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Jacqueline Rose: Well aren’t you lucky to have got in! Welcome to this event and, before they have even said a word, let me thank Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida for joining us this evening at this remarkable occasion which gives me enormous pleasure to be chairing.
First, what many of you will know already, but which is nonetheless important to re-iterate here, Jacques Derrida can I think be fairly called, and has been called many times, the greatest living philosopher. When Geoff Bennington once opened a session with those words he added, “Of course, there are a lot of other things he has been called as well!” Derrida is the creator of a whole way of thinking, deconstruction, which it would be a grave error to describe as system or school of thought because it has seized schools and systems by their very nerve endings, leaving nothing as it was before. Hélène Cixous, not just one of the defining intellectual women for a whole generation of feminist thought – I owe her a personal debt that I am delighted to be able to acknowledge here – but also someone who, in her writing of fiction and drama, her theatrical work, has demonstrated, or perhaps I should say enacted, the porousness of the boundary between thought and creativity in an utterly unique and significant way. They both break barriers, they both oblige us to think about where our own most inhibiting mental boundaries lie.
We are here today to talk about Jewishness. Some of you will have seen in the book fair, and I hope bought, the beautiful book by Cixous, just translated, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint which, sadly in translation, does not carry the ambiguity in the French of ‘Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a young Jewish monkey’, which I wanted to share with you in case you thought we were getting too reverent before we’ve even begun. We are nonetheless talking of a longstanding, passionate friendship and dialogue. “If there had not been Derrida I would have thought I was crazy,” Cixous has said of herself, as a young woman in France. A dialogue in which Jewishness has been key. If Cixous has painted Derrida as “young Jewish saint”, he comes close to returning the compliment in his own essay, Hélène Cixous for Life, that is to say [H.C., pour la vie, c’est à dire], that even more I think in relation to Jewishness when after a lengthy discussion of the key Jewish diaspora thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, he ends with Cixous as the writer who, in her poetics of language, in a miraculously unique way, weaves together all strands of the Jewish heritage, quote: “regenerating them towards an open, endless future”, not quite a saint, but I think to be handed the palm over those brilliant German Jewish thinkers, might be seen as going one better.
But they are not typical Jews, if there is any such thing. Both of our guests are, quote, French, writers, Jews from Algeria. Both, again to use Hélène’s expression, ‘étrange juif’, untranslatable – it won’t be the last time this evening – but which I think means something like ‘stranger Jew’, ‘foreign, alien Jew’, ‘estranged Jew’, even ‘strange Jew’, although, as she has also put it, “We too are differently foreigners; we are strangers in a different way.” They have both experienced exile. Hélène left Algeria in 1955; her mother followed her, expelled from the newly independent nation in 1962. Derrida left in 1955, returned and served in the Algerian Army as a teacher during the Franco-Algeria war, his whole family leaving the country definitively, like that of Hélène, in 1962. Before that, Derrida had been expelled from school as a Jew in 1942, measures which, he has said, “exceeded those of Vichy France”. Hélène faring better, or perhaps worse, was for many, many years under the rigidly applied quota system, the only Jewish girl in her class. They were, as she puts it, in some senses “the Arabs”. But if Jewishness is for both of them decisive, formative, originary, even, nonetheless in their writing it is also something that slips through. In France, Hélène has written, “What fell for me first was the obligation of Jewish identity.” In Derrida’s Algeria, “Jewishness,” he has said, “was an asphyxiated culture, offering no cultural heritage or resting point.” Nonetheless, or perhaps for that very reason, he has described himself as, “the last of the Jews”, an expression which I think has come back to haunt him many times. “I often,” he has said in a recent interview alongside Hélène, “presented myself as a Marrano, one of those forcibly converted Jews of Spain and Portugal, who cultivated their Judaism secretly, sometimes to the point of no longer knowing in what it consisted.”
Jewishness, then, central, our question this evening is how? What is Jewishness for these two key thinkers and writers of our time? What do they have to tell us about the relationship between Jewishness and identity, writing, memory, justice in the world today? That’s just for starters.
Before I turn to our guests, let me just recall a moment at the beginning of Derrida’s address to a conference organised a few years ago, in his honour, precisely around judéités, or Jewishnesses, when he said he had never felt so intimidated and anxious at the prospect of a conference on this topic. My task is therefore to put you at ease in a frankly impossible domain, and for this I apologise before we even begin.
Derrida and Cixous are going to start by reading a short passage from their writing on each other, then I will be asking them questions and I will aim to leave at least twenty minutes for questions from the floor. When I spoke to Hélène this week she said we would need all night. We have until 10.30! Then Hélène and Jacques will be very happy to sign books for those who would like to have books signed at the end of the session. Please join me in welcoming Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous this evening.
Jacques Derrida: First, I apologise for my poor English. I will be suffering and you will be suffering too from this poor English. But I want to warn you at the beginning. First of all I would like, in the name of Hélène and in my own name, to thank all of you for being here and to thank Anne Webber and Pam [Lewis] for their invitation, to thank the organisers of the Jewish Book Fair, we are very honoured and happy to be here, and I would like to thank Jacqueline Rose for her generous introduction.
The contract between Anne Webber and us was that we would just improvise the discussion between us, between you and us, and start with a short reading of a text by Hélène on me, by me on Hélène, just as a forward to the discussion. Then we will try and answer your questions. Who should start? I’m not the moderator here!
Hélène Cixous: I’ll start. We always have this quarrel, you know, who starts! It’s the first time I make as if I were starting.
[Reads passage from Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint:
“Was I Jewish?” he would have wondered all his life….
… Right away, the first time on the mountain, I realised I had to take him at his word, to the letter, to the summit, literally, to the comma as well, without which the sparks wouldn’t fly, nor the water gush from his text, meticulously, being attentive to the point of finickiness, to the point as well.]
Jacques Derrida: I’m afraid that tonight will be about translation and untranslatability. Hélène just told you that if I am fully effective it’s only in French. I’m not sure I’m ever fully effective, but if I were effective it would only be in French. Now, I said somewhere that “I have just one language and it’s not mine.” But at least I have one language, which is French. What should I say with the English? Now, Hélène is fortunate enough to have her book on me already translated into English. I wrote two books on her which are not translated into English, not yet. But at least there is one short text which I wrote for her, on her, and which was wonderfully translated by Eric Prenowitz, who is probably here.
I must tell you something before reading a short passage from this text. I must tell you that its own title is untranslatable. It has been translated as well as possible. But it’s the word fourmis. Fourmi is an ant in English and of course in the lecture I gave that day I played with more than one language: ‘fourmis’, ‘for me’, and so on. My point would be that the most untranslatable texts are texts written in more than one language. When you have two languages involved in the same word, it is impossible to state it in a single language. That’s the maximum of untranslatability and it so happens with Fourmis, the title of this text. One day Hélène called me on the phone and told me that she had a dream in which the word fourmis occurred and that’s what I’m dealing with in this text. I’ll read just a short passage.
[Reads passage from Fourmis]:
… Very quickly, and as deferred echo to what Hélène said a moment ago, I shall venture in parenthesis a sort of naïve secret, a confidence…
… one day we discussed the book by Michelet called The Insect.]
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you both very much for that. I think we have already had a performance – or is it? – of sexual difference, and a performance – or is it? – of Jewishness. I want to bring these questions now to the heart of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’s writing. We also had, of course, a performance of writing. I said to them earlier this evening that I thought, in this extraordinary lyrical evocation of each other through the problematic of writing and identity, they had, in a sense, created a new genre. I think that’s what we have just listened to this evening.
I want to pick up this question of sexual difference in relationship to Jewishness but in some perhaps slightly different ways. First a question to Hélène. You have a unique Jewish identity: you combine a sephardic father, whose family came from North Africa, and I believe spoke Arabic, and an ashkenaze, German mother. I’d like you to talk about that difference. But I’m also going to put a second question to you, so you can think about which or either you wish to respond to. I also feel that Jewishness is in some sense hidden in your writing, more so perhaps than in that of Derrida, but that there is the profoundest link between your sense of the poetic nature of all language, language as something always in flight, which we have just witnessed and experienced here today, resistant to meaning in its most obvious sense, and Jewishness. Am I right and if so how? So I wonder if you could address these two areas.
You have all night!
Hélène Cixous: So a short night! As regards my origins, after all they are … it’s very simple. At the closing of those two main trends of Jewishness, which you all know about, that is the sephardic and the ashkenaze, but what is interesting is that when my mother met my father and they were both away from their native countries, my mother was away from Germany and my father was away from Algeria, and they happened to meet in Paris. My mother had never heard about the existence of sephardic Jews and then my grandmother, who was living in Germany, thought that my mother was actually going to marry an African “thing” or “animal” and maybe also with a tail or something, so she was extremely worried about the situation. It was only on coming to Algeria that my mother realised that there existed other Jews than the Jews she knew. But she already knew a number of different genres of Jews. For instance, in her family, that was pure German, they had, of course, a kind of little remoteness regarding Polish Jews, those who came and knocked at the door of the elders and were always asking for help. But I must say in honour of my mother and grandmother, although they were steeped and … [break in recording] … They belonged to a very old German family and eventually landed in Algeria where racism was really ruling. I mean, racism was the master of Algeria; racisms I should say, because there was one racism against the other or fighting to be the hyper-racism compared to the other racisms. So this actually really fashioned my mind and my soul. At the same time, those intra-racisms and extra-racisms, plus of course my personal treasure which is one of languages, because in my house indeed we heard, if we didn’t speak at least we heard being spoken, a number of languages. My father could speak Arabic, he was an excellent francophone and he also spoke Spanish and his family was of Spanish origin. My mother started immediately to learn Spanish and other languages, and also body language, which is most important. For instance, my father at table would hear my mother and grandmother speak and exchange in German and my grandmother would say, “Ich weiβ nicht”, so my father said, “Schweiβ? I’ve heard that. That’s perspiration.” So he thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” That was already Derridian. So, when he didn’t know something he would say, “in a ‘monkey-way’”, so actually I learnt all languages, including ‘monkey-language’ when I was three or four. Thanks to that typically, after all, Jewish epinuary. So that’s part of the question.
