Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida, Between Testimony and Literature

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Demeur: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), p.76. ‘This is essential to the testimonial message that passes into the blood of reality through the epidermis of fiction’; trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Demeure. Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p.60. The same book contains Maurice Blanchot's short story The Instant of my Death [1994]. 2 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.33-4 3 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p.61. Here Derrida explicitly affirms the methodical necessity of the transcendental research. It is necessary to be faithful to phenomenology, at least up to a certain point. And precisely there where, on the way of the transcendental research, one finds arche-writing as the universal structure and irreducible condition of experience. At this point, the opposition transcendental/empirical unfolds itself as an effect of the iterable trace, of the elaboration of the ideality from the irreducible conditions of experience and not its cause. Then, the opposition comes to be un-founded while there is the possibility of a phenomenological research, which is effectively immanent to experience and no longer related to the metaphysics of the transcendental meaning. In this perspective Derrida uses the term quasi-transcendental to distinguish his transcendental research from metaphysics. On transcendental research and universal structures of experience see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of Mirror (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986). On the notion of ‘quasi-transcendental’ see Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Derrida [1991] (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 4 This perspective is developed in particular in Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: the two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason alone’[1996], in Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber and ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 5 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.29. 6 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.32. 7 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.33. 8 See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: an Introduction [1963], trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena; and other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs [1967], trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). I refer to the deconstruction of phenomenology in my reading of testimony: Francesco Vitale, ‘Let the Witness speak: from Arche-writing to the Community to-come’, in Derrida Today, 2:2, 2009. I account for the ethical and political effects of the quasi-transcendental structure of arche-writing. Now it is time to explore the description of this structure through the experience of literature. 9 For the reference to this structure see Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.40: ‘What is indispensable, even for a witness who does not know how to write, in the common and trivial sense of the word, is that he be capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating, remembering, performing, the acts of synthesis that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power, at the very least, some possibility of tracing or imprinting in a given element [élément quelconque]’. 10 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.41. 11 In this perspective it is possible to find in Derrida's late work the trace of a research on the transcendental performative touching upon the notions of responsibility, friendship, promise, testimony, oath and, in particular, trust and faith (freed from the sacer). 12 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [1980], trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p.41. 13 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.49. 14 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.65. 15 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: an Introduction, p.86: ‘Before the “same” is recognized and communicated among several individuals, it is recognized and communicated within the individual consciousness: after quick and transitory evidence, after a finite and passive retention vanishes, its sense can be re-produced as the “same” in the act of recollection; its sense has not returned to nothingness. In this coincidence of identity, ideality is announced as such and in general in an egological subject. […] Thus, before being the ideality of an identical object for other subjects, sense is this ideality for other moments of the same subject in a certain way, therefore, intersubjectivity is first the non-empirical relation of Ego to Ego, of my present to other presents as such; i.e. as others and as presents (as past presents). Intersubjectivity is the relation of an absolute origin to other absolute origins, which are always my own, despite their radical alterity. Thanks to this circulation of primordial absolutes, the same thing can be thought through absolutely other moments and acts. We always come back to the final instants of this: the unique and essential form of temporalization [original emphasis]’. 16 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.91. 17 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.92. 18 See J. Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. A. Bass (London and New York: Routledge) p.253: ‘No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance. But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of life. Or rather: as différance is not an essence, as it is not anything, it is not life, if Being is determined as ousia, presence, essence/existence, substance or subject. Life must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined as presence. This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death, that repetition and the beyond of the pleasure principle are native and congenital to that which they transgress [original emphasis]’. 19 Jacques Derrida, Demeure, p.95.