On Derrida

motifs in Derrida’s oeuvre should, at the very least, put us on guard con-
cerning any project that sets itself the task of inquiring into concepts
that are as problematic as ‘own’ and ‘conscience’. If Derrida’s work has
taught us anything regarding these matters it is that conscience more
than anything else is never one’s own, and that its voice(s) is always that
of the other(s). So why have I insisted on adhering to the phrase
‘Derrida’s own conscience’?

The phrase is not mine. It is a (slightly corrupt) citation, taken from

a brief essay by Jean-Luc Nancy

on Derrida.

My task in this initial

section is merely to partially restore the context of this citation by
offering a reading of Nancy’s ‘The Free Voice of Man’. If I limit myself
at the outset to an exposition of what Nancy has to say concerning the
ethical in Derrida’s work, it is not simply to engage in the task of empty
paraphrase or repetition. Instead, I hope to show that it is Nancy’s
reading of ‘Derrida’s own conscience’ that allows us to discern a subtle
shift in Derrida’s work from an emphasis on the question to a thought
of the call. In reading Derrida’s own conscience along with Nancy, I will
be doing nothing else but attempting to trace the contours of this shift,
and the imperative or command to which it is already a response.

Despite its relative brevity, Nancy’s ‘The Free Voice of Man’ is one

of the most rigorous accounts of the ethico-political dimensions of
deconstruction. Originally presented at the 1980 Cerisy colloquium ‘Les
Fins de l’homme’ organized by Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Nancy’s essay examines the distress that accompanies ‘the ends of man’
and the relation between this distress and the ethico-political. Nancy
opens his essay by citing a short phrase from Henri Birault’s Heidegger
et l’expérience de la pensée that speaks to this relation: ‘What indicates
the distress of our world is the reiterated appeal to an ethics which might
come to exorcise it.’

Although the meaning of the distress alluded to

here is seemingly self-evident, Nancy suggests that there are at least two
ways to understand it: (1) either the distress of the world comes from
a lack of ethics, a distress that could presumably be overcome if an ethics
were supplied or produced for us, or (2) the appeal or demand for an
ethics is itself a sign of distress. For Nancy, the latter reading is ‘more
decisive and problematic’, and indicates a means for understanding the
metaphysical closure within which the first reading of the phrase
remains. To appeal to an ethics in order to overcome distress is not even
to suspect that the ethical itself might be tied up with the distress of our
world. Phrased in more Heideggerian terms, we might say that a
straightforward demand for an ethics that would overcome our distress
remains within the closure of the end of philosophy (that is, if we grant
Heidegger’s argument in the ‘Letter on “Humanism” ’ that ethics [along
with logic and physics] appeared only when thinking was becoming
philosophy and philosophy was becoming epist¯em¯e, and that the history

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and end of this transformation are metaphysical). Remaining within this
closure, or at least remaining within it naively and uncritically, is tan-
tamount to subscribing to a metaphysical ethics; which is to say, that it
is equivalent to failing to ask after the non-ethical condition of ethics,
where ethics might come from, or what gives rise to ethics. These latter
questions, while still remaining within the closure of philosophy’s end,
at least provide the possibility of an opening to something other than
metaphysical ethics by challenging rather than confirming this closure.

Challenging the closure of the metaphysics of philosophical ethics

is, as Nancy will go on to propose in the remainder of his essay, the
task of deconstruction. Such a task, however, is far from straightforward
and is fraught with difficulties. The inquiry into the conditions of philo-
sophical ethics points toward a non-ethical, non-philosophical space;
thus, any attempt to describe these conditions in philosophical terms
amounts to bringing this non-ethical reserve within the bounds of the
closure of philosophy and betraying its non-ethical alterity. But how else
could this non-ethical space be brought to bear on the closure of philo-
sophy other than to speak of it in terms of the discourse of knowledge
and philosophy? Nancy’s critical questioning in this essay revolves
around this tension or double bind of deconstruction. In short, his
question to Derrida will be: what can we know or say about this non-
ethical reserve that gives rise to ethics?

Nancy’s question to Derrida should not be confused with the more

typical questions often posed to deconstruction concerning ethics and
politics. Especially in the United States, Derrida’s work has become syn-
onymous in some circles with nihilism since it fails to provide a deter-
mined ethico-political practice derived from its own theory. Critics of
deconstruction demand that Derrida’s ‘thought of writing, which is also
to say, the general problematic of the proper, should produce or
engender “an ethics”, something which would properly be an ethics’,
and ‘that such an ethics be produced as the practice of a theory’ (FV
33–4/VL 164–5). For Nancy (as for Derrida) such demands miss the
point of deconstruction altogether, not only because they are classically
metaphysical, but also because deconstruction is attempting to think,
indeed is already thinking, ethics otherwise. Asking Derrida to provide
a practice based on the theory of deconstruction is akin to asking
Heidegger, ‘When are you going to write an ethics?’ Heidegger’s
response to this question, that the thinking of the truth of Being and
man’s ek-sistence is in itself an original ethics (if we keep to the meaning
of ‘ethics’ as consisting of pondering the abode of man), holds in a
somewhat analogous fashion for Derrida. Deconstruction in itself is
already tied up with ethics and its conditions, with trying to think ethics
otherwise.

