As I was doing some reading earlier this evening I came across what Jon Stewart might call my moment of Zen for the day--from the contributors section of Deconstruction is/in America:
Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida.Perhaps I simply was suffering from an attack of the giggles, but I could not stop laughing about that biography. It's so casually arrogant, but, at the same time, it's hard to argue that he hadn't earned being able to say that in a collection of conference papers dedicated to the idea of Deconstruction. Nevertheless, in its tautological form, I couldn't help but think of that sentence as something like Derrida's Ron Burgundy moment--and given everything I've heard/read about the latter part of his career, he certainly seems to have taken on something of the qualities of that character, retreating into the arms of his cult at the slightest hint of question or criticism--a statement that deserves to be followed by "He is kind of a big deal. His apartment smells of rich mahogany. He has many leather-bound books."
Indeed, while such directness might (would?) jeopardize the very Derridean/deconstructive project, a contributor bio seems like the perfect place for Derrida to make good on his claims that he is (was) not deconstruction (a statement that seems as ridiculous as Robert Fripp's claims that he is not King Crimson) by presenting a clearly delineated definition of what Derrida is if he is (was) not deconstruction (and, conversely, what deconstruction is if it is not Derrida). There's probably quite an interesting reading to be developed from this about the proper name and its significance to Derrida--signified, of course, by that most inescapable of names. Jacques Derrida was (is) Jacques Derrida, yes, but was (is) he more than "Jacques Derrida?" Is he doomed to be only French and obfuscatory? To be an eternal author-function? I'm not a Derridean, so I don't think I can even venture an answer here, but I would gladly listen to/read some thoughts on this.
What's equally interesting to me, though, is how difficult it is to write about that sentence now, and how it resonates with the translation of his talk that appears in the book, "The Time is Out of Joint." Derrida is "out of joint;" at once the eternal present tense of the object of literary analysis and the past tense of the deceased person. Derrida still very much "is" something--in the sense of a meaning that continues to shape, change, and develop--even as he can never "be" anything again. In another, equally valid, sense, he "was" something, and can only ever "have been" that thing. He has become the spectre, the ghost, that he discusses in Spectres of Marx. Derrida, the hauntologist, becomes the hauntological object. Fittingly, he claimed to be a ghost before he ever became one in the common understanding of the term, and that biographical sentence conceals many ghosts.
Of course the impenetrability of the biographical statement works to create those ghosts: "there is no presence except mythologically, no myth without a recording surface which both refers to a (lost) presence and blocks us from attaining it." What else is the "is" in that biographical statement than the creation, the perpetuation of a myth? To return to Derrida's language in the talk: Jacques Derrida is/in/as/and "Jacques Derrida." The relationship drawn up here is always going to be one that is lost, for if the "is" must be interrogated, as Derrida makes clear it must, how can the relationship his biographical sentence proffers survive? How can it be accessed when, ultimately, it's unclear what would be accessed, but even by what method, through what authority, access is granted to us?
Both this biographical sentence and his talk hinge on "is." As Derrida frames his central questions:
Has deconstruction happened? Has it arrived? Of course it has, if you like, but then, if it has, so many questions arise: How? Where? When? On what date exactly? Was it so long ago, already? Or perhaps not yet? . . . Now, when and if one does not know when an event took place, one has to wonder if it indeed took place, or in any case if it took place in "material reality" as Freud might have said, and not only in the fabric of some "psychic reality," in phantasm or delirium. A date, which is to say, the objectivity of a presumed reference, stands precisely at the joining of the "material" and the "psychic." . . . And perhaps deconstruction would consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting "out of joint" the authority of the "is." Or yet again, rather than doing that, sooner, even before doing that, and doing it methodically, it would be a matter for deconstruction of measuring itself against the historical experience--and this is history itself--against the experience of that which in the "is," in time or in the present time of "is," remains precisely "out of joint." (17, 21, 25)
This is perhaps why, once the initial shock of its arrogance wears off, Derrida's biographical sentence becomes quite profound in a certain sense, an opening into how hauntology functions and how it develops out of ontology: "It is this sense of temporal disjuncture that is crucial to hauntology. Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past." In one sentence, Derrida has dinjunctured himself--he both is and was, will always be and has never been. This has been accomplished through the technology of language, of writing, and it is through that same technology that we must attempt to come to terms with this dinjuncture, to set Derrida right, to place him accurately within time, to find the presence that "Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida" implies, even as we know it to be a futile task. As he puts it, quoting himself (of course, necessarily, the ghost of himself making this point possible):
And so as to clarify this question of time, of the being of time, of what then is, in its impossible present, time itself, I continued: "Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstandings, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time?"
A delirium of the date thus confers on the incredible sentence "The time is out of joint" more than one supplementary meaning, to be sure, but at the same time, just as many more madnesses. At the same time. At once. As if there were a dead time in the hour itself. (19)In the hour that Jacques Derrida "is" Jacques Derrida there is a dead time, the time he "was" Jacques Derrida, and the future state in which the "is" will be both "is" and "was." At the same time, at once, Derrida as person, presence, spectre, ghost, absence. Our own desire to make that "is" an objective measurement, to establish an objective originary moment in which that "is" is true, is wholly present, creates these contretemps, these same times--the past present and the present (suffocating in) past. What does it mean that Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida when Jacques Derrida was Jacques Derrida, was always dead, was always a ghost?
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