Abstract
ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 26 number 5 october 2021 stephen thomson DERRIDA SOMNAMBULE Miss you by Zuzana Ridzonova. its own sleep, in its sleep. It seems a classic Der- […] pour que le reveil ne soit pas une ruse ridean strategy for troubling the sovereignty of du reve. C’est-à-dire encore de la raison. the philosophical “je suis” and the metaphysics ̂ of presence; such that, as Mahite Breton writes, ereve. Je somnambule,” says Jacques “categories of responsibility, intention, will and “J Derrida as he accepts the Adorno Prize mastery are destabilised” (207). Indeed, it in Frankfurt on 22 September 2001 (Fichus might be tempting to see the very concept of 22). It is a striking phrase, this “I am sleepwalk- sleepwalking as incipiently deconstructive; as ing,” but also one that strikes an idiomatically a topos in which deconstruction is already at Derridean note. The verb “somnambuler” (a work. Thus, Simon Morgan Wortham, having neologism: it does not appear in Littre), conju- shown how sleepwalking marks an excess in gated in the first-person present tense, entails a the dialectic of sleep and waking in Kant and “je somnambule” or “sleepwalking I”;an “I” Hegel, sums up: “in the very attempt to that can, with undecidable lucidity, proclaim ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/21/050101-16 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963084 101 derrida somnambule rationalize sleep […] a certain supplement is discusses the “je somnambule” briefly, in unleashed – call it somnambulance, or some passing, as a variant on the “je reve” that other name” (Wortham 38). Somnambulance guides her enquiry. And it is quite possible, would thus be a name for a deconstructive and coherent, as the example of Jean-Philippe quasi-concept, drawing on a spontaneous pro- Deranty shows, to comment lucidly and percep- pensity of the informal philospheme “somnam- tively on dream and dreaming in Fichus bulism” to do the work of deconstruction. It without mentioning sleepwalking at all. Why, may seem, thus, that sleepwalking was always then, dwell on a tiny rhetorical blip in this on the side of deconstruction, and that Derri- important topic? da’s “je somnambule” was something decon- A first reason would be that it appears struction had always been ready to utter. Derrida himself came to do so. From La The curious thing, however, is that Derrida’s contre-allee (1999), there is a subtle, but deci- own deployment of the lexicon of sleepwalking sive, change of direction, or involution, that does not bear this out; or at least it does not do continues through late texts such as Geneses, so until rather late in the day. Until around genealogies, genres et le genie (2003), ́ ́ ́ 1999, sleepwalking in Derrida was always in Fichus (2001/2002), and the seminars on the the third person: emphatically the sleepwalking beast and the sovereign (December 2001– of the other, it was an accusation, and even a March 2003). There, sleepwalking remains little polemical. It named the premature cer- other, but it is an other that intimately tainty and complacency of method; its assur- regards deconstruction; is in some manner ance that nothing unforeseen by the the responsibility of its I; and may even be programme is worth seeing. Sleepwalking was, assumed in the first person. Although unre- as such, a paradoxical form of vigilance, but marked by any explicit gesture of auto-cri- nothing like the deconstructive vigilance that, tique, there is a sort of correction implicit in as Peggy Kamuf has argued, tends an ear this turn. And as such it may serve as a remin- towards the other, on the lookout for whatever der of something we all theoretically know: interrupts the standard-issue vigilance that con- that we ought not to view the œuvre, and the sists of a “deciphering too certain of meaning” work of deconstruction least of all, as the (12). Far from it, sleepwalking was this compla- magisterial unfolding of an essence, even cency in method, this systematic failure to though we invoke some such essence whenever listen to discrepancy. As such, it was other, we verify the later Derrida against the earlier but not that as-yet undetermined other to (Naas 20); or whenever we judge a text which deconstruction must listen carefully for worthy or unworthy of deconstruction. Decon- traces of errancy. It was (and this is the polem- struction ought never to be quite equal to ical twist) positioned as the other of deconstruc- itself. This is, after all, the hope or chance of tion, to which it could point, and from which it Derrida’s wager with Geoff Bennington in could mark its distinction with unusual clarity. their collaborative Jacques Derrida (1991): Curiously, then, Wortham’s and Breton’s that J.D. might wriggle free from reduction reading of “somnambulism” is in many ways to the generative matrix of Djef’s “Derrida- more obviously consonant with deconstruction base” by saying something discrepant. The than Derrida’s own. Neither critic notes the drama, and indeed the comedy, of this lies in oddity of this situation, not least because the apprehension that deconstruction, pre- neither traces the idea of sleepwalking to any cisely insofar as it opposes totalisation, must Derridean source, or acknowledges that any itself struggle to avoid totalising. And it is in such source might exist. But then, why should the force field of this (comic) anxiety – over they? After all, sleepwalking is not such an deconstruction’s possible subsidence into a important figure in Derrida’s writing, and it set of predictable platitudes about the event, seems evidently a mere embellishment of the errancy, and so forth – that sleepwalking language of dream. Breton, indeed, only makes its turn in La contre-allee, from 102 thomson incipient gesture of mastery (over method) to accusation – curt, summary, even a little problem for deconstruction. polemical – levelled at method or programme. A couple of other topics that criss-cross this Thus, when Derrida tells us that Littre’sdefi- late writing, and whose links with sleepwalking nition of “suppleer” respects “comme un som- I will trace, also relate to problems of totalising nambule” the strange logic of the verb it is and mastery. Firstly there is the question of the because the lexicographer’s very fidelity to animal, from “L’animal que donc je suis” their material and methods has prevented (1997) to the seminars on the beast and the them from marking the strangeness of the sovereign where Derrida is concerned, as outcome (“Freud et la scene” 314). Something never before, to put in question the magisterial similar applies to the “legerete somnambuli- ́ ̀ ́ gestures of his own seminar, even, and que” of calling Molly Bloom’s monologue a especially, in the act of questioning mastery. monologue (Derrida, Ulysse gramophone Then there is the scene of prize-giving that 109). Common-sense reason gives the critic takes centre stage in Fichus, where Derrida winged feet, but only insofar as they follow must say yes to recognition as a master of the the path of least resistance, straight past a ques- critique of mastery, in the name of another. tion, to the patent, reasonable, yet always pre- Here the “je somnambule” modulates Derrida’s mature conclusion. The editors of a selection effort to evade, without ingratitude, counter- of Nietzsche’s uncollected fragments which signing the countersignature of his mastery includes the enigmatic scribble, “I have forgot- that the prize risks being, so as to consign his ten my umbrella,” fare even worse. Their expla- work to the chance, and the grace, of the natory note is “a monument of hermeneutic other and futurity. It is around these topoi, somnambulism of which every word covers and the intensification of the struggle with with the most insouciant tranquillity an ant- mastery that they constitute – one might say, heap of critical questions” (Derrida, É perons the masterful effort to avoid mastering or 104). Sleepwalking is thus an insensibility to being mastered – that the “new” sleepwalking, the questions that