Derrida Jacques - Derrida now: current perspectives in Derrida studies

Theory Now
John Armitage, Virilio Now
Ryan Bishop, Baudrillard Now
Verena Conley and Irving Goh, Nancy Now
Oliver Davis, Rancire Now
Stuart Elden, Sloterdijk Now
James Faubion, Foucault Now
Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg, iek Now
John W.P. Phillips, Derrida Now
Stephen Sale and Laura Salisbury, Kittler Now

Edited by John W.P. Phillips

polity

Copyright Polity Press 2016

Copyright Chapter 2 Geoffrey Bennington 2016
Copyright Chapter 8 Nicholas Royle 2016

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6288-6

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Derrida now : current perspectives in Derrida studies / John William Phillips.
pages cm. -- (Theory now)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-5573-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-5573-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-5574-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-5574-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Derrida, Jacques. I. Phillips, John William, editor.
B2430.D484D4856 2016
194--dc23

2015024618

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How are we to calculate the age of Deconstruction? We can ask about its chances. And we can acknowledge that not everything in it comes down to a name, not even that of Jacques Derrida. Nevertheless, it was Derrida who identified from time to time the necessity of a deconstruction and who insisted on its traversal across and beyond more familiar categories of academic practice. It is because deconstruction interferes with solid structures, material institutions, and not only with discourses or signifying representations, he writes in The Truth in Painting, that it is always distinct from an analysis or critique (Derrida, 1987a: 19). And it was Derrida who insisted that the necessity of a deconstruction couldnt be separated from the chances that we must take with it (Derrida, 1984).

Attempts to write in Derridas name or in the name of Deconstruction, or even to produce critical readings of Derridas works, face a peculiar problem. While the general outlines of the philosophy might be reasonably well known, and many exemplary studies exist, the provocation of the Derrida text remains. So, after Derrida in his name it is possible not only to present coherent accounts of the history of western metaphysics and the logocentrism that guides its programme, but also to intervene in that programme by mobilizing the a priori insinuation of the trace, of arche-writing, of iterability, of the remarkable mark, of diffrance, or of the supplement at the origin. Such practices, enchained in the narrative that helps to produce them, are today widespread. What remains, however, is the peculiar problem of the Derrida text, which presents its arguments (in sometimes strange syntactical arrangements) each time in the guise of complex webs of connections, allusions, sometimes obscure references and chains of association, the effects of which leave nothing untouched. If the now familiar narratives of logocentrism and iterability can be detached from the peculiarity of Derridas written signature, what, then, remains to be read in it? The question turns not on the status of the texts themselves but on an indeterminate (accidental, fatal) predicate that they acknowledge, perhaps uniquely in the history of western philosophy: an addressee at once adequate to reading them and yet absolutely outside determination.

In 2004 Derrida gave an interview, a few weeks before he succumbed to his fatal illness, where he discusses among many other topics matters of inheritance, writing and death. He reframes the question of the intellectual inheritance he will have left in terms of the familiar doctrine of the remarkable mark, already well established by the watershed year of 1967, which signifies the death of the writer in the repeatable form the obscure repeatability of the trace. The trace I leave, he says, signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me (Derrida, 2007: 32). This hope, from a writer who repeats here that we live death in writing, follows the structural form of the most contradictory hypothesis. Again the formulation traces a familiar pattern. The pathos of structural form precedes and exceeds the active control of the phantasmatic subject:

I have simultaneously I ask you to believe me on this the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not yet begun to read me, that even though there are, to be sure, many very good readers (a few dozen in the world perhaps, people who are also writer-thinkers, poets), in the end it is later on that all this has a chance of appearing; but also, on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. (Derrida, 2007: 34)

Survival here means not merely what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries but what still has the capacity to form its readers. The structural role of the addressee therefore haunts our hope for the survival of the written trace. Derrida identifies the peculiar properties of this addressee on several occasions. In a celebrated interview with Derek Attridge the dream of a writing that would be neither literature nor philosophy gives rise to certain thoughts that concern the reader of such a work: what it is in the work that produces its reader, a reader who doesnt yet exist, whose competence cannot be identified, a reader who would be formed, trained, instructed, constructed, even engendered, lets say invented by the work (Derrida, 1992: 74). Derrida returns to this thought in the last interview, confirming the connection between pedagogy, institutions, writing, experimentation and the future or to-come of an unimagined addressee. Each book, he reminds us, is a pedagogy aimed at forming its reader (Derrida, 2007: 31). If the writer is to take the desired addressee into account they must invent the law of a one-time event. In yet another interview (from 1987) Derrida answers to questions about the peculiarity of his writing again with reference to the necessity of formal adventure, which involves incorporating in some way the others signature (Derrida, 1995a: 188). The event of deconstruction thus occurs between the signature of the other and the unmarked addressee, which gives way (but never entirely) to the asymmetrical form of a signature-countersignature.