| The paper takes its cue from a brief but pointed passage in Specters of Marx, in which Jacques Derrida describes as "latecomers" those who discuss the apocalypse in a manner that disregards previous discussions of the theme within philosophy and theory. Especially concerned with tracing Derrida's wariness of the beguilements of narratives of the end, Callus and Herbrecther analyze the implications of that wariness for any study of the vexed relation between the apocalyptic and the posthuman, doing so on the basis of reference to a number of the relevant essays by Derrida, but in particular to "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." The main contribution of the paper, however, occurs once it is suggested that in recent work by Derrida the previously strong suspicion of the apocalyptic has become modulated by a different "tone" -- that of Derrida's essay on September 11th, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides." Contrasting tonalities discernible in "Autoimmunity" with Derrida's previous discussions of the apocalyptic, Callus and Herbrechter argue that Derrida's response to September 11 provides both the cue and the scope for an intriguing and urgent rethinking of his well-known views on "newisms," "postisms," and "seismisms." They suggest that, if it is arguable that there might be "a change or a rupture in tone" in Derrida's approach to what might broadly be regarded as the posthumanous, it might also be viable to think that there might have arisen a worrying punctuality in those whose talk on the apocalyptic might previously have come across, to Derrida and to others, as the prattle of "latecomers." Hence, if "we" do the apocalypse differently, "now," it is because it might well have become timelier to do so. | |
The Latecoming of the Posthuman, Or, Why "We" Do the Apocalypse Differently, "Now."
Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter
How does one know whether the end is an end, if one is not narrating it?
---Jean François Lyotard [1]Is there an economy of the eve?
---Jacques Derrida [2]
Figure 1: World Trade
Center, September 11, 2002. Copyright ©2001 Claus Guglberger.
http://www.cgpix.com/world_trade_center_terrorist_attack__photos.htm
1. Introduction
<1> In an early passage in Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida comments with some asperity about the
[m]any young people today (of the type "readers-consumers of Fukuyama" or of the type "Fukuyama" himself) [who] probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end of history," of the "end of Marxism," of "the end of philosophy," of the "ends of man," of the "last man" and so forth were, in the '50s . . . our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the "apocalyptic tone in philosophy" [3].
What instigates this sharpness is of course Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and its contention that the ideology and the politico-economic model of capitalism and the free market appeared, at the time of that work's publication, to have prevailed. The debatable contrast between the alleged callowness of Fukuyama and his "readers-consumers" on the one hand and, on the other, the "we" alongside whom Derrida ranges himself is further insisted upon when reference is pointedly made to the "classics of the end" (Derrida's emphasis). These classics, Derrida explains, "formed the canon of the modern apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger . . . ," and they were read and analysed in the context of an engagement with a particular "historical entanglement" involving, among other issues, "the Stalinism of the past and the neo-Stalinism in process" witnessed in events like "the repression in Hungary" (15). Derrida concludes: "[F]or those with whom I shared this singular period . . . for us, I venture to say, the media parade of current discourse on the end of history and the last man looks most often like a tiresome anachronism. . . . As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like latecomers . . . " (15).
<2> Such sentiments, expressive of wearied condescension in regard to contemporary endism generally and of a fastidious disdain for its philosophical probity, are all of a piece with the general provocativeness of Specters of Marx. Overshadowed by the attention accorded to the book's contentious view that Marxism's relevance might now best be projected as a principle of vigilance in an atheological heritage of the messianic, they have been less than regularly invoked in the multiple commentaries that, according to their very different lights, have sought to either engage or exorcise Specters. Yet in heralding Derrida's later inductive question, "How can one be late to the end of history?" (15), they provide the cue for the book's meditation on the generalized predicament of latecoming, and hence on belatedness, untimeliness, ghosting, phatasmagorization, and spectropoetics. Immediately, therefore, they trouble the vexed and vast question of all that is denoted and connoted by the prefix post-. They recall the questioning of the temporality of supersedence and of the complex relation between the anterior and the accompli that occurs in the Lyotardian timescapes of the future perfect and the event of the unpresentable (see below). The prefixed denotation of supplantedness (in the sense of the articulations with post- permitted by morphology) and the pre-fixing of what suggestedly befalls in the space cleared by that supplantedness (in the sense of the prefiguring of the goings and comings variously connoted by articulations of post- with whatever is allowed to follow the hyphen) find themselves effectively and exemplifyingly doubted in Lyotard's well-known formulations about the re-cognition of the postmodern. For the postmodern, as a particularly significant instance of those conceptualities marked by the post- prefix, implies "a procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy and anamorphosis which elaborates an 'initial forgetting,'" such that it would need to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)," and in realization of "the rules for what will have been made" (Lyotard's emphasis) [4]. This heady timescape is displacedly comprehensible in the passably synonymous sentences from Specters quoted above. That is because both Derrida and Lyotard stand aloof from a clear-cut understanding of the terminal and the apocalyptic, and indeed from any notion involving anything like a clear cut. French theory, it would appear, is singularly averse to any straightforward understanding of how to proceed, after endings and from beginnings, straight forward.
<3> For that very reason, the intuitions of French theory call for urgent reappraisal in a context like this issue of Reconstruction, focused as it is on the question of the posthumanous. The morphemes embedded in this compound adjectival term, posthumanous, cumulatively suggest an "after" of life (as suggested by the echo of posthumous), an "after" of terrestriality (humus is the Latin for earth), and an "after" of humanity (one also hears, in posthumanous, the word posthuman). A dropped suffix, which would have allowed us to hear the word posthumanist, also permits us to register, through an audible absence, the exceeding of all that was ever invested in humanism. This very loaded broaching, through the use of the word posthumanous, of the thought of an extreme posteriority finds itself sternly warned by Derrida's words, above. For what Derrida seems to be taking issue with is the currency of apocalyptism and, by extension, of the plausibility of the newness of any irruptive paradigm of the end. He is doubtful about the identifiability of anything posited as being "last," and about the discernibility of any "after." In other words, his disengagement from the excitable philosophizing of diverse endings and of what they could variously presage occurs in reaction to the plausibility of the broaching of questions of post-history (in the wake of Fukuyama's The End of History [1992]), of post-philosophy (in the wake of all those announcing that event with rather less sensitivity than Heidegger's The End of Philosophy [1961] did), and, perhaps most fundamentally, of the post-human (in response to the many different narratives of humanity's transience, whether they conform to the conventions of Armageddon-shadowed scenarios -- as in the Mad Max vistas discerned some time ago by a recently very messianic Mel Gibson -- or to the unease with a re-engineering of the very nature of the human -- as anticipated by Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future [2002]).
