I knew, in advance, that today I would be incapable of speaking, of finding the words, as it were.

Excuse me, therefore, if I read, and for reading not what I believe I must say (does one ever know what one must say in such a moment?), but simply enough to not let silence win out over everything else - just a few shreds of what I was able to tear away from the silence in the depths of which I would, like you, doubtlessly, have been tempted to close myself at this instant.

I learned of Louis’ death within the last twenty-four hours, upon returning from Prague - and the name of that city already seems to me so violent, almost unpronounceable. But I knew that upon my return I had to call him: I had promised him I would.

Someone present here, who was near Louis when I last spoke to him on the telephone, probably remembers: when I promised to call him and to come and see him when I came back from this trip, his last words, the last words I will have heard Louis pronounce were, ‘if I’m still alive, yes, call me and come over, hurry.’ I had answered him in a jocular tone in order to hide somewhere above my anxiousness and sadness, ‘OK, I’ll call and go over.’

Louis, that time is no longer with us, I no longer have the strength to call you, to talk to anyone - even to you (you are at once too absent and too close: in me, inside me), and even less have I the strength to speak to others about you even if they be, as is the case today, your friends, our friends.

The fetishism of the commodity and its secret

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determinants of value. For in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs.

I will suggest that the entire project of deconstruction, one of the major strands of post-structuralism under anyone's definition, is driven by an ethical desire to enact the ethical relation. By the ethical relation I mean to indicate the aspiration to a nonviolent relationship to the Other, and to otherness more gen era 11 y, that assumes responsibility to guard the Other against the appropriation that would deny her difference and singularity. I am deliberately using a broad brush here in defining the ethical relation, so as to include a number of thinkers who share the aspiration to heed the call to responsibility for the Other, but who would otherwise disagree on the philosophical underpinnings of the ethical relation and on its precise definition. I am, then, defining the ethical relation more broadly than the thinker Emmanuel Levinas, with whom the phrase is usually associated.11 will, however, return again and again to Levinas’ specific formulation of the ethical relation as the ‘beyond’ to ontology,2 because it is Levinas’ own understanding of the ethical relation that Derrida interrogates. As we will see, one way to approach the ethical desire of deconstruction is by examining Derrida's engagement with Levinas’ ethical philosophy of alterity.

But perhaps the ethical desire of deconstruction is never more evident than in Derrida's encounter with Hegel. When we confront our desire to ‘escape’ from Hegel, to put him to rest once and for all, we need to ask why we are trying to get out from under his shadow; or, more precisely, in the name of what do we make our escape.

This work does not accord with literary criticism in the traditional sense. Yet it is devoted to the understanding of a literary work. It could be said to reside within the precincts of philosophical endeavor. Indeed, it tries to understand an object that splits existence into incommensurable articulations. This object resists the revelation of its truth to the point of retaining the status of absolute otherness. Nonetheless, it has given rise to laws and moral pronouncements. This fact, in itself, is not alarming. The problem is signaled elsewhere, in the exhaustion of language. Where might one go today, to what source can one turn, in order to activate a just constativity? We no longer see in philosophy the ultimate possibilities for knowing the limits of human experience. And yet we began this study by citing Nietzsche. There were two reasons for this selection. In the first place, Nietzsche was the philosopher to think with his body, to ‘dance,’ which is a nice way of saying also to convulse, even to retch. And then, Nietzsche was the one to put out the call for a supramoral imperative. This summons in itself will urge us on - for we are dealing in a way with the youngest vice, still very immature, still often misjudged and taken for something else, still hardly aware of itself …

What follows, then, is essentially a work on Madame Bovary, and nothing more. If it were another type of work - in the genre of philosophical essay, psychoanalytic interpretation, or political analysis - it would be expected to make certain kinds of assertions which obey a whole grammar of procedure and certitudes.

The Metaphysics of Presence: Plato, Rousseau, Saussure

To ‘deconstruct’ a text is to draw out conflicting logics of sense and implication, with the object of showing that the text never exactly means what it says or says what it means. This approach was first developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (born 1921), whose ideas were then taken up by numerous (mainly American) literary critics. Derrida's writings have been predominantly concerned with philosophical, rather than literary texts, although he would certainly reject the very terms of this distinction, arguing that philosophy - like literature - is a product of rhetorical figures and devices. What defines philosophy as a discipline, he argues, is precisely its reluctance to face this fact; its desire to ignore the omnipresence of figural language in the texts of its own past and present. Deconstruction is the process of rhetorical close-reading that seizes upon those moments when philosophy attempts - and signally fails - to efface all knowledge of this figural drift.

