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  • Addressing Departure
  • Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (bio)

Der Untergang ist die Enstasis der Zeit, das Letzte, der Abschied "des" Anfangs. Aber Abschied ist nie Nichts. Er ist jenes Anfängliche des Anfangs in dem erst die äußerste Einzigkeit des Seins erdenkbar wird.

—Martin Heidegger, GA 70:
Über den Anfang

Nietzsche s'en doutait bien mais Zarathoustra en était sûr: "Me voici entouré de tables brisées et d'autres à demi gravées seulement. Je suis là dans l'attente. Quand viendra mon heure, l'heure de redescendre et de périr …" "Die Stunde meines Niederganges, Unterganges." Il faudra descendre, travailler, se pencher pour graver et porter la Table nouvelle aux vallées, la lire et la faire lire. L'écriture est l'issue comme descente hors de soi en soi du sens: métaphore-pour-autrui-envue-d'autrui-ici-bas, métaphore comme possibilité d'autrui ici-bas, métaphore comme métaphysique où l'être doit se cacher si l'on veut que l'autre apparaisse. [End Page 287] Creusement dans l'autre vers l'autre où le même cherche sa veine et l'or vrai de son phénomène. Submission où il peut toujours (se) perdre. Niedergang, Untergang. Mais il n'est rien, il n'est pas (lui-) même avant le risque de (se) perdre. Car l'autre fraternel n'est pas d'abord dans la paix de ce qu'on appelle l'intersubjectivité, mais dans le travail et le péril de l'interrogation; il n'est pas d'abord certain dans la paix de la réponse où deux affirmations s'épousent mais il est appelé dans la nuit par le travail en creux de l'interrogation. L'écriture est le moment de cette Vallée originaire de l'autre dans l'être. Moment de la profondeur aussi comme déchéance. Instance et insistance du grave.

—Jacques Derrida, L'écriture et la différence

Two Confessions

I must begin by avowing a certain lack of taste, if not outright imprudence or even impudence, in my choice of title. I am aware that my title errs on the side of explicitness: it exhibits, perhaps obscenely, the fact that we are here to mark and celebrate Peggy Kamuf's retirement from the University of Southern California (USC), where until May 2017 she held the Marion Frances Chevalier Chair in French Studies, with joint appointments in comparative literature and English. Without wanting to give an excuse to justify my choice of title, I should say that the phrase "addressing departure" came to my mind from the very moment in which Erin Graff Zivin asked me to say something on this occasion. This phrase was no doubt dictated to me by both the circumstances that determine our gathering—namely, Peggy's departure from USC—and the impact that Peggy's thinking on the concept of "address" has had on my own thinking about this "linguistic" structure. That said, if I decided to retain this phrase as my title, it is also because of the questions that assailed me as soon as the phrase "addressing departure" came to mind, beginning with the issue of whether it is possible to address departure. Although it seems obvious that departure is not only a possible topic of discussion that one could address in different discursive contexts but also an experience we undergo on a regular basis, there is something aporetic about departure that, moreover, becomes more salient when departure [End Page 288] is examined in terms of its addressability. This aporia could be stated in the following terms: though departures occur, whenever one addresses a departure, the very apostrophaic gesture implicit in address renders the absence that is conditio sine qua non of departure into a presence—even if in the mode of a present absence. In other words, though I may address the concept of departure in my remarks, I may not be able to address a movement of departure in its singularity without retaining both departure itself and whoever or whatever is departing within the field of presence, thus keeping departure and the "departed" from actually departing. Moreover, since settling on this title, I...

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