<4> Of course, all this is to be expected from Derrida. His remarks in Specters are consistent with a veritable sub-canon within his writings, one comprising texts which problematize straightforward apprehensions of crisis and deconstruct a thinking sold on successiveness and ruptures. His contribution to the discussion of what could take place in the space of the supposed terminality of the university and, more particularly, the humanities, provides a good instance of this [5]. Within a very specific context of apocalypse, the unavoidable points of reference include essays like "The Ends of Man" (1972), "Of a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy" (1981), "No Apocalypse, Not Now" (1984), and "Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms" (1990). These provide careful and powerful articulations of the need to approach millenarianism with an awareness that "the thinking of the end of man . . . is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man" [6]. Their elegantly equable tone is in telling contrast to the remarks in Specters, which are similarly minded but testier in their articulation. Yet there is almost a winsomeness in that testiness. It comes from a candor that is generally more apparent from Derrida when he is answering interviews than when he is elaborating the idiom of his essais, typically mediated through a greater circumspection. Thus the remarks on Fukuyama in Specters occasion the frisson, if one may call it that, bound to occur when witnessing a typically guarded philosopher unambiguously criticizing something he or she disdains. The unguardedness does not merely provide some quiet drama, however. It is also intriguing because it suggests an underlying and very decided prejudice -- in the Gadamerian sense. This should not pass unnoticed. The momentary shedding of the poise generally characterizing Derridean rhetoric reveals some very decided views that become more starkly and directly available to assessment than would normally be the case. For any consideration of the posthumanous, the content of that directness arrives as an unmistakable warning against patterning any understanding of the posthumanous in a way that is too callow or too "johnny come lately."
<5> For all that, however, the testiness of Derrida's remarks remains cautionary in another sense. It bespeaks the decidedness of one confirmed in his philosophical ways, and it thereby perhaps also demonstrates just a little predictability, just a little intransigence. In saying this we are all too aware that there is a mild opportunism in this fixing on some stray and quite unguarded remarks of Derrida's, and in suggesting that they are rawly indicative of a bias that elsewhere in his work is productively nuanced. It could amount to point-scoring of the shallowest kind to seize upon any philosopher's distrait comments in order to exploit what then becomes a rather too expedient relevance to a question in hand. That strategy becomes even more questionable if, as we believe, Derrida's take on contemporary apocalyptic tones is in fact made all the fresher by his indulgence of some straight talking about a bête noire of his -- but especially if it could be shown that such talk masks a deeper apprehensiveness over the possibility that, if "we" do the apocalypse differently "now," we do so with good reason rather than ineptly [7]. Indeed, we aim to show that the somewhat malapert remarks of Derrida on Fukuyama open up onto something that is much more significant than scorn. Let us proceed, therefore, by first dealing with the kind of knee-jerk reaction that could conceivably be prompted by Derrida's remarks, moving on afterwards to some different and possibly weightier reflections upon them. We hope that this will help us to understand why Derrida's outspoken suspicion of contemporary apocalyptism contrives to both be wide of the mark and spot on: in other words, that his uncharacteristic impertinence is an excellent cue for thinking that there might well pertinently be cause for detecting a new tone in his thought about the end, or ends.
2. Derrida and the Dubiousness of the Apocalyptically Posthumanous
<6> One of the easiest responses to the remarks by Derrida quoted at the start of our essay is that their peevishness seems that of a grand old man of letters or philosophy. "The apocalypse: been there, studied that": this, in reductive terms, is what they suggest. They scorn the discourse of the "Fukuyama-esque" and "young" commentators of today who seize upon the notion of the end as if it were some newly discovered and unpredecentedly compelling idea that had not been already quite exhaustively discussed before. Implicit in this stance is the aggrieved recognition that "the "young" are overlooking the work of "those with whom [Derrida] shared this singular period," and for whom he "venture[s] to speak." He ventures that not on the grounds -- which would have been compelling enough -- of his being the "the last man" of the Lacan-Bataille-Althusser-Barthes-Blanchot-Foucault-Deleuze-Lyotard-Derrida line-up [8] -- but through an implicit claim on a perspectival commonality that remains tangibly there even across all his differences with them. The kinship arises because, for that extraordinary generation of penseurs, talk of the apocalypse was "daily bread" and hence mundane rather than glitzy. It was situated on the bread line of philosophical discourse rather than the front line of "media parades" shot through with a soundbit idiom. If this suggests hurt and even what is, when all is said and done, a sense of rejection, there is also strong dismay at the allegedly inadequate current awareness of the past "historical entanglement" of endism in events like Stalinism or "the repression in Hungary." There is even stronger dismay at the lack of familarity with philosophy's "classics of the end," with "Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger . . . ." "Young people," it appears, simply do not know enough.
<7> "Young people": we are then in the space of generation gaps, and amidst the gambits of generation games. For there is an interesting interplay in Derrida's words between an us and a them, between on the one hand the perceivedly seasoned understanding of the apocalyptic on the part of the "'50s" generation of (mainly French, but at any rate predominantly European) intellectuals and on the other an allegedly callow and excitable construction of the posthuman by contemporary (mainly American, but quite certainly tendentially anglophone) thinkers of apocalyptism in the guise of posthumanism [9]. After Hegel's reflections on the teleological within history, Marx's on the spectral haunting of Europe by what portends, Nietzsche's on the time of the Overman, Husserl's on "the crisis of philosophy," Heidegger's on what might need to be remembered in any "Letter on Humanism," Foucault's on man being "an invention of recent date" whose "erasure" is a certain wager, Blanchot's on the predicament of the "last man," Lyotard's on the nature of the "inhuman," and Derrida's on the suspect basis of any "apocalyptic tone," what transpires is Fukuyama and like-minded "readers-consumers," with their talk on endism and posthumanism. So that, to rephrase a well-known sentence from the epilogue to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), then, "in sudden frost, came the age of Fukuyama." Faced with that, "old Europe," it might not too fancifully be said, thinks "back." The apocalyptic and the posthuman(ous), then, seem singularly subject to generational tensions, to nationally, continentally, and linguistically marked traditions of thought, and to a contingency determined by intellectual and political contexts [10].
