9 July 19791

So, what do you want me to say, I had a premonition of something nasty in it, like a word, or a worm, a piece of worm which would be a piece of word, and which would seek to reconstitute itself, slithering, something tainted which poisons life. And suddenly, precisely there, only there, I started to lose my hair, no, to lose some hair which was not necessarily mine, perhaps yours. I was trying to keep it by making knots which, one after the other, came undone only to re-form themselves further on. I felt, from a distance and confusedly, that I was searching for a word, perhaps a proper name (for example Claude, but I do not know why I choose this example right now, I do not remember his presence in my dream). Rather it was the term which was searching for me, it had the initiative, according to me, and was doing its best to collect itself by every means, for a period of time which I could not measure, all night perhaps, and even more, or else an hour or three minutes, impossible to know, but is it a question here of knowing? The time of this word remains, does it not, especially if it were a proper name, without comparison with everything which might surround it. The word was taking its time, and by dint of following it you ask me, I ask myself: where is this leading us, towards what place? We are absolutely unable to know, forecast [prevoir], /foresee, foretell, fortune-tell/.2 Impossible anticipation, it is always from there that I have addressed myself to you and you have never accepted it.

[1] ‘The eye captures what it will destroy. It ca’n not perceive what escapes death, what is invisible,’ he said.

‘The eye is human. It made Adam mortal.

‘When Adam opened his eyes God trembled.

‘Adam's fall is the triumph of the eye.’

‘God is eyeless,’ he also said.

God knows: He is blind. Man comes to know what his eyes destroy. All knowledge passes through choice. Choice guarantees murder.

‘Thou shalt not kill,’ commands God. Did he hope that man would turn blind again?

‘Ah Lord, why make me a murderer by giving me the sense of sight and then damn me for opening my eyes?’ wrote a rabbi I met shortly after writing the last page of the Book of Questions.

‘God created the world on the scale of the creature's glance so that they would die of one another,’ he had noted.

‘God created the world, that is, God created Himself, in order to face up to the eyes of man and to show His power by escaping them,’ he had noted elsewhere.

The best proof of love the creature could give God was to accept His Invisibility.

The world will go out with the eye. Everything will have been said, as at the beginning.

[2]

‘… the lethal opening of the eye.’ Jacques Derrida

[3]

The eye is a blank page. It succumbs to seeing.

You turn into writing what you see; what sees you, into reading.

The eye means oblivion. Both oblivion of things seen and the muted glace of oblivion.

You will do nothing. You will disintegrate.

The following remarks, transcribed by Jean-Trangois Lyotard, are taken from the discussion which took place after the reading of ‘Phrasing “After Auschwitz”’ at Cerisy.

Derrida states that he finds himself in agreement with the talk, that he does not want to ‘yield to this pathos’ (of agreement), that he seeks to ‘link on, no, not to link on, but to add phrases’. He wonders if ‘the question’ is not that of ‘the multiplicity of proper names’, if ‘the very grave stakes of what Lyotard has given to think’ are not ‘the fact that there are several proper names’. He wonders, first of all, about the ‘schema’ presupposed by Lyotard's discourse centred upon Auschwitz; and he thinks he perceives that ‘in referring to this nameless name, in making a model of it, that discourse risks reconstituting a kind of centrality’, a we for this occasion, one which is certainly not that of speculative dialectics, but which is related to the unanimous privilege ‘we Western Europeans’ grant Auschwitz in ‘the combat or the question’ we oppose to speculative dialectics, to ‘a certain kind of Western reason, etc.’. The risk is that this we ‘would consign to oblivion or would brush aside (lateraliserait) proper names other than that of Auschwitz and which are just as abhorrent as it’, names which have names, and names which don’t. ‘And my worry’, says Derrida, ‘is that a certain we, reconstitutes itself in reference to what you have said so admirably about Auschwitz.’

Derrida then formulates ‘another worry’, which resembles the less dramatic or ‘more formal’ one he feels when he reads Levinas: ‘Despite all the indisputable things he says about the utterly-other (le tout-autre), about the hiatus, the relation to the utterly-other gives rise to linkings of phrases.’

