The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

Christopher Peterson

Discourse, Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 400-422 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/552764

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 The Magic Cave of Allegory:
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

Christopher Peterson

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) opens with a close-up shot

of a young woman’s pallid face, her long, unkempt blonde hair
accentuating a visage utterly absent any affect or movement. As her
eyelids slowly open to expose a vacant gaze, dead birds begin to
fall against a bleak sky. We are thus initially invited to interpret
the film’s title as referring to a psychological or emotional state,
what contemporary psychology calls “depression” but went by the
name “melancholia” from ancient Hippocratic medicine through
modern Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet the subsequent images that
comprise the film’s introductory eight-minute sequence form a
quasi tableau vivant that troubles any simple equation of melancho-
lia with a psychological condition. These images record the final
moments in the lives of the film’s central characters as they prepare
for a catastrophic collision with a rogue planet named Melancho-
lia. Resembling Earth in appearance save for its much larger size,
Melancholia appears three times in the opening sequence: first as
it eclipses the red star Antares, second as it passes perilously close
to Earth in what astronomers call a flyby, and third when it returns
to impact directly with Earth, a collision in which Melancholia
devours its smaller twin.
Given the name of the rogue planet, together with the film’s
wrenching depiction of the incapacitating effects of psychological

Discourse, 35.3, Fall 2013, pp. 400–422.

Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
The Magic Cave of Allegory 401

depression, viewers would be well warranted to interpret Earth’s

annihilation as the most hyperbolic of allegories. Indeed, reviews
have characterized the film as such, describing it as “an epic meta-
phor for the devastating effects of depression,” a “profound apoc-
alyptic metaphor for depression,” a “metaphor for the onset of
severe depression that is about as subtle as being hit over the head
with a two-by-four,” and so on.1 In a press conference at the 2011
Cannes Film Festival, von Trier himself primed viewers for such
assessments, observing that “to me it’s not so much a film about the
end of the world; it’s a film about a state of mind.”2 Given the ubiq-
uitous use of the verb “catastrophize” by contemporary psychother-
apists to describe a cognitive distortion common to those suffering
from anxiety and depression, the popular imagination is already
well disposed to pursue this line of interpretation. For cognitive
behavioral therapists, to catastrophize is to magnify the perceived
negativity of a situation or condition in a manner that is dispro-
portional to reality.3 Von Trier explained that the initial impetus
for the film emerged from his own therapeutic situation. “My ana-
lyst told me that melancholiacs will usually be more level-headed
than ordinary people in a disastrous situation, partly because they
can say: ‘What did I tell you?’”4 This notion that paranoid antici-
pation of the worst ironically makes melancholics more prepared
to confront actual disaster is voiced in the film by Claire (played
by Charlotte Gainsbourg). Responding to the unaltered emotional
state of her sister Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) in the wake of
Earth having survived its first close encounter with Melancholia,
Claire asserts, “Oh, you have it easy, don’t you? Just imagine the
worst thing possible.” Since her worldview is enduringly negative,
Justine finds no peace or consolation in Earth’s apparent escape
from destruction.
An allegorical analysis of Melancholia would read the film as a
departure from the conventional Hollywood disaster genre insofar
as the latter typically stresses the literality of what is represented.
This literality is especially crucial to depictions of historical catas-
trophes. Consider James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), in which the
sinking of the eponymous ocean liner takes primacy over whatever
figurative meanings it may also imply with regard to the fate of star-
crossed lovers. As with most disaster films, moreover, in Titanic the
scope of the devastation stops short of total destruction. Indeed, a
fundamental, repetitive characteristic of the genre is its preoccupa-
tion with survival, the continued existence of at least one person
beyond the scene of devastation (although multiple people of both
genders is preferable, or else the human race could not propagate
itself). Writing specifically about science fiction disaster films,
402 Christopher Peterson

Susan Sontag observed in the 1960s that the genre permits one to
“participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and
more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” Disas-
ter films are thus primarily concerned with “accommodating to and
negating . . . the perennial human anxiety about death.”5 This two-
fold affirmation and denial of death is central to Rudolph Maté’s
When Worlds Collide (1951), whose depiction of Earth’s destruction
by a rogue star named Bellus clearly influenced von Trier’s film.
True to generic form, a small number of Earth’s inhabitants are
able to pilot a spacecraft to a planet orbiting around Bellus called
Zyra, whose habitability promises the possibility of a future for
the human race notwithstanding our planet’s total annihilation.
Melancholia, on the other hand, leaves us with no survivors, thus
depriving the spectator of the routine pleasures afforded by the
disaster genre—that is, the sublation of finitude by virtue of which
our identification with the survivors permits us to imagine our own
vicarious triumph over death.
Although von Trier’s film might at first appear to demand an
allegorical approach that distinguishes it from its generic anteced-
ents, I want to suggest that reading this cinematic annihilation of
the world as something other than what it purports to be—that is,
as the absolute effacement of all living beings (human, animal, or
plant)—risks the ironic consequence of relocating the film squarely
within those generic conventions that resist the possibility of total
obliteration without remainder or trace. An interpretation of von
Trier’s film that registers interplanetary impact solely in terms of
psychological depression would therefore measure Melancholia’s
arrival as a catastrophe that does not finally equate with complete
obliteration. It is not the end of the world after all. As cognitive
psychology would have us believe, melancholia figures merely as
the sign of an exaggerated, distorted perception of the world.
Melancholia as psychological distortion is therefore not of this
world. Having been “hiding behind the sun,” as Claire’s son Leo
naively explains, Melancholia heralds its devastating force from a
location wholly alien and external to “our” world. As a peripheral
threat, Melancholia can always “pass us by,” as Claire’s scientifically
minded husband John repeatedly insists.
As tempting as it may be to seek shelter in an allegorical read-
ing of Melancholia, I propose an alternative approach that resists
the apparent requirement that the viewer decide between the
literal and the allegorical. Indeed, the film frustrates interpreta-
tion precisely by destabilizing the distinction between these terms.
While allegory is traditionally defined as an extended metaphor,
Derek Attridge observes that interpretation presupposes a general
The Magic Cave of Allegory 403

