The rhetoric of survival and the possibility of romanticism.(Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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Is it possible, when one is in memory of the other, in bereaved memory of a friend, is it desirable to think of and to pass beyond this hallucination, beyond a prosopopoeia of a prosopopoeia?

--Jacques Derrida (1)

"I am myself torn ..."

IN THE OPENING SECTION OF ROGUES, ONE OF HIS LAST BOOKS, JACQUES Derrida describes his own position in approaching a topic whose contours deform and whose borders multiply with every word. Indeed, the word with which Derrida begins is "le tour"--or turn--which then turns itself becoming "la tour" (tower), trope, chance, before passing from French to Spanish, Latin, English and back. These first two "tours" also evoke, from the outset, the "Twin Towers" and the "tours" on which they were demolished, the turn of tropes (and implicitly of verse), the movement of alteration and opposition (to take turns, or speak by turns), and finally the wheel, sign of man, technology, mobility, and also of torture. The turns of which Derrida speaks also come to inflect (and reflect) the position from which he speaks, a position in which the act of speaking might preclude the position of which one speaks, which is to say, a situation of testimony. All of which is manifest in his confession: "I am myself tom or split in two." (2)

Some years earlier, in an interview devoted to forgiveness ("La Siecle et le Pardon"), Michel Wieviorka identified this structure of self-division in terms of ethics, and asked Derrida whether he is permanently divided between a "hyperbolic" ethical vision of forgiveness (or pure pardon) and the reality of a society at work in its pragmatic processes of reconciliation." (3) Here Wieviorka highlights upon a position that Derrida agrees is very much his own, and Derrida goes on to explain: "Yes, I remain 'torn,' as you say so well. But without power, desire, or need to decide. The two poles are irreducible to one another, certainly, but they remain indissociable. In order to inflect politics, or what you just called the 'pragmatic processes,' in order to change the law (which thus finds itself between the two poles, the 'ideal' and the 'empirical'--and what is more important to me here is, between these two, this universalizing mediation, this history of the law, the possibility of this progress of the law), it is necessary to refer to a '"hyperbolic" ethical vision of forgiveness'" (51). If in speaking of forgiveness, Derrida acknowledges that he is torn between the actual occurrence of forgiveness and the impossibility of true or pure forgiveness, between the empirical (that it happens) and the ideal (that it cannot), he also enjoys a relatively placid experience of this division and remains apparently untroubled by living in uncertainties.

Yet, despite the structural repetition, the experience of division emerges in quite a different way in Rogues, when Derrida promises to introduce the double question that orients--and divides--him. He begins by asking: "What is this question, divided or multiplied by two?" (7), and then goes on as I already have cited: "At the moment of confiding it to you, I am myself torn or split in two" (7). The moment, like the question, like the one who asks is divided. The question of the question ("What is this question ...") is divided, insofar as it both asks of itself (what is this question that is only of itself?) and of another (the question to come: what is it?). It is both the question of which it refers and it indicates another question yet to be asked (or recognized). And the self is divided insofar as it says that it is and insofar as it refers to itself as an object while also acting as a subject. When Derrida proceeds to refer to the moment of confession ("At the moment of confiding it to you"), he speaks both of a moment that has yet to occur as well as the moment that has just passed. Thus, both past and future, he finds himself split in two, subject and object of a question that will turn out to be the question of the very possibility, even necessity, of speaking democratically of democracy. (4) But, rather than continue, as before, without a feeling of pressure or obligation to decide, and rather than remain here with a certain familiarity or calm, Derrida explains that the experience of thinking democracy is not only tumultuous, but also torturous. "This double question," which he has yet to formally pose, "has returned to torment me. It has made a return, turning around me, turning and returning, turning around me and turning me upside down, upsetting me, as if I were locked in a tower, unable to get around" (7). He goes on to explain that this is torture's circular structure: it "always puts to work an encircling violence and an insistent repetition, a relentlessness, the turn and return of a circle" (8).

And so Derrida goes so far as to say that he is not just split, but quartered, like a guilty criminal or rogue, punished first by torture and then by death, (5) As we read on--in anticipation of the revelation of a question, which is also a confession, a question-confession that already will have been offered and remains still to come--it becomes clear that the division is in the first place an effect of language, that is, of the impossibility of asking a question that is not more than one (and hence is not divided). Yet, more than this, as Derrida finally confesses, it is a specific question of language: the question of the possibility or the necessity of speaking of democracy democratically. Torn, tortured, divided, quartered--"speaking without being able to speak" it is from this position that Derrida speaks of ethics and of politics. (6)

In Apprendre a vivre enfin, the last interview he was to give, Derrida refers to Rogues and to his claim there that the democracy to which Europe owes its origins is also a democracy that has yet fully to exist and remains still to come. Derrida recognizes in this claim a structure of internal division that recurs throughout his work, and of which he claims to have "no ultimate justification, except that it's me, it's there where I am." (7) He goes on, to elaborate (affirming a phrase offered by Jean Birnbaum, his interviewer, the very phrase that will give the title to the interview when it first appears in Le Monde): "I am at war against myself, it's true, and you cannot know the extent of it, it goes beyond what you guess, and these contradictory things I say, which, as they say, are in real tension constitute me, make me live and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and painful, but at the same time, I know that it's life [c'est la vie]. I will not find peace except in eternal repose" (49; my emphasis). The internal war that Derrida describes--even beyond the imagination or expectation of his interviewer--is not simply what destroys, but also what defines and shapes him. This war, which we could be tempted to call "cancer" in which the body levels an attack upon itself--up to the point of death--is here understood not as a physical state (although Derrida's physical state stands from the outset as the interview's unnamed, yet repeatedly invoked "context," but rather as the state of language and philosophy, and indeed of living and being alive ("c'est la vie"). It is not--or not only--the body, divided and at war against itself, but rather "these contradictory things I say" that constitute the war, the living--and the dying--of Jacques...

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