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Greene / Hors d’œuvre 367

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 367–379.

Hors d’œuvre

Jody Greene

To love friendship it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future.

—Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

Even if it is essentially preservative, love (but also deconstruction) is nev-ertheless no stranger to destruction, to loss, and to ruin.

—Peggy Kamuf, “Deconstruction and Love”

The archive should call into question the coming of the future.

—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

How we mourn, how we recognize and remember the dead, according to Jacques Derrida, dictates not only our relationship to the past, but also any possibil-ity of a future. This is also the commonest form of common sense, albeit pushed to its limits: while we cannot control the future in its unanticipatable unfolding, cannot predetermine or securely prepare for it, as death and “untimely death” above all surely shows, how we orient ourselves to the future in the wake of loss will have

Jody Greene is Associate Professor of Literature and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Pennsylvania, 2005), and the editor of The Work of Friendship (GLQ 10.3 [2004]). She is at work on a new project on poststructural-ism and book history, sections of which have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 / 3368

consequences for the memory or legacy of whatever or whomever has been lost, as well as for ourselves and those who come after us. Mourning, remembrance, and the preservation of the past are all intimately linked, as Derrida argues in Archive Fever, to “a responsibility for tomorrow.”1

In assembling a volume that engages the question of Derrida’s relationship to the eighteenth century, I am unquestionably participating in an act of public mourning, even as I ask others—readers, writers—to join with me in “bear[ing]” Derrida’s legacy as a scholar of eighteenth-century texts to an audience of eighteenth-century scholars. I am trying, that is, in what I know is a doomed act of preservation, to protect from the ruin of forgetting something specific about Derrida’s oeuvre—his lifelong engagement with an eighteenth-century archive—even as I call attention to the fact that so many prominent readers of Derrida’s work make a living or at least began their careers as dix-huitièmistes. This project remains doomed because it is as likely to fall on deaf ears among self-identified Derrideans, skeptical of historicisms and periodizations, as among those who desire no truck with poststructuralism. The proprietary challenge of “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” then, seems to solicit in return only two possible and equally proprietary responses: “Not my Derrida”; “Not my eighteenth century.” Yet my interests here are not exclusively preservative and might even, truth be told, border on the destructive, or at least the disruptive. I am hoping that a volume such as this one might change the way scholars of the eighteenth century, in both senses of that modifying genitive, understand “their” eighteenth century, as well as the way readers of Derrida apprehend the Derridean corpus, the archive or oeuvre that consigns itself under that proper name. At once a project of derangement and a scheme of conservation, this volume offers itself, too, however sheepishly, as an act of love—for eighteenth-century studies, for the work of Jacques Derrida—a hybrid venture of mourning, love, and reading that both affirms the future of the Derridean archive and calls that future into question.

Throughout Derrida’s work, mourning’s link to futurity is conceived in both ethical and practical terms. While the two inevitably contaminate each other, for the purposes of an introduction (a foolhardy enterprise in itself, as any reader of Derrida well knows), it seems excusable to hold them apart, however provisionally. Derrida’s ethical approach to mourning can be glimpsed in the passage from Politics of Friendship cited among the epigraphs above, the one in which he adjures us to “love the future.” Lest we think we know what it is we are being asked, or told, to love in this undeniably affirmative moment, Derrida modulates instantaneously and characteristically from affirmation to something more tentative: “there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps.’”2 An injunction to commit ourselves to a perhaps, a command, in the name of justice, to love a mere possibility, an instruction, finally, later in the passage, to “open on to the coming of what comes,” whatever that may be (PF 29): the terrain of friendship, love, “bear[ing] the other” is suddenly very short on assurances. Futurity is becoming more perilous by the moment.

