I'LL HAVE TO WANDER ALONE DERRIDA'S REACTION TO THE DEATH OF DELEUZE JACQUES DERRIDA (1967) |
Too much to say, and I don't have the heart for it today. There is too much to say about what has happened to us here, about what has also happened to me, with the death of Gilles Deleuze, with a death we no doubt feared (knowing him to be so ill), but still, with this death here (cette mort-ci), this unimaginable image, in the event, would deepen still further, if that were possible, the infinite sorrow of another event. Deleuze the thinker is, above all, the thinker of the event and always of this event here (cet evenement-ci). He remained the thinker of the event from beginning to end. I reread what he said of the event, already in 1969, in one of his most celebrated books, The Logic of Sense. He cites Joe Bousquet ("To my inclination for death," said Bousquet, "which was a failure of the will"), then continues: "From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something inthat which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that the Amor fatiis one with the struggle of free men" (One would have to quote interminably). There is too much to say, yes, about the time I was given, along with so many others of my "generation," to share with Deleuze; about the good fortune I had of thinking thanks to him, by thinking of him. Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience - so unsettling - of a proximity or a near total affinity in the "theses" - if one may say this - through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, "gesture," "strategy," "manner": of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the "theses" (but the word doesn't fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation ("yes, yes"), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this "generation." I never felt the slightest "objection" arise in me, not even a virtual one, against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition in Anti-Oedipus(I told him about it one day when we were coming back together by car from Nanterre University, after a thesis defense on Spinoza) or perhaps against the idea that philosophy consists in "creating" concepts. One day, I would like to explain how such an agreement on philosophical "content" never excludes all these differences that still today I don't know how to name or situate. (Deleuze had accepted the idea of publishing, one day, a long improvised conversation between us on this subject and then we had to wait, to wait too long.) I only know that these differences left room for nothing but friendship between us. To my knowledge, no shadow, no sign has ever indicated the contrary. Such a thing is so rare in the milieu that was ours that I wish to make note of it here at this moment. This friendship did not stem solely from the (otherwise telling) fact that we have the same enemies. We saw each other little, it is true, especially in the last years. But I can still hear the laugh of his voice,
a little hoarse, tell me so many things that
I love to remember down to the letter: "My
best wishes, all my best wishes," he
whispered to me with a friendly irony the
summer of 1955 in the courtyard of the Sorbonne
when I was in the middle of failing my agregation
exam. Or else, with the same solicitude of
the elder: "It pains me to see you spending
so much time on that institution (le College
International de Philosophie). I would rather
you wrote..." And then, I recall the
memorable ten days of the Nietzsche colloquium
at Cerisy, in 1972, and then so many, many
other moments that make me, no doubt along
with Jean-Francois Lyotard (who was also
there), feel quite alone, surviving and melancholy
today in what is called with that terrible
and somewhat false word, a "generation."
Each death is unique, of course, and therefore
unusual, but what can one say about the unusual
when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault
to Deleuze, it multiplies in this way in
the same "generation," as in a
series - and Deleuze was also the philosopher
of serial singuarity - all these uncommon
endings? |