EDITED BY EDUARDO CADAVA,
PETER CONNOR, JEAN-LUC NANCY
ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Jean-Luc Nancy
1 Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing
the Question Other-Wise 9
Sylviane Agacinski
2 On a Finally Objectless Subject 24
Alain Badiou
3 Citizen Subject 33
Etienne Balibar
4 Who? 58
Maurice Blanchot
5 The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics 61
Mikkel Barch-Jacobsen
6 Voice of Conscience and Call of Being 79
Jean-Franr,;ois Courtine
7 A Philosophical Concept. ... 94
Gilles Deleuze
8 "Eating Well," or the Calculation of the Subject:
An Interview with Jacques Derrida 96
Jacques Derrida
9 Apropos of the "Critique of the Subject" and
of the Critique of this Critique 120
Vincent Descombes
10 Being and the Living 135
Didier Franck
11 Who Comes after the Subject? 148
Gerard Granel
12 The Critique of the Subject 157
Michel Henry
13 Love between Us 167
Luce Irigaray
14 Descartes Entrapped 178
Sarah Ko/man
15 The Response of Ulysses 198
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
16 Philosophy and Awakening 206
Emmanuel Levinas
17 Seisus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi 217
Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard
18 L'Interloque 236
Jean-Luc Marion
19 After What 246
Jacques Ranciere
Name Index 253
About the Editors and Contributors 256
"Eating
Well," or the
Calculation of the Subject:
An Interview with Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida: From your question
one might pick out two phrases: first, "Who
comes after the subject?" the "who" perhaps already pointing
toward a grammar
that would no longer be subjected to the subject; and, second, "a
prevalent discourse
of recent date concludes with its [the subject's] simple
liquidation."
Now should we not take an initial
precaution with regard to the doxa, which in
a certain way dictates the very formulation of the question? This precaution
would
not be a critique. It is no doubt necessary to refer to such a doxa, should it
only
be to analyze it and possibly disqualify it. The question "Who comes
after the
subject?" (this time I emphasize the "after") implies that for a
certain philosophical
opinion today, in its most visible configuration, something named
"subject" can be
identified, as its alleged passing might also be identified in certain
identifiable
thoughts or discourses. This "opinion" is cohfused. The confusion
consists at least
in a clumsy mixing up of a number of discursive strategies. If over the last
twenty-
five years in France the most notorious of these strategies have in fact led to
a kind
of discussion around "the question of the subject," none of them has
sought to
"liquidate" anything (I don't know moreover to what philosophical
concept this
word might correspond, a word that I understand more readily in other codes:
finance, crime, terrorism, civil or political criminality; one only speaks of
"liquida
tion" therefore from the position of Lhe law, indeed, the police). The
diagnostic of
"liquidation" exposes in general an illusion and an offence. It accuses:
they tried
to "liquidate," they thought they could do it, we will not let them
do it. The
diagnostic implies therefore a promise: we will do justice, we will save or
rehabilitate
the subject. A slogan therefore: a return to the subject, the return of the
subject.
Furthermore, one would have to ask, to put it very briefly, if the stmcture of
every
subject is not constituted in the possibility of this kind of repetition one
calls a
return, and more important, if this stmcture is not essentially before the
law, the
relation to law and the experience, if there is any, of the law, but
let's leave this.
Let's take some examples of
this confusion, and also some proper names that might
serve as indices to help us along. Did Lacan "liquidate" the subject?
No. The
decentered "subject" of which he speaks certainly doesn't have the
traits of the
classical subject (thought even here, we'd have to take a closer look . . .),
though
it remains indispensable to the economy of the Lacanian theory. It is also a
correlate
of the law.
Jean Luc Nancy: Lacan is perhaps
the only one to insist on keeping the
name. . .
JD: Perhaps not the
only one in fact. We will speak later on about Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, but we might note already that Althusser's theory, for
example,
seeks to discredit a certain authority of the subject only by acknowledging for
the
instance of the "subject" an irreducible place in a theory of
ideology, an ideology
that, mutatis mutandis, is just as irreducible as the transcendental
illusion in the
Kantian dialectic. This place is that of a subject constituted by
interpellation, by
its being-interpellated (again being-before-the-law, the subject as a subject
sub-
jected to the law and held responsible before it). As for Foucault's discourse,
there
would be different. things to say according to the stages of its development. In
his
case, we would appear to have a history of subjectivity that, in spite of
certain
massive declarations about the effacement of the figure of man, certainly never
consisted in "liquidating" the Subject. And in his last phase, there
again, a return
of mortality and a certain ethical subject. For these three discourses (Lacan,
Althusser, Foucault) and for some of the thinkers they privilege (Freud, Marx,
Nietzsche), the subject can be re-interpreted, restored, re-inscribed, it
certainly
isn't "liquidated." The question "who," notably in
Nietzsche, strongly reinforces
this point. This is also true of Heidegger, the principal reference or target
of the
doxa we are talking about. The ontological question that deals with the
subjectum,
in its Cartesian and post-Cartesian forms, is anything but a liquidation.
J LN: For Heidegger,
nevertheless, the epoch that comes to a close as the epoch
of metaphysics, and that perhaps closes epochality as such, is the epoch of the
metaphysics of subjectivity, and the end of philosophy is then the exiling of
the
metaphysics of subjectivity . . .
JD: But this
"exiting" is not an exit, it cannot be compared to a passage beyond
or a lapsing, even to a "liquidation."
J LN: No, but I can't see in
Heidegger what thread in the thematic or the
problematic of the subject still remains to be drawn out, positively or
affirmatively,
whereas I can see it if it's a question of truth, if it's a question of
manifestation, a
question of the phenomenon . . .
JD: Yes. But two
things: The very summary exposition that I have just ventured
was a quick response, precisely, to whatever summariness there might be in this
doxa that doesn't go to the trouble of analyzing, up close, in a
differentiated manner,
the differential strategies of all these treatments of the "subject."
We could have
chosen examples closer to us, but
let's move on. The effect of the doxa consists in
saying: all these philosophers think they have put the subject behind them . .
.
J LN: So it would now be a
matter of going back to it, and that's the slogan.
JD: It's the effect of
the slogan I was getting at. Second thing: what you called
the "thread to be drawn" in Heidegger, perhaps follows, among other
paths, that
of an analogy (to be treated very cautiously) between the function of
the Dasein in
Being and Time and the function of the subject in an
ontological-transcendental,
indeed, ethico-juridical setting. Dasein cannot be reduced to a
subjectivity, cer-
tainly, but the existential analytic still retains the formal traits of every
transcenden
tal analytic. Dasein, and what there is in it that answers to the
question "Who?"
comes to occupy, no doubt displacing lots of other things, the place of the
"subject,"
the cogito or the classical "Ich denke." From these, it
retains certain essential traits
(freedom, resolute-decision, to take up this old translation again, a relation
or
presence to self, the "call" [Rj] toward a moral conscience,
responsibility, primor-
dial imputability or guilt [Schuldigsein] etc.). And whatever the
movements of
Heideggerian thought "after" Being and Time and
"after" the existential analytic,
they left nothing "behind," "liquidated."
J-LN: What you are aiming at
in my question then is the "coming after" as
leading to something false, dangerous . . .
JJ): Your question echoes, for
legitimate strategic reasons, a discourse of "opin-
ion" that, it seems to me, one must begin by critiquing or deconstructing.
I wouldn't
agree to enter into a discussion where it was imagined that one knew what the
subjcct is, where it would go without saying that this "character" is
the same for
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, and others, who
would somehow all be in agreement to "liquidate" it. For me, the
discussion would
begin to get interesting when, beyond the vested confusion of this doxa,
one gets
to a more serious, more essential question. For example, if throughout all
these
different strategies the "subject," without having been
"liquidated," has been re-
interpreted, displaced, decentered, re inscribed, then, first: what becomes of
those
problematics that seemed to presuppose a classical determination of the subject
(objectivity, be it scientific or other�ethical, legal, political, etc.), and
second:
who or what "answers" to the question "who"?
J-LN: For me, "who"
designated a place, that place "of the subject" that appears
precisely through deconstruction itself. What is the place that Dasein,
for example,
comes to occupy?
