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“Remembrance of the Future”: Derridaon MourningJoan KirkbyPublished online: 24 Jan 2007.

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‘‘Remembrance of theFuture’’: Derrida on Mourning

Joan Kirkby

In MEMOIRES for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as anongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us andcontinue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility andtransformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalyticaccounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus frompsychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok),gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

Keywords mourning; psychoanalysis; incorporation; gedachtnis; Derrida; deMan; Freud; Abraham and Torok

On an occasion to mark the death of Derrida and to celebrate the political futures

of his thought, I would like to revisit his own reflections on mourning, and inparticular the new model of mourning that he articulates and enacts inMEMORIES for Paul de Man*/a model that depathologises mourning and sees it

as the opportunity for a continuing engagement with the legacy of the dead whoremain within us and yet beyond us, and who look at us with a look that is not

ours to do with what we will, but a look that is a call to responsibility (Derrida2001a, 44 and Derrida 2001b, 161). MEMOIRES for Paul de Man was written on the

occasion of de Man’s death in 1983, delivered as a series of lectures on the eastand west coasts of the United States and finally published in 1988. I think it is fair

to say, indeed Derrida himself has said, that he has always been concerned withthe theme of mourning. In response to a question about ‘‘a certain relation to

loss which philosophy usually avoids’’, Derrida responds in a 1983 interview:

I rarely speak of loss, just as I rarely speak of lack, because these are words thatbelong to the code of negativity, which is not mine . . . I believe desire isaffirmation, and consequently that mourning itself is affirmation as well; I wouldaccept more readily to say that my writing is bereaved [endeuillee], or a writingof semi-mourning, without intending that to mean loss. (Derrida 1995b, 143)

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online/06/030461-12# 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10350330600824383

SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2006)

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Derrida’s re-articulation of mourning is part of his long engagement with Freud

and psychoanalytic thought. He has identified himself as someone whose

‘‘argument with psychoanalysis has driven me to prowl endlessly in the vicinity

of Beyond the Pleasure Principle ’’ (Derrida 1998, 24�/25).Certainly the motifs that contribute to Derrida’s reconceptualisation of

mourning have been present since the 1960s.In the early ‘‘Freud and the Scene

of Writing’’ he examines Freud’s concept of the trace and of deferral or

afterwardness (Nachtraglichkeit), concluding that: ‘‘The irreducibility of the

‘effect of deferral’ . . . is Freud’s discovery’’ (Derrida 1978, 203). He emphasises

Freud’s view of the psychic mechanism as a process of ‘‘memory traces being

subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh

circumstances to a retranscription’’, and notes ‘‘the effort of life to protect

itself by deferring a dangerous cathexis with the help of breaching or

repetition’’: ‘‘Is it not already death at the origin of a life which can defend

itself against death only through an economy of death, through deferment,

repetition, reserve’’ (Derrida 1978, 202). Similarly, in ‘‘Difference’’, Derrida

argues that a theory of the trace and differance as an ‘‘economics of forces’’

that puts into question the authority of consciousness is also ‘‘the major motif of

Freud’s thought’’ (Derrida 1982, 18). That ‘‘certain alterity’’ to which Freud gives

the name of the unconscious ‘‘differs from, and defers, itself’’. Moreover,

Derrida writes: ‘‘The structure of delay (Nachtraglichkeit)’’ and ‘‘the alterity of

the unconscious makes us concerned . . . with a past that has never been present,

and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a

reproduction in the form of presence’’ (1982, 21).

In ‘‘To Speculate*/on ‘Freud’’’, the last 250 pages of The Post Card, Derrida

offers a beautiful reading of Freud’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle; in

particular, the repetition compulsion of the fort/da game, as a work of mourning

for the death of Freud’s beloved Sophie, his ‘‘preferred daughter’’ (‘‘the one

whose image preserved in a medallion around his wrist he will show to a female

patient’’), and the subsequent death of her second son, Heinerle, the second son

who would have taken the first name of his maternal grandfather, Sigmund

(Derrida 1987, 333). It is for Freud the death that seems ‘‘irremediable’’, and he

is seen to cry for the only time. The death of Heinerle is itself

a repetition, for Freud’s younger brother Julius died when Freud was two. This

legacy of repetition impels Freud’s articulation of the fort/da game and assigns

it to ‘‘an auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing’’ (Derrida 1987, 336).

