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I'm going to have to wander all aloneDerrida, JacquesPhilosophy Today; Spring 1998; 42, 1; ProQuest Research Librarypg. 3

I'M GOING TO HAVE TO WANDER ALL ALONE

So mUl h 10 say. and I don't have the heart for it today. So 'llUc:b [I' ~ay about what has happened to us, about what has happened to me too, with the death. fGilles Deleuze; so much to say about what happens with a death that was undoubtedly feared-· \1 e I--ne\\ he was very ill-but yet so much to say abollt what happens with this death, this unimaginable image which in any event would still hollow out, ifit were possible, the sad infimty ot anothn event. More than anything else, Dele .lze the thinker is the thinker of the event and ;tlway~ of this event in particular. From beginning to end, he remained a thinker of this event. I rer :ad what he said concerning the event, already in . 969. III one of his greatest books, The Logic oj' ,"(,lIse. He quote:; los Bousquet, who says, "For my inclination toward death which was a failu: C of the willI substituted a longing for dying whil h is the apotheosis of the will." Then Deleuze adds. "From this inclination to this long­ing there is in a cl'rrain respect. no change except a change 01 the \\ ill, a sort ofa leap in place of the whole bod; which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It \vills nO'.>. not exactly what oc­curs, but s( 'methll1g in that which occurs, in ac­cordance \\ ith the laws of an obscure. humorous conformitv: the E\ent. It is in this sense that Amor tat/i, one with the struggle of free men.'" (One could go on quoting endlessly.)

I hme s( much to say, yes. like so many others of my '"gen,:ration," about the time that was allot­ted to me tll share with Deleuze, ~o much to say about the chance to think, thanks to him, by thinking about him. From the very beginning, all of his boob (hut tirst of all Vietzsche and Phi­losophy, Dl.'(erelll·e lind Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have' bCl'1l f()r me not only, of course. strong prm ocations to think but each time the flustering, reall:. tlustcring, experience of a closeness w of a nearly total affinity, concerning the "theses .. if \\ C can usc this word, across very ob\ious dis'an,:es. in wbat I would call-·-Iacking

Translated by .. conard Lw lor. L ni\ersli; of Memphis

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

Jacques Derrida

any better term-the "gesture," the "strateg)," the "manner" of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps. Therefore as regards these "the­ses"-but the word doesn't fit-notably the one concerning an irreducible difference in opposi­tion to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyously repeated affirmation ("yes, yes"), the taking into account of the simulacrum-Deleuze undoubtedly still remains, despite so many dissimilarities. the one among all those of my "generation" to whom I have always judged myself to be the closest. I ha\ e never felt the slightest "objectiun" arising in me, not even potentially, against any of his \\ orks, even if I happened to grumble a bit about one or another of the propositions found in Anti­Oedipus (I told him this one day while we were driying back together from Nanterre. after a the­sis defense on Spinoza) or perhaps about the idea that philosophy consists in "creating" concepts. One day, I would like to try to provide an account of such an agreement in regard to philosophic "content," when this same agreement never does away with all those deviations that I do not know, today. how to name or situate. (De leuze had agreed to publish at some point a long improvised talk between us on this problem and then we had to wait, we had to wait too long.) I only know that these differences never left room for anything be­tween us but friendship. There was never any shadow, any sign, as far as I know. that might in­dicate the contrary. This is rather rare in our mi­lieu, so rare that I want it to go on the record here right now. This friendship was not based only on the fact-and this is not insignifieant--that we had the same enemies. It's true, we didn't see each other very often, especially in the last years. But I still hear the laughter of his ,"oice. which was a little raspy, saying to me so many things that I like to recall exactly as they were. He whis­pered to me, "Best wishes, all my best wishes:'

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with a sweet irony in the summer of 1955 in the courtyard of the Sorbo nne when I was about to fail the examinations for the agregation. Or with a concern like that of an older brother: "It pains me to see you put so much time into this institu­tion [the International College of Philosophy], I would prefer that you write ... " And then, I recall the memorable ten days at the Nietzsche confer­ence at Cerisy in 1972, and then so many other moments, along with, of course, Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard (who was also there), which make me feel so alone, surviving and melancholy today in what we call with that terrible and a little mis­leading word, a "generation." Each death is unique. of course, and therefore unusual. But, what can one say about the unexpected when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to De­leuze, it multiplies like a series all these uncom­mon ends in the same "generation"? And De­leuze was also the philosopher of serial singularity.