JD: To elaborate this question
along topological lines ("What is the place of the
subject?"), it would perhaps be necessary to give up before the
impossible, that is
to say, before the attempt to reconstitute or reconstruct that which has
already been
deconstructed (and which, moreover, has deconstructed "itself," an
expression
that encapsulates the whole difficulty) and ask ourselves, rather: What are wc
designati ng, in a tradition that one would have to identify in a ri gorous way
(le t's
say for the moment the one that runs from Descartes to Kant and to Husserl)
under
the concept of subj ect, in such a way that once certain predicates have been
deconstructed, the uni ty of the concept and the name are radically affected ? These
predicates would be, for example, the sub jective structure as the being
thrown�
or under-lying�of the substance or of the substratum, of the
hypokeimenon, with
its qualities of stance or st ability, of permanent presence, of sustai ned
relation to
self, everything that links the "subject" to conscience, to humanity,
to history . . .
and above all to the law, as subject subjected to the law, s u bject to the law
in its
very autonomy, to ethical or juridical law, to political law or power, to order
(symbolic or not) . . .
J LN: Are you proposing
that the question be reformulated, keeping the name
"subject," but now used in a positive sense?
JD: Not necessarily. I
would keep the name provisionally as an index for the
discussion, but I don't see the necessi ty of keeping the word
"subject" at any pri ce,
e special ly if the context and conventions of discourse risk re-introducing
preci sely
what is in question . . .
J LN: I don't see how
you can keep the name without enormous misunder
standings. But in lieu of the "subject," there is something like a
place, a unique
point of passage. It's like the writer for Blanchot: place of passage, of the e
miss i on
of a voice that captures the "m u rmur" and detaches itself from it,
but that is nev er
an "author" in the classical sense. How might one name this place?
The qu estion
"who" seems to keep something of the subject, perhaps . . .
JD: Yes.
J LN: But the
"what" is no better; what about "process,"
"functioning," "text"
JD: In the case of the
text, I wouldn't say a "what" . . .
J LN: Can you be more
precise?
JD: Yes, a little
later, that can wait. I assumed, rather naively, that in our
discussion here we would try to bypass the work that we have both done c on ce
rning
the "subject." That of course is impossible; in fact, it's idiotic.
We will refer to this
later. Yes, it's idiotic. Moreover, one could pu t the subject in its
subjectivity on
stage, submit it to the stage as the idiot (the innocent, the
proper, the virgin, the
originary, the native, the naive, the great beginning: just as great, as erect,
and as
autonomous as submissive, etc.).
In the text or in writing,
such as I have tried to analyze them at least, there is,
I wouldn't say a place (and this is a whole question, this topology of a
certain
locatable non place, at once necessary and undiscoverable) but an instance
(without
stancc, a "without" without negativity) for the "who," a
"who" besieged by the
problematic of the trace and of difffrance, of affirmation, of the
signature and of
the so called "proper" name, of the je{clt (above all subject,
object, project), as
destinerring of missive. I have tried to elaborate this problematic
around numerous
ex am ples.
Let's go back a little and
start out again from the question "who?" (I note first
of all in passing that to substitute a very indeterminate "who" for a
"subject"
overburdened with metaphysical determinations is perhaps not enough to bring
about any decisive displacement. In the expression the "question
'Who'?" the
emphasis might well later fall on the word "question." Not only in
order to ask who
asks the question or on the subject of whom the question is asked
(so much does
syntax decide the answer in advance), but to ask if there is a subj ec t, no, a
"who,"
before being able to ask questions about it. I don't yet know who can ask
himself
th is nor how. But one can already see several possibilities opening up: the
"who"
might be there before, as the power to ask questions (this, in the end, is how
Heidegger identifies the Dasein and comes to choose it as the exemplary
guiding
threat in the question of Being) or else it might be, and this comes down to
the
same thi ng, what is made possible by its power (by its being able to ask
questions
about i tself (Who is who? Who is i t?). But there is another possibility that
interests
me more at this point: it overwhelms the question itself, re inscribes it in
the
ex peri ence of an "affirmation," of a "yes" or of an
"en - gage" (this is the word I use
in De I'esprit to describe Zusage, that acquiescing to language, to the
mark, that
the most primordial question implies), that "yes, yes" that answers
before even
being able to formulate a question, that is responsible without autonomy,
before
and in view of all possible autonomy of the who-subject, etc. The relation to
self,
in this situation, can only be diff6rance, that is to say alterity, or
trace. Not only
is the obligation not lessened in this situation, but, on the contrary, it
finds in it
its only possibility, which is neither subjective nor human. Which doesn't mean
that it is inhuman or without subject, but that it is out of this d i slocated
affirmation
(thus without "firmness" or "closedness") that someth
ing like the subject, man, or
whoever it might be can take shape. I now close this long parenthesis.)
Let's go back. What are we
aiming at in the deconstructions of the "subject"
when we ask ourselves what, in the stricture of the classical subject,
continues to
be required by the question "Who?"
In addition to what we have
just named (the proper name i n exappropriation,
signature, or affirmation without closure, trace, dfferance from self,
destinerrance,
etc.), I would add something that remains required by both the definition of
the classical subject and by these latter nonclassical motifs, namely, a
certain
responsibility. The singularity of the "who" is not the
individuality of a thing that
would be identical to itself, it is not an atom. It is a singularity that
dislocates or
divides itself i n gathering itself together to answer to the other, whose call
somehow
precedes its own identification with itself, for to this call I can only
answer, have
already answered, even if 1 think 1 am answering "no" (I try to
explain this
elsewhere, notably in Ulynse Gramophone).
Here, no doubt, begins the
link with the larger questions of ethical, juridical,
and political responsibility around which the metaphysics of subjectivity is
consti
tuted. But i f one is to avoid too hastily reconstituting the program of this
metaphysic
and suffering from its surreptitious constraints, it's best to proceed more
slowly and
not rush into these words . . .
J LN: For me, the subject is
above all, as in Hegel, "that which can retain in
itself its own contradiction." In the deconstruction of t his
"property," it seems to
me that the "that which," the "what" of the "itself'
brings forth the place, and the
question, of a "who" that would no longer be "in itself' in this
way. A who that
would no longer have this property, but that would nevertheless be a
who. It is
"him/her" I want to question here.
JD: Still on a preliminary
level, let's not forget Nietzsche's precautions regarding
what might link metaphysics and grammar. These precautions need to be duly
adjusted and problematized, but they remain necessary. What we are seeking with
the question "Who?" perhaps no longer stems from grammar, from a
relative or
interrogative pronoun that always refers back to the grammatical function of
subject.
How can we get away from this contract between the grammar of the subject or
substantive and the ontology of substance or subject? The different singularity
that
I named perhaps does not even correspond to the grammatical form
"who" in a
sentence wherein "who" is the subject of a verb coming after the
subject, etc. On
the other hand, i f Freudian thought has been consequential in the decentering
of
the subject we have been talking about so much these last years, is the
"ego," in
the elements of the topic or in the distribution of the positions of the
unconscious,
the only answer to the question "Who?"? And if so, what would be the
consequences
of this?
Henceforth, if we might retain
the motif of "singularity" for a moment, it is
neither certain nor a priori necessary that "singularity" be
translated by "who," or
remain the privilege of the "who." At the very moment in which they
marked, let
us say, their mistrust for substantialist or subjectivist metaphysics,
Heidegger and
Nietzsche, whatever serious differences there may be between the two, continued
to endorse the question "Who?" and subtracted the "who"
from the deconstruction
of the subject. But we might still ask ourselves j ust how legi ti m ate this
is.
Conversely, and to multiply
the preliminary precautions so as not to neglect the
essential entanglement of this strange history, how can one forget that even in
the
most marked transcendential idealism, that of Husserl, even where the origin
of the world is described, after the phenomenological reduction, as originary
consciousncss in the form of the ego, even in a phenom e nology that determines
thc
Being of beings as an object in general for a subject in general, even in this
great philosophy of the tra ns cen den tal subject, the interminable genetic
(so called
passive) analyses of the ego, of time and of the alter ego lead back to a pre-
egological and pre-subjectivist zone. There is, therefore, at the heart of what
passes
for and presents itself as a transcendential idealism, a horizon of questioning
that
is no longer dictated by the egological form of subjectivity or
intersubjectivity. On
the French philosophical scene, the moment when a certain central hegemony of
the subject was being put into question again in the 1960s was also the moment
when, phenomenology still being very present, people began to become interested
in those places in Husserl's discourse where the egological and more generally
the
subjective form of the transcendental experience appeared to be more
constituted
than constitutive�in sum, as much grounded as precarious. The
question of time
and of the other became linked to this transcendental passive genesis . . .