Yet there is, Nancy suggests, something to be gained from playing

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at and with this more classical philosophical question of ethics often
aimed at Derrida’s work. Before we can gain a greater understanding of
how deconstruction is already engaged with and responding to the
ethical, we should perhaps have some knowledge of what deconstruc-
tion has to say about ethics. Nancy thus suggests that we

. . . practice the ethics of the demand for an ethics, let us obey the tra-
ditional philosophical obligation of asking the question of obligation. Let
us ask Derrida, then, without further ado [sans autre forme de procès] (it
will already have the form of a trial, and the form of a requirement to
appear in court; but at the same time, there is no tribunal, no law as yet):
What is your ethics? . . . What do you obey? What is your obligation? (FV
34/VL 165–6)

As the parenthetical remark following the phrase ‘sans autre forme de
procès’ (which invokes a juridical context) implies, these traditional
philosophical questions have the form of bringing Derrida before a
tribunal – the very image, let us not forget, that Kant uses in his descrip-
tion of conscience in The Metaphysics of Morals. We might read Nancy
here as suggesting that the traditional philosophical question of obli-
gation remains (perhaps unknowingly) within a classical metaphysics of
conscience. To pose the question of obligation in this form, then, would
be a somewhat crude (grossière) metaphysical gesture that pays very
little attention to the manner in which Derrida’s work has challenged
this metaphysics of conscience.

But then there is (metaphysical) conscience and there is (non-meta-

physical) conscience, the voice of free man and the free voice of man.

(We will understand shortly that this question [i.e., the traditional philo-
sophical question of obligation] is perhaps less crude than at first it appears,
once we have the chance to hear it as the question posed by Derrida’s own
conscience [la propre conscience de Derrida – this italicized ‘own’ is what
renders our citation slightly corrupt], as the inner voice of a subject
supposed to be the author of the thought of writing. . . . We will see then
how much it changes.) (FV 35/VL 166)

For Nancy, there are at least two ways, then, of reading ‘Derrida’s own
conscience’, of raising the question of obligation with respect to decon-
struction. The first is to ask the traditional question of obligation, sum-
moning Derrida and his conscience to appear before a tribunal of sorts.
We will turn shortly to Nancy’s staging of this tribunal and the response
that Derrida has given to this traditional demand. The second way, the
one that Nancy will pursue at greater length, is a venture toward a
thought of the call that precedes ethics and metaphysical conscience.
This second, and decidedly more difficult, path leads to a discussion of
the pre-ethical call or imperative that originates the ethical gesture of
deconstruction. This second reading will reveal, by way of the logic of

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finitude, the im-propriety and uncanniness at the heart of ‘Derrida’s own
conscience’.

To the traditional question of obligation, there can be no doubt that

Derrida has responded, has even pledged his responsibility to it. Nancy
recalls for us this response in his discussion of the well-known opening
pages of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in which Derrida reflects on the
death of philosophy – philosophy’s finitude, end, or limit – and the
impossible, unanswerable questions that this death poses to philosophy.
Out of the impossibility of responding to the questions posed to philo-
sophy by its death arises an obligation and a community. This is a com-
munity sans community, a community without essence or commonality,
bound together only by the existence of questions without answers. In
Derrida’s words, it is ‘a community of the question about the possibility
of the question. This is very little – almost nothing – but within it, today,
an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision are sheltered and encap-
sulated. An unbreachable responsibility.’

To the traditional question of

obligation – What is your duty? – deconstruction responds that there is
a duty of ‘maintaining the question of the ends or of the question of the
end of philosophy’ (FV 38/VL 169).

Nancy makes certain not to conflate this duty of maintaining the

question with certain Heideggerian or Aristotelian versions of the duty
of thought (both of which remain to a certain extent modeled on a
notion of theo¯ria as praxis) where duty is understood as infinite ques-
tioning. The duty of deconstruction is not simply to question the end
of philosophy unceasingly and unrelentingly, but more modestly to
maintain this question as a question. To maintain the question of philo-
sophy’s end as a question is to protect the freedom of the question and
the question’s freedom for thought from philosophy.

This maintain-

ing of the freedom of the question is a protection against bringing the
question of philosophy’s end back within philosophy’s own borders. In
other words, it is an insistence on philosophy’s finitude, its inability to
answer the question of its own arche and telos. Nancy goes on to
suggest that the duty to maintain the question of philosophy’s finitude
is an indication (based on a reading of finite transcendence in
Heidegger’s Kantbuch) that, for Derrida, finitude itself is ‘the opening
of ethics – at the very point at which . . . ethics has only ever been the
properly infinite teleonomy of a merely provisionally finite being, albeit
one promised to the appropriation of its end. Finitude, on the contrary,
is the depropriation of the end’ (FV 40/VL 171–2). In depropriating
the end, finitude renders duty and ethics im-proper, in question,
uncanny. What deconstruction ultimately suggests to us is that the duty
to maintain the question is a maintaining of ethics in its impropriety,
as ‘the opening and the question of an unheimlich ¯ethos’ (FV 40–1/VL
172).

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But can we demand, ought we to demand, to know anything beyond

this response by Derrida to the traditional question of obligation? On
the one hand, by placing the opening of ethics beyond knowledge and
philosophy, Derrida protects radical alterity from the reductive language
of philosophy. On the other hand, such a characterization runs the risk
of allowing this opening to remain an ineffable, mysterious, and
transphilosophical Unheimlichkeit, completely beyond discourse and
philosophy, and thereby (paradoxically) reinforcing philosophy’s own
closure. The question that Nancy raises here for Derrida is, how to allow
the alterity of this opening to disrupt ethics and philosophy without
thereby letting it be simply reduced to and bound within its closure? In
other words, how to gain a knowing respect and regard for that which
one cannot know?

