ABSTRACT
My remarks are going to be somewhat personal.1 I do not mean I am preparing to talk about myself, at least not much. Rather, I want to say something about Jacques Derrida’s personal America. Many attempts have been made to characterize the intense relations that, forty years ago, began evolving between Derrida’s work and his readers (or non-readers) in the US, relations mediated in very complex ways by the body of his writing, by its reception and translation, by the different institutions or traditions that welcomed or resisted it, and so forth. Instead of another attempt in that general direction, I thought I would try to address the topic in a less, or rather differently mediated sense by saying something about his affective relation to the US. Certainly this is hardly less complex, if only because affect can rarely be assigned to a positive or negative pole without admixture. But there is also the complication – if indeed one can call it that – introduced when someone presumes to talk about another’s affective experience in order to say what this other feels or felt, the quality of his affect, what has affected him, and how. This ought to be not just complicated but impossible, practically and morally, or rather ethically. To think it is not impossible is to yield too complacently to the biographer’s temptation, and to the belief that whatever obstacles there may be in the way of putting oneself in the other’s place can be swept aside by dint of good will. Derrida is especially vigilant about the risk of this complacency; he never lets one forget that the others he writes about are constituted by that writing as texts, that is, as folded layers of sign-traces offered up to interpretation. To say that the other is encountered as text makes all ethics an ethics of reading, but one also thereby recalls that the other person is not, first of all or above all, a potential site of knowledge that I can appropriate, at least not without leveling all that makes that other other. Even with those who have been close companions of his life’s intellectual adventures, Derrida never relaxes his vigilance in this regard and especially with those friends whom one might presume he knows well, he never ceases, for example, to wonder how they experience what affects them.2
