fragilekeys

Who is comforted by it?
Pent in the packed compulsory ring
Round father’s frown each famus waits his
Day to dominate. Here a dean sits
Making bedroom eyes at a beef steak,
As wholly oral as the avid creatures
Of the celibate sea; there, sly and wise
Commuters mimic the Middle Way,
Trudging on time towards a tidy fortune.
(The senator said: ‘From swimming-hole
To board-meeting is a big distance.’)
Financiers on knolls, noses pointing
East towards oil fields, inhale the surplus
Their bowels boast of, while boys and girls, their
Hot hearts covered over with marriage
To tyrant functions, turn by degrees
To cold fish, though, precarious on the
Fringes of their feeling, a fuzzy hope
Persists somehow that some day all this
Will walk away, and a wish gestates
For explosive pain, a punishing
Demanded moment of mortal change,
The Night of the Knock when none shall sleep,
The Absolute Instant.

From W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” (1948)

I draw emphasis to this verse because of its reference to a “wish for explosive pain” that gestates in the anxiety wrought by life in Western societies.

The poem covers an array of diseases that afflict us: the obsession with ‘fathers’ of all sorts (founding fathers, nation states, religious fathers, but also sports-team fathers, etc.: masculine patriarchy, tied up with debt, compulsion, enforcement, etc.) by sons who are just waiting for the opportunity to take over and rule (to kill the patriarch, only to establish more fraternities); the erotic sloth of exorbitant consumption; the boredom of passing the time for meager achievements; the uncritical function of religion when it only greases the wheel of the machine of mobilization and production; the greed of investors bent on exploiting resources for profit; the impotent loud-mouthing of a political class disconnected from the people; the youth brought too soon into normalized roles and the resulting indifference; etc. I’m not so interested in this list of ills, but in what is described as the culmination of this (basically middle-class or affluent) ennui/depression: a “hope” that it will all go away, for an “explosive pain,” a necessary moment of punishment, the imposition of some change to wake us from our moral laxity and courage deficit, the Absolute Instant when attention must be paid, and so on. What sort of fantasy is this? And why does it appear here in affluence, where culture has largely achieved its goals (cleanliness, orderliness, taming of the instincts, adjustment to “reality,” etc.)?

I’m trying to root out certain continuities between what is registered in such a poem as part of the “affluent imaginary” and what might be called the “terroristic drive.” There is in the latter also a certain craving for an “Absolute Instant” in which all dissatisfaction and tension can be released in one devastating blow. As the poem makes explicit, this is a retributive moment, a time of payback against the past. This dream of obliteration has always been the stuff of apocalyptic thinking, but here we find it utterly secularized, without any horizon of salvation, Phoenix reduced to a kind of zero point of pyromania and arson. Here, the wish that, in this instant, everyone on earth be kept awake, is ambiguous: on the one hand, it could suggest the need for a certain existential awakening, and could perhaps represent heeding the call of justice (Levinas’ “insomnia”); but on the other hand, this sleepless vigil could be the mournful aftermath of the death and destruction spread in the “punishing moment” (which we should note in passing is the bad alternative to forgiveness).

We often try to trace a terrorists’ motives, for good reason, back to ideological causes, fantasies of fame or reward in heaven, social alienation, and economic situation, geopolitical entanglements (including access to weaponry). But I wonder sometimes if the dynamics of these decisions don’t have as much to do with something much less coherent, something essentially anti-cultural and anti-sensical: the aggression or death drive tacked on to all the other factors, feeding on them and aggravating them, and finally reducing them to rubble. I wonder how this death drive links up with the fantasy of the Absolute Instant (as much the answer to the anxiety of boredom as to the anxiety of oppression). Freud tells us this destruction drive is always dressed in the colors of Eros; I cannot help but recall the promise to martyrs that they will be welcomed by virgins after death, but in a sense any promise of reconciliation will work to justify the use of violent force. (There is an erotics to militarism which should be discussed, and in two directions: in the quest to found the One (founding and conserving violence) but also in the desire to have itself torn apart by the Other it can only feign to exclude from itself. According to the paradoxes of auto-immunity, the violent state wants contact with the very thing it says it wants to guard itself from contacting. The inevitable contact is devastating: the conflict goes on as if it wasn’t happening, as if without casualties or damage. But the drive for purity always ends up in contamination.)

