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Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, the Poem1

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Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, the Poem1 RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 1 TOPIC Interpreting Tradition Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:47:46PM via free access RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 2 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:47:46PM via free access RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 3 UNINTERRUPTED DIALOGUE: BETWEEN TWO INFINITIES, THE POEM1 by JACQUES DERRIDA École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales ABSTRACT With the attempt to express my feeling of admiration for Hans-Georg Gadamer an ageless melancholy mingles. This melancholy begins as of the friends’ lifetime. A cogito of the farewell signs the breathing of their dialogues. One of the two will have been doomed, from the beginning, to carry alone both the dialogue that he must pursue beyond the interruption, and the memory of the first interruption. To carry the world of the other, to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared, in a world without world. That shall be one of the ways to let resound within ourselves the line of poetry by Paul Celan, “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.” Will I be able to express, accurately and faithfully, my admiration for Hans-Georg Gadamer? I obscurely sense, mingling with the recognition and affection that have characterized this feeling for such a long time, an ageless melancholy. Such melancholy, I dare say, is not only historical. Even if, by some event still difficult to decipher, this melancholy corresponded to some such history, it would do so in a singular, intimate, almost private fashion, secret, and still in reserve. For the first movement of this melancholy does not always turn it towards [vers] the epicenters of earthquakes that my generation will have perceived most often, in their effects rather than in their causes, belatedly, indirectly and in a medi- atized fashion, unlike Gadamer who will have been their immense wit- ness, nay their thinker. And not only in Germany. Every time we spoke together, in French truth be told, more than once here in Heidelberg, often in Paris or in Italy, and through [à travers] every- thing he confided to me, with a friendliness whose warmth always hon- ored, moved and encouraged me, I had the feeling I understood bet- ter a century of German thought, philosophy, and politics—and not only German. Research in Phenomenology,34 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2004 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:47:46PM via free access RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 4 4 Such melancholy will no doubt have been changed—and infinitely aggravated—by death. It will have been sealed by it. Forever. Yet underneath the petrified immobility of this seal, in this difficult to read but in some way blessed signature, I have a hard time discerning that which dates from the death of the friend and that which will have preceded it for such a long time. The same melancholy, another one but the same also, must have invaded me as of our first encounter in Paris in 1981. Our discussion must have begun by a strange inter- ruption—something other than a misunderstanding [malentendu]—by a sort of prohibition, the inhibition of a suspension. And also by the patience of indefinite expectation, of an epoché that held your breath, and withheld judgment or conclusion. As for me, I stood there with my mouth gaping. I spoke very little to him, and what I said then was addressed only indirectly to him. I was, however, sure that a strange and intense sharing had begun. A partnership perhaps. I had a premonition that what he would have no doubt called an “interior dialogue” would be pursued in each of us, sometimes wordlessly, imme- diately in us or indirectly, as was confirmed in the years which fol- lowed, this time in very studious and eloquent, often fecund, fashion, through [à travers] a large number of philosophers who, in the world, in Europe but above all in the United States, attempted [ont tenté] to take charge of and reconstitute this exchange still virtual or withheld, to prolong it or to interpret its strange caesura. I In speaking of dialogue, I use here a word that I confess will remain for a long time and for a thousand good or bad reasons (which I’ll spare you the presentation of ) foreign to my lexicon, like a foreign language the usage of which would call for worried [inquiètes] and pre- cautionary translations. By specifying above all “interior dialogue,” I am delighted to have already let Gadamer speak in me. I literally inherit what he said in 1985, a little while after our first encounter, in the conclusion to his text “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion”: Finally, that dialogue, which we pursue in our own thought and which is perhaps enriching itself in our own day with great new partners who are drawn from a heritage of humanity that is extending across our planet, should seek its partner everywhere—just because this partner is other, and especially if the other is completely different. Whoever wants me to take deconstruction to heart and insists upon difference stands at the begin- ning of a dialogue, and not at its end.2 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:47:46PM via free access RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 5 , 5 What is it that remains, even today, so unheimlich about this encounter that was, according to me, all the more fortunate, if not successful, pre- cisely for having been, in the eyes of many, a missed encounter? It succeeded so well at being missed that it left an active and provoca- tive trace, which is promised to more of a future than a harmonious and consensual dialogue would have been. I call this experience, in German, unheimlich. I have no French equiv- alent to describe in one word this affect: in the course of a single and therefore irreplaceable encounter, a peculiar strangeness came to min- gle indissociably with a familiarity at once intimate and misleading, sometimes disquieting, vaguely spectral. I also use this untranslatable German word, unheimlich, to revive right here, even as I speak in English and you can read me in English, our common sensitivity to the limits of translation. I also use it in memory of what Gadamer diagnosed concerning what many of our friends hastily interpreted as an originary misunderstanding [malentendu]. According to him, the reef of transla- tion had been one of the essential causes of this surprising interrup- tion in 1981. At the opening of Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik, in 1988, a little while after, I assume, our second public debate right here in Heidelberg and with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Reiner Wiehl about Heidegger’s political commitments, Gadamer situated the test of trans- lation and the always threatening risk of misunderstanding at the bor- der of languages. My encounter with Derrida in Paris three years ago, which I had looked forward to as a dialogue between two totally independent developers of Heideggerian initiatives in thought, involved special difficulties. First of all, there was the language barrier. This is always a great difficulty when thought or poetry strives to leave traditional forms behind, trying to hear new orientations drawn from within one’s own mother tongue.3 The fact that Gadamer names “thought or poetry,” rather than science or philosophy, is not fortuitous. That is a thread that we ought not lose track of today. Moreover, in “The Boundaries of Language” (1984), which came before the essay I just quoted from 1988, but which was closer to our encounter (1981), Gadamer dwelled at length on what linked the question of translation to poetic experience. The poem is not only the best example of the untranslatable. It also gives its most proper, its least improper, place to the test of translation. The poem no doubt is the only place propitious to the experience of language, that is to say, of an idiom that both defies translation forever and therefore calls for a translation summoned to do the impossible, to Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 06:47:46PM via free access RIPH 34_f2_1-19 10/27/04 8:57 AM Page 6 6 make the impossible possible in an unheard of event. In “The Boundaries of Language,” Gadamer writes “that [he was just speaking of the “phe- nomenon of foreign language”] is valid especially when it is a ques- tion of translation [and he refers in a note precisely to his essay, “Reading is like Translating”4]. And in that case, poetry, the lyrical poem, is the great instance for the experience of the appropriateness and the foreignness of language.”5 Supposing that all of poetry belongs right through and simply to what we call art or the fine arts, let us also recall what Gadamer specifies more than once, notably in his Selbstdarstellung.6 He underlines the essen- tial role of what he calls “the experience of art” in his concept of philosophical hermeneutics, next to all the sciences of comprehension that serve for him as a starting point. Let us never forget that Truth and Method opened its proper space with a chapter devoted to “the experience of art,” to an “experience of the work of art” that “always fundamentally surpasses any subjective horizon of interpretation, whether that of the artist or that of the recipient.”7 Concerning this horizon of subjectivity, the work of art will never hold itself up straight like an object facing up to a subject.
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