For A Time
Kas Saghafi
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie
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Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015)
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Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
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For A Time
Kas Saghafi
The University of Memphis
What is the time of “for a time?” How long is “for a time?” How long
does survival last?
Less than an eternity, but not forever--for a time.
1
In his brilliant book Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two
Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media, Michael Naas patiently and
thoughtfully analyzes what he dubs a great philosophical text on religion,
2
namely, Derrida’s essay “Faith and Knowledge” published in 1996. Naas’s
book, itself a major work on Derrida’s thought, scrupulously guides and
informs the reader about the structure and details of the “Faith and
Knowledge” essay, which Naas calls “Derrida’s most direct and ambitious
attempt to answer the question of the nature of religion in general and its
relationship with science and the media” (21). Unlike the so-called guides
that have proliferated to meet the demands of academic presses, who
themselves seem to have abandoned the thought of publishing probing
intellectual research, Naas’s Miracle and Machine is a genuine guide. Patiently
explicated, expertly explained, demystifying without losing any sense of the
complexity of Derrida’s thought, Miracle and Machine discusses the structure,
architectonics, and typography of “Faith and Knowledge,” skillfully laying
bare its why and wherefore, demonstrating how its form, style, and format
reflect the theses within it.
With nine chapters, an Introduction, a Prologue, an Epilogue, an
analysis of Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld woven in as a sub-text, as a
supplement, four substantial “Observations” on Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and
Heidegger and a detailed and helpful timeline of Derrida’s publications
between 1993-1995 at the end of the book, Naas’s Miracle and Machine
masterfully brings together a macro- and micro-scopic reading, proceeding
from the conditions and the context of the arguments of the book to the most
minute details of its language and writing, in order to demonstrate the very
complex stakes involved in the question of “religion.” In addition to
explicating an undoubtedly complex Derridean text--complex in its structure
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2015.688
Kas Saghafi | 123
and its construction, its language and its thinking--following the logic of
exemplarity, Naas’s book also functions as a guide about the intricacies of a
deconstructive reading, steering and gently instructing the reader as it
carefully proceeds. In its sweep and detail, in the clichéd phrase that I find
impossible to avoid here, it is not possible to do this work justice.
Naas shows “Faith and Knowledge” to be an “at once improvised and
highly constructed” text full of repetitions, doublings and moments of
duplicity. Demonstrating the duplicity inscribed into the very form of “Faith
and Knowledge,” in the two words of the title, naming the two sources of
“religion,” the two forms of religion, the dogmatic and the true, the division
of the book into two sections (fifty-two sections composed of two sets of
twenty-six), the two times and places of its writing: first, its presentation at a
small, informal gathering on the island of Capri, Italy in February 1994 and
then, its writing at Laguna Beach, California in April 1995), the two, at least
two, kinds of “writing,” the spoken and the written, the two forms of
typescript or font, the further division of the text into the bolded and the
unbolded, Naas also shows that Derrida’s arguments do not proceed in a
logical and linear fashion but are scattered throughout, progressing
nonetheless by a constant doubling back to its themes and motif.
Even though Derrida’s arguments are not made in a straightforward
fashion, it is Naas’s contention that we can isolate three main theses
underlying “Faith and Knowledge.” Naas isolates them in a chapter (that he
must have had great fun titling) called “Three Theses on the Two Sources
and Their One Common Element.” According to Naas, these express: the
fundamental duplicity of religion, the fundamental conflict between science
and religion, and the fundamental complicity of religion and science (65).
While I am not able to pursue the full details of these topics here, I can
highlight the focus on elementary trust, reliability or, trustworthiness
[fiabilité].