Freud writes while observing Ernst’s game of throwing away his toys in order that

they may be found and reassembled, and Derrida suggests that Freud does with

writing what Ernst is doing with his spool. There is a ‘‘structural identification

with the grandson’’, who ‘‘compensates himself for his pain (the disappearance

of the mother) by playing at dis-appearance’’: ‘‘The serious play of the fort/da

couples absence and presence in the re- of returning’’ (Derrida 1987, 324, 320).In The Gift of Death Derrida argues that death is the place of one’s

irreplaceability (Derrida 1995a, 41) and the birth of responsibility: ‘‘my first

and last responsibility . . . is that responsibility of responsibility that relates me to

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what no one else can do in my place’’ (1995a, 44). He cites Levinas’ idea that

‘‘responsibility is not initially of myself or for myself’’, but is ‘‘derived from the

other’’: ‘‘I am responsible for the death of the other to the extent of including

myself in that death . . . I am responsible for the other inasmuch as the other is

mortal’’ (Derrida 1995a, 46).In Aporias Derrida argues that: ‘‘With death, Dasein awaits itself . . . in its

innermost potentiality for being’’ (1993, 64). He emphasises that the death of

the other is always first*/‘‘it is like the experience of mourning that institutes my

relation to myself’’*/and that ‘‘this self relation welcomes or supposes the other

within its being-itself as different from itself’’: ‘‘And reciprocally: the relation to

the other (in itself outside myself, outside myself in myself) will never be

distinguishable from a bereaved apprehension’’ (Derrida 1995a, 61) In contrast to

Heidegger, who regarded mourning as lying within ‘‘derivative disciplines such as

psychology or psychoanalysis, theology or metaphysics’’, Derrida argues that

mourning is constitutive of the self relation and of the relation to the other. He

further argues that mourning includes a political dimension: ‘‘It may even engage

the political in its essence’’.

In an economic, elliptic, hence dogmatic way, I would say that there is no politicswithout an organization of the time and space of mourning, without a topo-litology of the sepulcher, without an anamnesic and thematic relation of thespirit as ghost [revenant], without an open hospitality to the guest as ghost [inEnglish in the original,] whom one holds, just as he holds us hostage. (Derrida1995a, 61)

He also argues that the border between the living and the dead is never closed,

there is no ‘‘cutting off’’: the border between life and death remains ‘‘open and

ultimately interminable . . . , without end’’ (Derrida 1995a, 78).Derrida’s work on mourning grows out of a deep and longstanding engagement

with psychoanalytic thought, as far back as his realisation in 1965 of ‘‘the

necessity of psychoanalysis in my philosophical work’’: ‘‘Concerning the prob-

lematic of the trace, as an important principle of contestation and a strategic

lever of deconstruction, situating it within and along the edges of psychoanalysis

was indispensable . . . The question of differance, or of the trace, is not thinkable

on the basis of self-consciousness or self presence’’ (Derrida and Roudinesco

2004, 170). In response to Elizabeth Roudinesco’s observation regarding the

several ways in which his life and work ‘‘have been marked by psychoanalysis’’

and the important role that he along with Rene Major played in the history of

psychoanalysis in France over the past 30 years, Derrida replied that he liked

‘‘the expression ‘friends of psychoanalysis’’’, which ‘‘evokes the freedom of an

alliance, an engagement with no institutional status’’. ‘‘The friend’’, he writes,

‘‘maintains the reserve, withdrawal or distance necessary for critique, for

discussion, for reciprocal questioning . . .’’.