Thus Derrida reads philosophical texts very much against the grain of their overt meanings and intentions. He is proposing what amounts to a psychoanalysis of Western ‘logocentric’ reason, that reason which aims at a perfect, unmediated access to knowledge and truth. The ‘unconscious’ of philosophy - to pursue this comparison - could then be read in all the signs and symptoms of its own (long repressed) rhetorical dimension. This is why Derrida regards the opposition between speech and writing as among the most basic determinants of Western philosophical tradition. From Plato to Hegel, from Rousseau to Saussure and the modern (structuralist) sciences of man, speech is always privileged over writing, since spoken language is thought to possess a unique authenticity, a truthfulness deriving from the intimate relation between word and idea.

How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one. There are no witnesses. Those who were closest say only what was close to them, not the distance that affirmed itself in this proximity, and distance ceases as soon as presence ceases. Vainly do we try to maintain, with our words, with our writings, what is absent; vainly do we offer it the appeal of our memories and a sort of figure, the joy of remaining with the day, life prolonged by a truthful appearance. We are only looking to fill a void, we cannot bear the pain: the affirmation of this void. Who could agree to receive its insignificance - an insignificance so enormous that we do not have a memory capable of containing it and such that we ourselves must already slip into oblivion in order to sustain it - the time of this slippage, the very enigma this insignificance represents? Everything we say tends to veil the one affirmation: that everything must fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this fading movement, to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs.

I know there are the books. The books remain, temporarily, even if their reading must open us to the necessity of this disappearance into which they withdraw themselves.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 198 pp.

The Nag Hammadi Library in English, trans, and introduced by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont, California, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd, completely revised edn (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 549 pp.

No book review without phantoms. It is difficult to conceive of trying to review Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx without engaging with the strangeness of the ‘re-’ (repetition, viewing again, return, revenance) inscribed in the word ‘review’ and thus with a questioning of the very institution of the book review. ‘What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?’ I have a feeling that perhaps corresponds in some way with the feeling Derrida claims to have about Marx and ghosts in Spectres of Marx: as he puts it, ‘everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts’ (p. 139). Impossible, at least for me, to review this book about apparitions, phantoms, spectres, without feeling a need to respond in kind. In what follows, then, I propose to consider not only what Spectres of Marx has to say about speciality and phantoms (for example, in relation to the university, politics and religion), but also what it does not say, or says (perhaps) without saying. A phantom book calls for a phantom review.

In science, conceptual progress as well as ‘the wandering off into different fields,’ without which there is no such progress, leads to the impossibility of asking questions and explaining problems which were essential to the previous theoretical configuration. Indeed, such a loss is not considered a serious one for ‘there is no need to possess such knowledge,’ as the only one thing legitimately to be demanded of a theory ‘is that it should give us a correct account of the world, i.e., of the totality of facts as constituted by its own basic concepts.’ What is true of science is in principle also true of literary criticism. If ‘the context of discovery’ comes into conflict with ‘the context of justification,’ if the reading devices produce discoveries that the previous theories can no longer account for, and if in the eyes of the traditional critic it becomes undecidable ‘whether a new view explains what it is supposed to explain, or whether it does not wander off into different fields,’ then one may speak of what Paul Feyerabend calls the incommensurability of approaches. Yet, is this incommensurability as securely established as some of the Newer Critics - the socalled deconstructive critics - and most of their opponents would like to believe? Implicitly, a distinction such as Wayne C. Booth's between monism and limited pluralism (i.e., liberalism) acknowledges already that the seemingly mutually exclusive approaches to literature are about the same. What Booth's conceptual system vouches for - an intimate affinity of traditional academic criticism in all its forms and deconstructive criticism, a commensurability without the knowledge of the critics (Booth included) - is one of the presuppositions of this article.

