augustine, because,
say, I know I never met St. Augustine, but to ask a question to Augustine...
it's a number of accidents, not only in these confessions but in their context.
So there is, let's say, a love story and a deconstruction between us. But
I won't insist on St. Augustine here, it's too difficult, and the way that
this text is written cannot begin to account for such and such. See... so,
to address more hurriedly the question of religion - again, in a very oversimplifying
way - I would say this: first, I have no stable position as to the texts
you mentioned - the prophets, the Bible and so on. For me it's an open field
and I can at the same time receive the most necessary provocation from these
texts as from Plato and others.
In Specters of Marx I try to reconstitute the link between Marx and
some prophets and Shakespeare, through Shakespeare. This doesn't mean that
I'm simply a, let's say, a religious person or that I simply, unscrupulously
believe. For me, the concept we think of, the 'religion' within what one
calls religions - Judaism, Christianity or other religions - there are again
tensions, heterogeneities, disruptive 'volcanoes', so to speak, in the text
- even, especially in the prophets - which cannot be, let's say, reduced
to an institution, to a corpus, to a system. So I want to keep the right
to read these texts in a way which has to be culturally reinvented. It is
something which can be totally new at every moment. Then I would distinguish
between - with what I told you before about this tension - I would distinguish
between religion and faith. If by religion you mean a set of beliefs or
dogmas or institutions, church and so on and so forth, I would say that
religion as such can be... not only can be deconstructed but should be deconstructed,
sometimes in the name of faith. For me Kierkegaard is here as a minimum
a great example that is some paradoxical way of contesting the religious
discourse in the name of a faith which has no...no... that can't be simply
mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood... paradoxical,
paradoxical faith.
Now what I call faith in this case, this has something to do with justice
and the gift, it is something which is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive
gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other without an act
of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you testify, when you
attest to something? You address the other and ask belief. Even if you lie,
even if you are in a perjury you are addressing the other and asking the
other to trust you. This 'trust me, I'm speaking to you' is of the order
of faith. It cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determining
judgement; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith
is not religious, strictly speaking. At least, it is not, it cannot be totally
determined by a given religion. You find it - that's why this faith is absolutely
universal. And this attention to the singularity is not opposed to universality
- I wouldn't oppose as you did universality to singularity, I would try
to keep the two together - and the structure of this act of faith I was
just referring to is not as such conditioned by any given religion. That's
why it is universal. Which doesn't mean that in every given religion, determined
religion you do not find a reference to this pure faith which is not either
Christian nor Jewish nor Islamic nor Buddhist nor anything. Now I would
say the same with the messianic. When I insisted in the book on Marx on
messianicity - which I distinguished from messianism - I wanted to show
that the messianic structure is a universal structure, that as soon as you
address the other, as you are open to the future, as you are, have temporal
experience, you are waiting for the future, you are waiting for someone
to come...that the opening of the experience, someone is to come... is now
to come, and justice, peace will have to do with this coming of the other
- with a promise.
Each time I open my mouth I am promising something; when I speak to you
I am telling you I promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth
- even if I lie. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is that I promise
to tell you the truth. So the promise is not a speech act among others;
every speech act is permanently a promise. So this universal structure of
the promise, of the expectation for the future, for the one, the coming,
the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with
justice - that is what I call messianic structure. And this messianic structure
is not limited to what one calls messianisms, that is, Jewish, Christian,
or Islamic messianisms with a determined figure, a determined form of the
messiah. As soon as you reduce the messianic structure to messianism then
you are reducing the universality and this has big political consequences;
then you are, let's say, accrediting a tradition among others, the notion
of elect people, of a given ritual language...and so on and so forth. So
that's why I think that the difference however subtle it may appear between
the messianic or messianicity and messianism is very important. So...on
the side of messianicity there is faith. There is no society without a faith,
without a trust in the other. Even if I abuse this, if I lie or if I commit
perjuries, even if I am violent because of this faith, there is no...even
on the economic level, no society without this level of faith, this minimum
act of faith. The credit, what one calls credit in capitalism, in 'capital',
in the economy, has to do with faith; one knows this. The economists know
that faith. This faith is not and should not be reduced or defined by religion
as such.
