Signature Derrida
416
Signature Derrida
416Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like “The Law of Genre,” in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida’s writing includes the essays “Of Spirit” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories.
With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida’s work to date.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226924540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press Journals |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Series: | A Critical Inquiry Book |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Jay Williams is senior managing editor of Critical Inquiry.
Jay Williams is senior managing editor of Critical Inquiry.
Françoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College. Meltzer is the author of five books, most recently of Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, and a co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.
Read an Excerpt
Signature Derrida
By Jacques Derrida
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2013The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92454-0
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Law of Genre
Translated by Avital Ronell
Genres are not to be mixed.
I will not mix genres.
I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.
Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves.
Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free their random virtualities and turn them over to my audience— or, rather, to your audience, to your auditory grasp, to whatever mobility they retain and you bestow upon them to engender effects of all kinds without my having to stand behind them.
I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to be mixed; I will not mix them.
As long as I release these utterances (which others might call speech acts) in a form yet scarcely determined, given the open context out of which I have just let them be grasped from "my" language—as long as I do this, you may find it difficult to choose among several interpretative options. They are legion, as I could demonstrate. They form an open and essentially unpredictable series. But you may be tempted by at least two types of audience, two modes of interpretation, or, if you prefer to give these words more of a chance, then you may be tempted by two different genres of hypothesis. Which ones?
On the one hand, it could be a matter of a fragmentary discourse whose propositions would be of the descriptive, constative, and neutral genre. In such a case, I would have named the operation which consists of "genres are not to be mixed." I would have designated this operation in a neutral fashion without evaluating it, without recommending or advising against it, certainly without binding anyone to it. Without claiming to lay down the law or to make this an act of law, I merely would have summoned up, in a fragmentary utterance, the sense of a practice, an act or event, as you wish: which is what sometimes happens when we revert to "genres are not to be mixed." With reference to the same case, and to a hypothesis of the same type, same mode, same genre—or same order: when I said, "I will not mix genres," you may have discerned a foreshadowing description—I am not saying a prescription—the descriptive designation telling in advance what will transpire, predicting it in the constative mode or genre, that is, it will happen thus, I will not mix genres. The future tense describes, then, what will surely take place, as you yourselves can judge; but for my part it does not constitute a commitment. I am not making you a promise here, nor am I issuing myself an order or invoking the authority of some law to which I am resolved to submit myself. In this case, the future tense does not set the time of a performative speech act of a promising or ordering type.
But another hypothesis, another type of audience, and another interpretation would have been no less legitimate. "Genres are not to be mixed" could strike you as a sharp order. You might have heard it resound the elliptical but all the more authoritarian summons to a law of a "do" or "do not" which, as everyone knows, occupies the concept or constitutes the value of genre. As soon as the word "genre" is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: "Do," "Do not" says "genre," the word "genre," the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in all genres, be it a question of a generic or a general determination of what one calls "nature" or physis (for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general), or be it a question of a typology designated as nonnatural and depending on laws or orders which were once held to be opposed to physis according to those values associated with technè, thesis, nomos (for example, an artistic, poetic, or literary genre). But the whole enigma of genre springs perhaps most closely from within this limit between the two genres of genre which, neither separable nor inseparable, form an odd couple of one without the other in which each evenly serves the other a citation to appear in the figure of the other, simultaneously and indiscernibly saying "I" and "we," me the genre, we genres, without it being possible to think that the "I" is a species of the genre "we." For who would have us believe that we, we two, for example, would form a genre or belong to one? Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity. And so it goes in all cases, whether or not this law of genre be interpreted as a determination or perhaps even as a destination of physis, and regardless of the weight or range imputed to physis. If a genre is what it is, or if it is supposed to be what it is destined to be by virtue of its telos, then "genres are not to be mixed"; one should not mix genres, one owes it to oneself not to get mixed up in mixing genres. Or, more rigorously: genres should not intermix. And if it should happen that they do intermix, by accident or through transgression, by mistake or through a lapse, then this should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of "mixing," the essential purity of their identity. This purity belongs to the typical axiom: it is a law of the law of genre, whether or not the law is, as one feels justified in saying, "natural." This normative position and this evaluation are inscribed and prescribed even at the threshold of the "thing itself," if something of the genre "genre" can be so named. And so it follows that you might have taken the second sentence in the first person, "I will not mix genres," as a vow of obedience, as a docile response to the injunction emanating from the law of genre. In place of a constative description, you would then hear a promise, an oath; you would grasp the following respectful commitment: I promise you that I will not mix genres, and, through this act of pledging utter faithfulness to my commitment, I will be faithful to the law of genre, since, by its very nature, the law invites and commits me in advance not to mix genres. By publishing my response to the imperious call of the law, I would correspondingly commit myself to be responsible.
