Derrida somnambule Article

Published Version

Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY)

Open Access

Thomson, S. (2021) Derrida somnambule. Angelaki: Journal ofTheoretical Humanities, 26 (5). pp. 101-106. ISSN 1469-2899 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084 Availableat https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/89810/

It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing .

To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084

Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group

All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement .

www.reading.ac.uk/centaur

CentAUR

Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20

AngelakiJournal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

DERRIDA SOMNAMBULE

Stephen Thomson

To cite this article: Stephen Thomson (2021) DERRIDA SOMNAMBULE, Angelaki, 26:5, 101-116,DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by InformaUK Limited, trading as Taylor & FrancisGroup

Published online: 01 Sep 2021.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 297

View related articles

View Crossmark data

[…] pour que le reveil ne soit pas une rusedu reve. C’est-à-dire encore de la raison.1

“J e reve. Je somnambule,” says JacquesDerrida as he accepts the Adorno Prize

in Frankfurt on 22 September 2001 (Fichus22). It is a striking phrase, this “I am sleepwalk-ing,” but also one that strikes an idiomaticallyDerridean note. The verb “somnambuler” (aneologism: it does not appear in Littre), conju-gated in the first-person present tense, entails a“je somnambule” or “sleepwalking I”; an “I”that can, with undecidable lucidity, proclaim

its own sleep, in its sleep. It seems a classic Der-ridean strategy for troubling the sovereignty ofthe philosophical “je suis” and the metaphysicsof presence; such that, as Mahite Breton writes,“categories of responsibility, intention, will andmastery are destabilised” (207). Indeed, itmight be tempting to see the very concept ofsleepwalking as incipiently deconstructive; asa topos in which deconstruction is already atwork. Thus, Simon Morgan Wortham, havingshown how sleepwalking marks an excess inthe dialectic of sleep and waking in Kant andHegel, sums up: “in the very attempt to

101

ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 26 number 5 october 2021

Miss you by Zuzana Ridzonova.

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/21/050101-16 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited,trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited.https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084

stephen thomson

DERRIDASOMNAMBULE

rationalize sleep […] a certain supplement isunleashed – call it somnambulance, or someother name” (Wortham 38). Somnambulancewould thus be a name for a deconstructivequasi-concept, drawing on a spontaneous pro-pensity of the informal philospheme “somnam-bulism” to do the work of deconstruction. Itmay seem, thus, that sleepwalking was alwayson the side of deconstruction, and that Derri-da’s “je somnambule” was something decon-struction had always been ready to utter.

The curious thing, however, is that Derrida’sown deployment of the lexicon of sleepwalkingdoes not bear this out; or at least it does not doso until rather late in the day. Until around1999, sleepwalking in Derrida was always inthe third person: emphatically the sleepwalkingof the other, it was an accusation, and even alittle polemical. It named the premature cer-tainty and complacency of method; its assur-ance that nothing unforeseen by theprogramme is worth seeing. Sleepwalking was,as such, a paradoxical form of vigilance, butnothing like the deconstructive vigilance that,as Peggy Kamuf has argued, tends an eartowards the other, on the lookout for whateverinterrupts the standard-issue vigilance that con-sists of a “deciphering too certain of meaning”(12). Far from it, sleepwalking was this compla-cency in method, this systematic failure tolisten to discrepancy. As such, it was other,but not that as-yet undetermined other towhich deconstruction must listen carefully fortraces of errancy. It was (and this is the polem-ical twist) positioned as the other of deconstruc-tion, to which it could point, and from which itcould mark its distinction with unusual clarity.

Curiously, then, Wortham’s and Breton’sreading of “somnambulism” is in many waysmore obviously consonant with deconstructionthan Derrida’s own. Neither critic notes theoddity of this situation, not least becauseneither traces the idea of sleepwalking to anyDerridean source, or acknowledges that anysuch source might exist. But then, why shouldthey? After all, sleepwalking is not such animportant figure in Derrida’s writing, and itseems evidently a mere embellishment of thelanguage of dream. Breton, indeed, only

discusses the “je somnambule” briefly, inpassing, as a variant on the “je reve” thatguides her enquiry. And it is quite possible,and coherent, as the example of Jean-PhilippeDeranty shows, to comment lucidly and percep-tively on dream and dreaming in Fichuswithout mentioning sleepwalking at all. Why,then, dwell on a tiny rhetorical blip in thisimportant topic?

A first reason would be that it appearsDerrida himself came to do so. From Lacontre-allee (1999), there is a subtle, but deci-sive, change of direction, or involution, thatcontinues through late texts such as Geneses,genealogies, genres et le genie (2003),Fichus (2001/2002), and the seminars on thebeast and the sovereign (December 2001–March 2003). There, sleepwalking remainsother, but it is an other that intimatelyregards deconstruction; is in some mannerthe responsibility of its I; and may even beassumed in the first person. Although unre-marked by any explicit gesture of auto-cri-tique, there is a sort of correction implicit inthis turn. And as such it may serve as a remin-der of something we all theoretically know:that we ought not to view the œuvre, and thework of deconstruction least of all, as themagisterial unfolding of an essence, eventhough we invoke some such essence wheneverwe verify the later Derrida against the earlier(Naas 20); or whenever we judge a textworthy or unworthy of deconstruction. Decon-struction ought never to be quite equal toitself. This is, after all, the hope or chance ofDerrida’s wager with Geoff Bennington intheir collaborative Jacques Derrida (1991):that J.D. might wriggle free from reductionto the generative matrix of Djef’s “Derrida-base” by saying something discrepant. Thedrama, and indeed the comedy, of this lies inthe apprehension that deconstruction, pre-cisely insofar as it opposes totalisation, mustitself struggle to avoid totalising. And it is inthe force field of this (comic) anxiety – overdeconstruction’s possible subsidence into aset of predictable platitudes about the event,errancy, and so forth – that sleepwalkingmakes its turn in La contre-allee, from

derrida somnambule

102

incipient gesture of mastery (over method) toproblem for deconstruction.

A couple of other topics that criss-cross thislate writing, and whose links with sleepwalkingI will trace, also relate to problems of totalisingand mastery. Firstly there is the question of theanimal, from “L’animal que donc je suis”(1997) to the seminars on the beast and thesovereign where Derrida is concerned, asnever before, to put in question the magisterialgestures of his own seminar, even, andespecially, in the act of questioning mastery.Then there is the scene of prize-giving thattakes centre stage in Fichus, where Derridamust say yes to recognition as a master of thecritique of mastery, in the name of another.Here the “je somnambule”modulates Derrida’seffort to evade, without ingratitude, counter-signing the countersignature of his masterythat the prize risks being, so as to consign hiswork to the chance, and the grace, of theother and futurity. It is around these topoi,and the intensification of the struggle withmastery that they constitute – one might say,the masterful effort to avoid mastering orbeing mastered – that the “new” sleepwalking,the one that announces itself in the first person,crystallises. One might see in this the fruit of anact of reflexivity, in the limited sense thatreflexion on a rhetoric has led to a reformthereof. Beyond this, however, it is crucial tonote that what is at stake is not a self onwhich one meditates, but rather resignation ofthe self to an other that must be owned if it isnot to act in one’s place, and the nature of the“I” that can write this. The “je somnambule”takes the risk of owning and placing itself inthe most exposed position, on the waytowards a “you” that is – as we shall see, inthe formula “tu est tu” – “silenced.”