<8> There would, to be sure, be something tiresome in this replaying of what are essentially "Ancients-and-Moderns" and "French theory in America" controversies, had it not been for two quite significant considerations. The first involves the implications of Derrida's use in Specters of the trope of latecoming: "As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like latecomers, a little as if it were possible to take still the last train after the last train -- and yet be late to an end of history" (15). Being late for the last train, as an alternative image for being late for one's own funeral: this is beginning to seem distastefully like a row between the established and the parvenus over who is to preside over the obsequies for history, over who is to be the obituarist for the world, for discourse, and for humanity after the cosmophagic moment. If history is written by the victors, by whom is its passing to be written: by those who have already been lugubre and who have already written apopemptic words on history, philosophy, and humanity, or by those who, though late for history, will claim to be in time with the present and in time for the future? The issues of ripeness and untimeliness which are latent here are ones to which we shall return. The second point worth raising, meanwhile, is the fact that discussion of the apocalyptic and the posthuman(ous), "now," in what is "our" time, is not necessarily as inept as Derrida's remarks make it out to be. Perhaps if that discussion has acquired a reprioritization and a new tone it is necessarily so. This, too, shall concern us below, in relation to the intuition that the worst is not yet come and in accordance with the impression that that worst is imminent. As we shall see, that intuition and that impression are shared and indeed articulated by Derrida himself. They compel a tonal shift in his discourse on the apocalyptic and on the constitutivity and reconstitutivity of the human.
<9> Clearly, then, we have to deal with the issue of tone. Indeed: how to intone the end? Could what might be called "the right tone" be in fact what is missing in the projections of a posthuman future by "readers-consumers" of "the type 'Fukuyama'"? Surely what Derrida is at bottom reacting to when he takes that "type" to task is the impression of a certain depthlessness, in the Jamesonian sense. If he is perturbed it is because of the unentrenchedness of the resultant discourse in any very tangible philosophical nuancing, and because of the lack of any engagement with or deference to the extensiveness and rigor with which "the classics of the end" have already scanned, before the event and avant la terreur, our posthuman future. The crudest evidence of that is the scantiness of reference to penseurs like Derrida, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Lyotard, and so on -- one gets the picture -- in the pages of The End of History (even if in fairness it should be noted that Our Posthuman Future is more philosophically if not quite theoretically keyed). In other words, what is essentially being bemoaned by Derrida is the lack of any philosophical -- some would say also theoretical -- tone in such apocalyptism. In his plain view, a nakedly apocaplyptic tone needs philosophical definition if it is to have a gravitas taking it beyond journalism or the kind of cultural studies about which Derrida has declared some ambivalence [11]. Also potentially at stake, therefore, is a new take on the familiar issue of a contest of faculties: a stand-off between two discourses and their representatives, or at any rate between their idioms and their tones.
<10> Now it is hardly a coincidence, of course, that tone is such an overriding concern in Derrida's "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." That essay is exemplarily respectful of the ethic of the relation between different generations of thinkers, and of the elders of philosophy. Is it not written in invocation of and in counterpoint to Kant's Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie" (1796) ("On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy")? The essay can therefore be seen as one that sets the tone for how a "'50s" penseur would discuss the prospect of the terminality of the human. Significantly, and almost as if in contradistinction to "young" "readers-consumers" nowadays, who might compile unphilosophical studies not steeped in previous discussions of the apocalyptic, Derrida resourcefully bases his essay on (in his words) a "less well-known pamphlet" of Kant's [12]. Derrida builds much on Kant's text, which just so happens to itself be an attack on "a tone that denounces something like the death of philosophy" (123; Derrida's emphasis). According to Derrida, what Kant was taking issue with was the transgression of "the atonal norm of philosophical address" (123). This created space for the "bonus of seduction or intimidation," of "heated proclamations on the end to come or the end already accomplished" (125). In other words, "the "mystagogues make a scene" (125), doing so in philosophy and with all the "airs" of an "upstart [parvenu]" (129). They carry on, then, much like the "young" and lately come Fukuyama-like "readers-consumers," whose tiresomeness is denigrated by Derrida almost exactly two hundred years later.
<11> An added and important twist to this is that, in announcing a "newly arisen" apocalpyptic tone, it is as if Derrida's title had already intuited that apocalypse has something of the cyclical as well as the linear about it. Different generations do apocalypse anew: as if it had never already been done and as if there was a newness about it, and as if the thought of apocalypse can be renewed through the arising, as if "newly," of the apocalyptic tone. And what is re-energized in "prediction and eschatological preaching [predication]" is "the fact of telling, foretelling, or preaching the end, the extreme limit, the imminence of the last" (144). When that happens, it does so in expectation of going one better towards the end, as it were. Soothsayers attempt to outdo each other in saying sooth -- and here it should be remembered that the word sooth means, anciently, "truth," hence its appropriateness in any discourse of the apokalupsis, the disclosure, the unveiling of truth. For that reason as well as for a number of others, Derrida's words on a scene of oneupmanship in the differences between various eschatologies arrive very pertinently:
Haven't all the differences [différends] taken the form of a going-one-better in eschatological eloquence, each newcomer more lucid than the other, more vigilant and more prodigal too, coming to add more to it: I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . . the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, in the cataclysm, the fire, the blood, the fundamental earthquake, the napalm descending from the sky by helicopters, like prostitutes, and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don't know what else. (145)
Clearly, then, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Always, Apocalypse Variorum. The apocalypse is done now; the apocalypse is done successively; the apocalypse is done differently. Those who "do" the apocalypse therefore always do so late (because it has always been done already), and they always do so prematurely (because the unthinkability of the predicate(d) portends rather more than it impends). Hence they come lately to the apocalypse, which in turn is always late for them. There is some consolation in this for, as Derrida points out, knowledge of "the end of the end" must coincide, if it is to be clinching, with "the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language" (146). If soothsayers keep returning to tell the tale of the death of the world, of humanity, of history, it must be because the leading to "the place where the first vibration of the tone is heard" (151) remains deferred. It is because soothsayers will always have gone before that Derrida could take lightly, if he wanted to, "readers-consumers" of "the type 'Fukuyama'" as they reinvent the wheel of the apocalyptic turn in philosophy.