Auden’s poem lacks a promise of reconciliation. It shows the abyss of the terror motive in the more general longing for the unprecedented (in truth, a longing for time). This section of the poem ends:

It [the Absolute Instant] is here, now.
For the huge wild beast of the Unexpected
Leaps on the lax recollecting back;
Unknown to him, binoculars follow
The leaping lad; lightening at noonday
Swiftly stooping to summer-house
Engraves its disgust on engrossed flesh,
And at tea-times through tall french windows
Hurtle anonymous hostile stones.
No soul is safe…
We are mocked by unmeaning; among us fall
Aimless arrows, hurting at random
As we plan to pain.

The nonchalance of the imagery should not blind us to the implication here. My suggestion is that, read in a certain way, this describes a terrorist attack, the fruit of an aggression drive attacking, but also delivered over the abyss of affluence and futility. In the broader arc of the poem, all the characters end up tired and without patience and join the “jaw-dropped / Mildewed mob.”

Two other anecdotes come to mind in connection with our problem: Baudelaire’s causing trouble for the fun of it, a punk-beat anticism which almost sounds proto-terroristic: “These nervous practical jokes are not without peril, and they may often cost one dearly. But what does an eternity of damnation matter to he who has found in a second an infinity of enjoyment?” (The Bad Glazier); and Breton’s comment that, “The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.” Puerility and belligerence are perhaps never too far apart. (And we will probably not escape the impression that these ennui-terror narratives chronicle a particularly male type of masculinity: virility, control, potency, pride, protection.)

In broad strokes, the question is about the relation between our boredom with modern life (a problem that technology and relative affluence make possible but that, in my opinion, cannot be answered by them, especially when it is so organized to fill the void and never let it appear to us) and the increasing level of “explosions” now punctuating our lives with terrorism and its threat (the void manifesting in frustrations and murders). Not only do the authorities consider us all potential terrorists, but we ourselves are confronted with these possibilities, it is being advertised to us, flaunted even, as an answer to “nihilisitic” culture and its dreariness. It would be fruitful to ask how we are “terroristic” in our own messages and behaviors. To what extent do we demand “punishing moments” and hurtle “hostile stones”? How is this possible when we lack a goal for it?

To plan to pain is to let the mockery of unmeaning reign. Wherever this takes place, however, the arrows fly aimlessly. The “enemy” cannot be located, and to target one is to target civilians. And, we should add, it is to always hit the wrong target–or to hit it as haphazardly as the gunman. Perhaps we know this, but we keep shooting. The reason, I would argue, is an inability to confront the tedium and tyranny of our own world, to address it from the void that both boredom and terror reveal to us in concealed forms, and their apparent reversibility and mutual energetic.

Because the border between the two is not as wide as we might think. A few months ago, in Dubuque, Iowa, a young man accosted, raped, and murdered an elderly woman. His reason? He was bored. I neither mean to discount the other factors involved in that attack, nor do I mean to suggest that Islamist terrorism is at all traceable to boredom. I’m trying to tease out the more complex chain, as it seems to emerge in affluent-media culture, from boredom to restlessness to desensitization… to the rage for consequences, destruction, and conquest. What does it tell us about our emptiness within, our refusal of it? What does boredom share with oppression tout court, if they can both lead to such outbursts, to hellfire visions of revolution where they meet on the horizon with innocent vandalism? (Should we speak of a sublimation of the death drive in art? Is that why philosophy is so “boring”? This is, after all, an age of struck canvases.)

