derrida_eatingwell

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472 473otes to Pages 250-53

Obliteration of the will, unproductiv ity (a society offoragers), non-work.

oblivion as the forgetting of the city. Adorno and Horkheimer correctly

tie all these motifS tightly together, and, by contrast, tie them to the

history of truth or of Western rationality. Moreover, they propose •

modern political reading: "Thi s kind of idyll, which recalls the happinell

of narcotic drug addicts reduced to the lowest level in obdurate social

orders, who use their drugs to help them endure the unendurable.11

impermissible for the adherents of the rationale of self-preservation. I t it

actually the mere illusion of happiness, a dull vegetation, as meager as

animal's bare existence, a n ~ at best only the absence of the awareness

misfortune. But happiness holds truth, and is of its nature a resulc.

revealing itself with the abrogation of misery. Therefore the sufferer

cannot bear to stay with the Lotus-eaters is justified. He opposes

illusion with that which is like yet unlike: the realization of

through historical labor . . ." (Theodor W. Adorno and Max

heimer, The Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming [Londonl

Verso, 1979], pp. 62-63). I find this reading convincing, at least .

the general perspective of the book. But this would raise other typesquestions which I cannot go into here.

8. Ibid., p. 63.

9. I propose the word telerhetoric or metatelerhetoric to designate

general and more than general space in which these matters would

treated. For example: in the case of computers, is the use of the

"virus" simply a metaphor? And we might pose the same question for

use of the word "parasite." The prerequisite to this sort of problematiC

would have to concern rhetoric itself, as a parasitic or viral structures;

originarily and in general. Whether viewed from up close or from

away, does not everything that comes to affect the proper or the

have the form of a virus (neither alive nor dead, neither human

"reappropriable by the prope, of man," nor generally subjectivable)?

doesn't rhetoric always obey a logic of parasitism? Or rather, doesn't

parasite logically and normally disrupt logic? If rhetoric is viral

parasitic (without being the AIDS of language it at least opens up

possibility of such an affection) how could we wonder about the

cal drift of words like "virus," "parasite," and so forth? And

the computer virus, just like its "literal" counterpart, attacks, in this

telephonically, something like the "genetic code" of the computer

Fabien Gruhier, "Votre ordinateur a la verole" ["Your infected

puter"], Le Nouvel Observateur, November 18-24,1988. The author

Note to Page 255

that computer viruses are "contagious" and "travel through telephone

lines at the speed of an electron. . . . One need only be equipped with a

modem to be contaminated by a virus from Asia, America, or a nearby

suburb"). Even now "software vaccines" are being developed. Once again

we have the question of the pharmakon as the familial scene and the

question of paternity: last year it was a student at Cornell, the son ofan

official responsible for electronic security, who sent out the virus "guilty"of spreading this "infection" (and will we put quotation marks every

where, these speech act condoms, to protect ou r language from contami

nation?). This so-called computer infection, spliced onto the AIDS virus

itself grafted onto drugs, is more than a modern, worldwide figure of the

plague; we know that it mobilizes the entire network of American

security forces, including the FBI-and the DST (Direction de la Sur

veillancedu Territoire) and the DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securite

Exterieure). . . . I bring this up to revive our initial exchange concerning

the delimitation of competence. Who will determine the pertinence of

these questions? By what authority? According to what criteria? These

questions should in return affect everything that we have up to now saidabout drug addiction. I take the liberty of mentioning the many places

where I have attempted to treat the alogicof the parasite (for example: Of

Grammatology, "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination, "Signature Event

Context" in Margins-ofPhilosophy, Limited Inc, abc . .. and passim).

"Eating Well," or the Calculationof the Subject

NO T E : Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy pu blished in Cahiers Confionta

tum 20 (Winter 1989), an issue titled ''Apres Ie sujet qui vient" (After the

subject who comes). The note presenting the interview read as follows:

"Jacques Derrida was unable to write a text in time for Topoi (the journal

in which this interview was initially published in English translation in

October 1988 [vol. 7, no. 2]; the issue has since been re-edited as a book:

Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and

Jean-Luc Nancy [New York: Routledge, 1991)). He proposed th at we do

an interview instead. The latter, however, took place too late to be

integrally transcribed and translated in Topoi, which was able to publish

about halfof it. It appears here almost in its entirety (although not

without the omission of certain developments whose themes were an

nounced in Topo;: the whole would have been both too long and

occasionally too far afield from the main theme)."