<12> Yet he does not, as the rather odd discomposure of the remarks from Specters of Marx make clear. Why? After all Derrida was primed by his very essay to expect Fukuyama, or at least a Fukuyama. Yet he is visibly put out by him in the very text, Specters, which famously and recurrently speaks of a time that, if not apocaplyptic, is out of joint. Again: why? What might be read in Derrida's very tonally determined deviation from the atonality of philosophy as he takes Fukuyama's apocalyptically toned reflections to task? Has something changed in the way apocalypse is being done or prospected now? Is there currently, perhaps, a striking difference to the way it had always been done that Derrida has grown keenly aware of, and could it possibly be that the realization of the cogency of that difference is one that leaves him piqued, prompting a reaction that is, as it were, somehow out of time as well as off key?
<13> If we are to address this issue we need to characterize the manner in which Derrida has typically discussed the apocalyptic. What above all seems to distinguish this manner is a certain "counter-intuitiveness." By this we mean the disposition to think matters in a manner beyond their commonsensical apprehending by those members of humanity who are not philosophers or "theorists," and who intuit the end as an end, "pure and simple," so to speak, without laying much store by the thought that apocalypse has always been, will always have been, with us. Hence thought of the apocalypse, of posthumanous threats by forces that are extra-human, are straightforwardly and popularly thinkable, and lead to a rhetoric that understands the threat of apocalypse as a crisis and in terms of the urgency of "doing something about it," as the popular phrase has it. This is what makes so accessible to the popular imagination the speech given by the character of the American president in the film Independence Day (1996). It is a speech quoted to good effect by Christopher Keep in his article in a previous number of Reconstruction:
Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us. We can't be consumed with our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Today is the Fourth of July ... and should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight.. . . Today we celebrate our Independence Day! [13]
(American-inspired) independence from apocalypse is something everybody can unite behind, then: no doubt however with the exception of a (French) philosopher or theorist here and there who will insist on thinking things differently. That difference might modulate itself in the Lyotardian terms of the post, for instance, and their releasing of the pertinence of the future anterior tense rather than of the more urgent tonalities of doing something in the present to prevent the future from becoming humanity's past. Many other examples of indulgence of the counter-intuitive from the generation of thinkers associated with the "canon" of theory could be cited. Indeed one could start with Derrida's own, including the well-known deconstruction in Of Grammatology (1967) of speech's primacy over writing, or he complex and non-linear timescapes that dominate the spectropoetics of Specters. Or, to come round to the apocalyptic again, the view expressed in "No Apocalypse, Not Now" that another potential harbinger of the posthumanous, the nuclear threat, "is dealt with more 'seriously' in texts by Mallarmé, or Kafka, or Joyce, for example, than in the present-day novels that would offer direct and real descriptions of a 'real' nuclear catastrophe" [14].
<14> Indeed, Derrida's discussion of the nuclear threat in that essay might seem to provide a good example of a disinclination to think the nuclear threat in straightforward apprehension of and about ends. Decontextualized, his assertions on that theme can appear deeply capricious. The following is a relevant example: "The only 'subject' of all possible literature, of all possible criticism, its only ultimate and a-symbolic referent, unsymbolizable, even unsignifiable; this is, if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe, at least that toward which nuclear discourse and the nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the remainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature" (28; Derrida's emphasis). The unexpected equivalence exists because "[t]he only referent that is absolutely real is . . . of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity," such that [t]he absolute referent of all possible literature is on a par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, 'trace du tout autre'" (28). The projection of the nuclear age as bound up with what others have elsewhere called "the literary absolute" is, clearly, not the most intuitive of thoughts [15]. It is why Derrida's thought generally remains a challenge, and why it would be particularly significant to discern any convergence between deconstructive counter-intuitiveness and more straightforwardly linear understandings of the posthumanous. It is this convergence, we suggest, that might have become more tangible in some of Derrida's recent reflections on the apocalyptic, and it is this shift in tone that we would like to trace in what follows.
3. Of a Newly Apprehensive Apocalyptic Tone in Derrida's Philosophy
<15> That there might have been arising, gradually and through a long gestation, a newly apprehensive tone in deconstruction is detectable even in "No Apocalypse, Not Now." Derrida there admits that ingeniousness is all very well, but it does not safeguard the philosopher from generally shared extermination. Turning to consider the possibility of whether there is or is not a "radically new predicate in the situation known as 'the nuclear age,'" which he characterizes as one underpinned by dramatic "acceleration" and therefore in need of "critical slowdown," he concedes: "But this dissuasion and deceleration I am urging carry their own risks: the critical zeal that leads us to recognize precedents, continuities, and repetitions at every turn can make us look like suicidal sleepwalkers, blind and deaf alongside the unheard-of" (Derrida's emphasis). And further: "One may still die after having spent one's life recognizing, as a lucid historian, to what extent all that was not new, telling oneself that the inventors of the nuclear age or of nuclear criticism did not invent the wheel. . . . That's the way one always dies, moreover, and the death of what is still now and then called humanity might well not escape the rule" (21). An acknowledgement, then, that one would look pretty silly dying in the apocalyptic moment while one is still in eloquent philosophical, critical, and historical denial of the apocalypse. An indication, too, that the disdain for "readers-consumers" might mask a deeper concern.
