A DERRIDA READER

BETWEEN THE BLINDS

Edited,

with an introduction and notes,

by Peggy Kamuf

Columbia University Press New York

 Copyright acknowledgments continue
at the back of the book.

.) ;

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 1991 Columbia University Press
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Library of Congress ca~oein\-in-Publication Data

Derrida, Tacques.
[Selections. English. 1991j
A Derrida reader : between the blinds I edited by Peggy Kamuf.
p. cm.
"With only one exception, all the excerpted translations
have been previously published" - Pref.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-231-06658-9 (cloth).-ISBN 0-231-06659-7 (paper)
r. Philosophy. 2. Deconstruction.
I. Kamuf, Peggy, 1947- . II. Title.
B2430.D481D4713 1991
194-dc20
90-41354
CIP

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn

and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper

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 Contents

Preface vii
Introduction: Reading Between the Blinds xiii

Part One: Differance at the Origin 3

r. From Speech and Phenomena 6

2. From Of Grammatology 31
3. From "Differance" 59
4. "Signature Event Context" Bo
5. From "Plato's Pharmacy" II2

Part Two: Beside Philosophy-"Literature" 143

6. "Tympan" 146
7. From "The Double Session" 172
8. From "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 200
9. "Che cos'e la poesia?" 22!

Part Three: More Than One Language 241

ro. From "Des Tours de Babel"

r r. From "Living On: Border Lines"
12. "Letter to a Japanese Friend"
13. From "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing"
vi Contents

Part Four: Sexual Difference in Philosophy 313

14. From Glas 31 s

15. From Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 353
16. "Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference" 378
17. From "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am" 403
18. From "Choreographies"

Part Five: Tele-Types (Yes, Yes) 459

19. From "Le Facteur de la verite" 463

20. From "Envois" 484
21. From "To Speculate-on 'Freud' 11 516
22. From "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" 569

Bibliography of Works by Jacques Derrida 601

Selected Works on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction 613
Index of Works by Jacques Derrida 617
Index 619
 Preface

In 1962, Jacques Derrida published a long critical introduction to his

translation of Husserl's The Origin of Geometry. With that work he
began what has proved to be one of the most stunning adventures of
modem thought. It promised, from its first public acts, an explana-
tion with philosophical traditions unlike any other. That promise
has since been realized in more than twenty-two books and count-
less other uncollected essays, prefaces, interviews, and public inter-
ventions of various sorts. Many of these have been translated, inte-
grally or in part, into English. And new texts are appearing regularly,
as Derrida continues to write and to teach, in Europe and North
America and indeed throughout the world.
Today, it is with the word deconstruction that many first associ-
ate Derrida's name. This word has had a remarkable career. Having
first appeared in several texts that Derrida published in the mid-
196os, it soon became the preferred designator for the distinct ap-
proach and concerns that set his thinking apart. Derrida has con-
fessed on several occasions that he has been somewhat surprised by
the way this word came to be singled out, since he had initially
proposed it in a chain with other words-for example, differance,
spacing, trace-none of which can command the series or function
as a master word.
No doubt the success of deconstruction as a term can be explained
in part by its resonance with structure which was then, in the 1960s,
the reigning word of structuralism. Any history of how the word
deconstruction entered a certain North American vocabulary, for
instance, would have to underscore its critical use in the first text
by Derrida to be translated in the United States, "Structure, Sign,
viii Preface

and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." This was the
text of a lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. In
that lecture, he considered the structuralism of ethnologist Claude
Levi-Strauss whose thought, as Derrida remarked, was then exerting
a strong influence on the conjuncture of contemporary theoretical
activities. The word de-construction occurs in the following passage
concerned with the inevitable, even necessary ethnocentrism of any
science formed according to the concepts of the European scientific
tradition. And yet, Derrida insists, there are different ways of giving
in to this necessity:
But if no one can escape this necessity, and if no one is there-
fore responsible for giving in to it, however little he may do so,
this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of
equal pertinence. The quality and fecundity of a discourse are
perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relation
to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is
thought. Here it is a question both of a critical relation to the
language of the social sciences and a critical responsibility of
the discourse itself. It is a question of explicitly and systemati-
cally posing the problem of the status of a discourse which
borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the de-
construction of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and
strategy.*
As used here, "de-construction" marks a distance (the space of a
hyphen, later dropped! from the structuring or construction of dis-
courses, such as Levi-Strauss', that have uncritically taken over the
legacy of Western metaphysics. If, however, it cannot be a matter of
refusing this legacy-"no one can escape from it"-then the dis-
tance or difference in question is in the manner of assuming respon-
sibility for what cannot be avoided. Deconstruction is one name
Derrida has given to this responsibility. It is not a refusal or a
destruction of the terms of the legacy, but occurs through a re-
marking and redeployment of these very terms, that is, the concepts
of philosophy. And this raises the problem, as Derrida puts it, ltof
the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources
necessary for the de-construction of that heritage itself." It is in the
critical space of this problem, which needs to be thought through
rigorously, systematically, and responsibly, that Derrida proposes to
situate his discourse.
•Writing and Difference [1967], p. 289. All quotations of Derrida's works are from
published translations where available. For complete reference, consult the bibliography at
the end of this volume by the date given in brackets (e.g., here 1967!.
 Preface ix

Since its introduction, the work of Jacques Derrida has traced

wide and diverse paths of influence both within and without the
academic disciplines, wherever the relation to the heritage of West-
ern thought has become critical. Although this influence may have
been felt first among literary theorists, it quickly overran the bound-
aries of literary studies or of any academic discipline. Theologians,
architects, film makers and critics, painters, legal scholars, musi-
cians, dramatists, psychoanalysts, feminists, and other political and
social theorists have all found indispensable support for their reflec-
tion and practice in Derrida's writing. Even philosophy in America,
which began trying to purge itself of continental influences more
than a century ago, has had to yield significant ground to Derrida's
insistent questioning of the philosophical discipline. Thus, although
one can still hear or read statements to the effect that Derridean
deconstruction is the affair of a few North American literary critics,
the odds are good that they are coming from a philosopher who is
trying to ignore the obvious of what is going on all around him or
her.
Such discursive tactics of containment or denegation have flour-
ished in the vicinity of deconstruction, and not only among philoso-
phers. Both academic journals and the popular press have now and
then bristled with indignation when confronted with the evidence
that deconstruction is taking hold in the North American cultural
landscape. But this is understandable; Derrida's work is disconcert-
ing and deliberately so. The present collection of essays and extracts
will not conceal that fact. A reader who wants to approach this
writing is therefore urged to proceed patiently, as well as carefully.
Be advised that the most familiar may well begin to appear strangely
different. As Derrida writes in one of the extracts from Of Gramma-
tology included here, his final intention is "to make enigmatic what
one thinks one understands by the words 'proximity,' 'immediacy,'
'presence'," that is, the very words with which we designate what is
closest to us.
As to the choice and arrangement of texts, I have followed several
principles and endeavored to make them compatible with each other.
The easiest and most conventional of these is a very roughly chro-
nological ordering that can serve to illustrate some of the ways
Derrida has reshaped his thought over the last twenty or so years.
Between the earliest texts included here (extracts from Speech and
Phenomena and Of Grammatology) and the most recent ones, how-
ever, there is also an undeniable constancy and coherence which
belie any superficial impression that Derrida has revised or moved
x Preface

away from some former or initial way of thinking. Indeed, one of the
more extraordinary things about Derrida's thought is the way it has
shaped itself along a double axis or according to a double exigency:
it seems always to be moving beyond itself and yet nothing is left
behind. The first writings remaining implied in the succeeding ones,
they are literally folded into different shapes and yet do not lose
their own particular shape in the process. Nevertheless, because the
work advances by bringing its past along, it is necessary up to a point
to respect its chronology.
No sooner, however, has one underscored the coherence of these
writings than one must acknowledge as well their remarkable diver-
sity in subject, theme, form, tone, procedure, occasion, and so on.
Here a second principle is called for, one that does not present itself
so easily. The solution I have come to for grouping texts is, needless
to say, only one of the many that could have been chosen to repre-
sent this diversity. As the reader will soon see, I have applied in
effect no single principle but have grouped the sets of selections
according each time to a different, loosely defined criterion. Numer-
ous other criteria suggested themselves as did so many other texts
that had to be left out. What is more, almost all of the texts included
here would fit in several of the categories. This is but one of many
possible Derrida "readers."
As to why there are so many extracts and so few complete essays,
I decided, rightly or wrongly, that only this method permitted a
tolerable, though still insufficient representation of the diversity and
continuity of Derrida's work. I admit, however, that I hesitated long
before adopting this procedure. Derrida's writings are intricately
structured and perform a delicate balancing act between recalling
where they have been and forewarning where they are going. The
majority of them are deployed around extensive quotation of other
works and they elaborate complex patterns of renvois, Most often
the texts juxtapose and counter one style or tone with another,
shifting, for example, between the strictest form of philosophical
commentary and writing of a sort that such commentary has always
by definition, excluded. Needless to say, much of this intricacy,
balance, and counterplay has been sacrificed by the technique of
cutting out excerpts of the texts. On the one hand, I have consoled
myself for this loss with the thought that, with few exceptions, all
of the works excerpted here are readily available in extenso, and thus
no reader of A Derrida Reader need be content with shortened ver-
sions (see the appended bibliography which also lists some sugges-
tions for secondary reading). I made a mental note to remind readers
 Preface xi

of this fact which is what I am doing now. On the other hand, I

garnered a certain courage to excerpt so ruthlessly from Derrida's
own repeated insistence on the partialness of any text, a partialness
that is not recuperable in some eventual whole or totality. Moreover,
the notions of cutting, grafting, piecing together-extracting-are
everywhere in evidence in Derrida's texts, both as themes and as
practices, until they are virtually coextensive with the text he is
always interrogating and performing. Indeed, the masterful work
Glas may be read as a long reflection on cutting, which is always
culpable, put into practice. This is one reason I have placed a series
of brief passages from that work in the spaces between the sections.
These may be thought of as blinds or jalousies lowered into place as
reminders: "Look at the holes, if you can"; read between the blinds.
Ultimately, however, there is no final justification of this cutting
and splicing. A desire was always obscurely in play (and desire is the
very order of the unjustifiable) to offer up for another reading texts
that I have returned to more than once out of love and respect, but
also probably out of an unfathomable puzzlement. No doubt it is the
utterly naive desire that, by presenting these texts to be read again, I
will get back some signs of my own understanding.
And that leads me to a final principle-or rather, less a principle
than a wish that accompanied the editing of these pages. It is that
this volume should engage each of its readers differently even as it
made certain texts available to a broader general comprehension. I
wanted it to be possible, in other words, for every reader to encoun-
ter both the same and a different book as all other readers, and for
the same prepared trajectory to be nevertheless each time singular
and unpredictable. How to reconcile these two aims? No answer
presented itself in simple terms; instead, a reflection on that ques-
tion resulted in the essay "Reading Between the Blinds" which is
given here in the guise of an introduction to the selected excerpts
and essays. It may be read as the record of a negotiation, or exposi-
tion, between two versions of A Derrida Reader.

With only one exception, all the excerpted translations have been
previously published and are reproduced here most often with only
minor changes, if any. It should be said that Derrida's writing ac-
tively resists translation by seeking out the most idiomatic points in
the language, by reactivating lost meanings, by accumulating as far
as possible the resources of undecidability which lie dormant in
syntax, morphology, and semantics. The result can often seem ob-
scure to whoever has been taught that a standard of so-called clarity
xii Preface

of style is the first and indispensable criterion of expository prose.

But Derrida never cultivates this "obscurity" for its own sake; on
the contrary, the apparent density of his writing has its correlative
in a relentless demand for clarity of another order, which may be
called, in a seeming paradox, a clarity about the obscurity, opacity,
and fundamental difference of language. Standard notions of clarity
or "correct" style, when viewed from this perspective, must be seen
as, themselves, obscurantist since they encourage a belief in the
transparency of words to thoughts, and thus a "knowledge" con-
structed on this illusion. Deconstructing this knowledge will neces-
sarily be a matter of some difficulty.
 INTRODUCTION

Reading Between the Blinds

The following is not exactly a dialogue, although in places it resem-

bles an exchange that might actually have taken place between two
interlocutors. Yet, one will notice as well a certain inconstancy in
this resemblance. It is perhaps a typographical rather than a dia-
logic form that has imposed itself here, the back and forth of more
than one "voice" requiring the convention of blank intervals across
the page. These, in turn, could be thought of as the slats of a
venetian blind, or a ;alousie, which partially obstructs the view.*

--A Derrida Reader: Already I see a difficulty with that title,

with the concept of "reader."

--Perhaps, then, that is also the place to begin. Let me guess:

you are thinking of the difficulty there would be in negotiating
between the two senses of the term, between the "someone who
reads" and the "something that is read." Right? It is indeed a rather
unusual word in that way, and offhand I don't know of many other
nominalizations that can produce a similar palindromic syntax: "A
reader reads a reader." But maybe there is a reason for that ....

--Yes, yes. I'm listening.

--Well, imagine a somewhat peculiar dictionary entry for the

word reader. Instead of referring one to the the verb with a phrase
•Titles of works included or extracted herein are printed in boldface; boldface page
numbers for quotations refer to pages in this volume. All other page references are to the
edition of the translation listed by date in the bibliography.
xiv Introduction

like "someone who reads," it says, "you at this moment." That's all.
Such a "definition" transgresses the rules of lexicography in several
ways, for example, in the use of the second-person pronoun and of
the deictic this. Its greatest fault or idiosyncrasy, however, is that it
supplies only an example of how the word could be correctly used
(you, at this moment, are reading these words; you are thus a reader)
and fails to supply the general meaning of the word abstracted from
any singular moment of a particular reader's experience. The defini-
tion, that is, fails to respect the order of the concept as that which
gives meaning to any experience. This "order of the concept" is not
just an order of implication, of priority or anteriority; it is as well an
order of command or commandment given to the reader, the order
of a "thou shalt" or a "thou shalt not." It says, in effect: Thou shalt
read thine own experience as commanded by the concept of reading;
thou shalt read according to the law and submit thine understanding
to its order; thou shalt not put the instance of thine own singular
reading or idiosyncratic understanding before the law. Now, read
this and obey, which is also to say, do not read this before submitting
to its order. But to receive the order, must one not have already
transgressed it by reading it?

--It's like the famous graffito, "Do not read this."

--Exactly. That negative imperative phrase enacts, in the most

economical fashion, the predicament of a double bind. The reader is
already at fault before the law, before the law which comes before or
already: by reading the command, he or she ignores it; but ignoring
the command (by not reading it) does not rectify things, does not
equal obedience to a command that also demands to be read, that is,
to be acknowledged as command in order to have the force of a
command. Thus, the "someone who reads" is but the stage of a
certain performance positioned by this double bind. That perfor-
mance is always, in one way or another, to be compared to the act of
reading a dictionary entry for reader: before one can receive the order
of the concept, one has already given an example of it. The predica-
ment is temporal (but qualifying it in this or any other manner does
not resolve it; the predicament remains whole, at this very moment)
because the meaning of the act (its concept) is not given in the
present of its performance, it is not one with or immanent to the act,
but divides that "moment" upon itself, disperses it among the non-
present modes of before and after the act. The reader reads before the
law that he or she comes after. Neither the singularity of an act nor
 Introduction xv

the generality of a concept of reading or meaning can be thought of

as absolutely prior to the other, as a cause or condition of possibility
of the other. Or rather, both are at once conditions of the other. On
the one hand, the order of the concept requires the very act of reading
that it defines and defies; on the other hand, the reading act will
have been already determined by the order of the concept. Rather
than a logical order of determining priority, this relation is one of an
irreducible difference, that is, a relation that cannot be comprised by
one or the other of the terms. Each moment or term is only insofar
as it is related to the other. Each moment or term is cut across,
divided by the other. Each inscribes the other in itself and is in-
scribed by the other outside of itself.

--What you have just described sounds very much like the
structure of what Derrida has called the trace or differance. Look at
the essay titled "Differance" ...

--Yes, of course, I was thinking of that, and it is not in the least

surprising that we should encounter the problematic of the trace as
soon as we begin reflecting on reading and readers. But the same
problematic also requires a shift in the way we think of the reading
"act": instead of centered in or originating in a subject, a conscious-
ness, a "reader" in that sense, what we call reading would occur in
the opening of the trace. Listen to this, from the first chapter of Of
Grammatology where Derrida puts in place several of the concept-
like terms, such as trace, differance, archi-w:riting, that form the
theoretical armature of his earliest writings:
This trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the
enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside
to an outside: spacing. The outside, "spatial" and "objective"
exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar
thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear with-
out the gramme, without differance as temporalization, with-
out the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the meaning
of the present, without the relation to death as the concrete
structure of the living present.... The presence-absence of the
trace .... " (pp. 42-43).
Perhaps what we call a reader is precisely the impossibility of a
position which is not already a relation, an ex-position to something
(someone?) other. Perhaps, as well, this ex-posing of the reader ex-
plains that other common use of the term: a reader, not in the sense
xvi Introduction

of someone who reads, but in the sense of a collection of sample

texts, of the sort, for example, that was frequently in use in Ameri-
can primary education until not long ago. As pedagogical instru-
ments of reading discipline, these primers or anthologies, which
most often subordinated literacy to moral instruction (for what was
the purpose of learning to read if not to read and submit to the moral
law?), were called readers by means, it would seem, of a metonymi-
cal displacement from the "product" of the instructional activity-
the formed or disciplined reader-to one of its instruments. The
displacement, in other words, passes between what are taken to be
the active and passive faces of reading-from the "someone who
reads" to the "something that is read." This grammatical, syntacti-
cal convention relies on the mode of the transitive verb to space out
active subject from passive object. But there is another convention
at work here-call it the pedagogical convention, the convention of
moral education, a whole tradition of reading (as) discipline-which
reverses the transitive direction of the reading lesson. According to
this latter convention, the reader is a pupil who must be submitted
to the order of the moral law as given by that other reader, the text
(and as translated or interpreted by the figure of the teacher who
seemingly stands outside this interpretive scene, a mere animator of
the voice of the law). Thus, the reader-text acts on the reader-pupil,
reading his or her faults, illuminating the dark recesses of the soul,
and exposing them to the light of moral reason. Yet, despite the
contrary tensions of these two conventions, the grammatical-syntac-
tic convention and the moral-pedagogical convention, they remain
fundamentally conjoined in their very reversibility, a reversibility
that, if all goes well, ends in the finished product of a moral subject
fully formed by a reading apprenticeship. And, in any case, the
teacher is there to assure, with his or her own example, the finality
of the lesson and to assume as needed the position of the
text's master. More important, however, these two reading con-
ventions join together to master the relation reader-reader (pupil-
text), to bring it to reason by installing a finally stable distinction be-
tween them.
Yet if the reader is not a position but an ex-posed relation, then it
is only as a matter of convenience and convention that we speak of
the active and passive poles of the reading "activity" lor "passivity,"
perhaps even passion). The grammatical distinction or division con-
ventionally made between the two senses of the word (reader-reader,
active-passive) would have covered over a division or difference
 Introduction xvii

within "reader(s)," within the relation designated by that word which,

precisely because it is a differential relation rather than a unified
point, makes for uneasy reference as soon as one steps a little outside
lockstep convention. For the sake of convenient reference, we must
have recourse to pronoun substitutes which, inevitably, substitute
an identity fora difference. Thus do we speak of the reader, it or he
or she or I or you. With each distinction, a decision-that is, a cut
-is made that arrests the transfer for inscription) within difference:
inanimate or animate, nonhuman or human, masculine or feminine
fa distinction that invariably accompanies the other distinction of
active from passive), addressor or addressee.

--Are you suggesting that these discursive habits, the decisions

operated by discourse, should be broken or discarded?

--No, of course not, because discourse is possible only on the

condition of such decisions. I was merely attempting to recall the
difference that the convenience of discursive reference (but what,
exactly, is the value of this convenience? for whom is it convenient?)
too easily relegates to oblivion: the difference between linguistic,
discursive institutions of meaning and the ex-posed space of differ-
ential relations-the space opened up by the movement of differance
-within which or on which such institutions come to stand. Mis-
taking the former for the latter, the structures of language for that
which opens the very possibility of meaning, substituting the clo-
sure of constructed, instituted identities for this opening to and by
difference is an essential trait of what Jacques Derrida has called
logocentrism.

--And he has called deconstruction ·the work by which these

institutions, which are not just linguistic institutions, are being
opened to the difference or exteriority repressed-forgotten in a
strong sense-within them.
In sum, then, you are saying that A Derrida Reader ought to
remark as far as possible the ex-position you have just described.
Otherwise, what is the point? Much of Derrida's work has been
translated and is widely, easily available. So why collect a very small
part of it in one volume? Merely for someone's convenience (that
word again!}? Here, then, is the first risk or difficulty: it is the risk
of occulting the eruptive movement of the trace so that it can be
more conveniently presented. And with that, A Derrida Reader could
xviii Introduction

well end up absorbed by the structures that are always at work

obliterating or reducing the trace, the very structures, in other words,
that these writings ought to deconstruct.
Yet isn't that also inevitable from the moment-always and al-
ready-that, as Derrida writes in the same chapter of Of Gramma-
tology, "the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted; it is
produced as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as
such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself" ([1967j, p. 47).
So I don't see how ...
--Yes, yes, of course, and I'm not suggesting you have to seek
some pure exteriority, some extra- or counter-institutional purity.
On the contrary. Derrida's thinking, as you know, is all about the
necessary contamination of insides and outsides, and deconstruction
always works at the margins, on the limits of this organizing oppo-
sition. I was thinking, instead, of the rather facile judgments that
have been made concerning the so-called institutionalization of de-
construction. That charge, and it is indeed meant to have the force
of a charge or accusation, has always seemed to me to depend on at
least two fundamental misconceptions. In the first place, there is the
same na'ive conception of a pure exteriority that I just mentioned:
according to such a notion, deconstruction can prove its "purity"
only by demonstrating that it has no effect whatever within institu-
tions, that it does not let itself be contaminated by institutional
concerns. But in the second place, there is what appears to be a
deliberate confusion over the word or the name deconstruction. You
said a moment ago something like this: "Deconstruction names the
movement or work which is opening institutions to the difference
forgotten within them." I would only add that, as a name, decon-
struction, like any other name, is replaceable; its effacement is even
made necessary or predicted by the disagregation of the traits of the
"proper" (as in "proper name") which deconstruction uncovers in its
wake. Deconstruction, then, does not name a theory, a method, a
school, or any other such delimitable entity. Instead, deconstruction
is what is going on, happening, coming to pass, or coming about, all
intransitive locutions that dislocate the predicate's tie to any stable
present. That the name has been taken by some to be the name of a
school of thought, a method of reading, or a theory of some kind is
exactly the sort of logocentric confusion that deconstruction has
made apparent.
--That helps me to formulate another difficulty I foresee in
bringing this reader to term. The confusion you have just indicated
 Introduction xix

has become widespread. Even experienced teachers and scholars,

eminent critics, and philosophers speak of the "theory" or the
"method" of deconstruction, and often in order to tax it with a
theoretical inconsistency or insufficiency. This distortion has achieved
a certain currency which creates an expectation. The expectation
goes something like this: If, as so many say, deconstruction is a
method, a theory, a school, then one ought to be able to design a
manual that describes its tenets, defines its terms, and classifies its
principal texts. Now, A Derrida Reader ...

- -... has to serve a certain, let's say, pedagogical function?

--Yes, but it cannot do so simply by meeting this expectation,

or submitting to this virtual demand for a reassuring map of unfa-
miliar territory. Whereas most written material may be only too
eager to find and take up its place on the map of known coordinates,
so that it can be easily recognized by the largest number, some texts
are writing on the map itself, displacing the boundaries, blotting out
the cardinal reference points, thus making it more difficult to read
off the coordinates. Accordingly, these texts are called "difficult." In
the case of Derrida's texts, of this writing on writing ("but you know
I never write on anything ... I seek above all to produce effects (on
you)" writes the signatory of 11Envois 11 ), one might be tempted to
deal with this difficulty by extracting another set of coordinates with
which to orient reading. These coordinates would take their names
from the Derridean corpus and would, if possible, come together as a
meta-text or a meta-language with which to discipline and order the
landscape of that corpus. Such ordering would have a pedagogical
aim that is entirely laudable. But the pedagogical aim has to misfire
in its concern, precisely, to help wanderers find their bearings there
where the street signs have been turned around or, more disturb-
ingly, where they have been made to point off at an angle to every
intersection. The problem for this or any reader is therefore how to
find and show a way into these writings which does not simply
restore the kind of order they would put in question?

--What if, however, this were not a problem to be solved, but

rather a demand or a command, something like "Do not read this,"
which one can neither faithfully obey nor simply betray? In that
case, the question would be how not to betray a text whose self-
betrayal is the very condition of its readability-for nothing could
ever become readable unless it betrayed itself, gave itself away.
xx Introduction

--Yes, yes, I see that.

--"How not to betray?" This form of question is one Derrida

has explored in a text titled "How to Avoid Speaking" [r987J. It is at
once rhetorical and not rhetorical. That is, it says at once that one
cannot avoid betrayal; it is a statement in the form of a question.
But it also asks: Given this inevitability, which modes of betrayal
are nevertheless to be avoided? How must one not betray? There
thus appears, with this latter inflection of the question, the possibil-
ity of a faithfulness to the text's betrayal of itself. It is a faithfulness,
however, that is now reinscribed in a general economy of (self-I
betrayal.
This is the question or demand to which you must respond, to
which you are already responding, although as yet rather inchoately.
Shall I go on?

--Yes, I will interrupt you before long.

--You are asking how not to betray, how to respond to the

text's double demand: "Read me! But, whatever you do, do not read
me!" That is, read !hear, understand, translate, respond to) me; and
do not confuse me with others, with all the other me's who may use
the same language, who, like me, are constricted and surpassed by
this use. But, on the other hand, you also worry about meeting the
expectation for a manual, a map, or a meta-language. It is there,
between the demand and the expectation, that your ex-position must
occur, has, in fact, already begun. On both sides, the question: "How
to read-Derrida?" If you respond with a generality that would be
valid for anyone and everyone (a manual), you betray the demand for
a singular reading. If, however, your singular response has no general
validity, then A Derrida Reader will be unreadable. In fact, of course,
neither one of these responses is strictly possible without engaging
the other, without ex-posing the other. That is the movement of the
trace. Generalization is always limited, constricted by an unassimil-
able and singular other that is each time different; and singularities
can always be generalized, which is both a misery-and a chance.
So now you have to ...

--Take a chance? You were right that I had already begun to

respond, but at a kind of threshold or liminal space on the edge of
what I heard you saying. When you spoke about betrayal of the other,
self-betrayal, faithfulness, another word began to take shape for me,
 Introduction xxi

as if on the command of some silent dictation: the word ;ealousy.

Not just the word, of course, not just its referent or the "thing"
called jealousy, but a web of relations that all pass through jealousy.
Resonating somewhere near the center of this web, a vaguely re-
membered phrase, almost totally detached from any context, some-
thing like "In everything I talk about, jealousy is at stake." It occurs
in a polyvocal text of Derrida's, and, as I recall, it is spoken by a
feminine interlocutor. And when you came to the question "How to
read-Derrida?" it made contact with this web and set off a vibra-
tion that I will translate in these terms: What if, to be "faithful" to
the (self-Jbetrayal of Derrida's writing, one must pay attention to
what it has to say about jealousy? And not only to what it has to say
about it-jealousy as a theme, a topic, or a subject-but to a certain
movement through jealousy, in the sense of both of and against: the
movement of jealousy, as that through which movement is given or
provoked; and the movement against jealousy, as that through which
movement passes and which offers a resistance. What if, in other
words, jealousy were indeed "at stake" in everything Derrida talks
about? And what would happen if we looked at Derrida's work
through such a particular device, a device for selecting, cutting,
extracting which leaves whole large areas in shadow?

--But you said you thought that phrase was spoken by a femi-
nine voice, that is, one which, even if it is comprised by Derrida's
signature on that text, cannot be simply identified as Jacques Derrida
speaking in his own name, self-referentially, and so on. Doesn't that
make any difference?

--Yes, it makes all the difference. Just as it makes all the

difference that, as I said a moment ago, the word jealousy took shape
through a kind of silent dictation. In effect, you gave me the word
and the order to follow it. The hypothesis would be this: If jealousy
is indeed at stake in everything he talks about, then it is not Derrida
himself who says so or who authorizes that description of his writ-
ing. And yet it comes from him, but as if from another than himself.
I am sure that if we look at this structure more closely, we will see
that it is already caught up in a jealous movement, a movement
through jealousy.

--And one that does not stop at the limits, the apparent limits
of a printed text; it can carry over, be translated off the page, into
other texts, but not only other texts. Here, for example ...
xxii Introduction

--Of course, but first, some preliminary grounding of my hy-

pothesis (or rather yours because you have given it to me; later,
perhaps, I'll ask you whether gifts are ever exempt from jealousy,
whether they are even possible without jealousy): Derrida often speaks
of jealousy, but almost always in passing or on a sidetrack from the
principal path of a text. He has never devoted more than a few lines,
at most a paragraph, to the problem of jealousy although he has
always marked it as a problem whenever he speaks of it. Yet it never
comes under sustained scrutiny, never quite comes into focus. If it
did not seem to be rushing things a little, one might conclude that
some kind of jealous guard had been mounted around the subject.

--Yes, that would be a hasty conclusion, a short-circuit. You

said yourself that "it comes from him, but as if from another than
himself." If this jealousy is guarded, then that guard is not always on
guard. So I advise you to take another tack. For example, can you
avoid asking whose jealousy is "at stake" here?

--No, I won't avoid it, but will ask the question somewhat
differently. I want to follow a double movement through jealousy,
and that movement can always fold jealousy back onto itself, set it
against itself, make it jealous of itself. If jealousy can always double
itself, then the question of whose jealousy we are tracking through
these texts (or simply the question "who?") has to lead us away from
the double figure jealous of itself and therefore already (an)other than
itself. I will even risk a second preliminary hypothesis: If jealousy
were indeed a simple attribute assignable to a subject, so that the
question "who?" could receive a simple answer, then it could not be
provoked and would not even arise. Instead of a simple attribute,
jealousy is always jealousy of the other: one has to try to hear that
phrase in both of its senses at once.
But I think the tack you want me to take goes in a different sense.
The question "who?" may not be so easily dismissed as we approach
the heart of the subject of jealousy. It is as if that question and that
subject were related, possibly even the same, as if "who?" were
already a jealous question, posed on the restless edge of an answer
that is both desired and feared. So let us ask it anyway: whose
jealousy?
Is it the jealousy of God? What kind of answer is that? Such a
figure occurs frequently in Derrida's texts. I'll show you a few of
these places. First, however, there is the Scripture: "For I the Lord
 Introduction xxili

thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation of them who hate
me" {Deuteronomy 5 :9). The God who is said to be jealous not only
demands an exclusive devotion ("Thou shalt have no other gods
before me") but also refuses to manifest Himself, forbids the substi-
tution of an image for this non-manifestation {"Thou shalt not make
unto thee any graven image"), including the substitution of written
symbols for His name. The uniqueness and unicity of God must
forever prevent His appearance through any kind of substitute, any
doubling of the eternal One and the Same. God, who is unique and
uniquely the one who is, cannot tolerate a double, a replacement, a
representative.
But the jealousy of God also scandalizes reason, as Derrida at one
point recalls with this quotation fron Spinoza:
However, as we should depart as little as possible from the
literal sense, we must first ask whether this text, God is a fire
(Deus est ignis), admits of any but the literal meaning....
However, as we find the name fire applied to anger and jealousy
{see Job 31: 12), we can thus easily reconcile the words of Moses,
and legitimately conclude that the two propositions of Moses,
God is a fire, and God is jealous (zelotypus), are in meaning
identical. Further, as Moses clearly teaches that God is jealous
... we must evidently infer that Moses held this doctrine him-
self, or at any rate that he wished to teach it, nor must we
refrain because such a belief seems contrary to reason. (Ulysses
Gramophone [1987], p. 40, n. I; italics added.)
Spinoza's rational exegesis, in which fire and jealousy are metaphors
for each other, readily admits, despite the scandal for reason, the
substitutability which jealousy both forbids and commands: it for-
bids that Moses should see an image of God Himself, His double;
and it commands that the image be presented and consumed in the
burning bush. "God is a fire" is a metaphor not only for jealousy, but
one whose very manifestation as metaphor is inscribed by the move-
ment of jealousy. God's jealousy moves to subtract His name and
face from the substitutions of metaphor, but in forbidding substitu-
tion, it commands that there must be (only) substitution.
Derrida has translated the scene of God's jealousy in several texts
-and translated it, precisely, as the scene of translation. The story
of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is a story of God's jealousy, pro-
voked by the pretensions of men
xxiv Introduction

to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the name,

to construct themselves their own name, to gather themselves
there ... as in the unity of a place which is at once a tongue
and a tower, the one as well as the other, the one as the other.
He punishes them for having thus wanted to assure them-
selves, by themselves a unique and universal genealogy....
Can we not, then, speak of a ;ealousy of God! [italics added]
Out of resentment against that unique name and lip of men, he
imposes his name, his name of father; and with this violent
imposition, he opens the deconstruction of the tower, as of the
universal language; he scatters the genealogical filiation. He
breaks the lineage. He at the same time imposes and forbids
translation. He imposes and forbids it, constrains, but as if to
failure, the children who henceforth will bear his name. ("Des
Tours de Babel," pp. 248-49}

Translation becomes "necessary and impossible," writes Derrida,

"as the effect of a struggle for the appropriation of the name"; it is
"necessary and forbidden in the interval between two absolutely
proper names." Again, the double bind, which Derrida renders as,
"Translate my name; but, whatever you do, do not translate my
name." Because the proper name of God, Babel, which can be con-
fused with a homonym in the language of the Shemites, a common
noun meaning "confusion," is itself divided, "God deconstructs.
Himself" (p. 249}. The destruction of the Tower of Babel, the impo-
sition of the multiplicity of languages, and with it the necessity and
impossibility of translation-these are traits of what Derrida calls
here the deconstruction of God. It is a movement through jealousy:
God's jealousy against the jealousy of the Shemites. God interrupts
the completion of the tower which would have erected the name of
Shem as the sole name, the sole language of men. This project of
gathering men together under one name, the name of a father to
whom all future generations would remain bound, is made to fail
when God-out of jealousy-proclaims his own name, Babel, which
the Shemites cannot appropriate without confusion into their lan-
guage. The clamor of God's name rends the univocality of the com-
munity, opens within it the rift of the other's name that cannot be
subsumed to the same, the Shem. But at the same time as God gives
his name to the sons of Shem, He loses it as a properly proper name.
The Shemites are dispersed among many tongues, but so is God's
name that can impose itself only by deposing or deconstructing its
own unity. In order to reach men's ears and constrain them to hear
 Introduction xxv

His name above all others, God must go outside Himself and risk
the confusion of that name with a common noun, its generalization
in the other's language, its difference from itself. Hence, the decon-
struction of God will have been, from the origin, a movement of
difference within which a unity of the proper tries and fails to
impose itself as absolutely proper.

- - I am getting caught up in your web, the subtle, just visible

threads going from one text to the other. Here, for example, jealousy
of the proper and the proper name is linked, at one end, to these
lines which one can read in Glas: "What is the excess of zeal around
a signature? Can one be jealous of anything other than a seing?"
(Glas [1974] pp. 70-71). (The last word, an archaic term for signature,
sounds like and is made to resonate throughout with sein, breast.
Jealousy brings us back to the mother, the arch-mother who comes
before, always before-even God the Father. Hence His jealousy?)
And look here: these questions occur in a passage inset into a sen-
tence about the spider's web: "The thread and the web of the spider,
of the phallic or castrating mother, of the tarantula or the great
spider [inset] that eats her male." The inset, about jealousy, is itself
suspended in the web of the spidery phrase, of this prose that is
stretched over the page like a net meant to catch and hold anything
that flies into it. That makes it sound as if Derrida were the spider
(and for Nietzsche the spider or tarantula is a principal figure of
jealousy, for example in "On Tarantulas" in Thus Spake Zaranthus-
tra, Part II), but we should beware another hasty conclusion. One
would have to look, first, at the ways in which the signature, or the
seing, "Jacques Derrida" is itself caught up in the jealous spider's
web, consumed as a proper name and already transformed into the
common word deja. One would have to follow the thread that leads
from this inset to another one, sixty pages further on, and that echos
it closely: "So one is only jealous of a seing or, what comes down
here to the same, of a deja" /ibid., p. 152). And one would have to
unpack patiently everything that is compacted in the abbreviation of
that common word: here, the first letters of a proper name "De Ja,"
but also the mother's breast (Derrida recalls that Freud, in his "Lec-
ture on Femininity," gives the mother's milk as the source of jeal-
ousy; thus we should not forget that feminine jealousy, which Freud
calls penis envy, is also in the picture), an absolute already or past
that has never been present. Already, de;a, there is jealousy: de;a
;alousie, de;alousie. To de;alouser the signature, by giving away all
its jealous tricks, and with it the relation to the other, might that
xxvi Introduction

not describe Derrida's double movement through jealousy? Deia-

louser: This made-up word is untranslatable, of course, like any
signature. De-jealousize? The movement, however, is not only nega-
tive; it allows as well an affirmation of the other, the concealed face
of jealousy.

--No, don't attempt to translate. Let the word resonate be-

tween our languages.
But I am impatient to know where else you are going. You said
"at one end" jealousy of the proper name has many links with Glas.
That's clear. And at the other end?

--One of the other ends. I was thinking of that devilishly con-

ceived text "To Speculate-on 'Freud'." There, it is not the jealousy
of God but of the devil that one would have to follow. They resemble
each other, however, which is perhaps why they are both jealous.
Recall the phrase from Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert which Der-
rida says he takes as an epigraph for his remarks: "I read, when I was
young, a tragedy, which was part of the Escalade, in which the Devil
was actually one of the actors. I have been told that when this play
was once performed, this character, as he came on stage, appeared
double, as if the original had been jealous that they had had the
audacity to counterfeit him, and instantly everybody, seized by fright,
took flight, thus ending the performance" (The Post Card [1980], pp.
270-71). Derrida is interested in, among other things, the uncanny
doubling of the devil that puts an end to representation, in the double
that Freud also wants to exorcise and chase off the stage. He does
not, however, explicitly comment on Rousseau's speculation that
the devil acted out of jealousy: "as if the original were jealous that
anyone had had the audacity to counterfeit him." And yet I would
say that "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " is all about jealousy, that it is
"at stake" in everything Derrida is talking about there. Every step
that is taken and then taken back, as Derrida follows the rhythm of
Freud's inconclusive speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
is marked, impelled, pushed along by a jealous devil who keeps
interrupting the representation whenever it has the audacity to re-
place him with a counterfeit. Without thematizing jealousy or even
naming it very often, Derrida shows it at work in a large constella-
tion around Freud's name and signature, in its ascendant and descen-
dant relations, its philosophical, institutional, and familial ties. The
constellation is made up of other names, the rival names: Nietzsche,
Socrates, Schopenhauer, Heidegger are either pushed aside or si-
 Introduction xxvli

lenced altogether so Freud need not assume the debt of a philosophi-

cal inheritance; the son-in-law, Halberstadt, is eclipsed in the spec-
ulation that joins Freud to his daughter; the grandson, Ernst, is
assimilated in an identification with the grandfather; the younger
brother of Ernst, Heinerle, who had come along to trouble the "ex-
clusive possession of the mother," dies at the age of four; Freud's
own younger brother, Julius, died at eight months and left Freud
with a sense of guilt that, as he confided to Fliess, had never left
him.
Confronted with Freud's resolute irresolution, Derrida keeps ask-
ing, "But what is it that impels this writing-(un)step {pas d'ecri-
turej?" (ibid., p. 269). "Which is the devil that impels Freud to
write?" jp. 271) "What is it that gives the impetus to go further?" (p.
279). These are questions about the pulsion, the drive that drives all
the speculation. Freud is trying to distinguish what might be proper
to a death drive from the recognized properties of the pleasure prin-
ciple, or life drives, but his effort keeps falling back on this side of
the death drive proper. Derrida situates this continued hesitation,
deferral, or detour in the insurmountable but impossible desire (drive)
to die one's own or proper death (it is thus, notes Derrida, a theory
of deferred suicide). Death drives, life drives are all subsumed or
subordinated to this overdrive which Derrida designates "the drive
of the proper."

If ... the drive of the proper is stronger than life and stronger
than death, it is because, neither living nor dead, its force does
not qualify it otherwise than by its own, proper drivenness, and
this drivenness would be the strange relation to oneself that is
called the relation to the proper: the most driven drive is the
drive of the proper, in other words the one that tends to reap·
propriate itself. The movement of reappropriation is the most
driven drive. The proper of drivenness is the movement or the
force of reappropriation. The proper is the tendency to appro·
priate itself. Whatever the combinatory of these tautologies or
analytic statements, never can they be reduced to the form Sis
P. Each time, concerning the drive, the force, or the movement,
the tendency or the telos, a division must be maintained. This
forbids the drive of the proper from being designated by a
pleonastic expression defining the simple relation to itself of
the inside. Heterology is involved, and this is why there is
force, and this is why there is legacy and scene of writing,
distancing of oneself and delegation, sending, envoi. The proper
xxvlii Introduction

is not the proper, and if it appropriates itself it is that it disap-

propriates itself-properly, improperly. Life death are no longer
opposed in it. !ibid., pp. 356-57]

Because heterology is involved or in the picture, there is force, drive,

movement-jealousy. If I had to risk a drastically economical de-
scription, I would say that Derrida has always been writing on this
movement. The necessary failure of the proper to appropriate itself,
the ecart or spacing that must be maintained within the relation of
the proper to itself are not, however, just the dominant themes of a
discourse: this writing-on is also always a writing-through, a writing
driven by the very movement it treats. Thus, a text like "To Specu-
late-on 'Freud' " doubles Beyond the Pleasure Principle, follows it
step by step from beginning to end, and espouses its movement. In
this way, Derrida can isolate the moments where the "logic of the
proper" must be supplemented and overridden by another, more
powerful "logic," a "hetero-logic," if the writing is not to be stopped
dead in its tracks. His writing remarks the mark of heterology within
the proper. He is thus also always writing against or through the
enclosure of the "logic of the proper," molding his writing to the
movement he has called "exappropriation." The double prefix
"exap-"marks the sense of "-propriation" with an irreducible dis-
cordance or dissociation between its two directions. Whereas the
proper movement of the proper can only be in an appropriative
direction back to itself, the circle of return cannot complete itself
without also tracing the contrary movement of expropriation. The
more it seeks to keep itself to itself-uncontaminated, purely proper
-the more "propriation" loses itself in the "ex-" of an exteriority to
itself. The more it seeks to remain faithful to itself, the more it
betrays itself. Deconstruction occurs because there is exappropria-
tion. Deconstructive writing, or writing on deconstruction, attempts
to formalize the laws of exappropriation as far as possible without
being able, of course, to do so completely. !See The Post Card, of
which "To Speculate ... " is the second chapter, where Derrida sus-
tains this attempt at formalization through reference to the postal
system and code, that is, the series of relays or posts, that space out
any address, self-address, destination, and so forth.) Exappropriation
will always override the effort to say what it is in a proper sense.
And it is here, in this impossibility, that one must situate a certain
affirmation. Deconstruction is carried by a force of affirmation of the
other's impossible appropriation.
 Introduction xxix

--Yes. But what about jealousy? If we understand it as the drive

of the proper, it must always, like Freud's drive, have recourse to a
supplemental path through the other that cannot finally be appro-
priated. Yet it is precisely because jealousy is always defeated in its
aim that there is jealou.sy in the first place. If otherness could simpl~
be appropriated, it would be appropriated and jealousy would neve
even arise. If, on the other hand, this appropriation were simply and
strictly impossible, if it were altogether out of the question, as one
says, then similarly it would never arise. Don't we have to conclude
that jealousy can mark the relation to the other because, instead of
this simple alternative, its possibility is ineluctably inscribed as its
impossibility? One could even say that this is the jealous character
-possible-impossible, possible because impossible-of any mark,
trace, inscription, writing.

--But here I can imagine an objection that would go something

like this: "If you are saying that jealousy is inevitable, so we might
as well learn to live with it, even affirm it, are you not encouraging
a political irresponsibility? After all, we're not just talking about a
theory of drives or whatever; jealousy can also be a real plague,
especially when it is considered to be a 'natural' or inevitable com-
ponent of social relations, in particular sexual r~Jations. And yet you
say nothing about these politicaleffects.1 ,--In other words, what is to
prevent someone (a feminist, for example) from saying that decon-
structive thinking, in the end, gives comfort to machismo?

--If there is a prior determination to refuse the implications of

this thinking (in particular the implications that follow on its analy-
sis of phallogocentrism, which take in far more than the attitude
identified here as "machismo"), and to get others to refuse them by
issuing dire warnings about "political irresponsibility," then perhaps
indeed little can be done to forestall this reaction on the part of the
jealous watchdogs of "right thinking." But one might ask whether
such a refusal is not itself a political effect of jealousy, and therefore
whether it has much chance of leading beyond the very effects it
indicates.
This is not the place to analyze a feminist reception or nonrecep-
tion of deconstruction; however, since you brought up the example
here, I wonder whether such an analysis, if anyone were ever to
undertake it seriously, could bypass everything we have been saying
about jealousy. ls there or can there be something like a feminist
xxx Introduction

theory of jealousy which is not just an indictment of a masculine

prerogative to "possess" or "own" women? Given the virtually
unanimous rejection by feminist thinkers of Penisneid, of Freud's
theory of penis envy, what has been thought to take its place? I
believe the answer for many would be: a thinking that does not
dissimulate, as Freud did, the overwhelming fact that women have a
real cause for resentment given their sexual and economic oppres-
sion by men (who, for their part, would be jealous in an essential
way, jealous of the very fact of women's otherness). In that case,
feminine jealousy is merely contingent (unlike penis envy which
would be essential and determinant), that is, based on conditions
which are liable to change and which are already changing for many
women. If it is only contingent, then there is no essential feminine
jealousy, or women are essentially without jealousy. To put this in
other terms: feminism thinks its "own" jealousy on the basis of a
position without-jealousy. Now, the question one must ask about
this position ...

--Wait a minute. Before you get to that, it seems to me the

"jealous watchdogs," as you called them, might also be heard, not at
all in a suspicious or accusatory tone, asking a perfectly good ques-
tion. The jealousy of God you are talking about is a term that
Derrida would call a quasi-transcendental because it is neither sim-
ply inside nor outside a history of meaning, but inaugurates that
division and that history by dividing itself. Now, what is the relation
between this quasi-transcendental jealousy and jealousy in an every-
day or restricted sense? Why, if the very possibility of the relation to
the other, to an exteriority, is marked by jealousy, does it develop
into a relational or social pathology only in certain cases and not in
others? How, in other words, is your or my jealousy (or Derrida's or
anyone's) articulated with quasi-transcendental jealousy, God's or
no one's?

--Could there ever be a general answer to that question, one

which would be equally valid for you, me, Derrida, and everyone
else? Is there not, instead, each time a singular articulation with the
general law which is, for that very reason and at the same time, a
restriction-or constriction-of both singularity and generality? A
double constriction and a double bind? The questions you have
relayed have to be addressed to that place of double binding that
Derrida calls the signature. Recall the other questions you quoted
 Introduction xxxl

earlier from Glas: "What is this excess of zeal around a signature?

Can one be jealous of anything other than a seing/" Are we, in fact,
doing anything here other than trying to analyze an excess of zeal
around the signature of "Jacques Derrida," to understand, as you put
it, how it articulates jealousy in both a singular and general sense?
That is the place of ex-position, to recall your term, which we have
chosen, or which has befallen us, or which has been assigned-to
me by you, or to both of us-by the demand and the expectation
that we read, interpret, present Derrida's signature. Jealousy is "at
stake, but can you say for certain that it is yours or mine or
/1

Derrida's-or someone else's? Perhaps indeed there is a path-

ology ...

--You are being exceedingly coy with the quotation "Jealousy

is at stake" which you have yet to identify fully in its context. It is
as if you were trying to get me to hear it in many contexts at once,
including this one, the one in which we are talking, as if you wanted
constantly to remind me of the jealousy between us, or worse, to
provoke a jealous scene. Or perhaps you are reluctant to give it up to
someone else, out of jealousy.

- - I was about to quote the passage from which the phrase is

taken when you interrupted me. It has to do with the position
"without-jealousy" which grounds, not only for some feminists but
for many others as well, a certain thinking about jealousy, and thus
about the other, which itself would not be jealous. As I was saying,
one has to ask where such a position could be located other than
outside the field of difference, of the trace, of contaminating differ-
ences. And if one is prepared to claim such a transcendental position,
then one must also be prepared to accept certain theological conse-
quences, because this position "without-jealousy," which has to be
thought non-jealously, is fundamental to a theology. If not, then the
position "without-jealousy" must be allowed to deconstruct. In fact,
it already deconstructs itself. It is another version of the deconstruc-
tion of God, this time not the jealous God, but, precisely, "God-
without-jealousy.11 (However between these two monotheisms, the
old and the new, there is also jealousy.)
It is near the end of Derrida's contribution to a 1980 volume,
Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, that the phrase occurs. This text is,
as I mentioned, polyvocal; throughout, the principal voice addresses
a feminine interlocutor who, from time to time, intervenes. Well,
xxxii Introduction

near the end, this feminine interlocutor locates, in Levinas's think-

ing of the trace, "a singular relation of God (uncontaminated by
being) to jealousy." Here is how she describes this singular relation:
He, the one who has passed beyond all Being, must be exempt
from any jealousy, from any desire for possession, for guarding,
property, exclusivity, nonsubstitution, and so on. And the re-
lation to Him must be pure of all jealous economy. But this
without-jealousy [sans-jalousie/ cannot not guard itself jeal-
ously; and insofar as it is a past absolutely held in reserve, it is
the very possibility of all jealousy. Ellipsis of jealousy: ...
always a jalousie through which, seeing without seeing every-
thing, and especially without being seen, before and beyond the
phenomenon, the without-jealousy guards itself jealously, in
other words, loses itself, keeps-itself-loses-itself. By means of a
series of regular traits and re-treats /traits et retraits/: the figure
of jealousy, beyond the face. Never more jealousy, ever, never
more zeal; is it possible? ("At This Very Moment in This Work
Here I Am," p. 4 38)
The interlocutor introduces this passage with the brief and enig-
matic statement, "In everything I am talking about, jealousy is at
stake. [Dans tout ce dont ;e parle, il y va de la jalousie/." That
statement would seem to refer in part to what this interlocutor has
been saying up until this point about a certain phallocentrism in
Levinas's thought: the privileging of paternity (over maternity) and
of the son (over the daughter), but especially the subordination of
sexual difference to the neutrality of an "ii," the (masculine or
neuter) "Pro-noun marking with its seal everything that can bear a
name," in Levinas's phrase. She asks whether, through these kinds
of moves, Levinas (who is also designated here by the initials E. L.
that resonate with both the French feminine pronoun "elle" and an
elliptical designation for the name of God) has not sought a mastery
of the feminine, has not sought to enclose it within the home and
the economy of the same. Whereupon she wonders whether "femi-
nine difference does not thus come to stand for the wholly-other of
this Saying of the wholly other ... ? Does it not show, on the inside
of the work, a surfeit of un-said alterity? ... The other as feminine
(me), far from being derived or secondary, would become the other
of the Saying of the wholly-other, of this one in any case.... Then,
the Work apparently signed by the Pro-noun He would be dictated,
aspired and inspired by the desire to make She secondary, thus by
She /Elle/" (ibid., p. 434). A wholly other "she" (elle) would have
 Introduction xxxiii

dictated-or signed-Levinas's writing on the altogether other of

the "he" or "it" (il), the Pro-noun that marks everything that can
bear a name with its-or his-seal. It is a pro-noun, then, less in the
sense of that which replaces a noun than of that which precedes
every noun, every name, the nonphenomenal which disappears at
the limit of the phenomenal and allows it to appear, to be named:
the trace. For Levinas, religion consists precisely in a ligere, a linking
or tying of a relation to this precedence or trace of anteriority. As
the feminine interlocutor puts it: "Monotheistic humanity has a
relation to this trace of a past that is absolutely anterior to any
memory, to the absolute re-trait [both retreat or withdrawal, and
retracing] of the revealed name, to its very inaccessibility" (p. 436).
When she then comments that Levinas's "thought of the trace ...
thinks a singular relation of God (uncontaminated by being) to jeal-
ousy," she is saying that the notion of God Himself is being thought
in relation to "this trace of a past that is absolutely anterior to any
memory." And this "relation-to" leaves open the possibility of con-
tamination by that which must be excluded for God to be thought of
as having "passed beyond being." That which must be excluded, in
other words, jealousy: "any desire for possession, guarding, property,
exclusivity, non-substitution." Recall Spinoza's dismay before the
belief in a jealous God, a belief that goes contrary to reason because
jealousy can only be the attribute of a finite being. But this belief is
constructed on and partially conceals an even greater scandal: that
of God in a necessarily contaminating relation to jealousy. She says,
"This without-jealousy [an infinite God, one who is uncontaminated
by being] cannot not guard itself jealously [ne peut pas ne pas se
garder jalousement]." That is, in order that no desire for possession
or nonsubstitution, which are marks of finitude, contaminate the
beyond-being of God, it must keep itself from substituting another,
finite, jealous nature for its own infinite one. Any substitution is
possible except that one. Its infinite substitutability thus encounters
an internal limit; having undergone an operation of included exclu-
sion, the trait of jealousy, from within, puts the Infinite in relation
to an outside. The scandal of the deconstruction of God.
Our feminine interlocutor says of this "without-jealousy," which
cannot exclude without also including what it excludes, that it is a
"past absolutely held in reserve" and as such "it is the very possibil-
ity of all jealousy." The phrase translated as "past absolutely held in
reserve" reads in the original French "passee absolument reservee."
What the English translation must efface here without a trace is the
feminine inflection of the noun "passee" used in place of the stan-
xxxiv Introduction

dard masculine (or neuter) form, "passe." While it is not at all un-
common for French to nominalize the feminine form of past partici-
ples ("venue," "portee, 11 "vue," for example) which then function in
a nongendered sense, the unusual inflection of "passee" cannot pass
unnoticed; it leaves a feminine trace, all the more so since the phrase
qualifies a neuter (or masculine) subject: "as a past absolutely held
in reserve, it is ... [il est, en tant que passee absolument reservee
••• ]
11
The discrete, but undeniable trace of the feminine in or on that
masculine-neuter beyond-being-without-jealousy marks it with the
passage of an exteriority, a difference that has withdrawn into its
absolute reserve. Or rather, not a single difference, but differences,
which is why the absolute reserve can be called "the very possibility
of all jealousy." The possibility of jealousy resides in the drawing
and withdrawing of the trace.
If this notion of the trace seems difficult to grasp, it is precisely
because it concerns that which disappears as soon as one tries to
hold onto it. The figure of God-without-jealousy is an example of
this effect, one which, however, is not just any example, but the
culmination of a long tradition of thought that has aimed precisely
at reducing, sublimating, denying the trace. There, the trait "with-
out-jealousy" withdraws before the grasp that would fix it in a figure,
a concept, a sign, a representation. One is left holding (jealously) the
shell from which the desired thing has retreated. The figure "with-
out-jealousy" is expropriated by the gesture of appropriation: it is
exappropriated, its nonjealous face appears in the guise of jealousy.
As our feminine interlocutor says, "Ellipsis of jealousy ... this with-
out-jealousy guards itself jealously, in other words, loses itself, keeps-
itself-loses-itself. By means of a series of regular traits and re-treats:
the figure of jealousy, beyond the face. Never more jealousy, ever,
never more zeal, is it possible?" The final sentence reads, "Plus de
jalousie, toujours, plus de zele, est-Ce possible?" The adverbial phrase
"plus de" can, in certain contexts, allow for two absolutely contra-
dictory readings: more and no more. This particularity of the French
idiom is being fully exploited here to show the outline of the move-
ment of exappropriation. Because "no more jealousy" cannot secure
its borders against contamination by "more jealousy, no more is
11

always also more, and that calls up more zeal (jealous and zealous
were once the same word: zelotypus) in order to reduce the trace of
the other, to purify the figure of no (more) jealousy. Puritanical
zealotry in the name of no (more) jealousy, is that possible? But the
question should also be: how is it possible not to be jealous if what
arrives or comes from the other retreats from the grasp that would
 Introduction xxxv

hold it? If by being kept, held, grasped-in a concept, a name-the

trace gets lost? If, as Derrida has written elsewhere, "la trace n'arrive
qu'a s'effacer"-both it "arrives only on the condition of effacing
itself," and it "succeeds only in effacing itself"?
t::.•

--Since you are insisting on the movement (drawing and with-

drawing) of the trace in the idiom in which Derrida writes (and can
one be jealous of anything other than a signature or an idiom?),
shouldn't you say something about the phrase "ii y va de la jalousie"
which is only approximately translated by "jealousy is at stake"?
There is, however buried beneath conventional usage, some move-
ment implied in the phrase; jealousy goes there, one could say. You
have noticed, no doubt, that the same phrase has a prominent place
in Glas, set off by itself on the page (236, left column, in the original
edition [1974J). It articulates the two versions of God's relation to
jealousy that you have been spinning out. Look at the pages that
follow and you'll find Kant and Hegel locked in a dispute over the
jealousy of God. Briefly it goes like this: Hegel reproaches Kant for
his stubborn refusal to admit any knowledge of the infinite God by a
finite subjectivity. Kant, on the other hand, reproaches those who
believe G.od is knowable (Hegel would be an example) for having
degraded religion, replaced it, out of excessive pride, with a fetish-
ism. For Hegel, Kant's God is jealous, envious; he hides His manifes-
tation, keeps it to Himself, does not reveal His face. But, says Hegel,
the truth of the true religion (Christianity) is revelation, and if one
is going to think this truth in its essence (and not forbid oneself to
think it, as Kant does), then one must think revelation itself, the
revelation of revelation: "God's infinite revelation revealing itself in
its infinity ... the un-veiling as the unveiling of the veil itself" (p.
212). Infinite, and therefore without exteriority, without any view
on or of an other; instead, pure view, pure knowledge that knows
itself and is present to itself without any detour through otherness
-and thus without jealousy. For Hegel, jealousy will have been but
a necessary negative moment (or movement) in the production of
this truth. "In pure essentiality, jealousy is totally relieved" [relevee,
which is Derrida's translation of aufgehoben, usually translated as
"sublated"] {p. 240). But this relieving, sublation, or cancellation of
jealousy will have taken place only at the end of history, which is
thus a history of jealousy, of a movement through jealousy:

What he says of absolute religion and the nonjealous God is

valid only at the term of the absolute's process of reappropria-
xxxvi Introduction

tion by itself. Before term, prematurely, there is finitude and

thus jealousy. But self-jealousy. Of whom could God be jealous,
except himself and thus his very own son? The Nemesis, Juda-
ism, Kantianism are necessary, but abstract, moments of this
infinite process. In Sa, jealousy has no place any more. Jealousy
always comes from the night of the unconsious, the unknown,
the other. Pure sight relieves all jealousy. Not seeing what one
sees, seeing what one cannot see and what cannot present
itself, that is the jealous operation. Jealousy always has to do
with some trace, never with perception. Seen from the Sa,
thought of the trace would then be a jealous (finite, filial,
servile, ignorant, lying, poetic) thought. (pp. 214-15)

Yet "pure sight" cannot be the sight of any particular figure or

face, which would determine it and thus limit it in a representation.
Hegel's Absolute Spirit (Sa in Derrida's acronym) is unrepresentable:
finally it cannot show a face or figure. It thus ends up, in its invisi-
bility, strangely resembling Kant's jealous God. Or rather, as Derrida
puts it, "Jealousy is between them [La jalousie est entre euxj" (p.
237). Between the hidden God at the origin (Kant), and the infinite
revelation of God in the end (Hegel), there is history. Jealousy goes
there.

- - I would say that, like the other phrase "Jealousy is at stake or

goes there," which led you to the beginning of this sequence in Glas,
the phrase "Jealousy is between them" cannot be easily settled into
a certain context. "Between them," that is, between God (in Kant's
version, the Jewish God! and God (in Hegel's version, the Christian
God), between God and himself-after all, "of whom could God be
jealous except himself ?"-God and His only Son, God in a differ-
ence from himself. But what if Kant and Hegel, who are here made
to stage a philosophical debate over the jealousy of God, were also
implicated in this interval of jealousy "between them"? What if the
jealousy in question were not just the object of their dispute, but
also its force, that which puts it in motion and makes space for
remarking a difference? What if, in other words, this discourse on
jealousy were already a discourse of jealousy? (But whose jealousy?)
This is essentially the question Derrida asks in "To Speculate-on
'Freud'," in the midst of what, as you already mentioned, are multi-
ple motifs of jealousy. "What happens," he asks, "when acts or
performances (discourse or writing, analysis or description, etc.) are
part of the objects they designate? When they can be given as ex-
 Introduction xxxvii

amples of precisely that which they speak or write?" The answer he

proposes is not simple; indeed, it is the limit on the very possibility
to answer or give an account of what happens in that situation: "A
reckoning is no longer possible, nor can an account be rendered, and
the borders of the set are neither closed nor open. Their trait is
divided ... " (The Post Card [1980], p. 391).

--Are you suggesting that the history of philosophy is a history

of jealousy between philosophers?

--Would you find that a shocking suggestion? But for the mo-
ment I am merely pursuing the consequences of the divided trait for
the phrase "Jealousy is between them." I am. tempted now to under-
stand that phrase before or beyond any context," indeed as the very
possibility of any "context" whatever, any opening of a space of
meaning. "Jealousy is between": it "is," that is, an interval, a gap, a
space-difference-that joins and divides "them." The interval "be-
tween" relates them across a divide which the copulative verb "is"
cannot reduce. Copulated, "they" remain apart, a part and not a
whole. Desire is between them. But no desire without jealousy.
Jealousy is between them. The difference between them?
Always between, jealousy is persistently figured in veils, webs,
curtains-partitions of all sorts. Hence, a "jalousie" is a venetian
blind or a louvered shutter (a semantic displacement which is mas-
terfully exploited in Alain Robbe-Grillet's celebrated novel, La f al-
ousie). Such jalousies or partitions proliferate in Derrida's texts. Any
list of them would be necessarily partial because their traits are
always dividing, or opening and closing like the slats of a venetian
blind. (All the more partial since that device is the very one through
which we are looking at everything Derrida is talking about; there is
always one more "jalousie" to be accounted for.J Think of the veils
and sails in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, or yet again the umbrella
(opening and closing) in the same text; the curtain around little
Ernst's bed in "To Speculate-on 'Freud' "; the draperies and other
frames which are unwrapped in "The Parergon" [1978]; the ear drum
or tympanum stretched obliquely across "Tympan"; the eyelid, a
kind of organic jalousie, that is raised and lowered in "The Principle
of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils" [1983], and so
forth. These last two examples could, in turn, initiate another partial
list of body parts dissected or disassembled. Derrida writes "on the
body" in an unheard-of sense, on the body jealous of its unity, its
place in a hierarchy, its difference from the body either of animals or
xxxviii Introduction

of machines-in short, its property and properness, its bodiness. The

human body-itself-deconstructs, decomposes even, under pres-
sure from this writing which is exerted typically there where a
partition divides its trait between the inside and outside of the body
proper. From the organs of the abstract senses-ears and eyes-
which philosophy has always privileged, Derrida elsewhere turns to
the baser because more organic senses of smell and taste (see for
example "Economimesis" (1975]). And in this regard, Glas could be
read as a long treatise on the jealous functioning of the mouth, that
place where the other is at once symbolically ingested and named
("This is my body ... "), where the processes of interiorization, as-
similation, and appropriation, by which the proper self tries to con-
stitute itself, are made to pass through the contrary movements of
exteriorization and expropriation !exhaling or expiring, but also
speaking and vomiting). The mouth-lips, teeth, tongue, palate-is
also an antechamber of the throat, that is, trachea and oesophagus,
double columns which, like the double columns of Glas, are made
up of a series of sphincters or bands of constricting tissue the rhyth-
mic opening and closing of which regulates the passage between
inside and outside. The rhythm of the sphincter's constrictions
punctuates the movement of jealousy across and through the body
"proper," traversing all the orifices of sense, ingestion, respiration,
vocalization, elimination, but also the organs that are called sexual
in the strictest sense. Sexual jealousy-jealousy in a limited sense
-is a particularly acute constriction of this movement that contin-
ually opens the body to an outside, even turns it inside out like a
glove.

--Couldn't one extend this demonstration beyond the body's

orifices in the strict sense to those parts, such as hands and feet,
which have variously stood for what is most proper to humankind,
what distinguishes it from the nonhuman in general? Derrida has
exposed repeatedly the humanist gesture to grasp the properly hu-
man, for example with the hand !see "Heidegger's Hand" (r987J), or
to stand the human subject on its own feet (see "Restitutions ... ").
These body parts would also be partitions, jalousies, or veils, that is,
self-dividing traits between inside and outside, proper and improper.
Such an extended demonstration, however, could not stop with a list
of body parts; it would have to follow the movement of a certain
interlacing that grafts prostheses, supplements, simulacra, or mi-
metic doubles onto the body "proper."
But as you were enumerating the partial list of divided body parts,
 Introduction xxxvix

I was thinking of the one that, perhaps more than any other, concen-
trates all of these several motifs of jealousy in Derrida's thought: the
hymen. In "The Double Session," as you recall, this term imposes
itself, in all its undecidability, between the two versions of mimesis
that Derrida is reading side by side, Plato's and Mallarme's. In the
sense of film or membrane, hymen already envelops many of the
parts we've named: the feet of certain birds, the eyes of others, but
also the wings of certain insects, etc. It is, as Derrida writes, "the
tissue on which so many bodily metaphors are written" (Dissemi-
nation [1972], p. 213). In its etymology, the word would indeed seem
to have links with the whole network of weaving, in which one also
finds the spiderweb. I would even say that one could translate jeal-
ousy in the phrase "Jealousy is between them" by this other interval
of sense that Derrida calls "hymen." The hymen is between-them.
The phrase retains both of the word's most common senses, that is
the hymen as both the veil-like tissue across the vagina that remains
intact as long as virginity does, and, in a somewhat archaic but still
comprehensible sense (in English as well as French), hymen as the
union or marriage which is consummated by the act that ruptures it
(i.e., the hymen in the first sense). In other words, it is between
them, that is, it divides them, marks their difference as a sexual
difference of inside from outside; and it is between them, that is, it
joins them or unites them in a symbolic union. Like all the others
you have named, the partition of the hymen partitions itself, departs
from itself and from any proper meaning. It does so by articulating
the two senses of articulation: dividing-joining, by enfolding the
one in the other undecidably. Is not, therefore, the hymen a more
general name for all these jealous partitionings? And if so, can one
affirm, as you just did, that so-called sexual jealousy is simply a
more limited sense of the jealous movement of exappropriation? Is
not that movement necessarily always marked by sexual difference,
even in the case of the jealousy of God?

--Marked by sexual difference, yes; but perhaps there is still a

good reason to maintain some notion of the strict or limited sense of
sexual jealousy. If only in order to be able to point to the ways in
which it is constantly overrun. Consider, for example, the fact that
the Mallarme text, Mimique, which is featured in "The Double
Session" may be read as concerning the mime drama of a jealous
husband's murderous revenge for his wife's infidelity. This would be
the mime's "subject," but one that, as Derrida is concerned to show,
is constantly retreating from the stage of the present behind a series
xi Introduction

of textual veils or folds. Its presence is absolutely held in reserve,

which is to say, it is always already past. The classical, Platonic
theory of mimesis, on the other hand, posits a model or an original
that would have been fully present with a presence that can be
represented in the copy or imitation. Now, the question one might
ask-the question I hear you asking-is this: Is it a matter of indif-
ference that the deconstruction of this mimetic model passes by way
of a staging of sexual jealousy in the most limited sense? Or is it not
rather the case that what we call sexual jealousy-the jealousy of
the possessive lover-harbors, in its most acute or pointed form, the
possibility of this opening onto a past that has never been present,
an absolute past and an absolute other? The lover, in sum, is jealous
because nothing in the present can ground his jealousy, which is
how I understand Derrida's remark that the jealous operation "al-
ways has to do with some trace, never with perception." Pierrot's
revenge, his remembered or imagined crime (tickling his wife to
death), would serve above all to try to put a halt to the slide toward
the abyss into which the other retreats from any present that could
be grasped or possessed. The crime of murder can seem to be a
resolution of jealousy because it fixes the other in an unshakeable
grasp. However, the presence fixed thereby is, of course, the derisive,
mocking figure of death. Colombine dies, comes laughing.
Yet, such a representation of the jealous act never simply appears
here. It is enveloped in the undecidable folds of a hymen: between
past and future (is Pierrot remembering or imagining his act?); be-
tween revenge and love (is Colombine convulsed in the throes of
death or a paroxysm of pleasure?); between murder and suicide (is
Pierrot miming Colombine's demise or submitting to it himself)?
What is finally enveloped in all these folds of "pure fiction" is that
last instance or final appeal-the ultimate model, signified, mean-
ing, or referent-demanded by the "trial of truth" {le proces de la
verite] which is philosophy. Philosophy wants to get at the truth
behind all these feminine veils. And because the philosopher be-
haves like a jealous husband, "pure fiction"-a mime drama such as
Pierrot assassin de sa femme-can deconstruct the truth claims
which have always required a reduction of feminine difference, and
which accompany the substitution of a perceptible presence for the
trace of a past that has never been present.

One is never jealous in front of a present scene-even the

worst imaginable-nor a future one, at least insofar as it would
 Introduction xii

be pregnant with a possible theater. Zeal is lashed into fury

only by the whip of an absolute past .... So one is only jealous
of the mother or of death. Never of a man or a woman as such.
(Glas [1974], p. 134)

--Once again, I imagine an objection, which would go some-

thing like this: Is a deconstruction of this jealousy possible? Granted,
the metaphysics of presence is jealous, as you have just asserted and
as Derrida writes in the same passage from Glas ("That is why
metaphysics, which is jealous, will never be able to account, in its
language, the language of presence, for jealousy"). Yet, is not the
thinking of the trace always a thinking of the impossible reduction
of jealousy? And as such, does it not promise always more jealousy,
rather than no more jealousy?

--1, in tum, will imagine a reply that reapplies something you

said earlier about affirmation and that was left suspended: Do not
confuse a deconstruction of jealousy with its destruction, that is,
with a solely negative movement. There is also displacement of the
jealous structures from their human, all too human incarnations.
"The 'mother' of jealousy in question here-the trace of an absolute
past-stands beyond, /1 writes Derrida, "the sexual opposition. This
above all is not a woman. She only lets herself, detached, be repre-
sented by sex. /1 This displacement would not be, then, a beyond-
jealousy or without-jealousy except in the restricted sense that de-
pends on the terms of sexual opposition. There is beyond-jealousy
only beyond this opposition. And this is where the possibility of
affirmation can arise: to dejalouser the relation of sexual difference,
to affirm and thus exempt the jealousy of the other.
But having let that be said, I wonder if, all the same and after all,
we have not betrayed something through an excess of zeal ...

--Ah, my dear, are you still asking the same anxious question?
I do believe you are jealous of the web we have spun for each other
once you consider the necessity of cutting it off, detaching it, and
exposing its loose ends for A Derrida Reader. Come now, give me
your jealousy; it will not betray you unless you try to keep it to
yourself. You asked a moment ago whether gifts are ever exempt
from jealousy. You were puzzled, perhaps, by the double gesture this
supposes, since a jealous gift immediately takes back what it prof-
fers. But if I ask you to take my jealousy, if I give it to you, give it to
xiii Introduction

you to read, is it not yours to take away? Who else but you can
exempt this gift from retracting and betraying itself?
So here, take this, my jealousy, it is already yours to read.

--A series of jalousies, then, one laid over the next. "Let the
transference float" between one jalousie and the other, between one
language and the other. Read between the blinds. First of all, there is
translation. Do not forget that. These texts have already passed
through the filter of another language. And because Derrida's is a
jealous idiom, much will have filtered out or withheld itself from
view. But welcome this limitation as a chance to open the shutters
and the blinders of thought to what comes from its other, beyond
any one language or idiom. Let your language play in the slanting
rays. Whoever said that the most serious things must always be
treated gravely, somberly, behind closed doors was probably afraid of
letting a certain necessary play come to light within the serious.
Listen to Colombine's laughter.
A DERRIDA READER
'
 JALOUSIE ONE

Let us space. The art of this text is the air it

causes to circulate between its screens. The
chainings are invisible, everything seems im-
provised or juxtaposed. This text induces by
agglutinating rather than by demonstrating, by
coupling and uncoupling, gluing and ungluing
rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and
analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of
a discursive rhetoric.
-Glas, p. 75
 PART ONE

DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

N 1980 1 MORE than twenty years after he had begun teaching in

I France (first at a provincial lycee, then at the Sorbonne, the Ecole
Normale Superieure, and currently at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales), Jacques Derrida received a Doctorat d'Etat sur
travaux, that is, on the basis of a body of published work. In the
statement with which he presented this work at the formal defense
or soutenance (subsequently published in English translation with
the title "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations" 11983]), Derrida
described the itinerary he had followed since 19571 the year he
elected to prepare a thesis that would have been entitled "The Ideal-
ity of the Literary Object." Although this project was abandoned
then by choice, and later not revived because of the inhospitableness
of the French university to his work and that of many others who
were similarly working in its margins, Derrida evoked the premises
of his unwritten protothesis so as to underscore a certain continuity
of his preoccupation with philosophy and literature, in all the con-
jugations of their similarity and difference: the philosophy of litera-
ture, philosophy as literature, literature before or beyond philosophy,
literature in excess of philosophy. "It was then for me a matter of
bending, more or less violently, the techniques of transcendental
phenomenology to the needs of elaborating a new theory of litera-
ture, of that very peculiar type of .ideal object that is the literary
object" ( p. 37). Looking back at his never-abandoned interest in the
"literary object," Derrida saw there his earliest formulations of ques-
tions such as What is writing? How does writing disturb the ques-
tion "What is?" or "What does that mean?" When and how does an
inscription become literature? And these questions would, he sug-
gested, have their roots in another, more obscure question he asks of
4 Difference at the Origin

himself: "Why finally does inscription so fascinate me, preoccupy

me, precede me? Why am I so fascinated by the literary ruse of the
inscription?" (p. 38)
It was as a philosopher trained in the rigors of phenomenological
discipline that Derrida approached the question of inscription. His
first major publication was a critical introduction to his translation
of Husserl's The Origin of Geometry in 1962. There followed essays
-on Michel Foucault, Edmond Jabes, Emmanuel Levinas, Antonin
Artaud, Freud, Georges Bataille, Claude Levi-Strauss-that both set
out Derrida's affinities and marked his distance from thinkers around
him. In the same year, 1967, that these essays were collected under
the title L'Ecriture et la difference (Writing and Difference), Derrida
also published two other books, La Voix et le phenomene (Speech
and Phenomena) and De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology). The
first of these analyzes Husserl's doctrine of signification; the second
extends the analysis to a larger philosophical tradition which Hus-
serl both inherited and continued, at least as concerns certain key
features of his description of signification. One feature in particular,
which is consistently marked in one way or another from Plato to
Levi-Strauss, attracted Derrida's most relentless attention: the privi-
leging of voice as the medium of meaning and the consequent dis-
missal of writing as a derivative, inessential medium. This system-
atic evaluation has been preserved virtually unchanged by a history
of philosophy that has undergone so many other, apparently pro-
found revolutions. In a move that recognized the irreversible signifi-
cance of Heidegger's thought, Derrida argued that, if philosophers
have always failed to account for their own medium-writing-it is
because material inscription is so thoroughly inconsistent with the
fundamental requirement of their thinking, one that is supposed by
the very notion of philosophy in the West: truth or meaning as a
presence without difference from itself. Whatever else it is, writing,
or in general the inscription of marks, always supposes and indicates
an absence. In his initial considerations of the "question of inscrip-
tion," Derrida turned to Husserl's phenomenological research into
signification for both the most systematic version of meaning as
self-presence and the most rigorous tools with which to deconstruct
this system. Thus, the deconstruction of the philosophy of presence
(which, being the philosophy of proper sense, is the only philosophy
in the proper sense) undertaken by Derrida will not proceed like
some frontal attack or siege from outside philosophy's walls. It be-
gins necessarily within those walls, but this starting point is also
 Differance at the Origin 5

only the place from which to unsettle the very distinction between
inside and outside essential to the construction of self-presence.
Derrida's first two major works, Speech and Phenomena and Of
Grammatology, are concerned with certain systematic treatments of
signification and language: Husserl's, as mentioned, but also those
of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others.
Although it would be misleading to understand these earlier works
as in some simple way more systematic than his later work, Derrida
himself recognizes in "The Time of a Thesis" that they conform
perhaps more readily to some standard expectations governing dis-
cursive exposition of a thesis. In subsequent writings, most notably
Glas [1974), The Truth in Painting (1978), and The Post Card [1980),
these constraints are greatly loosened as Derrida moves beyond the-
matic considerations of writing as formal spacing and attempts new,
active determinations of the relation between theme and form. Later
sections in this book make room for many of these "experiments."
Here, however, in the initial set of selections, it is possible to follow
Derrida as he sets into place a number of his key concepts-or what
he calls semi- or quasi-concepts-that will remain in force wherever
his thinking takes him thereafter. These semi-concepts-trace, dif-
ferance, archi-writing, for example-so-called because they do not
function as the name of anything that can be thought of as ever
simply present, are not so much invented by Derrida as they are
found inscribed in the gaps of the theory of signification, the theory
of the sign. The gap, in French l'ecart which can also mean diver-
gence, is that opening to difference, to an outside, to an other-to
absence and to death-which, in any theory based on fully present
meaning, will have been covered over. Derrida's writing uncovers
and remarks these gaps.
 From Speech and Phenomena

(La Voix et le phenomene [1967])

"The present essay," writes Derrida in a note to his introduction,

"analyzes the doctrine of signification as it is constituted already in
the first of [Husserl's] Logical Investigations." This first investiga-
tion is titled "Expression and Meaning" and in it Husserl is princi-
pally concerned with separating sign (Zeichen) in the sense of
expression from sign in the other sense of indication. Only the
former, he will argue, can be understood as a meaningful sign since
the concept of meaning (Bedeutung) is reserved for the intention to
mean. Indicative signs, on the other hand, signify but they are not
themselves the bearers of an animating intention which infuses life
into the body of signs. (For example, gathering dark clouds indicate a
coming storm, but not anyone's intention to rain.) From the descrip-
tion and elaboration of this initial distinction, Husserl proceeds to
propose as the model of meaningful speech, and therefore the place
wherein it can be studied in its essence, not a communicated dis-
course, but the silent colloquy of consciousness with itself in "soli-
tary mental life." Derrida compares this isolation of interior con-
scious phenomena to what Husserl himself will later formalize as
the practice of phenomenological reduction whereby the "worldly" ·
support of conscious processes is systematically stripped away, re- j
duced, so as to allow more precise description of those processes.
Commenting on each step of this reduction, Derrida carefully fol-
lows the logic that labors to exclude any trace of indication, of
absence of intention, of difference within a living present present to
itself. It is a logic of presence both in the temporal sense, in that it
 Speech and Phenomena 7

supposes an undifferentiated present moment, and in a more spatial

sense, in that it supposes a meaning altogether immanent or interior
to itself, one that need never be proffered outside. Derrida demon-
strates repeatedly that such a description of the sign is always finally
an attempted effacement of the sign and of its essential and neces-
sary exteriority to any living intention-an effacement of the sign,
that is, of whatever can come along to interrupt the living present.
Derrida writes, "Indication is the process of death at work in signs.
As soon as the other appears, indicative language-another name for
the relation to death-can no longer be effaced. The relation to the
other as nonpresence is thus impure expression. To reduce indica-
tion in language and reach pure expression at last, the relation to the
other must perforce be suspended" (p. 40). For this reason among
others, Derrida will be led, in one of the extracts given here, to speak
of the logic of presence as a logic of pure auto-affection, and from
there to overturn the relation between expression and indication
within the other "logic" he calls that of the trace, which is a logic of
repeated inscription without simple origin. "This trace is unthink-
able on the basis of a simple present whose life would be interior to
itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace."
Extracted here are all of chapter 41 "Meaning and Representation,"
and most of chapter 6, "The Voice That Keeps Silence."
 Speech and Phenomena

[ .... J

Let us recall the object and crux of this demonstration: the pure
function of expression and meaning is not to communicate, in-
form, or manifest, that is, to indicate. "Solitary mental life"
would prove that such an expression without indication is pos-
sible. In solitary discourse the subject learns nothing about him-
self, manifests nothing to himself. To support this demonstra-
tion, whose consequences for phenomenology will be limitless,
Husserl invokes two kinds of argument.
r. In inward speech, I communicate nothing to myself, I indi-
cate nothing to myself. I can at most imagine myself doing so; I
can only represent myself as manifesting something to myself.
This, however, is only representation and imagination.
2. In inward speech I communicate nothing to myself because
there is no need of it; I can only pretend to do so. Such an
operation, the self-communication of the self, could not take
place because it would make no sense, and it would make no
sense because there would be no finality 1 to it. The existence of
mental acts does not have to be indicated (let us recall that in
general only an existence can be indicated) because it is immedi-
ately present to the subject in the present moment.
Let us first read the paragraph that ties these two arguments
together:
One of course speaks, in a certain sense, even in soliloquy,
and it is certainly possible to think of oneself as speaking,
and even as speaking to oneself, as, e.g., when someone says
to himself: "You have gone wrong, you can't go on like
 Speech and Phenomena 9

that." But in the genuine sense of communication, there is

no speech in such cases, nor does one tell oneself anything:
one merely conceives of (man stellt sich vor) oneself as
speaking and communicating. In a monologue words can
perform no function of indicating the existence (Dasein) of
mental acts, since such indication would there be quite
purposeless (ganz zwecklos wiire). For the acts in question
are themselves experienced by us at that very moment (im
selben Augenblick). 2

These affirmations raise some very diverse questions, all con-

cerned with the status of representation in language. Represen-
tation can be understood in the general sense of Vorstellung, but
also in the sense of re-presentation, as repetition or reproduction
of presentation, as the Vergegenwiirtigung which modifies a Prii-
sentation or Gegenwiirtigung. And it can be understood as what
takes the place of, what occupies the place of, another Vorstel-
lung (Repriisentation, Repriisentant, Stellvertreter). 3
Let us consider the first argument. In monologue, nothing is
communicated; one represents oneself (man stellt sich vor) as a
speaking and communicating subject. Husserl thus seems here
to apply the fundamental distinction between reality and repre-
sentation to language. Between effective communication (indi-
cation) and "represented" communication there would be a dif-
ference in essence, a simple exteriority. Moreover, in order to
reach inward language (in the sense of communication) as pure
representation (Vorstellung), a certain fiction, that is, a particular
type of representation, would have to be employed: the imag-
inary representation, which Husserl will later define as neutral-
izing representation (Vergegenwiirtigung).
Can this system of distinctions be applied to language? From
the start we would have to suppose that representation (in every
sense of the term) is neither essential to nor constitutive of
communication, the "effective" practice of language, but is only
an accident that may or may not be added to the practice of
discourse. But there is every reason to believe that representation
and reality are not merely added together here and there in lan-
guage, for the simple reason that it is impossible in principle to
rigorously distinguish them. And it doesn't help to say that this
10 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

happens in language; language in general-and language alone-

is this.
Husserl himself gives us the means to think this against what
he says. When in fact I effectively use words, and whether or not
I do it for communicative ends (let us consider signs in general,
prior to this distinction), I must from the outset operate (within)
a structure of repetition whose basic element can only be repre-
sentative. A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an
irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular. A sign which
would take place but "once" would not be a sign; a purely idio-
matic sign would not be a sign. A signifier (in general) must be
formally recognizable in spite of, and through, the diversity of
empirical characteristics which may modify it. It must remain
the same, and be able to be repeated as such, despite and across
the deformations which the so-called empirical event necessarily
makes it undergo. A phoneme or grapheme is necessarily always
to some extent different each time that it is presented in an
operation or a perception. But, it can function as a sign, and in
general as language, only if a formal identity enables it to be
issued again and to be recognized. This identity is necessarily
ideal. It thus necessarily implies a representation: as Vorstellung,
the locus of ideality in general, as Vergegenwiirtigung, the possi-
bility of reproductive repetition in general, and as Repriisenta-
tion, insofar as each signifying event is a substitute (for the
signified as well as for the ideal form of the signifier). Since this
representative structure is signification itself, I cannot enter into
an "effective" discourse without being from the start involved in
unlimited representation.
One might object that it is precisely this exclusively represen-
tative character of expression that Husserl wants to bring out by
his hypothesis of solitary discourse, which would retain the es-
sence of speech while dropping its communicative and indicative
shell. Moreover, one might object that we have precisely formu-
lated our question with Husserlian concepts. We have indeed.
But according to Husserl's description, it is only expression and
not signification in general that belongs to the order of represen-
tation as Vorstellung. However, we have just suggested that the
latter-and its other representative modifications-is implied
by any sign whatsoever. On the other hand, and more important,
 Speech and Phenomena 11

as soon as we admit that speech belongs essentially to the order

of representation, the distinction between "effective" speech and
the representation of speech becomes suspect, whether the speech
is purely "expressive" or engaged in "communication." By rea-
son of the originally repetitive structure of signs in general, there
is every likelihood that "effective" language is just as imaginary
as imaginary speech and that imaginary speech is just as effective
as effective speech. In both expression and indicative commu-
nication the difference between reality and representation, be-
tween the true and the imaginary, and between simple presence
and repetition has always already begun to be effaced. Does not
the maintaining of this difference-in the history of metaphysics
and for Husserl as well-answer to the obstinate desire to save
presence and to reduce or derive the sign, and with it all powers
of repetition? Which comes to living in the effect-the assured,
consolidated, constituted effect of repetition and representation,
of the difference which removes presence. To assert, as we have
been doing, that within the sign the difference does not take
place between reality and representation, etc., amounts to saying
that the gesture that confirms this difference is the very efface-
ment of the sign. But there are two ways of effacing the original-
ity of the sign; we must be attentive to the instability of all these
moves, for they pass quickly and surreptitiously into one an-
other. Signs can be effaced in the classical manner in a philoso-
phy of intuition and presence. Such a philosophy effaces signs by
making them derivative; it annuls reproduction and representa-
tion by making signs a modification that happens to a simple
presence. But because it is just such a philosophy-which is, in
fact, the philosophy and history of the West-which has so con-
stituted and established the very concept of signs, the sign is
from its origin and to the core of its sense marked by this will to
derivation or effacement. Consequently, to restore the original
and nonderivative character of signs, in opposition to classical
metaphysics, is, by an apparent paradox, at the same time to
efface a concept of signs whose whole history and meaning be-
long to the adventure of the metaphysics of presence. This schema
also holds for the concepts of representation, repetition, differ-
ence, etc., as well as for their whole system. For the present and
for some time to come, the movement of that schema will only
12 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

be capable of working over the language of metaphysics from

within, in a certain interior. No doubt this work has always
already begun. We shall have to grasp what happens in this
interior when the closure of metaphysics is announced.
With the difference between real presence and presence in
representation as Vortstellung, a whole system of differences
involved in language is pulled along in the same deconstruction:
the differences between the represented and the representative in
general, the signified and signifier, simple presence and its repro-
duction, presentation as Vorstellung and re-presentation as Ver-
gegenwiirtigung, for what is represented in the re-presentation is
a presentation (Priisentation) as Vorstellung. We thus come-
against Husserl's express intention-to make the Vorstellung
itself, and as such, depend on the possibility of re-presentation
(Vergegenwiirtigung). The presence-of-the-present is derived from
;, repetition and not the reverse. While this is against Husserl's
express intention, it does take into account what is implied by
his description of the movement of temporalization and of the
relation to the other, as will perhaps become clear later on.
The concept of ideality naturally has to be at the center of
such a question. According to Husserl, the structure of speech
can be described only in terms of ideality. There is the ideality of
the sensible form of the signifier (for example, the word), which
must remain the same and can do so only as an ideality. There
is, moreover, the ideality of the signified fof the Bedeutung) or
intended sense, which is not to be confused with the act of
intending or with the object, for the latter two need not necessar-
ily be ideal. Finally, in certain cases there is the ideality of the
object itself, which then assures the ideal transparency and per-
fect univocity of language; this is what happens in the exact
sciences. 4 But this ideality, which is but another name for the
permanence of the same and the possibility of its repetition, does
not exist in the world, and it does not come from another world;
it depends entirely on the possibility of acts of repetition. It is
constituted by this possibility. Its "being" is proportionate to the
power of repetition; absolute ideality is the correlate of a possi-
bility of indefinite repetition. It could therefore be said that being
is determined by Husserl as ideality, that is, as repetition. For
Husserl, historical progress always has as its essential form the
 Speech and Phenomena 13

constitution of idealities the repetition and thus the tradition of

which would be assured ad infinitum, where repetition and tra-
dition are the transmission and reactivation of the origin. And
this determination of being as ideality is properly a valuation, an
ethico-theoretical act that revives the decision that founded phi-
losophy in its Platonic form. Husserl occasionally admits this;
what he always opposed was a conventional Platonism. When he
affirms the nonexistence or nonreality of ideality, it is always to
acknowledge that ideality is according to a mode of being that is
irreducible to sensible existence or empirical reality and their
fictional counterparts. 5 In determining the ontos on as eidos,
Plato himself was affirming the same thing.
Now (and here again the commentary must take its bearing
from the interpretation) this determination of being as ideality is
paradoxically caught up with the determination of being as pres-
ence. This occurs not only because pure ideality is always that of
an ideal "ob-ject" which stands in front of, which is pre-sent
before the act of repetition (Vor-stellung being the general form
of presence as proximity to a gaze), but also because only a
temporality determined on the basis of the living present as its
source (the now as "source-point") can ensure the purity of ide-
ality, that is, an opening up of the infinite repeatability of the
same. For, in fact, what is signified by phenomenology's "princi-
ple of principles"? What does the value of originary presence to
intuition as source of sense and evidence, as the a priori of a
prioris, signify? First of all it signifies the certainty, itself ideal
and absolute, that the universal form of all experience (Erlebnis},
and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the
present. The present alone is all there is and ever will be. Being.
is presence or the modification of presence. The relation to the
presence of the present as the ultimate form of being and of
ideality is the move by which I transgress empirical existence,
factuality, contingency, worldliness, etc.-first of all, my own
empirical existence, factuality, contingency, worldliness, etc. To
think of presence as the universal form of transcendental life is
to open myself to the knowledge that in my absence, beyond my
empirical existence, before my birth and after my death, the
present is. I can empty all empirical content, imagine an absolute
overthrow of the content of every possible experience, a radical
14 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

transformation of the world. I have a strange and unique certi-

tude that this universal form of presence, since it concerns no
determined being, will not be affected by it. The relationship
with my death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this
determination of being as presence, ideality, the absolute possi-
bility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relationship
to death. The determination and effacement of the sign in meta-
physics is the dissimulation of this relationship to death, which
nevertheless produced signification.
If the possibility of my disappearance in general must some-
how be experienced in order for a relationship to presence in
general to be instituted, we can no longer say that the experience
of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (my death) affects
me, occurs to an I am, and modifies a subject. The I am, being
lived only as an I am present, itself presupposes in itself the
relationship to presence in general, to being as presence. The
appearing of the I to itself in the I am is thus originally a relation
to its own possible disappearance. Therefore, I am originally
means I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition. 6
We can therefore go further: as a linguistic statement "I am the
one who am" is the admission of a mortal. The move that leads
from the I am to the determination of my being as res cogitans
(thus, as an immortality) is a move by which the origin of pres-
ence and ideality is concealed in the very presence and ideality it
makes possible.
The effacement (or derivation) of signs is thereby confused
with the reduction of the imagination. Husserl's position with
respect to tradition is here ambiguous. No doubt he profoundly
renewed the question of imagination, and the role he reserves for
fiction in the phenomenological method clearly shows that for
him imagination is not just one faculty among others. Yet with-
out neglecting the novelty and rigor of the phenomenological
description of images, we should certainly be cognizant of their
origin. Husserl continually emphasizes that, unlike a memory,
an image is not "positional"; it is a "neutralizing" re-presenta-
tion. While this gives it a privilege in "phenomenological" prac-
tice, both an image and a memory are classified under the general
concept "re-presentation" (Vergegenwiirtigung), that is, the re-
 Speech and Phenomena 15

production of a presence, even if the product is a purely fictitious

object. It follows that imagination is not a simple "modification
of neutrality," even if it is neutralizing ("We must protect our-
selves here against a very closely besetting confusion, namely,
that between neutrality-modification and imagination"). 7 Its
neutralizing operation modifies a positional re-presentation (Ver-
gegenwiirtigung), which is memory. "More closely stated, imag-
ination in general is the neutrality-modification applied to 'po-
sitional' presentification (Vergegenwiirtigung), and therefore of
remembering in the widest conceivable sense of the term" (ibid.).
Consequently, even if it is a good auxiliary instrument of phe-
nomenological neutralization, the image is not a pure neutrali-
zation. It retains a primary reference to a primordial presentation,
that is, to a perception and positing of existence, to a belief in
general.
This is why pure ideality, reached through neutralization, is
not fictitious. This theme appears very early, 8 and it will contin-
ually serve to feed the polemic against Hume. But it is no acci-
dent that Hume's thought fascinated Husserl more and more.
The power of pure repetition that opens up ideality and the
power that liberates the imaginative reproduction of empirical
perception cannot be foreign to each other, nor can their prod-
ucts.
Thus, in this respect, the First Investigation remains most
disconcerting in more than one way:
I. Expressive phenomena in their expressive purity are, from
the start, taken to be imaginative representations (Phantasievor-
stellungen).
2. In the inner sphere thus disengaged by this fiction, the
communicative discourse that a subject may occasionally ad-
dress to himself ("You have gone wrong") is called "fictitious."
This leads one to think that a purely expressive and noncom-
municative discourse can effectively take place in "solitary men-
tal life."
3. By the same token, it is supposed that in communication,
where the same words, the same expressive cores are at work,
where, consequently, pure idealities are indispensable, a rigorous
distinction can be drawn between the fictitious and the effective
16 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

and between the ideal and the real. It is consequently supposed

that effectiveness comes like an empirical and exterior cloak to
expression, like a body to a soul. And these are indeed the no-
tions Husserl uses, even when he stresses the unity of the body
and soul in intentional animation. This unity does not impair
the essential distinction, for it always remains a unity of compo-
sition.
4. Inside the pure interior "representation,' in "solitary men-
1

tal life, /1 certain kinds of speech could effectively take place, as

effectively representative (this would be the case with expressive
language and, we can already specify, language with a purely
objective, theoretico-logical character), while certain others would
remain purely fictitious (those fictions located in fiction would
be the acts of indicative communication between the self and the
self, between the self taken as other and the self taken as self,
etc.).
However, if it is admitted that, as we have tried to show, every
sign whatever is of an originally repetitive structure, the general
distinction between the fictitious and effective usages of the sign
is threatened. The sign is originally wrought by fiction. From this
point on, whether with respect to indicative communication or
expression, there is no sure criterion by which to distinguish an
exterior language from an interior language or, in the hypothesis
of an interior language, an effective language from a fictitious
language. Such a distinction, however, is indispensable to Hus-
serl for proving that indication is exterior to expression, with all
that this entails. In declaring this distinction illegitimate, we
anticipate a whole chain of formidable consequences for
phenomenology.
What we have just said concerning the sign holds, by the same
token, for the act of the speaking subject. "But, /1 as Husserl says,
"in the genuine sense of communication, there is no speech in
such cases, nor does one tell oneself anything: one merely con-
ceives of oneself (man stellt sich vor) as speaking and communi-
cating" (LI, p. 280, § 8). This leads to the second argument
proposed.
Between effective communication and the representation of
the self as speaking subject, Husserl must suppose a difference
 Speech and Phenomena 17

such that the representation of the self can only be added on to

the act of communication contingently and from the outside.
Now, the originary structure of repetition that we just evoked for
signs must govern all acts of signification. The subject cannot
speak without giving himself a representation of his speaking,
and this is no accident. We can no more imagine effective speech
without there being self-representation than we can imagine a
representation of speech without there being effective speech.
This representation may no doubt be modified, complicated, and
reflected in the originary modes that are studied by the linguist,
the semiologist, the psychologist, the theoretician of literature or
of art, or even the philosopher. They may be quite original, but
they all suppose the originary unity of speech and the represen-
tation of speech. Speech represents itself; it is its representation.
Even better, speech is the representation of itself. 9
More generally, Husserl seems to allow that the subject as he
is in his effective experience and the subject as he represents
himself to be can be simply external to each other. The subject
may think that he is talking to himself and communicating
something; in truth he is doing nothing of the kind. Where con-
sciousness is thus entirely overcome by the belief or illusion of
speaking to itself, an entirely false consciousness, one might be
tempted to conclude that the truth of experience would belong
to the order of the nonconscious. Quite the contrary: conscious-
ness is the self-presence of the living, the Erleben, of experience.
Experience thus understood is simple and is in its essence free of
illusion, since it relates only to itself in an absolute proximity.
The illusion of speaking to oneself would float on the surface of
experience as an empty, peripheral, and secondary consciousness.
Language and its representation would be added on to a con-
sciousness that is simple and simply present to itself, or in any
event to an experience that could reflect its own presence in
silence.
As Husserl will say in Ideas I, § r II:

Every experience generally (every really living one, so to

speak) is an experience according to the mode of "being
present." It belongs to its very essence that it should be
18 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

able to reflect upon that same essence in which it is neces-

sarily characterized as being certain and present (p. 3 ro,
modified).

Signs would be foreign to this self-presence, which is the ground

of presence in general. It is because signs are foreign to the self-
presence of the living present that they may be called foreign to
presence in general in (what is currently styled) intuition or
perception.
If the representation of indicative speech in the monologue is
false, it is because it is useless; this is the ultimate basis of the
argumentation in this section (§ 8) of the First Investigation. If
the subject indicates nothing to himself, it is because he cannot
do so, and he cannot do so because there is no need of it. Since
lived experience is immediately self-present in the mode of cer-
titude and absolute necessity, the manifestation of the self to the
self through the delegation or representation of an indicative sign
is impossible because it is superfluous. It would be, in every
sense of the term, mthout reason-thus without cause. Without
cause because without purpose: zwecklos, Husserl says.
This Zwecklosigkeit of inward communication is the nonal-
terity, the nondifference in the identity of presence as self-pres-
ence. Of course this concept of presence not only involves the
enigma of a being appearing in absolute proximity to itself; it
also designates the temporal essence of this proximity-which
does not serve to dispel the enigma. The self-presence of experi-
ence must be produced in the present taken as a now. And this is
just what Husserl says: If "mental acts" are not announced to
themselves through the intermediary of a "Kundgabe," 10 if they
do not have to be informed about themselves through the inter-
mediary of indications, it is because they are "lived by us in the
same instant" (im selben Augenblick). The present of self-pres-
ence would be as indivisible as the blink of an eye.

[Derrida then raises the question of Husserl's own apparent rec-

ognition of the necessity of inscription for the constitution of abso-
lutely ideal objects, that is, of scientific truth. He refers back to his
introduction to The Origin of Geometry where he demonstrated that
this concession to inscription remains tied to everything said here
about voice because Husserl supposes the concept of phonetic writ-
 Speech and Phenomena 19

ing. Writing would thus, according to Husserl, serve "to fix, inscribe,
record, and incarnate an already prepared utterance. To reactivate
writing is always to reawaken an expression in an indication, a word
in the body of a letter. ... Already speech was playing the same role
by first constituting the identity of sense in thought."]
In order really to understand where the power of the voice lies,
and how metaphysics, philosophy, and the determination of being
as presence constitute the epoch of the voice as technical mas-
tery of objective being, to understand properly the unity of techne
and phone, we must think through the objectivity of the object.
The ideal object is the most objective of objects; independent of
the here-and-now acts and events of the empirical subjectivity
which intends it, it can be repeated infinitely while remaining
the same. Since its presence to intuition, its being-before the
gaze, has no essential dependence on any worldly or empirical
synthesis, the restitution of its sense in the form of presence
becomes a universal and unlimited possibility. But, being noth-
ing outside the world, its ideal being must be constituted, re-
peated, and expressed in a medium that does not impair the
presence and self-presence of the acts that aim at it, a medium
that preserves both the presence of the object before intuition
and self-presence, the absolute proximity of the acts to them-
selves. The ideality of the object, which is only its being-for a
nonempirical consciousness, can only be expressed in an element
the phenomenality of which does not have worldly form. The
name of this element is the voice. The voice is heard. 11 Phonic
signs ("acoustical images" in Saussure's sense, or the phenome-
nological voice) are heard [entendus ="heard" and also "under-
stood"] by the subject who proffers them in the absolute proxim-
ity of their present. The subject does not have to pass forth
beyond himself to be immediately affected by his expressive
activity. My words are "alive" because they seem not to leave
me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible dis-
tance; not to cease to belong to me, to be at my disposition
"without further props. 11 In any event, the phenomenon of speech,
the phenomenological voice, gives itself out in this manner. The
objection will perhaps be raised that this interiority belongs to
the phenomenological and ideal aspect of every signifier. The
ideal form of a written signifier, for example, is not in the world,
20 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

and the distinction between the grapheme and the empirical

body of the corresponding graphic sign separates an inside from
an outside, phenomenological consciousness from the world. And
this is true for every visual or spatial signifier. To be sure. And
yet every nonphonic signifier involves a spatial reference within
its very "phenomenon," in the phenomenological !nonworldly)
sphere of experience in which it is given. The sense of being
"outside," "in the world," is an essential component of its phe-
nomenon. Apparently there is nothing like this in the phenome-
non of the voice. In phenomenological interiority, hearing one-
self and seeing oneself are two radically different orders of self-
relation. Even before a description of this difference is sketched
out, we can understand why the hypothesis of the "monologue"
could have sanctioned the distinction between indication and
expression only by presupposing an essential tie between expres-
sion and phone. Between the phonic element !in the phenome-
nological sense and not that of a real sound) and expression,
taken as the logical character of a signifier that is animated in
view of the ideal presence of a Bedeutung !itself related to an
object), there must be a necessary bond. Husserl is unable to
bracket what in glossamatics is called the "substance of expres-
sion" without menacing his whole enterprise. The appeal to this
substance thus plays a major philosophical role.
Let us try, then, to interrogate the phenomenological value of
the voice, its transcendent dignity with regard to every other
signifying substance. We think, and will try to show, that this
transcendence is only apparent. But this "appearance" is the very
essence of consciousness and its history, and it determines an
epoch characterized by the philosophical idea of truth and the
opposition between truth and appearance, as this opposition still
functions in phenomenology. It can therefore not be called "ap-
pearance" or be named within the sphere of metaphysical con-
ceptuality. One cannot attempt to deconstruct this transcen-
dence without descending, feeling one's way across the inherited
concepts, toward the unnamable.
The "apparent transcendence" of the voice thus results from
the fact that the signified, which is always ideal by essence, the
"expressed" Bedeutung, is immediately present in the act of
expression. This immediate presence results from the fact that
 Speech and Phenomena 21

the phenomenological "body" of the signifier seems to be effaced

at the very moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to
the element of ideality. It performs a phenomenological reduc-
tion on itself, transforming the worldly opacity of its body into
pure diaphaneity. This effacement of the sensible body and its
exteriority is for consciousness the very form of the immediate
presence of the signified.
Why is the phoneme the most "ideal" of signs? Where does
this complicity between sound and ideality, or rather, between
voice and ideality, come from? (Hegel was more attentive to this
than any other philosopher, and, from the point of view of the
history of metaphysics, this is a noteworthy fact, one we will
examine elsewhere.) 12 When I speak, it belongs to the phenome-
nological essence of this operation that I hear myself lje m'en-
tende J at the same time that I speak. The signifier, animated by
my breath and by the meaning-intention (in Husserl's language,
the expression animated by the BedeutungsintentionJ, is in ab-
solute proximity to me. The living act, the life-giving act, the
Lebendigkeit, which animates the body of the signifier and trans-
forms it into a meaningful expression, the soul of language, seems
not to separate itself from itself, from its own self-presence. It
does not risk death in the body of a signifier that is given over to
the world and the visibility of space. It can show the ideal object
or ideal Bedeutung connected to it without venturing outside
ideality, outside the interiority of self-present life. The system of
Zeigen, 13 the finger and eye movements (concerning which we
earlier wondered whether they were not inseparable from phe-
nomenality) are not absent here; but they are interiorized. The
phenomenon continues to be an object for the voice; indeed,
insofar as the ideality of the object seems to depend on the voice
and thus becomes absolutely accessible in it, the system which
ties phenomenality to the possibility of Zeigen functions better
than ever in the voice. The phoneme is given as the dominated
ideality of the phenomenon.
This self-presence of the animating act in the transparent spir-
ituality of what it animates, this inwardness of life with itself,
which has always made us say that speech [parole] is alive,
supposes, then, that the speaking subject hears himself [s'en-
tendej in the present. Such is the essence or norm of speech. It is
22 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

implied in the very structure of speech that the speaker hears

himself: both that he perceives the sensible form of the pho-
nemes and that he understands his own expressive intention. If
accidents occur which seem to contradict this teleological neces-
sity, either they will be overcome by some supplementary opera-
tion or there will be no speech. Deaf and dumb go hand in hand.
He who is deaf can engage in colloquy only by shaping his acts
in the form of words, whose telos requires that they be heard by
him who utters them.
Considered from a purely phenomenological point of view,
within the reduction, the process of speech has the originality of
presenting itself already as pure phenomenon, as having already
suspended the natural attitude and the existential thesis of the
world. The operation of "hearing oneself speak" is an auto-affec-
tion of an absolutely unique kind. On the one hand, it operates
within the medium of universality; what appears as signified
therein must be idealities that are idealiter indefinitely repeata-
ble or transmissible as the same. On the other hand, the subject
can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he
produces, without passing through an external detour, the world,
the sphere of what is not properly his, the nonproper. Every other
form of auto-affection must either pass through what is outside
the sphere of "ownness" or forgo any claim to universality. When
I see myself, either because I gaze upon a limited region of my
body or because it is reflected in a mirror, the nonproper has
already entered the field of this auto-affection, with the result
that it is no longer pure. In the experience of touching and being
touched, the same thing happens. In both cases, the surface of
my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in
the world. But, we could ask, are there not forms of pure auto-
affection in the inwardness of one's own body which do not
require the intervention of any surface displayed in the world
and yet are not of the order of the voice? But then these forms
remain purely empirical, for they could not belong to a medium
of universal signification. Now, to account for the phenomeno-
logical power of the voice, we shall have to specify the concept
of pure auto-affection more precisely and describe what in it
makes it proper to universality. As pure auto-affection, the oper-
ation of hearing oneself speak seems to reduce even the inward
 Speech and Phenomena 23

surface of one's own body; in its phenomenal being it seems

capable of dispensing with this exteriority within interiority, this
interior space in which our experience or image of our own body
is spread forth. This is why hearing oneself speak [s'entendre
parler/ is experienced as an absolutely pure auto-affection, occur-
ring in a self-proximity that would in fact be the absolute reduc-
tion of space in general. It is this purity that makes it fit for
universality. Requiring the intervention of no determinate sur-
face in the world, being produced in the world as pure auto-
affection, it is a signifying substance absolutely at our disposi-
tion. For the voice meets no obstacle to its emission in the world
precisely because it is produced as pure auto-affection. This auto-
affection is no doubt the possibility for what is called subjectiv-
ity or the for-itself, but, without it, no world as such would
appear. For at its core it supposes the unity of sound (which is in
the world) and phone /in the phenomenological sense). An objec-
tive "worldly" science surely can teach us nothing about the
essence of the voice. But the unity of sound and voice, which
allows the voice to be produced in the world as pure auto-affec-
tion, is the sole case to escape the distinction between what is
worldly and what is transcendental; by the same token, it makes
that distinction possible.
It is this universality that dictates that, de jure and by virtue
of its structure, no consciousness is possible without the voice.
The voice is the being that is proximate to itself in the form of
universality, as con-sciousness [con-science/; the voice is con-
sciousness. In colloquy, the propagation of signs does not seem
to meet any obstacles because it brings together two phenome-
nological origins of pure auto-affection. To speak to someone is
doubtless to hear oneself speak, to be heard by oneself; but, at
the same time, if one is heard by another, to speak is to make
him repeat immediately in himself the hearing-oneself-speak in
the very form in which I produced it. This immediate repetition
is a reproduction of pure auto-affection without the help of any-
thing external. This possibility of reproduction, the structure of
which is absolutely unique, gives itself out as the phenomenon
of a mastery or limitless power over the signifier, since the sig-
nifier itself has the form of what is not external. Ideally, in the
teleological essence of speech, it would then be possible for the
24 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

signifier to be in absolute proximity to the signified aimed at in

intuition and governing the meaning. The signifier would be-
come perfectly diaphanous due to the absolute proximity to the
signified. This proximity is broken when, instead of hearing my-
self speak, I see myself write or gesture.
1.... ]
But if Husserl had to recognize the necessity of these "incar-
nations," even as beneficial threats, it is because an underlying
motif was disturbing and contesting the security of these tradi-
tional distinctions from within and because the possibility of
writing dwelt within speech, which was itself at work in the
inwardness of thought.
And here again we find all the incidences of originary nonpres-
ence the emergence of which we have already noted on several
occasions. Even while repressing difference by assigning it to the
exteriority of the signifiers, Husserl could not fail to recognize
its work at the origin of sense and presence. As the operation of
the voice, auto-affection supposed that a pure difference comes
to divide self-presence. In this pure difference is rooted the pos-
sibility of everything we think we can exclude from auto-affec-
tion: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon as it is
admitted that auto-affection is the condition for self-presence, no
pure transcendental reduction is possible. But it was necessary to
pass through the transcendental reduction in order to grasp this
difference in what is closest to it-which cannot mean grasping
it in its identity, its purity, or its origin, for it has none. We come
closest to it in the movement of differance. 14
This movement of differance is not something that happens to
a transcendental subject; it produces the subject. Auto-affection
is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that
would already be itself (autos). It produces sameness as self-
relation within self-difference; it produces sameness as the noni-
dentical.
Shall we say that the auto-affection we have been talking
about up until now concerns only the operation of the voice?
Shall we say that difference concerns only the order of the phonic
"signifier" or the "secondary stratum" of expression? Can we
always hold out for the possibility of a pure and purely self-
 Speech and Phenomena 25

present identity at the level Husserl wanted to disengage as a

level of pre-expressive experience, that is, the level of sense prior
to Bedeutung and expression?
It would be easy to show that such a possibility is excluded at
the very root of transcendental experience.
Why, in fact, has the concept of auto-affection imposed itself
on us? What constitutes the originality of speech, what distin-
guishes it from every other element of signification, is that its
substance seems to be purely temporal. And this temporality
does not unfold a sense that would itself be nontemporal; even
before being expressed, sense is through and through temporal.
According to Husserl, the omnitemporality of ideal objects is but
a mode of temporality. And when Husserl describes a sense that
seems to escape temporality, he hastens to make it clear that
this is only a provisional step in analysis and that he is consider-
ing a constituted temporality. However, as soon as one takes the
movement of temporalization into account, as it is already ana-
lyzed in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,
the concept of pure auto-affection must be employed as well.
This we know is what Heidegger does in Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics, precisely when he is concerned with the subject
of time. The "source point" or "originary impression," that out
of which the movement of temporalization is produced, is al-
ready pure auto-affection. First it is a pure production, since
temporality is never the real predicate of a being. The intuition
of time itself cannot be empirical; it is a receiving that receives
nothing. The absolute novelty of each now is therefore engen-
dered by nothing; it consists in an originary impression that
engenders itself :

The primal impression is the absolute beginning of this

generation-the primal source, that from which all others
are continuously generated. In itself, however, it is not gen-
erated; it does not come into existence as that which is
generated but through spontaneous generation. It does not
grow up lit has no seed): it is primal creation IThe Phenom-
enology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S.
Churchill [Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1964]
Appendix I, p. 131; italics added).
26 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

This pure spontaneity is an impression; it creates nothing. The

new now is not a being, it is not a produced object; and every
language fails to describe this pure movement other than by
metaphor, that is, by borrowing its concepts from the order of
the objects of experience, an order this temporalization makes
possible. Husserl continually warns us against these meta-
phors. 15 The process by which the living now, produced by spon-
taneous generation, must, in order to be a now and to be retained
in another now, affect itself without recourse to anything empir-
ical but with a new originary actuality in which it would become
a non-now, a past now-this process is indeed a pure auto-
affection in which the same is the same only in being affected by
the other, only by becoming the other of the same. This auto-
affection must be pure since the originary impression is here
affected by nothing other than itself, by the absolute "novelty"
of another originary impression which is another now. We speak
metaphorically as soon as we introduce a determinate being into
the description of this "movement"; we talk about "movement"
in the very terms that movement makes possible. But we have
been always already adrift in ontic metaphor; temporalization
here is the root of a metaphor that can only be originary. The
word time itself, as it has always been understood in the history
of metaphysics, is a metaphor which at the same time both
indicates and dissimulates the "movement" of this auto-affec-
tion. All the concepts of metaphysics-in particular those of
activity and passivity, will and nonwill, and therefore those of
affection or auto-affection, purity and impurity, etc.-cover up
the strange "movement" of this difference.
But this pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of
the living present, introduces into self-presence from the begin-
ning all the impurity putatively excluded from it. The living
present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from
the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace.
This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present
whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is
primordially a trace. The trace is not an attribute; we cannot say
that the self of the living present "primordially is" it. Originary-
being must be thought on the basis of the trace, and not the
reverse. This archewriting is at work at the origin of sense. Sense,
 Speech and Phenomena 27

being temporal in nature, as Husserl recognized, is never simply

present; it is always already engaged in the "movement" of the
trace, that is, in the order of "signification." It has always already
issued forth from itself into the "expressive stratum" of lived
experience. Since the trace is the intimate relation of the living
present to its outside, the opening to exteriority in general, to the
nonproper, etc., the temporalization of sense is, from the outset,
a "spacing." As soon as we admit spacing both as "interval" or
difference and as opening to the outside, there can no longer be
any absolute inside, for the "outside" has insinuated itself into
the movement by which the inside of the nonspatial, which is
called "time," appears, is constituted, is "presented." Space is
"in" time; it is time's pure leaving-itself; it is the "outside-itself"
as the self-relation of time. The exteriority of space, exteriority
as space, does not overtake time; rather, it opens as pure "out-
side" "within" the movement of temporalization. If we recall
now that the pure inwardness of phonic auto-affection supposed
the purely temporal nature of the "expressive" process, we see
that the theme of a pure inwardness of speech, or of the "hearing
oneself speak," is radically contradicted by "time" itself. The
going-forth "into the world" is also originarily implied by the
movement of temporalization. "Time" cannot be an "absolute
subjectivity" precisely because it cannot be thought on the basis
of a present and the self-presence of a present being. Like every-
thing thought under this heading, and like all that is excluded by
the most rigorous transcendental reduction, the "world" is origi-
narily implied by the movement of temporalization. As a relation
between an inside and an outside in general, an existent and a
nonexistent in general, a constituting and a constituted in gen-
eral, temporalization is at once the very power and limit of
phenomenological reduction. Hearing oneself speak is not the
interiority of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the
irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world
within speech. Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater
stage.
Thus, just as expression is not added like a "stratum" 16 to the
presence of a pre-expressive sense, so, in the same way, the inside
of expression does not accidentally happen to be affected by the
outside of indication. Their intertwining (Verflechtung) is origi-
28 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

nary; it is not a contingent association that could be undone by

methodic attention and patient reduction. The analysis, neces-
sary as it is, encounters an absolute limit at this point. If indica-
tion is not added to expression, which is not added to sense, we
can nonetheless speak in regard to them, of an originary
"supplement" 17 : their addition comes to make up for a defi-
ciency, it comes to compensate for an originary nonself-presence.
And if indication-for example, writing in the everyday sense-
must necessarily be "added" to speech to complete the constitu-
tion of the ideal object, if speech must be "added" to the thought
identity of the object, it is because the "presence" of sense and
speech had already from the start fallen short of itself.
[ .... ]

- Translated by David B. Allison

NOTES

1. I.e., purpose-ED.
2. Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities
Press, 1970), pp. 279-80. First Investigation § 8; further references to this
translation, abb1eviated LI, will be given in parentheses.
3. Cf. on this subject the note by the French translators of the Logical
Investigations (French ed., vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 276) and that by the French
translators of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (French
ed., p. 26).
4. Cf. on this subject The Origin of Geometry and the introduction to the
French translation, pp. 60-69.
5. The assertion implied by the whole of phenomenology is that the
Being (Sein) of the Ideal is nonreality, nonexistence. This predetermination
is the first word of phenomenology. Although it does not exist, ideality is
anything but a nonbeing. "Each attempt to transform the being of what is
ideal (das Sein des Idealen) into the possible being of what is real, must
obviously suffer shipwreck on the fact that possibilities themselves are ideal
objects. Possibilities can as little be found in the real world, as can numbers
in general, or triangles in general" (LI, Second Investigation, p. 345). "It is
naturally not our intention to put the being of what is ideal on a level with
the being-thought-of which characterizes the fictitious or the absurd (Wid-
ersinnigen)" (ibid., p. 352, § 8).
6. If one were to employ distinctions from "pure logical grammar" and
the Formal and Transcendental Logic, this impossibility would have to be
specified as follows: this proposition certainly makes sense, it constitutes
 Speech and Phenomena 29

intelligible speech, it is not sinnlos; but within this intelligibility and for the
reason indicated, it is "absurd" (with the absurdity of contradiction-Wid-
ersinnigkeit) and a fortiori "false." But as the classical idea of truth, which
guides these distinctions, has itself issued from such a concealment of the
relationship to death, this "falsity" is the very truth of truth. Hence, it is in
other completely different "categories" (if such thoughts can still be labeled
thus) that these movements have to be interpreted.
7. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R.
Boyce Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1931), I, p. 309; section 3, §
111; translation modified; further references to this translation will be in-
cluded in the text in parentheses.
8. Cf., particularly, LI, Second Investigation, ch. 2.
9. But if the re- of this re-presentation does not signify the simple-
repetitive or reflexive-reduplication that befalls a simple presence (which
is what the word representation has always meant), then what we are ap-
proaching or advancing here concerning the relation between presence and
representation must be approached in other terms. What we are describing
as originary representation can be provisionally designated with this term
only within the closure the limits of which we are here seeking to transgress
by setting down and demonstrating various contradictory or untenable prop-
ositions within it, attempting thereby to institute a kind of insecurity and to
open it up to the outside. This can be done only from a certain inside.
10. Manifestation.-En.
11. "La voix s'entend": the voice is heard, understood, but also it hears,
understands, and intends itself.-En.
12. See "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology" in
Margins of Philosophy [1972].-En.
13. Pointing, indication.-En.
14. For this term, see below, pp. 59-79.-En.
15. See, e.g., the admirable§ 36 of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness which proves the absence of a proper noun for this strange
"movement," which, furthermore, is not a movement. "For all this," con-
cludes Husserl, "names fail us." We would still have to radicalize Husserl's
intention here in a specific direction. For it is not by chance that he still
designates this unnamable as an "absolute subjectivity," that is, as a being
conceived on the basis of presence as substance, ousia, hypokeimenon: a
self-identical being in self-presence which forms the substance of a subject.
What is said to be unnameable in this paragraph is not exactly something we
know to be a present being in the form of self-presence, a substance modified
into a subject, into an absolute subject whose self-presence is pure and does
not depend on any external affection, any outside. All this is present, and we
can name it, the proof being that its being as absolute subjectivity is not
questioned. What is unnameable, according to Husserl, are only the "abso-
lute properties" of this subject; the subject therefore is indeed designated in
terms of the classical metaphysical schema that distinguishes substance
(present being) from its attributes. Another schema that keeps the incompa-
30 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

rable depth of the analysis within the closure of the metaphysics of presence
is the subject-object opposition. This being whose "absolute properties" are
indescribable is present as absolute subjectivity, is an absolutely present and
absolutely self-present being, only in its opposition to the object. The object
is relative; what is absolute is the subject: "We can say only that this flux is
something which we name in conformity with what is constituted, but it is
nothing temporally 'objective.' It is absolute subjectivity and has the abso-
lute properties of something to be denoted metaphorically as 'flux,' as a
point of actuality, primal source-point, that from which springs the 'now,'
and so on. In the lived experience of actuality, we have the primal source-
point and a continuity of moments of reverberation (Nachhallmomenten).
For all this, names are lacking" (ITC, § 36, p. 100; italics added). This
determination of "absolute subjectivity" would also have to be crossed out
as soon as we conceive the present on the basis of difference, and not the
reverse. The concept of subjectivity belongs a priori and in general to the
order of the constituted. This holds a fortiori for the analogical appresenta·
tion that constitutes intersubjectivity. lntersubjectivity is inseparable from
temporalization taken as the openness of the present upon an outside of
itself, upon another absolute present. This being outside itself proper to time
is its spacing: it is a protostage /archi-scenej. This stage, as the relation of
one present to another present as such, that is, as a nonderived re-presenta·
tion (Vergegenwiirtigung or Repriisentation), produces the structure of signs
in general as "reference," as being-for-something (fiir etwas sein), and radi-
cally precludes their reduction. There is no constituting subjectivity. The
very concept of constitution itself must be deconstructed.
16. Moreover, in the important §§ 124-27 of Ideas I, which we shall
elsewhere follow step by step, Husserl invites us-while continually speak-
ing of an underlying stratum of pre-expressive experience-not to "hold too
hard by the metaphor of stratification (Schichtung); expression is not of the
nature of an overlaid varnish or covering garment; it is a mental formation,
which exercises new intentional influences on the intentional substratum
(Unterschicht)" (Ideas I, p. 349, § 124).
17. This notion of originary supplementarity is developed at length in
the second part of Of Grammatology; see below, pp. 32-33-Eo.
 From Of Grammatology

(De Is grammatologie, [1967])

Of Grammatology, for many English-speaking readers Derrida's most

well known book, opens with a chapter titled "The End of the Book
and the Beginning of Writing." One should thus be forewarned that,
despite a certain familiar appearance, this is perhaps not a book, or
not a book like any other. But what is this "book" the end of which
is announced here so as to make way for something else called
writing?
It is the book dreamed up by logocentrism. On the first page of
the Grammatology, Derrida proposes, in effect, to substitute the
latter word for metaphysics in order to foreground that which has
always determined metaphysical systems of thought: their depen-
dance on a logos or speech, itself conceived on the model of the
phonetic sign. As in Aristotle's famous formulation, "Spoken words
are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the
symbols of spoken words," speech is thought of as remaining closer
to psychic interiority !that itself reflects things in the world by
means of natural resemblance) than writing, which symbolizes inte-
riority only at a second remove. And writing can be seen as deriving
from speech because it is thought of as purely phonetic transcrip-
tion. It mirrors speech but is less apt than speech to restore the
"thing itself," the referent, idea, or signified which, in one way or
another, occupies the place of a pure intelligibility that has never
"fallen" into the sensible realm of the exterior sign or symbol, and
that therefore always remains present to itself. Derrida quickly
sketches a few of the most important revisions this logocentrism
32 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

has undergone in the history of Western thought (the Scholastics,

Cartesianism, Rousseauism-to which he will return at length in
the second part of the book- Hegel, Heidegger) so as to underscore
its persistence to a greater or lesser extent, even with Heidegger,
who nevertheless so persistently challenged the metaphysics of pres-
ence. Nor has modern linguistics or semiotics, as inaugurated by
Saussure and elaborated by structuralists such as Roman Jakobson,
succeeded in divesting their science of its profoundly metaphysical,
logocentric ties. Derrida insists that linguistics remains a metaphys-
ics as long as it retains the distinction between signified and signifier
within the concept of the sign. This distinction is always ultimately
grounded in a pure intelligibility tied to an absolute logos: the face
of God. The concept of the sign, whose history is coextensive with
the history of logocentrism, is essentially theological.
How then to understand writing differently? To write differently?
Within the same tradition that debases writing as the sensible exte-
riority of the sign there is also and paradoxically a privileged place
reserved for it as the "writing" inscribed-by God or by Nature-in
the soul. "The paradox that must be attended to is this," writes
Derrida: "natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontem-
poral writing, is thus named by way of metaphor .... Of course, this
metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a 'literal' meaning of
writing as the first metaphor.... It is not therefore a matter of
inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of de-
termining the 'literal' meaning of writing as tnetaphoricity it~elf"
(p. I 5). This determination would be the beginning of writing be-
cause "metaphoricity itself" cannot have an ultimate referent in
some eternal presence. It cannot be totalized, as in a volume or a
book. The idea of the book, observes Derrida, is always an idea of
the totality of the signified pre-existing and watching over the in-
scription of the signifier while remaining independent in its ideality.
"The idea of the book ... is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.
It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism
against the disruption of writing ... against difference in general"
jp. 18).
Of Grammatology has two parts. "Writing Before the Letter," the
first part to which we have been referring and from which all the
following selections are taken, sets out a broad theoretical, historical
grid within which are identified the stakes of a deconstruction of
logocentrism. Part II, "Nature, Culture, Writing," proceeds to carry
out a minute and stunning deconstructive reading of Rousseau's
evaluation of writing, particularly in The Essay on the Origin of
 Of Grammatology 33

Languages, as a supplement to speech. The latter notion, which

floats between its two senses of that which is added on and that
which substitutes for and supplants, is an example of the undecida-
bility on which Derrida's deconstructive readings are often made to
tum. Having discovered undecidable supplementarity in Rousseau,
he will often refer to it as a semiconcept not unlike differance (see
below).
 Of Grammatology

1.... ]
The reassuring evidence within which Western tradition had to
organize itself and must continue to live would therefore be as
follows: The order of the signified is never contemporary, is at
best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel-discrepant by the
time of a breath-from the order of the signifier. And the sign
must be the unity of a heterogeneity, since the signified (sense or
thing, noeme or reality) is not in itself a signifier, a trace: in any
case is not constituted in its sense by its relationship with a
possible trace. The formal essence of the signified is presence,
and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phone is the
privilege of presence. This is the inevitable response as soon as
one asks: "What is the sign?," that is to say, when one submits
the sign to the question of essence, to the "ti esti." 1 The "formal
essence" of the sign can only be determined in terms of presence.
One cannot get around that response, except by challenging the
very form of the question and beginning to think that the sign)(
that ill-named~, the only one, that escapes the instituting
question of philosophy: "What is ... ?" 2
Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, eval-
uation, difference, and all the "empiricist" or nonphilosophical
motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout
the history of the West, and besides, have had nothing but the
inevitable weakness of being produced in the field of philosophy,
Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as Heideg-
ger wished) 3 within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the
liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with
respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the pri-
 Of Grammatology 35

mary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading,

and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche "originary" 4
operations II put that word within quotation marks for reasons
to appear later) with regard to a sense that they do not first have
to transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth
signified in the original element and presence of the logos, as
topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori
necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian
type, it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or
make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound
ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire
fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or
metaphysical text. The virulence of Nietzschean thought could
not be more completely misunderstood. On the contrary, one
must accentuate the "naivete" of a breakthrough which cannot
attempt a step outside of metaphysics, which cannot criticize
metaphysics radically without still utilizing in a certain way, in
a certain type or a certain style of text, propositions that, read
within the philosophic corpus, that is to say according to Nietzsche
ill-read or unread, have always been and will always be "naive-
tes," incoherent signs of an absolute appurtenance. Therefore,
rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we
should perhaps offer him up to it completely, underwriting that
interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the
point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being
almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute
strangeness, where his text finally invokes a different type of
reading, more faithful to his type of writing: Nietzsche has writ-
ten what he has written. He has written that writing-and first
of all his own-is not originarily subordinate to the logos and to
truth. And that this subordination has come into being during an
epoch the meaning of which we must deconstruct. Now in this
direction jbut only in this direction, for read otherwise, the
Nietzschean demolition remains dogmatic and, like all reversals,
a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to over-
throw. On that point and in that order of reading, the conclu-
sions of Heidegger and Fink are irrefutable), Heideggerian thought
would reinstate rather than destroy the instance of the logos and
of the truth of being as "primum signatum:" the "transcenden-
36 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

tal" signified ("transcendental" in a certain sense, as in the Middle

Ages the transcendental-ens, unum, verum, bonum-was said
to be the "primum cognitum") implied by all categories or all
determined significations, by all lexicons and all syntax, and
therefore by all linguistic signifiers, though not to be identified
simply with any one of those signifiers, allowing itself to be
precomprehended through each of them, remaining irreducible
to all the epochal determinations that it nonetheless makes pos-
sible, thus opening the history of the logos, yet itself being only
through the logos; that is, being nothing before the logos and
outside of it. The logos of being, "Thought obeying the Voice of
Being," 5 is the first and the last resource of the sign, of the
difference between signans and signatum. There has to he a
transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and
signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible. It is not by
chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcen-
dental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a lan-
guage of words [mots]. The voice is heard (understood)-that
undoubtedly is what is called conscience-closest to the self as
the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that
necessarily has the form of time and does not borrow from out-
side of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier,
any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is
the unique experience of the signified producing itself sponta-
neously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified con-
cept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unwordly
character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this
ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the
voice is not merely one illusion among many-since it is the
condition of the very idea of truth-hut I shall elsewhere show
in what it does delude itself. This illusion is the history of truth
and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of this
experience, the word [mot} is lived as the elementary and unde-
composable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept
and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is
considered in its greatest purity-and at the same time in the
condition of its possibility-as the experience of "being." The
word being, or at any rate the word designating the sense of being
in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word"
 Of Grammatology 37

("Urwort"), 6 the transcendental word assuring the possibility of

being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in
all language and-this is the opening of Being and Time-only
this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question
of the sense of being in general, beyond all regional ontologies
and all metaphysics: a question that broaches philosophy jfor
example, in the Sophist) and lets itself be taken over by philoso-
phy, a question that Heidegger repeats by submitting the history
of metaphysics to it. Heidegger reminds us constantly that the
sense of being is neither the word being nor the concept of being.
But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language
of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular
system of language (concesso non dato), at least to the possibility
of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible
simplicity. One could thus think that it remains only to choose
between two possibilities. (r) Does a modem linguistics, a sci-
ence of signification breaking up the unity of the word and break-
ing with its alleged irreducibility, still have anything to do with
"language?" Heidegger would probably doubt it. (2) Conversely,
is not all that is profoundly meditated as the thought or the
question of being enclosed within an old linguistics of the word
which one practices here unknowingly? Unknowingly because
such a linguistics, whether spontaneous or systematic, has al-
ways had to share the presuppositions of metaphysics. The two
operate on the same grounds.
It goes without saying that the alternatives cannot be so simple.
On the one hand, if modern linguistics remains completely
enclosed within a classical conceptuality, if especially it naively
uses the word being and all that it presupposes, that which,
within this linguistics, deconstructs the unity of the word in
general can no longer, according to the model of the Heideggerian
question, as it functions powerfully from the very opening of
Being and Time, be circumscribed as antic science or regional
ontology. Inasmuch as the question of being unites indissolubly
with the precomprehension of the word being, without being
reduced to it, the linguistics that works for the deconstruction of
the constituted unity of that word has only, in fact or in princi-
ple, to have the question of being posed in order to define its field
and the order of its dependence.
38 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

Not only is its field no longer simply ontic, but the limits of
ontology that correspond to it no longer have anything regional
about them. And can what I say here of linguistics, or at least of
a certain work that may be undertaken within it and thanks to
it, not be said of all research inasmuch as and to the strict extent
that it would finally deconstitute the founding concept-words of
ontology, of being in its privilege? Outside of linguistics, it is in
psychoanalytic research that this breakthrough seems at present
to have the greatest likelihood of being expanded.
Within the strictly limited space of this breakthrough, these
"sciences" are no longer dominated by the questions of a tran-
scendental phenomenology or a fundamental ontology. One may
perhaps say, following the order of questions inaugurated by
Being and Time and radicalizing the questions of Husserlian
phenomenology, that this breakthrough does not belong to sci-
ence itself, that what thus seems to be produced within an ontic
field or within a regional ontology, does not belong to them by
rights and leads back to the question of being itself.
Because it is indeed the question of being that Heidegger asks
of metaphysics. And with it the question of truth, of sense, of the
logos. The incessant meditation upon that question does not
restore confidence. On the contrary, it dislodges the confidence
at its own depth, which, being a matter of the meaning of being,
is more difficult than is often believed. In examining the state
just before all determinations of being, destroying the securities
of onto-theology, such a meditation contributes, quite as much
as the most contemporary linguistics, to the dislocation of the
unity of the sense of being, that is, in the last instance, the unity
of the word.
It is thus that, after evoking the "voice of being," Heidegger
recalls that it is silent, mute, insonorous, wordless, originarily a-
phonic (die Gewii.hr der lautlosen Stimme verborgener Quellen
.. .). The voice of the sources is not heard [ne s'entend pas]. A
rupture between the originary meaning of being and the word,
between meaning and the voice, between "the voice of being"
and the "phone," between "the call of being," and articulated
sound; such a rupture, which at once confirms a fundamental
metaphor, and renders it suspect by accentuating its metaphoric
discrepancy, translates the ambiguity of the Heideggerian situa-
 Of Grammatology 39

tion with respect to the metaphysics of presence and logocentr-

ism. It is at once contained within it and transgresses it. But it is
impossible to separate the two. The very movement of transgres-
sion sometimes holds it back short of the limit. In opposition to
what we suggested above, it must be remembered that, for Hei-
degger, the sense of being is never simply and rigorously a "sig-
nified." It is not by chance that that word is not used; that means
that being escapes the movement of the sign, a proposition that
can equally well be understood as a repetition of the classical
tradition and as a caution with respect to a technical or meta-
physical theory of signification. On the other hand, the sense of
being is literally neither "primary," nor "fundamental," nor
"transcendental," whether understood in the scholastic, Kantian,
or Husserlian sense. The extrication of being as "transcending"
the categories of the entity, the opening of fundamental ontology,
are nothing but necessary yet provisional moments. From The
Introduction to Metaphysics onward, Heidegger renounces the
project of and the word ontology. 7 The necessary, originary, and
irreducible dissimulation of the meaning of being, its occultation
within the very blossoming forth of presence, that retreat with-
out which there would be no history of being which was com-
pletely history and history of being, Heidegger's insistence on
noting that being is produced as history only through the logos
and is nothing outside of it, the difference between being and the
entity-all this clearly indicates that fundamentally nothing es-
capes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance,
the difference between signified and signifier is nothing. This
proposition of transgression, not yet integrated into a careful
discourse, runs the risk of formulating regression itself. One
must therefore go by way of the question of being as it is directed
by Heidegger and by him alone, at and beyond onto-theology, in
order to reach the rigorous thought of that strange nondifference
and in order to determine it correctly. Heidegger occasionally
reminds us that "being," as it is fixed in its general syntactic and
lexicological forms within linguistics and Western philosophy, is
not a primary and absolutely irreducible signified, that it is still
rooted in a system of languages and an historically determined
"significance," although strangely privileged as the virtue of dis-
closure and dissimulation; particularly when he invites us to
40 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

meditate on the "privilege" of the "third person singular of the

present indicative" and the "infinitive." Western metaphysics,
as the limitation of the sense of being within the field of pres-
ence, is produced as the domination of a linguistic form. 8 To
question the origin of that domination does not amount to hy-
postatizing a transcendental signified, but to a questioning of
what constitutes our history and what produced transcendental-
ity itself. Heidegger brings it up also when in Zur Seinsfrage, for
the same reason, he lets the word being be read only if it is
crossed out (kreuzweise Durchstreichung). That cross is not,
however, a "merely negative syrnbol." 9 This erasure is the final
writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the presence of a transcen-
dental signified is effaced while still remaining legible. Is effaced
while still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible
the very idea of the sign. Inasmuch as it de-limits onto-theology,
the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, this last writing
is also the first writing.
To come to recognize, not before but on the horizon of the
Heideggerian paths, and yet in them, that the sense of being is
not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified (even if it was
always dissimulated within the epoch) but already, in a truly
unheard of sense, a determined signifying trace, is to affirm that
within the decisive concept of ontico-ontological difference, all
is not to be thought at one go; entity and being, ontic and
ontological, "ontico-ontological," would be in an original style,
derivative with regard to difference; and with respect to what I
shall later call differance, an economic concept designating the
production of differing/deferring. The ontico-ontological differ-
ence and its ground (Grund) in the "transcendence of Dasein" 10
are not absolutely originary. Differance by itself would be more
"originary," but one would no longer be able to call it "origin" or
"ground," those notions belonging essentially to the history of
onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacement of
difference. It can, however, be thought of in the closest proximity
to itself only on one condition: that one begins by determining it
as the ontico-ontological difference before erasing that determi-
nation. The necessity of passing through that erased determina-
tion, the necessity of that trick of writing is irreducible. An
unemphatic and difficult thought that, through much unper-
 Of Grammatology 41

ceived mediation, must carry the entire burden of our question,

a question that I shall provisionally call historial [historiale]. It
is with its help that I shall later be able to attempt to relate
differance and writing.
The hesitation of these thoughts (here Nietzsche's and Heideg-
ger's) is not an "incoherence": it is a trembling proper to all post-
Hegelian attempts and to this passage between two epochs. The
movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the
outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take
accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting
them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the
more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from
the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of
subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally,
that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and
atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way
falls prey to its own work.

r
[ .... ]
,. '
The hinge [brisurej 11 marks the impossibility that a sign, the
unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the pleni-
tude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why there is
no full speech, however much one might wish to restore it with
or against psychoanalysis. Before thinking to reduce it or to re-
store the meaning of the full speech which claims to be truth,
one must ask the question of meaning and of its origin in differ-
ence. Such is the place of a problematic of the trace.
Why of the trace~ What led us to the choice of this word? I
have begun to answer this question. But this question is such,
and such the nature of my answer, that the place of the one and
of the other must constantly be in movement. If words and
concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one
can justify one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within
a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The
justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It
corresponds to a condition of forces and translates an historical
calculation. Thus, over and above those that I have already de-
fined, a certain number of givens belonging to the discourse of
our time have progressively imposed this choice upon me. The
42 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

word trace must of itself refer to a certain number of contempo-

rary discourses the force of which I intend to take into account.
Not that I accept them totally. But the word trace establishes the
clearest connections with them and thus permits me to dispense
with certain developments which have already demonstrated their
effectiveness in those fields. Thus, I relate this concept of trace
to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas
and his critique of ontology: 12 relationship to the illeity as to the
alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the
originary or modified form of presence. Reconciled here to a
Heideggerian intention,-as it is not in Levinas's thought-this
notion signifies, sometimes beyond Heideggerian discourse, the
undermining of an ontology that, in its innermost course, has
determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of
language as the full continuity of speech. To make enigmatic
what one thinks one understands by the words proximity, im-
mediacy, presence (the proximate {proche/, the proper {propre/,
and the pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book. This
deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the de-
construction of consciousness, and therefore through the irredu-
cible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean
and Freudian discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, nota-
bly in biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and
irreducible.
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be
thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality
and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of significa-
tion, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or
not, in one form or another, in a "sensible" and "spatial" element
that is called "exterior." Arche-writing, the first possibility of
the spoken word, then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the
birthplace of "usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, 13
this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the
enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside
to an outside: spacing. The outside, "spatial" and "objective"
exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing
in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the
gramme, without differance as temporalization, without the
nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the pre-
 Of Grammatology 43

sent, without the relationship to death as the concrete structure

of the living present. Metaphor would be forbidden. The pres-
ence-absence of the trace, which one should not even call its
ambiguity but rather its play jfor the word ambiguity requires
the logic of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic),
carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body
and soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I have
recalled. All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul
or of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist,
dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics
whose entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduc-
tion of the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full pres-
ence summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a
speech dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by
an onto-theology determining the archeological and eschatologi-
cal meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without
differance: another name for death, historial metonymy where
God's name holds death in check. That is why, if this movement
begins its era in the form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist
metaphysics. Only infinite being can reduce the difference in
presence. In that sense, the name of God, at least as it is pro-
nounced within classical rationalism, is the name of indifference
itself. Only a positive infinity can lift the trace, "sublimate" it
(it has recently been proposed that the Hegelian Aufhebung be
translated as sublimation; this translation may be of dubious
worth as translation, but the juxtaposition is of interest here). 14
We must not therefore speak of a "theological prejudice," func-
tioning sporadically when it is a question of the plenitude of the
logos; the logos as the sublimation of the trace is theological.
Infinitist theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are
creationisms or not. Spinoza himself said of the understanding-
or logos-that it was the immediate infinite mode of the divine
substance, even calling it its eternal son in the Short Treatise. It
is also to this epoch, "reaching completion" with Hegel, with a
theology of the absolute concept as logos, that all the noncritical
concepts accredited by linguistics belong, at least to the extent
that linguistics must confirm-and how can a science avoid it?
-the Saussurian decree marking out "the internal system of
language."
44 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of

writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature
and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with all
metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist,
objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference be-
tween outside and inside.
And above all with a "vulgar concept of time." I borrow this
expression from Heidegger. It designates, at the end of Being and
Time, a concept of time thought in terms of spatial movement or
of the now, and dominating all philosophy from Aristotle's Phys-
ics to Hegel's Logic. 15 This concept, which determines all of
classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's careless-
ness or from a theoretical lapse. It is intrinsic to the totality of
the history of the Occident, of what unites its metaphysics and
its technics. And we shall see it later associated with the lineari-
zation of writing, and with the linearist concept of speech. This
linearism is undoubtedly inseparable from phonologism; it can
raise its voice to the same extent that a linear writing can seem
to submit to it. Saussure's entire theory of the "linearity of the
signifier" could be interpreted from this point of view.
Auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimen-
sion of time. Their elements are presented in succession;
they form a chain. This feature becomes readily apparent
when they are represented in writing.... The signifier,
being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it
gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span,
and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a
line. 16
It is a point on which Jakobson disagrees with Saussure deci-
sively by substituting for the homogeneity of the line the struc-
ture of the musical staff, "the chord in music." 17 What is here in
question is not Saussure's affirmation of the temporal essence of
discourse but the concept of time that guides this affirmation
and analysis: time conceived as linear successivity, as "consecu-
tivity." This model works by itself and all through the Course,
but Saussure is seemingly less sure of it in the Anagrams. At any
rate, its value seems problematic to him, and an interesting
paragraph elaborates a question left suspended:
 Of Grammatology 45

That the elements forming a word follow one another is a

truth that it would be better for linguistics not to consider
uninteresting because evident, but rather as the truth which
gives in advance the central principle of all useful reflec-
tions on words. In a domain as infinitely special as the one
I am about to enter, it is always by virtue of the fundamen-
tal law of the human word in general that a question like
that of consecutiveness or nonconsecutiveness may be
posed. 18

