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Introduction: Whowhat Gives?!

2008; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dis.2008.a362095

1522-5321

Dragan Kujundžić,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

IntroductionWhowhat Gives?! Dragan Kujundžić (bio) What is a place? To whom and to what does it give place? What takes place under these names? Who are you, Khōra? —Jacques Derrida, Khōra What follows in this special issue are presentations made at the conference titled "'Who?' or 'What?'—Jacques Derrida" at the University of Florida on 9–11 October 2006. The title for the conference came, like so many things, from discussion with my colleague and friend, Akira Lippit, some time in the spring of 2003, when we began planning together an event to honor the work of Jacques Derrida. Aki's suggestion, for which I am truly grateful, was deceptive in its simplicity: why not hold a conference on something that seems to recur in the writing of Jacques Derrida, the persistence and oscillation between the questions "who?" and "what?" The question (who? what?), which itself is one that Derrida often asks in his works, is related to the duplicity or multiplicity of a subject, agency, or an object. In a reflection on forgiveness, Jacques Derrida, for example, asks, "What do I forgive? And whom? What and whom? Something or someone? This is the first syntactic ambiguity which will, be it said, [End Page 3] occupy us for a long time."1 This leads Derrida into an aporetic statement, of tremendous relevance for contemporary politics, that only the unforgivable can be forgiven. This aporia gives place to a proposition: "What I dream of, what I try to think as the 'purity' of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty."2 Just this brief inroad into the theme of the who and the what binds topics of sovereignty, impossible injunctions of forgiveness, pardon and reconciliation, that are elaborated at length in a number of Derrida's seminars and publications. They are, as Derrida says in Literature in Secret, nothing less than the questions of God: The two questions are equally impossible: they are the question of God (the question of "who"), of God's name, of what God's name means (the question of "what"), the question of forgiveness about which we have spoken, dividing as it does between the "who" and the "what." But dividing in such a way, also, as to discredit and ruin the distinction in advance, this impossible delineation of "who" and "what." Two questions to which one is always expected to respond yes and no, neither yes nor no.3 The questions of who or what is Jacques Derrida, not unlike those that inspire the essays published here, have recently been taken up in two different venues by Samuel Weber and Jean Luc Nancy. In his commemorative essay "Once and for All," written to "remember Jacques Derrida," but also an attempt, following Derrida, "to liberate the singular from the individual," Samuel Weber asks, What, after all, are we remembering? To begin with, a name: Jacques Derrida. But what is named by this name? A person? An individual? A signatory? The corpus of an oeuvre? … Does an underlying unity exist that would meet the conventional expectation of what it means to use a proper name? Or is the problem and question of such a unity not itself part and parcel of what the name Jacques Derrida gestures toward?"4 A life lived, to follow this analysis by both Weber and Derrida, would be unique, unrepeatable, inimitable, singular, but also, to that extent, precisely to the measure of its uniqueness, once and for all. And in his À plus d'un titre: Jacques Derrida—Sur un portrait de Valerio Adami (More than one title: Jacques Derrida—about a portrait by Valerio Adami), Jean-Luc Nancy reflects on Jacques Derrida's notion of self-portrait in a manner that finds itself before an aporia, the two branches of which are the who and the what. Jean-Luc Nancy notes that Jacques Derrida [End Page 4] writes that if what we call a self-portrait depends on the fact of calling it a "self-portrait," then an act of naming should allow me, justly entitle me, to call what ever, and why not, whom ever, self-portrait: for...