THE LOVE OF THE LETTER: DERRIDA AND
HIS ONLY LADY
Barbara Vinken (München)*
Derrida was a lover of wisdom; that was his profession as a
philosopher. But even more so was he a lover of the letter. It was
because of his excessive love of the letter that he felt threatened—
tongue in cheek—by his exclusion from the serious, identity-fixated,
male field of philosophy and pushed into, exiled to, the somehow more
frivolous, female field of literature or worse, rhetoric—a field without
much consequence in the hierarchy of the University. Derrida’s alliance
with all things female—even passing as a woman, as Avital Ronell put
it yesterday and opening the gates of the venerable, heavily maledominated institution that is the University for letting in other women
with him—made him un homme à femmes in an altogether different
sense.
In philosophy, language is often treated as a means of explanation
or communication. In our “information society” language is the grey
servant maid, a mere means of transmission. For Derrida, he says in his
last interview with Le monde, language was his only “souveraine,” his
master or rather his mistress, whom he started to serve, as he puts it in
Le monolinguisme de l’autre,1 at day break—matitudine.
He
surrendered and submitted unconditionally to her. To her, he devoted
his life. The French language was his life long passion.
Derrida thus inscribes himself in a very specific French tradition,
for which being in language is the heart of the erotic. More radically
than others, he has revived in his writings the tradition of courtly love.
He thus avows—the topos of the aveu d’amour—that the French
language was his only language, but that it was not his own, could not
be appropriated or domesticated, that it is the language of the other that
comes from elsewhere and alienates, displaces, and unsettles everything
at home. This is a universal situation since language does not belong to
anybody and is never anybody’s natural property: “Oui, je n’ai qu’une
* Institut für Romanistik, LMUniversität München, Ludwigstraße 25, D- 80539 München,
GERMANY. [email protected].
1 JACQUES DERRIDA, MONOLINGUALISM OF THE OTHER; OR, THE PROSTHESIS OF ORIGIN
(Patrick Mensah trans., Stanford Univ. Press 1998) (1996) [hereinafter DERRIDA,
MONOLINGUALISM ENGLISH TRANSLATION]; JACQUES DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME DE
L’AUTRE OU LA PROTHÈSE D’ORIGINE (1996) [hereinafter DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME].
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[Vol. 27:2
langue, or ce n’est pas la mienne.”2 “Yes, I only have one language, yet
it is not mine.”3 The fiction of a natural origin, property, and propriety
of language is what the essay, subtitled The Prosthesis of Origin, is
about.
Peter Goodrich has pointed out this affinity between the
troubadours and Derrida. 1152 is, he has calculated, Derrida’s number.
What about it? “It is the era of the troubadour lyric and the reception of
Ovid’s Art of Love . . . the flowers of rhetoric were being sown and we
might hazard that philosophy would later and ambivalently watch them
bloom . . . the first postclassical—cisalpine—postcards were being
sent, . . . A.D. to J.D., Arnaut Daniel to Jacques Derrida and beyond.”4
In what follows I will read Le monolinguisme de l’autre as a
treatise on love, a text of desire—or of the desire for the text. Let me
start by saying that this kind of love—in the age of sexuality, of needs
and satisfactions, where every desire is apparently fulfillable and there
is no space beyond satisfaction—has become somewhat unheard of, off
tune, out of step.
What is at stake is also a conception of identity, of selfhood.
Rodolphe Gasché has described this Derridean notion of selfhood as
“identity being the result of difference of itself.” To be oneself, one has
to break of from oneself, to be depossessed of one’s self. The self is
thus constituted—and deconstructed—in an asymmetrical, nonspectral,
relation to the other and can only come from the vantage point of the
other. I suggest that there is a name for that relation, this name being
passion.