This linearist concept of time is therefore one of the deepest

adherences of the modem concept of the sign to its own history.
For at the limit, it is indeed the concept of the sign itself, and the
distinction, however tenuous, between the signifying and signi-
fied faces, that remain committed to the history of classical
ontology. The parallelism and correspondence of the faces or the
planes change nothing. That this distinction, first appearing in
Stoic logic, was necessary for the coherence of a scholastic the-
matics dominated by infinitist theology, does not allow us to
treat today's debt to it as a contingency or a convenience. I
suggested this at the outset, and perhaps the reasons are clearer
now. The signatum always referred, as to its referent, to a res, to
an entity created or at any rate first thought and spoken, think-
able and speakable, in the eternal present of the divine logos and
specifically in its breath. If it came to relate to the speech of a
finite being (created or not; in any case of an intracosmic entity)
through the intermediary of a signans, the signatum had an
immediate relationship with the divine logos which thought it
within presence and for which it was not a trace. And for modem
linguistics, if the signifier is a trace, the signified is a meaning
thinkable in principle within the full presence of an intuitive
consciousness. The signified face, to the extent that it is still
originarily distinguished from the signifying face, is not con-
sidered a trace; by rights, it has no need of the signifier to be
what it is. It is at the depth of this affirmation that the problem
of the relations between linguistics and semantics must be posed.
This reference to the meaning of a signified thinkable and pos-
sible outside of all signifiers remains dependent upon the onto-
theo-teleology that I have just evoked. It is thus the idea of the
46 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

sign that must be deconstructed through a meditation upon writ-

ing which would merge, as it must, with the undoing /sollicita-
tion] 19 of onto-theology, faithfully repeating it in its totality and
making it insecure in its most assured evidences. 20 One is nec-
essarily led to this from the moment that the trace affects the
totality of the sign on both its faces. That the signified is origi-
narily and essentially (and not only for a finite and created spirit)
trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier, is
the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphys-
ics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon
writing as its death and its resource.
[ .... l
On what conditions is a grammatology possible? Its fundamental
condition is certainly the undoing /sollicitation] of logocentrism.
But this condition of possibility turns into a condition of impos-
sibility. In fact it risks upsetting the concept of science as well.
Graphematics or grammatography ought no longer to be pre-
sented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant when com-
pared to a grammatological knowledge.
Without venturing up to that perilous necessity, and within
the traditional norms of scientificity upon which we fall back
provisionally, let us repeat the question; on what conditions is
grammatology possible?
On the condition of knowing what writing is and how the
plurivocity of this concept is formed. Where does writing begin?
When does writing begin? Where and when does the trace, writ-
ing in general, the common root of speech and writing, narrow
itself down into "writing" in the colloquial sense? Where and
when does one pass from one writing to another, from writing in
general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the
graphie, from one graphic system to another, and, in the field of
a graphic code, from one graphic discourse to another, etc.?
Where and how does it begin ... ~ A question of origin. But a
meditation upon the trace should undoubtedly teach us that
there is no origin, that is to say simple origin; that the questions
of origin carry with them a metaphysics of presence. Without
venturing here up to that perilous necessity, continuing to ask
questions of origin, we must recognize its two levels. "Where"
 Of Grammatology 47

and "when" may open empirical questions: what, within history

and within the world, are the places and the determined mo-
ments of the first phenomena of writing? These questions must
be answered by the investigation and research of facts, that is,
history in the colloquial sense, what has hitherto been practiced
by nearly all archeologists, epigraphists, and prehistorians who
have interrogated the world's scripts.
But the question of origin is at first confused with the question
of essence. It could just as well be said that it presupposes an
onto-phenomenological question in the strict sense of that term.
One must know what writing is in order to ask-knowing what
one is talking about and what the question is-where and when
writing begins. What is writing? How can it be identified? What
certitude of essence must guide the empirical investigation? Guide
it in principle, for it is a necessary fact that empirical investiga-
tion quickly activates reflexion upon essence. 21 It must operate
through "examples," and it can be shown how this impossibility
of beginning at the beginning of the straight line, as it is assigned
by the logic of transcendental reflexion, refers to the originarity
(under erasure) of the trace, to the root of writing. What the
thought of the trace has already taught us is that it can not be
simply submitted to the onto-phenomenological question of es-
sence. The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the
question What is! and contingently makes it possible. Here one
may no longer trust even the opposition of fact and principle,
which, in all its metaphysical, ontological, and transcendental
forms, has always functioned within the system of what is. With-
out venturing up to the perilous necessity of the question or the
arche-question "what is," let us take shelter in the field of gram-
matological knowledge.
Writing being thoroughly historical, it is at once natural and
surprising that the scientific interest in writing has always taken
the form of a history of writing. But science also required that a
theory of writing should guide the pure description of facts, tak-
ing for granted that this last expression has a sense.
[ .... ]
The history of writing is erected on the base of the history of the
gramme as an adventure of relationships between the face and
48 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

the hand. Here, by a precaution whose schema we must con-

stantly repeat, let us specify that the history of writing is not
explained by what we believe we know of the face and the hand,
of the glance, of the spoken word, and of the gesture. We must,
on the contrary, disturb this familiar knowledge, and awaken a
meaning of hand and face in terms of that history. [Andre] Leroi-
Gourhan describes the slow transformation of manual motricity
which frees the audio-phonic system for speech, and the glance
and the hand for writing. 22 In all these descriptions, it is difficult
to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at
the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the
origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the
techne, of orientation in general. In fact, it is not difficult; it is
essentially impossible. And this is true of all discourse. From one
discourse to another, the difference lies only in the mode of
inhabiting the interior of a conceptuality destined, or already
submitted, to decay. Within that conceptuality or already with-
out it, we must attempt to recapture the unity of gesture and
speech, of body and language, of tool and thought, before the
originality of the one and the other is articulated and without
letting this profound unity give rise to confusion. These original
significations must not be confused within the orbit or the sys-
tem where they are opposed. But to think the history of the
system, its meaning and value must, in an exorbitant way, be
somewhere exceeded.
This representation of the anthropos is then granted: a precar-
ious balance linked to manual-visual script. 23 This balance is
slowly threatened. It is at least known that "no major change"
giving birth to "a man of the future" who will no longer be a
"man," "can any longer be easily produced without the loss of
the hand, the teeth, and therefore of the upright position. A
toothless humanity that would exist in a prone position using
what limbs it had left to push buttons with, is not completely
inconceivable." 24
What always threatens this balance is confused with the very
thing that broaches the linearity of the symbol. We have seen
that the traditional concept of time, an entire organization of the
world and of language, was bound up with it. Writing in the
narrow sense-and phonetic writing above all-is rooted in a
 Of Grammatology 49

past of nonlinear writing. It had to be defeated, and here one can

speak, if one wishes, of technical success; it assured a greater
security and greater possibilities of capitalization in a dangerous
and anguishing world. But that was not done one single time. A
war was declared, and a suppression of all that resisted lineariza-
tion was installed. And first of what Leroi-Gourhan calls the
11
mythogram," a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimen-
sionally; there the meaning is not subjected to successivity, to
the order of a logical time, or to the irreversible temporality of
sound. This pluri-dimensionality does not paralyze history within
simultaneity; it corresponds to another level of historical experi-
ence, and one may just as well consider, conversely, linear thought
as a reduction of history. It is true that another word ought
perhaps to be used; the word history has no doubt always been
associated with a linear scheme of the unfolding of presence,
where the line relates the final presence to the originary presence
according to the straight line or the circle. For the same reason,
the pluri-dimensional symbolic structure is not given within the
category of the simultaneous. Simultaneity coordinates two ab-
solute presents, two points or instants of presence, and it remains
a linearist concept.
The concept of linearization is much more effective, faithful,
and intrinsic than those that are habitually used for classifying
scripts and describing their history jpictogram, ideogram, letter,
etc.). Exposing more than one prejudice, particularly about the
relationship between ideogram and pictogram, about so-called
graphic 11 realism," Leroi-Gourhan recalls the unity, within the
mythogram, of all the elements of which linear writing marks
the disruption: technics (particularly graphics), art1 religion,
economy. To recover the access to this unity, to this other struc-
ture of unity, we must de-sediment 11four thousand years of lin-
ear writing." 25
The linear norm was never able to impose itself absolutely for
the very reasons that intrinsically circumscribed graphic phone-
ticism. We now know them; these limits came into being at the
same time as the possibility of what they limited; they opened
what they finished and we have already named them: discrete-
ness, differance, spacing. The production of the linear norm thus
emphasized these limits and marked the concepts of symbol and
50 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

language. The process of linearization, as Leroi-Gourhan de-

scribes it on a very vast historical scale, and the Jakobsonian
critique of Saussure's linearist concept, must be thought of to-
gether. The "line" represents only a particular model, whatever
might be its privilege. This model has become a model and, as a
model, it remains inaccessible. If one allows that the linearity of
language entails this vulgar and mundane concept of temporality
(homogeneous, dominated by the form of the now and the ideal
of continuous movement, straight or circular) which Heidegger
shows to be the intrinsic determining concept of all ontology
from Aristotle to Hegel, the meditation upon writing and the
deconstruction of the history of philosophy become inseparable.
The enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that
philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the inte-
rior of its own history. This night begins to lighten a little at the
moment when linearity-which is not loss or absence but the
repression of pluri-dimensional26 symbolic thought-relaxes its
oppression because it begins to sterilize the technical and scien-
tific economy that it has long favored. In fact for a long time its
possibility has been structurally bound up with that of economy,
of technics, and of ideology. This solidarity appears in the process
of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchiza-
tion, of the formation of ideology by the class that writes or
rather commands the scribes. 27 Not that the massive reappear-
ance of nonlinear writing interrupts this structural solidarity;
quite the contrary. But it transforms its nature profoundly.
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, 28 even
if, even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings
-literary or theoretical-allow themselves to be, for better or
for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings
to the envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself
between the lines in the volumes. That is why, beginning to
write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing
according to a different organization of space. If today the prob-
lem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of
this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are begin-
ning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently.
For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philos-
ophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields
 Of Grammatology 51

can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the

linear model. Which is to say the epic model. What is thought
today cannot be written according to the line and the book,
except by imitating the operation implicit in teaching modem
mathematics with an abacus. This inadequation is not modern,
but it is exposed today better than ever before. The access to
pluridimensionality and to a delinearized temporality is not a
simple regression toward the "mythogram;" on the contrary, it
makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as
another form and another age of mythography. The meta-ratio-
nality or the meta-scientificity which are thus announced within
the meditation upon writing can therefore be no more shut up
within a science of man than conform to the traditional idea of
science. In one and the same gesture, they leave man, science,
and the line behind.
I .... I
The necessary decentering cannot be a philosophic or scientific
act as such, since it is a question of dislocating, through access
to another system linking speech and writing, the founding cate-
gories of language and the grammar of the episteme. The natural
tendency of theory-of what unites philosophy and science in
the episteme-will push rather toward filling in the breach than
toward forcing the closure. It was normal that the breakthrough
was more secure and more penetrating on the side of literature
and poetic writing: normal also that it, like Nietzsche, at first
destroyed and caused to vacillate the transcendental authority
and dominant category of the episteme: being. This is the mean-
ing of the work of Fenellosa 29 whose influence upon Ezra Pound
and his poetics is well known: this irreducibly graphic poetics
was, with that of Mallarme, the first break in the most en-
trenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese
ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its
historical significance.
Ever since phoneticization has allowed itself to be questioned
in its origin, its history and its adventures, its movement has
been seen to mingle with that of science, religion, politics, econ-
omy, technics, law, art. The origins of these movements and
these historical regions dissociate themselves, as they must for
52 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

the rigorous delimitation of each science, only by an abstraction

that one must constantly be aware of and use with vigilance.
This complicity of origins may be called arche-writing. What is
lost in that complicity is therefore the myth of the simplicity of
origin. This myth is linked to the very concept of origin: to
speech reciting the origin, to the myth of the origin and not only
to myths of origin.
The fact that access to the written sign assures the sacred
power of keeping existence operative within the trace and of
knowing the general structure of the universe; that all clergies,
exercising political power or not, were constituted at the same
time as writing and by the disposition of graphic power; that
strategy, ballistics, diplomacy, agriculture, fiscality, and penal
law are linked in their history and in their structure to the
constitution of writing; that the origin assigned to writing had
been-according to the chains and mythemes-always analo-
gous in the most diverse cultures and that it communicated in a
complex but regulated manner with the distribution of political
power as with familial structure; that the possibility of capitali-
zation and of politico-administrative organization had always
passed through the hands of scribes who laid down the terms of
many wars and whose function was always irreducible, whoever
the contending parties might he; that through discrepancies, in-
equalities of development, the play of permanencies, of delays, of
diffusions, etc., the solidarity among ideological, religious, sci-
entific-technical systems, and the systems of writing which were
therefore more and other than "means of communication" or
vehicles of the signified, remains indestructible; that the very
sense of power and effectiveness in general, which could appear
as such, as meaning and mastery (by idealization), only with so-
called "symbolic" power, was always linked with the disposition
of writing; that economy, monetary or premonetary, and graphic
calculation were co-originary, that there could be no law without
the possibility of trace (if not, as H. Levy-Bruhl shows, of nota-
tion in the narrow sense), all this refers to a common and radical
possibility that no determined science, no abstract discipline, can
think as such.
Indeed, one must understand this incompetence of science
which is also the incompetence of philosophy, the closure of the
 Of Grammatology 53

episteme. Above all it does not invoke a return to a prescientific

or infra-philosophic form of discourse. Quite the contrary. This
common root, which is not a root but the concealment of the
origin and which is not common because it does not amount to
the same thing except with the unmonotonous insistence of
difference, this unnameable movement of difference-itself, that I
have strategically nicknamed trace, reserve, or differance, could
be called writing only within the historical closure, that is to say
within the limits of science and philosophy.
The constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a
necessary and difficult task. But, a thought of the trace, of differ-
ance or of reserve, having arrived at these limits and repeating
them ceaselessly, must also point beyond the field of the epis-
teme. Outside of the economic and strategic reference to the
name that Heidegger justifies himself in giving to an analogous
but not identical transgression of all philosophemes, thought is
here for me a perfectly neutral name, the blank part of the text,
the necessarily indeterminate index of a future epoch of differ-
ance. In a certain sense, "thought" means nothing. Like all open-
ings, this index belongs within a past epoch by the face that is
open to view. This thought has no weight. It is, in the play of the
system, that very thing which never has weight. Thinking is
what we already know we have not yet begun; measured against
the shape of writing, it is broached only in the episteme.
Grammatology, this thought, would still be walled-in within
presence.
[ .... ]

- Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

NOTES

1. What is? -ED.

2. I attempt to develop this theme elsewhere (Speech and Phenomena).
3. Derrida is here referring to Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche which
concludes that Nietzsche was the last of the metaphysicians. This conclu-
sion is also questioned in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles !see below, pp. 366-671.
-ED.
4. This does not, by simple inversion, mean that the signifier is funda-
mental or primary. The "primacy" or "priority" of the signifier would be an
54 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

untenable and absurd expression, formulated illogically with the very logic
it would, no doubt legitimately, destroy. The signifier will never by rights
precede the signified, in which case it would no longer be a signifier and the
"signifying" signifier would no longer have a possible signified. The thought
that is announced in this impossible formula without being successfully
contained therein should therefore be stated in another way; it will clearly
be impossible to do so without suspecting the very idea of the sign, the
"sign-of" which will always remain attached to what is here put in question.
At the limit, therefore, that thought would destroy the entire conceptuality
organized around the concept of the sign (signifier and signified, expression
and content, and so on).
5. Postface to Was ist Metaphysikl (Frankfurt am Main, 1960), p. 46. The
insistence of the voice also dominates the analysis of Gewissen [conscience]
in Sein und Zeit (pp. 312 ff.).
6. Cf. "Das Wesen der Sprache" [The Nature of Language) and "Das
Wort" [Words) in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfiillingen: G. Neske, 1959); On
the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York, 1971).
7. Heidegger, Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer,
1953); translated as An Introduction to Metaphysics by Ralph Manheim
(New Haven, 1959).
8. Ibid., p. 92. "All this points in the direction of what we encountered
when we characterized the Greek experience and interpretation of being. If
we retain the usual interpretation of being, the word being takes its meaning
from the unity and determinateness of the horizon which guided our under-
standing. In short: we understand the verbal substantive Sein through the
infinitive, which in tum is related to the is and its diversity that we have
described. The definite and particular verb form is, the third person singular
of the present indicative, has here a preeminent rank. We understand being
not in regard to the thou art, you are, I am, or they would be, though all of
these, just as much as is, represent verbal inflections of to be. . .. And
involuntarily, almost as though nothing else were possible, we explain the
infinitive to be to ourselves through the is.
"Accordingly, being has the meaning indicated above, recalling the Greek
view of the essence of being, hence a determinateness which has not just
dropped on us accidentally from somewhere but has dominated our histori-
cal being-there since antiquity. At one stroke our search for the definition of
the meaning of the word being becomes explicitly what it is, namely, a
reflection on the source of our hidden history." One should, of course, cite
the entire analysis that concludes with these words.
9. The Question of Being, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde,
bilingual edition (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), p. 83.
10. The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terence Malick (Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1969), p. 29.
11. On the word brisure, Derrida quotes a letter from a friend who wrote
to him: "You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating
difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert['s
 Of Grammatology 55

Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This
word is brisure [joint, break] '-broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack,
fracture, fault, split, fragment [breche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, frag-
ment./-Hinged articulation of two parts of wood- or metal-work. The hinge,
the brisure [folding-joint] of a shutter. Cf. ioint.'" Of Grammatology, p. 65.
-ED.
12. Cf. particularly "La Trace de l'autre, 11 Tidischrift voor filosofie (Sep-
tember 1963)1 and my essay "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the
Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" in Writing and Difference [1967].
13. On Plato's denunciation of writing, see below, "Plato's Pharmacy."
-ED.
14. On Derrida's translation of Aufhebung as releve (lifting up, relief),
see below, "Differance," n. 11.-ED.
15. I take the liberty of referring to a forthcoming essay, "Ousia and
Gramme; Note on a Note from Being and Time" [since published in Margins
of Philosophy (1972)].
16. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959) 1 p. 70; see also everything
concerning "homogeneous time," pp. 38 ff.
17. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The
Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956) 1 p. 106; see also Jakobson, "A la recherche de
!'essence du langage," Diogene 51.
18. Mercure de France (February 1964)1 p. 254. Presenting this text, Sta-
robinski evokes the musical model and concludes, "This reading is devel-
oped according to another tempo (and in another time); at the very limit, one
leaves the time of 'consecutivity' proper to habitual language." One could of
course say "proper to the habitual concept" of time and language. [The text
in question is a collection of posthumously published fragments in which
Saussure speculates on anagrammatic patterns in Latin poetry.-Eo.]
19. On Derrida's use of sollicitation, see below, "Differance," n. 6.-Eo.
20. I have chosen to demonstrate the necessity of this "deconstruction"
by privileging the Saussurian references, not only because Saussure still
dominates contemporary linguistics and semiology; it is also because he
seems to me to stand at the limit: at the same time within the metaphysics
that must be deconstructed and beyond the concept of the sign (signifier/
signified) which he still uses. But Saussure's scruples, his interminable hesi-
tation, particularly in the matter of the difference between the two "aspects"
of the sign and in the matter of "arbitrariness," are better realized through
reading Robert Godel's Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique
generale (Geneve: Droz, 1957)1 pp. 190 ff. Let us note in passing: it is not
impossible that the literality of the Course, to which we have indeed had to
refer, may one day appear very suspect in the light of unpublished material
now being prepared for publication. I am thinking particularly of the Ana-
grams [now published in Les mots sous Jes mots: Jes anagrammes de Ferdi-
nand de Saussure, J. Starobinski, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971)]. Up to what
point is Saussure responsible for the Course as it was edited and published
56 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

after his death? This is not a new question. Need we specify that, here at
least, we cannot consider it to be pertinent? Unless my project has been
fundamentally misunderstood, it should be clear by now that, caring very
little about the thought itself of Ferdinand de Saussure himself, I have
interested myself in a text the literality of which has played a well-known
role since 1915, operating within a system of readings, influences, misunder-
standings, borrowings, refutations, etc. What people have been able to read
there-as well as what they have not been able to read there-under the
title of A Course in General Linguistics has been given importance to the
point of excluding all hidden and "true" intentions of Ferdinand de Saussure.
If one were to discover that this text hid another text-and one will always
be dealing with only texts-and hid it in a determined sense, the reading
that I have just proposed would not be invalidated, at least not for that
reason alone. Quite the contrary. This situation, moreover, was anticipated
by the editors of the Course at the very end of their first preface.
21. On the empirical difficulties of a search for empirical origins, see M.
Cohen, La grande invention de l'ecriture (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1958),
vol. l, pp. 3 ff. Along with J. G. Fevrier's Histoire de l'ecriture !Paris: Payot,
1948), this is the most important work in France on the general history of
writing. Madeleine V. David has devoted a study to them in Critique 157
(June l 960).
22. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole !Paris: Albin Michel,
1965), vol. l, pp. 119 ff.
23. Ibid., pp. 161 ff.
24. Ibid., p. 183. The reader is also referred to L'Eloge de la main by Henri
Focillon (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) and to Jean Bron's La main et ]'esprit (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). In a totally different context, we
have elsewhere specified the epoch of writing as the suspension of being-
upright ("Force and Signification" and "La Parole soufflee," both in Writing
and Difference f1967].
25. Ibid., vol. r, ch. 4. In particular, the author shows there that "the
emergence of writing no more develops out of a graphic nothingness than
does the emergence of agriculture without the intervention of anterior states"
(p. 278); and that "ideography is anterior to pictography" (p. 280).
26. Certain remarks of Leroi-Gourhan on "the loss of multidimensional
symbolic thought" and on the thought "that moves away from linearized
language" !vol. 11 pp. 293-99) can perhaps be interpreted in this way.
27. Cf. L'ecriture et la psychologie des peuples !Proceedings of a Collo-
quium, 1963)1 pp. 138-39, and Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 1,
pp. 238-50. "The development of the first cities corresponds not only to the
appearance of the technician of fire but ... writing is born at the same time
as metallurgy. Here again, this is not a coincidence ... " !vol. l, p. 252). "It is
at the moment when agrarian capitalism began to establish itself that the
means of stabilizing it in written balance accounts appears and it is also at
the moment when social hierarchization is affirmed that writing constructs
its first genealogists" (p. 253). "The appearance of writing is not fortuitous;
 Of Grammatology 57

after millennia of maturation in the systems of mythographic representation,

there emerges, along with metal and slavery (see ch. 4j, the linear notation
of thought. Its content is not fortuitous" (vol. 21 p. 67; cf. also pp. 161-62).
Although it is now much better known and described, this structural
solidarity, notably between capitalization and writing, has been recognized
for a long time, by, among many others, Rousseau, Court de Gebelin, and
Engels.
28. Linear writing has therefore indeed "constituted, during several mil-
lennia, independently of its role as curator of the collective memory, by its
unfolding in a single dimension, the instrument of analysis out of which
grew philosophic and scientific thought. The conservation of thought can
now be conceived otherwise than in terms of books which will only for a
short time keep the advantage of their easy manageability. A vast 'tape-
library' with an electronic selection system will in the near future deliver
preselected and instantaneously retrieved information. Reading will still
retain its importance for some centuries to come, in spite of its perceptible
regression for most men, but writing [understood in the sense of linear
inscription] seems likely to disappear rapidly, replaced by automatic dicta-
phones. Should one see in this a sort of restoration of the state anterior to
the hand's subordination to phonetics? I rather think that it is here a ques-
tion of an aspect of the general phenomenon of manual regression and of a
new 'liberation.' As to the long-term consequences on forms of reasoning, on
a return to diffuse and multidimensional thought, they cannot now be fore-
seen. Scientific thought is rather hampered by the necessity of passing through
typographical channels and it is certain that if some procedure would permit
the presentation of books in such a way that the materials of the different
chapters are presented simultaneously in all their aspects, authors and their
users would find a considerable advantage. What is certain is that, while
scientific reasoning has clearly nothing to lose with the disappearance of
writing, philosophy and literature will no doubt see their forms evolve. This
is not particularly regrettable since printing will conserve the curiously
archaic forms of thought that men will have used during the period of
alphabetic graphism; as to the new forms, they will be to the old ones as
steel to flint, no doubt not a sharper instrument but a handier one. Writing
will pass into the infrastructure without altering the functioning of intelli-
gence, as a transition which will have had some millennia of primacy"
(Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 21 pp. 261-62).
29. Questioning by turns the logico-grammatical structures of the West
(and first Aristotle's list of categories), showing that no correct description of
Chinese writing can tolerate them, Fenellosa recalled that Chinese poetry
was essentially a writing or script. He remarked, for example, "Should we
pass formally into the study of Chinese poetry ... we should beware of
English grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction with
nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal
undertone of each noun. We should avoid the is and bring in a wealth of
neglected English verbs. Most of the existing translations violate all of these
58 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

rules. The development of the normal transitive sentence rests upon the fact
that one action in nature promotes another; thus the agent and object are
secretly verbs. For example, our sentence, 'Reading promotes writing,' would
be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such a form is the equivalent of
three expanded clauses and can be drawn out into adjectival, participial,
infinitive, relative, or conditional members. One of many possible examples
is, 'If one reads it teaches him how to write.' Another is, 'One who reads
becomes one who writes.' But in the first condensed form a Chinese would
write, 'Read promote write.'" "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry," in Ezra Pound, Instigations (Freeport, New York: Books for
Libraries Press, 1967)1 pp. 383-84.
 THREE

From "Differance" in Margins of Philosophy

("La Dlfferance" in Marges de la phllosophie [1972]

The text of a lecture delivered in 1968 to the Societe fram;aise de

philosophie, "Differance" glosses the neologism Derrida had intro-
duced into the language with the slight variance of an a in the
familiar word difference. One must first of all understand this inven-
tion in the context of the modern French language. Unlike English,
French has not developed two verbs from the Latin differre, but has
maintained the senses of both to differ and to defer in the same verb,
differer. Also, unlike English, in French no noun formed from this
verb carries the sense of deferral or deferment. Derrida's invented
word (which has since been recognized by lexicographers and in-
cluded in dictionaries) welds together difference and deferral and
thus refers to a configuration of spatial and temporal difference
together. As for the -ance ending, it calls up a middle voice between
the active and passive voices. In this manner it can point to an
operation that is not that of a subject on an object, that is, therefore,
not an operation at all. Instead, there is a certain nontransitivity
which, Derrida suggests, may well be "what philosophy, at its out-
set, distributed into an active and passive voice, thereby constituting
itself by means of this repression" (p. 9). And, so as to underscore
the relation Derrida sees between differance and writing in the gen-
eral sense he has worked out, he recalls that which for the audience
at his lecture would have been self-evident: the difference between
difference and differance is silent. Because it cannot be differentiated
in speech, the mark of their difference is only graphic; the a of
differance marks the difference of writing within and before speech.
60 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

It is, therefore, another name for writing. Derrida plays up the insuf-
ficiency of speech to comic effect in this oral presentation, inserting
remarks about his spelling and punctuation that are totally redun-
dant in the written text. One must imagine, therefore, as one reads
the lecture, that its delivery was punctuated by laughter.
These remarks about the formation of the word, however, are
only prefatory to an analysis (most of which is extracted below) of
the conjoined movements of differance as temporization and as spac-
ing. In the course of this explanation, Derrida also delineates that
which in the thought of others-Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and
Levinas are mentioned-has traced a "delimination of the ontology
of presence" (p. 74) and which has allowed the articulation of this
nonconcept: differance. 1
 Differance

[ .... ]
Differance as temporization, differance as spacing. How are they
to be joined?
Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic
of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in
the place of the thing itself, the present thing, "thing" here
standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the
present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we
cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-
present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go
through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal.
The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are
concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary
sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the
circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encoun-
ter the thing itself, make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it,
see it, intuit its presence. What I am describing here in order to
define it is the classically determined structure of the sign in all
the banality of its characteristics-signification as the differance
of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign,
which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the
presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence
that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiol-
ogy, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both sec-
ondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost
presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as con-
cerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in
this sense is a movement of mediation.
In attempting to put into question these traits of the provi-
62 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

sional secondariness of the substitute, one would come to see

something like an originary differance; but one could no longer
call it originary or final in the extent to which the values of
origin, archi-, telos, eskhaton, etc. have always denoted presence
-ousia, parousia. 2 To put into question the secondary and pro-
visional characteristics of the sign, to oppose to them an "origi-
nary" differance, therefore would have two consequences.
r. One could no longer include differance in the concept of the
sign, which always has meant the representation of a presence,
and has been constituted in a system (thought or language) gov-
erned by and moving toward presence.
2. And thereby one puts into question the authority of pres-
ence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, absence, or lack.
Thus one questions the limit that has always constrained us, still
constrains us-as inhabitants of a language and a system of
thought-to formulate the meaning of Being in general as pres-
ence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness (ousia).
Already it appears that the type of question to which we are
redirected is, let us say, of the Heideggerian type, and that differ-
ance seems to lead back to the ontico-ontological difference. I
will be permitted to hold off on this reference. I will note only
that between difference as temporization-temporalization, which
can no longer be conceived within the horizon of the present,
and what Heidegger says in Being and Time about temporaliza-
tion as the transcendental horizon of the question of Being, which
must be liberated from its traditional, metaphysical domination
by the present and the now, there is a strict communication,
even though not an exhaustive and irreducibly necessary one.
But first let us remain within the semiological problematic in
order to see differance as temporization and differance as spacing
conjoined. Most of the semiological or linguistic researches that
dominate the field of thought today, whether due to their own
results or to the regulatory model that they find themselves
acknowledging everywhere, refer genealogically to Saussure !cor-
rectly or incorrectly) as their common inaugurator. Now Saus-
sure first of all is the thinker who put the arbitrary character of
the sign and the differential character of the sign at the very
foundation of general semiology, particularly linguistics. And, as
we know, these two motifs-arbitrary and differential-are in-
 "Differance" 63

separable in his view. There can be arbitrariness only because the

system of signs is constituted solely by the differences in terms,
and not by their plenitude. The elements of signification func-
tion not through the compact force of their nuclei but rather
through the network of oppositions that distinguishes them and
then relates them one to another. "Arbitrary and differential,"
says Saussure, "are two correlative characteristics."
Now this principle of difference, as the condition for significa-
tion, affects the totality of the sign, that is, the sign as both
signified and signifier. The signified is the concept, the ideal
meaning; and the signifier is what Saussure calls the "image,"
the "psychical imprint" of a material, physical-for example,
acoustical-phenomenon. We do not have to go into all the
problems posed by these definitions here. Let us cite Saussure
only at the point which interests us: "The conceptual side of
value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect
to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its
material side .... Everything that has been said up to this point
boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even
more important, a difference generally implies positive terms
between which the difference is set up; but in language there are
only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the
signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds
that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual
and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The
idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less impor-
tance than the other signs that surround it." 3
The first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signi-
fied concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient
presence that would refer only to itself. Essentially and lawfully,
every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which
it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the system-
atic play of differences. Such a play, differance, is thus no longer
simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a
conceptual process and system in general. For the same reason,
differance, which is not a concept, is not simply a word, that is,
what is generally represented as the calm, present, and self-refer-
ential unity of concept and phonic material. Later we will look
into the word in general.
64 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

The difference of which Saussure speaks is itself, therefore,

neither a concept nor a word among others. The same can be
said, a fortiori, of differance. And we are thereby led to explicate
the relation of one to the other.
In a language, in the system of language, there are only differ-
ences. Therefore a taxonomical operation can undertake the sys-
tematic, statistical, and classificatory inventory of a language.
But, on the one hand, these differences play: in language, in
speech too, and in the exchange between language and speech.
On the other hand, these differences are themselves effects. They
have not fallen from the sky fully formed, and are no more
inscribed in a topos noetos, than they are prescribed in the gray
matter of the brain. If the word history did not in and of itself
convey the motif of a final repression of difference, one could say
that only differences can be "historical" from the outset and in
each of their aspects.
What is written as differance, then, will be the playing move-
ment that "produces" -by means of something that is not sim-
ply an activity-these differences, these effects of difference.
This does not mean that the differance that produces differences
is somehow before them, in a simple and unmodified-in-differ-
ent-present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple, structured
and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name origin
no longer suits it.
Since language, which Saussure says is a classification, has not
fallen from the sky, its differences have been produced, are pro-
duced effects, but they are effects which do not find their cause
in a subject or a substance, in a thing in general, a being that is
somewhere present, thereby eluding the play of differance. If
such a presence were implied in the concept of cause in general,
in the most classical fashion, we then would have to speak of an
effect without a cause, which very quickly would lead to speak-
ing of no effect at all. I have attempted to indicate a way out of
the closure of this framework via the "trace," which is no more
an effect than it has a cause, but which in and of itself, outside
its text, is not sufficient to operate the necessary transgression.
Since there is no presence before and outside semiological
difference, what Saussure has written about language can be
extended to the sign in general: "Language is necessary in order
 "Differance" 65

for speech to be intelligible and to produce all of its effects; but

the latter is necessary in order for language to be established;
historically, the fact of speech always comes first." 4
Retaining at least the framework, if not the content, of this
requirement formulated by Saussure, we will designate as differ-
ance the movement according to which language, or any code,
any system of referral in general, is constituted "historically" as
a weave of differences. "Is constituted," "is produced," "is cre-
ated," "movement," "historically," etc., necessarily being under-
stood beyond the metaphysical language in which they are re-
tained, along with all their implications. We ought to demonstrate
why concepts like production, constitution, and history remain
in complicity with what is at issue here. But this would take me
too far today-toward the theory of the representation of the
"circle" in which we appear to be enclosed-and I utilize such
concepts, like many others, only for their strategic convenience
and in order to undertake their deconstruction at the currently
most decisive point. In any event, it will be understood, by means
of the circle in which we appear to be engaged, that as it is
written here, differance is no more static than it is genetic, no
more structural than historical. Or is no less so; and to object to
this on the basis of the oldest of metaphysical oppositions !for
example, by setting some generative point of view against a
structural-taxonomical point of view, or vice versa) would be,
above all, not to read what here is missing from orthographical
ethics. Such oppositions have not the least pertinence to differ-
ance, which makes the thinking of it uneasy and uncomfortable.
Now if we consider the chain in which differance lends itself
to a certain number of nonsynonymous substitutions, according
to the necessity of the context, why have recourse to the "re-
serve," to "archi-writing," to the "archi-trace," to "spacing," that
is, to the "supplement," or to the pharmakon, and soon to the
hymen, to the margin-mark-march, etc. 5
Let us go on. It is because of differance that the movement of
signification is possible only if each so-called present element,
each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to
something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the
mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by
the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being
66 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

related no less to what is called the future than to what is called

the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of
this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not
even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must
separate the present from what it is not in order for the present
to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must,
by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby
also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought
on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language,
every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constitut-
ing itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what
might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the be-
coming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitution
of the present, as an "originary" and irreducibly nonsimple (and
therefore, stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces
of retentions and protentions (to reproduce analogically and pro-
visionally a phenomenological and transcendental language that
soon will reveal itself to be inadequate), that I propose to call
archi-writing, archi-trace, or differance, Which (is) (simulta-
neously) spacing (and) temporization.
[ .... J

Differences, thus, are "produced"-deferred-by differance. But

what defers or who defers? In other words, what is differance~
With this question we reach another level and another resource
of our problematic.
What differs? Who differs? What is differance~
If we answered these questions before examining them as
questions, before turning them back on themselves, and before
suspecting their very form, including what seems most natural
and necessary about them, we would immediately fall back into
what we have just disengaged ourselves from. In effect, if we
accepted the form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax
("What is?" "Who is?" "Who is it that?"), we would have to
conclude that differance has been derived, has happened, is to be
mastered and governed on the basis of the point of a present
being, which itself could be some thing, a form, a state, a power
in the world to which all kinds of names might be given, a what,
or a present being as a subject, a who. And in this last case,
 "Differance" 67

notably, one would conclude implicitly that this present being,

for example a being present to itself, as consciousness, eventually
would come to defer or to differ: whether by delaying and turning
away from the fulfillment of a "need" or a "desire," or by differ-
ing from itself. But in neither of these cases would such a present
being be "constituted" by this differance.
Now if we refer, once again, to semiological difference, of what
does Saussure, in particular, remind us? That "language [which
only consists of differences] is not a function of the speaking
subject." This implies that the subject (in its identity with itself,
or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its
self-consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a "function" of
language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech
conform-even in so-called creation, or in so-called transgres-
sion-to the system of the rules of language as a system of
differences, or at very least by conforming to the general law of
differance, or by adhering to the principle of language that Saus-
sure says is "spoken language minus speech." "Language is nec-
essary for the spoken word to be intelligible and so that it can
produce all of its effects." 6
If, by hypothesis, we maintain that the opposition of speech to
language is absolutely rigorous, then differance would be not
only the play of differences with language but also the relation of
speech to language, the detour through which I must pass in
order to speak, the silent promise I must make; and this is
equally valid for semiology in general, governing all the relations
of usage to schemata, of message to code, etc. (Elsewhere I have
attempted to suggest that this differance in language, and in the
relation of speech and language, forbids the essential dissociation
of speech and language that Saussure, at another level of his.
discourse, traditionally wished to delineate. The practice of a
language or of a code supposing a play of forms without a deter-
mined and invariable substance, and also supposing in the prac-
tice of this play a retention and protention of differences, a spac-
ing and a temporization, a play of traces-all this must be a kind
of writing before the letter, an archi-writing without a present
origin, without archi-. Whence the regular erasure of the archi-,
and the transformation of general semiology ~nto grammatology,
this latter executing a critical labor on everything within semiol-
68 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ogy, including the central concept of the sign, that maintained

metaphysical presuppositions incompatible with the motif of
differance.)
One might be tempted by an objection: certainly the subject
becomes a speaking subject only in its commerce with the sys-
tem of linguistic differences; or yet, the subject becomes a signi-
fying (signifying in general, by means of speech or any other sign)
subject only by inscribing itself in the system of differences.
Certainly in this sense the speaking or signifying subject could
not be prese~t to itself, as speaking or signifying, without the
play of linguistic or semiological differance. But can one not
conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject
before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a
silent and intuitive consciousness?
Such a question therefore supposes that, prior to the sign and
outside it, excluding any trace and any differarice, something
like consciousness is possible. And that consciousness, before
distributing its signs in space and in the world, can gather itself
into its presence. But what is consciousness? What does con-
sciousness mean? Most often, in the very form of meaning, in all
its modifications, consciousness offers itself to thought only as
self-presence, as the perception of self in presence. And what
holds for consciousness holds here for so-called subjective exis-
tence in general. Just as the category of the subject cannot be,
and never has been, thought without the reference to presence as
hupokeimenon or as ousia, etc., so the subject as consciousness
has never manifested itself except as self-presence. The privilege
granted to consciousness therefore signifies the privilege granted
to the present; and even if one describes the transcendental tem-
porality of consciousness, and at the depth at which Husserl does
so, one grants to the "living present" the power of synthesizing
traces, and of incessantly reassembling them.
This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the element of our
thought that is ca_ught in the language of metaphysics. One can
delimit such a closure today only by soliciting 7 the value of
presence that Heidegger has shown to be the ontotheological
determination of Being; and in thus soliciting the value of pres-
ence, by means of an interrogation whose status must be com-
pletely exceptional, we are also examining the absolute privilege
 "Differance" 69

of this form or epoch of presence in general that is consciousness

as meaning 8 in self-presence.
Thus one comes to posit presence-and specifically con-
sciousness, the being beside itself of consciousness-no longer
as the absolutely central form of Being but as a "determination"
and as an "effect." A determination or an effect within a system
which is no longer that of presence but of differance, a system
that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity,
nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determi-
nation, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect
or a determination, one continues-for strategic reasons that can
be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated
-to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-
limiting.
Before being so radically and purposely the gesture of Heideg-
ger, this gesture was also made by Nietzsche and Freud, both of
whom, as is well known, and sometimes in very similar fashion,
put consciousness into question in its assured certainty of itself.
Now is it not remarkable that they both did so on the basis of
the motif of differancd
Differance appears almost by name in their texts, and in those
places where everything is at stake. I cannot expand upon this
here; I will only recall that for Nietzsche "the great principal
activity is unconscious," and that consciousness is the effect of
forces the essence, byways, and modalities of which are not
proper to it. Force itself is never present; it is only a play of
differences and quantities. There would be no force in general
without the difference between forces; and here the difference of
quantity counts more than the content of the quantity, more
than absolute size itself. "Quantity itself, therefore, is not sepa-
rable from the difference of quantity. The difference of quantity
is the essence of force, the relation of force to force. The dream
of two equal forces, even if they are granted an opposition of
meaning, is an approximate and crude dream, a statistical dream,
plunged into by the living but dispelled by chemistry." 9 Is not all
of Nietzsche's thought a critique of philosophy as an active indif-
ference to difference, as the system of adiaphoristic reduction or
repression? Which according to the same logic, according to logic
itself, does not exclude that philosophy lives in and on differ-
70 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ance, thereby blinding itself to the same, which is not the iden-
tical. The same, precisely, is differance (with an a) as the dis-
placed and equivocal passage of one different thing to another,
from one term of an opposition to the other. Thus one could
reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is con-
structed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see
opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the
terms must appear as the differance of the other, as the other
different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligi-
ble as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different
and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-
deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, dif-
fering-deferring; all the others of physis-tekhne, nomos, thesis,
society, freedom, history, mind, etc. -as physis different and
deferred, or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in differance.
And in this we may see the site of a reinterpretation of mimesis
in its alleged opposition to physis). And on the basis of this
unfolding of the same as differance, we see announced the same-
ness of differance and repetition in the eternal return. Themes in
Nietzsche's work that are linked to the symptomatology that
always diagnoses the detour or ruse of an agency disguised in its
differance; or further, to the entire thematic of active interpreta-
tion, which substitutes incessant deciphering for the unveiling of
truth as the presentation of the thing itself in its presence, etc.
Figures without truth, or at least a system of figures not domi-
nated by the value of truth, which then becomes only an in-
cluded, inscribed, circumscribed function.
Thus, differance is the name we might give to the "active,"
moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces,
that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical
grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and
science.
It is historically significant that this diaphoristics, which, as
an energetics or economics of forces, commits itself to putting
into question the primacy of presence as consciousness, is also
the major motif of Freud's thought: another diaphoristics, which
in its entirety is both a theory of the figure (or of the trace) and
an energetics. The putting into question of the authority of con-
sciousness is first and always differential.
 "Differance" 71

The two apparently different values of differance are tied to-

gether in Freudian theory: to differ as discernibility, distinction,
separation, diastema, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, re-
serve, temporization.
r. The concepts of trace (Spur), of breaching (Bahnung), 10 and
of the forces of breaching, from the Project on, are inseparable
from the concept of difference. The origin of memory, and of the
psyche as (conscious or unconscious) memory in general, can be
described only by taking into account the difference between
breaches. Freud says so overtly. There is no breach without dif-
ference and no difference without trace.
2. All the differences in the production of unconscious traces
and in the processes of inscription (Niederschrift) can also be
interpreted as moments of differance, in the sense of putting into
reserve. According to a schema that never ceased to guide Freud's
thought, the movement of the trace is described as an effort of
life to protect itself by deferring the dangerous investment, by
constituting a reserve (Vorrat). And all the oppositions that fur-
row Freudian thought relate each of his concepts one to another
as moments of a detour in the economy of differance. One is but
the other different and deferred, one differing and deferring the
other. One is the other in differance, one is the differance of the
other. This is why every apparently rigorous and irreducible op-
position (for example the opposition of the secondary to the
primary) comes to be qualified, at one moment or another, as a
"theoretical fiction." Again, it is thereby, for example (but such
an example governs, and communicates with, everything), that
the difference between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle is only differance as detour. In Beyond the Pleasure
Principle Freud writes: "Under the influence of the ego's in-
stincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by
the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the
intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless
demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction,
the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfac-
tion and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the
long indirect road (Aufschub) to pleasure.11
Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on
the very enigma of differance, on precisely that which divides its
72 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

very concept by means of a strange cleavage. We must not hasten

to decide. How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand,
differance as the economic detour which, in the element of the
same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence
that has been deferred by Iconscious or unconscious) calculation,
and, on the other hand, differance as the relation to an impossi-
ble presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable
loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the
death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that appar-
ently interrupts every economy? It is evident-and this is the
evident itself-that the economical and the noneconomical, the
same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought together. If
differance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not
hasten to make it evident, in the philosophical element of evi-
dentiality which would make short work of dissipating the mi-
rage and illogicalness of differance and would do so with the
infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with,
having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function
in the structure of differance. Elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille,
I have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and,
in a new sense, "scientific" relating of the "restricted economy"
that takes no part in expenditure without reserve, death, opening
itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that takes into
account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if
it can be put thus. I am speaking of a relationship between a
differance that can make a profit on its investment and a differ-
ance that misses its profit, the investiture of a presence that is
pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss,
with death. Through such a relating of a restricted and a general
economy the very project of philosophy, under the privileged
heading of Hegelianism, is displaced and reinscribed. The Aufhe-
bung-la releve-is constrained into writing itself otherwise.
Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking
account of its consumption of writing. 12
For the economic character of differance in no way implies
that the deferred presence can always be found again, that we
have here only an investment that provisionally and calculatedly
delays the perception of its profit or the profit of its perception.
Contrary to the metaphysical, dialectical, "Hegelian" interpreta-
 "Differance" 73

tion of the economic movement of differance, we must conceive

of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses
and wins on every tum. If the displaced presentation remains
definitively and implacably postponed, it is not that a certain
present remains absent or hidden. Rather, differance maintains
our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue,
and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence. A
certain alterity-to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of
the unconscious-is definitively exempt from every process of
presentation by means of which we would call upon it to show
itself in person. In this context, and beneath this guise, the un-
conscious is not, as we know, a hidden, virtual, or potential self-
presence. It differs from, and defers, itself; which doubtless means
that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out dele-
gates, representatives, proxies, but without any chance that the
giver of proxies might "exist," might be present, be "itself"
somewhere, and with even less chance that it might become
conscious. In this sense, contrary to the terms of an old debate
full of the metaphysical investments that it has always assumed,
the "unconscious" is no more a "thing" than it is a virtual or
masked consciousness. This radical alterity as concerns every
possible mode of presence is marked by the irreducibility of the
aftereffect, the delay. In order to describe traces, in order to read
the traces of "unconscious" traces !there are no "conscious"
traces), the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical
discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate. !Although the phe-
nomenologist is not the only one to speak this language. J
The structure of delay (Nachtriiglichkeit) in effect forbids that
one make of temporalization ltemporization) a simply dialectical
complication of the living present as an originary and unceasing
synthesis-a synthesis constantly directed back on itself, gath-
ered in on itself and gathering-of retentional traces and proten-
tional openings. The alterity of the "unconscious" makes us
concerned not with horizons of modified-past or future-
presents, but with a "past" that has never been present, and
which never will be, whose future to come will never be a pro-
duction or a reproduction in the form of presence. Therefore the
concept of trace is incompatible with the concept of retention, of
the becoming-past of what has been present. One cannot think
74 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

the trace-and therefore, differance-on the basis of the present,

or of the presence of the present.
A past that has never been present: this formula is the one
that Emmanuel Levinas uses, although certainly in a nonpsy-
choanalytic way, to qualify the trace and enigma of absolute
alterity: the Other. 13 Within these limits, and from this point of
view at least, the thought of differance implies the entire critique
of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas. And the concept of
the trace, like that of differance thereby organizes, along the
lines of these different traces and differences of traces, in
Nietzsche's sense, in Freud's sense, in Levinas's sense-these
"names of authors" here being only indices-the network which
reassembles and traverses our "era" as the delimitation of the
ontology of presence.
Which is to say the ontology of beings and beingness. It is the
domination of beings that differance everywhere comes to so-
licit, in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as
a whole, to make tremble in entirety. Therefore, it is the deter-
mination of Being as presence or as beingness that is interrogated
by the thought of differance. Such a question could not emerge
and be understood unless the difference between Being and beings
were somewhere to be broached. First consequence: differance is
not. It is not a present being, however excellent, unique, princi-
pal, or transcendent. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and
nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any
capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of differance, but
differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which
makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by every-
thing within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future pres-
ence of a kingdom. And it is always in the name of a kingdom
that one may reproach differance with wishing to reign, believing
that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter.
Can differance, for these reasons, settle down into the division
of the ontico-ontological difference, such as it is thought, such as
its "epoch" in particular is thought, "through," if it may still be
expressed such, Heidegger's uncircumventable meditation?
There is no simple answer to such a question.
In a certain aspect of itself, differance is certainly but the
historical and epochal unfolding of Being or of the ontological
 "Differance" 75

difference. The a of differance marks the movement of this un-

folding.
And yet, are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being,
the determination of differance as the ontico-ontological differ-
ence, difference thought within the horizon of the question of
Being, still intrametaphysical effects of differance! The unfold-
ing of differance is perhaps not solely the truth of Being, or of the
epochality of Being. Perhaps we must attempt to think this un-
heard-of thought, this silent tracing: that the history of Being,
whose thought engages the Greco-Western logos such as it is
produced via the ontological difference, is but an epoch of the
diapherein. Henceforth one could no longer even call this an
"epoch, 11 the concept of epochality belonging to what is within
history as the history of Being. Since Being has never had a
"meaning," has never been thought or said as such, except by
dissimulating itself in beings, then differance, in a certain and
very strange way, (is) "older" than the ontological difference or
than the truth of Being. When it has this age it can be called the
play of the trace. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to
the horizon of Being, but whose play transports and encloses the
meaning of Being: the play of the trace, or the differance, which
has no meaning and is not. Which does not belong. There is no
maintaining, and no depth to, this bottomless chessboard on
which Being is put into play.
[ .... ]
For us, differance remains a metaphysical name, and all the
names that it receives in our language are still, as names, meta-
physical. And this is particularly the case when these names
state the determination of differance as the difference between
presence and the present (Anwesen!Anwesend), but above all,
and, already in the most general fashion, when they state the
determination of differance as the difference of Being and beings.
"Older" than Being itself, such a differance has no name in
our language. But we "already know" that if it is unnameable, it
is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet
found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it
in another language, outside the finite system of our own. It is
rather because there is no name for it at all, not even the name
76 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

of essence or of Being, not even that of "differance," which is not

a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly
dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitution.
"There is no name for it": a proposition to be read in its
platitude. This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no
name could approach: God, for example. This unnameable is the
play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary
and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substi-
tutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect differ-
ance is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false
entry or a false exit is still part of the game, a function of the
system.
What we know, or what we would know if it were simply a
question here of something to know, is that there has never been,
never will be, a unique word, a master-name. This is why the
thought of the letter a in differance is not the primary prescrip-
tion or the prophetic annunciation of an imminent and as yet
unheard-of nomination. There is nothing kerygmatic about this
"word," provided that one perceives its decapitajliza)tion. And
that one puts into question the name of the name.
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of
Being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside
of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost
native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this,
in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a
certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.
From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, from the
vantage of this affirmation foreign to all dialectics, the other side
of nostalgia, what I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into ques-
tion. I am not unaware how shocking this word might seem here.
Nevertheless I am venturing it, without excluding any of its
implications, and I relate it to what still seems to me to be the
metaphysical part of "The Anaximander Fragment": the quest
for the proper word and the unique name. Speaking of the first
word of Being (das friihe Wort des Seins: to khreon), Heidegger
writes: "The relation to what is present that rules in the essence
of presencing itself is a unique one (ist eine einzige), altogether
incomparable to any other relation. It belongs to the uniqueness
 "Differance" 77

of Being itself (Sie gehort zur Einzigkeit des Seins selbst). There-
fore, in order to name the essential nature of Being (das wesende
Seins), language would have to find a single word, the unique
word (ein einziges, das einzige Wort). From this we can gather
how daring every thoughtful word (denkende Wort) addressed to
Being is (das dem Sein zugesprochen wird). Nevertheless such
daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and every-
where throughout language." (p. 52).
Such is the question: the alliance of speech and Being in the
unique word, in the finally proper name. And such is the ques-
tion inscribed in the simulated affirmation of differance. It bears
(on) each member of this sentence: "Being I speaks I always and
everywhere I throughout I language."

- Translated by Alan Bass

NOTES

1. In this chapter we have followed the translator in preserving the French

spelling. Elsewhere, however, we assimilate the neographism to English
orthography and write, differance:--Eo.
2. Ousia and parousia imply presence as both origin and end, the found·
ing principle (arkhe-) as that toward which one moves (telos, eskhaton).-
TRANS.
3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade
Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. u7-18, 120.-TRANS.
4. Ibid., p. 18.-TRANS.
5. All these terms refer to writing and inscribe differance within them·
selves, as Derrida says, according to the context. The supplement (supple-
ment) is Rousseau's word to describe writing (analyzed in Of Grammatology.
It means both the missing piece and the extra piece. The pharmakon is
Plato's word for writing (analyzed in "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination,
meaning both remedy and poison; the hymen (l'hymen) comes from Derri-
da's analysis of Mallarme's writing and Mallarme's reflections on writing
("The Double Session" in Dissemination) and refers both to virginity and to
consummation; marge-marque-marche is the series en differance that Der·
rida applies to Sollers' Nombres ("Dissemination" in Dissemination).- TRANS.
6. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 37.-TRANS.
7. The French solliciter, as the English solicit, derives from an Old Latin
expression meaning to shake the whole, to make something tremble in its
entirety. Derrida comments on this later, but is already using "to solicit" in
this sense here.-TRANS.
78 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

8. "Meaning" here is the weak translation of vouloir-dire, which has a

strong sense of willing (voluntas) to say, putting the attempt to mean in
conjunction with speech, a crucial conjunction for Derrida. - TRANS.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universi-
taies de France, 1970), p. 49.
10. Derrida is referring here to his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing"
in Writing and Difference [1967]. "Breaching" is the translation for Bahnung
that I adopted there: it conveys more of the sense of breaking open (as in the
German Bahnung and the French frayage) than the Standard Edition's "facil-
itation." The Pro;ect Derrida refers to here is the Proiect for a Scientific
Psychology (l 89 5), in which Freud attempted to cast his psychological think-
ing in a neurological framework.- TRANS.
11. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London:
Hogarth Press, 1950 [hereafter cited as SE]), vol. 18, p. 10.-TRANS.
12. Derrida is referring here to the reading of Hegel he proposed in "From
Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve," in Writ-
ing and Difference [1967]. In that essay Derrida began his consideration of
Hegel as the great philosophical speculator; thus all the economic metaphors
of the previous sentences. For Derrida the deconstruction of metaphysics
implies an endless confrontation with Hegelian concepts, and the move from
a restricted, "speculative" philosophical economy-in which there is noth-
ing that cannot be made to make sense, in which there is nothing other than
meaning-to a "general" economy-which affirms that which exceeds
meaning, the excess of meaning from which there can be no speculative
profit-involves a reinterpretation of the central Hegelian concept: the
Aufhebung. Aufhebung literally means "lifting up"; but it also contains the
double meaning of conservation and negation. For Hegel, dialectics is a
process of Aufhebung: every concept is to be negated and lifted up to a
higher sphere in which it is thereby conserved. In this way, there is nothing
from which the Aufhe bung cannot profit. However, as Derrida points out,
there is always an effect of differance when the same word has two contra-
dictory meanings. Indeed it is this effect of differance-the excess of the
trace Aufhebung itself-that is precisely what the Aufhebung can never
aufheben: lift up, conserve, and negate. This is why Derrida wishes to
constrain the Aufhebung to write itself otherwise, or simply to write itself,
to take into account its consumption of writing. Without writing, the trace,
there could be no words with double, contradictory meanings.
As with differance, the translation of a word with a double meaning is
particularly difficult and touches upon the entire problematics of writing
and differance. The best translators of Hegel usually cite Hegel's own delight
that the most speculative of languages, German, should have provided this
most speculative of words as the vehicle for his supreme speculative effort.
Thus Aufhebung is usually best annotated and left untranslated. (Jean Hyp-
polite, in his French translations of Hegel, carefully annotates his rendering
of Aufhebung as both supprimer and depasser. Baillies's rendering of Aufhe-
bung as "sublation" is misleading.) Derrida, however, in his attempt to make
 "Differance" 79

Aufhe bung write itself otherwise, has proposed a new translation of it that
does take into account the effect of differance in its double meaning. Derri-
da's translation is la releve. The word comes from the verb relever, which
means to lift up, as does Aufheben. But relever also means to relay, to
relieve, as when one soldier on duty relieves another. Thus the conserving-
and-negating lift has become la releve, a "lift" in which is inscribed an effect
of substitution and difference, the effect of substitution and difference in-
scribed in the double meaning of Aufhebung. A. V. Miller's rendering of
Aufhebung as "supersession" in his recent translation of the Phenomenol-
ogy comes close to relever in combining the senses of raising up and replace-
ment, although without the elegance of Derrida's maintenance of the verb
meaning "to lift" (heben, lever) and change of prefix (auf-, re-).-TRANs.
13. On Levinas, and on the translation of his term autrui by "Other ,,
see "Violence and Metaphysics," note 6, in Writing and Difference [196;].
-TRANS.
 FOUR

"Signature Event Context" in Margins of Philosophy

("Signature Evenement Contexte" in Marges de

la phllosophie [1972])

This essay, reprinted in extenso, was first delivered as a lecture to

the Societes de philosophie de langue fran~aise at a colloquium on
the topic of communication. It elaborates Derrida's thinking on the
iterability or citationality of the sign, the place of intentionality in
the possibility of meaning, the context as a nonsaturable element in
any interpretation, and signature in the dimensions of its singularity
and repeatability. All of these questions have remained central to
Derrida's work and each is taken up in numerous other places. They
are posed here in relation to the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin
whose distinction of constative from performative utterances has
had such an important influence on Anglo-American linguistic phi-
losophy. While recognizing the significance of Austin's theory, Der-
rida remarks that, like other linguistic theories he has discussed
elsewhere, Austin's theory remains true to the logocentric program
when it attempts to set aside consideration of "non-serious" lan-
guage use, particularly its use in literary or fictional texts. This
exclusion of "parasitic" speech acts has, as Derrida argues, far-reach-
ing consequences for any theory of meaning.
The necessary iterability or citationality of the sign has had an
important place in Derrida's thinking since Speech and Phenomena.
As he had shown with regard to Husserl's concept of Bedeutung, the
fact that a sign must be repeatable, that it must begin by repeating
(which is one reason Derrida prefers the word trace to sign), sets
limits on intentionality as the determinable ground of signification.
 "Signature Event Context" 81

Iterability conditions any intention as possible but thereby impossi-

ble as a pure presence to itself. Unlike Austin (or Saussure or Hus-
serl), who sets out a theory of meaning based on a pure speech act,
Derrida argues the necessity of reconceiving the whole field of signi-
fication according to "something like a law of undecidable contami-
nation" between intentional acts or events and the "parasitical"
citations or repetitions that can never be rigorously excluded from
such acts and that can always divert an intention or cause it to go
astray.
As if to illustrate this point, Derrida's delimitation of intention-
ality has been frequently misinterpreted despite the very clear terms
within which his argument is posed, particularly in this essay. This
might seem surprising since American academic literary studies, at
least, have long been accustomed to New Criticism's reservations
concerning what it called "the intentional fallacy." But the "law of
undecidable contamination" does not accommodate New Criti-
cism's formalism any better than "old" criticism's historicism be-
cause it brings out, precisely, the contamination between these clas-
sically opposed domains of interpretation. The very grounds of
interpretive disciplines and institutions are put at stake here and in
a far more fundamental way than New Criticism ever envisioned. If
one may so easily encounter gross caricatures of deconstructive
thought which promote the notion, for example, that it has simply
abandoned altogether the category of intentionality, then perhaps
the reason is that these high stakes tend to push argument onto an
irrational ground in defense, paradoxically, of what passes for the
rational ground of argument.
"Signature Event Context" provoked a polemic with, most nota-
bly, the philosopher of language and disciple of Austin, John Searle. 1
As others had done, Searle chose to read Derrida's essay as an all-out
attack on, among other things, intentionality. The measure of this
misunderstanding and the paradoxes it reveals were in tum laid out
in Derrida's own, very polemical response to Searle, "Limited Inc a
b c ... " [1977]. The serious stakes of the debate do not prevent
Derrida, in this latter text, from displaying a highly developed sense
of the comic spectacle of an academic dispute over the possibility of
self-evident meaning even as misunderstanding writes itself large on
every page. For a recent re-edition of these essays j1989), Derrida has
also written an "Afterword," titled "Toward an Ethic of Discussion,"
which reflects on the ethical questions posed, not only by the debate
with Professor Searle, but in general by discussion on the very grounds
of reasonable discussion.
 Signature Event Context

Still confining ourselves, for simplicity, to spoken utterance.

- Austin, How to Do Things with Words

Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication 2

a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously
grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept? Following a
strange figure of discourse, one first must ask whether the word
or signifier "communication" communicates a determined con-
tent, an identifiable meaning, a describable value. But in order to
articulate and to propose this question, I already had to anticipate
the meaning of the word communication: I have had to predeter-
mine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage
of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. If communication
had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced,
then from the outset it would not be justifiable to define com-
munication itself as the transmission of a meaning, assuming
that we are capable of understanding one another as concerns
each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.). Now, the word
communication, which nothing initially authorizes us to over-
look as a word, and to impoverish as a polysemic word, opens a
semantic field which precisely is not limited to semantics, semi-
otics, and even less to linguistics. To the semantic field of the
word communication belongs the fact that it also designates
nonsemantic movements. Here at least provisional recourse to
ordinary language and to the equivocalities of natural language
teaches us that one may, for example, communicate a move-
ment, or that a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be
communicated-that is, propagated, transmitted. It is also said
that different or distant places can communicate between each
other by means of a given passageway or opening. What happens
in this case, what is transmitted or communicated, are not phe-
 "Signature Event Context" 83

nomena of meaning or signification. In these cases we are dealing

neither with a semantic or conceptual content, nor with a semi-
otic operation, and even less with a linguistic exchange.
Nevertheless, we will not say that this nonsemiotic sense of
the word communication, such as it is at work in ordinary lan-
guage, in one or several of the so-called natural languages, con-
stitutes the proper or primitive meaning, and that consequently
the semantic, semiotic, or linguistic meaning corresponds to a
derivation, an extension or a reduction, a metaphoric displace-
ment. We will not say, as one might be tempted to do, that
semiolinguistic communication is more metaphorico entitled
"communication," because by analogy with "physical" or "real"
communication it gives passage, transports, transmits some-
thing, gives access to something. We will not say so:
r. because the value of literal, proper meaning appears more
problematical than ever,
2. because the value of displacement, of transport, etc., is
constitutive of the very concept of metaphor by means of which
one allegedly understands the semantic displacement which is
operated from communication as a nonsemiolinguistic phenom-
enon to communication as a semiolinguistic phenomenon.
(I note here between parentheses that in this communication
the issue will be, already is, the problem of polysemia and com-
munication, of dissemination -which I will oppose to polysemia
-and communication. In a moment, a certain concept of writing
is bound to intervene, in order to transform itself, and perhaps in
order to transform the problematic. J
It seems to go without saying that the field of equivocality
covered by the word communication permits itself to be reduced
massively by the limits of what is called a context (and I an-
nounce, again between parentheses, that the issue will be, in this
communication, the problem of context, and of finding out about
writing as concerns context in general). For example, in a collo-
quium of philosophy in the French language, a conventional
context, produced by a kind of implicit but structurally vague
consensus, seems to prescribe that one propose "communica-
tions" on communication, communications in discursive form,
colloquial, oral communications destined to be understood and
to open or pursue dialogues within the horizon of an intelligibil-
84 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ity and truth of meaning, such that in principle a general agree-

ment may finally be established. These communications are to
remain within the element of a determined "natural" language,
which is called French, and which commands certain very partic-
ular uses of the word communication. Above all, the object of
these communications should be organized, by priority or by
privilege, around communication as discourse, or in any event as
signification. Without exhausting all the implications and the
entire structure of an "event" like this one, which would merit a
very long preliminary analysis, the prerequisite I have just re-
called appears evident; and for anyone who doubts this, it would
suffice to consult our schedule in order to be certain of it.
But are the prerequisites of a context ever absolutely determin-
able? Fundamentally, this is the most general question I would
like to attempt to elaborate. Is there a rigorous and scientific
concept of the contextt Does not the notion of context harbor,
behind a certain confusion, very determined philosophical pre-
suppositions? To state it now in the most summary fashion, I
would like to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely
determinable, or rather in what way its determination is never
certain or saturated. This structural nonsaturation would have as
its double effect:
1. a marking of the theoretical insufficiency of the usual con-
cept of (the linguistic or nonlinguistic) context such as it is
accepted in numerous fields of investigation, along with all the
other concepts with which it is systematically associated;
2. a rendering necessary of a certain generalization and acer-
tain displacement of the concept of writing. The latter could no
longer, henceforth, be included in the category of communica-
tion, at least if communication is understood in the restricted
sense of the transmission of meaning. Conversely, it is within
the general field of writing thus defined that the effects of seman-
tic communication will be able to be determined as particular,
secondary, inscribed, supplementary effects.

Writing and Telecommunication

If one takes the notion of writing in its usually accepted sense-

which above all does not mean an innocent, primitive, or natural
 "Signature Event Context" 85

sense-one indeed must see it as a means of communication.

One must even acknowledge it as a powerful means of commu-
nication which extends very far, if not infinitely, the field of oral
or gestural communication. This is banally self-evident, and
agreement on the matter seems easy. I will not describe all the
modes of this extension in time and in space. On the other hand
I will pause over the value of extension to which I have just had
recourse. When we say that writing extends the field and powers
of a locutionary or gestural communication, are we not presup-
posing a kind of homogenous space of communication? The range
of the voice or of gesture certainly appears to encounter a factual
limit here, an empirical boundary in the form of space and time;
and writing, within the same time, within the same space, man-
ages to loosen the limits, to open the same field to a much
greater range. Meaning, the content of the semantic message, is
thus transmitted, communicated, by different means, by techni-
cally more powerful mediations, over a much greater distance,
but within a milieu that is fundamentally continuous and equal
to itself, within a homogeneous element across which the unity
and integrity of meaning are not affected in an essential way.
Here, all affection is accidental.
The system of this interpretation (which is also in a way the
system of interpretation, or in any event of an entire interpreta-
tion of hermeneutics), although it is the usual one, or to the
extent that it is as usual as common sense, has been represented
in the entire history of philosophy. I will say that it is even,
fundamentally, the properly philosophical interpretation of writ-
ing. I will take a single example, but I do not believe one could
find, in the entire history of philosophy as such, a single counter-
example, a single analysis that essentially contradicts the one
proposed by Condillac, inspired, strictly speaking, by Warburton,
in the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur
l'origine des connaissances humaines). 3 I have chosen this ex-
ample because an explicit reflection on the origin and function
of the written (this explicitness is not encountered in all philos-
ophy, and one should examine the conditions of its emergence or
occultation) is organized within a philosophical discourse which
like all philosophy presupposes the simplicity of the origin and
the continuity of every derivation, every production, every analy-
86 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

sis, the homogeneity of all orders. Analogy is a major concept in

Condillac's thought. I choose this example also because the
analysis which "retraces" the origin and function of writing is
placed, in a kind of noncritical way, under the authority of the
category of communication. 4 If men write, it is (1 I because they
have something to communicate; (2) because what they have to
communicate is their "thought," their "ideas," their representa-
tions. Representative thought precedes and governs communica-
tion which transports the "idea," the signified content; (3) be-
cause men are already capable of communicating and of
communicating their thought to each other when, in continuous
fashion, they invent the means of communication that is writing.
Here is a passage from chapter 13 of part 2 ("On Language and
On Method"), section 1 ("On the Origin and Progress of Lan-
guage"), (writing is thus a modality of language and marks a
continuous progress in a communication of linguistic essence),
section 13 1 "On Writing": "Men capable of communicating their
thoughts to each other by sounds felt the necessity of imagining
new signs apt to perpetuate them and to make them known to
absent persons" (I italicize this value of absence, which, if newly
reexamined, will risk introducing a certain break in the homo-
geneity of the system). As soon as men are capable of "commu-
nicating their thoughts," and of doing so by sounds (which is,
according to Condillac, a secondary stage, articulated language
coming to "supplement" the language of action, the unique and
radical principle of all language), the birth and progress of writing
will follow a direct, simple, and continuous line. The history of
writing will conform to a law of mechanical economy: to gain
the most space and time by means of the most convenient abbre-
viation; it will never have the least effect on the structure and
content of the meaning (of ideas) that it will have to vehiculate.
The same content, previously communicated by gestures and
sounds, henceforth will be transmitted by writing, and succes-
sively by different modes of notation, from pictographic writing
up to alphabetic writing, passing through the hieroglyphic writ-
ing of the Egyptians and the ideographic writing of the Chinese.
Condillac continues: "Imagination then will represent but the
same images that they had already expressed by actions and
words, and which had, from the beginnings, made language fig-
 "Signature Event Context" 87

urative and metaphoric. The most natural means was therefore

to draw the pictures of things. To express the idea of a man or a
horse the form of one or the other will be represented, and the
first attempt at writing was but a simple painting" (p. 252; my
italics).
The representative character of written communication-
writing as picture, reproduction, imitation of its content-will
be the invariable trait of all the progress to come. The concept of
representation is indissociable here from the concepts of com-
munication and expression that I have underlined in Condillac's
text. Representation, certainly, will be complicated, will be given
supplementary way-stations and stages, will become the repre-
sentation of representation in hieroglyphic and ideographic writ·
ing, and then in phonetic-alphabetic writing, but the representa·
tive structure which marks the first stage of expressive
communication, the idea/sign relationship, will never be sup-
pressed or transformed. Describing the history of the kinds of
writing, their continuous derivation on the basis of a common
radical which is never displaced and which procures a kind of
community of analogical participation between all the forms of
writing, Condillac concludes (and this is practically a citation of
Warburton, as is almost the entire chapter): "This is the general
history of writing conveyed by a simple gradation from the state
of painting through that of the letter; for letters are the last steps
which remain to be taken after the Chinese marks, which par-
take of letters precisely as hieroglyphs partake equally of Mexi-
can paintings and of Chinese characters. These characters are so
close to our writing that an alphabet simply diminishes the
confusion of their number, and is their succinct abbreviation"
(pp. 254-53).
Having placed in evidence the motif of the economic, homog-
enous, and mechanical reduction, let us now come back to the
notion of absence that I noted in passing in Condillac's text.
How is it determined?
I. First, it is the absence of the addressee. One writes in order
to communicate something to those who are absent. The absence
of the sender, the addressor, from the marks that he abandons,
which are cut off from him and continue to produce effects
beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his
88 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

meaning, that is, beyond his life itself, this absence, which how·
ever belongs to the structure of all writing-and I will add,
further on, of all language in general-this absence is never
examined by Condillac.
2. The absence of which Condillac speaks is determined in the
most classical fashion as a continuous modification, a progres·
sive extenuation of presence. Representation regularly supple-
ments presence. But this operation of supplementation l"To sup-
plement" is one of the most decisive and frequently employed
operative concepts of Condillac's Essai) 5 is not exhibited as a
break in presence, but rather as a reparation and a continuous,
homogenous modification of presence in representation.
Here, I cannot analyze everything that this concept of absence
as a modification of presence presupposes, in Condillac's philos·
ophy and elsewhere. Let us note merely that it governs another
equally decisive operative concept !here I am classically, and for
convenience, opposing operative to thematic) of the Essai: to
trace and to retrace. Like the concept of supplementing, the
concept of trace could be determined otherwise than in the way
Condillac determines it. According to him, to trace means "to
express," "to represent," "to recall," "to make present" I"in all
likelihood painting owes its origin to the necessity of thus trac·
ing our thoughts, and this necessity has doubtless contributed to
conserving the language of action, as that which could paint the
most easily," p. 253). The sign is born at the same time as
imagination and memory, at the moment when it is demanded
by the absence of the object for present perception !"Memory, as
we have seen, consists only in the power of reminding ourselves
of the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances which accompa·
nied them; and this capacity occurs only by virtue of the analogy
of signs [my italics; this concept of analogy, which organizes
Condillac's entire system, in general makes certain all the con·
tinuities, particularly the continuity of presence to absence! that
we have chosen, and by virtue of the order that we have put
between our ideas, the objects that we wish to retrace have to do
with several of our present needs" Ip. 129). This is true of all the
orders of signs distinguished by Condillac !arbitrary, accidental,
and even natural signs, a distinction which Condillac nuances,
and on certain points, puts back into question in his Letters to
 "Signature Event Context" 89

Cramer). The philosophical operation that Condillac also calls

"to retrace" consists in traveling back, by way of analysis and
continuous decomposition, along the movement of genetic deri-
vation which leads from simple sensation and present perception
to the complex edifice of representation: from original presence
to the most formal language of calculation.
It would be simple to show that, essentially, this kind of
analysis of written signification neither begins nor ends with
Condillac. If we say now that this analysis is "ideological," it is
not primarily in order to contrast its notions to "scientific" con-
cepts, or in order to refer to the often dogmatic-one could also
say "ideological"-use made of the word ideology, which today
is so rarely examined for its possibility and history. If I define
notions of Condillac's kind as ideological, it is that against the
background of a vast, powerful, and systematic philosophical
tradition dominated by the self-evidence of the idea (eidos, idea),
they delineate the field of reflection of the French "ideologues"
who, in Condillac's wake, elaborated a theory of the sign as a
representation of the idea, which itself represents the perceived
thing. Communication, hence, vehiculates a representation as an
ideal content (which will be called meaning); and writing is a
species of this general communication. A species: a communica-
tion having a relative specificity within a genus.
If we ask ourselves now what, in this analysis, is the essential
predicate of this specific difference, we once again find absence.
Here I advance the following two propositions or hypotheses:
r. Since every sign, as much in the "language of action" as in
articulated language (even before the intervention of writing in
the classical sense), supposes a certain absence (to be deter-
mined), it must be because absence in the field of writing is of an
original kind if any specificity whatsoever of the written sign is
to be acknowledged.
2. If, perchance, the predicate thus assumed to characterize the
absence proper to writing were itself found to suit every species
of sign and communication, there would follow a general dis-
placement: writing no longer would be a species of communica-
tion, and all the concepts to whose generality writing was subor-
dinated (the concept itself as meaning, idea, or grasp of meaning
and idea, the concept of communication, of sign, etc.) would
90 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

appear as noncritical, ill-formed concepts, or rather as concepts

destined to ensure the authority and force of a certain historic
discourse.
Let us attempt then, while continuing to take our point of
departure from this classical discourse, to characterize the ab-
sence that seems to intervene in a fashion specific to the func-
tioning of writing.
A written sign is proffered in the absence of the addressee.
How is this absence to be qualified? One might say that at the
moment when I write, the addressee may be absent from my
field of present perception. But is not this absence only a pres-
ence that is distant, delayed, or, in one form or another, idealized
in its representation? It does not seem so, or at very least this
distance, division, delay, differance must be capable of being
brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure
of writing, supposing that writing exists, to be constituted. It is
here that differance as writing could no longer (be) an (ontologi-
cal) modification of presence. My "written communication" must,
if you will, remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of
every determined addressee in general for it to function as writ-
ing, that is, for it to be legible. It must be repeatable-iterable-
in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically
determinable set of addressees. This iterability (iter, once again,
comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows
may be read as the exploitation of the logic which links repeti-
tion to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, and does so
moreover for no matter what type of writing (pictographic, hier-
oglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to use the old cate-
gories). A writing that was not structurally legible-iterable-
beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. Al-
though all this appears self-evident, I do not want it to be as-
sumed as such and will examine the ultimate objection that
might be made to this proposition. Let us imagine a writing with
a code idiomatic enough to have been founded and known, as a
secret cipher, only by two "subjects." Can it still be said that
upon the death of the addressee, that is, of the two partners, the
mark left by one of them is still a writing? Yes, to the extent to
which, governed by a code, even if unknown and nonlinguistic,
it is constituted, in its identity as a mark, by its iterability in the
 "Signature Event Context" 91

absence of whomever, and therefore ultimately in the absence of

every empirically determinable "subject." This implies that there
is no code-an organon of iterability-that is structurally secret.
The possibility of repeating, and therefore of identifying, marks
is implied in every code, making of it a communicable, trans-
mittable, decipherable grid that is iterable for a third party, and
thus for any possible user in general. All writing, therefore, in
order to be what it is, must be able to function in the radical
absence of every empirically determined addressee in general.
And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence; it
is a break in presence, "death," or the possibility of the "death"
of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark (and it is
at this point, I note in passing, that the value or effect of tran-
scendentality is linked necessarily to the possibility of writing
and of "death" analyzed in this way). A perhaps paradoxical
consequence of the recourse I am taking to iteration and to the
code: the disruption, in the last analysis, of the authority of the
code as a finite system of rules; the radical destruction, by the
same token, of every context as a protocol of a code. We will
come to this in a moment.
What holds for the addressee holds also, for the same reasons,
for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that
will constitute a kind of machine that is in tum productive, that
my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from func-
tioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading and
rewriting. When I say "my future disappearance," I do so to make
this proposition more immediately acceptable. I must be able
simply to say my disappearance, my nonpresence in general, for
example the nonpresence of my meaning, of my intention-to-
signify, of my wanting-to-communicate-this, from the emission
or production of the mark. For the written to be the written, it
must continue to "act" and to be legible even if what is called
the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has
written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provi-
sionally absent, or if he is dead, or if in general he does not
support, with his absolutely current and present intention or
attention, the plenitude of his meaning, of that very thing which
seems to be written "in his name." Here, we could reelaborate
the analysis sketched out above for the addressee. The situation
92 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

of the scribe and of the subscriber, as concerns the written, is

fundamentally the same as that of the reader. This essential
drifting, due to writing as an iterative structure cut off from all
absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the authority of
the last analysis, writing orphaned, and separated at birth from
the assistance of its father, is indeed what Plato condemned in
the Phaedrus. 6 If Plato's gesture is, as I believe, the philosophical
movement par excellence, one realizes what is at stake here.
Before specifying the inevitable consequences of these nuclear
traits of all writing-to wit: (r) the break with the horizon of
communication as the communication of consciousnesses or
presences, and as the linguistic or semantic transport of meaning;
(2) the subtraction of all writing from the semantic horizon or
the hermeneutic horizon which, at least as a horizon of meaning,
lets itself be punctured by writing; (3) the necessity of, in a way,
separating the concept of polysemia from the concept I have
elsewhere named dissemination, which is also the concept of
writing; (4) the disqualification or the limit of the concept of the
"real" or "linguistic" context, the theoretical determination or
empirical saturation of which is, strictly speaking, rendered im-
possible or insufficient by writing-I would like to demonstrate
that the recognizable traits of the classical and narrowly defined
concept of writing are generalizable. They would be valid not
only for all the orders of "signs" and for all languages in general,
but even, beyond semiolinguistic communication, for the entire
field of what philosophy would call experience, that is, the expe-
rience of Being: so-called presence.
In effect, what are the essential predicates in a minimal deter-
mination of the classical concept of writing?
r. A written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is therefore a
mark which remains, which is not exhausted in the present of its
inscription, and which can give rise to an iteration both in the
absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically deter-
mined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced
it. This is how, traditionally at least, "written communication"
is distinguished from "spoken communication."
2. By the same token, a written sign carries with it a force of
breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which
organize the moment of its inscription. This force of breaking is
 "Signature Event Context" 93

not an accidental predicate, but the very structure of the written.

If the issue is one of the so-called real context, what I have just
proposed is too obvious. Are part of this alleged real context a
certain "present" of inscription, the presence of the scriptor in
what he has written, the entire environment and horizon of his
experience, and above all the intention, the meaning which at a
given moment would animate his inscription. By all rights, it
belongs to the sign to be legible, even if the moment of its
production is irremediably lost, and even if I do not know what
its alleged author-scriptor meant consciously and intentionally
at the moment he wrote it, that is, abandoned it to its essential
drifting. Turning now to the semiotic and internal context, there
is no less a force of breaking by virtue of its essential iterability;
one can always lift a written syntagma from the interlocking
chain in which it is caught or given without making it lose every
possibility of functioning, if not every possibility of "communi-
cating," precisely. Eventually, one may recognize other such pos-
sibilities in it by inscribing or grafting it into other chains. No
context can enclose it. Nor can any code, the code being here
both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential
iterability (repetition/alterity).
3. This force of rupture is due to the spacing that constitutes
the written sign: the spacing that separates it from other ele-
ments of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibil-
ity of its extraction and grafting), but also from all the forms of a
present referent (past or to come in the modified form of the
present past or to come) that is objective or subjective. This
spacing is not the simple negativity of a lack, but the emergence
of the mark. However, it is not the work of the negative in the
service of meaning, or of the living concept, the telos, which
remains relevable and reducible in the Aufhebung of a dialec-
tics. 7
Are these three predicates, along with the entire system joined
to them, reserved, as is so often believed, for "written" commu-
nication, in the narrow sense of the word? Are they not also to
be found in all language, for example in spoken language, and
ultimately in the totality of "experience," to the extent that it is
not separated from the field of the mark, that is, the grid of
erasure and of difference, of unities of iterability, of unities sepa-
94 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

rable from their internal or external context, and separable from

themselves, to the extent that the very iterability which consti-
tutes their identity never permits them to be a unity of self-
identity?
Let us consider any element of spoken language, a large or
small unity. First condition for it to function: its situation as
concerns a certain code; but I prefer not to get too involved here
with the concept of code, which does not appear certain to me;
let us say that a certain self-identity of this element (mark, sign,
etc.) must permit its recognition and repetition. Across empirical
variations of tone, of voice, etc., eventually of a certain accent,
for example, one must be able to recognize the identity, shall we
say, of a signifying form. Why is this identity paradoxically the
division or dissociation from itself which will make of this phonic
sign a grapheme? Is it because this unity of the signifying form is
constituted only by its iterability, by the possibility of being
repeated in the absence not only of its referent, which goes with-
out saying, but of a determined signified or current intention of
signification, as of every present intention of communication.
This structural possibility of being severed from its referent or
signified (and therefore from communication and its context)
seems to me to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in
general, that is, as we have seen, the nonpresent remaining of a
differential mark cut off from its alleged "production" or origin.
And I will extend this law even to all "experience" in general, if
it is granted that there is no experience of pure presence, but only
chains of differential marks.
Let us remain at this point for a while and come back to the
absence of the referent and even of the signified sense, and there-
fore of the correlative intention of signification. The absence of
the referent is a possibility rather easily admitted today. This
possibility is not only an empirical eventuality. It constructs the
mark; and the eventual presence of the referent at the moment
when it is designated changes nothing about the structure of a
mark which implies that it can do without the referent. Husserl,
in the Logical Investigations, had very rigorously analyzed this
possibility. It is double:
r. A statement the object of which is not impossible but only
possible might very well be proffered and understood without its
 "Signature Event Context" 95

real object (its referent) being present, whether for the person
who produces the statement, or for the one who receives it. If I
say, while looking out the window, "The sky is blue," the state-
ment will be intelligible (let us provisionally say, if you will,
communicable), even if the interlocutor does not see the sky;
even if I do not see it myself, if I see it poorly, if I am mistaken,
or if I wish to trick my interlocutor. Not that it is always thus;
but the structure of possibility of this statement includes the
capability of being formed and of functioning either as an empty
reference, or cut off from its referent. Without this possibility,
which is also the general, generalizable, and generalizing itera-
tion of every mark, there would be no statements.
2. The absence of the signified. Husserl analyzes this too. He
considers it always possible, even if, according to the axiology
and teleology that govern his analysis, he deems this possibility
inferior, dangerous, or "critical": it opens the phenomenon of the
crisis of meaning. This absence of meaning can be layered accord-
ing to three forms:
a. I can manipulate symbols without in active and current
fashion animating them with my attention and intention to sig-
nify (the crisis of mathematical symbolism, according to Hus-
serl). Husserl indeed stresses the fact that this does not prevent
the sign from functioning: the crisis or vacuity of mathematical
meaning does not limit technical progress. (The intervention of
writing is decisive here, as Husserl himself notes in The Origin
of Geometry.)
b. Certain statements can have a meaning, although they are
without objective signification. "The circle is square" is a prop-
osition invested with meaning. It has enough meaning for me to
be able to judge it false or contradictory (widersinnig and not
sinnlos, says Husserl). I am placing this example under the cate-
gory of the absence of the signified, although the tripartition
signifier/signified/referent does not pertinently account for Hus-
serl's analysis. "Square circle" marks the absence of a referent,
certainly, and also the absence of a certain signified, but not the
absence of meaning. In these two cases, the crisis of meaning
lnonpresence in general, absence as the absence of the referent-
of perception-or of meaning-of the actual intention to signify)
is always linked to the essential possibility of writing; and this
96 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

crisis is not an accident, a factual and empirical anomaly of

spoken language, but also the positive possibility and "internal"
structure of spoken language, from a certain outside.
c. Finally there is what Husserl calls Sinnlosigkeit or agram-
maticality, for example, "green is or" or "abracadabra." In the
latter cases, as far as Husserl is concerned, there is no more
language, or at least no more "logical" language, no more lan-
guage of knowledge as Husserl understands it in teleological
fashion, no more language attuned to the possibility of the intui-
tion of objects given in person and signified in truth. Here, we
are confronted with a decisive difficulty. Before pausing over it, I
note, as a point that touches upon our debate on communication,
that the primary interest of the Husserlian analysis to which I
am referring here (precisely by extracting it, up to a certain point,
from its teleological and metaphysical context and horizon, an
operation about which we must ask how and why it is always
possible) is that it alleges, and it seems to me arrives at, a rigor-
ous dissociation of the analysis of the sign or expression (Aus-
druck) as a signifying sign, a sign meaning something (bedeut-
same Zeichen), from all phenomena of communication. 8
Let us take once more the case of agrammatical Sinnlosigkeit.
What interests Husserl in the Logical Investigations is the sys-
tem of rules of a universal grammar, not from a linguistic point
of view, but from a logical and epistemological point of view. In
an important note from the second edition,9 he specifies that
from his point of view the issue is indeed one of a purely logical
grammar, that is, the universal conditions of possibility for a
morphology of significations in the relation of knowledge to a
possible object, and not of a pure grammar in general, considered
from a psychological or linguistic point of view. Therefore, it is
only in a context determined by a will to know, by an epistemic
intention, by a· conscious relation to the object as an object of
knowledge within a horizon of truth-it is in this oriented con-
textual field that "green is or" is unacceptable. But, since "green
is or" and "abracadabra" do not constitute their context in them-
selves, nothing prevents their functioning in another context as
signifying marks (or indices, as Husserl would say). Not only in
the contingent case in which, by means of the translation of
German into French "le vert est ou" might be endowed with
 "Signature Event Context" 97

grammaticality, ou (oder, or) becoming when heard oil (where,

the mark of place): "Where has the green (of the grass) gone (le
vert est ou?, 11 "Where has the glass in which I wished to give you
something to drink gone (le verre est oil)." But even "green is or"
still signifies an example of agrammaticality. This is the possi-
bility on which I wish to insist: the possibility of extraction and
of citational grafting which belongs to the structure of every
mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as
writing even before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic
communication; as writing, that is, as a possibility of functioning
cut off, at a certain point, from its "original" meaning and from
its belonging to a saturable and constraining context. Every sign,
linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense
of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put
between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given
context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely
nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is
valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only
contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citation-
ality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not
an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal-abnormal) with-
out which a mark could no longer even have a so-called normal
functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And
whose origin could not be lost on the way?

The Parasites. lter, of Writing: That Perhaps It Does Not Exist

I now propose to elaborate this question a little further with help

from-but in order to go beyond it too-the problematic of the
performative. It has several claims to our interest here.
r. Austin, 10 by his emphasis on the analysis of perlocution and
especially illocution, indeed seems to consider acts of discourse
only as acts of communication. This is what his French transla-
tor notes, citing Austin himself: "It is by comparing the consta-
tive utterance (that is, the classical 'assertion,' most often con-
ceived as a true or false 'description' of the facts) with the
performative utterance (from the English performative, that is,
the utterance which allows us to do something by means of
speech itself) that Austin has been led to consider every utter-
98 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ance worthy of the name (that is, destined to communicate,

which would exclude, for example, reflex-exclamations) as being
first and foremost a speech act produced in the total situation in
which the interlocutors find themselves (How to Do Things With
Words, p. 147). 11
2. This category of communication is relatively original. Aus-
tin's notions of illocution and perlocution do not designate the
transport or passage of a content of meaning, but in a way the
communication of an original movement (to be defined in a
general theory of action), an operation, and the production of an
effect. To communicate, in the case of the performative, if in all
rigor and purity some such thing exists (for the moment I am
placing myself within this hypothesis and at this stage of the
analysis), would be to communicate a force by the impetus of a
mark.
3. Differing from the classical assertion, from the constative
utterance, the performative's referent (although the word is in-
appropriate here, no doubt, such is the interest of Austin's find-
ing) is not outside it, or in any case preceding it or before it. It
does not describe something which exists outside and before
language. It produces or transforms a situation, it operates; and if
it can be said that a constative utterance also effectuates some-
thing and always transforms a situation, it cannot be said that
this constitutes its internal structure, its manifest function or
destination, as in the case of the performative.
4. Austin had to free the analysis of the performative from the
authority of the value of truth, from the opposition true-false, 12
at least in its classical form, occasionally substituting for it the
value of force, of difference of force (illocutionary or perlocution-
ary force.) (It is this, in a thought which is nothing less than
Nietzschean, which seems to me to beckon toward Nietzsche,
who often recognized in himself a certain affinity with a vein of
English thought.)
For these four reasons, at least, it could appear that Austin has
exploded the concept of communication as a purely semiotic,
linguistic, or symbolic concept. The performative is a "commu-
nication" which does not essentially limit itself to transporting
an already constituted semantic content guarded by its own aim-
ing at truth (truth as an unveiling of that which is in its Being, or
 "Signature Event Context" 99

as an adequation between a judicative statement and the thing

itself).
And yet-at least this is what I would like to attempt to
indicate now-all the difficulties encountered by Austin in an
analysis that is patient, open, aporetic, in constant transforma-
tion, often more fruitful in the recognition of its impasses than
in its positions, seem to me to have a common root. It is this:
Austin has not taken into account that which in the structure of
locution land therefore before any illocutory or perlocutory deter-
mination) already bears within itself the system of predicates
that I call graphematic in general, which therefore confuses all
the ulterior oppositions the pertinence, purity, and rigor of which
Austin sought to establish in vain.
In order to show this, I must take as known and granted that
Austin's analyses permanently demand a value of context, and
even of an exhaustively determinable context, whether de jure or
teleologically; and the long list of "infelicities" of variable type
which might affect the event of the performative always returns
to an element of what Austin calls the total context. 13 One of
these essential elements-and not one among others-classi-
cally remains consciousness, the conscious presence of the inten-
tion of the speaking subject for the totality of his locutory act.
Thereby, performative communication once more becomes the
communication of an intentional meaning, 14 even if this mean-
ing has no referent in the form of a prior or exterior thing or state
of things. This conscious presence of the speakers or receivers
who participate in the effecting of a performative, their conscious
and intentional presence in the totality of the operation, implies
teleologically that no remainder escapes the present totalization.
No remainder, whether in the definition of the requisite conven-
tions, or the internal and linguistic context, or the grammatical
form or semantic determination of the words used; no irreducible
polysemia, that is, no "dissemination" escaping the horizon of
the unity of meaning. I cite the first two lectures of How to Do
Things with Words: "Speaking generally, it is always necessary
that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be
in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly
necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should
also perform certain other actions, whether 'physical' or 'mental'
100 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

actions or even acts of uttering further words. Thus, for naming

the ship, it is essential that I should be the person appointed to
name her, for !Christian) marrying, it is essential that I should
not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced,
and so on; for a bet to have been made, it is generally necessary
for the offer of the bet to have been accepted by a taker !who
must have done something, such as to say 'Done'), and it is
hardly a gift if I say 'I give it you' but never hand it over. So far,
well and good" (pp. 8-9).
In the Second Lecture, after having in his habitual fashion set
aside the grammatical criterion, Austin examines the possibility
and origin of the failures or "infelicities" of the performative
utterance. He then defines the six indispensable, if not sufficient,
conditions for success. Through the values of "conventionality,"
"correctness," and "completeness" that intervene in the defini-
tion, we necessarily again find those of an exhaustively definable
context, of a free consciousness present for the totality of the
operation, of an absolutely full meaning that is master of itself:
the teleological jurisdiction of a total field whose intention re-
mains the organizing center (pp. 12-16). Austin's procedure is
rather remarkable, and typical of the philosophical tradition that
he prefers to have little to do with. It consists in recognizing that
the possibility of the negative (here, the infelicities I is certainly a
structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk in the oper-
ations under consideration; and then, with an almost immedi-
ately simultaneous gesture made in the name of a kind of ideal
regulation, an exclusion of this risk as an accidental, exterior one
that teaches us nothing about the language phenomenon under
consideration. This is all the more curious, and actually rigor-
ously untenable, in that Austin denounces with irony the "fe-
tish" of opposition value/fact.
Thus, for example, concerning the conventionality without
which there is no performative, Austin recognizes that all con-
ventional acts are exposed to failure: "It seems clear in the first
place that, although it has excited us (or failed to excite us) in
connexion with certain acts which are or are in part acts of
uttering words, infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which
have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conven-
tional acts: not indeed that every ritual is liable to every form of
 "Signature Event Context" 101

infelicity (but then nor is every performative utterance)" (pp. 18-

19; Austin's italics).
Aside from all the questions posed by the very historically
sedimented notion of "convention," we must notice here: (1)
That in this specific place Austin seems to consider only the
conventionality that forms the circumstance of the statement,
its contextual surroundings, and not a certain intrinsic conven-
tionality of that which constitutes locution itself, that is, every-
thing that might quickly be summarized under the problematic
heading of the "arbitrariness of the sign," which extends, aggra-
vates, and radicalizes the difficulty. Ritual is not an eventuality,
but, as iterability, is a structural characteristic of every mark. (2)
That the value of risk or of being open to failure, although it
might, as Austin recognizes, affect the totality of conventional
acts, is not examined as an essential predicate or law. Austin
does not ask himself what consequences derive from the fact that
something possible-a possible risk-is always possible, is
somehow a necessary possibility. And if, such a necessary possi-
bility of failure being granted, it still constitutes an accident.
What is a success when the possibility of failure continues to
constitute its structure?
Therefore the opposition of the success/failure of illocution or
perlocution here seems quite insufficient or derivative. It presup-
poses a general and systematic elaboration of the structure of
locution which avoids the endless alternation of essence and
accident. Now, it is very significant that Austin rejects this "gen-
eral theory," defers it on two occasions, notably in the Second
Lecture. I leave aside the first exclusion. ("I am not going into
the general doctrine here: in many such cases we may even say
the act was 'void' (or voidable for duress or undue influence) and
so forth. Now I suppose that some very general high-level doc-
trine might embrace both what we have called infelicities and
these other 'unhappy' features of the doing of actions-in our
case actions containing a performative utterance-in a single
doctrine: but we are not including this kind of unhappiness-we
must just remember, though, that features of this sort can and do
constantly obtrude into any case we are discussing. Features of
this sort would normally come under the heading of 'extenuating
circumstances' or of 'factors reducing or abrogating the agent's
102 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

responsibility,' and so on"; p. 21; my italics). The second gesture

of exclusion concerns us more directly here. In question, pre-
cisely, is the possibility that every performative utterance land a
priori every other utterance) may be "cited." Now, Austin ex-
cludes this eventuality land the general doctrine that would ac-
count for it) with a kind of lateral persistence, all the more
significant in its off-sidedness. He insists upon the fact that this
possibility remains abnormal, parasitical, that it constitutes a
kind of extenuation, that is, an agony of language that must
firmly be kept at a distance, or from which one must resolutely
tum away. And the concept of the "ordinary," and therefore of
"ordinary language," to which he then has recourse is indeed
marked by this exclusion. This makes it all the more problem-
atic, and before demonstrating this, it would be better to read a
paragraph from this Second Lecture:
"(ii) Secondly, as utterances our performatives are also heir to
certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances. And these
likewise, though again they might be brought into a more general
account, we are deliberately at present excluding. I mean, for
example, the following: a performative utterance will, for ex-
ample, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on
the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This
applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance-a sea-
change in special circumstances. Language in such circum-
stances is in special ways-intelligibly-used not seriously [I
am italicizing here, J.D.], but in ways parasitic upon its normal
use-ways that fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of lan-
guage. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our perfor-
mative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as is-
sued in ordinary circumstances" (pp. 21-22). Austin therefore
excludes, along with what he calls the sea-change, the "non-
serious," the "parasitic," the "etiolations," the "non-ordinary"
(and with them the general theory which in accounting for these
oppositions no longer would be governed by them), which he
nevertheless recognizes as the possibility to which every utter-
ance is open. It is also as a "parasite" that writing has always
been treated by the philosophical tradition, and the rapproche-
ment, here, is not at all fortuitous.
 "Signature Event Context" 103

Therefore, I ask the following question: is this general possi-

bility necessarily that of a failure or a trap into which language
might fall, or in which language might lose itself, as if in an
abyss situated outside or in front of it? What about parasitism?
In other words, does the generality of the risk admitted by Austin
surround language like a kind of ditch, a place of external perdi-
tion into which locution might never venture, that it might
avoid by remaining at home, in itself, sheltered by its essence or
telos? Or indeed is this risk, on the contrary, its internal and
positive condition of possibility? this outside its inside? the very
force and law of its emergence? In this last case, what would an
"ordinary" language defined by the very law of language signify?
Is it that in excluding the general theory of this structural para-
sitism, Austin, who nevertheless pretends to describe the facts
and events of ordinary language, makes us accept as ordinary a
teleological and ethical determination (the univocality of the
statement-which he recognizes elsewhere remains a philosoph-
ical "ideal," pp. 72-73-the self-presence of a total context, the
transparency of intentions, the presence of meaning for the abso-
lutely singular oneness of a speech act, etc.)?
For, finally, is not what Austin excludes as anomalous, excep-
tional, "non-serious, 1115 that is, citation Ion the stage, in a poem,
or in a soliloquy), the determined modification of a general cita-
tionality-or rather, a general iterability-without which there
would not even be a "successful" performative? Such that-a
paradoxical, but inevitable consequence-a successful performa-
tive is necessarily an "impure" performative, to use the word
that Austin will employ later or when he recognizes that there is
no "pure" performative. 16
Now I will take things from the side of positive possibility,
and no longer only from the side of failure: would a performative
statement be possible if a citational doubling did not eventually
split, dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event? I am
asking the question in this form in order to forestall an objection.
In effect, it might be said to me: you cannot allege that you
account for the so-called graphematic structure of locution solely
on the basis of the occurrence of failures of the performative,
however real these failures might be, and however effective or
104 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

general their possibility. You cannot deny that there are also
performatives that succeed, and they must be accounted for:
sessions are opened, as Paul Ricoeur did yesterday, one says "I
ask a question," one bets, one challenges, boats are launched,
and one even marries occasionally. Such events, it appears, have
occurred. And were a single one of them to have taken place a
single time, it would still have to be accounted for.
I will say "perhaps." Here, we must first agree upon what the
"occurring" or the eventhood of an event consists in, when the
event supposes in its allegedly present and singular intervention
a statement which in itself can be only of a repetitive or cita-
tional structure, or rather, since these last words lead to confu-
sion, of an iterable structure. Therefore, I come back to the point
that seems fundamental to me, and which now concerns the
status of the event in general, of the event of speech or by speech,
of the strange logic it supposes, and which often remains unper-
ceived.
Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did
not repeat a "coded" or iterable statement, in other words, if the
expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage
were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and
therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as "citation"?
Not that citationality here is of the same type as in a play, a
philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem. This is why
there is a relative specificity, as Austin says, a "relative purity"
of performatives. But this relative purity is not constructed against
citationality or iterability, but against other kinds of iteration
within a general iterability which is the effraction into the alleg-
edly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech
act. Thus, one must less oppose citation or iteration to the non-
iteration of an event, than construct a differential typology of
forms of iteration, supposing that this is a tenable project that
can give rise to an exhaustive program, a question I am holding
off on here. In this typology, the category of intention will not
disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no
longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of
utterances. Above all, one then would be concerned with differ-
ent types of marks or chains of iterable marks, and not with an
opposition between citational statements on the one hand, and
 "Signature Event Context" 105

singular and original statement-events on the other. The first

consequence of this would be the following: given this structure
of iteration, the intention which animates utterance will never
be completely present in itself and its content. The iteration
which structures it a priori introduces an essential dehiscence
and demarcation. One will no longer be able to exclude, as Aus-
tin wishes, the "non-serious," the oratio obliqua, from "ordi-
nary" language. And if it is alleged that ordinary language, or the
ordinary circumstance of language, excludes citationality or gen-
eral iterability, does this not signify that the "ordinariness" in
question, the thing and the notion, harbors a lure, the teleologi-
cal lure of consciousness the motivations, indestructible neces-
sity, and systematic effects of which remain to be analyzed?
Especially since this essential absence of intention for the actual-
ity of the statement, this structural unconsciousness if you will,
prohibits every saturation of a context. For a context to be ex-
haustively determinable, in the sense demanded by Austin, it at
least would be necessary for the conscious intention to be totally
present and actually transparent for itself and others, since it is a
determining focal point of the context. The concept of or quest
for the "context" therefore seems to suffer here from the same
theoretical and motivated uncertainty as the concept of the "or-
dinary," from the same metaphysical origins: an ethical and te-
leological discourse of consciousness. This time, a reading of the
connotations of Austin's text would confirm the reading of its
descriptions; I have just indicated the principle of this reading.
Differance, the irreducible absence of intention or assistance
from the performative statement, from the most "event-like"
statement possible, is what authorizes me, taking into account
the predicates mentioned just now, to posit the general graphe-
matic structure of every "communication." Above all, I will not
conclude from this that there is no relative specificity of the
effects of consciousness, of the effects of speech lin opposition to
writing in the traditional sense), that there is no effect of the
performative, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence
and of speech acts. It is simply that these effects do not exclude
what is generally opposed to them term by term, but on the
contrary presuppose it in dissymmetrical fashion, as the general
space of their possibility.
106 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

Signatures

This general space is first of all spacing as the disruption of

presence in the mark, what here I am calling writing. That all
the difficulties encountered by Austin intersect at the point at
which both presence and writing are in question, is indicated for
me by a passage from the Fifth Lecture in which the divided
agency of the legal signature emerges.
Is it by chance that Austin must note at this point: "I must
explain again that we are floundering here. To feel the firm
ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its
revenges" (p. 61). Only a little earlier an "impasse" had appeared,
the impasse one comes to each time "any single simple criterion
of grammar or vocabulary" is sought in order to distinguish be-
tween performative or constative statements. (I must say that
this critique of linguisticism and of the authority of the code, a
critique executed on the basis of an analysis of language, is what
most interested me and convinced me in Austin's enterprise.) He
then attempts to justify, with nonlinguistic reasons, the prefer-
ence he has shown until now for the forms of the first-person
present indicative in the active voice in the analysis of the perfor-
mative. The justification of last appeal is that in these forms
reference is made to what Austin calls the source (origin) of the
utterance. This notion of the source-the stakes of which are so
evident-often reappears in what follows, and it governs the
entire analysis in the phase we are examining. Not only does
Austin not doubt that the source of an oral statement in the first
person present indicative (active voice) is present in the utterance
and in the statement, (I have attempted to explain why we had
reasons not to believe so), but he no more doubts that the equiv-
alent of this link to the source in written utterances is simply
evident and ascertained in the signature: "Where there is not, in
the verbal formula of the utterance, a reference to the person
doing the uttering, and so the acting, by means of the pronoun 'I'
(or by his personal name), then in fact he will be 'referred to' in
one of two ways:
"(a) In verbal utterances, by his being the person who does the
uttering-what we may call the utterance-origin which is used
generally in any system of verbal reference-co-ordinates.
 "Signature Event Context" 107

"(b) In written utterances (or 'inscriptions'), by his appending

his signature (this has to be done because, of course, written
utterances are not tethered to their origin in the way spoken ones
are)" (pp. 60-61). Austin acknowledges an analogous function in
the expression "hereby" used in official protocols.
Let us attempt to analyze the signature from this point of
view, its relation to the present and to the source. I take it as
henceforth implied in this analysis that all the established predi-
cates will hold also for the oral "signature" that is, or allegedly
is, the presence of the "author" as the "person who does the
uttering," as the "origin," the source, in the production of the
statement.
By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empir-
ical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks
and retains his having-been-present in a past now, which will
remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the
transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general
maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctual-
ity, always evident and always singular, in the form of the signa-
ture. This is the enigmatic originality of every paraph. For the
attachment to the source to occur, the absolute singularity of an
event of the signature and of a form of the signature must be
retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.
Is there some such thing? Does the absolute singularity of an
event of the signature ever occur? Are there signatures?
Yes, of course, every day. The effects of signature are the most
ordinary thing in the world. The condition of possibility for these
effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their im-
possibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order
to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have
a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach
itself from the present and singular intention of its production. It
is its sameness which, in altering its identity and singularity,
divides the seal. I have already indicated the principle of the
analysis above.
To conclude this very dry 17 discourse:
1. As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining
the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of
intentions and meanings, the discourse and "communication of
108 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

consciousnesses." We are not witnessing an end of writing which,

to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a
transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more
and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of
which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence,
truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is
this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.
2. The semantic horizon which habitually governs the notion
of communication is exceeded or punctured by the intervention
of writing, that is, of a dissemination that cannot be reduced by
a polysemia. Writing is read, and "in the last analysis" does not
give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to the decoding of a
meaning or truth.
3. Despite the general displacement of the classical, "philo-
sophical," Western, etc., concept of writing, it appears necessary,
provisionally and strategically, to conserve the old name. This
implies an entire logic of paleonymy which I do not wish to
elaborate here. 18 Very schematically: an opposition of metaphys-
ical concepts !for example, speech-writing, presence-absence,
etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and
an order of subordination. Deconstruction cannot limit itself or
proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a
double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an
overturning of the classical opposition and a general displace-
ment of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruc-
tion will provide itself the means with which to intervene in the
field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of
nondiscursive forces. Each concept, moreover, belongs to a sys-
tematic chain and itself constitutes a system of predicates. There
is no metaphysical concept in and of itself. There is a work-
metaphysical or not-on conceptual systems. Deconstruction
does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in
overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the
nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articu-
lated. For example, writing, as a classical concept, carries with it
predicates that have been subordinated, excluded, or held in re-
serve by forces and according to necessities to be analyzed. It is
these predicates (I have mentioned some) whose force of general-
ity, generalization, and generativity find themselves liberated,
 "Signature Event Context" 109

grafted onto a "new" concept of writing which also corresponds

to whatever always has resisted the former organization of forces,
which always has constituted the remainder irreducible to the
dominant force which organized the-to say it quickly-logo-
centric hierarchy. To leave to this new concept the old name of
writing is to maintain the structure of the graft, the transition
and indispensable adherence to an effective intervention in the
constituted historic field. And it is also to give their chance and
their force, their power of communication, to everything played
out in the operations of deconstruction.
But what goes without saying will quickly have been under-
stood, especially in a philosophical colloquium: as a disseminat-
ing operation separated from presence (of Being) according to all
its modifications, writing, if there is any, perhaps communicates,
but does not exist, surely. Or barely, hereby, in the form of the
most improbable signature.

(Remark: the-written-text of
this-oral-communication was to
have been addressed to the Associa-
tion of French Speaking Societies of
Philosophy before the meeting. Such
a missive therefore had to be signed.
Which I did, and counterfeit here.
Where? There. J.D.) J. DERRIDA
- Translated by Alan Bass

NOTES

1. "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph 1 119771.

2. The theme of the colloquium at which Derrida delivered this lecture,
but also the term in French for a paper presented in such circumstances.
Derrida will exploit this ambiguity below.-En.
3. See Derrida's introductory essay, "The Archeology of the Frivolous"
[1976] 1 to the edition of Condillac's work.-En.
4. Rousseau's theory of language and writing is also proposed under the
general rubric of communication. l"On the Various Means of Communicat-
ing Our Thoughts" is the title of the first chapter of the Essay on the Origi.n
of Languages.I
110 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

5. Language supplements action or perception, articulated language sup-

plements the language of action, writing supplements articulated language,
etc.
6. See Chapter 5 below, "Plato's Pharmacy."-Eo.
7. On Derrida's translation of Aufheben as re/ever, and my maintenance
of the French term, see note 12 to chapter 3, "Differance," for a system of
references.-TRANS.
8. "So far we have considered expressions as used in communication,
which last depends essentially on the fact that they operate indicatively. But
expressions also play a great part in uncommunicated, interior mental life.
This change in function plainly has nothing to do with whatever makes an
expression an expression. Expressions continue to have Bedeutungen as they
had before, and the same Bedeutungen as in dialogue." Logical Investiga-
tions, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 278 .
. What I am asserting here implies the interpretation I proposed of Husserlian
procedure on this point. Therefore, I permit myself to refer to Speech and
Phenomena. [see above-Eo.)
9. "In the First Edition I spoke of 'pure grammar,' a name conceived and
expressly devised to be analogous to Kant's 'pure science of nature.' Since it
cannot, however, be said that pure formal semantic theory comprehends the
entire a priori of general grammar-there is, e.g., a peculiar a priori govern-
ing relations of mutual understanding among minded persons, relations very
important for grammar-talk of pure logical grammar is to be preferred."
Logical Investigations, vol. 21 p. 527. [In the paragraph that follows I have
maintained Findlay's translation of the phrase Derrida plays upon, i.e. "green
is or," and have given the French necessary to comprehend this passage in
parentheses.-TRANS.)
IO. T- L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1962). Throughout this section I have followed the stan-
dard procedure of translating enonce as statement, and enonciation as utter-
ance. - TRANS.
11. G. Lane, introduction to the French translation of How to Do Things
with Words.
12. " ... two fetishes which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry
with, viz., 1) the true/false fetish, 2) the value/fact fetish" (p. 150).
13. See e.g. pp. 52 and 147.
14. Which sometimes compels Austin to reintroduce the criterion of
truth into the description of performatives. See e.g. pp. 51-52 and 89-90.
15. The very suspect value of the "non-serious" is a frequent reference
(see e.g. pp. rn4, 121). It has an essential link with what Austin says else-
where about the oratio obliqua (pp. 70-71) and about mime.
16. From this point of view one might examine the fact recognized by
Austin that "the same sentence is used on different occasions of utterance
in both ways, performative and constative. The thing seems hopeless from
the start, if we are to leave utterances as they stand and seek for a criterion"
(p. 67). It is the graphematic root of citationality (iterability) that provokes
 "Signature Event Context" 111

this confusion and makes it "not possible," as Austin says, "to lay down
even a list of all possible criteria" (Ibid.).
17. Derrida's word here is sec, combining the initial letters of three words
that form his title, signature, event, context. -TRANS.
18. See Dissemination [1972] and Positions [1972].
 FIVE

From "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination

("La Pharmacle de Platon" In La Dissemination

(1972])

"Plato's Pharmacy," which precedes and lays the ground for "The
Double Session," is undoubtedly one of Derrida's most important
early texts because in it he examines the condemnation of writing as
philosophy's self-inaugurating gesture and he does so at its source:
in the texts of Plato. The key text is the Phaedrus, long considered
an essentially flawed or disjointed dialogue, but which Derrida will
argue is ordered by the "graphic" (rather than logic) of differance at a
level of textual play that Plato could only partially control. The
principal guide Derrida chooses to follow within the intricacies of this
play is the family of pharmaceutical terms that, more or less explic-
itly, are associated by Plato with writing, but particularly the term
pharmakon. In classical Greek, a pharmakon is a drug, and as such
it may be taken to mean either a remedy or a poison, either the cure
of illness or its cause. It is this essential undecidability of the phar-
makon that poses the problem of translation which, as Derrida points
out, is not simply the problem of translating Plato's Greek into
another language, but already introduces within that single language
(which happens to be the inaugural language of philosophy) the
necessity of translating Greek to itself. Derrida situates this problem
in the "violent difficulty of the transference of a nonphilosopheme
into a philosopheme" (p. 72). That is, the philosophical determina-
tion of writing as pharmakon cannot be made to function as an
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 113

unambiguous term available to dialectic reasoning (a philosopheme).

Instead it enters the dialectic from both sides at once (remedy-
poison, good-bad, positive-negative) and threatens the philosophi-
cal process from within. That is why Derrida writes, "With this
problem of translation we will thus be dealing with nothing less
than the problem of the very passage into philosophy." Whereas the
"passage into philosophy" requires the reduction of the sign to its
signified truth, translation cannot retain the meaning of an original
sign except by supplanting it with another sign. In this respect,
translation reveals itself always to be a writing (and a reading) which,
like the movement of the pharmakon, spaces out the same in a
difference from itself. It repeats, supplements, supplants. (For more
on the problem of translation, see Part Three below.)
"Plato's Pharmacy" is divided into two major parts and subdi-
vided into nine sections. The following excerpts, all taken from the
first part, retain the major portion of Derrida's reading of the myth
Socrates tells to account for the origin of writing. The fact that this
origin is available only as myth or rumor complicates considerably
the distinction of mythos from logos, of myth from philosophy that
Plato wants to establish. We pick up the reading at the point at
which it addresses Socrates's question that opens the final section of
the dialogue, the question of the propriety or impropriety of writing.
 Plato's Pharmacy

[ .... ]
It is truly morality that is at stake, both in the sense of the
opposition between good and evil, or good and bad, and in the
sense of mores, public morals and social conventions. It is a
question of knowing what is done and what is not done. This
moral disquiet is in no way to be distinguished from questions of
truth, memory, and dialectics. This latter question, which will
quickly be engaged as the question of writing, is closely associ-
ated with the morality theme, and indeed develops it by affinity
of essence and not by superimposition. But within a debate ren-
dered very real by the political development of the city, the
propagation of writing and the activity of the sophists and
speechwriters, the primary accent is naturally placed upon polit-
ical and social proprieties. The type of arbitration proposed by
Socrates plays within the opposition between the values of seem-
liness and unseemliness (euprepeialaprepeia): "But there re-
mains the question of propriety and impropriety in writing, that
is to say the conditions that make it proper or improper. Isn't
that so?" 1
Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is
it proper to write? Is it done?
Of course not. But the answer is not so simple, and Socrates
does not immediately offer it on his own account in a rational
discourse or logos. He lets it be heard by delegating it to an akoe,
to a well-known rumor, to hearsay evidence, to a fable transmit-
ted from ear to ear: "I can tell you what our forefathers have said
about it, but the truth of it is only known by tradition. However,
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 115

if we could discover that truth for ourselves, should we still be

concerned with the fancies of mankind?" j274c).
The truth of writing, that is, as we shall see, lthe) nontruth,
cannot be discovered in ourselves by ourselves. And it is not the
object of a science, only of a history that is recited, a fable that is
repeated. The link between writing and myth becomes clearer, as
does its opposition to knowledge, notably the knowledge one
seeks in oneself, by oneself. And at the same time, through
writing or through myth, the genealogical break and the es-
trangement from the origin are sounded. One should note most
especially that what writing will later be accused of-repeating
without knowing-here defines the very approach that leads to
the statement and determination of its status. One thus begins
by repeating without knowing-through a myth-the definition
of writing, which is to repeat without knowing. This kinship of
writing and myth, both of them distinguished from logos and
dialectics, will only become more precise as the text concludes.
Having just repeated without knowing that writing consists of
repeating without knowing, Socrates goes on to base the demon-
stration of his indictment, of his logos, upon the premises of the
akoe, upon structures that are readable through a fabulous ge-
nealogy of writing. As soon as the myth has struck the first blow,
the logos of Socrates will demolish the accused.

The Father of Logos

The story begins like this:

Socrates: Very well. I heard, then, that at Naucratis in Egypt
there lived one of the old gods of that country, the one
whose sacred bird is called the ibis; and the name of the
divinity was Theuth. It was he who first invented numbers
and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of
draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata). Now
the King of all Egypt at that time was Thamus who lived in
the great city of the upper region which the Greeks call the
Egyptian Thebes; the god himself they call Ammon. Theuth
came to him and exhibited his arts and declared that they
116 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. And Thamus

questioned him about the usefulness of each one; and as
Theuth enumerated, the King blamed or praised what he
thought were the good or bad points in the explanation.
Now Thamus is said to have had a good deal to remark on
both sides of the question about every single art (it would
take too long to repeat it here); but when it came to writing,
Theuth said, "This discipline (to mathema), my King, will
make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories
(sophoterous kai mnemonikoterous): my invention is a rec-
ipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom." But the
King said ... etc. j274c-e).

Let us cut the King off here. He is faced with the pharmakon.
His reply will be incisive.
Let us freeze the scene and the characters and take a look at
them. Writing !or, if you will, the pharmakon) is thus presented
to the King. Presented: like a kind of present offered up in hom-
age by a vassal to his lord !Theuth is a demigod speaking to the
king of the gods), but above all as a finished work submitted to
his appreciation. And this work is itself an art, a capacity for
work, a power of operation. This artefactum is an art. But the
value of this gift is still uncertain. The value of writing-or of
the pharmakon-has of course been spelled out to the King, but
it is the King who will give it its value, who will set the price of
what, in the act of receiving, he constitutes or institutes. The
king or god !Thamus represents 2 Ammon, the king of the gods,
the king of kings, the god of gods. Theuth says to him: 6 basileu)
is thus the other name for the origin of value. The value of
writing will not be itself, writing will have no value, unless and
to the extent that god-the-king approves of it. But god-the-king
nonetheless experiences the pharmakon as a product, an ergon,
which is not his own, which comes to him from outside but also
from below, and which awaits his condescending judgment in
order to be consecrated in its being and value. God the king does
not know how to write, but that ignorance or incapacity only
testifies to his sovereign independence. He has no need to write.
He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices. Whether a
scribe from his secretarial staff then adds the supplement of a
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 117

transcription or not, the consignment is always in essence sec-

ondary.
From this position, without rejecting the homage, the god-
king will depreciate it, pointing out not only its uselessness but
its menace and its mischief. Another way of not receiving the
offering of writing. In so doing, god-the-king-that-speaks is acting
like a father. The pharmakon is here presented to the father and
is by him rejected, belittled, abandoned, disparaged. The father is
always suspicious and watchful toward writing.
Even if we did not want to give in here to the easy passage
uniting the figures of the king, the god, and the father, it would
suffice to pay systematic attention-which to our knowledge
has never been done-to the permanence of a Platonic schema
that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos, to
the paternal position. Not that this happens especially and exclu-
sively in Plato. Everyone knows this or can easily imagine it. But
the fact that "Platonism," which sets up the whole of Western
metaphysics in its conceptuality, should not escape the general-
ity of this structural constraint, and even illustrates it with in-
comparable subtlety and force, stands out as all the more signifi-
cant.
Not that logos is the father, either. But the origin of logos is
its father. One could say anachronously that the "speaking sub-
ject" is the fa th er of his speech. And one would quickly realize
that this is no metaphor, at least not in the sense of any common,
conventional effect of rhetoric. Logos is a son, then, a son that
would be destroyed in liis very presence without the present
attendance of his father. His father who answers. His father who
speaks for him and answers for him. Without his father, he would
be nothing but, in fact, writing. At least that is what is said by
the one who says: it is the father's thesis. The specificity of
writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the
father. Such an absence can of course exist along very diverse
modalities, distinctly or confusedly, successively or simulta-
neously: to have lost one's father, through natural or violent
death, through random violence or patricide; and then to solicit
the aid and attendance, possible or impossible, of the paternal
presence, to solicit it directly or to claim to be getting along
without it, etc. The reader will have noted Socrates's insistence
118 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

on the misery, whether pitiful or arrogant, of a logos committed

to writing: "It always needs its father to attend to it, being quite
unable to defend itself or attend to its own needs" j275e).
This misery is ambiguous: it is the distress of the orphan, of
course, who needs not only an attending presence but also a
presence that will attend to its needs; but in pitying the orphan,
one also makes an accusation against him, along with writing,
for claiming to do away with the father, for achieving emancipa-
tion with complacent self-sufficiency. From the position of the
holder of the scepter, the desire of writing is indicated, desig-
nated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal
subversion. Isn't this pharmakon then a criminal thing, a poi-
soned present?
The status of this orphan, whose welfare cannot be assured by
any attendance or assistance, coincides with that of a graphein
which, being nobody's son at the instant it reaches inscription,
scarcely remains a son at all and no longer recognizes its origins,
whether legally or morally. In contrast to writing, living logos is
alive in that it has a living father !whereas the orphan is already
half dead), a father that is present, standing near it, behind it,
within it, sustaining it with his rectitude, attending it in person
in his own name. Living logos, for its part, recognizes its debt,
lives off that recognition, and forbids itself, thinks it can forbid
itself patricide. But prohibition and patricide, like the relations
between speech and writing, are structures surprising enough to
require us later on to articulate Plato's text between a patricide
prohibited and a patricide proclaimed. The deferred murder of
the father and rector.
The Phaedrus would already be sufficient to prove that the
responsibility for logos, for its meaning and effects, goes to those
who attend it, to those who are present with the presence of a
father. These "metaphors" must be tirelessly questioned. Wit-
ness Socrates, addressing Eros: "If in our former speech Phaedrus
or I said anything harsh against you, blame Lysias, the father of
the subject (ton tou logou patera)" j275b). Logos-"discourse"-
has the meaning here of argument, line of reasoning, guiding
thread animating the spoken discussion (the logos). To translate
it by "subject" [sujet], as Robin does, is not merely anachronistic.
The whole intention and the organic unity of signification is
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 119

destroyed. For only the "living" discourse, only a spoken word

(and not a speech's theme, object, or subject) can have a father;
and, according to a necessity that will not cease to become clearer
to us from now on, the logoi are the children. Alive enough to
protest on occasion and to let themselves be questioned; capable,
too, in contrast to written things, of responding when their father
is there. They are their father's responsible presence.
[ .... ]
But what is a father?
Should we consider this known, and with this term-the known-
classify the other term within what one would hasten to classify
as a metaphor? One would then say that the origin or cause of
logos is being compared to what we know to be the cause of a
living son, his father. One would understand or imagine the birth
and development of logos from the standpoint of a domain for-
eign to it, the transmission of life or the generative relation. But
the father is not the generator or procreator in any "real" sense
prior to or outside all relation to language. In what way, indeed,
is the father-son relation distinguishable from a mere cause-
effect or generator-engendered relation, if not by the instance of
logos? Only a power of speech can have a father. The father is
always father to a speaking-living being. In other words, it is
precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate some-
thing like paternity. If there were a simple metaphor in the
expression "father of logos," the first word, which seemed the
more familiar, would nevertheless receive more meaning from
the second than it would transmit to it. The first familiarity is
always involved in a relation of cohabitation with logos. Living-
beings, father and son, are announced to us and related to each
other within the household of logos. From which one does not
escape, in spite of appearances, when one is transported, by "met-
aphor," to a foreign territory where one meets fathers, sons,
living creatures, all sorts of beings that come in handy for ex-
plaining to anyone who does not know, by comparison, what
logos, that strange thing, is all about. Even though this hearth is
the heart of all metaphoricity, "father of logos" is not a simple
metaphor. To have simple metaphoricity, one would have to
make the statement that some living creature incapable of Ian-
120 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

guage, if anyone still wished to believe in such a thing, has a

father. One must thus proceed to undertake a general reversal of
all metaphorical directions, no longer asking whether logos can
have a father but understanding that what the father claims to be
the father of cannot go without the essential possibility of logos.
A logos indebted to a father, what does that mean? At least
how can it be read within the stratum of the Platonic text that
interests us here?
The figure of the father, of course, is also that of the good
(agathon). Logos represents what it is indebted to: the father who
is also chief, capital, and good(s). Or rather the chief, the capital,
the good(s). Pater in Greek means all that at once. Neither trans-
lators nor commentators of Plato seem to have accounted for the
play of these schemas. It is extremely difficult, we must recog-
nize, to respect this play in a translation, and the fact can at least
be explained in that no one has ever raised the question. Thus, at
the point in the Republic where Socrates backs away from speak-
ing of the good in itself (VI, 506e) 1 he immediately suggests
replacing it with its ekgonos, its son, its offspring:
Let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good
in itself, for to attain to my present surmise of that seems
a pitch above the impulse that wings my flight today. But
about what seems to be the offspring (ekgonos) of the
good and most nearly made in its likeness I am willing to
speak if you too wish it, and otherwise to let the matter
drop.
Well, speak on, he said, for you will duly pay me the
tale of the parent another time.
I could wish, I said, that I were able to make and you
to receive the payment, and not merely as now the inter-
est (tokous). But at any rate receive this interest and the
offspring of the good (tokon te kai ekgonon autou tou
agathou).
Tokos, which is here associated with ekgonos, signifies pro-
duction and the product, birth and the child, etc. This word
functions with this meaning in the domains of agriculture, of
kinship relations, and of fiduciary operations. None of these do-
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 121

mains, as we shall see, lies outside the investment and possibil-

ity of a logos.
As product, the tokos is the child, the human or animal brood,
as well as the fruits of the seed sown in the field, and the interest ,
on a capital investment: it is a return or revenue. The distribu-
tion of all these meanings can be followed in Plato's text. The
meaning of pater is sometimes even inflected in the exclusive
sense of financial capital. In the Republic itself, and not far from
the passage we have just quoted. One of the drawbacks of democ-
racy lies in the role that capital is often allowed to play in it:
"But these money-makers with down-bent heads, pretending not
even to see the poor, but inserting the sting of their money into
any of the remainder who do not resist, and harvesting from
them in interest as it were a manifold progeny of the parent sum
(tou patros ekgonous tokous pollaplasious), foster the drone and
pauper element in the state" (555e).
Now, about this father, this capital, this good, this origin of
value and of appearing beings, it is not possible to speak simply
or directly. First of all because it is no more possible to look
them in the face than to stare at the sun. On the subject of this
bedazzlement before the face of the sun, a rereading of the fa-
mous passage of the Republic (VII, 515c ff) is strongly recom-
mended here.
[ .... I
[In the third section titled "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes,
Thoth, Nabii, Nebo," Derrida fits the Platonic myth of Theuth into
a pattern of traits common to gods of writing from other mythic
traditions. His purpose is to demonstrate that Plato's story was not
simply a spontaneous invention, as commentators have always seen
it, but was also "supervised and limited by rigorous necessities" (p.
85). These necessities or structural laws consist in a series of oppo-
sitions clustered around the opposition speech and writing (e.g., life
and death, father and son, legitimate and bastard, soul and body,
good and evil, inside and outside, son and moon, and so forth). For
instance, the Egyptian god Thoth, who seems to be Theuth's nearest
forebear, is a secondary god, the son of the sun god. But his subordi-
nate position is the position also of the supplement, that which is
both added to and substituted for the father term. He represents thus
122 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

a danger for the sun's supremacy. His speech is likewise never abso-
lutely original; instead it introduces difference into language, which
is why he is associated with the origin of the plurality of languages.
He has power over the calculation of time and thus is associated
with death. To bring out these and other traits which are repeated in
Plato's myth is not merely an exercise in comparative mythology or
culture. Instead, that demonstration opens "onto the general prob-
lematic of the relations between the mythemes and the philo-
sophemes that lies at the origin of western logos" (p. 86). It is to this
general problematic that Derrida turns his attention by considering
Theuth as a repetition of Thoth who is, in tum, a figure of pure
repetition without proper identity or substance.J

The system of these traits brings into play an original kind of

logic: the figure of Thoth is opposed to its other (father, sun, life,
speech, origin or orient, etc.), but as that which at once supple-
ments and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or
replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and
takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for.
But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this mes-
senger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between oppo-
sites. If he had any identity-but he is precisely the god of
nonidentity-he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which
we will soon have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from
his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and repre-
1 'sentative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if

need be. He is thus the father's other, the father, and the subver-
sive movement of replacement. The god of writing is thus at
once his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a
fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an
intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but
rather a sort of ;oker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who
\. puts play into play.
This god of resurrection is less interested in life or death than
in death as a repetition of life and life as a rehearsal of death, in
the awakening of life and in the recommencement of death. This
is what numbers, of which he is also the inventor and patron,
mean. Thoth repeats everything in the addition of the supple-
ment: in adding to and doubling as the sun, he is other than the
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 123

sun and the same as it; other than the good and the same, etc.
Always taking a place not his own, a place one could call that of
the dead or the dummy, he has neither a proper place nor a proper
name. His propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriate-
ness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution
and play. Play, of which he is also the inventor, as Plato himself
reminds us. It is to him that we owe the games of dice (kubeia)
and draughts (petteia) j274d). He would be the mediating move-
ment of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely pre-
venting it, through this ironic doubling, from reaching some final
fulfillment or eschatological reappropriation. Thoth is never
present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can
properly be his own.
Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. This
god of calculation, arithmetic, and rational science 3 also presides
over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of
magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden
texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography no less than
' of every other -graphy.
Science and magic, the passage between life and death, the
supplement to evil and to lack: the privileged domain of Thoth
had, finally, to be medicine. All his powers are summed up and
find employment there. The god of writing, who knows how to
put an end to life, can also heal the sick. And even the dead. 4 The
steles of Horus on the Crocodiles tell of how the king of the gods
sends Thoth down to heal Harsiesis, who has been bitten by a
' snake in his mother's absence. 5
The god of writing is thus also a god of medicine. Of "medi-
cine": both a science and an occult drug. Of the remedy and the
poison. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon. And it is
writing as a pharmakon that he presents to the king in the
, Phaedrus, with a humility as unsettling as a dare.
124 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

The Phannakon

This is the malady in them all for which law must find a phar-
makon. Now it is a sound old adage that it is hard to fight
against two enemies at once-even when they are enemies
from opposite quarters. We see the truth of this in medicine
and elsewhere. (Laws, 919b)

Let us return to the text of Plato, assuming we have ever really

left it. The word pharmakon is caught in a chain of significa-
tions. The play of that chain seems systematic. But the system
here is not, simply, that of the intentions of an author who goes
by the name of Plato. The system is not primarily that of what
someone meant-to-say [un vouloir-dire]. Finely regulated com-
munications are established, through the play of language, among
diverse functions of the word and, within it, among diverse strata
or regions of culture. These communications or corridors of
meaning can sometimes be declared or clarified by Plato when
he plays upon them "voluntarily," a word we put in quotation
marks because what it designates, to content ourselves with
remaining within the closure of these oppositions, is only a mode
of "submission" to the necessities of a given "language." None
of these concepts can translate the relation we are aiming at
here. Then again, in other cases, Plato can not see the links, can
leave them in the shadow or break them up. And yet these links
go on working of themselves. In spite of him? thanks to him? in
his text? outside his text? but then where? between his text and
the language? for what reader? at what moment? To answer such
questions in principle and in general will seem impossible; and
that will give us the suspicion that there is some malformation
in the question itself, in each of its concepts, in each of the
oppositions it thus accredits. One can always choose to believe
that if Plato did not put certain possibilities of passage into
practice, or even interrupted them, it is because he perceived
them but left them in the impracticable. This formulation is
possible only if one avoids all recourse to the difference between
conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, a very
crude tool for dealing with relations in and to language. The same
would be true of the opposition between speech-or writing-
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 125

and language if that opposition, as is often the case, harked back

to the above categories.
This reason alone should already suffice to prevent us from
reconstituting the entire chain of significations of the pharma-
kon. No absolute privilege allows us absolutely to master its
textual system. This limitation can and should nevertheless be
displaced to a certain extent. The possibilities and powers of
displacement are extremely diverse in nature, and, rather than
enumerating here all their titles, let us attempt to produce some
of their effects as we go along, as we continue our march through
the Platonic problematic of writing. 6
We have just sketched out the correspondence between the
figure of Thoth in Egyptian mythology and a certain organization
of concepts, philosophemes, metaphors, and mythemes picked
up from what is called the Platonic text. The word pharmakon
has seemed to us extremely apt for the task of tying all the
threads of this correspondence together. Let us now reread, in a
rendering derived from Robin, this sentence from the Phaedrus:
"Here, 0 King, says Theuth, is a discipline (mathema) that will
make the Egyptians wiser (sophoterous) and will improve their
memories (mnemonikoterous): both memory (mneme) and in-
struction (sophia) have found their remedy (pharmakon)."
The common translation of pharmakon by remedy [remede]
-a beneficent drug-is not, of course, inaccurate. Not only can
pharmakon really mean remedy and thus erase, on a certain
surface of its functioning, the ambiguity of its meaning. But it is
even quite obvious here, the stated intention of Theuth being
precisely to stress the worth of his product, that he turns the
word on its strange and invisible pivot, presenting it from a single
one, and most reassuring, of its poles. This medicine is benefi-
cial; it repairs and produces, accumulates and remedies, increases
knowledge and reduces forgetfulness. Its translation by "remedy"
nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the
other pole reserved in the word pharmakon. It cancels out the
resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossi-
ble, an understanding of the context. As opposed to "drug" or
even "medicine," remedy says the transparent rationality of sci-
ence, technique, and therapeutic causality, thus excluding from
the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force the
126 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

effects of which are hard to master, a dynamics that constantly

surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as
subject.
Now, on the one hand, Plato is bent on presenting writing as
an occult, and therefore suspect, power. Just like painting, to
which he will later compare it, and like optical illusions and the
techniques of mimesis in general. His mistrust of the mantic and
magic, of sorcerers and casters of spells, is well attested. 7 In the
Laws, in particular, he reserves them terrible punishments. Ac-
cording to an operation we will have cause to remember later, he
recommends that they be excluded-expelled or cut off-from
the social arena. Expulsion and ostracism can even be accom-
plished at the same time, by keeping them in prison, where they
would no longer be visited by free men but only by the slave that
would bring them their food; then by depriving them of burial:
11
At death he shall be cast out beyond the borders without burial,
and if any free citizen has a hand in his burial, he shall be liable
to a prosecution for impiety at the suit of any who cares to take
proceedings" (X, 909b-c).
On the other hand, the King's reply presupposes that the effec-
tiveness of the pharmakon can be reversed: it can worsen the ill
instead of remedy it. Or rather, the royal answer suggests that
Theuth, by ruse and/or naivete, has exhibited the reverse of the
true effects of writing. In order to vaunt the worth of his inven-
tion, Theuth would thus have denatured the pharmakon, said
the opposite (tounantion) of what writing is capable of. He has
passed a poison off as a remedy. So that in translating pharmakon
by remedy, what one respects is not what Theuth intended, nor
even what Plato intended, but rather what the King says Theuth
has said, effectively deluding either the King or himself. If Plato's
text then goes on to give the King's pronouncement as the truth
of Theuth's production and his speech as the truth of writing,
then the translation remedy makes Theuth into a simpleton or a
flimflam artist, from the sun's point of view. From that view-
point, Theuth has no doubt played on the word, interrupting, for
his own purposes, the communication between the two opposing
values. But the King restores that communication, and the trans-
lation takes no account of this. And all the while the two inter-
locutors, whatever they do and whether or not they choose,
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 127

remain within the unity of the same signifier. Their discourse

plays within it, which is no longer the case in translation. Rem-
edy is the rendition that, more than "medicine" or "drug" would
have done, obliterates the virtual, dynamic references to the
other uses of the same word in Greek. The effect of such a
translation is most importantly to destroy what we will later call
Plato's anagrammatic writing, to destroy it by interrupting the
relations interwoven among different functions of the same word
in different places, relations that are virtually but necessarily
-..."citational." When a word inscribes itself as the citation of an-
other sense of the same word, when the textual center-stage of
"the word pharmakon, even while it means remedy, cites, re-
. cites, and makes legible that which in the same word signifies,
in another spot and on a different level of the stage, poison (for
example, since that is not the only thing pharmakon means), the
·choice of only one of these renditions by the translator has as its
first effect the neutralization of the citational play, of the "ana-
gram," and, in the end, quite simply of the very textuality of the
translated text. It could no doubt be shown, and we will try to do
so when the time comes, that this blockage of the passage among
opposing values is itself already an effect of "Platonism," the
consequence of something already at work in the translated text,
in the relation between "Plato" and his "language." There is no
contradiction between this proposition and the preceding one.
Textuality being constituted by differences and by differences
from differences, it is by nature absolutely heterogeneous and is
constantly composing with the forces that tend to annihilate it.
One must therefore accept, follow, and analyze the composi-
tion of these two forces or of these two gestures. That composi-
tion is even, in a certain sense, the single theme of this essay. On
the one hand Plato decides in favor of a logic that does not
tolerate such passages between opposing senses of the same word,
all the more so since such a passage would reveal itself to be
something quite different from simple confusion, alternation, or
the dialectic of opposites. And yet, on the other hand, the phar-
makon, if our reading confirms itself, constitutes the original
medium of that decision, the element that precedes it, compre-
hends it, goes beyond it, can never be reduced to it, and is not
separated from it by a single word (or signifying apparatus), oper-
128 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

ating within the Greek and Platonic text. All translations into
languages that are the heirs and depositaries of Western meta-
physics thus produce on the pharmakon an effect of analysis that
violently destroys it, reduces it to one of its simple elements by
interpreting it, paradoxically enough, in the light of the ulterior
developments it itself has made possible. Such an interpretative
translation is thus as violent as it is impotent: it destroys the
pharmakon but at the same time forbids itself access to it, leav-
ing it untouched in its reserve.
The translation by "remedy" can thus be neither accepted nor
simply rejected. Even if one intended thereby to save the "ra-
tional" pole and the laudatory intention, the idea of the correct
use of the science or art of medicine, one would still run every
risk of being deceived by language. Writing is no more valuable,
says Plato, as a remedy than as a poison. Even before Thamus has
let fall his pejorative sentence, the remedy is disturbing in itself.
One must indeed be aware of the fact that Plato is suspicious of
the pharmakon in general, even in the case of drugs used exclu-
sively for therapeutic ends, even when they are wielded with
good intentions, and even when they are as such effective. There
is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never
ii_ be simply beneficial.
1.... J
Perhaps we can now read the King's response:

But the king said, "Theuth, my master of arts (0 tekhniko-

tate Theuth), to one man it is given to create the elements
of an art, to another to judge the extent of harm and useful-
ness it will have for those who are going to employ it. And
now, since you are father of written letters (pater on gram-
maton), your paternal goodwill has led you to pronounce
the very opposite (tounantion) of what is their real power.
.·The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in
'.. the souls of those who have learned it because they will not
, need to exercise their memories {lethen men en psuchais
parexei mnemes aneletesiai), being able to rely on what is
written, using the stimulus of external marks that are alien
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 129

to themselves (dia pistin graphes exothen hup' allotrion

tupon) rather than, from within, their own unaided powers
to call things to mind (ouk endothen autous huph' hauton
anamimneskomenous). So it's not a remedy for memory,
but for reminding, that you have discovered (oukoun
mnemes, alla hupomneseos, pharmakon heures). And as for
wisdom (sophias de), you're equipping your pupils with
only a semblance (doxan) of it, not with truth (aletheian).
Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely -
read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in conse-
quence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide
knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part inca- (
pable of real judgment. They will also be difficult to get on
with since they will be men filled with the conceit of wis-
dom (doxosophoi), not men of wisdom (anti soph6n). (274e
11

- 275b)

The king, the father of speech, has thus asserted his authority
over the father of writing. And he has done so with severity,
without showing the one who occupies the place of his son any
of that paternal good will exhibited by Theuth toward his own
children, his "letters." Tham us presses on, multiplies his reser-
vations, and visibly wants to leave Theuth no hope.
In order for writing to produce, as he says, the "opposite"
effect from what one might expect, in order for this pharmakon
to show itself, with use, to be injurious, its effectiveness, its
power, its dunamis must, of course, be ambiguous. As is said of
the pharmakon in the Protagoras, the Philebus, the Timaeus. It
is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the
King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition
into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and out-
side, true and false, essence and appearance. If one rereads the
reasons adduced by the royal sentence, one will find this series
of oppositions there. And set in place in such a way that the
pharmakon, or, if you will, writing, can only go around in circles:
writing is only apparently good for memory, seemingly able to
help it from within, through its own motion, to know what is
true. But in truth, writing is essentially bad, external to memory,
130 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

,,. productive not of science but of belief, not of truth but of appear-
ances. The pharmakon produces a play of appearances which
enable it to pass for truth, etc.
But while, in the Philebus and the Protagoras, the pharmakon,
because it is painful, seems bad whereas it is beneficial, here, in
the Phaedrus as in the Timaeus, it is passed off as a helpful
remedy whereas it is in truth harmful. Bad ambiguity is thus
opposed to good ambiguity, a deceitful intention to a mere ap-
pearance. Writing's case is grave.
It is not enough to say that writing is conceived out of this or
that series of oppositions. Plato thinks of writing, and tries to
comprehend it, to dominate it, on the basis of opposition as such.
In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/
appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the
terms must be simply external to the other, which means that
one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and out-
side) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible
opposition. And one of the elements of the system (or of the
series) must also stand as the very possibility of systematicity or
seriality in general. And if one got to thinking that something
like the pharmakon-or writing-far from being governed by
these oppositions, opens up their very possibility without letting
itself be comprehended by them; if one got to thinking that it
can only be out of something like writing-or the pharmakon-
that the strange difference between inside and outside can spring;
if, consequently, one got to thinking that writing as a pharmakon
cannot simply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot
be subsumed under concepts whose contours it draws, leaves
only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as
logic arises from it-one would then have to bend [plier] into
strange contortions what could no longer even simply be called
logic or discourse. All the more so if what we have just impru-
dently called a ghost can no longer be distinguished, with the
same assurance, from truth, reality, living flesh, etc. One must
accept the fact that here, for once, to leave a ghost behind will in
a sense be to salvage nothing.
This little exercise will no doubt have sufficed to warn the
reader: to come to an understanding with Plato, as it is sketched
out in this text, is already to slip away from the recognized
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 131

models of commentary, from the genealogical or structural re-

constitution of a system, whether this reconstitution tries to
corroborate or refute, confirm, or "overturn," mark a return-to-
Plato or give him a "send-off" in the quite Platonic manner of
the khairein. What is going on here is something altogether
different. That too, of course, but still completely other. If the
reader has any doubt, he is invited to reread the preceding para-
graph. Every model of classical reading is exceeded there at some
point, precisely at the point where it attaches to the inside of the
series-it being understood that this excess is not a simple exit
, out of the series, since that would obviously fall under one of the
categories of the series. The excess-but can we still call it that?
-is only a certain displacement of the series. And a certain
folding back [repli]-which will later be called a re-mark-of
opposition within the series, or even within its dialectic. We
cannot qualify it, name it, comprehend it under a simple concept
without immediately being off the mark. Such a functional dis-
placement, which concerns differences (and, as we shall see,
"simulacra") more than any conceptual identities signified, is a
real and necessary challenge. It writes itself. One must therefore
begin by reading it.
If writing, according to the king and under the sun, produces
the opposite effect from what is expected, if the pharmakon is
pernicious, it is so because it doesn't come from around here. It
comes from afar, it is external or alien: to the living, which is the
right-here of the inside, to logos as the zoon it claims to assist or
relieve. The imprints (tupoi) of writing do not inscribe them-
selves this time, as they do in the hypothesis of the Theaetetus,
in the wax of the soul in intaglio, thus corresponding to the
spontaneous, autochthonous motions of psychic life. Knowing
that he can always leave his thoughts outside or check them
with an external agency, with the physical, spatial, superficial
marks that one lays flat on a tablet, he who has the tekhne of
writing at his disposal will come to rely on it. He will know that
he himself can leave without the tupoi's going away, that he can
forget all about them without their leaving his service. They will
represent him even if he forgets them; they will transmit his
word even if he is not there to animate them. Even if he is dead,
and only a pharmakon can be the wielder of such power, over
132 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

death but also in cahoots with it. The pharmakon and writing
are thus always involved in questions of life and death.
Can it be said without conceptual anachronism-and thus
without serious interpretive error-that the tupoi are the repre-
sentatives, the physical surrogates of the psychic that is absent?
It would be better to assert that the written traces no longer even
belong to the order of the phusis, since they are not alive. They
do not grow; they grow no more than what could be sown, as
Socrates will say in a minute, with a reed (kalamos). They do
violence to the natural, autonomous organization of the mneme,
in which phusis and psuche are not opposed. If writing does
belong to the phusis, wouldn't it be to that moment of the
phusis, to that necessary movement through which its truth, the
production of its appearing, tends, says Heraclitus, to take shelter
in its crypt? "Cryptogram" thus condenses in a single word a
pleonastic proposition.
If one takes the king's word for it, then, it is this life of the
memory that the pharmakon of writing would come to hypno-
tize: fascinating it, taking it out of itself by putting it to sleep in
a monument. Confident of the permanence and independence of
its types (tupoi), memory will fall asleep, will not keep itself up,
will no longer keep to keeping itself alert, present, as close as
possible to the truth of what is. Letting itself get stoned [medu-
see/ by its own signs, its own guardians, by the types committed
to the keeping and surveillance of knowledge, it will sink down
into lethe, overcome by nonknowledge and forgetfulness. 8 Mem-
ory and truth cannot be separated. The movement of aletheia is
a deployment of mneme through and through. A deployment of
living memory, of memory as psychic life in its self-presentation
to itself. The powers of lethe simultaneously increase the do-
mains of death, of nontruth, of nonknowledge. This is why writ-
ing, at least insofar as it sows "forgetfulness in the soul," turns
us toward the inanimate and toward nonknowledge. But it can-
not be said that its essence simply and presently confounds it
with death or nontruth. For writing has no essence or value of its
own, whether positive or negative. It plays within the simula-
crum. It is in its type the mime of memory, of knowledge, of
truth, etc. That is why men of writing appear before the eye of
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 133

God not as wise men (sophoi) but in truth as fake or self-pro-

claimed wise men (doxosophoi).

[Is not the diatribe against writing a continuation of Plato's ongo-

ing battle with the sophists? Yes and no, replies Derrida: yes, to the
extent that the sophist relies on writing as an aid to memory and
thus substitutes for living memory its dead monument, mnemotech-
nics; no, to the extent that the sophist also argues that "one should
exercise one's memory rather than entrust traces to an outside
agency." The condemnation of writing thus crosses the border sup-
posed to divide philosophy from sophistics.]