Perilous, or perhaps monstrous. One of Derrida’s preferred figures for the ethics of futurity from the time of the Grammatology forward, as Peggy Kamuf notes at the opening of her essay in this volume, is the figure of the monster. In 1990, in an interview on German radio, Elisabeth Weber asked Derrida to reflect on what he had elsewhere referred to as the monstrous nature of his writing, its


tendency to “mutate” away from the tradition in which he had begun writing into something new and unrecognizable, a mutation into the future that serves to illus-trate the writer’s powerlessness over his own text. “What is the relation between what you call the monsters of your writing,” Weber asked, “and the memory of this absence of power?”3 Derrida’s response itself mutates from a discussion of the past and of memory that returns him to the beginnings of his own oeuvre to an invocation of the future:

I think that somewhere in Of Grammatology I said, or perhaps it’s at the end of Writing and Difference, that the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. (P 386–87)

Derrida begins this recollection of his past writing practices by misremembering his own oeuvre, by failing to cite himself confidently, as if enacting a lifetime’s theorization of the failure of authorial self-presence in a momentary but illustra-tive lapse. The opening up of the past, the powerlessness over our own discourse that will ensure its mutation into the monstrosity of an unexpected future—these occur even as they are described in this passage. What arrives in the place of the recollection is a herald, a monstrous guest that is not the future but that, in its surprising appearance, reminds us of the duty to welcome whatever arrives. As it barrels through the door, this monstrous arrivant demands that we “open on to the coming of what comes,” whether we like it or not. The monster cannot itself be the future, because, as Derrida carefully notes, no sooner has it arrived than our hospitality tries to “domesticate” it, in a shuttling movement that alters both the monster and its host. To be open to the future, to the “perhaps,” means being willing to accommodate the monster, to put her up, to put up with her, to change our habits for her, but also and above all, even as this process of monster-taming is occurring, to be listening for the doorbell, the signal that the next monster is about to arrive, coming toward us from outside, de hors. This movement of hos-pitality, domestication, and repeated surprise, Derrida goes on, “is the movement of culture,” of writing and of scholarship, a movement that continually requires of us that we open toward the unknown (P 387).

As his disquisition on writing and monstrosity continues, Derrida moves from a figural meditation on the future and the ethical responsibility for hospitality to a more pragmatic discussion of the reception of texts. Like the monstrous figure that appears without warning demanding our welcome, new species of writing arrive on our desks and in our inboxes (electronic or otherwise) challenging us to make room for them, a challenge to which, more often than not, we fail to rise. Our failure to welcome these textual arrivants, however, does not necessarily ensure that they will leave us alone, much less that they will take a hint and go away:


Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, trans-form the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity. (P 387)

Those texts we have the most trouble welcoming, those that most resist domestica-tion, ultimately, even during the era of their anomaly, bring about transformations in the cultural and historical field. What is most powerfully rejected and forcibly held outside, Derrida insists, must nonetheless already be intimately connected with what is inside a given culture, inside its archive, or it would not require such radical denunciation in the first place. It would not, we could say, provoke such a perversely preservative response. As he put it in the very first section of his essay, “Scribble,” his introduction to the French translation of William Warburton’s 1742 essay on Egyptian hieroglyphics, “ce qui est chassé, exclus, dehors, se fait toujours représenter . . . au-dedans, il travaille de façon surcryptée au-dedans” [whatever is driven out, excluded, outside, always has itself represented; it works in an encrypted way on the inside].4 Whatever is deliberately defined as outside a culture, a system, or an oeuvre must also and at the same time be recognizable inside that culture, and thus must already reside there, albeit in an “encrypted” form.

Derrida’s remarks concerning the encrypted interior of any cultural system appear in the course of a discussion of the practice of editorial collections—specifi-cally, the curiously named “Collection Palimpseste” in which, in 1977, Warburton’s essay on hieroglyphics appeared. How do we decide what should go in such a collection, Derrida wonders, especially a collection devoted to texts “décryptés” [unburied, taken out of the crypt] (S10) after more than two hundred years? What should be included and what should be left out, and who decides? Almost twenty years later, Derrida would return to the question of the criteria that govern the collection of texts, this time in the 1990 work Archive Fever. Here, Derrida once again renders the movement between mourning and the future both as an ethical problem and as a matter of textual dissemination and reception, but now he does so in terms of the archive. One might be tempted to think of archives as reposi-tories of the past, Derrida hazards, whose job it is to gather up and preserve the artifacts of a bygone culture or deceased cultural maker in as complete, faithful, and permanent a manner as possible. Archives, then, would be yet another example of the work of mourning, of how we “bear the other in mourning,” not to mention of how we attempt to encrypt the things we love. Nothing, Derrida argues, could be further from the truth of the archive:

