Breaking Down “Man”: A Conversation with Avital Ronell

Breaking Down “Man”: A Conversation with Avital RonellAuthor(s): Diane DavisSource: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 47, No. 4, EXTRAHUMAN RHETORICAL RELATIONS:Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine (2014), pp. 354-385Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.47.4.0354 .

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Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Breaking Down “Man”: A Conversation with Avital Ronell

Diane Davis

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This interview with Avital Ronell, conducted by Diane Davis, explores a variety of extrahuman relations, demonstrating how the vegetal, the animal, the technologi-cal, the divine, and the dead play a significant role in the theory and practice of rhetorical relations.

Key wor ds: Anahuman, extrahuman, trans, rhetoric, address, modesty, animal,plant, technology, the dead, divine, judgment, parasite, pregnancy, friendship

Diane Davis (dd): In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler demonstrates the priority of rhetoric to ethics, noting that any giving of an account already involves the scene of address: a relational dimension of language which supersedes the account itself (2005). You demonstrate in The Telephone Book (1989) and elsewhere that you are called into being, that the call precedes you, indicating the priority of rhetoric to a certain pre-Heideggerian ontology. A major concern of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric involves the ways in which “the human” is constructed and/or deconstructed through this predicament of addressivity, particularly when the address comes in from or goes out to a nonhuman other: say, an animal, an object, the divine, or the dead or undead one. So let me just start by asking you for your thoughts about this notion of an extrahuman rhetorical relation. First, does this seem like a productive designation or a generative bloc, and if so, what might be some implications—for “the human,” for

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ethics, for rhetoric—of contemplating potential happenings or becomings at this dimly lit intersection?Avital Ronell (AR): Right, that’s simple [laughs].

dd: I thought we’d start small.ar: Okay, so—I’ll take it maybe by beginning with a sidebar or by

scoping a marginal pocket of the way you organized the question. Lately, I’ve been interested in inoccurrence and anahistory and what kind of slips by us historically or defies any kind of clear definition. Well, not just lately: I’ve always been having sidebars with those entities or nonentities or semi-or quasi phenomena that don’t get registered or don’t compute for all sorts of overdeter-mined reasons. So let me begin by suggesting a few things to help us get a handle on your questions. And one of those would be the supposition from which I’m imagining we are taking off, which is that there is a distinction to be drawn between the human and the nonhuman. Is that correct, that there’s at least a provisional distinction and boundary here?

dd: Yes, we’re operating on the perception that, despite it all—despite all the work that has been done to the contrary—such a clear dis-tinction is typically presumed in philosophy and rhetorical studies, and we’re interested in continuing to trouble and/or nuance that presumption.

ar: Right. There’s a lot of ethical push and pressure to interrogate that presumption and to tear it up. I mean, as you say it’s already so troubled and weighted with error and hubristic overreach that we really do need to look at it more closely. In the first place, in the work that I’ve been able to receive and print out—because I’m a mere transmitter—I’ve tried to explore those places where there’s contamination, where there are installations of the nonhuman, the machinic, the theological trace, the stall in, or even the stated impossibility of, constituting what counts as “the natural,” “the human.” I’m drawn to all of the overwritten areas of being that wouldn’t allow you to sort and sift in any knowing way or really claim a viable difference between “the human” and “the nonhu-man,” including installations of receptors that I tried to look at in writing on addiction and our being-on-drugs.

How is it that we already are equipped with—and “equipped” is already a term contracted from the technological dominion, so

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there’s a question already of the equip-mentality of the anthro-pos—how is it, then, that we’re already equipped with receptors for drugs? How is it that we’re already made up of all sorts of apps and calling instruments and all manner of technological ciphers and chemical command centers that require us somehow to break out of the humanist presumption? One could note in this regard a reac-tivity to self-knowledge, such as it is, inversely brought to the table as the distress and obsession at a certain historical moment with human excess, with the unintelligibility of the human: the mon-ster, forms or deformations in the apprehensively minted inven-tories of monstrosity, including schools of zombies, vampires, and other alegal aliens. All of that is a way of questioning and pushing the limits of the anthropos. Because what kind of mirroring or tac-tical displacement is taking place? What kinds of alterity already reside within the so-called human? What kind of contaminations and disruptors have found hospitality, and what runs already way beyond the way we tend to chart and map what constitutes even the neuroecology of the so-called human?

So all of that inmixation and technological “chipping in” requires critical scrutiny. One way to consider the techno-human combinatory is by example, perhaps initially moving through Star Trek, one of my generation’s favorite interspecial kinds of imagi-nary theaters, and I don’t know how many next generations still internalize or at least remember the stakes that were set up by this dramatized scene of consistent mutations and strife. Let us retrieve a chip off the old block that constituted Star Trek. For instance, I remember when I lived in San Francisco and taught at UC-Berkeley, I was especially cued into one of the films [Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)], which involves a kind of anxious and panicked tracking of a sonic signature. It takes place in San Fran-cisco, opening on a drama of trying to trace a call. There’s a great deal of static on the line, a persistently diverted itinerary of the call. They trace it only with a lot of difficulty—essentially because they made the wrong ontological assessment, a false presump-tion. A number of false starts on the axiological switchboard: they blindly seize upon familiar if not metaphysical axioms, assuming that the call has been made by a human entity, and it turns out, after a lot of circuitry, detour, deferral, and fabulous deconstruc-tive encumbrance along the way of language, that the call was put

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out by a great, gorgeous, ancient whale. (This theme in itself can be traced to all sorts of oceanic schools and tropologies—so many stories, consciously or not are swallowed up by the troubling figure of a whale.) As concerns the Star Trek film, this discovery of a nonhuman signature topples the whole narrative and hermeneutic hubris upon which the film builds its sense of urgency: all along the search they assume that they were trying to locate, as I recall, a human origin. Their locater and reading protocols actually kept on breaking down, and then we found out that it was a matter of another species entirely. I might be embellishing at this point, but the problems that I’m sure we’re going to raise here today—of language, of who suffers, who speaks, who sends out an SOS or call for help, who intercepts, and what kind of communication sys-tems have to be reconstructed when you assume that the listening, launching, or receptor-other is nonhuman or anahuman. The series of false starts and erroneous causalities contributes to the narrative collapse, marking all sorts of astonishments and compromising undercurrents in the ability to carry through the filmic narrative.

I was very pleased by that welcome disarticulation, the drama of a sustained snafu. I found the filmic negotiation with abso-lutely unpredictable otherness attractive and to be supplied with a deceptively simple access code. One could follow the theoretical negotiations that emerge with the enigma of a call: first of all, the narrative was motored by the false assumption that one knew how to trace a call and could ascertain from the start where it must have come from, almost along the lines of Derrida’s reading of the Lacanian ability to discover the phallus and to presume its right and proper place. So this film—not only because it hit my then-home base, San Francisco—was very significant and also a good way of trying to teach and chart all sorts of humanist presump-tions and their faltering moments. And so I must wonder if that couldn’t be helpful to us today, at least as a starting point for our investigations. The other disruptive configuration—another figure or disfigure—might be that of parasite, of which the human trait is hardly cleared or free. And many humans, or so-called humans that I know are parasites par excellence, of course [laughter]. How-ever, there are many kinds of parasites. There’s consensual—or commensal, actually—parasitism, which is to say more or less, that you can all sit at the same table without necessarily incurring

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malignant effects. There’s no relation of malignancy or destruction when some parasites join you—I am thinking of those variants of invasive foreign bodies that one can cheerfully host.