The second half of the question … you know, I don’t think that the Jewish theme is really hidden or not emphasised, or not to be noticed in my work, particularly in the most recent pieces of fiction which I have written for about past ten years and which are actually a fictionalising attempt to keep alive the story of my family. It’s … there are really many Jewish aspects that are quite explicit and obvious. But then maybe of course the question, and it’s a question, I think that now and then Jacques and I approach an impossible question which is: is there anything Jewish in … can we call something Jewish in our way of elaborating a certain type of thinking? I’m not … I don’t speak of course about references, I mean when he speaks about the cherem it’s obviously Jewish. No, in a certain manner of expressing something, in the untranslatability, has that got something to do with Jewishness? And how … the fact, for instance, is the undecidable, it’s a big question, is it, could it be somehow, Jewish? And what kind of somehow-ness? And then also, I, for instance, am a player on words and I was much before I wrote my thesis on Joyce. I inherited that actually from my family, but sometimes I wonder whether it wasn’t also a kind of phantasmatic influence of what I figured, not that I knew, but what I imagined or figured was happening in the Talmud or in the study of the Torah and the polysemantism of Hebrew, but not only that, a way of really suspending and intricating everything. I don’t know, it’s just suppositions. And maybe I could even go as far as asking myself about the influence of the bible in what I do, not thematically because thematically it’s everywhere, but the structure of the bible, both theatrically and in its … you were speaking about God and his specific or special jealousy, not only that, but the doubt that pervades everything, the instability, something that I think is to be found in what I write and in what Jacques writes. But it’s not direct, it’s not direct, it’s something in the air.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you very much. Well it couldn’t be direct without destroying what it is you’re saying about it, so that’s perfect. Thank you very much.
Jacques, I think Jewishness goes right back to the beginning in your writing. I’m thinking of ‘Jabès’ [in l’Écriture et la differance], 1967 I think this is, and it’s been a consistent theme throughout through Jabès and then Schibboleth – pour Paul Celan and your work on Yerushalmi, your work on Freud. One could say that it’s a theme throughout your writing but, I think I’d be right – but you’ll tell me – that recently, over the last ten years, there has been a clamour of a more personal engagement with these questions, which would start perhaps with Circonfession and Monolinguisme, Monolingualism of the Other and ‘The Circum as Cision’, which, in one passage, you say, in a sense this memory you’ve been writing as nothing else. Hélène describes it as your “primal scene”. And I think Geoff Bennington says somewhere that this “mal d’appartenir”, this ill-of-belonging in your Jewishness, could be seen as the affected thought of deconstruction, that is to say, following on from what Hélène has just said, that there is some very intimate relationship between the heart of your philosophical writing and this strange belonging and not belonging to Jewishness and the intense personal engagement with that. So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about that.
Jacques Derrida: Thank you. A very difficult question and a long, a long story. I will start with the dates and the references that you gave. When I wrote on ‘Jabès’, a long time ago, it was, … of course I insisted on the Jewish themes in ‘Jabès’, but because it was on the level of the imaginary in order that a book of questions is made of quotations of imaginary rabbis, so was a way of putting Jewishness on the side of the poetry, imagination, non-effective belonging literature. There are a number of signs in this text which put Jewishness at a distance. I have nothing against Jewishness, but I do not belong in a certain way.
Now, the following texts on Levinas, and much later on Celan, and much later on Yerushalmi are texts which, let’s say, discuss some Jewish dogmatism, or if not dogmatism then at least Jewishness as such. It is true in the case of Levinas, and I’m a great admirer of Levinas, but my first text on Levinas was questioning the authority of Judaism on his thought. And Celan is a very special Jew. Yerushalmi, well, it was an admiring criticism of Yerushalmi. So my philosophical or theoretical texts on Jewish authors were never “Jewish”, although of course I played with this ambiguous relationship.
Now, on the other hand, the long story I mentioned a moment ago, has to do with the fact that, when I was in Algeria until 1949, I left Algeria for the first time when I was nineteen years old, at the time in Algeria I was obsessed and wounded by antisemitism, racism, and so on and so forth. And as soon as I came to France, in 1949, I just forgot it. I had the feeling, the wrong feeling, that antisemitism had been left behind, and at least in the French intellectual milieu, no one would pay attention to me as a Jew. So I forgot it, so to speak, on a certain level. And in the Academy, my first books were very, let’s say, philosophical, in the academic sense, theoretical, and had almost, almost, almost nothing autobiographical, almost nothing. There were of course some hints, some small cryptic signs, some autobiographical signs, but very little of them. It was in conformity with the academic norms. Even when I was deconstructing them, I was considered a good academic, until the time when having, let’s say, conquered some credit in the academy, I felt freer, more free, to write differently, more and more differently. And then my texts became more and more autobiographical. It started with Glas and then Post Card and then Circonfession. As long as I was becoming autobiographical, although, as you know, I don’t believe in autobiography – all my autobiographies are sceptical on the concept of autobiography, but let’s take the word in its commonsensical meaning – but the more I became autobiographical, the more I had to insist on, not my Jewishness, but my French experience of Judaism with all the complications, the anxiety, sometimes the effort not to belong. As I often retold in many texts, the paradox in my youth, when I was expelled from school, as you recalled a moment ago, when I was expelled from school in 1942 for being Jewish by the French authorities, not by the Germans – there was not a single German soldier in Algeria – it was the French anti-seminitism which in Algeria was even stronger than in France, and when I was expelled from school at the time, my parents registered me, put me in a Jewish school. Of course, all the Jewish professors were expelled from the high schools, and the university professors too, so it was easy to have a very good Jewish school with all these people who had been fired. So I was in this Jewish school and immediately I felt uneasy about belonging, about being part of this Jewish, closed and communitarian identity. I was twelve at the time, I was twelve, and at the same time I rejected, of course, the antisemitic and racist environment and I rejected in some way, in some interior and subtle way, rejected the Jewish community. I wanted not to belong to any of this community and this of course remained stable until now, I would say.
Now, when my texts became, as I told you, “autobiographical”, it was a time when I decided I should write on circumcision and I worked and worked and wrote everything on circumcision, not only Jewish circumcision but also Islamic circumcision, or excision, too. I read and I took notes and filled a number of, let’s say, manuscripts and would have been able to write a book on this but I felt that I had to do this and to make a link between what I was doing philosophically, or theoretically, what I was writing as a philosopher, and so on and so forth, and the question, the general question of circumcision, in its anthropological dimension, and my own circumcision, my irreplaceable circumcision. And so I started writing Circonfession and then Monolingualism of the Other and, as long as you grow old and well known, you come closer to your origins, to your memory, and that was simultaneous with Hélène’s movement: almost at the same time, Jewishness appeared in our texts, having been totally invisible before.
Now, of course, my Jewish problems remain, my Jewish question remains intact. I am totally unstable on this question and this could be, I think, read and deciphered in all my texts. There is an enormous Jewish question, which remains unsolved. You know, the Jewish joke, if I may tell a Jewish joke…
Jacqueline Rose: Please tell a Jewish joke…
Jacques Derrida: …Everybody knows it here. There are three people isolated on an island: a German citizen, a French citizen and a Jew, totally alone on this island. They don’t know when they will leave the island and it is boring. One of them says, “Well, we should do something. We should do something, the three of us. Why don’t we write something on the elephants?” there were a number of elephants on the island. “Everyone should write something on the elephants and then we could compare the styles and the national idioms”, and so on and so forth. So the week after, the French one came, with a short, brilliant, witty essay on the sexual drive, or sexual appetite of the elephants; very short, bright and brilliant essay, very, very superficial but very brilliant. Three months, or three years after that, the German came with a heavy book on the … let’s say a very positive scientific book on the comparison between two kinds of species, with a very scientific title, endless title for a very positive scientific book on the elephants and the ecology of the elephants on the island. And the two of them asked the Jew, “Well, when will you give us your book?” “Wait, it’s a very serious question. I need more time. I need more time”. And they came again every year asking him for his book. Finally, after ten years, he came back with a book called, “The Elephant and the Jewish Question”.
That’s my work.
Jacqueline Rose: That’s wonderful. Hélène, please…
Hélène Cixous: …Yes, I just wanted to add a footnote, an elephant footnote. Actually, I was thinking, when we started we, of course, had not decided together which piece we would read but then I started thinking that we both had a piece that had some kind of link with animals: the ant and the monkey, and now he comes with the elephant. But it’s most important, for me this is the essential question, that is: can I say, or when can I say that my monkey or my dog is Jewish? I think it’s absolutely central to our thinking. It’s my experience too. That is, in my family, animals have always been ignored, that’s the best one can say in favour of my family. And it took me about fifty years before I realised that this is a Jewish attitude, that animals are not human. But this is a question: is it really so? And who can tell me that my cat is not Jewish? You know, they share my life, we speak together, they are female cats so the problem of circumcision is not there. But it’s a huge question and it’s part of, I think, our philosophical and concrete approach to life. Coming back to – I’m not kidding you know, I’m very serious – what we were saying about autobiography, which we agree on, that is, it’s not autobiography, it’s other biography anyway, but your particular approach, is unique, there is no precedent and I don’t think you have followers because what came out after you had somehow repressed … after the period when you had put on the academic robes, and then you un-robed yourself, and what comes out are not events, facts, it’s not factual what comes out from your life but it all has to do with traces and these traces are inscribed on the body. You are the philosopher of the priest but really then after thirty years of writing comes the trace of the priest, which is circumcision. And that writing, about your body, has a force, also a trope – it’s also a metaphor – but you spoke about Glas and in Glas you speak about the Torah and as … sexually, and when it’s demonstrated, it appears as part of the body, which is legs, penis and everything you want. And this is really something which, after all, could be somehow related to this mysterious, enigmatic origin of which we know nothing, of course, except that we feel a certain number of effects.
Jacques Derrida: One word on the animal and the autobiography. Some years ago … the question of the animal has always been on my mind, from the very beginning, and if I choose the word “trace” instead of “sign” or “signifier” it’s because I wanted to break with the most powerful tradition in philosophy, and in psychoanalysis, according to which there is, between man and animal, an indivisible line. I don’t deny there are differences, but not in the form of a single line, with the animal, in general, ants or elephants, and man on the other hand, on the other side. So from the very beginning, the ‘grammatology’, the ‘trace’, had to do with the project of a new experience, a new thought of what we call “the animal”. And this is absolutely constant in my work and, one of the last decades which was organised around me in Cerisy-la-Salle was entitled, The Autobiographical Animal, in which I tried with others, of course, to connect the question of the autobiography and the question of the animality and the way, and the deconstruction, if you want, of the most powerful tradition in western thought about animality. And it’s not simply a theoretical question or a philosophical question, it’s a practical question today: the way we deal with animals, we treat animals. So I would not dissociate the question of the trace and the question of the animal from the question of autobiography.
