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“To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life … And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live—alone, from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever do anything else but learn to live, alone, from oneself, by oneself? This is, therefore, a strange commitment, both impossible and necessary, for a living being supposed to be alive: “I would like to learn to live.” It has no sense and cannot be just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak like the just.
“If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing. An extreme process; we exert ourselves without knowing whom exactly the thing we leave behind is confided to. Who is going to inherit, and how? It is a question that one can pose oneself today more than ever. It constantly preoccupies me.”
“I Am At War With Myself,” Le Monde, August 19, 2004. Jacques Derrida, trans. Robert Knafo.
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“The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among others, end of someone or of something in the world, the end of a life or of a living being. Death puts an end neither to someone in the world nor to one world among others. Death marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of that which opens as a one and only world, the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it human or not.
“The survivor, then, remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he is also in some fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world outside the world and deprived of the world. At the least, he feels solely responsible, assigned to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared, responsible without world (weltlos), without the ground of any world, thenceforth, in a world without world, as if without earth beyond the end of the world…
Derrida, SOVEREIGNTIES IN QUESTION: THE POETICS OF PAUL CELAN.
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“Every revenant seems here to come from and return to the earth, to come from it as from a buried clandestinity (humus and mold tomb and subterranean prison), to return to it as to the lowest, toward the humble, humid, humiliated. We must pass by here, we too, we must pass over in silence, as low as possible to the earth, the return of an animal…”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“One must, magically, chase away a specter, exorcise the possible return of a power held to be baleful in itself and whose demonic threat continues to haunt the century. Since such a conjuration today insists, in such a deafening consensus, that what is, it says, indeed dead, remain dead indeed, it arouses a suspicion. It awakens us where it would like to put us to sleep. Vigilance, therefore: the cadaver is perhaps not as dead, as simply dead as the conjuration tries to delude us into believing. The one who has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not nothing. It does not do nothing. Assuming that the remains can be identified, we know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever. There is also a mode of production of the phantom, itself a phantomatic mode of production. As in the work of mourning, after a trauma, the conjuration has to make sure that the dead will not come back: quick, do whatever is needed to keep the cadaver localized, in a safe place, decomposing right where it was inhumed, or even embalmed as they liked to do in Moscow. Quick, a vault to which one keeps the keys! These keys would be nothing other than those of the power that the conjuration would like thus to reconstitute upon the death of Marx. We were speaking earlier of an unlocking. The logic of the key in which I hoped to orient this keynote address was one of apolitic-logic of trauma and a topology of mourning. A mourning in fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept, between introjection and incorporation. But the same logic, as we suggested, responds to the injunction of a justice which, beyond right or law, rises upon in the very respect owed to whatever is not, no longer or not yet, living, presently living.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“The specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the REVENANT or the return of the specter. There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed. The spirit, the specter, are not the same thing, and we will have to sharpen this difference; but as for what they have in common, one does not know what it is, what it presently. It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge. One does not know if it is living or if it is dead. Here is—or rather, there is, over there, an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, ‘this thing,’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde] comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy…
“(Marcellus: What, ha’s this thing appeard againe tonight? Barnardo: ‘I haue seene nothing’). The Thing is still invisible, it is nothing visible (‘I haue seene nothing’) at the moment one speaks of it and in order to ask oneself if it has reappeared. It is still nothing that can e seen when one speaks of it. It is no longer anything that can be seen when Marcellus speaks of it, but it has been seen twice. And it is in order to adjust speech to sight that Horatio the skeptic has been convoked. He will servie as third party and witness (terstis): ‘if againe this Apparition come, He may approue our eyes and speake to it.’
“The Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“Marx remains an immigrant chez nous, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still a clandestine immigrant as he was all his life. He belongs to a time of disjunction, to that ‘time out of joint’ in which is inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy. Between earth and sky. One should not rush to make of the clandestine immigrant an illegal alien or, what always risks coming down to the same thing, to domesticate him. To neutralize him through naturalization. To assimilate him so as to stop frightening oneself (making oneself fear) with him. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back, once again, him too, to the border.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint.