The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomor-row. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. (AF 36)


The archive, Derrida counsels, is not of the past but of the future, not complete but open—an “opening on the future” (AF 30)—not so much faithful as an example of what he later called “la fidélité infidèle” [unfaithful fidelity].5 There is no sub-ject who determines the meaning of the archive, though there are subjects—call them “archons” (AF 2)—whose job it will be to decide what should be included in a given archive and what should not. Every archiving gesture, it follows, is a gesture of exclusion as much as of inclusion, which is why, as he tersely put it, “No archive without outside” (AF 11). Once again, of course, as with an editorial collection, decisions concerning what to exclude will have ramifications for the reception of whatever finds inclusion, inflecting the meaning of the content of the archive inexorably. Better to leave the archive open, Derrida suggests (as though we have any other choice), better to be prepared to welcome the unexpected ar-rival, however monstrous, and even to prepare a response. The archive, he writes, should not try to determine the future but should, instead, “call into question the coming of the future,” primarily by recognizing its own contingency, its suscepti-bility to ruin and loss as well as to preservation (AF 33–34). As Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault note, in reflecting on Derrida’s own response to the works of his deceased friends, this conviction regarding the openness of the archive was derived from experience, as much as from philosophizing. In his acts of mourn-ing, they write in the introduction to The Work of Mourning, Derrida “always recognizes not only the systematicity and coherence of a corpus but its openness, its unpredictability, its ability to hold something in reserve or surprise for us.”6 Derrida, that is, models for us in his reading of others, particularly dead others, how to open our mourning work and our archiving work to the future, how to stay faithful to an oeuvre and attend to or at the very least make way for what is hors d’œuvre at the same time.

Not long before his death, in a now well-known interview with Jean Birn-baum published under the title Apprendre à vivre enfin [To Learn/To Teach How to Live, Finally], Derrida addressed in personal and often humorous terms the matter of his own oeuvre and its destiny both within his life and after his death. To send a book into the world, he emphasized, always uncannily anticipates the experience of one’s own death: “au moment où je laisse (publier) ‘mon’ livre (personne ne m’y oblige), je deviens, apparaissant-disparassaint, comme ce spectre inéducable qui n’aura jamais appris à vivre” [at the moment I let ‘my’ book go (to be published) (no one makes me do it), I start appearing and disappearing like that unteachable ghost who has never learned how to live] (AVE 33). Publication precipitates an experience of radical self-loss, a powerlessness not only over the work, which has mutated into a public object, but over what is “mine” more generally. In publish-ing, I let go of what I once thought of as “my” book—but was it ever properly mine?—relinquishing it to its readers, and in so doing confront the specter of my own exteriority with relation to myself and to what I thought I could call my own. This experience of self-loss that attends publishing, which Derrida playfully de-scribes as “irréappropriable” [unreappropriable], hardly differs from the experience of death itself. “Épreuve extrême: on s’exproprie sans savoir à qui proprement la chose qu’on laisse est confiée. Qui va hériter, et comment? Y aura-t-il même des héritiers?” [The final test: one expropriates oneself without knowing to whom the thing one leaves behind is properly entrusted. Who will inherit, and how? Will


there even be inheritors?] (AVE 33–34). “Confiée”: entrusted, confided, perhaps consigned, since that is the word Derrida repeatedly uses to describe deposition in an archive. Those who inherit what we expropriate by giving it out as though it were our own are also those who will decide what survives. To them is entrusted the task of gathering, but also “the tension between gathering and dispersion” that characterizes archive-making and knowledge-making more generally.7 The decisions they make, these inheritors and archons, will be responsible for determining what appears and disappears, if not for the future, then at least for tomorrow.