allegoricity: “To say what a fictional work is ‘about’ . . . is to pro-

ceed allegorically. If a wholly nonallegorical reading of a literary
work were possible, it would refrain from any interpretation what-
soever.”6 To read anallegorically would thus be not to read at all.
The collapse of any allegorical sign onto a determinate meaning
betrays what J. Hillis Miller describes as “allegoraphobia,” a fear of
language that speaks otherwise, which is to say a fear of language
itself: literary, cinematic, and so forth.7 When reviewers equate mel-
ancholia with psychological depression, they adopt a conventional
conception of allegory whereby symbol and meaning are fully
aligned: a total eclipse of the sign. An allegorical reading of the
film in this sense is attractive precisely because it figures absolute
death and destruction as completely other, impossible, and unreal.
Its prophylactic function is therefore similar to that of the so-called
magic cave that Justine (whom Leo calls “Aunt Steelbreaker”) con-
structs with her nephew Leo prior to Melancholia’s impact with
Earth. A meager assemblage of eight sticks of wood gathered from
a nearby forest, Aunt Steelbreaker’s cave is no match for inter-
planetary collision. Of course, Justine knows that the cave bears
no magical properties. Yet her willingness to construct it manifests
an unusual display of courage, calm, and above all compassion for
her nephew and sister who are utterly terrified of the impending
doom. That the content of any allegory is never absolutely certain,
moreover, means that Justine’s depression could metaphorize the
destruction of the world rather than the inverse. As Sigmund Freud
observed in “Mourning and Melancholia,” these related yet distinct
psychological conditions are both characterized by a certain loss
and absence of the “world.”8 This disappearance of the world may
function metaphorically in Freud’s account, but Melancholia could
be read precisely as inverting this figurative logic; that is, the film
obscures Earth’s literal destruction behind the allegorical shadow
of melancholia/depression. The complete destruction of Earth
seems indisputably to be the worse of these two possibilities. On
the other hand, its science fiction implausibility forms a protective
barrier between us and Justine’s melancholia insofar as imagining
the extraordinary event of the world’s demise is so literally and
figuratively out there that it fails to threaten with the same force as
the far more ordinary and common condition of depression. After
all, many of us have lived through psychological depression, but
none of us have witnessed the end of the world.
This assertion seems commonsensical enough. One witnesses
the end of the world only on the condition that one does not live to
tell about it, only on the condition that one cannot testify to its hav-
ing happened. Notwithstanding the apparent incontrovertibility of
404 Christopher Peterson

this observation, Jacques Derrida argues that the loss of the other
spawns a melancholia that is indistinguishable from the annihila-
tion of the entire world:

For each time singularly, and each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely,
death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among
others, the end of someone or of something in the world, the end of a life
or of a living being. Death puts an end neither to someone in the world
nor to one world among others. Death marks each time, each time in
defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of
that which each opens as a one and only world, the end of the unique
world, the end of the totality of what is or can be presented as the origin
of the world for any unique living being, be it human or not.
The survivor, then, remains alone. Beyond the world of the other, he
is also in some fashion beyond or before the world itself. In the world out-
side the world and deprived of the world. At the very least, he feels solely
responsible, assigned to carry both the other and his world, the other
and the world that have disappeared, responsible without world (weltlos),
without the ground of any world, thenceforth, in a world without world,
as if without earth beyond the end of the world.9

Derrida thus resists the Freudian paradigm of “successful mourn-

ing” through which one fully relinquishes one’s attachment to
the lost other: “This melancholy must still protest against normal
mourning. This melancholy must never resign itself to idealizing
introjection. . . . The norm is nothing other than the good con-
science of amnesia.”10 For Derrida, moreover, melancholic incor-
poration requires that we bear the other within from the very
beginning: “Mourning no longer waits.” Mourning thus has nei-
ther an identifiable origin nor a definitive conclusion. As if antici-
pating the reader’s resistance, Derrida insists that his account of a
mourning without beginning or end is not exaggerated or patho-
logical: “I say without the facility of hyperbole” that we “carry the
world of the other . . . after the end of the world.”11
How are we to read this denial of hyperbole? Are we to take
Derrida at his word? Or is it to be read as an ironic disavowal that
affirms what it denies? If there is an answer to such questions, then
perhaps it lies in the subtle but crucial shift between the following
two claims: “Death is . . . an end of the world” and “Death marks
. . . the absolute end of the one and only world.” Shifting to the
definite article, coupled with the addition of “absolute,” the second
assertion qualifies the previous suggestion that the death of the
other is merely an end among others. This oscillation between an
end and the end, between a relative and an absolute end, attests to
The Magic Cave of Allegory 405

the counterintuitive principle of an end of the world that repeats

itself over and over again, “in defiance of arithmetic,” each time a
singular other disappears from our world.
If Derrida’s contention is hyperbolic, then it is so in the truest
sense of this word: recall that hyperbole stems from the Greek verb
ballein, meaning “to throw.” Mourning is by definition hyperbolic
because it is thrown beyond restricted temporal and spatial bound-
aries, like a rogue planet that exceeds its orbit. These two forms
of hyperbole are not merely analogous to the extent that mourn-
ing figures a certain collision of worlds: “There is no longer any
world, it’s the end of the world, for the other at his death. And so
I welcome in me this end of the world, I must carry the other and
his world, the world in me.”12 Derrida’s language necessarily slides
between the singular world (of the other) and the world in totality.
To grasp this vacillation fully, we must take into account the final
line of the poem by Paul Celan that animates Derrida’s analysis:
“The world is gone, I must carry you.” The Freudian paradigm of
successful mourning assures us that the death of the other is not
the end of the world. Of course, it is the end of the other’s world,
but for me it is not an absolute catastrophe, as difficult and as pain-
ful as the experience of loss may be. Derrida’s reflections on the
world’s irrecuperable loss resonate with his discussion of Bataille
in Writing and Difference: specifically, the distinction that the latter
makes between general and restricted economies.13 The world is
not a self-enclosed whole that can effectively patch over the cracks
and fissures that appear each time a singular being leaks out of
existence.14 The world is gone when we lose others because it is not
a restricted economy or a closed system that can fully recover from
its losses. This principle of irrecoverable loss recalls John Donne’s
famous declaration that “Any Man’s death diminishes me, because
I am involved in Mankinde.”15 Whereas Donne believes that death
will be undone in an afterlife, Derrida maintains that such revers-
ibility is an illusion that disavows the irredeemable loss of others.
An uncanny parallel thus emerges between von Trier’s depic-
tion of depression as interplanetary collision and Derrida’s equally
hyperbolic equation of melancholia with the end of the world. The
term “melancholia” corresponds at once to a celestial body, a psy-
chological condition, and to the general condition of being-in-the-
world. Life itself is mourning. Of course, behind Derrida’s notion
of originary mourning is the shadow of Heidegger, for whom Dasein
“is always already dying” in its “being-toward-its-end.”16 The Heideg-
gerian notion of being-toward-death characterizes our relationship
to finitude in terms of an originary “thrownness.” Heidegger intro-
duces this term to describe our being delivered over to a world that
406 Christopher Peterson