Among the discussions that I found extremely illuminating and that I
greatly learned from in Miracle and Machine are: the treatment of the
question of salut, salut as salvation or as safety (50-2) and mondialisation, the
process of becoming world-wide (58) in Chapter 2; the discussion of the
miracle as being coextensive with elementary faith (93-4) and testimonial
faith’s conditioning of every social bond as an interruption, as an
interruptive unraveling (94-5, 97-9) in Chapter 3; the theme of breath (souffle)
(110-4), the connection between the machine (118) and faith, showing that it
is the machine that makes possible the faith that opens up a future (120) in
Chapter 4; the experience of the secret (127), in particular its relation to
Christianity as a religion of internalization, of the virtualization and
spectralization of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, explaining the
divergent uptakes by the Abrahamic religions of what took place and was
said between YHWH and Abraham, as well as the specificity of Islam’s
attachment to the untranslatable letter and its resistance to mediatization
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124 | For A Time
and translation (131) in Chapter 5; the penetrating examination of the most
desert-like khōra and the rethinking of “religion” itself on the basis of
another social bond, the one that first opens up, and interrupts in opening
up, every community (195) in Chapter 6; the consideration of “the ellipsis of
sacrifice” (207) and the discussion of how when the specter of life-death is
repressed the phantasm of pure life takes its place (225) in Chapter 7--and I
haven’t even mentioned yet the grenade and the pomegranate seeds in
Chapter 8.
Rather than engaging in a mechanical exercise of summary here, I
would like to submit to scrutiny--the very scrutiny that he himself practiced
when I had the privilege of being in his classes, in which he examined
minute details of Platonic arguments--Naas’s discussion of an important
theme raised at the end of his book, that of survival or living on [survivre]. I
would like to take the opportunity here to think through with Naas a most
pressing thought invoked in Chapter 9, entitled “The Passion of Literature:
Genet in Laguna, Gide in Algiers.” There, Naas takes up the unusual
juxtaposition of two writers who were important for Derrida during
different phases of his life: Gide especially during his youth, and Genet, who
played an important role in Derrida’s work, certainly since the composition
of Glas. Toward the end of Chapter 9, after speculating about the role played
by these writers in “Faith and Knowledge” and presenting a hypothesis
about their presence at the end of the essay, Naas turns to Derrida’s views
regarding death and the acceptance of death.
Examining the notion of “the end” in the Western tradition that Derrida
is reading, Naas remarks that in this tradition the end is never quite the end.
For there is always something that comes after the end, “something like an
afterlife or an afterworld, some kind of life ever-lasting” (263-4). What about
Gide of Fruits of the Earth, the Journals or even The Immoralist may have
appealed to Derrida, Naas writes, is his “unconditional embracing of life in
the here and now, on earth and in this world, rather than sacrificing this
world and this life to some beyond” (264). Bringing together his discussion
of Gide with Derrida’s “final words,” words scribbled on an envelope, as he
says, near the end of his life and read aloud by his son, Pierre Alferi, at his
gravesite in Ris-Orangis, Naas concludes that in their “emphasis on this
world, this finite world” both Derrida and Gide issue a plea not to sacrifice
this world for the promise of another world.
Naas explains that Gide’s reference to the very common expression de
l’autre côté, on the other side, very much like Nietzsche’s thought, eschews
an otherworldly religion or ethics, for what is promised on the other side of
life, and encourages the celebration of the joys and riches of this world. One
may wonder how to distinguish a thought embracing the wonders of this life
from other competing discourses on finitude such as Nietzschean tragic
finitude, or a certain embrace of Carpe diem by the existentialists, for whom
Gide was a favorite author. Of course, such a belief, as Naas rightly worries,
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
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Kas Saghafi | 125
can lead to the neglect of “the ‘other side’ that is to be found on this side, that
is of the other world within this world” (267). He will go on to explain what
he means by this other side within this world.
Having already referred to the appeal that Derrida makes to the phrase
de l’autre côté in Chapter 3, Naas writes that for Derrida there is already
“another side to this ‘other side,’ not some other world beyond this world
but an ‘other side’ or an ‘other world’ within this world” (267). This “other
side” is “not some other world to which I might gain entrance after death
but [rather] the inner sanctum of the other, to which I can have no access”
(267). For this reason, Naas writes, there is “another other world, but not one
above or beyond this one but another world ‘within’ the world, an infinitely
other, nondialectizable, nonsynthesizable world ‘within’ this one” (268).
And this thought becomes most poignant with the death of the other.