AIDS is always already inscribed in the program, is always already programmed and is always already on the program, that is, on the agenda. Another thinking resonates with these formulations, a thinking associated with the name Derrida. Along with Nancy, Jacques Derrida is probably one of the few philosophers or thinkers to inquire into the meaning of AIDS and remind us of the urgency of this question. He does so in an interview entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs.’ In a different interview, responding to Nancy's question ‘Who comes after the subject?,’ Derrida expresses his wish to talk about AIDS and immediately adds that for him the emergence and spread of the virus represents an event [Eregnis]: ‘an event that one could call historical in the epoch of subjectivity, if we still gave credence to historicality, to epochality, and to subjectivity’. What does this curious statement tell us? On the one hand, we no longer give credence to the concepts Derrida enumerates; we no longer consider them creditworthy; we distrust them; we are not willing to support them and to be supported by them. On the other hand, we continue to credit them; their value still remains high enough; we believe that, despite their loss of credit, they might contribute to clarification of what AIDS challenges us to think. The emergence and spread of AIDS, then, is not an event. Or rather, it is an event because it is not a pure event. If we can think about AIDS by relying, even with the greatest mistrust, on subjectivity (and Derrida has demonstrated that the concepts of historicity and epochality derive from the concept of subjectivity, from the concept itself), it is only because the virus weakens the subjective recuperation of the event, because it loosens and unhinges the ‘stabilizing arrest’ [arret stabilisateur﹜, which one calls ‘the subject.’

So much to say, and I don't have the heart for it today. So much to say about what has happened to us, about what has happened to me too, with the death of Gilles Deleuze; so much to say about what happens with a death that was undoubtedly feared - we knew he was very ill - but yet so much to say about what happens with this death, this unimaginable image which in any event would still hollow out, if it were possible, the sad infinity of another event. More than anything else, Deleuze the thinker is the thinker of the event and always of this event in particular. From beginning to end, he remained a thinker of this event. I reread what he said concerning the event, already in 1969, in one of his greatest books, The Logic of Sense. He quotes Jos Bousquet, who says, ‘For my inclination toward death which was a failure of the will I substituted a longing for dying which is the apotheosis of the will.’ Then Deleuze adds, ‘From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of a leap in place of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men.’1 (One could go on quoting endlessly.)

The Dependence of the Economy on the Circulation of Energy on the Earth

When it is necessary to change an automobile tyre, open an abscess or plough a vineyard, it is easy to manage a quite limited operation. The elements on which the action is brought to bear are not completely isolated from the rest of the world, but it is possible to act on them as if they were: one can complete the operation without once needing to consider the whole, of which the tyre, the abscess or the vineyard is nevertheless an integral part. The changes brought about do not perceptibly alter the other things, nor does the ceaseless action from without have an appreciable effect on the conduct of the operation. But things are different when we consider a substantial economic activity such as the production of automobiles in the United States, or, a fortiori, when it is a question of economic activity in general.

Between the production of automobiles and the general movement of the economy, the interdependence is rather clear, but the economy taken as a whole is usually studied as if it were a matter of an isolatable system of operation. Production and consumption are linked together, but, considered jointly, it does not seem difficult to study them as one might study an elementary operation relatively independent of that which it is not.

This method is legitimate, and science never proceeds differently. However, economic science does not give results of the same order as physics studying, first, a precise phenomenon, then all studiable phenomena as a co-ordinated whole. Economic phenomena are not easy to isolate, and their general coordination is not easy to establish.

The implicit operation of censorship is, by definition, difficult to describe. If it operates within a bodily understanding, as Taylor and Bourdieu suggest, how do we understand the bodily operation of such a linguistic understanding? If censorship is the condition of agency, how do we best understand linguistic agency? In what does the ‘force’ of the performative consist, and how can it be understood as part of politics? Bourdieu argues that the ‘force’ of the performative is the effect of social power, and social power is to be undertood through established contexts of authority and their instruments of censorship. Opposed to this social account of performative force, Derrida argues that the breaking of the utterance from prior, established contexts consitutes the ‘force’ of the utterance.

In the introduction I maintained that the speech act is a bodily act, and that the ‘force’ of the performative is never fully separable from bodily force: this constituted the chiasm of the ‘threat’ as a speech act at once bodily and linguistic. Felman's contribution to speech act theory underscores that speech, precisely because it is a bodily act, is not always ‘knowing’ about what it says. In other words, the bodily effects of speech exceed the intentions of the speaker, raising the question of the speech act itself as a nexus of bodily and psychic forces. In the preceding discussion, I noted that foreclosure, in its revised sense, inaugurates or forms the subject, delimiting the limits of speakable discourse as the viable limits of the subject.

