Derrida, Jacques - Thinking What Comes 2

The Frontiers of Theory
Thinking
What Comes
Volume 2
Institutions, Inventions,
and Inscriptions
Jacques Derrida
Edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghaﬁ
Thinking What Comes, Volume 2
The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
Available titles
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Derek Attridge Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: At the Borders of
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Andrew Benjamin Mairéad Hanrahan
Working with Walter Benjamin: Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth,
Recovering a Political Philosophy and the Human
Andrew Benjamin Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida
Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida Peggy Kamuf
Geoffrey Bennington Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in
Dream I Tell You Literature and Art
Hélène Cixous Robert Rowland Smith
Insister of Jacques Derrida Veering: A Theory of Literature
Hélène Cixous Nicholas Royle
Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009 Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading
Hélène Cixous in Practice and Theory
Andrzej Warminski
Poetry in Painting: Writings on
Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For de
Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Man
Joana Masó Andrzej Warminski
The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter- Without Mastery: Reading and Other
Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Forces
Blanchot and the later Gadamer Sarah Wood
Timothy Clark Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy,
About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Politics, Psychoanalysis
Philosophy of Time Simon Morgan Wortham
Mark Currie Mother Homer is Dead
The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality Hélène Cixous and Peggy Kamuf
and the Philosophy of Surprise Essays, Interviews, and Interventions:
Mark Currie Thinking What Comes, Volume 1
The Post-Romantic Predicament Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions:
The Paul de Man Notebooks Thinking What Comes, Volume 2
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
Forthcoming Titles:
Readings of Derrida
Sarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll
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Thinking What Comes,
Volume 2
Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions
Jacques Derrida
Edited by
Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii

Editors’ Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xiii
PART I Scenes of Differences

1. Scenes of Differences: Where Philosophy and Poetics,
Indissociably, Make the Event of Writing (2006) 3
Translated by Bradley Ramos
2. Philosophy at the Risk of the Promise (2004) 19
Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes
PART II On School and Writing

3. “School was hell for me . . .” (1989) 41
Translated by David Maruzzella
4. “I don’t write without artificial light” (1982) 60
Translated by Adam Rosenthal
5. Archive and Draft (1998) 69
Translated by Katie Chenoweth
6. Between the Writing Body and Writing (2001) 91
Translated by Katie Chenoweth
PART III “Oh my friends”

7. With Levinas: Between Him and Me in Affection and
Shared Trust (2003) 109
Translated by Philippe Lynes
8. Form and Fashion: (Never again: in the face of all
opposition, never again think that “For the Form”) (2001) 118
vi Contents
9. Echoes of Encounters (2003) 135

Translated by Adam Rosenthal
10. This Night in the Night of the Night . . . (2003) 146
Translated by Humberto González Núñez
11. Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the Infinite (2004) 166
Translated by Humberto González Núñez
12. Prière d’insérer (1991) 188
13. Eyespot Like No Other (1980) 192
Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes
Index 212
Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends,
and afterlife. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory, but a significant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of
auto-critique need to consider: What is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of
a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
“Theory” is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the trans-
formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought
in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent:
as a “name,” a word, and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions
such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or
to abandon Theory (on the contrary, one must always insist on the it-
is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all
kinds). Rather, this series is concerned with the presentation of work
which challenges complacency and continues the transformative work
of critical thinking. It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theo-
retical practice in the humanities, work which continues to push ever
further the frontiers of what is accepted, including the name of Theory.
In particular, it is interested in that work which involves the necessary
endeavor of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the speci-
ficity of disciplines. Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city
of Enlightenment, this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit:
viii Series Editor’s Preface
the continued exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which

counters modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the
series aims to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan
Editors’ Introduction
“What comes?” quizzically asks Elisabeth Roudinesco, eminent histo-

rian of psychoanalysis and interlocutor of Jacques Derrida. “Yes, what
arises unforeseeably,” Derrida responds,
what calls upon and overwhelms my responsibility [. . .] the event, the coming
of the one who or which [(ce) qui] comes but does not yet have a recognizable
figure—and who therefore is not necessarily another human, my likeness, my
brother, my neighbor.1
“It can also be,” Derrida adds, “a ‘life’ or even a ‘specter’ in animal or
divine form [. . .] and not only a man or a woman, nor a figure sexually
definable according to the binary assurances of homo- or heterosexual-
ity” (90–1/52). Derrida is in conversation with Roudinesco in a text
named after Victor Hugo’s poem and collected with other conversations
entitled For What Tomorrow . . . (2001). “Thinking What Comes”
serves as the title and the main motif of a discussion by Jacques Derrida
and Alain Minc, convened at the Sorbonne Auditorium on January
18, 1994, on the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Minc’s
Nouveau Moyen Age. First published in Derrida pour les temps à
venir,2 the essay now appears in English translation for the first time,
and supplies the title of the present collection.
Thinking What Comes, comprised of two volumes, contains twenty-
five of Derrida’s thus-far-untranslated pieces ranging from informative
discussions in interviews, contributions to conferences and special
issues of publications, to prefaces to the works of friends, political
1 Jacques Derrida, De Quoi demain . . . Dialogue. Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), 90;

For What Tomorrow . . .: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (with Elisabeth Roudinesco)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 52 (translation slightly modified). All
further references are to the French original and are cited in the body of the text.
2 Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007), 19–62.
x Editors’ Introduction
messages, and documents. In this wide array of texts, all previously

unpublished in English, Derrida considers topics as varied as the world,
writing, the promise and its relation to the messianic, fidelity, loyalty,
filiation, hospitality, “poeticity,” substitution, and drug addiction. He
makes political interventions regarding issues concerning the identity
of Europe, recalibrating his own relation to that continent while calling
for the necessity of the founding and maintenance of a “new European
political culture;” delivers impassioned remarks about the question
of the fate of Palestine; looks at the role of Nelson Mandela in South
Africa; makes observations on the history of the foundation, the inspi-
ration for, and the position of the Collège international de philosophie
in the context of the French educational system; talks about the role of
intellectuals, particularly in France, their function and presence in the
media, especially on television; and opines on his relation to his own
image as well as the existing conditions of publicity photographs of
authors. He considers the question of the archive, which is no longer
attached to the stability of a topos, as a relation between preserva-
tion and forgetting, and participates in an interview with proponents
of “genetic criticism,” evaluating the issue of the rough draft and
exploring the role that drafts play in writing. Moreover, in accessible
interviews Derrida discusses current events, his relation to the United
States and to his philosophical contemporaries in France, in doing so
responding to being asked about the reception of his work in the US in
comparison to France. The selections contained in this collection not
only reveal the diversity of the questions posed to Derrida, but also
demonstrate the patience with which he responds to at times seemingly
random and unexpected queries.
Thinking What Comes also features singular, inventive apprecia-
tions of the work of friends such as Emmanuel Levinas (where Derrida
describes a “strange, singular, and exemplary” friendship between
Levinas and Maurice Blanchot and their “irreconcilable differends,” and
describes his own fidelity and possible resistance to Levinas’s discourse),
Marie-Louise Mallet (where Derrida composes an ode to the night and
that ineffable thing called music), Louis Marin (where Derrida writes, in
further reflections on Marin’s work, about the possibility of putting into
relation Heidegger and Marin on representation, as well as exploring
the relation between the remainder and the neuter, about which Marin
wrote extensively), Safaa Fathy (where Derrida makes her theatrical
piece go through a “trial by ordeal”), and Alain David (in whose work
Derrida investigates the “twins” racism and anti-Semitism, and inter-
rogates their relation to form and formalization, finding them both in
league with a certain “idealism”).
Editors’ Introduction
xi
This collection, which contains frequent references to and inquiries

about what could be understood by the word “fiction,” also highlights
an important facet of Derrida’s own w riting—what might be called
his inventions: two fertile, “writerly” prefaces to the works of less
well-known writers, Jos Joliet and Mathieu Bénézet. Additionally, in
revelatory interviews Derrida speaks of his experience of attending
school and his struggles there (and his expulsion as a Jew under the
Vichy regime), his performance at school examinations, and his own
emotional experience of the general environment, atmosphere, and
ambiance of various educational institutions. Also illuminating are
Derrida’s detailed discussions of what may be called the “mechanics”
and the physical conditions of writing—what Derrida himself labels
his “scene of writing” (from the types of pens and other writing imple-
ments used, the chronology of their adoption, and the organization of
his library to the placement of his desks and the location of his study).
This examination, Derrida admits, is not without its own “fetishistic”
and “auto-erotic pleasure.”
While the lead essay and the title of this collection refer to a revolu-
tionary interruption, a singular occurrence that surprises the ordinary
course of events, history, and politics—like a revolution—and that in its
coming cannot be expected, it is worth noting that Derrida is emphatic
about the role that thinking p lays—thinking in the face of what comes.
It might seem odd to be thinking something like “what comes” if what
comes is indeed unforeseeable, but in the title essay Derrida argues that
this thinking is so indissociable from doing, that one must think “what
comes” together with “what is to be done?”
In the contribution called “Thinking What Comes,” galvanized by
the publication of Specters of Marx, Derrida speaks of the unprec-
edented and unique, describing the unforeseeable alterity and absolute
singularity of what happens as an event. Exploiting the French word
for the future, l’avenir, as he had in Specters of Marx, he meditates
on the second part of a word that he breaks up as à-venir, to explain
the coming upon us of what happens or occurs, or who comes. In his
talk Derrida insists that these unheard-of notions or terms themselves
remain other, coming unforeseeably, unpredictably, singularly, piercing
every horizon of expectation. This coming, maintains Derrida, needs to
be rethought and thought anew. And yet, to rethink what comes, we
cannot rely on knowledge, science, technology, philosophy, ethics, or
politics, for what comes or who comes can only come from somewhere
foreign [de l’étranger], as a foreigner [comme un étranger]. It is also
worth bearing in mind that in thinking what comes or what happens,
according to the inexorable twists of Derridean thinking, what comes
xii Editors’ Introduction
does not always manage to arrive or does not entirely arrive in its
arrival. Thinking what comes, we are also compelled to accept that the
event can also happen not to happen or come, and remains marked by
an irreducible “perhaps.”3
3 On the perhaps, see Derrida’s illuminating exchange with Alexander García

Düttmann, “Perhaps or Maybe,” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997):
1–17.
Acknowledgments
The editors warmly acknowledge the contribution of Andrew Kingston

to the revision of the translations in this volume, and to the proof-
reading process.
In memory of Pleshette DeArmitt,
who first had the idea for this project
Part I
Scenes of Differences
Chapter 1
Scenes of Differences:
Where Philosophy and Poetics,
Indissociably, Make the Event of
Writing (2006)
An interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber, “Scènes des differences: Où

la philosophie et la poétique indissociables, font événement d’écriture,”
was published in Littérature 142, no. 2 (June 2006): 16–29.
Mireille Calle-Gruber:1 Rereading your first books today, Writing and

Difference, On Grammatology,2 one is still impressed by the lucidity
with which, already, the stakes are designated and how these books
presage the coherence of your work. Indeed, when structuralism was in
full swing you make the differential voice of the text heard when you
declare yourself on the side of the energetic forces and the “dance” of
writing, when you warn against the forgetting of metaphor and its dis-
placements; this voice opens furrows that you will never stop working
at every point and every occasion. The concern about language and in
language that you raise shows, in particular, that our clichés of thought
are linguistic clichés, that we do not have the body to play-interpret the
possibilities of the text. In taking words by the roots, by the in-between
languages, in making the event occur in language, you made a formi-
dable resistance3 out of w riting—in the physical, electrical sense of the
word—where every wooden language [langue de bois] is put to the test:
politics, philosophy, that of literary criticism, that of aesthetics. I would
Translated by Bradley Ramos.

1 This interview first appeared in the Cahiers de l’École des Sciences Philosphiques
et Religieuses (CESPR) des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, no. 20,
1996.
2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998).
3 When this interview was taking place, Jacques Derrida had just published
Resistances. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
4 Scenes of Differences
willingly say that, in the dynamic that your imprint drives, writing
becomes an art of performing language, of giving every latitude to the
performativity of language. Would you accept formulating the whole of
your approach in this way? And could you sketch the elements at work
which constitute this performance of writing?
Jacques Derrida: If I can react to what I wrote in the past as a foreign

reader, and observe after decades the old texts that you have mentioned,
I would say that I too am struck by a certain insistence, by the continu-
ity, the return of a few motifs. I hope it is not all simply monotonous.
Something, so to speak, stays put: the movement is a movement of
transformation in insistence. And among the motifs of insistence, there
is indeed the one that you have underlined: that of force. When, in the
configuration of the era that was called structuralist, the motifs of for-
mality, of relationality, and of the configuration of systems dominated,
the reminder of what I was then calling “force” was nevertheless for-
mulated with a certain concern. This is because—I was already saying
this and I have had occasion to return to it since—the motif of force also
seems to me to be worrisome. I did not want to simply make an apology
for force: this is why I spoke, already at that time, and in a rather
Nietzschean tradition, more about the difference of forces than force
itself. I have always been afraid, for obvious reasons, of a philosophy of
force or of power that was not primarily, as in Nietzsche, a philosophy
of a differential of forces. I spoke, then, of what, in a certain manner,
has the force to interrupt force as well, and which—without being
arrested, paralyzed, frozen ahistorically by form or s tructures—can, no
less, defy force. Sometimes, unarmed weakness is stronger than force: I
was already trying to think force where it is not simply forceful. But in
this insistence—I don’t dare say “continuity” because the word is too
homogenist—in this insistence, I believe that you are correct to bring
out the experience of the breach of writing in language. Basically, what
I was engaged with at the time was what, in writing (breaching, the
trace as language) produces events and from them a history. Structural
knowledge, which also seems necessary to me (I was never simply anti-
structuralist: the structural attitude and the structuralist moment were
in my view fruitful moments, I never wanted to denigrate nor contest
that)—the simple structural posture, then, misses this breaching force of
language and what you call the events of writing. Basically, this is what
has always interested me the most. Whence, naturally, the recourse to
works of a literary or poetic type, at the most decisive moments of my
work.
As to what you called the “performative,” this is indeed what, little by
Scenes of Differences (2006)
5
little, and often under that name, imposed itself on me in order to indi-
cate the acts, the works, the inventions of writing in language that make
things change; that institute; that inaugurate. I would say t hat—despite
some questions and reservations this was able to inspire in me here and
there—the distinction between the constative and the performative that
comes from Austin’s theory is one of the most fruitful things of the
century. I believe that the formalized update of what we call the per-
formative structure of discourse, of utterance, is what has most trans-
formed the philosophical field, and those of literary criticism, linguistics,
the analysis of language. In a way, then, yes, it is the performative in
language that interests me. What was also sometimes called, in classi-
cal fashion, a poeticity of language. Of the idiom. Quite early, I tried to
articulate together the grammatological point of view and the pragmatic
point of view, that is, to uncover the interest for what, in the trace of the
address to the other, was not only discursive or linguistic, but gesture,
intonation, etc. And I formed the expression “pragmatological” to try
to weld together a thought of writing of the grammatological type, or
let’s say rather a grammatical point of v iew—because I do not believe
either in grammatology as a science of writing—and a pragmatic point
of view.
Still, as the theory of speech acts such as it became established—and
with it the theory of the performative—often seemed problematic to me
in certain of its formulations, and as the philosophy of the performative
continued to imply a sort of confidence in presence, the presentation of
the events of language, I ended up also distrusting this notion that I only
used in a strategic fashion in order to make myself understood. I would
not want the reference to this notion of the performative to become
another wooden language [langue de bois], as you were saying, and that
we place undue trust in it. There is something in this thought of the per-
formative that seems necessary to me, but from the moment we believe
that the performative is a new form of self-presentation of the event of
language, which does what it says presently, without gap, without dif-
ference, I am suspicious.
So in relation to the doxa or doctrine of the performative, I have
reservations. Basically, I believe that if there is a fidelity in what I do,
it is double. There is, on the one hand, the fidelity to this motif of the
force of the event in language; but also, on the other hand, the fidelity
to what happens [ce qui arrive], happens to us when we are the inheri-
tors in language. I try to think the language in which I write, as much
as the singular works of others, such as they occur in a language, in a
faithful way; that is, in trying to give myself over to what arrived there
before me—just as language is before me, the work of the other is before
e—and to countersign these events. The countersignature is itself a

m
performative, another performative; it is a performative of thanks given
to language or the work of the other. Thanks given, supposing that we
put our hands in, that we write something different in turn. That always
interested me much more than all the philosophical, even deconstruc-
tionist, theories in which I may have to indulge. In the end, that would
be more or less the constant factor.
MC-G: What you say about this disturbing force of what happens, is
this not just what occurs when writing makes room for the breaching
of voices? Constitutes, that is, a place of rupture and of junction at the
same time? I am thinking of a book like The Post Card4 under the sign
of Socrates and Plato: wherein writing is always at least two. And this
is, consequently, the situation of the greatest risk. The plurality of voices
that shape your text have at their disposal, then, the play of distance to
which you are extremely attentive: tele-scription, tele-gram, tele-phone
[. . .]. It allows for the endless staging of the question of destination, of
the one and the other, of the one to the other, in short, of alterity.
JD: It seems to me that in general, and in any case for me, being able to
write is also an experience of powerlessness, that is of the impossibility,
in writing, of bringing everything together in a monologic or a mono-
lingualism. Now, this powerless power is the experience of the plurality
of voices: the voice of the o ther—first of all in m
e—and of the voices
that fight to be heard, that give to be heard. Which, making themselves
heard in me, also fight among themselves. In this way, I realize that
very often when I begin to write a text and I am paralyzed, incapable
of finding the right tone—the tone is also a pragmatic affair: it is not a
question of language but of what we do with the language of gesture in
speech—I realize that I can give way to the writing only at the moment
when I accept that there be several voices, that the text be a polylogue.
I know, then, that there I am going to be able not only to speak in my
name or in the name of a unique and monological authority, but that
I am going to be able to change the tone and let the different voices
speak. Whence, in a form sometimes marked as such, the more and
more frequent appearance of texts with multiple voices, with dashes
indicating that one is passing from the one to the other. That for me is
the possibility of giving speech, of giving voice to multiple speeches and
tones. The most difficult thing when I write is not knowing whether or
4 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
7
not I have anything to say, though that question is important: basically,

the content of what I might say is less important than the tone, the
posture, the pose, the attitude to be found. That is, the address, always.
What sets the tone is not primarily oneself, it is the one to whom you
are addressing yourself. It is a question, then, of tuning [accorder] this
tone to the other; the tone comes from the other. In The Post Card, this
is thematized in a Hölderlinian notion: Wechsel der Töne, the change of
tone. It is always a question of knowing how to give a tone, to stabilize
or change a tone. There are several voices in every discourse, a jumble,
a braid of voices. When I write, I have the impression that I am braid-
ing voices, that I am letting speak, in every sense of the term. Yielding
the floor to the other; but also letting speak just as an analyst does. But,
obviously, this is also letting someone or a voice speak that we love to
hear.
It is in this way that I have the feeling, when I write, of a very serious
responsibility [. . .] and irresponsibility. When I write I have the impres-
sion that the point for me is to liberate myself from who knows how
many inhibitions in order to let multiple voices speak, to lift prohibi-
tions, let them speak to each other. Letting write and letting sign: what
is more than one. There is an event only on this condition.
MC-G: That is what is fascinating in your writing where risk and inven-
tion can be read: you have, of course, a great deal to say, but maybe,
also, you have to say to the extreme, to every extremity. So much so
that everything seems to occur as by the grace of a gift; by a coming
of writing that is a present [cadeau]. I am thinking, for example, of the
phrase: “cinders there are” [il y a là cendre] which, in the event of an
accent, an accidental accent, sets the tone, as you would say, and opens a
book: Cinders. I am quoting you, from the first pages of this text: “More
than fifteen years ago a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me; to
be more precise, it returned, unique, uniquely succinct, almost mute.”5
You also recall, in “Circumfession” in particular,6 that it is a question
of “finding the vein”—in the diverse senses of the expression, that you
deploy. In short, everything seems to happen as if, from a small kernel
of language, given by chance, something is developed, gets bigger, can
become very serious, and in any case extremely telling.
5 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1991).
6 Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
JD: Whence the double feeling of responsibility and irresponsibility.

Responsibility because, all of a sudden, one finds oneself burdened with
something one did not produce, which was given to me. This can be a
word from the French language, or a phrase, or a sentence that, suddenly,
imposed itself upon me and which in a way I inherit. Irresponsibility
because it does not come from me. Responsibility because I have custody
of it. And also, jubilation. Which is due to the fact that I have to make
the heritage bear fruit, as it were, exploit it, explore it, but as the thing of
the other. It may be the case that I would not enjoy it if the words were
my own. I enjoy insofar as it is the speech of the other—it is from the
other from that speech comes, that the legacy comes, the gift. The jubila-
tion is mine, but it is mine as the thing of the other. I cannot conceive of
jubilation otherwise.
All the so-called narcissistic gratifications that one can feel in writing
seem to me fundamentally very secondary, even if they are real, in rela-
tion to the enjoyment or the jubilation that takes place, at least in the
supposed-other. That is, in the one from which there comes, in language,
the signature, the work that we encounter. The work is not necessarily a
book. It may be a phrase, a given phrase. It can be the supposed-reader
as well: the reader who is going to find themselves, in this way, in the
situation of the one who gave me this phrase. It is, then, to the reader,
indeed to the reader “in me,” that I am going to give it, that I am going
to please. That is to say that enjoyment always takes place on the other
side: which does not for all that mean that it is lost.
MC-G: In this case of the phrase given or the arrival of the syntagm, it
is finally as if, at a certain moment, rhythm or poeticity took precedence
over thought.
JD: If I wanted to risk some propositions that would not only be pro-
vocative but would make my enemies all too happy, I would say that at
bottom philosophy, theory, etc. does not interest me that much. What is
important to me is indeed what you just named: rhythm, tone, gesture,
the “performative,” events. As for the “content,” if there is one such that
it could be d etached—which I do not believe—detached and isolated
from this act of writing language, this “content” of course interests me,
intensely, very secondarily. It is as if philosophy had been, I would say
first of all a pretext in order firstly to make phrases, to make the scene
which is made with phrases. But then, I would say that it is not only a
pretext: I believe that philosophy—philosophical texts: philosophy itself
does not exist, it exists in texts—interested me as an extremely rich
possibility of writing. There is a treasure, a philosophical matrix, in the
9
strict sense, in the Western tradition, which gives a lot, I would say, not
only for thinking but for writing, for working the language in the scene
that I just described: of relation to the other, gratification, thanks. The
philosophical corpus was for me, then, just like language, just like litera-
ture, a place to exhaust, or to draw from to the point of exhaustion. This
is why I have both the attitude of someone who says, “philosophy is
exhausted, it’s exhausted,” and the attitude of one for whom it remains
forever virginal and new. This is the impression that I have when I open
Plato anew—which I do as often as possible. I know that people have
a hard time thinking this and hearing it from me, those who tend to
think that I am someone who turns the page on philosophy, who says
“it’s over.” But no, on the contrary, in doing the work of deconstruc-
tion, of so-called “deconstruction,” which concerns a certain closure
of the philosophical or of the metaphysical, I never stop considering
philosophical texts as forever virgin and always open, welcoming a new
experience. It is to that extent that I also love to teach. Teaching often
gives, because of the questions of rhythm, of staging, more possibilities
and resources in the explication with the texts than published work or
the written word. That is what I love about teaching: suddenly reopen-
ing, for myself first and foremost—this is what I did today for my course
on hospitality—opening again from another point of view texts that I
thought I knew. Thus with Plato’s Sophist, Plato’s Statesman: there is
a position of the stranger who, in the Sophist, poses the question of the
parricide of Parmenides, or else who poses the question of knowing who
the statesman is. Anyway, these texts which I have been reading for forty
or more years, I am able to reread them differently for the first time in
my life on the basis of the question of the stranger and hospitality. So
much so that here I am beginning to read Plato! Beginning to read him
on the basis of the questions which I can pose in their elaborated form
only thanks to a long deconstructive trajectory—in this case, questions
about law, politics, hospitality. And it is on the basis of these over-coded
and over-formalized questions that I am able to have, suddenly, a com-
pletely fresh connection to very old texts.
MC-G: The one who knows how to go back through the texts with
fresh eyes and question them without end is like Edgar Poe’s analyst:
“the truly imaginative [person is] never otherwise than analytic.” This
sentence, which you yourself recall in Passions, seems to me to desig-
nate really appropriately the inventive listening that you have made
a true gift of to us readers. It seems to me, however, that the relation
to poeticity leads you to slightly different paths, which no doubt form
intersections, whether it is a question of the reading-writing bearing on
a philosophical body of work, or of the reading-writing having to do

with literary works. In the latter case, you note a distinction that always
seemed important to me: the distinction that, you say, should be made
between “literature” and “belles-lettres.” You especially emphasize that
literature “has the right to say everything,” “the unlimited right to pose
all questions, to suspect every dogmatism.” And again: “There is no
democracy without literature, no literature without democracy.”7 You
seem, then, to make literature the place par excellence for the question-
ing of thought, of its being put to the test?
JD: It would be necessary to multiply the distinctions. On the one hand,

if I say that what interests me in the first place in a so-called philosophi-
cal text is the poeticity, readers are going to misuse this proposition.
People often, wrongly, reproach me for confusing philosophy, litera-
ture, poetry, and for erasing, as it were, the philosophical specificity of
the philosophical text. This is not my intention. I believe that a certain
philosophical specificity must be maintained, and I strive to do so. But
on the other hand, what, with philosophy’s great canonical texts, one
calls philosophy, is a certain poeticity. By this I mean that what in these
texts must necessarily operate by passing through a natural language,
which welds the philosopheme, the content of thought, to a natural lan-
guage, whether it be Greek, German, Latin, French. This is what makes
the event, that for the sake of convenience I call “poetic.” Plato, in the
end, is an implementation of the Greek language at the most specifically
philosophical moment. In which each concept—eidos, ousia, etc.—is a
concept belonging to this natural language, Greek, and in which Plato
makes sentences that are also critiques of sophistry and rhetoric. He
makes sentences that are events, in which the philosophical and the
poetic, in any case the enunciation, the staging, the rhetoric are indis-
sociable. Those are the events that interest me. That said, I am taking
the word “poetic” in the broadest sense: event of language, institution of
these events in a natural language, a non-formalizable, non-formalized
rhetoric.
Now, if we try to get a firmer grasp on the concept of the poetic, of
poetry and literature, it is necessary to make distinctions. What I just
said, what I said about Plato, is not about literature in Plato. I try, then,
on the other hand, in this general history, to distinguish a moment
when what we call literature in the narrow sense is reduced neither
to poeticity, nor to the epic, nor to belles-lettres. This literature qua
7 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: An Oblique Offering,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas

Dutoit, trans. David Wood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3–34.
11
institution, which is a relatively modern creation, was possible starting

in the Middle Ages, then in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in a
certain cultural space where printing, copyright law, the condition of
the signing subject constitute an original sociopolitical field that did not
exist in Greek and Roman antiquity, and where the question of democ-
racy is posed otherwise.
It is about this literature in the narrow sense of the term that I ven-
tured to say that it was absolute: that it supposed, in principle, the right
to say everything in the form of fiction. Where, precisely, the signatory
is not only the subject-citizen but someone to whom the right to say
whatever, in the name of literature, must be accorded. And where this
right, qua r ight—and I am not saying this was true in fact—presupposes
democracy, presupposes that one have the right to publish whatever.
This does not mean that this right is respected: in fact it never was
respected, even in so-called democratic regimes. But the fact remains
that this right was posited in law: the right to free expression and to
free publication. Given that, literature as something written, as free
written production, occupies a place in History, a relatively limited
and recent place. At that point, this modern European literature is tied
in its destiny not only to the democratic p roject—always inadequate
to itself, always insufficiently d eveloped—but also to a philosophical
demand for freedom, autonomy, independence that is, in the end, the
demand of the Enlightenment as Kant formulated it. Namely, the right
for philosophy not to depend on the State, a right that must be recog-
nized by the State. It is, then, a question of its right to be independent
of the State in what it says. I am referring here to Kant’s Conflict of the
Faculties: he speaks of the university of his time and says that, certainly,
the faculty of philosophy is inferior to the faculties of law, medicine,
theology—which are superior because they are closer to the power of
the State—but what distinguishes philosophy from the superior facul-
ties is that it has the right to say everything in the university. I wrote
about this, and I would have many questions to pose to Kant. This does
not then mean that I subscribe to everything he says: however, he does
pose the question of the demand for a philosophical discourse that has
the unconditional right to say what it deems necessary to be said. Let’s
put it this way: the duty to be in conformity with truth, according to
Kant [. . .] It is this double demand of, on the one hand, the philosophi-
cal demand for the unconditional liberty to say everything that must
be said and, on the other hand, the literary demand to say everything
that one wants without any type of censorship, an emancipation with
respect to censorship. This is what seems to me to join in history the
literary project and the philosophical project. I do not confuse them;
but they share, I believe, in modernity, this demand. This does not
mean that this demand is satisfied; it is never satisfied. But there is here
an Idea, or rather, in order to not formulate it too much in Kantian
language, a demand, an urgency, an immediate injunction (here, now),
that is announced as such: this is what interests me. This exigency
gives rise to literary works, novels, poetry, stories, or to works of the
philosophical kind. What they all have in common is that they happen
through events, writings of languages.
MC-G: Did this double demand of philosophical discourse and liter-

ary work constitute the project of Clang,8 a book that you published
in 1974 and that was just reprinted? It is a demanding and difficult
book, not only because of the textual unmoorings that it puts into play
by weaving together Hegel and Genet, but because it operates, in this
way, unheard-of displacements: of roles, of places, of genres, of habits
of reading and thought. It questions the very status of the text and of
the book. Since its first publication, books have been written, by you, by
others: problematics of writings, textual intermixings [métissages], and
breachings were brought to light. Do you think that we are better able
to do a reading of Clang today, truly?
JD: I hope so, and over twenty years things have happened that would
allow for a reading of this b ook—a reading that I was always waiting
for and that, with some exceptions, I have not encountered. I will also
say—this is going to seem facetious—that the book is not being read.
This is not because the book would be beyond the reach of this or that
reader. It is because the apparently extrinsic elements have discouraged
reading—a presentation and thus a structure that I calculated and that
I wanted that way: the format, the typography, the layout, the tangle
of textual regimes, the formats of the writing, the overloading—all that
has discouraged people. Even the reader whom otherwise nothing would
have prevented from reading this text. So much so that, little by little, I
myself, seeing that the book was not being read, forgot about it.
When I say this book is not being read, I am speaking, of course, of
a collective readership because I know that there are individual readers
who have read the book. There are parts of it that are read, others not.
It is a book that does not come together. To a certain degree, it has been
less read than other perhaps just as unsettling texts, The Post Card,
Circumfession. But I am not best placed to talk about that.
8 Jacques Derrida, Clang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

13
MC-G: Let’s return to the signature, which is one of the major, recur-
ring questions in your thinking. Writing, certainly, in your scene, is first
and foremost the arrival of the inheritance for which a welcoming set-up
is developed in a language in which this very arrival can be inscribed.
Consequently, writing is also a becoming-one-with [faire-corps-avec]. I
am thinking precisely of the elements, each singular, but which consti-
tute together a field of processes of comprehension: Heidegger’s hand,
Nietzsche’s ear, the Tobit’s eyes, or self-portrait paintings . . .
JD: There is also a Heidegger’s ear.
MC-G: . . . Ponge’s talon [griffe] . . .
JD: There are also a lot of feet in The Truth in Painting, and shoes . . .
MC-G: We could, with this collection, reconstitute a strange and fabu-

lous body of reading-writing. It seems to me that writing thus reiterates
the demand, each time specific, to be the intimate gesture that allows for
the becoming-one with the objects of thought.
JD: We were speaking about the other, about the other signatory of the
work: what I try to do, in my way, without, if possible, forgetting the
written text, is to find the body again. Who is Heidegger’s body? Or
Nietzsche’s? This is what is in general passed over in silence. And this
way of passing the body over in silence is already the first gesture of
the one who writes. One writes: one abandons the trace to the paper,
to publication, which is a way of subtracting the body. So it is a ques-
tion of finding the body a gain—the body of the body of work [le corps
du corpus], if we can put it that way. Not in order to save it or make
it present again, but in order to greet it [le saluer] without saving it,
to greet it [le saluer] where there is no saving it [là où il n’y a plus de
salut pour lui]. Because it is not a question, of course, of finding Plato’s
or Heidegger’s body again, but of seeing in the text what is said of the
body, what remains of the body, what symptomatizes the body or the
unconscious. Basically, here “body” is the word that comes in the place
of the irreplaceable: the place of that which is not able to leave the
place. The word “body,” which I do not use in opposition to spirit , is
that which in the signature is inimitable, irreplaceable, singular. Cannot
be replaced. Even though writing consists, all the time, of replacing. So
the question is that of replacing the irreplaceable. What happens in the
substitution of that which resists substitution? This is what would be
meant by the insistence on what indeed resembles parts of the body:
hand, foot, ear, eyes. The hand is not only the hand, it is also what gives,
takes, signs, greets, it is what writes. Without wanting to reconstitute a
sort of philosophy of the body proper, which I don’t believe i n—because
the body cannot be reappropriated—it is a question, on the contrary, of
searching in the expropriation, what I call the “original exappropriation
of the body,” what happens instead in the place of the signature. How
a body is exposed, is expropriated, in leaving (go of) its mark, from its
mark.
MC-G: These grips that allow you to find the body of the signature in
the text also allow you to imprint your own countersignature. Because it
arises from the body, even a spectral body, is all writing not somewhere
in part biography or autobiography?
JD: To formalize this very quickly, I will say two things. On the one
hand, I do not believe that autobiography is possible, if autobiography
means a reappropriation, in writing, of what one is. In other words,
there is no pure autobiography. But on the other hand, there is no text
that is not in some way autobiographical: everything is part of autobiog-
raphy, and everything makes a part of autobiography, one part. This is
what I try to show concerning the self-portrait in painting. Everything,
in a certain manner, can be defined as self-portrait. I believe, then, that
the most philosophical, most speculative, most abstract system, let’s
say Hegel’s Science of Logic, is an autobiographical text. But it is an
autobiography that fails, necessarily, to reappropriate itself. There are,
then, two movements: everything is autobiographical, nothing is auto-
biographical. It is in this oscillation that things stand. This is one of the
borders between philosophy and literature. We have, indeed, a difficult
time classifying autobiography in literature, and often we say that auto-
biography is not a literary genre, unless it is a fiction.
MC-G: But isn’t it always somewhat fiction?
JD: Yes, it becomes literary insofar as it is fiction. It is not literary, but

it is literary. It is not philosophical—the autobiography of Kant or of
Hegel doesn’t interest a nyone—but if we manage to say, shockingly,
that the Critique of Pure Reason is an autobiographical book, then it
must be read in another way, searched in another way, without renounc-
ing the philosopheme. Search how to tie rigorously the Critique of Pure
Reason or the Science of Logic to their signatory in order to read them
as philosophy books and autobiographies at the same time. This is a bit
what I try to do in Clang, where I combine Hegel’s theory of religion,
15
of absolute knowing but also of the family, with family stories, with
Hegel’s family romance; and I try to show what lattice makes them
inextricably intersect.
MC-G: That’s the whole question of the subject, of the withdrawal of

the subject.
JD: Yes.
MC-G: And in particular, already in language, the inscription of sexual

difference? Not only just “writing and difference” we were talking about
earlier, but what in writing shows up as sexual difference, what gives us
to read sexual difference? In the sense where you write: “We can say that
every fabulous narrative recounts, stages, teaches sexual difference or
offers it for interpretation [. . .]. There would be no speaking, no word,
no saying that does not say and that is not and does not instigate or
translate something like sexual difference.”9
JD: Fabulous, that’s first of all language, speech. Every language,

every fable is marked by sexual difference: I try to demonstrate this by
showing, for example, how philosophy often bears the mark of mas-
culinity, is signed with the signature of men. That is to say, signatures
that try to neutralize sexual difference in order, according to a classic
stratagem, to impose the masculine signature. Every fable, then, every
discourse, every speech is marked sexually, and reciprocally, sexual
difference itself is an interpretation. If we do not want to reduce it to
bio-anthropological characteristics, it is necessary to emphasize that it is
a matter of interpretation, and thus, in a certain manner, invested with
fable, the fabulous, discursivity, interpretation, hermeneutics. The two
co-implicate each other here: the fabulous and sexual difference.
MC-G: So that would happen rather on the side of literature, or even on

the side of fiction?
JD: It would be necessary to pause here to speak at length about the

concept of fiction, which is not necessarily literary. There is a whole
dimension of literature that is fictional: the story, the novel. We do not
say, in the strict sense of the term, that poetry is a fiction. And con-
versely, every fiction is not literary. There is fiction in “life” but also in
9 Jacques Derrida, “Ants,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Oxford Literary Review 24, no. 1
(2002), 19–42, p. 19.
hilosophy. Not only could we show that every philosophical discourse

p
presupposes a certain fictionality, but also that it regularly resorts to
fiction. We could show that all philosophers, at a given moment, have
made fiction a touchstone of their discourse: there is a moment when
fiction, or the fictitious example, is a proof of the philosophical. This
might be the dream, as in Descartes. In Husserl, there is a technique,
a method of fictionality: fiction is the methodical instrument of phe-
nomenology. It is theorized by Husserl. He says also that the phenom-
enological analyses of structures of consciousness can survive the very
annihilation of the world in its totality. That means that whenever I
analyze the eidetic structures of phenomenological consciousness, I can
suppose that the world does not exist. This is not one fiction among
others: it is the fiction of the complete annihilation of the world. And
in a certain manner, this fiction is presupposed as the very element of
philosophical discourse.
To come back to the question of sexual difference, it is discourse that
is the site of interpretation, not the word. Words don’t have meaning.
As Austin puts it: only sentences have meaning. But as soon as a sen-
tence has meaning, it presupposes a place of enunciation, a relation to
the other, a body as you were saying, and a sexually marked body. This
implies a sexual strategy, a design and desire, a sexual mark, as it were,
like every address to the other. But because this sexual difference is not
a natural, simply biological given, it itself presupposes the interpretation
of language, it itself presupposes being invested by sentences.
MC-G: Mises en scène, then?
JD: Mises en scène, then, with the always open—and often covered
over—possibility of a sexual instability. Because the moment that gender
is not fixed naturally, there is necessarily a sort of lability, instability,
possibility. A text can have several sexes: simultaneously, successively,
the feminine and masculine voice can be woven into the same sentence.
MC-G: You have an admirable reading of this weaving of voices in

sexual difference in your analysis of Blanchot’s text, in particular, and I
thank you for having sketched out its theoretical stakes here.
I would like to conclude this interview by posing a question to you
[. . .] which is without end—and you know how important this is in
North A merica—it is the question of “deconstruction” and its posterity.
Plurally, all round, this deconstruction in the succession of its trans-
formations has already become “deconstructionism” and seems to be
becoming an institution in certain places. The title of a recent conference
17
publication reads Deconstruction is/in America. How do you view this

group of diverse practices?
JD: This is an enormous question indeed, and on this point more than
any other, I would hesitate to simplify and, above all, to conclude. I
believe that there is, first and foremost, plurality, and I hope that things
cannot be assembled or homogenized. There is a bit of everything: sim-
plifications but also fecundations, transplantations, and new inventions.
In North America, both in the United States and in Canada, we can see
appearing under the word “deconstruction” things that are fashion-
able and stereotypical, or the mechanical and technical application (of
so-called rules that just need to be applied), just as much as there are
extremely generative, generous, and inventive transformations from dif-
ferent languages, from different bodies of work.
In the domain of English and Anglo-American literature, lots of things
have happened that are foreign to me and that happen to me as some-
thing new: whether it’s English romanticism, Joyce, modern American
works, there come about, in the name of deconstruction, absolutely
inventive readings—and writings. In fields that are neither philosophi-
cal nor literary—for example, architecture, law, languages—very new
events are also taking place, engendered and nourished by a culture and
a language that was not initially the one in which the deconstruction
that mattered to me found its most favorable ground in Europe and in
France. This seems to me to be really interesting, very rich and powerful.
In all these domains, there is sometimes imitation, sometimes reflection,
sometimes genius; and that has to do as well with what we call too easily
the “genius” of the language, or rather with the “genius” of the one
who signs, because language in itself does not have its own genius. I will
say, then, that deconstruction is tied to the genius of the inheritors of
language and, beyond, to the future. I do not believe that we can stop it.
I will add, finally, the following remark. From the beginning, that
is thirty years ago now, people have said, especially in the United
States, speaking of deconstruction, that it was dead, “on the wane,”10
exhausted, that one could see the signs of this. It was like this from
the very beginning, and it has continued. And I often told myself:
when something or someone dies, it gets announced, an obituary, gets
published, but this is not repeated tomorrow and the day after tomor-
row. When the same death is announced every day, every week, every
month, something else is happening. And something whose survival,
whose longevity of survival, is being denied. For my part, I believe that
10 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.

econstruction was dead from the beginning, that it has to do with

d
death. This is one of its great themes: mourning, death. It was something
like death from the beginning: but a very paradoxical death. We know
less than ever what death is. Less than e ver . . . A
s to this death that has
been announced, that has been celebrated, that has been hoped for for
thirty years, it is repeated so much that you wonder what is happening
there. As far as fashions go, I never saw a death that lasted such a long
time!
Chapter 2
Philosophy at the Risk of the Promise

(2004)
“Questions à Jacques Derrida” is a discussion with Marc Crépon, Marc

de Launay, and Catherine Malabou that originally appeared in La phi-
losophie au risque de la promesse (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 183–209.
Questions to Jacques Derrida

Marc Crépon
The roundtable that gathers us around you today is entitled “The Work
of Jacques Derrida on the Promise.” If I remember correctly what
you wrote about the “title” in Mémoires for Paul de Man, this title is
already a promise. We promised each other to speak today about what
you’ve written on the subject of, or about, the promise. At least, that is
what I naively thought before making a promise to myself: to read or
reread everything you’ve written and published concerning the promise.
I had some idea of the places I needed to look: “Acts: the Meaning
of a Given Word,” in Mémoires for Paul de Man; “Advances,” the
preface to Serge Margel’s book The Tomb of the Artisan God, which
contains “Prolegomena to a Theory of the Promise;” the final pages of
Monolingualism of the Other; and also Specters of Marx (which con-
cerns the promise more than once—Catherine Malabou, I believe, will
say something about this later); and doubtless many more, if it were
necessary to include everything, earlier still, from the confrontation with
Austin and speech act theory.
The more I read, the clearer it became that this was very much a
promise, and had to remain so. In accordance with the very structure of
the promise, my promise was unkeepable. For everything was infinitely
more complicated. I quote this passage from “Advances,” in which what
Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes.

you call “the intrinsic aporia in the concept of the promise”1 seems to
be gathered—this aporia which, if I have correctly understood it, is at
once its chance and its threat. Its chance and its threat to an extent that,
if at all possible, I would like you to enlighten us about:
To be a promise, it must be able to be unkeepable and must thus be able not

to be a promise (for an unkeepable promise is not promise). Conclusion: one
can never constatively claim, any more than for the gift, that there is or that
there has been a promise. One can never establish this by way of a deter-
minant or theoretical judgment. One can only—performatively—promise a
consistent discourse on the promise.2
You can easily imagine the degree to which this theoretical statement
would worry (and slightly discourage) the one inviting you today to talk
about the promise. Except that this discouragement is perhaps part of
the very essence of receiving a p romise—which is always e xcessive—if
it is true, as you write in “Acts,” that this excess inscribes “a kind
of irremediable disturbance or perversion”3 in the language of the
promise—the very language the reader receives.
But above all, the more I read and reread the texts while trying to
keep this promise that I had made to myself, but doubtless also to the
audience and to you yourself (in organizing the roundtable), the more
it appeared to me that in proceeding thus I was only grasping one side
of things. After all, “Jacques Derrida’s work on the promise” could be
understood in two ways. It could mean: “what you have written about
the promise” (which raised the question of the status of these statements
and prolegomena and, because they are prolegomena, of this theory that
is perhaps still to come—that is, precisely, promised). But it could also
mean (and I am conscious of the brutal meaning this formulation could
have in a completely different context): “what your texts promise, what
they have always promised—perhaps even long before you had written
about the promise.”
But are the two things really dissociable? After all, doesn’t your
theory of the promise (this would be my first question) point toward this
“indissociability”? Put differently, am I grossly mistaken in thinking that
your work on the promise gives to think the promises of your work, or
1 Jacques Derrida, Advances, trans. Philippe Lynes (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2017), 27.
2 Derrida, Advances, 27–8.
3 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man: Revised Edition, trans. Cecile
Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York,
Columbia University Press, 1989), 94.
Philosophy at the Risk of the Promise (2004)
21
your work as promise? Or, perhaps even that it promises to give this to
think?
Holding onto the thread of this question, I’d like to separate it into
two, straightaway, if you’ll allow me.
Mémoires for Paul de Man has much to say about the promise, as well
as about deconstruction (I’m disregarding the entire complicated history
of this word between Europe and the United States, even if this complex-
ity perhaps has to do with what we’re speaking about today)—decon-
struction, then, and, notably what distinguishes it from critique. Yet
one of the main points of your theory of the promise (in “Advances”)
consists in saying that there is nothing programmatic about it:
The promise must always be at once, at the same time infinite and finite in
its very principle: infinite because it must be capable of carrying itself beyond
any possible program,4 and because in promising what is calculable and
certain one no longer promises; finite because in promising the infinite ad
infinitum one no longer promises anything presentable, and therefore one no
longer promises.5
My question, which is pretty broad, would then be the following: if

it is true that a critique always fulfils a program, does the opposition
between “deconstruction” and critique not mirror that of the promise
and the program? Can we say that deconstruction, as opposed to cri-
tique, never fulfils a program, but that it presents itself (has always pre-
sented itself) as a promise?
But the boundary between the two (program and promise) also passes
through language, through what happens to language, through this
work of language, and would perhaps be erased without it. The ques-
tion then becomes about the promises of the idiom, or of the idiom as
promise—what I would be tempted to call, in a slightly elliptical fashion,
in rereading Monolingualism of the Other, “the politics of the idiom”
(I don’t remember if you speak of it in these terms). To say it once again
too quickly: does what you have laid out as the structure of the promise
allow for making the invention of the idiom (and I include in this inven-
tion the decisive matter of translation—since perhaps your work on
translation isn’t entirely separate from your work on the promise) the
principle of a politics of the future [d’avenir] or of a politics to-come
[d’à-venir]?
Now I’d like to conclude by confessing (another performative) to you
a non-question—about something that I think could be at the center
4 [Translator’s note] Marc Crépon’s emphasis.

5 Derrida, Advances, 27
of this roundtable and which I have not managed to give the form of
a question. Perhaps it is even what I had foremost in mind in organiz-
ing, with Marc de Launay, this encounter with your work. I mean that
“messianicity without messianism” that seems to be at the heart of your
approach, and which, as you recall in Marx & Sons, presupposes:
taking into account, on the one hand, a paradoxical experience of the per-
formative of the promise (but also of the threat at the heart of the promise)
that organizes every speech act, every other performative, and even every pre-
verbal experience of the relation to the other; and, on the other hand, at the
point of intersection with this threatening promise, the horizon of awaiting
[attente] that informs our relationship to time—to the event, to that which
happens [ce qui arrive], to the one who arrives [l’arrivant], and to the other.6
Of course, I could have asked you, perhaps too broadly: “What is the
relation between this messianicity and ‘deconstruction’?” But, first, I
know that you don’t really like to talk in a general way about decon-
struction, and that you never speak in the name of deconstruction
(incidentally, it might very well be that this precisely has to do with
the promise or, let’s say, with this messianicity itself). Next, both more
and less than a q uestion—let’s say perhaps still a promise of questions.
If what I place here under the word “deconstruction” is indissociably
linked to a work of reading and writing, it would be the promise of
thinking that, perhaps, these readings and this writing (and everything
here that concerns the relation to language) have (I don’t know how to
say it) a messianic d
imension—in the narrow sense (that is, with no reli-
gious connotation) of this messianicity itself.
Marc de Launay
My questions will bear on “Advances,” the preface to Serge Margel’s
book The Tomb of the Artisan God.
In the third section of this preface, you outline a theory of the promise
around the following programmatic epigraph: “interpreting temporal-
ity on the basis of the promise and not the reverse.”7 This relation of
the promise to temporality seems strengthened by what you say a bit
later8 about different temporalities, where you distinguish aiōn, full
6 Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons;” trans. G.M. Goshgarian, in Ghostly

Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, ed. Michael
Sprinker (London: Verso, 2008), 250–1.
7 Derrida, Advances, 2.
8 Ibid., 29–30.
23
time, enumerable time, and the instant. Don’t you think (and this is my
first question) that the promise is a precipitate of these three temporali-
ties? The speech act of the promise always takes place in the present.
However, this present immediately generates a temporal disparity
between the chronological, enumerable time in which the promise is
supposed to be fulfilled—at such a date it will have been kept—and
full temporality, which will have anticipated the future’s indeterminacy
to make of it a future. Even if the promise is actually kept, even if, as
a result, it is limited to enumerable time (that of an overdue debt, for
example), the act of promising—independently of any promised content,
whether deemed feasible or n ot—brings in another temporal dimension
which leaves intact both the validity of the obligation for the one who
has promised, and the legitimacy of the demand of the person to whom
one has promised, even if both people will have forgotten that a promise
bound them together. How to think the relation between this temporal-
ity of the a priori and that of the aiōn? A bit further still, you make of
the “perhaps” “not the very modality of the promise but the condition
of possibility of any properly modalized promise.”9 The should- be,
the Sollen, is the condition of possibility: it indeed introduces a tempo-
rality other than that of being, and thus immediately an omnipresent
anteriority—what you call “the absolute or immemorial anteriority of
the principle of the promise.”10
You raise another difficulty in speaking of an “intrinsic aporia in the
concept of the promise:”11 it must both promise something other than
what belongs to the calculable and the certain, but, by thereby promis-
ing something infinite, it is no longer keepable at all. You come back to
this:
since, in order to be a promise, it must remain keepable without any assur-

ance that it be kept, it must be able to remain unkeepable, possibly unkeepa-
ble in order to remain what it will have been, to wit, a promise. But a merely
keepable promise remains finite. The structure of the promise thus destabi-
lizes the difference between the finite and the infinite.12
It seems to me that you introduce a subtle distinction here between