teem under the question at the one that announces itself in the first person, hand. crystallises. One might see in this the fruit of an Implicit in this usage is something like the act of reflexivity, in the limited sense that old theory according to which the sleepwalker reflexion on a rhetoric has led to a reform can only see objects insofar as they correspond thereof. Beyond this, however, it is crucial to to the objects in their dream (see, e.g., Maine de note that what is at stake is not a self on Biran). To the extent that a method or pro- which one meditates, but rather resignation of gramme has determined its objects and path the self to an other that must be owned if it is in advance, it has a propensity to plough on not to act in one’s place, and the nature of the regardless, with total confidence in its own “I” that can write this. The “je somnambule” steps, but oblivious to problems or questions takes the risk of owning and placing itself in that are beyond the scope of its plan, yet the most exposed position, on the way which may for all that be encountered or engen- towards a “you” that is – as we shall see, in dered in the going. This somnambulism is not, the formula “tu est tu”–“silenced.” thus, simply, axiomatically the contrary of vig- ilance. The two may even go hand in hand, as with the “sleepwalking, vigilant and automatic interpreters” of Aristotle conjured in the third-person somnambulism: the “Presentation” of Derrida’s Politiques de security of a rhetoric l’amitie (434; i.e., the back sleeve). There But before this, as I have said, sleepwalking in may, thus, be an automatic vigilance or vigilant Derrida was always, until quite late in the day, automatism that thrives in the similarly para- the sleepwalking of the other, in the third doxical mode of busy sleep. Importantly, the person. More than that, it was usually an lexicographers, critics, editors, and interpreters 103 derrida somnambule accused of sleepwalking are not thereby This characterisation of a whole tradition of accused of laxity or carelessness. On the con- (urgent, decisionistic) vigilance as a busy trary, their very diligence has led them blithely sleep is of no small importance to deconstruc- and efficiently past anything the itinerary had tion. It is not just something deconstruction not foreseen. The charge of sleepwalking con- sets out to avoid; in a sense, deconstruction is cerns not a simple lapse of attention, but a par- its avoidance. This is why deconstruction ticular form, or tempo, of vigilance; one whose must be “slow and differentiated” so as to investment, and assurance in its advance knowl- allow us to take stock of “what happens” edge of the route, is such as to forestall any along the way, to multiply “attention to differ- possibility of indecision; without which, as ences,” and perhaps “refine the analysis in a Derrida has also suggested, decision is strictly restructured field” (Derrida, La bê te I 113– impossible (La bê te II 79). 14, 36). In other words, the new things we A corollary of this is that we should be wary of notice may require us to redraw the map at any punctual moment that declares itself the any moment, and we must be ready to notice moment of vigilance par excellence, as in the this too. This topic has a couple of curious cor- old and widespread European topos of crisis as ollaries. Firstly, the departure from the critical the “moment de reveil” (Derrida, L’Autre cap tradition of vigilance demands a hyperbolic 34–35). To awaken, in this sense, would be to inflation of vigilance: deconstructive attentive- realise at one fell swoop, and today, the chance ness must aim to be impossibly prolonged and or the challenge to decide (κρίνειν)thatconsti- differentiated. But, equally, it must also watch tutes the κρίση. But if such a decisive moment over itself so as not to fall into a mere form of concentrates wakefulness, it also monopolises wakefulness; which is to say, method. For the it, thereby consigning all ensuing moments to rhetoric of slow and differentiated attention to sleep, and unwittingly assuming the impossible the discrepant irruption of the other cannot, responsibility of watching over them in insofar as it is a rhetoric, be assured that it advance. In this lies the problem of the “respon- too will not fall into a “dogmatic slumber” sibility as irresponsibility, of morality con- (155). Deconstruction, if it is to be a thing, founded with juridical calculation, of politics must avoid the slide into a guaranteed, pre- organised into techno-science” (71). All scripted set of moves that the practised decon- methods and programmes are, by their nature, structionist can invoke in their sleep, and at prone to this somnolence that consists of pro- which other deconstructionists can be counted ceeding as if wakefulness had already been on to nod reassuringly. And, just because the taken care of. Even the best-intentioned initia- vigilance to which it aspires is strictly impos- tive in the world can do good only on the con- sible, the performance of deconstruction must dition that we do not fall asleep on the job (55; always be haunted by the possibility of its “à la condition que notre attention ne s’y own sleep. endorme pas”). A further corollary of this is In other words, deconstruction can never be that there is something somnolent about the assured that it is always more vigilant than the very moment of decision itself, insofar as it vigilance of method; or that method is always acts as if it could abolish the need, and the possi- something that sits, at a clear and distinct dis- bility, of any future decision. Thus, it would be tance, over there. The problem with the accusa- “court et sommeillant,” curt and dozy, to tion of sleepwalking, however, is that this is respond to pressure to pronounce Nietzsche precisely what it does say. Whoever points the either aproto-Nazi, or entirely guiltless of any finger to say “they are asleep” says – immedi- such thing (Derrida, Otobiographies 93). The ately, implicitly –“I am awake.” And therein very posture of jumping to attention and decid- lies the danger. For anyone can say this, at ing, fully and finally, is already implicated in its any time, and even in their sleep. From this future sleep. The whole tendency of this form or would spring the sort of polemical bidding tempo of vigilance is thus towards sleep. war that, as Derrida suggests in D’un ton 104 thomson apocalyptique adopte naguere en philosophie epoch as a congealed structure. This “privilege” ́ ̀ (1983), characterises the cultural prognostica- over sleepwalking is thus also the precise tions of postmodernism, and into which decon- respect in which history itself is structuralist, struction must not slide (53). The accusation of and a sleepwalker. So it seems history and sleepwalking, however, opens onto precisely structuralism will deserve each other. this abyss, and it is a potential catastrophe for But the polemical thrust of such a verdict is a a vigilance that would be alert to its own trap, insofar as it acts as if it could have done sleep. Deconstruction, if it is to be deconstruc- with “structuralism.” For this “having done” tion, must somehow negotiate this abyss, and is, as Derrida reminds us, the structuralist avoid coming to rest in a moment of specular gesture par excellence, and it is not easily self-satisfaction. The curt othering of polemic avoided. Indeed, as Derrida also suggests in is, in this regard, a danger for deconstruction; another essay of the same time, it would be a moment of repose in which it is too clear easy to show that “a certain structuralism has where things stand. always been philosophy’s most spontaneous It would be wrong to suggest that the deploy- gesture” (“‘Genese et structure’” 237). Or, as ment of sleepwalking in the earlier Derrida Derrida goes on to say in “Force et significa- simply succumbs to the complacency of tion,” maybe consciousness just is structuralist polemic, or that there is never anything in the consciousness, insofar as it is consciousness of accusation of sleepwalking to