For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy

Translator’s Preface

Jacques Derrida loved the city of Strasbourg. Though he never lived or held a teaching position there, from the early 1970s right up to his death in 2004 Derrida traveled frequently to this city on the Franco-German border just over three hundred miles from Paris for everything from lectures, conferences, and colloquia to dissertation defenses, book signings, and artistic events. Attracted from the very beginning to this city because of its unique location and history, its multiplicity of languages and cultures, over time Derrida came to find Strasbourg an even more special place as organizations and movements that were dear to him came to be housed in or identified with the city, from the European Parliament to the International Parliament of Writers and the Parliament of Philosophers.

But it was above all friends who drew Derrida back to Strasbourg for more than three decades: friends in the municipality, friends in the artistic community, but especially friends in the university—beginning with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. It was through these friends that Strasbourg, City of Parliaments and City of Refuge par excellence, became for Derrida a city of conversation and hospitality, indeed, of friendship and philosophy.

It was thus absolutely fitting that in June 2004, just four months before his death, the Parliament of Philosophers and the Department of Philosophy at Marc Bloch University, where Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were both teaching, would invite Jacques Derrida to Strasbourg for three days of meetings and conversations around his work. From June 7 to 9, 2004, Derrida thus participated in a series of events, from a discussion with high school teachers from the Lycée Fustel de Coulanges about the teaching of philosophy to a tribute paid to him at Marc Bloch University and a public discussion with Isabelle Baladine-Howald on the topic of friendship at the Kléber Bookstore. On the evening of June 8, 2004, Derrida also gave what was to be his last lecture in France, Of the ‘Sovereign Good’—Europe in Want of Sovereignty.¹ The collection For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy grew out of these events in Strasbourg, though Derrida himself never planned such a publication.

The work begins with the long tribute Derrida paid the city of Strasbourg during his three days there in June 2004. Titled The Place Name(s)—Strasbourg (though it could easily bear the title or the dedication For Strasbourg), the essay recounts in great detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida’s affection for the city of Strasbourg, his many visits to this city, and, especially, his decades-long intellectual friendship with Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and others. Through reflections, anecdotes, and shared memories with these two philosopher friends, Derrida is able to paint a fascinating portrait of French intellectual life over a thirty-year period, with stories about the many conferences he attended in Strasbourg, his testy relationship with the French university system, his break with Tel Quel, his association with Editions Galilée, the founding of GREPH and of the International College of Philosophy, the importance of conferences at Cerisy-la-Salle, and so on.

This essay is a great testament to the importance of Strasbourg as a city of hospitality and of refuge for contemporary thought and, especially, for the kind of philosophy that was being done by Derrida, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe and that could find a home nowhere else. Originally published in the appropriately titled volume Penser a Strasbourg (Thinking of/in Strasbourg, 2004), the essay bears witness not just to Derrida’s deep attachment to this border city but to his continuing interrogation of the relationship between thought and place, philosophy and language, language and nationality, philosophy and friendship.² It thus raises a series of important philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida came to call in his seminars of the 1980s philosophical nationalities and nationalism.

But The Place Name(s)—Strasbourg is first of all a work of memory and of friendship. Punctuated by names and memories, it reads like a long good-bye to a city and its inhabitants, the last episode in Derrida’s three-decade adventure in shuttle philosophy between Paris and Strasbourg. Written at an almost breathless pace, with long sentences often interrupted by asides and parenthetical remarks, the essay betrays Derrida’s anxiety to say it all, to express fully his gratitude, to include every name and recount every experience having to do with Strasbourg. The essay bespeaks Derrida’s unique relationship to the city of Strasbourg and to the two friends or fellow musketeers who became major figures in their own right in contemporary philosophy and literary theory.³

The second text included in this collection has its origin in the same three days of homage and celebration in Strasbourg, and it brings Derrida together once again with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. During the final day of Derrida’s visit, a session was organized at Marc Bloch University around the work of four doctoral students, who presented their work and discussed it with Derrida.⁴ This session was then followed by a roundtable discussion between Derrida, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe that took as its point of departure these student presentations but that then went on to address questions related to the three thinkers’ own work, questions, for example, regarding Heidegger and his politics, community and generation, and, most poignantly, death, finitude, mourning, survival, and immortality. We thus hear Derrida, four months before his death, conversing with Strasbourg’s two most famous philosophers about the all too relevant and pressing questions of legacy, the archive, the afterlife, and immortality.

First published in the journal Rue Descartes, this wide-ranging discussion between these three philosopher friends combines sharp insights into one another’s work with personal anecdotes, friendly ribbing, and good humor. It is the kind of serious but also playful discussion that is possible only among close friends.⁵ As the editors of Rue Descartes say in their introduction to this exchange: No ‘subject’ had been determined for this conversation beforehand. The three ‘philosopher-friends’ thus came together. It would be for the last time.

