handshake - roxana rodríguez ortiz...handshake geoffrey bennington abstract how might derrida be...

Handshake

Geoffrey Bennington

Abstract

How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher?What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions thehandshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted toMerleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary caseof what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, andopens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy’sresponse to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back?By examining Nancy’s various (mis-)readings of Derrida’s famous phrase‘la différance finie est infinie’ it is possible to trace a subtle but irreduciblenon-reciprocity in this relationship, represented in the handshake ofthe ‘salut’ as greeting and valediction, beyond all safety or salvation.

*

‘I used to be a mason, but I canna mind the grips’Para Handy, Master Mariner

What kind of greeting does Derrida give to his friend Jean-Luc Nancy inLe Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy? What kind of address, salutation, saluteand welcome? There is of course the slightly lurid dream Derrida reportsof kissing Nancy on the mouth (Derrida 2000, 339). We could alsoeasily imagine something involving hugging, cheek-kissing, and possiblysome back-slapping, a classic French accolade fraternelle, although theblurb for this edition invites us – I’m afraid I might not manage this – tothink ‘beyond the intimacy of the fraternal relation between Derridaand Nancy’. There is also a strange passage in Le toucher that, perhapsinadvertently, Derrida repeats in extenso and almost unchanged (Derrida2000, 125 and 160) in which he reflects dialogically on the strangeness ofhis own gesture, of his own ‘drôle de salut’, the first time because it looksas though he is trying to render the whole vocabulary of touch useless or

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forbidden, the second, slightly modified and expanded version, becauseit looks as though he is trying to reappropriate that vocabulary for thetradition or for a filiation, or to cordon it off in that tradition as thoughit were a principle of contamination or even a virus.1 So, for now at least,rather than jumping straight into the complexities of that configuration,trying as usual to keep things simple, as simple as possible, let’s juststart by imagining them doing that very French thing: exchanging(if ‘exchange’ is the appropriate verb here, which I doubt)—exchangingor giving each other [se donnant] a handshake.

A handshake is of course not a simple thing, either historically orphenomenologically. Somewhere between the ‘blow’ and the ‘caress’that will occupy Derrida later in Le Toucher, supposedly a gesture oftrust and confidence, whereby I extend my empty right hand (usually theright hand) toward the other’s empty right hand, originally it wouldappear as proof that it is not holding a weapon, but which I thenstill use, in the very clasp and shake (if there is a shake: in Frenchone does not ‘shake’ hands (though my hand may of course shakewith fear or anxiety as I extend it toward yours), one ‘squeezes’ or‘clasps’ hands or even gets a fistful of hand [serrer la main à quelqu’un;une poignée de main]) – which I might still then use somewhat as aweapon, perhaps trying to intimidate my interlocutor by the firmnessof my grasp, while simultaneously measuring it against the firmnessof his (usually his: the paradigmatic handshake of course takes placebetween two men).2 Not a simple thing, then, a handshake, as rapidlybecomes clear from any self-help manual for businessmen (of the typeone sees being read in planes by those businessmen still unsuccessfulenough to be travelling economy, back with the academics, who thensurreptitiously try to read their self-help manuals). The site askmen.com,for example, distinguishes between the ‘wet’ handshake (referring tosweaty or clammy palms, which apparently are a widespread problemand do not go down at all well in the business world), the ‘softy’handshake (elsewhere referred to as the ‘wet fish’ or ‘dead fish’, perhapsa little like the handshake of the Autodidacte in Sartre’s La Nausée,the hand like ‘a fat white worm’ (Sartre 1963, 14)), the ‘tipsy finger’handshake (prissily squeezing the fingers rather than getting a goodvirile palm grip), the ‘squeeze’ grip (sometimes known, I believe, as the‘bonecrusher’), and the ‘homey’ grip, which seems to refer to a varietyof more or less showy, exotic, acrobatic or merely complex handshakes,apparently best avoided in the boardroom.3 This last category, like thesupplementary signifier in Levi-Strauss (or perhaps one of the entries in

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Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia),4 is really a placeholder for all the rest,all the other possibilities, the ‘etc.’s that the rest of the classification hasnot exhausted. (So other sources, for example, make a separate categoryfor the ‘glove’ handshake, when one of the shakers uses both hands toenclose the one hand of the other, whereas we assume that the ‘glove’is simply part of the ‘homey’ category in the askmen.com classificationI have taken as my guide, and others still distinguish a kind of handshakecalled the ‘pumper’, enthusiastically moving the hand some distance upand down several times.) This remainder or ‘reste’, as usual, rapidly alsoopens abyssally onto the world of the secret, here secret handshakes andsigns of recognition, secret signs exchanged, perhaps openly, but all themore secretly for that fact, conspiratorial possibilities opened behind agesture which is, after all, one of closure5 as much as one of opening.By definition, I cannot tell you the meaning of secret handshakesin general: we can never tell for sure whether a secret has or has not beenexchanged in a handshake that happens in plain view, and in shakinghands neither of us could ever know for certain whether a secret has infact been transmitted or failed to be received. But insofar as some secretscan be and have been revealed or unveiled (in at least a formal sense,so that I can know something of the secret even if I still don’t knowexactly what the secret is), we might look briefly at an example from a‘well-known’ repertoire of secret handshakes, or grips, namely that ofthe freemasons. Here for example:

The hand is taken as in an ordinary hand shake, and the Mason presses thetop of his thumb against the space between the first and second knuckle jointsof the first two fingers of his fellow Mason; the fellow Mason also presses histhumb on the corresponding part of the first Mason’s hand.

The name of this grip is “Shibboleth”. When a candidate is imparted withthis grip and its usage it is done in this manner:

First, the Worshipful Master says to the candidate:

‘I now present my right hand in token of the continuance of friendship andbrotherly love, and will invest you with the pass-grip, pass-word, real gripand word of a Fellow Craft. As you are uninstructed, he who has hithertoanswered for you, will do so at this time. Give me the grip of an EnteredApprentice.’

As previously explained from the Entered Apprentice degree, he then has thisexchange with the Senior Deacon, who is standing next to the candidate,


who is still kneeling at the altar, after having assumed the obligation of thisdegree):

WM: Brother Senior Deacon.

SD: Worshipful Master.

WM: Will you be off or from?

SD: From.

WM: From what and to what?

SD: From the grip of an Entered Apprentice to the pass-grip of a Fellow Craft.(At this time, the candidate is shown the Pass Grip)

WM: Pass. What is that?

SD: The pass-grip of a Fellow Craft.

WM: Has it a name?

SD: It has.

WM: Will you give it to me?

SD: I did not so receive it; neither will I so impart it.

WM: How will you dispose of it?

SD: Letter or syllable it.

WM: Syllable it and begin.

SD: You begin.

WM: Begin you.

SD: Shib

WM: bo

SD: leth

WM: Shibboleth, my Brother, is the name of this grip. You should alwaysremember it, for should you be present at the opening of a Fellow CraftsLodge, this pass-word will be demanded of you by one of the Deacons, andshould you be unable to give it, it would cause confusion in the Craft.6

‘Shibboleth is the name of this grip’, although it would seem that thepronouncing of the word ‘shibboleth’, which is of course a word madefor pronouncing if ever there were one, is reserved for this occasion ofinitiation, and prepared by the syllabic version of it (other such namesare first given backwards or in some other order) when the candidate is‘imparted’ with his grip: and one might imagine that a tendency to speakthe name of the grip when performing it might undermine its purposeas a discreet sign of mutual recognition between masons when amongnon-masons.