third-person somnambulism: the

security of a rhetoric

But before this, as I have said, sleepwalking inDerrida was always, until quite late in the day,the sleepwalking of the other, in the thirdperson. More than that, it was usually an

accusation – curt, summary, even a littlepolemical – levelled at method or programme.Thus, when Derrida tells us that Littre’s defi-nition of “suppleer” respects “comme un som-nambule” the strange logic of the verb it isbecause the lexicographer’s very fidelity totheir material and methods has preventedthem from marking the strangeness of theoutcome (“Freud et la scene” 314). Somethingsimilar applies to the “legerete somnambuli-que” of calling Molly Bloom’s monologue amonologue (Derrida, Ulysse gramophone109). Common-sense reason gives the criticwinged feet, but only insofar as they followthe path of least resistance, straight past a ques-tion, to the patent, reasonable, yet always pre-mature conclusion. The editors of a selectionof Nietzsche’s uncollected fragments whichincludes the enigmatic scribble, “I have forgot-ten my umbrella,” fare even worse. Their expla-natory note is “a monument of hermeneuticsomnambulism of which every word coverswith the most insouciant tranquillity an ant-heap of critical questions” (Derrida, Eperons104). Sleepwalking is thus an insensibility tothe questions that teem under the question athand.

Implicit in this usage is something like theold theory according to which the sleepwalkercan only see objects insofar as they correspondto the objects in their dream (see, e.g., Maine deBiran). To the extent that a method or pro-gramme has determined its objects and pathin advance, it has a propensity to plough onregardless, with total confidence in its ownsteps, but oblivious to problems or questionsthat are beyond the scope of its plan, yetwhich may for all that be encountered or engen-dered in the going. This somnambulism is not,thus, simply, axiomatically the contrary of vig-ilance. The two may even go hand in hand, aswith the “sleepwalking, vigilant and automaticinterpreters” of Aristotle conjured in the“Presentation” of Derrida’s Politiques del’amitie (434; i.e., the back sleeve). Theremay, thus, be an automatic vigilance or vigilantautomatism that thrives in the similarly para-doxical mode of busy sleep. Importantly, thelexicographers, critics, editors, and interpreters

thomson

103

accused of sleepwalking are not therebyaccused of laxity or carelessness. On the con-trary, their very diligence has led them blithelyand efficiently past anything the itinerary hadnot foreseen. The charge of sleepwalking con-cerns not a simple lapse of attention, but a par-ticular form, or tempo, of vigilance; one whoseinvestment, and assurance in its advance knowl-edge of the route, is such as to forestall anypossibility of indecision; without which, asDerrida has also suggested, decision is strictlyimpossible (La bete II 79).

A corollary of this is that we should be wary ofany punctual moment that declares itself themoment of vigilance par excellence, as in theold and widespread European topos of crisis asthe “moment de reveil” (Derrida, L’Autre cap34–35). To awaken, in this sense, would be torealise at one fell swoop, and today, the chanceor the challenge to decide (κρίνειν) that consti-tutes the κρίση. But if such a decisive momentconcentrates wakefulness, it also monopolisesit, thereby consigning all ensuing moments tosleep, and unwittingly assuming the impossibleresponsibility of watching over them inadvance. In this lies the problem of the “respon-sibility as irresponsibility, of morality con-founded with juridical calculation, of politicsorganised into techno-science” (71). Allmethods and programmes are, by their nature,prone to this somnolence that consists of pro-ceeding as if wakefulness had already beentaken care of. Even the best-intentioned initia-tive in the world can do good only on the con-dition that we do not fall asleep on the job (55;“à la condition que notre attention ne s’yendorme pas”). A further corollary of this isthat there is something somnolent about thevery moment of decision itself, insofar as itacts as if it could abolish the need, and the possi-bility, of any future decision. Thus, it would be“court et sommeillant,” curt and dozy, torespond to pressure to pronounce Nietzscheeither a proto-Nazi, or entirely guiltless of anysuch thing (Derrida, Otobiographies 93). Thevery posture of jumping to attention and decid-ing, fully and finally, is already implicated in itsfuture sleep. The whole tendency of this form ortempo of vigilance is thus towards sleep.

This characterisation of a whole tradition of(urgent, decisionistic) vigilance as a busysleep is of no small importance to deconstruc-tion. It is not just something deconstructionsets out to avoid; in a sense, deconstruction isits avoidance. This is why deconstructionmust be “slow and differentiated” so as toallow us to take stock of “what happens”along the way, to multiply “attention to differ-ences,” and perhaps “refine the analysis in arestructured field” (Derrida, La bete I 113–14, 36). In other words, the new things wenotice may require us to redraw the map atany moment, and we must be ready to noticethis too. This topic has a couple of curious cor-ollaries. Firstly, the departure from the criticaltradition of vigilance demands a hyperbolicinflation of vigilance: deconstructive attentive-ness must aim to be impossibly prolonged anddifferentiated. But, equally, it must also watchover itself so as not to fall into a mere form ofwakefulness; which is to say, method. For therhetoric of slow and differentiated attention tothe discrepant irruption of the other cannot,insofar as it is a rhetoric, be assured that ittoo will not fall into a “dogmatic slumber”(155). Deconstruction, if it is to be a thing,must avoid the slide into a guaranteed, pre-scripted set of moves that the practised decon-structionist can invoke in their sleep, and atwhich other deconstructionists can be countedon to nod reassuringly. And, just because thevigilance to which it aspires is strictly impos-sible, the performance of deconstruction mustalways be haunted by the possibility of itsown sleep.

In other words, deconstruction can never beassured that it is always more vigilant than thevigilance of method; or that method is alwayssomething that sits, at a clear and distinct dis-tance, over there. The problem with the accusa-tion of sleepwalking, however, is that this isprecisely what it does say. Whoever points thefinger to say “they are asleep” says – immedi-ately, implicitly – “I am awake.” And thereinlies the danger. For anyone can say this, atany time, and even in their sleep. From thiswould spring the sort of polemical biddingwar that, as Derrida suggests in D’un ton

derrida somnambule

104

apocalyptique adopte naguere en philosophie(1983), characterises the cultural prognostica-tions of postmodernism, and into which decon-struction must not slide (53). The accusation ofsleepwalking, however, opens onto preciselythis abyss, and it is a potential catastrophe fora vigilance that would be alert to its ownsleep. Deconstruction, if it is to be deconstruc-tion, must somehow negotiate this abyss, andavoid coming to rest in a moment of specularself-satisfaction. The curt othering of polemicis, in this regard, a danger for deconstruction;a moment of repose in which it is too clearwhere things stand.

