Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics

Appendix: The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling

Appendix “The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling” Jacques Derrida Without even admitting, sincerely, to a feeling of incompetence, I believe that never will I have been so lacking the strength to approach, in a study or philosophical discussion, the immense work of Paul Ricoeur. How can one limit oneself only to one of the places, to one of the stations along such a rich and long trajectory, spanning so many fields, themes, and problems: from ethics to psychoanalysis, from phenomenology to hermeneutics and even theology , through history and the responsibilities that it daily imposes on us, for several decades, through the history of philosophy and the original interpretation of so many philosophers, from Aristotle and Augustine to Kant, from Jaspers and Husserl to Heidegger and Lévinas, not to mention Freud and all the Anglo-Saxon philosophers that Ricoeur has had the courage and lucidity, so rare in France, to read, to make others read, and to take into consideration in his most innovative work? This seems to me difficult and indeed impossible if one does not want to betray, in a few pages, the unity of a style and of an intention, of a thought but also of a passion and of a faith, a thought faith and a thinking faith, of a commitment that, from the beginning, has never given up a certain fidelity. To oneself as much as to others. Re-reading what I have just written quite spontaneously (“difficult and indeed impossible”), I smile. I belatedly point out that, during the last two years, these two words were at the center of a debate between Paul Ricoeur and me on evil and forgiveness (firstly, a private debate over lunch near the Montsouris Park and, secondly, a public debate at the roundtables organized by Antoine Garapon with the jurists and then by Laure Adler for France-Culture at the Maison de l’Amérique latine). Against my apparently aporetic proposition according to which forgiveness is, in a nonnegative sense, the im-possible itself 167 168 Reading Derrida and Ricoeur (one can forgive only the unforgivable; forgiving that which is already forgivable is not forgiving; and this does not amount to saying that there is no forgiveness but that forgiveness would have to do the impossible, as one says, in order to become possible: to forgive the unforgivable), Ricoeur put forward another formula more than once: “Forgiveness is not impossible, it is difficult.”1 What is the difference, and where does it come to pass, between the (nonnegative) “im-possible” and the “difficult,” the very difficult, the most difficult possible, difficulty or the unfeasible itself? What is the difference between that which is radically difficult and that which appears to be im-possible? To put it telegraphically , the question could perhaps come down to that of the selfhood [ipséité] of the “I can.”2 Etymology confirms this pleonasm. The ipse is always the power or possibility of an “I” (I can, I want, I decide). The im-possible I am talking about perhaps signifies that I cannot and must not ever claim that it is within my power seriously and responsibly to say “I forgive” (or “I want” or “I decide”). It is only the other, myself as another, that within me wants, decides, or forgives, which does not absolve me of any responsibility; on the contrary. This exchange without agreement or opposition has a strange “logic,” whereby an encounter simultaneously tangential, tendentious, and intangible begins to emerge [s’esquisse] but also slips away [s’esquive] within the most amicable proximity (“we are alongside each other,” he told me one day, recently, while we were trying once again to think together what had come to pass, what had not come to pass, between the two of us during a whole life). “To be alongside each other” (parallel ways that will meet perhaps in infinity, progressing or navigating side by side, edge to edge, an implicit alliance without conflict but respectful of an irreducible difference) could be one of the potentially richest “metaphors” that we could attempt to adjust, complicate, and indeed contest in order to express what is at issue in this “logic.” If one were to deploy such a “logic” in many texts, while respecting not only silence and interruption, whether contingent or essential, but also what remains implicit or unsaid, one would be able to recognize in it the permanent law of a “singular...