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‘Shibboleth’, to be distinguished from other more or less complex andunpronounceable grips, such as the ‘Boaz’, ‘Jachin’, the ‘Tubalcain’ orthe ‘Ma-Ha-Bone’.

* * *

In Le Toucher, among those apparently more exciting forms of contact,such as kissing or the mysterious touching of eyes that opens the book,Derrida mentions the handshake in the course of the Tangente devotedto Merleau-Ponty (the central section of the book, and the longest of thefive tangentes). In a footnote, he points out that ‘Just as he [ . . . ] deniesany anthropological presupposition, Merleau-Ponty everywhere accordsan exemplary importance to the experience that consists in shaking[serrer] the other’s hand’ (Derrida 2005, 352), and goes on to point outthat this is a culturally limited ‘ritual gesture’, presumably thus castingdoubt on its general phenomenological pertinence. This note is provokedby a passage from Merleau-Ponty which presents itself as a reading ofHusserl, and which, as is the rule in Derrida’s relatively few explicitdiscussions of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida will suggest is a misreading,7 eventhough (or perhaps especially because) one might be tempted to see inMerleau-Ponty’s apparent attention to a certain implication of alteritywithin the selfsame a gesture of thought that would be at least Derrida-friendly, worthy of some kind of acknowledgement or salut, perhapsitself in the form of a handshake.

Put briefly, the point of contention is this: Merleau-Ponty argues,with explicit and apparently precise reference to Husserl, includingpage-references and words in German, for a kind of continuitybetween the experience in which I touch one of my hands with theother (this moment of the touchant-touché having become a kind ofMerleau-Pontyan signature, although it is first discussed, and at somelength, by Husserl himself)8, and the experience in which I shakeanother’s hand. In Merleau-Ponty’s phrase here quoted by Derrida (from‘Le philosophe et son ombre’), ‘Ce n’est pas autrement que le corpsd’autrui s’anime devant moi, quand je serre la main d’un autre hommeou quand seulement je le regarde.’ [It is not otherwise that the body ofanother person comes to life before me, when I shake another man’shand or when I merely look at him (cited in Derrida 2005, 190)].So do I experience the other (in the handshake) the same wayI experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left), ordo I experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left) the wayI experience the other (in the handshake)? These apparently symmetricaloptions and the ways in which they are not in fact entirely symmetrical


will become the difficulty that is here concentrated in the handshake asa kind of shibboleth between phenomenology and deconstruction.

Derrida wants to make two moves in this situation, in a way thatseems entirely characteristic: first, to re-establish a more accurate, evenrather literal, reading of the Husserl passage to which Merleau-Ponty israther ostentatiously referring; and then on the basis of that to proposewhat he thinks is a more radical or irreducible version of the self-other relation here being described by Merleau-Ponty. The first move isdictated in part by ‘a concern for philological integrity or discipline’, butalso because of what Derrida calls ‘some of its paradoxical and typicalconsequences’ (Derrida 2000, 216). The thought seems to go somethinglike this: Husserl could never have agreed that ‘ce n’est pas autrement’ inthe experience of the touchant-touché and that of the other man’s hand,just because I have a relation to my own body (and hand), as indeed doesthe other to his own body and hand, that is in some sense immediateand ‘without introjection’, as Husserl puts it: but my access to the otheralways and irreducibly has to go via introjection and appresentation.Derrida has always been impressed by Husserl’s insistence on the factthat any access I might claim to have to the other is always of thisappresentative nature, that there is a really radical interruption whichjust is the structure of the alterity of the other, an interruption withoutwhich there simply would be no other and therefore no possibility of arelation to him (her, it. . . : for the intrinsic non-humanity or ahumanityof the other in ‘its’ alterity is provided for by this same structure).9 Whatlooked as though it might be a ‘Derrida-friendly’ gesture on Merleau-Ponty’s part, in that it seemed to suggest that there was a kind ofsimilarity or continuity between on the one hand the kind of accessI have to my own embodied self (through the experience of onehand touching the other), and the kind of access I have to the other(through the experience of shaking his hand), turns out, ‘paradoxically’but ‘typically’ (both Derrida’s words here), to end up comforting andsupporting the sameness of the same, allowing in something that mightlook like alterity, but doing so in such a way that that alterity is alwaysin fact on the way to being subsumed under a sameness. This is anabsolutely fundamental point in Derrida’s work in general, and engagesa sort of ‘less is more’ logic that is one of the features that distinguishdeconstructive from dialectical thought. Here is how he puts it inLe Toucher:

Typical because [these consequences] have often given rise to similar gestures,especially in France. Paradoxical because, just when they send Husserl in

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the direction of taking the other into account more audaciously (of an otheroriginarily in me or for me, etc.), to the detriment of a Husserl who is moreclassical, more egocentered, etc., one runs the risk of arriving at exactlythe opposite result. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism ofimmediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my most properproper—and by the same token, doing without appresentation, indirection,Einfühlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of theother more certainly, more blindly and even more violently than ever. Inthis respect, Husserl’s prudence will always remain before us, as a model ofvigilance. One must watch over the alterity of the other: it will always remaininaccessible to an originary presentive intuition [intuition donatrice], to animmediate and direct presentation of the here. (cf. Derrida 2005, 191)

Derrida’s measured defense of Husserl on this point (and, as usual, itis only a measured defense, because as Derrida also says on this samepage, this thought of the radically-only-appresentational status of theother is difficult for phenomenology itself ‘to assimilate to its intuitionist“principle of principles” ’ (Derrida 2005, 191), and is indeed a kind ofongoing internal ruin of phenomenology) – this measured defense canbe seen to communicate with more obviously Derridean themes in theimmediately following paragraph, because this structure of the alterityof the other as thought in terms of a radical interruption with respect toall my powers of presentation or intuition just is the structure of whatwe are familiar with Derrida calling elsewhere ‘originary mourning’ or,as he does here, ‘pre-originary mourning’ (Derrida 2000, 218), i.e. thestructure whereby the other is, structurally speaking, even when alive,already in a relation to death as part of his (her or its) alterity. And thisseems even to have given a certain principle to Derridean ethics, arounda refusal of the supposedly normal structure of mourning, the workof mourning as ‘normally’ and normatively conceived, and gives it acharacter that one might be more tempted to associate with melancholia:

If I have often spoken on this matter of pre-originary mourning, linkingthis motif to that of an ex-appropriation, this was to mark the fact that inthis mourning before death, interiorization, and even the introjection thatis often granted to normal mourning, cannot and should not [or must not:ne peut pas et ne doit pas, my emphasis on this crucial point of what I callinterrupted teleology] be accomplished. Mourning as impossible mourning.And, moreover, a-human, more than human, pre-human, other than thehuman ‘in’ the human of humanism [humainisme for the ‘main’]. Well,in spite of all the differences that separate the discourse I am holding atthe moment from a Husserlian-style discourse, and doubtless too the greatmountain-ranges of phenomenology, I find that it has more affinity with the


discourse that Husserl obstinately maintains on the subject of appresentation(and that I am tempted to extend and radicalize, at the price of the necessarydisplacements, but this is not the place to insist on this), than with thediscourse of a certain Merleau-Ponty: the one whose typical gesture at leastwe are following here – typical because it recurs often in his work and in thatof others even if, whence my respectful prudence, it is far from exhaustingor even dominating his thought through and through. (Derrida 2000, 218–9;cf the explicit association with melancholia in Béliers.)10

