SubStance

How could I begin these reflections without recalling at least one phrase in French, the only language I will have ever spoken with Jacques Derrida? How could I begin without letting this language resonate within me, this French language that I will never feel absolutely at home in but that I nevertheless have come to love—and perhaps because of its foreignness—in large part thanks to Jacques Derrida? How could I begin thinking of him without letting these words reverberate within me, these words—"Alors, qui êtes-vous?"—since these were the very first words Jacques Derrida ever addressed to me, on the threshold of what would become—and I feel privileged to use the term—a friendship?

"Alors, qui êtes-vous?" I would like to emphasize at the outset that these are Jacques Derrida's words, not my own, so that no one is misled by my title into thinking that I would have the temerity of asking the question, "Qui êtes-vous, Jacques Derrida?", or the audacity to think I could actually provide a response. "Qui êtes-vous?"—that is a question I never posed and will never pose to Jacques Derrida. I underscore this because it is so tempting today, in the wake of Jacques Derrida's death on October 9,2004, to want to claim some special privilege, some unique intimacy, with the man or his work, in order to say something definitive about him or it. It is tempting to think that one can offer some final judgment, now that that life and that work have, it seems, come to an end. As Maurice Blanchot said at the end of Friendship, a text Jacques Derrida knew so well, this time just after the death of a thinker we've read, known, and admired is "the moment of complete works," the terrible moment when "one wants to publish 'everything,'" when "one wants to say 'everything,' . . . as if the 'everything is said' would finally allow us to stop a dead voice, to stop the pitiful silence that arises from it" (289-90). It is the moment when we are tempted by a final evaluation, a final reckoning, the moment when we feel more licensed than usual to go beyond the facts, to say something more than just "Jacques Derrida was born in 1930, in El Biar, Algeria; he went to France in the early 1950s, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and later took a teaching position at that same institution, eventually becoming known in France and, indeed, [End Page 6] throughout the world through his more than fifty books, translated into dozens of languages, for a type of philosophical and literary analysis known as 'deconstruction.'" It is the moment when the living feel justified, perhaps even entitled, to go beyond these facts to assess the merits of the man and his work and assign them some definitive place in the history of French letters or of Western philosophy. Faced with such a temptation, we would do well to recall what Blanchot once wrote after the death of his friend Georges Bataille, near the very end, once again, of Friendship.

How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one. There are no witnesses. Those who were closest say only what was close to them, not the distance that affirmed itself in this proximity, and distance ceases as soon as presence ceases.

"Alors, qui êtes-vous?" These words and the gestures and tone that accompanied them live on today—Blanchot is right—only in me, in my memory, so that everything I say might end up revealing only what was closest to me, and not Jacques Derrida. And yet I would like to believe that having been so profoundly marked by the thought and person of Jacques Derrida, touched in a way that goes well beyond...