"On Jacques Derrida"

Judith Butler

"How do you finally respond to your life and your
name?"

Derrida raised this question in his final interview
with Le Monde, published in August 18th of this year.
If he could apprehend his life, he remarks, he would
also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and
absolute, without resurrection and without redemption.

At this revealing moment, it is interesting that
Derrida the
philosopher should find in Socrates his proper
precursor, that he should turn to Socrates to
understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not
quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks,
come to terms with one's life without trying to
apprehend one's death, asking, in effect, how a human
lives and dies. Much of Derrida's later work is
dedicated to mourning, though he offers his acts of
public mourning
as a posthumous gift, for instance, in The Work of
Mourning published in 2001. There he tries to come to
terms with the death of other writers and thinkers
through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed,
their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of
mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre,
recommending to us a way to begin to mourn this
thinker who not only taught us how to read, but gave
the act of reading a new significance and a new
promise.

In that
book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes who died in
1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault,
who died in 1984, and a host of others, including
Edmund Jabes (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman
(1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-Francois
Lyotard (1998). The last of the essays, for Lyotard,
included in this book is written six years before
Derrida's own death. It is not, however, Derrida's own
death that preoccupies him here, but rather his
"debts."

These are authors that he could not do without,
ones with whom and through whom he thinks. He writes
only because he reads, and he reads only because there
are these authors to read time and again. He "owes"
them something or, perhaps, everything, if only
because he could not write without them; their writing
exists as the precondition of his own; their writing
constitutes the means through which his own writing
voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges,
importantly, as an address.

It strikes me as strange that in October of 1993 when
I shared
a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a
brief, private conversation with him that touched upon
these issues. As we were seated at a table together
with some other speakers, I could see in Derrida a
certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who
had translated him, those who had read him, those who
had defended him in
public debate, and those who has made good use of his
thinking and his words. I leaned over after one of
his several gestures of nearly inhuman generosity and
asked him whether he felt that he had many debts to
pay. I was hoping, vainly it seemed, to suggest to
him that he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I
did in a perhaps naively Nietzschean way that the debt
was a form of enslavement, and that he
did not see that what others offered him, they offered
freely. He seemed not to be able to hear me in
English. And so when I said "your debts," he said,
"my death?" "No," I reiterated, "your debts!" and he
said, "my death!?" At this point I could see that
there was a nexus between the two, one that my efforts
at clear pronunciation could not quite pierce, but it
was not until I read his later work that I came
to understand how important that nexus really was.

He writes, "There come moments when, as mourning
demands (deuil oblige), one feels obligated to declare
one's debts. We feel it our duty to say what we owe
to the friend." He cautions against "saying" the debt
and imagining that one might then be done with the
debt that way. He acknowledges instead the
"incalculable debt" that one that he does not want to
pay: "I am conscious of this and want it thus." He
ends his essay on Lyotard with a direct address:
"there it is, Jean Francois,
this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted
to try and tell you."

There is in that attempt, that
essai, a longing that cannot reach the one to whom it
is addressed, but does not for that reason forfeit
itself as longing. The act of mourning thus becomes a
continued way of "speaking to" the other who is gone,
even though the other is gone, in spite of the fact
that the other is gone, precisely because that other
is gone. We now must say "Jacques" to name the one
we have now lost, and in that sense "Jacques Derrida"
becomes the
name of our loss. And yet we must continue to say his
name, not only to mark his passing, but precisely as
the one whom we continue to address, in what we write,
because it is, for many of us, impossible to write
without relying on him, without thinking with and
through him. "Jacques Derrida," then, as the name for
the future of what we write.

It is surely uncontroversial to say that
Jacques Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers
of the 20th century, that his international reputation
far exceeds any French intellectual of his generation.