[Parenthetical ‘methodological’ remark: this is also a ‘typical gesture’on Derrida’s part. Identifying and formalizing a ‘typical gesture’ (evenif this is not always what he calls it) in the text being read (what hefamously calls Saussure’s ‘propos déclaré’, for example, as opposed to‘un autre geste’; or what he says Rousseau voulait dire, even if Rousseaualso says more or something other than that) – this gesture, ‘typical’ ofDerrida, is also what regularly provokes protests from his readers (PaulDe Man à propos of Rousseau; Barbara Johnson à propos of Lacan;Jacqueline Rose or Slavoj Žižek à propos of Hegel; I imagine any numberof phenomenologists here à propos of Merleau-Ponty) on the groundsthat Derrida is somehow in so doing limiting the author concerned tothis typicality which is, after all, simply the most obvious or surfaceaspect of the text, and saving for himself the credit for more complexinsights that, so the reproach goes, are really already ‘in’ the authorconcerned. There are several ways to respond to this widespread (indeed‘typical’) objection, which is in principle the objection of hermeneuticsto deconstruction. 1) Derrida in fact reserves no credit at all for himself,and regularly finds deconstructive insights in the texts he is reading (so,for example, the whole of deconstruction may be said to be ‘in’ Platowhen Plato is read a certain way, against the grain of Platonism, forexample, as in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’); 2) But this apparent ‘credit’given to the text of the other also involves the necessity of an activityof reading that draws from that text (through the operation of whatDerrida famously in La voix et le phénomène says is no longer of theorder of commentary nor that of interpretation (Derrida 1967c, 98))material that its signatory never signed (and perhaps never would sign),through the counter-signing operation in which ‘counter’ has a sense ofcontestation as much as of endorsement, and which must in principlebreak the horizons of hermeneutics in an operation I have beentempted on occasion to call ‘pure reading’. As always in Derrida, this‘methodological’ remark is not to be separated from the ‘substance’of his thought (and this inseparability already in fact flows from theapparently methodological remark itself): here, for instance, just the

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insistence on the irreducibly appresentative relation to the other as acondition of the other’s alterity, the very fact, explicitly thematized here,that I cannot directly intuit the other qua other, already entails the fact ofwhat I have just called reading. I read the other in general just becauseI cannot intuit him (her, it . . . ) directly. Only the alterity of the other,maintained thus as radical and irreducible (if not ‘absolute’), provokesthe operation worthy of the name ‘reading’ in the sense that exceeds theresources of hermeneutics – and simultaneously the ‘activity’ of readingin this sense always already bears witness to the irreducible alterity ofthe other. End of ‘methodological’ parenthesis.]

Derrida goes on immediately to say that this ‘typical’ gesture doesnot exhaust or even dominate Merleau-Ponty’s thought through andthrough, and that it is also, simultaneously, ‘exposed’ (the word issignificant and precious), ‘to an antagonistic necessity, to the otherlaw’ (Derrida 2000, 219). And this too would be characteristic of theconfiguration I’ve just been describing, as the ‘autre geste’ in Saussure orwhat Rousseau ‘dit sans vouloir dire’. This ‘autre loi’ is not just, or notentirely, idiomatic to Merleau-Ponty, but (and this would be partly itslaw-character) in part at least a general law of metaphysics itself, which‘is’ ‘itself’ (though of course this law is the law whereby it never is quiteitself) only to the extent that it is inhabited or haunted by this other law,to which it is not only exposed, but which is a law of exposure, of theintrinsic exposure of metaphysics to its other(s), what will later usuallyget called ‘auto-immunity’.

Insofar as it looks as though Merleau-Ponty is doing his best to thinkand formulate explicitly something of this exposure, one can see whyit might be thought that Derrida is being a little parsimonious in thecredit he is prepared to give him. After all, the Merleau-Pontyan thoughtmight go: here is Merleau-Ponty describing the constitution of the same,the propre as corps propre, in terms of an originary implication of theother, of the outside, so that my being myself as corps propre involvesan external surface exposed to touch, be that touch my own in the neverquite self-coincident, never quite completely reflexive example of thetouchant-touché, or that of the other whose hand I grasp, or whose handgrasps me, in the handshake.

And it is true that Derrida’s difference with Merleau-Ponty hereis subtle, and is reminiscent of other gestures made with respect toauthors one might suspect of being close to him. In terms of a semi-serious taxonomy I once proposed,11 this would be characteristic ofDerrida’s dealings with those who look as though they might be hisfriends or his brothers, i.e. texts or authors who look as though they are


more or less radically contesting ‘metaphysics’, but who, on Derrida’sreading, turn out still to rely at least to some extent on insufficientlythought-through or deconstructed metaphysical schemas. For example,in Spectres de Marx, Derrida finds Heidegger thinking about justice asalways involving a discord or an out-of-jointness, an Un-fuge; but thensays that nonetheless (in spite of the ‘credit’ he gets for this perception),he tends still to resolve things towards a gathering, a fit or a harmony,and thus lose the edge of the very Un-fuge he is credited also for havingthought.12 This general schema, one might suspect, is one that could alsobe recognized more generally in Derrida’s relations with Hegel and thespeculative dialectic: in a very general and schematic way, what Hegelcalls ‘the negative’ looks just like something for which Derrida mighthave to give him what I’ve been calling ‘credit’, to the extent that itseems to disturb the identity of the same or the self-same – but of coursethat negative is from the start and to the end destined for the complexkind of recovery called Aufheben. In the particular case before us, hereis how Derrida in Le toucher, sums up this issue around Merleau-Ponty:

What is it that makes reading Merleau-Ponty so uneasy (for me)? What is thatmakes the interpretation of his mode of philosophical writing something thatis both gripping and difficult, but also sometimes irritating or disappointing?Perhaps this, in a word: the movement we mentioned, this experience ofcoincidence with non-coincidence, of the coincidence of coincidence withnon-coincidence13 can be seen again transferred into the (non-consequent)consequence or the (interrupted) continuity of the philosophical statements,and not always diachronically, following the evolution or the mutation of athought, but sometimes synchronically. Must we give the philosopher creditfor this [faut-il en créditer le philosophe], as I am most often tempted to do,or on the contrary regret that he was unable to proceed to a more powerfulreformalization of his discourse to thematize and think the law under whichhe was thus placing himself, always preferring, at the end of the day,in fact, the ‘coincidence’ (of coincidence with non-coincidence) to the‘non-coincidence’ (of coincidence with non-coincidence)? (Derrida 2000,238–9)

This is a subtle, almost enharmonic, distinction at a second level – andperhaps this second-level distinction could be used as a principle offormalization to describe Derrida’s relation to texts of this type (where‘of this type’ refers to the ‘fraternal’ relation he might be thought tohave with texts or authors who might seem to be his friends, texts,then, that appear to be anti- or at least not-so-simply metaphysical, notso straightforwardly founded on the value of presence; and indeed theproblem Derrida has with the very concept of fraternity, and notably

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in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, would then be emblematic or stronglyexemplary of this configuration, so that we might be tempted to say thatwhat comes between Derrida and those we might think of as hisbrothers is precisely this concept of brotherhood, what separates themembers of this apparent fraternity is the concept of fraternity itself,what sets Derrida apart is the insistence on the Husserlian sense ofthe radical apartness of the other as really and radically not availableto me in intuition, but at best in analogical appresentation, that alterityof the other constantly belying the claim to fraternity, constantly makingthe handshake the mark of separation as much as and in fact morethan that of joining, the place of the shibboleth as also the irreducibilityof reading, which then becomes another name for just that irreduciblealterity of the other that the motif of fraternity is always reducing.I have to read, and I have to read just where it is unreadable, preciselybecause of this structure, which constantly, in the fact of readingitself, brings back the priority of non-coincidence over the coincidencethat, in reading, Derrida finds thematically prioritized by Merleau-Ponty. Reading in the strong sense practiced by Derrida, even whenit is not being thematized, is the proof, in actu, as it were, of thepriority of non-coincidence over coincidence that is the undoing of the‘principle of principles’ of phenomenology even as it is drawn from aphenomenological insight. And this would then go too for Derrida’sreflections on Didier Franck (whose claim as to an originary improprietyof the proper looks at first blush fairly Derridean) and Jean-LouisChrétien (whose insistence on interruption and interval can also havea deconstructive feel).

