Choosing One’s Heritage Elisabeth Roudinesco: I would like first of all to evoke the past, our common history. It has become respectable today to express disapproval of the thinkers of the 1970 s and to demand a “necessary accounting” or, even worse, a “repentance” from those who claim them as an inspiration. The works of the period, marked as they are by very peculiar intersections with “structuralism,” are the targets of an incoherent jumble of reproaches: they excessively valorize the spirit of revolt; they indulge in the cult of aestheti­ cism; they are too attached to a certain linguistic formalism; they reject democratic freedoms; and they are profoundly skeptical of humanism. I think this ostracism is utterly sterile; it seems better to approach our age in a completely different way, one that involves, in your words, “choosing ones heritage”:1 neither accepting everything nor erasing everything. You are the heir to the major works of the second half of the century. A number of these came out of systems of thought that are being chal­ lenged today. You have “deconstructed”2 these works, notably those of Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques La­ can.3 During their lifetimes, and taking their works as your starting point, you “explicated” yourself (you like this verb) in relation to them; you en­ gaged in a work of textual commentary, while also insisting on the impor­ tance, for your own teaching practices, of Edmund Husserl, Martin Hei­ degger, and Emmanuel Levinas. It was at that time, around 1967, that I began reading your works, es­ pecially O f Grammatology and Writing and Difference,4 as did all the stu- 2 Choosing One’s Heritage dents of literature of my generation interested in avant-garde literature and in the structural linguistics coming out of the work of Ferdinand de Saus- sure and Roman Jakobson. The subversive gesture then consisted in af­ firming that the human subject is determined by language, by symbolic functions, by the destiny of a “letter” or a signifier, or again by a writing prior to speech, and finally by the existence of the unconscious in the Freudian sense. While we respected Jean-Paul Sartre’s political engage­ ment, our generation was critical of his reluctance to confront directly the question of the unconscious in the formation of the subject, and we were skeptical of his humanism, with its “full” and self-transparent subject.5 Later, specifically at the second Cluny conference organized in spring 1970 by La Nouvelle Critique,6 the journal of the French Communist Party, I criticized you for what I saw as your “infidelity” to this heritage you were deconstructing. For my part, I wanted to be faithful, but not dogmatic. Later, I felt much closer to you, and I thought that you had been right in your attempt to make works speak from within themselves, through their fault lines, their blanks, their margins, their contradictions, but without trying to kill them. Hence the idea that the best way to be faithful to a her­ itage is to be unfaithful, that is, not to accept it literally, as a totality, but rather to take it as something in default, to grasp its “dogmatic moment” : “I feel that I am also an heir: faithful as far as possible,” you said in an in­ terview from 1983.7 Likewise, of Levinas you say that “his relation to on­ tology is one of both infidelity and fidelity.”8 The true adversaries of the thought of the period appeared later, in 1986, when Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut published a book that received a lot of attention: La pensee 68 (French Philosophy o f the Sixties)? Today, you are in a way the last heir to this thought, which has proven to be so fruitful. You are even, if I dare say so, its survivor, since with the exception of Claude Levi-Strauss, all the other protagonists of this scene are dead. And everything happens as if, through deconstruction, you managed to make them live and speak, not like idols but like the bearers of a living speech. In addition, and this is no doubt because you are a faithful and an unfaithful heir, you have taken up the position of a universal intellectual in today’s world, a position once occupied by someone like Zola or, more re­ cently, Sartre. In this respect you embody a new form of dissidence, which your spoken words and your works (translated into more than forty lan­ guages) carry from one end of the world to the other. In short, I am in­ clined to say that you have triumphed.10 Choosing Ones Heritage 3 In this respect, I sometimes have the impression that the world today resembles you and resembles your concepts, that our world is decon­ structed and that it has become Derridian to the point of reflecting, like an image in a mirror, the processes that decenter thought, psychology, and historicity and that you helped to set in motion. Jacques Derrida: Faithful and unfaithful, how right you are! I often see myself pass very quickly before the mirror of life, like the silhouette of a madman (at once comic and tragic) who is dying to be unfaithful in a spirit of fidelity. I am therefore ready to go along with you, except in your allusion to triumph. I do not at all have the same feeling as you— and I’m not saying this out of politeness or modesty. No doubt the landscape has changed. No doubt we are seeing a diminution (but let’s not exaggerate) of the compulsive and often pathetic efforts, desperate or fearful, to discredit at any cost— and not only my work, of course, but an entire configuration to which it belongs (although I am obliged to claim an unfortunate privi­ lege here: I seem to attract a more stubborn and relentless aggression). No doubt we can discern the signs, at times equally disturbing, of a certain le­ gitimacy. But can we really speak of triumph? No, and perhaps it is not de­ sirable. To return to your point of departure, and to accompany you in this dialogue, I will hazard a few generalities on the notion of heritage. It is true, whether it’s a question of life or work or thought, that I have always recognized myself in the figure of the heir— and more and more so, in a way that is more and more deliberate, and often happy. By in­ sistently confronting this concept or this figure of the legatee, I came to think that, far from the secure comfort that we rather too quickly associate with this word, the heir must always respond to a sort of double injunc­ tion, a contradictory assignation: It is necessary first of all to know and to know how to reaffirm what comes “before us,” which we therefore receive even before choosing, and to behave in this respect as a free subject. Yes, it is necessary [il faut\ (and this it is necessary is inscribed directly on and within the received heritage), it is necessary to do everything to appropri­ ate a past even though we know that it remains fundamentally inappropri­ a te , whether it is a question of philosophical memory or the precedence of a language, a culture, and a filiation in general. What does it mean to reaffirm? It means not simply accepting this heritage but relaunching it otherwise and keeping it alive. Not choosing it (since what characterizes a heritage is first of all that one does not choose it; it is what violently elects us), but choosing to keep it alive. Life— being-alive— is perhaps defined at 4 Choosing One’s Heritage bottom by this tension internal to a heritage, by this reinterpretation of what is given in the gift, and even what is given in filiation. This reaffir­ mation, which both continues and interrupts, resembles (at least) an elec­ tion, a selection, a decision. One’s own as that of the other: signature against signature. But I will not use any of these words without placing quotation marks and precautions around them. Beginning with the word “life.” It would be necessary to think life on the basis of heritage, and not the other way around. It would be necessary therefore to begin from this formal and apparent contradiction between the passivity of reception and the decision to say “yes,” then to select, to filter, to interpret, and therefore to transform; not to leave intact or unharmed, not to leave safe the very thing one claims to respect before all else. And after all. Not to leave it safe: to save it, perhaps, yet again, for a time, but without the illusion of a final salvation. So you see very well why I am sensitive to what you say about the ab­ sence of or the refraining from all killing or putting to death. I have always forbidden myself— as far as possible, of course, and however “radical” or inflexible an act of deconstruction ought to be— to injure or to put to death. It is always by reaffirming the heritage that one can avoid this put­ ting to death. Even at the moment— and this is the other side of the dou­ ble injunction— when this very heritage, in order to save its life (within its finite time), demands reinterpretation, critique, displacement, that is, an active intervention, so that a transformation worthy of the name might take place: so that something might happen, an event, some history [de l ’histoire\, an unforeseeable future-to-come.11 My desire resembles that of a lover of the tradition who would like to free himself from conservatism.