unsettle its own things done, completed (12). So we cannot assurance. There are also many places that simply have done with structuralism; nor even suggest a certain vigilance in sleep, though with the finite, determinate, historical “struc- these do not usually resolve into sleepwalking. turalist phenomenon.” For in it, Derrida says, In “Force et signification,” Derrida suggests we were finally obliged to think structure “in that the “structuralist phenomenon,” as it its concept.” And, as we live on its “fecundity,” wanes, “will deserve” to fall into the hands of it is too early to bat away our dream: “il est trop the historian of ideas, on account of tôt pour fouetter notre reve.” Rather, we must think, from within the dream and in a manner everything in this phenomenon that is not appropriate to dreams, what it could mean: the question’s transparence for itself, every- “Il faut songer en lui à ce qu’il pourrait signi- thing that, in the efficacity of a method, is a fier” (11). The verb “songer a” serves Derrida matter of the infallibility ascribed to sleep- well here, spanning a range of senses from walkers and which was once attributed to musing or daydreaming to more purposeful the instinct of which it was said that it was thinking, and leaving open the question of all the more sure for being blind. It is not what sort of thinking we can do in the dream the least dignity of that human science (en lui). Here, then, Derrida already proposes called history to concern by privilege, in the hesitation between philosophical rationality human actions and institutions, the and the qualified embrace of dream-thinking immense region of somnambulism, the for which, as we will see, he would praise almost-everything that is not pure waking, the sterile and silent acidity of the question Adorno thirty years later. itself, the almost-nothing. (11) And yet, crucially, Derrida does not (yet) call this dream-thinking sleepwalking. Rather, that The polemical moment of the passage is clear term is still reserved for the merely unthinking enough. The structuralist phenomenon “will devotion to method. At the end of “Force et sig- deserve” the attentions of history in the sense nification,” Derrida hands on the baton from that it serves it right for sleepwalking. As for philosophy to Nietzsche’s gai saber (47). But the “dignity” of history – what it is worthy of, he does not embrace sleepwalking as Nietzsche what it deserves – it not only “concerns” but embraces it in The Gay Science, when he depends upon somnambulism as the shadow- awakens into the “consciousness that I am agent of the typical acts that bequeath the dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest 105 derrida somnambule I perish – as a somnambulist must go on dream- even, as a symptom of bad faith. This is not ing lest he fall,” repositioning philosophy as to say that it will, when it next appears, have merely a means to “the continuation of the changed its face entirely. But the gesture of dream” (116). Nor would he ever, any more expulsion will have been, so to speak, expelled, than he would replace the “abandonment that for constituting in itself, so it would appear, is today the bad drunkenness of the most “the security of a rhetoric.” nuanced structuralist formalism” with aban- donment to the ecstatic lucidity of a putatively good drunkenness (46). Derrida’s “vigilance” “moi sauf moi”: travelling with … would always, until the end, and even when it somnambulism is implicated in the dream, require us to sober up, to be “degrisee” (Fichus 51). Likewise it ́ ́ We can trace this turn to La contre-allee would never be a question of replacing one som- (1999). In the first of his postcards to Cath- nambulism – benighted, automatic, mechanical erine Malabou (dated Istanbul, 10 May 1997), – with another sort that would be inspired, worrying over the “Travelling with …” rubric clairvoyant. Indeed, Derrida’s sleepwalking of the series in which the book will appear, would never cease to be other, even when con- Derrida asks: am I sure I have ever even “trav- jugated in the first person. Only it would radi- elled with” me? With me “alive or awake,” or cally lose its polemical potential for othering. “anything else but sleepwalking”? Before going on to consider the later turn, it To wake up it is not enough to open one’s is perhaps worth noting that the polemical eyes. Sleepwalking, moreover, draws me potential of the accusation of sleepwalking this morning as a seductive figure, she does not simply wane over time, and is if any- [elle], to designate my experience of the thing most apparent in its final appearance: trance or transition called “travel.” I see that is, in the “legerete somnambulique” that ́ ̀ ́ passing, very fast, the silhouette of the sleep- Derrida attributes to Carl Schmitt in Politiques walker [masculine], at the behest of a single de l’amitie (1994). As Schmitt parlays post-war dream: to awaken at last, and that [cela] will internment as a Nazi functionary into a spe- be, perhaps, perhaps not, hence the quaking cious scene of pseudo-Cartesian meditation, of my journeys, a nightmare. How can one and finds salvation in the “Wisdom of the explain otherwise, otherwise than by that Cell” (1948), there is absolutely no sense that apprehension of “perhaps,” the anguish of a double desire, contradictory and simul- Derrida finds this anything other than taneous: to go back “home” as fast as pos- revolting. sible, but to put off indefinitely the return? I transport, on my travels, this sole obses- Somnambulistic strength and lightness of sion: I can’t wait for it to end, alas! The ques- this progression. Prudence and security tion, then, and this is what I wanted to get to, [sûrete] of a rhetoric. The prisoner feels his will never have been that of “travel” but of way in the darkness, from one corner of “travelling-with.” (Malabou and Derrida 13) the cell to the other. He risks a step, then another and stops to meditate. (Derrida, Sleepwalking here starts in the third person, as Politiques de l’amitie 187) a spectacle, but one that is becoming the phan- Schmitt, says Derrida, makes as if to face up to tasm of an other that is mine, that haunts my his actions, but he never does, and never will. desire to travel; a dream that may only His pantomime of groping in the darkness awaken into a nightmare. Later in this first “risks” nothing because it is choreographed missive, in the midst of a reminiscence of and underwritten by the “security of a rhetoric” meeting a sephardic community in Turkey, as comically and pathetically limited as the Derrida casts himself as the “immobile scope of the cell. Sleepwalking here is, this voyeur” who watches himself travelling, as if one last time, emphatically rejected, expelled to figure out the enigma of himself in 106 thomson the movement [or trip, or displacement: tasked or stained with the name “Tachet pere deplacement] always “incognito” of a secret ́ et fils”– with the pathos of being an interna- that I transport without knowing it. Even tionally renowned philosopher, hawking his when I speak in front of crowds. I feel that wares round the conference circuit, mortified I transport (like an infant in the belly, I by the adulation as much as the opprobrium. hear his heart) but I don’t understand it at He has, in short, a “mauvaise image” of the all, this secret. Abroad perhaps someone whole business of his travels, including will tell me: revelation, bedazzlement, con- version, I fall backwards, I am born, I die the speeches through which one must con- in the moment of meeting, at the end of an vince or seduce, this whole “academic unknown alleyway, the messiah who will culture market” with which I have always come out of me where he has hidden for so got along so poorly [fait si mauvais long. (Malabou and Derrida 21) menage]. (Malabou and Derrida 39–40) Travelling, then, as if in the hope that others, The scare quotes that distance Derrida from the strangers, will tell me who I am, what I am for, phrase “academic culture market” also impli- becomes an ambivalent hunt, in which