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 A FTER DERRIDA
Literature, Theory a n d Criticism in the
Tw enty-First Century

EDITED BY

JE A N -M IC H E L R A B A T E
University o f Pennsylvania

關 C a m b r id g e
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 C ambridge
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 Contents

List o f Contributors page vii

Introduction i
Jean-Michel Rabate

PART I FRAMES 19

1 The Instant o f Their Debt: Derrida with Freud and

Heidegger in Greece 21
Vassiliki Kolocotroni
2 Derrida and the Psychoanalysis o f Culture 39
Andrea Hurst
3 Derrida and Sexual Difference 58
Ginette Michaud

4 Derrida Queries de Man: A Note on the Materiality o f the

Letter versus the Violence o f the Letter 80
Martin McQuillan

PART II FOCUS 95

5 Derrida as Literary Reader 97

Derek Attridge
6 Broken Singularities (Derrida and Celan) 111
Joshua Schuster
7 Derrida and the Essence o f Poetry 126
Yue Zhuo
8 From Mallarme to the Event: Badiou after Derrida 143
Laurent Milesi

v
vi Contents

PART III FUTURES 159

9 Ecce animot: Animal Turns 161
Jane Goldman
10 Deconstruction, Collectivity, and World Literature 180
Jen Hui Bon Hoa
11 Literature Calls Justice: Deconstruction^ KComing-to-
Terms” with Literature 197
Elisabeth Weber
12 The Documental Revolution and the Archives o f the Future 212
Maurizio Ferraris

Index 226
 Contributors

d e r e k a t t r i d g e , emeritus
Professor o f English at the University o f York,
has authored many books, which include Post-structuralism and the
Question o f History (co-edited with G eoff Bennington and Robert
Young) (1987), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995) and Joyce Effects:
On Language} Theoryf and History (2000). He has held fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation and the
Leverhulme Trust, and is a fellow o f the British Academy.
is Professor o f Philosophy at the University o f Turin,
m a u r i z i o f e r r a r is
where he also runs the Inter-University Centre for Theoretical and
Applied Ontology and the Laboratory for Ontology. He is the author
o f more than fifty books on aesthetics, Derrida and continental philo­
sophy. Books in English include History o f Hermeneutics (1996),
Documentality, or Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2012), Goodbye
Kant! (2013), Manifesto o f New Realism (2014) and Where Are You?
Ontolog)/ o f the Cell Phone (2014).
ja n e Go l d m a n is Reader in English Literature at the University of
Glasgow and General Editor o f the Cambridge University Press edition
o f the writings o f Virginia Woolf. She is the author o f The Feminist
Aesthetics o f Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the
Politics o f the Visual (1998) and the co-editor o f Modernism:
An Anthology o f Sources and Documents (1998). Other publications
include Modernism ， 1910—1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004) and
The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (1006). She is currently
completing a book on Virginia Woolfand the Signifying Dog.
j e n hu i bo n h o ais Assistant Professor o f Comparative Literature at
Yonsei University^ Underwood International College. She specializes in
modern French and English literature and continental philosophy. She

vii
viii List o f Contributors

is currently writing a book on post-Marxist theories o f community and

representations o f the city in contemporary French non-fiction.
andrea h u r s t is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She
is the author o f Derrida Vis-a-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and
Psychoanalysis (2008). She has published more than forty papers on
authors such as Lyotard, Levinas, Heidegger, Lacan, Irigaray, Zizek
and Adorno in various journals.
vassilik i k o l o c o t r o n i is Senior Lecturer and Head o f English
Literature at the University o f Glasgow. She has co-edited Modernism:
An Anthology o f Sources and Documents (1998), In the Country o f the
Moon: British Women Travellers in Greece 1718—1^ 2 (2005), Women
Writing Greece (2008) - a collection o f critical essays on gender,
Hellenism and Orientalism - and The Edinburgh Dictionary o f
Modernism (2017). She has a special interest in the subject o f
Hellenism and its uses by modern writers and thinkers, which is the
focus of her next book, Still Life: Modernism s Greek Turn.
m artin m cq uillan is Professor ofLiterary Theory and Cultural Analysis
and Dean o f the Faculty o f Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston
University, London. He is the author o f four books {Roland Barthes or
the Profession o f Cultural Studies, Deconstruction after p/ny Paul de Man
and Deconstructing Disney). He has edited nine collections o f essays on
topics like Paul de Man, Rousseau, Muriel Spark and Post-theory.
g in e t t e m ich au d is Professor o f French Literature at the University o f
Montreal. She is the author o f more than twenty books and collections,
half o f which deal with Quebecois literature, half with deconstruction
and Derrida, whose seminars she is publishing in French and English.
In 2010 she published Battements du secret litteraire: Lire Derrida et
Cixous, vol, 1, and Comme en revey vol. 2. In 2013 she published Cosa
Volante， and in 2014 she co-aiked Appels de Jacques Derrida.
lau rent m ilesi, formerly Chair o f the Centre for Critical and Cultural
Theory, Cardiff University, is Tenured Professor o f English Literature
and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is one o f the
general editors o f the Theory, Culture and Politics series at Rowman and
Littlefield International and, together with Arleen Ionescu, edits the
international journal Word and Text - A Journal o f Literary Studies and
Linguistics. He has edited James Joyce and the Difference o f Language
 List o f Contributors ix

(2003) and coedited Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money
(2017). He has translated works by Jacques Derrida (H. C. fo r Life, That
Is to Say , 2〇〇6) and Helene Cixous (Zeros Neighbour, 2010;
Philippines, 2011; Tomb(e)y 2014).
jo sh u a s c h u s t e r is Associate Professor o f English at Western
University. His book The Ecology o f Modernism: American
Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (2015) won the Alanna Bondar
Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment,
and Culture in Canada. Recent essays have appeared in Humanimalia,
Minnesota Review and Photography & Culture, as well as in an edited
volume, Critical Perspectives on Veganism^ and in the book Edward
Burtynsky: Essential Elements (2016). His next book is What
Is Extinction? A Cultural and N atural History o f Last Animals.
El i s a b e t h w e b e r is Professor o f German, Comparative Literature and
Religious Studies at the University o f California, Santa Cruz. She is the
author o f Verfolgung und Trauma (1990). She has edited Das
Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren (1997) and Questioning
Judaism (2004). She is the editor o f works by Jacques Derrida, and the
translator into German o f texts by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas
and Felix Guattari. Recent publications include the co-edited volume
Speaking about Torture (2012) and Living Together: Jacques Derrida's
Communities o f Violence and Peace (2013).
yue zhuo has taught at Yale and has been Andrew W. Mellon Research
Fellow at the University o f Pennsylvania. She is the author o f the
forthcoming La force du negatif, Georges Bataille et la question du sacre.
She has published twenty articles on Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes
and Pascal Quignard in various edited volumes and journals, including
Contemporary French & Francophone Studies', Critique^ French Forum\
Modern Language Notes' Theory, Culture & Society% Litterature; Yale
French Studies^ and Revue TextueL
 Introduction
Jean-M ichel Rabate

It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous

way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical
state of affairs from what one customarily calls its wreconstruc-
tion.” The “ reconstruction” in empathy is one-dimensional.
“Construction” presupposes “destruction.”1
Almost fourteen years after the death o f Jacques Derrida, the least one can
say is that his inheritance is as contested and fraught with rivalries, rejec­
tions, and appropriations as at the time o f the flowering o f deconstruction
in American universities in the seventies and eighties. A halt was observed
in 1988-89 after the posthumous revelations about Paul de Man’s past in
Belgium and Derridas embattled defense o f his friend.2 Today, in France,
one often hears that ^Derrida a fa it I'Ecole mais n *apas fa it ecole^ meaning
that Derrida passed the entrance examination o f the prestigious Ecole
normale superieure, where he taught for a long time, where he met Paul
(!clan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and many other luminaries,
wlicreiis he never had a real “school” in France — no real institutional
hacking beyond the various Parisian places at which he taught later, or
lluwc he founded, like the College de philosophic; his following consti-
Ultcil o f young philosophers, only a few o f whom became university
professors in their turn and disseminated his teachings. However, the
mechanisms o f power within the French university remained closed to
Derrida until the end; besides, he wanted to prevent the stereotyped
reproduction currently observed from master to disciple.3

' Wkiltrr Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
M A: 1larvard University Press, 1999), 470 .
See Mcij lies I )crrida, M em oires fo r P au l de M an, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Colum bia
l !tt)vct\ijy Press, 1989).
1 riiri r is .is yet no good historical account o f the links o f Derrida with French pedagogical institu-
i Imiin, nmlunj； comparable to the reliable and thorough survey o f Derrida^ years o f schooling and
*'♦ 11 ly ir.u at tlic flcolc normale* siip<f*ricurc provided by Edward Baring in The Young D errida an d
hrtu h l*hU〇>〇i>hy, 106S (i l.unhiiil^r: ( Cambridge University Press, 2011).