“A ‘new international’ is being sought through these crises of international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the law of the market, the ‘foreign debt,’ the inequality of technoscientific, military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (And provisionally, but with regret, we must leave aside here the nevertheless indissociable question of what is becoming of so-called “animal” life, the life and existence of “animals” in this history. This question has always been a serious one, but it will become massively unavoidable.)”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“This anxiety in the face of the ghost is properly revolutionary. If death weighs on the living brain for the living, and still more on the brains of revolutionaries, it must then have some spectral density. To weigh (lasten) is also to charge, tax, impose, indebt, accuse, assign, enjoin. And the more life there is, the graver the specter of the other becomes, the heavier its imposition. And the more the living have to answer for it. To answer for the dead, to respond to the dead. To correspond and have it out with [s’expliquer avec] obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry. Nothing is more serious and nothing is more true, nothing is more exact [juste] than this phantasmagoria.
“The specter weighs, it thinks, it intensifies and condenses itself within the very inside of life, within the most living life, the most singular (or, if one prefers, individual) life. The latter therefore no longer has and must no longer have, insofar as it is living, a pure identity to itself or any assured inside: this is what all philosophies of life, or even philosophies of the living and real individual, would have to weigh carefully.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“We are going to count the ghosts. On Marx’s fingers. But we cannot help asking ourselves, once again, at the opening of this fabulous scene: Why such relentless pursuit [ACHARNEMENT]? Why this hunt for ghosts? What is the reason for Marx’s rage? Why does he harass Stirner with such irresistible irony? One has the impression, since the critique appears so insistent and redundant, both brilliant and ponderous, that Marx could go on forever launching his barbs and wounding to death. He could never leave his victim. He is bound to it in a trouble fashion. His prey captivates him. The ACHARNEMENT of a hunter consists in setting out an animal lure, here the living lifeless body of a ghost, in order to trick the prey. I have my own feeling on this subject (I insist that it is a FEELING, my feeling and I have no reason to deny that it projects itself necessarily into the scene I am interpreting: my ‘thesis,’ my hypothesis, or my hypostasis, precisely, is that it is never possible to avoid this precipitation, since everyone reads, acts, writes with HIS OR HER ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other).”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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“Even if one wanted to, one could not let the dead bury the dead: that has no sense, that is impossible. Only mortals, only the living who are not living gods can bury the dead. Only mortals can watch over them, and can watch, period. Ghosts can do so as well, they are everywhere where there is watching; the dead cannot do so—it is impossible and they must not do so.
“In order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible price to pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to be begun again. But in memory, this time, of that impure “impure impure history of ghosts.” Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? ‘Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio. Question it.’
“The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the “there” as soon as we open our mouths, even at a colloquium and especially when one speaks there in a foreign language:
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf.
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CODA FOR A FUTURE IN WHICH YOU START TRYING TO REMEMBER HOW TO WRITE AGAIN:
Thou——baby Achilles looking for her Patroclus, boy who becomes mostly a girl later on in the story, Orlando in unrequited love with the world, possessed kid, sickly daughter, reincarnated ancestor, knight of faith in her old Adidas Dragons (although those are Nikes in the above picture), Socrates who doesn’t get drunk and doesn’t get cold, Socrates who doesn’t sleep, Socrates who endures, Socrates/Diotima who knows that love is knowing and knowing is love, Socrates loved by Alcibiades who bursts into the party unexpected and gets the last word as the drunken boy who speaks the clearer truth, the hopeless grinning lover who turns out to be a beloved, or is it the other way around, with Socrates you never know, Alcibiades the beloved and so saved friend (Plutarch, LIFE OF ALCIBIADES: “but Alcibiades receiving a wound, Socrates threw himself before him to defend him”), Alcibiades gets the last word but he still dies first; girl still in the middle of the action film, when the audience still doesn’t know whether or not the world is going to saved or lost, still not having learned the reciprocity between saving and losing; girl, daughter, impossible