I am cate him in it. For while they say, as Derrida hunter and hunted; as if there were someone I goes on to say, I am giving in a bit to a code, wanted to help to escape from me (se sauver I don’t entirely believe in what I’m saying (“je de moi)by savingit in me (en le sauvant en cede un peu à un code, je ne crois pas tout à moi). Indeed, the “most economic formula” fait à ce que je dis”), what is this giving-in-to- for travelling-with would be “Moi sauf moi”: a-code if not a surrender to the market? The me safe me, or me except for me (23). point becomes even clearer when he says, The ontological high drama of this is, rather sarcastically, “la ‘deconstruction,’ en however, almost systematically – and comi- un mot, ce serait une certaine experience du cally, in the manner of the postcard – undercut voyage, n’est-ce pas” (40). It would be hard to by the “perhaps” of the earlier passage, and the render exactly the conditional “serait,” and a comedy of contingency. Hence the confession, “n’est-ce pas” so deadpan it is not even a ques- embarrassing for a quasi-messianic thinker, tion (or at least does not rate a question mark). that, before every journey, he is terrified some- But the force of the phrase is: you all know the thing will happen: one about “deconstruction” being a certain experience of travel, don’t you. It anticipates, I give the impression [J’ai l’air] of being for in other words, a chummy connivance in the the event, and of elaborating, as they say, a very rhetoric that would announce the experi- thought of the event, of arrivance, of the ence of the event as exposure to the absolutely singular exposure to what is coming. You other, the absolutely unanticipated. We would, know the refrain. (Malabou and Derrida 23) of course, be foolish to think that deconstruc- But the joke is not just that the ardent propo- tion, any more than anything that can be repro- nent of the event is terrified something will duced as a rhetoric, is proof against happen. Worse even than the revenge of contin- commodification. But here, at any rate, gency on the concept is the prescripted plati- Derrida tragicomically stages “deconstruction” tude of “as they say” and “you know the as a brand that follows him around, and that refrain.” The discourse of the event is already goes out before him; that haunts him with a humiliated in itself when it can become just “mauvaise image,” and prevents everything another tune on the conceptual karaoke. And that deconstruction would be. this points to another ambivalence, another This, then, would be deconstruction’s own counter-alley, that threads its way through the sleepwalking. This is not to say that it is some text, linking Derrida’s memories of his other sleepwalking: it is still the becoming-com- father’s travails as a travelling salesman under placent of a programme or method, but a paternalistic, patriarchal merchant house – now this problem emphatically regards 107 derrida somnambule deconstruction. It would certainly not be right sort of threshold with Derrida’s turn to the to say that Derrida had never before engaged animal, and to the questions of domination with deconstruction’s entanglement with that would dominate his final work. Indeed, method. But the accusation of sleepwalking the second postcard of La contre-allee is had simplified this entanglement, functioning dated Cerisy-la-Salle 15 July 1997, the day rhetorically in such a way as to other method Derrida presented “L’animal que donc je and stabilise the relationship. Now, as all the suis,” the paper in which he remarks that anti-sleepwalking gestures are themselves asserting a total continuity between man and expressly opened up to the suspicion of sleep- beast “serait plus que somnambulique, […] walking, sleepwalking figures deconstruction’s simplement trop bete” (L’animal 52). This is, own other. Derrida casts himself as the host to some degree, a final fling for the “old” som- of a sleepwalker, as the immobile observer of nambulism, insofar as it warns against a sort of an other not quite in his control who parades precipitation towards a thesis (total continuity) the world in his place. Now, rather than that Derrida will not finally underwrite. And making the gesture of expulsion, he inoculates yet the “bê te” (the “beast” that is by no himself with the sleepwalker. means merely “stupid”) with which it is con- It is also in this ambivalent guise that the joined initiates a stealthy countermove, refus- sleepwalker returns in the final postcard of La ing to secure the border of the human, and to contre-allee (Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Ramallah, underwrite the entire dignity or sovereignty of ́ ́ le 11 janvier 1998), regarding the question its “I,” or the “auto-biographic or auto-deictic “am I at Jerusalem?” first posed in a paper relation to self as ‘I’” (Derrida, L’animal 57). delivered in Jerusalem in 1986. It is through Somnambulism here is already starting its a “sleepwalking spectre” that both “millennia countermove, in the direction of La contre- of amnesiac love for each stone, each dead allee, and onto the ground on which beast person of Jerusalem,” and Derrida’s political and sovereign are intricately entangled. differences with the state of Israel, can It is impossible to do justice to the intricacy cohabit his “body” and rend the “I” of the of the topology of the beast seminars. But one question (Malabou and Derrida 259). Sleep- has to start somewhere. At a certain point in walking is thus the ambivalent mode of “geopo- the sixth session of the second volume, after litical engagements” that might as well be an excursus on the faithful infidelity of “alibis, ways of being elsewhere,” confounding Celan’s “Die Welt ist fort / Ich muss dich the ethic of errance “sans certitude et sans tragen”– an “I” that promises to carry “you” assurance” with “la ponctualite du faux bond” in the absence of world – Derrida pulls up. (259–61), which is to say unerringly letting All this awakens us to a question that has not (someone) down, or standing them up. It is stopped somnambulating [qui n’a pas cesse thus in the name of a sort of clandestination/ de somnambuler] in our proceeding today. destinerrance of political action that Derrida The question: what is a phantasm? takes on the mantle of the sleepwalker here. (Derrida, La bê te II 244) So why, we might ask, does this turn come in 1999? Derrida dates his anxieties over travel to The surprise here may be that the question of his brush with prison in Prague in late 1981 the phantasm has ever been asleep. The word (Malabou and Derrida 40). And he also tells “fantasme” has been active throughout this us in a footnote that Blanchot and Genet had seminar, and indeed preceding seminars. Nor long been asking him why he had to make has it gone quite without definition. It has such an exhibition of himself (25). Could it be been determined as a zone in which the impos- that the experience of being published by sible may be named and apprehended. This high-end luggage-maker Louis Vuitton seminar has begun by invoking the “courage” brought the matter to a head? Perhaps. But it takes to think “ça” (215) which, as well as we might add that La contre-allee stands on a evoking the “Es” or “Id” of Freudian 108 thomson metapsychology, could stand for any “that,” of sleepwalking. Only now it is countersigned any object of thought. The “object” that by Derrida’s text as something it cannot quite Derrida proceeds to explore, the possibility of avoid, or at least chooses not to avoid: the pre- “the living-dead,” is profoundly phantasmatic, mature settling of the question “what is?” even dealing with something that cannot be loca- though, and precisely because, it is a question lised, that cannot “avoir lieu,” or is in a place that – spectacularly in the case of the phantasm without place; like the phantasm (according to – cannot be answered in a way that would Freud), that belongs at once “qualitatively” to satisfy “the logic of common sense that organ- the system perception-consciousness, and “fac- ises our