It would be wrong to suggest that the deploy-ment of sleepwalking in the earlier Derridasimply succumbs to the complacency ofpolemic, or that there is never anything in theaccusation of sleepwalking to unsettle its ownassurance. There are also many places thatsuggest a certain vigilance in sleep, thoughthese do not usually resolve into sleepwalking.In “Force et signification,” Derrida suggeststhat the “structuralist phenomenon,” as itwanes, “will deserve” to fall into the hands ofthe historian of ideas, on account of

everything in this phenomenon that is notthe question’s transparence for itself, every-thing that, in the efficacity of a method, is amatter of the infallibility ascribed to sleep-walkers and which was once attributed tothe instinct of which it was said that it wasall the more sure for being blind. It is notthe least dignity of that human sciencecalled history to concern by privilege, inhuman actions and institutions, theimmense region of somnambulism, thealmost-everything that is not pure waking,the sterile and silent acidity of the questionitself, the almost-nothing. (11)

The polemical moment of the passage is clearenough. The structuralist phenomenon “willdeserve” the attentions of history in the sensethat it serves it right for sleepwalking. As forthe “dignity” of history – what it is worthy of,what it deserves – it not only “concerns” butdepends upon somnambulism as the shadow-agent of the typical acts that bequeath the

epoch as a congealed structure. This “privilege”over sleepwalking is thus also the preciserespect in which history itself is structuralist,and a sleepwalker. So it seems history andstructuralism will deserve each other.

But the polemical thrust of such a verdict is atrap, insofar as it acts as if it could have donewith “structuralism.” For this “having done”is, as Derrida reminds us, the structuralistgesture par excellence, and it is not easilyavoided. Indeed, as Derrida also suggests inanother essay of the same time, it would beeasy to show that “a certain structuralism hasalways been philosophy’s most spontaneousgesture” (“‘Genese et structure’” 237). Or, asDerrida goes on to say in “Force et significa-tion,” maybe consciousness just is structuralistconsciousness, insofar as it is consciousness ofthings done, completed (12). So we cannotsimply have done with structuralism; nor evenwith the finite, determinate, historical “struc-turalist phenomenon.” For in it, Derrida says,we were finally obliged to think structure “inits concept.” And, as we live on its “fecundity,”it is too early to bat away our dream: “il est troptôt pour fouetter notre reve.” Rather, we mustthink, from within the dream and in a mannerappropriate to dreams, what it could mean:“Il faut songer en lui à ce qu’il pourrait signi-fier” (11). The verb “songer a” serves Derridawell here, spanning a range of senses frommusing or daydreaming to more purposefulthinking, and leaving open the question ofwhat sort of thinking we can do in the dream(en lui). Here, then, Derrida already proposesthe hesitation between philosophical rationalityand the qualified embrace of dream-thinkingfor which, as we will see, he would praiseAdorno thirty years later.

And yet, crucially, Derrida does not (yet) callthis dream-thinking sleepwalking. Rather, thatterm is still reserved for the merely unthinkingdevotion to method. At the end of “Force et sig-nification,” Derrida hands on the baton fromphilosophy to Nietzsche’s gai saber (47). Buthe does not embrace sleepwalking as Nietzscheembraces it in The Gay Science, when heawakens into the “consciousness that I amdreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest

thomson

105

I perish – as a somnambulist must go on dream-ing lest he fall,” repositioning philosophy asmerely a means to “the continuation of thedream” (116). Nor would he ever, any morethan he would replace the “abandonment thatis today the bad drunkenness of the mostnuanced structuralist formalism” with aban-donment to the ecstatic lucidity of a putativelygood drunkenness (46).2 Derrida’s “vigilance”would always, until the end, and even when itis implicated in the dream, require us to soberup, to be “degrisee” (Fichus 51). Likewise itwould never be a question of replacing one som-nambulism – benighted, automatic, mechanical– with another sort that would be inspired,clairvoyant. Indeed, Derrida’s sleepwalkingwould never cease to be other, even when con-jugated in the first person. Only it would radi-cally lose its polemical potential for othering.

Before going on to consider the later turn, itis perhaps worth noting that the polemicalpotential of the accusation of sleepwalkingdoes not simply wane over time, and is if any-thing most apparent in its final appearance:that is, in the “legerete somnambulique” thatDerrida attributes to Carl Schmitt in Politiquesde l’amitie (1994). As Schmitt parlays post-warinternment as a Nazi functionary into a spe-cious scene of pseudo-Cartesian meditation,3

and finds salvation in the “Wisdom of theCell” (1948),4 there is absolutely no sense thatDerrida finds this anything other thanrevolting.

Somnambulistic strength and lightness ofthis progression. Prudence and security[sûrete] of a rhetoric. The prisoner feels hisway in the darkness, from one corner ofthe cell to the other. He risks a step, thenanother and stops to meditate. (Derrida,Politiques de l’amitie 187)

Schmitt, says Derrida, makes as if to face up tohis actions, but he never does, and never will.His pantomime of groping in the darkness“risks” nothing because it is choreographedand underwritten by the “security of a rhetoric”as comically and pathetically limited as thescope of the cell. Sleepwalking here is, thisone last time, emphatically rejected, expelled

even, as a symptom of bad faith. This is notto say that it will, when it next appears, havechanged its face entirely. But the gesture ofexpulsion will have been, so to speak, expelled,for constituting in itself, so it would appear,“the security of a rhetoric.”

“moi sauf moi”: travelling with…

somnambulism

We can trace this turn to La contre-allee(1999).5 In the first of his postcards to Cath-erine Malabou (dated Istanbul, 10 May 1997),worrying over the “Travelling with…” rubricof the series in which the book will appear,Derrida asks: am I sure I have ever even “trav-elled with” me? With me “alive or awake,” or“anything else but sleepwalking”?

To wake up it is not enough to open one’seyes. Sleepwalking, moreover, draws methis morning as a seductive figure, she[elle], to designate my experience of thetrance or transition called “travel.” I seepassing, very fast, the silhouette of the sleep-walker [masculine], at the behest of a singledream: to awaken at last, and that [cela] willbe, perhaps, perhaps not, hence the quakingof my journeys, a nightmare. How can oneexplain otherwise, otherwise than by thatapprehension of “perhaps,” the anguish ofa double desire, contradictory and simul-taneous: to go back “home” as fast as pos-sible, but to put off indefinitely the return?I transport, on my travels, this sole obses-sion: I can’t wait for it to end, alas! The ques-tion, then, and this is what I wanted to get to,will never have been that of “travel” but of“travelling-with.” (Malabou and Derrida 13)

Sleepwalking here starts in the third person, asa spectacle, but one that is becoming the phan-tasm of an other that is mine, that haunts mydesire to travel; a dream that may onlyawaken into a nightmare. Later in this firstmissive, in the midst of a reminiscence ofmeeting a sephardic community in Turkey,Derrida casts himself as the “immobilevoyeur” who watches himself travelling, as ifto figure out the enigma of himself in

derrida somnambule

106

the movement [or trip, or displacement:deplacement] always “incognito” of a secretthat I transport without knowing it. Evenwhen I speak in front of crowds. I feel thatI transport (like an infant in the belly, Ihear his heart) but I don’t understand it atall, this secret. Abroad perhaps someonewill tell me: revelation, bedazzlement, con-version, I fall backwards, I am born, I diein the moment of meeting, at the end of anunknown alleyway, the messiah who willcome out of me where he has hidden for solong. (Malabou and Derrida 21)

Travelling, then, as if in the hope that others,strangers, will tell me who I am, what I am for,becomes an ambivalent hunt, in which I amhunter and hunted; as if there were someone Iwanted to help to escape from me (se sauverde moi) by saving it in me (en le sauvant enmoi). Indeed, the “most economic formula”for travelling-with would be “Moi sauf moi”:me safe me, or me except for me (23).