I
2 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

True, throughout his life, Derrida kept friendly conversations with

scholars like Jean-Luc Nancy, France4 5s leading phenomenologist; however,
Nancy has developed his own vocabulary, themes, and specific strategies,
moving away from a strict version o f deconstruction.4 One o f the star
students whose dissertation was supervised by Derrida, Catherine
Malabou, now teaching in London, moved in different directions by
developing a post-Hegelian concept o f plasticity and engaging with the
neurosciences. But indeed, one can say that her work has pointed in the
direction followed by another gifted disciple, Francesco Vitale, a professor
at Salerno University. Vitale moves into the field o f biology, taking
Derrida’s latest seminars as oflfering original perspectives on auto­
immunity and what he calls “bio-deconstruction.” Another brilliant fol-
lower, Bernard Stiegler, explored technology and media before launching
his philosophy o f politics and a new definition o f the bases o f democracy.
However, despite these exceptions, in France today at least, the impact of
Derrida on the humanities and literary studies has been minimal; in what
concerns the study o f the literature, the consensus among professors o f
French literature is that the theoretical site Derrida occupied has been
preempted by thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles
Deleuze, and Michel Foucault.
Nevertheless, it is Derrida who is still blamed for the exportation and re­
importation o f wTheory,,> whether French or Fresh, into Anglo-American
universities, a fashionable mixture appealing to artists and critics, abstruse
theories often descried as a compound o f hurried philosophemes and
heavy-handed abstractions indiscriminately applied to artworks and
texts. In 1998, burning what he had adored previously, Antoine
Compagnon dubbed this trendy moment Kthe demon o f T h e o r y ,a neat
phrase used to encapsulate the pernicious effects o f Roland Barthes^
theoretical legacy.5 If Barthes^ demons or theoretical imps have survived,
Derrida is regularly exorcised as the Devil himself. An intellectual public
keeps reading Derrida, which is confirmed by a steady stream o f previously
unpublished seminars and collections o f hitherto dispersed texts,6 but he is
rarely taught in departments o f French or comparative literature, and
almost never in those o f philosophy. When his influence can be observed

4 Derrida's at times tense debate with N an cy is in evidence in Derrida, O n Touching—Jea n -L u c N ancy,

trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2005), 135-58.
5 See Antoine Com pagnon, Literature, Theory an d Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosm an (Princeton,
N J: Princeton University Press, 2004).
6 A good example is Jacques Derrida, Periser a ne pas voir: Ecrits sur les arts du visible, i^y^ -20 0 4, ed.
Ginette Michaud et al. (Paris: Editions de la Difference, 2013).
 Introduction 3
as one sees in the work o f Jacques Ranciere, a visible philosopher o f the arts
and literature using a post-Marxist discourse, DerridaJs analyses o f the
“errant letter” are reproduced typically without being acknowledged:
Ranciere never mentions Derrida’s groundbreaking “grammatology,”
a notion developed as early as the sixties, and he jumps directly from
Plato and Aristotle to readings o f modern literature and film.
The situation is different in English-speaking countries, even though we
have come a long way from the promises o f knowledge-as-power rashly
made by the proponents o f deconstruction to American students at the
time o f its conquest o f campuses. Walter Kirn has documented this
theoretical infatuation in a witty memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy^ in
which he exposes the clangers o f being taught to deconstruct a <fWestern
tradition” he had not yet encountered. Kirn, majoring in English at
Princeton, discovered sexy terms like “invagination” in Derrida’s contri-
bution to Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), a collection o f essays pre­
senting him as the undisputed ringleader o f the uYale school.s, Kirn
explains how he and fellow students would pepper their papers with
terms like “playfulness” and “textuality•” Armed and dangerous, they
would herald the death o f the old world: “before we’d read even
a hundredth o f it，” they knew that the Western canon was “illegitimate,”
that it was a 'Veiled expression o f powerful group interests that it was our
duty to subvert/57 The idea o f deconstructing an entire corpus o f culture
proved irresistible to students, but they were given tools to dismantle
a liistory o f metaphysics that they had not begun to read.
Fhese heady days are over; given solid academic relays, serious and
systematic studies have begun. Most o f the editors o f Derrida's posthu­
mous seminars are located on the North American continent. Even if his
complex analyses tend to be reduced to a few canonical essays dating from
ll\c early sixties, Derrida is still taught regularly in classes on literary theory.
However, the answer to Kirn5s quandary does not lie in forcing todays
Mudcnts to absorb a huge philosophical culture in which one will find
Plato, Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Levinas, all important refer­
ences if one wishes to make full sense o f Derrida, however requiring
u lifetime o f investment. The aim o f this book is to help students in the
humanities who want to discover Derrida after Derrida, that is Derrida
now, so as to absorb the power and purchase o f his analyses o f literature
and philosophy. Our ambition is to guide readers to the main issues o f

Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy： The Undereducation o f an Overachiever (N ew York: Doubleday,
J(H>9), ui,
4 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

deconstruction by combining approaches and juxtaposing types o f com­

petence: the authority o f seasoned specialists who have worked directly
with Derrida and the innovative work by younger scholars who testify that
Derridas ideas are still alive today. This is obvious in countries like Brazil,
Mexico, China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, where Derrida s ideas
have enjoyed a renewed visibility and vibranq^ recently. This late flowering
has to do with the emergence o f a global culture unified by the techne o f
writing as developed by electronic media, even if Derrida never ceased
deconstructing globalization and stressed the need to rethink the nature o f
archives and documents, as Maurizio Ferraris shows in this collection.
There are excellent introductions to Derrida in the English language.8
These guides help students and first readers to orient themselves when
confronting the mass o f essays, books, and posthumous seminars written
by Derrida. At times, the impact o f deconstruction on scholarship, speci­
fically in literary and visual studies, has been made legible by focusing on
a single author or theme. Moreover, we now have a reliable biography, an
excellent book that reads like a novel: it gives voice to Derrida by quoting
numerous letters, drafts, unpublished texts, and personal testimonies.
Benoit Peeters^ biography9 allows us to reconsider Derrida^ oeuvre in
light o f his personality. In Peeters^ account, Derrida appears driven,
tormented, excessive, impassioned, a true Romantic, a Byron o f philoso­
phy much more than a famous academic. Peeters makes us want to know
more about Derrida's secrets; often his theoretical archive overlapped with
his private life; theoretical positions and political commitments were
intermingled.
A spate o f books in English written by friends and disciples wishing to
honor Derrida^ memory, monographs by Nicholas Royle, Peggy Kamuf,
Derek Attridge, and Geoffrey Bennington,10 all memorialize a beloved
mentor. These disciples disseminate his teachings while refusing to
“mourn” his untimely disappearance. Their books say important things
about aspects o f Derridas theories while hesitating between the status of
personal memoirs and textual exegesis. They sublimate the pathos o f

8 See, for instance, Leslie Hill's lucid and condensed book The Cam bridge Introduction to Jacques
D errida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Claire Colebrook^ useful collection
o f annotated Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2015).
9 Benoit Peeters, D errida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).
10 Nicholas Royle, In M emory o f Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009);
Peggy Kamuf, To Follow : The Wake o f facques D errida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010); Geoffrey Bennington, N o t H a lf N o E n d : M ilitantly M elancholic Essays in M em ory o f Jacques
D errida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Derek Attridge, Reading a n d Responsibility:
Deconstruction^ Traces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
 Introduction 5
personal loss by developing the legacy o f deconstruction. Other approaches
consist in interpretations o f Derrida’s philosophy by authors who were not
close to Derrida and therefore wanted to rethink his concepts and methods
in their own vocabulary. They were eager to avoid mimicking Derrida's
idiosyncratic style and autobiographical mode. Thus Peter Sloterdijk5s
Derrida, an Egyptian1 and Alain Badiou's homage in Pocket Pantheon^
are typical. Sloterdijk compares Derrida with Sigmund Freud, Franz
Borkenau, and Niklas Luhmann before identifying a central metaphor in
his oeuvre, the inverted Egyptian pyramid. Badiou insists on the politics at
work in deconstruction. For him, Derrida was a wman o f peace5' intent
upon destroying all dichotomies, whether philosophical, like Being and
being, racial, like Jew versus Arab, or political, like democracy versus
totalitarianism. Key in Derrida’s thinking would be the “indistinction”
o f distinction, another variation on the undecidable.
A similar effort at recapturing Derrida5s thought has been evinced by
Martin Hagglund in his book on Radical Atheism ^ Hagglund unifies
apparently disjointed or divergent problematics by rejecting the cliche
that Derrida moved from a playful and Nietzschean critique o f founda­
tions to serious, ethical, or even religious concerns for alterity, justice, and
messianicity. Going back to the concept o f “writing” containing the idea o f
trace and deferral, the complex notion o f differance understood as temporal
and spatial distance, Hagglund presents the logic o f survival as the keystone
o f deconstruction. On this account, there is only one Derrida, from his first
essays to the moving last interview in which the philosopher talks about his
impending demise with Jean Birnbaum in 2004.14 Here we find a thinker
o f radical finitude and the true heir o f Heidegger, not a Levinas in disguise.
A third group o f authors working with Derrida tends to function
dialogically by pursuing a dialogue between his work and other thinkers.
To take one example among many, in a collection edited by John Sallis
entitled Deconstruction and Philosophy^ Derrida is paired with Hegel,
Heidegger, Kant, and Husserl. He is contextualized within the discourses
o f metaphysics or ethics. Leonard Lawlor has examined DerridaJs critique

" Peter Sloterdijk, D erriday an Egyptian (London: Polity, 2009).

'* Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures o f Postwar Philosophy, trans. D avid M acey (London: Verso,
2009), 125-4 4 .
' ' Martin Hagglund, RadicalAtheism : D errida an d the Tim e o f Life (Stanford, C A : Stanford University
Press, 2008). He applies the logic o f survival to modernist literature in D ying fo r Tim e: Proust, Woolf,
Nabokov (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 2012).
S tr Jacques Derrida, Learning to L ive Finally, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and M ichel Naas
(hrooklyn, N Y : Melville House, 2007).
*' hreottstnu tion and Philosophy, a l. |olm Sallis (Chicago: C h ic ^ o University Press, 1987).
6 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

o f phenomenology in Derrida and Husserl.16 Raoul Moati reopens the

dialogue between Derrida and Austin in Derrida/Searley Deconstruction
and Ordinary Language.17 In this book, Moati does not bring his personal
testimony but displays the probity o f an impartial investigator. This was
a prerequisite, given the fact that the ground had been mined by the
copious exchanges o f insults between Searle and Derrida. Moati highlights
Derrida^ blind spots as much as Searle's dead ends. He insists on Derridas
dependence upon “metaphysicaT models that he then dismantled, while
pointing out Searle^ dangerous rejection o f the unconscious and o f fiction.
A Companion to Derrida, a huge collection o f essays o f more than 600
pages, confronts Derrida with major themes like Truth, Difference, the
Transcendental, Messianicity, and the Law, but strangely enough never
once quotes Maurice Blanchot and has comparatively few pages discussing
literature.18 After Derrida offers similarly contextualizing rereadings while
asking more pointedly about the visibility and productivity o f Derrida^
legacy. The focus will be on literary studies, which includes the varied
discourses o f Theory, and a retrospective and prospective survey aimed at
capturing the various strands o f Derrida’s polyphonic corpus and assessing
his influence in the humanities.
To begin historically, one needs to go back to 1967, when a triple
deflagration shook the French world o f letters and philosophy: the almost
simultaneous publication o i O f Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and
The Voice and Phenomena. No one who was a student at the time can forget
the shock. It has been evoked with verve by Emmanuel Levinas, who
compared the effect o f deconstruction to the sudden void in political
power that the French experienced during the exodus following the
German armys victory in 1940:
At the beginning, everything is in place, and after a few pages or paragraphs,
under the impact of a terrifying questioning, nothing remain[s] as
a habitable site for thought. Here was, besides the philosophical meaning
of the propositions, a purely literary effect, the new frisson, the poetry of
Jacques Derrida. When reading him I see again the Exodus of 1940.
The retreating military unit reaches a city that has no inkling of what is

16 Leonard Lawlor, D errida and Husserl: The Basic Problem o f Phenomenobgy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002).
17 See Raoul Moati, Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction an d Ordinary Language (N ew York: Colum bia
University Press, 2014). French version published by Presses Universitaires de France, 2009.
18 Sec Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor, eds.,^4 Companion to D errida (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2014). T he exceptions are Nicholas Royle^ "Poetry, Animality, Derrida" (see pages 524 -36 ), in
which D . H . Lawrence serves as a literary example, and Andrew Benjam ins ^Art's W ork: Derrida
and Artaud and Atlan,w with four excellent pages on Antonin Artaud (set* pages 398-40 2).
 Introduction 7
happening, where cafes are still open, where society ladies still go to
^Novelty fashion stores/' where hairdressers cut hair, bakers bake, where
viscounts meet other viscounts and exchange stories about viscounts, and
one hour later, everything is empty, desolate, houses closed or abandoned,
left with open doors, suddenly devoid of all inhabitants.19
This historical analogy dramatizes the moment when Derrida^ ques­
tions seemed if not to destroy then at least to suspend skeptically the
foundation o f all foundations, our innate and obdurate belief in “self-
presence.” Such a belief manifests itself whenever we imagine our con­
sciousness as the ability to speak to ourselves without any mediation.
At this crucial point, Derrida inserts the gap o f writing, o f traces, o f
a host o f spatiotemporal differences. Quite symptomatically, Levinas
talks here o f a “purely literary effect” and mentions the “poetry” o f
Derrida5s thought, which betrays some impatience, if not a lingering
resentment. Levinas insinuates that he, at any rate, will not mix philosophy
with literature. Most philosophers o f language from the Anglo-American
schools tend to agree with Levinas on this point. These are some o f the
questions that we want to revisit half a century after the sudden shock o f
the Blitzkrieg waged by Derrida.
There is a danger in winning a war too rapidly, as the US Army
discovered after its first campaign in Iraq. Derrida^ sudden victory in
major American departments o f comparative literature was followed by
entrenched resistance and then by the opening o f other theaters o f opera­
tions. One o f these, surprisingly, was the return o f the signifier o f udecon-
structionMin unexpected political areas; thus Stephen K. Bannon, once the
mastermind behind President Trum ps populist ideology during his con­
tested election, could say on Thursday, February 23, 2017, that his program
was a ''deconstruction o f the administrative state.,,2° O f course, Bannon
meant by this a systematic dismantling o f the system erected by Obama,
but the term appears as a dubious symptom o f the times; at least, one
currently shared caveat is that one should not talk about destruction but o f
deconstruction. Could this be Derrida's Pyrrhic victory?
Whatever we can say about these political issues, the truth is that some
fifty years later we still have to learn from deconstruction, for it still holds
a few surprises in reserve. In order to prove that we should keep on learning
from Derrida’s deconstruction, and from a deconstruction that has

,y Kmmanucl Levinas, wJ ac£?ues Derrida,Min Nom s Propres (Paris：

Fata Morgana, 1976), 82.
J<, See Max Fisher, "Bannon's Vision for a 'Deconstruction o f the Administrative State,5,5 N ew York
Times, I;cb. 25, 2017.
8 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

nothing to do with a conservative debunking o f state regulations or an

administration deemed too powerful, we need to examine Derrida5s texts
closely, so as to understand how they combine, to quote Walter Benjamin,
the constructive and the destructive, and make us survey a broader philo­
sophical tradition leading to the ethical and political issues o f a democracy
still to come.