Derrida’s argument in Speech and Phenomena is that such a regard

cannot be attained with Husserl’s phenomenology. In the chapter of this
book entitled ‘The Voice that Keeps Silence’, Derrida examines Husserl’s
reduction and exclusion of indication and expression from the mono-
logue of inner life, a reduction which allows Husserl to establish the
possibility of a signification without signs, i.e. a pre-expressive pure self-
presence. What is at stake for Husserl in this reduction is to demon-
strate that the language of inner monologue is a false language and can
ultimately be reduced to the silence of a purely present inner voice.
Husserl’s example of this is an example of the voice of conscience: ‘You
have acted badly, you can’t go on like that.’ For Husserl, both the indi-
cation and expression present in this phrase are unnecessary since it is
a false language. There is no need for communication in the inner mono-
logue of conscience since the self is fully present to itself in this instance.
Nancy confirms this close link between the voice of conscience and self-
consciousness in Husserl by remarking: ‘the being-conscious-of-self of
consciousness, Bewusstsein, seems to show itself most inwardly, most
intimately, or most originally as moral conscience, as a Gewissen. . . .
The voice of (moral) consciousness is thus declared to be the pure ori-
ginarity of a pure self-presence prior to language and signification’ (FV
42–3/VL 174).

If Nancy is more insistent than either Husserl or Derrida in expli-

citly naming this inner voice the voice of conscience, it is in order to
highlight that the example under discussion here is axiological and
practical. Thus, when Derrida argues that neither expression nor indi-
cation can be absent from this form of inner monologue, he is, in fact,
challenging a metaphysics of conscience that argues that the voice of
conscience is immediately self-present. And this challenge has immense
practical consequences. At the very least it would mean that ‘writing’,
which is to say, the voice of the other, is no longer absent from the
voice of conscience. It is this recognition or regard (gained through the

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deconstruction of phenomenology) of an unassumable alterity at the
very heart of conscience that opens the possibility of a respect for what
one cannot know.

For Nancy, then, what is at stake in Derrida’s critique of Husserl is

ethicity, which is not ethics exactly, but rather something closer to that
which is essential or originary in ethics: praxis, writing (in the broad
sense that Derrida gives to this term), the Other. These Derridean motifs
mark the ‘atopical but not utopian’ place of a regard for ¯ethos. Starting
out from these conclusions from Speech and Phenomena, Nancy
attempts to probe deeper into the non-ethical imperative, the non-
discursive obligation or ‘il faut’, that sets deconstruction under way.
This is carried out in the remainder of his essay through a sophisticated
re-reading of Kant’s categorical imperative by way of Heidegger’s
Kantbuch. It is here that we can begin to mark the shift (traced for us
here by Nancy) from a discourse on the question (the duty of decon-
struction) to a thought of the call or imperative that gives rise to this
duty. The importance of Nancy’s text for our reading is that it calls
attention to the need for deconstruction to ‘write’ this call, to leave a
trace of it in the metaphysical text of philosophy in order for this call
to disrupt the good conscience of philosophy’s discourse on ethics and
duty.

If one searches the history of philosophy for examples of the voice

of conscience that reinforce this good conscience regarding duty, Kant’s
account of moral consciousness and the categorical imperative are
certain to figure prominently. A straightforward reading of the categori-
cal imperative would suggest that the ‘moral law within me’ is, for Kant,
self-present and self-evident – in other words, it is the example of the
voice of self-present moral consciousness. As the formula of a command
of reason, an imperative orders the will (which does not always or
necessarily carry out rational actions) to act in accord with the represen-
tation of an objective, rationally valid principle. This order, it would
seem, comes to the self from the self’s own reason, thus producing the
ethics of proximity and autonomy for which Kant is so well known.

However, if we heed the appearance of freedom (freedom here

meaning being subject to moral laws in the Kantian sense) within the
imperative, we immediately see that the categorical imperative can no
longer simply be read in terms of the self-presence of the subject of
practical reason. Where freedom is understood as a subjection or placing
of the human under moral laws, the imperative inscribes itself as some-
thing received and divides the self from within. With this sense of
freedom in mind, Nancy explains that ‘Kantian freedom does not found
a being, and does not assure a presence – it bestimmt, determines and
destines man, which is something completely different’ (FV 47/VL
178–9).

Nancy’s deconstructive reading of Kant insists on this alterity

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and spacing within the ‘self’ that receives the call, an otherness and
heteronomy that is proper to the self before its even being a self. This
imperative, this free voice of man – coming from one knows not where
and addressed to a being which is not yet properly a self, that is, without
a proper identity – thus ‘renders indiscernible the “indices” of the
addresser and addressee’ (FV 48/VL 180). Even if the categorical
imperative is read as an example of reason speaking to itself in
autonomy and self-presence, it also has to be acknowledged that the
freedom at the heart of the imperative calls to reason from beyond itself,
introducing alterity into the proximity of self-presence.

Nancy’s reading of Kant helps to pinpoint the transition in decon-

struction to a discourse on the call that precedes the question. The struc-
ture of finitude and originary alterity that Nancy locates in Kant’s
imperative allows for an understanding of Dasein not as a being whose
primary mode of being is that of questioning (as the opening sections
of Being and Time seem to suggest), but rather as a being who is called,
ordered to-be-there. Ek-sistent Dasein would not be there of its own
volition, but only through being obliged, ordered by an imperative that
it does not itself originate or initiate. Hence, when Derrida character-
izes deconstruction’s duty as a maintaining of the question, it follows
from the logic of finitude as presented by Nancy that such a duty does
not arise wholly from within Derrida’s own conscience. The duty of
maintaining the question is already a response to an order or call that
originates elsewhere. As Nancy phrases it, in carrying out the duty of
maintaining the question, Derrida ‘was already obeying. . . . He was
only doing his duty’ (FV 51/VL 182).

