Derrida's Living Will

In Politics of Friendship Jacques Derrida claims "philia begins with the possibility of survival and that surviving is the other name of the mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited."¹ It has been two years since the death of Jacques Derrida and what makes my mourning for him so formidable is my inability to find a language capable of articulating the tragic loss of one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the twentieth century. Yet the question remains how one can act ethically out of duty to Derrida and still enable him to speak in his very absence.

For Derrida the mourning subject thus takes on the responsibility of remembering the departed. But unlike the Freudian model where one must introject the other and subsequently expel it as a sign of the successful overcoming of loss, the Derridean approach to mourning allows the other to live on albeit differentially. "Memory and interiorization since Freud, this is how the 'normal' work of mourning is often described. It entails a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other's visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them."² Far from conceptualizing this living on as the psychopathology Freud once described as melancholia, Derrida suggests that mourning becomes a discursive performance of memory that constitutes the acting out of inheritance and in the process allows it to become the locus of desire. Derrida once suggested in a text on Roland Barthes that it is only "in us that the dead may speak and ultimately reside, thereby revealing that death is not the end of being."³ To be sure, if the death of the other delivers us to memory and interiorization, it is in order to engage in the performance of a ghostly inheritance and debt. By allowing the departed object of our desire to live within us we are able to foreclose on the possibility of real death, which can only be realized when actual witnessing no longer exists.

However, Derrida is quick to point out what he describes as the "unbearable paradox of fidelity." The deceased who lives within the self is within us and yet it is not of us. The friend who is within us has been made subject to an unmitigated state of alterity, and so we are unable ever to articulate the "last word" on it. How, then, can we engage in a practice of hospitality toward the dead when all we have left is memory? "Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory . . . death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other than them; something outside of them within them."⁴

To honor Jacques Derrida's memory as executors of his living will, now more than ever we must let him speak in us. One must not forget, however, that for Derrida death is not an end in itself to which one would concede indomitable authority. It is therefore within this context that Derrida had chosen life over death, a phenomenon that was ultimately conceived as a non-event. In spite of the untimely nature of his death, Derrida has continued to live on in the excess of a life beyond death for which there is no finality. If the writing of a text represents that of a deceased being, it is, nevertheless, always working in its absence. Through his spectral presence, Derrida's living on beyond non-living, and the exemplarity of his critical thinking, we must become more vigilant than ever before to the political realities of today where arbitrary and dangerous decisions pass themselves off as both logical and natural.

Let us take the example of the so-called preventive action in Iraq carried out by the Bush administration in reaction to the fantasmatic...