Joyce

Question from the Floor: I'd like to ask you about your work on literary texts and the reverse - in particular, about your works on James Joyce, where the influence seems to go from him to you and to you to back from him, so you're deconstructing Joyce while Joyce is deconstructing you.

Derrida: No... I mean, what is the question?... You're right, but what is the question?

Question from the Floor: ... Expand.

Derrida: Expand... It's already very difficult to write on Joyce, but to speak on Joyce is an even more difficult task, but I'll try to say something. First of all, since the Dean referred to the time a long time ago when I spent one year in Harvard, in '56, what I did at Harvard was read Joyce in the library, what I encountered was Ulysses, and since then Joyce has been reserved for me... the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, that is a singular event, to gather - I'm referring here to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - to gather the totality, the presumed totality not only of one culture but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, religions and so on and so forth. And this impossible task of decided gathering in a totality, in a potential totality, the potentially infinite memory... is at the same time for me exemplarily new in its modern form and very classical in its philosophical form. That's why I have often compared Joyce's Ulysses to Hegel's, for instance, Hegel's Encyclopedia or Hegel's Logic. It is an attempt to read the absolute knowledge through a single act of memory; this being possible only by loading every sentence, every word with a maximum of equivocalities, of possibilities, of virtual associations, that is, by making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible.

Of course this at the same time reassembled the history of literature and inaugurated and produced a break in the history of literature, and what I tried to show also in the texts you are referring to is the fact that at the same time the writing of these works functioned as an injunction to the canon, that is, to the common literary critics, to the institutions of Joycean scholarship, to build a sort of beehive, an infinite institution of people working as interpreters, people deciphering Joyce's signature as a singular signature. From that point of view I think that Joyce is a great landmark in the history of deconstruction; that's why the reference to Joyce is involved with me... In a book on Husserl, my first book on Husserl, I tried to compare the way Joyce treated language and the way classical philosophers...also treated language. Joyce wanted to make history and the resumption, the totalization of history possible through the accumulation of equivocalities, of metaphoricities, tropes and so on and so forth whereas Husserl thought that historicity was made possible by the transparent univocality of language, that is, scientific, mathematical language, pure language. There is no historicity without the transparency of the tradition, Husserl says, and there is no historicity without this accumulation of equivocalities in language, as Joyce has said, and it's from that tension between the two interrelations of language that I try to address questions of language.

I would mention only two other points in Joyce in reference to our current discussion. One has to do with the question of the 'yes'. In my short essay on Joyce I tried to deal only with the word 'yes' as it was...performed, so to speak, in Ulysses; and I tried to show how all the paradoxes which are linked to this question of the 'yes'...this has to do with the fact that deconstruction is a 'yes', is linked, is an affirmation. When I say 'yes' - as you know, 'yes' is the last word in Ulysses - when I say 'yes' to the other in the form of a promise or an agreement or an oath, the 'yes' must be absolutely inaugural. In relation to the theme today, inauguration is a 'yes', I say 'yes' as a starting point, nothing precedes the yes, the yes is the moment of the institution, the origin; it's absolutely originary. But when you say 'yes', if you don't imply that the moment after that you will have to confirm the 'yes' by a second 'yes' - when I say 'yes', I immediately say 'yes, yes' - I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second, and tomorrow and after tomorrow and so on, which means that the 'yes' immediately duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say 'yes' without saying 'yes, yes', which implies memory in the promise; I promise to keep the memory of the first yes and when you, in a wedding for instance, in a performative, in a promise, when you say 'yes, I agree, I will' you imply, 'I will say 'I will' tomorrow and I will confirm my promise', otherwise there is no promise. Which means that the 'yes' keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning. That's the way it's a different word. If tomorrow you don't confirm that you have founded today your program you will not have any relation to it.

Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now we will - if today there has been any inauguration; we don't know yet, we don't know, we can't today, where I am speaking... who knows? So 'yes' has to be repeated, and immediately, immediately it implies what I call 'iterability', it implies the repetition of itself. Which is a threat, which is threatening at the same time because the second yes may be simply a parody or a record or mechanical repetition; it may say 'yes, yes' like a parrot, which means that the technical reproduction of the originary 'yes' is from the beginning threatening to the living origin of the 'yes', which means that the 'yes' is hounded by its own ghost, its own mechanical ghost, from the beginning. Which means that the second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent the first one. If tomorrow you don't reinvent today's inauguration... it will have been dead. Every day the inauguration has to be reinvented. So that's one thing.

The second thing I would select here has to do with what Joyce calls at some point the legal fiction of fatherhood. This is a very Christian moment - I am referring to this text; I cannot quote it here - but that's when Stephen says, well, 'Paternity is a legal fiction', and he refers to Christian texts, the Biblical text. Why is it so? Because one is supposed to know who the mother is; there is a possibility of bearing witness to who the mother is, whereas the father is only... only sort of reconstructed, inferred. The identification of the father is always resounding in a judgement - you cannot see the father. And I think that today we experience that not only is the father a legal fiction from which it draws and it has drawn its authority, and before I confirm this by saying, well, patriarchy has been a progress in the history of mankind because the father... to determine who the father is you need reason; for us to determine who the mother is, you only need sensible perception. I think he is wrong and he has always been wrong but we don't... there is not only this paternal preterite because the mother is also a legal fiction from that moment, that is, the motherhood is something which is interpreted. The theme of a reconstruction of an experience - what one calls today surrogate mothers for instance, with all the enormous problems that, you know, attest to the fact that we do not know is who is the mother - who is the mother in the case of surrogate mothers? And when we realize that the motherhood is not simply a matter of perception we realize that it has never been so, that the mother has always been a matter of interpretation, of social construction and so on and so forth, and this has enormous political consequences. We don't have time probably to deal with this but I would, if we had time I would try to show what the political consequences may be of this fact that the situation of the mother is the same as the one of the father in that respect.

[The conversation is brought to closure.] Back to the index?

Transcribed by J. Christian Guerrero; this interview is now in print in John D. Caputo, ed.: Deconstruction in a nutshell, Fordham UP 1997. Contact the webmaster fort details.