Derrida Page #2

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that supervenes afterwards...

from the outside, one fine day.

It is always already at work

in the work.

Since the disruptive force

of deconstruction...

is always already contained within

the very architecture of the work...

all one would finally have to do

to be able to deconstruct...

given this always already,

is to do memory work.

Yet since I want neither

to accept or to reject...

a conclusion formulated

in precisely these terms...

let us leave this question

suspended for the moment.

[ Chattering ]

[ In French ]

[ Beeping ]

[ Beeping ]

[ Meows ]

[ Speaking French ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ] Who is it that is

addressing you?

Since it is not an author,

a narrator or a deus ex machina...

it is an ''I'"that is both

part of the spectacle...

and part of the audience.

An ''I'"that,

a bit like ''you, '"

undergoes its own incessant

violent reinscription...

within the arithmetical machinery.

An ''I'"that functioning

as a pure passageway...

for operations

of substitution...

is not some singular

and irreplaceable existence...

some subject or life...

but only rather moves

between life and death...

between reality and fiction.

An ''I'"that is

a mere function or phantom.

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ] There is not

narcissism and non-narcissim.

There are narcissisms that are

more or less comprehensive...

generous, open, extended.

What is called non-narcissism

is in general...

but the economy of a much more

welcoming and hospitable narcissism.

One that is much more open to

the experience of the Other as Other.

I believe that without a movement

of narcissistic reappropriation...

the relation to the Other

would be absolutely destroyed.

It would be destroyed

in advance.

The relation to the Other,

even if it remains asymmetrical...

open, without possible

reappropriation...

must trace a movement

of reappropriation...

in the image of one's self

for love to be possible.

Love is narcissistic.

[ Footsteps Approaching ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ]

[ Derrida ]

- These are facts.

- [ Woman, In French ]

Raw facts.

[ Woman ] Now, well, okay.

[ In French ]

What I'd like to ask you about now

is this question of the anecdote.

At the biography conference,

you quoted Heidegger as saying...

that one could sum up

the life of Aristotle as:

Aristotle was born,

he thought and he died.

And then when I asked you about

your relationship with Marguerite...

you said I can give you the facts,

the dates and that's it.

Can you offer

some commentary on that?

[ In French ]

[ Woman ]

[ Derrida ]

[ Marguerite ]

[ Derrida ]

[ Woman ] Was it strange to you to see

something you had no memory of?.

[ No Audible Dialogue ]

[ Woman ]

Just whatever you want to say.

[ Woman, In French ]

[ Woman, In French ]

[ Woman, In French ]

[ Woman ]

How do you call this?

-[ Woman ] Dispute?

- No problem.

You know, the usual family--

Always something.

Absolute peace.

[ Woman ]

That was the first

and only last time.

[ Laughs ]

I saw that once and for all.

[ Mumbles ]

You remember this.

[ Chattering In French ]

[ Derrida, In French ]

[ Woman ]

[ Woman ]

And I am writing here at the moment...

when my mother

no longer recognizes me.

And at which, though still capable

of speaking or articulating a little...

she no longer calls me.

And for her, and therefore

for the rest ofher life...

I no longer have a name.

That's what's happening.

And when she nonetheless

seems to reply to me...

she's presumably replying

to someone...

who happens to be me

without her knowing it...

ifknowing

means anything here.

Like the other day in Nice...

when I asked her

if she was in pain.

''Yes. '"

Then where?

It was February 5, 1 989.

She had in a rhetoric

that could never have been hers...

the audacity of this stroke

about which she will...

alas, never know anything...

no doubt knew nothing...

and which piercing the night

replies to my question.:

''I have a pain in my mother, '"

as though

she were speaking for me...

both in my direction

and in my place.

I stop for a moment

over a pang of remorse...

in any case, over the admission

I owe the reader...

in truth that I owe

my mother herself...

for the reader will have understood

that I am writing for my mother...

perhaps even

for a dead woman.

For if I were here

writing for my mother...

it would be for a living mother

who does not recognize her son.

And I am paraphrasing here for whomever

no longer recognizes me...

unless it be so that one

should no longer recognize me...

another way of saying,

another version...

so that people think

they finally recognize me.

[ Man On Radio ]

[ Timer Bell Dings ]

[ Derrida Speaking French ]

[ Man ] We are now approaching

the actual maximum security prison.

[ Chattering ]

[ Man, Indistinct ]

- How much? Eighteen years.

- Eighteen years.

- That was his cell.

- That was his cell?

Yes.

[ Man ]

You will notice that in this cell...

there is no water facility

or toilets.

Toilets were the buckets.

Their own bucket with a lid.

[ Woman ]

As soon as there is the One...

there is murder,

wounding, traumatism.

The One guards against

the Other.

It protects itself

from the Other.

But in the movement

of this jealous violence...

it comprises in itself

its self-otherness or self-difference.

The difference from within one's Self,

which makes it One.

The One as the Other.

At one and the same time...

but in the same time

that is out ofjoint.

The One forgets to remember

itself to its Self.

It keeps and erases the archive

of this injustice that it is...

of this violence

that it does.

The One makes

itself violence.

It violates

and does violence to itself.

It becomes what it is, the very

violence that it does to itself.

The determination

of the Self as One is violence.

[ Derrida ]

More than once, we will be faced...

with the effects

of a preliminary question...

which is the question.:

Who or what?

Does one forgive someone

for a wrong committed...

or does one forgive

someone something?

Someone who, in whatever way,

can never totally be confused...

with the wrongdoing...

and the moment of the past wrongdoing

nor with the past injury.

So, the question:

Who or what?

Do we forgive someone, or do

we forgive someone something?

[ Man ]

Okay, a final final question.

[ Man ]

There is a very anxious question.

Um, so you're a white Western male,

speaking to a white audience.

We are part of the previous

oppressive community in South Africa.

And you are speaking to us

about unconditional forgiveness.

Um, you might have meant

that pure forgiveness thing...

um, with a lot of irony.

Um, and maybe that is something

that is really impossible.

You know, pure forgiveness

being really impossible.

But we sit here as

potential objects of forgiveness...

and we are, all of us,

you included, in a sense guilty.

- Now, don't you think-- Okay.

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