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ANOTHER POSSIBILITY
by
CATHERINE MALABOU
Universit de Paris X-Nanterre
ABSTRACT
We try to explore here the Derridean concept of possibility. Such a concept has no
contraries. It does not oppose eectivity or necessity, or even impossibility, but stays
what it is in any case: possible. Trying to negate it or to contradict it only leads to
denial. To Derrida, this strange status of possibility is addressed as the question of faith
as such, as it appears in Faith and Knowledge. Every belief is always, at its foundation, belief in the possibility of a completely dierent history altogether, in what Derrida
calls the utterly other chance. Is deconstruction the legible form of this otherness?
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Denegation is there, taken away and given at the same time, in the
manner in which this question inevitably resounds, like an irreducible
solicitation of thought by itself, in the manner in which this question
resounds without being able to be asked. The question of the absolute
(tout) other origin is a question that insists, digs, goes beyond the actual
event (vnement eectif ), gives it a surplus of the possible, insists by
repeating it, by repeating to itself that it cannot be asked. Inevitable
as a question, impossible as a question, necessary as a question. Denegation would name this yes and this no in question within the question.
The other opportunity is undeniable. It is for this reason that we
can, that we must, give it credit. Perhaps this opportunity could be
the impossibility to go beyond, further than denegation, to saturate it
or to suture the origin by a pressure that, while rendering it possible,
would not concede to it; it could perhaps be this impossibility of return
to the origin that would liberate, negatively, the trust in the wholly other
origin, in which we cannot but believe. The secret of the other opportunity seals the indissoluble alliance between faith and denegation.
The new orientation of Derridas interrogation logically leads him
in his nal texts to pursue his explanation with what is now called
negative theology. This motif of denegation, does it not lead one to
elaborate from a new form of apophatic discourse? If it is thus clear
that deconstruction seems to return to this rhetoric of negative determination in an insistent and regular fashion, endlessly multiplying the
cautionary apophatic warnings: this, which is called X (for example,
the text, the writing, the trace, the dirance, the hymen, the supplement,
the pharmakon, the paragon, etc.), it is neither this nor that, neither
sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither within
nor without, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive,
neither present nor absent, not even neutral.13 it is necessary that
Derrida explains this new proximity with negative theology which, to
avoid being merely apparent, must nonetheless be denounced in so far
as it is the mask of an irreducible gap.
The thinker recognizes well the necessity of a certain recourse to
the apophatic, i.e., to a modality of the negative, to speak of faith . . .
and to speak plainly, if it is true that every act of speech is only possible starting from an advantage (un crdit), an alliance which unites
the speaker to the listener. But far from accusing the shortcomings
of discourse in relation to what it designates (the essence or the
hyper-essentiality of God), this modality of the negative (it is not this,
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this caseits your motherhe cannot manage to make her present to the subject; he makes her come back denied, in other words
as a pure possibility. Its your mother, says the analyst, but since
the patient does not admit it, the mother does not become actual, but
she remains probable. It is possible, the patient retorts, but you are
the one who said it. Neither present, nor absent. Simply possible
negatively possible. She saves herself indenitely. Besides, the possible
would be exactly thatthat which, simply suggested by the other, keeps
itself on the ontological reserve, without the statute of being there.
That which remains on the threshold of being Freud calls the repressed.
Thus the denied object is not reduced to the statute of nonbeing
but quite thrown out of being. It is excluded from the register of
beings. The repressed, the denied, is rejected from presence. It remains
endlessly possible.
Such a possible is not a negation of the eective, neither is it an
armation of the impossible. Without being reduced to armation,
the negative possible is not the expression of any lack or decit. It is
witness to a power or to an aptitude of the negative that neither arms
itself nor subtracts itself (ni ne se manque). This strange possibility is thus
dened by Freud as the state of that which must not be made present. The
possible corresponds to an interdiction of presence.
Derrida takes up this understanding of the possible, made clear by
the problematic of denegation, and clearly connects it with the
philosophical question to which it is irreducibly connected: the question
of the absolute other origin. Denegation, whose meanderings and modalities
are multiple, would be governed by the fundamental motif of the other
possibility.