The ontological high drama of this is,however, almost systematically – and comi-cally, in the manner of the postcard – undercutby the “perhaps” of the earlier passage, and thecomedy of contingency. Hence the confession,embarrassing for a quasi-messianic thinker,that, before every journey, he is terrified some-thing will happen:

I give the impression [J’ai l’air] of being forthe event, and of elaborating, as they say, athought of the event, of arrivance, of thesingular exposure to what is coming. Youknow the refrain. (Malabou and Derrida 23)

But the joke is not just that the ardent propo-nent of the event is terrified something willhappen. Worse even than the revenge of contin-gency on the concept is the prescripted plati-tude of “as they say” and “you know therefrain.” The discourse of the event is alreadyhumiliated in itself when it can become justanother tune on the conceptual karaoke. Andthis points to another ambivalence, anothercounter-alley, that threads its way through thetext, linking Derrida’s memories of hisfather’s travails as a travelling salesman undera paternalistic, patriarchal merchant house –

tasked or stained with the name “Tachet pereet fils” – with the pathos of being an interna-tionally renowned philosopher, hawking hiswares round the conference circuit, mortifiedby the adulation as much as the opprobrium.He has, in short, a “mauvaise image” of thewhole business of his travels, including

the speeches through which one must con-vince or seduce, this whole “academicculture market” with which I have alwaysgot along so poorly [fait si mauvaismenage]. (Malabou and Derrida 39–40)

The scare quotes that distance Derrida from thephrase “academic culture market” also impli-cate him in it. For while they say, as Derridagoes on to say, I am giving in a bit to a code,I don’t entirely believe in what I’m saying (“jecede un peu à un code, je ne crois pas tout àfait à ce que je dis”), what is this giving-in-to-a-code if not a surrender to the market? Thepoint becomes even clearer when he says,rather sarcastically, “la ‘deconstruction,’ enun mot, ce serait une certaine experience duvoyage, n’est-ce pas” (40). It would be hard torender exactly the conditional “serait,” and a“n’est-ce pas” so deadpan it is not even a ques-tion (or at least does not rate a question mark).But the force of the phrase is: you all know theone about “deconstruction” being a certainexperience of travel, don’t you. It anticipates,in other words, a chummy connivance in thevery rhetoric that would announce the experi-ence of the event as exposure to the absolutelyother, the absolutely unanticipated. We would,of course, be foolish to think that deconstruc-tion, any more than anything that can be repro-duced as a rhetoric, is proof againstcommodification. But here, at any rate,Derrida tragicomically stages “deconstruction”as a brand that follows him around, and thatgoes out before him; that haunts him with a“mauvaise image,” and prevents everythingthat deconstruction would be.

This, then, would be deconstruction’s ownsleepwalking. This is not to say that it is someother sleepwalking: it is still the becoming-com-placent of a programme or method, butnow this problem emphatically regards

thomson

107

deconstruction. It would certainly not be rightto say that Derrida had never before engagedwith deconstruction’s entanglement withmethod.6 But the accusation of sleepwalkinghad simplified this entanglement, functioningrhetorically in such a way as to other methodand stabilise the relationship. Now, as all theanti-sleepwalking gestures are themselvesexpressly opened up to the suspicion of sleep-walking, sleepwalking figures deconstruction’sown other. Derrida casts himself as the hostof a sleepwalker, as the immobile observer ofan other not quite in his control who paradesthe world in his place. Now, rather thanmaking the gesture of expulsion, he inoculateshimself with the sleepwalker.

It is also in this ambivalent guise that thesleepwalker returns in the final postcard of Lacontre-allee (Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Ramallah,le 11 janvier 1998), regarding the question“am I at Jerusalem?” first posed in a paperdelivered in Jerusalem in 1986.7 It is througha “sleepwalking spectre” that both “millenniaof amnesiac love for each stone, each deadperson of Jerusalem,” and Derrida’s politicaldifferences with the state of Israel, cancohabit his “body” and rend the “I” of thequestion (Malabou and Derrida 259). Sleep-walking is thus the ambivalent mode of “geopo-litical engagements” that might as well be“alibis, ways of being elsewhere,” confoundingthe ethic of errance “sans certitude et sansassurance” with “la ponctualite du faux bond”(259–61), which is to say unerringly letting(someone) down, or standing them up. It isthus in the name of a sort of clandestination/destinerrance of political action that Derridatakes on the mantle of the sleepwalker here.

So why, we might ask, does this turn come in1999? Derrida dates his anxieties over travel tohis brush with prison in Prague in late 1981(Malabou and Derrida 40). And he also tellsus in a footnote that Blanchot and Genet hadlong been asking him why he had to makesuch an exhibition of himself (25). Could it bethat the experience of being published byhigh-end luggage-maker Louis Vuittonbrought the matter to a head? Perhaps. Butwe might add that La contre-allee stands on a

sort of threshold with Derrida’s turn to theanimal, and to the questions of dominationthat would dominate his final work. Indeed,the second postcard of La contre-allee isdated Cerisy-la-Salle 15 July 1997, the dayDerrida presented “L’animal que donc jesuis,” the paper in which he remarks thatasserting a total continuity between man andbeast “serait plus que somnambulique, […]simplement trop bete” (L’animal 52). This is,to some degree, a final fling for the “old” som-nambulism, insofar as it warns against a sort ofprecipitation towards a thesis (total continuity)that Derrida will not finally underwrite. Andyet the “bete” (the “beast” that is by nomeans merely “stupid”) with which it is con-joined initiates a stealthy countermove, refus-ing to secure the border of the human, and tounderwrite the entire dignity or sovereignty ofits “I,” or the “auto-biographic or auto-deicticrelation to self as ‘I’” (Derrida, L’animal 57).Somnambulism here is already starting itscountermove, in the direction of La contre-allee, and onto the ground on which beastand sovereign are intricately entangled.

It is impossible to do justice to the intricacyof the topology of the beast seminars. But onehas to start somewhere. At a certain point inthe sixth session of the second volume, afteran excursus on the faithful infidelity ofCelan’s “Die Welt ist fort / Ich muss dichtragen” – an “I” that promises to carry “you”in the absence of world – Derrida pulls up.

All this awakens us to a question that has notstopped somnambulating [qui n’a pas cessede somnambuler] in our proceeding today.The question: what is a phantasm?(Derrida, La bete II 244)

The surprise here may be that the question ofthe phantasm has ever been asleep. The word“fantasme” has been active throughout thisseminar, and indeed preceding seminars. Norhas it gone quite without definition. It hasbeen determined as a zone in which the impos-sible may be named and apprehended. Thisseminar has begun by invoking the “courage”it takes to think “ça” (215) which, as well asevoking the “Es” or “Id” of Freudian

derrida somnambule

108

metapsychology, could stand for any “that,”any object of thought. The “object” thatDerrida proceeds to explore, the possibility of“the living-dead,” is profoundly phantasmatic,dealing with something that cannot be loca-lised, that cannot “avoir lieu,” or is in a placewithout place; like the phantasm (according toFreud), that belongs at once “qualitatively” tothe system perception-consciousness, and “fac-tually” to the unconscious (218–20). As theseminar goes on to explore the impossibilityof localising the dead person through thechoice between burial and cremation, theentire field of the question comes to be investedby the phantasm, derealising every “object”even unto the “I” that would pose the question,and pose as the subject of the question.