Take this volume, for instance, which can certainly be understood to con-stitute a practice of archiving. Contributors were asked to consider whether Derrida could be said to have a special or privileged relationship with the materials of the eighteenth century, particularly at the beginning and end of his writing career, and to begin, if they so desired, by exploring certain key terms in the Derridean lexicon often associated with that century: reason, fraternity, democracy, and Enlighten-ment, to name only a few. The last of these, in particular, has been a persistent theme in the Derridean oeuvre, although the relationship between Derrida’s work and the project of Enlightenment has been understood more often as benighted than as privileged. As Derrida himself expostulated in 2002, “it is often the case that people would like to oppose this period of deconstruction to the Enlighten-ment. No, I am for the Enlightenment, I’m for Progress.”8 If Derrida can be said to be “for the Enlightenment,” if we may take him at his word here, then “Derrida’s eighteenth century” might be interchangeable with “Derrida’s Enlightenment”—and so the contributors to this volume have largely taken it to be, focusing their studies almost entirely on the two great thinkers of Enlightenment whose works take up the most space in Derrida’s writing, Rousseau and Kant. No surprises there: when one is asked to consider Derrida’s preferred eighteenth-century archive, the works of these two thinkers are surely the first to come to mind.

At the same time, however, the contributors to this volume nearly all ex-pressed understandable reservations, notwithstanding the self-evidence of Derrida’s repeated return to these thinkers of the Enlightenment, about a project that ap-peared to be trying to historicize Derrida’s work, to tie it to or even to claim him for a particular historical moment. These reservations are understandable because of Derrida’s own painstaking exposition of the tricky relationship between a text and, on the one hand, the era of its original composition and, on the other, the proper name with which it is signed. Just because a work was originally composed in the eighteenth century, Derrida insists, in yet another modulation on the notion of “unreappropriability,” it is not necessarily an “eighteenth-century text.” “Ev-erything is out of joint,” he explains in A Taste for the Secret, because texts are “heterogeneous,” not even “contemporary with themselves”; “if deconstruction is possible,” he continues, “this is because it mistrusts any sort of periodization,” just as it “mistrusts proper names.”9 As Geoffrey Bennington lays out in the first essay in this volume, an essay that might well be thought of as the collection’s proper introduction, or at least as required reading for what follows, this skepticism about periodization and the proper name, which runs throughout Derrida’s work, makes its first appearance and finds its fullest elaboration in Of Grammatology, with direct reference to “our” period: “le ‘XVIIIe siècle français,’” Derrida there calls it, “si quelque chose de tel existe” [the ‘French eighteenth century’ . . . if such


a thing exists].10 Anyone can see, Bennington argues, in the Grammatology above all, Derrida’s attention to and even “affection for” the texts of this period (382), a period Derrida identifies as uniquely important in the history of writing. For Derrida, this period stands out as the place where a battle for supremacy between speech and writing became explicit in Western European history and philosophy, a place of “combat” and “crisis” (G 147) precipitated by three scholarly developments that occurred in the epoch running roughly from Descartes to Hegel: the project for a universal writing; the scholarly exploration of non-European scripts; and the development of a “general science” of language and of writing. Yet that epoch, from our belated perspective, is not the eighteenth century, but “ce qu’on appelle le XVIIIe siècle” [what is called the eighteenth century] (G 147), a deliberate estrangement of the historical referent that leads Bennington to his title, “Derrida’s ‘Eighteenth Century.’” The necessity of defamiliarizing the referent, rendering it inhospitable, is directly traceable to the practice of reading: “the mere fact and act of reading (its very possibility),” Bennington writes, “is itself already sufficient to undo the largely unquestioned historicism” that continues to afflict “any periodizing effort” (384). Whatever it is that we access or respond to when we read a work written in the eighteenth century, Bennington reminds us, it is not a historically verifiable entity, the “reality and consistency” of another era located firmly in the past (384). What we access instead is a powerful received idea about the meaning of a par-ticular era—the “‘French eighteenth century,’” for instance—that conditions our reading practices but also inevitably deforms them. Our very activity as scholars, Bennington concludes, “opens texts up always beyond their historical specificity to the always possibly menacing prospect of unpredictable future reading” (392). Reading, that is, like archive-making, is open to the future, “unpredictable,” and, as often as not, fraught with danger.