is not of our choosing. To be thrown into being is to find oneself

in a situation that already shapes and determines us. Yet insofar as
death always already belongs to being as our “ownmost nonrela-
tional possibility,” Dasein is always in the process of being “thrown
into this possibility.”17 Heidegger’s ballistic language thus stresses a
hyperbolic logic that projects the self beyond the normal boundar-
ies that separate life and death as well as past, present, and future.
Whereas Heidegger maintains that we are cast ahead toward
death, thrust beyond the “now” of any living present, Derrida
underscores how we both carry—and are carried by—the mortal
others who inhabit our world. Throughout von Trier’s film, Claire
is often depicted as literally bearing the body of her sister, whose
severe depression has reduced her to a catatonic, “worldless” state.
In one particularly painful scene, Claire and a house servant strug-
gle to walk Justine’s immobile body to a bathtub, only to give up
once it becomes apparent that Justine is not even able to lift her
foot to climb into the water. Later they coax Justine to a dinner
table with the lure of meatloaf, her favorite food, only to witness
her break down in tears, crying that the food “tastes like ash.”
Although some viewers might find the film’s tone utterly cynical,
such moments portray a sororal intimacy that shares in Derrida’s
notion of world-bearing, which is not solely focused on our respon-
sibility toward the dead. Insisting that this carrying precedes the
physical disappearance of others, he traces this responsibility all
the way back to birth, to a mother’s visceral bearing of her child:
“Between the mother and the child, the one in the other and the
one for the other, in this singular couple of solitary beings, in the
shared solitude between one and two bodies, the world disappears,
it is far away, it remains a quasi-excluded third. For the mother who
carries the child, ‘Die welt is fort.’” The term “carry” thus “speaks
the language of birth” as well as describes the experience of the
survivor, the one who bears the other in mourning.18 Among the
series of arresting images with which Melancholia begins is that of
Claire carrying her young son Leo across the golf course on her
estate, returning to seek shelter after having engaged in a panicked
yet vain effort to escape the rogue planet’s impact. As with the
other images that comprise the opening sequence, Claire and Leo
are portrayed in extreme slow motion, her desperation and futility
aggravated by the visual deceleration. The world is both already
gone for mother and child, this “singular couple of solitary beings,”
and also not yet entirely gone. The world is on the verge of an
absolute disappearance after which there will be no world to carry.
It might seem that the disappearance of the world either through
its actual, physical destruction or as a consequence of the other’s
The Magic Cave of Allegory 407

death is distinct from maternal bearing. Yet natality and finitude

are never far apart to the extent that maternity means giving birth
to a mortal being who must continue to be borne by others long
after he or she is born.
If the generic formula of the disaster film typically stresses sur-
vival as a corrective to destruction, then there is no more culturally
cherished image than that of the child to bear this future. Quite
deliberately seeking to quash such optimism, von Trier’s film insists
on the impossibility of life in the wake of Melancholia’s impact.
Consider the conversation in which Justine informs her sister that
“the earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. . . . Nobody will
miss it.” Claire responds, “But where would Leo grow up?” Claire’s
response betrays a logic of disavowal that is at once poignant and
darkly comic. What part about the world coming to an end does
she not understand? Claire can accept her own death perhaps, but
she cannot contemplate the death of her son, who must survive as
the sign and trace of her own immortality. Apparently surrender-
ing to the possibility of Earth’s destruction and therefore of both
her and Leo’s demise, Claire then suggests that “there may be life
somewhere else.” Yet she barely finishes her sentence before Jus-
tine emphatically asserts, “But there isn’t.” She goes on to ascribe
to herself a clairvoyant ability to “know things. . . . When I say we’re
alone, we’re alone. Life is only on Earth, and not for long.” It does
not really matter whether Justine truly “knows things” and is there-
fore correct that the impact of Melancholia will entail not only the
destruction of life on Earth but also the annihilation of all life in
the universe. Justine’s certainty may turn out to be just as reliable
as that of John, whose confidence in science is dealt a devastating
blow when he discovers that Melancholia will collide with Earth
notwithstanding scientific predictions, a revelation that leads him
to commit suicide rather than face the end along with his wife,
son, and sister-in-law. What is crucial is that Justine’s assertion of
absolute destruction and loss is aligned with the film’s deliber-
ate positioning of itself as an antidisaster disaster film. On the one
hand, the film depicts a destruction of Earth that is quite literally
disastrous. Derived from the Latin astrum, the term “disaster” con-
notes a misfortune that befalls us on account of a malevolent star.
On the other hand, the destruction of Earth is not disastrous in
accordance with Hollywood convention, which requires that the
scene of destruction, no matter how devastating, cannot equate to
the absolute termination of all life. What Derrida once said of the
possibility of total nuclear war thus also applies to Melancholia:
its impact allows us to imagine the “possibility of an irreversible
destruction, leaving no traces.”19 As Derrida reminds us, moreover,
408 Christopher Peterson