J-LN: Still, it was by
penetrating into this Husserlian constitution, by "forcing"
it, that you began your own work . . .
JD: It is within, one might
say (but it is precisely a question of the effraction of
the within) the living present, that Urform of the transcendental
experience, that
the subject conjoins with nonsubject or that the ego is marked, without
being able
to have the originary and presentative experience of it, by the non-ego and
especially
by the alter ego. The alter ego cannot present itself, cannot
become an originary
presence for the ego. There is only an analogical a-presentation
[appr6sentation] of
the alter ego. The alter ego can never be given "in
person," it resists in principle
the principles of phenomenology�namely, the intuitive given of originary
presence.
This dislocation of the absolute subject from the other and from time neither
comes
about, nor leads beyond phenomenology, but, rather, if not in it, then
at least on
its border, on the very line of its possibility. It was in the 1950s and 1960s,
at the
moment when an interest in these difficulties developed in a very different way
(Levinas, Tran Duc Tao, myself) and following moreover other trajectories
(Marc,
Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger), that the centrality of the subject began to be
dis-
placed and this discourse of "suspicion," as some were saying then,
began to be
elaborated in its place. But if certain premises are to be found "in"
Husserl, I'm
sure that one could make a similar demonstration in Descartes, Kant, and Hegel.
Concerning Descartes, one could discover, following the directions of your own
work,3 similar aporia, fictions, and fabrications. Not identical
ones, but similar
ones. This would have at least the virtue of de-simplifying, of
"de-homogenizing"
the reference to something like The Subject. There has never been The Subject
for
anyone, that's what I wanted to begin by saying. The subject is a fable, as you
have shown, but to concentrate on the elements of speech and conventional
fiction that such a fable presupposes is not to stop taking it seriously
(it is the
serious itself) . . .
J LN: Everything you have
recalled here comes down to emphasizing that there
is not, nor has there ever been any presence to-self that would not call into
question
the distance from self that this presence demands. "To
deconstruct," here, comes
down to showing this distance at the very heart of presence, and, in so doing,
prevents us from simply separating an outdated "metaphysics of the
subject" from
another thinking that would be, altogether, elsewhere. However, something
has
happened, there has been a history both of the thinking of the
subject and of its
deconstruction. What Heidegger determined as the "epoch" of
subjectivity, has
this taken place, or has the "subject" always been only a surface
effect, a fallout
that one cannot impute to the thinkers? But in that case, what is Heidegger
talking
about when he talks about subjectivity?
JD: An enormous
question. I'm not sure that I can approach it head on. To the
degree I can subscribe to the Heideggerian discourse on the subject, I have
always
been a little troubled by the Heideggerian delimitation of the epoch of
subjectivity.
His questions about the ontological inadequacy of the Cartesian view of
subjectivity
seem to me no doubt necessary but inadequate, notably in regard to what would
link
subjectivity to representation, and the subject-object couple to the
presuppositions of
the principle of reason in its Leibnizian formulation. I have tried to explain
this
elsewhere. The repudiation of Spinoza seems to me to be significant. Here is a
great rationalism that does not rest on the principle of reason (inasmuch as in
Leibniz this principle privileges both the final cause and representation). Spinoza's
substantialist rationalism is a radical critique of both finalism and the
(Cartesian)
representative determination of the idea; it is not a metaphysics of the cogito
or of
absolute subjectivity. The import of this repudiation is all the greater and
more sig-
nificant in that the epoch of subjectivity determined by Heidegger is also the
epoch
of the rationality or the techno-scientific rationalism of modern metaphysics .
. .
J-LN: But if the
repudiation of Spinoza stems precisely from his having distanced
himself from what was dominant elsewhere, does that not confirm this
domination?
JD: It's not Spinoza's
case that is most important to me. Heidegger defines a
modern hegemony of the subject of representation or of the principle of reason.
Now if his delimitation is effected through an unjustified repudiation, it is
the
interpretation of the epoch that risks becoming problematic. And so everything
becomes problematic in this discourse. And I would graft on another remark at
this
point. We were speaking of dehiscence, of intrinsic dislocation, of
differance, of
destinerrance, etc. Some might say: but what we call "subject" is not
the absolute
origin, pure will, identity to self, or presence to self of consciousness but
precisely
this noncoincidence with self. This is a riposte to which we'll have to return.
By
what right do we call this "subject"? By what right, conversely, can
we be forbidden
from calling this "subject"? I am thinking ofthose today who would
try to reconstruct
a discourse around a subject that would not be predeconstructive, around a
subject
that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self, of adequation to
self,
center and origin of the world, etc. . . . but which would define the subject
rather
as the finite experience of nonidentity to self, as the underivable
interpellation
inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the
paradoxes or the aporia of being before the law, etc. Perhaps we'll pick this
up
again later on. For the moment, since we're speaking of Heidegger, let me add
this. I believe in the force and the necessity (and therefore in a certain
irreversibility)
of the act by which Heidegger substitutes a certain concept of Dasein
for a concept
of subject still too marked by the traits of the being as vorhanden, and
hence by an
interpretation ojtime, and insufficiently questioned in its ontological
structure. The
consequences of this displacement are immense, no doubt we have not yet
measured
their extent. There's no question of laying these out here in an improvised
manner,
but I simply wanted to note this: the time and space of this displacement
opened
up a gap, marked a gap, they left fragile, or recalled the essential
ontological
fragility of the ethical, juridical, and political foundations of democracy and
of
every discourse that one can oppose to national socialism in all its forms (the
"worst" ones, or those that Heidegger and others might have thought
of opposing).
These foundations were and remain essentially sealed within a philosophy of the
subject. One can quickly perceive the question, which might also be the task:
can
one take into account the necessity of the existential analytic and what it
shatters in
the subject and turn towards an ethics, a politics (are these words still
appropriate?),
indeed an "other" democracy (would it still be.a democracy?), in any
case towards
another type ofresponsibility that safeguards against what a moment ago I very
quickly
called the "worst?" Don't expect from me an answer in the way of a
formula. I think
there are a certain number of us who are working for just this, arid it can
only take
place by way of a long and slow trajectory. It cannot depend on a speculative
decree,
even less on an opinion. Perhaps not even on philosophical discursivity.
Having said this, whatever the
force, the necessity, or the irreversibility of the
Heideggerian gesture, the point of departure for the existential analytic
remains
tributary of precisely what it puts into question. Tributary in this respect�I
am
picking this out of the network of difficulties that I have associated with it
at the
beginning of OJSpirit (on the question of the question, technology,
animality, and
epochality)�which is intimately linked to the axiom of the subject: the chosen
point of departure, the entity exemplary for a reading of the meaning of Being,
is
the entity that we are, we the questioning entities, we who, in
that we are open to
the question of Being and of the being of the entity we are, have this relation
to
self that is lacking in everything that is not Dasein. Even if Dasein
is not the
subject, this point of departure (which is moreover assumed by Heidegger as
ontologico-phenomenological) remains analogous, in its "logic," to
what he inherits
in undertaking to deconstruct it. This isn't a mistake, it's no doubt an
indispensable
phase, but now . . .
J LN: I'd like to point
something out to you: a moment ago you were doing
everything to dismiss, to disperse the idea of a "classic"
problematic of the subject.
Now you are targeting in Heidegger that which would remain tributary of the
classical thinking or position of the subject. That seems 'a bit contradictory
. . .
