Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida both speak of their trips to Greece as eagerly anticipated but delayed. Both admit to a reluctance to take the step; Heidegger records “a long hesitation due to the fear of disappointment”:

Derrida too reflects on a similar motif: “This was my third stay in Greece. Barely stays, regrettably, more like visits, multiple, fleeting, and all too late. Why so late? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to Greece? So late in life?”Footnote ² This is of course partly a commonplace, quite literally a topos, a well-trodden rhetorical path in its own right, the traveler’s signature nod to a weak sublime: one always arrives in Greece too late – witness Virginia Woolf’s diary entry while there in 1906:

Two years earlier, in 1904, Freud experienced a disturbing sense of incredulity (or “derealization,” as he put it in his retrospective rendition of the scene in 1936) at the fact that he, in middle age, actually found himself on the Acropolis, the originary site of the civilization he was busily analyzing at the time of that recollection. The shock was compounded by guilt, for this was a feat his petty bourgeois father, a self-educated merchant, could neither accomplish nor appreciate. The episode has been richly commented upon,Footnote ⁴ not least by Freud himself, who made of it an exemplary manifestation of what Derrida would later call “hauntology,”Footnote ⁵ the persistent presence of the past in the present, as well as a testament to the psychic work of the uncanny, turning the ambivalent feeling of dread toward the dead to “filial piety,” thus temporarily laying to rest familiar phantoms.Footnote ⁶ As Freud put it: “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety.”Footnote ⁷ Freud had begun to explore that fraught relationship in Totem and Taboo (1913):

The connection with the uncanny was then made in the important 1919 work of that title:

That uncanny ambivalence toward the past, the incomplete substitution of piety for dread, is conjured up by the visit to Greece. A “visit” can be both literal and metaphorical, or indeed if we are to read the literal into the metaphorical, literally transportative, and in the case of the two visits to Greece on which this chapter dwells, both senses are continually at play. Like Freud’s earlier transcription of his moment of uncanny transport on the Acropolis, Heidegger’s 1962 Greek “sojourn” and Derrida’s “demeure/residence” in Athens thirty-one years later record confrontations with familiar ghosts. That Greece is the common site of this confrontation is no accident, nor simply a stop in a modern-day philosophical Grand Tour; it is rather the destination of that errancy, error and wandering that both haunts and drives philosophy, at least in Heidegger’s and Derrida’s errant terms: “the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring,” as Heidegger put it in 1950;Footnote ¹⁰ or as Derrida responded in 1964:

To follow the trail of that destinerrance,Footnote ¹² as Derrida would call it, requires the unpacking of a few mot-valises and the writing off of some considerable debts.

“Nous nous devons à la mort” – “we owe ourselves to death”: the sentence provides the subtitle for Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, written in 1996 by way of a preface to a collection of photographs by Jean-François Bonhomme. Here, Derrida draws on memories of his brief stays in Greece, “so late in life,” and reflects in an “aphoristic and serial” way on the photographs with which he traveled there.Footnote ¹³ The motif of death, treated exhaustively (though inexhaustible) in his writing, makes an instant appearance:

Though unacknowledged, the provenance of the sentence may lie in a deep memory recalled “by surprise” from the personal archive of Derrida’s encounters with Greek writing, as it features in a celebrated epigraph by Simonides, whose appearance in Plato’s Republic and Protagoras as a poet-bête noire will have registered with Derrida, incidentally at the very least: “A certain Theodorus rejoices because I am dead. Another / shall rejoice at his death. We are all owed to death.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Anne Carson has noted, “What Simonides contributed to our style of thinking and talking about death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor of exchange”; more specifically, “[t]he idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides.”Footnote ¹⁶ The instancing of the phrase “in the light,” however, points firmly toward the visual and conjures up an image of a Kerameikos column:

For Derrida, “the phallus or the colossus of Apollodorus immediately becomes the metonymic figure for the entire series of photographs collected in this book” and “each one of them remains in its turn what it becomes: a funerary inscription with a proper name”; as Derrida sees it, “never do any of these photographs fail to signify death.”Footnote ¹⁸ This signification is clear enough in the series of images from Kerameikos, Athens’s ancient cemetery, but Derrida reads a funereal inscription in images of a still living Athens, such as the flea market’s cornucopia of discarded things, and the death-like slumber of a café denizen, as well as the street piano and bouzouki player, a silent soundtrack for this collection, which Derrida hears as “a dirge of mourning.”Footnote ¹⁹

For Michael Naas, this “sense of obsolescence [l’affect de la disaffection]” or “dysfunction function” as he puts it, conveys both disappearance and its premonition. I would “leav(e) behind only its archive,”Footnote ²⁰ although, as Gerhard Richter points out in his introduction to Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, for Derrida “[t]here can be no photograph that is not about mourning and about the simultaneous desire to guard against mourning.”Footnote ²¹ The response to Bonhomme’s stills of life among the remains, however, like the uncanny protuberance of Apollodorus’s column, captures both the desire for inscription as petrified and thus perpetual attribution to the past, and its impossibility – Derrida’s “I would have loved to … I would have loved to” countersign for eternity the memory of the man who recorded the passing of the gods, but with the added implication of belatedness. Not copying but tracing Apollodorus’s inscription, what Derrida can sign instead is the sentence, his death sentence, his debt:

But why is this an “urgent sentence”?Footnote ²³ How does it compel Derrida to save it? Derrida protests too much. Because by accepting, receiving this death sentence, “for safekeeping,” as he says (perhaps for himself, perhaps for us), he inscribes a caption on every funerary image in this collection that forever defers death. To effect this delay, to make this debt unpayable, to declare it an “odious debt” (a topical term that one can’t help thinking Derrida would have loved), Derrida calls as witnesses a French word, an untranslatable sentence and four familiar ghosts.

This French word is demeure, both a noun meaning “residence,” “usual habitation” and a verb signifying “to stay” or “to remain” in the imperative.

And there are more nuances: the phrase à demeure (permanently, abidingly); the injunction demeure! (stay!), resonant of the ancient epitaphic imperative, urging the passerby to linger at the site of memory; the mise en demeure (to be given notice); the dernière demeure (final resting place, containing an echo of “qu’il meure,” or “that he die” in the subjunctive). Demeure, Athènes, of course, conveys all these connotations, as well as the literal declaration of Derrida’s brief demeure (residence) in Athens that July. But there is a further resonance, not captured by the English translators, a memento of a previous encounter undeclared but still present: Demeure, Athènes shares a title with a near contemporaneous Derridean piece, “Demeure: Fiction et Témoignage” (“Demeure: Fiction and Testimony”), a commentary on a late récit by Maurice Blanchot, entitled L’instant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death).Footnote ²⁵

In that lapidary autobiographical fragment, which Derrida defines as “autothanatographical in truth,”Footnote ²⁶ Blanchot recalls the instant of his near death in 1944, at the hands of the (anticommunist) Russian Liberation Army, operating under Nazi high command. Unspoken but implicit (and confirmed in Derrida’s reading) is Blanchot’s guilt at his escape, his unpaid debt to death, spared as he then resided in a castle, thus recognized by the soldiers as a member of the upper class. His survival made the witnessing of his own death an impossible testimony, his death a fiction, an escape from truth, compounded by the loss of a manuscript he carried with him at the time. Blanchot’s final words trigger Derrida’s deliberation on delayed testimony and “unexperienced experience”Footnote ²⁷:

Thus Derrida revisits this vocabulary in Greece, evoking Blanchot’s stay of execution. Such an ambivalent witnessing haunts Athens, Still Remains like a familiar ghost, adding by way of exemplarity to the “we” of Derrida’s death sentence, “we owe ourselves to death,” but also to its indefinite deferral, its abeyance.

Three more ghosts exemplify the workings of this delaying of the “right moment,”Footnote ³⁰ literalized in Derrida’s text by reference to the delay mechanism in every camera, the photographic shutter [obturateur]: first, Freud, whose “disturbance of memory on the Acropolis” is traced by Derrida as a visual echo in one of Bonhomme’s photographs – the photographer on the Acropolis. For Derrida, this scene from the Athens archive, “the stratified ruin of all the Athenian memories,” is one he “ha(s) never stopped thinking about, especially at the point where Freud meditates upon what he calls in French the “non arrivé.”Footnote ³¹ The moment in Freud’s text that Derrida captures appears by way of illustration of one of the ego’s defense mechanisms (of those “pathological methods of behaviour,” as Freud calls them, that lie “[b]etween repression and what may be termed the normal method of fending off what is distressing or unbearable”; Freud recalls the case of King Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Grenada at the end of the fifteenth century, who, hearing of the fall of his city of Alhama, “feels that this loss means the end of his rule. But he will not ‘let it be true,’ he determines to treat the news as ‘non arrivé.’ … By burning the letters and having the messenger killed he was still trying to show his absolute power.”Footnote ³²

Derrida has written copiously both about Freud’s testimony of the ambivalent workings of reason and about the possibility a letter might never reach its destination, but in Athens, he seems particularly moved to conjure up the specter of Freud as a witness. This is partly to echo Freud’s own confessed disavowal of and encounter with death expressed in the uncanny haunting by the memory of the father, but what Derrida homes in on is the brief instant in Freud’s analysis that accounts for that ultimate refusal, not to receive the news of one’s death, not to pay that debt. Again, one wonders, what would have Derrida made of the Greeks’ refusal to receive the news of the imminent default of their (if it is their) debt, to treat the austerity memorandum as a non arrivé?

