Apparitions-Of Derrida's Other

——duction

1 ——duction Everything is singular each time and each time analogical: a figuration of the other. Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile” What does it mean to introduce a book of essays? How does an introduction generally function? What is the role of the introduction in academic books? Do all books require an introduction? These questions are, of course, neither new nor profound. In a book on Jacques Derrida’s work, they are even banal. For, was it not Derrida himself who, in “Hors livre,” the famous beginning to Dissemination, wrote extensively on the function of a preface, in particular in Hegel’s work, and argued that the preof the preface serves to reduce the future, what is to come, to the form of an evident, already digested present? Is it not to Derrida’s writings that we also owe any questioning of the relation between what is called the “inside” and the “outside” of a text, of what belongs to or precedes a text proper (see Parages, for example)? Did Derrida’s writing not at all times structurally resist strategies of simplification, summarization, generalization , and so on? After Derrida, even the very gesture of putting into question and putting on the scene the function of introductions has itself become clichéd. However, a methodical run-through of a book’s chapters, explaining their main themes and the connection of the chapters to one another, is a prerequisite of almost all academic books, even those treating Derrida’s thought. A good introduction thus presents the argument(s) of a book. It is assumed that the argument(s) take the form of, or can be summarized into, a cogent thesis made up of clear, declarative, or expository sentences . The aim of the introduction would then be to present the explicit 2 ■ ——duction “arguments” of the book, these arguments having been extracted from their context and isolated in the form of theses. In “Hors livre,” Derrida eloquently explains that the preface assumes the existence of an “omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product).” Since the introduction is usually the first—or perhaps the only—part of a book that is read, it allows the prospective reader to anticipate all that awaits him or her, to form opinions on chapters that will follow, such that the reading of the book is determined by the introduction. The preface or the introduction announces in the future tense what will already have been written. It makes what is to come, to be read, already present. In rehearsing the argument(s) of the book, the introduction not only reduces the work to its “meaning , content, thesis, or theme” but actually relieves the reader of the task of reading the book.1 Nevertheless, I am a great admirer of those who are able to succinctly but skillfully summarize their books, providing a narrative to help the reader navigate through their work. After attempting to perform such a task myself and repeatedly failing at this task, I wondered whether this failure was not structural, in other words, whether there was not something inherent in the structure of this book that resisted or defied writing such an introduction. One can hear the skeptics saying that this is obviously an indication of a badly structured or ill-conceived book. I am certainly willing to entertain that possibility, but what if there is something about the material itself, the very thing being written about—the other— that resists summarization? As each of the chapters gathered here attempts to demonstrate, the other is intractable, irreplaceable, and singular.2 The other is thus irreducibly, infinitely other. As utterly and wholly other, it cannot be immediately presented as such, it cannot be recuperated or sublated . This may be why any writing on and of Derrida’s other cannot be simply a philosophical analysis, a work of synthesis, or an explication of “a theory of the other.” Since the other resists conceptualization or thematization , it would never be a matter, I suggest, of providing an exhaustive account of the descriptions of the other in Derrida’s work but rather of how the other is written (about), each time singularly. The other, whose appearance appears without appearing, effaces itself in its coming. A thinking of the other—as that which never fully comes to presence, as that which does not present itself as such, and as that to which no direct access is possible—necessitates a new approach to appearing , visibility, and phenomenality in general. The...