Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Crossings: An Interview
with Peggy Kamuf
DAWNE MCCANCE
DM The occasion for this interview is significant: you are in Winnipeg on the sec-
ond day of October 2008 to give a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer address at
the University of Manitoba. You hold the Marion Frances Chevalier Chair of
French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California,
and I am assuming that you will have something to say about literature, per-
haps also comparative literature, in your Distinguished Lecture tonight. In any
case, as I drove down here this morning, I was thinking about Derrida saying
that we cannot treat “literature” as a proper name. What do you take this to
mean?
PK Well, first of all, thank you very much. I am really delighted to be here. It is
beautiful in Winnipeg, a lovely day. I took a walk this morning down by the
river and, on my first visit here, I am looking forward to seeing more.
To come to your question: first of all, as Derrida has frequently pointed out,
“literature” is a very recent designation for what is now a limited kind of writ-
ing, a certain kind of writing. It is basically in early-nineteenth-century Europe
that the term, in the use that we still give it, is put in place and instituted, which
means that “literature” refers to a very specific historical and cultural institu-
tion and so, of course, we should be careful when we use the term not to treat
it as if it were a proper name. For one thing, the term belongs only to a certain
number of languages, which are Latinate languages: literature is a Latinate
word. It belongs to particular cultures, histories, and institutions that we’ve
become accustomed to, but a certain practice of reading texts according to a lit-
erary dispensation does not belong to that proper history, name, institution.
That would be my first gambit with the question.
DM In that you have asked for photocopies of the text, I know that you plan to
make reference in your lecture tonight to Kafka’s story “Before the Law.” In a
way, I think you cite that story at the opening of your book The Division of
Literature: Or the University in Deconstruction where, having just cited Derrida,
you write that we now find ourselves before the two uprights of a palace gate,
the two uprights of what would be a university foundation, the foundation that
must be interrogated and made new. Do you think literature has a specific role
to play in this interrogation of university foundations?
PK I had forgotten about that image in “The University Founders,” which is the
first chapter of The Division of Literature. I don’t believe I was thinking of
Kafka’s parable at the time, but that little matters. You are right, it does echo
Kafka’s story, being before the gate, before the portal, the door, and of course
behind that door there is another door, and then another door. But as to your
question: yes! Literature has a central role to play in interrogating the univer-
sity, which is what I was essentially doing in that book. Literature—as what I
call “division,” which plays on two senses of that word, both as a kind of gath-
ering, a division set aside within a larger organization, but also what divides, a
place of division—literature, I argue, has always had a very uneasy relation to
the fundamental mission of the modern scientific university: the search for
knowledge, as we write in our promotional brochures and as we put it repeat-
edly in our slogans, the preservation and search for new knowledge. Literature
is not unrelated to new knowledge, but its modes of discovery and invention
are unlike, or work differently from, what apparently goes on in the sciences,
Peggy Kamuf 229
DM I am interested in a number of things that come out of what you have just said.
In the history of the modern research university, as you know, literature has had
to compromise with philosophy. As late as Heidegger, literature, poetry, is still
having to “give way,” to yield to the concept and to philosophy. The sort of over-
seer role that philosophy has assumed in the research university—the university
as a philosophical, as much as a scientific, institution—seems to be compro-
230 Mosaic 50/1 (March 2017)
PK I think, yes, this is the case, although there are many ways that the university
does not tolerate this change. Despite all of our talk about interdisciplinarity,
there is some intolerance, even a lot of intolerance, of transgressions of the divi-
sion between literature and philosophy. Although I don’t believe we want to get
into the ways in which philosophy has coagulated into (according to some) dif-
ferent kinds of totally incompatible modes of thinking, still it is fair to observe
that deconstructive thought is not welcomed, and this is putting it mildly, by all
forms of philosophical instruction in the university. But in answer to your ques-
tion, yes. Indeed, the chapter you referred to in The Division of Literature takes
off from Derrida’s text on the conflict of the faculties, Kant’s essay The Conflict
of the Faculties, where Kant gives a curious description of the relation between
the faculty of philosophy, which he puts below the faculties of theology and law,
if I remember correctly, and yet he says that it is the faculty of philosophy that
basically oversees, as you put it, the whole university. I think that odd descrip-
tion, in which philosophy is both a “lower” faculty and yet above the “higher”
faculties, is in many ways still operative. But we also have to remember that
Kant’s idea of “the faculties”—the “university,” if you will—corresponds essen-
tially to the still classical rather than the modern university. What Kant calls the
“faculty of philosophy” would have to encompass what today we know as “the
humanities,” thus literary studies. Of course, this has a very long history; Kant
does not invent the quarrel between the philosopher and the poet. The way in