JD: I didn't say "there
is no problematic of the subject," but rather that it cannot
be reduced to a homogeneity. This does not preclude, on the contrary, seeking
to
define certain analogies or common sources, provided that one takes into
account
the differences. For example, the point of departure in a structure of
relation to self
as such and of reappropriation seems to me to be common just as much
to transcen-
dental idealism, to speculative idealism as the thinking of absolute
subjectivity, as
it is to the existential analytic that proposes its deconstruction. Being
and Time
always concerns those possibilities most proper to Dasein in its
Eigentlichkeit,
whateverthe singularity may be of this "propriation" that is not,
in fact, a subjectiva-
tion. Moreover, that the point of departure of the existential analytic is the
Dasein
privileges not only the rapport to self but also the power to ask
questions. Now I
have tried to show (Of Spirit, p. 129, n. 5, sq) what this presupposed
and what
could come about, even in Heidegger, when this privilege of the question was
complicated or displaced. To be brief, I would say that it is in the relation
to the
"yes" or to the Zusage presupposed in every question that one
must seek a new
(postdeconstructive) determination of the responsibility of the
"subject." But it
always seems to me to be more worthwhile, once this path has been laid down, to
forget the word to some extent. Not to forget it, it is unforgettable, but to
rearrange
it, to subject it to the laws of a context that it no longer dominates from the
center.
In other words, no longer to speak about it, but to write it, to write
"on" it as on
the "subjectile," for example. 4
In insisting on the as
such, I am pointing from afar to the inevitable return of a
distinction between the human relation to self, that is to say, that of
an entity
capable of conscience, of language, of a relation to death as such, etc., and a
nonhuman relation to self, incapable of the phenomenological as such�and
once
again we are back to the question of the animal. 5 The distinction
between the animal
(which has no or is not a Dasein) and man has nowhere been more radical
nor more
rigorous than in Heidegger. The animal will never be either a subject or a
Dasein.
It doesn't have an unconscious either (Freud), nor a rapport to the other
as other,
no more than there is an animal face (Levinas). It is from the standpoint of
Dasein
that Heidegger defines the humanity of man.
Why have I rarely spoken of
the "subject" or of "subjectivity," but rather, here
and there, only of "an effect" of "subjectivity"? Because
the discourse on the
subject, even if it locates difference, inadequation, the dehiscence within
auto-
affection, etc., continues to link subjectivity with man. Even if it acknowledges
that the "animal" is capable of auto-affection (etc.), this discourse
nevertheless
does not grant it subjectivity� and this concept thus remains marked by all the
presuppositions that I have just recalled. Also at stake here of course is
responsibil
ity, freedom, truth, ethics, and- law.
The "logic" of the
trace or of difJerance determines this re appropriation as an
ex-appropriation. Re-appropriation necessarily produces the opposite of what it
apparently aims for. Ex-appropriation is not what is proper to man. One can
recognize its differential figures as soon as there is a relation to self in
its most
elementary form (but for this very reason there is no such thing as
elementary).
J-LN: When you decide
not to limit a potential "subjectivity" to man, why do
you then li mit yourself simply to the animal?
JD: Nothing should be
excluded. I said "animal" for the sake of convenience
and to use a reference that is as classical as it is dogmatic. The difference
between
"animal" and "vegetal" also remains problematic. Of course
the relation to self i n
ex appropri ation is radically different (and that's why it requires a th
inking of
differance and not of opposition) in the case of what one calls the
"nonliving," the
"vegetal," the "animal," "man," or
"God." The question also comes back to the
d ifference between the living and the nonliving. I have tried to indi cate the
difficulty
of this difference in Hegel and Husserl, as well as i n Freud and Heidegger.
J-LN: For my part, in my work
on freedom, I was compelled to ask myself if the
Heideggerian partition between Dasein, on the one side, and, on the
other side,
Vor or Zuhandensein would not reconstitute a kind of distinction
between subject
and object.
JD: The categories of
Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit are also intended to avoid
those of object (correlate of the subject) and instrument. Dasein is
first of all thrown.
What would link the analytic of Dasein with the heritage of the subject
would
perhaps be more the determination of Dasein as Geworfenheit, its
primordial being-
thrown, rather than the determination of a subject that would come to be
thrown,
but a being-thrown that would be more primordial than subjectivity and
therefore
[more primordial] than objectivity as well. A passivity that would be more primordial
than traditional passivity and th an Gegenstand (Gegenwuif, the
old German word
for object, keeps this reference to throwing, without s tabilizing it into the
stance of
a stehen). I refer you to what I have said about the
"di sistance"6 of the subject in
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. I am trying to think through this experience of the
throwing/being-thrown of the subjectile beyond the Heideggerian protocols about
which I was just speaking and to link it to another thinking of destination, of
chance
and of destinerrance (see again "My Chances,"7 where I
situ ate a (repudiated)
relationship between Heidegger and a thinking of the Democritean type).
Starting at "birth,"
and possibly even prior to it, be ing- thrown reappropriates
itself or rather ex-appropriates itself in forms that are not yet those of the
subject or
the project. The question "who" then becomes: "Who (is)
thrown?" "Who becomes�
'who' from out of the destinerrance of the being-thrown?" That it is still
a matter
here of the trace, but also of iterability (cf. my "Limited Inc. "8)
means that this ex
ap pro priation cannot be absolutely stabilized in the form of the subject. The
subject
assumes presence, that is to say sub-stance, stasis, stance. Not to be able to
st.abilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be
stabilizing itself. Ex-
appro priation no lon ger closes itself; it never total i zes itself. One shou
ld not take
these figures for metaphors (metaphorici ty im plies ex-appropriation), nor
determine
them according to the gram matical opposition of active/passive. Between the
thrown
and the falling (Verfallen) there is also a possible point of passage. Why
is Geworfen
heit, while never put into question, subsequently given to marginalization
in Heidegger's thinking? This is what, it seems to me, we must continue to ask. And ex^
appropriation does not form a boundary, if one understands by this word a
closure
or a negativity. It implies the irreducibility of the relation to the other. The
othe:
resists all subjectivation, even to the point of the
interiorization-idealization of wha
one calls the work of mourning. The non-subjectivable in the experience of
mouminj
is what I tried to describe in Glas and in Memoires (for Paul de
Man). There is, ii
what you describe in your recent book as an experience of freedom, an openinj
that also resists subjectivation, that is to say, it resists the modern concept
o
freedom as subjective freedom.
J LN: In what you are
calling ex-appropriation, inasmuch as it does not close ii
on itself and although it does not close in on itself (let us say in and
in spite of it:
"passivity") is there not also necessarily something on the order of
singularity? I
is in any case something on the order of the singular that I was getting at
with m;
question who.
JD: Under the heading of
Jemeinigkeit, beyond or behind the subjective "self
or person, there is for Heidegger a singularity, an irreplaceability of that
whicl
remains nonsubstitutable in the structure of Dasein. This amounts to
an irreducibli
singularity or solitude in Mitsein (which is also a condition of
Mitsein) , but it is no
that of the individual. This last concept always risks pointing towards both
the eg<
and an organic or atomic indivisibility. The Da of Dasein singularizes
itself withou
being reducible to any of the categories of human subjectivity (self, reasonabl
being, consciousness, person), precisely because it is presupposed by all of
these
J LN: You are getting
around to the question "Who comes after the subject?'
reversing its form: "Who comes before the subject? . . .
JD: Yes, but
"before" no longer retains any chronological, logical, nor evei
ontologico-transcendental meaning, if one takes into account, as I have tried
to do
that which resists the traditional schema of ontologico-transcendental
questions.
J-LN: But I still do not
understand whether or not you leave a place for th,
question "Who?" Do you grant it pertinence or, on the contrary, do
you not eve)
want to pose it, do you want to bypass every question ... ?
JD: What troubles me is what
also commands my thinking here: it involves thi
necessity of locating, wherever one responds to the question
"Who?"�not only ii
terms of the subject, but also in terms ofDasein�conceptual oppositions that
hav<
not yet been sufficiently questioned, not even by Heidegger. I referred to this
i
moment ago, and this is what I have been aiming at in all my analyses of
Heidegger. 1 '
In order to recast, if not rigorously re-found a discourse on the
"subject," on tha
which will hold the place (or replace the place) of the subject (of law, of
morality
of politics�so many categories caught up in the same turbulence), one has to g
(
through the experience of a deconstruction. This deconstruction (we should one
again remind those who do not wanl to read) is neither negative nor nihilistic;
it is
not even a pious nihilism, as I have heard said. A concept (that is to say also
an
experience) of responsibility comes at this price. We have not finished paying
for
it. I am talking about a responsibility that is not deaf to the injunction of
thought.
As you said one day, there is a duty in deconstruction. There has to be, if
there is
such a thing as duty. The subject, if subject there must be, is to come
after this.
After: not that it takes the
rather improbable end of a deconstru ction before we
can assume responsibilities! But in order to describe the origin, the meaning,
or
the status of these responsibilities, the concept of subject still remains
problematic.