lives” (220). Our relation to the ques- tually” to the unconscious (218–20). As the tion of the phantasm must remain seminar goes on to explore the impossibility phantasmatic because any claim to resolve the of localising the dead person through the double bind would entail a definition, which is choice between burial and cremation, the to say a phantasm of method. But equally, dis- entire field of the question comes to be invested avowing method by placing somnambulism by the phantasm, derealising every “object” over there would only be another way of even unto the “I” that would pose the question, falling into the trap, reaffirming a secure and pose as the subject of the question. relation of subject to object at the very The seminar has promised it will end with moment in which it is said to tremble. the question of the image and the imagination The seminars on the beast and the sovereign (Derrida, La bê te II 219). But when it does are repeatedly, and from the start, concerned end with the “bilden,” or capacity of image- not to swear off but to dramatise their own making, that, from Kant to Heidegger, defines mastery; the moment of mastery that is implicit the Dasein, and the human exception (244– in even their most radical and destabilising 46), the path that has led us here may seem strategies. It is not just that the long, looping rather oblique and enigmatic. It supposes a arcs of exegesis are inevitably masterful long tradition, stretching back to Aristotle, insofar as their ellipses and oblique strategies for which the imagination or phantasia was cor- are compelling. The alternative to methodologi- poreal, and possibly the part of intelligence we cal definition – setting terms loose on us share with the beasts, as well as the instance without saying, or allowing us to ask, what governing sleepwalking (see, e.g., Maine de they mean, and leaving them to act without Biran, already cited). And it runs counter to question – entails its own methodological important twentieth-century efforts to hierarch- mastery. Derrida stages this in the very first ise (Husserl), or even to have done with (Sartre) seminar by invoking the opening of La Fon- the imagination. Refusing to assert the sover- taine’s “Le loup et l’agneau,” which makes a eignty of (human) reason over (beastly) phanta- promise now that it will show presently that sia, Derrida not only tracks the phantasm, but might is always right: “La raison du plus fort flags the necessarily phantasmatic aspect of est toujours la meilleure: / Nous l’allons the hunt. Hence his inquiry sleepwalks. montrer toute à l’heure” (La bê te I 20 and This is not, however, the only reason for the passim). The cunning of the verse, as Derrida somnambulance of the enquiry. When, at the later explains, is to perform the right of the outset of the sixth seminar, Derrida determines stronger just by ostentatiously deferring its the phantasm as a name for the “impossible,” explanation. But, just because he does explain he does so expressly “for methodological this later, Derrida’s exposition of La Fontaine reasons, that is to delimit the field that we are has also performed this deferral, advancing in going to explore” (La bê te II 217). He per- the meantime à pas de loup, and so participat- forms, thus, the very gesture of methodological ing, however playfully, in its peremptory vio- foreclosure of the question that he points to in lence. Derrida also explains this, citing his Heidegger’s seminars (151–52). Such a gesture “accredited position as a professor/teacher is also precisely what had always been accused authorised to speak ex cathedra for hours,” or 109 derrida somnambule weeks, or even years (La bê te I 117). Such a all the indeterminacy (“as if”) of all these feel- confession is as sheepish as it is wolfish; and ings of feelings, the most courageous sub- vice versa. That is, all the cunning or all the mission to errancy does not go without the simplicity it could muster could never undo hope of a certain surefootedness, or the the mastery implicit in such a gesture; and promise of a path, that is not entirely or even the loose, looping, recursive structure of surely distinguishable from the “infallibility” the seminars, which try so hard to deny any (or assurance or Sicherheit) conventionally sense of a placidly unfolding logic, are also, in attributed, as Derrida says in “Force et signifi- their way, irreducibly allied to method and cation,” to the sleepwalker. mastery. Derrida may oppose, at a given moment, a “slow and differentiated” decon- prizes, mastery, sovereign violence struction to the “ex cathedra” pronouncements that lay down the law of a seminar (La bê te I Before turning back to Fichus, there is one 113–14). But the one does not go without the other topic we need to broach; that of the other. award of prizes. Its links with mastery and It is in this way also that, in the seventh sovereignty may not be immediately apparent, session of the second volume of the beast semi- but they come to the fore in an unusually nars, Derrida’s effort to swear off “l’assurance polemical moment of the beast seminars, requise de la certitude indubitable” associated where Derrida evinces a pronounced distaste with method and the Cogito appeals to the for Agamben’s sovereign rage to award somnambulatory. himself the prize for being the first to award the prize. As always, always, when I speak or when I write, or doing the one and the other, Before this prizegiving for top of the class, when I teach, as always, always, with each prizes for excellence and accessits, ceremony step, with each word I sense or I fore- [where] the priest always starts and finishes, sense, in the future anterior, the ungraspably in a princely or sovereign fashion, by writing spectral figure of an event that could after himself into the top of the page […] the fact, lending itself to reinterpretation, (Derrida, La bê te I 138–39) re-stage, a stage still invisible and unforesee- able for anyone at all, re-stage, thus, from One may wonder how Derrida arrived at such top to bottom, everything that will have uncharacteristic exasperation. One could postu- been – dictated, whispered to me, I mean late a sort of subterranean tussle, between Force more or less consciously, or telepathically, de loi (1994), Foi et savoir (1996), and the first or somnambulatorily, intimated from Homo sacer (1995), over the reading of “bare inside me or enjoined from very far life” and the violent institution of sovereignty, outside. (Derrida, La bê te I 248) although, if there must be a question of pri- More than a turning away from method, this is ority, it would be hard to determine with any an agonising extension of the terror and uncer- certainty the order of the exchange. An Agam- tainty of its negative moment, its epoche,so benian might point to the reference, in La that every step is like the first step that has comunità che viene (1990), to our culture’s not yet reached, and will never reach, the pla- “hypocritical dogma of the sacredness of bare cidity and platitude of “je pense.” And this life” (68). But one might equally retort that is why any attempt at “je pense” disintegrates the paper “Force de loi” was first pronounced into the convolutions of having the feeling in 1989, and “Prenom de Benjamin” in April that I don’t yet feel, concluding, “Comme si 1990; and “Foi et savoir,” with its reference to j’etais prevenu de ce que je ne vois pas venir.” the “biozoologic (sacrificable),” in 1994 ́ ́ That is, roughly (sacrificing the echo of (Derrida, Foi et savoir 78). If one is to ask, on “venir” in “prevenir”): “As if I were fore- the other hand, where this exchange takes an warned of that which I don’t see coming.” For expressly polemical turn, one might plausibly 110 thomson look to Agamben’s swipe, in the fourth chapter is radically not an affair of the “I” (54). of Homo sacer, at deconstruction as “an infinite Indeed, the genius that is “tu” can be received negotiation” with the gatekeeper of Kafka’s only on condition that one does not know one “Before the Law” that risks leaving it (decon- receives it; and it is “more inappropriable struction) in the role of gatekeeper (Homo than anything of it that one can represent in sacer 63). It is far from clear that Agamben the consciousness” (88). sees this very intervention as itself an act of What is “tu” is thus like that “quite other gatekeeping. But why, in any case, fall into genius” of language that finds itself sleepwalk- the abyss of ascribing priority, whether in ing in the dreaming storehouse of language. praise or in blame? Agamben’s penchant for As such, sleepwalking is an agent of the “geni- ascribing priorities is, once pointed out, hard ality” that is, as Derrida says towards the end, to unsee. And it is enough to make the critic “neither a subject, nor an imaginary subject, of power want to take no part whatsoever in nor a subject of the law or of the symbolic, any scene of prize-giving. In any case, even if [or] a possible subject, but what happens [ce Agamben does fall into self-congratulation in qui arrive]” (Geneses 91). It is also the con- a particularly crass way, the condition of possi- dition of this geniality that it “never appears bility for this fall is a mess of potential narcis- and is never said in the present,” as expressed sism in which it is hard to see a safe position. in the phrase “Tu est tu.” Our greatest thanks What role sleepwalking might play in nego- is thus owed to a gift of sleepwalking that tiating this abyss is perhaps even less apparent. cannot be appropriated by the “I,” and that is In Geneses, genealogies, genres et le genie best honoured in silence. Which is to say, con- ̀ ́ ́ ́ (2003), it is a question of the “genius of signed “to the future,” and “to others” (100). language,” though not as we usually think of Before Derrida got to this “tu”– with its dis- it (as a treasury of words and forms); but, placement of the “I,” its equivocal presence, rather, a “quite other genius” that serves the and its quasi-silence – he routed another first by opening its eyes to “what turned up in tribute, this time to Adorno, through another it, I mean the French language, as in sleep or equivocal pronoun: a “je somnambule.” The sleepwalking in the infinite dream of its uncon- phrase is doubtless a “conventional banality, a scious, finding and meeting itself there, without politeness suitable to addressing the audience ever having found itself there” (31–32). Here, on prize day,” to quote Derrida’s quotation of in Derrida’s tribute to the dream archive of Paul Celan’s acceptance speech for the 1960 Helene Cixous, the problem of awarding Buchner Prize (La bê te I 304). Pinch me, I ́ ̀ prizes is more acute than ever. How should must be dreaming, says the modest winner, one acknowledge the thanks owed to another with winning modesty. But, like Celan’s without falling into the gift economy of the phrase “in your presence” [in Ihrer Gegen- ego; without, that is, the award of a prize wart], it is also linked to some of the most immediately coming back to the self? For one pressing concerns of Derrida’s speech; most does sometimes feel thanks without debt, obviously, the question of how philosophy guilt, or resentment, as Derrida says he feels should respond to sleep and dreams. Can one, “every time that I find that she has found he asks, speak of the dream without interrupt- before me what I believed I was the first to ing or “betraying” sleep? What Derrida have found” (77). But such “grace” is like the admires in Adorno is a double response that dream that may be more awake than waking, hesitates between the curt “no” of philosophy, yet can only be written on awakening and by and a “yes, perhaps, sometimes” that takes having another speak in its place, whereby “Il the part of literature and the arts (Fichus 12– est tu” (51). That is, “he/it is silenced,” but 14). This is Adorno’s “plus bel heritage,” to also “he/it is you.” Either way, the “I” is cir- have arraigned (fait comparaître) philosophy cumvented. For such consciousness as is before these, its “others” (16), and so to have involved, call it “the literary consciousness,” broached the “possibility of the impossible,” 111 derrida somnambule which can only be “dreamt,” and which dreams m’aurait fallu” so as to avoid “un double of a thought that would be “sans souvrainete echec”; a double failure of narcissistic indul- ́ ́ indivisible” (19–21). Since a respect for gence on the one hand, and over-valuation or dreams, against the presumptive wakefulness overinterpretation of the event on the other of the philosophical “I” and its claims to totalis- (44–45). What Derrida offers in the meantime ing self-presence and sovereignty, is at the heart is the prospectus, at once grandiose and of Derrida’s thanks to Adorno, maybe it is only summary, for “a book of which I dream to right that a “je somnambule” should turn up, interpret the history, the possibility and the on the next page, to acknowledge the debt. grace [grâ ce] of this prize.” The scope of the Or rather to continue, rather sheepishly, to seven chapter outlines that follow seems vast prepare an acknowledgement that “I” have (45–57). But since the writing of the book is not yet started. The sleepwalker’s first appear- framed in the conditional, and identified as a ance, eleven pages earlier, already articulated dream, this very scale only contributes to the a derealising modesty; an embarrassment sense that it will never be written. Except, whose excessive presence produces spectrality. that is, for the bits that had already been written. For the seventh and final “chapter”– In this very moment, addressing myself to on man’s mastery (Herrschaft) over animals, you, upright, eyes open, getting ready to and its implication in the “most powerful and thank you from the bottom of my heart, idealist tradition of philosophy”– largely re- with the unheimlich or spectral gestures of prises material presented in the 1997 paper a sleepwalker, or even of a highwayman “L’animal que donc je suis” that would later coming to lay hands on a prize that was not also be included in the book of the same meant for him, everything would thus name (Derrida, L’animal 139–43). It is a happen as if I were in the middle of dream- topic that had, at the time of the Frankfurt ing. (Derrida, Fichus 11) address, a tremendous and immediate future This dreaming I is, indeed, seemingly almost in the beast seminars. But there, in the semi- incapable of giving thanks. It is only “getting nars, there is not a word on Adorno. So it ready” to do so, and will continue to do so seems Derrida may already have said all he throughout the speech. Later we learn that had to say on this topic, despite the fact that this getting-ready has been going on for he deems it the “most decisive for readings of decades; decades in which voices from within Adorno to come.” Or perhaps for that very and from without asked: is it not finally time reason. For, as he also says, these readings to acknowledge, clearly and publicly, your “are already being written, I am sure of it” debt to Adorno (43)? And even then, when it (Derrida, Fichus 54–56). Such then is seems the moment has finally come, and “grace,” consigned to futurity and to others. Derrida thanks his hosts for the opportunity For all its modesty, however, this grace may to give his thanks, he is still not fully ready. also risk appearing graceless or ungrateful. When Derrida listens to his voices and says I am happy today, thanks to you [grâ ce à “yes,” it is in spite of the “tormented” land- vous], to be able and to be obliged to say scape of kinship and influence (Fichus 44). “yes” to my debt towards Adorno, and on And this may remind us of the torment more than one head, even if I am not yet (Qual) of the source (Quelle) of which he had capable of responding to it, and of taking written thirty years earlier in “Qual Quelle: responsibility for it [d’yrepondre et d’en les sources de Valery,” and make us wonder if repondre]. (44). ́ Adorno is not one of Derrida’s “aversions”; Beyond this bare “yes,” full-throated thanks an alien sovereignty from which he must steer here and