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 incoming (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

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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 outside 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?

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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.

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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. For the place of the Jew, of the outcast and outsider, is always occupied by someone, whatever the name. Derrida's idea is not to find the Jews-all the Jews, under any name- their own home and to secure their own private property, which holds "as many threats as promises." It belongs to the structure of his thought to say that the outsider, whoever that may be, is always out, structur-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 29 ally out, that justice is never here, that the messiah is not going to become present, that the promise is never fulfilled, that a community of singularities of always to come and that every existing community needs to be pried open. He is not trying to locate a Jewish Heimat to rival Heidegger's Heimatsdenken, to establish a strong nation state with an adequate national defense. Like Celan, he is inclined to agree that the proper essence of the Jew is to have no property, their essence is to be without essence (Schibb., 64/ WT, 37). Like Lyotard-whatever their differences (infra, n. 13)-he wants nothing to do with "geo- philosophy," a philosophy that grows like a plant on some national private property; that is something that pits him against Heidegger in a particularly profound way.5 The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation states with rigorous immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric, the politics, and the metaphysics of native land and native tongue, the politics of sites, of propria and my-ownness, to remain as vigilant as possible about the community of fusion. The idea is to disarm the bomb of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, against les juifs in Lyotard's sense, against all the Others, all the other Others, all of whom according to an impossible formula, a formula of the impossible, are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida's more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida's democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the ter- ror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual, communitarian unity, of the natu- ral, native bonds of the nation- (natus, natio) state, which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus ( Geschlecht) . He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativistic closure, of a community without identity. His is a nonidentical community that cannot say I or we, a "we" that is not constituted by its fortification against, but by its invention of, the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, by the spirit of the "we" of "Christian Europe," or of a "Christian politics," lethal com- pounds that spell death for Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian Euro- pean Holy Hegelian Spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all less juifs, even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. The partition by which Derrida's life is torn is a tear in language, not because Derrida is a philosopher of language but, for almost the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 30 very opposite reason, because he has no language. "Derrida," popu- larly thought to be the philosopher of language par excellence, even to excess, the philosopher who would turn philosophy and the world itself into words, for whom philosophy is supposed to be just a form of writing, who is content to play with words instead of offering argu- ments, this same Derrida, has no language of his own: I love words too much because I have no language of my own, only false escarres [bedsores]. ( Circon., 90/ Circum., 92; cf. PdS, 217-18/ Points, 203-4) He is Jewish and not Jewish, Jewish but without knowing Hebrew, Jew- ish but also something of an Arab, Jewish without a Jewish wife or circumcised sons. He calls himself "the most advanced eschatologist," living in the end-time, the "last of the Jews," the way Elijah, his given name, was the last of the prophets, loved dearly but also excluded by his family, ruptured without rupture (Circon., 92/Circum., 94-95), inside/outside Judaism. Although he is a Jew born in an Arab nation Derrida speaks to God/god/you in neither Hebrew nor Arabic, but in French, in "Christian Latin French" (Circon., 57/Circum., 58), the language of the colonizers of Algeria, of masters and schoolmasters (PdS, 217-18/Points, 204). He speaks and writes in the cut between Hebrew and Christian Latin French, between Arabic and Hebrew-Greek-Latin, so that for him even to speak and write French is to speak and write in a for.eign language, "the language of the other" (PdS, 217-18/Points, 204). He reads and writes in: "all of my foreign languages: French, English, German, Greek, Latin, the philosophic, metaphilosophic, Christian, etc." (Psy. 562 n. 1 /DNT, 135 n. 13). He writes in French even though the Vichy sponsored government in Algeria, and this without the intervention of the Nazis (Circon., 266/Circum., 288), expelled him, at the age of 13-"a little black and very Arab Jew" ( Circon., 57/ Circum., 58)-from the Lycee de Ben Aknoun, near El Biar, in virtue of the numerus clausus law, good Latin for closing admissions to Jewish stu- dents beyond a fix percentage point (7 percent), something which he did not understand or have explained to him. Circumfession itself is a Latinate work, written in the space between Arab Jew and the lush Patristic Latin of Augustine, his "compatriot" ( Circon., 19/ Circum., 18). Although circumcision is all he has ever talked about (Circon., 70/ Circum., 70), this word "circumcision" is Latin, the Hebrew word being scarcely known to him ( Circon., 75/ Circum., 76-77). Indeed he and his family, the Algerian Jews of El Biar, did not constitute a "true Jewish culture" but kept a certain external, even "banal" kind of religious observance (PdS, 218/Points, 205). They did not even speak of "circumcision" but of "baptism," nor of "Bar Mitzvah" but of "commu-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 31 nion," a "fearful acculturation" of this child who was Arab, not Catho- lic, barbarous (Circon., 72/Circum., 72-73), not baptized. What he now confesses openly, his circumcision, he was as a child taught to repress, even as he never learned until recently his Hebrew name, Elijah, the guardian of circumcision, the Jewish name he bears without bearing (Circon., 92, 93/ Circum., 95, 96). His ego is split and cut, not into transcendental and empirical selves, but into Jewish and unJewish, into Arab Jew and Christian Latin French, like a man trying to keep a log after a long journal by means of frag- ments of a forgotten, prehistoric language: what G., the one or the other [Geoffrey Bennington or his mother Georgette], will have never heard is that if I am a sort of marrane of French Catholic culture ... I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts. ( Circon., 150/ Circum., 170) The Marranos were Spanish or Portuguese Jews who were forcibly con- verted to Catholicism, under threat of death or exile, who practiced Judaism in secret. Deriving from the Spanish word for "pigs," from the Jewish prohibition against eating pork, the word carried a pejorative ring. At the end of Aporiczs, a detailed study of Heidegger's treatment of death in Being and Time, Derrida says that Heidegger's analysis belongs to "the huge archive where the memory of death in Christian Europe is being accumulated" (Apories, 338/Aporias, 80-81), whereas Derrida associates himself with the Marranos-"Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case, whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not." Who is the Marrano? Let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place where he lives, in the home of the inhabitant or of the occupant, in the home of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he stays without [sans] saying no but without [sans] identifying himself as be- longing to.... [I] n the dominant culture that by definition has calendars, this secret keeps the Marrano even before the Marrano keeps it. Is it not possible to think that such a secret eludes history, age, and aging? (Apories, 338/Aporias, 81 ) Derrida, whose family came to Algeria in the nineteenth century from Spain, describes himself as a Marrano, inwardly a Jew but out- wardly sucked into the French Catholic culture of Algeria, speaking Christian Latin French, but with this twist, that he is a Marrano who is not quite Jewish on the inside either, who is not exactly Jewish or not Jewish, who is not Christian and not quite free of Christianity, who is neither Algerian nor not, neither European nor not. In the logic of

