Peggy Kamuf Research Articles

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Without remainder: ruins and tombs in Shakespeare's Sonnets

In the sixteenth century, observes Margaret Aston, ‘England acquired a whole suite of ruins’.1 The widespread destruction of monastery buildings and church fabric – the sheer ubiquity of the destru...

Two Birds of Paradise in North Holland, 1592: The Gift in the Exotic

Two Birds of Paradise in North Holland, 1592: The Gift in the Exotic

Viewed from Behind: The Projected Image and its Doppelgänger

The spectre is also […] what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always...

Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II (review)

Reviewed by: Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II Tarek R. Dika Jacques Derrida. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Ed. Peggy Kamuf, and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. x + 352 pages. This second of two volumes re-traces some of Derrida’s most celebrated late essays and interventions on a wide variety of issues, ranging from negative theology to Heideggerian phenomenology, architecture, literature, and politics, maintaining throughout that remarkable depth and subtlety that has characterized Derrida’s mode and manner ever since the early days of what has come to be called “deconstruction” shook the European and American philosophical scene. Like its precursor, this volume brings together a number of previously translated essays as well as a few new or revised translations, [End Page 1194] namely, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” and “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German.” Taken together, the two essays on Heidegger form a meticulously argued and dense meditation on the overall structure of the basic conceptual arrangements and commitments made throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre. The first essay (“Geschlecht I”), focusing primarily on Sein und Zeit (1927) and the Marburg lecture course given shortly thereafter (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz; Gesamtausgabe 26), addresses problems surrounding what Heidegger understood as the ontological “neutralization” and/or “neutrality” of the term Dasein prior to every ethical, anthropological, biological, or metaphysical predetermination “so as to keep nothing but a relation to itself, a bare relation to the Being of its being ” or “the naked trait of this relation to self” (11). The essay is devoted to re-examining the logic and possibility of a “neutrality” (or, perhaps, “minimalism”) that seeks to describe what is “proper” to the essence or Being of Dasein prior to the factual concretions and determinations into which it is “thrown,” determinations which, despite their not belonging to the essence of Dasein as such, nevertheless are not merely negative, external, or accidental predicates that come to characterize or determine it from the outside, as it were. On the contrary, factual concretion or empirical determination belongs fundamentally to Dasein as one of its essential possibilities, and there neither is nor can be Dasein without the possibility and actuality of such concretion (and the “dispersion,” “multiplication,” or “dissemination” such a possibility necessitates). One might say that factual concretion belongs essentially to Dasein (as a possibility that is always already actual) without being essential or defining it essentially. There is much to be said, Derrida remarks, about the difficulties this logic of the “without” engenders. If Dasein, despite the factual or ontic concretions and categories that are its essential possibilities without characterizing or defining it essentially, is a fundamentally “neutral” being (i.e., has this “neutrality” as an existential structure), this requires that our proper phenomenological description “neutralize” those concretions so as to gain access to, precisely, the propriety concealed by those very determinations. (One can appreciate, I hope, how incredibly delicate this logic really is.) It is here that the question regarding the “sexlessness” (Geschlechtslosigkeit) of Dasein arises: Heidegger, Derrida notes, seems to be especially concerned with determining this “neutrality” as, first and foremost, one that is fundamentally “neuter” or, perhaps, “indifferent” as regards sexuality or the binarity that constitutes sexual difference; Dasein is not reducible to human being, consciousness (or unconsciousness), the ego, the subject, the individual, or even the animal rationale—these are precisely the sort of predeterminations that are to be neutralized by a proper phenomenologico-ontological investigation. It seems, then, that there should be no uneasiness regarding its irreducibility to sexual binarity; it would seem to carry no special problem as regards Dasein, its neutrality, and the phenomenological procedure that neutralizes such predeterminations. Nevertheless, [End Page 1195] as Derrida reads the Marburg lectures—where Heidegger “more patiently qualified, explained, and evaluated” the term Dasein—he notices that, amongst the factual concretions that Heidegger seems most concerned to neutralize, sexual difference “holds a privilege and seems to belong in the first place . . . to that ‘factual concretion’ that the analytic of Dasein should begin by neutralizing” (12–13). Hence there is a kind of precipitation or acceleration...