The seminar has promised it will end withthe question of the image and the imagination(Derrida, La bete II 219). But when it doesend with the “bilden,” or capacity of image-making, that, from Kant to Heidegger, definesthe Dasein, and the human exception (244–46), the path that has led us here may seemrather oblique and enigmatic. It supposes along tradition, stretching back to Aristotle,for which the imagination or phantasia was cor-poreal, and possibly the part of intelligence weshare with the beasts,8 as well as the instancegoverning sleepwalking (see, e.g., Maine deBiran, already cited). And it runs counter toimportant twentieth-century efforts to hierarch-ise (Husserl), or even to have done with (Sartre)the imagination. Refusing to assert the sover-eignty of (human) reason over (beastly) phanta-sia, Derrida not only tracks the phantasm, butflags the necessarily phantasmatic aspect ofthe hunt. Hence his inquiry sleepwalks.

This is not, however, the only reason for thesomnambulance of the enquiry. When, at theoutset of the sixth seminar, Derrida determinesthe phantasm as a name for the “impossible,”he does so expressly “for methodologicalreasons, that is to delimit the field that we aregoing to explore” (La bete II 217). He per-forms, thus, the very gesture of methodologicalforeclosure of the question that he points to inHeidegger’s seminars (151–52). Such a gestureis also precisely what had always been accused

of sleepwalking. Only now it is countersignedby Derrida’s text as something it cannot quiteavoid, or at least chooses not to avoid: the pre-mature settling of the question “what is?” eventhough, and precisely because, it is a questionthat – spectacularly in the case of the phantasm– cannot be answered in a way that wouldsatisfy “the logic of common sense that organ-ises our lives” (220). Our relation to the ques-tion of the phantasm must remainphantasmatic because any claim to resolve thedouble bind would entail a definition, which isto say a phantasm of method. But equally, dis-avowing method by placing somnambulismover there would only be another way offalling into the trap, reaffirming a securerelation of subject to object at the verymoment in which it is said to tremble.

The seminars on the beast and the sovereignare repeatedly, and from the start, concernednot to swear off but to dramatise their ownmastery; the moment of mastery that is implicitin even their most radical and destabilisingstrategies. It is not just that the long, loopingarcs of exegesis are inevitably masterfulinsofar as their ellipses and oblique strategiesare compelling. The alternative to methodologi-cal definition – setting terms loose on uswithout saying, or allowing us to ask, whatthey mean, and leaving them to act withoutquestion – entails its own methodologicalmastery. Derrida stages this in the very firstseminar by invoking the opening of La Fon-taine’s “Le loup et l’agneau,” which makes apromise now that it will show presently thatmight is always right: “La raison du plus fortest toujours la meilleure: / Nous l’allonsmontrer toute à l’heure” (La bete I 20 andpassim). The cunning of the verse, as Derridalater explains, is to perform the right of thestronger just by ostentatiously deferring itsexplanation. But, just because he does explainthis later, Derrida’s exposition of La Fontainehas also performed this deferral, advancing inthe meantime à pas de loup, and so participat-ing, however playfully, in its peremptory vio-lence. Derrida also explains this, citing his“accredited position as a professor/teacherauthorised to speak ex cathedra for hours,” or

thomson

109

weeks, or even years (La bete I 117). Such aconfession is as sheepish as it is wolfish; andvice versa. That is, all the cunning or all thesimplicity it could muster could never undothe mastery implicit in such a gesture; andeven the loose, looping, recursive structure ofthe seminars, which try so hard to deny anysense of a placidly unfolding logic, are also, intheir way, irreducibly allied to method andmastery. Derrida may oppose, at a givenmoment, a “slow and differentiated” decon-struction to the “ex cathedra” pronouncementsthat lay down the law of a seminar (La bete I113–14). But the one does not go without theother.

It is in this way also that, in the seventhsession of the second volume of the beast semi-nars, Derrida’s effort to swear off “l’assurancerequise de la certitude indubitable” associatedwith method and the Cogito appeals to thesomnambulatory.

As always, always, when I speak or when Iwrite, or doing the one and the other,when I teach, as always, always, with eachstep, with each word I sense or I fore-sense, in the future anterior, the ungraspablyspectral figure of an event that could afterthe fact, lending itself to reinterpretation,re-stage, a stage still invisible and unforesee-able for anyone at all, re-stage, thus, fromtop to bottom, everything that will havebeen – dictated, whispered to me, I meanmore or less consciously, or telepathically,or somnambulatorily, intimated frominside me or enjoined from very faroutside. (Derrida, La bete I 248)

More than a turning away from method, this isan agonising extension of the terror and uncer-tainty of its negative moment, its epoche, sothat every step is like the first step that hasnot yet reached, and will never reach, the pla-cidity and platitude of “je pense.”9 And thisis why any attempt at “je pense” disintegratesinto the convolutions of having the feelingthat I don’t yet feel, concluding, “Comme sij’etais prevenu de ce que je ne vois pas venir.”That is, roughly (sacrificing the echo of“venir” in “prevenir”): “As if I were fore-warned of that which I don’t see coming.” For

all the indeterminacy (“as if”) of all these feel-ings of feelings, the most courageous sub-mission to errancy does not go without thehope of a certain surefootedness, or thepromise of a path, that is not entirely orsurely distinguishable from the “infallibility”(or assurance or Sicherheit) conventionallyattributed, as Derrida says in “Force et signifi-cation,” to the sleepwalker.

prizes, mastery, sovereign violence

Before turning back to Fichus, there is oneother topic we need to broach; that of theaward of prizes. Its links with mastery andsovereignty may not be immediately apparent,but they come to the fore in an unusuallypolemical moment of the beast seminars,where Derrida evinces a pronounced distastefor Agamben’s sovereign rage to awardhimself the prize for being the first to awardthe prize.

Before this prizegiving for top of the class,prizes for excellence and accessits, ceremony[where] the priest always starts and finishes,in a princely or sovereign fashion, by writinghimself into the top of the page […](Derrida, La bete I 138–39)

One may wonder how Derrida arrived at suchuncharacteristic exasperation. One could postu-late a sort of subterranean tussle, between Forcede loi (1994), Foi et savoir (1996), and the firstHomo sacer (1995), over the reading of “barelife” and the violent institution of sovereignty,although, if there must be a question of pri-ority, it would be hard to determine with anycertainty the order of the exchange. An Agam-benian might point to the reference, in Lacomunità che viene (1990), to our culture’s“hypocritical dogma of the sacredness of barelife” (68). But one might equally retort thatthe paper “Force de loi” was first pronouncedin 1989, and “Prenom de Benjamin” in April1990; and “Foi et savoir,” with its reference tothe “biozoologic (sacrificable),” in 1994(Derrida, Foi et savoir 78). If one is to ask, onthe other hand, where this exchange takes anexpressly polemical turn, one might plausibly

derrida somnambule

110

look to Agamben’s swipe, in the fourth chapterof Homo sacer, at deconstruction as “an infinitenegotiation” with the gatekeeper of Kafka’s“Before the Law” that risks leaving it (decon-struction) in the role of gatekeeper (Homosacer 63). It is far from clear that Agambensees this very intervention as itself an act ofgatekeeping. But why, in any case, fall intothe abyss of ascribing priority, whether inpraise or in blame? Agamben’s penchant forascribing priorities is, once pointed out, hardto unsee. And it is enough to make the criticof power want to take no part whatsoever inany scene of prize-giving. In any case, even ifAgamben does fall into self-congratulation ina particularly crass way, the condition of possi-bility for this fall is a mess of potential narcis-sism in which it is hard to see a safe position.