Peggy Kamuf opens her essay, “To Do Justice to ‘Rousseau,’ Irreducibly,” in similar terms, with an act of estrangement and a warning of impending danger, a warning that is also, as with Bennington, a kind of promise. Like the “eighteenth century” to which he ostensibly belongs, “Rousseau” remains inaccessible to us, not only because the Rousseau we apprehend is a product of our reading, but also because the place in our reading from which “Rousseau” can be glimpsed is inevi-tably a “blind spot.” So, for instance, although Rousseau “names supplementarity endlessly,” refers to it constantly throughout his work, “the law of this naming and the concept governing its compulsive repetition in Rousseau’s discourse remains unthought, unnoticed, unread, and unseen by the signatory not less than by the generations of scholars or savants who have built a house of knowledge on the archive of Rousseau’s oeuvre” (396). The blind spot in Rousseau’s own discourse is replicated and redoubled in the field of vision of Rousseau scholars, such that they are as oblivious to the “law” of his discourse and hence of his entire oeuvre as he himself must inevitably be. What is significant in Rousseau’s writing thus remains outside his oeuvre, or rather, inside and outside at the same time: Rousseau’s legacy “both belongs to and does not belong to the author’s signed work” (396), rendering it “unreappropriable” by us as much as by Rousseau himself. The task of reading, nonetheless, of reading “Rousseau,” “the age of Rousseau,” and ultimately “the age of Derrida,” Kamuf writes, is to forge a “tiny opening” within the blind spot (402), to remove and reorient ourselves through a practice of reading that allows us,


anamorphically, to “round . . . on” our own blind spots otherwise (402). Whether it remains possible to effect such a reorientation through an act of will, an act of deliberate rereading of those corpuses, remains a question. Certainly, as Kamuf notes, it is too early to tell what the blind spots of “the age of Derrida”—includ-ing, quite possibly, that age’s “acrimony” toward the oeuvre of Jacques Derrida (402)—will have been. “Such acrimony writes on water,” she concludes, “where its ripples dissipate with the blink of an eye” (402). Given that our most generous and most loving readings, as much as our moments of acrimony, are afflicted by “little interval[s] of blindness” (402), our best hope is to turn and return, errantly but faithfully, toward an oeuvre that notwithstanding the efforts of “generations of scholars and savants” cannot, mercifully, be closed off or determined in advance.

The question of determination and its relationship to both faith and scholarship is taken up in the next two essays, Neil Saccamano’s “Inheriting En-lightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida,” and Richard Terdiman’s “Determining the Undetermined: Derrida’s ‘University without Condition.’” Saccamano’s essay presents us with yet another meditation on insides and outsides, this time with relation to the question of religion in Derrida’s thought, a question that might be phrased, how do we get outside the terms of religion sufficiently to be able to think religion? Given that the very ideals the Enlightenment is purported to have championed against religion—tolerance, publicity, universality, reason, critique itself—trace their roots to Christian theology, it remains impossible to stand outside religion sufficiently to deploy its critique a-theologically: “religion would seem impossible to think philosophically without religion,” Saccamano concludes (406). Ranging across the works of Kant to those of Shaftesbury, Hume, Voltaire, and even Richardson, Saccamano painstakingly and generously retraces what is only an apparent contradiction between the persistence of a discourse of faith and the dedication to rational exchange among Enlightenment thinkers—not least among them, Derrida himself. Derrida’s commitments to singularity, justice, and unconditionality, the unverifiable “absolutes,” as Terdiman will have it, of his philosophical project, only appear to be at odds with the more worldly, “progres-sive” concerns associated with the Enlightenment, including, as Saccamano points out, “the necessity of law, right, and norms in international politics” (421). Der-rida inherits his affirmation of unconditionality, which is also an article of faith, from the very thinkers—Kant, Rousseau—from whom he also receives the legacy of “perfectibility” that leads him to embrace the tools of progress, tools such as laws and norms (421). Thus Derrida “cannot but keep faith with the project of Enlightenment,” Saccamano concludes, because within that project the secret and the promise of an unconditional justice “resonate[s]” alongside the more practical, ethical, normative ends we cannot fail to be “for” (421).