The Ear, Who?

The Ear, Who? Peggy Kamuf (bio) Roderigo: Most reverend signor, do you know my voice? Brabantio: Not I. What are you? Roderigo: My name is Roderigo. Brabantio: The worser welcome: / I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors … —Shakespeare, Othello, act 1, scene 1 … about his feet / A voice clung sobbing till he questioned it, / "What art thou?" and the voice about his feet / Sent up an answer, sobbing, "I am thy fool …" —Tennyson, Idylls of the King The same question—"What are you?" "What art thou?"—posed each time to a voice, speaking or sobbing, detached from a familiar face, and thus made strange, unknown. As if the questioner had to doubt that it was indeed someone's voice, he asks of it "what" rather than "who." Calling upon the voice to attach itself again to a name, an identity, the question might well be addressing a ghost, an "it" not yet declared as the ghost of someone or other. Hamlet, you recall, begins [End Page 177] with Barnardo's question thrown out in the night—"Who's there?"—as he approaches his fellow watchman.1 And a few moments later Francisco takes up the call: "Stand! Who's there?" These sentinels have been put on edge by, as Barnardo puts it, "What we two nights have seen"; their question to "who," "who's there?" is something like whistling in the dark, a sound made to reassure themselves that it is indeed who and not what on approach. And when "it comes again / In the same figure like the King that's dead," Horatio's address will have the same form as Tennyson's King Arthur to the sobbing voice that clung about his feet: "What art thou that usurps't this time of night … ?" Like Arthur, Horatio addresses the figure—not a detached voice this time but a silent apparition—in the familiar form and yet refuses, to him, to thee, to it, the personal interrogative pronoun, calling out not "Who's there?" but "What art thou?" "Stay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak. [Exit Ghost]." In the wake of this silent retreating vision, Horatio counsels, "Let us impart what we have seen tonight," and, upon their return the next night with Hamlet, when the ghost's identity and story will unfold from his own mouth, so to speak, the watchers on the rampart question each other in all manner of ordinary what's (act 1, scene 4): "What hour now?" (l.3), "What does this mean, my lord?" (l.8), "What may this mean …" (l.32), "Why, what should be the fear?" (l.45), "And for my soul, what can it do to that… ?" (l.47), "To what issue will this come?" (l.66). But, in the next scene, the beginning of Hamlet's exchange with the Ghost interjects a suspended and ambiguous "What?" between the lines of the apparition's appeal: Hamlet: Alas, poor ghost! Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing To what I shall unfold. Hamlet: Speak, I am bound to hear. Ghost: So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear. Hamlet: What? (1.5.5–8) What is it possible to hear in this monosyllabic question or interjection "What?" Perhaps impatience to learn what he is bound to hear in a moment, to hear it without delay, in the anticipation that the Ghost has instilled. Or incredulity: Hamlet can't believe his own ears; has he indeed just heard the ominous word "revenge"? Or even deafness, incomprehension before the sounds the Ghost has made, as if to say "Come again? What did you say?" Finally, perhaps, one may also hear a protest against the precipitation with which his strange interlocutor has bound him through his ear, through his sense of hearing, and thus through his passive reception of the [End Page 178] other's words, to a program of bloody revenge even before he has been told what for. For, at the point of this interjection, the Ghost has not yet answered Horatio's question "What art thou?" with the claim "I am thy father's spirit," which is...

