Derrida e o Seculo 18

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Greene / Hors d’œuvre 367
Hors d’œuvre
Jody Greene
To love friendship it is not enough to know how to bear the other in

mourning; one must love the future.
—Jacques Derrida,
The Politics of Friendship
Even if it is essentially preservative, love (but also deconstruction) is nev-

ertheless no stranger to destruction, to loss, and to ruin.
—Peggy Kamuf, “Deconstruction and Love”
The archive should call into question the coming of the future.
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
How we mourn, how we recognize and remember the dead, according to

Jacques Derrida, dictates not only our relationship to the past, but also any possibil-
ity of a future. This is also the commonest form of common sense, albeit pushed to
its limits: while we cannot control the future in its unanticipatable unfolding, cannot
predetermine or securely prepare for it, as death and “untimely death” above all
surely shows, how we orient ourselves to the future in the wake of loss will have
Jody Greene is Associate Professor of Literature and Feminist Studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property
and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Pennsylvania, 2005), and the editor of The
Work of Friendship (GLQ 10.3 [2004]). She is at work on a new project on poststructural-
ism and book history, sections of which have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA and The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 367–379.

368 Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 / 3
consequences for the memory or legacy of whatever or whomever has been lost, as
well as for ourselves and those who come after us. Mourning, remembrance, and
the preservation of the past are all intimately linked, as Derrida argues in Archive
Fever, to “a responsibility for tomorrow.”1
In assembling a volume that engages the question of Derrida’s relationship
to the eighteenth century, I am unquestionably participating in an act of public
mourning, even as I ask others—readers, writers—to join with me in “bear[ing]”
Derrida’s legacy as a scholar of eighteenth-century texts to an audience of eighteenth-
century scholars. I am trying, that is, in what I know is a doomed act of preservation,
to protect from the ruin of forgetting something specific about Derrida’s oeuvre—his
lifelong engagement with an eighteenth-century archive—even as I call attention to
the fact that so many prominent readers of Derrida’s work make a living or at least
began their careers as dix-huitièmistes. This project remains doomed because it is as
likely to fall on deaf ears among self-identified Derrideans, skeptical of historicisms
and periodizations, as among those who desire no truck with poststructuralism.
The proprietary challenge of “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” then, seems to solicit
in return only two possible and equally proprietary responses: “Not my Derrida”;
“Not my eighteenth century.” Yet my interests here are not exclusively preservative
and might even, truth be told, border on the destructive, or at least the disruptive.
I am hoping that a volume such as this one might change the way scholars of the
eighteenth century, in both senses of that modifying genitive, understand “their”
eighteenth century, as well as the way readers of Derrida apprehend the Derridean
corpus, the archive or oeuvre that consigns itself under that proper name. At once a
project of derangement and a scheme of conservation, this volume offers itself, too,
however sheepishly, as an act of love—for eighteenth-century studies, for the work
of Jacques Derrida—a hybrid venture of mourning, love, and reading that both
affirms the future of the Derridean archive and calls that future into question.
Throughout Derrida’s work, mourning’s link to futurity is conceived in
both ethical and practical terms. While the two inevitably contaminate each other,
for the purposes of an introduction (a foolhardy enterprise in itself, as any reader of
Derrida well knows), it seems excusable to hold them apart, however provisionally.
Derrida’s ethical approach to mourning can be glimpsed in the passage from Politics
of Friendship cited among the epigraphs above, the one in which he adjures us to
“love the future.” Lest we think we know what it is we are being asked, or told,
to love in this undeniably affirmative moment, Derrida modulates instantaneously
and characteristically from affirmation to something more tentative: “there is no
more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps.’”2 An injunction to
commit ourselves to a perhaps, a command, in the name of justice, to love a mere
possibility, an instruction, finally, later in the passage, to “open on to the coming
of what comes,” whatever that may be (PF 29): the terrain of friendship, love,
“bear[ing] the other” is suddenly very short on assurances. Futurity is becoming
more perilous by the moment.
Perilous, or perhaps monstrous. One of Derrida’s preferred figures for the
ethics of futurity from the time of the Grammatology forward, as Peggy Kamuf
notes at the opening of her essay in this volume, is the figure of the monster. In
1990, in an interview on German radio, Elisabeth Weber asked Derrida to reflect
on what he had elsewhere referred to as the monstrous nature of his writing, its
tendency to “mutate” away from the tradition in which he had begun writing into
something new and unrecognizable, a mutation into the future that serves to illus-
trate the writer’s powerlessness over his own text. “What is the relation between
what you call the monsters of your writing,” Weber asked, “and the memory of
this absence of power?”3 Derrida’s response itself mutates from a discussion of the
past and of memory that returns him to the beginnings of his own oeuvre to an
invocation of the future:
I think that somewhere in Of Grammatology I said, or perhaps it’s at the

end of Writing and Difference, that the future is necessarily monstrous:
the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for
which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters.
A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would
already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All
experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome
the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to
that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to
try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it
assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. (P 386–87)
Derrida begins this recollection of his past writing practices by misremembering

his own oeuvre, by failing to cite himself confidently, as if enacting a lifetime’s
theorization of the failure of authorial self-presence in a momentary but illustra-
tive lapse. The opening up of the past, the powerlessness over our own discourse
that will ensure its mutation into the monstrosity of an unexpected future—these
occur even as they are described in this passage. What arrives in the place of the
recollection is a herald, a monstrous guest that is not the future but that, in its
surprising appearance, reminds us of the duty to welcome whatever arrives. As it
barrels through the door, this monstrous arrivant demands that we “open on to
the coming of what comes,” whether we like it or not. The monster cannot itself
be the future, because, as Derrida carefully notes, no sooner has it arrived than
our hospitality tries to “domesticate” it, in a shuttling movement that alters both
the monster and its host. To be open to the future, to the “perhaps,” means being
willing to accommodate the monster, to put her up, to put up with her, to change
our habits for her, but also and above all, even as this process of monster-taming
is occurring, to be listening for the doorbell, the signal that the next monster is
about to arrive, coming toward us from outside, de hors. This movement of hos-
pitality, domestication, and repeated surprise, Derrida goes on, “is the movement
of culture,” of writing and of scholarship, a movement that continually requires
of us that we open toward the unknown (P 387).
As his disquisition on writing and monstrosity continues, Derrida moves
from a figural meditation on the future and the ethical responsibility for hospitality
to a more pragmatic discussion of the reception of texts. Like the monstrous figure
that appears without warning demanding our welcome, new species of writing
arrive on our desks and in our inboxes (electronic or otherwise) challenging us to
make room for them, a challenge to which, more often than not, we fail to rise.
Our failure to welcome these textual arrivants, however, does not necessarily ensure
that they will leave us alone, much less that they will take a hint and go away:
Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection,

that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts
that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, trans-
form the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social
and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown
that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or
in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable,
of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity. (P 387)
Those texts we have the most trouble welcoming, those that most resist domestica-
tion, ultimately, even during the era of their anomaly, bring about transformations
in the cultural and historical field. What is most powerfully rejected and forcibly
held outside, Derrida insists, must nonetheless already be intimately connected
with what is inside a given culture, inside its archive, or it would not require such
radical denunciation in the first place. It would not, we could say, provoke such a
perversely preservative response. As he put it in the very first section of his essay,
“Scribble,” his introduction to the French translation of William Warburton’s 1742
essay on Egyptian hieroglyphics, “ce qui est chassé, exclus, dehors, se fait toujours
représenter . . . au-dedans, il travaille de façon surcryptée au-dedans” [whatever is
driven out, excluded, outside, always has itself represented; it works in an encrypted
way on the inside].4 Whatever is deliberately defined as outside a culture, a system,
or an oeuvre must also and at the same time be recognizable inside that culture,
and thus must already reside there, albeit in an “encrypted” form.
Derrida’s remarks concerning the encrypted interior of any cultural system
appear in the course of a discussion of the practice of editorial collections—specifi-
cally, the curiously named “Collection Palimpseste” in which, in 1977, Warburton’s
essay on hieroglyphics appeared. How do we decide what should go in such a
collection, Derrida wonders, especially a collection devoted to texts “décryptés”
[unburied, taken out of the crypt] (S10) after more than two hundred years? What
should be included and what should be left out, and who decides? Almost twenty
years later, Derrida would return to the question of the criteria that govern the
collection of texts, this time in the 1990 work Archive Fever. Here, Derrida once
again renders the movement between mourning and the future both as an ethical
problem and as a matter of textual dissemination and reception, but now he does
so in terms of the archive. One might be tempted to think of archives as reposi-
tories of the past, Derrida hazards, whose job it is to gather up and preserve the
artifacts of a bygone culture or deceased cultural maker in as complete, faithful, and
permanent a manner as possible. Archives, then, would be yet another example of
the work of mourning, of how we “bear the other in mourning,” not to mention
of how we attempt to encrypt the things we love. Nothing, Derrida argues, could
be further from the truth of the archive:
The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It

is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already
be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the
archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the
question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomor-
row. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will
only know in times to come. (AF 36)
The archive, Derrida counsels, is not of the past but of the future, not complete but
open—an “opening on the future” (AF 30)—not so much faithful as an example
of what he later called “la fidélité infidèle” [unfaithful fidelity].5 There is no sub-
ject who determines the meaning of the archive, though there are subjects—call
them “archons” (AF 2)—whose job it will be to decide what should be included
in a given archive and what should not. Every archiving gesture, it follows, is a
gesture of exclusion as much as of inclusion, which is why, as he tersely put it,
“No archive without outside” (AF 11). Once again, of course, as with an editorial
collection, decisions concerning what to exclude will have ramifications for the
reception of whatever finds inclusion, inflecting the meaning of the content of the
archive inexorably. Better to leave the archive open, Derrida suggests (as though
we have any other choice), better to be prepared to welcome the unexpected ar-
rival, however monstrous, and even to prepare a response. The archive, he writes,
should not try to determine the future but should, instead, “call into question the
coming of the future,” primarily by recognizing its own contingency, its suscepti-
bility to ruin and loss as well as to preservation (AF 33–34). As Michael Naas and
Pascale-Anne Brault note, in reflecting on Derrida’s own response to the works
of his deceased friends, this conviction regarding the openness of the archive was
derived from experience, as much as from philosophizing. In his acts of mourn-
ing, they write in the introduction to The Work of Mourning, Derrida “always
recognizes not only the systematicity and coherence of a corpus but its openness,
its unpredictability, its ability to hold something in reserve or surprise for us.”6
Derrida, that is, models for us in his reading of others, particularly dead others,
how to open our mourning work and our archiving work to the future, how to
stay faithful to an oeuvre and attend to or at the very least make way for what is
hors d’œuvre at the same time.
Not long before his death, in a now well-known interview with Jean Birn-
baum published under the title Apprendre à vivre enfin [To Learn/To Teach How to
Live, Finally], Derrida addressed in personal and often humorous terms the matter
of his own oeuvre and its destiny both within his life and after his death. To send a
book into the world, he emphasized, always uncannily anticipates the experience
of one’s own death: “au moment où je laisse (publier) ‘mon’ livre (personne ne m’y
oblige), je deviens, apparaissant-disparassaint, comme ce spectre inéducable qui
n’aura jamais appris à vivre” [at the moment I let ‘my’ book go (to be published)
(no one makes me do it), I start appearing and disappearing like that unteachable
ghost who has never learned how to live] (AVE 33). Publication precipitates an
experience of radical self-loss, a powerlessness not only over the work, which has
mutated into a public object, but over what is “mine” more generally. In publish-
ing, I let go of what I once thought of as “my” book—but was it ever properly
mine?—relinquishing it to its readers, and in so doing confront the specter of my
own exteriority with relation to myself and to what I thought I could call my own.
This experience of self-loss that attends publishing, which Derrida playfully de-
scribes as “irréappropriable” [unreappropriable], hardly differs from the experience
of death itself. “Épreuve extrême: on s’exproprie sans savoir à qui proprement la
chose qu’on laisse est confiée. Qui va hériter, et comment? Y aura-t-il même des
héritiers?” [The final test: one expropriates oneself without knowing to whom the
thing one leaves behind is properly entrusted. Who will inherit, and how? Will
there even be inheritors?] (AVE 33–34). “Confiée”: entrusted, confided, perhaps

consigned, since that is the word Derrida repeatedly uses to describe deposition in
an archive. Those who inherit what we expropriate by giving it out as though it
were our own are also those who will decide what survives. To them is entrusted
the task of gathering, but also “the tension between gathering and dispersion” that
characterizes archive-making and knowledge-making more generally.7 The decisions
they make, these inheritors and archons, will be responsible for determining what
appears and disappears, if not for the future, then at least for tomorrow.
Take this volume, for instance, which can certainly be understood to con-
stitute a practice of archiving. Contributors were asked to consider whether Derrida
could be said to have a special or privileged relationship with the materials of the
eighteenth century, particularly at the beginning and end of his writing career, and
to begin, if they so desired, by exploring certain key terms in the Derridean lexicon
often associated with that century: reason, fraternity, democracy, and Enlighten-
ment, to name only a few. The last of these, in particular, has been a persistent
theme in the Derridean oeuvre, although the relationship between Derrida’s work
and the project of Enlightenment has been understood more often as benighted
than as privileged. As Derrida himself expostulated in 2002, “it is often the case
that people would like to oppose this period of deconstruction to the Enlighten-
ment. No, I am for the Enlightenment, I’m for Progress.”8 If Derrida can be said to
be “for the Enlightenment,” if we may take him at his word here, then “Derrida’s
eighteenth century” might be interchangeable with “Derrida’s Enlightenment”—and
so the contributors to this volume have largely taken it to be, focusing their studies
almost entirely on the two great thinkers of Enlightenment whose works take up
the most space in Derrida’s writing, Rousseau and Kant. No surprises there: when
one is asked to consider Derrida’s preferred eighteenth-century archive, the works
of these two thinkers are surely the first to come to mind.
At the same time, however, the contributors to this volume nearly all ex-
pressed understandable reservations, notwithstanding the self-evidence of Derrida’s
repeated return to these thinkers of the Enlightenment, about a project that ap-
peared to be trying to historicize Derrida’s work, to tie it to or even to claim him
for a particular historical moment. These reservations are understandable because
of Derrida’s own painstaking exposition of the tricky relationship between a text
and, on the one hand, the era of its original composition and, on the other, the
proper name with which it is signed. Just because a work was originally composed
in the eighteenth century, Derrida insists, in yet another modulation on the notion
of “unreappropriability,” it is not necessarily an “eighteenth-century text.” “Ev-
erything is out of joint,” he explains in A Taste for the Secret, because texts are
“heterogeneous,” not even “contemporary with themselves”; “if deconstruction
is possible,” he continues, “this is because it mistrusts any sort of periodization,”
just as it “mistrusts proper names.”9 As Geoffrey Bennington lays out in the first
essay in this volume, an essay that might well be thought of as the collection’s
proper introduction, or at least as required reading for what follows, this skepticism
about periodization and the proper name, which runs throughout Derrida’s work,
makes its first appearance and finds its fullest elaboration in Of Grammatology,
with direct reference to “our” period: “le ‘XVIIIe siècle français,’” Derrida there
calls it, “si quelque chose de tel existe” [the ‘French eighteenth century’ . . . if such
a thing exists].10 Anyone can see, Bennington argues, in the Grammatology above
all, Derrida’s attention to and even “affection for” the texts of this period (382), a
period Derrida identifies as uniquely important in the history of writing. For Derrida,
this period stands out as the place where a battle for supremacy between speech
and writing became explicit in Western European history and philosophy, a place
of “combat” and “crisis” (G 147) precipitated by three scholarly developments
that occurred in the epoch running roughly from Descartes to Hegel: the project
for a universal writing; the scholarly exploration of non-European scripts; and the
development of a “general science” of language and of writing. Yet that epoch, from
our belated perspective, is not the eighteenth century, but “ce qu’on appelle le XVIIIe
siècle” [what is called the eighteenth century] (G 147), a deliberate estrangement
of the historical referent that leads Bennington to his title, “Derrida’s ‘Eighteenth
Century.’” The necessity of defamiliarizing the referent, rendering it inhospitable,
is directly traceable to the practice of reading: “the mere fact and act of reading
(its very possibility),” Bennington writes, “is itself already sufficient to undo the
largely unquestioned historicism” that continues to afflict “any periodizing effort”
(384). Whatever it is that we access or respond to when we read a work written
in the eighteenth century, Bennington reminds us, it is not a historically verifiable
entity, the “reality and consistency” of another era located firmly in the past (384).
What we access instead is a powerful received idea about the meaning of a par-
ticular era—the “‘French eighteenth century,’” for instance—that conditions our
reading practices but also inevitably deforms them. Our very activity as scholars,
Bennington concludes, “opens texts up always beyond their historical specificity
to the always possibly menacing prospect of unpredictable future reading” (392).
Reading, that is, like archive-making, is open to the future, “unpredictable,” and,
as often as not, fraught with danger.
Peggy Kamuf opens her essay, “To Do Justice to ‘Rousseau,’ Irreducibly,”
in similar terms, with an act of estrangement and a warning of impending danger,
a warning that is also, as with Bennington, a kind of promise. Like the “eighteenth
century” to which he ostensibly belongs, “Rousseau” remains inaccessible to us,
not only because the Rousseau we apprehend is a product of our reading, but also
because the place in our reading from which “Rousseau” can be glimpsed is inevi-
tably a “blind spot.” So, for instance, although Rousseau “names supplementarity
endlessly,” refers to it constantly throughout his work, “the law of this naming and
the concept governing its compulsive repetition in Rousseau’s discourse remains
unthought, unnoticed, unread, and unseen by the signatory not less than by the
generations of scholars or savants who have built a house of knowledge on the
archive of Rousseau’s oeuvre” (396). The blind spot in Rousseau’s own discourse is
replicated and redoubled in the field of vision of Rousseau scholars, such that they
are as oblivious to the “law” of his discourse and hence of his entire oeuvre as he
himself must inevitably be. What is significant in Rousseau’s writing thus remains
outside his oeuvre, or rather, inside and outside at the same time: Rousseau’s legacy
“both belongs to and does not belong to the author’s signed work” (396), rendering
it “unreappropriable” by us as much as by Rousseau himself. The task of reading,
nonetheless, of reading “Rousseau,” “the age of Rousseau,” and ultimately “the
age of Derrida,” Kamuf writes, is to forge a “tiny opening” within the blind spot
(402), to remove and reorient ourselves through a practice of reading that allows us,
anamorphically, to “round . . . on” our own blind spots otherwise (402). Whether
it remains possible to effect such a reorientation through an act of will, an act of
deliberate rereading of those corpuses, remains a question. Certainly, as Kamuf
notes, it is too early to tell what the blind spots of “the age of Derrida”—includ-
ing, quite possibly, that age’s “acrimony” toward the oeuvre of Jacques Derrida
(402)—will have been. “Such acrimony writes on water,” she concludes, “where
its ripples dissipate with the blink of an eye” (402). Given that our most generous
and most loving readings, as much as our moments of acrimony, are afflicted by
“little interval[s] of blindness” (402), our best hope is to turn and return, errantly
but faithfully, toward an oeuvre that notwithstanding the efforts of “generations of
scholars and savants” cannot, mercifully, be closed off or determined in advance.
The question of determination and its relationship to both faith and
scholarship is taken up in the next two essays, Neil Saccamano’s “Inheriting En-
lightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida,” and Richard Terdiman’s
“Determining the Undetermined: Derrida’s ‘University without Condition.’”
Saccamano’s essay presents us with yet another meditation on insides and outsides,
this time with relation to the question of religion in Derrida’s thought, a question
that might be phrased, how do we get outside the terms of religion sufficiently to
be able to think religion? Given that the very ideals the Enlightenment is purported
to have championed against religion—tolerance, publicity, universality, reason,
critique itself—trace their roots to Christian theology, it remains impossible to
stand outside religion sufficiently to deploy its critique a-theologically: “religion
would seem impossible to think philosophically without religion,” Saccamano
concludes (406). Ranging across the works of Kant to those of Shaftesbury, Hume,
Voltaire, and even Richardson, Saccamano painstakingly and generously retraces
what is only an apparent contradiction between the persistence of a discourse of
faith and the dedication to rational exchange among Enlightenment thinkers—not
least among them, Derrida himself. Derrida’s commitments to singularity, justice,
and unconditionality, the unverifiable “absolutes,” as Terdiman will have it, of his
philosophical project, only appear to be at odds with the more worldly, “progres-
sive” concerns associated with the Enlightenment, including, as Saccamano points
out, “the necessity of law, right, and norms in international politics” (421). Der-
rida inherits his affirmation of unconditionality, which is also an article of faith,
from the very thinkers—Kant, Rousseau—from whom he also receives the legacy
of “perfectibility” that leads him to embrace the tools of progress, tools such as
laws and norms (421). Thus Derrida “cannot but keep faith with the project of
Enlightenment,” Saccamano concludes, because within that project the secret and
the promise of an unconditional justice “resonate[s]” alongside the more practical,
ethical, normative ends we cannot fail to be “for” (421).
Terdiman’s contribution also worries the edge or fold between Derrida’s
invocation of unconditionality and his deployment of a vocabulary borrowed
from, even determined by, the Enlightenment. In this instance the university will
be the site for thinking this tension between the conditional and the unconditional,
a tension that becomes, in Terdiman’s uncompromising account, frankly unten-
able, “internally contradictory and logically incoherent” (427). While Terdiman
is sympathetic in principle to Derrida’s “motivation” in calling for a university
“without condition,” a place where any question can be asked, freed from the
encroachments of authority, he questions Derrida’s “model,” his “mechanism,”