Jacqueline Rose: I think what you’re saying is that the question of the animal is an ethical question, which I think is crucial. I want to pick up what Hélène was saying about the body, because I can see that is central to what we are talking about. When we talk about ‘étrange juif’ we are talking about the ‘corps étrange juif’, the strange Jewish body, and that is absolutely central. And I was very struck by an expression that Hélène uses somewhere in her writing, talking about the body as wounded, the expression, ‘nosblessures’, all as one word, which I will try and translated as ‘woundednus’, if you end with ‘us’. That is to say, the wound, it’s not a banner that you sport, it’s something that really strikes into the integrity, or lack of integrity, of your being. The reason why I want to raise this question of a wound that isn’t an identity, if you like, is because it is so often the case in the Jewish account of a certain history, that suffering, or ‘woundednus’, or trauma becomes the mark of an identity from which many things then follow. Now, I know when you talk about the wounded body, as in circumcision, and you’re talking about the body now, that’s not what you mean, right? And, if I can just add to that, I think the same thing happens in your relationship to time. So, Hélène talks about the ambiguity of the German word ‘jahre’, which can mean both time lost and time possessed; that is to say, something tragic and irretrievably gone, or something that you accumulate for yourself. And I remember one moment that I think is connected in your engagement with Yerushalmi, where he says “Only the Jewish people are given the specific injunction to remember, as a religious injunction to hold people.” And I think you say such remarks make you tremble, or shudder. So I see in both your cases, an attempt to call up a body, in relationship to Jewishness and ‘woundednus’, but isn’t the one we’re most familiar with, not the one most often cited as a mark of Jewish identity, it’s not that one: it’s different. So I’d love you both to talk about ‘woundednus’ and Jewishness in your thinking.
Jacques Derrida: First of all there is, and we of course improvise so I will be over-simplistic, no doubt, as we have to go quickly, but to go quickly I would say the ambiguity in my text on circumcision, the equivocality in this text, has to do with the fact that, on the one hand, I insist on the singularity, the irrepressibility of the wound, circumcision, my own circumcision, which is irreplaceable, it’s a wound which structures myself as an absolute singularity. But, on the other hand, I suggest that there are analogies between the Jewish circumcision and every kind of wound which constitutes a community. At the origin of any identity, or cultural identity or nationality, there is something like a circumcision, there is a mark on the body, an ineffaceable mark on the body and this wound is universal. So I postulate between the two and I want to say both things at the same time. On the one hand it is absolutely irreplaceable and on the other hand there are circumcisions everywhere, even outside the Jewish or Islamic communities. That’s the ambiguity of the mark on the body.
Now, in my discussion of Yerushalmi, on the one hand what made me tremble was this statement of, let’s say, statement, statement signed by the elected people. Jews distinguish between Jewishness and Judaism. For the Jewishness, if not the Judaism, there is an injunction to remember and an opening to the future, a hope for the future. And this is specific to Judaism. And what made me tremble was the idea of the elected people, with all its possible political consequences. But also, as a Jew, I thought that I would be, it would be more Jewish, that’s my hyperbolic belonging to Judaism, that when I fight against some forms of Judaism or some self-, self-identification or self-centred Judaism, I would have the vague feeling or the vague claim that I am more Jewish than themselves. That it is more Jewish to be critical of the notion of ‘elected people’, the confident feeling of being the ‘elected people’, with all the political consequences that you know, it is more Jewish, more of a Jew to be suspicious about that than the Jews themselves. That’s why I say I’m the last of the Jews, I don’t know how to say it in English, “Je suis le dernier des juifs”. That is the worst, the lowest kind, and perhaps the last one. So, there is this strange feeling that I am less and more Jewish than a lot of others.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you. Hélène.
Hélène Cixous: Well, that’s why I say, “Je ne suis pas juif.” “Je ne suis pas juif.” I am not Jewish.
Jacques Derrida: Il faut expliquer ce que ça veut dire en français.
Hélène Cixous: C’est ce que je viens de dire.
Jacques Derrida: Oui, oui, je sais.
Hélène Cixous: It’s our problem, as women. What do we do with circumcision? Do we mourn for circumcision? Do we miss circumcision? Or is it a metaphor? And, as Jacques said, it’s universal? We could replace, of course, circumcision by any other kind, as you said, of other type of marking of the body. But then, of course, there’s something particularly interesting in circumcision, which is the ring form, in every way, and the alliance. For those who are poetically inclined, it’s not replaceable by a linear wound, for instance; it would be quite different. But, to come back to my own experience, because I belong to a circumcised male family, I feel that my personal experience, as an individual, of an equivalent of circumcision was actually the death of my father; that is, I felt as if I had been circumcised of my father, because that happened when I was young, I mean I was ten. And I was severed, I mean, something happened in my flesh, in the world and in my flesh with the sudden disappearance of my father and what happened was that he was immediately transformed into a ghost who keeps coming back to me, today, tonight, regularly, which, of course, is what also happened with you, that is, circumcision has become an asset in everything you think, in your philosophy, not as something vulgar but, of course, as the sublime, philosophical consequence of this single act. And I do realise that I lost my father and immediately re-appropriated myself of him in the form of the spirit, or a god, or an inspirer, or a ghost, and I think that this is what we share. That is how we can communicate and, whether we are properly Jewish or not, and whatever, really I think the most formative experience in life is loss. So, if it’s the loss of a dear one, it can also be the loss of a limb, I can imagine that it could be at the loss of a limb, but loss is really the beginning, which is something we’re not used to thinking. It’s the opening, it’s the door, it opens, and it opens not on death but on life, and it’s really, it’s as if it were the first pun or the first way to make a word, ‘loss’, echo with others, for instance ‘love’. It’s the beginning of love, it’s the first word of love. So loss is, again, amorphous if you say that and what makes circumcision so striking is that it has a shape, it’s a work of art, really. But, then I think that we share the experience somehow and if circumcision has such a power on fates, on nations, it’s also because it has a legend, because it’s been written by literature in the bible and the legend is so beautiful, so cruel and beautiful. But it starts with that, with written circumcision.
Jacqueline Rose: One more question and then I’ll open it to the floor.
I am very interested in what Hélène has just said about fate and nations. I think we can’t meet here this evening and discuss Jewishness without talking about the Jewish nation. Jacques, when you visited Israel for the third time in 1988, you visited the Palestinians, I know, in the occupied territories, and recently, you, Hélène, have been involved in circulating a petition in support of the refuseniks of the Israeli Army. Justice has been central to both of your writing. And there’s one moment I particularly love in your work, Hélène, where you say that one of your favourite parables is of the wolf who loves the lamb, or the assassin that does not kill. Moshe Dayan famously said that “I’m very happy for the wolf to lie down with the lamb, provided I’m the wolf.”
I would love to hear you talk about Israel, how you see that in relationship to the question of Jewish identity today.
Jacques Derrida: A small question!
Jacqueline Rose: A very small question before I open it up to the floor.
Jacques Derrida: To come back just for a moment to the discussion with Yerushalmi, what made me tremble had to do not only with his self-confidence in the Jewish people having been the only one who listens to the injunction, to remember or to hope for the future, because this would amount to denying all the other nations, all the other cultures, the injunction of memory and the hope for the future. I think it’s simply wrong. It’s simply naïve. In every nation, every culture, every religion you have this duty to remember, that’s constitutive of the culture, and the hope for the future. So why isn’t it violent to deny other cultures this injunction to remember and this hope for the future? So that’s what, in the name of justice, justice to other people, to other nations, whether to be just with them.
Now, to come back to Jerusalem. On the one hand, of course, I went several times to Jerusalem, invited by my Israeli friends and just to manifest some love, some solidarity, and so on and so forth, for Israel which did not prevent me from asking terrible questions about the foundation of the state, the ways, the responsibilities, which were shared not only by the Israelis, the Zionist movement, but shared by England, the States, Russia, and so on. So, I can, and I want to, on the one hand, love Israel, love Jerusalem, fight for the security and the image and the honour of Israel, and keep asking questions about the complexity of the foundation of the state; all the states have been founded violently, that’s a structural law. There is no state which hasn’t been founded legally because there was no law before the foundation so every foundation of a nation state is violent and illegal, a-legal. And this is the case of Israel, not to speak of the expulsion of the Palestinians with all the responsibilities involved. Again, the Jewish ones, the Arabic ones, around Israel, the western ones: English, French, American and so forth.
So, when I went for the third or fourth time to Jerusalem for a seminar with Israeli colleagues and American colleagues, I put as a condition of my participation, that some Palestinians should be invited. My Israeli friends were first, not shocked, but surprised, and did their best to have at least one Palestinian at the conference. It was not only their fault because the Palestinians wouldn’t come. And then I gave a lecture, and in the footnote of the lecture, which had been circulated before the discussion, I said very clearly, now published, my opposition to the occupation of the territories, that was in the early 1990s. And suddenly, at the table – we were about twenty colleagues around the table – suddenly, all my Jewish friends and colleagues got angry at me, the object of the discussion was totally lost and just my footnote was the focus of the discussion. They took from their bags all the most terrible texts by Arafat and others, and I was totally isolated in this...
Jacqueline Rose: When was this, Jacques? What date was this? When was this?
Jacques Derrida: Early 1990s. I don’t remember, 1991? Perhaps earlier than that, I don’t remember. It’s published now.
And my reply, what I want to insist on is the way I replied to their angry aggression against me, their unanimous aggression, and this reply is my, let’s say, position on Israel. I said first that, of course, I was maintaining my argument, my opposition to the politics of the occupied territories. On the other hand, as I was saying this in the name of the interest and the honour of Israel, and the security of Israel, because when I am critical of the government, at the government, at the political agenda of the Israeli government, it’s not because I’m against Israel, it’s because it is a suicidal behaviour. Because it’s unjust, first of all, unfair with the Palestinians, first of all, and then it is suicidal. It is what I call ‘auto-immunity’, self-immunity, when a body destroys its own protections. And in the long-hand, I think that is the main argument I would have with the politics of almost all the governments of Israel, except Rabin’s. When I was given, a few months ago, an honorary degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I ended my speech, in which I said things like the words I have just said, I dedicated my doctorate to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin.
