Modalities of Death and the Thought of Life: The Politics of Metaphoricity in Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida

Abstract

This article throws into relief the difference that renders both Kristeva and Derrida's articulations of metaphor difficult. The difficulty lies in appreciating what I shall call the reversive force at work in every motion, a force suggested by the prefix dis-/dif- shared by both difference and difficulty. If misreading is the index of carelessness in the face of precisely such a reversive force, then the felicity of our conveyance through footsteps destined to remain ahead of us necessitates a commitment to a care-full reading that (following Maurice Blanchot) will take the risk of imagining the hand writing and the death (i.e. the promise, chance, fear of impossibility) that bears this hand along. Paradoxically, for Blanchot this difficult reading is marked by an ease that we associate with happiness and innocence, for it opens itself joyfully as well as trustingly to the death borne by writing and "holds [it] in its turn" though (as Blanchot emphasizes) only in order to reverse it (precisely "through its ease"). It is this happy innocence, this joyful beginning as if for the first time (without guilt or knowledge, without fear of harm, without praejudicium) that determines an understanding of politics in the second part of the essay which investigates the stakes of each theorist's pas au-delà: that is, their step beyond in the direction of a more archaic motility.