Keeping a Distance

Abstract

Distance is central to both Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida’s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, instability, and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts – to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship – that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it.

Keywords:

• Martin Heidegger
• Jacques Derrida
• distance
• foreignness
• friendship

Notes

1. Separation, which may designate a barrier between spaces, or division into component parts, adds to distance the presupposition of a prior (or prospective) unity. Both displacement and dislocation are specific kinds of distance that presuppose a usual or proper location and that represent disruption of an order. Pertinent here would also be an exploration of the psychoanalytic sense of displacement, of

• the fact that an idea's emphasis, interest or intensity is liable to be detached from it and to pass on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to the first idea by a chain of associations. (LaPlanche and Pontalis 121)

2 On familiarity, see also BT section 18.

3. Macquarie translates Ent-fernung as “de-severance”; Hubert Dreyfus translates it (perhaps more plausibly) as “dis-tancing.” See Dreyfus chapter 7. See also BT:

• If Dasein, in its concern, brings something close by, this does not signify that it fixes something at a spatial position with a minimal distance from some point of the body. When something is close by, this means that it is within the range of what is proximally ready-to-hand for circumspection. Bringing-close is not oriented towards the I-Thing encumbered with a body, but towards concernful Being in the world. (142)

4. Elaborating pain as a form of de-worlding, Scarry contends that pain is “a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe” (35). This logic also works in reverse; if foreigners are essentially material, one can be made foreign by being reduced to the materiality of the body.

5. One might profitably juxtapose this position with the numerous writings of exiles, expatriate artists, travelers, and anthropologists, who suggest that distance is what conditions reflection, that it is one's foreignness that allows for the translation of a previously unarticulated “concern” into an object of reflection.

6. On Russian formalism, see Shklovsky; Erlich; and Jameson.

7. See, for example, my analysis of St Augustine, Schleiermacher, and Bultmann in Concept of the Foreign chapter 7.

8. The obvious (though not irreconcilable) difference here is that Shklovsky and Brecht valorize reflection as necessary to contesting cultural and ideological hegemony, while Heidegger remains skeptical of reflection in the decontextualized, allegedly disinterested form it has been practiced in philosophy. Nonetheless, Heidegger's analysis of Das Man could easily be aligned with Shklovsky's elaboration of the “automatism of perception.”

9. I have developed this argument in detail in the context of South African apartheid and its regulation of black Africans who were made statutory foreigners in their own land, a process that was carried out, in part, by a system of intransigent meanings and numerous mechanisms for stabilizing signs and securing a literal reading of them. See Concept of the Foreign chapter 7.

10. Another name for this distance in language is figurality; literality is the name for its repression. It is not without significance that, in the Rhetoric, Aristotle's name for the literal is kurios (familiar) and his name for the figural is xenos (foreign). See Rhetoric Book II.

11. Another way of thinking this loss of distance would be in terms of the gaze. If for Sartre the distance of the gaze is agonistic, a distance through which one can be reduced to a (foreign) object, Foucault's panoptic gaze in all of its disciplinary, clinical, and penal manifestations is one that is experienced both as an absolute distance and as an eradication of distance. On the one hand, the impenetrable source of the panoptic gaze places it at an infinite distance; it is absolutely foreign. On the other hand, the invasive gaze that penetrates the inward, private space of mind and soul seems to collapse distance; nothing remains foreign to it. See Discipline and Punish Part Three.

12. See Freud's analysis of the latter meaning in “The ‘Uncanny.’”

13. The foreign, that is, both designates ambiguous cognitions, strange experiences, anomalous persons, confusing behaviors or practices, and is itself conceptually confused: exhibiting, for example, the telltale symptoms of semantic profligacy, relativity, equivocal valuation, heterogeneity, and metaphoricity. See Saunders chapter 1.

14. Also relevant here is Derrida's opening discussion of the Ciceronian distinction between true and vulgar friendship and the politics of proximity:

• And what about selection or election, affinity or proximity; what about parenthood or familiarity (oikeiótes, as Plato's Lysis already put it), what about one's being-at-home or being-close-to-oneself in regard to that which links friendship to all laws and all logics of universalization, to ethics and to law or right, to the values of equality and equity, to all the political models of the res publica of which this distinction remains the axiom, and especially in regard to democracy? (PF 3)

15 “[I]n a rather rich ambiguity,” writes Jean Claude Fraisse, “the adjective oikeios connotes, in Plato as in common language, that which is one's own, personal even intimate and interior, as well as that which is close, from the parent or the friend to the compatriot … ” (qtd in PF 169 n. 31).

16. I am extrapolating here from the semantic field of the Latin proprius (one's own, special, particular; a peculiar characteristic; lasting, permanent; and, adverbally (proprie), exclusively, particularly, characteristically, in a proper sense). Not only can proprius or propre, in many contexts, translate oikeios, but the word for foreign can, in numerous languages, be a simple synonym for improper. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, to be a foreigner is to fall outside this semantic field which, as Derrida has shown, also grounds Western metaphysics. See Saunders, The Concept of the Foreign chapter 1. It should not be overlooked the degree to which the lack of identity alluded to here coincides with non-being and de-worlding as I have discussed them above. See also Heidegger's use of Eigenschaft and Geeignetheit in his discussion of the properties and appropriate uses of the ready-to-hand (BT 114–14).

17. On the feminization of the Orient as the Other of Europe, see Said. On the colonial exploitation of women as internal foreigners, see Fanon 35–67.

18. In the original, the phrase reads: “elle la promet à la revenance testamentaire d’un plus-de-vie” (20).

19. Thus: “I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not survive him, except to the extent to which he already bears my death and inherits it as the last survivor. He bears my own death and, in a certain way, he is the only one to bear it – this proper death of myself thus expropriated in advance” (PF 13). To this “testamentary wisdom” Nietzsche opposes, “even at the price of madness, the exclaiming insurrection of the living present” (PF 51). See also Derrida's discussion of St Augustine on friendship and death in PF 186–88.

20. The phrase is Rimbaud's, from a letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871. According to Derrida, this uncanniness is also evinced in Heidegger, in the “equiprimordiality of truth and untruth” that “destabilizes all the conceptual distinctions that seem to structure the existential analytic, dooming its logic to an Unheimlichkeit marking each of its decisive moments” (PF 58). This mode of unheimlichkeit is also described through the figure of the foreigner:

• It lodges the enemy in the heart of the friend – and vice versa. Why do we say it “lodges” the other, the stranger, or the enemy? Because the word unheimlich is not unfamiliar, though it speaks precisely to the stranger, to the intimacy of the hearth and familial lodgings, to the oikeiótes; but above all because it provides a place, in a troubling way for a form of welcome in itself that recalls the haunt as much as the home – Unterkunft, lodgings, shelter, hospitable habitat, said the epilogue we cited above; and in a moment we will hear the voice of the friend as the voice of the spectre. (PF 58)

21 This is the “dangerous perhaps” or “maybe” which opens and pervades Beyond Good and Evil. See also Derrida, PF chapter 2.