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Notes
1 Blanchot, Disaster, 105.
2 Derrida, Beast 2, 131(194).
3 Ça translates ‘id’, as in Freud’s well-known ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden [‘Where the Id (literally, the “it”) was, there the Ego (the “I”) shall be’]. (Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 100). Within the Freudian framework, the ego is a secondary psychic structure, one that forms after the id from a developmental standpoint, whereas the id is treated as a primary structure and associated with a phylogenetic survival beyond the individual ego. (See also Freud’s The Ego and the Id.) Ça donne is also Derrida’s suggested translation of the Heideggerian ‘es gibt’ [‘there is’, but literally ‘it gives’]. Heidegger uses this German expression designating existence in general in order to think a primordial appropriation of Being that makes possible the difference between Being in general and individual ‘beings’. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 26; Heidegger, On Time and Being, 5; and Derrida’s commentary on these texts in Given Time, 18–23. Derrida’s use of ça here thus inscribes survivance in a trajectory of thought that has undermined the primacy of the human subject. However, Derrida is at the same time displacing the metaphysical assumptions maintained therein, namely a continued commitment to order and fundamentality or grounding.
4 Kas Saghafi has elegantly situated survivance in the trajectory of Derrida’s thought concerning survival, life death, revenance, the phantasm, and the trace. He treats Derridean survivance as a ‘quasi-transcendental condition of possibility and impossibility of life and death, forming a ground without ground for living death or dying alive’ (Saghafi, “Dying Alive,” 24). The term ‘life death [la-vie-la-mort]’ is the title of Derrida’s 1975 seminar, delivered at the École Normale Supérieure, portions of which were published in The Post Card. Francesco Vitale has been working extensively on this notion in the seminar and elsewhere throughout Derrida’s works. He interprets the notion of life death through Derrida’s readings of Hegel, from Writing and Difference to Glas (Vitale, “Life Death”).
5 Derrida, Beast 2, 131.
6 Ibid., 127, 131.
7 Ibid., 132.
8 Ibid., 148.
9 Ibid., 132.
10 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 270.
11 Ibid., 241. Following linguist Emile Benveniste, Derrida uses a set of etymologically and semantically related but ultimately undecidable terms to discuss indemnity, including: le salut, salvation, safety; (se) sauver, to save (oneself); sauf, safe, but also save, except; sain, healthy, well, sane, but also whole, sound, intact; sacré, sacred, but also profane; saint, holy, or a saint; intègre, integrated, whole, wholesome or ‘upstanding’; vivant, living; fecund or fertile; fort, strong, hard; and a parenthetical string of words in Latin, German, and English, ‘sacré, sanctus, helig, holy’ (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 9). Kas Saghafi has analyzed this term within the context of a proposed ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ through a comparison of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”).
12 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 61.
13 Ibid., 66.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 78.
16 I am here indebted to Michael Naas’ incisive reading of the machine in “The Telegenic Voice,” where he illustrates the manner in which the miracle is effected through a self-effacing technical apparatus (Nass, Miracle and the Machine, 125–151, esp. 140-1).
17 See what Derrida says about the ‘testimonial pledge of every performative’: ‘Either it addresses the absolute other as such, with an address that is understood, heard, respected faithfully and responsibly; or it retorts, retaliates, compensates and indemnifies itself in the war of resentment and of reactivity. One of the two responses ought to be able to contaminate the other. It will never be proven whether it is the one or the other, never in an act of determining, theoretical, or cognitive judgement (“Faith and Knowledge,” 66).
18 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 78.
19 Ibid., 80.
20 Ibid.
21 Camus, “Reflections,” 192; quoted in Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 248.
22 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 249.
23 Ibid., 250.
24 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87.
25 Ibid., 86.
26 David Wills analyses what he refers to as an ‘originary technicity’ that conjoins life and death in the machinery of the death penalty (Wills, “Machinery of Death or Machinic Life,”).
27 Derrida’s deployment of the term ‘la chose même’ is part of an ongoing engagement with the philosophical notion of ‘the thing itself’. A traditional reading of its canonical iterations such as the Platonic eidos or the Kantian noumenon would sharply distinguish between a truth or reality subtending human experience and the false or derivative representations of what actually ‘is’ as it appears to sense-perception. It should not come as a surprise that Derrida would contest such an opposition (one central to what he refers to in his early writings as the ‘metaphysics of presence’); more than that, though, to interpret Derrida’s texts through such a framework would be to grossly misunderstand his analyses. Survivance, therefore, should not be aligned with a traditional notion of ‘the thing itself’; that is, with anything like the ‘reality’ of the death penalty, which would be treated as a secondary phenomenon, or with some ‘truth’ behind phantasmatic iterations of indemnificatory mechanisms (e.g., ‘the unscathed’), which would be dismissed as ‘false’ representations of survivance. To put it differently, survivance is not a Derridean placeholder for metaphysical foundationalism. Because survivance designates the impossibility of being, identification, definition or delimitation, and presence-to-self, it can only be thought otherwise than it-self – here, as an unscathed survival staged through a self-effacing performance of sacrificial indemnification. Derrida is not, on this reading, attempting to dispel an error in judgment and replace it with a more precise representation of ‘reality’; rather, he is attempting to stage the staging of survivance as a survival unscathed, in other words, as a survival purified of all alterity. In so doing, he is himself staging a reconfiguration of survival (as survivance), one that is, as Pleshette DeArmitt has elegantly phrased it in another context, ‘more open to the other as other’ (DeArmitt, The Right to Narcissism, 12).
