Double Hand

for Peggy Kamuf

This short reflection is written in two columns: if they had titles, one might be "Peggy," the other a carefully pronounced "Kamuf." Ideally, I would read the two columns so that you heard them simultaneously. Even more ideally, the two columns would not be assigned a side, a "Peggy" on the left and a "Kamuf" on the right. Indeed, they might as easily be two horizontal columns dividing the page into a top half and bottom half. I don't even know if what you'll hear is in fact written, whether it is yet ready to be mis en page.

As you well know, there are noble precedents for my enterprise. Jacques Derrida famously wrote a book titled Glas consisting of two columns; he also wrote an article, "Living On/Border Lines" ("Survivre/Journal de bord") consisting of a "main" text with a footnote running beneath it from start to finish. My plan here, far less noble in its intent if not its subject but hoping to rise to the occasion of this celebration of Peggy Kamuf's long and illustrious career, is to combine some personal reminiscences with a few remarks that seek to do justice to that career, albeit a minute representative part of it. In the interests of justice—but anyone who knows Derrida (and his "Force of Law") will immediately understand that I am here applying a law that is far from an undeconstructible justice—in the interests of a type of justice I'll rigorously limit myself to equal parts "Peggy" and "Kamuf." Five typescript pages devoted to each, but not in that order, and I'll read them as alternating pages, separated by a short string of asterisks.

________

At the end of Kamuf's Book of Addresses,¹ as the fifteenth chapter of a long series of remarkable pieces, there is a doubly particular little text titled "Singular Sense, Second Hand." I call it "doubly particular" to allude to its title and conceit but also to note what, for me, will be two particulars: one, there is something of a Peggy in it, but two, Kamuf is at her inimitable best.

The Peggy is an autobiographical watch with second/hand story. She confesses that it is autobiographical some five pages in, as if after it all, once the storytelling is over, "Why tell you this story of a second hand? And why tell it in the third person as if it did not happen to me, but to another?"² Because the second hand in the secondhand story is really a hyphen linking that story to the rest of the discussion, which will range through Rodolphe Gasché—and Gasché's Derrida—before commenting on Jean-Luc Nancy's and Martin Heidegger's Mitsein, about which more in a minute or two. And it is also a mobile hyphen. First, because Peggy's hyphen moves as if on a dial or face to become a dash or a slash or disappears by coinciding with grander markers, rendering it functionally highly problematic. Second, because as she explains via the etymology, her hyphen, like any hyphen, "both joins what it separates and separates what it joins";³ here today gone tomorrow, here one second gone the next, here on one hand gone on the next. And beyond all that visual mobility, which only an Eric Partridge or a Chicago Manual of Style can resolve, there is this, which only a Kamuf can persist in, the fact that the question of the hyphen echoes through its own silence to be an unspoken mark of punctuation about which she will have the temerity to ask, "What does it mean to overhear a hyphen?"⁴

________

The year was 1986 or 1987 (which means, yes, about thirty years ago). I was in Baton Rouge, busted flat as ever, and a common friend—hearing that I was going to attend the annual 20th-Century French Studies conference (then it was neither the twenty-first century nor Francophone studies)—said that I had to make contact with Peggy Kamuf. I did, still am, having to. I determined that she...