Now... and I will end with this point here... now the problem remains, and
this is really a problem for me, an enigma, whether what one calls 'religions',
let's say for instance the western religion of the book, whether the religions
where specific examples of this structural, general structure of messianicity
there is a general messianicity as a structure of experience...and on this
modest ground there have been revelations of a history which one calls Judaism
and Christianity and so on and so forth, so that's a possibility; and then
you would have, in a Heideggerian gesture or style you would have to go
back from these religions to the ontological or phenomenological condition
of possibility of religions to describe a general structure of messianicity
on the modest ground of which religions have been made possible. That's
one hypothesis. The other hypothesis - and I confess I hesitate or oscillate
constantly between the two possibilities - the other possibility is that
the event of revelations in Biblical or Jewish traditions, Christian traditions,
Islamic traditions, have been absolute events, irreducible events which
have unveiled this messianicity. We wouldn't know what messianicity is without
messianisms, without these events which were of Moses, Abram, Jesus Christ
and so on and so forth. So in that case singular events would have unveiled
or revealed this universal possibility and it's only on that condition that
you can describe this, the messianicity. Between these two I must confess
I oscillate and I think some other schema has to be constructed to at the
same time do justice to the two possibilities. That's why - and perhaps
it's not a good reason, perhaps one day I will give up this - that's why
for the moment, the time being I keep the word 'messianic' because the word
'messianic', even if it's different from messianism, it's a reference to
the word 'messiah'; it doesn't simply belong to a certain culture, a Jewish/Christian
culture. I think that for the moment being I need this word to...I wouldn't
say to teach but to convince and to make people understand what I am trying
to say when I speak of messianicity, but in doing so I still keep the singularity
of a single revelation, that is, the Jewish/Christian revelation with its
reference to the messiah. It's a reinterpretation so to speak of this tradition
of the messiah. Let me tell you just... a story, something I read, I reread
recently and which I quote in the book on friendship which will be published
in a few days. It's Blanchot, Maurice Blanchot tells this story.
When the messiah in a sort of soiled robe was not recognized, was walking
in... ah, quelle chose?... he was poorly, poorly dressed and so on and so
on... and a young man recognized him, recognized that he was the messiah
and came to him and addressed him and asked the question, 'When will you
come?' I think it's a very profound reading which means that something,
some inadequation between 'the now' and now that he is coming now... the
messianic doesn't wait for... It's a way of waiting for the future, but
right now; and the responsibilities which are assigned to us by this messianic
structure are responsibilities for here and now. So the messiah is not some
future present, it's imminent. It's this imminence that I am describing
when I talk in the name of this messianic structure. Now there is another
possibility I imagine also in this book... that the messiah is not simply
the one, the other that I am waiting for constantly - there would be no
experience without the waiting of the coming of the other, the coming of
the event and justice - the messiah might also be the one I expect while
I don't want it, him, to come. There is this possibility that my relation
to the messiah is that I won't like it to come. I hope that he will come,
that the other will come as other; that will be justice, peace, and revolution
because in the concept of of messianicity there is revolution - not revelation,
but revolution - but at the same time I'm scared. I don't want what I want
and I would like the coming of the messiah to be infinitely postponed. And
the reason, this desire... that's why the man who addresses the messiah
said 'When will you come?' It's a way to say that, well, as long as I speak
to you, as I ask you the question 'When will you come?' at least you're
not coming, and that's the condition for me to go on asking questions and
living and so on and so forth. So that is this ambiguity in the messianic
structure. We wait for something we wouldn't like to wait for. That is another
name for that.
[The panel conversation is closed and questions are invited from the
floor.]
Question from the Floor: I'd like to ask you about your work on literary
texts and the reverse - in particular, about your works on James Joyce,
where the influence seems to go from him to you and to you to back from
him, so you're deconstructing Joyce while Joyce is deconstructing you.
Derrida: No... I mean, what is the question?... You're right, but what is
the question?
Question from the Floor: ... Expand.
Derrida: Expand... It's already very difficult to write on Joyce, but to
speak on Joyce is an even more difficult task, but I'll try to say something.
First of all, since the Dean referred to the time a long time ago when I
spent one year in Harvard, in '56, what I did at Harvard was read Joyce
in the library, what I encountered was Ulysses, and since then Joyce has
been reserved for me... the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single
work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, that
is a singular event, to gather - I'm referring here to Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake - to gather the totality, the presumed totality not only of one culture
but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, religions
and so on and so forth. And this impossible task of decided gathering in
a totality, in a potential totality, the potentially infinite memory...
is at the same time for me exemplarily new in its modern form and very classical
in its philosophical form. That's why I have often compared Joyce's Ulysses
to Hegel's, for instance, Hegel's Encyclopedia or Hegel's Logic. It is an
attempt to read the absolute knowledge through a single act of memory; this
being possible only by loading every sentence, every word with a maximum
of equivocalities, of possibilities, of virtual associations, that is, by
making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible.