Bracketing for the moment the possibility that Derrida could ever

do, i.e. assume, his duty (something that the deconstructive double bind
of duty would prevent a priori

), what I wish to do here is further

examine certain of the effects of this call that precedes the question. In
the ‘Debat’ following Nancy’s paper, Derrida himself marks this shift
from the question to the call in his work. Referring to the earlier text
on Levinas (‘Violence and Metaphysics’) from which Nancy extracted
the duty of maintaining the question, he notes that:

. . . although I am always concerned with Levinas’ questions, I could not
write it [‘Violence and Metaphysics’] like that today. . . . Why wouldn’t I
write like I had in 1964? Basically it is the word question which I would
have changed there. I would displace the accent of the question towards
something which would be a call. Rather than it being necessary to
maintain a question, it is necessary to have heard/understood a call (or an
order, desire, or demand). (FV 54/VL 184)

In re-marking along with Derrida this shift or displacement in his

work, I am not attempting to locate something like Derrida’s ethical

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Kehre; nor by avoiding such a sharp demarcation do I mean to imply
that a seamless continuity traverses his writings. Beyond both of these
projects, I am merely aiming to demonstrate that this displacement of
the priority of the question is accompanied by a thematic which has
become increasingly prevalent and significant in Derrida’s work, viz.,
the motif of ‘Viens’, or ‘Come’. In the section that follows, this ‘Come’
is read as an-other response to the call that reaches philosophy at its
end, a response to the injunction or call that is marked in/by Nancy’s
essay.

II: ‘Come’: a call beyond being

Nancy’s characterization of Derrida’s ethics and notion of duty makes
use of a certain apocalyptic tone, stressing as it does the twin ends of
philosophy and man, and the distress that accompanies these ends. Such
a tone is certainly not out of place at a conference entitled ‘The Ends
of Man’, a title borrowed from Derrida’s well-known polemical essay
on French (mis)appropriations of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.
Indeed, in one fashion or another, Derrida has always been engaged with
the apocalyptic theme of ends, if only to problematize such rhetoric with
his discourse on closure, or (and this might ultimately amount to the
same thing) multiply and complicate it by insisting on several ends
instead of one. But by 1980, this apocalyptic rhetoric of ‘end(s)’ had, if
not completely faded, certainly become less stylish and provocative on
the French scene. Thus, when Derrida is given occasion by the con-
ference ‘The Ends of Man’ to return to this dimension of his work, one
might anticipate that he would use the opportunity to distance himself
from this excess in his previous writings.

Against the grain of such expectations, Derrida’s contribution to this

conference entitled ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philo-
sophy’

does not abandon the theme of the apocalypse but instead

attempts both to identify and de-identify deconstruction with the most
famous apocalypse in western literature – the apocalypse of John of
Patmos. By invoking John’s apocalypse, Derrida implicates and entan-
gles himself in the problematic of translation, which includes not only
the difficulties of translating from Greek to French, but also from
Hebrew to Greek, as well as the larger question of translation itself.
According to André Chouraqui (whose French translations of the Greek
and Hebrew scriptures are often cited by Derrida both here and else-
where) the Greek apokalupsis is derived from the Hebrew gala. Gala
can be translated variously as reveal, appear, disclose, discover, denude.
Derrida cites Chouraqui in the opening of his essay not as an authority
on translation (authority regarding translation, as we shall see, is

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precisely what is at stake for Derrida in this essay

), but in order to

highlight the resonances of appearance, disclosure, and revelation that
are often overlooked by the more dominant sense of apocalypse as catas-
trophe or disaster. In short, what Derrida is bringing to our attention
in the opening pages of his essay is that the catastrophe of the apoca-
lypse is always implicated to some extent with themes of disclosure and
revelation.

Rather than taking up the multiple and intricate connections

between the Hebrew gala and the Greek apokalupsis, Derrida chooses
instead to speak of/in an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philo-
sophy (‘. . . j’ai choisi de vous parler plutôt d’un ton apocalyptique
adopté naguère en philosophie’ [AT 122/TA 16–17]), a task that mimics
the title of Kant’s short pamphlet ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in
Philosophy’,

which also serves as the subject of Derrida’s essay. The

choice to speak in this tone communicates with another choice, viz., to
relate to and build on the work of others at the same conference who
have made reference to a ‘certain Kantian caesura in the time of philo-
sophy’. Beyond these two choices, Derrida was also seduced by Kant’s
attention to tone in this work, something quite uncommon in most
philosophical expositions that aim in general to be atonal, or at the very
least neutral in tone. As Derrida notes, any exposition that would take
a philosophical approach to tone would be confronted by a number of
difficult, if not impossible, questions. By what is a tone marked? How
can a tonal difference be recognized? What are the criteria to be
employed in a philosophical analysis of tone? And how might philo-
sophy, which has always dreamt of making tonal difference inaudible,
account for tone within a philosophical discourse?

Even though Kant’s short essay is perhaps the first philosophical

work to deal explicitly with the theme of tone in philosophy, Derrida’s
questions are not exactly the ones Kant is interested in pursuing. Instead
of engaging in a philosophical analysis of tone, Kant settles for denoun-
cing a certain tone that announces the ‘death of all philosophy’. The
phrase ‘death of all philosophy’ (der Tod aller Philosophie) is not a
Derridean citation read back into Kant’s text, but is actually a phrase
employed by Kant himself twice in this brief essay. Both times that he
uses the expression it is in critical relation to those who claim privileged
access to a certain supernatural revelation which, in bypassing the work
of the concept, would attempt to put an end to all philosophy.