On the subject of whom one hosts and what one invites to become part of an ahuman aggregate: I have a certain syndromic habit that finds its corollary in Kafka’s “Before the Law,” when the man from the country—the hick who really needs to see or be close to and gain a certain entry to the law—ends up talking to the flea on his collar, who becomes his essential interlocutor. And who’s to say that the little flea on your collar isn’t the one whom you should be talking to? With whom or with what are you prone to having some sort of improbable exchange? I just read the talk you gave on Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy,” which raises some questions about Kafka’s animals—this is something that we were planning to discuss with Judith Butler—and about what kind of alterity or mirroring back to the so-called human occurs in these texts and fables and spe-cies crossovers (Davis 2013).1 What I wanted to say, perhaps by shift-ing some of the intensities and accents that we might be implying in this discussion, is that I don’t think there’s necessarily something like a leap or a crossover or an absolute distinction between or among life forms that are tagged as “human” and their many, many others. Not, of course, wishing simply to erase or foolishly disturb a certain number of hierarchical givens, I still have to admit that I’m by no means convinced that a big leap is necessary if we’re to try to establish a space in which to move among different life forms and their galaxy of inscription. A few hops here and there might do the trick.

dd: Derrida talks about it in terms of a multiplicity of differences. He doesn’t buy the whole biological continuism argument, and he doesn’t pretend there are no significant differences between those beings who call themselves human and those beings that human beings call animals. There are differences, obviously, but a huge problem arises in the notion that there’s a single, indivis-ible line separating the one from the other, an unleapable chasm or uncrossable abyss. The question always seems to be what’s the difference between “the animal” and “the human,” but he reminds us that there are so many differences, not only between human beings and other animal beings but between and among the innumerable animal societies and human societies, etc.2 To deconstruct this single indivisible line is not to reduce all living

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creatures to an undifferentiated homogeneity but to embrace the wild play of differences (the différance) that are effaced by this rude and crude dichotomy—and so to make it impossible to keep saying “the animal,” as if it could refer with equal validity to every nonhuman being, from a sea sponge or protozoa to an elephant or great ape.

ar: Derrida opened a huge dossier when he started addressing the ani-mal in philosophical headquarters. It took a while for his commit-ment to this oldest—and newest—problem set to make sense to his audiences, because he was at once shrewd and cautious as well as adamant about bringing the “animal problem” on board while at the same time warning against such discursive tendencies as those that underlie “animal rights.” Well, I always a priori have thought that Derrida’s the man, he’s the animal that I follow, in theory the gender and genre outlaw, and so exceeds the anthropos. Derrida occupies an immeasurably important space for me. I’m so lucky to have had the illuminating encounter with this teacher—well, I can’t quite capture it, and I cannot merely say he’s human. He was in many ways simply a monster, a being of seemingly superhu-man qualities and range, and in so many contiguous dimensions, but yes, I can unreservedly subscribe to what he’s saying—not in a psychotically fused and blind way—but I think the issues he’s sig-naled are fascinating and necessary in this area, certainly. And he opened it up in so many ways by shifting the way we decide what constitutes the human and the nonhuman, showing how they are intermixed and significantly undermined. Recently, Alenka Zupançiç has been working on the human animal, trying to read this uncomfortable designation in Nietzsche and the cultures he shares with us. Neither term is comfortably compatible with its assigned other, and yet one still launches this troubled terminol-ogy, staying with a paleonymic inheritance. Zupançiç (2013) shows how Christianity, moreover, outsources the animal as sin, as a cipher of transgression and excessive enjoyment. The disjunctive term “human animal” produces humanity around a void and indi-cates, among other things, that no human animal is fully operative. Philosophically, the human stands as half-finished animal. We are neither animal nor human.

When writing on the animal that I am/follow, Derrida focused at one point on nakedness, which is something that seems or

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is traditionally believed to be the primary property of human self-awareness (2008).3

dd: Modesty.ar: Modesty, yes, perhaps, though Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1990)

has complicated the itinerary of modesty and what we mean by it. He advocates it as a philosophical stance, a calculated retreat and a necessary step back, as Heidegger would say. By most measures, ani-mals are not considered to profile stances of modesty, with its moral mantling. However, I believe that I’ve met modest animals. I think I’ve recognized animals in the streets of New York who are ashamed to have to do their business on sidewalks, in front of people. I feel that they’re insulted; they convey a sense of injury. Now I already said, “I feel that,” which should give me some leeway without plung-ing into reductions of my ostensible subjectivity or limited perspec-tive. But, I tell you, I do have the perception that they are ashamed to be forced into a certain place of nakedness and exposure. I’m interested in shame and shaming, the syntax of these diminish-ments, the residue of scorned being and humiliation, of which Wayne Koestenbaum (2011) has written so poignantly—what it means to know and endure humiliation. For whom or what is the experience of humiliation reserved? In a similar vein, perhaps, I’ve been working on shame and color and the long-held question of who gets to blush—I mean, it has been assumed that feeling shame, which is to say something that accompanies a moral kind of rec-titude, is restricted to a white man’s capacity for social and moral decency—no comment. Strike that remark. This calls for comment and endless commentary, for a surge of outrage.

Let me resume the topic for one more round, which is as important for [Nathaniel] Hawthorne as it is for [Heinrich von] Kleist and Kafka, all of whom gave focus to the stain or splotch, the spread of redness on a momentarily but falsely readable face. Who can blush? Who can redden? Certain skin pigments are said not to be favorable to the blush. So how does one interpret the blush and its store of codifications? Or the stain on the skin—even in Hawthorne there’s a blotch on the skin, a birthmark to contend with—something that Shireen Patell has written on in regard to Levinas (2001). These marks are said to signify or to show something like an interiority that was reserved for certain kinds of so-called races and peoples. This is something that necessarily

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interests me, in part due to the exclusionary operations and fantastic yet lethal constrictions that put this anthropologically recycled view into circulation. That is to say, these marginal dots of signification where you have to fill in the dots and try to read unreadable disruptions in pigment or surface and that have been historically hijacked to express specific types of meaning. For the most part it’s been assumed that only a certain class of beings are truly capable of expressing and feeling shame, mostly a sector of humankind. But I feel that I’ve seen animals endure shaming, feel ashamed, and also shame another, a wayward human. Apparently, if you come home late, your dog will be like, “And where have you been all evening, missy?”

dd: That’s true.ar: Right? I lacked companionship in the animal world, an ongo-

ing crisis, and one among many reasons I might have wanted that companionship—in, say, a strictly egological sense—would be to have someone in my life who wouldn’t judge me. But then I was corrected by a friend, Barbara Spackmann. I was told, don’t kid yourself. Dogs do judge you and are quite prone to making scenes. Eventually they get over it and their horror at your mis-step is not relationship threatening, apparently. They’re not going to threaten you with abandonment or they’re out of here, basta, you’re cooked, or anything of the sort. Vicki Hearne, poet and ani-mal trainer, was the first to instruct me on how to listen to animals, and I was influenced by her book, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name. Animals may not subject you to endless hearings and trials. But they will say, “What do you think you’re doing?” So this in itself—judgment among species, even furtive flashes of something that correlates to acts of judgment, would be something I would want to look into. I don’t feel that a ladybug judges me, necessarily, but what do I know? I’ve been very interested in judgment and the rush to judgment, the libidinal excess of judgment. I don’t know if this is pertinent, if I should go on too strongly about judgment, because that’s usually assimilated to the so-called human faculty. Of course it’s ahuman as well, as it is derived from divine and cer-tainly ultimate judgment, the Last Judgment.

dd: Judgment is a major topos in rhetorical theory: Aristotle says it’s the object of rhetoric. From what I would say is a very tra-ditional perspective—there are other perspectives in rhetorical

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studies—a rhetor’s goal is to move others to action or attitude, to persuade an audience to come to a particular judgment (whether in judicial proceedings or more generally). The idea is that delib-eration hopefully leads to good judgments, prudent judgments, practical wisdom (phronesis), and so on.

ar: Well, that could be countered by what I would want to say about it because Martin Luther, who remains responsible for so much that is so wrong—he’s not alone, of course—but he really viciously went after judgment and wanted to make sure that it stayed out of the recipro-cal spaces of common interaction because he thought that judgment represents almost a libidinal, sexual, an aesthetic excess. Everyone gets off on judging, according to Luther, which led him to cut away at that instinct, to take it off the table because everyone loves to judge. It’s really held in suspicion as a libidinal delight, a thrill and high. Therefore only G-d should be allowed to judge.4 Because otherwise everyone will be judging everyone, and who are you to judge, you know? So I’ve been very keyed into who gets to judge, who gets not to judge, how to judge, in Lyotard’s phrasing, and also into the subtle syntax of judging animals. I mean, that sounds very difficult to justify. It’s just a dossier I would want to open at some point, if only in order to blur the distinction between moral behaviors and grammars of being in so-called human and other spheres of existence. I’d like to kind of move the boundary marker a little by imagining animals who judge and also the way greetings are dispatched.