“apocalypse” signifies revelation, an unveiling of truth. This unveil-

ing thus depends upon a dialectical movement that would sublate
the scene of destruction, that would resurrect the dead if only
vicariously through the figure of the survivor. Remaining precisely
to preserve the future against its neutralization, the survivor attests
to the conventional, apocalyptic disaster film’s decidedly conserva-
tive symbolic economy. If Melancholia is apocalyptic, then it begets
what Derrida characterizes as an apocalypse without apocalypse, a
revelation that unveils no truth.
Although the film depicts the possibility of a total eradication
of all traces, the image of Claire desperately trying to bear (up)
her child at the end of the world, to protect him from the danger
posed by Melancholia’s imminent impact, nevertheless attests to
the paradoxical condition of the trace, which can be both durable
and fragile. As Claire moves across the golf course, she appears
almost to sink into the ground, leaving deep footprints in the grass,
the earth apparently beginning to yield to Melancholia’s force. On
her final step her foot is entirely submerged under the earth, as if
she is slowly falling into an abyss from which she and Leo will not
return. Deeply implanted in the earth, these traces visually imply
a capacity to endure that is undermined by the ground’s increas-
ing destabilization, rendering these imprints wholly precarious and
subject to effacement.
The pathos that this image evokes is nonetheless punctured if
we turn our gaze from mother and son to the undulating golf flag,
which slowly unfurls to reveal the number 19 at the same moment
that Claire’s foot penetrates the liquefying ground. Of course, the
nineteenth hole literally does not exist in golf. If it did, it could
exist only hyperbolically, as it were, permitting the ball to be cast
beyond the game’s normal temporal and spatial limits. This supple-
mental hole would allow for a future above and beyond the end
of the game, an afterlife for the game that would prevent the ball
from descending into the eighteenth black hole, never again to
see the light of day. As with the psychological condition known as
melancholia, the nineteenth hole is a marker of excess, a surplus
that violates the standard rules of the game. In addition to psychol-
ogy and sports, this transgression of limits corresponds to John’s
two chief obsessions: stargazing and money. John parades his astro-
nomic wealth not only by throwing Claire an elaborate wedding
reception but also by repeatedly bragging quite specifically about
the number of holes on his golf course. A cosmic joke in more
ways than one, the nineteenth hole mocks both the extravagant
wealth that John displays and his confidence in astronomical cal-
culations. The faith in numbers that leads him to accept scientists’
The Magic Cave of Allegory 409

miscalculation of Melancholia’s trajectory is thus aligned with a far-

cical underestimation of the number of cups on his putting green.
While Derrida maintains that the world is destroyed “in defiance
of arithmetic” because the death of each singular being endlessly
repeats the end of the world, the destructive force of Melancholia
also defies arithmetic on a more basic level by virtue of an unavoid-
able incalculability, the “margin of error” whose existence John
finally acknowledges in the wake of the planet’s initial flyby.
Of course, this literal manifestation of a surplus hole plays
on the idiomatic practice of referring to the bar where one cel-
ebrates with a few (or more) drinks as “the nineteenth hole.” If the
nineteenth hole is as integral to the game of golf as the previous
eighteen holes, then what is von Trier trying to say with this refer-
ence? Game over? It’s the end of the world, so let’s gather at the
nineteenth hole and “party like it’s 1999” (as Prince’s apocalyptic
1982 hit song implores us)? Claire is not exactly in the mood to
celebrate, but once she finally accepts that the end of the world is
nigh, she informs her sister that she wants to “do this the right way.
. . . A glass of wine together, maybe.” Justine responds:

You want me to have a glass of wine on your terrace. . . . How ‘bout a

song? Beethoven’s Ninth, something like that? Maybe we can light some
candles? You want us to gather on your terrace to sing a song, have a glass
of wine, the three of us? . . . Do you know what I think of your plan? . . . I
think it’s a piece of shit.

Whether Prince or Beethoven, Justine is not willing to provide a

musical score for the apocalypse (ironically, von Trier is clearly
happy to oblige, though his choice of soundtrack is Wagner).
There will be no “Ode to Joy” for Justine; all men will not “become
brothers,” or perhaps more appropriately, all women will not
become sisters. Against Claire’s suggestion that a glass of wine on
the terrace would make the end of the world “nice,” Justine asks,
“Why don’t we meet on the fucking toilet”? Justine’s cruelty is cer-
tainly objectionable, despite the naïveté of her sister’s request for
a dignified exit. Yet in the final moments of the film, it is Justine
who provides if not a graceful death then one that softens Melan-
cholia’s impact by imagining an allegorical cushion in the form of
the magic cave. Justine’s indifference transforms into compassion
once her nephew Leo registers his fear. The three of them con-
struct an alternative world to the one that is about to be destroyed,
a world that cannot provide any actual shelter, a world whose walls
can be easily shattered but also mediate the characters’ relation-
ship to an unimaginable destruction. If Plato imagined his cave as
410 Christopher Peterson

a shelter that deceives its prisoners into mistaking the shadows on

the wall for reality, an error that can only be corrected once they
are released into the light of day, once they truly enter the world,
then perhaps the end of the world—whether we are talking about
its literal, physical destruction or the loss of the world on the occa-
sion of the other’s death—cannot be approached directly; it can
only be approached through a certain magical thinking that allows
one to believe in the shadows after all.

Irreducible Survival

If Melancholia goes where few (if any) disaster films dare to go—
that is, to the absolute end of all life, ostensibly leaving behind no
survivors or traces that could sublate this radical finitude—then
this depiction of absolute absence nevertheless depends on the
possibility of survival that it would negate. Indeed, the film itself
survives as a trace given to us as spectators who persist beyond the
film’s nihilistic conclusion. It might seem unwarranted to collapse
the film’s internal narrative world with the external world of its arti-
factual existence. Yet the film stresses not only the threat to life that
interplanetary collision poses but also the possible destruction of
all aesthetic creations, including its own digital traces. The opening
sequence alludes to a number of famous artistic works, including
John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia (1852), which is the inspira-
tion behind the image of Justine floating on a pond in her wed-
ding dress. In addition, a shot of the topiaries on the front lawn of
Claire and John’s opulent estate recalls the resort featured in Alain
Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Following this allusion to
Resnais, the film depicts Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Hunters in
the Snow (1565), fully reproduced and aligned with the cinematic
frame. This painting reappears later in the film, along with Ophelia
and another painting by Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (1567), as
well as Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1610). Aban-
doning her wedding guests and barricading herself in the library of
her sister’s house, Justine impulsively substitutes art books display-
ing these images in place of those featuring the abstract geometric
art of the twentieth-century painter Kazimir Malevich. Absorbing
these famous artistic creations into its visual landscape, Melancholia
not only acknowledges a shared interest in their dark, melancholic
aesthetics but also hints at their collective vulnerability to erasure,
as if the film mourns not only the loss of life but also the end of
all aesthetic productions that the world’s destruction must nec-
essarily engender. This destruction is dramatized in the opening
The Magic Cave of Allegory 411

