I Have to Wander All Alone

8/7/2019 I Have to Wander All Alone

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I Have to Wander All Alone---Jacques Derrida

Too much to say, and I don't have the heart for it today. There is too much to say about

what has happened to us here, about what has also happened to me, with the death ofGilles Deleuze, with a death we no doubt feared (knowing him to be so ill), but still, with

this death here (cette mort-ci), this unimaginable image, in the event, would deepen still

further, if that were possible, the infinite sorrow of another event. Deleuze the thinker is,above all, the thinker of the event and always of this event here (cet evenement-ci). He

remained the thinker of the event from beginning to end. I reread what he said of the

event, already in 1969, in one of his most celebrated books, The Logic of Sense. He citesJoe Bousquet ("To my inclination for death," said Bousquet, "which was a failure of the

will"), then continues: "From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect,

no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the

whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactlywhat occurs, but something inthat which occurs, something yet to come which would be

consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous

conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that theAmor fatiis one with the struggle of freemen" (One would have to quote interminably).

There is too much to say, yes, about the time I was given, along with so many others ofmy "generation," to share with Deleuze; about the good fortune I had of thinking thanks

to him, by thinking of him. Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of allNietzsche, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense) have been for me not only, ofcourse, provocations to think, but, each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience -

so unsettling - of a proximity or a near total affinity in the "theses" - if one may say this -

through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, "gesture,"

"strategy," "manner": of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the "theses"(but the word doesn't fit) and particularly the thesis concerning a difference that is not

reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction

(Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation ("yes, yes"),the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many

dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of

this "generation." I never felt the slightest "objection" arise in me, not even a virtual one,against any of his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or

that proposition inAnti-Oedipus(I told him about it one day when we were coming back

together by car from Nanterre University, after a thesis defense on Spinoza) or perhaps

against the idea that philosophy consists in "creating" concepts. One day, I would like to

explain how such an agreement on philosophical "content" never excludes all thesedifferences that still today I don't know how to name or situate. (Deleuze had accepted

the idea of publishing, one day, a long improvised conversation between us on thissubject and then we had to wait, to wait too long.) I only know that these differences left

room for nothing but friendship between us. To my knowledge, no shadow, no sign has

ever indicated the contrary. Such a thing is so rare in the milieu that was ours that I wishto make note of it here at this moment. This friendship did not stem solely from the

(otherwise telling) fact that we have the same enemies. We saw each other little, it is true,


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especially in the last years. But I can still hear the laugh of his voice, a little hoarse, tell

me so many things that I love to remember down to the letter: "My best wishes, all my

best wishes," he whispered to me with a friendly irony the summer of 1955 in thecourtyard of the Sorbonne when I was in the middle of failing my agregation exam. Or

else, with the same solicitude of the elder: "It pains me to see you spending so much time

on that institution (le College International de Philosophie). I would rather you wrote..."And then, I recall the memorable ten days of the Nietzsche colloquium at Cerisy, in 1972,

and then so many, many other moments that make me, no doubt along with Jean-Francois

Lyotard (who was also there), feel quite alone, surviving and melancholy today in what iscalled with that terrible and somewhat false word, a "generation." Each death is unique,

of course, and therefore unusual, but what can one say about the unusual when, from

Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to Deleuze, it multiplies in this way in the same

"generation," as in a series - and Deleuze was also the philosopher of serial singuarity -all these uncommon endings?

Yes, we will all have loved philosophy. Who can deny it? But, it's true, (he said it),Deleuze was, of all those in his "generation," the one who "did/made" (faisait) it the most

gaily, the most innocently. He would not have liked, I think, the word "thinker" that I

used above. He would have preferred "philosopher." In this respect, he claimed to be "themost innocent (the most devoid of guilt) of making/doing philosophy" (Negotiations).

This was no doubt the condition for his having left a profound mark on the philosophy of

this century, the mark that will remain his own, incomparable. The mark of a great

philosopher and a great professor. The historian of philosophy who proceeded with a sortof configurational election of his own genealogy (the Stoics, Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume,

Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.) was also an inventor of philosophy who never shut

himself up in some philosophical "realm" (he wrote on painting, the cinema, andliterature, Bacon, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Melville, etc.). And then, and then I want

to say precisely here that I loved and admired his way -- always faultless -- of negotiating

with the image, the newspapers, television, the public scene and the transformations thatit has undergone over the course of the past ten years. Economy and vigilant retreat. I felt

solidarity with what he was doing and saying in this respect, for example in an interview

inLiberationat the time of the publication ofA Thousand Plateaus(in the vein of his 1977pamphlet). He said: "One should know what is currently happening in the realm of books.

For several years now, we've been living in a period of reaction in every domain. There is

no reason to think that books are to be spared from this reaction. People are in the process

of fabricating for us a literary space, as well as judicial, economic, and political spaces,which are completely reactionary, prefabricated, and overwhelming/crushing. There is

here, I believe, a systematic enterprise thatLiberationshould have analyzed." This is

"much worse than a censorship," he added, but this dry spell will not necessarily last."

Perhaps, perhaps.

Like Nietzsche and Artaud, like Blanchot and other shared admirations, Deleuze neverlost sight of this alliance between necessity and the aleatory, between chaos and the

untimely. When I was writing on Marx at the worst moment, three years ago, I took heart

when I learned that he was planning to do so as well. And I reread tonight what he said in

1990 on this subject: "...Felix Guattari and I have always remained Marxists, in twodifferent manners perhaps, but both of us. It's that we don't believe in a political


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philosophy that would not be centered around the analysis of capitalism and its

developments. What interests us the most is the analysis of capitalism as an immanent

system that constantly pushes back its proper limits, and that always finds them again ona larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself."

I will continue to begin again to read Gilles Deleuze in order to learn, and I'll have towander all alone in this long conversation that we were supposed to have together. My

first question, I think, would have concerned Artaud, his interpretation of the "body

without organ," and the word "immanence" on which he always insisted, in order to makehim or let him say something that no doubt still remains secret to us. And I would have

tried to tell him why his thought has never left me, for nearly forty years. How could it do

so from now on?

Translated by David Kammerman

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I Have to Wander All Alone