What role sleepwalking might play in nego-tiating this abyss is perhaps even less apparent.In Geneses, genealogies, genres et le genie(2003), it is a question of the “genius oflanguage,” though not as we usually think ofit (as a treasury of words and forms); but,rather, a “quite other genius” that serves thefirst by opening its eyes to “what turned up init, I mean the French language, as in sleep orsleepwalking in the infinite dream of its uncon-scious, finding and meeting itself there, withoutever having found itself there” (31–32). Here,in Derrida’s tribute to the dream archive ofHelene Cixous, the problem of awardingprizes is more acute than ever. How shouldone acknowledge the thanks owed to anotherwithout falling into the gift economy of theego; without, that is, the award of a prizeimmediately coming back to the self? For onedoes sometimes feel thanks without debt,guilt, or resentment, as Derrida says he feels“every time that I find that she has foundbefore me what I believed I was the first tohave found” (77). But such “grace” is like thedream that may be more awake than waking,yet can only be written on awakening and byhaving another speak in its place, whereby “Ilest tu” (51). That is, “he/it is silenced,” butalso “he/it is you.” Either way, the “I” is cir-cumvented. For such consciousness as isinvolved, call it “the literary consciousness,”

is radically not an affair of the “I” (54).Indeed, the genius that is “tu” can be receivedonly on condition that one does not know onereceives it; and it is “more inappropriablethan anything of it that one can represent inthe consciousness” (88).

What is “tu” is thus like that “quite othergenius” of language that finds itself sleepwalk-ing in the dreaming storehouse of language.As such, sleepwalking is an agent of the “geni-ality” that is, as Derrida says towards the end,“neither a subject, nor an imaginary subject,nor a subject of the law or of the symbolic,[or] a possible subject, but what happens [cequi arrive]” (Geneses 91). It is also the con-dition of this geniality that it “never appearsand is never said in the present,” as expressedin the phrase “Tu est tu.” Our greatest thanksis thus owed to a gift of sleepwalking thatcannot be appropriated by the “I,” and that isbest honoured in silence. Which is to say, con-signed “to the future,” and “to others” (100).

Before Derrida got to this “tu” – with its dis-placement of the “I,” its equivocal presence,and its quasi-silence – he routed anothertribute, this time to Adorno, through anotherequivocal pronoun: a “je somnambule.” Thephrase is doubtless a “conventional banality, apoliteness suitable to addressing the audienceon prize day,” to quote Derrida’s quotation ofPaul Celan’s acceptance speech for the 1960Buchner Prize (La bete I 304). Pinch me, Imust be dreaming, says the modest winner,with winning modesty. But, like Celan’sphrase “in your presence” [in Ihrer Gegen-wart], it is also linked to some of the mostpressing concerns of Derrida’s speech; mostobviously, the question of how philosophyshould respond to sleep and dreams. Can one,he asks, speak of the dream without interrupt-ing or “betraying” sleep? What Derridaadmires in Adorno is a double response thathesitates between the curt “no” of philosophy,and a “yes, perhaps, sometimes” that takesthe part of literature and the arts (Fichus 12–14). This is Adorno’s “plus bel heritage,” tohave arraigned (fait comparaître) philosophybefore these, its “others” (16), and so to havebroached the “possibility of the impossible,”

thomson

111

which can only be “dreamt,” and which dreamsof a thought that would be “sans souvraineteindivisible” (19–21). Since a respect fordreams, against the presumptive wakefulnessof the philosophical “I” and its claims to totalis-ing self-presence and sovereignty, is at the heartof Derrida’s thanks to Adorno, maybe it is onlyright that a “je somnambule” should turn up,on the next page, to acknowledge the debt.

Or rather to continue, rather sheepishly, toprepare an acknowledgement that “I” havenot yet started. The sleepwalker’s first appear-ance, eleven pages earlier, already articulateda derealising modesty; an embarrassmentwhose excessive presence produces spectrality.

In this very moment, addressing myself toyou, upright, eyes open, getting ready tothank you from the bottom of my heart,with the unheimlich or spectral gestures ofa sleepwalker, or even of a highwaymancoming to lay hands on a prize that was notmeant for him, everything would thushappen as if I were in the middle of dream-ing. (Derrida, Fichus 11)

This dreaming I is, indeed, seemingly almostincapable of giving thanks. It is only “gettingready” to do so, and will continue to do sothroughout the speech. Later we learn thatthis getting-ready has been going on fordecades; decades in which voices from withinand from without asked: is it not finally timeto acknowledge, clearly and publicly, yourdebt to Adorno (43)? And even then, when itseems the moment has finally come, andDerrida thanks his hosts for the opportunityto give his thanks, he is still not fully ready.

I am happy today, thanks to you [grace àvous], to be able and to be obliged to say“yes” to my debt towards Adorno, and onmore than one head, even if I am not yetcapable of responding to it, and of takingresponsibility for it [d’y repondre et d’enrepondre]. (44).

Beyond this bare “yes,” full-throated thankshere and now, such as would allow him to“decently measure my gratitude,” remains aremote, past conditional: it is what “il

m’aurait fallu” so as to avoid “un doubleechec”; a double failure of narcissistic indul-gence on the one hand, and over-valuation oroverinterpretation of the event on the other(44–45). What Derrida offers in the meantimeis the prospectus, at once grandiose andsummary, for “a book of which I dream tointerpret the history, the possibility and thegrace [grace] of this prize.” The scope of theseven chapter outlines that follow seems vast(45–57). But since the writing of the book isframed in the conditional, and identified as adream, this very scale only contributes to thesense that it will never be written. Except,that is, for the bits that had already beenwritten. For the seventh and final “chapter” –

on man’s mastery (Herrschaft) over animals,and its implication in the “most powerful andidealist tradition of philosophy” – largely re-prises material presented in the 1997 paper“L’animal que donc je suis” that would lateralso be included in the book of the samename (Derrida, L’animal 139–43). It is atopic that had, at the time of the Frankfurtaddress, a tremendous and immediate futurein the beast seminars. But there, in the semi-nars, there is not a word on Adorno. So itseems Derrida may already have said all hehad to say on this topic, despite the fact thathe deems it the “most decisive for readings ofAdorno to come.” Or perhaps for that veryreason. For, as he also says, these readings“are already being written, I am sure of it”(Derrida, Fichus 54–56). Such then is“grace,” consigned to futurity and to others.