Terdiman’s contribution also worries the edge or fold between Derrida’s invocation of unconditionality and his deployment of a vocabulary borrowed from, even determined by, the Enlightenment. In this instance the university will be the site for thinking this tension between the conditional and the unconditional, a tension that becomes, in Terdiman’s uncompromising account, frankly unten-able, “internally contradictory and logically incoherent” (427). While Terdiman is sympathetic in principle to Derrida’s “motivation” in calling for a university “without condition,” a place where any question can be asked, freed from the


encroachments of authority, he questions Derrida’s “model,” his “mechanism,” or lack of one, for achieving such a space free of determination (433). The ab-sence of “attention to material factors” that would enable such a university to come into being (430), its reliance on the very notion of an unpredictable and open “à-venir” that also grounds his notion of the event, of mourning, and of the archive, remains, for Terdiman, another kind of “blind spot” in Derrida’s thinking (433). In Terdiman’s account, however, the refusal to specify anything short of a “miracle” that will get us from the university of today to the ideal and ideational one of the future makes of the essay on the university something more insidious than a failure of method.11 The problem with “The University without Condition” is not only that it is contaminated by Enlightenment thinking, and most notably by Kant’s thinking about the university, knowledge projects, Enlightenment, and critique more generally. Indeed, Derrida confesses as much at the outset. The issue is, rather, that Derrida knowingly inherits what Terdiman calls “Kant’s resonant theses about the liberation of thought,” but then “depoliticizes them,” emptying them of their pragmatic content, hollowing out Kant’s analysis of how the liberation of thought might be “made real” (434). Derrida relies too much on the thinking of the Enlightenment—and does not rely on it enough. In Saccamano’s terms, he is unfaithful in the very act of keeping faith with the Enlightenment. Derrida may have thought he was “for the Enlightenment,” according to Terdiman’s account, but in a fitting fulfillment of that prophecy of an unpredictable future to which he returned so frequently in his writing, he may also turn out to have been against it—dangerously, monstrously—all along.

Julie Candler Hayes joins the ranks of those interrogating Derrida’s rela-tionship to the Lumières in “Unconditional Translation: Derrida’s Enlightenment to Come.” Hayes sets out to circumvent the historicizing paradox that troubles some of the other contributors to the volume by focusing not on works published between 1700 and 1799, but instead on Derrida’s own “formulations and refor-mulations of a concept,” or rather of a series of concepts, including Enlighten-ment, Enlightenment to come, democracy to come, and even translation to come (444). In a painstaking review of the many articulations of the notion of the term “à venir” in Derrida’s writings, a kind of philology of the “to come,” alongside an exploration of what seems to have been a deliberate return to the vocabulary of Enlightenment in late works such as Rogues, Hayes tracks a shift in Derrida’s works from “the historical, however idealized Enlightenment” to “an ahistori-cal Enlightenment situated in the never-fully-present à venir” (445).12 Far from evacuating the concept of Enlightenment of its politically progressive utility, this “renvoi” constitutes an effort to free Enlightenment from the “totalizing or fetishiz-ing forms of reason” for which it had been condemned throughout the twentieth century (450). Derrida’s loving resignification of the term, Hayes argues, might turn out to be Enlightenment’s saving grace, allowing Derrida his claim to be “for the Enlightenment” after all. Yet we can only know whether that will have come to pass in retrospect, since what it will have meant to be “for the Enlightenment” will require acts of translation, as this term mutates away from its many points of origin. The last third of Hayes’s essay thus turns to translation both as a theme in Derrida’s writing and as a necessary dimension of his philosophical practice. As the constant shifting between Enlightenment, Aufklärung, Illuminismo, Lumières


shows, she argues, “semantic slipperiness,” far from constituting a hindrance to rational critique, is “salutary”: “it aids our understanding by preventing us from fixing on individual terms” (451). Semantic play allows and even forces us to move across a range of concepts “in an open-ended conversation between texts,” which makes possible a conversation among periods, languages, and genres of discourse that can only be felicitous for thinking, as well as for critique (454).

