What Comes

“What Comes” Kas Saghafi, University of Memphis We know less than ever what death is. NOTES Jacques Derrida, “Scènes des differences: Où la philosophie et la poétique indissociables, font événement d’écriture’ Littérature 142, 2 (June 2006): 16-29; trans. by Adam Rosenthal as “Scenes of Differences” An interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber in Thinking What Comes, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). In his last interview Apprendre à vivre enfin Derrida confesses that he has “never learned-to-live.” Jacques Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin: Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005), p.24, trans by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault as Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview (Hoboken, NJ, Melville House, 2007), p. 24. “In fact not at all!” (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 24/24). In the “Exordium” at the beginning of Specters of Marx a voice remarks that living, by definition, is not something one learns. Jacques Derrida Spectres de Marx: l’etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993, p.15. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1993). It is not learned from life by life. Moreover, dying is also not something one learns (Derrida, Spectres de Marx, p. 15/14). Alluding to Montaigne’s famous essay, Derrida notes in his interview that “learning to live, that would mean learning how to die, learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute mortality—without salvation” (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 24/24). He admits that he hasn’t learned anything or acquired anything about this subject. Can one learn, he wonders, “to accept or, better, to affirm life?” (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 24/24). He calls himself “uneducable” about this “wisdom [sagesse] of learning to die [savoir-mourir]” (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 25/25, trans. mod). In his last days, he writes with regret, that the time of sursis (reprieve, deferment, probation, suspension, deferral, postponement) has shrunk, retreated, flattened, narrowed [rétrécit] in an accelerated way [de façon accélérée] and has rapidly run out (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 25/25). The questions of survie or sursis, which always haunted him at every instant of his life in an unremitting fashion, now take on, become tinged, take color, take on another glow (se colore autrement) (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 26, trans. mod). Always having been interested in the theme of survie, he comments that this theme is “originary: life is survie, living on, survival” (Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin, p. 25/25). This, of course, is not a conventional recovery or survival after a life-threatening event or some perdurance after death, but then how are we to interpret this survie? In his last seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II Derrida writes of Heidegger who, pursuing his earlier critique of the metaphysical concept of animal rationale and the animalitas of man, claims in his later works that men must become not just rational living beings, animals endowed with reason, but it is necessary for them to “become mortals.” Jacques Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002-2003) (Paris: Galilée, 2010), p. 186 Translated by Geoffrey Bennington as The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 2. Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p.124. In a reading of Heidegger’s “Das Ding” Derrida explains that for Heidegger what has prevailed in metaphysics is a definition of man as a rational animal, an animal living being imbued with reason. Metaphysics has represented man as an animal endowed with ratio. Yet rather than a rational animal, Heidegger believes, man must be defined as mortal. Then, men “must not ‘learn how to die’ (as the tradition has been saying since Plato, thus defining the task of philosophy as epimeleia tou thanatou, exercise or discipline of preparation for death), but become mortal” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 186/124). Derrida recounts Heidegger’s assertion in “The Thing” that it is necessary for us to become mortal. “The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 182/121). Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske Verlag, 1954), 157-79, p.171; translated by Albert Hofstadter as “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165-182, p. 178. In Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, death as such, access or relation to death as such is a being-able, a power (Können, Vermögen), an ability. Dasein can die. Dying is something that one can do; thus, to die means to be capable of death as death. This power or potency is what defines the mortal, this power of the as such, this power to have access to the as such of death, Derrida determines, is none other than the relation to the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, which springs from a certain Walten (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 75/116). Thus, we must learn to become mortals and “that’s the great lesson to be learned,” Derrida explains ruefully, for the deaf, like me, who keep trying to learn how to become immortal, or a-mortal [a-mortel], basically like beasts. Ah ! If only we could stay beasts ! Unless, contrary to what Heidegger says, we did remain beasts who do not have the power to die, to whom death as such never appears, dying remaining, as Blanchot often complains, impossible, alas (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 186/124). What is it to “try to learn how to become a-mortal? “The following remarks will be devoted to exploring this question. 