Thus, in both cases, on both sides, writing is considered sus-

picious and the alert exercise of memory prescribed. What Plato
is attacking in sophistics, therefore, is not simply recourse to
memory but, within such recourse, the substitution of the mne-
monic device for live memory, of the prosthesis for the organ;
the perversion that consists of replacing a limb by a thing, here,
substituting the passive, mechanical "by-heart" for the active
reanimation of knowledge, for its reproduction in the present.
The boundary (between inside and outside, living and nonliving)
separates not only speech from writing but also memory as an
unveiling (re-)producing a presence from re-memoration as the
mere repetition of a monument; truth as distinct from its sign,
being as distinct from types. The "outside" does not begin at the
point where what we now call the psychic and the physical meet,
but at the point where the mneme, instead of being present to
itself in its life as a movement of truth, is supplanted by the
archive, evicted by a sign of re-memoration or of com-memora-
tion. The space of writing, space as writing, is opened up in the
violent movement of this surrogation, in the difference between
mneme and hypomnesis. The outside is already within the work
of memory. The evil slips in within the relation of memory to
itself, in the general organization of the mnesic activity. Memory
is finite by nature. Plato recognizes this in attributing life to it.
~As in the case of all living organisms, he assigns it, as we have
' seen, certain limits. A limitless memory would in any event be
not memory but infinite self-presence. Memory always therefore
already needs signs in order to recall the nonpresent, with which
134 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

it is necessarily in relation. The movement of dialectics bears

witness to this. Memory is thus contaminated by its first substi-
tute: hypomnesis. But what Plato dreams of is a memory with
no sign. That is, with no supplement. A mneme with no hypom-
nesis, no pharmakon. And this at the very moment and for the
very reason that he calls dream the confusion between the hypo-
thetical and the anhypothetical in the realm of mathematical
intelligibility (Republic, 533b).
Why is the surrogate or supplement dangerous? It is not, so to
speak, dangerous in itself, in that aspect of it that can present
itself as a thing, as a being-present. In that case it would be
reassuring. But here, the supplement is not, is not a being (on). It
is nevertheless not a simple nonbeing (me on), either. Its slidings
slip it out of the simple alternative presence-absence. That is
the danger. And that is what enables the type always to pass for
the original. As soon as the supplementary outside is opened, its
structure implies that the supplement itself can be "typed," re-
placed by its double, and that a supplement to the supplement, a
surrogate for the surrogate, is possible and necessary. Necessary
because this movement is not a sensible, "empirical" accident:
it is linked to the ideality of the eidos as the possibility of the
repetition of the same. And writing appears to Plato (and after
him to all of philosophy, which is as such constituted in this
gesture) as that process of redoubling in which we are fatally
(en)trained: the supplement of a supplement, the signifier, the
representative of a representative. (A series the first term or
rather the first structure of which does not yet-but we will do
it later-have to be kicked up [faire sauter] and its irreducibility
made apparent.) The structure and history of phonetic writing
have of course played a decisive role in the determination of
writing as the doubling of a sign, the sign of a sign. The signifier
of a phonic signifier. While the phonic signifier would remain in
animate proximity, in the living presence of mneme or psuche,
the graphic signifier, which reproduces it or imitates it, goes one
degree further away, falls outside of life, entrains life out of itself
and puts it to sleep in the type of its double. Whence the phar-
makon 's two misdeeds: it dulls the memory, and if it is of any
assistance at all, it is not for the mneme but for hypomnesis.
Instead of quickening life in the original, "in person," the phar-
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 135

makon can at best only restore its monuments. It is a debilitating

poison for memory, but a remedy or tonic for its external signs,
its symptoms, with everything that this word can connote in
Greek: an empirical, contingent, superficial event, generally a
fall or collapse, distinguishing itself like an index from whatever
it is pointing to. Your writing cures only the symptom, the King
has already said, and it is from him that we know the unbridgable
difference between the essence of the symptom and the essence
of the signified; and that writings belongs to the order and exte-
riority of the symptom.
Thus, even though writing is external to (internal) memory,
even though hypomnesia is not in itself memory, it affects mem-
ory and hypnotizes it in its very inside. That is the effect of this
pharmakon. If it were purely external, writing would leave the
intimacy or integrity of psychic memory untouched. And yet,
just as Rousseau and Saussure will do in response to the same
necessity, yet without discovering other relations between the
intimate and the alien, Plato maintains both the exteriority of
writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to
affect or infect what lies deepest inside. The pharmakon is that
dangerous supplement 9 that breaks into the very thing that would
have liked to do without it yet lets itself at once be breached,
roughed up, fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace
through which the present increases itself in the act of disap-
pearing.
If, instead of meditating on the structure that makes such
supplementarity possible, if above all instead of meditating on
the reduction by which "Plato-Rousseau-Saussure" try in vain
to master it with an odd kind of "reasoning," one were to content
oneself with pointing to the "logical contradiction," one would
have to recognize here an instance of that kind of "kettle-logic"
to which Freud turns in the Traumdeutung in order to illustrate
the logic of dreams. In his attempt to arrange everything in his
favor, the defendant piles up contradictory arguments: r. The
kettle I am returning to you is brand new; 2. The holes were
already in it when you lent it to me; 3. You never lent me a
kettle, anyway. Analogously: r. Writing is rigorously exterior and
inferior to living memory and speech, which are therefore un-
damaged by it. 2. Writing is harmful to them because it puts
136 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

them to sleep and infects their very life which would otherwise
remain intact. 3. Anyway, if one has resorted to hypomnesia and
writing at all, it is not for their intrinsic value, but because living
memory is finite, it already has holes in it before writing ever
comes to leave its traces. Writing has no effect on memory.
The opposition between mneme and hypomnesis would thus
preside over the meaning of writing. This opposition will appear
to us to form a system with all the great structural oppositions
of Platonism. What is played out at the boundary line between
these two concepts is consequently something like the major
decision of philosophy, the one through which it institutes itself,
maintains itself, and contains its adverse deeps.
Nevertheless, between mneme and hypomnesis, between
memory and its supplement, the line is more than subtle; it is
hardly perceptible. On both sides of that line, it is a question of
repetition. Live memory repeats the presence of the eidos, and
truth is also the possibility of repetition through recall. Truth
unveils the eidos or the ont6s on, in other words, that which can
be imitated, reproduced, repeated in its identity. But in the an-
amnesic movement of truth, what is repeated must present itself
as such, as what it is, in repetition. The true is repeated; it is
what is repeated in the repetition, what is represented and pre-
sent in the representation. It is not the repeater in the repetition,
nor the signifier in the signification. The true is the presence of
the eidos signified.
Sophistics-the deployment of hypomnesia-as well as di-
alectics-the deployment of anamnesia-both presuppose the
possibility of repetition. But sophistics this time keeps to the
other side, to the other face, as it were, of repetition. And of
signification. What is repeated is the repeater, the imitator, the
signifier, the representative, in the absence, as it happens, of the
thing itself, which these appear to reedit, and without psychic or
mnesic animation, without the living tension of dialectics. Writ-
ing would indeed be the signifier's capacity to repeat itself by
itself, mechanically, without a living soul to sustain or attend it
in its repetition, that is to say, without truth's presenting itself
anywhere. Sophistics, hypomnesia, and writing would thus only
be separated from philosophy, dialectics, anamnesis, and living
speech by the invisible, almost nonexistent, thickness of that
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 137

leaf between the signifier and the signified. The "leaf": a signifi-
cant metaphor, we should note, or rather one taken from the
signifier face of things, since the leaf with its recto and verso first
appears as a surface and support for writing. But by the same
token, doesn't the unity of this leaf, of the system of this differ-
ence between signified and signifier, also point to the inseparabil-
ity of sophistics and philosophy? The difference between signifier
and signified is no doubt the governing pattern within which
Platonism institutes itself and determines its opposition to so-
phistics. In being inaugurated in this manner, philosophy and
dialectics are determined in the act of determining their other.
[ .... I
- Translated by Barbara f ohnson

NOTES

1. Phaedrus, trans. by R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato,

Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Bollingen Series LXXI N.J.:
(Princeton, University Press, 1961)1 274b. References in parentheses will be
to this edition.-Ed.
2. For Plato, Thamus is doubtless another name for Ammon, whose
figure (that of the sun king and of the father of the gods) we shall sketch out
later for its own sake. On this question and the debate to which it has given
rise, see P. Frutiger, Les Mythes de Platon (Paris: Akan, 1930)1 p. 233 1 n. 21
and notably B. Eisler, "Platon und das agyptische Alphabet, Archiv fiir Ges-
chichte der Philosophie, 1922; A. F. von Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopii
die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1837-
1852 (art. Ammon); W. H. Roscher, Ausfurliches Lexikon der griechischen
und romischen Mythologie (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1884-1937) (art. Tha-
mus).
3. S. Morenz, La Religion egyptienne (Paris: Payot, 1962)1 p. 95. Another
of Thoth's companions is Maat, goddess of truth. She is also "daughter of Ra,
mistress of the sky, she who governs the double country, the eye of Ra which
has no match. 11 Erman, in the page devoted to Maat, notes: "one of her
insignia, God knows why, was a vulture feather" (p. 82).
4. Jacques Vandier, La Religion egyptienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France 1949)1 pp. 71 ff. Cf. especially A. J. Festugiere, La Revelation
d'Hermes Trismegiste (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981), pp. 287 ff., where a
number of texts on Thoth as the inventor of magic are assembled. One of
them, which particularly interests us, begins: "A formula to be recited before
the sun: 'I am Thoth, inventor and creator of philters and letters, etc.' 11
(292).
138 DIFFERANCE AT THE ORIGIN

5. Vandier, p. 230. Cryptography, medicinal magic, and the figure of the

serpent are in fact intertwined in an astonishing folk tale transcribed by G.
Maspero in Les Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne (Paris: E. Guilmoro,
19111. It is the tale of Satni-Khamois and the mummies. Satni-Khamois, the
son of a king, "spent his days running about the metropolis of Memphis so
as to read the books written in sacred script and the books of the Double
House of Life. One day a nobleman came along and made fun of him.-'Why
are you laughing at me?' The nobleman said:-'1 am not laughing at you;
but can I help laughing when you spend your time here deciphering writings
that have no powers? If you really wish to read effective writing, come with
me; I will send you to the place where you will find the book which Thoth
himself has written with his own hand and which will place you just below
the gods. There are two formulas written in it: if you recite the first, you
will charm the sky, the earth, the world of night, the mountains, the waters;
you will understand what the birds of the sky and the reptiles are all saying,
as they are; you will see the fish, for a divine force will make them rise to
the surface of the water. If you read the second formula, even if you are in
the grave you will reassume the form you had on earth; even shall you see
the sun rising in the sky, and its cycle, and the moon in the form it has when
it appears.' Satni cried; 'By my life! let me know what you wish and I will
have it granted you; but take me to the place where I can find the book!' The
nobleman said to Satni: 'The book in question is not mine. It is in the heart
of the necropolis, in the tomb of Nenoferkeptah, son of king Minebptah....
Take great heed not to take this book away from him, for he would have you
bring it back, a pitchfork and a rod in his hand, a lighted brazier on his head .
. . .'Deep inside the tomb, light was shining out of the book. The doubles of
the king and of his family were beside him, 'through the virtues of the book
of Thoth.' ... All this was repeating itself. Nenoferkeptah had already him-
self lived Satni's story. The priest had told him: 'The book in question is in
the middle of the sea of Coptos, in an iron casket. The iron casket is inside a
bronze casket; the bronze casket is inside a casket of cinnamon wood; the
casket of cinnamon wood is inside a casket of ivory and ebony. The casket
of ivory and ebony is inside a silver casket. The silver casket is inside a
golden casket, and the book is found therein. [Scribe's error? the first version
I consulted had consigned or reproduced it; a later edition of Maspero's book
pointed it out in a note: "The scribe has made a mistake here in his enumer-
ation. He should have said: inside the iron casket is ... etc." (Item left as
evidence for a logic of inclusion!.] And there is a schoene [in Ptolemy's day,
equal to about 12,000 royal cubits of o.52m] of serpents, scorpions of all
kinds, and reptiles around the casket in which the book lies, and there is an
immortal serpent coiled around the casket in question.' " After three tries,
the imprudent hero kills the serpent, drinks the book dissolved in beer, and
thus acquires limitless knowledge. Thoth goes to Ra to complain, and pro-
vokes the worst of punishments.
Let us note, finally, before leaving the Egyptian figure of Thoth, that he
possesses, in addition to Hermes of Greece, a remarkable counterpart in the
 "Plato's Pharmacy" 139

figure of Nabu, son of Marduk. In Babylonian and Assyrian mythology,

"Nabu is essentially the son-god and, just as Markduk eclipses his father, Ea,
we will see Nabu usurping Marduk's place." (E. Dhorme, Les Religions de
BabyJonie et d'Assyrie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France], pp. 150 ff.)
Marduk, the father of Nabu, is the sun-god. Nabu, "lord of the reed,'' "creator
of writing,'' "bearer of the tables of the fates of the gods,'' sometimes goes
ahead of his father from whom he borrows the symbolic instument, the
marru. "A votive object made of copper, uncovered in Susa, representing 'a
snake holding in its mouth a sort of pall,' was marked with the inscription
'the marru of the god Nabu' "(Dhorme, p. 155). Cf. also M. David, Les Dieux
et le Destin en Babylonie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), pp.
86 ff.
One could spell out one by one the points of resemblance between Thoth
and the biblical Nabu (Nebo).
6. I take the liberty of referring the reader, in order to give him a prelimi-
nary, indicative direction, to the "Question of Method" propossed in Of
Grammatology [1967). With a few precautions, one could say that pharma-
kon plays a role analogous, in this reading of Plato, to that of supplement in
the reading of Rousseau.
7. Cf. in particular Republic II, 364 ff; Letter VII, 333e. The problem is
raised with copious and useful references in E. Moutsopoulos, La Musique
dans l'reuvre de Platon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), pp. 13
ff.
8. We would here like to refer the reader in particular to the extremely
rich text by Jean-Pierre Vernant (who deals with these questions with quite
different intentions): "Aspects mythiques de la memoire et du temps," in
Mythe et pensee chez Jes Crees (Paris: Maspero, 1965). On the word tupos,
its relations with perigraphe and paradeigma, cf. A. von Blumenthal, Tupos
und Paradeigma, quoted by P. M. Schuhl, in Platon et ]'art de son temps
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), p. 18, n. 4.
9. The expression "that dangerous supplement,'' used by Rousseau in his
Confessions to describe masturbation, is the title of that chapter in Of
Grammatology in which Derrida follows the consequences of the way in
which the word supplement's two meanings in French-"'addition" and
"replacement"-complicate the logic of Rousseau's treatment of sex, edu-
cation, and writing. Writing, pedagogy, masturbation, and the pharmakon
share the property of being-with respect to speech, nature, intercourse, and
living memory-at once something secondary, external, and compensatory,
and something that substitutes, violates, and usurps.-TRANS.
I
 JALOUSIE TWO

To guard against the scaffolding going up here

-it is the healthiest, the most natural reflex-
one will protest: sometimes against these too-
long citations that should have been cut; some-
times on the contrary (indeed at the same time)
against these deductions, selections, sections,
suspension points, suture points-detach-
ments. Detachments of the sign, of course ....
That the sign is detached signifies that it is cut
off from its place of emission or natural belong-
ing; but the separation is never perfect. The
bleeding detachment is also-repetition-del-
egation, mandate, delay, relay. Adherence. The
detached remains glued thereby, by the glue of
differance, by the a. The a of gl agglutinates the
different detached pieces. The scaffolding of
the A is gluey.
So one will protest: you cut too much, you glue
too much, you cite too much and too little.
-Glas, p. 167
 PART TWO

BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- ''LITERATURE''

answer to the questions: "What is the place of a mani-

0
NCE, IN
festly poetic performance in your writing? Do you consider
poetry to be subordinated finally to philosophical discourse?" Der-
rida replied: "I do not read the genre of this body as either philo-
sophic or poetic. This means that if your questions were addressed
to the philosopher, I would have to say no. As for me, I talk about
the philosopher, but I am not simply a philosopher." 1 If we would
ask the question of genre of Derrida's writing, we must be prepared
for a response that itself poses a question to our confident distinc-
tions among kinds of writing. Derrida repeatedly reminds us that the
concepts ordering these distinctions, and principally the concept of
a representable truth, are already determined from within philoso-
phy rather than determining philosophy from some place outside it.
As such, they can distinguish philosophical from nonphilosophical
discourses only in terms that are already themselves philosophical.
And by these means, philosophy has always managed to comprehend
its outside, that is, to include the other-than-philosophy within phi-
losophy. The poetic or the literary has been not so much distin-
guished from the discourse of philosophy as subordinated to it. By
its own terms and thus by definition, there is no outside-philosophy.
Derrida's concern with literature is not that of the philosopher.
This means, to begin with, that he does not ask the philosopher's
question: "What is (literature)?" which subjects the literary, the
poetic to a concept. His concern, rather, is precisely with how the
philosopher's question is dislocated, thrown off balance by a writing
practice that does not claim to represent some truth outside itself
and thus does not attempt to hide its own inscription. It is, then,
this practice that is allowed to interrogate-indirectly, discreetly-
144 Beside Philosophy-" Literature"

the very distinctions supposed by philosophy to divide one kind of

writing from another. Derrida stages or provokes interventions of
the literary into the philosopher's domain. Some of these interven·
tions take place almost in the wings, for example the epigraph to
Speech and Phenomena from a Poe story where the spoken phrase "I
am dead" analyzes or exposes the sense implied by the Husserlian or
Cartesian subject of "I am" (see above, p. 14). 2 In this way, we are
discreetly asked why it is that, as Derrida has said in commenting
on this epigraph, only the fantastic fiction "can render an account-
in a philosophical or quasi-philosophical manner, both with and
without philosophy-of certain utterances that control every-
thing."3 In later texts, however, he provokes the literary analysis or
effraction of philosophy far more overtly. The text titled "Tympan"
(reprinted below in extenso) gives perhaps the most explicit form to
this strategy of intervention.
As to the place of poetic performance in Derrida's writing, one
must acknowledge another consequence of the dislocation of philos-
ophy's privilege to determine "its" other. The order of commentary
or criticism, which is the order of a nonimplication with the poetic
performance, can no longer pretend to be sustained. Writing on or of
poetry must not remain deaf to poetry's demand to be received
poetically and to learn what that demand might mean from the
poem itself. Thus, for example, the short essay included here, "Che
cos'e la poesia," answers the question of its title with a performance
of its theoretical propositions, thereby attempting to do what it says
or to say what it does.
The ways in which these texts transgress the separation of critical
commentary (called "secondary") from literary writing (called "pri-
mary"), and which are anything but mere formal innovations, has
prompted some critics to attempt to dismiss them as "presumptu-
ous," by which is understood that they presume to claim a poetic,
primary role for criticism. Such a "reproach," which appears to exalt
the literary condition, often in fact conceals a relegation of literature
< to a kind of empty aestheticism, and in that way it joins forces with
the gesture that has always subordinated literature to philosophical
truth. Derrida's gesture is altogether other. It presumes to assert, to
retrieve, to reinvent that which the philosophical, aesthetic tradition
has attempted to forget or suppress: the invention of truth by what
the Greeks called poiesis, its invention, that is, as a simulacrum.
The most far-reaching presumption here, the one that most pro-
foundly upsets the order within which literature has always been
contained, is not that a "critic" dares to measure his writing with
 Beside Philosophy-"Literature" 145

that of the poets, but that he reads the poets-Poe, Mallarme, Leiris,
Blanchot, Ponge, but also many others 4 -as having already taken
the measure of philosophy.

NOTES

1. The Ear of the Other [I982], p. I4I.

2. The epigraph in full reads: "I have spoken both of 'sound' and 'voice.' I
mean to say that the sound was one of distinct, of even wonderfully, thrill-
ingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke, obviously in reply to the
question .... He now said: 'Yes;-no;-1 have been sleeping-and now-
now-J am dead.'" For a more extensive treatment of Poe, see below "Le
Facteur de la verite." Poe's poem "The Bells" is also considered at length in
Glas.
3. "Entre crochets" [I976], R. rn8.
4. On Paul Celan, see Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan [I986]; on James
Joyce, see below, "Ulysses Gramophone"; on HOlderlin, see Memoires for
Paul de Man [1986]; on Georg Trakl, see "Heidegger's Hand: Geschlecht 11"
in Psyche [1987]; on "Romeo and Juliet," see "L'Aphorisme a contretemps,"
also in Psyche.
 "Tympan" In Margins of Philosophy

("Tympan" in Marges de la phllosophie [1972))

"Tympan" is the title of the introduction to Margins of Philosophy,

the collection of ten essays (including "Differance" and "Signature
Event Context") that Derrida published in 1972. Like Glas that will
be published two years later, "Tympan" deploys two columns side
by side on the page. On the left, an interrogation of the closed
philosophical structure that comp1ehends or includes its own out-
side and a reflection on the strategies for breaking into or out of this
closure; on the right, a long quotation from the first volume of
Michel Leiris's autobiographical memoirs, Biffures (1948). There are
as well three epigraphs from Hegel and sometimes elaborate notes
running across the bottom of most of the pages. By means of these
typographies, Derrida contrives to proliferate the margins on which
and in which he is writing. In its much narrower column, the Leiris
quotation appears to be written in the margin of Derrida's column
on the left, whereas the space between the two is a thin blank
column running down the right third of the page. Although Derrida
never explicitly refers to the quotation, it incessantly crosses over
the minimal barrier set up to its left and intrudes on the space
reserved for the introductory discourse. These silent crossings are
effected by means of the name Leiris gives to this chapter of his
work, the name Persephone, with which he associates all sorts of
spirals and corkscrew figures, but particularly the French name of
the insect known as an earwig: perce-oreille, literally, ear-piercer.
The two names, as he notes, "both end with an appeal to the sense
of hearing" I-phone and -oreille]. It is this appeal to the sense of
 "Tympan" 147

hearing that is obliquely answered (obliqueness is as well one of the

principal themes here) and echoed in Derrida's text, where philoso-
phy is configured as the apparatus of an ear, one that has learned to
tune out everything but the sound of its own name. This ear is x-
rayed, diagrammed, analyzed, dissected so as to lay bare the mecha-
nism of hearing-oneself-speak that Derrida first described in Speech
and Phenomena. In the process, the question is repeatedly addressed
of how to pierce this ear from outside without rendering it simply
useless. This is fundamentally the question of deconstruction, and
the answers Derrida brings to it provide, not a program, but an
opening for the deconstructive work that does not name itself phi-
losophy. Leiris's apparently marginalized text thus displaces the cen-
ter of hearing while its spiralling words, its feminine names and
sinuosities figure no longer the empty margin of philosophy, "no
longer a secondary virginity but an inexhaustible reserve, the stereo-
graphic activity of an entirely other ear." !Derrida has written else-
where on the ear; see in particular The Ear of the Other [1982] and,
most recently, "Heidegger's Ear" [forthcoming].)
"Tympan" is reprinted here in extenso.
 Tympan

The thesis and antithesis and their proofs therefore represent

nothing but the opposite assertions, that a limit is (eine Grenze
ist), and that the limit equally is only a sublatecl (aufgehobene
[releve]J one; that the limit has a beyond with which however it
stands in relation (In Beziehung steht), and beyond which it
must pass, but that In doing so there arises another such limit,
which is no limit. The solution of these antinomies, as of those
previously mentioned, is transcendental, that is.
-Hegel, Science of Logic

The essence of philosophy provides no ground (bodenlos) pre-

cisely for peculiarities, and In order to attain philosophy, it is
necessary, if its body expresses the sum of its peculiarities,
that it cast Itself into the abyss a corps perdu (sich a corps
perdu hlneinzustiinen).
-Hegel, The Difference between the Fichtean and
Schellingian Systems of Philosophy

The need for philosophy can be expressed as its presupposi-

tion if a sort of vestibule (elne Art von Vorhof) is supposed to
be made for philosophy, which begins with itself.
-Ibid.
 "Tympan" 149

'o tympanize 1 -philosophy. And I have cho-

Being at the limit: these words do not yet sen, as the sign be-
>rm a proposition, and even less a discourse. neath which to
ut there is enough in them, provided that one place them, the en-
lays upon it, to engender almost all the sen- tirely floral and
!nces in this book. subterranean name
Does philosophy answer a need? How is it of Persephone,
J be understood? Philosophy? The need? which is thus ex-
Ample to the point of believing itself inter- tracted from its
1inable1 a discourse that has called itself phi- dark terrestrial
1sophy-doubtless the only discourse that has depths and lifted to
v-er intended to receive its name only from the heavens of a
self, and has never ceased murmuring its ini- chapter heading.
al letter to itself from as close as possible- The acanthus
as always, including its own, meant to say its leaf copied in
mit. In the familiarity of the languages called school when, for
nstituted as) natural by philosophy, the lan- better or for worse,
1ages elementary to it, this discourse has al- one learns to use
·ays insisted upon assuring itself mastery over the fusain, the stem
ie limit (peras, limes, Grenze). It has recog- of a morning glory
ized, conceived, posited, declined the limit or other climbing
:cording to all possible modes; and therefore plant, the helix in-
f the same token, in order better to dispose scribed on the shell
: the limit, has transgressed it. Its own limit of a snail, the
id not to remain foreign to it. Therefore it meanders of the
is appropriated the concept for itself; it has small and the large
!lieved that it controls the margin of its vol- intestine, the sandy
ne and that it thinks its other. serpentine ex-
Philosophy has always insisted upon this: creted by an earth
Linking its other. Its other: that which limits worm, the curl of
, and from which it derives its essence, its childish hair en-
!finition, its production. To think its other: cased in a medal-
>es this amount solely to relever 2 (aufheben) lion, the putrid si-
1at from which it derives, to head the proces- mulacrum drawn

I. In French, tympaniser is an archaic verb meaning to criticize, to ridicule publicly. I

ve transliterated it here.- TRANS.
2. On Derrida's translation of the Hegelian term aufheben as relever, see above, "La
Eerance," note 12, for a system of notes. There is an untranslatable play of words here:
enser son autre: cela revient-il seulement ii relever (aufheben) ce dont elle releve ... l " -
ANS.
150 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

sion of its method only by passing the limit? by a slight pressure

Or indeed does the limit, obliquely, by sur- of the fingers from
prise, always reserve one more blow for philo- a pere-la-colique, *
sophical knowledge? Limit/passage. the marblings that
In propagating this question beyond the pre- bloom on the edges
cise context from which I have just extracted of certain bound
it (the infinity of the quantum in the greater books, the curved
Logic and the critique of the Kantian antino- wrought iron,
mies), almost constantly, in this book, I shall "modem style, 11 of
be examining the relevance 3 of the limit. And the Metro entries,
therefore relaunching in every sense the read- the interlace of
ing of the Hegelian Aufhebung, eventually be- embroidered fig·
yond what Hegel, inscribing it, understood ures on sheets and
himself to say or intended to mean, beyond pillow cases, the
that which is inscribed on the internal vesti- kiss-curl pasted
bule of his ear. This implies a vestibule in a with grease on the
delicate, differentiated structure whose ori- cheekbone of a
fices may always remain unfindable, and whose prostitute in the old
entry and exit may be barely passable; and days of Gasque
implies that the text-Hegel's for example- d'or, the thin and
functions as a writing machine in which a cer- browner braid of
tain number of typed and systematically en- the steel cable, the
meshed propositions lone has to be able to thick and blonder
recognize and isolate them) represent the one of the string
"conscious intention" of the author as a reader cable, the cerebral
of his "own" text, in the sense we speak today convolutions ex-
of a mechanical reader. Here, the lesson of the emplified by, when
finite reader called a philosophical author is you eat it, mutton
but one piece, occasionally and incidentally brains, the cork-
interesting, of the machine. To insist upon screwing of the
thinking its other: its proper 4 other, the proper vine, the image of
of its other, an other proper? In thinking it as what later will be
such, in recognizing it, one misses it. One -once the juice
reappropriates it for oneself, one disposes of it, has been bottled-
•A pere-la-colique is a small porcelain toy representing an old man sitting on a toilet
seat. When a certain product is put into it, it excretes.- TRANS.
3. Relevance is not the English "relevance" but a neologism from the translation of
aufheben as relever. Like Aufhebung, it is a noun derived from a gerund. - TRANS.
4. In French, propre can mean both "proper" and "own," as here with son propre autre,
its own other, the other proper to it. I have sometimes given simply "proper,'' and sometimes
"own, proper" (e.g., "its own, proper other"!.- TRANS.
 "Tympan" 151

one misses it, or rather one misses (the) miss- the corkscrew (it-
ing (of) it, which, as concerns the other, al- self prefiguring the
ways amounts to the same. Between the proper endless screw of
of the other and the other of the proper. drunkenness), the
If philosophy has always intended, from its circulation of the
point of view, to maintain its relation with the blood, the concha
nonphilosophical, that is the antiphilosophi- of the ear, the sin-
cal, with the practices and knowledge, empiri- uous curves of a
cal or not, that constitute its other, if it has path, everything
constituted itself according to this purposive that is wreathed,
entente with its outside, if it has always in- coiled, flowered,
tended to hear itself speak, in the same lan- garlanded, twisted,
guage, of itself and of something else, can one, arabesque, the spur
strictly speaking, determine a nonphilosophi- (which for my pur-
cal place, a place of exteriority or alterity from poses here I will
which one might still treat of philosophy~ Is imagine in a spiral)
there any ruse not belonging to reason to pre- of an espadon, the
vent philosophy from still speaking of itself, twists of a ram's
from borrowing its categories from the logos of horn, all this I be-
the other, by affecting itself without delay, on lieve uncovered in
the domestic page of its own tympanum (still the name of Per-
the muffled drum, the tympanon, the cloth sephone, pot en -
stretched taut in order to take its beating, to tially, awa1tmg
amortize impressions, to make the types (ty- only an impercep-
poi) resonate, to balance the striking pressure tible click to set it
of the typtein, between the inside and the out- off like the ribbon
side), with heterogeneous percussion? Can one of steel tightly
violently penetrate philosophy's field of listen- wound on itself in
ing without its immediately-even pretend- the midst of the
ing in advance, by hearing what is said of it, by pinions of a clock-
decoding the statement-making the penetra- work or the spring
tion resonate within itself, appropriating the in the closed-cover
emission for itself, familiarly communicating box from which
it to itself between the inner and middle ear, the bristly-bearded
following the path of a tube or inner opening, devil has not yet
be it round or oval? In other words, can one emerged.
puncture the tympanum of a philosopher and Therefore, es-
still be heard and understood by him? sentially, in ques-
To philosophize with a hammer. Zarathus- tion is a spiraled
 11
152 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE 11

tra begins by asking himself if he will have to name-or more

puncture them, batter their ears (Muss man broadly: a curved
ihnen erst die Ohren zerscblagen), with the name, but whose
sound of cymbals or tympani, the instruments, gentleness is not to
always, of some Dionysianism. In order to teach be confused with
them "to hear with their eyes" too. the always more or
But we will analyze the metaphysical ex- less lenitive char-
change, the circular complicity of the meta- acter of that which
phors of the eye and the ear. has been dulled,
But in the structure of the tympanum there since-quite to the
is something called the "luminous triangle." contrary-what is
It is named in Les Chants de Maldoror (II), piercing and pene-
very close to a "grandiose trinity." trating about it is
But along with this triangle, along with the confirmed by the
pars tensa of the tympanon, there is also found rapprochement to
the handle of a "hammer." be made between
In order effectively, practically to transform the syllables that
what one decries (tympanizes), must one still compose its name
be heard and understood within it, henceforth and the syllables
subjecting oneself to the law of the inner ham- forming the civil
mer? 5 In relaying the inner hammer, one risks status of the insect
permitting the noisiest discourse to participate called [in French]
in the most serene, least disturbed, best served perce-oreille (ear-
economy of philosophical irony. Which is to piercer) [and in En-
say, and examples of this metaphysical drum- glish, "earwig"]. For
ming are not lacking today, that in taking this not only do "Per-
risk, one risks nothing. sephone" and
From philosophy-to separate oneself, in "perce-oreille" both
order to describe and decry its law, in the di- begin with the
rection of the absolute exteriority of another same allusion to

5. The hammer, as is well known, belongs to the chain of small bones, along with the
anvil and the stirrup. It is placed on the internal surface of the tympanic membrane. It
always has the role of mediation and communication: it transmits sonic vibrations to the
chain of small bones and then to the inner ear. Bichat recognized that it has another
paradoxical function. This small bone protects the tympanum while acting upon it. ''Without
it, the tympanum would be affected painfully by vibrations set up by too powerful sounds."
The hammer, thus, can weaken the blows, muffle them on the threshold of the inner ear.
The latter-the labyrinth-includes a vestibule, the semicircular canals, a cochlea !with its
two spiralsl, that is, two organs of balance and one organ of hearing. Perhaps we shall
penetrate it more deeply later. For the moment, it suffices to mark the role of the middle ear:
it tends to equalize the acoustic resistance of the air and the resistance of the labyrinthine
liquids, to balance internal pressures and external pressures.
 "Tympan" 153

place. But exteriority and alterity are concepts the idea of "pierc-
which by themselves have never surprised ing" (less decided in
philosophical discourse. Philosophy by itself Persephone, be-
has always been concerned with them. These cause of the s
are not the conceptual headings under which which imparts
philosophy's border can be overflowed; the something undu-
overflow is its object. Instead of determining lating and grassy,
some other circumscription, recognizing it, chimerical and
practicing it, bringing it to light, forming it, in fleeting, to the
a word producing it (and today this word serves name, to the ex-
as the crudest "new clothes" of the metaphys- tent that one might
ical denegation which accommodates itself very be tempted, by ex-
well to all these projects), in question will be, ecuting an easy
but according to a movement unheard of by metathesis, to call
philosophy, an other which is no longer its her the Fay Person
other. ... ), but the one
But by relating it to something to which it and the other end
has no relation, is one not immediately per- with an appeal to
mitting oneself to be encoded by philosophical the sense of hear-
logos, to stand under its banner? 6 Certainly, ing, which is
except by writing this relationship following overtly in play, for
the mode of a nonrelationship about which it the insect, due to
would be demonstrated simultaneously or the enunciation of
obliquely-on the philosophical surface of the the word "ear"
discourse-that no philosopheme will ever (that is, of the or-
have been prepared to conform to it or trans- gan by means of
late it. This can only be written according to a which auditory
deformation of the philosophical tympanum. sensations pene-
My intention is not to extract from the ques- trate into us), and

6. Without an inventory of all the sexual investments which, everywhere and at all
times, powerfully constrain the discourse of the ear, I shall give an example here to indicate
the topics of the material left in the margins. The horn that is called pavillon (papillon) is a
phallus for the Dogon and Bambara of Mali, and the auditory canal a vagina. [Pavillon in
French has multiple meanings. Here, the reference is to the end of the horn called the bell in
English; it also designates the visible part of the ear. Further, both senses of pavillon just
given derive from its older sense of "military tent," because of such tents' conic shape.
Finally, pavilion can also mean flag or banner, as in the sentence above that ends with the
phrase "stand under its banner (pavillon). " - TRANs.] Speech is the sperm indispensable for
insemination. [Conception through the ear, all of philosophy one could say.I It descends
through the woman's ear, and is rolled up in a spiral around the womb. Which is hardly very
distant from Arianism !from the name Arius, of course, a priest from Alexandria, the father
of Arianism, a heretical doctrine of the conception in the Trinity!, from homoousios, and
from all the records of the Nicene Council.
154 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- ''LITERATURE''

tion of metaphor-one of the most continuous less directly in play

threads of this book-the figure of the oblique. for the goddess by
This is also, thematically, the route of Dis- means of the suffix
semination. 7 We know that the membrane of phone, also found
the tympanum, a thin and transparent parti- in "telephone" and
tion separating the auditory canal from the "gramophone," the
middle ear (the cavity), is stretched obliquely latter being an in-
(loxos). Obliquely from above to below, from strument for which
outside to inside, and from the back to the is more appro-
front. Therefore it is not perpendicular to the priate than the for-
axis of the canal. One of the effects of this mer the very eu-
obliqueness is to increase the surface of phonic ending that
impression and hence the capacity of vibra- beautifully defines
tion. It has been observed, particularly in birds, it as a musical
that precision of hearing is in direct proportion mechanism.
to the obliqueness of the tympanum. The tym- The insect
panum squints. whose principal
Consequently, to luxate the philosophical work is to gnaw on
ear, to set the loxos in the logos to work, is to the inside of fruit
avoid frontal and symmetrical protest, opposi- pits in order to take
tion in all the forms of anti-, or in any case to subsistence from
inscribe antism and overturning, 8 domestic them, and which
denegation, in an entirely other form of am- occasionally, so
bush, of lokhos, of textual maneuvers. they say, perfo-
Under what conditions, then, could one rates human tym-
mark, for a philosopheme in general, a limit, a panums with its

7. Cf. especially "The Double Session," in Dissemination.

8. On the problematic of overturning and displacement, see Dissemination and Posi-
tions. To luxate, to tympanize philosophical autism is never an operation within the concept
and without some carnage of language. Thus it breaks open the roof, the closed spiral- unity
of the palate. It proliferates outside to the point of no longer being understood. It is no longer
a tongue.
Hematographic music
"Sexual ;ubilation is a choice of glottis,
of the splinter of the cyst of a dental root,
a choice of otic canal,
of the bad auricular ringing,
of a bad instillation of sound,
of current brocaded on the bottom carpet,
of the opaque thickness.
the elect application of the choice of the candelabra of chiselled string,
in order to escape the prolific avaric obtuse music
without ram, or age, or rapage,
and which has neither tone nor age."
ARTAUD (December 1946)
 "Tympan" 155

margin that it could not infinitely reappro- pincers, has in

priate, conceive as its own, in advance engen- common with the
dering and interning the process of its expro- daughter of Deme-
priation (Hegel again, always), proceeding to ter that it too bur-
its inversion by itself? How to unbalance the ies itself in a sub-
pressures that correspond to each other on terranean kingdom.
either side of the membrane? How to block The deep country
this correspondence destined to weaken, muf- of hearing, de-
fle, forbid the blows from the outside, the other scribed in terms of
hammer? The "hammer that speaks" to him geology more than
"who has the third ear" (der das dritte Ohr in those of any
hat). How to interpret- but here interpreta- other natural sci-
tion can no longer be a theory or discursive ence, not only by
practice of philosophy-the strange and unique virtue of the carti-
property of a discourse that organizes the laginous cavern
economy of its representation, the law of its that constitutes its
proper weave, such that its outside is never its organ, but also by
outside, never surprises it, such that the logic virtue of the rela-
of its heteronomy still reasons from within the tionship that unites
vault of its autism? it to grottoes, to
For this is how Being is understood: its chasms, to all the
proper. It assures without let-up the relevant pockets hollowed
movement of reappropriation. Can one then out of the terres-
pass this singular limit which is not a limit, trial crust whose
which no more separates the inside from the emptiness makes
outside than it assures their permeable and them into resonat-
transparent continuity? What form could this ing drums for the
play of limit/passage have, this logos which slightest sounds.
posits and negates itself in permitting its own Just as one
voice to well up? Is this a well-put question? might worry about
The analyses that give rise to one another the idea of the
in this book do not answer this question, tympanum, a frag-
bringing to it neither an answer nor an answer. ile membrane
They work, rather, to transform and deplace threatened with
its statement, and toward examining the pre- perforations by the
suppositions of the question, the institution of minute pincers of
its protocol, the laws of its procedure, the an insect-unless
headings of its alleged homogeneity, of its ap- it had already been
parent unicity: can one treat of philosophy it- broken by too vio-
 11
156 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE"

self (metaphysics itself, that is, ontotheology) lent a noise-it is

without already permitting the dictation, along equally permissi-
with the pretention to unity and unicity, of ble to fear for the
the ungraspable and imperial totality of an or- vocal cords, which
der? If there are margins, is there still a philos- can be broken
ophy, the philosophy? instantaneously
No answer, then. Perhaps, in the long run, when, for example,
not even a question. The copulative correspon- one screams too
dence, the opposition question-answer is al- loudly, subjecting
ready lodged in a structure, enveloped in the them to excessive
hollow of an ear, which we will go into to take tension (in the case
a look. To find out how it is made, how it has of anger, grief, or
been formed, how it functions. And if the tym- even a simple game
panum is a limit, perhaps the issue would be dominated by the
less to displace a given determined limit than sheer pleasure of
to work toward the concept of limit and the shrieking), so that
limit of the concept. To unhinge it on several one's voice gets
tries. "broken." An acci-
But what is a hinge (signifying: to be rea- dent my mother
soned in every sense)? sometimes warned
Therefore, what legal question is to be re- me against,
lied upon if the limit in general, and not only whether she ac-
the limit of what is believed to be one very tually believed that
particular thing among others, the tympanum, it could happen, or
is structurally oblique? If, therefore, there is whether-as I tend
no limit in general, that is, a straight and reg- to believe-she
ular form of the limit? Like every limus, the used the danger as
limes, the short cut, signifies the oblique. a scarecrow that
But indefatigably at issue is the ear, the dis- might make me
tinct, differentiated, articulated organ that pro- less noisy, at least
duces the effect of proximity, of absolute prop- for a while. Mar-
erness, the idealizing erasure of organic ginal to Perseph-
difference. It is an organ whose structure (and one and perce-or-
the suture that holds it to the throat) produces eille, soldered
the pacifying lure of organic indifference. To together by a ce-
forget it-and in so doing to take shelter in ment of relation-
the most familial of dwellings-is to cry out ships hardened-in
for the end of organs, of others. broad daylight-by
But indefatigably at issue is the ear. Not their names, a du-
 "Tympan" 157

only the sheltered portico of the tympanum, rable suture is thus

but also the vestibular canal.9 And the pho- formed between
neme as the "phenomenon of the labyrinth" the throat and the
in which Speech and Phenomena, from its epi- tympanum, which,
graph and very close to its false exit, had intro- the one as much as
duced the question of writing. One might al- the other, are sub-
ways think, of course, in order to reassure ject to a fear of
oneself, that "labyrinthic vertigo" is the name being injured, be-

9. "Anatomical term. Irregular cavity that is part of the inner ear. Genital vestibule, the
vulva and all its parts up to the membrane of the hymen exclusively. Also the name of the
triangular space limited in front and laterally by the ailerons of the nymphs [small lips of the
vulva], and in back by the orifice of the urethra; one enters through this space in practicing a
vestibular incision. E. Lat. vestibulum, from the augmentative particle ve, and stabulum,
place in which things are held !see stable), according to certain Latin etymologists. Ovid, on
the contrary, more reasonably, it appears, takes it from Vesta because the vestibule held a
fire lit in the honor of Vesta [goddess of the proper, of familiarity, of the domestic hearth,
etc.]. Among the modems, Mommsen says that vestibulum comes from vestis, being an
entryway in which the Romans left the toga (vestis)." Littre. [Littre is an authoritative
French dictionary.-Eo.]
Lodged in the vestibule, the labyrinthic receptors of balance are named vestibular recep-
tors. These are the otolithic organs jutricle and saccule) and the semicircular canals. The
utricle is sensitive to the head's changes of direction, which displace the otoliths, the ear's
stones, small calcified granulations modifying the stimulation of the ciliary cells of the
macula !the thick part of the membranous covering of the utricle). The function of the
saccule in the mechanisms of balance has not yet been definitely ascertained. The semicir-
cular canals, inside the labyrinth, are sensitive to all the movements of the head, which
create currents in the liquid jendolymph). The reflex movements which result from this are
indispensable for assuring the stability of the head, the direction and balance of the body in
all its movements, notably in walking upright.
Tympanum, Dionysianism, labyrinth, Ariadne's thread. We are now traveling through
!upright, walking, dancing), included and enveloped within it, never to emerge, the form of
an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner walls, a city, therefore !labyrinth,
semicircular canals-warning: the spiral walkways do not hold) circling around like a stair-
way winding around a lock, a dike !dam) stretched out toward the sea; closed in on itself and
open to the sea's path. Full and empty of its water, the anamnesis of the concha resonates
alone on a beach. [There is an elaborate play on the words limai;on and conque here. Limai;on
!aside from meaning snail) means a spiral staircase and the spiral canal that is part of the
inner ear. Conque means both conch and concha, the largest cavity of the external ear-
TRANS.] How could a breach be produced, between earth and sea?
By means of the breach of philosophical identity, a breach that amounts to addressing the
truth to itself in an envelope, to hearing itself speak inside without opening its mouth or
showing its teeth, the bloodiness of a disseminated writing comes to separate the lips, to
violate the embouchure of philosophy, putting its tongue into movement, finally bringing it
into contact with some other code, of an entirely other kind. A necessarily unique event,
nonreproducible, hence illegible as such and, when it happens, inaudible in the conch,
between earth and sea, without signature.
Bataille writes in "The Structure of the Labyrinth": "Emerging from an inconceivable
void in the play of beings as a satellite wandering away from two phantoms lone bristling
with beard, the other, sweeter, its head covered with a chignon), it is first of all in the father
and mother who transcend it that the minuscule human being encounters the illusion of
sufficiency. j... ) Thus are produced the relatively stable gatherings whose center is a city,
similar in its primitive form to a corolla enclosing like a double pistil a sovereign and a king.
I... J The universal god destroys rather than supports the human aggregations which erect its
phantom. He himself is only dead, whether a mythical delirium proposes him for adoration
like a cadaver pierced with wounds, or whether by his very universality he becomes more
than any other incapable of opposing to the loss of being the breached walls of ipseity."
 11 11
158 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE

of a well-known and well-determined disease, sides both belong-

the local difficulty of a particular organ. ing to the same
This is-another tympanum. cavernous domain.
If Being is in effect a process of reappropria- And in the final
tion, the "question of Being" of a new type can analysis caverns
never be percussed without being measured become the geo-
against the absolutely coextensive question of metric place in
the proper. Now this latter question does not which all are joined
permit itself to be separated from the idealiz- together: the
ing value of the very-near, which itself re- chthonian divin-
ceives its disconcerting powers only from the ity, the insect pier-
structure of hearing-oneself-speak. The pro- cer of pits, the ma-
prius presupposed in all discourses on econ- trix in which the
omy, sexuality, language, semantics, rhetoric, voice is formed, the
etc. repercusses its absolute limit only in so- drum that each
norous representation. Such, at least, is the noise comes to
most insistent hypothesis of this book. A quasi- strike with its
organizing role is granted, therefore, to the motif wand of vibrating
of sonic vibration (the Hegelian Erzittern) as to air; caverns: ob-
the motif of the proximity of the meaning of scure pipe-works
Being in speech (Heideggerian NO.he and Ereig- reaching down into
nis). The logic of the event is examined from the most secret part
the vantage of the structures of expropriation of being in order to
called timbre (tympanum), style, and signa- bring even to the
ture. Timbre, style, and signature are the same totally naked cav-
obliterating division of the proper. They make ity of our mental
every event possible, necessary, and unfind- space the exhala-
able. tions-of variable
What is the specific resistance of philosoph- temperature, con-
ical discourse to deconstruction? It is the infi- sistency, and or-
nite mastery that the agency of Being land of namentation-that
the) proper seems to assure it; this mastery are propagated in
permits it to interiorize every limit as being long horizontal
and as being its own proper. To exceed it, by waves after rising
the same token, and therefore to preserve it in straight up from
itself. Now, in its mastery and its discourse on the fermentations
mastery (for mastery is a signification that we of the outside
still owe to it), philosophical power always world.
seems to combine two types. On the one
 "Tympan" 159

On the one hand, a hierarchy: the particular hand, therefore, is

sciences and regional ontologies are subordi- the outside; on the
nated to general ontology, and then to funda- other hand, the in-
mental ontology. 10 From this point of view all side; between
the questions that solicit Being and the proper them, the cavern-
upset the order that submits the determined ous.
fields of science, its formal objects or materials A voice is usu-
(logic and mathematics, or semantics, linguis- ally described as
tics, rhetoric, science of literature, political 'cavernous' to give
economy, psychoanalysis, etc.), to philosophi- the idea that it is
cal jurisdiction. In principle, then, these ques- low and deep, and
tions are prior to the constitution of a rigorous, even a bit too much
systematic, and orderly theoretical discourse so. For example: a
in these.domains (which therefore are no longer basse taille, * * in
simply domains, regions circumscribed, de- relation to a basse
limited, and assigned from outside and above). chantante with a
On the other hand, an envelopment: the higher register and
whole is implied, in the speculative mode of also more supple
reflection and expression, in each part. Ho- line, whereas that
mogenous, concentric, and circulating indefi- of the basse taille
nitely, the movement of the whole is re- rather would seem
marked in the partial determinations of the more proper~in
system or encyclopedia, without the status of that it seems rough,
that remark, and the partitioning of the part, as if hewn with an
giving rise to any general deformation of the ax-to the stone
space. breaker, the chise-
These two kinds of appropriating mastery, ler of funerary
hierarchy and envelopment, communicate with marbles, to the
each other according to complicities we shall miner with his
define. If one of the two types is more powerful pick, to the grave-
here (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Hei- digger, the ditch-
degger) or there (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel), they digger, and (if I can
both follow the movement of the same wheel, refer to a social sit-
whether it is a question, finally, of Heidegger's uation which,

10. The putting into question of this ontological subordination was begun in Of Gram-
matology.
••The basse-taille is the voice called in English and Italian the basso profundo, while
the basse chantante is the voice usually called "bass" !between basso profundo and baritone).
Leiris is playing on the taille in basse-taille, from the verb tailler meaning to hew, to cut, to
chisel, etc. - TRANS.
 11
160 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE"

hermeneutical circle or of Hegel's ontotheo- strictly speaking, is

logical circle. {"White Mythology" deviates ac- no longer a profes-
cording to another wheel.) For as long as this sion) to the monk,
tympanum will not have been destroyed {the pursued with
tympanum as also a hydraulic wheel, de- weighty steps,
scribed minutely by Vitruvius), 11 which can- down along clois-
not be achieved by means of a simply discur- tered corridors and
11. In De Architectura Vitruvius described not only the water clock of Ctesibius, who
had conceived aquarum expressiones automatopoetasque machinas multaque deliciarum
genera ("First he made a hollow tube of gold, or pierced a gem; for these materials are neither
worn by the passage of water nor so begrimed that they become clogged. The water flows
smoothly through the passage and raises an inverted bowl which the craftsmen call the cork
or drum (quod ab artificibus phellos sive tympanum dicitur). The bowl is connected with a
bar on which a drum revolves. The drums are wrought with equal teeth" (On Architecture,
translated and edited by Frank Granger [New York: Putnam, 1934], Book 9, ch. 8, p. 2591.
One ought to cite all the "corks or drums" which follow. Vitruvius also describes the axle of
the anaphorical clock, ex qua pendet ex una parte phellos (sive tympanum) qui ab aqua
sublevatur ("On one ends hangs a cork or drum raised by the water," ibid., p. 2631, and the
famous hydraulic wheel which bears his name: a drum or hollow cylinder is divided by
wedges which are open on the surface of the drum. They fill up with water. Reaching the
level of the axle, the water passes into the hub and flows out.

- - - ___
-----
- ----___,___
- -----------·- --------~--

Instead of the wedges of Vitruvius' tympanum, Lafaye's tympanum has cylindrical parti-
tions following the developables of a circle. The angles are economized. The water, entering
into the wheel, no longer is lodged in the angles. Thus the shocks are reduced and so, by the
same token, is the loss of labor. Here, I am reproducing the perhaps Hegelian figure of
Lafaye's tympanum (17171.
 "Tympan" 161

sive or theoretical gesture, for as long as these through the years,

two types of mastery will not have been de- by the slow voyage
stroyed in their essential familiarity-which toward an internal
is also that of phallocentrism and prey.
logocentrism 12 -and for as long as even the Of this basse
philosophical concept of mastery will not have taille, with the idea
been destroyed, all the liberties one claims to attached to it, like
take with the philosophical order will remain a stone around its
activated a tergo by misconstrued philosophi- neck, of steps fash-
cal machines, according to denegation or pre- ioned in the
cipitation, ignorance or stupidity. They very ground, as if in or-
quickly, known or unknown to their "au- der to go to the
thors," will have been called back to order. basement or step by
Certainly one will never prove philosophi- step to descend a
cally that one has to transform a given situa- certain number of
tion and proceed to an effective deconstruction meters below sea-
in order to leave irreversible marks. In the name level (... ) to open
of what and of whom in effect? And why not up a passageway
permit the dictation of the norm and the rule through the organs
of law a tergo (viz. the tympanotribe)? If the by burrowing
displacement of forces does not effectively through the canal
transform the situation, why deprive oneself of a wound narrow
of the pleasure, and specifically of the laugh- but deep enough to
ter, which are never without a certain repeti- involve the inner-
tion? This hypothesis is not secondary. With most muscles;
what is one to authorize oneself, in the last whether it is that

12. This ecorche (Dissemination too was to "skin the ear"), bares the phal/ogocentric
system in its most sensitive philosophical articulations. [An ecorche (from the verb ecorcher,
to skin) is a model of a human or animal without its skin used to teach the techniques of life
drawing. - TRANS.] Therefore, it pursues the deconstruction of the triangulocircular structure
(Oedipus, Trinity, Speculative Dialectics) already long since begun, and does so explicitly in
the texts of Dissemination and of Positions. This structure, the mythology of the proper and
of organic indifference, is often the architectural figure of the tympanum, the part of a
pediment included in the triangle of the three cornices, sometimes shot through with a
circular opening called an oculus. The issue here is not one of paying it the tribute of an
oracular denegation or of a thesis without a strategy of writing that the phallogocentric order
manipulates at every tum in its conceptual argumentation and in its ideological, political,
and literary connotations. The issue, rather, is to mark the conceptual holds and turns of
writing that the order cannot tum inside out in order to get its gloves back on or to start up
once more. Here, margin, march, and demarcation pass between denegation (plurality of
modes) and deconstruction (systematic unity of a spiral).
Speaking of the ecorche, there are then at least two anatomy lessons, as there are two
labyrinths and two cities. In one of them, a brain dissection, the surgeon's head remains
invisible. It seems to be cut off by the painter with a line. In fact, it was burned, in 172 3,
along with a quarter of the painting.
 11 11
162 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE

analysis, if not once more with philosophy, in of an artist from the

order to disqualify naivete, incompetence, or opera, cut from the
misconstrual, in order to be concerned with heart of the rock, or
passivity or to limit pleasure? And if the value fashioned in the
of authority remained fundamentally, like the most supple steel if
value of the critique itself, the most naive? it is that of a singer,
One can analyze or transform the desire for emerging from the
im-pertinence, but one cannot, within dis- moist earth of a
course, make it understand pertinence, and that hothouse or
one must (know how to) destroy what one de- stretched out in
stroys. breaking glass fila-
Therefore, if they appear to remain mar- ment if that of one
ginal to some of the great texts in the history of the creatures
of philosophy, these ten writings in fact ask more readily called
the question of the margin. Gnawing away at cantratrices than
the border which would make this question chanteuses (even
into a particular case, they are to blur the line though cantateurf
which separates a text from its controlled mar- is an unknown
gin. They interrogate philosophy beyond its species); or whether
meaning, treating it not only as a discourse it is the most vul-
but as a determined text inscribed in a general gar voice, issuing
text, enclosed in the representation of its own from the most in-
margin. Which compels us not only to reckon significant being for
with the entire logic of the margin, but also to the most insipid
take an entirely other reckoning: which is ballad or most triv-
doubtless to recall that beyond the philosoph- ial refrain, myste-
ical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty rious is the voice
margin, but another text, a weave of differ- that sings, in rela-
ences of forces without any present center of tion to the voice
reference (everything- "history," "politics," that speaks.
"economy," "sexuality," etc.-said not to be The mystery-if
written in books: the worn-out expression with we wish at any
which we appear not to have finished stepping price, for the pur-
backward, in the most regressive argumenta- poses of discourse,
tions and in the most apparently unforeseeable to give a figure of
places); and also to recall that the written text speech to that

t Cantatrice has the sense of an opera singer, a diva la hothouse, glass-breaking voice),
while chanteuse is simply a female singer. There is no masculine form cantateur correspond-
ing to cantatrice. - TRANS.
 "Tympan" 163

of philosophy (this time in its books) over- which by defini-

flows and cracks its meaning. tion cannot have
To philosophize a corps perdu. 13 How did one-can be repre-
Hegel understand that? sented as a margin,
Can this text become the margin of a mar- a fringe surround-
gin? Where has the body of the text gone when ing the object, iso-
the margin is no longer a secondary virginity lating it at the same
but an inexhaustible reserve, the stereographic time as it under-
activity of an entirely other ear? lines its presence,
Overflows and cracks: that is, on the one masking it even as
hand compels us to count in its margin more it qualifies it, in-
and less than one believes is said or read, an serting it into an
unfolding due to the structure of the mark untied harlequin of
(which is the same word as marche, 14 as limit, facts with no iden-
and as margin); and on the other hand, luxates tifiable cause at the
the very body of statements in the pretensions same time as the
to univocal rigidity or regulated polysemia. A particular color
lock opened to a double understanding no longer that it dyes the ob-
forming a single system. ject extracts it from
Which does not amount to acknowledging the swampy depths
that the margin maintains itself within and in which ordinary
without. Philosophy says so too: within be- facts are mixed up.
cause philosophical discourse intends to know Musical elocution,
and to master its margin, to define the line, compared to ordi-
align the page, enveloping it in its volume. nary elocution, ap-
Without because the margin, its margin, its pears to be en-
outside are empty, are outside: a negative about dorsed with a
which there seems to be nothing to do, a nega- similar irisation, a
tive without effect in the text or a negative fairy's coat, which
working in the service of meaning, the margin is the index of a
releve (aufgehoben) in the dialectics of the connivance be-
Book. Thus, one will have said nothing, or in tween that which
any event done nothing, in declaring "against" could seem to be
philosophy that its margin is within or with- only a human voice
out, within and without, simultaneously the and the rhythms of

13. See the second epigraph above for Hegel's use of the expression ii corps perdu. It
means impetuously, passionately.-TRANS.
14. Derrida often plays on the series marque, marche, marge (mark, step, marginj.-
TRANS.
 11
164 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE"

inequality of its internal spacings and the reg- the fauna and flora,
ularity of its borders. Simultaneously, by means that is, the rhythms
of rigorous, philosophically intransigent anal- of the mineral do-
yses, and by means of the inscription of marks main in which
which no longer belong to philosophical space, every velleity of
not even to the neighborhood of its other, one gesture is tran-
would have to displace philosophy's alignment scribed into a fro-
of its own types. To write otherwise. To de- zen form. And
limit the space of a closure no longer analo- when from spoken
gous to what philosophy can represent for it- language-which
self under this name, according to a straight or is sufficiently enig-
circular line enclosing a homogenous space. matic itself, since it
To determine, entirely against any philoso- is only from the in-
pheme, the intransigence that prevents it from stant in which it is
calculating its margin, by means of a limi- formulated, in ex-
trophic violence imprinted according to new ternal fashion or
types. To eat the margin in luxating the tym- not, that thought
panum, the relationship to itself of the double takes on its reality
membrane. So that philosophy can no longer -one comes to
reassure itself that it has always maintained sung language,
its tympanum. The issue here is the mainte- what one encoun-
nant [maintaining, now]: it travels through the ters before one is an
entire book. How to put one's hands [mains] enigma of the sec-
on the tympanum and how the tympanum ond degree, seeing
could escape from the hands of the philoso- that the closer one
pher in order to make of phallogocentrism an is in a sense to the
impression that he no longer recognizes, in corporal structures
which he no longer rediscovers himself, of (of which each note
which he could become conscious only after- emitted has the ap-
ward and without being able to say to himself, pearance of being
again turning on his own hinge: I will have the direct fruit) and,
anticipated it, with absolute knowledge. consequently, the
This impression, as always, is made on some more certain one
tympanum, whether resonating or still, on the is of apparently
double membrane that can be struck from either standing on firm
side. ground, one finds
As in the case of the mystic writing pad, I oneself, in truth, in
am asking in terms of the manual printing the grasp of the in-
press the question of the writing machine which effable, the me-
 "Tympan" 165

is to upset the entire space of the proper body lodic line present-
in the unlimited enmeshing of machines-of- ing itself as the
machines, hence of machines without hands. 15 translation, in a
The question of the machine is asked one more purely sonorous id-
time, between the pit and the pyramid, in the iom, of that which
margins (of the Hegelian text). could not be said by
In terms of the printing press, therefore, the means of words.
manual press, what is a tympan? We must And even more so
know this, in order to provoke within the bal- when the source of
ance of the inner ear or the homogenous cor- the song, rather
respondence of the two ears, in the relation to than being a hu-
itself in which philosophy understands itself man mouth (that is,
to domesticate its march, some dislocation an organ with
without measure. And, if the Hegelian wound which we are more
(Beleidigung, Verletzung) always appears sewn or less familiar), is
up again, to give birth, from the lesion without a mechanical de-
suture, to some unheard-of partition. vice adding to what
In terms of the manual printing press, then, is already strange in
there is not one tympan 16 but several. Two musical speech the
frameworks, of different material, generally surprise of being
wood and iron, fit into one another, are lodged, reproduced; one is
if one can put it thus, in one another. One then face to face
tympan in the other, one of wood the other of with a mystery in
iron, one large and one small. Between them, the almost pure
the sheet of paper. Therefore, in question is an state. ( ... J I my-
apparatus, and one of its essential functions self possessed a
will be the regular calculation of the margin. phonograph I ... J
This apparatus is lowered onto the marble on not only were there
which the inked form is found. A crank rolls no provisions for
the carriage under the platen, which is then, using it as a record-
with the aid of the bar, lowered onto the small ing device, but it
tympan. The carriage is rolled. The tympan could only be used
and the frisket are lifted ("Frisket. Printing term. for the cylinders of
The piece of the hand-operated press that the small or medium

15. As concerns the metaphysical concept of the machine, see, for what is questioned
here, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference; and Of Grammatology.
16. In French all the words on the senses of which Derrida plays throughout this essay
are tympan. In English they are all tympanum, with the single exception of the printing
term, which is tympan (as in French). I have kept the original French title-tympan-of this
essay.-TRANS.
166 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE"

printer lowers onto the sheet, both to keep it format, not for the
on the tympan and to prevent the margins and large ones, such as
spaces from being soiled." Littre), and the sheet those that could be
is then printed on one of its sides. From a heard on the other
treatise on typography: "The large tympan is a gramophone, which
wood chassis with a piece of silk stretched was fitted with bi-
over it; the points, the margin, and succes- zarre accessories
sively each of the sheets to be printed are placed that tended to clut-
on the tympan. The lever to which the frisket ter up all the
is attached is made of iron. The large tympan closets in the
is attached to the drum in its lower part, that house, along with a
is to the right-hand end of the press; it is held vast series of 'rolls'
by a double hinge called the couplets of the (as we called the
tympan. It is ordinarily of the same width as cylinders) that my
the drum. In each of the bars that extend along father had recorded
its width, the large tympan is pierced by two himself, and the
holes, one in the middle, the other two-thirds still virgin wax
up, into which the screws of the points fit. The rolls that had yet to
small tympan is a frame formed by four bands be engraved.
of rather thin iron, with a sheet or parchment When you
glued underneath, or more usually a piece of wanted to listen to
silk flattened onto the four sides of the chassis. a roll of the me-
It is fitted into the large tympan, to which it is dium format on the
attached at the top by two thin, pointed nails, junior apparatus,
which penetrate between the wood and the which was freely
silk, at the bottom by a hook, and at the sides available to me,
by clasps. The platen falls directly onto the you had to increase
small tympan when it is lowered by the bar. the size of the cy-
The sheets of cloth (satin, or merino if a less lindrical motor;
dry impression is desired), the cardboard, and you obtained this
the carriage are inserted between the silk of result with the aid
the large and the small tympans. The tympans of a metal tube
require careful maintenance, and must be re- adapted to the mo-
newed as soon as they have begun to deterio- tor, which could
rate." take only the
Will the multiplicity of these tympanums smallest cylinders
permit themselves to be analyzed? Will we be unless its diameter
led back, at the exit of the labyrinths, toward had been increased
 "Tympan" 167

some topos or commonplace named tym- to the desired pro-

panum! portions by means
It may be about this multiplicity that phi- of the addition just
losophy, being situated, inscribed, and in- described. Linked
cluded within it, has never been able to reason. to the horn+ by a
Doubtless, philosophy will have sought the re- short rubber tube
assuring and absolute rule, the norm of this analogous to the
polysemia. It will have asked itself if a tym- joints of gas ovens
panum is natural or constructed, if one does and of a brick-red-
not always come back to the unity of a dish color, a dia-
stretched, bordered, framed cloth that watches phragm of the type
over its margins as virgin, homogenous, and ordinarily called
negative space, leaving its outside outside, "sapphire" -a
without mark, without opposition, without small round box
determination, and ready, like matter, the ma- with a bottom
trix, the khora, to receive and repercuss type. made of a thin
This interpretation will have been true, the sheet of mica or
very history of the truth such as it is, in sum, some analogous
recounted a bit in this book. material which
But certainly that which cannot be pre- bore the tiny hard
sented in the space of this truth, that which appendix that was
cannot lend itself to being heard or read, or supposed to trans-
being seen, even if in the "luminous triangle" mit the vibrations
or oculus of the tympanum, is that this thing, inscribed in the
a tympanum, punctures itself or grafts itself. wax cylinder to the
And this, however one writes it, resists the sensitive mem-
concepts of machine or of nature, of break or brane-a dia-
of body, resists the metaphysics of castration phragrn which,
as well as its similar underside, the denegation when taken apart,
of modern Rousseauisms, in their very aca- could fit in toto in
demic vulgarity. the palm of your
Will it be said, then, that what resists here hand, did its best to
is the unthought, the suppressed, the repressed transform into
of philosophy? In order no longer to be taken sound waves the
in, as one so often is today, by the confused oscillations com-
equivalence of these three notions, a concep- municated to it
U.e., the bell-shaped horn, in French pavillon. See above, note 6, translator's interpola-
tion.- TRANS.
168 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- "LITERATURE"

tual elaboration must introduce into them a by the roll, which

new play of opposition, of articulation, of dif- seemed to be
ference. An introduction, then, to differance. If marked all over its
there is a here of this book, let it be inscribed surface (in a heli-
on these steps. coid too tight to
It has already begun, and all of this refers, show anything
cites, repercusses, propagates its rhythm with- other than the nar-
out measure. But it remains entirely unfore- row, dense stripes)
seen: an incision into an organ made by a hand by the furrow of
that is blind for never having seen anything varying depth that
but the here-and-there of a tissue. the original waves
What is then woven does not play the game had dug into it.
of tight succession. Rather, it plays on succes-
sion. Do not forget that to weave (tramer, Michel Leiris§
trameare) is first to make holes, to traverse, to
work one-side-and-the-other of the warp. The
canal of the ear, what is called the auditory
meatus, no longer closes after being struck by
a simulated succession, a secondary phrase,
the echo and logical articulation of a sound
that has not yet been received, already an ef-
fect of that which does not take place. "Hol-
low time, I a kind of exhausting void between
the blades of cutting I wood, I nothingness
calling man's trunk I the body taken as man's
trunk, such is the "tympanon" of the Tara-
11

humaras.
This already enervated repercussion, of a
kind that has not yet sounded, this timbered
time between writing and speech, call for/
themselves a coup de done.
As soon as it perforates, one is dying to
replace it by some glorious cadaver. It suffices,
in sum, barely, to wait.

Prinsengracht, eight-twelve May 1972

- Translated by Alan Bass
§Michel Leiris, Biffures !Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 85ff.
 SEVEN

From "The Double Session" in Dissemination

("La Double seance" in La Dissemination [1972])

Whereas "Tympan" functions on the principle of the oblique, un-

seen intervention of literature into philosophical discourse, in "The
Double Session" Derrida inserts the poetic text into the very "pro-
cess of truth" which has always been philosophy's exclusive con-
cern. Thus, rather than two columns running parallel, this text ini-
tiates its highly complex trajectory with a single page on which a
short prose piece by Mallarme (Mimique) appears inset into a frag-
ment from Plato's Philebus. By means of this typographic invention,
Derrida already announces an intention: to open up a space within
the truth process inaugurated by Plato for a consideration of the
poetic operation it has always condemned or excluded. In particular,
it is the concept of mimesis that Mimique, through Derrida's reading
of it, deconstructs. That concept, he notes, has determined "the
whole history of the interpretation of the arts of letters" (Dissemi-
nation, p. 187). Through its evocation of a mime drama, Mimique-
and beyond this single text, the whole of Mallarme's oeuvre-simu-
lates or mimics mimetic doctrine, as represented in the exemplary
extract from the Platonic dialogue. This simulation, which is no
longer comprehended by the truth process, would nevertheless be
separated from it only by the thinnest of veils, to which Derrida
assigns the name hymen that is found near the center of Mallarme's
text. The term hymen, which designates both a joining and a separa-
tion, is made to float undecidably between not only Plato and Mal-
larme (one of the alternative titles Derrida suggests for this two-part
essay is "Hymen: Between Plato and Mallarme"), philosophy and
 11
170 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE

literature, but also all of the temporal and spatial distinctions upon
which mimetic doctrine has been constructed: imitated and imita-
tor, referent and sign, signified and signifier. (For further commen-
tary on this essay and on the "hymen" in Derrida's thought, see
above, our introduction, pp. xxxix-x.)
Concerning the Platonic notion of mimesis, before which or
around which the Mallarmean mimicry is deployed, Derrida's analy-
sis is succinct to the point of ellipsis. This is in part because in
Dissemination the essay follows upon a lengthy analysis of Plato's
negative evaluation of writing wherein the idea of mimesis is already
heavily in question. Readers are therefore referred to extracts from
that chapter, "Plato's Pharmacy," which are included above.
"The Double Session" was originally presented as two long lec-
tures in Paris in 1969. Most of Part I is excerpted or summarized
here. In Part II, Derrida extends his reading of the hymen beyond
Mimique to other prose and verse texts of Mallarme, and in the
process demonstrates how the deconstructive force of Mallarme's
writing has been ignored or recuperated by the thematic readings of
its principal commentators.
 The Double Session

[ .... ]
The double session, about which I don't quite have the gall to
say plumb straight out that it is reserved for the question what is
literature, this question being henceforth properly considered a
quotation already, in which the place of the what is ought to
lend itself to careful scrutiny, along with the presumed authority
under which one submits anything whatever, and particularly
literature, to the form of its inquisition-this double session,
about which I will never have the militant innocence to an-
nounce that is is concerned with the question what is literature,
will find its comer BETWEEN [ENTRE/ literature and truth,
between literature and that by which the question what is? wants
answering.
[ .... J

On the page that each of you has, a short text by Mallarme,

Mimique, 1 is embedded in one comer, sharing or completing it,
with a segment from the Philebus, 2 which, without actually
naming mimesis, illustrates the mimetic system and even de-
fines it, let us say in anticipation, as a system of illustration.
What is the purpose of placing these two texts there, and of
placing them in that way, at the opening of a question about
what goes Ion) or doesn't go jon) between [entre] literature and
truth? That question will remain, like these two texts and like
this mimodrama, a sort of epigraph to some future development,
while the thing entitled surveys !from a great height) an event, of
which we will still be obliged, at the end of the coming session,
to point to the absence.
 SOCRATES: And if he had someone with him, he would put what he said to himself into actual
speech addressed to his companion, audibly uttering those same thoughts, so that what before we
called opinion IM€avJ has now become assertion j,\oyo<J.-PROTARCHUS: Of course.-SOCRA-
TES: Whereas if he is alone he continues thinking the same thing by himself, going on his way
maybe for a considerable time with the thought in his mind.-PROTARCHUS: Undoubtedly.-
SOCRATES: Well now, I wonder whether you share my view on these matters.-PROTARCHUS:
What is it?-SOCRATES: It seems to me that at such times our soul is like a book (Aoxei µ.ot r&re
i}µ.wv iJ tJroxi) {3tfJ,\iCJJ rtvi ?Tpo<Teotxevm).-PROTARCHUS: How so? -SOCRATES: It appears to me
that the conjunction of memory with sensations, together with the feelings consequent upon
memory and sensation, may be said as it were to write words in our souls jypa<petv T,µ.wv iw wi<
tJroxai< r&re ,\oyov~J. And when this experience writes what is true, the result is that true opinion and
true assertions spring up in us, while when the internal scribe that I have suggested writes what is false
ll/Je00i/ ll &rav 6 rowirro< ""P T,µ.iv ypaµ.µareiJ< ypao/n;J),
we get the opposite sort of opinions and assertions.
-PROTARCHUS: That certainly seems to me right,
and I approve of the way you put it-SOCRATES:
Then please give your approval to the presence of a MIMI QUE
second artist 1011µ.wvpyov) in our souls at such a Silence, sole luxury after rhymes, an or·
time.-PROTARCHUS: Who is that?-SOCRA- chestra only marking with its gold, its
TES: A painter IZwyp<i<pov) who comes after the writer brushes with thought and dusk, the detail of
and paints in the soul pictures of these assertions its signification on a par with a stilled ode
that we make.-PROTARCHUS: How do we make and which it is up to the poet, roused by a
out that he in his tum acts, and when?-SOCRA- dare, to translate! the silence of an after·
TES: When we have got those opinions and asser- noon of music; I find it, with contentment,
tions clear of the act of sight i'oiJiew<) or other sense, also, before the ever original reappearance of
Pierrot or of the poignant and elegant mime
and as it were see in ourselves pictures or images
Paul Margueritte.
(eixovc«I of what we previously opined or asserted.
Such is this PIERROT MURDERER OF
That does happen with us, doesn't it?-PROTAR· HIS WIFE composed and set down by him-
CHUS: Indeed it does.-SOCRATES: Then are the self, a mute soliloquy that the phantom,
pictures of true opinions and assertions true, and white as a yet unwritten page, holds in both
the pictures of false ones false?-PROTARCHUS: face and gesture at full length to his soul. A
Unquestionably.-SOCRATES: Well, if we are right whirlwind of naive or new reasons ema·
so far, here is one more point in this connection for nates, which it would be pleasing to seize
us to consider.-PROTARCHUS: What is that?- upon with security: the esthetics of the genre
SOCRATES: Does all this necessarily befall us in situated closer to principles than any!
respect of the present lrwv ovrow) and the past (row (no)thing in this region of caprice foiling the
yeyov&rwv), but not in respect of the future (rwv direct simplifying instinct... This- "The
scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual
µ.e,\,\ovrwv)?-PROTARCHUS: On the contrary, it
action, in a hymen (out of which flows
applies equally to them all.-SOCRATES: We said
Dream), trained with vice yet sacred, be·
previously, did we not, that pleasures and pains felt tween desire and fulfillment, perpetration
in the soul alone might precede those that come and remembrance: here anticipating, there
through the body? That must mean that we have recalling, in the future, in the past, under
anticipatory pleasures and anticipatory pains in re- the false appearance of a present. That is
gard to the future.-PROTARCHUS: Very true.- how the Mime operates, whose act is con·
SOCRATES: Now do those writings and paintings fined to a perpetual allusion without break·
(yp<iµ.µara re ""' €wypml"i/µarn), which a while ago ing the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a
we assumed to occur within ourselves, apply to past medium, a pure medium, of fiction.,, Less
and present only, and not to the future?-PROTAR· than a thousand lines, the role, the one that
reads, will instantly comprehend the rules
CHUS: Indeed they do.-SOCRATES: When you
as if placed before the stageboards, their
say 'indeed they do', do you mean that the last sort
humble depository. Surprise, accompanying
are all expectations concerned with what is to come, the artifice of a notation of sentiments by
and that we are full of expectations all our life long? unproffered sentences-that, in the sole case,
-PROTARCHUS: Undoubtedly. -SOCRATES: perhaps, with authenticity, between the
Well now, as a supplement to all we have said, here sheets and the eye there reigns a silence
is a further question for you to answer. still, the condition and delight of reading.
 "The Double Session" 173

Because of a certain fold that we shall outline, these texts, and

their commerce, definitively escape any exhaustive treatment.
We can nevertheless begin to mark out, in a few rough strokes, a
certain number of motifs. These strokes might be seen to form a
sort of frame, the enclosure or borders of a history that would
precisely be that of a certain play between literature and truth.
The history of this relationship would be organized by-I won't
say by mimesis, a notion one should not hasten to translate
(especially by imitation), but by a certain interpretation of mi-
mesis. Such an interpretation has never been the act or the spec-
ulative decision of any one author at a given moment, but rather,
if one reconstitutes the system, the whole of a history. Inter
Platonem et Mallarmatum, between Plato and Mallarme-whose
proper names, it should be understood, are not real references but
indications for the sake of convenience and initial analysis-a
whole history has taken place. This history was also a history of
literature if one accepts the idea that literature was born of it and
died of it, the certificate of its birth as such, the declaration of its
name, having coincided with its disappearance, according to a
logic that the hymen will help us define. And this history, if it
has any meaning, is governed in its entirety by the value of truth
and by a certain relation, inscribed in the hymen in question,
between literature and truth. In saying "this history, if is has any
meaning," one seems to be admitting that it might not. But if we
were to go to the end of this analysis, we would see it confirmed
not only that this history has a meaning, but that the very con-
cept of history has lived only upon the possibility of meaning,
upon the past, present, or promised presence of meaning and of
truth. Outside this system, it is impossible to resort to the con-
cept of history without reinscribing it elsewhere, according to
some specific systematic strategy.
True history, the history of meaning, is told in the Philebus.
In rereading the scene you have before your eyes, you will have
remarked four facets.
!Derrida then isolates four traits of the excerpt from the Philebus:
(1) "The book is a dialogue or a dialectic." The metaphor of the book,
to represent silent discourse of the soul with itself when no interlo-
cutor is at hand, indicates that the object of writing is to reconstitute
the presence of the other, and therefore its model is dialogue. (2)
174 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

"The truth of the book is decidable." This psychic writing is either

true or false, its only worth is its truth value. (3) "The value of the
book (true or false) is not intrinsic to it. 11 Since writing in general is
understood as an imitation of the living logos, its value (truth or
falsity) is dependent on this extrinsic source. (4) Writing's element is
the image in general. The soul and the book can be compared be-
cause each is the likeness of the other, and both are thought to be in
the image of the logos. Thus, the comparison with painting naturally
follows.]
As of this point, the appearance of the painter is prescribed
and becomes absolutely ineluctable. The way is paved for it in
the scene from the Philebus. This other "demiurge," the z6gra-
phos, comes after the grammateus: "a painter, who comes after
the writer and paints in the soul pictures of these assertions that
we make." This collusion between painting (zographia) and writ-
ing is, of course, constant. Both in Plato and after him. But
painting and writing can only be images of each other to the
extent that they are both interpreted as images, reproductions,
representations, or repetitions of something alive, of living speech
in the one case, and of animal figures in the other (zographia).
Any discourse about the relationship between literature and truth
always bumps up against the enigmatic possibility of repetition,
within the framework of the portrait.
What, in fact, is the painter doing here? He too is painting
metaphorically, of course, and in the soul, just like the gramma-
teus. But he comes along after the latter, retraces his steps, fol-
lows his traces and his trail. And he illustrates a book that is
already written when he appears on the scene. He "paints in the
soul pictures of these assertions." Sketching, painting, the art of
space, the practice of spacing, the inscription written inside the
outside (the outwork [hors-livrej), all these are only things that
are added, for the sake of illustration, representation, or decora-
tion, to the book of the discourse of the thinking of the inner-
most man. The painting that shapes the images is a portrait of
the discourse; it is worth only as much as the discourse it fixes
and freezes along its surface. And consequently, it is also worth
only as much as the logos capable of interpreting it, of reading it,
of saying what it is-trying-to-say and what in truth it is being
made to say through the reanimation that makes it speak.
 "The Double Session" 175

But painting, that degenerate and somewhat superfluous

expression, that supplementary frill of discursive thought, that
ornament of dianoia and logos, also plays a role that seems to be
just the opposite of this. It functions as a pure indicator of the
essence of a thought or discourse defined as image, representa-
tion, repetition. If logos is first and foremost a faithful image of
the eidos (the figure of intelligible visibility) of what is, then it
arises as a sort of primary painting, profound and invisible. In
that case painting in its usual sense, a painter's painting, is really
only the painting of a painting. Hence it can reveal the essential
picturality, the representativity, of logos. That is indeed the task
assigned by Socrates to the zographos-demiourgos in the Pbile-
bus: "How do we make out that he in his tum acts, and when?"
asks Protarchus, and Socrates replies, "When we have got those
opinions and assertions clear of the act of sight (opseos), or other
sense, and as it were see in ourselves pictures or images of what
we previously opined or asserted." The painter who works after
the writer, the worker who shapes his work after opinion and
assertion, the artisan who follows the artist, is able, through an
exercise of analysis, separation, and impoverishment, precisely
to purify the pictorial, imitative, imaginal essence of thought.
The painter, then, knows how to restore the naked image of the
thing, the image as it presents itself to simple intuition, as it
shows itself in its intelligible eidos or sensible horaton. He strips
it of all that superadded language, of that legend that now has the
status of a commentary, of an envelope around a kernel, of an
epidermic canvas.
So that in psychic writing, between the zographia and the
logos (or dianoia) there exists a very strange relation: one is
always the supplement of the other. In the first part of the scene,
the thought that directly fixed the essence of things did not
essentially need the illustrative ornament that writing and paint-
ing constituted. The soul's thinking was only intimately linked
to logos (and to the proffered or held-back voice). Inversely, a bit
further on, painting (in the metaphorical sense of psychic paint-
ing, of course, just as a moment ago it was a question of psychic
writing) is what gives us the image of the thing itself, what
communicates to us the direct intuition, the immediate vision of
the thing, freed from the discourse that accompanied it, or even
176 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE"

encumbered it. Naturally, I would like to stress once more, it is

always the metaphors of painting and writing that are linked in
this way back and forth: we recall that, on another plane, outside
these metaphors, Plato always asserts that in their literal sense
painting and writing are totally incapable of any intuition of the
thing itself, since they only deal in copies, and in copies of copies.
If discourse and inscription (writing-painting) thus appear al-
ternately as useful complements or as useless supplements to
each other, now useful, now useless, now in one sense, now in
another, this is because they are forever intertwined together
within the tissue of the following complicities or reversibilities:
r. They are both measured against the truth they are capable
of.
They are images of each other and that is why one can
2.
replace [suppleer] the other when the other is lacking.
3. Their common structure makes them both partake of mneme
and mimesis, of mneme precisely by dint of participating in
mimesis. Within the movement of the mimeisthai, the relation
of the mime to the mimed, of the reproducer to the reproduced,
is always a relation to a past present. The imitated comes before
the imitator. Whence the problem of time, which indeed does
not fail to come up: Socrates wonders whether it would be out of
the question to think that grammata and zographemata might
have a relation to the future. The difficulty lies in conceiving
that what is imitated could be still to come with respect to what
imitates, that the image can precede the model, that the double
can come before the simple. The overtures of "hope" (elpis),
anamnesis (the future as a past present due to return), the preface,
the anterior future (future perfect), all come to arrange things. 3
It is here that the value of mimesis is most difficult to master.
A certain movement effectively takes place in the Platonic text,
a movement one should not be too quick to call contradictory.
On the one hand, as we have just verified, it is hard to separate
mneme from mimesis. But on the other hand, while Plato often
discredits mimesis and almost always disqualifies the mimetic
arts, he never separates the unveiling of truth, aletheia, from the
movement of anamnesia (which is, as we have seen, to be distin-
guished from hypomnesia).
What announces itself here is an internal division within mi-
 "The Double Session" 177

mesis, a self-duplication of repetition itself, ad infinitum, since

this movement feeds its own proliferation. Perhaps, then, there
is always more than one kind of mimesis; and perhaps it is in the
strange mirror that reflects but also displaces and distorts one
mimesis into the other, as though it were itself destined to mime
or mask itself, that history-the history of literature-is lodged,
along with the whole of its interpretation. Everything would then
be played out in the paradoxes of the supplementary double: the
paradoxes of something that, added to the simple and the single,
replaces and mimes them, both like and unlike, unlike because
it is-in that it is-like, the same as and different from what it
duplicates. Faced with all this, what does "Platonism" decide
and maintain? (Platonism here standing more or less immedi-
ately for the whole history of Western philosophy, including the
anti-Platonisms that regularly feed into it.) What is it that is
decided and maintained in ontology or dialectics throughout all
the mutations or revolutions that are entailed? It is precisely the
ontological: the presumed possibility of a discourse about what
is, the deciding and decidable logos of or about the on (being-
present). That which is, the being-present (the matrix-form of
substance, of reality, of the oppositions between matter and form,
essence and existence, objectivity and subjectivity, etc.) is distin-
guished from the appearance, the image, the phenomenon, etc.,
that is, from anything that, presenting it as being-present, dou-
bles it, re-presents it, and can therefore replace and de-present it.
There is thus the 1 and the 2 1 the simple and the double. The
double comes after the simple; it multiplies it as a follow-up. It
follows, I apologize for repeating this, that the image supervenes
upon reality, the representation upon the present in presentation,
the imitation upon the thing, the imitator upon the imitated.
First there is what is, "reality, 11 the thing itself, in flesh and blood
as the phenomenologists say; then there is, imitating these, the
painting, the portrait, the zographeme, the inscription or tran-
scription of the thing itself. Discemability, at least numerical
discernability, between the imitator and the imitated is what
constitutes order. And obviously, according to "logic" itself, ac-
cording to a profound synonymy, what is imitated is more real,
more essential, more true, etc., than what imitates. It is anterior
and superior to it. One should constantly bear in mind, hence-
178 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

forth, the clinical paradigm of mimesis, the order of the three

beds in the Republic X (s96a ff): the painter's, the carpenter's,
and God's.
Doubtless this order will appear to be contested, even in-
verted, in the course of history, and on several occasions. But
never have the absolute distinguishability between imitated and
imitator, and the anteriority of the first over the second, been
displaced by any metaphysical system. In the domain of "criti-
cism" or poetics, it has been strongly stressed that art, as imita-
tion (representation, description, expression, imagination, etc.),
should not be "slavish" (this proposition scans twenty centuries
of poetics) and that consequently, through the liberties it takes
with nature, art can create or produce works that are more valu-
able than what they imitate. But all these derivative oppositions
send us back to the same root. The extra-value or the extra-being
makes art a richer kind of nature, freer, more pleasant, more
creative: more natural. At the time of the great systematization
of the classical doctrine of imitation, Desmaret, in his Art of
Poetry, translates a then rather common notion:
And Art enchants us more than nature does ....
Not liking what is imitated, we yet love what imitates.
Whether one or the other is preferred (but it could easily be
shown that because of the nature of the imitated-imitator rela-
tion, the preference, whatever one might say, can only go to the
imitated), it is at bottom this order of appearance, the precedence
[pre-seance} of the imitated, that governs the philosophical or
critical interpretation of "literature," if not the operation of lit-
erary writing. This order of appearance is the order of all appear-
ance, the very process of appearing in general. It is the order of
truth. "Truth" has always meant two different things, the history
of the essence of truth-the truth of truth-being only the gap
and the articulation between the two interpretations or pro-
cesses. To simplify the analyses made by Heidegger but without
necessarily adopting the order of succession that he seems to
recognize, one can retain the fact that the process of truth is on
the one hand the unveiling of what lies concealed in oblivion
(aletheia), the veil lifted or raised [releve} from the thing itself,
 "The Double Session" 179

from that which is insofar as it is, presents itself, produces itself,

and can even exist in the form of a determinable hole in Being;
on the other hand (but this other process is prescribed in the
first, in the ambiguity or duplicity of the presence of the present,
of its appearance-that which appears and its appearing-in the
fold of the present participle), 5 truth is agreement (homoiosis or
adaequatio), a relation of resemblance or equality between a re-
presentation and a thing (unveiled, present), even in the eventu-
ality of a statement of judgment.
Now, mimesis, all through the history of its interpretation, is
always commanded by the process of truth:
r. either, even before it can be translated as imitation, mimesis
signifies the presentation of the thing itself, of nature, of the
physis that produces itself, engenders itself, and appears Ito itself)
as it really is, in the presence of its image, its visible aspect, its
face: the theatrical mask, as one of the essential references of the
mimeisthai, reveals as much as it hides. Mimesis is then the
movement of the phusis, a movement that is somehow natural
lin the nonderivative sense of this word), through which the
phusis, having no outside, no other, must be doubled in order to
make its appearance, to appear (to itself), to produce !itself), to
unveil !itself); in order to emerge from the crypt where it prefers
itself; in order to shine in its aletheia. In this sense, mneme and
mimesis are on a par, since mneme too is an unveiling Ian un-
forgetting), aletheia.
2. or else mimesis sets up a relation of homoiosis or adaequa-
tio between two !terms). In that case it can more readily be
translated as imitation. This translation seeks to express (or rather
historically produces) the thought about this relation. The two
faces are separated and set face to face: the imitator and the
imitated, the latter being none other than the thing or the mean-
ing of the thing itself, its manifest presence. A good imitation
will be one that is true, faithful, like or likely, adequate, in
conformity with the phusis (essence or life) of what is imitated;
it effaces itself of its own accord in the process of restoring freely,
and hence in a living manner, the freedom of true presence.
In each case, mimesis has to follow the process of truth. The
presence of the present is its norm, its order, its law. It is in the
180 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

name of truth, its only reference-reference itself-that mime-

sis is judged, proscribed or prescribed according to a regular alter-
nation.
The invariable feature of this reference sketches out the clo-
sure of metaphysics: not as a border enclosing some homoge-
neous space but according to a noncircular, entirely other, figure.
Now, this reference is discreetly but absolutely displaced in the
workings of a certain syntax, whenever any writing both marks
and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke. This
double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth: it does
not overturn it but rather inscribes it within its play as one of its
functions or parts. This displacement does not take place, has
not taken place once, as an event. It does not occupy a simple
place. It does not take place in writing. This dis-location lis what)
writes/is written. The redoubling of the mark, which is at once a
formal break and a formal generalization, is exemplified by the
text of Mallarme, and singularly by the "sheet" you have before
your eyes jbut obviously every word of this last proposition must
by the same token be displaced or placed under suspicion).

[Derrida proceeds then to rule out an interpretation of Mallarme's

text that would see in it an " 'idealist' reversal of traditional mime-
tology" based on the phrase, "The scene illustrates but the idea, not
any actual action .... " On the contrary, says Derrida, there is "no
imitation. The Mime imitates nothing .... There is nothing prior to
the writing of his gestures .... His movements form a figure that no
speech anticipates or accompanies" (pp. 193-94). There is no book
prescribing the Mime's writing; he writes "upon the page he is." He
is both passive and active, the page and the pen, "the author, the
means, and the raw material of his mimodrama" (198). But what of
the book that Mallarme says he is reading and which contains the
printed version of the silent scene? Here at least would seem to be a
preexisting referent which reestablishes the order of limitation. First
of all, however, the booklet referred to was written only after the
performance of the mime; second, the drama itself is suspended in a
"false appearance of a present" which dismantles the time frame of
reference to a past event; third, the relation between the perfor-
mance and the booklet is not a stable system of reference, closed on
itself, because each form of writing refers also only to itself; their
relation is not that of imitation but of a grafting of one onto the
other (at this point Derrida suggests that one ought to explore sys-
 "The Double Session" 181

tematically the link, indicated by etymology, between graft and writ-

ing (graph)); fourth, the mimodrama Pierrot Murderer of His Wife
has to be reinserted in a long textual tradition-indeed "an inter-
minable network"-of similar mime dramas (in which Pierrot tic-
kles Colombine to death) as indicated by an epigraph to one such
predecessor in a Gautier poem. In all of these ways, Mimique resists
the mimetic tradition which subordinates writing to a truth ade-
quately represented. If, then, the mime imitates nothing, reproduces
nothing, "he must be the very movement of truth," not in the sense
of adequatio but of aletheia: unveiling of the present, manifestation.
Derrida contests this conclusion as well by pointing to the fact that,
although there is no imitation, there is mimicry or simulation, "ref-
erence without a referent." "Mallarme thus preserves the differential
structure of mimicry or mimesis, but without its Platonic or meta-
physical interpretation" (p. 206). This difference of the simulacrum,
which runs unnoticed throughout the tradition of mimesis, is that
"barely perceptible veil" to which Derrida assigns the undecidable
name "hymen."]
What interests us here is less these propositions of a philo-
sophical type than the mode of their reinscription in the text of
Mimique. What is marked there is the fact that, this imitator
having in the last instance no imitated, this signifier having in
the last instance no signified, this sign having in the last instance
no referent, their operation is no longer comprehended within
the process of truth but on the contrary comprehends it, the
motif of the last instance being inseparable from metaphysics as
the search for the arkhe, the eskhaton, and the telos. 6
If all this leaves its mark upon Mimique, it is not only in the
chiseled precision of the writing, its extraordinary formal or syn-
tactical felicity; it is also in what seems to be described as the
thematic content or mimed event, and which in the final analy-
sis, despite its effect of content, is nothing other than the space
of writing: in this "event"-hymen, crime, suicide, spasm (of
laughter or pleasure)-in which nothing happens, in which the
simulacrum is a transgression and the transgression a simula-
crum, everything describes the very structure of the text and
effectuates its possibility. That, at least, is what we now must
demonstrate.
The operation, which no longer belongs to the system of truth,
does not manifest, produce,. or unveil any presence; nor does it
182 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

constitute any conformity, resemblance, or adequation between

a presence and a representation. And yet this operation is not a
unified entity but the manifold play of a scene that, illustrating
nothing-neither word nor deed-beyond itself, illustrates noth-
ing. Nothing but the many-faceted multiplicity of a lustre which
itself is nothing beyond its own fragmented light. Nothing but
the idea which is nothing. The ideality of the idea is here for
Mallarme the still metaphysical name that is still necessary in
order to mark nonbeing, the nonreal, the nonpresent. This mark
points, alludes without breaking the glass, to the beyond of be-
ingness, toward the epekeina tes ousias: 7 a hymen (a closeness
and a veil) between Plato's sun and Mallarme's lustre. This "ma-
terialism of the idea" is nothing other than the staging, the
theater, the visibility of nothing or of the self. It is a dramatiza-
tion which illustrates nothing, which illustrates the nothing,
lights up a space, re-marks a spacing as a nothing, a blank: white
as a yet unwritten page, blank as a difference between two lines.
"I am for-no illustration.... " 8
[ .... ]
The stage [scene] thus illustrates but the stage, the scene only
the scene; there is only the equivalence between theater and
idea, that is (as these two names indicate), the visibility (which
remains outside) of the visible that is being effectuated. The
scene illustrates, in the text of a hymen-which is more than an
anagram of "hymn" [hymne]- "in a hymen (out of which fJ.ows
Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfill-
ment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there
recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance
of a present."
"Hymen" ( a word, indeed the only word, that reminds us that
what is in question is a "supreme spasm") is first of all a sign of
fusion, the consummation of a marriage, the identification of
two beings, the confusion between two. Between the two, there
is no longer difference but identity. Within this fusion, there is
no longer any distance between desire (the awaiting of a full
presence designed to fulfill it, to carry it out) and the fulfillment
of presence, between distance and nondistance; there is no longer
any difference between desire and satisfaction. It is not only the
 "The Double Session" 183

difference (between desire and fulfillment) that is abolished, but

also the difference between difference and nondifference.
Nonpresence, the gaping void of desire, and presence, the fullness
of enjoyment, amount to the same. By the same token [du meme
coup], there is no longer any textual difference between the im-
age and the thing, the empty signifier and the full signified, the
imitator and the imitated, etc. But it does not follow, by virtue
of this hymen of confusion, that there is now only one term, a
single one of the differends. It does not follow that what remains
is thus the fullness of the signified, the imitated, or the thing
itself, simply present in person. It is the difference between the
two terms that is no longer functional. The confusion or consum-
mation of this hymen eliminates the spatial heterogeneity of the
two poles in the "supreme spasm," the moment of dying laugh-
ing. By the same token, it eliminates the exteriority or anterior-
ity, the independence, of the imitated, the signified, or the thing.
Fulfillment is summed up within desire; desire is (ahead of)
fulfillment, which, still mimed, remains desire, "without break-
ing the mirror."
What is lifted, then, is not difference but the different, the
differends, the decidable exteriority of differing terms. Thanks to
the confusion and continuity of the hymen, and not in spite of it,
a (pure and impure) difference inscribes itself without any decid-
able poles, without any independent, irreversible terms. Such
difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process
of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the center of the
present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which
are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past
(present). What is marked in this hymen between the future
(desire) and the present (fulfillment), between the past (remem-
brance) and the present (perpetration), between the capacity and
the act, etc., is only a series of temporal differences without any
central present, without a present of which the past and future
would be but modifications. Can we then go on speaking about
time; tenses, and temporal differences?
The center of presence is supposed to offer itself to what is
called perception or, generally, intuition. In Mimique, however,
there is no perception, no reality offering itself up, in the present,
to be perceived. The plays of facial expression and the gestural
184 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE"

tracings are not present in themselves since they always refer,

perpetually allude or represent. But they don't represent anything
that has ever been or can ever become present: nothing that
comes before or after the mimodrama, and, within the mimo-
drama, an orgasm-crime that has never been committed and yet
nevertheless turns into a suicide without striking or suffering a
blow, etc. The signifying allusion does not go through the look-
ing-glass: "a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the
mirror," the cold, transparent, reflective window !"without
breaking the ice or the mirror" is added in the third version of
the textJ, without piercing the veil or the canvas, without tearing
the moire. The antre of Mallarme, the theater of his glossary: it
lies in this suspension, the "center of vibratory suspense," the
repercussions of words between the walls of the grotto, or of the
glottis, sounded among others by the rhymes "hair" [heir], "soir"
[evening], "noire" [black], "miroir" [mirror], "grimoire" (wizard's
black book], "ivoire" (ivory], "armoire" [wardrobe], etc.
What does the hymen that illustrates the suspension of differ-
ends remain, other than Dream? The capital letter marks what is
new in a concept no longer enclosed in the old opposition: Dream,
being at once perception, remembrance, and anticipation (desire),
each within the others, is really none of these. It declares the
"fiction," the "medium, the pure medium, of fiction" (the com-
mas in "milieu, pur, de fiction" also appear in the third version),
a presence both perceived and not perceived, at once image and
model, and hence image without model, neither image nor model,
a medium (medium in the sense of middle, neither/nor, what is
between extremes, and medium in the sense of element, ether,
matrix, means). When we have rounded a certain corner in our
reading, we will place ourselves on that side of the lustre where
the "medium" is shining. The referent is lifted, but reference
remains: what is left is only the writing of dreams, a fiction that
is not imaginary, mimicry without imitation, without verisimil-
itude, without truth or falsity, a miming of appearance without
concealed reality, without any world behind it, and hence with-
out appearance: "false appearance . .. "There remain only traces,
announcements and souvenirs, foreplays and aftereffects [avant-
coups et apres-coups] which no present will have preceded or
followed and which cannot be arranged on a line around a point,
 "The Double Session" 185

traces "here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the

past, under the false appearance of a present." It is Mallarme
who underlines (as of the second version, in Pages) and thus
marks the richochet of the moment of mimed deliberation from
Margueritte's Pierrot: at that point-in the past-where the
question is raised of what to do in the future l"But how shall I go
about it?"), the author of the booklet speaks to you in parenthe-
ses, in the "present": l"For Pierrot, like a sleepwalker, reproduces
his crime, and in his hallucination, the past becomes present.")
!Underlined by the author.) The historial ambiguity of the word
appearance {at once the appearing or apparition of the being-
present and the masking of the being-present behind its appear-
ance) impresses its indefinite fold on this sequence, which is
neither synthetic nor redundant: "under the false appearance of
a present." What is to be re-marked in the underlining of this
circumstantial complement is the displacement without reversal
of Platonism and its heritage. This displacement is always an
effect of language or writing, of syntax, and never simply the
dialectical overturning of a concept !signified). The very motif of
dialectics, which marks the beginning and end of philosophy,
however that motif might be determined and despite the re-
sources it entertains within philosophy against philosophy, is
doubtless what Mallarme has marked with his syntax at the
point of its sterility, or rather, at the point that will soon, provi·
sionally, analogically, be called the undecidable.
Or hymen.
The virginity of the "yet unwritten page" opens up that space.
There are still a few words that have not been illustrated: the
opposition vicious-sacred ("hymen (out of which flows Dream),
tainted with vice yet sacred"; the parentheses intervene in the
second version to make it clear that the adjectives modify "hy-
men"), the opposition desire-perpetration, and most importantly
the syncategorem "between" [entre].
To repeat: the hymen, the confusion between the present and
the nonpresent, along with all the indifferences it entails within
the whole series of opposites (perception and nonperception,
memory and image, memory and desire, etc.), produces the effect
of a medium (a medium as element enveloping both terms at
once; a medium located between the two terms). It is an opera-
 11
186 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE"

tion that both sows confusion between opposites and stands

between the opposites "at once." What counts here is the be-
tween, the in-between-ness of the hymen. The hymen "takes
place" in the "inter-," in the spacing between desire and fulfill-
ment, between perpetration and its recollection. But this me-
dium of the entre has nothing to do with a center.
The hymen enters into the antre. Entre can just as easily be
written with an a. Indeed, are these two (e) (a)ntres not really the
same? Littre: "ANTRE, s.m. r. Cave, natural grotto, deep dark
cavern. 'These antres, these braziers that offer us oracles,' Vol-
taire, Oedipe II, 5. 2. Fig. The antres of the police, of the Inquisi-
tion. 3. Anatomy: name given to certain bone cavities.-Syn:
Antre, cave, grotto. Cave, an empty, hollow, concave space in
the form of a vault, is the generic term; antre is a deep, dark,
black cave; grotto is a picturesque cave created by nature or by
man. Etym. Antrum, 'agv-rpov; Sanscrit, antara, cleft, cave. An-
tara properly signifies 'interval' and is thus related to the Latin
preposition inter (see entre). Provenc. antre; Span. and Ital. an-
tro." And the entry for ENTRER ["to enter"] ends with the same
etymological reference. The interval of the entre, the in-between
of the hymen: one might be tempted to visualize these as the
hollow or bed of a valley (vallis) without which there would be
no mountains, like the sacred vale between the two flanks of the
Parnassus, the dwelling place of the Muses and the site of Poetry;
but intervallum is composed of inter (between) and vallus (pole),
which gives us not the pole in between, but the space between
two palisades. According to Littre.
We are thus moving from the logic of the palisade, which is
always, in a sense, "full," to the logic of the hymen. The hymen,
the consummation of differends, the continuity and confusion of.
the coitus, merges with what it seems to be derived from: the
hymen as protective screen, the jewel box of virginity, the vagi-
nal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the hys-
tera, stands between the inside and the outside of a woman, and
consequently between desire and fulfillment. It is neither desire
nor pleasure but in between the two. Neither future nor present,
but between the two. It is the hymen that desire dreams of
piercing, of bursting, in an act of violence that is (at the same
time or somewhere between) love and murder. If either one did
 "The Double Session" 187

take place, there would be no hymen. But neither would there

simply be a hymen in (case events go) no place. With all the
undecidability of its meaning, the hymen only takes place when
it doesn't take place, when nothing really happens, when there is
an all-consuming consummation without violence, or a violence
without blows, or a blow without marks, a mark without a mark
(a margin), etc., when the veil is, without being, tom, for example
when one is made to die or come laughing.
A masked gap, impalpable and insubstantial, interposed, slipped
between, the entre of the hymen is reflected in the screen with-
out penetrating it. 9 The hymen remains in the hymen. The one
-the veil of virginity where nothing has yet taken place-re-
mains in the other-consummation, release, and penetration of
the antre.
And vice versa.
The mirror is never passed through and the ice never broken.
At the edge of being.
At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes
a mere mediation or work of the negative; it outwits and undoes
all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics. It
outwits them and-as a cloth, a tissue, a medium again-it
envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them. This non-
penetration, this nonperpetration !which is not simply negative
but stands between the two), this suspense in the antre of per-
penetration, is, says Mallarme, "perpetual": "This is how the
Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion
without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a me-
dium, a pure medium, of fiction." (The play of the commas,
virgulae, only appears, in all its multiplicity, in the last version,
inserting a series of cuts marking pauses and cadence, spacing
and shortness of breath, within the continuum of the se-
quence).10 Hymen in perpetual motion: one can't get out of Mal-
larme's antre as one can out of Plato's cave. Never min(e)d [mine
de rien], 11 it requires an entirely different kind of speleology
which no longer searches behind the lustrous appearance, outside
the "beyond," "agent," "motor," "principal part or nothing" of
the "literary mechanism" (Music and Letters, p. 647).
" ... as much as it takes to illustrate one of the aspects and
this lode of language" (p. 406).
 11 11
188 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE

"That is how the Mime operates": every time Mallarme uses

the word "operation," nothing happens that could be grasped as
a present event, a reality, an activity, etc. The Mime doesn't do
anything; there is no act (neither murderous nor sexual), no
acting agent and hence no patient. Nothing is. The word is does
not appear in Mimique, which is nevertheless conjugated in the
present, within and upon the "false appearance of a present,"
with one exception, and even then in a form that is not that of a
declaration of existence and barely that of a predicative copula
("It is up to the poet, roused by a dare, to translate!"). Indeed,
the constant ellipsis of the verb "to be" by Mallarme has already
been noted 12 This ellipsis is complementary to the frequency of
the word ;eu [play, game, act]; the practice of "play" in Mal-
larme's writing is in collusion with the casting aside of "being."
The casting aside [mise a l'ecart] of being defines itself and
literally (im)prints itself in dissemination, as dissemination.
[ .... ]
The Mime is acting from the moment he is ruled by no actual
action and aims toward no form of verisimilitude. The act always
plays out a difference without reference, or rather without a
referent, without any absolute exteriority, and hence, without
any inside. The Mime mimes reference. He is not an imitator; he
mimes imitation. The hymen interposes itself between mimicry
and mimesis or rather between mimesis and mimesis. A copy of
a copy, a simulacrum that simulates the Platonic simulacrum-
the Platonic copy of a copy as well as the Hegelian curtain 13 have
lost here the lure of the present referent and thus find themselves
lost for dialectics and ontology, lost for absolute knowledge.
Which is also, as Bataille would literally have it, "mimed." In
this perpetual allusion being performed in the background of the
entre that has no ground, one can never know what the allusion
alludes to, unless it is to itself in the process of alluding, weaving
its hymen and manufacturing its text. Wherein allusion becomes
a game conforming only to its own formal rules. As its name
indicates, allusion plays. But that this play should in the last
instance be independent of truth does not mean that it is false,
an error, appearance, or illusion. Mallarme writes "allusion," not
"illusion." Allusion, or "suggestion" as Mallarme says else-
 "The Double Session" 189

where, is indeed that operation we are here by analogy calling

undecidable. An undecidable proposition, as Godel demonstrated
in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms govern-
ing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor deductive conse-
quence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither
true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, with-
out synthesis.
"Undecidability" is not caused here by some enigmatic equiv-
ocality, some inexhaustible ambivalence of a word in a "natural"
language, and still less by some "Gegensinn der Urworte" IAbel). 14
In dealing here with hymen, it is not a matter of repeating what
Hegel undertook to do with German words like Aufhebung,
Urteil, Meinen, Beispiel, etc., marveling over that lucky accident
that installs a natural language within the element of speculative
dialectics 15 What counts here is not the lexical richness, the
semantic infiniteness of a word or concept, its depth or breadth,
the sedimentation that has produced inside it two contradictory
layers of signification (continuity and discontinuity, inside and
outside, identity and difference, etc.). What counts here is the
formal or syntactical praxis that composes and decomposes it.
We have indeed been making believe that everything could be
traced to the word hymen. But the irreplaceable character of this
signifier, which everything seemed to grant it, was laid out like a
trap. This word, this syllepsis, 16 is not indispensable; philology
and etymology interest us only secondarily, and the loss of the
"hymen" would not be irreparable for Mimique. It produces its
effect first and foremost through the syntax, which disposes the
"entre" in such a way that the suspense is due only to the
placement and not to the content of words. Through the "hy-
men" one can remark only what the place of the word entre
already marks and would mark even if the word "hymen" were
not there. If we replaced "hymen" by "marriage" or "crime,"
"identity" or "difference," etc., the effect would be the same, the
only loss being a certain economic condensation or accumula-
tion, which has not gone unnoticed. It is the "between," whether
it names fusion or separation, that thus carries all the force of
the operation. The hymen must be determined through the entre
and not the other way around. The hymen in the text (crime,
sexual act, incest, suicide, simulacrum) is inscribed at the very
 11
190 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE''

tip of this indecision. This tip advances according to the irre-

ducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic. The word
"between" has no full meaning of its own. Inter acting forms a
syntactical plug; not a categorem, but a syncategorem: what
philosophers from the Middle Ages to Husserl's Logical Investi-
gations have called an incomplete signification. What holds for
"hymen" also holds, mutatis mutandis, for all other signs which,
like pharmakon, supplement, differance, and others, have a dou-
ble, contradictory, undecidable value that always derives from
their syntax, whether the latter is in a sense "internal," articulat-
ing and combining under the same yoke, huph' hen, two incom-
patible meanings, or "external," dependent on the code in which
the word is made to function. But the syntactical composition
and decomposition of a sign renders this alternative between
internal and external inoperative. One is simply dealing with
greater or lesser syntactical units at work, and with economic
differences in condensation. Without reducing all these to the
same, quite the contrary, it is possible to recognize a certain
serial law in these points of indefinite pivoting: they mark the
spots of what can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or
dialecticized through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung. 17 Is it by
chance that all these play effects, these "words" that escape
philosophical mastery, should have, in widely differing historical
contexts, a very singular relation to writing? These "words" ad-
mit into their games both contradiction and noncontradiction
(and the contradiction and noncontradiction between contradic-
tion and noncontradiction). Without any dialectical Aufhebung,
without any time off, they belong in a sense both to conscious-
ness and to the unconscious, which Freud tells us can tolerate or
remain insensitive to contradiction. Insofar as the text depends
upon them, bends to them [s'y plie], it thus plays a double scene
upon a double stage. It operates in two absolutely different places
at once, even if these are only separated by a veil, which is both
traversed and not traversed, intersected [entr'ouvert]. Because of
this indecision and instability, Plato would have conferred upon
the double science arising from these two theaters the name
doxa rather than episteme. Pierrot Murderer of His Wife would
have reminded him of the riddle of the bat struck by the eu-
nuch.18
 "The Double Session" 191

Everything is played out, everything and all the rest-that is

to say, the game-is played out in the entre, about which the
author of the Essai sur la connaissance approchee, who also
knew all about caves, 19 says that it is "a mathematical concept"
Ip. 32). When this undecidability is marked and re-marked in
writing, it has a greater power of formalization, even if it is
"literary" in appearance, or appears to be attributable to a natural
language, than when it occurs as a proposition in logicomathe-
matical form, which would not go as far as the former type of
mark. If one supposes that the distinction, still a metaphysical
one, between natural language and artificial language be rigorous
land we no doubt here reach the limit of its pertinence), one can
say that there are texts in so-called natural languages wherein
the power of formalization would be superior to that attributed
to certain apparently formal notations.
One no longer even has the authority to say that "between" is
a purely syntactic furiction. Through the re-marking of its se-
mantic void, it in fact begins to signify. 20 Its semantic void sig-
nifies, but it signifies spacing and articulation; it has as its mean-
ing the possibility of syntax; it orders the play of meaning. Neither
purely syntactic nor purely semantic, it marks the articulated
opening of that opposition.
The whole of this dehiscence, finally, is repeated and partially
opened up in a certain "lit" ["bed," "reads"], which Mimique has
painstakingly set up. Toward the end of the text, the syntagm "le
lit" reproduces the strategem of the hymen.
Before we come to that, I would like to recall the fact that in
this Mimique, which is cannily interposed between two silences
that are breached or broached thereby {"Silence, sole luxury after
rimes ... there reigns a silence still, the condition and delight of
reading."), as a "gambol" or "debate" of "language," it has never
been a question of anything other than reading and writing. This
text could be read as a sort of handbook of literature. Not only
because the metaphor of writing comes up so often ("a phantom
... white as a yet unwritten page")-which is also the case in
the Philebus-but because the necessity of that metaphor, which
nothing escapes, makes it something other than a particular fig-
ure among others. What is produced is an absolute extension of
the concepts of writing and reading, of text, of hymen, to the
 11
192 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE"

point where nothing of what is can lie beyond them. Mimique

describes a scene of writing within a scene of writing and so on
without end, through a structural necessity that is marked in the
text. The mime, as "corporeal writing" (Ballets), mimes a kind
of writing (hymen) and is himself written in a kind of writing.
Everything is reflected in the medium or speculum of reading-
writing, "without breaking the mirror." There is writing without
a book, in which, each time, at every moment, the marking tip
proceeds without a past upon the virgin sheet; but there is also,
simultaneously, an infinite number of booklets enclosing and
fitting inside other booklets, which are only able to issue forth
by grafting, sampling, quotations, epigraphs, references, etc. Lit-
erature voids itself in its limitlessness. If this handbook of litera-
ture meant to say something, which we now have some reason
to doubt, it would proclaim first of all that there is no-or hardly
any, ever so little-literature; that in any event there is no
essence of literature, no truth of literature, no literary-being or
being-literary of literature. And that the fascination exerted by
the is, or the what is in the question what is literature~ is worth
what the hymen is worth-that is, not exactly nothing-when
for example it causes one to die laughing. All this, of course,
should not prevent us-on the contrary-from attempting to
find out what has been represented and determined under that
name-"literature"-and why.
Mallarme reads. He writes while reading; while reading the
text written by the Mime, who himself reads in order to write.
He reads, for example, the Pierrot posthume so as to write with
his gestures a mimic that owes that book nothing, since he reads
the mimic he thus creates in order to write after the fact the
booklet that Mallarme is reading.
But does the Mime read his role in order to write his mimic or
his booklet? Is the initiative of reading his? Is he the acting
subject who knows how to read what he has to write? One could
indeed believe that although he is passive in reading, he at least
has the active freedom to choose to begin to read, and that the
same is true of Mallarme; or even that you, dear everyreader,
retain the initiative of reading all these texts, including Mal-
larme's, and hence, to that extent, in that place, you are indeed
attending it, deciding on it, mastering it.
 "The Double Session" 193

Nothing could be less certain. The syntax of Mimique im-

prints a movement of (non-Platonic) simulacrum in which the
function of "le lit" ["the bed," "reads it," "reads him"] compli-
cates itself to the point of admitting a multitude of subjects
among whom you yourself are not necessarily included. Plato's
clinical paradigm is no longer operative.
The question of the test is-(for whom are) I jfor whoever
reads) these sheets. 21
Among diverse possibilities, let us take this: the Mime does
not read his role; he is also read by it. Or at least he is both read
and reading, written and writing, between the two, in the sus-
pense of the hymen, at once screen and mirror. As soon as a
mirror is interposed in some way, the simple opposition between
activity and passivity, between production and the product, or
between all concepts in -er and all concepts in -ed (signifier-
signified, imitator-imitated, structure-structured, etc.), be-
comes impracticable and too formally weak to encompass the
graphics of the hymen, its spider web, and the play of its eyelids.
This impossibility of identifying the path proper to the letter
of a text, of assigning a unique place to the subject, of locating a
simple origin, is here consigned, plotted by the machinations of
the one who calls himself "profoundly and scrupulously a syn-
taxer." In the sentence that follows, the syntax-and the care-
fully calculated punctuation-prevent us from ever deciding
whether the subject of "reads" is the role ("less than a thousand
lines, the role, the one that reads ... ") or some anonymous
reader ("the role, the one that reads, will instantly comprehend
the rules as if placed before the stageboards ... ") Who is "the
one?" "The one" ["qui"] may of course be the indefinite pronoun
meaning "whoever," here in its function as a subject. This is the
easiest reading; the role-whoever reads it will instantly under-
stand its rules. Empirical statistics would show that the so-called
"linguistic sense" would most often give this reading.
But nothing in the grammatical code would render the sen-
tence incorrect if, without changing a thing, one were to read
"the one" (subject of "reads") as a pronoun the antecedent of
which was "role." Out of this reading would spring a series of
syntactic and semantic transformations in the function of the
words "role," "le (it or him]," "placed," and in the meaning of
194 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- 11 LITERATURE''

the word "comprehend." Thus: "Less than a thousand lines, the

role (subject, not object), the one (referring back to "role") that
reads (the one that reads "him," not "it"] (referring to the Mime,
the subject of the preceding sentence), will instantly comprehend
!embrace, contain, rule, organize: read) the rules as if placed
before the stageboards (the role is placed facing the stage, either
as the author-composer, or as the spectator-reader, in the position
of the "whoever" in the first hypothesis), their humble deposi-
tory."
This reading is possible. It is "normal" both from the syntactic
and from the semantic points, of views. But what a laborious
artifice! Do you really believe, goes the objection, that Mallarme
consciously parceled out his sentence so that it could be read
two different ways, with each object capable of changing into a
subject and vice versa, without our being able to arrest this
movement? Without our being able, faced with this "alternative
sail," to decide whether the text is "listing to one side or the
other" (A Throw of Dice). 22 The two poles of the reading are not
equally obvious: but the syntax at any rate has produced an effect
of indefinite fluctuation between two possibilities.
Whatever might have been going on in Mallarme's head, in his
consciousness or in his unconscious, does not matter to us here;
the reader should now know why. That, in any event, does not
hold the least interest for a reading of the text. Everything in the
text is interwoven, as we have seen, so as to do without refer-
ences, so as to cut them short. Nevertheless, for those who are
interested in Stephane Mallarme and would like to know what
he was thinking and meant to do by writing in this way, we shall
merely ask the following question. But we are asking it on. the
basis of texts, and published texts at that: how is one to explain
the fact that the syntactic alternative frees itself only in the third
version of the text? How is one to explain the fact that, some
words being moved, others left out, a tense transformed, a comma
added, then and only then does the one-way reading, the only
reading possible in the first two versions, come to shift, to waver,
henceforth without rest? and without identifiable reference? Why
is it that, when one has written, without any possible ambiguity,
this: "This marvelous bit of nothing, less than a thousand lines,
whoever will read it as I have just done, will comprehend the
 "The Double Session" 195

eternal rules, just as though facing the stageboards, their humble

depository" I1886),
and then this: "This role, less than a thousand lines, whoever
reads it will comprehend the rules as if placed before the stage-
boards, their humble depository" (1891),
one should finally write this, with all possible ambiguity:
"Less than a thousand lines, the role, the one that reads, will
instantly comprehend the rules as if placed before the stage-
boards, their humble depository" (1897)?
Perhaps he didn't know what he was doing? Perhaps he wasn't
conscious of it? Perhaps, then, he wasn't completely the author
of what was being written? The burst of laughter that echoes
deep inside the antre, in Mimique, is a reply to all these ques-
tions. They can only have been formulated through recourse to
certain oppositions, by presupposing possibilities of decision whose
pertinence was rigorously swept away by the very text they were
supposed to question. Swept away by that hymen, the text al-
ways calculates and suspends some supplementary "surprise"
and "delight." "Surprise, accompanying the artiface of a nota-
tion of sentiments by unproffered sentences-that, in the sole
case, perhaps, with authenticity, between the sheets and the eye
there reigns a silence still, the condition and delight of reading."
Supplement, principle, and bounty. The baffling economy of se-
duction.
enter ... between ... a silence

"Each session or play being a game, a

fragmentary show, but sufficient at that
unto itself . .. "
[Le "Livre," 93 jA)]

[ .... ]

- Translated by Barbara fohnson

NOTES

1. Mimique: 11 1. Adj. ja) Mimic. Langage mimique., (i) sign language; (ii)
dumb show. (b) Z[oology]: Mimetic. 2. Subst. fem. (a) Mimic art; mimicry.
 11
196 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE 11

(b) F[amiliarl: Dumb show." (Mansion's Shorter French and English Dictio-
nary.)-TRANS.
2. Philebus, trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato,
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Bollingen Series LXXI (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 1118-19.-TRANS.
3. Nothing in the above-mentioned logical program was to change when,
following Aristotle, and particularly during the "age of classicism," the
models for imitation were to be found not simply in nature but in the works
and writers of Antiquity that had known how to imitate nature. One could
find a thousand examples up to the Romantics (including the Romantics and
often those well after them). Diderot, who nevertheless so powerfully solic-
ited the mimetological "machine," especially in Le Paradoxe sur le Come-
dien, confirms upon the analysis of what he calls the "ideal imagined model"
(supposedly non-Platonic) that all manner of reversals are included in the
program. And, as for the logic of the future perfect: "Antoine Coypel was
certainly a man of wit when he recommended to his fellow artists: 'Let us
paint, if we can, in such a way that the figures in our paintings will be the
living models of the ancient statues rather than that those statues be the
originals of the figures we paint.' The same advice could be given to literati"
("Pensees detachees sur la peinture," in Oeuvres esthetiques, ed. Paul Ver-
niere (Paris: Gamier, 1965) p. 816).
4. See above, "Plato's Phannacy"-Eo.
5. Cf. Heidegger, "Moira," in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and
F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper&. Row, 1975).
6. The simple erasing of the metaphysical concept of last instance would
run the risk of defusing the necessary critique it permits in certain determi-
nate contexts. To take this double inscription of concepts into account is to
practice a double science, a bifid, dissymmetrical writing. The "general
economy" of which, defined elsewhere, does indeed constitute, in a dis-
placed sense of the words, the last instance.
7. Beyond all being, the realm of the good in Plato.-Eo.
8. The context of this quotation should here be restituted and related
back to what was said, at the start of this session, concerning the book, the
extra-text [hors-livre], the image, and the illustration; then it should be
related forward to what will be set in motion, in the following session,
between the book and the movement of the stage. Mallarme is responding to
a survey: "I am for-no illustration; everything a book evokes should hap-
pen in the reader's mind: but, if you replace photography, why not go straight
to cinematography, whose successive umolling will replace, in both pictures
and text, many a volume, advantageously" (Oeuvres completes [Paris: Pleiade,
1945], p. 878).
9. The word Hymen, sometimes allegorized by a capital H, is of course
part of the vocabulary of "Pierrots" ("Harlequin and Polichinelle both aspire
to a glorious hymen with Colombine" -Gautier), just as it is included in the
"symbolist" code. It nevertheless remains-and is significant-that Mal-
larme with his syntactic play remarks the undecidable ambivalence. The
 "The Double Session" 197

"event" (the historical event, if you wish) has the form of a repetition, the
mark-readable because doubled-of a quasi-tearing, a dehiscence. "oEHIS-
CENCE: s.f. Botanical term. The action through which the distinct parts of a
closed organ open up, without tearing, along a seam. A regular predeter-
mined splitting that, at a certain moment in the cycle, is undergone by the
closed organs so that what they contain can come out ... E. Lat. Dehiscere,
to open slightly, from de and hiscere, the frequentative of hiare (see hiatus)."
Littre.
10. "I prefer, as being more to my taste, upon a white page, a carefully
spaced pattern of commas and periods and their secondary combinations,
imitating, naked, the melody-over the text, advantageously suggested if,
even though sublime, it were not punctuated" (p. 407).
11. In French, mine de rien means, in its colloquial sense, 11 as though it
were of no importance," but literally it can mean "a mine full of nothing."
-TRANS.
12. Cf. Jacques Scherer, ]'Expression litteraire dans ]'oeuvre de Mal-
larme, (Paris: Droz, 1947), pp. 142 ff.
13. As for the hymen between Hegel and Mallarme, one can analyze, for
example, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a certain curtain-raising observed
from the singular standpoint of the we, the philosophic consciousness, the
subject of absolute knowing: "The two extremes ... , the one, of the pure
inner world, the other, that of the inner being gazing into this pure inner
world, have now coincided, and just as they, qua extremes, have vanished,
so too the middle term, as something other than these extremes, has also
vanished. This curtain [Vorhang] hanging before the inner world is therefore
drawn away, and we have the inner being ... gazing into the inner world-
the vision of the undifferentiated selfsame being, which repels itself from
itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for
which equally these moments are immediately not different-self-con-
sciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed
to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind
it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be some-
thing behind there which can be seen. But at the same time it is evident that
we cannot without more ado go straightway behind appearance" [trans.
Miller, p. 103]. I would like to thank A. Boutruche for recalling this text to
my attention.
14. We are referring less to the text in which Freud is directly inspired by
Abel (1910) than to Das Unheimliche (1919), of which we are here, in sum,
proposing a rereading. We find ourselves constantly being brought back to
that text by the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the blurring of the
boundary lines between "imagination" and "reality," between the "symbol"
and the "thing it symbolizes" ("The Uncanny," trans. Alix Strachey, in On
Creativity and the Unconscious [New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 152),
the references to Hoffman and the literature of the fantastic, the considera-
tions on the double meaning of words: "Thus heimlich is a word the mean-
ing of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with
198 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species

of heimlich" (p. 131) (to be continued).
15. All of these words have contradictory meanings which Hegel ex-
ploited, leading him to remark that the German language was naturally
dialectical. -ED.
16. "The mixed tropes called Syllepses consist of taking one and the
same word in two different senses, one of which is, or is supposed to be, the
original, or at least the literal, meaning; the other, the figurative, or suppos-
edly figurative, even if it is not so in reality. This can be done by metonymy,
synecdoche, or metaphor" (P. Fontanier, Les Figures du discours, introduc-
tion by G. Genette, (Paris: Flammarion 1968,) p. 105.) {This figure is more
commonly called a zeugma in English.-TRANs.]
17. Hegelian terms: Erinnerung, interiorizing memory (see below, "Psy-
che," p. 203); Aufhebung, canceling/preserving movement of sublation (see
above, "Differance," note 12).-Eo.
18. "And again, do the many double things appear any the less halves
than doubles?-None the less.-And likewise of the great and the small
things, the light and the heavy things-will they admit these predicates any
more than their opposites?-No, he said, each of them will always hold of,
partake of, both.-Then each is each of these multiples rather than it is not
that which one affirms it to be?- They are like those jesters who palter with
us in a double sense at banquets, he replied, and resemble the children's
riddle about the eunuch and his hitting of the bat-with what they signify
that he struck it.• For these things too equivocate, and it is impossible to
conceive firmly any one of them to be or not to be both or neither.... But
we agreed in advance that if anything of that sort should be discovered, it
must be denominated opinable, not knowable, the wanderer between being
caught by the faculty that is betwixt and between" Ithe Republic V, 479 b, c,
d, trans. Paul Shorley, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], p. 719.
[•Francis M. Cornford, in his edition of the Republic (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1945 ), glosses the riddle as follows (p. 188): "A man who
was not a man !eunuch), seeing and not seeing (seeing imperfectly) a bird
that was not a bird (bat) perched on a bough that was not a bough la reed),
pelted and did not pelt it !aimed at it and missed) with a stone that was not
a stone !pumice-stone)." - TRANS. J
19. The chapter of La Terre et Jes reveries du repos [Earth and Dreams of
Rest] which deals with caves does not, however, mention Mallarme's in its
rich survey of various "caves in literature." If this fact is not simply insignif-
icant, the reason for it may perhaps appear later in the course of our discus-
sion of MallarmC's "imaginary." [The reference is to Gaston Bachelard.-
En.J
20. From that point on, the syncategorem "between" contains as its
meaning a semantic quasi-emptiness; it signifies the spacing relation, the
articulation, the interval, etc. It can be nominalized, turn into a quasi-
categorem, receive a definite article, or even be made plural. We have spoken
of "betweens," and this plural is in some sense primary. One "between"
 "The Double Session" 199

does not exist. In Hebrew, entre can be made plural: "In truth this plural
expresses not the relation between one individual thing and another, but
rather the intervals between things (loca aliis intermedia)-in this connec-
tion see chapter 101 verse 2 1 of Ezechiel-or else, as I said before, this plural
represents preposition or relation abstractly conceived." (Spinoza, Abrege de
grammaire hebraique [Paris: Vrin, 1968]1 p. 108.)
21. La question du texte est-pour qui le lit, literally, can mean both
"The question of the text is for the one who reads it (or him)" and "The
question of the text is: whom is the bed for?"-TRANS.
22. The reference is to Mallarme's famous poem. "Jamais un coup de des
n'abolira le hasard. 11 -ED.
 EIGHT

From "Psyche: Inventions of the Other"

("Psyche: Invention de l'autre" in Psyche:

Inventions de l'autre [1987))

In this title essay from a recent collection, Derrida returns to the

work of the French poet Francis Ponge to which he had earlier
consecrated a long text, Signsponge, first published in 1976. The
detailed reading of an eight-line poem titled "Fable" is accompanied
by a reflection on the rhetorical theory of Paul de Man, in particular
on the latter's analyses of irony and allegory. These reflections are
expanded in the book Memoires: For Paul de Man [1986] that Der-
rida wrote, as he did this essay, soon after his friend's death in 1983.
"Psyche" as well is strongly marked as a text of mourning and
remembering. It thus joins up with one of Derrida's most constant
preoccupations and the one most central to the major work Glas.
As he had done in "Signature Event Context," Derrida employs
here the theory of speech acts, in particular the category of the
performative, to approach the notion of the literary event. The essay
from which these pages are extracted is in fact a long meditation on
the conditions of the event of invention. It analyzes the essence of
invention, the history of its concept, and the principles of its legiti-
mation. Derrida himself describes the essay as posing the following
questions: "Why is it that invention cannot be reduced to the discov-
ery, the revelation, or the unveiling of truth? No more than it can be
reduced to the creation, the imagination, or the production of the
thing? And is the invention of the other the absolute initiative for
which the other is responsible and which thus comes back to him or
her? Or is it what I imagine of the other who is still held in my
psyche, my soul or the self of a mirror?" 1 Derrida's questions take
into account the fact that psyche is from the Greek word for soul,
but also that a psyche in French is an old-fashioned kind of mirror
set on a pivot. It is these questions of self and other that are reflected
or refracted in the mirror of Ponge's "Fable," which is itself written
on the mirror, the tain of its own language.
 Psyche: Inventions of the Other

[ .... ]

Fables: Beyond the Speech Act

Without yet having cited it, I have been describing for a while
now, with one finger pointed toward the margin of my discourse,
a text by Francis Ponge. This text is quite short: six lines in
italics, seven counting the title line-I shall come back in a
moment to this figure 7-plus a two-line parenthesis in roman
type. The roman and italic characters, although their positions
are reversed from one edition to the next, may serve to highlight
the Latin linguistic heritage that I have mentioned and that
Ponge has never ceased to invoke.
To what genre does this text belong? Perhaps we are dealing
with one of those pieces Bach called his inventions, contrapuntal
pieces in two or three voices that are developed on the basis of a
brief initial cell whose rhythm and melodic contour are very
clear and sometimes lend themselves to an essentially didactic
writing. 2 Ponge's text arranges one such initial cell, which is the
following syntagm: "Par le mot par ... 1 11 i.e., "By the word by."
I shall designate this invention not by its genre but by its title,
namely, by its proper name, Fable.
This text is called Fable. 3 This proper name embraces, so to
speak, the name of a genre. A title, always unique, like a signa-
ture, is confused here with a genre name; an apt comparison
would be a novel entitled Novel, or an invention called "Inven-
tion." And we can bet that this fable entitled Fable, and con-
structed like a fable right through to its concluding "lesson"
(moralite), will treat the subject of the fable. The fable, the
202 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- 11 LITERATURE"

essence of the fabulous about which it will claim to be stating

the truth, will also be its general subject. Topos: fable.
So I am reading Fable, the fable Fable.
Fable Fable
Par le mot par commence done /By the word by commences then
ce texte this text
Dont la premiere ligne dit la ve- !Of which the first line states the
rite, truth
Mais ce tain sous l'une et l'autre /But this silvering under the one
and other
Peut-il etre tolere? /Can it be tolerated?
Cher lecteur deja tu juges /Dear reader already you judge
La de nos difficultes ... /There as to our difficulties ...

(APRES sept ans de malheurs /(AFTER seven years of misfor-

tune
Elle brisa son miroir.) /She broke her mirror.)
Why did I wish to dedicate the reading of this fable to the
memory of Paul de Man? First of all because it deals with a text
by Francis Ponge. I am thus recalling a beginning. The first sem-
inar that I gave at Yale, at the invitation of Paul de Man who
introduced me there, was on Francis Ponge. La Chose was the
title of this ongoing seminar; it continued for three years, touch-
ing upon a number of related subjects: the debt, the signature,
the countersignature, the proper name, and death. To remember
this starting point is, for me, to mime a starting over; I take
consolation in calling that beginning back to life through the
grace of a fable that is also a myth of impossible origins. In
addition, I wish to dedicate this reading to Paul de Man because
of the resemblance Ponge's fable, bespeaking a unique intersec-
tion of irony and allegory, bears to a poem of truth. It presents
itself ironically as an allegory "of which the first line states the
truth": truth of allegory and allegory of truth, truth as allegory.
Both are fabulous inventions, by which we mean inventions of
language (at the root of fable and fabulous is fari or pbanai: to
speak) as the invention of language as the same and the other, of
·oneself as (of) the other.
The allegorical is marked here both in the fable's theme and
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 203

in its structure. Fable tells of allegory, of one word's move to

cross over to the other, to the other side of the mirror. Of the
desperate effort of an unhappy speech to move beyond the spec-
ularity that it constitutes itself. We might say in another code
that Fable puts into action the question of reference, of the
specularity of language or of literature, and of the possibility of
stating the other or speaking to the other. We shall see how it
does so; but already we know the issue is unmistakably that of
death, of this moment of mourning when the breaking of the
mirror is the most necessary and also the most difficult. The
most difficult because everything we say or do or cry, however
outstretched toward the other we may be, remains within us. A
part of us is wounded and it is with ourselves that we are con-
versing in the travail of mourning and of Erinnerung. 4 Even if
this metonymy of the other in ourselves already constituted the
truth and the possibility of our relation to the living other, death
brings it out into more abundant light. So we see why the break-
ing of the mirror is still more necessary, because at the instant of
death, the limit of narcissistic reappropriation becomes terribly
sharp, it increases and neutralizes suffering: let us weep no longer
over ourselves alas when we must no longer be concerned with
the other in ourselves, we can no longer be concerned with
anyone except the other in ourselves. The narcissistic wound
enlarges infinitely for want of being able to be narcissistic any
longer, for no longer even finding appeasement in that Erinne-
rung we call the work of mourning. Beyond internalizing mem-
ory, it is then necessary to think, which is another way of re-
membering. Beyond Erinnerung, it is then a question of
Gedachtnis, to use a Hegelian distinction that Paul de Man was
wont to recall in his recent work for the purpose of presenting
Hegelian philosophy as an allegory of a certain number of disso-
ciations, for example, between philosophy and history, between
literary experience and literary theory. 5
Allegory, before it is a theme, before it relates to us the other,
the discourse of the other or toward the other, is here, in Fable,
the structure of an event. This stems first of all from its narrative
form. 6 The "moral" or "lesson" of the fable, as one says, resem-
bles the ending of a story. In the first line the done appears
merely as the conclusive seal of a beginning, as a logical and
204 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- 11 LITERATURE 11

temporal scansion that sets up a singular consequentiality; the

word APRES ("AFTER") in capital letters brings it into sequen-
tial order. The parenthesis that comes after marks the end of the
story, but in a while we shall observe the inversion of these
times.
This fable, this allegory of allegory, presents itself then as an
invention. First of all because this fable is called Fable. Before
venturing any other semantic analysis, let me state a hypothesis
here-leaving its justification for later. Within an area of dis-
course that has been fairly well stabilized since the end of the
seventeenth century in Europe, there are only two major types of
authorized examples for invention. On the one hand, people
invent stories (fictional or fabulous), and on the other hand they
invent machines, technical devices or mechanisms, in the broad-
est sense of the word. Someone may invent by fabulation, by
producing narratives to which there is no corresponding reality
outside the narrative (an alibi, for example), or else one may
invent by producing a new operational possibility (such as print-
ing or nuclear weaponry, and I am purposely associating these
two examples, since the politics of invention is always at one
and the same time a politics of culture and a politics of war).
Invention as production in both cases-and for the moment I
leave to the term "production" a certain indeterminacy. Fabula
or fictio on the one hand, and on the other tekhne, episteme,
istoria, methodos, i.e., art or know-how, knowledge and research,
information, procedure, etc. There, I would say for the moment
in a somewhat elliptical and dogmatic fashion, are the only two
possible, and rigorously specific, registers of all invention today.
I am indeed saying "today, stressing the relative modernity of
/1

this semantic categorization. Whatever else may resemble inven-

tion will not be recognized as such. Our aim here is to grasp the
unity or invisible harmony of these two registers.
Fable, Francis Ponge's fable, is inventing itself as fable. It tells
an apparently fictional story, which seems to last seven years, as
the eighth line notes. But first Fable is the tale of an invention,
it recites and describes itself, it presents itself from the start as a
beginning, the inauguration of a discourse or of a textual mecha-
nism. It does what it says, not being content with announcing,
as did Valery, I believe, "In the beginning was the fable." This
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 205

latter phrase, miming but also translating the first words of John's
gospel ("In the beginning was the logos," the word) is perhaps
also a performative demonstration of the very thing it is saying.
And "fable," like logos, does indeed say the saying, speak of
speech. But Ponge's Fable, while locating itself ironically in this
evangelical tradition, reveals and perverts, or rather brings to
light by means of a slight perturbation, the strange structure of
the foreword (envoi) or of the evangelical message, in any case of
that incipit which says that in the incipit, at the inception, there
is the logos, the word. Fable, owing to a turn of syntax, is a sort
of poetic performative that simultaneously describes and carries
out, on the same line, its own generation. Not all performatives
are somehow reflexive, certainly; they do not all describe them-
selves, they do not designate themselves as performatives while
they take place. This one does so, but its constative description
is nothing other than the performative itself. "Par le mot par
commence done ce texte." Its beginning, its invention or its first
coming does not come about before the sentence that recounts
precisely this event. The narrative is nothing other than the
coming of what it cites, recites, points out, or describes. It is hard
to distinguish the telling and the told faces of this sentence that
invents itself while inventing the tale of its invention; in truth,
telling and told are undecidable here. The tale is given to be read;
it is a legend since what the tale narrates does not occur before it
or outside of it, of this tale producing the event it narrates; but it
is a legendary fable or a fiction in a single line of verse with two
versions or two versings of the same. Invention of the other in
the same-in verse, the same from all sides of a mirror whose
silvering could (should) not be tolerated. By its very typography,
the second occurrence of the word par reminds us that the first
par-the absolute incipit of the fable-is being quoted. The
quote institutes a repetition or an originary reflexivity that, even
as it divides the inaugural act, at once the inventive event and
the relation or archive of an invention, also allows it to unfold in
order to say nothing but the same, itself, the dehiscent and re-
folded invention of the same, at the very instant when it takes
place. And already heralded here, expectantly, is the desire for
the other-and to break a mirror. But the first par, quoted by the
second, actually belongs to the same sentence as the latter one,
206 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE"

i.e., to the sentence that points out the operation or event, which
nonetheless takes place only through the descriptive quotation
and neither before it nor anywhere else. Borrowing terms em-
ployed by some proponents of speech act theory, we could say
that the first par is used, the second quoted or mentioned. This
distinction seems pertinent when it is applied to the word par. Is
it still pertinent on the scale of the sentence as a whole? The
used par belongs to the mentioning sentence, but also the men-
tioned sentence; it is a moment of quotation, and it is as such
that it is used. What the sentence cites integrally, from par to
par, is nothing other than itself in the process of citing, and the
use values within it are only subsets of the mentioned values.
The inventive event is the quotation and the narrative. In the
body of a single line, on the same divided line, the event of an
utterance mixes up two absolutely heterogeneous functions, "use"
and "mention, /1 but also heteroreference and self-reference, alle-
gory and tautegory. Is that not precisely the inventive force, the
masterstroke of this fable? But this vis inventiva, this inventive
power, is inseparable from a certain syntactic play with the places
in language, it is also an art of disposition.
If Fable is both performative and constative from its very first
line, this effect extends across the whole of the text. By a process
of poetic generation we shall have to verify, the concept of inven-
tion distributes its two essential values between these two poles:
the constative-discovering or unveiling, pointing out or saying
what is-and the performative-producing, instituting, trans-
forming. But the sticking point here has to do with the figure of
coimplication, with the configuration, of these two values. In
this regard Fable is exemplary from its very first line. That line's
inventiveness results from the single act of enunciation that
performs and describes, operates and states. Here the conjunction
"and" does not link two different activities. The constative state-
ment is the performative itself since it points out nothing that is
prior or foreign to itself. Its performance consists in the "consta-
tation" of the constative-and nothing else. A quite unique re-
lation to itself, a reflection that produces the self of self-reflec-
tion by producing the event in the very act of recounting it. An
infinitely rapid circulation-such are the irony and the tempor-
ality of this text-all at once shunts the performative into the
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 207

constative, and vice versa. De Man has written of undecidability

as an infinite and thus untenable acceleration. It is significant for
our reading of Fable that he says this about the impossible dis-
tinction between fiction and autobiography: 7 the play of our
fable also lies between fiction and the implicit intervention of a
certain I that I shall bring up shortly. As for irony, Paul de Man
always describes its particular temporality as a structure of the
instant, of what becomes "shorter and shorter and always cli-
maxes in the single brief moment of a final pointe." "Irony is a
synchronic structure," 8 but we shall soon see how it can be
merely the other face of an allegory that always seems to be
unfolded in the diachronic dimension of narrative. And there
again Fable would be exemplary. Its first line speaks only of
itself, it is immediately metalingual, but its metalanguage has
nothing to set it off; it is an inevitable and impossible metalan-
guage since there is no language before it, since it has no prior
object beneath or outside itself. So that in this first line, which
states the truth of (the) Fable, everything is put simultaneously
in a first language and in a second metalanguage-and nothing
is. There is no metalanguage, the first line repeats; there is only
that, says the echo, or Narcissus. The property of language whereby
it always can and cannot speak of itself is thus graphically en-
acted, in accord with a paradigm account de Man elaborated.
Here I refer you to a passage from Allegories of Reading where de
Man returns to the question of metaphor and the role of Narcis-
sus in Rousseau. I shall simply extract a few propositions that
will allow you to recall the thrust of his full demonstration: "To
the extent that all language is conceptual, it already speaks about
language-and not about things .... All language is language about
denomination, that is, a conceptual, figural, metaphorical lan-
guage.... If all language is about language, then the paradigmatic
linguistic model is that of an entity that confronts itself." 9
The infinitely rapid oscillation between the performative and
the constative, between language and metalanguage, fiction and
nonfiction, autoreference and heteroreference, etc., does not just
produce an essential instability. This instability constitutes that
very event-let us say, the work-whose invention disturbs
normally, as it were, the norms, the statutes, and the rules. It
calls for a new theory and for the constitution of new statutes
 11 11
208 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE

and conventions that, capable of recording the possibility of such

events, would be able to account for them. I am not sure that
speech act theory, in its present state and dominant form, is
capable of this, nor, for that matter, do I think the need could be
met by literary theories either of a formalist variety or of a
hermeneutic inspiration (i.e., semanticist, thematicist, inten-
tionalist, etc.).
The fabulatory economy of a very simple little sentence, per-
fectly normal in its grammar, spontaneously deconstructs the
oppositional logic that relies on an untouchable distinction be-
tween the performative and the constative and so many other
related distinctions; it deconstructs that logic without disabling
it totally, to be sure, since it also needs it in order to detonate the
speech event. Now in this case does the deconstructive effect
depend on the force of a literary event? What is there of litera-
ture, and what of philosophy, here, in this fabulous staging of
deconstruction? I shall not attack this enormous problem head
on. I shall merely venture a few remarks that have some bearing
upon it.
1. Suppose we knew what literature is, and that in accord with
prevailing conventions we classified Fable as literature: we still
could not be sure that it is integrally literary (it is hardly certain,
for example, that this poem, as soon as it speaks of the truth and
expressly claims to state it, is nonphilosophical). Nor could we
be sure that its deconstructive structure cannot be found in other
texts that we would not dream of considering as literary. I am
convinced that the same structure, however paradoxical it may
seem, also turns up in scientific and especially in judicial utter-
ances, and indeed can be found in the most foundational or
institutive of these utterances, thus in the most inventive ones.
2. On this subject I shall quote and comment briefly on an-
other text by de Man that meets up in a very dense fashion with
all the motifs that concern us at this point: performative and
constative, literature and philosophy, possibility or impossibility
of deconstruction. This is the conclusion of the essay "Rhetoric
of Persuasion" (Nietzsche) in Allegories of Reading.

If the critique of metaphysics is structured as an aporia

between performative and constative language, this is the
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 209

same as saying that it is structured as rhetoric. And since, if

one wants to conserve the term "literature, one should
11

hesitate to assimilate it with rhetoric, then it would follow

that the deconstruction of metaphysics, or "philosophy," is
an impossibility to the precise extent that it is "literary."
This by no means resolves the problem of the relationship
between literature and philosophy in Nietzsche, but it at
least establishes a somewhat more reliable point of "refer-
ence" from which to ask the question.

