Jacques Derrida Psyche_ Inventions of the Other, Volume I (Meridian_ Crossing Aesthetics).pdf

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PSYCH E
Inventions of the Other, Volume I
laird by
Peggy Kama
and Elizabeth Rottenberg
Jacques Derrida
Stanford
University
Press
Stanford
California
2007
Contents
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation and Editors' Foreword © 2007 by the
Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
Editors' Foreword
Author's Preface
ix
xii
Pgehe
originally appeared in French as
Psyche: Inventions de
l'autre, tomes I et II,
by Jacques Derrida.
Copyright © Editions Galilee 1987/2003.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
Iiirm or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper
I Rita' y of ( :ongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Derrida, Jacques.
[Psyche. English]
INyt he : inventions of the other / Jacques Derrida.
p. c tn. (Meridian: crossing aesthetics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
978 1)
8047-4798-1 (cloth : v. 1 : alk. paper)
ISBN 978 0 8047-4799-8 (pbk. : v. 1 : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8047-5766-9 (cloth : v.
2 :
alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8047-5767-6 (pbk. : v.
2 :
alk. paper)
i. Soul. z. Narcissism. 3. Other minds.
(•heory of knowledge) I. Title.
B243o.D483P7813
2007
194—dc22
2006037117
§ I Psyche: Invention of the Other
§ 2
The
Retrait
of Metaphor
What Remains by Force of Music
Envoi
At This Very Moment in This Work
Here I Am
48
8i
§ 3
§ 4 To Illustrate, He Said . . .
§ 5
90
94
129
143
191
226
262
§ 6 Me—Psychoanalysis
§ 7
§ 8 Des tours de Babel
§ 9 Telepathy
§ io
Ex abrupto
§ II
§ 12
The Deaths of Roland Barthes
An Idea of Flaubert: "Plato's Letter"
Geopsychoanalysis "and the rest of the world"
264
299
318
344
§ t3
§
1
4 My Chances
I Mes chances:
A Rendezvous
with Some Epicurean Stereophonies
v ill
Contents
■iS Racism's Last Word
i6
377
Editors' Foreword
Nu Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead,
Seven Missiles, Seven Missives
387
4
11
SfIllree3
432
435
Index of Proper Names
The English edition of this work by Derrida is long overdue. Initially
published in one large (652-page) volume in 1987,
Psyche: Inventions de
l'autre
grew to two volumes in its second edition (1998, 2003) when two
essays
were added to the original twenty-six ("My Chances
/ Mes
chances"
in volume 1 and "Interpretations at War" in volume 2). With few excep-
tions, all of the essays eventually gathered here have long been available in
English translation; indeed, several of them appeared in English versions
before Derrida collected them in
Psyche
in their original French. And yet
to say that these translations were available is misleading in several ways.
First, because over time they have scattered to the four winds prevailing
over the fortunes of scholarly publishing, and several of the places of pub-
lication for these translations have since disappeared, or were so out of the
way from the start that few libraries ever entered them in their catalogues.
Second, because Derrida set the essays in this work and meant them to
be
accessed within the contiguity it provides, within what he calls in his
preface "a mobile multiplicity." "These texts," he writes, "follow one an-
other, link up or correspond to one another, despite the evident difference
of their motifs and themes, the distance that separates the places, mo-
ments, circumstances" (xii). What has been available in English until now,
therefore, leaves out these connections and this correspondence, which
only the work called
Psyche
can provide. Finally, it is misleading to say the
translations have long been available, because, without exception, Der-
rida
revised each essay for inclusion in
Psyche,
thereby rendering obsolete
translations based on unrevised versions or even sometimes on the text of
ix
x
Editors' Foreword
Editors' Foreword
xi
unpublished lectures. Although the extent of the author's revisions varies
considerably from one text to another, not one of the essays included here
will
be found to correspond exactly to the previously published English
version.
These essays, then, have appeared in myriad journals and collections in
English, and many translators have had a hand in them. Given this disper-
sion and diversity, it is hardly surprising that the sort of correspondence
and links Derrida signaled among the essays got lost from one transla-
t b► to
the next, since they were rarely done with any of the others in
mind. Rut the same conditions also explain why there was a great variance
among translating "styles," which will remain palpable to some degree
for the reader of these two volumes, because we have not sought system-
atically to overcome it with our editing. We have, however, endeavored
to revise existing
translations, and sometimes extensively, according to a
principle of
allegiance
or
alliance
to the idiom of Derrida's writing, to the
grain, rhythm, and
tone of his thought as it puts itself to work and
into
the work. This allegiance to
the written work and the work of writing
means that throughout
we have sought less to comfort eventual English
readers than to give
them access, through English, to Derrida's thought in
its practice of reflecting
on the language condition in general, but always
necessarily in a
particular language.
