Derrida From Now On

Michael Naas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823229604
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Written in the wake of Jacques Derrida's death in 2004, Derrida From Now On attempts both to do justice to the memory of Derrida and to demonstrate the continuing significance of his work for contemporary philosophy and literary theory. If Derrida's thought is to remain relevant for us today, it must be at once understood in its original context and uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. Michael Naas thus begins with an analysis of Derrida's attachment to the French language, to Europe, and to European secular thought, before turning to Derrida's long engagement with the American context and to the ways in which deconstruction allows us to rethink the history, identity, and promise of post-9/11 America. Taking as its point of departure several of Derrida's later works (from "Faith and Knowledge" and The Work of Mourning to Rogues and Learning to Live Finally), the book demonstrates how Derrida's analyses of the phantasms of sovereignty, the essential autoimmunity of democracy or religion, or the impossible mourning of the nation-state can help us to understand what is happening today in American culture, literature, and politics. Though Derrida's thought has always lived on only by being translated elsewhere, his disappearance will have driven home this necessity with a new force and an unprecedented urgency. Derrida From Now On is an effect of this force and an attempt to respond to this urgency.

1

Alors, qui êtes-vous?

Jacques Derrida and the Question of Hospitality

I could not begin these reflections on the life and work of Jacques Derrida without recalling at least one further phrase in French, the only language for which Derrida ever expressed his fidelity and his love and the only language I ever spoke with him. I could not begin without letting at least one more of those traces resonate within me, one of those traces of a French language in which I will never feel absolutely at home but which I nevertheless have also come to love—and in large part thanks to Jacques Derrida. Indeed, I could not cross this threshold without letting this simple phrase—Alors, qui êtes-vous?—reverberate within me, since it was the very first Jacques Derrida ever addressed to me, on the verge of what would become—and I feel fortunate to be able to use the terms—a relationship of hospitality and of friendship.

Alors, qui êtes-vous? I must emphasize here at the outset that these are Jacques Derrida’s words, not my own, so that no one is misled by the title of this chapter into thinking that I would have the temerity of asking this question of Jacques Derrida, or the audacity to think I could actually provide a response. Qui êtes-vous? “Who are you?” That is a question I never posed and will never pose to Jacques Derrida.¹ I underscore this because it is so tempting today, in the wake of Derrida’s death, to want to claim some special privilege, some unique intimacy, with the man or his work, in order to say something definitive about him or it. It is tempting to think that one can offer some final judgment, now that that life and that work have, it seems, come to an end. As Maurice Blanchot writes at the end of Friendship, a text Derrida knew very well, this unique time just after the death of a thinker we’ve read, known, and admired is typically “the moment of complete works,” the terrible moment when ‘one wants to publish ‘everything,’ one wants to say “everything,”… as if the ‘everything is said’ would finally allow us to stop a dead voice, to stop the pitiful silence that arises from it.”² It is the moment when we are tempted to give a final evaluation, a final reckoning, the moment when we feel more licensed than usual to go beyond the facts, to say something more than just “Jacques Derrida was born in 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria; he went to France in 1949, graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and later took a teaching position at that same institution, eventually becoming known in France and, indeed, throughout the world through his more than seventy books, translated into dozens of languages, for a type of philosophical and literary analysis known as ‘deconstruction.’” It is the moment when the living feel justified, even entitled, to go beyond these facts to assess the merits of the man and his work and assign them some definitive place in the history of French letters or of Western philosophy. Faced with such a temptation, we would do well to recall what Blanchot wrote after the death of his friend Georges Bataille, near the very end, once again, of Friendship:

How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one. There are no witnesses. Those who were closest say only what was close to them, not the distance that affirmed itself in this proximity, and distance ceases as soon as presence ceases.

Alors, qui êtes-vous? These words and the gestures and tone that accompanied them live on today—Blanchot is right—only in me, in my memory, so that everything I say reveals much more about me than about Jacques Derrida. And yet I would like to believe that having been so profoundly marked by the thought and person of Jacques Derrida, touched in a way that goes well beyond what we so blithely call “influence,” something of who Jacques Derrida was or is cannot help but be conveyed by these words, something like a secret we shared—a secret that would not be anything like an answer to the question Alors, qui êtes-vous? but that just might tell us something about the question itself.