It was Jacques Lacan, in his relentlessly mocking Anglo-American
egopsychology, who made the notion of the subject, the problematic of
identity into the stumbling block that separates Europe from the AngloAmerican world. To oversimplify things, you would have on the one
hand the notion of a self-possessed, self-centered, self-determined
subject. The birth of this subject in Enlightenment immediately
generated his counterpart, the woman, unfortunately subjected to her
sex, that displaced her in the very locus of her identity.5 Emancipation
has put women in the position to reach for the apparently enviable
subjectivity of the self-possessed, self-centered, self-determined subject.
If you could not parade such a flawless property, having any identity
trouble, you would hopefully get it as the result of successful analysis.
The Freudian conception of the subject, in the Lacanian rereading, sees
2
3
4
DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME, supra note 1, at 15.
DERRIDA, MONOLINGUALISM ENGLISH TRANSLATION, supra note 1, at 2.
See Peter Goodrich, J.D., 6 GERMAN L.J. 16, Jan. 1, 2005, at 20,
http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdf/Vol06no01/PDF_Vol_06_No_01_015-24_SI_
Goodrich.pdf.
5 For a striking example, see Denis Diderot, Sur les femmes, reprinted in QU’EST-CE QU’UNE
FEMME? (Elisabeth Badinter ed., Paris, P.O.L 1989) (1798).
2005]
THE LOVE OF THE LETTER
879
the subject as principally dislocated, depossessed, and alienated by the
difference of the sexes and therefore split by desire, a lacking subject.
In Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Derrida presents himself as a
martyr, ecce homo, a bearer of witness. It is because of his specific
personal experience—or non-experience since it was traumatic—that he
can testify better than others, in an exemplary way, for a universal
situation: having but one language, and this language being not one’s
own, coming from the other and thus alienating the subject in the very
site of its subjectivity, à demeure. Derrida’s unsettling experience thus
makes readable and understandable a universal situation to which we
are all subjected. Thanks to his specific situation, he can bear witness in
a particularly impressive way: à vif, he says, to the quick, his wounds
showing, thus referring to the rhetorical category of enargeia—putting
something in so lively a fashion that you have the feeling of seeing it
right in front of your eyes. His very wounds, his trauma, and his
identity trouble shed a light on the precarious formation of identity and
selfhood in everyone. It is an experience or non-experience that he
neither chose, nor came to understand, but simply had to suffer as his
passion: “Oui, je n’ai qu’une langue, or ce n’est pas la mienne.”6 And
it is this state of bereavement and privation that he is suffering.
What is this, his particular historical situation? As an Algerian
Jew, he speaks French, a language that truly is not his, but the language
of the other—the French colonizer. Neither he nor his mother has any
other language, be it Ladino, Arabic, Berber, or Hebrew; this being the
result of an incredibly fast assimilation, or rather acculturation, as
Derrida puts it. The rules and laws of this language come from some
place else, from beyond the sea, from the Metropolis. The situation is
even more complicated: French citizenship, which was granted to the
indigenous Jews of Algeria in 1871 because of their participation in the
war against Prussia, was taken away from them under, as the saying
went, the Occupation. Derrida underlines the bad faith of this
expression, since nobody had ever seen a German uniform in Algiers. It
was thus a strictly French affair. It is French people—i.e., the Vichy
government—that take away citizenship from other French people, the
indigenous Jews. The Algerian Jews become stateless, hostages at
home. They cannot travel, and they can no longer attend school.
Derrida’s politics of language—his politics of desire—is opposed
to two other models of language: the colonial politics on the one hand
and the politics of the colonized on the other. The colonizer lives in the
phantasm of the natural propriety and property of a mother tongue that
he masters. He imposes it as his own—the master’s voice—as the
master language onto the colonized population. He subjects the colony
6
DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME, supra note 1, at 15.