Srinivas Aravamudan’s “Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues” opens just such a conversation among discursive domains in its exploration of the literary and spe-cifically fabular language that permeates eighteenth-century political philosophy. Beginning his analysis with the opening of Rogues, but moving outward from there to other texts that did not immediately capture Derrida’s attention, Aravamudan asks, “what better way to approach the self-important and self-aggrandizing narra-tive of sovereignty and reason than through myths and fables?” (458). Aravamudan, following Derrida, comes at some of the more exalted Enlightenment writings on reason and sovereignty from a perspective that is both outside and below them, the perspective of literature, fiction, and in particular the beast(ly) fable, only to find those fables already well encrypted inside the sovereign archive. “The rich cultural history of roguery as Enlightenment,” too, which Derrida traces from its origins in late sixteenth-century rogue literature, through the nineteenth-century evolutionary science of Charles Darwin, and into the post-9/11 American obsession with the phenomenon of “rogue states,” provides a fresh perspective on sovereign exceptionalism through pointing to a certain lawlessness at the heart of democratic governance (461). Aravamudan carries the analysis, as well as the “open-ended conversation” among philosophy, literature, beastliness, and roguery, beyond the pages of Rogues, to sites that include the works of Hobbes, Defoe, and Montesquieu, which is to say, the theory of statecraft, the English novel, and the oriental tale. Aravamudan concludes with a timely reminder that “Derrida’s eighteenth century” should not become a “pick-and-choose-affair,” in which Derrida’s contribution to eighteenth-century studies is remembered exclusively in terms of his treatment of particular eighteenth-century figures, among them “Rousseau, Condillac, Kant, and to a lesser extent Hobbes” (464). He recommends, instead, in a project his essay profitably initiates, taking up “concepts that are derived from other periods and figures,” but that nonetheless “are central to eighteenth-century studies,” concepts such as modernity, tradition, the human/animal divide, and individual freedom, to name only a few (464). He recommends, that is, that we venture outside of Derrida’s oeuvre and also beyond the specific constraints of 1700–1799, reading through and across those clearly delimited archives in search of material we might read back onto the “narrower” concerns of eighteenth-century scholarship, in a process that promises to open the field, and perhaps too to call it into question in surprising and enlivening ways.

To Ian Balfour falls the last word in this volume, and appropriately enough, that last word is “difference.” Balfour’s “The Gift of Example: Derrida and the Origins of the Eighteenth Century” returns us one last time to questions of peri-odization and archiving, as well as to those key eighteenth-century figures who fill the pages of the Grammatology: Rousseau, Kant, Condillac, and Warburton. Yet Balfour, not content with these perennial examples, turns our attention to works that made only a brief appearance in this volume and in Derrida’s oeuvre, if they


made any appearance at all, works by Locke, the Shelleys, Defoe, Diderot, Herder, and even Cleland. Balfour references these works as some of those he might include alongside Kant and Rousseau in a new project on “the language of origins” in the eighteenth century (470), a project in dialogue with Derrida’s work, but which also aims to provide “a somewhat original supplement to Derrida’s charting of the ter-ritory” (471). A supplement, as readers of Derrida’s “Rousseau” well know, both adds to an entity and transforms it; thus Balfour’s work to come leaves us with a promise, a promise that it will expand what has come, perhaps in part through this volume, to be considered “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” even as it transforms that territory, that oeuvre, in as yet unpredictable ways.

To the list already provided by Balfour, I might add or expand on a few items of my own, items set down here like breadcrumbs for an eighteenth-cen-tury scholar to come, and especially for one who desires to perform a mutation in the archive we have so provisionally gathered here. Among the most obvious candidates for inclusion in the next version of “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” si quelque chose de tel existera, must surely be the works of and on Condillac and Warburton, treated in the Grammatology but also in essays of their own, each of which forms a tendentious introduction to a modern edition of an eighteenth-cen-tury work—“Scribble,” in the case of Warburton’s essay on hieroglyphics from The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, and The Archeology of the Frivolous, originally published as a sprawling introduction to Condillac’s Essay on the Origins of Human Understanding, itself advertised as a “supplement” to Locke.13 Briefer and harder-to-find but no less tantalizing examples, some of which might divert the conversation in revolutionary as well as monstrous directions, some of which also push the eighteenth century into its “long” version, include the following: the reflections on Robinson Crusoe that wind through the unpublished 2001–2003 seminars on “La Bête et le souverain,” as well as the extended lycological analysis of Hobbes touched on here by Aravamudan, which can be found in those same seminars and is already available in the French collection La Démocratie à venir; the discussion of Thomas Jefferson in “Declarations of Independence,” a must-read on this side of the Atlantic at least, particularly alongside Peggy Kamuf’s treat-ment of the work of Thomas Paine in “Signé Paine, ou la panique dans les lettres”; staying with the revolutionary theme, the staging of a conversation between the French revolution and the South African anti-apartheid struggle in “The Spirit of the Revolution”; and finally, the invocation of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Becca-ria as early and influential opponents of capital punishment in “Death Penalties,” perhaps paired with “Violence against Animals,” in which Bentham appears again, this time elaborating a ground for a theory of animal rights.14 These few and hastily assembled examples together serve to demonstrate that the present volume might be subject to yet one more act of diacritical defamiliarization: perhaps my title would be best rendered, with apologies to Geoffrey Bennington, as “‘Derrida’s’ Eighteenth Century,” given the near exclusive preoccupation in these pages with only two of Derrida’s eighteenth-century interlocutors. Is that preoccupation really a reflection of Derrida’s engagement with the eighteenth century, or does it instead tell us something about our own scholarly epoch, and perhaps also about our will to close off Derrida’s oeuvre, to domesticate that within it which is unfamiliar, foreign, or strange?


