Derrida From Now On

11. Lifelines

11 Lifelines Whatever one might say about it, and this can be drawn out ad infinitum, there is a line. —Jacques Derrida, SQ 95 In order to bear witness to the extraordinary intersection of life and work that goes by the name of ‘‘Jacques Derrida,’’ I shall limit myself here to an analysis of what is no doubt Derrida’s shortest published work, a oneline poem published in a somewhat obscure collection of poems more than two decades ago and then republished more recently in the Cahier de l’Herne devoted to Derrida.1 It is a text that fits on a single line and one that speaks, precisely, of the line and of life, and of the intersection of work and life, an exemplary text for thinking questions of living presence and its repetition, living speech and the dead letter, life and living on, the living being and its specters. I am tempted to say that the entire oeuvre, the entire ‘‘life,’’ of Jacques Derrida is sealed in this single line published more than two decades ago, a line that, it must be said, sounds so very different today now that that life and that lifeline have run their course. Here is the text in its entirety, along with its title and signature, which I cite here in French before venturing a translation in what will follow: Petite fuite alexandrine (vers toi) Prière à desceller d’une ligne de vie Jacques Derrida2 213 For a long time, this little verse, published in 1986 as a ‘‘Monostiche’’ or ‘‘One-Line Poem,’’ remained for me more or less inaudible, incomprehensible , indecipherable, whatever is sealed within it unreadable and inaccessible . But more recently I have had the impression that something has come loose within it, something unsealed, something that has put me on the path to an even more profound and irremediable inaccessibility—not simply another, more cryptic gift but, perhaps, the gift of its crypt. For what I had first taken for a fuite, a flight, an evasion, a verse itself in flight and perhaps even written on the fly, what I had first taken for a loss (fuite) of meaning, has come little by little to reveal itself as a revelation, a ‘‘leak’’ (fuite) of information or a kind of teaching on the subject of ‘‘life’’ itself.3 Prière à desceller d’une ligne de vie We must begin reading this line of poetry as if it were, precisely, a ligne de vie, a lifeline—taking into account the length, duration, and continuity of the line, that is to say, the number of letters or syllables, along with the cuts or interruptions, the caesuras, between them. It is indeed, as the title suggests, an alexandrine, a classic and traditional form of French verse of twelve syllables with a caesura in the middle. Hence the line of poetry, like the lifeline, is destined by convention to have a certain length, a caesura foreseen or prescribed somewhere near the middle, here between desceller and de, even if no one could have foreseen or prescribed this so singular verse.4 This petite fuite—this little line, this little flight—thus begins already to blur the line between form (the line of poetry) and content (the lifeline). One line leads already to the other, the lifeline spilling over into a line of poetry, which is then itself aligned with the lifeline. First question, then, apparently biographical—though, as we will see, life and work, life and line, seem to cross in this one-line poem: With what did Jacques Derrida write this little verse, this little leak? On a single page, undated and reproduced in the Cahier de l’Herne, it would appear (though I cannot be absolutely certain of this) that the ‘‘original’’ iteration was written along with several others on a typewriter, but then chosen as the ‘‘original,’’ decided upon and elected, circled, and then repeated as the chosen ‘‘original’’ with a pen, a verse first written, then, on a machine but then chosen and reinscribed by hand, with that elegant but barely decipherable handwriting that was his. And I would like to imagine that the line was written not with a fountain pen but with a kind of pen called a ‘‘Pilot Fineliner,’’ of which he once said in an interview in 1986—the same year this one-line poem was published: ‘‘It’s the only instrument that really suits me, that is, with which I have the...