In Memoriam, Derrida Living Will

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In Memoriam:Derridas Living Will

Lawrence D. Kritzman

In Politics of Friendship Jacques Derrida claims philia begins withthe possibility o survival and that surviving is the other name o themourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.1 It has been two

years since the death o Jacques Derrida and what makes my mourn-

ing or him so ormidable is my inability to fnd a language capableo articulating the tragic loss o one o the most brilliant intellectualso the twentieth century. Yet the question remains how one can actethically out o duty to Derrida and still enable him to speak in his

very absence.For Derrida the mourning subject thus takes on the responsibility

o remembering the departed. But unlike the Freudian model whereone must introject the other and subsequently expel it as a sign o thesuccessul overcoming o loss, the Derridean approach to mourning

allows the other to live on albeit dierentially. Memory and interi-orization since Freud, this is how the normal work o mourning isoten described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing ide-alization takes in itsel or upon itsel the body and voice o the other,the others visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouringthem.2 Far rom conceptualizing this living on as the psychopathologyFreud once described as melancholia, Derrida suggests that mourn-ing becomes a discursive perormance o memory that constitutes theacting out o inheritance and in the process allows it to become the

1 Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso,


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mass destruction. The imperative to act, in the name o a certainHegelian determinism, became a simulation o action itsel, or the

attempt to avoid a potential consequence saturated the decision toinvade Iraq with the so-called knowability o the world and our abil-ity to master it. Moreover, the call to action beore time evaporatessuggests that it can be located and inscribed in an order, a paralyzing

jointedness.Unlike the Sartrean intellectual who had exemplifed oppositional

behavior in the binary division o the Cold War world, Derridas senseo political responsibility is one derived rom a subject who must renderhimsel incapable o deciding. To be sure, the buzzwords o liberalnation states in the West such as democracy and justice are positedby Derrida as impossible ideals that are based on a responsibilitythat is infnite. The exigencies o democracys promise necessitatesmore justice and hospitality as it engages in a uture that can neverbe oreseen.

Derridas approach to intellectual engagement is more conduciveto being able to apprehend the limits o reason and to conceptual-ize the plurality o values. He opted or what Chantal Moue once

characterized as an agonistic encounter that challenges Kantianuniversalism.5

Justice, or Derrida, requires what he describes as respons-ability,the infnite capacity to respond because justice can never be arrested.Like the question o justice, democracy is viewed as an ideality, inca-pable o establishing an absolute identity. Nevertheless democracymust be practiced and essayed in terms o an itinerary unctioningin the name o an impossible ideal. Challenging the politics o theproper, Derridas politics o hospitality departs rom the paralysis o

a regulative idea governed by determinable expectations. Neithermoralistic nor prescriptive, the politics o hospitality engages in theunconditional welcoming o the unknown, however anxiety produc-ing it may be. In Specters of Marx, or example, Derrida compares thedisavowal o Marxism in liberal democracies in the postCold War erato a symptom o an unfnished mourning. Derrida contends that theinability to escape the spectrality o Marxism might just mean thatour inheritance has a uture and that it cannot be short-circuited by

wishul thinking.

Derrida promoted an intellectual engagement that abandoned theafrmations o the universal intellectual in avor o becoming what I


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have described in another context as an intellectual without borders.6He eschewed a moralizing ethics on questions such as morality and

justice so that the very possibility o the question could be maintained.I Derrida writes against the establishment o an ethical universal in

what he terms a non-ethical manner, he does so in the name o anuncompromising duty that is always already hospitable to the singu-larity o dierence. The lesson, i indeed there is one to be ound,is derived rom Derridas enactment o being politically responsible.This suggests that or him politics is less a question o content andmore a matter o rigorous intellectual perormance.