<16> If that were so, it would indeed be possible to speak of what would come across as a newly apprehensive tone in Derrida's thought of the apocalypse, and of a greater readiness than may have been expected from such a counter-intuitive thinker to accord with a more common drift in discussions of that theme. Of course, the querulousness expressing suspicion of thoughts of ruptures or breaks survives, as when he asks elsewhere why it is that the kind of "reaffirmation" provided by "thinkers of the abyss" appears to "have a future only through the seism of a destruction" [16]. But receptivity to a possibly newly arisen apprehensive tone permits one to pick up on overtones that go beyond such querulousness. It is therefore very significant that Derrida himself raises the issue of what might be at stake when a change in tone, or a new tone, becomes distinguishable in a thinker's work. In a passage that is absolutely crucial to what we are discussing here, he declares:
The attention to tone, which is not just style, seems rather rare to me. Tone has been little studied for itself, if we suppose that is possible or has ever been done. A tone's distinctive signs are difficult to isolate, if they even exist in complete purity, which I doubt, above all in a written discourse. By what is a tone marked: a change or a rupture in tone? And how do you recognize a tonal difference within the same corpus? What traits are to be trusted for analyzing this, what signposting [signalisation] neither stylistic, nor rhetorical, nor evidently thematic or semantic? The extreme difficulty of this question, indeed of this task, becomes more accentuated in the case of philosophy. Isn't the dream or the ideal of philosophical discourse, of philosophical address [allocution], and of the writing supposed to represent that address, isn't it to make tonal difference inaudible, and with it a whole desire, affect, or scene that works (over) the concept in contraband? Through what is called neutrality of tone, philosophical discourse must also guarantee the neutrality or at least the imperturbable serenity that should accompany the relation to the true and the universal. [17]
This is intimidating. It intimates just how difficult it will be to establish that there is, demonstrably, a certain "change or rupture in tone" (to repeat Derrida's own words) in Derrida's oeuvre, and how inscrutable and elusive the resources for doing that must be. All the more so if, as we are contending, the shift is perceptible when Derrida is speaking of the apocalyptic: of that which, etymology shows, must unveil "the true and the universal," and about which Derrida speaks with tones shaded by irony and elusiveness. To do justice to the extreme difficulty of detecting a change or rupture in tone in Derrida's corpus would require much more space than is available to us here. We can however attempt to at least show the way by, precisely, showing. We shall do so through quoting certain specific passages from certain distinct texts of Derrida's that appear to mediate a relation to the posthumanous that seems to be entrenched in a different way of doing the apocalyptic than may previously have been the case. A sanction for this derives from the reassurance provided by Herman Rapaport that there is, in fact, an identifiably "later Derrida," with distinct tonalities of thought to his earlier personas [18]. And the ultimate stakes are clear: if even Derrida "does" the apocalypse differently, "now," then "we" may all start to consider whether we should do so too. In order to keep things manageable in an essay of this scope, we have opted to allude to two texts of Derrida's which seem to be particularly relevant to any thought of the "posthumanous." These are the essay "The Aforementioned So-Called Human Genome" (first published in 1996 but originally an address delivered in 1992, hence just one year before the appearance of Specters of Marx), and the dialogue with Giovanna Borradori on the implications for philosophy of September 11, entitled "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides" and collected in her book Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) -- which also includes a dialogue with Jürgen Habermas.
<17> What intrigues Derrida in "The Aforementioned Human Genome" is, in his terms, the clash between the "question of human universality" and that of the "patentability" of the human. "What is man?" he asks, and "What might the so-called genome of the said man be?" [19] Additionally: "Where is a secret, in a sense, registered?" How, therefore, to register the "patent" of the reengineered essence of man, whose legal status becomes ambiguous in the new protocols of identity and similarity? Indeed: is the secret, the genome, of what man is to be registerable according to the law's provisions for "the sacred rights of patents" (203; Derrida's emphasis), given also that what immediately becomes subject to legislation is "the essence of the human" and its relation to "reproductive programming of the same or the similar," to "the unpredictable production and invention of the totally other" (206-07)? No response, as such, is given, but there ensues the following passage that is deeply relevant to discussion of any newly apprehensive tone in Derrida's discussion of the apocalyptic:
One has the impression (and I am describing my first impression, that of a tragic, apocalyptic pathos) . . . that the risk that is run at this unique moment in the history of humanity is the risk of new crimes being committed against humanity and not only, if I can say this, against millions of real human beings as was the case, but a crime such that a sorcerer's apprentice who was very cunning, the author of potential genetic manipulations, might in the future commit or supply the means for committing . . . against man, against the very humanity of man, no longer against millions of representatives of real humanity but against the essence-itself of humanity, against an idea, an essence, a figure of the human race, represented this time by a countless number of beings and generations to come …. (207-08; emphasis added)
Hence there can be little doubt that the apocalypse, or at least the potential for it and for the posthumanous, can be done differently "now." This "now" marks itself out by being, as Derrida has it, a "unique moment." For "[a]re we not," asks Derrida, "at this unheard-of moment in the history of science or techno-science and of humanity, in a situation where a terrible suspicion sets the stage for a grand judgment whose apocalyptic proportions begin to resemble a large judgment?" (208-09). If there is indeed scope for a new apprehensiveness in Derrida's discourse on apocalypse, it is because the disparities between the humanly possible and the inhumanly and dehumanizingly impossible have significantly altered and narrowed. In question is no longer "merely" the extermination of countless humans, but of the work of readaptation which can be undertaken on the very basis of the human. If Derrida's tone in discussions that open onto the posthumanous is discernibly changed, then, it is in recognition that "the question, What is man? could no longer wait as it seems to have done formerly." That is because it is "today taking on, here, now, a terribly concrete and urgent form at an infinitely accelerated rate" (209). In such circumstances, to be deconstructively counter-intuitive could risk appearing neither punctual nor as striking the right tone -- especially when the posthumanous arrives with the prospect of "the programmable reproduction of the identical to infinity, excluding mutability, progress as well as history" (212).
<18> Of course, this is very close to Fukuyama's own concern at the implications of the biotechnology revolution. Indeed, even while noting that Derrida's essay predates Fukuyama's by ten years, it is important to acknowledge that the Derrida of "The Aforementioned So-Called Human Genome" is much closer to the Fukuyama of Our Posthuman Future than is the case with the Derrida of Specters of Marx and the Fukuyama of The End of History. Fukuyama's recent book is, it has to be said, a much more nuanced study than Fukuyama's earlier one, but if there is a greater movement of convergence between what Derrida and Fukuyama respectively represent in the multivalent general discourse concerning apocalyptic threats to the human, it is at least as much the result of a more engagement on Derrida's part with the posthumanous as it is of an emancipation on Fukuyama's part from the rather more jejune tonalities of The End of History.