which that quarrel was determined or decided very early on, and has never been
re-adjudicated, has given us our whole idea of the university. You have the dis-
ciplines of fact, the sciences, and then you have these other pursuits, and it is
almost too much even to call these other pursuits—the arts—disciplines. When
it is a matter of teaching a technique as in studio art or music, that is one thing,
Peggy Kamuf 231
but what do literary studies do, how do they fit? The only truth they can teach
or tell is about fictions, and what is the value of that? As I said, that quarrel was
adjudicated very early on, with Plato, and then the judgment has been left more
or less in place. Heidegger certainly does attempt, and more than attempt, to
understand poetry and philosophy, or rather, as he puts it, Dichten und Denken,
as parallel tracks that are crossing, interfering with each other. On the Origin of
the Work of Art situates poetry as the supreme art, the essence of art. But I think
that others, such as Derrida and Blanchot (certainly not without Heidegger’s
push), have gone further. First of all in their own writing, in the experience of
writing itself. And, of course, that is where Derrida’s early work begins, with a
generalization of the writing experience and thus with a displacement of the
idea of writing as representation of living speech, which is itself representation
of the idea, the whole Platonic schema of this double remove from the realm of
the purely intelligible, unchanging idea. With Derrida, there is not simply a
reversal of this schema, but its displacement in writing or as writing, meaning
not just what I can trace on paper or on a pixelated screen but the spacing out
of differences, the interference of values and differences that are crossing with
each other, stabilizing but also destabilizing meanings. This movement is not
just historical, it is also the possibility of what is called history. So we’re not talk-
ing about only the space or the spacing of written texts, in the ordinary sense.
DM I am going to ask you about your work as a translator, which is without parallel.
As a translator, I think, you are reading and writing with effects—I may even be
quoting you here, I don’t know—you are reading and writing with effects that
both limit and multiply chance and indetermination and the very singularity of
texts. Is that something I can say? Might I use the word singularity in talking
about translation? Is translation a work that touches the singularity of a text?
PK It has to.
DM It has to?
come from reading Derrida first of all, more recently Cixous, and then trans-
lating what I am reading because a translator is a reader, first and foremost, and
his or her thought, his or her writing, is everywhere engaging with what we
commonly or not so commonly call translation. I think one could safely say
that every text of Derrida’s touches on translation, pushes against the expecta-
tions that what he is doing is translatable, in the ordinary sense. For example,
a text you know well, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is all about translation. It is all about
getting at the metaphysical notion of writing through the standard idea of
translation, the standard idea that is put in place, has to be put in place, in
exactly the same way, with the same moves, every time. You may recall that
early on in that long essay Derrida declares, and it is very significant: “With this
problem of translation we will be dealing with nothing less than the passage
into philosophy” (71-72).
But to come to your question about singularity: the singular is what has the
force to pull the universal, however slightly, into its orbit, if I can put it that
way. Of course we must all agree with Wittgenstein when he asserts that there
is no such thing as a private language, that such a thing would be a contradic-
tion in terms, that an absolutely singular, one-time-only, meaning event could
not mean anything, as language. There is language only if there is the possibil-
ity of meaning for another, a meaning that is repeatable. This is what Derrida
calls iterability: in order to signify, the mark or sign must be iterable by an
other, which is always also oneself, oneself as an other. This is why singularity
can be understood as the possibility of a kind of swerve, or marking, that
imposes a swerve on the universal, if I can say that, but that is also thereby and
at the same time forced into a common space of iterability. Which is to say that
the singular, the absolutely singular, in order to mark itself as singular, has to be
given up or has to be taken over, has to let itself be marked by the universal, to
use that short hand.
To bring this back to translation, what the translator does, first of all and
above all, is destroy the singular idiom of the source text. The translator stomps
all over the other’s idiom, necessarily—that is what is demanded and expected
of a translation. But of course it cannot do that, or it should not do that, with-
out leaving traces in its idiom of the singular marks it is conveying. When I am
translating a text of Derrida’s, I am often very aware that he was thinking about
the translator as he wrote, and indeed he frequently says that. He says things
like “how are they going to translate this,” “how is one going to translate” some
expression or word or usage whose idiomatic potential he is exploiting. At such
Peggy Kamuf 233
it a work. For a signature is always the signature of a work and vice versa; we call
a work that which bears a signature. There is plenty of writing, all kinds of texts,
that are not works, or they are not works until they are countersigned, which is
something I try to get across to students: I tell them, “You are the one making the
work a work, with your reading, with your writing, with your countersigning. Do
not go only by what you know has already been said about it, you don’t have to.”