Which brings us neatly to the untranslatable sentence and the final ghosts, both philosophers, both witnesses to philosophy’s living death, both guilty. Unlike modern-day Greeks, resistant and singularly unprepared to take the “medicine” prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (in the memorable phrase of its ex-president Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now departed), Socrates is remembered by Derrida here as “knowingly awaiting a death that had been promised him.”Footnote ³³ He lingers on the death of Socrates as the eventful period of a long delay:

Derrida fantasizes on Cape Sounion that he would photograph Socrates awaiting death,Footnote ³⁵ and later dreams of capturing him “as he speaks and claims to have foreseen the instant of his death”Footnote ³⁶ – unrealized negatives that further underline the impossibility of full testimony. This is a cliché, Socrates being Athens’s ghost-in-residence, patron saint of philosophers, whose absent presence would instantly trigger a whole spectrum of disturbances, from dread to filial piety. Derrida lingers on a particular detail from the story of Socrates’s long wait for death, which suggests an association with his reading of Freud: “And yet – a story of the eye – Socrates claimed to know it; he claimed to know when the theoria (ie. Athens’s pledge to Apollo of a yearly pilgrimage/procession to Delos, during which the city must be pure and not conduct any public execution) would end thanks to a dream or, more precisely, by means of a knowledge (savoir) based on a seeing (voir), the seeing of a vision (enupnion) come to visit him in the middle of the night in the course of a dream … My own dream telesympathized with his.”Footnote ³⁷ However, Derrida comes to Athens neither to bury Socrates nor to praise him – aware of the unavoidable encounter, he declares his difference, his respectful distance from that emblematic, definitive scene of death and its afterlife, armed with his own recalcitrant, idiomatic sentence, an uncanny formulation of filial piety:

Ultimately, what the untranslatability resists, though also partly incorporates (in the true manner of Freudian mourning), is the sense “of the great post-Socratic and sacrificial tradition of being-for-death, this ethics of dedication or devotion.”Footnote ³⁹ There are echoes here of Derrida’s reflection on the meaning of another “death sentence” in The Gift of Death: “[w]hat does donner la mort mean in French? How does one give oneself death [se donner la mort]?”Footnote ⁴⁰ but the redoubling of the “nous” complicates the subject–object relationship, rendering the ownership of the debt problematic. The translators of Athens, Still Remains opt for an English formulation that evokes both a “reflexive” and “reciprocal relation.”Footnote ⁴¹ David Wills in his review of the text sees the sentence as photographing the “passactive” relation of “originary mourning and indebtedness,” as well as “philosophising itself, philosophy captured in the necessity or presented with the responsibility of having to think death.”Footnote ⁴² Wills proposes “Photographer on the Acropolis” (fig. 9) as the “iconic photograph [that] photographs the sentence ‘we owe ourselves to death’ at the moment it comes to light.”Footnote ⁴³ The aporetic, uncanny doubling and troubling of the acceptance and refusal of death and the debt are realized in each still, as a “generalised punctum,” as Wills puts it,Footnote ⁴⁴ but also in formal terms. Formally, we see the repetition of the image of the Parthenon in the frame that freezes the “photographic waiting,” or the doubling of the name on the sign on Persephone Street (“ΟΔΟΣ ΠΕΡΣΕΦΟΝΗΣ/PERSEFONIS”). The picture-within-a-picture trope appears in the image of the Greek woman who contemplates a street painter’s attempt at reconstructing a local scene; and finally, photographs directly redouble or mirror each other, as in the flea market seller whose pose echoes the figure of the Silenus on the frieze at the Theatre of Dionysus.

Above all, Derrida concludes, it is what the sentence does, “decontextualized as a photograph,” aphoristic, oracular, an event that resists, that remains:

And perhaps one can see that innocence in those photographs of everyday life, where death (inanimate beings/dead flesh) and life harmoniously, busily coexist, as in the fish market seller handling his produce; and more arrestingly, the two brothers at Athinas Market facing Bonhomme’s camera directly.

For all his protestations, mantra-like invocations of ghosts and ruins-to-be, talk of death and debt, this spectator remains determined to capture in thought that instant of life that fends off the finite, that “inevitable moment – fatal like a click.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This may seem a mere signature move, the kind of “dazzling display of style” that for Vassilis Lambropoulos “philosophy exchanges with its (lost) gravity …, ultimately protecting its (reputation for) agility at a time it can no longer define its relevance,”Footnote ⁴⁷ but I would argue Derrida is on the offensive here. In claiming that way of looking, in the face of the debt, against the “supposed originarity of obligation, of Schuldigsein,” he defines the terms on which philosophy as political (metropolitical, cosmopolitical) discourse can still travel through Greece without de-animating it, without reducing it to ruin.

This is an oppositional move by Derrida, effected as he “photographs” another familiar ghost, fellow traveler to Greece Martin Heidegger, silently invoked in the extract cited earlier. Schuldigsein, being guilty, is dredged up from Heidegger’s Being and Time,Footnote ⁴⁸ but the reference to “the authority of this anteriority,” “the culture of loss and lack, and so on” snap Heidegger too; a delayed and still outstanding debt, this, owed by Derrida to Heidegger, photographed in the form of concealed details, such as in the reference just cited, but also in the obscured-through-translation echo of the two titles: demeure can also mean “sojourn” or Aufenthalt. Earlier, at the Kaisariani Monastery, Derrida had snapped at the German traveler whose footsteps he was following and who

And in Counterpath, a collection of fragmentary reflections on his experiences as a compulsive traveler, Derrida again invokes Heidegger (along with Blanchot), but as counter-companion:

Derrida’s jet-setting ways could not be in starker contrast to Heidegger’s ascetic reticence for travel, and the attendant sense of belonging to his native land is well documented and made meaningful in equal measure by both devotees and detractors – though mainly the latter. Stathis Gourgouris, for instance, finds Heidegger’s obsession with a “German Heimischsein (understood also as ‘being-at-home-in-the-nation’) and his desperate attempts to articulate the uncanny perspective of one’s foreignness within, facilitated by a certain cultural-political climate of enormous symbolic appeal, … expressed by an evident philosophical denial of cosmopolitan life.”Footnote ⁵¹ Gourgouris goes on to ground and gloss the particular connotations of “cosmopolitanism” in the German cultural context of the late 1920s and 1930s, dominated by “German-Jewish thinkers who essentially thought in Greek terms.”Footnote ⁵² Ultimately, Gourgouris argues, Heidegger, though not anti-Semitic per se, was “motivated by a class complex against (mostly Marxist) cosmopolitanism, whose paradoxical content consisted in significant ranks of hellenized Jews.”Footnote ⁵³

In Heidegger’s case, as with Freud (and Derrida too, who engaged closely with the Jewgreek/Greekjew conundrum), issues of anteriority, authority and ultimately truth are entangled with anxieties about cultural entitlement – and, more to the point, played out against a Greek backdrop, agonistically. As Derrida himself stated, “Most of my questions, reservations, perplexities, criticisms before Heidegger’s text, at one moment or another, concern in the end the Greek thing.”Footnote ⁵⁴ If Derrida stands in front of the “Greek thing” as a spectator who defers his dues to its antiquity, Heidegger simply refuses to see it, except when it fully appears in its originary form; or, put in Derridean terms, Heidegger approaches Greece in avoidance.Footnote ⁵⁵

In Sojourns, the account of his first, belated journey to Greece in 1962 (there were more to follow, with the final one in April 1967 for a lecture to the Athens Academy), Heidegger’s hide-and-seek with the “Greek element”Footnote ⁵⁶ is played out in a rhythm of anticipation and failed disclosure, against the inauthentic surround sound of the “unthoughtful (tourist) assault,” and punctuated by his insistent, almost hypnotic, questioning (fifty sentences end with a question mark).Footnote ⁵⁷ These, expressing desire and doubt and delivered didactically, generate an anticipatory dynamic, composed of equal amounts of deference and deferral:

In a series of false clearings, Corfu, Ithaca, Olympia, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Patmos (where he refused to disembark), even the Acropolis, Sounion and Delphi, fail to disclose the “proper element” – besieged as they tend to be by crowds of “people taking pictures.” “They throw their memories in the technically produced picture. They abandon without clue the feast of thinking that they ignore.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Throughout the journey, Heidegger relies on the words of Pindar, Aeschylus, Heracleitus and most consistently of Hölderlin, whose imaginary and thus most authentic (in Heidegger’s terms) “sojourn” in Greece he recites and consults as a vade mecum. Only on Delos and the temple of Afaia on Aegina does he accept the possibility of vision – and that, it becomes clear, because of the names, Δήλος – manifest, Α-φαία – unapparent, which contain in them evidence of α-λήθεια, conceived by Heidegger in his rather “coercive” or errant etymology,Footnote ⁶⁰ as “the unconcealed concealment.”Footnote ⁶¹ Denied vision, then, becomes the vision, not in the interpretable, representational or allegorical manner of a dream, but as a failed conjuration, an unheeded call, no less insistent or urgent in its “recollective” force, to quote Marc Froment-Meurice’s analysis of the Greek concept of knowledge:

For Heidegger, indeed, “What is coming only draws near and lasts for an insistent call.” He asks: “Are we today still heeding the call?” and then adds:

The idea of recollection contains a fundamental ambivalence, a doubleness such as we saw captured in Derrida’s reading of Bonhomme’s photographs. Jacques Rancière traces a similar effect in his definition of what he calls “the archaeomodern turn,” a kind of vanishing point for the perspective of modernity:

