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Description
By examining the relationship between sovereignty and the unconditional in several of Derrida's works from Speech and Phenomenon to Glas, "Faith and Knowledge" to Sovereignties in Question, this paper asks whether a deconstructive thinking of sovereignty can help determine and change for the better the deconstructive processes already at work in ourselves, our political systems, and our religious institutions.
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It is hard not to wonder what Jacques Derrida would have done with a title like "Following Derrida." For those of us here who follow Derrida, either in the sense of coming after him, following after him, or continuing to read and study him, we have no doubt all asked ourselves on several occasions over the past two years what Jacques Derrida would have done or thought about this or that, how he would have responded to some discourse or event. Though we speculate and, I think, should continue to speculate, since that is part of following him, we will never know--and must not claim to know. How would Jacques Derrida have responded to a title like "Following Derrida"? We simply do not know, we cannot know, though were I to speculate, and I think we must speculate, I believe he would have tried to turn us away from thinking of ourselves as either the heirs of a bygone past, those who simply come after him, or those who tag along after him as his followers or, worse, his disciples. He would have turned us instead, I would like to believe, toward a promise of the future that we would in fact be following or trying to follow after, a promise that goes by the name "Derrida" even if he himself, Jacques Derrida himself, was always following it. In short, he would have turned us toward following the future as the best way of refusing to make of him a father or a master or an icon, the best way of keeping us from thinking that he himself embodied the promise that he in fact was following, the best way, in the end, of dispelling any phantasm about him. (1)
I like to think, therefore, that Jacques Derrida would have seen in the title "Following Derrida" not simply an act of memory or remembrance but an invitation to think, from out of this memory, about the future--and about this memory as the future. Before trying to continue to follow him in this way, then, let me take this occasion to thank those responsible for this invitation, the journal Mosaic, and especially Dawne McCance and her assistant Lisa Muirhead, for the boundless creativity, energy, kindness, and hospitality they have shown in the organization of this conference, indeed, for the invitation they have extended to each of us to think about how we might follow Derrida today in the future. It is a pleasure, an honour, and a daunting responsibility--especially since, in a room such as this, so many of you know so much about the work of Derrida, for example, to name just one, my former teacher Hugh Silverman, the person with whom I took my first class on Derrida a couple of decades back at Stony Brook. It was in large part thanks to that class that I myself began following Silverman following Derrida. Let me thank him here publicly for that.
Now, I said a moment ago that while we cannot know how Derrida would have responded to this conference, I wager that he would have done what he could to dispel any phantasm of being a father or a master or an icon for us, a sovereign gaze that would watch over and determine everything we say and do, that would run all our words and deeds through a Derridean censor that perpetually makes us ask in that popular idiom, "what would Jacques do?" Such an inflexible law, such a sovereign power, would have the effect of submitting everything we say and do not simply to the memory or specter of Jacques Derrida, to his living on in us, but to our phantasm of him. As I will try to argue in what follows, to treat the memory of Jacques Derrida in this way, to treat him as if he were here, watching and judging us, passing judgment in advance over what we do, would be the beginning of a phantasm, the beginning of an as if, a comme si, that tries to pass itself off as an as so, a like so or a like that, a comme ca. From comme si to comme ca, from the comme si of a speculative fiction to the comme ca of an inflexible law--that is the nature, the conventional but seemingly natural nature, of a phantasm--the kind that Jacques Derrida spent so much of his work warning us against by calling into question and submitting to a vigilant critique-and right up to the end.
I will thus look at three such fictions or phantasms--the sovereignties of the self, the nation-state, and God--in order to understand Derrida's insistence that we must ultimately relinquish sovereignty, the phantasm of sovereignty and the sovereignty of the phantasm, in the name of the very thing that has traditionally been identified with it, that is, in the name of the unconditional. The fictions and phantasmatic powers of sovereignty must be given up, Derrida suggests, in the name of the unconditionality of the event or the unconditional coming of the other, since, without such a renunciation, there can be no ethics and there will be no future. Though sovereignty--be it the sovereignty of a self-determining or self-legislating individual, of a self-sufficient or self-founding nation-state, or of a single, all-powerful God--is today undergoing critique or deconstruction of its own accord, so to speak (in accordance with what Derrida has called an ineluctable "autoimmune process"), this deconstruction nonetheless remains for us an essential task. Following Derrida's thinking about the phantasms of self, state, and a sovereign God, I will inevitably conclude that at a time such as ours when the power of the phantasm shows no signs of abating, a thought like Derrida's--the haunting thought of Derrida--becomes all the more vital. Though the 1970s and 1980s will continue to be characterized by the theory textbooks as the "heyday of deconstruction," I would like to suggest that now may really be the time to be "following Derrida." I say this, I hope, without phantasm or illusion.