If we agree that there can be no easy way o f summarizing the main concepts
that would underpin a philosophy o f the text identified with adeconstruc-
tion,,>this comes from the fact that deconstruction should be apprehended
first by its framing effects, that is by considering the general questions it
poses, then by its style, not only Derridas idiosyncratic style but also the
style o f other investigations looking closely at certain texts, and finally by
posing the question o f its futurity - a future often thematized in advance
given an almost obsessive concern with issues o f historicity and globality, in
texts that move from the biology o f bodies that have been affected by
allergies to the Other to patterns o f auto-immunization often discussed by
the later Derrida, always pointing to societal evolutions that usher in
a more and more technological world. Hence the three sections that
organize the presentations o f our authors who all contribute original essays
specially commissioned for this collection.
These authors draw new maps after the dust o f the old wars has settled.
Getting ready for new skirmishes, they recapitulate what has been gained
in order to assess where we stand today. The “Frames” section begins with
essays exploring key theoretical frameworks, the main contexts, discourses,
and critical conversations from which Derridas analyses emerge.
The “Focus” section then pays more attention to certain applications of
deconstruction, mostly in the literary domain. In “Futures,” the contribu-
tors examine Derrida5s influence and its outreach into foreseeable conver­
sations to come, so as to limn new fields impacted by deconstruction like
animal studies, literature and law studies, and world literature and its
interpretive communities, and the digital humanities.
T&e “ Frames” section starts by revisiting the place Derrida occupied in
the history o f French critical thought, a half-century o f rapid advances
underpinned by the evolution o f the concept o f writing launched by
Roland Barthes's groundbreaking 1953 Writing Degree Zero and culminat­
ing with Jacques Ranciere^ 1998 Mute Speech. As I have suggested earlier in
this introduction, this excellent survey o f the evolution o f French literature
from the Romantics (mostly Victor Hugo) to Gustave Flaubert and Marcel
 Introduction 9
Proust was inspired by Derrida’s grammatology.21 If there cannot be
a positive or historical grammatology, nor any continuous genealogy,
writing surfaces as a key question for historicist studies in the field o f
literary studies and digital humanities: writing embodies the rejection o f all
norms and regimes o f expression in the name o f an emerging democracy.
All topics are available to writers suddenly allowed to say anything that
comes to mind. Mute Speech confirms indirectly (because the name o f
Derrida is never mentioned) the return o f the problematic o f “grammatol-
ogy51; its questions turn historical - they are applicable to particular authors
and definable periods — while considering the structural conditions o f
literature in general.
Derrida5s problematic o f writing was honed after reading key literary
texts, from Gide and Mallarme to Joyce and Pound, from Rousseau to
Artaud, Ponge and Celan. Quite early, Joyce was an unexpected source o f
inspiration for Derrida as he struggled with Husserl^ treatment of
writing.22 Then in Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida deconstructed the notion
o f a Joycean acompetence，>and the idea that it could be measured by the
number o f hours spent pondering admittedly intractable texts. Joyce was
the first modernist author to be taken seriously by Derrida as a literary
machine whose force, once unleashed, would disrupt the entire philoso­
phical machine o f phenomenology, and beyond that, o f speculative ideal­
ism. Joyce became the rival o f Husserl as they were momentously paired in
Derrida^s Introduction to HusserFs The Origin o f Geometry. Derrida had
perceived a tension between the transcendental foundation o f subjectivity
attempted by Husserl and the historicism embraced by Joyce in the wake o f
Vico, Hegel, and Marx. If Husserl had defined the role o f tradition and
transmission in the case o f anonymous mathematical or geometrical Kide-
alities,” one would want to know whether this was the case with literary
idealities.
Derrida had caught phenomenology hesitating about literature - this
has remained his point o f departure. Husserl had feared that literature, and
by extension all writing, that is writing as such, might undermine the
possibility o f a foundation, insofar the subjective foundation he was after
ought to be pinned to a living identity o f the self with the self. By slipping
in the issue o f literature, therefore o f cultural traces, and by extension o f

Roland Barthes, W riting Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and C olin Sm ith (N ew York: Noonday
IVcss, 1968) and Jacques Rancicrc, M ute Speech, trans. James Swenson (N ew York: Colum bia
University Press, 2011).
See rhe wliolc file a»ni|iilal !>y Aiulrcw J. Mirchell and Sam Slote, D errida an d Joyce: Texts and
C.onuxts (Alhany: Siati- Univcrsiiv of N rw York Press, 2013).
IO J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

technology, Derrida ushered in a concept o f writing defined as endless

iterability. This is the root o f the complex process o f mediation that he
named differance. The logic o f iterable differences would be allegorized by
Joyce first not just because he was the “most Hegelian o f all writers”
(Hegel5s system would also be afFected by the same logic o f writing, as
Glas demonstrates), but because Finnegans Wake had staged a fierce strug­
gle between rival brothers, Shaun the political orator and Shem the pen­
man, figuring the writer in general. As Lacan did a few years later, Joyce
had turned into a symptomatic allegory o f the letter and literature for
Derrida. In the end, more than an alternative to phenomenology, Joyce's
texts would embody a radical power o f affirmation condensed in Molly
Bloom’s “yes” to love and life.
Beckett pushed further the investigations o f the paradoxes o f speaking-
as-one-lives as opposed to writing-as-one-dies. Even if Derrida never
discussed him directly, he acknowledged their philosophical and literary
proximity.23 However, if one looks at Derrida s discussions o f poetry as
several contributors do in this volume, or at his confrontation with Joyce
and Beckett, one verifies that his practice as a reader could never be reduced
to a program, deconstructive or not. Indeed, if Derrida aimed at decon­
structing those pesky institutions o f knowledge that predetermine our
response to texts and thus prevent the necessary openness to literary
novelty he requires, what he highlighted in Joyce^ texts was their extra­
ordinary power o f affirmation.
If Joyce helped Derrida throw a wrench into the works o f Husserl's
phenomenology, one cannot forget how much deconstruction owes to
Heideggers conflicted relation with his former master Husserl. Heidegger
never used the term o f ‘(deconstruction，” but various usages o f terms like
Z 厶厶沒《 and D 打广rw蚤 anticipate Derrida’s coining. Most commentators
have noted that references to Heidegger are a regular feature in Derridas
essays from the beginning to the end o f his career. It was thus important to
begin this volume with an essay that pays homage to this proximity.
In aThe Instant o f Their Debt: Derrida with Freud and Heidegger in
Greece,MVassiliki Kolocotroni goes back to a scene Freud experienced
when he visited the Acropolis: a sudden moment of derealization, an

In a conversation with Derek Attridge, Derrida acknowledged how close to his position he felt
Beckett to be. See uT his Strange Institution Called Literature: A n Interview with Jacques Derrida,n
in Jacques Dernddiy Acts o f Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London ：Routledge, 1992), 6 0 -6 2. See also
Daniel Katz, Saying I N o M ore: Subjectivity an d Consciousness in the Prose o f Sam uel Beckett
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), and Asja Szafranicc, Beckett, DerricU and the
Event o f Literature (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2007).
 Introduction ii

awareness that the present scene, because it was loaded with too much
expectation, cannot be construed as a present any longer but offers
a baffling example o f originary repetition. Using this shared <<uncanny>，
sense o f place as a point o f departure, Kolocotroni compares the itineraries
o f two similarly belated travelers to Greece, Derrida and Heidegger. Both
Derrida and Heidegger evoke their visits to Athens in terms o f uncanny
anticipation, which leads them to meditate similarly on death, debt, and
memory. Kolocotroni focuses on their parallel accounts o f stays in Greece,
Athens, Still Remains from 1996 and Sojourns from 1962, so as to draw out
the motif o f modernity's errancy and textual debts. Questioning the very
possibility o f return, Heidegger's rumination on Greece suggests deferral as
well as deference in the presence o f empty temples and still inhabited
auratic words. Derrida’s visit to Greece’s “luminous memory” is likewise
preoccupied with language and death. Derrida dwells on what remains as
ruin and residence, while reflecting on photographic stills, images keeping
a testimony o f mourning and (re)collective thinking. Derrida catches
echoes o f these themes in the lives, deaths, and works o f Socrates, Freud,
Heidegger, and Blanchot. Echoing Blanchot^ famous novel, Derrida will
be seen composing a “death sentence” o f his own. Kolocotroni evokes
Blanchot’s autobiographical text, “The Instant o f M y Death,” abundantly
commented by Derrida, to suggest that creativity implies a debt to death
condensed in the economy o f writing.24
Following from the mention o f Freud, the essay by Andrea Hurst, the
author o f Derrida Vis-h-Vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and
examines Derrida’s contentious and productive interaction
with psychoanalysis. “ Derrida and the Psychoanalysis o f Culture” discusses
and ends up querying Sarah Kofman5s statement that deconstruction
consisted in a ''psychoanalysis o f philosophy,Ma statement Derrida later
rejected in no uncertain terms. Indeed, quite early, Derrida brought issues
o f paternity and Oedipal rivalries to bear on his readings o f Plato and
Hegel; at the same time, he was unforgiving when pointing to the meta­
physical undertones he saw in Freuds texts or in Lacan^ modernized
Hegelianism. One can say that Derrida invented his own variety o f psycho­
analysis when it came to literature. His critique o f Lacan5s concepts such as
the letter, the signifier, and the phallus testify to Kis immersion in
a psychoanalytical discourse. Such critical readings rebounded in the
work o f Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Later, almost