In Archive Fever, Derrida engages in a discussion concerning therelationship between memory and its messianic unction. His concern

with inheritance in this context may be linked to what he has calledpostal maneuvering, a phenomenon that suggests that what has beensent out may never reach its destination. The point o departure oDerridas analysis is a philological reading o the word archive orarkhe which signifes both commencement and commandment.For Derrida the archive contains two meanings in one: the principleaccording to nature or history, there where things commencephysi-

cal, historical, or ontological principlebut also the principle accord-ing to the law, there where men and god command, there whereauthority, social order are exercised in this place rom which orderis givennomological principle.7

I the archive is conceived as the locus o historical record, orDerrida it also represents the demand or the archive as well as itsbeginning. Yet Derridas essaying o the word archive suggests thatit cannot be associated with completion, or history is always in theprocess o being made and archived. The ruitless attempt to immor-

talize history and derive rom that process the truth o the past isdestined to ailure.

The desire or origins produces archive ever and with it comes thepassion to make the past infnitely present in order to be transported to

the uture. Derridas notion o the archive does not represent memory

itsel. For the archive to exist the intervention o the external may beallowed. In the end, survival cannot be realized without this interven-

6 See Lawrence Kritzman, LIntellectuel sans rontiers: Derrida, France-USA, inS.I.E.C.L.E Colloque de Cerisy. 100 ans derencontres intellectuelles de Pontigny Cerisy(Paris:


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passage rom child to adult. In willing to us a new ethics o academicresponsibility Derrida has suggested a symbolic covenant enacted

through a dierence that is redoubled again and again and that isalways already hospitable to alterity. The unicity o the other todayshould be awaited as such . . . it should be anticipated as the unore-seeable, the unanticipatable, the non-masterable, non-identifable, inshort, as that o which one does not have a memory.9

In The School o the Dead, Helene Cixous writes I like the dead,they are the doorkeepers, who while closing one side give way to theother, the other being the dead in us, in whose memory we live and by

whose death, the within me or the with us becomes more possible.10More recently Judith Butler in her own expression o mourning orDerrida claims that we inherit the traces o the dead and it is througha certain haunting that enables survival to take shape.11

At the moment when I leave (publish) my book [. . .] I become disappear-ing, as the uneducable specter who will have never learned to live. The tracethat I leave signifes to me at once my death, to come or already come, andthe hope that it will survive me. This is not an ambition o immortality, itis structural. I leave a bit o paper, I go, I die . . . it is impossible to get out

o the structure. It is the constant orm o my lie.12

Survival thereore becomes a question related to the promise o thearchive. Derridas archive o Being unctions in a manner similar toone o the Greek etymological meanings o the word history whichunctions as a story without closure. I the content o the Derrideanarchive exteriorizes what has been deposited in it, it is in order toremember and space a Being whose promise can only be realized in thedierentiation o time. Yet the representation o this Being producesa cornucopia that can never be ully possessed but which neverthelessallows or the spatio-temporal renewal that will make Derridas thoughtpossible as it is articulated as something to come.

As so-called custodians o literature and culture we should becomeskeptical, as Derrida suggests, o academias quest or pure knowledgeand the tranquility o primal grounds. Cultural legacies constitute anopening up to the virtual which is always already beyond the pres-ent. Inheritance should thereore be regarded as a temporal modal-

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Derrida, The Other Heading(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) 18.10 Hlne Cixous, The School o the Dead, Three Steps in theLadder of Writing(NewYork: Columbia UP, 1993) 5.


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ity, activated by critical thinking, whose very being is predicated ondivergence. In terms o literary culture, inheritance implies a politics

o memory, which, as Derrida suggests in Specters of Marx, is never agiven [. . .] and is always a taste, a reading in response to the otherstext. I archival memory evokes both past and uture, the latter canonly take shape through the virtualities that beall inheritance andthe perhaps that it incarnates.