This paragraph shelters too many nuances, shadings, and re-

serves for us to be able, in the short time we have here, to lay
open all the issues it raises. I hope to deal with it more patiently
some other time. 10 For now I shall make do with a somewhat
elliptical gloss. In the suggestion that a deconstruction of meta-
physics is impossible "to the precise extent that it is 'literary,'"
I suspect there may be more irony than first appears. At least for
this reason, among others, the most rigorous deconstruction has
never claimed to be foreign to literature, nor above all to be
possible. And I would say that deconstruction loses nothing from
admitting that it is impossible; also that those who would rush
to delight in that admission lose nothing from having to wait.
For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be the
danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed
procedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest of de-
construction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain
experience of the impossible: that is, as I shall insist in my
conclusion, of the other-the experience of the other as the
invention of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible
invention. Where, in relation to this, might we place that un-
placeable we call "literature"? That, too, is a question I shall
leave aside for the moment.
Fable gives itself then, by itself, by herself, a patent of inven-
tion. And its double strike is its invention. This singular dupli-
cation, from par to par, is destined for an infinite speculation,
and the specularization first seems to seize or freeze the text. It
paralyzes it, or makes it spin in place at an imperceptible or
infinite speed. It captivates it in a mirror of misfortune. The
breaking of a mirror, according to the superstitious saying, an-
 11
210 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE 11

nounces seven years of misfortune. Here, in typographically dif-

ferent letters and in parentheses, it is after seven years of misfor-
tune that she broke the mirror. APRES-"after"-is in capital
letters in the text. This strange inversion, is it also a mirror
effect, a sort of reflection of time? But if the initial effect of this
fall of Fable, which in parentheses assumes the classic role of a
sort of "moral" or lesson, retains an element of forceful reversal,
it is not only because of this paradox, not just because it inverts
the meaning or direction of the superstitious proverb. In an inver-
sion of the classical fable form, this "moral" is the only element
that is explicitly narrative, and thus, let us say, allegorical. A
fable of La Fontaine's usually does just the opposite: there is a
narrative, then a moral in the form of a maxim or aphorism. But
reading the narrative we get here in parentheses and in conclu-
sion, in the place of the "moral," we do not know where to locate
the inverted time to which it refers. Is it recounting what would
have happened before or what happens after the "first line"? Or
again, what happens throughout the whole poem, of which it
would be the very temporality. The difference in the grammatical
tenses (the simple past of the allegorical "moral" following a
continuous present) does not allow us to answer. And there will
be no way of knowing whether the "misfortune, the seven years
/1

of misfortune that we are tempted to synchronize with the seven

preceding lines, are being recounted by the fable or simply get
confused with the misfortune of the narrative, this distress of a
fabulous discourse able only to reflect itself without ever moving
out of itself. In this case, the misfortune would be the mirror
itself. Far from being expressible in the breaking of a mirror, it
would consist-so as to ground the infinity of reflection-in the
very presence and possibility of the mirror, in the specular play
for which language provides. And upon playing a bit with these
misfortunes of performatives or constatives that are never quite
themselves because they are parasites of one another, we might
be tempted to say that this misfortune is also the essential "in-
felicity" of these speech acts.
In any case, through all these inversions and perversions,
through this fabulous revolution, we have come to the crossroads
of what Paul de Man calls allegory and irony. Although unable to
undertake the analytic work here, I shall indicate three moments
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 211

or motifs to be pursued, for example, in the vitally necessary

rereading of "The Rhetoric of Temporality":
r. A "provisional conclusion" (p. 222) links allegory and irony
in the discovery-we can say the invention-"of a truly tem-
poral predicament." Here are some lines that seem to have been
written for Fable:
The act of irony, as we now understand it, reveals the exis-
tence of a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that
it relates to its source only in terms of distance and differ-
ence and allows for no end, for no totality [this is indeed the
mirror, a technical and nonorganic structure]. Irony divides
the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure
mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by
a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthen-
ticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and
repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains
endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowl-
edge applicable to the empirical world. It dissolves in the
narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes more and
more remote from its meaning, and it can find no escape
from this spiral. The temporal void that it reveals is the
same void we encountered when we found allegory always
implying an unreachable anteriority. Allegory and irony
are linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal
predicament." (rr8, my emphasis)
Suppose we let the word "predicament" (and the word is a
predicament) keep all its connotations, including the most ad-
ventitious ones. Here the mirror is the predicament: a necessary
or fateful situation, a quasi-nature; we can give a neutral formu-
lation of its predicate or category, and we can state the menacing
danger of such a situation, the technical machinery, the artifice
that constitutes it. We are caught in the mirror's trap. Here I am
fond of the French word piege, meaning trap: it was, a few years
ago, a favorite theme in elliptical and lighthearted discussions
between Paul de Man and myself.
2. A bit later, Paul de Man presents irony as the inverted
specular image of allegory: "The fundamental structure of alle-
gory reappears here [in one of Wordsworth's Lucy Gray poems) in
212 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- "LITERATURE"

the tendency of the language towards narrative, the spreading out

along the axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration to
what is, in fact, simultaneous within the subject. The structure
of irony, however, is the reversed mirror-image of this form"
(225, my emphasis).
3. And finally, a passage bringing these two inverted mirror
images together in their sameness: "Irony is a synchronic struc-
ture, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of
engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows
to be illusionary. Yet the two modes, for all their profound dis-
tinction in mood and structure, are the two faces of the same
fundamental experience of time" (226, my emphasis).
Fable, then: an allegory stating ironically the truth of allegory
that it is in the present, and doing so while stating it through a
play of persons and masks. The first four lines are in the third
person of the present indicative (the evident mode of the consta-
tive, although the "I,'' about which Austin tells us that it has, in
the present, the privilege of the perforrnative, can be implicit
there). In these four lines, the first two are indicative, the next
two interrogative. Lines five and six could make the implicit
intervention of an "I" explicit insofar as they address the reader;
they dramatize the scene by means of a detour into apostrophe
or parabasis. Paul de Man gives much attention to parabasis,
notably as it is evoked by Schlegel in relation to irony. He brings
it up again in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" (222) and else-
where. Now the tu ;uges (you judge, line 6) is also both perfor-
mative and constative; and nos difficultes (line 7) are as well the
difficulties of the author, those of the implicit "I" of a signatory,
those of the fable that presents itself, and those of the commu-
nity fable-author-readers. For everyone gets tangled up in the
same difficulties, all reflect them, and all can judge them.
But who is elle (the "she" of the last line)? Who "broke her
mirror?" Perhaps Fable, the fable itself (feminine in French),
which is here, really, the subject. Perhaps the allegory of truth,
indeed Truth itself, and it is often, in the realm of allegory, a
Woman. But the feminine can also countersign the author's irony.
She would speak of the author, she would state or show the
author himself in her mirror. One would then say of Ponge what
Paul de Man says of Wordsworth. Reflecting upon the "she" of a
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 213

Lucy Gray poem l"She seemed a thing that could not feel"), he
writes: "Wordsworth is one of the few poets who can write
proleptically about their own death and speak, as it were, from
beyond their own graves. The 'she' in the poem is in fact large
enough to encompass Wordsworth as well" 1225).
The she, in this fable, I shall call Psyche. You know that
Psyche, who was loved by Cupid, disappears when she sees Eros,
the rising sun. You are familiar with the fable of Psyche painted
by Raphael and found in the Farnese villa. Of Psyche it is also
said that she lost her husband for giving in to her wish to con-
template him when that had been forbidden to her. But in French
a psyche, a homonym and common noun, is also a large double
mirror installed on a rotating stand. The woman, let us say
Psyche, her beauty or her truth, can be reflected there, can ad-
mire or adorn herself from head to foot. Psyche is not named by
Ponge, who could well have given his fable an ironic dedication
to La Fontaine, who is celebrated in French literature both for his
fables and his retelling of the Psyche myth. Ponge has often
expressed his admiration for La Fontaine: "If I prefer La Fontaine
-the slightest fable-to Schopenhauer or Hegel, I do know why."
This Ponge writes in Proemes (Part II, "Pages Bis," V, 167).
As for Paul de Man, he does name Psyche, not the mirror, but
the mythical character. And he does so in a passage that matters
much to us since it also points up the distance between the two
"selves," the subject's two selves, the impossibility of seeing
oneself and touching oneself at the same time, the "permanent
parabasis" and the "allegory of irony":

This successful combination of allegory and irony also de-

termines the thematic substance of the novel as a whole [La
Chartreuse de Parme], the underlying mythos of the alle-
gory. This novel tells the story of two lovers who, like Eros
and Psyche, are never allowed to come into full contact
with each other. When they can touch, it has to be in a
darkness imposed by a total arbitrary and irrational deci-
sion, an act of the gods. The myth is that of the unovercom-
able distance which must always prevail between the selves,
and it thematizes the ironic distance that Stendhal the writer
always believed prevailed between his pseudonymous and
214 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE 11

nominal identities. As such, it reaffirms Schlegel's defini-

tion of irony as a "permanent parabasis" and singles out
this novel as one of the few novels of novels, as the allegory
of irony.

These are the last words of "The Rhetoric of Temporality" (BI,

228).
Thus, in the same strike, but a double strike, a fabulous inven-
tion becomes the invention of truth: of its truth as fable, of the
fable of truth, of the truth of truth as fable. And of that which in
the fable depends on language I fari, fable). It is the impossible
mourning of truth in and through the word. For you have seen it
well, if the mourning is not announced by the breaking of the
mirror, but consists in the mirror, if it comes with the speculari-
zation, well then, the mirror comes to be itself solely through
the intercession of the word. It is an invention and an interven-
tion of the word, and here even of the word meaning "word,"
mot. The word itself is reflected in the word mot as it is in the
name "name." The silvering (tain), which excludes transparency
and authorizes the invention of the mirror, is a trace of language
(langue):
Par le mot par commence done ce texte
Dant la premiere ligne dit la verite,
Mais ce tain sous l'une et l'autre
Peut-il etre tolerel

Between the two par the silvering that is deposited between

two lines is the language itself; it depends on the word, and the
word word; it is le mot, the word; it distributes, separates, on
each side of itself, the two appearances of par. It opposes them,
puts them opposite or vis-a-vis each other, links them indissoci-
ably yet also dissociates them forever. This process does an un-
bearable violence that the law should prohibit (can this silvering
be tolerated under the two lines or between the lines?); it should
prohibit it as a perversion of usage, an overturning of linguistic
convention. Yet it happens that this perversion obeys the law of
language, it is a quite normal proposition, no grammar has any-
thing to object to this rhetoric. We have to get along without that
prohibition, such is both the observation and the command con-
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 215

veyed by the igitur of this fable-the simultaneously logical,

narrative, and fictive done of the first line: "Par le mot par
commence done ce texte ... "
This igitur speaks for a psyche, to it (her) and before it (her),
about it (her) as well, and psyche would be only the rotating
speculum that has come to relate the same to the other. Of this
relation of the same to the other, we could say, playfully: It is
only an invention, a mirage, or an admirable mirror effect, its
status remains that of an invention, of a simple invention, by
which is meant a technical mechanism. The question remains;
Is the psyche an invention?
The analysis of this fable would be endless. I abandon it here.
Fable in speaking of the fable does not only invent insofar as it
tells a story that does not take place, that has no place outside
itself and is nothing other than itself in its own inaugural
in(ter)vention. This invention is not only that of a poetic fiction,
a work whose production becomes the occasion for a signature,
for a patent, for the recognition of its status as a literary work by
its author and also by its reader. The reader, the other who judges
("Cher lecteur de; a tu ;uges . .. ")-but who judges from the
point of his inscription in the text, from the place that, although
first assigned to the addressee, becomes that of a countersigning.
Fable has this status as an invention only insofar as, from the
double position of the author and the reader, of the signatory and
the countersignatory, it also puts out a machine, a technical
mechanism that one must be able, under certain conditions and
limitations, to reproduce, repeat, reuse, transpose, set within a
public tradition and heritage. It thus has the value of a procedure,
model, or method, furnishing rules for exportation, for manipu-
lation, for variations. Taking into account other linguistic vari-
ables, a syntactic invariable can, recurringly, give rise to other
poems of the same type. And this typed construction, which
presupposes a first instrumentalization of the language, is indeed
a sort of tekhne. Between art and the fine arts. This hybrid of the
performative and the constative that, from the first line (premier
vers or first line) at once says the truth ("dont la premiere ligne
dit la verite," according to the description and reminder of the
second line), a truth that is nothing other than its own truth
producing itself, this is indeed a unique event; but it is also a
 11
216 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE''

machine and a general truth. While appealing to a preexistent

linguistic background (syntactic rules and the fabulous treasure
of language), it furnishes a rule-governed mechanism or regulator
capable of generating other poetic utterances of the same type, a
sort of printing matrix. So we can propose the following example:
"Avec le mot avec s'inaugure done cette fable," i.e., with the
word "with" begins then this fable; there would be other regu-
lated variants, at greater or lesser distances from the model, that
I do not have the time to note here. Then again, think of the
problems of quotability, both inevitable and impossible, that are
occasioned by a self-quoting invention. If, for example, I say, as I
have done already, "By the word 'by' commences then this text
by Ponge entitled Fable, for it commences as follows: 'By the
word by' ... " and so forth. This is a process without beginning
or end that nonetheless is only beginning, but without ever being
able to do so since its sentence or its initiatory phase is already
secondary, already the sequel of a first one that it describes even
before it has properly taken place, in a sort of exergue as impos-
sible as it is necessary. It is always necessary to begin again in
order finally to arrive at the beginning and reinvent invention.
Let us try, here in the margin of the exergue, to begin.
It was understood that we would address here the status of
invention. You are well aware that an element of disequilibrium
is at work in that contract of ours, and that there is thus some-
thing provocative about it. We have to speak of the status of
invention, but it is better to invent something on this subject.
However, we are authorized to invent only within the statutory
limits assigned by the contract and by the title (status of inven-
tion or inventions of the other). An invention refusing to be
dictated, ordered, programmed by these conventions would be
out of place, out of phase, out of order, impertinent, transgres-
sive. And yet, some eagerly impatient listeners might be tempted
to retort that indeed there will be no invention here today unless
that break with convention, into impropriety, is made; in other
words, that there will be invention only on condition that the
invention transgress, in order to be inventive, the status and the
programs with which it was supposed to comply.
As you have already suspected, things are not so simple. No
matter how little we retain of the semantic load of the word
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 217

"invention," no matter what indeterminacy we leave to it for the

moment, we have at least the feeling that an invention ought
not, as such and as it first emerges, have a status. At the moment
when it erupts, the inaugural invention ought to overflow, over-
look, transgress, negate, (or, at least-this is a supplementary
complication-deny) the status that people would have wanted
to assign to it or grant it in advance; indeed it ought to overstep
the space in which that status itself takes on its meaning and its
legitimacy-in short, the whole environment of reception that
by definition ought never to be ready to welcome an authentic
innovation. On this hypothesis (which is not mine, for the time
being) it is here that a theory of reception should either encoun-
ter its essential limit or else complicate its claims with a theory
of transgressive gaps. About the latter we can no longer tell
whether it would still be theory and whether it would be a theory
of something like reception. Let's stick with this commonsense
hypothesis a while longer. It would add that an invention ought
to produce a disordering mechanism, that when it makes its
appearance it ought to open up a space of unrest or turbulence
for every status assignable to it. Is it not then spontaneously
destabilizing, even deconstructive? The question would then be
the following: what can be the deconstructive effects of an inven-
tion? Or, conversely, in what respect can a movement of decon-
struction, far from being limited to the negative or destructuring
forms that are often naively attributed to it, be inventive in itself,
or be the signal of an inventiveness at work in a sociohistorical
field? And finally, how can a deconstruction of the very concept
of invention, moving through all the complex and organized
wealth of its semantic field, still invent? Invent over and beyond
the concept and the very language of invention, beyond its rhet-
oric and its axiomatics?
I am not trying to conflate the problematics of invention with
that of deconstruction. Moreover, for fundamental reasons, there
could be no problematics of deconstruction. My question lies
elsewhere: why is the word "invention," that tired, worn-out
classical word, today experiencing a revival, a new fashionable-
ness, and a new way of life? A statistical analysis of the occiden-
tal doxa would, I am sure, bring it to light: in vocabulary, book
titles, 11 the rhetoric of advertising, literary criticism, political
218 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

oratory, and even in the passwords of art, morality, and religion.

A strange return of a desire for invention. "One must invent":
Not so much create, imagine, produce, institute, but rather in-
vent; and it is precisely in the interval between these meanings
!invent, create; invent, imagine; invent, produce; invent, insti-
tute; etc.) that the uniqueness of this desire to invent dwells. To
invent not this or that, some tekhne or some fable, but to invent
the world-a world, not America, the New World, hut a novel
world, another habitat, another person, another desire even. A
closer analysis should show why it is then the word "invention"
that imposes itself, more quickly and more often than other
neighboring words ("discover," "create," "imagine," "produce,"
and so on). And why this desire for invention, which goes so far
as to dream of inventing a new desire, on the one hand remains
contemporary with a certain experience of fatigue, of weariness,
of exhaustion, hut on the other hand accompanies a desire for
deconstruction, going so far as to lift the apparent contradiction
that might exist between deconstruction and invention.
Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not
settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it
marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only perfor-
mative, it produces rules-other conventions-for new perfor-
mativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of
a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its
process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the
coming-the venire-in event, advent, invention. But it can
only make it by deconstructing a conceptual and institutional
structure of invention that would neutralize by putting the stamp
of reason on some aspect of invention, of inventive power: as if
it were necessary, over and beyond a certain traditional status of
invention, to reinvent the future.
[ .••. J

- Translated by Catherine Porter

NOTES

1. Psyche: Inventions de l' autre, jacket note.

2. We may also recall Clement Jannequin's Inventions musicales (circa
 "Psyche: Inventions of the Other" 219

1545). Bach's inventions were not merely didactic, even though they were
also intended to teach counterpoint technique. They may be (and often are)
treated as composition exercises (exposition of the theme in its principal
key, reexposition in the dominant, new developments, supplementary or
final exposition in the key indicated in the sigature). There are inventions in
A major, in F minor, in G minor, and so on. And as soon as one gives the
title "inventions" in the plural, as I am doing here, one invites thoughts of
technical virtuosity, didactic exercise, instrumental variations. But is one
obliged to accept the invitation to think what one is invited to think?
3. In Proemes, part I, "Natare piscem doces" (Paris: Gallimard, 1948)1
p. 45. The term proeme, in the didactic sense that is emphasized by the
learned doces, says something about invention, about the inventive moment
of a discourse: beginning, inauguration, incipit, introduction. Cf. the second
edition of "Fable," with roman and italic type inverted, in Ponge's Oeuvres,
vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 19651, p. u4.
Fable finds and states the truth that it finds in finding it, that is, in
stating it. Philosopheme, theorem, poem. A very sober Eureka, reduced to
the greatest possible economy in its operation. In Poe's fictive preface to
Eureka we read: "I offer this book of truths, not in its character of Truth-
Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth, constituting it true. To
these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone,-let us say as a
Romance; or if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here
propound is true:-therefore it cannot die" (The Works of Edgar All~n Poe,
vol. 9, Eureka and Miscellanies [Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1895), p. 41·
"Fable" may be called a spongism, for here truth signs its own name, if
Eureka is a poem.
This is perhaps the place to ask, since we are speaking of Eureka, what
happens when one translates eurema as inventio, euremes as inventor, eu-
risk6 as "I encounter, I find by looking or by chance, upon reflection or by
accident, I discover or obtain it"?
4. Remembering; Hegel contrasts Erinnerung, interiorizing memory, to
Gediichtnis, rote, mechanical memory. See Memoires [1986) for a longer
discussion of this distinction.-ED.
5. Paul de Man, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," Critical In-
quiry, 8 (1982), pp. 761-75.
6. "Allegory is sequential and narrative" ("Pascal's Allegory of Persua-
sion," in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation [Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 1). And again: "Allegory
appears as a successive mode" ("The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness
and Insight, 2nd ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),
p. 226).
7. Cf. "Autobiography as De-facement," MLN, 94 (1979), p. 921.
8. "The Rhetoric of Temporality," pp. 225-26.
9. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 152-53. A
note appended to this sentence begins as follows: "The implication that the
220 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE''

self-reflective moment of the cogito, the self-reflection of what Rilke calls

'le narcisse exhauce,' is not an original event but itself an allegorical (or
metaphorical) version of an intralinguistic structure, with all the negative
epistemological consequences it entails .... " The equation between allegory
and metaphor, in this context, poses problems to which I shall attempt to
return elsewhere.
10. See Memoires [1986).-En.
11. In the space of a few weeks I received Gerald Holton's L'Invention
scientifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982)1 Judith Schlan-
ger's L'Invention intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1983), and Christian Delacam-
pagne's L'Invention du racisme (Paris: Fayard, 1983). I am naturally referring
to these three books and to many others (such as L'Invention d'Athenes by
Nicole Loraux and L'Invention de la democratie by Claude Lefort). Delacam-
pagne's book reminds us that there is an invention of evil. Like all inven-
tions, that one has to do with culture, language, institutions, history, and
technology. In the case of racism in the strict sense, it is doubtless a very
recent invention in spite of its ancient roots. Delacampagne connects the
signifier at least to reason and razza. Racism is also an invention of the
other, but in order to exclude it and tighten the circle of the same. A logic of
the psyche, the topic of its identifications and projections warrants a lengthy
discussion.
 NINE

"Che cos'e la poesia?" [1988]

The Italian poetry journal Poesia invited Derrida to write something

for the rubric with which it opens every issue under the title "Che
cos'e la poesia?" !What is poetry? or more literally, What thing is
poetry?). Derrida responded with this brief text that was then pub-
lished beside its Italian translation. We reproduce it here beside our
own English translation, thus devising yet another kind of "double
band."
As always, Derrida works to abolish the distance between what
he is writing about (poetry, the poem, the poetic, or as he will finally
call it: the poematic) and what his writing is doing. Reference with-
out referent, this poem defines or describes only itself even as it
points beyond itself to the poetic in general. It is, writes Derrida, a
herisson, in Italian istrice, a name which loses all its rich resonance
as soon as it is translated into English: hedgehog, a European cousin
of the porcupine that has similar habits of self-defense. The risk of
this loss in crossing over from one language to another, or already in
the transfer into any language at all, causes the herisson to roll itself
into a ball in the middle of the road and bristle its spines: herisser
means to bristle or to spike, and therefore it may be said of a text
that it is spiked with difficulties or even traps (e.g., "de nombreux
pieges herissent le texte"). If indeed the poetic bristles with diffi-
culty, this very mechanism of turning in on itself for protection from
the rush of traffic is also what exposes it to being rubbed out, obliter-
ated. Thus, the poem's appeal to the heart and to that other mecha-
nism for remembering which is called, in many languages, learning
by heart.
To increase the herisson's chances of getting across the road, we
have posted a number of signs here the length of the distance to be
traversed. These guideposts, in lieu of notes, are set to one side so
they will not get underfoot of the creature's movements.
 Che cos'e la poesia?

Pour repondre a une telle question-en deux

mots, n'est-ce pas? -on te demande de savoir
renoncer au savoir. Et de bien le savoir, sans
;amais l'oublier: demobilise la culture mais
ce que tu sacrifies en route, en traversant la
route, ne l'oublie jamais dans ta docte igno-
rance.
Qui ose me demander cela? Meme s'il n'en
parait rien, car disparaitre est sa Joi, la re-
ponse se voit dictee. * fe suis une dictee, pro- A common pedagogical
exercise in which stu·
nonce la poesie, apprends-moi par coeur, re- dents write under a teach-
copie, veille et garde-moi, regarde-moi, dictee, er's dictation. The femi·
nine noun is formed from
sous Jes yeux: bande-son, wake, sillage de lu- the past participle of the
verb dieter.
miere, photographie de la fete en deuil.
Elle se voit dictee, la reponse, d'etre poe-
tique. Et pour cela tenue de s'adresser a
quelqu'un, singulierement a toi mais comme
a l'etre perdu dans l'anonymat, entre ville et
nature, un secret partage, a la fois public et
prive, absolument l'un et l'autre, absous de
debars et de dedans, ni l'un ni l'autre, ]'ani-
mal jete sur la route, absolu, solitaire, roule
en boule aupres de soi. I1 peut se faire ecraser,
justement, pour cela meme, le herisson, is-
trice.
 Che cos'e la poesia?

In order to respond to such a question-in

two words, right?-you are asked to know
how to renounce knowledge. And to know
it well, without ever forgetting it: demobi-
lize culture, but never forget in your learned
ignorance what you sacrifice on the road, in
crossing the road.
Who dares to ask me that? Even though it
remains inapparent, since disappearing is its
law, the answer sees itself (as) dictated (dic-
tation). I am a dictation, pronounces poetry,
learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and
keep me, look out for me, look at me, dic-
tated dictation, right before your eyes:
soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph
of the feast in mourning.
It sees itself, the response, dictated to be
poetic, by being poetic. And for that reason,
it is obliged to address itself to someone,
singularly to you but as if to the being lost
in anonymity, between city and nature, an
imparted secret, at once public and private,
absolutely one and the other, absolved from
within and from without, neither one nor
the other, the animal thrown onto the road,
Throughout the text, the absolute, solitary, rolled up in a ball, next to
str-sound is stressed. One
may hear in it the distress (it)self. And for that very reason, it may get
of the beast caught in the itself run over, just so, the herisson, istrice *
strictures of this transla-
tion. in Italian, in English, hedgehog.
 11 /1
224 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERA TURE

Et si tu reponds autrement selon Jes cas,

compte tenu de l'espace et du temps qui te
sont donnes avec cette demande (deja tu parles
italien), par elle-meme, selon cette economie
mais aussi dans ]'imminence de quelque tra-
versee hors de chez soi, risquee vers la langue
de l'autre en vue d'une traduction impossible
ou refusee, necessaire mais desiree comme une
mart, qu'est-ce que tout cela, cela meme oil
tu viens deja de te delirer, aurait a voir, des
lors, avec la poesiet A vec le poetique, plut6t,
car tu entends parler d'une experience, autre
mot pour voyage, ici la randonnee aleatoire
d'un trajet, la strophe qui tourne mais jamais
ne reconduit au discours, ni chez soi, jamais
du mains ne se reduit a la poesie-ecrite, par-
Jee, meme chantee.
Voici done, tout de suite, en deux mots,
pour ne pas oublier.
1. L'economie de la memoire: un poeme doit
etre bref, par vocation elliptique, quelle qu'en
soit l'etendue objective ou apparente. Docte
inconscient de la Verdichtung * et du retrait. Condensation in German,
to recall, perhaps, Freud's
2. Le coeur. Non pas le coeur au milieu des use of the term, but also
phrases qui circulent sans risque sur Jes because of Dichtung, po-
etry.
echangeurs et s'y laissent traduire en toutes
langues. Non pas simplement le coeur des ar-
chives cardiographiques, l'objet des savoirs ou
des techniques, des philosophies et des dis-
cours bio-ethico-juridiques. Peut-etre pas le
coeur des Ecritures ou de Pascal, ni meme,
c'est mains sur, celui que leur prefere Heideg-
ger. Non, une histoire de "coeur" poetique-
ment enveloppee dans l'idiome "apprendre par
 "Che cos'e la poesia?" 225

And if you respond otherwise depending

on each case, taking into account the space
and time which you are given with this de-
Because in Italian, do- mand (already you are speaking Italian)*, by
manda means question.
the demand itself, according to this econ-
omy but also in the imminence of some
traversal outside yourself, away from home,
venturing toward the language of the other
in view of an impossible or denied transla-
tion, necessary but desired like a death-
what would all of this, the very thing in
which you have just begun to tum deliri-
ously, have to do, at that point, with poetry?
Or rather, with the poetic, since you intend
to speak about an experience, another word
for voyage, here the aleatory rambling of a
Stanza; from the Greek: trek, the strophe* that turns but never leads
turn.
back to discourse, or back home, at least is
never reduced to poetry-written, spoken,
even sung.
Here then, right away, in two words, so
as not to forget:
r. The economy of memory: a poem must
be brief, elliptical by vocation, whatever may
be its objective or apparent expanse. Learned
unconscious of Verdichtung and of the re-
treat.
2. The heart. Not the heart in the middle
of sentences that circulate risk-free through
the interchanges and let themselves be
translated into any and all languages. Not
simply the heart archived by cardiography,
the object of sciences or technologies, of
philosophies and bio-ethico-juridical dis-
courses. Perhaps not the heart of the Scrip-
tures or of Pascal, nor even, this is less cer-
tain, the one that Heidegger prefers to them.
No, a story of "heart" poetically enveloped
in the idiom "apprendre par coeur," whether
226 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-"LITERATURE"

coeur," celui de ma langue ou d'une autre,

l'anglaise (to learn by heart), ou d'une autre
encore, l'arabe (hafiza a'n zahri kalb)-un seul
trajet a plusieurs voies.
Deux en un: le second axiome s'enroule dans
le premier. Le poetique, disons-le, serait ce
que tu desires apprendre, mais de l'autre, grace
a l'autre et sous dictee, par coeur: imparare a
memoria. N'est-ce pas deja cela, le poeme,
lorsqu'un gage est donne, la venue d'un evene-
ment, a ]'instant OU la traversee de la route
nommee traduction reste aussi improbable
qu'un accident, intensement revee pourtant,
requise la oil ce qu'elle promet toujours laisse
a desirer/ Une reconnaissance va vers cela
meme et previent ici la connaissance: ta bene-
diction avant le savoir.
Fable que tu pourrais raconter comme le
don du poeme, * c'est une histoire emblema- Title of the Mallarrne
sonnet.
tique: que]qu'un t'ecrit, a toi, de toi, SUI toi.
Non, une marque a toi adressee, laissee, con-
fiee, s'accompagne d'une injonction, en verite
s'institue en cet ordre meme qui a son tour te
constitue, assignant ton origine ou te donnant
lieu: detruis-moi, ou plutot rends man support
invisible au dehors, dans le monde (voila deja
le trait de toutes Jes dissociations, l'histoire
des transcendances), fais en sorte en tout cas
que la provenance de la marque reste desor-
mais introuvable ou meconnaissable. Promets
le: qu'elle se defigure, transfigure ou indeter-
mine en son port, et tu entendras sous ce mot
la rive du depart aussi bien que le referent
 "Che cos'e la poesia?" 227

in my language or another, the English lan-

guage Ito learn by heart), or still another, the
Arab language (hafiza a'n zahri kalb)-a
Voies, for which a hom- single trek with several tracks.*
onym would be voix,
voices. Two in one: the second axiom is rolled
up in the first. The poetic, let us say it,
would be that which you desire to learn, but
from and of the other, thanks to the other
and under dictation, by heart; imparare a
memoria. Isn't that already it, the poem,
La venue, also "she who once a token is given, the advent* of an
has come."
event, at the moment in which the travers-
ing of the road named translation remains
as improbable as an accident, one which is
all the same intensely dreamed of, required
there where what it promises always leaves
something to be desired? A grateful recogni-
tion goes out toward that very thing and
precedes cognition here: your benediction
before knowledge.
A fable that you could recount as the gift
of the poem, it is an emblematic story:
someone writes you, to you, of you, on you.
No, rather a mark addressed to you, left and
confided with you, is accompanied by an
injunction, in truth it is instituted in this
very order which, in its tum, constitutes
you, assigning your origin or giving rise to
you: destroy me, or rather render my sup-
port invisible to the outside, in the world
(this is already the trait of all dissociations,
the history of transcendences), in any case
do what must be done so that the prove-
nance of the mark remains from now on
unlocatable or unrecognizable. Promise it:
let it be disfigured, transfigured or rendered
indeterminate in its port-and in this word
you will hear the shore of the departure as
well as the referent toward which a trans-
 11
228 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE''

vers lequel une translation se porte. Mange,

bois, avale ma lettre, porte-la, transporte-la en
toi, comme la Joi d'une ecriture devenue ton
corps: l'ecriture en soi. La ruse de l'injonction
peut d'abord se laisser inspirer par la simple
possibilite de la mort, par le danger que f ait
courir un vehicule a tout etre fini. Tu entends
venir la catastrophe. Des lors imprime a meme
le trait, venu du coeur, le desir du mortel eveille
en toi le mouvement (contradictoire, tu me
suis bien, double astreinte, contrainte apore-
tique) de garder de l'oubli cette chose qui du
meme coup s'expose a la mart et se protege-
en un mot, l'adresse, le retrait du herisson,
comme sur l'autoroute un animal roule en
boule. On voudrait le prendre dans ses mains,
l'apprendre et le comprendre, le garder pour
soi, aupres de soi.
Tu aimes-garder cela dans sa forme sin-
guliere, on dirait dans l'irrempla9able littera-
lite du vocable si on parlait de la poesie et non
seulement du poetique en general. Mais notre
poeme ne tient pas en place dans des noms, ni
meme dans des mots. I1 est d' abord jete sur
Jes routes et dans Jes champs, chose au-dela
des langues, meme s'il Jui arrive de s'y rappe-
ler lorsqu'il se rassemble, roule en boule aupres
de soi, plus menace que ;amais dans sa re-
traite: il croit alors se defendre, il se perd.
Litteralement: tu voudrais retenir par coeur
une forme absolument unique, un evenement
dont ]'intangible singularite ne separe plus ]'i-
dealite, le sens ideal, comme on dit, du corps
de la lettre. Le desir de cette inseparation ab-
solue, le non-absolu absolu, tu y respires l'ori-
 "Che cos'e la poesia~" 229

lation is portered. Eat, drink, swallow my

letter, carry it, transport it in you, like the
law of a writing become your body: writing
in (it)self. The ruse of the injunction may
first of all let itself be inspired by the simple
possibility of death, by the risk that a vehi-
cle poses to every finite being. You hear the
catastrophe coming. From that moment on
imprinted directly on the trait, come from
the heart, the mortal's desire awakens in
you the movement (which is contradictory,
you follow me, a double restraint, an apor-
etic constraint) to guard from oblivion this
thing which in the same stroke exposes it-
self to death and protects itself-in a word,
the address, the retreat of the herisson, like
an animal on the autoroute rolled up in a
ball. One would like to take it in one's hands,
undertake to learn it and understand it, to
keep it for oneself, near oneself.
Somewhere in "Envois" You love-keep that in its singular form,*
Derrida wonders how one
can say "I love you" in we could say in the irreplaceable literality
English, which does not of the vocable if we were talking about po-
distinguish between
"you" singular and "you" etry and not only about the poetic in gen-
plural. eral. But our poem does not hold still within
names, nor even within words. It is first of
all thrown out on the roads and in the fields,
thing beyond languages, even if it some-
times happens that it recalls itself in lan-
guage, when it gathers itself up, rolled up in
a ball on itself, it is more threatened than
ever in its retreat: it thinks it is defending
itself, and it loses itself.
literally: you would like to retain by heart
an absolutely unique form, an event whose
intangible singularity no longer separates the
ideality, the ideal meaning as one says, from
the body of the letter. In the desire of this
absolute inseparation, the absolute nonab-
 11
230 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- 11 LITERATURE

gine du poetique. D'ou la resistance infinie au

transfert de la lettre que l 'animal, en son nom,
reclame pourtant. C'est la detresse du heris-
son. Que veut la detresse, le stress memet
stricto sensu mettre en garde. D'ou la prophe-
tie: traduis-moi, veille, garde-moi encore un
peu, sauve-toi, quittons l'autoroute.
Ainsi se leve en toi le reve d'apprendre par
coeur. De te laisser traverser le coeur par la
dictee. D'un seul trait, et c'est ]'impossible et
c'est ]'experience poematique. Tu ne savais
pas encore le coeur, tu l'apprends ainsi. De
cette experience et de cette expression. f' ap-
pelle poeme cela meme qui apprend le coeur,
ce qui invente le coeur, enfin ce que le mot de
coeur semble vouloir dire et que dans ma lan-
gue ;e discerne ma] du mot coeur. Coeur, dans
le poeme "apprendre par coeur" (a apprendre
par coeur), ne nomme plus seulement la pure
interiorite, la spontaneite independante, la
liberte de s'affecter activement en reprodui-
sant la trace aimee. La memoire du "par coeur"
se confie comme une priere, c'est plus sfu, a
une certaine exteriorite de ]'automate, aux lois
de la mnemotechnique, a cette liturgie qui
mime en surface la mecanique, a ]'automobile
qui surprend ta passion et vient sur toi comme
du dehors: auswendig, "par coeur" en alle-
mand.
Done: le coeur te bat, naissance du rythme,
au-dela des oppositions, du dedans et du de-
hors, de la representation consciente et de
]'archive abandonnee. Un coeur la-bas, entre
Jes sentiers ou Jes autostrades, hors de ta pres-
ence, humble, pres de la terre, tout bas. Rei-
 "Che cos'e la poesia!" 231

solute, you breath the origin of the poetic.

Whence the infinite resistance to the trans-
fer of the letter which the animal, in its
name, nevertheless calls out for. That is the
distress of the herisson. What does the dis-
tress, stress itself, want? Stricto sensu, to
put on guard. Whence the prophecy: trans-
late me, watch, keep me yet a while, get
going, save yourself, let's get off the auto-
route.
Thus the dream of learning by heart arises
in you. Of letting your heart be traversed by
the dictated dictation. In a single trait-and
that's the impossible, that's the poematic
experience. You did not yet know the heart,
you learn it thus. From this experience and
from this expression. I call a poem that very
thing that teaches the heart, invents the
heart, that which, finally, the word heart
seems to mean and which, in my language,
I cannot easily discern from the word itself.
Heart, in the poem "learn by heart" (to be
learned by heart), no longer names only pure
interiority, independent spontaneity, the
freedom to affect oneself actively by repro-
ducing the beloved trace. The memory of
the "by heart" is confided like a prayer-
that's safer-to a certain exteriority of the
automaton, to the laws of mnemotechnics,
to that liturgy that mimes mechanics on the
surface, to the automobile that surprises your
passion and bears down on you as if from an
But also "outward" or outside: auswendig, "by heart" in German.*
"outside."
So: your heart beats, gives the downbeat,
the birth of rhythm, beyond oppositions, be-
yond outside and inside, conscious represen-
tation and the abandoned archive. A heart
down there, between paths and autostradas,
outside of your presence, humble, close to
 11
232 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- LITERATURE''

tere en murmurant: ne repete ;amais ... Dans

un seul chiffre, le poeme (l'apprendre par coeur)
scelle ensemble le sens et la lettre, comme un
rythme espai;dnt le temps.
Pour repondre en deux mots, ellipse, par
example, ou election, coeur ou herisson, il
t' aura fallu des emparer la memoire, des armer
la culture, savoir oublier le savoir, incendier
la bibliotheque des poetiques. L'unicite du
poeme est acette condition. Il te faut celebrer,
tu dais commemorer l'amnesie, la sauvagerie,
voire la betise du "par coeur": le herisson. Il
s'aveugle. Roule en boule, herisse de piquants.
vulnerable et dangereux, calculateur et ina-
dapte (parce qu'il se met en boule, sentant le
danger Sur ]'autoroute, iJ s'expose a ]'acci-
dent). Pas de poeme sans accident, pas de
poeme qui ne s'ouvre comme une blessure,
mais qui ne soit aussi blessant. Tu appelleras
poeme une incantation silencieuse, la bles-
sure aphone que de toi ;e desire apprendre par
coeur. Ila done lieu, pour l'essentiel, sans qu'on
ait a le faire: il se laisse faire, sans activite,
sans travail, dans le plus sabre pathos, etran-
ger a toute production, surtout a la creation.
Le poeme echoit, benediction, venue de l'autre.
Rythme mais dissymetrie. Il n'y a ;amais que
du poeme, avant toute poiese. Quand, au lieu
de "poesie", nous avons dit "poetique", nous
From the Greek: to make,
aurions du preciser: "poematique". Surtout ne to create.
laisse pas reconduire le herisson dans le cir-
que OU dans Je manege de la poiesis: rien a "Pure language": from
faire (poiein), * ni "poesie pure", ni rhetorique Walter Benjamin's essay,
"The Task of the Trans-
pure, ni reine Sprache, • ni "mise-en-oeuvre- lator."
 "Che cos'e la poesia?" 233

the earth, low down. Reiterate(s) in a mur-

mur: never repeat ... In a single cipher, the
poem (the learning by heart, learn it by heart)
seals together the meaning and the letter,
like a rhythm spacing out time.
In order to respond in two words: ellipsis,
for example, or election, heart, herisson, or
istrice, you will have had to disable mem-
ory, disarm culture, know how to forget
knowledge, set fire to the library of poetics.
The unicity of the poem depends on this
condition. You must celebrate, you have to
commemorate amnesia, savagery, even the
Betise, from bete, beast or stupidity* of the "by heart": the herisson. It
animal.
blinds itself. Rolled up in a ball, prickly with
spines, vulnerable and dangerous, calculating
and ill-adapted (because it makes itself into
a ball, sensing the danger on the autoroute,
it exposes itself to an accident). No poem
without accident, no poem that does not
open itself like a wound, but no poem that
is not also just as wounding. You will call
poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound
that, of you, from you, I want to learn by
heart. It thus takes place, essentially, with-
out one's having to do it or make it: it lets
itself be done, without activity, without
work, in the most sober pathos, a stranger
to all production, especially to creation. The
poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (or
from) the other. Rhythm but dissymmetry.
There is never anything but some poem, be-
fore any poiesis. When, instead of "poetry,"
we said "poetic," we ought to have specified:
"poematic." Most of all do not let the heris-
son be led back into the circus or the menag-
erie of poiesis: nothing to be done (poiein),
neither "pure poetry," nor pure rhetoric, nor
reine Sprache, nor "setting-forth-of-truth-in-
234 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY- ''LITERATURE''

de-la-verite". Seulement une contamination,

telle, et tel carrefour, cet accident-ci. Ce tour,
le retournement de cette catastrophe. Le don
du poeme ne cite rien, il n'a aucun titre, il
n'histrionne plus, il survient sans que tu t'y
attendes, coupant le souffle, coupant avec la
poesie discursive, et surtout litteraire. Dans
Jes cendres memes de cette genealogie. Pas le
phenix, pas l'aigle, le herisson, tres bas, tout
bas, pres de la terre. Ni sublime, ni incorporel,
angelique peut-etre, et pour un temps.
Tu appelleras desormais poeme une cer-
taine passion de la marque singuliere, la sig-
nature qui repete sa dispersion, chaque fois
au-dela du logos, anhumaine, domestique a
peine, ni reappropriable dans la famille du
sujet: un animal converti, roule en boule,
tourne vers l'autre et vers soi, une chose en
somme, et modeste, discrete, pres de la terre,
l'humilite que tu sumommes, te portant ainsi
dans le nom, au-dela du nom, un herisson
catachretique, toutes fleches dehors, quand cet
aveugle sans age entend mais ne voit pas venir
la mart.
Le poeme peut se rouler en boule mais c'est
encore pour tourner ses signes aigus vers le
dehors. Jl peut certes reflechir Ja Jangue OU
dire la poesie mais il ne se rapporte jamais a
lui-meme, il ne se meut jamais de lui-meme
comme ces engins porteurs de mart. Son
evenement interrompt toujours OU devoie Je
savoir absolu, l'etre aupres de soi dans l'auto-
telie. Ce "demon du coeur" jamais ne se ras-
semble, il s'egare plutot (delire ou manie), il
s'expose a la chance, il se laisserait plutot de-
chiqueter par ce qui vient sur Jui.
 "Che cos'e la poesia~" 235

See Heidegger, The Origin the-work."* Just this contamination, and this
of the Work of Art.
crossroads, this accident here. This tum, the
turning round of this catastrophe. The gift
of the poem cites nothing, it has no title, its
histrionics are over, it comes along without
your expecting it, cutting short the breath,
cutting all ties with discursive and espe-
cially literary poetry. In the very ashes of
this genealogy. Not the phoenix, not the ea-
gle, but the herisson, very lowly, low down,
close to the earth. Neither sublime, nor in-
corporeal, angelic, perhaps, and for a time.
You will call poem from now on a certain
passion of the singular mark, the signature
that repeats its dispersion, each time beyond
the logos, ahuman, barely domestic, not
reappropriable into the family of the sub-
ject: a converted animal, rolled up in a ball,
turned toward the other and toward itself,
in sum, a thing-modest, discreet, close to
the earth, the humility that you surname,
thus transporting yourself in the name be-
yond a name, a catachrestic herisson, its ar-
rows held at ready, when this ageless blind
thing hears but does not see death coming.
The poem can roll itself up in a ball, but
it is still in order to tum its pointed signs
toward the outside. To be sure, it can reflect
language or speak poetry, but it never re-
lates back to itself, it never moves by itself
like those machines, bringers of death. Its
event always interrupts or derails absolute
knowledge, autotelic being in proximity to
itself. This "demon of the heart" never gath-
ers itself together, rather it loses itself and
gets off the track (delirium or mania), it ex-
poses itself to chance, it would rather let
itself be tom to pieces by what bears down
upon it.
236 BESIDE PHILOSOPHY-''LITERATURE 11

Sans sujet: il y a peut-etre du poeme, et qui

se laisse, mais je n'en ecris jamais. Un poeme
je ne le signe jamais. L'autre signe. Le je n'est
qu'a la venue de ce desir: apprendre par coeur.
Tendu pour se resumer a son propre support,
done sans support exterieur, sans substance,
sans sujet, absolu de l'ecriture en soi, le "par
coeur" se laisse elire au-dela du corps, du sexe,
de la bouche et des yeux, il efface Jes bards, il
echappe aux mains, tu l'entends a peine, mais
il nous apprend le coeur. Filiation, gage d'elec-
tion confi_e en heritage, il peut se prendre a
n'importe que] mot, Q Ja chose, vivante OU
non, au nom de herisson par exemple, entre
vie et mart, a la tombee de la nuit ou au petit
jour, apocalypse distraite, propre et commune,
publique et secrete.
-Mais le poeme dont tu parles, tu t'egares,
on ne l'a jamais nomme ainsi, ni aussi arbi-
trairement.
-Tu viens de le dire. Ce qu'il fallait de-
montrer. Rappelle-toi la question: "Qu'est-ce
que ... ~" (ti esti, was ist ... , istoria, episteme,
philosophia). "Qu'est-ce que .. .?" pleure la dis-
parition du poeme-une autre catastrophe. En
announ9ant ce qui est tel qu'il est, une ques-
tion salue la naissance de la prose.
 "Che cos'e la poesiai" 237

Without a subject: poem, perhaps there is

some, and perhaps it leaves itself, but I never
write any. A poem, I never sign(s) it. The
other sign(s). The I is only at the coming of
this desire: to learn by heart. Stretched, ten-
dered forth to the point of subsuming its
own support, thus without external support,
without substance, without subject, abso-
lute of writing in (it)self, the "by heart" lets
itself be elected beyond the body, sex, mouth,
and eyes; it erases the borders, slips through
the hands, you can barely hear it, but it
teaches us the heart. Filiation, token of elec-
tion confided as legacy, it can attach itself
to any word at all, to the thing, living or not,
to the name of herisson, for example, be-
tween life and death, at nightfall or at day-
break, distracted apocalypse, proper and
common, public and secret.
--But the poem you are talking about,
you are getting off the track, it has never
been named thus, or so arbitrarily.
--You just said it. Which had to be
demonstrated. Recall the question: "What is
... ?" (ti esti, was ist ... , istoria, episteme,
philosophia). "What is ... ?" laments the
disappearance of the poem-another catas-
trophe. By announcing that which is just as
it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.

- Translated by Peggy Kamuf

 JALOUSIE THREE

In little continuous jerks, the sequences are en-

joined, induced, glide in silence. No category
outside the text should allow defining the form
or bearing of these passages, of these trances
of writing. There are always only sections of
flowers, from paragraph to paragraph, so much
so that anthological excerpts
inflict only the violence neces- a paraph is the
abbreviation
sary to attach importance to the of a para-
remain(s). Take into account the graph: what is
written on the
overlap-effects, and you will see side, in. the
that the tissue ceaselessly re- margin
forms itself around the incision.
-Glas, p. 25
 PART THREE

MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

AT THE BEGINNING of a series of memorial lectures for his friend

Jilli\ Paul de Man, Derrida reflects on a phenomenon with which
this eminent literary theorist was so often associated: "deconstruc-
tion in America." In explaining why he is unwilling to undertake a
thorough analysis of this phenomenon, Derrida nevertheless sketches
a few principles for such an analysis. He writes:
But is there a proper place, is there a proper story for this thing
[deconstruction]? I think it consists only of transference, and of
a thinking through of transference, in all the senses that this
word acquires in more than one language, and first of all that
of the transference between languages. If I had to risk a single
definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and eco-
nomical as a password, I would say simply and without over-
statement: plus d'une langue-more than one language, no
more of one language. 1
It should already have become clear in the preceding sections that
Derrida's thought is always turning, in one sense or another, around
what is called "the problem of translation." The logocentrism he
identified in his earliest writings, for example, may be understood as
another name for the dream of a universal language. Its denial or
forgetting of materiality and exteriority attempts to leap over the
fact of language as such, that is, language in its material exteriority
to purely inward, autoaffecting thought. The proof, so to speak, of
this materiality is that language as such manifests itself in its differ-
ence-through the multiplicity of languages.
If there is only multiplicity, then there is no master language,
although in the history of the West various tongues have pretended
242 More Than One Language

to this throne: Greek, Latin, French, German, and currently Ameri-

can English (the histories of imperialisms, of colonization, and of
consolidation of nation-states is also always written in and through
linguistic imposition.) 2 Derrida's password definition of deconstruc-
tion-more than one language/no more of one language-situates
that practice always in a very specific tension with mastery as it is
invested by a language. In its limited sense and within the confines
of its traditional concept, translation has always implied a secondary
operation coming after the original. The deconstruction of this con-
cept displaces that order with the almost unthinkable notion (almost
unthinkable because it points to the very limits of thinking) of an
originary translation before the possibility of any distinction be-
tween original and translation.
But deconstruction does not only enjoin us to think translation
differently, beyond the confines of its strict sense, that is, translation
of thought from one language to another. It also displays the move-
ment of the trans-translation, transference, transport, transforma-
tion-as the very movement of thought between points of origin
and arrival that are always being deferred, differed one by the other.
That is, deconstruction is deployed both as a theory of translation
which challenges the limits of that philosophical concept and as a
practice of translation which exhibits, rather than conceals, its own
limits. The practice of more than one language has frequently been
translated in Derrida's writings as a multivocality tyographically
marked as in a dialogue or a polylogue. That is why we have in-
cluded below excerpts from one such polyvocal text ("Restitutions
of the Truth in Pointing") even though, unlike the other texts se-
lected here, it deals less directly with questions of translation. (See,
however, its commentary on Heidegger's preoccupation with the
effects for philosophy of the translation of philosophical terms from
Greek into Latin.)

NOTES

1. Memoires for Paul de Man [1986], pp. 14-15.

2. For a discussion of some aspects of the imposition of French as a
national language, see Derrida's essay "Languages and Institutions of Philos-
ophy" [1984].
 From "Des Tours de Babel" [1985]

The title of this essay on translation, and written for translation, is

itself untranslatable. "Des Tours de Babel," notes the American
translator, "can be read in various ways. Des means 'some'; but it
also means 'of the,' 'from the,' or 'about the.' Tours could be towers,
twists, tricks, turns, or tropes, as in a 'turn' of phrase. Taken to-
gether, des and tours have the same sound as detour, the word for
detour." 1 As for the word 'Babel' in the title, it is taken to be a
proper name and as such is not translated. But Babel is the name
which, according to the biblical tradition, also installs the necessity
of translation. Babel must not be translated and yet it also must be
translated. This essay, which contains one of Derrida's most sus-
tained reflections on the problem of translation, sets out from this
double-bind condition as framed by the terms of the story in Gene-
sis, a story we must read in translation. Derrida's reading of the
Babel text forms a kind of prologue (presented below in full) to an
extended analysis of the influential essay by the German thinker
Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator." There, the relations
between translation and the proper name, indebtedness, the sacred
text, the law are explored through Benjamin's language. Derrida
asserts that what he is doing thereby is translating "in my own way
the translation of another text on translation" (p. 17 5 ). This descrip-
tion not only recalls that reading and writing are first of all versions
of translation, but it signals as well the limits on any theory of
translation. "No theorization," writes Derrida, "inasmuch as it is
produced in a language, will he able to dominate the Babelian perfor-
mance."
 Des Tours de Babel

"Babel": first a proper name, granted. But when we say "Babel"

today, do we know what we are naming? Do we know whom? If
we consider the sur-vival of a text that is a legacy, the recit, 2 or
the myth of the tower of Babel, it does not constitute just one
figure among others. Telling at least of the inadequation of one
tongue to another, of one place in the encyclopedia to another, of
language to itself and to meaning, and so forth, it also tells of the
need for figuration, for myth, for tropes, for twists and turns, for
translation inadequate to compensate for that which multiplicity
denies us. In this sense it would be the myth of the origin of
myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the
translation of translation, and so on. It would not be the only
structure hollowing itself out like that, but it would do so in its
own way (itself almost untranslatable, like a proper name), and
its idiom would have to be saved.
The "tower of Babel" does not figure merely the irreducible
multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impos-
sibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing
something on the order of edification, architectural construction,
system and architectonics. What the multiplicity of idioms ac-
tually limits is not only a "true" translation, a transparent and
adequate interexpression; it is also a structural order, a coherence
of construct. There is then (let us translate) something like an
internal limit to formalization, an incompleteness of the con-
structure. It would be easy and up to a certain point justified to
see there the translation of a system in deconstruction.
One should never pass over in silence the question of the
 "Des Tours de Babel" 245

tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into

which a discourse on translation is translated.
First: in what tongue was the tower of Babel constructed and
deconstructed? In a tongue within which the proper name of
Babel could also, by confusion, be translated by "confusion." The
proper name Babel, as a proper name, should remain untranslat-
able, but, by a kind of associative confusion that a unique tongue
rendered possible, one could think to translate in that very tongue,
by a common noun signifying what we translate as confusion.
Voltaire showed his astonishment in his Dictionnaire philoso-
phique, at the Babel article:
I do not know why it is said in Genesis that Babel signifies
confusion, for Ba signifies father in the Oriental tongues,
and Bel signifies God; Babel signifies the city of God, the
holy city. The Ancients gave this name to all their capi-
tals. But it is incontestable that Babel means confusion,
either because the architects were confounded after having
raised their work up to eighty-one thousand Jewish feet, or
because the tongues were then confounded; and it is ob-
viously from that time on that the Germans no longer un-
derstand the Chinese; for it is clear, according to the scholar
Bochart, that Chinese is originally the same tongue as High
German.
The calm irony of Voltaire means that Babel means: it is not
only a proper name, the reference of a pure signifier to a single
being-and for this reason untranslatable-but a common noun
related to the generality of a meaning. This common noun means,
and means not only confusion, even though "confusion" has at
least two meanings, as Voltaire is aware, the confusion of tongues,
but also the state of confusion in which the architects find them-
selves with the structure interrupted, so that a certain confusion
has already begun to affect the two meanings of the word confu-
sion. The signification of "confusion" is confused, at least dou-
ble. But Voltaire suggests something else again: Babel means not
only confusion in the double sense of the word, but also the
name of the father, more precisely and more commonly, the
name of God as name of father. The city would bear the name of
246 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

God the father and of the father of the city that is called confu-
sion. God, the God, would have marked with his patronym a
communal space, that city where understanding is no longer
possible. And understanding is no longer possible when there are
only proper names, and understanding is no longer possible when
there are no longer proper names. In giving his name, a name of
his choice, in giving all names, the father would be at the origin
of language, and that power would belong by right to God the
father. And the name of God the father would be the name of
that origin of tongues. But it is also that God who, in the action
of his anger (like the God of Bohme or of Hegel, he who goes out
of himself, determines himself in his finitude and thus produces
history), annuls the gift of tongues, or at least embroils it, sows
confusion among his sons, and poisons the present (Gift-gift). 3
This is also the origin of tongues, of the multiplicity of idioms,
of what in other words are usually called mother tongues. For
this entire history deploys filiations, generations and genealo-
gies: all Semitic. Before the deconstruction of Babel, the great
Semitic family was establishing its empire, which it wanted to
be universal, and its tongue, which it also attempts to impose on
the universe. The moment of this project immediately precedes
the deconstruction of the tower. I cite two French translations. 4
The first translator stays away from what one would want to call
"literality," in other words, from the Hebrew figure of speech for
"tongue," there where the second, more concerned about literal-
ity (metaphoric, or rather metonymic), says "lip," since in He-
brew "lip" designates what we call, in another metonymy,
"tongue." One will have to say multiplicity of lips and not of
tongues to name the Babelian confusion. The first translator,
then, Louis Segond, author of the Segond Bible, published in
1910, writes this:

Those are the sons of Sem, according to their families, their

tongues, their countries, their nations. Such are the families
of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, their
nations. And it is from them that emerged the nations which
spread over the earth after the flood. All the earth had a
single tongue and the same words. As they had left the
 "Des Tours de Babel" 247

origin they found a plain in the country of Schinear, and

they dwelt there. They said to one another: Come! Let us
make bricks, and bake them in the fire. And brick served
them as stone, and tar served as cement. Again they said:
Come! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose
summit touches the heavens, and let us make ourselves a
name, so that we not be scattered over the face of all the
earth.
I do not know just how to interpret this allusion to the substitu-
tion or the transmutation of materials, brick becoming stone and
tar serving as mortar. That already resembles a translation, a
translation of translation. But let us leave it and substitute a
second translation for the first. It is that of [Andre] Chouraqui. It
is recent and wants to be more literal, almost verbum pro verbo,
as Cicero said should not be done in one of those first recommen-
dations to the translator which can be read in his Libellus de
Optima Genera Oratorum. Here it is:
Here are the sons of Shem
for their clans, for their tongues,
in their lands, for their peoples.
Here are the clans of the sons of Noah for their exploits,
in their peoples:
from the latter divide the peoples on earth, after the flood.
And it is all the earth: a single lip, one speech.
And it is at their departure from the Orient: they find
a canyon,
in the land of Shine'ar.
They settle there.
They say, each to his like:
"Come, let us brick some bricks.
Let us fire them in the fire."
The brick becomes for them stone, the tar, mortar.
They say:
"Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.
Its head: in the heavens.
Let us make ourselves a name,
that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth."
248 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

What happens to them? In other words, for what does God

punish them in giving his name, or rather, since he gives it to
nothing and to no one, in proclaiming his name, the proper name
of "confusion" which will be his mark and his seal? Does he
punish them for having wanted to build as high as the heavens?
For having wanted to accede to the highest, up to the Most High?
Perhaps for that too, no doubt, but incontestably for having wanted
thus to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the
name, to construct for and by themselves their own name, to
gather themselves there !"that we not be scattered"), as in the
unity of a place which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as
well as the other, the one as the other. He punishes them for
having thus wanted to assure themselves, by themselves, a unique
and universal genealogy. For the text of Genesis proceeds imme-
diately, as if it were all a matter of the same design: raising a
tower, constructing a city, making a name for oneself in a univer-
sal tongue which would also be an idiom, and gathering a filia-
tion:

They say:
"Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.
Its head: in the heavens.
Let us make ourselves a name,
that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth."
YHWH descends to see the city and the tower
that the sons of man have built.
YHWH says:
"Yes! A single people, a single lip for all:
that is what they begin to do! ...
Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips,
man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor."
•-!

Then he disseminates the Sem, and dissemination is here decon- '

i
struction:

YHWH disperses them from here over the face of all the earth.
They cease to build the city.
Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion,
for there, YHWH confounds the lip of all the earth,
 "Des Tours de Babel" 249

and from there YHWH disperses them over the face of all
the earth.

Can we not, then, speak of a jealousy of God? Out of resent-

ment against that unique name and lip of men, he imposes his
name, his name of father; and with this violent imposition he
opens the deconstruction of the tower, as of the universal lan-
guage; he scatters the genealogical filiation. He breaks the lin-
eage. He at the same time imposes and forbids translation. He
imposes it and forbids it, constrains, but as if to failure, the
children who henceforth will bear his name, the name that he
gives to the city. It is from a proper name of God, come from
God, descended from God or from the father land it is indeed said
that YHWH, an unpronounceable name, descends toward the
tower) and from this mark that tongues are scattered, confounded
or multiplied, according to a descendance that in its very disper-
sion remains sealed by the only name that will have been the
strongest, by the only idiom that will have triumphed. Now, this
idiom bears within itself the mark of confusion, it improperly
means the improper, to wit: Bavel, confusion. Translation then
becomes necessary and impossible, like the effect of a struggle
for the appropriation of the name, necessary and forbidden in the
interval between two absolutely proper names. And the proper
name of God (given by God) is divided enough in the tongue,
already, to signify also, confusedly, "confusion." And the war
that he declares has first raged within his name: divided, bifid,
ambivalent, polysemic: God deconstructs. Himself. "And he war,"
one reads in Finnegans Wake, and we could follow this whole
story from the side of Shem and Shaun. The "he war" does not
only, in this place, tie together an incalculable number of phonic
and semantic threads, in the immediate context and throughout
this Babelian book; it says the declaration of war (in English) of
the One who says I am the one who am, and who thus was (war);
it renders itself untranslatable in its very performance, at least
in the fact that it is enunciated in more than one language at a
time, at least English and German. If even an infinite translation
exhausted its semantic stock, it would still translate into one
language and would lose the multiplicity of "he war." Let us
leave for another time a less hastily interrupted reading of this
250 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

"he war," 5 and let us note one of the limits of theories of trans-
lation: all too often they treat the passing from one language to
another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for lan-
guages to be implicated more than two in a text. How is a text
written in several languages at a time to be translated? How is
the effect of plurality to be "rendered"? And what of translating
with several languages at a time, will that be called translating?
Babel: today we take it as a proper name. Indeed, but the
proper name of what and of whom? At times that of a narrative
text recounting a story (mythical, symbolic, allegorical; it mat-
ters little for the moment), a story in which the proper name,
which is then no longer the title of the narrative, names a tower
or a city but a tower or a city that receives its name from an
event during which YHWH "proclaims his name." Now, this
proper name, which already names at least three times and three
different things, also has, this is the whole point of the story, as
proper name the function of a common noun. This story re-
counts, among other things, the origin of the confusion of tongues,
the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and impos-
sible task of translation, its necessity as impossibility. Now, in
general one pays little attention to this fact: it is in translation
that we most often read this recit. And in this translation, the
proper name retains a singular destiny, since it is not translated
in its appearance as proper name. Now, a proper name as such
remains forever untranslatable, a fact that may lead one to con-
clude that it does not strictly belong, for the same reason as the
other words, to the language, to the system of the language, be it
translated or translating. And yet "Babel," an event in a single
tongue, the one in which it appears so as to form a "text," also
has a common meaning, a conceptual generality. That it be by
way of a pun or a confused association matters little: "Babel"
could be understood in ·one language as meaning "confusion."
And from then on, just as Babel is at once proper name and
common noun, confusion also becomes proper name and com-
mon noun, the one as the homonym of the other, the synonym
as well, but not the equivalent, because there could be no ques-
tion of confusing them in their value. It has for the translator no
satisfactory solution. Recourse to apposition and capitalization
("Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion") is not
 "Des Tours de Babel" 251

translating from one tongue into another. It comments, explains,

paraphrases, but does not translate. At best it reproduces approx-
imately and by dividing the equivocation into two words there
where confusion gathered in potential, in all its potential, in the
internal translation, if one can say that, which works the word
in the so-called original tongue. For in the very tongue of the
original recit there is a translation, a sort of transfer, that gives
immediately (by some confusion) the semantic equivalent of the
proper name which, by itself, as a pure proper name, it would not
have. As a matter of fact, this intralinguistic translation operates
immediately; it is not even an operation in the strict sense.
Nevertheless, someone who speaks the language of Genesis could
be attentive to the effect of the proper name in effacing the
conceptual equivalent (like pierre [rock] in Pierre [Peter], and
these are two absolutely heterogeneous values or functions); one
would then be tempted to say first that a proper name, in the
proper sense, does not properly belong to the language; it does
not belong there, although and because its call makes the lan-
guage possible (what would a language be without the possibility
of calling a proper name?); consequently it can properly inscribe
itself in a language only by allowing itself to be translated therein,
in other words, interpreted by its semantic equivalent: from this
moment it can no longer be taken as proper name. The noun
pierre belongs to the French language, and its translation into a
foreign language should in principle transport its meaning. This
is not the case with Pierre, whose inclusion in the French lan-
guage is not assured and is in any case not of the same type.
"Peter" in this sense is not a translation of Pierre, any more than
Landres is a translation of "London," and so forth. And second,
anyone whose so-called mother tongue was the tongue of Gene-
sis could indeed understand Babel as "confusion"; that person
then effects a confused translation of the proper name by its
common equivalent without having need for another word. It is
as if there were two words there, two homonyms one of which
has the value of proper name and the other that of common
noun: between the two, a translation which one can evaluate
quite diversely. Does it belong to the kind that Jakobson calls
intralingual translation or rewording? I do not think so: "reword-
ing" concerns the relations of transformation between common
252 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

nouns and ordinary phrases. The essay "On Linguistic Aspects of

Translation" 6 distinguishes three forms of translation. Intralin-
gual translation interprets linguistic signs by means of other
signs of the same language. This obviously presupposes that one
can know in the final analysis how to determine rigorously the
unity and identity of a language, the decidable form of its limits.
There would then be what Jakobson neatly calls translation
"proper," interlingual translation, which interprets linguistic signs
by means of some other language-this appeals to the same
presupposition as intralingual translation. Finally there would be
intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which interprets lin-
guistic signs by means of systems of nonlinguistic signs. For the
two forms of translation which would not be translations "proper,"
Jakobson proposes a definitional equivalent and another word.
The first he translates, so to speak, by another word: intralingual
translation or rewording. The third likewise: intersemiotic trans-
lation or transmutation. In these two cases, the translation of
"translation" is a definitional interpretation. But in the case of
translation "proper," translation in the ordinary sense, interlin-
guistic and post-Babelian, Jakobson does not translate; he repeats
the same word: "interlingual translation or translation proper."
He supposes that it is not necessary to translate; everyone under-
stands what that means because everyone has experienced it,
everyone is expected to know what a language is, the relation of
one language to another and especially identity or difference in
fact of language. If there is a transparency that Babel would not
have impaired, this is surely it, the experience of the multiplicity
of tongues and the "proper" sense of the word translation. In
relation to this word, when it is a question of translation "proper,"
the other uses of the word translation would be in a position of
intralingual and inadequate translation, like metaphors, in short,
like twists or turns of translation in the proper sense. There
would thus be a translation in the proper sense and a translation
in the figurative sense. And in order to translate the one into the
other, within the same tongue or from one tongue to another, in
the figurative or in the proper sense, one would engage upon a
course that would quickly reveal how this reassuring tripartition
can be problematic. Very quickly: at the very moment when
pronouncing "Babel'' we sense the impossibility of deciding
 "Des Tours de Babel" 253

whether this name belongs, properly and simply, to one tongue.

And it matters that this undecidability is at work in a struggle
for the proper name within a scene of genealogical indebtedness.
In seeking to "make a name for themselves," to found at the
same time a universal tongue and a unique genealogy, the Sem-
ites want to bring the world to reason, and this reason can signify
simultaneously a colonial violence (since they would thus uni-
versalize their idiom) and a peaceful transparency of the human
community. Inversely, when God imposes and opposes his name,
he ruptures the rational transparency but interrupts also the
colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism. He destines them
to translation, he subjects them to the law of a translation both
necessary and impossible; in a stroke with his translatable-un-
translatable name he delivers a universal reason (it will no longer
be subject to the rule of a particular nation), but he simulta-
neously limits its very universality: forbidden transparency, im-
possible univocity. Translation becomes law, duty and debt, but
the debt one can no longer discharge. Such insolvency is found
marked in the very name of Babel: which at once translates and
does not translate itself, belongs without belonging to a language
and indebts itself to itself for an insolvent debt, to itself as if
other. Such would be the Babelian performance.
1.... I
-Translated by foseph F. Graham

NOTES

1. Joseph F. Graham, ed. and trans., Difference in Translation !Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 206.
2. On the untranslatability of recit, see below, "Living On: Borderlines,''
pp. 258-59.-ED.
3. One of Derrida's most persistent questions concerns the gift, the pos-
sibility of a giving that is not also a taking back jsee for example, below, "At
This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," pp. 408-11). In this regard, he
frequently recalls that a homonym of the German noun Gift is the adjective
meaning poisonous.-En.
4. These translations are in tum translated here into English.-En.
5. See "Two Words for Joyce" (1987].-En.
6. In R. A. Brower, ed., On Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1959), pp. 232-39.-En.
 ELEVEN

From "Living On: Border Lines" [1979]

("Survivre: Journal de bord" in Parages [1986])

One way to introduce this text is to translate part of the note with
which Derrida presented its first publication in French following its
"original" publication in English:
The first version of this text appeared in English in a work
titled Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press,
1979). It is useful, perhaps, to say a few words about this work,
or rather about the situation that explains, to a certain degree,
its publication, composition, and form. Around 1975, people
began to speak of a new school of literary criticisms or of
philosophy that had formed at Yale (the "Yale group" or the
"Yale school"). There would be much to say about the pre-
sumed reality, the diversity, or the overdetermined complexity
of this phenomenon. I do not intend to get into these problems
here; I only want to mention this circumstance: A publisher
proposed to the supposed adherents of this "school" (my friends
and colleagues Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey H. Hart-
man, J. Hillis Miller, and myself) to present what was called
their "method," their project, or their axioms in a common
volume and using an example of their choice. In short, an
explanation of their own work! With varying degrees of convic-
tion, no doubt, but a sufficiently shared one, we felt we had to
accept the offer as a wager. So as to accentuate its character of
a gamble or a wager, we then decided to adopt a very artificial
 "Living On-Border Lines" 255

rule for ourselves (it was especially so for me, obviously) which
was to treat Shelley's great poem, The Triumph of Life.*
Derrida takes up this wager in an altogether novel way. Once again,
his text splits the page in two, this time horizontally: in the upper
band, the main text pursues the complex senses of survival or living
on of literature; in the lower band, a long running "note to the
translator" for a text that was written to be translated. The note,
called "Journal de bord" (shipboard journal, translated as "Border
Lines") and dated like a journal, not only poses questions of transla-
tion but reflects on the institutional resistances to it and to decon-
structive thinking. This resistance may be located in the comple-
mentary beliefs that a text (1) has identifiable limits or borders and
(2) exists in a stable system of reference to other texts of "informa-
tion" (its "context") which, ideally at least, can be fully represented,
for example through a scholarly apparatus of notes. "Border Lines"
challenges these two notions by overflowing at every opportunity
the possibilities of complete reference. What is thus staged is the
question of the relation between texts once their limits or borders
can no longer be rigorously determined. As in "The Double Session,"
Derrida shows how the writing we call "literary," that is, writing
that is not on trial in the tribunal of truth, requires to be read at
once as referring only to itself and as referring to another writing. It
is a simulacrum, "reference without referent."
This doubled structure is displayed or deployed in a startling way
in the upper text, "Living On." There Derrida reads two short narra-
tives by Maurice Blanchot, La Folie du joui (The Madness of the
Day) and L'Arret de mort (Death Sentence), as, in effect, "transla-
tions" of Shelley's The Triumph of Life. Although we cannot begin
to summarize this reading here, the following excerpt, from the
beginning of the text, can illustrate some of what is at stake for the
institutions of reading when the borders of texts are no longer strictly
determinable.
Derrida has written elsewhere extensively on Maurice Blanchot,
whose recits he has described as having a very powerful effect on his
own thinking about writing. Along with "Living On: Border Lines,"
these essays ("Pas," "The Law of Genre," "Title-to be specified")
have been collected in the volume Parage:;; [1986J.

• Parages [ 1986], p. uB.

 Living On: Border Lines

[ .... ]
If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge. The question
of the text, as it has been elaborated and transformed in the last
dozen or so years, has not merely "touched" "shore," le bard
(scandalously tampering, changing, as in Mallarme's declaration,
"On a touche au vers"), all tpose boundaries that form the run-
ning border of what used to be called a text, of what we once
thought this word could identify, i.e., the supposed end and be-
ginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins,
the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so
forth. What has happened, if it has happened, is a sort of overrun
[debordement] that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and
forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion

[ .... ] I wish to pose the question of the bard, the edge, the border,
and the bard de mer, the shore. [These "Border Lines," in French,
are entitled "Journal de bord"-usually translated "shipboard jour-
nal," but here also "journal on bard"] (The Triumph of Life was
written in the sea, at its edge, between land and sea, but that doesn't
matter.) The question of the borderline precedes, as it were, the
determination of all the dividing lines that I have just mentioned:
between a fantasy and a "reality," an event and a nonevent, a fiction
and a reality, one corpus and another, and so forth. Here, from week
to week in this pocket-calendar or these minutes [proces-verbal], I
 "Living On-Border Lines" 257

of a "text," of what I still call a "text," for strategic reasons, in

part-a "text" that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of
writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a
differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to
something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the
text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far (not submerging
or drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather
making them more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes
and lines)-all the limits, everything that was to be set up in
opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real, history,
and what not, every field of reference-to body or mind, con-
scious or unconscious, politics, economics, and so forth). What-
ever the (demonstrated) necessity of such an overrun, such a de-
bordement, it still will have come as a shock, producing endless
efforts to dam up, resist, rebuild the old partitions, to blame what
could no longer be thought without confusion, to blame differ-
ence as wrongful confusion! All this has taken place in nonread-
ing, with no work on what was thus being demonstrated, with
no realization that it was never our wish to extend the reassuring
notion of the text to a whole extra textual realm and to transform
the world into a library by doing away with all boundaries, all
framework, all sharp edges (all aretes: this is the word that I am
speaking of tonight), but that we sought rather to work out the
theoretical and practical system of these margins, these borders,
once more, from the ground up. I shall not go into detail. Docu-
mentation of all this is readily available to anyone committed to
breaking down the various structures of resistance, his own resis-

shall perhaps endeavor to create an effect of superimposing, of super-

imprinting one text on the other. Now, each of the two "triumphs"
writes (on fsurj) textural superimprinting. What about this "on," this
"sur," and its surface? An effect of superimposing: one procession is
superimposed on the other, accompanying it without accompanying
it (Blanchot, Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas). This operation would
never be considered legitimate on the part of a teacher, who must
give his references and tell what he's talking about, giving it its
recognizable title. You can't give a course on Shelley without ever
mentioning him, pretending to deal with Blanchot, and more than a
258 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

tance as such or as primarily the ramparts that bolster a system

(be it theoretical, cultural, institutional, political, or whatever).
What are the borderlines of a text? How do they come about? I
shall not approach the question frontally, in the most general
way. I prefer, within the limits that we have here, a more indi-
rect, narrower channel, one that is more concrete as well: at the
edge of the narrative, of the text as a narrative. The word is recit,
a story, a narrative, and not narration, narration. The reworking
of a textual problematic has affected this aspect of the text as
narrative (the narrative of an event, the event of narrative, the
narrative as the structure of an event) by placing it in the fore-
ground.
(I note parenthetically that The Triumph of Life, which it is
not my intention to discuss here, belongs in many ways to the
category of the recit, in the disappearance or overrun that takes
place the moment we wish to close its case after citing it, calling
it forth, commanding it to appear.
r. There is the recit of double affirmation, as analyzed in "Pas"
[in Parages (1986)], the "yes, yes" that must be cited, must recite
itself to bring about the alliance [alliance, also "wedding band")
of affirmation with itself, to bring about its ring. It remains to be
seen whether the double affirmation is triumphant, whether the
triumph is affirmative or a paradoxical phase in the work of
mourning.
2. There is the double narrative, the narrative of the vision
enclosed in the general narrative carried on by the same narrator.
The line that separates the enclosed narrative from the other-

few others. And your transitions have to he readable, that is, in

accordance with criteria of readability very firmly established, and
long since. At the beginning of L'arret de mort, the superimposing
of the two "images," the image of Christ and, "behind the figure of
Christ," Veronica, "the features of a woman's face-extremely beau-
tiful, even magnificent"-this superimposing is readable "on the
wall of [a doctor's] office" and on a "photograph." Inscription and
reimprinting, reimpression, of light in both texts. La folie du jour.
The course of the sun, day, year, anniversary, double revolution, the
palindrome and the anagrammatic version or reversion of ecrit, recit,
 "Living On-Border Lines" 259

And then a Vision on my brain was rolled.

- marks the upper edge of a space that will never be closed.

What is the topos of the "I" who quotes himself in a narrative [of
a dream, a vision, or a hallucination) within a narrative, includ-
ing, in addition to all his ghosts, his hallucinations of ghosts,
still other visions within visions [e.g., "a new Vision never seen
before")? What is his topos when he quotes, in the present, a
past question formulated in another sort of present [" ... 'Then,
what is Life?' I said.... "] and which he narrates as something
that presented itself in a vision, and so on?
3. There is also the ironic, antithetical, underlying re-citation
of the "triumphs of death" that adds another level of coding to
the poem. What are we doing when, to practice a "genre," we
quote a genre, represent it, stage it, expose its generic law, ana-
lyze it practically? Are we still practicing the genre? Does the
"work" still belong to the genre it re-cites? But inversely, how
could we make a genre work without referring to it [quasi-]quo-
tationally, indicating at some point, "See, this is a work of such-
and-such a genre"? Such an indication does not belong to the
genre and makes the statement of belonging an ironical exercise.
It interrupts the very belonging of which it is a necessary condi-
tion. I must abandon this question for the moment; it's capable

and serie. The series (ecrit, recit, serie, etc.). Note to the translators:
How are you going to translate that, recit for example? Not as
nouvelle, "novella," nor as "short story." Perhaps it will be better to
leave the "French" word recit. It is already hard enough to under-
stand, in Blanchot's text, in French. An essential question for the
translator. The sur, "on," "super-," and so forth, that is my theme
above, also designates the figure of a passage by trans-lation, the
trans- of an Obersetzung. Version !version; also "translation into
one's own language"], transference, and translation. Obertragung.
The simultaneous transgression and reappropriation of a language
260 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

of disrupting more than one system of poetics, more than one

literary pact.)
What is a narrative-this thing that we call a narrative? Does
it take place? Where and when? What might the taking-place or
the event of a narrative be?
I hasten to say that it is not my intention here, nor do I claim,
nor do I have the means, to answer these questions. At most, in
repeating them, I would like to begin a minute displacement, the
most discreet of transformations: I suggest, for example, that we
replace what might be called the question of narrative ("What is
a narrative?") with the demand for narrative. When I say de-
mande I mean something closer to the English "demand" than
to a mere request: inquisitorial insistence, an order, a petition.
To know (before we know) what narrative is, the narrativity of
narrative, we should perhaps first recount, return to the scene of
one origin of narrative, to the narrative of one origin of narrative
(will that still be a narrative?), to that scene that mobilizes var-
ious forces, or if you prefer various agencies or "subjects," some
of which demand the narrative of the other, seek to extort it
from him, like a secret-less secret, something that they call the
truth about what has taken place: "Tell us exactly what hap-
pened." The narrative must have begun with this demand, but
will we still call the mise en scene [representation, staging! of
this demand a narrative? And will we even still call it mise en
"scene," since that origin concerns the eyes [touche aux yeuxj
(as we shall see), the origin of visibility, the origin of origin, the
birth of what, as we say in French, "sees the light of day" [voit le

[languej, its law, its economy? How will you translate langue! Let
us suppose then that here, at the foot of the other text, I address a
translatable message, in the style of a telegram, to the translators of
every country. Who is to say in what language, exactly what lan-
guage, if we assume that the translation has been prepared, the above
text will appear? It is not untranslatable, but, without being opaque,
it presents at every turn, I know, something to stop [arreterj the
translation: it forces the translator to transform the language into
which he is translating or the "receiver medium," to deform the
initial contract, itself in constant deformation, in the language of the
 "Living On-Border Lines" 261

;our, is born] when the present leads to presence, presentation, or

representation? "Oh, I see the daylight [;e vois le ;our], oh God,"
says a voice in La folie du ;our, a "narrative" [recit"] (?) by
Maurice Blanchot. [.... ]
What is judiciously called the question-of-narrative covers,
with a certain modesty, a demand for narrative, a violent putting-
to-the question, an instrument of torture working to wring the
narrative out of one as if it were a terrible secret, in ways that
can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for
making (and even letting) one talk that are unsurpassed in neu-
trality and politeness, that are most respectfully medical, psychi-
atric, and even psychoanalytic. For reasons that should be ob-
vious by now, I shall not say that Blanchot offers a representation,
a mise en scene, of this demand for narrative, in La folie du ;our:
it would be better to say that it is there to be read, "to the point
of delireium, /1 as it throws the reader off the track. For the same
reasons, I do not know whether the text can be classified as being
of the genre (Genette: the mode [mode; mood of a verbJ) "recit,"
a word that Blanchot has repeatedly insisted upon and contested,
reclaimed and rejected, set down and lthen) erased, and so forth.
In addition to these general reasons there is a singular character-
istic, involving precisely the linternal and external) boundaries
or edges of this text. The boundary from which we believe we
approach La folie du ;our, its "first word" !"I"), opens with a
paragraph that affirms a sort of triumph of life at the edge of
death. The triumph must be excessive lin accordance with the
"boundlessness" of hubris) and very close to what it triumphs

other. I anticipated this difficulty of translation, if only up to a

certain point, but I did not calculate it or deliberately increase it. I
just did nothing to avoid it. On the contrary, I shall try here, in this
short steno-telegraphic band, for the greatest translatability possible.
Such will be the proposed contract. For the problems that I wished
to formalize above all have an irreducible relationship to the enigma,
or in other words the recit, of translation. Above all, by making
manifest the limits of the prevalent concept of translation (I do not
say of translatability in general), we touch on multiple problems said
to be of "method," of reading and teaching. The line that I seek to
262 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

over. This paragraph begins a narrative, it seems, but does not

yet recount anything. The narrator introduces himself in that
simplest of performances, an "I am," or more precisely an "I am
neither . . . nor ... , " which immediately removes the perfor-
mance from presence. The end of this paragraph notes especially
the double excess of every triumph of life: i.e., the excessive
double affirmation, of triumphant life, of death which triumphs
over life.
I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known joys. That
is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the
greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (per-
haps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am
not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and
often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the
remarkable truth, which I am certain of: I feel boundless
pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in
dying.
A number of signs make it possible to recognize a man in the
first-person speaker. But in the double affirmation seen (re-
marked upon) in the syntax of triumph as triomphe-de, triumph
of and triumph over, the narrator comes close to seeing a trait
that is particularly feminine, a trait of feminine beauty, even.
Men want to escape death, strange animals that they are.
And some of them cry out "Die, die" because they want to
escape life. "What a life. I'll kill myself. I'll give in." That is
pitiful and strange; it is a mistake.

recognize within translatability, between two translations, one gov-

erned by the classical model of transportable univocality or of for-
malizable polysemia, and the other, which goes over into dissemi-
nation-this line also passes between the critical and the
deconstructive. A politico-institutional problem of the university:
it, like all teaching in its traditional form, and perhaps all teaching
whatever, has as its ideal, with exhaustive translatability, the efface-
ment of language {la langue]. The deconstruction of a pedagogical
institution and all that it implies. What this institution cannot bear,
is for anyone to tamper with {toucher ii; also "touch," "change,"
 "living On-Border Lines" 263

Yet I have met people who have never told life to be quiet
or told death to go away-almost always women, beautiful
creatures.
Later, on the next-to-last page, we learn that this opening
paragraph lthe upper edge of La folie .. . ) corresponds in its con-
tent and form, if not in its occurrence, to the beginning of the
account frecit] that the narrator tries to take up faborder] in
response to the demands of his interrogators. This creates an
exceedingly strange space: what appeared to be the beginning and
the upper edge of a discourse will have been merely part of a
narrative that forms a part of the discourse in that it recounts
how an attempt was made-in vain!-to force a narrative out of
the narrator. The starting edge will have been the quotation lat
first not recognizable as such) of a narrative fragment that in tum
will merely be quoting its quotation. For all these quotations,
quotations of requotations with no original performance, there is
no speech act not already the iteration of another, no circle and
no quotation marks to reassure us about the identity, opposition,
or distinction of speech events. The part is always greater than
the whole, the edge of the set fensemble] is a fold fpli] in the set
("'Happy those for whom the fold/ Of .. .'"), but as La folie du
four unfolds, explains itself fs'explique] without ever giving up
its "fold" to another discourse not already its own, it is better if I
quote. If I quote, for example, these last two pages:

"concern himself with"! language, meaning both the national lan-

guage and, paradoxically, an ideal of translatability that neutralizes
this national language. Nationalism and universalism. What this
institution cannot bear is a transformation that leaves intact neither
of these two complementary poles. It can bear more readily the most
apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of "content," if only that
content does not touch the borders of language [la langue] and of all
the juridico-political contracts that it guarantees. It is this "intolera-
ble" something that concerns me here. It is related in an essential
way to that which, as it is written above, brings out the limits of the
264 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

I had been asked, "Tell us exactly what happened." A story

[Un recit}t I began: I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have
known joys. That is saying too little. I told them the whole
story [histoire}, and they listened with interest, it seems
to me, at least in the beginning. But the end was a surprise
to all of us. "That was the beginning," they said. "Now
get down to the fads." How so? The story [recit} was fin-
ished!
I was forced to realize that I was not capable of forming a
story out of these events. I had lost the thread of the narra-
tive [l'histoirej: that happens in a good many illnesses. But
this explanation only made them more insistent. Then I
noticed for the first time that there were two of them and
that this departure from the traditional method, even though
it was explained by the fact that one of them was an eye
doctor, the other a specialist in mental illness, kept making
our conversation seem like an authoritarian interrogation
that was being supervised and guided by a strict set of rules.
Of course neither of them was the police chief. But because
there were two of them, there were three, and this third was
firmly convinced, I am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks
and argues with distinction, is always capable of recounting
facts that he remembers.
A story [recit}? No. No stories [pas de recit}, never again.
By definition, there is no end to a discourse that would seek to
describe the invaginated structure of La folie du ;our. Invagina-
tion is the inward refolding of la gaine !sheath, girdle], the in-

concept of translation on which the university is built, particularly

when it makes the teaching of language, even literatures, and even
"comparative literature," its principal theme. If questions of method
(here, a translators' note: I have published a text that is untranslata-
ble, starting with its title, "Pas," and in "The Double Session,"
referring to "dissemination in the refolding [replij of the hymen":
"Pas de methode ["no method," but also a "methodical step"] for it:
no path comes back in its circle to a first step, none proceeds from
the simple to the complex, none leads from a beginning to an end.
['A book neither begins nor ends; at most it pretends to.' ... 'Every
 "Living On-Border Lines" 265

verted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form

where the outside then opens a pocket. Such an invagination is
possible from the first trace on. This is why there is no "first"
trace. We have just seen, on the basis of this example refined to
the point of madness, how "the whole story [to which] they
listened" is the one (the same but another at the same time) that,
like La folie du ;our, begins "I am neither learned nor ignorant .
. . ." But this "whole story," which corresponds to the totality
of the "book," is also only a part of the book, the narrative that
is demanded, attempted, impossible, and so forth. Its end, which
comes before the end, does not respond to the request of the
authorities, the authorities who demand an author, an I capable
of organizing a narrative sequence, of remembering and telling
the truth: "exactly what happened," "recounting facts that he
remembers," in other words saying "I" (I am the same as the one
to whom these things happened, and so on, and thereby assuring
the unity or identity of narratee or reader, and so on). Such is the
demand for the story, for narrative, the demand that society, the
law that governs literary and artistic works, medicine, the police,
and so forth, claim to constitute. This demand for truth is itself
recounted and swept along in the endless process of invagination.
Because I cannot pursue this analysis here, I merely situate the
place, the locus, in which double invagination comes about, the
place where the invagination of the upper edge on its outer face
Ithe supposed beginning of La folie du ;our), which is folded back
"inside" to form a pocket and an inner edge, comes to extend
beyond jor encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge, on

method is a fiction.'] Point de methode ["absolutely no method,"

but also "a point of method"]: that doesn't rule out a certain course
to be followed" [Dissemination, p. 271]. The translators will not be
able to translate this pas and this point. Will they have to indicate
that this reminder is to be related to what is called the "unfinished"
quality of Shelley's Triumph and the impossibility of fixing [arreter]
the opening and closing boundaries of L'arret de mart, all problems
treated, in another mode, in the procession above? Will they relate
this untranslatable pas to the double "knot" of double invagination,
a central motif of that text, or, along with its entire semantic family,
266 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

its inner face (the supposed end of La folie du jour), which is

folded back "inside" to form a pocket and an outer edge. Indeed
the "middle" sequence ("I had been asked, 'Tell us exactly what
happened.' A story? I began: I am neither learned nor ignorant. I
have known joys. That is saying too little. I told them the whole
story and they listened with interest, it seems to me, at least in
the beginning. But the end was a surprise to all of us. 'That was
the beginning,' they said. 'Now get down to the facts.' How so?
The story was finished!"), this antepenultimate paragraph, re-
calls, subsumes, quotes without quotation marks the first sen-
tences of La folie du jour (I am neither learned nor ... ), including
in itself the entire book, including itself, but only after anticipat-
ing, by quoting it in advance, the question that will form the
lower edge or the final boundary of La folie du jour-or almost
final, to accentuate the dissymmetry of effects. The question "A
story?", posed as a question in response to the demand (Do they
demand a story, a recit, of me?) in the antepenultimate para-
graph, will be taken up again in the final sequence ("A story? No.
No stories, never again."), but again, just as in the previous
instance, this repetition does not follow (chronologically or logi-
cally) what nevertheless seems to come before it in the first line,
in the immediate linearity of reading. We cannot even speak here
of a future perfect tense, if this still presumes a regular modifica-
tion of the present into its instances of a present in the past, a
present in the present, and a present in the future. In this requo-
tation of the story [re-citation du recit], intensified or reinforced
here by the requotation of the word "recit," it is impossible to

to all the occurrences of "path," "past," "pass" in Shelley's Triumph?)--

if the question of teaching (not only the teaching of literature and
the humanities) runs throughout this book, if my participation is
possible only with supplementary interpretation by the translators
(active, interested, inscribed in a politico-institutional field of drives,
and so forth), if we are not to pass over all these stakes and interests
(what happens in this respect in the universities of the Western
world, in the United States, at Yale, from department to department?
How is one to step in? What is the key here for decoding? What am I
doing here? What are they making me do? How are the boundaries
 "Living On-Border Lines" 267

say which one quotes the other, and above all which one forms
the border of the other. Each includes the other, comprehends
the other, which is to say that neither comprehends the other.
Each "story" (and each occurrence of the word "story," each
"story" in the story) is part of the other, makes the other a part
(of itself), each "story" is at once larger and smaller than itself,
includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, iden-
tifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from
its homonym. Of course, at intervals ranging from two to forty
paragraphs, this structure of crisscross double invagination ("I
am neither learned nor [.... ] A story? I began: I am neither
learned nor[ .... ] The story was finished! [... ]A story? No. No
stories, never again.") never ceases to refold or superpose or ov-
eremploy itself in the meantime, and the description of this
would be interminable. I must content myself for the moment
with underscoring the supplementary aspect of this structure:
the chiasma of this double invagination is always possible, be-
cause of what I have called elsewhere the iterability of the mark.
Now, if we have just seen a strikingly complex example of this
in the case of a recit, a story, using the word "recit," reciting and
requoting both its possibility and its impossibility, double inva-
gination can come about in any text, whether it is narrative in
form or not, whether it is of the genre of mode "recit" or not,
whether it speaks of it or not. Nevertheless-and this is the
aspect that interested me in the beginning-double invagination,
wherever it comes about, has in itself the structure of a narrative
[recit/ in deconstruction. Here the narrative is irreducible. Even

of all these fields, titles, corpora, and so forth, laid out? Here I can
only locate the necessity of all these questions), then we must pause
to consider {on devra s'arreter sur/ translation. It brings the arret of
everything, decides, suspends, and sets in motion ... even in "my"
language, within the presumed unity of what is called the corpus of
a language. 9-16 fanuary 1978. What will remain unreadable for me,
in any case, of this text, not to mention Shelley, of course, and
everything that haunts his language {langue/ and his writing. What
will remain unreadable for me of this text, once it is translated, of
course, still bearing my signature. But even in "my" language, to
268 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

before it "concerns" a text in narrative form, double invagination

constitutes the story of stories, the narrative of narrative, the
narrative of deconstruction in deconstruction: the apparently
outer edge of an enclosure {cl6ture], far from being simple, sim-
ply external and circular, in accordance with the philosophical
representation of philosophy, makes no sign beyond itself, toward
what is utterly other, without becoming double or dual, without
making itself be "represented," refolded, superimposed, re-marked
within the enclosure, at least in what the structure produces as
an effect of interiority. But it is precisely this structure-effect
that is being deconstructed here.
[ .... ]

which it does not belong in a simple way. One never writes either in
one's own language or in a foreign language. Derive all the conse-
quences of this: they involve each element, each term of the preced-
ing sentence. [ .... ]
-Translated by fames Hulbert
 TWELVE

"Letter to a Japanese Friend"

("Lettre a un ami japonals" in Psyche:

Inventions de l'autre (1987])

This brief text, presented in extenso, needs little introduction. It

addresses quite directly the question of translation in the guise of a
long gloss on the word deconstruction as prolegomenon to its trans-
lation into Japanese. With the simple, descriptive title, however,
Derrida also cites a certain tradition of the Western philosopher
addressing himself to a question from the East, for example Male-
branche's Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a
Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God, or Heideg-
ger's "Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer" in
On the Way to Language.
 Letter to a Japanese Friend

IO July 1983
Dear Professor Izutsu, 1
At our last meeting I promised you some schematic and pre-
liminary reflections on the word "deconstruction." What we dis-
cussed were prolegomena to a possible translation of this word
into Japanese, one which would at least try to avoid, if possible,
a negative determination of its significations or connotations.
The question would be therefore what deconstruction is not, or
rather ought not to be. I underline these words "possible" and
"ought." For if the difficulties of translation can be anticipated
(and the question of deconstruction is also through and through
the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of
the conceptual corpus of so-called Western metaphysics), one
should not begin by naively believing that the word "deconstruc-
tion" corresponds in French to some clear and univocal signifi-
cation. There is already in "my" language a serious /sombre/
problem of translation between what here or there can be envis-
aged for the word and the usage itself, the reserves of the word.
And it is already clear that even in French, things change from
one context to another. More so in the German, English, and
especially American contexts, where the same word is already
attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emo-
tional or affective values. Their analysis would be interesting and
warrants a study of its own.
When I choose this word, or when it imposed itself upon me
-I think it was in Of Grammatology-1 little thought it would
be credited with such a central role in the discourse that inter-
ested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate
and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or
 "Letter to a fapanese Friend" 271

Abbau. Each signified in this context an operation bearing on the

structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts
of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French "destruc-
tion" too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduc-
tion much closer perhaps to Nietzschean "demolition" than to
the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I
proposed. So I ruled that out. I remember having looked to see if
the word "deconstruction" (which came to me it seemed quite
spontaneously) was good French. I found it in the Littre: The
grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses /porteesj were found
bound up with a "mechanical" sense /portee "machinique"/. This
association appeared very fortunate and fortunately adapted to
what I wanted at least to suggest. Perhaps I could cite some of
the entries from the Littre. "Deconstruction: action of decon-
structing. Grammatical term. Disarranging the construction of
words in a sentence. 'Of deconstruction, common way of saying
construction,' Lemare, De la maniere d'apprendre Jes langues,
chap. I?, in Cours de langue Latine. Deconstruire. I. To disas-
semble the parts of a whole. To deconstruct a machine to trans-
port it elsewhere. 2. Grammatical term ... To deconstruct verse,
rendering it, by the suppression of meter, similar to prose. Abso-
lutely. ('In the system of prenotional sentences, one also starts
with translation and one of its advantages is never needing to
deconstruct,' Lemare, ibid., 3. Se deconstruire (to deconstruct it-
self] ... to lose its construction. 'Modem scholarship has shown
us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its
own state of perfection is deconstructed /s'est deconstruite/ and
altered from within itself according to the single law of change,
natural to the human mind,' Villemain, Preface du Dictionnaire
de l'Academie."
Naturally it will be necessary to translate all of this into
Japanese but that only postpones the problem. It goes without
saying that if all the significations enumerated by the Littre
interested me because of their affinity with what I "meant"
/"voulais-dire"/, they concerned, metaphorically, so to say, only
models or regions of meaning and not the totality of what decon-
struction aspires to at its most ambitious. This is not limited to
a linguistico-grammatical model, nor even a semantic model, let
alone a mechanical model. These models themselves ought to be
272 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

submitted to a deconstructive questioning. It is true then that

these "models" have been behind a number of misunderstand-
ings about the concept and word of "deconstruction" because of
the temptation to reduce it to these models.
It must also be said that the word was rarely used and was
largely unknown in France. It had to be reconstructed in some
way, and its use value had been determined by the discourse that
was then being attempted around and on the basis of Of Gram-
matology. It is to this use value that I am now going to try to
give some precision and not some primitive meaning or etymol-
ogy sheltered from or outside of any contextual strategy.
A few more words on the subject of "the context." At that
time structuralism was dominant. "Deconstruction" seemed to
be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain
attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply
ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct
was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that
assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it
was also an antistructuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part
on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed,
desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, "logocentric, 11
"phonocentric" -structuralism being especially at that time
dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural
linguistics that was also called Saussurian-socio-institutional,
political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical).
This is why, especially in the United States, the motif of decon-
struction has been associated with "poststructuralism" (a word
unknown in France until its "return" from the United States).
But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures,
in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist move-
ment it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather
than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an
"ensemble" was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end.
However, the negative appearance was and remains much more
difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammar of the word
(de-), even though it can designate a genealogical restoration
[remonter] rather than a demolition. That is why this word, at
least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what
word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse. It is
 "Letter to a fapanese Friend" 273

difficult to effect it afterward because, in the work of deconstruc-

tion, I have had to, as I have to here, multiply the cautionary
indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical con-
cepts, while reaffirming the necessity of returning to them, at
least under erasure. Hence, this has been called, precipitously, a
type of negative theology (this was neither true nor false but I
shall not enter into the debate here). 2
All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is
neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have
to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular
because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward
a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values,
like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to
deconstruction. No more is it a critique, in a general sense or in
a Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or of krisis !decision,
choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of
transcendental critique, one of the essential "themes" or "ob-
jects" of deconstruction.
I would say the same about method. Deconstruction is not a
method and cannot be transformed into one. Especially if the
technical and procedural significations of the words are stressed.
It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially
in the United States) the technical and methodological "meta-
phor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word "decon-
struction" has been able to seduce or lead astray. Hence the
debate that has developed in these circles: Can deconstruction
become a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it
thus let itself be reappropriated and domesticated by academic
institutions?
It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be re-
duced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules
and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each
deconstructive "event" remains singular or, in any case, as close
as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must
also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an
operation. Not only because there would be something "patient"
or "passive" about it las Blanchot says, more passive than passiv-
ity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only
because it does not return to an individual or collective subject
274 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a

theme, etc. Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does
not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a
subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs it-self. It can be
deconstructed. [<;;a se deconstruit.} The "it" [<;a] is not here an
impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity.
It is in deconstruction lthe Littre says, "to deconstruct it-self fse
deconstruirej ... to lose its construction"). And the "se" of "se
deconstruire," which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a
consciousness, bears the whole enigma. I recognize, my dear
friend, that in trying to make a word clearer so as to assist its
translation, I am only thereby increasing the difficulties: "the
impossible task of the translator" !Benjamin). This too is what is
meant by "deconstructs."
If deconstruction takes place everywhere it {<;a] takes place,
where there is something jand is not therefore limited to mean-
ing or to the text in the current and bookish sense of the word),
we still have to think through what is happening in our world, in
modernity, at the time when deconstruction is becoming a motif,
with its word, its privileged themes, its mobile strategy, etc. I
have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All
my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable ques-
tion. They are modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative
interpretations. I would not even dare to say, following a Heideg-
gerian schema, that we are in an "epoch" of being-in-deconstruc-
tion, of a being-in-deconstruction that would manifest or dissi-
mulate itself at one and the same time in other "epochs." This
thought of "epochs" and especially that of a gathering of the
destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its disper-
sions {Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing.
To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining
and therefore also of translating the word "deconstruction" stems
from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all
the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations,
which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition
or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructible,
directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word, the very
unity of the word deconstruction, as for every word. Of Gram-
matology questioned the unity "word" and all the privileges with
 "Letter to a Japanese Friend" 275

which it was credited, especially in its nominal form. It is there-

fore only a discourse or rather a writing that can make up for the
incapacity of the word to be equal to a "thought." All sentences
of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" a
priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false.
As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is
called in my texts "deconstruction" is precisely the delimiting of
ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S
is P.
The word "deconstruction," like all other words, acquires its
value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitu-
tions, in what is too blithely called a "context." For me, for what
I have tried and still try to write, the word has interest only
within a certain context, where it replaces and lets itself be
determined by such other words as "ecriture," "trace," "differ-
ance," "supplement," "hymen," "pharmakon," "marge," "en-
tame," "parergon," etc. 3 By definition, the list can never be closed,
and I have cited only names, which is inadequate and done only
for reasons of economy. In fact, I should have cited the sentences
and the interlinking of sentences which in their tum determine
these names in some of my texts.
What deconstruction is not? everything of course!
What is deconstruction? nothing of course!
I do not think, for all these reasons, that it is a good word [un
bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau]. It has definitely been
of service in a highly determined situation. In order to know
what has been imposed upon it in a chain of possible substitu-
tions, despite its essential imperfection, this "highly determined
situation" will need to be analyzed and deconstructed. This is
difficult and I am not going to do it here.
One final word to conclude this letter, which is already too
long. I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived
event in relation to an original language or text. And as "decon-
struction" is a word, as I have just said, that is essentially re-
placeable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done
from one language to another. The chance, first of all the chance
of !the) "deconstruction," would be that another word !the same
word and an other) can be found in Japanese to say the same
thing !the same and an other), to speak of deconstruction, and to
276 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a word

which will also be more beautiful.
When I speak of this writing of the other which will be more
beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the same
risk and chance as the poem. How to translate
"poem"? a "poem"? ...
With my best wishes,
Jacques Derrida

-Translated by David Wood and Andrew Ben;amin

NOTES

1. Toshiko Izutsu is a well-known Japanese Islamologist.-Eo.

2. Derrida enters into this question at length in "How to Avoid Speaking"
[1987J.
3. Derrida has often exploited the contradictory semantic possibilities of
all these terms: "entame," for example, comes from a verb that means to
incise, to cut or bite into, and thus also to begin something; "parergon" is
that which is neither simply inside nor outside the work or "ergon," like the
frame of a painting. Derrida takes the term as the title of his essay on Kant's
Third Critique in The Truth in Painting [1978).-Eo.
 THIRTEEN

From "Restitutions of the Truth In Pointing" in

The Truth in Painting {"Restitutions: De la verite en

polnture" in La Verlte en peinture [1978])

More than one language is put in play in this text and in more than
one sense. First, it is a "polylogue" for an unspecified number of
voices; second, its object is the altogether other "language" of paint-
ing, specifically the idiom of Van Gogh; third, it concerns an ex-
change (a "correspondence") between two apparently disparate points
of view regarding a painting of Van Gogh's: that of the eminent
American art historian Meyer Schapiro and that of the German
thinker Martin Heidegger whose Origin of the Work of Art (1935)
makes reference to one of Van Gogh's paintings of shoes.
Whose shoes are they? While Schapiro and Heidegger disagree
over their attribution, the colloquy of Derrida and his interlocutors
finds a secret correspondence beneath the overt disagreement: to-
gether, the two great professors attribute or restore the shoes to some
owner, some subject (to Van Gogh himself or to a peasant). The
gesture of restitution is essentially the same even though a great gulf
divides the Heideggerian meditation on the origin of the work of art
from Schapiro's historicism. From out of this gulf arise specters or
ghosts of a recent German past, one that left mountains of aban-
doned shoes all over the European landscape. The discussants take
up the notion of restitution (to the owner, to the artist, to the
victims, to the past) with a certain detachment. Indeed, it is the
detachability of the work from any context, all the ways in which
278 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

the painted shoes are not tied up with or tied down to any subject,
that impels this polylogue, for more than a hundred pages, in a back
and forth movement, like laces crossing over the tongue of shoes. In
the process, Derrida does not so much fill Van Gogh's shoes with his
words as restore to words their condition of detachable things, aban-
doned, unlaced shoes. That condition lends itself to a range of tonal
variations: from gay abandon to stark analysis to an almost sinister
foreboding. No summary could do justice to all these crossings, but
the following excerpts, from the first thirty-five pages, can give at
least some notion of the polytonality of such a text.
"Restitutions" is the final essay of The Truth in Painting, a col-
lection which brings together two other texts on the plastic arts (the
works of Valerio Adami and Titus Carmel) as well as a long essay on
Kant's Third Critique ("Parergon").
 Restitutions of the Truth In Pointing [pointure]

for f. C. ..... szte;n

POINTURE (Latin punctura), sb. fem. Old synonym of prick.

Term in printing, small iron blade with a point, used to fix the
page to be printed on to the tympan. The hole which It makes
in the paper. Term in shoemaking, glovemaking: number of
stitches in a shoe or glove.
-Llttre

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

-Cezanne

But truth is so dear to me, and so is the seeking to make true,

that indeed I believe, I believe I would still rather be a cobbler
than a musician with colors.
-Van Gogh

--And yet. Who said-I can't remember-"there are no

ghosts in Van Gogh's pictures"? Well, we've got a ghost story on
our hands here all right. But we should wait until there are more
than two of us before we start.

--Before we get going at the double [pour appareilJer], you

mean: we should wait until there are even more than three of us.
The first part of this "polylogue" (for n+l-female-voices) was published in no. 3 of
the journal Macula, as part of a group of articles entitled Martin Heidegger and the Shoes of
Van Gogh. In it, I take my pretext from an essay by Meyer Schapiro published in the same
issue of Macula under the title "The Still Life as a Personal Object." This is a critique of
Heidegger, or more precisely of what he says about Van Gogh's shoes in The Origin of the
Work of Art. Schapiro's article, dedicated to the memory of Kurt Goldstein ("who was the
first," says the author, "to draw my attention to this essay !The Origin of the Work of Art)
presented in a lecture-course in 1935 and 1936"), first appeared in 1968, in The Reach of
Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer.].

TRANSLATORS' NOTE:-Translations from Heidegger take account of Derrida's French

versions. The translators have however consulted the English translation of The Origin of
the Work of Art by Albert Hofstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New
York: Harper & Row, 1971).
280 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

--Here they are. I'll begin. What of shoes? What, shoes?

Whose are the shoes? What are they made of? And even, who are
they? Here they are, the questions, that's all.

--Are they going to remain there, put down, left lying about,
abandoned [delaissees]? Like these apparently empty, unlaced
[delacees] shoes, waiting with a certain detachment for someone
to come, and to say, to come and say what has to be done to tie
them together again?

--What I mean is, there will have been something like the
pairing of a correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and Martin
Heidegger. And that if we take the trouble to formalize a little,
that correspondence would return to the questions I've just laid
down.

- - I t would return to them. Returning will have great scope

[portee] in this debate (and so will scope), if, that is, it's a matter
of knowing to whom and to what certain shoes, and perhaps
shoes in general, return. To whom and to what, in consequence,
one would have to restitute them, render them, to discharge a
debt.

--Why always say of painting that it renders, that it resti-

tutes?

--To discharge a more or less ghostly debt, restitute the

shoes, render them to their rightful owner; if it's a matter of
knowing from where they return, from the city {Schapiro) or the
fields (HeideggerJ, like rats, which I suddenly have an idea they
look like {then who is these rats' Rat Man?), unless it is rather
that they look like snares [pieges a lacets] lying in wait for the
stroller in the middle of the museum (will he or she be able to
avoid being in too much of a hurry and catching his or her feet in
them?); if it's a question of knowing what revenue is still pro-
duced by their out-of-service dereliction, what surplus value is
unleashed by the annulment of their use value: outside the pic-
ture, inside the picture, and, third, as a picture, or to put it very
equivocally, in their painting truth; if it's a question of knowing
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 281

Old Shoes with Laces. National Vincent Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

what ghost's step [quel pas de revenant], city dweller or peasant,

still comes to haunt them ("the ghost of my other I," the other I
of Vincent the signatory, as Schapiro suggests quoting Knut
Hamsun-but Heidegger also does this, elsewhere); if it's a ques-
tion of knowing whether the shoes in question are haunted by
some ghost or are ghosting/returning [la revenance] itself (but
then what are, who are in truth, and whose and what's, these
things?). In short, what does it all come down to [ya revient a
quoi]? To whom? To whom and to what are we to restitute, to
reattach, to readjust precisely

--to what shoe size exactly, made to measure, adequately

--and where from? How? If at least it's a question of know-

ing, returning will be from long range [d'une longue portee].
What I'm saying is that there will have been a correspondence
between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger.
282 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

One of them says in r 9 3 5: that pair comes back to, belongs to,
amounts to the peasant, and even the peasant woman

--what makes him so sure that they are a pair of shoes?

What is a pair?

--1 don't know yet. In any case, Heidegger has no doubt

about it; it's a pair-of-peasant-shoes lein Paar Bauernschuhe).
And i;;a revient, this indissociable whole, this paired thing, from
the fields and to the peasant, man or even woman. Thus Heideg-
ger does not answer one question, he is sure of the thing before
any other question. So it seems. The other one, not agreeing at
all, says after mature reflection, thirty-three years later, exhibit-
ing the juridical exhibits !but without asking himself any ques-
tions beyond this and without asking any other question): no,
there's been an error and a projection, if not deception and per-
jury, i;;a revient, this pair, from the city

--what makes him so sure that it's a pair of shoes? What is

a pair, in this case? Or in the case of gloves and other things like
that?

- - I don't know yet. In any case, Schapiro has no doubts

about this and lets none show. And according to him, i;;a revient,
this pair, from the city, to some city dweller and even to a
particular "man of the town and city," to the picture's signatory,
to Vincent, bearer of the name Van Gogh as well as of the shoes
which thus seem to complete/complement him, himself or his
first name, just when he takes them back, with a "they're mine"
["it's coming back to me": i;;a me revient], these convex objects
which he has pulled off his feet

--or these hollow objects from which he has withdrawn

himself.

--It's only just beginning but already one has the impression
that the pair in question, if it is a pair, might well not come back
to anyone. The two things might then exasperate, even if they
were not made in order to disappoint, the desire for attribution,
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 283

for reattribution with surplus value, for restitution with all the
profit of a retribution. Defying the tribute, they might well be
made in order to remain-there.

--But what does remain mean in this case?

--Let us posit as an axiom that the desire for attribution is

a desire for appropriation. In matters of art as it is everywhere
else. To say: this (this painting or these shoes) is due to [revient
a] X, comes down to [revient a] saying: it is due to me, via the
detour of the "it is due to (a) me." Not only: it is properly due to
such-and-such, man or woman, to the male or female wearer
("Die Biiuerin auf dem Acker triigt die Schuhe .... Die Biiuerin
dagegen triigt einfach die Schuhe," says the one in 1935, "They
are clearly pictures of the artist's own shoes, not the shoes of a
peasant," replies the other in 1968, my emphasis), but it is prop-
erly due to me, via a short detour: the identification, among
many other identifications, of Heidegger with the peasant and
Schapiro with the city dweller, of the former with the rooted and
the sedentary, the latter with the uprooted emigrant. A demon-
stration to be followed up, for let us have no doubt about this, in
this restitution trial, it's also a question of the shoes, or even the
clogs, and going only a little further back for the moment, of the
feet of two illustrious Western professors, neither more nor less.

--It's certainly a question of feet and of many other things,

always supposing that feet are something, and something identi-
fiable with itself. Without even looking elsewhere or further
back, restitution reestablishes in rights or property by placing the
subject upright again, in its stance, in its institution. "The erect
body," writes Schapiro.

--Let us then consider the shoes as an institute, a monu-

ment. There is nothing natural in this product. In the analysis of
this example, Heidegger is interested in the product (Zeug). (As a
convenient simplification, let us retain the translation of Zeug as
"product." It is used in the (French) translation of Holzwege, for
the translation of The Origin of the Work of Art. Zeug, as we
must specify and henceforth remember, is doubtless a "product,"
284 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

an artifact, but also a utensil, a generally useful product, whence

Heidegger's first question on "usefulness.") Speaking of this arti-
fact, the one says, before even asking himself or posing any other
question: this pair is due to the one (male or female). To the
other, replies the other, proof in hand but without further ado,
and the one does not amount to the same thing as [ne revient pas
a] the other. But in the two attributions it does perhaps amount
to the same thing via a short detour, does perhaps come down to
a subject who says me, to an identification.

--And these shoes concern them [Jes regardent: literally,

"look at them"]. They concern us. Their detachment is obvious.
Unlaced, abandoned, detached from the subject (wearer, holder
or owner, or even author-signatory) and detached/untied in them-
selves (the laces are untied)

--detached from one another even if they are a pair, but

with a supplement of detachment on the hypothesis that they
don't form a pair. For where do they both-I mean Schapiro on
one side, Heidegger on the other-get their certainty that it's a
question here of a pair of shoes? What is a pair in this case? Are
you going to make my question disappear? Is it in order not to
hear it that you're speeding up the exchange of these voices, of
these unequal tirades? Your stanzas disappear more or less rap-
idly, simultaneously intercut and interlaced, held together at the
very crossing point of their interruptions. Caesuras that are only
apparent, you won't deny it, and a purely faked multiplicity.
Your periods remain without enumerable origin, without desti-
nation, but they have authority in common. And you keep me at
a distance, me and my request, measuredly, I'm being avoided
like a catastrophe. But inevitably I insist: what is a pair in this
case?

--detached in any case, they concern us, look at us, mouth

agape, that is, mute, making or letting us chatter on, dumbstruck
before those who make them speak ("Dieses hat gesprochen,"
says one of the two great interlocutors) and who in reality are
made to speak by them. They become as if sensitive to the comic
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 285

aspect of the thing, sensitive to a point of imperturbably re-

strained hilarity. Faced with a procedure ldemarche] that is so
sure of itself, that cannot in its certainty be dismantled, the
thing, pair or not, laughs.

--We should return to the thing itself. And I don't know yet
where to start from. I don't know if it must be talked or written
about. Producing a discourse, making a speech on the subject of
it, on the subject of anything at all, is perhaps the first thing to
avoid. I've been asked for a discourse. They've put a picture (but
which one exactly?) and two texts under my nose. I've just read,
for the first time, "The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on
Heidegger and Van Gogh." And reread, once again, Der Ursprung
des Kunstwerkes. I won't here write the chronicle of my previous
readings. I'll retain from them only this, in order to get going. I
have always been convinced of the strong necessity of Heideg-
ger's questioning, even if it repeats here, in the worst as well as
the best sense of the word, the traditional philosophy of art. And
convinced of its necessity, perhaps, to the very extent that it does
this. But each time I've seen the celebrated passage on "a famous
picture by Van Gogh" as a moment of pathetic collapse, derisory,
and symptomatic, significant.

--Significant of what?

--No hasty step here, no hurrying pace toward the answer.

Hurrying along [la precipitation du pas] 1 is perhaps what no one
has ever been able to avoid when faced with the provocation of
this "famous picture." This collapse interests me. Schapiro also
detects it in his own way (which is also that of a detective) and
his analysis interests me thereby, even if it does not satisfy me.
In order to answer the question of what such a collapse signifies,
will we have to reduce it to a dispute over the attribution of the
shoes? Will it be necessary, in painting or in reality, to fight over
the shoes? Necessary to ask oneself only: who(se) are they? I
hadn't thought of this but I now find myself imagining that,
despite the apparent poverty of this quarrel over restitution or of
this trafficking in shoes, a certain deal done might well make
286 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

everything pass through it. In its enormity, the problem of the

origin of the work of art might well pass through these lace holes,
through the eyelets in the shoes (in a painting) by Van Gogh. Yes,
why not? But on condition that this treatment, of course, should
not be abandoned to the hands of Martin Heidegger or to the
hands of Meyer Schapiro. I do say "not be abandoned," for we
intend to make use of their hands, too, or even, what's more [au
reste] of their feet.
The choice of the procedure to adopt is difficult. It slides
around. What is certain is that there will have been correspon-
dence between Heidegger and Schapiro. And that there is here
something like a pairing-together in the difference of opinion,
the enigma of a complementary fitting-together of the two sides,
of one edge to the other. But I still don't know where to start
from, whether I must speak or write about it, nor, above all, in
what tone, following what code, with a view to what scene. And
in what rhythm, that of the peasant or that of the city dweller, in
the age of artisanal production or that of industrial technology?
Neither these questions nor these scruples are outside the debate
begun by Heidegger around the work of art.
But do I really want to undertake this procedure?
I shall begin by fixing a certainty that looks axiomatic. Settling
myself in it as though in a place where things appear not to
move, where things no longer slide around, I'll set off from there
(very quickly), having blocked one of my feet in that place, one
of my points, immobile and crouched before the starter's gun.
This place which I begin by occupying slowly, before the race,
can here only be a place of language.
Here it is. Questions about awkward gait (limping or shifty?),
questions of the type: "Where to put one's feet?" "How is it
going to work [marcher]?" "And what if it doesn't work?" "What
happens when it doesn't work (or when you hang up your shoes
or miss them with your feet)?" "When-and for what reason-it
stops working?" "Who is walking?" "With whom?" "With what."
"On whose feet?" "Who is pulling whose leg? [qui fait marcher
qui?]" "Who is making what go? [qui fait marcher quoi?j" "What
is making whom or what work?" etc., all these idiomatic figures
of the question seem to me, right here, to be necessary.
Necessary: it's an attribute.
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 287

--So are the shoes. They're attributed to a subject, tied on

to that subject by an operation the logico-grammatical equivalent
of which is more or less relevant.

--Necessary remains an adjective which is still a little vague,

loose, open, spreading. It would be better to say: question-idioms
the form of which is very fitting. It fits. It adjusts, in a strict,
tight, well-laced fashion, clinging tightly but flexibly, in vocabu-
lary, letter, or figure to the very body of what you here wish to
tum into an object, that is, feet. Both feet, that is of the first
importance.

--But you don't say a pair of feet. You say a pair of shoes or
gloves. What is a pair in this case, and where do they both get the
idea that Van Gogh painted a pair? Nothing proves it.
[ .... I
- - I advance, then: what of shoes when it doesn't work/when
they don't walk? When they are put on one side, remaining for a
greater or lesser period, or even forever, out of use? What do they
mean? What are they worth? More or less? And according to
what economy? What does their surplus (or minus) value signal
toward? What can they be exchanged for? In what sense !whom?
what?) do they faire marcher/ and make speak?
There's the subject, announced.
It returns slowly. But always too quickly-precipitate step/no
hurry [pas de precipitation]-headfirst to occupy upright, instan-
taneously, the abandoned places; to invest and appropriate the
out-of-use places as though they remained unoccupied only by
accident, and not by structure.
The subject having been announced, let's leave the shoes here
for a while. Something happens, something takes place when
shoes are abandoned, empty, out of use for a while or forever,
apparently detached from the feet, carried or carrying, untied in
themselves if they have laces, the one always untied from the
other but with this supplement of detachment on the hypothesis
that they do not make a pair.
--Yes, let us suppose for example two (laced) right shoes or
two left shoes, They no longer form a pair, but the whole thing
288 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

squints or limps, I don't know, in strange, worrying, perhaps

threatening and slightly diabolical fashion. I sometimes have this
impression with some of Van Gogh's shoes and I wonder whether
Schapiro and Heidegger aren't hastening to make them into a
pair in order to reassure themselves. Prior to all reflection you
reassure yourself with the pair.

--And then you know how to find your bearings in thought. 2

--As soon as these abandoned shoes no longer have any

strict relationship with a subject borne or bearing/wearing, they
become the anonymous, lightened, voided support (but so much
the heavier for being abandoned to its opaque inertia) of an absent
subject whose name returns to haunt the open form.

--But precisely, it is never completely open. It retains a

form, the form of the foot. Informed by the foot, it is a form, it
describes the external surface or the envelope of what is called a
"form, 11 that is, and I quote Littre again, a "piece of wood in the
shape [figure] of a foot which is used to assemble a shoe. 11 This
form or figure of the foot

--Schapiro will see the "face" [la figure] of Van Gogh in

"his" shoes.

--This wooden "form" or figure of the foot replaces the foot,

like a prothesis whose shoe remains ever informed. All these
ghost-limbs come and go, go more or less well, don't always fit.

--So what is one doing when one attributes shoes? When

one gives or restitutes them? What is one doing when one attri-
butes a painting or when one identifies a signatory? And espe-
cially when one goes so far as to attribute painted shoes (in
painting) to the presumed signatory of that painting? Or con-
versely when one contests his ownership of them?

--Perhaps this is where there will have been correspondence

between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger. I've an interest
in its having taken place. Apparently. But we don't yet know
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 289

what this place is and what "to take place" signifies in this case,
where, how, etc.

--The question's just been asked: what is one doing when

one attributes (real) shoes to the presumed signatory of a painting
which one presumes to represent these same shoes? Let's be
more precise: subject-shoes (support destined to bear their wearer
on the ground, of towns or fields, support which would here
figure the first substratum, unless the wearer put them to a use
other than that of walking, in which case the word "use" would,
according to some, run the risk of perversion) but itself the sub-
ject of a canvas which in tum constitutes its subject or framed
support. And it is this double subject (shoes in painting) that the
two litigants want to see restituted to the true subject: the peas-
ant man or woman on the one side, the city-dwelling painter on
the other (a bit more of a subject through being the signatory of
the picture supposed to represent his own shoes, or even himself
in person: all the subjects are here as close as can be to them-
selves, apparently).
Where is the truth of this taking-place? The Origin of the
Work of Art belongs to a great discourse on place and on truth.
Through everything just announced, it can be seen to communi-
cate (without its "author" 's knowing it?) with the question of
fetishism, extended beyond its "political economy" or its "psy-
choanalysis" in the strict sense, or even beyond the simple and
traditional opposition of the fetish with the thing itself.
Everything points to a desire to speak the truth about the
fetish.
[ .... ]
--There are two types of object and the "form" of the shoe
has another privilege: it combines in a system the two types of
object defined by Freud: elongated, solid or firm on one surface,
hollow or concave on the other. It turns inside out

--like a pair of gloves. Van Gogh painted a pair(?) of gloves

jin January 18891 in Arles) and in the note which he devotes to it,
Schapiro again seems to consider them to be "personal objects."
He reappropriates them, hastens to pair them up, and even to
290 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

pair them with the cypresses which appear in the same still life
!"The choice of objects is odd, but we recognize in it Van Gogh's
spirit. In other still lives he has introduced objects that belong to
him (my emphasis-J.D.) in an intimate way-his hat and pipe
and tobacco pouch.... His still lives are often personal subjects,
little outer pieces of the self exposed with less personal but
always significant things. Here the blue gloves, joined like two
hands (my emphasis-J.D.) in a waiting passive mood, are paired
in diagonal symmetry with a branch of cypress, a gesticulating
tree that was deeply poetic to Van Gogh ... the gloves and the
branches belong together ... " (my emphasis-J.D.). 3

--1 suggest that we don't yet risk dealing directly with this
question of fetishism, with the reversibility of gloves, or with
directionality in the pair. For the moment I'm interested in the
correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger.

--We're marking time. We're not even sliding around, we're

floundering, rather, with a slightly indecent complacency. To
what are we to relate this word "correspondence" which keeps
on returning? To this exchange of letters in 196 5?

--1 would be interested rather in a secret correspondence,

obviously: obviously secret, encrypted in the ether of obvious-
ness and truth, too obvious because in this case the cipher re-
mains secret because it is not concealed.
In short, again entrusted to the purveyor of truth, this corre-
spondence is a secret for no one. Its secret ought to be readable
in black and white [a lettre ouverte]. The secret correspondence
could be deciphered right on the level of the public correspon-
dence. It does not take place anywhere else and is not inscribed
elsewhere. Each of them says: I owe you the truth in painting
and I will tell it to you. But the emphasis should be placed on the
debt and on the owe [doit: il doit means "he must," "he ought,"
"he should," and also "he owes"J, the truthless truth of truth.
What do they both owe, and what must they discharge through
this restitution of the shoes, the one striving to return them to
the peasant woman, the other to the painter?
Yes, there was indeed that exchange of letters in 1965. Schap-
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 291

Still Life (basket with oranges and lemons, branches, gloves). Mellon Collec-
tion, Upperville, Virginia.

iro reveals it in "La nature morte," which is how one must

translate into French "The Still Life," which you have just read.
This "Dead Nature," the essay which bears this title, is a homage
rendered, a present made to one dead, a gift dedicated to the
memory of Kurt Goldstein, who had, during his lifetime, earned
Schapiro's gratitude by this gesture at least: having given him
The Origin of the Work of Art" to read l"It was Kurt Goldstein
who first called my attention to this essay ... "). In a certain way,
Schapiro discharges a debt and a duty of friendship by dedicating
his "Dead Nature" to his dead friend. This fact is far from being
indifferent or extrinsic jwe shall return to it), or at least the
extrinsic always intervenes, like the parergon, within the scene.
Remember these facts and dates. Meanwhile, I shall pick out a
few of them drily. Having emigrated when very young, Schapiro
teaches at Columbia !New York) where Goldstein, fleeing Nazi
Germany in 1933 !having been imprisoned there, and then freed
on condition of leaving the country) himself taught from 1936 to
292 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

1940. He arrived there after a painful stay of one year in Amster-

dam, precisely. He wrote The Structure of the Organism there.
These are the very years in which Heidegger was giving his
lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art and his Introduction
to Metaphysics course (the two texts in which he refers to Van
Gogh).
This last act happens, then, in New York, Columbia Univer-
sity, where, unless I'm mistaken, Schapiro was already living and
working when Goldstein arrived to teach from 1936 until his
death, with a break during the war (Harvard and Boston from
1940 to 1945). This last act

--Is it the last?

--At the present date, 4 the last act is in New York, at this
great university institution, Columbia, that has welcomed so
many emigrant professors, but what a trip and what a story, for
almost a century, for these shoes of Van Gogh's. They haven't
moved, they haven't said anything, but how they've made people
walk and talk! Goldstein, the aphasia-man, who died aphasic,
said nothing about them. He simply indicated, pointed out Hei-
degger's text. But it all looks just as if Schapiro, from New York
(where he also delivered Goldstein's funeral oration in 196 5 ), was
disputing possession of the shoes with Heidegger, was taking
them back so as to restitute them, via Amsterdam and Paris (Van
Gogh in Paris) to Van Gogh, but at the same time [du meme
coupj to Goldstein, who had drawn his attention to Heidegger's
hijack. And Heidegger hangs onto them. And when both of them
say, basically, "I owe you the truth" (for they both claim to be
telling the truth, or even the truth of the truth-in painting and
in shoes), they also say: I owe the shoes, I must return them to
their rightful owner, to their proper belonging: to the peasant
man or woman on the one side, to the city-dwelling painter and
signatory of the painting on the other. But to whom in truth?
And who is going to believe that this episode is merely a theoret-
ical or philosophical dispute for the interpretation of a work or
The Work of Art? Or even a quarrel between experts for the
attribution of a picture or a model? In order to restitute them,
Schapiro bitterly disputes possession of the shoes with Heideg-
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 293

ger, with "Professor Heidegger," who is seen then, all in all, to

have tried to put them on his own feet, by peasant-proxy, to put
them back onto his man-of-the-soil feet, with the pathos of the
"call of the earth," of the Feldweg or the Holzwege which, in
1935-36 1 was not foreign to what drove Goldstein to undertake
his long march toward New York, via Amsterdam. There is much
to discharge, to return, to restitute, if not to expiate in all this.
It all looks as though Schapiro, not content with thanking a
dead man for what he gave him to read, was offering to the mem-
ory of his colleague, fellow man and friend, nomad, emigre, city
dweller,

- - a detached part, a severed ear, but detached or severed

from whom?

--the pair taken back, whisked away, or even snatched from

the common enemy, or at any rate the common discourse of the
common enemy. For Schapiro, too, and in the name of the truth,
it is a matter of finding his feet again [reprendre pied], of taking
back [reprendre] the shoes so as to put the right feet back in
them. First of all by alleging that these shoes were those of a
migrant and city dweller, "the artist, by that time a man of town
and city," things later to get dangerously complicated by the fact
that this migrant never stopped uttering the discourse of rural,
artisanal, and peasant ideology. All these great professors will, as
they say, have invested a lot in these shoes which are out of use
in more ways than one. They've piled it on [Ils en ont remis].
Remettre would carry a lot of weight in this debate. The snares
[retsJ of these shoes are formed of these re- prefixes in revenir "to
return" and remettre. Remise des chaussures ["giving the shoes
back"; "putting the shoes back on"; "handing the shoes over";
"shoe shed"J. They are, they can always be detached (in all the
senses we have listed), abandoned, a la remise. A temptation,
inscribed from that moment on the very object, to put it back, to
put the shoes back on one's feet, to hand them over to the
subject, to the authentic wearer or owner reestablished in his
rights and reinstated in his being-upright. The structure of the
thing and the trial obliges you, then, always, to keep adding to it.
The measure here is one of supplementary retortion.
294 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

--Which is what this incredible reconstitution is now doing.

It's a delirious dramaturgy that projects in its turn: a collective
hallucination. These shoes are hallucinogenic.

--Yes, I'm going rather too quickly here. Let's say that all
this is going on into the bargain, and give me credit for the
moment. Allow me a slight advance and let's say that I'm espous-
ing what was, perhaps, on both sides, a delirium. There is perse-
cution in this narrative, in this story of shoes to be identified,
appropriated, and you know how many bodies, names, and ano-
nymities, nameable and unnameable, this tale is made up of.
We'll come back to it. What carries weight here, and what mat-
ters to me, is this correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and
Martin Heidegger.
[ .... ]
--The literal correspondence, what you call the exchange of
letters, is now (just about) a public phenomenon. Made public by
Schapiro in his homage to the memory of Goldstein. This hence-
forth public exchange gave rise, apparently, to something like a
disagreement. We could say that it resulted in a disagreement. At
any rate, Schapiro who unveils and comments on this correspon-
dence, thus hanging onto the last word, concludes on a disagree-
ment. He claims to hold the truth of the shoes (of the picture) of
Vincent (Van Gogh). And as he owes the truth, he restitutes it.
He identifies (in all sense of this word) the painting and the
shoes, assigns them their points or their proper size [pointure],
names the work and attributes the subject of the work (the shoes)
to the subject of the work, that is, to its true subject, the painter,
Van Gogh. According to him, Heidegger gets both the painting
and the shoes wrong. By attributing them to some peasant man
or woman, he remains in error ("the error lies ... "),in imaginary
projection, the very thing against which he claimed to put us on
our guard ("He has indeed 'imagined everything and projected it
into the painting' "). According to Schapiro, Heidegger has put
the shoes back onto (male or female) peasants' feet. He has, in
advance, laced them, bound them on to peasant ankles, those of
a subject whose identity, in the very contour of its absence,
appears quite strict. Such, according to Schapiro, is the error, the
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 295

imagination, the precipitate projection. It has many causes,

Schapiro detects more than one of them, but let's leave that aside
for the moment.

--But what's the cause of this so-called public correspon-

dence?

--Like all causes, and everything on trial [toute chose en

proces], the proximate cause is a sort of trap. Schapiro lays it for
Heidegger before catching his own feet in it.
[ .... ]
So Schapiro, insouciant, lays a trap for Heidegger. He already
suspects the "error," "projection," "imagination" in Heidegger's
text pointed out to him by his friend and colleague Goldstein.
The hearing having begun thus, he writes to Professor Heidegger
(that's what he calls him when speaking of the colleague and
correspondent, and simply Heidegger for the famous thinker,
author of The Origin of the Work of Art): which picture exactly
were you referring to? The "kind" reply from Professor H. l"In
reply to my question, Professor Heidegger has kindly written me
that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show
at Amsterdam in March 1930. This is clearly de la Faille's no.
255 [see figure 1]."J closes on its author like a trap. You can hear
the noise: clear. It's clear, "clearly," understood, the case has
been heard, de la Faille 255 1 that can't come down/back to peas-
anthood: "They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of
the town and city." Hearing over, sentence decided: all that's
required is to complete or refine the account of this trial which,
all in all, was rapidly expedited. The professor is caught. Schap-
iro, confirmed in his suspicion, can now reconstitute one of the
possible mechanisms of the mistake, a mistake which is itself in
the service of an instinctual and political pathos (the rural, peas-
ant "ideology"): a sort of resoling carried out with the aid of the
sole from another picture seen at the same exhibition in 1930.
That was the first mistake, the first trap, before the one set for
the professor by Schapiro to make up the pair and leave him no
chance. This by way of reply to the question put to me a moment
ago: all the causes of this trial will have been traps (as if figured
296 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

in advance by the apparent stake of the debate: to whom is the

trap due?), pitfalls or, if you prefer, snares [des lacets], traps with
laces. Old Boots with Laces, this is the title given by the large
catalog of the Tuileries exhibition 11971-72) !collection of the
Vincent Van Gogh National Museum in Amsterdam) to the pic-
ture that Professor Schapiro claims to identify on the basis of
Professor Heidegger's unwary reply, and which he reproduces
under the title Old Shoes. I do not yet know how much is due to
Van Gogh in the choice of this title. But as a certain essential
indeterminacy forms part of our problem which is also the prob-
lem of the title and the discourse produced (for example by the
author) on the subject of the picture, it is perhaps right to leave
the thing some suspense. The authors of the catalog I just quoted
took the de la Faille into account, the same de la Faille that is
Schapiro's authority l"The titles given by Vincent in his corre-
spondence, and commonly adopted, have been made more spe-
cific when they were not sufficiently explicit, whence some dif-
ferences compared with either the titles usual in the past, or
those of the new Catalogue Raisonne by J. Baart de la Faille ... ").
Whether named by Van Gogh or not, in a title or a letter, these
laces (for tightening or slackening the grip, more or less strictly,
on the bearing or borne subject) sketch out the very form of the
trap. As fascinating as they are (by that very fact) negligible for
the two professors who make not the slightest allusion to them.
That's one of the causes: the lace. A thing whose name is, in
French, also the name of a trap [le lacet: "snare"]. It does not
stand only for what passes through the eyelets of shoes or corsets.
Our voices, in this very place-

- - I do indeed notice, now, that strange loop

--ready to strangle

--of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than
the untied shoes, but after a sort of sketched-out knot

--it forms a circle at its end, an open circle, as though

provisionally, ready to close, like pincers or a key ring. A leash.
In the bottom right-hand comer where it faces, symmetrically,
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 297

the signature "Vincent," in red and underlined. It occupies there

a place very commonly reserved for the artist's signature. As
though, on the other side, in the other corner, on the other edge,
but symmetrically, (almost) on a level with it, it stood in place of
the signature, as though it took the (empty, open) place of it ...

--If the laces are loosened, the shoes are indeed detached
from the feet and in themselves. But I return to my question:
they are also detached, by this fact, one from the other, and
nothing proves that they form a pair. If I understand aright, no
title says "pair of shoes" for this picture. Whereas elsewhere, in
a letter that Schapiro quotes moreover, Van Gogh speaks of an-
other picture, specifying "a pair of old shoes." Is it not the
possibility of this "unpairedness" (two shoes for the same foot,
for example, are more the double of each other but this double
simultaneously fudges both pair and identity, forbids comple-
mentarity, paralyzes directionality, causes things to squint toward
the devil), is it not the logic of this false parity, rather than of
this false identity, which constructs the trap? The more I look at
this painting, the less it looks as though it could walk ...

--Yes, but for that to be the case the "unpairedness" must

remain a possibility which is, I shall say, a limit-possibility,
improbable. And what's more, even if Van Gogh had given a title
to the picture, and entitled it "pair of ... ," that would change
nothing in the effect produced, whether or not it is sought after
consciously. A title does not simply define the picture it's at-
tached to or which it's detached from according to numerous and
sometimes overdetermined modes. It can form part of the picture
and play more than one role in it, provide more than one figure
of rhetoric in it. "Pair-of-," for example, can induce one to think
of parity, the "truth of the pair," while showing unpairedness, or
the peerless [le hors-pair]. And then, another argument, the "un-
pairedness" can say and show parity, the truth of the pair, with
much greater force. Just as, as we shall see, the out-of-use ex-
hibits utility or idleness exposes the work.

--1 find this pair, if I may say so, gauche. Through and
through. Look at the details, the inside lateral surface: you'd
298 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

think it was two left feet. Of different shoes. And the more I look
at them, the more they look at me, the less they look like an old
pair. More like an old couple. Is it the same thing? If one let
oneself slip to the facility of the symbolism you were talking
about just now, the obvious bisexuality of this plural thing would
stem from the inside-out passivity, open like a glove, more of-
fered, more undressed, of the left shoe (I specify: on the left of
the picture, since unpairedness can also affect the layout of a
"real" pair, the left shoe facing us from the left, and the right
from the right, of the picture)
[ .... ]
--If, as Schapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner or, an
important nuance, the wearer of the shoes, shall we say that the
half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of the paint-
ing to the signature (to the sharpness, the pointure, that pierces
the canvas), of the shoes to their owner, or even of Vincent to
Van Gogh, in short a complement, a general reattachment as
truth in painting?

--That's moving far too fast. Whatever proof you claim to

have in hand, the signatory of a picture cannot be identified with
the nameable owner of an essentially detachable object repre-
sented in the picture. It is impossible to proceed to such an
identification without an incredible ingenuousness, incredible in
so authorized an expert. An identificatory ingenuousness with
respect to the structure of a picture, and even to that of an
imitative representation in the simplest sense of a "copy. 11 Iden-
tificatory ingenuousness with respect to the structure of a de-
tachable object in general and with respect to the logic of its
belonging in general. What interestedness can have motivated
such a faux-pas, that's the question I was trying to ask a while
ago with reference to the strange three-person restitution scene,
all three of them great European university professors. Why sud-
denly this blindness, this putting-to-sleep, all of a sudden, of all
critical vigilance? Why does lucidity remain very active, hyper-
critical, around this macula, but only on its edges? Why this
hasty compulsion, driving the one to give as homage to the
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 299

second, the dead one, a still life-dead nature snatched from (the
no less hasty and compulsive interpretation of) the other, the
third or the first as you wish, the fourth party as always remain-
ing in exclusion? <;a donne the better to take back, rya prend as it
gives, 5 as soon as there are these laces/snares
[ .... ]
And yet. There is homage. It gives. That's an Es gibt 6 that
Heidegger will have given us, better than any other, to think
about. The Es gibt "before" being, the literal [a la lettre) Es gibt,
the Sein starting from (and returning to) the Es gibt Sein.

--But we haven't yet opened the file of this correspondence

between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger. Let's take our
time. In any case, wherever they come from or come back from,
these shoes won't come back safe and sound [a bon port].

--Nor cheaply [a bon marche]. Despite the incredible bar-

gaining, or because of the interminable outbidding of an analysis
which is never finished tying together, this time

--They will have traveled a lot, traversed all sorts of towns

and territories at war. Several world wars and mass deportations.
We can take our time. They are there, made for waiting. For
leading up the garden path. The irony of their patience is infinite,
it can be taken as nil. So, we had got to this public correspon-
dence and I was saying that, sealing a disagreement, this sealed
exchange was holding, under seals, another correspondence. Se-
cret, this one, although it can be read right off the other. A
symbolic correspondence, in accord, a harmonic. In this commu-
nication between two illustrious professors who have both of
them a communication to make on "a famous picture by Van
Gogh"

--one of the two is a specialist. Painting, and even Van

Gogh, is, so to speak, his thing, he wants to keep it, he wants it
returned-
300 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

--what do we notice? Through the mutual esteem, the civil-

ity of a reciprocal legitimation which appears to button the most
deadly thrusts, one can feel the effects of a common code, of an
analogous lidentical, identifiable) desire, a resemblance in assi-
duity lempressement] jwhich is also an eagerness lempressement]
in the direction of identificatory resemblance), in short, a com-
mon interest, and even a common debt, a shared duty. They owe
the truth in painting, the truth of painting and even painting as
truth, or even as the truth of truth. !They must ldoivent] speak
the truth in painting. It is, of course, necessary to take into
account the debt or duty-"I owe you"-but what does "speak"
mean here? And speak in painting: truth spoken itself, as one
says "in painting"? Or truth spoken about painting, in the do-
main of painting? Or truth spoken in painting, by the sole means
of painting, no longer spoken but-"to speak" being only a man-
ner of speaking, a figure-painted, truth silently painted, itself,
in painting?) In order to do this, they both have an interest in
identifying, in identifying the subject jbearer or borne) of these
shoes, in tying up, tying back together stricto sensu, in their
right sense, these objects which can't do anything about it-in
identifying and reappropriating (for themselves), in using in their
tum this strange out-of-use, this product productive of so much
supplementary surplus value. At all costs its size, its pointure
must be found, even if this "subject" is not the same one for both
parties. They are in agreement, that's the contract of this tacit
institution, to seek for one, or to pretend to seek for one, given
that both are certain in advance that they have found it. Since it
is a pair, first of all, and neither of them doubts this fact, there
must be a subject. So that in this shoe market [marche; also, "a
deal"], the contract, the institution, is first of all the parity be-
tween the shoes, this very singular dual relationship which fits
together the two parts of a pair !identity and difference, total
identity in the concept or in formal semantics, difference and
non-overlap in the directionality of the traits). If there is a pair,
then a contract is possible, you can look for the subject, hope is
still permitted. A colloquy-and collocation-can take place,
the dispute will be able to commence or commit. It will be
possible to appropriate, expropriate, take, give, take back, offer,
discharge, do homage or insult. Without which
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 301

--Why do you say that this correspondence is symbolic?

Symbolic of what?

--Of the symbol. Of the symbolon. I said symbolic corre-

spondence because of this prior, coded commitment, because of
this colloquy contracted on the basis of a common interest (reat-
tachment by a nexus, the annexation of the shoes or, and this is
enough already, the mere formation of the statement "Whose are
the shoes" or, what just about comes down [revient] to the same
thing, in the infantry of this slightly military preparation, "Whose
or what's are the feet" which are here the object of the professors'
constant care). This implies a sort of reciprocal recognition (of
the pair), a diplomatic exchange (double and reciprocal) or in any
case the law of nations presupposed by a declaration of war. In
order to commemorate the mutual commitment, the shoes are
shared, each party keeps one piece of the symbolon. 7 And the
same piece, or rather the similar and different piece of the same
whole, the complementary piece. This is why the pair is the
condition of the symbolic correspondence. There is no symbolic
contract in the case of a double which does not form a pair.
Which would not be one (selfsame) thing in two, but a two in
identity.

--So, finally, this correspondence bears on what subject? On

the subject of correspondence? On the subject of this parity of
the pair?

--Ah, here we are. On what subject. The question "Whose

are the feet?" to which they wanted to bring round [faire revenirJ
the question "Whose are the shoes?" assumes that the question
"Of what" or "What are the feet?" has been resolved. Are they?
Do they represent? Whom or what? With or without shoes?
These shoes are more or less detached (in themselves, from each
other and from the feet), and by that fact discharged: from a
common task or function. Both because they are visibly detached
and because-never forget the invisible ether of this trivial self-
evidence-they are painted objects (out-of-work because they're
in a work) and the "subject" of a picture. Nonfunctioning, de-
funct, they are detached, in this double sense, and again in an-
302 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

other double sense, that of being untied and that of the detach-
ment/secondment of an emissary: diplomatic representation, if
you like, by metonymy or synecdoche. And what is said of the
shoes can also be said, although the operation is more delicate
around the ankle, of the neck or the feet.
On what subject, then, this correspondence? On the subject of
the subject of reattachment. They're in a hurry to tie up the
thread with the subject. Detachment is intolerable. And the cor-
respondence takes place on the subject of the true subject of the
subject of a "famous picture." Not only on the subject of the
subject of the picture, as they say, but of the subject (bearer or
home) of the shoes which seem to form the capital subject of the
picture, of the feet of the subject whose feet, these shoes, and
then this picture itself seem here to be detached and as if adrift.
That makes a lot of things. And it's very complicated. The struc-
ture of detachment-and therefore of the subjectivity of these
different subjects-is different in each case. And we have to
make clear that the correspondence we're interested in aims to
efface all these differences. Among which I have not yet counted
the one which determines the (underlying) subjectivity of the
shoe in its fundamental surface, the sole. Nor the still !more or
less) fundamental subjectivity of the ground Ion or without the
support of the canvas) along with this pas de contact Ithis pas de
sujet) which, rhythmically, raises the adhesion of a march/walk/
step. The pas is not present or absent. And yet it works lmarche]
badly without a pair.

--But I'm very surprised. It was indeed Heidegger's text that

opened this debate. Now he leaves any problematic of subjectiv-
ity far behind him, doesn't he? Such a problematic in fact presup-
poses what is here, among other things, desedimented by him,
that is, the determination of the thing as hypokeimenon, support,
substratum, substance, etc.?

--That's one of the paradoxes of this exchange. Each dis-

course in it remains unequal, inadequate to itself. In The Origin,
the passage on "a famous picture by Van Gogh" belongs to a
chapter "Thing and Work." He is occupied in that chapter with
removing (but removal is not enough) the thing from the meta-
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 303

physical determinations that, according to Heidegger, have set

upon it, covering it over and simultaneously assaulting it, doing
it injury [injure] IUberfall), insulting [insultant], as the French
translator has it, what is properly speaking the thing in the thing,
the product in the product, the work in the work ldas Dinghafte
des Dinges, das Zeughafte des Zeuges, das Werkhafte des Werkes).
These determinations of the Uberfall go in pairs or couples.
Among them is the determination of the thing as underneath
lhypokeimenon or hypostasis) in opposition to the symbebekota
which arise on top of it. This oppositional couple will be trans-
formed, in Latin, into subjectum (substantia)laccidens. This is
only one of the pairs of oppositions that fall upon/attack the
thing. The other two are, according to Heidegger, that of aisthe-
ton/noeton (sensible/intelligible) and that of hyle/eidos-morphe
(matter/form-figure).
We must accompany for a while this Heideggerian procedure.
It constitutes the context immediately framing the allusion to
the "famous picture." And if Schapiro is right to reproach Hei-
degger for being so little attentive to the internal and external
context of the picture as well as to the differential seriality of the
eight shoe paintings, he ought himself to have avoided a rigor-
ously corresponding, symmetrical, analogous precipitation: that
of cutting out of Heidegger's long essay, without further precau-
tions, twenty-odd lines, snatching them brutally from their frame
which Schapiro doesn't want to know about, arresting their
movement and then interpreting them with a tranquillity equal
to that of Heidegger when he makes the "peasant's shoes" speak.
Thus, getting ready to deal with shoes in painting and with
subjectum in multiple senses, and with ground, background,
support Ithe earth and the canvas, earth on the canvas, canvas on
the earth, shoes on the earth, earth on and under the shoes, shod
feet on the earth, the subject supposed to bear jor be borne by)
the feet, the shoes, etc., the subject of the picture, its subject-
object and its signatory subject, all this over again on a canvas
with or without an underneath, etc.), in short, getting ready to
deal with being-underneath, with ground and below ground, it is
perhaps appropriate to mark a pause, before even beginning, around
this subjectum.
[ .... ]
304 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

I think it's appropriate for [two] reasons. The question of the

underneath as ground, earth, then as sole, shoes, sock-stocking
-foot, etc., cannot be foreign to the "great question" of the thing
as hypokeimenon, then as sub;ectum. And then, if it is accepted
that the procedure of The Origin intends to lead back beyond,
upstream of or to the eve of the constitution of the subjectum in
the apprehension of the thing (as such, as product or as work),
then asking it the question of the "subject," of the subject of this
pair of shoes, would perhaps involve starting with a misappre-
hension, by an imaginary projective or erroneous reading. Unless
Heidegger ignores (excludes? forecloses? denies? leaves implicit?
unthought?) an other problematic of the subject, for example in a
displacement or development of the value "fetish." Unless,
therefore, this question of the sub;ectum is displaced otherwise,
outside the problematic of truth and speech which governs The
Origin. The least one can say is that Schapiro does not attempt
to do this. He is caught in it and without even, apparently, having
the least suspicion of this.
[ .... ]
--If, then, however, this "backward step" on the road of
thought was supposed to go back behind any "sub;ectum," how
do we explain this naive, impulsive, precritical attribution of the
shoes in a painting to such a determined "subject," the peasant,
or rather the peasant woman, this tight attribution and determi-
nation which direct this whole discourse on the picture and its
"truth"? Would we all agree about calling this gesture naive,
impulsive, precritical, as I have just done?

