Traveling Sovereignty: Counter-crossing Bolaño with Derrida

Abstract

Traveling Sovereignty:Counter-crossing Bolaño with Derrida Tram Nguyen Roberto Bolaño's 2666, a sprawling book of voyages which steals toward a body of disappearances and murders resembling the real life events of Ciudad Juárez (a Mexican town on the border of Texas) begins enticingly with the hunt for a mysterious author named Benno von Archimboldi by four European literary critics. The novel soon becomes estranged from itself and devolves, breaking off into numerous travel narratives. These narratives are interconnected but not entirely parts of the whole; instead, each section gathers to itself more displacements and hostilities of travel. Archimboldi is revealed in the final section of the book as a former Second World War soldier, drafted by the Third Reich. Yet this is not quite the kernel of the novel. The horror is not contained or containable to one single period of history or one narrative; it bleeds, ranges over time and space, and mutates biologically, physically, and politically. Unmoored, the reader must come to terms with a traveling sovereignty that brings about her potential and necessary catastrophe, for 2666 maintains its sovereignty by deploying the dual logic of hospitality and by violently destabilizing the event of reading so that the reader is deposited on another bank, not knowing if she is arriving or leaving. This undecidability preternaturally conjures Derrida's deconstructive practice, but especially his late project to think the plight of the Other and "sovereign without sovereignty" (Philosophy 191n.14). Through the metaphor and concept of travel, Derrida advances the possibility of an existence without power, an existence that opens itself up to the dissymmetry of the Other. In particular, Derrida's collaboration with Catherine Malabou in Counterpath movingly grafts together the idea of hospitality and travel to test the deformation of the self, because only through the ruination of the sovereign self can the question of the Other be conceived. For Derrida, to think "as if " death and ruin of self-knowing and self-construction can surface with an encounter with an Other brings about the shape of the future to come. Chasing these strange counter-journeys, this paper attempts a double mapping of, on the one hand, Derrida's ethical framing of hospitality and sovereignty in relation to the circumlocution of 2666; and, on the other, of the confrontation between readers and texts mobilized by Bolaño's traveling book. I submit that Derrida and Bolaño both force [End Page 24] sovereignty to trip up (over) the self, eviscerating the sovereign's sovereignty, to chance upon the Other. I. Hospitality and Traveling Sovereignties From the outset of Counterpath, Derrida grounds his sovereignty in the secret1, a secret about traveling, "the most sacred . . . , the most protected part of [his] life" (Derrida and Malabou 5n1). And yet this secret is immediately contaminated by "the ultimate question-of-the-Other," which is as much a question of how to encounter an Other as how to travel with an Other, even if the Other is a close friend (Derrida and Malabou 5). Derrida offers his treasured secrets to his friend Catherine Malabou, co-author of Counterpath and of Derrida's travels from May 1997 to May 1998, in a gesture of profound hospitality and vulnerability. By agreeing to allow Malabou and the reader to "travel with" him for a year, Derrida affords us intimate access to a terrain of negotiations where self, subject, ethics, autobiography, readerly scrutiny, friendship, violence, hospitality and deconstruction explicitly jostle for space. But precisely because Counterpath trespasses into autobiography, it enables Derrida to enact the very ethical crossings which he sought with great conviction toward the end of his life. Kronick argues that Derrida's autobiographical writing responds to a call from an Other which when answered leaves a fracture in the self, because the Other "provokes in him something singular, a text of his own whose otherness surprises him" (Kronick 1000-01). Incited by an Other, Derrida offers up his "secrets" not as original truths, but as a commodious receptivity to catastrophe. He says, "'Traveling with': it is as if I were to accept in advance to share the instant of my death, or even my grave" (Derrida and...