Versprechen, the act of promising, and Versprechung, the content of
such a promise (or even Verheißung, the content with an immediately
religious connotation). It is necessarily uncertain that a promise will
9 Ibid., 45.
10 Ibid., 31.
11 Ibid., 27.
12 Ibid., 37–8.
be fulfilled, inasmuch as the future is indeterminate, independently of

the content of this promise. Even if the one who promises is “God,”
and even if his promise is conditional, the fact that there is a promise
is enough to introduce a temporal dimension that belongs to history
and not to the time of clocks. Stricto sensu, God could never promise
anything (Exodus 3:14 seems to give an indication of the link between
“God” and the temporal register of the promise).
Yet you write, “the thought of the promise or of promising [. . .]
opens up, in the [. . .] “present” [. . .] a nonsaturable future, the advance
of a to-come that nothing could foreclose.”13 In the Pentateuch, certain
divine “words” are understood by those to whom they are addressed,
and are interpreted, as promises: έπαγγελία is both annunciation and
promise, and there will always be the temptation for the New Testament
to go in for a typological interpretation of the Old (as is clearly evident in
The Divine Comedy). And this thus raises the question of the difference
between the messianism of the prophets, which is not eschatological,
Christian eschatological messianism, and a wholly other form of mes-
sianism. However, my question simply focuses on the relation between
the content of the promise and the act of promising: if the promise must
be both keepable and unkeepable, does this tie it in some way or another
to one or other of its contents?
Another question may be added to this one, concerning the content
of every promise: “the promise should never promise a curse.”14 And
you return to this point: “I can only promise something ‘good.’”15 If the
promise is understood as a “social act,” as Adolf Reinach puts it, or a
speech act, then it is necessarily addressed to some other person; the act
of the promise invests this other person with a legitimate demand to see
the promise fulfilled. Now, if the content of the promise is harmful to
him, he can always refuse the demand that is his due, and this refusal
singlehandedly annihilates the promise as surely as its fulfillment ordi-
narily would. It is not that the promise would secretly always be condi-
tional, but, since it is a social act, it implies the explicit declaration that
there is a promise, and that this speech act is received or understood as
such. In what way could the perversion of the promise—“promis[ing] a
threatening gift”16—be presented as a condition of possibility?
For that matter, you seem to respond indirectly to this yourself when
you say that “the theoretical and ontological discourse on the p romise
13 Ibid., 49.
14 Ibid., 26.
15 Ibid., 46.
16 Ibid., 46.
25
[. . .] is overrun in advance by the performative of the promise that

remains its element and implicitly or explicitly confers upon it its general
form.”17 Furthermore, the thinking of the promise also presupposes that
the grammatical register of the promise is the first person plural: “What
cannot be derived from this place is the ‘we’ of one and the other, one as
the other, even when the one guards itself from the other [quand l’un se
garde de l’autre].”18 What’s more, this we is qualified as “dissymmetri-
cal,” and you say that it is “anterior to every social bond.”19 Isn’t this an
acknowledgment that the promise is the source of the first juridical bond:
the a priori relation between a (spontaneously and publicly desired)
constraint and an immediately legitimate demand? Independent of all
content, isn’t the act of promising also a social bond created between
two (or more) people, in which one party commits to subjecting a certain
duration of their future to an obligation while crediting the other with
an expectation that has a legitimate claiming force? And can we extend
this form of originary juridical bond to the form of every social bond?
Catherine Malabou
I’d like to begin by recognizing the work that Jacques Derrida has
conducted for many years on the promise by recalling that, far from
being a mere “theoretical reflection”—for that matter, there can be
no “theory of the promise,” strictly speaking, he tells u s—this work
involves a political commitment at every moment. At the Parliament of
Writers at UNESCO, in different countries (including the United States,
South Africa, Israel, and Palestine, notably) and in so many newspapers,
so many languages, Derrida constantly affirms that at the heart of the
promise lies the undeconstructible character of certain values of justice
and democracy which call for constant and immediate commitment. In
a text entitled “Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism,”20 he offers
the four major directions of this commitment: work, forgiveness, peace,
and the death penalty.
No promise, then, that would not be a promise of justice. No promise
of justice that would not be inscribed within “the most concrete urgency,
and the most revolutionary as well.”21
17 Ibid., 48.
18 Ibid., 49.
19 Ibid., 49.
20 Jacques Derrida, “Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism,” trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 371–86.
21 Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 249.
You will have recognized, in this alliance of the promise and commit-
ment, the motif of this strange structure Derrida calls the “messianic,”
which holds together the simultaneously transcendental and empirical
character of the promise. This is precisely the point on which I would
like to pose my questions to him.
Unfortunately, I cannot go back over the long argumentative chain
here in which the word “messianic” is involved, from “Khōra”22 to
Specters of Marx,23 passing through Faith and Knowledge,24 up to, very
recently, Marx & Sons. I will get straight to the point and formulate two
questions. The first concerns the relation of the messianic to the sacred
and to language, and the second concerns the relation of the messianic
to the site.
First question: I recall, Jacques Derrida, that by “messianic” you
mean “a messianicity without messianism.” This messianicity or this
messianic “no longer has any essential connection with what messianism
may be taken to mean, that is, at least two things: on the one hand, the
memory of a determinate historical revelation [. . .] and, on the other, a
relatively determinate messiah-figure.”25 In other words, the messianic
breaks with the testamentary and Koranic revelations. That is how the
promise of justice “would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was
Christian or even Abrahamic.”26
Would you say, then, that the coming of the word “messianic” is a
result of a desacralization of messianism? Does the undeconstructible
character of the promise come to light following the end of an undertak-
ing to profane messianism?
If I ask this, it’s because you insist on the fact that the word “mes-
sianic” “is, in [your] estimation, relatively arbitrary or extrinsic; it has
merely rhetorical or pedagogical value.”27 Thus, we could say that it is
22 Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” trans. Ian McLeod in On the Name, ed. Thomas
Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130.
23 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics,
2006).
24 “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,”
in La Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Seuil, 1996);
“Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ within the Limits of Mere
Reason,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
26 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of
Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40–101.
27
a provisional word, which we will one day be able to let go of, and thus
will be able to do without.
If this is indeed the case, if there is desacralization, does it concern the
word “messianism,” or the thing, “the messiah”? Here we encounter
the question Spinoza raises in the Theological-Political Treatise. What
is sacred: language itself, or that of which it speaks? These questions
seem crucial to me to the extent that every promise presupposes that the
one who promises and the one who receives the promise in some way
speak the same language. Now, in using the word “messianic,” do you
take yourself to be speaking the (universal and rational) language of
everyone, a language that would sacralize neither work, nor forgiveness,
nor peace, nor life, that would detach itself from any chosen language,
that would privilege no idiom? Or, on the contrary (though the contrary
is not an incompatibility), do you want to encrypt language such that its
understanding is postponed until some later messianic horizon, postpon-
ing the sacred for the use that humans will one day make of language?
When this day comes, they will be able to eliminate the word: pedagogy
will have achieved its goal. In order to promise, then, must one speak
everyone’s language, or wait for everyone to change their relation to
language? Where is sacredness lodged within this question of language
that cannot help but be posed here, since you are inventing the words
“messianic” and “messianicity”? Does promising always involve chang-
ing the words of language, and why?
Second question. This one is clearly closely linked to the first, because
it again concerns the status of the invention of the “messianic.” It con-
cerns more specifically the site of the messianic, the location whence it
comes, as well as the location where it might come to pass. In Marx &
Sons, you mention the critiques put to your book Specters of Marx in
the United States, according to which the “messianic” would be nothing
but a utopia. The “messianic,” or “messianicity without messianism,”
would be utopian: that is to say, according to etymology, “without any
site.” You respond in a very vehement manner to this critique:
this exposure to the event, which can either come to pass or not (condition
of absolute otherness) [which is precisely the messianic], is inseparable from
a promise and an injunction that call for commitment without delay [sans
attendre] [. . .] here and now [. . .]. Anything but Utopian, messianicity man-
dates that we interrupt the ordinary course of things, time and history here-
now; it is inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice.28
28 Ibid., 249.
Thus, when it comes to the “messianic,” as you say again a bit later, it’s
a matter of developing a “non-utopian way of thinking messianicity.”29
I conclude from this, then, that messianicity takes place. In a sense,
this question is very simple: what is this site, and what does “here and
now” mean for you? Because, if messianicity is not bound to a revela-
tion, then it is no longer attached to a site e ither—to some country or
other, some soil or other, some language or other. One could reply that
messianicity commands one to commit oneself everywhere, and promises
everywhere. But what does everywhere mean? If we say “everywhere,”
do we not precisely end up with the Christian paradigm of the urbi et
orbi that in so many ways underlies the process of globalization today?
Ought one not suppose, on the contrary, that messianicity is rooted in a
kind of non-site, a non-situable, non-localizable place that would be the
very resource of the promise, a site in which, in a sense, nothing could
be kept? Is this not what you call khōra—which, you say, gives place
without taking place? Pure possibility of the site that gives place without
itself occupying a space, “place itself [. . .] this undiscoverable place.”30
The messianic appears as a surplus or originary supplement that is
without any possible localization as such. Now, in Faith and Knowledge,
you summon four figures of this site without site: khōra, the island, the
desert, and the promised land; the formula is important. These you say,
are “aporetical places:” “with no way out or any assured path, without
itinerary or point of arrival, without an exterior with a predictable map
and a calculable program.”31 You can guess what my question is, then.
What difference do you make between this site without place, this atopia,
and utopia? Can one have the experience of this site without site here
when one fights for work, peace, forgiveness, the abolition of the death
penalty? Can one experience the promised land here? If the promise is
always the promise of a language, is it always the promise of a land as
well? And, if so, how might we think the essential link that continues
to unite the messianic with the site, language, and thus with historicity?
Jacques Derrida’s Responses
I would like to thank my hosts, Marc Crépon and Marc de Launay, and
before responding to the questions that have just been put to me, I would
like to analyze what has crossed my mind in the past few days regarding
29 Ibid., 249.
30 Derrida, “Khōra,” 111.
31 “Faith and Knowledge,” 7.
29
the promise. Your invitation was a promise to welcome me here, and

my response was even more of a promise: “I will come.” That might be
understood as a simple programmatic expectation or as a promise that
I would come. But if the loss of my voice that struck me for two days
had persisted, I could not have come, or come and spoken. Following
the definition of speech acts in the academic sense, if I had not come due
to aphonia (or if I came but did not speak due to aphonia), no speech
act theorist could have reproached me with having broken my promise.
In promising to come, I promised to do everything I could to come and,
from the moment it was impossible for me to speak, I would not have
broken my promise, since an incident independent of my conscious and
voluntary intention prevented me from keeping it.
Yet, as you surely believe, things are more complicated, and in saying
this, I am thinking back to what I heard yesterday, which was uttered
under the authority of speech acts, hermeneutics, and phenomenology.
What finds itself excluded by this triple authority? An interpellation of
the following type: if we consider, in the capacity of rigorous speech act
theorists, that we only promise some good, it would have to be under-
stood that, in your inviting me to come and in my promising to come,
we were in agreement beforehand about the fact that this was a good
thing, that in coming to speak, I was committing myself to promising
something good, and that you, by means of your hospitality, were offer-
ing me something good, and we all had the same idea about what the
good deed consisted of. Not only must there be intentional conscious-
ness (since there can be unconscious intentions) to give something good,
but the recipient of the promise must also have the exact same concept
of what the good deed consists in. Put differently, not only must both
sides have good intentions, but there must also be a consensus and an
unfailing transparency between us about the nature of the promised
gift. Naturally, I have a lot of doubts in this regard and on all similar
occasions. I doubt that, even in the most consensual situations of accord
and ecstatic harmony, a saturable consensus can exist—and, above all,
can be proven. What’s more, in the case of my own aphonia, it would
perhaps be necessary to integrate into the analysis of the good deed of
my promise to come here the fact that perhaps it may insidiously turn
back into some poison—that is, to integrate the fact that there could be
some possibility of parasitism, a possibility that should always be taken
in account. I don’t want to call up psychoanalysis here, but rather the
sheer possibility that, within the ipseity Paul Ricoeur spoke about yester-
day, there is a multiplicity of sites not under the authority of the ipse, of
the self-same—one with itself—and thus that there is also a multiplicity
of agencies involved in the matter.
In the same way, while respecting the entirely indispensable legitimacy

of the analysis of speech acts that wants the promise never to be a threat,
and while respecting the hermeneutic and phenomenological analyses
regulated upon this axiomatic, I wonder whether, without going too
far afield, there might be, I do not say a perversion, but a structural
pervertibility in the gift or good deed that makes it such that the gift
turns into a poison. Or rather that, in obligating the other to enter into
the framework of the promise, I do harm in doing what seems good
to me: I produce something that turns bad. In other words, I wonder
whether the misdeed is at work within the good deed, or, more precisely,
I wonder whether the possibility of the misdeed is at work in the good
deed. In the present case, I may wonder whether in coming here I do
well, whether in speaking I really respond to the expectations my hosts
had, etc. Analyses of this type are properly infinite; but what interests
me is less the notion of pervertibility than the necessity for speech act
theory, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, to integrate these pos-
sibilities of deviation. Indeed, I hold that a promise not constitutively
haunted—and I give a very strong meaning to this word: that of being
inhabited—by these possibilities would not be a promise. A promise
that would be certain that the good is the good, that the good will do
no harm, that the other and I myself understand each other transpar-
ently and harmoniously about what the good consists in, that there is no
misunderstanding, and that we understand exactly the same thing by the
word “promise,” is not truly a promise.
We’ve relied broadly on speech act theory since yesterday, and quite
legitimately so, since it is thanks to this theory that the promise has seen
so many recent developments within philosophy, as we know. However,
this theory and the prospects of the development it has generated must
integrate the possibilities I just mentioned. There is no promise worthy
of the name—that is, a promise in the sense given to us by the tradition,
and to which we try our best to c orrespond—the most vivid experience
of which does not take into account the most disastrous possibility of
the pervertibility that I just mentioned. If I know who promises what to
whom (I, ipse)—and I believe that everything comes back to the ques-
tion of the ipse—and if I know that I, ipse, promises to another ipse who
also knows what he is receiving and from whom, then at that point the
promise becomes calculable. And, from the moment it is determinable,
it turns into a program, it is betrayed as a promise. Put differently, the
promise is betrayed in its dignity as a promise, precisely where it does
not accept that the risk of betrayal inhabits it incessantly.
Furthermore, since yesterday we have been endorsing the fact that
the promise is a speech act. However, there can be promises that are
not verbal, verbalized, or verbalizable. It is not out of the question that
among animals, who are not supposed to speak, there be some behav-
iors equivalent to the promise. I am speaking not only of domesticated
animals, who virtually promise to come back whenever they leave the
house; I mean that, since there is some relation to the symbolic among
animals, there is some promise, some commitment. As a result, the
promise does not fall completely within the problematic of speech acts.
Among humans as well, plenty of promises do without words. In a
certain way, since a promise must always be idiomatic (that is to say,
singular: someone promises this to someone), it is betrayed from the
moment the singularity of such a promise enters into the generality of
language (on the level of performatives regulated by linguistic insti-
tutionality). Consequently, what is purest in the promise, before any
betrayal, is sworn to silence; the promise is secret and silent. Language
is itself relatively extrinsic. As soon as I promise in a language, which
is by definition general, shareable, and protected by codes and rites, the
promise loses its singularity, and is already betrayed as a promise. Even
though I made reference to the performative in the texts you mentioned
in your questions, I am more and more suspicious of what this speech
act theory, as fertile as it may have been, hides, forbids, neutralizes in
the event of the promise. If, like every performative, a promise must
conform to a certain number of rules in order to be a promise (the first
person, the present, a number of conventions and conventional con-
sensuses, a number of codes and rites), it loses its singularity: it risks
becoming a code of manners, a rite. So a promise worthy of the name, to
the extent that it can be irruptive and incisive, interrupting the ordinary
course of history, and to the extent that it can have something revolu-
tionary about it, must subvert codes, scoff at codes, and not conform
to all the codes regulating performatives. The promise arrives. If, in
an already conventional frame, I promise something I can keep—and
speech act theory obligates me not to keep the unkeepable—I’d say I
promise nothing at all. If I promise the possible, if I do what I can, the
promise as performative can only clarify a certain number of possibili-
ties that are in me. It can only roll out a kind of program, whereas the
promise worthy of the name must exceed, qua singular event, this set of
possibles. It must be that something stronger than me, greater than me,
something that I myself obey, promises itself through me. In this sense,
even when I am promising, it is the other that promises in me, a force in
me that exceeds my possibilities. In the same way that the idiom flouts
conventions, something happens here that is promised through me, a
kind of passive decision that finds itself settled.
Now, I’ll try to respond to your questions.

Marc Crépon, your first question was about what was not program-
matic in the theory of the promise, and about deconstruction. I indeed
think that deconstruction always, in my eyes, had an affinity with some-
thing like the promise. As for critique, if it is distinct from deconstruc-
tion, it is not simply because it is programmatic. It is also because critique
is a binary agency, judgment, and discernment. It decides and judges; it
plays the role of krineïn—and, in this sense, it is n ecessary—whereas
deconstruction can involve the history, the genealogy of the critical idea.
Deconstruction is thus wider than the critical perspective—to which it
is not opposed—and, at the same time, it inclines toward sites of unde-
cidability where the critical agency, as a binary agency, finds itself in a
way unsettled, incompetent. On the question of language, it’s true that
I try to raise the question of the idiom from a political perspective in
Monolingualism of the Other.32 I venture to wager on saving the idiom:
not to rescue it, but to affirm the idiom (the singular commitment of
the promise must be idiomatic). Incidentally, the sentence that promises
must be poetic, even if I employ everyday words; it must constitute an
unprecedented event of language. How can the idiom be affirmed in a
way that does not give rise to a nationalism or a conservatism of the
national language? This is not always easy, since we know very well that
cultivating the idiom is often a pretext for nationalist phantasms and
temptations. What I try to show in this context is that, since language
is in a certain way inappropriable (as you nicely recalled this morning),
nationalism or colonialism consists in the phantasm of the appropriation
of language and the idiom as reappropriable, whereas I try to show that
the idiom, where it is absolutely singular, is not reappropriable. Not only
is it not appropriable by the other; at its most untranslatable, it is also
not even appropriable by me. I myself cannot appropriate what is most
idiomatic in “me.” It is a serious challenge to separate the affirmation
of the idiom from nationalist will or from reappropriation, especially
in Europe in relation to Anglo-American. I attempt to respond to this
question in a book [published in January 2003] on the question of the
democracy to come;33 and I try to explain what “future” means to me.
What can be interpreted as a politics to come, but also as a future where
what the political and the political tradition have imposed up until now
would be as it were exceeded, surpassed, rendered o bsolete—so much
32 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin,

trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
33 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
33
so that the word “politics” would no longer be suitable. Not that this is
a matter of depoliticization, but rather of another notion of the politi-
cal, of democracy. This would be related to the question of the site that
Catherine Malabou asked me. This reflection on the politics to come
may be interpreted either as politics to come or as something which,
concerning the social bond, will no longer be called politics because the
concept of the State, of state sovereignty, will no longer play a central
role in it, nor will territoriality. So much so that the traditional notion of
politics, which is always linked to the city or to the State, and to topical,
territorial rootedness, will not escape unscathed. This entire tradition is
currently undergoing an earthquake that is far, of course, from having
destroyed these old structures, but which all the same seriously jeopard-
izes them. Will it still be necessary to use the word “politics”?
I am getting to your final question. You ask me whether what I
call messianicity without messianism is not linked to what is called
deconstruction. Although my thematic attention to the promise and
the messianic are relatively recent—dating from the past ten y ears—I
would say, without cheating with hindsight, that in a way the gesture
I associated with the word “deconstruction” was always friendly with
these themes. Why did I come to speak about messianicity at a given
moment? There are probably contextual reasons for this, readings or
transformations of the reference apparatus that convinced me that this
relation to messianicity was necessary, without at any moment this
disrupting the work of deconstruction, but on the contrary obeying the
same impulse.
I will try now to respond to what Marc de Launay said on the basis of
“Advances,” which was just a preface to Serge Margel’s book.
I will freely agree with what you said about the promise as a pre-
cipitate of the three temporalities that you distinguished, because what
interested me in the promise is particularly the unforgettable fact that
Paul Ricoeur spoke about this morning: a promise that comes about,
not because I decide it, even if I end up making a promise, a promise
only happens to me when it presents itself (which does not mean that its
source is p resent—it could come from very far away), because I promise
in the present, in a moment that indeed seems incisively to interrupt the
continuum of the ordinary course of history. This promise has a dura-
tion. It lasts, and not merely because its structure implies that I am ready
to repeat it or renew it. Yet it survives even when it is not renewed,
even when it is not kept. The promise is an unforgettable event. The
promise worthy of the name remains as an event that is in principle
unforgettable—one can forget it, by accident or neglect, but this does
not affect the duration proper to this event.
With respect to the “perhaps,” I’ll say that this is the category that
allows us to think the promise. Naturally, a promise can always be per-
verted, be transformed into a threat, take back what it g ives—this is a
possibility that may be inscribed in the register of the “perhaps.” This
is not to say that promising consists of saying “perhaps;” but there is
another “perhaps” that makes the promise remain incalculable. Without
this perhaps, the promise would become a prediction. The statement
“I will come” is at times a prediction, at others a promise; for it to be
a promise, it is necessary that the “perhaps I won’t come” be there like
a parasite, a haunting obsession, an accident. This is where we face the
radical heterogeneity between the logic of calculation, of the predict-
able, and that of the promise. This is not to say that one must promise
without calculating: as soon as I happen to make a promise worthy of
the name, I do not renounce calculation; I will try to calculate whether I
can really come on Saturday, on such a date; I will calculate as much as
possible, I will try to know as many things as possible within the order
of what is predictable, calculable, programmable. But the moment of
the p romise—its agency—remains totally heterogeneous to all predic-
tive calculation. The concept of the predictable and that of incalculable
irruption are at once heterogeneous and indissociable. I notice, in my
own work, that I constantly deal with these kinds of conceptual couples
(like conditional forgiveness and unconditional forgiveness, or uncondi-
tional hospitality and conditional hospitality), with radically heteroge-
neous logics that are nonetheless indissociable within experience.
I will have a harder time responding to your question about prophetic
messianism without eschatology, and about Christian messianism,
which for its part is eschatological. I will simply say that I try to dissoci-
ate the messianicity to which I allude from eschatology; my concern was
not about knowing whether it is more Jewish than Christian. This mes-
sianicity is neither teleological nor eschatological; for me, it is a poten-
tially universal category that is thus in principle free of any reference to
an Abrahamic religion.
I’ve already begun to respond to your question about the content of
the promise. According to speech act theory (which I hold dear—don’t
take me to be speaking ill of it), a promise in the usual sense cannot be
accompanied by a curse. You said that, if the content of the promise
were harmful, it could always be refused by the beneficiary: I don’t
know whether the other can always reject the violence of a threat when
it is ciphered, unconscious, unavowable. If the beneficiary has to accept
a promise that is made to him, doesn’t this transform the promise into a
contract? Doesn’t this make the relation between the beneficiary and the
one who promises symmetrical? I think that one can receive promises
35
while being incapable of refusing them, and can accept them without
seeing that they may be harmful in the short term or long term. It seems
as though we can agree that the possibility for a promise to be unkeepa-
ble or threatening is its very condition, meaning that there can be some-
thing bad about the promise. In Greek culture, the oath could provoke
distrust. Why does one promise? In order to bind oneself, to bind oneself
and the other even though it’s possible that everything might turn out
badly. And why, if one wants it to turn out well, doesn’t one simply do
what one promised? As soon as I venture into these waters—as soon
as it’s a question of the promise as a social bond—I often think about
Kant’s great little text On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic
Motives. What Kant says—namely, that one must never lie, but must
always speak the truth on every occasion even if it is harmful or threat-
ening to the other—is that to lie is to break a promise, because as soon
as I speak to the other, I implicitly promise them to tell the truth (the
liar can only lie on the condition of having promised the truth). What
Kant says about the breach of promise that the lie constitutes is that, if
one is given the right to lie, making a maxim of it in a way, one destroys
language and sociality, one posits as a universalizable maxim the fact
that language, qua social institution, may be ruined. Now this entails
that every time one lies, one is not speaking. One ruins the social bond
of address to the other, and ruins what founds language and the social
bond. To lie is no longer to speak to the other. The question would thus
be, and in a certain way it is always the same, of knowing whether the
social bond is a knot as such, or whether it is rather an unbinding, an
interruption of a bond? The relation to the other presupposes an unbind-
ing, and it is the possibility of this unbinding that would constitute it. If
the social bond were something fixed, if it were an indestructible solidar-
ity, it would cease to exist. It presupposes a certain unbinding. I must
take the other at their word, and it is precisely in this situation that the
other can always lie without my being able to prove that he has done so,
since he will be able to affirm that he was sincere even when he said what
he himself concedes was not true. This is at once the chance and the
threat of the social bond. What I just said about unbinding is anterior to
the juridical bond, a “we” is made from this unbinding, and this is the
opening to a social bond that I would place beyond the juridical bond or
social law. And it is the question of justice that would be reformulated
here, that of a justice that always exceeds law.
Now, I will turn to the questions posed by Catherine Malabou.
I am grateful to you for having recalled that the emancipatory promise
was, in its structure, revolutionary—which does not mean that it would
conform to the traditional or ordinary imagery of revolution. There
is something in every promise that interrupts the ordinary course of

history: and in this sense, it is urgent and revolutionary. This allows me
to note a d istinction—which is not unrelated to the m essianic—with
respect to the regulative idea or the infinite task, precisely because Kant’s
texts on the question of the regulative idea go hand in hand with that
of the unity of the world and enter into a reflection regulated by the als
ob, but above all because the urgency of what does not wait—in com-
mitment, the social bond, and, more generally, politics—is irreconcilable
with the dilatory character of the regulative idea.
You ask me if one can deduce a desacralization or profanation from the
distinction I make between messianicity and messianisms that are linked
to revelations. Yes, to the extent that I try to show that what I provi-
sionally call the messianic is a universal structure (which is not linked to
Judaism, Christianity, etc.): it is a relation of waiting to what comes, and
this relation is of a universal order. Because of this universal significance,
this messianicity is torn from its sacral confessional ground. But messi-
anicity itself is a structure that irresistibly tends toward resacralization:
the relation to the idiom is sacralizing, even if one is suspicious of what
is sacred. So I don’t think it is a matter of simply evacuating every sacral
or sacralizing experience (we would have to distinguish here between
“holy” [saint], heilig, holy [in English in the original], etc., the whole of
this giant semantic field). The movement that seeks to save the sacred
or the holy, even the hale, inevitably tends to multiply self-destructing
movements within a unified experience: that is, it tends to desacralize in
order to sacralize. To my eyes, this is a very powerful logic, especially in
the political domain, and it is no doubt irreducible.
I have no firm response to the question about the term “messianic”
that I provisionally employ. Within our Abrahamic culture, I found it
convenient to call this structure that I just described as universal “messi-
anic.” Thanks to this term, I think that waiting for what comes (without
a promise necessarily having been made)—a waiting that always has the
figure of justice and peace—can be better understood. Nonetheless, I
don’t think it is simply a matter of a tactical convenience to better clarify
this configuration: it is not impossible that the structure I call universal
could only have appeared as such, would only have occurred in historical
experience, or would only be given to thinking as such, on the basis of
the Abrahamic revelations. The Heideggerian Offenbarkeit (even though
he thinks of it as the condition of possibility of the Offenbarung, hence
as anterior to it) is perhaps only confirmed as revealability on the ground
of the event of Revelation. This leads us to rethink the future of revealed
religions, which is not in my eyes a completed history. In any case, the
future of the term “messianic” (even understood without messianism) is
37
to my mind open. This is my way of contributing to this movement of

the universal sharing of language, not only as a citizen of the world, but
also beyond this cosmopolitanism. This is my way of sharing this type
of discourse beyond cultures, whether they be Abrahamic or Greek, so
that it can become the language of all. It so happens that the possibil-
ity of this universal sharing of language must, no doubt, pass through
some encryption here or there, pass through a language that would have
all the appearances of an esoteric discourse. This is a difficult political
choice to make, but at times to renounce certain aspects of esotericism
is a sin against democracy, an abdication in the face of democratic duty.
I come now to the question of the “site.” What is it to take place here
and now, to commit oneself everywhere in every site? The “everywhere”
is linked to the future of a certain Christianity that I call “globalatiniza-
tion.” It is not a sign of relativism to say that everyone, wherever they
may be, must commit themselves according to their idiom, their concrete
situation, the singularity of the site, everywhere. There is the necessity
of both the universal and the singular rootedness in the here and now,
in the idiom. Of course, the way I interpreted the khōra in the Timaeus
concerns a site or a spacing that is absolutely indifferent to history and
thus to historical sites (the promised land, etc.). It is an entirely insensi-
ble receptacle, and is the spacing for the “il y a.” This reference to the
khōra has nothing to do with the determinate and singular topos. It
is what does not allow itself to be historicized by a grand narrative of
anthropo-theological revelation: the khōra, impassive, receives what is
imprinted upon it. It is the opening of every possible topos: it is not a
site. It is before the gift, before the promise, before the promised land. It
is a gaping opening that is neither a void nor a nothingness, but which,
because of this indeterminacy, can become a universal reference. This
explains the political consequences that in some texts I try to draw out
of this interpretation of the khōra. Beyond negative theology, which
remains fundamentally Christian (even though there are tendencies in
Judaism in this vein), khōra remains a preanthropological, pretheologi-
cal space. It is the absolute “il y a” which is atopian, and by reference
to which I try to maintain a discourse that would not be without ethico-
political consequences.
I will take one final precaution given the way that, in order to
respond to these difficult questions, I have had to proceed with certain
simplifications. The way I pull discourse—for example, khōra rather
than promised land or revelation, a certain non-negative impossibility
rather than the possible, a thinking of the promise that is not completely
saturated by speech act theory or phenomenology—does not amount
to maintaining an oppositional discourse. When I speak of messianicity
without messianism, this is anything but a critique of messianism, or a

declaration of war against messianism. For me, it is a matter of thinking,
perhaps through messianism, something that cannot be reduced to what
is too easily interpreted as messianism. It is not a critical discourse that I
maintain, but a discourse that tries to take up or take on the numerous
heritages of which we just spoke. This is a way of being within the fidel-
ity that consists in keeping one’s word, in reflecting on the way in which
one’s word might be kept (messianic speech, for example), in the sense
of philosophical and theoretical consistency. In order for this word to be
kept or to keep itself, there are moments when it is necessary to make it
tremble with what trembles within it. is At least, this is the style of my
commitment.
Part II
On School and Writing

Chapter 3
“School was hell for me . . .” (1989)
A conversation with Bernard Defrance regarding Derrida’s experience

in school and his subsequent encounters with the educational establish-
ment, which appeared in two parts in Cahiers pédagogiques: “L’école a
été un enfer pour moi: conversation avec Jacques Derrida,” Cahiers péd-
agogiques 270 (January 1989): 41–2; and “Liberér la curiosité, susciter
du désir: conversation avec Jacques Derrida,” Cahiers pédagogiques
272 (March 1989): 44–7.
Jacques Derrida speaks in a slightly muted, hesitant, but even-toned and

serene voice. Sometimes a few breaks, brief ones, in this reserved voice,
reveal secret wounds. Derrida, like Michel Serres1 but in a different way,
experienced a few “wars,” in the literal and figurative sense, which have
left traces and which have not yet been extinguished, perhaps (but let the
non-specialists reassure themselves: we will not speak of Heidegger . . .).
In this first interview, we speak of his memories of school. Then, we
will turn to the teaching of philosophy and the history of the GREPH.2
Bernard Defrance: Jacques Derrida, a question that will perhaps seem a

bit ridiculous to you: what are your memories of school, of elementary
school in particular?
Jacques Derrida: That depends on what you have in mind with this
question . . . I could respond at the level of my quasi-affective experience
Translated by David Maruzzella.

1 See “Conversation avec Michel Serres,” Cahiers Pédagogiques nos. 264/265, 266,
267, 268, 269, and 270, May–June, September, October, November, and December
1988 and January 1989.
2 Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement Philosophique, 54, rue d’Orléans,
93600 Aulnay-sous-bois.
42 On School and Writing
of the thing or at the pedagogical level or the memory I have of what was
taught, the models of authority . . . T
hese are very different things: so, if
we only have two pages in the Cahiers [Pédagogiques], see what I mean!
I could respond with 100 pages.
BD: Let’s pretend that’s what you’ll do!
JD: Fine, so let’s begin with the affective: as a child I was a very
unhappy little student, that is to say, I suffered a lot at school . . . It
must be said that this was in Algeria. I started elementary school in
’34–35, and very quickly thereafter the war began. This was a school
where racial problems were already very noticeable: there was already
lots of brutality among the students, fights between little Arab and
little French students . . . so there is the experience of violence. I felt I
was a child who was very exposed, who instead would rather go home
and protect myself against a universe that seemed extremely violent.
In elementary school I was what is called a very good student, with a
very fearful relation to the machine and to this student milieu that I felt
to be extremely violent. And very quickly it became associated in me,
in my memory, with war. The Vichy regime was very pronounced in
Algeria: there weren’t any Germans, but Pétainism was very oppressive,
very noticeable. Memories of letters that we had to send to Marshal
Pétain, and the anti-Semitism . . . I am Jewish. And the violence took
the form not only of fights amongst students, anti-Semitic remarks,
but also this: Pétainism everywhere, photos of the Marshal all o ver . . .
One anecdote has remained etched in my mind: I was top of the class.
This came with some privileges. Every morning there was a flag-raising
ceremony with the song “Marshal, here we are!” And I noticed one
day that, though I was first in the class, because I was Jewish, they
didn’t have me raise the flag! Even though those who were top of their
class were supposed to hoist the flag. And suddenly, I u nderstood . . .
without understanding! why they wouldn’t let me raise the fl ag . . . S o
a good student . . . but whose writing was impossible. I had illegible
handwriting, and it still is to this day, always. Already at that point, I
felt that there was a certain image of myself that I was giving to these
good teachers: gifted student but whose writing is impossible. I had a
teacher who was already a former liberated prisoner of war, so this
must have been in ’40, and who was also the leader of the scouts in the
little town outside of Algiers where I lived. I was a cub scout: he did
scouting activities in class and the class was divided into three teams:
Swallows, Ants, and B ees—those were the scout troops! With competi-
tions, grades, in this atmosphere, this Pétainist ideology, these teams
43
structured the class! And since I was a good student I was the leader of
the Bees. And I had a hard time coping, due to the same difficulties I
had socializing, with my scout experience. I was a scout for six months
and I was very unhappy: so I quit. This universe seemed very oppressive
to me and I felt in it the Pétainist ideology, the anti-Semitism. I remem-
ber, to come back to my writing, being told by this same teacher during
recess, “Go back to class and redo your work,” which was very badly
written.
BD: Was it a ploy so that you could be protected?
JD: No, no, not at all! It was quite simply that he thought that a good
student was supposed to write well. It had to be r ewritten . . . He had
esteem for a good student, but a good student with respect to whom one
should appear as demanding. He said to me one day, and this I think is
interesting, “When you’re in high school you’ll be able to get away with
writing poorly, but here you can’t do that yet! So get back to class and
copy out your work again.”
BD: Yes, but what I had in mind was a bit more optimistic. I thought
your teacher might have been using it as a way to get you away from the
violence of the playground . . .
JD: Ah no! Let’s not exaggerate! I wasn’t being lynched! It was more
of an atmosphere, fights . . . It was probably also my slightly fearful
idiosyncrasy that explained it. There was racist violence, racial, which
was developing rapidly, anti- Arab racism, anti- Semitic, anti-
Italian,
anti-Spanish . . . there was everything! All the racisms intersected . . .
So that’s a little bit about the atmosphere at elementary school, which,
nonetheless, turned out fine for me, to the extent things went well from
the scholastic point of view.
Then, I took the entrance exam in seventh grade and started high
school. And the following year I was thrown out of school! The first
year, the application of racial laws, the numerus clausus, hadn’t yet
begun, that was in 1940– 41 . . .
I actually don’t remember so well
what happened. My brother and sister were kicked out, she from the
elementary school, he from the high school, before me, I don’t know
why. And as for me, it was during the time school was starting back up
in the Autumn of ’42, when the general supervisor called me into his
office and said to me: “You’re going home, your parents will explain
it to you.” And what my parents explained to m e—my parents didn’t
really understand either—was that I was a Jewish kid and that I had to
leave the school. The Allies arrived in November 1942 and yet—this is
a completely s ingular and interesting political episode—the anti-Semitic
laws remained in place for six months, under De Gaulle–Giraud’s two-
headed government. In fact, Giraud was Vichyist, a Pétainist at heart.
The racial laws remained in place until April 1943 when Algeria was
liberated, and at war against Germany. It was only in April that I was
able to go back to school as a second-year student. So then there was a
great deal of disorder; the high school was occupied by the British who
had transformed it into a hospital, and we had classes in these kind
of barracks, very precarious facilities, with teachers who were either
women or retired men: all of the able-bodied people were at the front.
So studies were very much unsettled until the end of the war; we thought
more about soccer or war than our school work.
BD: And relations with the teachers?
JD: This was during the time when instructors were authoritarian, they’d
rap your knuckles with a ruler, pull you by the ears . . . A lot of spell-
ing of course, lots of dictation and—very specific to Algeria—whereas
in elementary school, there were lots of little Algerians, the further one
went, the less of them there were; at high school there practically weren’t
any left.
BD: But it is still the same today in France for immigrant children. In the
upper classes at high school there aren’t very many.
JD: Exactly! At high school, I have the memory of one or two Algerian
kids per class, three at most; they generally came from bourgeois
families, and at the baccalaureate level there practically weren’t any.
And not any Algerian teachers. There were Algerian “peons,” student-
monitors; and there might have been an Algerian who taught Arabic.
Arabic was only offered as an archi- foreign language; we learned
English, German. It was very rare, apart from two or three Arab stu-
dents, that somebody studied Arabic. It was a rather odd choice; you
had to really want to study it, or to be in a particular social situation
in order to decide to pursue Arabic as a foreign language. Occasionally
some little rural French students would take it, sons of farmers who felt
it was necessary for them to learn Arabic for their work. This was a
phase in the history of colonization, of coloniality rather, of the violent
erasure of Arab culture; everything was excessively Frenchified, truly.
It is one of my regrets not to have learned Arabic, neither in my socio-
familial environment, where nobody spoke it at all, nor at school. It was
45
not forbidden, I could have learned it in principle, but the pressure was
such that in fact it was forbidden. So my studies in high school were
extremely fragile, and I paid the price afterwards; in certain subjects like
math or Latin I was very weak, and I realized this later when I began
advanced studies in khâgne. I then no longer needed mathematics; my
math culture is very weak. My foundations in Latin, in languages, were
very weak, and I had to work extremely hard to get a middle-of-the-
road grade in Latin theme and version. I really had to exert myself at
the end of high school, and after the bac [baccalaureate], to make up
for all these delays.
BD: This was due to the war?
JD: Yes, in part. And from the pedagogical point of view it must also
be said that the norms, especially in the relation to language and to
culture, were metropolitan French, that is to say, that the prevailing
culture was marked by this non-Algerian Frenchness; professors, by
and large, came from metropolitan France. Distinction in the use of lan-
guage was felt as coming from metropolitan France. We had a relation,
a bit like colonized people, both intimidated and also a bit ironic, that
is to say, in typical pied-noir mentality, what came from metropolitan
France was both marked by mastery—the masters are over there—and
naivety—the masters are naïve, naive foreigners. So there was a kind of
irony with respect to this culture that was taught to us, that was incul-
cated in us, with all the values associated with these cultural messages.
We had to learn the social distinction which was that of metropolitan
France, it was a question of accent, rhetoric, correctness. Distinction
was metropolitan.
BD: You said that you were a good student . . .
JD: In elementary school! Then in high school things were much more
complicated. In high school I was “middle of the road;” things went
well in French, beginning at a certain point, but with lots of worries and
fragilities elsewhere. It was very uneven . . .
BD: Yes, if I come back to this, it’s because I often want to ask the ques-
tion: what is a “good student”?
JD: In high school things were very uneven, I always felt at fault, unsure,
except for when writing and composition got a bit literary, I started to
like that. I started reading on my own, I wrote good papers. I started to
excel in French in ninth and tenth grade. But in other subjects such as
mathematics, history, my grades weren’t great, they were inconsistent.
What we called a “good student,” was one who was consistent, some-
body who was sure in all areas, who worked well on his own, a student
who came in with knowledge and know-how on which one could count.
That was not at all the case with me, except in French, then philosophy
during my final year. There was a zone in which I was what you might
call a good student, but for other subjects, it was sporadic, irregular,
with failures. I experienced failures at the École normale [École normale
supérieure; ENS], with the agrégation. It was always: “He shows some
promise, but . . .”
BD: There was always a flaw somewhere?
JD: It was not a done deal.
BD: Was it not because of this “flaw,” this uncertainty, that creative
capacities were able to show themselves? Derrida, whatever one might
say, isn’t a nobody, today, in the history of t hought . . . What I’m asking
is if conformity, the consistency without flaws of a “good student” isn’t
a bit troubling.
JD: In some cases, yes.
BD: I know that as a teacher, that there are often good students who
worry me . . .
JD: Yes, I’ve had very good students of this kind, consistent, homogene-
ous, and who, in fact, remained “good students”! But I won’t get into
that [. . .] we’re entering a zone where [. . .] I don’t want to evaluate
myself, but yes, no doubt, from the point of view of types, of typical
generality, you’re right. And ultimately, to finish with the affective, I
can say that school was hell for me. It was truly traumatizing. I cried
every year when school started up again up to the age of 13 or 14 [. . .].
And again, when I was holed up in khâgne, boarding for the first time,
at Louis-le-Grand, I had arrived just the day before from Algeria: this
imprisonment, anxiety, tears . . . I have an absolutely neurotic relation
to the institution that I’ve nevertheless inhabited my whole life; and,
still today, when I enter into buildings like the one we’re in now,3 I can
3 The interview took place at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, boulevard
Raspail in Paris.
47
feel it in my gut, truly, and these are things—that would need to be

analyzed—that go all the way back to elementary school . . .
Part II “Liberate curiosity, incite desire . . .”
Part two of our interview with Jacques Derrida: the origins of GREPH,
teaching philosophy, reflections continuous with our issue from last
January where the first part of our conversation was published. Jacques
Derrida was put in charge, along with Jacques Bouveresse, of the com-
mission tasked with the redesign of the curricula, content, and methods
in philosophy. What he said on May 11, 1988 is thus all the more
interesting.
BD: Let’s imagine, Jacques Derrida, that you’re a high school teacher,
for example, in a technical school, with five or six classes, each two
hours a w
eek—what would you do with your students?
JD: This would be very d ifficult . . . I was a high school teacher in

Le Mans, in 1959, with a senior class A, it was called “Philo,” and a
hypokhâgne. I liked it a lot, it wore me out, it was my first year teaching
and so I gave it my all and I finished the year on my knees, and I don’t
know if I would have been able to keep up with that kind of routine for
very long! Or else I would have had to learn to slow down, to e conomize
. . . So to try to answer your question, if I had several classes each of two
hours . . . I have no idea, improvising like that, what I would be able
to do! I think, on the basis of what I now know about myself, that I
would have a hard time, psychologically, dealing with all that. And that
I would therefore try to protect myself, probably by mechanizing . . .
Because being so totally committed to your discourse, to relationships
with students, in five or six classes . . .
BD: Some colleagues have as many as eight c lasses—I have six.
JD: Eight! That must be really difficult. And relationships with students
couldn’t be the same as when you have one or two classes at eight hours
each. Moreover, for me, in Le Mans, the classes were not too big. So
I imagine that if I were to get over the fatigue and discouragement, I
would give way to a kind of automation, mechanization, certainly . . .
Or, I’m trying to imagine, I never really thought seriously about this
before your question, I’d be led to repeat a course put together without
much thought, dispensing useful content, in a somewhat impersonal
way, or else I wouldn’t teach, in the sense of transmitting knowledge,

but I would try each time to discuss, to make something lively happen
but without worrying about the content of what I’m getting across. In
other words showing up to class practically empty-handed, trying to
start a discussion . . .
BD: Empty-handed?
JD: No, I mean . . . e mpty-handed, that is without an already polished

course that I’d . . .
BD: It is true that nine times out of ten, when I get to class I don’t know
in advance what is going to happen . . .
JD: That’s it, remaining open to your students’ questions . . .
BD: Yes, but that’s not at all “empty-handed”! You have to have a
filing-cabinet full of texts, if you want to go beyond mere conversation,
and since we can’t foresee what’s going to happen, you have to have it
at hand, in case you might need it!
JD: And then there is another difficulty with this situation: the relation
between what we end up teaching and then what interests us on the
other hand, what we’re currently thinking about, is much more difficult,
I guess, to establish. When I began to teach, nonetheless, I tried to com-
municate to my students what I was currently thinking about, that it was
I who was speaking to them! I said to them: here’s what I’m . . .
BD: . . . working on right now.
JD: That’s it. Which was, however, very personal. So if I had five classes!
I don’t know if it would be p
ossible . . . Or else, once again, this would
be in the mode of impersonal discussion and not all teaching as trans-
mission of content, of knowledge.
BD: The difficulty is that—I see it clearly when meeting with some
of my colleagues—on the one hand, lecture courses, take on in this
situation—200 or more students!—a mechanical, repetitive aspect, it
cannot be this thinking out loud of somebody who is researching, for
themselves first, and then communicating this research to those who
are interested, and that, on the other hand, discussion often turns into
a kind of free-for-all, dinnertime chitchat that is a bit shallow, that
49
quickly loses all substance, all interest, wherein one ends up dueling at
the level of opinions and where the students end up feeling like, “it’s not
worth it to keep engaging with him since he always ends up having the
last word!” So, personally, I now try, and have for the last ten years,
something different. I try to escape this oscillation that I notice in some
colleagues between lecture and free-for-all or pseudo-debates. Many
colleagues, realizing that they’re speaking into the void, or only to the
front row, try to make the students talk, but very rapidly they stifle the
debate and end up back in the void where they first started and so they
try to lecture again, and so o n . . . And others still “technicize” by pre-
paring essays or textual exegesis: another way of avoiding the problem,
of depersonalizing things, which of course leads to disinvestment, to
lack of student interest . . . So I’ve tried another method, which is not
without its difficulties but strikes me as nonetheless being more effective,
in any case from the point of view of the student’s investment, if not
their results on the b ac—which are not in any case worse than elsewhere
and even somewhat better—; it consists essentially in trying to “make
the students speak,” but above all not by appealing to their “thoughts,”
their opinions. I ask them above all to recount something: they have had
very different social experiences, things happen to them in their lives!
Conflicts, joys, loves, work experience, v iolence . . . I never ask them:
“What do you think about . . .” such and such q uestion—I even provoke
them often by telling them nobody cares what they think or what they
believe they think! That what interests us is not the opinion of so and
so, but the truth . . . On the other hand, what they recount, it’s incred-
ible, it’s often . . . extraordinary, sometimes dramatic, whereas it seems
to them to be banal, uninteresting, unfit for being discussed at school!
And especially not in philosophy class! And what they say interests me,
and they can discover therein, sometimes, unexpected m eanings . . . And
there is also this: it is not first of all or only those who already “know
how to talk” who speak up. Anybody at all, who believes themselves
incapable of formulating “ideas,” can talk about what they’re living
through, what is happening to them . . .
JD: Yes, there are those who want to talk, who have the drive to speak,
yes . . .
BD: And these are not necessarily the “good students”! What’s more,
in the end almost all of them end up talking. And for me the difficulty
is not before the classes, the preparation, but after, remembering what
was said, including in the faults, the interstices, the revealing “off topic”
remarks: my job is to keep track of all of that, then to propose ways of
structuring, concepts, analyses, texts that would allow them to begin to

understand what is happening there that is ordinarily imperceptible if
we “saturate” them with classes prepared in advance and presented in
a lecture f ormat . . . B
ut I realize that I’m doing all the talking now . . .
JD: But yes, why? It is totally . . .
BD: So! Let’s pick back up with the questions! What was at the origin
of GREPH? What were the determining factors in the elaboration of
GREPH’s proposals? Today we get the impression a bit that there is
consensus, even relative or confused, regarding the necessary progres-
sivity of teaching philosophy and thus regarding its extension upstream
from senior y ear . . . E
ven if there are clearly considerable resistances,
from the side of the Inspectorate and its reflection, the Association.4
But nothing has really come of it, apart from the extension to the group
of technical sections which is incidentally revealing of a whole series of
difficulties that aren’t specific to these sections . . .
JD: You know the history of the GREPH: I would really like it if someone
were to write it seriously, and not simply beginning with its creation, but
the history of the premises of the GREPH.5 As for the creation of the
GREPH, I can tell you the objective facts that are in its archives. But
how I was led at a given moment to make this proposal, the premises of
the thing are rather obscure. I would need a fair bit of time to reconsti-
tute them, and here I’ll be telling things from my point of view, whereas
the GREPH is not just me and I would never have been able to do it
on my own, of course. The GREPH is nevertheless something post-’68:
we thus have to follow a shockwave that followed from ’68. In ’68 I
was at the École normale. This is the time when I decided to give up on
having a career, meaning working on a dissertation, which would have
4 L’association des professeurs de philosophie [Association of Philosophy

Professors] that claimed responsibility for the quasi-monopoly on the expression
of professors in the discipline and whose positions no doubt constitute the major
obstacle to all evolution of teaching philosophy; see the quarrels between Philippe
Meirieu or Michel Tozzi and this “corporation.”
5 See for example, concerning what preceded the creation of GREPH: Paulette
Blanchet, “Les débuts de la philosophie en troisième,” in Classes Nouvelles, dossiers
pédagogiques pour l’enseignement du second dégré, 3rd series, no. 5, (1 October
1947) (this journal would become the Cahiers Pédagogiques); “L’enseignement de la
philosophie,” dossier des Cahiers Pédagogiques no. 6, 8th year (1 May 1953); “Des
lycéens vous parlent,” Cahiers Pédagogiques no. 76 (September 1968), 56–8, in
which the extension of philosophy upstream from senior year is explicitly demanded.
51
been the typical path at the École n ormale . . . I had proposed a disserta-
tion subject and was planning to work with Hyppolite. Coincidentally,
Hyppolite died in ’68. And I had already begun to publish things that
broke with academic discourse in Tel Quel, on Freud, on Artaud, which
made it such that the Sorbonne professors, Canguilhem, etc. who, at
the beginning, considered me as a future Sorbonne professor, at least
as somebody who was well on the way to becoming one . . . found that
I had gone off the rails a bit, that I was getting a bit lost, so they were
lenient: fine, so Derrida does serious things on the one hand, on Husserl,
and on the other hand he publishes things on Artaud, Bataille, ok, that’s
his problem . . .
BD: “Good student, impossible writing!”
JD: Exactly! And so in ’68 Hyppolite dies, and, more or less spontane-
ously, without this being the object of deliberation, I abandon the idea
of doing a dissertation. I continue to write things that interest me, pub-
lishing a lot, in a less and less academic mode. And thus feel myself to be
in a kind of marginal position, even though I teach in this golden fortress
that is the École normale . . . And I was feeling less and less at ease in
the university setting. However at the beginning I was really in the thick
of it, I was an assistant professor at the Sorbonne, I taught at the École
normale, institutional places that were v ery . . . solid!
BD: Central.
JD: And I felt worse and worse there and then I began to witness this
kind of more conservative power regaining control after ’68—I’m not
speaking of directly political conservatism, there was that too— but
philosophical conservatism, that is to say, that the apparatus was being
taking over again by people who w ere . . . what am I trying to say?
BD: Mediocre?
JD: Mediocre yes, that’s it. But, ok, we’re not going to print “medio-
cre” in your article!6 Let’s say that, before ’68, the power of evaluation,
6 This “appraisal” of the “corporation,” and those that follow, provoked a

major outcry in the Derrida–Bouveresse commission, no doubt at the worst pos-
sible moment! Derrida sent a rectifying letter to the Cahiers (protesting against its
publication—he didn’t have the time to rectify the transcript that I sent to him—but
not altering the truth of the claims . . .). Cahiers Pédagogiques no. 276 (September
s anction, was nevertheless in the hands of, for example in the case of the
agrégation, people who nevertheless had a certain distinction, it was a
true power, control of course, but let’s call it “enlightened:” people like
Hyppolite, Canguilhem, etc. were on the jury of the agrégation, these
weren’t nobodies! And then Hyppolite dies, Canguilhem leaves, and the
power is taken over, in the case of the agrégation, by Dagognet, etc. And
I feel that the rupture is more and more palpable, with truly repressive
effects, effects that lasted for the first few years after ’68 until ’72–’74.
And in ’74 there was a decisive event, which was the fact that Althusser,
who had defended his dissertation,7 was barred by the committee in
charge: he was not given a post.8 And I recall writing a letter of protest
against this committee; which meant that I began to be seen as an enemy
in those circles. There was also a particular CAPES report (I no longer
remember the details, this was a while ago!) that was absolutely ridicu-
lous, written by Muglioni, which I commented on in my seminar, and
we again wrote letters in protest. This was in ’74, and so, on all sides, we
felt that the war had begun. I proposed then, and this was the pre-project
of the GREPH, to create a group which, on the one hand, would analyze
institutional structures and practices of teaching philosophy and, on the
other hand, would put forward transformative proposals. We created
the GREPH at the beginning of ’74–’75, and I devoted a seminar to the
problem of teaching philosophy, beginning with the French ideologues
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its relation to the history
of the French philosophical institution. And this was also the moment of
the Haby reform, which really made the GREPH all the more relevant!
1989); for the story of this tempest in a teapot see Le Plaisir d’enseigner, Quai
Voltaire éd., 1992, 150–3; it is also worth noting that the present interviews are
mentioned in the bibliography of interviews with Jacques Derrida in Points de
supension, entretiens, Galilée edn., 1992, 413.
7 [Translator’s note] Cf. Althusser, “Soutenance d’Amiens,” in Positions (1975),
Éditions Sociales.
8 [Translator’s note] Althusser, like Derrida, did not pursue the typical academic
path that Derrida has already mentioned, namely, passing the agrégation and then
pursuing a doctoral degree. Althusser’s academic career was interrupted by World
War II and he was taken as a prisoner of war beginning in 1940, not returning to the
ENS until 1945. After passing the agrégation he immediately started teaching at the
ENS where he would stay for the entirety of his career. However, in 1975 Althusser
was encouraged by his former students Bernard Rousset and Dominique Lecourt to
defend all his previous publications at the University of Amiens to be awarded a doc-
torate and potentially be given a post at the university. However, though Althusser
successfully defended his work, he was not given the post in question. See the edito-
rial introduction to the reprinted version of “Soutenance d’Amiens” in Solitude de
Machiavel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).
53
Naturally our project was not limited to the war against Haby, but this
really mobilized us and gave us more visibility.
BD: And contributed to the success of the “Estates General of

Philosophy.”
JD: Exactly. But all of this was prepared between ’68 and ’74. So I’m of
course describing things from my point of view . . .
BD: Yes, in ’71–’72 I was at the PRC (Pedagogical Research Centre) in

Roland Brunet’s class at Voltaire and people were already talking about
a number of problems . . .
JD: Of course, if I had been alone it wouldn’t have worked! There were
lots of students, high school teachers, young p
rofessors . . . and you have
to remember that in the GREPH, there was never a single professor from
a major institution.
BD: So what contributed to a certain success of the GREPH’s claims?

Every year, I have students who, of course, not knowing anything about
this history, say to me: but why didn’t we start philosophy earlier, in
junior year for example? In the technical school where I am, with indus-
trial sections, every year I get to hear t hat . . . So how to explain this at
least apparent consensus, and the institutional blockage, beyond just
questions of how to finance the new teaching positions that would have
to be created?
JD: This is the essential idea of GREPH: progressivity. But when in April
’74 I had written the proposal, the idea hadn’t yet occurred to me, I
hadn’t thought of it. And then the idea came to me, what am I trying to
say? like a strange intuition that took me be surprise, and it was during
the beginning of the school year when we began the work of the GREPH
that I said to myself: this is the essential axis, contesting the necessity of
beginning philosophy at age 17 and putting forward an idea of progres-
sivity. And the current resistance to this idea is due to the fact that the
whole structure, at once mental, ideological, and properly institutional,
is designed to resist it!
BD: Does this blockage relate back to the war that you spoke about
between yourself and the members of the GREPH on the one hand,
and those who have power in the philosophical institution, on the other
hand, or were there deeper causes?
JD: I believe that the causes were much deeper! People like Muglioni and
others are merely representatives of an enormous machine . . .
BD: Isn’t the difficulty the fact that the academic institution, beginning
in middle school and even in elementary school, does not recognize, is
not able to appreciate the instituting powers [pouvoirs instituants] of
the students?
JD: Absolutely! But it is not only a French problem. We mustn’t forget

that the idea that philosophy shouldn’t be available basically before
adulthood is even more deeply rooted outside of France, that it is an old
story that goes back to Plato! And there are still people in France who
think they’re enlightened, non-retrograde, and who consider it a far-
fetched idea to want to teach philosophy to students in middle school,
and even to juniors in high school.
BD: In the interview I conducted with Michel Serres, he explained that

his hesitancy with respect to the extension upstream from senior year
didn’t have to do so much with the supposed capacities of children,
but rather with who philosophy professors are and what they do, and
so to entrust them with middle schoolers . . .! With the way in which
most of them operate, there would be some risks! Because, if some stu-
dents ask for this instruction beginning in junior year, other students by
contrast—I know many of them in various high schools—would will-
ingly go without these two hours of class and besides they’ll end up not
taking them since they’ll be doing math homework while the professor
is chattering away . . .
JD: Yes, the argument isn’t totally without merit, of course. But we
have to be attentive to the system of proposals put forward by the
GREPH, their coherence, which also seek to transform the professors!
We had to, we must still, transform everything: professors, procedures,
curricula, etc. The best way to refuse this idea of progressivity is to say
that we can’t teach to middle schoolers what we teach to seniors in high
school. But we never proposed that! We proposed to transform every-
thing, and we were never shy about the fact that it is a radical, deep
transformation, not only of high school, but practically of society, of
the family . . .
BD: That is to say that there is in some sense a return to this idea that we
do not “teach” philosophy but that we make all teaching philosophical
and learn to philosophize. But in reality professors don’t even teach phi-
55
losophy, rather they teach various philosophies or the history of ideas.