Kant charges those

who invoke such supernatural revelations that

signal the death of philosophy with being mystagogues. These mysta-
gogues, according to Kant, pervert the first and true meaning of philo-
sophy as the ‘scientific wisdom of life’ when they claim that supernatural
revelation or communication (which is devoid of the hard work of
science and knowledge) is a form of philosophy. As Derrida notes, it is

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only because of a certain structural slackness (here he is engaging in a
play on the Greek tonos) between philosophy and its meaning that such
a ‘perversion’ or ‘intellectual travesty/transvestism’ (the French traves-
tissement carries both these senses) could arise under the name of phil-
osophy. That philosophy is able to a certain extent to wander away from
its ‘proper’ signification implies that those like Kant who want to protect
philosophy must tighten up the slack, re-establish the tension, between
philosophy and its meaning. Such are the stakes of Kant’s enterprise in
this short work – to protect philosophy from its death by bringing phil-
osophy back to its first, true, and proper signification as the ‘scientific
wisdom of life’.

Kant sets about accomplishing this task not by criticizing or attack-

ing tone per se, but by taking aim at young ‘upstarts’ who mimic or act
like true aristocrats by taking on a superior, overlordly tone. In taking
on this fictive tone and mimicking true aristocrats, the mystagogues
(who are themselves professional philosophers) seek to elevate them-
selves above their philosophical counterparts in the university and else-
where who insist on the free and public use of reason as the only and
true means of doing philosophy. By appealing to the authority of a
supernatural voice beyond reason, the mystagogues are guilty of mixing
up the two voices within us, the voice of the oracle and the voice of
reason. (We should note here that, in a parenthetical remark, Derrida
says that this distinction between the voice of reason and the voice of
the oracle will permit him to ‘echo’, without being sure he is respond-
ing to ‘the questioning, the injunction, or the request’ that Jean-Luc
Nancy addressed to him in ‘The Free Voice of Man’. We will encounter
another ‘echo’ from Derrida momentarily.) The voice of the oracle, since
it is properly private and can be made to say whatever one wishes it to
say, tends to overpower the voice of reason, which is properly public
and cannot be made to say just anything.

This admixture of the voice of the oracle and the voice of reason is

evidence, according to Kant, of the mystagogues’ delirium, Verstim-
mung, which more literally means being out of tune, or mistuned. The
inability to distinguish properly between the voice of the oracle and the
voice of reason betrays a mistuning of the voices in one’s head. A tune-
up of sorts is thus required to straighten these voices out. It begins with
the Kantian distinction between pure speculative reason and pure
practical reason that the mystagogues ignore. The mystagogues would
like to think that they can know things which are properly thinkable
only by practical reason (one could call this the paralogism of the mys-
tagogues). However, practical reason gives us no knowledge, at least not
the type of knowledge proper to theoretical reason. As Nancy’s essay
recalls for us, in Kant, practical reason only dictates the moral law to
us, and this dictation or prescription is what creates the distance or

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spacing of man from himself. The moral law is not like the voice of the
oracle because it cannot be made to say just anything; the moral law is
received as a command, arising from a site beyond knowledge. Derrida
further explains this when he writes: ‘Although it [the voice of practical
reason] gives rise to autonomy, the law it dictates is as little flexible, as
little subject to free interpretation as if it came from the completely other
in me [si elle venait du tout autre en moi]’ (AT 132/TA 136). Herein lies
the true secret or mystery for Kant, the secret that the mystagogues, for
all their secrecy and mystery, miss. Our inability to grasp or compre-
hend the dictates of practical reason through the means of theoretical
reason does nothing to prevent these commands from being received as
binding, as obligations. This sense of obligation, according to Kant, is
what provokes in us the greatest astonishment and mystery.

The mystagogues believe that through the voice of the oracle they

can somehow lift the veil of practical reason and see or touch this secret
of the moral law for itself, make it their own, as an object of secret know-
ledge that they can then share with their initiates. Kant points out that
the means by which the mystagogues supposedly have direct access to
the moral law is not through rational argumentation or proof, but with
mere personifying metaphors, figural expressions, and analogies (the
mystagogues speak of the moral law as a ‘veiled goddess’, and believe
they can get near enough to her to ‘perceive the rustle of her garment’).
Such procedures are anything but philosophy to Kant’s mind, and here
is where he locates the grounds of the disagreement between himself and
the mystagogues. If only the mystagogues could realize that by employ-
ing metaphor and analogy they are killing authentic philosophy! Despite
his name-calling and polemical tone, Kant does not want to fight with
the mystagogues, for their intentions, if not their tone or mode of philo-
sophizing, are ultimately good. Kant believes that they share ‘one and
the same intention’ with him, viz., ‘to make people wise and virtuous’.
Hence, Kant would much rather bring the mystagogues back within the
proper limits of philosophy by way of a treaty or agreement.

The veiled goddess before whom we of both parties bend our knees is the
moral law in us, in its inviolable majesty. We do indeed perceive her voice
and also understand very well her command. But when we are listening,
we are in doubt whether it comes from man, from the perfected power of
his own reason, or whether it comes from an other, whose essence is
unknown to us and speaks to man through this, his own reason. At bottom
we would perhaps do better to rise above and thus spare ourselves research
into this matter. . . . [T]he didactic procedure of bringing the moral law
within us into clear concepts according to a logical methodology is the only
authentically philosophical one, whereas the procedure whereby the law is
personified and reason’s bidding is made into a veiled Isis . . . is an aes-
thetic mode of representing precisely the same object; one can doubtless

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use this mode of representation backward, after the first procedure has
already purified the principles, in order to enliven those ideas by a sensible,
albeit only analogical, presentation, and yet one always runs the danger of
falling into an exalting vision, which is the death of all philosophy.