1. Mortals For Heidegger the examination of mortality has its starting point with Dasein, which is defined as that being that is concerned about its very being. In fact, the understanding of being is a determination of the being of Dasein. This is why Dasein takes an ontic-ontological priority over all other beings. Being toward death belongs primordially and essentially to the being of Da-sein. Heidegger devotes §§ 49-53 in Division II of Being and Time to the existential analysis of death, where he argues that the existential interpretation is prior to any biology and ontology of life. He defines the existential phenomenon of death, which is ontologically constituted by mineness, as the ownmost nonrelational possibility of Dasein. As Being-toward-death [Sein zum Tode] Dasein exists its death. In his writings Heidegger distinguishes dying [Sterben], the way of being in which Dasein is toward its death, from the intermediate phenomenon of demise [Ableben] and perishing [Verenden], the ending of what is alive (Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 246-267/229-246). He asserts that Dasein never perishes; it can only demise as long as it dies. It is in the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30) that Heidegger seeks to discern what specific relation the stone, animal, and man have toward world. He formulates what he refers to as three distinctions or theses in order to unfold the question “What is world?” These theses are: 1. The stone is worldless [weltlos], 2. The animal is poor in world [weltarm]; 3. The animal is deprived of world, but man does have a world. In fact, man is world-forming [weltbildend]. Heidegger then relates the question of death to each of these, the stone, animal, and man. He states that the animal cannot die but comes to an end (verenden) because the animal does not have a relation to death as such. In truth, the animal lacks the experience of the as such—thus perishes (verendet)—while the stone, in contrast, is without world (Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 388/267). What Derrida finds objectionable in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II about Heidegger’s references to death is “the confidence with which Heidegger attributes dying properly speaking to Dasein” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 175/116). The force of Derrida’s reading is that he not only reconsiders the question of death but also the privilege bestowed upon Dasein, by examining what limits the living from the nonliving, what delimits Dasein from the animal, god, and the stone. In the 1940s Heidegger’s thought witnesses a transition from a concern with Dasein to a vocabulary of “the mortals [die Sterblichen]” as part of taking up the fourfold [das Geviert], with Earth, Sky, and God. According to Werner Marx the term “the mortals” comes from Hölderlin’s poetry. Werner Marx, Is There a Measure On Earth? Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics, translated by Thomas Nenon and Reginald Lilly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gibt es auf Erden ein Mass?: Grundbestimmungen einer nichtmetaphysischen Ethik (Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1983); also see Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung 1936-68 (GA 4, 60). Discussions of “mortals” occur in several of Heidegger’s essays, notably in “The Thing,” “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954) and “The Essence of Language” (1957). Martin Heidegger, “Das Wesen der Sprache” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959), GA 12; “The Essence of Language,” translated as “The Nature of Language” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Herz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). In both ““The Thing”—which Derrida reads as a great text on death and on the mortality of Dasein—and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” we read: “The mortals are the human beings. They are called the mortals because they can die [sterben können]. To die means to be capable of death as death [den Tod als Tod vermögen]. Only the human dies” while “the animal perishes [verdendet]” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 171/150). Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske Verlag, 1954), GA 7, pp.145-6. in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). We now call mortals mortals—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because, as noted above, they are capable of death as death. In 1957 broaching the relationship of the mortals to death and language Heidegger states in “The Essence of Language” (1957-58) that “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal is not capable of this.” (Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 203/107). A reference to “mortals” is also made in Der Satz vom Grund, The Principle of Reason (GA10) also published in 1957. The mortals never finish dying. In his late Hölderlin interpretation, “Hölderlin’s Earth and Sky” (1959) that appeared in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlin Heidegger claims that “the mortals die their death in life. In death the mortals become im-mortal [un-sterblich]. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991) GA 4; Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Holler (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), GA 4:165/190, trans. mod. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” Heidegger further elucidates that “The mortals are in the fourfold, in that they dwell” (Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 152/50, trans. mod). To be a human then means: “to be upon the earth as mortal: it means to dwell.” (Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 149/145, trans. mod). Thereby, “in becoming a mortal, one must learn dwelling [Wohnen]” (Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 163/159, trans. mod). Heidegger proclaims that “only the human dies—and indeed continually, as long as he abides upon the earth, as long as he dwells.” (Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 200/219, trans. mod). 2. “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die” In his reading of the Phaedo (80e) in Donner la mort Derrida examines very closely the discipline or “the exercise that consists in learning to die in order to attain the new immortality, that is, meletē thanatou, the care taken [le soin pris] with death, the exercise of death, the “practicing (for) death [s’exercer à la mort] that Socrates speaks of” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 9/14). The Phaedo, for Derrida, explicitly names philosophy as the “attentive anticipation of death, care brought to bear upon dying” and “the experience of a vigil over the possibility of death” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 29/14). “‘Practicing death’ [meletē thanatou]” in Derrida’s reading of Plato is when the soul “has kept itself separate [from the body] as its regular practice—in other words, if it has pursued philosophy in the right way [he orthōs philosophousa] and really practiced how to face death easily” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 31/14). Derrida describes this meletē thanatou as “a matter of souci, care, a ‘keeping-vigil-for [veiller-à],’ a solicitude for death that constitutes the relation to self of that which, in existence, relates to oneself” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 31/16). Yet in Derrida’s view, the soul “only distinguishes itself, separates itself, and assembles itself within itself in the experience of this meletē tou thanatou. It is nothing other than this care about dying as a relation to self and assembling itself […] becoming conscious [s’éveiller] […] through this care for death” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 31-2/16). Then, philosophy, or the dialectic, to the extent that it can be taught, as a discipline “is nothing other than this vigil over death [veille de la mort] that watches out for death and watches over death” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 32/17). “The Platonic philosopher is in no better a position than the animal,” Derrida claims, “when it comes to ‘looking’ death in the face and, as a result, to having access to that authenticity of existence linked to the epimeleia tēs psykhēs as meletē thanatou, the caring concern for the soul that cares by watching for/over death [souci veillant sur la mort]” (Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 38/21). In his famous essay “[That to] Philosophize is to Learn to Die” Montaigne does not refer to Plato but to Cicero who states in his Tusculan Disputations, having Socrates in mind: “For the whole life of the philosopher, as the same wise man says, is a preparation for death [Tota enim philosophorum vita, uta it idem, commentatio mortis est].” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, translated by J.E. King (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966), I, xxx, p. 74. Echoing Plato and inspiring Montaigne, Cicero inquires: “But is the severance of the soul from the body anything else than learning how to die [Secernere autem a corpore animum ecquid aliud est quam mori descere]?” Then he urges his reader “Let us, therefore, believe me, make this preparation and dissociation of ourselves from our bodies [disiungamus que nos a corporibus], that is, let us habituate ourselves to die [consuescamus mori]” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, p. xxxi, p 75). At the beginning of his essay Montaigne relates that “Cicero said that to philosophize is nothing other than preparing for death [s’apprêter à la mort].” Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, I, xxx, 74-xxxi, 75. The translator of the Penguin edition Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection (London: Penguin, 1993), p.17 (trans. mod). M.A. Screech, notes that Cicero translates “practice” not by meditatatio but by commentatio, which means a careful preparation. Montaigne is echoing Cicero here, not Socrates. This is because “study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat [retirent aucunement] outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away [embesognent] from the body, which are both apprenticeship of and resemblance to death” (Montaigne, Essais, p. 103-4/17). Michel de Montaigne, “Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir” in Essais, texte établi et annoté par Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade» To this extent, for