Derrida’s thought already inscribes the logic (and effect of return) in the encounter with the ruin, as he puts it in Memoirs of the Blind: “The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and figuration is eclipsed.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The “archaeomodern turn” in Heidegger’s ruminations, however, is cast in the form of an insistent questioning of the very possibility of return, suggesting a negative while maintaining the effect of a derealization, as Freud experienced on the Acropolis. The Parthenon, the ruins of Apollo’s temple in Delphi and on Delos, the temple of Afaia on Aegina are confirmed as “vacant lots,” retaining the power to awake the “sleeping meaning” of still inhabited words. Heidegger’s resistance and recollection proposes a prolonged farewell, or rather an almost ritualistic emptying, a vacation of the site of its weak, false echoes and apparitions. Only a sustained backward look can call up its recollective power and keep open “the field of anticipation.” Heidegger’s look proposes an impossible recuperation that could be seen as doubly focused. As Paul Duro argues,

Suspended thus between fiction and testimony, to echo Derrida’s reading of Blanchot, Heidegger’s “Greek thing” is a forced re-enchantment of the word, of the Greek word, of the poetic word. It is literally an “artificial archaism,” as Gadamer put it,Footnote ⁶⁷ or, in a Benjaminian context, the restoration of its aura, as if it were an artwork. In that sense, the “near” is “preserving its farness,” as in Heidegger’s definition of “The Thing”:

What remains, inscribed by this Heideggerian sleight of hand is the “weak messianic power,”Footnote ⁶⁹ as Walter Benjamin puts it, of the promise of an ever-receding world, conveyed in the double negative of the “not-yet” because “no-longer.” For Derrida, that power resides, remains with memory – as he put it in a late piece: “My first desire is not to produce a philosophical work or a work of art: it is to preserve memory”;Footnote ⁷⁰ and Greece in these accounts seems both a preserved memory and the privileged procedure of preservation itself. Or, to put it differently, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s sojourns conserve in the world’s memory bank, where re-collectors “poetically dwell,” the “Greek thing,” its debts always necessarily unpaid.

Psychoanalysis as a Site of Cultural Production

Psychoanalysis emerged at the core of what we can now look back on as an adversarial age, a general logic of suspicion. No stranger to controversy, Freud characterized the human condition in terms of power struggles of various forms. The discipline of psychoanalysis was a combat zone from its inception. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,Footnote ² Derrida has provided an extended elaboration of the sites of contention and struggle in Freud’s professional life and works. However, in spite of Freud’s struggles to legitimize the practice of psychology as a medical science, psychoanalysis as it exists today cannot be said to correspond to systematic or cumulative extension of his original ideas. Internal conflicts over Freud’s legacy have undone psychoanalysis as a unified science, which has resulted in divergent, competing schools and an entangled Web of intersecting terms that serve different conceptual schemas and carry different meanings.Footnote ³

Despite internal disintegration and diversification, the practice of psychoanalysis has not dissolved but persists, more, as Alan Stone suggests, in the form of an art closer to the humanities. Stone is not the only thinker who believes that, today, psychoanalysis appears as “an art form that belongs to the humanities and not to the natural sciences.”Footnote ⁴ This is an important issue: positioning the practice of psychoanalysis either as an art or as a medical science changes what psychoanalytic interpretation can yield. To view psychoanalysis as a medical science means anticipating causal explanations for psychopathologies, generating viable therapies for their relief. Let us recall that despite multiple nominations, Freud never won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. For a number of literary greats like Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann who admired him, the solution was to support Freud’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The only official distinction Freud obtained in the German-speaking world was the Goethe prize given to him in 1930. On what grounds can psychoanalysis be identified as a literary art? Stone places Freud in the company of great literary figures and philosophers who similarly shaped our “conception of the human condition without any systematic proofs of their contentions.”Footnote ⁵ Thus instead of obeying the explanatory rules of an empirical science, a psychoanalytic interpretation works like a good poem: in the words of Dylan Thomas, it “helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”Footnote ⁶

If we accept a broad distinction between explaining and understanding, psychoanalysis should be placed on the side of understanding. Psychoanalysis joins philosophy and literature in addressing the basic hermeneutic tasks that these disciplines share across specific differences. The primary aim of the hermeneutic arts, as opposed to the explanatory sciences, is to generate insight into human experience rather than knowledge about things, the aim condensed by Socrates’s injunction in the Phaedrus: “Know Thyself!”Footnote ⁷ To lay out the connection between psychoanalysis and the other hermeneutic arts, I would suggest that the shared hermeneutic task combines four interrelated elements. The first of these elements is a focus on language. Psychoanalysis shares with the hermeneutic arts a belief in the power of words and the assumption that language is the key for unlocking the human condition. This belief in the power of words is ancient, and is reflected in the Phaedrus, where Socrates, the infamous inquirer into the human psyche, is lured beyond the city walls, his habitual terrain for observing and questioning human beliefs, by Phaedrus’s promise to share an intoxicating text. The belief in the power of words is reflected in psychoanalysis’s famous “talking cure,” a phrase coined by hysteric Bertha Pappenheim. Freud was taken with the metaphor and it became something of a slogan for psychoanalytic treatment. The “talking cure” presupposes that linguistic anomalies reflect psychological troubles that can be alleviated by linguistic intervention.Footnote ⁸

The second element of the hermeneutic task is the insistence on the Other as a site of truth. Language will mediate a person’s encounter with an Other diversely conceived as the divine, the Impossible, the Unconscious, the Real, etc. The hermeneutic arts and psychoanalysis thus share an assumption that the Other remains unspeakable; it can be indicated elliptically through the words that cannot properly express it. The hermeneutic arts agree with Freud’s sense that the unfathomable Other is the site of “truths” about the human condition, whether we desire to grasp or escape them. This attribution holds across the diverse ways of positing the underlying truth about the shape of the human world seen less as “cosmos” or “chaos” than as Joyce’s apt term of a “chaosmos.”Footnote ⁹

The third element of the hermeneutic task is inspiration. Because the enigmatic Other is elliptically indicated, any true understanding of phenomena will emerge in a flash of inspiration that exceeds systematic orders of reasoning and knowledge accumulation. This assumption is not foreign to philosophers. In the opening paragraphs of Phaedrus, for example, Socrates supports the idea that we should accept and account for phenomena without relying solely on reason, which prefigures Socrates’s contention later in the text that love, a kind of madness beyond reason, should not be dismissed as monstrous. Instead, love should be recognized as the indication of divine inspiration that works through people (and therefore texts) as a passion, and opens humans to the confluence of truth, beauty and goodness.

The fourth element of the hermeneutic task is the creation of new insight. A partial glimpse of the Other, whether achieved through patient reasoning or inspiration, can afford people insight into the true nature of things. Those with insight have recognized something deeply profound that cannot but transform their existence. They, in turn, strive to express such insight in words or works. The insights inscribed in such works are confirmed and underwritten through intersubjective recognition, their power to generate insight in others and their capacity to engender practical transformation on a communal level. Such works therefore offer a broadly ethical education, covering any of the three aspects of the ethos: world, self and society.Footnote ¹⁰ Seeking insight into the human psyche, for example, Freud’s works incessantly circle around Socrates’s unanswerable question: am I “a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature”?Footnote ¹¹ Freud’s works share with literature the characteristic of inscribing and engendering powerful, albeit competing, life-changing ethical insights.

To sum up, the hermeneutic arts, whether literary, philosophical or psychoanalytic, share a mode of getting to the bottom of things that involves a focus on language, the insistence on the Other as a site of truth, the affirmation of inspiration and the task of generating insight. Keeping in sight the question of the connection between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, it is useful to recall Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is not a kind of psychoanalysis, which implies a parallel claim that a deconstructive reading does not do what a hermeneutic reading does in these four senses; or at least, not exactly. In order to address this contention, the relation between poetic and theoretical wisdom must be established.

Theoretical Wisdom and Poetic Wisdom

Taking psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic art raises the question of whether a psychoanalytic interpretation of an event is a matter of artistic inspiration, which would align it with what literary works can do, or objective explanation, which would align it with what theoretical works aim to do. This question mirrors a distinction in philosophy between theoretical wisdom and poetic wisdom, which is the site of the age-old quarrel between philosophers and poets. One may speak more generally about a quarrel between artists and theorists. Theoretical works are said to be distinguishable from artworks, as works that criticize artworks and offer a theoretical wisdom that supersedes poetic wisdom.

However, the quarrel between artists and theorists is characterized by a kind of ambiguous doublespeak. On the one hand, there is a fairly stereotypical tendency to grant classic poets and artists a privileged access to the Other as the site of “truth” via effortless inspiration. For example, in a gesture repeated by Freud, Socrates insists that, prior to the young, contemporary rhetorician and theoretician admired by Phaedrus, he has heard about love from older, wiser sources, “perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise; or, possibly, from a prose writer.”Footnote ¹² Freud, positioning himself as a mere theorist, repeatedly echoes this affirmation of poetic wisdom. As David Carroll remarks, “throughout his entire work … Freud follows the lead of poets; he tries to achieve ‘scientifically’ what they have achieved through their imagination.’”Footnote ¹³ Freud grants the poets intuitive insight into the shape of the world, the divine, human nature and ethical value that philosophers and psychoanalysts would stumble toward clumsily. Along with inspired access to the truth, academic theoreticians also recognize that art has the power to affect us profoundly. The spectator becomes lost in the encounter with a work, and without reflective distance, the text takes hold of and shapes the soul.Footnote ¹⁴

Having acknowledged the affective and educational power that lies in the hands of the poets and artists, theorists nonetheless have a deep concern about any claim to a privileged access to truth through inspiration. They argue for careful reflection on what enigmatic and powerfully affective works might teach, and favor the idea that more trustworthy insight is won through the distancing act of reflective, analytical explication. In this way, the theorists and philosophers often turn the tables on the poets and artists: poetic insight will only be recognized by a theoretician to the extent that it conforms to preestablished philosophies or psychoanalytic doctrines.

