The Work of Mourning (review)

[W]hat I thought impossible, indecent, and unjustifiable, what long ago and more or less secretly and resolutely I had promised myself never to do (out of a concern for rigor or fidelity, if you will, and because it is in this case too serious), was to write following the death, not after, not long after the death by returning to it, but just following the death, upon or on the occasion of the death, at the commemorative gatherings and tributes, in the writings "in memory" of those who while living would have been my friends, still present enough to me that some "declaration," indeed some analysis or "study," would seem at that moment completely unbearable.

(Derrida,The Work of Mourning, 49-50, original italics)

Had Derrida kept this resolve, we would not have this volume, which brings together "writings" ranging from letters of condolence and memorial essays to eulogies and funeral orations, "written" over almost two decades on a pantheon of French and American intellectuals, and assembed here for the first time. Yet, curiously enough, Derrida does not admit that they have, after all, been written. He wants to give a wide berth to the Scylla of writing and the Charybdis of not writing following the death of a friend; he thus ambivalently tries to take a line that paradoxically enables him to evade the very activity (duty) he is engaged in. Derrida stops at the threshold of writing and on the verge of articulation; all he manages to pen is a promise to return to writing at some later date—or so he would have us believe. For Derrida, the death of a friend tosses the survivor onto the horns of a dilemma; he is forced to commit one of two possible infidelities: either to speak, to write (and therefore elide the other's voice), or not to speak, not to write, (and thus thrust the other into oblivion, and kill him, as it were, a second time). What are at stake in the very act of speaking or writing about the other immediately following his death are issues of justice, alterity, and loyalty, which tend to be paradoxically undermined in the very act that is presumed to bear witness to them: writing. The only way out of this vertigo, which Derrida elaborates in his Specters of Marx, is the uncanny practice of a ghostly writing, a writing of the promise of writing:

To go on speaking of this all alone, after the death of the other, to sketch out the least conjecture or risk the least interpretation, feels to me like an endless insult or wound - and yet also a duty, a duty toward him. Yet I will not be able to carry it out, at least not right here. Always the promise of return. (55, my italics)

Writing bears witness to "being at a loss" (94); since writing amounts to insulting the other as much as forbearance from writing threatens to kill him a second time, writing can only emanate from a space in which the writing subject is at a loss to write.

This flustering loss that the writing subject suffers after the death of a friend is poignantly enacted by Derrida in this original collection of texts—The Work of Mourning—brought together by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. The editors have translated most of the texts; in addition, their lengthy introduction offers a much needed handrail, by no means simplistic or reductive, for readers who might find themselves stumbling along on unfamiliar ground. Derrida's prose is infamously opaque and unyielding, if not torturous, and likely to cast the reader adrift rather than bring him home. The collection comprises a chronologically arranged selection of éloges that Derrida was prompted to "write" upon the demise of such figures as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard, and others. In mourning for...