--Yes, and on this precise point Schapiro's demonstration

confirms what could very quickly be seen. But we still have to
demarcate the place and function of this "attribution" in the
text, trace the map of its effects in the long run of Heidegger's
move, its apparent noncongruence with the dominant motifs of
the essay: a climb back up behind the sub;ectum, indeed, but
also a critique of representation, of expression, of reproduction,
etc. We shall have to come back to this, and to the logic of the
Uberfall. On all these questions, and despite having a negative
and punctual pertinence, Schapiro's determination seems to me
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 305

to be soon exhausted. And its "impulsive or precritical naivete"

(I pick up these words) seems to me to be entirely symmetrical
or complementary with the naivete that he rightly denounces in
Heidegger. The correspondence will forward these effects, right
down to their details.
[ .... ]
Let's go back to before the allusion of the "famous picture," to
the point where the chapter "Thing and Work" names "the fun-
damental Greek experience of the Being of beings in general." I
emphasize fundamental (Grunderfahrung). The interpretation of
the thing as hypokeimenon and then as subjectum does not only
produce (itself as) a slight linguistic phenomenon. The transform-
ing translation of hypokeimenon as subjectum corresponds, ac-
cording to Heidegger, to another "mode of thought" and of being-
there. It translates, transports, transfers (Heidegger emphasizes
the passage implied in iiber) over and beyond the aforementioned
fundamental Greek experience: "Roman thought takes over
(iibernimmt) the Greek words (Worter) without the correspond-
ing co-originary experience of what they say, without the Greek
word (Wort). The absence-of-ground (Bodenlosigkeit) of Western
thought opens with this translation."
The ground (of thought) comes then to be lacking when words
lose speech [la parole]. The "same" words (Worter) deprived of
the speech (Wort) corresponding to the originarily Greek experi-
ence of the thing, the "same" words, which are therefore no
longer exactly the same, the fantomatic doubles of themselves,
their light simulacra, begin to walk above the void or in the void,
bodenlos. Let's hang on for a long time to this difference between
words and speech; it will help us in a moment, and again later,
to understand, beyond the narrow debate on the attribution of
these attributes, of these accidents that feet reputedly are, and
that shoes are a fortiori, what the thing says. What one makes or
lets it say, what it makes or allows to be said.

--Ought we to believe that there is some common topos

between this deprivation of ground and the place of these shoes,
their taking-place or their standing-in [leur avoir-lieu ou leur
tenir lieu]? They do indeed have an air of being a bit up in the air,
306 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

whether they appear to have no contact with the surface, as if in

levitation above what nevertheless supports them (the one on
the right, the most visibly "gauche" [left) of the two, seems a
little lifted up, mobile, as if it were rising to take a step, while
the other stuck more firmly to the ground), or whether, aban-
doned to their being-unlaced, they suspend all experience of the
ground, since such experience presupposes walking, standing up-
right, and that a "subject" should be in full possession of his or
her or its feet, or again whether, more radically, their status as
represented object in the strict frame of a painted canvas, or even
one hung on the wall of a museum, determines the Bodenlosig-
keit itself, provokes or defines it, translates it, signifies it or, as
you will, is it, there

--and the desire then to make them find their feet again on
the ground of the fundamental experience

--no, no, or at least not so quickly. It's only a matter, for

starters, of discovering a few cave-ins of the terrain, some abysses
too in the field where advance so tranquilly

--Why no tranquillity? Why this persecution?

--the discourse of attribution, declarations of property, per-

formances or investitures of the type: this is mine, these shoes
or these feet to someone who says "me" and can thereby identify
himself, belong to the domain of the nameable (common: the
peasant man or woman, the man of the city; or proper: Vincent
Van Gogh; and proper in both desires: Heidegger, Schapiro, who
demand restitution). These abysses are not the "last word" and
above all do not consist simply in this Bodenlosigkeit about
which we've just been talking. At the very moment when Hei-
degger is denouncing translation into Latin words, at the mo-
ment when, at any rate, he declares Greek speech to be lost, he
also makes use of a "metaphor." Of at least one metaphor, that
of the foundation and the ground. The ground of the Greek expe-
rience is, he says, lacking in this "translation." What I have just
too hastily called "metaphor" concentrates all the difficulties to
come: does one speak "metaphorically" of the ground for just
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 307

A Pair of Boots. The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection, Balti-
more, Maryland.

anything? And of walking and shoes (clothing, the tool, the insti-
tution, even investiture) for thought, language, writing, painting
and the rest.
What does Heidegger say? This: as soon as one no longer
apprehends the things as the Greeks did, in other words as hy-
pokeimenon, but instead as substantia, the ground falls away.
But this ground is not the hypokeimenon, it's the originary and
fundamental experience of the Greeks or of Greek speech which
apprehends the things as being-underneath. This is the ground of
the hypokeimenon. This (metaphorical?) doubling must be inter-
rogated on its own account. And the underneath of the under-
neath leads to a thinking of the abyss, rather than of the mise-en-
abyme, and the abyss would "here" be one of the places or
nonplaces ready to bear the whole of this game [un des lieux ou
non-lieux prets a tout porter de ce jeu; also, "one of the off-the-
peg, ready-made places or nonplaces of this game"].
308 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

--Which takes us far away from Schapiro's "Still Life ... "
and from what was a moment ago, if I remember rightly, called
the offering to Goldstein of the severed ear.

--No, the offering of a pair (which perhaps never existed,

which no one ever had) of things detached and tied back together
again to make a present of them. A present [cadeau], as the
[French] noun shows, in a chain. Has it gone away? What is it to
go away [s'eloigner]? The e-loignement ent-fernt, he says, dis-
tances the distant [e-loigne le lointainl ... 8

--I'm not going away, I'm in the process, starting from here,
of coming back to what the other says. For the thing is still more
hidden away or wrapped up underneath its investiture than ap-
pears to be the case. At the very moment when he calls us back
to the Greek ground and to the apprehension of the thing as
hypokeimenon, Heidegger implies that this originary state still
covers over something, falling upon or attacking it. The hypo-
keimenon, that underneath, hides another underneath. And so
the Latin underneath (substantia-subjectum) causes to disappear,
along with the Greek ground, the Greek underneath (hypokei-
menon), but this latter still hides or veils (the figure of veiling, of
veiling linen as over-under, will not take long to appear, and the
hymen which will draw it into undecidability will not be unre-
lated to the sock, the socklet, or the stocking [le bas], between
foot and shoe) a "more" originary thingliness. But as the "more"
carries itself away, the thing no longer has the figure or value of
an "underneath." Situated (or not) "under" the underneath, it
would not only open an abyss, but would brusquely and discon-
tinuously prescribe a change of direction, or rather a completely
different topic.

--Perhaps that of this returning whose great scope, just now

--Perhaps. The topos of the abyss and a fortiori that of the

mise-en-abyme could also hide, or in any case dampen a little
the brusque and angular necessity of this other topics. And of
this other pas. That's what interests me "underneath" this cor-
 "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing" 309

respondence with respect to a "famous picture" of old unlaced

walking shoes

--half-unlaced

--and when the question of its place is posed, if I can say

that. How to take this correspondence and this transfer(ence), all
these translations?
[ .... ]

- Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod

NOTES

1. "Pas" means step, but it is also the adverb of negation. Derrida will
exploit throughout the text this double movement, advancing and negating,
of the "pas." He has also written at length about Blanchot's "pas" in "Pas"
(Parages [1986] and Freud's "pas de these" (see below, "To Speculate-on
'Freud' ").-En.
2. A reference to Kant's 1786 article "Was heisst: sich in Denken orien-
tiren," translated into French as Qu'est-ce que s'orienter dans la pensee,
trans. A. Philonenko, 4th ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1978).-TRANS.
3. Meyer Schapiro, Van Gogh (New York: Abrams, 1950)1 p. 92.
4. I reproduce here the editorial note proposed by Macula: "Since that
date, and at a time when it was already in galley proofs, the fiction which we
publish here was so to speak acted out or narrated by Jacques Derrida at
Columbia University (Seminar on Theory of Literature) at the invitation of
Marie-Rose Logan and Edward W. Said. This session took place on 6 October
1977. Meyer Schapiro took part in the debate which followed. Editors' Note."
5. 11 c;:a donne," it gives; "i;a prend," it takes. The impersonal pronoun i;;a
is also the French term for what Freud calls the "Es," in English the id.-Eo.
6. The reference is to the Heideggerian "Es gibt Sein," literally "It gives
Being," but in everyday usage "There is Being." For some commentary on
this phrase, see below, Envois, p. 493££.-Eo.
7. A symbolon is the token of a promise or commitment divided between
the parties.-Eo.
8. On Heidegger's use of Entfemung, see below, Spurs, pp. 358-59.-Eo.
'
 JALOUSIE FOUR

Who are they trying to kid. What is being pro-

posed to us. Flourishes? An anthology? by what
right. And the complete text is being dissimu-
lated from us?
Not even an anthology. Some morsels of an-
thology. As an invitation, if possible, to rebind,
in any case to reread. Inside out and right side
out, while taking up again by all the ends.

Nevertheless, all these morsels cannot, natu-

rally, be bound (together).

The object of the present work, as well as its

style, is the morsel.

Which is always detached ...

-Glas, p.118
I
 PART FOUR

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

ITH THE term logocentrism, introduced in Of Grammatology,

W Derrida indicates in an economical manner the set of traits
organizing the metaphysics of presence around a center (see above,
pp. 34-53). By 1972, with the publication of Margins of Philosophy,
Dissemination, and the lecture on Nietzsche eventually titled Spurs,
the term has been expanded by the addition of a few letters, yielding
the neologism or suitcase word: phallogocentrism. This expansion is
in fact an explicitation of a basic article in the logocentric baggage
that Derrida has been weighing and examining since his earliest
writings: the privilege accorded to the phallus as a mark of presence.
Derrida's orthographic invention signals an indissociability of the
phallo- and the logo-, a continuity of phallus in logos, and thereby it
indicates a certain sexual scene behind or before-but always within
-the scene of philosophy.
Philosophy has always reasoned with and about sexual difference,
although it has always seemed to do so slightly offstage, in the wings
of its principal production. There, sexual difference has been brought
to reason, which has also meant, almost without exception, that
social, political, economic forms of the differentiation of the sexes
have been grounded, and thus legitimated, in reason, by reason.
Derrida's deconstruction of this scene proceeds, as it often does, by
shifting focus from center stage to the margins so as to bring out the
exclusions at work in the production of reason. Such a shift has
several implications and consequences. First, it overturns the order
of priority that treats the question of sexual difference as derivative
of fundamental, ontological questions. Secondly and as a conse-
quence, Derrida reserves no position of originary neutrality or neu-
terness from which to think sexual difference. Because there is dif-
314 Sexual Difference in Philosophy

ference at the origin, the phallogocentric privilege (which is the

privilege of the one, the unitary origin, the Father) can constitute
itself only through a reduction or effacement of this difference. Thus
and thirdly, the reduction of sexual difference, which appears to
occur far from the center of philosophic concern, would be made to
appear as in fact indispensable to its centering.
It is, of course, quite arbitrary to isolate some "theme" of sexual
difference (or, as in preceding sections, of literature or translation) in
Jacques Derrida's writings. The movement of spacing or differencing
is, rather, the very medium of this writing. Indeed, the thematization
of sexual difference may be seen as part of the more general tendency
to reduce that difference. It is precisely this tendency that Derrida's
writing interrupts, but not without also demonstrating the necessity
of such an interruption in the tradition of philosophical discourse
about sexual difference or femininity. That necessity is confronted
in a variety of texts where Derrida asks, in effect, What happens
when philosophers speak of sexual difference or of women? Kant,
Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas are cited to respond in the
following selections.
Because such analyses are integral to the interruption of a phallo-
gocentric construction of sexual differences, Derrida's writings have
had a wide, and widely ambivalent, reception within recent femi-
nism. This ambivalence can be easily traced to the fact that decon-
struction does not accommodate any "-ism" (including "deconstruc-
tionism"). The reversal of the sexual opposition or the recentering of
phallogocentrism must make way for a displacement or transgres-
sion of the limits that have constrained a repetition of phallogocen-
tric structures. It is this work of displacement, at stake in all of
Derrida's writings, that ceaselessly "de-isms" the seismic ground of
thinking.
 FOURTEEN

From Glas [1974]

One way to describe Glas is simply to invoke its volume: 100 cubic
inches (10 x 10 x 1 in the original edition). On its large, squared
pages, two wide columns face off in different type: smaller, denser
on the left, larger, more spaced out on the right. Thumb through the
pages and you will see a third type, the smallest of the three, cutting
into the column at various points, forming inscribed incisions either
along its outermost edge, or down the center (see illustration, p.
316). There are no notes, no chapter headings, no table of contents.
Each column begins in what appears to be the middle of a sentence
and ends, 28 3 pages further on, without any final punctuation.
What is going on here? Clearly many things at once, too many
ever to allow anything but a very partial description. On every page,
Glas demonstrates the borderless condition of texts, and their sus-
ceptibility to the most unexpected encounters. The Hegelian dialec-
tic of Absolute Spirit, tracked relentlessly with the left hand, can
thus be made to recognize something like its reverse image in the
mirror of the writings of Jean Genet which are lovingly dissected
with the right hand. The work of the negative which drives the
dialectic toward an ever-higher synthesis on the left is constantly
encroached upon by the glorification of the criminal underclass cited
at length on the right. It is this double-columned movement up and
down, rising and falling, not successively but always at the same
time, that Derrida is tracing in its most paradoxical consequences
for the dialectic of reason. The glas jdeath knell) is sounded on every
page for the pretensions of the dialectic to totalize or absolutize pure
spirit without any remainder in everything that pulls it down.
The pages included here are extracted from close to the center of
the left-hand column. They concern specifically that moment in the
 racionncl qui nc s'assemble qu'i lui-mCme dans sa ralit,, Jc n'ai pas le droit d'opererainsi, sClcctionnons
est d'une part, en raison de cctte immediatcte de son
identit~ objective, Jc rnour i la 11it (Jie R.WHthr t,11111
ccpcndanr. scctionnons dans Jes dcux pages qui
Leben), mais elle a cgalemcnt telcvc (mef!!hol!m) ectte suivcnt pour joindrc la cravatc qui traine (c •••
forme de son immediatctC ct cllc a son plus haut contrairc polichincllc... la gloirc... la fcntc adorable... millc
en clle. t L'ldCc, vie immCdiatc ct natu.rcllc, sc rclCve,
supprimc ct conserve, meun en s'Clcvant i la vie spiri-
prCcurscurs de Notre-Dame, ange annonciatcur
tuclle. La vie sc dCvcloppc done dans la contradiction de ccttc vicrgc,
ct la nCgativitC, la metaphorc cntrc lcs dcux vies n'm
« Notre·Oatne, ;ange annonc:iateur de cette
quc cc rnouvcmcnt de la nCgativitC rdcvanrc. • Le concept v1erge > Notre-0.me n'est done pas seulement
n 'est pas sculcmcnt 41111 ( Sttit} 1 concept librc ct subjcctif un autre nom de la V1erge Marie, du Pr&ident,
qui est pout soi ct posH:de de cc fait la J1"JOtllldJiti, - le du Chrin et de toute la Satnte Farmlle, 11 est auss1
concept objcctif, pratique, en ct pour soi dCtcrminC qui l'ange annonc11teur de la vitet"ge, comme un autre
en tant quc personnc est unc subjcctivitC impenetrable, prinotn de la mtre.
atorniquc, rnais qui, en mCrne temps, n'cst pas une indi- Dans Notre-~Fleurs, Oivme aune Gabriel,
vidualitC exclusive de toutcs lcs autrcs mais pour soi surnommt l'Archange. Pour !'amener l l'amour,
,. m seollMI ~,, unc univcrsalitC ct une coonaisSUtCC, Ct elle met un pe1,1 de son urine dans ce Qu'elle lu1
J dans son autrc sa proprc objectivite donne l bo1re ou l manger. C'est ain1i qu'on s'atu.-
Le• IOI! Htre • r\t
le syntllfhe mtme com me objct ( .1ti111 eigme Objehivit lit che les chiens, ava•t-elle entendu dire. Elle rattire
du propre hegehett. z.11111 GtgnutllNk). Tout le rcstc est dans son gren1er. y menace une atrnos~re fuMbre
d const1tue i. ttqat .. (ten~bre, encens, glas) : « ... qu'un jour elle fit
v1tf ;au service du errcur, trouble, opinion (Mei111111t) 1 tcn- wnir Gabr1d /;.Nut. la r1daux It.ant tirh. 11 se
sen1 Pf"OJl'"e_ QUM\CI dancc, arbitrairc ct passage ( V ergiing-
!a vie devient pour
trouve dans une th!M>re d'autant plus massive qu'y
/i,Uuit) ,· scule l"IdCc absolue est ilrt
s01 '°" propre ob1et . mo•S•»ait depu1s Oe:s anntts, comme un puium
l"o1>Ject1v1tf de la (Sein). ,;, qui ne passc pas (_,,-gtmg- d'eneen1 glace, !'essence s1.1bt1le des pets «105 11. »
v•e naturelle rnevn /i,ht1 Leben). vCritC sc connaissa.nt, Ct Quand 11 la penttre. Gabriel donne • 1 sa verce
etsernet cenf.ce •
de l'ldi!e. eomme une
clle est toute vC:ritt. • un fremissernent eomp.arable 1 eelui d'un chevat
chosepil"tttvllb'e,au '.\femc mouvcmcnt clans r &ty,J,.. qui s'indigne ». II est vrai Qu'en la i>enttrant, l
sujet de laouelle on piJie, i la fut, quant au Sa. Le troisieme 1upposer qu'il porte quelque part le ~me pr~
peutparler.Enveme, que cttte put.am dt mtre, ii ne flit que retrouver
c'estlavi101.11pirhe
terme revenant i l'immCdiatcd. cc
to1.1101.1rsd'elle-mtme. retour a la simplicit~ s'opCrant pa.t la
sa forme et son heu. Divine lui await d1t ; « Je t'aime
de sav1eet de sa rdC:vc de la diffCrcncc ct de la mCdiation, comme s1 tu eta1s dins man ventre » ou encore :
mort, eneore de SI la Vic natUtCilC OCCUpt a la foiS la fin «Tu n'es pas monam1, tu es moi·mlme. Mon cmur
ou man sexe. Une branche de mo•.
ct le dC:but. Dans leur sens ontologiquc, « Et Gabriel, emu, ma•s sour1ant de fl~ :
Jes mCtaphorcs sont toujours de la vie, ellcs rythment -Oh!mac:arelle. »
l'CgalitC imperturbable de la vie, de l'Ctre, de la. vCritC,
de la 6liation : pl(y1i1. un jcunc garson blond (• Des
Le systC:mc hcgclien commande done qu'on le lise
commc un livrc de la vie. Les catCgories de lecture doivcnt filles blondes commc des garsons... • Jc nc me
d'abord s'y plier. Parler de plusicurs Ct:ats de la pcnsCe lasscrai pas de ccttc phrase, dccidcmcnt, qui a
hcgelicnnc, d'un Hcgd de jcunessc ou d'un Hegel achcvC, la seduction de !'expression : • Un gardc-fran-
c'c:st i la fois hcgclicn rt ami-hcgdicn. Ainsi le livre
de Bourgeois sur Hegel a Francfort appliquc a son sujer ~aisc •) quc j'obscrvais dans lcs ensembles de
lcs carCgorics lcs plus prCformationnistes de Hegel. ll gymnastiquc. II depend.it des figures qu'il scrvait
oppose, ccrtcs, l' • avCnemcnt du hegelianismc de la i. tracer, ct par ccla n'Ctait qu'un signc .... en
maturitC • au • hcgefu.nismc naissant • ma.is precise que
cdui-ci • s'cngagc sur la voic du hcgc:lianismc proprcmcnt tcrre... nonnc ccarta.rrt son voile ... pocmc (ou
dit, dont il formulera i Iena !'intuition gCaiale en Ccrivant fable) qui naquit de lui (miracle rcnouvcle d' Anne

-Glas, p. 96, courtesy Editions Galilee

 Sexual Difference in Philosophy 317

Hegelian dialectic that negotiates with sexual difference, love, mar-

riage, the family, the transition to the people, and eventually the
state. Derrida has announced at the beginning(?) of Glas his choice
to draw on the thread of the family as a guide to his reading of Hegel.
The family is a first term in one of the syllogisms that Derrida
situates as follows:
In the major expositions of the Encyclopedia or the [Element
of the] Philosophy of Right, the "objective spirit" is developed
in three moments: abstract right (Recht), morality (Moralitii.t),
and Sittlichkeit-a term translated in various ways (ethics,
ethical life, objective morality, bonnes moeurs) ... Now, within
Sittlichkeit, the third term and the moment of synthesis be-
tween right's formal objectivity and morality's abstract subjec-
tivity, a syllogism in tum is developed.
Its first term is the family.
The second, civil or bourgeois society (biirgerliche Gesell-
schaft).
The third, the State or the constitution of the State (Staats-
verfassung).
Derrida then comments on what is at stake in the familial moment
of the syllogistic series: "Its interpretation directly engages the whole
Hegelian determination of right on one side, of politics on the other.
Its place in the system's structure and development ... is such that
the displacements or the disimplications of which it will be the
object could not have a simply local character" (Glas, pp. 4-5). That
is, displacing the familial moment, the point at which sexual differ-
ence is determined in oppositional terms and then reduced, negated,
relieved (aufgehobene) to permit passage to the next moment, has to
shake up the whole structure. In effect, by reading this moment as
the strangle-point of the vast dialectical architecture, Derrida "sexu-
alizes" that structure throughout, disturbing the versions of inno-
cence or neutrality that define it at its outset (the religion of flowers
which is not-yet-sexual or guilty) and in its outcome (Absolute Spirit
which is no-longer-sexual). Derrida writes that his choice itself is
"far from innocent" because it engages Hegel's text there where
unconscious motivations are at work, that remainder that continues
to fall outside the totalizing circle of consciousness. One figure of
the remainder is an unrelieved sexual difference.
"Before attempting an active interpretation, perhaps even a criti-
cal displacement," writes Derrida, "we must still patiently decipher
this difficult and obscure text." It is to this work of patient decipher-
318 MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE

ing that these pages are largely devoted, as Derrida follows Hegel's
text step by step. Along the way, a detour is taken through Kant's
discussion of sexual difference in his Anthropology in order to un-
derscore the traits that distinguish it from Hegel's speculative dialec-
tics.

[N.B.: Glas contains no footnotes that identify precisely the source

of its numerous quotations. The translation respects this convention
and does not add any translator's notes. The translator, John Leavey,
has provided, however, a list specifying Glas' sources in a separate
volume, Glossary (see bibliography, 1974). For the excerpt presented
here, the quotations from Hegel are taken from The First Philosophy
of Spirit (also called the Jena Philosophy of Spirit), Philosophy of
Nature, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, and The Phi-
losophy of Right. The quotations from Kant are all from Anthropol-
ogy from a Practical Point of View. In the edition of the translation,
the excerpt is found on pp. 108-14 and 118-39, left column.)
 Glas

I .... I
If we read Hegel from within, the problematic of Sittlichkeit, and
then, in that, of the family, can henceforth be unfolded only in a
philosophy of spirit. The absolute ethical totality having been
defined "people-spirit" IVolksgeist), its genealogy must be traced.
That is the task of the first philosophy of spirit IJena). The three
"powers" of consciousness (1. Memory, language. 2. The tool. 3.
Possession, family.) constitute the spirit of a people at the term
of their development. From an architectonic viewpoint, the third
power, the family, marking the passage to Sittlichkeit, occupies
at the same time the first phase, forms the first moment of
ethical life, its most immediate and most natural moment. That
will be confirmed, if such can be said, fifteen years later, in the
Philosophy of Right.
In effect, right after it set out the third power, the Jena philos-
ophy of spirit describes the transition from the family to the
people. A transition in the strong and active sense of this word:
self-destructive passage. The family, through marriage, posses-
sion, and education, annihilates or relieves itself, "sacrifices"
itself, Hegel says. And consequently, in the course of a struggle
for recognition, the family loses and reflects itself in another
consciousness: the people. The family exists in the people only
"relieved" (aufgehobeneJ, destroyed, preserved, debased, de-
graded, raised.
What is consciousness, if its ultimate power is achieved by the
family?
Consciousness is the Idea's or absolute being's return to self.
Absolute being takes itself back, it is sich zuriicknehmend, it
320 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

retracts itself, contracts itself, reassumes and reassembles itself,

surrounds and envelops itself with itself after its death in nature,
after it lost itself, "fell," Hegel literally says, outside itself injto)
nature. The philosophy of nature is the system of this fall and
this dissociation inlto) exteriority. The philosophy of spirit is the
system of the relief of the idea that calls and thinks itself in the
ideal element of universality.
The transition from nature to spirit is also a reversal. In its
highest reaches, the transition is produced in the organic, after
the mechanical, the chemical, and the physical. The transition
signifying violent self-destruction and passage to the opposite,
the relief of natural life injto) spiritual life necessarily comes
about through disease and death. So disease and death are the
conditions of the spirit and of all its determinations, among
others, the family.
Among others only?
The last chapters of the Jena Philosophy of Nature-more
precisely the last sections of the last chapter-concern the "pro-
cess of disease." Dissolution of natural life, disease works at the
transition toward the spirit. The life of the spirit thus becomes
the essence, the present truth of the past, the Gewesenheit of
natural dissolution, of natural death. "With disease the animal
transgresses liiberschreitet) the limits of its nature; but animal
disease is the becoming of the spirit." In the dissociation of the
natural organization, the spirit reveals itself. It was working on
biological life, like nature in general, with its negativity and
manifests itself therein as such at the end; spirit will always
have been nature's essence; nature is within spirit as its being-
outside-self. In freeing itself from the natural limits that were
imprisoning it, the spirit returns to itself but without ever having
left itself. A procession of returning (home). The limit was with-
in it; the spirit was chaining up, contracting, imprisoning itself
within itself. It always repeats itself. The end of the analysis of
animal disease: "Nature exists in the spirit, as in what is its
essence."
This joint will assure, in the circle of the Encyclopedia, the
circle itself, the return to the philosophy of spirit. There again,
after analyzing the genus animal and the sexual relationship, the
last sections of the philosophy of nature treat of disease and
 Glas 321

death. Here the question would be to accomplish the teleology

inaugurated by Aristotle, reawakened by Kant, the concept of
internal finality having nearly been lost between them, in mod-
ern times. This internal finality is not conscious, as would be the
position of an exterior end; it is of the order of "instinct (In-
stinkt)" and remains "unconscious." Instinct here is a determi-
nation of drive (Trieb).
The normal fulfillment of the biological process and, in it, of
the generic process is death. Death is natural. And in the same
stroke violent: no contradiction in that, no other contradiction
than the contradiction internal to the process.
Genus designates the simple unity that remains (close) by
itself in each singular subject, in each representative or example
of itself. But as this simple universality is produced in judgment,
in the originary separation (Urteil), it tends to go out of itself in
order to escape morseling, division, and to find, meet itself again
back home, as subjective universality. This process of reassem-
bling, of regrouping, denies the natural universality that tends to
lose itself and divide itself. Thus, the natural living one must die.
The necessary differentiation of genus that determines itself in
species provokes war. The species inflict on themselves a violent
death. The genus naturally produces itself through its own vio-
lent self-destruction. Lamarck and Cuvier-cited at Jength-
knew how to choose the criteria of specific differentiation: the
teeth, claws, etc., the "weapons" by which the animal "estab-
lishes and preserves itself as a being-for-self, that is, differentiates
itself."
Man, insofar as he is a living creature in nature, does not
escape this war of species. This war is the negative face of the
genus division. In its ordinary partition (Urteil), genus divides or
multiplies itself into specific morsels only in order to reassemble
itself (close) by itself. The bellicose and morseling operation of
the generic process (Gattungsprozess) doubles itself with an affir-
mative reappropriation. Singularity rejoins, repairs, or reconciles
itself with itself within the genus. The individual "continues
itself" in another, feels and experiences itself in another. This
begins with need and the "feeling of this lack." The lack is
opened with the inadequation of the individual to the genus. The
genus is in the individual as a gap, a tension (Spannung). Whence
322 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

lack, need, drive: the movement to reduce the wound of the gap,
to close the cut, to draw together its lips. In the same stroke, the
drive tend~ to accomplish just what it strictly reduces, the gap of
the individual to the genus, of genus to itself in the individual,
the Urteil, the originary division and judgment. This operation
that consists of filling in the gap, of uniting one to the other by
carrying out the Urteil in the most pronounced way, is copula-
tion. The word for copulation or coupling, for this general play of
the copula, is Begattung, the operation of the genus (Gattung),
the generic and generative operation. Just as what is rightly trans-
lated by sexual relationship (Geschlechtsverhiiltnis) also desig-
nates the relationship of genus, species, or race (family, lineage)
or the sex relationship as the feminine or masculine gender (Ges-
chlecht).
As is often the case, the section concerning the "sexual rela-
tionship" and copulation is augmented with an "appendix" by
which precisely is abridged the classic Encyclopedia of the Philo-
sophical Sciences in Outline. This addition (Zusatz) takes up
again, almost literally, the end of the Jena Philosophy of Nature.
In it Hegel treats of sexual difference. "The separation of the two
sexes" presents a very singular structure of separation. In each
sex the organic individuals form a totality. But they do not relate
to those of the other sex as inorganic alterity. On each side they
belong to the genus, "so that they exist only as a single Ges-
chlecht (sex or gender)." "Their union is the effacement of the
sexes, in which the simple genus has come into being (Ihre
Vereinigung ist das Verschwinden der Geschlechter, worin die
einfache Gattung geworden ist). 11 When two individuals of the
same species copulate, "the nature of each goes throughout both,
and both find themselves within the sphere of this generality."
Each one is, as the party taking part, at once a part and a whole;
this general structure overlaps them both, passes as bisexuality
into each of them. What each one is in (it)self (a single species),
each one actually posits as such in copulation. "The idea of
nature here is actual in the male and female couple [pair, Paare];
up till now their identity and their being-for-self merely were for
us only in our reflection, but they are now, in the infinite reflec-
tion of both sexes, experienced by themselves within themselves.
 Glas 323

This feeling of generality is the highest to which the animal can

be brought."
"Contradiction" inherent to the difference of sexes: both the
generality of genus and the identity of individuals (its belonging
to the genus) are "different" from their separate, particular (be-
sonderen) individuality. "The individual is only one of the two
individuals, and exists not as unity (Einheit), but only as singu-
larity (Einzelheit). 11 Sexual difference opposes unity to singularity
and thereby introduces contradiction into the genus or into the
process of Urteil, into what produces and lets itself be consti-
tuted by this contradiction. Producing the contradiction, this
process resolves the contradiction: the process of copulation aims
at preserving, while annulling, this difference.
Copulation relieves the difference: Aufhebung is very pre-
cisely the relation of copulation to sexual difference.
The relief in general cannot be understood without sexual
copulation, nor sexual copulation in general without the relief.
In general: if one takes into account that the Au/hebung is
described here in a strictly determinate (strangulated) moment of
the becoming of the idea (the final moment of the philosophy of
nature)-but also that this moment of life is re-marked at the
term of the philosophy of spirit-then the Aufhebung of the
sexual difference is, manifests, expresses, stricto sensu, the
Au/hebung itself and in general.
Still in the appendix: "The activity of the animal consists in
relieving this difference (Die Tiitigkeit des Tiers ist, diesen Un-
terschied aufzuheben)." The process indeed has the form of a
syllogism. And the "mediation or middle term" of the syllogism
is the gap (Spannung), the inadequation between the individual
and the genus, the necessity for the singular to look for "self-
feeling" in the other.
What are the conditions of this relieving copulation? In de-
scribing what he calls the formation of sexual difference-or
more precisely of the different sexes (die Bildung der unterschie-
denen Geschlechter)-Hegel subjects to the most traditional, in
any case Aristotelian, philosophical interpretation what he con-
siders the assured acquisitions of the epoch's anatomical science.
He found there the proof of a hierarchic-arranging dissymmetry.
324 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

The formation of the different sexes must be "different," dif-

ferentiated. By reason of the "primordial identity of the forma-
tion," the sexual parts of the male and the female must certainly
belong to the "same type," but in one or the other this or that
part constitutes the "essential (das Wesentliche)." In the type's
generality, all the parts are thus present in each sex, but one
dominates here, the other there, in order to constitute the es-
sence of the sex. The morphological type is bisexual in its under-
lying and microscopic structure. Within this structure, one ele-
ment's prevailing provokes the hierarchy between the sexes.
But the difference is not so simple. To say that one element
dominates here, the other there, is not enough: in the female the
essence consists of indifference-rather the indifferent ldas In-
differente); in the male the essence consists in the difference, the
divided-in-two, rather, the opposition ldas Entzuweite, der Ge-
gensatz). Male and female are not opposed as two differents, two
terms of the opposition, but as indifference and difference (oppo-
sition, division). The sexual difference is the difference between
indifference and difference. But each time, in order to relieve
itself, difference must be determined in-as opposition.
So difference is produced through the general identity of the
anatomical type that goes on differentiating itself. In the lower
animals, the difference is hardly marked at all. Certain locusts,
for example the Gryllus verruccivorus, a kind of grasshopper,
bear large testicles coming from vessels twisted into rolls like
fascicles, testicles similar to large ovaries coming from egg ducts
themselves rolled into fascicles. The same analogy between the
testicles and the ovarian sacs of gadflies.
"The greatest difficulty": "discovering the female uterus in
the male sexual parts." Unfortunately, people thought they rec-
ognized it in the testicle sac, in the scrotum, since the testicles
seem precisely to be what corresponds to the ovaries. But instead,
the prostate fulfils in man a function qualified to that of the
uterus. In the man, the uterus lowers itself, falls to the state of a
gland, in a kind of undifferentiated generality. Hegel refers here
to Ackermann's Darstellung der Lebenskriifte. Ackermann has
shown, on his hermaphrodite, the place of the uterus in the
"former masculine formations." But this uterus is not only in
lthe) place of the prostate: the ejaculatory ducts also go through
 Glas 325

its substance and open at the crista galli, into the urethra. The
lips of the vulva are moreover testicle sacs, and testicle forma-
tions filled the lips of the hermaphrodite. The medial line of the
scrotum finally parts in the woman and forms the vagina. "In
this way, the transformation (Umbildung) of one sex into the
other is understandable. Just as in the man the uterus sinks down
to a mere gland, so in the woman, the masculine testicle remains
enclosed, enveloped (eingeschlossen) within the ovary."
An apparently anatomical description. But in its vocabulary
and its syntax, the hierarchic evaluation mobilizes the object.
The testicle "bleibt eingeschlossen," remains enclosed, envel-
oped. The development, the bringing to light, the production has
been insufficient, delayed, lagging behind [en reste]. From this
teleological interpretation is drawn a very marked speculative
conclusion: "On the other hand, the male testicle in the woman
remains enclosed within the ovary, does not project into opposi-
tion (tritt nicht heraus in den Gegensatz), does not become for
itself, does not become an active brain (wird nicht fiir sich, zum
tiitigen Gehirn), and the clitoris is inactive feeling in general."
"The clitoris is inactive feeling in general," "der Kitzler ist
das untiitige Gefiihl iiberhaupt," in general, absolutely, chiefly,
above all, principally. Who and what says iiberhaupt?
This dissymmetry is not compensated for by the fall of the
uterus in the man. What does not yet emerge in the woman is
sexual activity. The sexual difference reproduces the hierarchical
opposition of passivity to activity, of matter to form. Hegel al-
ways, expressly, determines Reason as Activity. The Aufhebung,
the central concept of the sexual relation, articulates the most
traditional phallocentrism with the Hegelian onto-theo-tele-
ology.
Production, differentiation, opposition are bound to the value
activity. That is the system of virility. The clitoris, which resem-
bles the penis, is passive: "in the man on the contrary, we have
there active sensibility (haben wir dafiir das
who, we? magisterial tiitige Gefiihl), the overflowing swelling of
we, we of Sa, we men?
And what if it were al- t h e h eart (d as aufsch we11en de Herz,) t h e
ways the same? And blood rushing into the corpora cavemosa and
who-we-assists-us here into the meshes of the spongy tissue of the
urethra. To this rushing of blood in the man
326 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

corresponds then in the woman the effusion of blood." The same

abundance of blood fills and rises on the one side, pours out and
is lost on the other. Swelling (gonflement] of the heart also says
erection; Aufschwellen often signifies turgescence, intumesc-
ence.
Man's superiority costs him an inner division. In passively
receiving, woman remains one (close) by herself; she works less
but lets herself be worked (over) less by negativity. "The receiv-
ing [Das Empfangen: this is also the conceiving of childbirth] of
the uterus, as simple behavior, as in the man, in this way, divided
in two (entzweit) into the productive brain and the external heart
(in das produzierende Gehirn und das iiusserliche Herz). The
man then, through this difference, is the active jDer Mann ist
also durch diesen Unterschied das Tiitige); but the woman is the
receptacle (das Empfangende), because she remains in her unde-
veloped unity (weil sie in ihrer unentwickelten Einheit bleibt).11

Remaining enveloped in undifferentiated unity, woman keeps

herself nearer the origin. Man is secondary, as the difference that
causes passing into the opposition. Paradoxical consequences of
all phallocentrism: the hardworking and determining male sex
enjoys mastery only in losing it, in subjugating itself to the
feminine slave. The phallocentric hierarchy is a feminism: man
submits dialectically to Femininity and Truth, both capitalized,
making man the sub;ect of woman.
Subject and form: "Coitus must not be reduced to the ovary
and the sperm as if the new formation were merely the assem-
blage of forms or parts of two partners, for the feminine certainly
contains the material element, while the male contains the sub-
jectivity. Conception is the contraction of the whole individual
into the simple self-abandoning unity, into its representation (in
seine Vorstellung) . ... " The seed is this simple representation
itself, entirely reduced to one single "point, "as the name and
11

the entire self." "Conception then is nothing but this: the op-
posed, this abstract representation become a single one. 11
This discourse on sexual difference belongs to the philosophy
of nature. It concerns the natural life of differentiated animals.
Silent about the lower animals and about the limit that deter-
mines them, this discourse excludes plants. There would be no
sexual difference in plants, the first "Potenz" of the organic
 Glas 327

process. The Jena philosophy of nature stresses this. The tuber,

for example, is undoubtedly divided (entzweit sich) into a "differ-
ent opposition (differenten Gegensatz)" of masculine and femi-
nine, but the difference remains "formal." This difference does
not produce totalities, individual plants where some would be
male and others female. "The difference between male plants
and female plants is only a difference of parts on the same plant,
not the formation of two individuals." Hegel notes in passing
that in the cryptogam in general the sexual parts are assumed to
be "infinitely small."
In this sense, the human female, who has not developed the
difference or the opposition, remains closer to the plant. The
clitoris nearer the cryptogam.
[ .... ]
We have yet to encounter the family. At least the human
family, what, by a convenience more and more problematic, one
would still be tempted to call the family properly so called:
neither the infinite Holy Family, nor the natural cell of the finite
living.
The analysis of the human family now seems accessible: on
coming out of nature, when the spirit takes itself back, becomes
an object for itself in consciousness. The first philosophy of
spirit, at Jena, inscribes the first determination of the human
family in a theory of consciousness. Thus its organizing concepts
are those of Potenz and Mitte, power and middle term, milieu,
center. The family is the third Potenz, the ultimate one, of con-
sciousness. It achieves itself in Sittlichkeit and in the people-
spirit.
As the spirit's return to (it)self, consciousness is the simple
and immediate contrary of itself, is what it is conscious of, to wit
its opposite. At once active and passive, identifying itself with
its own proper opposite, consciousness separates itself from or by
itself as from its object, but hems itself in as the strict unity of
its own proper separation: "On the other hand (das andre Mal),
consciousness is the contrary of this separation, the absolute
being-one (Einssein) of the difference, the being-one of the exis-
tent difference and of the relieved difference." As such, as the
two opposites and the movement of opposition, the differents
328 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

and the difference, consciousness is Mitte, mediation, middle,

medium.
Consequently, each "power" of consciousness will have the
determination of a middle. And since consciousness is the relief
of nature injto) spirit, each of these middles guards within itself
a natural relieved determination. Each corresponds every time to
the idealization of a natural middle, and consciousness is the
middle of ideality in general, then of universality in general. It is
ether: absolutely welcoming transparency offering no resistance.
Ether is not natural like air, but it is not purely spiritual. It is the
middle in which the spirit relates to itself, repeats itself in going
through nature like the wind.
Consciousness idealizes nature in denying it, produces itself
through what it denies !or relieves). Through: the going through
and the transgression leave in the ideal middle the analogical
mark of the natural middle. There is thus a power and a middle
corresponding to the air: memory and language; next, to the
earth: labor and tool. In the case of the family, the third power,
an essential supplementary complication: the middle through
which my family produces itself is no longer inorganic like air or
earth. It is no longer simply external to the ideal middle. More
than one consequence will follow.
How does the family come to air and earth, that is, to language
and memory, to labor and the tool?
Homogeneous and fluid, air allows showing through and re-
sonating, seeing and hearing. Theoretico-phonic middle. The first
power of consciousness is "pure theoretical existence." It deter-
mines and holds itself back as such in memory, that is, without
solid assistance. The question is obviously that of the pure and
living memory, a memory that would be purely evanescent with-
out language, which furnishes it stable but still completely inte-
rior and spontaneous products. But because of this interiority and
this spontaneity, language is a product that effaces itself in time.
In time thoretical consciousness also disappears. It cannot posit
itself, exist as theoretical consciousness. To do that, it must then
go out of itself, pass yet into its opposite, deny its own proper
theoreticity, its air. Theoretical consciousness cannot posit itself
as theoretical consciousness except by becoming practical con-
sciousness, through the earthly element. To the memory then is
 Glas 329

chained labor, to the linguistic product of memory the tool and

the product of labor. Just as language was at once the effect and
the organ of memory, the tool (Werkzeug) serves the labor from
which it proceeds. In both cases, an activity gives rise to the
production of a permanence, of an element of relative subsis-
tence.
The family presupposes the two preceding powers, but it also
goes through the organic element, desire and sexual difference.
The permanent product is the child and family goods (Familien-
gut). Family property, proprietorship, finally raises inorganic na-
ture (earth and air) to the ideality of a universal proprietorship
guaranteed by juridical rationality. Then the ether again becomes
absolute, and the family accomplishes itself by disappearing, by
denying its singularity in the people-spirit.
Such is the general schema. Let us regard more closely the
transition from the second to the ultimate Potenz, that is, the
origin of the family.
In language, the invisible sonorous, evanescent milieu, theo-
retical consciousness effaces itself, denies itself, reduces itself to
the punctual instant. So the theoretical freedom in that instant
is negative and formal. As it is only a point, this freedom con-
verts itself into its contrary. Its universality becomes pure singu-
larity, its freedom caprice or hardheadedness (Eigensinn). The
proper sense of this hardheaded freedom is death [mort]. In order
to be sure to remain (close) by (it)self and not to release its hold
on it, theoretical consciousness renounces everything. It wants
to escape the death of the inorganic, to escape the earth, but it
remains in the air and dies all the more (beautiful). The purity of
life is death.
So practical consciousness is at once the negation and the
posit(ion)ing of theoretical consciousness. This is played out in
the passage from desire to labor.
Desire is theoretical, but as such is tortured by a contradiction
that makes it practical.
In effect, theoretical consciousness (death) has only to do with
the dead. In the opposition constituting theoretical conscious-
ness, its object, its opposite is not a consciousness, but a thing-
a dead thing-that itself does not oppose itself, does not of itself
enter into relation. The dead thing is in the relation without,
330 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

itself, relating-to. So theoretical consciousness has the form of a

contradiction, the form of a relation that relates itself to some-
thing that is not related, that does not relate (itself I (Widerspruch
einer Beziehung auf ein absolut nicht Bezogenes), that absolves
itself of the relation.
This changes only with desire. Desire is related to a living
thing, thus to something that relates (itself). So the negation of
theoretical consciousness is first of all desire. Desire perforce
implies just what it denies: theoretical consciousness, memory
and language.
One might be tempted to conclude from this that desire is the
proper(tyJ of the speaking being. In fact Hegel does not refuse
desire to the animal. So the passage from animal desire to human
desire supposes theoretical consciousness and speaking [parole]
as such. As such: for there is indeed also a theoretical attitude in
the animal, if the theoretical is the relation to the dead thing.
Nothing more theoretical in this regard than the animal. But
neither the animal nor the theoretical can posit itself as such.
According to a long-lived tradition, the animal would be incapa-
ble of both language and labor.
Hegel at least does not refuse desire to the animal. The animal
even has the power to curb or inhibit its desire. Simply, in the
animal the structure of inhibition is other. No doubt the ten-
dency to annihilate the opposed object (desire) inhibits itself (sich
... hemmt). The members of the opposition must be relieved (als
aufzuhebende) and as such are they "posited." Desire itself is
posited as "ought-to-be annihilated." Desire holds in check the
destruction of what it desires, that is, of what it desires to con-
sum(mat)e, destroy, annihilate. It wants to keep what it wants to
lose. Desire is of/for the Aufhebung. Inhibition and relief are
inseparable; the effect of ideality that always ensues also belongs
to the structure of animal desire in general.
What then distinguishes animal desire from human desire? A
question of time. The moments of the operation are dissociated
and external in the animal Aufhebung. The annihilation and the
preservation juxtapose themselves, hold themselves "separated
in time (in der Zeit auseinandergeriickt)." The consum(mat)ing
and the suppression are not present at the same time, do not
occupy the same present. So there is no present Aufhebung in

J
 Glas 331

the animal, a fortiori in inorganic nature. That is the very defini-

tion, and not just one predicate among others, of nature. In that
sense, it is not absurd to say that there is no Aufhebung or
dialectics of nature. At least the dialectics does not present itself
there. The dialectics announces itself-already-according to
the mode of the not-yet. Nothing more dialectical, however.
There is animality when consumlmat)ing and noncon-
sum(mat)ing follow one another but do not reassemble them-
selves. The animal as such !that is why it would have no history
and would endlessly repeat itself), man as animal con-
sumlmat)es, then does not consumjmat)e; destroys, then does
not destroy; desires to destroy, then desires not to destroy; sa-
tiates itself, then stops itself; stops itself, then satiates itself;
and begins again, This dissociation or this successiveness is pre-
cisely what human desire relieves. Inhibition, this time, inhabits
the consumlmat)ing itself. Ideality, the effect of inhibition, forms
part of the present of the consumjmat)ing. The Aufhebung pres-
ently produces itself there, in the heart of the enjoyment. "Hu-
man desire must be ideal lideell) in the relief itself jim Auf heben
selbst), it must be relieved (aufgehoben), and the object must
equally, while (indem) it is relieved, remain (bleiben)."
So the Aufhebung relieves itself in present desire. Human
desire: relief of the relief, relieving presence of the relief, reliev-
ance (relevance]. The truth of ideality presents itself there as
such.
The Aufhebung is not some determinate thing, or a formal
structure the undifferentiated generality of which applies itself
to every moment. The Aufhebung is history, the becoming of its
own proper presentation, of its own proper differentiating deter-
mination, and it is subject to the law, to the same law as what it
is the law of: it first gives itself as immediate, then mediatizes
itself by denying itself, and so on. That it is subject to the law of
what it is the law of, this is what gives to the structure of the
Hegelian system a very twisted form so difficult to grasp.
How does desire become labor? Why does desire remain in the
animal whereas it cannot not posit itself in man's labor?
In animal desire-which constitutes the animal as such-
ideality is not internal to consumlmat)ing, to satisfaction; ideal-
ity only succeeds desire. "The becoming actual of the relief, the
332 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

stilling IStillung) of desire, is [in the animal] an immediate be-

coming-relieved, without ideality, without consciousness." !One
could already conclude from this, against the so clear interest of
this obscure humanism, that ideality, consciousness, the human-
ity of desire, all that is the supplementary mediatization of ani-
mal desire-neither more nor less.) Inasmuch as desire no longer
has to do with a dead object and as the preserving ideality saves
up desire, it is no longer a simply theoretical operation. Desire is
already practical relation. Human desire is labor. In itself. This
depends on inhibition in general structuring desire in the most
interior and the most essential way. Room must be made for the
generality of this structure; then one must ask whether some-
thing like repression can figure a species of the genus Hemmung
in this general structure, whether the logic of repression is com-
patible with the general logic of inhibition and relief. If there
were a decidable response to this question, it could not be said in
a word.
So Hegel must simultaneously describe the emergence of hu-
man desire and the emergence of the practical relation. There is
no animal labor, and praxis is a "power" of consciousness. "The
practical relation is a relation IBeziehung) of consciousness."
This depends on annihilation of the object being, in its very
simplicity, an operation that inhibits itself within itself and op-
poses itself to itself (ein in sich Gehemmtes und Entgegenge-
setztes). That is why desire is never satisfied, and there lies its
"practical" structure itself. "Desire does not come to its satisfac-
tion in its operation of annihilation." Its object stays, not because
it escapes annihilation, keeps outside the range for annihilation,
but because it stays in its annihilation. Desire remains inasmuch
as it does not remain. Operation of mourning: idealizing con-
sum(mat)ing. This relation is called labor. Practical conscious-
ness elaborates in the place where it annihilates and holds to-
gether the two opposites of the contradiction. In this sense labor
is the middle (Mitte) of the opposition intrinsic to desire.
This middle in its turn posits itself, gives itself permanence.
Without that, it would collapse into a pure negativity, would
sink like a pure activity that of itself progressively removes itself.
In order to posit itself, labor must then pass into its opposite,
 Glas 333

settle outside itself in the resistance of the middle. That is the

origin of the tool (Werkzeug), the object (producer and product)
of labor. "Labor is itself a thing (Ding). The tool is the existing
rational middle, the existing universality, of the practical pro-
cess."
What is such a thing (Ding)? What is the being-thing of that
thing-there (Ding)? It's an existent universality because the gen-
erality of the implement prevents labor from being depleted in
the singular acts of an empiric subjectivity. Without the tool's
universal objectivity, labor would be a one-sided experience, would
destroy and carry itself off into the ineffable multiplicity of deeds
and gestures. So the tool guards labor from self-destruction, is
the relieving ideality of praxis, is at once active and passive: the
remain(s) of labor that enters tradition, practical history. But
practical history as history of desire. Desire and labor disappear,
with their objects, as empiric individuals. One desires, one con-
sum(mat)es, one labors, it (~a) passes (away) and dies. As empiric
individuals. So tradition (that is Hegel's word) is what resists this
loss and constitutes the maintained ideality: not the finite and
elaborated object, but the labor tool that can yet be of service,
because of its generality structure. The tool is endowed with an
ideal, reproducible, perfectible identity, gives rise to accumula-
tion, and so on. So one cannot desire without desiring to produce
tools, that is, production tools.
Now the most difficult step is to be taken: marriage.
Some lines-more elliptical than ever-close the analysis of
the second "Potenz" (the tool) and must in sum explain the
upsurge of the third Ithe family) in its first phase. So the question
is accounting for the production of marriage by the tool.
As always, this movement has the form of a production by
positlion)ing: objectification, contradiction, interiorization, sub-
jectification, idealization, setting free, relief. Marriage: relief of
the implement.
The implement is solid. Resistant thus to consum(mat)ing and
assuring tradition, it acts at the same time as an outer constraint.
Elaborative desire gives itself the tool, to be sure, but as an
external thing and in a heteronomous relation. No longer does
desire freely, spontaneously, from within, refrain from con-
334 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

sum(mat)ing the other. Ideality still remains in a certain dissoci-

able outside. The freedom of consciousness does not fully affirm
itself in inhibitory reserve.
Marriage is the relief of this constraint, the interiorization of
this exteriority, the consum(mat)ing of the implement. The labor
of desire without instrument. The exteriority of the tool chain
has just been defined: "The freedom of consciousness relieves
this need, and inhibits the annihilating in enjoyment, through
consciousness itself (durch sich selbst); that makes the two sexes
into consciousness for one another, into beings and subsisters for
one another . . . in such a way that in the being-for-self of the
other, each is itself.... 11
This is the first time the Jena philosophy of spirit touches on
(and tampers with) sexual desire. The philosophy of nature treats
of biological sexuality. As for desire, it had not yet been specified
as sexual desire and therefore could as well be a matter of drink-
ing and eating. So at the moment the Aufhebung, within enjoy-
ment, inhibits, retains, and relieves pleasure in order not to de-
stroy the other and so destroy itself as enjoyment; at the moment
it limits in order to keep, denies in order to enjoy, as if through
fear there were no need to reach, to yield to, a too good that
would risk sweeping away what is given in its very own excess;
at that furtive moment, very near and very far from itself, from
its own proper present, hardly phenomenal, between night and
day-the penumbra(! man) [le penombre]-at that moment does
Hegel determine desire as sexual desire. This secret of enjoyment
that sacrifices itself, immolates itself to itself, say on the altar of
enjoyment, in order not to destroy (itself), itself and the other,
one in the other, one for the other-essential unenjoyment and
im-potence-that is what Hegel calls love. The two sexes pass
into each other, are one for and in the other-this constitutes
the ideal, the ideality of the ideal.
This ideality has its "middle" in marriage. The inhibition
freed in desire, the desire that "frees itself from its relationship
with enjoyment," is love; and love's subsistence, its duration, its
staying, its elementary middle is marriage. "And the sexual rela-
tionship comes to be that in which each one is one with the
other in the being of the consciousness of each one, in other
words, an ideal relation. Desire frees itself from its relationship
 Glas 335

with enjoyment; it becomes an immediate being-one IEinssein)

of both in the absolute being for-lit)self of both, i.e., it becomes
love; and the enjoyment is in this intuiting IAnschauen) of one-
self in the being of the other consciousness. The relationship
itself becomes in the same way the being of both and a relation-
ship as durable lbleibende) as the being of both, that is, it be-
comes marriage."
An appendix of the Philosophy of Right will distinguish mar-
riage from concubinage by the "repression" of the natural im-
pulse (there Naturtrieb is zuriickgedriingt). Concubinage on the
contrary satisfies the natural impulse.
We have again found the syllogistic deduction of love and
marriage as the immediate unity of the family.
Duration, what remains (bleibt) of this moment that is to love
what the implement is to labor, does not remain at peace. A new
dialectical cycle starts up here, a new war begins to rage. The
struggle to the death for recognition is inscribed here within the
family syllogism. A difference between the Jena analysis and the
much fuller one of the Philosophy of Right; the first compre-
hends, in the development concerning the child, an explanation
of the struggle to the death for recognition and possession.
So marriage is the first moment of the family, its most natural
and immediate moment. Marriage is monogamous: a constant
implication declared later on in the Philosophy of Right: "Mar-
riage, and essentially monogamy, is one of the absolute principles
on which the Sittlichkeit of a community depends." Or again:
"In essence marriage is monogamy."
The free inclination of both sexes, marriage excludes any con-
tract. Such an abstract juridical bond could in effect bind persons
only to (dead) things, could not by right commit two living free-
doms. In marriage there can be empiric determinations, "patho-
logical" inclinations, but that is inessential.
Against marriage's essentiality no consideration of the empiric
limitations of freedom can measure up. So Hegel never takes into
consideration Kant's whole pragmatic anthropology, everything
in it concerning conjugal agonistics, the struggle for mastery
between husband and wife. Never does the philosophy of spirit
state anything at all about the sex difference between the spouses.
Nothing more logical: everything must happen as if the spouses
336 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

were the same sex, were both bisexual or asexual. The Aufhe-
bung has worked.
The war begins with the child. So all discourse on the inequal-
ity of the sexes in marriage would remain empiric, not pertinent,
foreign to the essence of marriage. In "Characterization," the
second part of his Anthropology, Kant analyzes the "Character of
the Sexes" in and out of marriage. He does so in terms of the
struggle for domination, the complex struggle wherein mastery
passes from one sex to the other according to the domains and
moments. Mastery is rarely where one expects to find it. The
inequality of the sexes is the condition for a harmonious union.
Equality of forces would render one sex unbearable to the other.
So the progress of culture must favor inequality for the protec-
tion and propagation of the species. Bent to the teleology of
nature, culture produces and accentuates the heterogeneity in
the disproportion of the sexes. Man must be superior by his
physical force and his courage, the woman by-I cite-her "nat-
ural talent [Naturgabe: natural gift] for mastering (sich bemeis-
tern) man's inclination toward her." This strange superiority of
the woman is not natural. It depends on the culture that thus
privileges the woman, since in nature all superiority "is on the
man's side." If, then, culture transforms the natural situation by
providing some artificial superiority to the woman, a theory of
culture-what Kant here calls anthropology-must have as its
privileged, if not unique, object the status of femininity. Anthro-
pology should be a theory of the woman. ". . . the peculiarly
feminine proper(ty) (weibliche Eigentiimlichkeit), more than the
masculine sex, is a subject for study by the philosopher."
Culture does not limit itself to the simple revelation of an
enveloped feminine specificity.
It grafts. The cultured woman's relative superiority is a graft
of man: "In the state of brute nature (Jm rohen Naturzustande)
one can no more recognize [the specifically feminine character-
istics] than those of crab apples or wild pears, which disclose
their multiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit) only through grafting
(Pfropfen) or innoculation (Inokulieren)." Here the graft trans-
forms only in order to display natural characteristics or proper-
ties, which explains why the relative superiority the graft confers
on the woman seems to overturn the natural situation but con-
 Glas 337

sists only in knowing how to submit to man's inclination. "For

culture does not introduce these peculiarly feminine characteris-
tics," it only produces them, brings them to light, "only causes
them to develop and become remarked under favorable circum-
stances."
Within this general anthropo-botany, Kant analyzes the war of
the sexes in marriage. The woman has a taste for domestic war;
the man flees it; he "loves domestic peace" and voluntarily sub-
mits to the woman's government. "The woman wants to domi-
nate (herrschen), the man wants to be dominated (beherrscht)
(particularly before marriage)." The consequence of culture, mar-
riage frees the woman and enslaves the man; "the woman be-
comes free by marriage; the man loses his freedom thereby."
Simulacrum of reversal: the woman does not become the
stronger, but culture makes her weakness a lever. The possibility
of inverting the natural signs-femininity itself-prohibits ana-
lyzing an essence, a feminine nature. Femininity is the power to
be other than what one is, to make a weapon of weakness, to
remain secret. The woman has a secret (Geheimnis); the man is
deprived of it. That is why he is easy to analyze /Der Mann ist
leicht zu erforschen). Analysis of the woman is impossible; she
does not reveal her secret, which does not prevent her, on the
contrary, from regularly betraying that of others. Because she
speaks: the reign of culture as the reign of the woman is also the
field of speaking [parole]. Language never says anything but this
perversion of nature by culture-by the woman. The feminine
weapon is the tongue. She transforms the slave's weakness into
mastery by the tongue but already, always, by that perversion of
discourse that is chitchat, loquaciousness, verbosity, volubility
(Redseligkeit). Thus does she triumph in the domestic war and
love it, unlike the man who has something else to do outside.
Accumulating all the rights, she triumphs in the war by ruse:
sheltered behind her husband (the right of the stronger), she
controls her master (the right of the weaker). The art of the lever.
Through this law of perversion that displaces the primitive
hierarchy, the natural teleology continues to operate, realizes its
normal, normalizing designs, through ruses and detours. The
Kantian "description" doggedly restores its intention.
In effect the woman resembles a "folly" of nature, the human
338 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

folly of nature. But by seducing the man, by leading him astray

from his natural trajectory, she accomplishes in the final analysis
the wise design of nature. The gap has been calculated for all
time; the two sexes have been carefully and implacably ordained
to this grand finality, without the subjects' understanding any-
thing about it. That is why we cannot think feminine sexuality.
Our categories, our aims, the forms of our consciousness are
incapable of doing it, a bit like anthropomorphic metaphors in a
discourse on God. In order to reach, to have access to, the "char-
acteristic of the feminine sex," we must not regulate ourselves
by the principle of our own proper finality, of "what we have
devised ourselves as our end," but on "nature's end in the consti-
tution of femininity." "Human folly" is a means with a view to
this end that is "wisdom" when "the intention of nature" is
considered. So the principle of the characteristic does not depend
on "our own choice," but on a "higher intention": "preservation
of the species," "the improvement of society and its refinement
by femininity." According to what ways?
Having entrusted to the woman the "fruit of the womb" that
allows the species to develop itself, nature has taken fright for
the woman in which such a "pledge" was deposited; nature has
preserved its daughter, sheltered her, has made her fearful and
timid in the face of danger. She has been assured the man's
protection. The woman's fear is nature's or life's fear for itself.
Social refinement obeys the same finality. In order to favor that
refinement, nature has made "the feminine sex the master (Be-
herrscher) of the masculine sex." This mastery has been assured
by a moralization: not in the sense of the moral, of Moralitiit,
but of mores, of Sittsamkeit, if not of Sittlichkeit. Sittsamkeit is
decency, honesty, modesty, reserve. In the space of a few lines,
one sees it opposed to morality (Moralitiit). With its ease and
fluency of discourse and the games of mimicry, Sittsamkeit is
even the mask of morality (the text would be made unreadable if
Sittsamkeit were translated by morality), the ruse that enslaves
man. Man is then, because of his "own magnanimity," "imper-
ceptibly fettered by a child." Modesty, decency, reserve, Sitt-
samkeit indeed serves as veil or "cloak (Kleid)" to an invisible
morality. The woman is on the side of Sittlichkeit or Sitt-
samkeit, which Kant places below morality. Hegel will reverse
 Glas 339

the relation of Moralitiit to Sittlichkeit. There a chiasm(us) is

given that cannot be maintained in the limits of an "anthropol-
ogy."
How does (feminine) perversion place itself at the service of
the teleology hidden in marriage? And in what way does this
teleological problem reproduce the chiasm(us)?
In the natural state, in the Kantian sense, the man's polygamy
is nearly natural. The paradigmatic structure resembles the har-
em's. The man naturally desires the whole sex and not one
woman; his dealings are only with exemplars of femininity. He
does not love, he loves any woman, no matter whom. The woman
is a kind of whore. Conversely, in the cultural state, the woman
does not indulge the pleasure of the man outside of marriage, and
of monogamous marriage; but she desires all men and so be-
comes, in act or intention, the whore. So the Kantian man never
deals with anyone but the whore. And if this categorical pornog-
rapher were asked what he prefers, whore or virgin, he would
respond virgin, knowing all the while full well that nature, which
leads him to this, takes care to see to it that this comes down, at
the limit, to the same thing. A situation that cannot be without
relation to what Hegel will analyze as the beautiful soul and the
unhappy consciousness.
In both cases, natural polygamy and historic monogamy, the
place of the man always determines the concept. Monogamy is a
man and a woman; polygamy is again a man and many women.
The woman is never polygamous, neither in Kantian nature nor
in Kantian society. So it appears: in truth the woman always has
everything, both in monogamy and in polygamy. In the harem,
for example, there is no true multiplicity and man loses every
time, with every stroke. The women make war in order to restore
the monogamous relationship and so that one among them has
the whole man, at least potentially [en puissance]. With the
result that they all have him, no one is deprived of him, and one
among them also ends by reigning over him. Thus described, the
harem belongs neither to nature nor to culture. Polygamy cannot
be thought in this opposition. In nature there is no marriage; in
true culture, it's monogamy. Kant qualifies as "barbaric" this
unclassifiable phenomenon, this society that is no longer natural
and not yet moral. Starting from this "perversion," one ought to
340 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

interrogate the opposition of concepts from which polygamy es-

capes, that of the man about which Kant speaks, that of the
woman about which he says nothing.
In the harem, the woman is no longer the "domestic animal"
she had to be in nature; she begins to fight and use cunning to
chain up the man's drive or captivate his desire. The harem is a
prison, an enclosed precinct (Zwinger), but the woman already
knows how to establish her mastery in it. The man no longer
knows any repose there amid the busy competition of the women.
Such is the "barbaric constitution" of oriental polygamy, nei-
ther natural nor civil. In the monogamy of civil (bourgeois) soci-
ety, as long as culture is not too developed, the man punishes the
woman if she threatens to give him a rival. But when civilization
(Zivilisierung) is refined to the point of decadence, when it per-
mits '"gallantry" (the fact for a married woman of having lovers)
and makes of it a fashion that makes jealousy rediculous, then
the feminine characteristic "discloses itself." The gallant perver-
sion reveals the true nature of the woman, her profound design:
"with the favor of men but against them to lay claim to freedom
and thereby, simultaneously, to take possession of the whole
sex." This theft, this stealing (Eroberung) of the man by the
woman is not simply condemned by Kant. In his analysis of the
feminine perversion, the complex system of phallogocentrism
can be read. But this system is always precarious and neutralizes
itself, contains what contradicts it. Here, for example, Kant in-
cessantly effaces the moralizing connotation that nonetheless
seems so massive: he often specifies that one must not succumb
to the illusions of consciousness or intention. In feminine perver-
sion, in the cultural, symbolic, verbal ruses-all of this passes
through the woman's tongue, Kant has to read the text of love in
the tongue of the woman who herself knows how to bind virile
energy-one must recognize a hidden natural process, a wisdom
of nature. Kant's discourse, despite pronounced and ridiculous
appearances, would not be, finally, the moral disqualification of
a monstrosity.
But one must admit that this last proposition immediately
reverses itself. If Kant does not maintain the discourse of anti-
feminine morals, it is because he moralizes through and through
his recourse to nature, to the providential wisdom of her who
 Glas 341

keeps vigil over perversion. Nature is good, is a good woman,

that is, in truth, by her productive force, her reason, her profound
logos that dominates all the feminine chatterings, her imperturb-
able and always victorious logic, her educative resources, a fa-
ther. The good woman is a father; the father is a good woman;
and that is finally what speaks through the women, who intend
to appropriate him.
Natural reserve: if, in bourgeois monogamous marriage, the
woman wants to appropriate the whole sex, that is because the
man !husband or father) is finite; he dies, often young, almost
always before the woman, who remains, then, alone, young, wid-
owed. And who will have had, thus, to prepare this mourning,
who knows herself always threatened, in the state of lacking a
man. She takes an interest, provisionally, in sex, on the maternal
advice of nature. "Although this inclination is in ill repute, under
the name of coquetry, it is not without a real justifiable basis. A
young wife is always in danger of becoming a widow, and this
leads her to distribute her charms to all men whose fortunes
make them marriageable; so that, if this should occur, she would
not be lacking in suitors."
This hidden teleology justifies all the dissymmetries and all
the inequalities of development that Kant believes can be de-
scribed under the title of sexual difference.
The woman wants to be a man, the man never wants to be a
woman. "Whenever the refinement of luxury ILuxus) has reached
a high point, the woman shows herself well-behaved jsittsam)
only by compulsion IZwang), and makes no secret in wishing
that she might rather be a man, so that she could give larger and
freer playing room (Spielraum) to her inclinations; no man, how-
ever, would want to be a woman." Kant does not enlarge on this
last proposition, in the closing lines of the paragraph. It goes
without saying that that's unheard of and will never be heard of.
Even if by chance one believed one had come across such an
aberration, what would it mean? What would it mean, for a man,
to want to be a woman, seeing that the woman wants to be a
man the more she cultivates herself? That would mean then,
apart from the semblance of a detour, to want to be a man, to
want to be-that is to say, to remain-a man.
Is it so simple? Does Kant say that the woman wants to be a
342 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

man? He says, more precisely, that she would like, in certain

situations, to adorn herself with attributes of the man in order to
realize her womanly designs: to be better able to have all men.
She pretends to want to be a man or to be a man in order to
"extend the playing room" of her inclinations. Everything is
overturned: either the man who wants to be only a man wants to
be a woman inasmuch as the woman wants to be a man; so he
wants to be a woman in order to remain what he is. Or else the
man who wants to be a woman only wants to be a woman since
the woman wants to be a man only in order to reach her wom-
anly designs. To wit, the man. And so on.
All this happens very quickly in the penumbra where desire
itself binds itself, if something such as that exists.
In fact, even if she truly wanted to, which is not the case, the
woman could never be a man. The masculine attributes with
which she adorns herself are never anything but fake, signifiers
without signification, fetishes. Are never anything but show
[montre], but the watch [montre]. Badly adjusted [reglee] to the
sun's movement. To illustrate that the woman can on no ac-
count appropriate the masculine attribute, for example or substi-
tution, science, culture, the book, Kant denounces a kind of
transvestism: As for scholarly women, they use their books
11

somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear the watch so it can be
noticed they have one, although it is usually stopped or badly
adjusted to the sun." The choice of paradigm once more confirms
it: "characteristic genius" cannot be thought without the uncon-
scious.
The endless dissymmetry between the sexes is accentuated
before the taboo of virginity. The woman does not desire that the
man be a virgin or continent before his marriage. She does not
even ask herself any questions on this subject. For the man the
question is "infinitely" important. Kant does not say that he
requires virginity, or even that he desires it, but that for him the
question is most serious. Perhaps he can love only virginity,
perhaps he can never do so, perhaps his desire is born of the
overlapping of virginity by its contrary. All this is played out in
the gap of a sign that is almost nothing and necessarily describes
itself in the subtlety of nuances and of wordplays: the man is
patient (duldend), the woman tolerant (geduldig), and they do
 Glas 343

not suffer, do not behave in suffering (dulden) in the same way.

The man is sensible (empfindsam), feeling, the woman impres-
sionable (empfindlich), irritable, sensitive, touchy. The economy
of the man tends to acquiring, that of the woman to saving. The
man is jealous when he loves; the woman is jealous also when
she does not love.

This cultural theory of the difference of sexes in marriage has

no possible housing in the Hegelian philosophy of spirit. Love
and marriage belong to the element of the freedom of conscious-
ness and suppose the Aufhebung of sexual difference. The war
described by pragmatic anthropology can take place in it, in fact,
but only insofar as the partners are not true spouses, as the
essence of marriage is not accomplished. In that case, one has
gotten no further than the sexual life of empiric nature, before
the emergence of Sittlichkeit. What Kant will have described
would be in sum a structure of empiric, "pragmatic" accidents, a
structure that does not come under the pure concept of marriage
from which by vice and perversity it strays. Kant could not think,
did not begin by thinking the concept marriage. This concept
being posited, Hegel on the contrary wants to deduce its devel-
opment and not its regression. Once more, Kant would remain
no further along than this nondialectical conjunction of an em-
piricism and a formalism, a conjunction denounced in the article
on natural law. Without proceeding from the essential unity of
marriage, one accumulates and isolates without order the de-
scriptive traits; one joins side by side empiric violence and con-
tractual formalism.
The speculative dialectics of marriage must be thought: the
being-one (Einssein) of the spouses, the consciousness of one in
that of the other, such is the medium, the middle of exchange.
The sexual opposition is relieved there. As means or mediation,
this middle has two sides: the one by which the two spouses
recognize one another and relieve their difference; the other, by
which this consciousness must be, as middle, opposed to their
own and must bear its relief.

That is the child. "It is the child in which they recognize

themselves as one, as being in one consciousness, and precisely
344 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

therein as relieved, and they intuit in the child this relief of

themselves." They "produce" thus "their own death." In order
to think this death, one must make the middle of consciousness
intervene and must think childhood as consciousness. The natu-
ral child, as living animal, does not bear the death of its genitors.
So the death of the parents forms the child's consciousness.

That is education. Empirico-formalism cannot think educa-

tion because empirico-formalism cannot think the parents' nec-
essary death in the child. Yet Kant speaks of the parents' death.
One will say perhaps that this is still a matter of empiric death:
the preference of the father for the daughter, of the mother for
the son, above all for the most insolent, the most undisciplined
son, these preferences are still explained by the possibility of
widowhood. The child of the opposite sex would be the better
support in old age. This derisively empiric explanation neverthe-
less covers the essential affect-mourning-that relates one of
the parents to the child of the other sex after the death of the
married partner. The mother loves the son according to the fa-
ther's death; the father loves the daughter who succeeds the
mother. By reason or way of the empiric, doesn't one thus go
further than the Hegelian deduction of the parents' death, which
seems rather undifferentiated and abstract from the sexual point
of view? A chiasmus again: speculative dialectics thinks this
death in its structural necessity, thinks it as it thinks the efface-
ment of sexual difference that empiricism puts forward.
What is education? The death of the parents, the formation of
the child's consciousness, the Aufhebung of its unconsciousness
in(to) the form of ideality. "In education the unconscious unity
of the child is relieved." One must not hurry to identify this
idealizing relief with a "repression" of the "unconscious." But
the question of such a translation cannot be avoided. Education
(Erziehung) and culture (Bildung) violently delimit a matter by a
form containing it. This violent form is ideal, passes through the
instances of language and labor, of voice and tool. Like every
formation, every imposition of form, it is on the male's side, here
the father's, and since this violent form bears the parents' death,
it imposes itself above all against the father. But the death of the
father is only the real death of the mother, corresponds to the
 Glas 345

idealization of the father, in which the father is not simply anni-

hilated. The relieving education interiorizes the father. Death
being a relief, the parents, far from losing or disseminating them-
selves without return, "contemplate in the child's becoming their
own relief." They guard in that becoming their own disappear-
ance, reg(u)ard their child as their own death. And in reg(u)arding
that disappearance, that death, they retard it, appropriate it; they
maintain in the monumental presence of their seed-in the name-
the living sign that they are dead, not that they are dead, but
that dead they are, which is another thing. Ideality is death, to
be sure, but to be dead-this is the whole question of dissemi-
nation-is that to be dead or to be dead? The ever so slight
difference of stress, conceptually imperceptible, the inner fragil-
ity of each attribute produces the oscillation between the pres-
ence of being as death and the death of being as presence. As long
as the parents are present to their death in the child's formation,
as long as one keeps [garde! the sign or the seme of what is no
longer, even were it the ashes consumed in the small morning of
a penumbra(! man), the enjoyment remains, the enjoyment of
just what is, even of what is dead as what is no longer. But if
death is the being of what is no more, the no-more-being, death
is nothing, in any case is no longer death. One's own proper
death, when contemplated in the child, is the death that is de-
nied, the death that is, that is to say, denied. When one says
"death is," one says "death is denied"; death is not insofar as one
posits it. Such is the Hegelian thesis: philosophy, death's posit-
ing, its pose.
The child-relief of the loss. This loss, the labor of form on
matter, the forming of unconsciousness, the economic process,
production, exchange, dies away, is amortized. The Aufhebung
is the dying away, the amortization, of death. That is the concept
of economy in general in speculative dialectics.
Economy: the law of the family, of the family home, of posses-
sion. The economic act makes familiar, proper, one's own, inti-
mate, private. The sense of property, of propriety, in general is
collected in the oikeios. Whatever the exportation or the gener-
alizing expropriation of the concept economy, that concept never
breaks the umbilical cord attaching it to the family. Or rather
yes, it always breaks the cord, but this rupture is the deduction
346 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

of the family, belongs to the family process insofar as that pro-

cess includes a cutting instance. The Aufhebung, the economic
law of absolute reappropriation of absolute loss, is a family con-
cept.
And thus political. The political opposes itself to the familial
while accomplishing it. So the political economy is not one
region of the general onto-logic; it is coextensive with it. All the
more so since, in the Hegelian systematics, there is never any
simply hierarchic relationships between genus and species: each
part represents the whole, each region is capable of everything.
Thus ideality, the production of the Aufhebung, is an onto-
economic "concept." The eidos, the general form of philosophy,
is properly familial and produces itself as oikos: home, habita-
tion, apartment, room, residence, temple, tomb, hive, assets,
family, race, and so on. H a common seme is given therein, it is
the guarding of the proper, of property, propriety, of one's own [la
garde du propre]: this guarding retains, keeps back, inhibits, con-
signs the absolute loss or consumjmat)es it only in order better
to reg(u)ard it returning to jit)self, even were it in the repetition
of death. Spirit is the other name of this repetition.
Such is the cost of the child: "In education the unconscious
unity of the child relieves itself (hebt sich ... auf), articulates
itself in (it)self (gliedert sich in sich), becomes formed, cultured
consciousness (gebildeten Bewusstsein); the consciousness of the
parents is its matter (Materie), at the cost of which (auf deren
Kosten) it is formed; they (the parents) are for the child an un-
known, obscure presentiment of itself; they relieve its simple,
contracted (gedrungen) being-in-(it)self; what they give the child
they lose; they die in it; for what they give it is their own
consciousness."
If one cuts it off here, education could be a loss without return,
a gift without a countergift, without exchange. But in truth ex-
change takes place. The other consciousness, the child's, in which
the parents lose theirs, is their own proper consciousness. The
other and one's own proper(ty) do not oppose each other, or rather
yes, they do oppose each other, but the opposition is what per-
mits, not what interrupts, the specular, imaginal, or speculative
circulation of the proper, of one's own proper(ty). The proper,
one's own proper(ty), posits itself in opposing itself in the other,
 Glas 347

in dis-tancing itself from itself. The unity of the specular and the
speculative is remarked in the possibility for the parents to re-
gard, to contemplate their own proper disappearance relieved in
the mirror of the child, of the child in formation, as becoming-
conscious; in the material unconscious they would see nothing,
not even their own proper death, the death wherein they are
guarded, not even death, then, or only death. "Die Eltem schauen
in seinem Werden ihr Aufgehobenwerden an": "the parents con-
template in the child's becoming their becoming-relieved."
The child's consciousness does not come to the world as to a
material and inorganic exteriority. The world is already elabo-
rated when education begins, is a culture penetrated, permeated,
informed by the "knowledge of his parents." What first confronts
the child as and in place of inorganic nature is inherited knowl-
edge, already a certain ideality. So the child raises itself inlto) the
"contradiction" between the real world and the ideal world. The
process of education consists in relieving this contradiction. That
is possible only with the disappearance !relieving) of the family
itself, since the family is the place of this contradiction: it's the
passage to the people-spirit.
Here intervenes the struggle to the death for recognition. It is
most often known in the form given it by the Phenomenology of
Spirit. Now previously three texts had treated of it: the System
of "Sittlichkeit" !probably earlier, just a little bit; than the Jena
Philosophy of Spirit), the Jena Realphilosophie (almost contem-
poraneous with the Phenomenology of Spirit), and the Philoso-
phy of Spirit. This last one is the only one to explain this struggle
within a problematics of the family.
The struggle in the family does not oppose, as is often be-
lieved, family heads. The text gives no indication of this. Once
the family is constituted, as a power of consciousness, the strug-
gle can break out only between consciousnesses, and not be-
tween empiric individuals. From this viewpoint, the gap narrows
between the Jena text and that of the Phenomenology. If the
Phenomenology takes up the family moment after the dialectic
of master and slave, that is because in it the family is interro-
gated according to a very particular guiding thread: the passage
from the ancient family and city to Roman law and formal mo-
rality. With the result, another architectonic phenomenon at first
348 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

approach !abord] disconcerting, that in the Phenomenology, the

moment of "morality" and of formal right follows that of the
family, whereas the inverse is produced in the Philosophy of
Right. In the Phenomenology, the Greek is inscribed in a general
problematics of the history of the family. So there is no "evolu-
tion of Hegel's thought" there.
At the point where we are, the struggle to the death for recog-
nition opposes consciousnesses, but consciousnesses that the
family process has constituted as totalities. The individual who
engages in war is an individual-family. The essence of conscious-
ness cannot be understood without passing through the family
"Potenz." A phenomenology of spirit, that is, according to the
subtitle, an "Experience of Consciousness," cannot be described
without recognizing in it the onto-economic labor of the family.
There is no pure consciousness, no transcendental ego into which
the family kernel might be reduced. Here is situated the principle
of a critique of transcendental consciousness as the formal I
think !thinking is always said of a member of the family), but
also a critique of concrete transcendental consciousness in the
style of Husserlian phenomenology. Not only is there no mon-
adic consciousness, no sphere to which the ego properly belongs,
but it is impossible to "reduce" the family structure as a vulgar
empirico-anthropological addition of transcendental intersubjec-
tivity. Transcendental intersubjectivity would be abstract and
formal-constituted and derived-if in it the family structure
was not recognized as one of its essential structures, with all the
powers Hegel implies therein: memory, language, desire, labor,
marriage, the proprietorship of goods, education, and so on.
Consciousness does not relate to itself, does not reassemble
itself as totality, does not become for itself-does not become
conscious-except as, except in the family. "In the family, the
totality of consciousness is the same thing as what becomes for
self; the individual contemplates himself in the other." Con-
sciousness posits itself for itself only through the detour of an-
other consciousness that posits itself as the same and as other.
So given there, standing up face to face, are two totalities. Singu-
lar totalities, since they also make two, are two: absolute, insol-
uble contradiction, impossible to live with. The relationship can
only be violent. The two consciousnesses structurally need each
 Glas 349

other, but they can get themselves recognized only in abolishing,

or at least in relieving, the singularity of the other-which ex-
cludes it. A pure singularity can recognize another singularity
only in abolishing itself or in abolishing the other as singularity.
The contradiction, although not explicit here in this form, op-
poses more precisely knowing (the kennen of erkennen), which
can deal only with universal ideality, and the singularity of the
totality "consciousness," being-in-family.
The struggle to the death that is triggered then between two
stances seems, in its exterminating violence, more mercilessly
concrete than it does in later texts. Nevertheless two conditions
contain it, the concepts of which must indeed be carefully regu-
lated.
I. Death, the "demonstration" that "is achieved only with
death," destroys singularity, relentlessly hounds what in the other
consciousness-family remains singular. This is not a matter of
just death, but of the annihilation of the characteristics of singu-
larity, of every mark of empiricalness. Is the name, for example,
the stake that founders or the stake that saves itself in this war?
One will ask, what remains when all of the empiricalness is
abolished? Nothing, nothing that may be present or existent. To
be sure. But what is present, what is as such when there is only
singularity? Nothing. One fights to the death, in any case, for
nothing, such is no doubt the intention hidden in the shadow of
the Hegelian discourse. By definition, this intention cannot be
said as such, since discourse is precisely what makes the univer-
sal pass for something, gives the impression that the universal
remains something, that something remains, when every singu-
larity has been engulfed. Medusa's face watching over the Hege-
lian text in the penumbra(! man) that binds [lie] desire to death,
that reads [lit] desire as the desire of, the desire for, death.
The question has not been answered: is the proper name of a
family and of an individual classed in the family a pure singular-
ity? No. Is it a pure ideality? No.
2. Second strict, conceptual condition: the death of singular-
ity is always an Aufhebung. The so frequent translation of
Aufhebung by abolition or cancellation effaces precisely this:
that death abolishes the pure and simple abolition, death without
ado, death without name. "It is absolutely necessary that the
350 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

totality which consciousness has reached in the family can rec-

ognize itself as the totality it is in another such totality of con-
sciousness. In this recognition, each is for the other immediately
an absolute singular (ein absolut Einzelner); each posits itself
(setzt sich) in the consciousness of the other, relieves (hebt ...
auf) the singularity of the other, or each posits the other in its
consciousness as an absolute singularity of consciousness."
One consciousness can posit itself as such only in another
consciousness: in order in it to see, to know itself, to get itself
recognized. As soon as the other consciousness recognizes "my
own," it goes out of its empiric singularity. I must incite it to
this, and the radical going outside of empiric singularity has no
other name but death. Putting to death implies here the whole
chain of essential concepts !relief, posit(ion)ing as passage to the
opposite, ideality as the product of negativity, and so on) of
speculative dialectics.
The destruction of singularity must leave no remain(s), no
empiric or singular remainls). It must be total and infinite. If they
should happen to desire to be loved, recognized by the other's
consciousness, the subjects must accept to bear or suffer !here
reciprocity is the rule) a wound, an infinite injury ("the injury
(Verletzung) of any one of his singularities is therefore infinite").
The outrage, the offense, the violation (Beleidigung), the colli-
sion (Kollision) ends only with death. As this collision, this
violation is reciprocal (gegenseitige), the project of mastery, of
getting-oneself-recognized must in the same stroke engage infi-
nite desire in a risk of absolute nonmastery: the subject must
admit to itself that it no longer dominates its relation to the
other. There it desires. It posits its desire only in risking death.
Total and real violence: to be sure language is implicated here,
but in this affair mere words are worthless. The war is not con-
ducted with volleys of signifiers, above all linguistic signifiers.
With names perhaps, but is the proper name a linguistic signi-
fier? Hegel insists on this: the struggle for recognition does not
have its element in the tongue. The struggle is played out be-
tween bodies, to be sure, but also between economic forces,
goods, real possessions, first of all the family's. The linguistic
element implies an ideality that can be only the effect of the
destruction of empiric singularities, an effect and not a middle of
 Glas 351

the struggle. In the practical war between singular forces, the

injuries must bring about actual expropriations. They must wrest
from the other the disposition of its own body, its language, must
literally dislodge the other from its possessions. The field of the
word does not suffice for this: "Language, explanations, promis-
ing are not this recognition, for language is only an ideal middle
(ideale Mitte); it vanishes as it appears; it is not a real recogni-
tion, one that remains (bleibendes)." The insistence is very
marked: linguistic idealism, linguisticism, these can always up-
surge again-the temptation is too strong-to sweeten or cica-
trize the injury, to make one forget that the middle of the carnage
is not ideal but "actual." "No one can prove this to the other
through words, assurances, threats, or promises; for language is
only the ideal existence of consciousness; here, on the contrary,
actual opposites confront one another, i.e., absolutely opposed
opposites that are absolutely for themselves; and their relation is
strictly a practical one, it is itself actual; the middle of their
recognition must itself be actual. Hence they must injure one
another. The fact that each posits itself as exclusive totality in
the singularity of its existence must become actual. The viola-
tion [Beleidigung: outrage, rape, abuse) is necessary."
Without this Beleidigung no consciousness, no desire, no rela-
tionship to the other could posit itself. But this breaking-in that
comes to injure the other's proper(ty), the other's own, does not
come down to a singular initiative, to the decision of a freedom.
This breaking-in is engendered by a contradiction that inhabits
the proper itself, one's own own. It is a matter here, since Hegel
insists above all on the possession of things, rather than of one's
own body proper, of a contradiction in the thing itself. It is
contradictory that a thing (Ding) be some one's or some people's
proper(ty), their own. "In particular each must be dislodged from
its possession (Besitze), for in possession there lies the following
contradiction: ... "An exterior thing, a thing, a universal reality
of the earth, by essence exposed to all, cannot, without essential
contradiction, stay in the power of a singularity. The contradic-
tion must be resolved. It can be so only by the violent and total
expropriation of the singularity. But if this injury were the redis-
tribution of morsels of proprietorship, if a singular reappropria-
tion followed, the same contradiction would persist. So the only
352 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

end possible is to put to death singularity as such, the possession

of properjty), of one's own, in general. What is said here of the
body in general, of the thing of the earth, of everything that is
exposed to the light, how is the exception of one's own body
proper marked in this? As visibility and availability at least, the
body proper is worked lover) by the same contradiction, the stake
of the same strµggle to the death.
Yet death does not resolve the contradiction. To say "on the
contrary" would be too simple and one-sided. One must again
speak of relief: the Aufhebung is indeed the contradiction of the
contradiction and of the noncontradiction, the unity as well of
this contradiction. Here, strictly, unity and contradiction are the
same.
In effect I can make an attempt on others' life-in its singular-
ity-only in risking my own. To posit oneself (sich setzen) as
consciousness supposes exposure to death, engagement, pawn-
ing, putting in play [en ;euj or at pawn [en gage}. "When I go for
his death, I expose myself to death (setze ich mich selbst dem
Tode aus), I put in play my own proper life (wage ich mein eignes
Leben)." This putting (in play, at pawn) must, as every invest-
ment, amortize itself and produce a profit; it works at my recog-
nition by or through the other, at the posit(ion)ing of my living
consciousness, my living freedom, my living mastery. Now death
being in the program, since I must actually risk it, I can always
lose the profit of the operation: if I die, but just as well if I live.
Life cannot endure in the incessant imminence of death. So I lose
every time, with every blow, with every throw la tous Jes coups].
The supreme contradiction that Hegel marks with less circum-
spection than he will in the Phenomenology.
[ .... ]

-Translated by fohn P. Leavey, fr., and Richard Rand

 FIFTEEN

From Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

(Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche [1978))

First delivered as a lecture in 1972 with the title "The Question of

Style" ("La Question du style"), Spurs proposes a reading of Nietzsche
along the axis of "the woman question." It is one of Derrida's most
important texts to take up this question, but also one of the most
perplexing. Near the beginning, for example, one may read: "woman
will be my subject." This assertion is then made to pass through the
gauntlet of Nietzsche's warring styles which inscribe woman in
many guises. When it comes out at the other end of the text, the
assertion has been contradicted: "woman, then, will not have been
my subject." What happens between these two statements erodes
the ground from under woman (or sexual difference) as an essence or
a Being that could enter into a stable opposition. Woman-la femme
- has been differentiated.
One of the key passages from Nietzsche that Derrida reads be-
tween these two moments is a brief allegory from Twilight. of the
Idols, "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth: History of an
Error." Nietzsche characterizes six stages in the history of the idea
that a "real world" lies somewhere beyond the apparent world of
phenomena. After the first, Platonic stage, this idea is taken up by
Christianity which promises the real world in a life-after-death. At
that point, Nietzsche notes, the idea "becomes woman [sie wird
Weibj." This notation (which Heidegger does not remark in his own
reading of the same passage) acts as a kind of magnet pulling in the
multifarious references to woman and women that Derrida has iso-
lated in Nietzsche's texts, references that do not form any simple
354 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

pattern but range from debasement to antifeminism to affirmation.

It is woman as a figure of castration (the absence of the real world)
that Derrida finds at work in the two versions of Nietzsche's con-
demnation of women, versions that are in fact inversions of each
other: truth or lie, castrating or castrated. The rarest allusions are to
that rarest of creatures, the affirmative woman "dissimulating, art-
ist, dionysiac." This value of simulation or simulacrum beyond truth
and lie recalls what Derrida has written elsewhere of the pharmakon
and hymen, that is, to these other names that do not name an
essence but an undecidable process of inscription. The styles and the
spurs of the title both invoke pointed instruments with which to
rend the castrating veil of femininized "truth" or with which to
protect oneself from its castrating thrusts. But it is finally the irre-
ducible plurality of Nietzsche's styles that interests Derrida. Only
such a plurality can welcome the advent of an affirmative writing of
the feminine, beyond the phallogocentric idea of "truth."
Pluralized in this way, Nietzsche's text can no longer be a simple
object for hermeneutics, for the search for a single, essential mean-
ing. Spurs also addresses the immense problem for interpretation
posed by the plural, feminine text. Derrida writes that one has to
accept the fact that one will never have done with the text's differ-
ence from itself. Not even Nietzsche could see clearly, in one blink
of the eye, what he had spun out, somewhat like a spider lost in his
own web. "There is loss, that can be affirmed, as soon as there is
hymen . . . He was, he dreaded this castrated woman. He was, he
dreaded this castrating woman. He was, he loved this affirmative
women. All that at once, simultaneously or successively" (p. 372).
Lost in his own text, "Nietzsche" cannot serve as the anchoring
point of biographical reference for interpretation. The writing of
Nietzsche's woman, the writing of the woman Nietzsche-"la femme
(de) Nietzsche"? It is in the space of their difference, writes Derrida,
that our interpretive readings risk losing anchor.
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

[ .... l
Distances'

The question of style is always the examination, the weighing-in

of a pointed object. Sometimes it is only a feather, a quill; but it
may also be a stylet, or even a dagger. Objects with which one
can, to be sure, launch a vicious attack on what philosophy calls
matter or matrix so as to thrust a mark upon it, leave an imprint
or a form upon it; but also so as to repel a menacing form, to
keep it at a distance, to repress it and guard against it-while
fold~ng back or withdrawing, in flight, behind veils and sails
[voiles].
Let us leave this elytron to float between the masculine and
the feminine. Our tongue allows us such a pleasure, provided at
least that we do not articulate. 2
And as for veils and sails, while we're about it, Nietzsche will
have exercised all the genres.
Thus the style would jut out, like a spur [eperon], for example
the ram of a sailing ship, the rostrum or prong that surges ahead
to meet the attack and cleave the opposing surface. Or yet again,
still in a nautical sense, the point of rock that is also called a
spur and that "breaks up the waves at the entrance to the har-
bor."
With its spur, then, style can also protect against the terrify-
ing, blinding, mortal threat (of that) which presents itself, which
obstinately makes itself seen: presence, the content, the thing
itself, meaning, truth-unless this is already the abyss deflow-
ered in all this unveiling of difference. Already [Deja]: 3 the name
of that which is effaced or subtracted beforehand, yet which
leaves a mark, a subtracted signature on the very thing from
356 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

which it withdraws-the here and now. It must be taken into

account, which I will do; but the operation can be neither simple
nor brought to a point in a single blow.
The French eperon, in Frankish or High German sporo, in
Gaelic spar, becomes spur in English. In Les mots anglais, Mal-
larme relates it to the verb to spurn: to disdain, rebuff, reject
scornfully. One sees here not just a fascinating homonymy, but
as well the operation of a historical and semantic necessity from
one language to another: the English spur is the "same word" as
the German Spur: trace, wake, indication, mark.
The spurring style, the long, oblong object, a weapon that
parries as well as perforates; its oblong-foliated point drawing its
apotropaic power from the cloth, webs, veils, and sails that are
stretched taut, that fold or unfold around it, this style is also,
don't forget, an umbrella.
For example, but it is not to be forgotten. 4
So as to insist on that which imprints the mark of the styled
spur on the question of woman (note that I did not say, as so
many do, the figure of woman; that is what we will see stripped
away here, carried off [s 'enlever], the question of the figure being
at once opened and closed by what is called woman); also so as
to announce what will, from now on, regulate the play of the
sails (for example, of a ship) around apotropaic anxiety; and so as
to let an exchange finally appear between Nietzsche's style and
Nietzsche's woman, here are a few lines from foyful Wisdom:

Women and Their Effect in the Distance /ihre Wirkung in

die Ferne].
Have I still ears? Am I only ear, and nothing else besides?
[All of Nietzsche's questions, in particular when he ques-
tions woman, are coiled up in the labyrinth of an ear( ... )]
Here I stand in the midst of the surging of the breakers, [this
is an untranslatable play on words: Hier stehe ich inmitten
des Brandes der Brandung. Brandung is related to the con-
flagration expressed in Brand which itself also signifies the
mark left by a burning branding iron. It is the seething surf,
the waves rolling back over themselves as they crash against
the rocky shoreline or break on the reefs, the cliffs, the
eperons,] whose white flames fork up to my feet [so I too
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 357

am an eperon];-from all sides there is howling, threaten-

ing, crying, and screaming at me, while in the lowest depths
the old earth shaker sings his aria !seine Arie singt, beware,
Ariane is not far away] hollow like a roaring bull; he beats
such an earth shaker's measure thereto, that even the hearts
of these weathered rock-monsters tremble at the sound.
Then, suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears
before the portal of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fath-
oms distant,-a great sailing ship !Segelschiffl gliding si-
lently along like a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With
what enchantment it seizes me! What? Has all the repose
and silence in the world embarked here lsich hier einge-
schifft)? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my
happier ego, my second immortalized self? Still not dead,
but also no longer living? As a ghost-like, calm, gazing,
gliding, sweeping neutral being (Mittelwesen)? Similar to
the ship, which, with its white sails, like an immense but-
terfly, passes over the dark sea! Yes! Passing over existence!
!Uher das Dasein hinlaufen!) That is it! That would be it!-
It seems that the noise [Liirm] here has made me a visionary
[Phantasten]? All great noise (Liirm) causes one to place
happiness in the calm and in the distance !Ferne). When a
man is in the midst of his hubbub ILiirm], in the midst of
the breakers [again Brandung) of his plots and plans [Wiirfen
und Entwiirfen], he there sees perhaps calm, enchanting
beings glide past him, for whose happiness and retirement
[Zuriickgezogenheit: withdrawing in oneself) he longs-they
are women [es sind die Frauen]. He almost thinks that there
with the women dwells his better self [sein besseres Selbst);
that in these calm places even the loudest breakers [Bran-
dung) become still as death [Totenstille], and life itself a
dream of life [iiber das Leben). [The preceding fragment,
"We Artists!," which began with "When we love a woman,"
describes a movement that carries with it simultaneously
the somnambulistic risk of death, the dream of death, sub-
limation, and the dissimulation of nature. The value of
dissimulation cannot be dissociated from the relation of art
to woman. (... )) 5 But still! But still! my noble enthusiast,
there is also in the most beautiful sailing ship so much
358 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

noise and bustling [Liirm], and alas, so much petty, pitiable

bustling [kleinen erbiirmlichen Liirm)! The enchantment
and the most powerful effect of woman [der Zauber und die
miichtigste Wirkung der Frauen], is, to use the language of
philosophers, an effect at a distance (eine Wirkung in die
Feme], an actio in distans; there belongs thereto, however,
primarily and above all-distance! [dazu gehort aber, und
vor allem-Distanz!). 6

Veils

What is the opening step of this Dis-tanz? 7 Nietzsche's writing

already mimics it with an effect of style distributed between the
Latin quotation (actio in distans) that parodies the language of
the philosophers and the exclamation point, while the hyphen
suspends the word Distanz. A pirouette or a play of silhouettes
invites us to keep our distance from these many veils that make
us dream of death.
Woman's seduction operates at a distance; distance is the ele-
ment of her power. Yet one must keep one's distance from this
song, this enchantment; one must keep at a distance from dis-
tance, not only, as one might think, to protect oneself from this
fascination, but also in order to experience it. There must be
distance (which is lacking) [ll faut la distance (qui faut)J; one
must keep one's distance (Distanz!), that's what we lack, that's
what we fail to do. All this also sounds like the advice one man
gives another: how to seduce without being seduced.
If it is necessary to keep one's distance from the feminine
operation !from the actio in distans), which does not simply
amount to approaching it, except at the risk of death itself [elle-
meme], it is perhaps because "woman" is not some thing, the
determinable identity of a figure that appears in the distance, at
a distance from other things, and which could be approached or
left behind. Perhaps, as non-identity, non-figure, simulacrum,
she is the abyss of distance, the distancing of distance, the divi-
sion of spacing, distance itself, if it were still possible, which it
is not, to say distance itself [elle-meme]. Distance distances it-
self; the faraway furthers itself. Here we must have recourse to
Heidegger's use of the word Entfernung: at once separation, re-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 359

moval, distance, and the distancing of distance, the distancing of

the distant, de-distancing, the constituting destruction (Ent-) of
the distant as such, the veiled enigma of proximation.
The spaced-out opening of this Entfernung gives rise to truth
and there woman averts herself from herself, on her own [la
femme s'y ecarte d'elle-meme].
There is no essence of woman because woman averts and
averts herself from herself, on her own. Out of the depths, end-
less and unfathomable, she engulfs and enveils any essentiality,
any identity, any properness. Blinded here, philosophical dis-
course founders-lets itself be hurled toward its ruin. There is
no such thing as the truth of woman, but that is because this
abyssal divergence of the truth, this non-truth is the "truth. 11
Woman is a name of this non-truth of truth.
I will support this proposition with several texts, among many
others.
On the one hand, Nietzsche assumes and takes up again, but
in a way that will have to be qualified, this barely allegorical
figure: truth as woman or as the movement of the veil of femi-
nine modesty. The complicity land not the unity) of woman, life,
seduction, modesty, and all the effects of veiling (Schleier, En-
thiillung, Verhiillung) is developed in a rarely quoted fragment.
The formidable problem of that which unveils itself but once
(das enthiillt sich uns einmal). I quote only the final lines:
For ungodly, activity does not furnish us with the beautiful
at all, or only does so once! I mean to say that the world is
overfull of beautiful things, but it is nevertheless poor, very
poor, in beautiful things. But perhaps this is the greatest
charm [ZauberJ of life: it puts a golden-embroidered veil
[golddurch-wirkter Schleier] of lovely potentialities over it-
self, promising, resisting, modest, mocking, sympathetic,
seductive. Yes, life is a woman!
But, on the other hand, the credulous and dogmatic philoso-
pher who believes in this truth that is woman, who believes in
truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has under-
stood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nothing of
woman. Because if woman is truth, she knows there there is no
truth, that truth does not take place, and that no one has it, the
360 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

truth. She is woman insofar as she, for her part, does not believe
in truth, thus in what she is, in what she is believed to be, which
therefore she is not.
In its maneuvers, distance strips the lady of her proper identity
and unseats the philosopher-knight-unless, that is, he has not
already received two spurs, two thrusts of style or dagger blows
in an exchange that scrambles sexual identity:
[ .... ]
How can woman, who is herself truth, not believe in truth?
And yet, how is it possible to be truth and still believe in it?
Beyond Good and Evil opens:
Supposing truth to be a woman-what? is the suspicion not
well-founded that all philosophers, when they have been
dogmatists, have had little understanding of women [sich
schlecht auf Weiher verstanden, have been misunderstand-
ing as to women]? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy
importunity with which they have been in the habit of
approaching truth have been inept and improper means [un:-
geschickte und unschickliche Mittel] for winning a wench
[Frauenzimmer is a term of contempt: an easy woman]? 8

Truths

At this moment, Nietzsche causes the truth of woman, the truth

of truth to veer off: "Certainly she has not let herself be won
over-and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and dis-
couraged. If it continues to stand at all!"
Woman (truth) does not let herself be won over, taken (in).
In truth woman, truth does not let herself be taken (in)-by
truth. 9
That which will not be taken in (by) truth is-feminine, which
one must not hasten to translate by femininity, woman's femi-
ninity, feminine sexuality, or by any other essentializing fe-
tishes. These are precisely what, in their foolishness, the dog-
matic philosopher, the impotent artist, or the inexperienced
seducer believe they have won over.
This divergence of truth that carries it off and strips it of itself,
that raises it between quotation marks (the screeching machina-
tion of a hooker, or crane [grue], its flight and claws), 10 everything
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 361

in Nietzsche's writing that compels the suspension of "truth"

between quotation marks-and, as a strict consequence, all the
rest-which is thus going to inscribe the truth and, as a strict
consequence, inscribe in general; all of this is, let us not even say
the feminine, but the feminine "operation."
She writes (herself). Style comes back or comes down to her.
Or rather: if style were the man (much as the penis, according to
Freud, is the "normal prototype of the fetish"), then writing
would be woman.
All these weapons circulate from hand to hand, passing from
one opponent to the other, while the question remains of what I
am doing here right now.
Must not these apparently feminist propositions be reconciled
with the overwhelming corpus of Nietzsche's vehement antifem-
inism?
Their congruence-a word I will oppose here, by convention,
to coherence-is very enigmatic, but strictly necessary. Such, in
any case, would be the thesis of this presentation.
Woman, truth, is skepticism and veiling dissimulation: that is
what we have to be able to think through. The skepsis of "truth"
is as old as woman:

I fear that women who have grown old [altgewordene Frauen]

are more sceptical in the secret recesses of their hearts than
any of the men; they believe in the superficiality of exis-
tence as in its essence, and all virtue and profoundity is to
them only the disguising [Verhiillung] of this "truth," the
very desirable disguising of a pudendum-an affair, there-
fore, of decency and modesty, and nothing more! ( foyful
Wisdom, 64, Sceptics. Cf. also the conclusion especially of
the introduction to foyful Wisdom.)
"Truth" would be but a surface; it would only become profound,
naked, and desirable by the effect of a veil-that falls over it.
This truth is not suspended by quotation marks and it covers
over the surface in a movement of modesty. But should that veil
be suspended or be allowed to fall in a different way, there would
be no more truth, or only "truth" -so written. Le voile/tom be. 11
So why, then, this fear, this dread, this "modesty"?
Feminine distance abstracts truth from itself by suspending
362 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

the relation to castration. It is suspended, like a stretched canvas,

or broken off like a relation, but at the same time left hanging-
in indecision. In the epoche.
Suspended relation to castration: not to the truth of castration,
which wo,man does not believe in, nor to truth as castration, nor
to truth-castration. Truth-castration, that's man's business; man
busies himself with it because he has never come of age, he is
never skeptical or secretive enough. In his credulousness and
foolish innocence !which is always sexual, although it at times
represents itself as expert mastery), he castrates himself and se-
cretes the lure of truth-castration. IIt is on this point that one
should perhaps interrogate-unpack [decapitonner] 12 -the met-
aphorical deployment of the veil, of the truth that speaks, of
castration, and phallocentrism in the Lacanian discourse, for ex-
ample.)
"Woman"-an epoch-making word 13-does not believe either
in the simple obverse of castration, anticastration. Much too
clever for that, she knows land we-who we?-should learn
from her, or at least from her operation) that such a reversal
would deprive her of any possible recourse to simulacra; it would,
in truth, come down to the same thing and would land her back
as surely as ever in the same old machine, in a phallogocentrism
assisted by its crony: the reverse image of the pupil, the rowdy
student, which is to say, the disciplined disciple of the master.
"Woman" needs the castration effect, because without it she
would not be able to seduce or stir desire. But obviously she does
not believe in it. "Woman" is what does not believe in it and
plays with it. She takes aim and plays with it [en joue] as with a
new concept or a new structure of belief meant to make one
laugh. About man, from man-she knows and with a knowledge
that no dogmatic or credulous philosophy will have been able to
match-that castration does not take place, has no place [n'a
pas lieu].
This formula is to be very carefully displaced. It marks first of
all that the place of castration is not determinable: an undecida-
ble mark or non-mark, a discreet margin the consequences of
which are incalculable. IOne of these, as I have observed else-
where, amounts to the strict equivalence between the affirma-
tion and the negation of castration, between castration and anti-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 363

castration, between assumption and denegation of castration. 14

This is to be pursued later, under the heading of the argument of
the girdle borrowed from Freud's text on fetishism. 15 )

Adornments

If, on the contrary, it took place, castration will have been this
syntax of the undecidable that guarantees all discourses pro and
con by annuling them and equating them. It is the coup pour
rien, the throw for nothing, the waste of time-which, nonethe-
less, is never attempted without some interest. Whence the ex-
treme "Skepsis des Weibes."
Once she has rent the veil of modesty or truth in which she
has been bound and held "in the greatest ignorance possible in
eroticis," a woman's skepticism knows no bounds. One has only
to read "Von der weiblichen Keuschheit 11 ("On Female Chastity,"
foyful Wisdom, 71): in "love and shame in contradiction," in the
"proximity of God and animal," between the "enigma of this
solution" and the "solution of this enigma," here "the ultimate
philosophy and skepticism of the woman casts anchor." It is in
this void that she casts her anchor (die letzte Philosophie und
Skepsis des Weibes an diesem Punkt ihre Anker wirft).
"Woman" takes so little interest in truth, she believes in it so
little that she is no longer concerned even by the truth as regards
herself. It is "man" who believes that his discourse on woman or
truth concerns woman-circumvents her. (This is the topo-
graphical question that I was attempting to sketch earlier-and
that also kept slipping away as always-with regard to the un-
decidable contour of castration.) It is "man" who believes in the
truth of woman, in woman-truth. And in truth, the feminist
women who are the target of Nietzsche's constant sarcasm are
men. Feminism is the operation by which woman wants to re-
semble man, the dogmatic philosopher, demanding truth, sci-
ence, objectivity, that is, demanding the whole virile illusion,
along with the castration effect that comes with it. Feminism
wants castration-including that of woman. Gone is the style.
What Nietzsche clearly denounces in feminism is its lack of
style: "Is it not the worst of taste when woman sets about be-
coming scientific (wissenschaftlich) in that fashion? Enlighten-
364 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

ment (Aufkliiren) in this field has hitherto been the affair and
the endowment of men (Manner-Sache, Miinner-Gabe)-we re-
mained 'amongst ourselves' ('unter sich') in this" !Beyond Good
and Evil, frag. 232; cf. also frag. 233).
It is true that elsewhere jfrag. 206), but this is not in the least
a contradiction, the mediocre man of science who creates noth-
ing, who begets nothing, who is, in sum, content to mouth the
rote words of science, whose eye is "like a reluctant smooth lake"
that nevertheless at any moment can become the very keen eye
"for what is base in those natures to whose heights he is unable
to rise," this sterile man of science is compared to an old maid.
Nietzsche, as is everywhere evident in his texts, is the thinker of
pregnancy. He praises it in man no less than in woman. And
because he was so easily moved to tears, because he sometimes
spoke of his thought as of a woman pregnant with child, I often
imagine him shedding tears over his swollen belly. 16
We remained 'amongst ourselves' in this; and whatever
women write about 'woman,' we rriay in the end reserve a
good suspicion as to whether woman really wants
[Nietzsche's italics] or can want [will und wollen kann]
enlightenment [Auf kliirungJ about herself . . . Unless a
woman is looking for a new adornment for herself [einen
neuen Putz fiir sich] in this way-self-adornment pertains
to the eternal womanly, does it not?-she is trying to in-
spire fear of herself-perhaps she is seeking dominion
[HerrschaftJ. But she does not want truth [Aber es will nicht
Wahrheit): what is truth to a woman! From the very first
nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman
than truth-her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is
appearance [Schein) and beauty. !Beyond Good and Evil,
frag. 232).

Simulation

The whole process of the feminine operation is spaced out within

this apparent contradiction. Woman is twice the model, in a
contradictory fashion: she is both praised and condemned for it.
As writing does regularly and not by chance, woman plies the
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 365

prosecutor's argument into the twisted logic of the kettle. 17 As a

model of truth, she enjoys a seductive power that governs dog-
matism, bewilders and keeps those credulous men, the philoso-
phers, running all over the place. But inasmuch as she herself
does not believe in truth, although she does find the truth that
does not concern her to be in her interest, she is once again the
model: this time the good model, or rather the bad model as good
model. She plays at dissimulation, at adornment, deceit, artifice,
artistic philosophy. She is a power of affirmation. If she contin-
ues to be condemned, it would be because she adopted the point
of view of man in order to deny this affirmative power, to lie
while still believing in the truth, and to reflect in a specular
fashion the foolish dogmatism she provokes.
In its praise of simulation, of the "delight in dissimulation"
[die Lust an der Verstellung], of histrionics, and of the "danger-
ous concept of 'artist'," foyful Wisdom ranks both Jews and
women among those expert simulators: artists. The association
of the Jew and the woman is probably not insignificant. Nietzsche
often gives them parallel treatment, which could send us back to
the motif of castration and the simulacrum, or even the simula-
crum of castration of which circumcision is the mark, the name
of the mark. I quote from the end of this fragment (361) on "the
histrionic capacity":

What good actor at present is not-a Jew? The Jew also, as

a born literary man, as the actual ruler of the European
press, exercises this power on the basis of his histrionic
capacity: for the literary man is essentially an actor,-he
plays the part of "expert," of "specialist."-Finally women.
If we consider the whole history of women [that history
which oscillates between histrionics and hysterics will come
to be read a little later as a chapter in the history of truth],
are they not obliged first of all, and above all to be ac-
tresses? If we listen to doctors who have hypnotized women
[Frauenzimmer], or, finally, if we love them-and let our-
selves be "hypnotized" by them,-what is always divulged
thereby? That they "give themselves airs" ["give them-
selves for"], even when they-"give themselves" ... [Daj]
366 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

sie "sich geben", selbst noch, wenn sie-sich geben

once again the play here of both the quotation marks and
the hyphens should be noted] Das Weib ist so artistisch,
Woman is so artistic. 18
To sharpen the terms of this category, one should recall as one
listens to this equivocal praise, which is not that far from an
indictment, that the concept of artist is always divided. There is
the artist-histrion, the affirmative dissimulation, but there is also
the artist-hysteric, the reactive dissimulation that belongs to the
"modem artist." Nietzsche compares the latter precisely to "our
little hysterics" and to "little hysterical women." In a parody of
Aristotle, Nietzsche also heaps abuse on small women I foyful
Wisdom, frag. 75 1 "The Third Sex"). "And our artists are only too
closely related to little hysterical women. But this is to speak
against 'today' and not against the 'artist.'"
[ .... ]
Thus, the question of art, style, truth cannot be dissociated
from the question of woman. But the question, What is woman?
is suspended simply by the formulation of their common prob-
lematic. One can no longer chercher la femme, go looking for
woman, or the femininity of woman or feminine sexuality. Or at
least they cannot be found by any known mode of thought or
learning-even if one cannot stop looking for them.
[ .... ]

Femina vita

History of an Error: 19 In each of its six sections, its six epochs,

with the exception of the third one, a few words are underlined.
In the second epoch, Nietzsche has underlined only the words
"sie wird Weib," it [the Idea] becomes woman.
Heidegger cites this section, reproduces its underlining, but
his commentary avoids the woman, as always seems to be the
case. All the elements of the text are analyzed, without excep-
tion, except for the becoming-woman of the idea (sie wird Weib).
The phrase is abandoned, much as one would do in skipping over
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 367

a concrete image in a philosophy book, or in tearing out an

illustrated page or an allegorical representation in a serious book.
All of which permits one to see without reading or to read with-
out seeing.
By looking more closely at the "sie wird Weib," we are not
going counter to Heidegger, which is to say along the same path
as his gesture. We are not going to do the contrary of what he
does which would amount once again to the same thing. We are
not going to pluck a mythological flower, this time to study it,
to pick it up rather than let it drop.
Instead let us try to decipher this inscription of woman: Its
necessity is surely neither that of a metaphorical or allegorical
illustration without concept nor that of a pure concept without
any fantasic design.
As the context clearly indicates, what becomes woman is the
idea. The becoming-woman is a "process of the idea" (Fortschritt
der Idee). The idea is a form of truth's self-presentation. So truth
has not always been a woman. Woman is not always truth. They
both have a history, they form a history-history itself perhaps,
if history in the strict sense has always presented itself as such
in the movement of truth-which philosophy cannot decipher
on its own, being itself included therein. Before this progress in
the history of the true-world, the idea was Platonic. And the
Umschreibung, the transcription, the periphrasis, or the para-
phrase of the Platonic utterance, in that inaugural moment of the
idea, was, "Ich, Plato, bin die Wahrheit," "1, Plato, am the truth."
The second age, the age of the becoming-woman of the idea as
the presence or representation of the truth, is therefore the mo-
ment when Plato can no longer say "I am the truth," when the
philosopher is no longer the truth, when he is separated from it
as from himself, when he no longer follows it, but only its traces,
when he is exiled or allows the idea to be exiled. At this moment,
history begins, all the trouble begins. At this point distance-
woman-averts truth-the philosopher and bestows the idea.
Which withdraws into the distance, becomes transcendent, inac-
cessible, seductive. It acts and shows the way from afar, in die
Ferne. Its veils float in the distance, the dream of death begins: it
is woman.
368 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

The true world-unattainable for now, but promised for the

sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who re-
pents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious,
incomprehensible-it becomes woman .. .)20
All the attributes, all the traits, all the attractions that Nietzsche
saw in woman-seductive distance, captivating inaccessibility,
the infinitely veiled promise, the transcendence that produces
desire, the Entfernung-belong indeed to the history of truth as
history of an error.
And then Nietzsche, as if in apposition or as if to explicate
and analyze the "it becomes woman, adds "sie wird christlich
... "and closes the parenthesis.
It is within the epoch of this parenthesis that one can attempt
to draw this story's fabulous plot toward the motif of castration
in the Nietzschean text, in other words, toward the enigma of
the nonpresence of truth.
I will try to show that what is emblazoned in red letters by the
"it becomes woman ... Christian" is "she castrates !herself)": 21
she castrates because she is castrated, she plays out her castra-
tion in the epoch of a parenthesis, she feigns castration-both
suffered and inflicted- in order to master the master from afar,
to produce desire, and with the same stroke lit is here "the same
thing"), to kill him.
A phase and a necessary periphrasis in the history of woman-
truth, of woman as truth, of verification, and of feminization.
Let us turn the page of Twilight of the Idols to the one that
follows the "History of an Error." Here opens the "Moral als
Widernatur," "Morality as Anti-Nature" where Christianity is
interpreted as castratism (Kastratismus). The extraction of a
tooth, the plucking out of an eye are, says Nietzsche, Christian
operations. They are acts of violence that belong to the Christian
idea, to the idea become woman.
All the old monsters are agreed on this: il faut tuer Jes
passions [It is necessary to kill passion]. The most famous
formula for this is to be found in the New Testament, in
that Sermon on the Mount, where, incidentally, things are
by no means looked at from a height. There it is said, for
·~

.
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 369

example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thy eye

offend thee, pluck it out." Fortunately, no Christian acts in
accordance with this precept. Destroying the passions and
cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stu-
pidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity-
today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of
stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who "pluck out"
[ausreif3en] teeth so that they will not hurt any more.
Nietzsche opposes Christian extirpation or castration, at least
that of the "early Church" jbut we have not left the Church), to
the spiritualization of passion. He seems to imply by this that no
castration is at work in such a spiritualization-which is by no
means obvious. I leave this problem open.
So the Church, the early Church, truth of the woman-idea,
proceeds by ablation, extirpation, excision:
The Church fights passion with excision [Ausschneidung,
severance, castration] in every sense: its practice, its "cure,"
is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize,
beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress
of discipline on extirpation [Ausrottung] jof sensuality, of
pride, of the lust to rule [Herrschsucht], of avarice [Hab-
sucht], of vengefulness [Rachsucht]). But attack on the roots
of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice
of the church is hostile to life [lebensfeindlich].
Hostile to life, therefore hostile to woman who is life ( femina
vita): castration is an operation of woman against woman, no
less than of each sex against itself and against the other. 22
The same means in the fight against a craving-castration,
extirpation-is instinctively chosen by those who are too
weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose modera-
tion on themselves ... One should survey the whole history
of the priests and philosophers, including the artists: the
most poisonous things against the senses have been said not
by the impotent, nor by the ascetics, but by the impossible
ascetics, by those who really were in dire need of being
ascetics ... The spiritualization of sensuality is called love:
it represents a great triumph over Christianity. Another
370 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a

profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in
short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way
[umgekeh'rt] from that which has been the rule. The church
always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we im-
moralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this,
that the church exists ... The saint in whom God delights
is the ideal eunuch.

Positions

The heterogeneity of the text makes it very plain: Nietzsche did

not delude himself into thinking he knew what was going on
with the effects called woman, truth, castration, or the ontologi-
cal effects of presence or absence. Rather, he analyzed this very
delusion. He was very careful to avoid the sort of precipitous
denegation that would consist in erecting a simple discourse
against castration and its system. Without a discreet parody,
without a writing strategy, without a difference or divergence of
pens, in a word, without style-the grand style-such a reversal
comes down to the same thing in a noisy declaration of the
antithesis.
Whence the heterogeneity of the text.
I will not try to treat here the large number of propositions
concerning woman. Instead, I will attempt to formalize their rule
and to reduce them to a finite number of typical and matrical
propositions. Then I will indicate the essential limit of such a
codification and the problem it entails for reading.
Three types of statement, then, three fundamental proposi-
tions which are also three positions of value, each stemming
from a different place. After a certain kind of elaboration (which
I can only indicate here), these positions of value might also take
on the sense that psychoanalysis (for example) gives to the word
position.
1. Woman is condemned, debased, and despised as a figure or
power of falsehood. The indictment is thus produced in the name
of truth, of dogmatic metaphysics, of the credulous man who
puts forward truth and the phallus as his own attributes. The-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 371

phallogocentric-texts written from this reactive perspective are

very numerous.
2. Woman is condemned and despised as a figure or power of
truth, as a philosophical and Christian being, whether because
she identifies herself with the truth, or because, at a distance
from truth, she continues to play with it as with a fetish, to
manipulate it to her advantage. Without believing in it, she re-
mains, through guile and naivete land guile is always contami-
nated by naivete), within the system and the economy of the
truth, within the phallogocentric space. This trial is prosecuted
from the point of view of the masked artist. The latter, however,
still believes in woman's castration and he does not get beyond
the inversion of the reactive and negative instance. Up to this
point, woman is twice castration: truth and nontruth.
3. Beyond this double negation, woman is recognized, af-
firmed as a power of affirmation, dissimulation, as an artist, a
dionysiac. She is not affirmed by man, but affirms herself, in
herself and in man. In the sense I set out earlier, castration does
not take place, has no place Ila castration n'a pas lieu]. In its
tum, antifeminism is reversed since it condemned woman only
insofar as she was, she answered to man from the two reactive
positions.
To form an exhaustive code out of these three types of state-
ment, to try to reconstitute their systematic unity, one would
have to be able to master the parodic heterogeneity of the style,
of the styles, and to reduce them to the content of a thesis. It
would also be necessary (but these two conditions are indissoci-
able) that each value implicated in the three schemas be decida-
ble within an oppositional couple, as if each term, for example
woman, truth, castration, had a contrary.
But the graphics of the hymen or of the pharmakon inscribes
the effect of castration within itself, even as it is not reducible to
that effect. 23 At work everywhere, particularly in Nietzsche's
text, this graphics irrevocably limits the pertinence of these her-
meneutic or systematic questions. It always withholds a margin
from the control of meaning or of the code.
This does not mean that one should passively take the side of
the heterogeneous or the parodic !which would be to reduce them
once again). Nor should one conclude that, because the master
372 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

meaning, the unique and inviolate meaning, is unattainable,

Nietzsche had an infinite mastery, an impregnable power, an
impeccable manipulation of the trap, as if he had exercised a
kind of infinite calculus, almost that if Leibniz's God. This time,
however, it would be an infinite calculus of the undecidable in
order to escape the hold of hermeneutics. Such a conclusion, in
its very attempt to elude the snare, succumbs to it all the more
surely. It makes of parody or the simulacrum an instrument of
mastery in the service of truth or castration; it reconstitutes
religion, the cult of Nietzsche for example, and serves the inter-
est of a priesthood of parody interpreters [pretrise de l'interprete
es parodies, interpretrise].
No, parody always supposes somewhere a measure of naivete,
back to back with an unconscious, and the vertigo of nonmas-
tery, a loss of consciousness. An absolutely calculated parody
would be a confession or a table of the law.
One has to acknowledge, quite simply, that if the aphorisms
on woman cannot be assimilated-first of all among themselves
-to the rest, it is also because Nietzsche did not see his way too
clearly there, nor could he take it all in with a blink of the eye,
in a split second. This regular, rhythmic blindness takes place in
the text. Nietzsche is a little lost there. There is loss, it can be
affirmed, as soon as there is hymen.
Nietzsche is a little lost in the web of the text, like a spider
overwhelmed by what has been produced around him-like a
spider, I say, or like several spiders: Nietzsche's but also Lautrea-
mont's, Mallarme's, and those of Freud and Abraham.
He was, he dreaded this castrated woman.
He was, he dreaded this castrating woman.
He was, he loved this affirming woman.
All this at once, simultaneously or successively, depending on
the places of his body and the positions of his history. He was
dealing with so many women, within himself, outside of himself.
Like another Council of Basel.

The Gaze of Oedipus

There is no one woman, no one truth in itself about woman in

itself: that much he did say, along with the highly diverse typol-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 373

ogy, the horde of mothers, daughters, sisters, old maids, wives,

governesses, prostitutes, virgins, grandmothers, big and little girls.
For this very reason, there is no one truth of Nietzsche or of
his text. The phrase one reads in Beyond Good and Evil, "These
are only-my truths," which underscores "meine Wahrheit sind,"
occurs precisely in a paragraph on women. My truths implies no
doubt that these are not truths because they are multiple, varie-
gated, contradictory. There is no one truth in itself, but what is
more, even for me, even about me, the truth is plural. This
passage is inserted between, on the one hand, the famous para-
graph on "der schreckliche Grundtext homo natura" where
Nietzsche appeals to the intrepid gaze of Oedipus ("unerschrock-
nen Oedipus-Augen") with which to confront the decoys of the
old metaphysical birdhandlers (die Lockweisen alter metaphys-
ischer Vogel/anger), a wised-up Oedipus who no longer denies
nor assumes their blinding accusation, and, on the other hand,
the indictment of feminism, of "the eternal feminine," of "woman
as such," Madame Roland, Madame de Stael, Monsieur George
Sand, their "bad taste" (Nietzsche cites the Church's "taceat
mulier in ecclesia," and Napoleon's "taceat mulier in polticis,"
and then adds, as a "true friend of women," "taceat mulier de
muliere"). 24
There is thus no truth in itself of sexual difference in itself, of
man or woman in itself; on the contrary, the whole of ontology,
which is the effect of an inspection, appropriation, identification,
and verification of identity, presupposes and conceals this unde-
cidability.
Beyond the mythology of the signature, beyond the theology
of the author, biographical desire gets inscribed in the text, leaves
an irreducible, and irreducibly plural, mark there. Everyone's
"granite stratum of spiritual fate" gives and receives these marks,
form their matter. L'erection tombe. 25 The biographical text is
fixed and stabilized for an uncertain duration; it constitutes for a
long time the immovable stele, with all the dangers of this "mon-
umental history" that were recognized beforehand by the Un-
timely Meditations. This granite is a system of

predeterminated decision and answer to predeterminated

selected questions. In the case of every cardinal problem
374 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

there speaks an unchangeable "das bin ich" ["this is I"];

about woman and philosophy, for example, a thinker cannot
relearn (umlernenJ but only learn fully [auslernenJ-only
discover all that is "firm and settled" with him on this
subject ... Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty
compliments [the spiritual fate has just been described as
our stupidity) I may perhaps be more readily permitted to
utter a few truths about 'woman as such': assuming it is
now understood from the outset to how great an extent
these are only-my truths. 26
And in Ecce Homo ("Why I Write Such Good Books"), two
sections (4 and 5) follow each other in which Nietzsche proposes
successively that he has a "great number of possible styles," or
that there is no such thing as "style in itself" because, as he says,
he "knows women for rather the female: WeibleinJ well":
This knowledge is part of my Dionysian patrimony. Who
knows? Maybe I am the first psychologist of the eternally
feminine. Women all like me ... But that's an old story:
save, of course the abortions among them (verungliickten
Weiblein], the emancipated ones, those who lack the where-
withal to have children. Thank goodness I am not willing
to let myself be tom to pieces! the perfect woman tears you
to pieces when she loves you ...

From the moment the question of woman suspends the decid-

able opposition of the true and the non-true, from the moment it
installs the epochal regime of quotation marks for all concepts
belonging to this system of philosophical decidability, once it
disqualifies the hermeneutic project that postulates a true mean-
ing of a text and liberates reading from the horizon of the mean-
ing of being or the truth of being, from the values of production
of the product or the values of presence of the present-from
that moment, what is unleashed is the question of style as a
question of writing, the question of a spurring operation more
powerful than any content, any thesis, or any meaning. The
stylate spur [eperon style] traverses the veil, tears it not only in
order to see or produce the thing itself, but to undo the self-
opposition, the opposition folded upon itself of the veiled-un-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 375

veiled, the truth as production, unveiling-dissimulation of the

product made present. It neither raises nor lets fall the veil: it de-
limits the veil's suspense-the epoch. But to de-limit, to undo,
to come undone, when it is a matter of veils, is that not tanta-
mount to unveiling once again? Or even to destroying a fetish?
This question, inasmuch as it is a question (between logos and
theoria, saying and seeing) remains, interminably.
[ .... ]

NOTES

1. There are two extant English versions of this text: a complete transla-
tion by Barbara Harlow (University of Chicago Press, 1979) and an abridged
translation by Ruben Berezdivin (in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary
Styles of Interpretation, David B. Allison, ed., [New York: Dell, 1977)). The
version presented here falls somewhere between a compilation of these other
two versions and a new translation.-Eo.
2. That is, provided that the word voile is not articulated in a sentence,
it can float between its masculine form, which means "veil," and its femi-
nine form, 11 sail." - Eo.
3. On Derrida's use of this word as an abbreviated signature, see our
introduction, p. xxv-Eo
4. Derrida is pointing toward the final section of Spurs, not included
here, where he reads a sentence from Nietzsche's unpublished fragments: "I
have forgotten my umbrella." This section raises many questions about the
interpretation of the Nietzschean text, the totality of which, Derrida sug-
gests, might well be of the type of this isolated, enigmatic sentence.-Eo.
5. The foyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1960) 1 fragment 59.
6. Ibid, fragment 60.
7. Tanz, in German: dance-ED.
8. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1973).
9. This is only an approximate translation of Derrida's undecidable syn-
tax in these two sentences: "La femme (la verite) ne se laisse pas prendre. A
la verite la femme, la verite ne se laisse pas prendre. 11 -ED.
10. I.e., the lifting and suspending action of the quotation marks can lead
one to think of the action of a crane, in French une grue, which also happens
to be a slang term for prostitute.-Eo.
11. This is a play on the word tombe, which is both the noun "tomb"
and the third person present singular of 11 tomber, 11 to fall. Thus the phrase
could be translated as either "The veil falls" (it falls away or it is lowered
into place) or "The veil/tomb. 11 -Eo.
376 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

12. A reference to Jacques Lacan's theory of the "point de capiton, 11

literally a quilting stitch; see below, "Le Facteur de la verite,'' pp. 472-73.-
En.
13. The expression "faire epoque" that Derrida uses here revives the
sen&e of the Greek, epoche, suspension.-En.
14. See Dissemination [1972], p. 401 n. 39 and passim.
15. Derrida will develop his critique of the standard interpretation of
fetishism in Glas. The argument of the girdle (la gaine) concerns a certain
structure of restriction that reverses opposites.-ED.
16. "Mothers. Animals think differently from men with respect to the
females; with them the female is regarded as the productive being [als das
produktive Wesen]. There is no paternal love among them, but there is such
a thing as love of the children of a beloved, and habituation to them. In the
young, the females find gratification for their lust of dominion [Herrsch-
sucht]; the young are a property [Eigentum], an occupation, something quite
comprehensible to them, with which they can chatter: all this conjointly is
maternal love,-it is to be compared to the love of the artist for his work.
Pregnancy has made the female gentler, more expectant, more timid, more
submissively inclined; and similarly intellectual pregnancy engenders the
character of the contemplative, who are allied to woman in character:-they
are the masculine mothers.-Among animals the masculine sex is regarded
as the beautiful sex." ( foyful Wisdom, frag. 72) The characteristics of a
woman are determined by the mother's image. They are designated and
predestined from the moment of nursing: "From the mother [Von der Mutter
her].-Everyone carries in himself an image of woman derived from the
mother; by this he is determined to revere women generally, or to hold them
in low esteem, or to be generally indifferent to them." !Human, All Too
Human, I, trans. Walter Kaufman, in The Portable Nietzsche [New York:
Viking, 1968], frag. 380).
17. This refers to the joke of the borrowed kettle that Freud first tells in
The Interpretation of Dreams. In fokes and Their Relation to the Uncon-
scious, it serves as an example of the "mutual cancelling out by several
thoughts, each of which is in itself valid" !Standard Edition, VIIl, p. 205.)
Derrida retells the joke often, for example, in "Plato's Pharmacy" jsee above,
pp. 135-36).-ED.
18. On woman's mask as man's desire, see also fragment 405.
19. On this text, see above, p. 353.-En.
20. Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable
Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1968).
21. Elle (se) chatre: the feminine pronoun elle refers first to the "idea,"
the idea that has become woman. One should also therefore translate: it
castrates (itself). The fact that both translations can be correct may be seen
as a castration effect, a withdrawal of truth of the sort Derrida is examining
here.-Eo.
22. As soon as sexual difference is determined as an opposition, the
image of each term is inverted into the other. Thus the machinery of contra-
 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 377

diction would be a proposition whose two x's are at once subject and predi-
cate and whose copula is a mirror. While Nietzsche. follows tradition by
inscribing man in the system of activity (along with all the values that are
associated with that system) and woman in the system of passivity, he also
at times reverses the direction of the copula, or rather he explains the
mechanism of reversal. Human, All Too Human (411 l attributes understand-
ing and mastery to the woman, sensitivity and passion to the man, whose
intelligence is "in itself something passive" (etwas Passives). Because desire
is narcissistic, passivity loves itself as passivity in the other, projects it as
"ideal," transfixes its partner in that passivity. In return, the partner loves
its own activity. It actively renounces being the model of that activity and
instead takes the other as model. The active-passive opposition speculates
on its own homosexual effacement to infinity; it raises itself [se releveJ in
the structure of idealization or the desiring machine. "Women are often
silently surprised at the great respect men pay to their character. When,
therefore, in the choice of a pattern, men seek specially for. a being of deep
and strong character, and women for a being of intelligence, brilliancy, and
presence of mind, it is plain that at the bottom men seek for the ideal man,
and women for the ideal woman,-consequently not for the complement
[Ergiinzung] but for the completion [Vollendung] of their own excellence."
23. On the hymen and the pharmakon, see above, pp. 124-28 and pp.
185-87.-ED.
24. fenseits ... 232 Cf. also 230 to 239. Whereas this might appear to
contradict the statement: "The Perfect Woman.- The perfect woman [das
vollkommene Weib] is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and
also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds
in support of this theory." (Human All Too Human [377]), it, on the contrary,
confirms it.
25. "The erection falls" and "The erection tomb"; see above, note 11. -
ED.
26. Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983), frag. 231.
 SIXTEEN

''Geschlecht: Sexual Difference,

Ontological Difference"

("Geschlecht: Difference sexuelle, difference

ontologlque," in Psyche: Inventions de l'autre [1987))

The work of Martin Heidegger has, without a doubt, a preeminent

importance for Derrida's thought. Explicit references to the German
thinker are a constant feature of these writings, and everywhere
Derrida supposes that the passage through the Heideggerian recast-
ing of the philosophical legacy is an unavoidable one for whoever
would continue to question that legacy. The relation to Heidegger
evinced by these writings is not, for all that, a simple one, and
Derrida can hardly be called a disciple of Heidegger or a Heidegger-
ian. (It was, moreover, Heidegger himself who first ridiculed the
notion that there was such a thing as a Heideggerian philosophy that
could form disciples.) Instead, this relation could be characterized as
a particularly stressed form of deconstruction. Derrida has pointed
out on several occasions that the latter term was contrived in part as
a translation of the use Heidegger makes of the two German words
Abbau and Destruktion (see, for example, "Letter to a Japanese
Friend"). But if he thus in some sense credits Heidegger with this
notion, it is not in order to exempt the latter's texts from the pres-
sures of deconstruction which, in effect, fold that operation back
onto itself. The following text is a fine illustration of how Derrida
 "Geschlecht" 379

[. reads both with and against Heidegger's text so as to locate certain

i·
~ points or layers where its deconstruction/Destruktion risks being
stopped short.
The pressure point that is singled out here is sexual difference. As
already clear in Spurs, where he noticed that Heidegger passes over
Nietzsche's remark that "the idea became woman," Derrida is inter-
ested in the apparent lack of reference to sexual difference in Heideg-
ger's thought. A passing reference in a text from 1928, however,
leads him to question the place of the notion of Geschlecht, a word
that, among other things, means sex in the sense of either masculine
or feminine, within the distinction Heidegger makes of ontological
from ontic difference. It is in the latter category that Heidegger
seems to place sexual difference, that is, the category of determinate
differences that can merely predicate Dasein which is itself neutral
or neuter. But Derrida remarks that the reduction of sexual differ-
ence or its neutralization also occupies a privileged place in the
existential analytic. From this indication, there emerges a sense of
the neuter which is not simply negative (neither ... nor) and which
therefore does not imply an absence of sex. What is neutralized is
sexual difference as a binary pair, a distinction between two, and no
more than two, sexes. It is toward this possibility of thinking a
sexuality in dispersion and multiplication, thus without the negativ-
ity always implied by the dialectic of a duality (and Hegel's or Kant's
are but the most systematic versions of this dialectic; see Glas), that
Derrida signals in the final pages.
 Geschlecht:

1
Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference

To Ruben Berezdivin

Of sex, one can readily remark, yes, Heidegger speaks as little as

possible, perhaps he has never spoken of it. Perhaps he has never
said anything, by that name or the names under which we recog-
nize it, about the "sexual-relation," "sexual-difference," or in-
deed about "man-and-woman." That silence, therefore, is easily
remarked. Which means that the remark is somewhat facile. A
few indications, concluding with "everything happens as if ... 1 11
and it would be satisfied. The dossier could then be closed, avoid-
ing trouble if not risk: it is as if, in reading Heidegger, there were
no sexual difference, and nothing of this aspect in man, which is
to say in woman, to interrogate or suspect, nothing worthy of
questioning, fragwiirdig. It is as if, one might continue, sexual
difference did not rise to the height of ontological difference: it
would be on the whole as negligible, with regard to the question
of the sense of being, as any other difference, a determinate
distinction or an antic predicate. Negligible for thought, of course,
even if it is not at all negligible for science or philosophy. But
insofar as it is opened up to the question of being, insofar as it
has a relation to being, in that very reference, Dasein would not
be sexed. Discourse on sexuality would thus be abandoned to the
sciences or philosophies of life, to anthropology, sociology, biol-
ogy, or perhaps even to religion or morality.
Sexual difference, we were saying or we heard ourselves say-
 "Geschlecht" 381

ing, would not rise to the height of ontological difference. It

changes nothing, apparently, to know that "rising to heights"
should be out of the question, since the thought of difference
gets on no such high horse; yet there is silence. One might even
find this to be, precisely, haughty, arrogant, or provoking in a
century when sexuality, commonplace of all babbling, has also
become the currency of philosophic and scientific "knowledge,"
the inevitable Kampfplatz of ethics and politics. Not a word from
Heidegger! One might judge this to be rather "grand style," this
scene of stubborn mutism at the very center of the conversation,
in the uninterrupted and distracted buzzing of the colloquium. In
itself it has a waking and sobering value jbut what exactly is
everyone talking about around this silence?): Who, indeed, around
or even long before him, has not chatted about sexuality as such,
as it were, and by that name? All the philosophers in the tradi-
tion have done so, from Plato to Nietzsche, who for their part
were irrepressible on the subject. Kant, Hegel, Husserl all re-
served a place for it; they at least touched on it in their anthro-
pology or in their philosophy of nature, and in fact everywhere.
Is it imprudent to trust Heidegger's manifest silence? Will this
apparent fact later be disturbed in its nice philological assurance
by some known or unedited passage when, while combing through
the whole of Heidegger, some reading machine manages to hunt
out the thing and snare it? Still, one must think of programing
the machine, one must think, think of it and know how to do it.
What will the index be? On which words will it rely? Only on
names? And on which syntax, visible or invisible? Briefly, by
which signs will you recognize his speaking or remaining silent
about what you nonchalantly call sexual difference? What is it
you are thinking beneath those words or through them?
What would be, in most cases, the sufficient basis for remark-
ing today such an impressive silence? What measure would seem
to suffice to allow that silence to appear as such, marked and
marking? Undoubtedly this: Heidegger apparently said nothing
about sexuality by name in those places where the best educated
and endowed "modernity" would have fully expected it given its
panoply of "everything-is-sexual-and-everything-is-political-and-
reciprocally" (note in passing that the word "political" is rarely
used, perhaps never, in Heidegger, another not quote insignifi-
382 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

cant matter). Even before the statistics were in, the matter would
seem already settled. But there are good grounds to believe that
the statistics here would only confirm the verdict: about what
we glibly call sexuality Heidegger has remained silent. Transitive
and significant silence (he has silenced sex) which belongs, as he
says about a certain Schweigen ("hier in der transitiven Bedeu-
tung gesagt"), to the path of a word (parole] he seems to interrupt.
But what are the places of this interruption? Where is the silence
working on that discourse? And what are the forms and deter-
minable contours of that non-said?
You can bet that there's nothing immobile in these places
where the arrows of the aforesaid panoply would pin things down
with a name: omission, repression, denial, foreclosure, even the
unthought.
But then, if the bet were lost, would not the trace of that
silence merit the detour? It is not just anything he silences and
the trace does not come from just anywhere. But why the bet?
Because before predicting anything whatever about "sexuality,"
it may be verified, one must invoke chance, the aleatory, destiny.
Let it be, then, a so-called modem reading, an investigation
armed with psychoanalysis, an enquiry authorized by all of an-
thropological culture. What does it seek? Where does it seek?
Where may it deem it has the right to expect at least a sign, an
allusion, however elliptical, a reference, to sexuality, the sexual
relation, sexual difference? To begin with, in Sein und Zeit. Was
not the existential analytic of Dasein near enough to a funda-
mental anthropology to have given rise to so many misunder-
standings or mistakes regarding its supposed "realite-humaine"
or human reality as it was translated in France? Yet even in the
analyses of being-in-the-world as being-with-others, or of care
either in its self or as Fiirsorge, it would be vain, it seems, to
search even for the beginning of a discourse on desire and sexual-
ity. One might conclude from this that sexual difference is not
an essential trait, that it does not belong to the existential struc-
ture of Dasein. Being-there, being there, the there of being as
such, bears no sexual mark. The same then goes for the reading
of the sense of being, since, as Sein und Zeit clearly states (§ 2) 1
Dasein remains in such a reading the exemplary being. Even
were it admitted that all reference to sexuality isn't effaced or
 "Geschlecht" 383

remains implied, this would only be to the degree that such a

reference presupposes quite general structures (In-der-Welt-sein
als Mit- und Selbst-sein, Riiumlichkeit, Befindlichkeit Rede,
Sprache, Geworfenheit, Sorge, Zeitlichkeit, Sein zum Tade). Yet
sexuality would never be the guiding thread for a privileged ac-
cess to these structures.
There the matter seems settled, it might be said. And yet! Und
dennoch! (Heidegger uses this rhetorical turn more often than
one would think: and yet, exclamation mark, next paragraph).

And yet the matter was so little or so ill understood that

Heidegger had to explain himself right away. He was to do it in
the margins of Sein und Zeit, if we may call marginal a course
given at the University of Marburg an der Lahn in the summer
semester 1928. 2 There he recalls certain "directive principles" on
"the problem of transcendence and the problem of SEIN UND
ZEIT" (§ ro). The existential analytic of Dasein can occur only
within the perspective of a fundamental ontology. That is why it
is not a matter of an "anthropology" or an "ethic." Such an
analytic is only "preparatory," while the "metaphysics of Das-
ein" is not yet "at the center" of the enterprise, clearly suggest-
ing that it is nevertheless on the program.
It is by the name of "Dasein" that I would here introduce the
question of sexual difference.
Why name Dasein the being that constitutes the theme of this
analytic? Why does Dasein give its "title" to this thematic? In
Sein und Zeit Heidegger had justified the choice of that "exem-
plary being" for the reading of the sense of being: "Upon which
being should one read off the sense of being... ?''In the end, the
response leads to the "modes of being of a determinate being,
that being which we the questioners ourselves are." If the choice
of that exemplary being, in its "privilege," becomes the object of
a justification !whatever may be its axiomatics and whatever one
may think of them), Heidegger on the contrary seems to proceed
by decree, at least in this passage, when it becomes a matter of
naming that exemplary being, of giving it once and for all its
terminological title: "That being which we ourselves are and
which includes questioning as one of its possibilities of Being
ldie Seinsmoglichkeit des Fragens], we name being-there !we
384 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

grasp it, arrest it, apprehend it 'terminologically,' fassen wir ter-

minologisch als Dasein]." That "terminological" choice un-
doubtedly finds its profound justification in the whole enterprise
and in the whole book by unfolding a there and a being-there
which (nearly) no other predetermination should be able to com-
mand. But that does not remove the decisive, brutal, and ellipti-
cal appearance from this preliminary proposition, this declara-
tion of name. On the contrary, it happens that in the Marburg
course, the title of Dasein-its sense as well as its name-is
more patiently qualified, explained, evaluated. Now, the first
trait that Heidegger underlines is its neutrality. First directive
principle: "For the being which constitutes the theme of this
analytic, the title 'man' (Mensch) has not been chosen, but the
neutral title 'das Dasein.' "
At first glance the concept of neutrality seems quite general.
It is a matter of reducing or subtracting, by means of that neu-
tralization, every anthropological, ethical or metaphysical prede-
termination so as to keep nothing but a relation to itself, bare
relation, to the Being of its being. This is the minimal relation to
itself as relation to Being, the relation that the being which we
are, as questioning, maintains with self and with its own proper
essence. This relation to self is not a relation to an ego or to an
individual, of course. Thus Dasein designates the being that, "in
a determined sense," is not "indifferent" to its own essence, or
to whom its own Being is not indifferent. Neutrality, therefore,
is first of all the neutralization of everything but the naked trait
of this relation to self, of this interest for its own Being (in the
widest sense of the word "interest"). The latter implies an inter-
est or a precomprehensive opening up for the sense of Being and
for the questions thus ordained. And yet!
And yet this neutrality will be rendered explicit by a leap,
without transition and in the very next item (second directive
principle) in the direction of sexual neutrality, and even of a
certain asexuality (Geschlechtslosigkeit) of being-there. The leap
is surprising. If Heidegger wanted to offer examples of determi-
nations to be left out of the analytic of Dasein, especially of
anthropological traits to be neutralized, he had many to choose
from. He begins with, and in fact never gets beyond, sexuality,
more precisely sexual difference. It therefore holds a privilege
 "Geschlecht" 385

and seems to belong in the first place-if one follows the state-
ments in the logic of their connection-to that "factual concre-
tion" that the analytic of Dasein should begin by neutralizing. If
the neutrality of the title "Dasein" is essential, it is precisely
because the interpretation of this being-which we are-is to be
engaged before and outside of a concretion of that type. The first
example of "concretion" would then be belonging to one or an-
other of the two sexes. Heidegger doesn't doubt that they are
two: "That neutrality means also [my emphasis-J.D.] that Das-
ein is neither of the two sexes [keines von beiden Geschlechtern
ist]."
Much later, at any rate thirty years later, the word "Ges-
chlecht" will be charged with all its polysemic richness: sex,
genre, family, stock, race, lineage, generation. Heidegger will
retrace in language, through irreplaceable path-openings (that is,
inaccessible to common translation), through labyrinthine, se-
ductive and disquieting ways, the imprint of paths that are often
closed. Here they are still closed by the two. Two: that can not
count anything but sexes, it seems, what are called sexes.
I have underlined the word also ("that neutrality means also
... "). By its place in the logical and rhetorical chain, this "also"
recalls that among the numerous meanings of that neutrality,
Heidegger judges it necessary not so much to begin with sexual
neutrality-which is why he also says "also"-but, neverthe-
less, immediately after the only general meaning that has marked
neutrality up to this point in the passage, to wit the human
character, the title "Mensch" for the theme of the analytic. That
is the only meaning that up till then he has excluded or neutral-
ized. Hence there is here a kind of precipitation or acceleration
which can not itself be neutral or indifferent: among all the traits
of man's humanity that are thus neutralized, along with anthro-
pology, ethics, or metaphysics, the first that the very word "neu-
trality" makes one think of, the first that Heidegger thinks of in
any case, is sexuality. The incitement cannot come merely from
grammar, that's obvious. To pass from Mensch, indeed from
Mann, to Dasein, is certainly to pass from the masculine to the
neutral, while to think or to say Dasein and the Da of Sein on
the basis of that transcendent which is das Sein ("Sein ist das
transcendens schlechthin," Sein und Zeit, p. 28), is to pass into
386 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

a certain neutrality. Furthermore, such neutrality derives from

the nongeneric and nonspecific character of Being: "Being as
fundamental theme of philosophy is not a genre of a being (keine
Gattung) ... " (ibid.). But once again, although sexual difference
necessarily has a relation to saying, words, and language, still it
cannot be reduced to a grammar. Heidegger designates, rather
than describes, this neutrality as an existential structure of Da-
sein. But why does he all of a sudden insist on it with such haste?
While in Sein und Zeit he had said nothing of asexuality (Ges-
chlechtslosigkeit), it figures here at the forefront of the traits to
be mentioned when recalling Dasein's neutrality, or rather the
neutrality of the title "Dasein." Why?
A first reason comes to mind. The very word Neutralitiit (ne-
uter) induces a reference to binarity. If Dasein is neutral, and if it
is not man (Mensch), the first consequence to draw from this is
that it does not submit to that binary partition one most sponta-
neously thinks of in such a case, to wit "sexual difference." If
"being-there" does not mean "man" (Mensch), a fortiori it desig-
nates neither "man" nor "woman." But if the consequence is so
near common-sense, why recall it? Above all, why should one go
to so much trouble in the continuation of the course to get rid of
anything so clear and secure? Should one conclude that sexual
difference does not depend so simply on all that which the ana-
lytic of Dasein can and must neutralize, to wit, metaphysics,
ethics, and especially anthropology, or indeed any other domain
of antic knowledge, for example biology or zoology? Ought one
to suspect that sexual difference cannot be reduced to an ethical
or anthropological theme?
Heidegger's precautionary insistence lets one think, in any
case, that these things are not a matter of course. Once anthro-
pology (fundamental or not) has been neutralized and once it has
been shown that anthropology cannot engage the question of
being or be engaged with it as such, once it has been observed
that Dasein is reducible neither to human-being, nor to the ego,
nor to consciousness, nor to the unconscious, nor to the subject,
nor to the individual, nor even to an animal rationale, one might
have thought that the question of sexual different did not have a
chance of measuring up to the question of the sense of being or
of the ontological difference, that even its dismissal did not de-
 "Geschlecht" 387

serve privileged treatment. Yet unquestionably it is the contrary

that happens. Heidegger has barely finished recalling Dasein's
neutrality, and then right away he has to clarify: neutrality also
as to sexual difference. Perhaps he was responding to more or
less explicit, nai'.ve or sophisticated, questions on the part of his
hearers, readers, students, or colleagues who were still held back,
whether they liked it or not, within anthropological space: What
about the sexual life of your Dasein? they might still have asked.
And after having answered the question on that terrain by dis-
qualifying it, in sum, after having recalled the asexuality of a
being-there which is not an anthropos, Heidegger wishes to en-
counter another question, even perhaps a new objection. That is
where the difficulties are going to begin to accumulate.
Whether one talks of neutrality or asexuality (Neutralitiit,
Geschlechtslosigkeit), the words accentuate strongly a negativity
which manifestly runs counter to what Heidegger thereby wishes
to mark out. It is not a matter here of linguistic or grammatical
signs at the surface of a meaning which, for its part, remains
untouched. By means of such manifestly negative predicates, one
must be able to read what Heidegger does not hesitate to call a
"positivity" (Positivitiit), a richness, and even, in a heavily charged
code, a power (Mii.chtigkeit). This clarification suggests that the
asexual neutrality does not desexualize, on the contrary; its on-
tological negativity is not deployed with respect to sexuality
itself (which it would instead liberate), but with respect to the
marks of difference, or more precisely to sexual duality. There
would be no Geschlechtslosigkeit except with respect to the
"two"; asexuality would be determined as such only to the de-
gree that sexuality is immediately understood as binarity or sex-
ual division. "But such asexuality is not the indifference of an
empty nothing (die Indifferenz des leeren Nichtigen), the feeble
negativity of an indifferent antic nothing. In its neutrality, Das-
ein is not just anyone no matter who, but the originary positivity
(urspriingliche Positivitiit) and power of essence [etre] (Miichtig-
keit des Wesens)."
If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the two sexes, that does
not mean that its being is deprived of sex. On the contrary: here
one must think of a predifferential, or rather a predual, sexuality
-which does not necessarily mean unitary, homogeneous, or
388 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

undifferentiated, as we shall see later. Then, beginning with that

sexuality, more originary than the dyad, one may try to think at
its source a "positivity" and a "power" that Heidegger is careful
not to call sexual, fearing no doubt to reintroduce the binary
logic that anthropology and metaphysics always assign to the
concept of sexuality. But it would indeed be a matter here of the
positive and powerful source of every possible "sexuality." The
Geschlechtslosigkeit would not be more negative than aletheia.
One might recall what Heidegger said regarding the "Wiirdigung"
des "Positiven" im "privativen" Wesen der Aletheia (in Platons
Lehre von der Wahrheit).
From this point, the course sketches a quite singular move-
ment. It is very difficult to isolate in it the theme of sexual
difference. I would be tempted to interpret this as follows: by a
kind of strange and quite necessary displacement, it is sexual
division itself that leads to negativity; so neutralization is at
once the effect of this negativity and the effacement to which
thought must subject it to allow an original positivity to become
manifest. Far from constituting a positivity that the asexual neu-
trality of Dasein would annul, sexual binarity itself would be
responsible, or rather would belong to a determination that is
itself responsible, for this negativation. To radicalize or formalize
too quickly the sense of this movement before retracing it more
patiently, we could propose the following schema: it is sexual
difference itself as binarity, it is the discriminative belonging to
one or another sex, that destines or determines Ito) a negativity
that must then be accounted for. Going still further, one could
even link sexual difference thus determined lone out of two),
negativity, and a certain "impotence." When returning to the
originality of Dasein, of this Dasein said to be sexually neutral,
"originary positivity" and "power" can be recovered. In other
words, despite appearances, the asexuality and neutrality that
must first of all be subtracted from the binary sexual mark, in
the analytic of Dasein, are in fact on the same side, on the side
of that sexual difference-the binary-to which one might have
thought them simply opposed. Would this interpretation be too
violent?
The next three subparagraphs or items I§ 3, § 4, § 5) develop
the motifs of neutrality, positivity, and originary power, the ori-
 "Geschlecht" 389

ginary itself, without explicit reference to sexual difference.