Now, one of the most wounding attacks or threats in the current situation, I think not only in France, is that as soon as you ask a question or critique the government of Israel, the policy of Israel, or the interpretation of Zionism, because there is not only one Zionism… there has been a number of Zionisms and one of them has prevailed. There were Zionists who were ready to have another politics with Palestinians, and so on and so forth. So I’m not anti-Zionist; I’m against this kind of Zionism which prevails in the violent way that we know. And one of the most wounding facts today, not only in France, I would say, is that as soon as you ask a question, or a critical question about Israel, you are suspected of being anti-semitic or judeophobic, as we say now in France. And I think it’s the most terrible trap, the most terrible threat and we have to be courageous to avoid following in this scheme. I claim, I want to have the right to be lucid or critical about the politics of the Israeli government, with another position, which I share with a number of Israeli, courageous Israeli people, perhaps the most numerous, if not the most vociferous. So I want to keep the right to be critical of the politics without being charged of anti-semitism.
Jacqueline Rose: Hélène will respond to the question and then I will open it to the floor for ten or fifteen minutes.
Hélène Cixous: Of course, I can say that Jacques has spoken for me too, and for you too. We recognise ourselves in what he said. I’ll just illustrate what he said by referring to my favourite character, that’s my mother. When, after the war, my father, who was an atheist – he was Jewish but he was an atheist and a socialist – and he had been so humiliated and offended by Vichy that he felt like emigrating to Palestine, because that was before Israel, but he died in 1948, and he died so he couldn’t achieve his dream. And my mother, who is a very plain-speaking person and a transparent person, said “Thank God”, because she would never have wanted to go to Israel, to Palestine, then Israel. She had been a witness to Zionism in Germany and she would tell me, in very vivid tales and images, how suddenly it had flared up in German society and how she had resisted immediately, Zionism, feeling that the fate, the future was European. As a young girl, she already thought like that. So, that’s just to situate my mother. But then, she is typically Jewish in the way I’m going to explain now. As so many people who have been hurt, and who don’t even know the depth of the hurt or the want, by antisemitism, my mother will almost compulsively idealise what is Jewish but only regarding ‘les autres’, particularly the Goyes. So then everything that is Jewish is good, even the criminal is good, because you must not say it, you know, if a Jew is a criminal, you must not say it. That is the sentence I hear all the time, “You must not say it.” So when I start, that’s where I join Jacques, when I start criticising the politics of Israel for the very same reasons, she immediately calls me an antisemite, she says, “You are an anti-semite.” So I tell her, “But you are an antisemite because you are actually favouring what is immoral or unjustified in order to keep the image safe”, which is something that we have to do. We have to face that all the time, I mean, all our lives, I think almost daily in our families, we have that problem of having to keep the image, of course, totally falsified and simulating goodness. And then I understand, of course, I can understand that. Particularly with, for instance, the memory in my family, on my mother’s side, where half of the family has died in concentration camps and my mother never comes back on those events. But it’s true that the threat, the big threat, is irreversible somehow and it explains, it does not justify, it explains psychologically the mechanism that makes so many Jewish people react in a way which is irrational. That is, as you said, they don’t react on, we don’t react on an objective situation where it would be necessary to take this stand in order to make sure that the issue will be positive for those we love. No, we react phantasmatically and it’s terrible because this is something that is very difficult to undo.
We do have to work, not only on the political situation, not only on the rights of two peoples, but on so many traces, so many ghosts. And it’s true that this people of ours has thousands of years of all kinds of strange recollections that are coming to the surface all the time and trouble what we should keep absolutely pure of that, that is principles, principles, not anecdotes, not this situation, not that discourse of Arafat, or this attitude of France, no. One principle, which is very clear, and which would indeed ensure the survival of Israel. But this is a tragic situation. I don’t see something in the near future that is reassuring. I think that we have to fight individually, collectively and individually, all the time to protect the principle.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you very much.
I’m glad they let me ask my last question because those were such wonderful responses. Please, we have some time for questions. I’ll take three straightaway: here, and then this gentleman here, and then there’s somebody right over at the back there …
Could we have a light on in the hall now so everybody can see and be seen. Is that possible?
Questioner 1: Hello. I have a question which might be a little impertinent or impolite, I’m not sure. I think it might be the question of a ‘young imbecile’, a phrase I use because I’m recalling a questioner who questioned Jacques at a conference at the UCLA, and accused him of not doing enough to save the Jews, which is spoken about in Circonfession. And Jacques subsequently thought, “Well he asked me that because he didn’t know I was Jewish, in which case I haven’t publicly declared my Jewishness enough, in which case he may be right. The other is always right, I haven’t done enough to save the Jews because I haven’t been publicly Jewish enough.” My question is really this question about the desire of this other, various others, who choose your identity for you, who say, referring back to what Hélène said earlier, is what we’re doing Jewish? Is it Jewish? This is a question you are constantly asking yourselves. And there are various people out there saying, “Yes, it is, it is, it is.” I want to ask, in both your cases, and also in my own case, whether you ultimately desire that what you are doing be Jewish or will have been Jewish. That’s my question.
Jacques Derrida: Since it’s a very difficult question, my answer will be very brief and I will insist on the grammar of your question. Do you desire that your work “will have been” Jewish? And that, of course, is an important point. I cannot answer the question, “Is my work Jewish?” because only the future, the future of the world, of politics, of Judaism, of the interpretation of what Judaism has been, it’s not finished, it’s not … this history hasn’t come to an end. We don’t know what Judaism will have been, or what Christianity will have been. It is even more difficult for Christianity than for Judaism. Only the future will decide what Jewishness is, that was one of the points of my discussions with Yerushalmi. Who can say, “This is Jewish”? And I deny the right to say this to a number of people, sometimes to Jewish experts, Jewish rabbis, Jewish theologians or Jewish politicians. I’m not sure that the definition of Jewishness is in the hands of the Israelis, for instance. Why does Israel represent Jewishness in the world more than the diaspora? Hum? These are questions. I’m not, I don’t say this against Israel, of course, and I know why Israel was born and what the Shoah was. I don’t want to insult this memory. Nevertheless, who has the right, who is entitled to define what Jewishness is? What the Jewish faith is? I don’t know. The future will tell and that, I would say modestly, is true of my work. I don’t know if it’s … my feeling is that it is more and less Jewish than any others. But what does that mean, more and less Jewish? But that’s my feeling, that’s my feeling. I was angry, just one more word, I was angry at the beginning when a number of especially American academics, not only American academics, wanted to put me in the case of Jewish philosophers – there was a book, I don’t remember the name of the book, which was totally organised to demonstrate that I couldn’t do what I’m doing if I were not Jewish. That the way I write, the way I decipher a text, and so on and so forth, is Jewish through and through, as if, again, as if deciphering a text or interpreting a text in a sophisticated way was exclusively Jewish. I don’t think so. I don’t … So, I resisted the drive, the move by a number of people to put me in a Jewish drawer. Nevertheless, at the same time, I wanted to be more Jewish than they thought I was, you see.
Hélène Cixous: I’ll pick up on the word ‘desire’ because I’m not sure this is the word I would keep since how can desire or not desire? How can you un-desire something which is born with you? I mean, I was born inside, I was born inside the enigma. I, of course, and particularly as a woman, I have always had problems in identifying with a definition. I was defined, I must admit, negatively, partly negatively, when I was a child, in the Sartrian way which I think is absolutely disgusting, by the anti-Jewishness around me and, positively, by the poetry that emanated from my grandmother, who was real Jewish, who believed not in God and not in religion, but only in faithfulness, in fidelity. So, desire, I don’t think that I’ll ever … I mean, this will never happen that I should ultimately desire something that has started before. The problem is, of course, again, that question of the limits, the definition, the extension of something which is not a concept, which is totally, and which is partial, that is, as Jacques has, of course, immediately made clear, Jewishness cannot sum up anyone on earth. I, you know, when I arrived in France, I had the same experience he had: I stopped being Jewish because simply the intensity of anti-semitism was so much less in France than in Algeria that I too could forget about it. But I immediately, on the very same day, I stopped being “Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, you’re a Jew, dirty Jew”, which was my daily fare, I became a woman and I think it’s most important, it’s most important to realise that. Why should I be more Jewish than woman? So I have to make new words and associate different fragments of my structure, which are not separate, which merge, exchange and, of course I should add, not only woman, but grandmother, baby, cat, etc. etc. It’s a whole and it’s very variegated.
Questioner 2: Thank you. Like Mrs Cixous, I am a ashkephardi as well and, as Mr Derrida, I suffered the same experience in 1940 in Morocco, when the antisemitism was brought to me as being a Jew and suddenly I became a Jew. And this is when I became a Jew in every sense of the word, when I had been expelled and went to Alliance Israelite, in the same place where you were. But, today aren’t we living an entirely situation? When you talk, like you talk among us, among people, excuse my impudence, like people, it’s fine. But when we talk at the outside, when we talk à l’extérieur, antisemitism doesn’t worry me at all, having suffered what I have. What I’m worried about now is the discussion, the insidious discussion, about the legality of the State of Israel, and you have one particular gentleman, Tariq Ramadan, when you hear what he is saying, that’s what’s worrying me for the future. So, I am Jewish, I can be critical of the government of Israel, not Israel, and that is where a gentleman and lady like you both could help us more in discussing among ourselves, as you do, but have, unfortunately, another language outside the Jewish people.
Jacques Derrida: Well, I share your concerns but I don’t think I would speak otherwise when I speak with other people. I say the same thing. On the one hand, I don’t think that the State of Israel is illegal, that’s a very, very, very tricky problem and I am ready to meditate and be on the side of the security of Israel and do everything I can to protect, to help protect the security and the existence of Israel. Now, the question of the legality of the nation state depends, as you know, it’s not an essence, it depends on the agreement of an international community, and so on and so forth. At the beginning, Israel was not a state and then, in a given situation, a geopolitical situation, after Zionist and Jewish terrorism, and so on and so forth, and the British mandate and you know all the story, the State of Israel has been recognised as a legal state, internationally. Now it’s a fact. It’s a fact. It’s a legal fact in terms of international law. It’s a real and rude fact in terms of the life and the organisation of the nation, of the territory. So for me, even if I have in the back of my mind some questions about the conditions in which the state has been created, I’m still in favour of the state. That’s a fact. Israel should not be destroyed. So what is the best way for it not to be destroyed? Not to be erased from the surface of the earth? I think with another politics of the government and with another geo-politics, another American politics, with a big change. And that would be to me, I may be wrong, to me it would be the best protection for the State of Israel and I’m ready to say this openly and answer this openly to the public, Jewish or non-Jewish.
