For Strasbourg by Derrida Jacques; Brault Pascale-Anne; Naas Michael

Author:Derrida, Jacques; Brault, Pascale-Anne; Naas, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2014-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Responsibility—Of the Sense to Come

(2002)

FRANCIS GUIBAL: I won’t be so foolish as to try to introduce Jacques Derrida here. I know that there are many among us who are grateful for everything he has brought to thinking, brought into in our space of language and of writing, and we are happy to see the continuation of exchanges with Jean-Luc Nancy that are neither simply self-serving nor self-satisfied but that, it seems to me, intersect and, so to speak, fecundate one another. I think that we are now going to see how this will continue. Let me thus give Jacques Derrida the floor right away and thank him again.1

JD: Future, mother, father, fecundity: these words have been nagging us since earlier today. I will not flee from them. Thank you, Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin, for having taken this very felicitous initiative. I think I can speak on behalf of everyone here—since this is the last session—and declare to you our immense gratitude. We were all looking forward to this event.

Just one question: Is one responsible for what happens [arrive]?

I could stop right there …

Another way of putting the same question would be: Isn’t a decision always unjustifiable? Can one be or not be responsible for an event? And for a singularity, for the singularity of an event?

These uncertainties will remain suspended, as if in exergue.

You are probably very tired. Tiredness or fatigue might be a theme to reawaken. It was fashionable before and after the war. It was a topos for existential or existentialist philosophy. It was a question at that time of an ontological fatigue, if not a fatigue of ontology. A few decades ago, it was discussed quite a bit around Levinas and Bataille, to whom we should also add Blanchot and others. You are probably tired by all this talk, and not only because of the time that passes, but perhaps also because of the affect produced by what Jean-Luc Nancy yesterday called a sort of general equivalency. Our situation of thought, our “conjuncture,” no doubt remains to be defined or thought. Without consensus, we are in fact struggling in a sort of dangerously common place. In the same place, the call to the event, to singularity—that is today no doubt the most commonly shared thing in the world, perhaps a bit too much so.

So, how are we to begin or begin again this evening without giving in to all these sorts of fatigue? Many among us here have written extensively on the themes announced and treated since yesterday. And written about them usually better than when we speak about them. At least I hope that is my case. What we should do here, if something still needs to be done, right at this moment, is speak as if we were beginning to speak, as if we were going to make something happen or come, that is, produce an event while improvising. Improvisation was part of the contract between Francis Guibal, Jean-Clet Martin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and myself.

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