sequence when The Hunters in the Snow begins to burn at its edges
and becomes perforated with holes. Insofar as the painting’s bor-
ders fully coincide with the cinematic frame, the film appears to
succumb to the same radical annihilation.
As indicated by its tagline—“A beautiful movie about the end of
world”—Melancholia is preoccupied not only with the annihilation
of aesthetics but also with the aesthetics of annihilation.20 Despite,
or perhaps because of, this coalescence of beauty and destruction,
von Trier worriedly confessed in an interview with Nils Thorsen
that the final result might be overly polished and too beautiful.
Thorsen asked, “Doesn’t it help to destroy the whole world?” To
this von Trier replied, “I hope so. The approaching planet does
provide some fundamental suspense, at least. . . . And Thomas Vin-
terberg [his friend and fellow Danish director] said something very
sensible when he had seen it . . . which was: how do you make a
film after this?”21 Implying that the film does not merely represent
the end of the world, but rather performatively enacts it, von Trier
enfolds the film’s ostensibly extradiegetic trace into the scene of
destruction that it depicts. The film depicts an end of the world,
the end of one cinematic world among others, but this end slides
between a relative and an absolute end, as if the end of this singular
world amounts to nothing less than the absolute destruction of the
one and only world. Due to its mechanical reproducibility, how-
ever, this performative annihilation bears a capacity to repeat itself
before innumerable spectators at all corners of the globe whose
total destruction it nevertheless portrays. Each time unique, each
spectator “witnesses” the end of the world according to a conserva-
tive mode that shores these planetary fragments against their ruin.
Melancholia’s obliteration of all life on Earth thus exists only
as a fantasy or fiction in the same manner that Derrida character-
izes the threat of total nuclear destruction. As Peggy Kamuf puts it,

the end of all life . . . is precisely what we cannot think except in a mode
and as a vestige of survival beyond the annihilation that will therefore not
have been total. Instead, the movement of a dialectic recuperates the loss
of everything as not-quite everything; there remains a remainder for the
speculative imagination, which can project the end of everything only by
surviving to mourn it.22

As with any fantasy of total nuclear war, we can only imagine our
planet’s absolute destruction “in a mode and as a vestige of sur-
vival.” Notwithstanding film’s quasi-magical power to psychically
suture us into its imaginative world, thus temporarily collapsing
the distinction between imagining and witnessing, believing and
412 Christopher Peterson

knowing, this “witnessing” amounts to a speculative projection

that dialectically reverses the irreversible destruction that the film
depicts. Although it belongs to the archive of human artifacts
whose devastation it portrays, the film Melancholia cannot avoid
presenting itself as a symbolic cushion that softens or deadens the
destructive impact of its literal, planetary namesake. Melancholia
therefore cannot neutralize the movement of survival in a manner
that would fully depart from the conventional disaster film. As Der-
rida observes, archivation and monumentalization ensure that “the
burden of every death can be assumed symbolically by a culture
and a social memory.” Only the absolute destruction of all life and
all symbolic capacity would generate the “absolute referent,” which
equates to “the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus
the only ineffaceable trace, . . . the trace of what is entirely other.”23
The “absolute referent”—that is, a referent wholly independent of
language and representation—would require the total destruction
of all life and all symbolic possibility. In this sense, the demand for
the absolute or “pure” referent is ultimately nihilistic to the extent
that any unmediated (nonrepresentational and nonsymbolic)
access to the world would necessitate the utter absence of all living
witnesses and all artifactual representations of life.
Death is thus another name for this absolute referent: the
entirely other that cannot be known or avowed by any living wit-
ness. As much as Melancholia may insist on the eradication of all
traces of life, it can do so only through a mode of irreducible sur-
vival. Survival is irreducible precisely because the “imagination
of disaster,” to borrow Sontag’s phrase, can never transgress the
threshold that separates life from death.24 Although Melancholia
departs from conventional cinematic fantasy by leaving us bereft of
any living protagonists with whom to identify, we nevertheless sur-
vive on the condition that we are denied access to the experience
of total annihilation without remainder. Survival is irreducible, in
other words, because it cannot open onto any apocalypse; it cannot
unveil any knowledge or truth beyond the border that separates life
from death. As Derrida argues, death names “the most improper
possibility and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating
one.”25 Whereas Heidegger distinguishes between inauthentic and
authentic being-toward-death, the latter naming an attitude that
affirms Dasein’s “ownmost nonrelational possibility,” the death that
belongs to each one of us and that therefore ought not to be dis-
owned and projected onto others, Derrida underscores that death
cannot finally be owned.26 This conceptual turn away from Heideg-
gerian authenticity sheds light on some remarks that Derrida made
in an interview published in Le Monde less than two months before
The Magic Cave of Allegory 413

his death in October 2004. Knowing that he was suffering from a

terminal illness, he confessed that he had

never learned-to-live. In fact not at all! Learning to live should mean

learning to die, learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute
mortality. . . . I remain uneducable when it comes to any kind of wisdom
about knowing-how-to-die, or, if you prefer, knowing-how-to-live. I still
have not learned or picked up anything on this subject. The time of the
reprieve is rapidly running out.27

This acknowledgment of having failed to learn to live or die might

seem to conflict with his affirmation of survival as nonsupplemen-
tary: “It is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary:
life is living on. Life is survival.”28 As with his concept of the trace
and originary mourning, survival is a structural condition of being.
Given that he characterizes all living beings as “survivors who have
been granted a temporary reprieve,” we might expect him to adopt
a Socratic acceptance of mortality in the face of his terminal diag-
nosis.29 In this sense, affirming life as originary survival would be
akin to learning to die or accepting death. While Derrida claims
to “believe in this truth [acceptance of death],” he reveals that he
is nevertheless unable to accede to it.30 He thus implies that this
failure to “own” his death, to say “yes” to its inevitability, bespeaks
a singular or unique failure on his part, or at least a failure that is
not shared with everyone, as if there may be other mortal beings
capable of achieving a passing grade on this subject for which he
remains hopelessly unteachable. Yet he also implies that the ques-
tion of educability extends beyond the singular self: “Can one
learn, through discipline or apprenticeship, through experience
or experimentation, to accept or, better, to affirm life?”31 The pro-
nominal shift from “I” to “one” (“I remain uneducable . . . ,” “Can
one learn . . . ?”) implies that Derrida is skeptical that both living
and dying constitute subjects on which any of us can be successfully
educated. Indeed, despite their apparently confessional tone, Der-
rida’s remarks remain irreducible to the biographical. The “I” who
claims to remain uneducable on the subject of knowing-how-to-die
or knowing-how-to-live is ironically trying to teach us something
about the unteachability of these subjects. The lesson to be learned
is that there is no lesson to be learned; we cannot be taught how
to live and die, at least not according to an instructional model for
which one can submit to examination and therefore be said to have
passed or failed. A measurably “successful” affirmation of death
makes about as much sense as successful mourning, which simi-
larly relies on a logic of calculation by virtue of which melancholia
414 Christopher Peterson

