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  • ContretempsQu'est-ce qui arrive?—Two Texts, Divided in Two, After Glas: What? Who?
  • John Leavey (bio)

Qu'est-ce qui arrive? …

I began by asking, "What's happening?" … The phrase first asks "what"—or "who": what is occurring, who is coming to surprise me where I hadn't been expecting it, where I'd been expecting it without expecting it, without seeing it coming, like Ornette and his mother and his son in my life, etc.; and then, which is not quite the same thing: "what must be what's happening?" Or who must be coming so that it happens, and on what conditions so that someone, messiah or not, comes to us, comes to us in music, so that some one new musical event comes upon us?

—Jacques Derrida, "Play—The First Name"1 [End Page 54]

I. Qu'est-ce qui arrive? What Is Coming? The Undocumented?

Tell me what you think of translation, and I will tell you who you are.

—Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"2

In principle, a philosopher should be without a passport, even undocumented [sanspapiers]; he should never be asked for his visa. He should not represent a nationality, or even a national language. To want to be a philosopher, in principle and in relation to the most long-standing tradition, is to want to belong to a universal community. Not only cosmopolitan, but universal: beyond citizenship, beyond the state, and thus beyond even the cosmopolitical.

But at the same time, philosophy is always registered in idioms, starting with Greek. A philosopher's first obligation is perhaps not to refuse this trial, the most difficult trial possible: that of confronting the urgency of those universal questions (globalization, as we say, is just one of several), while insisting on signing in their own language, and even on creating their own language with their own language. This singular language, this idiomatic language, does not have to be pure, or even national.

—Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine3

I am tempted in principle to imagine a single-tongued reader who reads only English, is trained in the precision of language, his own language and philosophy's, who knows nothing of or cares little about the canonical wars fought in other disciplines. This reader, a male reader, continues an exceptional take on, continues to take on philosophy, particularly the prefaces and notes of the translators, for the specific assumptions regarding the universal community of philosophy that speaks English only, even if it is with a pronounced accent. In this story of mixed and ill-fitting genres (in principle, in English), of a singular philosophical desire in English and about two injunctions, I imagine that accent (as) confirming the absolute monolingualism of philosophy as English, but without ever getting to or beyond English. [End Page 55]

I make this assumption in principle, and I tell this story because of its relevance or lack of relevance. I know I am fabricating a story that is tugging at the exclusions that a philosopher in English brings along. And I am telling a story that runs the risk of repeating the story from the German side of Adorno's first encountering English as a child in books given to him by "English ladies." Not understanding English, he did not read the books in English. They were objects of a peculiar inaccessibility. The twenty-sixth aphorism of Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951) is entitled in English in the original "English spoken," which is the "language of the donors":

In my childhood, some elderly English ladies with whom my parents kept up relations often gave me books as presents: richly illustrated works for the young, also a small green bible bound in morocco leather. All were in the language of the donors: whether I could read it none of them paused to reflect. The peculiar inaccessibility of the books, with their glaring pictures, titles and vignettes, and their indecipherable text, filled me with the belief that in general objects of this kind were not books at all, but advertisements, perhaps for machines like those my uncle produced in his London factory. Since I came to live in Anglo...

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