The language of Lacan and Derrida is shaped by a Heideggerian detour. Both writers see Western philosophy as reflecting through its grammar, its categories, and its now inbuilt manner of discourse a desire for reality-mastery as aggressive and fatal as Freud's death instinct. Their critique of metaphysics seems to blend with the findings of Freudian metapsychology. The Western thinker gloats over reality like Shakespeare's Achilles over the living body of Hector. Achilles, in a jocose and terrible taunt, inspects Hector as if he were infinitely vulnerable:

This fearful power of pointing out, or pointing at, expresses what Lacan describes as the phantasm of morcellation, or of the ‘corps morcele’ - a phantasm that the psyche is always seeking to allay. If we remember that Achilles is almost immortal, that in theory he can only be wounded through a heel left untouched by his immersion in the Styx, then we see the connection between this taunt and a deeply human anxiety. In ordinary mortals the Achilles heel is everywhere; psychic development is therefore a balance between the hope of immortality and the continuous fear of mortal exposure.

Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from Prague to Sofia, not to mention Berlin or Paris, your work gives people an impression of being in touch with the moment, with actuality. Do you share that feeling? Are you a philosopher of the present? Or at least one of those who think their time?

Derrida: Who knows? How could anyone be sure? And anyway, being ‘in touch with actuality’ and ‘thinking one's time’ are not the same thing. Both of them imply doing something, over and above establishing facts or offering descriptions: taking part, participating, taking sides. That is when you ‘make contact’, and perhaps change things, if only slightly. But one ‘intervenes’, as they say, in a time which is not present to one, or given in advance. There are no pre-established norms which can guarantee that one is ‘making contact with actuality’, or ‘thinking one's time’ as you put it. And you often get one without the other. But I don't think I am capable of improvising an answer to this kind of question. We must stick to the time of our conversation - and of course time is limited. Now more than ever, thinking one's time - especially if there is a danger, or a hope, of speaking about it in public - means recognising and exploiting the fact that the time of this speaking is produced artificially.

The history of philosophy has always demonstrated a two-fold concern with architecture. The first is by philosophy either addressing architecture as an aesthetic form (e.g. in Hegel's Aesthetics), or deploying architectural examples in a more general discussion of aesthetics or art (e.g. Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple in The Origin of the Work of Art). The second is the presence of architectural forms (e.g. Kant's architectonic) or architectural metaphors in the development or construction of a philosophical argument. The second of these is, in this instance, the more relevant. To delimit a specific terrain of discussion into which Derrida's writings on architecture can be articulated, I will concentrate on the justly famous architectural metaphor developed by Descartes in the second part of the Discourse on Method. Despite the length of this passage I will quote it in full in order that its force may be made clear:

So many have sung the praise of WINE. Countless drunken poets have reached up to lyrical heights and held out to the gods the goblet of strong WINE that their souls awaited.

WINE is most precious and deserves those praises. But how ungrateful and mistaken were those who cursed WATER …

Divine lucidity, transparent Rock, marvelous Agent of life, universal WATER, to you I would gladly pay my respects with an endless litany. Let me sing the stillness of WATER, luxuriating in sites of absolutely calm expanses, pure plane in whose mirror all becomes more perfect than it is. All of nature turns into Narcissus there, and loves itself …

WATER MOVES, soft and strong, and, sweating, grinding with stupendous slowness, by sheer weight, unstoppable currents and swirls, misty and raining, streaming, cascading in cataracts, water shapes the rocks, polishes granite, wears down marble, rounds pebbles indefinitely, cradling the wealth of sand she has made then laying it out like the train of a gown, making soft beaches. She labors and diversifies, sculpts and decorates the hard ground's harsh, sullen figure.

WATER IS MULTIFORM; she lives in clouds and fills abysmal depths; she lands as snow on sun-drenched heights, which let her flow away, pure again; and following paths she knows, blindly, with strange, confident assurance, she descends invincibly toward the sea, her greatest quantity.

Sometimes she runs away, visible and clear, fast or slow, with a mysterious murmur which suddenly changes into the bellow of a leaping torrent, only to melt into crushing and dazzling waterfalls with their perpetual thunder and their rainbows borne in vapors.

The messianic tone of deconstruction was not at all evident at the start. Instead, in the midst of what looked more like a certain Nietzschean tone recently adopted in French philosophy in the 1960s, Derrida was visited with a suggestive ‘objection’ that occasioned his first encounter with theology. ‘[V]ery early on,’ he says, ‘I was accused of - rather than being congratulated for - resifting the procedures of negative theology’ (Psy., 537/DNT,74), of putting these procedures to work, it would seem, in the service of some magnum mysterium called differance.