or lack of one, for achieving such a space free of determination (433). The ab-
sence of “attention to material factors” that would enable such a university to
come into being (430), its reliance on the very notion of an unpredictable and
open “à-venir” that also grounds his notion of the event, of mourning, and of the
archive, remains, for Terdiman, another kind of “blind spot” in Derrida’s thinking
(433). In Terdiman’s account, however, the refusal to specify anything short of a
“miracle” that will get us from the university of today to the ideal and ideational
one of the future makes of the essay on the university something more insidious
than a failure of method.11 The problem with “The University without Condition”
is not only that it is contaminated by Enlightenment thinking, and most notably
by Kant’s thinking about the university, knowledge projects, Enlightenment, and
critique more generally. Indeed, Derrida confesses as much at the outset. The issue
is, rather, that Derrida knowingly inherits what Terdiman calls “Kant’s resonant
theses about the liberation of thought,” but then “depoliticizes them,” emptying
them of their pragmatic content, hollowing out Kant’s analysis of how the liberation
of thought might be “made real” (434). Derrida relies too much on the thinking
of the Enlightenment—and does not rely on it enough. In Saccamano’s terms, he
is unfaithful in the very act of keeping faith with the Enlightenment. Derrida may
have thought he was “for the Enlightenment,” according to Terdiman’s account,
but in a fitting fulfillment of that prophecy of an unpredictable future to which he
returned so frequently in his writing, he may also turn out to have been against
it—dangerously, monstrously—all along.
Julie Candler Hayes joins the ranks of those interrogating Derrida’s rela-
tionship to the Lumières in “Unconditional Translation: Derrida’s Enlightenment
to Come.” Hayes sets out to circumvent the historicizing paradox that troubles
some of the other contributors to the volume by focusing not on works published
between 1700 and 1799, but instead on Derrida’s own “formulations and refor-
mulations of a concept,” or rather of a series of concepts, including Enlighten-
ment, Enlightenment to come, democracy to come, and even translation to come
(444). In a painstaking review of the many articulations of the notion of the term
“à venir” in Derrida’s writings, a kind of philology of the “to come,” alongside
an exploration of what seems to have been a deliberate return to the vocabulary
of Enlightenment in late works such as Rogues, Hayes tracks a shift in Derrida’s
works from “the historical, however idealized Enlightenment” to “an ahistori-
cal Enlightenment situated in the never-fully-present à venir” (445).12 Far from
evacuating the concept of Enlightenment of its politically progressive utility, this
“renvoi” constitutes an effort to free Enlightenment from the “totalizing or fetishiz-
ing forms of reason” for which it had been condemned throughout the twentieth
century (450). Derrida’s loving resignification of the term, Hayes argues, might
turn out to be Enlightenment’s saving grace, allowing Derrida his claim to be “for
the Enlightenment” after all. Yet we can only know whether that will have come
to pass in retrospect, since what it will have meant to be “for the Enlightenment”
will require acts of translation, as this term mutates away from its many points of
origin. The last third of Hayes’s essay thus turns to translation both as a theme in
Derrida’s writing and as a necessary dimension of his philosophical practice. As
the constant shifting between Enlightenment, Aufklärung, Illuminismo, Lumières
shows, she argues, “semantic slipperiness,” far from constituting a hindrance to

rational critique, is “salutary”: “it aids our understanding by preventing us from
fixing on individual terms” (451). Semantic play allows and even forces us to move
across a range of concepts “in an open-ended conversation between texts,” which
makes possible a conversation among periods, languages, and genres of discourse
that can only be felicitous for thinking, as well as for critique (454).
Srinivas Aravamudan’s “Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues” opens just such a
conversation among discursive domains in its exploration of the literary and spe-
cifically fabular language that permeates eighteenth-century political philosophy.
Beginning his analysis with the opening of Rogues, but moving outward from there
to other texts that did not immediately capture Derrida’s attention, Aravamudan
asks, “what better way to approach the self-important and self-aggrandizing narra-
tive of sovereignty and reason than through myths and fables?” (458). Aravamudan,
following Derrida, comes at some of the more exalted Enlightenment writings on
reason and sovereignty from a perspective that is both outside and below them,
the perspective of literature, fiction, and in particular the beast(ly) fable, only to
find those fables already well encrypted inside the sovereign archive. “The rich
cultural history of roguery as Enlightenment,” too, which Derrida traces from its
origins in late sixteenth-century rogue literature, through the nineteenth-century
evolutionary science of Charles Darwin, and into the post-9/11 American obsession
with the phenomenon of “rogue states,” provides a fresh perspective on sovereign
exceptionalism through pointing to a certain lawlessness at the heart of democratic
governance (461). Aravamudan carries the analysis, as well as the “open-ended
conversation” among philosophy, literature, beastliness, and roguery, beyond the
pages of Rogues, to sites that include the works of Hobbes, Defoe, and Montesquieu,
which is to say, the theory of statecraft, the English novel, and the oriental tale.
Aravamudan concludes with a timely reminder that “Derrida’s eighteenth century”
should not become a “pick-and-choose-affair,” in which Derrida’s contribution to
eighteenth-century studies is remembered exclusively in terms of his treatment of
particular eighteenth-century figures, among them “Rousseau, Condillac, Kant, and
to a lesser extent Hobbes” (464). He recommends, instead, in a project his essay
profitably initiates, taking up “concepts that are derived from other periods and
figures,” but that nonetheless “are central to eighteenth-century studies,” concepts
such as modernity, tradition, the human/animal divide, and individual freedom,
to name only a few (464). He recommends, that is, that we venture outside of
Derrida’s oeuvre and also beyond the specific constraints of 1700–1799, reading
through and across those clearly delimited archives in search of material we might
read back onto the “narrower” concerns of eighteenth-century scholarship, in a
process that promises to open the field, and perhaps too to call it into question in
surprising and enlivening ways.
To Ian Balfour falls the last word in this volume, and appropriately enough,
that last word is “difference.” Balfour’s “The Gift of Example: Derrida and the
Origins of the Eighteenth Century” returns us one last time to questions of peri-
odization and archiving, as well as to those key eighteenth-century figures who fill
the pages of the Grammatology: Rousseau, Kant, Condillac, and Warburton. Yet
Balfour, not content with these perennial examples, turns our attention to works
that made only a brief appearance in this volume and in Derrida’s oeuvre, if they
made any appearance at all, works by Locke, the Shelleys, Defoe, Diderot, Herder,
and even Cleland. Balfour references these works as some of those he might include
alongside Kant and Rousseau in a new project on “the language of origins” in the
eighteenth century (470), a project in dialogue with Derrida’s work, but which also
aims to provide “a somewhat original supplement to Derrida’s charting of the ter-
ritory” (471). A supplement, as readers of Derrida’s “Rousseau” well know, both
adds to an entity and transforms it; thus Balfour’s work to come leaves us with a
promise, a promise that it will expand what has come, perhaps in part through
this volume, to be considered “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” even as it transforms
that territory, that oeuvre, in as yet unpredictable ways.
To the list already provided by Balfour, I might add or expand on a few
items of my own, items set down here like breadcrumbs for an eighteenth-cen-
tury scholar to come, and especially for one who desires to perform a mutation
in the archive we have so provisionally gathered here. Among the most obvious
candidates for inclusion in the next version of “Derrida’s eighteenth century,” si
quelque chose de tel existera, must surely be the works of and on Condillac and
Warburton, treated in the Grammatology but also in essays of their own, each of
which forms a tendentious introduction to a modern edition of an eighteenth-cen-
tury work—“Scribble,” in the case of Warburton’s essay on hieroglyphics from The
Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, and The Archeology of the Frivolous,
originally published as a sprawling introduction to Condillac’s Essay on the Origins
of Human Understanding, itself advertised as a “supplement” to Locke.13 Briefer
and harder-to-find but no less tantalizing examples, some of which might divert
the conversation in revolutionary as well as monstrous directions, some of which
also push the eighteenth century into its “long” version, include the following: the
reflections on Robinson Crusoe that wind through the unpublished 2001–2003
seminars on “La Bête et le souverain,” as well as the extended lycological analysis
of Hobbes touched on here by Aravamudan, which can be found in those same
seminars and is already available in the French collection La Démocratie à venir;
the discussion of Thomas Jefferson in “Declarations of Independence,” a must-read
on this side of the Atlantic at least, particularly alongside Peggy Kamuf’s treat-
ment of the work of Thomas Paine in “Signé Paine, ou la panique dans les lettres”;
staying with the revolutionary theme, the staging of a conversation between the
French revolution and the South African anti-apartheid struggle in “The Spirit of
the Revolution”; and finally, the invocation of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Becca-
ria as early and influential opponents of capital punishment in “Death Penalties,”
perhaps paired with “Violence against Animals,” in which Bentham appears again,
this time elaborating a ground for a theory of animal rights.14 These few and hastily
assembled examples together serve to demonstrate that the present volume might
be subject to yet one more act of diacritical defamiliarization: perhaps my title
would be best rendered, with apologies to Geoffrey Bennington, as “‘Derrida’s’
Eighteenth Century,” given the near exclusive preoccupation in these pages with
only two of Derrida’s eighteenth-century interlocutors. Is that preoccupation really
a reflection of Derrida’s engagement with the eighteenth century, or does it instead
tell us something about our own scholarly epoch, and perhaps also about our will
to close off Derrida’s oeuvre, to domesticate that within it which is unfamiliar,
foreign, or strange?
The answer to such a question must come from elsewhere, from outside
these pages. It will require a turn and a return toward the works of the past, a
renvoi that is in part a work of mourning and in part a welcoming of the future.
It will require not only revisiting the archive, but remaking it, attending to what is
dehors as much as to what is dedans. To hear the answer, the echo from the crypt
that calls the future into question, all that is demanded is a willingness to listen,
to read, and in turn, to respond.
What happens when a great thinker becomes silent, one whom we knew
living, whom we read and reread, and also heard, one from whom we
were still awaiting a response, as if such a response would help us not
only to think otherwise but also to read what we thought we had already
read under his signature, a response that held everything in reserve, and
so much more than what we thought we had already recognized there?
(WM 206)
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1996), 36. Hereafter abbreviated as AF.
2. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 29. Here-
after abbreviated as PF.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points:

Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 385. Hereafter
abbreviated as P.
4. “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire” was first published as an introduction to a modern edition of Léonard

des Malpeines’ 1744 translation of Warburton’s essay, issued under the title, William Warburton, Es-
sai sur les hieroglyphes des Egyptiens (Paris: Collection Palimpseste, Aubier-Montaigne, 1977). Most
of the essay, minus the first ten pages, was translated into English by Cary Plotkin, and published as
“Scribble (writing-power)” in Yale French Studies 58 (1979): 117–47. My citations are taken from
the first, untranslated section of the French edition, and the translations are my own (10). Hereafter
abbreviated as S.
5. Jacques Derrida and Jean Birnbaum, Apprendre à vivre enfin (Paris: Galilée/Le Monde, 2005),
38, my translation. An English translation is forthcoming from Meville House Publishing in 2007.
Hereafter abbreviated as AVE.
6. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of
Mourning,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Brault and Naas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001),
28. Hereafter abbreviated as WM.
7. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005),
13.
8. Jacques Derrida, “What is Owed to the Stranger?” Arena Magazine (August–September 2002),
6.
9. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David
Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 9.
10. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 150. Translations follow those
adopted by Geoffrey Bennington in this volume.
11. Neil Saccamano notes below that Derrida in fact made direct reference to the concept of miracles
in “Faith and Knowledge,” in which he “asks us to believe that we already believe in the everyday
occurrence of miracles” (413). See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at
the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vatimo
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).
12. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
13. For Scribble, see above n. 4. “L’Archéologie du frivole” was originally published as the introduc-
tion to Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Paris: Galilée, 1973), and translated
into English as The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln
and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1980).
14. All material is by Derrida, unless otherwise noted: for the Robinson Crusoe material in “La Bête
et le souverain,” see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida Enisled,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 248–76; for Hobbes,
see “La Bête et le souverain,” in La Démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise
Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 433–76; for Jefferson, see “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom
Keenan and Thomas Pepper, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2006), 46–54; for Paine, see Kamuf, “Signé Paine, ou la
panique dans les lettres,” in La Démocratie à venir, 19–35; for the last three breadcrumbs, see “The
Spirit of the Revolution” (77–105), “Death Penalties” (139–65), and “Violence against Animals”
(62–76), all in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow?: A Dialogue, trans.
Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).
Bennington / Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century” 381
Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century”
Geoffrey Bennington
Mais ni Descartes ni Hegel ne se sont battus avec le problème de

l’écriture. Le lieu de ce combat et de cette crise, c’est ce qu’on appelle le
XVIIIe siècle.
[But neither Descartes nor Hegel grappled with the problem of writing.
The place of this combat and crisis is what is called the eighteenth century.]
. . . le “XVIIIe siècle français” par exemple et si quelque chose de tel existe . . .

[for example, “the French eighteenth century,” if such a thing exists.]
Un texte a toujours plusieurs âges, la lecture doit en prendre son parti.

[A text always has several epochs and reading must resign itself to that fact.]
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie
“Ce qu’on appelle. . . .” “What we call,” “what one calls,” “what is

called”—the Eighteenth Century.
My brief remarks bear the same title as this volume as a whole, with,
however, this very slight difference: that the words “Eighteenth Century” are now
enclosed in quotation marks. So not “Derrida’s Eighteenth Century,” but “Derrida’s
‘Eighteenth Century.’” These quotation marks are supposed to function as “scare-
quotes,” first, suspending a potentially problematic term or concept, “mentioning”
it rather than “using” it, not quite wanting to subscribe to it, but they also func-
tion as “real” quotation marks, because I am quoting Jacques Derrida’s use of the
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory Uni-
versity. He is the author of 12 books, including Sententiousness and the Novel (1985), Inter-
rupting Derrida (2001), Frontières kantiennes (2001), and Other Analyses (ebook 2005). He
is currently working on the deconstructive theory of democracy.

words “Eighteenth Century” (or at least “XVIIIe siècle”).1 And then they have to
be doubled up quotation marks, double and single, because I am especially quoting
his use of those words already in quotation marks, more than once, several times,
probably more often than not, in fact, in more than one text, the words “XVIIIe
siècle” enclosed in what seem to be scare-quotes, and more explicitly still suspended
in Derrida’s reference to “what we call” or “what one calls” the Eighteenth Century,
“if any such thing exists.” My real point here will be to insist on those quotation
marks and to wonder what they might do to the object of our study. What, for
example, would it mean if the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
were to place quotation marks around the “Eighteenth-Century” in its title?
So: what he calls “what we call” the Eighteenth Century.
Now Derrida might reasonably be thought to have a certain affection for
what he calls “what we call” or “what one calls” the Eighteenth Century. Among
the very many centuries across which his work ranges, the eighteenth might not
be the one most insistently discussed, but it could certainly be thought at least
to hold its own. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps most obviously, is given a very
central role (for reasons we shall probably see in due course) in Derrida’s “early”
developments around the problem of writing—developments that are arguably
absolutely crucial to his thinking in general; Kant, too, occupies an important place
in Derrida’s understanding of deconstruction, if perhaps somewhat negatively, both
in that one of the things that deconstruction must most saliently be compared to
and distinguished from—in other words one of the things it might most obviously
be, and has been, mistaken for—is critique,2 and in that the “Idea in the Kantian
sense” (usually though not always filtered through Husserl’s idea of Kant’s Idea) is
also something I believe to be a real crux of Derrida’s thinking from the very first
to the very last. In addition, Derrida famously asserts an interest in and affection
for the so-called “mechanical” materialists when interviewed by a pair of Parisian
dialectical materialists in 1972,3 and also writes directly and one might say enthu-
siastically about figures such as Condillac or Warburton.
As the quotation I used as my first epigraph makes clear, this interest in the
eighteenth century (or at least in what Derrida calls more saliently in the Gram-
matology the “époque de Rousseau” [145]) has its initial reason in that that age
or era is the one in which a certain set of problems about writing come to the fore
in an original way. In the section from which I take that epigraph, Derrida draws a
very broad and quite dense picture of the history of metaphysics as the metaphys-
ics of presence or as logocentrism. He suggests one major point of articulation in
that history around Descartes, at which point presence takes on the form of self-
presence, internalizing possibilities of repetition and mastery already given by the
ancient forms of ousia and eidos, and reinforces them into an unassailable power
of auto-affective ideality, which power can be called “God” without in principle
compromising the integrity of consciousness, and this inaugurates a subsequent
period (defined as that in which “l’entendement infini de Dieu est l’autre nom du
logos comme présence à soi” [God’s infinite understanding is the other name for
the logos as self-presence] (G, 146; OG, 98)—a subsequent period that stretches
from Descartes to Hegel. That period identifies consciousness with voice (neces-
sarily, according to Derrida), or more precisely with hearing-oneself-speak, as the
only possibility whereby this idealizing mechanism of auto-affection can seem to
function without the need to compromise itself with alterity or mundanity. With
its inherent phonocentrism, this Descartes-to-Hegel period has within it a new
articulation, defined as the moment when writing is confronted and dealt with as
such in these terms of self-presence. The story of that articulation, which Derrida
wants to concentrate on Rousseau, is a story whereby the apparently inevitable
tendency of the self-presence of consciousness to experience itself via voice and
“hearing-oneself-speak” finds itself needing to expel writing from its central
concerns; and needing to do so explicitly and vigorously in the wake of an event
Derrida describes as follows: “les tentatives de type Leibnizien avaient ouvert une
brèche dans la sécurité logocentrique” [attempts of the Leibnizian type had opened
a breach in logocentric security] (G, 147; OG, 98) operated by projects for a uni-
versal characteristic. Rather than center his story on Leibniz, say (or, one might
think, Wilkins, or even the earlier exchanges between Mersenne and Descartes on
the possibility of an essentially written Universal Language, which Derrida does
discuss to some extent in the Grammatology and again at greater length in seminars
some fifteen years later),4 he here chooses the slightly earlier moment at which the
logocentric closure (in its “modern” or post-Cartesian form) is being repaired or
reinforced in reaction to such a potential breach, and that repair or reinforcement
must take the form of a reassertion of the foundational values of consciousness
(or sentiment, adds Derrida perhaps a little rapidly, remembering that Rousseau
is going to be his man here), and that repair (given the claimed centrality of the
experience of hearing-oneself-speak to the new form taken by metaphysics in the
whole Descartes-Hegel tranche of its history) must then take the form of an explicit
grappling with and reduction of writing. This configuration would then organize
the “age of Rousseau,” and Rousseau would be the central figure or hero of that
age just because he happened, or so Derrida claims, to be the one who most obvi-
ously stepped up to the breach, as it were, and tried to repair it. Rousseau would
then seem to define or sum up “Derrida’s Eighteenth Century” because he is the
one who most clearly or at least most energetically takes on this task of fighting
off the threat that a certain kind of thinking about writing poses to the closure of
metaphysics as defined in this, its Descartes-to-Hegel period.
On this reading, then, “Derrida’s Eighteenth Century” is defined not so
much as an “age of Enlightenment” or an “age of Reason,” but as the age in which
a certain unfolding story of metaphysics as presence and then self-presence has its
specific crisis as a moment of recovering the foundational privilege of voice from
the threat of writing. And this privilege is asserted more forcibly still elsewhere in
the Grammatology, when in the chapter dealing with grammatology “as a positive
science” Derrida writes,
A quel point le XVIIIe siècle, marquant ici une coupure, a tenté de faire
droit à ces deux exigences [i.e., that investigation of writing allow a
theory to guide a history], c’est ce que trop souvent l’on ignore ou sous-
estime. Si, pour des raisons profondes et systématiques, le XIXe siècle
nous a laissé un lourd héritage d’illusions ou de méconnaissances, tout
ce qui concerne la théorie du signe écrit à la fin du XVIIe et au cours du
XVIIIe siècles en a souffert par privilège. (G, 111)
[The extent to which the eighteenth century, here marking a break, at-
tempted to comply with these two exigencies, is too often ignored or
underestimated. If for profound and systematic reasons, the nineteenth

century has left us a heavy heritage of illusions or misunderstandings, all
that concerns the theory of the written sign at the end of the seventeenth
century and during the eighteenth centuries has suffered the consequenc-
es. (OG, 75)]
All of which might reasonably lead us to suppose that “Derrida’s Eighteenth Cen-
tury” is almost simply “Derrida’s Century,” the one that he would be the most
inclined to celebrate and investigate, and those of us who have kept at least part-
time day jobs as “dix-huitièmistes” might feel inclined to be pleased about that.
And yet the tranquility (as Derrida might have said) with which these
characterizations are made—forgetting the “ce qu’on appelle,” and those persis-
tent quotation marks around the words “XVIIIe siècle”—that tranquility is one
we might do well to question, before settling back more or less comfortably in the
dix-huitièmiste armchairs of our supposed specialty. We would hardly be reading
Derrida seriously if we thought it appropriate, or even really possible, to assume
the reality and consistency of anything like an “eighteenth century” as a referent
about which he might have said certain specific things (as opposed to other things
he might have said about the sixteenth or nineteenth or fifth BC or any other “cen-
tury” at all). A little later I’ll be suggesting that the mere fact and act of reading
(its very possibility) is itself already sufficient to undo the largely unquestioned
historicism that still, I fear, affects most work in the humanities and that haunts
any periodizing effort. But in any case, the very passage I have been looking at in
the Grammatology, on the “age of Rousseau” itself, immediately proceeds to put
some preliminary questions to the kind of thing that is at stake in making such
assumptions.
Les noms d’auteurs ou de doctrines n’ont ici aucune valeur substantielle.