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In a word this ‘‘yes’’ of friendship assumes the certainty that psychoanalysisremains an ineffaceable historical event, the certainty that it is a good thing ,and that it ought to be loved, supported. (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004, 167)

Nevertheless he insists upon the necessity of making free with its conceptual

apparatus, arguing that ‘‘the large Freudian machines’’ are only ‘‘provisionalweapons’’ or ‘‘rhetorical tools’’ to be used against a philosophy of consciousness

and fully responsible intentionality (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004, 172). Hemaintains that ‘‘the very aim of the psychoanalytic revolution is the only one not

to rest, not seek refuge, in principle, in what I call a theological or humanist alibi’’:

Among the gestures that convinced me, seduced me in fact, is its indispensableaudacity of thought, what I do not hesitate to call its courage: which hereconsists in writing, inscribing, signing theoretical ‘‘fictions’’ in the name of aknowledge without alibi. (Derrida 2002, 173)

‘‘Psychoanalysis, for me . . . would be another name for the ‘without alibi’’’. In

Without Alibi he argues that ‘‘no other discourse of knowledge stands ready totake an interest in something like cruelty*/except what is called psychoanalysis’’

(Derrida 2002, 240).

MEMOIRES for Paul de Man: A Derridean Model of Mourning

What I would like to do in the rest of this paper is to track Derrida’s revision of

classic ideas about mourning in the very beautiful book written upon the deathof Paul de Man. In MEMOIRES for Paul de Man and in subsequent texts of mourning

written on the occasion of the deaths of friends, now collected as The Work ofMourning, Derrida articulates a new model of mourning, one that depathologises

mourning and finds in it the beauty of friendship and of our connection with somekind of beyond. In Derridean mourning we honour the otherness of the dead and

our attachment to them; we do not abandon them and substitute another in theirplace for, as he says in The Gift of Death, the dead are irreplaceable*/death is

that which is irreplaceably mine. (Derrida 1995a, 41) Whereas the classicpsychoanalytic account of mourning demands that we revive, relive and thenrelinquish the memories that tie us to the dead, Derrida argues that the death of

the other is constitutive of our self-relation and the occasion for an ongoingengagement with them, for they are now both ‘‘within us’’ and ‘‘beyond us’’.

Derrida points out that all our relationships are from the beginning tinged withmourning, for the unspoken truth of every friendship is that one of us will live to

see the other die*/‘‘there is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude’’(Derrida 1986, 29). He also says that we are who we are because of the memory

of those we have loved and carry within us. We come into being in dialogue withthe dead and can only think of ourselves in ‘‘bereaved allegory’’ (Derrida 1986,28). For Derrida mourning is constitutive; it is the memory of the future death of

the other that constitutes our interiority:

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This terrible solitude which is mine or ours, at the death of the other is whatconstitutes that relationship to self, which we call ‘‘me,’’ ‘‘us,’’ ‘‘between us,’’‘‘subjectivity,’’ ‘‘intersubjectivity,’’ ‘‘memory.’’ . . . We weep precisely over whathappens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory that is ‘‘in me’’or ‘‘in us.’’ But we must also recall, in another turn of memory, that the ‘‘withinme’’ and the ‘‘within us’’ do not arise or appear before this terrible ex-perience . . . The ‘‘within me’’ and the ‘‘within us’’ acquire their sense and theirbearing only by carrying within themselves the death and the memory of theother . . . (Derrida 1986, 33)

He also says that we know this, that we ‘‘remember’’ the possibility of mourning

even before the death of the loved one, and that ‘‘we come to ourselves throughthis memory of possible mourning’’ (Derrida 1986, 34).

In contrast to Derridean mourning, the classic psychoanalytic account ofmourning is gothic, haunted by the image of an ‘‘open wound’’ that draws intoitself all the negative energies of the world and empties the ego until it is

‘‘totally impoverished’’ (Freud 1984, 262), giving rise in turn to feelings of hatredand persecution in the bereaved (Klein 1986, 156). In Abraham and Torok’s

account, there is an attempt to ‘‘hide, wall in, and encrypt’’ the wound, toisolate it from the rest of the psyche in ‘‘a crypt built with the bricks of hate and

aggression’’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 136). There is inevitably an element ofdisfiguration, for as Judith Butler has written more recently, ‘‘I am wounded, and

I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am . . . given over to theOther in ways that I cannot fully predict or control’’ (Butler 2004, 28).

In ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ Freud emphasises that mourning is profound

and time-consuming work. There is a ‘‘loss of interest in the outside world’’, a‘‘turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of the one

who has been lost’’, and a ‘‘loss of capacity to adopt any new objectof love (which would mean replacing him)’’. In his account, ‘‘each single one

of the memories and expectations’’ that attached us to the dead must be workedthrough ‘‘bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy’’. The

mourner ‘‘must’’ relive and then relinquish their attachment to the beloved,severing the memories and images that tie them to the dead in order to

reconnect to the world of the living (Freud 1984, 252�/253). In a sense the deadmust be put to death again, by our own hand. The guilt born of this strenuous,impossible demand is almost unbearable to the mourner. The abhorrence of

abandoning the now defenceless other, and the guilt that one must be the agentof this abandonment, are insufferable. There is a battle within the psyche. Will

the good self who is trying to keep the dead alive win? Or will the bad self whoabandons the beloved to seek new attachments in the world of the living? The

cultural demand that one give up and get over the dead exacerbates the pain ofloss, and leads to guilt and the hatred and aggression that the classical accounts

of psychoanalysis have given us. And yet this is the model that our culturefollowing Freud has adopted.

Derrida’s ideas regarding mourning spring from his dissatisfaction with the

alternatives provided by Freud and by Abraham and Torok’s elaboration of

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Freud’s ideas on mourning. In ‘‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus

Incorporation’’ Abraham and Torok introduce the concepts of introjection, the

process by which the ego is enlarged when, upon the death of the other, it

introjects the qualities esteemed in the other into itself and continues in a

somewhat self-satisfied and complacent way; and incorporation, in which the

ego internalises the lost object and builds a monument to them, a crypt, within

the psyche. They argue that incorporation is pathological, a refusal of loss and an

attempt to keep the dead alive within, sealed up in a kind of psychic crypt:

‘Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject . . . the objectal

correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person. A whole

world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and

concealed existence’’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 130). From its ‘‘hideaway in the

imaginary crypt’’, the interred object unsettles the subject: ‘‘Sometimes in the

dead of night . . . the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt’’ (Abraham and

Torok 1994, 131). Derrida was dissatisfied with these alternatives, writing in his

Forward to Abraham and Torok’s book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: ‘‘everything

is organized in order that he [the dead person] remain a missing person in both

cases, having vanished, as other, from the operation, whether it be mourning or

melancholy. Departed, nowhere to be found, atopique’’ (Derrida 1977, 103). The

question of the general safekeeping of the other as other remains his concern for

the dead as for the living. Derrida’s model of mourning adopts the concept of

incorporation, but opens the doors of the crypt and instantiates an ongoing

conversation with the dead.

As he said, in response to a question from Geneveive Lloyd at the Sydney

Seminars, he was moved to challenge the pertinence of the distinction set up by

Abraham and Torok, ‘‘two analysts, two friends, now dead’’, because neither

introjection nor incorporation is satisfactory: ‘‘if I succeed ‘normally’ in the

process of introjection then I am untrue to the Other, the Other simply becomes

myself, and it’s a way of remembering the Other by forgetting the Other. The

Other becomes part of myself and I have a narcissistic relation to the Other inside

myself’’. That, he declares, is ‘‘an untrue mourning, untrue to the memory of the

Other’’. That is why he prefers their so-called pathological option: incorporation.

