Derrida, Supplements

By Jean-Luc Nancy and Anne O'Byrne

When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531503390

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

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Prologue

It’s not a matter of adding something to Derrida. It’s not about making up deficits. It has nothing to do with the double sense of the word supplement, which he made one of his conceptual signatures (along with differance, specter, come!, and so on).

Generally speaking, one doesn’t complete or replace anything in the work of an author. The work stands as it is. I’m thinking, rather, of a third meaning of the word supplement, the literary or journalistic sense according to which one publication is added to another, offering another way of speaking, or another aspect (a magazine supplement, an audio supplement, or indeed the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville …).

The following texts were all written in response to particular circumstances—colloquia, anthologies—over the course of twenty-five years, and they are not studies or commentaries or interpretations of Derrida’s thought. Instead, I think of them as responses to his presence. We shared a friendship from 1970 on but I can also say that, from the very start, when he erupted into my intellectual landscape through his essays in the 1960s, it was also the eruption of a presence. From the first time I read him I could see not only the power and incisiveness of a thought but also the resonance of something current, present; for the first time I really heard a voice of our time. I remember comparing it to the experience I had had when I discovered electronic music—so-called musique concrète—a few years before: the reality of my time was taking shape. I realized that the music—or philosophy—I had been preoccupied with up until then, despite all it had to offer, was a thing of the past. I even included Heidegger there. I had read him as one author among others, until Derrida gave me a new point of access to his work.

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This new point of access needs to be emphasized today, since it has been misrecognized and misinterpreted. Here’s a detail I discovered only recently: in 1968, Derrida, along with some others, published a collection of essays called L’endurance de la pensée: Pour saluer Jean Beaufret and included in it "Ousia et grammè." (The essay was later collected in Marges de la philosophie.¹) This text is certainly the most important that Derrida devoted to Heidegger’s thinking of time. In it, he takes up what prevented Heidegger, despite himself, from shifting the present in the direction of coming to presence [venue en présence], a move which has in fact been available since Aristotle (the move of exceeding the metaphysics of presence from the inside) and which, Derrida notes, Heidegger may have become more sensitive to as time went by. It all comes down to the relation between the words Gegenwärtigkeit and Anwesenheit. In fact, the lecture Temps et être was included in the same collection, in pride of place.² It had not appeared up until then, and in it one can very clearly see Heidegger shifting his evaluation of Anwesenheit.³ Without knowing it, Derrida accompanied Heidegger even as he projected him beyond himself. These insights are as precious as they are rare. Those who denounce Heidegger as a swine, and Derrida along with him, should think again. It’s not a matter of this or that author; it’s a matter of getting access to ourselves, to our history of yesterday and today.

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The encounter with a presence was completely bound up with encountering a thought. I immediately understood the rigorous analysis of self-presence in the silent voice of Husserl as the arrival of an unknown in whom I recognized a presence. This was not exactly a presence to self but a presence in the world, present to us insofar as we were in a moment when we could feel an era passing away (with Sartre, with the end of the war in Algeria) and something new arriving.

In their various ways, all of these texts were ways of saying this arrival, or this coming, as it continued to come and come again (after 2004).⁴ I’ve left out some texts (just a few) that had more to do with theoretical analysis, and also the little texts or interviews I was invited to give after he left us.

Derrida is known as the one who deconstructed the metaphysics of presence. He was also someone who never stopped presenting himself in his thinking—and therefore absenting himself from it. He thought as he came to a meeting, or scribbled three words on a scrap of paper or even as he picked up the phone: living in different cities, we used to talk on the phone a lot. I can still hear the very particular tone of voice he used, both hesitant and decisive, when he would say: It’s Jacques.

Also included here, as a supplement to the supplements, is a text by Alexander García Düttmann that seemed to me to fit into the amicable proximity of the presence—still so close—of Derrida.⁵

1 / Elliptical Sense

Writing on Derrida strikes me as violent.¹ There is nothing more banal than writing on somebody, that is, writing about his work or his thinking. Derrida himself does it. But here, on this occasion, where I am supposed to write on him, he has set a trap. His use of language, his passion for playing around with it, his mad desire to touch it—always violently—means writing on him, on his body. Not the corpus but the body. It means passing it through the machine from Kafk a’s Penal Colony, or maybe tattooing it.

He cannot but suffer as a result, and will surely try to find some artifice or other to cover up the tattoo—a rose, a heart with an arrow through it, an eagle, an anchor, or an ellipse. To cover up and reveal these pieces of skin. But this is how the body is lost [le corps se perd ]. Scratches and tattoos: there, right at the body [à-même-le-corps], the body is lost, losing its character as a sort of tissue stretched—closed and mute—over its interior. (What interior? A soul? The soul of Jacques Derrida? Psyché ? The one that can touch and embrace the body of its lover—the body, its lover—but is forbidden to see it? Derrida always struggled against unseen assailants.)