The answer to such a question must come from elsewhere, from outside these pages. It will require a turn and a return toward the works of the past, a renvoi that is in part a work of mourning and in part a welcoming of the future. It will require not only revisiting the archive, but remaking it, attending to what is dehors as much as to what is dedans. To hear the answer, the echo from the crypt that calls the future into question, all that is demanded is a willingness to listen, to read, and in turn, to respond.

What happens when a great thinker becomes silent, one whom we knew living, whom we read and reread, and also heard, one from whom we were still awaiting a response, as if such a response would help us not only to think otherwise but also to read what we thought we had already read under his signature, a response that held everything in reserve, and so much more than what we thought we had already recognized there? (WM 206)

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 36. Hereafter abbreviated as AF.

2. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 29. Here-after abbreviated as PF.

3. Jacques Derrida, “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 385. Hereafter abbreviated as P.

4. “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire” was first published as an introduction to a modern edition of Léonard des Malpeines’ 1744 translation of Warburton’s essay, issued under the title, William Warburton, Es-sai sur les hieroglyphes des Egyptiens (Paris: Collection Palimpseste, Aubier-Montaigne, 1977). Most of the essay, minus the first ten pages, was translated into English by Cary Plotkin, and published as “Scribble (writing-power)” in Yale French Studies 58 (1979): 117–47. My citations are taken from the first, untranslated section of the French edition, and the translations are my own (10). Hereafter abbreviated as S.

5. Jacques Derrida and Jean Birnbaum, Apprendre à vivre enfin (Paris: Galilée/Le Monde, 2005), 38, my translation. An English translation is forthcoming from Meville House Publishing in 2007. Hereafter abbreviated as AVE.

6. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Brault and Naas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), 28. Hereafter abbreviated as WM.

7. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 13.

8. Jacques Derrida, “What is Owed to the Stranger?” Arena Magazine (August–September 2002), 6.

9. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 9.

10. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 150. Translations follow those adopted by Geoffrey Bennington in this volume.

11. Neil Saccamano notes below that Derrida in fact made direct reference to the concept of miracles in “Faith and Knowledge,” in which he “asks us to believe that we already believe in the everyday occurrence of miracles” (413). See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vatimo (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).


12. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005).

13. For Scribble, see above n. 4. “L’Archéologie du frivole” was originally published as the introduc-tion to Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Paris: Galilée, 1973), and translated into English as The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980).

14. All material is by Derrida, unless otherwise noted: for the Robinson Crusoe material in “La Bête et le souverain,” see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida Enisled,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 248–76; for Hobbes, see “La Bête et le souverain,” in La Démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 433–76; for Jefferson, see “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Thomas Pepper, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006), 46–54; for Paine, see Kamuf, “Signé Paine, ou la panique dans les lettres,” in La Démocratie à venir, 19–35; for the last three breadcrumbs, see “The Spirit of the Revolution” (77–105), “Death Penalties” (139–65), and “Violence against Animals” (62–76), all in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow?: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).

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