Chapter One
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Deconstruction and Love Can one speak of loving without declaring love, without declaring war, beyond all possible neutrality? Without confessing, be it the unspeakable? -Jacques Derrida
The conjunction of deconstruction and love will seem an unexpected one to some. It is an association excluded by the widely circulated image of deconstruction as an essentially negative operation, as if the term were really a synonym of "destruction" and the additional syllable simply superfluous. This persistent reduction has come about only after many repetitions, performed most often so as to give someone a pretext for denunciation. Deconstruction has had bad press almost since it first appeared in Derrida''s writings. Things got quickly worse when others began to pick up the term, perhaps because this could be taken as a signal that something larger was afoot and would have to be dealt with more severely. Thus it is that, after several decades of such severity, one cannot approach an essay on deconstruction and love without anticipating a resistance fed by the rumor that deconstruction is essentially destructive and even that it destroys everything we, as members of civilized societies, ought to work to preserve from destruction, which is to say, everything we love or at least everything we are told we ought to love. Beginning with love itself. At its core, this resistance would be working to protect love itself from destruction, and thus to protect everything and everyone we love. And what could be more natural than that? The nature of this resistance would thus be that of the tautology assumed between acts of loving and acts of preserving or protecting from destruction. As such, the resistance is likely to be activated by very powerful forces indeed.
The task of this chapter cannot be to overcome this powerful resistance, assuming that such a thing were even possible. It cannot aim, in other words, simply to dismantle the resistant idea that love essentially seeks to preserve from destruction and is therefore what must, above all, be preserved. Rather, I will try to make apparent how a loving movement is the indispensable key to understanding what deconstruction does. In the process-and this would be the ultimate stakes of the undertaking-the idea will have to be approached that even if it is essentially preservative, love (but also deconstruction) is nevertheless no stranger to destruction, to loss, and to ruin. To put it less litotically, in other words, to avoid that figure of speech whereby an affirmation is expressed by the negative of the contrary, we will be approaching the figure of love as affirmation that deconstructs the opposition between preservation and destruction, of love, therefore, as that which, like deconstruction, takes place along the divided, ruined border of this alternative.
Let''s begin by citing just one of the many occasions on which Derrida has sought to arrest the assimilation of deconstruction to a negative operation, to a destruction. It is from the transcription of a discussion he had with some colleagues in Montreal in 1979 (Derrida is thus not the only signatory of this text). He is explaining how he initially never intended to attach any privilege to the term "deconstruction," which he began using in a chain with many others. This privilege got assigned when others began to repeat the term as the principal designation for what he and soon many others were interested in doing. But insofar as the word carried connotations, as he puts it, "of a technical operation used to dismantle systems," he has never much liked it. The technical reference, he explains, tends to screen out the more important association for him: that the deconstructive gesture be "accompanied, or can be accompanied (in any case, I would hope to accompany it), by an affirmation. It is not negative, it is not destructive." He goes on to recount that, once it became clear how this word was being singled out by others, he tried "to determine this concept," as he writes, "in my own manner, that is, according to what I thought was the right manner, which I did by insisting on the fact that it was not a question of a negative operation" (87). And then, so as to make his insistence on the non-negative, affirmative concept of deconstruction clearer still, Derrida speaks of love:
I don''t feel that I''m in a position to choose between an operation that we''ll call negative or nihilist, an operation that would set about furiously dismantling systems, and the other operation. I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts I love, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for reading. They are texts whose future, I think, will not be exhausted for a long time.... [M]y relation to these texts is characterized by loving jealousy and not at all by nihilistic fury (one can''t read anything in the latter condition) ... (ibid.)
