Dis-Enclosure by Nancy Jean-Luc; Bergo Bettina; Malenfant Gabriel

Author:Nancy, Jean-Luc; Bergo, Bettina; Malenfant, Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2008-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Consolation, Desolation

In the Preface he wrote for the volume entitled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Each Time Unique, the End of the World),1 a collection of memorial addresses, Jacques Derrida emphasizes how much the “adieu” should salute nothing other than “the necessity of a possible non-return, the end of the world as the end of any resurrection.” In other words, the “adieu” should in no way signify a rendezvous with God but, on the contrary, a definitive leave-taking, an irremissible abandonment—as much an abandonment of the deceased other to his effacement as an abandonment of the survivor to the rigorous privation of all hope in some kind of afterlife, whether that of the other or indeed, ultimately, of the survivor himself: I, who salute the other, whom another will salute, some other day.

This necessity is tied to that according to which we must recognize, in each death, the end of the world, and not simply the end of a world: not a momentary interruption in the chain of possible worlds, but rather the annihilation with neither reserve nor compensation “of the sole and unique world,” “which makes each living being a single and unique one.” We must say “adieu” without return, in the implacable certainty that the other will not turn back, will never return.

A salutation [salut] “worthy of the name” rejects all salvation. It salutes the absolute absence of salvation [il salue l’absence absolu de salut], or, again, it “foregoes salvation [salut] in advance,” as Derrida wrote already in Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy.2 Just as he then addressed that salute to me, that salute dismissing salvation, he again directs to me the monition of this “book of adieu.” He specifies, in effect, that “resurrection” must be refused, not only “in the usual sense, which imagines bodies that have come back to life get up and walk about; but even in the sense of anastasis of which Jean-Luc Nancy speaks.”3 In effect, the latter “continues to console, were this with the rigor of a certain cruelty. It postulates both the existence of some God and that the end of one world may not be the end of the world.”

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