What exactly is this lust for the Absolute Instant? We could never recall all the ways religion and philosophy are looped around such a concept. Nor could we count all the atrocities committed underhandedly in its name. The fight for the Unique, the Absolute, the Ultimate–this is a fight for mockery and unmeaning, its result a sorry string of futile appropriations (patriations, patriarchializations, etc.) on the way to terror and, in their failure, boredom. At any rate, this is a psychic space that is very poorly understood, which I think can be seen in our collective inability to critically address either of these problems. In lieu of this confrontation, I fear we risk slipping even further into a world that is increasingly terrifying, boring, and anxious.

Poetry and philosophy could be described as two modes of intervention in language that seek to reinvent what human discourse means or can do, and so to reinvent what it means to speak and be.

The one, poetry, would speak a beyond of language in language for the sake of contacting things: to make language “itself” a thing, to give it the weight of a body; or to bring “things” directly into language, to give bodies the power and flow of a voice. The other, philosophy, would speak a beyond of the concept through concepts for the sake of altering language, where language is understood as our basic “medium” of thought: to give body to concepts and to weigh that body; or to think what remains unthought in the concepts that guide our normal ways of thinking, our relationship to reality, world, and others. Poetry would affirm an outside of language in language, in the name of joy, that elevates language into a unique sphere of expressive life, while philosophy would affirm a strike on language, in the name of justice, that integrates language into thought’s struggle for the future and for peace.

One might account for the sparkle of poetry and the alarm of philosophy in this way. Poems would be like lightning strikes, philosophy the laborious thunder coming after, the one surrendering to the speed of ungraspable realities, from love to anger to grief, affirming sensation and the singularity of experience, the very mystery of earth and birth, while the other submits itself to a sedulous investigation of that speed, endeavoring to bring the lightness of sense into thought’s clarity, tragically aware that ultimately it cannot be grasped. Both would undo the “naive evidence” of the world as it is given, normalized, and prescribed by prevailing uncreative modes of discourse, yet in opposite directions: poetry amplifying that naivety, celebrating innocence and its fervor, such that the world appears afresh in its ever-renewed inaugural emergence; philosophy engaging that naivety as both its enemy and its resource, drawing from it without stalling content with it, sustaining it alive in a way that contends with the passage of time and the ordeal of history.

They would seem almost incompatible: what remains intolerable for poetry (explication, labor, analysis, mediation) would be philosophy’s wellspring; and what remains intolerable for philosophy (plays on words, unbridled inspiration, spontaneity, intimation) would be poetry’s. And yet both would be urgent interventions, the one reinvigorating language as tangible and tactile vehicle for emotional life, tending toward singular and irreplaceable experiences; the other reinvigorating thought as a material operation capable of remaking history, tending toward universalization and peace. But both would be destined to redesign our bodies and recalibrate our minds. And they would need each other–not to be each other’s answer, but to communicate the full range of experience, the syncopated rhythm of life and thought. To communicate what it means to communicate as such: to reinvent it.

I have retained the conditional tense here (“would be…”) because of course I do not believe in a simple bifurcation between poetry and philosophy. Although I can’t deny that these names represent different things, two “genres” with different modes of expression, it would be foolish, especially today, to believe in any natural division of labor between the two. I’m playing on it here to illuminate some features, but also to emphasize the need to imbue the one with the other: not so much poetry with philosophy and vice versa, but spontaneity with mediation, inspiration with thought, and so on. Thinkers and poets both “divine and anticipate,” they both use language to question the automatic course of things and to ready us for unprecedented events, encounters, pivots, and perils. In so doing, they re-destine humanity beyond its merely instrumental purpose, and first of all by treating language as something more than a tool. That is the common aspiration of their intervention: to rework language such that we may teach ourselves how to “pay a different kind of attention,” which amounts to relearning what it means to be and share a world, remembering always that what counts for beauty counts for politics and vice versa.