If mourning is to be ‘‘the mourning of the Other as such’’, he argues, ‘‘then it has

to be incorporated’’: ‘‘But the incorporation should not be total, and in that

case, of course, the Other remains foreign in myself, it remains Other, it doesn’t

become part of myself. I cannot appropriate the Other in myself so it is a failure

in a work of mourning, but it is the only way of respecting the Otherness of the

Other’’. In that sense, you succeed only by failing, ‘‘the only possible way of

mourning’’ is ‘‘the impossible mourning’’ (Patton and Smith 2001, 66).In his recasting of Abraham and Torok’s schema, Derrida privileges incorpora-

tion over introjection, their model of healthy mourning, which assimilates the

other to the sameness of the self. Derrida prefers incorporation because it

acknowledges the otherness of the other, their irreducibility to ourselves.

However, to the idea of incorporation, he adds the idea of a certain kind of

memory as refracted through Hegel and de Man; namely gedachtnis, a thinking

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externalising memory that gives us over to writing and thought in a future-oriented engagement with the dead.

The chance of a single idiom has it that memory and interiorization coincide inErrinerung . In German it means remembrance, and Hegel notes its motif ofsubjectivizing interiorization . . . In the last few years, Paul de Man had workedand taught, and written on the subject of the opposition posited by Hegel’sEncyclopedia between Errinerung and Gedachtnis , between remembrance asinteriorization and a thinking memory which can also be linked to technical andmechanical hypomnesis. (Derrida 1986, 35)

The structure of mourning is that of an ongoing conversation with the dead. We

engage with the other, who, although wholly other as he has always been, is nowwithin us, constitutive of our interiority and self-relation; however, we engage

with them not in a private, secret, phobic, guilty internalising memory, but ingedachtnis, a thinking externalising memory that gives us over to writing and

thought. An externalising memory that is future-oriented and in which we act outthe entrusted responsibility that is the other’s gift or promise to us. In a Hegelian

recasting of Abraham and Torok, Derrida recasts the traditional idea of mourning.It is a long passage, but granted its importance, I would like to cite it in full:

The movement of interiorization keeps within us the life, thought, body, voice,look or soul of the other, but in the form of those hypomnemata, memoranda,signs or symbols, images or representations which are only lacunary fragments,detached and dispersed*/only ‘‘parts’’ of the departed other. In turn they areparts of us, included ‘‘in us’’ in a memory which suddenly seems greater andolder than us . . . sublimely greater than this other that the memory harbors andguards within it, but also greater with this other, greater than itself, inadequateto itself, pregnant with this other. And the figure of this bereaved memorybecomes a sort of (possible and impossible) metonymy, where the part stands forthe whole and for more than the whole that it exceeds . . . It speaks the other andmakes the other speak, but it does so in order to let the other speak, for theother will have spoken first . It has no choice but to let the other speak, since itcannot make the other speak without the other having already spoken, withoutthis trace of speech which comes from the other and which directs us to writingas much as to rhetoric . . . This trace is interiorized in mourning as that which canno longer be interiorized, as impossible Erinnerung , in and beyond mournfulmemory*/constituting it, traversing it, exceeding it, defying all reappropriation,even in a coded rhetoric or conventional system of tropes, in the exercises ofprosopopoeia, allegory, or elegiac and grieving metonymy . . . To this thoughtthere belongs the gesture of faithful friendship, its immeasurable grief but alsoits life: the sublimity of a mourning without sublimation and without theobsessive triumph of which Freud speaks. (Derrida 1986, 37�/38)

In this passage, interiorisation is recast as gedachtnis*/a thinking memory thatimpels us to writing and thought. There is in our own speech always the trace ofspeech that comes from the other. We think as part of a greater whole; our words

and worlds are larger with this trace, with these traces of the other, which in turn

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incline us to speech and writing. The voice of the other permeates us*/

constituting, traversing, exceeding, defying all re-appropriation.

It is important to remember that Derrida’s text is itself an act of mourning forhis dead friend, a re-reading that is also a re-writing of de Man’s thought. And this

mourning by re-thinking is future-oriented and productive of Derrida’s innovativereworking of the classic schema of mourning. For instance, Derrida deploys de

Man’s work on Hegel’s distinction between erinnerung and gedachtnis, de Man’sidea of rhetoricity, metonymy, the logic of sets and prosopopeia (the fiction of

the voice from beyond the grave, which de Man argues is the constitutive tropeof poetic discourse), his sense of memory as future-oriented and the concept of

aporia, the impasse that provokes the thinking of new paths, as well as de Man’sidea of the text as a promise.