"Power" becomes that of an origin (Ursprung, Urquell), and
moreover Heidegger will never directly associate the predicate
"sexual" with the word "power," the first remaining all too
easily associated with the whole system of sexual difference that
may, without much risk of error, be said to be inseparable from
every anthropology and every metaphysics. More than that, the
adjective "sexual" (sexual, sexuell, geschlechtlich) is never used,
at least to my knowledge, only the nouns Geschlecht or Ges-
chlechtlichkeit; this is not without importance, since these nouns
can more easily radiate toward other semantic zones. Later we
will follow there some other paths of thought.
But without speaking of it directly, these three subparagraphs
prepare the return to the thematic of Geschlechtlichkeit. First of
all they efface all the negative signs attached to the word neutral-
ity. The latter does not have the emptiness of an abstraction;
neutrality rather leads back to the "power of the origin" which
bears within itself the internal possibility of humanity in its
concrete facuality. Dasein, in its neutrality, must not be con-
fused with the existent. Dasein only exists in its factual concre-
tion, to be sure, but this very existence has its originary source
(Urquell) and internal possibility in Dasein as neutral. The ana-
lytic of this origin does not deal with the existent itself. Precisely
because it precedes them, such an analytic cannot be confused
with a philosophy of existence, with a wisdom (which could be
established only within the "structure of metaphysics"), or with
a sermonizing that would teach this or that "world view." It is
therefore not at all a "philosophy of life." Which is to say that a
discourse on sexuality of this order (wisdom, knowledge, meta-
physics, philosophy of life or of existence) falls short of every
requirement of an analytic of Dasein in its very neutrality. Has a
discourse on sexuality ever come forward that did not belong to
any of these registers?
It must be recalled that sexuality is not named in this last
paragraph nor in the one that will treat (we will return to it) a
certain "isolation" of Dasein. It is named in a paragraph in Vom
Wesen des Grundes (the same year, 1928) which develops the
same argument. The word occurs in quotation marks, in a par-
enthesis. The logic of the a fortiori raises the tone somewhat
390 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

there. For in the end, if it is true that sexuality must be neutral-

ized a fortiori, erst recht, why insist? Where is the risk of misun-
derstanding? Unless the matter is not at all obvious, and there is
still a risk of mixing up once more the question of sexual differ-
ence with that of Being and the ontological difference? In that
context, it is a matter of determining the ipseity of Dasein, its
Selbstheit or being-a-self. Dasein exists only for its own sake [a
dessein de soil (umwillen seiner), if one can put it thus, but that
means neither the for-itself of consciousness, nor egoism, nor
solipsism. It is starting from Selbstheit that an alternative be-
tween "egoism" and "altruism" may arise and become manifest,
as well as a difference between "being-I" and "being-you" IIch-
sein/Dusein). Always presupposed, ipseity is therefore also "neu-
tral" with respect to being-me and being-you, "and with all the
more reason with regard to 'sexuality'" (und erst recht etwa
gegen die "Geschlechtlichkeit" neutral). The movement of this
a fortiori is logically irreproachable on only one condition: It
would be necessary that the said "sexuality (in quotation marks)
be the assured predicate of whatever is made possible by or
beginning with ipseity, here, for instance, the structures of "me"
and "you," yet that it not belong to "sexuality," to the structure
of ipseity, an ipseity not as yet determined as human being, me
or you, conscious or unconscious subject, man or woman. Yet, if
Heidegger insists and underlines ("with all the more reason"), it
is because a suspicion has not yet been banished: What if "sex-
uality" already marked the most originary Selbstheit? If it were
an ontological structure of ipseity? If the Da of Dasein were
already "sexual"? What if sexual difference were already marked
in the opening up to the question of the sense of Being and to the
ontological difference? And what if neutralization, which does
not happen all by itself, were a violent operation? "With all the
more reason" may hide a more feeble reason. In any case, the
quotation marks always signal some kind of citation. The current
usage of the word "sexuality" is "mentioned" rather than "used,"
one might say in the language of speech act theory; it is cited to
appear in court, warned if not accused. Above all, one must
protect the analytic of Dasein from the risks of anthropology, of
psychoanalysis, even of biology. Yet there still may be a door
open for other words, or another usage and another reading of the
 "Geschlecht" 391

word "Geschlecht," if not the word "sexuality." Perhaps another

"sex," or rather another "Geschlecht," will come to be inscribed
within ipseity, or will come to disturb the order of all its deriva-
tions, for example, that of a more originary Selbstheit making
possible the emergence of the ego and of the you. Let us leave
this question suspended.
Although this neutralization is implied in every ontological
analysis of the Dasein, that does not mean that the "Dasein in
man," as Heidegger often says, need be an "egoistic" singularity
or an "ontically isolated individual." The point of departure in
neutrality does not lead back to the isolation or insularity jlsoli-
erung) of man, to his factual and existential solitude. And yet the
point of departure in neutrality does indeed mean, Heidegger
carefully observes, a certain original isolation of man: not, pre-
cisely, in the sense of factual existence, "as if the philosophizing
being were the center of the world," but as the "metaphysical
isolation of man." It is the analysis of this isolation which then
brings out again the theme of sexual difference and of the dual
partition within Geschlechtlichkeit. At the center of this new
analysis, the very subtle differentiation of a certain lexicon al-
ready signals translation problems which are only going to get
worse for us. It will always be impossible to consider them as
either accidental or secondary. At a certain moment we will even
be able to notice that the thought of Geschlecht and that of
translation are essentially the same. The lexical hive brings to-
gether (or swarms) the series "dissociation," "distraction," "dis-
semination," "division," "dispersion." The dis- is supposed· to
translate, though only by means of transfers and displacements,
the zer- of Zerstreuung, Zerstreutheit, Zerstorung, Zersplitte-
rung, Zerspaltung. But an interior and supplementary frontier
partitions yet again the lexicon: dis- and zer- often have a nega-
tive sense, yet sometimes also a neutral or nonnegative sense (I
would hesitate here to say positive or affirmative).
Let us attempt to read, translate as literally as possible and
interpret. Dasein in general hides, shelters in itself the internal
possibility of a factual dispersion or dissemination ( faktische
Zerstreuung) in its own body (Leiblichkeit) and "thereby in sex-
uality" (und damit in die Geschlechtlichkeit). Every proper body
of one's own (corps propreJ is sexed, and there is no Dasein
392 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

without its own body. But the linking proposed by Heidegger

seems quite clear: the dispersing multiplicity is not primarily
due to the sexuality of one's own body; it is its own body itself,
the flesh, the Leiblichkeit, that draws Dasein originally into the
dispersion and in due course [par suite] into sexual difference.
This "in due course" (damit) insists in the interval of a few lines,
as if Dasein were supposed to have or be a priori las its "interior
possibility") a body that happens to be sexual and affected by
sexual division.
Here again, an insistence on Heidegger's part recalls that, like
neutrality, dispersion (and all the meanings in dis- or zer-) must
not be understood in a negative manner. The "metaphysical"
neutrality of isolated man as Dasein is not an empty abstraction
drawn from or in the sense of the antic, it is not a neither-nor,
but rather what is properly concrete in the origin, the "not yet"
of factual dissemination, of dissociation, of being-dissociated or
of factual dis-sociality: faktische Zerstreutheit here and not Zer-
streuung. This dissociated being, unbound, or desocialized (for it
goes together with the isolation of man as Dasein) is not a fall or
an accident, a decline [decheance] that has supervened. It is an
originary structure of Dasein that affects it and the body, and
hence sexual difference, with multiplicity and with lack-of-bind-
ing [deliaison], these two significations remaining distinct though
gathered together in the analyses of dissemination (Zerstreuung
or Zerstreutheit). Assigned to a body, Dasein is separated in its
facticity, subjected to dispersion and parcelling out (zersplittert),
and thereby (ineins damit) always disjunct, in disaccord, split up,
divided (zwiespiiltig) by sexuality toward a determinate sex (in
eine bestimmte Geschlechtlichkeit). These words, undoubtedly,
have at first a negative resonance: dispersion, parcelling out,
division, dissociation, Zersplitterung, Zerspaltung, quite like
Zerstorung (demolition, destruction), as Heidegger explains; this
resonance is linked with negative concepts from an antic point
of view, a fact that immediately entails a meaning of lesser value.
"But something else is at issue here." What? Another meaning,
marking the fold of a mani-fold "multiplication." We can read
the characteristic sign (Kennzeichnung) by which such a multi-
plication is recognizable in the isolation and factual singularity
of Dasein. Heidegger distinguishes this multiplication (Mannig-
 "Geschlecht" 393

faltigung) from a simple multiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit), from a

diversity. One must also avoid the representation of a grand
original being whose simplicity was suddenly dispersed (zerspal-
tet) into various singularities. It is rather a matter of elucidating
the internal possibility of that multiplication for which Dasein's
own body represents an "organizing factor." The multiplicity in
this case is not a simple formal plurality of determinations or of
determinities (Bestimmtheiten); it belongs to Being itself. An
"originary dissemination" (urspriingliche Streuung) belongs al-
ready to the Being of Dasein in general, "according to its meta-
physically neutral concept." This originary dissemination
(Streuung) becomes, from an altogether determined point of view,
dispersion (Zerstreuung): here a difficulty of translation forces
me to distinguish somewhat arbitrarily between dissemination
and dispersion, in order to mark out by a convention the subtle
trait that distinguishes Streuung from Zerstreuung. The latter is
the intensive determination of the former. It determines a struc-
ture of originary possibility, dissemination (Streuung), according
to all the meanings of Zerstreuung (dissemination, dispersion,
scattering, diffusion, dissipation, distraction). The word Streuung
occurs but once, it seems, and it designates this originary possi-
bility, this disseminality (if I may be allowed that word). After-
wards, the word is always Zerstreuung, which would add-but it
isn't that simple-a mark of determination and negation, had
not Heidegger warned us just a moment before against that value
of negativity. Yet, even if not totally legitimate, it is hard to
avoid a certain contamination by negativity, indeed by ethico-
religious associations that would link that dispersion to a fall or
to a corruption of the pure originary possibility (Streuung), which
appears thus to be affected by a supplementary tum. It will
indeed be necessary to elucidate also the possibility or fatality of
that contamination. We will return to this later.
Some indications of this dispersion (Zerstreuung). First of all,
Dasein never relates to an object, to a sole object. If it does, it is
always in the mode of abstraction or abstention from other beings
which always co-appear at the same time. This multiplication
does not supervene because there is a plurality of objects; ac-
tually it is the converse that takes place. It is the originary
disseminal structure, the dispersion of Dasein, that makes pos-
394 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

sible this multiplicity. And the same holds for Dasein's relation
to itself: it is dispersed, which is consistent with the "structure
of historicity in the widest sense, to the extent that Dasein
/1

occurs as Erstreckung, a word the translation of which remains

very risky. The word extension could all too easily be associated
with extensio, which Sein und Zeit interprets as the "fundamen-
tal ontological determination of the world" according to Des-
cartes (§ 18). Here something completely other is at issue. Er-
streckung names a spacing which, "before" the determination of
space as extensio, comes to extend or stretch out being-there, the
there of Being, between birth and death. As an essential dimen-
sion of Dasein, the Erstreckung opens up the between that links
it at once to its birth and to its death, the movement of suspense
by which it itself tends and extends itself between birth and
death, these two receiving their meaning only from that interval-
lic movement. Dasein affects itself with this movement, and that
auto-affection belongs to the ontological structure of its historic-
ity: "Die Spezifische Bewegtheit des erstreckten Sicherstreckens
nennen wir das Geschehen des Daseins" I§ 72). The fifth chapter
of Sein und Zeit links together precisely this intervallic tension
and dispersion IZerstreuung) (notably in § 75 1 p. 390). Between
birth and death, the spacing of the between marks at once the
distance and the relation, but the relation according to a kind of
distension. This "between-two" as relation (Bezug) having a link
[trait] with both birth and death belongs to the very Being of the
Dasein, "before" any biological determination, for instance ("Im
Sein des Daseins liegt schon das 'Zwischen' mit Bezug auf Ge-
burt und Tod, 11 p. 374). The link thus enter-tained, inter-twined
[entre-tenu, entre-tendu], held or drawn in, over or through the
distance between [entre] birth and death, maintains itself by
dispersion, dissociation, unbinding (Zerstreuung, Unzusammen-
hang, etc. Cf. p. 390 for example). That link, that between, could
not take place without them. Yet to take them as negative forces
would be to precipitate the interpretation, for instance to render
it dialectical.
The Erstreckung is thus one of the determinate possibilities of
essential dispersion (Zerstreuung). That "between" would be im-
possible without dispersion yet it constitutes only one of its
 "Geschlecht" 395

structural dependents, to wit, temporality and historicity. An-

other dependent, another possibility-connected and essential-
of originary dispersion is the originary spatiality of Dasein, its
Riiumlichkeit. The spatial or spacing dispersion is manifested,
for instance, in language. Every language is first of all determined
by spatial significations (Raumbedeutungen). 3 The phenomenon
of so-called spatializing metaphors is not at all accidental, nor
within the scope of the rhetorical concept of "metaphor." It is
not some exterior fatality. Its essential irreducibility cannot be
elucidated outside of this existential analytic of Dasein, of its
dispersion, its historicity, and its spatiality. The consequences
therefore must be drawn, in particular for the very language of
the existential analytic: all the words Heidegger uses necessarily
refer back also to these Raumbedeutungen, beginning with the
word Zerstreuung (dissemination, dispersion, distraction) which
nevertheless names the origin of spacing at the moment when,
as language, it submits to its laws.
The "transcendental dispersion" (as Heidegger still names it)
thus belong to the essence of Dasein in its neutrality. "Meta-
physical" essence, we are more precisely told in a course pre-
sented above all at that time as a metaphysical ontology of Das-
ein, whose analytic constitutes only a phase, undoubtedly
preliminary. This must be taken into account in order to situate
what is said here about sexual difference in particular. Transcen-
dental dispersion is the possibility of every dissociation and par-
celling out (Zersplitterung, Zerspaltung) into factual existence. It
is itself "founded" on that originary character of Dasein that
Heidegger then called Geworfenheit. One should be patient with
that word, subtracting it from so many usages, current interpre-
tations or translations (for instance dereliction, being-thrown).
This should be done in anticipation of what the interpretation of
sexual difference-which right away follows-retains in itself of
that Geworfenheit and, "founded" on it, of transcendental disper-
sion. There is no dissemination that does not suppose such a
"throw" [jetee], Da of Dasein as thrown (jetee]. Thrown "before"
all the modes of throwing that will later determine it: project,
subject, object, abject, trajectory, dejection; throw that Dasein
cannot make its own in a project, in the sense of throwing itself
396 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

like a subject master of the throw. Dasein is geworfen: this

means that it is thrown before any project on its part, but this
being-thrown is not yet submitted to the alternative of activity
or passivity, this alternative being still too much in solidarity
with the couple subject-object and hence with their opposition,
one could even say with their objection. To interpret being-
thrown as passivity could reinscribe it within the derivative
problematic of subjecti(vi)ty (active or passive). What does "throw"
mean before any of these syntaxes? And being-thrown even be-
fore the image of the fall, be it Platonic or Christian? There is a
being-thrown of Dasein even "before" the appearance appears-
in other words, "before" the advent for it there-of any thought
of throwing amounting to an operation, activity, or initiative.
And that being-thrown of Dasein is not a throw in space, in what
is already a spatial element. The originary spatiality of Dasein
depends on the throw.
It is at this point that the theme of sexual difference can
reappear. The disseminal throw of being-there (understood still
in its neutrality) is particularly manifest in the fact that Dasein
is Mitsein with Dasein. As always in this context, Heidegger's
first gesture is to observe an order of implication: sexual differ-
ence, or belonging to a genre, must be elucidated starting from
being-with, in other words, from the disseminal throw, and not
inversely. Being-with does not arise from some factitious connec-
tion; "it cannot be explained from some presumably originary
generic being," by a being whose own body would be partitioned
according to a sexual difference (geschlechtlich gespaltenen lei-
blichen Wesen). On the contrary, a certain generic drive of gath-
ering together (gattungshafte Zusammenstreben), the union of
genres (their unification, rapprochement, Einigung), has as
"metaphysical presupposition" the dissemination of Dasein as
such, and thereby Mitsein. The Mit of Mitsein is an existential,
not a categorial, and the same holds for the adverbs of place (Sein
und Zeit, § 26). What Heidegger calls here the fundamental meta-
physical character of Dasein is not to be derived from any generic
organization or from a community of living beings as such.
How does this question of order matter to a "situation" of
sexual difference? Thanks to a prudent derivation that in tum
 "Geschlecht" 397

becomes problematic for us, Heidegger can at least reinscribe the

theme of sexuality, in rigorous fashion, within an ontological
questioning and an existential analytic. As soon as one no longer
pins one's hopes on a common doxa or a bio-anthropological
science, both of which are sustained by a metaphysical preinter-
pretation, sexual difference remains to be thought. But the price
of that prudence? Is it not to distance sexuality from every origi-
nary structure? To deduce it? Or in any case to derive it while
thus confirming the most traditional philosophemes, repeating
them with the force of a new rigor? And did not that derivation
begin by a neutralization the negativity of which was laboriously
denied? And once the neutralization is effected, does one not
accede once again to an ontological or "transcendental" disper-
sion, to that Zerstreuung the negative value of which was so
difficult to efface?
In this form these questions remain, undoubtedly, summary.
But they could not be elaborated in a simple exchange with the
passage in the course of Marburg which names sexuality. Whether
it be a matter of neutralization, negativity, dispersion, or distrac-
tion (Zerstreuung), all of which are, if we follow Heidegger, indis-
pensable motifs here for posing the question of sexuality, it is
necessary to return to Sein und Zeit. Although sexuality is not
named there, these motifs are treated in a more complex, more
differentiated fashion, which does not mean, on the contrary, in
an easier or more facile manner.
We must be content here to pose several preliminary indica-
tions. Resembling a methodical procedure in the course, neutral-
ization is not unrelated to what in Sein und Zeit is called the
"privative interpretation" I§ 11 ). One could even speak of a method,
since Heidegger appeals to an ontology that is accomplished by
or on the "way" of a privative interpretation. That way allows
the "a priori's to be brought out, and a note on the same page,
crediting Husserl, says that it is well known that "a priorism is
the method of every scientific philosophy that understands it-
self." In this context, it is a question, precisely, of psychology
and biology. As sciences, they are founded on an ontology of
being-there. This mode-of-being that is life is accessible, essen-
tially, only through being-there. It is the ontology of life that
398 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

requires a "privative interpretation": "life" being neither a pure

Vorhandensein nor a Dasein (Heidegger says this without consid-
ering that the issue requires more than a mere affirmation: for
him it seems to be obvious), it is accessible only by a negative
operation of subtraction. One may very well wonder what is the
being of a life which is nothing but life, which is neither this nor
that, neither Vorhandensein nor Dasein. Heidegger never elabo-
rated that ontology of life, but one can imagine all the difficulties
it would have run into, since the "neither ... nor" that condi-
tions it excludes or overflows the basic structural (categorial or
existential) concepts of the whole existential analytic. It is the
whole problematic organization that is here in question, the one
that subjects positive forms of knowledge to regional ontologies,
and these to a fundamental ontology, which itself at that time
was preliminarily opened up by the existential analytic of Da-
sein. It is no accident (once more, one might say, and show) if it
is the mode of being of the living, the animated (hence also of the
psychical) which raises and situates this enormous problem, or
in any case gives it its most recognizable name. We cannot go
into this matter here, but with the underlining of its all too often
unnoticed necessity, it should at least be observed that the theme
of sexual difference cannot be dissociated from it.
Let us for the moment keep to that "way of privation," the
expression picked up again by Heidegger in § 121 and this time
again to designate the a priori access to the ontological structure
of the living. Once that remark is developed, Heidegger enlarges
upon the question of those negative statements. Why do negative
determinations impose themselves so often within this ontolog-
ical characteristic? Not at all by "chance." It is because one must
remove the originality of the phenomena from what has dissem-
bled, disfigured, displaced, or covered them over, from the Ver-
stellungen and Verdeckungen, from all those preinterpretations
the negative effects of which must in their turn be annulled by
the negative statements the veritable "sense" of which is truly
"positive." This is a schema we recognized earlier. The negativ-
ity of the "characteristic" is therefore not any more fortuitous
than the necessity of alterations or dissemblances which it at-
tempts in some manner methodically to correct. Verstellungen
and Verdeckungen are necessary movements in the very history
 "Geschlecht" 399

of Being and its interpretation. They cannot be avoided, like

contingent faults, any more than one can reduce inauthenticity
(Uneigentlichkeit) to a fault or a sin into which one should not
have fallen.
And yet. If Heidegger uses so easily the word "negative" when
it is a matter of qualifying statements or a characteristic, he
never uses it, it seems to me (or, more prudently, he uses it much
less often and much less easily), to qualify the very thing that, in
preinterpretations of Being, nevertheless makes necessary those
methodical corrections which take a negative or neutralizing
form. Uneigentlichkeit, Verstellungen and Verdeckungen are not
of the order of negativity (the order of the false or of evil, of error,
or of sin). And one can well understand why Heidegger carefully
avoids speaking in this case of negativity. He thus avoids reli-
gious, ethical, indeed even dialectical schemas, claiming to go
back further or "higher" than they.
It should then be said that no negative signification is ontolog-
ically attached to the "neuter" in general, particularly not to this
transcendental dispersion (Zerstreuung) of Dasein. Thus, with-
out speaking of negative value or of value in general (Heidegger's
distrust of the value of value is well known), we must take into
account the differential and hierarchical accentuation that regu-
larly in Sein und Zeit comes to mark the neutral and dispersion.
In certain contexts, dispersion marks the most general structure
of Dasein. We saw this in the course, but it was already the case
in Sein und Zeit, for example in§ 12 (p. 56): "The being-in-the-
world of Dasein is, with its facticity, always already dispersed
(zerstreut) or even parcelled out (zersplittert) into determinate
modes of being-in." Heidegger proposes a list of these modes and
of their irreducible multiplicity. Yet elsewhere, dispersion and
distraction (Zerstreuung in both senses) characterize the inau-
thentic ipseity of Dasein, that of Man-selbst, of that One which
has been "distinguished" from the authentic and proper (eigen-
tlich) ipseity (Selbst). As "anyone," Dasein is dispersed or dis-
tracted (zerstreut). The whole of that analysis is well known; we
are only detaching from it that which concerns dispersion (cf. §
27), a concept one can again find at the center of the analysis of
curiosity (Neugier, § 36). The latter, let us recall, is one of the
three modes of falling (Verfallen) of Dasein in its everyday-being.
400 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

Later we shall have to return to the precautions Heidegger takes:

falling, alienation (Entfremdung), and even downfall (Absturz)
are not meant here as the theme of a "moralizing critique," a
"philosophy of culture," a dogmatic religious account of the fall
(Fall) from an "original condition" (of which we have neither
antic experience nor ontological interpretation) or of a "corrup-
tion of human nature." Much later, we will have to recall these
precautions and their problematic character, when, in the "situ-
ation" of Trakl, Heidegger will interpret the decomposition and
the de-essentialization (Verwesung), that is to say also a certain
corruption, of the figure of man. It will still be a matter, even
more explicitly this time, of a thought of "Geschlecht" or of the
Geschlecht. I put it in quotation marks because the issue touches
as much on the name as on what it names; and it is here as
imprudent to separate them as to translate them. As we shall
see, what is at stake is the inscription of Geschlecht and of the
Geschlecht as inscription, stamp, and imprint.
Dispersion is thus marked twice: as general structure of Da-
sein and as mode of inauthenticity. One might say the same for
the neutral: in the course, whenever it is a question of Dasein's
neutrality, there is no negative or pejorative index; yet "neutral,"
in Sein und Zeit, may also be used to characterize the "one," to
wit, it is what becomes of the "who" within everyday ipseity:
the "who," then, is the neutral (Neutrum), "the one"(§ 27).
This brief recourse to Sein und Zeit has perhaps allowed us
better to understand the sense and necessity of that order of
implications that Heidegger wants to preserve. Among other
things, that order may also account for the predicates used by all
discourse on sexuality. There is no properly sexual predicate; at
least there is none that does not refer, for its sense, to the general
structures of Dasein. So that to know what one is talking about,
and how, when one names sexuality, one must indeed rely upon
the very thing described by the analytic of Dasein. Inversely, so
to speak, that disimplication allows the general sexuality or sex-
ualization of discourse to be understood: sexual connotations can
mark discourse, to the point of a complete takeover, only to the
extent that they are homogeneous with what every discourse
implies, for example the topology of those irreducible "spatial
 "Geschlecht" 401

meanings" (Raumbedeutungen), but also all those other traits we

have situated in passing. What would a ''sexual" discourse or a
discourse "on-sexuality" be that did not evoke farness [eloigne-
ment], the inside and the outside, dispersion and proximity, the
here and the there, birth and death, the between-birth-and-death,
being-with and discourse?
This order of implications opens up thinking to a sexual differ-
ence that would not yet be sexual duality, difference as dual. As
we have already observed, what the course neutralized was less
sexuality itself than the "generic" mark of sexual difference,
belonging to one of two sexes. Hence, in leading back to disper-
sion and multiplication (Zerstreuung, Mannigfaltigung), may one
not begin to think a sexual difference (without negativity, let us
clarify) not sealed by a two? Not yet sealed or no longer sealed?
But the "not yet" or "no longer" would still mean, already, a
submission to the control and inspection of reason.
The withdrawal [retrait] of the dyad leads toward the other
sexual difference. It may also prepare other questions. For in-
stance, this one: How did difference get deposited in the two? Or
again, if one insisted on consigning difference within dual oppo-
sition, how does multiplication get arrested in difference? And in
sexual difference?
In the course, for the reasons given above, Geschlecht always
names sexuality such as it is typed by opposition or by duality.
Later (and sooner) matters will be different, and this opposition
is called decomposition.

-Translated by Ruben Bevezdivin

NOTES

1. First and wholly preliminary part of an interpretation by which I wish

to situate Geschlecht within Heidegger's path of thought. Within the path of
his writings too, and the marked impression or inscription of the word
Geschlecht will not be irrelevant. That word I leave here in its language for
reasons that should become binding in the course of this very reading. And
it is indeed a matter of "Geschlecht" (sex, race, family, generation, lineage,
species, genre/genus) and not of the Geschlecht: one will not pass so easily
toward the thing itself (the Geschlecht), beyond the mark of the word (Ges-
402 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

chlecht) in which, much later, Heidegger will remark the "imprint" of a

blow or a stamp (Schlag). This he will do in a text we shall not discuss here
but toward which this reading will continue, by which in truth I know it is
already magnetized: "Die Sprache im Gedicht, Eine Eriirterung von Georg
Trakls Gedicht" (1953) in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959, pp. 36 ff.). [This text
is taken up in "Heidegger's Hand: Geschlecht II" in Psyche (1987)-Eo.]
2. Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz,
Gesamt-Ausgabe, volume 26.
3. Cf. also Sein und Zeit, p. 166.
 SEVENTEEN

From "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Arn"

("En ce moment m6me dans cet ouvrage me voici,"

in Psyche: Inventions de l'autre [1987])

In an essay titled "Violence and Metaphysics" initially published in

1964 (reprinted in Writing and Difference [1967)J, Derrida had first
engaged at length with the thought of his contemporary, the French
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He would later point out, for ex-
ample in Of Grammatology (see above, p. 42) and "DiHerance,"
that his formulations of notions such as the trace with which to
delimit the metaphysics of presence had been worked out within
close range of Levinas's sense of the trace of a past that has never
been present, an absolute alterity. Yet, as he had always done with
Heidegger, Derrida posed certain questions of Levinas that marked
the limits of any convergence. In 1980, in a second essay on Levinas
which was commissioned for a Festschrift and which is extracted
below, these questions concern sexual difference.
The questions come mostly at the end of this polyvocal essay and
are attributed to the feminine interlocutor who has been largely
silent up until that point. The principal part of the essay elaborates
a model of Levinas's writing as one that manages to inscribe or let
be inscribed, beyond its representation or thematization, the alto-
gether other which is nevertheless incommensurable with the lan-
guage of presence, of being, of essence in which he is writing. Derrida
is concerned to show how this achievement both constitutes the
singularity of Levinas's work and yet, for the very reason that that
404 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

work succeeds in bearing traces of the other, cannot be attributed to

a single signature. Meanwhile, this whole development in the essay
is represented as addressed to a feminine interlocutor. The latter
feature is crucial to the essay because it recalls at every step the
Saying of the other that overflows the present writing which Derrida
is tracing through Levinas. In effect, as the first interlocutor remarks,
she dictates that which he addresses or gives to her. We are led to
relate this structure of address to the Levinasian notion of the trace,
the Pro-noun "il" (both he and it) that "marks with its seal anything
that may carry a name." When, therefore, the feminine interlocutor
takes over the final pages, it is in order to ask about this masculine/
neuter "il," whether it can in any sense comprehend her or she.
What, she asks, is the relation Levinas proposes between autrui
(others) as other sex, otherwise sexed, on the one hand, and autrui as
the "altogether other, beyond or before sexual difference" on the
other hand? It would appear, she says, that the former is understood
as secondary and subordinate to the latter. She remarks that such a
gesture of subordination has invariably meant, despite the distortion
of logic required, situating a certain masculinity before the differen-
tiation masculine/feminine. The consequences of this illogic are
then played out as far as they will go: the Pro-noun of Cod which
guards jealously its neutrality against any contamination by deter-
mined being, by sexual difference. (For an analysis of this figure of
the jealous God and, in particular, of the final paragraphs of this
essay, see above, my introduction, pp. xxxi-xxv.J
 At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am 1

- He will have obligated [Il aura oblige].

At this very instant, you hear me, I have just said it. He will
have obligated. If you hear me, already you are sensible to the
strange event. Not that you have been visited, but as after the
passing by of some singular visitor, you are no longer familiar
with the place, those very places where nonetheless the little
phrase-where does it come from? who pronounced it?-still
leaves its resonance lingering [egaree].
As if from now on we didn't dwell there any longer, and to tell
the truth, as if we had never been at home. But you aren't uneasy,
what you feel-something unheard-of yet so very ancient-is
not a malaise; and even if something is affecting you without
having touched you, still you have been deprived of nothing. No
negation ought to be able to measure up to what is happening so
as to be able to describe it.
Notice you can still hear and understand yourself all alone,
therefore, repeating the three words l"il aura oblige"); you have
failed neither to hear its rumor nor understand its sense. You are
no longer without them, without these words which are discreet,
and thereby unlimited, overflowing with discretion. I myself no
longer know where to stop them. What surrounds them? He will
have obligated. The edges of phrase remain drowned in a fog.
Nevertheless it seems quite plain and clearly set off in its author-
itarian brevity, complete without appeal, without requiring any
adjective or complement, not even any noun: he will have obli-
gated. But precisely, nothing surrounds it sufficiently to assure
us of its limits. The sentence is not evasive but its border lies
406 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

concealed. About the phrase, the movement of which can't be

resumed by any of the one, two, three words ["il aura oblige"] of
one, two, three syllables, about it you can no longer say that
nothing is happening at this very moment. But what then? The
shore is lacking, the edges of a phrase belong to the night.
He will have obligated-distanced [eloigne] from all context.
That's right, distanced, which does not forbid, on the contrary,
proximity. What they call a context and which comes to shut in
the sense of a discourse, always more or less, is never simply
absent, only more or less strict. But no cut is there, no utterance
is ever cut from all context, the context is never annulled with-
out remainder. One must therefore negotiate, deal with, transact
with marginal effects [les effets de bard]. One must even negoti-
ate what is nonnegotiable and which overflows all context.
Here at this very moment, when I am here trying to give you
to understand, the border of a context is less narrow, less strictly
determining than one is accustomed to believe. "Il aura oblige":
there you have a phrase that may appear to some terribly indeter-
minate. But the distance that is granted to us here would not be
due so much to a certain quite apparent absence of an edge l"il
aura oblige'', without a nameable subject, complement, at-
tribute, or identifiable past or future on this page, in this work
[ouvrage] at the moment when you hear yourself presently read-
ing it), but rather because of a certain inside of what is said and
of the saying of what is said in the phrase, and which, from
within, if this may still be said, infinitely overfl.ows at a stroke
all possible context. And that at the very moment, in a work for
example-but you don't yet know what I mean by that word,
work-when the wholly other who will have visited this phrase
negotiates the nonnegotiable with a context, negotiates his econ-
omy as that of the other.
He will have obligated.
You must find me enigmatic, a bit glib or perverse in cultivat-
ing the enigma every time I repeat this little phrase, always the
same, and lacking context, becoming more and more obscure.
No, and I say this without studying the effect, the possibility of
this repetition is the very thing that interests me, interests you
as well, even before we should happen to find it interesting, and
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 407

I should like slowly to move closer (to you, maybe, but by a

proximity that binds [lie], he would say, to the first comer, to the
unmatched other, before all contract, without any present being
able to gather together a contact), slowly to bring myself closer
to this, namely that I can no longer formalize since the event ("il
aura oblige") will have precisely defied within language [la lan-
gue] this power of formalization. He will have obligated to com-
prehend, let us say rather to receive, because affection, an affec-
tion more passive than passivity, is party to all this, he will have
obligated to receive totally otherwise the little phrase. To my
knowledge he has never pronounced it as such; this matters
little. He will have obligated to "read" it totally otherwise. Now
to make us (without making us) receive otherwise, and receive
otherwise the otherwise, he has been unable to do otherwise than
negotiate with the risk: in the same language, the language of the
same, one may always ill receive what is thus otherwise said.
Even before that fault, the risk contaminates its very proposition.
What becomes of this fault then? And if it is inevitable, what
sort of event is at issue? Where would it take place?

He will have obligated. However distanced it may remain,

there is certainly some context in that phrase.
You hear it resonate, at this very moment, in this work.
What I thus call-this work-is not, especially not, domi-
nated by the name of Emmanuel Levinas.
It is rather meant to be given to him. Given according to his
name, in his name as much as to his name. Therefore there are
multiple chances, probabilities, you cannot avoid surrendering to
them, so that the subject of the phrase, "il aura oblige", might
be Emmanuel Levinas.
Still it is not sure. And even if one could be sure of it, would
one thereby have responded to the question, Who is the "He"
("Jl") in that phrase?
Following a strange title that resembles a cryptic quotation in
its invisible quotation marks, the site of this phrase "princeps"
doesn't allow you yet to know by what right He carries a capital.
Perhaps not only as an incipit, and, in this hypothesis of another
capital letter or of the capital letter of the Other, be attentive to
408 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

all the consequences. It is drawn into the play of the irreplaceable

He submitting itself to substitution, like an object, into the
irreplaceable itself. He, without italics.
I wonder why I have to address myself to you to say that. And
why after so many attempts, so many failures, here I am obli-
gated to renounce the anonymous neutrality of a discourse pro-
posed, in its form at least, to no matter whom, pretending self-
mastery and mastery of its object in a formalization without
remainder? I won't pronounce your name or inscribe it, but you
are not anonymous at the moment when here I am telling you
this, sending it to you like a letter, giving it to you to hear or to
read, giving being infinitely more important to me than what it
might transmit at the moment I receive the desire from you, at
the moment when I let you dictate to me what I would like to
give you of myself. Why? Why at this very moment?
Suppose that in giving to you-it little matters what-I wanted
to give to him, him Emmanuel Levinas. Not render him any-
thing, homage for example, not even render myself to him, but
to give him something which escapes from the circle of restitu-
tion or of the "rendez-vous" ("Proximity," he writes, "doesn't
enter into that common time of clocks that makes the rendez-
vous possible. It is derangement."). I would like to do it fault-
lessly (sans faute), with a "faultlessness" ["sans faute"] that no
longer belongs to the time or logic of the rendez-vous. Beyond
any possible restitution, there would be need for my gesture to
operate without debt, in absolute ingratitude. The trap is that I
then pay homage, the only possible homage, to his work (oeuvre),
to what his work says of the Work (Oeuvre]: "The Work thought
to the end requires a radical generosity of the movement in
which the Same goes toward the Other. Consequently, it requires
an ingratitude from the other." He will have written this twice,
in appearance literally identically, in The Trace of the Other and
in Signification and Sense. But one cannot economize on this
seriality, I will return to this.
Suppose then that I wished to give to him, to E. L., and beyond
all restitution. I will have to do it in conformance with what he
will have said of the Work in his work, in the Work of his work.
I will still be caught in the circle of debt and restitution with
which the nonnegotiable will have to be negotiated. I would be
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 409

debating with myself, interminably, forever, and even before hav-

ing known it, up to the point, perhaps, when I would affirm the
absolutely anachronic dissymmetry of a debt without loan, ac-
knowledgment, or possible restitution.
According to which he will have immemorially obligated even
before calling himself by any name whatsoever or belonging to
any genre whatsoever. The conformity of conformance is no
longer thinkable within that logic of truth which dominates-
without being able to command it-our language and the lan-
guage of philosophy. If in order to give without restituting, I must
still conform to what he says of the Work in his work, and to
what he gives there as well as to a re-tracing of the giving; more
precisely, if I must conform my gesture to what makes the Work
in his Work, which is older than his work, and whose Saying
according to his own terms is not reducible to the Said, there we
are, engaged before all engagement, in an incredible logic, formal
and nonformal. If I restitute, if I restitute without fault, I am at
fault. And if I do not restitute, by giving beyond acknowledg-
ment, I risk the fault. I leave for now in this word-fault-all
the liberty of its registers, from crime to a fault of spelling. As to
the proper name of what finds itself at issue here, as to the proper
name of the other, that would, perhaps, return lor amount) to the
same.
There you are, forewarned: it is the risk or chance of that fault
that fascinates or obsesses me at this very moment, and what
can happen to a faulty writing, to a faulty letter (the one I write
you), what can remain of it, what the ineluctable possibility of
such a fault gives to think about a text or a remainder. Inelucta-
ble since the structure of "faultiness" is a priori, older even than
any a priori. If anyone IHe) tells you from the start (d'abord):
"don't return to me what I give you," you are at fault even before
he finishes talking. It suffices that you hear him, that you begin
to understand and acknowledge. You have begun to receive his
injunction, to give yourself to what he says, and the more you
obey him in restituting nothing, the better you will disobey him
and become deaf to what he addresses to you. All that might
resemble a logical paradox or trap. But it is "anterior" to all logic.
I spoke wrongly of a trap just now. It is only felt as a trap from
the moment when one would pretend to escape from absolute
410 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

dissymmetry through a will to mastery or coherence. It would be

a way to acknowledge the gift in order to refuse it. Nothing is
more difficult than to accept a gift. Now what I "want" to "do"
here is to accept the gift, to affirm and reaffirm it as what I have
received. Not from someone who would himself have had the
initiative for it, but from someone who would have had the force
to receive it and reaffirm it. And if it is thus that lin my tum) I
give to you, it will no longer form a chain of restitutions, but
another gift, the gift of the other. Is that possible? Will it have
been possible? Shouldn't it have already taken place, before
everything, so that the very question may emerge from it, which
in advance renders the question obsolete?
The gift is not. One cannot ask, "what is the gift?"; yet it is
only on that condition that there will have been, by this name or
another, a gift.
Hence, suppose that beyond all restitution, in radical ingrati-
tude !but notice, not just any ingratitude, not in the ingratitude
that still belongs to the circle of acknowledgment and rec-
iprocity), I desire (it desires in me, but the it Ile ~a) is not a
neutral non-me), I desire to try to give to E. L. This or that? Such
and such a thing? A discourse, a thought, a writing? No, that
would still give rise to exchange, commerce, economic reappro-
priation. No, to give him the very giving of giving, a giving that
might no longer even be an object or a present said, because every
present remains within the economic sphere of the same, nor an
impersonal infinitive (the "giving" [le "donner"] therefore must
perforate the grammatical phenomenon dominated by the cur-
rent interpretation of language), nor any operation or action suf-
ficiently self-identical to return to the same. That "giving" must
be neither a thing nor an act, it must somehow be someone (male
or female), not me: nor him ("he"). Strange, isn't it, this excess
that overflows language at every instant and yet requires it, sets
it incessantly into motion at the very moment of traversing it?
That traversal is not a transgression, the passage of a cutting
limit; the very metaphor of overflowing [debordement] no longer
fits insofar as it still implies some linearity.
Even before I attempt or desire to attempt it, suppose that the
desire for that gift is evoked in me by the other, without however
obligating me or at least before any obligation of constraint, of a
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 411

contract, or gratitude, or acknowledgment of the debt: a duty

without debt, a debt without contract. That should be able to do
without him or happen with anyone: hence it demands, at once,
this anonymity, this possibility of indefinitely equivalent substi-
tution and the singularity, no, the absolute uniqueness of the
proper name. Beyond any thing, beyond whatever might lead it
astray or seduce it toward something else, beyond everything
that could somehow or other return to me, such a gift should go
right to the unique, to what his name will have uniquely named,
to that uniqueness that his name will have given. This right does
not derive from any right, from any jurisdiction transcendent to
the gift itself; it is the right of what he calls, in a sense that
perhaps you don't understand yet, because it disturbs language
every time it visits it, recitude or sincerity.
Which his name will have uniquely named or given. But (but
it would require saying but for every word) uniquely in another
sense than that of the singularity that jealously guards its propri-
ety or property as irreplaceable subject within the proper name
of an author or proprietor, in the sufficiency of a self assured of
its signature. Finally, suppose that in the wake of the gift I
commit a fault, that I let a fault, as they say, slip by, that I don't
write straight (que je n'ecrive pas droit], that I fail to write as one
must (but one must fil fautf, one must understand otherwise the
one must), or that I fail to give him, to him, a gift that is not his.
I am not at this very moment thinking of a fault on his name, on
his forename or patronym, but with such a default in the writing
that in the end would constitute a fault of spelling, a bad treat-
ment inflicted on this proper name, whether done consciously or
expressly by me or not.
Since in that fault your body is at issue [il y va], and since, as I
previously said, the gift I would make him comes from you who
dictate it to me, your unease grows. In what could such a fault
consist? Shall one ever be able to avoid it? Were it inevitable, and
hence in the final account irreparable, why should reparation
require claiming? And especially, above all, on this hypothesis,
what would have taken place? I mean: What would happen (and
about what? Or whom?)? What would be the proper place of this
text, of this faulty body? Will it have properly taken place? Where
should you and I, we, let it be?
412 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

--No, not let it be. Soon, we shall have to give it to eat, and
drink, and you will listen to me.
[ .... ]
- - How, then, does he write? How does what he writes make
a work (ouvrage), and make the Work [Oeuvre] in the work
[ouvrage]? For instance, and most especially, what does he do
when he writes in the present, in the grammatical form of the
present, to say what cannot be nor ever will have been present,
the present said only presenting itself in the name of a Saying
that overflows it infinitely within and without, like a sort of
absolute anachrony of the wholly other that, although incom-
mensurably heterogeneous to the language of the present and the
discourse of the same, nonetheless must leave a trace of it, al-
ways improbably but each time determinate, this one, and not
another? How does he manage to inscribe or let the wholly other
be inscribed within the language of being, of the present, or
essence, of the same, of economy, etc., within its syntax and
lexicon, under its law? How does he manage to give a place there
to what remains absolutely foreign to that medium, absolutely
unbound from that language, beyond being, the present, essence,
the same, the economy, etc.? Mustn't one reverse the question,
at least in appearance, and ask oneself whether that language is
not of itself unbound and hence open to the wholly other, to its
own beyond, in such a way that it is less a matter of exceeding
that language than of treating it otherwise with its own possibil-
ities? Treating it otherwise, in other words to calculate the trans-
action, negotiate the compromise that would leave the nonnego-
tiable intact, and to do this in such a way as to make the fault,
which consists in inscribing the wholly other within the empire
of the same, alter the same enough to absolve itself from itself.
According to me that is his answer, and that de facto answer, if
one may say so, that response in deed, at work rather in the
series of strategic negotiations, that response does not respond to
a problem or a question; it responds to the Other-for the Other
-and approaches laborde] writing in enjoining itself to that for-
the-Other. It is by starting from the Other that writing thus gives
a place and forms an event, for example this one: "Il aura oblige."
It is that response, the responsibility of that response, that I
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 413

would like to interrogate in its tum. Interrogate, to be sure, is

not the word, and I don't yet know how to qualify what is
happening here between him, you and me, that doesn't belong to
the order of questions and responses. It would be rather his
responsibility-and what he says of responsibility-that inter-
rogates us beyond all the coded discourses on the subject.
Hence: What is he doing, how does he work [oeuvre] when,
under the false appearance of a present, in a more-than-present
[plus-que-present], he will have written this, for example, where
I slowly read to you, at this very moment, listen:

Responsibility for the other, going against intentionality

and the will which intentionality does not succeed in dissi-
mulating, signifies not the disclosure of a given and its
reception, but the exposure of me to the other, prior to every
decision. There is a claim laid on the Same by the other in
the core of myself, the extreme tension of the command
exercised by the Other in me over me, a traumatic hold of
the other on the Same, which does not allow the Same time
to await the other. [... ] The subject in responsibility is
alienated in the depths of its identity with an alienation
that does not empty the Same of its identity, but constrains
it to it, with an unimpeachable assignation, constrains it to
it as no one else, where no one could replace it. The psyche,
a uniqueness outside of concepts, is a seed of folly, already
a psychosis. It is not an ego (Moi), but me (moi) under
assignation. There is an assignation to an identity for the
response of responsibility, where one cannot have oneself
be replaced without fault. To this command continually put
forth only a 11here I am" [me voici] can answer, where the
pronoun "I" is in the accusative, declined before any declen-
sion, possessed by the other, sick,2 identical. Here I am-an
inspired saying, which is not a gift for the fine words or
songs. There is constraint to give with full hands, and thus
a constraint to corporeality. [... ] It is the subjectivity of a
man of flesh and blood, more passive in its extradition to
the other than the passivity of effects in a causal chain, for
it is beyond the unity of apperception of the I think, which
is actuality itself. It is a being-torn-up-from-oneself-for-an-
414 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

other in the giving-to-the-other-of-the-bread-out-of-one's-

own-mouth. This is not an anodyne formal relation, but all
the gravity of the body extirpated from its conatus essendi
in the possibility of giving. The identity of the subject is
here brought out, not by resting upon itself, but by a rest-
lessness that drives me outside of the nucleus of my sub-
stantiality.3
( .... ]
You have just heard the "present" of the "Here I am" freed for
the other and declined before any declension. That "present" was
already very complicated in its structure, one could say almost
contaminated by that very thing from which it should have been
rent. It is not the presumed signatory of the work, E. L., who
says: ''Here I am", me, presently. He quotes a "Here I am", he
thematizes what is nonthematizable Ito use that vocabulary to
which he will have assigned a regular-and somewhat strange-
conceptual function in his writings). But beyond the Song of
Songs or Poem of Poems, the citation of whoever would say
"Here I am" should serve to mark out this extradition when
responsibility for the other gives me over to the other. No gram-
matical marking as such, no language or context would suffice to
determine it. That present-quotation, which, as a quotation, seems
to efface the present event of any irreplaceable "here I am," also
comes to say that in "here I am" the self is no longer presented
as a self-present subject, making itself present to itself II-myself),
it is declined before all declension, "in the; accusative", and he

--He or she, if the interruption of the discourse is required.

Isn't it "she" in the Song of Songs! And who would "she" be?
Does it matter?
Nearly always with him, this is how he sets his work in the
fabric: by interrupting the weaving of our language and then by
weaving together the interruptions themselves, another language
comes to disturb the first one. It doesn't inhabit it, but haunts it.
Another text, the text of the other, arrives in silence with a more
or less regular cadence, without ever appearing in its original
language, to dislodge the language of translation, converting the
version, and refolding it while folding it upon the very thing it
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 415

pretended to import. It disassimilates it. But then, that phrase

translated and quoted from the Song of Songs which, it should be
recalled, is already a response, and a response that is more or less
fictitious in its rhetoric, and what is more, a response meant in
tum to be quoted, transmitted, and communicated in indirect
discourse-this gives the accusative its greatest grammatical
plausibility (various translations render it more or less exactly:
"I opened to my beloved; I but my beloved had gone away, he
had disappeared. I I was outside myself when he spoke to me ....
I called him and he did not reply ... They have taken away my
veil, the guards of the walls. I I implore you, daughters of Jerusa-
lem I If you find my beloved, I What will you say to him? ... I
That I am sick of love.-" Or again, "I open myself to my darling
I but my darling has slipped away, he has passed. I My being goes
out at his speaking: I I seek him and do not find him. I I call him:
he does not reply .... On me they take away my shawl, I the
guardians of the ramparts. I I appeal to you, daughters of Yer-
oushalai:m: if you find my darling, what will you declare to him?
/-That sick of love, I ... "), that phrase translated and quoted
(in a footnote, so as to open up and deport the principal text) is
torn from the mouth of a woman, so as to be given to the other.
Why doesn't he clarify that in this work?

--Doubtless because that remains in this context, and with

regard to his most urgent purpose, secondary. Here, at least, he
doesn't seem to answer that question. In the passage that quotes
the "here I am," which I have in tum read to you, the structure
of the utterances is complicated by the "astriction to giving."
What is quoted here is what no quotation should be able to
muffle; what is each time said only once, and henceforth exceeds
not the saying but the said in language. The phrase describes or
says what within the said interrupts it and at one stroke makes
it anachronistic with respect to the saying, negotiated between
the said and the saying and at the same time interrupting the
negotiation while forthwith negotiating interruption itself. Such
negotiation deals with a language, with the ordering of a gram-
mar and a lexicon, with a system of normative constraints, which
tend to interdict what here must be said [il f aut dire], namely,
the astriction to giving and the extradition of subjectivity to the
416 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

other. The negotiation thematizes what forbids thematization,

while during the very trajectory of that transaction it forces
language into a contract with the stranger, with what it can only
incorporate without assimilating. With a nearly illegible stroke
the other stands the contaminating negotiation up [fait faux.-
bond], furtively marking the effraction with a saying unreduced
to silence although no longer said in language. The grammatical
utterance is there, but dislodged so as to leave room for lthough
not to establish residence in) a sort of agrammaticality of the gift
assigned from the other: I in the accusative, etc. The interdictory
language is interdicted but continues speaking; it can't help it, it
can't avoid being continually and strangely interrupted and dis-
concerted by what traverses it with a single step, drawing it along
while leaving it in place. Whence the essential function of a
quotation, its unique setting to work, which consists in quoting
the unquotable so as to lay stress on the language, citing it as a
wholt in order to summon at once as witness and as accused
within its limits, (sur)rendered to a gift, as a gift to which lan-
guage cannot open up on its own. It is not, then, simply a matter
of transgression, a simple passage beyond language and its norms.
It is not, then, a thought of the limit, at least not of that limit all
too easily figured forth by the word beyond so necessary for the
transaction. The passage beyond language requires language or
rather a text as a place for the trace of a step that is not (present)
elsewhere. That is why the movement of that trace, passing
beyond language, is not classical nor does it render the logos
either secondary or instrumental. Logos remains as indispensable
as the fold folded onto the gift, just like the tongue (langue) of
my mouth when I tear bread from it to give it to the other. It is
also my body.
[ .... ]
Here now is another example. He speaks of "this book," even
here, of the fabrication of "this work," of the "present work";
these expressions repeat themselves as with the above "at this
moment," but this time interlaced with a series of "one musts."
A "me" and "here I am" slide incessantly from the quotation to
an interminable oscillation between "use" and "mention." This
happens in the last two pages of Otherwise than Being . .. (chap-
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 417

ter VI: Outside). I select the following, not without some artifi-
cial abstraction: "Signification-one-for-the-other-relation with
alterity-has already been analyzed in the present work (my
italics, J.D.) as proximity, proximity as responsibility for the
Other [autruiJ, and responsibility for the Other-as substitution:
in its subjectivity, in its very bearing as separated substance, the
subject has shown itself as expiation-for-the-other, condition or
uncondition of hostage." I interrupt for an instant; "in the pre-
sent work" the impresentable has therefore presented itself, a
relation with the Other [AutreJ that defeats any gathering into
presence, to the point where no "work" can be rebound or shut
in upon its presence, nor plotted or enchained in order to form a
book. The present work makes a present of what can only be
given outside the book. And even outside the framework. "The
problem overflows the framework of this book." These are the
last words of the last chapter of Totality and Infinity (immedi-
ately before the Conclusions). But what overflows has just been
announced-it is the very announcement, messianic conscious-
ness-on the internal border of that utterance, on the frame of
the book if not in it. And yet what is wrought and set to work in
the present work only makes a work outside the book. The
expression "in the present work" mimics the thesis and the code
of the university community; it is ironic. It has to be so as
discreetly as possible, for there would still be too great an assur-
ance and too much glibness to break the code with a fracas.
Effraction does not ridicule; it indeed makes a present of the
"present work."
Let's continue: "This book interprets the sub;ect as hostage,
and the subjectivity of the subject as substitution breaking with
the essence of being. The thesis exposes itself imprudently to the
reproach of utopianism, in the opinion that modem man takes
himself for a being among beings, while his modernity explodes
as an impossibility of staying at home. This book escapes the
reproach of utopianism-if utopianism be a reproach, if thought
can escape being utopian -by recalling that what humanely took
place has never been able to remain shut in its place." "The
thesis" is therefore not posed; it is imprudently and defenselessly
exposed, and yet that very vulnerability is ("this weakness is
necessary," we will read a little later on) the provocation to
418 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

responsibility for the other; it leaves place for the other in a

taking-place of this book where the this here no longer shuts in
upon itself, upon its own subject. The same dehiscence that
opened up the series of "at this moment" is there at work in "the
present work," "this book," "the thesis," etc .. But the series is
always complicated by the fact that the inextricable equivoca-
tion, contamination, soon it will be called "hypocrisy," is at once
described and denounced in its necessity by "this book," by "the
present work," by "the thesis," and in them, out of them, in
them, but destined in them to an outside that no dialectic will
be able to reappropriate into its book. Thus II underline it is
necessary {il faut/, it was necessary {il fallait/):

. . . Each individual is virtually an elect, called forth to

leave, in his tum-or without awaiting his tum-from the
concept of the self, from his extension into the people, to
respond to responsibility: me, that is to say, here I am for
the others, called forth radically to lose his place-or his
refuge within being, to enter within a ubiquity that is also a
utopia. Here I am for the others-e-normous responsibility
whose lack of measure is attenuated by hypocrisy from the
moment it enters into my own ears, warned, as they are, of
the essence of being, that is to say, of the way in which it
carries on. Hypocrisy immediately denounced. But the norms
to which the denunciation refers have been understood within
the enormity of their sense, and in the full resonance of
their utterance, true like an unbridled witness. No less, at
any rate, is necessary for the little humanity that adorns the
earth.... There must be a de-regulation of essence by means
of which essence may not solely find violence repugnant.
This repugnance attests only to the phase of an inaugural or
savage humanity, ready to forget its disgusts, to be invested
as "essence of de-regulation," surrounding itself like all
essence with honors and military virtues, inevitably jealous
of its perseverance. For the little humanity that adorns the
earth there must be a relaxing of essence to the second
power: in the just war made on war, to tremble-even
shiver-every instant, because of that very justice. There
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 419

must be this weakness. This relaxing virility, without cow-

ardice, was necessary for the little cruelty that our hands
repudiate. This is the sense, notably, which should have
been suggested by the formulas repeated in this book (my
italics, J. D.) about the passivity more passive than any
passivity, the fission of the Self as far as myself, or about
the consummation for the other without the act being able
to be reborn from out of the ashes of that consummation.

I again interrupt: no Hegelian Phoenix after this consumma-

tion. This book is not only singular in not being put together like
the others; its singularity has to do with this seriality here, ab-
solute enchainment, rigorous yet with a rigor that knows how to
relax itself as is necessary so as not to become totalitarian again,
even virile, hence to free itself to the discretion of the other in
the hiatus. It is in this seriality here and not another Ithe array in
its homogeneous arrangement), in this seriality of derangement
that one must hear each philosopheme deranged, dislocated, dis-
articulated, made inadequate and anterior to itself, absolutely
anachronic to whatever is said about it, for example, "the passiv-
ity more passive than any passivity" and the whole "series" of
analogous syntaxes, all the "formulas repeated in this book."
Now you understand the necessity of this repetition. You thus
approach the "he" ["ii") which occurs in this work and from
which the "one must" ["il faut"] is said. Here are the last lines:

In this work (my italics, J. D.) which does not seek to

restore any ruined concept, the destitution and de-situation
of the subject do not remain without meaning: following
the death of a certain god inhabiting the hinter-worlds, the
substitution of the hostage discovers the trace-unpro-
nounceable writing-of what, always already past, always
"he" ["il") never enters any present and to whom no names
designating beings, nor verbs where their essence resounds,
are any longer appropriate, but who, Pro-noun [Pro-nom],
marks with his seal anything that can carry a name.
--Will it be said of "this work [ouvrage]" that it makes a
work? From which moment? Of what? Of whom? Whatever the
420 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

stages may be, the responsibility comes back to him, "he", to

him, who "undersigns" every signature. Pro-noun without pro-
nounceable name that "marks with its seal whatever can carry a
name." This last phrase comes at the end of the book as if in
place of a signature. Emmanuel Levinas recalls the preceding Pro-
noun that replaces and makes possible every nominal signature;
by the same double stroke, he gives to it and withdraws from it
his signature. Is it him, "he," that then is set to work? Of him
that the work responds? Of him that one will have said, "il aura
oblige," "he will have obligated"? I do not think that between
such a pro-noun and a name or the bearer of a name there is what
one could call a difference or a distinction. This link between
"he" and the bearer of a name is other. Each time different, never
anonymous, "he" is (without sustaining it with any substantial
presence) the bearer of the name. If I now transform the utter-
ance, which came from I know not where and from which we
took our point of departure ("il aura oblige"), by this one, "the
work of Emmanuel Levinas will have obligated," would he sub-
scribe to that? Would he accept my replacing "he" by Emmanuel
Levinas in order to say (who) will have made the work in his
work? Would it be a fault, as to "he" or as to him, E. L.?

--Now, I write at your dictation, "the work of E. L. will

have obligated."
You have dictated it to me and yet what I write at this very
moment, "the work of E. L. will have obligated," articulating
together those common nouns and proper names, you don't yet
know what that means. You don't know yet how one must read.
You don't even know how, at this moment, one must hear this
"one must" [il faut}.
The work of E. L. comprehends an other manner to think
obligation in the "one must," an other manner of thinking the
work, and even of thinking thought. One must therefore read it
otherwise, read there otherwise the "one must," and otherwise
the otherwise.
The dislocation to which this work will have obligated is a
dislocation without name; toward another thought of the name,
a thought that is wholly other because it is open to the name of
the other. Inaugural and immemorial dislocation, it will have
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 421

taken place-another place, in the place of the other-only on

the condition of another topic. An extravagant topic (u-topic,
they will say, believing they know what takes place and what
takes the place of) and absolutely other. But to hear the absolute
of this "absolutely," one must have read the serial work that
displaces, replaces, and substitutes this word "absolute." And to
start with, the word "work." We endlessly get caught up in the
network of quotation marks. We no longer know how to efface
them, nor how to pile them up, one on top of the other. We no
longer even know how to quote his "work" any longer, since it
already quotes, under quotation marks, the whole language-
French, Western, and even beyond-even if it is only from the
moment and because of the fact that "he" must put in quotation
marks, the pronominal signatory, the nameless signatory with-
out authorial signature, "he" who undersigns every work, sets
every work [ouvrage] to work [met en oeuvre], and "marks by his
seal whatever can carry a name. 11 If "he" is between quotation
marks, nothing more can be said, about him, for him, from him,
in his place or before him, that would not require a tightly knit,
tied up and wrought [ouvragee] series, a whole fabric of quotation
marks knitting a text without edge. A text exceeding language
and yet in all rigor untranslatable from one tongue to another.
Seriality irreducibly knots it to a language.
If you wish to talk of E. L's operation when he sets himself
into "this work" [ouvrage], when he writes "at this moment,"
and if you ask, "What is he doing?" and "How does he do it?"
then not only must you dis-locate the 11he 11 who is no longer the
subject of an operation, agent, producer, or worker, but you must
right away clarify that the Work, as his work gives and gives
again to be thought, is no longer of the technical or productive
order of the operation (poiein, facere, agere, tun, wirken, erzeu-
gen, or however it may be translated). You cannot therefore speak
-pertinently-of the Work before what "his" work says of the
Work, in its Saying and beyond its Said, because that gap remains
irreducible. Nor is there any circle here, especially not a herme-
neutic one, because the Work-according to his work-"is" pre-
cisely what breaks all circularity. There, near but infinitely dis-
tanced, the dislocation is to be found in the interior without
inside of language which is yet opened out to the outside of the
422 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

wholly other. The infinite law of quotation marks seems to sus-

pend any reference, enclosing the work upon the borderless con-
text which it gives to itself: yet behold here this law making
absolute reference to the commandment of the wholly other,
obligating beyond any delimitable context.
If, therefore, I now write "the work of E. L. will have obligated
to an absolute dislocation," the obligation, as the work that
teaches it, teaching also how one must teach, will have been
without constraint, without contract, anterior to any engage-
ment, to any nominal signature, which through the other re-
sponds for the other before any question or requisition, ab-solute
thereby and ab-solving. "He" will have subtracted dissymmetrical
responsibility from the circle, the circulation of the pact, the
debt, acknowledgment, from synchronic reciprocity, I would even
dare say from the annular alliance, from the rounds [tour], from
whatever makes a round from a finger and I dare say from a sex.
Can it be said? How difficult, probably impossible, to write or
describe here what I seem on the verge of describing. Perhaps it
is impossible to hold a discourse that holds itself at this moment,
saying, explaining, constating (a constative discourse) E. L's work.
There would have to be [faudrait] a writing that performs, but
with a performative without present (who has ever defined such
a performative?), one that would respond to his, a performative
without a present event, a performative the essence of which
cannot be resumed as to presence ("at this very moment," at this
present moment I write this, I say I, presently; and it has been
said that the simple utterance of an I was already performative),
a performative heretofore never described, the performance of
which must not, however, be experienced as a glib success, as an
act of prowess. For at the same time it is the most quotidian
exercise of a discourse with the other, the condition of the least
virtuoso writing. Such a performance does not correspond to
[repond a] the canonical description of a performative, perhaps.
Well then, let the description be changed, or renounce here the
word "performative"! What is pretty certain is that that perfor-
mance derives nothing from the "constative" proposition, nor
from any proposition at all; but inversely and dissymetrically,
every so-called constative proposition, every proposition in gen-
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 423

eral presupposes this structure before anything else, this respon-

sibility of the trace (performing or performed).
For example, I wrote earlier: " 'he' will have withdrawn it
from the circle ... ". Now it would already be necessary-infi-
nitely-that I take back and displace each written word in series.
Displacing being insufficient, I must rip away each word from
itself, absolutely rip it away from it-self (as, for example, in his
manner of writing "passivity more passive than passivity," an
expression that undetermines itself, can just as well pass into its
opposite, unless the ripping off stops somewhere, as if by a piece
of skin symbolically ripped off from the body and remaining,
behind the cut, adhered to itJ, I must absolutely detach it and
absolve it from itself while nevertheless leaving upon it a mark
of attachment (the expression "passivity more passive than pas-
sivity" does not become just any other expression, it does not
mean "activity more active than activity"); in order that two
annulments or two excesses not be equivalent, within indeter-
mination, the ab-solving erasure must not be absolutely absolute.
I must therefore make each atom of an utterance appear faulty
and absolved; faulty in regard to what or whom? And why? When
I write, for example, "'he' will have withdrawn it ... etc.," the
very syntax of my phrase, according to the dominant norms that
interpret the French language, the "he" appears to be constituted
into an active subject, author and initiator of an operation. If "he"
were the simple pronoun of the signatory (and not the Pro-noun
marking with its seal whatever may carry a name ... ), it could
be thought that the signatory has the authority of an author, and
that "he" is the agent of the action that "will have withdrawn,"
etc. Now it would have been necessary to say, it must therefore
be said, that "he" has withdrawn nothing whatever, "he" has
made appear the possibility of that withdrawal, he has not made
it appear, he has let it appear, he has not let it appear, since what
he has let (not to be but to make a sign, and not a sign but an
enigma), what he has let produce itself as enigma, and to produce
itself is still too much, is not of the phenomenal order, he has
"let" "appear" the nonappearing as such (but the nonappearing
never disappears into its "as such," etc.) on the limit of the
beyond, a limit that is not a determinable, visible, or thinkable
424 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

line, and that has no definable edges, on the "limit," therefore, of

the "beyond" of phenomena and of essence: that is to say I!) the
"he" himself. That's it, the "he" himself, that is to say (!), the
Other. "He" has said "He," even before "I" may say "I" and in
order that, if that is possible, "I" may say "I."
That other "he," the "he" as wholly other, was only able to
arrive at the end of my phrase (unless my phrase never arrived,
indefinitely arrested on its own linguistic shore) by means of a
series of words that are all faulty, and that I have, as it were,
erased in passing, in measure, regularly, the one after the other,
while leaving to them the force of their tracing, the wake of their
tracement [tracement}, the force (without force) of a trace that
will have allowed passage for the other. I have written in marking
them, in letting them be marked, by the other. That is why it is
inexact to say that I have erased those words. In any case, I
should not have erased them, I should have let them be drawn
into a series la stringed sequence of enlaced erasures), an inter-
rupted series, a series of interlaced interruptions, a series of hia-
tuses (gaping mouth, mouth opened out to the cut-off word, or to
the gift of the other and to the-bread-in-his-mouth) that I shall
henceforth call, in order to formalize in economical fashion and
so as not to dissociate what is not dissociable within this fabric,
the seriasure [seriature]. That other "he" could have only arrived
at the end of my phrase within the interminable mobility of this
seriasure. He is not the subject-author-signer-proprietor of the
work; it is a "he" without authority. It could just as well be said
that he is the Pro-noun leaving its presignature sealed under the
name of the author, for example, E. L., or conversely that E. L. is
but a pronoun replacing the singular pronoun, the seal that comes
before whatever can carry a name. From this point of view, E. L.
would be the personal pronoun of "he." Without authority, he
does not make a work, he is not the agent or creator of his work,
yet if I say that he lets the work work la word that remains to be
drawn along), it must immediately be specified that this letting
is not a simple passivity, not a letting of thought within the
horizon of letting-be. This letting beyond essence, "more passive
than passivity," hear it as the most provocative thought today. It
is not provocative in the sense of the transgressive, and glibly
shocking, exhibition. It is a thought also provoked, first of all
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 425

provoked. Outside the law as law of the other. It is only provoked

from its absolute exposure to the provocation of the other, expo-
sure stretched out with all possible force in order not to reduce
the past anterior of the other, so as not to turn inside out the
surface of the self who, in advance, finds itself delivered to it
body and soul.
"Past anterior" (in the past, in the present past), "first of all,"
"in advance": among the words or syntax whose setting in seria-
sure I have not yet sketched, there is the future anterior, which I
shall have nonetheless used frequently, having no alternative
recourse. For example, in the little phrase "il aura oblige," or
"the work of E. L. will have obligated" (Obligated to what? and
who, in the first place? I have not yet said thou [tu}, me, you
[vous}, us, them, they [ils, elles}, it). The future anterior could
turn out to be-and this resemblance is irreducible-the time of
Hegelian teleology. Indeed, that is how the properly philosophi-
cal intelligence is usually administered, in accord with what I
called above the dominant interpretation of language-in which
the philosophical interpretation precisely consists. Yet here in-
deed [ici meme}, within this seriasure drawn along the "il aura
oblige," "he will have obligated," in this and not in another quite
similar seriasure, but determining otherwise the same utterance,
the future anterior, "here indeed," will have designated "within"
language that which remains most irreducible to the economy of
Hegelian teleology and to the dominant interpretation of lan-
guage. From the moment when it is in accord with the "he" as
Pro-noun of the wholly-other "always already past," it will have
drawn us toward an eschatology without philosophical teleology,
beyond it in any case, otherwise than it. It will have engulfed the
future anterior in the bottomless bottom of a past anterior to any
past, to all present past, toward that past of the trace that has
never been present. Its future anteriority will have been irredu-
cible to ontology. An ontology, moreover, made in order to at-
tempt this impossible reduction. This reduction is the finality of
ontological movement, its power but also its fatality of defeat:
what it attempts to reduce is its own condition.
That future anteriority there would no longer decline a verb
saying the action of a subject in an operation that would have
been present. To say "il aura oblige"-in this work, taking into
426 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

account what sets things to work within this seriasure-is not

to designate, describe, define, show, etc., but, let us say, to en-
trace /entracerj, otherwise said to perform within the in-
terlelJlacement /entr(el)acement} of a seriasure that obligation
whose "he" will not have been the present subject but for which
"I" hereby respond: Here I am, 1IJ come. He will not have been la)
present but he will have made a gift by not disappearing without
leaving a trace. But leaving the trace is also to leave it, to aban-
don it, not to insist upon it in a sign. It is to efface it. In the
concept of trace is inscribed in advance the re-treat /re-trait} of
effacement. The trace is inscribed in being effaced and leaving
the traced wake of its effacement (etc.) in the retreat, or in what
E. L. calls the "superimposition" ("The authentic trace, on the
other hand, disturbs the order of the world. It comes 'superim-
posed' ... Whoever has left traces in effacing his traces did not
mean to say or do anything by the traces he left." 4 The structure
of superimposition thus described menaces by its very rigor,
which is that of contamination, any authenticity assured of its
trace ("the authentic trace") and any rigorous dissociation be-
tween sign and trace ("The trace is not a sign like any other. But
it also plays the role of a sign ... Yet every sign, in this sense, is
a trace," ibid.). The word "leave" in the locution "leave a trace"
now seems to be charged with the whole enigma. It would no
longer announce itself starting from anything other than the
trace, and especially not from a letting-be. Unless letting-be be
understood otherwise, following the sign the trace makes to it
where it is allowed to be effaced.
What am I saying to you when I pronounce "leave me"? Or
when you say "he has left me," or as in the Song of Songs, "he
has slipped away, he has passed by"?
Otherwise said !the serial enchainment should no longer slip
through a "that is to say" but instead it should be interrupted
and retied at the border of the interruptions by an "otherwise
said"), for this not-without-trace /pas-sans-trace], the contami-
nation between the "he" beyond language and the "he" within
the economic immanence of language and its dominant interpre-
tation, is not merely an evil or a "negative" contamination;
rather it describes the very process of the trace insofar as it makes
a work, in a work-making /faire-oeuvre} that must be grasped by
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 427

means neither of work nor of making, but instead by means of

what is said of the work in his work, by the saying of the said, by
its interjel)laced performance. There is no more a "negative"
contamination than there is a simple beyond or a simple inside
of language, on the one side and the other of some border.
Once again you find the logical paradoxy of this seriasure (but
this one in its irreplaceable singularity counts for every other):
one must, even though nobody constrains anybody, read his work,
otherwise said, respond to it and even respond for it, not by
means of what one understands by work according to the domi-
nant interpretation of language, but according to what his work
says, in its manner, of Work, about what it is, otherwise said,
about what it should (be), otherwise said about it should have Ito
be), as work at work in the work.
That is its dislocation: the work does not depart some utter-
ance, or series of utterances; it re-marks in each atom of the said
a marking effraction of the saying, a saying no longer a present
infinitive, but already a past of the trace, a performance (of the)
wholly other. And if you wish to have access to "his" work, you
will have to have passed by what it will have said of the Work,
namely, that it does not return to him. That is why you yourself
must respond for it. It is in your hands, which can give it to him;
I will even say more-dedicate it to him. At this moment, in-
deed:
The Other can dispossess me of my work, take it or buy
it, and thus control my very conduct. I am exposed to insti-
gation. The work is dedicated to this foreign Sinngebung
from its very origin in me ... Willing escapes the will. The
work is always, in a certain sense, an unsuccessful act /acte
manque]. I am not fully what I want to do. Whence an
unlimited field of investigation for psychoanalysis or soci-
ology that seizes the will in its apparition within the work,
in its conduct or its products. 5
The Work, such as it is at work, wrought, in the work of E. L.,
as one should read it if one must read "his" work, does not return
-from the origin-to the Same; which does not imply that it
signifies waste or pure loss within a game. Such a game would
still, in its waste, be determined by economy. The gratuity of
428 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

this work, what he still calls liturgy, "a losing investment" or

"working without remuneration" (Humanism of the Other Man),
resembles playing a game but is not a game; "it is ethics itself,"
beyond even thinking and the thinkable. For the liturgy of work
should not even be subordinated to thinking. A work that is
"subordinated to thinking" (The Trace of the Other and Human-
ism of the Other Man), still understood as economic calculation,
would not make a Work.
What E. L.'s work will therefore have succeeded in doing-in
the unsuccessful act it claims to be, like any work-is to have
obligated us, before all contract of acknowledgment, to this dis-
symmetry which it has itself so violently and gently provoked:
impossible to approach his work without first of all passing,
already, by the re-treat of its inside, namely, the remarkable
saying of the work. Not only what can be found said on this
subject, but the interjel)laced saying which comes to it from out
of the other and never returns it to itself, and which comes !for
example, exemplarily) from you jcome), obligated female reader
[lectrice obligee/. You can still refuse to grant him that sense, or
only lend yourself to that Sinngebung while still not approaching
that singular ellipsis where nevertheless you are perhaps already
caught.

--1 knew. In listening I was nonetheless wondering whether

I was comprehended myself, and how to stop that word: compre-
hended. And how the work knew me, whatever it knew of me.
So be it: to begin by reading his work, giving it to him, in order
to approach the Work, which itself does not begin with "his"
work nor with whoever would pretend to say "my" work. Going
toward the Other, coming from the Same so as not to return to
it, the work does not come from there, but from the Other. And
his work makes a work in the re-treat which re-marks this het-
eronomous movement. The re-treat is not unique, although it
remarks the unique, but its seriasure is unique. Not his signature
-the "he" undersigning and under seal-but his seriasure. So be
it. Now if, in reading what he shall have had to give, I take
account of the unique seriasure, I should, for example, ascertain
that the word "work" no more than any other has no fixed sense
outside of the mobile syntax of marks, outside of the contextual
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 429

transformation. The variation is not arbitrary, the transformation

is regulated in its irregularity and in its very disturbance. But
how? By what? By whom? I shall give or take an example of it.
More or perhaps another thing than an example, that of the "son"
in Totality and Infinity, of the "unique" son or sons: "The son is
not merely my work like a poem or an object." That is on page
254 of Totalite et Infini (Totality and Infinity p. 277), and I
assume that the context is re-read. Although defined as beyond
"my work, /1 "the son" here seems rather to have the traits of
what in other contexts, doubtless later on, is called, with a capi-
tal letter, the Work. Otherwise said, the word work has neither
the same sense nor the same reference in the two contexts,
without however there being any incoherence or contradiction
among them. They even have a wholly other link to sense and
reference.
"The son"-movement without return toward the other be-
yond the work-thus resembles what is called elsewhere and
later on, the Work. Elsewhere and later on, I also read: "The link
with the Other by means of the son .. ."(Du Sacre au Saint).
Now, in the same paragraph of Totality and Infinity (and else-
where) where it is nearly always "son" (and "paternity") that is
said, a sentence talks of the "child" ("I don't have my child, I am
my child. Paternity is a relation with the stranger who while
being Other [autrui] ... is me; a relationship of the ego with a
self which is nevertheless not me."). Is it that "son" is another
word for "child," a child who could be of one or the other sex? If
so, whence comes that equivalence, and what does it mean? And
why couldn't the "daughter" play an analogous role? Why should
the son be more or better than the daughter, than me, the Work
beyond "my work"? If there were no differences from this point
of view, why should "son" better represent, in advance, this
indifference? This unmarked indifference?
Around this question which I here abandon to its elliptical
course, I interrogate the link, in E. L's Work, between sexual
difference-the Other as the other sex, otherwise said as other-
wise sexed-and the Other as wholly other, beyond or before
sexual difference. To himself, his text marks its signature by a
masculine "I-he," a strange matter as was elsewhere noted "in
passing," a while back, by an other ("Let us observe in passing
430 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

that Totality and Infinity pushes the respect for dissymmetry to

the point where it seems to us impossible, essentially impossible,
that it could have been written by a woman. The philosophical
subject of it is man /vir]"). 6 And on the same page that says "the
son" lying beyond "my work," I can also read: "Neither knowl-
edge nor power. In voluptuousness, the Other-the feminine-
retires into its mystery. The relation with it (the Other) is a
relation with its absence .... " His signature thus assumes the
sexual mark, a remarkable phenomenon in the history of philo-
sophical writing, if the latter has always been interested in occu-
pying that position without re-marking upon it or assuming it,
without signing its mark. But, as well as this, E. L.'s work seems
to me to have always rendered secondary, derivative, and subor-
dinate, alterity as sexual difference, the trait of sexual difference,
to the alterity of a sexually non-marked wholly other. It is not
woman or the feminine that he has rendered secondary, deriva-
tive, or subordinate, but sexual difference. Once sexual difference
is subordinated, it is always the case that the wholly other, who
is not yet marked, is already found to be marked by masculinity
(he before he/she, son before son/daughter, father before father/
mother, etc.). An operation the logic of which has seemed to me
as constant as it is illogical (last example to date, Freudian psy-
choanalysis and everything that returns to it), yet with an illogi-
cality that will have made possible and thus marked all logic-
from the moment it exists as such-with this prolegomena!
"he." How can one mark as masculine the very thing said to be
anterior, or even foreign, to sexual difference? My question will
be clearer if I content myself with quoting. Not all of those
passages where he affirms femininity as an "ontological category"
("The feminine figures among the categories of Being"), a gesture
which always leaves me wondering whether it understands me
to be against a tradition that would have refused me that onto-
logical dignity, or whether better than ever it understands me to
be within that very tradition, profoundly repeating it. But rather
quoting these passages:

Within Judaism woman will only have the destiny of a

human being, whose femininity will solely count as an
attribute ... the femininity of the woman would know
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 431

neither how to deform nor how to absorb its human es-

sence. In Hebrew 'woman' is called Ichah, because, the
bible says, she comes from man, Iche. The doctors seize
hold of this etymology in order to affirm the unique dignity
of the Hebrew that expresses the very mystery of creation,
woman derived quasi-grammatically from man .... "Flesh
of my flesh and bone of my bones" signifies therefore an
identity of nature between man and woman, an identity of
destiny and dignity and also a subordination of sexual life
to the personal link that is equality in itself. An idea more
ancient than the principles on behalf of which modem
woman fights for emancipation, yet the truth of all those
principles in a sphere where the thesis that opposes itself to
the image of an initial androgyny is supported as well, at-
tached to the popular idea of the rib-side. That truth main-
tains a certain priority of the masculine; he remains the
prototype of the human and determines eschatology. The
differences of the masculine and the feminine are blotted
out in those messianic times. 7
Very recently:
The sense of the feminine will be found clarified by taking
as a point of departure the human essence, the Ichah follow-
ing the Iche: not the feminine following the masculine, but
the partition-the dichotomy-between masculine and
feminine following the human. . . . Beyond the personal
relationship that establishes itself between these two beings
issued from two creative acts, the particularity of the femi-
nine is a secondary matter. It isn't woman who is second-
ary, it is the relation to woman qua woman that doesn't
belong to the primordial human plan. What is primary are
the tasks accomplished by man as a human being, and by
woman as a human being.... The problem, in each of these
lines we are commenting upon at this moment, consists in
reconciling the humanity of men and women with the hy-
pothesis of a spirituality of the masculine, the feminine
being not his correlative but his corollary; feminine speci-
ficity or the difference of the sexes that it announces are not
straight away situated at the height of the oppositions con-
432 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

stitutive of Spirit. Audacious question: How can the equal-

ity of the sexes proceed from a masculine property? ...
There had to be a difference that would not compromise
equity, a sexual difference; and consequently, a certain pre-
eminence of man, a woman arrived later and qua woman as
an appendix to the human. Now we understand the lesson:
Humanity cannot be thought beginning from two entirely
different principles. There must be some sameness com-
mon to these others: woman has been chosen above man
but has come after him: the very femininity of woman
consists in this initial afterwards [apres coup]. 8

Strange logic, that of the "audacious" question. It would be nec-

essary to comment upon each step and verify that each time the
secondary status of sexual difference signifies the secondary sta-
tus of the feminine (but why is this so?) and that the initial
status of the pre-differential is each time marked by the mascu-
linity that should, however, have come only afterwards, like
every other sexual mark. It would be necessary to comment, but
I prefer, under the heading of a protocol, to underline the follow-
ing: he is commenting himself and says that he is commenting;
it must be taken into account that this discourse is not literally
that of E. L. while holding discourse, he says that he is comment-
ing upon the doctors at this very moment ("the lines we are
commenting upon at this moment," and further on, "I am not
taking sides; today, I comment"). But the distance of the com-
mentary is not neutral. What he comments upon is consonant
with a whole network of affirmations which are his, or those of
him, "he." Furthermore, the position of commentator corre-
sponds to a choice: to at least accompany and not displace, trans-
form or even reverse what is written in the text that is com-
mented upon.
[ .... ]

I come then to my question. Since it [ellej is under-signed by

the Pro-noun He [Ilj (before he/she, certainly, but it is not She),
could it be that in making sexual alterity secondary, far from
allowing itself to be approached from the Work, his, or the one
said to be, becomes a mastery, the mastery of sexual difference
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 433

posed as the origin of femininity? Hence mastery of femininity?

The very thing that ought not have been mastered, and that one
-therefore-has been unable to avoid mastering, or at least
attempting to master? The very thing that ought not have been
derived from an arche (neutral, and therefore, he says, masculine)
in order to be subjected to it? The aneconomical, that ought not
have been economized, situated in the house, within or as the
law of the oikos? The secondary status of the sexual, and there-
fore, He says, of feminine difference, does it not thus come to
stand for the wholly-other of this Saying of the wholly other
within the seriasure here determined and within the idiom of
this negotiation? Does it not show, on the inside of the work, a
surfeit of un-said alterity? Or said, precisely as a secret or as a
symptomatic mutism? Then things would become more compli-
cated. The other as feminine (me), far from being derived or
secondary, would become the other of the Saying of the wholly
other, of this one in any case; and this last one insofar as it would
have tried to dominate alterity, would risk, (at least to this ex-
tent) enclosing itself within the economy of the same.
Wholly otherwise said: made secondary by responsibility for
the wholly other, sexual difference (and hence, He says, feminin-
ity) is retained, as other, within the economic zone of the same.
Included in the same, it is by the same stroke excluded: enclosed
within, foreclosed within the immanence of a crypt, incorporated
in the Saying which says itself to the wholly other. To desexu-
alize the link to the wholly-other (or equally well, the uncon-
scious as a certain philosophical interpretation of psychoanalysis
tends to do today), to make sexuality secondary with respect to a
wholly-other that in itself would not be sexually marked ("be-
neath erotic alterity, the alterity of the one for the other; respon-
sibility before eros"J, 9 is always to make sexual difference sec-
ondary as femininity. Here I would situate his profound complicity
with such an interpretation of psychoanalysis. This complicity,
more profound than the abyss he wishes to put between his
thinking and psychoanalysis, always gathers around one funda-
mental design: their common link to me, to the other as woman.
That is what I would like to give them (first of all, to read).
Shall I abuse this hypothesis? The effect of secondarization,
allegedly demanded by the wholly-other (as He), would become
434 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

the cause, otherwise said the other of the wholly other, the other
of a wholly other who is no longer sexually neutral but posed
(outside the series within the seriasure) and suddenly determined
as He. Then the Work, apparently signed by the Pro-noun He,
would be dictated, aspired, and inspired by the desire to make
She secondary, therefore by She [Elle}. She would then under-
sign the undersigned work from her place of derivable depen-
dence or condition as last or first "Hostage." Not in the sense
that undersigning would amount to confirming the signature,
but countersigning the work, again not in the sense that coun-
tersigning would amount to redoubling the signature, according
to the same or the contrary-but otherwise than signing.
The whole system of this seriasure would silently comment
upon the absolute heteronomy in respect to She who would be
the wholly other. This heteronomy was writing the text from its
other side like a weaver its fabric louvrage]; yet it would be
necessary here to undo a metaphor of weaving which has not
imposed itself by chance: we know to what kind of interpretative
investments it has given rise with regard to a feminine specificity
which Freudian psychoanalysis also regularly derives.
I knew it. What I here suggest is not without violence, not
even free of the redoubled violence of what he calls "trauma-
tism," the nonsymbolizable wound that comes, before any other
effraction, from the past anterior of the other. A terrifying wound,
a wound of life, the only one that life opens up today. Violence
faulty in regard to his name, his work, insofar as it inscribes his
proper name in a way that is no longer that of property. For, in
the end, the derivation of femininity is not a simple movement
in the seriasure of his text. The feminine is also described there
as a figure of the wholly other. And then, we have recognized
that this work is one of the first and rare ones, in this history of
philosophy to which it does not simply belong, not to feign
effacing the sexual mark of his signature: hence, he would be the
last one surprised by the fact that the other (of the whole system
of his saying of the other) happens to be a woman and commands
him from that place. Also, it is not a matter of reversing places
and putting woman against him in the place of the wholly other
as arche. If what I say remains false, falsifying, faulty, it is also
to the extent that dissymmetry (I speak from my place as woman,
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 435

and supposing that she be definable) can also reverse the perspec-
tives, while leaving the schema intact.
It has been shown that ingratitude and contamination did not
occur as an accidental evil. Its a sort of fatality of the Saying. It is
to be negotiated. It would be worse without negotiation. Let's
accept it: what I am writing at this very moment is faulty. Faulty
up to a certain point, in touching, or so as not to touch, his name,
or what he sets to work in his rigorously proper name in this
unsuccessful act (as he says) within a work. If his proper name,
E. L., is in the place of the Pronoun (He) which preseals every-
thing that can carry a name, it isn't him, but Him, that my fault
comes to wound in his body. Where, then, will my fault have
taken bodily form? Where in His body will it have left a mark, in
his own body, I mean? What is the body of a fault in this writing
where the traces of the wholly other are exchanged, without
circulating or ever becoming present? If I wished to destroy or
annul my fault, I would have to know what is happening to the
text being written at this very moment, where it can take place
or what can remain of its remains.
In order to make my question better understood, I shall take a
detour around what he tells us of the name of God, in the non-
neutral commentary that he proposes. 10 According to the treatise
Chevouoth (3sa), it is forbidden to efface the names of God, even
in the case when a copyist would have altered the form. The
whole manuscript then has to be buried. Such a manuscript, E.
L. says, "has to be placed into the earth like a dead body." But
what does "placing in earth" mean? And what does a "dead body"
mean, since it is not effaced or destroyed but "placed in the
earth"? If one simply wanted to annihilate it-to keep {garder/ it
no longer-the whole thing would be burned, everything would
be effaced without remains. The dys-graphy [dis-graphie/ would
be replaced, without remnant, by orthography. In inhuming it,
on the contrary, the fault on the proper name is not destroyed, at
bottom one keeps guard of it, as a fault, one keeps it at the
bottom. It will slowly decompose, taking its time, in the course
of a work of mourning in which, achieved successfully in spiri-
tual interiorization, an idealization that certain psychoanalysts
call introjection, or paralyzed in a melancholic pathology (incor-
poration), the other as other will be kept in guard, wounded,
436 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

wounding, impossible utterance. The topic of such a faulty text

remains highly improbable, like the taking-place of its remains
in this theonymic cemetery.
If I now ask at this very moment where I should return my
fault, it is because of a certain analogy: what he recalls about the
names of God is something one would be tempted to say analog-
ically for every proper name. He would be the Pro-noun [Pro-
nomj or the First name [Pre-nomj of every name. Just as there is
a resemblance between the face of God and the face of man (even
if this resemblance is neither an "ontological mark" of the worker
on his work nor "sign" or "effect" of God), in the same way there
would be an analogy between all proper names and the names of
God, which are, in their tum, analogous among themselves. Con-
sequently, I transfer by analogy to the proper name of man or
woman what is said of the names of God. And of the "fault" on
the body of these names.
But things are more complicated. If, in Totality and Infinity,
the analogy is kept, though not quite in a classical sense, be-
tween the face of God and the face of man, here on the contrary,
in the commentary on the Talmudic texts, a whole movement is
sketched in order to mark the necessity of interrupting that
analogy, of "refusing to God any analogy with beings that are
certainly unique, but who compose with other beings a world or
a structure. To approach, through a proper name is to affirm a
relation irreducible to the knowledge which thematizes or de-
fines or synthesizes, and which, by that very fact, understands
the correlate of that knowledge as being, as finite, and as imma-
nent." Yet the analogy once interrupted is again resumed as an
analogy between absolute heterogeneities by means of the enigma,
the ambiguity of uncertain and precarious epiphany. Monotheis-
tic humanity has a relation to this trace of a past that is abso-
lutely anterior to any memory, to the ab-solute re-treat [re-trait/
of the revealed name, to its very inaccessibility. "Square letters
are a precarious dwelling whence the revealed Name already
withdraws itself; effaceable letters at the mercy of the man who
traces them or recopies them." Man, therefore, can be linked
with this retreat, despite the infinite distance of the nonthema-
tizable, with the precariousness and uncertainty of this revela-
tion.
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 437

But this uncertain epiphany, on the verge of evanescence, is

precisely that which man alone can retain. This is why he
is the essential moment both of this transcendence and of
its manifestation. That is why, through this ineffaceable
revelation, he is called forth with an unparalleled straight-
forwardness.
But is that revelation precarious enough? Is the Name
free enough in regard to the context where it lodges? Is it
preserved in writing from all contamination by being or
culture? Is it preserved from man, who has indeed a voca-
tion to retain it, but who is capable of every abuse?

Paradox: the precariousness of the revelation is never precar-

ious enough. But should it be? And if it were, wouldn't that be
worse?
Once the analogy is resumed, as one resumes the interruptions
and not the threads, it should be recalled, I should be able to
transpose the discourse on the names of God to the discourse on
human names, for example, where there is no longer an example,
that of E. L.
And thus to the fault to which the one and the other expose
themselves in body. The fault will always, already, have taken
place: as soon as I thematize what, in his work, is borne beyond
the thematizable and is put in a regular seriasure within which
he cannot sign himself. Certainly, there is already contamination
in his work, in that which he thematizes "at this very moment"
of the nonthematizable. I am contaminating this irrepressible the-
matization in my turn, and not merely according to a common
structural law, but just as much with a fault of my own that I
will not seek to resolve or absolve within the general necessity.
As a woman, for example, and in reversing the dissymmetry, I
have added rape [viol] to it. I should have been even more un-
faithful to him, more ungrateful, but was it not then in order to
give myself up to what his work says of the Work: that it pro-
vokes ingratitude? Here to absolute ingratitude, the least foresee-
able in his work itself?
I give and play ingratitude against jealousy. In everything I am
talking about, jealousy is at stake. The thought of the trace as
put in seriasure by E. L. thinks a singular relation of God (not
438 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

contaminated by being) to jealousy. He, the one who has passed

beyond all Being, must be exempt from any jealousy, from any
desire for possession, for guarding, property, exclusivity, nonsub-
stitution, and so on. And the relation to Him must be pure of all
jealous economy. But this without-jealousy [sans-jalousie) can-
not not guard itself jealously; and insofar as it is a past absolutely
held in reserve, it is the very possibility of all jealousy. Ellipsis of
jealousy: seriasure is always a jalousie through which, seeing
without seeing everything, and especially without being seen,
before and beyond the phenomenon, the without-jealousy guards
itself jealousy, in other words, loses itself, keeps-itself-loses-
itself. By means of a series of regular traits and re-treats [re-
traits}: the figure of jealousy, beyond the face. Never more jeal-
ousy, ever, never more zeal; is it possible?
If feminine difference presealed, perhaps and nearly illegibly,
his work, if she became, in the depths of the same, the other of
his other, will I then have deformed his name, to him, in writing,
at this moment, in this work, here indeed, "she will have obli-
gated" ["elle aura oblige"N

- - I no longer know if you are saying what his work says.

Perhaps that comes back to the same. I no longer know if you are
saying the contrary, or if you have already written something
wholly other. I no longer hear your voice, I have difficulty distin-
guishing it from mine, from any other, your fault suddenly be-
comes illegible to me. Interrupt me.
I .... I
- Translated by Ruben Berezdivin

NOTES

1. The translator would like to thank Geoff Bennington for his generous
advice on an earlier version of this translation.
2. "I am sick of love," Song of Songs, 5:8.
3. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso
Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 141-42.
4. Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 104.
 "At This Very Moment in This Work" 439

5. Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Mar-

tinus Nijhoff, 1979), pp. 227-28.
6. Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of
Emmanuel Levinas," in Writing and Difference (1967).
7. "Judai:sme et le feminin," in Difficile liberte: Essais sur le judafsme,
2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), p. 56-57.
8. "Et Dieu crea la femme," in Du sacre au saint: Cinq nouvelles lec-
tures talmudiques (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 132-42.
9. Otherwise than Being, p. 192, n. 27.
10. "Le nom de Dieu d'apres quelques textes talmudiques," in Du sacre
au saint.
 EIGHTEEN

From "Choreographies" [1982]

In this written interview, Derrida responds to questions about sexual

difference, femininity, and feminism. His replies summarize suc-
cinctly some of the major points of the texts included in this section.
Specifically, Derrida reviews the two principal modes he has ana-
lyzed by which sexual difference is appropriated to phallogocentric
ends: dialectical binarism or opposition (as assumed by Hegel and as
parodied by Nietzsche), and neutralization of sexual difference through
a movement of subordination to ontological difference (as performed
to some extent by both Heidegger and Levinas). Derrida also com-
ments on the use he has made of terms like hymen and invagination
which, as the interviewer, Christie McDonald, remarks, "in their
most widely recognized sense pertain to the woman's body." He
situates his use in a strategy to resexualize philosophical or theoret-
ical discourse which, as he has shown, tends on the contrary toward
a strategy of neutralization. But terms such as these imply literally a
folding that transforms or deforms the space within which differ-
ences, including sexual difference but also the various distinctions
that have ordered sexual difference (originary or derived, ontological
or ontic, etc.), have been positioned. Moreover, they cannot be appro-
priated by one of the sexes because, precisely, they render undecida-
ble the line of cleavage between the two. Derrida concludes the
interview by situating the frequent polyvocality of his texts (see
above, "Restitutions" and "At This Very Moment in This Work
Here I am") within the dream of a "multiplicity of sexually marked
voices, 11 a dream that dares to put its weight in the balance with the
preponderance of monological, monosexual discourse.
 CHOREOGRAPHIES

Question I

CHRISTIE V. McDONALD: Emma Goldman, a maverick fem-

inist from the late nineteenth century, once said of the feminist
movement: "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your
revolution." Jacques Derrida, you have written about the ques-
tion of woman and what it is that constitutes "the feminine." In
Spurs/Eperons, a text devoted to Nietzsche, style, and woman,
you wrote, "that which will not be taken in (by) truth [truth?] is,
in truth, feminine." And you warned that such a proposition
should not be hastily mistaken for a "woman's femininity, for
female sexuality, or for any other of those essentializing fetishes.
These are precisely what, in their foolishness, the dogmatic phi-
losopher, the impotent artist, or the inexperienced seducer be-
lieve they have won over."
What seems to be at play as you take up Heidegger's reading of
Nietzsche is whether or not sexual difference is a "regional ques-
tion in a larger order which would subordinate it first to the
domain of general ontology, subsequently to that of a fundamen-
tal ontology and finally to the question of the truth [whose?] of
being itself." You thereby question the status of the argument
and at the same time the question itself. In this instance, if the
question of sexual difference is not a regionaJ one (in the sense of
subsidiary), if indeed "it may no longer even be a question," as
you suggest, how would you describe "woman's place"?
[ .... ]
442 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

DERRIDA: Perhaps woman does not have a history, not so

much because of any notion of the "Eternal Feminine" but be-
cause all alone she can resist and step back from a certain history
(precisely in order to dance) in which revolution, or at least the
"concept" of revolution, is generally inscribed. That history is
one of continuous progress, despite the revolutionary break-
oriented in the case of the women's movement towards the reap-
propriation of woman's own essence, her own specific difference,
oriented in short towards a notion of woman's "truth." Your
"maverick feminist" showed herself ready to break with the
most authorized, the most dogmatic form of consensus, one that
claims (and this is the most serious aspect of it) to speak out in
the name of revolution and history. Perhaps she was thinking of
a completely other history: a history of paradoxical laws and
nondialectical discontinuities, a history of absolutely heteroge-
neous pockets, irreducible particularities, of unheard of and in-
calculable sexual differences; a history of women who have-
centuries ago-"gone further" by stepping back with their lone
dance, or who are today inventing sexual idioms at a distance
from the main forum of feminist activity with a kind of reserve
that does not necessarily prevent them from subscribing to the
movement and even, occasionally, from becoming a militant
for it.
But I am speculating. It would be better to come back to your
question. Having passed through several detours or stages, you
wonder how I would describe what is called "woman's place";
the expression recalls, if I am not mistaken, "in the home" or "in
the kitchen." Frankly, I do not know. I believe that I would not
describe that place. In fact, I would be wary of such a description.
Do you not fear that having once become committed to the path
of this topography, we would inevitably find ourselves back "at
home" or "in the kitchen"? Or under house arrest, assignation a
residence as they say in French penitentiary language, which
would amount to the same thing? Why must there be a place for
woman? And why only one, a single, completely essential place?
This is a question that you could translate ironically by saying
that in my view there is no one place for woman. That was
indeed clearly set forth during the 1972 Cerisy Colloquium de-
voted to Nietzsche in the lecture to which you referred entitled
 "Choreographies" 443

Spurs!Eperons. 1 It is without a doubt risky to say that there is no

place for woman, but this idea is not antifeminist, far from it;
true, it is not feminist either. But it appears to me to be faithful
in its way both to a certain assertion of women and to what is
most affirmative and "dancing," as the maverick feminist says,
in the displacement of women. Can one not say, in Nietzsche's
language, that there is a "reactive" feminism, and that a certain
historical necessity often puts this form of feminism in power in
today's organized struggles? It is this kind of "reactive" feminism
that Nietzsche mocks, and not woman or women. Perhaps one
should not so much combat it head on-other interests would
be at stake in such a move-as prevent its occupying the entire
terrain. And why for that matter should one rush into answering
a topological question !what is the place of woman lquelle est la
place de la femme)J? Or an economical question (because it all
comes back to the oikos as home, maison, chez-soi lat home in
this sense also means in French within the self], the law of the
proper place, etc., in the preoccupation with a woman's place)?
Why should a new "idea" of woman or a new step taken by her
necessarily be subjected to the urgency of this topo-economical
concern (essential, it is true, and ineradicably philosophical)?
This step only constitutes a step on the condition that it chal-
lenge a certain idea of the locus [lieu] and the place [place] (the
entire history of the West and of its metaphysics) and that it
dance otherwise. This is very rare, if it is not impossible, and
presents itself only in the form of the most unforeseeable and
most innocent of chances. The most innocent of dances would
thwart the assignation a residence, escape those residences un-
der surveillance; the dance changes place and above all changes
places. In its wake they can no longer be recognized. The joyous
disturbance of certain women's movements, and of some women
in particular, has actually brought with it the chance for a certain
risky turbulence in the assigning of places within our small
European space (I am not speaking of a more ample upheaval en
route to worldwide application). Is one then going to start all
over again making maps, topographies, etc.? distributing sexual
identity cards?
The most serious part of the difficulty is the necessity to bring
the dance and its tempo into tune with the "revolution." The
444 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

lack of place for [l'atopie] or the madness of the dance-this bit

of luck can also compromise the political chances of feminism
and serve as an alibi for deserting organized, patient, laborious
"feminist" struggles when brought into contact with all the forms
of resistance that a dance movement cannot dispel, even though
the dance is not synonymous with either powerlessness or fragil-
ity. I will not insist on this point, but you can surely see the kind
of impossible and necessary compromise that I am alluding to:
an incessant, daily negotiation-individual or not-sometimes
microscopic, sometimes punctuated by a poker-like gamble; al-
ways deprived of insurance, whether it be in private life or within
institutions. Each man and each woman must commit his or her
own singularity, the untranslatable factor of his or her life and
death.
Nietzsche makes a scene before women, feminists in particu-
lar-a spectacle which is overdetermined, divided, apparently
contradictory. This is just what has interested me; this scene has
interested me because of all the paradigms that it exhibits and
multiplies, and insofar as it often struggles, sometimes dances,
always takes chances in a historical space whose essential traits,
those of the matrix, have perhaps not changed since then in
Europe (I mean specifically in Europe, and that perhaps makes all
the difference although we cannot separate worldwide feminism
from a certain fundamental europeanization of world culture;
this is an enormous problem that I must leave aside here). In
Spurs!Eperons I have tried to formalize the movements and typi-
cal moments of the scene that Nietzsche creates throughout a
very broad and diverse body of texts. I have done this up to a
certain limit, one that I also indicate, where the decision to
formalize fails for reasons that are absolutely structural. Since
these typical features are and must be unstable, sometimes con-
tradictory, and finally "undecidable," any break in the move-
ment of the reading would settle in a counter-meaning, in the
meaning which becomes counter-meaning. This counter-mean-
ing can be more or less na1ve or complacent. One could cite
countless examples of it. In the most perfunctory of cases, the
simplification reverts to the isolation of Nietzsche's violently
antifeminist statements (directed first against reactive, specular
feminism as a figure both of the dogmatic philosopher and a
 "Choreographies" 445

certain relationship of man to truth), pulling them out land pos-

sibly attributing them to me though that is of little importance)
of the movement and system that I try to reconstitute. Some
have reacted at times even more perfunctorily, unable to see
beyond the end of phallic forms projecting into the text; begin-
ning with style, the spur or the umbrella, they take no account
of what I have said about the difference between style and writ-
ing or the bisexual complication of those and other forms. Gen-
erally speaking, this cannot be considered reading, and I will go
so far as to say that it is to not read the syntax and punctuation
of a given sentence when one arrests the text in a certain posi-
tion, thus settling on a thesis, meaning or truth. This mistake of
hermeneutics, this mistaking of hermeneutics-it is this that
the final message [envoiJ of "I forgot my umbrella" should chal-
lenge. But let us leave that. The truth value lthat is, Woman as
the major allegory of truth in Western discourse) and its correla-
tive, Femininity lthe essence or truth of Woman), are there to
assuage such hermeneutic anxiety. These are the places that one
should acknowledge, at least, that is, if one is interested in doing
so; they are the foundations or anchorings of Western rationality
(of what I have called "phallogocentrism" [as the complicity of
Western metaphysics with a notion of male firstness]). Such rec-
ognition should not make of either the truth value or femininity
an object of knowledge (at stake are the norms of knowledge and
knowledge as norm); still less should it make of them a place to
inhabit, a home. It should rather permit the invention of an other
inscription, one very old and very new, a displacement of bodies
and places that is quite different.
You recalled the expression "essentializing fetishes" (truth,
femininity, the essentiality of woman or feminine sexuality as
fetishes). It is difficult to improvise briefly here. But I will point
out that one can avoid a trap by being precise abut the concept of
fetishism and the context to which one refers, even if only to
displace it. (On this point, I take the liberty of alluding to the
discussions of fetishism and feminine sexuality in Spurs, Glas or
The Post Card, specifically in "Le facteur de la verite.") Another
trap is more political and can only be avoided by taking account
of the real conditions in which women's struggles develop on all
fronts (economic, ideological, political). These conditions often
446 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

require the preservation (within longer or shorter phases) of

metaphysical presuppositions that one must land knows already
that one must) question in a later phase-or an other place-
because they belong to the dominant system that one is decon-
structing on a practical level. This multiplicity of places, mo-
ments, forms, and forces does not always mean giving way either
to empiricism or to contradiction. How can one breathe without
such punctuation and without the multiplicities of rhythm and
steps? How can one dance, your "maverick feminist" might say?
[ .... J
McDONALD: This raises an important question that should
not be overlooked, although we haven't the space to develop it to
any extent here: the complicated relationship of a practical poli-
tics to the kinds of analysis that we have been considering (spe-
cifically the "deconstructive" analysis implicit in your discus-
sion). That this relationship cannot simply be translated into an
opposition between the empirical and the nonempirical has been
touched on in an entirely different context. Just how one is to
deal with the interrelationship of these forces and necessities in
the context of feminine struggles should be more fully explored
on some other occasion. But let's go on to Heidegger's ontology.
[ .... ]
DERRIDA: To answer your question about Heidegger, and
without being able to review here the itinerary of a reading in
Spurs!Eperons clearly divided into two moments, I must limit
myself to a piece of information, or rather to an open question.
The question proceeds, so to speak, from the end; it proceeds
from the point where the thought of the gift [le don) and that of
of "propriation" disturb without simply reversing the order of
ontology, the authority of the question, What is it?, the subordi-
nation of regional ontologies to one fundamental ontology. I am
moving much too rapidly, but how can I do otherwise here? From
this point, which is not a point, one wonders whether this ex-
tremely difficult, perhaps impossible idea of the gift can still
maintain an essential relationship to sexual difference. One won-
ders whether sexual difference, femininity for example-how-
 "Choreographies" 447

ever irreducible it may be-does not remain derived from and

subordinated to either the question of destination or the thought
of the gift (I say "thought" because one cannot say philosophy,
theory, logic, structure, scene, or anything else; when one can no
longer use any word of this sort, when one can say almost noth-
ing else, one says "thought," but one could show that this too is
excessive). I do not know. Must one think "difference" "before"
sexual difference or taking off "from" it? Has this question, if not
a meaning (we are at the origin of meaning here, and the origin
cannot "have meaning") at least something of a chance of open-
ing up anything at all, however im-pertinent it may appear?
1.... ]
Question II
McDONALD: The new sense of writing with which one asso-
ciates the term deconstruction has emerged from the close read-
ings that you have given to texts as divergent as those of Plato,
Rousseau, Mallarme, and others. It is one in which traditional
binary pairing (as in the opposition of spirit to matter or man to
woman) no longer functions by the privilege given to the first
term over the second. In a series of interviews published under
the title Positions in 1972, you spoke of a two-phase program
(phase being understood as a structural rather than chronological
term) necessary for the act of deconstruction.
In the first phase a reversal was to take place in which the
opposed terms would be inverted. Thus woman, as a previously
subordinate term, might become the dominant one in relation to
man. Yet because such a scheme of reversal could only repeat the
traditional scheme (in which the hierarchy of duality is always
reconstituted), it alone could not effect any significant change.
Change would only occur through the 'second' and more radical
phase of deconstruction in which a "new" concept would be
forged simultaneously. The motif of differance, as neither a sim-
ple "concept" nor a mere "word," had brought us the now famil-
iar constellation of attendant terms: trace, supplement, pharma-
kon, and others. Among the others, two are marked sexually and
in their most widely recognized sense pertain to the woman's
body: hymen (the logic of which is developed in "The Double
448 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

Session") and double invagination (a leitmotif in "Living

On:Borderlines''). 3
( .... J
It seems to me that while the extensive play on etymologies
(in which unconscious motivations are traced through the trans-
formations and historical excesses of usage) effects a displace-
ment of these terms, it also poses a problem for those who would
seek to define what is specifically feminine. That comes about
not so much because these terms are either under- or overvalued
as parts belonging to woman's body. It is rather that, in the
economy of a movement of writing that is always elusive, one
can never decide properly whether the particular term implies
complicity with or a break from existent ideology.
[ .... )
How can we change the representation of woman? Can we
move from the rib where woman is wife ("She was called Woman
because she was taken from man"-Genesis 2:23) to the womb
where she is mother ("man is born of woman"-Job 14:13) with-
out essential loss? Do we have in your view the beginning of
phase two, a "new" concept of woman?
DERRIDA: No, I do not believe that we have one, if indeed it
is possible to have such a thing or if such a thing could exist or
show promise of existing. Personally, I am not sure that I feel the
lack of it. Before having one that is new, are we certain of having
had an old one? It is the word "concept" or "conception" that I
would in tum question in its relationship to any essence which
is rigorously or properly identifiable. This would bring us back to
the preceding questions. The concept of the concept, along with
the entire system that attends it, belongs to a prescriptive order.
It is that order that a problematics of woman and a problematics
of difference, as sexual difference, should disrupt along the way.
Moreover, I am not sure that "phase two" marks a split with
"phase one," a split the form of which would be a cut along an
indivisible line. The relationship between these two phases
doubtless has another structure. I spoke of two distinct phases
for the sake of clarity, but the relationship of one phase to an-
other is marked less by conceptual determinations (that is, where
 "Choreographies" 449

a new concept follows an archaic one) than by a transformation

or general deformation of logic; such transformations or defor-
mations mark the "logical" element or environment itself by
moving, for example, beyond the "positional" (difference deter-
mined as opposition, whether or not dialectically). This move-
ment is of great consequence for the discussion here, even if my
formulation is apparently abstract and disembodied. One could, I
think, demonstrate this: when sexual difference is determined by
opposition in the dialectical sense (according to the Hegelian
movement of speculative dialectics which remains so powerful
even beyond Hegel's text), one appears to set off "the war be-
tween the sexes"; but one precipitates the end with victory going
to the masculine sex. The determination of sexual difference in
opposition is destined, designed, in truth, for truth; it is so in
order to erase sexual difference. The dialectical opposition neu-
tralizes or supersedes [Hegel's term Aufhebung carries with it
both the sense of conserving and negating. No adequate transla-
tion of the term in English has yet been found] the difference.
However, according to a surreptitious operation that must be
flushed out, one insures phallocentric mastery under the cover of
neutralization every time. These are now well known paradoxes.
And such phallocentrism adorns itself now and then, here and
there, with an appendix: a certain kind of feminism. In the same
manner, phallocentrism and homosexuality can go, so to speak,
hand in hand, and I take these terms, whether it is a question of
feminine or masculine homosexuality, in a very broad and radical
sense.
And what if the "wife" or the "mother"-whom you seem
sure of being able to dissociate-were figures for this homosex-
ual dialectics? I am referring now to your question on the "rep-
resentation" of woman and such "loss" as might occur in the
passage from man's rib to the womb of woman, the passage from
the spouse, you say, to the mother. Why is it necessary to choose,
and why only these two possibilities, these two "places," assum-
ing that one can really dissociate them?
McDONALD: The irony of my initial use of the cliche "wom-
an's place" which in the old saw is followed by "in the home" or
"in the kitchen" leaves the whole wide world for other places for
the same intent. As for the "place" of woman in Genesis, and
450 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

fob, as rib (spouse) or womb (mother), these are more basic func-
tional differences. Nevertheless, within these two traditional roles,
to choose one implies loss of the other. You are correct in observ-
ing that such a choice is not necessary; there could be juxtaposi-
tion, substitution or other possible combinations. But these bib-
lical texts are not frivolous in seeing the functional distinction
which also has distinguished "woman's place" in Western cul-
ture.
DERRIDA: Since you quote Genesis, I would like to evoke the
marvelous reading that Levinas has proposed of it without being
clear as to whether he assumes it as his own or what the actual
status of the "commentary" that he devotes to it is. 4 There
would, of course, be a certain secondariness of woman, Ichah.
The man, Iche, would come first; he would be number one; he
would be at the beginning. Secondariness, however, would not be
that of woman or femininity, but the division between mascu-
line and feminine. It is not feminine sexuality that would be
second but only the relationship to sexual difference. At the
origin, on this side of and therefore beyond any sexual mark,
there was humanity in general, and this is what is important.
Thus the possibility of ethics could be saved, if one takes ethics
to mean that relationship to the other as other which accounts
for no other determination or sexual characteristic in particular.
What kind of an ethics would there be if belonging to one sex or
another became its law or privilege? What if the universality of
moral laws were modelled on or limited according to the sexes?
What if their universality were not unconditional, without sex-
ual condition in particular?
Whatever the force, seductiveness, or necessity of this reading,
does it not risk restoring-in the name of ethics as that which is
irreproachable-a classical interpretation, and thereby enriching
what I would call its panoply in a manner surely as subtle as it is
sublime? Once again, the classical interpretation gives a mascu-
line sexual marking to what is presented either as a neutral
originariness or, at least, as prior and superior to all sexual mark-
ings. Levinas indeed senses the risk factor involved in the erasure
of sexual difference. He therefore maintains sexual difference:
the human in general remains a sexual being. But he can only do
so, it would seem, by placing (differentiated) sexuality beneath
 "Choreographies" 451

humanity which sustains itself at the level of the Spirit. That is,
he simultaneously places, and this is what is important, mascu-
linity [le masculin] in command and at the beginning (the arkhe),
on a par with the Spirit. This gesture carries with it the most
self-interested of contradictions; it has repeated itself, let us say,
since "Adam and Eve," and persists-in analogous form-into
"modernity," despite all the differences of style and treatment.
Isn't that a feature of the "matrix," as we were saying before? or
the "patrix" if you prefer, but it amounts to the same thing, does
it not? Whatever the complexity of the itinerary and whatever
the knots of rhetoric, don't you think that the movement of
Freudian thought repeats this "logic"? Is it not also the risk that
Heidegger runs? One should perhaps say, rather, the risk that is
avoided because phallogocentrism is insurance against the return
of what certainly has been feared as the most agonizing risk of
all. Since I have named Heidegger in a context where the refer-
ence is quite rare and may even appear strange, I would like to
dwell on this for a moment, if you don't mind, concerned that I
will be both too lengthy and too brief.
Heidegger seems almost never to speak about sexuality or
sexual difference. 5 And he seems almost never to speak about
psychoanalysis, give or take an occasional negative allusion. This
is neither negligence nor omission. The pauses coming from his
silence on these questions punctuate or create the spacing out of
a powerful discourse. And one of the strengths of this discourse
may be stated (though I am going much too quickly and schema-
tizing excessively) like this: it begins by denying itself all ac-
cepted forms of security, all the sedimented presuppositions of
classical ontology, anthropology, the natural or human sciences,
until it falls back this side of such values as the opposition
between subject-object, conscious-unconscious, mind-body, and
many others as well. The existential analytic of the Dasein opens
the road, so to speak, leading to the question of being; the Dasein
is neither the human being (a thought recalled earlier by Levinas)
nor the subject, neither consciousness nor the self Ile moil (whether
conscious or unconscious). These are all determinations that are
derived from and occur after the Dasein. Now-and here is what
I wanted to get to after this inadmissible acceleration-in a
course given in 1928, Heidegger justifies to some degree the
452 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

silence of Sein und Zeit on the question of sexuality [Gesamtaus-

gabe, Band 26, No. ro, p. 171 ff.]. In a paragraph from the course
devoted to the "Problem of the Sein und Zeit," Heidegger re-
minds us that the analytic of the Dasein is neither an anthropol-
ogy, an ethics, nor a metaphysics. With respect to any definition,
position, or evaluation of these fields, the Dasein is neuter. Hei-
degger insists upon and makes clear this original and essential
"neutrality" of the Dasein: "That neutrality means also that the
Dasein is neither of the two sexes. But such a-sexuality IGe-
schlechtslosigkeit) is not the indifference of an empty nothing, the
feeble negativity of an indifferent antic nothing. In its neutrality,
Dasein is not just anyone no matter who (Niemand und Teder),
but the originary positivity and power of being or of the essence,
Miichtigkeit des Wesens." One would have to read the analysis
that follows very closely; I will try to do that another time in
relation to some of his later texts. The analysis emphasizes the
positive character, as it were, of this originary and powerful a-
sexual neutrality which is not the neither-nor IWeder-noch) of
antic abstraction. It is originary and ontological. More precisely,
the a-sexuality does not signify in this instance the absence of
sexuality-one could call it the instinct, desire, or even the
libido-but the absence of any mark belonging to one of the two
sexes. Not that the Dasein does not ontically or in fact belong to
a sex; not that it is deprived of sexuality; but the Dasein as
Dasein does not carry with it the mark of this opposition !or
alternative) between the two sexes. Insofar as these marks are
opposable and binary, they are not existential structures. Nor do
they allude in this respect to any primitive or subsequent bi-
sexuality. Such an allusion would fall once again into anatomi-
cal, biological, or anthropological determinations, And the Das-
ein, in the structures and "power" that are originary to it, would
come "prior" to these determinations. I am putting quotation
marks around the word "prior" because it has no literal, chrono-
logical, historical, or logical meaning. Now, as of 1928, the ana-
lytic of the Dasein was the thought of ontological difference and
the repetition of the question of being; it opened up a problemat-
ics that subjected all the concepts of traditional Western philos-
ophy to a radical elucidation and interpretation. This gives an
idea of what stakes were involved in a neutralization that fell
 "Choreographies" 453

back this side of both sexual difference and its binary marking, if
not this side of sexuality itself. This would be the title of the
enormous problem that in this context I must limit myself to
merely naming: ontological difference and sexual difference.
And since your question evoked the "motif of difference, I /1

would say that it has moved, by displacement, in the vicinity of

this very obscure area. What is also being sought in this zone is
the passage between ontological difference and sexual difference;
it is a passage that may no longer be thought, punctuated, or
opened up according to those polarities to which we have been
referring for some time (originary-derived, ontological-antic,
ontology-anthropology, the thought of being-metaphysics or
ethics, etc.). The constellation of terms that you have cited could
perhaps be considered (for nothing is ever taken for granted or
guaranteed in these matters) a kind of transformation of defor-
mation of space; such a transformation would tend to extend
beyond these poles and reinscribe them within it. Some of these
terms, "hymen" or "invagination, 11 you were saying, "pertain in
their most widely recognized sense to the woman's body... .11
Are you sure? I am grateful for your having used such a careful
formulation. That these words signify 'in their most widely rec-
ognized sense" had, of course, not escaped me, and the emphasis
that I have put on resexualizing a philosophical or theoretical
discourse, which has been too "neutralizing" in this respect, was
dictated by those very reservations that I just mentioned con-
cerning the strategy of neutralization (whether or not it is delib-
erate). Such resexualizing must be done without facileness of any
kind and, above all, without regression in relation to what might
justify, as we saw, the procedures-or necessary steps-of Levi-
nas or Heidegger, for example. That being said, "hymen" and
"invagination," at least in the context into which these words
have been swept, no longer simply designate figures for the fem-
inine body. They no longer do so, that is, assuming that one
knows for certain what a feminine or masculine body is, and
assuming that anatomy is in this instance the final recourse.
What remains undecidable concerns not only but also the line of
cleavage between the two sexes. As you recalled, such a move-
ment reverts neither to words nor to concepts. And what remains
of language within it cannot be abstracted from the "performativ-
454 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

ity" (which marks and is marked) that concerns us here, begin-

ning-for the examples that you have chosen-with the texts of
Mallarme and Blanchot, and with the labor of reading or writing
which evoked them and which they in turn evoked. One could
say quite accurately that the hymen does not exist. Anything
constituting the value of existence is foreign to the "hymen."
And if there were hymen-and I am not saying if the hymen
existed-property value would be no more appropriate to it for
reasons that I have stressed in the texts to which you refer. How
can one then attribute the existence of the hymen properly to
woman? Not that it is any more the distinguishing feature of
man or, for that matter, of the human creature. I would say the
same for the term "invagination" which has, moreover, always
been reinscribed in a chiasmus, one doubly folded, redoubled and
inversed, 6 etc. From then on, is it not difficult to recognize in the
movement of this term a "representation of woman"? Further-
more, I do not know if it is to a change in representation that we
should entrust the future. As with all the questions that we are
presently discussing, this one, and above all when it is put as a
question of representation, seems at once too old and as yet to be
born: a kind of old parchment crossed every which way, over-
loaded with hieroglyphs and still as virgin as the origin.
I .... I
McDONALD: I would like to come back to the writing of the
dance, the choreography that you mentioned a while back. If we
do not yet have a "new" "concept" of woman, because the radi-
calization of the problem goes beyond the "thought" or the con-
cept, what are our chances of "thinking 'difference' not so much
before sexual difference, as you say, as taking off 'from' 11 it?
What would you say is our chance and "who" are we sexually?
DERRIDA: At the approach of this shadowy area it has always
seemed to me that the voice itself had to be divided in order to
say that which is given to thought or speech. No monological
discourse-and by that I mean here monosexual discourse-can
dominate with a single voice, a single tone, the space of this half-
light, even if the "proffered discourse" is then signed by a sex-
ually marked patronymic. Thus, to limit myself to one account,
and not to propose an example, I have felt the necessity for a
 "Choreographies" 455

chorus, for a choreographic text with polysexual signatures. 7 I

felt this every time that a legitimacy of the neuter, the apparently
least suspect sexual neutrality of "phallocentric or gynocentric"
mastery, threatened to immobilize (in silence), colonize, stop, or
unilateralize in a subtle or sublime manner what remains no
doubt irreducibly dissymmetrical. More directly: a certain dis-
symmetry is no doubt the law both of sexual difference and the
relationship to the other in general (I say this in opposition to a
certain kind of violence within the language of "democratic"
platitudes, in any case in opposition to a certain democratic
ideology), yet the dissymmetry to which I refer is still let us not
say symmetrical in turn (which might seem absurd), but doubly,
unilaterally inordinate, like a kind of reciprocal, respective, and
respectful excessiveness. This double dissymmetry perhaps goes
beyond known or coded marks, beyond the grammar and spell-
ing, shall we say (metaphorically), of sexuality. This indeed re-
vives the following question: what if we were to reach, what if
we were to approach here (for one does not arrive at this as one
would at a determined location) the area of a relationship to the
other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be dis-
criminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far from it,
but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that
governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition femi-
nine-masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosex-
uality and heterosexuality, which come to the same thing. As I
dream of saving the chance that this question offers I would like
to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices. I would
like to believe in the masses, this indeterminable number of
blended voices, this mobile of nonidentified sexual marks whose
choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each "indi-
vidual," whether he be classified as "man" or as "woman" ac-
cording to the criteria of usage. Of course, it is not impossible
that desire for a sexuality without number can still protect us,
like a dream, from an implacable destiny which immures every-
thing for life in the figure 2. And should this merciless closure
arrest desire at the wall of opposition, we would struggle in vain:
there will never be but two sexes, neither one more nor one less.
Tragedy would leave this strange sense, a contingent one finally,
that we must affirm and learn to love instead of dreaming of the
456 SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

innumerable. Yes, perhaps; why not? But where would the "dream"
of the innumerable come from, if it is indeed a dream? Does the
dream itself not prove that what is dreamt of must be there in
order for it to provide the dream? Then too, I ask you, what kind
of a dance would there be, or would there be one at all, if the
sexes were not exchanged according to rhythms that vary consid-
erably? In a quite rigorous sense; the exchange alone could not
suffice either, however, because the desire to escape the combi-
natory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would re-
main.

- Translated by Christie V. McDonald

NOTES

1. See above.-Eo.
2. See Rodolphe Gasche, "The Internal Border," and the response by
Jacques Derrida, in The Ear of the Other [1982].
3. See above.-Eo.
4. For the passage from Levinas and Derrida's longer commentary, see
above, "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," pp. 431-32.-Eo.
5. Concerning Heidegger's "silence" on sexual differences, see above,
"Geschlecht," pp. 380-83.-Eo.
6. For "hymen," see above, "The Double Session," pp. 124-28; for
"chiasmatic double invagination of the borders," see above, "Living On :
Borderlines," and "The Law of Genre," Parages [1986].-Eo.
7. This is an allusion to "Pas" in Parages [1986], "Restitutions" (see
above), "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am" (see above), and
Feu la cendre [1987]. Derrida's most recent polyvocal text is in Droit de
regards [1985].-Eo.
 JALOUSIE FIVE
I

I am seeking the right metaphor for the opera-

tion I am pursuing here. I would like to describe
my gesture, the posture of my body behind this
machine.
What it would be hardest for him to tolerate
would be that I assure myself or others of the
mastery of his text. [... ]
No danger. We are very far from that; this right
here, I repeat, is barely preliminary.

. . . a sort of dredging machine. From the

hidden cabin (small, closed, glassed-in) of a
crane, I manipulate some levers and (I saw this
done at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer at Easter), from
afar, I plunge a mouth of steel into the water.
And I scrape the bottom, grab some stones and
algae that I bring back up to the surface in
order to set them down on the ground while the
water quickly falls out of the mouth.
And I begin again to scrape, to scratch, to dredge
the bottom of the sea.
I barely hear the noise of the water from the
little room .
. . . some algae, some stones.... Detached.
-Glas, pp. 204-05
 PART FIVE

TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

N THIS LAST section, we have grouped selections from several of

I Derrida's more recent works, in particular the collection titled
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond j1980]. The latter
work joins three essays on psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic
institution to a long introduction, "Envois," that elaborates on what
Derrida calls the postal principle. Abbreviated frequently as PP, the
postal principle subsumes and displaces the pleasure principle which,
as Freud writes in the first sentence of Beyond the Pleasure Princi-
ple, is assumed by the theory of psychoanalyis to regulate automati-
cally "the course taken by mental events." Whereas the pleasure
principle is conceived as regulating the "psychic apparatus" from
within, as it were, Derrida's postal principle traverses the whole field
of message transmission, of delegation and representation, in short,
of sending within which the psychic apparatus of conscious repre-
sentations and unconscious traces comes to be inscribed. It is not
just Freud's description of the mental apparatus that is inscribed
within the postal system, but his own position as inscriber of the
letter sent as a legacy to the heirs of the psychoanalytic institution
(a legacy, moreover, that that institution has had the greatest diffi-
culty receiving). What is more, as the subtitle of The Post Card
implies, Derrida sees the postal principle as traversing the history of
Western metaphysics from Socrates to Freud and beyond. One of the
most important stopovers on this routing of the message is Heideg-
ger's notion of the sending of Being. As Alan Bass writes in the
introduction to his translation of The Post Card:
460 Tele-Types (Yes, Yes)

An entire reading of this book could be organized around Hei-

degger's sentence [from On Time and BeingJ, "A giving which
gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and with-
draws, such a giving we call a sending.... "Recall that Heideg-
ger is shifting his meditation of the relation between Being and
time-or time and Being-via a shift of emphasis in the phrase
es gibt Sein. In The Post Card, Derrida radicalizes this shift.
The examination of es gibt-it gives, there is-in terms of
sending, and the principles operative in any "sending system"
(e.g., the postal system), reveals a certain indeterminacy intrin-
sic to the concept of sending.

The "sending system" of relays or posts between addressor and

addressee (in French, destinateur!destinataire, words that retain the
link to destiny and destination) cannot overcome this intrinsic inde-
terminacy because, as Derrida first put it in the essay on Lacan's
seminar on "The Purloined Letter," "a letter can always not arrive
at its destination. Its 'materiality' and 'topology' are due to its divi-
sibility, its always possible partition.... Not that the letter never
arrives at its destination, but it belongs to the structure of the letter
to be capable, always, of not arriving. And without this threat ...
the circuit of the letter would not even have begun. But with this
threat, the circuit can always not finish" (444).
This divisibility of the letter, as well as the necessary detachment
of the sending, are the material conditions of what Derrida earlier
called dissemination. The latter is working to displace the concept
of signification which has always regulated the movement of signs,
meanings, messages, letters in terms of a circulation. Since his ear-
liest texts on Husserl's phenomenology of signification (see above,
8-28), Derrida has shown how only a persistent determination of
signs as exclusively ideal (and therefore indivisible) can permit the
notion of their circulation within, precisely, a closed circuit of
meaning. The detachment of the sign would, according to this ideal
schema, merely allow it to circle back to the place of its emission.
In Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology, Derrida analyzes
the ideality described by the privileged voice which hears-itself-
speak in a circle of auto-affection. In the texts collected in The Post
Card, this structure of circularity is described via that of a letter sent
and received by the same in a trajectory Derrida analyzes in terms
not only of auto-affection or the pleasure principle (s'envoyer, the
reflexive form of the verb to send, when used in certain expressions,
 Tele-Types (Yes, Yes) 461

means to have it off with someone, to get laid), but as well of an

attempted reversal or recuperation of dissemination that would al-
low one to inherit from oneself, to be one's own and only legitimate
heir. Freud's recuperative speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple are read according to this impossible structure, but Derrida also
places these speculations along the trajectory of the "letter" (in fact,
a post card) posted twenty-five centuries earlier by Socrates and
retransmitted by the heir, Plato. But it is precisely this order of
inheritance and priority (Socrates before Plato, speech before writing,
the pure idea before its material inscription or representation) that is
put in question by the undecidability of s'envoyer. Who sends what
to whom? Which inherits from the other? Is not this very structure
of representation, delegation, and legacy conceived of as circulating
only within the element of the Same, where the one is also always
the other, in a homoerotic logic of the paternal bequest of itself to
itself? The legacy of Platonic idealism, from Socrates to Freud and
beyond, would be the ideal post card (indivisible, immaterial, purely
intelligible) that still circulates in every theory of signification based
on the model of the predicated subject: Sis P, that is, Socrates is (the
same as) Plato.
Derrida, bound no less than any other by the terms of the inheri-
tance, does not suppose, as does Freud to an important extent, that
it can be simply rejected. Such a belief is but the condition of a
repetition and retransmittal, a reposting of the same letter. On the
one hand, s'envoyer describes the structure of the most proper sense
of desire, which is the drive of the proper toward proper-ness, toward
self-appropriation. But, on the other hand (which is the hand of the
other), the fact that this desire is impossible, that its condition of
possibility as desire is its condition of impossibility (just as the
possibility of the letter's not arriving at its destination is the condi-
tion of its sending) opens the way to a thinking of affirmation which
is heir more to a Nietzschean than to a Platonic legacy. Saying yes
to the other, to the dissemination of the desire of the proper, to the
divisibility of its addresses requires an affirmation of the catastrophe
that has befallen and continues to befall the unique, univocal, and
unidirectional destination of Truth. It requires, that is, an affirma-
tion of the other not as an accident that happens to the Same (to the
self or to me), but as that which (the one who) sends me, addresses
me (to) my self, which (who) dictates, therefore, what I can seem to
address to the other. Derrida's thinking since The Post Card has
been drawn more and more to examine the strangeness of the affir-
462 Tele-Types (Yes, Yes)

mative gesture, of the Yes (or the oui, ;a, si, etc.) which, he shows,
are at the very limits of language and its representation of the Same.
As such, the Yes implies always a repetition, a (Yes) Yes. We close
this volume with a recent text that explores this repetition of the
Yes.
 NINETEEN

From "Le Facteur de la verlte," in The Post Card:

From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

(La Carte p(Jstale: De Socrate a Freud

et au-de/a [1980])

In a collection of interviews published under the title Positions,

Derrida was asked by one of his interlocutors to specify "what rela-
tionship a problematic of writing seems to you to maintain to the
problematic of the signifier such as Lacan has developed it, in which
the signifier 'represents the subject for another signifier'." 1 The same
interlocutor also wonders whether the "differences" that Derrida
talks about are not just another name for what Lacan calls "the
symbolic." Like many others at the time Derrida's writings first
began to appear in France, this interviewer was attempting to under-
stand them within the powerfully systematizing terms proposed by
the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as if to confirm thereby this sys-
tem's comprehensive powers of explanation. Derrida responds only
briefly in the interview to these questions by pointing out that
dissemination escapes from and disorganizes the "order of the sym-
bolic" as Lacan defines it. Subsequent to this exchange, however,
Derrida added a long note which traces succinctly the limits of any
rapprochement between Lacan's thinking and his own. He concludes
the note with the mention of a work in progress on Lacan, particu-
larly on his "Seminar on the Purloined Letter." Published first in
464 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

1975 and late1 collected in The Post Card, this essay, "Le Facteur de
la vfaite," constitutes Derrida's patient reply to those who are in a
hurry to assimilate deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
The first obstacle Derrida marks to such an assimilation is the
supplementary framing of textual systems which psychoanalytic
interpretation most often disregards. Once reframed by the psycho-
analytic discourse, once the doubling operation of a textual supple-
ment, which doubles any structure of meaning, is out of the picture,
the text can appear to submit to a deciphering of its message. Jacques
Lacan's seminar on Poe's short story, despite certain appearances to
the contrary, remains within this hermeneutic model that treats a
text as the vehicle of a truthful sense, here the truth of sense, the
truth of truth. Derrida describes Lacan's reframing as a repeated
truncation of a fourth term, producing thereby triangulated figures
and tripartite structures within which the terms can circulate, ex-
change places, even as the structure itself remains firmly in place.
Holding it in place is the phallus, which Lacan calls a transcendental
signifier, but which Derrida shows to be actually functioning in
Lacan's discourse as a signified, that is, a proper meaning. Lacan is
illustrating his theory of the primacy of the signifier over the sub-
jects who appear to manipulate it with Poe's story of a letter the
contents of which are so unimportant to the intrigue that they need
never be revealed to the reader. But this primacy of the letter or the
signifier, inasmuch as it is serving to illustrate the truth of a psycho-
analytic doctrine, constrains the letter always to return to the same
place, its proper place. "This proper place ... is the place of castra-
tion: woman as the unveiled site of the lack of a penis, as the truth
of the phallus, that is castration."
As he had already done in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Derrida points
out that the complicity of these terms-woman, castration, truth-
has had a long history, the history, precisely, of truth as presence.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, far from delimiting the metaphysics of
presence, reinscribes itself wholly within the tradition even as it
powerfully renews that tradition's momentum. The theory of the
symbolic as the place of castration, the place of, in Lacan's phrase,
"le manque a sa place" (the missing-from-its-place, but also the lack-
in-place-of ... ) can, paradoxically, function as the truth of a presence
as soon as this lack itself has a proper place to which it always
returns, i.e., the phallus. By rewriting Lacan's formula minus an
acute accent, "le manque a sa place" (the lack has its place), Derrida
shifts the accent in Lacan's discourse from the materiality of the
signifier (which, in fact, Lacan would have finally disregarded) to the
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 465

ideality of a signified, that which has its own place, which remains
in its place no matter how many displacements are undergone by
the signifier. It is this single and identical place of lack that finally
differentiates Lacan's conceptualization of the symbolic from Derri-
da's understanding of dissemination. Or, as Derrida puts it in a
formula that must be read more than once: "The difference which
interests me here is that-a formula to be understood as one will-
the lack does not have its place in dissemination" (p. 467; see Spurs,
p. 362, for a comparable formula: "La castration n'a pas lieu").
The following excerpts from "Le Facteur de la verite" are selected
with a view toward at least two of the senses of the facteur in that
title. On the one hand, factor, as in the element of something, here
the factor of truth, which is not just one element among others, but
the one that distributes all the others. Consistent with this sense,
Derrida analyzes the truth system to which Lacan's discourse be-
longs or refers in terms that recall very closely the analyses of
logocentrism and phonocentrism with which he began in Speech and
Phenomena and Of Grammatology. On the other hand, a facteur in
French is a mailman, and with this sense Derrida's analyses look
ahead to the postal principle brought to the fore in "Envois" and "To
Speculate-on 'Freud'.''
 Le Facteur de la Verlte

[ .... ]
"Just so does the purloined letter, like an immense female body,
stretch out across the minister's office when Dupin enters. But
just so does he already expect to find it [my italics-J.D.], and
has only, with his eyes veiled by green lenses, to undress that
huge body.
"And that is why without needing any more than being able
to listen in at the door of Professor Freud, he will go straight to
the spot in which lies and lives what that body is designed to
hide, in a gorgeous center caught in a glimpse, nay, to the very
place seducers name the Castle Sant'Angelo in their innocent
illusion of being certain that they can hold the city from there.
Look! between the jambs of the fireplace there is the object
already within reach of the hand the ravisher has but to
extend ... " 2
The letter-place of the signifier-is found in the place where
Dupin and the psychoanalyst expect to find it: on the immense
body of a woman, between the "legs" of the fireplace. Such is its
proper place, the terminus of its circular itinerary. It is returned
to the sender, who is not the signer of the note, but the place
where it began to detach itself from its possessor or feminine
legatee. The Queen, seeking to reappropriate for herself that which,
by virtue of the pact which subjects her to the King, i.e. by virtue
of the Law, guaranteed her the disposition of a phallus of which
she would otherwise be deprived, of which she has taken the risk
of depriving herself, that she has taken the risk of dividing, that
is, of multiplying-the Queen, then, undertakes to reform, to
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 461

reclose the circle of the restricted economy, the circulatory pact.

