Testing the Limit by Sebbah François-David

Author:Sebbah, François-David.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

Spectral Subjectivity According to Jacques Derrida

With only very rare exceptions—when, for example, he is in some way “obliged” to do so, as in an interview1—Jacques Derrida never takes the question of subjectivity as the central theme of his work.

However, even if it is never in the spotlight, the question of the subject is an insistent one in Derridean texts, and not only in the form of an exemplary reminder of the metaphysics he has set out to eradicate with a gesture that is simple and without nuance: the subject is not the scapegoat of deconstruction.

Let us recall briefly some of the stakes of this insistence, this “resistance” to subjectivity at the very margins of a work that will in turn be carried to the margins of modern metaphysics. In a surprising reversal, is it not the central motif of the metaphysics of presence, disrupting “deconstruction” at its margins?

•Since Speech and Phenomena, the impossible possibility of the words of Poe’s M. Valdemar, “I am dead,” comes to haunt and deconstruct the pure presence to self of the Husserlian consciousness that ceaselessly reassures itself in its interior monologue.

•During the period in which the thought of différance was being elaborated as a grammatology, the question of the signature signals at once the deconstruction of subjectivity—this time less as presence to self of fundamental substance than as presence of the singular event of Self—and the insistence of a subjectivity that, like signature, precisely, persists in its very effacement.

•In recent texts (since 1985) the motif of subjectivity is constantly at work, in a lateral manner—as if only this approach was capable of being appropriate to it—but more and more obsessively, it seems.

And here are some indices: “Ulysses Gramophone,”2 for example, adheres to an “auto-position of self in the yes” (UG, 131) that brings about a “reference of self to self.” This certainly is not a matter of a reinstallation of the metaphysics of presence—this yes is “preontological” and therefore “older than knowledge” (UG, 121)—but the decisive motif for Derrida, the distance and/or the originary delay is now complicated, perhaps even concurrently, even if it is in no case a contradiction or a correction, through the movement—we must return to this—of an “affirmative” “force” that is older than the origin, older than all origin, even if older, strictly speaking, than all affirmation, a “force” in which Self is always already promised.

Beside the texts devoted to this archi-originary yes—and not in contradiction with them, rather on the contrary3—of others, more or less explicitly in dialogue with Levinas (if not consecrated to Levinas)—Derrida “invests” a domain that could be called religious, 4 if it is true that from a certain viewpoint subjectivity—not as ground but as interiority—was invented by monotheism: what is thus principally in play is the “I am here” of Abraham that gives itself integrally to God to be given to him by God in a paradoxical relation that is a separation.5

•There is something like a “revenance” of subjectivity in the “last” Derrida; and his most

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