Now, perhaps you are today anxious about what we call in France, and probably in Europe more generally, the renewal of antisemitism, new signs of a new kind of antisemitism. It is true that, especially in France, there have been, in the last two years, a number of such signs: aggressions against synagogues, against cemeteries, and so on and so forth. I think these acts should be condemned unconditionally and punished unconditionally. I’ve no hesitation to say this. But, at the same time, once we have condemned and punished these acts, we have to go on analysing what is the origin and what is the responsibility of this new kind of antisemitism. In France, it’s not the old-style antisemitism, it’s not the social … France has always been antisemitic in a certain way, as well as the United States. Today, it’s not on the side of the extreme right-wing. It comes mainly, mainly from the poor suburbs of Maghrebin-Arabic immigrants who have not been taken care of enough by the French government, who share some responsibility. These are young people, … unemployed people, who are poor and are, well, in a situation which makes the best conditions for this kind of aggressivity, on the one hand, against society in general and against Jews. Why? Because against the background of all these signs there is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no doubt, no doubt. Israel makes the confusion, the bad confusion against which I fight, we have to fight, between the politics of Israel, and Jews all around the world. And so, who is responsible for that? Themselves first of all, that’s why I said from the beginning they have to be condemned and punished. But this responsibility is shared by French society, the French government, which doesn’t integrate them – as we say in France – enough, doesn’t give them the, conditions, the healthy conditions of life. The responsibility is shared by Sharon himself, because you remember at the beginning, two or three years ago, the Israeli government charged France with being, as a nation, antisemitic and called for the immigration of the French Jews to Israel, to use this, argument, this pretext, to have the French Jews make the aliyah to Israel, which is rather, I would say, suspect. So the responsibility is a shared responsibility, by which I don’t, of course, exonerate the authors of these aggressions, not at all. But, while I condemn them, I want to make clear that the responsibilities are shared by themselves, by the French government, the French society, by the Israeli society, by the American society, and so on and so forth. And since it becomes now a European problem, you know that the European Commission is now addressing the question for Europe, we have to, they have to take all these complexities into consideration. That is what I say, what I would say to Jews or to non-Jews, publicly.
Hélène Cixous: It’s just again, of course I totally agree and for once I must say our French government – with whom we have really very little sympathy – regarding this precise point they are very clear. They have absolutely no hesitation regarding the decision regarding Israel, etc. The counter-publicity, which comes from Israel, and which seems or pretends that there is a kind of latent and brazen antisemitism in France, is something which is very damaging and quite unfair.
But then, to come back to the precise situation in France and those acts that exist, but I don’t think are threatening because they are explainable, you know, they’re not out of the blue. It’s true that the Muslim community is shamefully treated. It has been for forty years: it’s a shame, it’s one of the historical shames of France. So we share it too; everybody shares it in France. But what is complicated, and I very often think about that because I can identify with those because these are the acts of young people, of course, they are, of course, indoctrinated, etc. etc. but not only that. I think it has a kind of history which is that of … we all inherit that old history of colonisation in France and the moment, which you know, when the Jewish people and the Arabs were separated by the fact that the Jews got the French nationality and the Arabs remained outside, which is something that is not erased, it’s always lurking somewhere. And now I think that, seen from the eyes of a young Arab in France, whether he is Algerian, Moroccan, I’m sure that they look at the Jews as enemy brothers. There is something very close, there is a close relationship, the hatred of close people. These were, these Jews were former outsiders who now are insiders, whereas these people from the Maghreb, are still outsiders and they, I’m absolutely sure, feel hurt by that particular difference, that particular inequality, which exists, absolutely. Of course they could upbraid the French, French, French, but they are closer to the Jews so they are further, they reject them much more.
Jacqueline Rose: I’m afraid we can take no more questions. We’ve run way over time. I am astounded by how few people have left when they’ve had the opportunity. I think this has been an extraordinary and very moving evening. I cannot thank Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous enough for the time and the care with which they have spoken to us tonight.
[End]
Jacqueline Rose: Well aren’t you lucky to have got in! Welcome to this event and, before they have even said a word, let me thank Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida for joining us this evening at this remarkable occasion which gives me enormous pleasure to be chairing.
First, what many of you will know already, but which is nonetheless important to re-iterate here, Jacques Derrida can I think be fairly called, and has been called many times, the greatest living philosopher. When Geoff Bennington once opened a session with those words he added, “Of course, there are a lot of other things he has been called as well!” Derrida is the creator of a whole way of thinking, deconstruction, which it would be a grave error to describe as system or school of thought because it has seized schools and systems by their very nerve endings, leaving nothing as it was before. Hélène Cixous, not just one of the defining intellectual women for a whole generation of feminist thought – I owe her a personal debt that I am delighted to be able to acknowledge here – but also someone who, in her writing of fiction and drama, her theatrical work, has demonstrated, or perhaps I should say enacted, the porousness of the boundary between thought and creativity in an utterly unique and significant way. They both break barriers, they both oblige us to think about where our own most inhibiting mental boundaries lie.
We are here today to talk about Jewishness. Some of you will have seen in the book fair, and I hope bought, the beautiful book by Cixous, just translated, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint which, sadly in translation, does not carry the ambiguity in the French of ‘Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a young Jewish monkey’, which I wanted to share with you in case you thought we were getting too reverent before we’ve even begun. We are nonetheless talking of a longstanding, passionate friendship and dialogue. “If there had not been Derrida I would have thought I was crazy,” Cixous has said of herself, as a young woman in France. A dialogue in which Jewishness has been key. If Cixous has painted Derrida as “young Jewish saint”, he comes close to returning the compliment in his own essay, Hélène Cixous for Life, that is to say [H.C., pour la vie, c’est à dire], that even more I think in relation to Jewishness when after a lengthy discussion of the key Jewish diaspora thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, he ends with Cixous as the writer who, in her poetics of language, in a miraculously unique way, weaves together all strands of the Jewish heritage, quote: “regenerating them towards an open, endless future”, not quite a saint, but I think to be handed the palm over those brilliant German Jewish thinkers, might be seen as going one better.
But they are not typical Jews, if there is any such thing. Both of our guests are, quote, French, writers, Jews from Algeria. Both, again to use Hélène’s expression, ‘étrange juif’, untranslatable – it won’t be the last time this evening – but which I think means something like ‘stranger Jew’, ‘foreign, alien Jew’, ‘estranged Jew’, even ‘strange Jew’, although, as she has also put it, “We too are differently foreigners; we are strangers in a different way.” They have both experienced exile. Hélène left Algeria in 1955; her mother followed her, expelled from the newly independent nation in 1962. Derrida left in 1955, returned and served in the Algerian Army as a teacher during the Franco-Algeria war, his whole family leaving the country definitively, like that of Hélène, in 1962. Before that, Derrida had been expelled from school as a Jew in 1942, measures which, he has said, “exceeded those of Vichy France”. Hélène faring better, or perhaps worse, was for many, many years under the rigidly applied quota system, the only Jewish girl in her class. They were, as she puts it, in some senses “the Arabs”. But if Jewishness is for both of them decisive, formative, originary, even, nonetheless in their writing it is also something that slips through. In France, Hélène has written, “What fell for me first was the obligation of Jewish identity.” In Derrida’s Algeria, “Jewishness,” he has said, “was an asphyxiated culture, offering no cultural heritage or resting point.” Nonetheless, or perhaps for that very reason, he has described himself as, “the last of the Jews”, an expression which I think has come back to haunt him many times. “I often,” he has said in a recent interview alongside Hélène, “presented myself as a Marrano, one of those forcibly converted Jews of Spain and Portugal, who cultivated their Judaism secretly, sometimes to the point of no longer knowing in what it consisted.”
Jewishness, then, central, our question this evening is how? What is Jewishness for these two key thinkers and writers of our time? What do they have to tell us about the relationship between Jewishness and identity, writing, memory, justice in the world today? That’s just for starters.
Before I turn to our guests, let me just recall a moment at the beginning of Derrida’s address to a conference organised a few years ago, in his honour, precisely around judéités, or Jewishnesses, when he said he had never felt so intimidated and anxious at the prospect of a conference on this topic. My task is therefore to put you at ease in a frankly impossible domain, and for this I apologise before we even begin.
Derrida and Cixous are going to start by reading a short passage from their writing on each other, then I will be asking them questions and I will aim to leave at least twenty minutes for questions from the floor. When I spoke to Hélène this week she said we would need all night. We have until 10.30! Then Hélène and Jacques will be very happy to sign books for those who would like to have books signed at the end of the session. Please join me in welcoming Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous this evening.
Jacques Derrida: First, I apologise for my poor English. I will be suffering and you will be suffering too from this poor English. But I want to warn you at the beginning. First of all I would like, in the name of Hélène and in my own name, to thank all of you for being here and to thank Anne Webber and Pam [Lewis] for their invitation, to thank the organisers of the Jewish Book Fair, we are very honoured and happy to be here, and I would like to thank Jacqueline Rose for her generous introduction.
The contract between Anne Webber and us was that we would just improvise the discussion between us, between you and us, and start with a short reading of a text by Hélène on me, by me on Hélène, just as a forward to the discussion. Then we will try and answer your questions. Who should start? I’m not the moderator here!
Hélène Cixous: I’ll start. We always have this quarrel, you know, who starts! It’s the first time I make as if I were starting.
[Reads passage from Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint:
“Was I Jewish?” he would have wondered all his life….
… Right away, the first time on the mountain, I realised I had to take him at his word, to the letter, to the summit, literally, to the comma as well, without which the sparks wouldn’t fly, nor the water gush from his text, meticulously, being attentive to the point of finickiness, to the point as well.]
Jacques Derrida: I’m afraid that tonight will be about translation and untranslatability. Hélène just told you that if I am fully effective it’s only in French. I’m not sure I’m ever fully effective, but if I were effective it would only be in French. Now, I said somewhere that “I have just one language and it’s not mine.” But at least I have one language, which is French. What should I say with the English? Now, Hélène is fortunate enough to have her book on me already translated into English. I wrote two books on her which are not translated into English, not yet. But at least there is one short text which I wrote for her, on her, and which was wonderfully translated by Eric Prenowitz, who is probably here.