There’s the famous story in Levinas (1990) of Bobby, the dog, who confers the humanness of the dehumanized on the dispir-ited mind-bodies that were dragged through the labor camps’ work detail, for example. The German officers called the prison-ers “Schweinhund,” or “dog-pig”; this is the nice way that these Germans address, or addressed, one—neither entirely swine nor entirely canine but the degradation of each and both in a hybrid that language posits. In Levinas’s recollection of returning to the camp after a long day of forced labor, the dog shows up each time to greet and wag a tail and recognize—an offer of recognition that was brutally withheld and withdrawn by the Nazi officer. So how the greeting is dispatched or executed or what it does to create a scene of bringing one into existence, as Hannah Arendt says in another context, saying, “I want you to be,” sets up a precondi-tion for some of the exchanges that we might want to imagine.

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But from the moment that an animal confers the greeting—or is greeted by the greeting that the animal could further transmit and everything that the greeting indicates and brings to existence and somehow momentarily stabilizes or affirms—that animal will show up for you in that essential way.5

The greeting itself, or the salutation, in Latinate languages also means “healing.” Of course there’s the pernicious side of a move from “healing” to “heil,” the Führer’s salute. Nonetheless, I wanted to say something about that which affirms us in our existence as coming from a greeting, and acknowledgment doesn’t have to come from a place of distinctly human spacing and so-called conscious-ness, which is highly problematic philosophically to the extent that the greeting initiates being in a certain way that we don’t have to encumber ourselves with right now. But who is it that opens up the world to us and allows something to stay open, if only for a momentary duration, a flash of graciousness? And that doesn’t even need to be—it can be a little machine, a sweet alarm clock that sings to you in the morning. I mean, that kind of—it’s not even a function. Something is happening that is not restricted to the spheres of human expressivity, and I think it’s something very essential and crucial that everyone, according to Arendt, is in need of. We need to be welcomed, she has said, referring to the refugee. And what welcomes, who welcomes, who or what can satisfy that requirement—that existentially pitched requirement?

I myself am moved to tears when the MTA bus stops at the feet of my mother, now fragile, and kneels. New York City buses open their doors and kneel to let in passengers. As far as urban scales and technologies go, the bus is big, voluminous, and thus powerful seeming. To see it kneel to let one in touches me, precisely because it’s not a human act of accommodation or warmth but sheer pos-ture of letting in. . . . Don’t get me started on public transporta-tion, however. The moment of flash-plenitude ends abruptly. Who has to wait endlessly for a bus to appear, exhausted and resigned? Usually the poor, people of color. This flashpoint of urban factic-ity also moves me to tears—of despair. “If you see something, say something” is the motto on subway platforms and at bus stops. I’m saying something.

dd: I want to come back around to the parasite in the context of the welcome—or the refusal of the welcome—to the question,

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maybe, of autoimmunity, of hospitality or hostility, which are not necessarily different.

ar: I was thinking in terms of some of these topoi and motifs: “para-site” and “welcoming” that, as you know, point to something at once human and nonhuman, unreadable and disruptive, at least when approached from a great eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writer (who spans both centuries) such as Heinrich von Kleist. A model for Kafka and intense point of interest for critics as varied as Paul de Man and Slavoj Žižek, Kleist motivates rhetorical con-templation of the enigma of pregnancy. Which, for whatever rea-son, we think we need to assume we know what to do with. But all sorts of phantasms and material alterations of what Kleist calls the “changing figure” insinuate themselves here, meaning, at the first level, that the protagonist’s figure suddenly is changed, frustrat-ing the faculty of understanding—so figuration, already thrown into question, becomes part of the problem of self-doubling and becoming other. And the bloating belly that carries this unknown, this alterity, cannot comprehend or account for its condition, the family way that is the theme of the short story, “The Marquise von O.” The story is, to say it far too quickly, “about” a woman who faints at the moment of forced conception, and the entire narrative is organized around a dash that represents—so to speak—what happened when, fainting, she loses consciousness (at one point there’s a slippage that works well in English as well: Kleist switches “conscience” for “conscious,” which opens up all sorts of dilemmas). Ever slipping away from itself, unable to account for its origin and core, the story tries to retrieve the missing narrative, the radically lost object.

And not only does Kleist restrict focus to the story’s particular squabbles with itself and the emphatic struggle to establish nar-rative, and not only is this gaping origin about all narrative that might pivot around a traumatic blur that it fails to account for, but the work is also about aboutness itself, or any mode of origina-tion, narrative birthing. In a very modern way, Kleist cuts into the sexual nonrapport, according to Lacan, when he says that there is no sexual relation, meaning you can’t relate it to itself, to yourself, making it a sign for the nonrelatable. Jean-Luc Nancy (2001) reads it as a “relating,” as in “report:” “rapport” as “report.” Can you report on what happened—even when it is not a matter of violation and

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criminal violence, disturbed recall and memory lapse? In sexual relation you can’t relate one to the other. There’s something that happens in the skid of the Real that you can’t really—well, it’s nonsymbolizable; it has a traumatic residue that cannot be reap-propriated, recuperated into narrative. If Kleist cannot scope sexual relation, he implies, he cannot write: the condition for all writing. Thus, on the other hand, we have story only because we cannot know the origin—this is why, in Bataille’s language, we need story. Kleist notoriously investigated the limits of knowability and plunged into the limits set by Kant, his up close and personal disaster. For writing to be event, something impossible must be eating at its core, eluding its own and our grasp.

So how did this pregnancy even occur, or inoccur, because if it doesn’t occur, the narrative cannot account for itself. There’s only a dash where the rape scene—if we can reconstruct according to some logical sequencing maneuvers—occurred. In sum, the story that I’m talking about and that Kleist wrote is absolutely fasci-nated and blinded by a searing episode of carrying an “other” and what that other is: where it came from, where it’s going, violent instantiation, what at all happens to the figure and figuration, how does this belly bloat up with the unknown future? By the way, it’s significant for us in many ways to think about the fantasy of male pregnancies as well because Nietzsche was more often than not barefoot and pregnant, always expecting. Expecting the future and very often writing through a lexicon of what it means to be carrying something to term. So, considering Kleistian and other reflections on the mysteries inherent in pregnancy, I would think that—and we know this knot from all sorts of anxieties that are recorded—very often there’s a fearful sense that someone is car-rying, if not a child (a fairly modern perception), then a parasite or a Rosemary’s baby–type miscreant. So that kind of thing—or [Daniel Paul] Schreber, who got rays up his ass from G-d and wanted to carry G-d’s child to term—haunts every pregnancy and requires us to think about the pre- or post- or a- or nonhuman features of expecting—what? Even a continuation of yourself and some pooled DNA presents a scary picture to some, a plunge into nonrecognition and horror.