Alors, qui êtes-vous? Though I had been reading Jacques Derrida for several years and had heard him speak in public on numerous occasions, indeed, had even attended his seminar in Paris for an entire year, I had never spoken to him directly before the fall of 1988, when I approached his desk one day after class in the Salle Dussane at the École Normale Supérieure in order to volunteer—in order to be “volunteered,” really, for it was an act of divine madness—to give an exposé in his seminar later that year. After a brief description of that exposé in halting and embarrassed French, Derrida looked at me kindly, with a light and I think somewhat amused smile, and asked, Alors, qui êtes-vous? Little did I know at the time that these very simple, common words, this everyday question, would end up transforming so radically my evolving answer to that question, so that it would be impossible for me to answer that question today without recalling that conversation of 1988 and everything it ultimately led to or portended.

I have thus tried over the years to hear those words as they were spoken on that day, without the successive overlays of so many subsequent memories, conversations, readings, and interactions. I have tried to recall the nuances and inflection of this everyday, threshold phrase. Spoken not at all out of impatience or irritation, as a way of asking me, Alors, qui êtes-vous? Vous vous prenez pour qui? “Just who are you or who do you think you are?” but, rather, out of what I would like to call a certain hospitality, it was offered—or at least this is how I heard it—as an invitation, as a way of saying Dites-moi un peu plus. Dites-moi qui vous êtes; “Tell me a bit more. Tell me who you are,” for example, “Tell me your name.” It was, in short, a welcoming, hospitable phrase, an invitation to tell him not exactly who I was but just a little more about myself, beginning with my name, what I was doing in France, in Paris, in his class, proposing to give an exposé in his seminar later that year on the topic of friendship in Homer.

Yes, when Jacques Derrida asked me that day in the fall of 1988 Alors, qui êtes-vous? he was in effect asking me, there on the threshold of an introduction and an invitation, and I heard it in precisely this way, “What is your name?” Comment t’appelles-tu? That is, he was asking me with this very common, everyday phrase what he would come to call in a book of 1997 entitled Of Hospitality the question of hospitality itself, a question that, depending on the inflection, can either exclude or invite, repel or draw in. Derrida there writes:

The foreigner … who has the right to hospitality in the cosmopolitan tradition which will find its most powerful form in Kant [in, for example, Perpetual Peace]… is someone with whom, to receive him, you begin by asking his name; you enjoin him to state and to guarantee his identity, as you would a witness before a court. This is someone to whom you put a question and address a demand, the first demand, the minimal demand being: “What is your name?” … What am I going to call you? It is also what we sometimes tenderly ask children and those we love. (H 27–28)

The threshold question is thus the question of the name, a seemingly banal, everyday question that can be asked and/or heard as either an invitation or a threat, a welcoming or an interrogation. In an interview published in Le Monde shortly after the publication of Of Hospitality, Derrida was asked to elaborate upon this question, to explain whether hospitality consists in “questioning the one who arrives, and first of all by asking him his name,” or whether it begins “with the welcome that is without question.” He was asked, in other words, a question about the necessary conditions of hospitality, and he responded:

The decision is made at the heart of what looks like an absurdity, impossibility itself (an antinomy, a tension between two equally imperative laws that are nonetheless not opposed). Pure hospitality consists in welcoming the arrivant, the one who arrives, before laying down any conditions, before knowing or asking anything of him, whether this be a name or a piece of identification. But this pure hospitality also presupposes that one addresses him, and singularly so, that one thus calls him and acknowledges a proper name for him. “What is your name?” [Comment t’appelles-tu, toi?] Hospitality consists in doing everything to address the other; it consists in granting him, indeed, in asking him, his name, all the while trying to prevent this question from becoming a “condition,” a police interrogation, an inquest or an investigation, or a border check. The difference is subtle and yet fundamental, a question asked on the threshold of one’s home [chez soi] and on the threshold between two inflections.³