This might well have been a fitting way to conclude For Strasbourg, with the final conversation between Derrida, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe on topics ranging from community to the afterlife. But because the philosophical conversations between Derrida and his two most famous Strasbourgian interlocutors will continue on in their writings long after their deaths, we have the opportunity, even the obligation, to go back to other conversations from earlier times, times when the end was not already casting its shadow over everything. It is for this reason that two additional public conversations between Derrida and Nancy have been included in this volume. The first of these, entitled simply Opening, is a transcription of the opening session, on November 4, 2003, of three days of celebration marking the twenty-year anniversary of the International College of Philosophy, of which Derrida was one of the founders.⁶ We hear Derrida discussing with Jean-Luc Nancy and others, including Hélène Cixous and Michel Deguy, the political and cultural circumstances surrounding the founding of the International College of Philosophy, the place of philosophy in the French university and in other academic institutions, the sometimes conflicted relationship between the members of the College and the university, and the importance of the College as a place of refuge for university professors and, especially, high school teachers of philosophy. The conversation sheds a great deal of light both on this counter-institution called the International College of Philosophy, which, now more than thirty years later, is still thriving, and on the importance of philosophy more generally in France from the late 1960s into the new millennium. (It is worth noting that both this chapter and the previous one were first published in Rue Descartes, the journal of the International College of Philosophy.)

The fourth and final chapter of For Strasbourg is a conversation between Derrida and Nancy that took place at a conference devoted to Nancy’s work—once again at the International College of Philosophy—on January 18 and 19, 2002.⁷ The conversation begins with the question of the relationship between responsibility and the event, the question of whether one can ever bear or assume responsibility for an event, that is, for something that happens in some sense without or before any subject, without or before anyone’s decision. This question provides the terms for then rethinking a whole host of other questions, from that of the gift and of debt to questions of the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, the meaning of revelation, sense, and guilt, the commonly assumed philosophical distinction between the human and the animal, and so on. If Derrida and Nancy ultimately agree on many issues in the course of this long exchange, they often disagree very strongly on one another’s approach. We hear Nancy, for example, expressing skepticism about Derrida’s emphasis in recent works on the human/animal distinction, and we hear Derrida professing his profound resistance or allergy to terms such as sense, world, creation, freedom, and community, which are at the center of Nancy’s thought. But, once again, what comes across here despite these differences, perhaps even because of them, is the deep friendship—the philosophical friendship—between these two thinkers.

All four of the texts collected in For Strasbourg are thus relatively late texts in the corpus of Jacques Derrida, with three of the four taking place during the final year of his life. This lends the volume a somewhat melancholic tone at times, especially in the two works that originated in Strasbourg just months before Derrida’s death. (Derrida knew that he was gravely ill, and his friends did as well, when he visited Strasbourg in June 2004.) But what comes across most clearly, in the end, is not his impending death and not some wistful nostalgia for a bygone age but the intellectual vigor and vibrancy of friends who have shared a great deal and who have chosen to continue to discuss topics of philosophical interest to the three of them right up until the end. These texts should thus be read not just for what they reveal about Derrida’s thinking near the end of his life but for what they teach us about his thought in general. Indeed, these texts present in very clear and often personal terms many important aspects of Derrida’s thought, from his early thinking of the trace and of speech acts to his work in the 1980s and 1990s on friendship, the gift, and religion, to his later thought on the archive and on legacy.

For Strasbourg is a testament to the important place of Strasbourg for contemporary thought and to Derrida’s great affection for this city and for the two thinkers most closely identified with it. It is also a testament to an extraordinary period of philosophical activity in France more generally and to the philosophical friendships that made so much of what happened possible.

For Strasbourg

CHAPTER ONE

The Place Name(s)—Strasbourg

(2004)

Der Ort sagt …

This is going to be about thinking [il y va de la pensée], to be sure, about thinking as a going concern, about whether it’s going well or poorly (just try to translate this into another language, into German, for example: la pensée comme elle va).¹ It is going to be about the thinking writing [l’écriture pensante] that traverses philosophy, literature, poetry, music, theater, the visual arts—as well as politics—and the rest.

Why begin with such a dry, cold, abstract statement? If I insist on saying that, first of all and finally, everything will have had to do, in the last analysis, for me, for us, for you, with thinking and with writing, whatever this may mean and whatever it may entail, it is in part in order to protect myself. To protect myself against myself. It is in order to try to stem the flow, in truth, to stem the tears of emotion, of gratitude, of love and of friendship, of nostalgia as well, indeed of melancholy, which would otherwise overwhelm my words here today in Strasbourg. My tone should not be one of an eschatological pathos in philosophy. This is not a last meeting with my friends from Strasbourg. That is at least my hope, and I mean it with all my heart.

If I thus begin by recalling thinking or writing, it is not because I still know, after all these years, what these words mean or, at least for us, what they