Jacques Derrida

The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)

To begin with, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. Naked in the first place-but this is in order to announce already that I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy. Starting from Genesis. I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart. And to utter these words without repeating myself, without beginning again what I have already said here, more than once. It is said that one must avoid repeating oneself, in order not to give the appearance of

The Law of Genre

I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them. Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves. Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free their random virtualities and turn them over to my audience-or, rather, to your audience, to your auditory grasp, to whatever mobility they retain and you bestow upon them to engender effects of all kinds without my having to stand behind them. I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to be mixed; I will not mix them.

February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe

It is the wish of Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas to be co-signatories of what is both an analysis and an appeal. They regard it as necessary and urgent that French and German philosophers lift their voices together, whatever disagreements may have separated them in the past. The following text was composed by Jurgen Habermas, as will be readily apparent. Though he would have liked to very much, due to personal circumstances Jacques Derrida was unable to compose his own text. Nevertheless, he suggested to Jurgen Habermas that he be the co-signatory of this appeal, and shares its definitive premises and perspectives: the determination of new European political responsibilities beyond any Eurocentrism; the call for a renewed confirmation and effective transformation of international law and its institutions, in particular the UN; a new conception and a new praxis for the distribution of state authority, etc., according to the spirit, if not the precise sense, that refers back to the Kantian tradition.

The Principle of Hospitality

Le Monde: In your last book, Of Hospitality, you oppose ‘the unconditional law of unlimited hospitality’ and ‘the laws of hospitality, these rights and obligations always conditioned and conditional’ What do you mean by this? Jacques Derrida: It is between these two figures of hospitality that responsibilities and decisions must in effect be taken. This is a formidable challenge because if these two hospitalities do not contradict each other, they remain heterogeneous at the very moment that they appeal to each other, in a disconcerting way. Doubtless, all ethics of hospitality are not the same, but there is no culture or social bond without a principle of hospitality. This principle demands, it even creates the desire for, a welcome without reserve and without calculation, an exposure without limit to whoever arrives [l’arrivant]. Yet a cultural or linguistic community, a family, a nation, can not not suspend, at the least, even betray this principle of absolute hospitality: to protect a ‘home’, without doubt, by guaranteeing property and what is ‘proper’ to itself against the unlimited arrival of the other; but also to attempt to render the welcome effective, determined, concrete, to put it into practice [le mettre en oeuvre]. Whence the ‘conditions’ which transform the gift into a contract, the opening into a policed pact; whence the rights and the duties, the borders, passports and doors, whence the immigration laws, since immigration must, it is said, be ‘controlled’. It must be remembered that the stakes of ‘immigration’ do not in all rigour coincide with those of hospitality which reach beyond the civic or properly political space. In the texts you cite, I analyse something which is not a simple opposition between the ‘unconditional’ and the ‘conditional’. If the two meanings of hospitality remain mutually irreducible, it is always in the name of pure and hyperbolic hospitality that it is necessary, in order to render it as effective as possible, to invent the best arrangements [dispositions], the least bad conditions, the most just legislation. This is necessary to avoid the perverse effects of an unlimited hospitality whose risks I tried to define. This is the double law of hospitality: to calculate the risks, yes, but without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner. It defines the unstable site of strategy and decision. Of perfectibility as of progress. This site is being searched for today, for example in debates on immigration.

A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event

Thank you. I assure you that what I’m going to say will be much more unequipped and exposed thanGadSoussana’s beautiful lecture.Beforebabbling a few words, I’d like to join in the thanks already expressed and tell Phyllis Lambert and all our hosts how grateful I am for the hospitalitywith which they’ve honored me. We settled on very little in advance, but we did agree that I’d try to say a few words after Gad Soussana, that I’d then turn the floor over to Alexis Nouss, andwould pick up afterwards in a somewhat more enduring way. I will try to carry through my task in the first part of this promised talk by saying a few very simple things. It is worth recalling that an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable, and we at least agreed to one thing between ourselves and that was that the title for this session, for this discussion, would be chosen by my friends sitting here beside me. I take this opportunity to say that it was on account of friendship that I thought I should accept to expose myself here in this way, friendship not only for those who are sitting here beside me but for all my friends from Quebec; some, whom I haven’t seen for a long time, are here today in the audience and to them I address a word of greeting. I wanted this open-ended and, to a large degree, improvised gathering to be placed in this way under the heading of an event of friendship. This presupposes friendship, of course, but also surprise and the unanticipatable. It was understood that Gad Soussana and Alexis Nouss would choose the title and that I would try as well as I could to present not answers but some improvised remarks. Obviously, if there is an event, it must never be something that is predicted or planned, or even really decided upon.