What we “need,” then, is an agile poetry coextensive with daily speech, a careful philosophy coextensive with daily thought. But while the task must reach into the most minute aspects of daily life, we still have to learn what we’re called to do from those who came before us. What do they tell us? What do they ask us to receive? What do they ask us to give? The answers here are not univocal, and we shouldn’t expect them to be. Their difference is the gift of plural tendency, a diversity of ambition in which they invite us to share. Because although each teaches us something unique, I believe it is their desire to reach that unites them. That desire is a quasi-universal, and they invite us in unison to cultivate it.

For before and beyond everything they say, they speak to us. They address us as irreplaceable and call us to discover it. That could be the irreplaceability of a feeling or a moment, as in poetry, or the irreplaceability of a thought or a trajectory, as in philosophy. But they never ask us to emulate them. They call us to make it our own, and so to re-direct it into our own rarity. Re-direct me, take me with you, abandon me, it matters little, they seem to say, so long as you reach, believe, and live outside your caricature. At stake is always a reinvention: of language, of things, of life in common, of the future. And so of them, of the very beings from whom we learn to live, who call us. And so of us, who are still learning to live, who are still learning to receive and to call.

This could be an awakening to the truth of what is already there, or it could be a refusal of what is with an eye to its total transformation. Poetry or philosophy, it’s always a question of being-reaching, of letting oneself be reached, for it is our landscape and light to rediscover, it is our responsibility to love. The weight of time and the exposure to the other is ours. The re-destination of humanity is for us–to express and to think, to breathe and to sing. Joy and justice, the rhythm of your rhythm in ours.

To render what is due to the other. How could I?

As I tried to prepare these comments, I was overwhelmed by an inadequacy to which I felt rather doomed. To measure up to Derrida’s work, especially on the other, to measure up to the other, could only mean letting myself be put in question, and it felt necessary to acknowledge this and begin from there: from where an other, Derrida, and from where others, all of you, put me in question, where I feel obligated to let my response remain haunted by an inadequacy, and more importantly, by an indebtedness to Derrida and to you that I feel: a debt to the other that no response, no discourse, no act, could ever fulfill. [Punctuation 1: “), how we would have loved it. The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”[1]]

A debt, therefore, announces itself. I must have felt it when I proposed this presentation, too, with the idea of sensitizing us to a certain priority of the other in Derrida’s work. A debt to the other, to render what is due to it in that work. Perhaps I also felt a debt to indebt others to the other, by calling attention to it, by calling attention to the other that calls us first to think. That will be my topic today. What is due to the other? How to render it?

This sentence, my opening sentence, can be read in at least two ways. First, to render what is due to the other means: to give it what is owed to it, to pay the debt, to give it its due. The offering or payment could be many things: a sacrifice, an act, a word, or just gratitude and appreciation. But whatever it may be, this reading already confronts us with something immeasurable: how to know, calculate, or even guess what I owe? And how to know when? According to what timescale does the debt come due? Such a question is abyssal, and I want to emphasize it, because it should already lead us to question any economy of restitution: I will never be able to give what I owe, because I could never guess its true extent. I can never know what’s expected of me in full, and perhaps the other also does not know. And so I must always start over from the start. I must calculate words and deeds, negotiating with an incalculable debt that only increases the more I try to pay it back, to the point of near-paralysis. I would have to give to the other more than I could give, more than they asked for, more than was due. I would even owe it what I did not have to give. To render what can’t be rendered, to an other or to others whose call is not always so clear, and is multiple and conflicting: that would be what is “due,” and what I must do, in excess of what I have to give, what I can say, in excess of my very capacity to act. It’s due to happen, it can’t wait. But there’s no guarantee that it will, or that it can.