This lost body, this à corps perdu (lost accord?) that I would end up writing on, is the first thing that occurred to me when I was asked to write on Jacques Derrida.² A lost body is a body already covered with marks and writing and thus relieved of its organicity (with a nod here to Deleuze on Derrida). Body as surface, as nothing but surface and traces.

This violence has yet another face. Is writing on not a way of avoiding writing, absolutely? A way of leaning on another writing, delivering a commentary instead of writing itself? What do we care about commentaries if they don’t touch on the thing itself? Isn’t there a violence in turning away, in refusing, even if the refusal is an effort to avoid the violence that the thing inevitably does to writing? But what if writing is the thing itself? What if the thinking of writing, which the signature "J.D." gets mixed up with, calls for, demands a surplus of writings, graphes, grammes, traces, to the point of being violently illegible? But what about this trap? Could it be that it, in turn, has been set too well, too carefully calculated to send us straight into the abyss, into a silence beyond calculation? I am not going to try to sort all this out.

In the end, it would be vain to try to write without violence. This is too often forgotten these days. For a long time now, Derrida has recalled nothing but this.

I have never written on Jacques Derrida: neither on his body nor on his work. There was one occasion when I addressed the voice of duty in his work, but I have never written on this thinking, nor proposed a reading of that particular text. This is understandable. We are too close, and I’ve often written in the space of that closeness, and thanks to that space. This does not always mean that we converge or connive. It is an elliptical sort of proximity, not a matter of identity, and the ellipse traces this lack of a simple identity. After all, an ellipse is a circle bent out of shape, deformed.

This lack of circularity, this distance that disrupts any absolute return to self, is also what governs the relationship between Derrida’s text—Ellipsis—and the book by Jabès on which it is written.

If I now decide to write on Derrida, or if I at least pretend to do so, our proximity is not erased. On the contrary, I’m doing it because I want to retrace the movement of this ellipse. It was enough that a happy fate, "ein freundliches Geschick," as Hegel puts it, gave me the opportunity.³ I knew right away that, of all Derrida’s texts, I would write on Ellipsis. (It’s easy to imagine how writing on the ellipse could become a theme or concept in the Derridian corpus. But it’s not our job to augment the corpus here, only to pass close to the body.) I chose this text for the sake of pleasure. Then I realized that this short text, certainly the shortest of his properly theoretical texts (though we can’t forget the violence that such a categorization does), describes elliptically the whole orbit of Derrida’s thinking. Yet it does not complete or close off the figure of the ellipse, but inscribes in it the doubling, displacing curve by which this orbit, like the orbit of the earth and the orbit of all thinking, does not remain self-identical, but turns and bends à corps perdu.

In the end, I am writing here because I choose to, for the sake of the pleasure of friendship. It too is an ellipse.

1

For Kant, a pleasure that we no longer perceive is at the origin of thought. This is why thought is originally impassioned, as Derrida puts it in Ellipsis. The trace of this pleasure might be found in all philosophy. It is the pleasure of the origin itself: the satisfaction or joy of discovering the source, getting to the center or ground. More exactly: the satisfaction or joy which the origin experiences in finding and touching itself, the joy of originating from itself in itself.

This is also, properly speaking, the act of thought that Kant calls transcendental: reason discovering itself, making itself available as the principle of its own possibilities. We shall have more to say about the transcendental. But for the moment let us say that Ellipsis, in writing on the origin and on writing as the passion of the origin, adopts a transcendental standpoint. Or at least it seems to adopt such a standpoint.

From this position is derived the condition of possibility which is not itself the origin (and this ellipsis or eclipse of the origin in the Kantian condition of possibility is undoubtedly what sets off the whole of modern thought), but which forms, on the contrary, the condition of possibility of the origin itself. This is our history since Kant: the origin is no longer given—likewise, its pleasure is no longer given—but becomes instead that toward which reason regresses, or that toward which it advances, up to the very limits of its possibilities. The origin enters what Derrida will call its différance. The origin differs or defers, differs from itself or defers itself. And that is its joy or passion: à corps perdu.

The origin, or sense, if the origin is by definition the origin of sense, contains within itself (and/or differing) the sense of the origin, its own sense, itself being the very sense and site of sense. Nothing less than sense itself, all sense, as is written in Ellipsis. (This is the only occurrence of the word sense in Derrida’s text. In one fell swoop, for the entire text and its ellipsis, all sense. The slightest text of thought can expose no less.)