Learning to philosophize is perhaps to enter into a process, recognizing
that students have subject status, that they have their instituting powers,
and this from the age of 12 or 13, if not before . . .
JD: And more radically still, what you’re calling instituting power would
not only concern the production of philosophical thoughts, philosophi-
cal content, but already concern the relationship to language . . .
BD: Precisely.
JD: Already a certain experience of language, a power of initiation, a

less submissive relation—although the relation to language is always
submissive in a certain way—let’s say submissive in a different way,
with a sensitivity to what in language, is coded, prohibitive. But if you
like, rather than speaking generally, I’ll tell you about an experience I
had, when the GREPH already existed, when myself and some other col-
leagues visited a class of second-year students in Tours. We spoke with
the students, and this was an unforgettable experience for me: we read
Plato with them in as intelligent and lively a way as you can do with high
school seniors, and even beyond that, practically without missing any-
thing, without leaving anything from Plato’s text out. Well, these kids
said: but we were forbidden from using such and such a word! These so-
called abstract or learned words were forbidden in the same way as dirty
words! They felt, on that day, a liberation in their relation to language,
to words. There was suddenly a verbal universe that became available in
class, whereas elsewhere it was forbidden to them, they had the feeling
of a real prohibitive discrimination in the use of words. I believe that
on this point, the experience was extremely powerful: the relation to
language.
That being said, to return to resistance, there, I’m completely in agree-
ment, I believe that obstruction, resistance to the spread of the GREPH’s
ideas is not at all how we sometimes believe it to be, in the domain of
organized political power, government, the ministry, but among col-
leagues. As long as we haven’t associated colleagues teaching French,
math, history with this project, it will not work, and the ministers will be
able to continue to say, and moreover with plenty of justifications, that
we can’t overload schedules and so, if one day this is to happen, it will
happen only on the basis of a consensus among all of the teachers, of all
disciplines, and it is therefore them that we must first convince that this
idea does not threaten them, that they can get on board without losing
ground, on the contrary. We have to find modalities [dispositifs] of
c ollaboration, of cooperation between disciplines that allow these ideas

to be implemented without that actually threatening other disciplines,
on the contrary. I believe that this is the task, and it’s difficult.
BD: It’s difficult because it breaks compartmentalizations, the general

structuring of teaching in different disciplines without mutual commu-
nication. We would have to break down these “boundaries” between
specialties and it is no doubt the major obstacle, beginning with the
division between “humanities” and “sciences.” When I ask students:
what are you doing when you do math? I realize that they’re incapable
of answering! Whereas they have ten hours of math class a week, for
example! And I sometimes say to myself that it should be the math
teacher’s job to explain the history of mathematics, the epistemology
of mathematics, etc., and no doubt the properly mathematical work
would be made easier. I know that, personally, I only began to get
interested in mathematics after what my philosophy professor in senior
year said! And clearly it was a bit late . . . B
ut it is difficult to go from a
conception of teaching as a simple transmission of knowledge—as if it
were simple!—to, how should I put it? Entering into an active process,
where the construction of concepts and their interconnections takes
place, going from a curriculum conceived of as a quantity of material
to be absorbed to a curriculum—but it’s not certain that this word is
still appropriate—conceived as a process, moreover as a philosophi-
cal process that cannot be inscribed in a predictable trajectory. My
students, for example—they talk among themselves from one class to
another—are often surprised that we don’t all do the same thing, that
we don’t see the same, that we don’t deal with the same notions (in
the classes of the same stream) whereas, in theory the curriculum is the
same!
JD: And there again, among all the objections, there is one that isn’t
without merit, but of which one can make a very suspect usage. It is that
to provoke, to introduce, liberate rather, in children their instituting
powers can only be done to the detriment to knowledge, that is, that if
we say that it is essential for students to be active, to invent things, etc.,
it is the content that suffers, and there are people, I’m thinking of [Jean-
Claude] Milner, who would say: you consider the school to be a place
of education, where freedom is introduced and not at all a space for the
transmission of knowledge and you are perhaps going to wind up with
students who are very inventive [instituants] but ignorant. And this is
an objection that has to be taken into account and which can serve as a
justification for the most authoritarian models . . .
57
BD: . . . the most bound up with phantasms of “mastery.”
JD: There compromise has to be found, of course, because it is not at all

a question of abandoning all transmission of knowledge.
BD: In fact, I wonder if those who insist on the transmission of knowl-

edge don’t deprive themselves, in fact, in the reality of the classroom,
of all means, given what students are, of effectively transmitting knowl-
edge to all of them: speaking to the front row is not, it seems to me,
very e ffective . . . People always reason in a completely simplistic way
in terms of “either/or” . . . Of course we have to “transmit knowl-
edge”! Of course this transmission, this access to knowledge implies
ruptures, an effort in order to break with ordinary experience, “lived
experience” [le vécu], but still we have to clarify how this is to be done
with the real, living students that we have, for example in technical
sections (and besides, with the others it’s the same!), and regarding
how this is to be done, which specifically defines pedagogy, Milner and
co. are totally silent and impotent . . . And then moreover, given that
it is a question of transmitting knowledge, knowledge inculcated dog-
matically, in an authoritarian style, with grades as blackmail, is it still
knowledge?
JD: Yes, of course . . .
BD: I’m thinking of your text on “seven contradictory commandments”9

...
JD: Ah yes, that’s it . . .
BD: . . . which allows us precisely to hold on to requirements that we

are trying to satisfy, in a tension, a disequilibrium, an unforseeability to
be taken on board.
JD: Indeed we must liberate curiosity, incite desire . . .
BD: . . . day after day, in the classroom on a daily basis. And in order to
allow for this we have to meet students halfway if precisely we do not
want to resign ourselves to keeping them where they already are, and
9 “Les antinomies de la discipline philosophique,” in Du droit à la philosophie,

(Paris: Galilée, 1992), 413.
that our “discourse” does not wash over them like water off a duck’s
back. To finally take up what Bachelard calls the necessary catharsis
for the construction of serious forms of knowledge [des savoirs au
sérieux].
JD: Yes, and I would then say, going very quickly, in a more formalized
way, that, in the best case scenario, that is to say in an open, generous
school, where it is not simply a matter of calibrating teaching to market
needs, but where we do much more, in such a way that this gives way
to a truly national educational curriculum, in this France, well, even
in this best case scenario, I personally think that we have to continue
to fight, in order to make room for spaces of non-conformity, of, how
should I put it? . . . I believe that there are at least two fronts: on the
one hand, I would be on the side of those fighting for a, say, progressiv-
ist school—well, OK let’s call it that . . . s uch as we could hope for in
a left-wing government, open to the future, generous, egalitarian, etc.
A good school. That’s one front: a good school against a bad school.
And then there is another front where, against this “good school,” no,
not “against,” but vigilantly, it would be crucial not to submit every-
thing to the curriculum of this good school, leaving a counter-power,
even if the very idea of a counter- power has become stereotyped,
codified . . .
BD: The programming shouldn’t plan everything out. And that philoso-
phy . . .
JD: And that philosophy be precisely a place of contesting this educa-

tional model, that philosophy still be . . .
BD: . . . the moment of questions outside the curriculum, open inter-

rogations . . .
JD: That’s it, absolutely. And not only academic interrogations . . . The
place of a combat to loosen up curricula . . . And there I think that the
GREPH still has a role to play, I believe that if it has a future, this is it.
BD: The necessity of a place, in the institution, of negativity against the

stifling positivity, of a free play rid of the mechanical finalities of exams
or others, commodification, professionalization . . .
JD: We need spaces were we can b reathe . . . where the marginal, in the
best case scenario, not speaking of the worst, can breathe. That we don’t
59
try to program everything. Philosophy is a space of deprogramming,

there you have it!10
BD: Thank you, Jacques Derrida.11
10 And of course, this sentence, spoken on May 11, 1988, published at the moment
when Derrida was working to reform philosophy curricula, in March 1989,
appeared as a real provocation in the eyes of the president of the association, Jean
Lefranc, who clearly didn’t understand any of it . . .
11 In the transcript from the Cahiers Pédagogiques, some of my [Bernard Defrance]
sentences were left out, including this one! They’ve been included here, and the
majority of the notes were added for the current printing.
Chapter 4
“I don’t write without artificial light”

(1982)
An interview with André Rollin, “Je n’écris pas sans lumière artificielle,”
was first published in Le fou parle 21/22 (November/December 1982)
and reprinted in Ils écrivent: Ou? Quand? Comment? edited by André
Rollin (Paris: Editions Mazarine, 1986), 145–52.
Rue d’Ulm, École normale supérieure, is the place where Jacques Derrida
teaches, where he leaves his “trace.” Philosopher, writer, he deepens, he
fixes from book to book, the word “writing.” His research can be found
in Of Grammatology, Clang, The Post Card, Writing and Difference,
Positions, Margins of Philosophy.
At the beginning of Clang—in the right column— Derrida writes:
“Each little square is delimited, each column cut out with impassive
smugness, and yet the element of contagion, the infinite circulation
of general equivalence brings each phrase, each word, each stump of
writing (for example “je m’ ec . . . ”) back to each of the others, within
each column and from one column to the other of the infinitely calcula-
ble what remained.”
So: Derrida.
Jacques Derrida: May I first tell you something about the reasons why I
hesitated . . .
André Rollin: Of course.
JD: . . . to respond to these questions in this setting? First, it was by a

kind of . . . not distrust, but reserve with respect to a certain imagery
complacently held by writers, on the one hand, and by those who exploit
this imagery on the other.
Translated by Adam Rosenthal.

“I don’t write without artificial light” (1982)
61
So it’s about the insistence on fetishes of rewriting, the insistence on a

certain type of environment that certain writers narcissistically exhibit.
I have nothing against narcissism or against fetishism as such. Here it
would be necessary to speak of this at length, and this is not the place,
but the stereotyping of this fetishism seemed to me a little irksome—let’s
say has become irksome— and it was necessary not to maintain it
unduly. So when you told me that you wanted precisely to break with
this representation and with everything that sustains it in our culture, I
told myself, well okay, let’s go!
AR: So, to start, what do you write with?
JD: In this regard, things have indeed changed a lot.
AR: Today . . .
JD: Today, I write both on a typewriter and by hand. Quantitatively,

a lot more on the typewriter. For example, for my courses, seminars,
lectures, I write almost exclusively on the typewriter. So, I’m at my type-
writer and alongside I write by hand.
AR: So, typewriter and notepad side by side?
JD: Well, to be precise, if you wish, I have a large table.
AR: Made of wood?
JD: Made of wood. In an attic. I have two studies, but the first, the one
I was using . . .
AR: There is a study for the typewriter and an study for paper?
JD: No, not at all. Before, there used to be one study for both. It became
too small, too encumbered with papers, and a few years ago I took
refuge in an attic in which I can’t stand upright. I go up on a sort of small
wooden ladder and when . . .
AR: You arrive hunched over in the . . .
JD: No, not hunched over. I mean that I have to lower my head because
this is a small attic and there is one square meter where I can stand up,
but as soon as I get to the place where I write, I have to sit down. So, I’m
in a corner, there are some bookshelves on both sides, a little table for
the typewriter, a writing desk; that is, a low table for the typewriter and
to my right a large wooden table on which I have some papers, on which
I take notes, scribble things, but I rarely write in a continuous manner
there. So, as concerns the texts I’m writing at the moment, that is, the
preparation of courses, from week to week, I’m seated at my typewriter
in a revolving chair that turns, like this one here.
AR: So, you go from one table to the other?
JD: I turn. Sometimes I’m at the typewriter, sometimes I’m turned

toward the table.
AR: The difference between the texts that are written by hand and those
written by typewriter?
JD: This is the most usual situation, for course preparation or writing
letters, at least a certain type of letter. I should clarify that over the last
few years, finding that I was writing too much at the typewriter and that
something of handwriting was being lost, on several occasions I decided
. . . one could say to re-educate myself. Moreover, I remember having had
a very long c onversation—one would have to say an argument—about
twelve years ago with Jean Genet about this. Jean Genet, speaking about
typing, was telling me that, in his view, it wasn’t possible to write well
on a typewriter. I told him that, even while I acknowledged what he
was getting at, recognized the truth of it, I thought that as soon as the
machine wasn’t totally foreign, one could write easily and quickly on the
typewriter, that another body should, as it were, reconstitute itself with
the typewriter, not simply an abstract, technical, and machinic relation,
but another scenario, another continuity, another impetus, and that I
wasn’t claiming that this was the same body . . .
AR: It isn’t the same body?
JD: It isn’t the same body, but there is some body. This isn’t simply
a relation of abstraction or a relation that would totally freeze what
manuscript writing supposedly keeps living, warm and intact. At first,
he resisted this argument, but then, a little later, he thought that I must
be right, then, a third time, he told me, no, after a ll . . . This is a memory
of a conversation that lasted an entire night, about which I think every
time that . . .
63
AR: So the subject isn’t so minor as that?
JD: No, it’s a subject that preoccupies me constantly. I mean that I’m
very attentive and very obsessed by these problems of, one could say
technique, and technique of the body, as it were. I’m like everyone in
my profession, who spends their life at it. Before, when I began writing,
I mean writing for publication, I didn’t write on the typewriter. I wrote
entirely by hand until the last manuscript, until the final draft of the text.
And then, little by little, the typewriter crept in . . .
AR: And when it was by hand, it was always a fountain pen.
JD: At first, no. At first, and I’m talking about twenty years ago, it was
a dip pen, and ink, and inkwell.
AR: So the ritual of ink . . .
JD: The ritual with a totally singular pen, I no longer use it now. It’s a
pen, I don’t know what you call this thing, with a sort of nib on top to
hold the ink. So, I was constantly looking for these pens and I could only
write in a writing that didn’t cause problems with this pen and its large
holder. A large dip pen with a little lever arm to lock the nib. And then,
little by little, the typewriter crept in. More and more, I write directly
on the typewriter, even if, still now, for certain t exts—and now I’m not
speaking of teaching texts—for texts, let’s say, which matter to me in
another way.
AR: You go back to the pen?
JD: I have to rely on the pen for the the first path-breaking [frayage],
that is, for the first pages that I rewrite a great number of times—the
beginnings of texts are very difficult for me, I think as they are for many
others—but to start to write is very difficult, and here I sense that I can’t
start at the typewriter. So very often the ritual is the following: I start by
hand, one page, two pages, three pages, four pages . . .
AR: On large white sheets of paper?
JD: On large white typewriter paper, and then, if I’m not happy with it,
I start over.
AR: You make multiple beginnings? On different pages?

JD: Multiple beginnings that I start again.
AR: The page is not entirely full?
JD: Sometimes the page is full, three or four full pages, and then I start
over. This is the moment of dissatisfaction, of spinning, these are very
painful moments, very anxiety-producing, with the feeling of impossibil-
ity. Here, it’s impossible . . .
AR: After, you go back to your text that you transcribe on the typewriter.
JD: Yes, that’s it. This doesn’t mean that what follows is continuous. So,
next there are several drafts on the typewriter. But in general, once the
first few pages are launched, if I can say that, when the schema or the
perspective of the text overall starts seeming possible, at this moment I
continue at the typewriter.
AR: And you type, two fingers, three fingers, quickly?
JD: This is rather difficult for me to describe, because I never . . . I learned

empirically, a long time ago, thirty years ago in the United States. I had
spent a year in the United States and I had to type out a very long text,
like this, to put food on the table. And this is when I learned, on a little
American typewriter, and for a long time I had to buy my typewriters in
the United States because the keyboard was the international style. So, I
only knew how to type with three or four fingers, I wouldn’t know how
describe it to you now, on an international keyboard as you know the
letters aren’t laid out as they are on a French keyboard. And then, two
or three years ago, I started to think that this situation was absurd, to
have to go to the United States, to take advantage of a trip to America to
buy a little Olivetti. I decided to put in the work necessary to accustom
myself to the French keyboard and I bought an electric typewriter. So,
three years ago I transitioned to an electric typewriter with a French
keyboard. It was for The Post Card. The Post Card was written, for the
first time, on an electric typewriter with a French keyboard. And I type
very quickly. In spite, then, of this routine I have come to type extremely
quickly. Not very well, not very cleanly, but very quickly. So, once the
thing has been started, then, I make several drafts, typewriter drafts, that
I correct by hand.
AR: The pen comes back for corrections?

65
JD: Well now there is no longer a fountain pen, there is a stick pen. I’m
wondering if it isn’t the same as the one you have. I can’t write anymore
except with this thing here, which I found two years ago, called a Pilot
Fineliner. It’s the only instrument that suits me, that is, with which I have
the feeling that my spontaneous gesture isn’t impeded by the instrument.
And with which I recognize my handwriting and can read it, because
yes, it must be said that since I was a child, I have had a handwriting
that everyone agrees is difficult to read. And it had become difficult for
me to read myself. That’s one advantage of the typewriter for me. When
I write with a kind of urgency, each word is scarcely formed and, after a
certain amount of time, I have difficulty rereading myself.
AR: But don’t you recognize yourself more, Jacques Derrida, in your
handwriting than in your typed writing? Is there perhaps, in a certain
moment, precisely, a regret?
JD: Of course, at least in a certain type of image, yes. And it’s for certain
texts I’m attached to, or would like to be particularly attached to, that
I’m attempting the re-education that I spoke of a moment ago. So, for
periods of varying length, I come back, for personal notes for an inac-
cessible book, I come back to notebooks and to hand-writing with these
little Pilot Fineliners, and I can write for a long time like this . . .
AR: And always in the same place, you don’t leave your attic to write?
JD: Yes, that’s where it happens most of the time, though I do sometimes
write in the room downstairs, my old study, but less and less often.
Here, for example, I never work.
AR: Here, at the École normale?
JD: Here, at the École normale, I never work, well, I never write.
From time to time, I write while traveling, on the train or in the plane.
I remember, for example, two years ago, there was a p eriod—how to say
it—when what you’d call a need or desire to write was more manifest,
and it happened that I wrote during an entire plane trip to the United
States. Or also in the car.
AR: While driving?
JD: No, I don’t write while driving! I’ve scribbled some things . . .
AR: Do you have a fixed notebook?
JD: I’ve tried all kinds of things, fixed notebook, little scraps of paper, in
general nothing lasts, I’m not organized. I constantly make resolutions
for new systems, small scraps of paper, pencils in the car, once I even
thought about keeping a tape recorder in the car, not only for serious
writing situations like the ones we were perhaps just speaking about, but
also for reminders and similar things, but I never succeeded in doing it,
but I dream all the time about technical systems of this kind.
AR: Did you ever stop in a parking lot to write? Because you had an idea
that came to you?
JD: No, but to hope for . . . no, no idea, I don’t have any ideas, it’s that
sometimes there is a word that just happens, one or two words, that I
want to note in order not to lose the word rather than the idea. So then,
no, I don’t stop in a parking lot, but it does happen that I hope for a
little traffic jam or a red light which would allow me to jot down a word.
AR: Tell us a little about this attic. What’s it like? The table, is there only
paper, books, nothing else?
JD: Well, okay, it’s small, this attic, but I had it filled it with book-
shelves, there are books all around. It’s a kind of mansard, what do you
call it? I mean that it’s what is under the roof with two skylights.
AR: So there is the sky above you?
JD: Which I don’t see. There’s a sort of little window that opens towards
the top. So, light on all the time. I can’t work, this is part of my per-
sonal pathology, I can’t work unless there’s an artificial light. Even if it’s
daytime, even in full daylight.
AR: Always the light on?
JD: Always a lamp.
AR: That illuminates your paper?
JD: That illuminates the paper, typewriter, and this I . . .
AR: It’s the first thing you do when you start to write?
67
JD: Yes. And even in the room downstairs that was normally bright,
there has to be a supplementary artificial light.
AR: You don’t write without artificial light?
JD: I don’t write without artificial light. It’s set like this, it’s become like
this, I always have the impression that there isn’t enough light. And this
attic, for example, the switch is below, outside the attic, which means
that before climbing up I turn on the light.
AR: You really climb into your attic every day?
JD: The days when I’m not obliged to come to Paris are, unfortunately,
rather few. On those days I indeed come up to my attic.
AR: And you stay there for many hours?
JD: No. I work in short bursts.
AR: About how long?
JD: It’s hard to say, I never stay seated at the typewriter for more than
a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes. I have to get up, I have to do
something else.
AR: And as the attic is very low you are forced to come back down?
JD: Yes, I come back down or I do something else in the attic, but I don’t
write in sequences or long bouts [pulsions]. The more something inter-
ests me or requires of me . . .
AR: . . . the more you leave your seat . . .
JD: . . . the more quickly I stop. Well, I stay for longer periods at
the typewriter when the work is done, when I am in the process, for
example, of retyping it for a more or less definitive version, so then the
work is done and I re-transcribe or retype, then I might have the patience
to stay an hour or two. But when I write a text in its initial form, then
I’d say that the better it goes the briefer it is.
AR: So you can go up there at any moment of the day. There is no ritual,
the morning, evening?
JD: No. I almost never go there at night. It’s true I work better in the
morning. Let’s say the favorite moment is immediately on getting up,
after a coffee. After breakfast, it’s hard, I can only work in the afternoon
as well when I’m at home, never in the evening. I have never worked in
the evening, it’s impossible.
Chapter 5
Archive and Draft (1998)
“Archive et brouillon,” an extensive roundtable discussion on the

relation between rough drafts and the archive in 1995, with Michel
Contat, Daniel Ferrer, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Louis Hay, appeared
in Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories, edited by Michel
Contat and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: CNRS, 1998), 189–209.1
Michel Contat: Our gathering— which will be improvised, per your

wish—is focused on a theme that is crucial for us: the rough draft. It leads
off a year-long seminar over the course of which we will be attempting
to interrogate the foundations of the concepts we employ. We wanted
to begin, however, by opening ourselves up to a philosophical critique
in a dialogue that has involved you, Jacques Derrida, since very early
on—in our minds, at least. A question came to me while reading your
recent work: could one substitute for the concept of avant-texte2 that
of the archive? Nearly every time our work sees the light of day, that
is, gets published, the legitimacy of our scholarly attention to rough
drafts is called into question. The publication of the initial outlines of
Translated by Katie Chenoweth. All notes to this chapter have been provided by the
translator.
1 The roundtable published here under the title “Archive and Draft” was organized
by ITEM (L’Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes), the leading research group
in France dedicated to genetic criticism; formally created in 1982 at the Centre
national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the group also has long-standing insti-
tutional ties with two other prestigious centers of intellectual life in France: the École
normale supérieure (ENS) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF). “Genetic
criticism” refers to a scholarly approach to literature that examines the “genesis”
of literary texts by way of manuscripts, drafts, notes, outlines, sketches, and other
documents that predate the published version of the text.
2 The term avant-texte has sometimes been translated elsewhere as “pre-text” or
“foretext;” often, it is left in French, as we have done here, to denote a technical
term specific to genetic criticism.
Madame Bovary dumbfounded some people: “What’s the point? What

use are manuscripts?” Talking with some journalist friends, I came up
with the provocative formulation that the addressee of the draft is the
genetic critic, which is a way of underscoring the cultural gratuitousness
of what we do. But I will leave this idea for you to consider. First, I will
summarize for you the broad strokes of what was said during last year’s
seminar, in which we invited philosophers to interrogate the ideas of
genetic criticism. On the subject of fiction writing, Julia Kristeva pro-
posed the term “pre-draft” for the state that precedes writing (writing in
the graphic sense of the term), situated between psychic experience and
the practice of writing; this would be a sort of pre-syntactic modality
of reverie or submersion in which the unconscious is still very active,
ecstatic in the practical sense, whereas in the rough draft [brouillon] the
unconscious is already scrambled [brouillé]—though it is still more open
than in the final version, where a cultural “impression” prevails. Daniel
Andler borrowed a provocative formula found in Louis Hay’s book Les
Manuscrits d’écrivains [“Writers’ Manuscripts”]: the text is a machine
produced by a machine, and it produces a m achine—but it’s an abstract
machine that moves in conceptual space. Manuscripts would thus give
us access to the microstructure of cognition. He asked about newness
in texts, suggesting that either novelty is radical—in which case there’s
nothing to say about it—or else it entails a new arrangement of pre-
existing elements, and drafts would show this assemblage at work, i.e. in
motion. Michael Riffaterre, who was posing the question of literariness
in the avant-texte, demonstrated that the birth of a certain literariness
between avant-texte and text is dictated by the intertext; he introduced
(already in the study of the avant-texte) his own theory of the structure
of the intertext, what he calls the “wisdom” of the text, in other words,
what the text knows or believes it knows. And the avant-texte would be
situated on the side of mimesis, whereas the text would be situated on
the side of semiosis. He defines the draft as a text without an addressee.
Drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts, Jean-François Courtine developed
the notion of the preparatory manuscript or research manuscript, recall-
ing Husserl’s formulation: “One writes not with one’s consciousness,
but with one’s pen.” Husserl’s stenographic method is a form of writing
that serves the development of thought; it no longer has anything to do
with the archive. It’s a form of writing in the present that is followed by
repeated impasses in order to prevent sedimentation—thus a writing that
is always regenerating, and a discourse with no address or addressee.
Daniel Ferrer: My first question is a big one. Starting from what you
call the iterability of the m
ark—that is, the idea that any sign can
71
be repeated and is therefore susceptible to being cited outside of its

context—you describe a “functioning being cut off, at a certain point,
from its ‘original’ desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from
its participation in a saturable and constraining context.”3 Such a
mechanism is not at all foreign to genetic critics; on the contrary, they
see it at work when they observe that the invention of the text necessar-
ily entails—from one draft to the next, or from one round of revision
to the next— a certain forgetting of the original desire- to-
say-
what-
one-means. But if this cut were really absolute, if there could be a total
forgetting when one passes from draft to text, wouldn’t the work we do
be completely futile? Doesn’t this cut call for a complement, what one
might call context memory, according to which every grafted fragment
preserves something of its originary context or, better still, something
of all the contexts through which it has passed, contaminating the new
context with them . . .?
Jacques Derrida: I was struck by a formula Michel Contat used. He

said that the genetic critic is the addressee [destinataire] of the draft.
Here, you are the genetic critics and I am the draft. We use the word
“brouillon” as a noun and an adjective.4 Today, I am in the position
of being-draft-like [l’être-brouillon], prone to improvising, saying things
that don’t deserve to be dwelled upon, that I’ll want to strike out imme-
diately. I am speaking to you in rough draft. I am the draft addressed to
the expert genetic critics that you are.
Before attempting to respond to the question you’ve asked me, I
would like to say a few w ords—probably well-worn words for y ou—in
response to your summary of the trajectory of last year’s seminar. Of
course, in the concept of the draft there are at least two dimensions to
take into account: on the one hand, a technical dimension, that of the
medium and technical modes of inscription, which are rapidly evolv-
ing (I imagine this is a topic of ongoing reflection and concern for
you), and, on the other hand, a juridical dimension, which cannot be
separated from the technical dimension. All of that is rapidly evolving.
And when you mentioned the issue of the legitimacy or legitimation
of scholarly attention to rough drafts, immediately the question arises
of knowing who the critic is, who decides on the legitimacy, and who
establishes the criteria of legitimation, institutional or scientific. In
3 “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey
Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 12.
4 As a noun, brouillon means “rough (or first) draft;” as an adjective, it means
“disorderly, disorganized, muddled.”
other words, who has the legitimizing power? You have succeeded in
establishing a national and international institution. It is recognized
for its ability to study manuscripts and drafts; your legitimacy but
also your legitimating power are recognized through a quite lengthy
history. In order to analyze this power one would have to consider
the content of your work as well as the structures of French institu-
tions, academic and otherwise, the economico-scientific institutions.
There is already, then, a whole history of your legitimating power.
This power could become an object of reflection for others, or you
yourselves.
Now, among all the juridico-political aspects of this legitimation,
beyond those I have just mentioned, there are those that concern not
only the power to establish and interpret the avant-texte and the draft
(I will come back to this distinction in a moment), but also the power
to possess: the appropriation and possession of a manuscript. Who pos-
sesses this “thing”? Who has the right to inspect it? This is a question of
public versus private, a question of the family, and a question of public
appropriation. And by introducing what you called the legitimation
or legitimacy of scholarly attention to the draft, we immediately open
onto a host of very serious political, theoretical, and scientific problems,
problems of the law in general.
You posed the question of the distinction between avant-texte and
archive. In order to respond to this question seriously, it is necessary
to take stock, in a very exacting way, of the concept of the avant-texte.
This concept now gets used in a routine and informal way, although
for me things aren’t so clear. If I’ve understood correctly, what you call
avant-texte is a state of writing that precedes the legal establishment of
publication, all accessible text prior to legal deposit.
MC: Before its printing, before the author’s decision to publish. For us,
the concept has become very complicated. Bellemin-Noël presented it
as the work of ordering a set of documents, since the avant-texte is also
a critical construct. Some of us still endorse this notion, but the term is
used as the equivalent of working document.
JD: But would the raw material—before you work on the drafts an
author has left behind, for example—be an avant-texte?
MC: In principle, no. We would speak of a preparatory dossier, a docu-

mentary dossier. The avant-texte would already be the result of a critical
activity.
73
JD: Depending on whether one defines the term in this way or otherwise,
the relationship of the avant-texte to the archive, another very ambigu-
ous concept, is different. It seems to me that the a rchive—to retain just
two minimal yet indispensable predicates of this c oncept—presupposes,
on the one hand, something that belongs to what you call the dossier.
But already, in order for there to be a dossier or draft not established in a
critical manner, there has to be a deposit in a place of exteriority. That’s
where I would distinguish archive from memory. There is no archive if
there is not conservation in a place of exteriority, in a medium [support].
Topography and exteriority seem to me to be indispensable in order for
there to be archive. That is a first predicate.
It seems to me that already in this gesture—consigning to an exter-
nal medium—even before your own sophisticated, “secondary” criti-
cal intervention, there is an operation of selection and intervention, a
type of critical work, even before the institutional or “qualified” critics
arrive. In the act of consignation, however simple and spontaneous it
may be, there is already selection, interpretation, and therefore exercis-
ing of a power. In the concept of the archive, I would be very attentive to
the fact that a power of interpretation and s election—and therefore also
a power of repression and exclusion—must be exercised. Consequently,
there is archiving from the earliest avant-texte.
The conventional nature of archiving (which implies an empowered,
legally authorized body) is even more pronounced in the second concept
of the avant-texte, the established avant-texte that you have granted a
legal status. Depending on how we shift these two concepts about, we
will be able to see them intersecting. They are sure to become inter-
twined. Both imply, in any case, a rupture with some supposed spon-
taneity, originality, or primitiveness of the document, of any document
whatsoever.
MC: If I have understood you correctly, for the author himself, the
moment of archiving is when, in the Macintosh procedure, he saves the
document—or is it when he prints it?
JD: The logical difficulty we are already encountering, and which will
probably be repeated, is that the conditions of possibility become strati-
fied such that one can always speak of “archive” at different levels. I will
try to be clearer. It is easier to understand “archive” in the conventional
sense, as the final moment of official archivization when there is inter-
pretation by competent authorities. But the condition of possibility of
the archive begins much earlier, as soon as there is an apparently uncal-
culated deposit in a place of exteriority. The condition of possibility of
the archive is already there, and there is already an act of power and
selection. However, one mustn’t collapse the last level into the first. Very
important things happen from one to the other, and one must distin-
guish between these different moments. But the last level is already pos-
sible. Its condition of possibility lies in the first level, which is already an
act of interpretation. It is necessary to maintain this kind of continuity
in the sequence without abandoning the distinctions between the stages,
which are heterogeneous.
I would say the same thing about the paradigm of the computer.
There will, of course, be a more explicit archiving the day my text gets
published as a book. But from the moment I save it, there is already sta-
bilization in an external place that is more secure than its previous state.
But I still wouldn’t say there was no archive before I saved it. Already, at
the moment the words appeared on my screen, there was a relative sta-
bility. Even if there was some accident and the thing disappeared, there
will have been archiving. What would the place of exteriority be? The
topology must be shifted. As soon as there are words—which are iter-
able from the outset, which are also inscribed in m emory—this can leave
a trace in a place of exteriority. It won’t necessarily leave any trace on
my floppy disk, but it will leave a trace that we could spend ages analyz-
ing. Just like the rough draft on paper in the old model, it will affect the
ensuing activity. Even if it disappears, it leaves breaches [frayages], and
not only in memory. They are there; they remain. My m emory—that
also means the unconscious, and various places of inscription. Already,
when I work at my computer, when something appears on the screen,
it inscribes itself in my memory—but not in my memory as a homoge-
neous place. It inscribes itself in different layers of the system. What I
find interesting here in Freud is the attention he gives to the topological
structure of the psyche. What is erased here remains inscribed there. And
stays, inscribed in another fashion, transcribed according to another
logic. That doesn’t mean that nothing is ever totally destroyed: there is
archive only where destructibility remains possible. It has to be able to
be destroyed without remainder. But the fact that the trace disappears
from the screen and isn’t saved doesn’t stop it from being inscribed else-
where, “in my head.” But there, too, it’s very complicated; I might have
forgotten it here and retained it there. What isn’t saved in one site is
saved somewhere else. There is (some) archive there. This archive begins
before I save it on the computer, even though what we commonly call
archive—one that is socializable, legible by others—is more apparent
when the text is printed, saved, and then published. There are, then,
different “moments,” successive or simultaneous albeit heterogeneous,
in a process of archiving. There isn’t one archive, there is an archiving
75
process with different states, but never one established archive. There
are punctuated and articulated steps in an archiving process that has no
real origin—no simple origin, in any case.
MC: I would like you to say a few words about the addressee . . .
Jacques Derrida: I wouldn’t want to be inconsistent with what I’ve said

before on several occasions. We have to reconcile two apparently incom-
patible propositions. One is that there are always addressees. We might
say that the addressee cannot always necessarily be socially determined.
There is, even in the unconscious, someone for whom one speaks. But
the fact that there are addressees does not prevent the archive, trace, or
gramme that is inscribed from being able (because of the structure of
iterability we talked about earlier) to detach itself from any determined
addressee. Its structure is such that it is able to change or liberate itself
from any determined addressee, and therefore not to have an empirically
determined addressee.
These two propositions seem contradictory, but they’re not. There is
some address [il y a de la destination] but, by reason of an irreducible
margin of indeterminacy, it’s as if there were not. There has to be play
in the address such that one must always be able to say that a deter-
mined addressee is not unique, not the only one, sometimes not even the
primary one.
MC: I believe you referred to that somewhere as the future of the draft.
Does the draft have a future?
JD: Yes, it always has a future. Allow me to pick up on a remark you

recalled in reference to Husserl. It was of particular interest to me
during the period when I had access to Husserl’s manuscripts. And
what struck me was that, for him, the archive was always secondary.
In accordance with the principles of phenomenology that he always
sought to maintain, the fact of inscribing a thought always belonged to
the realm of c ommunication—potentially between him and himself, an
aide-mémoire—but it was extrinsic to the intuition, the thought, and
the truth he wanted to confide or consign. The story I heard in Louvain
in 1953 is that, before the war, when Husserl’s manuscripts were
under threat (there were already thousands and thousands of pages),
some friends advised him not to keep them: “You can’t let the Nazis
get their hands on it.” But Husserl wasn’t all that worried; he didn’t
share his friends’ concerns: “It doesn’t matter if it’s destroyed, it’s the
truth.” In spite of everything, he knew he had entrusted thoughts to
the archive—just thoughts, whose meaning, necessity, and heterogene-

ity with respect to language were such that the words, the body of the
archive, and even the language could be destroyed without what mat-
tered to him above all else—namely, meaning and truth in their apod-
ictic universality—getting lost or damaged through the destruction of
the archives. For him, the archive was an external memory aid, an aux-
iliary consignation that, in its essence, had nothing to do with intuitive
thought, the truth, meaning, etc. I find this thinking to be admirable and
very problematic, not to say inadequate, but this is the great tradition. It
raises among other questions that of the difference in principle between
the archive of knowledge or science and the archive of literature. You
are interested in literary archives, but have you ever dealt with archives
of mathematics or physics?
MC: We have been interested in Einstein’s papers, Pasteur’s notebooks,

his laboratory notebooks.
JD: Where the archive becomes irreducible and indispensable is where

truth and meaning become inseparable from language events, from
events in general, where the question of the event itself is irreducible and
indispensable. There is something in the concept of the archive that is
riven to the singularity of the event, and, in the case of literature, there
is something in the singularity of inscription in a national language that,
in principle, does not hold for pure science, at least not for a purely for-
malizable knowledge, if such a thing exists.
I will now turn to the question of iterability from the point of view of
the archive and the work you do here. On the one hand, in order for there
to be an archive of the kind you privilege here, there must be iterability,
in other words, texts, and not only linguistic or discursive ones (mostly
these texts are composed of words, but it’s true that you also deal with
outlines, media, and other things that are not discursive). But let’s say,
broadly speaking, that discursivity as well as non-discursive elements are
both things that must be iterable. They must have an objective identity
that everyone could recognize as a scholarly object. This object has to
be the same for all of you; it has to be something you could potentially
photocopy. It’s necessary, then, that a certain repeatability allow it to
become objective. From the start, this iterable object could detach itself
from an original context and circulate, as it never ceases to do. It can,
then, get decontextualized. It is necessary to take this decontextualiza-
tion into account, yet you will feel you’ve successfully completed your
work if, in spite of all this, when you reconstitute, analyze, and interpret
this object, you bring it back as close as possible to its unique origin,
77
which is assumed to be its unique context. One must recontextualize as

much as possible, not only within the sociopolitical context but also in
the biographical context (dating, identifying, etc.). One must take into
account both the power of decontextualization—and thus also the inde-
terminacy of origin and destination—and, at the same time, close in as
nearly as possible on the singular origin. This is Freud’s dream when he
says his archaeological concern is to recover a point of origin where the
archive talks on its own. Your work will be done when the archive no
longer needs you. That is the moment when the writer recorded such-
and-such a word. When you reconstitute the most determinable context
and date the singularity of the event, you will feel you are dealing with
the “thing itself” as archive.
This is a necessary, noble, and infinite task, but one whose results are
always suspect for structural reasons. You will be able to touch this non-
iterable point of origin only insofar as you will have identified a trace
that, in its very structure, was iterable from the start. There is a sort of
contradiction or double bind here, which is not a catastrophe or any-
thing negative. It is also the condition of work: if this double bind didn’t
exist, there would be no task. What constitutes the condition of work
and its chance is the same thing that will forever prevent it from ending
up in intuitions, in other words, in exhibiting the unique. An archive
must be at once unique and signifying. In some cases, we are dealing
with the trace of a unique event. Since it’s an archive, however, you
know that this uniqueness you are grasping was only able to inscribe
itself as such to the extent that it was repeatable. It already bears its
double within itself. And it was only able to inscribe itself by sacrificing,
excluding, and repressing any number of things that continue to haunt
it. This means that the signature of the first inscription was already an
act of archiving, even before the archivist comes along to do the work
of collecting, assigning, or establishing. And in this archiving exercise,
there was an act of power, selection, and violence. It will always con-
tinue to be haunted by what it has excluded and by its double. Here one
can only multiply contradictory statements.
Jean-Michel Rabaté: Starting from the concept of the signature—to go

from the problematic of the archive to that of the signature—we can
call into question the uniqueness and the materiality of the object con-
structed by genetic criticism. It seems to me that the questions Derrida is
directing back at us lead us to rethink the presuppositions of an overall
method, the one used by genetic criticism. As far as the operations of
ITEM are concerned, should we say we have teams working on “sig-
natures,” such as that of Zola, Flaubert, or Joyce, or should we instead
consider a signature of ITEM itself that would serve as a “trademark”5

and would repeat protocols of reading? It’s interesting that this seminar
chose the draft as a research theme, because “to rough draft” [brouillon-
ner] is now going to become a v erb—a verb that already implies that one
has a sense of what the fair copy, the recopied text, will look like. When
one does this work that is somewhat lexical in nature, problems of trans-
lation are raised more acutely; the object we have been talking about is
almost a rchaic—the written draft, the signed draft with handwriting we
can recognize, with paper we can d ate—whereas the electronic archive
disappears into the infinity of networks on the “web” . . . Won’t the sig-
nature of a contemporary author be identical to that of any other Mac?
Which brings me to the question of the Derridean problematic put to
ITEM: is there a reading protocol that could be established in view of the
draft—of the writer, philosopher, or s cientist—with all the consequences
this entails in terms of graphism in the strict sense, or even graphomania
(as with Newton or Husserl), which would imply an almost mechanical
functioning of the action of writing in a given medium?
There is another question I would like to put to Jacques Derrida
concerning the materiality of the archive. It seems to me that choosing
the expression “rough draft” points us toward something that will be
less constructed by theory than the avant-texte. This latter term implies
a critical construction. Does the draft already enter into a critical con-
struction, or is it a kind of pre-avant-texte, a more untreated mate-
riality? This leads me to reformulate my question, which arose in an
American context in relation to a book by Jerome McGann called The
Textual Condition—a text that has served as a relay in the United States
for what ITEM has been doing a bit longer in France, namely, bringing
back into fashion questions of pre-publication materials and the history
of publication as a material history. It’s interesting to note that the intro-
duction to this book cites Derrida extensively, setting him against Paul
de Man and [G. Thomas] Tanselle and maintaining that there are two
tendencies in the legacy of deconstruction: one that seeks to reconstitute
an ideal or Platonic meaning-to-say, and another (which would be the
more rigorously Derridean tendency) that would emphasize the pure
materiality of the printed text.
JD: On this very last point, one of the paradoxes is that de Man uses the
enigmatic term “materiality” much more than I do. Not with respect to
the medium [support]; he has a concept of the materiality of the text that
remains very strange and obscure for me. It isn’t related to the archive or
5 In English in the original.

79
the medium, yet he speaks much more than I do of “materiality.” With

respect to law and politics, the transformations we are engaged in move
so quickly that it is difficult to take them into account at every moment.
But among all these transformations are those that concern what one
archives and what one submits for archiving. We were talking about
signatures, both of authors and of ITEM. We were in a situation where
the privileged objects of ITEM were what one calls great names, great
works, or, more commonly, “big names” [grandes signatures]. Joyce,
Proust, and H eine—sovereign “big names”—were already there. The
object had a legitimacy that was at once cultural, political, and social.
This legitimacy was already established, and then the ITEM signature
came along both to distinguish and oppose itself while simultaneously
receiving this legitimacy from a certain power. If you had started out
with unknown authors, it wouldn’t have worked. So, on the one hand,
you received the power of these signatures and, on the other hand, your
gesture, your work is also a signature, with everything this implies in
terms of decision, problematics, and critical choice. These are gestures
of power, imposition, exclusion, and repression; they are countersig-
natures. What I wanted to underscore is that in the archive in general,
the “first” moment, the “originary” moment of archiving is a signature
of authority: it authorizes. Those who then come to work on this first
archiving countersign in every sense of the word. On the one hand, they
come to try and confirm the signature, to authenticate, recognize, and
analyze it; at the same time, they set up a counter-force against it, in
other words, they come to make choices of their own. However fasci-
nating and necessary they may be, these choices have a countersignature
effect. In every archiving, there is both signature and countersignature.
What’s sweeping over us today along with new archiving technologies
is the proliferation of institutions and research sites like yours. This
has a transformative effect on everyone who writes. Of course, Plato,
Rousseau, or Hugo knew, to a certain extent, that what they wrote had
some chance of remaining; but they knew it in a particular mode that
doesn’t bear much resemblance to what we know about what could be
stored now. Today, given the existence of institutions like yours, when
writers write they have in m ind—even in their correspondence—the
likelihood that something will last. Although this same power can also
create the opposite effect: loss through overabundance . . .
Let’s try to imagine what Joyce would have done if he’d had a com-
puter. It would have changed any number of things. But I imagine, or I
hope, that he would have kept multiple floppy disks at different stages.
He would have treated the rough draft differently. He would have erased
or substituted one word for another without leaving any trace, but at
certain stages I imagine he would have been tempted to save a state

of the manuscript on a separate disk, copy it, and then start over, etc.,
leaving behind drafts of a kind that don’t bear any relation to the ones
you’re working on.
I believe that what’s changing at breakneck speed is this signature/
countersignature relation, the project of the signature. The structure
of the signature is no longer the same once the archiving machine is no
longer the same. This means that, today, one can no longer s ign—and I
mean signature as much in the sense of patronymic inscription as in the
sense of “writing how one writes”—one can no longer sign in the same
way when the archiving technology changes. The project of the signature
in every sense of the term is no longer the same once the structure of the
medium changes, and along with it the structure of archiving. A writer
who writes on the computer these days, or who corresponds via e-mail,
no longer signs in the same way as before. It’s banal to say this, but this
doesn’t mean that the computer necessarily changes everything about
the modes of writing or of style. The very project of the signature—this
desire to leave a trace, this first g esture—is affected by technology.
I’m not certain that a market of rough draft disks isn’t already taking
shape. The same buyers and the same connoisseurs aren’t involved, but
I know that some American libraries are interested in floppy disks. The
question of property rights is also changing, for example with every-
thing that is happening on the Internet. Huge amounts of text are being
produced there, and it’s not clear who owns them or who has the right
to copy them. The property of the signature itself is affected. It’s obvious
that if I write a text for myself, on paper, at home, that’s one thing; if
I write it on the computer it’s another thing. The situation has already
changed. But if I write what I write while connected via Internet at one
o’clock in the morning with someone located in South Africa, and I start
to muse on something, to improvise, I know that I am dispossessed in a
form of dispossession that no longer bears any relation to the disposses-
sion that nevertheless takes place even when I’m writing a rough draft
in my room. As soon as I put a word down on paper, there is dispos-
session. But the dispossession, and therefore the signature (the signature
dispossesses me), is no longer the same if I’m improvising on the Internet
while writing to someone located in South Africa who will do whatever
he wants with those traces the very next moment.
MC: It’s a kind of contract. You offer your thought, or the expression of
that thought, without signing it and therefore without demanding from
the other a request for permission to reproduce. It’s a different mode of
sociality.
81
Jacques Derrida: The fact that things are changing so rapidly and so
massively is something that certainly must be taken into account. The
mode of sociality has changed. At the same time, however, something
analogous persists. A certain dispossession takes place from the moment
there is iterability, thus from the moment I write a word on paper, even
if no one sees it; even before writing on paper, when I say a word to
myself “in my head,” it will inscribe itself in one of the places of my
psyche. Since these places constitute a multiplicity, there’s no way I
could gather them together in one spot. There is, then, dispossession
even in soliloquy; it is analogous to the one that takes place when I’m
chatting online. What I also find interesting in Freud is that he took into
account the space inside the psyche, the multiplicity of places, and the
impossibility of gathering oneself together in a simple and singular act.
What occurs in the psyche is “analogous” to what occurs in the tech-
nological modernity that we were just talking about in relation to the
Internet. In both cases there is archiving, there is dispossession, there is
a dividing of the signature, etc.
A participant: Technology allows for the locking of printed texts on

floppy disks, while at the same time allowing the reader to take notes in
the margins.
Jacques Derrida: In my opinion, what protects the property or original-

ity of the text can in no case be technology as such. Law [droit] is what
does it, even if the law is still catching up with technology. This law
can always be violated. In the case of a disk, even one protected by a
copyright, you’ll never be able to prevent someone from printing and
scanning the text—and, once it is scanned onto this person’s computer,
you will never be able to prevent him or her from photocopying it. You
know there is copyright law governing photocopying, but that this law
is unenforceable and unenforced. Consequently, law itself will never be
protected. In essence, as law, it must be exposed to breaking and enter-
ing, to infraction.
This is not merely an accident. It belongs to the structure of the thing
that is to be protected. The structure of the archive is such that one
cannot in fact protect it because it is immediately exposed. It is immedi-
ately abandoned, given over, exposed in space. We publish and, at the
same time, we try to protect. As soon as it’s published, it c an—by virtue
of iterability—be reproduced and altered. If I chose this word “iter-
ability,” it is because in this word there is repetition, reproduction, and
alteration. Alteration through repetition can never be prevented. Even
if you protect your diskette, someone can reproduce it; and once they
reproduce it, they can make use of it beyond your ability to protect it.
They can transform the text. They can steal it and scan it. This is what
has always happened with the history of texts.
For we want to protect our text, its originality—but we want above
all not to protect it. We want it to be violated. This starts with the first
reading. If I really wanted to protect the thing, I wouldn’t show it to
anyone, not even to myself in some respect. The moment I release it
means “I’m going to take you to court, but I would like you please to
plagiarize, pillage, graft, alter, transform my text to the point that I rec-
ognize it everywhere, without recognizing it; when I no longer recognize
my text, that will be the sign it really worked.” This double bind within
the same desire is inscribed right in the archive.
All of us here publish. Anyone who publishes can get very upset if
someone steals his or her books—for example, if someone makes pho-
tocopies and purchases a book that’s worth 25 dollars for 3 dollars. But
we’re also quite happy about it because we want to be robbed. This is
what we’re doing when we sign; we want to be robbed and we want
the thief to keep the signature he has carried off. It’s a very contradic-
tory desire, but without this contradictory desire there would be no
archive.
MC: Brecht used to say, “texts belong to those who make them better.”
And the CD-ROM that La Pléiade is planning to release will allow us to
intervene in Proust’s text, to rewrite and move things around: an interac-
tive Proust.
JD: Lots of people from my generation might be instinctively wounded

by these expropriations. The idea that people are going to be able to
meddle with this text is, in an immediate way, a wound, given our body
and our culture, the culture that has carved our body as readers. We
fetishize Proust in a way, and we are revolted by the idea of altering
the “original” text. At the same time, however, we realize that this has
always taken place, even before the CD-ROM. When a reader of Proust
opens Proust and writes on Proust, he writes his text, he coats Proust
in something. He does something of a similar nature. We are used to
articles on Proust, yet literary criticism has always done this, and before
criticism the act of reading always did the same thing La Pléiade is pre-
paring to do. For people of my age, though, it is still a form of violence.
The role of fantasm is incalculable.
The question is then that of evaluating differentials of force. Some
forms of violence are more interesting than others. A text belongs to the
one who makes the best use of it, the “strongest.” One wants to be vio-
83
lated by that person, rather than by others. It’s not a question of “yes”
or “no,” but of the hierarchy of forces and values.
DF: Even while they allow for new transgressions, don’t the Internet and
electronic writing also allow for new forms of control?
JD: There are always what are called subjects. They control each other;
there are readers, critics, writers, etc. Actually, they are always reading
programs. There are potentialities of reading. We feel we are being
monitored by another program to which we must adjust our own, just
as when you go from one program to another on the computer: we
convert things, as if you were plugging your program into mine to see
if it works. In fact, in what we call “culture,” there may only be con-
nections between programs, with the play of iterability we were talking
about a moment ago.
For example, the choice of addressing the archive of one’s text to a
particular social group, of having it recognized: I’ll write knowing that
I’ll be read by only fifteen people. A text written in this way, with this
program, wouldn’t be decipherable today by more than fifteen people.
Whereas if I write a different text, it will have 100,000 readers right
away. It’s a choice or a motivation that is very difficult to translate
into a calculation because the fifteen readers in question may become
programs that are much more powerful tomorrow than those of the
100,000 readers—powerful in terms of their capacity to establish a
tradition.
The author, the signatory, is a censor. The censor or archivist counter-
signs. The archivist is always a censor. He or she is someone who capaci-
tates, excludes, authorizes. This act makes of the censor an author. It
has already begun with the author. Joyce is a censor. Since there is more
than one of him in his head, there are many censors. Censorship has
already begun with writing.
MC: There is an issue Jean-Michel Rabaté raised that is important to

us. It’s the issue of the reading protocols for the documents we study.
We don’t have a reading protocol, that much is certain. However, we do
have protocols for establishing the corpus itself, that is, for distinguish-
ing different types of writing, establishing chronology, etc. You said
that there is memory but no project. What one sees, for example, with
the Freud archives, is rather that it actually functions to institutionalize
the psychoanalytic International and preserve secrecy. We, on the other
hand, try to foil secrecy. And we don’t deal with institutional texts, but
rather texts that a private individual has gifted to the public by keeping
the archive of their work—why, we don’t know. That’s the biggest

mystery: most of the authors we deal with hate their manuscripts and
keep them for unspeakable reasons, for reasons they find very difficult to
explain. They desire the gaze of the genetic critic and, at the same time,
dread it more than anything.
So, this double bind you were talking about is already present in
the writer’s ambiguous desire. And we haven’t set the question of the
reading protocol as one of our objectives because that would entail
having a single legitimate, authorized, and methodologically founded
reading that would be the only one, which would make us a kind of
dogmatic institute, even though all the resistance we have encountered
in the university has come precisely from the fact that we are destabiliz-
ing the text by shaking up the archive. This wasn’t received well by the
people whose job it is to study texts and convey to an auditorium full
of students a kind of truth—a subjective truth, perhaps, but one that
presents itself as the legitimate reading, the richest and most meaning-
ful reading of a text. Then we came along and, with our rough drafts
(for example Flaubert’s), gave some mobility to texts that seemed
unchangeable. It shook things up. Now these ideas are taking hold due
to the simple fact that they provoke a kind of curiosity in addition to
mistrust.
You spoke of the necessity of our work. Personally, I see it more
as gratuitousness and a very high level of civilization: in other words,
a relation to the book that allows one— a bit like in a Talmudic
community—
to work on the text and the avant-textes without any
social benefit. A cultural benefit, certainly, but social benefit would
entail instituting a law of the text.
JD: Even if you leave things open, there is a moment of relative textual
stabilization: that’s a social benefit. People ask you to produce positive
results, and there is a moment when, while still leaving open a future
destabilization, you produce results that are relatively stable. These are
accompanied by a social institutional benefit that is the basis of your
legitimacy. That’s why you are accepted by the university, the CNRS,
and French society. There is also an investment for that.
However, I don’t totally agree with you that you are destabilizing
the text and that, in this respect, you are a nuisance to those who, in
the universities especially, wanted to be w orking—and believed they
were indeed working—with a text that was definitively established, ne
varietur, and therefore more sanctifiable and manipulable. To get to the
essential or structural limit of this question, I would say that there has
never been any stable text. The trace of the archive is such that a text
85
can only be stabilizable. There is stabilization and naturalization, which

means that there is no natural stability. A text, any text whatsoever, may
have been authorized or confirmed in the most indisputable way: it still
remains destabilizable. Instability abides—it is irreducible; it is part of
the text. And it wouldn’t be legible if it were naturally stable. A text is
not natural, therefore it isn’t stable. Even supposing that nature is stable
(we’re referring here to an artificial concept of nature).
You mentioned the case of texts like Freud’s, which are institutional
and institutionalized. That said, there are still texts of Freud’s that are
not accessible, at least not to everyone.
How do we deal with this question of secrecy? I don’t know if secrecy
exists, strictly speaking, in relation to the concept of the archive. Let’s
say there is a will to keep the secret, or a possibility of keeping the secret.
Do you consider it part of your duty, according to your professional
ethics, not to respect this secret?
MC: I can give you a very specific answer that has to do with Sartre.
I can create an archive here on the spot by recounting a lunch with
François Georges: we’re talking about psychoanalysis, and Sartre winds
up telling us, “Of course the unconscious exists, but I can’t say that
because then I would have to rework everything I’ve written, and I don’t
have the time anymore.” I just created an archive and an apocryphal
story. On the other hand, I was able to facilitate the acquisition by
the Bibliothèque Nationale of about a thousand pages of Sartre’s cor-
respondence, which no one is allowed to consult for thirty years. These
letters concern Sartre’s private life. I won’t tell you anything about
them since they implicate people who are still alive. In this instance, the
researcher’s values and conscience come into play. I respect the law, and
even if the law didn’t exist, I would apply Levinas’s rule that as long as a
text can hurt a living person, it is better to preserve it, to put it on hold,
but never destroy it.
JD: By what right should we stop only with a living person? It is possible
to hurt the dead. A text can hurt living people centuries later. We live in
a culture where there are texts that hurt living people centuries or mil-
lennia after the fact. All of us are alive in a sense. What is this criterion?
I’m convinced that if we lingered over this a while, it wouldn’t hold up.
Louis Hay: To say that a writer is split between two positions—concealing

and communicating—I don’t think this formula (any more than any
other formula, for that matter) works for us in terms of its applicabil-
ity to the totality of the production of the human mind. Because we
know that it has been the case, but so have lots of other things. There
was a whole era when writers didn’t want their papers to be dealt with,
because they believed that if what they wrote was good, they would
publish it, and if it wasn’t good, it shouldn’t be published. That’s what
happened with Heine. He wrote explicitly in his will that he would curse
anyone who published a single line he hadn’t authorized for publication.
Today it’s the exact opposite, and Aragon declared that he was deposit-
ing his manuscripts to prevent critics from saying about his work what-
ever came into their heads. So, in order to understand what it means to
respect the writer’s wishes, in order to conceive the archive, you have to
know what kind of social universe you’re dealing with, and especially
the reasons the archive has been preserved.
It also troubles me somewhat that the archive is being made to extend
from mental traces all the way to the French National Archives. I would
like to advocate keeping “archive” as a rival notion to “text.” When
dealing with manuscripts, I think one may consider them texts, but this
seems very debatable to me. I’m not convinced that every inscription
in a manuscript is a text. On the other hand, I am convinced that there
are many things in a manuscript that are sense-making, including blank
spaces, drawings, lines, or certain kinds of crossings-out. For my own
private use, I use the word “archive” to mean an “event of writing.”
This frames the manuscript as a unique event, where something hap-
pened in writing. Additionally, from a different perspective, it asks
whether textual elements were produced, how they are organized, how
they hang together. I don’t think this use will take hold because it’s too
removed from customary usage, but some day we will need to come to
an agreement on what we mean by “archive.”
People have given us a very hard time about the following issue: our
documents are unique, and there is no science of the singular. I think
the notion of the archive gives us the start of a solution to this seeming
aporia, insofar as these events are unique, if you consider each one
separately. But they are very numerous, and you can put a manuscript
of Proust’s and a manuscript of Flaubert’s side by side and it will make
sense. You would see that processes of writing, practices of writing,
vary from one writer to another, are characteristic of a personality, but
also that they vary over the centuries. There is, then, a historicity of the
culture of practices of writing. So we are not in the realm of the unique
in the Mallarméan sense—the unique about which nothing can be said,
it can only be perceived.
JD: About the Mallarméan unique, what we are saying about iterabil-
ity concerns the unique inasmuch as it is immediately haunted by the
87
typical. In the typical there is both the unique and reproducibility, and
therefore the divisibility or destruction of the unique. There is never any
pure unique. One must presume there is pure uniqueness, and one never
encounters it as such. And when you say “there is the unique, but it is
numerous,” I would reply that the numerous has never been incompat-
ible with the unique.
About historicity we agree: the historical is affected by the rate at
which these things we’re talking about are transforming. As for the
definitions of concepts that you proposed, you said, “for my own
private use, I prefer to distinguish between archive and text.” You have
every right to do that. However, you are explaining this private use to
us, making us accept it and even imposing it on us. If you succeed, I
will say you’re right, but if you don’t succeed, then you’re wrong. You
said that your definition won’t succeed in taking hold because it’s too
removed from customary usage. In the end, we are always dealing with
conflicts of authority, force, and usage in the definition of concepts; and
it’s unlikely that you will manage to impose the distinction between
archive and text. Personally, I prefer to side with the strongest and say
that the archive is always a text. Which won’t stop us later on from
distinguishing, within this concept, different kinds of archives, different
kinds of texts—but I will never make text and archive into opposing
terms, unless, in a very particular context, for reasons of convention,
text is made distinct from archive and everyone agrees on this conven-
tion, and your private use is acceptable to everyone. Then it will still be
a matter of convention.
Today, particularly in France, on account of the transformations
we’ve been talking about, the problems of major archives are multiply-
ing: Sartre, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Levinas, Artaud. This last case
is particularly interesting. Paule Thévenin worked on [Artaud] manu-
scripts that were bequeathed to her under conditions that were legally
problematic, but sufficiently reliable for her to undertake the massive
project of editing a “Complete Works” with Gallimard. Now there are
challenges from the family, as you know. But also from certain scholars
who think that some of the readings and editorial decisions are question-
able, even though it’s published by Gallimard. That’s an example where
neither IMEC6 nor you have a stake in the matter. It’s a huge field, and
I’ve noticed that all these problems have been increasing in France over
6 IMEC is the acronym for the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine

(Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), an archive founded in 1988 dedi-
cated to the French publishing world; since 2004, it has been based at the Abbaye
d’Ardenne outside Caen, in the Normandy region of France.
the past few years, because those who leave their manuscripts now can
anticipate to some extent what’s going to happen, and they can take
measures—or not.
MC: For all the writers I know, there has been a very clear change as to
what should be done with these papers, what measures to take. That’s
where our work leads to a certain reflexive relationship for writers: they
know that genetic criticism is out there for them to manage, and that
certain techniques either promote or prevent it.
JD: Even back in the nineteenth century there were writers who copied
their manuscripts to sell them. We can imagine that, now, for reasons
of authority or legitimacy, writers will copy their drafts onto multiple
diskettes so they can give them to legitimating institutions, since having
your “stuff” at IMEC makes you somebody; there are more and more
people who want to deposit their work. Already now, getting accepted
into IMEC is like publishing with Gallimard. So, there are still enormous
struggles, some that go on within the university, as well.
I was on the jury for a dissertation on Genet’s final work. The archive
is still unstable, burning hot, borderless, and the candidate wrote a
dissertation in which he took into account this archive that is still
being established or stabilized. It’s the first time a dissertation has been
written so soon, so close to the moment of a text’s official archiving, its
establishment.
LH: German created a neologism to describe the estate of a writer who

anticipates his death. His documents get collected first and he is left
alive.
JD: A writer is above all someone who writes a will: whatever he writes
is, as a public and surviving thing, testamentary in nature. The struc-
ture of the social apparatus of archiving does not come later, to receive
the will; this structure marks the form and content of the will from the
beginning and from the inside. One doesn’t write the same will under
different conditions of archiving. Institutions like yours have not just a
secondary effect on what comes after the fact, the collection or recep-
tion of the inheritance, but already a primary effect on the way people
write and how they organize their will, or destroy it. They take you into
account in everything they do, in their way of writing or in the sentence
they produce, just as much as in the way they organize their manu-
scripts, their diskettes, etc. The one who does the archiving plays his or
her part in the origin of the content that is archived.
89
J-MR: In the United States there are university libraries that go out and
find living writers and negotiate, sometimes with remuneration and
sometimes without. It’s appalling to see this dynamic “archiving.”
JD: These transactions are going to increase, and not just with literature.
The French National Archives must make choices. These days they have
the capacity to record everything that happens in France, to put micro-
phones and video cameras everywhere, and some people will record all
the visible and audible phenomena that can be saved. Archivists will
collect all these accounts and then realize that they have to choose, that
you can’t save everything in the National Archives. It’s a very serious
political choice: what should be saved? Who will get access? It’s a major
political problem.
I did not say that everything could be saved, for two reasons. From
the perspective of consciousness, in the Freudian sense, what is not in
active memory can be stored elsewhere and not get lost. But I don’t
think that everything is always saved. There is also a kind of finitude
for the unconscious. I just wanted to underscore that it’s not as lost as
we think. What is lost on the computer can be saved somewhere else,
and what is lost in active memory can be saved in the unconscious. That
doesn’t mean, however, that everything is always saved somewhere. I
think not, and that’s why there is archiving. Indeed, if everything were
saved somewhere, there wouldn’t be any need for the archive. Not an
essential, irreducible need. Everything can’t be saved, first of all because
the storage capacity, in the everyday sense of the term, is finite, as much
in space—public or otherwise—as in the unconscious. “Archive fever”
[mal d’archive]7 can mean a suffering in the face of the impossibility of
saving everything. More seriously, however (and now I’m coming to the
death drive), beyond this extrinsic or external finitude as an empirical
limit, in the relation to the archive there is a desire, an urge to erase or
destroy even what can be saved. If there were not this possible destruc-
tion of the archive, this possible desire to destroy, that evil [mal] that
consists in destroying, one would not have the desire to save, either. If I
want to save, it’s because I know I can want not to save or that the other
can want not to save. Therefore to destroy even the trace of what can
be saved. Death is not merely an accident that takes a living being by
surprise; it’s also something on the basis of which there is life, and which
is at the origin of the desire to save.
7 Derrida refers here to the title of his book Mal d’archive, first published in French
in 1995; the English translation by Eric Prenowitz, titled Archive Fever (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), was published in 1996.
The desire to save is also inseparable from the desire to destroy. This
is because saving is losing. If, in order to save the trace of what’s happen-
ing now, I take a note so I don’t forget it; I write it on a piece of paper
and put it in my pocket. If it stops there, that means I lose—I expose the
paper to its loss. In order to save, I have to expose to loss. This exposure
to loss is a double gesture whose duality is irreducible. Wanting to save
in memory is to expose to forgetting. This is what I call “archive fever.”
There is the suffering linked to the archive and the desire for the archive.
The desire for the archive is what runs through this experience of the
radical destructibility of the archive.
If we were certain that the destructibility of the archive was accidental
and that, in certain cases, an accident can happen but everything can
be saved in principle, there wouldn’t be any need for archives, or any
worrying over the archive. If there is worrying and suffering over the
archive, it’s because we know that everything can be destroyed without
any remainder. Not only without a trace of what has been, but without
any memory of the trace, without the name of the trace. And that is both
the threat of the archive and its chance. The archive must be outside,
exposed to the outside.
Chapter 6
Between the Writing Body and

Writing (2001)
Derrida’s revealing, detailed interview about the “mechanics” of writing

with Daniel Ferrer, “Entre le corps écrivant et l’écriture,” was published
in Genesis, manuscrits, recherche, invention 17 (2001): 59–72.
Jacques Derrida is without doubt the philosopher who has taken the
most interest in writing. For the first time, he has agreed to describe here
in detail his own work practices and the concrete organization of this
scene of writing (and of reading) that has always preoccupied him.
Daniel Ferrer: Two years ago we launched the first session of this
seminar, “Writers’ Libraries,” with a very nice quote from one of your
texts on the “invention of the other,” and we set out from the hypothesis
that the writer’s library, whether real or virtual, was the privileged site
for observing how the writer “lets the other come through the economy
of the same.”1 We would have many questions for you on this subject,
but today you have agreed to speak to us, in a more personal mode,
about your own library and your own practice of writing and reading.
Jacques Derrida: The exercise I’ve been invited to is a formidable one. It

is a call for a quite indecent gesture, a gesture that some might interpret
as narcissistic, exhibitionist, or even nudist. At issue is speaking of what,
in each of our lives, represents the most secret, the most intimate: what
we do in solitude, at home, when, in a space that is highly eroticized and,
I would say, almost autoeroticized, we prepare with all sorts of instru-
Translated by Katie Chenoweth. Unless otherwise indicated, all footnotes to this

chapter have been provided by the translator.
1 [French editor’s note] See Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Invention of the Other,”
trans. Catherine Porter, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. I, ed. Peggy Kamuf
and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 45 (quotation
modified).
ments and media [supports] something that is already an exhibition:

publications. These machines of autoerotic pleasure or torture are what
I must exhibit, since I must speak of my library and my way of writing,
taking notes, and handling the instruments of “word processing”
[“traitement de textes”]. I used the loaded words “narcissism,” “voyeur-
ism,” “exhibitionism” . . . The most appropriate word in this case would
actually be “fetishism.” The objects and things I’m going to be speaking
of are, for all of us, objects of a heavy fetishistic investment. All these
objects, from paper to the computer, are objects that allow themselves to
be fetishized more easily than others. I have to talk about all that: nar-
cissism, exhibitionism, autoeroticism, fetishism . . . But all that prepared
within our private space in view of publication. This is our destiny, for
all of us present here. We are creatures of publication who sharpen, in
the night of secrecy, all kinds of instruments of pleasure and torture.
Another misgiving that would keep me from speaking here, is a ten-
tativeness in the face of what is typical, what is common to each one of
us, because we all essentially belong to the same social and professional
group, but also to the same generation. Everything I am going to talk
about has been marked by a history that, over the course of this genera-
tion, has been the site of profound and radical transformations. So, I’ll
vacillate between describing typical traits and structures, generalities,
and describing things that are more idiomatic, more singular, more per-
sonal. I don’t want to hide personal things, since I’m invited, I imagine,
because there is a curiosity to see how I participate in a typical, general
movement, as well as how I might deviate in certain ways. I will navigate
between these two reefs: of the feebly, generally typical and of the purely
idiomatic that is very difficult to grasp. I will be testifying, then, at the
crossroads of singularities and common traits of belonging.
I have in front of me two letters from Daniel Ferrer. The first alluded
to the “way in which the writing being done hinges on the already-
written.” This is a rule I am going to give myself, that I am going to
receive, but in order to do so I will rely on another already-written, a
second letter from Daniel Ferrer that I received from him recently, in
which he sent me a list of questions that it would be appropriate for me
to try to answer. I will try to respond to each of the questions he has
extended, following the already-written.
Before getting to these questions—and after a few general remarks
on the troubled and turbulent history of my experience of reading and
writing, on some points of reference and some general scansions—I
would like to speak in a naive way about what I recall of my history with
respect to writing and reading, books, media [supports], etc.
Like all of us, I suppose, when I work, whether I’m reading or writing,
Between the Writing Body and Writing (2001)
93
I observe myself. And this observation is part of the experience. I observe

my body—since bodies are what we’re going to talk a bout—the position
of my body. From the beginning, in my constant interest in writing—an
interest that I have perhaps privileged a bit more than others—the ques-
tion of the writing body has always preoccupied me, interested me; it
has always been a site of experimentation and observation; and, for
example, the question of knowing how one should write, in what posi-
tion one should be while writing—lying down, seated, or standing. So,
one of the texts that came out of your work from last year, which Daniel
Ferrer gave me to read, a text on Nietzsche’s library, opens with a quote
from Nietzsche: “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis.”2 And I recall
that in my first publication, in 1962, I quoted this passage and had the
following to say about it, which, if I may, I will quote in turn before
offering some commentary based on my experience of the “lying down-
sitting-standing” of writing.3 In reference to Flaubert, after a quote from
Nietzsche that says “‘Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l’homme n’est rien,
l’oeuvre est tout,’”4 I add:
We would have to choose then, between writing and dance.

Nietzsche recommends a dance of the pen in vain: “. . . dancing with the feet,
with ideas, with words, and need I add that one must also be able to dance with
the pen—that one must learn how to write?” Flaubert was well aware, and he
was right, that writing cannot be thoroughly Dionysiac. “One can only think
and write sitting down,” he said. Joyous anger of Nietzsche: “Here I have got
you, you nihilist! A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only
those thoughts that come when you are walking have any value.”
But Nietzsche knew well enough that the writer would never be upright;
that writing is first and forever something over which one bends. Better still
when letters are no longer figures of fire in the heavens.5
These different movements are also the movements of my interminable

back-and-forth between writing-lying-down, writing-sitting-down, and
2 “One can think and write only when sitting down.” Nietzsche quotes this line
from Flaubert in French in the “Maxims and Barbs” section of Twilight of the
Idols. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a
Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9.
3 See Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification,” in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 29.
4 “Flaubert is always hateful, man is nothing, the work is everything.” This quote,
which appears in French in Nietzsche’s text, patches together a famous Flaubert line,
“L’homme n’est rien, l’œuvre est tout” (Letter to George Sand, December 1875),
with a play on Pascal’s “Le moi est haïssable” (Pensées, no. 141 [Lafuma], 455
[Brunschvicg]).
5 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 29.
writing- standing-
up. It sometimes happens that I write lying down,
that I take notes, when I wake up, after a dream. Most often I write
like everyone else, sitting down, albeit with the feeling that nothing
very important happens when I write sitting down. When I write sitting
down, I manage thoughts, ideas, the movements of thoughts, which
always come to me when I’m up and about doing something else:
walking, driving, running. When I used to run (I’ve stopped now), that
was when the most organizing things, the ideas, would come to me.
Sometimes I would go running with a piece of paper in my pocket to jot
things down. Later, when I sat down at my table, in front of my com-
puter, I did the managing, I exploited the furtive, cursory, sometimes
lightning-fast things that came to me on the run.
I became aware of this very quickly, that it was when I was up that
these good things could happen to me. So, in the first of my offices
(I have four or five), I set up a shelf at my standing height, slightly
slanted, telling myself: if you manage to write standing up (I wrote with
a dip pen [plume] then), it will be better. I made great efforts, but it
didn’t go anywhere. This is one small indicator to mark that the position
of the body is something I’m very attentive to. All the time it pains me
to write sitting down. I understand Nietzsche’s protest very well—and
also that of Flaubert, who knows very well that a certain type of work
presupposes immobility, being seated.
After this detour, an occasion simply to recall that what we are talking
about is a certain desiring, writing, suffering body, I return to early
childhood, since the question at hand is writing. The first violence I felt
with respect to this matter was one of the violences of school (there were
many): what happened is that very early, in primary school, I was a very
good student (things went downhill later) except for writing, and there
were times when, during recess, the teacher—who knew I was at the top
of the class—would say to me: “go back in and write that out again,
it’s illegible; when you’re in high school you can let yourself write like
that, but for now it’s not acceptable.” So, very quickly I encountered
the ordeal of the illegibility of my writing, which unfortunately has not
improved since. My writing has remained very difficult to read, to the
point that some of my friends are obliged to have my letters deciphered
by “experts.” This has always troubled me, and there are, among the
instruments for writing by hand, those that respect the normal form of
my writing—still every bit as illegible—and others that do not respect it.
For example, there is a pencil that respects my writing and fountain pens
that do not respect it. I have had very few pens in my life; I can see that
my writing has changed since I was a young professor or student, it was
much sharper and more disconnected then than it is now, but equally
95
illegible. It’s like studying an archive [on a une impression d’archive]

observing the transformation of one’s handwriting.
To stay with the question of instruments and media [support], for a
very long time I was able only to write with a pen dipped in ink (not
with a fountain pen [stylo]). During tests and exams, I would bring my
inkwell with a particular nib and a particular penholder. I did this for
a very long time, even up through the period when I began to publish. I
could write the first versions of a text only on large pieces of paper using
a dip pen. When I was a child, an adolescent, I would shut myself up
at home (very early, writing for me was a kind of shutting in, a kind of
retreat, withdrawal), I would shut myself in my room and write either in
notebooks—I’m talking about a kind of diary, written in school exercise
books—or else on another medium [support]; I can still remember a
table in El Biar, in Algeria, which was my desk, in a little room, covered
in pink paper, like a tablecloth, and the little thoughts I would divulge
to that paper; then I would cut them up, and I can clearly recall having
cut up—cutting with scissors into the pink paper—the things I wrote on
that table.
This history of instruments and materials has, I think, been common
to all the intellectuals of my generation. First the dip p
en—not the ball-
point, the dip pen—for the first versions of texts, even when I began to
publish. I wrote all my first books with a dip pen. I only typed the final
version. I bought my first typewriter in the United States in 1956. It
was necessary for me to type. That’s where I learned to type. I type very
quickly, very badly, with many mistakes. I learned to t ype—quickly and
badly—in Cambridge, at Harvard, where I spent a year after my time in
school. At that time my wife—we didn’t have any money—was translat-
ing a Russian novel, and I would type her translations. So, I bought a
little Olivetti 32 with an international keyboard, because I couldn’t find
a French keyboard there.6 Which means that for many years, from
1957 until the ’70s, I had to take advantage of trips to the U.S. to find
the international keyboard I was used to. I couldn’t type on a French
keyboard until then. Each time, I replaced a little Olivetti with a little
Olivetti.
To mark the main beats: after the dip pen there was the Olivetti type-
writer, from my earliest publications at the beginning of 1960 up until
1979. Nearly twenty years. In 1979 I bought an electric typewriter, and
6 Derrida is undoubtedly thinking here of the Olivetti Lettera 22, a portable type-
writer that was enormously popular during the 1950s and was available with an
“international” keyboard containing French accents. The Olivetti Lettera 32, suc-
cessor to the earlier model, was released in 1963.
I wrote The Post Card on an electric machine with a different rhythm.

So, my workshop went electric in 1979, then, ever resistant (I still resist
modernization, technological progress), I organized my resistance to
the computer, starting in 1984–5. In 1985, the difficult but decisive
experience was when Jean-François Lyotard, who was organizing the
exhibition “Les Immatériaux” at the Pompidou Center, enlisted me in
a group of people who were supposed to correspond with each other,
defining a certain number of words—he had compiled a list—but via
coordinated computers that had been provided by Olivetti who, as a
promotional effort, had supplied twenty-six computers. Each of us was
supposed to produce his or her own definitions and send them to the
others. I installed this machine at home, and when it entered the house
I felt as if a monster had been smuggled in. And, naturally, I was totally
incapable of using it. I gave up and told the organizers that I was going
to write on my electric typewriter, and that they would have to take care
of transferring the thing. That’s what happened. “I will never come to
terms with that,” I told myself at the time.
Nevertheless, seeing the progress this thing was making—particularly
abroad, with my American friends—and seeing how useful it was for
them, I got on board. I bought a computer. There were a few catastro-
phes, which should have been enough to make me give up definitively,
but which on the contrary encouraged me to take additional precau-
tions, and, from that moment on, it was like the organization of a drug
addict. I no longer even understand how I managed to work on a type-
writer. I can go back to writing by hand, and I’m still nostalgic for the
texts I wrote by hand; I go back to writing longhand for correspondence,
because it’s more economical. So, the drive toward writing by hand is
very much alive in me, but I will never again be able to write on a type-
writer, whether mechanical or electric. Every time I try, it’s as if I was
writing with jackhammers. So now I go back and forth between word
processing machines, as we so curiously say,7 and writing by hand.
I am often asked: has using the computer transformed the way you
write? I don’t know how to answer. Yes and no. No, I believe, with
respect to something that continues to whisper [souffler] the words, the
rhythm of sentences, etc. Yes, undeniably, it has changed with respect to
the economy of composition. I write all my seminars, everything I teach,
on the computer, and I can see, when I want to compose a session, that
is, to move something, put something that comes at the end back at the
beginning, that from that perspective I’m doing things I never could have
7 The French term for “word processing” is traitement de texte, which more liter-
ally means “text treatment.”
97
one—sometimes that I would never have even thought to d

d o—by hand,
or even on the typewriter. Undeniably, with respect to composition,
flexibility, and speed, it has profoundly changed things. With respect to
sentence structure, movement, the relationship of the body to writing,
I’m not sure.
Allow me to tell a little anecdote on this topic: one day, over dinner,
a discussion was struck up between Jean Genet, Paule Thévenin, and
myself on this topic. Jean Genet, who had never touched a typewriter,
says to me: “But one cannot write on a typewriter; you realize that it
kills your phrasing, it’s an unacceptable violence, it’s a question of the
body, etc.” And so it turns into a long discussion, a whole evening where
I try to convince him that the interposition of the machine, whatever it
may be, no doubt transforms the writing body, the relationship between
the body and the letter and the sentence, but that it’s a transformation
that does not interrupt, that does not cut off the body from writing. A
cut is introduced even with the pen or the pencil. In any event, there is
cutting, and that’s why ideas come rather when one isn’t writing: while
walking, running, driving. I drive a lot, and it is often when I’m driving
that I receive the best things. There is a cut, then, when one writes
with a fountain pen or a goose quill, there is a cut with the typewriting
machine, but these are two types of cut that, nonetheless, do not prevent
something of the body from passing through the cut. It is another organ-
ization of the cut. We had a long discussion about it all evening. “I’m
saying that the machine does not prohibit; you’re saying that it stops
poetry, that it stops literature, that it stops the breath of the phrase . . .
No, it’s a different body.” He was not convinced. He left around mid-
night with Paule Thévenin, with whom I used to see him often. When
they get back to Paris, he says to her, “I think Jacques is right.” The next
morning, at dawn, he calls me on the phone to tell me what amounts
to: “In the end, you’re wrong.” An interminable discussion about what
happens between the writing body and writing, depending on what
comes between them—and, clearly, the thing that comes between them
is also a someone who comes between them. In this scene of writing that
has always interested me, there are naturally figures, characters, forces
that come to be incarnated, instrumentalized in all these instruments,
and which we treat as we treat a “who” and a “what.”
Now, I will tell you, to give you an image of how neurotic I am in
the scene of writing, about my terror, since I started using computers,
the terror of losing texts, a terror that stems from some initial traumas
(I lost texts, as everybody has), a terror that I might have felt when I
used to write on paper, since you can lose a piece of paper very easily.
Nevertheless, the terror is of losing text. I now have in the house, I will
dare to admit this, three computers, two of which have an additional

“Zip drive,”8 a supplementary hard drive (the word “supplement”
is wonderful for describing these things), and when I’m writing a long
text that has gone a long time without being printed, I never leave the
house—because I’ve gotten burgled and my computers were stolen—I
never leave the house without having duplicated the text in question
one, two, three, four . . . there will be at least ten copies that I leave
in different places, because there is also the risk of fire, burglary. And
here in my briefcase I have the bulk of what I’m working on now (not
the back catalogue [la reserve générale]). What’s still pending is in my
briefcase.
That’s the neurosis that develops with technology. I didn’t worry
about such things when I wrote by hand. I don’t even recall making
photocopies of my earliest texts. I would have a carbon copy, that’s all.
Now, in spite of all that, when I’ve finished a long text, an article or a
book, once it’s printed, I take it to the photocopier and I make a copy
for myself.
Now, after these generalities (for they are generalities— some of
the pathological traits are my own, but there are many traits you’ve
undoubtedly recognized within your own universe as a writer, your own
writing universe), I will try to respond to the more precise, specific ques-
tions put to me by Daniel Ferrer.
“Do you read with a pencil in hand?” Yes, sometimes, but I don’t take
notes; when I read, there is no paper on the side. The pencil serves to
mistreat the book, that is to say, to scribble, underline, or draw arrows.
I’ve brought a few copies of books that have been tortured in this way,
from when I was a student and some very recent ones. But in general, I
don’t take notes on the side, what are called “reading notes” [notes de
lecture]. I did that when I was a young student. I may note things I know
I will need, but I don’t take notes while reading a book linearly. This is
a topic of irony and critique in my family, because I have two sons who,
unlike me, are very respectful of books, they’re real bibliophiles. I’m no
bibliophile, I don’t have a religious respect for the beauty of the book
object. My sons don’t want to use my books; they would rather buy
other copies because they see the traces of the violence of pencil strokes,
exclamation points, arrows, underlining.
“If so, what do you write on? On the book itself, in a notebook,
on index cards?” It varies. I read with a project in mind. I rarely read
in a disinterested way; I am almost always in the process of looking
for something because I’m working on a project, a seminar, so I read
8 In English in the original.

99
actively, selectively, too selectively, not passively enough. So, I look for
things, and I might note references, put a Post-it in the book, dog-ear
a page, or, indicate on the last page of a book that this word or idea is
on this page. These aren’t indexes, but rather reminders of the places in
the book where I can find an idea, a problem, or a word. What I often
note—when I’m not at my desk, behind the wheel, at a red light—what
I note, what I find, is a word, an inducing or formalizing word, an eco-
nomical word, that’s all it is.
As for index cards, there’s nothing regular. I used to make them, a
long time ago, when I was working on Of Grammatology, on writing,
precisely. At that point I had accumulated index cards that I put in
boxes, wooden boxes I had bought at Gibert, like people who are
writing dissertations. I don’t do that anymore. Now, it happens that,
when I’m writing something, on a project that lasts a certain amount of
time, I travel with notebooks. I like notebooks with thick paper; I walk
around with them. For quite a long period in my life, when I was pre-
paring a book that I never ended up writing, on c ircumcision—what’s
left of it is that little text called “Circumfession”9—for years I filled
notebooks with a certain type of notes, in a way that wasn’t random but
was still very far from the writing stage: notes that were very potential,
very virtual. I took notes on everything that might one day be related to
circumcision. Sometimes they were reading notes, sometimes they were
just thoughts that crossed my mind. I have a great number of them. They
were drawing books, Canson sketchbooks, very nice paper. All of them
began with Hebrew letters; I don’t know how to write Hebrew, but I
learned the name for circumcision, which is mila, and in these sketch-
books, these drawing books, I wrote at some length, in a writing that is
no longer exactly mine now.
“When you take a note, do you know exactly what it’s intended for?”
In principle, yes. Except in the case I’ve just been talking about, and even
then I knew that, directly or indirectly, it was supposed to be related
to circumcision; otherwise, yes. I take notes based on things that are in
the making. More often than not for teaching, incidentally, since what
occupies me the most, for most of the year, is the seminar I’m giving at
the time. At the moment, it’s everything having to do with forgiveness or
the death penalty. I scribble something that is illegible for anyone else.
But it’s a sort of reminder, a prompt, to go back and find the passage in
question.
“Do your reading notes then lead to traces that are perceptible in your
9 See Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques

Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
rough drafts?” I don’t have rough drafts. In the beginning, in the proto-
history I was speaking of, I would have several stages of a text, and I
would rewrite. I didn’t correct much; I would rewrite an entire text.
Once I even rewrote an entire book by hand. I remember that my first
book—L’introduction à l’origine de la géométrie, which is around 200
pages—I rewrote by hand before typing it. That’s over now. Since it’s
on the computer, there’s no draft; there are different states of the floppy
disk, which I generally don’t save. Once or twice, for “Circumfession,”
I happened to keep a few stages. But for most texts I don’t keep any-
thing; it transforms and leaves no traces.
“Do you read different types of books differently?” Certainly. Now
that I’ve answered “yes” to this question, I wouldn’t know how to
elaborate on the analysis. There is a question of pace here. If I were
really to tell the truth about how I read, I would have to recognize that
I read very impatiently, very quickly, and that this selective impatience
costs me d early— probably much injustice and negligence. But very
often, by opening a book in the middle, this impatience has cast me
toward what I was looking for, or what I didn’t know I was looking for
and wound up finding. So this very impatient, very s elective—much too
selective—mode of reading is a price I pay. What pains me is that, even
if this quickness sometimes serves me well in the case of philosophical
texts, it is absolutely unjustifiable in the case of novels or poems, literary
texts. In that instance, I must say, in order to do what one calls reading
a text—let’s call it a literary text—I have to decelerate, I have to slow
down the pace at which I normally read when I work. I often notice that
it’s while I’m writing about a literary text that I begin to read it, and
that my first reading, made up of intermittent glimmers, is very spotty.
Fundamentally, my experience (to sum up my answer) is that I can only
read in a way that is just and faithful, I can only do justice to the text
I am reading when I am teaching it, writing about it, taking an interest
in a passage from the text. The Social Contract, for example, which I
read and studied for the agrégation, is suddenly there under my lamp
when I’m preparing to explain a passage to my students, and I feel as
if I’m reading it for the first time. And that I’m reading it at the pace it
demands, and that I never could have read it that way by starting on
the first page and finishing on the last page; it’s impossible. Sometimes
I might start from a hypothesis to guide the reading and w riting—one
formed before I’ve put in sufficient work—and do an exhaustive reread-
ing to verify the hypothesis. For example, I counted every “yes” in
Ulysses after I’d started writing a text on the “yes” in Ulysses; but once
I’ve formulated the hypothesis, I have to go back and reread everything.
So I reread the whole thing in French and in English, annotating every
101
yes in both v ersions—and their equivalents. In that instance I read at a

laborious and patient pace, which isn’t my normal reading pace. That’s
not how I read Ulysses when I read it the first time, when naturally I
missed any number of things.
So I only read when I’m working, even when it comes to texts that
seem the most removed from our idea of work: poetic texts, prayers,
mystical texts—I read or receive them only when I am in a position to
work on them, and even to teach them. Fundamentally, teaching is what
makes me read.
“Does the order of your l ibrary—whether premeditated or
random—have an influence on your thinking?” Yes, it matters very
much. It’s like the body; the way the books are arranged in the house, at
home, is something that has always preoccupied me. Even though I’ve
never lived comfortably or luxuriously in this respect, I’ve nevertheless
always been very attentive to it. The topology of things is simultane-
ously rational and empirical; it is stratified and retains the marks of the
history of my life, my house. Let’s go back to adolescence: I grew up in
a family where there were few books—a few bad novels, which I read,
like Paul Bourget . . . and that’s it. I bought my first books in Algiers
with the money my father gave me for the week. An absolute fetishism,
then; above my bed were The Flowers of Evil and Gide, for whom I had
a great passion: I had ten, fifteen, twenty books. I carried them with
me—I brought them here, to this house.10 I had all my books in Paris,
and when I left for the United States I left behind a trunk of books (I had
a hundred, hundred fifty) in the attic of the place [the École normale
supérieure, 45, rue d’Ulm]; I wasn’t ever able to get them back after I
returned, and I still lament the loss of those b ooks—those books of my
adolescence that were stolen from me.
Next, I began to reconstitute a little library, without stratification: an
empirical topology. In the beginning, in the original house (a detached
house in the suburbs), the library consisted of shelves on top of bricks.
And these books, which I transported in 1968 when I moved, were, on
the one hand, the philosophical works and, on the other hand, the books
that I liked, literary texts, or the books that I was starting to receive.
Little by little, the house was organized in this way: in the attic where I
soon set up my workspace, since there was no more room, were all the
philosophical works I needed for my work (I worked in what I called my
“sublime,” an attic, which I climbed up into on a ladder). I worked there
for ten years, and all my books for work, the great philosophers—Plato,
10 Derrida is alluding to the École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris,
where the interview took place.
Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.—were up there. Downstairs

were the books I was starting to receive, books addressed to me by the
author. I don’t throw out any books, and I receive many, more and more
all the time. So, all the signed books are together, in alphabetical order.
There are now a number of rooms filled with these signed books. When
my two sons left the house I took over their rooms; now the attic and
three rooms on the second floor are full of these books; on the ground
floor is literature. There are foreign book sections, Anglophone litera-
ture has its own place, as do art books, and then there’s the literature
I hold dear: Mallarmé, Artaud, Ponge, Blanchot, Bataille, Kafka . . .
The newest development: since the house could no longer contain
the books, a few months ago we had an addition built that extends the
house out into the garden; this has become my studio. There, for the
first time in my life, I have an adequate space; it’s a large, high-ceilinged
room, with a mezzanine, bookshelves, and ladders that go all the way
up. I’m in the process of reorganizing the entire logic of the library.
Roughly speaking, the point I’m at now is that the philosophical works
will come down into this studio, where I work on one of my comput-
ers. I haven’t even mentioned what takes up the most space next to the
books, namely, the cardboard boxes where many papers, manuscripts,
and letters go. As it h appens—another confession—for the past three
or four years there has been a Franco-American housing project for my
archive, and the University of Irvine,11 where I teach, p roposed—and
I accepted—to house copies of all the papers, a large quantity of notes
(related to my seminars; I’ve been teaching for thirty-five years), some
typed items, and many manuscripts from early on, the originals of which
go there while I keep a copy. And there is an arrangement between
IMEC and this American archive for the items to exist in duplicate, so
that things—or access to them—is shared, especially the correspond-
ence. Someone comes to help me now, to sort it, to put in order, inven-
tory and send o ff—either to Paris or I rvine—this archive of manuscripts,
graded papers, and notes.
Question from the audience: You said that at the conception stage,
which precedes writing, you jot down a word. What do you mean by
that?
JD: This word is actually a bit more than a word. It is a word that
has, in the best of cases, a formalizing capacity: the future, perhaps, of
a thought, a word that is a theoretical matrix, or a word that allows
11 That is, the University of California, Irvine.

103
me, through condensation, to say more very quickly. I will be prowl-

ing around a hypothesis, a logic, an explanation, and suddenly a word
seems able, in its economy, to formalize, to capitalize. It’s not a word,
it’s a concept. But it’s not only a concept: it is inseparable from the body
of a word in the French language. The feeling I get is that I didn’t invent
this thing, that I wasn’t its active author, but that I have received it like
a stroke of luck. This word comes to me from the French language, like
something that was being held in reserve and has come to formalize and
liberate simultaneously a sort of theoretical potentiality. I won’t say
that this happens to me often, but it’s what the best kind of thing that
happens to me when I work looks like. At that moment, I discover this
word I feel I’ve never paid attention to until now, and, all of a sudden, it
arrives to respond to an expectation.
Question from the audience: What link do you see between these words
and your impatient reading?
JD: The word as a unit remains that which, in my impatient reading,

guides me like a beacon. There are more and more books I don’t have
time to read. So I thumb through them, and when I thumb through
them this way, with that mixture of blindness and insight I was talking
about earlier, what jumps out at me are words, not long sentences. And
I myself am often amazed by a certain reliability—inseparable from
chance—of encountering the word I’m looking for. When I’m working
I have a program of study underway, a certain theme that interests
me and organizes everything, and so whatever I open up, a book or a
newspaper, this programming thematic operates like a computer that
searches. That’s how I function. So, I know what I’m searching for; the
computer is operating, I open the book, and voilà! At that point, no
matter what I open, I’m going to go straight to what’s important for me.
And this passes through words. Words are what come straight at me.
Question from the audience: In this geography of books, in this evolv-

ing organization, is there a place for affectivity? Is there a room where
you have books that aren’t for work? What books do you have in your
bedroom?
JD: Everything is charged with affectivity, everything—even philosophi-

cal books, technical books. On my bedside table are the books I read
every night—briefly; I don’t read for very long. I read every night before
going to sleep, and there are books I fall asleep with. These are never
books of philosophy or books for work, since I get the feeling those
would put me in an active mindset that would be detrimental for sleep.

There are books from which I expect affective gratification, pleasure.
They might be books written by people I know or people who have
some relationship to my life, to what matters to me. This is often the
time when I also flip through the newspaper. In general, there’s not one
book but four or five books next to me, which I open one after the other
for five minutes each. I’m not what you’d call a real bookworm. There
aren’t any bookworm’s books on my bedside table.
Question from the audience: Where does your distaste for throwing
away books or papers come from?
JD: I started to talk about fetishism and autoeroticism. It is clear that

what we write on, these traces, are pieces of our orgasmic, eroticized
body. It’s narcissism. Even when I keep others’ books, it is not divorced
from some narcissism. It is always self-preservation to some extent.
The great fantasm (let’s call it a fantasm, for want of a better for-
mulation) that is present for me—actively, presently, thematically, at
every m oment—is that all these papers, books or texts, or disks, already
survive me. They are already witnesses. I think about this all the time,
about who will come after my death, who will come look, for example,
at this book I read in 1953 and ask: “Why did he put a checkmark here,
an arrow there?” I am obsessed by the surviving structure of each of
these bits of paper, these traces. The structure of the trace is survival
itself. And for me this house is already a place I imagine (mistakenly so,
of course, as I am well aware) that might be of interest to people, pos-
sibly my family members. I tell myself that maybe they will come and
archive, inventory, classify, or look at everything they didn’t see while
I was alive. I am obsessed by that scene, that part of me that’s already
passing away, that which already survives me. But of course, I don’t
believe any of it.
Question from the audience: You talked about the relationship between
the body and writing—doesn’t that have to do with age?
JD: Of course! What I described in a very cursory way a moment ago is

both the historico-technical transformation of t hings—the passage from
the quill to the computer—but also the passage from one age to another.
Likewise, I am obsessed with death, with survival; I observe myself aging
in writing. I am constantly on the lookout for signs of change in the way
I read and write—not so much the way I write in the sense of style or
thought, but technically, my memory. I am constantly monitoring my
105
memory capacities, and monitoring what has, in my case, always been a

very active forgetfulness. Earlier I was talking about selectivity, filtering.
Needless to say, selectivity and filtering are at work not only when I open
a book in the present, but in what is retained of the past. Needless to
say, I have absolutely vertiginous capacities for amnesia, which are also
what allow me to move forward, to continue. Amnesia in terms of what
I read and what I write. And here it’s not just a question of age: I have
always operated through forgetting as much as memory. Which means
that I very often retread the same paths, where I rediscover things. It’s a
very strange film: you are in a sequence and, all of a sudden, you realize
you are visiting a very familiar textual place you had totally forgotten,
in a different way. It might be the text of an author, or it might be a way
of formulating a reading hypothesis. You start the same thing all over
again, which you had forgotten.
Part III
“Oh my friends”
Chapter 7
With Levinas: Between Him and Me

in Affection and Shared Trust (2003)
An interview with Alain David, “Derrida and Lévinas: ‘Entre lui et moi
dans l’affection et la confiance partagée,’” appeared in Magazine litté-
raire 419 (April 2003): 30–4.
In this interview, Jacques Derrida cautions against the risk of recu-

peration and “depoliticization” in the reception of Emmanuel Levinas,
with whom he shared a deep friendship of the mind and of the heart.
By his own admission, Derrida placed his work under the triple sign
of Heidegger, Blanchot, and Levinas. Moreover—and I can attest to this
personally—what “Derrida thinks” or “but what does Derrida think
of this,” was the source of a constant preoccupation, an anxiety and a
stimulation for Levinas. The friendship between Derrida and Levinas
(to recall here a deeply moving expression from Adieu1 on Levinas
and Blanchot) was a blessing [une grâce]—a blessing that lets something
of itself be read here in this interview which Derrida has granted the
Magazine Littéraire today. We offer here our—infinite—gratitude.
Alain David: At the end of the text he devotes to you, Levinas speaks
of this “pleasure of a contact at the heart of a chiasmus,”2 which is
like “the very modality of the encounter in philosophy,” to which you
responded that the chiasmus was “very narrow” [très effilé]. I’d like to
better understand this statement, and to try to assess the meaning of
your long contact with Levinas, a contact which has translated itself
Translated by Philippe Lynes.

1 [Translator’s note] Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Translation of Jacques Derrida, Adieu . . . Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997).
2 [Translator’s note] Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael Smith
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 62. Translation of Emmanuel Levinas,
Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976).
110 “Oh my friends”
r epeatedly—I dare not say constantly—in texts such as “Violence and

Metaphysics,”3 “At This Very Moment in this Work Here I Am,”4
Adieu, and in everything you devote to him in On Touching: Jean-Luc
Nancy,5 to note only the most obvious examples. What to say, what
would you say about this companionship, about this infinite conversa-
tion with Levinas?
Jacques Derrida: How can one not feel disarmed before such a question?
In its very letter (“companionship,” “infinite conversation”) I imagine
it is not fortuitously that it alludes to well-known works by Blanchot,
another friend, a great friend of Levinas’s, another immense thinker
whose vigilance has for a long time and will to the end have been one
of the opportunities of a lifetime for me. But I also understand “com-
panionship,” in the syntax of Blanchot’s title (He who was not accom-
panying me),6 as that friendship of thought which in a way, without
abandoning you, leaves you alone. It even enjoins you, in the name of
proximity, to endure a certain separation, infinite distance, interrup-
tion, even contestation, the “relation without relation,” as they would
both say. Two idioms remain untranslatable one within the other as the
conversation continues. This also holds for the personal and intellec-
tual friendship between Levinas and Blanchot. A strange, singular, and
exemplary friendship, which I have been thinking of more than ever since
Blanchot’s death. As enigmatic as it remains, it orients the space within
which—with others, I’m sure—I feel myself “situated” in some way,
drawn [aimanté], without there being in that any more “Levinasianism”
than “Blanchotianism,” two adjectives the one as stupid as the other and
more unacceptable than all other labels of this type when it is a question
3 [Translator’s note] Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing

and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Translation of Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique,” in L’écriture et la dif-
férence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967).
4 [Translator’s note] Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I
Am,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Translation of Jacques
Derrida, “En ce moment même, dans cet ouvrage, me voici,” in Psyche: Tome I:
Nouvelle Édition Augmentée (Paris: Galilée, 1991).
5 [Translator’s note] Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans
Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Translation of
Jacques Derrida, Le toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
6 [Translator’s note] Translated as Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing
Apart from Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1993). The origi-
nal French is Maurice Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (Paris: Gallimard,
1953), literally “He who was not accompanying me.”
With Levinas (2003)
111
of what is called thinking. Whatever Levinas or Blanchot may have said

or published as to their agreement or their alliance, there is an abyss sep-
arating them which, if one wished to examine it, could give way to irrec-
oncilable differences, sometimes frontal or explosive oppositions. On
the “neutral,”7 for example, on a certain “anonymity,” and even in the
forms in which they take their respective distances from Heideggerian
thought. Not to mention what the names “Sade,” “Lautréamont,” or
“Bataille” represent at least by metonymy. Let us not forget the “politi-
cal” question, their respective political experience or “practices,” before
and after the war. Both denounced Hitlerism very early on, well before
the war, but from “political” grounds that, it is all too obvious, are as
incompatible as can be. In a word, after the war, Levinas was not a man
of the Manifesto of the 121 or of May ’68! All right. So one must stop
feeling reassured in bringing them together as if they were saying the
same thing. Between them is a terrifying scene of discord which has been
reduced to silence. Having felt so attached to both for so long, I cannot
help perceiving this subterranean rumbling, and trying to understand it.
This underground informs and hollows out with an infinite distancing
the very landscape of my admiration and gratitude for both. Here lies
an essential and living site of this turbulent landscape, I’d be tempted to
say its “heart” (or, in a less appeasing tone, its seismic “fault”). It is the
muffled rumbling of this “fault” that I am permanently trying to listen
for, if only to know where, and at what irreducible distance from it, I
can be, myself, with others, a part of it in my generation or the next. I
am trying to hear the thing “beat” (also its beating in a fight, since there
is, beyond the premises of a seismic tremor, a kind of virtual war). One
can also call it a “beating” like the pulse of what you just called the
“heart” of an “infinite conversation.”
Yes, infinite conversation. Since I began reading Levinas, my work has
relied on his groundbreaking texts on Husserl (1930!),8 and those fol-
lowing it, before the war and long before Totality and Infinity (1962).9
And this “companionship,” even when it did not give way to published
texts or teachings (as you know, Levinas is very present in my semi-
nars), has always taken the form of incessant debates, of respectful but
7 Allow me to refer to what I write in Adieu, 53/98–9.

8 [Translator’s note] Emmanuel Levinas, Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s
Phenomenology: Second Edition, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1995). Translation of Emmanuel Levinas, La Théorie de l’intuition
dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1930).
9 [Translator’s note] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Translation of Emmanuel
Levinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961).
often serious discussions. Moreover, the chiasmus of which he speaks,

the “heart of the chiasmus,” I don’t know, I am less sure than ever if it
gives rise to some “contact,” but it is certainly a question of the heart.
What can sometimes take the form of a dispute has its place within me,
between me and me, between Levinas in me and Levinas outside of me.
And then always between him and me in affection and shared trust.
I hope one can read this in all the texts you have recalled. A serious
response to your question would have to go via a micrological reading of
the published writings, first of all those of Levinas, of course. If, for the
sake of a brief and schematic interview, one wished to give at least the
titles of this at once interior and exterior debate, I would refer to a few
principal places. It is not about “deconstruction” in general. In his own
way, through the idiom of his own history, and without using the word,
Levinas also engaged a powerful “deconstruction” of ontology, that is
to s ay—without getting into further d
etail—of what dominates Western
philosophy. A trace of this can be found in our shared recourse (decisive
for both of us, and almost simultaneous, albeit without consultation or
borrowing from either of us) precisely to the word “trace.” Already in
the sixties, this is a word of which we had made, to be sure, quite dif-
ferent uses in so many respects. But between simple chance homonymy
and essential synonymy, the same word condenses and signs, no doubt
better than any other, what you recalled of a point of “contact at the
heart of a chiasmus.”
1. My concern was first directed (especially in “Violence and
Metaphysics”) to Levinas’s strategy and discursive e conomy—and this is
not limited to secondary problems of style and rhetoric: how to regulate
and legitimate the use of the lexicon, of the logic, of the syntax and of
the semantics Levinas continually had to borrow from Greco-Hegelian,
or even Heideggerian ontology, at the very moment he takes them on
and radically contests them, as justified as such a contestation may
be? So I tried to elucidate the consequences and inconsistencies of this,
without ever directly opposing Levinas’s “project,” in whose necessity I
have always believed.
2. Next (although these premises could already be read at the end of
“Violence and Metaphysics”) comes the question of sexual difference
and of a certain phallocentric dissymmetry whose signs and discrete vio-
lence I believed I could detect in Levinas, even when he had the courage
and the remarkable merit to engage, in a manner so rare in philosophy,
in the phenomenological thematic of eros and of the feminine. The loving
attention directed to the feminine does not always exclude the gesture of
a muted subjection by virile speech (and this could perhaps also be said,
in another way, about Blanchot). Moreover, Levinas was able, and this is
With Levinas (2003)
113
rare, to assume the virility of his philosophical signature. What is at stake

cannot be circumscribed, and there lies the risk of a serious limit to any
alleged deconstruction which did not take this into account. In “At This
Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” I thus tried to let speak (within
me or in a fictional debate) a feminine voice. It would protest softly, but
uncompromisingly, against the androcentric, indeed patriarchal privilege
which leaves so many marks in Levinas’s texts, the privilege of the He
[Il] in the nomination of the wholly other, the exclusive predominance of
the Father and the Son in every allusion to filiation (there is never a child,
but always the Son), etc. This privilege of the Father-Son, with its power-
ful Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) tradition, is indissociable
from the privilege of fraternity, the powerful tradition and devastating
consequences of which I attempted, in The Politics of Friendship10 and
elsewhere, to interrogate, precisely by putting into question certain state-
ments of Levinas, Blanchot, and others. This debate around femininity
is deployed at length in Adieu around the problems of welcoming and
hospitality, and in On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. An entire chapter of
that book (“The Untouchable, or the Vow of Abstinence”), is devoted
to the “phenomenology of eros,” to its “obvious dissymmetry,” to the
“femininity of the Beloved [l’Aimée],” and to the “caress” in Levinas,
but also to the effects of what I call an “implacable configuration: femi-
ninity, childhood, animality, irresponsibility.”
3. On the question of the living being [le vivant] and the animal, I
tried, in an as yet unpublished lecture at in Cerisy in 1997,11 to sharpen
a potential discussion with Levinas.
4. Finally, and this would visibly be the most enduring part of what
you call the “infinite conversation,” there is indeed a “political ques-
tion.” Nothing is more different between Levinas and me than our
political cultures and histories. And no doubt political choices, in France
and elsewhere.
But again I prefer to refer to the texts, beginning with those of Levinas
of course. If there is something that what you call the infinite conversa-
tion will always resist, it is precisely “conversation,” simple finite con-
versation, the interview. I mean the limits of the dialogue within which
you and I here find ourselves enclosed.
10 Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso,

2005), 304–5. Translation of Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée,
1994), 338. But the privilege of the brother is everywhere in Levinas. See Adieu to
Emmanuel Levinas, 67.
11 [Translator’s note] Since published as Jacques Derrida, The Animal That
Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
Translation of Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006).
AD: Levinas is in fashion. In other words, he serves as a pretext for a

certain lack of lucidity of our time in relation to itself. Is this for you a
result of the work itself, or do you see in the latter resources defending
it from any recuperation?
JD: Of course, and we are right to rejoice about this: even if it is not
always the most or the best read, Levinas’s work is achieving, quite late
in its history, the rank of facile reference, or even of common guarantee.
But there is a price to pay for what sometimes resembles an ideological,
indeed demagogical and depoliticizing instrumentalization of Levinas’s
metaphysics, of what he calls “metaphysics” or “first philosophy” or
“ethics” in opposition to ontology. The reference to the Other becomes
simplistic and incantatory, and I am finding the expression “relation
to the other” or “respect for the other” more and more fastidious and
“right-thinking.” People season these words with a lazy verbal nod to
Levinas, in order to pass the border check of seriousness and of philo-
sophical audacity with an argument from authority, and that’s all there
is to it. The word “ethics” sometimes plays the same role. People often
forget, especially if they have never read him, the difficulty and risks to
which Levinas himself exposes his thought with these words, the turns
and traps he recognizes along the path, the aporias, sometimes, within
which he admits having to remain patiently (there is nothing “right-
thinking” in him, ever). The greatest risk shows up with the question of
the third, in particular, of the other of the other, which precedes as much
as it interrupts the face-to-face of faces and who reintroduces, and must
reintroduce (it is also a duty), within the “wholly other” the same, com-
parison, reason, universal intelligibility, the institution of the law (which
Levinas often calls “justice”), Greek philosophical discourse, and so on.
All of this complicates the Judaic heritage at the center of Levinasian
ethics, or rather of the interpretation of holiness, etc. (One day Levinas
said to me more or less the following: “You know, people often speak
of ethics concerning my work, but what is primarily important to me
is not ethics but holiness.”) There is also the question of the “fellow”
[semblable] and the neighbor [prochain], the other as God, and of man
as the other man. “Every other (one) is every (bit) other,” as I one day
responded to Levinas, in a formula quite difficult to translate, perhaps
perverse, the stakes of which cannot be mastered. It gathers together
both a fidelity and a possible resistance to Levinasian discourse. One
of the most worrisome forms of what you called a “lack of lucidity”
or of “recuperation” is the use, so widespread and facile today, of the
supposedly “ethical” instance to neutralize the ineluctable urgency and
tragic conflictuality of “political” responsibilities. One can certainly
With Levinas (2003)
115
try to take “ethics,” or the “relation to the other” to be independent

of and transcendent in relation to the juridical and political, but we
must not make an alibi of it to neutralize the juridical and the political,
especially if it’s to smuggle in, to covertly validate, in confusion, a very
determinate politics. I am not only thinking here of the conflicts in the
Middle East and the distressing Israeli–Palestinian question. There is a
risk of depoliticization in the reception of Levinas. It seems to me that
he is neither totally responsible for this, not totally innocent of it. In any
case, although I would have some difficulty proving this at such a speed,
there is in Levinas a politics, a determinate political practice (which I,
once again going too quickly, at bottom find rather conservative, on
the domestic and national plane in particular, and from which I feel
very distant, for a thousand reasons, which have to do in part with our
respective histories) just as incontestable, the seeds of a revolutionary
politics (whether it is a question of hospitality, the stranger, the home-
less, the heteronomical curvature which always yields to the other, to
the responsibility for the other, etc.) It is even a question of a revolution
of the political, where, without renouncing everything that goes in the
direction of autonomy, emancipation, etc., one is brought to another
experience of heteronomy and of the third. This revolutionary dimen-
sion in Levinas’s writing would resist, I believe, the “recuperation” you
are talking about. But one must still read it, this writing, and interpret
it, put some pressure on some of its articulations in a very determinate
manner, in one sense and not in another. It’s difficult; the text is never a
natural datum, decidable in its sense. The responsibility of reading falls
upon us, and cannot fail to itself engage a politics.
AD: I’d like to repeat my question more bluntly. You have just pub-
lished Rogues.12 You are continuing your reflection on “The Beast and
the Sovereign” in your seminar. In many ways, these moments seem to
characterize what in you is the furthest from—and perhaps, in a sense,
the closest to—Levinas. Do you believe Levinas can offer us a politics
for today?
JD: If by “a politics” you mean a coded program, then no, I don’t believe
that Levinas “can offer us a politics for today.” At any rate, I for one
don’t find it there. There would rather be, without this necessarily being
depoliticizing, another manner of placing “politics after!,” as he said, of
12 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault

and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Translation of
Jacques Derrida, Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003).
circumscribing the concept and the space of the political (in the Greek
sense of the term) beginning from an “ethical” thought of messianism
and propheticism, from another thinking of peace. “Peace is a concept
that overruns purely political thought,” as he says to designate a peace
the meaning of which would carry beyond what he calls the “tyranny
of the State” of “the anonymous universality of the State.” By which
he attempted, without anti-statist anarchism, to oppose the State of
David to the State of Caesar. I tried to say more about this in Adieu, by
showing that in Levinas, “the beyond of the purely political does not
gesture toward the non-political.” What I there called a certain “hiatus”
between ethics and politics (“an open mouth to speak and to eat, but
a mouth still mute”)13 is also the condition of a specifically political
responsibility for which schemas can only be lacking, in other words
that must be invented by each and every one, without relativism, in
every singular situation. Levinas calls for ethical and universal safe-
guards. These appear indispensable to me for drawing, at least in the
negative, the contours of a politics. Take for example what Levinas
critiques under the heading of “nationalist particularism” (which could
target an Israeli politics just as much as a Palestinian politics), to what
he says on what is owed to the “poor,” and to the “stranger,” what he
teaches of a God who “loves the strangers,” of “refuge cities or cities of
exiles,” etc. “The image of God,” he says, “is better honored in the right
given to the stranger than in symbols. Universalism [. . .] bursts the letter
apart, for it lay, like an explosive, within the letter.”14 It is a political
attention that Levinas has always paid to the body, to the materiality of
needs, to the question of money. And then the concern that I share with
him, in my own way no doubt, and according to different premises and
to other ends, on the destiny, the honor, the image and the future of
Israel, never pushed him to leniency or complacency. He one day dared
to write that “to lay claim” to the Holocaust “in order to say that God
is with us in every circumstance, is as abhorrent as the Gott mit uns
written on the belt buckles of the executioners.” Alain Finkielkraut cites
this15 and recalls that in an interview after Sabra and Shatila, Levinas
did not shy away from the subject of “Israel and Ethics:”16 “Here, no
13 Adieu, 196/113.
14 Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowitz
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28.
15 Alain Finkielkraut, “Le risque du politique,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Cahier
Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1991), 473.
16 Ibid., 471. Sabra and Shatila. Levinas, we can imagine, was not among those
seeking to deresponsibilize, to exculpate or, even worse, to justify at all costs any
violence (active or passive), as soon as it was produced under the name of a gov-
With Levinas (2003)
117
one can tell us: you are in Europe and in peace, you are not in Israel and
you allow yourself to judge! I think that there, precisely, this distinction
between these people and those, for once at least, disappears.” In the
same article, Finkielkraut also cites what I take to be a veritable lesson
in politics, in Israel, in Palestine, and elsewhere: “The person is holier
than a land, even when it is a holy land, because before an offense done
to a person, this holy land appears, in its nudity, of stone and of wood.”
ernment, the army, or state police, whether or not that of the State of Israel. We
therefore have difficulty imagining him coming to the aid of the good consciences
(especially in France), for example, as I have seen many times these last few months.
Some have even attempted to argue from the fact that, after all, “in Sabra and Shatila
were Arabs who massacred other Arabs,” or further that faced with “Sabra and
Shatila,” a “metaphysical event.” Begin was not wrong to claim “non-Jews killed
non-Jews and here we stand accused.” Thanks to which, always from Paris, it seems
we want to lecture everyone, even Israelis! 1. To the 300,000 Israelis who should not
have repressed their bad consciousness of “scapegoat,” and their sense of responsi-
bility and expressed their outrage in the streets of Tel Aviv, after Sabra and Shatila.
2. To the Israeli institution which did not follow the verdict of the Parisian author of
whom I speak (an author for whom “of course, Sharon was not responsible”). It is
an Israeli institution, let us recall, which judged that Sharon was not without some
responsibility (euphemism) for Sabra and Shatila. Following which he was forced to
resign from the government. Levinas, I suppose, knew all too well what this “nega-
tion” resembled when it contorted itself to once again deny the undeniability of
what occurred. He knew all too well what it meant to “revise” history to let oneself
be drawn along these dubious paths.
Chapter 8
Form and Fashion: (Never again: in

the face of all opposition, never again
think that “For the Form”) (2001)
“La forme et la façon: (plus jamais: envers et contre tout, ne plus jamais
penser ça ‘pour la forme’),” originally appeared as the Preface to Alain
David, Racisme et antisemitisme: Essai de philosophie sur l’envers des
concepts (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), 7–27.
Suppose, for example, a “denial:” “I am above all not doing that,”

“I above all do not mean that,” “I am above all not this or that,” for
example, “I am not racist or anti-Semitic.”1
One will agree, I suppose, that the truth here does not manifest itself
in the statement of what I say, it betrays itself practically, pragmati-
cally, in the gesture, in the fashion of doing, in the fashion of the doing,
in the word beyond the word, as a symptom. Truth becomes, de facto,
Translated by Philippe Lynes.