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Blanchot, Derrida a Jew sans Judaism, Christianized sans Christianity, an Arab sans Islam, a French citizen sans being French, an American "phenomenon" sans being American, a religious man sans theism. This atheist Arab Jew who speaks French and lives in France, whose greatest recognition is in the United States, suffers from the "illness of Proteus" ( Circon., 184/ Circum., 198): always less recognizable in my family than in my country, in my country than in Europe, in Europe than anywhere else ... so that I do not deprive myself ... to speak Latin, to oblige you to learn Latin again to read SA, me, at work, the little Latin I know through having begun to learn it when Vichy had made it, I believe, obligatory in the form just before booting me out of the school in the Latin name of the numerus clausus by withdrawing our French citizenship. ( Circon., 196/Circum., 210-11) Speaking to his dying mother on the phone, he cannot understand her incoherent words; she might as well be speaking Hebrew to him, he who is "reaching the end without ever having read Hebrew" ( Circon., 264-65/ Circum., 286-87). It is as if all of his difficult and convoluted writings are elaborate circumlocutions for the unknown language and grammar of Hebrew, as if the formidable difficulty of his writings comes from cutting around this "unreadability." Derrida has no language of his own because he has two languages, Hebrew and French, neither of which are his. He only pretended to know Hebrew, to get by Bar Mitzvah, like a Catholic altar boy in pre-Vatican II, memorizing Latin he does not understand from a badly mimeographed copy of phonetically spelled Latin. ("Day-oh grah-si-ahs.") He has/does not have two languages: the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it, the secular they made clear would never be mine. (Circon., 267/ Circum., 289) The first, Hebrew, he never learned; the second, Christian Latin French, could never be his. He loves words because he has no mother tongue or native soil, no Heideggerian Bodenstdndigkeit. This complaint echoes the complaint he made in "How to Avoid Speaking," that "for lack of capacity, competence, or self-authorization, I have never been able to speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab" (Psy., 562 n. 1 /DNT, 135 n. 13). Unlike Heidegger's Holderlinian Greco-Germans, who are all "plants," Derrida is a graft or transplant, always being uprooted and planted somewhere else, made more welcome in a foreign land (cf. PdS, 201-2/ Points, 189; PdS, 362/Points, 351 ) , always displaced and invited to move on (or else locked up! [PdS, 137-39/Points, 128-30]. He is a "plant" only idiomatically, like a secret agent, a "plant" paid to spy on the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 33 enemy, someone placed strategically in a foreign setting. Whatever his debt to Heidegger, Derrida's experience of language, his experience with language, eine Erfahrung mit Sprache zu machen, is an experience of exile-a "politics of the emigre or exile"6-that is almost completely un-Heideggerian and brings out everything that separates Derrida from Heidegger, and everything that is intolerable and dangerous about Heidegger-about Heidegger's poets and Heidegger's Holderlin, about Heidegger's Greeks and Heidegger's Germans, about Heidegger's Sprache, in short, about Heidegger's nationalistic experience of language, (cf. PdS, 194-95/Points, 183-84).