For Derrida, then, hospitality—a theme he treated in several works during the last decade of his life—consists in what might be called a negotiation between two seemingly contradictory imperatives, the imperative to welcome the other unconditionally, before any knowledge, recognition, or conditions, indeed, before any names or identities, and the imperative to welcome someone in particular and not some indefinite anyone, someone, then, with a particular name, identity, and origin. The question of hospitality, Comment t’appelles-tu? “What is your name?” thus appears stretched between “two equally imperative laws,” its offering and its reception suspended on the lip “between two inflections,” between the conditional and the unconditional, possibility and the impossible. But since any notion of hospitality that refers to the “unconditional” can so easily be written off as naïve, utopian, impractical, or, simply, impossible, I would like to linger a bit here on this threshold of hospitality in order to ask about the relationship between unconditional and conditional hospitality in Derrida. I do so because I cannot help but think that Derrida is right when he claims that unconditional hospitality is impossible, or the impossible, but that it nonetheless takes place, indeed, all the time, and sometimes through the most everyday and unremarkable gestures, such as the one I experienced in the Salle Dussane of the école Normale Supérieure that fall day in 1988. If unconditional hospitality is impossible, or the impossible, it is the only hospitality that can give any meaning to the concept of hospitality itself and, thus, the only possible hospitality, the only one worthy of this name.

What then “is” hospitality for Derrida? The first thing to note is that, for Derrida, the concept of hospitality must be rigorously distinguished from any relation of reciprocity or exchange between two parties, whether we are talking about an exchange of goods and services, or a more symbolic exchange of words and assurances, or simply an exchange of names. There would be no hospitality, no rigorous concept of hospitality, no hospitality worthy of the name, without an unconditional welcoming of the other before any exchange, a welcoming of an other whose identity and character are thus not assured, an other, therefore, who may in fact pose a threat to us, who may cause us to question our right to what we call “our home,” or who may in fact try to evict us from that home and from everything we consider “our own.” At the limit, then—and to define a concept rigorously one must always think the limit—there would be no hospitality without this exposure to an arrivant who arrives or comes even before he or she can even be identified or greeted as “our guest,” since any identification of this other would already take back, betray, or nullify the hospitality being extended. In Aporias Derrida elaborates upon this unconditional welcoming of the arrivant, of the one who arrives, a welcoming that would take place before all interrogations and identifications and would thus seem to be the essence of hospitality, the only true, genuine, or pure hospitality, the only one worthy of the name:

I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest. He surprises the host—who is not yet a host or an inviting power—enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. (AP 34)

Hospitality thus seems to require this unconditional welcoming of the other before any powers or possibilities, any identities or identifications, before the French word hôte, for example, has been read or interpreted to mean either host or guest, before any difference between host and guest, the one who invites and the one invited, before, it seems, any power or capacity to ask a question like Comment t’appelles-tu? It appears to make no sense to speak of hospitality—as opposed, say, to relations of exchange, interaction, and commerce—without this unconditional invitation where nothing is expected in return, without this absolute or hyperbolic opening of the host to the guest, an opening so radical that the host must give up even his or her identity as host.

And yet, as we can see, this radical or absolute exposure to the other in unconditional hospitality actually threatens the very categories that make it possible. For if it makes no sense to speak of hospitality, as opposed to commerce or exchange, without this notion of an unconditional welcome, it also appears to make no sense to speak of hospitality without, precisely, a hand being extended or a good being offered from host to guest, that is, without a difference between host and guest and an orientation, if not a direction, being established between the one offering or welcoming and the one being offered or welcomed. Indeed, there would seem to be no hospitality worthy of the name in a general invitation or welcome that is not extended by some particular host with a name and an identity to some particular guest, to someone, therefore, who might well be asked there on the threshold, who perhaps must be asked in order for the invitation to be effective, effectively offered and received, Alors, qui êtes-vous? or Comment t’appelles-tu?

It thus appears that what Derrida calls pure or absolute hospitality has its chance only in the impure or conditional hospitality that then conditions and threatens it. That is why Derrida speaks in the passage cited above of a “tension” or an “antinomy” between “two equally imperative laws.” Unconditional or pure hospitality is at once betrayed or perverted by impure or conditional hospitality and yet also given its only chance as pure hospitality by it. Similarly, conditional hospitality can only ever be called hospitality and experienced as hospitality by means of the pure or absolute hospitality toward which it is drawn and by which it is inspired. As Derrida puts it in Paper Machine, without a certain “impossible,” without, in this case, unconditional hospitality, the “desire, the concept, and experience, the very thought of hospitality, would be meaningless” (PM 131).

