Derrida Enisled

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 248-276

  Miller, J Hillis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 61249574005     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/511493     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. "I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing to him the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other" (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills [Chicago, 1995], p. 68; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated GD)
2. See Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris, 1999), p. 98; hereafter abbreviated DM: "Je ne peux répondre à l'appel, à la demande, à l'obligation, ni même à l'amour d'un autre sans lui sacrifier l'autre autre, les autres autres. Tout autre est tout autre."
3. See Raymond Williams, "Enclosures, Commons, and Communities" and "Knowable Communities," The Country and the City (Oxford, 1975), pp. 96-107, 165-81
4. and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford, 1985), pp. 75-76
5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. pub., ed. Roy Pascal (New York, 1969), p. 74. Scholars think the words are probably Marx's
6. See Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris, 1986), trans. Peter Connor et al. under the title The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, Minn., 1991)
7. and Être singulier pluriel (Paris, 1996), trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne under the title Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif., 2000)
8. Georges Bataille, L'Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste démocratique à Acéphale: Textes, lettres et documents (1932-1939), ed. Marina Galletti (Paris, 1999)
9. Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris, 1983), trans. Pierre Joris under the title The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, N.Y., 1988)
10. Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin, 1990), trans. Michael Hardt under the title The Coming Community (Minneapolis, Minn., 1993)
11. and Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington, Ind., 1994)
12. See Edmund Husserl, "Fifth Meditation: Uncovering the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity," Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1960), pp. 89-151, esp. p. 108, on "the mediate intentionality of experiencing someone else, as 'appresentation' (analogical apperception)."
13. Paul Celan, "Grosse, Glühende Wölbung," Atemwende (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 93, l. 14
14. Derrida, "Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue - Between Two Infinities, the Poem," in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York, 2005), p. 161
15. See Derrida, Béliers: Le Dialogue Ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris, 2003), pp. 75-76: Dans cette solitude absolue de l'ego pur, quand le monde s'est retiré, quand Die Welt ist fort, l'alter ego qui se constitue dans l'ego n'est plus accessible dans une intuition originaire et purement phénoménologique. Husserl doit le concéder dans ses Méditations cartésiennes, l'alter ego est constitué seulement par analogie, par apprésentation, indirectement, au-dedans de moi, qui alors le porte là où il n'y a plus de monde transcendant. Je dois alors le porter, te porter, là où le monde se dérobe, c'est là ma responsabilité. Mais je ne peux plus porter l'autre, ni toi, si porter veut dire inclure en soi-même, dans l'intuition de sa propre conscience égologique. Il s'agit de porter sans s'approprier. Porter ne veut plus dire "comporter," inclure, comprendre en soi, mais se porter vers l'inappropriabilité infinie de l'autre, à la rencontre de sa transcendance absolue au-dedans même de moi, c'est-à-dire en moi hors de moi. It would be necessary to read Husserl's fifth meditation carefully, word for word, to decide whether or not Derrida's commentary exceeds hermeneutical exegesis, as he claims in Béliers all good reading does
16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London, 1962), pp. 154-55; hereafter abbreviated BT
17. See Williams, "Enclosures, Commons, and Communities," p. 105
18. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), p. 207
19. The last ten seminars that Derrida wrote and delivered, entitled "La Bête et le souverain," were presented in Paris in 2002-3
20. Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à- l'autre (Paris, 1991), pp. 19-20; hereafter abbreviated EN
21. Lévinas, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (The Hague, 1974), back cover
22. Henry James, The Aspern Papers, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J., 1971-79), 12:42
23. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, in The Riverside Shaksespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2d ed. (Boston, 1974), 3.1.52-54, p. 864
24. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn., 1959), p. 50
25. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlins Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York, 2000), p. 48
26. In opposition to Heidegger's positive reading of Hölderlin's "Heimkunft: An die Verwandten," Bajorek writes, "On the contrary ... it [Hölderlin's poem] inscribes a movement of infinite return, or of returning without return, at the beginning of every homecoming, as its very condition of possibility and as its falling ground" (Jennifer Bajorek, "The Offices of Homeland Security, or Hölderlin's Terrorism," Critical Inquiry 31 [Summer 2005]: 893)
27. Paul de Man had already defined Heidegger's radical misreading in italicized words: "It is the fact that Hölderlin says exactly the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say" (Paul de Man, "Heidegger's Exegeses of Hölderlin," Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, trans. and ed. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis, 1983], pp. 254-55)
28. The original French version of this essay appeared as "Les Exégèses de Hölderlin par Martin Heidegger," Critique, nos. 100-1 (Sept.-Oct. 1955): 800-19
29. See Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne "Der Ister," vol. 23 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1984); trans. McNeill and Julia Davis under the title Hölderlin's Hymn "TheIster" (Bloomington, Ind., 1996)
30. I may perhaps be permitted to cite a passage from my essay on E. M. Forster's Howards End: Howards End dramatizes the ideological assumption that nationality determines personal identity not only in many remarks by the characters but, more centrally, in the way the two chief protagonists, Margaret Schlegel and her sister Helen, are defined as products of a marriage between nationalities. Their father was German, their mother English. The narrator remarks that being half English and half German "was a unique education for the little girls." Their mixed national heritage means that as children they have been exposed to English people, like their Aunt Julia, who think God has appointed England to govern the world, and to German people, like their cousins who visit their father in England, who think God has appointed Germany to lead the world. The precocious Margaret aged thirteen causes embarrassment all around when she says, "To me one of two things is very clear: either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God." The dangerous absurdity of these assumptions is evident, but how many of us can say we are entirely free of such assumptions about fixed national identity and its God-given mission? Which of us does not have some ignoble hankering to live in a country where everyone speaks the same language, shares the same "values," reads the same books, and inhabits the same culture? Do not some Americans still think that God has appointed the United States to govern the world? [J. Hillis Miller, "E. M. Forster: Just Reading Howards End," Others (Princeton, N.J., 2001), pp. 193-94]
31. Jacques Lacan, "The Seminar on The Purloined Letter," The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, 1988), p. 32; hereafter abbreviated "S."