* * *

What kind of handshake might Nancy give, or be giving, in return?Even a ‘normal’ handshake must involve two hands and two shakes,as it were (this being one of the reasons why in fact my shaking theother’s hand is an experience incommensurable to my touching my righthand with my left: just because I have one right and one left handI cannot really shake hands with myself, in that a handshake involvesusually two right hands (or occasionally, as I believe is the case inthe boy scout movement, two left hands)). So nothing prevents (andin fact all the self-help business world discussions more or less secretlypresuppose) some asymmetry at work in the handshake. The ‘wet fish’handshake is, one imagines, identified as such by and from a handshakeof a different type. The ‘pumper’ is usually pumping a non-pumper (twopumpers pumping each other is really not a pretty sight). The ‘glove’ is


by definition not quite reciprocal: there are enclosing hands and a handenclosed by them. So however we characterize the handshake Derridagives Nancy, in Le Toucher or in Voyous, we might expect to find adifferent handshake coming back from Nancy to Derrida. How does itlook when we consider the shaker shaken?

One element of a response to this quite difficult question would, Ithink, come from looking at the fate of what I’m tempted to call a‘line’ from Derrida, in Nancy’s hands. This ‘line’, from La voix et lephénomène, and which we might also call a slogan, a motto, a maxim,a sentence, even perhaps a witticism, is one that I was once moved tocall, about twenty years ago, ‘one of the most enigmatic statementsin the whole of Derrida’14 (Bennington 1994, 31), and reads simply:‘La différence infinie est finie’ [‘Infinite différance is finite’] (Derrida1967c, 114).15 This difficult claim, in which we might suspect that alot of Derrida is packed, or tightly curled up around itself like thoseextra spatial dimensions that string-theory postulates, shows up at leastthree times in Nancy,16 once before Derrida’s death (and indeed beforeLe Toucher), and twice since. The most recent of these occurrences is inthe short piece Nancy wrote in Libération after the very recent death ofPhilippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

Un jour, il m’est venu d’user du mot de syncope, et tu l’aimais aussi. C’estpar là, sans doute, que nous touchions le mieux l’un à l’autre et que nousfut donnée la possibilité d’un singulier partage des vies et des pensées. Entrenous, oui, un suspens, une retenue de présence, des signes nombreux et fortséchangés d’une rive à l’autre, et la traversée toujours nécessairement différée.Mais la différance, mémoire entre nous de ce mot de Jacques et de Jacqueslui-même, la différance de l’un à l’autre diffère peu, en fin de compte, de ladifférance à soi-même. [So here perhaps something a little like the Merleau-Ponty argument about the handshake and the ‘ce n’est pas autrement’.]

Aujourd’hui la différance infinie est finie ; la césure s’éternise, la syncopereste ouverte. Ce n’est pas sans beauté, malgré tout, tu le sais : c’est même tonsavoir le plus intime.(http://www.liberation.fr/rebonds/232489.FR.php)

[One day I happened to use the word ‘syncope’, and you liked it too.This is probably where we best touched each other and that we were giventhe chance of a singular sharing of life and thought. Between us, yes, asuspense, a holding-back of presence, numerous and strong signs exchangedfrom one bank to the other, and the crossing always necessarily deferred.But différance, memory between us of this word of Jacques’s and of Jacqueshimself, the différance from one to the other differs little, in the end, from thedifférance from oneself.

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Today infinite différance is finite; the caesura becomes eternal, the syncoperemains open. This is not without beauty, in spite of everything, you knowthat: that’s even your most intimate knowledge.]

‘Aujourd’hui la différance infinie est finie’. There’s obviously a strangeeffect in adding the specific ‘aujourd’hui’ to what elsewhere looks ratherlike a general claim, perhaps even a definition, although in a sense allit does is remind the reader of the finitude in the definition itself: if wetake seriously the thought that ‘infinite’ différance is finite, then thatfinitude or perhaps becoming-finite of the infinite différance might bethought to entail something of the order of a now or an aujourd’hui ingeneral, if I can put it that way, that would here be being re-marked byNancy. Différance, we might want to say, brings with it an each-time-nowness that would bear some measured cross-reading with the each-time-mineness, the Jemeinigkeit, that Heidegger famously attributes toDasein in Being and Time, and that Nancy himself comments on at somelength at the beginning of L’Expérience de la liberté.17

Moving back in time, the next reference is in the address Nancy gaveto the event organized by the Collège international de philosophie afterDerrida’s death, in October 2004. Here, under the title ‘Trois phrases deJacques Derrida’, Nancy again quotes the sentence (‘La différance infinieest finie’), and tells an anecdote about once talking with Derrida aboutthis line, with Derrida reportedly replying: ‘You know, I’m not certainI really understand it myself’ [“Tu sais, je ne suis pas certain de trèsbien comprendre moi-même.” (Nancy 2005, 69)] Whatever we mightmake of that anecdote (so that we always might wonder, alterity-of-the-other oblige, whether Derrida ‘really meant’ it when he said it, assuminghe said it, in the proto-fictional structure that Derrida finds at work inany act of witnessing or testimony)18, which we should also put in theperspective of a relative paucity of viva voce philosophical discussionbetween Derrida and Nancy,19 there is something striking about it, akind of humanizing gesture with respect to a difficult thought, perhaps,but also something of a self-protective gesture on Nancy’s part, perhaps,a kind of avowal of non-comprehension that then needs to support itselfor cover itself with the idea that even Derrida himself did not understandit. Nancy says firmly of this sentence (for this, rather than the sloganitself, is one of the ‘trois phrases’ that Nancy is reporting, as we knowfrom the fact that he opens his remarks with the observation that thethree sentences in question are all spoken rather than written) that, insaying it, Derrida ‘Was smiling, but was not joking’ [Il souriait, mais


ne plaisantait pas] (Derrida 2005, 69) (How could one be sure?). Nancythen reports of his reaction to Derrida’s saying this:

Je compris ce jour-là que chez lui aussi la pensée s’échappait : la proprepensée débordait, nécessairement, par quelque extrémité – et j’éprouvais quepenser c’est toujours avoir à faire à cette échappée, cette inaccessibilité dansl’événement même de l’accès. Jacques n’a jamais cru avoir achevé une pensée.Et c’est justement cela, la « différance » : non une simple distinction entre l’êtreet l’étant, mais la pensée de l’être qui se diffère dans l’étant. (Nancy 2005, 69)

This sense of a perhaps slightly recuperative need to protect or coversomething can be given further support by the fact that, although to myknowledge neither Derrida nor Nancy ever publicly refers to this fact(though this could perhaps have been the reason for their conversationthat day, that Nancy has just been reporting), this same motto orslogan shows up earlier still in Nancy, this time in the preface to Unepensée finie (1991), where however it is misquoted as ‘La différencefinie est infinie’ (Nancy 1991, 20n).20 Here Nancy is again glossing,in a footnote, Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference, and suggesting(not uncontroversially, I think, given what Derrida says himself, forexample in the Grammatologie)21 that Derrida’s différance is an attemptto capture the Heideggerian sense in which that difference involves aself-differing and deferring of being, and goes on:

This is what Jacques Derrida wanted to bring to light with the neither-wordnor-concept ‘différance’. And as he wrote in La voix et le phénomène (Paris:PUF, 1967, p. xxx [sic: one imagines that Nancy had meant to correctthis in proof and forgot to do so or was perhaps prevented (by illness?) fromdoing so]: “Finite différence [with an e, so this is also a misquotation] isinfinite.”—“This sentence, I fear, is meaningless”, he said one day [perhapsthis refers to the same incident differently reported in the ‘Trois phrases’piece?]. Perhaps, but meaning is in it.