Hence unconditional hospitality is not some goal or telos toward which we must strive; it is not some utopic ideal on which we must keep our eyes fixed. It is what accounts for the very concept and experience of hospitality itself, and it is what drives all “progress” toward a more universal hospitality, such as we find it, for example, in Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Even though absolute or unconditional hospitality becomes conditioned the moment it is codified, the moment it is put into practice or law, the moment it becomes effective (and so, in Kant, the moment it is extended to citizens of other nation-states but not to noncitizens, or the moment nation-state citizens are granted a temporary right to asylum but not a permanent one), this unconditional hospitality remains that which draws and inspires all effective hospitality, and it remains the only hospitality in the name of which any hospitality can be offered.

It is important to underscore this relationship between unconditional and conditional hospitality, since so many of Derrida’s other analyses of what we take to be ethical concepts—from the gift to friendship—rely upon a similar articulation. Whereas unconditional hospitality, like the gift, is irreciprocal, absolute, and hyperbolic—that is, beyond or transgressive of all norms, customs, and laws—conditional hospitality always entails a relationship of exchange and reciprocity, a regime of norms, customs, laws, and proportion. Whereas unconditional hospitality is offered to the anonymous arrivant, to the absolute other, before any identities or names have been given, before the other has been identified as either human, god, or animal, as either living or dead, conditional hospitality is always offered by a figure with some power or sovereignty, some means of identification, selection, and determination, to someone with a name, family, and social status—and, thus, not to others. Whereas unconditional hospitality is thus an impossible hospitality, that is, a hospitality beyond or before all possibilities and all powers, the only one, therefore, truly worthy of the name, and thus the only possible hospitality, every conditional hospitality, every hospitality determined by laws, codes, and powers, is, as possible, impossible, that is, a hospitality unworthy of the name and thus no hospitality at all. Whereas unconditional hospitality, like a kind of grace or absolute form of respect, corresponds to an absolute desire for hospitality, to what Derrida would elsewhere call justice or, in this context, a just hospitality, conditional hospitality entails laws, rights, duties, and debts, pacts made between individuals or groups on the basis of names, lineages, and histories, in a word, laws of hospitality that are inscribed in a particular language and culture and so are always subject to history and change.

Unconditional hospitality would thus seem to correspond to a call for justice that the law or the laws of conditional hospitality can never heed and yet can never do without. Justice is thus always heterogeneous to and yet inseparable from the law it both makes possible and perpetually interrupts. Recall that in the passage cited above Derrida called unconditional hospitality and conditional hospitality “two equally imperious laws” (my emphasis), laws that, he will go on to say in Of Hospitality, are “heterogeneous but inseparable,” “irreducible” and “antinomic,” forming a “nondialectizable antinomy.” The question concerning the link or relation, the articulation, between these two laws, these two regimes of hospitality, must thus be constantly raised, and the language to describe this relation perpetually reinvented.

In Of Hospitality Derrida calls the law of unconditional hospitality a kind of law above all laws, an anomos nomos, a law, a singular law, above all conditioned plural laws. It is this law that accounts for the desire for hospitality and justice; like the law above all laws that inspires all civil disobedience (though this is just an analogy, since civil disobedience typically relies upon one conditioned law being placed above another, a respect for human rights, for example, above some law of the nation-state), the law of unconditional hospitality “inspires,” “draws,” and “guides” the many conditional laws of hospitality. It is thus in the name of the law of unconditional hospitality that conditional laws are made effective and inscribed in history, even if these conditional laws inevitability betray the law of the unconditional and even if they not only expose the perfectibility of this law to pervertibility but sometimes hinder its progress and even lead to its regression. I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida
• Introduction: Bénédictions—“traces in the history of the French language”
• 1 Alors, qui êtes-vous? : Jacques Derrida and the Question of Hospitality
• 2 Analogy and Anagram: Deconstruction as Deconstruction of the as
• Derrida’s Laïcite
• 4 A Last Call for “Europe”
• 5 Derrida’s America
• 6 Derrida at the Wheel
• 7 “One Nation … Indivisible”: Of Autoimmunity, Democracy, and the Nation-State
• 8 Autonomy, Autoimmunity, and the Stretch Limo: From Derrida’s Rogue State to DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
• 9 History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event(s) of 9/11
• 10 Comme si, comme ça: Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God
• 11 Lifelines
• Conclusion: The World Over
• Notes
• Index