Freud was confident that psychoanalytical interpretations of literary or artistic works could be accomplished. These would disclose the enigma of a work’s powerful effect by showing that it had to do with the Oedipal structures that also form us as subjects. The Oedipus complex refers to intense, incestuous passions, positive and negative, directed toward parental figures. For Freud, Oedipal power dynamics describe the universal Truth about the human condition. All of our conversations on the couch can be tied back to them, and all cultural production, insofar as it reveals the Truth, reveals the working of the Oedipal mechanism.

We have turned full circle: Freud’s invention of his myth of Oedipalization is hardly a matter of mastering poetic wisdom using objective analytical thinking. Further, the Oedipal myth works at an affective level to powerfully captivate the contemporary psyche. This captivation is demonstrated when axial concepts like “narcissism” become so much a “naturalized” part of everyday discourse that their status as Freudian inventions is forgotten. Further, even though psychoanalysis encounters resistance around every corner – including resistances to the authority of Freud’s interpretations and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis – it responds by converting these resistances into confirmations of the Oedipal narrative. “Oedipus” becomes an enclosure within which everything is integrated.Footnote ¹⁵

The Western philosophical tradition is not immune to this kind of enclosure. Indeed, Socrates’s praise of inspiration served the philosopher’s later claim to convey insight regarding the nature of the soul by way of a mythical narrative. This suggests that the age-old quarrel between philosophers and poets is not really a denial of poetic wisdom in the name of analytical reflection. Rather, this is a competition for priority between opposing worldviews or “mythologies,” that is, discourses, ideologies, narratives, structures or models that tell us what we are like, why we are here, what is valuable and what to do.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, like the Freudian myth that ties the Other to Oedipus, we might speak of the Platonic myth that ties the Other to the divine cosmic order, and insists that this shines forth, however imperfectly, in the worldly and in texts as beauty, symmetry, harmony and so on. With these myths of ontological orderliness are juxtaposed counter-myths that, for example, tie the Other to chaos or absurdity, such as the metaphysics that underpins Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.Footnote ¹⁷

In short, within the hermeneutic arts, the adversarial distinction between theoretical and poetic wisdom cannot be sustained. Philosophies and psychoanalytical interpretations share with literary works the character of myth construction. Their basic aim is to make the Other present in a defining figure even if this is a figure of absurdity or absence. Precisely because he is sensitive to the dangers of ideological closure in any form of mythologizing, Derrida resists a seamless connection between deconstruction and the hermeneutic arts outlined earlier, including psychoanalysis and philosophy. He offers deconstruction as a different way of thinking so as to transform these arts from within.

The basis of Derrida’s resistance to mythologizing is the argument that whatever the mythology, its author or inventor will necessarily have veiled or excluded something crucial, unjustly relegated or elevated something in a hierarchical arrangement, reduced some necessary element to a supplement or suppressed moments of instability for the sake of securing presence. Cultural production, characterized in a traditional Western context by competition between mythologies, has therefore largely been caught up in what Derrida has named the “metaphysics of presence.”Footnote ¹⁸ “The metaphysics of presence” refers to “the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, essence, existence, substance, subject, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.”Footnote ¹⁹ Deconstruction attacks the metaphysics of presence under its multiple shapes, which includes, as Derrida argued repeatedly, the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis whenever it aimed at creating a science or a system.

Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

For Derrida, it is not only instructive but also ethically exigent to uncover where and how the elisions necessary for myth making transpire: inevitably, somebody or something will suffer from the violence of mythologizing. This deconstructive work is, without doubt, similar to the psychoanalytic work that uncovers repressed material, but there is an important difference. For Freud, different kinds of pathological constructions result when the ego represses, rejects or disavows events that cause traumatic, affective dissonance or incoherence. Pathological constructions stem from the ego’s desire to conform to or reconstruct a reality that affords the ego a measure of mastery and control. Freudian psychoanalysis unpacks these anomalous constructions in order to iron them out; the aim is to release the ego from paralyzing, irrational illusions of mastery and pseudo-control, and to remobilize the rational ego’s power to integrate events into a coherent, shared, socially approved narrative.

By contrast, Derrida’s efforts to undo theoretical constructions and uncover the elements that theorists elide, repress, reject or disavow in their efforts to achieve a coherent myth do not aim to iron things out. Based on the idea that perfect coherence is artificial, static and dangerous, the point of a deconstructive reading is to render a work more realistic – that is, more dynamic and open to contingency. For Derrida, the instability or anomaly in a situation of paradox or dilemma is not a sign of error but an indication of “truth.” Our obligation is to face up to the “truth” of our uncertainty and work out how to deal with meaning and ethical life within the strictures of this discomforting predicament. Therefore, to any suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis of philosophy Derrida’s negative response seems well grounded.Footnote ²⁰

And yet, in another twist, the move that places deconstruction and psychoanalysis in discursive competition means that psychoanalysis, because it looks so much like deconstruction, was never purely a matter of myth construction. This would make Freudian thinking a precursor to deconstruction. The justification for this about-face lies in the observation that besides being a notoriously authoritarian mythmaker, Freud was also a revolutionary genius, a fiend for jokes, who recognized obscurity and riddles, gave us the “primary process,” “kettle logic” and myriad other novel concepts that radically upset age-old ideas and pushed us to think in new ways. Consider Freud’s remark in a letter to Fliess of February 1, 1900: “For I am actually not a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”Footnote ²¹ Accordingly, it was to the adventurer in Freud that Derrida was consistently attracted. He saw in Freud a thinker open to chances, not just the myth constructor erecting a system. In repeating Freud differently through deconstruction, Derrida remains faithful to what was radical in Freud; this sometimes meant turning “the Other Freud” against Freudian mythologies.

Similarly, in Lacan’s famously proclaimed “return to Freud,” it was an “Other” Freud that was launched against the mainstream legacy of classical Freudianism. In minutely responsive dialogue with Freud’s texts, Lacan enters into the Freudian universe, inspects the intricate details bit by bit, loosening here, overturning there, disrupting the text, and prying concepts loose. This is a matter of working through Freud’s texts and not against them. Lacan submits to the concepts and then submits them to their own uncertainties and complexities by pressing them to follow through on what they open up. Both Derrida and Lacan, through intensive readings of Freud’s texts, aimed not to dismantle psychoanalysis as such but to open its texts to a future, to give psychoanalysis its chances. In this sense, the aims of deconstruction are compatible with the aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In that sense only, there would be seeds of truth in the suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis of philosophy.

We who come after should be wary of anything Derrida or Lacan had to say about the other’s projects and focus instead on what they tried to do. This caution, initially voiced by Barbara Johnson,Footnote ²² is particularly important given that, ironically, Derrida set the frame for an antagonistic encounter between deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis when Lacan’s analysis of Poe’s The Purloined LetterFootnote ²³ provoked him into writing a critical essay, “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” published first in Poétique, later reprinted in The Post Card.Footnote ²⁴

To detail the points of contact is too complex for a short discussion, but it is important to emphasize that Derrida and Lacan share a starting point. Acknowledging that the enigmatic Other necessarily transcends human understanding, both argue that anything that is given to us to interpret is more “event” than “object.” It is more correct to say that it “happens” than it “exists.” Neither Derrida nor Lacan makes the philosophical error of giving the transcendent a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder of the permanent possibility that any event can be interpreted differently. One must sidestep Derrida’s remarks about Lacan’s multilayered treatment of the “letter” as a metaphor for the event or the Real in his analysis of Poe’s The Purloined Letter.Footnote ²⁵

Without claiming to do justice to Lacan’s encounter with Poe’s The Purloined Letter and Derrida’s intricate critique, it is productive to consider briefly what each tried to do in the name of producing intensive readings. Lacan saw in Poe’s story an unintentional illustration of the intricate intersubjective dynamics, driven by desire for mastery and power, that are always occasioned by an event. Lacan shares with Derrida the conception of the event as an enigmatic Other that necessarily transcends human understanding and requires interpretative engagement. Neither makes the philosophical error of giving the event a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder of the permanent possibility that any event can be interpreted differently. An event, therefore, is always traumatic in the sense that it transgresses an existing status quo, and both cannot and must be accommodated within its bounds. In Poe’s story, the purloined letter, whose contents are never divulged, provides an analogy for the traumatic, transgressive event. Lacan extended this analogy to language, arguing that it applied in principle to any sign. For Lacan, the letter allegorizes the itinerary of a signifier whose signified remains inaccessible. Even though the letter has no inherent, essential content to analyze, the letter’s presence as a transgression has effects. Part of Lacan’s multifaceted aim was to draw psychoanalytic insight for training analysts regarding the letter’s effects. The most important of these have to do with the strategies of “hide and seek” played out between analysts and analyses in the interpretative situation.