is said to resolve once one measures one’s loss as less than total. It
is not the end of the world (one has not lost everything), and thus
it is the end of melancholia. One could truly “get over” death only
by denying it, that is, only by submitting it to the same amnesia
that Derrida associates with the Freudian paradigm of successful
mourning. This amnesia is precisely what the conventional disas-
ter film induces by soliciting our identification with its surviving
characters. If the disaster film comforts us by literally projecting
mortality elsewhere, then the Derridean notion of survival thinks
death within life according to a mode that resists their sublation
and thereby destabilizes the opposition between affirming and
negating finitude.
That Derrida’s uneducability extends far beyond a merely
anomalous, personal failing becomes clearer if we ask ourselves
how seriously we could take him if he were to answer in the
affirmative, if he were to assert without equivocation “Yes, I have
indeed learned to die.” How could we not smile at the audacity of
such a claim? Who among us could rightly ascribe to themselves
such an unmitigated capacity for affirming finitude? Is not the full
and final acceptance of finitude indistinguishable from its full and
final disavowal? Although Lee Edelman does not say so directly,
he implies in a reading of Derrida’s final interview that such an
affirmation is possible, that one can in fact learn to avow finitude.
According to Edelman, Derrida ultimately “chooses” life over death
and thereby betrays a “conservative rhetoric of futurism over real
openness to an event.”32 At first glance, Derrida’s comments seem
to support such an interpretation. After all, he insists that he

would not want to encourage an interpretation that situates surviving on

the side of death and the past rather than life and the future. No, decon-
struction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of
life. Everything I say . . . about survival as a complication of the opposition
life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional affirmation of life. This
surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a
discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being
who prefers living and thus surviving to death.33

Edelman opposes this “instinct for self-preservation” to “real open-

ness to the unknown of the ‘à-venir.’”34 Such “real openness” rhe-
torically implicates the Derridean à venir in an apparently false
openness. Indeed, “real openness” suggests something like an
absolute or unconditional affirmation of the future as “radically
unknown” that runs counter to the formulation of life as sur-
vival, which negates the future by seeking to know it in advance.
The Magic Cave of Allegory 415

For Edelman, saying “yes” to survival, and therefore to the future,

amounts to “anticipating a future whose very anticipation effec-
tively prevents it.”35 Affirmation of life as anticipation of a future to
come thus implies an “economy of reserve . . . by means of which
the future promises ‘the good.’”36
Edelman’s critique of Derrida is part of a larger interroga-
tion of “reproductive futurism,” which circles around the figure
of the child as the promise and guarantee of “social and cultural
survival.”37 For Edelman, those who come to occupy the position of
the queer threaten this ideology of survival through their ostensibly
antisocial nonreproductivity. Although Derrida never suggests that
queers are a threat to the future, Edelman nevertheless implicates
him in reproductive futurism on the basis that any thought of the
future presupposes the ideological fantasy of the child as the guar-
antor of this future. Responding to Derrida’s characterization of
the yes as the “condition of all promises or of all hope, of all await-
ing, of all performativity, of all opening to the future, whatever it
may be,” Edelman reduces such hope to a utopic messianism.38 As
he writes in No Future, “we are no more able to conceive of a poli-
tics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of
a future without the figure of the Child.”39 Rather than advance
an alternative conception of the future that would not rely on the
child as its dominant figure, Edelman maintains that all thought
of the future is inescapably bound to the child and its various alle-
gorical guises: the archive, the specter, the yes, the promise, and so
on. Even when they do not explicitly invoke the child, all of these
concepts belie the openness to which they purport to subscribe by
retaining a messianic investment in the future.
Edelman bases his critique of Derrida on a reading of “Archive
Fever,” in which Derrida observes that the archival gesture not only
points to the past but also “turns incontestably toward the future
to come. It orders to promise, but it orders repetition, and first of
all self-repetition, self-confirmation in a yes, yes.”40 Edelman hears
in this double yes a conservative gesture that “obliges the future
to conform to the past. . . . The archive, after all, like the spec-
ter . . . evinces that reserve whose survival produces the future as
its own.”41 Although Derrida alludes very briefly to the notion of
the double yes in “Archive Fever,” he discusses it extensively in a
number of other texts, including “Two Words for Joyce,” “Ulysses
Gramophone,” and “A Number of Yes.”42 Far from constraining the
future to conform to our hopes, the yes constitutes a performative
promise or pledge that exposes itself to the structure of iterability.
The yes is the condition of possibility for a future that can be either
better or worse. No yes is immune to becoming no. Its iterability is
416 Christopher Peterson

what “threatens it as well.”43 The yes thus wagers on a future that

it can never guarantee. To promise this yes to a future beyond
its enunciation is therefore not to secure this future in advance.
Channeling Doris Day, Edelman sings que sera, sera to Derrida’s
ostensibly false openness to the future. Yet a purely nonanticipa-
tory, unconditional relation to the future amounts to an impossible
nonrelation. The future may not be ours to see, but we cannot not
project ourselves into it, no matter how wrong our prognoses often
turn out to be. Our relation to the future cannot but be antici-
patory. Distinct from Edelman’s notion of futurism, moreover, the
Derridean à venir does not hold out the promise of a future present
that is infinitely deferred. In a brief allusion to the musical Annie,
Edelman mockingly rebukes the optimistic refrain of “tomorrow,
tomorrow . . . you’re always a day away.” Yet the future is also always
both more and less than a day away. The interval separating the
present from the future is at once infinitely large and infinitely
small. That the à venir does not wait, that it signifies urgency and
imminence as much as deferral, means that it cannot be equated
with the infinitely delayed future that Edelman identifies as the
sine qua non of reproductive futurism.
Whereas Edelman reduces the yes, yes to a mechanical repeti-
tion that “promises the good,” Derrida insists that the

