Abstract
In Session 7 (26 February 2003) of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, Jacques Derrida engages again with Maurice Blanchot, two days after the latter’s cremation. This intervention also appears as a post-face to Derrida’s 2003 edition of Parages, his collection of essays devoted to the work of Blanchot. In this article, I examine Derrida’s affinity to the work of Blanchot, as the one whose work ‘stood watch over and around what matters to me, for a long time behind me and forever still before me’ [The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 176]. In doing so I look at the manner in which Derrida engaged with Blanchot in his work and how in examining this engagement another reading of sovereignty emerges, one which is not tethered to liberal models of sovereign will but one which eludes biopolitical ordering and may be seen as a form of disappearance. Through a reading of Derrida’s readings of Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day I emphasize the link of this alternative sovereignty to both writing and literature in order to demonstrate how a more radical thinking of sovereignty can be discovered in Derrida’s thought.
Highlights
Derrida engaged with Blanchot in his work and how in examining this engagement another reading of sovereignty emerges, one which is not tethered to liberal models of sovereign will but one which eludes biopolitical ordering and may be seen as a form of disappearance
Maurice Blanchot’s spectral interruption of the Beast and the Sovereign seminars can be seen as a continuation of the mutually productive interruptions performed by Blanchot of Derrida during the former’s lifetime and a means of further underlining the importance of Blanchot for Derrida as an influence and critical interlocutor
This caesura provokes a thinking of the interpenetration of death, sovereignty and literature in a seminar which itself has become a testament to Derrida’s life and work, an oration before the fact
Summary
Interruption anticipates death, precedes death [1]. it is at the moment when Derrida himself, a living man about to die (lui mourant vivant), survivor in reprieve, faces his own death, that he carries, bears and endures with the greatest lucidity, without turning. While Derrida in the Beast and the Sovereign seminars links the notion of the right to disappearance explicitly to the corpse and the choice between inhumation and cremation, I want to take this notion and extend it into the realm of the relationship between the writer and the text and in particular the manner in which the text bears testimony to another spectre, the absent writer This right to disappear may be linked to the written word which entails the absence of the author and is in a certain sense structured by the possibility of death. This impossible “right to disappearance” may well assist us in thinking another form of sovereignty, not one bound to sovereign will or power but intimately linked to becoming imperceptible, a right to live dying This sovereignty as disappearance is one that escapes formation and surveillance, and subsists elsewhere, not in the Day of biopolitical ordering but in the Night, beyond the scopic order of law. The lawmen, he radically persecutes them and... conceals from them... the truth they demand and without which they are nothing [17]
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