I must tell you something before reading a short passage from this text. I must tell you that its own title is untranslatable. It has been translated as well as possible. But it’s the word fourmis. Fourmi is an ant in English and of course in the lecture I gave that day I played with more than one language: ‘fourmis’, ‘for me’, and so on. My point would be that the most untranslatable texts are texts written in more than one language. When you have two languages involved in the same word, it is impossible to state it in a single language. That’s the maximum of untranslatability and it so happens with Fourmis, the title of this text. One day Hélène called me on the phone and told me that she had a dream in which the word fourmis occurred and that’s what I’m dealing with in this text. I’ll read just a short passage.
[Reads passage from Fourmis]:
… Very quickly, and as deferred echo to what Hélène said a moment ago, I shall venture in parenthesis a sort of naïve secret, a confidence…
… one day we discussed the book by Michelet called The Insect.]
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you both very much for that. I think we have already had a performance – or is it? – of sexual difference, and a performance – or is it? – of Jewishness. I want to bring these questions now to the heart of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’s writing. We also had, of course, a performance of writing. I said to them earlier this evening that I thought, in this extraordinary lyrical evocation of each other through the problematic of writing and identity, they had, in a sense, created a new genre. I think that’s what we have just listened to this evening.
I want to pick up this question of sexual difference in relationship to Jewishness but in some perhaps slightly different ways. First a question to Hélène. You have a unique Jewish identity: you combine a sephardic father, whose family came from North Africa, and I believe spoke Arabic, and an ashkenaze, German mother. I’d like you to talk about that difference. But I’m also going to put a second question to you, so you can think about which or either you wish to respond to. I also feel that Jewishness is in some sense hidden in your writing, more so perhaps than in that of Derrida, but that there is the profoundest link between your sense of the poetic nature of all language, language as something always in flight, which we have just witnessed and experienced here today, resistant to meaning in its most obvious sense, and Jewishness. Am I right and if so how? So I wonder if you could address these two areas.
You have all night!
Hélène Cixous: So a short night! As regards my origins, after all they are … it’s very simple. At the closing of those two main trends of Jewishness, which you all know about, that is the sephardic and the ashkenaze, but what is interesting is that when my mother met my father and they were both away from their native countries, my mother was away from Germany and my father was away from Algeria, and they happened to meet in Paris. My mother had never heard about the existence of sephardic Jews and then my grandmother, who was living in Germany, thought that my mother was actually going to marry an African “thing” or “animal” and maybe also with a tail or something, so she was extremely worried about the situation. It was only on coming to Algeria that my mother realised that there existed other Jews than the Jews she knew. But she already knew a number of different genres of Jews. For instance, in her family, that was pure German, they had, of course, a kind of little remoteness regarding Polish Jews, those who came and knocked at the door of the elders and were always asking for help. But I must say in honour of my mother and grandmother, although they were steeped and … [break in recording] … They belonged to a very old German family and eventually landed in Algeria where racism was really ruling. I mean, racism was the master of Algeria; racisms I should say, because there was one racism against the other or fighting to be the hyper-racism compared to the other racisms. So this actually really fashioned my mind and my soul. At the same time, those intra-racisms and extra-racisms, plus of course my personal treasure which is one of languages, because in my house indeed we heard, if we didn’t speak at least we heard being spoken, a number of languages. My father could speak Arabic, he was an excellent francophone and he also spoke Spanish and his family was of Spanish origin. My mother started immediately to learn Spanish and other languages, and also body language, which is most important. For instance, my father at table would hear my mother and grandmother speak and exchange in German and my grandmother would say, “Ich weiβ nicht”, so my father said, “Schweiβ? I’ve heard that. That’s perspiration.” So he thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” That was already Derridian. So, when he didn’t know something he would say, “in a ‘monkey-way’”, so actually I learnt all languages, including ‘monkey-language’ when I was three or four. Thanks to that typically, after all, Jewish epinuary. So that’s part of the question.
The second half of the question … you know, I don’t think that the Jewish theme is really hidden or not emphasised, or not to be noticed in my work, particularly in the most recent pieces of fiction which I have written for about past ten years and which are actually a fictionalising attempt to keep alive the story of my family. It’s … there are really many Jewish aspects that are quite explicit and obvious. But then maybe of course the question, and it’s a question, I think that now and then Jacques and I approach an impossible question which is: is there anything Jewish in … can we call something Jewish in our way of elaborating a certain type of thinking? I’m not … I don’t speak of course about references, I mean when he speaks about the cherem it’s obviously Jewish. No, in a certain manner of expressing something, in the untranslatability, has that got something to do with Jewishness? And how … the fact, for instance, is the undecidable, it’s a big question, is it, could it be somehow, Jewish? And what kind of somehow-ness? And then also, I, for instance, am a player on words and I was much before I wrote my thesis on Joyce. I inherited that actually from my family, but sometimes I wonder whether it wasn’t also a kind of phantasmatic influence of what I figured, not that I knew, but what I imagined or figured was happening in the Talmud or in the study of the Torah and the polysemantism of Hebrew, but not only that, a way of really suspending and intricating everything. I don’t know, it’s just suppositions. And maybe I could even go as far as asking myself about the influence of the bible in what I do, not thematically because thematically it’s everywhere, but the structure of the bible, both theatrically and in its … you were speaking about God and his specific or special jealousy, not only that, but the doubt that pervades everything, the instability, something that I think is to be found in what I write and in what Jacques writes. But it’s not direct, it’s not direct, it’s something in the air.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you very much. Well it couldn’t be direct without destroying what it is you’re saying about it, so that’s perfect. Thank you very much.
Jacques, I think Jewishness goes right back to the beginning in your writing. I’m thinking of ‘Jabès’ [in l’Écriture et la differance], 1967 I think this is, and it’s been a consistent theme throughout through Jabès and then Schibboleth – pour Paul Celan and your work on Yerushalmi, your work on Freud. One could say that it’s a theme throughout your writing but, I think I’d be right – but you’ll tell me – that recently, over the last ten years, there has been a clamour of a more personal engagement with these questions, which would start perhaps with Circonfession and Monolinguisme, Monolingualism of the Other and ‘The Circum as Cision’, which, in one passage, you say, in a sense this memory you’ve been writing as nothing else. Hélène describes it as your “primal scene”. And I think Geoff Bennington says somewhere that this “mal d’appartenir”, this ill-of-belonging in your Jewishness, could be seen as the affected thought of deconstruction, that is to say, following on from what Hélène has just said, that there is some very intimate relationship between the heart of your philosophical writing and this strange belonging and not belonging to Jewishness and the intense personal engagement with that. So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about that.
Jacques Derrida: Thank you. A very difficult question and a long, a long story. I will start with the dates and the references that you gave. When I wrote on ‘Jabès’, a long time ago, it was, … of course I insisted on the Jewish themes in ‘Jabès’, but because it was on the level of the imaginary in order that a book of questions is made of quotations of imaginary rabbis, so was a way of putting Jewishness on the side of the poetry, imagination, non-effective belonging literature. There are a number of signs in this text which put Jewishness at a distance. I have nothing against Jewishness, but I do not belong in a certain way.
Now, the following texts on Levinas, and much later on Celan, and much later on Yerushalmi are texts which, let’s say, discuss some Jewish dogmatism, or if not dogmatism then at least Jewishness as such. It is true in the case of Levinas, and I’m a great admirer of Levinas, but my first text on Levinas was questioning the authority of Judaism on his thought. And Celan is a very special Jew. Yerushalmi, well, it was an admiring criticism of Yerushalmi. So my philosophical or theoretical texts on Jewish authors were never “Jewish”, although of course I played with this ambiguous relationship.
Now, on the other hand, the long story I mentioned a moment ago, has to do with the fact that, when I was in Algeria until 1949, I left Algeria for the first time when I was nineteen years old, at the time in Algeria I was obsessed and wounded by antisemitism, racism, and so on and so forth. And as soon as I came to France, in 1949, I just forgot it. I had the feeling, the wrong feeling, that antisemitism had been left behind, and at least in the French intellectual milieu, no one would pay attention to me as a Jew. So I forgot it, so to speak, on a certain level. And in the Academy, my first books were very, let’s say, philosophical, in the academic sense, theoretical, and had almost, almost, almost nothing autobiographical, almost nothing. There were of course some hints, some small cryptic signs, some autobiographical signs, but very little of them. It was in conformity with the academic norms. Even when I was deconstructing them, I was considered a good academic, until the time when having, let’s say, conquered some credit in the academy, I felt freer, more free, to write differently, more and more differently. And then my texts became more and more autobiographical. It started with Glas and then Post Card and then Circonfession. As long as I was becoming autobiographical, although, as you know, I don’t believe in autobiography – all my autobiographies are sceptical on the concept of autobiography, but let’s take the word in its commonsensical meaning – but the more I became autobiographical, the more I had to insist on, not my Jewishness, but my French experience of Judaism with all the complications, the anxiety, sometimes the effort not to belong. As I often retold in many texts, the paradox in my youth, when I was expelled from school, as you recalled a moment ago, when I was expelled from school in 1942 for being Jewish by the French authorities, not by the Germans – there was not a single German soldier in Algeria – it was the French anti-seminitism which in Algeria was even stronger than in France, and when I was expelled from school at the time, my parents registered me, put me in a Jewish school. Of course, all the Jewish professors were expelled from the high schools, and the university professors too, so it was easy to have a very good Jewish school with all these people who had been fired. So I was in this Jewish school and immediately I felt uneasy about belonging, about being part of this Jewish, closed and communitarian identity. I was twelve at the time, I was twelve, and at the same time I rejected, of course, the antisemitic and racist environment and I rejected in some way, in some interior and subtle way, rejected the Jewish community. I wanted not to belong to any of this community and this of course remained stable until now, I would say.
Now, when my texts became, as I told you, “autobiographical”, it was a time when I decided I should write on circumcision and I worked and worked and wrote everything on circumcision, not only Jewish circumcision but also Islamic circumcision, or excision, too. I read and I took notes and filled a number of, let’s say, manuscripts and would have been able to write a book on this but I felt that I had to do this and to make a link between what I was doing philosophically, or theoretically, what I was writing as a philosopher, and so on and so forth, and the question, the general question of circumcision, in its anthropological dimension, and my own circumcision, my irreplaceable circumcision. And so I started writing Circonfession and then Monolingualism of the Other and, as long as you grow old and well known, you come closer to your origins, to your memory, and that was simultaneous with Hélène’s movement: almost at the same time, Jewishness appeared in our texts, having been totally invisible before.