And yet there is a second way to read the sentence. Without nullifying what I’ve just said, we could read this “due” to mean: because of, by reason of, from the other. To render what is due to the other would take on a paradoxical form: to render back to it what it caused, to give to you what the other in me instigated or sparked up. As if the other had first given me what I will have given. As if you gave it to me, so I could give it to you. As if the other had given me to give, to render what was due to you by giving me to give, before I even knew who I was. Something like: giving the gift of giving itself. [Punctuation 2: “But this is impossible, in any case it can only await your grace, if you are willing to give me what I write to you, you my immense, you my unique destiny.”[2]]

However we choose to hear the phrase, “to render what is due to the other,” it puts us in question right where we are called to be responsible. The other indebts me, obligates me beyond my capacity to know and to give; but it also interrupts me, destabilizes me and breaks the economy of the same in which I could still identify myself as myself, as one. And this interruption only magnifies the obligation. For while it is due to the other that I can say “Here I am” and respond, it is also due to the other that I can’t be so certain. The “here I am” is itself put into question from the moment I must ask, “Yes, here I am, but where? Due to what or to whom?” Due to the other, yes, but who or what is that?

I’ve promised to talk about it, the other, about what is due to the other in Derrida’s work, with a suggestion that this work “revolves” around it, around a respect for the other and its chance. The best I can do, perhaps, is give it a chance myself. If there is a “revolution” in his work, or in deconstruction, I believe it finds its center of gravity there, around the other and the chain of thoughts associated with it. But if I say “center,” it’s important to stress (and I’m sure you could have guessed) that this center is not a center, but rather the “centrality” of a displacement, the force of an alteration or alterity that comes before any center. Not a decentering that would come secondary, but something at the center’s very core, a core which it perhaps does not have.

We are all probably familiar with the initial iterations of this displacement, this thought of alterity, in Derrida’s work: the concepts or non-concepts of différance, the supplement, and the trace. He began this work with an interrogation of purity, of the purity of being, of presence, of the same, of identity, of the logos, of full speech in the voice, and more generally, of the idea of purity itself, of indivisibility, incorruptibility, and sovereignty in all its forms. He highlighted an alterity that came before the same, a supplement that came before the origin, an archi-originary contamination of the same by the other, in an attempt to account for an initial or pre-initial play of differences without which no center, no system, no effect of presence whatsoever could even arise. These early deconstructions sought to mark a non-coincidence of the same with itself, even where it appears to have won a center; an irreducible hiatus in the circle of self-representation or self-identity; a division or non-contemporaneity of the present with itself; in sum, a non-closure, openness, or incompleteness without which there could be no interpretation and, furthermore, no future.

I don’t want to dwell on these points, only to reference two moments in his early work to help orient us. The first comes from an article entitled Différance, where he speaks about its “point of greatest obscurity,” of the very enigma of différance. He asks:

How can we, on the one hand, conceive of différance as the “systematic detour,” within the element of the same, that always aims at regaining the presence or pleasure that is in one way or another deferred, and, at the same time, to conceive of différance as “the relation to an impossible presence, as an expenditure without reserve, as an irreparable loss of presence, an irreversible wearing-down of energy, or indeed as a death instinct and a relation to the absolutely other that apparently breaks up any economy”?

He goes on to add that the system and the nonsystem, the same and the absolutely other cannot be conceived together[3]. At the risk of overstating it, I would say that Derrida never abandoned this enigma, which I would reformulate in the following experimental ways (and these are questions, restatements): How to negotiate between the calculations that must be made by a subject, whose “sameness” or “system” is in a sense inescapable, and the incalculable other that one must respect, lest that system close in on itself and lose its future? How to negotiate the drive to presence or pleasure with this “impossible presence” or “irreparable loss” that marks a certain never-there, that exposes that drive to presence or pleasure to a death that cannot be reduced and in fact insinuates itself at the heart of life? How to negotiate between the necessary assimilation of the other, however failed, and the relation to the absolutely other that lets it be other and leaves it its chance? How to negotiate discourse, action, and economy, while at the same time exposing oneself to a call that carries discourse beyond itself, beyond every norm and toward a sort of aneconomic “expenditure without reserve”? What I can only suggest here is that, while Derrida never gave up meditating on the aporia of such questions, and never simply resolved them, at the same time he never ceased to inflect his work in the direction of the inappropriable, the risk of incineration and death, the beyond-economy, the wound, the incalculable. In other words, he never stopped striving to render what was due to the other. [Punctuation 3: “You will follow me everywhere. And I will never know if I am suffering in you or in me. This is my suffering.”[4]]