M See Maurice Blanchot, The Instant o f M y Deathl]zc<\nts Derrida, Demeure: Fiction an d Testimony,
trails. I^lizabcth Rottcnbcrg (Sranford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2000).
12 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

posthumously, Derrida made peace with Lacan. What is the place o f

literature, from Poe to Shakespeare, from Mallarm^ to Kafka, in this
protracted controversy? Can a psychoanalytical reading avoid reducing
texts to examples o f preestablished theories, or should one argue that the
unsettling o f the metaphysical tradition belongs both to psychoanalysis
and to deconstruction?
Ginette Michaud5s essay is linked with the preceding one insofar as
Derrida kept stressing the question o f femininity as a problem for psycho­
analysis and for philosophy, which did not prevent him from pointing out
his own difficulties with feminism. In “Derrida and Sexual Difference,”
Michaud reminds us that Derrida had been one o f the philosophers
promoting the question o f sexual difference in philosophy and literature.
Derrida began his inquiry by placing Jean Genet next to Hegel in Glas,
Genet becoming another wsister, o f Hegel in the process. He investigated
the notion o f sex and gender as a category absent from Heidegger5s
philosophy in Geschlecht I and II. Is it possible to think in terms o f gender
what would be a post-Heideggerian phenomenology? Thanks to his life­
long and intimate dialogue with his friend Helene Cixous, Derrida was
made attentive to the issue o f “feminine writing” more than once. From
the many books written in dialogue with Cixous, can one conclude that
Derrida ascribes a specific difference to texts written by women? How can
one call a woman writer like Cixous a “genius”？Derrida’s questions were
posed to the field o f gender studies via the concept o f the “performative,”
and some o f these have been deemed aggressive or offensive; they have had
a lasting impact on the philosophy o f drag and gender performance
developed by Judith Butler. Does deconstruction confirm or invalidate
the concerns o f postfeminist approaches to literature? Ginette Michaud,
one o f the editors o f the Derrida archive, answers those burning questions
in a balanced manner.
A similarly querying question is tackled by Martin McQuillan when he
discusses the conversations, at once cordial and critical, exchanged by
Derrida and Paul de Man. In uDerrida Queries de Man: A Note on the
Materiality o f the Letter versus the Violence o f the Letter/7 McQuillan
examines decades o f friendship between Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man
without dwelling on the “scandal” that accompanied posthumous revela-
tions about the latters politics and private life.25 The controversy all but

See Evelyn Barish's ferocious biography, The Double Life o f P au l de M an (N ew York: W . W . Norton
& Com pany, 2014). D e M an died in 1983. Leaving out most o f the public career o f the famous Yale
professor, this biography only covers the years up to 1962.
 Introduction 13
made deconstruction a liability in American universities. Paul de Man and
Derrida met in 1966 during a famous conference devoted to structuralism
in Baltimore, after which they maintained a productive exchange and
a sincere friendship. However, de Man began by criticizing Derrida's
^blindness55 when reading Rousseau in O f Grammatology. His reading
protocols complicate the strategies deployed by Derrida. For de Man,
any text can appear to be already deconstructing itself, whereas for
Derrida, one needs a philosophical gesture. Martin McQuillan, a reputed
specialist o f both authors, assesses the consequences o f their confrontation.
Taking, like Kolocotroni, a point o f departure in well-known images,
McQuillan uses Mark Tansey5s emblematic painting Derrida Queries de
M an as a starting point. Commenting on Marc Redfield^ discussion in
Theory at Yale, McQuillan unpacks the points o f contact and divergence in
the work o f Derrida and de Man, following their discussions o f Nietzsche
and Rousseau in a series o f texts going from “The Rhetoric o f Blindness” to
Derrida s later essays on his departed friend.
The second section, aFocus,Mpresents a close-up on one central concern
in DerridaJs approach to literature: how can one combine an attentiveness to
the singularity o f a text with the inevitable generality and repetitiveness o f
any method o f reading? In uDerrida as Literary Reader/* Derek Attridge
evokes the crucial role that he himself played when he presented for the first
time the vast array o f concepts and protocols o f reading deployed by Derrida
about literature. In Acts o f Literature, Attridge5s invaluable contribution
segued from his conversations with Derrida to the latter's readings o f various
texts, all exemplifying the need for a radical openness to literature. In this
essay, Attridge starts from a tension between the apparent lack o f limits o f
texts presented by Derrida as being without any 'Outside,55 and the inter­
pretive communities or institutions o f leaning that provide a limiting frame.
If the law o f any text is to question the politics o f interpretation, and beyond
that the political frameworks in which the interpretation takes place, how
can we relate to the singularity o f literary texts and respond adequately?
Alluding to texts by Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ponge, Mallarme, Kafka,
Blanchot, and Celan, Attridge shows that any author s writing can find
a place in an ethical and political context enhancing deconstruction^ main
tenets.
Returning to the question o f the singularity o f literary texts, Joshua
Schuster focuses on the dialogue between Celan and Derrida. In ^Broken
Singularities (Derrida and Celan),>, Schuster pays attention to the wformal
existentialism” o f texts tli:u Derrida presupposes when he reads Celan’s
as a uniquely si"giliar “shibboleth.” Celan presents his poerns as
14 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATF.

philosophical “noems” that are also idiomatic, signed, and irreversibly

historicized performances. Celan^ work is marked by a tension between
dialectical reversals like time and space, the possible and the impossible,
citation and recitation, because one has to combine the logics o f iteration
and irreversible instances never to be repeated. The reader^ task is to
identify points o f no return, singular instants that will not be re-cited.
If literature aims at inscribing singular moments, moments that change the
conditions o f events by undoing themselves, the agency o f texts takes on
the structure o f the trace even when it presents nonreversible and non-
systemizable moments.
Developing themes derived from the crossing paths o f Martin
Heidegger and Paul Celan, Yue Zhuo poses a similar question about the
essence o f poetry. In wDerrida and the Essence o f Poetry,MZhuo argues that
Derrida aimed at defining an essence, the essence o f poetry, by moving
from readings o f poets like Antonin Artaud and Paul Valery to an engage­
ment with the signatures o f poets like Paul Celan and Francis Ponge.
The starting point will be Derrida’s surprising account o f the “thing” we
call poetry. In MChe cosa e la poesia?，> Derrida implicitly dialogued with
Heideggers conception o f poetry before developing his own myth: poetry
is seen as a little hedgehog, an animal lying on the side o f the road;
moreover, poetry is defined as a text requesting to be learned by heart.
How can one reconcile this statement with the problematic o f writing that
dominated in Derrida^ earlier texts? How can Derrida point to the uheart，>
as the organ o f poetry? In order to analyze his statements about poetry,
Zhuo discusses first how Paul de Man negotiated between Hegel,
Holderlin, and Heidegger before presenting Derrida^s readings o f Celan
and then o f Paul Valery, Francis Ponge, and Antonin Artaud. Another
French poet, Stephane Mallarme, provides the opportunity for a last
dialogue, the contentious conversation between Derrida and Alain
Badiou. Laurent Milesi tackles their interaction in aFrom Mallarme to
the Event: Badiou after Derrida.” The writings o f Mallarme durably
inspired both philosophers. I f Badiou’s Platonician foundationalism
clashes with Derrida's anti-foundationalism, both engage with the poetry
o f Mallarme in order to posit an “experience o f the impossible.” This
experience ushers in the notion o f an event to which any subject will be
connected by an inner necessity, whether it be an ethical responsibility or
a fidelity to a truth that has brought something radically new. Milesi
highlights points o f convergence and divergence: if both philosophers
adhere to diverging concepts o f the trace， Badiou appropriated Derrida’s
concept o f dissemination while Derrida used Badiou's idea o f subtraction.
 Introduction 15
Their dialogue took a more positive turn after 2000, when both thinkers
were united by a common concern for the experience o f the event as both
undecidable and impossible, which led them to dismantle generalities and
posit teeming irreducible singularities.
The third section, “Futures,” discusses topics that point to an elsewhere，
to other domains deconstruction has opened up. One o f these is what is
currently called animal studies. For Derrida, the animal poses a decisive
question that is also the issue o f the language we use. Taking the coining o f
ilanim of as a point o f departure, Jane Goldman starts from Derrida^
posthumous book The Anim al That Therefore I Am to investigate the
contested divide between humans and animals. Derrida was instrumental
in launching animal studies in the literary field given a relentless criticism
o f all previous writers who had discussed animals, but when he reviewed
and attacked canonical analyses o f animality presented by Heidegger,
Lacan, Levinas, and Agamben, he found his strongest allies among poets.
How does Derrida allow us to read the animal in literature? Goldman
tackles this question, already broached in the collection The Anim al
Question in Deconstruction (2013), by adducing examples from authors
like Daniel Defoe, Paul Celan, and Virginia Woolf. Against Robinson
Crusoe^ dog introduced in the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign^ against
Emmanuel Levinas^ Kantian dog critically discussed in The Anim al That
Therefore I Am - unlike Virginia Woolf, a modernist writer who had found
an original strategy to give voice to Flush, a cocker spaniel - Derrida chose
to follow his unnamed female cat, even if this meant doggedly questioning
the limit separating humans from animals.
It is to a similar expansion o f deconstruction that Jen Hui Bon Hoa
invites us. In ''Deconstruction, Collectivity, and World Literature,5, she
interrogates a wider community o f readers. Derrida has observed that while
no text can escape the regulatory regimes o f genre, such a participation in
genres never amounts to a belonging. Can one extrapolate a principle o f
non-identitarian community from Derrida’s concept o f participation
without belonging? Derrida shows that texts are always already enmeshed
in identity politics relying on communities o f genre while not completely
identified with them. In a famous 1983 essay on ^inoperative commu­
nities,^ Jean-Luc Nancy had privileged indetermination facing genres;
however, this position bars him from addressing sociohistorical particular­
ity, a tendency that becomes more marked in Giorgio Agamben^ theories
of community. Derrida indicates a solution by positing not an originary
itidetermination but the proliferation o f determinations. These principles
t)l community are brought to bear on concepts o f cosmopolitanism and
l6 J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

