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This Monstrous Figure without Figure or Face
- Fordham University Press
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29 2 This Monstrous Figure without Figure or Face This visitor can be called Gast, or ghost, guest or Gespenst. Derrida, The Truth in Painting le revenant, l’hôte, guest, ghost. Derrida, La vérité en peinture What is coming shall be monstrous. It shall have the figure without figure or face (figure sans figure) of a monster.1 And yet, what kind of shape or “form” does the monstrous have? No anticipation can prepare one to identify this figure, this “formless” form for which one does not yet have, perhaps never will have, a name. That which cannot be figured, the unacceptable, the intolerable, comes as a monster. Without precedence, without tradition, it shows itself, yet will go unrecognized . For the monstrous is not simply grotesque, aberrant, or deviant, a strange, misshapen anomaly, but is also a prodigious figure, marvelous beyond belief, excessive, unrestrained, and extraordinary. Beyond all genres or kinds, this spectral silhouette without features whose contours cannot be traced, thus making it seem more like a hallucination, not only puts into question every thought of figurality and figuration but also disturbs all existing mechanisms of reception and receptivity put in place to receive it. No monstrous figure can remain without shape for long, however, for there is a need to give it form, to cloak it, cover it over, as all thinking of form has to do with wearing or donning an outer garment or veiling a naked core. Yet the nudity of the monstrous, a bareness more nude than nude, is the very undoing or interruption of form as we know it. I In the preface written for Alain David’s book Racisme et antisemitisme, entitled “La forme et la façon,” Derrida examines his thought-provoking 30 ■ Analogies claim that the “almost originary crime [faute]” of racism and anti-Semitism consists of “privileging form and cultivating formal limits.”2 Written in response to the provocation of the immeasurable violence of the past century, David’s book, whose “unprecedented ambition” Derrida acknowledges , confronts the entire history of philosophy and the social sciences, including all contemporary approaches to racism and anti-Semitism (FF 9). “Thinking racism and anti-Semitism, and the and of their dogmatic conjunction ” together, this book is a “debate with [explication avec]” philosophy as that which questions after the essence of things (FF 10). The essential philosophical mode of interrogating—the “What is?” question—is itself put on trial, forcing us to hear it anew. Is it still possible, Derrida inquires, to pose the “What is?” question to the problem of racism? In other words, is it still possible to ask “What is racism?” if race and the science of race do not really exist? At the same time, can one still ask “What is antiracism?” if the latter shares the risks of its counterpart, racism? Nonetheless, David’s book, “a book of philosophy,” is also, by necessity, “a book on philosophy,” on the limits of philosophy, on philosophy as a certain “passion of, passion for the limit itself” (FF 10). According to Derrida, what is so striking about David’s text is that it provides a new access to the problematic of racism and anti-Semitism through: nothing other than form itself, the fascination for form, that is for the visibility of a certain organic and organizing contour, an eidos, if you will, and thus an idealization, an idealism itself insofar as it institutes philosophy itself, philosophy or metaphysics as such. Racism and anti-Semitism would be in part linked to a certain “idealism .” (FF 10)3 The source of “all evil, radical evil itself,” would be, according to David’s hypothesis, “an experience of limit,” “a passion for limitation, which would become confused with a philosophical desire, with a desire constitutive of philosophy, with a limiting or delimiting process, with the structure that it produces, as if this limiting condition were a natural form” (FF 10). Yet how can such an abstract thing as “form, limitation, limitation by form,” Derrida wonders, be made responsible for all that is evil and monstrous, the worst that is humanly possible—for example, slavery or Auschwitz, and so on? (FF 11). Pointing to the word envers, “the other side, the reverse (side),” in the book’s subtitle, Essai de philosophie sur l’envers des concepts, Derrida notes that David by no means seeks to overturn philosophy. Rather, David’s “material phenomenology,” partly inspired by the work of Michel Henry, [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE...