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10. Comme si, comme ça
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10 Comme si, comme ça Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God Those of us today still following Derrida, either in the sense of coming after him, following after him, or continuing to read and study him, have no doubt all asked ourselves on occasion over the past few years what Jacques Derrida would have done or thought about this or that, how he would have responded to some discourse or event. Though we speculate and, I think, should continue to speculate, since that is part of following him, we will never know—and must not claim to know. How, for example , would Jacques Derrida have responded to a subtitle that begins ‘‘Following Derrida’’? We simply cannot know, though were I to speculate, and I think we must speculate, I believe he would have tried to turn us away from thinking of ourselves as simply the heirs of a bygone past, or else as those who simply come along after him as his followers or, worse, his disciples. He would have turned us instead, I would like to believe, toward a promise of the future that we would in fact be following or trying to follow after, a promise that goes by the name ‘‘Derrida’’ even if he, Jacques Derrida, was himself always following after it. In short, he would have turned us toward the future as the best way of warning us against making of him a father or a master or an icon, the best way of preventing us from thinking that he himself embodied the promise that he himself was following, the best way, in the end, of dispelling any phantasm about him.1 In this chapter I would like to pull together many of the conclusions of the previous few chapters in order to ask about the nature of the 187 phantasm in general in Derrida’s work and, as I conclude, the dangers of turning Derrida or his memory into a phantasm. For if we must continue to honor the thought and memory of Derrida by reading him, by following him, we surely must not do so by submitting everything we say and do to his authority or his sovereign gaze, by treating him as if he were here, watching and judging us, passing judgment in advance over what we say and do. To treat the memory of Derrida in this way would run the risk of turning him into that which his entire work, from beginning to end, attempted to interrupt, namely, a phantasm, an as if, a comme si, that tries always to pass itself off as an as so or an as such, a comme ça. From comme si to comme ça, from the comme si of a speculative fiction to the comme ça of an inflexible law—that, as we shall see, is the nature, the conventional but seemingly natural nature, of a phantasm, the kind that Jacques Derrida spent so much of his work warning us against by calling into question and submitting to vigilant critique. I will concentrate in this penultimate chapter on three such phantasms, which are also three forms of sovereignty—those of the self, the nationstate , and God. We have already seen these three forms of sovereignty in several earlier chapters, but I return to them here in order to explore Derrida ’s insistence, especially in some of his later texts, that we must ultimately relinquish sovereignty, the phantasm of sovereignty and the sovereignty of the phantasm, in the name of the very thing that has traditionally been identified with it, that is, in the name of the unconditional. The fictions and phantasmatic powers of sovereignty must be given up, Derrida suggests, in the name of the unconditionality of the event or the unconditional coming of the other, since without such a renunciation there can be no ethics and there will be no future. Though sovereignty —be it the sovereignty of a self-determining or self-legislating individual , of a self-sufficient or self-founding nation-state, or of a single, allpowerful God—is today undergoing critique or deconstruction of its own accord or in accordance with what Derrida has called, as we saw in Chapter 7, an ineluctable ‘‘autoimmune process,’’ this deconstruction of the phantasm nonetheless remains for us an essential task. Following Derrida ’s thinking about the phantasms of self, state, and a sovereign God, I will conclude that at...