translation as they have been used in debates on world literature with

Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Ranciere, and Emily Apter. Here,
examples like Virginia W oolfs A Room o f One's Own and Viet Thanh
Nguyen^ 2015 novel The Sympathizer are used to verify the relevance of
Derrida's view that the premise o f originary dispossession is the founding
condition o f politics today and in the future.
Another topic that forces us to pose the question o f the future is the
couple formed by deconstruction and justice. In ''Literature Calls Justice:
Deconstruction^ <Coming-to-Terms， with Literature,n Elisabeth Weber
examines Derrida’s famous statement that justice is the only concept that
cannot be deconstructed. In the last decade o f his career, Derrida devel­
oped the notion o f a ^democracy to come55and criticized the death penalty
and the politics o f apartheid. The most influential book o f this period was
no doubt Specters o f Marx, which Weber unpacks here by looking at Toni
Morrison^ Beloved and Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to open vast file of
the intersections between Marxism and deconstruction, and also between
literature and the law. What have been the ideological consequences of
slavery in American culture? Can the Shakespearean motto o f athe time is
out o f joint55 be used to understand the legacy o f Marxism today? Can we
forget that the United States has condoned the usage o f torture for prison­
ers suspected o f terrorism and wages war in several countries using drones
to kill unseen enemies? Weber explores how literature and critical theory
contribute to a better understanding o f trauma, o f human rights and their
violations. Derrida incites us to reflect on concepts whose borders have
become uncertain, like “the human,” “ rights,” and “democracy.” Such
burning issues have often been tackled better by novelists than by ethicists
and philosophers —however, they all appeal to a concept o f justice, at least
when they envision the future.
The future is also a central concern for Maurizio Ferraris, a specialist of
the technology o f the archive. In uThe Documental Revolution and the
Archives o f the Future,55 Ferraris points out links between Derrida5s phi­
losophy o f writing and recent developments o f our culture characterized by
an explosion o f archives, records, and memory machines o f all types. When
we witness the uprogress5> o f a technology that keeps producing cheaper,
simpler, and more lasting ways o f keeping traces o f our existences, it all
looks like an extension o f a Derridean dream - or nightmare, perhaps.
I f one essential feature o f human nature is a dependence on writing and
memory, does this change when we are bombarded with electronic docu­
ments? What happens to a science o f literature when its very object, the
literary text, is regulated by technologies o f the archive like hypertexts,
 Introduction 17
e-books, the Web, YouTube, electronic blackboards, computers, data­
banks, etc.? Our life as humans living in society cannot subsist without
such inscriptions. Records are central to our lives; literature, with its rich
traditions, belongs to these testimonies. However, our society o f commu­
nication has turned into a society o f recording. Recordings are constructed
social objects; inscriptions overflow our world and rule our lives.
Technological innovation arrives so fast that the concept o f the archive
has been radically transformed. Maurizio Ferraris explores the conse­
quences o f Derrida's concept o f the archive from the groundbreaking
JrrAzVf the overarching principle o f “documentality.”
The writings o f Derrida provide a sustained meditation on writing,
traces, and archives thanks to which we can begin to think our historical
moment marked by new digital humanities, which appear as ways o f
quantifying the overabundant data that inundate our lives; these devices
and machines manifest the emergence o f a new, perhaps monstrous or
dangerous, future; but as Holderlin said o f the gods and Heidegger o f
technology, where there is danger, there we can find a saving grace.

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Baring, Edward. The YoungDerrida and French Philosophy, ip4^~ip68. Cambridge:
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Barish, Evelyn. The Double Life o f Paul de Man. New York: W. W. Norton &C
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Barthes, Roland. WWrtwg 從 Z^r久 丁 ranslated by Annette Lavers and

Colin Smith. New York: Noonday Press, 1968.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and
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Hlanchot, Maurice, and Jacques Derrida. The Instant o f My Death/Demeure:
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Stanford University Press, 2000.
Clolcbrook, Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, London: Routledge, 2015.
( ]〇 mpagnon, Antoine. Literature, Theory and Common Sense. Translated by
Carol Cosman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
I )crriila, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Translated by Cecile Lindsay et al.
New York: Columbia lJnivc*rsity Press, 1989.
l8 J E A N - M I C H E L RAHATH

KThis Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques

Derrida/* In Acts o f Literature. Edited by Derek Attridgc, 60-62. London:
Routledge, 1992.
On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA:
University of Stanford Press, 2005.
Learning to Live Finally. Translated by Pascale-Annc Brault and Michel Naas.
Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2007.
Penser a ne pas voir: Ecrits sur les arts du visible, ipy^—2004. Edited by
Ginette Michaud et al. Paris: Editions de la Difference, 2013.
Direk, Zeynep, and Leonard Lawlor, eds. A Companion to Derrida. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Fisher, Max. ^Bannon^ Vision for a 'Deconstruction of the Administrative
State.,wNew York TimeSy Feb. 25, 2017.
H gghxnd， M nin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time o f Life. Stdinfoii CIA，.
》 沒 ，

Stanford University Press, 2008.

Dyingfor Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012.
Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Kamuf, Peggy. To Follow: The Wake o f Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010.
Katz, Daniel. Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of
Samuel Beckett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Kirn, Walter. Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation o f an Overachiever,
New York: Doubleday, 2009.
Lawlor, Leonard. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem o f Phenomenology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, zo〇2.
Levinas, Emmanuel. aJacques Derrida/' In Noms Propres, 81-89. Paris: Fata
Morgana, 1976.
Mitchell, Andrew J., and Same Slote. Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.
Moati, Raoul. Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction and Ordinary Language. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014.
Peeters, Benoit. Derrida: A Biography. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge:
Polity, 2013.
Ranciere, Jacques. Mute Speech> Translated by James Swenson. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011.
Royle, Nicholas. In Memory o f Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2009.
Sallis, John, ed. Deconstruction and Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press3
1987.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Derrida, an Egyptian. London: Polity, 2009.
Szafraniec, Asja. Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007.
PART I

Frames
 CHAPTKR 1

The Instant o f Their Debt

D errida w ith Freu d an d Heidegger in Greece
Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida both speak o f their trips to

Greece as eagerly anticipated but delayed. Both admit to a reluctance to
take the step; Heidegger records ua long hesitation due to the fear o f
disappointment”：
[T]he Greece of today could prevent the Greece of antiquity, and what was
proper [Eigenem] to it, from coming to light. But also a hesitation that stems
from the doubts that the thought dedicated to the land of the flown gods
was nothing but a mere invention and thus the way of thinking [Denkwe^
might be proved to be an errant way [Irrwe^.1
Derrida too reflects on a similar motif: “This was my third stay in Greece.
Barely stays, regrettably， more like visits, multiple，fleeting, and all too late.
Why so late? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to
Greece? So late in iife?>,2 This is o f course partly a commonplace, quite
literally a topos, a well-trodden rhetorical path in its own right, the
traveler^ signature nod to a weak sublime: one always arrives in Greece
too late —witness Virginia W oolf s diary entry while there in 1906:
Once again, the Ancient Greek had the best of it: we were very belated
wayfarers: the shrines are fallen, & the oracles are dumb. You have the
feeling very often in Greece, that the pageant has passed long ago, & you are
come too late, & it matters very little what you think or feel. The modern
Greece is so flimsy and fragile, that it goes to pieces when it is confronted
with the roughest fragment of the old.3
Two years earlier, in 1904, Freud experienced a disturbing sense o f
incredulity (or “derealization,” as he put it in his retrospective rendition

, Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Albany:
State University o f N ew York Press, 2005), 4 -5.
1 latqucs Derrida, Athens, S till Remains: The Photographs o f Jean-Frangois Bonhomme, trans.
A n ik* Brault and Michael Naas (N ew York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17.
* Virginia W oolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 189 7-19 0 9, ed. Mitchell A . Leaska
(l om lon: Hogarth Press, 1990). 3M-