friend, you loved someone once, death takes everything but it doesn’t take that, that truest of pleas in the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, which is almost my dead friend’s name but not quite, “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal over your arm; for love is as strong as death”; remember things like that, thou, Lancelot, who uses her sword as a bridge, Lancelot who is told that only the destined knight will lift up the stone slab of the tomb to read its inscription; Lancelot who then lifts up the stone slab of the tomb, as if it is nothing, as if it does not burden her, which is to say, as if it does not grieve her, si que de neant ne s’i grieve; thou, Bradamante of Silicon Valley always fated to fall in love with an inconvenient foreigner, Urduja who will marry no one but he who defeats her in battle, my mom is Pangasinan after all, why not be Urduja, too, why not wear the aegis of any of the illustrious cunted knights, or indeed take up the mantle of one of Kierkegaard’s Knights of Faith and Knights of Infinite Resignation; but really it’s always been more like a peasant disguised as a knight or a secret prince disguised as a knight, isn’t it, like in A KNIGHT’S TALE with Heath Ledger as servant-turned-knight and James Purefoy as prince-turned-knight, transvestism of every stripe and color, class drag, too, she wants to be a knight but one half of her family is royal and the other half is peasant, where does that leave you, class schizophrenia means context is something that can always be yanked out from underneath you, but then all the immigration and emigration have already seen to that a thousand times over; thou, filmer, the one for whom a film is still a membrane, envoi sent to a dead person, tell me something I don’t already know and haven’t already devoted my life to like an idiot, self-forgetting as Lancelot in love or Socrates in thought, girl never Hamlet but always Horatio, Horatio who almost kills himself (saying he’s an ancient Roman, god, that sounds familiar), but Hamlet stops him, stops him and then dies instead; you stopped me and then died instead; Horatio the friend, the one who survives, Horatio meant to live on and tell the tale, Hamlet who begs Horatio not to kill himself (and in doing so, find happiness), but rather, to stay alive (and in doing so, accept ceaseless pain); asks Horatio to live, still, to live, if only to tell this story, the story of their lives, the story of what happened here, for that’s what it is, to be the one who survives to tell the story (“Absent thee from felicity a while, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story”); and after it’s all done, everyone’s dead, the whole world is lost, it’s Horatio who has to declare to Fortinbras, his heart broken and still breaking, “And let me speak to th’ yet-unknowing world / How these things came about” (and this is something I am still learning, a lesson which is emotional, which is to say it is radical, which is to say it is political: how to speak to and live in, the yet unknowing world); okay, okay, okay, but really, who gives a shit about Hamlet, who gives a shit about telling your story, stay with me, it’s not time to go yet, let’s do it another way, the way the morning after they’ve made love for the first time, Juliet tries to convince Romeo that it’s not morning yet, he doesn’t have to leave for exile in Mantua yet (this speech which I recited to F. on our first morning after in Paris, god, what a cheesy fucking thing to do, I can’t even believe the lengths of my cheesiness, I really am my dead best friend’s daughter after all, Christ), and Romeo very sweetly “believes” her lie, knowing and loving it as a lie, coming back to her, playing along with her, even though the stakes are his life: “Come death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so. How is’t my soul? Let’s talk, it is not day”; so can’t I, too, say, knowing the truth is coming but wanting to push it away a minute longer, wanting to stay in this sweet fiction a little while longer, can’t I also say, “how is’t, my soul, let’s talk, it is not day,” to remain a little longer in this waking dream of night even though the dead-cold clarity of day is already here, I don’t want to be Horatio, let me be stupid-happy Romeo a little bit longer, let me have my love alive and well a little longer, just a little longer; but we all know how that play ends, too; there’s a reason why I insist that my favorite Shakespeare is the comedy TWELFTH NIGHT)——thou, writer, not good with words, not good at all really, but always with words; thou, inheritor, heir, the left one, the one who was left——
——thou art a scholar; speak to it.
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“It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’
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ASH-AS-POSTSCRIPT:
“La phrase se pare de toutes ses morts. Et si mieux tu te ravales, dit la grand-mère et le loup pour quoi tu travailles, c’est encore au bénéfice du deuil.”
“The sentence is adorned with all of its dead. And all the better to eat yourself with, say the grandmother and the wolf for whom you work; it is still to the benefit of mourning.”
Derrida, FEU LA CENDRE/CINDERS.