At this juncture in his chapter, Naas admits that it would be difficult not
to want to pose the question, the question that many readers of Derrida may
have been wondering about, about whether Derrida himself believed in
another world or in an afterlife. Quoting Derrida’s own statements about his
own death, for example the one in A Taste for the Secret when he said “I do
not believe that one lives on post mortem,” Naas says declaratively that
“Derrida did not believe that we live on somewhere else or that we live
again; he did not believe in another world; in a world ‘on the other side’ of
this one” (270). Glossing this further, Naas observes that “while we are not
resurrected for another life or in another life, ‘we’ do sur-vive or live on for a
time after death through the traces we produce and the marks that make us
visible to others. […] ’We’ begin sur-viving or living on from the moment we
are born” (270; my emphasis). This surviving is, as Derrida wrote in Archive
3
Fever, “the surviving of an excess of life” over itself.
In what follows I would like to underscore Naas’s use of the phrase “for
a time” toward the end of Chapter 9 in four other instances (one of them
italicized by him). Now I claim no expertise in numerology, and in the wake
of Naas’s own book that makes a great case for the significance of all kinds
of numbers in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge,” I cannot say anything
substantial about this number of repetitions--five--except to point out his
emphasis on the expression “for a time.” My remarks or questions will have
to do with how to understand this “for a time.”
Commenting on Derrida’s views about death and what may come after
it, Naas goes on to say that Derrida’s work argued for and demonstrated a
logic of survival and living on from the very beginning, though this should
not be mistaken for a belief in an afterlife. “Derrida developed throughout
his work,” Naas writes, “a singular thinking of survival or living on, a
notion of the trace as what, in principle if not in fact, always survives the one
who produced it or received it […] As soon as I utter or even read a trace, as
soon as I make a mark, my death and my survival are implied therein, my
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
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126 | For A Time
death and the trace or mark that can always survive me for a time” (Here I
note the second appearance of the phrase “for a time”) (271; my emphasis).
In other words, the trace survives me: “while every trace--as finite--is
threatened by forgetting, erasure, indeed by catastrophe or apocalypse, the
trace in principle survives me” (271). However, this powerful thought of
survival is “a far cry from any kind of belief in an afterlife or in the
immortality of the soul” (271).
We begin living on already from the beginning, and we continue to live
on in these very marks, these signs, after our deaths. But how then to
understand this living on? When Derrida says in his final note “I love you
and am smiling at you from wherever I am,” Naas emphasizes that “We are
to understand living on as living on only ‘in’ these words,” in the
subjunctive and not in the indicative, “as they are repeated or as they remain
repeatable in others, for others—and only for a time” (271, author’s italics, the
third appearance of the phrase). So, only in the time of “for a time.” Derrida
did not believe, Naas continues, in an afterlife or in an eternal or immortal
life after death but “always only a finite and very mortal survival” (272).
Here we could ask what a “finite” and “mortal” survival would be? If
Derrida has been rethinking “finitude” from his earliest texts, combining a
thinking of finitude with that of the infinite, surely we cannot take “finite”
and “mortal” here as simply the end of a short, death-bound life on this
earth, especially since in several other places, such as The Beast and the
Sovereign, volume 2, Derrida links finitude with a survivance that is “neither
life nor death pure and simple.” There, writing of the alliance of the living
4
and the dead, he states “this finitude […] is survivance.” Perhaps survivance
requires that we think the finite in relation to the infinite. In other words,
would we be able to think of living on as infinitely finite?
Naas very astutely notes that “it might be thought that this living on is
something of a consolation in the face of death, solace in the recognition that,
although we are not immortal, the traces we leave live on within the world
in the memories of others, in the works available to others to read, hear, or
experience, and so on” (272). Yet, Naas explains that Derrida’s survival is,
first, anything but a “personal” survival, “for the trace I leave behind is
precisely not ‘my own’” and second, that “with every death, including my
own, there comes the end not of some individual within the world but the
end of the world as such” (272). This end of the world is, of course, a
reference to a notion that Derrida argued for in the Preface to the French
edition of The Work of Mourning, entitled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde,
where he emphatically stated that the death of the other signifies not the end
of a world but the end of the world itself. As Naas notes, Derrida rejects the
thought that my death can be understood and situated dialectically within
the horizon of other deaths. In other words, Derrida does not agree with the
idea of a common horizon of death. For, death truly is “the end of the
world.”