474 475otes to Pages 26I-76

1. Cf. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Parages, "Prejuges" in La Jaculte de juger

(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), "Ulysses Gramophone," Of Spirit,

"Number of Yes" in Psyche, and passim.

2. See for example Speech andPhenomena, p. 84, n. 1. This long note de

velops the implications of Husserl's sentence: " We can on ly say that this

flux is something which we name in conformity with what is constituted,

but is nothing temporally 'objective.' It is absolute subjectivity and has

the absolute properties of something to be denoted metaphorically as'flux,' as a point of actuality, primal source-point, th at from which springs

the 'now,' and so on. In the lived experience of actuality, we have the pri

mal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all

this, names are lacking."The rest of the not e describes that being-outside

the-self of time as spacing, and I conclude: "There is no constituting

subjectivity. The very concept of constitution must be deconstructed."

3. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1975).-Trans.

4. See Derrida, "Forcener Ie subjectile" in Antonin Artaud: Portraits et

Dessins (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

5. Cf OfSpirit, and "Heidegger' s Hand," passim.

6. See Derrida, "Desistance," preface to American translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's 1Jpography, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cam

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).-Trans.

7. "My Chances," trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking

Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and

William Kerrigan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1984).

8. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience ofFreedom, trans. Bridget McDon

ald (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993).

9. Cf also, for example, The Truth in Painting, p. 286: "Unless

Heidegger ignores (excludes? forecloses? denies? leaves implicit? un

thought?) an other problematic of the subject, for example in a displace

ment or development of the value 'fetish.' Unless, therefore, this question

of the subjectum is displaced otherwise, outside the problematic of truth

and speech which governs The Origin." -Trans.

ro. On the question, see Of Spirit, passim; on the "yes, yes," see

"Otobiographies," trans. A. Ronell, in The Ear ofthe Other, and "Num

ber of Yes"; on "viens," see "Psyche: Invention of the Other." - Trans.

II . "The Politics of Friendship."

12. Maurice Blanchot, L'amitie (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 328; see

also Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et

• Notes to Pages 28I-88

al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), and Maurice

Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris (New York: Station

Hill Press, 1988).

13. Cf above, n. II .

14. Even Hitler did not propose his vegetarianismas an example. This

fascinating exception, moreover, can be integrated in the hypothesis I a m

evoking here. A certain reactive and compulsive vegetarianism is always

inscribed, in the name of denegation, inversion, or repression, in thehistory of cannibalism. What is the limit between coprophagy and

Hitler's notorious coprophilia? (See Helm Stierlin, AdolfHitler, Psychol-

ogie du groupe Jamilial [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975],

p. 41.) I refer the reader to Rene Major's valuable contribution (De

!'election [Paris: Aubier, 1986], p. 166, n. I).

15. The phrase in play here, "11 faut bien manger" (which is also the

original title of this interview), can be read in at least two ways: "one

must eat well" or "everyone has to eat." In addition, when the adverb

"bien" is nominalized as "Ie Bien," there results the sense of "eating the

Good." It is this multivalent sense that Derrida explores in the succeed

ing sentences.-Trans.

Che cos'efa poesia?

NOTE: First published in Poesia I, no. II (November 1988); republished

in Podrsie 50 (Autumn 1989), where it was preceded by the following

note: "The Italian journal Poesia, where this text appeared in November

1988 (translated by Maurizio Ferraris), begins each of its issues with the

attempt at or the simulacrum of a response, in a few lines, to t he question

'Che cos'e la poesia?' It is asked of a living person, while the ques

tion 'Che cos' era la poesia?' is addressed to the dead, this time to the

'Odradek' by Kafka. At the moment he or she is writing, the living

respondent does n ot know the answer given by the dead one: it appears at

the end of the issue and is the choice of the editors. Destined to appear in

Italian, this 'response' exposes itself in passing, sometimes literally, in

letters and syllables, the word and the thing ISTRICE (pronounced 1Z-

TRR1-TCHAY), which, in a French connection, will have yielded the

'herisson' [and in English, the hedgehog]."

Throughout the text, the str-sound is stressed. One may hear in it the

distress of the beast caught in the strictures of this translation. For that

reason, the text is published also in the original French.

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