PK Certainly, yes.
DM You have talked about œuvre and the distinction between œuvre and work. Can
you say something about this?
PK That’s an interesting question, and I am not sure how to approach it. Does psy-
choanalysis give us other modes of receiving or recognizing œuvres? Yes, cer-
tainly, because for one thing, the notion of the signature is altogether revised
once one must admit the signifying—signing—force of unconscious desire. So
who or what is it that signs a work? But we could also come back to something
you said earlier about how you recognize the deconstructive thrust in a certain
destabilization of differences among what are called philosophy, literature, or
theory. I would add psychoanalysis into that mix. Many have shown, after Lacan,
after Freud, the importance of thinking among all of those distinctions, and have
drawn heavily, deeply, on psychoanalytic concepts to say new things about liter-
ature, reading, writing, as well as about psychoanalysis; they have dug out of the
pages of Freud’s work a lot of material for poetic thinking. A good example here
would be the work of Nicholas Royle on telepathy as a principle of literary nar-
ration or on the uncanny as an essentially literary experience. His book The
Uncanny doesn’t just take off from Freud’s essay of that name, but takes off and
comes back, reads it more probingly than anyone else has done, and then takes
off again in surprising directions, but perhaps not so surprising once one has
unpacked, with Freud’s help, which is not always deliberate, thus his inadvertent
indications in that essay and elsewhere about the “uncanny.” What are the char-
acteristics of the uncanny? One of the things Nick does, which is also very funny,
is to list in the initial paragraph of that book all of the different things that Freud
designates as “uncanny” in the course of his thirty-five-or-so-page essay. The list
includes death, the double, being buried alive, intellectual uncertainty, confusion
between the mechanical and the living, and on, and on, and on. In other words,
the category of uncanny experiences proliferates very uncannily!
So yes, psychoanalysis is an enormous source for thinking about literature
(and thus about everything else), with its reasoning from a relation to the
unconscious, unconsciousness, or the non-conscious, and therefore to a fun-
damental otherness, which is clearly its importance for so many thinkers like
Derrida, who draws immensely on psychoanalysis. He does not draw on its
conceptual scheme so much as on its principles of reading and interpretation.
After all, texts are dreams; dreams are texts.
236 Mosaic 50/1 (March 2017)
DM Now that is important! You know, as to my earlier question, I think right where
Derrida says that we cannot treat literature as a proper name, he also says that
we cannot treat psychoanalysis as proper name. Perhaps that is in the “Mes
Chances” essay.
PK The first thing I would say is that Derrida really demands and wants to be read
in ways that he could not himself predict or anticipate. He says somewhere in
Glas that what is really interesting about what is going on there is that somewhere
he does not know what he is doing. What he wants people to read is what he can-
not read on his own. I believe this is true of everyone: everyone desires a coun-
tersignature. So when Derrida says “reads me down right to the unconscious,” I
think he would say that about all who have read his work in a manner that coun-
tersigns, all those who have taken on that responsibility of reading, which is not
pure license. One is not given license to say anything whatsoever, and there is no
permission to disregard your best adequation of someone’s intent in a text. That
has been a very large and idiotic misunderstanding about Derrida’s thought,
namely that it dispenses with intent or intention. What this grotesque caricature
wants to avoid coming to terms with is the idea that language and writing work,
say things, and cause things to come to the readable surface that the figure of the
conscious intention of the writer can never fully encompass. I believe Derrida the
writer is far more aware than just about anyone of what his own writing is up to,
but there are always other possibilities being awakened. This is what Freud and
psychoanalysis authorize us to engage with as readers, writers, and students of
texts. Along with a clinical practice, a mode of therapy, and a mode of analysis of
cultural phenomena, psychoanalysis is perhaps most fruitful today as a theoriza-
tion of reading. That is why, as we were saying last night, Freud is read most often
today in university literature departments.
Peggy Kamuf 237
DM What about resistance, what is it? What is resistance? This is the question you
ask in your introduction to Without Alibi, a wonderful introduction.