Unless, of course, I were actually implicated in a wager, a challenge, an impossible bet—in short, a situation that would exceed the matter of merely engaging a commitment from me. And suppose for a moment that it were impossible not to mix genres. What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility that would confound its sense, order, and reason?
I have just proposed an alternative between two interpretations. I did not do so, as you can imagine, in order to check myself. The line or trait that seemed to separate the two bodies of interpretation is affected straight away by an essential disruption that, for the time being, I shall let you name or qualify in any way you care to: as internal division of the trait, impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence. All these disruptive "anomalies" are engendered—and this is their common law, the lot or site they share—by repetition. One might even say by citation or re-citation (ré-cit), provided that the restricted use of these two words is not a call to strict generic order. A citation in the strict sense implies all sorts of contextual conventions, precautions, and protocols in the mode of reiteration, of coded signs, such as quotation marks or other typographical devices used for writing a citation. The same holds no doubt for the récit as a form, mode, or genre of discourse, even—and I shall return to this—as a literary type. And yet the law that protects the usage, in stricto sensu, of the words "citation" and "récit" is threatened intimately and in advance by a counter-law that constitutes this very law, renders it possible, conditions it and thereby renders it impossible—for reasons of edges on which we shall run aground in just a moment—to edge through, to edge away from, or to hedge around the counter-law itself. The law and the counter-law serve each other citations summoning each other to appear, and each recites the other in this proceeding (procès). There would be no cause for concern if one were rigorously assured of being able to distinguish with rigor between a citation and a non-citation, a récit and a non-récit or a repetition within the form of one or the other.
I shall not undertake to demonstrate, assuming it is still possible, why you were unable to decide whether the sentences with which I opened this presentation and marked this context were or were not repetitions of a citational type; or whether they were or were not of the performative type; or certainly whether they were, both of them, together—and each time together—the one or the other. For perhaps someone has noticed that, from one repetition to the next, a change had insinuated itself into the relationship between the two initial utterances. The punctuation had been slightly modified, as had the content of the second independent clause. Theoretically, this barely noticeable shift could have created a mutual independency between the interpretative alternatives that might have tempted you to opt for one or the other, or for one and the other of these two sentences. A particularly rich combinatory of possibilities would thus ensue, which, in order not to exceed my time limit and out of respect for the law of genre and of the audience, I shall abstain from recounting. I am simply going to assume a certain relationship between what has just now happened and the origin of literature, as well as its aborigine or its abortion, to quote Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
Provisionally claiming for myself the authority of such an assumption, I shall let our field of vision contract as I limit myself to a sort of species of the genre "genre." I shall focus on this genre of genre which is generally supposed, and always a bit too rashly, not to be part of nature, of physis, but rather of technè, of the arts, still more narrowly of poetry, and most particularly of literature. But at the same time, I take the liberty to think that, while limiting myself thus, I exclude nothing, at least in principle and de jure—the relationships here no longer being those of extension, from exemplary individual to species, from species to genre as genus or from the genre of genre to genre in general; rather, as we shall see, these relationships are a whole order apart. What is at stake, in effect, is exemplarity and its whole enigma—in other words, as the word "enigma" indicates, exemplarity and the récit—which works through the logic of the example.
Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.
