Philosophia Africana, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2005 Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004 "Uprooted African I am." —^Jacques Derrida, Who Is Afraid of Philosophy? What could be the meanings of this confession—or, as the author might have insisted, circonfession? At this time it is nearly trivial to pursue the question bio- graphically: after all, isn't it known to anyone who ever cared about such things that Derrida was born to Jewish parents in Algeria? As he would later write, and in more than one place, "[I was] born in Algiers in an environment about which it would always be difficult to say whether it was colonizing or colonized."^ To echo Chinua Achebe, another writer speaking about his own Igbo parentage and in his signature deprendre de soi: "It is enough for me that anyone wants to be African!" What invites—indeed demands—philosophical interest in Derrida's "Uprooted African I Am" is not the biographical question of place of birth (however relevant this might be); what requires meditation, especially in the time of the passing of its speaker on October 8, 2004, is context. Context establishes the difference we have drawn between confession and circonfession. Beyond what is said, the circum- stances of speaking, as is often the case, invited reflections on several subjects, at several times and places. The subjects and places were well known, and such were Derrida's roles on events that his interventions were easily subsequently gathered under the title Who Is Afraid of Philosophy? The Right to Philosophy. What is this right to philosophy? Is philosophy a right or a privilege? In our Age of Science and Artificial Intelligence, what is so important about the work of philosophizing? Besides, to return to the beginning question. Who—within or without Africa—is afraid of philosophy? What philosophy is afraid of Africa or of philosophy's other social and historical realities? Does the truth that lends Achebe's irony its needle suggest that we ask. Who could have thought that for philosophy, Africa was regarded to have been to Europe what Jerusalem was said to have been to Athens? Jerusalem and Athens, Africa and Europe—and often black and white: How does one philosophically trace the implied histories of exclusions and belongings, of sameness and difference? What does this difference amount to for a thinker of difference} The man Jacques Derrida, notorious for his unfailing generosity, was an edito- rial advisor to Philosophia Africana—and as such we mourn his passing. But the relationship pre-dates his role with the journal: it originated in 1989 at a conference in New York on "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice." Graduate 79 so Philosophia Africana students that we were at the time, but even then already in search of ways to make philosophy speak to, or speak philosophy through, what was then known as Africa's "postnationalistic," Europe's "postcolonial," and the United States' "post- civil rights" melancholia, we recognized in Derrida's work—and in our then young dreams for a pan-African philosophical journal of record, an Acta Philosophia Af- ricana—openings to forms of thought that would more courageously than before seek to get to the bottom of questions that continue to tremor at the hearts of cross-cultural philosophical traditions—in concepts not just of justice but also of truth, being, reality, self, other, and so forth. Derrida remained, for us as for many in our generation, a friend. Whether in the letters—couriers famous as much for the messages carried as for the hardly legible penmanship—or in telephone conver- sations, he was interested in the fates of engaged philosophical reflections in and on Africa and the African diaspora, from Benin, Algeria, or South Africa through Brazil and Cuba, Erance, Germany, or Britain to the United States' national debates about multiculture and democracy. Derrida's interest in Philosophia Africana was wide-ranging and the relationship was—on all sides—both welcome and uncanny. It is tempting, in thinking of the passing of the man to focus on the contro- versy surrounding what has already been written in the name of "obituary." Der- rida was, after all, the theorist of text. But responding to the proliferation of texts at this moment seems just a litde too enticing. We have sought wisdom from other sources. Birago Diop, for example, reminds us that, in West African cultures, it is just as important to listen to as to speak about the dead. "The dead," Diop wrote in one of his ancestral poems, "are not dead / Listen to things than to what is said." If one listens otherwise, one may well hear that those who write contemp- tuously about the dead understand only too well the power of the dead, the force of ghosts. This is a form of ghostly encounter that the Igbo religion records in the story of eneke nti oba, a mythical entity that decided to go to war against its own shadow—its own soul. It is also the sort of unwinnable war that Derrida under- stood quite well—and recently thematized, in Rogues—in the concept of dangerous sovereign autoimmunity.