Derrida is hard to follow.
To begin a text with a sentence like that is, of course, to follow Derrida: to follow in his footsteps by finding an incipit that, shorn of context, proffers an undecidable choice of meanings, and which, moreover, stages the very issue the text is to take up. To follow in this sense is to redeploy a machine that someone else has invented, as Derrida demonstrates in "Psyche" by varying Ponge's opening line "With the word with commences then this text" as "At the word at commences then this text," adding, "There would be other regulated variants, at greater or lesser distances from the model, that I do not have the time to note here." But this possibility of variation does not simply follow an invention, it constitutes the invention as an invention, by means of an achronological logic that we see everywhere at work in Derrida, a logic which does not allow for a simple process of following. If you follow this logic as you read Derrida, it becomes hard not to follow him, hard not to repeat him in your own thinking and writing – testimony, if testimony were needed, to the inventiveness of his texts. Yet to follow Derrida by repeating, by following out the logic of his inventions, is not to follow Derrida in the sense of writing as he writes: for he does not merely repeat what he reads, but invents afresh. So to truly follow Derrida, you have to be inventive too, to provide a singular counter-signature to testify to his singular inventiveness. For an invention not only makes a formula available for variations, it makes further inventions possible, though not easy. In this sense, Derrida is hard to follow. It is hard to follow Derrida – to come after him, to write in his wake – because it is hard to follow him – to think and write in a way that does justice to his thought and writing – because it is so easy to follow him – to repeat his inventions without inventiveness. If the text I am writing now simply follows out some variations on Derrida's inventions – such as his ambiguous and self-referring incipits – it is nothing but an effect of those inventions (albeit a constituting effect); if it achieves inventiveness itself, it does justice to the inventiveness of those inventions. Of course, which of these it does emerges not in itself, but in the thoughts and utterances that might follow it.
To follow Derrida might also mean to pursue him, to be "after" him in the third of the three senses so brilliantly teased out by Nick Royle in After Derrida, to find him always further on when one reaches a place he has been. In this sense, too, it is hard to follow Derrida because it is easy to follow him: he lures you on, but just when you think you have caught up with him, you find him further on, still inviting, still promising.
I follow Derrida in saying "Derrida is hard to follow," then, though I fail to follow him too. I also frequently fail to follow him whenever I read him, read those texts, try to respond to those events. There must be very few readers of Derrida who have not said to themselves while engaged with a work of his: this is hard to follow. Most of the time, no doubt, this is because they – we – are not reading carefully enough; or we are reading translations based on careless readings. (When I began on the work of editing Acts of Literature, I had no intention of revising existing translations, but I found many instances where, in reading through a translation and finding a sentence that was hard to follow, turning to the French text solved the problem immediately.) But there are moments when it is difficult not to feel that the way is deliberately blocked, that no amount of careful reading would enable us to follow. These can be very powerful moments. One of my favorites is the ending of "Aphorism Countertime," which also serves, appropriately, as the end of Acts of Literature:
The absolute aphorism: a proper name. Without genealogy, without the least copula. End of drama. Curtain. Tableau (The Two Lovers United in Death by Angelo dall'Oca Bianca). Tourism, December sun in Verona ("Verona by that name is known"). A true sun, the other ("The sun for sorrow will not show his head").
Turning to the French will help a little here, but not much: tableau in French conveys a transition from the theatre to painting in way that "tableau" in English doesn't, being much more rooted in the world of the stage. The end of Romeo and Juliet (quoted twice in the paragraph) presents a tableau mirrored in a painting (to be seen, presumably by visitors to Verona): but why "December sun"? An irreducibly personal memory? One that functions like a proper name, like an aphorism, like death, like the other?
I've been trying to follow Derrida for about thirty years. You would think that by now it wouldn't seem such a hard thing to do. But every new work I read throws down its challenges: both textual moments of opacity, and movements of thought into what I would have thought were no-go areas. Take the work I have read most recently: "L'animal que donc je suis" in L'animal autobiographique. (How will the title of this essay be translated into English? "Je suis" can be "I am" – a reading strengthened by the echo of Descartes' cogito in French – and "I follow." Anyone who knows the essay will know that I have been following Derrida in taking advantage of the ambiguities of the verb "to follow," even though these ambiguities work differently in French and in English.) Not only are there particular passages that baffle me, where I find it hard to follow the logic of the sentences, but I find myself balking at – hesitating to follow – the larger argument even when I have no trouble in following sentence by sentence.
I should have seen it coming, of course, and one of the things Derrida does in this essay is to show how the question of the animal, or of animality, has been surfacing in his work for a very long time. I should have paid more attention to the readings of Heidegger on animals, in Of Spirit and the 1988 interview with Jean-Luc Nancy in Who Comes after the Subject? ("after" in which sense?, I now want to ask, after Royle) – where Levinas, too, is challenged on the subject of animality. I should have remembered the startled expression on Derrida's face when, before his delivery of the lecture "Force of Law" at the Cardozo Law School in 1989, a technician testing the microphone yelled to his mate: "HEY, ANIMAL!" I should have taken more fully to heart his response to a talk I gave in Alabama in 1995, which circled around the starving cats in The Gift of Death, a response which included cogent criticism of the treatment of animals by large-scale agri-business. Indeed, I should have thought more about those cats as cats, and not just as a convenient example.
Yet it was not Derrida who finally made me face up to the question of the animal, but another writer whom I have always found ahead of me as I try to follow him: the novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee. In his case, too, there were premonitions I should have registered, notably the question he asked after a seminar paper I presented on Levinas in Cape Town in 1994: "Are you also being addressed by the face of the other when the eyes that are looking at you are those of the slaughter-ox?" As with Derrida, I had written an essay giving a central place to an animal in his work: the chained dog which Dostoevsky releases in The Master of Petersburg. But I did not acknowledge the force of the challenge that this moment and others like it in his writing offered to my long-held preconceptions until I read the two works he published last year, Lives of Animals and Disgrace. I now know I shall have to respond to these works, and to Derrida's "L'animal que donc je suis," with some kind of writing of my own (whether I publish it or not): an attempt to follow these writers that does not simply follow out the logic of what they say (which is not only a matter of logic, of course) but tries to follow them in being inventive, inventively exploring their differences from each other. (Two memories: a lunch with Jacques Derrida in Paris, who talks to me about carnophallogocentrism while eating with gusto a plate of steak tartare; a lunch with John Coetzee in Princeton, who orders a vegetarian meal before giving his first lecture on "The Lives of Animals" in which he carefully avoids stating a position of his own on the ethics of animality.) I shall have to explore, too, the resistances I feel as I read them on animals, trying to do justice to each one's singularity, to follow each one's inventiveness as faithfully as I can, which does not mean just faithfully following them.
Derrida at seventy has a huge following, which he entirely deserves. I write this short piece as one of his followers, in homage and in gratitude for what he has given me over the past thirty years. I do not expect to catch up, and I am grateful for that too.