For Derrida, the subject in mourning takes it upon himsel toremember the dead. But to introject the object o ones mourningis, ethically speaking, to deny your responsibility to the other andsomehow abandon it. Derridas rhetoric o mourning becomes oneo speculation, which suggests issues such as inheritance and transac-tion and with it, the possibility o substantive loss. As mourners orour lost riend we must open ourselves to a ghostly inheritance whichin return requires debt. The aporia that marks the gap between thepresence o the other in us and the reality o its passing suggests animpossible mourning that will orever oreground the inability toreach closure.

Derridas living will shall enable us to turn the grie o mourn-

ing into an ethical act, a responsibility whereby loss paradoxicallybecomes the condition enabling the other to survive. He invitesus to remember that it is only within us that the dead may speakand ultimately reside, thereby revealing that death is not the end obeing.13 Like the Derridean concept o the archive, the inheritancethat he has bequeathed to us becomes a question that can only beginto be answered in the uture. As custodians o this living will, we mustdiscover in it the potentiality o a promise or the uture and yet wemust accept our inability to uncover an origin that cannot be ound.

Based on the logic o an impossible mourning, Derrida has discoveredin death the experience o the promise, which is one o afrmation.Our very survival, in the shadow o the loss o Jacques Derrida, canonly be realized by a praxis o aporia, which incapable o deliveringsalvation, remains nevertheless in the paradoxical situation o beingboth visible and crossed out. Can one ever accept working or HisHighness Mourning? How can one not accept it? That is what mourn-ing is, the history o its reusal, the narrative o your revolution, ourrebellion, my angel.14

Dartmouth College


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twentieth-century French literature and theory, as well as Francophone litera-

ture. A philosopher and writer, he is the author o more than thirty books,

including Une histoire du racisme(Paris: Poche, 2000) and Histoire de la philosophieau XXe sicle(Paris: Seuil, 1995). His most recent publications include Il faut

croire en la politique(orthcoming, ditions de la Martinire) and Apprendre

vivre ensemble: Cinq essais de philosophie pour tous(Paris: Audibert, 2004).

Peggy Kamufis Marion Frances Chevalier Proessor o French and compara-tive literature at the University o Southern Caliornia. She is the author, most

recently, oBook of Addresses(2005) and editor and translator oWithout Alibi

(2002), which brings together fve essays by Derrida. She is currently co-editing

the translation o the two volumes o Derridas Psyche: Inventions of the Other.

Lawrence D. Kritzman is the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Proessor in the

Arts and Sciences and Proessor o French, Italian and Comparative Literature

at Dartmouth College. His publications include The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the

Literature of the French Renaissance(New York: Cambridge UP, 1991) and The

Fabulous Imagination: The Minds Eye in Montaignes Essays(orthcoming at the

Columbia University Press). He is also the editor o the European Perspectives

Series, published by Columbia University Press, and oAuschwitz and After: Race,

Culture, and The Jewish Question in France(New York: Routledge, 1995), and

The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought(New York: ColumbiaUP, 2006). He is currently working on a bookDeath Sentences: Representations

of Death in French Literature and Thought since World War II.

Michael Lynn-George obtained his PhD in Ancient Greek rom the Univer-

sity o Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow o Kings College beore

moving to the University o Alberta in Canada. His frst published work onSaussure appeared in his bookEpos: Word, Narrative and the Iliad, in connec-

tion with the origins o oral theory. He is currently working on the modern

construction o orality in intellectual history.

Esther Marion recently deended her doctoral dissertation on Marguerite

Duras at Princeton University, and is currently an Assistant Proessor in the

Department o Foreign Languages and Literatures at SUNY Brockport. She

has published an article on Duras and Levinas, and is interested in the rep-

resentation o narration, memory and ethics.

J. Hillis Miller taught or many years at the Johns Hopkins University and

then at Yale University beore going to the University o Caliornia at Irvine

in 1986, where is he now UCI Distinguished Research Proessor. He is theauthor o many books and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English,

E ropean and American literat re and on literar theor His most recent


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In Memoriam, Derrida Living Will