As usual, his accusers/congratulators were only half right. For impossible things have on the whole always exercised a greater fascination over Derrida than the garden variety possibilities whose conditions philosophy is traditionally content to supply. So, it makes perfect sense that Derrida would ‘have always been fascinated’ (Psy., 545/DNT, 82) by the impossible situation in which negative or apophatic theology finds itself, of denying that it is possible to speak of God even while, as theology, it keeps on speaking. As a good friend of mine once said, ‘Of God I do not believe we can say a thing, but, on the other hand, as a theologian, I have to make a buck.’ That is ‘the impossible.’

Derrida was understandably fascinated with the syntactical strategies and discursive resources of negative theology, with a deployment of signs intent on the ‘rarefaction of signs,’ with a play of traces aimed at effacing the trace, with a language that is ‘more or less than a language,’ that ‘casts suspicion on the very essence or possibility of language’ ﹛Sauf, 41/ON, 48), with a ‘wounded’ language, where the ‘scar’ of the ‘impossible’ has left its mark ﹛Sauf, 63/ON, 59-60), with ‘the most economical and most powerful formalization, the greatest reserve of language possible in so few words’ ﹛Sauf, 113/DNT, 321).

The Tain of the Mirror established Rodolphe Gasche as the undisputed moral consciousness (or let's say the super-ego) of all Derrideans (and maybe even Derrida himself). There was something inexorable and unavoidable about the book, probably because in almost every detail it was so clearly right. Any temptation we, or some of us, may have had to get playful or, especially, ‘literary’ about Derrida was sternly put in its place as irresponsible, because philosophically ill-informed, and this judgement could be felt, immediately and a little dispiritingly, stretching into all our Derridean futures, condemning us to at least Kant, Hegel and Heidegger if we wanted to earn the right to keep following the master. The book was essentially, explicitly and unashamedly a rephilosophising of Derrida, the beginning of a systematic and potentially exhaustive1 transcription of Derrida's work back into something more ‘properly’ philosophical than Derrida's work itself seemed always to be. Derrida did deconstruction, and Gasche was doing the philosophy of deconstruction. Derrida, the book seemed to imply, always might be seducing us, leading us astray, especially if we were ‘literary’ people, because the apparently literary feel of some of his work always might hide its true or genuine philosophical import. Gasche offered no such prospects of seduction and wandering, keeping us firmly away from temptation, on a rather puritanical straight and narrow that looked as though it would require constant vigilance, lots of honest hard work and a good deal of self-denial.

Ever since the publication of Specters of Marx, though perhaps as a minor and unintended consequence, English departments have been looking at Hamlet with renewed attention. The play, we now recognise, begins in mystery, with an enigma, a Ghost, which cannot be classified with certainty as either alive or dead, and thus exceeds the frame of what we seem to know. This apparition, a ‘thing’ that presents a puzzle for epistemology and defies both semantics and ontology, also prompts within the play an ethical question that I want, very tentatively, to pursue.

The Ghost itself, it must be said, is not tentative at all. On the contrary, the Ghost consistently addresses Hamlet in the imperative: ‘Mark me’, it urges (1.5.2); ‘lend thy serious hearing/To what I shall unfold’ (1.5.5-6); ‘Now, Hamlet, hear’ (1.5.34). Hamlet, who is all ears, barely needs these injunctions, or, when the tale is told, the further imperative, ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91). Finally, from an invisible place below the stage, ‘Swear’, the Ghost insists, not once, but four times in succession (1.5.157, 163, 169, 189). This is evidently a spectre which intends to be obeyed, and the main purpose of its encounter with Hamlet is to deliver the specific command which both names the genre and inaugurates the action of the play: ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love - … Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ (1.5.23—5).

The Ghost sustains the enigma of its own being. A ghost is not a person, but the ghost of a person. This spectre initially affirms a distinction between itself and Old Hamlet: ‘I am thy father's spirit’ (1.5.9), but it moves on to a sequence of possessives which collapse the two identities in references to ‘my death’, (1.5.37) ‘my … queen’ (1.5.47), ‘my orchard’ (1.5.59). By speaking in the name of the father, the spirit lays claim to the authority of the paternal law.