Ils n’indiquent ni des identités ni des causes. Il y aurait de la légèreté à
penser que “Descartes,” “Leibniz,” “Rousseau,” “Hegel,” etc., sont des
noms d’auteurs, les noms des auteurs de mouvements ou de déplacements
que nous désignons ainsi. La valeur indicative que nous leur attribuons
est d’abord le nom d’un problème. Si nous nous autorisons provisoire-
ment à traiter de cette structure historique en fixant notre attention sur
des textes de type philosophique ou littéraire, ce n’est pas pour y recon-
naître l’origine, la cause ou l’équilibre de la structure. Mais comme nous
ne pensons pas davantage que ces textes soient de simples effets de la
structure, en quelque sens qu’on l’entende; comme nous pensons que tous
les concepts proposés jusqu’ici pour penser l’articulation d’un discours
et d’une totalité historique sont pris dans la clôture métaphysique que
nous questionnons ici, comme nous n’en connaissons pas d’autre et que
nous n’en produirons aucun autre tant que cette clôture terminera notre
discours; comme la phase primordiale et indispensable, en fait et en droit,
dans le développement de cette problématique, consiste à interroger la
structure interne de ces textes comme de symptômes; comme c’est la seule
condition pour les déterminer eux-mêmes, dans la totalité de leur appar-
tenance métaphysique, nous en tirons argument pour isoler Rousseau
et, dans le rousseauisme, la théorie de l’écriture. Cette abstraction est
d’ailleurs partielle et elle reste à nos yeux provisoire. (G, 147–48)
[The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value.

They indicate neither identities nor causes. It would be frivolous to think
that “Descartes,” “Leibniz,” “Rousseau,” “Hegel,” etc., are names of
authors, or the authors of movements or displacements that we thus des-
ignate. The indicative value that I attribute to them is first of all the name
of a problem. If I provisionally authorize myself to treat this historical
structure by fixing my attention on philosophical or literary texts, it is
not for the sake of identifying in them the origin, cause, or equilibrium
of the structure. But as I also do not think that these texts are the simple
effects of structure, in any sense of the word; as I think that all concepts
hitherto proposed in order to think the articulation of a discourse and
of an historical totality are caught within the metaphysical closure that
I question here, as we do not know of any other concepts and cannot
produce any others, and indeed shall not produce any so long as this
closure limits our discourse; as the primordial and indispensable phase,
in fact and in principle, of the development of this problematic consists
in questioning the internal structure of these texts as symptoms; as that
is the only condition for determining these symptoms themselves in the
totality of their metaphysical appurtenance, I draw my argument from
them in order to isolate Rousseau, and, in Rousseauism, the theory of
writing. This abstraction is, moreover, partial and it remains, in my view,
provisional. (OG, 99)]
So here we have Derrida arguing that: 1) the only concepts we have available at pres-
ent for formulating the relationship between a discourse and “its” historical struc-
ture or totality are caught up in the very metaphysics under discussion; 2) we can
only hope to begin to get some distance from that metaphysics by first reading the
“internal structure” of texts as symptoms. At which point (or so a historian might
suggest), Derrida happily gets into just that “internal” type of reading (typically,
on the evidence of the Grammatology at least, in a ratio of several hundred pages
as compared to two or three on the history bit) and never really reemerges.
The historian, of course, will in general be suspicious of what can only
seem to be a somewhat homogenizing tendency (so that the history of metaphys-
ics seems to be kind of all the same thing, or, even allowing the major articulation
around Descartes, is still pretty much the same kind of thing, or, if we allow the
identification of an “age of Rousseau” along the lines I’ve just rehearsed, still not
really so very different), whereby metaphysics will always say something like “it all
really comes down to presence, innit?,” and deconstruction will reply, “in fact it’s
all really text and trace, innit?”). This tendency seems to be confirmed in a passing
remark in the course of the essay “La mythologie blanche,”5 which clearly enough
has Foucault in its sights, although Foucault is not explicitly named here.
Comme il va de soi, nulle pétition ici de quelque continuum homogène

qui rapporterait sans cesse à elle-même la tradition, celle de la métaphysi-
que comme celle de la rhétorique. Néanmoins, si l’on ne commençait par
prêter attention à telles contraintes plus durables, exercées depuis une très
longue chaîne systématique, si l’on ne prenait pas la peine d’en délimiter
le fonctionnement général et les limites effectives, on courrait le risque
de prendre les effets les plus dérivés pour les traits originaux d’un sous-
ensemble historique, d’une configuration hâtivement identifiée, d’une
mutation imaginaire ou marginale. Par une précipitation empiriste et
impressionniste vers de prétendues différences, en fait vers des découpa-

ges principiellement linéaires et chronologiques, on irait de découverte en
découverte. Une coupure sous chaque pas! On présenterait par exemple
comme physionomie propre à la rhétorique du “XVIIIe siècle” un ensem-
ble de traits (tel le privilège du nom) hérités, quoique sans droite ligne,
avec toute sorte d’écarts et d’inégalités de transformation, d’Aristote ou
du Moyen Age. Nous sommes ici reconduits au programme, tout entier à
élaborer, d’une nouvelle délimitation des corpus et d’une nouvelle problé-
matique des signatures. (Marges, 274–75; cf. Marges, 82)
[As goes without saying, no claim is being made here as to some homog-
enous continuum ceaselessly relating tradition back to itself, the tradition
of metaphysics or the tradition of rhetoric. Nevertheless, if we did not
begin by attending to some of the more durable constraints which have
been exercised on the basis of a very long systematic chain, and if we
did not take the trouble to delimit the general functioning and effective
limits of this chain, we would run the risk of taking the most derivative
effects for the most original characteristics of a historical subset, a hastily
identified configuration, an imaginary or marginal mutation. By means of
an empiricist and impressionistic rush toward alleged differences—in fact
toward periodizations that are in principle linear and chronological—we
would go from discovery to discovery. A break beneath every step! For
example, we could present as the physiognomy proper to “eighteenth
century” rhetoric a whole set of characteristics (such as the privilege of
the name), inherited, although not in a straight line, and with all kinds of
divisions and inequalities of transformation, from Aristotle or the Middle
Ages. Here, we are brought back to the program, still entirely to be elab-
orated, of a new delimitation of bodies of work and of a new problematic
of the signature. (Margins, 230–31; cf. Margins, 71–72)]
Derrida’s manner here (and this seems to be consistent throughout his work) is to
try to combine two gestures: the one will insist on the secular or millennial, quasi-
but never quite permanent features of what he calls, for shorthand, “metaphysics.”
Any “century” (or age or epoch or era) will tend in this perspective to lose specific-
ity as it is placed in the extreme long view that doesn’t even begin with Plato. On
the other hand, specific texts will be read with that famously minute attention to
detail and, more importantly, to their internal coherence, economy or “syntax” (as
Derrida sometimes calls it). This moment corresponds to the “phase primordiale et
indispensable” we saw mentioned earlier in the Grammatology, which “consiste à
interroger la structure interne de ces textes comme de symptômes.”
In “La mythologie blanche,” Derrida also constantly interrogates this play
between a kind of “internal” articulation of concepts, and a historical or genealogi-
cal attachment. The relationship between the two, as exemplified by the question
of the “XVIIIe siècle” is precisely our problem here.
Il ne s’agit pourtant pas de reconduire, selon une ligne, la fonction du

concept à l’étymologie du nom. C’est pour éviter cet étymologisme que
nous avons prêté attention à l’articulation interne, systématique et syn-
chronique, des concepts aristotéliciens. Néanmoins, aucun de leurs noms
n’étant un X conventionnel et arbitraire, l’attache historique ou généalo-
gique (ne disons pas étymologique) qui lie le concept signifié à son signi-
fiant (à la langue) n’est pas une contingence réductible. (Marges, 302)
[However, the issue is not to take the function of the concept back to the
etymology of the noun along a straight line. We have been attentive to
the internal, systematic, and synchronic articulation of the Aristotelian
concepts in order to avoid this etymologism. Nevertheless, none of their
names being a conventional and arbitrary X, the historical or genealogi-
cal (let us not say etymological) tie of the signified concept to its signifier
(to the language) is not a reducible contingency. (Margins, 253)]
En rappelant ici l’histoire du signifiant “idée”, il ne s’agit pas de céder à

l’étymologisme que nous avons plus haut récusé. Tout en reconnaissant
la fonction spécifique d’un terme à l’intérieur de son système, nous ne
devons pourtant pas tenir le signifiant pour parfaitement conventionnel.
Sans doute l’Idée de Hegel, par exemple, n’est-elle pas l’Idée de Platon;
sans doute les effets de système sont-ils ici irréductibles et doivent-ils être
lus comme tels. Mais le mot Idée n’est pas un X arbitraire et il importe
une charge traditionnelle qui continue le système de Platon dans le sys-
tème de Hegel et doit aussi être interrogée comme telle, selon une lecture
stratifiée: ni étymologie ni origine pures, ni continuum homogène, ni
synchronisme absolu ou intériorité simple d’un système à lui-même. Cela
implique qu’on critique à la fois le modèle de l’histoire transcendantale
de la philosophie et celui des structures systématiques parfaitement closes
sur leur agencement technique et synchronique (qu’on n’a jamais reconnu
jusqu’ici que dans des corpus identifiés selon le “nom propre” d’une
signature). (Marges, 304; no mention of Kant and his idea here)
[Here, in recalling the history of the signifier “idea,” we are not giving in
to the etymologism that we refused above. While acknowledging the spe-
cific function of a term within its system, we must not, however, take the
signifier as perfectly conventional. Doubtless, Hegel’s Idea, for example,
is not Plato’s Idea; doubtless the effects of the system are irreducible and
must be read as such. But the word Idea is not an arbitrary X, and it
bears a traditional burden that continues Plato’s system in Hegel’s system.
It must also be examined as such, by means of a stratified reading; neither
pure etymology nor pure origin, neither a homogenous continuum nor
an absolute synchronism or a simple interiority of a system to itself.
Which implies a simultaneous critique of the model of a transcendental
history of philosophy and of the model of systematic structures perfectly
closed over their technical and synchronic manipulation (which until now
has been recognized only in bodies of work identified according to the
“proper name” of a signature. (Margins, 254–55)]
And this seems to be the point of the quite complex and obscure opening section
to the chapter of the Grammatology on “La violence de la lettre,” which opens on
the question of genealogy. Here Derrida advances a number of difficult points:
1) Si, de manière un peu conventionnelle, nous appelons ici discours la

représentation actuelle, vivante, consciente d’un texte dans l’expérien-
ce de ceux qui l’écrivent ou le lisent, et si le texte déborde sans cesse
cette représentation par tout le système de ses ressources et de ses lois
propres, alors la question généalogique excède largement les possibili-
tés qui nous sont aujourd’hui données de l’élaborer. Nous savons que
la métaphore est encore interdite qui décrirait sans faute la généalogie
d’un texte.
2) En sa syntaxe et son lexique, dans son espacement, par sa ponctua-
tion, ses lacunes, ses marges, l’appartenance historique d’un texte
n’est jamais droite ligne. Ni causalité de contagion. Ni simple accu-
mulation de couches. Ni pure juxtaposition de pièces empruntées.
3) Et si un texte se donne toujours une certaine représentation de ses
propres racines, celles-ci ne vivent que de cette représentation, c’est-à-
dire de ne jamais toucher le sol. Ce qui détruit sans doute leur essence
radicale, mais non la nécessité de leur fonction enracinante. Dire
qu’on ne fait jamais qu’entrelacer les racines à l’infini, les pliant à
s’enraciner dans des racines, à repasser par les mêmes points, à redou-
bler d’anciennes adhérences, à circuler entre leurs différences, à s’en-
rouler sur elles-mêmes ou à s’envelopper réciproquement. dire qu’un
texte n’est jamais qu’un système de racines, c’est sans doute contredi-
re à la fois le concept du système et le schème de la racine. Mais pour
n’être pas une pure apparence, cette contradiction ne prend sens de
contradiction et ne reçoit son “illogisme” que d’être pensée dans une
configuration finie—l’histoire de la métaphysique—prise à l’intérieur
d’un système de racines qui ne s’y termine pas et qui n’a pas encore de
nom.
4) Or la conscience de soi du texte, le discours circonscrit où s’articule la
représentation généalogique (par exemple ce que Lévi-Strauss consti-
tue d’un certain “XVIIIe siècle” en s’en réclamant), sans se confondre
avec la généalogie même, joue, précisément par cet écart, un rôle
organisateur dans la structure du texte. Si même on avait le droit de
parler d’illusion rétrospective, celle-ci ne serait pas un accident ou
un déchet théorique; on devrait rendre compte de sa nécessité et de
ses effets positifs. Un texte a toujours plusieurs âges, la lecture doit
en prendre son parti. Et cette représentation généalogique de soi est
déjà elle-même représentation d’une représentation de soi: ce que le
“XVIIIe siècle français” par exemple et si quelque chose de tel existe,
construisait déjà comme sa propre provenance et sa propre présence.
(149–50)
[1) If in a rather conventional way I call by the name of discourse the
present, living, conscious representation of a text within the experi-
ence of the person who writes or reads it, and if the text constantly
goes beyond this representation by the entire system of its resources
and its own laws, then the question of genealogy exceeds by far the
possibilities that are at present given for its elaboration. We know
that the metaphor that would describe the genealogy of a text cor-
rectly is still forbidden.
2) In its syntax and its lexicon, in its spacing, by its punctuation, its
lacunae, its margins, the historical appurtenance of a text is never a
straight line. It is neither causality by contagion, nor the simple ac-
cumulation of layers. Nor the pure juxtaposition of borrowed pieces.
3) And if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own
roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touch-
ing the soil, so to speak. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical
essence, but not the necessity of their racinating function. To say
that one always interweaves roots endlessly, bending them to send
down roots among the roots, to pass through the same points again,
to redouble old adherences, to circulate among their differences, to
coil around themselves or to be enveloped one in the other, to say
that a text is never anything but a system of roots, is undoubtedly
to contradict both the concept of system and the schema of the root.
But even though it is not merely apparent, this contradiction takes on

the meaning of a contradiction, and receives its “illogicality,” only
through being thought within a finite configuration—the history of
metaphysics—and caught within a root system which does not end
there and which as yet has no name.
4) The text’s self-consciousness, the circumscribed discourse where
genealogical representation is articulated (what Lévi-Strauss, for
example, makes of a certain “eighteenth century,” by quoting it as
the source of his thought), without being confused with genealogy
itself, plays, precisely by virtue of this divergence, an organizing role
in the structure of the text. Even if one did have the right to speak
of retrospective illusion, this would not be an accident or a piece of
theoretical detritus; one would have to account for its necessity and
its positive effects. A text always has several epochs and reading must
resign itself to that fact. And this genealogical self-representation is
itself already the representation of a self-representation what, for ex-
ample, “the French eighteenth century,” if such a thing exists, already
constructed as its own source and its own presence. (101–102)]
This methodological point is also made in the famous explicit exchange

with Foucault, albeit not now about the “eighteenth century,” but about the
history in terms of which anything like an “Eighteenth [or any other] Century”
might be named. Announcing in a preliminary way the kinds of questions he will
be asking of Foucault’s “interpretation,” Derrida defines interpretation in “Cogito
et l’histoire de la Folie” as “un certain rapport sémantique proposé par Foucault
entre, d’une part, ce que Descartes a dit—ou ce qu’on croit qu’il a dit ou voulu
dire—et, d’autre part, disons à dessein très vaguement pour le moment une certaine
‘structure historique’, comme on dit, une certaine totalité historique pleine de sens,
un certain projet historique total dont on pense qu’il se laisse indiquer en particu-
lier à travers ce que Descartes a dit—ou ce qu’on croit qu’il a dit ou voulu dire”
[a certain semantic relationship proposed by Foucault between, on the one hand,
what Descartes said—or what he is believed to have said or meant—and on the
other hand, let us say, with intentional vagueness for the moment, a certain “his-
torical structure,” as it is called, a certain historical totality replete with meaning,
a certain total historical project through which we think what Descartes said—or
what he is believed to have said or meant].6 This unpacks as two subquestions:
first as to “what-Descartes-said,” and second as to its historical significance and its
significance as essentially historical. And in a slightly later reference to the first of
these subquestions, Derrida says the following, announcing some of the questions
he’ll be putting to Foucault about the latter’s reading of Descartes:
Je ne sais pas jusqu’à quel point Foucault serait d’accord pour dire que
la condition préalable d’une réponse à de telles questions passe d’abord
par l’analyse interne et autonome du contenu philosophique du discours
philosophique. C’est quand la totalité de ce contenu me sera devenue pat-
ente dans son sens (mais c’est impossible) que je pourrai la situer en toute
rigueur dans sa forme historique totale. C’est alors seulement que sa réin-
sertion ne lui fera pas violence, qu’elle sera réinsertion légitime de ce sens
philosophique lui-même. En particulier en ce qui regarde Descartes, on ne
peut répondre à aucune question historique le concernant—concernant le
sens historique latent de son propos, concernant son appartenance à une
structure totale—avant une analyse interne rigoureuse et exhaustive de

ses intentions patentes, du sens patent de son discours philosophique.
C’est à ce sens patent, qui n’est pas lisible dans une immédiateté de
rencontre, c’est à cette intention proprement philosophique que nous
allons nous intéresser maintenant. (ED, 70)
[I do not know to what extent Foucault would agree that the prerequisite
for a response to such questions is first of all the internal and autono-
mous analysis of the philosophical content of the philosophical discourse.
Only when the totality of this content will have become manifest in its
meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be able to situate
it in its historical form. It is only then that its reinsertion will not do it
violence, that there will be a legitimate reinsertion of this philosophical
meaning itself. As to Descartes in particular, no historical question about
him—about the latent historical meaning of his discourse, about its place
in a total structure—can be answered before a rigorous and exhaustive
internal analysis of his manifest intentions, of the manifest meaning of his
philosophical discourse has been made.
We will now turn to this manifest meaning, this properly philosophi-
cal intention that is not legible in the immediacy of a first encounter.
(WD, 45)]
“C’est quand la totalité de ce contenu me sera devenue patente dans son sens (mais
c’est impossible) que je pourrai la situer en toute rigueur dans sa forme historique
totale.” So it looks as though we will never get to the “historical moment” . . .
Derrida’s reading would then tend to remain at the interminable preliminary stage
of decipherment, and endlessly defer the properly “historical moment” that it might
seem ought to follow on. The suspicion would be that the “new delimitation of
corpuses” and the “new problematic of signatures,” announced in “La mythologie
blanche,” simply never comes.
And yet Derrida, in spite of certain appearances, really is arguing all this in
some sense in the interests of history, of the possibility of history, and is doing so in
a way that is already enacting (or at least beginning to enact) that new delimitation
and new problematic. The burden of his argument with Foucault in this respect is
that without the moment of “madness” that the “internal” philosophical reading
finds in Descartes (i.e., that the cogito is valid whether I am mad or not), and which
Derrida assimilates to a “mad” philosophical endeavor to exceed any determinate
totality whatsoever, then there would be no history at all. When Derrida returns to
Foucault many years later, and more specifically to Foucault’s treatment of Freud,
he finds some comfort for this argument in a later reference Foucault makes to
the “Malin Génie” (a reference which Derrida seems to have overlooked at the
time of the “Cogito and History of Madness” essay) in which Foucault sees the
“Malin Génie” posing an ongoing and indeed “perpetual threat” to the security of
the cogito: what kind of historical status in general can the notion of “perpetual
threat” have, asks Derrida:
On peut imaginer les effets que peut avoir la catégorie de “menace

perpétuelle” (ce sont les mots de Foucault) sur les indices de présence, les
repères positifs, les déterminations des signes ou des énoncés, bref toute
la critériologie ou la symptomatologie qui peut donner son assurance à
un savoir historique sur une figure, une épistémè, un âge, une époque,
un paradigne, dès lors que toutes ces déterminations se trouvent mena-

cées, et perpétuellement, perpétuellement dérangées par une hantise. Car
en principe toutes ces déterminations sont pour l’historien ou bien des
présences ou bien des absences. Elles excluent la hantise. Elles se laissent
repérer par des signes, on dirait presque sur une table des absences et des
présences. Elles relèvent de la logique de l’opposition, ici de l’inclusion
ou de l’exclusion, de l’alternative du dedans et du dehors, etc. La menace
perpétuelle, c’est-à-dire l’ombre de la hantise (et pas plus que le fantôme
ou la fiction d’un Malin Génie, la hantise n’est ni la présence ni l’absence,
ni le plus ni le moins. ni le dedans ni le dehors), ne s’en prend pas seule-
ment à ceci ou à cela: elle menace la logique de la distinction entre le ceci
et le cela, la logique même de l’exclusion ou de la forclusion, tout comme
l’histoire fondée sur cette logique et ses alternatives. Ce qui est exclu n’est
évidemment jamais simplement exclu, par le Cogito ni par quoi que ce
soit, sans que cela fasse retour, voilà ce qu’une certaine psychanalyse nous
aura aussi aidé à comprendre.
[One may imagine the effects that the category of the “perpetual threat”
(Foucault’s term) can have on indications of presence, positive mark-
ings, determinations made by means of signs or statements, in short,
the whole criteriology and symptomatology that can give assurance to a
historical knowledge concerning a figure, an episteme, an age, an epoch,
a paradigm, once all these determinations are found to be threatened, and
perpetually so, perpetually disturbed by a haunting. In principle, all these
determinations are, for the historian, either presences or absences. They
exclude haunting. They allow themselves to be located by means of signs,
one would almost say on a table of absences and presences; they come
out of the logic of opposition, in this case, the logic of inclusion or exclu-
sion, of the alternative between the inside and the outside, and so on.
The perpetual threat, that is, the shadow of haunting (and haunting is,
like the phantom or fiction of an Evil Genius, neither present nor absent,
neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside), does not chal-
lenge only one thing or another; it threatens the logic that distinguishes
between one thing and another, the very logic of exclusion or foreclosure,
as well as the history that is founded upon this logic and its alternatives.
What is excluded is, of course, never simply excluded, neither by the
cogito nor by anything else, without this eventually returning—and that
is what a certain psychoanalysis will have also helped us to understand.] 7
And this point is also just what the famous argument about context is establishing
in “Signature, Event, Context” and “Limited Inc.” If I can caricature a little and
say that the historian will always want to put it back into its context (the tiger is
out of the cage, the historian always wants it put back inside), then Derrida will
always also be urging the question: “how did it escape in the first place?” And
the best proof that it did escape seems to be the irreducible (and somewhat mad)
fact of reading. None of these questions could even arise were it not for reading,
reading must by definition entail escape from context, and therefore something of
the “madness” that Derrida is talking about in the “Cogito” text, something of
the “haunting” he posits in later work, and therefore something of the order of
an ongoing unreadability.
Oddly enough, perhaps, this argument could also be illustrated around an-
other preeminently Rousseauian theme (albeit not one that Derrida himself focuses
particularly on Rousseau), that also happens to be one of the chosen themes of