For all its modesty, however, this grace mayalso risk appearing graceless or ungrateful.When Derrida listens to his voices and says“yes,” it is in spite of the “tormented” land-scape of kinship and influence (Fichus 44).And this may remind us of the torment(Qual) of the source (Quelle) of which he hadwritten thirty years earlier in “Qual Quelle:les sources de Valery,” and make us wonder ifAdorno is not one of Derrida’s “aversions”;an alien sovereignty from which he must steerclear so as to avoid being engulfed. After all,a prize for work “in the spirit of the FrankfurtSchool” may seem to effect a sort of retroactive

derrida somnambule

112

matriculation into that school (8). And if, asDerrida suggests in Geneses, the geniality thatis “tu” remains “Without child, name, and heri-tage, without school” (91), this is surely a ques-tion that concerns ascendence as much asdescendence. Might acceptance of a prize inthe name of the master seem a sort of adoption?And could the “je somnambule” that virtuallyabsents itself from this scene be, in part, a strat-egy for defending his own geniality from thistakeover by a programme?

This ambivalence might explain Derrida’smarked (and potentially graceless) preferencefor speaking of Walter Benjamin, and perhapseven for him, as if taking his part againstAdorno. The speech, after all, takes its titleand a text from a dream Benjamin recounts ina letter to Gretel Adorno from a detentioncamp in France in 1939, in which he says tohimself, in French, “Il s’agissait de changeren fichu une poesie” (Derrida, Fichus 10–11);that is, it was a matter of changing a poetry ora poem into a “head-scarf.” Moreover, thisword “fichu,” taken colloquially and as anadjective, veils Benjamin’s knowledge, a yearbefore his death, helpless and in the mannerof dreams – “le sachant sans le savoir,”knowing without knowing it – that he was“done for” (Fichus 36, 40–41). And this senseof Benjamin’s helpless exposure to his own vul-nerability marks a slender but decisive differ-ence between him and Adorno thatpunctuates Derrida’s speech. Thus, while wecannot be sure that Adorno ever got over(soit… revenu) his exile, Benjamin was theone who simply never came back (revint) (21).Absolutely done for, and no comebacks. Simi-larly, Adorno may well have been, as Habermassays, “without defence” – like a child, easy totalk down, a stranger in the institutions heinhabited – but he was still “less so” than Ben-jamin (30). Benjamin wins, as it were, the prizefor defencelessness: an absolute defenceless-ness, but equally an impossible prize, insofaras the “winner” could never come back toreceive it.

This radical helplessness is not simply Derri-da’s invention. In his essay “CharakteristikWalter Benjamins,” Adorno suggests that the

“anti-subjectivism” that made Benjamin a“supreme instrument of knowledge” alsoentailed an unexampled openness to the playof forces, terribly close to a sort of naivety orvulnerability. Derrida does not cite this essay,but one might see in it a belated instance ofwhat he calls Adorno’s “quasi-systematic”desire “to shield” (soustraire… à) everything“without defence” against violence, even theviolence of “traditional interpretation”(Fichus 29). One might also see in it a certainpaternalism at which Derrida hints. For thisdesire to remove from or take out of (soustraire… à) harm’s way also involves, insofar as itoperates as if already at a remove, a sort ofpaternal fantasy, albeit one that is strangelygrounded in what Adorno calls the Abgrundor “abyss” of his own childhood; specifically,in the tremendous sadness and impotence hefeels when he surprises himself one evening inuttering a solecism drawn from the dialect ofhis childhood (Derrida, Fichus 28). The sole-cism, Derrida suggests, appears as such in thecontext of Adorno’s advocacy of German – aproper German, one that would be rooted inthe earliest childhood – as the elective languageof philosophy. His self-mortification is thusultimately symptomatic of the same “Jewish-German psyche” (Fichus 26) that, in Force deloi (1994), Derrida had linked with Benjamin,and the notion that Zur Kritik Der Gewalt(1921), his strange critique of violence, washaunted in advance by the final solution(Force de loi 67, 72–73). What distinguishesAdorno’s impulse to defend from Benjamin’shelplessly principled self-exposure to theforces that would destroy him – what keeps itat a remove – is thus a certain paternal violenceagainst the child of his own childhood, recuper-ating a wound quasi-systematically imposed onit by assuming the role of chastiser. This“quasi-systematic” defence and the minor vio-lence of rebuke are thus intimately entangled.

In Fichus, this fatal involvement and depend-ency of defence and violence is played outthrough a phantasmatic family in which Benja-min would be, although the elder in years, theson. Why, Derrida asks, does Benjaminaddress his dream letter to Gretel and not to

thomson

113

“Teddie”? And why was it also to Gretel that hewrote, four years earlier, in response to Teddie’srather “authoritarian and paternal criticisms”on, as it happens, the topic of dreams? Derridaostensively leaves these questions hanging; or,as he says, asleep [en sommeil] (Fichus 37–38).Doubtless, then, he is talking in his sleepwhen, ten pages later, in parenthesis, he imagi-nes a “confidential” letter he would write toGretel, on the subject of relations betweenTeddie and Detlef (Benjamin’s pet name inthis family), asking why there is no prize in Ben-jamin’s honour, and sharing with her his“hypotheses on this subject” (46–47). Whateverthese hypotheses may be, Derrida leaves them inthe parenthesis of sleep. The tenor of his dreamis nevertheless apparent: in the mere gesture ofwriting this letter, he writes himself into thisphantasmatic family, and takes the part of Ben-jamin. That is to say, (of course, evidently) hewill speak on behalf of Benjamin; but also (phan-tasmatically) he will assume the role of, or speakfrom the place of the benjamin, or youngest son.He can only, of course, take this place phantas-matically, but he must do so if the defence ofthe son is not to be a scene of adoption or kid-napping; a contest between fathers over theright to dominate.

The place awarded to Benjamin in Fichus –as a silent witness to an absolute defenceless-ness that cannot speak for itself – is itself atonce impossible and necessary. There mustbe this grace that moves outwith the narcissis-tic economy of the ego. Yet to name it isalready to award a prize, and so to betray itby drawing it into the orbit of that veryeconomy. One manner of awarding this prizewould be that of Hannah Arendt’s famousprofile, in which Benjamin was like “a sleep-walker […] invariably guided […] to thevery centre of a misfortune” (Arendt 13).Arendt invokes here an unhappy version ofthe somnambule Sicherheit that, in hernative German, traditionally keeps the sleep-walker safe. Unhappy, that is, for Benjamin.For his misfortune is our great goodfortune. As Arendt’s sleepwalker, he is help-lessly ethical; that is, without defenceagainst even his own ethos. It is a condition

no one could, by definition, wish upon them-selves, and that nobody would want, but thateveryone concerned with justice wants a pieceof. In its most placidly commonsensicalinstances, the discourse of justice entails thisimpossibility. One way round this is thepathos of Arendt’s sleepwalker: maintaining,at a safe distance, as a spectacle to beadmired and pitied, an exemplary figure thatis absolutely debarred from regarding itself,and that cannot decide its path (consciously,in the form of a decision) precisely becauseit is (systematically, in the totality of itsbeing) determined towards a certain step.Derrida’s justice always wagered on rhetorics– of errancy, path-breaking, attentiveness tothe irruption of the quite other, the to-come, and the monstrous – that implied ahigh level of risk, such that they could not,for the life of them, stand at a distance spec-tating. This nevertheless seemed to placethem at a distance from another phantasm,that of the somnambule Sicherheit of thealready-beaten path of method. But then, ata certain point, it seems there is a risk forthe very rhetoric of risk that it may, preciselyby avoiding this risk of sleepwalking, subsideinto platitude. The risk of this sleepwalkingwould be not just that it is not assured byeither the absolute assurance and justice ofan idiomatic step, or the absolute assuranceand justice of a preordained path, but thatit is not assured of falling into either.Indeed, deconstruction had always been thehope, without assurance, and only withoutassurance, of a step that would be adjustedto a certain path. Setting out, as disarmedas possible, with every fibre attuned to whatis to come, hoping that noneof this is merely “the securityof a rhetoric,” but painfullyconscious that there can be noassurance that it is not, “jesomnambule.”