What I find disturbing is not that it is inadequate: it is no doubt the
case that there
neither can be nor should be any concept adequate to what we call respons
ibility.
Responsibility carries within it, and must do so, an essential excessiveness. It
regulates itself neither on the principle of reason nor on any sort of
accountancy.
To put it rather abruptly, I would say that, among other thin gs, the subj ect
is
also a principle of calculability� for the political (and even, indeed, for the
current concept of democ racy, which is less clear, less homogenous, and less
of a given than we believe or claim to believe, and which no doubt needs to
be rethought, radicalized, and considered as a thing of the future), in the
question of legal and human rights (including the rights of man, about which
I would repeat what I have just said about democracy) and in morality. There
has to be some calculation, and this is why I have never held against cal
culati on
t h at condes cending reticence of "Heideggerian" haughtiness. Still
c alculation is
calculation. And if I speak so often of the incalculable and the undecidable
it's
not out of a simple predilection for play nor in order to neutralize decision:
on
the contrary, I believe there is no responsibility, no ethico political
decision,
that must not pass through the proofs of the incalculable or the undecidable.
O therwise everything would be reducible to calculation, program, causality,
and,
at best, "hypothetical imperative."
It is therefore a certain
closing off�the saturating or suturing�of identity to
self, and a structure still too narrowly lit to self-identification, that today
gives the
concept of subject its dogmatic effect. Something analogous perhaps occurs, it
seems to me, with the concept of Dasein, but at a distance that must
never be
neglected. In spite of everything it opens up and encourages us to think, to
question, and to redistribute, Dasein still occupies a place analogous
to that of the
transcendental subject. And its concept, in Being and Time, is
determined, it
seems to me, on the basis of oppositions, that remain i n suffic i ently
interrogated.
Here once again we find the question ofman. The possibility for the
indeterminate
"who" to become subject, or, more originarily, to become Dasein
and Dasein thrown
(gewoifene) into the world, is reserved for man alone. This possibility,
which in
.sum defines man for Heidegger, stands in opposition to every o ih er form of
self
relation, for example, what one calls the living in general, a very obscure
notion,
fo r the very reasons we have indica ted. As long as these op posi tions have
not been
deconstructed�and they are strong, subtle, at times mainly implicit�we will
reconstitute under the name of subject, indeed under the name of Dasein,
an
illegitimately delimited ide nti ty, illegi ti mately, but often
precisely under the author
ity of rights!�in the name of a particular kind of rights. For it is in order
to put
a stop to a certain kind of rights, to a certain juridico political
calculation, that this
qu estioni n g has been inte^ pte d. Deconstruction therefore calls for a
different kind
of rights, or, rather, lets itself be called by a more exacting articulation of
rights,
prescribing, in a different way, more responsibility.
It is thu s not a matter of
opposing another discourse on the same "things" to the
enormous multiplicity of traditional discourses on man, animal, plant, or
stone,
but of ceaselessly analyzing the whole conceptu al machinery, and its i
nterestedness,
which has allowed us to speak of the "subject" up to now. And the
analys is produces
always m ore and something other than an analysis. It transforms; it translates
a
transformation already in pro gress. Translation is transformative. This e x
plains the
nervous distrust of those who want to keep all these themes, all these
"words"
("man," "subject," etc.), sheltered from all questioning,
and who manipulate an
ethico-poli ti c al s uspicion with regard to deconstruction.
If we still wish to speak of
the subject�the juridical, ethical, polit i cal, psycho-
logi c al subject, etc.�and of what makes its semantics communicate with that
of
the subj ec t of a pro posi tion (distinct from qualities, attributes viewed as
substance,
phenomen a, etc.) or with t he theme or the thesis (the subject of a discourse
or of
a book), it is first of all necessary to submit to the test of questioning the
essential
predicates of which all subj ec ts are the subject. While these predicates are
as
numerous and diverse as the type or order of subjects dictates, they are all in
fact
ordered around being present (etant present), presence to self�which
implies
therefore a certain interpretation of temporality: identity to self,
positionality,
property, personality, ego, consciousness, will, intentionality, freedom, human
i ty,
etc. It is necessary to quest ion this authority ofthe being present, but the
qu es ti on
itself neither offers the first nor the las t word, as I have tried to show for
example
in De L'esprit, but also eve^vhere I have spoken of the "Yes,
yes," of the "Come"
or of t he affirmation that is not addressed first of all to a subj ect. "
This vigil or
be yond of the question is anything but precritical. Beyond e ven the force of
critique,
it situates a responsibility as irreducible to and rebellious toward the
traditional
category of "subj ec t. ' ' Such a vigil leads us to recogni ze the
processes of differance,
trace, i terab i li ty, ex- appropriation, and s o on. These are at
work everywhe re, which
is to say, well beyond humanity. A di scourse thus restructured can try to
situate i n
another way the question of what a h uman subj ect, a morali ty, a politics, t
he ri gh ts
of the human subject are, can be, and should be. Still to come, this task is
i ndeed far ahead of us. It requi res passing through the great
phenomeno-ontological
question of the as such, appearing as such, to the extent that it is
held to distinguish,
in the last analysis, the human subject or Dasein from every other form
of relation
to the self or to the other as such. The experience or the opening of
the as such in
the onto phenomenological sense does not merely consist in that which is
lacking
in the stone or the animal; it equally involves that to which one cannot and
should
not submit the other in general, in other words the "who" of the
other that could
only appear absolutely as such by disappearing as other. The enormity
involved in
que stions of the subject, as in the questions of right, ethics, and politics,
always
lead back to this place.
If we go back to the semantics
of throwing or of the "subjectile" that has instituted
the co ncept of subj ect, we should note that the Geworfenheit
(thrownness) of Dasein,
even before being a subjectivity, does not simply characterize a state, a
fact, as in
bei n g-thrown into the world at birth. It can also describe a manner of being
thrown,
delivered, expose d to the call (Ruf). C onsider the analysis of Gewissen
and originary
Schuldigsein. Heidegger shows in particular what is insufficient, from
the anthropo-
logico ontological point of view, about both the "picture" (Bild) of
the Kantian
"court of justice" and any recourse to psychical faculties or
personal actions (Being
and Time, p. 271) in order to describe the call and "moral
conscience." But the
translation remains equivocal. Gewissen is not yet the "moral
conscience" it renders
possible, no more th an Schuldigsein is a culpabi lity: it is rather the
possibili ty of
bei ng guilty, a liability or an i mputability. I would be tempted to relate
this call to
what Heidegger says enigm atically and elliptically about the "voice of
the friend,"
and particularly in tenns of "hearing" this voice that every
Dasein "carries within
it" (Being and Time, p. 163). I treat this elsewhere.12
But for the moment I would
already say this much: the "who" of fri endsh ip, the voice of the
friend so described,
be longs to the existential structure of Dasein. This voice does not
impl icate just
one passion or affect among others. The "who" of friendship, as the
call (Ruf) that
prov ok e s or convokes "conscience" and therefore opens up
responsibility, precedes
every subjectal determination. On the indefinite openness of this question I
would
be tempted to read to you from your The Inoperable Community or from
Blanchot's
The Unavowable Community, or else these few lines from his L'amitie:
"And when
we ask the question: 'Who has been the subject of this experience?' this
question
is perhaps already I1-n answer, if, for the one who introduced it, it was
affirmed
through him in this inte rrogative form, substituti ng for the closed and
unique 'I'
the openness of a 'Who?' without answer. Not that this means that he simply had
to as k himself: 'What is this me that I am?' but much more radically he had to
seize
hold of himself and not let go, no longer as an 'I?' but as a 'Who?,' the
unknown
and sli ding b eing of an indefini te 'Who?.' "13
The origin of the call that
comes from nowhere, an ori gin in any case that is not
yet a divine or human "subject," inslitutes a responsibili ty that is
to be found at
the root of all ulterior responsibilities (moral, juridical, political), and of
every
cate gori c al i mpe rati ve. To say of this responsibility, and even of this
friendship,
that i t is not "human," no more than it is "divine," does
not simply come down to
saying that it is inhuman. This said, in this regard it is perhaps more
"worthy" of
humanity to maintain a certain inhumanity, which is to say the rigor of a
certain
inhumanity. In any case, such a law does not leave us any choice. Something of
this call of the other must remain nonreappropriable, nonsubjectivable, and in
a
certain way nonidentifiable, a sheer .supposition, so as to remain other,
a singular
call to response or to responsibility. This is why the determination of the
singular
"Who?"�or at least its determination as subject�still remains
problematic. And
it should remain so. This obligation to protect the other's otherness is
not merely
a theoretical imperative.