this volume. Rousseau arguably offers the most coherent and economical account
of sovereignty to be found in the tradition, and the account that shows up more
clearly than some the inevitability of its deconstruction. Happily enough for our
purposes, the deconstruction of sovereignty is the condition of history itself. For if
sovereignty “worked,” as it were, then its temporality would be one of absolutely
self-contained instants that would have no link between them: the present would
always be radically in the present with no possible link to past or future—whence
a profound identity, in spite of some appearances, between a Rousseauian and a
Nietzschean or Bataillean version of sovereignty. The same argument of course
holds for subjectivity, too. What makes sovereignty not work, never quite work,
and which in Rousseau gives rise to all the strictly supplementary features of the
state, without which there would be no politics (the legislator, the government,
the tribunate, and so on), is what Derrida is increasingly in his later work inclined
to call “auto-immunity,” whereby a structure’s attempts to secure itself as itself
and in itself founder on an irreducible opening to an “outside” which allows it
to be, certainly, but to be only as finite and intrinsically (“perpetually”) menaced
by unpredictable events without the possibility of which, however, the structure
in question would simply not be (or would be dead, at best in a kind of living
death). In the current case, this means that if the “Eighteenth Century” ever could
be defined in and as itself, it would quite simply become unreadable to us, and
that its continued readability and availability for discussion depend on our not
quite knowing what it is and in general on its failure to be quite itself. This is also
why, for example, Lévi-Strauss is still in some meaningful sense part of the “age
of Rousseau,” and why texts have several ages.
In the general case before us, this auto-immunity is just what I call reading,
as what opens texts up always beyond their historical specificity to the always pos-
sibly menacing prospect of unpredictable future reading. The link between this and
madness is something that Rousseau’s work as a whole makes very plain. But just
that same structure is what gives Rousseau’s texts their several ages, why reading
is never completed, and why we’ll always do well to keep putting the “Eighteenth
Century” in quotation marks.
NOTES
1. The relevant passages invoking the eighteenth century, or the “eighteenth century,” appear in
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 147 and 150, hereafter cited as G; trans-
lations, with occasional slight modifications, are from Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 98 and 102, hereafter cited as OG.
2. See my “Almost the End,” in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000).
3. See Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 69.
4. Cf. “Les romans de Descartes ou l’économie des mots,” in Du droit à la philosophie (Paris:
Galilée, 1990), 311–41.
5. The essay appears in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), translated by Alan Bass
as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982). Cited in the text as Marges and
Margins. Again, minor modifications have been made to the translation.
6. L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 53; translated by Alan Bass as Writing and Dif-
ference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 32. Cited in the text as ED and WD.
7. Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 111–12; translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pas-
cale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas as Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1998), 87–88.
Kamuf / To Do Justice to “Rousseau,” Irreducibly 395
To Do Justice to
“Rousseau,” Irreducibly
Peggy Kamuf
De la grammatologie is a monstrous work. One should say that, if pos-

sible, in the best sense, which is to say the sense evoked, now famously, in the last
sentences of that book’s initial chapter, titled “Exergue”:
Perhaps the patient meditation and rigorous inquiry around what is still
provisionally called writing . . . are the errancy of a thinking faithful and
attentive to the world that, irreducibly, is coming and that proclaims itself
at present, beyond the closure of knowledge. The future cannot be antici-
pated except in the form of absolute danger. It is what breaks absolutely
with constituted normality and can announce itself, present itself only as
a kind of monstrosity.1
Monstrous is an “errancy . . . beyond the closure of knowledge” and it is with just

such a wandering, without the security of known and normal compass points, that
Derrida makes his way, blindly or monstrously, toward a future for thought and
a thought of the future. Wandering, errancy [errance] is the name he will claim
again, some two hundred pages later, for the “method” he is following, that is,
the path toward the exit from “the closure of knowledge,” of metaphysics: “[This
exiting] proceeds in the manner of an errant thinking concerning the possibility
of itinerary and of method. It affects itself [s’affecte] with nonknowledge as with
its future and deliberately ventures out [s’aventure]” (232). An errant method, a
Peggy Kamuf teaches French and comparative literature at the University of Southern
California. She has translated several works by Jacques Derrida and edited two volumes of his
essays (A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds [Columbia Univ. Press, 1991] and Without Alibi
[Stanford Univ. Press, 2002]). Her early work was on 18th-century French fiction (Fictions of
Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise [Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982]); she is the author
most recently of Book of Addresses (Stanford Univ. Press, 2005).

method of errancy is a flagrant contradiction in terms, a monstrosity that flaunts

its aberration by questioning the very possibility of method. Here is a thinker who
proclaims, without apology, not only that he is making it up as he goes along but
that he is looking for an exit from safe precincts, for the path toward danger, and
that, without knowing it, he knows a blind spot organizes the reading produced
in this way: “And what we are calling production is necessarily a text, the system
of a writing and a reading, about which we know, a priori—but only now—and
with a knowledge that is not one, that they are ordered around their own blind
spot” (234).
Another monstrous provocation: “their own blind spot,” “leur propre
tache aveugle.” How can a blind spot be properly attributed? To whom, to what
does it belong or return? This formulation is reflecting or repeating the designation
of “a sort of blind spot in the text of Rousseau” (234), in other words, in the text
being read and whose law is being produced by this reading. The Rousseauvian
blind spot, namely, the law of the supplement, “the concept of the supplement”
(234). Rousseau, as Derrida shows beyond dispute, names supplementarity tire-
lessly, even obsessively, in his theoretical or philosophical texts (Émile, Essai sur
l’origine des langues) no less than in his autobiographical or literary texts (Les
Confessions, Les Rêveries). But the law of this naming and the concept governing
its compulsive repetition in Rousseau’s discourse remains unthought, unnoticed,
unread, and unseen by the signatory no less than by the generations of scholars or
savants who have built a house of knowledge on the archive of Rousseau’s oeuvre.
The blind spot at once belongs and does not belong to the author’s signed work;
that is, it is undeniably used and properly intended by his discourse, but in order
to become legible at all the proper aim of this intention to mean has to deviate
through a point it cannot grasp or see and therefore cannot intend. This necessary
deviation is therefore at once a condition of possibility of proper meaning and the
condition of its impossibility as proper. That the possibility of the properness of
any “thing” is conditioned by and as impossibility is what Derrida knows with a
knowledge “that is not one” and what his errant thought will remain faithful to in
every turn it takes from this point on. It accounts for both the immense diversity
across his writings and the incomparable coherence of their wanderings.
But to return to De la grammatologie: its deconstruction of property in
“the Age of Rousseau” sends tremors across innumerable faultlines and shakes up
(and down) the ground of every ontological certainty. This is an enormous claim,
befitting the monstrous. To measure it solely within the confines of a reflection on
“Derrida’s ‘eighteenth century’” will certainly fail to do it justice. But then what
might count as justice done to a work of this magnitude and whose impact has
only begun to register against such formidable resistance? Perhaps Derrida would
say that the justice awaiting his thought will have to be an unraveling around its
“own” blind spots, on the order of that which he undertakes with Rousseau’s
unthought thinking of supplementarity, or again, of Plato’s anagrammatic writing
of the pharmakon.2 And if this comparison sounds exaggerated, it is still the least
one might envision as justice to a thought and a work that, by dint of wandering,
would find the exit toward nothing less than a certain outside of “Platonism,” that
is, of the massive and comprehensive structure that raised the curtain on the theater
of the West and on its play, in continuous performance since then. One may rightly
expect such an unraveling to be delayed for some good while yet, and, even given
the acceleration afforded by ever-new technologies of writing, likely to require
more than the three centuries separating the appearance of De la grammatologie
from that of Rousseau’s Confessions or L’Essai sur l’origine des langues. As Der-
rida writes on the opening page of “Plato’s Pharmacy”: “The dissimulation of the
woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web.”3 To be sure, the
texture of Plato’s web will have resisted its undoing far longer than Rousseau’s, but
this tends to confirm Derrida’s reading of “Rousseau” as largely a repetition, with
some important new twists, produced on the stage of the Platonic theater. And,
of course, as far as most specialist scholars are concerned, they both continue to
resist very well, thank you. The Age of Derrida may have dawned already but, for
its contemporaries, it will have remained largely within their blind spot.
Such a figure of doing justice by undoing a text around one of its blind
spots (for one cannot assume that there is ever only one)4 can take us closer to the
particularity, even the singularity, of Derrida’s “Rousseau,” if not his “eighteenth
century.” For, at first approach, the figure would seem to promise harsh justice
indeed, on the order of a judgment, sentence, or condemnation, a justice that is
exacted by rending the tissue of the corpus rather than justice that is rendered,
which is to say, returned or given back to the other, here to the name—Rousseau,
Plato, Derrida—that stands metonymically for a work and, even beyond that, for
an age, an epoch.
In order to hear a rendering rather than a rending as the blind spot comes
to light, one has to pay close attention to the ways in which De la grammatologie
is situating Rousseau’s text, writing, thought, and, finally or perhaps first of all, his
experience. These ways are numerous, but may well all be described as modes of
découpage: of cutting, separating, partitioning, dividing.5 It is a matter of setting
off thereby different levels or layers of the text from each other by identifying, to
some extent, what Derrida calls their “structures of appartenance”—that is, of as-
sociation, belonging, or affiliation. I’ve already mentioned one very large structure,
“Platonism” or metaphysics, to which Rousseau’s texts largely belong through a
direct, even if only rarely acknowledged, line of inheritance, in particular as regards
the treatment of the question of writing. Within that découpage, however, there
would be the affiliation between “Rousseau” and other, comparable metonymies,
for example, “Warburton,” “Condillac,” “Hobbes,” “Mandeville,” “Vico,” “Des-
cartes”—but also “Hegel” or “Saussure,” which extends the text’s layering beyond
considerations of its assumed influences or declared polemics.6
Besides these declared or more or less legible lines of division, there is what
Derrida refers to as the habitation of the text being read, that is, the situation of
any text in a language and a culture that it inhabits, is habituated to, and repro-
duces, up to a certain point, by habit, without reflection, this being a condition of
the minimal level of its readability.7 Of this habitual habitation, Derrida remarks,
underscoring twice the preposition “in”: “the writer writes in a language and in a
logic of which, by definition, his discourse cannot dominate absolutely the system,
laws, and life. He uses it only by letting himself, in a certain way and up to a certain
point [emphasis added], be governed by the system” (227). Up to a certain point:
this phrase points to a place of découpage that must occur if a reading is not to miss,
precisely, the point by settling for a repetition of habit that might have occurred in
any number of other texts, with other signatures, from different “ages.”
One of the many moments at which Derrida recalls the difficulty and
necessity of this essential level of découpage occurs in the key metadiscursive
chapter titled “The Exorbitant. Question of Method” when he is distinguishing
his “method” of reading from that of a certain psychoanalysis:
Such a psychoanalysis [of Jean-Jacques Rousseau] would have to locate

already all the structures of belonging of Rousseau’s text, everything that
is not proper to it, by reason of the overarching already-thereness of lan-
guage or of culture, everything that is inhabited rather than produced by
the writing. Around the point of irreducible originality of this writing an
immense series of structures, historic totalities of all kinds are organized,
envelope, and cut across each other. Assuming that psychoanalysis could
rightly carry out to completion their découpage and their interpretation,
assuming that it takes account of the whole history of Western metaphys-
ics that sustains relations of habitation with Rousseau’s writing, it would
still have to elucidate its own belonging to metaphysics and Western
culture. (230–31; emphases added)
I’ve underscored two phrases in the above lines because they situate something
like the stakes or the point of the daunting enterprise of découpage that Derrida
challenges psychoanalysis, or any other “method” of interpretation (including the
one he is here setting out as his own), to carry out fully. The point would be to
be able to situate “the point of irreducible originality of this writing” by cutting
away “everything that is not proper to it,” a point that would, as it were, remain
in the hopper of the reading grid once everything that belongs to other structures
of belonging or habitation has been sifted out or cut away. Indeed, the passage
just cited continues with an image of reading (or interpretation) as something like
a piece of large earth-moving equipment that carries away far more than what it
is looking for:
Let us not pursue in this direction. We have already taken the measure of
the difficulty of the task and the share of failure in our interpretation of
the supplement. We are certain that something irreducibly Rousseauist
is captured there but we have carried off, at the same time, a still quite
shapeless mass of roots, soil, and sediments of every sort. (231; emphasis
added)8
Something “irreducibly Rousseauist” would be a “point of irreducible origi-

nality.” An irreducible point ought to suggest that which cannot be broken down
or divided any further; it would be very hasty, however, to understand Derrida’s
point in a quasi-geometrical sense of indivisibility. For irreducible originality, that
point from which it resists further reduction to some encompassing historical to-
tality or overarching habitation, has also the character or the function of a blind
spot and thus of what necessarily divides any proper economy (of a self, a subject,
a discourse, an intention, etc.) from and within itself. The proper divides (itself)
and this is its improperly proper law. And yet, divided and cut off from itself, the
irreducible still insists; it beckons to a reading that would not be content to leave
undisturbed all those roots and sediments caught up with it, dissimulating its sharp,
needle-like point in a haystack of historical, cultural repetitions and habits.
The passage cited above is just one of many comparable moments that
surge into view as Derrida proceeds to sharpen ever more finely the irreducible
blind spot or point. At this point, the reading of “Rousseau” has only begun,
by digging first, as a kind of test drill site, into Jean-Jacques’s confessional texts.
The “interpretation of the supplement” has thus first situated supplementarity’s
disconcerting logic—“almost inconceivable for reason” as Rousseau says of his
cohabitation with the one he called “Maman,” Mme de Warens—in an economy
of desire that ruses with substitution, delay, displacement, onanism, guilt, pleasure,
nature, and its degradation in depravity. Given that Derrida has elected to initiate
his reading with the specifically sexual underpinnings, as one is wont to say, of
Rousseau’s, or rather Jean-Jacques’s experience, the warnings about confusing his
“method” (that is, this path being cut through the thicket of three centuries’ worth
of metaphysical reappropriations of “Rousseau”) with those of psychoanalysis
seem altogether called-for. And especially in 1967, a year after the much-heralded
first publication of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits, a work whose blind spot Derrida will
soon situate in the place of the literary signifier.9 But these warning remarks about
the immense, in fact impossible task (in French, tâche, differentiated only by its
circumflex from tache, as in tache aveugle, blind spot, stain, patch) stand also at
the threshold to the reading of the—apparently—nonconfessional, philosophical
or theoretical text that is Essai sur l’origine des langues, which occupies the much
longer second part of the section of De la grammatologie devoted to the “Age of
Rousseau.” One has, however, also been put on notice that such a distinction—con-
fessional from philosophical, sexually-charged and driven from sexually-neutral
or neutralized—is in question from here on out; indeed, the reading of the Essai
is everywhere shot through with references forward or back to Les Confessions,
Les Rêveries, Les Dialogues. Thus, the questioning of these entirely metaphysical
distinctions will have begun with Rousseau “himself” (“c’est la faute de Rousseau
. . .”)—in other words, with his experience as writer, thinker, reader, and relay point
in the long legacy of Platonism. The question arises not only because the putatively
speculative or theoretical writings (the Essai above all, but also Émile, Lettre à
d’Alembert, Le Discours sur l’inégalité, Du Contrat social, etc.) rarely pass on the
opportunity to put femininity, “le sexe,” in its place far from the stage of serious
public matters, as Derrida unfailingly remarks, but above all because Rousseau
“chose to exist by literary writing” (230), a choice made no less ineluctable by the
inflection he gave to the Platonic schema denouncing all the dangers attending such
a “life” in writing. It is, then, Rousseau’s experience, in its singularity, of ineluctable
textual/sexual supplementarity that writes itself across the oeuvre subsumed to his
name, to his signature.
It is such an experience—singular, signed, proper, but in irremediable,
irreducible, and original rupture with the economic circle of pure auto-affection,
without alterity—that the dredging machine of reading and interpretation must
bring to the surface so as there to begin sifting through the roots and sediments in
which it has lain buried, for want, perhaps, of a corresponding desire that could
read it under the haystack of negations.10 These negations appear to be its “own”
but they also resemble and inhabit those of centuries upon centuries of repression.
Repression of writing, of desire, of the other, of “woman,” of the blind spot, of
errancy, and centuries upon centuries, the eighteenth being one more in a series that
continues beyond it, approaching closure but still unclosed. But in that century,
Rousseau will have cried out in writing for justice and articulated this cry or call in
his own name (for example, in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques) and in the general
name of “man” (Discours sur l’inégalité parmi les hommes). To read “Rousseau”
justly, one has to try to hear this articulation so as to respond in kind, that is, in
and with the supplementary articulation whereby experience is endlessly textual-
ized by differences that alter and space out the selfsame.
Which is why, throughout De la grammatologie and without contradicting
the concern to cut away everything that does not belong or return to the name, Der-
rida is no less interested to show how “Rousseau” names, more properly or more
legibly than any of his contemporaries, a general, universal condition of experience.
What Jean-Jacques in Les Confessions refers to as “the dangerous supplement”
of his onanism, for example, is articulated by Derrida’s analysis at precisely the
juncture of individual experience and its universal condition: “Auto-affection is
a universal structure of experience. Every living being is a potential of auto-affec-
tion. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say, of affecting itself,
can let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of
experience in general” (236).
Rousseau names this condition in another sense as well, that of giving
the name to the structure whereby auto-affection requires and thus calls for a
supplement in order to “be” (with) itself. But in this very act of naming, Rous-
seau would have also been at his most blind to what was being said and done in
his text and by his text. And it is this absence from himself, this irreducible blind
spot, this condition of writing and being written at once, beyond the pertinence
of the opposition of activity to passivity, that calls for justice, which is to say, for
the supplement of reading.
At least twice in the course of reading “The Age of Rousseau,” Derrida
settles provisionally on the notion of “dream” to qualify this state of writing/being
written while remaining essentially blind or unconscious. Both passages, however,
are clearly articulated around the necessity to produce a new space for thinking
experience that does not fall back on metaphysical categories, to which the psycho-
analytic concept of dream, in its opposition to waking, consciousness, or vigilance,
remains largely hostage. For this reason, the term can be used only provisionally,
as a paleonym, or under erasure:
Using the word and describing the thing, Rousseau displaces and deforms
the sign “supplement” in a certain manner, the unity of the signifier
and the signified. . . . But these displacements and these deformations
are regulated by the contradictory—or itself supplementary—unity of a
desire. As in the dream, in Freud’s analysis, incompatibilities are admitted
simultaneously when it’s a matter of satisfying a desire, despite the prin-
ciple of identity or the excluded middle, that is, despite the logical time
of consciousness. By using another word than dream, by inaugurating a
conceptuality that would no longer be that of the metaphysics of presence
or consciousness (which opposes, still within Freud’s discourse, waking
and dream), one would thus have to define a space in which this regu-
lated “contradiction” has been possible and can be described. (348–49)
This new conceptual space would exit the space of metaphysics by per-
mitting an account of regular “contradictions,” which in their very regularity and
regulation overrun the explanatory capacity of conscious logic that wants to exclude
any such contradictions as aberrations, anomalies, monstrous. This observable

regularity requires and thus calls for a new set of rules, rules that have to be pro-
duced as one goes along, inductively and deductively, or rather by thinking always
at the site of articulation between general structures and their inscription by and
as proper names.11 For this conceptual work, “Rousseau” cannot serve merely as
an example, replaceable by or reducible to other examples, even as his articulation
of supplementarity is not to be accounted for in and of itself, outside the general,
universal, and historical conditions Derrida calls differance. Rather, it is a matter
of displacing “all the concepts proposed until now with which to think the articula-
tion of a discourse and an historical totality” (148; emphasis in the original) and
of doing so under the impulse given each time differently, under a different name
and in view of a different displacement, by the inscription of desire in a space like
that of dream. For example, and exemplarily, the name of supplement, which will
have been (one of) Rousseau’s secret proper names.
The last paragraphs of De la grammatologie return to this problem of the
term dream, but this time the movement of displacement toward a new concept
is carried by the full impact and impulse of this inscription of “Rousseau.” This
phrase, “the inscription of ‘Roussseau,’” must therefore now be understood at once
in the active or subjective sense and the passive or objective sense of the genitive:
the inscription of Rousseau, that is, his inscription both of and by the text that is
offered up to reading in the very movement of supplementarity it describes and
submits to.
To the extent that he belongs to the metaphysics of presence, [Rousseau]

dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, of evil to good, of rep-
resentation to presence [etc.]. . . . But all of these oppositions are irreduc-
ibly rooted [emphasis added] in this metaphysics. . . . None of the terms
of this series, insofar as they are comprehended there, can dominate the
economy of differance or of supplementarity. The dream of Rousseau has
consisted of forcibly introducing the supplement into metaphysics.
But what does that say? Is not the opposition of dream to vigilance
also a representation of metaphysics? And what must the dream be, what
must writing be, if, as we now know [emphasis added], one can write
while dreaming? And if the scene of dreaming is always a scene of writ-
ing? (444–45)
“As we now know”: I am tempted to read this phrase as the echo of one
cited earlier in which Derrida, using (as he does throughout De la grammatologie)
the convention of the first-person plural, points to what “we know, a priori—but
only now” to be the blind spot ordering the production of this text, “the system of
a writing and a reading” (234). How can one know something a priori and yet with
delay, “only now”? This delayed effect of knowing is the mark of supplementary
differance, of the irreducible detour through the other, which is to say, the blind
spot. When, in the closing paragraph just cited, Derrida remarks again the present
of knowing, “as we now know,” this delay or detour has not been closed up or
closed down but rather displayed and displaced through the other’s text. For hav-
ing so patiently tracked “Rousseau” through innumerable points of articulation of
his discourse with all sorts of general structures, what “we now know” (and “we”
now, at the end of this work, includes Derrida’s readers) has the singular nature of
a dream, “the dream of Rousseau,” which “has consisted of forcibly introducing

