LEARNING TO ZJ ~T~} 'Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Q, Qj Derrida, who died in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as —— one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century.' >*J — The New York Times LIVE FINALLY r— ^-» With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world's most famous __ *T\ philosopher - known as the father of 'deconstruction' - sat down ~' with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surpris The Last Interview ingly accessible, and moving final interview. Sometimes called 'obscure' and branded 'abstruse' by his critics, 'ACOUES DERRIDA the Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, 'To philosophize is to learn to die'; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death-including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career. The late Jacques Derrida was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. ISBN 978-0-230-53785-9 9 780230 537859 Cover illustration © Carol Hayes Learning to Live Finally The Last Interview Jacques Derrida An Interview with Jean Birnbaum Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas With a bibliography by Peter Krapp All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIT 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in France as Apprendre a vivre enfin: Entretien avecjean Birnbaurn by Editions Calilee/Le Monde. Copyright © i Editions Galilee 2005. First published in the United States by Melville House Publishing. Translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas © Melville House Publishing 2007. 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Let us then hasten to begin by the end.1 On August 19, 2004, the French newspaper Le Monde published an interview with Jacques Derrida. i In that interview, which appeared under the title "I j am at war with myself," the philosopher appeared on a scene that was familiar to him, that of a mourning at once originary and incessantly to come, and whose imminence now seemed to color his every gesture. On this scene or stage Derrida had chosen to come forward, this time more than ever, as a survivor. That is, as both an "uneducable specter who will have never learned how to live" and a man who does not want to stop saying "yes" to life, a thinker whose entire work pays homage to the subversive intensity of existence. Bearing Loss: Derrida as a Child A few weeks after the publication of this a man already half in the grave, what was inaugurated interview, during the night of October 9, Derrida was indeed something like a cogito of survival: "I succumbed to his illness. For those who had read and survived therefore I am." Everything is there if you loved him, and who were ready to accompany him listen carefully, everything returns in the form of some further, for a long time still and always in the present, Derridean theme: "I was able to survive, or simply to it wasn't easy to find the strength. At the moment the be and exist, only in secret," confides the narrator of curtain fell, one felt, almost instinctively, that it was this strange Kaddish. best not to move: better just to stay there by his side, There would be much to say about these moments on that inexorable stage of mourning where we would when the spectral writing of Kertesz seems inhabited, have to bid him "farewell [salui\." indeed literally ventriloquized, by the spirits (for there Not to disappear from the scene, then, not to are more than one) of Derrida. Let me simply mark leave the stage. If I may thus be forgiven an apparent this double uncertainty, the double aporia with which aside, I would like to recall here the name of Imre the Hungarian author struggles: it is impossible, from Kertesz and thank the theater company of the Theatre childhood on, to know what it is "to be Jewish"— Ouvert in Paris, where his Kaddish for a Child Not that's the original problem of identity; and it is also Born was adapted for the stage and performed.2 As impossible to acquire, in the proper sense of the term, early as the end of August, the director of this national any kind of6'savoir-vivre" any kind of "knowing how center for drama, Lucien Attoun, after having read to live." No way to learn to live \apprendre a vivre], to the interview with Derrida in Le Monde, invited me take up the expression Kertesz uses repeatedly, never to come hear the spectral writing of this Hungarian without italics, to describe the absolute solitude of writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.3 his character, a former prisoner of the concentration There was no coincidence in this generous invitation: camps, now a writer whose wife has left him: "She in this Kaddish of Kertesz, in these wandering words of repeated more than once that it was from me that LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY Bearing Loss: Derrida as a Child she learned to live" recalls the narrator of this Kaddish of a death that is coming, always already there, wherein the futility of such hope is expressed on every impossible to anticipate; hope in an unrelenting page.4 fidelity—an entrusted trace, a renewed promise. It is That's it for the end; now let's return to the here that we find again the theme of transmission, of beginning. A few months before this coup de theatre, legacy, the "politics of memory, of inheritance, and I went to the home of Jacques Derrida. It was the of generations" that is sought in Derrida's Specters of spring of 2004; the terrible illness was there but the Marx, on the horizon of an obligation to justice and hour of the Kaddish seemed far away. No one, at least, an endless responsibility before "the ghosts of those could really imagine it. After many hesitations, at the who are not yet born or who are already dead."6 moment of beginning our conversation, of posing a This archive desire, this essential concern for first question, it was almost exactly the same words, generations, haunts the entire Derridean landscape. the same italics, that imposed themselves upon us: From out of this landscape two figures emerge, those "Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: / of the ghost and of the child—the only witnesses at would like to learn to live finally "^ Everything began the end. To follow the traces they leave behind, let there, everything being contained there in reserve, us return briefly to the two aporias of Imre Kertesz's in this enigmatic formula that gave the interview its Kaddish. initial impetus and its momentum. First, Jewishness: a "lost child" of Judaism, That the philosopher himself wished to confer Derrida often recalled the double movement of upon his responses a sort of testamentary charge was acquiescence and anxiety, of love and revolt, that clear from the outset. To rediscover them today, in characterized his relationship to the tradition of Israel. light of the Kaddish, is to confront the affirmation Evoking in this regard "the obscure and uncertain and hope that are displayed there, no matter the experience of inheritance," he underscored the violence cost, one line after another: the lucid affirmation of an assignation of identity inscribed from the outset LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY Bearing Loss: Derrida as a Child in the immemorial time of an interminable repetition, two silhouettes: the specter and the child. Not only, and first of all in "the memory without memory of of course, because whoever goes through the trial of circumcision." A so very dangerous assignation that death prepares to take the step beyond—"as disarmed as seizes, "harpoons," and threatens (with death) the a newly born child"—but also and especially because Jewish child "before any fault and before any act," the task of every survivor, that is, of the one who that is, we might say, before even any act of birth.7 temporarily survives the other, the friend, consists Called thus into a covenant, as if prior to any coming in enduring his or her disappearance.10 This survivor into the world, all those who bear a Jewish name find prepares to bear (tragen) the absence—or, better, to themselves in what Derrida calls "the situation of an bear the loss as one bears a child.11 at once spectral and patriarchic nursling."8 Such is the burning vocation of the survivor, this And then: learning to live. As with Jewishness, we apprentice ghost who never looks backward without would have to cite text after text on this point, so much falling back into childhood: "survival structures is Derridas reflection obsessed by this second aporia, every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, that this other way of naming the impossible: "To live, of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the by definition, is not something one learns. Not from untimely moment and the posthumous into what is oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only most living in the living present, the rearview mirror from the other and by death."9 Living, like dying, is of an expecting-death at every moment," writes not something one learns. All one can really do is see Derrida.12 it coming. Together. To try to learn from one another A few days before the publication of our to live, in a shared anxiety and a difficult freedom, interview (which here appears in its entirety and as where each expects him or herself to die: a passing Derrida himself had approved it), the philosopher out of life, farewell [salut] in the night. Whence the was seated at a table at his home in Ris-Orangis. Pen renewed necessity not to distinguish between these in hand, he reread the contents of the interview with LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY Bearing Loss: Derrida as a Child