Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Works by Jacques Derrida Cited
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Watchwords
- 1 “Tape-Recorded Surprise”: Derrida Interviewed
- 2 “Bartleby,” or Decision: A Note on Allegory
- 3 Urgent Translation
- 4 Coming to the Beginning
- 5 To Follow
- 6 La Morsure
- 7 “One day someone …”
- 8 The Affect of America
- 9 From Now On
- 10 Stunned: Derrida on Film
- 11 Aller à la ligne
- 12 Composition Displacement
- 13 The Ear, Who?
- 14 To Do Justice to “Rousseau,” Irreducibly
- 15 The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis
- 16 The Philosopher, As Such, and the Death Penalty
- Epitaph
- Index
5 - To Follow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Works by Jacques Derrida Cited
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Watchwords
- 1 “Tape-Recorded Surprise”: Derrida Interviewed
- 2 “Bartleby,” or Decision: A Note on Allegory
- 3 Urgent Translation
- 4 Coming to the Beginning
- 5 To Follow
- 6 La Morsure
- 7 “One day someone …”
- 8 The Affect of America
- 9 From Now On
- 10 Stunned: Derrida on Film
- 11 Aller à la ligne
- 12 Composition Displacement
- 13 The Ear, Who?
- 14 To Do Justice to “Rousseau,” Irreducibly
- 15 The Deconstitution of Psychoanalysis
- 16 The Philosopher, As Such, and the Death Penalty
- Epitaph
- Index
Summary
It is impossible that we should each survive the other. That's the duel, the axiomatic of every duel, the scene which is the most common and the least spoken of—or the most prohibited—concerning our relation to the other. Yet the impossible happens—not in “objective reality,” which has no say here, but in the experience of Romeo and Juliet. And under the law of the pledge, which commands every given word.
(“Aphorism,” 422)So wrote Jacques Derrida in 1986.
So he writes in “Aphorism Countertime.”
These two assertions attempt to say something about the legacy of one who was an unflinching thinker of inheritance and legacy. Between them, the first in a dated past tense and the second with its descriptive present tense, they conjugate the times of a survival into a present without limit, which is also and at the same time the limitless future of a promise. This “at the same time” points, at the same time, to the contretemps of a survival, a living on, that was already given by the law commanding “every given word” in every duel. Already, which means not just in the wake of a dreaded, lamented event that can be dated and that happens only once. Already before that date there will have been living on, before and therefore also beyond the event. The impossible happens, the impossible event happens every day, and not merely on that day when “The sun for sorrow will not show its face,” which is recorded and dated as the beginning of mourning in “objective reality.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- To FollowThe Wake of Jacques Derrida, pp. 55 - 67Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010