Table Of ContentDerrida
Continuum Studies in Philosophy
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Derrida: Writing Events, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida: Writing Events
Simon Morgan Wortham
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Material from Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression © 1998,
University of Chicago Press, reproduced with kind permission.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10: HB: 1-8470-6247-4
ISBN-13: HB: 978-1-8470-6247-5
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Wortham, Simon.
Derrida: writing events/Simon Morgan Wortham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84706-247-5
1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Events (Philosophy). 3. Written
communication. I. Title.
B2430.D484W69 2008
194--dc22
2007051298
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Writing the Event, or, Citations
from an Archive of the Future 1
1. The Archive and the Anthological 20
2. Writing Obsession 30
3. Writing Friendship: Agamben and Derrida 48
4. Anonymity Writing Pedagogy: Beckett, Descartes, Derrida 70
5. Raelity 85
6. Can Dreaming be ‘Political’? Some Questions on the
‘Politics’ of Cultural Studies: An Interview
with Paul Bowman 102
7. End Note: Saying the Event 119
Notes 127
Bibliography 139
Index 143
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of ‘Writing Obsession’ was published as ‘Obsessional Writing’
in Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 47–63. ‘Writing Friendship: Agamben and
Derrida’ originally appeared as ‘Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida’ in
New Formations 62 (2007): 89–105. ‘Raelity’ fi rst appeared on-line in Culture
Machine 2 (2000) (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk). I am grateful for the per-
mission to reproduce this material here.
I would like to thank a few people who have commented on draft work,
responded with helpful remarks at various events, assisted in the prior publica-
tion of parts of this book or shown encouragement more generally. Among
them are Avital Ronell, Sean Gaston, William Watkin, Peggy Kamuf, Nicholas
Royle, J. Hillis Miller, Peter Boxall, Peter Nicholls, David Glover and Gary Hall.
Chris Shilling was hugely supportive during his time at Portsmouth. Finally,
special thanks are due to Samuel Weber for the incredible kindness and
generosity he has shown over several years – it is diffi cult to convey my gratitude
to him.
Introduction: Writing the Event, or,
Citations from an Archive of the Future
Thinking the Event
In his interview with Giovanni Borradori conducted just a few weeks
after the attacks in the United States on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon,1 Jacques Derrida dwells on Borradori’s opening sug-
gestion that ‘September 11 (le 11 septembre) gave us the impression of
a major event’ (p. 85). Throughout the dialogue, Derrida offers a clear
and compelling account of what is at stake in analysing this ‘event’.
With great incision, he explores how ‘the impression of a major event’
must be understood in terms of the intersection of highly determined
political, military and media interests and powers. In particular, the
‘ritual incantation’ of the name to which the ‘event’ was so quickly
reduced – ‘September 11’, ‘9/11’ – sought at once to ‘neutralize the
traumatism and come to terms with it through a “work of mourning”’
(p. 93), while at the same time maintaining a mechanical repetition,
‘a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain’, which in the end ‘admits to
not knowing what it’s talking about’ (p. 86). (Perhaps also, we might
add, this ‘ritual incantation’ served, whether intentionally or not, to
cultivate an all too familiar and increasingly banal reaction or non-
reaction of ‘shock’ in the face of terrorist ‘atrocities’, allowing certain
vested interests in the government, military and elsewhere to steal a
march on the interpretative process and occupy the rhetorical high
ground.) Despite the fact that the United States had not been attacked
on American soil for almost two centuries, Derrida wonders about
the singularity and surprise of this event, given the numerous attempts
to target American interests abroad (Derrida notes in passing the dif-
fi culty, today, of distinguishing fully between the ‘national territory’
of the United States and ‘American interests’ more generally); given,
too, the infamous Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (while McVeigh
2 Derrida: Writing Events
and Nichols were US nationals, the perpetrators of ‘9/11’ were also,
in a sense, home-grown, trained on American soil, launching the
attack from ‘within’ by utilizing ‘US’ technology, being themselves
‘produced’ by a longer-term background of American support and
training in Afghanistan and elsewhere during the Cold War); and
given the previous attempt to blow up the Twin Towers in 1993. He
asks not only why the CIA and FBI did not see it coming, as fi lm-
makers uncannily seemed to do (the release of a number of Hollywood
blockbusters was halted soon after the attacks, since these movies
contained elements which resonated all too uncomfortably with the
events in New York and Washington), but also why this ‘event’ might
qualify for ‘major’ status in contrast to ‘quantitatively comparable
killings, or even those greater in number’ which ‘never produce
such an intense upheaval when they occur outside European and
American space’ (p. 92). Since what is ‘major’ or distinctive about
‘9/11’ is not, strictly speaking, either the motivation for the attacks,
the means and technology used (hijacking aircraft), or the size of the
atrocity, Derrida embarks on a qualitative analysis which explains the
events of ‘9/11’ as not only a new phenomenon occurring ‘at the end
of the Cold War’ but also a distant effect of the Cold War itself, albeit
an effect that ‘appears infi nitely more dangerous, frightening, terrify-
ing than the Cold War’ (p. 99); as an act of terrorist aggression which,
when one seeks to bring out its defi nition, reintroduces the question
of so-called state terrorism, including that pursued by the United
States; and, in the last analysis, as one notably spectacular incident of
quasi-suicidal autoimmunity. Autoimmunity is the failure of an organ-
ism to recognize its own constituent parts as such, therefore resulting
in an immune response against its own ‘self’. For Derrida, auto-
immunity thus names a process in which, while seeking to protect
and defend itself, a thing actually violates and does violence to itself,
so that, in what may look like a further twist, ‘an autoimmunitary
process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal
fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize
itself against its own immunity’ (p. 94). Furthermore, since the upshot
is at once a violent non-recognition of the ‘other’ in the self, but also
an inextricable, antagonistic dependency of sorts upon the very same
‘other’ that is projected and denied, the effect of such autoimmuni-
Introduction: Writing the Event 3
tary processes is ‘to produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity
they claim to overcome’ (p. 99). Thus Derrida analyses the shared
quasi-suicidal traits that in fact defi ne the divisible or deconstructible
‘identities’ of the ostensibly polarized adversaries in the scenography
of ‘9/11’.
Despite the highly complex analysis that this understanding of
autoimmunity on a world-wide stage produces, Derrida does not hesi-
tate to express his unconditional condemnation of the attacks, and
moreover states:
[If] I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situa-
tion, well, I would. Despite my very strong reservations about the
American, indeed, European, political posture, about the ‘interna-
tional antiterrorist’ coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all
the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very
international institutions that the states of this coalition themselves
founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side
of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective
open to perfectibility in the name of the ‘political,’ democracy, inter-
national law, international institutions, and so on. (pp. 113–14)
What Derrida ultimately rejects in what he calls the ‘strategy’ of the
‘bin Laden effect’ is ‘not only the cruelty, the disregard for human
life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in tech-
nocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism’. It is
‘the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and,
in my view have no future’ (p. 113). In contrast, while the European
tradition has fostered international institutions and law that remain
deeply fl awed and are frequently ineffectual, these still provide the
occasion for a deconstructive affi rmation of the democracy to come,
not as a programmable or foreseeable future, but as an opening occa-
sioned in fact by a continuing exposure to the ‘aporia of the demos’.
Between the ‘incalculable singularity of anyone, before any “subject,”
the possible undoing of the social bond by a secret to be respected,
beyond all citizenship, beyond every “state,” indeed every “people,”’ and
‘the universality of rational calculation, of the equality of citizens before
the law, the social bond of being together’ we fi nd the impossible