Dorsal Chances: An Interview with David Wills

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Aristotle, Ethics, rev. edn, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, Penguin: 1976), VI.iv.1140a19‐20. 3. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality’, parallax, 10:3 (2004), pp. 36‐52 (p. 38). 4. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back’, p. 51, fn.1. 5. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming spring 2008). 6. ‘There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out’, or ‘The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one‐hundred‐and‐eighty‐degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’ [my emphasis] ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 170–86 (p. 174). 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 65–66. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 262. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86. 11. Jacques Derrida, L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 132. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 152. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 53. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. 16. See ‘Techneology or the Discourse of Speed’, in The Prosthetic Impulse, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 237–63. 17. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power, 2001). 18. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 169. 21. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 76. 22. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3–35; 36–49. 23. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, New York: Verso, 1997). 24. David Wills, ‘Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship’, Postmodern Culture, 15:3 (2005). 25. An avenue developed by Derrida in ‘“Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’, PLI Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 1–18. 26. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 30; 29. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti‐Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69–152 (p. 131). 28. ‘Every art [tekhnē] is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or not being, and the cause of which is in the producer and not in the product. For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned, nor with natural objects (because they have their own origin in themselves). And since production is not the same as action, art must be concerned with production, not with action. There is a sense in which art and chance operate in the same sphere, as Agathon says: Art has a love for chance, and chance for art.’ [our emphasis] Aristotle, Ethics, VI.iv.1140a.6–20. 29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 197. 30. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 105. 31. Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, 1992); L'Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). 32. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 33. David Wills, ‘Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit’, paragraph, 21 (1998), pp. 131–49. 34. See David Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem or the Music of Memory’, Mosaic, 39:3 (2006), pp. 27–46. 35. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 11. 36. See Wills, Prosthesis, p. 88ff.

Touching: Proximity, Remove, and the Measure of Things

Touching:Proximity, Remove, and the Measure of Things1 Christian Moraru (bio) Published originally as Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy by the Parisian press Galilée in 2000, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy is among the first Derrida translations to come out in English after the philosopher's death in 2004. There is a lot to be said about Derrida's relation to Nancy or, as some might put it, about Nancy's relation to Derrida's thought. But even if Nancy "comes after" Derrida and "owes" him more than the other way around, On Touching bears out the substantial, equal-footing kind of dialogue that starts taking place between the two somewhere around the mid-90s. This exchange goes on after Derrida's departure, in this very book, which features Nancy's tribute to Derrida, "Salut to you, salut to the blind we become" ("Salut à toi, salut aux aveugles que nous devenons"), printed by Libération on October 11, 2004. The obituary is brief, unconventional, and deeply moving, touching in more sense than one. While it can no longer touch Derrida properly speaking, in only a few sentences it touches on him, cuts to the heart of what the great philosopher has been ("all about") in life and continues to be in death, in the "blindness" in which his absence has thrown us only to prompt inquiry, discovery and self-discovery, insight. The touching farewell follows and echoes Derrida's own "Salve," the "Untimely Postscript, for Want of a Final Retouch" to On Touching. Notably, this sanctions the epistemological "bliss" of this sort of blindness where that which blinds or keeps us in obscurity also shows the way out by pushing us to "orient" ourselves—"like any good blind man" (303)—"by touch." For we must first touch the world, palpate its body, and poke around in the [End Page 306] "darkness" of the senses, of the invisible here and now, the corporeal, and the "irrational" to "get a sense" of this world, of what it means. Touching, then, is philosophically groundbreaking. It captures the most fundamental move of thought in general and deconstructive thought in particular. Thus, Peggy Kamuf is right to stress that Christine Irizarry's translation is one of the "most important works in Derrida's immense oeuvre." Touching, indeed, is what the knowing subject must do in order to do more and touch on or, "get to the bottom" of, things. This bottom cannot reveal itself, and as a result the "transcendent" revelation it occasions will not occur unless we touch things first, that is, feel their surfaces. In other words—and these are always the words, the illuminatingly touching circumlocutions Derrida and Nancy speak to each other and to us—there is no depth without surface, no spirit without a body embodying and demarcating it, no territory without limit, no access without the threshold and trial of entry. In brief, and this is what Derrida keeps repeating throughout his career and again in this book, truth, being, and so on are tied into the problematic of the "haptical" (from háptomai, "to touch" in Greek). Or, even better: no matter how elusive and "intangible" (297), all problematics turns out to have something to do with "haptics," with liminality. One reaches the limit of things, of what we know, of our habit and comfort zone, that point that we need to go beyond in order to "find out," only insofar as we activate this sense. And vice versa, it is only through touching that we reach, as Derrida says, "a limit at the limit" (297). Superficial and sensorial as it may be, the haptical instantiates and inaugurates if not absolute knowledge, then at least the awareness without which there is no learning. I find it quite remarkable that what touching has done for philosophy across its history, and what it does again for Derrida, Nancy as a philosopher of "le toucher" does for his friend. On Touching is anything but a monograph on Nancy although Derrida does not shy away from calling him "the greatest thinker about touching of all time" (4). However, no matter what Derrida touches on in it, he touches on Nancy...