To demonstrate this, I shall hold to the leanest generalities. But I should like to justify this initial indigence or asceticism as well as possible. For example, I shall not enter into the passionate debate that poetics has brought forth on the theory and the history of genre-theory, on the critical history of the concept of genre from Plato to the present. My stance is motivated by these considerations: in the first place, we now have at our disposal some remarkable and, of late, handsomely enriched works dealing either with primary texts or critical analyses. I am thinking especially of the journal Poétique, of its issue entitled "Genres" (32) and of Genette's opening essay, "Genres, 'Types,' Modes." From yet another point of view, L'Absolu littéraire [The literary absolute] has already created quite a stir in this context, and everything that I shall risk here should perhaps resolve itself in a modest annotation on the margins of this magistral work which I assume some of you have already read. I could further justify my abstention or my abstinence here simply by acknowledging the terminological luxury or rapture as well as the taxonomic exuberance which debates of this kind, in a manner by no means fortuitous, have sparked: I feel completely powerless to contain this fertile proliferation—and not only because of time constraints. I shall put forth, instead, two principal motives, hoping thereby to justify my keeping to scant preliminary generalities at the edge of this problematic.
To what do these two motives essentially relate? In its most recent phase—and this much is certainly clear in Genette's propositions—the most advanced critical axis has led to a rereading of the entire history of genre-theory. This rereading has been inspired by the perception—and it must be said, despite the initial denial, by the correction—of two types of misconstruing or confusion. On the one hand, and this will be the first motive or ground for my abstention, Plato and Aristotle have been subjected to considerable deformation, as Genette reminds us, insofar as they have been viewed in terms alien to their thinking, and even in terms that they themselves would have rejected; but this deformation has usually taken on the form of naturalization. Following a classical precedent, one has deemed natural structures or typical forms whose history is hardly natural but, rather, quite to the contrary, complex and heterogeneous. These forms have been treated as natural—and let us bear in mind the entire semantic scale of this difficult word whose span is so far-ranging and open-ended that it extends as far as the expression "natural language," by which term everyone agrees tacitly to oppose natural language only to a formal or artificial language without thereby implying that this natural language is a simple physical or biological production. Genette insists at length on this naturalization of genres: "The history of genre-theory is strewn with these fascinating outlines that inform and deform reality, a reality often heterogenous to the literary field, and that claim to discover a natural 'system' wherein they construct a factitious symmetry heavily reinforced by fake windows" (p. 408, italics added). In its most efficacious and legitimate aspect, this critical reading of the history (and) of genre-theory is based on an opposition between nature and history and, more generally—as the allusion to an artificial construct indicates ("... wherein they construct a factitious symmetry....")—on an opposition between nature and what can be called the series of all its others. Such an opposition seems to go without saying; placed within this critical perspective, it is never questioned. Even if it has been tucked away discretely in some passage that has escaped my attention, this barely visible suspicion clearly had no effect on the general organization of the problematic. This does not diminish the relevance or fecundity of a reading such as Genette's. But a place remains open for some preliminary questions concerning his presuppositions, for some questions concerning the boundaries where it begins to take hold or take place. The form of these boundaries will contain me and rein me in. These general propositions whose number is always open and indeterminable for whatever critical interpretation will not be dealt with here. What however seems to me to require more urgent attention is the relationship of nature to history, of nature to its others, precisely when genre is on the line.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface.................... vii
Acknowledgments.................... xiii
Introduction.................... xv
1 The Law of Genre TRANSLATED BY AVITAL RONELL.................... 3
2 The Linguistic Circle of Geneva TRANSLATED BY ALAN BASS.................... 33
3 Racism's Last Word TRANSLATED BY PEGGY KAMUF.................... 52
4 But, beyond ... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon) TRANSLATED BY PEGGY KAMUF.................... 63
5 Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War TRANSLATED BY PEGGY KAMUF.................... 81
6 Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments TRANSLATED BY PEGGY KAMUF.................... 152
7 Of Spirit TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY BENNINGTON AND RACHEL BOWLBY.................... 220
8 Given Time: The Time of the King TRANSLATED BY PEGGY KAMUF.................... 240
9 "To Do Justice to Freud": The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis TRANSLATED BY PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT AND MICHAEL NAAS......... 270
10 Adieu TRANSLATED BY PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT AND MICHAEL NAAS.................... 315
11 By Force of Mourning TRANSLATED BY PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT AND MICHAEL NAAS.................... 326
12 What Is a "Relevant" Translation? TRANSLATED BY LAWRENCE VENUTI.................... 350
13 The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) TRANSLATED BY DAVID WILLS.................... 380