Derrida's Destinerrance Author(s): J. Hillis Miller Source: MLN, Vol. 121, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 2006), pp. 893-910 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490747 . Accessed: 10/11/2014 07:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MLN. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 07:11:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Derrida's Destinerrance J. Hillis Miller [... .] une lettre peut toujoursne pas arriver 'tdestination, et [...] doncjamais elle n'y arrive. -Derrida, La Cartepostale What is destined to happen to the corpus of Derrida's works? What fate will befall them? As I have shown in another essay,' Derrida was anxious about what would happen after his death to his "remains," in the double sense of his dead body and the body of his writings. This anxiety is expressed both in A Tastefor the Secretand in the long amazing reflection on death, apropos of Robinson Crusoe's fear of it, carried on from seminar to seminar in his last seminars (2002-03). Derrida elsewhere put the reasons he had for worrying about what would happen to his legacy after his death under the aegis of a strik- ing neologism: destinerrance. What is destinerrance?Discussing it fully would be a virtually endless task. It is a concept, or better, motif, or, better still, spatio-temporal figure, that connects intimately with the other salient spatio-temporal figures in Derrida's work. I call destinerrancespatio-temporal because, like most of Derrida's key terms, it is a spatial figure for time. It names a fatal possibility of erring by not reaching a predefined temporal goal in terms of wandering away from a predefined spatial goal. Destiner- rance is like a loose thread in a tangled skein that turns out to lead to the whole ball of yarn. It could therefore generate a potentially I"Derrida's Remains," forthcoming in Mosaic. MLN 121 (2006): 893-910 @ 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 07:11:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 894 J. HILLIS MILLER endless commentary. Destinerrance is connected to diffirance, that is, to a temporality of differing and deferring, without present or presence, without ascertainable origin or goal; to trace, iterability, signature, event, context, play (jeu: in the sense that one says, "There is play in this machine"); to Derrida's anomalous concept of speech acts; to the future or the "to come" (i'a venir); to the democracy to come in that avenir to come; to decision, obligation, responsibility, and, in another of Derrida's neologisms, irresponsabilisation (Derrida, Don- ner la mort 89); to interruption, dissemination, the wholly other; to exappropriation, adestination, justice, law, right, the gift, the secret, hospitality, testimony, sendings or dispatches (envois); to the messianic without messianism, as developed in Spectres de Marx and elsewhere; to the specter, singularity, the apocalyptic, the apotropaic or, in John Leavey's coinage, the apotropocalyptic (Leavey);2 finally, always and everywhere, to "l'impossible possibilite de [...] mort" (Derrida, Spec- tres de Marx 187). Each motif is connected in one way or another to destinerrance, in fulfillment of Derrida's claim, in A Taste for the Secret, that his works are not a heterogeneous collection of occasional essays, but that portentous thing, an ceuvre, an organic corpus (Derrida, A Tastefor the Secret 14-15). The word or the notion of destinerrance appears in a large number of Derrida's works, early and late. It appears in the contexts of quite different topics. The word, or sometimes the concept without the word, appears in "Le Facteur de la verite," in La Carte postale (441-524), in "Envois," also from La Carte postale (7-273), in "Telepathie," in "Mes Chances," in D'un ton apocalyptique adopti naguere en philosophie, in "No apocalypse, not now (a' toute vitesse, sept missiles, sept mis- sives)," in "Mes chances: Au rendez-vous de quelques stereophonies epicuriennes," and in L'Autre Cap. These uses, the reader will note, include psychoanalytical and political contexts, as well as the question of letters in the epistolary sense and also the question of the subject or ego. No doubt destinerrance appears in other places too that I have not identified. For lack of space, I must postpone to another essay discussion of the explicitly political uses of the word (or the concept) of destinerrance. La Carte postale is a novel in letters about the way those exposed letters called postcards deconstruct (if I may dare to use that word) 2Leavey's essay is the best discussion I know of Derrida's destinerrance.I am grateful for his help and for help from Julian Wolfreys in tracking down Derrida's uses of the word or, sometimes, the figurative idea without the word. This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 07:11:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions M LN 895 sender, message, and addressee, all three, divide them from within and scatter them. In La Carte postale Derrida uses the alternative neologism, adestination (35). The notion of destinerrancewas already present in Derrida's putdown of Lacan in "Le Facteur de la verite." It appears in the powerful investigation of telepathy as destinerrancein "Telepathie." Destinerranceunderwrites the discussion of Greek atom- ism and Freud's notion of chance and the aleatory in "Mes chances." Speaking there of the clinamen or unpredictable deflection of atoms falling in the void in the atomism of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, Derrida says: "Seule cette deviation peut detourner une destination imperturbable et un ordre inflexible. Une telle errance (je l'ai appele ailleurs 'destinerrance') peut convenir aux lois du destin, aux conventions ou aux contrats, aux accords du fatum (fati foedera [Lucretius, De natura rerum,2: 254])" (Derrida, "Mes chances" 24). I shall return to this essay. A peculiarity of many places where the word or the concept, if it can be called that, of destinerranceappears is that they tend to say, in an act of differance,something like: "as I have elsewhere explained, with examples." I have not yet found, in the labyrinth of Derrida's writings, what might be called the "mother lode," the place where the word appears for the first time, with full explanation, though the concept without the word is perhaps first developed in the essay on Lacan, "Le Facteur de la verite." Perhaps no such origin for the word exists. Perhaps the word itself is the consequence of a destinerrance,a wandering from locus to locus that to some degree takes for granted its meaning as something always already established somewhere else. Each of the essays or books I have mentioned is characteristically intricate. Each is a brilliantly innovative argumentation. Each calls for an extended commentary. In a short paper, to avoid an interminable accounting, I must necessarily be brief, whatever injustice to the tangled skein that leads me to commit. I want to look with a sharp eye at a number of the passages where the word or the concept appears, in order to see if I can identify just what Derrida is saying. I want then to speculate on just what destinerrancemight mean for the destiny of Derrida's own writings, now that he is dead. The logic, if it can be called that, of destinerranceseems straightfor- ward enough. It is a small bomb that is one of the chief weapons in some of Derrida's most exuberant acts of deconstruction. In calling it a bomb, I am thinking of Derrida's fantasy, expressed in A Tastefor the Secret,of blowing up a railway during the Resistance and of his con- nection of that fantasy with deconstruction. This confessional passage This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 07:11:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 896 J. HILLIS MILLER is strange enough and disquieting enough to justify citing it here. It is particularly disquieting whenjuxtaposed to today's roadside bombs set by "insurgents" in Iraq. What right-minded person, however, could be against the terrorist acts performed by the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation? Make what you will of this passage, dear reader, as it makes its way to you by destinerrance and exappropriation: Naturally my heroic phantasms [. .] usually have to do with the period of the Resistance, which I did not experience firsthand; I wasn't old enough, and I wasn't in France. When I was very young-and until quite recently-I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombs on the railway:blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemy's movements more hazardous.