Poe’s tale articulates three intersubjective scenes from which Lacan draws psychoanalytic insight by asking such questions as: Who remains blind? Who is protected from analytic insight? Who wishes to hide/show the transgression? Who is exposed to whom? Who “sees” (understands) what? In the first scene, the King, who embodies the law and draws his power from his status quo position characterized by ideological closure, remains blind to the very possibility of legitimate transgression. He, therefore, cannot see or interpret what happens. The Queen represents the discomfort of transgressive insight. In her awareness that the status quo lacks and transgression is possible, she either risks her own safety or threatens the status quo. The letter, which she hides out in the open by placing it face down on the table, is a symptom of transgressive insight. A symptom is produced by the desire to simultaneously hide and show a trauma. The Minister represents the power of analytical insight. Astutely assessing the situation, seeing the King’s oblivion and the Queen’s discomfort, the Minister understands that the Queen’s unwillingness to risk her safety will render her impotent. The Minister may act in favor of any of the three subjects. His decision will have the effect of changing the power dynamics of the intersubjective scene. He decides to steal the letter, in the hope of profiting from its possession. Under the Queen’s silent gaze, he switches her letter for one of his own. This act repositions the letter, which, in turn, has the effect of reconfiguring the intersubjective power relations. In his analysis of the second scene, Lacan introduces a second major theme, pertaining to language, which draws on his articulation of the four discursive positions that condition the interpretation of an event/sign. The Queen’s unwillingness to openly transgress the status quo ties her to its discursive conditions. She operates now from the King’s position of absolute power to command allegiance. That the letter must be recovered is an imperative that is obeyed by the Prefect of police through loyalty rather than reason. The Prefect commands the resources of rational discourse to serve the master. Lacan is quick to demonstrate its limitations in the analytic situation. The Prefect and his detectives never find the letter because they impose rational assumptions concerning how the letter must be hidden, and these condition the rules of their search. The Minister retrogresses to the discourse of transgressive insight that previously rendered the Queen impotent to act. He displays the same vigilant anxiety of the one who hides the transgression out in the open, and remains, therefore, in indecisive limbo. Dupin is introduced at this point as the analyst whose sensitivity to poetic wisdom enables him to grasp the complexities of the situation and who is able, therefore, to act decisively. In the third scene, the letter is again repositioned. Dupin, drawing on his insight into the Minister’s mental process, prepares an exact double of the stolen letter and strategically reverses the first theft. As an analyst who has transcended the status quo, Dupin is not drawn into the aporetic power dynamics of paranoid master and transgressive hysteric. He does not, in turn, hide the letter in the hope of profiting from it. Instead he profits by halting the circulation of the letter and presenting it to the Prefect of police, for a sum.

May one propose Dupin as a role model for aspiring analysts? Lacan affirms Dupin’s analytical astuteness and exteriority to intersubjective power dynamics. But the task of an analyst is ethical. In this respect, Dupin falls short in many respects, including his stance of cynical externality, which enables him to profit from the status quo, without challenging it. Further, not content with the Minister’s inevitable downfall, Dupin is animated by the wish to settle an account with him and acts to ensure that the Minister will recognize him as the instrument of his downfall. In the fake letter he leaves in the place of the Queen’s original, Dupin quotes lines by Crébillon that will identify him to the Minister. In this act of egotistical one-upmanship, Dupin exposes himself to the all-seeing gaze of the author, Poe, or of his readers, who are in the position of the psychoanalyst.

In “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” Derrida does not directly address Lacan’s aim to elucidate intricate intersubjective dynamics for training analysts, but takes Lacan to task for tacitly resorting to about eight of the most deconstructible motifs in philosophy in his textual production. Derrida argues that these motifs necessarily support Lacan’s basic insistence that “a letter always arrives at its destination,” which goes hand in hand with the claim that the letter cannot be divided. As Barbara Johnson indicated, it is not very difficult to demonstrate point for point the injustice of Derrida’s criticisms. However, to quibble over the proper interpretation of a multivocal aphorism such as “a letter always reaches its destination” or “a letter cannot be divided” is to miss what both Derrida and Lacan aim to demonstrate regarding interpretation. Instead, one may produce a productive reading of this encounter by following Johnson’s lead and resisting the temptation of egotistical one-upmanship. In outline Johnson argues that Derrida produces a violent reading of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” that flattens out the ambiguities in Lacan’s text. She attributes this violence to a rhetorical strategy that aims to demonstrate performatively how the textual effects of Lacan’s cavalier importation of metaphysically loaded terms subverts what he is overtly trying to demonstrate. Due to the metaphysical baggage still carried by the terms Lacan uses subversively, Derrida demonstrates how easy it is to produce a relatively coherent “metaphysical” reading of Lacan’s text that binds up multiple reinforcing motifs such as circular return, indivisibility, phonocentrism, phallocentrism, and so on. Derrida demonstrates performatively that Lacan, ironically, did not carefully follow his own advice to remain vigilant concerning the textual effects of the letter and to astutely attend to its “truth” defined in terms of its effects rather than in terms of adequacy. Importantly, however, a criticism of Lacan for a textual performance that is inconsistent with what he wishes to say tacitly grants that the Lacanian discourse itself cannot conform to the metaphysics of presence. This returns us to the final lesson of the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” which is a caution against falling, along with Dupin, into the trap of adversarial one-upmanship, which tempts even the most astute analysts.

Lacan and Derrida both go to great lengths to show in what sense the languages we have developed to mediate events are in themselves complex. Derrida writes that “they simultaneously incline toward increasing the reserves of random indetermination as well as the capacity for coding and overcoding or, in other words for control and self-regulation. Such competition between randomness and code disrupts the very systematicity of the system while it also, however, regulates the restless, unstable interplay of the system.”Footnote ²⁶ It is essential to hear in this citation both Derrida’s persistently repeated rejection of adversarial “either/or” thinking and his alternative “both/and” way of thinking initially articulated this in the term of différance.Footnote ²⁷ Subsequently it accrued various nicknames, the clearest of which is formalized in his essay Aporias as the “plural logic of the aporia.”Footnote ²⁸

Derrida articulates three forms of the aporia, the Greek term for an unpassable path or dead end. First aporia: When we face an enigmatic event, Derrida argues, it is necessary for practical purposes to try to secure its meaning. Such an “economic” interpretation of an enigmatic event is only possible if we prioritize codes, laws, regularities, structures, and so forth and protect the interpretation by dismissing discrepancies or anomalous bits of empirical evidence. The aporia lies in the reversal by which the attempt to secure an interpretation absolutely is in fact to render it insecure. Since no single, static, supposedly complete interpretation does justice to the complexity of things, events inevitably overtake such interpretations, leaving them standing as dangerously ideological rigidities.

As Lacan would repeat, human psychological development requires a child to secure an identity by constructing an “economic” self-interpretation in the form of a fundamental fantasy. Answering questions of relation like “What am I to You?” or “What are You to me?,” the fundamental fantasy offers a first determination of how I am related to the terrifying and attractive significant Other. Backed by rudimentary oppositional thinking, the fundamental fantasy offers a self-interpretation in terms of a limited number of possible intersubjective power positions, which supports habitual patterns of interaction. However, a contingent, enigmatic event (metaphorically the purloined letter) produces power-effects depending on where it is positioned in the complex network of those who are structurally related to it and to each other. Things change, depending on whose hands the letter lands in, who knows what about it, who is blind to what about it and who is related to whom. The letter as “event” flutters into circulation as the epitome of chance. Our habitual response to chance is to try to control its effects and rigidly protect our subject positions under the illusion that they afford us mastery, but we only create other chances for interventions that endanger us in these positions.

Second aporia: Lacanian therapeutic work involves helping people traverse the fundamental fantasy. But, in line with the complexity of the plural logic of the aporia, this working through that opens up habitually structured relations must not risk the schizophrenic opposite extreme at which self-interpretations break down, leaving only arbitrary reactions to utter contingencies. Derrida, likewise, is wary of the “aneconomic” extreme, which leads to a second dead end. He acknowledges that there is always an equally valid and necessary interpretation of the same event. It will be construed in terms of random indetermination, of dynamism and diversity. Such an “aneconomic” interpretation aims to do justice to the dynamic multiplicity of forces at play in every event. However, a fully “aneconomic” interpretation of an event is a contradiction in terms. When an interpretation becomes too inventive, loose, playful, or over-complicated, it fails to do justice to the event for it misses the legitimate regularities, patterns and trends that enable us to make the general theoretical propositions essential for deciding what to do. The aporia of this approach lies in the reversal by which too much dynamism makes it impossible to move.

In sum, both economic and “aneconomic” interpretations are aporetic in the sense that the closer either gets to its perfection, respectively of absolute systematic modeling or chaotic randomness, the more likely it is to auto-deconstruct by opening up to its opposite. The violent imposition of a rigid code of laws creates the conditions for its violent overthrow. Equally, absolute refusal to configure codes and laws leaves people vulnerable to the imposed strictures of brute force. In a more complicated articulation that brings the two together, one may argue that if one chooses absolutely one side of the economic/“aneconomic” pair, the other side is lost. Yet, because they are interdependent – one is the necessary condition for the other – this means also to lose the original choice. To the question of how one might make a choice between these opposing approaches to interpretation, Derrida’s answer is that the choice is impossible. Economic and “aneconomic” senses of an event form a double bind; they are tied in such a knot that loosening one side tightens the other, in a movement that Derrida calls ‘‘stricture.’’Footnote ²⁹ This is the shape of the third aporia. Derrida names the third aporia “the impossible.”Footnote ³⁰

In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak offers a detailed, performative example of how Derrida’s third aporia shapes the problem of speaking and otherness.Footnote ³¹ Briefly outlined, she accepts that, as Derrida insists, we must speak.Footnote ³² Absolutely “aneconomic” refusal to speak simply means a paralyzing exclusion from the human condition. But can everyone speak? Regarding the subaltern (the other who is subjugated), this question engages Derrida’s third aporia. The condition that makes it possible for the subaltern to speak is the very condition that eradicates the subaltern as such. Since speaking includes being heard, to speak at all, a subaltern speaker must form words and thoughts according to the dictates of the dominant discourse within which she wants to be heard. But by this very act of “speaking,” she is of course, no longer speaking as a subaltern.

Derrida argues that we face the plural logic of the aporia in all aspects of human life and that there is no way of resolving its reversals, double binds and circularities.Footnote ³³ This would not be something to bemoan. The form of the double bind offers us breathing space, that is, freedom from the ideological stasis of any preprogrammed economic stance or paralysis of an “aneconomic” stance.