«To do justice to Freud»: the history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis

When Elisabeth Roudinesco and Rene Major did me the honor and kindness of inviting me to a commemoration that would also be a reflection, to one of these genuine tributes where thought is plied to fidelity and fidelity honed by thought, I did not hesitate for one moment. First of all, because I love memory. This is nothing original, of course, and yet how else can one love? Indeed, thirty years ago, this great book of Foucault was an event whose repercussions were so intense and multiple that I will not even try to identify much less measure them deep down inside me. Next, because I love friendship, and the trusting affection that Foucault showed me thirty years ago, and that was to last for many years, was all the more precious in that, being shared, it corresponded to my professed admiration. Then, after 1972, what came to obscure this friendship, without, however, affecting my admiration, was not, in fact, alien to this book, and to a certain debate that ensued-or at least to its distant, delayed, and indirect effects. There was in all of this a sort of dramatic chain of events, a compulsive and repeated precipitation that I do not wish to describe here because I do not wish to be alone, to be the only one to speak of this after the death of Michel Foucaultexcept to say that this shadow that made us invisible to one another, that made us not associate with one another for close to ten years (until 1

Taking chances : Derrida, psychoanalysis, and literature

A challenging and multisided meditation on the importance of Derrida to current developments in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical interpretations of literature.

The Last of the Rogue States: The "Democracy to Come," Opening in Two Turns

I have already played a great deal with this verbal thing voyou, this idiom of recent or modern French invention (dating back only to the nineteenth century, to the beginning, therefore, of an urban society entering the age of industrial capitalism), an idiom of popular origin and barely French, but also, in spite of or actually because of all this, an untranslatable, or barely translatable, incrimination, a sort of French interjection or exclamation, ‘‘voyou!’’ which, I neglected to say, can be turned by means of an intonation into something tender, affectionate, maternal (my maternal grandmother used to call me this when I was a child, pretending to be angry with me, ‘‘voyou, va! ’’ [‘‘you little rascal!’’]). I have played a great deal with this word, which, while remaining untranslatable, nonetheless becomes in the expression ‘‘Etat voyou’’ a more-than-recent translation, almost still brand new, barely used, approximate, franglaise, of the Anglo-American ‘‘rogue state’’—that so-very-singular indictment I discovered for the first time in my own language a little more than a year ago, and doubly associated with the state, when it was announced after a cabinet meeting that the president and

The Linguistic Circle of Geneva

Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language cease to be proscribed (as they had been from the end of the nineteenth century) and when a certain geneticism--or a certain generativism--comes back into its own. One could show that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activ-

Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection

Abstract A translation of Jacques Derridas “Admiration de Nelson Mandela, ou Les lois de la réflexion,” first published in Pour Nelson Mandela (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry conceived of and edited by Derrida and Mustapha Tlili, and later in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, II (Paris: Galilée, 1987–2003), is given. In part a tribute to the iconic leader of the struggle against apartheid, “Admiration of Nelson Mandela” also presents a sustained analysis of Nelson Mandelas thought and practice through close readings of his speeches and writings, notably the statements that Mandela delivered in his own defense during his trial of 1962 and the Rivonia trial of 1963–64. In addition, “Admiration of Nelson Mandela” represents a significant articulation within the series of reflections that Derrida devoted throughout his career to questions of law and justice, ethics and politics, and democracy. The present translation includes a translators introduction which situates the essay within this broader constellation of writings and elaborates a number of the problems and concepts central to Derridas approach to legal theory.