If I distrust my memory - neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well - I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which this note is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind the place where this ‘memory’ has been deposited and I can then ‘reproduce’ it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory.

If I want to make full use of this technique for improving my mnemic function, I find that there are two different procedures open to me. On the one hand, I can choose a writing-surface which will preserve intact any note made upon it for an indefinite length of time - for instance, a sheet of paper which I can write upon in ink. I am then in possession of a ‘permanent memorytrace’. The disadvantage of this procedure is that the receptive capacity of the writing-surface is soon exhausted. The sheet is filled with writing, there is no room on it for any more notes, and I find myself obliged to bring another sheet into use, that has not been written on. Moreover, the advantage of this procedure, the fact that it provides a ‘permanent trace’, may lose its value for me if after a time the note ceases to interest me and I no longer want to ‘retain it in my memory’.

To begin with that beginning we call a title, I will point out that my title uses an ambiguous plural. By grammar alone and without much context, one cannot decide whether to read the plural ‘ghosts’ as the two ghosts of critique and deconstruction, each having or being its own ghost, or whether to read a plural plurality: both critique and deconstruction having or being more than one ghost and even more than one kind of ghost. Both of these plurals are possible, which means that there is yet another kind of plurality to be reckoned with in the title's phrasing: a plurality of kinds of pluralization other than the pluralization of separable, identifiable ones. There would be a possible plurality of not just the more than one but also a plurality of modes of plurality: the other than one.

In French, there is an expression that says at the same time more than one and other than one: plus d’un. Depending on whether or not one pronounces the ‘s’: ‘plus/plus,’ the expression shifts its register from that of counting by ones to that of counting without number one, or of taking account of the other than one. In French, then, it is possible to say all that at once, or rather to write it, because this pluralization of the same time has its effect only if voice itself is muted so as to suspend the final ‘s’ of ‘plus/plus’ between its two possibilities.

Jacques Derrida has frequently made use of this fortunate possibility in the French idiom, to the perpetual torment, perhaps, of his translators. But it is also the chance his texts give to the work of translation between languages and idioms: the chance of pluralization of another language.

Philosophers ‘do’ ‘it’, literary critics ‘do’ ‘it’, even architects and psychoanalysts ‘do’ ‘it’, poets ‘do’ ‘it’, painters ‘do’ ‘it’, capital and the political are said to ‘do’ ‘it’, texts ‘do’ ‘it’ to themselves and justice is ‘it’, but what is this thing? The following pages are an introduction to the term which has come to act as a metonym for the work of Jacques Derrida and the substantial body of knowledge which has grown up around his texts in the form of an extensive commentary and dialogue. However, the word means more than this. It is a translation (and adaptation) into French, and then into the languages of the world, of the Heideggerian term ‘Destruktion’ or ‘Abbau\ In this sense it suggests an operation performed in relation to the structure of the fundamental concepts of Western metaphysics. It is a translation - successful or not - which attempts to limit the connotations of ‘destruction’ implied by a straight transliteration of Heidegger's term into French. In French, it has both a grammatical and a mechanical meaning. It means both to disarrange the construction of words in a sentence and to disassemble a machine and transport it elsewhere. It also forms a reflexive verb [sc deconstuire] meaning to lose one's own construction. However, this thing cannot be reduced to a semantic or a mechanical model. Indeed the term itself questions the architecture of such models, as well as the model of architecture.

The theory of autobiography is plagued by a recurrent series of questions and approaches that are not simply false, in the sense that they are farfetched or aberrant, but that are confining, in that they take for granted assumptions about autobiographical discourse that are in fact highly problematic. They keep therefore being stymied, with predictable monotony, by sets of problems that are inherent in their own use. One of these problems is the attempt to define and to treat autobiography as if it were a literary genre among others. Since the concept of genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function, what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history. The investment in such a convergence, especially when autobiography is concerned, is considerable. By making autobiography into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status of mere reportage, chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest one, among the canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres. This does not go without some embarrassment, since compared to tragedy, or epic, or lyric poetry, autobiography always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in a way that may be symptomatic of its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values. Whatever the reason may be, autobiography makes matters worse by responding poorly to this elevation in status. Attempts at generic definition seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable.