To avoid the risk of the death of all philosophy, a death that comes to
it in the form of an ‘exalting vision’ (schwärmerische Vision), the
sensible presentation of the moral law in the personified form of a
goddess must subsequently be avoided. This is Kant’s peaceful, philo-
sophical solution to the disagreement.

From this passage one could begin to draw out several directions

for further inquiry concerning the Kantian delimitation of the sphere of
the ethico-philosophical: the exclusion of the goddess (as a representa-
tive figure for woman, body, the sensible, the pathological) from ethics;
the sharp distinction between an aesthetic and a philosophical approach
to the moral law; and the protection and guarding of philosophy from
its other, where the other is death in the form of an ‘exalting vision’.
Derrida’s essay takes up each of these themes at length, but it is the last
of these themes – the death of philosophy – that most interests him. As
Derrida is quick to point out, even as Kant is busy denouncing the
superior tone of the mystagogues who announce the end of philosophy,
Kant perhaps neglects to notice that his own philosophy has proclaimed
not a few ends and limits of its own. Kant’s critical philosophy has
marked the deaths of several previous philosophies and philosophemes
(from the First Critique alone we could cite the well-known death or
end of a certain Subject in the Transcendental Deduction and the Para-
logisms, as well as the progression beyond the limits of previous meta-
physics in Kant’s Copernican revolution from the Preface). In fact, Kant
is so well known for this, that one could suggest – and Derrida does –
that the more recent phenomena of the deaths of man, philosophy, and
so forth have a certain affinity with and heritage in Kant himself. This
is one of the lessons of Derrida’s statement that ‘Each of us is the mys-
tagogue and the Aufklärer of another’ (AT 142/TA 53).

Ever since Kant, and to a certain extent thanks to him, there has

been an increasing prevalence of eschatological discourses in philosophy,
the names of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche being the most obvious
markers. Closer to our own time, we are surrounded by proliferating
apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of nearly everything: Man,
history, class struggle, philosophy, Christianity and morals (a pro-
nouncement which Derrida believes to be seriously naive), the subject,
Oedipus, psychoanalysis, literature, phallogocentrism, and who knows
what else? Someone, in the person of Derrida, has even come to tell us
that the end of the end is here, that the end is always already here, that
we need to distinguish between ‘end’ and ‘closure’ – all of this to suggest
that there is no Apocalypse (capital A). Yet even though Derrida has

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always maintained a critical distance with respect to contemporary
apocalyptic discourses, he acknowledges here that his critical inter-
ventions or displacements ultimately amount to participating in the
concert of apocalyptic voices. What Derrida has perhaps come to
realize, something he certainly ‘knew’ all along, is that there is no dis-
cursive space remaining which is uncontaminated by apocalyptic dis-
course. Hence, this essay marks for Derrida the ‘end of metalanguage
on the subject of eschatological language. With the result that we can
wonder if eschatology is a tone, or even the voice itself’ (AT 146/TA
60).

At this point we arrive at a critical juncture in Derrida’s essay, at

the crossroads of a deconstructive double bind. Derrida finds himself
confronted with two conflicting demands. On the one hand, there is the
inheritance of the legacy of Kantian and post-Kantian Enlightenment
thought, a legacy that insists on the importance of lucidity and eluci-
dation, critique and truth, one that demands the demystification of
apocalyptic discourses founded on imminent vision and supernatural
revelation (we will return to the ‘other hand’ of this ‘on the one hand’
momentarily). Derrida does not side-step this inheritance from the
Enlightenment, as certain of his neo-Enlightenment readers might be
surprised to find out. Instead he argues that this inheritance is received
as a command, an imperative (and here is where we might be able to
locate another one of Derrida’s echoings of Nancy) that determines and
destines us. Derrida writes, ‘We cannot and we must not – this is a law
and a destiny – forgo the Aufklärung . . .’ (AT 148/TA 64). The diffi-
culty that Derrida has in following through on and carrying out this
inheritance, a problem that does not seem to bother modern-day Aufk-
lärers, is that this ‘law’ and ‘destiny’ are complicated by the fact that
apocalyptic tones take on multiple and complex forms.

A philosophical approach might have us believe that there is only

one, unified apocalyptic tone, and that anyone who uses this tone has
come to tell us only one thing: The end is near! Be ready! Stay awake!
In support of this approach, one could perhaps choose no better
example of the essence of the apocalypse than that of John of Patmos.
But Derrida locates something altogether different in John’s apocalypse,
something that was already there, uncannily, waiting for him: a quasi-
structural apocalyptic problematic that both complicates his Enlighten-
ment inheritance and anticipates certain of his previous writings on
Blanchot. Derrida notes that if we pay careful attention to the narrative
voice (here he is taking over a distinction from Blanchot between an
unidentifiable narrative voice and the narrating voice of an identifiable
subject) of John’s Apocalypse, what is really going on is a vast and
complex system of sendings and receivings of letters and messages with
various addresses and addressees. For not only is John dictating and

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being dictated to by the command of a ‘great voice’ behind him (Revel-
ations 1: 10), but the Apocalypse opens with an account of the complex
transmission of the apocalyptic message (from Elohim through Jesus
Christ through an angel and finally to John [Revelations 1: 1–2]). This
is further complicated in so far as John’s already transmitted message is
then sent to seven different churches. As Derrida remarks, John’s Apoca-
lypse is characterized by ‘so many envois, so many voices, and this puts
many people on the line’ (AT 155/TA 75).