Of course this at the same time reassembled the history of literature and
inaugurated and produced a break in the history of literature, and what
I tried to show also in the texts you are referring to is the fact that
at the same time the writing of these works functioned as an injunction
to the canon, that is, to the common literary critics, to the institutions
of Joycean scholarship, to build a sort of beehive, an infinite institution
of people working as interpreters, people deciphering Joyce's signature
as a singular signature. From that point of view I think that Joyce is a
great landmark in the history of deconstruction; that's why the reference
to Joyce is involved with me... In a book on Husserl, my first book on Husserl,
I tried to compare the way Joyce treated language and the way classical
philosophers...also treated language. Joyce wanted to make history and the
resumption, the totalization of history possible through the accumulation
of equivocalities, of metaphoricities, tropes and so on and so forth whereas
Husserl thought that historicity was made possible by the transparent univocality
of language, that is, scientific, mathematical language, pure language.
There is no historicity without the transparency of the tradition, Husserl
says, and there is no historicity without this accumulation of equivocalities
in language, as Joyce has said, and it's from that tension between the two
interrelations of language that I try to address questions of language.
I would mention only two other points in Joyce in reference to our current
discussion. One has to do with the question of the 'yes'. In my short essay
on Joyce I tried to deal only with the word 'yes' as it was...performed,
so to speak, in Ulysses; and I tried to show how all the paradoxes which
are linked to this question of the 'yes'...this has to do with the fact
that deconstruction is a 'yes', is linked, is an affirmation. When I say
'yes' - as you know, 'yes' is the last word in Ulysses - when I say 'yes'
to the other in the form of a promise or an agreement or an oath, the 'yes'
must be absolutely inaugural. In relation to the theme today, inauguration
is a 'yes', I say 'yes' as a starting point, nothing precedes the yes, the
yes is the moment of the institution, the origin; it's absolutely originary.
But when you say 'yes', if you don't imply that the moment after that you
will have to confirm the 'yes' by a second 'yes' - when I say 'yes', I immediately
say 'yes, yes' - I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second,
and tomorrow and after tomorrow and so on, which means that the 'yes' immediately
duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say 'yes' without saying 'yes,
yes', which implies memory in the promise; I promise to keep the memory
of the first yes and when you, in a wedding for instance, in a performative,
in a promise, when you say 'yes, I agree, I will' you imply, 'I will say
'I will' tomorrow and I will confirm my promise', otherwise there is no
promise. Which means that the 'yes' keeps in advance the memory of its own
beginning. That's the way it's a different word. If tomorrow you don't confirm
that you have founded today your program you will not have any relation
to it.
Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now we will - if
today there has been any inauguration; we don't know yet, we don't know,
we can't today, where I am speaking... who knows? So 'yes' has to be repeated,
and immediately, immediately it implies what I call 'iterability', it implies
the repetition of itself. Which is a threat, which is threatening at the
same time because the second yes may be simply a parody or a record or mechanical
repetition; it may say 'yes, yes' like a parrot, which means that the technical
reproduction of the originary 'yes' is from the beginning threatening to
the living origin of the 'yes', which means that the 'yes' is hounded by
its own ghost, its own mechanical ghost, from the beginning. Which means
that the second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent the first one.
If tomorrow you don't reinvent today's inauguration... it will have been
dead. Every day the inauguration has to be reinvented. So that's one thing.
The second thing I would select here has to do with what Joyce calls at
some point the legal fiction of fatherhood. This is a very Christian moment
- I am referring to this text; I cannot quote it here - but that's when
Stephen says, well, 'Paternity is a legal fiction', and he refers to Christian
texts, the Biblical text. Why is it so? Because one is supposed to know
who the mother is; there is a possibility of bearing witness to who the
mother is, whereas the father is only... only sort of reconstructed, inferred.
The identification of the father is always resounding in a judgement - you
cannot see the father. And I think that today we experience that not only
is the father a legal fiction from which it draws and it has drawn its authority,
and before I confirm this by saying, well, patriarchy has been a progress
in the history of mankind because the father... to determine who the father
is you need reason; for us to determine who the mother is, you only need
sensible perception. I think he is wrong and he has always been wrong but
we don't... there is not only this paternal preterite because the mother
is also a legal fiction from that moment, that is, the motherhood is something
which is interpreted. The theme of a reconstruction of an experience - what
one calls today surrogate mothers for instance, with all the enormous problems
that, you know, attest to the fact that we do not know is who is the mother
- who is the mother in the case of surrogate mothers? And when we realize
that the motherhood is not simply a matter of perception we realize that
it has never been so, that the mother has always been a matter of interpretation,
of social construction and so on and so forth, and this has enormous political
consequences. We don't have time probably to deal with this but I would,
if we had time I would try to show what the political consequences may be
of this fact that the situation of the mother is the same as the one of
the father in that respect.