The condition of possibility of the origin (of sense) is called writing. Writing isn’t the vehicle or medium of sense; were this so, it wouldn’t be its condition of possibility, but the condition of its transmission. Here, writing doesn’t refer to Derrida’s writing, which communicates to us the sense and the logic of a certain discourse on the origin, sense, and writing (at least insofar as this sense and this logic are communicable). This writing is not that of the book which this text concludes and closes (which is entitled Writing and Difference). Or rather, the writing of the origin is this writing itself, and this book itself: there is no other, there is nothing more to read once the book has been closed, there are not two writings, one empirical and one transcendental. There is a single transcendental experience of writing. But this experience attests precisely to its non-self-identity. In other words, it is the experience of what cannot be experienced. Writing is difference.

Thus writing is said to be the passion of and for the origin. This passion does not arise at the origin: it is and makes the origin itself. The origin is a passion, the passion of the self in its difference, and it is that which makes sense, all sense. All sense is always passion, in all the senses of the word sense. (Hegel, building on Kant, was well aware of this: sense—the sense of being—is also the sense of sensibility. For Hegel, this was the crux and the passion of the aesthetic in general, and hence also of writing in its relation to philosophy, in the sense of its relation to philosophy.) What makes sense about sense, what makes it originate, is that it senses itself making sense. (To sense the sense or to touch the being-sense of sense, even if it were to be senseless—that’s Derrida’s passion. To touch the body of sense. To incorporate sense. Scratching, cutting, branding. Putting to the test of sense. I shall write about nothing else.) Sense isn’t a matter of something having or making sense (the world, existence, or this discourse of Derrida’s). It’s rather the fact that sense apprehends itself, grasps itself as sense.

This means that sense, essentially, has to repeat itself: not by being stated or given twice in identical fashion, as is the case with the reissuing of a book, but by opening in itself (as itself) the possibility of relating to itself in the referral of one sign to another. It is in just such a referral that sense is recognized or grasped as sense. Sense is the duplication of the origin and the relation that is opened, in the origin, between the origin and the end, and the pleasure, for the origin, of enjoying that which it originates (that of which it is the origin and the fact that it originates).

Such is the passion, the whole passion of writing: sense, in order to be or to make sense, has to repeat itself, which is to say, in the original sense of this word, it must make repeated demands on itself. Sense is not given; it is the demand that it be given. (This implies a giving of the demand, but that is precisely what, in Kantian terms, ought to be termed the transcendental and not, of course, the transcendent, which would be the pure presence of sense, neither demanded nor capable of being demanded.) Sense must interrogate itself anew (though it is in this anew that everything begins; the origin is not the new, but the anew); it must make demands on itself, call to itself, ask itself, implore itself, want itself, desire itself, seduce itself as sense. Writing is nothing other than this demand, renewed and modified without end. Sense calls for more sense, just as, for Valéry, the sense calls for more form in poetry. And, in effect, it comes down to the same thing. All poetry, and all of Derrida’s philosophy, meets this demand.

Consequently there is something missing in sense, something missing from the start. And all sense is altered or exhausted by this lack. Writing is the outline of this alteration. Hence, this outline is "in essence elliptical," because it does not come back full circle to the same. Ellipsis: the other in the return to the self, the geometral of the pas of meaning, singular and plural.

Strictly speaking, however, nothing is altered. It’s not as if there’s a first sense that would then be diverted and disturbed by a second writing, doomed to lament its infinite loss or painfully to await its infinite reconstitution. "All sense is altered [tout le sens est altéré]." Which means, first of all, that sense is thirsty [altéré as the opposite of désaltéré, refreshed]. It thirsts after itself and its own lack; that is its passion. (And it is also Derrida’s passion for language; in the word altéré as he employs it here, an ellipsis of sense makes sense, the alteration and the excess of sense.) Sense thirsts after its own ellipsis, for its originary trope, for that which hides it, eludes it, and passes it by in silence.

Ellipsis: the step/pas of sense passing beneath sense. What is passed over in silence, in all sense, is the sense of sense. But there is nothing negative in this, nor, in truth, anything silent. For nothing is lost, nor anything silenced. Everything is said, and, like every philosophical text (every text in general?), this text says everything about the origin, says the whole origin, and presents itself as the knowledge of the origin. (Here is its first word, and later on we read we now know.) Everything is said here and now, all sense is offered on the surface of this writing. No thinking thinks more economically, and less passionately, than in thinking everything, all at once. No pleasure of thinking can enjoy in a lesser degree than absolute enjoyment. Thus this text pronounces itself, or the orbit that carries it, to be nothing less than a system, the system in which the origin itself is only a locus and a function.

Writing is the passion of this system. Broadly speaking, a system is the conjunction that holds articulated parts together. More strictly, in the philosophical tradition, it is the juncture, the conjoining of the organs of the living being, its life or Life itself (this life which, according to Hegel, is most profoundly characterized by sense, insofar as it senses and senses itself sensing). The adjoining or conjoining of writing is the binding joint of the book, or its life. The life of the book is played out—is in play and at stake—not in the closed book, but in the open book between the two hands which hold the book, this book by Jabès that Derrida holds open and reads for us. Jabès, who writes nothing but a continuation of the book, and on the book; this book of Derrida’s which he writes to us and gives us to read and to hold in the ellipse of our hands.