1 [Translator’s note] A note on the title, “La Forme et la façon (plus jamais: envers
et contre tout, ne plus jamais penser ça ‘pour la forme’):” (a) Façon is difficult to
translate, one could use “way” or “manner,” but also a kind of “style,” “fashion,”
“imitation;” façon can also mean airs of snobbishness. One would also speak of
façonner as “fashioning,” or “making,” or façon to refer to a “sort,” “kind,”
or “type” of something. Other idiomatic uses in Derrida’s preface include “sans
façon” (no thank you) and “de tout façon” (in any case). (b) Envers: The underside
(envers) of concepts is very important to Derrida’s preface, but the phrase “envers
et contre tout” means more precisely “against all opposition,” “against all odds,”
“though thick and thin.” I found it useful to keep the reference to “face” here (in the
face of all opposition); see Derrida’s discussion of “the other face” of the concept
in a Levinasian sense below. (c) Pour la forme: a literal translation here would be
“for form,” although English more commonly uses the Latin pro forma. From the
Oxford English Dictionary: “adjective: 1. Done or produced as a matter of form
1.1. Denoting a standard document or form, especially an invoice sent in advance
of or with goods supplied. adverb: 1. As a matter of form or politeness.” Merriam
Webster: “done or existing as something that is usual or required but that has little
true meaning or importance [. . .] made or carried out in a perfunctory manner or
as a formality.”
Form and Fashion (2001)
119
a symptom and one would therefore have to analyze, interrogate, or

even denounce it as such. With respect to truth, one would have in this
fashion to make the truth, as Saint Augustine would put it otherwise.
But we will never be sure that this “make the truth” says the truth about
truth and would not in turn and again be a symptom. One could say
more or less the same thing, outside the code of psychoanalysis, with
respect to what in Frankfurt they used to call a “performative contradic-
tion,” that is, the gesture through which I do the opposite, in saying it,
of what I say I am doing.
One will wonder what this contradiction in the very form of a per-
formative could possibly have to do with racism and anti-Semitism. Let
us be patient.
One of my hypotheses, perhaps, would now be the following: that to
take seriously and sometimes to affirm, even prefer the inexorable fatal-
ity, in any language, including the language of science and philosophy,
of these two forms of the same fault, the same failure, the same incon-
sistency, even of the same hypocrisy, one must be led to change the very
concepts of these “things” to which one gives the names of “truth,”
“experience,” “event,” “contradiction,” “negation,” “denial” (indeed
“denialism”) and therefore a few others still.
Further still, one would have to successfully pull off the “good” denial
and the most efficient performative contradiction. One would have to
know how to choose. It is on this condition alone that one could even
make something happen to these “things” (the concepts of truth, expe-
rience, event, etc.). Now there is no assured knowledge here, one can
never be sure of this success. By definition there is no theoretical crite-
rion, no prior norm, no definitive instrument of judgment with which
to conclude here or to calculate. Everything must be given over to the
“perhaps,” to the essential category of the “perhaps,” that is, to what
remains, in any case [de toute façon], the incalculable: the to-come of
what comes from the other and its infinite transcendence.
In closing this enigmatic preamble to a preface, I thus ask the ques-
tion: Will I have enclosed myself in every fashion in a “denial” or in a
“performative contradiction”? In writing this, for example, to finally
begin (let us open the quotation marks):
“What would one still call a preface?” I would ask. Answer: well, that
from which this book frees itself in advance, better than so very many
others. It must do so and it does so. It emancipates itself from the
authority alleged by this law of g enre—and by everything this law pre-
supposes. In truth, in excessively extending this notion of a “preface,”
I would be tempted to see in this book an implacable “return inquiry”
as to everything that comes before it—and not only to what its title calls
“racism and anti-Semitism,” indeed “philosophy” itself. Its fashion of
doing bears on and intimately works through the history of this century,
it is our history. It can never be reduced to a purely formal critical pro-
testation, to a position taken “for the form.”
“Our history.” Let us thus understand by this the world history of this
century, but also, very close to us, European, and German and French
history, always along a double scale, commensurate with the telescope
and the microscope.
That one should read Alain David is ultimately all I wish to make
understood here. I suppose that one will therefore agree: it is in the
end a question of thinking (what one in fact calls thinking, and often
against or without those who ask themselves Was heisst Denken),
and to think in thinking first and foremost, close to the umbilicus of
thought itself, racism, anti-Semitism, racism and anti-Semitism, and
the and of their dogmatic conjunction. To think that in the fidelity of
a response, a response granted, a response corresponding, to the point
of madness, to the provocation without measure of the event, to the
unprecedented violence of what has come upon us in this century, from
the other, but which will have already been swooping down on us since
time immemorial. It would be a question of thinking this in liberating
the thought of the past from an interminable p reface—namely from
the consensual premises and confusions that Alain David nonetheless
recalls, rewrites, reinterprets, indeed salutes with an often authentic,
sometimes amused respect, always without mercy, here and there in
an offhand way [sans façon]: it is the entire history of philosophy,
including (with just one exception, we will come to this) the history
of phenomenology, it is the entire history of the social sciences, all
the “modern” (theoretical and practical, discursive, militant or insti-
tutional, “associative”) approaches to racism and anti-Semitism, anti-
Semitism and Judaism—whether animated by the worst or the best
intentions, the best letting itself be ventriloquized here and there, in this
terrible history, by the worst.
An ambition, to my knowledge, without precedent.
First of all because of its properly philosophical nature. Has anyone
ever attempted a properly “philosophical” debate with racism, antira-
cism, and the enigmatic conjunction adjoining it to “Judaism,” with the
philosophies of racism, antiracism, and Judaism? Has anyone ever read
such an explication that was also a debate with philosophy as an inter-
rogation about essence? (What is racism, if race and a science of race do
not exist? What is antiracism? What does it risk sharing with its twin,
racism? What risk perpetuates this very concern? And, before what one
121
calls anti-Semitism, what is the “Judaism” thus confusedly conjoined to

race, ethnicity, community, etc.?)
To the extent that this book of philosophy, this Essay of philoso-
phy . . . also happens to be, by necessity, a book on philosophy, on
its limits—all of which perhaps come down to, we will come to this, a
certain passion of the limit itself. All evil, radical evil itself, would come
about here from an experience of the limit, a passion for limitation
confounded with a philosophical desire, with a desire constitutive of
philosophy, with a limiting or delimiting process, with the structure it
produces, as if this limiting condition were a natural form.
Another unique thing, I believe: this book of philosophy on philoso-
phy, this book of philosophy, in this philosophical limitation of philoso-
phy, deciphers a code, the form of the code that gives access to a new
problematic of racism and anti-Semitism. And to hurry things along a
little, I would say that the form of this code is without doubt nothing
other than form itself, the fascination for form, that is to say for the vis-
ibility of a certain organic or organizing contour, an eidos, if you will,
and thus an idealization, even an idealism insofar as it institutes philoso-
phy itself, philosophy or metaphysics as such. Racism and anti-Semitism
would be in league with a certain “idealism,” if one indeed wants to
take seriously the consequences of such a provocative affirmation. This
would suffice to justify a certain original “materialism” in its thesis, or
rather, we will come to this, the singular arbitration of a “material phe-
nomenology.” But let us not be too hasty.
I have had to search for an “economical” (and therefore formalizing)
guiding thread for a foreword that must of course be limited, and that
I wish here to efface as much as to write, that I would want to render
as effaced as possible, to leave the reading of the book all its freedom.
And already I notice, I will have to explain without being able to exon-
erate myself, that with these two imprudent words, “formalizing” and
“limited,” I have already committed the two sins (philosophical! As if
philosophy could sin), the two offences incriminated by Alain David.
It would in fact be one and the same fault: to delimit by giving form
or believing to see a form. Here is perhaps the unique source, but also,
the one always dividing itself in two, the two sources of racism and
anti-Semitism.
You are surprised: how could something so abstract, form, limitation,
limitation by form, be made responsible not only for evil, the worst
(genocides, secular persecutions, slavery, Auschwitz— which David
decides to write without quotation marks), but guilty of what defies the
norm and deforms the form, to wit, the monstrous? And how to choose
between the two monstrosities of the alternative, that which defies good
form for the best and that which dooms it to the worst? How can the
desire of form and formal limitation produce something teratological?
Well, read the book, and not only the passage entitled “Teratology.”
Still in search of an economical guiding thread, I had first thought of
explaining and thereby justifying the book’s title, at least its first words.
These indeed seem less immediately legible than the others. “The under-
side of concepts” does not announce a reversal, an inversion, a brutal
subversion. A subversion, perhaps,2 but one that would operate in a
discrete and silent fashion, efficiently, yes, without appearing to touch it,
directly on the formality of form. It would thus be a returning, a return,
a re-duction that lays bare what is under the f orm—and in so doing, we
will come to this, gives nudity to be thought. Shame and nudity. This
reduction would also be a conversion, a more than transcendental con-
version. For it seems to me that the strategically decisive moment of this
discourse, its linchpin or major articulation is, within phenomenology,
a conversion of the “classical,” formalist, indeed eidetist, transcendental
conversion. It would be the passage toward a “material phenomenol-
ogy” as Michel Henry understands it.
Who could have guessed that one could not elaborate a rigorous
problematic of racism and anti-Semitism without this conversion of the
conversion, without raising the stakes of the transcendental reduction,
that does everything but turn the world upside down or topsy-turvy,
and that incidentally, to reawaken them a bit, often recalls to their
senses the interpretations of racism and antiracism that today believe
themselves to be the most sophisticated? Here, in going around the con-
cepts, to access their underside, one goes behind them and accesses the
other side [face]. This side often uncovers, incidentally, the face itself,
the occulted visage, the transcendence of the other that the concept,
as it traditionally gives itself to science and philosophy, tends to fix in
the objectivity of a form. This form is at bottom nothing other than
an image, a scopic production of the imaginary. Thus, I would invite
the reader to begin, perhaps, with the Appendices of a book whose
composition—in itself a gesture, a fashion of doing—is of a strange and
courageous audacity. To begin then with “Les Nègres,” the first of these
three Appendices that at bottom gather the most powerful “formaliza-
tion,” the most explicit logic of the book, I would draw attention at
once to the singular writing of Alain David, to its spirit, its verve, to
2 The lexicon of subversion specifically appears in “Homosexualities: Sodom and

Jerusalem, the Other Politics.” It is always a form that one subverts (“. . . subverting
forms,” “. . . the subversion of forms”), cf. Alain David, Racisme et antisemitisme:
Essai de philosophie sur l’envers des concepts (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), 314–16.
123
the serious play that plays out in the extraordinary puzzle of references
(philosophical, literary, institutional, drawn from the depths of lan-
guage and everyday life), in the shifts in tone and humor, and above all
to the importance of this “underside” of concepts. The paragraph I am
about to cite recalls, then, that the book regularly denounces the power
of “form,” the formation of form, philosophical formalization. And it
also recalls the role that “color” will have already played in the demon-
stration in the last chapter of the last part, “Material Phenomenology.”
For among so many possible readings, one can follow in this book,
alongside a genea-teratology, alongside a philosophical inquiry into the
origins and the law of the monstrous (see “Transcendental Reduction
and Monstrosity”), a treatise on color, a subtle chromatology. In “Les
Nègres” then, a mise en scène of form and color is presented in a few
lines. Both form and color but also, in the same living tableau, phi-
losophy (here Kant and Heidegger, in what is also a book on Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Bergson, Benjamin,
Levinas, Arendt, Lévi-Strauss—“one of the authors the most read and
the most cited by the New Right,”3 etc.), but also slavery, and America,
but also literature (here Faulkner, in what is also a book on Proust,
Kafka, Musil, Apollinaire, Valéry, Conrad, Primo Levi, Antelme, and
so many others), but also rhetoric, this tropics of hypallagia that Alain
David, in the last chapter bearing this title (and treating in succession
“Childhood— In search of Lost Time,” “Women,” “The Animal,”
“Death,” “Color (the sequel),” “Note on Spielberg”), recalls that this
figure of style, hypallagia then, attributes to certain words, within the
same sentence, a displaced signification. It is the attribution of an attrib-
ute that other words in truth call for, without for all that creating any
misunderstanding of their meanings. An example of hypallagia, color,
again: the yellow sweetness of tea for the sweetness of yellow tea. If, as
David claims, hypallagia produces an effect of meaning in exchanging
the roles or “inverting the principal substantive with its determinants,”
then the writing of this entire book is a virtuosic exercise in hypallagia,
a gentle violence of composition or mise en scène that, while bringing
clarity or respecting the Enlightenment, acts out, indeed produces a
considerable “effect of meaning:” what profoundly changes in such a
mutation is our access to the problematic itself, to the philosophical and
scientific implementation of the questions of racism and anti-Semitism.
Here then is the aforementioned paragraph, as a sample, to give the
taste of a wonderfully disorienting book, all the while attempting one of
the multiple fashions of understanding the “underside” of its title, “The
3 David, Racisme et antisemitisme, 284.

underside of concepts.” I emphasize, of course, “form,” “color,” and

“imaginary.”
The conclusion would of course be first and foremost: black is beautiful.

But these words cannot be said in the first person. The first person is the
cogito, that of the Discourse on Method. It posits the word, in its forms,
its structures, and ignores color. This means first of all that I have only
spoken of imaginary Negroes. However, let us understand imaginary in the
Kantian sense, Einbildungskraft, and not Phantasie: transcendental receptiv-
ity. Incidentally, are there Negroes other than imaginary ones? There is—as
Aristotle said—nothing but humans. Humans and their suffering. So how
could the worst sufferings have come about without the imaginary? It is in
the language of the imaginary that the Negroes are there (Da-sein), concern
us and look at us, witnesses, as in Faulkner, of the sin that interrupts the con-
tinuity of the white world, not as people, but as Quentin recognizes in The
Sound and the Fury, “a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives
among,” indistinct silhouettes profiled in the dusty light of the South, sensed,
as is the case for Joe Christmas in Light in August, in every white person.
The imaginary Negro! That it is so, we can all agree: Faulkner is a good
endorsement. But Africa?
In reading what comes before and what follows, one will admire the
discrete yet strong consequence of this thesis, even if, for my part, it
is not so certain that Faulkner is here a sure and “good endorsement”
(but let us leave aside this secondary point, and David’s tone remains
ambiguous here). Is it possible to understand the expression “underside
of concepts” on the basis of this “obverse”? Perhaps, but we will come
to this in concluding, to one occurrence of the word “underside” (in
Levinas this time) that ties together even better the sense of this term in
the book’s title.
I now once again pick up the thread of my unjustifiable guiding thread.
It remains unjustifiable because it is a fashion of philosophically formal-
izing a profusion of philosophical, literary, historical, sociological, etc.
riches, all of which precisely are destined to demonstrate that the quasi
originary fault of racism and anti-Semitism consists in privileging form
and cultivating formal limits. I therefore risk making this absurd gesture
that would consist in repeating the fault by allegedly giving an account
[rendre compte] of a powerful discourse that itself begins by giving an
account of it and thereby raises itself above the bad effects of said fault.
Can one contradict oneself in a more flagrant fashion? I do not believe
so, but I ask that one first give me the time of the fault.
“Giving an account of” (I have just twice said “giving an account of”)
is incidentally itself a faulty expression, since it appeals to a principle
of reason or of calculation, a “reddendae rationis” that David’s entire
book puts to the formidable test of the incalculable, the illimitable, a
125
principle of unlimitedness. The expression “principle of unlimitedness”

appears very early on, and I believe illuminates his entire project. At
bottom, this book is a critical (I dare not say deconstructive) history of
a principle of reason that would have some responsibility in the genesis
of racism and anti-Semitism. But for all that, this historical genealogy
does not renounce Reason and the Enlightenment, even when the epoch
of the Enlightenment is severely passed under the X-rays of a hyper-lucid
inquiry. This is why, owing to the anguished complexity of this strategy,
I dare to speak of “deconstruction” rather than “critique.” No renounc-
ing of Reason and the Enlightenment. Quite the contrary. Whence the
difficulty, the courage of this divided, anxious, and sometimes torn
gesture.
At the end of an immense trajectory, whose map I will not redraw
(just read the book without awaiting the end of a poor preface!), David
asks himself what could be a politics of material phenomenology, this
phenomenology whose path has supposedly been opened up by Michel
Henry. In freeing itself from what submits phenomenality to the privi-
lege of the gaze, a material phenomenology would push the transcen-
dental reduction beyond form, which would always be, in this logic at
least, a visible form. This new “materialism” would radicalize the tran-
scendental reduction, it would be suspicious of “the generalized reduc-
tion of sense to the concept, that is to say its determination as form,” it
would be a “refusal of form” on the basis of an appearing that, before
any object, before any objectification of beings for Henry, would be “a
radical self-appearing.”4
The argumentation of the book seems to me to depend, at least in
its philosophical logic, on this critique of formalism, of a formalism
congenital with philosophy and its alleged survival in Husserlian phe-
nomenology (including almost its entire heritage), in ontology or more
specifically, in Heideggerian “destruction” (including almost its entire
heritage). If what I am thus putting forward is not too imprudent or
too broad, one should not rush to conclude that the entirety of the
book would risk suffering from whatever might (perhaps) weaken the
axioms of this material phenomenology or problematize its compat-
ibility
with— for
example— a Levinasian axiomatic (also powerfully
at work in David’s discourse). No, the richness and diversity of these
analyses (philosophical, literary, socio-institutional, etc.) would keep
all their value, particularly their capacities as heuristic provocations
even for a reader who might like to interrogate or complicate a little the
authority of said “material phenomenology,” the confidence it places in
4 Ibid., 218.
concepts like those of pure “transcendental life,” absolute immanence,

the “feeling oneself alive,” not to mention the virtual risks and much
more grave and sinister political complicities that a transcendental vital-
ism (if this is at bottom what is at stake) could make one fear. One does
not have to remind Alain David of all the historical connotations that
come to weigh upon our memory as soon as the pure life of the “living,”
and especially the immanence of the “feeling oneself alive” become the
ultimate recourses of thinking.
Even if these insomniac questions can be found along the way, they
do not dictate my trajectory here, nor are they my primary concern.
Moreover, Alain David is not insensitive to the risk he runs. He does
not back away before this monstrous question, but one so classical, so
inevitable: that of monstrosity itself, which is never the formless or the
deformed in its pure state: “In what form does what proceeds from the
interruption of forms appear?” And he continues: “Contradictory and
clumsy question? Of course! It is nonetheless Kantian, seeking, beyond
the interruption signified by the antinomies, the solidity of a ground—
Grundlegung, establishment of a ground—the firmness of a universal
form that nevertheless and paradoxically does not make a world. It
would be appropriate at this point to prolong Kant through Levinas.”5
And thus the recourse to a logic of interruptive transcendence that is
just as indispensable to the book, but that some will wonder to what
point it can be allied to the somewhat vitalist immanentism of a “mate-
rial phenomenology.” For my part, it seems to me that the tension, the
active competition between these two “phenomenologies” (which I
would dare call, too quickly and too simplistically, “post-Husserlian”—
and very French at bottom, let us not forget this) is one of the secrets
of this book, of its own “phenomenology,” which of course cannot be
reduced to either of these two. This would be at once its originality and
its efficaciousness, its demonstrative force: what it does, in fact, in its
own fashion.
What I would like to pursue instead would be the rigorous conse-
quence that links the indictment of form (“Race is this hyperbole of
form”),6 thus of limitation, to the cause, the just cause of an uncondi-
tional affirmation, an unlimited affirmation. That is to say to the impos-
sible, to another thought of the impossible.
5 Ibid., 91. I have emphasized the word “form” that I believe bears the decisive
force of this argument. Its recurrence would confirm this throughout the book and
again on the same page: David speaks here of a humanism of the other human where
“metaphysical forms” would be interrupted. (My emphasis.)
6 Ibid., 284.
127
Through a fascinating and original analysis of the singular role of the

1901 Associations in France (LDH, LICRA, MRAP, SOS Racisme),7
David opens onto the thought of an unconditional demand for justice,
attentive not only to what “calls for a law” but also to what calls for a
“law not yet written” and even to what does not call. “Suspecting injus-
tice everywhere, it (the association) invents the other, in the register of
its invisibility.”8 This justice for the invisible, for the other as invisible,
for the other who is not there, or who is there but still out of sight, this
is what seems to confirm a “material phenomenology” concerned with
exceeding formality at the same time as visibility. Yet this is also where
this excess of justice with regard to existing law (that is to say the pos-
sible) takes the figure (a figure without figure, precisely, and without
possible form) of the im-possible. Not a negative im-possible but the
Im-possible as the site of the other, source of the most inflexible and by
definition unlimited injunction, the a priori excessive, disproportionate
injunction of the other as other. This im-possible is not, I was saying,
contrary to what its grammar could lead one to think, the negativity
of an interdiction, it fashions and figures the most affirmative, the least
limited of affirmations. This is indeed what David tells us immediately
after—every time he writes, with a capital letter, the Impossible. In a
very French context, for example, marked by the Dreyfus Affair, he
revives Péguy’s lesson (“Everything begins in mysticism and ends in poli-
tics”) and thus defines the Republic, the “republican affirmation” as this
“mysticism” of the Impossible. Not an abdication or resignation before
what remains impossible and thus inaccessible but, quite the contrary,
the condition, sense, and motivating force of an effective political action,
a militancy worthy of the name: “mystical, the republican affirmation
constitutes subjectivity in its responsibility for the Impossible.” Or
again: “Responsibility for what is not there.” Or again: “The position of
militancy is henceforth that of a continuous attention to the Impossible:
in other words, if one agrees that the Impossible is what cannot figure
into a present, to a memory.” And this memory will be all the less
“sacralizing” (one glimpses the political consequences of this icono-
clastic sobriety, this sobered-up fervor) in being severed from all idols,
that is to say from every present or presentable figure: “Memory on the
contrary of what does not figure, and has never figured in the present.”
7 [Translator’s note] Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH); Ligue internationale

contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA); Mouvement contre le racisme et pour
l’Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP); SOS Racisme.
8 Appendix II, “Militants, One More Effort!” See David, Racisme et antisemi-
tisme, 300.
This is the condition to be suspicious of all communitarianisms: not to

reprimand them and forbid them the culture of their culture—folklore,
language, cuisine, m orals—but only to subject them to the republican
demand. This is the condition for detecting the racism or anti-Semitism
that still keep watch, “germinally,” in an insufficiently republican
democracy, in a liberalism that could not protect itself from (some-
times well intentioned) forms of association, from identitarian claims
or purely economic concepts of citizenship, in a word in a politics of
the “possible”—I will say “politics” period, in a politics that would
be nothing other than a politics, in sum a pro forma politics. David is
correct to qualify this politics, and precisely to disqualify it thus: “the
art of the possible, the safeguarding and management of the present”9—
the dish that presently, and alas even in the best of cases, we are served
under the name “politics,” the politics of government.
There are, in this matrix (and more than the matrix, for David gives
rich illustrations of this throughout his book), the resources for a vigilant
critique, armed to detect all the temptations, conscious or not, at work
in even the democratic and antiracist programs that seem the most above
suspicion. One must thus read and reread the subtle, tightly interwoven,
lively discussions with those holding “friendly” discourses. David’s
vigilance never lets itself be disarmed, whether by allies or by those to
whom he owes much. The debates initiated, on more than one occasion,
with Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Pierre-André Taguieff,
Dominique Schnapper, or Léon Poliakov are particularly enlightening.
Let me insist on the logic of this argumentation for a moment. It is not
only important for its own sake, for the tools of analysis, the impera-
tives, maxims or political regulative Ideas it proposes to every “militant”
and (yes, indeed!) that it also inevitably formalizes. It perhaps allows
one to discern, at the center of a complex and fully assumed inheritance,
the original singularity of Alain David’s gesture. If this new definition
of “subjectivity” (from mysticism to politics) on the basis of responsi-
bility for the other revives and reinscribes, it would appear, a teaching
of Levinas’s, if the attention to what exceeds the figure or the figurable,
that is to say sense as form, is oriented according to a schema closer
to Henry’s material phenomenology, I believe (but I am putting this
forward in a perhaps imprudent fashion) that conversely the concept
(without concept) of the Im- possible, and especially the unlimited
affirmation of the Im-possible10 does not belong to the idiom of either
9 Ibid., 274.
10 This affirmation of the unlimited impossible is also, one must understand, the
affirmation of a law, a commandment. It is rather affirmation as response. A “yes” is
129
of these two thinkers so important to David. This would be his own

fashion of doing, his own proper gesture, appropriate to sketching out
a politics, a political hyperbole, a practical philosophy of the res publica
whose elaboration one would seek in vain in Levinas and Henry. In one
as in the other, one would perhaps seek in vain (perhaps, perhaps, if I
am not jumping too far ahead) what constitutes one of the levers of this
hyperbolics: a problematic of the law and the border between law and
justice. When David speaks of law, he does so in a sense he does not hide
still remains “unheard of.”11 But this allows him to diagnose in an acute,
efficacious, and convincing manner the limits of always imperfect legis-
lations, their impotence and thus ultimately their injustice, even when
they appear well intentioned.
(In a general fashion this book is incidentally at least just as worth-
while for its warnings against “good intentions,” as for its uncom-
promising verdicts against the evil genius or the radical evil before
which a certain “democratic” consensus of our time sometimes risks
slumbering. Is to read the underside of “good intentions” not to
always a response; this can already be understood in the structure of its grammar, if
one can say so, in its implicit syntax. This response is a responsibility before this law
“commanding . . . the impossible” (David, Racisme et antisemitisme, 291). I specify
this point to sharpen the question a little. If the affirmation of an infinite responsi-
bility indeed recalls a teaching of Levinas (who incidentally shares it with others,
but this is not important here), the lexicon, at least, of the Im-possible seems more
foreign to his teaching. One would have to discern between several thoughts of the
im-possible (Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, others) without necessarily assigning these
inheritances to Alain David, who seeks and no doubt finds here a different, origi-
nal path. It remains that the unlimited, or rather the “principle of unlimitedness,”
attributed here to the aforementioned affirmation— without hesitation, without
starting over, as I would be attempted to do—David calls it “Judaism,” and almost
everything in his book depends on this: “Judaism represents within the space of con-
cepts, that is to say within the space of the limit, a principle of unlimitedness. The
social sciences, encountering the question of a relation to a transcendence, cannot
do without this principle” (113). Elsewhere, in a somewhat problematic fashion for
me, David relates the affirmation, “the chance of the affirmation” we are speaking
of, to the Old Testament. And it is the word “culturally” here that would leave me
perplexed: “the chance of an affirmation, an affirmation that was culturally that of
the law of the Old Testament, and which today gives weight to the republican affir-
mation” (300). It is perhaps because it is in tune with this “principle of unlimited-
ness,” and thus of infinite indefiniteness, because it lets or makes itself be chosen by
the unlimited that Judaism is, as one of David’s titles puts it, “nowhere to be found.”
But racism would also (correlatively?) be “nowhere to be found:” “What about
racism? A universally present object that is nowhere to be found, an inconsistent
and yet real form, does it not play the role of what the Marxist tradition presented
as ideology?” (83).
11 David, Racisme et antisemitisme, 302.
take seriously the logic of denial and performative contradiction?

At bottom, this book is also in its own way a treatise on denial and
performative contradiction— and this is why I began there, even
before beginning. David is merciless about what public opinion, and
sometimes the academic tradition, blindly hold to be above suspi-
cion. Already the eighteenth century, already the most glorious and
most uncontested representatives of the illustrious Enlightenment
appear here under a crueler light, that is to say naked in the shadow
of their pro-slavery inclinations. Read here, in the wake of Louis Sala-
Molins’s Le Code Noir, some terrifying pages on Voltaire, Rousseau,
Condorcet, etc.)
Two examples, both taken up in an analysis of associative logic.
On the one hand the laws on racism (for example the Pleven law of
1972) provide an imperfect instrument, that is to say one programmed
by a crude concept of the functioning of the non-concept or figure of
“race,” and thus of racism. Such a juridical instrument fails to identify
the indirect, micrological or symptomatic manifestations of “everyday”
racism. The law misses and will continue to miss for a long time the
concepts that would allow it to adjust itself to the “implicit,” not to
mention the unconscious. On the other hand, the concept of crimes
against humanity (whose history and structure would deserve a book
and a “preface” of their own!) has all the ambiguity of a juridical
concept (set down during the Nuremburg Trials by a performative act
inscribed into international law since 1945) that nonetheless, in France,
due to the imprescriptibility voted in in 1964, exceeds the order and
thus the determinable sense of the juridical. Even if it is not, as David
(who I would perhaps not follow on this point) suspects, “an opening
onto utopia,”12 imprescriptibility indeed installs human law within an
element of infinity that is foreign and transcendent to it: “indefinite
time,” says David precisely and, it seems to me, more in keeping with
the logic of some Last Judgment. It is a question here of an eternal cul-
pability and a transhistorical justice that a human and secular law can
only feign to bend toward.
Ground without ground of what is perhaps no longer even a horizon.
Is it not in this non-site that the most urgent and difficult questions
emerge? Not only the question of the human in general, or the question
of the proper of the human. But today, more “specifically,” that of the
human of “crimes against humanity” and the human of Human Rights.
David writes: “The philosopher, metaphysician and humanist, cannot
12 Ibid., 302.
131
avoid transforming himself into an anthropologist. Who is the Human

of Human Rights?”13
This book’s major point of interest for me, in sum, is that the criti-
cal force of its operation, its demystifying strategy, is never deployed
to the detriment of its integrity. To demonstrate the failure of the
social sciences to “conceptualize racism and anti-Semitism,” the best
work of these sciences is taken into account, taken up with sympa-
thy, without any denigratory critique,14 it is instead worked through,
integrated—and always by a thought, in the name of a thought that is
in no way anti-scientific, but that also wants, despite all the difficulty
of the task, to remove the unlimited affirmation, as with the “power
of affirmation”15 from which it proceeds, just as much from reflexive
consciousness as from utopia, myth or ideology. The immense ambition
David modestly presents, in the manner of a laboratory researcher who
takes their risks, as a “hypothesis,” is that of “an affirmation irreduc-
ible to reflexive consciousness, to the knowledges that society produces
about the world and about itself; an affirmation that crystallizes, in the
quasi-Stendhalian sense of the word, around the motifs of racism and
anti-Semitism. But how is one to understand or make such an affirma-
tion understood without falling into the traps of myth or of ideology?”
Against this risk, which by definition one will never be done with, the
recourse of this book must be that of a knowledge, even a philosophical
science. It will be the knowledge of this “rigorous science” that Husserl
called “phenomenology.” Simply, if one can still say “simply,” David
inaugurates a double movement here:
1. He in fact proposes objects to this philosophical science that are abso-

lutely unheard of for it (racism and anti-Semitism), incommensurable
object-events, historical objects marked today by a singular irruption
and thus by the question it poses, “the question of extermination”
in this century (one will follow on this subject the continuous debate
with Adorno, Lyotard, Nancy, Lanzmann and a few others).
13 Ibid., 281. On the other side of these inevitable limits and presuppositions,
David is no doubt thinking of a beyond of anthropology, indeed of an anthropolo-
gist to come, formed by the urgency of this question, measuring up to this question.
It would be a matter of another discipline.
14 And sometimes even (albeit rarely) without objection, with recognition. This
is notably the case for demographic studies, notably those of Hervé le Bras. The
latter, as we know, brings the past to light as well as certain ideological orientations
(sometimes of the extreme right) that leave their mark on a French natalism and on
institutions like the INED. David, Racisme et antisemitisme, 103ff.
15 Ibid., 115.
2. He imprints upon the phenomenological project this “material”—

if not materialist—inflexion we have spoken of, without which it
would be impossible, in any case very difficult, to take affect into
account. Where, outside the artifact thus named, there is not the
race or the Semite, or the Jew, how can one speak of racism and
anti-Semitism without taking seriously the effects of the artifact, the
phantasm, the imaginary—and above all of affect itself? Denial is
everywhere, already at the heart of affect. We must thus speak of
affect—and the interest of this other phenomenology (a material
phenomenology that would thus lead beyond consciousness! beyond
“reflexive consciousness”!), is precisely to open itself toward affect.
To the question “What is a race?,” and after having objected just as
much to the positivism of the social sciences as to the Marxist analy-
sis of ideology, David seeks in affect the true historical weight of
this artifact without consistency we call race. And it is from shame,
from the human experience of nudity that he deduces, on the basis
of a more or less allegorical analysis of the second story of Genesis,
the “feeling that governs the division of the races,”16 to wit the affect
of primitive humiliation that the “superior” projects before itself to
constitute the “inferior” as its other, over there, outside, elsewhere.
(Can one think shame, modesty, and the feeling of nudity without
reading an invincible denial there? A “performative contradiction”?
The a nimal—man, since it has no clothing. It is more naked and
(but) it is not naked, not yet naked. The human, for its part, is more
naked than the animal, for this very reason, it is the only living
being capable of nudity. It would be the only one who would have
to say, “I am not naked because I am naked.” Clothing, the “form”
of modest clothing would be a denial made real, a denial clothed,
fashioned, already the mode or fashion [le mode ou la mode], the
affectation of some fashion,17 an originary betrayal of the truth, an
ineffaceable and immemorable perjury: I am (not) naked [je (ne) suis
(pas) nu(e)].
Because here again, in this deduction of the effects of nudity, pre-

cisely when nudity finds itself stripped of all its effects, the question of
form returns, notably on the basis of Levinas’s definition of nudity: it is
reality when reality is “stripped of its form.” I will in turn cite this cita-
tion of Levinas since behind, underneath, or rather on the underside of
this dramaturgy of form, which occupies the whole scene of the book,
16 Ibid., 135.
17 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.
133
it exhibits the underside itself, the being-underside of the underside.

Denial of denial, it is the story of the denuded nude, also of the denud-
ing of nudity:
Let us cite a few lines that this essay will never stop wanting to comment
on, that defy commentary: “Form is that by which a being is turned toward
the sun, that by which it has a face, through which it gives itself, by which
it comes forward. It conceals the nudity in which an undressed being with-
draws from the world, and is as though its existence were elsewhere, had an
“underside,” as though it were surprised during the time of “a bare breast
glimpsed between gown and gown.” This is why the relationship with nudity
is the true experience of the otherness of the other—were the term experience
not impossible where it is a question of a relation which goes beyond the
world.”18
“. . . the true e xperience . . . were the term experience not impossible

where it is a question of a relation which goes beyond the world.”
Levinas will thus have spoken, in naming it, of what it is “impossible” to
say as such: experience. What is impossible is to inscribe this transcend-
ence (the “relation that goes beyond the world”) within immanence, to
wit the presence, proximity, and immediacy one necessarily associates
with the word “experience”—and to the phenomenology supposedly
in tune with the things themselves in their most stripped-down nudity.
However, all the while denying its possibility or legitimacy, Levinas does
the impossible, he effectively makes use of an “impossible” term, experi-
ence. And we understand it.
This is what occurs. This is what happens. Experience itself. What
has already happened. An absolute interruption will have taken place,
and things nonetheless continue. And this will have affected all the
concepts that have preoccupied us up to this point: experience, event,
truth, denial, performative contradiction19—and the racism and anti-
18 David, Racisme et antisemitisme, 137, note 187. The citation of Levinas refers to
De l’Existence à l’Exsitant: Second Edition (Paris, Vrin, 1981), 61; trans. Alphonso
Lingis as Existence and Existents (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 40. One
will find elements of this analysis on “shame” in the pages devoted to Lanzmann’s
Shoah (see 207ff.) which so powerfully claim, on the basis of some extraordinary
declarations by Primo Levi, the impossibility of witnessing (“. . .we the survivors are
not the real witnesses . . . T
his is a disturbing notion.”).
19 I leave aside here, having sketched it elsewhere, a certain calling into question,
or rather a delimitation of this motif (incidentally so necessary and productive) of
performativity in general, of so-called performative force or form, of the performa-
tive act that produces the event it speaks of, of all that attests to performativity in
language (almost everything). Everywhere it operates, the form of this performativ-
ity presupposes a mastery. This mastery is first of all ensured by the conventional
Semitism that one will not have begun to think if one does not decide to
take seriously, as Alain David does here, what has already come about,
and what comes there, effectively, beyond all form.” (let us close the
quotation marks).
Have I finished with my “performative contradictions”? Have I con-
tradicted myself enough, contradicted myself well enough? Have I done
well?
(thus fictional and symbolic) conditions of its legitimation in an already given

context. These conditions are formal and, in a certain sense, the performative that
submits itself to these always does so, in a certain measure, “Pro Forma.” Such a
mastery neutralizes in advance (at least relatively, in a certain measure), it amortizes
the absolute irruption of the event that the performative is supposed to produce, the
alterity of the event or the event of the other. Where an event worthy of the name
comes about, a certain performativity must be rerouted. As much as any appeased
“constative.” The event, the coming of the other, must affect beyond all anticipation,
convention, and performative horizon. The first “performative contradiction” is
perhaps situated there, before any other determinable contradiction. It first of all has
its site in form itself, in the formality of the performative. It neutralizes in advance
the event, that is to say the other, that it is supposed to produce or to make possible.
Chapter 9
Echoes of Encounters (2003)
“Echos des rencontres III,” from a volume dedicated to the work of

Louis Marin, was originally published in Signes, Histoire, Fictions,
edited by Frédéric Pousin and Sylvie Robic (Paris: Editions Arguments,
2003), 136–43.
I feel the honor I’ve been granted, or the blessing I’ve been accorded, all
the more profoundly since I have no right to preside over this session.
This is not a figure of rhetoric or of politesse. Claude Frontisi has given
me excessive credit in having me lead a seminar on Louis Marin. No,
this seminar does not have a director. Along with a few friends and
colleagues, we had decided several years ago to begin to host such a
seminar—
notably with Pierre- Antoine Fabre, Nicole Loraux, Yves
Hersant, Catherine Peschanski, and others who are also here. Before
we judged it necessary to dedicate it to the published and forthcoming
works of Louis Marin, this seminar e xisted—in fact, since my arrival at
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. With Louis and others,
since 1985–1986 we had organized it around the always changing theme
of “Philosophy and Social Sciences.” We had here, with Louis, many
enthralling exchanges. For me personally, my relationship with Louis
was that of an admiring friend who is trying to follow or intersect as best
he can an immense trajectory, having the growing feeling that he is still
far from having taken its measure—and this colloquium will have made
even clearer to me my inability to take that measure.
It was fifty years ago that I met Louis Marin, when we were together
in preparatory classes at Louis- le-
Grand before the École normale
supérieure. At the time, Louis was part of those that were called the
“Lyonnais” (with Henri Joly and Bernard Comte). If I like to say that I
was a student with him, it is also because, studying around him, reading
Translated by Adam Rosenthal.

him, learning to follow him and learning to learn, I always had a non-
affected feeling of modesty that has never left me.
When I say that, throughout this entire half- century, we crossed
paths, I speak not only of these amicable proximities that never had
any shadow. I mean that we crossed paths in the work of thought and
writing, according to complicated and often implicit itineraries that I
will not try to reconstitute here: I wouldn’t be capable of it. Crossed
paths alike in French and non-French institutions: thus, in the United
States, at Johns Hopkins; at the University of California, Irvine; at
Cornell . . . Here are a few breadcrumbs that marked the paths that led
me to follow Louis Marin to this point, to the Centre Thomas More,
where he arrived before me and for the sake of which, in the name of all,
I thank the hosts who welcome us here so generously.
Unworthy of the grace I’ve been granted and incapable of refusing
it, I will not take over the seminar. I will be content with handing the
floor off after I’ve offered a few questions, hypotheses, interpretations,
suggestions, and modest perspectives, in memory of what was given us
to hear here. Everything will come back to the question of “fiction and
knowledge,” under three headings in which fiction is found each time:
signature and fiction, representation and fiction, power and fiction.
Signature and Fiction
To begin, I refer to the title of this colloquium, elaborated in our

seminar: “Making History with Signs [Faire l’histoire avec des signes].”
This title is obviously ambiguous. To make history, that is to exercise
a force, that of the actor of history. It is also to exercise a knowledge,
that of the historian, who performs their trade as a historian. In these
two ways of making history, the point would be to find a fiction at
work. Evidently, this fiction has a form that, to keep it short, I will call
performative, because I want, at the end of this trajectory, to return to
the great question of the performative and to pose a question on the
subject of the performative and of historicity. This fiction that makes
history with signs—the word “signs” is very equivocal—is a performa-
tive fiction. It is found first of all under the form of the signature. I will
link this to what was said here about Klee’s signature, or about that of
Marin himself, as the author of a fiction of knowledge, of description, of
observation, a productive fiction.
I was also thinking of citing Louis Marin’s text on the marvelous book
by Thomas More, in those passages where one finds Marin’s proper
name as a common noun, a barely encrypted signature:
137
From the eye of the one to the ear of the other, the experience of the world
is communicated in stories, in order to constitute a knowledge that More
terms “historia,” a great totalizing narrative that brings together in this
place, here, direct eyewitness accounts, the very presence of foreign things
that are elsewhere. “Then I didn’t guess too far wrong,” replies More. “The
moment I saw him, I thought he must be a sailor.” More’s conjecture is both
true and false. The traveler is a sailor [un marin], but not by profession. He
has certainly sailed, but not like Palinurus; more like Ulysses, or even better,
like Plato. In these three names lie three epic and historic figures: Palinurus,
the carefree traveler in Virgil’s Aeneid who perished when he fell asleep at
the helm; Ulysses, the Homeric hero of a thousand ruses who learned of the
world, of men, and of gods in his ten years of wandering; and Plato, who
went to Egypt to know the truth of society and to Sicily to establish it. [I
comment: to know and to establish, the two movements of knowledge (to
make history as historian) and of inauguration (to make history by estab-
lishing society).] These three names designate three journeys in fiction and
in history, three manners of traveling around the world. From these three
names, Peter Giles and More construct the figure of the utopian traveler: the
one he is not, the one he resembles, and the one he represents in his own
way.1
Another occurrence was signaled this morning, I won’t return to it. Then
this, which I will read, while leaving open for later the issue at work in
the passage:
In Book 1, the reader sees the precise marks of how fiction casts off from
“reality” (the fictionalization of the real) or is anchored in reality (the
realization of the fictive). He finds these marks between journeys and maps,
mapped journeys (the journey “realizes” the map in the reality the map
represents) and unmapped journeys (the map is suppressed by the journey
“to the unknown”), between enunciators of utterances and utterances of
enunciators. As we know, Book 1 was written after Book 2 and reinforces
the anchoring of the wondrous island in the social, political, and historical
known world. Or perhaps, conversely, it cuts, one by one, every tie with this
world. First, it cuts its spatial ties: It seems, in fact, that Raphael, despite
his wanderings in every direction, is in some sense drawn toward Utopia
like a magnet. We know that he evokes, in turn, his visits to three “imagi-
nary” nations. The first nation encountered, that of the Polyleritae, is, we
find, a more-or-less independent province of Persia. The second, that of the
Achoriorum, is situated to the southeast of the island of Utopia. The third,
that of the Macarenses, is nearby.2
1 Louis Marin, Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1988), 27.
2 Marin, Cross-Readings, 30.
Then here is the passage that counts most for me:
From the first to the last nation, the reference points have shifted: Persia has
given way to Utopia, but conversely, the traveler has passed from absurdity
to happiness by way of nonspace (poluleiros to macairos by way of a-chora).3
This chora and the difference that there may be between the non-place
and chora, a place that is also, in a certain way, a non-place, is impor-
tant to me. In these passages we are dealing with two statuses of fiction
and history: first, the fiction described by Marin, fiction at work in
history, which makes history, fiction that structures, institutes, consti-
tutes power [pouvoir], through the potency [puissance] of history. The
fiction produced by Marin is signed by h im—a signature that, on the
one hand, is part of the text, like Marin is in the text, and on the other
hand, is outside the text, in this margin where the signature effaces
itself [s’efface]. In both cases the signature effaces itself: in the first case,
because it is part of the tableau, it is inscribed in the very thing that is
being written; in the second case, because this author’s signature falls
outside of the text.
The signature is always a fiction, of the order of the performative. It
describes nothing. When I sign, I don’t describe my name. I don’t write
my name like when, in an airplane, I fill out a landing card: there, it isn’t
a signature. I only sign when I place my autograph at the bottom of a
text and this gesture is performative. It’s me who signs, I say that I sign,
I describe nothing. The fiction produced and signed by Marin can itself
have a double status and that is what is at stake in part of our discus-
sions. Is this fiction in the service of knowledge? Is it regulated by the
law of the historian, curious for knowledge or for teaching knowledge?
Or else does the performative fiction create a new event? Does it add
something? Does it make another history? Between the two statuses of
this performative fiction that one calls a signature, it is very difficult to
decide. It is the reading that will decide.
I want to link this question of the two statuses of the signature, of
fiction, to that of the neuter, about which we have been speaking since
yesterday. The neuter, on which Louis Marin worked so extensively,
signifies at once the zero point of the decision, which is the center of
sovereignty and the place of the k ing—and what makes the wheel go
round, and as a result, escapes the relation of contradiction that founds
it. This neither-nor of the neuter, ne-uter, can always be translated
by a both-and, a possibly dialectical synthesis. One finds a thousand
3 Ibid., 30.
139
examples of this in the history of philosophy. A glance at Plato’s chora

would give us an example. The chora can be interpreted as the inter-
mediary, the metaxu: neither sensible nor intelligible, neither sensibility
nor understanding, but also that which participates in both. Either one
can subtract chora from opposition, and it is radically foreign to all the
predicates that one would like to oppose to it—or else it is already the
combination of the two. These two gestures are always possible: one can
always dialectize the neuter. At the matrix of everything I am saying, I
would like to suggest that, ceaselessly, what is unrepresentable as neuter
or vacant center can only be represented. One cannot represent it, but
all that one can do is to represent it. One can only determine it where it
escapes determination.
I will take a political example. What is in question here is the excep-
tional. The neuter is the exceptional. The figure of the king, the zero
point, reunites or separates contradictions. It is the place without con-
tradiction, where all contradictions can precipitate out. The king is the
exception. The sovereignty of the absolute monarch comes to him from
God, but it will subsequently be transferred to the people by Rousseau
(and the concept of sovereignty will remain intact). This exception that
sovereignty constitutes is the foundation of everything. In other words,
it is the exception that founds the space in relation to which the excep-
tion is excepted. Let’s take the example of the power to pardon, absolute
attribute of the sovereignty of regal right: it’s the absolute exception,
but it is also the very thing that founds the unity of the nation, the unity
of the State. It is the very thing that founds what it escapes. It is, in a
certain manner, unrepresentable. The king is a figure that represents the
unrepresentable and every representation of it will come in place of the
unrepresentable, which means that there will be no opposition between
the unrepresentable and representation. The unrepresentable and repre-
sentation are in a way the same.
Representation and Fiction
In homage to Thomas More, the proper name of utopia and the name of
the place where we are, I cite once again the magnificent text “Journeys
to Utopia” of Cross-Readings [Lectures traversières]:
[The island] has become an object of language, of listening and writing,

a text, and if w
e—who are about to read Thomas More’s Utopia—see its
image and are able to dream of what the image represents, it is only through
the mediation of the two figures, Raphael and More, through the dialogue,
the narrative, and the description that these figures represent. We see it only
as the “ekphrasis” that Raphael’s narrative and More’s writing have con-
structed: fiction.
[. . .] On geographical maps, these place names are written on the repre-
sented places they name, so that the referent, the represented, and the name
coincide. In Holbein’s engraving, however, by means of the decorative appa-
ratus that bears them, these names are brought forward visually, in front
of the represented objects they name. They move in front of the image as a
whole; they belong to its frame, its edge. [I comment: we find again the prob-
lematic of the frame and edge, of the parergon, about which we have already
spoken]. They are posed, we might say, on the transparent plane of the screen
of representation. They obliquely show the unrepresentable part of the iconic
sign, the part that, if it were to be represented, would neutralize and nullify
by its opacity what the representation represents. They show that Utopia
(the island and the map) is only a representation, a discursive “ekphrasis,”
a fiction of things through words. But they also show, conversely, that every
representation, at its edges and its limits, conceals a utopia, the fiction of a
desire for elsewhere realized right here, the promise of happiness in a journey,
and a fiction of a return to the native country.4
Of these lines that would call for a discussion without end, I retain only
this: between representation and the unrepresentable, there is naturally
no antinomy. Representation only represents the unrepresentable; the
latter is the object of transitive representation. If it were representable,
one would have no need of representation. We are here dealing with
this strange word, in Latin as in French, “representation,” which would
merit a preliminary semantic, etymological, and lexical analysis. As we
already said, in the polysemy of this word one finds at least three senses:
the repetition of presence, the supplementary substitution that adds
something to presence, or the delegation representing absence. Each
time it is the unrepresentable that calls for representation. It is a certain
impossibility, provisional or radically definitive, of presentation that
calls for representation, and the two are the same.
Here, when I read Marin, who battled his entire working life with this
logic of representation, I ask myself—and this is a difference between
our two stories—if and why another approach to this great question
wasn’t attempted by him: for example that of a Heidegger, who begins
from German, where they battle with another lexicon, and where they
sometimes have recourse to Latin, as Repräsentation, but where they
use above all Vorstellung (which doesn’t designate the substitute or
the supplement or the delegated, but simply the object, objectivity), or
Darstellung (which signifies presentation). Why were beings given their
dominant form as objects of representation? And in the history of this
4 Ibid., 32–3.
141
privilege of representation, which Heidegger articulates in his way, it

happens that the seventeenth century occupies a determinative place.
I’m not saying that one must accept without question what Heidegger
tells us happened with representation in the seventeenth century, but
there is certainly, between the two seventeenth centuries, that of Louis
Marin and that of Heidegger, the program for a great discussion, for a
problematic translation.
Heidegger interprets this privilege accorded to representation on the
basis of the Cartesian and Leibnizian projects, from the subjectivity
of the cogito or from Leibnizian finalism. There are some enormous
lacunae in his schema, for example Spinoza who is neither a thinker of
representation, nor a thinker of the cogito. Heidegger sets up his inter-
pretation of the hegemony of the principle of reason—above all in the
text entitled The Principle of Reason5—in this epoch when representa-
tion comes to dominate. I wonder what one could do by putting into
relation the advances of Marin’s work and the epochalization Heidegger
goes in for. I wonder the same thing about Freud who himself worked
extensively on representations, on this word, playing sometimes with
Vorstellung, sometimes with Repräsentant. There are even representa-
tives of representation in Freud, which have to do with things more
proximate to Marin, since it is also a question of Darstellbarkeit, of
the possibility of mise en scène, of figurability. There would be great
interest in exploring an enormous territory with the instruments that
Marin has left us, for example in trying to historicize or politicize the
Heideggerian or Freudian readings. I only wished to indicate here one
possible reading.
Power and Fiction
In the third place is raised the question of the force of power, which
has constantly returned in our discussions. Obviously, this force, this
enigma of force, is sustained by fiction. Why fiction, why do all the fic-
tions about which I’ve just spoken hold a power? Power of the image,
which is naturally at the hinge between the logic of fiction and the
historical interpretation of political events about which we’ve spoken.
Why is historical p ower—in the process of historical reality, not on the
side of the h
istorian—founded on a fiction? How can a fictional reality
found a power? The fictions we are talking about are the establishments
5 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press, 1996).
of events. Yesterday, we paused on the “everything happens as if [tout

se passe comme si].” What to think of the “everything [tout],” conse-
quently of the “without remainder [sans reste]”? In order to articulate
this question of the “everything happens as if,” I would be tempted to
connect it to that of the remainder. There is some remainder, there is
no remainder [il y a du reste, il n’y a pas de reste]: it looks as though I
want to reconcile contradictories. Just as between the unrepresentable
and representation there is no contradiction, neither is there any contra-
diction between the remainder and the “there is no remainder.” This is
what I would like to emphasize, by way of conclusion.
Let’s return to the figure of the king, the “king himself.” What is this
himself [même]? We are guided here by the fact that, when we want
to think something, we think the thing itself [même]. Who is this king
himself [même]? Himself [Même], this means power. In the ipseity of the
king himself, if one follows the etymology and the history, in the affir-
mation of the sameness of the self [mêmeté du soi], there is the affirma-
tion of a power: I can. Benveniste shows this very well: the ipse, whether
it is that of the host, hospes, the master of the house or the husband—I
refer you to the texts of Benveniste on hospitality— the hospes, the
ipse, it is he who can, who says: “I can.” To say “myself [moi-même]”
(meisme, metipse, metipsissimus) is to affirm a power. Therefore, the
king himself is the site of an absolute power, as is ipseity in general.
“Everything happens as if” means that the same, wherever it appears,
wherever there is power and totality, is all without remainder. The all
without remainder, which is founded on a fiction, is not the “everything
happens as if” because nothing else is there. It is because everything [le
tout], the signification of everything, is “as if.” It is the fiction of the
same and of power, without remainder. “Everything happens as if” is
not a sentence about fiction, it is a sentence about the whole [le tout].
About the same everything, about the everything itself [sur le même
tout, sur le tout même]. This is to say that there is nothing outside of
this everything (happens as if). There is no remainder. There is nothing
outside. That which is outside, is the nothing. The remainder is nothing.
It is the thing as nothing. The remainder is nothing. [Le reste n’est rien.
Il est la chose comme rien. Le reste est rien.]
Between the propositions “there is some remainder” and “there is no
remainder,” there is no contradiction. I am trying to think the remain-
ing of the remainder [la restance du reste], not as something, since it’s
nothing, but as this X that does not allow itself to be ontologized. A
remaining [restance] is not a modality of something that would be a
permanence or a subsistence. The remaining is nothing. There is some
remainder, which is not [Il y a du reste, qui n’est pas]. The power of the
143
king himself is precisely the elimination of every remainder that would

be, but it remains that it does not remain. Nothing remains. This remain-
der has the status of the neuter, which does not exist. The neuter is not.
Where has one ever encountered any neuter? But the neutrality of the
neuter is what will set into motion representation, fiction, the remainder
that is nothing, etc. It is this logic that sets everything in motion.
Necessity of the Trap
This is what will allow me to move rapidly toward a conclusion, by

returning for a moment to utopia and to the performative. If people have
believed that they could oppose, on the one hand a function, a finality
of utopia as critique of ideology, until the end of ideologies, and on the
other hand a utopia that would open onto hope, that would not simply
be critique, but would be a sort of “hope principle,” this is because the
indeterminacy that shapes utopia is the condition of indeterminate hope,
in other words a species of messianicity without messianism, without
determinable figure. It is a relation to the event that comes from this
empty place, that of the neuter, of the “without remainder,” of the
remainder that is no longer anything. This is where the performative
fiction, or general representation, has its place or its chance. One only
has the chance to make history, in all the senses of this word, where
there is a relation to the future, to what comes, to the other that comes
unforeseeably. There is made, as a result, a promise of unforeseeability,
which can only be a fiction. And there, between making and not-making,
there is not a contradiction either.
I would be tempted, not to put into question this performativity about
which I’ve been speaking since the beginning, but to find a limit for it.
Fiction is performative, whatever fiction is in question. By performative,
I understand the institution, the production, of an event by a sentence, a
discourse, or a simple silent mark. There is production of history, which
goes both for the “making-history” of the historian, who must speak,
testify, and, in their way, make history, and for those that one calls his-
torical actors. In this performative making of history that passes through
fiction, I would say that there cannot not be a limit. I will only invoke,
in order to suggest this, this experience of the event. When it is a matter
of history, it is a matter of event. Even if there is repetition, it is a matter
of event. Now, an event that I could produce performatively would be
incontestably an event, certainly. It is the definition of the performa-
tive: it makes happen what it is speaking about. The whole fiction we’re
talking about is this: to make happen that about which one speaks.
But if the event were, in its eventality, exhausted by performativity, it

wouldn’t be purely an event. There is in the event something that defeats
the performative, routs it. There must be in my relation to the event an
exposure to what comes, about which I know that I cannot produce it
by the performative. The performative here encounters its finitude, its
limit. The event is what affects me where I cannot produce it. Where I
can produce an event, it isn’t an event. If I can produce the future, be
it in the form of an anticipation, if I can represent it to myself, in other
words give a figure to the indeterminate messianicity I’m talking about,
if I can have a horizon of expectation and as a result anticipate what
comes, there is already the seed of some performative and therefore the
event is neutralized. For something to arrive, there must be a failure, a
limit of the performative and therefore of a certain fiction in the active
sense of the term; the performative must touch its limit.
To come back to the debate of historians from which we began yes-
terday morning, perhaps the historian, by divesting themself of fiction,
is interested in what arrives in this way, in this experience of passivity,
in affect, where force is made of the power to be affected. I am affected
rather than active. There is only event where I am affected, where I can’t
even expect what happens to me. What arrives explodes the horizon of
expectation. Where I expect what I am waiting for, the event is neutral-
ized in advance. What arrives is by definition what I cannot expect and
what, as a result, gives rise neither to a performative, nor, still less, to a
constative. This performative-constative couple finds itself put back into
question, it encounters its limit, where it is a question of the event and
therefore of real history. To this, no performative, no constative, can
measure up. In this open space without anticipation, without horizon
of expectation, open to what comes and to what I expect without being
able to await it, without being able to prefigure it, it is here that this
experience of belief [croire] surges up.
It would be necessary to reread all of Marin in order to find out if,
at one moment or another, he problematizes what one understands
by belief. It is in my opinion, in spite of every appearance, a totally
new question in philosophy: what does it mean to believe? I don’t
dare translate this by “faith,” because the word is very loaded. Belief,
upon which everything we are here speaking about d epends—fiction,
representation, utopia, are phenomena of belief [croyance]—this so
enigmatic belief, this faith without religion, without determinate figure,
surges up in its relation to the event that can come, that will come
perhaps: it is necessary to retain this major modality of the perhaps.
The messiah will come, or won’t . . . If one is sure that he will come, it
isn’t the messiah. Messianicity is suspended on an absolute perhaps. It
145
is here that the experience of belief finds its breath, if one can say such
a thing.
I would like to return to the matter of the trap, evoked at the end of
the paper on the body of the tsar.6 On the subject of this experience of
the event, I happened to speak about the promise. The word is improper,
because the promise is a type of performative. We are dealing here with a
promise that does not even come under the theory of speech acts, accord-
ing to which the promise must be made seriously and in good faith. One
doesn’t promise either the worst or the bad, one promises in good faith
something good. One therefore cannot here speak of promise. There
is nevertheless an absolutely indeterminate experience of the promise,
which can turn to the worst and which can be boobytrapped. A belief, a
faith in the sense that I just been speaking of, which wouldn’t be threat-
ened by the possibility of the w orst—that is to say, by the t rap—would
no longer be a belief. The belief that I am speaking about here implies
that the worst, the trap, can remain open. If I wish to eliminate it, I am
transforming faith into assurance and I am negating the naked experi-
ence of faith. The trap cannot not remain there, threatening and lying in
wait for faith in its very chance. To the extent that one cannot separate
all the motifs that we have discussed, in the wake of Marin’s work, from
this phenomenon of belief, the trap is there, it cannot not be there. And
I will stop my story here on this trap.
6 Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, “Autour du corps du Tsar,” in Le Tsar c’est moi:

l’imposture permanente d’Ivan le Terrible à Vladimir Poutine Paris (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2015).
Chapter 10
This Night in the Night of the Night