Before underscoring a few points about these remarks, one might ask: Is it certain that this is the most auspicious place to begin a discussion of deconstruction and love? When one says that one loves a text, when the object of the transitive verb "love" is not an animate thing, then is there not a very large distance taken at the outset from the heart of the love relation, which has to be (does it not?) either interpersonal or at least a relation formed between animate, living beings? In other words, by setting out from a remark about love for something like texts, are we not going off in a wrong direction, which has to lead wide of the animate heart or soul of love? Worse still, beginning in this fashion might risk confirming yet another facet of deconstruction''s negative association in many people''s minds, all those for whom, for example, Derrida''s famous assertion "there is no outside-the-text" is heard only as an intellectual''s negation of all activity other than writing and reading. To even seem to imply that the love in question in deconstruction is first of all the love of texts appears designed to discourage at the outset anyone who might harbor this misguided notion from giving it up.
That is always possible. Yet, if these risks seem worth taking, it could well be for a reason not unlike the one that leads Derrida, in the above passage, to insist to the extent he does that, contrary to a common perception, his own practice of deconstruction proceeds out of love rather than under the sway of a destructive impulse: that reason is to add the force of affirmation to what otherwise appears destined to have only the negative force of its technical, dismantling operation. Likewise, if we begin here by speaking of the love of texts with some faith that we will thereby be led to the heart of the matter, then it must be because we have already begun to affirm something about love''s heart: it is that which would be able to hold together in an essential relation the movement toward the animate as well as toward the inanimate, toward life as well as non-life, or death, and therefore toward that which can be preserved in life as well as that which has never had or no longer has any life as such to be preserved. At the heart of love, all of these apparent oppositions would be suspended, no longer or not yet in force, or already ruined, in ruins.
But this is indeed to anticipate where the opening quotation, on loving the texts one deconstructs, may lead. To consider these remarks less precipitously, one should recall that they were improvised for a specific occasion and in response to another''s question; as such, they are perhaps less guarded, less policed than they might otherwise be for publication under an author''s sole signature. Derrida here is sharing with others the responsibility for signing this text. Which is not to say, of course, that they are unsigned or unattributable, but merely that they bear a particular relation to the movement whereby one signs something. Indeed, Derrida had been invited on the occasion in question to air thoughts about that movement itself, to characterize his own gesture when he signed other texts elsewhere, to offer reflections from a certain remove about what put them and his signature in motion. As remarks about the relation one may have to the writing and reading one does (or to which one submits), they would attempt to configure those activities (or those passions) from somewhere exterior to them, at some distance before or beyond what is being described. And since what is being described or characterized is the relation, passion, and impulse called love, then the external vantage point aimed for here would itself have to stand outside that love relation, in a position of "objective neutrality," as it is called, which would be the position of the would-be scientist or scholar. But is this attempt in fact a success? Is there, in other words, an objectively neutral, scholarly position that can be identified there?
That is very doubtful, for reasons one may quickly see. As already pointed out, the remarks summarize how Derrida had to work to counter a prevalent understanding of the deconstructive gesture as negative or destructive. They give a condensed account of his efforts to resituate this concept "according to what [he] thought was the right manner," which was the manner of an affirmation. Notice, however, that at a certain point, the point at which the quoted extract begins, the speaker is no longer giving simply an account of what he has done, of other texts he has signed; the mode or manner of his remarks also shifts to that of affirmation. And it is at this point that he invokes love: "I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from a deconstructive point of view are texts I love ..." Such phrases, and those that surround them, can no longer be heard as merely descriptive-or constative, as speech act theorists would say; in other words, they do not only describe a state of affairs, which led someone to do something, and then the something that he did ("to determine this concept in my own manner") or that he continues to do ("I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner"). Without drama, but with indisputable emphasis, these phrases also do something: they declare love, and as such they perform the affirmation by which, as Derrida had earlier observed, the deconstructive gesture "is accompanied, or can be accompanied (in any case, I would hope to accompany it)." In doing so, in declaring love, they affirm the accompanying affirmation in the present of their performance, at the scene of discussion with some colleagues in Montreal in 1979, but also, of course, at every other scene at which these remarks can be and have been repeated, including this one. Each repetition differs in force, but with each quotation or repetition, the affirmative declaration remains, as it were, in excess over the descriptive value of these sentences. In excess, or rather let us say that the affirmative force of the declaration is that which conditions the description as more, less, or simply other than the description that it also is, but that it is only by virtue of having been declared. In other words, when Derrida (or anyone else) says or writes: "I love X very much," he is describing a certain relation, but he can describe it only by affirming again that he loves X very much. Because an affirmative accompaniment puts in place the description, which it thereby precedes and conditions, no objective neutrality is to be found outside this structure, for one is already within it, which is to say, within a structure conditioned by the non-objective, non-neutral, affirmative declaration: "I love ..."