[C’est ce que Jacques Derrida a voulu mettre au jour avec le ni-mot, ni-concept de « différance ». Et comme il l’a écrit dans La voix et le phénomène(Paris, PUF, 1967, p. XXX [sic]) : « La différence finie est infinie. »—« Cettephrase, je le crains, n’a pas de sens », dit-il un jour. Peut-être, mais le sens yest. (Nancy 1991, 20, note)]

This misquotation is, in a sense, less being corrected than being repeatedand justified in the ‘Trois phrases’ piece (even though there Nancy doesnot mention his own earlier misquotation and is this time very carefulto quote the sentence correctly, even insisting with an almost parodicscholarly care and accuracy, rather like Merleau-Ponty quoting Husserl:‘I reread it yesterday, it is on page 114’ (Nancy 2005, 69)). This very

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precise reference is then pursued as follows: ‘it is on page 114, and I sawthat the sentence, printed in italics, follows these words: “the finitude oflife as essential relation to self as to one’s death”’ (Nancy 2005, 69).And Nancy proceeds, after closing the quotation marks, by way ofcommentary: ‘And that very thing is the infinite or else makes theinfinite’ [‘Et cela même est l’infini ou bien fait l’infini’] (Nancy 2005, 69).This seems a little like a repetition or justification of the earliermis-quotation, still making Derrida’s slogan turn toward the infinite,whereas Derrida seems to have it always turn or fold back to the finite.22

And this motif of the infinite, or this turn to the infinite on Nancy’s part,returns in the third of these ‘three sentences’:23 this one is about Derridain hospital, after an operation, just a day or so before his death, andsaying to Nancy, with reference to the latter’s heart-transplant: ‘NowI have a scar as big as yours’. Nancy comments:

Beyond the humor, [this sentence] touched me: as though there were a friendlyrivalry in the suffering, incision and inscription of the body. As though fromthe one scar to the other there could be competition – for what? For theincision and inscription of what? Of our finitude the tracing of which makesour infinitude appear in “the sans of the pure cut” as he wrote earlier.’ (Nancy2005, 69)

And Nancy ends this part of his short text with a little one-sentenceparagraph: ‘But I don’t want to make him say more than he said’ [Maisje ne veux pas lui faire dire plus qu’il n’a dit] (Nancy 2005, 69).

I don’t want to make Nancy say more than he said either, of course(although there would be a good deal more still to say about whatthat would mean, and how reading may also always involve havingthe text say more than it says), but I want to suggest in conclusionthat this somewhat anecdotal thread can help us approach somethingof the difference between Derrida and Nancy more generally. InLe Toucher itself, Derrida is concerned to bring out and even celebratean aspect of Nancy’s thinking that tends to distinguish him fromthe configurations he sketches out in the five ‘Tangents’ that form themiddle portion of the book, and that are concerned essentially to pursuethe fate of a certain reading of Husserl, and more specifically the Husserlof Ideen II, in twentieth century French thought. What Derrida likes inNancy’s account of touch and space and corporeality is that, unlike theMerleau-Pontyan drift we have been following, it seems to stress the‘non-coincidence’ part of the second-level equation of coincidence andnon-coincidence, and in so doing more radically exposes the thoughtof touch to the type of alterity we have been talking about, especially


in the directions of exteriority, the inhuman, the inorganic, the graftand (thereby and essentially) the technical (cf. among other examplespp. 205–6, but more especially the ‘precision’ on pp. 322–3).

But let’s imagine here that there’s an even more refined version ofthe ‘second-level’ structure I laid out earlier, and that we’re here ina ‘third-level’ logic, which can only be paradoxical. On the ‘secondlevel’, dealing with Merleau-Ponty exemplarily here for us, Derridatakes propositions that might look somewhat ‘deconstructive’ (or atleast not conventionally metaphysical), and shows how, even if theystress something of the order of non-coincidence at the first level, theystill, on a second level of the relation between coincidence and non-coincidence, tend to prefer the coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence to their non-coincidence (or, in the Heidegger example,prefer the jointedness of the jointed and the out-of-joint to their out-of-jointedness: or, perhaps more generally, prefer the gathering of gatheringand dispersion to their dispersion, etc.).24 Nancy helps Derrida makethese second-level points, for example through his insistence on thepartes extra partes, a kind of non-gatherable exteriority that would openup to the ‘technical’ and also be the condition of ‘freedom’.

And yet, on what I am here pretending to isolate as a ‘third level’, thethought would be that Nancy still, in spite of everything, for examplein the motif of fraternity in the freedom book, or more generally inhis attachment to Christian motifs, or here, more symptomatically,in his repeated and insistent difficulty with the slogan about infinitedifférance being finite, in the end, ‘ultimately’ (the ultimate here beingvery precisely part of the problem)25 – Nancy ‘prefers’ the infinite to thefinite even as he thinks the finite more finitely, more ‘exactly’, than thephenomenologists. Nancy’s initial misquotation of Derrida’s slogan as tothe finitude of infinite différance, and then his complex countersigningof that misquotation in the ‘trois phrases’ essay, in which in spite ofthe letter of Derrida’s text, what emerges is a somewhat un-Derrideanemphasis on the infinite, shows that even as Nancy holds thought openbeyond the already complex phenomenological closure, at what I amartificially here calling the ‘third level’ he closes it again, paradoxicallyenough, by ‘preferring’ the infinite to the finite, preferring to read thealways radically finite trace as still a trace of an infinite, rather than,as in Derrida himself, the always finite opening of the finite itself as(infinitely) finite, or more properly, as the same passage from La Voix etle phénomène goes on to make clear, as neither straightforwardly finitenor infinite.26

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This extremely subtle (‘third-level’) difference, (which it would be niceto be able to articulate with the difference Derrida himself proposesbetween the ‘Il n’y a pas “le”. . . ’ of Nancy and his own ‘S’il y ena . . . ’ (Derrida 2000, 323–4)) is the very surface of the difference in thehandshake, the trace of non-reciprocity that the thought of exposureentails, the shibboleth that always might go unrecognized in the gripbut that reading can perhaps bring out as at least a possibility, theresidual possibility of a violence that the concept of fraternity violentlydenies. If I am not mistaken, this is also what Derrida calls ‘salut’, inthe non-soteriological sense he briefly develops at the very end of thefirst essay in Voyous, the ‘salut sans assurance à l’autre qui vient ouqui part’ (Derrida 2003, 160), salute without safety or salvation, alwaysshibboleth perhaps, some more or less secret grip I’ll never be certainof having really grasped, and which makes perhaps its first appearancehere, at the very end of Le Toucher, before the longer developmentat the end of the first essay in Voyous, last wave or handshake, ‘unimprésentable salut qui d’avance renonce, comme il se doit pour êtreun salut digne de ce nom, au Salut.’

ReferencesBennington, Geoffrey (1994), Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction, London:

Verso Books.Bennington, Geoffrey (2000), Interrupting Derrida, London: Routledge.Derrida, Jacques (1967a), De la grammatologie, Paris: Editions de minuit.Derrida, Jacques (1967b), L’Ecriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil.Derrida, Jacques (1967c), La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du

signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,Epiméthée: Essais philosophiques.

Derrida, Jacques (1988), Psyché, inventions de l’autre, Paris, Galilée.Derrida, Jacques (1993), Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée.Derrida, Jacques (1994), Politiques de l’amitié, Paris: Galilée.Derrida, Jacques (1997), Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, Paris: Galilée.Derrida, Jacques (2000), Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée.Derrida, Jacques (2003), Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison, Paris: Seuil.Derrida, Jacques (2005), Touching On – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry,

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Husserl, Edmund and Jacques Derrida (1962), L’origine de la géometrie, Paris: P.U.F.Major, R., and P. Guyomard (eds) (2000), Depuis Lacan, Paris: Flammarion.Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), Une pensée finie, Paris: Galilée.Nancy, Jean-Luc (2005), ‘Trois Phrases de Jacques Derrida’, Corpus, 48(2), Paris:

Rue Descartes, P.U.F.Royle, N. (ed) (2000), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, Basingstoke and New York:

Palgrave.Sartre, Jean Paul (1963), La Nausée, Paris: Livre de poche.


Notes1. Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris : Galilée, 2000 [English

translation by Christine Irizarry (Stanford University Press, 2005)] p. 125[p. 107]. The translations used in this essay are my own: ‘(—Et tu te dis, à parttoi: drôle de salut admiratif et reconnaissant que tu lui adresses là, à Jean-LucNancy, curieuse façon de prétendre le toucher en faisant tout comme si tu voulaismettre son lexique du toucher désormais hors de service. À l’index, même. Oucomme si tu t’entêtais à rappeler qu’il aurait dû, de toujours, être déjà horsd’usage, même si nous aimons ça, toucher, justement quand c’est impossible-interdit, et que même nous aimons appeler cela aimer—s’abstenir. Comme lemessie. Drôle de présent, en effet, quelle offrande! Tout comme si, au momentd’appeler les autres à s’extasier devant cette grande œuvre et cet immense traitéphilosophique du toucher, tu lui murmurais à l’oreille: « Maintenant, Jean-Luc,ça suffit, ne touche plus à ce mot, c’est interdit, tu entends, abstiens-toi de ce“toucher”, ne te sers plus jamais de ce vocabulaire incroyable, de ce conceptsans répondant assuré, de ces figures sans figure et donc sans crédit. D’ailleursn’as-tu pas dit toi-même, je te le rappellerai encore, “il n’y a pas ‘le toucher”’? Ne continue donc plus à faire semblant de croire, cesse de faire comme si tuvoulais nous faire croire qu’il y a quelque chose qu’on puisse appeler le toucher,une “chose-même” au sujet de laquelle on pourrait faire semblant de s’entendre,là où, touchant à l’intouchable, elle demeure intouchable. Tel que je te connais,cette objection ne t’arrêtera pas—me dis-je. Non, tu continues, et moi aussi, etreconnaissant je te suis. »)P. 160 [138–9]: (Et tu te dis, à part toi : drôle de salut admiratif et reconnaissantque tu lui adresses là, à Jean-Luc Nancy, curieuse façon de prétendre le toucheren faisant tout comme si tu voulais remettre son lexique du toucher au serviced’une tradition, pire, d’une filiation même. Ou rappeler qu’il aurait dû, detoujours, ce lexique, être déjà rapporté à des usages, voire à une usure sansâge, même si nous aimons ça, toucher, à neuf justement, quand c’est impossible-interdit, et que même nous aimons appeler cela aimer – s’abstenir. Drôle deprésent, en effet, quelle offrande ! Tout comme si, au moment d’appeler lesautres à s’extasier devant cette grande œuvre et cet immense traité philosophiquedu toucher, tu lui murmurais à l’oreille: Maintenant, Jean-Luc, ça suffit, rendsce mot, c’est interdit, tu entends, laisse-le aux ancêtres, ne te compromets pasavec lui, ne te laisse pas contaminer par ce megalovirus, ne te sers plus jamaisde ce vocabulaire incroyable, de ce concept sans répondant assuré, de ces figuressans figure et donc sans crédit. Ne continue plus, comme eux, à faire semblant decroire, cesse de faire comme si tu voulais nous faire croire qu’il y a quelque chosequ’on puisse appeler le toucher, une chose même au sujet de laquelle on pourraitfaire semblant de s’entendre, et dire quelque chose de nouveau, là même où,touchant à l’intouchable, elle demeure intouchable. Le toucher, c’est la finitude,un point c’est tout. N’as-tu pas dit toi-même « il n’y a pas “le” toucher » ? Telque je te connais, cette objection ne t’arrêtera pas—me dis-je.

—Toi non plus. Voudrais-tu le toucher, comme tu dis, à la façon dont ontouche, dans un duel, d’une pointe mouchetée ? « Touché » disent aussi lesAméricains en français, avec un drôle d’accent, au moment de marquer unpoint.

—Au contraire, c’est sa singularité, son « être singulier pluriel » qui m’importeici avant tout, même quand je parle aux autres des autres. C’est cettesingularité absolue de sa signature que je m’efforce d’atteindre.

—Tu t’efforces ? Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire ?)

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2. I remember too from schooldays that there was reputed to be a way of giving avery specific and well-timed shake of the hand that would dislocate the other’sshoulder. Remember too ‘OddJob’s’ literally bone-crushing handshake in themovie Goldfinger.

3. Of course the language of handshake and handshaking extends in a way I amsure Derrida would be cautious about calling metaphorical in other situations.Do not get me started, for example, on the computer science network protocoluse of the term, which would, however, comfort the ‘technological’ drift ofDerrida’s argument. Or how about this, from an article by John G. Cramer called‘The Quantum Handshake’: ‘The absorber theory description, unconventionalthough it is, leads to exactly the same observations as the conventional one.But it differs in that there has been a two-way exchange, a “handshake” acrossspace-time which led to the transfer of energy from emitter to absorber. Thisadvanced-retarded handshake is the basis for the transactional interpretation ofquantum mechanics. It is a two-way contract between the future and the pastfor the purpose of transferring energy, momentum, etc. It is nonlocal becausethe future is, in a limited way, affecting the past on the same basis that the pastaffects the future. When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred lightyears away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travellingfor a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyeshave reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in yourdirection.’ (http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw16.html)

4. See Derrida’s quoting and commenting on Foucault’s use of this in the Prefaceto Les mots et les choses, in ‘Et Cetera. . . ’, in Royle 2000, 284–8.

5. The handshake is the sign of closing a deal as well as of opening negotiations.6. See http://www.ephesians5-11.org/handshakes.htm7. See for example, L’origine de la géométrie (Husserl and Derrida 1962, 71–2

and 116–22), and L’Ecriture et la différence, (Derrida 1967b, 245, n. 1). Acouple of pages earlier in Le toucher, Derrida has reflected more generally onthis tendency in Merleau-Ponty (and elsewhere), after quoting a passage from ‘Lephilosophe et son ombre’: ‘on this passage and so many others, we would haveto locate the moment when, by a simple rhetorical slippage, the accompanimentof the commentary, the pedagogical restitution, without simply betraying theother’s intention, begins to inflect it discreetly to lead it elsewhere. Moreover,the precaution that consists in giving a precise reference and in sheltering behinda literal quotation, in German, sometimes betrays the betrayal – and not only inMerleau-Ponty.’ (Derrida 2000, 214)

8. In Ideen II, §§36 ff.9. See for example La Voix et le phénomène, (Derrida 1967c, 5, 42ff., 94 n1) ;

L’Ecriture et la différence, (Derrida 1967b, 181ff). Recalled also in Politiques del’amitié, (Derrida 1994, 73) and Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 1997, 96).