So many people and so many sendings in fact that one can no longer

be certain of who is sending and who is receiving the message, who is
writing it and who is reading it. That such messages may or may
not arrive at their destination (the possibility of ‘destinerrance’) is the
‘apocalyptic’ (recalling both John’s Apocalypse and the etymological
sense of the ‘catastrophe’ of apocalypse) structural condition of all
writing. All writing is apocalyptic, in so far as the full presence of the
sender and the assured destination of the receiver are no longer guaran-
teed. One can never be certain that one’s words will reach a particular
reader or audience, and even if they happen to reach their assured des-
tination, who or what could ever guarantee that they will be properly
understood? Derrida has been making this sort of argument in many
forms beginning with his earliest writings on the trace, writing, the
mark, and so forth. He recalls it for us here in order to complicate the
Enlightenment legacy of demystification, thereby returning us to the
double bind we referred to above. Thus, on the one hand, there is the
inheritance of a law and a destiny from the Enlightenment to demystify
the apocalyptic tone that is grounded in supernatural revelation. On the
other hand, one must also recognize that the apocalyptic tone is various
and complicated, such that whenever one takes up the law and destiny
of demystification, it is never quite certain who or what is the target of
critique.

Ultimately, the marking of this double bind by Derrida amounts to

a call for modesty concerning Enlightenment demystification, lest this
law and destiny turn into the Law that comes to censor any writing or
speech that does not obey the limits and modalities of Enlightenment
discourse. It is at this limit that another limit of demystification is
reached, a limit that would distinguish deconstruction from Enlighten-
ment demystification (a distinction that ‘perhaps’ could be made,
Derrida adds in parentheses with characteristic caution). For even as
deconstruction subscribes to the Enlightenment duty of demystification,
this duty is simultaneously submitted to complication and delimitation.
There are limits to the demystification of apocalyptic tones – especially
concerning the apocalyptic tone that resounds in ‘Viens’, or ‘Come’ (a
motif that Derrida had first come across in Blanchot’s recits and written
about in ‘Pas’ before realizing that it harmonized with the ‘Come’s of

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John’s Apocalypse). With the ‘Come’ (erkhou) of John’s Apocalypse (as
with the ‘Viens’ of Blanchot’s recits), we encounter a tone that cannot
be fully demystified by Enlightenment critique, not because ‘Come’ is a
supernatural revelation, but rather because it is irreducible to the
Enlightenment discourse of presence. ‘Come’ itself is not a present
occurrence or event, but a responsivity and responsibility that takes the
form of a call of, or calling for, an event. The closing pages of John’s
Apocalypse offer us a glimpse into the advent-ual structure of the
‘Come’ as it functions in Derrida’s text:

The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’. And let him who hears say ‘Come’.
And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life
without price. I warn every one who hears the words of this prophecy of
this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues
described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the
book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and
in the holy city, which are described in this book.

He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon’. Amen.

Come, Lord Jesus! (22: 17–20)

This ‘Come’ precedes and calls forth the event or occurrence of the
coming. Here, the ‘Come’ is an opening to the future, to what is to-
come, and it is this advent-ual structure of the call that allows for a
certain identification of deconstruction with John’s Apocalypse.
However, the de-identification of deconstruction with the Apocalypse is
just as significant. Whereas John’s Apocalypse concludes with a ‘Come’
that calls forth a particular, identifiable event (the coming of Jesus),
‘Come’, as Derrida would have us understand it, is not quite so certain
of what is coming or what its call might bring forth.

What, then, is this ‘Come’? Responding to the philosophical

question of the ti esti of the ‘Come’ is what allows Derrida to ‘write’
this call in the text of philosophy, but a significant risk attends such an
attempt. Why? Because, for Derrida, ‘Come’ marks a ‘place’ and a ‘tem-
porality’ that cannot be contained within the confines of philosophy,
metaphysics, and onto-eschato-theology and the critiques that these dis-
courses have offered on the apocalyptic. Preceding and opening this
philosophical scene, ‘Come’ is irreducible to philosophy’s modes of
representation, citation, and categorization. To write this ‘Come’ in
philosophical language is to risk ‘essentially deforming it’ since these
modes can only reduce to a logic of the event that which exceeds this
very logic and the event itself. To risk writing this ‘Come’ philosophi-
cally is to open it to a necessary deformation, but it also offers the possi-
bility of exposing philosophical discourse to its other (and it is here that
we can locate another echo of, if not a response to, Nancy’s injunction).

So, with these precautions in mind, what does Derrida say this

‘Come’ is? He tells us that it is the ‘gesture in speaking [parole], that

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gesture that does not let itself be recovered [reprendre] by the analysis
– linguistic, semantic or rhetorical – of speaking’ (AT 166/TA 94). He
goes on to add that ‘it [‘Come’], engaging perhaps in the place in which
Ereignis (no longer can this be translated by ‘event’) and Enteignis
unfold the movement of propriation, comes from beyond being and calls
beyond being’ (AT 166/TA 94). ‘Come’ can thus perhaps be understood
in terms of a radical exposure in language – beyond the language of
being – to alterity, to the call of the other, i.e. to ‘language’, or more
precisely to language coming from the other(s). This gesture, this
exposure beyond the activity/passivity binary, does not arise from any
identifiable ‘subject’, ‘I’, or ‘Self’, any more than the ‘Come’ which it
issues is addressed or destined to an identifiable other (man, woman,
animal, God, etc.). Derrida writes, ‘ “Come” is only derivable, abso-
lutely derivable, but only from the other, from nothing that may be an
origin or a verifiable, decidable, presentable, appropriable identity . . .’
(AT 166–7/TA 95). In Blanchot’s terms, this ‘Come’ is the disaster; in
John of Patmos’ terms, this ‘Come’ is apocalyptic. If we bring these two
‘Come’s together along with Blanchot’s syntax of the ‘sans’ (‘without’),
we get ‘an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without
vision, without truth, without revelation’, which is also a never-ending
apocalypse without an end. ‘Come’ announces nothing and does not
lead; it is an-agogic, that is, it leads us nowhere, at least nowhere (in
the) present. It is an opening to, and an affirmation of, something that
is other than the present, a tear in the fabric of the present that opens
onto an anachronic temporality in which what is to come is beyond the
grasp of knowledge or recovery, com-prendre or re-prendre.