“second” yes must come as an absolute renewal, once again absolutely

inaugural and “free,” failing which it would only be a natural, psychologi-
cal, or logical consequence. It must act as if the first had been forgotten,
past enough to require a new initial yes. This forgetting is not psychological
or accidental, it is structural, the very condition of fidelity.44

Although Derrida distinguishes between first and second yeses, his

scare quotes indicate the inadequacy that attends any effort to cal-
culate their ordinal enumeration. If the second yes turns out to
be the second first yes, then these yeses no longer conform to any
orderly inventory. In addition, we gravely miscalculate if we pre-
sume a capacity to tally up the number of yeses in order to arrive
at the finite number of two: “A yes cannot be counted. Promise,
mission, emission, it always sends itself off in number.”45 Indeed,
the two yeses are themselves doubled—and therefore total at least
four—insofar as they slide between prescriptive affirmation (one
“ought to” or “should” say yes) and what Derrida variably charac-
terizes as a “quasi-transcendental,” “silent performative,” or “archi-
originary yes.” I might say “yes” to alterity out of a sense of ethical
duty or fidelity, but this “second” yes is preceded by a silent yes
that is the condition of possibility for any affirmative or negative
The Magic Cave of Allegory 417

utterance. Even if I say “no” to the other—in case the other threat-
ens to harm me, for example—I must still have first “said” yes:

As a quasi-transcendental and silent performative, it is removed from any

science of utterance, just as it is from any speech act theory. It is not,
strictly speaking, an act; it is not assignable to any subject or to any object.
If it opens the eventness of every event, it is not itself an event. It is never
present as such. What translates this nonpresence into a present yes in the
act of an utterance or in any act at the same time dissimulates the archi-
originary yes by revealing it.46

Whereas Edelman misreads the yes as a transcendental condition

of possibility—an affirmation that stabilizes itself across innumer-
able repetitions—Derrida underscores the quasi-transcendental
character of the yes, its status as both the condition of possibility
and impossibility of a pure, unequivocal affirmation of alterity, life,
and the future.47 “Prior” to any affirmation or negation, whether
spoken or written, the silent, unpresentable yes always already
“says” yes to alterity. This “first” yes thus names an originary expo-
sure to what Derrida elsewhere names the arrivant, which signifies
whoever or whatever arrives (ce qui arrive), whether we judge this
alterity to be welcome or monstrous, good or bad.48
To claim that “deconstruction is always on the side of the yes,
on the side of the affirmation of life,” is thus not to choose life, as
if Derrida is simply reiterating an old platitude, either in its biblical
form or in its 1980s’ incarnation on T-shirts worn by the British pop
duo Wham! Far from making “the choice of life over death,” Der-
rida crucially employs a vocabulary of preference.49 Survival names
“the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus sur-
viving to death.” And who does not prefer living to death? Anyone
who is still alive has already affirmed life, has already “said” yes.
This yes is both archi-originary (a consent or acquiescence to the
life into which we are thrown in the Heideggerian sense) and one
that we reaffirm as long as we take measures to ensure our survival.
We might indeed find ourselves in situations where we imagine
death to be preferable to life, and we might even choose to has-
ten the advent of our death on the basis of this perception. Yet
insofar as we are all “survivors who have been granted a temporary
reprieve,” we can say “no” to life only on the condition of having
first said “yes.” As Derrida suggests in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say
. . . , one cannot ultimately make a choice between life and death;
any “choice” for death remains a choice for life. Derrida recounts
an ongoing, interminable “dispute” between himself and his friend
Hélène Cixous, in which he sides with death and she sides with life,
418 Christopher Peterson

in which he finds himself reminding her that “we die in the end,
too quickly,” while she cannot bring herself to believe what she
nevertheless knows all too well, “as if [si] she said, ‘We’re not going
to die’; ‘Yes we are [mais si],’ I would answer. She knows I tell the
truth, I know she tells the truth.”50 Indeed, we can say “no” to life
(or “yes” to death) only on the side for which there is no opposite,
no beyond that we might access, the side of no side that we cannot
not side with, the side of being-for-death that does not side against
but instead runs alongside life. We thus do not choose to be on
the side of life so much as we find ourselves inhabiting its space of
infinite irreversibility.51
Edelman’s preoccupation with the innocent child as the
emblem of futurity thus seems to be haunted by a correlative figure:
the incorrigible child who cannot be taught how to live or die and
therefore fails to advance or mature. As Derrida observes, “appren-
dre à vivre” means both to mature and to educate. “Je vais t’apprendre
à vivre” means “‘I am going to teach you how to live’” or “‘I’m going
to teach you a lesson.’”52 The claim that all thought of the future,
that all affirmative declarations, promises, and hope, amount to
reproductive futurism ironically proselytizes a certain nonbelief in
the future by reprimanding those errant children who, like little
Hank in The Man Who Knew Too Much, need to be taught to let go
of the future, to let the future be what it will be. Consigning all
thinkers of the future to the “futurch,” Edelman fashions himself
as the lone apostle of the New Anti-Futurch whose creed insists on
an impossible nonrelation to the future that is literally utopic: a
nonplace that no one can occupy, not even its fiercest leader.53
Although the conventional disaster film is predicated on a dis-
avowal of finitude, Melancholia does not simply negate the nega-
tion; it does not simply say “no” to the future. It does not call upon
its central characters to convert their reflexive human tendency to
deny death into an equally stable and unequivocal affirmation, an
acceptance of mortality to which we as spectators would likewise be
urged to assent. Justine may summon us to accept radical finitude
by asserting that “life is only on Earth,” a conclusion that the film
underscores when the screen fades to black in the wake of Mel-
ancholia’s impact. Yet this black hole into which we as spectators
descend cannot open onto the referent of absolute destruction.
Consider the film’s final line of dialogue, “close your eyes,”
an imperative that Justine issues to Leo but also directs the spec-
tator to deny by proxy the imminent threat of total destruction.
Although she displays utter serenity and composure in the face
of Melancholia’s approach, Justine physically turns her back to
its final arrival. And while she ostensibly builds the magic cave to
The Magic Cave of Allegory 419