Derridas oeuvre in its entirety can be read as the most scrupulous,
the most audacious attempt to legitimize the question of the wholly
other opportunity: the right of this question resides in its undeniable
character. This theme is clearly present in the very rst texts, to which
the commentary on the thought of Levinas, developed in Violence et
mtaphysique, attests in particular. Derrida recognizes as undeniable the
Levinasian dream of a dispossession, of a de-motivation of the philosophical tradition in the name of the other in Greek, of the other of
the Greek source and of its German reappropriation. Violence et mtaphysique characterizes this other as the ultra-logical aect of speech:
Interpolation of Greek by the non-Greek from the depth of a silence,
of an ultra-logical aect of speech, of a question which can only be
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said by forgetting itself in the language of the Greeks; which in forgetting itself, can only be said in the languages of the Greeks. Strange
dialogue between speech and silence.17 And further: The question
has already begun, we know it and this strange certitude concerning
another absolute origin, another absolute decision, keeping the past of
the question in mind, liberates an incommensurable teaching: the discipline of the question.18
The later texts emphasize the importance of this discipline. And
so, a text like Foi et savoir gives the problem of the wholly other
origin a fundamental importance. It turns this problem into the
very origin of faith, as we can see in this decisive passage: The
gap between the opening of possibility (as a universal structure) and
the determined necessity of this or that religion will always remain irreducible; and sometimes within each religion, between, on the one hand,
what keeps it closest to its own pure possibility and, on the other, its
own necessities or authorities determined by history. It is thus that we
can always criticize, reject, or combat this or that form of sacredness
or belief, even of religious authority, in the name of the most originary [originaire] possibility. This one can be universal (faith or trustworthiness, good faith as a condition of testimony, of the social tie and
even of the most radical kind of questioning) or already particular, for
example the belief in some original event of revelation, of promise or
injunction, like in the reference to the Commandments, to primitive
Christianity, to some fundamental speech or writing, more archaic and
pure than the clerical or theological discourse. But it seems impossible to deny possibility in the name of which, thanks to which derived
necessity (determined authority or belief ) would nd itself put in question, suspended, rejected or criticized, even deconstructed. We cannot
[on ne peut pas] deny it, which means we can at best go so far as to
deny it. Thus the discourse that we would use to oppose this would
always cede to the gure or the logic of denegation. Such would be
the place where, before and after the enlightenments of the world,
reason, criticism, science, tele-techno science, philosophy, thought in
general keeps the same resources as religion in general.19
Let us recall the general context of the analysis: Why is the phenomenon of the return of the religious, which marks itself today by
a violent resurgence of the religious questionfanaticism, extreme
orthodoxy, fundamentalismso dicult to think, in other words, to
understand and criticize at the same time?
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This universal religion is the other name for faith in justice and
democracy. It characterizes itself by an openness towards the arrival of
the other. This openness to the other characterizes the messianic or
messianicity (messianicit ) without messianism (messianisme). It would
be the openness to the future or to the arrival of the other as the
coming of justice, but without a horizon of expectation and without
prophetic preguration. The coming of the other cannot arise as a
singular event except where no anticipation can see coming, where the
other and deathand true evilcan surprise at any given instant.24
The messianic points to a faith without dogmas that inhabits
every act of language and every act of addressing the other, which
is postulated every time I open myself to the other and show some
trust (conance) that I have or would like to have in him, a trust (conance)
that I have or would like to have in the event of the encounter or
the future of the community. Yetand here we begin to approach
the motif of denegationthis faith is, in its possibility, more originary
than any act of confessional faith, more than any adhesion to a historically-determined religion. This faith or this act of trust (crdit) is in
some way prior to history, utterly originary (arche-originary), for it makes
a sign, beyond the historical event of revelation, towards revealability
itself. Here Derrida interrogates, in the name of this strange faith, a
surplus or supplement of origin that exceeds the logic of history that
it has nevertheless opened and to which it does not belong. This
surplus, which no determined religion can understand, would coincide
precisely with the possibility of the wholly other opportunity (la tout
autre chance).
This surplus, then, is a place, the place, that at the same time is
atopical (atopique), that is to say, without place, without possible
localization. It is the pure possibility of the place that gives rise without itself occupying a space, without taking care of its own space. A
location we can only reach by the detour of a certain via negativa. This
place without location eects thought ultra-logically by shying away,
since the wholly other origin or the wholly other opportunity did not
take place (donnent lieu) and might never take place. They give rise (lieu),
they can give rise, but they themselves do not present themselves and
will not present themselves. Thus we can only speak of them apophatically, by summoning gures of aporia. In Foi et savoir, Derrida names
four of these gures: the island, the promised land, the desert, and khora.