If language is the key to unlock the human condition, then sensitivity to this aporetic complexity transforms the task of contemporary literature as much as that of philosophy and psychoanalysis. The shared task of the hermeneutic arts becomes to address the question of how to get along with “the plural logic of the aporia” that will never be resolved. For Derrida, any hope would lie in the Other. By nature, the identified territories of dominant discourses have margins; they always open up “secondary or marginal areas.”Footnote ³⁴ Further, the necessary violation that divides the central from the marginal sparks the resistance from the margins that may reopen a discourse to its chances.

A good example can be found in Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (1988). Gates argues that Africans dislocated by the slave trade were forced to use the language – Standard English – of a people who defined them as less than human. To use the language at all was necessarily to pay lip service, at least, to the values inscribed in it, the values of white superiority, thereby to entangle oneself in an aporia; as a consequence, to speak is to engage in a process of self-destruction.

Instead of resulting in paralysis, however, a black vernacular, a resistant, subversive manner of speaking, developed in the margins created by Standard English. Words and phrases were subversively doubled so that literal utterances that “signified” in Standard English would “Signify” in black vernacular. This constituted an inventive practice of saying something Significant, without literally saying it, because it lay behind a literal utterance that signified something else. Further, as Gates’s attempt to document this practice indicates, if this practice of subversion from within through “saying without saying” were to remain an internalized secret code tied to the specific context of slavery, it would become extinct in succeeding generations. However, the work of contemporary authors is not only to recover and document the ways in which the double-edged practice of “Signifying” interlaces languages in ways that transform both. Its task is also to learn from the art of “Signifying” a transformative practice that can be applied in new contexts. This kind of inventive mobility, practiced “out in the open” so to speak, requires openness on all sides to the genuinely transformative engagement that is, perhaps, the fundamental condition for ethical interpretation.

Derrida insists that we have an obligation to brave the anxiety and the burden of responsibility associated with the double bind, and face ethical, political or conceptual paradoxes and dilemmas that can neither be overcome nor evaded, but must be worked through interminably. The hermeneutic task that unifies contemporary literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis is to teach humans to surrender the desire for mastery and control, and open our future to the chances, unimaginable at present, for something other than the power struggle. Although this task, formalized as getting along with the plural logic of the aporia, is easy to grasp at an intellectual level, it is extremely difficult to marshal the will to practice it.

The “shocking truth” that psychoanalysis reveals is that people often do not want the therapeutic intervention it offers: they do not want to be healed. The same may be said of deconstruction. Demanding the secure authority of an irrational master, people resist the ethical goals of the hermeneutic arts – autonomy, creativity, self-reliance, responsibility. Many will suffer, even desire, their neuroses and psychoses, for fear of releasing the power of dialogical engagement, which requires the risk and responsibility of deep, honest self-reflection. Thus, in conclusion, one can say that the Derridean intervention facing psychoanalysis was timely but also out of its time: in fact, it is still to come. We who come after Derrida in time are, at least, no longer going after Derrida in virulent antagonism, but we are still chasing after Derrida in the hope of catching up.

Since the beginning(s) – and by “beginning(s),” I do not mean only in Jacques Derrida’s philosophical body of work but also in his life, what in “Otobiographies” he would later call, with no small irony, “‘my-life,’ the ‘I-live’”Footnote ² – the problem of sexual difference was to play a part for “Jackie,” someone whose first name had a feminine flexional ending, as well as a childish diminutive derived from “Jackie Coogan,” a.k.a. “The Kid,” the American child hero of the silver screen made famous by Charlie Chaplin’s film. As is well known, Derrida changed his first name upon entering the public sphere, because he found that “Jackie was not possible as the first name of an author.”Footnote ³ “Jackie” lacked the authority, the legitimacy and ultimately the virility required to affix one’s signature to a philosophical oeuvre. Derrida thus opted for “Jacques,” “a semi-pseudonym” that he calls “very French, Christian, simple,” even as he admits that this gesture “erased more things than [he] could say in a few words.”Footnote ⁴ Without going as far Peter Benson, who argues that Derrida “has therefore conducted his whole professional life in a form of drag, donning a new name for his public persona,”Footnote ⁵ the fact remains that this decision is by no means negligible in the construction – or deconstruction – of an “identity.” Moreover, “Jackie” rhymed with the secret Jewish first name of “Élie” that had been bestowed by his mother, Esther; it was never recorded in the civil registry and belatedly discovered by Derrida. Derrida discloses this “revelation” in “Circumfession,” an essay that, much like Glas (1974) and The Postal Card (1980), is unquestionably one of his most adventurous texts, because it lays bare the question of sexuality in the life of a philosopher (all of these words imply invisible quotation marks, of course). Discovering the gift of the (first) name, something of the relation to sexual difference then compelled Derrida in all of its paradoxically essential ambivalence, equivocation and instability.

In the film Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida declares all at once his interest in the topic of the sex lives of philosophers: “Their sex lives … I would like to hear them speak about their sexual lives … Because it’s something they don’t talk about. I’d love to hear something they refuse to talk about. Why do philosophers present themselves asexually in their work? Why have they erased their private lives from their work?”Footnote ⁶ This is not a joke as one might think but a most serious question: indeed, Derrida makes the apparent asexuality of philosophical discourse in Kant, Hegel, Levinas and Heidegger a true focus for his work, and not simply a secondary theme. More than any philosopher before him, Derrida has insisted on a re-sexualization of philosophical or theoretical discourse, especially each time he would discern a “strategy of neutralization”Footnote ⁷ aimed at erasing sexual difference.

The stakes invested in the “feminine,” a notion that cannot be reducible to the opposition between man and woman, has remained at the core of Derrida’s embodied thinking, as he underlines it in “Geschlecht II”: “Thinking is not cerebral or disincarnate.”Footnote ⁸ This insistence over determines the importance that he always grants to the question of sexual difference in his philosophical work not only in its conceptual regime but also in its textual strategies; this appears most eloquently in his polylogues,Footnote ⁹ those polyvocal, polylocal and polysexual discourses that he puts forward in a number of essays (“Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” Memoirs of the Blind, Feu la cendre, “Right of Inspection,” “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” to name but a few). These texts stage a performative scenography enacting a desire not to remain at the level of the division of “sex(d)uality” but on the contrary to multiply and divide the innumerable, infinitely differentiating voices woven in each sex and text. Derrida alluded to this weaving of voices in Safaa Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida (one can note that this film stressed much more the question of sexual difference than the American DerridaFootnote ¹⁰), by stating to which point a constant vigilance should be exerted against the sexual repression and violence exerted on women wherever their voices are at risk of being muted, censored or prohibited. The essay in Veils, in which Derrida announced that by pulling on the string of this single word, the whole fabric of culture would follow (“to touch ‘that’ which one calls ‘veil’ is to touch everything. You’ll leave nothing intact, safe and sound, neither in your culture, nor in your memory, nor in your language, as soon as you take on the word ‘veil.’ As soon as you let yourself caught up in it, in the word, first of all the French word, to say nothing yet about the thing, nothing will remain, nothing will remain anymore”Footnote ¹¹), anticipated in a remarkable manner what we have seen happen in politics about the issue of the veil, an issue that has become increasingly loaded and tense in the past twenty years.

While it is difficult and insufficient, as always in Derrida’s work, to attempt a thematization of the question of sexual difference in his thinking, important nodal points have nevertheless marked the often controversial reception of his meditations by diverse feminist currents on both sides of the Atlantic since the seventies. I would list here a series of issues: the problem of generalized fetishism (KofmanFootnote ¹²), gender performativity (ButlerFootnote ¹³), the rereading of the figure of Antigone (ChanterFootnote ¹⁴), the question of hospitality as rethought from the point of view of the feminine (StillFootnote ¹⁵), the political debates between Anglo-American feminists and deconstruction (ElamFootnote ¹⁶), the ethical dimension of feminism and the deconstruction of the law (CornellFootnote ¹⁷), debates with queer theory and transgender studies over the concepts of embodiment, drag as paradigm for performativity and subversion of gender, the political implications of speech-act theory and performativity (Deutscher).Footnote ¹⁸ Without having to analyze in detail this complex reception that has gone over several generations now (if Derrida’s positions have been criticized violently by some feminist theoreticians, they met with frank success with gay and queer studiesFootnote ¹⁹), it is necessary to recall what Derrida meant to elaborate in his first texts through concepts like the “hymen” (“The Double Session”) and “double invagination” (“Living on: Borderlines”). Very early, we find a new way of thinking sexual difference that, while apparently borrowing these figures from the feminine body, in fact radically questions any appeal to anatomy and to essentialism. What is rejected is that

Much like literature, the “feminine,” rather than Femininity, is thus associated in Derrida’s writings with figures of displacement, of the “other” or the stranger, with “fleeting beings” passing through all borders, beings without an oikos or a place to settle, as suggested by this passage from Fichus in which Derrida states: “And language will be my subject,”Footnote ²¹ echoing the opening remark of Spurs: “However – it is woman who will be my subject.”Footnote ²² He adds: “The specimen exhibits for this defenseless being, this power-deprivation, this vulnerable Ohnmächtigkeit, can be the dream, or language, or the unconscious, just as well as the animal, the child, the Jew, the foreigner, or the woman.”Footnote ²³

What is even more significant is that Derrida attacks the “concept of the concept” (as matrix and conception) by critiquing this determination of sexual difference following binary oppositions (feminine/masculine, bisexuality, homosexuality/heterosexuality and so on) that always return to the same idea, the law of the proper and of propriety; it is this “prescriptive order” that he wants to dismantle: “It is that order that a problematics of woman and a problematics of difference, as sexual difference, should disrupt along the way.”Footnote ²⁴ By questioning the anatomical, biological and anthropological determinations that are supposed to found sexual difference, Derrida’s deconstruction attacks the phallocentric system in its very root, which triggers a cascade of effects at all levels, including the philosophical (affecting all metaphysical presuppositions, including the ontic-ontological one), ethical, sociopolitical, pragmatic and practical ones.