. . . (2003)
A session that took place on February 1, 2003 at the Collège interna-

tional de philosophie, dedicated to a discussion of Marie-Louise Mallet’s
book La musique en respect (Paris: Galilée, 2002), “Cette nuit dans
la nuit de la nuit . . .” was originally published in Rue Descartes 42
(2003): 112–27.
Fiction: Someone poses this question, “What is Music [Qu’est-ce que

la musique]1?” Someone asks this question. In the night. Allows it to
be heard in the night. Without visible context. In a tone one could not
decide whether it is innocent or insolent, although one can perceive that
a certain “la” is given2 with a slightly more marked accent: “What is
that, Music [Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça, la musique]?” Would I, myself,
have dared to ask such a question, to begin with, in broad daylight? No,
of course not. As respectful as it may seem, that is a question one should
not have the effrontery to raise, at least in this philosophical form,
neither before nor after, and especially not in front of Marie-Louise
Mallet, or next to her, nor after having read her book.
Such a question (“Music, what is it?,” “Music in general, but Music
in the singular, the musicality of Music, what is it? What does that
mean?”), if I had had the temerity to formulate it on my own account,
it would have been seemingly modest and naive, like the question of
someone who really, sincerely, and upon reflection, would admit that he
does not know what he is talking about or what is being talked about
Translated by Humberto González Núñez.

1 [Translator’s note] Throughout the essay, I have taken the liberty of capitalizing
the “M” in “music” to highlight the conceptual distinction made by Derrida between
“la musique” and “musique,” that is, between asking about music in general and
asking, for example, about specific music or specific experiences with music, etc.
2 [Translator’s note] “Donner le la” is to give the A when tuning an orchestra or
an instrument.
This Night in the Night of the Night . . . (2003)
147
when Music [La musique] is named—Music in general, Music in the

singular, nor what is worthy of a single name, of this name, nor what
could be meant here by “to be worthy,” worthy of the name, or even to
be worthy of a proper and singularly singular name that would invite
us to substitute for the question “what is music?,” a “who is music?”
or “who is worthy of signing music or responding to it?” This “who”
would introduce serious disturbances to the heart of the “what” ques-
tion—“what is music?,” “what is worthy of being considered music?,”
and, therefore, who is qualified to answer this question “what,” in every
aspect of culture, at any moment in history? Etc. But this modesty might
hide the pretension, the philosophical ambition or arrogance of a phi-
losopher who would claim for himself the sovereign right to ask “ti esti”
about any subject whatsoever by preparing, by assuming that it, at least,
anticipates and pre- comprehends a philosophical definition—that he
claims the right, even the prerogative, to such a philosophical definition
(hence universalizable and consensual) of something like the essence of
Music. The arrogant philosophical naivety would consist in demanding
that to this single word—“music”—there corresponds, in a univocal
way, a single concept according to which all consequent uses, all the
sentences that are heard around this word as subject or complement,
object-complement of any verb, should be regulated. Even in a title
without verbs, such as Music in Respect, where Music simultaneously
presents itself as a subject or an object of the discourse thus undertaken.
By mimicking a modern-day Socrates, someone would act the faux-naïf
by asking: what, exactly, do you mean by Music, in the proper sense,
its ousia or its Wesen, its being, its act of being, the energy proper to
it and by which it is what it is, as it produces itself, as it unfolds and
asserts itself in its being, both in the energy of its act and the dynam-
ics of its power [puissance]? This modern-day clone of Socrates would
thus, deliberately, before even beginning, bend to this Greco-Germanic
vocabulary (ousia, energeia, dynamis, Wesen, etc.) in order to situate the
purported originarity of this question (what is Music? what is worthy
of the name music?)—even before the distinction between, on the one
hand, any sound judged to be musical, wherever it might make itself
heard, and, on the other hand, that which is called a musical work [une
œuvre musicale]. Is there Music in what is belatedly called “nature,”
and more originarily physis, before that “institutional” or “social” thing
(thésis, nomos, tekhnè) we call a composed work, or a tradition, genre
or code? When we talk about music, do we intend to refer first and
foremost, be it in an implicit manner, to what is enigmatically called a
work, the presumed unity and uniqueness of a work of art in the history
of works, works that, whether entitled, signed or not, with an individual
signature or not, are held, at least generally, to be human works (neither

animal nor divine)—so much so that where they might be described as
animal or divine, but always as the products of living beings—for it is
also assumed that the noise or sound emanating from non-living things,
such as wind, sea, earthquakes, and even the pure technical materiality
of machines abandoned to themselves (i.e. not guided by the living)—
none of this amounts to Music: so much so, then, that sound phenomena
emanating from non-human living beings, so-called animals or deities,
would not be called “musical” except by way of an anthropomorphic
figure. But we know that interpretations of the musical thing often give
way to the temptation to make of them more than just tropes, and that
more than once the derivation of the human institution of a musical
work has been a ttempted—either, on the one hand, according to a kind
of zoo-physiology, by way of its vital and animal origin or, on the other
hand, in a kind of theology or onto-theology of creation or divine inspi-
ration, or even of its vocation and divine destination, in oration, prayer,
hymn, or chant in general. In the first case, the true signatory, as well as
the true recipient, would always belong to life, a living being [un vivant],
a living animal, human or not, the beast, human, or God. In the second
case, the true signatory, as well as the true recipient, would be a living
being properly and only human, and the entire enigma would remain
intact, even before the definition of Music, that is, of what is meant by
noise, breath, cry, voice, articulation, etc. Leaving open for the moment
the question of being that lies dormant in the “ti esti,” we have already
specified three serious questions concerning the being of Music, as well
as all the pragmatic uses of what, in Greek, is called mousikos (and
which does not only concern, as you know, what we call Music, not
even song, but sometimes all the arts, teaching, know-how, and knowl-
edge tout court). These three questions would be:
1. The question of life, in opposition to death, or, if you prefer, the

question of the living and the non-living: can the musical be produced
by something non-living, the dead or the inanimate, for example by
a purely technical machinality [machinalité]? We will just now have
an idea of the richness of this vein, when it traverses Marie-Louise
Mallet’s great book. The same will be true of the second question:
2. The question of the internal differentiation of life, so-called animal
life (biological or zoological), human or divine life, in a word: is
music proper to man, to the so-called “human” living being?
3. And, above all, the question of the work (poiesis, poéma, ergon,
Werk, work, opus). Is there anything musical without a work? What
is a work, the unity or unicity of a work? And is there any work
149
without labor, any labor without technè? Basically, the question

of Music, if there is any and if it is one, or if it is capable of being
unified (which I will always find problematic), would perhaps be one
of the most propitious places, today more than ever, to ask the ques-
tion of technique, in its greatest depth and its broadest extension. If
philosophy—as such—has had such a hard time properly speaking
about music, while always keeping it at a distance and respectfully at
bay, defensively and definitively respecting it, this is perhaps, among
other things, because philosophy made its discourse on Music, its
theory, its thought depend upon not only the ti esti question, but
also the three questions that I have just recalled so schematically: the
living or non-living (whether technical or not), the living human or
ahuman (zoo-theological), physis or the work and art (technè) or the
fine arts, this last concept itself pregnant with the immense question
of aesthetics, history, and the genealogy of what is called aesthetics.
Does M usic—the discourse of Music—pertain to aesthetics, aesthet-
ics in general, either as a discourse on art and the work of art, or as
a discourse on the sensible (aisthêsis), and therefore on passivity or
receptivity, particularly that form of passive sensibility called time,
or even, what later on I will try to distinguish from the affectivity of
an affect that would not be bound to a sense, to a region of sensi-
bility, the ear for example; or even, what would be something else
again, aesthetics as callistics, theory of the beautiful and the sublime,
of the fine arts?
These questions remain, of course, and they will never cease to torment
us. But as necessary as I may find questions of this type—whose poten-
tially infinite series I deliberately interrupt here—I would say that one
feels, I feel, unworthy to expose them before Marie-Louise Mallet, much
less to address them to her, for more than one reason.
On the one hand, because, long before and beyond Music in Respect,
but masterfully in her book, Marie-Louise (I shall say Marie-Louise
from now on) will have developed, interpreted, and deployed these ques-
tions as well as proposed a complex answer, sometimes implicitly, often
explicitly.
And then, because what would have been the first answer to be whis-
pered [soufflée] to me for a long time now? To the question, then, “What
is that, Music? What can you say about it?,” my very personal answer,
the one I have been lucky enough to have for more than twenty years
and which comes to me without delay, would be, after substituting the
“who” for the “what” and ready to assume all the consequences, to give
a response by way of a proper name, for example: “but Music is Marie-
Louise Mallet herself, in person, what she does and what she says about
it, what she writes about it, since you have known her, and whatever
she does or says, you cannot but learn it, try to understand it, follow it,
repeat it, develop it or prolong it by following her t races—and her music
lessons. And her evaluations, the singular names of musicians, of works
and of performers, of moments that are marked and remarked.” It is
true that there are few here, besides me, who can boast or blame them-
selves, as you wish, for holding Music at bay, namely, of never daring
to speak of it directly, of keeping themselves walled in and mute in their
incompetence, of loving music in religious silence and without ever
honoring or threatening it with a theoretical or philosophical discourse.
In this sense, I am modest because I modestly count myself among
those accused by this book. I feel even more respectful, in the equivo-
cal sense cultivated by Marie-Louise, more respectful than the deafened
or deafening philosophers who dare to speak of music by denying it,
by objectifying it, that is, by avoiding it and holding it, maintaining
it at a distance, keeping it in sight, that is, in an inaudibly unheard-of
way. I am, therefore, in the obstinate silence of my guilty conscience,
both worse and better than they. Worse, because I pretty much never
breathed [soufflé] a word about Music as such. Better, because at least
I didn’t breathe a word and claim to say something relevant and appro-
priate. This is indeed, I must admit, what I have always done and will
probably continue to do even today. And my friendship with Marie-
Louise, the admiration with which I have read her and listened to her
talk about music for more than twenty years, will have only aggravated
my case, encouraging both my good and bad conscience. My bad con-
science because ever since I have been listening to her, I have kept more
than ever quiet about Music because I am terrified at the idea of saying
something stupid (philosophical, theoretical, technical, even aesthetic)
in front of her, a big stupidity [une grosse bêtise] that would ratify my
incompetence, my lack of culture, the corrupt nature of my taste or, even
worse than my deafness, my being without an ear [mon être sans oreille]
(but, you will say, is Music the ear’s thing, and could it not survive deaf-
ness? Does it pertain to a sense? Marie-Louise has some beautiful pages
on this subject, whether dealing with Beethoven or not). I just said my
bad conscience. My good conscience is reassured to know that Marie-
Louise is there to say what there is to say, in particular regarding the
philosophy of Music, a certain deafness of philosophy to M usic—which
we still need to talk about. We can, in any case, I can, hold Marie-Louise
to be the most responsible guardian [la responsable la plus responsable]
delegated to deal with this matter. When it comes to Music, her word is
gold and all I need to do is trust it.
151
This is all the more true and this trust today all the more legitimate
since in this book—as in so many of Marie-Louise’s texts that we have
read and that have not yet been collected, as I imagine and hope they
will be, in future books—philosophy, if there is one that is one (because
this is a concern, as with Music [LA musique]), philosophy is first of
all called to testify [appelée à comparaître] (not so we can see it appear
[paraître], since this book is a treatise of distrust as regards seeing,
appearing, the phenomenon, the eidos or the idea, revelation itself or
unveiling, and thus a certain truth), but called less to be judged or con-
demned than to be called precisely [justement appelée], heard, listened
to, auscultated. Beginning with the great Hegel as spokesperson or
loudspeaker [porte-parole ou porte-voix]—and so many others could
follow. I was just now speaking, to feign or sketch out a question, of the
living human being [du vivant humain], between the animal and God.
We will see why it seems both necessary and difficult to speak here of
life, and, if one can say so, “of the living of life” [du vivant de la vie].
But, as for the living being, who is between the animal and God, this
motif arises from the beginning of Music in Respect. It will traverse
its entire composition. For example, in the course of this magnificent
reading of a painting (because this book on music paradoxically begins
with an extraordinary iconographic lesson that gives as much to hear as
to see a painting by Rembrandt, more than one painting by Rembrandt)
(p. 22), well, what I will call the theo-zoological question of Music is set
up, from Rembrandt to Kafka. It is shown that the saint of the painting
(Jerome or Paul), when listening to the Other, remains listening only
to the Word or Logos as word in the sense of light and idea—well, he
listens to nothing else. “Philosophy (or theology),” says Marie-Louise,
“only ever thought of ‘listening’ as listening to the word, that is, under
the theoretical authority of sight, neglecting, in the word itself, what is
not part of it, and which remains largely ungraspable: tone, tremor, the
‘pure differential vibration’ of voice, its evanescence.” Such would be
the deafness of the “little intellectual animal” (an expression of Valéry’s
in a text that had also just been richly interpreted), a deafness to which
Marie-Louise opposes not the listening of the animal in general, but that
of the blind animal of Kafka’s Burrow, which she had already analyzed
elsewhere, its anguished listening in a night that is no longer of the
order of the visible, of a radical invisibility that is no longer a negative
or potential v isibility—a listening that can certainly be said [se dire],
Marie-Louise specifies, but a saying [dire] that is irreducible to any
“said” [dit]. And she adds an alternative that will leave us forever hesi-
tant about the proper meaning of Music. As for this saying [dire] of lis-
tening that exceeds the said [dit], Marie-Louise will be able to say [dire],
and one could stay endlessly with what is said [dit] in Marie-Louise’s
saying [dire]: “We need the language of Kafka, for example. Or else the
Music [Ou bien la musique].” I underline: “Or else the Music [Ou bien
la musique].” Which seems to mean that some events of language can,
sometimes, perhaps, more than philosophy, say [dire] both listening
and Music itself. This alternation is abyssal, especially since the night
of listening cannot be reduced to the night of Music. Before going back
over this subtle difference, I will be content, due to lack of time, with
pointing out another complication with regard to the animal, which is
given its rightful due later on (p. 142): it is that Hegel also takes into
account a non-theoretical ear of the animal, in its natural or sensitive
soul. Hegel acknowledges that the animal may, even if it does not have
a speaking voice, still have a voice to shout and sing. Such voice will
be aufgehoben, sublated [relevée] in the voice of the real soul of man.
“And we have seen,” Marie-Louise notes (and this expression is only
one example, which can be infinitely multiplied, of the fatal necessity
that rivets discourse in general [and not only philosophical discourse] to
figures of sight, or even of theory, thus preparing to do, without delay,
what it is said [dit] should not be done . . .). “[And we have seen] the
trouble that can be introduced—for example [and I emphasize, that this
is just one example], when Music, music without words and the ear
become blind once again—when this theoretical assumption becomes
uncertain.” Nietzsche, for his part, as Marie-Louise immediately shows,
would no longer proceed to this “sublation” [relève], especially in a text
where, celebrating in his own way the lexicon of respect, he speaks of
the “respectable verbal splendor,” which camouflages the “primitive
text, the frightening text of natural man,” of “homo natura.”
The night of listening, as I was saying, is not to be reduced to the night
of Music. Indeed, in “The Philosopher’s Night [La nuit du philosophe]”
(the first quasi-chapter of the book), which I also read as the most poetic
and thoughtful ode to the night (an ode, you know, is in the strict sense
a lyrical work that is sung or that is accompanied by music). Well, in this
sublime song of the night that comes just after what is entitled the over-
ture [ouverture] of the book (the overture of the book that announces,
from before its first beat, before we see anything of the theatre that will
follow, that the composition of the work will be rhythmic and organ-
ized, chanted according to the progression or return of motifs rather
than according to the architectonic system of philosophemes as a work
itself musical, rather than meta-musical), just after the opening, then,
in “The Philosopher’s Night,” what does Marie- Louise offer us to
think? First of all, of course, what presents itself as a “hypothesis,” in
truth the book’s masterful thesis, namely that, I quote, “Music is the
153
philosopher’s night,” a phrase that is itself very much played out, very
well played, where the night becomes as equivocal as respect, more
equivocal, even, as we will see or hear, namely that in that night when
the philosopher always seeks to see, he sees nothing at all [il ne voit plus
rien]. Seeking to see [cherchant à voir], he finds nothing to see in that
night which, as Marie-Louise says, “sometimes fascinates him, which he
greets from afar, which he almost always flees. With rare exceptions: St.
Augustine, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche . . ., to stick to the past, all
somewhat ‘marginal’ philosophers, thinkers rather than ‘philosophers.’”
A night so equivocal, so indecisive, even more so than respect itself,
full of resentment and denial, which holds at bay [en respect] what it
purports to respect—a night so obscure in its sense, that it is first of all,
though not only (and here is the risk of an inevitable difficulty), the night
of someone who, seeking to see, and privileging the théorein, is lost,
fascinated but wandering, lost before or in the night. A perdition such
that, seeking still to see in the night, it misses even the night itself, even
the very essence of the nocturnal, the nocturnal even more nocturnal
than the night—and this would be M usic—or, more precisely, listen-
ing, for this would be even more nocturnal than Music: “even more
primitive, even more archaic, even more nocturnal, there is listening
(Marie-Louise’s emphasis). It is within this nocturnal ground that music
is developed. Music is made (is played), that is, gives itself to be heard,
and is listened to [s’écoute].” If you will allow me, I will dwell a little
on these last sentences, which I choose as examples (but there would
be so many others, just as exemplary), to admire in them, on the one
hand, the logical and rhetorical caution of a thought concerned never to
simplify matters, never violently to erase the folds of complication and
exceptions to the rule, namely, the events that can be either unique indi-
viduals or unique works and, on the other hand, the analytical concern
that divides the atoms of each figure in order to better formalize the dif-
ficulty or even the aporia of the ongoing explication between language in
general and Music, between the place of the philosophical and the place
of the musical. One can indeed read this book as an explication: both a
rigorous explication in the sense of an analysis that unfolds, shows, and
demonstrates, as well as explicating many texts, taken from the greatest,
most canonical vein of philosophy (Hegel for example) or on the edge
of philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche), but also a first great explication between
philosophy and music, an explication of philosophy with music:
Auseinandersetzung, that is, not a war, but, as Kant would say, a con-
flict, namely an explication in which both parties get to say their piece,
and accept in principle the arbitration of a neutral institution, here lan-
guage [langage], the language [langue], even if—I will give an example
in a moment—the neutrality of this language is improbable. Discourse,

unless it negotiates endlessly, always risks surreptitiously playing into
the hands of one or other of the involved parties, and therefore, whether
one likes it or not, runs the risk of skewing the game [de fausser le jeu]
to the benefit or detriment of one or other of the parties involved. At
first, Marie-Louise presents her claim modestly, as a “hypothesis” rather
than as a thesis: “A night that sometimes fascinates him, which he greets
from afar, from which he almost always flees. With rare exceptions: St.
Augustine, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche . . ., to stick to the past, all
somewhat ‘marginal’ philosophers, thinkers rather than ‘philosophers.’”
I offer here two remarks of different types:
1. First, Marie-Louise’s measure and extreme caution, her unequivocal

respect for all that comes to defy or complicate calculable laws. This
respect, of which we have a thousand different signs throughout the
book, is marked in almost every word of the sentence I have just
quoted here. If the philosopher flees Music, the gaze, the optics, and
the seeing that keep Music at a distance are also fascinated—that is
to say, fixedly attracted, even to the point of enjoying the v ertigo—by
that against which the gaze defends itself. But even this fascina-
tion, which Marie-Louise admits as an essential complication of the
philosophical defense, does not always take place. As Marie-Louise
cautiously says, “A night that sometimes fascinates him.” And if
the philosopher “flees” the night that is Music, he flees it, she notes,
“almost always”—almost, not always without exception. This atten-
tion reserved for the sometimes and the almost withdraws from the
opposition of day and night—it resonates at dawn or at dusk. And
it is difficult to measure the distance at which philosophical respect
holds Music: there is “fascination sometimes” (and fascination fixes
the gaze on the body of the fascinating object that both arouses and
paralyzes desire), but the philosopher then “greets from afar” the
night of Music. From afar, but to what extent? At what distance?
To what extent must he be close or distant from Music in order to
hear it and, especially, to listen to it, and to listen to himself hear it
[s’écouter l’entendre]? And the greeting, is it a deferential homage
or a farewell, a refined and respectful way of separating forever, of
taking or giving leave? Which gives space for what Marie-Louise
calls “those rare but beautiful exceptions: St. Augustine, Rousseau,
Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche . . ., to stick with the past.” The present
and the future, then, remain. And these philosophers are, she says,
“marginal,” or even—a nuance within the nuance—I quote: “some-
what marginal,” “and thinkers rather than philosophers.” The
155
stakes of all these careful nuances are considerable. What is at stake

is nothing less than the relationship between philosophy and its
margins, and therefore the supposedly identifiable unity of the philo-
sophical in its relationship with the presumed unity of the musical. It
really is a matter, under the outward appearance of a great discourse
on music, of re-posing the question, “What is philosophy?” What is
a philosopher? Is there a unity, a self-identity, of philosophy or the
philosopher? What is at stake is nothing less than the relationship
between the “past” and the present or future of philosophy. What
is at stake is nothing less than the relationship between thinker and
philosopher, thought and philosophy (in more than one language,
with all of the semantic adventures of Denken, Danken, and Gedanc
in German, to think [penser] and to weigh [peser], or to examine in
Franco- Latin, to measure and metronimize [métronomiser], etc.),
that is to say, the relationship between thought and philosophy,
philosophy and science or “theoria,” of which we know at least that
they are neither identical nor simply oppositional or exterior to each
other.
2. So far, in the analysis of this simple passage, arbitrarily taken from
the inexhaustible and intimidating riches of this book, I have accen-
tuated the caution, the nuances, the stakes of a “more or less,” of a
“somewhat,” of a “sometimes,” of an “almost,” of the margin or
exception as regards the rule. And with the possibility of the excep-
tion, here too, as in politics, it is a matter, Schmitt would say, of a
certain sovereignty, the deciding event that, by itself, whether it be
an individual or an always exceptional work, defies the law and gives
itself the right to suspend right and the generality of the law. Still to
give an example of the extraordinary subtlety of the issues and their
treatment in this book, I would now like to pick out immediately
afterwards a turn [tour] of language, a devious turn [un tour retors]
that no longer displaces the degrees, the margins, or the exceptional
cases, but which completely turns inside out [retourne comme un
gant] the meaning of a word and concept in order to make a wholly
other meaning appear at the heart of the same, an absolutely dis-
simulated, wholly other m eaning—a wholly other concept, previ-
ously invisible, at the heart of the same word. And the turn of this
revolutionary return may seem to go unnoticed or even inaudible
but, as soon as one has become sensitive to it, it gives one vertigo
[il donne le vertige]. It turns everything around, it re-turns every-
thing and induces a vertigo that affects, or should go on to affect, the
reading of the whole book. Here, this word, but I could have chosen
others, would be the somber word “night.” There are not a thousand
and one nights, but it seemed to me I could recognize—hear—at least

three nights in play. It is the same night, but it envelops, if I may say
so (and this metaphor, already spatial, and therefore objectifying,
that, like any spatial metaphor, with its invincible objectifying effect,
we know does not allow itself to be circumscribed in language, it
invades language, at the very place where language protests against
it, and this will be one of the debates, one of the internal tensions of
the writing of this book)—so, as I was saying, it is the same night, but
it envelops en abyme three experiences, three modalities of apprehen-
sion, three modes of existence, I dare not say three situations, but
rather three affects (I will return to this word) of the nocturnal:
a. On the one hand, there is the night “irreducible to any

objectification,” and in fact to any visibility (and, on this
subject, Marie-Louise quotes a beautiful passage from The
Phenomenology of Perception). Even if this night recalls
music, as Marie-Louise says, it is primarily, for the canoni-
cal philosopher, a threat, and a fascinating threat, precisely
because it remains an invisible source of visibility. The phi-
losopher would like to see it, he would like to see into it. As
a kosmo-théoros, as well as a man of the idea or eidos, he
relates to that menacing or attractive night as if it were a pho-
tographic negative of what he wants to see in the contours of
its forms and its objectivity.
b. Now, secondly, the Music itself that, as Marie-Louise notes,
this night “recalls us to,” is yet another night, another expe-
rience of the night, of an absolute invisibility that no longer
even promises a spatializing object and which is therefore
essentially foreign both to threat and fascination. It is both the
same and not the same as the previous night. It is no longer a
night where one tries to s ee—Music is, therefore, a night in the
night.
c. But as this night remains a figure—night is a figure—there is
still a third night, a third invisibility (but I dare not say, and
we should speak neither of an in-visibility, because this nega-
tivity still makes us think of a possible visibility of what
remains in-visible, nor of a third depth of invisibility, because
depth is still a spatializing and visible figure—and it is always
the same endless explication with a language that still betrays
that of which it speaks with the utmost respect); there is, then,
a third night which is the same (and the arithmetic here is also
unfaithful to the being of what we are talking about because
157
counting, and even counting in music, is already objectifying);

so, then, let us speak still figuratively of this night in the night
of the night, this abyssal night in the night of the night, that is
no longer Music; it is what Marie-Louise defines as listening
or, more precisely, and this supplementary fold bears all of the
stakes, the “listening to itself/being listened to” [le s’écouter],
in both a sense that is simultaneously reflexive, auto-affective
and non-reflexive, hetero-affective the reflexive sense, auto-
affective, and non-reflexive, hetero-affective. Music listens to
itself/is listened to [La musique s’écoute]. I quote Marie-
Louise who speaks better than anyone else of this night in the
night of the night insofar as it listens to itself [s’écoute]. She
has just defined the night of the philosopher which threatens
and fascinates him, the one who is not only deaf but also blind
to music, and blind precisely because he wants to see where
there is nothing to see, and she has just told us that this night
re-calls Music—which is therefore also the night of the phi-
losopher. She now specifies: “But more primitive, still more
archaic than music itself, still more nocturnal, there is listen-
ing. It is out of this nocturnal ground that music is developed
[s’élabore]. Music is made (is played), that is to say, it offers
itself to be heard and listens to itself/is listened to [s’écoute]”
(p. 25). Marie-Louise emphasizes the words, “more noctur-
nal” and “listening,” in order to emphasize that, at the same
time, in the same night, one intensifies still more (I no longer
dare say the depth, the thickness, or even the essence, much
less the figure of the n
ight—and even when she speaks of “the
nocturnal ground out of which music is developed,” Marie-
Louise visibly intends a ground even deeper than Music itself;
thus, a truly groundless ground [un fond sans fond], an
abyssal and non-spatializable ground, much less objectifia-
ble)—so, Marie-Louise emphasizes the words, “more noctur-
nal” and “listening,” in order to note that, at the same time,
in the same night, one continues to intensify. But the night of
the night, the nocturnal, does not simply refer to a difference
in degree within the figure of the night, but to another night,
and this time, in the same word, one records a heterogeneous
meaning, a conversion that will have to affect language as a
whole. Like a madness of the night which is nothing other, at
bottom, because it responds to it at the heart of a strange inti-
macy, than a “madness of the day.” And Marie-Louise puts
Blanchot’s title in quotes, in order to evoke its infinite reserve.
Without taking into consideration the fact that the word

“nocturnal [nocturne]”—so well chosen, according to its
apparent grammatical value as an adjective—allows its
homonym to resonate within it, that is to say, the name of the
nocturne, with the full range of its musical variations: first, the
nocturne in its liturgical opposition to the matins, then the
twilight serenade for wind instruments or, finally, the work
for piano in the freedom of its melancholic notes (everyone
always refers to Chopin’s Nocturnes)—melancholic notes as if
from out of the nocturnes had always emerged, in a singular
manner, a sort of essential mourning at work in all works and
all listening, in every musical phenomenon (in this phenome-
non without phenomenon, of course, as the author of The
Madness of the Day would claim, since it is the thesis and
hypothesis of the book Music in Respect—and respect is the
protective distance of respicere, the regard that guards and
keeps vigil in front of and behind oneself, and which oversees
[surveille] in the light), Music withdraws from phenomenality
understood as an appearing in the objectal or objectifying
agenda—a problem to which I will return in a moment. So
that one must speak here as much of a phenomenon of mourn-
ing, everywhere at work in music, as of a mourning of the
phenomenon, which deplores the end of the day or the
madness of the day. We must emphasize an even more sup-
plementary import to this night of listening, which is already
more nocturnal than the “philosopher’s night” and even than
“the night of Music.” Thus announced, the night of
listening—in the composition of this book or this nocturne,
since even before the first chapter which gave its title to the
final chapter (“Nietzsche—the night of listening”)—the night
of listening is also the night of who or what listens to itself/is
listened to [s’écoute]. It would be very difficult to translate
into another language the ambiguity of this “to itself” [s’]. It
is only in French that this expression can give something to
hear [entendre], to imply [sous-entendre], beneath the domi-
nant grammar (Music s’écoute, that means that one listens to
it, that it is ready to be listened to) a more insinuating and
reflexive grammar, or even a suggestion of auto- affection:
Music listens to itself [la musique s’écoute elle-même], the
experience of Music consists in the possibility of listening to
oneself [s’écouter], the possibility of being able to recall
oneself [se rappeler] in the reflexive auto-affection of memory.
159
It is not certain (this is a huge question that I can only briefly

skim here) that this auto-affection, or this becoming auto-
affective of a hetero-affection is still sensory, in the empirical
or transcendental sense of a sense- region (hearing, for
example). For, on the one hand, the pure differential vibra-
tion, the vibrational difference that Marie-Louise invokes on
the previous page (p. 22) when explaining why and how phi-
losophy (or theology), having never thought “listening” except
as listening to the word (on the one hand, then, this vibra-
tional differential), is necessarily and a priori tied neither to
speech, certainly, but no more to music: not every differential
vibration is musical. On the other hand, as pure differential-
ity, it is not related to any sensory plenitude, be it that of any
sense [sens], of course, but also in the sense of the heard and
the auditory organ, the ear. I leave open this formidable ques-
tion in order to insist on the listening to itself [s’écouter] that
Marie-Louise articulates with the possibility of a memory, a
repetition, or a mnemotechnic writing long before any nota-
tion, and which explains that a musician not born deaf
(Beethoven) can find in his “inner ear (memory or imagina-
tion . . .),” I quote: “This listening which was his first experi-
ence the loss of which, until the end of his life, he will never
cease to mourn.” Here, too, a possible “listening to itself”
[s’écouter] of Music can no longer be separated from the pos-
sibility of an essential m ourning—the mourning of the actual
presence of a sensible fulfillment of sound as a sign of life.
How can this insensibility [insensibilité] inscribe itself within
the mourning of sensibility or into a sensibility in mourning [le
deuil de la sensibilité ou dans une sensibilité endeuillée]? For
lack of time (and this entire question is also that of time,
potentially of time as a pure form of sensibility, that is, a non-
sensible form of sensibility and auto-affection—it is the non-
sensible sensible that Kant, Hegel, and Marx all speak of, the
non-sensible sensible that shows up again in Heidegger’s dis-
course on auto-affection in Kant)—for lack of time, then, I
indicate only one of the many places where, in Music in
Respect, this night that listens to itself [s’écoute] in the night
of the night of Music, appears without appearing. Marie-
Louise quotes and analyzes striking texts that are more auto-
biographical than philosophical, if one can put it like that, by
Nietzsche, for example (p. 154), those in which he says how,
at the hour of twilight, precisely, almost at night, the bells of
Genoa, above the noises of the street (and one must insist on
this force and this victory, in what is a competition and a war
of noises), “vibrated according with an almost insatiable
sound of itself, which wandered away in the sky and the sea
breeze, so gloomy, so childish at the same time, of an infinite
melancholy . . .”
An echo of Wagner, Marie-Louise suggests, after having just brought up

“The Drunk Song of Zarathustra.” The “sound of bells that was slowly
rising from the depths” and that told “a terrible, comforting secret to
the ear like the one dictated to me by this midnight bell . . .” Nietzsche
names, then, a depth that exceeds phenomenal spatiality, deeper than
depth and more nocturnal than such and such a night of space which
would be merely the reserve of a daylight. He writes, and Marie-Louise
quotes him:
From the depths of what past, from what distance comes your voice, coming
from so far away, from the ponds of love. Old bell, sweet lyre! All pain
strikes you in the heart—paternal pain [. . . of the father or son, the pain of
the dead and blind father . . .]. The world is profound, more than the day
could imagine.
In the echo of these texts, in a certain affirmation of pain, in a “yes” to

mourning and the night, Marie-Louise recognizes an exemplary para-
digm, or even an a priori: she says with great precautions, redoubling
caution, as you will hear, a quasi a priori, a double quasi a priori, both
of Nietzsche’s sensibility and of his musical sensibility in general. This
double quasi a priori, where the quasi is itself accentuated by an even
more prudent perhaps, that is, a “perhaps like” [peut-être comme], this
double quasi a priori gives to sense and sets to music the whole gravity,
all the way to the quasi-center of gravity, of this book. I quote: “The
‘song’ (this Lied by Zarathustra) ends, as we know, with joy, deeper still
than pain (I e mphasize—deeper), and that wants eternity. But the depth
of this joy lies in the depth of the pain endured, it is a ‘Yes’ to pain itself,
to the pain of the ‘night,’ to the ‘terrible secret’ (and ‘comforting’ perhaps
because freed from illusion) of the ‘midnight darkness,’ to the tragic
that no ‘absolute knowledge’ can sublate.” This “terrible secret” that
must listen to itself [s’écouter] (Marie-Louise’s emphasis), the wounded
listening of the child encountered it very early on. And this listening
constitutes perhaps something like [peut-être comme] (my emphasis)
a quasi a priori structure of Nietzsche’s sensibility. It has an essential
relationship with his musical sensibility. Isn’t music “the art of night and
penumbra?” I have already been overusing speech and my speaking time
161
here, all the while remaining on the threshold of a book that remains to
be read and read again and where the last thing to overuse is the verb.
So I will break off, after dreaming about one of the scenes that makes
me think in particular of the great chapter, “Nietzsche—The Night of
Listening,” and after having finally noted, reported in a very formal,
telegraphic or algebraic way, some of the questioning implications that
are at work in the great explication, indeed the great altercation between
philosophy and music to which this book testifies, which this book sets
to music until it is dis-concerting.
My dream, the scenario of which I dream awake or sleeping standing
up, would be inspired in me by everything which, in the chapter on “The
Night of Listening”—it’s admirably r ich—revives mourning and melan-
cholia, a melancholia that, in Nietzsche, also repeats the “melancholy”
(Nietzsche’s word) of the father, the day he began to decline to the point
of losing his sight. The bereaved suffering, or even the song of mourn-
ing, always guides our steps toward a cemetery, Nietzsche’s cemetery,
“a child within earshot” (p. 148), which recalls a memory from when he
was four years old, concludes: “The cemetery is there before my eyes”
(qtd. p. 149).
This scene would unite life and death indiscernibly, the one in the
other, life death [la vie la mort], as Marie-Louise says (p. 158), and
more precisely these two forms or intensities of life of which Nietzsche
speaks—the lives of those who suffer from an “overabundance of life,”
and the life of those who suffer from an “impoverishment of life” (qtd.
p. 171). This dream of which I dream would be neither Apollo’s nor
Dionysus’,” but that of Dionysus’ servant who Nietzsche says must be
“in a state of drunkenness and at the same time posted behind himself
as a lookout” (p. 171). So let us dream of someone who would dream,
it could be me, a me or a you, or anyone who would say something like
this, to confess his love without respect for Music: “When I love some
music, and it can happen to me at any moment, when my love is declared
for music of whatever k ind—of whatever origin, of whatever time, of
whatever culture—when music lifts me up or fills me with love, I wonder
what it means to love, where love means loving Music or loving in music
[aimer la musique ou aimer en musique].” This truly ecstatic experience
lets itself be recognized under the sign of an irresistible projection, the
quasi-hallucination of a theatre, both visible and audible, of a plot in
which the visible is carried away, transported by the time without time
of music, and the scene of a theatrical or musical act (but certainly not
an opera) where I a m—or where the I finds itself—dead but still there,
and where all those who are loved or will have been loved, all together,
but each and every one would religiously listen for themselves and
together to this music, which can be a song, but a song not dominated
by an intelligible voice, a music of which the dead one would not be the
author (since he would have, already, been invaded and affected), but
which he would have chosen, as if he wished he had had the genius to
invent it, to compose it in order to offer it to them, so much so that in this
speech (“here is the Music, he would say to himself, in which I would
have wished to die, for which, in view of which, at the end, I would wish
to die”), the sadness of death or of farewell would then be transfigured
from one moment to the next into an overabundance of life. Others
would say, more hastily, into a sur-vival [sur-vie]—I’m not saying that.
The self [Le moi-même], dead but lifted by this music, by the unique
coming of this music here, here and now, in the same movement, the self
would die in saying “yes” to death and would at once come back to life,
telling itself, I am reborn, but not without dying, I am reborn posthu-
mously, the same ecstasy uniting in it death without return and resurrec-
tion, death and birth, the desperate greeting [salut] of a farewell without
return or salvation, without redemption but with regard [salut] for the
life of the other living being [l’autre vivant] in the secret sign and exu-
berant silence of an overabundant life. This last and first breath of life
in death, that sigh at once inhaled and exhaled [inspiré et expiré], that
would be Music. The Music of the soul, the soul of Music, the “soul of
Music itself [âme même de la musique]” of which Nietzsche also speaks
in “The Traveller and His Shadow” (qtd. p. 186), after having described
this ecstasy, this being “almost melted in ecstasy by its opposite,” a living
soul, certainly, is the essence of the soul, of the psychè, but of a life that
would be neither sensible nor even living, where Nietzsche says that he
“does not differentiate between music and tears” (Marie-Louise, quoting
this line, also speaks, on the last page of the book, of the voice of the
specter [revenant], of the echo and of the respons, of “the other song,”
“the one that is sung by the soul of the one who writes the poem”).
But, naturally, I am speaking of this dream in order to laugh or smile,
through tears, like in those moments of anticipation in which, strangely
drunk with happiness, someone (me, for example) would say to himself
each time “yes, yes” to this music, but also “yes, yes but,” “yes but”—
there would be so many others to choose from, so many other pieces of
music, and one would have to die so many times in order to deserve all
these pieces of music, die so many times in order to enjoy them that the
suffering of choosing, of the impossible choice, still comes to make me
suffer, and I retract myself, and I begin to dread yet again the choice, the
last will for this last quasi-testamentary moment, a music to which all of
my friends do not consent, accusing me again, without my being able to
justify myself any longer—of having made one last error of taste [faute
163
de goût]. The verdict that I would fear above all would remain that of
Marie-Louise.
So, really to conclude this time, here is how I would imagine the
most sensitive places of an explication with philosophy. This explica-
tion always risks becoming endless and not giving rise [donner lieu] to
a conclusion in the form of philosophical discourse but in the form of
the event that makes a work [l’événement qui fait œuvre], for example
in a book like this, which transforms the very givens of the explication.
These places are perhaps the places where, in Marie-Louise’s book, the
altercation, the interminable Auseinandersetzung, between philosophy
and music intertwines as much as it analyzes, separates or opposes, and
seeks and finds the chances of its language.
Because:
1. The discourse on Music or on “music and philosophy” always

risks—and no precaution can, in a single phrase (it always takes
more than one), annul this risk—being unable to escape the spa-
tializing metaphorization which is not an extrinsic accident of lan-
guage. Given that, this discourse cannot escape the temptation of
an apparently theoretico-philosophical metalanguage contaminated
by some objectification. Even in order to denounce this risk and to
protect oneself from it, it would still be necessary to engage oneself
in a discursive argument that does what it says should not be done.
Marie- Louise offers the response to this difficulty in a practical
manner. This response, this responsibility, consists in taking the risk
into account as much as possible and relying not on philosophical
propositions but on the composition of a work that is musical in its
essence, the event of which asserts itself, undeniably, not only as a
musical performance but as the source of a musical affect.
2. A word about the objectification or even the spatialization of which
this book, in short, conducts the trial. Without even mentioning
Bergson, one cannot fail to think of the great Heideggerian protest
against the interpretation of being as object, even in Husserlian
phenomenology—
and if Heidegger spoke so little about music,
assuming he ever did so, that could, indeed, be explained as much by
this defensive, incompetent, or censoring respect, as by the hypoth-
esis that the objectification of being would not only or essentially
affect Music, and that what concerns music should be reinscribed
into a broader and limitless analytic or Destruktion. Now one will
have all the more trouble purifying music of this objectivation, this
theorein, this production of the great ideal (therefore visible) Object,
in that it does not befall music from the outside (and this is an
objection that, for once, one could make to Heidegger himself) but
arises from the iterability that, even in the unique work, in the expe-
rience of listening or the singular and irreplaceable, even irreversibly
improvised (as in jazz) differential vibration, allows one to identify
anything at all, differentiality itself, and thus begins its work of ide-
alization or ideal objectivation without delay. Supposing that sight,
more than touch, is the first and last word, the first and last trope, the
most powerful master of philosophical discourse, all of which is both
true and problematic—but I will not go off in that direction. And
this objectification, via whatever sense it passes, is perhaps still more
inescapable for the musical work, even before any notation, than for
the listening of a music before the work, the question of knowing
where the work begins or ends, where the interpretation begins and
ends, being relaunched at every moment, directly or indirectly, by
Music in Respect. To take this second question into account would
be to open up to the hypothesis that Music itself respects itself [la
musique se respecte elle-même], it secretes its own autoimmune
defenses by putting to work right in the work [en mettant en œuvre,
à même l’œuvre] the processes of iterability, idealization, and fatally
objectifying identification, even before any notation, any spacings
[espacements] that allow it both to be what it is, to maintain itself
[se garder]—and to be listened to [s’écouter], again and again. Even
night is spacing. Even in its temporalization.
3. Thirdly, I wonder, finally, if, in its competence and in its perfor-
mance, as they used to say, Music in Respect, a philosophical and
musical work that is self-sufficient and calls for a unique and incom-
parable listening, I wonder if this great book, then, cannot also be
listened to, heard, interpreted as the most beautiful prelude to a play
[mise en jeu] that would no longer oppose, face to face, in alterna-
tion or as an alternative, like night and day, Philosophy to Music [La
philosophie à La musique], but that would decipher another history
in the in-between or the interlacing of possibilities of thought (philo-
sophical or not), works of thought (philosophical or not), and works
of musical thought. For example, in these historical interlacings of
forms or forces of philosophical discourse, and forces or forms of
musical invention, there would be, here, appropriation or harmony,
there rejection, misunderstanding. There would be several musics
and several philosophies [des musiques et des philosophies] differing
in mode, genre, forms, instruments, techniques, voices, with their tra-
ditions, etc., musics and philosophies in the plural, with agreements
here, shifts there, anachronisms, and reciprocal encouragements or
impediments [des entraînements ou des freinages réciproques]. And
165
this from Plato to the thinkers and philosophers of our time, here in
their incomprehension, their rejection, there in the reworking of their
discourse, not in the face of the transformations of twentieth-century
music, in all cultures, not only European or American, not only faced
with them, but immersed in a culture, a knowledge, even a technol-
ogy, in a world that they, thinkings (philosophical or not) and musics
share, share out by letting themselves be divided by them. From this
point of view, the philosophical thought of the twentieth century
(for example, but this is just one example, the different thoughts of
a deconstructive type) would be not only, but also, co-determined,
in what they say and in what they do not say, by new more or less
strictly contemporary forms or possibilities of musical invention.
By the possibility of new musical works. By the history of music, in
short, which itself would not be independent of the history of phi-
losophies. In that case, one would no longer talk about the essence of
Music or Philosophy; it would not even be possible to ask the ti esti
question, “what is (Music or Philosophy)?” Each philosopher, each
philosopheme, if there is one and if it be pure, would have a differenti-
ated relationship, a different explication with this or that music. One
would conclude, then, that there is no general essence, no essence
tout court, neither of the one nor the other, but rather modalized
workings and processes which, in different contexts, respond to the
interest of identifying the same thing, for example the same sentence,
here as properly philosophical, there as not properly philosophical,
here as properly musical, there as not properly musical. And there
would be something of the musical in the philosophical or vice versa.
This process would be, perhaps before being and beyond essence,
a process that is always begun and always unfinished, a process of
appropriation and expropriation, in truth of exappropriation. And I
am still making this claim in the wake of and under the authority of
Marie-Louise. For example, when she wonders (p. 159): “Isn’t music
an insurmountable challenge to the question of the ‘proper’? Doesn’t
it put the very notion of the ‘proper’ into a sort of crisis? Can we
answer the question ‘Who?’ when listening to music? Any more than
the question ‘What?’”
I leave you, then, or rather I urge you to read and reread the rest, but
also all that precedes.
Chapter 11
Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the

Infinite (2004)
“Son malin génie: Préparatifs pour l’infini” was first published as a

preface to the work of Safaa Fathy, Egyptian poet, documentary film-
maker, playwright, and essayist on theater, poetry, and theatrical work:
Safaa Fathy, Ordalie-Terreur (Brussels: Lansmann, 2004), 5–29.
Ordalie [Trial by Ordeal]: a “play” [“pièce”], as one might say a little

hastily, a piece of theatre.
This “play” [“pièce”], in any case, is not in one piece. Rather, it would
have the force, the audacity, the singularity, it would even run the risk of
smashing everything to pieces [de mettre tout en pièces]. That would be
its genius, or even, we’ll really have to get into this later, its evil genius
[son malin génie], a genius for evil [un génie du mal], no d oubt—but a
genius that uses its ingenuity [s’ingénie] in order to indict evil itself, evil
everywhere. Indicting evil itself, as one takes a blow, summoning it to
appear in an unprecedented trial, the evil genius, then, shatters every-
thing to pieces [met tout en pièces].
To begin with the play [pièce] itself, you and me. Like any trial by
ordeal [ordalie] worthy of its name, it judges us, all of us, both you and
me.
But if, from such an Ordalie, no one came out quits, acquitted or
unscathed, this would perhaps be the condition for finally seeing inno-
cence appear. In order to think this innocence, reaffirm it, and put it into
a theatrical work, at last, albeit without any guarantees, even if it were
to be in the undeniable form of an “as if.”
No one will come out quits, acquitted or unscathed, above all not the
theatre, the very essence of which, under the name of trial by ordeal, is
here subjected by Safaa Fathy to a strange putting into question.
Translated by Humberto González Núñez.

Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the Infinite (2004)
167
Putting into question? Let us rather say a putting into question of the
putting of the question.
In an even more vertiginous or abyssal way, theatre is here undergo-
ing the trial of a calling into question [remise en cause], one might also
say, because what is at stake is a matter of law, of trial, of a judgment to
be prepared, and of that thing which justice calls a cause. Trial against
trial, a calling in to question calls into question even the very putting of
the question [une remise en cause remet en question jusqu’à la mise à
la question], that is, an unjustifiable cruelty of interrogation, a right to
torture for those whoever authorize themselves to judge in the name of
God. Once the calling into question is denounced, it is thus, at its core,
the question itself that sees itself put on stage: directly or indirectly, at
one and the same time in life, in history, and in theatre. The historical
trials by ordeal, the real trials by ordeal, have always had, throughout
the centuries, a theatrical dimension. Ordalie interrogates, in truth,
the history of the scene, in a hand-to-hand struggle, and at the birth of
poetic language.
Everything in the play returns to the event of some birth, precisely, of
an infant word or a word that seeks to be born, sometimes restrained in
aphasia, in the inarticulate or in glossopoiesis, speaking in tongues. And
always in order to try to say the right thing about a genesis or a geneal-
ogy, of a conception or filiation, legitimate or bastard, in order to know
to whom the newborn returns, who the father was, why the breast of the
mother was cut, and the milk flooded with blood.
This name, Ordalie, resembles a woman’s name.
The name of a woman to come, Ordalie, the play, would be as if
someone, male or female, were interrogating more specifically, and
were pressing questions to the question itself, that is, that which ties an
entire history of the theatrical scene to this sometimes unfamiliar form
of a trial that is, precisely, called ordalium:1 interrogation, test, torture,
1 Often ignored, an immense anthropological literature is dedicated to these fun-

damental rites of jurisdiction, of jus dicere, of the establishment of truth or of the
verification of a verdict (vere dictum). In this note, I will only include what seems to
me the most proper for elucidating the historical substratum of Fathy’s work. In The
Compulsion to Confess (New York: Farrar, 1959, 97ff.), Theodor Reik dedicates
two rich chapters to this proceeding (“Oracle and Trial by Ordeal,” “The Oral Trial
by Ordeal”).
According to one of his conjectures, though God’s judgment [judicium dei] was
probably for a long time the main recourse among all peoples, “God was not origi-
nally the one who was questioned, but the dead one.” Reik recalls some striking
illustrations of this. In Australia or West Africa, the corpse itself denounces the
murdering sorcerer or unknown murderer. In spite of these pagan origins, Reik tries
verdict, and penalty, sometimes followed by putting to death or various

mutilations. Through an implacable rite, at the end of a proceeding
designed to terrorize, it is a matter of, as we know, submitting the fate of
such and such a defendant or alleged perpetrator to the judgment of God
(ad judicium dei, as it is often said, in Ordalie), after what could have
looked like a probative ordeal [un supplice probatoire]. Thus denounced
and then mortified, as if punished in advance by the preliminary trial,
to demonstrate that the Christian Middle Ages had substituted for it rites involving
Holy Communion. “In Europe,” he explains, “they ceased to have recourse to God’s
judgment [Gottesurteil] toward the end of the Middle Ages” (p. 97).
It is precisely these historical limits and this periodization that Ordalie comes,
perhaps, to problematize. In disguised forms, by deploying figures, tricks, or strata-
gems of the unconscious, the trial-by-ordealistic [ordalique] structure might be said
to survive today, tirelessly prolonging the Middle Ages into our modernity. This
hypothesis would call for a political response.
Benjamin had also proposed a juridico-political reading of the theatrical trial
by ordeal, its outcome [dénouement] and its apparent overtaking in the space and
time of Greek tragedy. “In antiquity the trial—especially the criminal trial—is a
dialogue, because it is based on the twin roles of prosecutor and accused, without
official procedure [I ask myself in passing if this is not one of the singularities and
forces of Ordalie, that is, the blurring of the distinction between these two instances
in the play, in its other “chorus”]. It has its chorus: partly in the sworn witness
(in ancient Cretan law, for instance, the parties provided their case with the help
of compurgators, that is to say character-witness, who originally stood surety for
the right of their party with weapons in the trial by ordeal), partly in the array of
comrades of the accused begging the court for mercy, and finally in the adjudicating
assembly of the populace. The important and characteristic feature of Athenian law
is the Dionysian outburst, the fact that the intoxicated, ecstatic word was able to
transcend the regular perimeter of the agon, that a higher justice was vouchsafed by
the persuasive power of living speech than from the trial of the opposed factions, by
combat with weapons or prescribed verbal forms. The practice of the trial by ordeal
is disrupted by the freedom of the logos. This is the ultimate affinity between trial
and tragedy in Athens. The hero’s word, on those isolated occasions when it breaks
through the rigid armor of the self, becomes a cry of protest. Tragedy is assimilated
in this image of the trial; here too a process of conciliation takes place. So it is that
in Sophocles and Euripides the heroes learn “not to s peak . . . o nly to debate;” and
this explains why “the love-scene is quite alien to ancient drama” (Rosenzweig) (The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: Verso, 1998, 116].
My reading hypothesis, given this, my counterhypothesis: the final love song, in
Ordalie, coming from the mouth of a woman (“Dionysiac,” “drunk and ecstatic”
words) also exceeds this institutional limit of Greek tragedy.
Topicality of the trial by ordeal. One could give a thousand examples of it, “at
home” and throughout the world. Today, in Nigeria, a clerical-judicial power is
threatening to put to death, by stoning, the body (already buried up to the neck) of a
mother accused of adultery. I cite this example only because it resonates, to a certain
extent, with the example of Ordalie.
169
and whatever the outcome may have been, the person judged is never
presumed innocent. She is “accused” without watchful custody [“prév-
enue” sans garde à vue]. Paradoxically, there would be a theatricality,
there, without “watchful custody” [sans “garde à vue”].
From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, this properly fan-
tastical piece, Ordalie, disturbs the order of time. It crosses the borders
of centuries and of cultures. But the point is that a universally ordeal-
istic [ordalique] theatricality finds itself here lucidly exhibited, thought,
ripped from the night of history or of the unconscious, illuminated by
the glare of the footlights, in a word, reactivated very close to us. The
question insists: and what if the trial by ordeal survives, under other
names and other figures, today, among us [chez nous], in Christian
cultures as much as in Middle Eastern, Arabic or Islamic cultures, as
suggested by all the characters in this play, no matter where they happen
to encounter each other, whether they are called Mary or Zahra, Salem
or Dar? Despite great cultural differences, and although its legal name
mainly designates the sacrificial forms of the Greek or Christian West,
the ritual of trial by ordeal seems to be universally pervasive. One finds
analogues everywhere. Still today, under a thousand disguises, no matter
what some anthropologists say when they relate it only to ancient forms
and archaic codes.
Safaa Fathy explains herself better than anyone else, on stage and on
center stage [à la scène et en avant-scène]: she has chosen to repeat, in
the fiction of an “as if,” a real trial by ordeal, so to speak, to repeat it
in a sense that is at once ontological, theatrical, and psychoanalytic. It
is an indomitable compulsion to repeat that she gives us to think. She
has planned to reactualize in the theatre a particular archived trial by
ordeal—the so-called trial by ordeal of Tours—by transporting it, trans-
posing it to an elsewhere that is fabulous and yet all the more revealing
of the dark powers of today.
The fable reveals because it tears the veils of modesty, ignorance, and
denial. The analytical power of this disorientation— undeniable and
unimpeachable—cannot be dissociated from poetic force. And if it is
fantastic or phantasmatic, such a transference, such a historical displace-
ment, is today anything but anachronistic. One might believe that the
trial by ordeal, of which the anthropologists speak, is from another time.
It could be shown, as we noted above, that it survives in so many other
forms, very close to home. In Tours, centuries ago, we must recall, an
archbishop, suspected of having got a nun pregnant, was exonerated. As
almost always, it was the triumph of an occult authority, the victory of
an obscurantism sometimes linked to clerical power. The judgment of
God—and of the king by divine right—is at its service. It was claimed
that the divine truth was heard from the mouth of a child: when ques-
tioned, the infant answers in Church Latin. As is most often the case, a
woman is presumed guilty and judged accordingly (well played, men!).
The mother is punished. The milk will have been criminalized as well
as the blood: so she will have her breasts cut off before being put to
death—shedding of blood and milk. Outpourings. This blood and this
milk flow to us, their gushing irrigates the cries, the prayers, and the
paths of Ordalie, beginning with “the uniqueness of the path that leads
nowhere and of the one that departs and never returns.”
What is theatrical, even before fiction, in the reality of such a trial?
What is fictional, already, in the spectacular violence of this real simula-
crum? That is one of the questions staged, one of the puttings into ques-
tion of the putting to the question put on stage. [Voilà une des questions
mises en scène, une des mises en question de la mise à la question mise
en scène]. Safaa Fathy’s extraordinary and adventurous transposition
will have given these questions a body still unheard of. After having
exhumed its unconscious, she will have dealt with, on another stage, a
fury whose “resistible history” remains unfinished. Perhaps the very idea
of the end of history and absolute knowledge still remains a matter of
some trial by ordeal. A resistible history because it would be enough to
probe the denial of a final judgment, or even of judgment [Urteil] tout
court—and cut short.
Resistible history because perhaps it would be enough to agree to
wait, which is more than waiting, to think already of another end,
another way of ending, to wait for the other of a known end of absolute
knowledge as the end of the other. “I love you so much and I’m waiting
for you, I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting for you,” these are the last
words of Ordalie.
Perhaps a change of accent would suffice for a different interpretation
of this “end of a trial by ordeal” that sings, cries, and prays a woman’s
final monologue, an immense love poem next to a “white dress, stained
with red blood.” When this woman says, “Pray. Make as if,” when
she seems to hold her “head that departs decapitated” at the end of
a kite, she summons in a dream, she holds at the end of her dream an
innocence freed from any guilt assigned in advance, an innocence finally
freed from everything that an immense tradition—religious but also
philosophical—will have inculcated under the species of a possibility of
sinning from before any fault, a guilt that a priori, originally, at birth
itself, makes us into either the accused or the defendants, the “presumed
guilty.”
Perhaps the “end of a trial by ordeal,” sung in a low voice by the
woman who calls out to you (“pray and make as if”), can be, of course,
171
the desperate accomplishment of a historical trial. But it can also

be—whence what I call resistible h istory—the very revocation of the
ordeal sacrifice and of all that it will have ordained in its ancestral rites
in what we call “history.” It is also necessary, and this is one of the great
imports of this play, that the end of the trial by ordeal does not prorogue
the trial by ordeal by other means (such as torture and beyond2), by so
many other disguised modes of cruelty. Nothing is more inventive than
cruelty. Cruelty is inventive in its essence, and any invention in need of
cruelty. Any decision, even.
For a decision, as its name suggests, cannot but tear apart [déchirer].
It cannot but cut at one blow [couper d’un coup] (and I am speaking
here not only of a cut breast). The fatally tearing violence that Ordalie
2 We must mention here a seductive conjecture by Lacan. It concerns a genealogy

full of meaning, through a series of relays: from trial by ordeal to human rights,
passing through the legal use of torture. All of this, I would say, coming back from
and coming under the s ame—if not of the same in différance—originary ground, that
is to say, in the trial by ordeal as originary division [Ur-teil].
With regard to a “crisis” of “penal philosophy,” Lacan centers his remarks, then,
on a central stake, namely, on “faith in man,” on the “believable” man, and on the
possibility of sworn faith as the emergence of man. To begin with, then, the trial by
ordeal:
A parallel evolution in the proving of crime indeed corresponds to the evolution

in the meaning of punishment.
Beginning in religious societies with the ordeal and the test of sworn oath,
in which the guilty part is identified by means of belief or offers up his fate to
God’s judgment, probation demands ever more of the individual’s involvement
in confession as his juridical personality is progressively specified. This is why the
entire humanist evolution of Law in E urope—which began with the rediscovery
of Roman Law at the University of Bologna and extended to the entire appropria-
tion [captation] of justice by royal jurists and the universalization of the notion of
the Law of Nations [Droits des gens]—is strictly correlative, in time and space, to
the spread of torture that also began in Bologna as a means in the probation of a
crime. This is a fact whose import people apparently still have not gauged.
For the concept for conscience that is manifest in the widespread reappearance
of this practice as a means of oppression hides from us what faith in man it pre-
supposes as a means of enforcing justice.
If the juridical practice of torture was abandoned precisely when our society
began promulgating Human Rights, which were ideologically founded in the
abstraction of man’s natural being, it was not because of an improvement in
mores, which would be difficult to sustain given the historical perspective we
have on nineteenth-century social reality. Rather, it was because this new man,
abstracted from his social consistency, was no longer believable in either sense of
the term. That is, since he was no longer subject to sinning [peccable], one could
lend credence neither to his existence as a criminal nor to his confession. (Jacques
Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: W.W. Norton, 2006], 113/138–9)
awakens, and which its poetic veridiction sovereignly decides, results

not just from the provenance of the trial by ordeal, nor from the origi-
nary trial by ordeal, nor from the etymon of trial by ordeal. Indeed, this
strange word keeps, in its flesh (I am deliberately speaking in a religious
and rather Christian language), hiding them here, exposing them there,
the ageless stigmata of a bloody wound, a cruel cut or a mortal incision,
an original split [Ur-teil].
But the theatrical power far exceeds the play on words, the play of
words, although this play is darkly and terribly gleeful in the provoca-
tion of language. As for words and as for animals, as for “animals in
words” that sometimes “utter subtle cries of joy,” as for animal-words
[animots], as for the lively, swarming, turbulent animality that pen-
etrates wild, savage, or cultivated signifiers, these phonemic faunae are
always well tended. Their “handling” is both masterly and docile, so
free at heart, emancipated, rash, inventive and faithful. This “handling”
is the very body of narrativity, as the recited and the reciter of the narra-
tive [récit]. The gravedigger, who, above or beside the mad king, occu-
pies the place of the chorus or of absolute knowledge, explains it to you
very well. The gravedigger speaks in the name of absolute reflection. The
theatre is reflected in him. Gravedigger is the talking mirror of Ordalie.
Listen to him, then, the great philosophical witness, the representative
of the metanarrative and the metalanguage who will bury us all, the
thanatographer of autobiography, the undertaker who puts everything
at half-mast and en abyme:
I have already told you and warned you, your time is only, only the time of
the story. Telling, telling, touching the memory of words. And I’ll just have
fun with syllables and letters and words in animals and fertile bush land and
in all words I’ll write myself into a story, an auto-bio-graphy, and vice versa,
and when we all go down the river [sur la route de l’eau], I couldn’t give a
damn [je m’en fous], not dead yet, and we’ll finish it by finishing.
We’ll finish by finishing, he says. He knows, with absolute knowledge,

he knows he’s right: Ordalie is a piece about the end. The end is every-
where in it, you’ll see that from the beginning. This truly eschatological
piece begins and ends with the end. Extremely. It prepares itself for the
end infinitely, in the end.
Somebody, she no doubt, Safaa Fathy, is also having fun, she judges
and enjoys maliciously both the words and the names she gives them,
which these animots receive, or in truth are and become. She judges and
enjoys, her story [récit] gives itself over to the enjoyment of their mon-
strous grafts, copulations, metamorphoses, metempsychoses, transports,
and transfigurations that carry them away. This enjoyment [jouissance]
173
unleashes their proliferation by chain fission or by germ cell division. We

see them pass in procession, sometimes dancing, sometimes marching
or parading. We “touch” them, these words, we caress them in passing,
we listen to them, we hear them speak, these unheard-of characters,
these theories of animated puppets or small eloquent b easts—of theatre
“game” [du “gibier” de théâtre].
The animots receive as proper names the strangest common names in
the language. They carry them on their backs like a title or a destiny.
They get mixed up with these signs. They are the body of their letters:
Salamander [Salamandre], Flick [Chiquenaude], Ludicrous [Saugrenu],
Once Again [Derechef ], Jolt [Soubresaut]. The proper name is thus
proverbialized, and sometimes adverbialized, Once Again [Derechef ].
Before the “-chef” [Avant le chef ], once again, before the verb, the
adverb. The idiom animates itself, it animalizes itself, the words begin
to speak of themselves. Of themselves, they speak to our unconscious.
They make it speak in speaking of themselves. They converse spon-
taneously on the subject of their own genesis. Like little emancipated
fetishes, like the table-puppet that comes alive and starts dancing in
Capital. Even before they’re spoken, the ventriloquist syllables become
speaking organisms, one might say, “speaking subjects.” The French
language is staged [montée en scène] like never before. Ordalie stages
[monte] the French language. Ordalie reminds the French language
of what it has always owed to immigrants. In the mouth of Zahra or
Marie, of Dar or Salem, of the gravedigger or the king, and even in the
voiceover, and even in the voice of the baby who speaks Latin (Si ego te
genui? Si tu es pater meus. Non tu es pater meus), language goes mad
and jubilates. It enjoys itself, of itself, as of a power of enchantment. It
bewitches itself. It is affected by witchcraft. It affects it in any case, and
this affect invades the play. It spreads like a properly theatrical tremor:
strangely uncanny and familiar at the same time, somewhat terrifying,
unheimlich, as Freud would s ay—or Heidegger, when he translates the
Greek deinon in Sophocles.
Ordalie (Ur-teil, judgment, verdict, originary partition, primitive dis-
sociation), such a “theatrical piece” [“pièce-de-théâtre”] therefore has
the virtue of dividing. It has the strength and courage of its partition. It
partitions and shares everything: all sense is turned upside down, both
the order of the scene and its hierarchies and hieratism.
But first, she’s beautiful enough to drive you crazy. What do you
mean? Why do you say that?
Raise the curtain, primal scene of the first act: indeed, everything
seems to begin with a madness. We are not at the theatre of just any
madness. It is not just anybody’s madness. You are witnessing the King’s
madness. You are participating, whether you like it or not, in the mon-
arch’s delirium. Thus, in the extravagance of the One who presides over
the commencement and the commandment (arkhè). This initial aberra-
tion divides an absolute monarch who no longer knows who he is. One
thinks of all the mad kings, recognized as such, of Charles VI, known as
“the Beloved,” the king of the last trial by ordeal stricto sensu, of George
III, the mad king of England whose hyperlucidity was extravagant
enough to lead him astray [l’égarer] to the point of saying that America,
after its revolution, was not a great loss, not irreparable in any case
(“America is lost! Must we fall beneath the blow? Or have we resources
that may repair the mischief?”). This mad king, we remember, built
himself a famous “Tower of Books” which was like a theatre of memory
for a precious edition of Shakespeare. Shakespeare prowls everywhere in
the labyrinths of Ordalie. Zahra quotes him in English (Yes. As they say:
“We are the stuff that dreams are made of”). Ah, if only all kings read
Shakespeare! Would they be less insane?
What king is not mad? Isn’t it crazy, being sovereign? Here the
monarch is wandering, his sovereignty assures him only of the adventur-
ous power to go astray within himself (“Intimate and astray,” Ordalie
shouts this leitmotif, its recurrence signals the return of an indecipher-
able law, a law of the secret, a secret both kept and lost, at the bottom
of an open crypt, inside and outside).
Ur-teil: judgment, a verdict that operates on the basis of the absolute
division of the absolute. As if from the first moment, in the first or last
instance, the One, the Monarch, God himself, the arbiter of the Last
Judgment or his Lieutenant the King, had started to go astray [s’était
mis à errer]. The absolute Judge, the one responsible for both the verdict
and the penalty: here he is delirious. The force of law in person will have
lost its mind, sense, and all judgment. From that point on, who still has
a chance of knowing? And of knowing what to say, and of knowing
what it must mean? Come on, Flick [Chiquenaude]! Ask him, call Once
Again [Derechef ], Ludicrous [Saugrenu] interrogate him. Grammar,
along with meaning, science, and conscience, goes out the window.
Nothing and no one is any more worthy of their name, nor of the name
in general. General de-nomination, last trial by ordeal of the name, its
last jolt [soubresaut], its last twitch, the name is sentenced [le nom passe
en jugement], the last judgment, and language is made to confess its
originary crime.
As if the topos of Absolute Knowledge3—as a place, precisely, as a
3 In the name of Absolute Knowledge, a desire takes hold of me to associate here

quotations from Littré’s dictionary and from Hegel. I could have reproduced in
175
s tage—still kept the memory of a theatre, of a first coup de théâtre. As if

one could decipher in it, perhaps in the aftermath of what Hegel called
the Speculative Good Friday, the bloody theatre of a terrifying verdict.
As if Absolute Knowledge, in the place of the king, the sovereign or
God, bore in its body the indelible scar of a schize, the syndrome of a
primordial schizophrenia.
The scar is moreover bloody, the bloodshed floods and makes the
stage speak from start to finish. Blood (cruor, cruelty)—blood is every-
where. It pours out especially in the mouths of the characters. The
hemorrhage confesses the blood of birth, the blood of crimes, menstrual
blood, milk become blood. In the penultimate scene, with the help of
the Mad King, Mary endlessly exhumes blood-stained bandages. She
looks underground for the newborn, then bathes the fabric in milk that
instantly turns red.
Ordalie primordiale, primordial ordeal. Is this limitless disaster possi-
ble? But if it remains impossible, is it, for all that, avoidable? Why? Yes,
why, that’s the word.
This is the first word of a mad king: “Why?” A Voice soon delivers an
initial verdict that will mark the expiration of all other sentences: “The
king is mad.” A sharing of voices between reason and madness. The
verdict, “the king is mad,” was handed down after the king had uttered
a seemingly senseless sentence (“Yes. I’m encircling my brain”). This
send-off [coup d’envoi] leaves a terrible suspicion forever lingering (but
no one will decide, no one will ever judge, no judgment [Urteil] will ever
decide it with certainty). What suspicion? That the whole story might
extenso Kafka’s Das Urteil [The Trial]—or, above all, its final moment, as an
example of trial by water (suicide by drowning on order and conviction of a Father
[d’un père]).
Littré: “Trial by Ordeal [Ordalie]. n. fem. Any legal test used, in the Middle
Ages, under the name of the judgment of God. ‘There were many species [of judi-
cial trials]; but they all relate to three main ones, namely the oath, the duel and the
trial by ordeal or trial by elements.’ Duclos, Œuvres, v. 1, p. 301. Name given to
the vats in which the water test was performed. – Bas. Lat. ordalium, ordela; from
the Germanic: Anglo-Sax. ordâl; Ger. Urthel, Urtheil, judgment, that is to say, ur,
fundamental, and Theil, sharing.”
Hegel, always confident in what he calls our language [in unserer Sprache], writes
about judgment: “The etymological meaning of ‘judgment’ [Urteil] in our language
[in unserer Sprache] is profounder [tiefer] and expresses the unity of the concept
as what comes first, and its differentiation [die Einheit des Begriffs als das Erste
und dessen Unterscheidung] as the original division [als die ursprüngliche Teilung]
that the judgment truly is.” Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic
Outline, trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, §166, p. 241).
have been hallucinated by the king. It would expose an oneiric vision

or the hallucination of a sovereign in pursuit of specters—were he not
being persecuted, hunted, or even captured by them. For one truly feels
that this almighty king is being held in captivity by all his ghosts.
This is all the more the case because in the end the king speaks of
himself in the third person. He sees and describes himself thus, running
after shadows (“the shadows of these strange beasts, bearing their names
on their backs, Flick [Chiquenaude], Ludicrous [Saugrenu], and Once
Again [Derechef ]”). He repeats words that will span the entire play, as
if they figured the essence and errancy of all the characters: “intimate
and astray.” The king always wants to say, as any self-respecting king
would, “I, a king.” The trial by ordeal sets the stage for the delirium that
condemns such a hubris of ipseity—“I, a king”—to failure.
So much so that, in order to have done with the king, to have done
with the king’s judgment (I suppose that one of the virtual strategies,
one of the possibilities or one of the powers [un des possibles ou une des
puissances], of the play that her evil genius [son malin génie] still has the
kindness to deliver over to everyone’s free will: you can allow yourself,
like me, to overinterpret it—infinitely, it is made and well made for that,
it lends itself to it. It gives you this right), in order finally to abandon
this sovereign who remains perhaps a secondary character, an “extra”
of history, let us note that, if he starts by being crazy, he ends by talking
in hiccups of monosyllables, as if his speech had been cut off, in truth
castrated. But these last syllables are not his final word. And they are not
just any final words (“Ho ho ho, pa pa pa”). (One will always wonder
how a king, someone who says, “I, a king,” might be nothing more than
a figure, a passive witness, an impotent passer-by. A kind of spectator
at the theatre of history. You can always put him between parentheses.)
After his last syllables, in the remorse of a postscript, the king responds
with one last breath, in a whisper, to the gravedigger who often occupies,
as we noted above, the place of the philosopher, of the absolute knower,
of the judge, of the metalanguage or of the truth that gives or draws out
the lessons. The gravedigger decrees, in short, “I, the truth, I judge,”
“I judge by digging graves”—and a gravedigger in the theatre must
allow himself to be haunted by all the specters of Shakespeare—“I make
the whole world speak, I distribute the word and archive it, I am the
presiding secretary general of the trial by ordeal” (“Or, then, I will make
this shameless (rather castrated) king speak, this stuttering eunuch, at
the omen of a crumpled draft.”) The king, then, still responds, after the
end of the story, to the gravedigger who buries everyone, watches over
and interprets the whole play. The king dares to classify the animots.
He gives attributes to each of these common names, to each one who
177
has become a person or persona, to Flick [Chiquenaude], Ludicrous

[Saugrenu], Once Again [Derechef ]:
(The self listens in silence and contemplates the shadows)
Murmurs of the king: Eyelids on the pasture, expended flesh, chasing a

desire and saying to it: will not forget it, at the bedside of a regulatory old
age, bite the dust; covered with virility, contempt of an ankle, foolish Flick
[Chiquenaude], easy Ludicrous [Saugrenu], and Once More [Derechef ] quite
light . . .
As if the king suspected, denounced, insulted, desperately tried to judge

these animots—these non-subjects, these impersonal puppets with their
names inscribed on their backs. As if he had accused them of being, in
the unconscious of the story, the true subjects, the main characters, the
most active heroes—the most effective actors, basically, of the “plot,” of
the conspiracy [complot] and theologico-politico-judicial intrigue of this
story of madness. Which is also a history of philosophy [une histoire de
la philosophie], of truth and of verdict.
You have noticed that, after these last monosyllabic hiccups, at the
moment of his final outburst, in the theory of animots, the king forgets
one of them. He names Flick [Chiquenaude], Ludicrous [Saugrenu], and
Once More [Derechef ]. But he omits Jolt [Soubresaut]. Why?
By the way, what is the difference, in good French, between a start
and a jolt [un sursaut et un soubresaut]? Certainly, there is more than
one difference in usage, but no difference in meaning and in filiation. It
is always a matter of a sudden, unexpected, convulsive movement to
jump on [sauter dessus]. But [as a verb], one says sursauter, not sou-
bresauter. And one speaks more easily about a last outburst [dernier
sursaut] than a last twitch [dernier soubresaut]. Does Ordalie entrust
Jolt [Soubresaut] with a key by making him one of her characters? I still
wonder what and who this little animal puppet will look like on stage.
But, above all, I wonder if this little animal puppet will not, as a spokes-
person or an interpreter, speak to the meaning and rhythm, to the tempo
of the play, and to the infinite difference between the last outburst [le
dernier sursaut] of the trial by ordeal in the world and the infinite future
of its upheavals [ses soubresauts]. In any case, jolt [soubresaut] would
be a coded figure, one of the great allegories or metonymies of Ordalie.
“This is a jolt [soubresaut],” said the king, as if pointing with his finger
at the scene—and the theatre within the theatre. But the hiccups of the
story [de l’histoire] are also jolts [des soubresauts].
I insist on Jolt [Soubresaut] because he has a singular role. He
has some part apart in the territory of the animots. From out of this
reserve, Salamander [Salamandre] (“Like a salamander, what horror”),

p
let us note in passing, had long been hunted: “They are not of the species
of salamander.” Before forgetting Salamander to the benefit of the other
three animots, before, in short, subtracting him from the rest, the king
had already dissociated Soubresaut. The thing takes place in an autobio-
graphical story [récit] in front of one of his mirrors. After starting with
a “When I was young,” the mad king describes the animots. They are
within him. They are a part of him. These are entoptic images, visions
or fantasmatic hallucinations, that come to inscribe themselves in him
on a screen, at the bottom of the cave that his eyelids are, while he is
himself a shadow, the shadow of himself, less than a shadow, in truth,
the simulacrum of a shadow, in sum, the theatre itself, the very writing
of the theatre, and the theatre of a writing:
A feigned shadow, that I myself was, enclosed under the eyelids, there took
place images of strange wild beasts who mistreated him under the branches
and whose backs were covered with writing—a flick [chiquenaude], ludi-
crous [saugrenu], once more [derechef ]. Jolt [Soubresaut]. Yes, he was still
running, too, this is a jolt [soubresaut]. Yes . . . No, they weren’t wearing the
handwriting, they were it. Wild words, carnal, sweat, soot, nothing . . . one
of them always summoned me before a jolt [soubresaut].
So, let us begin again. The story begins again [L’histoire recommence].
One burst [sursaut] after the other, one jolt [soubresaut] upon the other.
The trial by ordeal will have no end, but, in the desire of its institution, it
will always have deployed a theatricalization of the verdict. Especially in
the Christian Middle Ages, but even before then and all over the world,
under this name or another. As we know, the trial by ordeal is primar-
ily, in the usual sense, a judgment of God, a judicial test in which the
truth of a verdict, the sentence of a veridictum, finally fell. Especially in
the European Middle Ages, but also in other ways throughout all cul-
tures, the verdict was signed by God, signified in the name of God—ad
judicium dei. This sign of God, his operation, his becoming-sign, his
sign-making, his signification, the process of his manifestation would
be theatre itself, the becoming-visible of the stage before any staging.
“Spectaculum. Ad judicium dei,” clarifies Marie, Zahra’s double. What
happens in the history of the trial by ordeal, but also in the history of
theatre, when one seriously “plays” the trial by ordeal on the stage of a
theatre, today, when one tends to it and deals with it [quand on en traite
et quand on la traite] in a twenty-first-century theatrical institution?
If I often use this verb, “treat,” it is because, in a double play,
Ordalie’s genius perhaps comes from the fact that its essential trait,
act, verb, signature, in a word its treatment of the thing would be like
179
the musical inscription of two staves [deux portées] in the unique body
of one and the same event: on the one hand, a concentrated, dense,
immediate analysis of the history of all trials by ordeal—a snapshot,
a radiographic treatise, richer and more vivid, more economical than
all the analyses (historical, sociological, philosophical, psychoanalytic)
that are, moreover, put into play in the wings of the play; on the other
hand, a treatment designed to put an end to evil—but a non-therapeutic
and perhaps hopeless treatment, like the song of hope and love that is
pronounced at the end of the “end of a trial by ordeal.” Hoping without
hope. A treatment all the more intense because it would put an end to
the trial by ordeal, its horizon of atonement, redemption, and salvation.
Even though we would say “no, it’s over [non, fini],” to its verdicts, its
condemnations, to the instituted power of all its courts, its police and
questions, even though we would call into question their putting to the
question, even though no trial by ordeal would condemn anyone ever
again, we would still be condemned to the trial by ordeal. The session
continues. Unrelenting, inexpiable.
Genet once said that any theatre worthy of the name stages a
judgment.4 In the trial of this theatre, the first accused, the absolute
4 In short, any play would be a descendant, the granddaughter, of some trial by

ordeal, and Ordalie would deal with nothing less than this history of theatre. At the
same time, it would also deploy and relate, in one and the same volume, a theatrical
treatise on this history of t heatre—for the living and for their dead. Can we not say
of Ordalie, as I believe we can, what Genet will have said about his The Screens?
Genet: “The fête, while limited in time and space, apparently intended for a few
spectators, will be of such gravity that it will also be intended for the dead. No one
should be excluded from or deprived of the fête: it must be so beautiful that the dead
also feel it, and blush [. . .], always going in the sense of the unique only party, and
very far into it. Everything must be brought together with the end of puncturing
[crever] what separates us from the dead. Everything must be done so that we can
have the sentiment that we have worked for them and have done so successfully”
(Jean Genet, Letters to Roger Blin [Paris: Gallimard, 1966], 11–12).
This address to the dead seems to me to be in deep, secret, subterranean con-
sonance with the singularity of the affect given to us perhaps (for it is also a gift)
by Safaa Fathy’s play, in resonance with what accords me, in any case with what
Ordalie accords me: the irresistible sentiment of a fête unique for the dead, primar-
ily for the female dead, for the dead female victims of all of history’s injustices, so
many dead women whose specters are found in the audience. Finding themselves
there, they see and recognize, they recognize themselves with gratitude in Ordalie.
In the rapes, the tortures, the perjury and the injustice, the cuts, the mutilations, in
childbirth and in death, in blood and in milk, but above all, in the end, in an unlim-
ited “yes,” in a “yes” to the day, in a “yes one day” for all days, in a “yes” always
despite all the nights of history, in the “yes” of an unheard song, a song of songs
of all the times expected for our time. “And the night will be ours despite the next
efendant, presumed guilty, the one who is called to appear before the
d
law, the first judged, or even the pre-judged, is you, the reader or the
spectator. And in fact, right here, as soon as you read Ordalie, or believe
you have “attended” the performance of Safaa Fathy’s work, you will
become the prey or object, beyond any possible representation, of this
machine. Of this machine judging the judging machine, of the machine
judging the deus ex machina of theatre.
And this has been signaled since the protest of the liveliest, the most
animated, the most inspired life. A woman attests and protests. For evil
or the malignant [le mal ou le malin] is most often a masculine figure,
that of the male, the king, the master, the priest, the judge, the inquisi-
tor, the policeman (yes, yes, “well played, men”). Though this woman
seems “impassible,” she is rather “impossible,” clarifies Dar, atten-
tive to the letter, and to what is only slightly lacking. An impossible
woman, who is she? It is perhaps a woman who agrees to think and do
the impossible, a woman for whom it is possible to act, without doing
anything, precisely, letting the impossible arrive. This woman of the
impossible rises up against the trial by ordeal. She does everything (the
impossible) to extract from it the good, to snatch in a flash [éclat], the
time of a lightning-flash [éclair], the vision of a golden age to come, yes,
a nugget of innocence, a yes at last.
Long before the final love song responds to him, before this last
“monologue of one of these women,” Dar was appealing to this improb-
able future, to the arrival of the impossible. He dared to speak of prepar-
ing the infinite, if I dare say so.
How to prepare the infinite? How does one prepare for this?
Especially where we are so wary of the “great narrative [grand récit]
syndrome”? Any answer? No, demand and appeal of Dar: I love you
in a word. While she at the end will say to the welcome beloved,
“I love you so much and I am waiting for you, I am waiting for you,
I am waiting for you,” he, Dar, will have preceded her with all her
impatience. He knows how to wait, does Dar, he knows the diaboli-
cal, he knows the malignant, and he names it. He declares that in a
couple, “the third is necessarily the devil in person,” but he would like
to prepare the infinite future. He keeps his faith in the great narrative
[grand récit]. However, without waiting—he does not want to lose
anything by waiting:
night, I mean, yes in spite of it and always. End of a trial by ordeal, I will be up to
the task, stay with me, be welcome my love, I love you so much and I am waiting for
you, I am waiting for you, I am waiting for you.”
181
Dar: If I understand correctly, a yet-unfinished “I love you” is written in the

infinity of the narrative [récit], the great narrative [grand récit] of all. Come
on, let’s prepare the infinite [préparons l’infini]. Therefore, I would say: what
would our missed story of the now be, there is one . . . I see it, like that, later,
after us, there will be more than one story, my little contribution to the late
moment named the future? Me . . . as yet unfinished and maybe already fin-
ished . . . an ‘I love you,’ as yet unfinished of it having been a time . . . Finally,
as for me, I do not want to miss my story of the now . . .
The gravedigger: Which one?
Doesn’t the gravedigger feel that history risks escaping him, the history
of love and the future of history? History tout court of which he will
have known nothing, with an absolute non-knowledge?
An impossible woman, we were saying, is this not a woman who
busies herself for the future with wedding preparations to infinity? The
fiancée of infinity? It’s also a kind of flick [chiquenaude], because you
will have noticed here, this eccentric, in her way of distinguishing herself
[se singulariser]. She stands out [se singularise] differently than Jolt
[Soubresaut] who also knew how to isolate himself: of all the animots,
Flick [Chiquenaude] is the only one with a feminine name. That is why
she is always a bit set apart, in the trial or in the procession of those who
perhaps are trying to bring her to justice, Jolt [Soubresaut], Ludicrous
[Saugrenu], and Once Again [Derechef ]. Noun or adverb, each and
every one of these others acts the m ale—and the malignant [fait le mâle.
Et le malin].
When madness, which is what comes in the first place, when madness
affects the king, when an originary madness makes the principle itself
tremble—and the prince, and the commencement and the command-
ment, and the sovereignty of the sovereign—when madness decides on
the first word, when a mad king is the first to take the floor, well, just so
you know, Ordalie, the trial by ordeal, is once more [derechef ] under-
way, up to its last or penultimate start [sursaut].
But before the king takes the floor, first, you are already in the
theatre—you are already delivered over to the mute visibility of the
meaning of royalty, which, precisely, goes to his head: “one distin-
guishes a crown.” But the king is the first one to speak. In the beginning,
with a flick [chiquenaude], there was the logos, reason, and the Word
of God or his lieutenant, the king, but logos, reason, and the word were
already crazy. Not by accident because word of origin cannot be guaran-
teed, assured, or founded by any prior reason. But the lord has nothing
to say, he speaks for speaking’s sake. Prince and sovereign, he first takes
the floor with a single word: “Why?” He already understands nothing,
and everything will follow from this. The king loses his head. The king is
a madman. He is as crazy as no one is crazy, but he is as crazy as One, as

the monarch, as the One that he is, in arkhè, at the commencement and
the commandment. All of this can be said a priori, can it not? Each of
the kings is a kind of madman, from the moment when, qua sovereign,
he makes the law without any law, he has the right to suspend all right.
The law is mad [folle]. But this can also be verified in history, in theatre,
in the history of theatre as in the theatre of h istory—not only in the
examples of “really mad” kings, of kings gone mad—in those who are
nevertheless charged by fate to tell the truth of the sovereign, and again
right here, in Ordalie (as Safaa Fathy says, “an archetypal and historical
character at the same time [with reference to King Charles VI , therefore,
to the Beloved]”).
A theatre begins, then, with the madness of the king who ends up
losing his h
ead—as well as his judgment. In the French idiom, the one
that allows its body to be worked over [se laisse travailler au corps],
body and soul, by a foreign body, in this unique piece, in Ordalie, well,
losing one’s head also means losing all sense, all common sense, losing
consciousness, losing oneself or losing all judgment.
One loses one’s head when the chief, the capital, the master, the king,
God if you wish, no longer knows where to turn his head. He has not yet
been decapitated, cut in half even before the Terror,5 but he no longer
knows where to turn his head. The king is divided and doubled up. In
the same vein of the same sequence, he tells you “I love the truth” and
“I am lying to you.” And yet—although Marie comes to caress him,
although he is sometimes made to eat like an infant who does not yet
5 In the last sequence of Terror, another theatrical work by Safaa Fathy, very close
to the end this time, this madness is already due to the division of absolute knowl-
edge, to incompleteness, to incompletion, to beheading, to the “divergence” of a
look or of a fragmented, cut, shredded, and exploded body. We receive the avowal
of this madness of divisibility. It is confessed, as at the end of a trial, an inquisition
or a trial by ordeal. It is recognized by the becoming-historian [devenir-historien] of
Character 1:
Character 1 (becomes Historian [devient Historien]): I’m looking for a whole

subject. Possible that it be incomplete. In continuity with the . . . (Pause) What a
burden it is to be lucid with such a definitive divergence, to have such a fragmented
body . . . To have this arbitrary and perishable thing.
Character 2 (becomes a historian [devient historien]): How can one know one’s
own death.
In Ordalie, in an at least analogous manner, there is also a sort of historian or archi-

vist, the neutral gaze of the chronicler, of the great witness, of the observer or of the
philosopher who claims absolute knowledge, and that is the gravedigger.
183
know the meaning of speech, more like an infant than a king—believe

me, he is not saying any old thing.
I, too, could begin otherwise and continue to speak as if to say nothing
at all, to talk about the infinite that sinks into the abyss of a play, a piece,
as they say, of theatre. Infinite that thinks evil [qui mal y pense], that
sinks into evil—but for what purpose? Everything would play itself out
as if it were a matter of the infinite adorning itself [se parer] for a time, of
taking the time to prepare itself [se preparer], of preparing the prepara-
tions for an improbable future.
I, too, could begin otherwise, or end here, stop here and tell you: read,
then, imagine, go see the play [pièce] in order to find out what follows,
namely, history itself as a trial by ordeal. Given that this resembles, at
least on the surface, a history of madness itself, do not expect me to try
to tell it in a kind of preface that would extract a meaning or narrative
scenario, a story [récit] from it, in order to replace the theatrical experi-
ence. Read, then, go and see for yourself. Above all, listen.
Moreover, this play itself consists of a story [récit]. It is the collec-
tive anamnesis of characters who narrate themselves to themselves as
well as to others. As is done in theatre, they double themselves, double
themselves up and repeat their history [histoire], the bloody cruelty of
an improbable genealogy and an impossible world, where “the world
is lacking.” It is indeed “a failed history,” with many ellipses and ana-
colutha (since the author likes the latter word, one begins to regret that
she did not make it into a character or an animated puppet, “remotely
controlled,” as she says, and always interrupting in order to always say
more—like any self-respecting anacoluthon—taking the floor from the
king, from Zahra, from Marie (who will have caressed the king), from
Salem and from Dar, but also from Flick [Chiquenaude], from Once
Again [Derechef ], from Ludicrous [Saugrenu]—and even from Jolt
[Soubresaut]).
Is the madness of the king simply one madness among others? A case?
One symptom among others? Or is it madness itself—the madness of the
“same,” the “same as oneself,” the madness of the ipse, of the “myself,”
of self-identity [l’identité à soi], of the sovereign judge? Everything I
have just named, the king, the same, the ipse, the sovereign, the princi-
ple, the one, the commencement, the commandment, absolute power,
absolute knowledge, becomes the “etc.” in a flick [chiquenaude].
The flick [La chiquenaude] seems to do nothing but pass, in the
almost anonymous crowd of a Sunday demonstration, in the theory or
parade of jolts, extravagances, and repetitions [des soubresauts, des sau-
grenus et des derechefs]. In truth, for the sake of memory as well as for
the French grammar and nomenclature of this Ordalie (recall Charles
VI, our mad king, the king of the last trial by ordeal), for the sake of
French literature and philosophy (though somewhat contaminated since
Poitiers and other wars by the Arab invasion, by Zahra and Salem,
always at the edge of the idiom), and indeed, Flick [Chiquenaude], as
ludicrous [saugrenu], ironic, malignant [malin], and mischievous as that
might seem (but come on, Ordalie, you leave your grain of salt every-
where6). Flick [Chiquenaude], in good French, brings back in every
good Frenchman an old specter [revenant].
But who, then, in the end? Nothing less than the specter of Descartes’
God. Once again, Flick [Chiquenaude] opens—another endless trial by
ordeal—the lawsuit brought by Pascal against Descartes’s God without
God. Like Once Again [Derechef], moreover. She could have called Once
Again [Derechef ] Iterum; but she, like Descartes, preferred the French
language. The chief, the head, the king, God himself, all make haste in
order to return. For, reading Ordalie as one must, a tongue in the cheek
6 When Safaa Fathy reminds us, precisely, in her Notes for a Staging [Notes pour
une mise en scène], that “the text is above all ironic,” does she think only, cum
grano salis, with a grain of salt or with such and such a ludicrousness [saugrenu]
which (like the gravedigger or the mad king, but also as each of the characters who
substitute for each other) would give its fundamental note to the play, affecting or
connoting the inscribed metalanguage, as one role among others, at the heart of the
play, or even as the signature of a tragedy that makes you laugh and cry?
No doubt. But she is also surely thinking of the rhetorical figure called “irony.”
This use of antiphrasis is constant, and if Fathy also speaks of “metaphoricity,”
“allegory,” “anacoluthon,” it is because a kind of general substitution is at work
everywhere. An unbridled rhetoric has driven crazy [affoler] the very meaning of the
story [récit] as well as that of theatre. The story [récit] narrates the theatre that stages
the story [récit] itself (“between theatre and theatre in theatre,” she says, “The play’s
the thing”). It only takes one flick [chiquenaude] for one character to speak in the
place of an other: “the characters play their own role” but they also play “a role in
the story [récit] of another character.” “Forget who you are. I follow you, I am in
your place [Je te suis, je suis à ta place],” says Zahra to Marie, and then, imitating
Marie’s voice, “I have already taken your place.” And an event takes place [a lieu],
precisely, it takes place [prend place], always in the place of an other. It expropriates
and dispossesses by the mere repetition of what it replaces. This is perhaps the trial
by ordeal of all trials by ordeal, the essence and the condition of every possible trial
by ordeal.
And then, flick or ludicrous yourselves [chiquenaude ou saugrenu vous-mêmes],
you play your role as that of an other, you are each time yourself as if enrolled in
this general substitution. Whether you like it or not, whether you protest or not, you
take a singular pleasure in being thus committed in advance. Tokens and hostages
[Gages et otages]. And remotely controlled, each and every one of you [chacun
chacune], vivid puppets manipulated with love.
In a story [histoire] of evil whose salvation [salut] is never assured. Cheers for
salvation [Salut au salut]!
185
[Eng.], in more than one tongue [en plus d’une langue], that is to say, as
it is written, mischievously, cum grano salis, with a pinch of salt without
laughing. Who among us, the French [les Français], does not remember
the title of Descartes’ Fifth Meditation: “On the Essence of Material
Things and, Once More [derechef ] Concerning God, that He Exists”
(. . . & iterum de Deo, quod existat)? When I quote Latin here, I still
hear the infant in Ordalie speaking Latin (Si tu es pater meus. Non tu es
pater meus. Ad libitum. Ad eternam. Ad eternam). What good French
person does not remember the moment when, after having defeated the
madness with which he was hypothetically threatened by the perversity
of an “Evil Genius” (genium aliquem malignum), a “shrewd and deceit-
ful” devil who, in place of a “true God,” “a sovereign source of truth,”
would have “used all his industry to deceive me”—Descartes must again
prove the existence of God, a second time, once more [derechef ]? God
always remains to be proven once more, iterum, does He not? This is
his future without future, his infinite future. This preparation that never
ends. We must start all over again, always, endlessly, we must reiterate
as if only once in only one language, as if once and for all were never
enough, as if, always threatened by his double or by his devil, by the
Evil of his Malignancy [par le Mal de son Malin]—God still remained
improbable, and therefore yet to be proven.
These debates are familiar; so many trials invoking, in short, the judg-
ment of God—ad judicium Dei, familiar the specters that never sleep in
the libraries and judicial archives of these philosophical and theological
disputations. As if we were in danger of losing our memory (it must be
remembered, remembered that it must be remembered, indefinitely), or
as if we were in danger of going mad, or as if a malignant [malin] God
had left us delirious in the meantime.
So, Pascal accuses Flick [Chiquenaude]. He does not forgive a “useless
and uncertain” Descartes, but above all he does not forgive Descartes
for Flick [Chiquenaude]. What remains unforgivable? Who? Flick
[Chiquenaude].
I cannot forgive Descartes: indeed he would have liked, in all his philosophy,
to be able to do without God; but he couldn’t help but have him give him a
flick [chiquenaude] to set the world in motion.
Okay, Pascal has the right to disagree with D escartes— agreed. But
where is the Evil? And the philosopher’s malignancy? Why does Pascal
judge t hem—Descartes and his flick [chiquenaude]—to be unforgivable?
And having put his fingers in, having dared without laughing to pinch
the origin of the world between his fingers? (For the flick [chiquenaude]
is a story of fingers that begins by seemingly pinching with two fingers
of one hand and not just any finger. The flick [chiquenaude] is the story
of a naughty game, of maneuver and manipulation, like the art of a
puppeteer. Littré, who declares the origin of this word unknown, says
that “flick” [chiquenaude] means “blow” [coup]—I would say here a
discreet coup de théâtre—a “blow applied by the middle finger whose
tip is pressed firmly under the tip of the thumb and which is released
with effort.”)
Where is the evil, then? And the unforgivable? Another story [histoire]
of blood and milk? Another trial of birth and genealogical parentage, as
in Ordalie? The nun apparently knows who the progenitor is: an impos-
sible father, too, and one who never c onfesses—a man of the cloth, the
last one who would be capable of recognizing a child. Now the sister, let
us call her a sister, the one who will have her breasts cut off, and for a
reason, she gives up the Bishop. She gives up the father.
She gives him up: what does that mean? First, in short, she gives him
up to the police, she denounces him, as today a symptom would signal
the truth in a psychoanalytic trial by ordeal for our time. But how does
she give up the Bishop or the unknown father? Well, she gives him to
be known by giving only his name. Not directly to the police or to some
new Inquisition but quite simply to the newborn. She gives the baby the
name of the father. And the name of the newborn screams, it then shouts
a question that will resound until the end of time: will the sister have
orgasmed when she received the “incandescent seeds of the bishop?”
And what about the episcopal orgasm? Before, after, during? Was there
orgasm in the Church?
Insemination scatters itself everywhere [l’ensemencement se répand
partout]. Language itself, the language of the immigrant, is “insemi-
nated by the Frenchman.” There is nothing but natural language, lan-
guages, more than one language, the languages of immigrants, starting
with French: “I, no one, Zahra proclaims, my name is ‘no one’ from a
tale [conte] already having arrived as an immigrant” and Dar protests
against “goody-goody cosmopolitanism.”
The bishop disavows, then, he denies all fatherhood. I will be neither
papa nor pope [pas papa, ni pape], as the mad king’s hiccups will end
up saying.
Now the unforgivable crime, according to Pascal, is to have claimed
to deny paternity. Descartes will not have allowed himself to be haunted
in vain by an evil genius to whom he always remains hostage. He will
have pushed the diabolical challenge to the point of doing everything in
order to go without the father creator. And Pascal accuses him of having
killed God in a way, one more time, of having substituted a machine
for God, the theatre of a deus ex machina, of having made the world a
187
child without a father (Si tu es pater meus. Non tu es pater meus, moans
the newborn in Ordalie). Pascal accuses the father of “And once more
[derechef ] of God that He exists,” of having forgotten the blood of an
“unknown father,” the blood of a Conception (maculate/immaculate),
and the Blood of Christ. For this is indeed the substance of Pascal’s
accusation against the flick [chiquenaude], and the substance of the for-
giveness denied by a great Christian. We are still in the middle of a trial
by ordeal, even if it is happening long after the death of the mad king,
Charles VI, the Beloved: there was a crime, one judges, one does not
forgive, one appeals to the judgment of God, of a God who was a victim
of murder, once more [derechef ], of a God assassinated and deprived,
precisely, of his power to judge the murderer, his own murderer: the
end of a trial by ordeal, of all trials by ordeal, of the principle of trial
by ordeal. But one can still judge. The session c ontinues—or so people
believe. People believe they can still denounce a devil or an evil genius,
these specters [revenants] who come back and move about behind the
curtain, in the wings of the unconscious, even when we think we have
driven them off the stage.
As the author’s evil genius says, the dwelling-places [les demeures] are
haunted.
Chapter 12
Prière d’insérer (1991)
Preface written for the publication of French writer and poet Mathieu
Bénézet’s Dits et Récits du mortel (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). It was first
published in Ubacs 10 (1991): 30–7.
Sometimes, go disfigure, the tongue becomes bigger than the tongue and
it’s more than enough . . .
This book makes noise. Must one speak of it already, at what risk?
I felt precipitated into it in any case, without knowing, but the book no
doubt knows more about this than its author and than I myself, having
drawn us here for the first and last time. The risk with noise is that one
silences it under the pretext of making something heard or understood,
one informs about noise in a discourse, one articulates it by giving it
figures: those of the subject, of language and literature. But what dis-
cordantly arrives through the voice of this mortal that puts itself up
for a uction—having come from before the tongue, and even before this
tongue you have in your mouth, leading beyond literature, toward sites
where a subject that figures can no longer be h eard—is a singular noise.
It reverberates long after literature when it writes directly on its own
saturation, beyond its oldest “that’s enough,” miming the passion of its
body, up to its resurrection the fourth day to recall that since the begin-
ning it is enough, and too much for it. The perverted saturation remains,
still literature around the edges and overboard, something like satire.
But the satire of satire, the Menippea according to Saint Marx. To rumi-
nate, I’ll return to this, in the belly of another.
I will not recite this book, it is there to be read, out loud but from
behind the tongue, just between the teeth, that is to say practically
played alongside others. I limit myself to a single stitch in time [je me
Translated by Philippe Lynes. All the notes in this chapter have been provided by
the translator.
189
limite à un point, de suture]. I suspect that what the figurant of this

book pleads to include is the instrument, the surgery of a writing that
can pop this stitch, by taking a final scar from the rear. Such would be
at the very least the hypothesis of my reading: namely a mortal, a piece
of this mortal, a bit [un mors], then, or a morsel, explaining to you,
on its tongue and in its mouth, how a piece of the corpus could have
become bigger than the whole. Monstrosity itself, but it exculpates me
in advance, I myself who am in the process of trying to make a detached
part pass for the overrun whole of the great eucharist. Let us suppose
then that this bit of book says and recites the origin of the figure in
general, thus of all the figures of the figure, form, facies, the face, turns
of phrase, procedures of rhetoric or logic, modes or genres of literature,
etc. One would thus call this place of origin the FIGURANT. This would
be the topos, itself unfigured, unfigurable, of what gives a figure, that
which actively producing, constituting, signifying, figures [fait figure]. In
so doing, it disappears. Persona without person, pushed to the back of
the scene or fourteenth at table, the figurant in the theatre effaces itself
(“how to not lose face?”), it forgets even its name in the indistinct rumor
of masks and the movement of the tide. The two values of “figurant”
pass into one another and if “figuring as [faire figure de]” also comes
down to giving the slip to a simulacrum, it is as if a figurant figured as
figuring [comme si un figurant faisait figure de figurer]. Here, sewn in
both directions, would be the stitch in time. One last thread pulled, it
pops here: in no way does the thread of the so-called récit return, to re-
engender the figure, to some great figurant.
But to the DISFIGURED. In the passive sense, a passion here affecting
the subject to whom something happens, without return and even before
it happens to itself: a fatal accident, preceding any operation whatso-
ever. This is not only said, it must be recited because disfiguration will
have been an event, a more than singular accident, multiple, immedi-
ately dividing its first time (some times), thereby wounded, disfigured as
a plural event. Figuring as saying, in its name, the origin without face of
every figure, the mortal recites the wound. It exhibits disfiguration, that
of an event that can no longer lose face. Like an ineffaceable branded
letter, a mark through the mask. Imagine, in uncovered permanence,
the unbearable alliance of a circumcision that would no longer turncut
around but that you would impudently bear, like your name, near the
mouth. “How not to lose face?” You understand better how it figures—
works through a récit, this time begun not with “once upon a time, go
figure” (implicit in any narration) but with the apostrophizing attack
that I translate in my way: once upon some times, go disfigure.
General disfiguration makes for a story only if monstrosity no longer
lets itself be cosmeticized. For that, it is necessary that the tranquil

relation of the whole to the part be that of a perverted event. No more
synecdoche or metonymy to give it a good figure. This is what one faces
off with [dévisage] or deduces from (once upon some times, at least, the
whole does less than the part and one recalls the old word deduction
for narration) the news of four days (“after three days I will resurrect,”
announced another mortal in another more or less good news, rever-
berating four times), nothing less is necessary to return the farcical or
overstuffed [farcie] passion of literature into catastrophe. Deduction
is thus part of the whole that names it, hear this: make of the whole a
part. As in the recitation of the mortal that names itself and kills itself
ventriloquizing therein, “occupied with the deafened noise that flows
from its blood . . .”
Resonance from before the tongue, the body and the tongue even
before the tongue, one nonetheless fatter than the o ther—no body
without organs—the explosion from before the first time of articulated
language or literature pregnant with itself impassioned can no longer be
amortized. It drags, it remains like the mother, “Mommy Mallarmé”
after the end, still epilogizing in the derision of the citational graft, of
farce, (in organic decomposition), the derision of literary cuisine also, the
(very calculated) fatrasie, the (very overdetermined) carnival, (mimed)
parody, (overwritten) satire (satire of the “satire” genre): “it’s fucked,
the noise that this book makes is nothing but the noise of the rending
of the literary that perpetuates the race . . .” And the veil of the temple
(“literature”) was torn through the middle. Says and recites the Gospel.
Satire itself thus no longer suffices, the supersaturated Menippea here
becomes a register among others, even if it works through and comprises
them. It is a piece, a bit in the mouth like a torn tongue (“to tear the
tongue from one’s body”), a piece detached from oneself, held between
the teeth, knowledgeably orienting the blindered beast.
It is also, for example! a citation violently extorted from Capital then
disproportionately extended beyond its own corpus: “[. . .] the absurd
fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of
his own body.”1 At the dawn of its third day, Dits et Récits serves
this fragment of Marx as its hors d’œuvre, or if you prefer its epigraph.
When Marx analyzes the capitalist character of manufacture and its
monstrous effects on the figure of the human, can one make him dem-
onstrate, ventriloquizing him, with the same statements, dits et récits, a
general disfiguration? Not eternal or originary, but overflowing this or
that mode of production toward the longer sequence of another history?
1 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990), 481–2.