A Community Without Truth

Contrary to the intuitions of philosophy, the community to come of which Derrida speaks-if we force him to use a word he does not like-would be a community without truth. The viens, which goes to the heart of everthing deconstruction desires, to its passion and its patience, is directed to the impossible-sans the blood that gets spilled every time someone assures us that they speak for God, that they are acting under instructions from God-or Being, or Truth. In John's Apocalypse, God assures John that He will back him up with a plague or two upon his enemies if they dare give him trouble.8 Unlike John's apocalypse, Jacques' is "an apocalypse without apocalypse," an apocalypse "without vision, without truth, without revelation" ( Ton., 95/RTP, 167). Derrida's secret is the secret that there is no secret, at once "as secret and superficial as the postcard apocalypse" (Ton., 42/RTP, 136), the unveiling of the bad news that nobody has a secret access, that we are all in this together-and this is our common ground!-and that nobody has won the high ground of the grand seigneur. The visionaries of the viens are all blind, sans vision, sans vérité, sans révélation (Ton., 95/RTP, 167). They live in a kind of community of the blind, are granted only an apocalypse of the sans, where everything turns on learning to live with this "without." But this sans is not the scene of a loss but of an opening that lets something new happen, letting in a little biblical novelty, without which no event can come. In the quasi-messianic time and space of deconstruction, the step beyond, le pas au dela, is a step in the dark, feeling one's way with a stick, like the blind men in the Louvre whom Derrida studies in Memoirs of the Blind. Derrida dislocates the apocalyptic tone of the Apocalypse, cuts it down a notch or two, on behalf of another, blinder, more open-ended apocalypse without apocalypse. For the apocalyptic notion of a privileged access, the high-handed politics of a special communication from on

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 34 high granted to a few from which the rest of us are excluded ("cryptopolitics": Ton., 42/RTP, 136; a "politique de lieux," Kh6ra, 49/ ON, 104), the epistemics of a secret access to the revelation of a mystery, which goes to the heart of historical apocalyptic literature-that is everything that Derrida resists. Let us hasten to a conclusion, since these are matters that must be developed with greater care in another context. The point of deconstruction is to keep the cut of circumcision open, for circumcision is otherwise and ordinarily a mark of exclusionary membership in a community. Deconstruction traces the cut that serves us from the Truth of an Assured Destination, that keeps us "destinerrant." Deconstruction is impassioned by the cut, for that is the condition of keeping the future open, of letting the unforeseeable and unanticipatable come, of letting events happen that the horizons of the community cannot accommodate or imagine. The point is to let the unimaginable come, to call for it to come, to invoke and provoke events of which the community cannot dream, to heave and sigh for the incoming, the invention, of the other, to dream the dream of the impossible. Let us cite, parsed out graphically, what is almost the final phrase of Circumfession, which reads like a kind of Derridean psalm, a psalm to himself, like a Jewish Walt Whitman, marking off the strata of his passion: you have spent your life inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing commanding sacrificing ( Circon., 290-91 / Circum., 314) Calling for and dreaming of what? A "secret truth, i.e., severed from truth," a secret cut off from truth, circum-cut off from truth, where the Truth of truth, savoir absolue, falls onto the mohel's napkin like a severed foreskin, Saint PréPuce. For it is this severance from Truth, this Truth-less truth of his existence, that impassions. If for his "compatriot" Saint Augustine, God is Truth, for Derrida the truth is living sans verité, severed from God's Truth and Truth's God. His destiny is to be without destination, destined to be cut off from truth, severed from the truth of a single destiny, a dream without (sans) truth, a secret truth whose only witness testifies that there is no witness. That is his passion. He makes a "pure" confession, without truth, the confession and profession of a future that is not fettered to Truth, with a