All of these considerations might seem like aberrant stories about the miscarriage of the very thought of pregnancy. On the

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other hand, this series of anguished obsession may be what preg-nancy implies and involves, pointing up the repressed, necessarily repressed, side of the experience of pregnancy—which is why we probably transvalued it long ago into a worshippable portrait of the holy family and the divine child: because there’s something mon-strous and unknowable that links us all to various sorts of species and extraspecial forms of generation. There’s something mystify-ingly unsettling about carrying a living being—if it’s simply living. I mean, there are all sorts of questions and anxieties around it that, importantly, Kleist and others—of course Mary Shelley, too—were interrogating as so many effects of the phantom. What kind of sci-entific birthing takes place in a hay-wired imaginaire, a birthing that can’t biologically take place (though one could say Victor Frankenstein’s birthing techniques are hyperbiological: chemical and ensconced in the physical sciences)? Electricity-obsessed Mary Shelley and her generation of ghostwriters. Fields contiguous with natural science started showing the point of breakage in Nature, her self-alienation and demonic fugues, destructive outbursts. Victor Frankenstein, resignifying paternity—something that was never natural or provable enough (and, as Derrida points out, there are no brothers and sisters in nature, all such designations being an effect of convention and specific codifications)—puts together his creation from dead body parts and other scraps of organic as well as inorganic, electrophoric nature. Dr. Frankenstein’s trying to create what he calls “animation” from the material world and that probe, as we all know from popular remakes, brings forth the unnamable monstrosity that we’ve nicknamed Frankenstein.

But the monstrosity even of birth and pregnancy, when you’re not set on reanimating or cloning or technically remodeling living being, is something that remains hard to talk about in terms of psychic disturbances—we’re barely making it to postnatal depres-sion as a suitable topic for public discourse. One has had somehow to domesticate and restory the event of pregnancy, ever since Eve got everyone in trouble and made sure we all had labor pains of one form or another. The phantasmata attending pregnancy still represent an area that one might want to look at, as did Marie-Hélène Huet in her teratology (1993). I mean, I’m interested in these developments or deformities even though I am of no woman

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born, myself—my mother is a lizard [laughter]. Very reptilian. But you know that lizards just—they don’t even hatch. The kids come out all formed and just kind of—

dd: Start running . . .ar: Right. They just run away. I mean, they’re done. We’re done.

Whereas the rhinoceros is a beautiful, exemplary, doting parent, you know. And elephants are very sweet also. So I don’t know how we got to me and my origins, but one could certainly take this autobiographeme further and reinvolve the enigma of birthing in some of what we’re talking about.

dd: Yes, the “birth” of Frankenstein’s monster, which you describe as a synecdoche for technology in The Telephone Book. And then the fact that pregnancy is one of the things that the specifically human being shares with so many other beings.

ar: Well, not only pregnancy, but interspecial fertilization—what insects do with and for flowers, what flowers do among themselves, what happens in botanical Las Vegas that stays in botanical Las Vegas. Darwin himself was shocked and nearly freaked when pollination—cross-pollination—hit the thought screens, and so he devoted himself to that phenomenon, utterly unanticipated in his day, very freakish and indecent. The discovery of cross- pollination actually shocked a lot of people because flowers were supposed to signify differently, being pure and spared any kind of sexual innuendo or need or whatever you want to call it. Hence there was another myth shot to hell. Even flowers do it. And that was a narcissistic, you know, stock market crash. Together with the news delivered by Mr. Darwin that our parents are actually gorillas—which engendered disavowal, horror, shock, dismay—now we learn that flowers are not themselves so innocent that one can no longer “say it with flowers,” or we’re saying something on the order of species-wide obscenity.

dd: One of the narcissistic wounds.ar: Voilà. And I speculate that this type of woundedness accounts to

this day for animal cruelty; it’s the disavowal of our “father,” the gorilla, you know. This is narcissistically—I mean, I’m quite sure we by now could feel honored by this lineage and the awe-inspiring origin—but this was a narcissistic blowout whose range and depth we shouldn’t underestimate: It’s still resonating and wiggling

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through our consciousness. “Really? That’s what we trace back to?” You know, and all these family trees of course try to pull up away from the origin of the species, concealing us in arborescence.

dd: Right, “My ancestral line dates back to kings,” that kind of thing. . . . It probably accounts for a lot of familiar philosophical scrambling, even in Heidegger. But let me take this in a slightly different direc-tion. To Heidegger’s contention that only a being able to die is able to ask questions and that an animal cannot ask questions because it does not experience death, Derrida suggests that there are acts of questioning that do not necessarily take recourse to discursivity, as you put it in the opening pages of Finitude’s Score. To which you add, “Plants may be questioning, too. Every living being is equipped for receiving information. Every living being is capable of investi-gation, looking for something, one doesn’t always know what. Veg-etal beings show curiosity: a plant or root probes” (1998, 3). Could we consider this nondiscursive curiosity a rhetorical scene, as the scene of addressivity or responsivity? Not at the level of the word, but at the level of that minimal, primary, telephonic “yes” that you and Derrida have so meticulously described in The Telephone Book and “Ulysses Gramophone” (2013), respectively?

ar: The scene of questioning is such a philosophically weighted space that it’s almost not fair for Heidegger to make that a way—a lever—for determining who or what questions. But once it’s admitted into court, you can ask, together with him, “What, after all is said and done—and undone—is a question?” Can one philosophize—and this of course has a question mark on it—without a question? Werner Hamacher wrote an entire text pro-vocatively constructed without a question mark—very difficult in philosophy, though not entirely out of the question.6 But my ques-tion goes on the quest of another sort, requiring us to open up the understanding we have of questioning, because there’s all sorts of modalities of questioning, including that of a pleading look, a look of surprise, a gesture, a bodily syntax expressing what is going on, or “is this really happening?” So even the traumatic kind of ver-tigo of being dumbstruck with wonder and astonishment—for the Greeks, the originary philosophical stance is that of astonishment and wonder—reveals a stance of questioning.

But if you’re too astonished, then you’re an idiot, as I can attest [ laughter]. And if you have no curiosity whatsoever, then you’re

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a loser and sealed off in your autistic space. So there has to be something like a questioning stance, but one or ones which aren’t hyperbolically questioning in the form of a nagging child or in the form of a really dimwitted existent. At the same time, I’ve tried to show how close the figures of the philosopher—the foolosopher, as Erasmus says—and the dimwit, the nitwit, the knucklehead, are precisely linked through scenes of original philosophizing. And that’s probably why, at least from the philosopher’s point of view (but probably also from the dimwit’s point of view—who wants to be known as a philosopher? That really would be a bummer), a lot of effort has to be made to exile the very notion of stupid-ity or unintelligence, and so on and so forth. This in part is why I would have to say that, first of all, yes, I try to indicate that nearly all living forms probe—have their way of pushing their little enve-lopes and checking out the scene. Also for protective reasons, like with your whiskers or your nervous little rabbit ears, which, for Heidegger, again, is the exemplary stance of thinking. This gives pause, and I certainly like it, inasmuch as the nervous little rab-bit ears, they’re questioning, ever on alert—like, “Who’s gonna get me?” And they’re trying to scope out the predatory environment.

There’s a whole environmental quasi agency of calling: it’s also the case that the kettle on the stove calls you. It may not be ques-tioning you, but it calls when it’s ready and whistles, you know? That’s no doubt a rhetorical outpost, saying, “Get your ass over here!” You know, on the order of “we’re done here.” So, actually, I don’t know where questioning stops or where it even starts. Because, what is a question? What constitutes a question? And what is not a question? What is not putting you in question or questioning your very right to do, to be, to think, to not think, your right to not have rights, your right to abstain, to rescind, to respond, to ward off the call, to hide? What is not questioning, demanding, needling, wanting? Of course, it all depends, as Derrida was wont to say. Some minds are very tranquil and don’t feel that they’re constantly being thrown into question and into reverse. I’m supposing that we first do want to know why Heidegger wants the question to func-tion as an important lever here. At the same time, this is someone who has a lot of disdain for mere curiosity. Philosophy in general shows little patience with curiosity, a downgraded level of knowl-edge—the need to know—mostly associated with women and cats.