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2015.688
Kas Saghafi | 127
Since Derrida did not believe that he would be going to another world,
Naas writes, “there might be living on for a time, but certainly no afterlife”
(272, my emphasis, fourth appearance). For, despite his genuine struggle
and constant preoccupation with death, Derrida could not accept death. “He
could not accept death because he--like all of us--had a certain preference for
life” (273). He could not accept it because he could not think or assimilate it;
he could not accept it because he wished to question and thus rethink the
concepts he had inherited from the tradition, in particular, those of
redemption and resurrection. We can say that what he thought was always
on the side of life, as he described the thought of Hélène Cixous in H.C., That is
To Say…
Derrida “simply could not accept death,” Naas argues, “because to do
so would be to accept nothing less than the end of the world” (273). Thus,
the acceptance of [his own] death would be tantamount to accepting the end
of the world. It is true that Derrida could not accept death in the sense of
resigning himself to it. This he could never do, but he did accept death as the
end of the world; he did know that death would be the end of the world. I
would like to say a few more words about this at the end of my paper.
Naas then writes that for Derrida there is living on but there would be
no resurrection (274). With every breath one is already living on, surviving,
not at all immortal but living on as absolutely mortal. As Naas shows
throughout the book, Derrida’s thinking of the trace was always tied to a
reflection on death and mourning, a mourning that begins from the very
beginning. “Only insofar as work allows itself to be […] uprooted, displaced,
and translated, transplanted elsewhere, can it live on for a time” (274, my
emphasis, fifth appearance). How do we take this emphasis again on
“absolutely mortal?” Surely, this mortality is not that of a dying subjectivity
or of a simple finitude. How would we reconcile the relation between
mortality and a certain living on, surviving, remaining [restance], ghostly
coming back [revenance], that is, a certain immortality? When in one of the
first substantial treatments of the notion of survival in an essay on Blanchot
called “Living On: Borderlines”, Derrida remarks that in L’Arrêt de mort the
living on [survivance] of the one who narrates [le récitant], who is a survivor,
is also a spectral coming back, a ghostly return [cette survivance est aussi une
5
revenance spectrale], what is the time or duration of this survival? Is its time
only “for a time?”
Perhaps with his stress on the expression “for a time” Naas is
emphasizing the provisional nature of survival and living on, survival for a
time, in the same way that he argues in Chapter 6 “’Jewgreek is Greekjew’:
Messianicity—Khôra—Democracy,” that Derrida was not willing to give up
the notion of the messianic “for the moment” (172). Or perhaps Naas wants
to say that survival lasts “for a time,” as in the duration of one’s epoch. One
way of reading the thought that one lives on “for a time” after one’s death,
would be to say that the memory that others have of oneself lasts only for a
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2015.688
128 | For A Time
time, only for one’s time, for one’s epoch, after which this memory naturally
dissipates. In a wonderfully strange text entitled “‘Dead Man Running’:
Salut, Salut,” written in honor of the 50th anniversary of Les Temps modernes,
Derrida comments on this very thought, on what you might perhaps call
Sartre’s over-zealous belief in finitude. In this hastily-written essay penned
in the form of a letter to Claude Lanzmann, Derrida links epochalization, the
fact that one’s thought belongs to an epoch, to the process of sanctification,
showing an alliance between the concept of epoch and the concept of
salvation. For Derrida, this emphasis on epochalization is predetermined
and overdetermined by the value of life. So does memory just endure “for a
time,” the time of one’s epoch?
Or perhaps, like the Homeric belief in the fame or reputation that
outlasts the hero’s lifetime, survival is akin to the living on of memory. This
would, then, be something like a living on in posterity, the survival that
posterity promises. For Homeric kleos, honor and glory is bestowed upon the
hero who has died a glorious death and whose memory will live on. The
hero’s desire is to perform great deeds in order to transform his death into
eternal glory. In the Iliad Hektor does not intend to die without “some great
6
deed whose fame will live on among men to come [essomenoisi puthesthai].”
The beautiful death (kalos thanatos), the glorious death (eukleēs thanatos), in
the prime of youth leads to glory, virtually guaranteeing unassailable
renown. The logic underlying heroic honor is the need to be recognized as
7
supreme, to be famed “among men to come [hommes à venir].”
Heroic striving has its roots in the will to escape aging and death, which
amount to amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, and the absence of fame.
