Derrida

Derrida:la Vie et l'Oeuvre Bruno Clément (bio) Translated by David F. Bell My encounter with Derrida was organized around Circonfession. This text occupies a very distinctive place within his body of work. It seems to me that its problematic object more or less determined the conditions of our dialogue. Indeed, this "more or less" defines the space of a philosophical question that Jacques Derrida helped pose, I believe, in a quite original manner—at least within the domain of philosophy. In this process, Derrida's texts, as I have always read them, are doomed to be embodied (in the form of encounters, dialogues, protests, doubts). Therein undoubtedly lies the secret of a certain fervor, which became manifest spontaneously and in multiple forms after October 9, 2004. I heard in circles around me and read at the time what I myself had always observed and felt—namely, that Jacques Derrida's life was inseparable from his work, that our tears also had a philosophical meaning—those very tears that Circonfession works so hard to bring into the realm of thought. What I retain from this stunning book (hardly a book, in fact—more a series of annotations at the bottom of the page), from this commentary in the form of an autobiography (or this autobiography in the form of a commentary—the whole question is there), what I retain is the thesis—formulated with sufficient resolve to constitute henceforth a problem—that the biographical event (here circumcision) determines the nature, the scope, the acuteness of philosophical questioning and proposition. Here is how this is formulated in the notebooks that Circonfession works through: Circumcision—I have never spoken about anything else. Consider the discourse on the limit, margins, marks, steps, etc., closure, the ring (wedding or gift), sacrifice, the writing of the body, the pharmakos excluded or cut off, the cut/seam of Glas, the blow sown and re-sewn. Hence the hypothesis that it's this—namely, circumcision—about which I have been speaking or letting myself speak all along, without knowing it, by never speaking about it or by speaking about it only in passing, as an example. (70) The implications of such a hypothesis are immense. But even before attempting to enumerate or evaluate them, I want to point out that if the [End Page 35] question may appear new in philosophy, it has been the object of a closely-argued and uneasy questioning in literature for a long time. The idea that the literary work has something to do with the life of the person who writes it originated in the nineteenth century. Sainte-Beuve was its well-known and unhappy promoter, and Proust its committed adver-sary. They are perhaps not as far-removed from one another as has been suggested, or even as Proust himself intimated. The "social I," of course, is not the "true I," but neither Sainte-Beuve nor Proust would think of denying the fact that the work is the result of an essentially subjective process. This is precisely Jacques Derrida's thesis in Circonfession. It is clearly an old thesis, or at least well staked out, and no writer of the previous century failed to choose sides with respect to it, whether within his or her work or outside of it. Sartre was one of the writers most concerned about it: "What is the relation between the man and the work? I have never stated it until now, nor has anyone, to my knowledge" (preface to L'Idiot de la famille). If the hypothesis of Circonfession means anything, this is not because it is new, because clearly it is not. What happens is that Derrida imports it into philosophy. To treat the work of Kant or Hegel or Thomas Aquinas as novelistic, or pictorial, or musical is certainly not self evident. It must be remarked here that Circonfession is not an ordinary biographical text. Jacques Derrida wrote it as a form of commentary in the bottom margins of a monograph on his work by Geoffrey Bennington, and the enterprise is thus without any doubt philosophical. The life story and even the autobiographical account do not, of course, enter into

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