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to the language of which he himself is supposedly a subject. The
politics of the colonized, on the other hand, here represented by
Abdelkebir Khatibi, is the possession of two interfering languages. He
calls this bi-langue: double language.7
The sexual metaphor for the first, the politics of the colonizer, is
rape. The colonist appropriates the language and makes it his through
rape. The metaphor for the second being in language is, as Khatibi
himself puts it, promiscuity—multiple erotic partners and a variety of
sexual practices in which the tongue—la langue—plays a determinant
role. There is also another relation to the mother: Khatibi has a mother
tongue, even if his mother is illiterate. Derrida’s mother not only does
not speak her own language, but is, while he is writing this book, more
and more unable to speak and deprived of language—aphasique.
Derrida opposes to these two models that of high courtly love. To
language—his lady, his mistress—he is subjected; he is her subject. He
has totally succumbed to her. A la vie, à la mort—unto life, unto death,
he is in her service.8 Even before he could speak, vows were binding
him to her. These vows prescribed an almost monkish solitude in her
service, starting at dawn—matitudine—the time the monks start their
morning prayer. But this only one, this sovereign lady, interdicting and
interdicted, cannot be appropriated; it cannot be made his and cannot
become his property. Since she comes from the other, and since she
comes form elsewhere—au delà de la mer, from beyond the sea—he is
forever deprived of her. It is a passion that he cannot help but suffer in
order to expose his wounds of love. What Derrida then proposes is an
unheard of way, a totally new way of making love, and of inscribing
oneself into the body of another—into the body of language by
inscribing stigmata, tattoos, and wounds of love.9
Derrida devotes himself to the French in another venerable
tradition: as the defender and illustrator of the French language by
quoting Du Bellay’s famous title Deffence et illustration de la langue
francaise. Derrida’s oeuvre can be read as precisely that, as a defense
and illustration of the French language. But differently from Du Bellay,
Derrida does not imagine this illustration in the oedipal register—as a
fight between sons and fathers, during which the ancients have to be
plundered and incorporated in order for the sons to come into their
own.10 Into his own Derrida cannot come since his mistress, language,
cannot be mastered or plundered or possessed; it cannot be made his.
7 ABDELKEBIR KHATIBI, LOVE IN TWO LANGUAGES 5 (Richard Howard trans., Univ. of
Minn. Press 1990) (1983).
8 DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME, supra note 1, at 14.
9 A propos stigmata and tattoos: Derrida wrote this in 1996, and thus before the sacred
heart—stigmata of all stigmata, wound of love par excellence—could be spotted in the Collection
of Dolce & Gabbana or Gautier, very avant garde, setting the fashions of the time.
10 See BARBARA VINKEN, DU BELLAY UND PETRARCA: DAS ROM DER RENAISSANCE (2001).
2005]
THE LOVE OF THE LETTER
881
She cannot but keep her withdrawn distance in purity; she comes from
somewhere else. It is an amour de loing as the troubadours would say.
What links Derrida’s conception of language to the sovereign
mistress and to the tradition of courtly love? It is opposed not only to
rape and promiscuity, but also, and maybe foremost, to marriage.
Derrida’s answer to what love is may well be that of the troubadours.
Qu’est-ce que l’amour? Something else, apparently, than a functioning
relationship—something else, certainly, than satisfying sex. Maybe it is
but the name for a wound—a split in the subject that cannot be healed, a
grief, a lover’s lament, addressed at the other.
The parallelism between the courtly mistress and language, as
Derrida conceives it, is the total exclusivity of the one and only. All
desires are directed at her; she is the only occupation of the lover. The
lover surrenders unconditionally to her sovereignty. But this total
surrender is not respect; it retains accents of revenge and jealousy. This
only object of desire remains principally unreachable—the lady cannot
be appropriated, cannot become mine. Their exclusive relationship
must be kept totally secret. Being subjected to passion, this suffering
surrender, surrendering to suffering, is neither a choice nor can it be
understood; it is something done to the subject that it cannot but suffer.
Courtly love is a mode of relating to the other that exposes the subject
to lack. It can never come into its own, but is always exiled from itself.
