Un/civil Mourning: Remembering with Jacques Derrida

Abstract

The death of philosopher and public intellectual Jacques Derrida drew international attention and generated public acts of mourning in the media. Several of the published obituaries for Derrida are notable for their overtly hostile and dismissive tone. This essay explores the genre of epideictic rhetoric and is grounded in Derrida’s work on mourning, analyzing several instances of “uncivil” epideictic rhetoric including three hostile obituaries and several responses to them written by friends and colleagues of Derrida for the insight that they yield regarding ethical public remembrance. We argue that a sincere engagement with the ideas of the dead, while always incomplete, is at the heart of an ethical, civil mourning.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kevin D. Kuswa, the two anonymous reviewers, and the RSQ editor for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2011 Eastern Communication Association conference in Arlington, VA.

Notes

1. ¹The publication outlet also influences the content, which can be seen, for instance, in the different approaches to the obituary taken by editors of the NYT and Le Monde. In interviews with Bridget Fowler, the NYT editor emphasized that the newspaper’s “decisions are made on news value,” emphasizing “people whose lives and careers, well known to the public or not, left a significant lasting imprint for good or ill on those of us who remain among the living” (Obituary 116). The paper’s criteria for using a particular author for an obituary include “(1) expertise, (2) familiarity with the subject, (3) acquaintance and (4) ability to write—sometimes, not always, ability to deliver soon” (116). In contrast, the editor of Le Monde indicated that her paper’s obituaries stressed “‘objectivity,’ over and above the journalists’ individual styles,” adding that “‘it is a question above all of retracing a life, a career, a passage in the most objectively possible manner without being either hagiographic or negative’” (112).

2. ²On this point, Joshua Gunn locates a type of dyspeptic mourning in the “public mêlée between smug journalists denouncing Derrida’s playful, poststructuralist prose at the event of his passing, and outraged academics defending his intellectual legacy and humane character, [which] reenacts the Freudian allegory of primal horde: the exiled sons, desiring equality and resentful of the father’s control over women (knowledge), band together, kill the father, and eat him. ‘As soon as they kill and devour the deceased father,’ explains Laurence Rickels, ‘they double over with indigestion … and thus they find that they must also mourn him, that they are already mourning him’” (Gunn 96).

3. ³Uncritical defense of decorum as a standard for public discourse has been rightly questioned by Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud as sometimes insulating the powerful from criticism. A full engagement with the nuances of that critique of the potentially silencing effects of calls for “civil” discourse, which may rule legitimate and necessary protest against injustice outside the bounds of decorum, is beyond the scope of this essay. However, we want to endorse that project of reflecting on the ideological assumptions and consequences of language use while preserving a critical space that utilizes concepts like “civil discourse” that demand ongoing critique even as they remain necessary (see Spivak, “Translator’s Preface” xiv).

4. ⁴These pointed criticisms by Weber and Reinhard are included in the online version of the letter but were excluded from the print version published by the NYT.

5. ⁵As Derrida makes clear, playing with language is not an end in itself but rather one of the means to illustrate an argument in the philosophy of language. He disavows as “a pathology or a linguistic dysfunction … language games which the philosopher would take seriously without perceiving what, in the functioning of language, makes the game possible” (“Sending” 319).