The text called Comment ne pas parler already insists on the desertic
character, radically ahuman and atheological, of this place.25 The
place of the wholly other possibility uproots the tradition of the place,
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whether this word is understood in the temporal sense (tradition of the taking place [avoir lieu] as an event) or in the spatial sense
(the tradition of the topic, of the place of discourse, and of the situation
that which takes place is there). Thus the desert names the place of the
abstraction of the place, the place where the place loses its proper
trace, according to the paradox that has it that the foundation of the
lawthe law of the law, the institution of the institution, the origin
of the constitution[be] a performative event that cannot belong to
the whole that it founds, inaugurates or justies. Such an event is
unjustiable in the logic of what it will have opened. It is the decision
of the other in the undecidable.26 The desert, or desert in the desert,
is thus the paradoxical site of rootingthe foundation of tradition
where the root is at the same time torn from itself, swallowed up by
the source of all radicality. Between the root and the source, the distance of absolute alterity opens itself.
This place is a place of innite resistance, impassive. Like the
khra of the Timaeus, it is an-archical and un-archivable (an-archivable),
without age and without history. Khra is nothing, Derrida says; but
this nothing does not even announce itself as beyond being (au-del
de ltre); it is not reappropriable (rappropriable), even by negative
theology, for it does not make a sign towards an essence: Nothing
arrives by it [khra] and nothing happens to it.27 Khra, he adds,
remains absolutely unmoved [impassible] and heterogeneous to all the
processes of historical revelation or of anthropo-theological experience,
which nonetheless supposes its abstraction.28 But this reserve and this
abstraction that resists as promise, as excess of possibility, are in fact
sources of faith, faith in the wholly other opportunity: the opportunity
of this desert in the desert . . . is that by uprooting the tradition that
carries it, by atheologizing it, this abstraction liberates, without denying
faith, a universal rationality and political democracy which is inseparable
from it.29
It is now possible to take into account the logic of denegation that
upholds such a discourse. The place of the wholly other possibility,
of the wholly other opportunity, is nothing, we have just seen; it
resists without being, without having the time or the history; it is from
before time, from before history, without being able to situate this
lead, whether chronologically, logically, or ontologically. It, then, is
neither a principle nor an origin nor an event. It has nothing to do
with an instance but rather reveals itself in the play of an instance
(here we can speak neither of being nor of manifestation) whose force
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that in fact Derrida is always speaking from the Testamentary tradition, which he never pretended to do otherwise. The gap that he
attempts to analyze, between possibility and determined necessity, does
not situate itself beyond religion but opens itself within ( mme)
historically-determined religion. Not surprising then that we can decipher
its path, already, in this or that tradition. There is always more than
one source.30
A third objection could raise the question of knowing if what Derrida
names faith, tolerance, trust (crdit), messianic, etc., truly has a connection
with faith or with religionif it has to do with a misuse of language
or not: faith is faith and not a subtle disguise of a form of atheism or
a ruse on the part of reason, of a counterfeit of faith. To answer this
objection would be to show that one cannot delimit a domain of
authentic faith without having faith in this authenticity itself, otherwise
said: unless one has faith in faith. This duciary reexivity, this reexivity
of faith, is made possible by an originary act of belief in faith itself
that does not confuse itself completely with the object of faith. It is
this gap that is given the name of possibility, or decision of the other.
It would probably be possible to multiply the eects of denegation on
denegation, that is to say, of the undeniable. They would come up
against the implacable logic of Derridas argumentation. The undeniable
can only be denied. It is in the name of undeniable possibility that
determined or derived necessity can be deconstructed. Thus, as it has
been shown as early as Of Grammatology, in considering writing as that
which has been derived from the gaze of speech (la parole), metaphysics
had at the same time repressed the supplement, in other words, rst
and foremost the possibility of the supplement of origin and of the
wholly other possibility.
The tie that unites possibility and denegation is structural. The
possiblethat which must not come into presenceis the very indentation (echancrure) of the future. Denying always demands an act of faith,
which I would dene as faith in another possible beginning, in another
source. As soon as I deny, that is to say, as soon as I deny the evidence,
I postulate, without being able to arm it, that everything could have
been otherwise, that everything could have happened dierently.
Denegation liberates the negative possibility of another history/story
(histoire). The negative possible, the state of that which must not be
made present, is the question that cannot be asked and that, at the
same time, can only be asked. It is this too that we cannot not hold
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