<19> The views of Derrida on the import of September 11 further reinforce the impression of a greater willingness to address a broad worry less counter-intuitively than might earlier have been the case. The new tonality of his discourse on such matters might usefully be demonstrated by drawing attention to the frequency with which one word, bad¸ recurs in Philosophy in a Time of Terror. It does so most often in the form of the comparative and the superlative of bad: worse and worst. Borradori's otherwise excellent commentaries on her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida overlook this really rather remarkable feature and its implications for an understanding of how "we" -- and Derrida too -- might be "doing" the apocalypse differently, "now." Here, before we probe this issue further, are some examples of the incidence of worse or worst in the book, with respective authorship indicated:
Borradori: In all its horror, 9/11 has left us waiting for the worst. [20]
Habermas: In New York people seemed ready for the worst. [21]
Derrida: At issue again is . . . what, when seen from the Capitol, might be worse than the Cold War.
Derrida: Or at least, if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place. (Derrida's emphasis)<br> Derrida: Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by aggression that is "over and done with." (Derrida's emphasis)
Derrida: But, and here's another paradox . . . even if this terror is the very worst, even if it touches the geopolitical unconscious of every living being and leaves there indelible traces . . . because of the anonymous invisibility of the enemy, because of the undetermined origin of the terror . . . the worst can simultaneously appear insubstantial, fleeting, light, and so seem to be denied, repressed, indeed forgotten, relegated to being just one event among others, one of the "major events" . . . in a long chain of past and future events. (Derrida's emphasis)
Derrida: One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life . . . of a "great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends.
Derrida: We thus deny the irresistible foreboding that the worst has not taken place, not yet. [22]
<20> We do not claim to have inventorized all instances of the words worse or worst in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, and we are keeping in reserve reference to at least one other [23]. That said, it is striking that worse and worst clearly recur more frequently in Derrida's text than in those of the two others, Habermas and Borradori hereself, represented in the volume. This is all of a piece with the unwavering, uncompromising focus of Derrida on just how apocalyptically bad the aftermath of September 11 could conceivably turn out to be. For there could be little that is worse than the apocalypse, or darker than that posthumanous brought about by the readiness of a few to precipitate the unthinkable and the incalculable upon multitudes. Hence Derrida dares to express this unthinkable and this incalculable, inevitably deploying a further mention of worse:
One day it might be said: "September 11" -- those were the ("good") old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and that's what's scary. (102)
The prospect is sufficiently disturbing to induce Derrida to denounce and to take sides -- with qualifications, but nevertheless quite unequivocally:
What appears to me unacceptable in the "strategy" . . . of the "bin Laden effect" . . . is, above all, the fact that such actions and discourses open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the "world" itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter. . . . That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would. . . . 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, international law, international institutions, and so on. . . . I don't hear any such promise coming from "bin Laden," at least not one for this world. (113-14; Derrida's emphasis).
<21> Strong words from the arch-deconstructor of binary oppositions, and a significant choice between binary opposites. It is a choice understandable in terms of the apocalypse being that which, by definition, leaves no future, and in this sense what Derrida terms the "bin Laden effect," which opens onto no future, is the very figure of the apocalyptic. But of course what is telling here is the newly urgent tone in Derrida's idiom. It is a tone that is more consistently earnest (certainly more so than that discernible in the ludic spaces of Dissemination (1972) or Glas (1974), for instance) -- no doubt in part due to the overtly political theme and the all too tangible gravity of what is being discussed. True, the deconstructively mercurial insight is still in evidence, as in the paragraphs assiduously thinking the date/name September 11 as a "telegram of metonymy" (86), and most particularly in the fastidious rigor with which the "autoimmune logic" that made September possible is pursued throughout (see below). But what is ultimately noteworthy is the readiness with which it is suggested by Derrida that, at a time when September 11 is clearly the contemporary counterpart to the events called "Stalin" or "Hungary" that were mentioned in the passage from Specters of Marx quoted earlier, circumspection is no option: "If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors, artists, and journalists do not, before all else, stand up together against such violence, their abdication will be at once irresponsible and suicidal" (125). Admittedly, one must be careful here. The context is by this point in the dialogue with Borradori a discussion of the probity of tolerance rather than of any coordinated denunciation of the "bin Laden effect." Yet the contrast with another Derrida who admits to not having been a soixante-huitard because of his aversion to, in his words, "vibrating in unison," will not, we think, be lost upon those who have followed the development of his work [24]. More so since, in the same context, there is the further suggestion that "one of our first responsibilities [is] to analyze the emergence of what is new and unprecedented," and the reflection as well that "[o]nly by rigorously taking into account this novelty will we be able to adjust our ripostes and our acts of resistance" (125-26). And also, one might add, our tonalities.
<22> It is difficult to be clinchingly persuasive about these new tonalities in Derrida's writing without undertaking more extended comparative analysis on the differences between the earlier and the later work, and without engaging with the "new criteriology," as Derrida has it, that may have emerged in the wake of recent events [25]. We hope to have provided in this section at least some preliminary evidence to support the supposition that the difference in tone is in fact demonstrably there. In the background of that, it becomes opportune to return to our opening and reconsider the viability of Derrida's suggestion in Specters of Marx that contemporary posthumanists are seemingly unaware that they are latecomers to the end of history. That reconsideration should assist an understanding of why "we" do the apocalypse differently, "now."
4. The Latecoming of the Posthuman, or, Why "We" Do the Apocalypse Differently, "Now"
<23> It needs to be said immediately that if "we" are starting to discuss endism differently it is because the apocalypse can be done so more unthinkably and incalculably now than was ever the case. The challenge of the nuclear that provided a focus for "No Apocalypse, Not Now" is one about which it is possible to be almost nostalgic in the context of all the circumstances that make the posthumanous so immediate to both experience and possibility: the biotechnology revolution and the various technologies for the prosthesization of the human, the prospect of engineered pandemics, worldwide virality that could be digital as well as organic, indeed all the processes that could conceivably operate according to the logic of autoimmunity, whereby "a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity" (Derrida's emphasis) [26]. According to Derrida, "what is put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is nothing less than the existence of the world, of the worldwide itself" (Derrida's emphasis; 98-99). This risk, whereby the human itself creates the conditions for that which might exceed it, doing so without simultaneously immunizing itself against the worst with any adequacy or proper foresight, is what makes the posthumanous the episteme of our time. Reflections upon it could therefore look like a processual rather than posthumous epitaph on the human. In that context, the (sur)passing of the human becomes less amenable to the protocols of poststructuralist counter-intuitiveness than may previously have been the case. Hence, to recast the famous reflections from the conclusion to Foucault's The Order of Things (1966), the posthumanous is an invention of very recent date, and what is therein discovered is that the erasability of the human is an all too immediate wager.
