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Abstract
In Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other, a theory about the universal and constitutive alienation of the speaking subject from language finds its exemplary grounding in Derrida’s own experience as an Algerian Jew, one whose relationship to the French language is both totalizing and exiled (‘I have only one language, it is not mine.’). He equates speaking not only with contingent citizenship and a divestment of what one never really had in the first place, but also with the extreme experiences of torture, threat and physical violence. He indeed uses the words ‘passion’ and ‘martyr’ to describe his experience. In this paper, I will read Derrida ‘backwards,’ and against the universalizing move Derrida and those following him make in order to suggest a way of reading some scenes of violent death as scenes about diasporic cultural divestment. I’ll specifically attend to martyrs’ speech, and do so reading them as archives of the perils and inescapable expenses of entering dominant cultural ‘languages.’
Notes
1. ‘Quite far from dissolving the always relative specificity, however cruel, of situations of linguistic oppression or colonial expropriation, this prudent and differentiated universalization must account, and I would even say that it is the only way one can account, for the determinable possibility of a subservience and a hegemony. And even account for a terror inside languages (inside languages there is a terror, soft, discreet, or glaring; that is our subject). For contrary to what one is often tempted to believe, the master is nothing. And he does not have exclusive possession of anything. Because the master does not possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language, because, whatever he wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate [dire] this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politico-phantasmatic constructions, because language is not his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact, pretend historically, through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose it as “his own.”’ (23).
2. As Derrida recounts, Jews of Algeria received French citizenship in 1870, only to have it revoked, and then regained, over the course of the next 80 years.
3. Indeed despite the tensions between universals and cultural and political specificities that characterise this text, Derrida’s legacy has fallen strongly on the side of the abstract and universalizing. This is not surprising, of course, since so many of Derrida’s other texts theorise precisely in that vein.
4. In Mark 1:23–34, Jesus has his first encounter with an unclean spirit, who says, ‘What do you want with us, Jesus the Nazarene? Have you come to destroy us? I know you, who you are: the holy one of God!’ (1:24). Interestingly, Jesus is identified here geographically (from Nazareth) as well as being called the ‘holy one of God.’ But in this scene people have already begun talking, and ‘reports about him went out in all the countryside surrounding Galilee’ (1:28). In the episode immediately following, the ‘whole city’ is at the door of the house where he is healing (1:33), and the text says he ‘doesn’t permit the demons to speak because they knew him’ (1:35). That obviously doesn’t work for long, since the Gerasene demoniac speaks to and names him later (5:7–8).
5. See also Mark 1:44 and 3:12, for instance.
6. In 3:14 he forms the group of twelve disciples to be sent out to ‘proclaim’ (kerussein) and drive out demons.
7. This description of trials (‘and you will stand before governors and kings for the sake of me as a testimony [marturion] to them … ’) has often been interpreted as an early instance of persecution against early followers of Jesus. However, Mark 13 seems to be mishmash of references to various forms of strife plaguing the Judean community both from without and within, including the chaos and cataclysm of the Roman-Judean war. Not incidentally, the chapter mentions ‘false prophets and false Christs’ who perform signs and wonders ‘so as to deceive’ (13:21–1), suggesting that perhaps one of struggles for Judeans following Jesus was, following the work of Heidi Wendt, debates about authenticity and expertise. Wendt’s work has illustrated not only how this language was common rhetoric for a competitive the field of independent or ‘freelance’ experts on (ethnically coded) religious traditions which pervaded the social world of the ancient Mediterranean. She has also suggested that such figures were seen as suspicious to imperial authorities, in part because they had not official links to cultural/social/religious institutions, and were regularly subject to legislation trying to target and describe them. Indeed, she suggests that one way to understand ‘martyrdom’ is that so-called Christian martyrs were such freelance experts, since the punishments and accusations were so similar. See Wendt (Citation2015, Citation2016).
8. One might add that these voices become one to painfully ironic effect: ‘Alethws utos o anthropos uios theou’ spoken by the torturer seems to mock, rather than proclaim in earnest.
9. Althusser (Citation1971) theorises the production of identity through state institutions, and to illustrate this dynamic (which he terms ‘interpellation’) he used the example of the police officer calling out to someone on the street, and the ‘someone’ turning in response. The juridical framing is an important one, and has been taken up in the history of philosophy and contemporary theory by many thinkers, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler being two of the most prominent.
10. See Mark 5:41; 7:34, 14:36; 15:34.
11. The episode with the Gerasene demoniac, whose name is ‘Legion’ (a reference to the Roman military) most obviously illustrates this. But healing powers were attributed to all kinds of powerful and divine figures, including (and not insignificantly) Roman emperors. See for example Tacitus Histories 81:-1–1 on the healing performed by Vespasian, and the treatment of healing and social power in Perkins (Citation1995). Likewise, Asklepius (the god of healing) had some imperial resonances as the son of Apollo, the patron deity of Julius Caesar and Augustus.
12. The earlier version notes that it was only after Paul stopped speaking, and was silent, that the executioner cut off his head.
13. ‘In total disregard for the Law, Jason change the nation’s whole mode of life and its polity; not only did he lay out a gymnasium on the citadel of our native land but he also rescinded the service of the Temple.’ (4 Macc 4:19–21).
14. Likewise, the transformation of Eleazar’s old and feeble body into an athletic and virile physicality under torture is a fantasy that registers vulnerability as much as it offers an imagination of overcoming it.
15. This is also echoed in the Gospel of Truth, for instance, in which the Father’s inaccessibility, abandonment, and implication in violence regarding those for whom he ostensibly cares, are continually affectively re-valenced as and with pleasurable experience. In that text, Jesus’ death on a ‘tree’ becomes fruit that one can enjoy guiltlessly. See Kotrosits (Citation2015).
16. As Ignatius writes, ‘For me, ask only that I have power both inside and out, that I not only speak but also have the desire, that I not only be called a Christian but also be found one. For if I am found a Christian, I can also be called one, and then be faithful, when I am no longer visible in the world’ (Romans 3:2). He writes to the Magnesians that ‘it is fitting not only to be called Christians, but also to be Christians’ (4:1). As I argued elsewhere: ‘The notion that for Ignatius, his Christian-ness is in question until he dies, that he anticipates the revelation of his being Christian in the arena, would seem to confirm that “Christian” carries the valence of imperial targeting, if not tortured-induced truth production, rather than an identity with obvious or given content. The “truth” of being a Christian, for Ignatius, is revealed primarily in the crosshairs of state discipline. Indeed the only real content to “being Christian” for Ignatius is imitating Christ in death (as someone else who died under the auspices of the state): he hopes to become worthy of “the name” by dying honourably and voluntarily. In anticipation of his death, he figures himself as Christ, or as about to “attain” Christ, thus becoming a “sacrifice.” Consonant with the noble death traditions that shaped understandings and representations of Jesus’ death, for Ignatius, “Christian” what gives meaning to his death or, put differently, what rescues his death from meaninglessness, rather than what causes it.’ (Kotrosits Citation2015).