ABSTRACT
AIDS is always already inscribed in the program, is always already programmed and is always already on the program, that is, on the agenda. Another thinking resonates with these formulations, a thinking associated with the name Derrida. Along with Nancy, Jacques Derrida is probably one of the few philosophers or thinkers to inquire into the meaning of AIDS and remind us of the urgency of this question. He does so in an interview entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs.’ In a different interview, responding to Nancy’s question ‘Who comes after the subject?, ’ Derrida expresses his wish to talk about AIDS and immediately adds that for him the emergence and spread of the virus represents an event [Eregnis]: ‘an event that one could call historical in the epoch of subjectivity, if we still gave credence to historicality, to epochality, and to subjectivity’. What does this curious statement tell us? On the one hand, we no longer give credence to the concepts Derrida enumerates; we no longer consider them creditworthy; we distrust them; we are not willing to support them and to be supported by them. On the other hand, we continue to credit them; their value still remains high enough; we believe that, despite their loss of credit, they might contribute to clarification of what AIDS challenges us to think. The emergence and spread of AIDS, then, is not an event. Or rather, it is an event because it is not a pure event. If we can think about AIDS by relying, even with the greatest mistrust, on subjectivity (and Derrida has demonstrated that the concepts of historicity and epochality derive from the concept of subjectivity, from the concept itself), it is 312only because the virus weakens the subjective recuperation of the event, because it loosens and unhinges the ‘stabilizing arrest’ [arrêt stabilisateur], which one calls ‘the subject.’ We give credence to the subject, we credit it, only after having denied it credit. AIDS not only receives credit through the confession, as Guibert maintains. It decides on creditworthiness itself. However, is not the emergence and epidemic spread of AIDS exactly that event which poses the challenge to think its own im-pertinence? This im-pertinence consists in the impossibility, for the event, of appropriating itself and of belonging to itself. This does not mean, however, that it therefore simply belongs to that which is not event-like. A thinking that concerns itself with AIDS, with the event of its emergence and spread, with contamination and the relation between event and contamination, seems unable to prevent its own contamination, to prevent AIDS.