Yes. we will have all loved philosophy, who can deny it? But, it is true--he said it~Deleuze was the one among all of this "generation" who "was doing" philosophy the most gaily, the most innocently. I don't think he would have liked me using the word "thinker" earlier. He would have preferred "philosopher." In this regard, he was making himself out to be "the most innocent" (the least guilty) "of doing philosophy.'" Un­doubtedly, this was the necessary condition in or­der to leave on the philosophy of this century the incomparably deep mark that will always be his. The mark of a great philosopher and of a great professor. The historian of philosophy, who con­ducted a kind of configuring election of his own genealogy (the Stoics, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume. Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.), was also an inventor of philosophy who never enclosed himsel f within some philosophic "field"~he wrote on painting, cinema and literature, Bacon, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Melville, etc.

Next, next I want to say even here [in Libera­tion] that I loved and admired the way~which was always fair~he treated images, magazines, television, the public stage and the transforma­tions that it has undergone during the last dec­ades. Economy and vigilant retreat. I felt in com-

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)Iete agreement with what he was doing and saying in this regard, for example, in an interview ~or Liberation (October 23, 1980) on the occa­sion of the publication of A Thousand Plateaus (in the vein of his 1977 Dialogues).' He said, "It is necessary to come to understand what is really going on in the field of books. We've been going through a period of reaction in all fields for sev­eral years. There's no reason for it not to have af­fected books. People are setting up a literary space, along with a legal space, and an economic and political space, that's completely reaction­ary, artificial, and crippling. I think it's a system­atic process, which Liberation should have inves­tigated." It is "far worse than censorship," he added; but "this sterile phase won't necessarily go on indefinitely."· Perhaps, perhaps. Like Ni­etzsche and like Artaud, like Blanchot, others whom we both admired, Deleuze never lost sight of this connection of necessity with the aleatory, chaos, and the untimely. When I was writing on Marx, at the very worst moment in 1992, I was re­assured a little by finding out that Deleuze in­tended to do the same thing. And I reread this evening what he said in 1990 on this subject: "I think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marx­ists, in two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must tum on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most inter­esting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself."s

I am going to continue-or begin agaifr-to read Gilles Deleuze in order to learn, and I'm go­ing to have to wander all alone in that long inter­view that we should have had together. I think my first question would have concerned Artaud, De­leuze's interpretation of the "body without or­gans," and the word "immanence," which he al­ways held onto, in order to make him or let him say something which is still for us undoubtedly secret. And I would have tried to say to him why his thought has never left me during nearly forty years. How could it from now on?

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E,'IIDl\'OTES

I. Gilles Deleuze, La Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), tions: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press.

p. 174; English translation by Mark Lester with Charles 1995), pp. 4-6.

Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Co- 3. Gilles Deleuze and Calire Pamet, Dialogues (Paris: Flam-

lumbia Lniversity Press, 1990), p. 149. marion, 1977); English translation as Dialogues by Hugh

2. Apparently, Derrida is referring to comments Deleuze Tomlinson and Barbara Habbedam (New York: Columbia

made in "Lettre a un critique severe." in Pourparlers University Press, 1987).

(faris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 12-14; English translation by 4. De leuze, Pourparlers, p. 41: Negotiations, pp. 26-27.

Martin Joughin as "Letter to a Harsh Critic." in Negotia- 5. De leuze, Pourparlers, p. 232; Negotiations. p. 171.

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

TO WANDER ALONE

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