The maintenant, the now, of sense articulates itself, repeats itself and puts itself in play in the mains tenant, the hands holding the book. These mains tenant multiply the now (the maintenant), dividing presence, eliding it and making it plural. These are our hands: it is no longer an I that is being uttered, but the uttering and articulation of a we. This juncture goes beyond the adjoining of a living being that reads. It prolongs and exceeds him. It is not someone living who reads, even if it is not someone dead. (And the book itself is neither alive nor dead.) What now holds or takes the book in hand is a system whose systematicity differs from and defers itself. "The différance in the now of writing is itself the system of writing, within which the origin is inscribed merely as a place."

Différance is nothing other than the infinite re-petition of sense, which consists neither in its duplication nor in its infinite distancing from itself. Rather, différance is the access of sense to sense in its own demand, an access that does not accede, this exposed finitude beyond which, now that God is dead, there is nothing to think.

If sense were simply given, if access to it were not deferred, if sense did not demand sense (if it demanded nothing), sense would have no more sense than water within water, stone within stone, or the closed book in a book that has never been opened. But the book is open, in our hands. Différance can never be conceptualized, but it can be written. Différance is the demand, the call, the request, the seduction, the imprecation, the imperative, the supplication, the jubilation of writing. Différance is passion.

With a blow—because it is a blow, struck by the origin against the origin itself—"the joint is a brisure [‘hinge’]." The system, then, really is a system, but a system of brisure. This is not the negation of system, but system itself, suspended at the point of its systasis. Brisure does not break the joint: in repetition nothing has budged. Or else, the joint has always already been broken in itself, as such and in sum by itself. What joins divides; what adjoins is divided. Brisure is not the other of juncture, it is its heart, its essence, and its passion. It is the exact and infinitely discrete limit upon which the joint articulates itself. The book between our hands and the folding in of the book upon itself. The heart of the heart is always a beating, and the essence of essence consists in the withdrawal of its own existence.

It is this limit that passion demands, this that it craves. The limit of what, in order to be itself and to be present to itself, does not come back to itself. The circle which at once closes itself off and fails to do so: an ellipsis.

Sense which does not come back to itself is elliptical. Sense which, as sense, does not close off its own sense, or closes it off only by repeating and differing from itself, appealing again and again to its limit as to its essence and its truth. Returning to itself, to this passion.

To appeal to the limit is not to set out to conquer a territory. It is not to lay claim to boundaries or borders, for when borders are appropriated, there is no longer any limit. Yet to demand the limit as such is to demand what cannot be appropriated. It is to demand nothing, an infinite exposition which takes place at the limit, the abandonment to this space without space that is the limit itself. This space has no limits, and is thus infinite, though this does not mean that it is an infinite space, any more than that it is finite. Rather, it is, not finished, but the end, or finitude itself.

Thought of the origin: of the end: of the end of the origin. An end that initiates a cut into the origin itself: writing.

Such is the last page of the book, the last line of the text—the other site of the ellipsis, after the hic et nunc of the beginning—which is what the book, the text, never stops demanding, calling for, soliciting. The ellipsis of Ellipsis closes itself off in différance and its own circularity, and in the play of a recognition which never returns. In the last line Derrida inscribes the final words of a quotation from Jabès. It is a signature, the signature on a fragment, a pronouncement that precedes it: Reb Dérissa. All the authority, if not all the sense, of the text will have been altered by this move. It will have been the thirst or the passion for putting into play the I, the origin, the author, the subject of this text.

Closing of the text: quotation of the other text, ellipsis. This quotation, almost signature. The signature marks the limit of signs. It is their event, the propriety of their advent, their origin or sign of origin, or origin itself as a singular sign, which no longer signals anything, which cuts sense in two. Derrida signs and de-signates himself; his signature is repeatable. It owes its sense entirely to its repetition; it has no signification. Its sense is repetition, the demand for the singular. Derrida asks for himself, and is altered. Singularity is doubled and thirsts after itself insofar as it is the origin of the text. An exorbitant thirst, the thirst of one who has already drunk, who has drunk the entire text, the whole of writing, and whose drunkenness asks for it all over again. Derrida is a drunken rabbi.

The mastermind that ordains the system of the text bestows his own name on a double (itself unreal; the text has not neglected to remind us that Jabès’s rabbis are imaginary). The double substitutes a double s—that disseminating letter, Derrida writes later—for the d in the da of Derrida. An elsewhere in the guise of a here, a fictitious being in the guise of Dasein, or existence. Dérissa—slim, razor-sharp, derisory—touches the limits of a name and a body "with an animal-like, quick, silent, smooth, brilliant, slippery motion, in the