Pas de Deux: “The Simulacrum of a Duel”

Abstract

The very fact that Derrida has begun to write an autobiographical mode is a slippery affair about which both he and we need to be vigilant, lest we and he be the victims of a ruse which he more than anyone has done the most to expose. (PT, 279)1 Derrida,2 one supposes, presumes to expose the and of The book simulates an apparently decisive cut between Geoffrey Bennington's Derridabase (1993)' above the line, and Derrida's Circumfession4 below. This cut, it would seem, separates opposing modes of exposition, explication and confession, that both, nevertheless, claim rights to the singularity marked by the name Jacques Derrida. In the preface, then, it is announced that the book's condition of possibility is a contract, a challenge, outbidding, or raising the stakes. According to this contract, Bennington was to attempt a clear, argued exposition of the thought of By extracting the thought from the life, and laying bare the bones of its general system, he proposes an explication without residue (and principle incapable of being surprised), which would, moreover, make it in principle . .. accessible to any user. turn, was to undertake to meet the challenge posed by Bennington's text by writing something that indeed surprises (escapes) his proposed general system, thereby demonstrating the ineluctable necessity of Bennington's failure. It is, then, as if the book simulates a between reader and author, for rights to the singular name Jacques Derrida, for power over its exposition. Bennington's aim is to show that this singularity is fabricated within a general textuality as an ideality of sorts (as the repeatability, or better, iterability, of quasi-transcendental logic). Guided by the form of a contest, one might expect to find that contrast, demanding respect for the thought that will not be drawn (like blood) from the life that sustains it, proposes to confess his thinking its unrepeatable, living, breathing, historical singularity. In this duel, it would seem, an iterable signature is opposed to a living singularity, such that the condition of the possibility of the one is the rejection of, or escape from, the other. Yet, this interpretation, admittedly facilitated by the preface which the challenge is announced (but countersigned by whom`?), belongs to a credulous reading of the juxtaposed texts terms of the very oppositional logic that Derrida has famously worked to unsettle. What choreographer, one might then ask, has been authorized to counter-position the texts signed by jailer and escapee (above, below; outer, inner; system, singular; closed, open), who both remain incredulous toward this very kind of counter-positioning? Why the complicity of the incredulous dance-partners a simulacrum of a duel between opposites (DB, 318)? Perhaps it is significant that the text announcing this contract remains unsigned, detached from what is signed, and left without guarantee the equivocal counter-signatures of self-effacement and silence. This is reason enough at least not to take the challenge set up the preface too readily at face value. Indeed, I would argue that readers are obliged to remain suspicious of which only strategically, but by no means substantively, sets itself up as a between Geoffrey Bennington and Thus, one should not, through credulous reading, miss the irony of this play, and thereby obscure a subtly wrought performance of the double bind of the text (this particular one, to be sure, but more generally any text that claims, or is claimed by, a proper name); namely the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of saying something singular. What I shall attempt to set out more detail, then, is a suspicious reading that detects complications both texts, and shows how the performance of a at one level is simultaneously the undermining of this oppositional posture. …