comfort her nephew, perhaps she too requires a symbolic bulwark

against destruction. Whereas Leo dutifully obeys his aunt’s com-
mand and Justine sits with her back to the looming rogue planet,
only Claire turns her face toward the source of their impending
demise. Death finds Claire watching, “trying to see beyond seeing,”
peering over a horizon that cannot ultimately be crossed.54 Claire,
however, does not maintain a steady, unflinching gaze toward
Melancholia; instead, she repeatedly shifts between regarding the
planet, Justine, and Leo before finally covering her ears and staring
directly toward the earth, a split second before Earth and all of its
living inhabitants are consumed by a cataclysmic explosion. Each
character thus embodies a different mode of comportment toward
the absolute end. One can close one’s eyes, turn one’s back, or gaze
directly at this end, yet none of these modes are presented to us as
necessarily more authentic, dignified, or graceful than the others.
Melancholia may not teach us how to live or die authentically,
but it cannot really be faulted for failing to achieve the impossi-
ble. Edelman is surely correct that our culture is deeply invested
in a reproductive futurism that relies on the idealized figure of
the child. Concluding with the construction of the magic cave,
Melancholia seems poised to reproduce this ideology by giving
Leo the task of voicing his fear when confronted with imminent
death. What could be more predictably poignant than measuring
the force of absolute destruction against the face of an innocent
child? Yet the film does not fully reproduce this cultural fantasy
insofar as Leo does not survive to engender a future. We are all
that remains, we as spectators, “survivors who have been granted
a temporary reprieve.” The world is gone, yet as long we survive,
which is to say as long we say “yes” to life, we must carry this world
into a future that survives the total destruction to which we can
never bear witness.

Notes
1.
James Kendrick, “Review of Melancholia,” Qnetwork, www.qnetwork.
com/index.php?page=review&id=2681; Allison Vitkauskas, “An Apocalyptic
Portrait,” Cornell Daily Sun, November 18, 2001, http://cornellsun.com/?s
=%22an+apocalyptic+portrait%22; and Richard LeBeau, “Hauntingly Accu-
rate Portrayals of Severe Mental Illness at a Theater Near You,” Psychology
in Action, December 12, 2011, www.psychologyinaction.org/2011/12/12/
hauntingly-accurate-portrayals-of-severe-mental-illness-at-a-theater-near-you/.
2.
Vitkauskas, “An Apocalyptic Portrait.”
3.
David Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (New York: Avon Books, 1999).
420 Christopher Peterson

4.
Nils Thorsen, “Interview: Longing for the End of All,” Melancholia: Lars von
Trier, www.melancholiathemovie.com/#_interview.
5.
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965, 44, 48.
6.
Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 36.
7.
J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Allegories,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, edited by
Morton Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 356.
8.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1975), 245.
9.
Jacques Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities,
the Poem,” translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, in Sovereignties in
Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 140.
10.
Ibid., 160.
11.
Ibid., 140.
12.
Ibid., 160.
13.
Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism With-
out Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 251–77. According to Bataille, Hegelian dialectics constitutes a
“restricted economy” that aims to sublate and thereby recover (from) all of its losses,
including death. A “general economy,” on the other hand, attests to a surplus that
can never be fully exhausted or contained by the Hegelian synthesis. See Georges
Bataille, La part maudite (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1967).
14.
I borrow this phrase from J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In the final scene of the
novel, the narrator describes the room where David’s dog is euthanized as “a hole
where one leaks out of existence.” See J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin,
1999), 219.
15.
John Donne, “Seventeenth Meditation,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,
edited by Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 87.
16.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996), 253.
17.
Ibid., 240, 251.
18.
Ibid., 159.
19.
Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles,
Seven Missives),” translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics 14, no.
2 (Summer 1984): 26.
20.
“Directors Statement,” Melancholia: Lars von Trier, www.melancholiath-
emovie.com/#_directorsstatement.
21.
Thorsen, “Interview: Longing for the End of All.”
22.
Peggy Kamuf, “Competent Fictions: On Belief in the Humanities” (working
paper, 2010), 9.
23.
Derrida, “No Apocalypse,” 28.
The Magic Cave of Allegory 421

24.
Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster.”
25.
Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 77.
26.
Ibid., 240.
27.
Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascal-
Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Melville House, 2011), 25.
28.
Ibid., 26.
29.
Ibid., 24. For a comparison of Derrida’s interview with Plato’s Phaedo, see
Judith Butler, “On Never Having Learned How to Live,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2005): 27–34.
30.
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Lee Edelman, “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 162.
33.
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 51.
34.
Edelman, “Against Survival,” 157.
35.
Ibid., 154.
36.
Ibid., 163.
37.
Ibid., 148.
38.
Ibid., 161.
39.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 11.
40.
Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” translated by Eric
Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 51.
41.
Edelman, “Against Survival,” 160.
42.
See Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” translated by Geoffrey Ben-
nington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays From the French, edited by Derek Attridge
and Daniel Ferrer, 145–58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jacques
Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” translated by Tina Kendall and
Shari Benstock, in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, edited by Bernard Benstock, 27–75
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988); and Jacques Derrida, “A Number of
Yes,” translated by Brian Holmes, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2, edited by
Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 231–40 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press).
43.
Derrida, “A Number of Yes,” 240.
44.
Derrida, “A Number of Yes,” 240.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Ibid., 239.
47.
For more on the difference between transcendental and quasi-transcendental
conditions, see Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge,
2000), 40–41, 89–92.
422 Christopher Peterson

48.
Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 33–34.
49.
Edelman, “Against Survival,” 162.
50.
Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . , translated, with additional
notes, by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, NY: Stanford University
Press, 2006), 2, 158.
51.
It might be argued that those who are unable to consent to their survival
cannot exhibit a preference (or not) for living: for example, a comatose individual
whose continued survival depends on the actions of others, who may or may not
represent the wishes of the patient. Yet even if, prior to one’s incapacitation, one
expresses a wish not to persist in a vegetative state, this desire nevertheless springs
from the irreversible side of life.
52.
Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 23.
53.
Lee Edelman, “Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory,”
PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 821.
54.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins,
2000), 200.