The Work of Mourning

271 Pages·2001·11.64 MB·English

by  Jacques Derrida

THE WORK OF
MOURNING
jACQUES DERRIDA
EDITED BY
PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT AND MICHAEL NAAS
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LoNDON
Jacques Derrida is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities
at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many
books, including Th~ Gift of D~ath and Archiv~ F~v"- both
published by the University of Chicago Press. Pascale-Anne
Brault is associate professor of French at DePaul University.
Michael Naas is professor of philosophy at DePaul University.
Together they have translated several works by Derrida, in
cluding Mnnoirs of th~ Blind, published by the University of
Chicago Press, and Adi~u.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 6o637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2001 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America
English language only.
10 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03 02 01 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: o-226-14316-3 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Derrida, Jacques.
The work of mourning I Jacques Derrida; edited by Pascale
Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
EM SBN o-226-14316-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Derrida, Jacques--Friends and associates.
2. Philosophers--Biography. 3· Eulogies. I. Brault,
Pascale-Anne. II. Naas, Michael. III. Title.
f3
B24jo.D483 W67 2001
Z4'3Q
194-dc21
'b ; 2 oo-o 12995
@The paper used in this public~ meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Infor
mation Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1992.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida's
Politics of Mourning
CHAPTER ROLAND BARTHES (1915-80)' jl
The Deaths of Roland Banhes
2 PAUL DE MAN (1919-83)
In Memoriam: Of the Soul
3 MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-84) 77
"To Do Justice to Freud"
4 MAX LOREAU (1928-90) 9'
Letter to Francine Loreau
5 JEAN-MARIE BENOIST (1942-90) 105
The Taste of Tears
6 LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) Ill
Text Read at Louis Ahhusser's Funeral
7 EDMOND JAB~S (1912-91) 119
Letter to Didier Cahen
8 JosEPH N. RIDDEL (1931-91) 125
A·demi-mot
9 MICHEL SERVI~RE (1941-91) ljj
As If There Were an Art of the Signature
10 LOUIS MARIN (1931-92) '39
By Force of Mourning
I. The biographical >kerches art> by Kas Saghafi.
v
VI CONTENTS
II SARAH KOFMA.N (1934-94) t65
........
12 GILLES DELEUZE (19:15-95) t89
I'm Going to Have to Wander All Alone
13 EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1906-95) '97
Adieu
14 JEAN-FRANf;OIS LYOTARD (19Z4-98) 211
All-Out Friendship
Lyotard and Us
BIBLIOGRAPHIES, COMPILED BY KAS SAGHAFI 24J
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impetus for this book was a conference held on
October 7, 19¢, at DePaul University on the themes of
mourning and politics in the work of Jacques Derrida.
We offer our heartfelt thanks to David Krell, who or
ganized the conference and provided us with a forum
for discussing this topic with Jacques Derrida, and to
Peg Birmingham, who first suggested the idea of collect
ing these texts into a single volume. Their support and
collegiality have been invaluable in the preparation of
this work.
Of the fifteen translations gathered here, eight have
been previously published. We are grateful to Kevin
Newmark (and Columbia University Press), Samuel
Weber (and the Louisiana State University Press), and
Leonard Lawlor (and Philosophy Today) for allowing us
to republish their translations of Derrida's texts on de
Man, Riddel, and Dcleuze. Our thanks also to Boris
Belay for making his translation of "Lyotard and Us"
available to us for this volume, and to Stanford Univer
sity Press, Critical Inquiry, and Northwestern Univer
sity Press for permission to reprint our own previously
published translations of the texts on Foucault, Kofman,
VII
VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Levinas, Marin, and Barthes. All but the Foucault and Kofman tens arc
published here in their entirety, these being abridged only in those places
where they depart significantly from the central themes of the volume. The
complete version of these texts can be found in R~istanc~s ofP sychoanalysis
and TM Sarah Kofman R~ada, both from Stanford University pres~.
We owe a truly inestimable debt to Kas Saghafi of DePaul University
for compiling the biographies and bibliographies in this volume. His
exceptional library sleuthing skills and exemplary attention to detail have
helped put Derrida's words of remembrance into the context of the lives
and works of these thinkers. Kas has asked us to thank here in his
name the excellent staff at the DePaul University Library, particularly
Marilyn Browning, John Rininger, and Denise Rogers, for their umparing
and professional assistance. Kas's efforts, and those of the library staff
at DePaul, have helped make this collection of works of mourning a