Montaigne “all the wisdom and reasoning [discours] in the world in the end come down to [se résout enfin] this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die” (Montaigne, Essais,104/17, tr mod). In De Brevitate Vitae collected in his Moral Essays Seneca echoes Cicero that “it takes the whole of life to learn how to die [tota vita discendum est mori].” Seneca, “On the Brevity of Life” in Moral Essays, volume II, translated by John W. Basore (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7.3 He adds further that it is keeping the company of philosophers that teaches him how to die and he calls on the learned men of history such as Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle, and Theophrastus who will not “force you to die, but all will teach you how to die” (Seneca, Moral Essays, 15.1) In his essay Montaigne declares that “The end of our course is death” (Montaigne, Essais 106/20). However, in a footnote, fn.13, the English translator M.A. Screech contrasts this statement with another reference (III, 12) where Montaigne “denies that death is the end to which our life aims (its but) but merely its ending (bout) [C’est bien le bout, non pourtant le but de la vie]” (Montaigne, Essais,). Montaigne, Essais, edition d’Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig et Alexandre Tarrête (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), Livre III, Chapitre 12, p. 1180. Nevertheless, Montaigne believes: “To practise [préméditation] death is to practice freedom” (Montaigne, Essais, p. 110/24). Accordingly, “knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint” and death will be “the origin of another life” (Montaigne, Essais p. 111/30). Let us recall that since Plato the philosophical tradition has described the practice of philosophy as preparation for and as an apprenticeship for learning how to die. Philosophy has been defined as promoting care and concern for the soul, which eventually separates from the body, enabling one to face death. Philosophers have described death not as something to be feared but prepared for without dread and faced with equanimity. While the Heidegger of Being and Time in order to overcome metaphysical partiality chose the term Dasein to refer to what in philosophy has been variously described as man, the human being, life, the self, hypokeimenon, ego cogito, subjectum, consciousness, self-consciousness, the “I think,” etc., in his later writing he opted for the designation “mortal,” thus defining the philosophical task as learning how to become mortal. Heidegger believed that the thought of infinity prevalent in Western metaphysics is, in fact, derived from and secondary to finitude. Derrida’s approach would seem to go against the sacrosanct tenet or law of Heideggerian philosophy—that is to say, Being-toward-death—and the stress placed on the finitude of Dasein, perhaps suggesting that what is necessary to do is {to learn how to} become “a-mortal.” Typically, the privative is an indication of deprivation, absence, or loss but the a- in a-mortal of Derrida’s terminology, in distinction to Heidegger’s insistence on the primordial significance of being-toward-death, no longer places significance and stress on mortality. By naming the “a-human”—falling somewhere between god, animot, and human—and the “a-mortal” mentioned above, Derrida seems to be alluding to, addressing, and attempting to reconsider the question initially raised by Jean-Luc Nancy who, serving as the guest editor of a special issue of Topoi, had proposed to organize the issue around the question “Who comes after the subject [Qui vient après le sujet]?” What is at stake is what happens when the philosophical “subject” is rethought? 3. Life Death A reading of Derrida’s recently published Life Death seminar given in 1975-76 will provide a discerning insight into Derrida’s approach toward the relation between life and death and will allow us to better interpret his apparently opaque comments in his last seminar regarding “living death” and “dying alive (mourir vivant).” In his Life Death seminar as in other published writings addressing the question of death, Derrida calls into question the clear distinction made by metaphysics between life and death, reframing the pre-eminence and role given to the mortal human being. Derrida’s reading, a radical reinterpretation of the entire framework of Heideggerian philosophy, puts into question the established injunction that we need to learn how to become mortal. The discussion of life death is a subtle shift away from an emphasis in the history of philosophy on the singularity and significance of mortality and death itself. It will be recalled that from his early writings Derrida always insisted that a thinking of différance is not a thinking of finitude. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). “Difference is also something other than any finitude (OG xx/68). In an early article Derrida is even more emphatic: “Differance is not finitude.” See Jacques Derrida, “De la grammatologie II” Critique 224 (1966), p. 36. At the beginning of the Life Death seminar in the chapter entitled “Programs” Derrida asserts that a reading of Hegel’s Logic demonstrates that the difference between life and death is not of the order of opposition, of two sides facing each other, but that of an other alterity. Hegel’s dialectic, he explains, presents itself as a very powerful thinking of life and death, a process in which one opposite passes into the other, the one is sublated into the other. The dialectic is propelled, Derrida elaborates, by “the driving schemas” of the concept and the position, the position of the concept (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 19/1). Jacques Derrida, La vie la mort Paris: Seuil trans by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault as Life Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 19/1). In Hegel’s Logic life is considered, Derrida notes, as a position [Setzung]. In his comments at the beginning of the seminar Derrida wonders, however, whether these concepts of position and op-position were not themselves constructed by the logic of “life death” (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 20/2). As if dialectical logic were a ruse put forward by “life death,” so as to conceal or harbor something, something that would no longer be “in this sense of position,” something “that is no longer … posited” (Derrida, La vie la mort, 20/2). Thus, by proffering life death, Derrida is not intending to oppose opposition and identification but, he says, to neutralize opposition. This neutralization, according to Derrida, is in order to gesture [faire signe] not toward another logic—an opposite logic of life and death—but toward an other topos, toward another topography. This would allow him to read “the entire program of the and and of the is,” (that is to say, that life is death or that life is opposed to death), of the positionality and presence of being (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 25/6). Position and presence then would need to be thought as effects and this presupposes another thinking of effect (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 25/6). In Derrida’s synopsis, if life at the end of the Greater Logic has no opposition and it reappropriates itself, life is (the reappropriation of) being (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 22/4). Derrida makes a reference to Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” fragments that Heidegger quotes in his Nietzsche book: “’Being’ [das ‘Sein’]—we have no other representation [Vorstellung] of this than as ‘living’ [als ‘leben’]—How can anything dead ‘be’?” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche English v.2, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979-87), p.91; Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Gunther Neske Verlag, 1961) v.1, p. 350 Therefore, Derrida summarizes, being-dead is “unthinkable,” “unrepresentable, unpresentable, unsayable.” Thus, those who identify being and life, like Hegel does, still “remain within representation” (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 23/5). But we must go beyond representation. In other words, they are those whose point of view places the world or things before them. The Nietzschean-Heideggerian critique of representation involves “modern man” for whom to be is to-be-represented and who judges what is before it. “If language and logic are a language and a logic of the living, it is futile to try to say and to think within these something like the dead [le mort]” (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 24/6). The only way to do this would be to think the dead beyond language, logic, metaphorics, etc. Then “the dead” would be “the generic name for everything that exceeds, overflows, transgresses the limits of the sayable, the expressible” (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 24/6). In Derrida’s estimation “being-dead is something we are unable to think because we are unable to say it, etc.” (Derrida, La vie la mort, p. 24/6). In contrast to what the philosophical tradition has maintained, in Derrida’s view life and death cannot be regarded as concepts to be opposed to each other. The philosophical goal of learning how to die assumes that living and dying are two separate opposed, positions, or states. If life and death were not seen as discrete, unconnected states, then living cannot have as its task or vocation the exercise set by the philosophical tradition—learning to die. On learning how to die, see “Jacques Derrida: ... A Life” in Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). If we are not described merely as mortals, as Western metaphysics has conceived it, if life is haunted and inhabited by death, if life involves death in itself, then we cannot be limited to the definition of humans who will die. Life death is the very neutralization of the opposition of life and death. For Derrida, Life death is an originary. quasi-transcendental notion that should be thought as an alterity or difference. Like other quasi-concepts or quasi-transcendentals, such as trace, archi-writing, différance, life death is inscribed in an anonymous field within a structure of generalized reference—a system of reference constituted as a tissue, web, or chain of other quasi-transcendentals. It is the investigation of life and death in Life Death that allows Derrida, we can now speculate, to state in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II seminar that “perhaps thinking death as such [la mort comme telle], in the sense Heidegger wants to give it, is still only imagination. Fantasia, Fantastic phantasmatics” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 176/117). Thinking death would only be the case of a phantasm. Yet, Derrida adds forcefully : “This fantasmatic virtuality in no way diminishes