The Tears of Philosophy

The Tears of Philosophy Didier Maleuvre The most notorious ill-fortune must, in the end, yield to the untiring courage of philosophy. —E. A. Poe, "Loss of Breath" WE MAY TAKE IT as a token of his honest commitment to the question, when, writing about death, Jacques Derrida confesses he has nothing to tell us—nothing, in any case, that would make sense to say: "Fundamentally, one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent of this word [death]."1 We stand warned: philosophy is dealing here with a word that means nothing, describes nothing, a word for nothing. Some would see this as a clear invitation for philosophy to chase other goals. Others, Derrida among them, as an invitation for philosophy to switch into high gear. This premise that no definite word is ever said about death summarizes how Derrida's writing on death can initially be understood as working through some disappointment with philosophy's instruction, particularly the analysis most influential to him, Heidegger's Being and Time. How Derrida carves a philosophical path out of this disappointment is our subject here. Impatience clearly makes itself felt in Derrida's most recent statement on philosophy's word on death: "I feel increasingly tempted not to accept the discourse on being-for-death in its Heideggerian form [...] without a lot of questions of all sorts [...], discussion or even critical objections. But I can't say more about this."2 Derrida means to record here his knee-jerk objection to Heidegger's idea that Dasein can never meet death and thus does not die. As it goes (and to take extreme shortcuts), Heidegger argues that one's relation to one's mortality, i.e., Dasein, cannot witness itself stopping and thus does not die. If, however, Heidegger's idea is correct that only Dasein makes us authentically human, then it follows that the authentically human is in some sense immortal. In Aporias, Derrida's interest was to point out the various upshots in this paradox of the human as an immortal who fears mortality. Now Derrida allows himself to disagree more openly with Heidegger, yet at the same time finds himself strangely lacking a philosophical language to voice his objection; he says he cannot venture more on the matter: "I can't say more about this." And then he goes on to write: the idea that death "happens only to some immortal who lacks for lacking nothing" is "a scandal for sense and for good sense" (Resistances 66). This protest reads feebly enough as 36 Spring 2000 Maleuvre saying that the human does come to die because it is plain sense that he does. To some ears it is likely that Derrida's appeal to "good sense" (i.e., the sense that does not bother to understand how it is "good") will sound like an abandonment of the self-listening voice of philosophy, a kind of intellectual disenchantment . A possible interest might be to understand why, once voiced, the conviction that "I do die" causes the philosopher to sound a little inexpressive or even "unphilosophical," as if philosophy made no room for heartfelt belief; as if to impart one's private conviction that one dies was to forgo philosophical argument. What Derrida expresses here is that he believes in death, believes that we do die, but this statement of conviction forces him to be commonsensical , hence outside of analytical discourse. We might want to imagine Derrida as experiencing here that there are things which the grammar of philosophy does not allow one to voice, such as one's intimate sense of oneself , of one's mortality—as though philosophy works so long as the thinker in person stays quiet. This failure of philosophy perhaps is what prompts Derrida to tum to autobiography in his late writing, why he may wish to communicate the thoughts of one individual—the single person who only speaks for himself and, for all of philosophy's panacea, stands undefended before death. This perception leads us now to tum to Circumfession. With this book, Derrida writes "a naive, credulous piece of writing," a philosophical journal in "another language, an entirely crude language"3 made up of...