The second moment from his early work that I wanted to share comes from 1971 in Positions, where Derrida summarizes in a correspondence with the interviewer, “No more than it is a form of presence, other is not a being (a determined being, existence, essence, etc.)” and he asks, “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same…? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship [to the same] that which in no case can be ‘posed.’”[5] Here Derrida contests the conception of the other in Hegelian dialectics, in which the self posits the other as itself, with the aim of reappropriating the other into itself, “in the infinite richness” of its own determination. As he will say twenty years later in Aporias, “Each time the decision concerns the choice between the relation to an other who is its other (that is, an other that can be opposed in a couple) and the relation to a wholly, non-opposable, other, that is, an other that is no longer its other.”[6] We could see here an echo of the enigma of différance we spoke about above: the choice is between an other caught up in my own schema of representation, reappropriation, and presence, and an other that is not my other, that is wholly other and remains so, that cannot be incorporated into me, and that, on the contrary, exposes and expropriates me beyond any self-return. An other that even calls the self to its own interruption, from the innermost interior of its self. In other words, to a deconstruction. [Punctuation 4: “But you, you know that I wrote you something entirely other, you are this itself (for me this is your only good determination): the one who knows that I am not there, that I have written you something entirely other.”[7]]

I would now like to jump, no doubt too quickly, to a provisional outline of “the other” as Derrida tries to think it. Although it never becomes a “theme,” precisely because it resists all thematization, I think some characteristics can be outlined. This outline is truly just a sketch. Here are three brief points:

• The other is not a present being, it is not a determined being or presence, and in this sense, it “is” not. The other is not and is never present to me. It does not present itself. As Levinas would say, it is beyond being; ontology and phenomenology do not reach it. Derrida often returns to Husserl’s discovery that the alter ego can never be originarily presented to my consciousness. The other is never intuited, I apprehend it only through what Husserl calls appresentation or analogy. Put a bit more strongly, the coming of the other is what the subject never sees coming. It is defined in this way. It is the absolute surprise. But what is interesting here is that, for Derrida, this appellation of “other” applies to any and every other, to any living thing, if not to any thing, animate or inanimate. One of his favored formulas is, in the French, tout autre est tout autre, every other is wholly other, every other is every bit as other. This forumla signifies that, “every other is singular, that ‘every’ is a singularity, which also means that every is each one.”[8] In other words, the alterity of each other makes each other an exception. It makes the exceptionality and unconditionality of the Absolute Other universal. As he writes in The Gift of Death, each other as other is, “absolutely singular, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest.”[9] [Punctuation 5: “Sometimes I wish that everything remain illegible for them—and also for you. To become absolutely unknowable for them. For me the absolute mystery is you.”[10]]

• As mentioned in the quote from Positions, the other cannot be posed, positioned, or situated, topologically or temporally. The other and its call are atemporal, an-archic or, as Levinas again would say, ana-chronic. Just as the other is not a present being, it doesn’t belong to a past present or a future present either. It is linked to an immemorial past that is indistinguishable from what comes. Such is why it deconstructs the very opposition between life and death, obeying what Derrida calls a spectral logic that exceeds ontology: its first arrival may always seem like a return, and its return may always seem like a first arrival. We can’t be certain. But one can also never be sure that the other has arrived, just as the other may never arrive. That the other may never arrive is not, however, a limitation, but its chance, its freedom as other. Without the possibility of leaving, of changing the destination, of interrupting the trajectory, the other would lose its otherness and would become part of a program determined in advance. It can always arrive elsewhere, or not arrive at all. And it can always abandon. All of this renders any mapping of the present, of history, or of a context in general, not impossible, but interrupted by the other’s surprise event. However, to put it the other way around, we could also say that this uninsurable relation to the other, the possibility of its coming and going in excess of any teleological process, is what opens history. Without the open and unknown destination, the possibility of divagation or what Derrida calls destinerrance, nothing would come. [Punctuation 6: “And now, because I love you better still, I leave you: more undetermined than ever.”[11]]