PK Exactly, yes, but they are things that are on the periphery. I think one has to
beware of the model of manifest and latent, to use the terms with which Freud
describes the dream content and the dream work, the depth model that contrasts
what is on the surface and is manifest or visible with what is buried, hidden, has
to be dug out. With a written text, one has only surface, so that at least in the sense
of geometric space, there is no hidden depth. Although we talk about layers and
about things being hidden, nevertheless, nothing is hidden that is not also show-
ing itself on the surface in some fashion. Which is why, paradoxically, literature
is so secretive, because it has to keep its secrets in the open like so many purloined
letters. But still it is a very differentiated surface that we are dealing with when we
read. One has to look not just for what words and sentences are meaning; one
can’t go after simply meaning, although of course we are always dealing with
meaning. But one has also, for example, to break down words and look for the
repetition of phonemes and sounds, according to a poetic principle. Derrida
238 Mosaic 50/1 (March 2017)
wrote an amazing book called Glas according to the principle of repetition of the
“gl-” syllable, its strangled sound, which spurts and gets stuck in the throat, a
strangling in the throat of what is not yet a word, stuck on its way to being a word
and therefore meaning. There is something that another may make sense of, but
it is not yet sense. It is something stuck in the body, in the glottis. Such pieces,
fragments, or shards of not-yet-language remain available to readers everywhere.
It’s just that we have been taught to pay no attention to them, so as to get quickly
to meaning. That is how you learn to read, you take the phonemes, the letters, the
sounds, and combine them into words, and then you match the words to a pic-
ture, in order to arrive at the word-sense. That is how you are taught to read, that
is how you have to be taught to read, otherwise you cannot read [laughs]!
DM One of the terms I think students (and not only students) have difficulty with
is “event.” How do you talk with your students about “event,” and the relation
between “event” and “machine”?
PK Yes, the idea of event in Derrida’s work. I mean that was how I limited it [laughs].
I laugh because event is such a pervasive idea throughout all of Derrida’s work,
but we could also have read Lyotard, Badiou, Deleuze, and that’s staying only
within French thought. But you know the problem, you have only one brief
semester, you have to limit things, so I chose to read and work only with texts by
Derrida. It is something I had been thinking about ever since I wrote the intro-
duction to Without Alibi, which I titled “Event of Resistance.” You perhaps have
had the experience in which an idea can be there, even very prominently there,
in your understanding or your knowledge, and yet it does not really come into
focus at all. When I was working on that book, and particularly, once again, “The
University Without Condition” but also “Typewriter Ribbon,” the text on de
Man, for the first time (and I am embarrassed to say this) the importance of
Derrida’s thinking of event came into a certain focus for me. Perhaps it was
because I translated these texts and, working at that really close level, one is
forced to pay attention to things at both the micro and macro levels.
The way it came most clearly into focus was through the distinction Derrida
makes between the performative and the event or, if you will, between a perfor-
mative event—event as performative, performative as event—and event in
Peggy Kamuf 239
another sense, in a sense beyond the performative, beyond or before the perfor-
mative. This has been a consistent critique that, ever since “Signature Event
Context,” Derrida has made of Austin’s notion of the performative and of the
notion of the speech act as accomplished by a first person in the present, using
conventional language, in an authorized situation. These are components of the
felicitousness, as Austin calls it, of the performative, and they make the event of
the felicitous speech act an effect of the cause that is the conscious, intentional
subject. The felicitous performative is thus a possible event, an event that is
already possible, and when it happens, it happens as the fulfillment or realization
of a known possibility. Performative “events” are possible, entirely possible. They
happen every day, all the time. But when what happens is possible, then, in the
sense Derrida insists on, there is no event. To be possible as something other than
the unfolding of already known possibilities, an event must be im-possible. I’ve
just now given an example of the very paradoxical syntax of im-possibility that
Derrida worked out most thoroughly, perhaps, in the title essay in Psyche:
Inventions of the Other. The event is impossible, beyond the horizon of known
possibilities, but also insofar as it cannot fall within the power of any subject to
produce, effect, or authorize it with an “I may,” “I can,” “I do,” “I will.” It helps to
bring French into the picture because the links are made clearer there among
“possibility,” “power,” and the first-person singular je peux, from the verb pouvoir,
to have the power, to be able, which also gives us the common noun le pouvoir,
power. This thinking of event at the limits of the performative has direct links to
Derrida’s work on sovereignty, the power of the sovereign instance, which he was
developing most fully in his last seminars but that is also clearly in evidence in
“The University Without Condition” in Without Alibi.
So we spent a semester thinking about event and yes, it was very interesting.