genuinely collective work of memory.
Our special thanks to Fran10oise Marin and Christiane Mauve for
the biographical information they were kind enough to share with us
concerning their late husbands, Louis Marin and Michel Serviere, and to
Didier Cahen, who made available to us an unpublished leuer by Derrida
on Edmond Jabes and helped write the biographical sketch on the poet.
Our thanks as wdl to Pleshette DeArmitt, David Krell, and Alan Schrift
for their many excdlent suggestions on the penultimate draft of this work.
We would also like to express our gratitude to the University
Research Council at DePaul University, along with DePaul's College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences, and especially its dean, Michael Mezey, for their
generous support of this project over the past couple of years.
Finally, we offer our deepest thanks to Jacques Derrida, who not only
accepted our request to collect these very personal reflections on friends
and colleagues into a single volume but encouraged us throughout with a
grace and generosity beyond measure.
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
To RECKON WITH THE DEAD: JACQUES
DERRIDA'S POLITICS OF MOURNING
Philia begins with the possibility of survival.
Surviving-that is the other name of a mourning
whose possibilit)' is never to be awaited.
Politics of Friendship
One musr always go before the orher. In the Politics of
Friendship, Jacques Derrida demonstrates that this is the
law of friendship--and thus of mourning.' One friend
musr always go before rhe other; one friend must always
die first. There is no friendship without the possibility
rhat one friend will die before the other, perhaps right be
fore the other's eyes. For even when friends die togerher,
or rather, at the same time, their friendship will have been
srructured from the very beginning by the possibility that
one of rhe two would see the orher die, and so, surviving,
would be left ro bury, ro commemorare, and ro mourn.
1, Jacques Dc:rrida, Politio of Frinuiship, trans. George Collins (New
York: Verso, 1997).
~ INTRODUCTION
While: Jacques Derrida has formalized this law in numerous texts
over the past few decades, he has also had to undergo or bear witness to
it, as friends--and there are now many of them-have gone before him,
making explicit or effective the structural law that will have determined
all his friendships from the beginning. Over the past couple of decades,
then, Derrida has not only continued to develop in a theoretical fashion
this relationship between friendship and mourning but has, on several
occasions, and in recent years with greater and greater frequency, been
called upon to respond at a determined time and place to an unrepeatable
event-the death of a friend. Each time this has occurred, Derrida has
tried to bear witness to the singularity of a friendship, to the absolute
uniqueness of his relationship with a friend, in a form that varies between
a word or letter of condolence, a memorial essay, a eulogy, and a funeral
oration. Each time, he has tried to respond to a singular event, a unique
occasion, with words fit for the friend-words that inevitably relate life
and friendship to death and mourning. This volume gathers together these
various responses, written over a period of some twenty years, in order to
draw attention to a series of questions and aporias concerning what we
have risked calling Jacques Derrida's "politics of mourning."
The idea of bringing these texts together first grew out of a confer
ence with Jacques Derrida at DePaul University in October of 19¢ on the
theme of mourning and politics. During that conference, it became clear
that while these texts were not originally destined to share the same space,
they have come: to resemble a sort of corpus within the corpus ofDc:rrida.
Having prevailed upon Jacques Derrida to allow us to gather these texts
of mourning into a single volume, we have asked in essence for a sort of
reckoning between them. From the very first of these essays, "The Deaths
of Roland Barthes," written in 1981, Derrida has been concerned with the
relationship between the singularity of death and its inevitable repetition,
with what it means to reckon with death, or with the dead, with all those:
who were once close to us but who are no longer, as we say, "with us,"
or who are "with us" only insofar as they are "in us." By bringing these
various tributes together under a single cover, by drawing up a sort of
account of those whom Derrida has mourned, we have in effect asked
each of these texts to reckon not only with the singular death that each
addresses but with one another, and with the inevitable repetition and
betrayal that each represents in relation to the others.
To reckon: that is to say, to recount, relate, or narrate, to consider,
judge, or evaluate, even to estimate, enumerate, and calculate. Such a
reckoning is perhaps to be expected when it comes to politics, where
accounts must be given, judgments rendered, and calculations made. But