Translator's and editor's
notes have been kept to a minimum. In the
text of the essays
square brackets or, on very rare occasions, curly brackets
enclose insertions by the translators or
editors, usually to clarify a transla-
tion,
When brackets enclose
an insertion within a quotation, these indi-
cate
a comment or clarification
made by the author.
Work on this project began in
earnest in 2003, when we could still look
liirward to collaborating with the author
whenever the need might arise.
We knew from earlier experiences translating and editing Jacques Derrida's
work that wr could count on his
always generous counsel and support.
selves, alas, when we
must
no longer be concerned with the other
in ourselves,
we
can
no longer be concerned with anyone except the other
in ourselves.
The
narcissistic wound enlarges infinitely for want of being able to be narcissistic
any longer, for no longer even finding appeasement in that
Erinnerung
we call
the work of mourning. Beyond internalizing memory, it is then necessary
to
think,
which is another way of remembering. (9)
"It is then necessary
to think . . . ";
yes, and to think how thinking is an
invention of the other. This is
Psyche's
injunction, which we now pass
on
in
another language.
Peggy
Kamuf
Elizabeth Rottenberg
I (is disappearance leaves this work, in its
survivance,
bereft and inconsol-
able.
Rut the inconsolable condition of thought
is also what is called here,
in the
first essay that gives its title to the whole work, "Psyche," the mir-
ror,
and the mirror that
must, sooner or later, be broken:
So we
Pier
why the breaking of the mirror is still more necessary, because at
the inpoant of death, the limit of narcissistic reappropriation becomes terribly
%hap, it increases and neutralizes suffering: let us weep no longer over our-
Author's Preface
xiii
Author's Preface
These texts have accompanied, in some fashion, the works I have pub-
lished over the last ten years.' But they have also been dissociated from
those works, separated,
distracted.
This is marked in their
formation,
whether one understands with this word the movement that engenders by
giving form or the figure that gathers up a mobile multiplicity: configura-
tion in displacement. A formation must move forward but also advance
in a group. According to some explicit or tacit law, it is required to space
itself out without getting too dispersed. If one were to make of this law
a theory, the formation of these writings would proceed like a
distracted
theory.
1,"
of a discontinuous theory or discreet appearance of the series, these
texts, then, follow one another, link up or correspond to one another, de-
spite the evident difference of their motifs and themes, the distance that
separates the places, moments, circumstances.
And the names, especially the names, proper names. Each of the es-
says appears in fact to he devoted, destined, or even singularly dedicated
to sontronc,
very often to the friend, man or woman, close or distant,
living or not, known or unknown. It is sometimes but not always a
poet Or a thinker, the philosopher or the writer. It is sometimes but
not always the one who
puts things on stage
in the worlds that are called
politics, the theater, psychoanalysis, architecture. Certain texts seem to
hear witness better than others to this quasi-epistolary situation. "Let-
ter to a Japanese Friend," "Envoi," "Telepathy," "'Plato's Letter'" or
"Seven Missives," for example, might have stood in the place of the title
or the preface, thanks to the play of some metonymy. I made another
choice. By disrupting the chronological order only once, I thought that
"Psyche: Invention of the Other" might better play this role. At the
halfway point (1983), a certain
psyche
[which is also what the French
call a "cheval glass," that is, a full-length, free-standing mirror] seems to
pivot on its axis so as to reflect in its way the texts that preceded it and
those that followed. By the same token, a mobile mirror feigns to gather
the book together: in any case in what resembles it, its image or phan-
tasm. This remains, after all—technique of the simulacrum—always the
proper function of a preface.
Simulacrum and specularity. It is a matter here of speculating on a
mirror and on the disconcerting logic of what is blithely called narcis-
sism. There is some complacent self-satisfaction, already, in the gesture
that consists in
publishing.
Simply in publishing. This first complacency
is
elementary; no denial could erase it. What then should be said of
the gesture that gathers up previous writings, whether or not they are
unpublished?' Without denying this additional exhibition, let us say
that it also makes up the object of this book. But the mirror named
psyche
does not figure an object like any other. Nor is the gesture that
gets caught
wanting to show the mirror just one gesture among others.
Whether or not it is granted this right, whether or not it makes of the
right a duty, it has no choice but to watch itself showing while listening
to itself speak. Is that possible?
And why
expose
oneself to this risk? To the other each time addressed,
the question also becomes a demand. In its most general and most im-
plicit form, it could be translated in several words, thus: What is an in-
vention? And what does invention signify when it must be
of the other?
The invention
of the
other would imply that the other remains still
me,
in
me, of me,
at best,
for me
(projection, assimilation, interiorization,
introjection, analogic appresentation, at best, phenomenality)? Or else
that my invention of the other remains the invention of me by the other
who finds me, discovers me, institutes or constitutes me? By coming
from her (or him), the invention of the other would then return to him
(or her).
Is there a choice between these modalities? The other without me, be-
yond
nic,
in me, in the impossible experience of the gift and of mourning,
in the impossible condition of experience, is that not still something else?
sll

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