32. See Derrida, "Le Facteur de la vérité," La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris, 1980), pp. 439-524; trans. Alan Bass under the title "Le Facteur de la vérité, " The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago, 1987), pp. 413-96. As Derrida reminds the reader, the last sentence of Lacan's seminar on La Lettre volée is "c'est ainsi que ce veut dire 'la letter volée,' voire 'en souffrance,' c'est qu'une lettre arrive toujours à destination" (Derrida, La Carte postale, p. 521 n. 29). Bass translates this as, "Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay the 'non-delivered letter' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination" (Derrida, The Post Card, p. 491 n. 66). Here is Derrida's response in Bass's translation: "The divisibility of the letter - this is why we [he means 'I'] have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar: the mystic atomicity of the letter - that is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return, the remaining [restance] of anything whatsoever: a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity not to arrive torments it with an internal drifting" (ibid., p. 489; trans. mod.)
33. Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif., 2000), pp. 61-63
34. Derrida, unpublished transcript of the eighth seminar of "La Bête et le souverain," 2003. Here is the French: Ni les animaux d'espèce différente, ni les hommes de culture différente, ni aucun individu animal ou humain n'habite le même monde qu'un autre, si proche et si semblable ces individus vivants soient-ils (humains ou animaux), et la différence d'un monde à l'autre restera toujours infranchissable, la communauté du monde étant toujours construite, simulée par un ensemble de dispositifs stabilisants, plus ou moins stables, donc et jamais naturels, le langage au sens large, les codes de traces étant destinés, chez tous les vivants, à construire une unité du monde toujours déconstructible et nulle part et jamais donnée dans la nature. Entre mon monde, le "mon monde"; ce que j'appelle "mon monde" et il n'y en a d'autre pour moi, tout autre monde en faisant partie, entre mon monde et tout autre monde, il y a d'abord l'espace et le temps d'un différence infinie, d'une interruption incommensurable à toutes les tentatives de passage, de pont, d'isthme, de communication, de traduction, de trope et de transfert que le désir de monde ou le mal du monde, l'être en mal de monde tentera de poser, d'imposer, de proposer, de stabiliser. Il n'y a pas de monde, il n'y a que des îles. C'est là une des milles directions dans lesquelles je serai incliner d'interpréter le dernier vers d'un court et grand poème de Celan: Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen, poème de deuil ou de naissance
35. See Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, De l'hospitalité (Paris, 1997)
36. and L'Autre cap suivi de la démocratie ajournée (Paris, 1991), trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas under the title The Other Heading (Bloomington, Ind., 1992)
37. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," Essays, trans. E. J. Trechmann (New York, 1946), p. 163. Derrida discusses at length the apostrophe, "O my friends! There is no friend," in its Ciceronian, Aristotelian, and Platonic contexts, in "Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating, Counting," Politics of Friendship, pp. 1-25
38. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 29
39. See Derrida, L'Autre cap, p. 35: "Il faut se faire les gardiens d'une idée de l'Europe, d'une différence de l'Europe mais d'une Europe qui consiste précisément à ne pas se fermer sur sa propre identité et à s'avancer exemplairement vers ce qui n'est pas elle, vers l'autre cap ou le cap de l'autre, voire, et c'est peut-être tout autre chose, l'autre du cap qui serait l'au-delà de cette tradition moderne, une autre structure de bord, un autre rivage."
40. See W. J. T. Mitchell, "Picturing Terror: Derrida's Autoimmunity," pp. 277-90 of this issue
41. The name for this figure is metalepsis. "In rhetoric, the precise sense of metalepsis is uncertain, but it refers to various kinds of figure or trope that are figurative to the second and third degree; that is, they involve a figure that either refers us to yet another figure or requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference, usually by a process of metonymy" (Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [Oxford, 2001], p. 152). I must thank Kir Kuiken for this reference
42. Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone," trans. Samuel Weber, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York, 2002), p. 80 n. 27
43. Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le "Concept" du 11 septembre, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Paris, 2003), p. 152: Il reste que tous ces efforts pour atténuer ou neutraliser l'effet du traumatisme (pour le dénier, refouler, oublier, pour en faire son deuil, etc.), ce sont, eux aussi, des tentatives désespérées. Et autant de mouvements auto-immunitaires. Qui produisent, inventent et nourrissent la monstruosité même qu'ils prétendent terrasser. Ce qui ne se laissera jamais oublier, c'est donc l'effet pervers de l'auto-immunitaire lui-même. La répression, au sens psychanalytique et au sens politico-policier, politico-militaire, politico-économique, nous savons maintenant qu'elle produit, reproduit, régénère cela même qu'elle tente de désarmer
44. The second passage referenced in the French edition is from an additional essay not included in the English volume; see Derrida, "La Littérature au secret," Donner la mort, pp. 163-73