now, such as would allow him to clear so as to avoid being engulfed. After all, “decently measure my gratitude,” remains a a prize for work “in the spirit of the Frankfurt remote, past conditional: it is what “il School” may seem to effect a sort of retroactive 112 thomson matriculation into that school (8). And if, as “anti-subjectivism” that made Benjamin a Derrida suggests in Geneses, the geniality that “supreme instrument of knowledge” also is “tu” remains “Without child, name, and heri- entailed an unexampled openness to the play tage, without school” (91), this is surely a ques- of forces, terribly close to a sort of naivety or tion that concerns ascendence as much as vulnerability. Derrida does not cite this essay, descendence. Might acceptance of a prize in but one might see in it a belated instance of the name of the master seem a sort of adoption? what he calls Adorno’s “quasi-systematic” And could the “je somnambule” that virtually desire “to shield” (soustraire … à) everything absents itself from this scene be, in part, a strat- “without defence” against violence, even the egy for defending his own geniality from this violence of “traditional interpretation” takeover by a programme? (Fichus 29). One might also see in it a certain This ambivalence might explain Derrida’s paternalism at which Derrida hints. For this marked (and potentially graceless) preference desire to remove from or take out of (soustraire for speaking of Walter Benjamin, and perhaps … à) harm’s way also involves, insofar as it even for him, as if taking his part against operates as if already at a remove, a sort of Adorno. The speech, after all, takes its title paternal fantasy, albeit one that is strangely and a text from a dream Benjamin recounts in grounded in what Adorno calls the Abgrund a letter to Gretel Adorno from a detention or “abyss” of his own childhood; specifically, camp in France in 1939, in which he says to in the tremendous sadness and impotence he himself, in French, “Il s’agissait de changer feels when he surprises himself one evening in en fichu une poesie” (Derrida, Fichus 10–11); uttering a solecism drawn from the dialect of that is, it was a matter of changing a poetry or his childhood (Derrida, Fichus 28). The sole- a poem into a “head-scarf.” Moreover, this cism, Derrida suggests, appears as such in the word “fichu,” taken colloquially and as an context of Adorno’s advocacy of German – a adjective, veils Benjamin’s knowledge, a year proper German, one that would be rooted in before his death, helpless and in the manner the earliest childhood – as the elective language of dreams –“le sachant sans le savoir,” of philosophy. His self-mortification is thus knowing without knowing it – that he was ultimately symptomatic of the same “Jewish- “done for” (Fichus 36, 40–41). And this sense German psyche” (Fichus 26) that, in Force de of Benjamin’s helpless exposure to his own vul- loi (1994), Derrida had linked with Benjamin, nerability marks a slender but decisive differ- and the notion that Zur Kritik Der Gewalt ence between him and Adorno that (1921), his strange critique of violence, was punctuates Derrida’s speech. Thus, while we haunted in advance by the final solution cannot be sure that Adorno ever got over (Force de loi 67, 72–73). What distinguishes (soit … revenu) his exile, Benjamin was the Adorno’s impulse to defend from Benjamin’s one who simply never came back (revint) (21). helplessly principled self-exposure to the Absolutely done for, and no comebacks. Simi- forces that would destroy him – what keeps it larly, Adorno may well have been, as Habermas at a remove – is thus a certain paternal violence says, “without defence”– like a child, easy to against the child of his own childhood, recuper- talk down, a stranger in the institutions he ating a wound quasi-systematically imposed on inhabited – but he was still “less so” than Ben- it by assuming the role of chastiser. This jamin (30). Benjamin wins, as it were, the prize “quasi-systematic” defence and the minor vio- for defencelessness: an absolute defenceless- lence of rebuke are thus intimately entangled. ness, but equally an impossible prize, insofar In Fichus, this fatal involvement and depend- as the “winner” could never come back to ency of defence and violence is played out receive it. through a phantasmatic family in which Benja- This radical helplessness is not simply Derri- min would be, although the elder in years, the da’s invention. In his essay “Charakteristik son. Why, Derrida asks, does Benjamin Walter Benjamins,” Adorno suggests that the address his dream letter to Gretel and not to 113 derrida somnambule “Teddie”? And why was it also to Gretel that he no one could, by definition, wish upon them- wrote, four years earlier, in response to Teddie’s selves, and that nobody would want, but that rather “authoritarian and paternal criticisms” everyone concerned with justice wants a piece on, as it happens, the topic of dreams? Derrida of. In its most placidly commonsensical ostensively leaves these questions hanging; or, instances, the discourse of justice entails this as he says, asleep [en sommeil](Fichus 37–38). impossibility. One way round this is the Doubtless, then, he is talking in his sleep pathos of Arendt’s sleepwalker: maintaining, when, ten pages later, in parenthesis, he imagi- at a safe distance, as a spectacle to be nes a “confidential” letter he would write to admired and pitied, an exemplary figure that Gretel, on the subject of relations between is absolutely debarred from regarding itself, Teddie and Detlef (Benjamin’s pet name in and that cannot decide its path (consciously, this family), asking why there is no prize in Ben- in the form of a decision) precisely because jamin’s honour, and sharing with her his it is (systematically, in the totality of its “hypotheses on this subject” (46–47). Whatever being) determined towards a certain step. these hypotheses may be, Derrida leaves them in Derrida’s justice always wagered on rhetorics the parenthesis of sleep. The tenor of his dream – of errancy, path-breaking, attentiveness to is nevertheless apparent: in the mere gesture of the irruption of the quite other, the to- writing this letter, he writes himself into this come, and the monstrous – that implied a phantasmatic family, and takes the part of Ben- high level of risk, such that they could not, jamin. That is to say, (of course, evidently) he for the life of them, stand at a distance spec- will speak on behalf of Benjamin; but also (phan- tating. This nevertheless seemed to place tasmatically) he will assume the role of, or speak them at a distance from another phantasm, from the place of the benjamin, or youngest son. that of the somnambule Sicherheit of the He can only, of course, take this place phantas- already-beaten path of method. But then, at matically, but he must do so if the defence of a certain point, it seems there is a risk for the son is not to be a scene of adoption or kid- the very rhetoric of risk that it may, precisely napping; a contest between fathers over the by avoiding this risk of sleepwalking, subside right to dominate. into platitude. The risk of this sleepwalking The place awarded to Benjamin in Fichus – would be not just that it is not assured by as a silent witness to an absolute defenceless- either the absolute assurance and justice of ness that cannot speak for itself – is itself at an idiomatic step, or the absolute assurance once impossible and necessary. There must and justice of a preordained path, but that be this grace that moves outwith the narcissis- it is not assured of falling into either. tic economy of the ego. Yet to name it is Indeed, deconstruction had always been the already to award a prize, and so to betray it hope, without assurance, and only without by drawing it into the orbit of that very assurance, of a step that would be adjusted economy. One manner of awarding this prize to a certain path. Setting out, as disarmed would be that of Hannah Arendt’s famous as possible, with every fibre attuned to what profile, in which Benjamin was like “a sleep- is to come, hoping that none walker […] invariably guided […] to the of this is merely “the security very centre of a misfortune” (Arendt 13). of a rhetoric,” but painfully Arendt invokes here an unhappy version of conscious that there can be no the somnambule Sicherheit that, in her assurance that it is not, “je native German, traditionally keeps the sleep- somnambule.” walker safe. Unhappy, that is, for Benjamin. For his misfortune is our great good disclosure statement fortune. As Arendt’s sleepwalker, he is help- lessly ethical; that is, without defence No potential conflict of interest was reported by against even his own ethos. It is a condition the author. 