The Gift of Death & Literature in Secret by Jacques Derrida

Author:Jacques Derrida [Derrida, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226532660
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1995-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Tout autre est tout autre

The danger is so great that I excuse the suppression of the object.

BAUDELAIRE, “The Pagan School”

. . . Christianity’s stroke of genius . . .

NIETZSCHE, The Genealogy of Morals

“Every other (one) is every (bit) other”—the stakes seem to be altered by the trembling of this formula. It is no doubt too economical, too elliptical, and hence, like any formula, so isolated and capable of being transmitted out of its context, too much like the coded language of a password. One uses it to play with the rules, to cut someone or something short, to aggressively circumscribe a domain of discourse. It becomes the secret of all secrets. Is it not sufficient to transform what one complacently calls a context in order to demystify the shibboleth or decipher all the secrets of the world?

Is not this formula—tout autre est tout autre—in the first place a tautology? It doesn’t signify anything that one doesn’t already know, if by that one simply refers to the repetition of a subject in its complement, and if by so doing, one avoids bringing to bear upon it an interpretation that would distinguish between the two homonyms tout and tout, one an indefinite pronominal adjective (some, someone, some other one) and the other an adverb of quantity (totally, absolutely, radically, infinitely other). But after appealing to the supplement of a contextual sign in order to distinguish between the two grammatical functions and the two senses of what appears to be the same word (tout), one must also get around to distinguishing between the two autres. If the first tout is an indefinite pronominal adjective, then the first autre becomes a noun, and the second, in all probability, an adjective or attribute. One escapes the tautology but instead utters a radical heterology, the very proposition of the most irreducible heterology. Or else as a further alternative one might consider that in both cases (tautology and heterology, homonym or not) the two autres are finally repeated in the monotony of a tautology that wins out after all, the monotony of a principle of identity which, thanks to the copula and sense of being, would here take over alterity itself, nothing less than that, in order to say: the other is the other, that is always so, the alterity of the other is the alterity of the other. And the secret of the formula would close around a heterotautological speculation that always risks meaning nothing. But we know from experience that the speculative always requires a heterotautological position. That is its definition according to Hegel’s speculative idealism, and it is the impetus for the dialectic within the horizon of absolute knowledge; which means, let us not forget, absolute philosophy as truth of a revealed religion that is precisely Christian. The heterotautological position introduces the law of speculation, and of speculation on every secret.

Let us not play at turning this little sentence around in order to make it dazzle from every angle. We would pay only slight

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