PK “Yes” is the short answer. In that essay you just referred to, Derrida is essentially
arguing with Heidegger, with Heidegger in the positive sense—I mean not sim-
240 Mosaic 50/1 (March 2017)
ply against Heidegger but with Heidegger’s very fundamental thinking about
ontological difference. He does this in part by remarking small details in the
texts he is talking about, in particular in the seminar that Heidegger gave right
after the publication of Being and Time, in 1928, the “Marburg seminar.” In it,
Heidegger says that Dasein is neutral, adding immediately that this neutrality
is “first of all” or “above all” not sexual neutrality. He does not mean by this that
Dasein is sexualized, but rather that its neutrality is of a different order. So
Heidegger means to set aside or subordinate the whole question of sexual dif-
ference. In other words, ontological difference precedes, grounds, or has to be
thought before sexual difference. Sexual difference is secondary, it is an ontic,
Heidegger would say, rather than an ontological difference. What Derrida
points out is that even in order to say that, Heidegger must acknowledge,
although inadvertently and through a negation, that this has to be asserted,
that it is not self-evident. He also points out how Heidegger’s gesture ends up
repeating and reinforcing, despite the radicalness of his critique of meta-
physics, a gesture that has been fundamental throughout the history of Western
philosophy and of Western philosophers, which is the secondarization of sex-
ual difference, which has always meant the presumed secondarity of the femi-
nine. So I think, yes, that essay, above all, is where Derrida, in what seems to be
the most fundamental place that one can take up the question that you just
asked, shows that sexual difference is always originally in play in any difference.
PK I would begin by picking up from the phrase you just used: “telling the truth.”
This is idiomatic English: we say “to tell the truth,” we don’t often say “to say
the truth” or “to speak the truth,” although no doubt you would be understood
if you did, but more idiomatically we say “to tell the truth,” just as we also speak
of telling lies, telling tales, or telling stories. The act of telling implies a narra-
tive act, and the narrative may well be fictional story. To be sure, not all narra-
tives are what we call fiction, but neither are all narratives testimony. Most
Peggy Kamuf 241
telling the truth, I believe him when he says he is telling the truth, or I don’t.
Because of course he could be lying, making up a story, or perhaps simply mis-
taken about what actually happened. He could be lying even when he swears to
tell the truth, that is, he could be withholding his full intent in swearing the
oath. It would be like what we used to do as kids, crossing our fingers behind
our backs when we promised something. All testimony rests on belief and this
belief is irreducible. That is to say, we never get to a point beyond belief, or if
we do, then we are no longer dealing with testimony, but with what is called
proof. I’m relying here, as usual, on Derrida’s analysis of testimony, and I would
say that that analysis places a lot of caution around our notion of proof. It sug-
gests that we are never simply outside the realm or regime of belief, perhaps not
even in the conduct of the hardest of hard sciences. But as regards what we call
testimony, this is not a radical or difficult idea. It is even common sense, when
you think about it and when you consider what is happening when someone
swears to tell the truth—explicitly or implicitly—and then proceeds to bear
witness. To recognize that the value of testimony depends upon someone’s
belief is neither hard to understand, nor is it scandalous at all.
What has largely happened, however, is a kind of bracketing in the ways tes-
timony is received, treated, or utilized, which tends to close the gap of belief.
And it is a gap! I think that it is better to go more slowly, to keep the gap open
in some way, or at least to acknowledge it, not so that we are constantly skepti-
cal about everything, questioning everything, but so that we may assume our
beliefs as such and take responsibility for them as beliefs. I can affirm my belief
but I can only affirm it as belief, I cannot affirm it as certainty, knowledge, or
proof. Rather, if I affirm, assume my belief, I do so knowing I may be wrong, I
may be proved wrong, and I may be forced by other testimonies to recant my
belief. It is rare that a belief is irreversible—well, maybe not so rare—because
it certainly happens that one has to revise one’s beliefs. What probably is rare,
though, is that one arrives at a certainty simply out of belief. Such insistence on
the language of belief or believing is perhaps unsettling in the post-
Enlightenment world that we are supposed to inhabit, in which belief has been
largely conflated with religious belief or faith in religious ideology. What may
be unsettling is the idea of a faith or belief regime, as I call it sometimes, all
across the board, religious belief being merely one form.
WORKS CITED
Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1981. Print.
_____ . Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Print.
Kamuf, Peggy. Book of Addresses. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Print.
_____ . “Composition Displacement.” MLN 121.4 (2006): 872-92. Print.
_____ . The Division of Literature: Or the University in Deconstruction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
Print.
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Print.
DR. PEGGY KAMUF has written extensively on the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and
Jean-Luc Nancy and translated a number of their texts. Book of Addresses (2005) gathers essays on
fictionality, sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and literary theory around the figure of the address
of speech and writing and To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida (2010) collects ten years of her
writings on Derrida. She has also edited several collections of work by Derrida: A Derrida Reader:
Between the Blinds (1991), Without Alibi (2002), and Psyche: Inventions of the Other (2007). She is
a co-editor of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida series at the University of Chicago Press and is a
member of the editorial board of Oxford Literary Review.