Jacques Derrida or the Gift of Writing -- When Something Happens

Jacques Derrida or the Gift of Writing—When Something Happens David Carroll (bio) Memories Like many others here, I have no desire to speak today.1 I wish I did not have to. I have no idea what to say. That is why I am not going to say anything; instead, I plan to tell a few stories. I address my stories first and foremost to Marguerite Derrida, who I hope will recognize the memories I am going to evoke. Before beginning I also want to say that I will not be speaking alone today but for or rather with Suzanne Gearhart, who has her place, a very important place, in all the stories and memories I am about to relate. "I never knew how to tell a story." As you well know, this is a quotation. To which I will add only one comment: "Me neither." But in spite of this incapacity, I will nevertheless still try to tell a few stories and relate some of my most vivid memories of Jacques Derrida. First of all, because I do not think this is the appropriate moment to analyze his work. In any case, I know I would be incapable of doing so today and probably for quite some time in the future. So I propose not analyses but rather little stories that I do not know how to tell and that I have not even been able to link together very successfully to form a proper, coherent narrative. It is nevertheless still possible that the stories I am about to tell still constitute a testimony of sorts. I certainly hope so. But I apologize in advance for their lack of coherence. Memory works that way, especially at a moment as terrible as this one. Student stories I heard Jacques Derrida speak for the first time in Baltimore in 1966. I had just begun my first year of graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, and after two weeks of courses I witnessed the beginning of what was later called "the French invasion" of the United States. The participants in the colloquium on structuralism that was held that fall at Hopkins, later known of course as The Structuralist Controversy, included a young French philosopher named Jacques Derrida, who at that time was totally [End Page 60] unknown in the United States. He later told me that he had been a very late addition to the colloquium and had almost not been invited. In listening to his analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss, even without understanding everything he had to say, especially since my knowledge of the structuralist anthropologist was, to put it very generously, fairly limited at the time, I sensed that Derrida's paper was the event of the colloquium. Right away I knew something was happening in his presentation that wasn't happening in any of the other papers. I couldn't say exactly what—probably even today I would not be able to explain very well exactly what it was—but since that day in the fall of 1966 I have been trying to better understand. And since 1966, all sorts of different and unexpected things have happened in the conferences, seminars, and texts of Jacques Derrida. But always something. In Paris the following year, in a seminar that Jacques Derrida gave for students from Hopkins and Cornell on the "Philosophical Foundations of Literary Criticism," I began to understand a little better what I had felt but not really understood in Baltimore. The Paris seminar shook up, if not destroyed all the ideas we had about literature, most of which, I admit, were clichés. Derrida, to put it briefly and badly, presented something completely new to those who attended that seminar and who, given the state of literary studies at the time, expected something completely different—or like me, did not know what to expect. In each session he presented us with a double and doubly critical mode of reading, questioning, and analysis. His readings focused on the contradictory relations, which were as much internal as external, between philosophy and literary criticism, literary figures and philosophical concepts. I was astounded—we were all astounded—by Derrida's style

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Reading (process) · Wish · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

• Supplication as violence

  Open Access•Prashan Ranasinghe•Philosophy & Social Criticism•2025

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