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:31:48PM via free access 35 capital letter, that has to make and do the truth (facer veritatem), wit- nessing to truth, to justice. The resurrection that comes of this cut is to deliver us from the hands of the One and Only Jealous God of Truth who spills the blood not only of those who defy his wishes but also of his faithful to remind them of their covenant (Yiddish: bris; Hebrew: bent; French: alliance), of which circumcision is the sign. The cut delivers "us" from an identitarian community, a community of fusion, a community that closes in around itself, that builds a wall around itself, circum-scribing and circumcizing itself against the other. The point of Derrida's work is performative and impassioning-to dream and give thanks, give and dream-not disinterested and constative. In it, truth is always subordinate to the gift without exchange, to the future, to what can come: Truth belongs to this movement of repayment that tries in vain to render itself adequate to its cause or to the thing. Yet this latter emerges only in the hiatus of disproportion. The just measure of "restoring" or "rendering" is impossible-or infinite. (MdA, 36/MB, 30) Et solidasti auctoritatem libri tui: "And thou didst establish the firma- ment of the authority of Thy Book," Augustine wrote.' But Derrida has only ic7iture, no Book, which was also his argument with jab?s, no guiding light or guiding star, and he is more than a little worried by those religious communities which, having been given a Book, always manage to spell war not peace: ergo es [therefore you are], in this very place, you alone whose life will have been so short, the voyage short, scarcely organized, by you with no light house and no book, you the floating toy at high tide and under the moon.... (Circon., 291 / Circum., 314-15) The cut with this secret truth is the condition of the future, of the open-endedness of the future, of the passion for the future-which you can call a community if that gives you comfort, an "open, quasi- community," a community of singularities, a community to come, a community without truth. For the quasi-Judaism of Derrida-his quasi- atheistic, slightly Arabic Judaism, the circumcision he is all along reinscribing, his circumcized heart and ear-is the deal he has cut with what is coming, his covenant with the promise of what is to-come, his passion for something impossible to come, for the future, l'avenir. Viens, oui, oui.

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ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Jacques Derrida Aporias Aporias.Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Apories"Apories: Mourir-s' attendre aux 'mites de la vérité. '"In Le Passage des frontieres: Autour du travail de JacquesDerrida. Colloque de Cerisy. Paris: Galil6e, 1994. Pp. 309-38. Translated under the title Aporias. Circon. "Circonfession:cinquante-neuf piriodes et périPhrases."In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991. Translated under the title "Circumfession: Periods and " Fifty-nine Periphrases." Circum. "Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases." In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kh6ra Khora. Paris: Galilee, 1993. Translated by Ian McLeod under the title Khora. In ON, 87-127. MB Memoirsof the Blind: 7he Self-Portraitand Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. MdA Memoirsd'aveugle: L'autobiographie et autres ruines. Paris: Éditions de la Reunion des mus6es nationaux, 1990. Translated under the title Memoirsof the Blind: The Self-Portraitand Other Ruins. ON On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. PdS Points de suspension:Entretiens. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Paris: Galil6e, 1992. Translated under the title Points... : Intervierus,1974-94. Points Points... : Interviews,1974-94. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and others. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Psy. Psyche:Inventions de l'autre. Paris: Galil6e, 1987: "Psyché:Invention de l'autre," 11-62, translated by Catherine Porter under the title "Psyche: Inventions of the Other," in RDR, 25-65; and "Commentne pas parler: Dénégations,"535-96, translated by Ken Frieden under the title "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in DNT, 73-142. Sauf Sauf le nom. Paris: Galil6e, 1993. Translated by John Leavey, Jr., under the title "Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum),"in ON, 33-85. Schib. Schibboleth:pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galil6e, 1986. Translated by Joshua Wilner under the title "Shibboleth: For Paul Celan." In WT, 3-72. Ton. D'un ton apocalyptiqueadopti naguèreen philosophie.Paris: Galil6e, 1983. Translated by John Leavey, Jr., under the title "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." In RTP, 117-71. Other Works DNT Derrida and NegativeTheology. Ed. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay. Albany: SUNYPress, 1992. RDR Reading de Man Reading. Ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. RTP Raising the Tone of Philosophy:Late Essaysby ImmanuelKant, Transformative Critique byJacques Derrida. Ed. Peter Fenves. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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WT Word Traces:Readings of Paul Celan. Ed. Aris Fioretos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

NOTES

1. A number of passages of the present study are taken from John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears ofJacques Derrida, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and are printed here with permission of Indiana University Press. 2. See Levinas, Totalitéet infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1961 ) 35-36;, translated by A. Lingis under the title Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 64. 3. This and the following citation of Edith Wyschogrod are taken from her unpub- lished paper delivered at the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, Novem- ber 18, 1995, at a session on her Saints and Postmodernism(Chicago: Univerity of Chicago Press, 1990) and my Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 4. See the discussion following "The Ends of Man," in Lesfins des hommes: Apartir du travail deJacques Derrida, Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Galil6e, 1981), 311-12. 5. For an elaboration of this line of criticism of Heidegger, see my Demythologixing Heidegger(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 6. See Dialogueszuith Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 119-20; see also Richard Kearney, Poeticsof Modernity(At- lantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 158-59. 7. See Caputo, DemythologizingHeidegger, chap. 8; for another view of Heidegger's language, one that tries generously to bring him closer to Derrida, see Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger'sEstrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Ha- ven, Yale University Press, 1989). 8. It is like an "eschatological messianism," which is always turned in expectation to the coming one, not an "apocalyptic messianism," which thinks that doomsday is at hand for its enemies. Cf. Levinas, Totalité,xi/ Totality,22. 9. Confessions,bk. 13, chap. 33.

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