Now, of course, my Jewish problems remain, my Jewish question remains intact. I am totally unstable on this question and this could be, I think, read and deciphered in all my texts. There is an enormous Jewish question, which remains unsolved. You know, the Jewish joke, if I may tell a Jewish joke…
Jacqueline Rose: Please tell a Jewish joke…
Jacques Derrida: …Everybody knows it here. There are three people isolated on an island: a German citizen, a French citizen and a Jew, totally alone on this island. They don’t know when they will leave the island and it is boring. One of them says, “Well, we should do something. We should do something, the three of us. Why don’t we write something on the elephants?” there were a number of elephants on the island. “Everyone should write something on the elephants and then we could compare the styles and the national idioms”, and so on and so forth. So the week after, the French one came, with a short, brilliant, witty essay on the sexual drive, or sexual appetite of the elephants; very short, bright and brilliant essay, very, very superficial but very brilliant. Three months, or three years after that, the German came with a heavy book on the … let’s say a very positive scientific book on the comparison between two kinds of species, with a very scientific title, endless title for a very positive scientific book on the elephants and the ecology of the elephants on the island. And the two of them asked the Jew, “Well, when will you give us your book?” “Wait, it’s a very serious question. I need more time. I need more time”. And they came again every year asking him for his book. Finally, after ten years, he came back with a book called, “The Elephant and the Jewish Question”.
That’s my work.
Jacqueline Rose: That’s wonderful. Hélène, please…
Hélène Cixous: …Yes, I just wanted to add a footnote, an elephant footnote. Actually, I was thinking, when we started we, of course, had not decided together which piece we would read but then I started thinking that we both had a piece that had some kind of link with animals: the ant and the monkey, and now he comes with the elephant. But it’s most important, for me this is the essential question, that is: can I say, or when can I say that my monkey or my dog is Jewish? I think it’s absolutely central to our thinking. It’s my experience too. That is, in my family, animals have always been ignored, that’s the best one can say in favour of my family. And it took me about fifty years before I realised that this is a Jewish attitude, that animals are not human. But this is a question: is it really so? And who can tell me that my cat is not Jewish? You know, they share my life, we speak together, they are female cats so the problem of circumcision is not there. But it’s a huge question and it’s part of, I think, our philosophical and concrete approach to life. Coming back to – I’m not kidding you know, I’m very serious – what we were saying about autobiography, which we agree on, that is, it’s not autobiography, it’s other biography anyway, but your particular approach, is unique, there is no precedent and I don’t think you have followers because what came out after you had somehow repressed … after the period when you had put on the academic robes, and then you un-robed yourself, and what comes out are not events, facts, it’s not factual what comes out from your life but it all has to do with traces and these traces are inscribed on the body. You are the philosopher of the priest but really then after thirty years of writing comes the trace of the priest, which is circumcision. And that writing, about your body, has a force, also a trope – it’s also a metaphor – but you spoke about Glas and in Glas you speak about the Torah and as … sexually, and when it’s demonstrated, it appears as part of the body, which is legs, penis and everything you want. And this is really something which, after all, could be somehow related to this mysterious, enigmatic origin of which we know nothing, of course, except that we feel a certain number of effects.
Jacques Derrida: One word on the animal and the autobiography. Some years ago … the question of the animal has always been on my mind, from the very beginning, and if I choose the word “trace” instead of “sign” or “signifier” it’s because I wanted to break with the most powerful tradition in philosophy, and in psychoanalysis, according to which there is, between man and animal, an indivisible line. I don’t deny there are differences, but not in the form of a single line, with the animal, in general, ants or elephants, and man on the other hand, on the other side. So from the very beginning, the ‘grammatology’, the ‘trace’, had to do with the project of a new experience, a new thought of what we call “the animal”. And this is absolutely constant in my work and, one of the last decades which was organised around me in Cerisy-la-Salle was entitled, The Autobiographical Animal, in which I tried with others, of course, to connect the question of the autobiography and the question of the animality and the way, and the deconstruction, if you want, of the most powerful tradition in western thought about animality. And it’s not simply a theoretical question or a philosophical question, it’s a practical question today: the way we deal with animals, we treat animals. So I would not dissociate the question of the trace and the question of the animal from the question of autobiography.
Jacqueline Rose: I think what you’re saying is that the question of the animal is an ethical question, which I think is crucial. I want to pick up what Hélène was saying about the body, because I can see that is central to what we are talking about. When we talk about ‘étrange juif’ we are talking about the ‘corps étrange juif’, the strange Jewish body, and that is absolutely central. And I was very struck by an expression that Hélène uses somewhere in her writing, talking about the body as wounded, the expression, ‘nosblessures’, all as one word, which I will try and translated as ‘woundednus’, if you end with ‘us’. That is to say, the wound, it’s not a banner that you sport, it’s something that really strikes into the integrity, or lack of integrity, of your being. The reason why I want to raise this question of a wound that isn’t an identity, if you like, is because it is so often the case in the Jewish account of a certain history, that suffering, or ‘woundednus’, or trauma becomes the mark of an identity from which many things then follow. Now, I know when you talk about the wounded body, as in circumcision, and you’re talking about the body now, that’s not what you mean, right? And, if I can just add to that, I think the same thing happens in your relationship to time. So, Hélène talks about the ambiguity of the German word ‘jahre’, which can mean both time lost and time possessed; that is to say, something tragic and irretrievably gone, or something that you accumulate for yourself. And I remember one moment that I think is connected in your engagement with Yerushalmi, where he says “Only the Jewish people are given the specific injunction to remember, as a religious injunction to hold people.” And I think you say such remarks make you tremble, or shudder. So I see in both your cases, an attempt to call up a body, in relationship to Jewishness and ‘woundednus’, but isn’t the one we’re most familiar with, not the one most often cited as a mark of Jewish identity, it’s not that one: it’s different. So I’d love you both to talk about ‘woundednus’ and Jewishness in your thinking.
Jacques Derrida: First of all there is, and we of course improvise so I will be over-simplistic, no doubt, as we have to go quickly, but to go quickly I would say the ambiguity in my text on circumcision, the equivocality in this text, has to do with the fact that, on the one hand, I insist on the singularity, the irrepressibility of the wound, circumcision, my own circumcision, which is irreplaceable, it’s a wound which structures myself as an absolute singularity. But, on the other hand, I suggest that there are analogies between the Jewish circumcision and every kind of wound which constitutes a community. At the origin of any identity, or cultural identity or nationality, there is something like a circumcision, there is a mark on the body, an ineffaceable mark on the body and this wound is universal. So I postulate between the two and I want to say both things at the same time. On the one hand it is absolutely irreplaceable and on the other hand there are circumcisions everywhere, even outside the Jewish or Islamic communities. That’s the ambiguity of the mark on the body.
Now, in my discussion of Yerushalmi, on the one hand what made me tremble was this statement of, let’s say, statement, statement signed by the elected people. Jews distinguish between Jewishness and Judaism. For the Jewishness, if not the Judaism, there is an injunction to remember and an opening to the future, a hope for the future. And this is specific to Judaism. And what made me tremble was the idea of the elected people, with all its possible political consequences. But also, as a Jew, I thought that I would be, it would be more Jewish, that’s my hyperbolic belonging to Judaism, that when I fight against some forms of Judaism or some self-, self-identification or self-centred Judaism, I would have the vague feeling or the vague claim that I am more Jewish than themselves. That it is more Jewish to be critical of the notion of ‘elected people’, the confident feeling of being the ‘elected people’, with all the political consequences that you know, it is more Jewish, more of a Jew to be suspicious about that than the Jews themselves. That’s why I say I’m the last of the Jews, I don’t know how to say it in English, “Je suis le dernier des juifs”. That is the worst, the lowest kind, and perhaps the last one. So, there is this strange feeling that I am less and more Jewish than a lot of others.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you. Hélène.
Hélène Cixous: Well, that’s why I say, “Je ne suis pas juif.” “Je ne suis pas juif.” I am not Jewish.
Jacques Derrida: Il faut expliquer ce que ça veut dire en français.
Hélène Cixous: C’est ce que je viens de dire.
Jacques Derrida: Oui, oui, je sais.
Hélène Cixous: It’s our problem, as women. What do we do with circumcision? Do we mourn for circumcision? Do we miss circumcision? Or is it a metaphor? And, as Jacques said, it’s universal? We could replace, of course, circumcision by any other kind, as you said, of other type of marking of the body. But then, of course, there’s something particularly interesting in circumcision, which is the ring form, in every way, and the alliance. For those who are poetically inclined, it’s not replaceable by a linear wound, for instance; it would be quite different. But, to come back to my own experience, because I belong to a circumcised male family, I feel that my personal experience, as an individual, of an equivalent of circumcision was actually the death of my father; that is, I felt as if I had been circumcised of my father, because that happened when I was young, I mean I was ten. And I was severed, I mean, something happened in my flesh, in the world and in my flesh with the sudden disappearance of my father and what happened was that he was immediately transformed into a ghost who keeps coming back to me, today, tonight, regularly, which, of course, is what also happened with you, that is, circumcision has become an asset in everything you think, in your philosophy, not as something vulgar but, of course, as the sublime, philosophical consequence of this single act. And I do realise that I lost my father and immediately re-appropriated myself of him in the form of the spirit, or a god, or an inspirer, or a ghost, and I think that this is what we share. That is how we can communicate and, whether we are properly Jewish or not, and whatever, really I think the most formative experience in life is loss. So, if it’s the loss of a dear one, it can also be the loss of a limb, I can imagine that it could be at the loss of a limb, but loss is really the beginning, which is something we’re not used to thinking. It’s the opening, it’s the door, it opens, and it opens not on death but on life, and it’s really, it’s as if it were the first pun or the first way to make a word, ‘loss’, echo with others, for instance ‘love’. It’s the beginning of love, it’s the first word of love. So loss is, again, amorphous if you say that and what makes circumcision so striking is that it has a shape, it’s a work of art, really. But, then I think that we share the experience somehow and if circumcision has such a power on fates, on nations, it’s also because it has a legend, because it’s been written by literature in the bible and the legend is so beautiful, so cruel and beautiful. But it starts with that, with written circumcision.
Jacqueline Rose: One more question and then I’ll open it to the floor.