28 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 86–7.
29 Ibid., 87.
30 This phrase would be more literally translated as ‘living from’, as Alphonso Lingis renders ‘vivre de’ in Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (111–2). Since Levinas there describes life as a ‘transitive verb’ composed of ‘direct objects’ that nourish it and fill it with pleasure, vivre de could also be translated into English as ‘living on…’ in the sense of ‘living off of…’; it could even be rendered as ‘to get off on’.
31 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 219.
32 Ibid., 219.
33 Ibid.
34 Derrida notes that his use of the term fantasme (which he sometimes spells phantasme) ‘is not necessarily congruent or compatible with any philosophical concept of the phantasma, of fantasy or fantastic imagination, any more than with the psychoanalytic concept of the phantasm [fantasme]’ (Derrida, Beast 2, 149). Despite Derrida’s regular usage of this term, especially in the later works, no sustained treatment of its meaning has yet been conducted.
Provisionally, at least, the Derridean phantasm is a powerful belief that is produced and authorized through human practices, institutions, technologies, and discourses in both their interrelatedness and relative autonomy. Phantasms are highly effective, organizing human life and relations on a variety of registers. Phantasms, like Platonic copies, are not the ‘thing in itself’; unlike the Platonic tradition, however, no subtending reality would, for Derrida, arbitrate judgments of truth and misconception. Like Freudian fantasies, phantasms cathect libidinal investments in the absence of the object. Unlike classical psychoanalysis (which Derrida has shown to be indebted to a Platonic tradition in The Post Card), however, no ‘proper’ object would adequately satisfy phantasmatic investments. Thus, modifying or dispelling (or deconstructing) a phantasm would not be a matter of subjecting it to a reality principle. For further commentary on this topic, see Naas, “Comme si, comme ça,” and Saghafi, “Dying Alive.”
35 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 220.
36 Ibid., 257.
37 Elizabeth Rottenberg describes the ways in which the spectacle of the death penalty has been virtualized. She reads the seminar as a critical extension of Foucault’s claim in Discipline and Punish that punishment has been subject to a process of devisibilization in the modern era. For Derrida, the concept of the death penalty demands that someone see the sentence as it is carried out; a witness must attest to the execution. The virtualization of the spectacle through various media sources allows for the phantasm of mastery over finitude to be effected at the level of mass culture (Rottenberg, “A New Primal Scene”). Also see Fulton, “Phantasmatics”.
38 Derrida often hyphenates sur-vie in an effort to draw out a sense in which survival is ‘over’ or ‘above’ (sur) ‘life’ (la vie). He similarly hyphenates in-finite to call the reader’s attention to the fact that the notion of infinity contains within it a negation of or a ‘putting-and-end-to’ finitude by way of the prefix ‘in-’. Derrida’s articulation of ‘in-finitization’ is elaborated below.
39 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 258.
40 Ibid., 257.
41 Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús calls Derrida’s thought of the death penalty an ‘abolitionism at its limits’; it is, he writes, ‘to be an abolitionist on the condition that all anticipation concerning the moment of the death penalty’s abolition becomes strictly speaking impossible’ (Mendoza-de Jesús, “Invention,” 225). Mendoza-de Jesús articulates this impossible abolitionism by interpreting the survival of the death penalty in terms of Derrida’s analysis of invention. He describes invention as an aporia in which ‘the only “possible” invention would be the invention of the impossible, namely, the kind of invention that does not even succeed in inventing itself as invention, the invention that becomes other to itself in every moment of its in-finite movement’ (233).
42 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 282–3.
43 Ibid., 283, 258.
44 Ibid., 258.
45 Ibid., 254–5.
46 Peggy Kamuf has written a moving commentary on the significance of the phrase ‘the heart of the other’ in the seminar. See Kamuf, “At the Heart of the Death Penalty”.
47 Derrida, Death Penalty 1, 256.
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Sarah Kathryn Marshall
Sarah Kathryn Marshall is a Marilyn Yarbrough Fellow at Kenyon College and a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Memphis, where she also received her Masters degree. She is currently writing a dissertation on the notion of sacrificial economy in Jacques Derrida’s seminars on the death penalty. Marshall has published on Sartre and the imaginary as well as on Arendt and Kristeva on femininity and writing. Her primary research interests lie in contemporary continental philosophy, with particular focus on deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and political theory. E-mail: [email protected]