MEMOIRES is suffused with de Manian rhetoric, voice and tone, as well as the

motifs that will inform Derrida’s re-articulation of mourning. In ‘‘Autogiographyas De-facement’’, an essay on Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs, de Man suggests

that autobiography demonstrates ‘‘the impossibility of closure and of totalizationof all textual systems made up of tropological substitutions’’ and that ‘‘The

dominant figure of the epitaphic or autobiographical discourse is . . . proso-popoeia, the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the grave’’, which de Man later

identifies as the ‘‘master trope’’ of poetic discourse in general (Derrida 1986, 24,26). Derrida also borrows from de Man the idea of ‘‘a certain rhetoricity’’, whichis always ‘‘the trace of the other’’ (Derrida 1986, 31). Just as a text resists

closure and totalisation, so do the dead. Mourning involves a certain rhetoricityin that our own speech is inevitably traversed by traces of the words, thoughts,

inscriptions of the other, their mobilisation of metaphor, metonymy, signs,symbols and images, and so forth. The figure of ‘‘bereaved memory . . . speaks

the other and makes the other speak, but it does so in order to let the otherspeak, for the other will have spoken first’’ (Derrida 1986, 37). This trace of the

other constitutes, traverses and exceeds ‘‘mournful memory’’ and defies allreappropriation: ‘‘the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory’’

(Derrida 1986, 34).

In the strict and almost institutional domain of rhetoric, all figures, modes ortypes . . . receive their possibility from these paradoxical structures: first, theinclusion in a set of a part that is greater than the set; second, a logic or ana-logic . . . which regulates . . . all our relations with the other as other, that is, asmortal for a mortal, with the one always capable of dying before the other. Our‘‘own’’ mortality is not dissociated from, but rather also conditions this rhetoricof faithful memory, all of which serves to seal an alliance and to recall us to anaffirmation of the other. The death of the other . . . is also situated on our side atthe very moment when it comes to us from an altogether other side. (Derrida1986, 39)

Derrida also discerns that for de Man there is only memory, but that strictlyspeaking the past does not exist. Memory projects itself toward the future and is

future-oriented. Derrida writes:

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The memory we are considering here is not essentially oriented toward the past,toward a past present deemed to have really and previously existed. Memorystays with traces, in order to ‘‘preserve’’ them, but traces of a past that hasnever been present, traces which . . . always remain, as it were, to come*/comefrom the future, from the to come . Resurrection . . . does not resuscitate a pastwhich had been present; it engages the future. (Derrida 1986, 58)

Paul de Man, Derrida argues, was ‘‘always attentive to this trace of the future

as the power of memory’’. In de Man’s words, which he cites: ‘‘The power ofmemory does not reside in its capacity to resurrect a situation or a feeling that

actually existed, but is a constitutive act of the mind bound to its own presentand oriented toward the future of its own elaboration’’ (Derrida 1986, 59). In

conclusion, Derrida observes that ‘‘We are quite close here to a thinking memory(Gedachtnis) whose movement carries an essential affirmation, a kind of

engagement beyond negativity, that is to say also beyond the bereaved interiorityof introjection (Erinnerung): a thinking memory of fidelity, a reaffirmation of

engagement . . .’’ (Derrida 1986, 65). Thought, he writes, is not ‘‘bereavedinteriorization; it thinks at boundaries, it thinks the boundary, the limit ofinteriority’’ (Derrida 1986, 71).

Derrida also recalls de Man’s insistence on ‘‘the performative structure of thetext in general as promise’’ (1986, 93), and goes on to argue that ‘‘the essence of

speech is the promise, that there is no speaking that does not promise, which atthe same time means a commitment toward the future through . . . ‘a speech act’

and a commitment to keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of thisact’’ (1986, 97). He also reflects upon the significance of the word aporia in de

Man’s last texts, in which an absence of path ‘‘gives or promises the thinking ofthe path’’ and provokes the thinking of ‘‘what still remains unthinkable orunthought’’ (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia provokes ‘‘a leap of memory and a

displacement of thinking which leads toward a new thinking’’.