the real almightiness of what […] organizes and rules over everything we call life and death, life death. This power of almightiness belongs to a beyond of the opposition between being or not being, life and death, reality and fiction or fantasmatic virtuality” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, 192-3/130). Derrida underscores that in Greek the word phantasmata has at once the sense of “the product of the imagination and fantasy or revenant [produit de l’imagination ou le fantasme et le revenant]” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 200/136). This will then allow Derrida to leave philosophers with this parting shot : “the phantasm is really more effective, more powerful, it is really [en effet] more powerful [plus puissant] than what is opposed to it—let’s say, good sense and reality, the perception of the real, etc. The perception of the real has less power than this quasi-hallucination” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 201/137). 4. A-mortal, A-human It is probable that no more than a few occurrences of the terms “a-mortal” or “a-human” could be found in Derrida’s later writings. Although he does not elaborate on these terms in any detail, they are an index, I believe, of his ongoing interrogation of the metaphysical distinction between the human and the animal. If we were to return to the passage with which I began, Derrida’s wistful wish for us to remain beasts, which occurs in the context of The Beast and Sovereign Seminar, Vol. II, a seminar partially devoted to reading Heidegger’s 1929/1930 lecture course, Derrida’s quip can be read as partly concerned with his interrogation of the notion of the beast—which is not strictly speaking the animal— but also with the relation to death that different entities interrogated by Heidegger—god, animal, stone--have. Perhaps, like beasts, we do not have the power to die. In his very last writings, in addition to the reference to what may be a-mortal mentioned above, there are three places where Derrida refers to the notions a-mortal (twice) and a-human (once), making use of the privative. In these late texts, Derrida, in contradistinction to the emphasis placed by Heidegger on the mortality of Dasein, puts into question not only the mortality but also the humanity of what we will no longer dare call “man” or “the subject.” In a section of Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) entitled ‘Tangente III” Derrida mentions that he has relinked “pre-originary mourning” to the motif of ex-appropriation “in order to mark that in this mourning before death, interiorization and even introjection, which one often takes for granted in normal mourning, cannot and must not be achieved.” Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy J. Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris, Galilée, 2000), p. 218, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, p.192. This would be an “im-possible mourning” and moreover, he adds, “a-human [in-humain], more than human, pre-human, other than human ‘in’ the human of humanualism [humainisme]” (Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 218/192). In The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I from the following year (2001-2002) Derrida again makes a reference to the “a-human” which indicates, and refers to, the alliance of god and animal. He wonders whether the denied but common implication of the discourses of Lacan and Levinas about the other [l’autre] and the third party “do not situate at least one instance of the animal, of the animal-other, of the other as animal, of the other-living-mortal, of the nonfellow in any case, the nonbrother [the divine or the animal, here inseparable], in short of the a-human [in-humain] in which god and animal form an alliance according to all the theozoomorphic possibilities properly constitutive of myths, religions, idolatries and even sacrificial practices of monotheisms that claim to break with idolatry?” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume I, p. 176-7/126). A little further on Derrida questions whether the a-human [in-humain] falls between (or includes both) the animal and the human: “[The phallus] is it proper to man or else, already cut from man, is it a ‘something,’ a thing, an a-human, inhuman what, which is, moreover, scarcely more masculine than feminine? Neither animal nor human?” (*Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume I, p. 297/222). How are we to read these allusions to the a-mortal and the a-human? 5. Coda One cannot say that Derrida’s writings are restricted to addressing, or speaking about, humans or mortals. If, unlike the practice and exercise of preparing for death, etc. prized by Western metaphysics, Derrida’s concern is also with the coming of what comes, happens, or arrives, then what we need to turn to, a reading of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II would suggest, is to think—if we are able to think it—dying alive or living death. Derrida describes dying a living death (mourir vivant) as “a real almightiness [la toute puissance effective]” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 201/137). This “power of almightiness [puissance de toute puissance]” that “commands and organizes what we call life death [la vie la mort] […] belongs to a beyond of the opposition between being or not being” (Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II, p. 192-3/130). The use of