Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida Author(s): Emily Apter, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Seyla Benhabib, Geoffrey Bennington, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Culler, Patricia Dailey, Alessia Ricciardi, Carla Freccero, Geoffrey Hartman, Peggy Kamuf, Christie McDonald, J. Hillis Miller, Andrew Parker, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Marc Redfield, Avital Ronell, Matthew Rowlinson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 2 (Mar., 2005), pp. 464-494 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486172 . Accessed: 30/11/2011 17:55 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]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org PMLA Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida the world many have said 464 Emily Apter Jacques derrida's departure from is,as in conversation and other an unthinkable event. The unthink 466 Houston A. Baker, Jr. exchanges, even as one was occurrence able has happened, and knew it coming, its be 468 Seyla Benhabib queaths a practical problem: how will we carry on theoreticallywithout his 470 Geoffrey Bennington presence, his steadfast appearance in the ongoing international seminar 471 Eduardo Cadava thatwas his life?Surely one way to carry on without him will be to adhere Culler 472 Jonathan to the conviction that theorymatters, that it is not dead, that ithas a fu a 473 Patricia Dailey and ture?indeed, vital future?which Derrida himself theorized brilliantly. a Alessia Ricciardi Derrida's work was formation in literary studies formy cohort, trained in literature in the 1970s and 1980s. He us to 476 Carla Freccero departments taught appreciate the intermediation of literaryreading and philosophy, thevalue 478 Geoffrey Hartman of the "live" lecture in thedouble sense of speaking out and performing the 479 Kamuf Peggy ritual of the reading on itsway to becoming a diagnosis of the event. He Christie McDonald 481 helped explicate the violent, combustive process bywhich the future,or its into word much 482 J.Hillis Miller yet-to-be-cognized Idea, breaks discourse, transgressing (a loved in the intellectual of and 484 Andrew Parker 1980s) protocols logic naming, traducing humanist pieties held sacrosanct in mainstream belles lettres, and philo 485 Jean-Michel Rabat? sophically delegitimating apartheid, inhospitality,and exclusion. 487 Marc Redfield The outpouring of hundreds of signatures to a letter in theNew York 488 Avital Ronell Times by SamuelWeber and Kenneth Reinhard thatprotested the crude and Matthew Rowlinson attests to the of 490 dishonoring rhetoric of the newspaper's obituary presence a bound a commitment to 492 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak very large community together by theory.1 Many whose names did not appear on the letterstill characterize theirwork and as a of cause?not as sectarian but as teaching perpetuation theory's dogma dissemi interpretive practices and critical paradigms of erasure, gramme, de-construction. nation, brisure, diff?rance, pharmakon, supplementarity, In committing themselves to the future of theory,and specifically to the and will the sur-vie of Derridean thought, many have engaged engage prob lem of how radical alterity enters the domain of thought. For Derrida, this was often a matter of tracingdeath in language. Beginning inAporias with va It involves a certain he the phrase "Il y d'un certain pas" step/not, goes 464 2005 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA i 2 o . 2 Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida465 at a certain associates the of "an along pace,' Derrida pas Derrida discerned theworkings implacable or law: the one that with a "recumbent corpse" limit condition be regulates every autoimmunitary tween is to itself: As we an language and that which other process. know, autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in This border of translation does not var to pass among quasi-swicidal fashion, 'itself works destroy ious It translation from itself, own to languages. separates its protection, immunize itself against its it within one and the same separates translatability 'own' immunity" (94). The idea of a suicide drive language. A certain pragmatics thus inscribes this programmed within the living organism was of border in the very inside the so-called French lan of course in the immediate after a particularly potent guage_Condition of the self, such difference math of global disaster. Even ifwe choose not to from and with itselfwould thenbe itsvery thing, interpretthis model of the body's catastrophic at the pragma of its pragmatics: the stranger at home, tack on its own defense as a al the invited or the one who is called. (10) system transparent an or as legory of empire's suicidal foreign policies an