Screen's Winter 1987 issue is entitled ‘Deconstructing “Difference”’. What would it mean to deconstruct ‘difference’? Given, that is, that deconstruction charts the operation of something called difference - which is already defined as deconstructed difference. Why does Screen need to do it all over again?

We soon discover, however, that neither ‘deconstructing’ nor ‘difference’ are being used in a technical deconstructive sense. In ‘Difference and Its Discontents’, the introduction to the issue, Mandy Merck makes it clear that by ‘difference’ is meant ‘the theory of sexual difference’. The theory of sexual difference, she suggests, requires deconstruction, in the name of sameness. But is there such a thing as ‘the theory of sexual difference’?

Apparently so, for the complaint against ‘the theory of sexual difference’ is precisely that it is a homogenous theory. But, paradoxically, what is wrong with this homogeneous theory is that it always promotes heterogeneity. It neglects sameness in its desire for otherness: otherness always defined as ‘the same difference’ of heterosexuality.

Merck argues that what she calls ‘the “difference” school’ is ‘largely unable to theorise homosexuality’ (p 6). As proof she cites the lack of lesbian representation in the Oxford Literary Review's ‘Sexual Difference’ conference, and the absence of homosexuality altogether in the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. While there is no doubt that homosexuality was under-represented in both cases, it does not necessarily follow that this was the result of a deficiency in theory. For it is not so much that the so-called difference school has been unable to theorise homosexuality as that its theorisation of homosexuality has produced certain theoretical problems. These in turn produce difficulties at the level of political strategy.

I do not have the strength, I feel unable to fit public words to what has just happened, and which leaves speechless all those who had the chance to become acquainted with the great thinker - whose absence, I am certain, will remain for me forever unthinkable: the unthinkable itself, shrouded in tears.

Jean-Francois Lyotard remains one of my closest friends, in as much as one is anxiously seeing that these words retain some meaning. It is as if, in my heart and in our thought, we have been friends forever - a word which, to me, translates more than 40 years of reading and ‘discussion’ (he always preferred this word, which he used as the title of a great text on Auschwitz - and on other things). A ‘discussion’ which was watchful, therefore, without complacency, a bemused provocation, always in the breath of a smile, I think, a smile which was both tender and mocking, an irony ready to yield in the name of something we had no name for at the time, and whose nickname now is ‘friendship-above-all’ [‘Amitie-a-tout-rompre’]. An overall tone which was both light and solemn, as well as the burst of philosophical laughter which all of Jean-Francois's friends no doubt can hear, deep inside themselves, today. A peculiar combination of curt laughter (judgement) and infinitely considerate attention which I always loved and thought I could recognise even at those - rare and difficult to pinpoint - times of ‘differend’, throughout the common grounds we had (phenomenology to start with, and an admiring and indispensable reference to Levinas, although, once again, it wasn't the same reference - that is to say, it was one among so many other landmarks thus inscribed in the same landscape).

Friedrich Engels died in 1895. On the centenary of his death in 1995 it might have been appropriate, if anachronistic, to consider his legacy, especially in the wake of the publication of Jacques Derrida's fullest, but by no means first, engagement with Marx. It may take a hundred years for the impact of Specters of Marx to be felt and its implications thought through, but one thing that disappointed me was the low visibility of Engels. It seems that Derrida finds it as hard as anyone else to keep Engels in mind, or in sight, when dealing with Marxism. One could count on the fingers of two hands the references to Engels, including one hyphenated allusion to a body called ‘Marx-Engels’.

This was especially disheartening for me, because deconstruction is precisely that form of textual practice that one would expect to be most sensitive to the question of co-authorship. What happens between two authors? Co-authorship - itself a kind of ghost-writing, like all writing - is an unavoidable reality for all of us, yet we continue to experience difficulty in dealing with Marx's other half. Indeed, paraphrasing Derrida, one might venture the following proposition: ‘There is nothing outside of co-authorship, no discourse that is not haunted by the other.’ So much of Derrida's writing depends upon multiple reading heads, and although he has not, on the face of it, engaged in co-authorship, narrowly conceived, if we think in broader terms, in terms of interviews, dialogues, translations, examples, citations, iterability, double bands like those in Gias, or ‘Living On/Borderlines’, the heat-seeking missives of The Post Card, or simply in terms of the medley of styles that he adopts, not to mention his constant openness to the other, then we could say that Derrida only ever co-authors.

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce.