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The Ghost of Jacques Derrida
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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65 4 The Ghost of Jacques Derrida “Here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts [crois-moi, je crois aux fantômes].”1 So declares Jacques Derrida, recounting the words of another, words that were once pronounced to him by Pascale Ogier during the filming of the movie Ghost Dance.2 These words, repeated in a filmed interview with Bernard Stiegler, form part of a book entitled Echographies of Television published in 1996. In this interview, Derrida describes the singular, “strange,” and “unreal” experience of filming a scene in his office for Ken McMullen’s movie, a scene in which he and Ogier sit face-to-face, looking at each other, into one another’s eyes. Practicing with Ogier, Derrida is supposed to ask her: “And you then, do you believe in ghosts?,” and at the behest of the director, she is to respond succinctly: “Yes, now, yes.” Derrida recalls this experience—that of rehearsing this scene in his office with Ogier at least thirty times—when, two or three years later, he is asked to view McMullen’s movie again by his students in the United States. Asking Stiegler to imagine his experience, given the fact that Ogier had unexpectedly passed away in the interim, Derrida remarks: “I saw the face of Pascale, all of a sudden, coming on the screen, which I knew was the face of a dead person” (E 135). “She responded to my question ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Looking at me almost in the eyes, she said to me again, on the large screen: ‘yes, now, yes’” (E 135). Subsequently , after Ogier’s death, while viewing Ghost Dance, Derrida has the overwhelming feeling of the return of “the specter of her specter [le spectre de son spectre],” coming back “to tell me, here now: ‘Now . . . 66 ■ Apparitions now . . . now . . . that is, in this dark room or auditorium of another continent, in another world, here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts’” (E 135). A voice comes forward to say “Here, now,”—but which “now?”—“yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts.” The voice does not simply seek to assure— “believe me, have faith in me”—but asks to be trusted—“believe me when I say that I believe in ghosts.” How is one to take this phrase, “Believe me, I believe in ghosts,” especially if it is itself the repetition of the very phrase of another? What is it not only to believe in ghosts but to declare that one believes in them? Soon it becomes clear that this strange enunciation is much more complex than it first appears, bearing within it a (double) affirmation (“yes” and “I believe”), an exhortation (“believe me!”), a request (“please believe what I tell you”), a declaration (“I believe in ghosts”), an (infinite) repetition (“yes, I believe in ghosts,” this utterance being itself the repetition of another’s avowal, repeated again with every appearance of Ogier on the screen), and a testimony that in repeating affirms the belief. As if matters were not already complicated enough, all of this is brought to us via video, thus raising the question of the relation between technics and the affirmation of belief or believing in general. I would like to take up Derrida’s avowal of belief in ghosts, not simply to explain the significance of “ghosts,” simulacra, doubles, hence images, in Derrida’s work and to show their relation to death and mourning nor to merely draw an analogy between the structure of doubles or simulacra and what we may call “synthetic” images but also in order to scrutinize each part of the expression “Believe me, I believe in ghosts.” This phrase would oblige us not only to attend to the performative force of “Believe me!” but also to think the alliance between the image, the ghostly, and belief. The aporetic rapport between faith (religious and fiduciary) and technics, in every attestation and testimony, would bring to the fore the credit we accord the image. If I will have resorted to what may seem like “excessive quotation” by the standards of academic writing, I will have done so in order to give Derrida the word. By citing him as much as possible in an essay that is “mimetic,” I have tried to bear in mind what he taught us about citation. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that much of Derrida’s thought can be contained in this very phrase, “Believe me, I believe in ghosts...