the supplement into metaphysics.”
Once again, the genitive construction must be given its full play: “the dream
of Rousseau” does not let one decide whose dream is inscribing the supplement.
And it is through this very undecidability that De la grammatologie does justice
to the one and the other “Rousseau,” Rousseau as irreducibly the name of more
than one, its divisibility being the im-possible condition of its proper reference.
The name refers now—but a priori it always already did—to a text, that is to say,
to an experience lived as supplementarity. And this is so not only because Rous-
seau also chose to write. But because he wrote, and because while writing dreamed
incompatible things, it is to the writer’s name that is rendered the justice of his
immense accomplishment: forcibly displacing the conceptual field of metaphysics
from within.
Such a displacement, however, is not yet an exit from that field. The exit
had still to be dreamed of when Rousseau wrote and lived, in the “eighteenth
century.” This delay will now have to be accounted for according to a differant
historicity. The delayed dream of a new Enlightenment will necessarily have been
the dream of (a) monstrosity, which ventures out blindly toward, as we read, “the
world that, irreducibly, is coming.” But it will also have signaled yet a greater
accomplishment, just underway, as the Age of “Derrida” begins to unfold in the
blind spot of its history.
Coda
When and if this age ever rounds on itself to try to identify its “own” blind
spot, what will it see? This is, of course, a ridiculously premature question since the
delay has only begun and the “dissimulation of the woven texture can take centuries
to undo its web.” In the meantime, there have been relentless attacks on Derrida’s
work. So far, however, these have not opened up even the smallest breach in that
work’s incredibly tightly woven—and calculated—fabric. The reason cannot be
that no room is left there for discussion, debate, questions, and disagreement. On
the contrary, responses are constantly invited and called for.12 It is rather, I believe,
because these bids to dismiss out of court, without a hearing, have precisely the
aggressive, even furious character of attack, which is a state that leaves the aggres-
sors utterly incapable of reading. As I’ve argued above, and differently elsewhere, 13
Derrida is most fundamentally misread when his own work on others’ texts (and
he is always reading) has been received as destructive, that is, as rending rather
than rendering justice. Love for a text, as Derrida has affirmed more than once,
is a necessary condition for reading. Perhaps it is a sufficient condition as well.
As to why a number of Derrida’s contemporaries believed they ought not to love
his writing and therefore ought not to read it, that is a question on which one can
only speculate. But it’s also a question I don’t believe is going to trouble readers
of the future, because such acrimony writes on water where its ripples dissipate in
the blink of an eye, in a little interval of blindness.
That said, a tiny opening seems to appear in the very last line of De la
grammatologie. It looks to be not deliberate, but instead, although one cannot
assert this with any certainty, what is called a lapsus. Bringing his text to a close,
and as he so often does with unfailing courtesy, Derrida leaves the last word to his
textual interlocutor of the moment. Hence, he cites and gives one to read a passage
from Émile, in which Rousseau writes this on the subject of dreams:
the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say I
too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my
dreams as dreams, and leave it to the reader to discover whether there is
anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.14
The last clauses of this cited passage, which fall on the final lines of De la
grammatologie, read in French: “je donne mes rêves pour des rêves, laissant chercher
[. . .] s’ils ont quelque chose d’utile aux gens éveillés.” Where I’ve inserted brackets
Derrida’s quotation has dropped two words from Rousseau’s original text, an omis-
sion that, as it happens, does not disturb the syntax in French as it might have in
English. The two words are, simply: “au lecteur,” that is, “to the reader.”
To the reader. A blind spot? Perhaps. But whose?
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 14; further references, in paren-
theses, are to this original edition and all translations are my own.
2. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1981).
3. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 63.
4. “The theme of supplementarity is no doubt, in certain ways, but one theme among others. It
is in a chain, carried along by that chain. Perhaps one could substitute for it something else. But it so
happens that it describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitu-
tion, the articulation of desire and language, the logic of all the conceptual oppositions that Rousseau
takes on board” (233; emphasis in the original).
5. See 230 for a foregrounded use of the term découpage.
6. On the crucial découpage Derrida effects between “Rousseau” and both “Warburton” and
“Condillac,” see, for example, 384 ff.
7. The term “habitation” is used by Rousseau in Les Confessions as just cited in the previous
section: “I had noticed moreover that living with women [l’habitation des femmes; also translated
as “intercourse with women”] worsened my condition perceptibly” (224). Derrida’s attention to the
inscription of sexual difference never flags, here or elsewhere. For example, after citing a passage from
La Lettre à d’Alembert (the text containing some of Rousseau’s most furiously misogynistic writing),
in which Rousseau elevates his bad experience with “l’habitation des femmes” into the principle that
men suffer more than women from their “intercourse,” Derrida comments: “The parties are unequal
and this is perhaps the most profound meaning of the play of supplementarity” (252).
8. Reading the works of Jean Genet, Derrida employs a similar image to describe his reading “op-
eration”: “. . . a sort of dredging machine. From the dissimulated small, closed, glassed-in cabin of a
crane, I manipulate some levers and, from afar . . . I plunge a mouth of steel in the water. And I scrape
the bottom, hook onto stones and algae there that I lift up in order to set them down on the ground
while the water quickly falls back from the mouth” (Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr.
[Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986], 204).
9. See Jacques Derrida, “Le Facteur de la vérité,” trans. Alan Bass, in Derrida, The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). That a certain psychoanalytic
interpretation remains blind to the literary signifier is already asserted explicitly in De la grammatologie:
“If the trajectory we have followed in the reading of the ‘supplement’ is not simply psychoanalytic, it
is no doubt because the habitual psychoanalysis of literature begins by bracketing the literary signifier
as such” (230).
10. On several occasions, Derrida has recalled that his reading of Rousseau as a youth, and especially
Les Confessions, was a determining experience in his own decision to write. The axes of his identifi-
cation with Rousseau could be seen as falling along the conventional divisions between philosophy,
literature, and autobiography, “genres” that Derrida melds, crosses, and rearticulates with incredible
inventiveness. The confessional genre in particular is one Derrida completely overhauls in Circumfes-
sion (in Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Bennington [Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1993]).
11. On the question of the empiricism of his “method,” see 232.
12. See, in particular, Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” trans. Samuel
Weber, in Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988). For a recent and very fine
analysis of the hostility Derrida’s work has encountered, see Marian Hobson, “Hostilities and Hostages
(to Fortune): On Some Part of Derrida’s Reception,” in Epoché 10.2 (Spring 2006): 303–14.
13. See the chapter “Deconstruction and Love,” in Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 2005).
14. As cited in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1975), 316; translation slightly modified.
Saccamano / Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida 405
Inheriting Enlightenment, or
Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida
Neil Saccamano
In his remarks on the question of method in Of Grammatology, Jacques

Derrida acknowledges that the eighteenth century, characterized there as the “‘age of
Rousseau’ [‘l’époch de Rousseau’]” holds a surprising privilege in his work insofar
as it enables a “decisive articulation of the logocentric epoch” broadly understood
(from Plato to Husserl or Heidegger) and thereby aids the effort of deconstruction
to attain a certain exteriority in relation to that epoch.1 Yet Derrida also explains
that the privilege accorded this historical moment cannot be methodologically or
logically justified with reference to an already secured knowledge that lies beyond it:
the gesture of departure in deconstruction necessarily “takes the form of empiricism
and errancy” because “it is affected by nonknowledge as by its future” (G, 162).
If we possess no determinate knowledge of a destination that would sanction the
choice of a beginning and if we can only attempt to read for traces of closure, then,
Derrida argues: “We must begin wherever we are . . . in a text where we already
believe ourselves to be” (G, 162).
In 1967, when Of Grammatology was first published in France, Derrida
believed himself in a certain way to be inhabiting the texts and language of an
“epoch” epitomized by Rousseau’s energetic reaction to the threat of writing that,
with Leibniz’s universal characteristic, “had opened a breach within logocentric
security” (G, 98). For Derrida, “[t]he place of this combat and crisis is called the
eighteenth century,” and he sets as a task to “bring to light [mettre au jour] . . .
what limited the power and the extent of the breakthrough” (G, 98–99). By the
1990s, Derrida had for some time been venturing out from texts that mark another
Neil Saccamano is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell Uni-
versity. He has published various articles on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy and,
most recently, co-edited Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton, 2006). His current
research centers on the aesthetics and politics of force from Hobbes to Rousseau.

form of crisis, although this point of departure is also called the eighteenth century
precisely insofar as it concerns the legacy and continued pertinence of critique, which
seeks to “bring to light” limits, which discriminates and separates. As Derrida’s
later work increasingly reads the texts of Kant and often takes up the notion of
“enlightenment,” we could say that the eighteenth century appears there as the
“age of Kant,” who, in turn, believed himself to be inhabiting “the age of criticism
(Zeitalter der Kritik).”2 Moreover, just as enlightenment, identified by Kant with
the autonomous use of one’s public reason, must emancipate itself from religious
authority as the most pernicious of all restrictions on freedom of thought, so the
question of religion gets repeatedly raised by Derrida in his reflections on the sta-
tus of critique.3 Indeed, the combat of religions—combat by religions against each
other and by critique against religious dogmatism and fanaticism—may be said
to constitute an insistent point of departure in his later work. In the Specters of
Marx (1993), for instance, Derrida declares religious combat for what he calls the
“‘appropriation of Jerusalem’” to be “today the world war”—this ubiquitous war
“is our world” as well as the “singular figure of its being ‘out of joint’”—and, in
response to this war, he sets out in that text in part to reread the “indispensable”
inheritance of Marxist critique.4 Similarly, in the essay “Faith and Knowledge”
(1996), he again refers to a “war of religion” as “what is happening to us,” what
characterizes precisely a “today” for an “us,” and poses this question or responds
to this demand: “[I]n view of the Enlightenment of today and of tomorrow, . . . how
to think religion in the daylight of today without breaking with the philosophical
tradition,” with “the epoch and spirit of the Aufklärung” to which belongs Kant’s
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.5
In response to the worldwide violence that Derrida says is misleadingly
attributed to a “return of religions”—as if a period was supposed to have been
put to religion by two centuries of “enlightened” scientific and critical discourses,
including Marxism, Nietzschean genealogy, and psychoanalysis—an effort to think
religion would seem to define an especially urgent task (FK, 5). Yet, the prevalence
of theological problematics and of religiously derived concepts or terms in his
later writings (forgiveness, messianicity, gift, hospitality) has been read by some
to be indicative of a turn toward theology, or as a belated thematization of what
had always been implicit, despite his repeated statements to the contrary. One can
imagine how Derrida’s resort to these religious terms, coupled with his question-
ing of the ability to limit the reach of the religious, might lead to such a reading.
For instance, “to determine a war of religion as such,” he notes, “one would have
to be certain that one can delimit the religious,” distinguish its predicates, and
dissociate them from “those that establish, for example, the concept of ethics, of
the juridical, of the political or of the economic”; for Derrida, however, “nothing
is more problematical than such a dissociation.” With regard to the political as
an obstinately theological concept, he remarks that the so-called “wars of religion
could also imply radical challenges to our project of delimiting the political” and
“constitute a response to everything that our idea of democracy . . . still entails that
is religious” (FK, 26). Given its hegemony or perhaps sovereignty, religion would
seem impossible to think philosophically without religion.
This difficulty in attaining a certain exteriority in relation to religion is, for
some like John Caputo, not so much an inadequacy of deconstruction as a “blessing
for religion, its positive salvation,” insofar as deconstruction “keep[s] it open to

constant reinvention.”6 To consider deconstruction to be the reinvention of religion
is perhaps one way of reading Derrida’s acknowledgment that deconstruction shares
with the Abrahamic religions and with a secular, especially Marxist, critique of re-
ligion “a certain experience of the emancipatory promise” that historically belongs
to “messianic eschatology” and that is retained by deconstruction as the “formal-
ity of a structural messianism” (SM, 59). Indeed, Derrida’s strategy of formalizing
and redeploying as irreducible such concepts as messianism no doubt complicates
efforts to distinguish rigorously between religion or theology and deconstruction.
Rodolphe Gasché, for instance, argues with exceptional precision that “God” in
Derrida is an effect of the trace as a self-effacing structure of referral, “that is, of
the inevitable negativity and endless referral to Other that all attempts to think a
positive infinity and full presence must meet”; but since “God” is also a singular
figure for, or the “exemplary revelation” of, this structure, “the temptation, or the
danger, . . . to theologize is always imminent,” although Gasché concludes that
deconstruction “is certainly closer to philosophy than theology.”7 On the other
hand, Hent de Vries claims that Gasché underestimates the work done by theologi-
cal and religious terms in Derrida insofar as the very privilege accorded religion
makes it a “constitutive or essential instance” of a “structure of exemplarity per
se” according to which the trace gets thought; for de Vries, the religious figures
that preponderate in Derrida’s later work are “more than simply strategic” and
function as what he calls a “generalized religion” on the analogy to a generalized
writing in the earlier work.8
Whatever their differences with regard to the problem of thinking religion
without religion in Derrida, these readings agree that deconstruction does not sim-
ply reproduce, as Gasché puts it, a “demystification in the style of Enlightenment”
(ID, 161). In fact, the difficulty for Derrida is to think religion today in the spirit of
Enlightenment without relying, however, solely on the demystifying aims of rational
critique. To understand how Derrida seeks to negotiate this difficulty will be the
aim of my essay and, in deference to certain themes identified with the eighteenth
century, will require that we examine Derrida’s aporetic notion of responsibility
in relation to the ethics of public discourse usually taken without qualification to
be a common good. For, as de Vries has also noted in recalling Kant, “the ques-
tion of religion cannot be addressed without incessant reference to the categories
and the realm of the public—or without a consideration of the idea and practice
of publicity, of censorship and tolerance, of secrecy, and of media and mediatiza-
tion” (PTR, 64, n. 40). As a result, if the place of the combat of religion is called
the eighteenth century, a deconstructive reading of the “age of critique” will also
question the idea of an ethical community and the notion of the social bond as
public responsibility that supports it.
For reasons we will examine in a moment, the task of thinking religion to-
day cannot limit itself to critique, but this does not mean that Derrida repudiates it.
On the contrary, in “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” he insists
on the need “to demystify, or if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse,”
to bring to light the interests, calculations, ruses, and ends of those who declare
“the imminence of the end,” for instance, “of man or the subject, of consciousness,
of history, of the West or of literature, . . . of progress itself”—and, we should add,
of religion and of logocentrism.9 Similarly, when Derrida affirms the necessity of

the spirit of Marxism today, he does so, in part, by stressing its critical resources in
transformed historical circumstances that require it itself to be transformed in order
to provide “a new thinking of the ideological”—to analyze, for example, “the new
articulation of techno-economic causalities and of religious ghosts” (SM, 58). With
regard to these demystifying exigencies, the eighteenth century bequeaths a legacy
that we cannot but inherit and carry forward: “We cannot and must not—this is
a law and a destiny—forgo the Aufklärung, in other words, what imposes itself as
the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique
and truth” (AT, 148). If the Enlightenment has no imminent end, then critique
must continue to be deployed to question every proclamation of truth by author-
ity and to bring potential dissimulations and ruses of mastery to light in a public
reckoning. In this project of a progressive critical accounting, philosophy thus
finds itself still bound to republican democracy as to the cause of publicness [res
publica] and to “the enlightened virtue of public space, emancipating it from all
external power,” from “religious dogmatism, orthodoxy or authority”—although
not from all faith, Derrida qualifies (FK, 8). An enlightened philosophy thus also
finds itself caught up with literature since, for Derrida, the possibility of literature
is politically inseparable from that of democracy and of the “unlimited right to
ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism” and “to say everything publicly, or to
keep it a secret, if only in the form of fiction.”10
Yet critique, however indispensable, is not sufficient for Derrida or coexten-
sive with deconstruction. The ambiguity of the “or” in his statement of the need to
“demystify or, if you will, deconstruct”—conjunctive and/or disjunctive?—signals
the complexity of the relation. For despite the importance of mobilizing diverse
analyses of mastery in response to “wars of religion,” critique does not sufficiently
think through the relation of faith or belief to science or reason. Hence Derrida takes
some distance from the Marxist position that holds the “critique of religion to be
the premise of all ideology-critique” and religion “the matrix of all ideology” not
only because Marxism’s own version of “messianic eschatology” would perforce
subject it to the ideology-critique it demands, but also because Derrida suspects the
principles of such critique might “still appeal to a heterogeneity between faith and
knowledge” or, in explicitly Kantian terms, “between practical reason and theo-
retical cognition” (FK, 40). In Kant, we should recall, critique is the self-critique
of reason in general, and its “primary use [ihr erster Nutzen]” is to perform what
Kant figures as a “policing” function: critique distinguishes among the faculties,
sets their proper boundaries, and determines their jurisdictions so as especially to
make room for faith by restraining theoretical or speculative reason from venturing
beyond the limit of experience, the condition of knowledge, and encroaching upon
the domain of moral-practical reason, which alone must postulate and think God,
freedom, and immortality (CPR, 26–27, 29). To reaffirm critique as the bequest of
the Enlightenment is, for Derrida, to carry it forward in a reading (since “one must
filter, sift, criticize” in every inheritance [SM, 16]) that questions its most essential
concepts and practices. “[I]n the name of an Enlightenment to come,” deconstruc-
tion would suspend “in an argued, deliberated, rational fashion” all “hypotheses,
conventions, and presuppositions” and would “criticiz[e] unconditionally all
conditionalities, including those that still found the critical idea, namely, those of
the krinein, of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision or judgment.”11 And
foremost among the suppositions of critique that Derrida suspends in his later work
is the possibility that constitutes its primary or “first” decision: the possibility of
rigorously separating faith and knowledge.
What might be surprising to some in the way Derrida proceeds in his
critique, or deconstruction, of this critical decision is his insistence on remaining
true to a kind of reason: “For deconstruction . . . would remain above all, in my
view, an unconditional rationalism that never renounces” (R, 142). Even when the
deconstructive target in the Grammatology was logocentrism as phonocentrism,
Derrida had remarked that an “enlarged and radicalized” notion of writing is still
governed by a “rationality,” although he wondered whether that word should be
“abandoned” since this rationality “no longer issues from a logos” (G, 10). Later,
in The Other Heading, Derrida similarly remarks that, “to remain faithful to the
ideal of the Enlightenment,” we should address the question of faith as well as
other thoughts in the “history of reason” that “necessarily exceed its order, without
becoming, simply because of this, irrational, and much less irrationalist.”12 Rather
than renunciation, it is a question of how to keep faith with reason: how to remain
faithful to reason; how not to separate faith and reason; how reasonably to sustain
faith. For Derrida, the exorbitant question of faith marks, finally, the limit of critique
in the way it thinks its future insofar as its historicity depends on the repetition of
an “enigmatic desire” that is not empirical or contingent but “imposes itself” and
constitutes a “law” and a “destiny.” Critique must be interminably reaffirmed,
read, taken up, and carried forward as our inheritance because we must desire the
truth unconditionally.
In thus characterizing the necessity of (a future) Enlightenment, Derrida
signals at least two complications to be elaborated: the claim to autonomy of
public reason touches on the law of a desire that suggests heteronomy, and the
“enigmatic” quality of this desire suggests a secret or mystery at the heart of critical
demystification. The question of faith, in other words, raises for Derrida the issue
of whether the origin and future of critical rationality is itself rational, and, if so,
in what sense. In reading a strain of philosophical idealism on this issue, Derrida
takes as exemplary Husserl’s insistence that the unity of reason requires its self-
origination—the desire, the seeking or wanting, to be rational both is and must
be rational—but reason is not to be differentiated into the potentially conflicting
modalities of the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic. The necessity of the unity of
reason functions as an imperative of reason that governs our knowledge of reason;
there ought to be, there is to be, no differentiation of “ought” and “is.” In response
to the question of why a “heroism of the responsible decision” in the face of crisis
in Husserl remains “a heroism of reason,” Derrida answers: “It is not because faith
would exceed reason. It is because theoretical reason is first of all, and finally, for
him as for Kant, a prescriptive or normative task, through and through, a practi-
cal reason, or, as others might say, a metaphysics of free will” (R, 131). Of course,
Kant’s critical apparatus requires precisely such differentiation, but Kant also insists
that “it is still only one and the same reason which, whether from a theoretical or
a practical perspective, judges according to a priori principles.”13 Hence the claim
of a differentiated but unified reason as a faculty of a priori judgment enables Kant
to counter the threat of heteronomy entailed in the possibility that what he calls
the interest of reason might originate in an empirical desire, feeling, or passion—a