This suggests that, without much apparent calculation (for that is the character of improvisation), the remarks I''ve quoted and then partially analyzed would have performed once again the accompanying affirmation that Derrida finds to be missing whenever deconstruction is construed as a merely technical operation of dismantling, whenever its gesture is taken up and repeated as technique or mere method, whenever an external, objectively neutral position is assumed as the place from which to deconstruct whatever by whomever, and by anyone at all like everyone else. The affirmation by which Derrida would wish to accompany the deconstructive gesture cannot be neutral; it is, rather, of the nature of love, that is, of that whose non-neutrality must be thought of in at least two different ways.
On the one hand, when one loves something or someone, one is partial to it, to him, or to her; one even has a passion, as we say, for that thing or that person or that creature. That is why, for example, in allegories of love (e.g., Cupid), love''s passion will be represented somehow as a blindness. But this impaired visibility or vision is precisely not the blindness we believe to be required of justice, which is conceived of or allegorized as a blindness in the interest of dispensing a neutral, or just, justice. The blindness of love, in its partiality, is assumed to prevent, overturn, or at least make improbable the blind, impartial neutrality of justice. On the other hand, love is not neutral in the sense that he or she who loves is not just anyone, no matter who; it is he who loves, she who loves. Each has his or her idiom of love, but this idiom is less something one has or knows than something one does. (We will return to this notion of idiom below).
Now, these two faces or figures of love''s non-neutrality might be called objective and subjective if it were not that such a distinction is suspended by or from the passion of love, in other words, by or from that which one experiences in a certain passivity under the influence or the pull of another whom one loves, that is, the other to whom one''s feeling of love becomes addressed and by whom it is therefore determined as address. Determined by the other, the address of love is never issued by a pre-existent subject in the direction of an object, its object, or destination. As Jean-Luc Nancy has put it:
Love re-presents the "I" to itself as broken ... To the "I" it presents this: that it, this subject, has been touched, breached, in its subjectivity, and from now on, it is; for the time of love, broken or cracked, however slightly. It is so, which means that the break or the wound is neither an accident nor a property that the subject could make its own. Since it is a break of its property as subject, it is, essentially, an interruption in the process of relating to oneself outside oneself.... For as long as it lasts, love does not cease to come from without and to remain, not outside but this outside itself, each time singular, a blade plunged into me and that I cannot rejoin because it disjoins me.
One could say, in somewhat simple terms, that the position of subject, the subject position, the positionality of subject/object are, as such, incapable of the experience of love''s passion or even that they are opposed to that experience insofar as it knows no subject, no "I" who loves "X," outside or before the passion of the subject''s address of love. In other words, love is not a matter of position, whether of subject or object, and therefore of opposition, but of an address that does not originate from any home, as it were. An address without home, without the property of a subject from which it is sent and to which it returns, love always brushes up against the uncanny, the unheimlich, which might also be translated for the occasion as "un-homelike." Love brings with it the un-homelike because it is the experience of the sudden or not-so-sudden arrival of the other who expropriates address, which is to say appropriates it, exappropriates it: when I say "I love ...," it is always the declaration of the other at my address.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BOOK OF ADDRESSESby Peggy Kamuf Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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