Jacques Derrida Circumfession

"Circumfession . It’s actually called Jacques Derrida/Circumfession . The bit called Jacques Derrida is written by Geoffrey Bennington, who was one of his main English translators. The bit called Circumfession is written by Derrida and, again, this is performing deconstruction. In a sense, the top half of the book is Bennington talking about Derrida and going through his theories. The bottom half of the book is a series of footnotes, which is Derrida telling his life story, but a very partial life story, a life story based very closely on St Augustine’s Confessions . To deal with the Derrida part first. For him, confession was a very interesting thing. Obviously, he wrote a lot about Rousseau and Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions . In addition, he was very intrigued by St. Augustine’s Confessions , particularly chapter 10 where Augustine says, ‘Why do we confess when we’re confessing to God, who is the one entity who actually knows everything we’ve done?’ So confession actually isn’t about explaining to God. Confession is something else, about self-justification, about talking, about speaking, about thinking, about writing. Derrida is performing this down at the bottom of the text on the page, and he sticks fairly closely to St. Augustine’s methods and structure. Most of the chapters start with a little quote from Augustine . It’s also very close because Augustine wrote about the death of his mother. That is one of the main things in the Confessions , the death of Augustine’s mother. Rebecca West thought it the most moving moment in all of literature. Derrida is also writing about his own mother dying. So he’s drawing these parallels all the time, but also exploring the nature of what confession is, of what secrets are, and what sins are. He’s doing that down at the bottom of the text and, I think, writing very beautifully. There are people to whom Derrida is anathema. They just think his writing is nonsense—and some Derrida is. But I think sometimes Derrida writes incredibly movingly, especially about himself, and about guilt, and about secrets and mourning and those sort of things. So he stayed on the bottom of the page, while above him Beddington is basically going through the theories of deconstruction. In that sense, it’s a dialogue as well. “All of these writers are trying to get away from the idea that you can just declare things” One of the challenges that Derrida set Bennington was that Bennington wasn’t allowed to quote Derrida when he’s describing deconstruction. Bennington’s having to come up with his own words. In a way that’s sealing off the idea of Derrida being in the top half of the book, Derrida’s own words don’t have access to the upper half. There’s this beautiful dialogue that happens between them. It’s one of those books where it’s annoying when you first open it, because you don’t know if you should be reading the top or if you should be reading the bottom, or one then the other, or what’s going on. But, again, it requires that reading where you open yourself up to moving between the two, and more and more meanings come out of that. It’s performing deconstruction as much as saying what deconstruction is. It was written in 1993. Yes. One interesting thing: early on, Derrida would not allow himself to be photographed, because he didn’t want Jacques Derrida, the man, to get in the way of the philosophy. He also—I think, quite rightly—hated author photos. That fits with his philosophy. He, as author, shouldn’t have any greater say over the text than anyone else, so the author doesn’t matter all that much: although eventually that position, not being photographed, was unsustainable. But early on, he also eschewed autobiographical writing generally. But gradually, as his thinking evolved, more and more he came to see all philosophy as a sort of confession of the philosopher, that you’re this certain person who has written a book. This particular person has written Hegel’s works, this particular person has written Heidegger’s works, and you can’t pull the person away from that, you have to analyse that. His writing became a lot more autobiographical. Quite movingly, the end of the book consists of lots of photographs of Derrida throughout his life, which in some ways is a sort of arrogance or showing off. But I think he thought of it as performing arrogance. He was performing this idea of, ‘here is me, here is this thing now’ having, throughout the book, had this very self-deprecating, in many ways quite sad version of himself. Yes, absolutely. And I think they are obviously in dialogue with each other about this. I’m glad you brought up Camera Lucida . That kind of sadness, and that sense of mourning that is in that book, I think, is very much in Circumfession . Derrida later had a collection called Work of Mourning , which was a collection of writings about, and even funeral eulogies of, his contemporaries who had died. It is a book about the idea of mourning – that any friendship has mourning built into it, in the sense that, at some point, you will lose each other. One of you will die, or the friendship will be broken off. Of course, in this particular book, as with Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the mourning is for the parent. Derrida says something like, ‘this woman who’d never read a word that I’ve written is going and therefore, he, Derrida, is becoming a different person through that process.’ These philosophers wanted to bring the feeling self into that. A lot of them, of course, grew up during World War Two and in the aftermath of World War Two, after that calamity. You can’t shrug that off from any of these writers—whether France was implicated in the calamity or had resisted it. All those things were built into their way of looking at the world."