Le plaisir de la lecture Reading the Other Animal

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

To Follow

peggy kamuf has translated several works by Jacques Derrida and edited two volumes of his essays, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Columbia University Press, 1991) and Without Alibi(Stanford University Press, 2002). The author most recently of Book of Addresses (Stanford University Press, 2005), she teaches French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.

The Strange Case of Araki Yasusada: Author, Object

The essay reads the authorial hoax surrounding Araki Yasusada, said to be the author of poems relating experiences in post-Hiroshima Japan. The case—Yasusada's poems seem to have been written by a white American man—recalls (not for the first time) the difficulty the literary imagination has in dealing with biographical authorship. After examining the polemics the case generated around poetries of witness, the essay connects Yasusada's imagination to three other ideas: first, the collectively pathological memory associated with historical trauma (exemplified by Binjamin Wilkomirski'sFragments); second, subject-object relations in modern poetry (the essay closely reads two Yasusada poems in terms of their phenomenological concerns); and, third, a debate around the question of “woman's writing” carried on by Nancy K. Miller and Peggy Kamuf and inspired by another authorial hoax. The essay concludes by thinking about authors as historical objects—objects of readers’ subjective perception of them.

Nonplaces: An Anecdoted Topography of Contemporary French Theory

Nonplaces:An Anecdoted Topography of Contemporary French Theory Bruno Bosteels (bio) In its juridical sense, a non-lieu is a judgment that suspends, annuls, or withdraws a case without bringing it to trial. It is thus a judgment that announces or enunciates that there will be no judgment as to guilt or innocence, a finding that there is no place to judge. It therefore renders justice by refusing to render it under the law, which it does when it pronounces or enunciates the non-lieu. —Peggy Kamuf, "Béance"1 Inside the Spatial Turn If modernity will always be remembered as an era dominated by questions of time and history, then perhaps the steady waning of modern ideals invites us to think of the entry into something called the postmodern as a passage dominated by questions of space and geography. As Michel Foucault once famously observed in a 1967 conference paper, first published two decades ago: "Perhaps we might say that some of the ideological conflicts that animate today's polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the willful inhabitants of space" ["Of Other Spaces" 22]. This conflict over time and space presupposes a much larger argument that is not only historical but also methodological in nature. What is at stake is both a question of the passage, or transition, from modernity to postmodernity, if that is indeed what we decide to name modernity's aftermath, and a question of the theoretical consequences that follow from giving precedence to space over time in treating this very transition. With regard to this second question, too, Foucault's work stands as exemplary insofar as he was able to show the degree to which a vital emphasis on space, geography, and territoriality [End Page 117] forces us to take leave of the modern paradigm of consciousness—typically associated with the category of time and its unfolding in the mind or spirit—in favor of a situated understanding of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. "Metaphorizing the transformations of discourse in a vocabulary of time necessarily leads to the utilisation of the model of individual consciousness with its intrinsic temporality," Foucault observes in an interview with the editors of the French journal of geography Hérodote, and he continues: "Endeavouring on the other hand to decipher discourse through the use of spatial, strategic metaphors enables one to grasp precisely the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the basis of relations of power" ["Questions on Geography" 69–70]. Whether real or metaphorical, a willful displacement of our categorial apparatus from time to space thus might enable one to avoid the idealist temptation inherent in a strictly discursive or textual model, by inscribing all discourses and practices in the geopolitics of power relations. My aim in the following pages is not to go over the