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There’s a border dispute between “curiosity” and the “question,” curiosity being a vulgar correlate of idle chatter, rendering mere inquisitiveness. And I would like to first of all establish—if anyone had interest in doing so—why Heidegger has to reopen the way and clear the decks for the question and make sure that it’s not being nibbled at or contaminated by other forms—more degraded forms—of questioning, such as inquisitiveness, nosiness, snoopi-ness, alternate forms of investigation, you know? Curiosity is not unrelated to “care,” so perhaps it’s getting too close to a prime Hei-deggerian category. Could you imagine in Sein und Zeit a section on the snoop? The philosophical snoop, ontological snooping.

dd: Snooping and Time or The Time of the Sleuth [laughter].ar: I try to move philosophy—and so does, I should say, before me of

course, Gilles Deleuze—into grammars of sleuthing. He calls his procedure “detective work” at one point.

dd: He does? Or you do?ar: Oh, right—no, he doesn’t. I call it “detective work.” He likes phi-

losophy to be on a par with crime stories. For my part, I opened up a detective agency in his neighborhood of philosophizing. I do a lot of those feminine types of sleuthing around: from Nancy Drew to Murder, She Wrote, to mobilizing all sorts of remembered femi-nine snoopers who are in everybody’s business, especially those of the fabulous lesbian detective genre. So the philosopher, of course, has to wall up against this embarrassing disfigurement of his job description. And yet I try to bring it back in. You know, the eaves-droppers, the female busybody and whistle-blowers.

dd: The one interested in much more than “he lived, he wrote, he died.”ar: Yes, there is that admonition standing behind the snooping

scenes. Well, sometimes I share it, to be sure, since the foibles and details of a particular personality match up with only trivial yields. Still, I find myself sifting and sorting, rebuilding biography as I delve into a given field or signed work. I don’t know how to explain this compulsion to get under the skin of “he lived,” for instance.

dd: You want the details.ar: Yes. I want the dish on that. I have tried consistently to open up

the work and lives of my dance partners, even though this gesture has nothing to do with the dance, I grant that. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to chart the flow and go with those flows that are sometimes

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almost science fiction. You know, like, how did Goethe’s text on the jaw infect Freud fatally?7 I try to create an improbable rendezvous of unanticipated causalities and new unintelligibilities. But that also goes, very often, by way of archival snooping. Like, you know, what is our business in any case? How do we determine that certain forms of investigation are off limits? And, to stay on point, why does Heidegger need to purify specific acts and scenes of question-ing? Also, why is the scene of reception so detoxified in Heidegger? This is something that I’ve tried to treat in many ways: the way he doesn’t want contaminants on board. Most especially when he’s warding off, or cordoning off, the Nietzschean spaces he’s flagged. Because Nietzsche was dragged into the mud of the Nazi propa-ganda machine, and so was—hello?—Heidegger. In ways that I’ve tried to map more rigorously than I can in conversation, Heidegger throws Nietzsche, and probably himself with him, into rehab, and tries to clean him up, clean up his act, make him—so to speak—viable again. Altogether, I would first want to interrogate or ques-tion or snoop into the privilege and perhaps repressed anxiety that goes into enthroning “the question.” At the same time, Heidegger is very right to push up against academic pseudoquestioning. Because he’ll show that such questions snappily come up with answers. And the minute you slap an answer on to a question, you’re effacing the question, refusing it entry rights into the slow timing of thinking.

dd: It’s no longer what is called thinking.ar: In that regard, you know, I do consider, as an inheritor of Heidegger,

my own job description to be that of one who protects the question. That would provide another—yet another—angle and perspective that I need to submit to your consideration, which involves the labor around and on behalf of the question: it’s not easy to protect the question, especially when the question is being stomped on in pernicious ways in tactical politics. George Bush had no ques-tions. And he’s a very content man, we recently heard, when his library opened. What a travesty, an abomination of libraries and an insult to books. Let’s drop that call. When you have a questioning being who might go to the extent of Hamlet’s incessant question-ing and indecisiveness, with which questioning sometimes gets confused, then you’re holding open—despite Heidegger, maybe, or ironically, thanks to Heidegger—all sorts of possibilities for ethical abundance, if one can imagine those two or three terms in close

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proximity: “Heidegger,” “ethical,” “abundance.” What I’m trying to get at is the tensional quality of an ethical engagement that stays with the question, not being satisfied with prescriptive limits or foreclosive answers to a complex problem. This does not mean that some problems are not easy to tackle: responses to poverty, hunger, misogyny, racism, and other degradations should be no-brainers.

dd: Okay, so plants are one thing, but what about objects? Would you agree . . .

ar: Well, wait: plants are not one thing, because—dd: That’s true.ar: What about plants that are carnivorous?dd: Yes.ar: Or predatory? Like the Venus flytrap. Or other plants that, you

know, cross some of those borders and boundaries. And even poi-sonous plants, you know, who go after you in certain ways, attack-ing your skin.

dd: My apologies to all varieties of vegetal beings for that conceptual violence. The plant, the animal, the human—my bad.

ar: We’ll let it slide. I would have loved to go to the botanical gardens with you to open the conversation on the mobility and transgres-sions of plants, all sorts of plants, including herbaceuticals, phar-maceuticals, the farmer’s market, and chemistry of drugs.

dd: Right, right. So now we’re in the realm of technology.ar: Yes. And so then maybe you’re right. Plants can be grasped as

thing. They have thingliness as well as other qualities.dd: Okay, let’s shift gears. In redescribing the basic unit of commu-

nication not as “a word” or “the signifier”—the anthropological definition of language—but as the “mark” or the “trace,” Derrida nudges language into the realm of the inhuman or ahuman or anahuman. I’m wondering what sort of consequences you think that might have for Lacan’s designations of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary (later knotted in interdependence). Specifically, if the “mark” involves any inscription of difference and so of mean-ing, and if—as Derrida suggests—it’s not restricted to human communication, does its priority in any way mess with Lacan’s strict distinction between an animal’s “system of signaling” and the properly human “subject of the signifier”? Between communica-tion as mere signal relay, or reaction, and language which is already rhetorical inasmuch as it seeks “the response of the other”?

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ar: Lacan’s mappings do not restrict themselves to human categories, even if he sometimes articulated that kind of representation. His structural and mathematical investments suggest a wider scope of inscription, at times bringing him close to Derrida, at other times swerving away and into other zones of psychic and ontological dis-turbance. Lacan worked through Heidegger as well as Freud. He was rattled by the subject, but hung onto it, introducing modifica-tions of its constitution. Sometimes—this is well documented and part of their respective oeuvres—there was quite a bit of rough-housing between Lacan and Derrida, no doubt well deserved by Lacan, who tended to hit below the belt. Derrida came back at him with the heavy guns of philosophical skepticism. The analyst was fascinated by Derrida—ask Hélène Cixous, who was his guest at the dinner table and who was prodded for information about Der-rida. Still, there were the love-letter moments, when Derrida said he had always embraced Lacan and respected his discoveries, loved his work. Nevertheless, perhaps Derrida was a little too tough on Lacan, especially in the “Purloined Letter” series, and his brand of tough love no doubt stung.8 All in all, I’d say that Derrida marked off major checkpoints that were necessary for obtaining a really lucid relation to the Lacanian insight, which is so enriching on so many crucial levels. But Derrida has stated that he felt Lacan depended too heavily on linguisticity. Lacan is seen to be dependent on a cer-tain appropriation of language—very often metaphysical. Derrida also worries that Lacan did not tend to that which flies beneath philosophical radars or psychoanalytic system controls and virus checks. You know, he really hung on to a certain grid that was very illuminating and necessary but nonetheless limiting and restrictive in what it can handle and—in certain necessary moments—defuse and dismantle. So, among other points of dispute, an overreliance on a linguistic structuring is something that Derrida diagnoses Lacan with retaining throughout his analytical work.