Specter, ghost, phantom, spectrality, fantomaticity, hauntology, phantasm: these words are, as we know, at the centre of Derrida's work, and already from the beginning, even if they have the appearance of becoming more explicit and central in the final two decades of his life. I will not rehearse here the relationship between what Derrida calls dissemination, differance, or iterability and spectrality or hauntology. Some of you right here, in fact, such as my friend Kas Saghafi, have already done this work, and done it in an exemplary fashion (see Sagafi, "The Ghost of Jacques Derrida"). It thus no longer needs to be shown how Derrida, almost from the beginning, spoke of the "spectral errancy of words," of the "ineluctable originarity of the specter," of a reve-nance of the mark that "does not befall words by accident" but conditions them "from their first emergence," of the trace as being related from its first inscription to an originary mourning and a certain kind of living on ("Shibboleth" 53).
Though the notion of the phantasm undoubtedly belongs to this same set of words or quasi-concepts, I would like to try to reserve for it a rather special use and status in Derrida's work. I will try to situate this special status by asking, first, just what a phantasm is, what contexts it emerges in, what problems--of individual identity formation, nation-station identification, or religious understanding--it helps us to diagnose and, finally, what promises a critique of the phantasm at the level of the individual, the nation-state, and religion can hold for us today. (2)
Though the notion of the "phantasm" appears in many earlier works, from Speech and Phenomenon to Glas, to name just two, I would like to begin this reading of Derrida's phantasms in one of Derrida's most autobiographical works, Monolingualism of the Other. Appearing, then, in a genre of writing that typically assumes a coincidence or identity between the one writing and the one being written about, this text introduces, it seems, a certain non-coincidence, non-simultaneity, or de-identification between the self and itself, the self that is writing and the self being written about. This should come as little surprise, of course, since one of the very first lessons of deconstruction is that a certain difference or distance is necessary to the production of what would seem to come before it, the living presence of a self in absolute proximity to itself, the immediate presence of a self hearing itself speak and so assuming within itself the meaning of a vouloir dire. But in Monolingualism of the Other, this classic Derridean theme is cast in a slightly different light, that is, in the light of the phantasm. Speaking of the fact that the language one speaks is always the other's and that there is, thus, an inalienable alienation within one's own speech, Derrida writes: "This structure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, is not only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the peculiarity and property of language. It institutes the phenomenon of hearing-oneself-speak in order to mean-to-say [pour vouloir dire]. But here, we must say the phenomenon as phantasm. Let us refer for the moment to the semantic and etymological affinity that associates the phantasm to the phainesthai, to phenomenality, but also to the spectrality of the phenomenon. Phantasma is also the phantom, the double, or the ghost" (25). Here we have, bundled into one tight paragraph, many of the words I mentioned earlier: phantasm, phantom, ghost, spectrality. But are these all quasi-synonyms or non-substitutable synonyms for the same phenomenon? Derrida ends the passage I just cited by speaking of the spectrality of the phenomenon, that is, I take it, the intrinsic possibility of doubling and iteration that makes any phenomenal appearance possible. Spectrality would be one of those non-synonymous substitutes for what was once called iterability or differance. As for phantasm, it comes, as Derrida points out, from the same semantic "family" as phenomenon, namely phainesthai, meaning to appear, become apparent, become phenomenal. The point would seem to be that iterability or spectrality is the condition, so to speak, of every coming to appear, including the coming to appear of oneself to oneself or the coming to hear oneself speak in a meaning-to-say or a vouloir dire. But this spectrality or "inalienable alienation" then "institutes," Derrida says, "the phenomenon of hearing-oneself-speak in order to mean-to-say [pour vouloir dire]," that is, it institutes "the phenomenon as phantasm." Spectrality would seem to be the condition of phenomenality as well as of that particular kind of phenomenon called the phantasm. Without having, at this point, to circumscribe the field of the phantasm in relation to other kinds of phenomena, we can see coming to light one defining characteristic of the phantasm: the phantasm suggests or leads us to believe in a non-alienation of the self from itself in language, it leads us to believe in a coincidence of the self that speaks and the self that hears itself speak in a vouloir dire, the immediate apprehension of a self by itself in a vouloir dire. The very first phenomenon as phantasm would thus seem to be the phantasm of hearing oneself speak in order to mean-to-say. Though the phantasm as phenomenon, as an appearing to the self, always introduces appearance, iterability, and,... |
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