114 thomson In addition to numerous references to Blanchot in notes the beast seminars – including the notion, cited 1 “De l’économie restreinte” 369–70. from L’écriture du désastre, of the unconscious as “la veille dans sa vigilance non éveillée” (Derrida, 2 Derrida nods here to the notion, usually attrib- La bête II 258) – see the motto “Je rêve, donc uted to Saint Ambrose (of Milan), of a bona ebrietas cela s’écrit” in Blanchot’s extraordinarily sugges- that exalts the soul with joy, but without the tive 1962 essay “Rêver, écrire,” in L’Amitié 165. attendant confusion and tottering. 3 Derrida’s relationship with the epoché of Des- cartes’s withdrawal into his poêle is, to say the least, complicated. See, e.g., his comments on bibliography the “courage” it takes to think “ça” (La bête II Adorno, Theodor W. “Charakteristik Walter 215), to which I will turn presently. But also note Benjamins.” Prismen: Kulturkritik und gesellschaft. how, in what follows, Freud’s “abyssal daring” München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1963. 234– and courageous advance into contradiction conju- 49. Print. gate with the feint of “splendid isolation” (La bête II 220, 224, 230); and compare with Derrida’s Adorno, Theodor W. “A Portrait of Walter account of his own period of retreat from 1963 Benjamin.” Prisms. Trans. Samuel Weber and to 1968 in “Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse.” Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1981. 229–41. Print. 4 Schmitt’s essay “Weisheit der Zelle” was first published in 1948 in Ex Captivitate Salus. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Print. 5 It is important to note in passing, because there is not space to go into it in detail, that this book, Agamben, Giorgio. La comunità che viene. Turin: like the collaboration with Geoff Bennington Bollati Boringhieri, 2001. Print. already cited, takes the form of a double wager, Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction.” Walter Benjamin. according to which Catherine Malabou tracks Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, the “écart” or “catastrophe” between “arriver et 1999. 7–58. Print. dériver” since “Derrida est passé” (11), and Derrida must attempt to wriggle free in the Blanchot, Maurice. “Rêver, écrire.” L’Amitié. Paris: mode of the postcard. Gallimard, 1971. 162–71. Print. 6 I explore this in my article, “Jeux d’écarts: Der- Breton, Mahité. “Rêve qui peut: la pensé du rêve rida’s Descartes.” dans Fichus.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 40.2 (June 2007): 199–212. Print. 7 This refers back to Malabou’s citation (122) from “Comment ne pas parler,” in Psyché: Inven- Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “Adorno’s Other Son: tions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Derrida and the Future of Critical Theory.” Social Semiotics 16.3 (2006): 421–33. Print. 8 Montaigne’s efforts, in his “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” to demote human reason and Derrida, Jacques. “De l’économie restreinte à elevate animal intelligence, stress the imagination. l’économie générale – Un hegelianisme sans For Gassendi too, the beasts manifestly have réserve.” L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, some sort of intelligence, albeit one that works 1979. 369–70. Print. through the Phantasia –“sufficiat videri satis man- ifestum, esse speciem quandam rationis in Brutis, Derrida, Jacques. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté ac ipsorum Phantasiam suo quodam modo ratioci- naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1983. Print. nari” (413) – but he draws the line at the faculty of Derrida, Jacques. Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche. attention (419). Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Print. 9 With regard to the production of heterodox Derrida, Jacques. Fichus. Paris: Galilée, 2002. Print. Cogitos, I explore the importance of Paul Valéry as one of Derrida’s “re-pères” in my article Derrida, Jacques. Foi et savoir suivi de Le Siècle et le “Jeux d’écarts: Derrida’s Descartes,” cited above. pardon (entretien avec Michel Wieviorka). Paris: Another re-père in this regard would be Blanchot. Seuil, 2000. Print. 115 derrida somnambule Derrida, Jacques. Force de loi: Le “Fondement mys- Maine de Biran. “Nouvelles considérations sur le tique de l’autorité.” Paris: Galilée, 1994. Print. sommeil, les songes et le somnambulisme.” Œuvres philosophiques. Vol. 2. Paris: Ladrange, Derrida, Jacques. “Force et signification.” L’écriture 1841. 275–77. Print. et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 9–49. Print. Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida, Jacques. “Freud et la scène de l’écriture.” Derrida: La contre-allée. Paris: Quinzaine L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 293– Littéraire/Louis Vuitton, 1999. Print. 340. Print. Montaigne, Michel de. “Apologie de Raimond Derrida, Jacques. “‘Genèse et structure’ et la Sebond.” Essais. Vol. 1. Ed. Maurice Rat. Paris: phénoménologie.” L’écriture et la différence. 229– Garnier, 1962. 479–680. Print. 51. Print. Naas, Michael. “‘Comme si, comme ça’: Phantasms Derrida, Jacques. Genèses, généalogies, genres et le of Self, State, and a Sovereign God.” Mosaic 40.2 génie. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Print. (June 2007): 1–26. Print. Derrida, Jacques. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Galilée, 2006. Print. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Print. Derrida, Jacques. L’Autre cap. Paris: Minuit, 1991. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’imagination. 7th ed. Paris: PUF, 2012. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Thomson, Stephen. “Jeux d’écarts: Derrida’s Galilée, 1984. Print. Descartes.” Oxford Literary Review 39.2 (2017): 189–209. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Politiques de l’amitié, suivi de L’oreille de Heidegger. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Print. Wortham, Simon Morgan. The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy. London: Bloomsbury, Derrida, Jacques. “Ponctuations: le temps de la 2013. Print. thèse.” Du droit à la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1990. 439–59. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Qual Quelle: les sources de Valéry.” Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. 325–63. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: La bête et le souverain Volume I (2001–2002). Paris: Galilée, 2008. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire: La bête et le souverain Volume II (2002–2003). Paris: Galilée, 2010. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Print. Derrida Jacques, and Geoff Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Print. Gassendi, Pierre. Syntagma Philosophicum. Vol. 2. Lyon, 1658. Print. Husserl, Edmund. Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. John B. Brough. Stephen Thomson Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Print. Department of English Literature University of Reading Kamuf, Peggy. To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Print. Reading RG6 6AA UK E-mail: s.thomson@reading.ac.uk
Journal
Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities
– Taylor & Francis
Published: Sep 3, 2021
Keywords: sleepwalking; somnambulism; sovereignty; mastery; method; Derrida
