Afterw.rds

I prefer to reply to a letter, that's the first reply to your questions.

For by replying to a letter, even by simulacrum and in the form of a final 'afterword' (final is always a simulacrum in this case), nothing is closed off, nothing is concluded, the exchange is left open, this is even marked by a clause of infinite opening - and the possibility of speaking is returned. My first reply, then, is that if there is a reply, an Afterword in the form of a reply will never be a last word.

For there must not be a last word - that's what I'd like to say, finally; the afterword is not, that means ought not, ought never to be a last word. It comes after the discourse, that's true, but detached enough not to accomplish, finish off, close or conclude. It lifts the closure but does not sublate it; it does not present itself absolutely nor does it present anything else in the sublation of an Aufhebung. We're dealing here with a different order, a different temporality, heterogeneous enough to gather into it an interruption that cannot be scarred over. There's no suture once there's the after-event, the Nachträglichkeit of an afterword.

I shall deduce from this 'must' all the other propositions of this letter, in reply to your questions and so as not to conclude. Of course I shall sign this quasi -final afterword, but that is not so serious if we take as read that an afterword is not a last word and that the signature, which is not a word like other words, and above all not a 'term', is neither an afterword nor a conclusion.

So after these introductory or preliminary remarks, in other words after this foreword, I begin:

1. You suggest some titles for this afterword. Yes, I always prefer to multiply or pluralise titles, i.e. those 'first words' which are not first words and which, as you suggest, I quote, 'could be entitled "Afterword", or "Afterwords" (?) (or "After Words" or "Afterwards"??)': my choice will be Afterw.rds, this furtive interruption mobilising two letters towards the improbable end of a word which hesitates between noun and non-noun. I do not think it is possible to answer the question 'what is an afterword?', because, as I have suggested, by interrupting the order of a discourse which it does not round off like a conclusion, like a last word or a last judgement, still less an apocalypse, the afterword withdraws from the logos of ontology and everything that comes under the question 'what is?'. The 'logic' without logic or logos of the afterword signals towards what comes after the order, meaning and authority of the question 'what is?'. (In the beginning there was perhaps the logos, but after history opened in this way, the afterword no longer belongs to it, it is not a term, and the after marking it is not inscribed in a succession of 'befores', 'nows', 'afters', as so many present 'nows'.) I am not saying that this is the case for any afterword, for every piece of writing which lays claim to this title and to being reapproporiated by the logos, even as its end. But if we follow carefully the call and structure of a rigorous afterword, one should be led there, over there, beyond the question 'What is?' and all the logic, ontologic, and teleology it commands (and thus also beyond the arkhè, the command and the beginning, and so beyond archeo-logy.) You see how an affinity is beginning to show up between what you call 'deconstruction' (in the singular) and the strange experience of an afterword.

2. This brings me to your second question, 'Can deconstruction have an afterword?'. Rapidly, as a serious boutade: it can't, but it must. It can't in so far as the hypothesis of an afterword to deconstruction assumes that the discourse of deconstruction has the form of a concluded, closed-off totality, a book, the great Book after which and outside which a postface or a postscript would add a second 'last word', a second term. You know that 'deconstruction', writing of a deconstructive style, the experience of deconstruction do not lend themselves to this totalisation or post-totalisation and cannot be punctuated by the full-stop after which a 'post-word' could be written. There is no post, only posts for a deconstruction, telecommunications and, as you well know, telepathies with no full presence. Unless a certain 'logic of the supplement' (and at bottom that's what I should constantly be referring to in order to answer your questions) inscribes in deconstruction that shortage or lack, that de-totalising principle that necessarily and indefinitely calls for the supplement of an afterword. But if the afterword is a supplement, does it still deserve its name? Does it not already form part of the incomplete corpus to which it appears to be added after the event from outside? Can the common concepts of what is ordinarily and in its dominant usage called an afterword tolerate the logic of the supplement? Is it not on the contrary there to deny, repress and reduce that logic to silence?

