Derrida From Now On

1. Alors, qui êtes-vous?

1 Alors, qui êtes-vous? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Hospitality I could not begin these reflections on the life and work of Jacques Derrida without recalling at least one further phrase in French, the only language for which Derrida ever expressed his fidelity and his love and the only language I ever spoke with him. I could not begin without letting at least one more of those traces resonate within me, one of those traces of a French language in which I will never feel absolutely at home but which I nevertheless have also come to love—and in large part thanks to Jacques Derrida. Indeed, I could not cross this threshold without letting this simple phrase—Alors, qui êtes-vous?—reverberate within me, since it was the very first Jacques Derrida ever addressed to me, on the verge of what would become—and I feel fortunate to be able to use the terms—a relationship of hospitality and of friendship. Alors, qui êtes-vous? I must emphasize here at the outset that these are Jacques Derrida’s words, not my own, so that no one is misled by the title of this chapter into thinking that I would have the temerity of asking this question of Jacques Derrida, or the audacity to think I could actually provide a response. Qui êtes-vous? ‘‘Who are you?’’ That is a question I never posed and will never pose to Jacques Derrida.1 I underscore this because it is so tempting today, in the wake of Derrida’s death, to want to claim some special privilege, some unique intimacy, with the man or his work, in order to say something definitive about him or it. It is tempting to think that one can offer some final judgment, now that that life and that work have, it seems, come to an end. As Maurice Blanchot writes at the 18 end of Friendship, a text Derrida knew very well, this unique time just after the death of a thinker we’ve read, known, and admired is typically ‘‘the moment of complete works,’’ the terrible moment when ‘‘one wants to publish ‘everything,’ one wants to say ‘everything,’ . . . as if the ‘everything is said’ would finally allow us to stop a dead voice, to stop the pitiful silence that arises from it.’’2 It is the moment when we are tempted to give a final evaluation, a final reckoning, the moment when we feel more licensed than usual to go beyond the facts, to say something more than just ‘‘Jacques Derrida was born in 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria; he went to France in 1949, graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and later took a teaching position at that same institution, eventually becoming known in France and, indeed, throughout the world through his more than seventy books, translated into dozens of languages, for a type of philosophical and literary analysis known as ‘deconstruction.’’’ It is the moment when the living feel justified, even entitled, to go beyond these facts to assess the merits of the man and his work and assign them some definitive place in the history of French letters or of Western philosophy. Faced with such a temptation, we would do well to recall what Blanchot wrote after the death of his friend Georges Bataille, near the very end, once again, of Friendship: How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility , belong to no one. There are no witnesses. Those who were closest say only what was close to them, not the distance that af- firmed itself in this proximity, and distance ceases as soon as presence ceases. Alors, qui êtes-vous? These words and the gestures and tone that accompanied them live on today—Blanchot is right—only in me, in my memory , so that everything I say reveals much more about me than about Jacques Derrida. And yet I would like to believe that having been so profoundly marked by the thought and person of Jacques Derrida, touched in a way that goes well beyond what we so blithely call ‘‘influence,’’ something of who Jacques Derrida was or is cannot help but be conveyed by...