J LN: In that respect,
indeed, the determination of "who" is problematic. But in
another respect, is not the interrogative "Who?"�the one I used in my
question�
determinative? By which I mean that it predetermines�as every question predeter
mines the order of response�a response from someone, from some one. What
is
predetermined�which is also to say, what is called�is a respondent. It
seems to
me that this would link up with the guiding threat of your response. But I
would
note that with a single gesture, or at least in this same interview, you are
keeping
at a distance, under suspicion, the question "Who?" while you also
increasingly
validate the "Who?" You validate it by suppressing that which, a
priori, would
limit the question to humanity.
JD: Yes, I would not
want to see the "who" restricted to the grammar of what we
call Western language, nor even limited by what we believe to be the very humanity
of language.
J LN: An incidental
remark. In Heidegger's seminar, to which you alluded in
reference to the animal, there is all the same something strange, if I remember
correctly: toward the end of the analysis of the animal, Heidegger attributes to
it
a sadness, a sadness linked to its "lack of world." With this
single remark, does
not Heidegger contradict part of what he said before? How could sadness be
nonhuman? Or rather, how would such a sadness fail to testify to a relation to
a
world?
JD: The Heideggerian discourse
on the animal is violent and awkward, at
times contradictory. Heidegger does not simply say "The animal is poor in
world
[weltarm]," for, as distinct from the stone, it has a world. He
says: the animal has
a world in the mode of a not having. But this not-having does not
constitute in his
view an indigence, the lack of a world that would be human. So why this
negative
determination? Where does it come from? There is no category of original
existence
for the animal: it is evidently not Dasein, either as vorhandene
or zuhandene (Being
cannot appear, be, or be questioned as such [als] for the animal). Its simple
existence introduces a principle of disorder or of limitation into the
conceptuality
of Being and Time. To come back to your remark, perhaps the animal is
sad,
perhaps it appears sad, because it indeed has a world, in the sense in which
Heidegger speaks of a world as world of spirit, and because there is an
openness
of this world for it, but an openness without openness, a having (world)
without
having it. Whence the impression of sadness�for man or in relation to man, in
the
society of man. And of a sadness determined in its phenomenology, as if
the animal
remained a man enshrouded, suffering, deprived on account of having access
neither to the world of man that he nonetheless senses, nor to truth, speech,
death,
or the Being of the being as such. Heidegger defends himself in vain against
this
anthropo-teleological interpretation, which seems to me to derive from the most
acute aspect in his description of having-in-the-mode-of-not having-a-world. Let
us venture, in this logic, a few questions. For example, does the animal hear
the
call that originates responsibility? Does it question? Morever, can the call
heard
by Dasein come originally to or from the animal? Is there an advent of
the animal?
Can the voice of the friend be that of an animal? Is friendship possible for
the
animal or between animals? Like Aristotle, Heidegger would say: no. Do we not
have a responsibility toward the living in general? The answer is still
"no," and
this may be because the question is formed, asked in .such a way that the
answer
must necessarily be "no" according to the whole canonized or
hegemonic discourse
of Western metaphysics or religions, including the most original forms that
this
discourse might assume today, for example, in Heidegger or Levinas.
I am not recalling this in
order to start a support group for vegetarianism,
ecologism, or for the societies for the protection of animals�which is
something I
might also want to do, and something which would lead us to the center of the
subject. I feel compelled to underscore the sacrificial structure of the
discourses to
which I am referring. I don't know if "sacrificial stricture" is the
most accurate
expression. In any case, it is a matter of discerning a place left open, in the
very
structure of these discourses (which are also "cultures") for a
noncriminal putting
to death. Such are the executions of ingestion, incorporation, or introjection
of the
corpse. An operation as real as it is symbolic when the corpse is
"animal" (and
who can be made to believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal
proteins are irreplaceable?), a symbolic operation when the corpse is
"human."
But the "symbolic" is very difficult, truly impossible to delimit in
this case, hence
the enormity of the task, its essential excessiveness, a certain
unclassifiability or
the monstrosity of that for which we have to answer here, or before
which (whom?
what?) we have to answer.
Keeping to original, typical
possibilities, let's take things from another angle:
not that of Heidegger but of Levinas, for whom subjectivity, of which he speaks
a
great deal in a new, forceful, and unusual way, is constituted first of all as
the
subjectivity of the hostage. Rethought in this way, the hostage is the
one who is
delivered to the other in the sacred openness of ethics, to the origin of
sacredness
itself. The subject is responsible for the other before being responsible for
himself
as "me." This responsibility to the other, for the other, comes to
him, for example
(but this is not just one example among others) in the "Thou shalt not
kill." Thou
shalt not kill thy neighbor. Consequences follow upon one another, and must do
so
continuously: thou shalt not make him suffer, which is sometimes worse than
death,
thou shalt not do him harm, thou shalt not eat him, not even a little bit, etc.
The
other, the neighbor, the friend (Nietzsche tries to keep these two values
separate
in Zarathustra, but let's leave that, I'll try to come back to it
elsewhere), is no doubt
infinitely remote from transcendence. But the "Thou shalt not kill"
is addressed to
the other and presupposes him. It is destined to the very thing that it institutes,
the other as man. It is by him that the subject is first of all held h ostage. The
"Thou
shalt not kill'�with all its consequences, which are limitless�has never been
understood within the Judeo Christian tradition, nor apparently by Levinas, as
a
'Thou shalt not put to death the living in general." It has become
meaningful in
religious cultures for which carnivorous sacrifice is essential, as being
flesh. The
other, such as this can be thought according to the imperati ve of ethical
transcen
dence, is indeed the other man: man as other, the other as man. Humanism of the
other man is a title in which Levinas suspends the hierarchy of the attribute
and
the subject. But the other man is the subject.
Discourses as original as
those of Heidegger and Levinas disrupt, of course, a
certain traditional humanism. In spite of the differences separating them, they
nonetheless re ma i n profound humanisms to the extent that they do
not sacrifice
sacrifice. The subject (in Levinas's sense) and the Dasein are
"men" in a world
where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on
life
in general, but only on the life of a man, of other kin, on the other as
Dasein.
Heidegger does not say it this way. But what he places at the origin of moral
conscience (or rather Gewissen) is obviously denied to the animal. Mitsein
is not
conferred, if we can say so, on the living in general, no more than is
Dasein, but
only on that being toward death that also makes the Dasein into
something else,
somethi ng more and better than a living [thing]. As j ustified as it may be
from a
certain point of view, Heidegger's obstinate critique of vitalism and of the
philoso-
phies of life, but also of any consideration of life in the structure of Dasein
is not
unrelated to what I am calling here a "sacrificial structure." This
"sacrificial
structure," it seems to me (at least for the moment, this is a hypothes is
that I am
trying to relate to what I call elsewhere the "phallogocentric"
structure) defines the
invisible contour of all these reflections, whatever the distance taken with
regard
to ontology in Levinas's thinking (in the name of what he calls metaphysics) or
in
Heidegger's with regard to onto-theological metaphysics. Going much too quickly
here, I would still try to link the questi on of the "who" to the
question of "sacrifice. "
The conjunction of "who" and "sacrifice" not only recalls
the concept of the subject
as phallogocentric structure, at least according to its dominant schema:
one day I
hope to demonstrate that this schema implies carnivorous
virility. I would want to
explain camo-phallogocentrism, even if this comes down to a sort of
tautology or
rather hetero-tautology as a priori synthesis, which you could translate as
"specula
tive idealism," "becoming-subject of substance," "absolute
knowledge" passing
through the "speculative Good Friday": it suffices to take seriously
the idealizing
interiorization of the phallus and the necessity of its passage through the
mouth,
whether it's a matter of words or of things, of sentences, of daily bread or
wine, of
the tongue, the lips, or the breast of the other. You will possibly want to
object:
there are ethical, juridical, and political subjects (recognized only quite
recently,
as you well know), full (or almost full) citizens who are also women and/or
vegetari
ans! But this has been admitted in principle, and in rights, only recently and
p re cis el y at the moment when the concept of subject is submitted to
deconstruction.