Tracking different itineraries of language and address, I’ve been interested in something that’s barely a signifier, which is the “trans.” Not only because Heidegger has said that Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” has been egregiously translated as “superman” and “über” commonly and consistently translated in terms of “above” or “super,” but also because he wants this to be read in the alterna-tive way, which is also primary in German. “Über” can also mean

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“trans.” So I was interested in Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” (2000), in what happens in the Tower of Babel, in transpositions in music, and in all sorts of transit systems, including the meta-phorical, rhetorical markers that we ride on and depend on for our existence in many unavoidable ways. And yet “trans” is barely a word; it hardly weighs in as a signifier. Still, I wanted to see all the transferences that are made possible by just pushing hard on the “trans.” I was very impressed and blown away by Derrida’s reading of the Tower of Babel, which should help us understand that one cannot ever, ever say—which is commonly said by the delirious right in America, the Christian right—that “the Bible says so,” or the Bible told us this and that. Because the minute that sense was being made, G-d, in the Bible—according to Derrida, according to Benjamin, according to G-d’s scripters—blew up the Tower of Babel and instituted babble— babbling and translation, the need for translation—and G-d-given unintelligibility, as a kind of con-trol tower in the Bible that tells us very firmly, “Thou shalt never decipher fully”—and so one can henceforth never think that one knows what the Bible is saying.9 Transparency has been, by divine ordinance, skimmed off any biblical form of utterance.

You know, this story of decisive smackdown represents a big blow against transparency, and those who are allied in some way to Bible belters and thumpers are falsely proclaiming a transparency that G-d—according to their Bible—absolutely was intolerant of. The Tower of Babel project wanted transparency and a unilanguage, one big signifier, that pointed the way. And G-d was hyperallergic to that project and brought down an immemorial punishment—an act that put us all in business, by the way—which, as punishment, consists in legislating our incomprehension, our eternal time-out as concerns any claim for understanding what is being said. Henceforth, we are condemned to not understanding the other or what we’re talking about. We stand limited, sure only of not being sure that one word can translate into a similar or adequate word in another language, so that there would always be divergence, inadequacy, inadequation, nontranslatability in acts of translating and reading—all this downshifting starts with a Book of books that has installed its own scrambling machine. If anything, the Book gives a key to considering and evaluating those who think that they have a hold on language, those who mistakenly believe

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that language points clearly and with certitude and with some intelligibility to what we should be doing and are doing. I think it’s very important that the theo-signifier cut that down right away. G-d was completely averse to any pretension of securing a finaliz-ing understanding, except possibly in his own apocalyptic tone. In any case, we can add this commandment to the list of “thou shalt not” injunctions: thou shalt not render meaning transparent.

dd: That’s a nice segue into what is maybe the most nontransparent territory: let’s talk about the dead. What sort of relation might one have with the dead, or even the undead? Assuming such relations are not simply optional, could they be considered rhetorical? You’ve spoken eloquently about mourning and melancholia, for example. Derrida has suggested the mournful relation begins at the beginning: here and now, as soon as one has a name or as soon as there is writing in general, and you’ve written about the ways in which friendship is from the start wrapped up in mourning. Larry Rickels emphasizes the primal precondition for every so-called self-relation is that it must always take a detour through the dead other (1989, 5). In Loser Sons (2013) you suggest that Kafka’s letter to the father is written to the paternal unconscious, that is to say, to the always already dead father, the one positioned as essential addressee. How would you describe this rhetorical relation with or to the dead that seems to be the basis of friendship, of the relation to self, and of any so-called concrete situation?

ar: I certainly sympathize with the question, with the trajectory, and with the proper names that ally themselves to the question. And to the extent that we at all address or speak, we’re speaking to that which is not fused to us in some kind of living way but which is already enmeshed in nonpresence, abandoning, long distance. Even if it’s a close-up, there’s a distance. It can be a miniscule distance or escalate into an experience of intimate remoteness like, “Whoa, what is that?” You know? So I don’t even think it’s a question of dividing the two spaces of address.

dd: The space of the living from the space of the dead, you mean?ar: Right. I think certainly there are different modalities of awareness,

repression, forgetting, and distancing that may give us, momen-tarily, the delusion that we’re not addressing the dead, or even the dead center of the other, when we’re addressing. To the extent that

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you’re addressing, you’re reaching out—or reaching deep within to an exteriority, an alienated inwardness. Such a metaphorics no longer suffices, but let us continue anyway, in good faith. There’s at any rate an outreach program to the moribund, the nonpre-sent, the faraway and remote, involving destiny and destination and—destiny, which may not be dead, it may just be not alive. It may be deferred. It may go through some call-forwarding sys-tem. It might be about the future, or atemporal, immemorial, a smudged arrival date. It’s not clear that the dead are simply dead, as our culture has insistently made noises about: the zombie cul-ture, the vampires, the overpopulation of the undead among us. Larry [Rickels] says that the vampires are kind of an advance over the regression to zombie culture, because at least the vampires have a relation to the other and want the other. But zombies are—

dd: But zombies do desire the other in the sense that they eat them. They want the other or at least the other’s brain, in that way.

ar: That’s a good point, but they’re not, you know, in the devouring mode of cannibalistic libidinal appreciation of “yum yum,” you know? Well, but you’re saying otherwise, and you’re asserting that zombies feast on the other too, so—hmm. I have to recalibrate and choose my con-sumers more carefully. In any case, what I’m saying is that the place of address, the fact of addressing, may come from a dead place in you. There are dead zones, or, in terms of depletion and hollow address, there are deadbeats within and without. There are dead letters that get addressed and never show up anywhere. There’s a lot of death that can’t be separated off from life, as any good yogic practitioner can tell you. So the only question, if it is a question, would be why we think there’s any other route or routing system—why we think, after all the cultural and scientific props and cards we’ve been dealt, that there is a reliable way of taking a detour around the death drive.

dd: The only question, in other words, is why this distinction is so decisive for us, so significant, as if it’s an either/or, you’re dead or alive—never both and never neither. What is this ostensibly indivisible line buying us?

ar: We’ve become detached from more ancestral and cultural practices where you honor and enfold the dead, and, certainly, I’ve been con-cerned about honoring—or refusing to honor—the dead enemy. I think it’s an egregious mistake to refrain from addressing the dead enemy. I taught a course recently on the event and the address. And

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the last sessions were on what should not have happened, or what should not have been addressed. My concerns are organized not only around addressing but about what happens with calamitous address—calamitous events of address that should not have hap-pened. There are certain things that should never have been said, never have been addressed, never sent off by missive or missile, and should never have happened. I found myself in that peculiar and contorted space of trying to give a lecture on what should never have been said or addressed. And so I would want to recruit and mobilize all those difficult and dense contingencies and essential parts built into the very thought of address or relationality. Because nonrelation is also relation, of course. And the refusal to relate or address is also an address. I’ve been interested also in these refus-als, the nonaddress that is politically and ethically pernicious. For instance, the histories conserved in the question of who doesn’t get addressed. “I’m not addressing you,” you know? Those are the kind of hurtful considerations I wanted to bring to the table.

dd: What were some of the texts in that class? Do you remember?ar: Well, we spent a lot of time with Lacoue-Labarthe and his text

called “Modesty” (1990), because I felt I had to beat some modesty into the theory heads. I’m very concerned—not only with my own beat but with a lot of precincts of productivity—I’m concerned with the epidemic shortfall of modesty. With the chest beating, as you said earlier, that goes on, the arrogance that responds no doubt to the devaluations and humiliations that one consistently encounters in a soulless world. We’ll put aside for the moment the metaphysics of the soul and so on. But a soulless world that prizes scientific objectivization over speculative inventiveness and poetic probes. I have to think that one of the counterphobic moves, or compensatory economies meant to counter the steady downgrading tendencies of our profession, involves overly arro-gant stakeouts of our often fragile objects and our areas of inquiry.