• Third, the other is not the possible. It is here that all we have said regarding the other links up with a chain of thoughts closely associated to it, namely: the event, the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, invention, bearing witness, the promise, and death (of course I say this just to orient readings, in some manner). All of these retain something of the other, of an inconceivable relationship to that which overwhelms and exceeds the self. They all contend with the aporetic structure he tried to formalize in which the “condition of possibility” for something is simultaneously its “condition of impossibility.” Such is why deconstruction was often defined as an experience of the impossible, as it applies to all the thoughts I mentioned. This is an impossible that is not negative, but which says, for example: the other is only possible as impossible. Or again, to quote from Psyche, “invention invents nothing, when in invention the other does not come, and when nothing comes to the other or from the other,” meaning that the only possible invention would be the invention of that which did not appear to be possible, since otherwise it would just be the product of a program in the economy of the same.

It is here—on this logic of the possible and impossible, and its relation to the subject—it is here Derrida most forcefully contests the traditional models of decision, performativity, and freedom (and I can of course only touch on these today). He speaks of a decision that “only returns to the other,” a passive decision that affects me by an other in me who precedes me and to whom I have no access, a decision that would always be “of” the other. He speaks of a freedom that would not be the possession of a subject but would break the subject open, disrupting the fabric of the possible, disrupting the very texture of its context, in an unexpected, unforeseeable, and uncontrollable way. And he speaks of a meta-performativity without power, exposed to the arrival of an event that outstrips the capacity of any “I can” and touches its “exposed vulnerability.” He says in fact that “ethics begins in this performative powerlessness” in which the other overloads responsibility exorbitantly, forcing us to invent something not only beyond the norms and rules, but something beyond the possible; to suspend the horizon of knowledge out of an urgency to respond, without waiting; and to refuse all the ruses of good conscience, in other words, never to overlook the debt. The other instigates, then, a responsibility that I cannot assume, and that demands that in the end only the other come back. I can only know this responsibility as an infinite debt that overwhelms my finite powers of assuming it, in other words, a responsibility that I can only assume in an impossible assumption, forever haunted by indecision and inconclusiveness: have I really assumed it? Have I even begun to respond? Have I ever, could I ever, render what is due to the other?

Let me close by giving Jacques the last word, on thought and what thought is due to. It comes from the end of his book on Nancy—and speaks to you:

In spite of thought: thought thinks only in spite of itself, or, I would say, à son corps défendant [i.e., reluctantly, unwillingly, notwithstanding itself]; [thought] thinks only there where the counterweight of the other weighs enough so that it begins to think, that is, in spite of itself, when it touches or lets itself be touched against its will. That is why it will never think, it will never have begun to think by itself. That is what it is necessary to think of thought, to ponder and weigh of weight. [Punctuation 7: “Promise me that one day there will be a world. And a body.”[12]]

Notes:
[1] The Post Card, pg  25
[2] The Post Card, p 80.
[3] Différance, pg 293
[4] The Post Card, pg. 227
[5] Positions, p 94-95
[6] Aporias, pg 18
[7] The Post Card, pg. 229
[8] The Gift of Death, pg. 87
[9] The Gift of Death, pg. 78
[10] The Post Card, pg 205
[11] The Post Card, pg. 186
[12] The Post Card, pg. 122

[The above is a transcript of a talk I gave to my GCAS class on Deconstruction. I want to thank the course instructor, Giovanni Tusa, for giving me this opportunity, and the other students for listening and for opening such a good conversation afterwards (which sadly cannot be reproduced here). This text is the second in a series titled, The Duties of Deconstruction (cf. “Eating Well”, Emptying Recurrence.]