ABSTRACT
Let’s not be so naïve as to suppose that he cannot speak. Moreover, we have to attempt to answer for the fact that – for Derrida, which is also to say from Derrida – a ghostly response is always possible. That much is perhaps already legible in the ‘for’ of ‘For Derrida’: it is a ‘for’, as he himself says in the context of the poetry of Paul Celan, ‘whose rich equivocation remains
ungraspable (“in the place of”, “on behalf of”, “destined for”)’.2 Writing of Freud in Archive Fever Derrida comments: ‘Naturally, by all appearances, we believe we know that the phantom does not respond. He will never again respond … Freud will never again speak’.3 And what Derrida says here about Freud, we can also say about Derrida. As his text knows – and knows also that things are not so simple. In order to illustrate this, he calls up the example of the telephone answering machine. We know that Freud is dead, and Derrida is dead. Derrida writes:
Now in spite of these necessities, these obvious facts and these substantiated certitudes, in spite of all the reassuring assurances which such a knowing or such a believing-to-know dispenses to us, through them, the phantom continues to speak. Perhaps he does not respond, but he speaks. A phantom speaks. What does this mean? In the first place or in a preliminary way, this means that without responding it disposes of a response, a bit like the answering machine whose voice outlives its moment of recording: you call, the other person is dead, now, whether you know it or not, and the voice responds to you, in a very precise fashion, sometimes cheerfully, it instructs you, it can even give you instructions, make declarations to you, address your requests, prayers, promises, injunctions. Supposing, concesso non dato, that a living being ever responds in an absolutely living and infinitely well-adjusted manner, without the least automatism, without ever having an archival technique [such as that of the answering machine] overflow the singularity of an event, we know in any case that a spectral response (thus informed by a techne and inscribed in an archive) is always possible. There would be neither history nor tradition nor culture without that possibility. It is this that we are speaking of here. It is this, in truth, that we must answer for.4