Perhaps as the field has become increasingly feminized, if I may say so, all of which is just a mythic layering because it isn’t true as such and yet it promises to be; nonetheless, the field has been devalued. You know, we’re up against the hard sciences. We fight back, I guess, not with tai chi, reticence, sharpness, precision of movement, or even the abeyance of movement but instead with loudmouth, arrogant posturing. I suppose I was very interested in

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showing the kids what modesty might be, philosophically con-strued, also in the face of someone like Alain Badiou, who’s a ter-ribly sweet guy, really has a lot of charm and intelligent generosity when you encounter him—he’s very, very pleasant and agreeable in so many ways. Yet I don’t think he would disagree with me if I suggested that his language usage and philosophizing lacks the pace and phrasing of modesty, to say the least.

dd: I don’t think he’d disagree with you about that, no. I do wonder if he would value philosophical modesty, though.

ar: Good point. I do. Let us continue to think about what it is to be modest as we proceed and question and interrogate. So, to resume, I’ve been very interested in the undead and the friends, dead or alive, that one can have or not have, the barriers to friendship—all of which is sometimes laughably grim: what does it take for schol-ars to sustain friendships—does the institution disrupt or block genuine friendship, should such a thing or practice or gift exist? That’s another storyline.

I’ve always been trying to think in terms of that which dictates from the dead. I’m assuming that relation is in some ways a rela-tion to the dead in the other, or as the other, or self as other, and so on and so forth. The relation, friendship, in other words, is always attached to what survives all sorts of nasty, trivial disappointments, allowing one to memorialize the other. I would imagine that a noble friendship or relationship already is fielded in that aggres-sive and ambiguous embrace of having to hold the dead other. To really love someone the way one loves and misses someone who passes away or crosses over to the other side, or sides, would prob-ably—to speak with Aristotle—be the most direct route to exem-plary friendship, right?

To be a true friend, for Aristotle, is to love the other as one loves the deceased, which is to say one doesn’t demand that the other love you back. It could be nonrequited—though this gets sticky. Friedrich Kittler once said that all love is requited. That was how he read a statement of Lacan’s. Maybe all love is returned, which complicates the transferential itinerary as it circuits through the ambiguity of return, as in “I return your love.” Kittler held out for requital, a certain algorithm of reciprocity. I wish! One-way friend-ship, nondemanding, should be very honoring, it’s very freeing, also quite restricted in a quasi-dialectic spin—one has lost the other as

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one gains on the other in terms of being able truly to be in relation to the other. Otherwise relation probably requires too violent a close-up or too violating a project. So one is always bound up in all sorts of offshoots and aspects of the death drive in order to be able at all to embrace the other. You have to disappear them as you move in on them, maybe imagine killing them with a silencer and make sure they’re disarmed in a certain way, but nothing is more armed than a dead other because they can really get you from their, you know, spooky and hauntingly appointed spaces of retribution—if it comes to that. This may sound a bit psychopathic, but one must never forget, as the political philosopher said, that we stand capable of killing one another—and in many ways we carry out the threat of taking down the counterpart, the fellow being. So I would think that if we’re at all able to honor each other, such a practice or store of affect must be learned in the first place from the way we fail to or are able to honor the dead. In provisional conclusion, I would think it’s the opposite of what we have observed. If we’re at all able to relate to a somewhat living other, then that must be—we must be trained on the relation to those who have left us definitively.

dd: In The Gift of Death (2007b), Derrida analyzes—ar: Him again? No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding.dd: [laughter] Derrida analyzes Abraham’s response to God’s

demand that he sacrifice Isaac: “Behold, here I am.” What a response and what a demand! Does this scene of addressivity/responsivity—the call and the leap—seem in any way the paradigmatic relation with the divine? I’m thinking of Kafka’s complication of this rhetorical situation, of course, which you read, and also the reverse scenario: the call to the divine in, say, prayer. And another arena with the divine in Heidegger’s fourfold.10

ar: Well, I guess the relation to the so-called divine often enough comes down to “Jump!”/”How high?” I mean, what’s important about that scene, besides what I’ve tried to elucidate in my work, is how jealous G-d can be, how lacking, as Benjamin observes. G-d wants the relation on the basis of—well, the question of proving your love is something that has obsessed me as well: the proving grounds of relation, not only to the divine, the constant testing facilities that are integrated into the testaments, the way that G-d asks you to lose the thirdness: “Get rid of whatever else

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you love the most so that we can have a relation, or that I can know that our relation is for real.” And the question would be, to what extent is that of course a projection but also, more perturbingly, a structuring of every relation?

One is constantly asked to sacrifice the most beloved, another “object” receiving loving intensity, or what could potentially become beloved, in order to assure and guarantee something like relation that can only be recognized through sacrifice of all other relation-ality. Of course, Levinas asks, when we will sacrifice sacrifice? But is there any possibility of thinking the divine without sacrifice? That would comprise one of my remaining, residual questions. And also, in that vein (for sacrifice is also address, addressed), what compels me are other scenes of what you call addressivity and responsiv-ity, for example, when Moses comes down hard on G-d and says, “Wait a minute. You promised to do this differently.” G-d has to be reminded, has a relation to promise that he wants to break but can’t—well, He certainly can but is called to order by his mortal servant, a nice bind. G-d has given his word, which is teetering on the fault lines of promise. These kinds of things and phrasal regimens interest me as well: the moments when the Almighty starts the stuttering machine. Moses, of course, was famously a stutterer and forms a telephone with his brother Aaron, who’s the receiver. Well, Moses is the receiver and actually Aaron is the one who speaks, is the mouthpiece in the relation to the divine and in matters of transmission to the people of Israel. I’ve tried to show how a lot of this is telephonically constellated. So a lot remains to be unpacked and unfolded, and I also want to think of how the ram—according to Hélène Cixous (1986)—substitutes for the paternal, making what is sacrificed a certain principle of the paternal.

dd: In one of your pieces on Abraham, you talk about the fact that God had to call the name twice, indicating a little stuttering, but certainly some static on God’s part (2002, 294).

ar: That’s right.dd: So static is on the line in any call, even to or from the divine—

maybe especially to or from the divine.ar: Yes, the patterns of interference commanded my attention, for one

would expect the call to come in loud and clear, as it does to psy-chotics who claim to be commanded by G-d, or are on a mission

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from G-d, or a transmission from G-d, to commit murdering acts. A scene of murder and slaughter, commanded by G-d, urged by divine mandate to kill. Even though I know we’re supposed to say the opposite. And the Bible does say the opposite as well. But those who have all of those installations of godly broadcast sys-tems are usually commanded to kill.

I have devoted my work—again, as we said about Babel—indeed, to the static, to what runs interference with any purportedly coher-ent or clear line, what breaks up meaning and drops the call, and what fails to get through as part of its mode of getting through. I’m very interested in the moments where these apparently lifetime-guaranteed faultless boom boxes actually make so much noise that we don’t know what was meant or even said, if something was said. This is what became very important to me as I started to read the interference and static on lines of all sorts of communications or ostensible communication. What’s the scratch noise, how do we cope with such constitutive disturbances? What comes through as repetitive and therefore perhaps self-annulling or -canceling? For significance to run smoothly, one would suppose that repeti-tion wouldn’t be necessary, but of course Derrida has shown how important—and Søren Kierkegaard as well, Deleuze and others—how important repetition is, and how iterability works. I by no means want to settle for a simplistic sense of repetition.

Nonetheless, the static dossier opens up all sorts of failings and disruptions that have something to do with the essential unread-ability of certain (and therefore all) calls—the ontotheological calls, we could say—that are determining and destinal, or destin-erring, as Derrida would say, does say, showing the way they roam and go off arbitrarily within a given range of possible arrival and reception areas. So we don’t even know if the call—thanks to Kafka and Derrida—we don’t know if the call is meant for you. (I am quot-ing Kafka’s last line in the parable, “Before the Law,” that Derrida commented on powerfully: this door was meant only for you, “nur für Dich bestimmt.”) We don’t know for sure whether, if you catch a call in the outfield of reception, that it was aimed at you or you’re intercepting what needed to go elsewhere. Or whether the call has a traceable provenance and direction—where indeed it comes from, and when it’ll be picked up. There’s a lot of postponement, defer-ral, detouring, rerouting, miscarriage of the call. A lot of secretaries

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on the line are ready for the call and a lot of bureaus—bureaus, ever since Kafka—taking the call, transmitting it, or promising a transmittal of some sort that may or may not go through.