Is this fortuitous? And that
which I am calling here schema or image, that which
links the concept to intuition, installs the virile figure at the determinative
center
of the subject. Authority and autonomy (for even if autonomy is subject to the
law,
this subjugation is freedom) are, through this schema, attributed to the man
(homo
and vir) rather than to the woman, and to the woman rather than to the
animal. And
of course to the adult rather than to the child. The virile strength of the
adult male,
the father, husband, or brother (the canon of friendship, I will show
elsewhere,
privileges the fraternal schema) belongs to the schema that dominates the
concept
of subject. The subject does not want just to master and possess nature
actively.
In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh. Since we haven't much
time or
space here, and at the risk of provoking some screaming (we pretty much know
from which quarter), I would ask you: in our countries, who would stand any
chance
of becoming a chef d'Etat (a head of State), and of thereby acceding
"to the
head," by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself
to be a
vegetarian?14 The chifmust be an eater of flesh (with a view,
moreover, to being
"symbolically" eaten himself�see above). To say nothing of the
celibate, of homo-
sexuality, and even of femininity (which for the moment, and so rarely, is only
admitted to the head of whatever it might be, especially the State, if it lets
itself
be translated into a virile and heroic schema. Contrary to what is often
thought,
the "feminine condition," notably from the point of view of rights,
deteriorated from
the fourteenth to the nineteenth century in Europe, reaching its worst moment
when
the Napoleonic code was inscribing the positive right of the concept of subject
we
arc talking about).
In answering these questions,
you will have not only a scheme of the dominant,
of the common denominator of the dominant, which is still today of the
order of the
political, the State, right, or morality, you will have the dominant schema of
subjectivity itself. It's the same. If the limit between the living and the
nonliving
now seems to be as unsure, at least as an oppositional limit, as that between
"man"
and "animal," and if, in the (symbolic or real) experience of the
"eat-speak-
interiorize," the ethical frontier no longer rigorously passes between the
"Thou
shalt not kill" (man, thy neighbour) and the "Thou shalt not put to
death the living
in general, " but rather between several infinitely different modes of the
conception
appropriation-assimilation of the other, then, as concerns the "Good"
(Bien) of
every morality, the question will come back to determining the best, most
respectful,
most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of
relating the
other to the self. For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of
orality,
but also of the ear, the eye�and all the "senses" in general) the
metonymy of
"eating well" (bien manger) would always be the rule. The
question is no longer
one of knowing if it is "good" to eat the other or if the other is
"good" to eat, nor
of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself bc eatcn by
him.
Thc so called nonanthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropophagy and
even construct their most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their
morality,
their politics, and their right, on this anthropophagy. Vegetarians, too,
partake of
animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation. The moral
question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this
and
not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must
eat in any
case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there's no other
definition of
the good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien
manger)? And
what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to
be
regulated? And in what respect does the formulation of these questions in
language
give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question, if you
will,
carnivorous? The infinitely metonymical question on the subject of "one
must eat
well" must be nourishing not only for me, for a "self," which,
given its limits,
would thus eat badly, it must be shared, as you might put it, and not
only in
language. "One must eat well" does not mean above all taking in and
grasping in
itself, but learning and giving to eat,
learning-to-give-the-other-to eat. One never
eats entirely on one's own: this constitutes the rale underlying the statement,
"One
must eat well." It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. And in all
differences,
ruptures and wars (one might even say wars of religion), "eating
well" is at stake.
Today more than ever. One must eat well�here is a maxim whose modalities and
contents need only be varied, ad infinitum. This evokes a law of need
or desire (I
have never believed in the radicality of this occasionally useful distinction),
orexis,
hunger, and thirst ("one must," "one must [eat] well"),
respect for the other at the
very moment when, in experience (I am speaking here of metonymical
"eating" as
well as the very concept of experience), one must begin to identify with the
other,
who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (something one can
never
do absolutely without addressing oneself to the other and without
absolutely limiting
understanding itself, the identifying appropriation), speak to him in words
that also
pass through the mouth, the ear, and sight, and respect the law that is at once
a
voice and a court (it hears itself, it is in us who are before it).
The sublime refinement
involved in this respect for the other is also a way of "Eating
well," in the sense
of good eating but also doing well to eat. The Good can also be eaten. And it
must
be eaten well. 1 don't know, at this point, who is "who," no more
than 1 know what
"sacrifice" means; to determine what this last word means, 1 would
retain this clue:
need, desire, authorization, the justification of putting to death, putting to
death as
denegation of murder. The putting to death of the animal, says this denegation,
is
not a murder. 1 would link this denegation to the violent institution of the
"who"
as subject. There is no need to emphasize that this question of the subject and
of
the living "who" is at the heart of the most pressing concerns of
modern societies,
whether they are deciding birth or death, including what is presupposed in the
treatment of sperm or the ovule, pregnant mothers, genetic genes, so called
bioeth
ics or biopolitics (what should be the role of the State in determining or
protecting
a living subject?), the accredited criteriology for determining, indeed for
"euthanas-
tically" provoking death (how can the dominant reference to consciousness,
to the
will and the cortex still be justified?), organ transplant, and tissue
grafting. (I might
recall in passing that the question of the graft in general has always been�and
thematically so from the beginning�essential to the deconstruction of phallogo
centrism).
Let's go back a little: In
relation to whom, to what other, is the subject first
thrown (geworfen) or exposed as hostage? Who is the "neighbor"
dwelling in the
very proximity of transcendence, in Heidegger's transcendence, or Levinas's? These
two ways of thinking transcendence are as different as you wish. They are as
different or as similar as being and the other, but seem to me to follow the
same
schema. What is still to come or what remains buried in an almost inaccessible
memory is the thinking of a responsibility that does not stop at this
determination
of the neighbor, at the dominant schema of this determination. One could, if
one
so wished, show that the problems or the questions that I am raising here
concern
not only metaphysics, onto-theologies, and certain claims to go beyond them,
but
also the ethnology of the religious domains in which these thinkings
"presented"
themselves. I have tried to suggest, notably in Of Spirit, that in spite
of many denega
tions, Heidegger was a Judeo-Christian thinker. (However, an ethnology or a
sociol
ogy of religions would only be up to these questions if it were no longer
itself domi
nated, as regional science, by a conceptuality inherited from these metaphysics
or
onto-theologies. Such an ethnology would in particular have to spend quite some
time
in the complex history of Hinduist culture, which perhaps represents the most
subtle
and decisive confirmation of this schema. Does it not, precisely, set in
opposition the
political hierarchy�or the exercise of power�and the religious hierarchy, the
latter
prohibiting, the former allowing itself, indeed imposing upon itself the eati
ng ofmeat?
Very summarily, one might think of the hierarchy of the varna, if not of
the castes,
and of the distinction between the Brahman priests, who became vegetarians, and
the
Kshatriya warriors, who are not ...
J-LN: I must inte^upt you, for
in the time remaining I want to ask you some
more questions. Beginning with this one: in the shift, which you judge to be
necessary, from man to animal�I am expressing myself very quickly and crudely�
what happens to language?
JD: The idea according
to which man is the only speaking being, in its traditional
form or in its Heideggerian form, seems to me at once undisplaceable and highly
problematic. Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is
reserved
for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one reinscribes language in
a
network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it
irreducibly
from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in
general, of the trace, of iterability, of diffirance. These
possibilities or necessities,
without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human.
It is not
a question of covering up ruptures and heterogeneities. I would simply contest
that
they give rise to a single linear, indivisible, oppositional limit, to a binary
opposition
between the human and the infra-human. And what I am proposing here should
allow us to take into account scientific knowledge about the complexity of
"animal
languages," genetic coding, all forms of marking within which so-called
human
language, as original as it might be, does not allow us to "ciu" once
and for all
where we would in general like to cut. As you can see, in spite of appearances,
I
am speaking here of very "concrete" and very "current"
problems: the ethics and
the politics of the living. We know less than ever where to cut�either at birth
or
at death. And this also means that we never know, and never have known, how to
cut up a subject. Today less than ever. If we had been given more space,
I would
like to have spoken here about AIDS, an event that one could call historial
in the
epoch of subjectivity, if we still gave credence to
historiality, to epochality, and to
subjectivity.