^ Whether in the Spectre of Marx or in his more intimate reflections on death and the passing of friends, Derrida understood very much how the dead do not die to friends—nor to foes. "What I thought impossible, indecent, and unjustifiable," he once wrote, "what long ago and more or less secretly and resolutely I had promised myself never to do . . . was to write following the death, not after, not long after the death by returning to it, but just following the death, upon or on the occasion of the death, at the commemorative gatherings and trib- utes, in the writings 'in memory' of those who while living would have been my friends, still present enough to me that some 'declaration,' indeed some analysis or 'study,' would seem at that moment completely unbearable."^ What makes Derrida a friend to some of us is not the fact of his African Jew- ish heritage (though we note this, too). After all, only a historical accident of place of birth is neither sufficient nor necessary to make one a philosopher or scholar of Africa. Yet, though he never made much of his place of birth, in our age of biocriticism, Derrida's birthplace has nonetheless come under some scrutiny. Helene Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004 81 Cixous' understandably playful attempt at hagiography—Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Sainf—addresses the other trace, the more prominent one, she thought, that lay at the border of the Jewish and non-Jewish, the French and non-French, the African and non-African. Cixous' playful engagements ("J's Jewish roots"); her attempts to recover a liminality through feminine elaborations on "Jackie" (about one notorious for the claim that "a philosopher could not be my mother, and my mother could not be a philosophy—only a thinker"); and so forth, gives us many reasons why it is hard to raise, from a single angle, questions about "home" for one who defines himself as uprooted, one who thinks of all as text, or of being itself as dissemination. It is arguable that what most marked Derrida's interests in Africana philos- ophy were his concerns about debts and duties. He recognized that everything he did depended on those who had gone before: that texts speak to, and from, other texts. Furthermore, Derrida, also like Africana philosophers, took seriously modes—styles—of language and forms of thought every bit as much as the con- tents or substance of the thought. He recognized that philosophy could be found in improvisation, in play, in sorrow, and in the traces of words that give evidence of social and historical responsibility. Whether one finds the specifics of the Derridean stylistic disruptions—that is, what some of his disciples have called, following Hei- degger's acknowledged practices, the violence of reading^—of certain canons useful or not, there is little doubt that he walked the path as those who want to question the received certainties of a cultural logocentrism—make it fallogocentrism. In the process of signifyn' on traditional metaphysics, Derrida opened the door to what some of his francophone African students have called the "jubilation"—and we add, agonies—of writing. Philosophy after Derrida means that forms of expression have philosophical force. We thus suggest that those who wilfully misunderstand Derrida appear to un- derstand him well enough. There is much in his work to resist: the deep com- mitment to social justice or what he himself called the "democracy to come"; the insistence on the "event"—the surprising, improvisational character of utterance and agency; and the exhortation to attention or active waiting—an exercise in philosophical vigilance capable of frustrating even the most fervent and well-inten- tioned activist. Just as being French or American does not automatically make one a democrat, and being Jewish or Algerian does not dictate one's sources of debt and duties, we see in Derrida surprising modes of thought that constantly insist on the demands of global and transcendent justice. Whether he was thinking against Apartheid, in favor of welcoming the refugee, or in defense of the freedom of the persecuted writer, Derrida is a thinker not just of liberty (independence) but also of freedom (belonging). In fact, when he wrote about debt—especially debt to the dead—Derrida came closest to revealing a unique strain of the "Afro": he thinks that the dead belongs to the living as much as the living belongs to the dead. Once again, on the subject of mourning a friend who had died, he mused, "When I say Roland Barthes it is certainly him whom I name, him beyond his name. But since he himself is now in- 82 Philosophia Africana accessible to this appellation . . . it is him in me that I name, toward him in me, in you, in us that I pass through his name."* This is how, without any metaphysical or functional guarantees, the dead becomes, for the living, ancestors or the living- dead. The living-dead are alive because their words, their works, earn a life in the words and works of those still capable to live death. E. C. Eze Department of Philosophy DePaul University Bruce Janz Department of Philosophy University of Central Florida Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Who Is Afraid of Philosophy: The Right to Philosophy I, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 103. 2. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 3. Jacques Derrida, "Roland Barthes," in Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, eds.. The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 49-50. 4. Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 5. An anectode has it that Levinas once complained to Derrida, about one particular interpretation of Levinas' work: "You anaesthetize, then you operate." 6. Derrida, "Roland Barthes," 46.