possibility he associates with the British theory of “moral sense,” which, through
the contingent feelings of pleasure and pain associated with virtue and vice, reduces
everything “to desire for one’s own happiness” (CPrR, 35). Such a “pathological”
theory of the will entails heteronomy for Kant insofar as reason does not legislate
and obligate itself unconditionally but goes outside of itself and finds its end in
empirical objects that promise happiness according to the choice of each person.
As a consequence of this “pathology,” a will to morality as well as what we might
call a will to knowledge could have no necessity and could not constitute a law or
a vocation. Yet, if Kant affirms the rational autonomy of the will, he also risks a
potential conflict within the faculty of reason in general that he attempts to avoid
by introducing a hierarchy: “in the union of pure speculative with pure practical
reason in one cognition, the latter has primacy. . . . For, without this subordination
a conflict of reason itself would arise, since if they were merely juxtaposed (coordi-
nate), the first would of itself close its boundaries strictly and admit nothing from
the latter into its domain.” And it is precisely Kant’s aim that certain propositions
of morality that transcend knowledge and experience (God, freedom, immortality)
be, like a “foreign possession,” “carried over” into the domain of theoretical reason
[“als einen fremden auf sie übertragenen Besitz”] and united with concepts that
make knowledge possible. This transference or translation of faith to the realm of
knowledge must take place because, Kant claims, the interest of knowledge must
be determined in order to “complete” it, and interest can only be determined by
practical reason (hence its superiority) (CPrR, 101–102).
Since deconstruction never simply renounces an inheritance, Derrida char-
acteristically offers a double reading of this idealist recourse to a reason that requires
a faith in knowledge, a reason that precedes and orients itself as if by analogy to
the divine fiat that there be the light of knowledge. On the one hand, the moral-
practical origin of cognition introduces a certain unconditionality—an imperative
task or responsibility that cannot be strictly accounted for or calculated (it remains
“foreign” to knowledge) but cannot be refused as irrational—that Derrida reads
affirmatively as an opening to the event of the Enlightenment and a democracy-
to-come. Already in the “greatest tradition of rationalist idealism,” he notes, “a
rational and rigorous incalculability presented itself as such” in the unconditioned
domain of practical reason (R, 133). For Hobbes, as a point of contrast, reason
originates in the motions of the passions or appetites and consists in “nothing but
Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting)”; in Kant and the idealist tradition,
Derrida reminds us, rationality is not limited “to reason as calculation, as ratio,
as account, an account to be settled or an account to be given” (R, 133).14 Moral-
practical reason supposes an order of the incalculable that remains irreducible to
the generality of concepts and the subsumption of particulars under them that con-
stitute knowledge, or to the rules of evidence and norms of argument that govern
discourses of knowledge; nor is it simply identifiable with positive universal laws
and formally equivalent subjects under law. Rather, practical reason is the law of
law, the unconditional demand that there be law: in commanding one to act in
such a way that the maxim of the will could function “as a principle in a giving
of universal law,” it “gives (to the human being) a universal law which we call
the moral law” (CPrR, 28–29). Citing Kant on the sublime dignity of humanity
as an end in itself and thus as incalculable, Derrida elaborates the rational uncon-
ditionality he finds in Kant’s moral “kingdom of ends” as “at once universal and
exceptional,” requiring us (impossibly) to universalize singularity by responding to
each and every case as if it were unprecedented (as if it were precisely not a “case”
of some general principle) and could justly depart from existing rules, norms, and
laws to invent its own (R, 133).
Yet, if Derrida marks out a direction for thinking religion or, rather, faith
through this affirmative reading, on the other hand, he also acknowledges the need
to disentangle, if possible, the notion of unconditionality from what constrains it in
Kant and the idealist tradition more generally: from the teleology of a self-founding
and self-orienting reason that remains temporally or historically self-identical, and
thus also from sovereignty as the autotelic power of “ipseity” or self-sameness that
“gives itself its own law, its force of law” (R, 10–11). For reason, in this tradition,
always holds in advance some idea of what ought or is to be, which annuls the
singularity and incalculability of any event. As we noted with regard to the “ra-
tionality” of writing in Of Grammatology, Derrida in this context also wonders
whether a reading of practical reason as radically unconditional might offer the
chance to think a reason other than “the classical reason of what presents itself or
announces its presentation according to the eidos, the idea, the ideal, the regulative
Idea, or . . . the telos” (R, 135). This other reason, if that word is to be retained,
might be distinguished from an ideology and teleology of the unconditional by
emphasizing the paradoxical structure of the event of law-giving: it is a “‘perfor-
mative’ event that cannot belong to the set it founds, inaugurates, or justifies” (FK,
18). Consequently, an unconditional imperative might still possess what is called
rationality, but it is ultimately unjustifiable in terms of the knowledge it commands
and also, we shall see, in terms of ethics and the “ought” of duty. If law-giving is
“performative” insofar as it is an event of founding or invention, it also exceeds the
“performative” insofar as it is an unconditional and, strictly speaking, impossible
invention, since it cannot be granted any legitimacy or authority as an invention on
the basis of the norms, rules, expectations, and institutions that actually or ideally
precede, anticipate, and generally condition its occurrence. As Werner Hamacher has
remarked, the demand for the autonomy of a self-legislating will in Kant involves
the paradoxical “double structure of the law” as both command and rule: the law
that commands there be a rule is itself an “unregulated command and law without
law”; as “the giving of the law and not a given law,” the law lies in a “groundless
laying down—groundless because ground-giving and ground-laying.”15 In expos-
ing practical reason to a rigorous thought of the paradoxical event of law-giving,
Derrida hopes to displace the sovereign power of reason in the idealist tradition
to posit, legislate, and orient itself as the self-same—a power he also finds entailed
in the “calculable mastery” of the performative over the event it produces—and
to open up a historicity in which reason exceeds itself and something “arrives or
happens by reason and to reason” (R, 152, 135).
This critique or deconstruction of Enlightenment critique in relation to
a rational unconditionality leads Derrida, too, to stress a heterogeneity between
theoretical and practical reason. However, unlike Kantian critique, he does not
deny knowledge to make room for faith, and, unlike Marxist critique, he does not
deny faith in the name of knowledge; rather, both of these postulates of reason
are necessary, necessarily inseparable, and necessary but impossible to negotiate

harmoniously (R, 150). In fact, the hiatus between the unconditional and the
conditional marks the place from which Derrida wants to think the religious and,
especially, its relation to sociality:
The hiatus between these two equally rational postulations of reason, this
excess of a reason that of itself exceeds itself and so opens onto its future,
its to-come, its becoming, this ex-position of the incalculable event,
would also be the irreducible spacing of the very faith, credit, or belief
without which there would be no social bond, no address to the other, no
uprightness or honesty, no promise to be honored. . . . This hiatus opens
the rational space of a hypercritical faith, one without dogma and with-
out religion, irreducible to any and all religious and implicitly theocratic
institutions. It is what I’ve called elsewhere the awaiting without horizon
of a messianicity without messianism. It goes without saying that I do
not detect here even the slightest hint of irrationalism, obscurantism, or
extravagance. This faith is another way of keeping within reason [raison
garder], however mad it might appear. If the minimal semantic kernel
of reason we might retain from the various lexicons of reason, in every
language, is the ultimate possibility of, if not a consensus, at least an
address universally promised and unconditionally entrusted to the other,
then reason remains the element or very air of a faith without church and
without credulity, the raison d’être of the pledge, of credit, of testimony
beyond proof, the raison d’être of any belief in the other, that is, of their
belief and of our belief in them—and thus also of any perjury. (R, 153)
Just as he tries to think unconditionality with and beyond Kant, so Der-

rida employs the term “messianic,” which is historically marked as belonging to
the Abrahamic religions, to refer to a “general structure of experience” that, we
previously noted, he considers deconstruction and Marxism formally to share and
that he wants to distinguish from any determinate revelation: the messianic names
“the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice,
but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration”—a non-
teleological waiting (“without awaiting itself”) exposed to the “absolute surprise”
of a singular event (for the best or the worst) that can occur at any moment and
that “no anticipation sees . . . coming” (FK, 17–18). The messianic is the hope of
a “universalizable culture of singularities” (FK, 18) that is promised by a faith or
belief in the other as the possibility of the social. If one were to entertain the pos-
sibility that “all moral and ethical, legal and political systems have reached their
limits, at least as historical constructions,” Derrida states that what would be left is
“the barest foundation of the social bond”: “What remains—the minimum, but it
is ‘fundamental’—is faith.”16 The “‘fundamental’” character of this messianic faith,
which precedes and exceeds dogma and religion, lies in its constituting a “general
structure of experience”—a kind of “transcendental condition of all discourse,
of all experience even, of every mark or trace,” as Derrida suggests with regard
to the “exemplary” structure of apocalyptic discourse in which “the destination
remain[s] to come” (AT, 156–57). This faith is unconditional—our destiny is to
desire repeatedly a destination that remains to come—because it gets inscribed in
every utterance, not only in the type of performative that declares “let there be
knowledge” or “let there be moral law.” The messianic event announces itself “in
the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every
address to the other” (FK, 18). Addressed and entrusted to the other, every act of
language entails “an experience of faith, of believing, of credit that is irreducible
to knowledge and of a trust that ‘founds’ all relation to the other in testimony”—a
belief in the truth of the testimony of the other “beyond proof” or demonstration
(FK, 18). Rational critique must suppose this trustworthiness of testimony and
this truthfulness of bearing witness, even when suspecting lie or perjury, as the
“elementary condition” of the religious that Derrida distinguishes from religion
itself (FK, 44–45). And to give point to this analysis that renders critical philoso-
phy and religion conditional upon a prior act of unconditional faith, Derrida asks
us to believe that we already believe in the everyday occurrence of miracles. The
promise entailed in every act of speech that one speaks truthfully and in good faith
amounts to this: “‘Believe what I say as one believes in a miracle.’ Even the slight-
est testimony concerning the most plausible, ordinary, or everyday thing cannot
do otherwise: it must still appeal to faith as would a miracle. . . . [and] leaves no
room for disenchantment” (FK, 63–64).
In emphasizing that faith conditions this communicative rationality—the
consensus or address universally promised to the other—Derrida not only allusively
counters Max Weber’s well-known claim that scientific rationality is fated to de-
mystify the modern world, but he also radicalizes the notion of critical thinking as
publicity that Hannah Arendt had elaborated in her reading of Kant’s discussion
of sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment.17 For Arendt, Kant’s maxims of
sensus communis—to think for oneself; to think from the standpoint of everyone
else; to think consistently—mean that philosophical truth in the Enlightenment must
have “general communicability” as its condition of possibility; whereas scientific
truth depends on the reproducibility of experiments and has a “general validity”
for Kant, critical philosophy and indeed “the very faculty of thinking depends
on its public use” and needs “others to be possible at all” (LK, 40–41). Critical
rationality as the “giv[ing] of an account” by which everyone could publicly be
“held responsible and answerable” requires this communicability and promise of
universal community (LK, 41). Derrida, on the other hand, extends the faith or
trust in others that underwrites critique to include scientific truth insofar as science,
whether purely theoretical or techno-science, is also premised on a “profound and
essential ‘performativity’ of knowledge.” Scientific knowledge cannot deny faith
without denying its own possibility since “an element of the fiduciary remains es-
sential to all shareable knowledge, which is to say, all knowledge as such”: “there is
no science without public space and without scientific community,” Derrida states,
and consequently a “sworn faith” beyond proof or demonstration also organizes
the community of scientists who must believe in “truthfulness” as they would in
a miracle (AA, 63).
Yet, if Derrida remains so faithful to the Enlightenment demand for public
reason and for an essentially communicable or shareable knowledge that he goes
beyond the limits that constrain publicity in Kantian critique, his affirmation of
unconditional faith leads him, at the same time, to take issue with this very demand
for publicity, especially insofar as it supports an ethics that seeks to hold everyone
formally “responsible and answerable,” as Arendt puts it in recalling that the Greek
phrase “Logon didonai, ‘to give an account,’” is “political in origin: to render
accounts is what Athenian citizens asked of their politicians, not only in money
matters but in matters of politics” (LK, 41). For publicity, Arendt argues, is not a
condition of knowledge alone: “publicness is already the criterion of rightness in
[Kant’s] moral philosophy” (LK, 49). The maxim of one’s action needs to be made
public and thereby potentially universalized in order for it to become moral. The
hidden, the secretive, or the mysterious shelters immorality: “To be evil, therefore,
is characterized by withdrawal from the public realm. Morality [in Kant] means
being fit to be seen, and this not only by men, but, in the last instance, by God, the
omniscient knower of the heart” (LK, 49–50). In employing reason publicly and
in giving accounts, one not only seeks to bring truth to light but allows oneself to
be seen and to be held to account by others and, in the last instance, by the utterly
other. For Derrida this demand for publicity, which has a regulative function, is
necessary and must be (cannot but be) reaffirmed; however, an unconditional faith
in always singular others, who are irreducible to instances of law in its formality
and generality, must make room for precisely the secretive as the figure for the
unethical or, perhaps, the an-ethical demand for justice.
A particularly striking example of the ethics of publicity can be found
in “Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” (1709),
a text by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, that Derrida does not cite
but that was influential on the eighteenth-century discourse of common sense on
which Kant will later draw. Shaftesbury’s work belongs to the tradition of “moral
sense” philosophy criticized by Kant for effectively vacating morality by locating
its (original) motive in sensibility. Shaftesbury’s understanding of moral self-
regulation, for instance, is premised on a natural economy of affections in which
individual happiness is coordinated with the “strictest society and rule of common
good,” and “the most unnatural of all affections are those which separate from
this community”; the more these natural social affections remain dominant, “the
more powerful and absolute I must be in self-enjoyment and the possession of my
good.”18 In Derrida’s paraphrase of Kant’s objection, morality cannot character-
ize actions performed out of a “sense” of duty that is “natural, programmed by
nature”; moral law, rather, commands our duty as rational beings and should thus
“enjoin the sacrifice of everything that would only obey this sensible inclination”
(P, 14). If we needed a warrant for introducing this text here, we would point to
the fact that Derrida does not endorse Kant’s rejection of a “sensuous” incentive
to morality, a rejection that relies on such critical distinctions as the sensible and
the intelligible, the passive and the active, which Derrida questions in his effort
to displace a logic of sacrifice and to think an affect or “passion that would be
non-‘pathological’ in Kant’s sense”—a rejection, furthermore, that Derrida won-
ders whether Kant himself can rigorously make since the command that sacrifices
incentives of sensibility must, paradoxically, also inscribe in sensibility the feeling
of “respect” for the law as its sole moral incentive (P, 14).19
However, what especially motivates the introduction of Shaftesbury’s text
here is the remarkable way that it both thematizes and performs this performative
notion of sociality as necessary and as necessarily regulative. In Shaftesbury, dia-
logue in particular is the mode or genre of critical thinking—“a freedom of raillery,
a liberty in decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unravel-
ling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer” (C, 33)—by means
of which religious and political authority can be questioned but without leading
to the radical uncertainty associated with “endless skepticism” (C, 33, 39). The
via negativa of critique is, instead, the “experiment” by which Shaftesbury hopes
to recover an “assurance of things” (C, 39). In relying on critique as a dialogical
practice, he seeks to test received opinions in religion and politics not only by try-
ing their reasons, but by taking the performance of dialogue itself necessarily to
presuppose and to manifest a common sense—a sentiment of sociality and of public
interest—regardless of the specific intentions or positions stated by an interlocutor.
Common sense is cunning, as Shaftesbury’s critical strategy in combating one “able
and witty philosopher” exemplifies (C, 42). Hobbes is taken to task for having
become so possessed by his terror of civil war and religious enthusiasm that he
acted in a terrifying “spirit of massacre” and attempted to destroy the grounds of
moral community and put an end to republican liberty (C, 42). In the guise of a
“modern projector,” Hobbes would “new-frame the human heart . . . and reduce
all its motions, balances and weights to that one principle and foundation of a
cool and deliberate selfishness” (C, 54). Since Shaftesbury believes the “truth . . .
may bear all lights” (C, 30), he challenges this principle precisely by questioning
Hobbes, by addressing him as an interlocutor and by staging a dialogue:
What should we say to these anti-zealots who, in the zeal of such a cool
philosophy, should assure us faithfully “that we were the most mistaken
men in the world to imagine that there was any such thing as natural
faith or justice? For that it was only force and power which constituted
right. That there was no such thing in reality as virtue, no principle of or-
der in things above or below, no secret charm or force of nature by which
everyone was made to operate willingly or unwillingly towards the public
good, and punished and tormented if he did otherwise.” . . . “Sir! The
philosophy you have condescended to reveal to us is most extraordinary.
. . . But, pray, whence is this zeal in our behalf? What are we to you? Are
you our father? [emphasis added] Or, if you were, why this concern for
us? Is there then such a thing as natural affection? If not, why all these
pains, why all this danger on our account? Why not keep this secret to
yourself? . . . It is directly against your interest to undeceive us. . . . Leave
us to ourselves. . . . It is not fit we should know that by nature we are
all wolves. Is it possible that one who has really discovered himself such
should take pains to communicate such a discovery?” (C, 43–44)
By conjuring up Hobbes as a figure whom he can address and make speak

in a dialogue, Shaftesbury does not criticize Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology
and theory of sovereignty simply by offering an alternative account, although he
claims to present a less reductive view of the heart’s motions. As if he wished to avoid
acting in the “spirit of massacre” by radically opposing and repudiating Hobbes’s
principles, Shaftesbury instead refers to the performativity of language in order
to insinuate that Hobbes is in conflict with himself and must have already been
moved, like Shaftesbury and all others, by an affection for community. In effect,
Shaftesbury argues that the very act of speaking involves Hobbes in a performa-
tive contradiction, since the desire itself to give a truthful account of the ruses of
mastery constituting social relations formally betrays the general knowledge of a
wolfish human nature presented in the account. That Hobbes finds himself moved
to speak and to make public this “secret” means, for Shaftesbury, that he takes
responsibility for others and responds to the other in himself as if commanded

by a force or charm that makes him “operate willingly or unwilling towards the
public good.” Before Hobbes can decide whether and under what conditions to
enter into covenants, to exchange an insecure freedom for the life of a subject, and
to replace a fear of violent death at the hands of any and all others by a fear of
the sovereign force of law in civil society, he has been addressed by and answered
the call of a public that includes Shaftesbury, with whom, consequently, he must
already agree even in the act of disagreeing. For “It is the height of sociableness to
be thus friendly and communicative” (C, 43).
The cunning of a common sense that speaks for (an) us in our acts of speech
and that thus seems unlimited or universal—a kind of divine cunning we would
need to relate to Shaftesbury’s belief in a providential order that determines what
is naturally “fitting” and that binds us through acts of language—also, however,
sets limits and enforces exclusions. As Derrida notes, for instance, with regard to a
theory of “communicative action,” the advocacy of “good sense, common sense, or
the democratic ethic” tends, “by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to
discredit anything that complicates this model” and “imposes a model of language
that is supposedly favorable to this communication” (OH, 55).20 Although we
might follow up this suggestion by examining what constitutes “polite” or “de-
cent” language (and persons) in Shaftesbury, Derrida’s reservations concerning an
originary faith inhabiting every act of language have less to do with the imposition
of a communicative model than with the normativizing effect of speaking at all: it
assimilates in advance the singular speaking other to an existing regulative (ethical)
society of formally equal and substitutable persons. In speaking, one cannot but be
a “semblable,” as Rousseau would put it, and belong with others. As Shaftesbury
remarks of those who fiercely prosecute all religion as superstition: “whatever
savages they may appear in their philosophy, they are in their common capacity as
civil persons as one could wish. Their free communicating of their principles may
witness for them” (C, 43). If it were possible not to speak, Hobbes might have
remained true to himself and to his analysis of infidelity by declining to publish his
thought. The medium of print may be essential to the eighteenth-century imaginary
of republican community, and, as we have seen, Derrida also repeats the call for
an “enlightened notion of public space” (FK, 8), yet media also operate as means
of normativization. To say everything publicly, to profess, to confess, to respond,
to enter into dialogue is not only a right but a command. No one must have or
keep secrets from the public.
Hence Derrida stresses the necessity of both publicity and the secret that
responds to an unconditional demand to do justice to singularity. In order to think
singularity as absolute—etymologically, “that which is cut off from any bond, de-
tached, and which cannot itself bind”—he must elaborate a notion of the secret not
as the concealed that can still be revealed or the unspoken that can still be publicly
shared, but as the condition of communicability that remains “non-thematizable,
non-objectifiable, non-sharable” and wholly resistant “to the daylight of phenom-
enality.”21 The absolute secret in this sense names a radical “nonbelonging” that
precedes and exceeds the distinction between private and public, individual and
social, and that also suggests, however, the inaugural power of sovereignty that
shadows Derrida’s resort to unconditionality. For he repeatedly acknowledges that
the ability or power to respond unconditionally to “absolute singularity,” to “in-

