Occasional Deconstructions

Chapter 4. Between: Speculations

Chapter 4 BETWEEN: SPECULATIONS When I write “what interests me,” I am designating not only an object of interest, but the place that I am in the middle of. Jacques Derrida Between is not. Or: between “is” nothing. It “is”—above all—nothing , of which one could talk without it not already participating, and participating in this way, it would pull all talk inside itself, and its nothingness. . . . This nothing of our imaginations, of our names, concepts and our language—this between that cannot be grasped— plays around and surrounds everything we can possibly imagine, name or comprehend. Werner Hamacher For we are insufficient to ourselves and become ourselves in interplay with the other; and we do appropriate the other to ourselves; the love of the other returns to the self, and the other is very often, perhaps most often, sought for this return to the self. William Desmond I W hat is the place or, perhaps more precisely, what is the “taking place,” that the notion or motif of between designates? Hardly a concept, more a figure for a motion without form, between, if it is anything at all, is among the most ambiguous and inaccurate of terms. 87 A “syncategorem,” between re-marks a “semantic quasi-emptiness,” even though “[o]ne “between” does not exist.”1 It names, even as it traces, an unmappable space, a spacing whose crossing implicates a temporality without measure. It articulates the possibility that something unseen, some manifestation of the other, has arrived by which it gets going, without necessarily having arrived itself at any destination. Preceding in principle any subject or object, it nonetheless is constituted through an uncanny motion, uncanny precisely because not only is this between, every between without proper home, but also its interval and traversal is comprehended or recognized after the fact, as the retrait of some aprèscoup . What performative staging or phantom event, then, might this figureless figure of between acknowledge, for example in any act of writing, so that, in reflecting on this disquieting motif the subject finds him- or herself, positioned relationally, momentarily, and in an instance that is both unique and iterable? Can we legitimately talk of between when no place as such exists to which one might apply this improper name, other than as the necessary and provisional correspondence between identities (which space exists as the taking place of identity), which are themselves given by the passage and spacing, the interval, of between? II And why, to risk a speculative assumption and shift ground somewhat abruptly, might love name otherwise the nonplace that is the takingplace of between, not in some abstract fashion, but in the event of every singular taking place? A between, the trace of a difference, will have already taken place when I address my love: for, in recognizing my love, the other will have addressed me, placing me in relation to an other, to whom I then address my love, which is an address, as Peggy Kamuf puts it, “without home, without the property of a subject from which it is sent and to which it returns.”2 Moreover, the disturbance of which we are speaking here is registered by the fact, in Alain Finkielkraut’s words, that the “‘you’ of ‘I love you’ is never precisely my equal or my contemporary, and ‘love’ is the frantic investigation of this anachronism.”3 Love is thus comprehended, like the motif of between, after the fact; it leaves its mark after it has retreated into the invisible. Love announces and performs this haunting performativity in its passage across that nonplace, between 88 Identities in Ruins self and other, disturbing in its crossing the sense of self, of home: “love always brushes up against the uncanny, the unheimlich, the un-homelike . Love brings with it the unhomelike because it is the experience of the sudden or not-so-sudden arrival of the other who expropriates address , which is to say appropriates it, exappropriates it: When I say ‘I love . . . ,’ it is always the declaration of the other at my address.”4 Thus, I am haunted by this apparition—between—that installs a radical instability at the heart of any identity, and which appears most forcefully in the name of love. III There are certain interwoven, though obliquely situated, interests in this chapter, as these find themselves caught up in the figure of between, a figure of translation and transport...