At the risk of further deforming this ‘Come’, I would like, in closing,

to draw out some of the consequences that this call has for a philo-
sophical thought of obligation and responsibility. At the outset of my
reading of Derrida’s essay, I suggested that ‘Come’ marks another
response to the call that reaches philosophy at its end. This suggestion
was itself reached only at the end of an exposition of Nancy’s essay that
proposed a reading of ‘Derrida’s own conscience’. Nancy’s essay offered
us two different ways of raising the question of obligation with respect
to Derrida’s work: bringing Derrida before a tribunal to answer the
philosophical question ‘What is your obligation?’, and a more nuanced
approach that inquires after the possibility of ‘writing’ the call that gives
rise to the response (‘It is necessary to maintain the question’) to this
traditional question. What Nancy’s essay gives us to think is the possi-
bility that the project of reading Derrida’s own conscience in its more
classical, philosophical form gives way to another thought of conscience
and obligation that exceeds and disrupts the metaphysics of conscience.
What I want to suggest here is that the ‘Come’ is (in so far as it ‘is’ at
all) this other thought of conscience, a thought – beyond metaphysical

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conscience – of exposure and responsivity to the other’s call, another
response to the impossible questions and imperatives that reach philo-
sophical ethics at its limit. In reading Derrida’s own conscience and
tracing the deconstructive displacement of the question in favor of a
call, we have engaged ourselves in what I take to be one of the central
‘texts’ for Derrida’s interventions into the history of the metaphysics of
conscience. In later writings,

‘Come’, as the response to this call, will

increasingly come to mark the impossibility of good conscience, as it
already does to a certain extent in ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone
in Philosophy’. In this text, ‘Come’ is the site of an affirmation of the
aporetic structure of duty, or double bind, that disrupts the good con-
science of the Enlightenment duty of demystification. What I have
sought to demonstrate in this attempt to read Derrida’s own conscience
is that this double bind announces another thought of obligation, as
well as the death, the end, of metaphysical conscience. Or, if we are no
longer so easily seduced by such talk of the end, perhaps we have sensed
that we are confronted by an obligation to think conscience otherwise
– that we ought, at the very least, to ‘avoid good conscience at all
costs’.

Department of Philosophy, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA, USA

Notes

1 ‘The Free Voice of Man’, trans. Richard Stamp, in Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks
(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 32–51, henceforth cited as
FV; Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Voix libre de l’homme’, in Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Les Fins de l’homme: À partir du travail
de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1981), pp. 163–82, henceforth cited as
VL.

2 ‘On Derrida’, for lack of a better phrase, as Nancy’s essay is not exactly

‘on’ Derrida or deconstruction. In ‘Elliptical Sense’ (in Derrida: A Critical
Reader, ed. David Wood [Oxford: Blackwell, 1992]), Nancy notes that he
has ‘never written on Jacques Derrida – neither on his body nor on his work’
(p. 36). This is, perhaps, because the proximity of Nancy’s and Derrida’s
work is so close as to preclude the distance required of certain forms of
commentary. The questions posed to Derrida by Nancy throughout ‘The
Free Voice of Man’ are questions addressed as much to Derrida as they are
to Nancy’s own writings.

3 Birault cited in Nancy, FV 32/VL 163.
4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence et métaphysique’, in L’Écriture et la différence

(Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1967), p. 118; ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in

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Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80.

5 Nancy returns to this problematic in his L’Oubli de la philosophie (Paris:

Galilée, 1986), pp. 68–73.

6 Nancy undertakes a similar reading in defense of Kant against Nietzsche’s

criticisms of conscience and the categorical imperative in ‘Notre Probité:
Sur la vérité au sens moral chez Nietzsche’, in L’Imperatif catégorique
(Paris: Flammarion, 1983). In this essay, he argues that Nietzsche’s intel-
lectual conscience or probity (the very thing Nietzsche believes Kant is
lacking) has a certain parallel in Kant’s categorical imperative.

7 On the double bind of duty, see in particular Derrida’s L’Autre cap, suivi

de la democratie ajournée (Paris: Minuit, 1991); The Other Heading:
Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B.
Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

8 ‘D’Un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie’, in Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Les Fins de l’homme: À partir
du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1981), pp. 445–79. Reprinted
in book form with modifications as D’Un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère
en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983); Kant, ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyp-
tic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, in Raising the Tone of Philo-
sophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993). All citations are from the revised French edition
and the English translation, henceforth cited respectively as TA and AT.

9 For more on Derrida’s remarks concerning questions of authority in

Chouraqui’s translation, see the lengthy footnote in AT, pp. 118–20, n.
1/TA, pp. 12–13, n. 1.

10 ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, in Raising the Tone of

Philosophy, pp. 51–72.

11 Kant’s primary target is Johann Georg Schlosser. See the editor’s remarks in

the ‘Notes on the Text’ of Kant’s ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in
Philosophy’, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, pp. 72–5, for a more
complete account of the debate between Kant and Schlosser.

12 ‘Newly Arisen Superior Tone’, p. 71.
13 See, for example, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’,

Cordozo Law Review 11 (5–6) (1990), and Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).

14 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (one another at) the Limits of

Truth, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1993), p. 19.

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