indirect reference to the breakdown of immu Derrida's identification of aporia with infinite in the own translatabilitywithin language itselfsuggests that nity taking place philosopher's body, Derrida's of self-destruction the radically other?death, the idea, intractable concept programmed the and difference?enters theworld through linguistic undergirds guiding metaphors paradigms of the viral and the pragmatics, a programmed code of lifeand nonlife age: bacteriological spread; of connected dots and vanished front lines decipherable in the grammatology of language. logic common to warfare, and Looking back over the inaugural chapter ofOf paranoia, computerized one encounters and and the Grammatology, with astonishment conspiracy world-systems theory; trauma of the event as ithas to be theorized: Derrida's prescient understanding of the relevance yet of the cybernetic program to theory.Published in X will have been traumatized (X? Who or what 1967 during the high era of cybernetics and bio isX? less than the "world," well that Nothing beyond genetic research,Of Grammatology predicts or the United States, in any case, the possibil ity of the "world"), but traumatized not in the the entire field covered by the cybernetic pro present or from the memory of what will have gramwill be the fieldof writing. If the theoryof been a past present. No, traumatized from the cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical unpresentable future, from the open threat of the of soul, of life, concepts?including concepts an one aggression capable day of striking?for of value, of choice, of until re memory?which never you know?the head of the sovereign cently served to separate the machine from man, nation-state par excellence. (98) conserve itmust the notion of writing, trace, or until its gramme [written mark], grapheme, Derrida combined the of the own character is also ex power soothsayer historico-metaphysical with the of the of as lucidity philosopher eschatology posed. Even before being determined human in a suicidal drive from the (with all the distinctive characteristics that have adducing repressive man of civilization. "What will never let it always been attributed to and the entire sys apparatus tem or self be is thus the effect of the of significations that they imply) nonhu forgotten perverse itself. For we now know that re man, the gramme?or the grapheme?would thus autoimmunitary name its sense the element. (9; interpolation in orig.) pression in both psychoanalytical and its it political sense?whether be through the police, If on, Derrida the or here, relatively early imagined military, the economy?ends up produc as a of language beyond metaphysics language ing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing of information and it seeks to program capable translating disarm" (99). The autoimmune complex acu genie code, late in his career, with similar describes the kind of attack against oneself that he seized on of remains an men, the relevance biotechnology inexplicable, irrational drama unless to in the futureof one the of as a metaphysics directing theoryaf accepts logic death preprogrammed ter to 9/11 the problem of autoimmunity. In "Auto call for the life cycle of a body to end. The end of Real and a the is not immunity: Symbolic Suicides," dialogue program unforeseen, but the philosophi in a a published Philosophy in Time ofTerror (2003), cal definition of its afterlife remains major task 466 Forum:The Legacyof JacquesDerrida PMLA a a from a hat. He wrinkled for the futureof theory, task rendered intelligible like rabbit magician's by JacquesDerrida. his brow in anguished dismay. I had only asked, are Did "So, what you working on?" he, would he, EmilyApter answer a could he after such masterly "French" New York University orange-peeling performance? "Deconstruction. Derridean deconstruction. Jacques Derrida's, uh, Note an new projet?project. It's entirely thing. Not 1 much is translated here." He a slice of See Kandell. The additional signatures to the letter popped on a into his I am self appear Web site of the University of California, Ir orange mouth, feeling, certain, vine: Remembering Jacques Derrida. satisfied.He then somberly toldme the basics of a revolutionary, antimetaphysical "reading prac Works Cited tice" thathe had absorbed during the same period in Paris when he became competent in the art of Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stan A con ford: Stanford UP, 1993. the unbroken orange peel. very Derridean -. I later was to learn. the or "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides?A juncture, indeed, (On with Derrida." With Giovanna Bor "I Dialogue Jacques der of have forgotten my umbrella.") radori. in a Time Terror: with to an Philosophy of Dialogues Learning peel orange with European Habermas and Derrida.