Aporicity promises an other thinking, ‘‘an other text, the future of anotherpromise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most ‘trustworthy,’ ‘reliable’place or moment for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.’’(Derrida 1986, 132�/133)

The aporia ‘‘engenders, stimulates, makes one write, provokes thought . . .’’.

There is in it ‘‘the incalculable order of a wholly other: the coming or the call ofthe other’’ (Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Man’s death has provoked

Derrida’s re-reading of de Man and a re-casting of the process of mourning.These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic model of

mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionallynuanced model of mourning, a model wherein healthy psychic functioning

depends neither on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derrideanmodel offers a respect for the (dead) Other as Other; it allows agency tothe mourner in the possibility of an ongoing creative encounter with the Other

in an externalising, productive, future-oriented memory; it emphasises the

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importance of acting out the entrusted responsibility, which is their legacy to us;it upholds the idea of community and reminds us of our interconnectedness with

our dead. And in a sort of irreligious religiosity, it enables us to conceive of abond greater than ourselves, ‘‘the far away’’ within us.

To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida privileges theprocess of incorporation , which classical psychoanalysis has been seen as the

pathological response to loss. He does this essentially because incorporationacknowledges the other as other, while the so-called normal process of mourning

(introjection) merely assimilates the other into the self in a kind of psychicplagiarism. Second, however, it is not an unreconstructed incorporation that he

recommends; he makes two important theoretical moves. In the distinctionbetween memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as a giving over tothinking and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate

with incorporation. So that what we internalise upon the death of the other istheir dynamic engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animat-

ing principle, their dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/wedo not murder them and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third,

the other important thing about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory;it is linked with technical or mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It

is productive; it leads to external engagement in an ongoing dialogue with theother. It is, as he says, a ‘‘remembrance of the future’’ (Derrida 1986, 29). Inconclusion, Derrida asks ‘‘What is love, friendship, memory?’’

These questions can be posed only after the death of a friend, and they are notlimited to the question of mourning. What should we think of all of this . . . since apromise, from the first moment that it pledges . . . pledges beyond death, beyondwhat we call, without knowing of what or of whom we speak, death. It involves,in reverse, the other dead in us, from the first moment . . . This is perhaps whatthinking gives us to think about, what gives us to think about thinking. (Derrida1986, 149)

The Politics of Mourning

And so to return to Derrida’s claim that there can be no politics without an

organisation of the time and space of mourning. In what might the politics ofmourning reside? I think Derrida’s answer to this question would circle around his

idea of the aporia as a gift for the future, a provocation to think new paths, newways through apparent impasses. It would also have to do with our responsibility

to the mortal other and with forgiveness. Death gives us over to thought and toreckoning with the thought of the other. Mourning puts the subject in question

and on trial; this loss of presence with oneself enables one to resist the totalisinggestures, which in later Derrida is ‘‘the worst’’. Certainly history has demon-strated that cultures that foreclose mourning have tended towards violence to

others.

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In mourning the other, Derrida emphasises the importance of citing the other,giving them a ‘‘sort of survivance, a kind of living on’’ (Brault and Nass 2001, 23)

Such a turn to the friend is all we have to give, and we turn not as constitutedbeings toward the one who has died who has for the time become ‘‘our law’’, but

in an offer to remake ourselves. For, as Derrida writes so eloquently in relation toBarthes and to Louis Marin, the dead look at us within us but they are not ours;

we look at their image and we are looked at by them from the place of their‘‘infinite alterity’’ (Derrida 2001b, 161) We are affected by their law, their gaze;

we offer in turn the gift of openness and the possibility of remaking ourselves, weoffer ourselves as the heirs of questions, of reading and re-reading and analysing

