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Reviewed by:
  • Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview
  • Alan D. Schrift
Jacques Derrida. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2007. 75 pp.

Jacques Derrida died, following a long struggle with cancer, on October 9, 2004. Seven weeks earlier, on August 19, the French newspaper Le Monde published what would be Derrida’s final interview, under the title “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même” (“I am at war with myself”). The volume under review translates that interview, conducted by Le Monde journalist Jean Birnbaum, prefaced by a short introduction by Birnbaum and followed by a bibliography, compiled by Peter Krapp, of English translations of Derrida’s texts and essays. [End Page 333]

Among the topics discussed in the interview are Derrida’s relation to the French language (his “violence” towards it, his love of it, his feeling—as both Algerian and Jew—a foreigner to it), which he summarizes as his “unfaithful fidelity” to it; his identification with Europe even as he criticizes a certain Eurocentrism (deconstruction “is European,” “is a product of Europe, a relation of Europe to itself,” but it is so in the sense in which, “since the time of the Enlightenment, Europe has undertaken a perpetual self-critique” [44–45]); the future of the university and the relation between truth, and power; cosmopolitanism, American hegemony, and his views on the future of “Europe”; his thoughts on the history of philosophy, marriage (in the context of “same sex marriage” vs. civil unions), and his willingness, in certain contexts, to identify as a Jew (“we Jews”).

The main theme of the interview, which both opens and closes it, is the question of survival: what it means to survive, to live on, to live on after one is dead. This allows Derrida to reflect on the fact that he is perhaps the last of his generation of philosophers (Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, but also Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Levinas, Blanchot, Kofman, Bourdieu), a generation that has excited and inspired readers for almost a half century. It allows him also to confront the fact, which he does on several occasions in the interview, both that his illness will not allow him to survive for much longer and that he has already lived his death each time he sent one of his writings into the world: “Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing” (33). This is, of course, the structure of the trace, the structure that animated the basic insights of grammatology, of Derrida’s analyses of writing, iterability, presence and absence, and that has been in the forefront of his work from his earliest essays. It is therefore not surprising that the interview ends with a final thought on survival and the trace. In response to Birnbaum’s last question (“might not deconstruction be considered an interminable ethics of the survivor?”), Derrida once again returns to the structure of the trace, but highlighting this time its futural and affirmative nature: insofar as “survival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein, we are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament” (51). But, he hastens to add, he wants to draw attention not to what has been survived—death and the past—but to what itself survives: life and the future. “Deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life . . . [M]y discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible” (51–52). [End Page 334]

Readers familiar with Derrida’s eulogistic works—Memoires: For Paul de Man and essays collected in The Work of Mourning—will not be surprised by the sensitivity and thoughtfulness that characterizes Derrida’s comments in this interview. Nor will readers familiar with The Work of Mourning be surprised by the sensitive, careful, and empathic translation of Derrida’s interview by Pascale...

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