Introduction: The Work of Friendship

Often those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one, deep inside, to a dead friend or master, those who make themselves heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond. With tears in their voices, they sometimes speak familiarly to the other who keeps silent, calling upon him without detour or mediation, apostrophizing him, even greeting him or confiding in him. This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of the rhetoric of oration. It is rather so as to traverse speech at the very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning, to what is called, in a confused and terrible expression, "the work of mourning."

—Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning

It is hard to speak properly of the dead—most of all, perhaps, of a dead friend. So, anyway, Jacques Derrida argues in a volume that both theorizes and performs the work of its title, The Work of Mourning.¹ Collected in this volume are eulogies for friends and "masters"—I will return in what follows to the seemingly odd, seemingly inevitable conjunction of those terms—from Louis Marin to Paul de Man, from Sarah Kofman to Michel Foucault. Scattered throughout these pained and deeply personal expressions of loss and remembrance are reflections on friendship, mourning, work, and survival, reflections that offer a meditation not on what to say but on how to frame one's address on an occasion such as this one, the occasion of remembering a friend and—though he would certainly have refused the title—a master, or perhaps I should say maître, a figure who resides somewhere between master and teacher, Alan Bray.

The difficulty of address—of whom to address, and how—is paramount on such occasions. "Speaking is impossible," Derrida insists, "but so too would be silence or absence or a refusal to share one's sadness."² Of course, pragmatically speaking, silence and absence are anything but impossible at moments like this. As Jeffrey Merrick wrote to me in the days following Alan's death, "Thinking back, I'm not sure we in LGBT studies have done a very good job of memorializing our pioneers. We should do better this time."³ How exactly to do a better job, to work in the face of mourning, to allow our mourning to make our work better, has remained the animating impulse for this special issue. The specific work of this introduction, then, is to consider why mourning and memorialization constitute such exacting, such "confused and terrible" but also crucial and even occasionally pleasurable labor. It considers the particular difficulties attached to mourning a figure such as Alan Bray even as it takes up more generally the question, posed by Merrick, of why memorializing the founding figures of LGBT studies might entail specific difficulties. To do so, this introduction traverses material both pre- and postmodern in an effort to locate models that might assist in the job of paying tribute to a teacher, a scholar, and a friend who was also, and fundamentally, a scholar of the friend. Only after giving time to this more general and even historical interrogation will I turn—briefly here, as others do more fully in the essays that follow—to the work, and hence to the legacy, of Alan Bray himself.

As Derrida makes clear, and as contributors to this issue can no doubt attest, to know that one must speak—and speak publicly—on the occasion of the death of a friend and teacher is only...