ZI
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing
learning, and stimulating progress, with the same unflinching
constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most
skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most
profound philosophers; while they were only second to the moderns
in the cultivation of natural science, they were also the chief
256
interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”
In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how
beneficial has, since their emancipation, been the activity of the
Jews in other than financial departments. In face of these facts how
ineffably ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the
Coheleth type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas
the soul of the Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-
sufficient pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and
Idealist intellect is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or
power.” The remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are
concerned. But, unless the writer means to make the astounding
assertion that, other conditions being identical, the one type is
peculiar to the Jews, and the other to the Christians—that the
ordinary Jew is born a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an
Idealist,—his statement is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless
when he proceeds to emphasise the “compact organisation” of
Jewish, as contrasted with the “loose texture” of Christian society,
and to proclaim that “in this respect the Gentile, instead of starting
257
fair, is handicapped in the race.” The only logical inference to be
drawn from these premisses is that the balance must be redressed
by oppressing the Jew. But the author shrinks from drawing that
inference. Mediaeval and Continental anti-Semites have been more
consistent and courageous.
Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the
bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The
English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary
theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee
against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance
is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and
mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.
The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and
Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more
industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more
temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The
danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the
English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the
Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer
channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared,
the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new
crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of
Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations
exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from
becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that
object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression
who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn
their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted;
but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in
countries less populous than England and more suitable for
colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations
addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers
abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market,
258
efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration. But
these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the
interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while,
has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the
nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth,
our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness.
We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy
appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it
not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great,
none of the banners are new.
First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as
valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy
descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if
he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past
remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of
familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?
“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have
the law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way.
Although they have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth,
because Jesus is the Truth and Life!” and after several sentences
rich in emphasis, fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old
conclusion: “adoption and true spiritual life there is none, where
Christ has not kindled it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless
Israel, shows this to the whole world. Notwithstanding the great
activity and energy of the religious life of the Jews, they have—we
say it with great sorrow—no life indeed—what they have is all carnal
—and this accounts for the phenomenon that they have not been of
much spiritual use to the world since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone
259
will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.”
So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is
as great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs
us with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly
preparing the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my
good friend, it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true
spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very
pleasant to point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very
well to prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a
blessing to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is
so? This ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of
centuries, has lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and
survived so much, is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments?
Or would you advise us to bid the Jew once more choose between
baptism and the stake? This argument also has been tried and found
inadequate. Convert the Jews! You might as hopefully attempt to
convert the Pyramids.
Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot—a student of
statistics, sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones
of sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the
fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer,
and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the
press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the
substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have
formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who
have made the Empire”—if these dire calamities are to be averted,
England must “abandon her secular practice of complacent
acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these
shores.” Should nothing be done to check the evil, there is bound to
ensue an outbreak against the race “the members of which are
260
always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption.”
The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author
had any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen
that Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have
summoned to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things
differ as widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British
Empire were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an
empire. Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to
an unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good—the author does not
state whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race
as one “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in
the land of their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.
The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much
spiritual use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement,
because it is impossible to know the particular meaning which the
prophet attaches to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable.
The patriot, however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of
“material aims,” and thereby convicts himself either of gross
ignorance or of deliberate distortion of facts. What the world of
thought owes to the Jews has already been described with a fulness
of detail which will probably appear superfluous to most educated
people. As regards the assertion that the Jew still looks upon himself
as one in exile and a stranger in a foreign land, we propose to deal
with it when we come to consider the attitude of the Jews towards
the Zionist movement. Here it is sufficient to point out that the term
“Jew” is far too wide to warrant any sweeping generalisation. There
are Jews and Jews, just as there are Christians and Christians.
History abundantly proves that the Jew in the past retained most of
his clannishness where he was most grievously oppressed. As to
modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn there has set
in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and confident
pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice an
adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for such
a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question,
“Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of
modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the
French in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the
Austrians in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866,
with the Germans against the French and the French against the
Germans in 1870, with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877?
Or can man express his devotion to his country in a more
unambiguous manner than by dying for it? Unless, indeed, the
perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by some ulterior motive.
But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay
wrote: “If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is
because she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has
ceased to treat the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s
change of attitude towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude
towards England? On Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts
attended a special service, at the Central Synagogue in Great
Portland Street, held for Jewish members of the regular and auxiliary
forces who fell in South Africa fighting for England. The day was well
chosen; for on the same day is performed the annual celebration in
remembrance of the warlike exploits of the Maccabees—a
coincidence which disproves in a practical manner the dogmatic
generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong to two nations,” and
which shows that the English Jew, at all events, can be both a
Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of the past
and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers in whose
memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force counting
more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part in the
war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider that
the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not exceed
 261
180,000, and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The Jew
has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian
sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to
join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides
life—something that he holds higher than life—some of his religion,
and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and
the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon
Singer, maintained that duty to England justified and even
consecrated this sacrifice.
Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary
instance. For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been
associated with a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and
Auxiliary Forces. On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen,
to whose initiative the custom is due, inaugurated the second
decade of these celebrations at the New West-end synagogue in the
presence of 38 officers and 167 men, and also a number of new
Jewish officers, including a Major-General and a General. The
preacher dwelt on the promptitude with which Jewish Britons
responded to the call during the last war. He referred to the 127
Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag they all honoured and
loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to the pride and joy
wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing in the voluntary
burden of their common country’s defence,” they sought to endow a
trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the great annual
meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might stimulate
others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the military use
of that weapon which might at any moment again be required to
262
protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.” The truth is
that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the
composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s
development sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude
loyalty to one’s country, any more than loyalty to one’s country
prevents hatred of one’s co-religionists in other countries.
The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern
Europe has kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural,
great numbers of the hunted race turned to England as to the one
European country where liberty has not yet been seriously
endangered by the revival of intolerance. But the welcome which
they met with in this sanctuary of freedom has not been unanimous.
The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed, has roused considerable
anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We are told by the
melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular
263
publication, that it is a menace to the nation, that “British right of
asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to the
immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted to
reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right in
“permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to
contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of
existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable
aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these
aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would
cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a
movement for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems
to lurk in some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish
race as a whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The
melancholic patriot opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who
settle in England are almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is
therefore impossible to discuss the question of foreign immigration
without raising the Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the
mask, he proceeds to give utterance to candid and undisguised anti-
Semitism:
“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by
intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis,
or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors
refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The
matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being not
new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have
been the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not
formed a “peculiar people” they would not have been made the
milch-cows and the scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But
it can also be shown that at the present day this is only partially true
in the countries which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is
estimated that there occur far more marriages in England between
Jews and Christians than between Protestants and Catholics. By the
Jewish law marriage between a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly
lawful. The barrier is thus, after all, one of religion rather than of
race. Naturally an inclination towards such intermarriage would not
prevail on either side except in comparatively rare cases. Yet the
strange fact remains that such mixed marriages are at least as
common in the lower as in the upper classes of Jewish society.
Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains
its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern
statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion?
Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them,
is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying
with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far more
effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a people
apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already
been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.
The oracle supplies us with seven reasons—mystic and ominous
number—why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and
Poland is a national evil.”
1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are
unduly addicted to the calling of usury.”
2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is
“not to determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the
survival of the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”
3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to
sustain the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”
4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of
unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing
question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”
5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled
labourers.”
6. “They raise rent.”
 7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”
The usury charge has been answered by experience and
Economic Science ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the
discussion quite a fresh element when he describes the Jewish
immigrants as paupers and, in the same breath, as usurers. He does
not deign to explain how men who, as he later asserts, are induced
to leave their homes by destitution and are drawn to London by the
“magnetism” of the Jewish charities, how these penniless beggars
can “adopt money-lending as a means of livelihood.” If they are
paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if they are money-
lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at the same
time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.
As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which
legislation, if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less
drastic remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The
remaining reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their
logical dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the
Jew, because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we,
and can live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the
purposes of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we.
He is too formidable a rival.
But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal
variance. Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish
immigrant’s success as due to his lower standard of living and
greater capacity for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as
though one were to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the
worse did most work and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the
true reason of the displacement of the English craftsman, not in the
“alleged frugality of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do
more for his money,” but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief
... which makes rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.”
As an instance, he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the
Jews’ Free School in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a
charitable Hebrew family. The writer, though apparently resenting
even competition in philanthropy as something monstrous and
dishonest, yet is charitable enough to admit that “it may be good, it
 264
may be bad; fair or unfair to other schools.” One would think that
schools were shops competing with one another as to which of them
will attract the greatest number of customers and not disinterested
institutions for the education of the community. Furthermore, one
would think that the fact quoted alone ought to move good Christians
to an emulation of the Jewish rival and thank him for the example of
beneficence which he sets them, instead of turning that very
example into a new reproach and adducing it as a reason for
excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think that, instead
of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate co-religionists, a
true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to assist his own. But
what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We let our own
unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor
unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as
its logic.
The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the
present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on
Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as
Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks,
and Italians. The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the
Greeks of keeping their shops open later than the natives, the
Italians of sending large sums of money (their hardly earned
savings) out of the Colony to their homes. A writer commenting on
this report sensibly remarks: “Against stupidity of this sort argument
265
fights in vain.” And his opinion will be shared by most sane people
in England. Yet many of these people will probably be ready to
approve the exclusion of the Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what
is rightly condemned as stupid intolerance in one country can hardly
be justified as enlightened statesmanship in another.
Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and
clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the
Scotch competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate
to the South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding
together” and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the
world, and were denounced for pushing one another on. The
clamour has passed away, and no sober Englishman of to-day would
dream of reviving it. Patriotic bigots in those days advised the
exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,” and had a goodly following
among people who, having failed in life themselves, could not forgive
the foreigner his success. “But,” as a writer on the subject pertinently
asks, “would it have been well for England, even in a purely
commercial point of view, if the Scotch had been legally excluded?
Have not her children reaped benefits from the labours of those
266
whom their forefathers desired to forbid the country?”
To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly
invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and
contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish
millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes
the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an
extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact
moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant
race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art
of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an
artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic
predominance” has been promoted by—O ye shades of King John
and Torquemada—“the mild spirit of Christianity!”
To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely
ludicrous: “Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be
the subject of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded
Englishmen.” Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very
distant when the King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish
financier,” “is the guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest
horror of all, “in the published names of the dinner party on the first
night every one was a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the
exception of the King’s aide-de-camp and the Portuguese
Minister”—the latter, if not a Jew, an alien!
The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of
Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien
influence. There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the
effect that wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed
the King of England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the
duty of the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the
toils of the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there
is the less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at
Court. No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without
anxiety the gradual disappearance of the old families and the
ascendancy of the smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led
captains what remains of English society. The efficiency of the British
nation requires the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic,
element in it. It is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-
lenders from Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly
ominous reminder: “In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”
Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these
lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all
the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust
of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or
humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair
specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent,
though still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the
subject will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the
Russian Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments,
sentiments and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this
lugubrious production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than
a literary curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance
in itself, yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current,
this product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign
of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal
enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor
Jewish immigrants—their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice
—and to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which
impels these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings
in prayer and in the study of the Book which has been the only
source of comfort to millions of their people for the last twenty
267
centuries and to millions of our own for more than half that time.
From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document,
even more valuable, because more candid, than a less crude
performance would have been. It forms a hyphen of connection
between pure anti-Semitism—a small matter in England as yet—and
another tendency entirely different in origin, far more widely spread,
and shared by persons who, in other respects, have little in common
with the provincial patriot. This is the tendency towards a reaction of
which the anti-alien agitation is one symptom, and the clamour for
protection another; both pointing to a change of sentiment in favour
of the political ideals fashionable before the reign of Queen Victoria.
Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory
country. The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the
assumption—no doubt largely justified in those days—that the many
were not fit to rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was
virtually a family heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and
favouritism controlled the army and the navy. The whole of English
public life—civil, religious, and military—was under the sway of an
oligarchy, and fair competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign
of Protection in the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the
awakening of the masses—an awakening the first token of which
had already appeared in the transference of a literary man’s homage
from a noble patron to the general public—and gradually the
lethargic acquiescence in the decrees of an aristocratic Providence
was supplanted by healthy discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow
evolution was the series of reforms which, by transferring to public
opinion the power which was formerly vested in a privileged class,
turned England from a pure aristocracy into a moderate kind of
democracy. The rotten boroughs were swept out of existence, and,
by the removal of religious disabilities, the English Parliament and
the English Universities became truly representative institutions.
Along with these changes came the demand for free competition in
another sphere—commerce—and the agitation resulted in the repeal
of the Corn Laws. In every department of life the individual claimed
and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and action. Laissez-faire
became the motto of the Victorian era, and the free international
exchange of goods promised at last to realise the ideals of
international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth century
had preached but proved unable to practise.
 We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It
looks as though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus
far has spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The
House of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives,
but it has lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the
respect which was once paid to it. Laissez-faire is only mentioned to
be derided, the principle of free competition is openly assailed,
internationalism is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to
humanity as proofs of morbid sentimentality; while protection is
confidently advocated in commerce and industry. How has this
change of sentiment come about? One of its causes may be found in
the growth of the Imperial idea. The history of all nations shows that
national expansion, though often achieved by individual enterprise,
can only be maintained by organised effort, by concentration of
power in a few hands, and by a proportionate diminution of individual
freedom. Democracy and Empire have never flourished together.
That the one may prosper, the other must perish. For this reason we
find the true democrat necessarily what is now called amongst us a
Little Englander; the true Imperialist as necessarily a dictator. The
anti-democratic reaction in England was inevitable, owing partly to
the expansion of Greater Britain itself, and partly to the development
of other countries on Imperialist and despotic lines. For it is now less
possible than ever for England to develop uninfluenced by the
example of her neighbours. And the example set by those
neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant nationalism in
their relations with foreigners, and with regard to domestic matters
despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this inevitable
reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more specific
causes.
For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England
enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity—an unchallenged commercial
and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over
which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four
corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself
unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking
superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born
British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston
described Prussia as a country of “d——d professors,” and Matthew
Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset
perambulator.
But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe
recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England
alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars
had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young
states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased
away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having
once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for
expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she
could produce other things than “d——d professors”; France
likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland,
Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the
American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with
renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and
industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was
that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of
the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We
saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models
and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave
place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was
succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our
former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own
“unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more
carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of
asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly
regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands;
whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the
last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how
came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to
copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so
successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s
progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater
adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to
the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous
exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has
already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts
made in every part of England to revise and to improve our
commercial and industrial methods and by special education to
qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far
our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has
aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed
supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of
our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also
aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us—too
intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent
enough to diagnose the real cause of the change—have come to the
conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very
fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete,
and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must
adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy,
and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation.
Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of
date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven
out by the cult of nationalism.
As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the
march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry
for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of
alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is
to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive
duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign
labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of
view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected.
They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards
despotism and nationalism—control over the individual and hostility
to the foreigner—reaction against free competition on the one hand
and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent
pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two
demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle
is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they
are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members
of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on
Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was
moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major
Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien
cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration
into England concludes his study of the problem with the following
illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of
the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word
‘free’—are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us
to abandon our long-played rôle of philanthropist among nations, and
so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much
advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these
268
things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”
As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native
unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the
former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last
cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been
expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only
the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not
only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists;
not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the
adversaries of the Jew.
The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in
January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the
Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s
adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England
would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long
afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the
matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of
one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the
conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any
serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the
continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled
269
labour market.” Five out of the seven members recommended the
exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced
“undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the
economic position of the districts in which they settled in great
numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on
their recommendation.
Both objections—moral and economic—had been anticipated
outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in
sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself
of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how
desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of
alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries
flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days
were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner
Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables
270
the better.” Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied
by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily
occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion
would be urged because some of them at times obstructed
thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable
time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the
Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was
brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a
barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the
offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of
proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these
people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is
271
abominable!”
On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform
Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and
legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets
widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other
speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The
information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of
foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils
which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their
competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial
minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London
and the consequent dispossession of the native working population
by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903),
Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of
an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the
dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how
rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding,
of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the
assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating
stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later
(March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by
bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of
272
Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”
In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade
the House that the proposed measures were not directed against
aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then
proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill
was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the
measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to
this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless
victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the
native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers,
because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of
the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the
figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of
the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the
number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the
ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident
in almost every other civilised country—in fact, that many more
destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute
aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would
be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we
should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it
been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly
have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived
here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards
welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this
country for having maintained them—men like Dalou, one of the
greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and
many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give
hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in
England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian
Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The
Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made,
inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there
were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were
engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and
some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the
people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had
seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political
reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons
they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition
when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own;
and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years,
he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British
race.
Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first
time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading
in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate
which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the
course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects,
was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously
by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He
moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-
priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent
sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill,
that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention
of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This
amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which,
having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and
once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom
the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their
religion—people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted
from their homes to death—finally expressed his conviction that
behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country,