the term “toute-puissance,” in Derrida’s later work, whether associated with sovereignty or as a description of the work of Hélène Cixous, would be worthy of further study. See especially, Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 117. If as the Life Death seminar already demonstrates, philosophically living has meant being and being has meant living—to live is to be—then to die or being dead is unthinkable. The task of thinking cannot be devoted to the dead one (le mort) or to being dead. They are both unthinkable because each is what Derrida calls a phantasm. This is why Derrida proclaims, in light of a reading of Heidegger and Crusoe, that we die a living death. What is compelling and of great import is that what Derrida’s thinking calls for—the arrivant, who or what comes—cannot be solely determined as human, nor can it be necessarily defined by its relationship to its mortality and to death. In some of Derrida’s writings we can find references to an unidentifable alterity, to a gift, to what comes (indications of which we could already infer from his earlier writings on sexual difference and Geschlecht). When Derrida writes of the totally aleatory “what comes or arrives” (ce qui arrive), he does not necessarily have an identifiable subject, a consciousness, or a mortal in mind. To illustrate this, I have selected four texts, which I would like to place an emphasis on, where Derrida writes about preparing for the arrival of an indeterminate, indistinguishable, uncategorized, and unclassified X, which is not necessarily a being. In these texts Derrida provides descriptions of an alterity that is to come. He does not speak of a subject or of subjectivity, whether it is identifiable or not, but of ce qui vient, who or what comes. These texts do not have as their concern that which is mortal (fr. mortalis, 1080, entered the English language in 1567) or mortality (fr. mortalitas 12th C, entered the English language 14th C). Here are the chosen passages: In a discussion entitled “Fidelity to More than One” that took place in Rabat, Morocco in April 1996 with a group of intellectuals of the Arab World, collected under the title Idiomes, nationalités, déconstructions Derrida speaks of the arrivant or what comes whose features cannot be anticipated or determined. The arrivant must be so surprising to me that I can’t even determine it as human. …. Now, the other who may be a god or a dog, and I can’t even anticipate that the arrivant has a human face. In this social dis-solution [dé-liaison] I am bound to whomever and the hospitality unconditionally opened to the arrivant ought to expose me to any arrivant whatsoever, but also to what we so quickly call an animal or a god. Good or evil, life or death. Jacques Derrida, “Fidelité à plus d’un” in Idiomes, nationalités, deconstructions, p.27; translated as “Fidelity to More than one” by Adam Rosenthal and Rodrigo Therezo in Thinking What Comes, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), forthcoming. In another discussion at the Philosophy Department at the University of Warwick published in 1997 in their journal Pli, only available in English, and Derrida remarks that “the alterity that I am referring to under the mediality of maybe is perhaps radically inhuman, radically non-subjective, a non-subject,” which elsewhere in the discussion he refers to as “a singularity.” Jacques Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” Pli vol. 6 Summer 1997, p.4. Discussion with Alexander Garcia Düttmann. Since no published French transcript exists it is impossible to know what word Derrida may have used. In an interview that at first appeared as a journal article before appearing as the first chapter of Echographies—de la Télévision in 1997, “Artéfactualités,” Derrida speaks of an address to alterity that cannot be determined in advance: For there to be an event and history, it is necessary that a ‘come’ is opened and is addressed to someone, to someone other who I cannot and must not in advance determine [il faut qu’un “viens” s’ouvre et s’addresse à quelqu’un, à quelqu’un d’autre que je ne peux ni ne dois d’avance déterminer ], neither as subject, self, consciousness, nor as animal, god or person, man or animal, living or non-living (one must have the ability to call/summon [appeler] a specter. Jacques Derrida, Echographies—de la télévision (Entretiens filmés avec Bernard Stiegler) (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 20; translated by Jennifer Bajorek as Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 12. And finally, in a conversation with Elisabeth Roudinescou under the title De quoi demain … in 2001, Derrida discusses The coming of the one who or which comes but does not yet have a recognizable figure or face [figure reconnaissable]—and who therefore is not necessarily another man, my likeness, my brother, my neighbor [la venue de (ce) qui vient mais n’a pas encore de figure reconnaissable—et qui donc n’est pas nécessairement un autre homme, mon semblable, mon frère, mon prochain] … it can also be a ‘life’ or even a ‘specter’ in animal or divine form, without being ‘the animal’ or ‘God,’ and not only a man or woman, nor a figure sexually definable according to the binary assurances of homo- or heterosexuality. Jacques Derrida et Elisabeth Roudinesco, De Quoi demain. Dialogue [With] (Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), 90-1; translated by Jeff Fort as For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 52. What Derrida’s thinking comprehends is not simply the philosophical sub-ject but also takes in an other -jet or chute. What Derrida labeled “the jetty [la jetée]” of deconstruction, to distinguish it from a methods or strands within what was labeled in America as “theory” and to mark it out from competing fields in the intellectual “marketplace,” particularly in the United States, involves a questioning of finitude, (im)mortality, life, death, alterity, and the event of what comes. Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms and Postisms, Parasitisms and other small Seisms” in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 223-252. Originally written in French but presented in English for the first time in April 1987, it was translated by Anne Tomiche where it first appeared in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, edited with an Introduction by David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). This jetty, which brings together a thinking of la chute, l’envoi, and la restance, the fall, the sending, and the remaining of the remainder, defies questions in the form of “What is?” or “What does it mean?” (Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, p. 252/94). Bibliography G. Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, translated by J.E. King, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1966. J. Derrida, Apprendre à vivre enfin,, Entretien avec Jean Birnbaum, Paris, Galilée, 2005, p.24, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault Melville House, 2007, p. 24. J. Derrida, “De la grammatologie II” Critique 224, 1966, p. 36. J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit, 1967. trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Jacques Derrida et Elisabeth Roudinesco, De Quoi demain. Dialogue, Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001, 90-1; For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue, trans. by Jeff Fort, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004, 52. J. Derrida, “Fidelité à plus d’un” Idiomes, nationalités, deconstructions, p.27; “Fidelity to More than one” by trans. Adam Rosenthal and Rodrigo Therezo, Thinking What Comes, eds. Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. J. Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” Pli vol. 6 Summer 1997, pp, 1-17. Discussion with Alexander Garcia Düttmann. J. Derrida, Echographies—de la télévision (Entretiens filmés avec Bernard Stiegler), Paris, Galilée, 1996, p. 20; Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2002. J. Derrida, Scènes des differences: Où la philosophie et la poétique indissociables, font événement d’écriture’ Littérature 142, 2 (June 2006), p.16-29; trans. by Adam Rosenthal as “Scenes of Differences” An interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber in Thinking What Comes, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. J. Derrida Spectres de Marx: l’etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993, p.15. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York, Routledge, 1993. J. Derrida, Séminaire La bête et le souverain. Volume II (2002-2003), Paris, Galilée, 2010, p. 186 The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 2, Eds, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p.124 ; J. Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris, Galilée, 2000. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003. J. Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce, Paris, Galilée, 1987. J. Derrida, Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, dir. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, Paris, Galilée, 2009, 223-252. “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms and Postisms, Parasitisms and Other Small Seisms” trans. Anne Tomiche, The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990. J. Derrida, La vie la mort, Paris, Seuil , 2019, Life Death, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2020. M. Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung 1936-68, GA 4, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991; Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Holler (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Pfullingen: Gunther Neske Verlag, 1961, v.1, p. 350, Nietzsche v.2, trans. David Farrell Krell, New York, Harper & Row, 1979-87. M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30) M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA2, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Pfullingen, Günther Neske, 1959, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Herz, New York, Harper & Row, 1971. M. Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, Gunther Neske Verlag, 1954, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row, 1971. W. Marx, Gibt es auf Erden ein Mass?: Grundbestimmungen einer nichtmetaphysischen Ethik, Hamburg, F. Meiner Verlag, 1983, Is There a Measure On Earth? Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics, trans. Thomas Nenon and Reginald Lilly, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. M. Montaigne, Essais, texte établi et annoté par Albert Thibaudet, Paris, «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade» Gallimard, 1950, The Essays: A Selection, trans. M.A. Screech, London: Penguin, 1993. Seneca, De Brevitate, Moral Essays, volume II, trans. John W. Basore, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001, 7.3 20