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported bythe author.

derrida somnambule

114

notes

1 “De l’économie restreinte” 369–70.

2 Derrida nods here to the notion, usually attrib-

uted to Saint Ambrose (of Milan), of a bona ebrietas

that exalts the soul with joy, but without the

attendant confusion and tottering.

3 Derrida’s relationship with the epoché of Des-

cartes’s withdrawal into his poêle is, to say the

least, complicated. See, e.g., his comments on

the “courage” it takes to think “ça” (La bête II

215), to which I will turn presently. But also note

how, in what follows, Freud’s “abyssal daring”

and courageous advance into contradiction conju-

gate with the feint of “splendid isolation” (La bête II

220, 224, 230); and compare with Derrida’s

account of his own period of retreat from 1963

to 1968 in “Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse.”

4 Schmitt’s essay “Weisheit der Zelle” was first

published in 1948 in Ex Captivitate Salus.

5 It is important to note in passing, because there

is not space to go into it in detail, that this book,

like the collaboration with Geoff Bennington

already cited, takes the form of a double wager,

according to which Catherine Malabou tracks

the “écart” or “catastrophe” between “arriver et

dériver” since “Derrida est passé” (11), and

Derrida must attempt to wriggle free in the

mode of the postcard.

6 I explore this in my article, “Jeux d’écarts: Der-

rida’s Descartes.”

7 This refers back to Malabou’s citation (122)

from “Comment ne pas parler,” in Psyché: Inven-

tions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987).

8 Montaigne’s efforts, in his “Apologie de

Raimond Sebond,” to demote human reason and

elevate animal intelligence, stress the imagination.

For Gassendi too, the beasts manifestly have

some sort of intelligence, albeit one that works

through the Phantasia – “sufficiat videri satis man-

ifestum, esse speciem quandam rationis in Brutis,

ac ipsorum Phantasiam suo quodam modo ratioci-

nari” (413) – but he draws the line at the faculty of

attention (419).

9 With regard to the production of heterodox

Cogitos, I explore the importance of Paul Valéry

as one of Derrida’s “re-pères” in my article

“Jeux d’écarts: Derrida’s Descartes,” cited above.

Another re-père in this regard would be Blanchot.

In addition to numerous references to Blanchot in

the beast seminars – including the notion, cited

from L’écriture du désastre, of the unconscious as

“la veille dans sa vigilance non éveillée” (Derrida,

La bête II 258) – see the motto “Je rêve, donc

cela s’écrit” in Blanchot’s extraordinarily sugges-

tive 1962 essay “Rêver, écrire,” in L’Amitié 165.

bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. “Charakteristik Walter

Benjamins.” Prismen: Kulturkritik und gesellschaft.

München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1963. 234–

49. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W. “A Portrait of Walter

Benjamin.” Prisms. Trans. Samuel Weber and

Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1981.

229–41. Print.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e

la nuda vita. Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Print.

Agamben, Giorgio. La comunità che viene. Turin:

Bollati Boringhieri, 2001. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction.”Walter Benjamin.

Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico,

1999. 7–58. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. “Rêver, écrire.” L’Amitié. Paris:

Gallimard, 1971. 162–71. Print.

Breton, Mahité. “Rêve qui peut: la pensé du rêve

dans Fichus.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical

Journal 40.2 (June 2007): 199–212. Print.

Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “Adorno’s Other Son:

Derrida and the Future of Critical Theory.”

Social Semiotics 16.3 (2006): 421–33. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “De l’économie restreinte à

l’économie générale – Un hegelianisme sans

réserve.” L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil,

1979. 369–70. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté

naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1983. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche.

Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Fichus. Paris: Galilée, 2002. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Foi et savoir suivi de Le Siècle et le

pardon (entretien avec Michel Wieviorka). Paris:

Seuil, 2000. Print.

thomson

115

Derrida, Jacques. Force de loi: Le “Fondement mys-

tique de l’autorité.” Paris: Galilée, 1994. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Force et signification.” L’écriture

et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 9–49. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Freud et la scène de l’écriture.”

L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 293–

340. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “‘Genèse et structure’ et la

phénoménologie.” L’écriture et la différence. 229–

51. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Genèses, généalogies, genres et le

génie. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris:

Galilée, 2006. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. L’Autre cap. Paris: Minuit, 1991.

Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: l’enseignement de

Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris:

Galilée, 1984. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de

L’oreille de Heidegger. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Ponctuations: le temps de la

thèse.” Du droit à la philosophie. Paris: Galilée,

1990. 439–59. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Qual Quelle: les sources de

Valéry.” Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit,

1972. 325–63. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: La bête et le souverain

Volume I (2001–2002). Paris: Galilée, 2008. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: La bête et le souverain

Volume II (2002–2003). Paris: Galilée, 2010. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots

pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Print.

Derrida Jacques, and Geoff Bennington. Jacques

Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Print.

Gassendi, Pierre. Syntagma Philosophicum. Vol. 2.

Lyon, 1658. Print.

Husserl, Edmund. Phantasy, Image Consciousness,

and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. John B. Brough.

Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Print.

Kamuf, Peggy. To Follow: The Wake of Jacques

Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print.

Maine de Biran. “Nouvelles considérations sur le

sommeil, les songes et le somnambulisme.”

Œuvres philosophiques. Vol. 2. Paris: Ladrange,

1841. 275–77. Print.

Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. Jacques

Derrida: La contre-allée. Paris: Quinzaine

Littéraire/Louis Vuitton, 1999. Print.

Montaigne, Michel de. “Apologie de Raimond

Sebond.” Essais. Vol. 1. Ed. Maurice Rat. Paris:

Garnier, 1962. 479–680. Print.

Naas, Michael. “‘Comme si, comme ça’: Phantasms

of Self, State, and a Sovereign God.” Mosaic 40.2

(June 2007): 1–26. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans.

Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’imagination. 7th ed. Paris: PUF,

2012. Print.

Thomson, Stephen. “Jeux d’écarts: Derrida’s

Descartes.” Oxford Literary Review 39.2 (2017):

189–209. Print.

Wortham, Simon Morgan. The Poetics of Sleep:

From Aristotle to Nancy. London: Bloomsbury,

2013. Print.

Stephen ThomsonDepartment of English LiteratureUniversity of ReadingReading RG6 6AAUKE-mail: s.thomson@reading.ac.uk

derrida somnambule