<24> A grim scenario brings this point starkly home. It has to do with the fact that the worries of the Cold War, even the rigors of all previous wars, look -- and one hopes to be forgiven for saying this -- almost quaint beside the order and enormity of the posthumanous understood as the apocalyptic eventuality that is scripted by the various formulations of the autoimmunity contrived by the human. It is by no means certain, to follow Blanchot and Rapaport, that humanity will grow quite as blasé about the banality of the end as it had grown inured, through thanatopraxie and the various resources of the writing of the disaster, to Cold War menaces [27]. Quite simply, that is because it is possible to do the apocalypse more inventively now, and through all the inventions that have made previous technologies of the end obsolete and that will continue, in a paradoxical renewing of their ends, to do so. This, in fact, is itself a sign of the apocalyptic newness of the "now." Previous apocalyptic technologies have been obliterated by an accelerated logic of obsolescence, almost as if previous generations seem datedly exterminable, while "we" appear to be available to more designedly state-of-the-art (indeed practically "designer") endings which are potentially procurable by those -- and this where terrorism comes in -- undeterred by any détente. Consequently, the worst is not merely thinkable, but apprehensible as something on this side of improbability. In that apprehending the mannerisms of deconstructive, poststructuralist, or postmodernist logic, particularly their counter-intuitive temporalities and their reluctance to countenance straightforward projections of supersedence, seem to lack le bon ton. Indeed, there is no greater indication of the appositeness of a different tone and a different temporization of the posthumanous, and of the way in which even deconstruction finds itself driven to do the apocalypse differently now, than the following statement by Derrida:
We are talking about a trauma, and thus an event, whose temporality proceeds neither from the now that is present nor from the present that is past but from an im-presentable to come (à venir). A weapon wounds and leaves forever open an unconscious scar; but this weapon is terrifying because it comes from the to-come, from the future, a future so radically to come that it resists even the grammar of the future anterior [emphasis added]. [28]
Never before this did there seem to have been such cause for the newly apprehensive apocalyptic tone in Derrida. The shift is precipitated by what is glimpsed in the words we have italicized in the above quotation. They are clear enough: in a time of apocalypse, the simple tenses may become more apt than the complex ones.
<25> If we overstate or overdramatize this shift in tense and tone, it is with a purpose: to bring to stark definition the realization that talk of the posthumanous can no longer seem, as it may have done to Derrida in a piqued moment in Specters of Marx, the excitable futurological prattle of those whom, as has been seen, he designated as "latecomers." Needless to say, there must be some embarrassment there: at having to shift tone, and at the sensation of suddenly starting to come across as ever so mildly apprehensive. Derrida himself tries to take the edge off the intensity of his tonally different concern with the end when he asks an apparently offhand question: "Either there will be another suicidal attempt to harness technology to the ends of man (fascism in alliance with biogenetics is perhaps our worst future) and/or technology, an inhuman will to power, will overpower humanity. Is this proposition too oppositional, too human, too pious?" [29] Perhaps he need not have fretted, however, at this redramatization of what has been called postmodernism's "de-dramatization of the end" [30]. One may take exception to the tones and styles and intensities of various apocalyptic rhetorics of our time, to their varying abilities to overcome depthlessness, to the sensitivity of their understanding of the pathos of the human shading into the posthumanous -- but their pertinence, even amid all the potentially impertinent counter-accusations levelled at each other by the different camps saying sooth, is safe, even while nothing else seems to be.
<26> If we are right in what we have claimed above on the currently boosted relevance of the simple tenses, then it might have become "unfashionable" to respond counter-intuitively [31]. Indeed, had the discernibility of the newly apprehensive apocalyptic tone in Derrida's writing on the posthumanous not been "exemplary," and quite up to the recent "fashion," this would have been the section in our paper where we would have needed to problematize the notion of the posthuman's latecoming. We could have subjected it, for instance, to a reading informed by the counter-intuitive temporalities of the spectropoetics advanced by Derrida in Specters of Marx. We would have gone along with the typically poststructuralist modulation of the simple tenses through the devices of auxiliarization, citing, for instance, Geoffrey Bennington's words on the anticipation of the absolute event: "[The] anticipatory gesture is itself complex: the event anticipates on a time which it will turn out to be right or appropriate, it will drag the time in which it occurs along to the stage which it already represents, ahead of its time; but it also anticipates on a time in which it will be possible to see that it always was going to turn out to be appropriate, that the next stage already was 'formed in the womb of time', as its very appearance will have proved" (Bennington's emphasis) [32]. Yet Derrida's words on the resistance of a new apocalyptics to the grammar even of the future anterior is dissuasive. They signal a change in the tone with which Derrida approaches endism and its rhetoric, and something of a diminished readiness to ironize the "postisms," "newisms," and "seismisms" devolving upon any broaching of the posthumanous. It is enough to move us to reassess our own call for "a critical posthumanism" in our previous reflections upon the topic: not because a critical posthumanism is any less necessary or more mistimed now, but because the resistance of "state-of-the-art" apocalypse to any poststructuralist protocols investing in the logic of the future anterior needs to be critically rethought before poststructuralist counter-intuitiveness can be reasserted [33]. This paper therefore announces, as it were, the urgency of that rethinking, which has implications for an evaluation of poststructuralist pertinences in the time of the posthumanous. A fuller rehearsal of that rethinking, however, must be deferred to another context, to another time, in a postponement that can however at least declare here that what suddenly grows urgent in the time of the posthumanous is the thought not of the future anterior or even of the supersedence which linear time makes possible, but the intuition announced by Bennington: "The time is always ripe just for the untimely" (Bennington's emphasis) [34]. For the posthumanous, there is always time.
