Derrida, Sovereignty and Style

Abstract

‘What does it mean to inherit?’ This question never ceased to occupy Derrida’s thought and writing. A response to the question ‘What does it mean to inherit the work of Jacques Derrida?’ then, would have to take account of his own patient meditation on the former question, all the while interrogating what seems implied by the form of the latter, not least the way it positions an already declared ‘inheritor’. Naturally, these difficult problematics cannot be adequately addressed without a long and careful development. Here I wish merely to raise a hypothesis: taking into account all that has been said by others ‘in the wake’ of Derrida, one of his most difficult legacies is, and will be, the problem of philosophical style. In the case of Derrida, I would venture to say that no discipleship will ever be able to master the question of style, since this question is always directed toward that which cannot be reduced to a set of propositions or get caught up in the patient recapitulation of ‘Derridean thought’ that is the style and gesture proper to the disciple. What, then, would be the style and gesture ‘proper’ to Jacques Derrida? Is there one, or would the very notion of a ‘proper style’ be what would need to be questioned from the outset? Here, too, one would have to engage in a patient consideration of Derrida’s attention to this problem in so many texts and arguments, for example in Spurs. In place of this analysis, I will briefly pursue one component of what might be called Derrida’s ‘style’, by turning to his close reading of Celan’s Meridian Address in a short text titled ‘Majesties’. What emerges there is a particular, yet equivocal, gesture in relation to Celan, a gesture of a specific kind in relation to a specific text. It at once repeats Celan’s problematisation of the traditional concept of sovereignty, and allows it to solicit other such problematisations, including Heidegger’s.