Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Auto-
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Summary
(Little polyparergonal frame for three ‘photographs with automobile’ that were never taken.)
-affections
‘Auto-affection constitutes the self-same by dividing it.’
‘Before all else one must affect oneself with one's own death (and the self does not exist before all else, before this movement of auto-affection), make death be auto-affection of life or life auto-affection of death. The whole of différance is lodged in the desire (desire is only this) of this auto-tely.’
According to the analyses of the Grammatology, there is no auto-affection without hetero-affection, without exposure, without a vulnerable surface and a relation with a certain outside. I affect myself – always with the other. I am – I live – as revenant: returning to myself from this outside. Vital and mortal exposure, skin deep. Narcissistic revenant that keeps exposing its vulnerability. No inner sense without this relation to the outer, no time without this space. Whence, among other things, a certain return of ‘experience’, after the warnings in the Grammatology: experience would be nothing without peril, without perishing – all experience would be in some sense traumatic. There are a thousand figures of this configuration: ‘l'Un se garde de l'autre’; ‘l'Un se fait violence’.
No exposure without protection, however. What exposes me protects me: what protects me exposes me. In Freud, this would be the fable in the Project as well as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties. It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification.
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- Not Half No EndMilitantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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