I am very interested in what Hélène has just said about fate and nations. I think we can’t meet here this evening and discuss Jewishness without talking about the Jewish nation. Jacques, when you visited Israel for the third time in 1988, you visited the Palestinians, I know, in the occupied territories, and recently, you, Hélène, have been involved in circulating a petition in support of the refuseniks of the Israeli Army. Justice has been central to both of your writing. And there’s one moment I particularly love in your work, Hélène, where you say that one of your favourite parables is of the wolf who loves the lamb, or the assassin that does not kill. Moshe Dayan famously said that “I’m very happy for the wolf to lie down with the lamb, provided I’m the wolf.”
I would love to hear you talk about Israel, how you see that in relationship to the question of Jewish identity today.
Jacques Derrida: A small question!
Jacqueline Rose: A very small question before I open it up to the floor.
Jacques Derrida: To come back just for a moment to the discussion with Yerushalmi, what made me tremble had to do not only with his self-confidence in the Jewish people having been the only one who listens to the injunction, to remember or to hope for the future, because this would amount to denying all the other nations, all the other cultures, the injunction of memory and the hope for the future. I think it’s simply wrong. It’s simply naïve. In every nation, every culture, every religion you have this duty to remember, that’s constitutive of the culture, and the hope for the future. So why isn’t it violent to deny other cultures this injunction to remember and this hope for the future? So that’s what, in the name of justice, justice to other people, to other nations, whether to be just with them.
Now, to come back to Jerusalem. On the one hand, of course, I went several times to Jerusalem, invited by my Israeli friends and just to manifest some love, some solidarity, and so on and so forth, for Israel which did not prevent me from asking terrible questions about the foundation of the state, the ways, the responsibilities, which were shared not only by the Israelis, the Zionist movement, but shared by England, the States, Russia, and so on. So, I can, and I want to, on the one hand, love Israel, love Jerusalem, fight for the security and the image and the honour of Israel, and keep asking questions about the complexity of the foundation of the state; all the states have been founded violently, that’s a structural law. There is no state which hasn’t been founded legally because there was no law before the foundation so every foundation of a nation state is violent and illegal, a-legal. And this is the case of Israel, not to speak of the expulsion of the Palestinians with all the responsibilities involved. Again, the Jewish ones, the Arabic ones, around Israel, the western ones: English, French, American and so forth.
So, when I went for the third or fourth time to Jerusalem for a seminar with Israeli colleagues and American colleagues, I put as a condition of my participation, that some Palestinians should be invited. My Israeli friends were first, not shocked, but surprised, and did their best to have at least one Palestinian at the conference. It was not only their fault because the Palestinians wouldn’t come. And then I gave a lecture, and in the footnote of the lecture, which had been circulated before the discussion, I said very clearly, now published, my opposition to the occupation of the territories, that was in the early 1990s. And suddenly, at the table – we were about twenty colleagues around the table – suddenly, all my Jewish friends and colleagues got angry at me, the object of the discussion was totally lost and just my footnote was the focus of the discussion. They took from their bags all the most terrible texts by Arafat and others, and I was totally isolated in this...
Jacqueline Rose: When was this, Jacques? What date was this? When was this?
Jacques Derrida: Early 1990s. I don’t remember, 1991? Perhaps earlier than that, I don’t remember. It’s published now.
And my reply, what I want to insist on is the way I replied to their angry aggression against me, their unanimous aggression, and this reply is my, let’s say, position on Israel. I said first that, of course, I was maintaining my argument, my opposition to the politics of the occupied territories. On the other hand, as I was saying this in the name of the interest and the honour of Israel, and the security of Israel, because when I am critical of the government, at the government, at the political agenda of the Israeli government, it’s not because I’m against Israel, it’s because it is a suicidal behaviour. Because it’s unjust, first of all, unfair with the Palestinians, first of all, and then it is suicidal. It is what I call ‘auto-immunity’, self-immunity, when a body destroys its own protections. And in the long-hand, I think that is the main argument I would have with the politics of almost all the governments of Israel, except Rabin’s. When I was given, a few months ago, an honorary degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I ended my speech, in which I said things like the words I have just said, I dedicated my doctorate to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin.
Now, one of the most wounding attacks or threats in the current situation, I think not only in France, is that as soon as you ask a question or critique the government of Israel, the policy of Israel, or the interpretation of Zionism, because there is not only one Zionism… there has been a number of Zionisms and one of them has prevailed. There were Zionists who were ready to have another politics with Palestinians, and so on and so forth. So I’m not anti-Zionist; I’m against this kind of Zionism which prevails in the violent way that we know. And one of the most wounding facts today, not only in France, I would say, is that as soon as you ask a question, or a critical question about Israel, you are suspected of being anti-semitic or judeophobic, as we say now in France. And I think it’s the most terrible trap, the most terrible threat and we have to be courageous to avoid following in this scheme. I claim, I want to have the right to be lucid or critical about the politics of the Israeli government, with another position, which I share with a number of Israeli, courageous Israeli people, perhaps the most numerous, if not the most vociferous. So I want to keep the right to be critical of the politics without being charged of anti-semitism.
Jacqueline Rose: Hélène will respond to the question and then I will open it to the floor for ten or fifteen minutes.
Hélène Cixous: Of course, I can say that Jacques has spoken for me too, and for you too. We recognise ourselves in what he said. I’ll just illustrate what he said by referring to my favourite character, that’s my mother. When, after the war, my father, who was an atheist – he was Jewish but he was an atheist and a socialist – and he had been so humiliated and offended by Vichy that he felt like emigrating to Palestine, because that was before Israel, but he died in 1948, and he died so he couldn’t achieve his dream. And my mother, who is a very plain-speaking person and a transparent person, said “Thank God”, because she would never have wanted to go to Israel, to Palestine, then Israel. She had been a witness to Zionism in Germany and she would tell me, in very vivid tales and images, how suddenly it had flared up in German society and how she had resisted immediately, Zionism, feeling that the fate, the future was European. As a young girl, she already thought like that. So, that’s just to situate my mother. But then, she is typically Jewish in the way I’m going to explain now. As so many people who have been hurt, and who don’t even know the depth of the hurt or the want, by antisemitism, my mother will almost compulsively idealise what is Jewish but only regarding ‘les autres’, particularly the Goyes. So then everything that is Jewish is good, even the criminal is good, because you must not say it, you know, if a Jew is a criminal, you must not say it. That is the sentence I hear all the time, “You must not say it.” So when I start, that’s where I join Jacques, when I start criticising the politics of Israel for the very same reasons, she immediately calls me an antisemite, she says, “You are an anti-semite.” So I tell her, “But you are an antisemite because you are actually favouring what is immoral or unjustified in order to keep the image safe”, which is something that we have to do. We have to face that all the time, I mean, all our lives, I think almost daily in our families, we have that problem of having to keep the image, of course, totally falsified and simulating goodness. And then I understand, of course, I can understand that. Particularly with, for instance, the memory in my family, on my mother’s side, where half of the family has died in concentration camps and my mother never comes back on those events. But it’s true that the threat, the big threat, is irreversible somehow and it explains, it does not justify, it explains psychologically the mechanism that makes so many Jewish people react in a way which is irrational. That is, as you said, they don’t react on, we don’t react on an objective situation where it would be necessary to take this stand in order to make sure that the issue will be positive for those we love. No, we react phantasmatically and it’s terrible because this is something that is very difficult to undo.
We do have to work, not only on the political situation, not only on the rights of two peoples, but on so many traces, so many ghosts. And it’s true that this people of ours has thousands of years of all kinds of strange recollections that are coming to the surface all the time and trouble what we should keep absolutely pure of that, that is principles, principles, not anecdotes, not this situation, not that discourse of Arafat, or this attitude of France, no. One principle, which is very clear, and which would indeed ensure the survival of Israel. But this is a tragic situation. I don’t see something in the near future that is reassuring. I think that we have to fight individually, collectively and individually, all the time to protect the principle.
Jacqueline Rose: Thank you very much.
I’m glad they let me ask my last question because those were such wonderful responses. Please, we have some time for questions. I’ll take three straightaway: here, and then this gentleman here, and then there’s somebody right over at the back there …
Could we have a light on in the hall now so everybody can see and be seen. Is that possible?
Questioner 1: Hello. I have a question which might be a little impertinent or impolite, I’m not sure. I think it might be the question of a ‘young imbecile’, a phrase I use because I’m recalling a questioner who questioned Jacques at a conference at the UCLA, and accused him of not doing enough to save the Jews, which is spoken about in Circonfession. And Jacques subsequently thought, “Well he asked me that because he didn’t know I was Jewish, in which case I haven’t publicly declared my Jewishness enough, in which case he may be right. The other is always right, I haven’t done enough to save the Jews because I haven’t been publicly Jewish enough.” My question is really this question about the desire of this other, various others, who choose your identity for you, who say, referring back to what Hélène said earlier, is what we’re doing Jewish? Is it Jewish? This is a question you are constantly asking yourselves. And there are various people out there saying, “Yes, it is, it is, it is.” I want to ask, in both your cases, and also in my own case, whether you ultimately desire that what you are doing be Jewish or will have been Jewish. That’s my question.
Jacques Derrida: Since it’s a very difficult question, my answer will be very brief and I will insist on the grammar of your question. Do you desire that your work “will have been” Jewish? And that, of course, is an important point. I cannot answer the question, “Is my work Jewish?” because only the future, the future of the world, of politics, of Judaism, of the interpretation of what Judaism has been, it’s not finished, it’s not … this history hasn’t come to an end. We don’t know what Judaism will have been, or what Christianity will have been. It is even more difficult for Christianity than for Judaism. Only the future will decide what Jewishness is, that was one of the points of my discussions with Yerushalmi. Who can say, “This is Jewish”? And I deny the right to say this to a number of people, sometimes to Jewish experts, Jewish rabbis, Jewish theologians or Jewish politicians. I’m not sure that the definition of Jewishness is in the hands of the Israelis, for instance. Why does Israel represent Jewishness in the world more than the diaspora? Hum? These are questions. I’m not, I don’t say this against Israel, of course, and I know why Israel was born and what the Shoah was. I don’t want to insult this memory. Nevertheless, who has the right, who is entitled to define what Jewishness is? What the Jewish faith is? I don’t know. The future will tell and that, I would say modestly, is true of my work. I don’t know if it’s … my feeling is that it is more and less Jewish than any others. |