J LN: Second question: since,
in the logic you have deployed, you foresee for a
lon g time hence the possibility of coming back to or c omi n g at last to
interrogate
the subjcct of ethical, juridical, political responsibility, what can one say
of this
or these responsibilities now? Might one not speak of them under the heading of
a
"provisional morality"? What would this mean? And I would add to this
the question
of what is today perhaps recognized as "the" question, or as
"the" figure of
responsibility, namely, Auschwitz. There, where an almost general consensus
recognizes an absolute responsibility and calls for a responsibility so that it
might
not be repeated, would you say the same thing�provisionally or not�or would
you say that one must defer the answer to this question?
JD: J cannot subscribe
to the expression "provisional morality." At the very
least, an exa c ting responsibility requires not trusting blindly the axioms of
which
we have just spoken. These limit still more the concept of responsibility
within
frontiers that the axioms refuse to answer for, and they constitute, in the
form of
provisional schemas, the very models of traditional morality and right. But for
this surplus of responsibility that summons the deconstmctive gesture or that
the
deconstructive gesture of which I am speaking calls forth, a waiting period is
neither possible nor legitimate. The deconstmctive explication with provisional
prescriptions might ask for the indefatigable patience of the recommencement,
but
the affirmation that motivates the deconstruction is unconditional, imperative,
and
immediate�in a sense that is not necessarily or only Kantian, even if this
affirma
tion, because it is double, as I have tried to show, is ceaselessly threatened.
This
is why it leaves no respite, no rest. It can always upset, at least, the
instituted
rhythm of every pause (and the subject is a pause, a stance, the stabilizing
arrest,
the thesis, or rather the hypothesis we will always need), it can always
trouble
our Saturdays and Sundays . . . and our Fridays. . . . I'll let you complete
this
monotheistic sentence, it's a bit wearying.
J LN: Would you think, then,
that Heidegger's silence concerning the camps�
this almost total silence, as distinct from his relative silence about his own
Nazism�
would you think that this silence might have come from such a
"deconstructive
explication," at once different but comparable, that he might have been
trying to
carry out in silence, without managing to explain himself on it? (I could ask
this
question about others, about Bataille, for example, but let's stick to
Heidegger for
today. )
JD: Yes and no. The
surplus of responsibility of which I was just speaking will
never authorize any silence. I repeat: responsibility is excessive or it is not
a
responsibility. A limited, measured, calculable, rationally distributed
responsibil
ity is already the becoming-right of morality; it is at times also, in the best
hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience, in the worst hypothesis, of the
small or grand inquisitors. 1 suppose, 1 hope you are not expecting me simply
to
say "I condemn Auschwitz" or "I condemn every silence on
Auschwitz." As regards
this last phrase or its equivalents, 1 find a bit indecent, indeed, obscene,
the
mechanical nature of improvised trials instigated against all those whom one
thinks
one can accuse of not having named or thought "Auschwitz." A
compulsion toward
sententious discourse, strategic exploitation, the eloquence of denunciation:
all
this would be less grievous if one began by stating, rigorously, what we call
"Auschwitz" and what we think about it, if we think something.
What is the referent
here? Are we making a metonymical usage of this proper name? If we are, what
governs this usage? Why this name rather than that of another camp, of other
mass
exterminations, etc. (and who has answered these questions seriously)? If not,
why
this forgetful and just as grievous restriction? If we admit�and this
concession
seems to me to be readable everywhere�that the thing remains unthinkable, that
we still have no discourse equal to it, if we recognize that we have nothing to
say
about the real victims of Auschwitz, the same ones we nonetheless authorize
ourselves to treat by metonymy or to name via negativa, then let's stop
diagnosing
the alleged silences, forcing avowals of the "resistances" or the
"unthought" in
everyone indiscriminately. Of course, silence'on Auschwitz will never be
justifiable;
nor is speaking about it in such an instrumental fashion and in order to say
nothing,
to say nothing about it that does not go without saying, trivially, serving
primarily
to give oneself a good conscience, so as not to be the last to accuse, to teach
lessons, to take positions, or to grandstand. As for what you call Heidegger's
"infamous silence," 1 think that in order to interpret or to judge
it�which is not
always the same thing�it would be necessary at least to take into
account, and
this is not easy to circumscribe and would require more space and time, what we
have said here about the subject, about man, about the animal, but also about
sacrifice, which means also about so many other things. A necessary condition,
which would already call for lengthy discourse. As for going beyond this
necessary
but insufficient condition, 1 would prefer that we wait for, let us say,
another
moment, the occasion of another discussion: another rhythm and another
form.
1. CF. Spur,,: Nietzsche's
Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979);
"Pr6juges" in La facultl de
juger (Paris Minuit, 1984); Ulysse Gramomophone (Paris,
Galilee, 1987);
Of spirit: He idegger
and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby
(Chicago, 1989). On
the "yes, yes," cf. note 11 here.
2. Cf. for example
La voix et lepMnomine (Paris, PUF, 1967), p. 94, n. l
Speech, andPhenomena,
trans. David B. Allison, (Northwestern University Press, 1973),
p. 84, n. 1. This note develops
the implications of Husserl's sentence: "We can only say that this /lux is
something which we name
in conformity with what is constituted, but is nothing temporally 'objective.' It
is absolute subjectivity
and has the absolute properties of something to be denoted metaphorically as
'flux,' as a point of
actuality, primal source-point, that from which springs the 'now,' and so on. In
the lived experience
ofactuality, we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of
reverberation [Nachhall-
momenten]. For all this, names are lacking." The note ends
with: "There is no constituting
subjectivity. The very concept of constitution must be deconstructed."
3. Cf. Ego
Sum (Paris, Flammarion, 1975).
4. Cf. "Forcener
le subjectile" in Antonin Artaud: Portraits et Dessins
(Paris, Gallimard, 1986).
5. Cf. 0/Spirit, pp. 27 75, sq. and
PsycM, p. 415 sq.
6. Cf. "Desistance",
preface to the American translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's
Typography,
ed. C. Fynsk (Harvard University Press, 1989).
7. Cf. "My
Chances" in Taking Chances, trans. A. Ronell and I. Harvey
(Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984).
8. Cf. Limited Inc., trans. Samuel
Weber (Northwestern University Press, 1988).
9. L'expirience de
la liberte (Paris, Galilee, 1988).
10. Cf. also, for
example, The Truth in Painting, trans. G.
Bennington (The University of Chicago
Press, 1987), p. 286: "Unless Heidegger ignores (excludes?
forecloses? denies? leaves implicit?
unthoughl?) an other problematic of the subject, for example in a
displacement or development of
the value "fetish." Unless, therefore, this question of the
subjectum is displaced olhenouse, outside
the problematic of truth and speech which governs The
Origin
11. On the
question, cf. O/Spirit: Heidegger and the Question,
passim; on the "yes, yes," cf. "Otobiogra-
phies," trans, A. Ronell in The Ear of the Other,
ed. C. McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989), and "A Number of Yes," trans. B. Holmes
in Qui Park, vol. 2, no. 2 (Berkeley,
1988), pp. 120-33; on "viens," cf. "Psyche:
Inventions de l'autre" in the volume of the same name
(Paris: Galilee, 1989), pp. 11--62, and Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1988).
12. Cf. ''The Politics of
Friendship," trans. G. Motzkin in The Journal of Philosophy
(1988) pp. 632
44.
13. M. Blanchot,
Uamitii (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 328. Cf. also Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Inoperative
Community, trans. P. Connor (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, forthcoming), and M.
Blanchot, The Unavvowable Community, trans. P.
Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988).
14. Hitler himself did not offer
his vegetarian practices as an example. This fascinating exception,
moreover, can be integrated into the hypothesis I am evoking
here. A certain reactive andcompulsive
vegetarianism is always inscribed, in the name of denegration,
inversion or repression, in the
history of cannibalism. What is the limit between coprophagy and
Hitler's notorious coprophilia?
(See Helm Stierlin, Adolf Hitler, psychologie de
groupefamilial [Paris: PUF, 1975], p. 41). I refer
the reader to Rene Major's valuable contribution {De
I'iUction [Paris: Aubier, 1986], p. 166, n.
1). JD.