much-discussed shift from time to space once more, even as I take advantage of several of its methodological principles along the way. Instead, I want to map out a momentous change of perspective that has been taking place over the past few decades within the parameters of the so-called spatial turn itself. In fact, if and when modernity is coming to an end, both in the sense of completing itself and of revealing its character as a finite historical entity, not only does whatever shape critical thought takes in the face of this turnabout need to be securely fastened onto specific places and spaces but, if we are to believe a growing number of authors, particularly but by no means exclusively in France, the study of art, literature, politics, philosophy, and even anthropology would also require a thorough consideration of so-called "nonplaces" as a rigorous category for critical thinking today [for a brief discussion of the use of "nonplace" in Anglo-American anthropology, including Melvin M. Webber's notion of "nonplace urban realm" from the mid-1960s, see Weiner]. In the end, these proponents of the nonplace confront us with one disarmingly simple question: how can critical thinking in the present time respond to the task of having to work through whatever lies outside of the order that is actually in place? The Exhaustion of...

Process Philosophy and the Possibility of Critique

ed phase of conformal feeling is not meant to imply that such a phase could, in concrete, ever occur alone. concrete becoming of an actual entity is always dipolar and atemporal. This discussion is for purposes of analytic clarity only. It is a discussion that can occur only within genetic division. 9. For a superb treatment of these notions, see Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 10. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 42. 11. This is, I suppose, a rather fundamental notion of psychology. past presents possibil ity of its overcoming. But I emphasize again that non-conformal proposition emerges from feeling of specific situation to which that proposition refers. As evidence of this, I have noticed, when teaching African American Philosophy, that many white students in class will repeatedly say that does not matter believing that this pronouncement is very liberal and liberating. They do not understand that only someone who has not been subjected to racism can make this claim. For those who are oppressed on basis of their race, race always matters. It is (processively) a part of who they are because it is a part of landscape out of which they must construct themselves. 12. Take, for example, recent event of mainstream media being increasingly acquired by major corporations. Such acquisition allows a certain formal characteristic of these media to appear rather more evidently and starkly than it has in past. 13. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 19-34. 14. See Noam Chomsky, Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 121-36. notion of the manufacture of consent was, Chomsky points out, coined by Walter Lippmann to indicate a revolution in practice of democracy (136). Needless to say, what Lippmann saw as a great advance, Chomsky sees as fundamentally antithetical to freedom. 15. This may be at heart of Walter Benjamin's notion of dialectical image and its explo sive revolutionary potential. 16. See Max Horkheimer The Authoritarian State, in Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Mike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), 115-17. 17. original line is, of course, Thinking of key, each confirms a prison. line is from The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot, Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1934), 45. 18.1 should hope that one would think here of Derrida's astounding passage: let us never neg lect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on earth, from Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: State of Debt, Work of Mourning, and New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 85. 19. Karl Marx, Grundisse: Foundations of Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 542. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.112 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 05:22:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Process Philosophy and Possibility of Critique 49

Tracing Calculation [ Calque Calcul ] Between Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Derrida

Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul] Between Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Derrida Lawrence Johnson To calculate the loss—is this the challenge that Nicolas Abraham has given to Jacques Derrida? Between 1959 and 1975, the year of Abraham’s unexpected death, they were close friends, sharing what Elisabeth Roudinesco describes as “a marginal position in relation to the dominant philosophical discourse of the day, and an almost identical syntax” (599). Yet it can hardly be said that they participated together in an intellectual movement in the same way that Abraham and his wife Maria Torok—and, latterly, Nicholas Rand—had done. Texts such as De la grammatologie, L’ecriture et la différence, and La voix et le phénomène (1967) elevated Derrida to a position of eminence among French theorists; Abraham, however, remained virtually unknown outside French psychoanalysis until after his death. Only a fraction of his work was published during his lifetime and that was primarily in essay form. It was not until 1976, the year after his death, with the publication of Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups, that Abraham’s work became more widely known. Interestingly, Derrida himself may have contributed to the marked disparity between the levels of recognition that Abraham’s work received before and after his death. He refers rarely, if at all, to Abraham in his own work before 1975. Then, in two interviews at the end of the same year, he refers directly to Abraham’s work; he writes the foreword to Cryptonymie the following year; within four years he writes another essay, “Me—Psychoanalysis,” to introduce the English translation of Abraham’s “The Shell and the Kernel”; and, in the last two decades, references to the ideas of a crypt within the ego and the anasemic character of psychoanalytic language are made usually, though not always, in connection with Abraham’s name—in La carte postale, Psyché, The Ear of the Other, Donner la mort, Donner le temps, and elsewhere. What Roudinesco describes as an “identical syntax” might seem to us, when laid out in this way, more like a compensation or a reaction-formation in the direction of Derrida’s own project. Yet nothing is gained by asking whether Derrida’s interventions contributed to Abraham’s belated recognition. Since his death, immediately prior to the publication of his most famous account of failed mourning, it has been almost impossible for the responses to Abraham’s work to divorce the theory of the crypt from his name and, therefore, from the life for which this name purports to have signed. Remarkably, of the many occasions on which Derrida refers to Abraham and his work, after his death, none refer directly to this death. As Peggy Kamuf noted soon after the publication of Abraham and Torok’s collection of essays in 1978 (L’ecorce et le noyau), Derrida’s foreword to Cryptonymie bears down so heavily upon the term which Abraham and Torok take as the title of this work, and upon the names of the analysts, that Derrida’s words “cut through to the stone so that we can read them as epitaph” (33). “Writing on Abraham’s crypt,” Derrida thus casts himself in the role of Abraham’s “eulogist” (34). The role of the eulogist is, of course, not to refer directly to the death, but to give praise and recall the life. Like the eulogia from which the eulogy takes its name—the bread of the Eucharist that is distributed among those who do not participate in communion—it keeps the body of the dead alive. The “fantasy of incorporation,” as Abraham and Torok described it, is just such a refusal to mourn—a refusal by the ego, that is, to introject loss: Incorporation is the refusal to reclaim as our own the part of ourselves that we placed in what we lost; incorporation is the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us. (Shell 127) Incorporation produces the gap in the psyche which Abraham and Torok have called the crypt, a place where the lost object is to be kept alive within the ego...

Nostalgia for the Future

Nostalgia for the Future

The division of literature, or, The university in deconstruction

Where does the university begin and the outside end? How has literature become established as a separate domain within the university? Demonstrating that these questions of division are intricately related, Peggy Kamuf explores the space that the university devotes to the study of literature. Kamuf begins by analyzing the complex history of literary study within the modern university, critically reading developments from the French Revolution through the 19th century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon - Melville's The Confidence-Man - to show how academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past.

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. By Jacques Derrida. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. 198p. $55.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. By Jacques Derrida. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. 198p. $55.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

The Temptation of Fascism and the Question of Literature: Justice, Sorrow, and Political Error (An Open Letter to Jacques Derrida)

1. Jacques Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 12764-republished in a slightly expanded form in Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). All references, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the Critical Inquiry edition and will be cited parenthetically.