10. Cf. too Le Toucher, (Derrida 2000, 65): ‘Si Psyché est la vie même, le deuil dePsyché ne sera donc pas un deuil parmi d’autres. C’est le deuil même. C’est ledeuil absolu, le deuil de la vie même, mais un deuil qui cette fois ne sauraitni être porté (aucune vie ne peut plus porter ce deuil), ni faire son « travail ».Deuil sans travail de deuil, deuil sans deuil. Deuil sur le seuil du deuil. Notre vieelle-même, n’est-ce pas’ [If Psyché is life itself, the mourning of Psyché will notbe one mourning among others. It is mourning itself. It is absolute mourning,mourning of life itself, but a mourning that this time could not be borne (nolife can bear this mourning any longer), nor do its ‘work’. Mourning withoutwork of mourning, mourning without mourning. Mouring on the threshold ofmourning. Our life itself, no?]. See too p. 66: ‘Il n’y a pas d’autobiographie, iln’y a jamais eu de “je me touche” pour Psyché, pour une psychè tout exposée au


dehors et à l’autre. Point d’autobiographie signée pour celle qui, intouchable àelle-même, ne sent ou ne sait rien d’elle-même. Le deuil de l’autobiographie n’estpas un deuil parmi d’autres, pas plus que le deuil de Psyché ne se laisse précéderni proprement figurer par aucun autre. Autant dire que, inimaginable, il ne peutdonner lieu qu’à des images, des phantasmes, à des spectres : figures, tropes,allégories ou métonymies ouvrant les voies d’une technique. Indéniable, il nepeut laisser place qu’à de la dénégation. Alors le deuil sans deuil ne sera jamaissurmonté par aucun “travail-du-deuil”, qu’il soit manqué ou réussi’. [There isno autobiography, there never was a ‘I touch myself’ for Psyché, for a psycheentirely exposed to the outside and the other. No signed autobiography for shewho, untouchable to herself, feels or knows nothing of herself. The mourningof autobiography is not an autobiography among others, any more than themourning of Psyché lets itself be preceded or properly figured by any other. Asmuch as to say that, because it is unimaginable, it can give rise only to figures,tropes, allegories or metonymies opening the ways of a technique. Because itis undeniable, it can only give rise to negation. And then mourning withoutmourning will never be overcome in any ‘work of mourning’, be it successfulor a failure.] (Cf. a slightly different derivation of this ‘technical’ moment onp. 206). This passage occurs shortly after a complex sequence in which Derridanotes that ‘Le toucher reste pour Nancy le motif d’une sorte de réalisme absolu,irrédentiste et post-déconstructif’ [Touch remains for Nancy the motif of a sortof absolute, irredentist and post-deconstructive realism] (p. 60), and then returnsto Aristotle to show how death supervenes immediately in the absence of touch,but also in the face of too great an intensity of touch (p. 61): touch must thentake place in a kind of measure, a self-restraint or tact. See too the developmentaround tact and the law, pp. 81–2.

11. See my ‘Circanalyse’, in Major and Guyomard, 2000, 270–94; Englishtranslation in my Interrupting Derrida (Bennington 2000, 93–109).

12. ‘Est-ce que, comme il le fait toujours, Heidegger ne dissymétrise pas en faveurde ce qu’il interprète en effet comme la possibilité de la faveur même, de lafaveur accordée, à savoir de l’accord qui rassemble ou recueille en harmonisant(Versammlung, Fug), fût-ce dans la mêmeté des différents ou des différends, etavant la syn-thèse d’un sys-tème ? [. . . ] Au-delà du droit, et plus encore dujuridisme, au-delà de la morale, et plus encore du moralisme, la justice commerapport à l’autre ne suppose-t-elle pas au contraire l’irréductible excès d’unedisjointure ou d’une anachronie, quelque Un-Fuge, quelque dislocation « outof joint » dans l’être et dans le temps même, une disjointure qui, pour risquertoujours le mal, l’expropriation et l’injustice (adikia) contre lesquels il n’est pasd’assurance calculable, pourrait seule faire justice ou rendre justice à l’autrecomme autre ?’ [Does not Heidegger, as always, dissymetrize in favor of what heindeed interprets as the very possibility of favour, favour accorded, namely theaccord that gathers or brings together harmoniously (Versammlung, Fug), evenin the sameness of differences or disputes, before the syn-thesis of a sys-tem? [. . . ]Beyond right, and still more so beyond juridicalism, beyond morality, and stillmore so beyond moralism, does justice as relation to the other not presupposeon the contrary the irreducible excess of a dis-jointing or an anachrony, someun-Fuge, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjoingingthat, even as it always runs the risk of evil, expropriation and injustice (adikia)against which there is no calculable assurance, could alone do justice or renderjustice to the other qua other?] Spectres de Marx, (Derrida 1993, 55). Cf. tooVoyous, (Derrida 2003, 128).

13. This kind of ‘second-level’ argument might provide a tool for formalizing therelations here: cf. Hegel in Glas, and the question of the relation between the

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dialectical and the non-dialectical, which must be dialectical according to Hegel,but perhaps need not be for Derrida.

14. See my ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers: The Very Idea’, in (Bennington1994, 11–60) p. 31.

15. Here is some immediate context, even though this sentence has a sententiousquality to it and to that extent tends to detach itself from its context: ‘QueHusserl ait toujours pensé l’infinité comme Idée au sens kantien, commel’indéfinité d’un « à l’infini », cela donne à croire qu’il n’a jamais dérivé ladifférence de la plénitude d’une parousie, de la présence pleine d’un infini positif;qu’il n’a jamais cru à l’accomplissement d’un « savoir absolu » comme présenceauprès de soi, dans le Logos, d’un concept infini. Et ce qu’il nous montredu mouvement de la temporalisation ne laisse aucun doute à ce sujet : bienqu’il n’ait pas fait un thème de l’ « articulation », du travail « diacritique »de la différence dans la constitution du sens et du signe, il en a reconnu enprofondeur la nécessité. Et pourtant, tout le discours phénoménologique est pris,nous l’avons assez vu, dans le schème d’une métaphysique de la présence quis’essouffle inlassablement à faire dériver la différence. A l’intérieur de ce schème,le hegelianisme semble plus radical : par excellence au point où il fait apparaîtreque l’infini positif doit être pensé (ce qui n’est possible que s’il se pense lui-même)pour que l’indéfinité de la différance apparaisse comme telle. La critique de Kantpar Hegel vaudrait sans doute aussi contre Husserl. Mais cet apparaître de l’Idéalcomme différance infinie ne peut se produire que dans un rapport à la mort engénéral. Seul un rapport à ma-mort peut faire apparaître la différance infinie dela présence. Du même coup, comparé à l’idéalité de l’infini positif, ce rapportà ma-mort devient accident de l’empiricité finie. L’apparaître de la différanceinfinie est lui-même fini. Dès lors, la différance qui n’est rien hors de ce rapport,devient la finitude de la vie comme rapport essentiel à soi comme à sa mort.La différance infinie est finie. On ne peut donc plus la penser dans l’oppositionde la finité et de l’infinité, de l’absence et de la présence, de la négation et del’affirmation.’ (Derrida 1967c, 114).

16. Almost four times, perhaps, if one includes the tangential reference in thediscussion between Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe transcribed in the‘Penser avec Jacques Derrida’ issue of Rue Descartes, No. 52 (2006), 86–99,which opens with a reference to a notion of ‘finitude infinie [infinite finitude]’that Derrida and Nancy supposedly share (p. 88), whereas, according to Nancy,Lacoue-Labarthe would be on the side of an ‘infinitude finie [finite infinitude]’.