calculable and exceptional singularity,” by departing from given norms, rules, and
concepts in the face of the unprecedented and in the hope of some other invention is
allied, albeit conflictively, with modern (and still theological) forms of sovereignty
theorized in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Schmitt as the “right to decide on the
exception and the right to suspend rights and law” (R, 148, 141). As confirmed
by Hobbes’s account of the sovereign as the one who remains exempt from the
general renunciation of the freedom to use force that all possess as a natural right
(“he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any other man a
Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to which every man had
not Right by Nature” [L, 190–91]), the sovereign decides the exception because
the sovereign is the exception: this one giveth and taketh away the force of law. In
other words, a question that puts Derrida here to the question (R, 14) is whether
he can think a responsibility that would not be limited solely to the inquisitorial
demand to give an account, but that would also not endorse the sovereignty of the
wolf or werewolf whose force constitutes right, as Shaftesbury writes of Hobbes
and as Derrida also remarks of the general concept of sovereignty in his reading of
the La Fontaine fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” which introduces “The Reason of
the Strongest” in Rogues. For both sovereignty and unconditionality figure a non-
belonging or nonsharing that paradoxically founds community. Just as “sovereignty
withdraws from language” as a universalizing medium that subjects one to “the
law of giving reason(s)” and thereby shares and divides authority (R, 101)—the
wolf’s acts of speech before devouring the lamb in the fable obviously retreat from
communicating anything communal in practice—so too does singularity remain
an absolute secret, even when it is spoken and made public, since “it is the sharing
of what is not shared; we know in common that we have nothing in common”
(TS, 58). Hence Derrida must try to distinguish, “even when this appears impos-
sible,” between “the postulation of unconditionality” and the “auto-positioning
of sovereignty” (which includes the “mastery of the lord or seigneur, of the father
or husband”) as exigencies of reason associated with secrecy (R, 142). And this
distinction would then make possible the deconstruction of sovereignty in the name
of unconditionality.
Most interestingly for our purposes, Derrida attempts to make room
for a nonpublicizable secret in public space through a reading of Kierkegaard on
the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in which two equally necessary modalities of
responsibility come into conflict as each tries to keep faith. (With regard to this
foundational narrative of sacrifice, Shaftesbury’s questions to Hobbes may take
on a very different tonality if one imagines them asked by Isaac or by any of the
monotheistic children descended from Abraham’s faith: “Are you our father? What
are we to you?” No wonder, then, that Derrida also figures nonbelonging by the
phrase, “I am not one of the family [je ne suis pas de la famille]” [TS, 27]). Tracing
Kierkegaard back to the convert St. Paul and the “still Jewish experience of a secret,
hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious God,” Derrida notes that Abraham must
keep secret what God has ordered him to do both because he must remain faithful
to this command and also because it is unaccountable to him—“he is unaware of its
ultimate rhyme or reason”—and hence incommunicable.22 “[A]t the moment he has
to be obeyed,” Derrida comments, “God doesn’t give reasons . . . or share anything
with us”; otherwise, “we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God
as wholly other [tout autre]”: “we would share a type of homogeneity” (GD, 57).
In terms of Kierkegaard’s ethical order, which consists of the norms that dutifully
bind us to our family, community, or nation, Abraham’s secret about child murder
is an abhorrent transgression, but this unbreakable silence also sustains Abraham’s
singularity in his unconditional responsibility to an utterly other. If he were to speak,
his singularity would be dispatched to a general public, thus depriving or relieving
him of his liberty and responsibility. For responsibility “consists in always being
alone, entrenched in one’s own singularity at the moment of decision” (GD, 60)
that can only take place when actions are not determined by knowledge.
The double imperatives of responsibility thus define a “scandal and a
paradox” (GD, 60) for Derrida. On the one hand, “ethical exigency is regulated by
generality; and it therefore defines a responsibility that consists of speaking, that is,
of involving oneself sufficiently in the generality to justify oneself, to give an account
of one’s decision and to answer for one’s actions” before others (GD, 60–61). On
the other hand, Abraham’s secrecy contradicts the common-sense and philosophical
belief that “responsibility is tied to the public”; his is a responsibility that consists in
not responding to others (GD, 60). Paradoxically and indeed terrifyingly, Abraham
“answer[s] for nothing and to no one” in the community and must, in fact, resist
the “moral temptation” of public self-accounting that would dissolve his singularity
and make him irresponsible before what he calls God (GD, 60–61). Always to act
ethically, in this respect, is to be absolutely irresponsible. Hence, for Derrida, the
conflicting imperatives of responsibility are aporetic: “Absolute responsibility . . .
needs to be exceptional and extraordinary . . . as if [it] could not be derived from
the concept of responsibility and . . . must therefore be irresponsible in order to be
absolutely responsible” (GD, 61). We must be irresponsible to be responsible, or,
in Kantian terms, it is our duty not to act out of duty.23
To begin to follow out a couple of the effects of this deconstruction of
“ethics as irresponsibilization” (GD 61), let me recite what Derrida imagines
God might have said to Abraham in commanding his secrecy: “Above all, no
journalists!” The absolute responsibility of faith in its singularity allows for no
mediator or public media—not even Christ who, like an Evangelist bringing the
Good News, “will have been the first journalist,” Derrida suggests (AA, 57). In
so doing, he characterizes the Enlightenment itself as a Christian phenomenon
in a number of ways. First of all, in contrast to Judaism and Islam, Christianity
promotes a notion of universal humanity and of a world shared by all peoples as
children, specifically sons, of God, and this notion of universal “fraternity” has
been “elaborated into the form in which it today dominates both philosophy and
international law” (AA, 74). In a somewhat polemical reading of Voltaire, for
instance, Derrida argues that tolerance as an enlightened virtue in the service of
one world of united nations remains a principle internal to Christianity. Those
who would “sloganize Voltaire and rally behind his flag for critical modernity,”
he objects, fail to recognize that this committed deist and anticleric seems to think,
“a little in the manner of Kant,” that “Christianity is the sole ‘moral’ religion”
precisely for having obligated itself to the principle of tolerance (FK, 22).24 On the
one hand, as Derrida acknowledges, Voltaire in the Philosophical Dictionary calls
tolerance “l’apanage de l’humanité [the prerogative of humanity].”25 In that text as
well as in the Treatise on Tolerance, we should recall, Voltaire claims that all reli-
gions and cults before Christianity practiced tolerance. Ancient peoples considered
different religions to be “comme des noeuds qui les unissaient tous ensemble” in
“une association du genre humain” [“like knots that united them all” in an “as-
sociation of human kind”]; “une espèce de droit d’hospitalité [a kind of right of
hospitality]” existed among peoples and their gods such that a stranger arriving in
a city would begin by worshiping the local deities; even the gods of an enemy were
worthy of veneration.26 Like Hume, Voltaire approvingly cites Roman tolerance
of the deities presiding over their conquered territories, and, unlike Hume, who
identifies intolerance with monotheism generally, he offers an ambivalent assess-
ment of Judaism, the toleration of which by the scornful Romans being for him
the greatest example that they regarded this principle “la loi plus sacrée du droit
des gens [the most sacred law of the right of peoples]”: “On ne trouve dans toute
l’histoire de ce peuple aucun trait de générosité, de magnanimité, de bienfaisance;
mais il s’échappe toujours dans le nuage de cette barbarie si longue et si affreuse,
des rayons d’une tolérance universelle [One does not find in the entire history of
(the Jewish) people any mark of generosity, magnanimity, benevolence; but from the
cloud of this long and frightful barbarism some rays of universal tolerance always
escape]” (TT 163, 202–203).27 Although certain Jewish sects differed from others
more than Protestants differ from Catholics, he pointedly remarks, these sects still
remained “dans la communion de leurs frères” (TT, 215–16). Nor did schisms result
from conflicts among the apostles themselves, some of whom continued to follow
Jewish religious practices—as did Christ himself, Voltaire stresses. In a strategy
that seems to counter a critical-historical appeal to original Christianity, Voltaire
insists that the early Christians constituted one Jewish sect among others and that
only subsequently with the influence of Platonism did they become independent,
although also divided among themselves. Hence, he suggests an affirmative response
to his question: “Mais quoi! faudra-t-il que nous judaïsions tous parce que Jésus a
judaïsé toute sa vie? [Must we all become Jews because Jesus was a practicing Jew
his entire life?]”(DP, 566). And once it succeeds in separating itself from Judaism
and then becomes the imperial religion with Constantine, Christianity breaks with
the tradition of Greek, Roman, and Jewish tolerance: “c’est nous chrétiens, c’est
nous qui avons été persécuteurs, bourreaux, assassins! Et de qui? de nos frères [it
is we Christians, we who have been persecutors, executioners, murderers! And of
whom? Our brothers]” (TT, 182–83).
Yet if Voltaire repeatedly attacks Christianity as historically a murderous
religion, he does so, on the other hand, by speaking in the voice of a Christian
and by presenting a truer conception of Christian morality, especially with regard
to the practice of tolerance as characteristic of Christian fraternity. For instance,
Voltaire remarks that “notre sainte religion . . . sans doute est la seule bonne [our
holy religion . . . is without doubt the sole good (one)]” (DP, 483), claims that
fanaticism is inspired by “l’abus de la religion chrétienne mal entendue [the abuse
and misunderstanding of the Christian religion]” (TT, 147), and praises the Jan-
senists for helping to extirpate from the spirit of the French nation “la plupart des
fausses idées qui déshonoraient la religion chrétienne [the majority of false ideas that
have dishonored the Christian religion]” (TT, 243). For Voltaire, as Derrida notes,
Christianity remains a privileged example: “De toutes les religions, la chrétienne est
sans doute celle qui doit inspirer le plus de tolérance, quoique jusqu’ici les chrétiens
aient été les plus intolérants de tous les hommes [Of all the religions, Christianity
is without doubt the one that ought to inspire the most tolerance, although until
now Christians have been the most intolerant of men]” (DP, 558). Thus Derrida
remarks that the word “tolerance” “conceals a story: it tells above all an intra-
Christian history and experience,” a story Voltaire narrates as a “co-religionist”
who reminds his fellow Christians of the superlative tolerance of their faith (FK, 22,
n.13).28 Although Voltaire presents tolerance as the dominant practice of religions
before Christianity, we should recall that the Treatise on Tolerance responds to
the plight of the Huguenots under French Catholicism and intervenes specifically
in the Calas affair—he urges the French government to tolerate the Huguenots in
a kind of “indulgence paternelle envers nos frères errants qui prient Dieu en mau-
vais français [paternal indulgence toward our erring brothers who pray to God in
bad French]” (TT, 146)—and that tolerance becomes historically thematized as a
necessary principle to observe only in its breach by Christians, who persecute other
sects and faiths while proclaiming a universal fraternity. Reading with Derrida,
we can then interpret Voltaire’s dramatization of the horror of Christians killing
Christians as a lesson, rather, about the nonarbitrary linkage of an appeal to hu-
manity as fraternity and wars of religion. In his analysis of Carl Schmitt’s political
philosophy in the Politics of Friendship, for instance, Derrida not only marks the
exclusion of sisters and women generally from the political, but shows that war
is entailed, not contradicted, by the notion of fraternity: the enemy is my brother
or myself (“c’est nous”), “at one and the same time the closest, the most familiar,
the most familial, the most proper”; war is essentially the intrafamilial violence of
fratricide or suicide—we kill ourselves.29 Hence, for Derrida, although to practice
intolerance is even worse, to preach tolerance as a secular virtue of Enlightenment
that could resolve conflicts among the Abrahamic religions, to advance it simply
as a dehistoricizable ideal, is to remain within a Christian hegemony. Tolerance
sovereignly and inhospitably sets conditions on the other and thus risks little or
nothing and can paradoxically further the interests of the intolerant.
And one condition it sets is to enter into mediation in public space. The
instituting of a public space capable of providing a potentially worldwide medium
of communication—as television now seems to do and print publication understood
itself to do in the eighteenth century —is itself a historically marked phenomenon
that cannot be severed from Christian universality (which promotes the virtues of
being “friendly and communicative,” to recall Shaftesbury). Whenever one seeks
to put an end to the religious violence that one rightly calls “fratricide,” Derrida
observes, one proposes that a rabbi, a priest, and an imam participate in a “dialogue
between the religions” in the name of “ecumenism, of religious cosmopolitanism,”
and that this dialogue be broadcast in the ecumenical medium of television (AA,
89). Yet the notions of universality and mediatization conditioning this “fraternal”
dialogue are marked as precisely Christian. The mediatic presentation of the differ-
ences between religions “seeks to capture and first of all produce . . . the unifying
horizon of [the] ‘paternal-fraternal’ sameness” of all religions as postulated by
Christianity (AA, 89). From the moment that representatives of different religions
enter into the public space of televisual media to discuss their differences and simi-
larities in an appeal to tolerance, they have become Christianized. Derrida puts it
formulaically: “media function as the mediatization between religions, in the name

of religion, but above all in the name of what in Christianity is called religion”;
Christianity is the “religion of the media or the media of religion” (AA, 89). Hence
to employ a virtual public space of dialogue to mediate warring religions is by no
means a politically neutral practice.
Finally, the irreducibility of belief forms part of the technology of media.
Derrida tends to concentrate on televisual media and their immediate or “live”
quality for this argument, but print technology was also exploited by epistolary
fiction and other novelistic forms in the eighteenth century to produce the effect of
immediacy, of a making present, so that reading could be experienced as a kind of
seeing. We have already encountered this making present in the way that Shaftesbury
frames “Sensus Communis” as a letter that continues a conversation with the reader
as addressee (“What should we say to these anti-zealots?”) and then dramatically
addresses and conjures up Hobbes as an interlocutor in a dialogue that transpires at
that very moment (“Sir!”). Employing what will become a characteristic technique
of epistolary fiction, Shaftesbury makes as if a past event happens in the reader’s
present and performs the kind of incarnation that contemporary readers of Samuel
Richardson’s novels, for instance, found virtually miraculous: when Pamela “pours
out all her Soul” in her letters “without Disguise,” “one may judge of, nay, almost
see, the inmost Recesses of her Mind.”30 For Derrida, such moments of presentation
or phenomenalization traverse a contradiction in “appealing to faith at the very
moment of ‘letting know’”: “There is no need any more to believe; one can see,”
“you are there before ‘the thing itself’” (AA, 63). Even though “seeing is always
organized by a technical (mediatic and mediatizing) structure that supposes the
appeal to faith,” the advance of televisual media over print in this respect consists
in “the structural credulity” that, as “with the Evangelical dimension, one can
almost put one’s finger on the wound”: “Belief is both suspended in the name of
intuition and knowledge, and (at the same time, naturally) reinforced” (AA, 64).
Believe me, you do not need to believe; you see it here and now yourself.
A critique or deconstruction of Enlightenment critique, then, marks the
historical, ideological, and hegemonic traces of religion in what the Enlightenment
opposes to religion— universality, humanism, tolerance, mediation, to mention
only these few. And it does so in keeping faith with an unconditionality that ex-
ceeds the limited norms and general rules of the ethical. Yet despite his reading of
ethics as irresponsible to the unconditional demand for justice or democracy, Der-
rida continues to insist on the necessity of law, right, and norms in international
politics. Commenting, for instance, on the “cruelty, the disregard for human life,
the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist
modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism” in what he calls the strategy
of the “bin Laden effect” on and after 9/11, he declares as if decisively: “such
actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future.
If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world
juridico-political scene, of the ‘world’ itself, then, there is, it seems to me, nothing
good to be hoped for from that quarter” (AI, 113). Derrida cannot but keep faith
with the project of Enlightenment since its sense of a “perfectibility” (alluding to
Rousseau and Kant) in the name of the political still “lets resonate within it an
invincible promise” (AI, 114).
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1976), 161–62; De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 146. Hereafter abbrevi-
ated as G.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965), 9, note a: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism [Zeitalter der Kritik], and
to criticism everything must submit”; Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974),
13, note. Herafter abbreviated as CPR.
3. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writ-
ings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 59.
4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 58.
Hereafter abbreviated as SM.
5. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason
Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1998), 40. Hereafter abbreviated as FK.
6. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1997), 159.
7. Rodolphe Gasché, The Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1994), 161–62, 170. Hereafter abbreviated as ID.
8. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1999), 90, 94, 434. Hereafter abbreviated as PTR.
9. Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” trans. Peter Fenves, in
Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 148–49. Hereafter abbreviated
as AT.
10. Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’” trans. David Wood, in On the Name (Stan-
ford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 28, and “The University Without Condition,” in Without Alibi, ed.
and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 205. In the latter essay, Derrida links
the university to literature, but the publicity required and advocated by philosophy and literature con-
nect them both to the university as a privileged institutional space of a democratic polity. In “Derrida
and the Singularity of Literature” (Cardozo Law Review 27 [2005]: 869–75), Jonathan Culler stresses
that the democratic politics of literature for Derrida is surprisingly caught up with the status of fiction
and with “a fictionalized literary subject rather than . . . [a] calculable, responsible citizen-subject”
(874), although the notion of responsibility of a subject before the law belongs to ethics and thus is
also irresponsible, as we shall see.
11. Jacques Derrida, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment To Come (Exception, Calculation, Sov-
ereignty),” Part II of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 142. Hereafter abbreviated as R.
12. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), 78–79.
13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997), 101; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1956). Hereafter ab-
breviated as CPrR.
14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 111. Hereafter abbrevi-
ated as L.
15. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans.
Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 90, 92.
16. Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and
Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 64. Hereafter abbreviated as AA.
17. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1992); see 68–72 for her reading of sensus communis. Hereafter abbreviated as LK. The maxims of
sensus communis appear in paragraph 40 (“Taste as a kind of sensus communis”) of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment.
18. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Miscellany 4,” in Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 432, 424. Hereafter abbreviated
as C.
19. See the Critique of Practical Reason, Book 1, chapter 3, “On the incentives of pure practical
reason,” for Kant’s discussion of respect as both an effect and an incentive of moral law, and for his
insistence that, in morality, “we stand under a discipline of reason” and must always posit the possibility
of a desire to deviate that “costs the subject some sacrifice and therefore requires self-constraint” (71).
For a compelling analysis of Derrida’s effort to displace sacrifice while recognizing it to be unavoidable,
see Tyler Roberts, “Sacrifice and Secularization: Derrida, de Vries, and the Future of Mourning,” in
Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge,
2005), 263–82.
20. Although I obviously run a risk in suggesting a similarity between Shaftesbury’s communicative
notion of sociality and the “transcendental pragmatics” Derrida criticizes here, Laurent Jaffro in Éthique
de la communication et art d’écrire: Shaftesbury et les Lumières anglaises (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998) explicitly situates Shaftesbury’s ethics of discussion in relation to the work of Karl-Otto
Appel and Jürgen Habermas, and does so by also citing Shaftesbury’s “demonstration by ‘performative
contradiction’” in countering Hobbes (11–13).
21. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David
Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2001), 57. Hereafter abbreviated as
TS.
22. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995),
58, 59. Hereafter abbreviated as GD.
23. Derrida does more than elaborate the aporetic relation of the ethical responsibility of publicity
and the absolute responsibility of the secret: he suggests that there is a kind of hyper-ethical modality
of language which communicates incommunicability, which expresses responsibility “in a language
that is foreign to what the community can already hear or understand only too well.” Following
Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham’s last words to Isaac, “God himself will provide for the holocaust,
my son,” Derrida comments that Abraham speaks without lying, speaks without saying anything true
or false, and thus articulates a “strange responsibility that consists neither of responding nor of not
responding” (GD, 74). Such acts of language invoke a notion of fiction that Derrida connects in this
context both to Kierkegaard’s concept of irony and to the enigmatical and repetitive “I would prefer
not to” of Melville’s Bartleby.
24. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant distinguishes between a “religion of
rogation (of mere cult) and moral religion, i.e., the religion of good-life conduct” that requires the
“moral labor” of self-improvement from every human being. For Kant, “the Christian [religion] alone
is of this type” of moral religion (in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. George Di Giovanni
[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996], 95). Also see Derrida’s further remarks on Voltaire and
tolerance in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Giovanna Borrodari’s Philosophy in a
Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2003), 124–27, hereafter abbreviated as AI, and A Taste for the Secret, 62–63. For conflicting
opinions regarding Voltaire’s theism, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, see René Pomeau,
La Religion de Voltaire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1969), especially 7–16, 463–68; however, for Pomeau
and most Voltaire scholars: “Voltaire fut déiste ardemment, agressivement. Pendant quelque soixante
années, il a cherché des justifications historiques et philosophiqes. . . . Il n’a cessé, lui, de combattre
pour et contre, pour la religion dite naturelle, et contre la chrétienne” (463).
25. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Les oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 1968–2006), vols. 35 and 36. The citation is from the article “Tolérance” in vol. 36, 552.
Hereafter abbreviated as DP.
26. Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, ed. John Renwick, in Les oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol.
56c, 159. Hereafter abbreviated as TT.
27. Compare Hume: “The intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of
God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of the polytheists. The implacable narrow spirit of the
Jews is well known. Mahometanism set out with still more bloody principles. . . . And if, among Chris-
tians, the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded
from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and
bigots” (David Hume, The Natural History of Religion [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993], 162).
28. In conjunction with the claim that Christianity is the most tolerant religion and thus, in effect,
the religion most exemplary of “humanity,” Derrida reads Voltaire as “proto-Catholic” in his “declared
preference, sometimes nostalgic, for primitive Christianity” (FK 22, n.13). This reading of Voltaire’s
recourse to original Christianity as more “authentic” seems to run counter to Voltaire’s argument that
Christians were originally indistinguishable from Jews, who, like the Greeks and Romans, were tolerant
of other sects.
29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 163.
Derrida here reads the “figure of the brother” as Schmitt’s solution to the logical dilemma that the
enemy must be both an effect of the self calling itself into question and the other of the self.
30. From a letter attributed to Reverend William Webster and included in the prefatory material to
the second edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), 7.
Terdiman / Derrida’s “University Without Condition” 425
Determining the Undetermined:

Derrida’s “University Without
Condition”
Richard Terdiman
In “The University Without Condition,” Derrida imagines a university-

to-come.1 His projection seems breathtaking. Without condition! Exempt from
dictations and servitudes (224), immune from the exactions of authority and the
contaminations of power (220). Self-standing, self-defined, self-governing, self-
responsible (236). Sovereign (213; cf. 206, 208). It is as if the university Derrida
conceives might at last complete the leap beyond its origin in a medieval meta-
physics of the theological to become free, self-determining and self-determined:
thought thinking.
But such thinking has been thought before. Consequently, Derrida’s essay
on the university-to-come cannot not think about Enlightenment conceptions of
the thought-world through whose polemical and conceptual projection eighteenth-
century philosophes imagined overturning the onerous conditions for thinking that
burdened their experience. Derrida’s conception of the university’s absolute radi-
cality, of the radical absoluteness of its constitution, would then turn out to have
its own unexpected roots. Its thinking of the unconditioned and the undetermined
would be ghosted—conditioned—by its own determinations.2
In this essay I consider the filiation between the à-venir of Derrida’s uni-
versity-to-come (229–31), and the Enlightenment determinations it internalizes
both in the form of its address and in the substance of its affirmations. I hazard
the paradox that in this essay that imagines a place for thought absolutely beyond
determinations, Derrida comes as close as anywhere else in his work to registering
Richard Terdiman is Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University

of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and
Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Present-Past: Modernity and
the Memory Crisis, and Body and Story.

