Derrida and the Impossible Community JOHN D

A without Truth: Community Derrida and the Impossible Community JOHN D. CAPUTO Villanova University "I don't much like the word community," Jacques Derrida said in an interview; indeed "I am not even sure I like the thing" (PdS, 366/ Points, 355). No wonder: "I have always had trouble vibrating in uni- son" (PdS, 358/Points, 348).' I do not deny or even doubt that we all need a certain community, that we are all nourished by our communities. But before we close down our suspicions about this word, before we close in upon ourselves in self-affirming celebration of who "we" are, before hastening to feel better about the bottomless truth of "our" "tradition" and "our" "community," I want to rehearse Derrida's equally bottomless dislike for this word. For his salutary distrust of this word provides an indis- pensable precondition for coping with the aporetics of community, with its unavoidable necessity and its undeniable violence. After all, a communitas is a military formation, referring to the common defense we build against the other, the fortifications built around the city: munire, to fortify ourselves, to build a wall, to gather ourselves together ( com) for protection against the other; to encircle ourselves with a common wall or barrier that protects the same from the incom- ing (invenire, invention) of the other, that keeps the same safe from the other. In that sense, community, that sense of community, is everything that deconstruction resists. For deconstruction is through and through L'invention de l'autre, the affirmation- viens, oui, oui-of the 25 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 26 tout autre (Psy., 58-61/RDR, 59-62), and so everything that is done in deconstruction takes aim at this wall of defense that community throws up against the other. Still, the deconstruction of community would never amount to its simple destruction, to razing communal walls. "Deconstruction, let's say it again, is not destruction or demolition" (PdS, 224/Points, 211), but rather the recognition or affirmation of "another" community, "an open 'quasi-community"' (PdS, 362/Points, 351), beyond the community of identitarian fusion, one that is permeable and porous, its powerful sense of self-identity having been shaken loose: Nevertheless I would like to speak of another "community" (a word I never much liked, because of its connotation of participation, indeed, fusion, identification: I see in it as many threats as promises), of another being-together than this one here, of another gathering- together of singularities, of another friendship, even though that friendship no doubt owes the essential to being- or gathering-together. ( Sauf, 38/ ON, 46) One wonders what such a "community of singularities" would look like. It would no doubt be a nontotalizing community, a community which recognizes that we do not need to have everything in common, that our differences communicate, but they communicate in such a way as to recognize the abyss or gulf of singularity, the idiosyncrasy of the singular, the irreducible, untranslatable idiomatic quality of the singular. The quasi law of such a community might be something like what Levinas calls the relation without relation, the relation in which the relata absolve themselves from the relation.2 The whole idea of such a holism would be to think of the world as a loose or vague whole- and here I am picking up on a Peircean image suggested by Edith Wyschogrod-an underdetermined, open-ended, quasi system that lacks programmable effects, in which things maintain a constant interaction, in which there are no atoms of individuality, no separate substances.' One could imagine an undecidable system, a vague, quasi community, that would communicate only in the sense of being interactive or rela- tional, of containing non-isolable elements or moments, that would together make for a loose ensemble, at best a kind of quasi system inasmuch as it would be underdetermined, a whole that would not be so sufficiently ordered as to produce predictable, foreseeable results, but would always be vulnerable to chance and surprise from what is out- side the community. Might we speak of a quasi-transcendental field, a field of anonymous, underdetermined relations or relationalities that release unforeseeable, unpredictable effects, like sparks from a roar- ing fire? Would that not be all the community we could tolerate? Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 27 If that is so, if we may dream of such an impossible whole, or non- whole, then that, I would say, is only possible (or impossible) in virtue of d#'erance. Such a community of singularities would be a poststructuralist nonstructure, a quasi structure that has been deconstructed into a something sufficiently loose and open-ended, porous and permeable as to tolerate, indeed to enable, singularities, to tolerate and enable expenditures without reserve. All of which would belong to something that Derrida is trying, not to map out, God forbid, but to inhabit and invoke (viens, oui, oui! ) . For what can resist the programming effect of the community, offset its too tight network, upset the totalizing im- pulses of communities, networks, chains, systems, holisms, etc. other than maintaining one's loyalty to the idiosyncrasies of the singular and the differentials of diflbrance? Would not a sense of loose relationality that keeps tripping over singularities, a sense of what Edith Wyschogrod calls so very nicely "a space in which to experience an encounter of incommensurables," would not this be all the community one would need or could ever tolerate? Are not pockets of irreducible singularity and idiosyncrasy the only thing that stands between a totalizing and nontotalizing community, a community of fusion and a community of singularities? Do they skew the communal whole so that it cannot be programmed? Such a quasi community is essentially non existent, not with the ideal non existence of a utopian plan or infinite horizon, but with the force of a messianic dream of something that never is but is always to come, something essentially other than the present order of plenary content- ment with who we are, something unforeseeable: Such a community is always to come, it has an essential relation to the singularity of the event, of that which is coming but therefore "has not happened." (PdS, 362/Points, 351) For Derrida the question of community is through and through a question of identity, a question that has for him a deeply autobiographical resonance. For Derrida has always had to wrestle with his own identity, or non identity, as a Jew, as an Algerian Jew, a Jew who is also Arab, and yet not quite a Jew, since he rightly passes for an atheist, and also not quite Arab or Algerian, because he is also French, but not quite French, because he is also a little American, too, although not quite American. So this whole question of community and identity, of the identity of the community, which is very theoretical, is for Derrida also highly personal and autobiographical, implicated with his most intimate and private life. Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 28 Derrida and the Jew That is why in recent years he has begun to expose his circumcision, scandalously, in public, like an ancient Cynic, scars and all, that is, more and more to address the question of his relationship to Judaism. Derrida is not a Jewish writer in the strong sense in which that is true of Rosenzweig, Buber, or Levinas. He is a Jew who is "rightly described as an atheist," of an "assimilated" family, raised in an Arab country, whose native language, culture, and education are deeply French- "Christian Latin French" ( Circon., 57/Circum., 58). He was trained in the Greco-European tradition of philosophy and letters, has lived in France since the age of nineteen, although his greatest following is in the United States, and he is always being made welcome elsewhere. But this diaspora of Derrida's psyche does not mean his work is not driven by a Jewish passion, not haunted by the figure of the Jew, that he does not write in the name of the Jew, if not always by name, at least by indirection. On the contrary, this dispersion and dissemination is the very substance of his Jewishness. When he writes of the exile, the outsider, the nomad, the desert, the uprooted, the dispersed, of dissemination and the cut, of writing itself-is that not to write under another name about the Jew, about Jewish passion, the passion and suffering of the Jew? And is this not to write about himself? When he writes about the tout autre, as he has done more and more since 1980, that is not only an excellent Jewish way to write about the name of God, it is a discourse on the Jews themselves, a way the Jews have found of singing a beautiful and haunting song to their own history. For the Jew is both the substance and the figure of the outsider, of the other, of the children of the tout autre who bear a family likeness to their father. Unless you are Palestinian; then the Palestinians are the Jews. That, too, is a central part of Derrida's argument and of his own Algerian provenance. For without minimizing the substance and the singularity of Jewish suffering, the Jew is also the placeholder for all those who have no place, even as Auschwitz is absolutely unique and also the placeholder for all the Auschwitzes,4 for every other heinous name, since there were other death camps, and the hatred of the other can take other forms than anti-semitism.

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