By welcoming death and confronting it with valor, death is overcome as
something to be feared. What matters most is being valued, honored, and
recognized and by being glorified in a song of praise the hero is allowed to
continue, beyond the reach of death, to be present in the community of the
living, his life converted into legend and linked to that of other heroic
individuals. In his analysis of “glorious death,” Jean-Pierre Vernant notes
that this kleos, of course, assumes the existence of a tradition of oral poetry
which serves as a repository of shared culture and as societal memory. The
hero who is praised in song is not only committed to memory,
memorialized, remaining present in the memory for all “those to come” but
also commemorated in the memorial tomb, the raising of a sema.
When Naas writes that accepting death is something Derrida could
never do because it would be equivalent to accepting the end of the world,
he appeals to Derrida’s words in Learning to Live Finally: “We are all
survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve [en sursis]” in order
8
to underscore the temporariness of this “for a time.” However, isn’t the
reprieve that Derrida is referring to here that of the duration of our life--the
duration of our life itself as a reprieve--and not what happens after it? It is
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2015.688
Kas Saghafi | 129
our life itself, the life that is riven with death and will live on, that Derrida
considers as a temporary reprieve (273).
Furthermore, almost every time that Derrida wrote about the end of the
world, whether it was in The Work of Mourning or in Rams, was it not always
in relation to the other’s death, and not in reference to his own or the death
of “the I?” When Naas writes that in the Preface of Chaque fois unique Derrida
made it very clear that “death--in this case, the death of the other--must be
understood not as an event within the world […] but as the end of the world
itself,” does he mean to suggest that Derida could also have been referring to
“death in general” or “my death?” Is Naas implying that this case, this
particular case, that of the other’s death, is just an example to be included
among the rest? (273, my emphasis). Or was it a mere coincidence that
whenever Derrida wrote about “the end of the world” it was the death of the
other that provoked his discussion? Can we say that it is not just “in this
case,” but only in this case, the case of the other’s death, that he speaks of it?
Every death of the other, each time, is the end of the world. This is
because the other’s death is the end of the world envisioned as something
that we commonly share. The death of the other is a reminder that what we
call “the world,” the fact that we believe that there is only one world is the
result of a tacit agreement, a shared history. For “the world”—whether the
kosmos, the universe, or the globe—does indeed have a history, a history that
requires to be told again. With the other’s death so dies a certain concept of
the world as one world. Each birth opens up and each death closes a “unique
9
world.” The other’s is “an other world.” And each death, each time,
10
signals “another end of the world.” With each death there is a world that
disappears. It will be claimed that, nevertheless, the “world” is there.
Derrida believed that what we call “the world” is the indispensable
assumption or presumption of a “credible” gathering, the gathering of an
infinity of worlds, depending on an act of faith. The presumption of a
community, a gathering of this infinite dispersion of worlds, is faith itself.
With the invocation of faith, it is time once again to say what a
miraculous work Naas’s book is, miraculous in the sense that he helps us
understand that a marvelous event causes wonder. In Miracle and Machine he
shows us that this miracle could not be understood without a relationship to
calculation, programming, and repetition. And the wonder is that to accede
to the event of this miracle we had to pass via the machine, via all the
repetitions and duplicities recounted and marvelously mapped out through
the chapters of Miracle and Machine.
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
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130 | For A Time
1
This paper was originally presented at a SPEP Session on Michael Naas’s Miracle
and Machine in Eugene, Oregon October 24, 2013. Paul Davies was my co-panelist.
2
Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of
Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
Further references shall be given in the body of the text.
3
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive. Une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995),
96 ; Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 60.
4
Jacques Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002-2003), ed.
Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 193;
The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 130.
5
Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 182; Parages, ed. John P. Leavey,
trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford :
Stanford University Press, 2011), 159.
6
7
Homer, lliad (22.304-5).
Jean-Pierre Vernant, “La belle mort et le cadavre outragé,” in L’individu, la mort,
l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 50; “A
‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic,” in Mortals and
Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 55.
8
Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris:
Editions Galilée/Le Monde, 2005), 25; Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House
Publishing, 2007), 24.
9
Jacques Derrida, Echographies--de la télévision (Entretiens filmés avec Bernard
Stiegler) (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 138; Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews,
trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 123.
10
Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 124;
The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 95.
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française
Vol XXIII, No 2 (2015) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2015.688