17. Cf. too Une pensée finie, (Nancy 1991, 19) : ‘Ce « un seul » sens n’a pas uniténi unicité : il est « un seul » sens (d’ « un seul » être), parce qu’il est chaque foisle sens.’

18. Cf. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris : Galilée, 1998).19. This is something Nancy reports in Safaa Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida, and

(with Lacoue-Labarthe) in the collective volume Penser à Strasbourg (Galilée,2004), p. 15: ‘Jean-Luc. . . découvrait la capacité de silence de Jacques Derrida. . .nous étions vaguement étonnés : nous apprenions qu’on ne parle pas forcémentde philosophie avec un philosophe, et que le travail passe par les textes’ (p. 15).Anecdotally again, I along with many others can confirm an experience of that‘capacity for silence’. At Cerisy in 2002, after Derrida’s paper in which thereis a long, detailed and intransigent critique of Nancy’s appeal to the motif offraternity in the Freedom book, I asked Derrida if he and Nancy had discussedthe matter before: he replied, ‘No, we’ve never talked so much philosophy as wehave this week’.

20. If I can also briefly enter the realm of anecdote: when I mentioned this to Derrida,who at the time had not yet read Nancy’s book, and saw his look of surprise,


I said a little lightly: ‘but maybe in the end it comes to the same thing’. Derridavery quickly said: ‘I don’t think so’, giving me a curious look as though I hadjust shown myself to be an imbecile after all.

21. See, for example: ‘En venir à reconnaître, non pas en deçà mais à l’horizondes chemins heideggeriens, et encore en eux, que le sens de l’être n’est pasun signifié transcendantal ou trans-époqual (fût-il même toujours dissimulédans l’époque) mais déjà, en un sens proprement inouï, une trace signifiantedéterminée, c’est affirmer que dans le concept décisif de différence ontico-ontologique, tout n’est pas à penser d’un seul trait: étant et être, ontique etontologique, « ontico-ontologique » seraient, en un style original, dérivés auregard de la différence; et par rapport à ce que nous appellerons plus loin ladifférance, concept économique désignant la production du différer, au doublesens de ce mot. La différence-ontico-ontologiqueet son fondement (Grund) dansla « transcendance du Dasein » (Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 16) ne seraientpas absolument originaires. La différance tout court serait plus « originaire», mais on ne pourrait plus l’appeler « origine » ni « fondement », Cesnotions appartenant essentiellement à l’histoire de l’onto-théologie, c’est-à-direau système fonctionnant comme effacement de la différence. Celle-ci ne peuttoutefois être pensée au plus proche d’elle-même qu’à une condition: qu’oncommence par la déterminer comme différence ontico-ontologiqus avant debiffer cette détermination. La nécessité du passage par la détermination biffée,la nécessité de ce tour d’écriture est irréductible. Pensée discrète et difficile qui,à travers tant de médiations inaperçues, devrait porter tout le poids de notrequestion, d’une question que nous appelons encore provisoirement historiale.C’est grâce à elle que nous pourrons plus tard tenter de faire communiquer ladifférance et l’écriture.’ (Derrida 1967a, 38)

22. ‘C’est justement le propre du pouvoir de différance que de modifier de moins enmoins la vie à mesure qu’il s’étend. S’il devenait infini – ce que son essence excluta priori – la vie elle-même serait rendue à une impassible, intangible et éternelleprésence: la différance infinie, Dieu ou la mort.’ (Derrida 1967a, 191).

23. The first of the three sentences is a remark from around 1970, ‘no doubt’, toldas follows by Nancy: ‘I was in a moment of doubt and discouragement, and Isaid to Jacques that I thought I didn’t have, or no longer had, much to say. Hereplied the following, brusquely, almost angry: ‘Yes, I know, these are pretextsone gives oneself to avoid having to write’. I was astonished, and that’s why Ididn’t forget what he said (later, he had forgotten).’ (Nancy 2005, 68)

24. Cf. Derrida’s piece on Bernard Tschumi: ‘Point de folie—maintenantl’architecture’, in Psyché, inventions de l’autre (Derrida 1988, 477–93).

25. Just after the footnote in Une pensée finie, Nancy explicitly addresses thisquestion, in the context of Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death’: ‘what carriesthought in an expression like ‘being to death’ [“être à la mort”] (zum Tode sein)[Nancy here has a note justifying the translation with ‘à’ rather than ‘pour’ onthe grounds that ‘pour’ is too purposive], is not primarily “death”, but the to,about which “death” indicates only that it is maintained, as a structure of being,“to the end” [jusqu’au bout] – which is an absence of “end”, extremity or finality[fin: also just ‘end’] were the infinite circle of a sense-less appropriation would beclosed. [ . . . ]. . . in “finitude” the question is not that of the “end” [fin], neitheras aim nor as accomplishment, but only of a suspense of sense, in-finite, eachtime played anew, re-opened, each time exposed with such a radical newnessthat it immediately misses itself.’ (Nancy 1991, 21). The question is simply thatof the passage from ‘each time anew’ to ‘in-finite’.

26. This is not just a terminological question, of course. Derrida himself uses theword ‘infini’ (for example in a reference to the ‘infini secret de l’autre’, in

Handshake 189

Voyous (Derrida 2003, 128)): but most often it is still wrapped in a paradoxicalrelation to the finite. Cf., still in Voyous, (Derrida 2003, 211): ‘Car dès lorsque la raison ne se ferme pas à l’événement (de) (ce) qui vient, s’il n’est pasirrationnel de penser que le pire peut toujours arriver, et bien au-delà dece que Kant contient encore sous le titre de « mal radical », alors seule lapossibilité infinie du pire et du parjure peut accorder la possibilité du Bien,de la véracité et de la foi jurée. Cette possibilité reste infinie mais commela possibilité même d’une finitude auto-immunitaire.’ [‘For once reason doesnot close itself to the event of who or what comes, if it is not irrational tothink that the worst can always happen, and well beyond what Kant stillcontains under the name “radical evil”, then only the infinite possibility ofthe worst and of perjury can grant the possibility of the Good, of veracityand sworn faith. This possibility remains infinite but as the very possibilityof an auto-immunitary finitude.’ (My emphasis)] See too the important miseen garde in the Grammatologie, ‘Que le logos soit d’abord empreinte et quecette empreinte soit la ressource scripturale du langage, cela signifie, certes,que le logos n’est pas une activité créatrice, l’élément continu et plein de laparole divine, etc. Mais on n’aurait pas fait un pas hors de la métaphysiquesi l’on n’en retenait qu’un nouveau motif du « retour à la finitude »,de la « mort de Dieu », etc. C’est cette conceptualité et cette problématiquequ’il faut déconstruire. Elles appartiennent à l’onto-théologie qu’elles contestent.La différance est aussi autre chose que la finitude’ (Derrida 1967a, 99). [Thatthe logos be first an imprint and that this imprint be the scriptural resource oflanguage means, of course, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuousand full element of the divine word, etc. But one would not have taken a singlestep outside metaphysics if one took from it no more than a new motif of the‘return to finitude’, of the ‘death of God’, etc. This is the conceptuality andproblematic that we must deconstruct. They belong to the onto-theology theycontest. Différance is also something other than finitude. (my emphasis)].’ InLe Toucher itself, in the second version of the repeated passage (Derrida 2000,125 and 160), we do find the following, but the context clearly suggests akind of free indirect discourse: ‘Le toucher, c’est la finitude, un point c’est tout’[touch is finitude, period]. Immediately followed by the mention of the English(or American) usage of ‘touché’ in the language of the duel or of fencing.

DOI: 10.3366/E1754850008000213

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