And yet, for the same reasons, following the same premises, deconstruction must have the afterword that it cannot have. For, always incomplete, of an incompletion which is not the negativity of a lack, it is interminable, an 'interminable analysis' ('theoretical and practical', as we used to say). As it is never closed into a system, as it is the deconstruction of the systemic totality, it needs some supplementary afterword each time it runs the risk of stabilising or saturating into a formalised discourse (doctrine, method, delimitable and canonised corpus, teachable knowledge, etc.). It must be what it both is an is not in itself: an effect that cannot totalise itself; the 'all' of philosophy, the 'all' of western culture, or rather the infinite idea of totality, wherever and in whatever form it can present itself: afterword to the presence or presentation of the present itself. After all, having to be what one cannot be, the strange structure of this topos, is the opening of the future itself, a future which does not allow itself to be modlised or modified into the form of the present, which allows itself neither to be fore-seen nor pro-grammed; it is thus also the opening to freedom, responsibility, decision, ethics and politics, so many terms that would therefore have to be withdrawn from the deconstructible logic of presence, conscience or intention. This is also what I've called elsewhere the experience of the impossible, a scarcely acceptable expression that nonetheless remains, to my eyes at least, the least bad definition of deconstruction, the most 'necessary', the necessary here no longer contradicting the impossible. That the necessary is impossible, or rather the impossible necessary, that's perhaps why deconstruction which 'lives' on this 'contradiction', must have the afterword it cannot have; perhaps quite simply because it 'is' it, or promises to be, will have promised to be it, according to a modality of the future perfect that does not modalise, as is often thought, the tense of the present (whence the strange relation between afterward and forward in the time, space and 'movement' of deconstruction; and the reason why I have associated afterword and afterward in our title)
(Here I ask myself a question that I have neither the time not the strength to refine: would I be able to find a program (for example a computer program) which would allow me to adjust and translate on the subject of the afterword everything I once wrote - and which would in that case be simply symmetrical - on the subject of the preface, the avant-propos, the introduction, etc., in what I entitled:

HORS LIVRE
Prefaces

3. I've probably already begun to reply, in principle, to your third question ('What is the time of an afterword? And place?'). Suffice it to reread and translate. I shall add only a supplementary remark, a postscript, if you like, to what I have just been saying. It's that the concept of Nachträglichkeit (which is translated as après-coup in French and I don't know in English) is no doubt very interesting. It helps to re-elaborate the concept of the afterword in its topo-logic and its chrono-logic, by withdrawing it from the logic of consciousness or of presence as consciousness. But it does not do this on its own, and often the ways it is put tp work in certain psychoanalytical discourses reappropriate it to time and space, to the economy of the logocentric totalisation I was peaking of above. They subject it to an economy of repression as simple placing in reserve, delay or detour (Umweg) without heterogeneity, therefore without différance, in a simple displacement of the place of inscription. The après-coup I refer to in a work of deconstruction and in the afterword it conditions is not limited to that Nachträglichkeit. It deconstructs that too, going toward what exceeds it and carries beyond it or after it. The afterword runs after, never stops getting out of breath running after what is in front of it. This inversion of the front and back is the theme of The Post Card. Plato is in fron of Socrates because he is behind him and comes after him; and they are both writing a sort of afterword, the one because the other preceded him with his speech, the other because te other preceded him with his writing. They precede and wait for each other but without the least reciprocity. The Afterword or the Nachwort are incompatible with even the slightest symmetry, with the slightest 'syn' in general. Being-before-the-law (Vor dem Gesetz, think of Kafka's text) both puts in motion and paralyses before the same open door - and the same aporia.

4. 'Might it be possible to suggest that there is only "afterword"?' That's your fourth question. And an interesting suggestion indeed, which could fit in with the propositions I've just risked. If what came 'before' never lets itself be totalised, there is no longer any pure 'before', everything begins with delay and différance, everything begins by engaging, calling or prescribing the afterword. Deconstruction would be just that. The more so in that it comes 'after the word', to recall that it takes place beyond discourse: not only - as in Of Grammatology - does deconstruction take on logo-phonocentrism, not only does it question the authority, unity or very identity of the word (the linguistics of the 'word', the vocable) but it insists where it is no longer merely a question of deconstructing discourses and semantics, but also and primarily institutional and political structures.

However, the 'only' in your question ('... to suggest that there is only "afterword"') will always run the risk of retransforming the afterword into a text that is major, principal, total, solitary in a word and therefore monarchical: the absolute knowledge of its own authority, the master word drawing its authority only from itself, the eschatological word, the advent of the extreme. No: and this is why I insisted on the plurality and opening (afterwords, afterwards) of what remains to come.

5. To your last question ('And that the time and place of an afterword, this afterword, could be identified with the time and place of "deconstruction in Finland"?'), I have no reply, not even the principle of a reply. I dare not say, either for Finland or for deconstruction, 'I hope not'. And I'd be wary of whoever wanted to translate Finland as 'land of the end' [pays de la fin], like Finistère, in Brittany, means land of the end, limit-land.

With my most telepathic friendship,
Jacques Derrida

P.S. Need I stress that this text, which is more or less ruled by my language, the French language, will be all the harder to translate into English for the fact that it could not even be retranslated into French? There is no strict equivalent for 'afterword' in French. And Afterw.rd does not belong to the dictionary of any known language. Try any language + Finnish.

Epilogue

Last resort solution, if you still want to publish this text: do so in several languages (at least a bi-lingual face-to-face).