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Abstract
Most countries provide some form of nationality or citizenship either by birthright or inheritance. This paper accepts Jacques Derrida’s invitation to imagine nationality or citizenship otherwise, this time by death and burial: you are from where you die or are buried. I read Derrida’s invitation alongside his four studies of Martin Heidegger’s use of “Geschlecht” to argue that we ought to reconsider the relationship between the nation and (its) philosophy. I show that Derrida’s proposed “law of the eclipse” provides us new resources to rethink nationalism today.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This paper has benefited from the generosity of many people. Special thanks to Daniel Conway, Katie Chenoweth, David Liakos, Armando M. Mastrogiovanni, Thomas Clément Mercier, Ian Alexander Moore, Jake Reeder, Adam R. Rosenthal, and two very helpful referees for Angelaki. I provide French pagination then English pagination. Translations are my own unless cited from a previously translated text.
There are only a few studies that reference this passage explicitly, and even fewer that consider it at length. For studies more similar to my own, see Khanna; Segarra. For studies that reference this text as context, see Bowlby 188fn2; Holland 133. When referenced, this passage is often used to situate Monolinguisme alongside Derrida’s work on “hospitality” and the Greek “law of burial” found in his seminars of the 1990s. Consider the seminar sessions included in De l’hospitalité which discuss how “the foreigner, the foreign citizen, the foreigner to the family or nation, is defined on the basis of birth […] a born foreigner” and how, instead, in
the experience of death and mourning, it is first of all the law of burial that becomes – let us say the word – determining. The question of the foreigner concerns what happens at death and when the traveler is laid to rest in a foreign land. (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 81/87)
2 Derrida invokes Oedipus at Colonus when he hints to belonging “by death,” which suggests that the dying person’s sovereignty might be less relevant than the Sovereign’s decision to exclude the dead foreigner through the denial of burial rites.
3 This is of central interest to Derrida in his late seminars, principally “La bête et le souverain I” (2001–02) and “La bête et le souverain II” (2002–03).
4 Jean-Luc Nancy makes this point in “L’insacrifiable,” that
the Aryan is basically one who sacrifices himself for the community, for the race; that is, one who gives his blood for the greater Aryan Blood. He is thus not merely one who sacrifices himself but is, in essence, sacrifice itself, sacrifice as such. Of course, there’s nothing to be sacrificed here; he is only to eliminate what is not himself, what is not living sacrifice. (95/70)
5 This is why, for Nancy, “everything happens as if the West began where sacrifice ends,” where the “end” of sacrifice is really just a further sacrifice: “a sacrifice to sacrifice through the sacrifice of sacrifice” (67/52, 72/55).
6 After all, as Derrida argued in “The Ends of Man,” every conference is political.
7 Derrida’s important work on “life-death” is beyond the scope of this paper. More directly relevant to the present study is Blanchot’s “mort-naissance” or “death-birth,” see Lacoue-Labarthe 59/26. This theme is central to Geschlecht III, see Krell, “We, the Unborn.”
8 The French soldiers killed by the terrorist were born in France and were of north-African origin; one was buried in France and the other in Morocco. The political point being made is that the foreigner is the one who returns to foreign lands. On deciding where to be buried, see Balkan and Masarwa.
9 Zemmour does not focus his criticism on the murdered soldiers who, ostensibly, died for France. Despite pertaining to an event from 2012, Zemmour returned to these comments in 2021 during the lead-up to his presidential bid. Thank you to Anna Klarsfeld for bringing this to my attention.
10 Derrida was buried near his house outside of Paris in 2004.
11 For particularly helpful studies of the “mother tongue” and “absolute translation,” see Gaffney; George 163–82.
12 The Geschlechter are spread over several texts. For the first and second installments (“GI” and “GII”), see Derrida, Psyché II. Inventions de l’autre. For the third (“GIII”), see Derrida, Geschlecht III. For the fourth (“GIV”), see Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié and Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV).”
13 This is resonant with Benedict Anderson’s discussion of that religious interest in “the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation” and the nation’s “secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” (11). Thank you to Maddalena Cerrato for bringing this to my attention.
14 I am unfortunately unable to explore other important aspects of the eclipse, like non-total eclipses or the difference between a solar and a lunar eclipse, due to limited space.
15 This theme is central to Derrida’s reading of Paul Celan in “Rams.”
16 I emphasize this point to draw attention to how accidental everything about “Geschlecht” seems. Derrida acknowledges as much when reflecting on why Heidegger ultimately discussed Dasein’s sex:
Perhaps he [Heidegger] was responding to more or less explicit, naïve or enlightened, questions on the part of readers, students, or colleagues, who were still, whether they liked it or not, wholly within anthropological space: What about the sexual life of your Dasein? they might still have asked. (GI 21/13)
17 In “Geschlecht I” Derrida announces that the Geschlechter is likewise oriented and “magnetized,” this time by the Sinn of Geschlecht III (15n1/7*).
18 For a treatment of the Heideggerian insistence on strategic repetition (in my study, that the national idiom too exists through its repetition), see Moreiras.
19 Derrida’s point is more precise since he refers to a nostalgia for the loss of an “phileîn originaire.” The point is the same: philosophy is fundamentally a type of mourning, a “reactive nostalgia.”
20 This is why “there is no nationalism without some ghost” (Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism” 15). The national struggle against oblivion produces (its) ghosts.
21 For a helpful study of “struggle” in Heidegger, see Fried.
22 It is in this sense that Heidegger’s “violence” is righteous since “it claims to restore an originary sense against another violence” (GIV 405/205).
23 If we were to follow the “Geschlecht of [this] Geschlecht” (GII 58/51) we would find, as Adam R. Rosenthal documents, a distinctly Derridean interest in “helio-poetics,” the “solar trajectories” that define the Western philosophical tradition and which positions the sun to “silently vouchsafe a whole series of relays, or ‘analogical chains,’ through which God becomes linked to King, King to Poet, and Poet back to God” to affirm and reaffirm a traditional “Odyssean voyage […] pre-oriented by the primal desire for repatriation and return” (1–2).
24 For Derrida, no reading “will ever master the ‘on’ of living on” since we cannot “exhaust its ambiguity,” which reveals how we are essentially trapped “in some sort of untranslatability” that requires we cross over “into the language of the other” and use “a language that is not our mother tongue” (Parages 112–13/104–05). This is why Derrida’s displacement of the mother tongue, which he describes in the hospitality seminars as that home that “you carry with you, the one that also carries us from birth to death” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalité 83/89), complicates everything: birth and death, life as the interval between birth and death, etc.