File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9706, message 64


Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 22:09:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-crl.com>
Subject: Re: Lyotard & Derrida




Darren quoted a passage from Derrida's "Spectres of Marx".  Hugh wondered 
if it wasn't an overly intellectualized way of talking about people's 
souls.  I see something more here than talk about "souls", at least "souls 
in the quasi-religious or Platonic sense our ears are use to, so I would 
like to show you how I read the excerpt that darren gave us.

Myself, I read through Derrida like an editor who is working with a badly
written manuscript, one in which the sentences are too long and the
general words are too vague.  I break them up, put in more specific
references to aid the reading and then try to read my "translation".  What
I come up with is generally interesting (to me, and sometimes to others)
and I feel, often enough, that I learn from it.  These translations are as
tight as I can get (in terms of being coherent) without obviously
betraying the meaning detectable in the sentences.  

I thought some people here might find that process interesting, and
perhaps add to my transalation.  There are certainly cases in which I take
vague and ambiguous words and make guesses, but they are not wild guesses. 
I choose them from within the possibilities I see to make the most
interesting sense I can imagine, according to my own ear and
sensibilities.  The test of the pudding is always, for me, whether or not
it opens up the text that follows so that it makes more sense to me than
before.  

I love doing this, by the way, and, as I say, invite you to join in with
me. I am certainly not an expert on the textual excerpt I am working with
here. I haven't even read the "Spectres of Marx".  This is just the way I
pull it together for myself.  Once I work through a text in this way, I 
like to re-read the original to see if it is more "open", and then, if I 
am really feeling into it, do the whole thing again.

So here's my suggested first translation.  I hope someone who has read the 
entire text goes through my translation and edits it and makes it 
better.  Again, the point (as I see it) is not just to capture Derrida's 
intent.  It is to develop the most coherent, interesting and meaningful 
restatement of the passage I (or we) can without doing violence to the 
manifest meaning of what he is saying.  Derrida's passages are preceeded 
by the '> >' marks, and mine are indented.

> > "And one does not have to wait for the objection: To whom, finally,
> > would an obligation of justice ever entail a commitment, one will
> > say, and even be it beyond law and beyond the norm, to whom and to
> > what if not to the life of a living being? 

   If we are obligated by the call of justice to have a commitment, to
   to whom would this commitment be if it were not to a living being?

Is there ever justice,
> > commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to
> > answer for itself (for the living self) before anything other, in the
> > last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by
> > that natural life or the life of the spirit? Indeed. The objection
> > seems irrefutable.

   Is there ever a call to justice that has to answer to its own conscience 
   in any way other than to support the life of a living being?
   Whether this is the natural life of the living being or the life of that
   being's spirit?  This seems irrefutably so. 

 But the irrefutable itself supposes that this
> > justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there,
> > its empirical or ontological actuality; not toward death but toward a
> > *living-on*, namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves
> > be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in
> > advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the
> > living present as well as of any effectivity. 

   But if this call of justice to support life is irrefutable, then this 
   justice carries life beyond the present life, not towards death, but 
   towards a living on after the present.  And, if this is so, then the life 
   we are supporting is but a trace, and a traces of traces.  That trace of 
   the future always disjoins itself from the identity of the present
   self.  By doing so, it undermines any ability of the present self 
   to be effective in the present -- unless it imagines the trace 
   of its future and is inspired (or filled) by it.

There is then *some
> > spirit*. Spirits. And *one must* reckon with them."

   And this means that the trace of the future haunts the just conscience
   in the present like a spirit.  In this way, we have spirits in our 
   hearts, and we who have a conscience must reckon with these spirits 
   for our spirits of the future tell us there will be a payment if we 
   do not do so.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

What I am reminded of as I work through this passage is the Anaximander 
fragment, which Heidegger tells us is the oldest fragment of writing in 
Western world (Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, p.13).  It was written, 
we are told, somewhere from the end of the seventh century BC to the 
middle of the sixth.  The fragment reads (in Nietzsche's translation):

    Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass 
    away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be 
    judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.

And according to the translation of Wilhelm Dilthey:

    But where things have their origin, there too their passing away 
    occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty
    to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly 
    established time.

Can you see a connection between the Anaximander fragment and the fragment
we have taken from Derrida?  Darren, I do not have Spectres of Marx, but I
wonder if you would tell us a bit more of the context of this Derrida
excerpt.  I am not so much asking for an exegesis as a some information as
to whether Derrida is talking about some work in this passage (such as 
something from Heidegger or Marx). 

..Lois Shawver


   

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