More than that, his work fundamentally changed the
way in which we think about language, philosophy,
aesthetics, painting, literature, communication,
ethics and politics. His early work
criticized the structuralist presumption that language
could be described as a static set of rules, and he
showed how those rules admitted of contingency and
were dependent on a temporality that could undermine
their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical
positions that uncritically subscribed to "totality"
or "systematicity" as values, without first
considering the alternatives that were ruled out by
that preemptive valorization. He insisted that the
act of reading extends from literary texts to films,
to works of art, to popular culture, to political
scenarios, and to philosophy itself. The practice of
"reading" insists that our ability to understand
relies on
our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes
that signs come to signify in ways that no particular
author or speaker can constrain in advance through
intention. This does not mean that our language
always confounds our intentions, but only that our
intentions do not fully govern everything we end up
meaning by what we say and write
(see Limited Inc., 1977). Derrida's work moved from a
criticism of philosophical presumptions in
groundbreaking books such as On Grammatology (1967),
Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972),
The Post Card (1980), and Spurs (1978), to the
question of how to theorize the problem of
"difference." This term he wrote as "différance," not
only to mark the way that signification works, with
one term referring to another, always relying on a
deferral of meaning between signifier and signified,
but also to characterize an ethical relation, the
relation of sexual difference, and the relation to the
Other. If some readers thought that Derrida was a
linguistic constructivist, they missed the fact that
the name we have for something, for ourselves, for an
other, is precisely what fails to capture the referent
(as opposed to making or constructing that
referent).

He clearly drew critically on the work of Emmanuel
Levinas in order to insist upon the "Other" as one to
whom an incalculable responsibility is owed, one who
could never fully be "captured" through social
categories or designative names, one to whom a certain
response is owed.

This framework became the basis of
his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa,
his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes and
forms of intellectual censorship, his theorization of
the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality,
his opposition to European racism, and his critical
relation to the
discourse of "terror" as it worked to fortify
governmental powers that undermine basic human rights,
in his defense of animal rights, in his opposition to
the death penalty, and even in his queries about
"being" Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality
to those of differing origins and language. One can
see these various questions raised in The Ear of the
Other (1982), The Other Europe, Positions (1972), For
Nelson Mandela (1986), Given Time (1991) The Gift of
Death (1992), The Other Heading: Reflections on
Today's Europe (1992), Spectres of Marx (1993),
Politics of Friendship (1994), The Monolingualism of
the Other (1996), Philosophy in a Time of Terror (with
Jurgen Habermas) (2002), and his conversations with
Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young
Jewish Saint (2001).

Derrida made clear in his small book on Walter
Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a
concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that
we cannot expect instances of justice in this life,
and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us
only in another life. He was clear that there was no
other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is
that toward which we strive, without end. Not to
strive for justice because it cannot be fully realized
would be as mistaken as believing that one has already
arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm
oneself adequately to fortify
its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he
opposed) and the second is dogmatism (which he
opposed). Derrida kept us alive to the practice of
criticism, understanding that social and political
transformation was an incessant project, one that
could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive
with the becoming of life itself, and with a reading
of the rules through which a polity constitutes
itself through exclusion or effacement. How is
justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what
does it mean to act in the name of justice? These
were questions that had to be asked regardless of the
consequences, and this meant that they were often
questions asked when established authorities wished
that they were not.

If his critics worried that, with Derrida, there are
no foundations upon which one could rely, they
doubtless were mistaken in that view. Derrida relies
perhaps most assiduously on Socrates, on a mode of
philosophical inquiry that took the question as the
most honest and arduous form for thought. "How do you
finally respond to your life and to your name?" This
question is posed by him to himself, and yet he is, in
this interview, a "tu" for himself, as if he is a
proximate friend, but not quite a "moi." He has taken
himself
as the other, modeling a form of reflexivity, asking
whether an account can be given of this life, and of
this death. Is there justice to be done to a life?
That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even
foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that
life and that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless
task of honoring what cannot be possessed through
knowledge, that in a life that exceeds our grasp.
Indeed, now that Derrida, the person, has died, his
writing makes a demand upon us, bequeathing his name
to us who will continue to address him. We must
address him as he addressed himself, asking what it
means to know and approach another, to apprehend a
life and a death, to give an account of its meaning,
to acknowledge its binding ties with others, and to do
that justly.

In this way, Derrida has
always been offering us a way to interrogate the very
meaning of our lives, singly and plurally, returning
to the question as the beginning of philosophy, but
surely also, in his own way, and with several
unpayable debts, beginning philosophy anew.