You’re constituted by the call that you take; you can’t be said to exist prior to the call. Among other retrievable intentions, I wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail into what were, in those days, sturdy concepts and conceptual arrangements around “sender/receiver” and communication satellites that I hoped to reprogram in my way. The plan was to go to the top, meaning to follow the mandate to trace G-d’s call to Abraham, which Kafka intercepts and makes highly problematic, showing that Abraham had to be ready to take a call in order for the call to come through.

dd: So: where’s the leap?ar: Right. Exactly. That is Kafka’s question, urging a rereading of

Kierkegaard’s findings.dd: Let me close with one last question: In Loser Sons you unpack an

essay by Jean-François Lyotard on puberty, explicating what he calls the “phrase affect” of adolescence, in which a phrase with-out link calls, marking a turnover from childhood to majority (2013, 175–80). Lyotard compares Emma Eckstein to Abraham in the sense that both are affectable, addressable, which is to say responsive or responsible (response-able), to this phrase affect. The call in either case comes in and produces what you call a “local shakedown.” Whereas one call’s unquestioned reception turns its addressee (Abraham) into the primal father, the model of divine goodness and faith, response without thinking, before thinking, the other call’s addressee (Emma) became the model of hysterical pathology. So, with Archie Bunker, I ask: what’s the difference? What’s the (sexual) difference here?

ar: That’s a beautiful, beautiful question. Yes, that is what is being set up, at least in my appropriation, of this critically important and sub-tle text by Lyotard. Which concerns, first of all, difference as sexual difference—yes, to be sure. And then we can cross genres/genders in order to interrogate, in the way Kafka implicitly establishes, the hysterical, paranoid responsiveness of Abraham. I wanted to add something to a long conversation on adolescence that, in many ways, Laurence Rickels captures in his Case of California (1991), specifically his poignant “Teen Passion.” The violation of the

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interpellation, the scene of being called, of being appointed in a shaming, naming way—according to all sorts of imperatives and command systems that tackle the one being called—creates a sud-den traumatic makeover.

In the case of Emma, she was lewdly called into her sexuality, and her naive stance of not knowing was demolished—she was called out of, she was ripped out of, her childhood. So there’s the violating call, or catcall, that dresses her down and leaves her exposed just by fact of being addressed in a brutal way by the shopkeeper who’s checking her out and making an insinuating entry, verbally forcing himself on her, committing an act that results in a battery of some kind, a break-in into her body-mind, her mind-body. Something has happened that she can’t appropriate or master. Something also happens when Abraham is shaken out of his lethargy or quasi nonbeing and called up to become primal father, as well. So these pure evental jolts registered by Lyotard have prompted me to trace this issue in the section in Loser Sons called—I think it’s called—“The Turn of the Screwed,” with a view to showing, according to protocols of sexual difference, who’s screwed and how we’re screwed by these unreadable yet violent intrusions that are still searingly marking us up (2013).

dd: I wonder if you have the energy for one more? It’s a spin-off question that might take us into (and let us end on) something like the politi-cal implications of talking to the dead. In Loser Sons you suggest that whereas Mohammed Atta crashed into the World Trade Center expecting to be embraced by the transcendentalized father, Kafka’s letter to the paternal unconscious left the father and the whole affair within a “secular colloquy at the level of mortal wounding” (2013, 13). Would you elaborate on the implications of this analogy with difference in terms of the relation with the dead? But let me give you a little more of you, first. Two more quotes: “What this means is that the writer after Kafka . . . rigorously desists from exploding into the space of disaster to which writing remains responsible” (13). And second quote, from another section: “The work of disinstall-ing a lock on the imaginary that holds these figures over the fire of material consequence remains a vivid part of Kafkan legacy” (82). What’s interesting to me—and I think this is maybe what the book is driving at—is that there are substantial political consequences

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involved in whether or not you’re willing to talk to the dead, to acknowledge that you’re talking to the dead other in you, an internal alterity that’s very powerful and punishing, rather than insisting on violently addressing some presumably external reality.

ar: Right, right.dd: Would you like to elaborate? If it interests you, and if you’ve got

the energy for it. If not, that’s—ar: It does. It’s beautiful material binding Lyotard, Derrida, Nancy,

and so many others, but I’m now not up to the task—I guess, as weariness overcomes me, I can revert to the phrase adequate to your project as I fade out: “I’m only human.”

notes1. Originally, this was to be a conversation with Avital Ronell and Judith Butler;

Butler had to cancel due to scheduling issues.2. See, especially, Derrida 2008 and 2009–11.3. See Derrida 2008.4. The (mis)spelling here and throughout is Ronell’s attempt to foreground the

unnameable, unpronounceable nature of whatever may be hailed as the divine.5. On this point, see Ronell’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Holderlin’s

“Remembrance” (2005).6. See Hamacher 1981.7. The reference regards an essay by Goethe on his discovery of the intermaxillary

bone in humans in 1784. Ronell opens her Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986) with a discussion of this discovery’s influence on Freud.

8. This is in reference to Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (1972) and Derrida’s response (1987).

9. See Derrida 2007a.10. Ronell reads Kafka’s “Abrahams” in the “Kant Satellite” in Stupidity (2002, 278–310).

works citedBenjamin, Walter. 2000. “The Translator’s Task.” Trans. Steven Rendell. In The Translation

Studies Reader, ed. Laurence Venuti, 75–83. London: Routledge.Cixous, Hélène. 1986. Inside. New York: Schocken.Davis, Diane. 2013. “Human Acts: Animal Publics.” Paper read at the Conference on

College Composition and Communication, Las Vegas, NV, 13–16 Mar.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “The Purveyor of Truth.” Trans. Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ran, and M. R. Logan. In The Purloined Poe, ed. John Muller, 173–212. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

———. 2007a. “Des Tours de Babel.” Trans. Joseph F. Graham. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg, 191–225. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2007b. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.

———. 2009–11. The Beast and the Sovereign. 2 vols. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2013. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Trans. Francois Faffoul. In Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, 41–86. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hamacher, Werner. 1981. “Peut-être la question—langage et finitude chez Heidegger.” In Les fins de l ’homme a partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, 345–66. Paris: Galilée.

Hearne, Vicki. 2007. Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name. New York: Skyhorse.Huet, Marie-Hélène. 1993. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Koestenbaum, Wayne. 2011. Humiliation. New York: Picador.Lacan, Jacques. 1972. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.” Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman.

Yale French Studies 48:39–72.Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1990. “The Age’s Modesty.” In Heidegger, Art, and Politics:

The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner, 1–7. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. “The Name of a Dog; or, Natural Rights.” In Difficult Freedom:

Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, 151–53. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L’“il y a” du rapport sexuel. Paris: Galilée.Patell, Shireen. 2001. “Toward an Ethics of Reading: Levinas and American Literature.”

PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley.Rickels, Laurence. 1991. The Case of California. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

Press.———Ronell, Avital. 1986. Dictations: On Haunted Writing. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.———. 1989. The Telephone Book. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.———. 1998. Finitude’s Score. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.———. 2002. Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.———. 2005. “On the Misery of Theory Without Poetry: Heidegger’s Reading of

Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken.’” PMLA 120 (1): 16–32.———. 2013. Loser Sons. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Zupançiç, Alenka. 2013. Unpublished lecture. European Graduate School, Saas Fee,

Switzerland.

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Breaking Down “Man”: A Conversation with Avital Ronell

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