The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida (review)

Sean Gaston's The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida, written during the ten weeks after Derrida's death, takes the form of a philosophical journal containing daily entries (although not without gaps) which see the author struggling to respond to the question of mourning, both in relation to Derrida's passing and in regard to the intricately knotted threads in Derrida's own thought which tie philosophy to mourning and death. Quick to recognise the inevitable disappointment of those who would turn to Derrida's texts in order to discover a resource for confronting or overcoming the experience of mourning itself, Gaston's writing endures the most difficult of encounters with its subject matter, which indeed—for all the book's scholarship and eloquence—it hardly seems to know. In short, Derrida's death discomposes the work. Or, rather, Derrida's many deaths (including the deaths of others, philosophers and friends, strangers, too, which he inherits or foresees, like his own, but cannot reconcile or appropriate) deny Gaston's writing its composure. But animate rather than decompose, too, in the very gap of knowing which causes such a "deeply read" study (as Nicholas Royle observes in his endorsement of the book) to resist the temptation to "monu-memorialize, to idealize and interiorize the 'father' as an act of mourning, to make a monument out of a memorial, to make an Aufhebung of the death of Jacques Derrida" (2). Each entry in the diary, beginning with the first, is not only marked by the date of its composition, but haunted by its own time, a time that is much less its own than impossibly inherited in the unsituatable experience of Derrida's passing. "I shall now try to write in the past tense," Gaston begins (1). Written in the present tense—"now"—these opening words, as faltering as they are urgent, inaugurate the event of writing as at once an unfulfillable anticipation of what is to come, what is ahead of or in the work, and an all too precipitate (and therefore "improper") decision about the past as, from now on, the "proper" tense. And Gaston knows this, senses it at least, for all that he doesn't know. Starting out from a time that is impossibly dislocated, then, it is as if Gaston nevertheless wants to recall Derrida somehow, fanning echoes of the occasional style of Derrida's own textual performances amid dreams and recollections of him, while minding the gaps which gape "now" as we read Derrida again, gaps which from the very beginning structure his thought and writing about language, literature, philosophy and philosophy's history, but which also intervene to complicate "our" relationship to him, and indeed his to himself. Writing about Of Grammatology, Gaston notes:

Derrida links the interval to spacing, two pages later he links it to temporization. As soon as there is representation, one cannot avoid 'the gap [le décalage] between the thing and its double' . . . Un décalage, a gap, an interval, is also a time lag: the time difference (le décalage horaire). For Derrida, there (are) always gaps: the gaps of space becoming time and of time becoming space, the gaps of différance and gaps as différance—différance always leaves a gap . . . .

(10)

The gap—which makes as much as it breaks—is therefore where Gaston starts, and re-starts time and again, so that "Envois," La dissémination, Politics of Friendship, and other writings by Derrida are read as "prefaces to Glas, preface to an impossible mourning on the gap" (12). Meanwhile, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and others return to haunt the book, making us dwell in and on the gaps they continue to open across the history of philosophy, gaps of space and time which lead back to (as much as away from) the book's founding problem. Dwelling among these gaps, the book understands itself as yet another preface, nothing more than "a prefatory aside" (18), one that indeed observes the double...