Since the famous 1972 conference on “Nietzsche today?” during which Derrida astonished his audience when he declared in a panel: “I would like to write like a woman as well, and I keep trying,”Footnote ²⁵ since Spurs and Glas, up to the series of essays entitled “Geschlecht”Footnote ²⁶ that are devoted to Heidegger and to this untranslatable term (“it can be translated by sex, race, species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy, community”Footnote ²⁷), Derrida wonders whether the question of sexual difference is only a “regional question in a larger order which would subordinate it first to the domain of a general ontology, subsequently to that of a fundamental ontology and finally to the question of the truth of being itself.” He adds, and this is my main focus: “Indeed, it may no longer even be a question.”Footnote ²⁸ This strategic move – and the question of strategy is indeed crucial hereFootnote ²⁹ – is equally at the core of his reading of Heidegger, in which the issue concerning “Dasein as such [which] belongs to neither of the two sexes” is to see that it “does not mean that its being is deprived of sex. On the contrary, here one must think of a predifferential, or rather a predual, sexuality – which does not necessarily mean unitary, homogeneous, or undifferentiated.”Footnote ³⁰ Here, Derrida pushes Heidegger’s argument to its final consequence, opening in the apparent neutrality or asexualization of Geschlecht the path of another thinking of sexual difference “that would not yet be sexual duality, difference as dual”:

At stake here is the possibility of thinking sexual difference without resorting to negativity, by reverting to the dispersion and multiplication of Geschlecht (hence without glossing over its polysemy, as Heidegger still tries to do by reducing it to a primordial simplicity or unity); sexual difference would as yet “not be sealed by a two,” not “typed by opposition or by duality.” Can it be “Not yet sealed or no longer sealed?”Footnote ³² Derrida asks. Peggy Kamuf stresses this point in her commentary of “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference”:

Twenty years after Geschlecht I was first published in French in 1983, Jean-Luc Nancy unhesitatingly reaffirmed this sexualization of différance in The “There Is” of Sexual Relation in which he asserted that “Derrida’s différance must therefore be sexual. That is to say, ontological difference is sexual, and vice versa, which no doubt affects being in its beingness [étance ou estance].”Footnote ³⁴ Then if one hears already in “différance” the syntagm of “sexual difference,” one should also keep in mind this definition of “deconstruction,” a definition that, unlike the four or five other definitions given by Derrida, has rarely been commented:

This “greatest possible pleasure” thus lies at the core of Derrida’s reading of sexual difference. Beyond the “decorum of all codes” and gender norms, he dreams of a “multiplicity of sexually marked voices,” of an “indeterminable number of blended voices, this mobile of non-identified sexual marks whose choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual,’ whether he be classified as ‘man’ or as ‘woman’ according to the criteria of usage.”Footnote ³⁶ It is this “joyous disturbance,” a “risky turbulence” escaping all “assignation à résidence” and identity surveillance that he wishes to save through what he calls the “chance” of a dance whereby places are exchanged until they “can no longer be recognized.”Footnote ³⁷ By not answering to a topological or economical question, by differing these questions and most of all the question itself (what is a woman? what does woman want?), by resisting the order that turns truth values or femininity into objects of knowledge, Derrida seeks the “invention of an other inscription, one very old and very new, a displacement of bodies and places that is quite different.”Footnote ³⁸ “Différence sexuelle,” an idiomatic French syntagm that resists translation (as noted by Anne Emmanuelle BergerFootnote ³⁹), thus leads to “the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.”Footnote ⁴⁰

*

That said, topics such as “Derrida and the Feminine” remain sensitive issues in the Derridean canon. They are to be considered, as is always the case with “différance” (which is neither a thing nor a concept), “in context,” and with caution, for such questions are deeply enmeshed “in social activism – feminism, race or national or cultural politics –,” which requires us to be “wary about so-called identity politics,”Footnote ⁴¹ as Penelope Deutscher duly notes. It is indeed difficult, when reflecting on the word “feminine,” to avoid the complex network of meanings it inevitably conjures up (like femininity, sexual difference, feminism, gender norms, familial genealogy). From the outset, Derrida’s work has dealt with the deconstruction of phallocentrism, putting “this question at the center of the philosophical discourse,”Footnote ⁴² as he somewhat equivocally says himself. But if Derrida’s contribution to this issue remains decisive, it is not only because of the analyses of Rousseau’s “dangerous supplement” and of the “incest/insect” motif in Of Grammatology, not only because of notions like hymen or double invagination, or of the original way of thinking sexual and generic gender and genre in “The Law of Genre,”Footnote ⁴³ or, later still, of his discussion of genius (a word normally masculine in French but here parsed as a feminine for Hélène Cixous, just as she had invented for Derrida a masculine ant, “le fourmi” instead of the correct feminine word la fourmi, in “Ants”Footnote ⁴⁴), a concept that comes precisely to block genealogies – no, if Derrida’s contribution remains decisive in order to think sexual difference, it is above all because of his position as a reader, that is insofar as he reconfigures the concept of reading as such, as for example in “Heidegger’s Hand”: “For I never ‘criticize’ Heidegger without recalling that that can be done from other places in his own text. His text could not be homogeneous and is written with two hands, at least.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is such an oscillation that has been privileged in his readings since Spurs, whether he discusses Genet, Ponge, Nietzsche or Heidegger. Sarah Kofman was one of the first commentators who noted that this oscillation was Derrida’s distinctive mark, a signature resisting any stabilization in Glas (“My excitement [émoi] is the oscillation”Footnote ⁴⁶). One can recall here the warning Derrida gave about Spurs and its counter-readings isolating the most violently anti-feminine declarations of Nietzsche, for the issue is that of the same “perverse” effects that erase sexual differences by replaying “difference [la différance] as an oppositional duality [which] tends to homogenize” and “delete all sexual differences”Footnote ⁴⁷:

If we had to single out one feature that we would inherit and keep forever “after Derrida,” it would be the provocative law that he nearly formalized in his seminal interview with Derek Attridge, when he stated that “sometimes the texts which are most phallocentric or phallogocentric in their themes … can also be, in some cases, the most deconstructive.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He continues: “There are sometimes more deconstructive resources … in some texts by Joyce or Ponge, who are often phallocentric or phallogocentric in appearance, than in some texts which, thematically, are theatrically ‘feminist.’”Footnote ⁵⁰ Or again:

This warning was recognized as a “potential contribution by Derrida to a feminist practice”Footnote ⁵² by many feminist philosophers, critics and theorists, however critical they may have been of other aspects of Derrida’s approach. “The suggestion seems to be that any feminism should be accompanied with a simultaneous effort to deconstruct feminism. This can be a constructive contribution to feminism.”Footnote ⁵³

Nevertheless, the relationship between Derrida and feminist discourses (especially Anglo-American ones) has been tense, to say the least. Even as he was denouncing the repression of women “perpetuated in the philosophical groundings of phallocentrism,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and declaring his alliance with feminine culture, Derrida also expressed “reservations about some manifestations of feminism,”Footnote ⁵⁵ as, in his eyes, “to simply invert the hierarchy, or for women to appropriate the most negative aspects of what’s conventionally viewed as masculine behavior benefits no one.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Derrida warned feminists against the risk of legitimation of women’s studies, which threatens to make them the guardians of the law once recognized and sanctioned by universities. Derrida evinced skepticism facing an axiomatic notion like that of progress, and he even took some distance from the very idea of “liberation” insofar as it remains “at once punctuated by determinable stages and commanded by an ultimately thinkable telos, a truth of sexual difference and femininity, etc.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Derrida went as far as to call this representation of progress an idealization or even a “sinister mystification”Footnote ⁵⁸ because it carried in its wake metaphysical values such as reappropriation, autonomy, mastery, sovereignty and so on. For Derrida, this moment of the feminist “revolution” is nothing but a specular reversal, a repetition working from within the phallocentric tradition that it wanted to subvert. For his part, he called upon a conception of history:

Thus one will not be surprised that notorious passages like this one, from Spurs:

or the statement that “there is no place for woman”Footnote ⁶¹ should have been received as provocations by certain feminist theoreticians. Derrida was aware of the risks created by a position that he himself described as neither anti-feminist nor feminist. Such an oscillation between “neither” and “nor” could not but trigger resistance: “Feminists were divided in their response. Some saw considerable potential in a deconstructive feminism, while others were caustic about Derrida, perceiving an appropriation of feminist reflection.”Footnote ⁶² If, in a first moment, feminist critique profited from the deconstruction of sexual difference (notably with feminist psychoanalytic critics, Marxist feminists and feminist deconstructors such as Shoshana Felman, Peggy Kamuf, Jane Gallop, Gayatri Spivak and Barbara Johnson), the gap between feminist critique and deconstruction widened for reasons well summed up by Elizabeth Meese, who evokes “the issues underlying the fears feminism and deconstruction have of one another”Footnote ⁶³:

The relations between deconstruction and feminism (two terms that should always be used in the plural) generated many misunderstandings – but let us not forget that this is a positive concept for Derrida, because a dispute (a différend) can keep open the possibility of a critical dialogue to come and reveal historical and cultural differences in the translation of philosophical concepts, as Anne-Emmanuelle Berger has shown in The Queer Turn in Feminism.Footnote ⁶⁵ One can note that the term “gender” was rarely used by Derrida, as Peggy Kamuf has underlined.Footnote ⁶⁶ Derrida has also been taken to task for having avoided to read closely women philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, a reproach that is not without ground if one recalls the almost total absence of discussions with philosophers like Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler or Élisabeth de Fontenay in his work. As Deutscher notes, if Derrida comments on Madame de Maintenon in Given Time and on Hannah Arendt in History of the Lie (as well as in several seminars, including the seminar on “Forgiving and perjuring”), properly philosophical discussions with feminine philosophical authors remain rare. With women writers, if one excepts Hélène Cixous, few belong to Derrida’s privileged corpus; he names George Eliot, George Sand, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and calls them “immensely great modern writers,”Footnote ⁶⁷ but questions the fact that their texts are “simply non- or anti-phallogocentric”Footnote ⁶⁸ and never devotes a full-fledged study to them.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, one should also stress the crucial role that Derrida grants to figures like that of Echo, of Dibutades (Memoirs of the Blind), of Gradiva (Archive Fever), of Portia in The Merchant of Venice (“What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”), of Molly Bloom’s Yes-Laughter (Ulysses Gramophone). One can also think of his fruitful collaborations with authors like Anne Dufourmantelle (Of Hospitality), Élisabeth Roudinesco (For What Tomorrow…) or Catherine Malabou (Counterpath), and with artists such as Camilla Adami, Colette Deblé, Marie-Françoise Plissart, Micaëla Henich and Safaa Fathy.