She wants the letter-fetish brought back to her and therefore
begins by replacing, by exchanging one fetish for another: she
emits-without really spending it, since there is an equivalence
here-a quantity of money which is exchanged for the letter and
assures its circular return. Dupin, as (the) analyst, is found /se
trouve] on the circuit, in the circle of the restricted economy, in
what I call elsewhere the stricture of the ring, which the Seminar
analyzes as the truth of fiction. We will come back to this prob-
lem of economics.
This determination of the proper, of the law of the proper, of
economy, therefore leads back to castration as truth, to the figure
of woman as the figure of castration and of truth. Of castration
as truth. Which above all does not mean, as one might tend to
believe, to truth as essential dislocation and irreducible fragmen-
tation. Castration-truth, on the contrary, is that which contracts
itself (stricture of the ring) in order to bring the phallus, the
signifier, the letter, or the fetish back into their oikos, 3 their
familiar dwelling, their proper place. In this sense castration-
truth is the opposite of fragmentation, the very antidote for frag-
mentation: that which is missing from its place has in castration
a fixed, central place, freed from all substitution. Something is
missing from its place, but the lack is never missing from it
/Quelque chose manque a sa place, mais le manque n'y manque
jamais]. The phallus, thanks to castration, always remains in its
place, in the transcendental topology of which we were speaking
above. In castration, the phallus is indivisible, and therefore in-
destructible, like the letter that takes its place. And this is why
the motivated, never demonstrated presupposition of the materi-
ality of the letter as indivisibility is indispensable for this re-
stricted economy, this circulation of the proper.
The difference which interests me here is that-a formula to
be understood as one will-the lack does not have its place in
dissemination.
By determining the place of the lack, the topos of that which
is lacking from its place, and in constituting it as a fixed center,
Lacan is indeed proposing, at the same time as a truth-discourse,
a discourse on the truth of the purloined letter as the truth of
468 TELE-TYPES jYES, YES)

The Purloined Letter. In question is a hermeneutic deciphering,

despite any appearances or denegation. The link of Femininity
and Truth is the ultimate signified of this deciphering.
[ .... ]

Point de Vue: 4 Truth In (the) Place of Female Sexuality

[ .... ]
Until now, our questions have led us to suspect that if there is
something like a purloined letter, perhaps it has a supplementary
trap: it may have no fixed location, not even that of a definable
hole or assignable lack. The letter might not be found, or could
always possibly not be found, or would be found less in the sealed
writing whose "story" is recounted by the narrator and deci·
phered by the Seminar, less in the content of the story, than "in"
the text which escapes, from a fourth side, the eyes both of Dupin
and of the psychoanalyst. The remainder, what is left unclaimed,
would be The Purloined Letter, i.e., the text bearing this title
whose location, like the large letters once more become invisible,
is not where one would expect to find it, in the framed content
of the "real drama" or in the hidden and sealed interior of Poe's
tale, but rather in and as the open, the very open, letter that is
fiction. The latter, because it is written, at the very least implies
a self-divesting fourth agency, which at the same time divests
the letter of the text from whoever deciphers it, from the f acteur
of truth who puts the letter back into the circle of its own, proper
itinerary: which is what the Seminar does in repeating Dupin's
operation, for he, in accord with the circularity of the "proper
itinerary" "has succeeded in returning the letter to its proper
course" (S, p. 69) 1 according to the desire of the Queen. To return
the letter to its proper course, assuming that its trajectory is a
line, is to correct a deviation, to rectify a departure, to recall, for
the sake of the rule, i.e., the norm, an orientation, an authentic
line. Dupin is adroit, knows his address, and knows the law. At
the very moment one believes that by drawing triangles and
circles, and by wielding the opposition imaginary/symbolic one
grasps The Purloined Letter, at the very moment one reconsti·
tutes the truth, the proper adequation, The Purloined Letter es-
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 469

capes through a too self-evident opening. As Baudelaire bluntly

reminds us. The purloined letter is in the text: not only as an
object whose proper itinerary is described, contained in the text,
a signifier become the theme or signified of the text, but also as
the text producing the effects of the frame. At the very moment
when Dupin and the Seminar find it, when they determine its
proper location and itinerary, when they believe that it is here or
there as on a map, a place on a map as on the body of a woman,
they no longer see the map itself: not the map that the text
describes at one moment or another, but the map [carte} that the
text "is," that is describes, "itself," as the deviation of the four
[l'ecart du quatre/ with no promise of topos or truth. The
remaining 5 structure of the letter is that-contrary to what the
Seminar says in its last words ("what the 'purloined letter,' that
is, the not delivered letter [lettre en souffrancej means is that a
letter always arrives at its destination." S, p. 72)-a letter can
always not arrive at its destination. Its "materiality" and "topol-
ogy" are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition. It
can always be fragmented without return, and the system of the
symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of the truth, of the con-
tract, etc., always attempts to protect the letter from this frag-
mentation: this is the point of view of the King or the Queen,
which are the same here; they are bound by contract to reappro-
priate the bit. Not that the letter never arrives at its destination,
but it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable, always,
of not arriving. And without this threat (breach of contract, divi-
sion or multiplication, the separation without return from the
phallus which was begun for a moment by the Queen, i.e., by
every "subject"), the circuit of the letter would not even have
begun. But with this threat, the circuit can always not finish.
Here dissemination threatens the law of the signifier and of
castration as the contract of truth. It broaches, breaches {entamej
the unity of the signifier, that is, of the phallus.
At the moment when the Seminar, like Dupin, finds the letter
where it is found [se trouvej, between the legs of woman, the
deciphering of the enigma is anchored in truth. The sense of the
tale, the meaning of the purloined letter ("what the 'purloined
letter,' that is, the not delivered letter [lettre en souffrancej,
means is that a letter always arrives at its destination") is uncov-
470 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

ered. The deciphering (Dupin's, the Seminar's), uncovered via a

meaning (the truth), as a hermeneutic process, itself arrives at its
destination.
[ .... l
We are not going to give an exposition of this system of the
truth, which is the condition for a logic of the signifier. More-
over, it consists of what is nonexposable in the exposition. We
will only attempt to recognize those characteristics of it which
are pertinent to the Seminar, to its possibility and its limits.
First of all, what is at issue is an emphasis [emphase], as could
equally be said in English, on the authentic excellence of the
spoken, of speech, and of the word: of logos as phone. This
emphasis must be explained, and its necessary link to the theory
of the signifier, the letter, and the truth must be accounted for. It
must be explained why the author of The Agency of the Letter in
the Unconscious and of the Seminar on The Purloined Letter
ceaselessly subordinates the letter, writing, and the text. For even
when he repeats Freud on rebuses, hieroglyphics, engravings,
etc., in the last analysis his recourse is always to a writing spiri-
tualized (releve) by the voice. This would be easy to show. One
example, among many others: "A writing, like the dream itself,
may be figurative, it is like language always articulated symboli-
cally, that is, it is like language phonematic, and in fact phonetic,
as soon as it may be read." 6 This fact has the stature of a fact
only within the limits of the so-called phonetic systems of writ-
ing. At the very most, for there are nonphonetic elements in such
systems. As for the nonphonetic field of writing, its factual
enormity no longer has to be demonstrated. But small matter.
What does count here, and even more than the relation of the de
facto to the de jure, is the implied equivalence ("that is") be-
tween symbolic articulation and phonematicity. The symbolic
occurs through the voice, and the law of the signifier takes place
only within vocalizable letters. Why? And what relation does
this phonematism (which cannot be attributed to Freud, and thus
is lost in the unfolding of the return to Freud) maintain with a
certain value of truth?
Both imports of the value of truth are represented in the Sem-
inar, as we have seen. I. Adequation, in the circular return and
 "Le Facteur de la Vl~rite" 471

proper course, from the origin to the end, from the signifier's
place of detachment to its place of reattachment. This circuit of
adequation guards and regards [garde et regarde} the circuit of
the pact, of the contract, of sworn faith. It restores the pact in the
face of what threatens it, as the symbolic order. And it is consti-
tuted at the moment when the guardianship [la garde/ of the
phallus is confided as guardianship of the lack. Confided by the
King to the Queen, but thereby in an endless play of alternations.
2. Veiling-unveiling as the structure of the lack: castration, the
proper site of the signifier, origin and destination of its letter,
shows nothing in unveiling itself. Therefore, it veils itself in its
unveiling. But this operation of the truth has a proper place: its
contours being [etant/ the place of the lack of Being [manque a
etre/ on the basis of which the signifier detaches itself for its
literal circuit. These two values of truth lean on and support
each other (s'etaient). They are indissociable. They need speech
or the phonetization of the letter as soon as the phallus has to be
kept [garde/, has to return to its point of departure, has not to be
disseminated en route. Now, for the signifier to be kept [pour
que le signifiant se garde} in its letter and thus to make its
return, it is necessary that in its letter it does not admit "parti-
tion," that one cannot say some letter [de la lettre}, but only a
letter, letters, the letter (S, pp. 53-54). If it were divisible, it
could always be lost en route. To protect against this possible
loss the statement about the "materiality of the signifier," that
is, about the signifier's indivisible singularity, is constructed.
This "materiality," deduced from an indivisibility found no-
where, in fact corresponds to an idealization. Only the ideality
of a letter resists destructive division. "Cut a letter in small
pieces, and it remains the letter it is" (S, p. 53): since this cannot
be said of empirical materiality, it must imply an ideality (the
intangibility of a self-identity displacing itself without altera-
tion). This alone permits the singularity of the letter to be main-
tained [se garderj. If this ideality is not the content of meaning,
it must be either a certain ideality of the signifier (what is iden-
tifiable in its form to the extent that it can be distinguished from
its empirical events and re-editions), or the "point de capiton" 7
which staples the signifier to the signified. The latter hypothesis
conforms more closely to the system. This system is in fact the
472 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

system of the ideality of the signifier. The idealism lodged within

it is not a theoretical position of the analyst; it is a structural
effect of signification in general, to whatever transformations or
adjustments one subjects the space of semiosis. One can under-
stand that Lacan finds this "materiality" "odd" ["singuliere"]:
he retains only its ideality. He considers the letter only at the
point at which it is determined lno matter what he says) by its
content of meaning, by the ideality of the message that it "vehi-
culates," by the speech whose meaning remains out of the reach
of partition, so that it can circulate, intact, from its place of
detachment to its place of reattachment, that is, to the same
place. In fact, this letter does not only escape partition, it escapes
movement, it does not change its place.
Aside from a phonematic limitation of the letter, this supposes
an interpretation of phone which also spares it divisibility. The
voice occasions such an interpretation in and of itself: it has the
phenomenal characteristics of spontaneity, of self-presence, of
the circular return to itself. And the voice retains [garde] all the
more in that one believes one can retain [garder] it without
external accessory, without paper and without envelope: it finds
itself [se trouve], it tells us, always available wherever it is found
[se trouve]. This is why it is believed that the voice remains
more than do writings: "May it but please heaven that writings
remain, as is rather the case with spoken words" (S, p. 5 6). Things
would be quite otherwise if one were attentive to the writing
within the voice, that is, before the letter. For the same problem
is reproduced concerning the voice, concerning what one might
still call its "letter," if one wished to conserve the Lacanian
definition of this concept !indivisible locality or materiality of
the signifier). This vocal "letter" therefore also would be indivi-
sible, always identical to itself, whatever the fragmentations of
its body. It can be assured of this integrity only by virtue of its
link to the ideality of a meaning, in the unity of a speech. We are
always led back, from stage to stage, to the contract of contracts
which guarantees the unity of the signifier with the signified
through all the "points de capiton," thanks to the "presence"
(see below) of the same signifier (the phallus), of the "signifier of
signifiers" beneath all the effects of the signified. This transcen-
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 473

dental signifier is therefore also the signified of all signifieds, and

this is what finds itself sheltered within the indivisibility of the
(graphic or oral) letter. Sheltered from this threat, hut also from
the disseminating power that in Of Grammatology I proposed to
call Writing Before the Letter (title of the first part): the privilege
of "full speech" is examined there. The agency of the Lacanian
letter is the releve of writing in the system of speech. 8
"The drama" of the purloined letter begins at the moment-
which is not a moment-when the letter is retained [se garde].
With the movement of the minister who acts in order to conserve
it (for he could have torn it up, and this is indeed an ideality
which then would have remained available and effective for a
time), 9 certainly, but well before this, when the Queen wishes to
retain it or refind it [la garder ou la retrouver]: as a double of the
pact that binds her to the King, a threatening double, but one
that in her guardianship [sous sa garde] cannot betray the "sworn
faith." The Queen wishes to be able to play on two contracts. We
cannot develop this analysis here; it is to be read elsewhere.
What counts here is that the indestructibility of the letter has
to do with its elevation toward the ideality of a meaning. How-
ever little we know of its content, the content must be in relation
to the original contract that it simultaneously signifies and sub-
verts. And it is this knowledge, this memory, this (conscious or
unconscious) retention which form its properness /propriete],
and ensure its proper course toward the proper place. Since its
ultimate content is that of a pact binding two "singularities," it
implies an irreplaceability and excludes, as uncontrollable threat
and anxiety, all double simulacra. It is the effect of living and
present speech which in the last analysis guarantees the indes-
tructible and unforgettable singularity of the letter, the taking-
place of a signifier which never is lost, goes astray, or is divided.
The subject is very divided, but the phallus is not to be cut.
Fragmentation is an accident which does not concern it. At least
according to the certainty constructed by the symbolic. And by a
discourse on the assumption of castration which edifies an ideal
philosophy against fragmentation. 10
In principle this is how the logic of the signifier is articulated
with a phonocentric interpretation of the letter. The two values
474 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

of the truth (adequation and movement of the veil) henceforth

cannot be dissociated from the word, from present, living, au-
thentic speech. The final word is that, when all is said and done,
there is, at the origin or the end (proper course, circular destina-
tion), a word that is not feigned, a meaning that, through all
imaginable fictional complications, does not trick, or that at that
point tricks truly, again teaching us the truth of the lure. At this
point, the truth permits the analyst to treat fictional characters
as real and to resolve, at the depth of the Heideggerian medita-
tion on truth, the problem of the literary text which sometimes
led Freud (more nai:vely, but more surely than Heidegger and
Lacan) to confess his confusion. And we are still only dealing
with a literature with characters! Let us cite the Seminar first.
The suspicion that perhaps the author's purpose was not, as
Baudelaire said, to state the true has just been awakened. Which,
however, does not always amount to having a good time. Thus:
"No doubt Poe is having a good time ...
"But a suspicion occurs to us: might not this parade of erudi-
tion be destined to reveal to us the key words of our drama? Is
not the magician repeating his trick before our eyes, without
deceiving us this time about divulging his secret, but pressing his
wager to the point of really explaining it to us without our seeing
a thing? That would be the summit of the illusionist's art: through
one of his fictive creations truly to delude us. And is it not such
effects which justify our referring, without malice, to a number
of imaginary heroes as real characters?
"As well, when we are open to hearing the way in which
Martin Heidegger discloses to us in the word aletheia the play of
truth, we rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated
her lovers, and through which they learn that it is in hiding that
she offers herself to them most truly" (S, pp. 50-5 r ).
Abyss effects are severely controlled here, a scientifically irre-
proachable precaution: this is science itself, or at least ideal
science, and even the truth of the science of truth. From the
statements I have just cited it does not follow that truth is a
fiction, but that through fiction truth properly declares itself.
Fiction manifests the truth: the manifestation that illustrates
itself through evasion. Dichtung (poetic saying or fiction, this is
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 475

both Goethe's and Freud's expression: just as for Heidegger, the

issue is one of literary fiction as Dichtung) is the manifestation
of the truth, its being-declared: "There is so little opposition
between this Dichtung and Wahrheit in its nudity that the fact
of the poetic operation rather should give us pause before the
characteristic which is forgotten in all truth, that it declares
itself in a structure of fiction." 11 Truth governs the fictional
element of its manifestation, which permits it to be or to become
what it is, to declare itself. Truth governs this element from its
origin or its telos, which finally coordinates this concept of liter-
ary fiction with a highly classical interpretation of mimesis: a
detour toward the truth, more truth in the fictive representation
than in reality, increased fidelity, "superior realism." The preced-
ing citation called for a note: "The suitability of this reminder
for our subject would be sufficiently confirmed, if need be, by
one of the numerous unpublished texts that Delay's opus pro-
vides us, enlightening them in the most appropriate way. Here
from the Unpublished f ournal, said to be from la Brevine where
Gide lived in October 1894 (note on page 667 of his volume 2).
" 'The novel will prove that it can paint something other than
reality-emotion and thought directly; it will show to what
extent it can be deduced, before the experience of things-to
what extent, that is, it can be composed-that it is a work of art.
It will show that it can be a work of art, composed entirely out
of its own elements, not out of a realism of petty and contingent
facts, but a superior realism.' " There follows a reference to the
mathematical triangle, and then: " 'It is necessary that in their
relation itself each part of a work prove the truth of each other
part, there is no need for any other proof. Nothing is more irritat-
ing than the testimony that M. de Goncourt gives for everything
he asserts-he has seen! he has heard! as if proof via the real
were necessary.'" Lacan concludes:
"It has to be said that no poet has ever thought otherwise ... ,
but that no one follows through on this thought." And in the
same article it is confirmed that it is a "person" who "bears" the
"truth of fiction." This person is the "seductress" of the "young
boy." 12
Once one has distinguished, as does the entire philosophical
476 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

tradition, between truth and reality, it immediately follows that

the truth "declares itself in a structure of fiction." 13 Lacan insists
a great deal on the opposition truth-reality, which he advances
as a paradox. This opposition, which is as orthodox as can be,
facilitates the passage of the truth through fiction: common sense
always will have made the division between reality and fiction.
But once again, why would speech be the privileged element
of this truth declared as fiction, in the mode or structure of
fiction, of verified fiction, of what Gide calls "superior realism"?
As soon as the truth is determined as adequation (with an
original contract: the acquitting of a debt) and as unveiling (of
the lack on the basis of which the contract is contracted in order
to reappropriate symbolically what has been detached), the guid-
ing value is indeed that of propriation, and therefore of proxim-
ity, of presence, and of maintaining [garde]: the very value pro-
cured by the idealizing effect of speech. If one grants this
demonstration, it will not be surprising to find it confirmed. If
one does not, then how is one to explain the massive co-implica-
tion, in Lacanian discourse, of truth and speech, "present," "full"
and "authentic" speech? And if it is taken into account, one
better understands: r. That fiction for Lacan is permeated by
truth as something spoken and therefore as something nonreal.
2. That this leads to no longer reckoning, in the text, with every-
thing that remains irreducible to speech, to the spoken word [le
dit], and meaning [vouloir-dire]: that is, irreducible dis-regard,
theft without return, destructibility, divisibility, the failure to
reach a destination (le manque adestination) (which definitively
rebels against the destination of the lack [la destination du man-
quej: an unverifiable nontruth).
When Lacan recalls "the passion for unveiling which has one
object: the truth" 14 and recalls that the analyst "above all re-
mains the master of the truth," it is always in order to link the
truth to the power of speech. And to the power of communica-
tion as a contract (sworn faith) between two present things. Even
if communication communicates nothing, it communicates to
itself: and in this case better yet as communication, that is,
truth. For example: "Even if it communicates nothing, the dis-
course represents the existence of communication; even if it
denies the evidence, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 411

if it is intended to deceive, the discourse speculates on faith in

testimony." 15
What is neither true nor false is reality. But as soon as speech
is inaugurated, one is in the register of the unveiling of the truth
as of its contract of properness [propriete]: presence, speech, tes-
timony: "The ambiguity of the hysterical revelation of the past
is due not so much to the vacillation of its content between the
imaginary and the real, for it is situated in both. Nor is it because
it is made up of lies. The reason is that it presents us with
the birth of truth in speech and thereby brings us up against the
reality of what is neither true nor false. At any rate, that is the
most disquieting aspect of the problem.
"For it is present speech that bears witness to the truth of this
revelation in present reality, and which grounds it in the name
of that reality. Yet in that reality, only speech bears witness to
that portion of the powers of the past that has been thrust aside
at each crossroads where the event has made its choice." 16 Just
before this passage there is a reference to Heidegger, which is not
surprising; the reference resituates Dasein in the subject, which
is more so.
As soon as "present speech" "bears witness" to the "truth of
this revelation" beyond the true or the false, beyond what is
truthful or lying in a given statement or symptom in their rela-
tion to a given content, the values of adequation or unveiling no
longer even have to await their verification or achievement from
the exterior of some object. They guarantee each other intrinsi-
cally. What counts is not whatever (true or false) is communi-
cated, but "the existence of communication," the present reve-
lation made within communication of the speech that bears
witness to the truth. Whence the necessary relaying by the val-
ues of authenticity, plentitude, properness, etc. The truth, which
is what must be refound [retrouve], therefore is not an object
beyond the subject, is not the adequation of speech to an object,17
but the adequation of full speech to itself, its proper authenticity,
the conformity of its act to its original essence. And the telos of
this Eigentlichkeit, the proper aiming at this authenticity shows
the "authentic way" of analysis, of the training analysis in partic-
ular. "But what in fact was this appeal from the subject beyond
the void of his speech? It was an appeal to the very principle of
478 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

truth, through which other appeals resulting from humbler needs

will vacillate. But first and foremost it was the proper appeal of
the void [appel propre du videj . .. " 18
From the proper appeal of the void to the achieving of full
speech, the "realization" of full speech through the assumption
of desire (of castration)-such, then, is the ideal process of analy-
sis: "I have tackled the function of speech in analysis from its
least rewarding angle, that of empty speech, where the subject
seems to be talking in vain about someone who, even if he were
his spitting image, can never become one with the assumption of
his desire ... If we now turn to the other extreme of the psycho-
analytic experience-its history, it argumentation, the process of
the treatment-we shall find that to the analysis of the here and
now is to be opposed the value of anamnesis as the index and
source of therapeutic progress; that to obsessional intrasubjectiv-
ity is to be opposed hysterical intersubjectivity; and that to the
analysis of resistance is to be opposed symbolic interpretation.
The realization of full speech begins here" 19
Speech, here, is not full of something beyond itself which
would be its object: but this is why all the more and all the
better, it is full of itself, of its presence, its essence. This pres-
ence, as in the contract and the sworn faith, requires irreplacea-
ble properness [propriete}, inalienable singularity, living authen-
ticity-so many values the system of which we have recognized
elsewhere. The double, repetition, recording, and the mimeme in
general are excluded from this system, along with the entire
graphematic structure they imply; and they are excluded both in
the name of direct interlocution and as inauthentic alienation.
For example: "But precisely because it comes to him through an
alienated form, even a retransmission of his own recorded dis-
course, be it from the mouth of his own doctor, cannot have the
same effects as psychoanalytic interlocution." 20
The disqualification of recording or repetition in the name of
the act of living and present speech conforms to a well-known
program. And is indispensable to the system. The system of "true
speech," of "speech in act," cannot do without the condemna-
tion, which stretches from Plato to a certain Freud, of the simu-
lacrum of hypomnesis, hypomnesis condemned in the name of
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 479

the truth, in the name of that which links mneme, anamnesis,

aletheia, etc.
Materiality, the sensory and repetitive side of the recording,
the paper letter, drawings in ink, can be divided or multiplied,
destroyed or set adrift (since authentic originality is always al-
ready lost in them). The letter itself, in the Lacanian sense, as
the site of the signifier and symbol of a sworn faith, and therefore
of a true full and present speech, has as its property, its "singu-
lar," "odd" property in effect, "not to admit partition."
"Present speech," then, as "full speech": "I might as well be
categorical: in psychoanalytic anamnesis, it is not a question of
reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder
past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities
to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through
which the subject makes them present." 2 1
Henceforth, a text, if it is living and animated, full and authen-
tic, will be of value only by virtue of the speech it will have as
its mission to transport. Therefore, there also will be full texts
and empty texts. The former only "vehiculate" a full speech, that
is, an authentically present truth which simultaneously unveils
and is adequate to or identical with that which it speaks about.
Which is itself, therefore ("the thing speaks of itself"), at the
moment when it makes its return to the encircled hole and to
the contract which constitute it. For example, as concerns Freud's
text, which must be returned to, and be returned to itself as well
(see above): "Not one of those two-dimensional, infinitely flat (as
the mathematicians say) texts, which are only of fiduciary value
in a constituted discourse, but a text that is the vehicle of a
speech, in that speech constitutes a new emergence of the truth."
Such a text, as present, inaugural, and constitutive speech, itself
answers for itself if we question it, as is said in the Phaedrus of
the logos which is its own father. It simultaneously gives the
questions and the answers. Our activity of mobilizing "all the
resources of our exegesis" is only in order "to make it [Freud's
text] answer the questions that it puts to us, to treat it as a real
speech, we should say, if we knew our own terms, in its transfer-
ence value." Our "own terms": let us take this as the terms of
the discourse which questions and answers, Freud's discourse.
480 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

"Of course, this supposes that we interpret it. In effect, is there a

better critical method than the one which applies to the compre-
hension of a message the very principles of comprehension of
which it is the vehicle? This is the most rational mode in which
to experience its authenticity.
"Full speech, in effect, is defined by its identity with that
which it speaks about." 22
The exegete's full speech fills itself when it assumes and takes
upon itself the "principles of comprehension" of the other's-
here Freud's-message, to the extent that this message itself
"vehiculates" a "full speech." The latter, since it is inaugural
and "constitutes a new emergence of the truth," contracts only
with itself: it speaks of itself by itself. This is what we are calling
the system of speech, or the system of truth.
One cannot define the "hermeneutical circle," along with all
the conceptual parts of its system, more rigorously or more faith-
fully. It includes all the circles that we are pointing out here, in
their Platonic, Hegelian, and Heideggerian tradition, and in the
most philosophical sense of responsibility: 23 to acquit oneself
adequately of that which one owes (duty and debt).
[ .... ]

- Translated by Alan Bass

NOTES

1. Positions (1972), p. 80.

2. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on The Purloined Letter," trans. by Jeffrey
Mehlman, Yale French Studies (1972), no. 48, p. 66; hereafter abbreviated as
S. References to other texts of Lacan will be either to the original French
edition of Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) or to the partial translation by Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). In the latter case, the title Ecrits will be
followed by the indication (tr.J.-Eo.
3. The Greek oikos means the house, the dwelling, and is also the root
from which the word economy is derived.-TRANS.
4. Point de means both "point of" and "no, none at all." Thus, point of
view/no view, blindness.-TRANS.
5. "La structure restante de la lettre ... "For Derrida, writing is always
that which is an excess remainder, un reste. Further, in French, mail deliv-
ered to a post office box is called poste restante, making the dead letter office
the ultimate poste restante, literally "remaining mail." Thus, Derrida is
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 481

saying that Lacan's notion that the nondelivered letter, la lettre en souf-
france, always arrives at its destination overlooks the structural possibility
that a letter can always remain in the dead letter office, and that without
this possibility of deviation and remaining-the entire postal system-there
would be no delivery of letters to any address at all.-TRANs.
6. "Situation de la psychanalyse en 1956," Ecrits, p. 470.
7. Capitonner means to quilt; point de capiton is Lacan's term for the
"quilted stitch" that links signifier to signified.-TRANS.
8. See above, Of Grammatology (pp. 42-46); on this use of releve, see
above, "Differance," note 12.-Eo.
9. For a time only: until the moment when, unable to return a "mate-
rial," divisible letter, a letter subject to partition, an effectively "odd" letter,
he would have to release the hold over the Queen that only a destructible
document could have assured him.
10. What we are analyzing here is the most rigorous philosophy of psy-
choanalysis today, more precisely the most rigorous Freudian philosophy,
doubtless more rigorous than Freud's philosophy, and more scrupulous in its
exchanges with the history of philosophy.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the import of the proposition about
the indivisibility of the letter, or rather about the letter's self-identity that is
inaccessible to fragmentation ("Cut a letter in small pieces, it remains the
letter it is"), or of the proposition about the so-called "materiality of the
signifier" (the letter) which does not bear partition. Where does this come
from? A fragmented letter can purely and simply be destroyed, this happens
(and if one considers that the unconscious effect here named letter is never
lost, that repression maintains everything and never permits any degradation
of insistence, this hypothesis-nothing is ever lost or goes astray-must
still be aligned with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, or other letters must be
produced, whether characters or messages).
11. Ecrits, p. 7 42.
12. Ecrits, p. 753.
13. For example: "Thus it is from elsewhere than the Reality with which
it is concerned that the Truth takes its guarantee: it is from Speech (la
Parole). Just as it is from Speech that it receives the mark which institutes it
in a structure of fiction.
"The primal word (le dit premier) decrees, legislates, aphorizes, is oracle,
it confers upon the real other its obscure authority." Ecrits, p. 808.
14. "You have heard me, in order to situate its place in the investigation,
refer with brotherly love to Descartes and to Hegel. These days, it is rather
fashionable to 'surpass' the classical philosophers. I equally could have taken
the admirable dialogue with Parmenides as my point of departure. For nei-
ther Socrates, nor Descartes, nor Marx, nor Freud can be 'surpassed' to the
extent that they have conducted their investigations with that passion for
unveiling which has a single object: the truth.
"As one of those, princes of the verb, and through whose fingers the
strings of the mask of the Ego seem to slip by themselves, has written-I
482 TELE-TYPES jYES, YES)

have named Max Jacob, poet, saint, and novelist-yes, as he has written in
his Dice Cup, if I am not mistaken: the true is always new." Ecrits, p. 193.
This is true, always. How not to subscribe to it!
15. "Empty and full speech in the psychoanalytic realization of the sub-
ject" in the Rome Report (Function and Field of Speech .. .), Ecrits (tr.I, p.
43-Trans.
16. Ibid., p. 47.-TRANs.
17. "True speech" is the speech authenticated by the other in faith sworn
or given. The other makes speech adequate to itself-and no longer to the
object-by sending back the message in inverted form, by making it true, by
henceforth identifying the subject with itself, by "stating that it is the same."
Adequation-as authentification-must pass through intersubjectivity.
Speech "is therefore an act, and as such supposes a subject. But it is not
enough to say that in this act the subject supposes another subject, for it is
much rather that the subject is founded in this act as being the other, but in
that paradoxical unity of the one and the other, by whose means, as has been
shown above, the one depends upon the other in order to become identical
to itself.
"Thus one can say that speech manifests itself not only as a communica-
tion in which the subject, in order to await that the other make his message
true, is going to project the message in inverted form, but also as a commu-
nication in which this message transforms the subject by stating that it is
the same. As is apparent in every given pledge, in which declarations like
'you are my wife' or 'you are my master' signify 'I am your husband,' 'I am
your disciple.'
"Speech therefore appears all the more truly speech in that its truth is
less founded in what is called adequation to the thing: true speech, thereby,
is opposed paradoxically to true discourse, their truth being distinguished by
the fact that the former constitutes the subjects' acknowledgment of their
Beings in that they have an inter-est in them, while the latter is constituted
by the knowledge of the real, to the extent that the subject aims for it in
objects. But each of the truths distinguished here is changed by intersecting
with the other in its path." Ecrits, p. 351 (Variantes de la cure-type). In this
intersecting, "true speech" always appears as more true than "true dis-
course," which always presupposes the order of true speech, the order of the
intersubjective contract, of symbolic exchange, and therefore of the debt.
"But true speech, in questioning true discourse about what it signifies, will
find that signification always refers to signification, there being no thing
that can be shown otherwise than with a sign, and henceforth will show true
discourse to be doomed to error." Ecrits, p. 352. The ultimate adequation of
the truth as true speech therefore has the form of making quits (l'acquitte-
ment), the "strange adequation ... which finds its response in the symbolic
debt for which the subject as subject of speech is responsible." Ecrits (tr.), p.
144. These are the final words of "The Freudian Thing." Adequation to the
thing (true discourse) therefore has its foundation in the adequation of speech
to itself (true speech), that is to the thing itself: in other words of the
 "Le Facteur de la verite" 483

Freudian thing to itself: "The thing speaks of itself" (Ecrits (tr.!, p. 121!1 and
it says: 1111 the truth, speak." The thing is the truth: as cause, .both of itself
and of the things of which true discourse speaks. These propositions are less
new, particularly in relation to the Rome Report, to Variantes de la cure-
type, and to the texts of the same period, than their author says: "This is to
introduce the effects of truth as cause at a quite different point, and to
impose a revision of the process of causality-the first stage of which would
seem to be to recognize the inherent nature of the heterogeneity of these
effects.5' 1 Ecrits (tr.I, p. 127. (The footnote: 11 5. This rewritten paragraph
antedates a line of thought that I have since explored further (1966). 11 Ecrits
(tr.), p. 145.)
"True speech" (adequate to itself, conforming to its essence, destined to
be quits of a debt which in the last analysis binds it only to itself I therefore
permits the contract which permits the subject "to become identical to
itself." Therefore it reconstitutes the ground of Cartesian certainty: the
transformation of the truth into certainty, subjectification (the determina-
tion of the Being of beings as subject!, and intersubjectification (the chain
Descartes-Hegel-Husserl). This chain ceaselessly captures, in the Ecrits,
Heideggerian motions which would appear, rigorously speaking, to be al-
lergic to it, and would appear to have "destructive" effects on it. For the
moment, let us abandon these kinds of questions-the most decisive ones
-which Lacan's discourse never articulates.
18. Ecrits (tr.), p. 40.-TRANS.
19. Ibid. (tr.), pp. 45-46.-TRANS.
20. Ibid. (tr.), p. 49.-TRANS.
21. Ibid. (tr.), p. 48.-TRANS.
22. Ecrits, p. 381.-TRANS.
23. This responsibility is defined immediately after, and on the basis of,
the exchange of "full speech" with Freud, in its "true formative value": "For
in question is nothing less than its adequation at the level of man at which
he takes hold of it, no matter what he thinks-at which he is called upon to
answer it, no matter what he wants-and for which he assumes responsibil-
ity, no matter what his opinion." Ecrits, p. 382. As concerns the "level of
man, 11 we do not have enough space to verify the essential link between
metaphysics (several typical characteristics of which we are pointing out
here) and humanism in this system. This link is more visible, if not looked
upon more highly, in the conglomeration of statements about "animality,"
about the distinction between animal and human language, etc. This dis-
course on the animal (in general! is no doubt consistent with all the catego-
ries and oppositions, all the bi- or tri-partitions of the system. And it con-
denses no less the system's greatest obscurity. The treatment of animality,
as of everything that finds itself in submission by virtue of a hierarchical
opposition, has always, in the history of (humanist and phallogocentric)
metaphysics, revealed obscurantist resistance. It is obviously of capital inter-
est.
 TWENTY

From "Envols," in The Post Card

(La Carte postale [1980))

You might read these envais as the preface to a book that I

have not written. It would have treated that which proceeds
from the pastes, pastes of every genre, to psychoanalysis. Less
in order to attempt a psychoanalysis of the postal effect than to
start from a singular event, Freudian psychoanalysis, and to
refer to a history and a technology of the caurrier, to some
general theory of the envai and of everything which by means
of some telecommunication allegedly destines itself.... As for
the "Envois" themselves, I do not know if their reading is
bearable. You might consider them, if you really wish to, as
the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence.
These opening remarks are followed by the long text of "Envois," a
"preface" which has gotten thoroughly out of hand and doubled the
length of the book Derrida says he planned to write but did not.
Getting out of hand is in fact the very condition of an envai, which
means a sending, a kickoff, a dispatch, a missive, or transmission; in
short, it marks a passage out of hand and into a postal or telecom-
munications network from which the envoi may or may not emerge
at its addressed destination. "Envois" indeed resembles the remains
of a correspondence: a succession of dated fragments, a form of
intimate address ("you, my love"), constant reference to sending and
receiving letters or post cards of which the very ones we are reading
seem to be part. No addressee or addressor is ever identified by his
or her name, at least not a recognizable public name. These names
 "Envois" 485

would be but one of the things censored or cut out from the texts we
are reading which are in fact punctuated by frequent gaps. Although
the principal correspondent seems identifiable in almost every way
with Jacques Derrida, the signatory of "Envois," at the same time
nothing could be less certain than this sort of identification. In
accordance with the postal principle, which these letters are both
analyzing and submitting to, "identity" is but the spacing of a self-
address, analogous therefore to the distance between addressor and
addressee. There is no telling where that gap widens sufficiently to
accommodate the conventions of a fictional first-person narrator.
The principal letter-writer has come across a post card which
carries an illustration from a thirteenth-century manuscript. It shows
Socrates writing at a table while Plato, standing immediately behind
him, reaches over his shoulder as if to direct what his master is
writing. For this correspondent, the image is uncannily reminiscent
of his own "illustrations" of the structures of delegation, secondari-
ness, and paternal legacy, structures largely inherited from the Pla-
tonic text. Profoundly fascinated by this image of an apparent rever-
sal, since Socrates is supposed by a whole philosophical tradition to
be, as Nietzsche puts it, "the one who does not write," the letter-
writer pursues its implications on the back of countless copies of the
post card, dispatched to "you," "you, my love." The letters shuttle
between this apostrophe (the turning aside of discourse in a singular
address) and the catastrophe (literally: an overturning) of destination
which has already turned the address aside from itself. The singular
address divides, fragments, goes astray, and, like a misdelivered post
card, lays itself open to anyone's reading.
But the letter writer wonders: What is not already, like a post
care, delivered up to public scrutiny, even to the police? Does not
the postal principle (pp) lift the bar of the public-private (p-p) dis-
tinction? Indeed it does, and the letter-writer proposes to demon-
strate this rule by publishing everything in this "intimate" corre-
spondence that belongs or returns to the tropological (turning and
turning aside) system of the post. The rest-represented by the
blanks on the page-will have been saved from this destruction of
singular address which is publication. However, since the postal
system is first of all a system of supports for the messages it relays,
this saving cannot take the form of preserving cards and letters. To
save the singular address, the unreproducible "I love you," the letter-
writer and his addressee will consign what remains to the flames.
The only chance for the address is thus a radical forgetting, one that
consumes even the traces of what has been forgotten.
 Envois

[ .... )
6 June 1977
[ .... ]
Do people II am not speaking of "philosophers" or of those who
read Plato) realize to what extent this old couple has invaded our
most private domesticity, mixing themselves up in everything
taking their part of everything, and making us attend for centu-
ries their colossal and indefatigable anaparalyses? The one in the
other, the one in front of the other, the one after the other, the
one behind the other?
[ .... ]
Be aware that everything in our bildopedic culture, in our politics
of the encyclopedic, in our telecommunications of all genres, in
our telematicometaphysical archives, in our library, for example
the marvelous Bodleian, everything is constructed on the proto-
colary charter of an axiom, that could be demonstrated, displayed
on a large carte, a post card of course, since it is so simple,
elementary, a brief, fearful stereotyping (above all say or think
nothing that derails, that jams telecom.). The charter is the con-
tract for the following, which quite stupidly one has to believe:
Socrates comes before Plato, there is between them-and in
general-an order of generations, an irreversible sequence of in-
heritance. Socrates is before, not in front of, but before Plato,
therefore behind him, and the charter binds us to this order: this
is how to orient one's thought, this is the left and this is the
right, march. Socrates, he who does not write, as Nietzsche said
 "Envois" 487

(how many times have I repeated to you that I also found him
occasionally or even always somewhat on the border of being
naive; remember that photograph of him with his "good guy"
side, at the beginning in any event, before the "evil," before the
disaster?). He understood nothing about the initial catastrophe,
488 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

or at least about this one, since he knew all about the others.
Like everyone else he believed that Socrates did not write, that
he came before Plato who more or less wrote at his dictation and
therefore let him write by himself, as he says somewhere. From
this point of view, N. believed Plato and overturned nothing at
all. The entire "overturning" remained included in the program
of this credulity. This is true a fortiori, and with an a fortiori
different each time and ready to blow up otherwise, from Freud
and from Heidegger.* Now, my post card, this morning when I
am raving about it or delivering it [quand je la delire ou la
delivre] in the state of jealousy that has always terrified me, my
post card naively overturns everything. In any event, it allego-
rizes the catastrophic unknown of the order. Finally one begins
no longer to understand what to come [venir], to come before, to
come after, to foresee [prevenir], to come back [revenir] all mean
-along with the difference of the generations, and then to in-
herit, to write one's will, to dictate, to speak, to take dictation,
etc. One is finally going to be able to love oneself [s'aimer]
[ .... )
Would like to address myself, in a straight line,
directly, without courrier, only to you, but I do not arrive, and
that is the worst of it. A tragedy, my love, of destination. Every-
thing becomes a post card once more, legible for the other, even
*I must note it right here, on the morning of 22 August 1979, 10 A.M., while typing this
page for the present publication, the telephone rings. The U.S. The American operator asks
me if I accept a "collect call" from Martin (she says Martine or martini) Heidegger. I heard,
as one often does in these situations which are very familiar to me, often having to call
"collect" myself, voices that I thought I recognized on the other end of the intercontinental
line, listening to me and watching my reaction. What will he do with the ghost or Geist of
Martin? I cannot summarize here all the chemistry of the calculation that very quickly made
me refuse ("It's a ;oke, I do not accept") after having had the name of Martini Heidegger
repeated several times, hoping that the author of the farce would finally name himself. Who
pays, in sum, the addressee or the sender? who is to pay? This is a very difficult question, but
this morning I thought that I should not pay, at least not otherwise than by adding this note
of thanks. I know that I will be suspected of making it all up, since it is too good to be true.
But what can I do? It is true, rigorously, from start to finish, the date, the time, the content,
etc. Heidegger's name was already written, after "Freud,'' in the letter that I am in the course
of transcribing on the typewriter. This is true, and moreover demonstrable, if one wishes to
take the trouble of inquiring: there are witnesses and a postal archive of the thing. I call upon
these witnesses (these waystations between Heidegger and myself) to make themselves
known. All of this must not lead you to believe that no telephonic communication links me
to Heidegger's ghost, as to more than one other. Quite the contrary, the network of my
hookups, you have the proof of it here, is on the burdensome side, and more than one
switchboard is necessary in order to digest the overload. It is simply, let me say for the ears
of my correspondents of this morning (to whom I regret a bit, nevertheless, that I did not
speak), that my private relation with Martin does not go through the same exchange.
 "Envois" 489

if he understands nothing about it. And if he understands noth-

ing, certain for the moment of the contrary, it might always
arrive for you, for you too, to understand nothing, and therefore
for me, and therefore not to arrive, I mean at its destination. I
would like to arrive to you, to arrive right up to you, my unique
destiny, and I run I run and I fall all the time, from one stride to
the next, for there will have been, so early, well before us
l .... I
9fune1977

Plato wants to emit. Seed, artificially, technically. That devil of

a Socrates holds the syringe. To sow the entire earth, to send the
same fertile card to everyone. A pancarte, a pan-card, a billboard
that we have on our backs and to which we can never really turn
round. For example, poor Freud, Plato, via Socrates, via all the
addressees who are found on the Western way, the relays, the
porters, the readers, the copyists, the archivists, the guardians,
the professors, the writers, the facteurs right?, Plato sticks him
with his pancarte and Freud has it on his back, can no longer get
rid of it. Result, result, for it is not so simple and as-1-show-in-
my-book it is then Plato who is the inheritor, for Freud. Who
pulls the same trick, somewhat, on Plato that Plato pulls on
Socrates. This is what I call a catastrophe.
[ .... ]
you under
stand, within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there
is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible
for another, another than you or me, everything is messed up in
advance, cards on the table. The condition for it to arrive is that
it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving. This is how it
is to be read, and written, the carte of the adestination. Abject
literature is on the way, and it spies on you, crouching within
language, and as soon as you open your mouth it strips you of
everything without even letting you enjoy getting underway again,
completely naked, to the one you love, living, living, living,
there, out of reach. The condition for me to renounce nothing
and that my love comes back to me, and from me be it under-
490 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

stood, is that you are there, over there, quite alive outside of me.
Out of reach. And that you send me back
[ .... ]
Example: if one morning
Socrates had spoken for Plato, if to Plato his addressee he had
addressed some message, it is also that p. would have had to be
able to receive, to await, to desire, in a word to have called in a
certain way what S. will have said to him; and therefore what S.,
taking dictation, pretends to invent-writes, right? p. has sent
himself a post card (caption + picture), he has sent it back to
himself from himself, or he has even "sent" himself S. And we
find ourselves, my beloved angel, on the itinerary. Incalculable
consequences. Go figure out then if you, at this very moment, in
your name
this is the catas-
trophe: when he writes, when he sends, when he makes his
(a)way, Sis p, finally is no longer totally other than p (finally I
don't think so at all, Swill have been totally other, but if only he
had been totally other, truly totally other, nothing would have
happened between them, and we would not be at this pass, send-
ing ourselves their names and their ghosts like ping-pong balls).
pp, pS, Sp, SS, the predicate speculates in order to send itself the
subject
[ .... ]
3 September 1977
[ .... ]
All the precautions in the world are taken in vain, you can
register your envois with a return receipt, crypt them, seal them,
multiply coverings and envelopes, at the limit not even send
your letter, still, in advance it is intercepted. It falls into anyone's
hands, a poor post card, it ends up in the display case of a
provincial bookseller who classifies his merchandise by name of
city (I confess that I have often dug around in them, but only for
you, searching for memories of our cities that would have trans-
ited into other memories, other histories, preferentially from
before we were born, in the belle epoque). Once intercepted- a
 "Envois" 491

second suffices - the message no longer has any chance of reach-

ing any determinable person, in any (determinable) place what-
ever. This has to be accepted, and ;'accepte. But I recognize that
such a certainty is unbearable, for anyone. One can only deny
this self-evidence, and, by their very function, those who deny it
most energetically are the people charged with the carrying of
the mail, the guardians of the letter, the archivists, the professors
as well as the journalists, today the psychoanalysts. The philoso-
phers, of course, who are all of that at once, and the literature
people.
[ .... ]
Plato's dream: to make Socrates write, and to make him write
what he wants, his last command, his will. To make him write
what he wants by letting (lassen) him write what he wants.
Thereby becoming Socrates and his father, therefore his own
grandfather (PP), and killing him. He teaches him to write. Soc-
rates ist That (demonstration of the PP). He teaches him to live.
This is their contract. Socrates signs a contract or diplomatic
document, the archive of diabolical duplicity. But equally consti-
tutes Plato, who has already composed it, as secretary or minis-
ter, he the magister. And the one to the other they show them-
selves in public, they analyze each other uninterruptedly, seance
tenante, in front of everyone, with tape recorder or secretary.
What happens when there is a third party in front of the couch?
Or another analyst who is providing himself a tranchet Obliquely,
the book would also deal with Freud's correspondence (or Kafka's,
since this is what you want), and with the last great correspon-
dences (still hidden, forbidden), and it would also inscribe Le
facteur de la verite as an appendix, with the great reference to
Beyond ... , to the Symposium, and then above all to the Phile-
bus on pleasure, which Freud never cites, it seems to me, al-
though in a way he translates or transfers its entire program. As
if via so many relays Socrates had sent him a post card, already a
reproduction, a stereotype, an ensemble of logical constraints
that Freud in tum comes to reproduce, ineluctably, without being
too aware of it, in an incredible discourse on reproduction and on
the repetition compulsion.
As soon as, in a second, the first stroke of a letter
492 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

divides itself, and must indeed support partition in order to iden-

tify itself, there are nothing but post cards, anonymous morsels
without fixed domicile, without legitimate addressee, letters open,
but like crypts. Our entire library, our entire encyclopedia, our
words, our pictures, our figures, our secrets, all an immense
house of post cards. A game of post cards (I recall at the moment
that the French translation of Beyond ... makes Freud's pen put
a house of cards in the place where he literally says, I think, that
his edifice of "speculative" hypotheses could crumble in an in-
stant, at any moment). There it is, to speculate on post cards, on
shares embossed with crowned heads.
1.... ]
5 September 1977

1.•.. ]
I am teaching
you pleasure, I am telling you the limit and the paradoxes of the
apeiron, and everything begins, like the post card, with reproduc-
tion. Sophie and her followers, Ernst, Heinele, myself and com-
pany dictate to Freud who dictates to Plato, who dictates to
Socrates who himself, reading the last one (for it is he who reads
me, you see him here, you see what is written on his card in the
place where he is scratching, it is for him that is written the very
thing that he is soon going to sign), again will have forwarded.
Postmark on the stamp, obliteration, no one is any longer heard
distinctly, all rights reserved, law is the rule, but you can always
run after the addressee as well as after the sender. Run in circles,
but I promise you that you will have to run faster and faster, at a
speed out of proportion to the speed of these old networks, or in
any event to their images. Finished, the post, or finally this one,
this epoch of the destinal and of the envoi (of the Geschick the
other'old man would say: everything is played out in this, once
more, and we will not get around Freiburg, let it be said in
passing. Geschick is destiny, of course, and therefore everything
that touches on the destination as well as on destiny, and even
on "sort"-it means "sort," as you know, and there we are close
to the fortune-telling book. I also like that this word Geschick,
which everything ends up passing through, even the thinking of
 "Envois" 493

the history of Being as dispensation, and even the gift of the "es
gibt Sein" or "es gibt Zeit," I like that this word also says
address, not the address of the addressee, but the skill of whoev-
er's tum it is, in order to pull off this or that, chance too some-
what, one dictionary says the "chic" - I'm not making it up!
And schicken is to send, envoyer, to "expedite," to cause to leave
or to arrive, etc. When Being is thought on the basis of the gift of
the es gibt (sorry for the simplifying stenography, this is only a
letter), the gift itself is given on the basis of "something," which
is nothing, which is not something; it would be, hmmmm, like
an "envoi," destination, the destinality, sorry, of an envoi which,
of course, does not send this or that, which sends nothing that is,
nothing that is a "being," a "present." Nor to whoever, to any
addressee as an identifiable and self-present subject. The post is
an epoch of the post, this is not very clear, and how can I write
you this in a letter, and in a love letter, for this is a love letter,
you have no doubt, and I say to you "come," come back quick,
and if you understand it it burns up the road, all the relays, it
should not suffer any halt, if you are there -

P.S. I have again overloaded them with colors, look, I made up

our couple, do you like it? Doubtless you will not be able to
decipher the tatoo on plato's prosthesis, the wooden third leg,
the phantom-member that he is warming up under Socrates' ass.

6 September 1977 I can't go on, I would like never to miss a

pickup, and at least describe to you my impatience so that you
hurry up a bit.
Okay, I've calmed down, and I will profit from it by clearing
up, a bit, the story of the address, finally of the Geschick. This is
very difficult, but everything is played out there. If what is called
the post in the usual sense, in the strict sense if you wish, what
everyone believes they understand under this heading (a same
type of service, a technology which goes from the courrier of
Greek or Oriental antiquity, along with the messenger who runs
from one place to another, etc., up to the State monopoly, the
airplane, the telex, the telegram, the different kinds of mailmen
and delivery, etc.), if this post is only an epoch of the envoi in
general- and along with its tekhne it also implies a million
494 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

things, for example identity, the possible identification of the

emitters and the receivers, of the subjects of the post and of the
poles of the message - , then to speak of post for Geschick, to
say that every envoi is postal, that the destinal posts itself, is
perhaps a "metaphoric" abuse, a restriction to its strict sense of
a sense which does not permit itself to be narrowed into this
sense. Doubtless this is what Martin would object. Although ...
For finally, one would have to be quite confident of the notion of
"metaphor" and of its entire regime (more than he himself was,
but there we would have to see ... there is also what-I-call,
citation, "the metaphoric catastrophe") in order to treat the fig-
ure of the post this way. The thing is very serious, it seems to
me, for if there is first, so to speak, the envoi, the Schicken
reassembling itself into Geschick, if the envoi derives from noth-
ing, then the possibility of posts is always already there, in its
very retreat [retrait]. As soon as there is, as soon as it gives (es
gibt), it destines, it tends (hold on, when I say "come" to you, I
tend to you, I tender nothing, I tender you, yourself, I tend myself
toward you, I await [attends} you, I say to you "hold," keep what
I would like to give you, I don't know what, more than me
doubtless, keep, come, halt, reassemble, hold us together, us and
more than you or me, we are awaited [attendusj by this very
thing, I know neither who nor what, and so much the better, this
is the condition, by that very thing which destines us, drop it), as
soon as there is, then, it destines and it tends (I will show this in
the preface, if I write it one day, by rereading the play of Geben,
Schicken, and Reichen in Zeit und Sein). If I take my "departure"
from the destination and the destiny or destining of Being (Das
Schicken im Geschick des Seins), no one can dream of then
forbidding me to speak of the "post," except on the condition of
making of this word the element of an image, of a figure, of a
trope, a post card of Being in some way. But to do it, I mean to
accuse me, to forbid me, etc., one would have to be naively
certain of knowing what a post card or the post is. If, on the
contrary (but this is not simply the contrary), I think the postal
and the post card on the basis of the destinal of Being, as I think
the house (of Being) on the basis of Being, of language, and not
the inverse, etc., then the post is no longer a simple metaphor,
 "Envois" 495

and is even, as the site of all transferences and all correspon-

dences, the "proper" possibility of every possible rhetoric. Would
this satisfy Martin? Yes and no. No, because he doubtless would
see in the postal determination a premature (?J imposition of
tekhne and therefore of metaphysics (he would accuse me, you
can see it from here, of constructing a metaphysics of the posts
or of postality); and above all an imposition of the position pre-
cisely, of determining the envoi of Being as position, posture,
thesis or theme (Setzung, thesis, etc.), a gesture that he alleges to
situate, as well as technology, within the history of metaphysics
and within which would be given to think a dissimulation and a
retreat /retrait] of Being in its envoi. This is where things are the
most difficult: because the very idea of the retreat (proper to
destination), the idea of the halt, and the idea of the epoch in
which Being holds itself back, suspends, withdraws, etc., all these
ideas are immediately homogenous with postal discourse. To
post is to send by "counting" with a halt, a relay, or a suspensive
delay, the place of a mailman, the possibility of going astray and
of forgetting (not of repression, which is a moment of keeping,
but of forgetting). The epokhe and the Ansichhalten which es-
sentially scan or set the beat of the "destiny" of Being, or its
"appropriation" (Ereignis), is the place of the postal, this is where
it comes to be and that it takes place (I would say ereignet), that
it gives place and also lets come to be. This is serious because it
upsets perhaps Heidegger's still "derivative" schema (perhaps),
upsets by giving one to think that technology, the position, let
us say even metaphysics do not overtake, do not come to deter-
mine and to dissimulate an "envoi" of Being (which would not
yet be postal), but would belong to the "first" envoi - which
obviously is never "first" in any order whatsoever, for exampie a
chronological or logical order, nor even the order of logos (this is
why one cannot replace, except for laughs, the formula "in the
beginning was the logos" by "in the beginning was the post"). If
the post (technology, position, "metaphysics") is announced at
the "first" envoi, then there is no longer A metaphysics, etc. (I
will try to say this one more time and otherwise), nor even AN
envoi, but envois without destination. For to coordinate the dif-
ferent epochs, halts, determinations, in a word the entire history
496 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

of Being with a destination of Being is perhaps the most outland-

ish postal lure. There is not even the post or the envoi, there are
posts and envois. And this movement (which seems to me simul-
taneously very far from and very near to Heidegger's, but no
matter) avoids submerging all the differences, mutations, scan-
sions, structures of postal regimes into one and the same great
central post office. In a word (this is what I would like to articu-
late more rigorously if I write it one day in another form), as soon
as there is, there is differance (and this does not await language,
especially human language, and the language of Being, only the
mark and the divisible trait), and there is postal maneuvering,
relays, delay, anticipation, destination, telecommunicating net-
work, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity of going
astray, etc. There is strophe (there is strophe in every sense,
apostrophe and catastrophe, address in turning the address [al-
ways toward you, my love], and my post card is strophes). But
this specification gives one the possibility of assimilating none
of the differences, the (technical, eco-political, phantasmatic etc.)
differentiation of the telecommunicative powers. By no longer
treating the posts as a metaphor of the envoi of Being, one can
account for what essentially and decisively occurs, everywhere,
and including language, thought, science, and everything that
conditions them, when the postal structure shifts, Satz if you
will, and posits or posts itself otherwise. This is why this history
of the posts, which I would like to write and to dedicate to you,
cannot be a history of the posts: primarily because it concerns
the very possibility of history, of all the concepts, too, of history,
of tradition, of the transmission or interruptions, goings astray,
etc. And then because such a "history of the posts" would be but
a minuscule envoi in the network that it allegedly would analyze
(there is no metapostal), only a card lost in a bag, that a strike, or
even a sorting accident, can always delay indefinitely, lose with-
out return. This is why I will not write it, but I dedicate to you
what remains of this impossible project. The (eschatological,
apocalyptic) desire for this history of the posts worldwide is
perhaps only a way, a very infantile way, of crying over the
coming end of our "correspondence" - and of sending you one
more tear.
[ .... J
 "Envois" 497

ro September 1977
[ .... ]
They are dead and they travel through us in order to step up to
the cashier, not them, their name, at every instant. At this very
moment. How they resemble each other. Never forget that they
have existed outside their names, truly. - How is that, you say.
- Well, like you and me. - Not possible? - Mais si, mais si.
And then every word must be franked in order to be addressed to
whomever. Au-to-ma-tic-al-ly. Whatever I say, whatever I do, I
must paste on myself a stamp with the effigy of this diabolical
couple, these unforgettable comperes, these two patient impos-
tors. A little engraving with this royal, basilical couple, sterile
but infinite in its ideal progeniture. Cynically, without a cent,
they have issued a universal stamp. A postal and fiscal stamp, by
making themselves appear to advance funds. And on the stamp
both are to be seen in the course, the one in front of the other, in
the course, en train, of drawing a stamp and of signing the origi-
nal. And they plaster themselves on the walls. An immense
poster. This is a stamp. They have signed our 1.0.U. and we can
no longer not acknowledge it. Any more than our own children.
This is what tradition is, the heritage that drives you crazy.
People have not the slightest idea of this, they have no need to
know that they are paying (automatic withdrawal) nor whom
they are paying (the name or the thing: name is the thing) when
they do anything whatsoever, make war or love, speculate on the
energy crisis, construct socialism write novels, open concentra-
1

tion camps for poets or homosexuals, buy bread or hijack a plane,

have themselves elected by secret ballot1 bury their own, criticize
the media without rhyme or reason, say absolutely anything
about chador or the ayatollah, dream of a great safari, found
reviews, teach, or piss against a tree. They can even never have
heard the name of p. and of S. (hey, I see them as very chirpy,
suddenly). Via all kinds of cultural, that is postal, relays they pay
their tax, and no need for that to be taxed with "platonism," and
even if you have overturned platonism (look at them, turn the
card, when they write upside down in the plane). Of course the
tax goes only to the names1 that is to no one (for the "living,"
notice, this is not absolutely1 rigorously different), since the two
498 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

pilots are no longer there, only subject, submitted, underlying

their names, in effigy, their heads topped by their names. No
more than Hegel, Freud or Heidegger, who themselves had to put
themselves into the position of legatees, from the front or the
back. Standing or lying, not a movement, not a step without
them. I even would like to believe that those who liberate them-
selves better and more quickly, those at least who desire to pay
the least and to "acquit" themselves most properly, are those
who attempt to deal directly with them, as if this were possible,
the patient philosophers, historians, archivists who are relentless
over the issuing of the stamp, who always want to know more
on this subject, dream of the original imprint. Me, for example.
But naturally, the busier one gets liberating oneself, the more
one pays. And the less one pays, the more one pays, such is the
trap of this speculation. You will not be able to account for this
currency. Impossible to return it, you pay everything and you pay
nothing with this Visa or Mastercharge card. It. is neither true
nor false. The issuing of the stamp is simultaneously immense,
it imposes and is imposed everywhere, conditions every other
type, timbre, or tympan in general; and yet, you can barely see
it, it is minuscule, infinitely divisible, composes itself with bil-
lions of other obliterating positions, impositions, or superimpo-
sitions. And we, my angel, we fove each other posted on this
network, at the toll booth one weekend return !fortunately we
can love each other [on peut s'aimer], in a car), crushed by taxes,
in permanent insurrection against the "past," full of acknowledg-
ments however, and virgin from debt, as at the first morning of
the world.
[ .... J

When I am creating corre-

spondence (which is not the case here), I mean when I write
several letters consecutively, I am terrified at the moment of
putting the thing under seal. And if I were to make a mistake
about the addressee, invert the addresses, or put several letters
into the same envelope? This happens to me, and it is rare that I
do no reopen certain letters, after having failed to identify them
by holding them up to the light at the moment of throwing them
into the box. My sorting [tri] and my postal traffic is this scene.
 "Envois" 499

It precedes and follows the obsession of the pickup, the other

one, the next one or the one that I missed. The obsessional
moment occasionally lasts beyond the imaginable. Once the let-
ter or the lot of letters is gone II have finally unclenched my
hand), I can remain planted in front of the box as if before an
irreparable crime, tempted to await the following pickup in order
to seduce the f acteur and to take everything back, in order to
verify at least one last time the adequation of addresses II did this
once, but it was somewhat different, in order to intercept my
own mail which was going to be "forwarded" to a place that I did
not want it to go, and where it would have arrived before me) and
that there is indeed only one letter, the right one, per envelope.
The situation is that of a confession without a crime las if this
were possible; mais si, mais si!), of an exhibit which becomes
the cause of a crime. In any event, this confession before the
mailbox does not await that one write, I mean "missives" in the
impoverished sense, but already when one speaks, when one
touches, when one comes. Not only is there always some post
card, but even if you leave it virgin and without address, there
are several at once, and in the same envelope
[ .... ]
The Postal Pros-
pect is henceforth the site of the psych. and po problematic lthe
question of women, of psychoanalysis, and of politics, it brings
them all together); the question of Power, as they still say, is first
of all that of the post and telecommunications, as is well known.
Then one must know: that the volume of mail is going to in-
crease by 3 % per year approximately, "spread unequally," says a
principal Inspector of the P. and T., "over diverse objects of
correspondence, with a higher percentage for the 'economic' mail
and a levelling off for 'household' mail. This increase will be
congruent with the development of informational systems which,
in the years to come, will overwhelm not only the highly indus-
trialized countries, but also the rest of the world." Suppose that I
write a book, let us say "Plato and telecom.," it necessarily falls
into the hands of Monsieur Bregou, principal Inspector of the
Posts and Telecommunications, and he decides !because I quote
him) to put it on sale, as they do sometimes, in all the post
500 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

offices, the proceeds for the mailmen's benefit funds. The book
is displayed in every branch, it wouldn't do badly. And then the
translations. What's more, while increasing the sales (the price of
one or two booklets of stamps) it would make Plato penetrate the
hamlets. To increase the sales, on the publisher's advice I would
criticize the publishing apparatuses and the media (which are
also a postal agency) and would have a band placed around the
book: the only writer to refuse such and such a show. I would be
invited to be on it immediately, and at the last moment, to the
surprise of everyone obviously, and I would accept on the condi-
tion of being permitted to improvise freely on the postal agency
in the Iranian uprising (the revolutionary role of dis-tancing, the
distancing of God or of the ayatollah telekommeiny giving inter-
views from the Parisian suburbs) provided that I nuance it a bit
the next day in one of the dailies or weeklies. A very trivial
remark, the relations between posts, police and media are called
upon to transform themselves profoundly, as is the amorous
message (which is more and more watched over, even if it has
always been), by virtue of informatization, so be it. And therefore
all the networks of the p.p. (psych. and pol). But will the relations
between the police, the psychoanalytic institution, and letters be
essentially affected? Inevitably, and it is beginning. Could Poe
adapt The Purloined Letter to this? Is it capable of this adapta-
tion? Here I would bet yes, but it would be very difficult. The
end of a postal epoch is doubtless also the end of literature. What
seems more probable to me is that in its actual state psychoanal-
ysis, itself, cannot read The Purloined Letter, can only have itself
or let itself be read by it, which is also very important for the
progress of this institution. In any case, the past and present of
the said institution are unthinkable outside a certain postal tech-
nology, as are the public or private, that is secret, correspon-
dences which have marked its stages and crises, supposing a very
determined type of postal rationality, of relations between the
State monopoly and the secret of private messages, as of their
unconscious effects. That the part of "private" mail tends toward
zero does not only diminish the chances of the great correspon-
dences (the last ones, those of Freud, of Kafka), it also transforms
the entire field of analytic exertion - and in both the long and
the short term, with all the imaginable and unimaginable conse-
 "Envois" 501

quences for the "analytic situation," the "session," and the forms
of transference. The procedures of "routing" and of distribution,
the paths of transmission, concern the very support of the mes-
sages sufficiently not to be without effect on the content, and I
am not only speaking of the signified content. The "letter" dis-
appears, others must be found, hut this will be simultaneously
the unlimited empire of a postcardization that begins with the
trait itself, before what they call writing (even before mail as
sticks-messages and as quippos), and the decadence of the post
card in the "narrow" sense, the decadence which for barely more
than a century, but as one of the last phenomena, a sign of
acceleration toward the end, is part of the "classic" postal sys-
tem, of the "posta," of the station in the mail's making its
(a)way, of the "document" to be transmitted, support and mes-
sage. In everyday language the post, in the strict sense, is distin-
guished from every other telecommunication (telegraph or tele-
phone, for example, telematics in general) by this characteristic:
the transport of the "document," of its material support. A rather
confused idea, but rather useful for constructing a consensus
around the banal notion of post-and we do need one. But it
suffices to analyze this notion of "document" or of material
support a bit for the difficulties to accumulate. (You have just
called from the station, you are settling down in the train, I feel
so calm suddenly. Several hours more and I am coming to get
you.) Now, a certain form of support is in the course of disappear-
ing, and the unconscious will have to get used to this, and this is
already in progress. I was speaking to you just now of the progres-
sive disappearance of private mail and of my terror before the
"collective" envelope. I had not read Mousier Bregou at that
moment. I have just done so. Imagine our entire history, and the
most recent history, imagine it in Monsieur Bregou's "prospect":
"The development of informational systems, as much for the
post as for the users, certainly will permit the installation of new
modalities for the transmission of information. In the years to
come, exception made for the mail of private individuals ["excep-
tion made," which one, until when?], it can be thought that it
will no longer be writing that will be transported, but the perfo-
rated card, microfilm, or magnetic tape. The day will come that,
thanks to the 'telepost,' the fundamentals will be transmitted by
502 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

wire starting from the user's computer going to the receiving

organs of the computer of the post office nearest [all the same]
the residence of the addressee, who will be charged with the
impression of the order or the bill [his distinction between the
mail of individuals and the other supposes a bit quickly that the
individuals, ourselves, we send on their way something entirely
other than orders and bills: in fact these great technologues al-
ways really have a metaphysician's naivete, it's part of the same
thing]. It will remain for the postal employee only to place the
envelope into distribution, which moreover will be able to en-
compass several correspondences emanating from different send-
ers. The traditional process thereby will find itself upset for a
major portion of the mail." Yes and no: for as long as it is not
proven that into each of our so secret, so hermetically sealed
letters several senders, that is several addressees have not already
infiltrated· themselves, the upset will not have been demon-
strated. If our letters are upsetting, in return, perhaps it is that
already we are several on the line, a crowd, right here, at least a
consortium of senders and addressees, a real shareholders' com-
pany with limited responsibility, all of literature, and yet it is
true, my unique one, that Monsieur Bregou is describing my
terror itself, Terror itself. He insists, with all the satisfaction of a
factory boss demonstrating the new machines he has just re-
ceived. And he is waiting for others which will increase the
returns, for the good of all, producers and consumers, workers
and bosses: "At a time when rural civilization is giving way to
an ever increasing urban concentration, the post will have to
adapt itself to the needs of its clientele: a painful mutation, for
example when the postal traffic of certain rural areas no longer
justifies the maintenance of an office, while the lack of personnel
makes itself felt painfully in the large agglomerations. To get to
this point, perhaps it will be necessary to upset certain habits.
Why not envisage an extension of the capacities of the post [here
you are going to believe that I am inventing the words for the
needs of my demonstration] which, omnipresent by means of its
offices or its 'facteurs' [I like the way he went at it with these
quotation marks], could treat all [my emphasis] the operations
placing the population in contact with the administration?" Hey!
and even the contact between THE Population and THE Admin-
 "Envois" 503

istration! Why not envisage omnipresence, says he. Of the offices

and the "facteurs." I can't decide what is most striking here: the
monstrosity of this future that the principal Inspector envisages,
with a beatific and quite forward-looking insouciance (while he
calmly converses with us about the worst of State and trans-State
police, of generalized perforization: for example S. inanalysis
with P. will be able to, and even will have to, because of the
traffic jams, at the time of his session, send his tape or his cards
of associations-free associations of course- to the said P.,
passing through Monsieur Bregou's omnipresent one. And in or-
der to insure the autonomy of the psychoanalytic institution as
concerns the State, the latter would name, at the proposal of the
corps of certified analysts united in a General Assembly, and no
matter what group they belong to, a Commission of wise men -
they could be seven, for example- which would watch over all
the transferences passing through the omnipresent one, so that
confidentiality will be well maintained, out of the reach of all
the police, even the secret police. Naturally, so that all this
remains in conformity with the psychoanalytic vocation (how is
it to be called otherwise?), with the spirit and the letter of Freud,
six members of the Commission of the rights of psychoanalysis
would be inanalysis, at least for a time, with the seventh, who in
some fashion elected by general suffrage (it is a democracy that I
am describing) would have to figure things out all by himself
with the omnipresent one or with one of his facteurs, for ex-
ample Monsieur Bregou) I don't know what terrifies me the most,
the monstrousness of this prospective or on the contrary its
ancestral antiquity, the very normality of the thing. In its es-
sence, of course, in-its eidos it is more than twenty-five centuries
old.
[ .... l
25 September 1977
[ .... l
And you're right, the "correct," expert interpretation of S. and
p. will change nothing. The icon is there, much more vast than
science, the support of all our fantasies. In the beginning was
their own fantasy, that was to engender everything, up to the
504 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

work of Paris [the engraver whose work is reproduced on the post

card. - En.] According to Plato it was first Socrates who will
have written, having made or let him write. There is there a
souffrance de la destination (no, not a fate neurosis, although
... ) in which I have every right to recognize myself. I am suffer-
ing (but like everyone, no? me, I know it) from a real pathology
of destination: I am always addressing myself to someone else
(no, to someone else still!), but to whom? I absolve myself by
remarking that this is due, before me, to the power, of no matter
what sign, the "first" trait, the "first" mark, to be remarked,
precisely, to be repeated, and therefore divided, turned away from
whatever singular destination, and this by virtue of its very pos-
sibility, its very address. It is its address that makes it into a post
card that multiplies, to the point of a crowd, my addressee,
female. And by the same token, of course, my addressee, male. A
normal pathology, of course, but for me this is the only meur-
triere: one kills someone by addressing a letter to him that is not
destined to him, and thereby declaring one's love or even one's
hatred. And I kill you at every moment, but I love you. And you
can no longer doubt it, even if I destroy everything with the most
amorous patience (as do you, moreover), beginning with myself.
I'm destroying my own life, I had said to him [Jui/ in English in
the car. If I address myself, as it is said, always to someone else,
and otherwise !right here, again), I can no longer address myself
by myself. Only to myself, you will say, finally sending me all
those cards, sending me Socrates and Plato just as they send
themselves to each other. No, not even, no return, it does not
come back to me. I even lose the identity of the, as they say,
sender, the emitter. And yet no one better than I will have known
how, or rather will have loved to destine, uniquely. This is the
disaster on the basis of which I love you, uniquely. You, toward
whom at this very moment, even forgetting your name I address
myself.
I .... I
P.S. I forgot, you are completely right: one of the paradoxes of
destination, is that if you wanted to demonstrate, for someone,
that something never arrives at its destination, it's all over. The
 "Envois" 505

demonstration, once it had reached its end, would have proved

what it was not supposed to demonstrate. But this is why, dear
friend, I always say "a letter can always not arrive at its destina-
tion, etc." This is a chance.*
You know that I never say that I'm right and never demon-
strate anything. They support this very badly, consequently they
would like nothing to have happened, everything wiped off the
map. Wait for me.

* P.S. Well, a chance, if you will, if you yourself can, and if you
have it, the chance ltukhe, fortune, this is what I mean, good
fortune, good fate: us). The mischance jthe mis-address) of this
chance is that in order to be able not to arrive, it must bear
within itself a force and a structure, a straying of the destination,
such that it must also not arrive in any way. Even in arriving
(always to some "subject"), the letter takes itself away from the
arrival at arrival. It arrives elsewhere, always several times. You
can no longer take hold of it. It is the structure of the letter (as
post card, in other words the fatal partition that it must support)
which demands this, I have said it elsewhere, delivered to a
facteur subject to the same law. The letter demands this, right
here, and you too, you demand it.
[ .... ]
A day in May 1978
[ .... ]
I truly believe that I am singing someone who is dead and
whom I did not know. I am not singing for the dead jthis is the
truth according to Genet), I am singing a death, for a dead man or
woman already [deja]. Although since the gender and number
remain inaccessible for me I can always play on the plural. And
multiply the examples or working hypotheses, the hypotheses of
mourning.
Thus I have lost my life writing in order to give this song a
chance, unless it were in order to let it silence itself, by itself.
You understand that whoever writes must indeed ask himself
what it is asked of him to write, and then he writes under the
506 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

dictation of some addressee, this is trivial. But "some addressee,"

I always leave the gender or number indeterminate, must indeed
be the object of a choice of object, and chosen and seduced.
"Some addressee" winds up then, to the extent that the ap-
proach, the approximation, the appropriation, the "introjection,"
all progress, no longer able to ask anything that has not already
been whispered [souffle} by me. Thereby everything is corrupted,
there is only the mirror, no more image, they no longer see each
other, no longer destine each other, nothing more. Do you think
that this exhaustion is happening to us? We would have loved
each other too much. But it is you I still love, the living one.
Beyond everything, beyond your name, your name beyond your
name.
[ .... ]
15 June 1978
[ .... ]
You are my only double, I suppose, I specu-
late, I postulate,
in sum everything that sets me on the march today, the
entire postulate of my practical reason, all my heart, and I spec-
ulate on you, you are now the name, yourself, or the title of
everything that I do not understand. That I never will be able to
know, the other side of myself, eternally inaccessible, not un-
thinkable, at all [du tout}, but unknowable, unknown-and so
lovable. As for you, my love, I can only postulate (for who else,
with whom would I have dreamed this?) the immortality of the
soul, liberty, the union of virtue and happiness, and that one day
you might love me.
[ .... I
9 October 1978

I .... I
from the very first envoi: no gift, gift
step [pas de don}, without absolute forgetting (which also ab-
solves you of the gift, don, and of the dose), forgetting of what
 "Envois" 507

you give, to whom, why and how, of what you remember about
it or hope. A gift, if there is one, does not destine itself.
[ .... J

January 1979
[ .... ]
the end of my delirium around S and p. Prose begins here,
starting with the expertise of the doctor who comes to teach me
how to read the card. I had called him in for a consultation and
here is his answer (he is writing to J.C., you recall that he had
offered to take on this mission to the Kunstgeschichte specialist):
"Dear Sir, your question can be answered quite simply. One has
but to read the miniature verbally. Socrates is in the course of
writing. Plato is beside him, but is not dictating. He is showing,
with his index finger pointed toward Socrates: Here is the great
man. With the left index finger he is drawing the attention of the
spectators, who must be imagined more to the right toward the
philosopher who is writing. Therefore he is rather subordinate, of
lesser size and with a more modest headpiece. Please accept my
kindest regards." He has to be believed, he is right. "Read ver-
bally" must mean "literally." I am persuaded that he is literally
right, and the entire context that one might imagine land of
which he himself has knowledge), the code which governs the
gestures and positions in all this iconography, all of this, I have
never doubted it, makes him right, and me too. It is I who should
have read somewhat "verbally" and thereby unleashed literality.
He reminds me a bit of Schapiro in his diagnosis. That being said,
if I were given the time, I could demonstrate that nothing in my
delirium is literally incompatible with his "very simple" answer,
all that I'm doing is developing it a bit, and this is our history,
and our difference. Moreover, the expert can be objective only in
the extent (what an extent) to which his place is designated,
assigned on the card, in the picture, and not facing it: a moment
of the desire for objectivity, a tremor of the episteme whose
origin regards you here in two persons. They are setting you,
literally, and with a shake of the wand, on the way: know clearly,
know clearly that, it must indeed be known, here is the truth of
508 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

the picture, hold it close, the answer is very simple. Useless to

lift up so many robes, it tears out the eyes.
[ .... I
February 1979

I would still like to convince you. By publish-

ing that which, concerning the post card, looks like a "post card"
(let's say the brief sequence of a secret correspondence between
Socrates and Freud conversing with each other at the bottom of
the post card, about the support, the message, the inheritance,
telecommunications, the envoi, etc.), we will finish off destruc-
tion. Of the holocaust there would remain only the most anony-
mous support without support, that which in any event never
will have belonged to us, does not regard us. This would be like
a purification of purification by fire. Not a single trace, an abso-
lute camouflaging by means of too much evidence: cards on the
table, they won't see anything else. They will throw themselves
onto unintelligible remainders, come from who knows where in
order to preface a book about Freud, about the Platonic inheri-
tance, the era of the posts, the structure of the letter and other
common goods or places. The secret of what we will have de-
stroyed will be even more thoroughly destroyed or, amounting to
the same thing, by all the evidence, with all its self-evidence
more thoroughly preserved. Don't you think? Never will I have
loved so much. And by means of the demonstration that only is
[est] the post card, beyond everything that is, we will remain to
be reborn. We will begin to love each other. I also like the cruelty
of this scene, it still resembles, it resembles you. And then I
would operate such that it would become absolutely i 11 e g i b I e
for you. You will recognize nothing yourself, you will feel noth-
ing, and when you read even I will pass unnoticed. After this
final murder we will be more alone than ever, I will continue to
love you, living, beyond you.
1- ... I
February 1979

I am reflecting upon a rather rigorous principle of destruction.

What will we burn, what will we keep lin order to broil it better
 "Envois" 509

still)? The selection {tri], if it is possible, will in truth be postal: I

would cut out, in order to deliver it, everything that derives from
the Postal Principle, in some way, in the narrow or wide sense
(this is the difficulty, of course), everything that might preface,
propose itself for a treatise on the posts (from Socrates to Freud
and beyond, a psychoanalysis of the post, a philosophy of the
post, the of signifying belonging or provenance, psychoanalysis
or philosophy operating since, on the basis of the posts, I would
almost say: on the basis of the nearest post office, etc.). And we
burn the rest. Everything that from near or far touches on the
post card (this one, in which one sees Socrates reading us, or
writing all the others, and every post card in general), all of this
we would keep, or finally would doom to loss by publishing it,
we would hand it over to the antiques dealer or the auctioneer.
The rest, if there is any that remains, is us, is for us, who do not
belong to the card. We are the card, if you will, and as such,
accountable, but they will seek in vain, they will never find us
in it. In several places I will leave all kinds of references, names
of persons and of places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events,
they will rush in with eyes closed, finally believing to be there
and to find us there when by means of a switch point I will send
them elsewhere to see if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or
the grattoir I will make everything derail, not at every instant,
that would be too convenient, but occasionally and according to
a rule that I will not ever give, even were I to know it one day. I
would not work too hard composing the thing, it is a scrap copy
of scrapped paths that I will leave in their hands. Certain people
will take it into their mouths, in order to recognize the taste,
occasionally in order to reject it immediately with a grimace, or
in order to bite, or to swallow, in order to conceive, even, I mean
a child.
[ .... J

15 March 1979

The difficulty I would have in sorting out this courrier with the
aim of publication is due, among other perils, to this one: you
know that I do not believe in propriety, property, and above all
not in the form that it takes according to the opposition public-
510 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

private (p-p, so be it). This opposition doesn't work, neither for

psychoanalysis (especially with the tranche-ferential sectoring
that is being lowered onto the capitals like a net that they them-
selves can no longer master: this is the fatality of the parallel
police forces), nor for the post (the post card is neither private nor
public), nor even for the police (they leave us, whatever the
regime, only the choice between several police forces, and when
a pp [public police] doesn't accost you in the street, another pp
[private parallel police] plugs its microphones into your bed, seizes
your mail, makes you spit it out in full ecstasy- and the secret
circulates with full freedom, as secret you promise I swear, this
is what I call a post card.)
I .... I
May 1979

It's the end of an epoch. The end of a race also or of a banquet

that is dragging on until the small hours of morning (I no longer
know to whom I was saying that "epoch" - and this is why I am
interrogating myself on this subject - remains, because of the
halt, a postal idea, contaminated in advance by postal differance,
and therefore by the station, the thesis, the position, finally by
the Setzen (by the Gesetzheit des Sichsetzens that he talks about
in Zeit und Sein). The postal principle does not happen to differ-
ance, and even less to "Being," it destines them to itself from the
very "first" envoi. Now there are also differences, there is only
that, in postal differance; one can still, by means of a figure
folded back over onto itself, name them "epochs" or subepochs.
In the great epoch (the technology of which is marked by paper,
pen, the envelope, the individual subject addressee, etc.) and
which goes shall we say from Socrates to Freud and Heidegger,
there are subepochs, for example the process of state monopoli-
zation, and then within this the invention of the postage stamp
and the Berne convention, to use only such insufficient indices.
Each epoch has its literature (which in general I hold to be
essentially detective or epistolary literature, even if within it the
detective or epistolary genre more or less strictly folds it back
onto itself).
 "Envois" 511

Here Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin

them within me like the two great ghosts of the "great epoch."
The two surviving grandfathers. They did not know each other,
but according to me they form a couple, and in fact just because
of that, this singular anachrony. They are bound to each other
without reading each other and without corresponding. I have
often spoken to you about this situation, and it is this picture
that I would like to describe in Le legs: two thinkers whose
glances never crossed and who, without ever receiving a word
from one another, say the same. They are turned to the same
side.
The master-thinkers are also masters of
the post. Knowing well how to play with the post restante.
Knowing how not to be there and how to be strong for not being
there right away. Knowing how not to deliver on command, how
to wait and to make wait, for as long as what there is that is
strongest within one demands - and to the point of dying with-
out mastering anything of the final destination. The post is al-
ways en reste, and always restante. It awaits the addressee who
might always, by chance, not arrive.
And the postal principle is no longer a principle, nor a
transcendental category; that which announces itself or sends
itself under this heading (among other possible names, like you)
no longer sufficiently belongs to the epoch of Being to submit
itself to some transcendentalism, "beyond every genre." The post
is but a little message, fold (pli), or just as well. A relay in order
to mark that there is never anything but relays.
Nancy, do you remember Nancy?
In a word, this
is what I am trying to explain to him. Tekhne (and doubtless he
would have considered the postal structure and everything that
it governs as a determination (yes, precisely, your word), a meta-
physical and technical determination of the envoi or of the des-
tinality (Geschick, etc.) of Being; and he would have considered
my entire insistence on the posts as a metaphysics corresponding
to the technical era that I am describing, the end of a certain
post, the dawn of another, etc.); now tekhne, this is the entire-
infinitesimal and decisive - differance, does not arrive. N o more
512 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

than metaphysics, therefore, and than positionality; always, al-

ready it parasites that to which he says it happens, arrives, or
that it succeeds in happening to [arrive aarriver]. This infinites-
imal nuance changes everything in the relation between meta-
physics and its doubles or its others.
Tekhne does not happen to language or to the poem, to Dich-
tung or to the song, understand me: this can mean simulta-
neously that it does not succeed in touching them, getting into
them, it leaves them virgin, not happening to arrive up to them
[n'arrivant pas a arriver jusqu'a euxj, and yet it has to happen to
them like an accident or an event because it inhabits them and
occasions them.
[ .... ]
The entire
history of postal tekhne tends to rivet the destination to identity.
To arrive, to happen would be to a subject, to happen to "me."
Now a mark, whatever it may be, is coded in order to make an
imprint, even if it is a perfume. Henceforth it divides itself, it is
valid several times in one time: no more unique addressee. This
is why, by virtue of this divisibility (the origin of reason, the mad
origin of reason and of the principle of identity), tekhne does not
happen to language - which is why and what I sing to you.
[ .... ]

May 1979

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but writ-
ten. Myself, I am a man of speech, I have never had anything to
write. When I have something to say I say it or say it to myself,
basta. You are the only one to understand why it really was
necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomat-
ics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words
you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the
guard, etc. I have necessarily written upside down - and in order
to surrender to Necessity.
I .... I
 "Envois" 513

End of June 1979

[ .... ]
I also thought that upon reading this sorted mail [courier trie]
they could think that I alone am sending these letters to myself:
as soon as they are sent off they get to me (I remain the first and
last to read them) by means of the trajectory of a "combined"
emitter-receiver. By means of this banal setup I would be the
earpiece of what I tell myself. And, if you are following closely, a
priori this gets to its destination, with all the sought-after effects.
Or further, which amounts to the same, I find the best means to
find myself a priori, in the course of awaiting or reaching myself,
everywhere that it arrives, always here and there simultaneously,
fort und da. So then it always arrives at its destination. Hey! this
is a good definition of "ego" and of fantasy, at bottom. But there
it is, I am speaking of something else, of you and of Necessity.
[ .... ]
30 July 1979
[ .... ]
if fire's due is impossible to delimit, by virtue of the lexicon and
the "themes," it is not for the usual reason (give fire its due, light
counter-fires in order to stop the progression of a blaze, avoid a
holocaust). On the contrary, the necessity of everything [du tout]
announces itself terribly, the fatality of saving everything from
destruction: what is there, rigorously, in our letters that does not
derive from the forta:da, from the vocabulary of going-coming,
of the step, of the way or the away, of the near and the far, of all
the frameworks in tele-, of the adestination, of the address and
the maladdress, of everything that is passed and comes to pass
between Socrates and Plato, Freud and Heidegger, of the "truth,"
of the facteur, "du tout," of the transference, of the inheritance
and of the geneaology, of the paradoxes of the nomination, of the
king, of the queen and of their ministers, of the magister and of
the ministries, of the private or public detectives? Is there a word,
a letter, an atom of a message that rigorously speaking should
not be withdrawn from the burning with the aim of publication?
514 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

To take an example, the most trivial and innocent example,

when I write to you "je vais mal," the phrase already derives
from the thematics and the lexicon, in any event from the rheto-
ric of going, the aller, or the step, which form the subject of the
three essays just as it belongs to the corpus of S/p. If I circumcise,
and I will, it will have to bleed around the edges, and we will put
in their hands, under their eyes, shards of our body, of what is
most secret in our soul
[ .... ]
Perhaps
they are going to find this writing too adroit, virtuosic in the art
of turning away, perhaps perverse in that it can be approached
from everywhere and nowhere, certainly abandoned to the other,
but given over to itself, offered up to its own blows, up to the end
reserving everything for itself. Why, they ask themselves, inces-
santly let the destination divide itself? You too, perhaps, my
love, you too question yourself, but this perversion, first of all, I
treat. It is not my own, it belongs to this writing that you, you
alone, know me to be sick of. But the song of innocence, if you
love me, you will let it come to you, it will arrive for you.
[ .... ]
8 August 1979

Who will prove that the sender is the same man, or woman?
And the male or female addressee? Or that they are not identical?
To themselves, male or female, first of all? They they do or do
not form a couple? Or several couples? Or a crowd? Where would
the principle of identification be? In the name? No, and then
whoever wants to make a proof becomes a participant in our
corpus. They would not prevent us from loving each other. And
they would love us as one loves counterfeiters, imposters, contre-
facteurs (this word has been looking for me for years): while
believing that they are still dreaming of truth, authenticity, sin-
cerity, and that out of what they burn they are paying homage to
what they bum. One can only love that, the truth jask Freud's
uncle). Do you believe that one can love that, truly?
and you, you would have made me give birth
 "Envois" 515

to the truth? Stretched out on my back, you know the scene well,
I would have asked you, every night, "tell me the truth." And
you, "but I have nothing to say to you myself." I wind up believ-
ing it. While waiting I talk and you listen, you understand more
or less nothing, but this has not the slightest kind of importance
for this reason
Plato loved Socrates and his vengeance will last until the end of
time.
but when the syngram has been published, he no longer will
have anything to do with it, or with anyone - completely else-
where - , the literary post will forward it by itself, q.e.d. This
has given me the wish, envie {this is indeed the word), to publish
under my name things that are inconceivable, ·and above all
unlivable, for me, thus abusing the "editorial" credit that I have
been laboriously accumulating for years, with this sole aim in
mind. Will anyone let himself be fooled by such an intensely
political demonstration? They are going to tell me again that I
would not sign just anything: prove it
[ .... ]

- Translated by Alan Bass

 TWENTY-ONE

From ..To Speculate - on 'Freud'," in The Post Card

("Speculer - sur 'Freud'," In La Carte postale [1980])

In a brief preface to his first published essay devoted to Freud, "Freud

and the Scene of Writing" (in Writing and Difference [1967)), Derrida
signaled several important ways in which deconstruction resembles
psychoanalysis: both are concerned with the analysis of a repression
that fails to prevent the return of the repressed in the form of symp-
toms; both bring out the enigma of presence as a duplication, an
originary repetition; both discern the relation between conscious-
ness or the "preconscious" and the phone or "verbal representation."
And yet, writes .Derrida, "despite the appearances, the deconstruc-
tion of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy." Because
Freudian concepts belong to the history of metaphysics and are thus
part of the logocentric repression, they cannot supply the conceptual
tools for its deconstruction. This complicity of psychoanalysis and
metaphysics has to be discerned at work behind Freud's persistence
in seeking purely scientific or empirical grounds for the enterprise of
psychoanalysis as a theory and a practice, as well as in his insistence
on setting aside any consideration of the philosophical precedents of
his own thought.
In "To Speculate- on 'Freud'," Derrida undertakes a long reading
of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work whose "specula-
tive" character has long divided the psychoanalytic institution. There,
Freud sets out from the question of whether there is any evidence
for a death drive, that is, a drive not governed by the pleasure princi-
ple and therefore unaccounted for by psychoanalysis which has
understood the psychic mechanism as wholly under the sway of the
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud'" 517

latter principle. Derrida proposes to follow Freud step by step on his

speculative voyage in order to remark the curious procedure of this
text which consists in taking a step (beyond the pleasure principle)
only to take it back in the next step. This cancelling cadence of the
impossible step beyond is repeated in each of the seven chapters.
Derrida calls this cadence that of "l'athese," both the thesis and the
"athesis," a posing and a suspending of the thesis of the death drive
that compels its own repetition. The repetition compulsion, which
Freud poses - and dismisses - as evidence of a death drive, is thus
not only an object of this discourse, but its motive or driving force
as well. The discourse on repetition repeats.
At stake in Freud's speculations is the institution of psychoanal-
ysis both as a properly scientific (i.e., nonspeculative) science and as
an original knowledge, not indebted to some antecedent discourse,
for example philosophy. And since, unlike any other scientific disci-
pline, psychoanalysis is bound up with the name of its founder, at
stake, Derrida argues, is the properness of Freud's name. He relates
the structure of a compulsive repetition to the structure of an impos-
sible bequest of the name to itself, the name inheriting from itself.
The scene of inheritance is brought out with particular complexity
in Derrida's reading of the famous second chapter where Freud de-
scribes his observation and analysis of the "fort!da" game invented
by a child who happened to be his grandson. This reading is ex-
cerpted at length below. (For further comments on "To Speculate-
on 'Freud'," see above, my introduction, pp. xxvi-xxviii.)
 To Speculate - on "Freud"

The title of this chapter, "Freud's Legacy," is a deliberately cor-

rupt citation, which doubtless will have been recognized. The
expression legs de Freud 1 is often encountered in the writings of
Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff. Naturally I leave the reader
as judge of what is going on in this corruption.
This chapter was first published in the issue of Etudes freu-
diennes devoted to Nicolas Abraham. I had then prefaced it with
this note:
Extract of a seminar held in 1975 at l'Ecole normale
superieure under the heading Life death. Maria Torok,
who became aware of this last year, told me that she was
sensitive to certain intersections, convergences, affini-
ties with some of the still unpublished works of Nicolas
Abraham, among those which soon will appear in L'Ecorce
et le noyau (Anasemies II, Aubier-Flammarion, coll. "La
philosophie en effet"). This is what has encouraged me to
publish this fragment here. Those who wish to delimit its
import can also consider it as a reading of the second chap-
ter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. At this determined
stage of the seminar, the question was to examine the (prob-
lematic and textual) specificity of Beyond . .. , of rebinding
what is irreducible about a "speculation" with the economy
of a scene of writing, which itself is inseparable from a
scene of inheritance implicating both the Freuds and the
psychoanalytic "movement." The session immediately pre-
ceding this one had specified the space of this investigation
and the singularity of Freud's speculative procedure [de-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 519

marchej. This session had proposed some abbreviations, for

example PP for pleasure principle, PR for reality principle. 2
Other fragments of the same seminar will appear soon in
book form.

The "Same Root" of the Autobiography

Nothing yet has contradicted or in any way contested the author-

ity of a PP which always comes back [revient/ to itself, modifies
itself, delegates itself, represents itself without ever leaving itself
[se quitter}. Doubtless, in this return to itself there may be, as
we have demonstrated, the strict implication of a haunting by
something totally other. The return never "acquits" the specula-
tion of the PP. Doubtless it is never quits with it because it takes .
place within the PP it(him)self, and indebts it (him) at every step
[pas/. And yet in Freud's discourse, let us say in the discourse of
a certain speculator, on the subject of the PP which never quits
itself, and therefore always speaks of it(him)self, nothing yet has
contradicted the authority of the first principle. Perhaps it is that
this PP cannot be contradicted. What is done without it (him), if
anything is, will not contradict: first because it will not oppose
itself to the PP (it will be done without him in him, with his own
step without him), and then because it will be done without him
by not saying anything, by stifling itself, inscribing itself in si-
lence. As soon as it speaks it submits to the authority of the
absolute master, the PP which (who) as such cannot be quiet. But
which (who), by the same token, lets the other ventriloquate it
(him): in silence then.
At the end of the first chapter the PP is thus confirmed in its
absolute sovereignty. Whence the necessity of new problematics,
of "fresh questions bearing upon our present problem."
Now, if one attempts to pay attention to the original modality
of the "speculative," and to the singular proceeding [demarchej
of this writing, its pas de these 3 which advances without advanc-
ing, without advancing itself, without ever advancing anything
that it does not immediately take back, for the time of a detour,
without ever positing anything that remains in its position, then
one must recognize that the following chapter repeats, in place
and in another place, the immobile emplacement of the pas de
520 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

these. It repeats itself, it illustrates only the repetition of that

very thing (the absolute authority of the PP) which finally will
not let anything be done without it (him), except repetition itself.
In any event, despite the richness and novelty of the content
adduced in the second chapter, despite several marching orders
and steps forward, not an inch of ground is gained; not one
decision, not the slightest advance in the question which occu-
pies the speculator, the question of the PP as absolute master.
This chapter nonetheless is one of the most famous in Be-
yond ... , the one often retained in the exoteric, and occasionally
the esoteric, space of psychoanalysis as one of the most impor-
tant, and even decisive, chapters of the essay. Notably because of
the story of the spool and of the fort!da. And as the repetition
compulsion (Weiderholungszwang) is put into communication
with the death drive, and since in effect a repetition compulsion
seems to dominate the scene of the spool, it is believed that this
story can be reattached to the exhibition, that is, the demonstra-
tion, of the said death drive. This is due to not having read: the
speculator retains nothing of this story about the fort!da, at least
in the demonstration in view of a beyond of the PP. He alleges
that he can still explain it thoroughly within the space of the PP
and under its authority. And, in effect, he succeeds. It is indeed
the story of the PP that he is telling us, a certain episode of its
fabulous reign, to be sure an important moment of its (his) own
genealogy, but still a moment of it(him)self.
I do not mean to say that this chapter is without interest, nor,
above all, that the anecdote of the spool is without import. Quite
to the contrary: it is simply that its import is perhaps not in-
scribed in the register of the demonstration whose most apparent
and continuous thread is held in the question: are we correct, we
psychoanalysts, to believe in the absolute domination of the PP?
Where is this import inscribed, then? And in what place that
could be both under the mouvance 4 of the PP, the graphics we
pointed out the last time, and, simultaneously, the mouvance of
the speculative writing of this essay, that which commits the
essay to the stakes of this speculative writing?
Let us first extract a skeleton: the argumentative framework
of the chapter. We observe that something repeats itself. And
(has this ever been done?) the repetitive process must be identi-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 521

fied not only in the content, the examples, and the material
described and analyzed by Freud, but already, or again, in Freud's
writing, in the demarche of his text, in what he does as much as
in what he says, in his "acts," if you will, no less than in his
"objects." (If Freud were his grandson, one would have to attend
to repetition on the side of the gesture, and not only on the side
of the fort!da of the spool, of the object. But let us not shuffle the
cards; who said that Freud was his own grandson?) What repeats
itself more obviously in this chapter is the speculator's indefati-
gable motion in order to reject, to set aside, to make disappear,
to distance (fort), to defer everything that appears to put the PP
into question. He observes every time that something does not
suffice, that something must be put off until further on, until
later. Then he makes the hypothesis of the beyond come back
/revenir/ only to dismiss it again. This hypothesis comes back
/revient/ only as that which has not truly come back [revenu/,
that which has only passed by in the specter of its presence.
Keeping, at first, to the argumentative framework, to the logi-
cal course of the demonstration, we observe that after having
treated the example of traumatic neurosis, Freud renounces,
abandons, resigns himself. He proposes to leave this obscure
theme (Ich mache nun den Vorschlag, das dunkle und diistere
Thema der traumatischen Neurose zu verlassen .. .). First dis-
missal.
But after having treated "children's play," the anecdote of the
spool and of the fort!da, Freud renounces, abandons, resigns him-
self again: "No certain decision (keine sichere Entscheidung) can
be reached from the analysis of a single case like this". 5 Second
dismissal. But what kind of singularity is this? Why is it impor-
tant, and why does it lead to disqualification? Then, after another
wave, another attempt to derive something from children's play,
Freud renounces, abandons, resigns himself: "Nor shall we be
helped in our hesitation between these two views by further
considering children's play" (r6). Third dismissal. Finally, the
last words of the chapter. Freud has just invoked games and the
imitative drives in art, an entire aesthetics oriented by the eco-
nomic point of view. He concludes: "They are of no use for our
purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance
[Herrschaft, mastery] of the pleasure principle; they give no evi-
522 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

dence of the operation [Wirksamkeit, being-at-work] of tenden-

cies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more
primitive (urspriinglicher) than it and independent of it" (17).
Fourth dismissal. (Let us retain this code of mastery and of
service or servitude; it will be less and less indifferent for us here.
It can appear strange when in question are the relations between
principles, and it is not immediately explained by the fact that a
principle (arche) is both at the beginning and in command within
language.)
This is the conclusion of the chapter. We have not advanced
one step, only steps for nothing on the path of the manifest
investigation. It repeats itself in place. And yet, in this foot-
stamping, repetition insists, and if these determined repetitions,
these contents, kinds, examples of repetition do not suffice to
dethrone the PP, at least the repetitive form, the reproduction of
the repetitive, reproductivity itself will have begun to work with-
out saying anything, without saying anything other than itself
silencing itself, somewhat in the way it is said on the last page
that the death drives say nothing. They seem to accomplish their
work without themselves being remarked, putting into their ser-
vice the master himself who continues to speak out loud, the PP.
In what can no longer even be called the "form" of the text, of a
text without content, without thesis, without an object that is
detachable from its detaching operation, in the demarche of Be-
yond ... , this has come to pass in the same way, even before it
is a question of the death drive in person. And even without one
ever being able to speak of the death drive in person.
Such would be the de-monstration. Let us not abuse this facile
play on words. The de-monstration makes its proof without
showing [montrer], without offering any conclusion as evidence,
without giving anything to carry away, without any available
thesis. It proves according to another mode, but by marching to
its pas de demonstration. It transforms, it transforms itself in its
process rather than advancing the signifiable object of a dis-
course. It tends to fold into itself everything that it makes ex-
plicit, to bend it all to itself. The pas de demonstration is of that
which remains in this restance.
Let us come back briefly to the content exhibited by this
second chapter.
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 523

Among the new materials called upon at the end of the first
chapter, among the questions that seem to resist the analytic
explanation dominated by the PP, there are the so-called trau-
matic neuroses. Th~ war has just given rise to great numbers of
them. The explanation of the disorder by organic lesions has
shown itself to be insufficient. The same syndrome (subjective
ailments, for example melancholia or hypochondria, motor
symptoms, enfeeblement and disturbance of mental capacities),
is seen elsewhere, without any mechanical violence. In order to
define the trauma, one must then distinguish between fear (Furcht)
and anxiety. The first is provoked by the presence of a known
and determined dangerous object; the second is related to an
unknown, indeterminate danger; as a preparation for danger, anx-
iety is more a protection against trauma; linked to repression, it
appears at first to be an effect, but later, in Inhibition, Symptom
and Anxiety Freud will say, a propos of Little Hans, that anxiety
produces repression. Neither fear (before a determined and known
danger) nor anxiety (before an unknown and indeterminate dan-
ger) causes trauma; only fright (Schreck)-which actually puts
one face to face with an unknown and determined danger for
which one was not prepared, and against which anxiety could
not protect-can do so.
Now what does one observe in the case of the fright that
induces the so-called traumatic neuroses? For example that dreams--
the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental pro-
cesses, Freud says at this point-have the tendency to reproduce
the traumatic accident, the situation of fright. Here, Freud pi-
rouettes curiously. Since it is granted, or if it is granted, that the
predominant tendency of the dream is wish-fulfillment, how is
one to understand what a dream reproducing a situation of vio-
lent unpleasure might be? Except by granting that in this case
the function of the dream has been subject to an alteration that
turns it away from its aim, or again by evoking "mysterious
masochistic trends." At this point Freud drops these two hy-
potheses (but why?), to pick them up later, in chapter IV, at the
moment of the most unrestrained speculation. He will admit
then that certain dreams are the exception to the rule of wish
fulfillment, which itself can be constituted only late, when all of
psychic life has submitted itself to a PP whose beyond is then
524 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

envisaged. He also will admit (in chapter IV) the operation of

masochism, and even, contrary to what he had held previously,
of a primary masochism. But for the moment, Freud drops these
hypotheses, which, from the point of view of the rhetoric of the
investigation, might appear unjustified. In an arbitrary and deci-
sive style, he proposes to leave there the obscure theme of the
traumatic neurosis, and to study the way the psychic apparatus
works "in one of its earliest normal activities-I mean in chil-
dren's play" (14).
Thus, he is in a hurry to get to this point, at the risk of
abandoning an unsolved problem that he will have to come back
to later, and especially at the risk of having the demonstration of
a beyond of the PP not advance at all (which in effect will be the
case). What is at stake in this haste, therefore, is something
other, of another order. This urgency cannot be deciphered in the
import of the demonstrative declaration, the manifest argumen-
tation. The only justification for proceeding this way, in terms of
classical logic or rhetoric, would be the following: one must first
come back [revenir] to "normality" (but then why not begin with
it?), and to the "earliest," most precocious normality in the child
(but then why not begin with it?). When the normal and original
processes will have been explored, the question of the traumatic
neuroses will be taken up again. The problematic of the binding
of energy then will have disengaged a more propitious space; the
question of masochism also will be taken up again when the
notions of topical agencies, of narcissism, and of the Ego will
have been more fully elaborated.
Let us begin then with the "normal" and the "original"· the
child, the child in the typical and normal activity usually at-
tributed to him, play. Apparently this is an activity entirely
subject to the PP-and it will be shown that indeed it is, and
entirely under the surveillance of a PP which (who) nevertheless
permits it(him)self to be worked upon in silence by its (his) other
-and as unaffected as possible by the second principle, the PR.
And then the argument of the spool. I am saying argument,
the legendary argument, because I do not yet know what name
to give it. It is neither a nairative, nor a story, nor a myth, nor a
fiction. Nor is it the system of a theoretical demonstration. It is
fragmentary, without conclusion, selective in what it gives to be
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud'" 525

read, more an argument in the sense of a schema made of dotted

lines, or with ellipses everywhere.
And then what is given to be read here, this legend, is already
too legendary, overburdened, obliterated. To give it a title is
already to accredit the deposit or the consignment, that is, the
investiture. As for the immense literature whose investment this
legendary argument has attracted to itself, I would like to at-
tempt a partial and naive reading, as naive and spontaneous as
possible. As if I were interesting myself for the first time in the
first time of the thing.
Initially, I remark this: this is the first time in this book that
we have an apparently autobiographical, indeed domestic, piece.
The appearance is veiled, of course, but all the more significant.
Of the experience Freud says he has been the witness. The moti-
vated witness. It took place in his family, but he says nothing
about this. Moreover we know this just as we know that the
motivated witness was none other than the child's grandfather.
"I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some
weeks ... " (14). Even if an experiment 6 could ever be limited to
observation, the conditions as they are defined were not those of
an observation. The speculator was not in a situation to observe.
This can be concluded in advance from what he himself says in
order to accredit the seriousness of his discourse. The protocols
of experimentation, including sufficient observation ("It was more
than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof
as the child and his parents for some weeks ... "), guarantee the
observation only by making of the observer a participant. But
what was his part? Can he determine it himself? The question of
objectivity has not the slightest pertinence here-nor does any
epistemological question in canonic form-for the primary and
sole reason that the experiment and its account will pretend to
nothing less than a genealogy of objectivity in general. How,
then, can they be subject to the authority of the tribunal whose
institution they repeat? But inversely, by what right is a tribunal
forbidden to judge the conditions of its establishment? and, what
is more, forbidden to judge the account, by a motivated witness,
a participant, of the said establishment? Especially if the in-
volved witness gives all the signs of a very singular concern: for
example, that of producing the institutions of his desire, of graft-
526 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

ing his own genealogy onto it, of making the tribunal and the
juridical tradition his inheritance, his delegation as a "move-
ment," his legacy, his own. 7 I will indeed refrain from insisting
on the syntax of his own. Both so that you will not get lost right
away, and because I suspect that he himself has a hard time
recognizing himself among his own. Which would not be ume-
lated to the origin of objectivity. Or at least of this experiment,
and the singular account we are given of it.
What is given is first filtered, selected, actively delimited. This
discrimination is in part declared at the border. The speculator
who does not yet say that he has truly begun to speculate (this
will be on the fourth day, for there are seven chapters in this
strangely composed book: we will come back to this), acknowl-
edges this discrimination. He has not sought "to include the
whole field covered by these phenomena." He has only retained
the characteristics pertinent to the economic point of view. Eco-
nomic: this might already be translated, if one plays a bit (play is
not yet forbidden in this phase of the origin of everything, of the
present, the object, language, work, seriousness, etc.), but not
gratuitously, as point of view of the oikos, law of the oikos, of
the proper as the domestico-familial and even, by the same to-
ken, as we will verify, as the domestico-funerary. 8 The grandfa-
ther speculator does not yet say that he has begun to speculate in
broad daylight (the daylight will be for the fourth day, and yet),
he will never say that he is the grandfather, but he knows that
this is an open secret, le secret de Polichinelle. Secret for no one.
The grandfather speculator justifies the accounts he is giving,
and the discrimination he operates in them, in broad daylight.
The justification is precisely the economic point of view. Which
until now has been neglected by the "different theories of chil-
dren's play," and which also constitutes the privileged point of
view for Beyond... , for what he who here holds or renders the
accounts is doing, to wit, writing. "These theories attempt to
discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to
bring into the foreground the economic motive, the considera-
tion of the yield of pleasure (Lustgewinn) involved. Without
wishing to include the whole field covered by these phenomena,
I have been able, through a chance opportunity which presented
itself, to throw some light upon the first game invented by him-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 527

self (das erste selbstgeschaffene Spiel) that was played by a little

boy of one and a half. It was more than a mere fleeting observa-
tion, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents
for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the
meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated"
j14; sl. mod.).
He has profited from an opportunity, a chance, he says. About
the possibility of this chance he says nothing. From the immense
discourse which might inundate us here, but which is held back,
let us retain only this: the opportune chance has as its propitious
terrain neither the family (the narrow family, the small family in
its nucleus of two generations: Freud would not have invoked
the opportune chance if he had observed one of his nearest, son,
daughter, wife, brother or sister, mother or father), nor the non-
family (several weeks under the same roof is a familial experi-
ence). The field of the experiment is therefore of the type: family
vacationcy. 9 A supplement of generation always finds here rea-
son to employ or deploy its desire.
From the first paragraph of the account on, a single trait to
characterize the object of the observation, the action of the game:
repetition, repeated repetition (andauemd wiederholte Tun). That
is all. The other characteristic !"puzzling," riitselhafte) describes
nothing, is void, but with a vacancy that calls out, and calls for,
like every enigma, a narrative. It envelopes the narrative with its
vacancy.
It will be said: yes, there is another descriptive trait in this
first paragraph. The game, of which the repetition of repetition
consists, is a selbstgeschaffene game, one which the child has
produced or permitted to be produced by itself, spontaneously,
and it is the first of this type. But none of all this !spontaneity,
autoproduction, the originality of the first time) contributes any
descriptive content that does not amount to the self-engendering
of the repetition of itself. Hetero-tautology (definition of the
Hegelian speculative) of repeated repetition, of self-repetition. In
its pure form, this is what play will consist of.
It gives time. There is time.
The grandfather lwho is more or less clandestinely the) specu-
lator (already not yet) repeats the repetition of repetition. A repe-
tition between pleasure and unpleasure, of a pleasure and an
528 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

unpleasure whose (agreeable-disagreeable) content, however, is

not added to repetition. It is not an additive but an internal
determination, the object of an analytic predication. It is the
possibility of this analytic predication which slowly will develop
the hypothesis of a "drive" more original than the PP and inde-
pendent of it (him). The PP will be overflowed, and is so in
advance, by the speculation in which it (he) engages, and by its
(his) own (intestine, proper, domestic, familial, sepulchral) repe-
tition.
Now-fold back (reapply) what the grandfather, who still is
hiding from himself that he is the grandfather, says here without
hiding it from himself, reapply what he has said, by repeating it,
about the repetition of the grandson, the eldest of his grandsons,
Ernst. We will come back to this in detail. Fold back what he
says his grandson is doing, with all the seriousness appropriate
to an eldest grandson called Ernst (the importance of being ear-
nest), 10 but not Ernst Freud, because the "movement" of this
genealogy passes through the daughter, the daughter wife who
perpetuates the race only by risking the name, (I leave it to you
to follow this factor 11 up to and including all of those women
about whom it is difficult to know whether they have main-
tained the movement without the name or lost the movement in
order to maintain, in that they have maintained, the name; 12 I
leave it to you to follow this up suggesting only that you not
forget, in the question of the analytic "movement" as the geneal-
ogy of the son-in-law, Judaic law), fold back, then, what he says
his grandson is doing seriously on what he himself is doing by
saying this, by writing Beyond . .. , by playing so seriously (by
speculating) at writing Beyond .. .. For the speculative hetero-
tautology of the thing is that the beyond is lodged (more or less
comfortably for this vacance) in the repetition of the repetition
of the PP.
Fold back: he (the grandson of his grandfather, the grandfather
of his grandson) compulsively repeats repetition without it ever
advancing anywhere, not one step. He repeats an operation which
consists in distancing, in pretending (for a time, for time: thereby
writing and doing something that is not being talked about, and
which must give good returns) to distance pleasure, the object or
principle of pleasure, the object and/or the PP, here represented
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 529

by the spool which is supposed to represent the mother (and/or,

as we will see, supposed to represent the father, in the place of
the son-in-law, the father as son-in-law, the other family name),
in order to bring it (him) back indefatigably. It (he) pretends to
distance the PP in order to bring it (him) back ceaselessly, in
order to observe that itself it (himself he) brings itself (himself)
back lfor it (he) has in itlhim)self the principial force of its lhis)
own economic return, to the house, his home, near it(him)self
despite all the difference), and then to conclude: it (he) is still
there, I am always there. Da. The PP maintains all its lhis)
authority, it lhe) has never absented itlhim)self.
One can see that the description to follow of the fort!da Ion
the side of the grandson of the house) and the description of the
speculative game, so painstaking and so repetitive also, of the
grandfather writing Beyond ... overlap down to their details. It
is the same application. I have just said: one can see that they
overlap. Rigorously speaking, it is not an overlapping that is in
question, nor a parallelism, nor an analogy, nor a coincidence.
The necessity that binds the two descriptions is of another kind:
we would have difficulty naming it; but of course this is the
principal stake for me in the selective and motivated reading that
I am repeating here. Who causes (himself) to come back {revenir],
who makes who come back {revenir] according to this double
fort/da which conjugates, the same genealogical land conjugal)
writing, the narrated and the narrating of this narrative (the game
of the "serious" grandson with the spool and the serious specu-
lation of the grandfather with the PP)?
This simple question in suspense permits us to glimpse the
following: the description of Ernst's serious game, of the eldest
grandson of the grandfather of psychoanalysis, can no longer be
read solely as a theoretical argument, as a strictly theoretical
speculation that tends to conclude with the repetition compul-
sion or the death drive or simply with the internal limit of the
PP (for you know that Freud, no matter what has been said in
order vehemently to affirm or contest it, never concludes on this
point), but can also be read, according to the supplementary
necessity of a parergon, 13 as an autobiography of Freud. Not
simply an autobiography confiding his life to his own more or
less testamentary writing, but a more or less living description of
530 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, most

notably Beyond .... In question is not only a folding back or a
tautological reversal, as if the grandson, by offering him a mirror
of his writing, ·were in advance dictating to him what land where)
he had to lay out on paper; as if Freud were writing what his
descendence (in sum holding the first pen, the one that always
passes from one hand to another) prescribed that he write; as if
Freud were making a return to Freud through the connivance of
a grandson who dictates from his spool and regularly brings it
back, with all the seriousness of a grandson certain of a privileged
contract with the grandfather. It is not only a quei::tion of this
tautological mirror. The autobiography of the writing posits and
deposits !deposes) simultaneously, in the same movement, the
psychoanalytic movement. It performs, and bets on that which
gave its occasional chance. Which amounts [revenant] to saying
in sum, jbut who is speaking here?), I bet that this double fort!da
cooperates, that this cooperation cooperates with initiating the
psychoanalytic cause, with setting in motion the psychoanalytic
"movement," even being it, even being it, in its being itself, in
other words, in the singular structure of its tradition, I will say
in the proper name of this "science," this "movement," this
"theoretical practice" which maintains a relation to its history
like none other. A relation to the history of its writing and the
writing of its history also. If, in the unheard-of event of this
cooperation, the unanalyzed remainder of an unconscious re-
mains, if this remainder is at work, and from its alterity con-
structs the autobiography of this testamentary writing, then I
wager that it will be transmitted blindly by the entire movement
of the return to Freud. 14 The remainder which in silence works
upon the scene of this cooperation is doubtless illegible jnow or
forever, such is a restance in the sense in which I take it), but it
defines the sole urgency of what remains to be done, is truly its
only interest. Interest of a supplementary repetition? interest of
a genetic transformation, of a renewal effectively displacing the
essential? This alternative is lame, it is in advance made to limp
by the demarche one can read here, in the bizarre document
which concerns us.
I have never wanted to abuse the abyss, nor, above all, the
mise "en abyme. " 15 I do not believe in it very much, I am wary
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 531

of the confidence that it inspires fundamentally, I believe it too

representative either to go far enough or not to avoid the very
thing toward which it allegedly rushes. I have attempted to ex-
plain myself on this question elsewhere. Onto what does a cer-
tain appearance of mise "en abyme" open-and close-here?
This appearance is not immediately apparent, but it has had to
play a more or less secret role in the fascination exerted on the
reader by the small story of the spool, this anecdote that could
have been taken as banal, impoverished, truncated, told in pass-
ing, and without the slightest import for the ongoing debate, if
one is to believe the relater of the story himself. The story that is
related, however, seems to put into "abyme" the writing of the
relation (let us say the history, Historie, of the relation, and even
the history, Geschichte, of the relater relating it). Therefore the
related is related to the relating. The site of the legible, like the
origin of writing, is carried away with itself. Nothing is any
longer inscribable, and nothing is more inscribable [rien n'est
plus inscriptible]. The notion of the repetition "en abyme" of
Freud's writing has a relation of structural mimesis with the
relation between the PP and "its" death drive. The latter, once
again, is not opposed to the former, but hollows it out with a
testamentary writing "en abyme" originally, at the origin of the
origin.
Such will have been the "movement," in the irreducible nov-
elty of its repetition, in the absolutely singular event of its double
relation.
If one wished to simplify the question, it could become, for
example: how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an
unterminated self-analysis, give to a worldwide institution its
birth? The birth of whom? of what? and how does the interrup-
tion or the limit of the self-analysis, cooperating with the mise
"en abyme" rather than obstructing it, reproduce its mark in the
institutional movement, the possibility of this remark from then
on never ceasing to make little ones, multiplying the progeniture
with its cleavages, conflicts, divisions, alliances, marriages, and
regroupings?
Thus does an autobiography speculate, but instead of simpli-
fying the question, one would have to take the process in reverse,
and recharge its apparent premise: what is autobiography if
532 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

everything that follows from it, and out of which we have just
made a long sentence, is then possible? We do not yet know, and
must not pretend to know. Even less as concerns a self-analysis.
He who called himself the first, and therefore the only, one to
have attempted, if not to have defined it, did not himself know,
and this must be taken into account.
To go forward in my reading, I now need an essential possibil-
ity whose chance, if it can be put thus, will have been momen-
tous: it is that every autobiographical speculation, to the extent
that it constitutes a legacy and the institution of a movement
without limit, must take into account, in its very performance,
the mortality of the legatees. As soon as there is mortality, death
can in principle overtake one at every instant. The speculator
then can survive the legatee, and this possibility is inscribed in
the structure of the legacy, and even within this limit of self-
analysis the system of which supports the writing somewhat like
a grid. The precocious death, and therefore the mutism of the
legatee who can do nothing about it: this is one of the possibili-
ties of that which dictates and causes to write. Even the one who
apparently will not have written, Socrates, 16 or whose writing is
supposed to double discourse, or above all listening, Freud and
several others. One then gives oneself one's own movement, one
inherits from oneself for all time, the provisions are sufficient so
that the ghost at least can always step up to the cashier. He will
only have to pronounce a name guaranteeing a signature. One
thinks.
This has happened to Freud, and to several others, but it does
not suffice that the event occupy the world theater for its possi-
bility to be illustrative of it.
And what follows is not only an example.

Conjoint Interpretations

There is a mute daughter. And more than another daughter who

will have used the paternal credit in an abundant discourse of
inheritance, it is she who will have said, perhaps, this is why it
is up to your father to speak. Not only my father, but your father.
This is Sophie, the daughter of Freud and mother of Ernst whose
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 533

death soon will toll in the text. Very softly, in a strange note
added afterward.
I am taking up my account exactly at the point at which I left
it off, without skipping over anything. Freud sets the stage, and
in his fashion defines the apparently principal character. He in-
sists upon the normality of the child. This is the condition for
justifiable experimentation. The child is a paradigm. He is there-
fore not at all precocious in his intellectual development. He is
on good terms with everyone.
Particularly with his mother.
Following the schema defined above, I leave it to you to relate
-to refold or to reapply-the content of the narrative to the
scene of its writing, and to do so here for example, but elsewhere
too, and this is only an example, by exchanging the places of the
narrator and of the principal character, or principal couple, Emst-
Sophie, the third character (the father-the spouse-the son-in-
law) never being far off, and occasionally even too close. In a
classical narrative, the narrator, who allegedly observes, is not
the author, granted. If it were not different in this case, taking
into account that it does not present itself as a literary fiction,
then we would have to, will have to reelaborate the distinction
between the narrator's I and the author's I by adapting the dis-
tinction to a new "metapsychological" topic.
Thus he is apparently on good terms with everyone, especially
his mother, since lor despite the fact that) he did not cry in her
absence. She occasionally left him for hours. Why didn't he cry?
Freud simultaneously seems to congratulate himself for the child's
not crying and to be surprised, even sorry, about it. Is this child
fundamentally as normal as Freud himself imagines him to be?
For in the very same sentence in which he attributes his grand-
son's excellent personality to the fact that he did not cry for his
daughter (his mother) during such long absences, he adds "al-
though" or "and yet." He was very attached to her, not only had
she herself breast-fed him, she had cared for him with help from
no one. But this small anomaly is quickly erased, and Freud
leaves his "although" without consequences. Everything is fine,
excellent child, but. Here is the but: this excellent child had a
disturbing habit. One does not immediately get over Freud's
534 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

imperturbable conclusion at the end of his fabulous description

of the disturbing habit: "I eventually realized that it was a game."
Here is the description, and I will interrupt my translation at
moments.
"The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual devel-
opment. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few
comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of
sounds which expressed a meaning [bedeutungsvolle Laute, pho-
nemes charged with meaning! intelligible to those around him.
He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one
servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a 'good [anstiin-
dig, easy, reasonable] boy.' He did not disturb his parents at
night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain
things or go into certain rooms, and above all [vor allem anderen,
before all else] he never cried when his mother left him for hours,
although he was greatly attached to this mother, who had not
only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any
outside help" (p. 14).17
I interrupt my reading for a moment. The picture painted is
apparently without a shadow, without a "but." There is indeed
an "although" and a "however," but these are counterweights,
internal compensations used to describe the balance: he was not
at all precocious, even a bit slow, but he was on good terms with
his parents; he did not cry when his mother left him, but he was
attached to her, and for good reason. Am I alone in already
hearing a restrained accusation? The excuse itself has left an
archive within grammar: "however," "although." Freud cannot
prevent himself from excusing his daughter's son. What, then, is
he reproaching him for? But is he reproaching him for what he
excuses him for, or for what excuses him? the secret fault for
which he excuses him, or precisely that which excuses him for
his fault? and with whom would the prosecutor be identified in
the mobile syntax of this trial?
The big "but" will arise immediately afterward and this time
as a shadow in the picture, although the word but itself is not
there. It is translated as "however" (nun): now, still it happens
that, nonetheless it remains that, it must be said however, and
nevertheless, fancy that, "This good little boy, however, had an
occasional disturbing habit ... "
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 535

What (despite everything) is satisfactory about this excellent

child, that is, his normality, his calm, his ability to bear the
absence of the beloved daughter (mother) 18 without fear or tears
-all of this makes some cost foreseeable. Everything is very
constructed, very propped up, dominated by a system of rules
and compensations, by an economy which in an instant will
appear in the form of a disturbing habit. Which permits him to
bear what his "good habits" might cost him. The child too is
speculating. How does he pay (himself) for accepting the order
not to touch certain things? How does the PP negotiate between
good and bad habits? The grandfather, the father of the daughter
and mother, actively selects the traits of the description. I see
him rushing and worried, like a dramatist or director who has a
part in the play. Staging it, he has to act with dispatch /il se
depechej: to control everything, have everything in order, before
going off to change for his part. This is translated by a peremptory
authoritarianism, unexplained decisions, interrupted speeches,
unanswered questions. The elements of the mise en scene have
been put in place: an original normality in relation to the good
breast, an economic principle requiring that the withdrawal of
the breast (so well dominated, so well withdrawn from its with-
drawal) be overpaid by a supplementary pleasure, and also requir-
ing that a bad habit reimburse, eventually with profit, good hab-
its, for example the orders not to touch certain things .... The
mise en scene hastens on, the actor-dramatist-producer will have
done everything himself, he also knocks the three or four times, 19
the curtain is about to rise. But we do not know if it rises on the
scene or in the scene. Before the entrance of any character, there
is a curtained bed. All the comings and goings, essentially, will
have to pass before the curtain.
I myself will not open this curtain-I leave this to you-onto
all the others, the words and things (curtains, canvases, veils,
hymens, umbrellas, etc.) with which I have concerned myself for
so long. 20 One could attempt to relate all these fabrics to one
another, according to the same law. I have neither the time nor
the taste for this task, which can be accomplished by itself or
done without.
Rather, here is Freud's curtain along with the strings pulled by
the grandfather.
536 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

"This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing

habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throw-
ing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on,
so that hunting for his toys (Spielzeuge, playthings) and picking
them up [zusammensuchen, to search in order to bring together,
to reassemble] was often not easy work" (14).21
The work is for the parents, but also for the child who expects
it from them. And the work consists of reassembling, of search-
ing in order to bring together, of reuniting to order to give back.
This is what the grandfather calls work, an often difficult work.
In return, he will call play the dispersion which sends far away
(the operation of distantiation), and will call playthings the col-
lection of manipulated objects. The entire process is itself di-
vided; there is a division which is not the division of labor, but
the division between play and work: the child plays at throwing
away his "toys," and the parents work at reassembling them,
which is often not easy. As if in this phase of the operation the
parents were not playing and the child were not working. He is
completely excused from working. Who would dream of accusing
him of this? But the work is not always easy, and one heaves a
little sigh. Why does he disperse, why does he send far away
everything he has at hand, and who and what?
The spool has not yet made its appearance. In a sense, it will
be only an example of the process Freud has just described. But it
will be an exemplary example, yielding a supplementary and
decisive "observation" for the interpretation. In the exemplary
example the child throws away and brings back to himself, dis-
perses and reassembles, gives and takes back by himself: he
reassembles the reassembling and the dispersion, the multiplic-
ity of agents, work and play, into a single agent, apparently, and
into a single object. This is what the grandfather will understand
as "a game," at the moment when all the strings are brought
back together, held in one hand, dispensing with the parents,
with their work or play which consisted in straightening up the
room.
The spool has not yet made its appearance. Until now Spiel-
zeug has designated only an aggregate, the set of toys, the unity
of a multiplicity that can be scattered, that the parents' work at
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 537

reassembling, precisely, and that the grandfather here reassem-

bles in one word. This collective unity is the apparatus of a game
that can dislocate itself: can change its place and fragment or
disperse itself. The word for things as a set, in this theory of the
set, is Zeug, the instrument, the tool, the product, the "thing,"
and, according to the same semantic transition as in French or in
English, the penis. I am not commenting on what Freud says, I
am not saying that Freud is saying: by dispersing his objects or
playthings into the distance the child not only separates himself
from his mother (as will be said further on, and even from his
father), but also, and primarily, from the supplementary complex
constituted by the maternal breast and his own penis, allowing
the parents, but not for long, to reassemble, to cooperate in order
to reassemble, to reassemble themselves, but not for long, in
order to reassemble what he wants to dissociate, send away,
separate, but not for long. If he separates himself from his Spiel-
zeug as if from himself and with the aim of allowing himself to
be reassembled, it is that he himself is also an aggregate whose
reassemblage can yield an entire combinatorial of sets. All those
who play or work at reassembling are participants. I am not
saying that Freud says this. But he will say, in one of the two
footnotes I have mentioned, that it is indeed himself or his image
that the child "plays" at making appear-disappear also. He is
part of his Spielzeug.
The spool has not yet made its appearance. Here it is, again
preceded by an interpretive anticipation: "As he did this [throw-
ing away his entire Spielzeug] he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-
out 0-0-0-0,' accompanied by an expression of interest and satis-
1

faction, which according to the common judgment 22 of his mother

and the writer of the present account [the daughter and the
father, the mother and the grandfather are here conjoined in the
same speculation] was not a mere interjection but represented
the German word 'fort' [gone, far away]. I eventually realized that
it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys
[Spielsachen] was to play 'gone' [fortsein] with them" (14-r s ).
Freud's intervention (I am not saying the grandfather's inter-
vention, but the intervention of whoever recounts what the ob-
server experienced, whoever finally realized that "it was a game":
538 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES I
there are at least three instances of the same "subject," the
narrator-speculator, the observer, the grandfather, the latter never
being openly identified with the two others by the two others,
etc.)-Freud's intervention deserves to give us pause. He re-
counts that as an observer he has also interpreted. And has named
Now, what does he call a game, rather than work, the work itself
consisting of reassembling? Well, paradoxically, he calls a game
the operation that consists in not playing with one's toys: he did
not employ them, he did not use (beniitze) his toys, he says, he
did not make them useful, utensiles, except by playing at their
being gone. The "game" thus consists in not playing with one's
toys, but in making them useful for another function, to wit,
being-gone. Such would be the deviation or teleological finality
of this game. But a teleology, a finality of distantiation with its
sights set on what, on whom? For what and for whom, this
utilization of that which is usually given as gratuitous or useless,
that is, play? What does this nongratuitousness yield? And for
whom? Perhaps not a single profit, nor even any profit at all, and
perhaps not for a single speculative agency. There is the teleology
of the interpreted operation and there is the teleology of the
interpretation. And the interpreters are many: the grandfather,
the said observer, the speculator, and the father of psychoanaly-
sis, here the narrator, and then, and then, conjoined to each of
these instances, she whose judgment would have concurred, in
coinciding fashion (iibereinstimmenden Urteil) to the extent of
being covered by it, with the father's interpretation.
This coincidence which conjoins the father and the daughter
in the interpretation of the 0-0-0-0 as fort is odd for more than
one reason. It is difficult to imagine the scene in detail, or even
to accredit its existence and everything recounted within it. But
it remains that Freud reports it: the mother and the observer are
somehow reassembled in order to make the same judgment on
the meaning of what their son and grandson articulated before
them, even for them. Try to figure out where the induction of
such an identity, such an identification of point of view, comes
from. But we can be sure that wherever it does come from, it has
come round and has bound the three characters in what must
more than ever be called the "same" speculation. They have
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 539

secretly named the "same" thing. In what language? Freud asks

himself no questions about the language into which he translates
the o/a. To grant it a semantic content bound to a determined
language (a given opposition of German words) and from there a
semantic content which surpasses language (the interpretation of
the child's behavior), is an operation impossible without multi-
ple and complex theoretical protocols. One might suspect that
the o/a is not limited to a simple formal opposition of values the
content of which could vary without being problematical. If this
variation is limited (which is what must be concluded from the
fact-if, at least, one is interested in it-that the father, the
daughter, and the mother find themselves reunited in the same
semantic reading), then one can put forward the following hy-
pothesis: there is some proper noun beneath all this, whether
one takes the proper noun in the figurative sense (any signified
whose signifier cannot vary or be translated into another signifier
without a loss of signification induces a proper noun effect), or in
the so-called literal, "proper" sense. I leave these hypotheses
open, but what seems certain to me is the necessity of formulat-
ing hypotheses on the conjoining interpretations of 0-0-0-01 that
is, o/a, in whatever language jbe it natural, universal, or formal),
the interpretations conjoining the father and the daughter, the
grandfather and the mother.
And the grandson and the son: for the two preceding genera-
tions have sought to be together, have been, says one of the
generations, conscious of being together in order to understand
in their common verdict what their child intended to have them
understand, and intended that they understand together. There is
nothing hypothetical or audacious about saying this; it is an
analytical reading of what Freud's text says explicitly. But we
know now what a tautology can bring back by gushing over.
And what if this were what the son, I mean the grandson, were
after, what if this superimposing coincidence in the judgment
(Urteil) were what he believed without knowing it, without
wanting it? The father is absent. He is far away. That is, since
one must always specify, one of the two fathers, the father of a
little boy so serious that his play consists in not playing with his
toys but in distancing them, playing only at their distantiation.
540 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

In order to make his play useful for himself. As for the father of
Sophie and of psychoanalysis, he is still there. Who is specu-
lating?
The spool still has not yet made its appearance. Here it is. To
send it off, the child was not lacking in address. 23
It follows immediately. "One day I made an observation which
confirmed my view. The child had a wooden spool 24 (Holzspule)
with a piece of string (Bindfaden) tied round it. It never occurred
to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and
play at its being a carriage, but rather he held the spool by the
string and with great address (Geschick) threw it over the edge of
his little curtained bed (or veiled bed, verhiingten Bettchens), so
that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expres-
sive (bedeutungsvolle, meaningful) '0-0-0-0.' He then pulled the
spool out of the bed again by the string and hailed its appearance
with a joyful 'Da' (there). This, then, was the complete game
(komplette SpieJ)-disappearance and return (Verschwinden und
Wiederkommen). As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which
was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no
doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act."
And with this word a call for something. A call for a footnote
that I will read presently.
"This, then," says Freud, "was the complete game." Which
immediately implies: this, then, is the complete observation, and
the complete interpretation of this game. Nothing is missing, the
game is saturable and saturated. If the completion were obvious
and certain, would Freud insist upon it, remark upon it as if he
quickly had to close, conclude, enframe? One suspects an incom-
pletion (in the object, or in its description) all the more in that:
(r) this is the scene of an interminable repeated supplementation,
as if it never finished completing itself, etc; and (2) there is
something like an axiom of incompletion in the structure of the
scene of writing. This is due at very least to the position of the
speculator as a motivated observer. Even if completion were
possible, it could neither appear for such an "observer" nor be
declared as such by him.
But these are generalities. They designate only the formal
conditions of a determined incompletion, the signifying absence
of a particularly pertinent given trait .. Which may be on the side
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 541

of the scene described, or on the side of the description, or in the

unconscious which binds the one to the other, their unconscious
that is shared, inherited, telecommunicated according to the same
teleology.
It speculates on the return, it is completed in coming back:
the greater pleasure, he says, although this spectacle is less di-
rectly seen, is the Wiederkommen, the re-tum. And yet, that
which thereby again becomes a revenant must, for the game to
be complete, be thrown away again, indefatigably. It speculates
on the basis of the return, on the departure of that which owes it
to itself to return. On what has come back from leaving or just
left again [A ce qui revient de partir ou vient de repartir}.
It is complete, he says.
And yet: he regrets that it does not roll along as it should roll
along. As it should have rolled along if he, himself, had been
holding the string.
Or all the strings. How would he, himself, have played with
the kind of yo-yo that is thrown in front of or beneath oneself,
and which returns as if by itself, on its own, by rolling itself up
anew? Which comes back as if by itself, if it has been sent off
correctly? One must know how to throw it in order to make it
return by itself, in other words in order to let it return. How
would the speculator himself have played? How would he have
rolled the thing, made it roll, let it roll? How would he have
manipulated this lasso? Of what would his address have con-
sisted?
He seems surprised, adding to this surprise a confident regret
that the good little boy never seemed to have the idea of pulling
the spool behind him and playing at its being a carriage: or rather
at its being a wagon (Wagen), a train. It is as if one could wager
(wagen again) that the speculator (whose contrary preference,
that is, railway phobia, Eisenbahn, is well enough known to put
us on the track) would himself have played choo-choo with one
of these "small objects" (kleinen Gegenstii.nde). Here then is the
first problem, the first perplexity of the father of the object or the
grandfather of the subject, of the father of the daughter (mother:
Ernst's object) or the grandfather of the little boy (Ernst as the
"subject" of the fort!da): but why doesn't he play train or car-
riage? Wouldn't that be more normal? And why doesn't he play
542 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

carriage by pulling the thing behind him? For the thing is a

vehicle in convoy. 25 If he had been playing in his grandson's place
(and therefore playing with his daughter, since the spool replaces
her, as he will say in the next paragraph, or at least, following
its/his thread, is but a trait or train leading to her, in order to
come just to depart from her again), the (grand)father would have
played carriage [I must be pardoned all these parentheses, the
(grand)father or the daughter (mother), they are necessary in order
to mark the syntax in erasure of the genealogical scene, the
occupation of all the places and the ultimate mainspring of what
I began by calling the athesis of Beyond . .. ): and since the game
is serious, this would have been more serious, says he, quite
seriously. Too bad that the idea never occurred to him !for in-
stance!) to pull the spool behind him on the floor, and thus to
play carriage with it: Es fi.el ihm nie ein, sie zum Beispiel am
Boden hinter sich herzuziehen, also Wagen mit ihr zu spielen,
sondern es warf. ... This would have been more serious, but the
idea never occurred to Ernst. Instead of playing on the floor (am
Boden), he insisted on putting the bed into the game, into play,
on playing with the thing over the bed, and also in the bed. Not
in the bed as the place where the child himself would be, for
contrary to what the text and the translation have often led many
to believe (and one would have to ask why), it appears he is not
in the bed at the moment when he throws the spool. He throws
it from outside the bed over its edge, over the veils or curtains
that surround its edge (Rand), from the other side, which quite
simply might be into the sheets. And in any event, it is from
"out of the bed" (zag . .. aus dem Bett heraus) that he pulls back
the vehicle in order to make it come back: da. The bed, then, is
fort, which perhaps contravenes all desire; but perhaps not fort
enough for the (grand)father who might have wished that Ernst
had played more seriously on the floor (am Boden) without both-
ering himself with the bed. But for both of them, the distancing
of the bed is worked upon by this da which divides and shares it:
too much or not enough. For the one or for the other.
What is to play train, for the jgrand)father? To speculate: it
would be never to throw the thing !but does the child ever throw
it without its being attached to a string?), that is, to keep it at a
distance continuously, but always at the same distance, the length
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 543

of the string remaining constant, making (letting) the thing dis-

place itself at the same time, and in the same rhythm, as oneself.
This trained train does not even have to come back [revenir], it
does not really leave. It has barely come to leave when it is going
to come back.
It is going. This is what would suit and go for the (grand)father-
speculator. Which enables him to be certain of the measure of
the thing only by depriving himself of an extra pleasure, the very
pleasure that he describes as the principal one for Ernst, to wit,
the second act, the return. He deprives himself of this pleasure
in order to spare himself the pain or the risk of the bet. And in
order not to put the desired bed into play.
To play carriage also indeed would be "to pull" the invested
object "behind him" (hinter sich herzuziehen), to keep the loco-
motive well in hand and to see the thing only by turning around.
One does not have it before one. As does Eurydice or the analyst.
For the speculator (the analyst) is obviously the first analysand.
The analysand-locomotive for whom the law of listening is sub-
stituted for the law of looking.

It is not for us to judge the normality of the child's choice, and

we know about it only according to what the ascendant reports.
But we might find the ascendant's inclination 26 strange. Every-
thing occurs around a bed and has never occurred except around
a bed surrounded with veils or curtains: what is called a "skirted
crib." If the child were indeed outside the bed but near it, occu-
pied with it, which his grandfather seems to reproach him for,
then these curtains, these veils, this cloth, this "skirt" that hides
the bars, form the inner chamber of the fort/ da, the double screen
which divides it inside itself, dividing its internal and its external
aspects, but dividing it only by reassembling it with itself, stick-
ing it to itself doubly, fort:da I am calling this, once more, and
necessarily, the hymen 27 of the fort:da. The veil of this "skirt"
is the interest of the bed and the fort:da of all these generations.
I will not venture saying: it is Sophie. How could Ernst have
seriously played carriage using a veiled bed, all the while pulling
the vehicle behind him? One asks oneself. Perhaps quite simply
it was his duty not to do anything with the object (obstacle,
screen, mediation) named bed, or edge of the bed, or limen or
544 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

hymen, his duty to stay off to one side completely, and thereby
to leave the place free, or to stay inside completely las is often
believed), which would have set loose less laborious identifica-
tions. But in order to have the Spielzeug or "small object" behind
onself, with or without bed, in order to have the toy represent
the daughter !mother) or the father [the son-in-law, as will be
envisaged further on, and the (grand)father's syntax easily skips
the parenthesis of a generation with a step to the side], one must
have ideas. Follow the comings and goings of all these fils (strings,
sons). The grandfather regrets that his grandson did not have
them, these (wise or foolish) ideas of a game without a bed,
unless it be the idea of a bed without a curtain, which does not
mean without hymen. He regrets that his grandson has not had
them, but he himself has not failed to have them. He even
considers them natural ideas, and this is what would better com-
plete the description, if not the game. By the same token, if one
might say, he regrets that his grandson has indeed had the ideas
that he has had for himself. For if he has had them for himself, it
is indeed that his grandson has not failed to have them for him
also.

(This entire syntax is made possible by the graphics of the

margin or the hymen, of the border and the step, such as was
remarked elsewhere. I will not exploit it here.)
For, in the end, was this bed with so necessary and so undecid-
able a border a couch? Not yet, despite all the Orphism of a
speculation. And yet.
What the grandjfather-)speculator calls the complete game,
thus, would be the game in its two phases, in the duality, the
redoubled duality of its phases: disappearance/re-tum, absence/
re-presentation. And what binds the game to itself is the re- of
the return, the additional turn of repetition and re-appearance.
He insists upon the fact that the greatest quantity of pleasure is
in the second phase, in the re-turn which orients the whole, and
without which nothing would come. Revenance, that is, return-
ing, orders the entire teleology. Which permits one to anticipate
that this operation, in its so-called complete unity, will be en-
tirely handed over to the authority of the PP. Far from being
checked by repetition, the PP also seeks to recall itself in the
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 545

repetition of appearing, of presence, of representation, and, as we

shall see, via a repetition that is mastered, that verifies and
confirms the mastery in which it consists (which is also that of
the PP). The mastery of the PP would be none other than mastery
in general: there is not a Herrschaft of the PP, there is Herrschaft
which is distanced from itself only in order to reappropriate
itself: a tauto-teleology which nevertheless makes or lets the
other return in its domestic specter. Which thus can be foreseen.
What will return [reviendra], in having already come, not in
order to contradict the PP, nor to oppose itself to the PP, but to
mine the PP as its proper stranger, to hollow it into an abyss
from the vantage of an origin more original than it and indepen-
dent of it, older than it within it, will not be, under the name of
the death drive or the repetition compulsion, an other master or
a counter-master, but something other than mastery, something
completely other. In order to be something completely other, it
will have to not oppose itself, will have to not enter into a
dialectical relation with the master {life, the PP as life, the living
PP, the PP alive). It will have to not engage a dialectic of master
and slave, for example. This nonmastery equally will have to not
enter into a dialectical relation with death, for example, in order
to become, as in speculative idealism, the "true master."
I am indeed saying the PP as mastery in general. At the point
where we are now, the allegedly "complete game" no longer
concerns any given object in its determination, for example the
spool or what it supplements. In question is the re- in general,
the returned or the returning [le revenu ou le revenant]-to re-
turn [revenir] in general. In question is the repetition of the
couple disappearance-reappearance, not only reappearance as a
moment of the couple, but the reappearance of the couple which
must return. One must make return the repetition of that which
returns and must do so on the basis of its returning. Which,
therefore, is no longer simply this or that, such and such an
object which must depart/return, or which departs-in-order-to-
return, but is departure-returning itself, in other words, the pre-
sentation of itself of representation, the return to-itself of return-
ing. No longer an object which would re-present itself, but re-
presentation, the return of itself of the return, the return to itself
of the return. This is the source of the greatest pleasure, and the
546 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

accomplishment of the "complete game," he says: that is, that

the re-turning re-turns, that the re-turn is not only of an object
but of itself, or that it is its own object, that what causes to
return itself returns to itself. This is indeed what happens, and
happens without the object itself re-become the subject of the
fortlda, the disappearance-reappearance of itself, the object reap-
propriated from itself: the reappearance, one can say in French,
of one's own "bobine" [see note 24], with all the strings in hand.
This is how we fall upon the first of the two footnotes. It is called
for by the "second act" to which "the greater pleasure" is un-
questionably attached. What does the note say? That the child
plays the utility of the fort!da with something that is no longer
an object-object, a supplementary spool supplementing some-
thing else, but with a supplementary spool of the supplementary
spool, with his own "bobine" with himself as object-subject
within the mirror/without the mirror. Thus: "A further observa-
tion subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day
the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her
return (Wiederkommen) was met with the words, 'Baby 0-0-0-0!'
which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however
(Es ergab sich aber bald), that during this long period of solitude
(Alleinsein), the child had found a method of making himself
disappear (verschwinden zu lassen). He had discovered his reflec-
tion in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the
ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-
image fort [gone away] (15, n. r).
This time, one no longer knows at what moment it came to
pass, led one to think (Es ergab sich .. .), or for whom. For the
grandfather-observer still present in the absence of his daughter
(mother)? Upon the return of the latter, and conjointly again? Did
the "observer" still need her to be there in order to reassure
himself of this conjunction? Does he not make her return him-
self without needing her to be there in order to have her at his
side? And what if the child knew this without needing to have
this knowledge?
Therefore he is playing at giving himself the force of his dis-
appearance, of his "fort" in the absence of his mother, in his own
absence. A capitalized pleasure which does without what it needs,
an ideal capitalization, capitalization itself: by idealization. One
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud'" 547

provides oneself (and dispenses with) the head of what one needs
by doing without it in order to have it. A capitalized pleasure:
the child identifies himself with the mother since he disappears
as she does, and makes her return with himself, by making
himself return without making anything but himself, her in him-
self, return. All the while remaining, as close as possible, at the
side of the PP which (who) never absents itself (himself) and thus
provides (for himself) the greatest pleasure. And the enjoyment
is coupled. He makes himself disappear, he masters himself sym-
bolically, he plays with the dummy, the dead man, as if with
himself, and he makes himself reappear henceforth without a
mirror, in his disappearance itself, maintaining himself like his
mother at the other end of the line. He speaks to himself tele-
phonically, he calls himself, recalls himself, "spontaneously"
affects himself with his presence-absence in the presence-ab-
sence of his mother. He makes himself re-. Always according to
the law of the PP. In the grand speculation of a PP which (who)
never seems to be absent itself-(himself) from itself-(himself). Or
from anyone else. The telephonic or telescripted recall provides
the "movement" by contracting itself, by signing a contract with
itself.
Let us mark a pause after this first footnote.
For in having been played out for all ages, all of this has just
begun.