191
And of another body? What Marx intends to articulate upon one

body would become a figure, of rhetoric this time, for this other body.
Manufacture, according to Marx, “cripples the worker,” “converts the
worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in
a forcing-house . . . just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole
beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. Not only is the specialized
work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual
himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a
detail operation, thus realizing the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa,
which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body.”2
Once the fragment of this fragment on fragmentation is reinscribed,
does one know if a Capital also belongs to the history of literature or if
it swallows the literary farce whole to other ends and without return, in
the story it tells and the event it performs?
Below this question, the unique signing wound is impassive.
Another history of bits larger than the whole that incorporates it.
And since the mouth of a mortal can never get enough of seasoning
the farce, of being right or explaining the reasons of cuisine, may I be
permitted to add a little more, I myself who has so far only deducted
and sliced away to include. I thus add a piece of this Capital that will
long remain an avant-garde dish, an appetizer.3 Mathieu Bénézet does
not cite it. It is a ventri-loquent matter of the “belly of another [panse
d’un autre]:” “Citizen Weston illustrated his theory by telling you that
a bowl contains a certain quantity of soup, to be eaten by a certain
number of persons, an increase in the broadness of the spoons would
produce no increase in the amount of soup. He must allow me to find
this illustration rather spoony. It reminded me somewhat of the simile
employed by Menenius Agrippa. When the Roman plebeians struck
against the Roman patricians, the patrician Agrippa told them that the
patrician belly fed the plebeian members of the body politic. Agrippa
failed to show that you feed the members of one man by filling the belly
of another.”4
This is not its body, only a pasticcio, or even a false communion host
upon language. Read the rest, of the Capital and the Dits et Récits du
mortel. Without forgetting where “I set the avant-garde”—he says—
“where I think” [“je mets l’avant-garde”—dit-il—“où je pense”].
2 Ibid.
3 The text Derrida refers to is Value, Price and Profit, published one year before the
first volume of Capital.
4 Karl Marx, Value Price and Profit (New York: International Co., 1969), 6–7.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/value-price-profit.pdf
Chapter 13
Eyespot Like No Other (1980)
“Ocelle comme pas un” appeared as the preface to Jos Joliet’s L’enfant
au chien-assis (Paris: Galiée, 1980), 9–43.1
on this day
. . . no longer knowing where to put oneself and I think of a law: the
energy of an apostrophe is always recognized in that it provokes you
where you no longer know from the start where to put yourself.2
Where The Child speaks to me as not one.
Where? But then there, what does that mean? Where does this there
take p lace—since, where the other comes to you, where the other joins
you (you yourself by the address to yourself adjoined), where, joined,
you would take place you no longer know where to put yourself? You
no longer know where to put yourself because, suddenly violated by
the apostrophe, on such and such a day and in this light you glimpse
the secret: namely, so to speak, that you hardly know where your name
comes from, who summons you, what your name is, and who is in
charge of your identity: questions of birth and blood, imbroglio of filia-
tions, when so many genetic difficulties [gênes], through generations of
people, gentle and otherwise, genetics and genealogy are crossbred.
Between genetics and genealogy, sight turns cloudy and distinction
fails. The division between nature (in the sense in which one speaks of
a natural, illegitimate child) and all its others (society, law, culture, the
familial order, the accredited language that decides, legitimates, excludes,
attests) fades away. Now it is at the moment of this v iolence—when the
Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes. Unless otherwise indicated, all
footnotes to this chapter have been provided by the translators.
1 [Translators’ note] Another possible translation of the title is “Ocellus like none.”
2 “Ne pas savoir où se mettre” more properly means “not knowing what to do
with oneself,” but this loses the specific spatial reference in Derrida’s demonstration.
193
apostrophe calls you in your body without legitimating y ou—it is in this

light [sous ce jour] that you no longer know where to put yourself, you
feel unique (not one, but unique) and you wonder whether this, one day,
for a day, happens to you only in order to draw you out of your retreat
and to cut you off from it entirely, and whether this happens only to you.
It has happened already, you no longer know how to parry; and to
know this would still be to parry.
The initial apostrophe got you out of your nest [déniché] with a word,
where you thought you were most protected in your secret.
This word (is it still a name? Not so sure in any case, and not just
one)—I still don’t know exactly which one it is. I suspect it, but will
likely hold off on establishing it right away, hypothesis is always more
effective. Because this book, and everything that I have read or heard
about it, remains enigmatic to me even as I think I am getting close to
its umbilical secret. I love it with an admiration that keeps a respect-
ful distance from something unsaid that paints a picture. I could talk
about it for centuries, quite knowledgeably, ceaselessly turning around
the hieroglyph. To what end? Read. If I said thrown out [déniché], it’s
so that I can teach you. I pointed upwards and toward a dog—rather,
toward a constellation of dogs that neither bark nor dwell. They nest
[nichent] above, they watch over a type of house from on high, they
represent the most high of a house. Understand this last word in the
sense of “family” as well: domesticity, economy, dirty laundry and lin-
gerie, the ownmost and the lineage, the beds or the coat of arms. They
watch over, these cynical emblems, from the roof. And this is why I said
protected.
We’re dealing, know this, with the story of a roof.
Roof, the same roof under which, one day, it was a matter of your
birth, which was by their lights and under (always under, always under-
lying) the rule of these dormers [chiens assis].3 There The Child was con-
ceived without a father, without one who dares speak his name, above
the “linen closet [lingerie],” in an “attic.” It was accessible by a ladder,
and this attic was “blind,” “windowless, having only the light of four
chiens assis, in the middle of the roof covered below with glass wool.”4
Do you know what chiens assis mean, and the expression “chiens
3 “Chien-Assis,” or “sitting-dog,” simply refers to a type of dormer window. We

have left the original French untranslated throughout.
4 Jos Joliet, L’Enfant au chien-assis (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 142. Derrida at times
mistranscribes Joliet’s book; the hyphenation or absence thereof of chien-assis does
not appear to follow a consistent logic in this text. Unless otherwise indicated, all
page references will be to this book, and given in parentheses in the text.
assis”? They must be questioned, but let us retain for now that chiens
assis above a roof let light pass. They are literally kinds of LUCARNES.
This word all of a sudden terrifies me, like a name of vengeful and infer-
nal gods destined to be famished, bloodthirsty, and licking their chops.
Roof above which these four dogs are immobile, impassive, and mute
as judges. They signify without opening their maws, they reign, they stay
on their backsides, not in a bed but above a bed. They have no head,
they are lucarnes, one cannot tell if they are looking inside or outside.
Blind, too, only letting pass the light of day when something happened,
which under their aegis was you. From the doorway, these transparent
statues watch over family honor and the scourges of the race, coldly, like
a title made of glass (everything that protects is of glass, beginning with
glass wool). They stand guard over family nobility. They are the police
of the name.
The sitting of these dogs is frightening.
It will have let be said—and silenced—what it has kept from a taboo
on a leash. Will the secret be extorted?
And the book title, an all-powerful phantasm hung as a painting—The
Child at the Chien-Assis—would be the child’s name, like a royal fetish
held at the end of a thread (or a cord, rather) above his head. It would be
the name of a child who had none: neither one nor another. His father
“is nameless” (p. 137), he says (he is the head of the house). As for she
[celle]—I say she so as not yet to say his m other—she who gave birth to
him, he has trouble distinguishing himself from her. Like she who brings
him into the world, he is first of all multiple—the Multiple, in Book I,
in the “several Mothers” section. And when in Book II, in the course
of an apparently completely different story that is in no way one with
Book I (which is also a non-story), when the one he calls “my mother”
becomes unique, he becomes one with her. His “I” and his mother’s
too easily pass into one another: “this story [. . .] is not my own. It is
that of someone who has been us, my mother and me, folded into one
another” (pp. 151–2), “I had until then been united with her alone . . .
Truer to say that I was nothing but her” (p. 172).5 I/we [Je/nous]: a scene
exhumes two interlocked skeletons, “one much bigger than the other,”
“a skull on a knee [genou]” (p. 164). This I/we is before and after him.
So that he can be one with Edmonde Benlott, she who bore the name of
his mother, he is not one with himself. “I” does not make one, he has
no proper place; he does not know where to put himself. He is named
for four chiens assis, and so many other quadrants that are arranged in
5 Joliet writes: “Peut-on dire que je n’étais qu’elle,” which Derrida transcribes as
“Plus vrai de dire que je n’étais qu’elle.”
195
the narrative, but he has no identity card. He will never be able to be

identified or identify himself, I mean to himself. They both end up in the
madhouse.
This is why I say that, even before the second Book, it is written as not
one. And as not one it writes you, as this will have been of the gravest
consequence for you. It is your story.
The apostrophe dislodged you. It drew you toward a certain day, and
you can no longer get out of it alone. In exposing The Child of the Chien-
Assis (in the way a child is exposed, left in front of a church, or a work
hung on a gallery wall, exhibiting the family romance of decorum), the
apostrophe overturns the scene, bursts in mid-session. And immediately
the question “what is a session? One session?” becomes the performance
of acting out.
And I am speaking of every apostrophe, both within books and outside
of them, when, no longer knowing where to put yourself to begin with,
you do not know how to say it of a liveable language, in what Book II
calls a “docile language” (we must acknowledge right away that, in this
book, the idiom is at stake—the newest and the most singular idiom, in
this book that lets itself be maneuvered by two languages at least, one
of which—the second—as appearances go [though I would not put too
much trust in this if I were you] indeed wishes to be more “docile” than
the other. This regime change is the event I will no doubt not manage
to speak about, and in the end I am happy about that). Your very
language—you hear it as more old gossipmongering and more infant
than ever. Some semblance of recognition takes place: your language, an
other but still yours, recognizes you before you do. You are ashamed,
you want and you jubilate, you know deep down in the disaster that you
are more loved or better rejected than ever, deserted [délaissé] rather by
a single mother who had only you in the world. (Perhaps another day I
will say why, it being a question of language and single mother, I believe
in the apocalypse here, in the truly apocalyptic virtue of this writing.)
Once upon a time, then, as in dreams of nudity, I no longer know
where to put myself, one no longer knows where to put it, I no longer
knows where to be put, they no longer know where to put us, the
masters, to put those who, wherever they are, these men, those women
[ceux-ci, celles-là], exactly who and whom within this huge group of
islanders. Who are these men, who are these women in the archipelago
of these “innumerable navels” (p. 77) from all over who open the books
(I recall that there are at least two in this one, and take the opportunity
to do so, once again persuaded that in the end I will have nothing to
say about this enigma), from all over and from within unseal the songs
and the narrative like eyes. They open ears, too, and mouths, orificial
myriads of sex organs in all genders, as well as the sphincter. The

stricture of the sphincter is the reason for it all, the general form of all
comings and goings as “double to-and-fro defecation” (p. 96); the word
“droppings” is a dropping, too, but “do not t hink . . . that every sphinc-
ter is anal” (p. 104).
It speaks, and things are suddenly full of centers, a plethora of identi-
ties each in turn divisioned in its progeny, an instant proliferation of
birth places and birth certificates, a crowd of madmen saying “I,” a floc-
culation of umbilici exchanging everything from the quickening haste of
the First Book, and of cords drawn in every direction, a weft of lineages.
Every line of this text inbreeds like the lineage of an obscure birth. It
does not call for its ancestors. That would be too simple, the ancestry it
still seeks is a crime, one “which is not avowable,” so he searches in the
night, one day—“what to seek,” it gives a violent and hidden writing,
fervent [verveuse], powerful and inventive in its warbling, signed with
blood as never before, exultant with suffering and yet retrenched toward
the absolute secret, a poetic parade spotted and sealed [oscellée] with
painful blazons, and devastating, upside down on the enflamed charter
of fabulous genealogies where illegitimacy becomes a title, and a birth
madness, I mean the badge of nobility to be decrypted.
(Let the word warbling [ramage] come, because of the olive twig
[rameau], of course, and the branch, because of the babbling that vocal-
izes beyond meaning, because of Babel and the confusion of tongues,
because of the song [“The bird ready to die cries in its warbling,”6
not far from a plumage spotted (ocellé) with little eyes full of color and
chromosomal rainbows], but especially because in the language of juris-
prudence “ramage” designates the branch of a genealogical tree. Now
this is one of the subjects of the double book, and of knowing what
happens when the right to say “I,” “me, so-and-so” to bear one’s name
as another, a subject only expects it from a sententious ruling, from a
precarious and aleatory jurisprudence.)
And it’s always a question of me, of me before me. And you no longer
know where I come from or who is speaking to you, they all pronounce
in you before you, they cut your cord—or feign to, so that you will still
drag it around like a leash in your name or a tax on your words.
Yet you will have had to respond—and, like him, you can very well
invoke some “lingual irresponsibility” (p. 56), but you can never take
shelter there like you would at home, you are interpellated (accused) in
advance, dragged before your judges, engaged by the original apostro-
phe. It takes you, it leaves you, and at the same time it rejects you. It
6 See Fables de la Fontaine, “Le Cygne et le cuisinier.”

197
diverts you.
Less than ever will I know where to put myself in writing, and in what
tone, and in what pose for my voice. I say this to you right away, I want
neither to teach, nor to mime, nor to assist. I say this to you as sincerely
as possible for once: jump, make haste toward The Discovery that awaits
you immediately [séance tenante] after my italics. I can do nothing for
you or for this text that does everything there is to do: it weeps over itself
and defends itself against itself, it accepts itself and finally rejects itself,
describes itself by deduction from its own seed, in any case seeks them as
not one, I mean in equilibrium over so many many umbilical cords that
it has an ear for making sing. (“I plotted a vast melody” [p. 68].)
It puts itself down in order to understand itself: perhaps, in hearing
itself give an order (“youicide” (p. 85)), and in giving you to think start-
ing from the bottom (down to the garbage and the immigrant worker
at the end, everything from the raised attic, under the ass of the chiens
assis where the decorum [bienséance] of families hid the conception of
a bastard), as an expert on everything within the scope of a posterity:
namely, whatever returns or does not return to the genealogical order.
And I am saying this right away to save space: each time generation is
mentioned, in the double register of the genetic or the genealogical, please
understand—alongside the subject concerned with its proper n ame—that
it is the autobiography of language and literature that is worked through.
The Child. . . pushed me out under the spotlight, threw me out into
the daylight in giving me an order the first time I read it. It was last July,
until daybreak in a hotel near Heathrow airport. It bore another title,
The Red Summer [L’été rouge]. Should I have revealed this? I feel like a
bit of a snitch, an informer, but I also feel justified in betraying a secret.
Justified for several reasons, and I plead (this book has an atmosphere
of sublime police interrogation, circuit courts [cours d’assises], robed
judges, where the general counsel represents the families and society,
a sombre story of treason, crime, rape, windowless attics, unavowable
pregnancy, the prison and asylum are not far away, bourgeois legitimacy
is threatened, and they are all sitting [siègent]—that’s the word for it—in
order to judge, condemn, enclose, but also to appear before, for it is the
trial of the law). So I also plead the following:
1. I am justified in betraying by the one who says “I” from the start of
The Discovery (and discovering promises not so much a tranquil knowl-
edge as violent access to a secret) and who translates “what can I see?”
as “who can I betray?” “Either: traitor—or spy” (p. 52). One sees right
through it. Judas, it gives: from the discovery on the scene of the first
Book (which contains thirteen subjects—thirteen scenes, as they say).
The crucifix discreetly appears once in each book, the first in a sequence
that leads one to notice the nails, the screws, the ancient basement,
the odd number and the series 6 7 8 9. The second time is in the attic
under the 4 chiens assis. Ecce homo. From the first page I saw a migrant
worker appear who resembled Judas, asking himself about his chromo-
somes. Betrayal here would be revealing the secret of a b irth—and thus
of a hidden title. The title of a book is its proper name. The Red Summer
was almost this name back in the day. In truth, one could say that it was
from then on, even if it remains apocryphal after I forced it out of its
clandestinity.
2. The two books in one succeed each other according to an inherit-
ance of genes, names, and labels of identity; with dissimulation, substi-
tution, or debarment of the title. Thus, I love that a title was replaced
by another at the last minute in a furtive, clandestine way. I too want to
keep this in mind.
3. To do this, I must not only name or cite the old title, but rather must
give you an account of my hypotheses on the obsolete, the lost, the fore-
closed. The Red Summer will not only have been a memorable season,
the hell of birth with all the stories of blood which, you will see, irrigate
the two Books. From beginning to end, it is a self-analysis of blood, of
blood itself, if it can be said, as it flows in the veins, and of the genealogi-
cal vector, metaphor for race. This red summer will have been the past
anterior, absolutely anterior, of a blood turned black. First word of the
first book, The Discovery: “I believe I have blood black” (p. 49). He will
have been red [il aura été rouge] at birth, from the moment of the sepa-
ration with the One, the only one of his countless mothers, the only one
the second time around (Book II) among the crowds of the first. He will
have been red at birth, from the moment of the “red magma,”7 still
very close to this moment (which is truly interminable and unbearable,
for that matter), when “I was nothing but her” (p. 172). I must quote
Book I to make you understand a language that I forbid myself to mime
or describe, and to suggest what the red summer might have been. It’s
the eve, prehistory or preceding myth, the accompaniment as well, the
story he then feigns to lay out according to reasons. It’s another time,
the time of the Multiple. And here he s ays—for example, after having
named “the innumerable and polysemitic navel of the sectionarized
foreskin” (p. 78)8 more than once, after having stated and restated the
multiplicity of mothers, all these “perforated hymens,” this “maculate
7 Derrida writes “magna rouge,” which is a horse breed, but does not appear in
Joliet’s book. It is unclear whether this is a typographical error.
8 Joliet writes: “ou prépuce sectionnarisé,” which Derrida transcribes as “du
prépuce sectionnarisé.”
199
conceptual farandole, this prodigious multisphincteral perforation”

(p. 75)—here:
Get this: this tattoo enlocks each navel but never overflows onto the proximal
zone. They stop and edge themselves to the brink of the next, meshed by I do
not know what hand. Is it a seal that each of my parturients stamped with
her red tampon of stercoral forms? Is it a signature that my copulates appose
to the bottom of this cloaginating expression? Is it a sign of reminiscence that
my perforates spurted upon my distended pores? (p. 78)
I have “been red summer [j’ai été rouge],” is thus a hidden signature, a
title encrypted in the folds of its navel, not chosen, not elected, affixed
each time, so many times, on the navel of “I,” of the Multiple, by
so many many mothers, affixed like a seal, like a stamp from a “red
tampon.” From the first lines of “several Mothers” (Book I), a mother
without nobility (“ignoble”), just one this time (and this is doubtless
what is ignoble about the thing), would have failed to ratify it thus:
“He was no longer frightened of this spatulous spider scorpionized
umbilicus and that an ignoble mother would not have sealed a tampon
upon the subabdominal cavity no longer terrorized him” (p. 73). There
he no longer fears the nameless one from the other story. Because of
the red, I would have spoken of progeminiature or similimignature and
would have let you follow it alongside the “red sea,” of the “red of the
fire,” and of the “red eyelid.” But, above all, alongside a certain syntac-
tical idiom of the signatory: he often reverses the roles of the auxiliary
verbs “to be” and “to have.” For example, he says “I have” instead of
“I am,” like the mistake of a perverse and badly educated, badly raised
child, who skillfully draws you toward another logic. He says, for
example, or she, “I have obliged” for (p. 22) “I am obliged,” so that
beyond it you understand “I is obliged,” or I apostrophe, I’s obliged, I
am or I is bound. I again pronounce “I have dead” for “I am dead.” The
article of death is elided. It confuses the noun with the attribute (follow
the consequence), it would just as well say I have been red summer
[j’ai été rouge], “été” becoming a noun, as I am red summer [je suis été
rouge], and you see language blush red. I have dead will have been the
title of a b ook—the previous o ne—another story, if it can be said, of
genetico-genealogical “cryptomassacre,” with sigils sealed in the body,
mother raped by the father, and an entire “labyrinth of multiparous
constructions” (p. 105) from which would issue, once the cord was
cut, our Child of the Chien-Assis. Among other things, and hypotheti-
cally. If I recall the last page of I Have Dead (“His wife, sublimated
by the paternal rape, ennobled by the fallenness of her husband”), it is
always hypothetical: what if the child of the chien-assis were also the
grandson of his unknown father—in other words, of the pateron9 of

the mother from whom he has trouble distinguishing himself? Son of
the same father, wouldn’t he be the brother of his mother (to be con-
tinued)? This is not said, since it says nothing about what is left for you
to read, and it does not decrypt. It encrypts or seals as not one all the
deciphering to which it has long devoted itself. It delivers itself: one of
the most singular, powerfully solitary undertakings in years, inventing
its writing at a distance, yielding to no intimidation, too occupied in
secretly forging a signature of irreplaceable language, a nobility, yes,
which jeopardizes itself like any birth, and which makes itself bleed
from one book to the other.10All the mountains of the work are sepa-
rated by unbridgeable collapses, but they belong to the same range, to
the same series of geo-genealogical events. I predict that, one day, an
entire science will be needed to gather it u p—even special instruments
to tackle it.
“I have d
ead . . . I am dead and I am born,” I have such a red summer,
such was his first signature, sealed by she [celle] of whom he says “I was
nothing but her” (p. 172). This would have been its first title. And I
received it as an order without authority. And the desire to recognize it
came—that’s the word for it—to me. Please understand: in the way you
could recognize, if you had ever done so, all the known and unknown
fathers from which you think you came, and the grandfathers, in order
to say: see, I come from there, from all those men, that’s my family, it’s
not me but I would like for it to be, and it’s just as if. And recognizing
these mothers, this mother who is so numerous for once, she still who
holds me by the navel of her language, unique nonetheless, almost iden-
tical to the one who says “I,” I call out [j’apostrophe], but unique as
not one, too unique for it not to make more than one story, for it not to
make so many stories in one blow.
In fact there are quite clearly two stories, and The Child. . . seems
divided into two, into two tomes, and only the second seems to run
like an extended narrative, a more or less continuous report despite
some backward moves, with a single narrative voice, more or less a
single I, between mother and son. And the two books in one, as not
one, are written in two languages that are still the same, the abiding
enigma of a secret code: it makes translating the two progenies into
one another possible. I am thinking about a kind of DNA of litera-
ture. And transcription would not operate between two stories, but
9 Recurring word blending the Latin pater (father) and the French patron (boss).
10 [Derrida’s note] L’Orage à la campagne, 1970; Le repas d’os, 1971; J’ai mort,
1972, ed. Robert Morel.
201
between a story and a non-story, a narrative and something non-

narratable. The same seems to lend itself to the transfers between the
two of them, and yet the two tomes, the two atoms are absolutely
independent, their indivisibility refusing to compose with the composi-
tion that nonetheless holds them together in the same formula. As in
Death Sentence,11 see, since this is also an arrêt de mort in every sense,
including what makes the law, as different from the first as possible.
One tells oneself in a dream that the common code must exist even
if the key remains nowhere to be found. One senses that the same
generation is stated twice rather than once, once sung, harangued,
strophed, dispersed, and once (after an obscure event, a mutation in
the order of time, the death of the survivors and the lifting of a taboo)
recited under control with a regulated application, as if it were going
to the lineage for some notarized document, a legalized attestation—at
least, this is how it looks according to the supplement of a simulacrum.
One tells oneself that meanwhile, between the two processes, a lost
umbilicus must draw the two books into one, toward the center of
this umbilical spotting [ocellure]. But precisely, he states, the hiatus
must remain uncrossable between the two times: “it is forbidden to
mix two stories” (p. 139). A certain “I” says so, in the second Book,
at the moment when he prepares to tell the Story of the Mother—or
rather, to let her tell it to a first person that I deliver over to the zeal
of the identifiers, to the tranquil competence of the experts, the judges,
the narratologists, and the speech act theorists (and I, of course, wish
them lots of fun). “It is up to me or him or her to tell this story of the
mother, but to make it simpler one says I, and when it’s I, it means
my mother or my mother’s daughter, etc.” (p. 139).12 Just before the
Story of the Mother begins, the “red magma” had been expelled, the
cord cut by the mother’s teeth: “She cut my cord with her upper and
lower teeth. Her teeth separated me from her definitively. Because it
is forbidden to mix two stories” (pp. 138–9). This second book thus
appears docile, and already in its language, which at least seems nor-
malized or calmed d own—a lull after the sublime unfurling. Docile
and submitted to a prohibition: a law commands that the “I”s and
their stories cannot be mixed. The narrative voices can indeed mul-
tiply themselves. In any case, their identities must be determined. In
11 Maurice Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” trans. Lydia Davis in The Station Hill
Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown:
Station Hill Press, 1999), 129–88.
12 Joliet writes: “raconter cette histoire de ma mère,” which Derrida transcribes as
the chapter’s title, “raconter cette histoire de la mère.”
sum, in this second Book a certain “I” would put things in order and
would subject itself to the law of narration. This law would also be the
genealogical law: itself needing to be the accountant of the generation
of generations, to avoid confusion. Book II indeed begins with this
invocation of law. It calls the law forth to the order of the story, to
the “one must” of the narrative, and it continues with an ergo above
the infinite interruption: “So, this story must very well be told. Which
one? And who will tell it?” (p. 135). Of the combinatorics and substi-
tutions that follow—you could say “childish substitutions”—can one
think that they are the result of a “one must”? of a “one must tell”
as “it is forbidden to mix two stories” (p. 139)? I am still suspicious
of this hypothesis and will have to return to it. For the interdiction is
imposed at the moment when, another interdiction having been lifted,
it would finally be possible to move on to the narrative. Before, one
did not have the right to state the genealogy, but only to sing the gen-
erative madness—the unfurling of the genetic poem would itself have
been the effect of a censoring. The unavowable had to be silenced, not
stated aloud; one had to allegorize while mobilizing all the powers of
a new language and maddened by its secret, writing had to be silenced
to the point of being made to tremble out of fear, primary enjoyment,
or ecstatic dispossession. So one taboo would have followed the other,
or just as well the lifting of one followed the other, and the death of
the parents, in other words, of every possible contemporary, deliver-
ing the narrative as living-on [survivance]. “Now that all these people
are dead, I have no reason to hide the identities or fear any backlash”
(pp. 136–7). So from one interdiction to the other, from one “must
not” to the other, The Child. . . would operate the trial of genealogi-
cal law. And this could only be done in two times, around an absolute
interruption. The first Book would preface the second only by already
letting the interdiction of legitimacy play out. I no longer know how to
understand this expression, “interdiction of legitimacy.” The position
of its genitive seems obscure to me and its obscurity necessary. Perhaps
I will return to it, and I sense that the word “naturalization” will lead
us there, I read it somewhere, one time, in the first Book.
Not knowing where to put oneself from the moment that writing
this, in this very place, the fact can no longer be silenced that under
one name or another—especially without the title of preface (especially
not a preface, right)—this will come to precede under some title (pre-
ceded by, for example, “Eyespot Like No Other”, by Jacques Derrida)
and right before your eyes The Child of the Chien-Assis. No denial
can change anything about this: a preface comes before in order to
recognize—with the foresight of its coming before [prévenance]—and
203
make recognize what nonetheless precedes it in the order of genera-

tions, to authorize with a favorable assessment what nonetheless had
not waited for it. Legitimation, legal acknowledgment of The Child. . .
which is already there. All this would come down to fathering, pater-
oning, recognizing. You do not imagine a preface having come to
damn or malign, unless this is the unconscious of every preface. This is
why I no longer know where to put myself. I have accepted an impos-
sible situation, despite the subtle denials and the quite implicit form
of the contract. I was committed to it before even being able to tell
myself all the good reasons I would have to flee before The Child. . .
Never indeed will a pretention to legitimate or to pateron have been
so absurd, vain, derisory, silly, and blind. Whence the trap into which
I fall. As not one—this double book denounces from beginning to end
the pateroning imposture, the infamy of a known pateron who was
an unknown father (needing to remain unknown, and thus of course
known), the graft, bastardry, illegitimacy of the child of the chien-
assis, his definitive inadmissibility, the infamous afamily, the disper-
sion and cross-breeding of genes, the clandestine conception that no
symbolic order could never either assimilate or reject. It is the very
identity of this order that is lost. And this double book which thus is
not one and states the not one, announces this from its title, from its
“real” title, the second, the supervening one, the arriving one. I must
indeed say something about it, as the book changed its proper name in
passing, furtively, and apparently says next to nothing about its civil
name or legal deposit: the title is cut out as if in passing, like a little
piece of text that will stand for the whole, the distraction of a synec-
doche. I must say something about it because this double book deals
with the question of the title (and even the double title): by what right,
in what respect, what is your identity, what is the unity of your story,
what authorizes you as author to inflate yourself so? and also—what
is the auctoritas of one who takes the floor before the other? What
authorizes itself to preface? This is ultimately about a title, a title about
which one can no longer know anything.
Of the chien-assis, the child. If you know how to translate “of,” you
can decide on everything, on she [celle], to begin with, from which he is
barely detached, the Detached. Try all the ofs, all the orders of belonging
or participation, accompaniment or property, tell me how it turns out.
In the singular, the chien assis stands like a balloon, or a blazon, above
the head of the child. It no more belongs to the subject than it possesses
him; it marks him without this mark being a part of him; it situates
him from his birth and gives rise to him without having any relation of
natural resemblance to him. It sits atop the child and The Child, before
and above it, or before and above both of them (for the child and The
Child are not one) as a title: before and above the book. And a preface.
This is a chien assis.
He picked one dog out of four for the title. In picking, he gathered,
collected, identified, figured, raised to the dignity of an emblem. They
were four, not one, above the roof of the house, above an attic, for
everything comes down from there, even the I. From a windowless attic
whose gloominess is not interrupted, so to speak, but which is also
sealed with only the “light of four chien assis” (p. 142). With a roof, all
that squares to bring to the light of day.
It is here that on a day, in this daylight, in a crib, me the mother was
impregnated by the pateron and me his son was conceived by his father,
who was not named and who did not recognize me. By the chien assis,
one day the birth occurred, the name refused, but the chien assis now
gives the name, doubtless so that it can take off one day. Pay attention
to the number: 1, 4. I had remarked the 6 7 8 9 and the play of the even
or odd. Because of the numerology, fascinated by the fixity of these
glass dogs that watch him from on high, perched at the highest point
of the scene, I thought that the child of the dog perhaps belonged, with
all the aleatory crossbreedings you would like, to the great family of the
wolfman. But that is my analysis and I will tell you nothing of all my
associations. There are too many. Like dogs, they watch me.
Another word and I’ll give up. The author—let us leave aside the nar-
rator, whom I have even more trouble identifying—does he know that
assis, the word “assis” belongs to the code of heraldry? Assis is said of
domestic animals when a blazon depicts them seated on their backsides.
It belongs to a code: indeed, to a typical representation. The posture is
frequent, this position, if you will. It is a sitting.
In the space of visibility, on a day carved up by the sitting of these
highly domestic animals, two pairs of dogs attended a scene that only
they witnessed. They attended it face on or with their backs turned
(who knows for glass dogs, and how to orient the lucarne). In any case
on their backsides, and sphincters are involved—which you would be
wrong to think are all of the anal kind.
And the position of the p arents—the dogs, they saw it!
They missed nothing of it, they observed it with their little eyes fixed
above the scene, from their glass eyespots. Synopsis, Argus, so many
pairs of eyes to rummage through the four corners, so many ocular
witnesses imperturbably immobilized before the tribunal of a memory.
They were gripped. But, as everything happened from behind or on the
behind, the gaze and the scene, whether or not they had eyes in the back
of their head, they had to hide what they saw, they occulted.
205
Another day.
. . . the hypothesis of a first reading, which I pronounce clearly,
pedagogically, “methodementedly,” as it is written. I clarify: with
composure. For, above all, one must not attempt to equal or mime the
intoxicating beauty of its language. I want to leave you alone with the
poetic art of this raging enthusiasm, with the kick of this new idiom.
I plan to abandon The Child. . . leaving it to what it predicts or outbids
of itself. I pull out from the hypothesis pronounced (a formality, because
I impoverish to the extreme in formalizing, literally saying nothing,
saying nothing that does not erase itself before you and it in the rush
of a first reading), I leap as I walk along. The ignoble prefacing scene,
which you will not confuse with the primal scene under the pretext that
it introduces all of its precedence [préséance] and that, in sum, it plays
at presentations. The ignoble scene is interrupted only by a leap, one as
arbitrary as a genetic accident, one day, at a certain address.
The prefacing hypothesis concerns the hypothesis: the hypothesis
posited by the light of the chiens assis and beneath the two, under the
binding of the two books, for example, the two books that one day are
assembled as not one, in a singular position. The Child of the Chien-
Assis (he has six legs, that one) is not one. It is delivered in two volumes.
Yet it describes its becoming-one. In the first volume, a first-person who
is no one and who nonetheless proceeds to analyze their own generation.
They say “I” but I decomposes upon analysis, upon the auto-haemato-
analysis of the genetic components of their own blood, from everything
that, in giving them a body, disperses them into the innumerable. This
first volume is the book of the multiple or of the not one: the supposed
subject (under the chien assis that in a word, for it is only a word, shows
them its ass), the supposed subject has several births, several sexes, they
call themselves several times a hermaphrodite and even “hermanphro-
gyne” (p. 61) apparently (Of the Names of Anatomy), they have so
many mothers, so many fathers. The mother will become or will have
been unique in the other book, and the single father of the first book will
have been m ultipenile—red, no doubt. Only one father gives the name,
the only name, but this father was “polyshafted,” “multipenile” (p. 75).
Such was “the miracle of nature:” “that my multipenile father was alone
in this termite-mound saraband. A single man to give me a single name,
levelling menstruated legions with his appendices” (p. 75). Book I: a
single polyshafted father who gives the name. Several natural mothers.
Conversely, Book II: a single monoshafted genitor who does not give his
name. A single natural mother. The mother is always natural. The first
time (Book I) would thus be the time of the multiple: gigantic polyse-
mitic panspermia, as the Multiple says itself. Discontinuous time of a
generation without family, without calendar, without charter, without

genealogy: too many shafts and too many mothers, too many navels for
a supposedly unique name. He is not one, that one who analyzes his
mixed blood, this metic so naturally polygenetic. Whence the very-
skillful decomposition of this Book of deliverance that is not one: spe-
ciously discontinuous series of songs, strophes, harangues, apostrophes,
and stances with no narrative thread. Acts, tableaus, scenes, descrip-
tions, ecstasies, and convulsions, not a story, not a threaded narration,
no unified filiation, no genealogy regulated by a social order, no coat of
arms (no animal fetish presides yet), just an aleatory multiplicity of
bodies, genes, globules, members and organs, the skins, the colored sur-
faces, the grains, the navels, all the sphincterian orifices you will, a thou-
sand copulations, and the conception proliferates in the maddening
panic of a combinatorics. The progenial dispersion not only affects the
mode of composition and the rhetoric of a decomposition in long
unfurled sequences: language itself is furiously torn apart. In this first
Book, language is not one. It proliferates in the most germinal state,
language in incessant formation at a time when French is not yet the law:
the time of the State language, paternal decorum, and the academic dic-
tionary has not yet come. Everything is possible with a language [langue]
that does not yet have to answer before its judges (it is “lingual irrespon-
sibility” [p. 56] at the moment when one “mother held my other hand”
[p. 55]). Everything is possible with the word “langue” at that moment
(‘Her breast that I engulfed with all my suction left upon my tongue
[langue] a taste that I have never found again. [. . .] The bulbed straw-
berry came and went at my tongue’s whim” [p. 55]). This tongue moves
about at the edge of a volcano that makes new words rise up through
tremors from under the sea. They arrive burning at the surface, the
jolting eruption spits them out molten hot, brand new bodies of words
that no longer owe anything to anyone, and, despite the surprise of their
emergence, they let themselves be better understood than the old ones,
closer to all bodies, clearer, more rigorous, surer of their madness. Of
course, there are regularities, typical modes of formation, recurrences,
and one could distribute them in classes or class them in school, but the
eloquence always surprises you, at each moment it conceives and births
unheard-of words in order to say, as has never been said, the body of the
Multiple and all its progenitors. A twentieth- century Rabelais, the
schoolmaster would say, before realizing that it is indeed absurd to
assign paradigms or ancestors to an orphan of this sort who happens to
know everything. He presupposes Rabelais, his giganticity and a few
others (“I am obsessioned with this picrocholine enterprise” [p. 66]), he
even couples him with Rubens and, as always, you have more than one
207
body in one under “this skin of intrabuttockal and rubaisselian velvety

blacknesses that one had to touch all over” (p. 167). The language of the
first Book is in perpetual expansion, it precipitates words into what is
properly their flocculation; it coagulates them too at times, agglomerates
or binds them with only a surface of their prior bodies, practices organ
grafts that always take, without fail. At each moment this copufloccula-
tion ingeniuses, brazenly laying bare whatever gets language hard, down
to its most invisible e lement—genes, chromosomes, spermatozoa, and
the ova of a vocabulary wild with desire. And in all of these positions,
on one’s backside and otherwise, it fucks the French sentence as only the
unruly bastards or the migrant workers of literature can. The Multiple,
no, does not make use of an idiom in formation in order to state its
polygeny. It is not a manipulative frenzy. It is the body of language,
which teaches its history itself—the eve of its history, rather, if a story
presupposes an intelligible process regulated by a discursive order,
monogenesis, preformation, and a law. Through the Multiple, you read
the flocculating prehistory, the Babelian confusion of languages and lit-
eratures. Imagine, as the “schoolizing” “weighty logicaster” would say,
Rabelais after Freud, to the discovery of DNA, with the combinatory
idea of these graphic codes traversing all writings, from genetics to lit-
erature and law. Up to the Zarathustrian harangue (nothing is missing
there, neither the “funambule” nor the “saltimbes”) and beyond Joyce.
These authors’ names—in other words, these names of presumed fathers
who scandalously inflate themselves with their supposed p rogeny—have
no rights here, whether they themselves are polyshafted or anonymous.
Here they escape the order of recognition. However, I will scandalously
concentrate on Joyce. Certainly, nothing returns to him from this
Child. . . and I will not keep track of all the differences here. But see the
“polysemitic” (p. 78) (one should say here polychemitic and dicheminat-
ing in thinking of Shem the penman of Finnegans Wake, and of the
Babelian motif that traverses the book. Moreover, in disseminating the
tribe of Shem, which sought to make a name for itself and establish its
language—
and language is called “lip” even as Shem meant to say
“name”—in deconstructing the tower YHWH literally disperses them in
order to shout his own name, Bavel, Confusion). Well, then, the poly-
chemitic of languages and literature, don’t you think it would give an
eyespotted wink toward your cousin from inner Ireland? toward a ger-
minal cousin by the mother, by the daughter-mother and whore of lan-
guage? Or by cousin german. Take, for example, Germaine Gaillot from
I have dead (“Germaine—tell me about this organ that has penetrated
you? . . . Oh, tell me, Germaine”) whose fate, I want to say whose lot, in
the end, recalls that of Edmonde Benlott, the mother of the Child. . .
Benlott, son or daughter of Lott? For in Book II, the Story of the mother,
of the daughter-mother more or less raped by her father (at least by the
father of her son), penetrated by a pateron in the course of a hymen
without hymen, the story of this virgin whore having never married, is
the unavowable story of a certain Edmonde Benlott “issued from I never
knew what Irish thigh and my father was nameless” (p. 137). And I take
on the name of her mother, he shares her lot. She who was one at the
end, but with whom becoming one he confuses himself more or less all
the way to the madhouse. That one, he does not come after her. He or
she. I is she. He is also his mother’s congener, maybe her twin brother.
He is born of his sister if the pateron is common to them: “In order to
be truer than nature, I really must get it into my head that I was born
right at the same time as my mother, Edmonde Benlott” (p. 137). I is;
I have no longer where to put myself in the order of generations.
One in Book II, the mother in Book I will have been multiple (already
she was him, the Multiple): not one and thus still an “ignoble mother,”
an unclean one, a whore subject to the sole but polyshafted father.
Yet among the confusion (“Confusion. Mosaics!” [p. 76]), the confu-
sion of tongues, and prostitution, the spawning is ancestral, Babelian,
Joycian and apocalyptic. Reread all the revelation, bring yourself back
to Revelation, the whore of Babel, “the beast’s name or the number that
stood for its name.” In the Revelation of John, the whore presides. She
is seated, she too, and the scarlet beast is not far, not difficult to imagine:
“came and said to me, ‘Come here. I will show you the judgment on
the great harlot who lives near the many waters. The kings of the earth
have had intercourse with her, and the inhabitants of the earth became
drunk on the wine of her harlotry.’ Then he carried me away in spirit to
a deserted place where I saw a woman seated on a scarlet beast that was
covered with blasphemous names, with seven heads and ten horns. The
woman was wearing p urple . . . On her forehead was written a name,
which is a mystery, ‘Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and of the
abominations of the earth. [. . .] Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great.’”13
Perhaps Babèl is not Bavèl, but here it is a matter of the name of confu-
sion and of the confusion of names, tongues, and generations.
The Child begins with Revelation and, by reversing its order in
order to draw out its themes, the Heading at the bottom, ends with a
seemingly ordered Genesis. Book II resembles the Heading [L’Entête],
another word for Genesis. How the things of generation are recited in
order, feigning at least to return to it, and according to what infinitely
jubilant suffering, according to what catastrophic and self-destructive
13 Revelation 18:2, New American Bible.

209
inversion: this is the question of the story. It is posed or supposed, like a

chien assis, between two books. In both, it is a matter of crossbreeding.
No family with itself makes one, neither in one nor in two, neither in one
book nor in the other. Yet the crossbreeding of two independent books,
and how this crossbreeding engenders, must once more be considered.
For it is at work, and it is The Child of the Chien-Assis. Even though
at the end it rejects itself like an excrement, waste fit for the trash, even
though it often represents its own childbirth as a dejection (and you will
connect this to birthing a litter [la chiennerie], the puppy [le chiot], and
the shitter [les chiottes]), it puts itself to work, it will have been made
work, summer makes work. I repeat: of what crossbreeding?
Its scheme is a chiasmus.
While in Book I (Revelation with daybreak fever [mal d’aurore]14),
the Multiple is conceived through the copulation of a single polyshafted
one and several mothers, in Book II (by contrast) the Multiple becomes
one only in order to lose itself in its mother. As in the preceding case,
the “mad” house awaits them. She who gives birth to him seems as one
this time, but since the absent father has and gives no name, the mother/
son couple is not one. There is neither mother nor son nor holy spirit.
Only a labile I between her and him, a suspended I, a great uncertainty
about the tree of generations. The whore remains a virgin. You may still
“schoolize” the unclean and whisper names: Oedipus and Jocasta (in
the madhouse, where he is locked up with Edmonde his mother: “she
also caressed my sex with her tense hand, and it hardened, swelled. She
gripped it between her thighs” [p. 173]), Mary and Jesus (more than one
allusion to his thirty-three years, ecce homo, and to this crucifix, which
appears once in each Book, in One in Chapter 2, A Dream Father and
Mother, in Two, in the attic of the Story of my Mother). You can cross-
breed Jocasta and Jesus, Oedipus and Mary, but the four emblazoned
names would initiate further recognition-trials before the law. Hence it
is this genealogical jurisdiction and this notariat in literatures and reli-
gions that The Child. . . screws up with its idiom, even as its story is “Of
human history, and that’s it” (p. 136).
And in the same way a s . . . all the same, here is another text under
seals. Just as Book I played at nature or feigned genetics, a generation’s
Revelation subject to natural multiplicity or to biological contingency,
Book II mimes culture and simulates a genealogical ordering: Genesis of
humanity, filiation narrated with regard to the law, families, domesticity,
the narrative of a descendance as family romance and a utobiography.
14 See Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Hubert

Juin (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
But in both cases, in both falls, things end in the madhouse and in the
trash, under the eye of the non-naturalized migrant workers. In both
cases there is ruse, war, and feint [feinte].
And droppings [fiente]. “Double to- and- fro defecation” (p. 96)
according to the clenching and the rhythm of a universal sphincter. This
is the secret in the doubling of the Book. The performance of a signature
losing its head over grafts—in both scenarios, signatura rerum or signing
names. Genetics was already contaminated by genealogy; biological
naturality bore the effect of symbolic crossbreeding, with the triangula-
tion, patronym, and filial disquiet of the Multiple.
By contrast—the branch of a chiasmus always redeploys itself—the
genealogy of Book II will have been, again, a natural biogenesis. It
analyzes the file of an infamily, the notarized acts, the medico-legal and
psycho-social archives of an illegitimate birth, and of a so-called natural
child. “The triumphant beast” (p. 179) reappears in chapter seven (the
number of seals and we’re back in Revelation), the father is unnameable,
the good mother “ignoble.”
The feint will have taken f orm—this is its g enerosity—and is at work.
On what condition?
That a simulacrum of genesis resembles genealogy. Then that the
apocalypse again disguises itself as nature to the point of being mistaken
for it.
But Nature was not, nor Culture. Only naturalizations. And without
number, and by their very proliferation, every limit is overrun. An illicit
laborer [travailleur noir] of the concept and conception is smuggled
over every border, or perhaps it’s the “Arab Judeo-Gypsy” (p. 167)
proletarian. Every border and everything becomes clandestine, between
nature and culture, nature and the law, nature and society, nature and
history, nature and freedom, beast and human, this and that, non-
language and language, one and two, two and three, the couple and
the triangle, the imaginary and the symbolic, the specular and the other
(you will notice the crucifix “above the mirror” [p. 142], in the attic
of the chiens assis of the maculate conceptor). There is not one, not
one and two, nor two and three; there are all at once four chiens assis,
a whole lot of chiens assis without nature. They are also naturalized.
They watch over a clandestination. I baptize thus, with this name, the
hiding of an address, an invisible referral, just enough to lose the desti-
nation and make you with the same address change countries without
leaving you the time to return. You have just crossed the line, and the
landscape has changed. You are sure of this, but you have understood
nothing. There has been a sending of yourself, and you no longer know
where to put yourself.
211
The lot of chiens assis watches over a crypt. They wordlessly guard
the memory of a sacred text that was never legible: the act of a naturali-
zation, in short. Naturalization always imposes itself on desire, but it
remains impossible, interminable, and finally indecipherable. Its apocry-
pha does not stand on the other side of an interpretation. It affects the
very idea and secret of interpretation. It clandestinates it.
This is perhaps what I, between parentheses, give to think: “(will I one
day have the sacred knowledge of this text, of this story that was written
on a skin one slipped me into, where I was naturalized?)” (p. 52).
Who is I in the “fugitive bocson” of these Bibles? (p. 128). In this
clanded testamentary?
I. [I] thus oscillates between two I. I call out [J’apostrophe] twice.
I give to think, one gives like the generous, the giver of blood, and
the other—the d ouble—gives like the traitor, unveils identities to you
knowing full well what it does. Do not trust it.
Index
Adorno, Theodor, 131 De Gaulle, Charles, 44

Althusser, Louis, 52 Defrance, Bernard, 41–59
Andler, Daniel, 70 Descartes, René, 16, 123, 184–6
Antelme, Robert, 123
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 123 Einstein, Albert, 76
Aragon, Louis, 86
Arendt, Hannah, 123 Fabre, Pierre-Antoine, 135
Artaud, Antonin, 51, 87, 102 Fathy, Safaa, 10, 166–87
Austin, J. L., 5, 16, 19 Faulkner, William, 123, 124
Ferrer, Daniel, 69–70, 91–105
Barthes, Roland, 87 Finkielkraut, Alain, 117, 119
Bataille, Georges, 51, 102, 112, Flaubert, Gustave, 77, 84, 86,
129 93–5
Bénézet, Mathieu, 12, 188, 191 Foucault, Michel, 87
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 123 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 51, 74, 77, 81,
Benveniste, Émile, 142 83, 85, 141, 173, 207
Bergson, Henri, 123, 163
Blanchot, Maurice, 10, 16, 102, Genet, Jean, 12, 62, 88, 98, 179
109–14 Georges, François, 85
Bourget, Paul, 101 Gide, André, 101
Bouveresse, Jacques, 47, 51 Giraud, Henri, 44
Brunet, Roland, 54
Hay, Louis, 69, 70, 85
Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 3–18 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12,
Canguilhem, Georges, 51–2 14, 15, 102, 123, 151, 152, 153,
Chopin, Frédéric, 158 159, 174, 175
Comte, Bernard, 135 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 10, 13, 41,
Conrad, Joseph, 123 102, 109, 123, 129, 140–1,159,
Contat, Michel, 69, 71 163–4, 173
Courtine, Jean-François, 70 Heine, Heinrich, 79, 86
Crépon, Marc, 19, 21, 28, 32 Hersant, Yves, 135
Hugo, Victor, 9, 79
Dagognet, François, 52 Husserl, Edmund, 16, 51, 70, 75,
David, Alain, 5, 10, 41, 109–17, 78, 102, 112, 123, 131
118–34 Hyppolite, Jean, 51, 52
Index
213
Joliet, Jos, 12, 192–211 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 13, 93, 95,

Joly, Henri, 135 152–4, 158–62
Joyce, James, 17, 77, 79, 83, 207
Parmenides, 9
Kafka, Franz, 102, 123, 151–2, 175 Pascal, Blaise, 94, 184–7
Kant, Immanuel, 11, 14, 35, 36, 102, Pasteur, Louis, 76
123, 126, 153, 159 Peschanski, Catherine, 135
Kierkegaard, Søren, 153–4 Plato, 6, 9, 10, 13, 55, 56, 79, 101,
123, 137, 139, 165
Lacan, Jacques, 87, 129, 171 Ponge, Francis, 13, 102
Lanzmann, Claude, 131, 133 Pousin, Frédéric, 135
Levi, Primo, 123, 133 Proust, Marcel, 79, 82, 86, 123
Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 10, 85, 87,
109–17, 119, 123, 124, 126, 128, Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 69, 77, 83
129, 132, 133 Rabelais, François, 206–7
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 123 Riffaterre, Michael, 70
Littré, Émile, 174, 175, 186 Robic, Sylvie, 135
Loraux, Nicole, 135 Rollin, André, 60
Roudinesco, Elizabeth, 9
Malabou, Catherine, 19, 25, 33, 35 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 79, 130,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 102, 190 139, 153–4
Mallet, Marie-Louise, 10, 146–79
Margel, Serge, 19, 22, 33 Saint Augustine, 119, 153–4
Marin, Louis, 10, 135–45 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 85, 87
Marx, Karl, 9, 12, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27, Socrates, 6, 147
102, 123, 159, 188, 190, 191 Spinoza, Benedictus, 27, 123, 141
McGann, Jerome, 78
Milner, Jean-Claude, 57–8 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 78
Minc, Alain, 9 Thévenin, Paule, 87, 98
More, Thomas, 7, 63, 89, 100, 127,
136, 137, 139, 140, 177, 185 Valéry, Paul, 123, 151
Muglioni, Jacques, 52, 55 Van Rijn, Rembrandt, 151
Musil, Robert, 123
Wagner, Richard, 160
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 110, 114, 131
Newton, Isaac, 78 Zola, Émile, 77

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The Frontiers of Theory

Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at

© The translators their respective translations

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and

ISBN 978 1 4744 1073 1 (hardback)

Series Editor’s Preface vii

PART I Scenes of Differences

PART II On School and Writing

PART III “Oh my friends”

9. Echoes of Encounters (2003) 135

the continued exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which

“What comes?” quizzically asks Elisabeth Roudinesco, eminent histo-

1 Jacques Derrida, De Quoi demain . . . Dialogue. Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), 90;

messages, and documents. In this wide array of texts, all previously

This collection, which contains frequent references to and inquiries

3 On the perhaps, see Derrida’s illuminating exchange with Alexander García

The editors warmly acknowledge the contribution of Andrew Kingston

An interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber, “Scènes des differences: Où

Mireille Calle-Gruber:1 Rereading your first books today, Writing and

Translated by Bradley Ramos.

Jacques Derrida: If I can react to what I wrote in the past as a foreign

­ e—­and to countersign these events. The countersignature is itself a

not I have anything to say, though that question is important: basically,

5 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Minneapolis: University of

JD: Whence the double feeling of responsibility and irresponsibility.

a philosophical body of work, or of the reading-­writing having to do

JD: It would be necessary to multiply the distinctions. On the one hand,

7 Jacques Derrida, “Passions: An Oblique Offering,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas

institution, which is a relatively modern creation, was possible starting

MC-G: Did this double demand of philosophical discourse and liter-

8 Jacques Derrida, Clang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

JD: There is also a Heidegger’s ear.

MC-G: . . . Ponge’s talon [griffe] . . .

MC-G: We could, with this collection, reconstitute a strange and fabu-

MC-G: But isn’t it always somewhat fiction?

JD: Yes, it becomes literary insofar as it is fiction. It is not literary, but

MC-G: That’s the whole question of the subject, of the withdrawal of

MC-G: And in particular, already in language, the inscription of sexual

JD: Fabulous, that’s first of all language, speech. Every language,

MC-G: So that would happen rather on the side of literature, or even on

JD: It would be necessary to pause here to speak at length about the

­ hilosophy. Not only could we show that every philosophical discourse

MC-G: Mises en scène, then?

MC-G: You have an admirable reading of this weaving of voices in

publication reads Deconstruction is/in America. How do you view this

10 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.

­ econstruction was dead from the beginning, that it has to do with

Philosophy at the Risk of the Promise

“Questions à Jacques Derrida” is a discussion with Marc Crépon, Marc

Questions to Jacques Derrida

Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes.

To be a promise, it must be able to be unkeepable and must thus be able not

1 Jacques Derrida, Advances, trans. Philippe Lynes (Minneapolis: University of

My question, which is pretty broad, would then be the following: if

4 [Translator’s note] Marc Crépon’s emphasis.

6 Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons;” trans. G.M. Goshgarian, in Ghostly

since, in order to be a promise, it must remain keepable with­out any assur-

It seems to me that you introduce a subtle distinction here between

be fulfilled, inasmuch as the future is indeterminate, independently of

e—and to countersign these events. The countersignature is itself a

a philosophical body of work, or of the reading-writing having to do

hilosophy. Not only could we show that every philosophical discourse

econstruction was dead from the beginning, that it has to do with

since, in order to be a promise, it must remain keepable without any assur-

[. . .] is overrun in advance by the performative of the promise that

feel it in my gut, truly, and these are things—that would need to be

JD: This would be very d ifficult . . . I was a high school teacher in

BD: Some colleagues have as many as eight c lasses—I have six.

JD: No, I mean . . . e mpty-handed, that is without an already polished

c ollaboration, of cooperation between disciplines that allow these ideas

BD: I’m thinking of your text on “seven contradictory commandments”9