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Le Toucher Juste Le Toucher Juste YVE-ALAIN BOIS This is the first time I have taken part in a memorial of this sort.1 Thus far my hesitation has always been stronger than my desire to pay tribute. But there are two reasons why I have now managed to bypass this con- stitutive reluctance. The first is that while such a reluctance was long shared by Jacques Derrida himself, he lifted it, painfully and hesitantly, but lifted it nevertheless, as he analyzed its multifarious motives in his first piece of obituary prose (“The Deaths of Roland Barthes”) and in all the posthumous homages he was driven to write, down to the last pub- lished one, pronounced at the burial of Maurice Blanchot a year and a half ago. After reading Derrida’s numerous “adieux” to friends and colleagues, none of the fears one might have in taking up the role of memorialist are dissipated—quite the contrary—but at least we know that there is no way out and that whatever we say will necessarily fall into one or the other of the identificatory booby traps he has so unremit- tingly disclosed. The second reason why I summoned the courage to speak is that I felt some public event should send a message of protest against the revolting obituary of Derrida published in the New York Times on October 10, 2004. In today’s pervasive anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and xenophobic climate in this country, I think it is our duty to salute a thinker whose entire oeuvre militated against the forces that set the conditions of possibility of such a climate. At the risk of falling into identificatory trap number one (that by which the phrase “the great man and I” is surreptitiously transformed into “I and the great man”), I shall dwell on my encounters with Jacques Derrida, mostly because they had a determining effect on my profes- sional choice. I had been lucky enough to be exposed to his writing while in high school—the first text of his that I read was one of his first on Antonin Artaud, “La parole soufflée” (reprinted in Writing and Difference). It was daunting, but with the help of a professor of philosophy who was kind enough to hold a private tutorial for several students frustrated by the regular curriculum, I did not give up. Other difficult texts followed, and I quickly realized that they helped each other in my mind, that it was all right not to understand everything at once and that there were thresholds of understanding that one could pass, one after the other, incrementally and perhaps irreversibly so. 90 Grey Room 20, Summer 2005, pp. 90–94. © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 By the time I came to Paris to study with Roland Barthes, I was ready to tackle On Grammatology. This book was the most complex I had ever read—it took me a good three months to swallow it. It did not change my determination not to become a philosopher. But in its powerful cri- tique of logocentrism, including that of Barthes’s reversal of Saussure’s characterization of linguistics as part of semiology, this book became an ally. I had wanted above all to study art history. But because this disci- pline was utterly mediocre in France at that time, and I am sorry to say that it has not changed much, I had opted for Barthes’s semiology, soon to grasp that its main motto, “Il n’y a de sens que nommé,” (there is no meaning that is unnamed) was also that of this particular branch of art history, called iconology, against which I would spend the rest of my life struggling. Perhaps under the pressure of what I saw as two irreconcilable systems of thought, I literally collapsed. (I would realize only a bit later that Barthes himself had already left the semiological territory he had helped to chart and that he was not fundamentally in disagreement with Derrida—even if he still believed, and would until the end of his life, in Emile Benveniste’s statement according to which language is the only system of signification that is able to interpret other systems.) But I was not that clever or well-informed in 1972, and after reading in a binge the three books by Derrida that appeared that year (Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and Positions), I fell into a deep depression. What I did not know was that Derrida was in a pretty bad state too. The reason was the almost complete silence that surrounded the publication of the three books I mentioned. They were quite simply boycotted by the French intelligentsia. The only reviews to appear were, quite hilariously in hindsight, in the Communist press. Coming out of my slumber one morning, I wrote him a postcard saying something like: “do not worry about the silence; people, particularly young people, do read your work.” He responded immediately—and I will always remem- ber his phrase: “votre lettre me touche, et elle touche juste” (your letter touches me, and it touches right on)—and he asked me to call him up. During my first visit, with his usual generosity, he took a gamble and, in order to pull me out of my depressive state, commissioned an essay from me, vowing to have it published in the journal Critique—which is what eventually happened. One could say that the topic of the essay was a kind of compromise—it concerned Matisse’s texts on art, which had just appeared, and not directly his art itself—but I knew, after hav- ing passed this test, that I could, if I wanted to, become an art historian. Thanks to Derrida’s encouragements, but also to Hubert Damisch’s and of course to Barthes’s, I started coediting a journal (or rather a kind of yearly almanac whose fourth and last issue had circa 300 pages!). It is Re JD: Remembering Jacques Derrida | Bois | Le Toucher Juste 91 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 to this “journal,” called Macula, that Derrida offered in 1978 his famous essay “Restitutions de la vérité en pointure” (rendered in English as “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” which does not come close to translating the pun of the French title between pointure—the size of a shoe—and peinture). I would have quite a few amusing anecdotes to tell about the origin of this text and the various problems encountered around its publication, but all that I currently want to mention is that, at the time, the essay was for me a disappointment. Not only did it not per- form what I expected it would and had nothing to do with the scathing critique of Heidegger’s text Derrida had offered in his seminar on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which I had attended, but also it seemed to me to be suffering from the same malady that affects all French philoso- phers, except perhaps Merleau-Ponty, when they write about art—which I would call a certain blindness to the specificity of art, a certain ten- dency to consider the work of art as an illustration, as a document rather than a monument.2 Of course I should have known better and not considered this bril- liant piece of writing as having anything to do with art per se, or art crit- icism, and read it, as I had done for Derrida’s even more brilliant text on Kant’s aesthetics (“The Parergon”), as a philosophical tract. But I had some excuse for my misprision, which is that, like many French literati before him, Derrida was then beginning to indulge in the belletristic exercise of the exhibition catalogue, and his artistic taste was then, I am afraid to say, at the measure of his ignorance. Like many, many before him, he had been seduced by the work of artists whose works were illustra- tive and in many ways made to seduce, with a few clever devices, writ- ers like him. The same was also beginning to hold true in the field of architectural criticism, into which he intervened as well (to much dev- astating effects, particularly in this country, given the fickle voracity of architects and their eagerness to consume theory as ornament). As I had started Macula with the firm desire to combat the dilettan- tism of the belletristic genre, it is not hard to understand why I was dis- appointed, particularly because I had always considered Derrida, no matter how odd it might seem to many, as a model of earnestness—and one has to remember his critique of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to grasp why this could be so, for in this critique which he reiterated in the obituary of his former professor, Derrida had chided Foucault for his nonchalance with regard to the canon and stressed the necessity, before attempting to “deconstruct” anything, to learn its codes by heart. In short, reading the various texts on art and archi- tecture that Derrida was prone to publish in the late seventies and early eighties, I felt that he was not doing what he had advocated and so superbly done when dealing with Saussurean linguistics or with 92 Grey Room 20 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 psychoanalysis (and also with modern poetry and fiction): he had not really paid attention to pictorial and architectural codes, and even less to their history.
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