<27> In the meantime, there remains one issue that needs addressing: the we in our title, and its subsequent appearance within quotation marks at various points in the text of our essay. In the "Reading Us" section of "The Ends of Man," but even before, Derrida speaks of the inscrutability of the use of we and also of its entrenchment in a certain tradition of Western metaphysics. "The we," he notes, "is the unity of absolute knowledge and anthropology, of God and man, of onto-theo-theology and humanism" (121). We, then, can be said in the context of discourse of absolutes and humanism and when these are not subject to the experience of tenuousness. Derrida is clear-minded about the consequences of that: "Once one has given up positing the we in the metaphysical of "we men" with the metaphysical determinations of the proper of man, it remains that . . . the thinking of the proper of man is inseparable from the question of the truth of Being." One would presumably have to pass, then, through Heidegger. But -- and it is almost as unconscionable to ask this as it is symptomatic of what it is in fact very urgent to ask -- does that passage remain as pertinent in the age of the posthumanous? Does the posthumanous not make even Heidegger, with his fastidious musings on an essence of the human, "quaint"? To "keep within an understanding of the is" (124), Derrida says, becomes harder when the thought of a collective we "no longer" irrupts, when "[w]hat is threatened in the extension of metaphysics and technology . . . is the essence of man" (128). We therefore becomes a far from innocent word at the moment of the apprehending of the worst and of the apocalyptically posthumanous, when the realization that is uppermost is that we have autoimmunizingly put ourselves in the position of proceeding to make ourselves "quaint." And quaint, it should be remembered here, derives from old French cointe, "knowing." A heavy irony, when, as the epigraph from Lyotard points out, we are hardly in a position to know the end, to hear anybody deploy the past or indeed the future anterior in our regard, to hear a "they [for "we" will not be around to say we] were" or a "they will have been." At the time of the posthumanous we are as "unbeknownst" -- another word of Lyotard's [35] -- as ever. We may wonder, sometimes vaguely, sometimes intently, about apocalypse and its doing: whether the "Come" invoked at the end of Revelation or indeed "our" meddlings with autoimmunity beckon something that might yet be later or earlier than anticipated. We may speculate too whether they will presage anything very different from what was said, perhaps not all that soothly, by all the eschatological visions of the past on their way to becoming all our presents. Hence, in the midst of an economy of the eve, all that remains is to consider whether to change tone in reflection of all the shifts, as they arise, of "our" (un)timely meditations on the (un)punctual.
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Notes
[1] Jean François Lyotard, "Being Done with Narrative by Cubism and André Malraux," in Robert Newman, ed., Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79. [^]
[2] Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 136. [^]
[3] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 14-15. [^]
[4] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 93 and 24. [^]
[5] See Jacques Derrida, "The future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the 'Humanities,' what could take place tomorrow," in Tom Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24-57. [^]
[6] Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 121. [^]
[7] In what follows, and as in our title, the use of we and now will regularly be kept within quotation marks. This is being done in order to foreground the fact that in the contexts cited they are less than innocent terms, but also in anticipation of their problematization in our conclusion. [^]
[8] Clearly, not all in the line-up belong, strictly, to a "'50s" generation; their inclusion can however be permitted if it is accepted that what is at stake is as much a tonality of French theory (about which more is said later in the essay) as a particular "vintage" of it. [^]
[9] We are here using the term "'50s" generation in echo of Derrida's own use of '50s in the passage quoted from Specters at the start of our essay: though the reference is to figures whose first important work may have appeared in the 60s, Derrida's point is surely that the intellectual formation behind that work was, at least in part, the product of readings and of an education informed by the agendas of the earlier decade. [^]
[10] On this issue, see Derrida's comments on France and "national philosophical identity" in "The Ends of Man" (particularly the first two sections). [^]
[11] See Derrida, "The future of the profession," 50. [^]
[12] Jacques Derrida, "Of a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 122. [^]
[13] Christopher Keep, "Of Technology and Apocalypse, or, Whose Independence Day?" Reconstruction 4.1 (2004). Available online: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/home.htm [^]
[14] Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, diacritics, Summer 1984: 27-28. [^]
[15] See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philippe Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New Press, 1988). For further reflections on this theme, see Joseph G. Kronick, "Deconstruction and the Future of Literature (or, Writing in the Nuclear Age)," in Derrida and the Future of Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 101-41. [^]
[16] Jacques Derrida, "Nietzsche and the Machine," trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 219. [^]
[17] Derrida, "Of A Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy," 122-23. [^]
[18] See Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003). [^]
[19] Jacques Derrida, "The Aforementioned So-Called Human Genome," in Negotiations, 202. [^]
[20] Giovanna Borradori, "Introduction: Terrorism and the Legacy of the Enlightenment-Habermas and Derrida," in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 21. [^]
[21] Jürgen Habermas, "Fundamentalism and Terror-A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas," in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 26. [^]
[22] The quotations from Derrida are taken from "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides-A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida," in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 96-97, 99, 101, and 189. [^]
[23] See, apart from the mention of worst being held "in reserve," that which occurs in Derrida's argument (discussion of which is not quite relevant in this context) on how "the worst . . . is also the best"-"Autoimmunity," 124 (Derrida's emphasis). [^]
[24] See Jacques Derrida, "A Madness Must Watch over Thinking," in Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 347-48. [^]
[25] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 106. [^]
[26] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 94. [^]
[27] See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), and Herman Rapaport, "Deconstructing Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Ashbery, Derrida, Blanchot," Criticism 27.4 (1985): 390. [^]
[28] Derrida, "Autoimmunity," 97. [^]
[29] Derrida, "Nietzsche and the Machine," 253. [^]
[30] Klaus R. Scherpe, "Dramatization and De-dramatization of 'the End': The Apocalyptic Consciousness of Modernity and Post-Modernity," trans. Brent O. Peterson, Cultural Critique 5 (1986): 102. [^]
[31] We are using unfashionable here in the sense used by Geoffrey Bennington in Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2000), 129-a sense to do with the hope of academic discourse that it will be able "to set the tone again."
[32] Bennington, 133. [^]
[33] See our "extroduction" to Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, eds, Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)Resistibility of Theory (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; forthcoming), and also our "What's Wrong with Posthumanism?" in Rhizomes 7 (2003). Available online: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue7/callus.htm [^]
[34] Bennington, 130. [^]
[35] See Jean-François Lyotard, "Unbeknownst," in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van der Abbeele (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 185-97. [^]