"La S6ance continue"

(Return to Sender, the Telegram, and the Generation of
the Sons-In-Law)

The serious play of the fort!da couples absence and presence in

the re- of returning [revenir]. It overlaps them, it institutes repe-
tition as their relation, relating them the one and the other, the
one to the other, the one over or under the other. Thereby it
plays with itself usefully, as if with its own object. Thus is
confirmed the abyssal "overlapping" that I proposed above: of
the object or the content of Beyond . .. , of what Freud is suppos-
edly writing, describing, analyzing, questioning, treating, etc.,
and, on the other hand, the system of his writing gestures, the
scene of writing that he is playing or that plays itself. With him,
548 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

without him, by him, or all at once. This is the same "complete

game" of the fort!da. Freud does with !without) the object of his
text exactly what Ernst does with (without) his spool. And if the
game is called complete on one side and the other, we have to
envisage an eminently symbolic completion which itself would
be formed by these two completions, and which therefore would
be incomplete in each of its pieces and consequently would be
completely incomplete when the two incompletions, related and
joined the one to the other, start to multiply themselves, supple-
menting each other without completing each other. Let us admit
that Freud is writing. He writes that he is writing, he describes
what he is describing, but this is also what he is doing, he does
what he is describing, to wit, what Ernst is doing: fort!da with
his spool [bobine}. And each time that one says to do, one must
specify: to allow to do (lassen). Freud does not do fort!da, inde-
fatigably, with the object that the PP is. He does it with himself,
he recalls himself. Following a detour of the tele, 28 this time an
entire network. Just as Ernst, in recalling the object (mother,
thing, whatever) to himself, immediately comes himself to recall
himself in an immediately supplementary operation, so the spec-
ulating grandfather, in describing or recalling this or that, recalls
himself. And thereby makes what is called his text, enters into a
contract with himself in order to hold onto all the strings, the
sons [fl.ls} of the descendance. No less than of the ascendance. An
incontestable ascendance. The incontestable is also that which
needs no witness. And which, nevertheless, cannot not be granted
its rights: no countertestimony appears to have any weight before
this teleological auto-institution. The net [fl.let} is in place, and
one pulls on a string [fill only by getting one's hand, foot, or the
rest, caught. It is a lasso or a lace. 29 Freud has not positioned it.
Let us say that he has known how to go about things, to get
caught in it [s'y prendrej. But nothing has been said yet, nothing
is known about this knowledge, for he himself has been caught
in advance by the catching. He could not have or foresee this
knowledge entirely, such was the condition for the overlapping.
Initially this is imprinted in an absolutely formal and general
way. In a kind of a priori. The scene of the fort!da, whatever its
exemplary content, is always in the process of describing in
advance, as a deferred overlapping, the scene of its own descrip-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 549

tion. The writing of a fort!da is always a fortlda, and the PP and

its death drive are to be sought in the exhausting of this abyss. It
is an abyss of more than one generation, as is also said of com-
puters. And is so, as I said, in an absolutely formal and general
way, in a kind of a priori, but the a priori of an aftereffect. In
effect, once the objects can substitute for each other to the point
of laying bare the substitutive structure itself, the formal struc-
ture yields itself to reading: what is going on no longer concerns
a distancing rendering this or that absent, and then a rapproche-
ment rendering this or that into presence; what is going on
concerns rather the distancing of the distant and the nearness of
the near, the absence of the absent or the presence of the present.
But the distancing is not distant, nor the nearness near, nor the
absence absent or the presence present. The fortsein of which
Freud is speaking is not any more fort than Dasein is da. Whence
it follows (for this is not immediately the same thing), that by
virtue of the Entfernung and the pas in question elsewhere, the
fort is not any more distant than the da is here. An overlap
without equivalence: fort:da.
Freud recalls himself. His memories and himself. As Ernst
does with the glass and without the glass. But his speculative
writing also recalls itself, something else and itself. And specu-
larity above all is not, as is often believed, simply reappropria-
tion. No more than the da.
The speculator himself recalls himself. He describes what he
is doing. Without doing so explicitly, of course, and everything I
am describing here can do without a thoroughly auto-analytic
calculation, whence the interest and necessity of the thing. It
speculates without the calculation itself analyzing itself, and
from one generation to another.
He recalls himself. Who and what? Who? himself, of course.
But we cannot know if this "himself" can say "myself"; and,
even if it did say "myself," which me then would come to speak.
The fort:da already would suffice to deprive us of any certainty
on this subject. This is why, if a recourse, and a massive recourse,
to the autobiographical is necessary here, the recourse must be
of a new kind. This text is autobiographical, but in a completely
different way than has been believed up to now. First of all, the
autobiographical does not overlap the auto-analytical without
550 TELE-TYPES jYES, YES)

limit. Next, it demands a reconsideration of the entire topos of

the autos. Finally, far from entrusting us to our familiar knowl-
edge of what autobiography means, it institutes, with its own
strange contract, a new theoretical and practical charter for any
possible autobiography.
Beyond . .. , therefore, is not an example of what is allegedly
already known under the name of autobiography. It writes auto-
biography, and one cannot conclude from the fact that in it an
"author" recounts a bit of his life that the document is without
value as truth, science, or philosophy. A "domain" is opened in
which the inscription, as it is said, of a subject in his text jso
many notions to be reelaborated) is also the condition for the
pertinence and performance of a text, of what the text "is worth"
beyond what is called an empirical subjectivity, supposing that
such a thing exists as soon as it speaks, writes, and substitutes
one object for another, substitutes and adds itself as an object to
another, in a word, as soon as it supplements. The notion of truth
is quite incapable of accounting for this performance.
The autobiographical, then, is not a previously opened space
within which the speculating grandfather tells a story, a given
story about what has happened to him in his life. What he re-
counts is autobiography. The fort:da in question here, as a partic-
ular story, is an autobiography which instructs: every autobiog-
raphy is the departure/return of a fort/ da, for example this one.
Which one? The fort!da of Ernst? Of his mother conjoined with
his grandfather in the reading of his own fort!da/ Of her father,
in other words of his grandfather? Of the great speculator? Of the
father of psychoanalysis? Of the author of Beyond . .. ? But how
can one accede to the latter without a spectral analysis of all the
others?
Elliptically, lacking more time, I will say that the graphics,
the autobiographies of Beyond . .. , of the word beyond ( ;enseits
in general, the step beyond in general), imprints a prescription
upon the fort:da, that of the overlapping by means of which
proximity distances itself in abyme (Ent-fernung). The death
drive is there, in the PP, that activates itself with a fort:da.
Freud, it will be said, recalls himself. Who? What? Trivially,
first of all, he recalls himself, he remembers himself. He tells
himself and tells us an incident which remains in his memory,
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 551

in his conscious memory. The remembrance of a scene, which is

really multiple, consisting as it does of repetitions, a scene that
happened to another, to two others (one male, one female), but
who are his daughter and his grandson. His eldest grandson, let
us not forget, but who does not bear the name of the maternal
grandfather. He says that he has been the regular, durable, trust-
worthy "observer" of this scene. He will have been a particularly
motivated, present, intervening observer. Under a roof which
although not necessarily his, nor simply a roof in common,
nevertheless belongs to his own, almost, with an almost that
perhaps prevents the economy of the operation from closing itself
and therefore conditions the operation. Under what headings can
one say that in recalling what happens (on) to the subject (of)
Ernst he is recalling himself, recalling that it happened to him?
Under several interlaced, serial headings, in the "same" chain of
writing.
First, he recalls to himself that Ernst recalls (to himself) his
mother: he recalls Sophie. He recalls to himself that Ernst recalls
his daughter to himself in recalling his mother to himself. The
equivocal syntax of the possessive here is not merely an artifact
of grammar. Ernst and his grandfather are in a genealogical situ-
ation such that the most possessive of the two can always be
relayed by the other. Whence the possibility immediately opened
by this scene of a permutation both of places and of what indeed
must be understood as genitives: the mother of the one is not
only the daughter of the other, she is also his mother; the daugh-
ter of the one is not only the mother of the other, she is also his
daughter, etc. Even at the moment when the scene, if this can be
said, took place, and even before Freud undertook to relate it, he
was in a situation to identify himself, as is all too readily said,
with his grandson, and, playing both colors, to recall his mother
in recalling his daughter. This identification between the grand-
father and the grandson is attested to as an ordinary privilege,
but, and we will soon have more than one proof of this, it could
be particularly spectacular for the forebear of psychoanalysis.
I have just said: "Already even at the moment when the scene,
if this can be said, took place." And I add a fortiori at the moment
of desiring to write about it, or of sending oneself a letter about
it, so that the letter makes its return after having instituted its
552 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

postal relay, which is the very thing that makes it possible for a
letter not to arrive at its destination, and that makes this possi-
bility-of-never-arriving divide the structure of the letter from the
outset. Because (for example) there would be neither postal relay
nor analytic movement if the place of the letter were not divisi-
ble and if a letter always arrived at its destination. I am adding a
fortiori, but let it be understood that the a fortiori was prescribed
in the supplementary graphics of the overlapped taking place of
what too hastily would be called the primary scene.
The a fortiori of the a priori makes itself (a bit more) legible in
the second note of which I spoke above. It was written afterward,
and recalls that Sophie is dead: the daughter (mother) recalled by
the child died soon after. Was in a completely different way
recalled elsewhere. Before translating this supplementary note, it
must be situated in the itinerary. It follows the first note only by
a page, but in the interval a page has been turned. Freud has
already concluded that no certain decision can be reached from
the analysis of so singular a case. Such is his conclusion after a
paragraph full of peripateias, a paragraph which begins by con-
firming the rights of the PP: this is the moment when the inter-
pretation (Deutung) of the game explains how the child compen-
sates himself, indemnifies himself, reimburses himself for his
pain (the disappearance of the mother) by playing at dis-reappear-
ance. But Freud immediately distances, sends off, this interpre-
tation insofar as it has recourse to the PP. For if the mother's
departure is necessarily disagreeable, how can it be explained
according to the PP that the child reproduces it, and even more
often in its disagreeable phase (distancing) than in its agreeable
one (return)? It is here that Freud is obliged, curiously, to modify
and to complete the previous description. He must, and in effect
does, say that one phase of the game is more insistent and fre-
quent than the other: the completion is unbalanced, and Freud
had not mentioned it. Above all, he tells us now that the "first
act, 11 the distancing, the Fortgehen, was in fact independent: it
"was staged as a game in itself 11 ("fur sich allein als Spiel inszen-
iert wurde"). Distancing, departure, is therefore a complete game,
a game quasi-complete unto itself in the great complete game.
We were correct, even more correct than we said, not to take the
allegation of completion as coin of the realm. Thus, it is because
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 553

distancing is itself an independent and more insistent game that

the explanation by the PP must once more fortgehen, go away,
distance itself in speculative rhetoric. And this is why no deci-
sion can be reached from the analysis of such a case.
But after this paragraph Freud does not simply renounce the
PP. He tries it twice more, after the final resigned suspension of
it in this chapter. 1. He tries to see in the active assumption of a
passive situation jsince the child is unable to affect his mother's
displacement) a satisfaction land therefore a pleasure), but a sat-
isfaction of a "drive for mastery" (Bemii.chtigungstrieb), which
Freud curiously suggests would be "independent" of whether the
memory was pleasurable or not. Thus would be announced a
certain beyond of the PP. But why would such a drive !which
appears in other texts by Freud, but which plays a strangely
erased role here) be foreign to the PP? Why could it not be
juxtaposed with a PP that is so often designated, at least meta-
phorically, as mastery (Herrschaft)~ What is the difference be-
tween a principle and a drive? Let us leave these questions for a
while. 2. After this try, Freud again attempts "another interpre-
tation," another recourse to the PP. It is a question of seeing it
function negatively. There would be pleasure in making disap-
pear; the sending away that distances the object would be satis-
fying because there would be a !secondary) interest in its disap-
pearance. What interest? Here, the grandfather gives two curiously
associated or coupled examples: the sending away of his daughter
!mother) by his grandson and/or the sending away of his son-in-
law !father), who here-a significant fact and context-makes
his first appearance in the analysis. The son-in-law-father ap-
pears only to be sent away, and only at the moment when the
grandfather attempts a negative interpretation of the PP accord-
ing to which the· grandson sends his father off to war in order not
to be "disturbed in his exclusive possession of his mother." This
is the sentence that calls for the note on Sophie's death. Before
translating this paragraph on the two negative functionings of
the PP, note included, I am extracting a notation from the preced-
ing paragraph. I have extracted it only because it did appear
dissociable to me, like a parasite from its immediate context.
Perhaps it is best read as an epigraph for what is to follow. In the
preceding paragraph it resonates like a sound come from else-
554 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

where, that nothing in the preceding sentence calls for, and that
nothing in the following sentence develops: a kind of assertive
murmur that peremptorily answers an inaudible question. Here
it is then, to be read without premises or consequences: "It is of
course naturally indifferent (natiirlich gleichgiiltig) from the point
of view of judging the affective nature of the game whether the
child invented it himself or made it his own on some outside
suggestion (Anregung)." (15). 30 Oh? Why? Naturally indifferent?
Really! Why? What is a suggestion in this case? What are its
byways? From whence would it come? That the child made his
own, appropriated (zu eigen gemach), the desire of someone else,
man or woman, or the desire of the two others conjoined, or that
inversely he gave occasion to the appropriation of his own game
(since the appropriation can take place in both senses, either
hypothesis being excluded)-all this is "naturally indifferent"?
Really! And even if it were so for the "affective evaluation,"
which therefore would remain the same in both cases, would this
be equivalent for the subject or subjects to whom the affect is
related? What is incontestable is that all these questions have
been deferred, distanced, dissociated.
I now translate the attempt at another interpretation, concern-
ing the negative strength of the PP. In it, the successive sending
away of the mother and the father is pleasurable and calls for a
note: "But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throw-
ing away (Wegwerfen) the object so that it was 'gone' (fort) might
satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his
actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from
him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: 'All right,
then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away myself.' A
year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game
used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the
floor, exclaiming: 'Go to the war! [Geh in K(r)ieg!, the r in paren-
theses taking into account the actual and reconstituted pronun-
ciation of the child]. He had heard at that time that his absent
father was 'at the war,' and was far from regretting his absence;
on the contrary he gave the clearest indications that he had no
desire to be disturbed in his exclusive possession of his mother"
(16). Call for a note on Sophie's death. Before coming to it, I
emphasize the certainty with which Freud differentiates be-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 555

tween, if it can be put thus, the double sending away. In both

cases, the daughter [mother] is desired. In the first case, the
satisfaction of the sending away is secondary (vengeance, spite);
in the second it is primary. "Stay where you are, as far away as
possible," signifies (according to the PP) "I prefer that you come
back" in the case of the mother, and "I prefer that you do not
come back" in the case of the father. This, at least, is the grand-
father's reading, his reading of the indications which, he says, do
not deceive, "the clearest indications" (die deutlichsten An-
zeichen). If they do not deceive, actually, one might still ask
whom they do not deceive, and concerning whom. In any event,
concerning a daughter (mother) who should stay where she is,
daughter, mother. Wife, perhaps, but not divided, or divided be-
tween the two Freuds [Jes deux Freud) in their "exclusive posses-
sion," divided between her father and her offspring at the mo-
ment when the latter distances the parasite of his own name, the
name of the father as the name of the son-in-law.
The name which is also borne by his other brother, the rival.
Who was born in the interval, shortly before the death of the
daughter (mother). Here, finally, is the second note, the supple-
mentary note written afterward. The date of its inscription will
be important for us: "When this child was five and three-quar-
ters, his mother died. Now that she was really fort l'o-o-o') [only
three times on this single occasion], the little boy showed no
signs of grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had
been born and had roused him to violent jealousy" (16).
This cadence might lead one to believe that a dead woman is
more easily preserved: jealousy is appeased, and idealization in-
teriorizes the object outside the rival's grasp. Sophie, then,
daughter there, mother here, is dead, taken from and returned to
every "exclusive possession." Freud can have the desire to recall
(her) (to himself) and to undertake all the necessary work for her
mourning. In order to speak of this one could mobilize the entire
analysis of Mourning and Melancholia (published several years
before, three at most) and the entire descendance of this essay. I
will not do so here.
In the most crushing psychobiographical style, there has been
no failure to associate the problematic of the death drive with
Sophie's death. One of the aims has been to reduce the psycho-
556 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

analytic significance of this so ill-received "speculation" to a

more or less reactive episode. Several years later, will not Freud
himself say that he had somewhat "detached" himself from Be-
yond . .. ? But he had also foreseen the suspicion, and the haste
with which he counteracts it is not designed to dispel it. Sophie
dies in 1920, the very year in which her father publishes Beyond
... On July 18, 1920, he writes to Eitingon: "The 'Beyond' is
finally finished. You will be able to certify that it was half fin-
ished when Sophie was -alive and flourishing." 31 He knows in
fact, and says to Eitingon, that "many people will shake their
heads over it {Beyond . .. j." 32 Jones recalls this request to bear
witness and wonders about Freud's insistence upon his "unruf-
fled conscience over it {Beyond)": is there not here some "inner
denial"? 33 Schur, who can hardly be suspected of wanting to save
Beyond ... from such an empirico-biographical reduction jhe is
among those who would seek to exclude Beyond ... from the
corpus), nevertheless affirms that the supposition of a link be-
tween the event and the work is "unfounded." However, he
specifies that the term "death drive" appears "shortly after the
deaths of Anton van Freund and Sophie." 34

For us, there is no question of accrediting such an empiricobio-

graphical connection between the "speculation" of Beyond ...
and the death of Sophie. No question of accrediting even the
hypothesis of this connection. The passage we are seeking is
otherwise, and more labyrinthine, of another labyrinth and an-
other crypt. However, one must begin by acknowledging this: for
his part, Freud admits that the hypothesis of such a connection
has a meaning to the extent to which he envisages and antici-
pates it, in order to defend himself against it. It is this anticipa-
tion and this defense that have meaning for us, and this is where
we start to seek. On 18 December 1923 Freud writes to Wittels,
the author of a Sigmund Freud, His Personality, His Teaching,
and His School: "I certainly would have stressed the connection
between the death of the daughter and the Concepts of the fen-
seits in any analytic study on someone else. Yet still it is wrong.
The fenseits was written in 1919, when my daughter was young
and blooming, she died in 1920. In September 1919 I left the
manuscript of the little book with some friends in Berlin for their
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 557

perusal, it lacked then only the part on mortality or immortality

of the protozoa. Probability is not always the truth. " 35
Freud therefore admits a probability. But what truth could be
in question here? Where is the truth of a fort:da from which
everything derives/drifts away (derive), including the concept of
truth?
I will confine myself to "overlapping" Freud's work after So-
phie's definitive Fortgehen with the work of his grandson as
Beyond ... will have reported it.
1. The irreparable wound as a narcissistic injury. All the let-
ters of this period speak of the feeling of an "irreparable narcissis-
tic injury" (letter to Ferenczi, 4 February 19201 less than two
weeks after Sophie's death). 36
2. But once she is fort, Sophie can indeed stay where she is. It
is a "loss to be forgotten" (to Jones, 8 February). She is dead "as if
she had never been" (27 January, to Pfister, less than a week after
Sophie's death). "As if she had never been" can be understood
according to several intonations, but it must be taken into ac-
count that one intonation always traverses the other. And also
that the "daughter" is not mentioned in the phrase: "snatched
away from glowing health, from her busy life as a capable mother
and loving wife, in four or five days, as if she had never been." 37
Therefore the work goes on, everything continues, fort-geht one
might say. La seance continue. 38 This is literally, and in French
in the text, what he writes to Ferenczi in order to inform him of
his mourning: "My wife is quite overwhelmed. I think: La se-
ance continue. But it was a little much for one week." 39 What
week? Watch the numbers. We had pointed out the strange and
artificial composition of Beyond . . . in seven chapters. Here,
Sophie, who was called "the Sunday child" by her parents, is
snatched away in "four or five days," although "we had been
worried about her for two days," starting with the arrival of the
alarming news, on the very day of von Freund's burial. This is
the same week, then, as the death of von Freund, which we
know, at least via the story of the ring [requested by the widow
of the man who was to have been a member of the "Committee"
of seven, where he was replaced by Eitingon, to whom Freud gave
the ring that he himself wore] 40 was yet another wound in what
I will call Freud's alliance. The "Sunday child" is dead in a week
558 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

after seven years of marriage. Seven years-is this not enough

for a son-in-law? The "inconsolable husband," as we soon will
see, will have to pay for this. For the moment the "seance"
continues: "Please don't worry about me. Apart from feeling
rather more tired I am the same. The death, painful as it is, does
not affect my attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for
the loss of our sons; now it is our daughter .... 'The unvaried,
still returning hour of duty' [Schiller], and 'the dear lovely habit
of living' [Goethe] will do their bit toward letting everything go
on as before" (to Ferenczi, 4 February 1920, less than two weeks
laterJ. 41 On 27 May, to Eitingon: "I am now correcting and com-
pleting 'Beyond,' that is, of the pleasure principle, and am once
again in a productive phase .... All merely [a matter ofJ mood,
as long as it lasts." 4 2
3. Third "overlapping" characteristic: ambivalence concern-
ing the father, the father of Ernst, that is, the son-in-law of the
grandfather, and the husband of Sophie. The battle for the "exclu-
sive possession" of the daughter (mother) rages on all sides, and
two days after her decease (Fortgehen), Freud writes to Pfister:
"Sophie leaves behind two boys, one aged six and the other
thirteen months [the one Ernst would have been jealous of, as of
his father], and an inconsolable husband [indeed] who will have
to pay dearly for the happiness of these seven years ... I do as
much work as I can, and am grateful for the distraction. The loss
of a child seems to be a grave blow to one's narcissism; as for
mourning, that will no doubt come later ... " 43 The work of
mourning no doubt comes later, but the work on Beyond ... was
not interrupted for a single day. This letter is situated between
Sophie's death and cremation. If the work is a "distraction," it is
that he is not just working on just anything. This interval be-
tween the death and the cremation (a form of Fortgehen which
can only have quite singular effects on a work of mourning) is
marked by a story about trains and even of children's trains, an
anecdote imprinted on all of Freud's letters of this week. No
train to go to the deceased, she who is already gone (fort), before
going up in ashes. A letter to Binswanger first alludes to von
Freund's death: "We buried him on 22 January. The same night
we received a disquieting telegram from our soncin-law Halber-
stadt in Hamburg. My daughter Sophie, aged 26, mother of two
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 559

boys, was stricken with the grippe; on 25 January she died, after
a four days' illness. At that time our railroads were shut down,
and we could not even go there. Now my deeply distressed wife
is preparing for the trip, but the new unrest in Germany makes it
doubtful that this intention can be carried out. Since then a
heavy oppression has been weighing on all of us, which also
affects my capacity for work. Neither of us has got over the
monstrous fact of children dying before their parents. Next sum-
mer-this will answer your friendly invitation-we want to be
together somewhere with the two orphans and the inconsolable
husband whom we have loved like a son for seven years. If this is
possible!" 44 Is it possible? And in the letter to Pfister I have
already cited in order to point out the allusion to the "seven
years" and to the "distraction" of work, the problem of the train
to the deceased is posed again, placed in a differentiated network:
" ... as if she had never been. We had been worried about her for
two days, but were still hopeful [will she come back?]. From a
distance it is so difficult to judge. The distance still remains. We
could not, as we wished to, go to her at once when the first
alarming news came, because there were no trains, not even a
children's train. The undisguised brutality of our time weighs
heavily on us. Our poor Sunday child is to be cremated tomor-
row. Not till the day after tomorrow will our daughter Mathilde
and her husband, thanks to an unexpected concatenation of cir-
cumstances, be able to set off for Hamburg in an Entente train.
At least our son-in-law was not alone. Two of our sons who were
in Berlin are already with him ... " ("Children from starving
Austria were sent abroad by an international children's aid asso-
ciation," notes Schur.) 45
The "inconsolable husband who will have to pay dearly for
the happiness of these seven years" will not have remained alone
with the deceased. Freud is represented by his own, despite the
suspension of the trains, by another daughter and two sons, bear-
ers of the name (recall his preferred game-the train kept at a
constant distance).
The classical institution of a science should have been able to
do without the Freuds' name. Or at least should have made of its
forgetting the condition and proof of its transmission, its proper
inheritance. This is what Freud believed or affected to believe,
560 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

half believed, as in the classical model of science, the model

which he fundamentally will have never renounced playing at
for psycholanalysis. Two weeks before Sophie's death, he writes
to Jones. Havelock Ellis has just maintained that Freud is a great
artist, and not a scientist. Keeping to the same categories, the
same oppositions, the very ones that we are putting to the test
here, Freud makes a rejoinder. In it, the great speculator in sum
declares himself ready to pay for science with his own, proper
name, to pay the insurance premium with his own name. "This
[what Ellis saysJ is all wrong. I am sure in a few decades my name
will be wiped away and our results will last" 46 (February 12,
1920). To pay for (the) science (of) with his proper name. To pay,
as I said, the insurance premium with his own name. And to be
able to say "we" ("our discoveries") while signing by himself. It
is as if he did not know, already, that in paying for science with
his proper name, it is also the science of his proper name that he
is paying for, that he pays himself with a postal money order sent
to himself. For this operation it suffices I!) to produce the neces-
sary postal relay. The science of his proper name: a science which
for once is essentially inseparable, as a science, from something
like a proper name [nom propre], as an effect of a proper name
which the science allegedly accounts for (in return) by making
its accounts to it. But the science of his proper name [nom
propre] is also that which remains to be done, as the necessary
return to the origin of and the condition for such a science. Now,
the speculation will have consisted-perhaps-in allegedly pay-
ing in advance, paying as dearly as necessary, the charges for
such a return to sender. This is a calculation without foundation,
for the abyssal devaluation or surplus value ruin it, and ruin even
its structure. And yet there must have been a way to bind his
name, the name of his own (for this cannot be done alone), to
this ruin, a way to speculate on the ruin of his name (new life,
new science) which preserves what it loses. No one any longer
has to be there in order to preserve, but it preserves itself in the
name which for itself preserves it. Who? What? It remains to be
had/seen [Reste as'avoir].
4. Let us continue to analyze the "overlapping" structure of
the Fortgehen. Freud, in his name, recalls his daughter (his "fa-
vorite" daughter, let us not forget, the one whose image pre-
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 561

served in a medallion around his wrist he will show to a female

patient: from his hand, held by a kind of band, she will have
followed, preceded, accompanied the entire movement), and re-
calls his grandson. Within the fort:da, identification in every
sense passes through the relay of the structural identification
with the grandson. This privileged identification once more will
be paid for by an event that is exemplary for more than one
reason. In itself this event implies Ernst's younger brother, the
very one who exasperated, like another son-in-law, the jealousy
of the older brother, a jealousy very comprehensible to and well
understood by the grandfather. The "exclusive possession" of the
daughter (mother) is at stake. This exemplary event indeed con-
firms that in its "overlapping" the fort:da leads autobiographical
specularity into an autothanatography that is in advance expro-
priated into heterography. In 1923, the year in which he warns
Wittels against any probabilistic speculation on the relation be-
tween Beyond ... and Sophie's death, what happens? The cancer
of the mouth reveals its malign and fatal character. First of the
thirty-three operations. Freud had already asked Deutsch to help
him "disappear from the world with decency" when the time
came. In 1918 he already thought.that he was going to die (in
February 1918, as you know he had always believed), but then
recalled (himself to) his mother: 11My mother will be eighty-three
this year, and is now rather shaky. Sometimes I think I shall feel
a little freer when she dies, because the idea of her having to be
told of my death is something from which one shrinks back." 47
All speculation, as we said above, implies the terrifying possibil-
ity of this usteron proteron 48 of the generations. When the face
without face, name without name, of the mother returns, in the
end, one has what I called in Glas the logic of obsequence. The
mother buries all her own. She assists whoever calls herself her
mother and follows all burials.
In 1923, then, first operation on the mouth. On the grandfa-
ther's mouth, yes, but also, almost at the same time, on Hei-
nerle's (Heinz Rudolph) mouth, Sophie's second son, Ernst's
younger brother. Tonsils. He is the preferred grandson, the pre-
ferred son of the preferred daughter. His grandfather considered
him, says Jones, 11the most intelligent child he had ever encoun-
tered." (He did not think as much of Ernst, the older brother.)
562 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

They talk together about their operation, as if it were the same,

of their mouth, as if it were the same, the mouth eating itself
and speaking through what it eats: "'I can already eat crusts.
Can you too?' " 49
Following the operation, and then weakened by miliary tuber-
culosis, less resistant than his grandfather, Heinerle dies. On 19
June 1923: Freud is seen to cry. For the only time. The following
month he confides to Ferenczi that he feels depressed for the first
time in his life. Several years later, in 1926, Binswanger loses his
elder son, and on this occasion Freud tells Binswanger what
Heinerle had been for him: he who had taken the place of chil-
dren and grandchildren. Thus he lives the death of his entire
filiation: "This is also the secret of my indifference-it was
called courage-toward the danger to my own life." 50 The fol-
lowing year: "I have survived the Committee that was to have
been my successor. Perhaps I shall survive the International As-
sociation. It is to be hoped that psychoanalysis will survive me.
But it all gives a somber end to one's life" Ito Ferenczi, 20 March
1924). 51 That he hoped for this survival of psychoanalysis is
probable, but in his name, survival on the condition of his name:
by virtue of which he says that he survives it as the place of the
proper name.
He also confides to Marie Bonaparte, 2 November, 1925: since
the death of the one who took the place of filiation for him, who
was a kind of universal legatee, and bearer of the name according
to the affect (the community's filiation assured by the woman,
here by the "favorite" daughter; and in certain Jewish communi-
ties the second grandson must bear the first name of the maternal
grandfather; everything could be settled by a Judaic law), he no
longer succeeds in attaching himself to anyone. 52 Only the pre-
vious ties are maintained. No more ties, no more contracts, no
more alliances, no more vows to attach him to any future, to any
descendance. And when the ties are only from the past, they
have passed. But Marie Bonaparte, who is part of the old alliance,
receives the confidence, the act of this confidence which in a
way renews the engagement by declaring it past. Of this, as of a
certain effect of inheritance, she will remain the depository. If I
insist upon the confession to Marie Bonaparte, it is in order to
have it forwarded. By the facteur de la verite (mailman, factor of
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 563

truth) into the family scene on the side of the French branch, at
the moment when one believes that a testament is unsealed.
Who then will not enter into "exclusive possession," as one
enters into a dance or trance? One of the elements of the drama:
several families bear the same name without always knowing it.
And there are other names in the same family. (Here, I interrupt
this development. If one is willing to read its consequences,
including its appendix in Le facteur de la verite, one will per-
ceive, perhaps, a contribution to a decrypting still to come of the
French analytic movement.) 53
The condition of filiation: its mourning or, rather, as I named
it elsewhere, its mid-mourning. In 1923 Heinerle, the place holder
of filiation, is gone (fort), the pains in the mouth remain, terrible
and threatening. He is more than half sure of what they hold in
store for him. He writes to Felix Deutsch: "A comprehensible
indifference to most of the trivialities of life shows me that the
working through of the mourning is going on in the depths.
Among these trivialities I count science itself." 54 As if the name,
in effect, was to be forgotten, and this time along with science.
But even if he more than half believed it, this time or the preced-
ing one, when he linked science to the loss of the name, will we
believe it? No more this time than the preceding one.
Of this fort:da as the work of mid-mourning and of specula-
tion operating on itself, as the gieat scene of the legacy, the abyss
of legitimation and delegation, there would still be, to the point
of no longer being countable, other sons, strings [fils]. Let us
limit ourselves here to the work of mid-mourning (introjection
and/or incorporation, mid-mourning here being represented by
the bar between and and/or or, which for structural reasons
seems to me as necessary as it is necessarily impure), 55 to the
work of mid-mourning in the relationship to oneself as grandson
and as younger brother of the grandson. It is with the younger
brother of the giandson, the place holder of all filiation, that
death seems irremmediable, descendance wiped out, and for the
first time cried over, the depression insurmountable !for a time),
new alliances forbidden. But in order to understand, in order to
attempt to understand the closure of alliances to his future,
perhaps one has to pull on other strings, sons of the past. For
example, let us name Julius. Freud's younger brother, who occu-
564 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

pied Heinerle's place in relation to Ernst. He died at the age of

eight months. Freud at that time was two. Ernst was one and a
half when the fort:da was observed. 56 Says Jones: "Before the
newcomer's birth the infant Freud had had sole access to his
mother's love and milk, and he had to learn from the experience
how strong the jealousy of a young child can be. In a letter to
Fliess 11897) he admits the evil wishes he had against his rival
and adds that their fulfillment in his death had aroused self-
reproaches, a tendency that had remained ever since. In the light
of this confession it is astonishing that Freud should write twenty
years later how almost impossible it is for a child to be jealous of
a newcomer if he is only fifteen months old when the latter
arrives." 5 7
It repeats Iitself) and overlaps. But how to separate this graph-
ics from that of the legacy? Between the two, however, there is
no relation of causality or condition of possibility. Repetition
legates itself, the legacy repeats itself.
If the guilt is overlapped with the one whose death he lived as
his own death, to wit the death of the other, of Ernst's younger
brother as of his younger brother, Julius, one holds several jonly)
of the strings in the lace of murderous, mournful, jealous, and
guilty identifications which entrap speculation, infinitely. But
since the lace constrains speculation, it also constrains it with
its rigorous stricture. The legacy and jealousy of a repetition
!already jealous of itself) are not accidents which overtake the
fort:da; rather they more or less strictly pull its strings. And
assign it to an auto-biothanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing.
This scene of writing does not recount something, the content
of an event which would be called the fort:da. This remains
unrepresentable, but produces, there producing itself, the scene
of writing.
[ .... I
-Translated by Alan Bass

NOTES

1. The bilingual pun-legs, legacy-is at work throughout. It is related

to Derrida's analysis of the rhetoric of Beyond ... , Freud's repeated gesture
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud'" 565

of taking another step forward that goes nowhere, the rhetoric of the athesis.
Step in French is pas, which is also the most common word of negation.
This fits extremely well with the idea of steps for nothing, the "legwork" of
the legacy. I have indicated the play on pas in brackets throughout.-TRANS.
2. These abbreviations, when pronounced in French, could be mistaken
for pepe, a common child's name for grandfather, and pere, father. Derrida
lets this possible confusion play throughout the text.-En.
3. To continue note 11 I have also indicated the play on demarche
throughout. The best English equivalent is procedure, but this loses the play
on marche, from marcher (to walk, to work, as in {:a marche) and on de- as a
prefix of negation. To put it elliptically, the athesis depends upon a de-
marche, or as Derrida puts it here, a pas de these: a no-thesis that is as
formally organized as any ballet step.-TRANs.
4. Mouvance refers both to the relation of dependence between two fiefs,
and to the state of being in movement. The former meaning relates to
everything that Derrida has to say about the dominance of the PP, the prince
and the satellites in the "society" of the drives. The latter meaning relates
to Derrida's use of noun-verbs suspended between the active and the passive,
as in differance, restance, revenance. In fact, as a description of the relation
between fiefs, mouvance has either an active or a passive sense also.-
TRANS.
5. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, ed. and trans. (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-1974)1 vol. 18, p. 16; all further page references will be given in the
text.-En.
6. Experiment in French is experience, and has the cognate double mean-
ing. - TRANS.
7. "His own" here are Jes siens, which has the sense of one's closest
relations. This is the syntax that is referred to in the next sentence.-TRANS.
8. Oikos, home, is the Greek root of economy.-ED.
9. Vacance in French is both vacation and the state of vacancy. Derrida
is punning on the fact that Freud observed Ernst while on vacation with a
grandson who is also somewhat outside the family, in that he has a different
last name. And of course vacation is the time when the family is away (fort).
-TRANS.
10. In English in the original.- TRANS.
11. Factor is facteur, which is also the mailman, as in le facteur de la
verite. -TRANS.
12. The allusion is to Freud's other daughter, Anna, who became a psy-
choanalyst and whose (considerable) authority in the psychoanalytic move-
ment was challenged by Jacques Lacan.-En.
13. That which borders a work (ergon), e.g., a picture's frame or a statue's
pedestal. This is the title of Derrida's essay on Kant's Third Critique in The
Truth in Painting [1978].-En.
14. An allusion to the Lacanian school which proposes to "return to
Freud. 11 -En.
566 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

15. En abyme is the heraldic term for infinite reflection, e.g., the shield
in the shield in the shield ... Derrida has used this term frequently. The
appearance of mise en abyme here is the overlap between what Freud says
and what Freud does in Beyond ... - TRANS.
16. On Socrates's delegation of writing to his inheritor, see above, "En-
vois." -En.
17. Strachey's translation sometimes does not convey the nuances of the
German original which are particularly important in this chapter. I will give
a few instances of these discrepancies. All references to the German text are
to the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13 (London: Imago, 1940), and will be given
as GW and a page number. Thus Strachey has translated Freud's "wenn die
Miitter es fiir Stunden verliess" (GW, 13) as "when his mother left him for a
few hours." - TRANS.
18. Derrida will indicate Sophie's place in this scene as that of the fille
(mere), daughter (mother); but a fille mere is also an unwed mother. This
latter designation would seem to correspond to the effacement of Freud's
son-in-law and Ernst's father, Halberstadt.-En.
19. Referring to the traditional knocks that precede the raising of the
curtain in French theater.- TRANS.
20. On these curtains and "jalousies," see above, my introduction, pp.
xxxvii-xxxviii.-En.
21. The last three words are "keine leichte Arbeit" (GW, 13) which
Strachey has given as "quite a business."-TRANS.
22. Freud's phrase (GW, 13) is "iibereinstimmenden Urteil," which
Strachey has given as "were agreed in thinking."-TRANS.
23. GW, 13. The pun on address exists in German as well (Geschick),
and is crucial to Derrida's analysis of this passage.-TRANS.
24. GW, 13. I have consistently modified Strachey's "reel" to read "spool"
(Spule). The "spool" in French is bobine, which has an additional slang
sense of "face" or "head." This play on bobine will be indicated in the text.
-TRANS.
25. To indicate the impossibility of translating Derrida's sentence here,
and the long commentary to which it could give rise, I will simply cite it:
"Car la chose est un vehicule en translation." -TRANS.
26. "la pente de l'ascendant." An elaborate play on words, since pente
also has the sense of a cloth that goes over the canopy of a bed. Ascendant,
of course, is the opposite of descendant, but has a resonance of ascent, again
relating it to pente ("inclination" in both senses).-TRANS.
27. Hymen is irreducibly both virginity and consummation (marriage),
related here to the conjoined interpretations of the father and the daughter,
grandfather and mother, of what takes place around the bed. See also "The
Double Session," above. - TRANS.
28. Tele is the French equivalent of the American expression TV-the
English "telly" is almost perfect here-as well as the prefix to "telecommu-
nication," communication at a distance, from the Greek tele (distant, loin,
fort). "Network" at the end of this sentence translates chaine, which has the
 "To Speculate-on 'Freud' " 567

sense of chain and of network, as in a television or radio station, one of the

tele-'s byways or detours.-TRANs.
29. Concerning the double stricture of the lace in relation to the fort:da,
I must refer to Glas [1974] and to "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing"
[see above].
30. GW, 13. Freud's phrase is "fur die affektive Einschiitzung dieses
Spiel es," which Strachey mistakenly gives as "judging the effective nature of
the game." (Perhaps an uncorrected typographical error?)-TRANS.
31. Cited in Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press, 1972), p. 329.-TRANs.
32. Cited in Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3
(New York: Basic Books, 1957), p. 40. Hereafter I will refer to Jones 1 and
Jones 3 to distinguish between the volumes of this work.-TRANS.
33. Jones 3, p. 40.-TRANs.
34. Schur, pp. p8-29.-TRANS.
35. Cited in Jones 3, p. 41; Freud's emphasis.-TRANS.
36. Cited in Schur, p. 331.-TRANS.
37. Ibid., p. 330.-TRANS.
38. La seance continue means "the session proceeds, continues," in the
sense of parliamentary procedure, but also the resonance of an analytic
session.-TRANS.
39. Cited in Jones 3, p. 19.-TRANS.
40. Anton von Freund was a wealthy Hungarian supporter of psychoanal-
ysis who donated several funds for analytic publications and instruction.
The "Committee" was the official, secret group that was formed around
Freud after the break with Jung. Freud presented each member with a Greek
intaglio ring. Communication was by circular letter. The original 1913 mem-
bers were Jones, Ferenczi, Rank, Abraham, Sachs, and Freud.-TRANS.
41. Cited in Schur, p. 33 r.-TRANS.
42. Ibid.-TRANS.
43. Ibid., p. 330.-TRANS.
44. Ibid., p. 329.-TRANS.
45. Ibid.-TRANS.
46. Cited in Jones 3, p. 21.-TRANS.
4 7. Cited in Schur, pp. JI 4-1 5. - TRANS.
48. The usteron proteron is the "preceding falsehood" on which a falla-
cious argument is based. Freud used the term in his theoretical explanation
of hysteria in The Pro;ect for a Scientific Psychology (1895).-TRANS.
49. Cited in Jones 3, p. 92.-TRANS.
SO. Cited in Schur, p. 360.-TRANS.
51. Cited in Jones 31 p. 66.-TRANS.
52. Ibid., p. 92.-TRANS.
53. See the complete text of "Le facteur de la verite" (1980] where Der-
rida considers Marie Bonaparte's more "classical" psychoanalytic reading of
the Poe story, as well as Lacan's peremptory dismissal of it.-Eo.
54. Cited in Jones 31 p. 91.-TRANS.
568 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES'

SS. See "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok"
[1976]. On mid-mourning (demi-deuil), see "Ja, ou le faux-bond" [1977].
S6. The original edition of La carte postale read that Freud was one and a
half when Julius died, i.e., the age of Ernst when the fort:da was observed.
This was corrected in discussion with Derrida.-TRANS.
S7. Jones 1, pp. 7-8.-TRANS.
 TWENTY-TWO

From "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce"

("Ulysse gramophone: Oui-dlre de Joyce," In Ulysse

gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce [1987])

"What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation from

Ulysses~" asks Derrida in this essay first presented as the introduc-
tory lecture to the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium.
"This is both legitimate and illegitimate, to be made legitimate like
an illegitimate child" (p. 45 ). Our Reader closes with a legitimate-
illegitimate set of quotations of Derrida quoting Ulysses, setting his
signature beside and beneath that of Joyce, but also beside and be-
neath that of Molly Bloom whose final "yes I said yes I will Yes," as
Derrida notes, "occupies the place of the signature at the bottom
right of the text" (p. 54). In so doing, this legitimate-illegitimate
collection of excerpts and interrupted quotations (or jealous blinds
that conceal more than they reveal) ends on the note of a double
affirmation-yes, yes-which forms one of the most persistent
threads of Derrida's meditation here. But only one among others,
although perhaps the easiest to lift out of the pattern Derrida weaves
through Joyce's warp.
Pattern, however, is not the best word because it hides too neatly
the series of apparently chance encounters that Derrida is also re-
counting and reflecting upon. Many of these encounters are place
names-Tokyo, Ohio, Ithaca-all of which Leopold Bloom stum-
bles upon in the course of his day and all of which the lecturer had
visited while preparing his lecture. These crossing paths, not just
570 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

geographical but also "in the chance form of letters, telegrams, of

newspapers called The Telegraph, for example, long-distance writ-
ing, and also of post cards" (32), lead Derrida to wonder at what point
the aleatory itself is already on the vast Joycean program whose
system would resemble a central post office or telephone switch-
board. In Ulysses, in fact, there is mention of a main switchboard-
a "trunk line"-operated by Elijah, which just happens to be Derri-
da's Hebrew name, which in French is written Elie, which resonates
with the name of Bloom's ad agency Helys, which contains an ana-
gram of "yes," as does also Ulysses, as does (almost) Joyce, as does,
if one switches languages, Elijah or, in yet another tongue, Derrida,
and so on ... The reader is hereby referred to the complete text of
"Ulysses Gramophone" in which one will also find, for instance, the
peripatetic narrator telling his audience of Joyce experts about the
brand of yogurt, discovered in Ohio, called Yes that advertises itself
with the slogan: "Bet You Can't Say No to Yes," or the books for
commercial travelers displayed side by side in the newsstand of a
Tokyo hotel with the titles 16 Ways to Avoid Saying No and Never
Take Yes for an Answer.
No legitimating agency can authorize the excision of most of this
programmatological narrative. On the other hand, we have retained
here Derrida's question to the gathering of scholars concerning the
nature of an institution that would promote expertise in the matter
of Joyce's works. If indeed the Joycean text puts the aleatory on the
program, the chance encounter of letters and languages, then is not
expertise or mastery a forever receding horizon? And must one not
then imagine Joyce having had a really good laugh in anticipation of
the spectacle of a meeting of "Joyce specialists"? To be sure, but
there are in tum two ways of hearing this laughter and of responding
to it: as a reactive, derisive, ironic laugh that echos the accents of
mastery, that reminds one of an indebtedness one can never liqui-
date and that therefore prevents one from hearing and responding
"without resentment and without jealousy," as Derrida writes in
another essay on Joyce; 1 or as an affirmative laughter, a joyce-ful
wisdom that bids one hear the "yes" before anything else.
It is the latter tone that resonates here, but not only here. In all of
Derrida's writings, this laughter is to be heard, even or especially
there where the most serious, deadly stakes are in play. Future
Derrida Readers and readers should not forget to listen for it.
 Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce

[ .... ]
If I am not mistaken, the first phone call sounds with Bloom's
words: "Better phone him up first" in the sequence entitled
"AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER." 1 A little
before, he had somewhat mechanically, like a record, repeated
this prayer, the most serious of all prayers for a Jew, the one that
should never be allowed to become mechanical, to be gramo-
phoned: Shema Israel Adonai Elohanu. If, more or less legiti-
mately (for everything and nothing is legitimate when we lift out
segments as examples of narrative metonymy), we cut out this
element from the most obvious thread of the narrative, then we
can speak of the telephonic Shema Israel between God, who is
infinitely removed (a long-distance call, a collect call from or to
the "collector of prepuces"), and Israel. Shema Israel means, as
you know, call to Israel, listen Israel, hello Israel, to the address
of the name of Israel, a person-to-person call. 2 The "Better phone
him up first" scene takes place in the offices of The Telegraph
(and not The Tetragram) newspaper and Bloom has just paused
to watch a kind of typewriter, or rather a composing machine, a
typographic matrix: "He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter
neatly distributing type." And as he first of all reads it backwards
("Reads it backwards first"), composing the name of Patrick Dig-
nam, the name of the father, Patrick, from right to left, he re-
members his own father reading the hagadah in the same direc-
tion. In the same paragraph, around the name of Patrick, you can
follow the whole series of fathers, the twelve sons of Jacob, et
cetera, and the word "practice" crops up twice to scan this patris-
tic and perfectly paternal litany ("Quickly he does it. Must re-
572 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

quire some practice that." And twelve lines lower, "How quickly
he does that job. Practice makes perfect"). Almost immediately
after this we read, "Better phone him up first": "plutot un coup
de telephone pour commencer," the French translation says. Let's
say: a phone call, rather, to begin with. In the beginning, there
must have been some phone call.
Before the act or the word, the telephone. In the beginning was
the telephone. There would be much to say about the apparently
random figures that this coup de telephone 3 plays on; we hear it
resonate unceasingly. And it sets off within itself this yes toward
which we slowly, moving in circles around it, return. There are
several modalities or tonalities of the telephonic yes, but one of
them, without saying anything else, amounts to marking, sim-
ply, that one is there, present, listening, on the other end of the
line, ready to respond but not for the moment responding any-
thing other than the preparation to respond (hello, yes: I'm listen-
ing, I can hear that you are there, ready to speak just when I am
ready to speak to you). In the beginning the telephone, yes, in the
beginning of the coup de telephone
! .... I
Telephonic spacing is particularly superimprinted in the scene
entitled "A DISTANT VOICE." The scene crosses all the lines in our
network, the paradoxes of competence and institution, repre-
sented here in the shape of the professor, and, in every sense of
the word, the repetition of the "yes" between eyes and ears. All
these telephonic threads can be drawn from one paragraph:
A DISTANT VOICE
--I'll answer it, the professor said going ....
--Hello? Evening Telegraph here ... Hello? ... Who's
there? ... Yes ... Yes ... Yes ....
The professor came to the inner door.
--Bloom is at the telephone, he said. (U, 137-38)
Bloom-is-at-the-telephone. In this way, the professor defines a
particular situation at a certain moment in the novel, no doubt,
but as is always the case in the stereophony of a text that gives
several levels to each statement, always allowing for metonymic
extracts-and I am not the only reader of Joyce to indulge in this
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 573

pursuit, at once legitimate and abusive, authorized and illegiti-

mate-the professor is also naming the permanent essence of
Bloom. It can be read by means of this particular paradigm: he is
at the telephone, he is always there, he belongs to the telephone,
he is both riveted and destined there. His being is a being-at-the-
telephone. He is hooked up to a multiplicity of voices and an-
swering machines. His being-there is a being-at-the-telephone, a
being for the telephone, in the way that Heidegger speaks of a
being for death of Dasein. And I am not playing with words when
I say this: Heideggerian Dasein is also a being-called, it is always,
as we are informed in Sein und Zeit, and as my friend Sam Weber
reminded me, 4 a Dasein that accedes to itself only on the basis
of the Call (der Ruf), a call which has come from afar, which
does not necessarily use words, and which, in a certain way, does
not say anything. The whole of chapter 57 of Sein und Zeit on
the subject of der Ruf, down to the last detail, could be adjusted
to this analysis, drawing, for example, on phrases like the follow-
ing: Der Angerufene ist eben dieses Dasein; aufgerufen zu sei-
nem eigensten Seinkonnen (Sich-vorweg .. .) Und aufgerufen ist
das Dasein durch den Anruf aus dem Verfallen in das Mann ....
The called one is precisely this Dasein; convoked, provoked,
interpellated toward its possibility of being the most proper !be-
fore itself). And in this way the Dasein is hailed by this call,
called out to, called out of the collapse into the "One". Unfortu-
nately, we do not have the time to enter further into this analy-
sis, within or beyond the jargon of Eigentlichkeit, which this
university [Frankfurt] may well remember.
--Bloom is at the telephone, he said.
--Tell him to go to hell, the editor said promptly.Xis
Burke's public house, see? jU, 138)
Bloom is at the telephone, hooked up to a powerful network
to which I shall return in a moment. He belongs in his essence
to a polytelephonic structure. But he is at the telephone in the
sense that one also waits on the telephone. When the professor
says, "Bloom is at the telephone," and I shall shortly say, "Joyce
is at the telephone," he is saying: he is waiting for someone to
respond to him, waiting for an answer, which the editor, who
decides the future of the text, its safekeeping or its truth, does
574 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

not want to give-and who at this point sends him to hell, into
the depths, in the Verfallen, the hell of censured books. 5 Bloom
is waiting for an answer, for someone to say, "hello, yes," that is,
for someone to say, "Yes, yes," beginning with the telephonic
yes indicating that there is indeed another voice, if not an an-
swering machine, on the other end of the line. When, at the end
of the book, Molly says, "yes, yes," she is answering a request,
but a request that she requests. She is at the telephone, even
when she is in bed, asking, and waiting to be asked, on the
telephone (since she is alone) to say, "yes, yes." And the fact that
she asks "with my eyes" does not prevent this demand from
being made by telephone; on the contrary: "well as well him as
another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and
then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so
he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going
like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes" (U, 704).
The final "Yes," the last word, the eschatology of the book,
gives itself up only to reading, since it distinguishes itself from
the others by an inaudible capital letter, an inaudible, only visi-
ble remains, the literal incorporation of the yes in the eye of the
language, of the yes in the eyes. Language of eyes, of ayes. Langue
d'oeil. 6
We still do not know what yes means and how this small
word, if it is one, operates in language and in what we glibly refer
to as speech acts. We do not know whether this word shares
anything at all with any other word in any language, even with
the word no, which is most certainly not symmetrical to it. We
do not know if a grammatical, semantic, linguistic, rhetorical, or
philosophical concept exists that is capable of this event marked
yes. Let us leave that aside for the moment. Let us, and this is
not merely a fiction, act as if this did not prevent us, on the
contrary, from hearing what the word yes governs. We will move
on to the difficult questions later, if we have time.
Yes on the telephone can be crossed, in one and the same
occurrence, by a variety of intonations whose differential quali-
ties are potentialized on long stereophonic waves. They may
appear to be limited to interjection, to the mechanical quasi
signal that indicates either the mere presence of the interlocutory
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 575

Dasein at the other end of the line (Hello, yes?), or the passive
docility of a secretary or a subordinate who, like some archiving
machine, is ready to record orders (yes sir) or who is satisfied
with purely informative answers (yes, sir; no, sir). Here is just
one example among many. I have deliberately chosen the section
where a typewriter and the trade name H. E. L. Y.'S lead us to the
last piece of furniture in this vestibule or this techno-telecom-
munication preamble, to a certain gramophone, at the same time
as they connect us to the network of the prophet Elijah. So here
we are, though of course I have sectioned and selected, filtering
the noise on the line:
Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of The
Woman in White far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet
of gaudy notepaper into her typewriter.
Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that
one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil
Haye.
The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased
and ogled them: six.
Miss Dunne clicked at the keyboard:
--16 June 1904. [almost eighty years.]
Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's
corner and the slab where Wolfe Tone's statue was not,
eeled themselves turning H. E. L. Y.'S and plodded back as
they had come ....
The telephone rang rudely by her ear.
--Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up
after five. Only those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All
right, sir. Then I can go after six if you're not back. A
quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and six. I'll tell him.
Yes: one, seven, six.
She scribbled three figures on an envelope.
--Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from Sport was
in looking for you. Mr Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the
Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five.
(U, 228-29)
It is not by accident that the repetition of yes can be seen to
assume mechanical, servile forms, often bending the woman to
576 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

her master, even if any answer to the other as a singular other

must, it seems, escape those forms. In order for the yes of affir-
mation, assent, consent, alliance, of engagement, signature, or
gift to have the value it has, it must carry the repetition within
itself. It must a priori and immediately confirm its promise and
promise its confirmation. This essential repetition lets itself be
haunted by an intrinsic threat, by an internal telephone which
acts like a parasite, like its mimetic, mechanical double, its
incessant parody. We shall return to this fatality. But we can
already hear a gramophony which records writing in the liveliest
voice. A priori it reproduces it, in the absence of all intentional
presence of the affirmer. Such gramophony responds, of course,
to the dream of a reproduction which preserves as its truth the
living yes, archived in the form of the most living voice. But by
the very same token, it gives way to the possibility of parody, of
a yes technique that persecutes the most spontaneous, the most
giving desire of the yes. To meet (repondre a) its destination, this
yes must reaffirm itself immediately. Such is the condition of a
signed commitment. The yes can only speak itself if it promises
itself its own memory. [Le oui ne peut se dire que s'il se promet
la memoire de soi.] The affirmation of the yes is the affirmation
of memory. Yes must preserve itself, and thus reiterate itself,
archive its voice in order to give it once again to be heard and
understood.
This is what I call the gramophone effect. Yes gramophones
itself and, a priori, telegramophones itself.
The desire for memory and the mourning of the word yes set
in motion the anamnesic machine. And its hypermnesic overac-
celeration. The machine reproduces the quick [le vif], it doubles
it with its automaton.
[ .... ]
I was telling you about my travel experiences, my round trip,
and about a few phone calls. If I am telling stories, it is to put off
speaking about serious things and because I am too intimidated.
Nothing intimidates me more than a community of experts in
Joycean matters. Why? I wanted first of all to speak to you about
this, to speak to you about authority and intimidation. The page
that I am going to read was written on the plane to Oxford, Ohio,
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 577

a few days before my trip to Tokyo. I had decided at that time to

put before you the question of competence, of legitimacy, and of
the Joycean institution. Who has a recognized right to speak of
Joyce, to write on Joyce, and who does this well? What do com-
petence and performance consist of here?
When I agreed to speak before you, before the most intimidat-
ing assembly in the world, before the greatest concentration of
knowledge on such a polymathic work, I was primarily aware of
the honor that was being paid me. I wondered by what claim I
had managed to make people think I deserved it, if only to a
minor degree. I do not intend to answer this question here. But I
know, as you do, that I do not belong to your large, impressive
family. I prefer the word family to that of foundation or institute.
Someone answering, yes, in Joyce's name, to Joyce's name, has
succeeded in linking the future of an institution to the singular
adventure of a proper name and a signature, a signed proper
name, for writing out one's name is not yet signing. In a plane, if
you write out your name on the identity card which you hand in
on arrival in Tokyo, you have not yet signed. You sign when the
gesture whereby, in a certain place, preferably at the end of a card
or a book, you inscribe your name again, takes on the sense of a
yes, this is my name, I certify this, and, yes, yes, I will be able to
attest to this again, I will remember later, I promise, that it is
indeed I who signed. A signature is always a yes, yes, the syn-
thetic performative of a promise and a memory that conditions
every commitment. We shall return to this obligatory departure
point of all discourse, following a circle which is also that of the
yes, of the "so be it"-of the amen and the hymen.
I did not feel worthy of honor that had been bestowed on me,
far from it, but I must have been nourishing some obscure desire
to be part of this mighty family which tends to sum up all others,
including their hidden narratives of bastardy, legitimation, and
illegitimacy. If I have accepted, it is mainly because I suspected
some perverse challenge in a legitimation so generously offered.
You know better than I that the worried concern regarding fa-
milial legitimation is what makes Ulysses, as well as Finnegans
Wake, vibrate. I was thinking, in the plane, of the challenge and
the trap: Experts, I said to myself, with the lucidity and experi-
ence that a long acquaintance with Joyce confers on them, ought
578 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

to know better than most to what extent, beneath the simula-

crum of a few signs of complicity, of references or quotations in
each of my books, Joyce remains a stranger to me, as if I did not
know him. They realize that incompetence is the profound truth
of my relationship to this work which I know finally only indi-
rectly, through hearsay, through rumors, through what people
say, second hand exegeses, always partial readings. For these
experts, I said to myself, the time has come for the deception to
be exposed, and how better to expose or denounce it than at the
opening of a large symposium?
So, in order to defend myself against this hypothesis, which
was almost a certainty, I asked myself: but in the end what does
competence come down to in the case of Joyce? And what can a
Joycean institution or family, a Joycean international be? I do not
know how far we can speak of the modernity of Joyce, but if this
exists, beyond the apparatus for postal and programophonic tech-
nologies, it consists in the fact that the declared project of keep-
ing generations of university scholars at work for centuries of
babelian edification must itself have been drawn up using a tech-
nological model and the division of university labor that could
not be that of former centuries. The scheme of bending vast
communities of readers and writers to this law, of detaining
them by means of an interminable transferential chain of trans-
lation and tradition, can equally well be attributed to Plato and
Shakespeare, to Dante and Vico, without mentioning Hegel or
other finite divinities. But none of these was able to calculate, as
well as Joyce did, his move, by regulating it on certain types of
world research institutions prepared to use not only means of
transport, of communication, or organizational programming that
allow an accelerated capitalization, a crazy accumulation of in-
terest in terms of knowledge blocked in Joyce's name, even as he
lets you all sign in his name as Molly would say l"I could often
have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his name on
it" U, 702) 1 but also modes of archivization and consultation of
data unheard of for all the grandfathers whom I have just named,
omitting Homer.
Hence the intimidation: Joyce experts are the representatives
as well as the effects of the most powerful project for program-
ming the totality of research in the onto-logico-encyclopedic field
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 579

for centuries, all the while commemorating its own, proper sig-
nature. A Joyce scholar has the right to dispose of the totality of
competence in the encyclopedic field of the universitas. He has
at his command the computer of all memory, he plays with the
entire archive of culture-at least of what is called Western
culture, and of that which in this culture returns to itself accord-
ing to the Ulyssean circle of the encyclopedia; and this is why
one can always at least dream of writing on Joyce and not in
Joyce from the fantasy of some Far Eastern capital, without, in
my case, having too many illusions about it.
The effects of this preprogramming, which you know better
than I, are admirable and terrifying, and sometimes intolerably
violent. One of them has the following form: nothing can be
invented on the sub;ect of Joyce. Everything we can say about
Ulysses, for example, has already been anticipated there, includ-
ing, as we have seen, the scene about academic competence and
the ingenuousness of metadiscourse. We are caught in this net.
All the gestures by which we might attempt to take the initiative
are already announced in an overpotentialized text that will re-
mind you, at a given moment, that you are captive in a network
of language, writing, knowledge, and even narration. That is one
of the things I wanted to demonstrate earlier, in recounting all
these stories, which were moreover true. [ .... ] We have verified
that all this had its narrative paradigm and was already re-
counted in Ulysses. Everything that happened to me, including
the narrative that I would attempt to make of it, was already pre-
dicted and pre-narrated in its dated singularity, prescribed in a
sequence of knowledge and narration, within Ulysses, to say
nothing of Finnegans Wake, by a hypermnesic machine capable
of storing in an immense epic work, along with the memory of
the West and virtually all the languages in the world up to and
including traces of the future. Yes, everything has already hap-
pened to us with Ulysses and has been signed in advance by
Joyce.
It remains to be seen what happens to this signature in these
conditions, and this is one of my questions.
This situation is one of reversal, stemming from the paradox
of the yes. Moreover, the question of the yes is always linked to
that of the doxa, to what is opined in opinion. So this is the
580 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

paradox: just when the work of such a signature starts operating

-some might say subjugating, at any rate relaunching for itself,
so that there might be a return-the most competent and reli-
able production and reproduction machine, it simultaneously
ruins its model. Or, at least, it threatens its model with ruin.
Joyce laid stakes on the modern university, but he challenges it
to reconstitute itself after him. He marks its essential limits.
Basically, there can be no Joycean competence, in the certain and
strict sense of the concept of competence, with the criteria of
evaluation and legitimation that are attached to it. There can be
no Joycean foundation, no Joycean family; there can be no Joy-
cean legitimacy. What is the relation between this situation, the
paradox of the yes, or the structure of a signature?
The classical concept of competence supposes that one can
rigorously disassociate knowledge (in its act or in its position)
from the event that one is dealing with, and especially from the
ambiguity of written or oral marks-let's call them gramophon-
ies. Competence implies that a metadiscourse is possible, neutral
and univocal with regard to a field of objectivity, whether or not
it has the structure of a text. Performances ruled by this compe-
tence must in principle lend themselves to translation with
nothing left over on the subject of the corpus that is itself trans-
latable. Above all they should not be essentially of a narrative
type. In principle, one doesn't tell stories in the university; one
does history, one recounts in order to know and to explain; one
speaks about narrations or epic poems, but events and histories
(stories) must not be produced there under the heading of insti-
tutionalizable knowledge. Now with the event signed by Joyce, a
double bind has become at least explicit (for we have been caught
in it since Babel and Homer and everything else that follows): on
the one hand, we must write, we must sign, we must bring about
new events with untranslatable marks-and this is the frantic
call, the distress of a signature that is asking for a yes from the
other, the pleading injunction for a counter-signature; but on the
other hand, the singular novelty of every other yes, of every other
signature, finds itself already phonoprogrammed in the Joycean
corpus.
I do not notice the effects of the challenge of this double bind
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 581

on myself alone, in the terrified desire I might have to belong to

a family of Joycean representatives among whom I will always
remain an illegitimate son; I also notice these effects on you.
On the one hand, you are legitimately assured of possessing,
or being in the process of constructing a supercompetence, which
would measure up to a corpus that includes virtually all the
corpuses treated in the university (sciences, technical domains,
religion, philosophy, literature, and, co-extensive to all this, lan-
guages). With regard to this hyperbolic competence, nothing is
transcendent. Everything is internal, mental telephony; every-
thing can be integrated into the domesticity of this programmo-
telephonic encyclopedia.
But, on the other hand, one must realize at the same time, and
you do realize this, that the signature and the yes that occupy
you are capable-it is their destination-of destroying the very
root of this competence, of this legitimacy, of its domestic inte-
riority, capable of deconstructing the university institution, with
its internal or interdepartmental divisions, as well as its contract
with the extra-university world.
Hence the mixture of assurance and distress that one can sense
in "Joyce scholars." From one point of view, they are as crafty as
Ulysses, knowing, as did Joyce, that they know more, that they
always have one more trick up their sleeve. Whether it is a
question of totalizing resumption or of subatomistic micrology
(what I call "divisibility of the letter"), one can do no better;
everything can be integrated in the "this is my body" of the
corpus. But, from another point of view, this hypermnesic inter-
iorization can never be closed on itself. For reasons that have to
do with the structure of the corpus, the project, and the signa-
ture, there can be no assurance of any principle of truth or legiti-
macy.
Given that nothing new can take you by surprise from the
inside, you also have the feeling that something might eventually
happen to you from an unforseeable outside. And you have guests.
You are awaiting the passage or the second coming of Elijah.
And, as in all good Jewish families, you always have a place set
for him. Waiting for Elijah, even if his coming is already gramo-
phoned in Ulysses, you are prepared to recognize, without too
582 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

many illusions, I think, the external competence of writers, phi-

losophers, psychoanalysts, linguists. You even ask them to open
your colloquia.
[ .... ]
When you call on incompetents, like me, or on allegedly external
competences, knowing full well that these do not exist, is it not
both because you want to humiliate them and because you are
awaiting from these guests not only some news, some good news,
come at last to deliver you from the hypermnesic interiority in
which you go round in circles like hallucinators in a nightmare,
but also, paradoxically, a legitimacy? For you are at once very
sure and very unsure of your rights, and even of your community,
of the homogeneity of your practices, your methods, your styles.
You cannot rely on the least consensus, on the least axiomatic
concordat among you. Basically, you do not exist, you are not
founded to exist as a foundation, and this is what Joyce's signa-
ture gives you to read. So you call on strangers to come and tell
you, as I am doing in reply to your invitation: You exist, you
intimidate me, I recognize you, I recognize your paternal and
grandpaternal authority, recognize me and give me a diploma in
Joycean studies.
Of course you do not believe a word of what I am saying to
you at the moment. And even if it were true, and even if, yes, it
is true, you would not believe me if I told you that I am also
called Elijah: no, this name is not inscribed on my official docu-
ments, but it was given to me on my seventh day. Moreover,
Elijah is the name of the prophet present at all circumcisions. He
is the patron, if we can put it like this, of circumcisions. The
chair on which their newborn baby boy is held is called "Elijah's
chair."
[ .... ]
So where are we going with the alliance of this Joycean com-
munity? What will become of it at this pace of accumulation and
commemoration in one or two centuries, taking into account
new technologies for archiving and storing information? Finally,
Elijah is not me, nor some stranger come to say this thing to you,
the news from outside, even the apocalypse of Joycean studies,
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 583

that is, the truth, the final revelation (and you know that Elijah
was always associated with an apocalyptic discourse). No, Elijah
is you: you are the Elijah of Ulysses, who is presented as a large
telephone exchange ("HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!" U, 149), the
marshalling yard, the network through which all information
must transit. We can imagine that there will soon be a giant
computer of Joycean studies ("operating all this trunk line ....
Book through to eternity junction" U, 473). It would capitalize
all publications, coordinate and teleprogram all communication,
colloquia, theses, papers, and would draw up an index in all
languages. We would be able to consult it any time by satellite
or by "sunphone," day and night, taking advantage of the reliabil-
ity of an answering machine. "Hello, yes, yes, what are you
asking for? Oh, for all the occurrences of the word yes in Ulysses?
Yes." It would remain to be seen if the basic language of this
computer would be English and if its patent would be American,
given the overwhelming and significant majority of Americans
in the trust of the Joyce Foundation. It would also remain to be
seen if we could consult this computer on the word yes, and if
the yes, in particular, the one involved in consulting operations,
can be counted, calculated, numbered. A circle will shortly lead
me back to this question.
In any case, the figure of Elijah, whether it be that of the
prophet or the circumciser, of polymathic competence, or of
telematic mastery, is only a synecdoche of Ulyssean narration, at
once smaller and greater than the whole.
We should, then, get rid of a double illusion and a double
intimidation. (I) No truth can come from outside the Joycean
community, that is, without the experience, the cunning, and
the knowledge amassed by overtrained readers. But (2) inversely,
or symmetrically, there is no model for "Joycean" competence,
no interiority and no closure possible for the concept of such a
competence. There is no absolute criterion for measuring the
relevance of a discourse on the subject of a text signed "Joyce."
The very concept of competence finds itself shaken by this event.
For we must write, write in one language, while we respond to
the yes and countersign in another language. The very discourse
of competence (that of neutral, metalinguistic knowledge im-
mune from all untranslatable writing, etc.) is thus incompetent,
584 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

the least pertinent there is on the subject of Joyce, who, more-

over, also finds himself in the same situation whenever he speaks
of his "work".
Instead of pursuing these generalities, and bearing in mind
time passing, I return to the yes in Ulysses. For a very long time,
the question of the yes has mobilized or traversed everything
that I have been trying to think, write, teach, or read. To cite
only the example of readings, I had devoted seminars and texts
to the yes, to the double yes in Nietzsche's Zarathustra ("Thus
spake Zarathustra," Mulligan moreover says-U, 29), the yes,
yes of the hymen, which is still the best example, the yes of the
great midday affirmation, and then the ambiguity of the double
yes: one of them comes down to the Christian assumption of
one's burden, the fa, fa of the donkey overloaded as Christ was
with memory and responsibility; and the other yes, yes that is
light, airy, dancing, solar is also a yes of reaffirmation, of prom-
ise, and of oath, a yes to the eternal recurrence. 7 The difference
between the two yeses, or rather between the two repetitions of
the yes, remains unstable, subtle, sublime. One repetition haunts
the other. For Nietzsche, who, like Joyce, anticipated that one
day professorships would be set up to study his Zarathustra, the
yes always finds its chance with a certain kind of woman. In the
same way, in Blanchot's La folie du ;our, the quasi-narrator attri-
butes the power to say yes to women, to the beauty of women,
beautiful insofar as they say yes: 'Tai pourtant rencontre des
etres qui n'ont jamais dit a la vie, tais-toi, et jamais a la molt,
va-t-en. Presque toujours des femmes, de belles creatures" (Yet I
have met people who have never said to life, "Quiet!", who have
never said to death, "Go away!" Almost always women, beauti-
ful creatures.)
The yes then, would be of woman-and not just of the mother,
the flesh, the earth, as is so often said of Molly's yeses in the
majority of readings devoted to her: "Penelope, bed, flesh, earth,
monologue," said Gilbert, and many others after him and even
before him, and here Joyce is no more competent than anyone
else. This is not false, it is even the truth of a certain truth, but
it is not all, and it is not so simple. The law of gender /genre/ 8
seems to me to be largely overdetermined and infinitely more
complicated, whether we are speaking of sexual or grammatical
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 585

gender, or again of rhetorical technique. To call this a monologue

is to display a somnambulistic carelessness. So I wanted to listen
again to Molly's yeses. But could one do this without making
them resonate with all the yeses that prepare the way for them,
correspond to them, and keep them hanging on the other end of
the line throughout the whole book? So, last summer in Nice I
read Ulysses again, first in French, then in English, pencil in
hand, counting the oui's and then the yeses and sketching out a
typology of them. As you can imagine, I dreamt of hooking up to
the Joyce Foundation computer, and the result is not the same
from one language to the other.
Molly is not Elijah (Elie}, is not Moelie !for you know that the
Moy'l is the circumciser), and Molly is not Joyce, but even so:
her yes circumnavigates and circumscribes, encircling the last
chapter of Ulysses, since it is at once her first and her last word,
her send-off [envoi} and her closing cadence [chute}: "Yes be-
cause he never did" and finally "and yes I said yes I will Yes" IU,
704). The last, eschatological "Yes" occupies the place of the
signature at the bottom right of the text. Even if one distin-
guishes, as one must, Molly's "yes" from that of Ulysses, in
which she is but a figure and a moment, even if one distin-
guishes, as one also must do, these two signatures Ithat of Molly
and that of Ulysses) from that of Joyce, even so they read each
other and call out to [s'appellent} each other. They call to each
other precisely through a yes, which always inaugurates a scene
of call and request: it confirms and countersigns. Affirmation
demands a priori confirmation, repetition, the safekeeping, and
the memory of the yes. A certain narrativity is to be found at the
simple core [coeur simple} of the simplest yes: "I asked him with
my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say
yes" IU, 704), and so on. A yes never comes alone, and one is
never alone in saying yes. Nor do we laugh alone, as Freud says,
and we shall come back to this. And Freud also stresses that the
unconscious never says no.
But in what way does the Joycean signature imply what we
will curiously refer to here as the question of yes? There is a
question of the yes, a request of the yes, and perhaps, for it is
never certain, an unconditional, inaugural affirmation of the yes
that cannot necessarily be distinguished from the question or the
586 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

request. Joyce's signature, or at least the one that interests me

here, though I will never claim to exhaust the phenomenon,
cannot be summarized by the affixing of his seal in the form of
the patronymic name and the play of signifiers, as they say, in
which to reinscribe the name "Joyce." The inductions to which
these associations and society parlor games have for a long time
been giving rise are easy, tedious, and naively jubilatory. And
even if they are not entirely irrelevant, they begin by confusing a
signature with a simple mention, apposition, or manipulation of
the name as conferred by one's civil status. However, neither in
its juridical phenomenon, as I have just suggested, nor in the
essential complexity of its structure, does a signature amount to
the mere mention of a proper name. Nor can the proper name
itself, which a signature does not merely spell out or mention, be
reduced to the legal patronym. The latter risks setting up a screen
or mirror toward which psychoanalysts, in a hurry to conclude,
would rush headlong like dazzled birds. I have tried to show this
for Genet, Ponge, and Blanchot. 9 As for the scene of the pa-
tronym, the opening pages of Ulysses should suffice to educate
the reader.
Who is signing? Who is signing what in Joyce's name? The
answer cannot be in the form of a key or a clinical category that
could be pulled out of a hat whenever a colloquium required.
Nevertheless, as a modest foreword, which might be of interest
only to me, I thought it possible to examine this question of
signature through that of the yes which it always implies and
insofar as it espouses [se conjoint/ here, it marries, [se marie/
another question: Who is laughing and how does one laugh with
Joyce, in a singular way in Joyce, and since Ulysses?

I .... I
But why laugh and why laughter? No doubt, everything has
already been said on laughter in Joyce, on parody, satire, derision,
humor, irony, mockery. And on his Homeric laughter and his
Rabelaisian laughter. It remains perhaps to think of laughter,
precisely, as a remains. What does laughter want to say? What
does laughter want? [Qu'est-ce que fa veut dire, le rire? Qu'est-
ce que fa veut rire?j Once one recognizes that, in principle, in
Ulysses the virtual totality of experience, of meaning, of history,
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 587

of the symbolic, of language, and of writing, the great cycle and

the great encyclopedia of cultures, scenes, and affects, in sum,
the sum total of all sum totals tends to unfold itself and reconsti-
tute itself by playing out all its possible combinations, while
writing seeks to occupy virtually all the spaces, well, the totaliz-
ing hermeneutic that makes up the task of a worldwide and
eternal institution of Joyce studies will find itself confronted
with what I hesitate to call a dominant affect, a Stimmung or a
pathos, a tone that re-traverses all the others and that neverthe-
less is not part of the series of the others since it re-marks all of
them, adds itself to them without allowing itself to be added in
or totalized, in the manner of a remains that is at once quasi-
transcendental and supplementary. And it is this yes-laughter
[oui-rire} that overmarks not only the totality of the writing, but
all the qualities, modalities, genres of laughter whose differences
might be classified into some sort of typology.
1.... 1
With a certain ear, with a certain hearing, I can hear a reactive,
even a negative, yes-laughter [oui-rire} resonate. It takes joy in
hypermnesic mastery and in spinning spiderwebs that defy all
other possible mastery, as impregnable as an alpha and omega-
programophone in which all histories, all stories, discourses,
knowledge, all the signatures to come that Joycean and a few
other institutions might address, would be prescribed, computed
in advance outside the scope of any effective computer, under-
stood in advance, captive, predicted, partialized, metonymized,
exhausted, like subjects, whether they know it or not. And sci-
ence, consciousness !conscience] cannot fix the situation, on the
contrary. It just allows its supplementary calculation to be put to
the service of the master signature. It may laugh at Joyce, but it
thereby indebts itself once again to him. As is said in Ulysses,
"Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen./Brood of mockers" (U,
197).
There is a James Joyce whom one can hear laughing at this
omnipotence, at this great tour joue: a trick played and a grand
tour completed. I am speaking of the tricks and tours of Ulysses,
the trickster, the cunning one [le retors}, and of the great tour he
completes when on his return [retour,} he has come back from
everything, from all his illusions. This is triumphal, jubilatory
588 TELE-TYPES jYES, YES)

laughter, certainly, but it is also, since jubilation always betrays

some kind of mourning, the laughter of resigned lucidity. For
omnipotence remains phantasmatic, it opens and defines the
dimensions of phantasm. Joyce cannot not know this. He cannot,
for example, not know that the book of all books, Ulysses or
Finnegans Wake, is still fairly inconsequential among the mil-
lions and millions of other works in the Library of Congress.
[ .... ]
Even in its resignation to phantasm, this yes-laughter [oui-
rire] reaffirms the control of a subjectivity that draws everything
together as it draws itself together, or as it delegates itself to the
word, in what is merely a vast dress rehearsal [repetition], during
the sun's movement, one day from east to west. It heaps abuse
on others and on itself, sometimes sadistically, sardonically: it is
the cynicism of a sneering grin, of sarcasm, and of mocking
laughter: brood of mockers. It heaps a burden on itself and loads
itself down, gaining weight and growing pregnant with the whole
of memory; it assumes the resumption, the exhaustion, the par-
ousia. It is not contradictory to state, regarding this yes-laughter,
that it is that of Nietzsche's Christian donkey, the one who cries
fa, ;a, or even of the Judeo-Christian beast that wants to make
the Greek laugh once he has been circumcised of his own laugh-
ter: absolute knowledge as the truth of religion, memory, guilt,
literature of burden [litterature de somme]-as we say, "beast of
burden"-and literature that summons one to appear before the
law {litterature de sommationj, the moment of the debt. A, E, I,
0, U, I owe you: This I constitutes itself in the debt itself; it
only comes into its own, there where it was, on the basis of the
debt. 10
[ .... ]
This yes-laughter of encircling reappropriation, of all-powerful
Odyssean recapitulation, accompanies the installation of a struc-
ture virtually capable of impregnating in advance its patented
signature, even that of Molly, with all the countersignatures to
come, even after the death of the artist as an old man, who moves
off with only the empty shell, the accident of a substance. The
machine of filiation-legitimate or illegitimate-functions well
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 589

and is ready for anything, ready to domesticate, circumcise, cir-

cumvent everything; it lends itself to the encyclopedic reappro-
priation of absolute knowledge which gathers itself up close to
itself, as Life of the Logos, that is, also in the truth of natural
death. We are here in Frankfurt to bear witness to this in com-
memoration.
But the eschatological tone of this yes-laughter also seems to
me to be worked over or traversed-I prefer to say haunted-
joyously ventriloquized by a completely different music, by the
vowels of a completely different song. I can hear it too, very close
to the other one, as the yes-laughter of a gift without debt, the
light almost amnesic, affirmation, of a gift or an abandoned event,
which in classical language is called "the work," a lost signature
without a proper name that only shows and names the cycle of
reappropriation and domestication of all the paraphs in order to
delimit their phantasm, to contrive the break-in necessary for
the coming of the other, an other whom one can always call
Elijah, if Elijah is the name of the unforeseeable other for whom
a place must be kept, and no longer Elijah, head of the megapro-
gramotelephonic network, Elijah, the great switchboard operator,
but the other Elijah: Elijah, the other. But there we are, this is a
homonym: Elijah can always be one and the other at the same
time, we cannot invite the one without the risk of the other
turning up. But this is a risk that must forever be run. I return
then, in this final movement, to the risk or the chance of this
contamination of one yes-laughter by the other, of the parasiting
of one Elijah, that is to say of one me, by the other.
Why have I linked the question of laughter, of a laughter
which remains as the fundamental and quasi-transcendental
tonality, to that of the "yes"?
In order to ask oneself what happens with Ulysses, or with the
arrival of whatever, whomever-of Elijah for example-it is nec-
essary to try to think the singularity of the event, and therefore
the uniqueness of the signature, or rather of an irreplaceable
mark that cannot necessarily be reduced to the phenomenon of
copyright, legible in the patronym after circumcision. It is nec-
essary to try to think circumcision, if you like, beginning with a
possibility of the mark, that of a trait that precedes and provides
its figure. Now if laughter is a fundamental or abyssal tonality in
590 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

Ulysses, if its analysis is not exhausted by any of the forms of

knowledge available precisely because it laughs at knowledge
and from knowledge, then laughter bursts out in the event of
signature itself. And there is no signature without yes. If the
signature does not amount to the manipulation or the mention
of a name, it supposes the irreversible commitment of the person
confirming, who says or does yes, the token of some mark left
behind. Before asking oneself who is doing the signing, whether
Joyce is or Molly is, or what is the status of the difference be-
tween the author's signature and that of a figure or a fiction
signed by an author; before conversing about sexual difference as
duality and expressing one's conviction of the "onesidedly wom-
anly woman" (and here I am quoting Frank Budgen and others
after him) of Molly's character, the beautiful plant, the herb or
pharrnakon, 11 or of the "onesidedly masculine" character of James
Joyce; before taking into consideration what Joyce says about the
non-stop monologue as "the indispensable countersign to Bloom's
passport to eternity" (and once again, the competence of Joyce in
letters and conversations does not seem to me to enjoy any
privilege); before manipulating clinical categories and a psy-
choanalytical knowledge that are largely derivative in view of
the possibilities we are talking about here, it is necessary to ask
oneself what a signature is: It requires a yes more "ancient" than
the question "what is?" since the latter presupposes it; it is thus
"older" than knowledge. It is necessary to ask for what reason
the yes always comes about as a yes, yes. I say the yes and not
the word "yes," for there can be a yes without the word, which
is precisely our problem.
One ought, then, to have preceded all of this with a long,
knowledgeable, and thoughtful meditation on the meaning, the
function, the presupposition above all of the yes: before language,
in language, but also in an experience of the plurality of lan-
guages that perhaps no longer belongs to linguistics in the strict
sense. The expansion toward a pragmatics seems to me to be
necessary but inadequate so long as it does not open itself up to
a thinking of the trace, of writing, in a sense that I have tried to
explain elsewhere and which I cannot go into here.
What is it that is spoken, written, what occurs [advient] with
yes~
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 591

Yes can be implied without the word being said or written.

This explains, for example, the multiplication of yeses every-
where in the French version when it is assumed that a yes is
marked by English sentences from which the word yes is in fact
absent. But at the limit, given that yes is co-extensive with every
statement, there is a great temptation, in French but first of all
in English, to double up everything with a kind of continuous
yes, even to double up the yeses articulated simply to mark the
rhythm, intakes of breath in the form of pauses or murmured
interjections, as sometimes happens in Ulysses. This yes comes
-from me to me, from me to the other in me, from the other to
me-to confirm the primary telephonic "Hello": yes, that's right,
that's what I'm saying, I am, in fact, speaking, yes, there we are,
I'm speaking, yes, yes you can hear me, I can hear you, yes, we
are in the process of speaking, there is language, you are receiving
me, it's like this, it takes place, happens, is written, is marked,
yes, yes.
But let's set out again from the yes phenomenon, the manifest
yes patently marked as a word, spoken, written, or phonogramed.
Such a word says but says nothing in itself, if by saying we mean
designating, showing, describing some thing to be found outside
language, outside marking [hors marque}. Its only references are
other marks, which are also marks of the other. Given that yes
does not say, show, name anything that is beyond marking, some
would be tempted to conclude that yes says nothing: an empty
word, barely an adverb, since all adverbs, in which grammatical
category yes is situated in our languages, have a richer, more
determined semantic charge than the yes they always presup-
pose. In short, yes would be transcendental adverbiality, the inef-
faceable supplement to any verb: in the beginning was the ad-
verb, yes, but as an interjection, still very close to the inarticulated
cry, a preconceptual vocalization, the perfume of a discourse.
But can one sign with a perfume? Just as we can replace yes
neither by a thing which it would be supposed to describe (it
describes nothing, states nothing, even if it is a sort of performa-
tive implied in all statements: yes, I am stating, it is stated, etc.),
nor even by the thing it is supposed to approve or affirm, likewise
one cannot replace the yes by the names of the concepts sup-
posed to describe this act or operation, if indeed this is an act or
592 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

operation. The concept of activity or of actuality does not seem

to me apt to account for a yes. And this quasi-act cannot be
replaced by approval, affirmation, confirmation, acquiescence,
consent. The word affirmative used by the military to avoid all
kinds of technical risks, does not replace the yes; it supposes it
once again: yes, I am saying affirmative.
What does this yes lead us to think, this yes that names,
describes, designates nothing, and that has no reference outside
marking (and not outside language, for yes can get by without
words, or at least the word yes)? In its radically nonconstative or
nondescriptive dimension, even if it is saying "yes" to a descrip-
tion or a narration, yes is par excellence and through and through
a performative. But this characterization seems to me inade-
quate. First because a performative must be a sentence and one
which is sufficiently endowed with meaning by itself, in a given
conventional context, if it is to bring about a determined event.
Now I believe, yes, that-to put it in a classical philosophical
code-yes is the transcendental condition of all performative
dimensions. A promise, an oath, an order, a commitment always
implies a yes, I sign. The I of I sign says yes and says yes to itself,
even if it signs a simulacrum. Any event brought about by a
performative mark, any writing in the widest sense of the word
involves a yes, whether or not it is phenomenalized, that is,
verbalized or adverbalized as such. Molly says yes, she remem-
bers yes, the yes that she spoke with her eyes to ask for yes with
her eyes, et cetera.
We are in an area which is not yet the space where the big
questions of the origin of negation, affirmation or denegation
can and must be deployed. Nor are we even in the space where
Joyce was able to reverse "!ch binder Geist, der stets verneint"
by saying that Molly is the flesh that always says yes. The yes
we are talking about now is "anterior" to all these reversing
alternatives, to all these dialectics. They suppose it and envelop
it. Before the !ch in !ch bin affirms or negates, it poses itself or
pre-poses itself: not as ego, as the conscious or unconscious self,
as masculine or feminine subject, spirit or flesh, but as a pre-
performative force that, for example, in the form of the "I" marks
that "I" as addressing itself to some other, however undeter-
mined he or she is: "Yes-I," or "Yes-I-say-to-the-other," even if I
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 593

says no and even if I addresses itself without speaking. The

minimal, primary yes, the telephonic "hello" or tap [coup] through
a prison wall, marks, before meaning or signifying: I-here, listen
answer, there is some mark, there is some other. Negativities
may ensue, but even if they completely take over, this yes can
no longer be erased.
I have had to yield to the rhetorical necessity of translating
this minimal and undetermined, almost virgin, address into words,
into words such as "l, 11 "I am," "language," at a point where the
position of the I, of being, and of language still remains derivative
with regard to this yes. This is the whole problem for anyone
wishing to speak on the subject of the yes. A metalanguage will
always be impossible here insofar as it will itself suppose the
event of the yes which it will be unable to comprehend. The
situation will be the same for any accountancy or computation,
for any calculation aiming to regulate a series of yeses according
to the principle of reason and its machines. Yes marks that there
is address to the other. This address is not necessarily a dialogue
or an interlocution, since it supposes neither voice nor symme-
try, but the haste, in advance, of a response that is already asking.
For if there is some other, if there is some yes, then the other no
longer lets itself be produced by the same or by the self. Yes, the
condition of any signature and any performative, addresses itself
to some other that it does not constitute, and to whom it can
only begin by asking, in response to a request that is always
anterior, to ask him/her to say yes. Time appears only with this
singular anachrony. These commitments may remain fictitious,
fallacious, and always reversible, and the address may remain
invisible or undetermined; this does not change anything in the
necessity of the structure. A priori it breaks off all possible mono-
logue. Nothing is less a monologue than Molly's "monologue,"
even if, within certain conventional limits, we have the right to
consider it as deriving from the genre or type known as the
"monologue." But a discourse comprised between two Yeses of
different quality, two Yeses with capital letters, and therefore
two gramophoned Yeses, could not be a monologue, but at the
very most a soliloquy.
But we can see why the appearance of a monologue imposes
itself here, precisely because of the yes, yes. The yes says nothing
594 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

and asks only for another yes, the yes of an other, which, as we
will shortly see, is analytically-or by a priori synthesis-im-
plied in the first yes. The latter only situates itself, advances
itself, marks itself in the call for its confirmation, in the yes, yes.
It begins with the yes, yes, with the second yes, with the other
yes, but as this is still only a yes that recalls, (and Molly is
remembering, is recalling to herself [se rappelle} from the other
yes), we might always be tempted to call this anamnesis monol-
ogic. And tautological. The yes says nothing but the yes, another
yes that resembles it even if it says yes to the advent of an
altogether other yes. It appears monotautological or specular, or
imaginary, because it opens up the position of the I, which is
itself the condition of all performativity. Austin reminds us that
the performative grammar par excellence is that of a sentence in
the first person of the present indicative: yes, I promise, I accept,
I refuse, I order, I do, I will, and so on. "He promises" is not an
explicit performative and cannot be so unless an I is understood,
as, for example, in "I swear to you that he promises."

[" " l
The self-positioning in the yes or the Ay is, however, neither
tautological nor narcissistic; and it is not egological even if it
commences the movement of circular reappropriation, the odys-
sey that can give rise to all these determined modalities. It holds
open the circle that it commences. In the same way, it is not yet
performative, not yet transcendental, although it remains presup-
posed in any performativity, a priori in any constative theoricity,
in any knowledge, in any transcendentality. For the same reason,
it is preontological, if ontology expresses what is or the being of
what is. The discourse on being supposes the responsibility of
the yes: yes what is said is said, I am responding, or the interpel-
lation of being is responded to, and so on. Still in telegraphic
style, I will situate the possibility of the yes and of the yes-
laughter [oui-rire] in that place where transcendental egology,
the ontoencyclopedia, the great speculative logic, fundamental
ontology, and the thought of being open onto a thought of the
gift and of sending which they presuppose but cannot contain.

I .... I
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 595

The self-affirmation of the yes can address itself to the other

only by recalling itself to itself [se rappelant a soi], in saying to
itself yes, yes. The circle of this universal presupposition, fairly
comic in itself, is like a dispatch [envoi] to oneself, a sending
back [renvoi] of self to self which both never leaves itself and
never arrives at itself. Molly says to herself (apparently talking
to herself), reminds herself, that she says yes in asking the other
to ask her to say yes, and she starts or finishes by saying yes to
the other in herself, but she does so in order to say to the other
that she will say yes if the other asks her, yes, to say yes. This
sending back and forth [envois et renvois] always mimics the
situation of questions and answers in scholastics. And the scene
of "sending oneself to oneself, getting it off with oneself" is
repeated many times in Ulysses in its literally postal form. 12 And
it is always marked with scorn, like the phantasm and failure
themselves. The circle does not close.
[ .... ]
So it is a matter of self-sending [s'envoyer], and in the end of
sending oneself someone who says yes without needing, in order
to say it, what the French idiom or argot babelizes under the
terms of s'envoyer: to get it off with oneself or someone. Self-
sending barely allows itself a detour via the virgin mother when
the father imagines sending himself, getting off on, the seed of a
consubstantial son: "a mystical estate, an apostolic succession,
from only begetter to only begotten" (U, 207). It is one of the
passages on "Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive,"
which "may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a
legal fiction" (U, 207 ).
[Another] example precedes it slightly and comes immediately
after Was Du verlachst: "He Who Himself begot, middler the
Holy Ghost, and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between
Himself and others, Who ... " (U, 197). Two pages later:

--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram!

A papal bull!
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joy-
fully:
--the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without
596 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

incurring the immense debtorship of the thing done. Signed:

Dedalus. (U, 199)

To be more and more aphoristic and telegraphic, I will say in

conclusion that the Ulyssean circle of self-sending commands a
reactive yes-laughter, the manipulatory operation of hypermne-
sic reappropriation, whenever the phantasm of a signature wins
out, a signature gathering the dispatch together near itself. But
when (and it is only a question of rhythm) the circle opens,
reappropriation is renounced, the specular gathering together of
the dispatch lets itself be joyfully dispersed in a multiplicity of
unique yet innumerable dispatches, then the other yes laughs,
the other, yes, laughs.
But here's the thing: The relationship of one yes to the Other,
of one yes to the other, and of one yes to the other yes, must be
such that the contamination of the two yeses remains inevitable.
And not only as a threat: but also as a chance. With or without
words, taken as a minimal event, a yes demands a priori its own
repetition, its own memorizing, demands that a yes to the yes
inhabit the arrival of the first yes, which is therefore never sim-
ply originary. We cannot say yes without promising to confirm it
and to remember it, to keep it safe, countersigned in another yes;
we cannot say yes without promise and memory, without the
promise of memory. Molly remembers, recalls herself to herself.
This memory of a promise begins the circle of appropriation,
bringing with it all the risks of technical repetition, of automa-
tized archives, of gramophony, of simulacrum, of wandering de-
prived of address and destination. A yes must entrust itself to
memory. Having come already from the other, in the dissymme-
try of the demand, and from the other of whom it is requested to
request a yes, the yes entrusts itself to the memory of the other,
of the yes of the other and of the other yes. All the risks already
crowd around from the first breath of yes. And the first breath
hangs on the breath of the other, already, always a second breath.
It remains there out of sound and out of sight, linked up in
advance to some "gramophone in the grave. 11
We cannot separate the twin yeses, and yet they remain com-
pletely other. Like Shem and Shaun, like writing and the post.
Such a coupling seems to me to ensure not so much the signature
 "Ulysses Gramophone" 597

of Ulysses but the vibration of an event which succeeds only in/

by asking. A differential vibration of several tonalities, several
qualities of yes-laughter which do not allow themselves to be
stabilized in the indivisible simplicity of one sole dispatch, of
self to self, or of one sole consigning, but which call for the
counter-signature of the other, for a yes which would resonate in
a completely other writing, an other language, an other idiosyn-
crasy, stamped with an other timbre.
[ .... ]

-Translated by Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock

NOTES

1. Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 124. All further references to this

edition will be indicated by U, followed by the page number.-Eo.
2. Elsewhere, in the brothel, it is the circumcised who say the "Shema
Israel," and once again the dead sea, the Locus Marte, shows up: "THE
CIRCUMCISED: (In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead fruit upon him,
no flowers) Sberna Israel Adonai Elohena Adonai Echad" {U, 496).
And since we are talking about Ulysses, the dead sea, the gramophone,
and soon laughter, here is Remembrance of Things Past: "He stopped laugh-
ing; I should have liked to recognize my friend, but, like Ulysses in the
Odyssey when he rushes forward to embrace his dead mother, like the
spiritualist who tries in vain to elicit from a ghost an answer which will
reveal its identity, like the visitor at an exhibition of electricity who cannot
believe that the voice which the gramophone restores unaltered to life is not
a voice spontaneously emitted by a human being, I was obliged to give up
the attempt." Earlier we read: "The familiar voice seemed to be emitted by a
gramophone more perfect than any I had ever heard." The Past Recaptured,
Andreas Mayor, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pp. 188-89.
3. Derrida calls attention here to the word coup in the expression coup
de telephone, telephone call, and thus to the resonance with figures of
chance and randomness (coup de des, throw of the dice; coup de chance,
stroke of luck) as well as the arbitrary imposition of an order or a law (e.g.,
coup d'etat). The word coup has been given a large field of play throughout
Derrida's writing; cf., in particular, Glas and Dissemination.-Eo.
4. See Samuel Weber, "The Debts of Deconstruction and Other, Related
Assumptions" in William Kerrigan and Joseph H. Smith, eds., Taking Chances:
Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1984), pp. 59 ff.-Eo.
5. In the French Bibliotheque Nationale, certain materials considered
scandalous are shelved in an area called l'enfer jhell).-Eo.
598 TELE-TYPES (YES, YES)

6. Literally, language of the eye, but one hears and sees as well langue
d'oi1, the medieval northern language from which modem French derives for
the most part. The latter was distinguished from the southern language-
langue d'oc-by the different words for yes: oil (oui) and oc. Earlier in the
essay, Derrida noted that Italian was also sometimes called the "langue de
si."-Eo.
7. On Nietzsche and affirmation see especially The Ear of the Other
(1982); also Spurs, above.-Eo.
8. "The Law of Genre" is the title of one of Derrida's essays (in Parages)
on the Blanchot text mentioned here, La folie du ;our; see as well "Living
On," above.-Eo.
9. Derrida has written on Genet's signature in Glas, on Ponge's signature
in Signsponge, and on Blanchot in Parages. -Eo.
10. This passage is making oblique reference to Freud's famous formula:
Wo Es war, soll lch werden, which is usually translated as "Where Id was,
there shall Ego be." - TRANS.
11. On this word, see above, "Plato's Pharmacy," pp. 185-87.-Eo.
12. Literally, s'envoyer would mean to send oneself something. But this
form of the verb is used colloquially in the expressions: s'envoyer quelqu'un
(literally to send oneself someone), to make it with someone, to have it off
with someone, to get laid; s'envoyer en l'air (literally, to send oneself into
the air), also to have it off, get some, or get laid. The only point at which
colloquial English might be seen to approach such a use would be in expres-
sions like "You send me," "That really sends me."-Eo.
 JALOUSIE SIX

All the examples are thus cut out and cut across
each other. Look at the holes, if you can.
-Glas, p. 210
 Bibliography of Works by Jacques Derrida

The following bibliography lists, by date of publication in France, all the

major texts Derrida has published as of 1990. Essays first published sepa-
rately and later reprinted as book chapters or in a collection are generally
listed under the latter date. The French entry is followed by reference to the
American edition of the English translation, if available. In the rare cases in
which a translation was published before the French edition, this order is
reversed and the entry is listed by date of publication of the translation. The
titles of works included or excerpted in A Derrida Reader are printed in
boldface.
This bibliography is extensive, but not exhaustive. It does not list abso-
lutely everything Derrida has so far published and it does not give a history
of the publication of each text, many of which have appeared in several
different forms and places. For more complete information, readers are di-
rected to "A Jacques Derrida Bibliography: 1962-1990" by Albert Leventure,
forthcoming in Textual Practice (vol. 5, no. l [Spring 1991)). I was fortunate
in being able to consult Leventure's bibliography in manuscript while com-
piling this list and acknowledge gratefully the thoroughness of his research.
Derrida's work is being translated into English at a considerable pace.
Many of the untranslated titles listed here may have been translated by the
time this bibliography appears. Although I was not always able to anticipate
forthcoming publications, I have noted texts that will be translated for two
important volumes of Derrida's writings currently in preparation, both ed-
ited by Deborah Esch and Thomas Keenan: Institutions of Philosophy (Har-
vard University Press) and Negotiations: Writings (University of Minnesota
Press).

1962: "Introduction a L'Origine de la geometrie par Edmund Husserl." Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France. Edmund Husserl's "Origin of
Geometry": An Introduction. Translated with an introduction and
afterword by John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989 (rev. ed.). [Derrida's presentation of his own transla-
tion of Husserl's text.]
602 Bibliography of Works

1967: La Voix et le phenomene: Introduction au probleme du signe dans

la phenomenologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's
T!teory of Signs. Edited and translated with an introduction by
David B. Allison. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1973.
De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Of Grammatology.
Translated with an introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
L'ecriture et la difference. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Writing and Dif-
ference. Translated with an introduction by Alan Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978. [This collection contains es-
says on formalist literary criticism ("Force and Signification"), on
Foucault's History of Madness ("Cogito and the History of Mad-
ness"), on the poet Edmond Jabes ("Edmond Jabes and the Ques-
tion of the Book," and "Ellipsis"), on Emmanuel Levinas ("Vio-
lence and Metaphysics"), on the French interpretation of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind (" 'Genesis and Structure' and Phenom-
enology"), on Antonin Artaud ("La parole soufflee" and "The The-
ater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation"), on Freud's
"metaphor" of writing ("Freud and the Scene of Writing"), on
Georges Bataille's reading of Hegel ("From Restricted to General
Economy: An Hegelianism without Reserve"), and on the struc-
turalism of Claude Levi-Strauss ("Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences").
1972: La dissemination. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Dissemination. Trans-
lated with an introduction by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1981. [Beside "Plato's Pharmacy" and "The
Double Session," this collection contains two other long essays:
"Hors livre," on the genre of the preface, with particular reference
to Hegel, and "Dissemination," on Nombres by Philippe Sollers.]
Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Margins of Phi-
losophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982. [Beside "Tympan," "Differance," and "Signature Event
Context," this collection contains: "Ousia and Gramme: Note on
a Note from Being and Time," "The Pit and the Pyramid: Intro-
duction to Hegel's Semiology," "The Ends of Man" (on Sartrean
humanism and the anthropological interpretation of Hegel, Hus-
serl, and Heidegger), "The Linguistic Circle of Geneva," "Form
and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language," "The
Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics" (on Emile
Benveniste's linguistic categories), "White Mythology: Metaphor
in the Text of Philosophy" (on Aristotelian rhetoric), and "Qual
Quelle: Valery's Sources."]
Positions. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Translated by Alan Bass. Chi-
 Bibliography of Works 603

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. [A series of three inter-

views, the first Derrida ever gave. His interlocutors are members
of the Tel Que] group !Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis
Houdebine, and Guy Scarpetta). He is interrogated about, among
other things, his relation to semiology, Marxism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis.]
1974: Glas. Paris: Editions Galilee. [Reprinted, in two volui. es, by Denoel/
Gonthier, 1981.] Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., and Rich-
ard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. [A com-
panion volume to the translation, Glossary (also University of Ne'
braska Press, 1986), contains a very useful index, concordance, and
list of references.]
1975: "Economimesis." In Mimesis: Des articulations. Edited by Sylviane
Agacinski et al. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975. "Economime-
sis." Translated by Richard Klein. Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2 (1981),
pp. 3-25. [On Kant's Critique of fudgment.]
1976: L'Archeologie du frivole: Lire Condillac. Paris: Denoel/Gonthier. The
Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condi/lac. Translated with
an introduction by John P. Leavey, Jr. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne
University Press, 1980; reprinted, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1987. [Derrida's essay prefaces a new edition of Condillac's
Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, which had long
been unavailable in French.]
"Entre crochets: Entretien avec Jacques Derrida, Jere partie." Di-
graphe no. 8, pp. 97-114. [Translation forthcoming in Negotia-
tions; a long written "interview" that ranges widely and in which
Derrida discusses Glas in particular; see below, Part II, "Ja, ou le
faux-bond," 1977.]
"Fors: Les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok." Fore-
word to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonomie: Le Ver-
bier de ]'Homme aux loups. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion. "Fors: The
Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok." Translated
by Barbara Johnson as foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Translated
!except for Derrida's foreword) with an introduction by Nicholas
Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
"Ou commence et comment finit un corps enseignant." In Politiques
de la philosophie: Chatelet, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Serres.
Edited by Dominique Grisoni. Paris: Grasset, pp. 60-89. [Trans-
lation forthcoming in Institutions.]
1977: "L'age de Hegel." In Qui a peur de la philosophie, edited by GREPH
[Groupe de recherches sur l'enseignement de la philosophie]. Paris:
Aubier-Flammarion, pp. 73-107. "The Age of Hegel." Translated
by Susan Winnett. Glyph Textual Studies I, 1986. [The "mani-
604 Bibliography of Works

festo" of the GREPH, of which Derrida was founding member and

long-time president; the French volume contains another brief es-
say by Derrida, "La Philosophie et ses classes," pp. 445-50.)
"Ja, ou le faux-bond: Entretien avec Jacques Derrida, 2eme partie."
Digraphe, no. 11, pp. 83-121. [Translation forthcoming in Nego-
tiations; see above, "Entre crochets," 1986.j
Limited Inc abc . ... Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University
Press. [The French text was published as a supplement to its En-
glish translation, by Samuel Weber, which appeared first in Glyph
2. (On this debate with the American philosopher John Searle, see
above our presentation of "Signature Event Context," p. 81.) The
English translation has been reprinted, along with "Signature Event
Context" and a new afterword, "Toward an Ethic of Discussion,"
also translated by Samuel Weber, in Limited Inc, edited by Gerald
Graff. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988. French
edition, under the same title: Paris: Galilee, 1990.)
"Scribble (pouvoir/ecrire)." Preface to Bishop Warburton's The Di-
vine Legation of Moses Demonstrated: Essay on the Hieroglyphs
of the Egyptians. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, pp. 7-43. "Scribble
(writing-power)." Abridged translation by Cary Plotkin. Yale French
Studies, 58 (1979), pp. 116-47.

1978: Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche. Introduction by Stefano Agosti. Paris:

Aubier-Flammarion. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Translated by Bar-
bara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. [The
American edition is bilingual.I
La Verite en peinture. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion. The Troth in
Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. [A collection of Derrida's
writings on painting and aesthetics; beside "Restitutions of the
Truth in Pointing," it contains a preface ("Passe-Partout"), a long
essay on Kant's Critique of fudgment ("Parergon"), catalogue texts
for the painter Valerio Adami ("+R (Into the Bargain)"), and the
artist Gerard Titus-Carmel ("Cartouches").)

1979: "Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The

Shell and the Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham." Translated by Rich-
ard Klein. Diacritics, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 4-12. [The French text,
"Moi-la psychanalyse," is included in Psyche, 1987.J
"Philosophie des Etats Generaux." In Etats Generaux de la philoso-
phie. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. [The opening address delivered to
the Estates General of Philosophy convened in 1979 by a group of
philosophers to address the curtailment of the teaching of philos-
ophy in French lycees and universities; translation forthcoming in
Institutions. J
"Living On: Borderlines." Translated by James Hulbert. In Decon-
 Bibliography of Works 605

struction and Criticism. Edited by Harold Bloom et al. New York:

Seabury Press. "Survivre: Journal de bord" first published in Par-
ages (19861.
1980: La Carte postale: de Socrate a Freud et au-dela. Paris: Aubier-Flam-
marion. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
Translated with an introduction by Alan Bass. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1987. [Beside "Envois," "To Speculate-on
'Freud'," and "Le Facteur de la verite," this volume contains a
short essay on transference in psychoanalysis, "Du tout."]
"Ocelle comme pas un." Preface to L'enfant au chien-assis, by Jos
Joliet. Paris: Editions Galilee. [Untranslated.]
1982: "Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida." Edited and
translated by Christie V. McDonald. Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 2
(Summerl, pp. 66-76. [No published French version.]
"Coup d'envoi. 11 1n Extraits d'un rapport pour le College Interna-
tional de Philosophie. [Part of Derrida's contribution to the report
commissioned by the Minister of Education, which became the
founding document of the College International de Philosophie;
this institution was established in 1983 with Derrida as its first
president; translation forthcoming in Institutions.]
L'Oreille de l'autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes
et debats avec facques Derrida. Edited by Claude Levesque and
Christie V. McDonald. Montreal: VLB Editions. The Ear of the
Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Dis-
cussions with facques Derrida. Edited by Christie V. McDonald.
Translated by Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1988 (rev. ed.I. [Contains an essay on
Nietzsche, "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the
Politics of the Proper Name," and two roundtable discussions, on
the topics of autobiography and translation, with participants at a
colloquium in Montreal in 1979; the French text of the essay was
published separately by Editions Galilee in 1984 as Otobiogra-
phies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre.]
1983: D'un ton apocalyptique adopte naguere en philosophie. Paris: Edi-
tions Galilee. "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Phi·
losophy." Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. The Oxford Literary
Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (19841, pp. 3-37. [This is the text of Derrida's
lecture presented at the colloquium devoted to his work held at
Cerisy-la-Salle in 1980. It was first printed in the volume of the
proceedings from that colloquium: Les fins de l'homme: A partir
du travail de facques Derrida. Edited by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981. This volume
also contains interesting exchanges between Derrida and the other
participants.]
606 Bibliography of Works

"La langue et le discours de la methode." Recherches SUI la philoso-

phie et la langage, no. 3, pp. 35-51. !Untranslated.)
"My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendez-Vous with Some Epicurean
Stereophonies." Translated by Irene E. Harvey and Avita! Ronell.
In Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Ed-
ited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 1-32. "Mes chances: au ren-
dez-vous de quelques stereophonies epicuriennes" in Cahiers
Confrontation no. 19 11988). !An essay on the relations between
psychoanalysis and telepathy; the volume of essays is integrally
translated in the French journal.I
"The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils."
Translated by Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris. Diacritics,
vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 3-20. "Les pupilles de l'Universite: Le principe
de raison et l'idee de l'universite." Cahiers du College Interna-
tional de Philosophie, no. 211986), pp. 7-34.
"The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." Translated by Kathleen
McLaughlin. In Philosophy in France Today. Edited by Alan
Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 34-
50. [The text of Derrida's presentation at his thesis defense, June
1980; French version in Du Droit a la philosophie 11990).)
1984: "Bonnes volontes de puissance lune reponse a Hans-Georg Gada-
mer)." Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 38, no. 151, pp.
341-43. "Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer." In Dialogue
and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Edited and
translated by Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1989. The same vol-
ume includes another text by Derrida, "Interpreting Signatures
!Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions." [A brief "encounter" with
the leading spokesman of Heideggerian hermeneutics.]
"Languages and Institutions of Philosophy." Translated by Sylvia
Soderlind et al. Recherches Semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, vol. 4,
no. 2, pp. 91-154. "Les langages et les institutions de la philoso-
phie." Texte: Revue de critique et de theorie litteraire, no. 4, pp.
9-39.
"Mochlos, ou le conflit des facultes." Philosophie, no. 2, pp. 21-53.
[English translation forthcoming in Institutions. J
"No Apocalypse, Not Now !full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven
missives)." Translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Dia-
critics, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 20-31. The French text, "No Apoca-
lypse, Not Now Iii toute vitesse, sept missiles, sept missives)," is
included in Psyche; see 1987. [The text of Derrida's lecture to a
colloquium on "nuclear criticism.")
Signeponge/Signsponge. Bilingual edition. Translated by Richard Rand.
New York: Columbia University Press. !On the poet Francis Ponge.
 Bibliography of Works 607

The complete French text of Signeponge was also published in

1988 by Editions du Seuil.]
"Voice II. ... "Translated by Verena Andermatt Conley. Boundary 2,
vol XII, no. 2, pp. 68-93. [Letter response to Conley's questions
about "masculine"/"feminine" voice; a bilingual text.]

1985: A reading of the photo-novel Droit de regards by Marie-Franc;:oise

Plissart. Paris: Editions de Minuit. "Right of Inspection." Trans-
lated by David Wills. Art etJ Text, no. 32 (Autumn 1989), pp. 19-
97.
"Le langage." In Douze ler;ons de philosophie. Edited by Christian
Delacampagne. Paris: Editions de la Decouverte, pp. 14-26. [A
telephone "interview" and practical lesson in "speech acts";
translation forthcoming in Negotiations.]
"Popularites: Du droit a la philosophie du droit." Foreword to Les
Sauvages dans la cite: Auto-emancipation du peuple et instruc-
tion des proletaires au XIXe siecle. Paris: Champ Vallon, pp. 12-
19. [On "popular" philosophy, with reference to Kant; translation
forthcoming in Institutions.]
"Prejuges: Devant la loi." In La faculte de juger. Paris: Editions de
Minuit, pp. 87-139. "Before the Law." Abridged translation by
Avital Ronell. In Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Perfor-
mance: Centenary Readings. Edited by Alan Udoff. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 128-49. [The text of Derrida's
lecture, on a short story of Kafka's, presented at the Cerisy-la-
Salle colloquium on the work of Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard.]
"Des Tours de Babel." Translated by Joseph F. Graham. In Difference
in Translation. Edited by Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, pp. 165-248. [A bilingual edition. The French
text is reprinted in Psyche; see 1987.]

1986: "Antinomies de la discipline philosophique: Lettre preface." In La

Greve des philosophes: Ecole et philosophie. Paris: Osiris. [On
certain antinomies, with reference to Kant, in the teaching of phi-
losophy in the current university; translation forthcoming in In-
stitutions.]
"But, beyond .... "Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, vol.
13 (Autumn), pp. 155-70. [No French edition; in the form of an
open letter, Derrida replies to criticism of "Racism's Last Word"
(see Psyche, 1987).]
"Declarations of Independence." Translated by Tom Keenan and Tom
Pepper. New Political Science, no. 15 (Summer), pp. 7-15. (From
a 1976 lecture at the University of Virginia on the American Dec-
laration of Independence. The French text is included in Otobio-
graphies; see entry for L'Oreille de l'autre, 1982.]
"Forcener le subjectile." In Dessins et portraits d'Antonin Artaud.
608 Bibliography of Works

Edited by Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevenin. Paris: Gallimard.

[English translation forthcoming.]
Memoires for Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan
Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia
University Press (1st ed., 1986; revised and augmented edition,
1989.) [The text of three commemorative lectures written for Paul
de Man after the latter's death in 1983; revised edition includes
"Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell" (first published
1988), which addresses the discovery, in 1987, of articles de Man
wrote between 1940 and 1942 for a collaborationist newspaper in
Brussels; see also "Biodegradables," 1989. The French edition,
Memoires pour Paul de Man, was published by Editions Galilee
in 1988.]
Parages. Paris: Editions Galilee. [Collection of Derrida's essays on
the recits of Maurice Blanchot. Includes, beside "Living On: Bor-
der Lines" (see 1979), "Pas," "Title (to be specified)," and "The
Law of Genre." While "Pas" has yet to appear in English transla-
tion, "Title (to be specified)" has been translated by Tom Conley
(Sub-Stance 31, 1981, pp. 5-22) and "The Law of Genre" by Avital
Ronell (Glyph 7, 1980, pp. 176-232; reprinted in Critical Inquiry,
vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980, pp. 55-81).]
Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan. Paris: Editions Galilee. "Shibboleth."
Translated by Joshua Wilner. In Midrash and Literature. Edited
by Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1986, pp. 307-47.

1987: De ]'esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Editions Galilee. Of Spirit:

Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
"Chora." In Poikilia: Etudes offertes a fean-Pierre Vemant. Paris:
Editions de l'EHESS, pp. 265-96. [Translation forthcoming; on the
ch6ra mentioned in Plato's Timaeus. This text became the basis
of Derrida's collaboration with the architect Peter Eisenman; see
below, "Pourquoi Peter Eisenman.... "]
Feu la cendre. Paris: "Bibliotheque des voix," editions des femmes.
[Polyphonic text in which Derrida mediates on the cendres-ashes,
cinders-scattered throughout his other texts; accompanied by
cassette recording of Derrida and the actress Carole Bouquet read-
ing the text; not translated into English.]
Psyche: Inventions de l'autre. Paris: Galilee. A collection of 25 es-
says, most of which are listed here unless they appeared first in
translation.
"Admiration de Nelson Mandela, OU les lois de la reflexion." "The
Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration." Transc
lated by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz. In For Nelson
Mandela. Edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili. New
 Bibliography of Works 609

York: Seaver Books, 1987. [The latter volume is a translation

of the book of essays offered to Nelson Mandela published first
in Paris (Gallimard) in 1986.]
"L'aphorisme a contretemps." [Untranslated; on Romeo and fu-
liette.[
"Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos." "Fifty-Two
Aphorisms for a Foreword." Translated by Andrew Benjamin.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Deconstruction in Art and
Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1988.
"Comment ne pas parler: Denegations." "How To Avoid Speak-
ing: Denials." Translated by Ken Frieden. In Languages of the
Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary
Theory. Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 3-70. [On negative the-
ology, particularly Master Eckhart.]
"Le demier mot du racisme." "Racism's Last Word." Translated
by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, vol. 12 (1985), pp. 290-99.
[Text commissioned by the Association of Artists of the World
Against Apartheid for the catalogue of an itinerant exhibit of
art works that will continue to be shown around the world
until apartheid is abolished in South Africa. For some polemic
concerning this text, see above, "But beyond ... , " 1986. J
"Desistance." Preface to Typography, by Philippe Lacoue-La-
barthe. Translated by Christopher Fynsk. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989.
"Des Tours de Babel." See 1985.
"En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici." "At This Very
Moment in This Work Here I Am." Translated by Ruben Ber-
ezdivin. In Re-Reading Levinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi
and Simon Critchley (forthcoming).
"Envoi." "Sending: On Representation." Abridged translation by
Peter and Mary Ann Caws. Social Research, vol. 49, no. 2
(Summer 1982), pp. 294-326.
"Geopsychanalyse-et 'the rest of the world'." [The text of the
opening lecture to a colloquium on psychoanalysis in Latin
America; translation forthcoming in Negotiations.)
"Geschlecht: Difference sexuelle, difference ontologique." "Ge-
schlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference." Trans-
lated by Ruben Berezdivin. Research in Phenonomenology, vol.
13 (1983), pp. 65-83.
"Une idee de Flaubert: La lettre de Platon." "An Idea of Flaubert:
'Plato's Letter'." Translated by Peter Starr. MLN, vol. 99 (Sept.
1984), pp. 748-68.
"Lettre a un ami japonais." "Letter to a Japanese Friend." Trans-
lated by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin. In Derrida and
Differance. Edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Ev-
610 Bibliography of Works

anston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 1-5.

"La main de Heidegger: (Geschlecht II)." "Geschlecht II: Heideg-
ger's Hand." Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. In Deconstruc-
tion and Philosophy: The Texts offacques Derrida. Edited by
John Sallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 161-
96.
"Moi-la psychanalyse." See 1978.
"Les Marts de Roland Barthes." "The Deaths of Roland Barthes."
Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. In Con-
tinental Philosophy I: Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since
Merleau-Ponty. Edited by Hugh J. Silverman. New York and
London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 259-97. [Essay first published in
a memorial issue of the review Poetique.)
"No Apocalypse, Not Now (a toute vitesse, sept missiles, sept
missives)." See 1984.
"Nombre de oui." "A Number of Yes." Translated by Brian Holmes.
Qui Parle, vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 120-33. [Originally pub-
lished in a memorial volume for Michel de Certeau.)
"Point de folie-maintenant !'architecture." English translation
(same title) by Kate Linker. In Bernard Tschumi, La Case vide.
London: Architectural Association, Folio VIII. [On the architec-
tural plans of Bernard Tschumi for the Pare de la Villette in
Paris; Derrida collaborated with the American architect Peter
Eisenman for this project.)
"Pourquoi Peter Eisenman ecrit de si bons livres." "Why Peter
Eisenman Writes Such Good Books." Translated by Sarah
Whiting. In Architecture and Urbanism [Tokyo], August, 1988,
pp. 113-24. [On the collaboration with architect Eisenman for
the design of a garden at the Pare de la Villette; see above,
"Point de folie ... ," 1986, and "Chora," 1987.]
"Psyche: Invention de l'autre." "Psyche: Inventions of the Other."
Translated by Catherine Porter. In Reading de Man Reading.
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
"Le retrait de la metaphore." "The Retrait of Metaphor." Trans-
lated by F. Gasdner et al. Enclitic, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 5-33. [A
supplement to "The White Mythology" (Marges, 1972); on Hei-
degger and metaphor.]
"Telepathie." "Telepathy." Translated by Nicholas Royle. The
Oxford Literary Review, vol. 10, nos. 1-2 (1988), pp. 3-41. [A
"postscript" to "Envois" in The Post Card.]
Ulysse Gramophone: Deux mots pour foyce. Paris: Editions Gal-
ilee. [The translations of the two essays on Joyce have been
published separately: "Two Words for Joyce." Translated by
Geoff Bennington. In Post-Structuralist foyce: Essays from the
French. Edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cam-
 Bibliography of Works 611

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 145-58. And

"Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce." Translated by
Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock. In fames foyce: The Aug-
mented Ninth. Edited by Bernard Benstock. Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 1988, pp. 27-75.)
1988: "Che· cos'e Ia poesia." In Poesia (Milan), vol. 1, no. 11, pp. 5-10.
Translated by Peggy Kamuf in A Derrida Reader. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1991.
"Interview with Jacques Derrida (by Jean-Luc Nancy)." Translated by
Peter T. Connor. Topoi, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 113-121. [The longer
French version of this interview is titled "'Il faut bien manger',
ou le calcul du sujet," Cahiers Confrontation 20 (1989), pp. 91-
114.]
"The Politics of Friendship." Translated by Gabriel Motzkin. The
fournal of Philosophy, vol. 85, no. 11, pp. 632-45. [No published
French text. J
1989: "Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments." Translated by Peggy Ka-
muf. Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 812-73. [Derrida's re-
sponse to a number of critical replies to the essay "Like the Sound
of the Sea ... " on Paul de Man's wartime journalism (see Mem-
oires, 1986); no published French text.]
"Rhetorique de la drogue." Autrement, no. 106. [Derrida responds to
questions for a special issue of this review titled L'Esprit des
drogues; untranslated.]
"Toward an Ethic of Discussion." Translated by Samuel Weber. In
Limited Inc. [An afterword to the debate with John Searle; see
above, 1977.]
1990: Du Droit ala philosophie. Paris: Galilee. [A collection of essays, many
of which are listed above, on the institution and teaching of phi-
losophy.)
Memoires d'aveugle, L'autoportrait et autres mines. Paris: Rei:inion
des Musees Nationaux. [The text for an exhibition of drawings at
the Louvre.)
Le Probleme de la genese dans la philosophie de Husserl. Presses
Universitaires de France. [The first publication of Derrida's mas-
ter's thesis from 1954.)
"Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Pos-
tisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seisrnisms." Translated by
Anne Torniche. In The States of "Theory." Edited by David Car-
rol. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 63-94.
612 Bibliography of Works

Beside the written interviews included in the above list, Derrida has given a
number of informal interviews for publication, some of which have been
translated into English. Once again, this list is not exhaustive.

1983: "Derrida l'insoumis." Le Nouvel observateur, September 9, pp. 62-

67; interview with Catherine David. "Interview with Derrida."
Translated by David Allison et al. In Derrida and Differance. Ed-
ited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 1988, pp. 71-82.
1984: "Deconstruction and the Other." In Dialogues with Contemporary
Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage. Edited by
Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.
105-26.
"Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida." sub;ects/
ob;ects {Spring). Reprinted in Men in Feminism. Edited by Alice
Jardine and Paul Smith. New York and London: Methuen, 1987,
pp. 189-203.
1987: "Deconstruction in America." An interview with James Creech, Peggy
Kamuf, and Jane Todd. Translated by James Creech. In Critical
Exchange, no. 17 IWinter), pp. 1-33.
Interview with Imre Salusinszky. In Criticism in Society. Edited by
lmre Salusinszky. New York and London: Methuen, 1987, pp. 9-
24.
"Some Questions and Responses." In The Linguistics of Writing: Ar-
guments Between Language and Literature. Edited by Nigel Fabb,
Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin Maccabe. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 252-64.
1989: "Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Christopher Norris." Archi-
tectural Design, vol. 58, nos. 1-2, pp. 6-11.
 Selected Works on Jacques Derrida

and Deconstruction

The principle of selection for the following list is availability to readers of

English and French. I have listed only a handful of the hundreds of separate
essays in journals or collections; otherwise the entries are restricted to
monographs, anthologies, and special issues of journals.

Arac, Jonathan, Wlad Godzich, and W. Martin, eds. The Yale Critics: Decon-
struction in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
L'Arc, no. 54 (1973). "Jacques Derrida" (in French).
Bennington, Geoffrey. ''Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea)."
Oxford Literary Review, vol. 10, nos. 1-2 (1988).
Berman, Art. From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1988.
Brunette, Peter and David Wills. Screenplay: Derrida and Film Theory.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics: Deconstruction and the Hermeneu-
tic Pro;ect. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Carroll, David. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York and
London: Methuen, 1987.
Culler, Jonathan. "Jacques Derrida." In John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and
Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979.
--On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, De-
construction, and Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989.
Diacritics, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter 1985). "Marx after Derrida."
Ecarts: Quatre essais apropos de Derrida. Paris: Fayard, 1983.
614 Selected Works

Fish, Stanley. "With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin

and Derrida." Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 (1982).
Frow, J. "Foucault and Derrida." Raritan, vol. 5, no. 1 (1985).
Gasche, Rodolphe. "Deconstruction as Criticism." Glyph 6 (1979).
--The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Genre, vol. 17, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1984). "Deconstruction at Yale. 11
Giovannangeli, D. Ecriture et repetition: Approche de Derrida. Paris: Union
Generale d'Editions, 1979.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Balti-
more, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
Harvey, Irene E. Derrida and the Economy of Difference. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986.
Johnson, Barbara. "Introduction" to Dissemination, translated by Barbara
Johnson. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
The fournal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 17, no. 3 (October
1986). "The Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. 11
Kerrigan, William and Joseph H. Smith, eds. Taking Chances: Derrida, Psy-
choanalysis, and Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984.
Klein, Richard. "Prolegomenon to Derrida. 11 Diacritics, vol. 2, no. 4 (1972).
Kofman, Sarah. Lectures de Derrida. Paris: Galilee, 1984.
Krupnick, Mark, ed. Displacement: Derrida and After. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Les fins de l'homme: A
partir du travail de facques Derrida. Paris: Galilee, 1981.
Leavey, John P., Jr. Glassary. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Laruelle, Jean-Frani;ois. Les Philosophies de la difference. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1986.
Leitch, Vincent B. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Llewelyn, John. Derrida on the Threshold of Sense. London: Macmillan,
1986.
Maclean, Ian. "Un dialogue de sourds? Some Implications of the Austin-
Searle-Derrida Debate. 11 Paragraph 5 (March 1985).
Melville, Stephen W. Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Mod-
ernism. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Michelfelder, Diane P. and Richard E. Palmer, eds. Dialogue and Decon-
struction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989.
Muller, John P. and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan,
Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1988.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London and New
York: Methuen, 1982.
--Derrida. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
 Selected Works 615

The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 211978). "Derrida."

Research in Phenomenology, no. 8 (1978). "Reading(s) of Jacques Derrida."
[Contains "A Derrida Bibliography" by John P. Leavey, Jr., and David
Allison.]
Rapaport, Herman. Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Lan-
guage. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Ray, William. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
La Revue philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger, Special Issue "Der-
rida," April-June, 1990.
Rorty, Richard. "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida."
New Literary History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1978).
Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Bal-
timore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Staten, Henry. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1984.
Taylor, Mark. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago, Ill.: University of
Chicago Press, 1984.
Sallis, John, ed. Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of facques Der-
rida. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Continental Philosophy II: Derrida and Deconstruc-
tion. London and New York: Routledge, 1984.
Silverman, Hugh J. and Don Ihde, eds. Hermeneutics and Deconstruction.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.
Sub-stance, no. 7 (Fall 1973). "Literature ... and Philosophy? The Dissemi-
nation of Derrida."
Ulmer, Gregory L. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from facques
Derrida to foseph Beuys. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985.
--"Sounding the Unconscious." In John P. Leavey, Jr., Glassary. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987.
Wood, David. The Deconstruction of Time. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: The
Humanities Press, 1989.
--"An Introduction to Derrida." Radical Philosophy, no. 21 (1979), pp.
18-28.
Wood, David and Robert Bernasconi. Derrida and "Differance." Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
 Index of Works by Jacques Derrida

Boldface page numbers indicate selections in this volume.

"L'Aphorisme a contretemps, II "Force and Signification," 56n24

145n4 "Fors," 566n5 5
"The Archeology of the Frivolous," "Freud and the Scene of Writing,"
109n3 165n15, 516
At This Very Moment In This Work
Here I Am, xxxi-xxxiv, 253n3, "Geschlecht," 378-402, 451-53
403-39, 440, 450-51 Glas, xi, xxv, xxxv-xxxvi, xxxviii,
xl-xli, 5, 145n2 1 146 1 200, 315-52,
"Che cos'e la poesia," 144, 221-37 376n13, 379, 561, 567n29, 597n3
"Choreographies," 440-56 Of Grammatology, ix, xv, xviii, 4-5,
3on17, 31-58 139n6, n9, 165n15,
"Differance," xv, 59-79, 146, 149, 270, 272, 274, 313, 403, 460, 465,
403, 48m8 48m8
Dissemination, 111n15, 154, 154ll8,
"Heidegger's Hand," xxxviii, 145n4
16m12, 313, 597n3
"How To Avoid Speaking," xx,
"The Double Session," xxxix-xl,
276n2
112, 154ll7, 169-99, 255, 264,
447, 566n27 "Introduction to The Origin of Ge-
"Droit de regards," 456n7 ometry," vii, 4, 18-19, 28n4

The Ear of the Other, 145n1, 147, 'Ja, ou le faux-bond," 568n55

456n2, 598n7
"Economimesis," xxxviii "Languages and Institutions of Phi-
"Entre crochets," 145n3 losophy," 242n2
"Envois," xix, 31on6, 459, 465, 484- "The Law of Genre," 456n61 597n8
515, 566m6 "Letter to a Japanese Friend," 378;
269-76
"Le Facteur de la verite," 145n2, Limited Inc ab c ... , 81
445, 463-83, 491, 562-63, 567n53 "Living On: Borderlines," 253n2,
Feu la cendre, 456n7 254-68,448, 597n8
618 Index of Works

Margins of Philosophy, 146, 313 xxviii, xxxvi-xxxvii, 309n1, 465 1

Memoires for Paul de Man, 145n41 516-68
200 Speech and Phenomena, 4-5, 6·30,
53n2, 801 IIon8, 144, 157, 460,
"Ousia and Gramme," 55n1 5 465
Spurs, xxxvii, 53n3 1 31on8 1 313,
"The Parergon, 11 xxxvii, 2 78 353-77, 379, 441-46, 464-65,
"La Parole soufflee," 56n24 598n7
Parages, 25 5 "Structure, Sign and Play in the Dis-
"Pas," 258 1 2641 309n1, 456n7 course of the Human Sciences,"
"The Pit and the Pyramid/' 29m2 vii-viii
"Plato's Pharmacy," 112-39, 170,
196n41 376n17, 597n8 "The Time of a Thesis," 31 5
Positions, 111n181 IS4n8, 161n12, "Des Tours de Babel," 243-53;
447,463 "Toward an Ethic of Discussion,"
The Post Card, 51 459-60 81
"The Principle of Reason," xxxvii The Truth in Painting, 51 276n2,
"Psyche" 200-20 565n13
"Two Words for Joyce," 253n5
"Restitutions of the Truth in Paint- "Tympan," xxxvii, 144, 146-68, 169
ing," xxxvii, 277-310, 440,
567D29 "Ulysses Gramophone," 145n4, 569·
98
Schibboleth, pour Paul Celan,
145n4 "Violence and Metaphysics," 79n13,
"Signature Event Context," 80-111, 403, 439n6
146,200
Signsponge, 200 "White Mythology," I 59
"To Speculate-on 'Freud'," xxvi- Writing and Difference, 4
 Index

This index contains more than one "fictional" entry !e.g., presence, inscrip-
tion, unconscious [!)). The reader is advised, in those cases, to consider page
references as indicating some sample locations.

Abraham, Karl, 372 Bataille, Georges, 72, 157n9, 188

Abraham, Nicolas, 5r 8 Baudelaire, Charles, 469, 474
Address, xxviii, 223-29 1 4041 408, Being, 35-401 42 1 62 1 68-69 1 74-76 1
484-515, 593-96 109, 155, 158, 179, 299, 31on6,
Affirmation, xxvi, xxviii, xii, 761 345, 374, 380-401 passim, 4301
218, 258, 261-62, 354, 362, 364, 459, 471, 494-96, 510-12, 594; see
371, 410, 443, 455, 461, 584, 589- also Ontology
97 Benjamin, Walter, 243, 274
Adequatio, 470-801 482nI? Binarity, 386-401, 440, 447, 452, 455
Aletheia, 132, r76-81 passim, 388 1 Blanchot, Maurice, 145, 255-68, 273,
474,479 454, 584, 586
Allegory, 200, 202-14 passim, 445 Bloom, Harold, 254
Anthropology, 335-43, 382, 386-87 Bonaparte, Marie, 562-63, 567n53
Appropriation, xxviii-xxix, xxxiv,
283, 300, 461, 495, 554, 594-96 Capitalization, 50, 52, 56n27, 74, 76,
Archi-writing, xv, 5, 26, 42, 52, 65 1 120-21, 546-47, 578
67 Castration, 167, 354, 362-72, 464,
Aristotle, 44, 1591 196n3, 321, 366 466-80 passim
Artaud, Antonin, 15~8 Catastrophe, 229, 235, 2841 461,
Aufhebung, xxxv, 43, 72, 78n12, 93, 486-515
149-50, 163, 189-90, 198nI?, 316- Chance, 235, 275-76, 382, 408, 443-
36, 343-52, 449 44, 485, 505, 510, 527, 569-70,
Austin, J. L., 80-81, 97-107, 212, 594 584, 589, 596, 597n3
Autobiography, 207, 525, 529-32, Les Chants de Maldoror, 152
549-5 I Child, 329, 343-45, 429, 524, 533-64
passim
Bach, J. S., 201, 219n2 Christianity, xxxv-xxxvi, 368-69,
Bass, Alan, 459 371, 396
620 Index

Cicero, 247 158, 255; of the sign, 45-46; as

Circularity, xxviii, 65, 160, 408, 422, word, 270-71, 274-76; of the
460, 466-71 passim, 594-96 word "being," 37-41
Circumcision, 365, S 14, 582, 585, De Man, Paul, 200, 202-14, 241 1 254
588-89, S97n2 Descartes, Rene, 159, 394, 481n1 4,
Citationality, So, 97, 102-9, uon16, 483m7
127, 141, 206, 216, 258-59, 266- Destination, 447, 460-61, 469-70,
67, 361, 374, 390, 414-22 passim; 47~484-515, 55~ 596
see also Grafting Detachment, 141, 277, 284-309 pas-
Code, 90-91, 94, 106, 190, 455 sim, 423, 460, 466-72 passim
Communication, 8-II, 15-17, So, Dialectics, u3-14, 123, 127, 134,
82-109, 475-76, 482m7 136-37, 161n12, 173, 185·90 pas-
Competence, 578-84 sim, 315-52, 379, 418, 449, 545,
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 85- 592.
89 Diderot, Denis, 196n3
Contamination, xviii, xxxii·xxxiii, Differance, vii, xv, 5, 24, 33, 40, 42,
235, 393, 407, 418, 426-27, 435, 531 59-79, 90, 105, II2, 168, 190,
43 7, 589, 596 275, 447, 510
Context, Bo, 83-84, 92-97, 99-105, Displacement, xli, 82-84, 89, 108,
255,274-75, 303, 407,422 125, 131, 154Il8, 161, 180, 185,
260, 304, 314, 316, 388, 423, 443,
Dance, 358, 441-56 passim 445,448
Dasein, 380-401, 451-53, 477, 573- Dissemination, 83, 92, 99, 108, 188,
75 262, 264, 345, 391-96, 460-61,
Death, xv, xxvii, 7, 14, 43, 90-91, 463-65, 467-69
122-23, 132, 202-03, 225, 229, Divisibility, 460-61, 466-72 passim,
262, 320-21, 329, 335, 344-52, 48m10, 487-515 passim, 581
357-58, 367, 444, 505, 533, 545, Double bind, xiv, xxiv, 243, 580-81
555-64, 589
Debt, 118, 120, 200, 243, 253, 280, Ear, 146-68 passim, 356, 587
290-91, 300, 408-11, 422, 475, Economy, 72, 78n12, 155, 345, 350,
480,482n17,519, 570, 588-89 410, 427-28, 433, 438, 443, 467,
Deconstruction, 41, 50, 147, 161, p6
161n12, 169, 242, 270-76; "in Elijah, 570, 575, 581-83, 585
America," 241; as double ges- Entfernung, 308, 310n8, 353-54, 368,
ture, 108, 447-49; and feminism, 549-50
xxix·xxx; first occurrence, vii· Erasure, 40, 67, 156, 423-24, 426,
viii; of God, xxiv, xxxiii, 249; as 450, 542
impossible, 209; of institutions, Event, 10, 84, 103-5, 107-9, 158,
xvii, 262, 581; as invention, 217- 180-81, 200, 203, 207-8, 215, 218,
18; and literature, 208-9; and 256, 260, 273, 405-14 passim,
method, xviii-xix, 273; in narra- 422, 531, 574, 589, 593-97
tive, 267-68; and philosophy, ix;
of presence, 4-5, 42; of the Feminine, 212, 262, 326, 336-43,
proper, xxvii-xxviii; and psycho· 354, 359-60, 430-34, 440, 445,
analysis, 464, 516; resistance to, 448, 468
 Index 621

Feminism, xxix-xxx, 314, 326, 354, 477, 4Bo, 483n17, 488, 492-96,
361,363, 373,440-44,449 510-12, 573
Fetishism, xxxv, 289-90, 304, 360- Hermeneutics, 372-375, 445, 463,
61, 363, 371, 375, 376n15, 445, 466-70
467 History, 39, 47-53 passim, 64-65,
Fiction, 14-16, 144, 184, 204-16, 75, 17~ 17~ 331,333,36~442,
256, 468, 474-76 496
Finnegans Wake, 249-50 Hume, David, 15,
Freud, Sigmund, xxvi-xxviii, xxx, Husserl, Edmund, 4, 6-30, 6B, Bo-81,
42, 69-71, 73-74, 135, 197n14, 94-97, 159, 34B, 3Br, 397
289, 361, 372, 376n17,451 1 461, Hymen, xxxix-xl, 65, 169-70, 173,
466, 470, 474, 475, 478-79, 1B1-95, 264, 275, 309, 371, 372,
4Bm14, 4B9-92, 516-64 440, 447-4B, 453-54, 535, 543-44,
566n27, 5B4
Genet, Jean, 315, 505, 5B6
Genette, Gerard, 261 Ideality, 10-14, 19-22, 36, 134, 1B2,
Genre,201,259,261,409, 510 229, 32B-35 passim, 460, 465,
Ghost, 130, 259, 277-309 passim, 471-73
519, 532, 5B4, 589 Identification, 2B4, 294, 298, 300,
Gide, Andre, 475-76 494, 514, 53B, 551, 561
Gift, xxii, xli, 11B, 227, 235, 246, Index, 381, 5B3
253n3,291,299, 309, 346,407- Inscription, 4, 7, 1B-19, 174, 1B7-90,
II, 424-26, 446-47, 460, 493, 506· 367, 403, 426, 445
7, 574, 5B9, 594 Institution, xvii-xviii, 25 5, 262-64,
Godel, Kurt, 1B9 2B3, 300, 517, 525, 531-32, 559-
Goethe, J. W. von, 475 60, 570, 577-B1
Goldman, Emma, 441-42 Intentionality, Bo-Br, 91-105 pas-
Goldstein, Kurt, 279-309 passim sim, 124, 413
Grafting, xi, 93 1 97 1 109 1 167, 1Bo, Intervention, 108-9, 144, 169, 214-
192, 336; see also Citation- 15
ality Invagination, 265-6B, 440, 44B, 453-
Grammatology, 46-53 passim, 67 54
Irony, 200, 202-14 passim, 259,
Hartman, Geoffrey, 254 299
Hegel, G. W. F., xxxv-xxxvi, 32, 42 1 Iterability, Bo-81, 90-97, 99-107,
44, 146, 14B, 150, 154, 158-60, 11on16, 263, 267; see also Repe-
163, 165, 1BB-89, 197n13, 203, tition
219n4, 246, 314-36, 343-52, 379,
381,419,440,449,4Bo,481n14, Jacob, Max, 4B2n14
527 Jakobson, Roman, 44
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 25, 32, 34-43, Jealousy, xxi-xlii, 249, 340, 343, 404,
50, 62, 68, 74-77, 15B-59, 178, 411, 41B, 437-3B, 488, 555, 561-
196n5, 242, 269, 270-71, 274, 64, 569
277-309, 31onn6, 8, 314, 353, Joyce, James, 569-97
358, 366-67, 378-402, 403, 440- Judaism, xxiii, xxvi, 365, 430-32,
41, 446, 451-53, 459-60, 474-75, 528, 562, 571, 5B1-83
622 Index

Kant, Immanuel, xxxv-xxxvi, I59, Margin, xviii, 146, 149-64passim,

273, 276n2, 309n2, 314, 3I7, 321, 256-68passim, 275, 313, 362,
335-44, 379, 381 544
Mark, 90-106 passim, 163-64, I67,
Lacan, Jacques, 376n!2, 463-83, 518 1 180, 249, 267, 355, 356, 362, 373,
565n12 423, 435, 452, 58~ 591-94
La Fontaine, Jean de, 210, 212 Marx, Karl, 48rn14
Laughter, 60, 76, 16I, 183, 186, 195, Mastery, xxxii, 158-62, 241-42, 326,
284, 362, 570, 586-90 336-40, 368, 372, 408, 449, 519-
Lautreamont, 372 22, 545,547, 553, 570,587-89
Law, 253, 265, 301, 331, 466, 470 Materiality, 241, 460, 464-65, 469-
Legacy, viii-ix, 237, 244, 378, 459, 80, 481n10
461, 485-515 passim, 517-18 1 Memory, 14-15, 42, 71, 88, 114, !29-
530-32, 559-64 36, 202-3, 328-30, 478-79, 549-5 I,
Leibniz, G. W., 195 576-79, 584, 588, 596
Leiris, Michel, 145-47 Metaphor, xxiii, 26, 32 1 38 1 42, 83 1
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, 48-50 II6, II8-20, 152, 175-76, 190,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, viii 22009, 244, 252, 306-7, 434, 494-
Levinas, Emmanuel, xxxi-xxxiv, 42, 95
74, 314, 403-38, 440, 450-51, 453 Metaphysics, viii, II, 26, 31-32, 34-
Limit, 149-156, 164, 255-59 1 263-68 40, 42-46, 65 1 68, 75, 108, II6,
passim, 320, 370, 410, 423-24, !28, 152-53, 155, 167, 178-81
444, 462; see also Margin passim, 207-8, 271, 303, 313,
Linguistics, 3 7-39, 44-45, 62-63, 82- 370,403,459,483023, 516
83, 590 Miller, J. Hillis, 254
Linearity, 48-5 r, 44, 410 Mimesis, !26, 169, 170-80, 475
Literature: end of, 500; and epoch, Mise en abyme, 308-9, 530-31,
5 ro; essence of, 192; as event, 566m5
208; history of, 173, 177; and Modernity, 204, 274, 320, 381, 417,
philosophy, 3, 143-45; and refer- 451
ence, 203; status of, 215; theories Mother, xxv, 344-45, 364, 376016,
of, 208; and truth, 174, 474-76; 449, 533, 538-41, 546-47, 55 l-5 5
what is ... ?, 172, 192 Mourning, 200, 203, 214, 257, 332,
Logocentrism, xvii, 31-32, 40, 46, 344, 435, 505, 555-63 passim,
Bo, 108, 159, 241, 272, 313, 465, 576, 588
516 Myth, II3, 115, 121-23, 244
Logos, 35-39 passim, 45, 75, 114-21,
153-55, 174-77, 205, 313, 34I, Narrative, 203-10 passim; 244, 250,
416, 479, 589 258-68, 527, 533, 571, 579-80
Necessity, viii, 243, 287, 418, 512-
Machine, 48, 150, 164-65, 204, 215- 13
17, 235, 271, 381,458, 576, 593 Negative theology, 273, 276n2
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 269 Negotiation, 406-16 passim, 433,
Mallarme, Stephane, xxxix-xl, 5 l, 435, 444
145, 169-73, 180-95, 256, 352, Neutralization, 384-401 passim,
356, 372,447,454 440, 449-53
 Index 623

Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxv, 34-35, 41, 136-37, 177, 185, 353, 367, 396,
51, 53n3, 69-701 741 76, 98, 208-9, 4801 484-515 passim
271, 314, 353-75, 381, 440-45, Play, 43, 641 122-27, 173, 1821 188·
461, 485,486-87, 584, 588 95 passim, 362, 524-48 passim
Poe, Edgar Allan, 144-45, 219n3,
Objectivity, 525-26 1 580 466-70
Ontology, 35, 42, 50, 74-75, 1591 Poematic, 223-37
373, 380-401, 441, 425, 446, 452· Politics, 204, 346, 381, 445-46, 499
53, 594; see also Being Ponge, Francis, 145, 200-16, 586
Opposition, 63 1 70-71 1 105 1 108, 114, Postal system, xxviii, 459-60, 465 1
122, 124-27, 129-37, 178, 185-86, 484-515
195, 208, 214, 324-52passim, Poststructuralism, 272
353, 371, 374, 401, 447-55 pas- Pound, Ezra, 5 l
sim, 509-10 Presence, 6-7, II-I 5, 18-28 passim,
Origin, 40, 46-47, 51·53, 56n21, 62· 29nn9, 15, 34, 42-46, 61-77 pas-
66 passim, 77n2, 85 1 97, 106-07, sim, 88-92 passim, 105-9 passim,
u5-122, 242 1 244-53 passim, 116 1 173-83 passim, 261, 374,
260, 273, 286, 305, 313-14, 326, 417,422,464,476
388-89, 433, 447-52 passim, 470, Program, 216·17, 381, 476, 570, 578·
510, 515-26, 531, 545, 592 81
Other, xxv·xxvi, xxxii, 7, 149-53, Promise, 576-77, 584, 592-96
200, 202-3, 253, 268, 350-52, 403, Proper, xviii, xxvii·xxviii, 123, 150-
405-38, 450, 455, 461, 519, 545, 59, 161n12, 19~ 33~ 345, 351-
589-97 52, 359, 446, 454, 461, 466-80
Proper name, xxiv·v, 76-77, 123 1
Paul, St., 205 202, 243-53, 349-50, 409-n, 420,
Painting, 17 4-76, 279-309 passim 434-36, 517, 528, 539, 559-60,
Parasite, 102-3, 210, 512, 553 1 576, 577, 586, 589
589 Psyche land Cupid), 213
Parergon, 291, 529 Psychoanalysis, 38, 370, 430, 433-
Paternity, xxiv, xxxii, l 17-23, 1291 35, 451, 459, 463-83, 499-503,
314, 429, 461, 479, 519-64pas- 518-64
sim Purloined Letter, The, 466-701 500
Performative, 97-109, 200, 205-12
passim, 422, 591-941 see also Reading, xiv-xvi, so, 191-95, 243 1
Speech act theory 274, 370, 374,444-45,454
Phallogocentrism, xxix, 159n121 Recit, 258-68
164, 313-14, 340, 354, 362, 371, Reference, 180, 1841 206-071 255 1
440,445,451,483n23 257, 429
Phallus, 313, 370, 464, 466-70 Remainder, 99, 315-16, 349, 406,
Pharmakon, 65, u2-13, 116-18, 1 23 .
409, 435, 468-69, 480-8rn5 1 5301
35, 190, 275, 354, 371, 447, 590 586-89
Plato, 92 1 112-37, 169-80, 190, 19 3, Re-mark, 131, 182, 268 1 427 1 587
3671 381, 461, 478, 484-515 Pas- Remembrance of Things Past,
sim 597n2
Platonism, 13, 43, n2-13, 117, 127, Repetition, 10-13, Bo, II5 1 1221 13 3.
624 Index

Speech act theory, 80-81, 97-109,

36, 141, 1591 174-77, 205, 266, 2001 206 1 208 1 390, 574; see also
346,41~46~478, 516-17, 519- Performative
564, 576-97. See also Iterability Spinoza, Baruch, xxiii, xxxiii, 42,
Representation, xl, 8-18 1 29n 91 87- 159
891 134, 136, 175-80, 261, 454, Structuralism, vii-viii, 272
459 Subject, xv-xvi, 16-19, 23-24, 29n15,
Responsibility, viii, 412-23 passim, 66-68, 91, 126, 144, 192-93, 212,
433,480,483n18, 584, 594 273, 278, 283, 287-89, 293-94,
Romantics, l96n3 300-4, 326, 333, 396, 411-29 pas-
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xxvi, 51 31- sim, 461 1 464, 473, 477, 482n17,
32, 57n27, 109n4, 135, 207, 447 538-52, 588, 592
Supplement, 28 1 3on17, 33, 65 1 86,
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5, 321 43-441 88 1 109n5, 113 1 121-23, 133-361
55n20, 62-65 1 67, 135 1 272 139n, 175-801 190, 195, 275 1 2841
Schapiro, Meyer, 277-309, 507 447, 464, 546, 550, 587, 591
Schlegel, Friedrich, 212 Symbol, 301
Science, 5 l - 53 Symbolic, the, 463-64, 466-80 pas-
Searle, John R. 1 81 sim
Sending, 408 1 459-61 1 466-67 1 484-
515, 551-53, 594-97 Technology, 493-96, 510-12
Sexual difference, xxxii, xxxix-xli, Teleology, 339-41, 425, 538, 544
313-16, 322-44, 373, 376n22, 379- Temporization, 60-61, 65-67, 71 1 73
401, 403, 429-33, 440-456, 590 Testament, 530-31
Shelley, PercyB., 255-621 265-67 Text, 35 1 124-25 1 127, 162-63, 256-
Sign, 6-7, 10-141 16-28 passim, 31 1 58, 409, 416, 421, 468, 479, 548
34-36, 44-46, 55n4, 61-68 passim, Theuth (Thoth), 121-23 1 125-26
87-94passim, 134, 426 1 460 Torok, Maria, 518
Signature, xxv, xxx-xxxi, Bo, 106-9, Trace, vii, xv, xviii, xxxii-xxxv, 51 7,
158, 201, 202, 215, 256, 267, 273, 26-27, 341 40-47 passim, 52-53 1
297-98, 355, 373, 37~3, 404, 64-75, 88, 135, 184-85, 257, 265,
411, 420-34passim, 455, 532 1 275, 356, 382, 403, 412-16 pas-
569, 576-96 passim sim, 423-26, 435, 437, 447, 590
Simulacrum, 131-32, 144, 181-95 Trakl, Georg, 400
passim, 255, 305, 337, 354, 358, Transcendentality, xxx-xxxi, 37-401
362, 365, 372, 473, 478 91, 348, 367, 382, 395, 464, 473-
Singularity, 321, 349-52, 392-93, 74, 591-94
403, 411, 419, 427, 444, 471, 478, Translation, xi, xxiv, xiii, 112-13 1
589 120, 125-28, 225-26, 241-53, 255,
Socrates, 113-181 1761 459, 461 1 259-68, 270-76, 305-09, 391, 414-
48rn14, 484-515 passim 151 421, 580
Sophistics, 113 1 133 1 136-37 Triumph of Life, The, 255-62 1 165
Spacing, vii, xv, xxviii, 27, 3on15 1
60-61, 65-67, 71, 93, 106, 174, Unconscious, 71, 73, 105, 1241 1901
182, 186, 190, 314, 358, 394-96, 194, 316, 320, 344, 347, 372, 433,
45 I, 485, 572 585
 Index 625

Undecidabilit y, 112, 180, 185-95, Woman, 213, 353-75, 464, 499, 584
205-8, 362-63, 372-73, 440, 444, Wordsworth, William, 212-13
453,461
University, 262-64, 274, 578-82 Writing, xix, 3-5, 31-32, 35, 40-53
passim, 61-65, 72, 84-97, 102-9,
Valery, Paul, 204 112-19, 122-23, 126, 130-36,
Van Gogh, Vincent, 277-309 l6rn12, 191-95, 243, 374, 412-13,
Voice, 4, 18-24, 36, 38, 454-55, 460, 422-23, 435, 454, 474-75, 512,
470-73, 576 5 14, 5 19, 530-64
Voltaire, 245
"Yale School," 254
Warburton, Bishop M., 85, 87
Weber, Samuel, 573 Zarathustra, 151-52, 584