and questioning*/what Levinas calls the ‘‘question-prayer’’ (Derrida 2001c, 209)We experience an expansion (Kristeva would call it an enlargement of psychicspace) that Derrida calls so beautifully ‘‘the far away within us’’ (1986, 204). We

inherit the ‘‘entrusted responsibility’’ of the survivor. In Levinas’ words, whichDerrida cites in ‘‘Adieu’’, ‘‘The death of the Other affects me in my very identity

as a responsible I . . . made up of unspeakable responsibility’’ (Derrida 2001c,205). Derrida experiences Levinas’ legacy to him as ‘‘a very gentle force that

obligates’’*/it is an obligation, in Levinas’ words, to yield to ‘‘the completelyother (that is to justice)’’ (Derrida 2001c, 207). At the death of the other a

conversation is initiated, it is a time of reading and thinking. (Derrida 2001d, 226)And that conversation does not cease; mourning is never lifted. The thinking wesurvives, and Derrida surmises that perhaps it survives as ‘‘survival itself, through

a subtle and infinitesimal excess of thinking’’ (2001d, 240).This is a long way from the hatred and aggression of foreclosed mourning, a

mourning that goes wrong because of cultural demands to relinquish the dead andforestall critical thought. There is, in the normal accounts of mourning, a refusal

to submit to transformation*/to be reorganised and reconstituted in relation andresponse to the lost other (whose gaze continues to look at us within us). Derrida

offers us the possibility of a reconstitution of self in writing and thinking andacting and creating in relation to the words and the ideas of the other. Derrida’s

reading of de Man is not dead homage, but a re-reading and re-constituting of deMan and of Derrida. As Derrida writes in the beautiful eulogy read at the funeral ofLouis Marin, we find that we can only interiorise the dead by ‘‘exceeding,

fracturing, wounding, injuring, traumatizing the interiority that it inhabits or thatwelcomes it through hospitality, love, friendship’’ (Derrida 2001b, 160).

Louis Marin is outside and he is looking at me, he himself, and I am an image forhim. At this very moment . . . Louis Marin is looking at me, and it is for this, forhim, that I am here this evening. He is my law, the law, and I appear before him,before his word and his gaze . . . We bear in ourselves the gaze that Louis Marinbears on us . . . The gaze is his, and it will always remain his, infinitel . . . Faraway in us. In us, there where this power of the image comes to open the being-far-away. (Derrida 2001b, 161)

Department of Critical and Cultural Studies,

Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

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References

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Brault, P., and M. Nass. 2001. Jacques Derrida: The work of mourning . Chicago andLondon: The University of Chicago Press.

Butler, J. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence . London and NewYork: Verso.

Derrida, J. 1977. Fors. The Georgia Review 31:64�/116.*/*/. 1978. Writing and difference . London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.*/*/. 1982. Margins of philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 1986. MEMOIRES for Paul de Man . New York: Columbia University Press.*/*/. 1987. The post card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond . Chicago and London: The

University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 1993. Aporias . Stanford: Stanford University Press.*/*/. 1995a. The gift of death . Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 1995b. Points: Interviews 1974�/1994 . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.*/*/. 1998. Resistances of psychoanalysis . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.*/*/. 2001a. The deaths of Roland Barthes. In Jacques Derrida: The work of mourning ,

edited by P. Brault and M. Nass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 2001b. By force of mourning. In Jacques Derrida: The work of mourning , edited by

P. Brault and M. Nass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 2001c. Adieu. In Jacques Derrida: The work of mourning , edited by P. Brault and

M. Nass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 2001d. Lyotard and us. In Jacques Derrida: The work of mourning , edited by

P. Brault and M. Nass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.*/*/. 2002. Without alibi . Stanford: Stanford University Press.*/*/, and E. Roudinesco. 2004. For what tomorrow . . . A dialogue. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.Freud, S. 1984. On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis . Middlesex and New

York: Penguin Books.Klein, M. 1986. The selected essays of Melanie Klein . London: Penguin.Patton, P., and T. Smith. 2001. Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction engaged . Sydney: Power

Institute for Visual Arts.

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