This self-alienation does not only inhabit the subject, but is the very
nature of language. It inhabits language and finds its best expression—
its perfect illustration—in the address to the beloved in the lover’s
lament. Derrida uses all these topoi of courtly love to illustrate the
paradox of a language that is his only one but that does not belong to
him.
Even Amor, the god of love, plays his part. When exposed to
literature—the most important thing in the world11—during the exile of
French literature during the Occupation of Algiers, he is pierced by
spears that enflame him; he is suffering a passion. And he tries, and in
fact dreams of nothing else as the courtly lover does, to enflame the
adored mistress, to make her burn, and to leave a trace, jealous and
vengeful, in her body. Leaving a trace in the other’s body should not
happen by breaking the rules and the laws of the body of language by
harming her, nor by making language impure through accents in a corps
à corps, but through an erotic surprise that displaces language in her
innermost recess. It makes her come to herself in a totally new way, sie
ver-rücken as the Germans would say. This caress should drive her
crazy and make her go mad so that she does not get over it: “qu’elle
11 See JACQUES DERRIDA, PASSIONS (1993); Jonathan Culler, Derrida and the Singularity of
Literature, 27 CARDOZO L. REV. 869 (2005).
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n’en revienne pas” as Derrida writes.12
The relation to language is thus dreamed of as an erotic encounter,
a tête à tête, where only the lover understands the secret rules. Only to
her lover, conditionally surrendering, does she confide her innermost
secrets and laws: “une loi de la langue qui ne se confierait qu’à moi.”13
It is because of this knowledge that he can dream of making her come
into herself differently—to make something incredible happen to her:
“de lui faire arriver quelque chose.”14 It is a dream of a desiring trace, a
trace of desire, of jelousy and revenge, left in the innermost recess of
the body of rules and laws that informs Le monolinguisme de l’autre:
“faire venir autrement, autrement dit, à soi en soi.”15 It is the mark of
this event that she will keep in her body
gardant en son corps, elle, l’archive ineffaçable de cet événement:
non pas un enfant, nécessairement, mais un tatouage, une forme
splendide, cachée sous le vêtement, où le sang se mêle à l’encre pour
en faire voir de toutes les couleurs. L’archive incarnée d’une
liturgie dont personne ne trahirait le secret. Que personne d’autre
en vérité ne pourrait s’approprier. Pas même moi qui serais
pourtant dans le secret.16
In this strange economy—rather of an-economy—the addition of
lack “giving to language what she doesn’t have, but what the lover does
not have either”17 will make a difference, not a satisfactory one, sans
doute, but a desirable one. Greffer, griffer this body, even with
borrowed nails, leaving a trace—a wound of love and thereby letting
her come into herself differently was Derrida’s dream.
The hostility, the bashing, and the envy with which he met was, I
suggest, less due to his fame, his dandyesque suits, or his good looks—
all of which he had—but rather to his strength to speak from a position
that used to be called the difference of the feminine—not to be confused
with “writing like a woman,” another form of identity politics. He
spoke, or wrote, not as a self-possessed, self-determined, and selfcentered man, but from the atopos of the passionate, the lacking self,
displaced by desire, ent-setzt, ausgesetzt, out of himself: in writing.
12
13
14
15
16
DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME, supra note 1, at 80.
Id. at 79.
Id. at 85.
Id. at 84.
Id. at 85-86.
Keeping in her body this ineffaceable archive of this event: not necessarily an infant
but a tattoo, a splendid form, concealed under garments in which blood mixes with ink
to reveal all its color to the sight. The incarnate archive of a liturgy whose secret no
one will betray. One that no other person could really appropriate. Not even I, who
would, however, be in on the secret.
DERRIDA, MONOLINGUALISM ENGLISH TRANSLATION, supra note 1, at 51-52.
17 See DERRIDA, LE MONOLINGUISME, supra note 1, at 124 (“pour lui donner ce qu’elle n’a
pas et qu’il n’a pas lui-même”).