But above all, and this is what is most important, Derrida has never stopped taking into account “the most lethal explosions of a violence that is inevitably ethnico-religious … women in particular are singled out as victims (not ‘only’ of murders, but also of the rapes and mutilations that precede or accompany them).”Footnote ⁷⁰ His most essential political contribution to the question of the feminine is to be found without any doubt in Politics of Friendship, in which he “offered a reading of the exclusion of women from ideals of political association,”Footnote ⁷¹ and probed “the relationship between the political bond and the metaphors of fraternity, the constitutive exclusion of the daughter and sister from the political”Footnote ⁷²:

In Of Hospitality, he returns to the figure of Antigone via another angle than in Glas, that is by broaching the issue of mourning and the tears of Œdipus’s daughters; in another session of the seminar on “Hostipitality,” he evokes the link between mourning, tears and ghostly returns with a story that he finds in Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil. De Léry describes how the women of these tribes welcome the white visitors, those conquerors taken for specters, with their abundant tears; as he tells all future scholars in Specters of Marx, it is a fact that women knew already how to address ghosts and talk to them. In a similar fashion, in Memoirs of the Blind, only the crying women of the last drawings of the exhibit were granted the privilege of ushering in another “story of the eye,” an eye made not only to see but also to cry. In Veils, Derrida renders his homage to Cixous by inscribing her “as the only woman in this genealogy of night,”Footnote ⁷⁴ raising her “to genius in this great lineage of prophetic poets,”Footnote ⁷⁵ alongside “Homer, Milton, Nietzsche, Joyce, Borges,” Furthermore, he expresses his admiration to Cixous, not without a touch of envy, because she has managed to end her mourning: “Like me, but quite differently, she does her mourning for the veil (as for me, I’d like to have done with mourning, she has perhaps already succeeded in that).”Footnote ⁷⁶ The same analysis would obtain when we see him acknowledging her priority in her treatment of dreams in “Ants” and in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius (2006). Derrida underscores the “almighty” fiction of Cixous with a rare force in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… (2006) by elaborating a subjunctive mode in which potentiality and virtuality surpass all grammatical norms. Such a “might” is a modalized power (puisse) that is so mighty that it becomes an “absolute performative”Footnote ⁷⁷ that precedes and exceeds any ontological main clause (“The wish comes before everything; it lives before everything, before knowing [savoir], having [avoir], being able [pouvoir], even wanting [vouloir]”Footnote ⁷⁸).

The manner in which Derrida rethinks the issue of unconditional hospitality, which is linked with what he calls democracy-to-come, is also associated with the question of the feminine and with the “historically changing political status of women [which] takes its place within this articulation.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, while questioning the alternative between “an androcentric hyperbole and a feminist one” (“Is there any place for such a choice in ethics? And in justice? In law? In politics? Nothing is less certain”Footnote ⁸⁰), he strongly affirms his position, namely that from now on “whatever we might say about it, we would do well to remember, even if silently, that this thought of welcome, there at the opening of ethics, is indeed marked by sexual difference. Such sexual difference will never again be neutralized. The absolute, absolute originary welcome, indeed, the pre-original welcome, the welcoming par excellence, is feminine.”Footnote ⁸¹ In Voyous (for which there is no “corresponding”Footnote ⁸² feminine noun), Derrida associates, as in Fichus, women, minors and foreigners, calling women’s improving rights as the emblem of democracy’s unending perfectibility. Yet as is the case with democracy, both perfectible and pervertible,Footnote ⁸³ “Derrida’s sense of perfectibility implies that legal, social or political reforms could never be thoroughly justifiable. Perfectibility is a paradoxical concept, based on the notion of improvement whose problem is that we are exposed to a future which alters, in an unknown way, the certainties of what seems to us progress.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Already in the seminar “Women in the Beehive,” Derrida analyzed how this dy-chrony was at work within the very question of sexual difference.Footnote ⁸⁵ Derrida’s position is consistent with his hypothesis regarding sexual difference and the importance given to discontinuity, distancing, interruption and what he calls the “in-between between the two,”Footnote ⁸⁶ “the spacing of contretemps”: “my other hypothesis being that there are no appointments without the space of the contretemps, without the spacing of the contretemps, and there is no contretemps without sexual difference, as if sexual difference were contretemps itself.” Footnote ⁸⁷

Therefore, it is essential to stress that, for Derrida, sexual difference is (if indeed it is) above all “a scene of reading, a reading of sexual difference,”Footnote ⁸⁸ the double genitive signifying “that there is no asexual, a-sexed or meta-sexed reading of sexual difference because it is at once read and reading.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In the many exchanges between Derrida and Hélène Cixous about sexual difference (that she abbreviated as D.S. for différance sexuelle but also calling up “déesse” (a goddess), all these signifiers stressing speed, mobility and the power of transforming identities), Derrida underlined in a famous passage of “Ants” that sexual difference, a French expression that is idiomatic, was not a pure concept that could be universally translated. It could not be abstractly universalized, or be exported to any context, history, culture and so forth. Derrida never ceased, on the other hand, to reject the “assumption of visibility”Footnote ⁹⁰ that continued to define it if not really found it. As he writes in “Ants,” “Une fourmi can be seen [se voit] perhaps but already to challenge you to identify the sex of this little black living creature. As for un fourmi, it is already the adventure of reading and interpretation, it swarms [fourmille] with thousands of meanings [mille et un sens], a thousand and one [une] images, a thousand and one [un] sexes.”Footnote ⁹¹ In “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” he returns via the bombyx, those Chinese silkworms that he raised in a shoebox as a child, to this imperceptible and invisible sexual difference: “But it was impossible to discern a sex.”Footnote ⁹² This difference from before sexual duality (“the extruded saliva of a very fine sperm, shiny, gleaming, the miracle of a feminine ejaculation … The self-displacement of this little fantasy of a penis, was it erection or detumescence?”Footnote ⁹³) is irreducible to the logic of visibility (“without seeing anything”), for sexual difference is only “promised in this way to reading”Footnote ⁹⁴:

Derrida critiques this demand for visibility in its double value as veridictional and jurisdictional, as Berger states. He is always wary of equating vision, taken to be the transparence of experience, with positive knowledge and power. Moreover, while recalling that the cut, section and divisibility are always implied in sexuality, he insists that one should not be taken in by the staging of the scene, by its appearance or evidence, especially when it comes to the division of roles and all the aspects touching on pairs, parity, partition, couples and so forth. He describes the two conditions of this “reading” or “interpretation” of sexual difference:

Thus sexual difference does not evoke for Derrida stable or separate identities, even if they are “playful,” “produced” or “constructed,” which marks his distance from gender or queer studies, the production of stable and separate identities always serving the establishment and perpetuation of hierarchies. And it is not the issue of a sexual identity, a complex process implying identifications, transferences, cultural and social assignations, that interests him. The conceptualization produced by Derrida does not proceed from a thinking of diversity (which maintains the principle of identity and pulls together) but from a thinking of difference that ruins every claim to identity and divides, disturbing it from within, as Berger sees it very well.Footnote ⁹⁷ For Derrida, sexual difference, like différance, is a movement, it begins in or from a passage “from one to the other, by one and the other, from one to the other like une fourmi, un fourmi of a dream.” While passing, sexual difference unexpectedly switches over from one line to the next. Like Cixous, who in her readings of sexual difference is singularly attentive to the “who” or “what” that still “meandrogynes, that invents and saves the fragile, sumptuous mysteries of differences: sexual differences, and also ‘properly individual difference,’ the one which prevents an individual still alive, still formless, from being instituted and cadaverised in the state of a sexual, social identity, or of an identity of age and species,”Footnote ⁹⁸ Derrida is interested above all in a sexual difference that remains both troubling and troubled, disoriented and disorienting, opening up, like the silkworms in the shoebox, discourse in every sense.Footnote ⁹⁹ Neither doctrine nor ideology, sexual difference is both offered freely and impregnable, for it is untamable: it rests in the “secret of the idiom,” and moreover, as Derrida sees it, it constitutes “the very limit of readability.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sexing différance is a fabulous, formidable event in its unforeseeable performativity according to the hypothesis that “as soon as there is sexual difference, there are words, or rather traces to be read. It begins there [par là].”Footnote ¹⁰¹