Comment ne pas trembler?: Derrida’s Earthquake

A secret always makes you tremble.

—Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death

One night as he sat trembling head in hands from head to foot a man appeared to him and said, I have been sent by—and here he named a dear name—to comfort you. Then drawing a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat he sat and read till dawn. Then disappeared without a word.

—Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu

Introduction

Jacques Derrida began a lecture entitled “Comment ne pas trembler,” that he delivered on 17 July 2004 at the Fondazione Europea del Disegno in Meina on the shores of Lago Maggiore, Italy, almost three months before his death on 8 October, by recalling a lecture he had delivered twenty years earlier. He noted that he had begun a lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a city, like my own, situated on an earthquake belt), with the phrase, of which the syntax was more or less the same, “Comment ne pas parler.” This lecture, which has now been translated and published as “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” is on the ne-pas (the how not to, ought not, should not, must not,…), how not (ne pas) to take the step (le pas) to say something. The full ambiguity of Derrida’s French title cannot be caught in the English “How to Avoid Speaking.” The French also encompasses literally “How not to say” or even “How to speak of the negative.” In French pas has four senses that are relevant to Derrida’s discussion: pas understood as step; pas as in ne pas“‘not’” or ne pas encore“‘not yet’”; the pas of passive (passif) (and we might note of passion [passion]); the pas of the past (passé). Derrida’s lecture traces the history of a double bind that also involves me here: “how to avoid speaking since I have always already begun to promise to speak” (Pysche II 154-55). Last year I promised this text to the editor of this issue of SubStance and I began speaking it, speaking of it. Derrida knows that the trace of a speech will always have preceded his speech. That is, the moment that the question “How to avoid speaking?” arises, it is already too late. “It was no longer a question of not speaking. Language has begun without us, in us, before us,” he declares (166). He also knows that “To speak in order to say nothing is not not to speak. Above all, it is not to speak to no one” (145). Derrida’s lecture is also a reflection on the nature of the il faut, another theme that can be found running throughout his work, the modalities of the “it is necessary.” “How to Avoid Speaking” explores what Derrida described elsewhere as

the trivium of il faut, the “it is necessary,” in which we need to hear at once défaut, that is, default, fault or failing; faillir, meaning to fail at something or fail to do something; faillite, that is, failure, collapse, or bankruptcy; and défaillance, meaning a failing or weakness.

(Rogues 109)

It will be necessary that I come back to the “it is necessary.”

Trembling. How to avoid speaking of it from now on? How to remain silent on this subject? How, if one speaks of it, to avoid speaking of it? How not to speak of it? How must one not speak of it? Trembling, how can I think the tremor / earthquake, the seismic thought that trembles in us and around us, that trembled in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, first on Saturday 4 September 2010, then again on Tuesday 22 February 2011, and continued to delivering aftershocks for more than a year; or the 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake off the coast of Sendai, Japan, on Friday 11 March 2011 that triggered destructive tsunamis of up to 38 metres in height that struck the coast and in places penetrated ten kilometers inland. How do we think the seismic thought that has become Japan today? What I wish to offer you here is a solicitation...