the determinations of the period in Western thought that most rooted itself in the
notion of determination to begin with.
But Derrida’s essay does so in a mode that he elsewhere defined as the
gap between what a text declares—what it explicitly wants to claim, and what
it describes—what can be read beneath and against its explicit assertion.3 Then
Derrida’s twentieth-century imagination of the “unconditioned” university—what
his essay declares—shines light in its description upon the Enlightenment’s own
thinking about thought’s constraint, upon the philosophes’ reflection concerning
what impedes, inhibits, conditions, or determines the fetters that bear upon and
against thinking’s freedom. In any case, Derrida’s consideration on the university
needs to be understood as embodying a reflection on the mode and means of En-
lightenment understanding of the very conditions for whose elimination Derrida
calls in his essay.
But from its very different situation at the conclusion of the twentieth
century, and in an epistemological mode hostile to Enlightenment thinking about
determination, “The University Without Condition” can hardly express this con-
dition in an uninflected way. Consequently it speaks this meaning—and says that
it speaks it—as if in the voice of someone else, of a stranger, even a suspect: in a
mode of self-betrayal rather than of affirmation. Derrida is explicit about this. At
the opening of his essay he casts himself as “a professor who would act as if he
were . . . unfaithful [infidèle] or a traitor [traître] to his habitual practice” (202).
Why would an orator begin his speech with such a self-inflicted disqualification?
To be sure, the mode of “as if” that Derrida asserts or assumes here has
a distinguished lineage. Consider this passage from the second essay in Rogues:
“‘What if we were called here to save the honor of reason?’ Or, if you prefer the
fiction of the as if to a hypothesis, the fiction of the als ob honored in philosophy,
and in the name of reason itself, by Kant and others, ‘it would be as if we were
called here to save the honor of reason.’”4 In “The University Without Condition,”
however, the as if fiction—a mode presumably more playful and liberatory than
the more logical “hypothesis” with which Derrida contrasts it in Rogues even as
he analogizes the two—is not directed toward entertaining an invention about the
external world of reason or thought, but about the philosopher himself. This “as
if” functions as if to allow thought to slip the bonds of (some) constraint—perhaps
to evade the very “conditioning” at the heart of what Derrida wants to consider in
his lecture. So at its outset, Derrida seems to be granting himself the franchise to act
in a guise or a disguise whose difference from himself—“infidèle,” “traître”—he
at once asserts and subverts through the counterfactual mode which will frame
everything that follows. But why the masquerade to begin with?
The odd, self-subverting mode of address with which Derrida initiates his
discussion arises, I think, because to make his argument concerning the liberation
of the university, to have a base to stand on to make this argument, Derrida finds
himself appealing to a complex of ideas—the humanities, the freedom of inquiry,
the affirmation of truth—that he is constrained to recognize sound anomalous in
his own discourse. Derrida doesn’t talk like that, he seems to be saying. These no-
tions, as he says, mark “the Enlightenment—Aufklärung, Lumières, Illuminismo”
(203). The rhetorical extension through which Derrida repeats the Enlightenment’s
names by mapping its dissemination across Europe itself seems a forceful signifier
of emphasis.5 Make no mistake, the iteration appears to tell us, I know perfectly
well what I’m saying here, even if my profession (202), which is also a confession
(213), might surprise you, coming as it does from me.6
This profession then presumes and relies upon a “reference to truth” and a
“concept of man” (203) that Derrida’s listeners may have been startled to encounter.
For these overtly “metaphysical” notions mark the specific place of Derrida’s dif-
ference with Enlightenment tradition and its grounding presumptions.7 Why this
self-subversion, this seeming apostasy, and this unexpected profession of allegiance
to ideas that Derrida had contested since his very earliest work?
Derrida knows what he is doing in foregrounding the anomaly in his dis-
course. But naming the incongruity does not suspend it. Rather, it lands his “profes-
sion” in an unaccustomed place: in the mode of thinking of the intellectual complex
against which his own thinking has always defined itself—often strenuously, and
sometimes with an edge of philosophical disdain. It’s as if Derrida found himself
shipwrecked on the island of the Enlightenment—relieved to have fetched up on
dry land, but astonished that it should be that land which saved him.
It is not hard to understand this derogation of “Derrideanism” by Der-
rida himself. His invocation of a set of concepts tainted with—indeed, constitutive
of—“Western metaphysics” is clearly purposive, pragmatic, and task-oriented. The
philosophico-political objective of “The University Without Condition,” and the
rhetorical strategy that enables it, depend upon a set of conceptions and commit-
ments reaching back to the Enlightenment’s own projection, and to the intellectual
and polemical—ultimately the political—tools the philosophes devised to press their
case against the tyranny of irrational power.8 At the same time, however, Derrida
is obliged to register the degree to which today such liberatory Enlightenment
conceptualizations and objectives still remain embattled. The despotic powers of
the eighteenth century against which the thinkers of the Enlightenment asserted
their counter-discourse remain effective today—or there would have been no need
for Derrida’s essay in the first place.9 In the mode of Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic
essentialism”—the adoption for the purposes of political effectiveness of a theo-
retical position one would ordinarily resist—Derrida then finds himself coquetting
with the Lumières.10
To understand the politico-conceptual projection of “The University With-
out Condition,” we need to explain two things: first, why the Lumières’ construc-
tions of “truth” and “humanity” still remain effective, and why therefore Derrida
should have felt constrained to rely upon them. Second, how the resistance against
these projections or these ideals manifests itself, beyond the capacity of Derrida’s
self-conscious embrace of Enlightenment conceptions and ideals. If we want to
take Derrida’s argument seriously both in its implications and in the “unsaids” it
carries within it, the central paradox to be examined is that in his essay the no-
tion of the “unconditioned” is conditioned. I will argue that this concept of the
“unconditioned” is internally contradictory and logically incoherent.
v
When we consider Enlightenment anticipations of Derrida’s reflection in
“The University Without Condition” concerning intellectual and critical freedom,
it is striking how closely his position tracks the tenets of their formulation more
than two hundred years ago. These convergences bear upon my argument here,
because Derrida’s essay makes the issue of determination or entailment—the con-
trary of the unconditionality he invokes—central to his construction of the matter.
Consequently, I want to consider what Enlightenment figures argued concerning
key issues raised in “The University Without Condition.” I begin with Kant, then
I pass on briefly to the French philosophes whom Derrida does not mention in
his essay.
Derrida refers to Kant frequently in “The University Without Condition,”
citing The Critique of Judgment and The Conflict of the Faculties. However, he
does not mention what many would consider the intertext most apposite to his
own profession in “The University Without Condition,” Kant’s “What is Enlight-
enment?”11 What concepts, what arguments do we find there? How would the
Enlightenment dialogue with Derrida on these points? Very close to the beginning
of his essay, Derrida characterizes the university he envisions as follows:
This university demands and ought to be granted in principle . . . an un-

conditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further,
the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and
thought concerning the truth. (202; cf. also 220)
Here, in a celebrated passage, is Kant 214 years earlier:
For this enlightenment . . . nothing more is required than freedom: . . .

the freedom to make a public use of one’s reason in all matters . . . The
public use of reason must at all times be free, and it alone can bring
about enlightenment among men. . . . (59)
The passage strikingly anticipates Derrida. Directly following it, Kant specifies
what he means by “public” use: “I understand . . . that use which anyone makes
of [reason] as a scholar [Gelehrter] before the entire public of the reading world”
(60). He further specifies that “all citizens . . . would be left free in their capacities
as scholars—that is, through writings—to point out the defects in the existing order
of things [über das Fehlerhafte der dermaligen Einrichtung seine Anmerkungen zu
machen]” (61, translation modified).
Despite profound transformations of the world over two hundred years, it
is difficult to see much daylight between Kant’s and Derrida’s respective affirmations
of the absolute right of free inquiry and of the free circulation of reasoned criticism.
It is true that Kant does not localize his scholars specifically within universities,
though such institutional formations are already visible on the horizon he projects.12
Likewise Derrida’s projection of the university as “an ultimate place of critical resis-
tance . . . to all the powers of dogmatic and unjust appropriation” (204; cf. 206–8)
precisely echoes Kant’s assertion in the passage from “What is Enlightenment?” cited
just above concerning the right of citizens to criticize existing institutions, and the
corresponding argument a bit later in the essay that such freedom is in the interest
of the polity itself, despite the state’s notorious tendency to impede it.
A head of state who favors such enlightenment . . . sees that even with
regard to his own legislation there is no danger in allowing his subjects to
make public use of their reason and to lay publicly before the world their
thoughts about a better formulation of this legislation as well as a candid

criticism of laws already given. (“What is Enlightenment?” 63)
In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant does not principally utilize the vocabu-

lary of “truth” that comes as something of an unaccustomed surprise at the open-
ing of Derrida’s essay (203). The term does, however, appear at a crucial point in
Kant’s text concerned with the freedom of scholars of theology to critically examine
the theses of religion. In such critical examination, Kant writes, “it is not entirely
impossible that truth may lie concealed” (60, emphasis added). One senses in this
oblique formulation the sensitivity of the religious question in Kant’s period. He
acknowledges the thorny status of this area of inquiry near the conclusion of his
text: “I have placed the main point of enlightenment—mankind’s exit from self-
imposed immaturity—primarily on religious matters” (62–63, emphasis added),
because, as he says, the sovereign has permitted much freer inquiry in the arts and
sciences than in questions of religion and theology (63). But despite the rhetorical
restraint of his formulation, in this passage Kant confronts his period’s most criti-
cal case for freedom of thought and expression. He makes it clear that even in this
most sensitive area, scholarly reflection and criticism must be absolutely free.
No doubt Derrida doesn’t think “The University Without Condition”
asserts a new right or set of rights for the university, but rather (re)articulates the
freedoms that the modern university has always asserted. But are we to think that
Derrida considers his own projection as a pure repetition of Enlightenment asser-
tions, even as an echo or a simple pleonasm? If so, the purview of his essay would
narrow considerably. Therefore reading it implies discerning what constitutes its
difference from the traditional intellectual and institutional sources—arising in the
Enlightenment particularly—to which Derrida appeals.
v
What’s critical in Derrida’s essay would not appear to lie in the specifics
of his account of the university’s mission or of its privileges. These, beginning with
the university’s exemption from “conditions,” are familiar and widely agreed upon.
From the Enlightenment period in which Derrida roots his discussion, the university
was always supposed to be without conditions. First of all, there was to be no limit
imposed upon the reach of its study. Here is how Diderot’s Encyclopédie put the
point in its article “Université”:
They are called universities or universal schools [universités, ou écoles

universelles] because it is supposed that the four faculties form the
university of studies or include all those [studies] which are possible.
(emphasis added)
The university’s “immunity” from external interference, which Derrida argues

we ought to commit to “with all our might” (220), likewise is rooted in ancient
practice. Here is the same Encyclopédie article on this point:
The popes exempted these bodies of scholars [docteurs] and students

from ordinary jurisdiction and gave them authority over all the members
of the [university] body, no matter what diocese or nation they came
from; and [gave] to those whom they had examined and admitted as doc-
tors the right to teach anywhere in Christendom. Kings also took them
under their protection, and . . . the members of these universities were
exempt from lay jurisdiction. . . .13
This extension of scholarly privilege to the entire possible field of inquiry and to
the entire world—or at least the Christian one—means that the university’s cos-
mopolitanism (to which Derrida alludes approvingly [204]) is similarly built into
the university’s unconditionality, its exemption from restriction.14
But beyond what Derrida attributes to Enlightenment arguments on this
point, there is no trace in “The University Without Condition” of any justification
for the unconditionality of university privilege that Derrida claims for it. Such
an omission in Derrida’s essay is curious. What, we must therefore ask, are the
“conditions” that Derrida thinks the university should be without? Fundamen-
tally these are political: they relate to power. And this is the point upon which an
assessment—and a critique—of Derrida’s own projection of the university might
most usefully put pressure.15 The construction of the problem in “The University
Without Condition” is clear. Derrida claims that despite the fact that the “idea,” the
“vocation” (204) of the university—since the Enlightenment, at least—has always
projected the absolute right to search for and to communicate truth, this right “has
never been in effect [effective]” (206). Through its contrast with the much less fa-
vorable empirical situation of state and corporate interests and interferences well
known to modern intellectuals, the assertion of this abstract or theoretical right
itself demonstrates the university’s actual “impotence, the fragility of its defenses
against all the powers that control [commandent] it, surround it, and attempt to
appropriate it” (206, translation modified).
Derrida has no difficulty situating the tension between the university’s
sovereign commitment to freedom of thought, research, and expression on the one
hand, and the forces inimical to such freedom on the other. However his analysis
diverges from Enlightenment reflections and descriptions. He construes the issue
with almost no attention to the material factors—particularly the interests of
countervailing powers mobilized against the university’s sovereign freedom, and
their underlying motivation—in a way very different from what typically occurs
in eighteenth-century discussions of freedom of thought and reflection, and of the
constraints that impede or oppose it.
Perhaps that fact has a relatively simple explanation. We might say that
people living in situations of absolutist censorship and repression, as under the
ancien régime, will have a livelier sense of the material constraints—Diderot clapped
in Vincennes prison; Voltaire exiled to England; Rousseau oscillating nervously
between France, England, and Geneva; Sade in the Bastille and in Charenton—that
represent peremptory examples of tyranny’s domination.16 Conversely, today—in
the advanced democracies at least—the mechanisms of opposition and control tend
to be less sovereign or unanswerable than were the overtly repressive apparatuses
of the Enlightenment period.17
It would be naive to think that attempts by governments in the advanced
democracies to subvert or repress academic and intellectual freedom are not occur-
ring regularly. While such interference bears some resemblance to limitations on
individual or collective freedom in the Enlightenment period, and while in many
countries the situation of civil liberties has suffered a perceptible deterioration since
9/11, it would be an exaggeration to equate their severity with what regularly and
almost unanswerably occurred under the ancien régime. Through material experi-
ence, people in the eighteenth century probably knew more about the conditions
constraining the exercise of intellectual freedom than we do today. They studied
them because they had to. Determination was for them a palpable and singularly
aversive reality, consequently one upon whose functioning they reflected intricately.
Perhaps then it’s no surprise that Enlightenment discourses on the functioning of
power—typically in articles in the Encyclopédie that intricately traced its mecha-
nisms in all the areas of life—captured its operation with greater acuteness, and
that their arguments for the establishment of intellectual freedom rang out with
greater resonance, than similar discourses in our own period.
Whether this rough-and-ready hypothesis is true or not, it seems clear that
while Derrida’s projection of the sovereign unconditionality that ought to inhere
in the university’s search for truth tracks with Enlightenment analyses and incite-
ments, “The University Without Condition” diverges from the reformist line of
attack that determined the political strategies of Lumières writers under the ancien
régime. Once Derrida had posited the inimical force of state or corporate power
that threatens to condition—indeed potentially to destroy—the freedom of the
university, we might have expected that his analysis would turn to the functioning
of power itself in order to conceptualize and mount an opposition to it.
This, however, is the weakest element in Derrida’s account.18 Derrida
knows the name of the problem—the power of the state and of political and cor-
porate interests—and he repeats it throughout his essay (206, 219). But though
he appeals to the Enlightenment ideas that frame the ideal of thought’s liberation
in a move whose oddity in his own discourse he clearly foregrounds, he declines
to bring to bear the conceptual instruments that Lumières thinkers devised and
deployed for understanding how this power works, and how one might interrupt its
maleficence. This is surprising because—since the Enlightenment at least—positing
a gap between an actual state of affairs and the ideal that reason argues ought to
obtain in its place would seem almost automatically to solicit a critical discourse
seeking to overcome the disparity.
But Derrida’s instruments for framing such an analysis are not well suited
for modeling the determinations that might give some grasp of the organization
of the powers inimical to the university’s autonomy, of how such powers are in
fact deployed, or of the mechanisms that might be contrived to interrupt or deflect
them. The absolutism of the paradigm Derrida deploys here—no condition! no
determination!—reflects unhelpfully back into his account to block access to an
understanding of how the power of institutions seeking to limit the intellectual
freedoms that ought to be at the heart of the university could be gamed, impeded,
disorganized, or otherwise subverted.
As I’ve been suggesting, Derrida’s term “condition” in “The University
Without Condition” is code for a cardinal Enlightenment concept, determination.
This is the part of the philosophes’ understanding of the world to which Derrida
refuses to subscribe. The whole liberatory orientation of his essay depends upon
blanking such a mechanism. Consequently, throughout the essay, the term “condi-
tion” appears only in the privative mode: “without condition” (202), “un-limited”
(202), “un-conditional” (203), “without conditions” (204; all with emphasis
added), and so on. This rigorous, unqualified insistence leaves Derrida’s analysis
one concept short of a means for understanding how the conditions from which
he wants to free the university—and beyond it, thinking itself—impose themselves
upon it. Derrida’s analysis seems to conflate the concept of “conditions” and
“determinations” with the consequence of their operation—as if one might catch
coercion by analyzing its mechanism. How else to explain the determined absolut-
ism of his stance excluding and repudiating determination in any form? But this
absolutism is brittle.
The theory of determination that I believe is Derrida’s ghostly antagonist
here is primarily to be found in Hegel. There is some semantic blurring between the
Hegelian terms Bedingung (normally translated as “condition”) and Bestimmung
(usually rendered as “determination”).19 But Derrida conflates them, for example in
his dialogue with Giovanna Borradori. There he utilizes bedingt as the equivalent of
“determinate” and Bedingung to render “determination” (see Philosophy in a Time
of Terror, 129–30). His usage is similar in Rogues.20 But in “The University Without
Condition” Derrida is working in a mode of absolute negation of condition, of the
radically unbedingt. The concept of determination is consequently unavailable to
him for understanding how in the case of the university, the unrealized character
of its unconditionality might be made real.21
So Derrida’s insistence upon unconditionality—non-determination, ab-
solute sovereignty—blocks conceiving the functioning of determination that the
Enlightenment located at the heart of its understanding of human beings and doings.
But without a capable theory of determination, it is hard to make sense of how any
institution—the university in particular—could be freed from “conditions,” from
outside determination, to begin with. The strange position of two recurrent themes
in Derrida’s essay—on the one hand work (209ff.), on the other constraint or servi-
tude (224)—can rightly be understood, I think, only against this background. These
materialities are the shadowy other part of a dialectic that propels the argument
for freedom of thought and expression, without the interrelation ever being made
explicit. The argument for empowering the university must depend at its foundation
on a conception of power to begin with—of state and other actors whose ability
to do work and enforce constraints upon the political and intellectual registers of
existence must logically and practically precede any liberation from power, and
hence any achievement of unconditionality. But such processes are never seriously
analyzed in Derrida’s essay.
If the university’s claim to unconditionality has never been “effective,”
as Derrida claims (206), the question then becomes, how does one get the claim
honored? About that, Derrida does not have anything practical to say. The philo
sophes’ reformist view relied upon detecting the irrationalities of state and church
power that inhibited the rational exercise of human understanding, identifying their
agents and their mechanism, and marshaling public opinion to limit or abrogate
these irrationalities. But this materialist, realist conception of how power works
and how it could be countered or interrupted diverges from Derrida’s exhortation
to institute a state of affairs—the university’s liberation, the realization of its un-
conditionality—that he claims has never yet been achieved.
v
The blind spot in Derrida’s account of how this transformation might be

realized lies in his reliance, here as frequently in the work of his middle and later
period, upon the messianic notion of the “à-venir” and its complement, the uncon-
ditioned “event.” Though they call out for change and hope for it, these modalities
have no means of conceptualizing transformation, still less of producing it. To make
certain my argument here is clear, I should say that I have no doubt whatever that
Derrida believed that social existence changes, or that specific changes (with which
many of us would agree) would be most salutary. The critique I want to make of
his view of the “event” does not question his motivation, it questions his model,
particularly asking whether the conceptualization he projects in the coupled no-
tions of the “event” and the “à-venir” does a capable job of comprehending the
transformations he urges. My claim is that it does not.
This is because Derrida has no way to explain how a current pernicious state
of affairs could be altered. Indeed he declines on principle to proffer an account of
how this might happen. The mechanism and the temporality of what Derrida calls
for and hopes to call forth are those of a—presumably agentless—miracle (I use
the word in a technical, not an evaluative sense). That is, a process that cannot be
accounted for by natural or social mechanism, that intervenes in the flow of tem-
porality but can never be organized or organized for. In “The University Without
Condition,” Derrida’s term for these miraculous transformations is the “impossible
possible” (234). Surely we can hope for such a wondrous transformation, and we
cannot say the university will never benefit from one. But the wait for this unaccount-
able realization could be frustrating. We need to better understand the modality of
Derrida’s “à-venir” and “event,” and the motivation behind his concepts, if we are
to assess what he is arguing in “The University Without Condition.”22
In his middle and later work, the “event” is one of Derrida’s most insis-
tent themes. The notion is knotty—if one can even call it a notion, given that ex
hypothesi it must exist as a form without any possibility of specifiable content.
The event is what is “to come” (à-venir) in the sense of being what is absolutely
not here now. If it is performable, deducible, predictable, if it is determined, en-
tailed—“conditioned”—in any way by any present fact or tendency, it does not
count as an “event” in Derrida’s understanding of the term. For him, an “event”
is a “leap” (230) beyond any proposition, postulate, or project. It thus prosecutes
an absoluteness that by this very quality converges with the notion of an institution
“without condition” with which Derrida begins his essay.
In Specters of Marx, in “Force of Law” (particularly in “First Name
of Benjamin”) and ubiquitously elsewhere in his later work, Derrida weaves a
complex reflection around the notion of the “event,” which he conceives as the
un-anticipatable, the in-conceivable, the “impossible.” “The University Without
Condition” essentially concludes with this idea (233–34). This seemingly absolute
epistemological indetermination is the irreducible element in the “à-venir.” As Der-
rida puts it in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, “The event is what comes and, in
coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and suspend comprehension: the event
is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of
all that I do not comprehend. It consists in that, that I do not comprehend: that
which I do not comprehend and first of all that I do not comprehend, the fact that
I do not comprehend: my incomprehension” (90).
This Derridean ideologeme refers to a familiar problematic, and we can

see the motivation behind it. Derrida is seeking to deal with a constitutive asym-
metry between past and future—between the empirically knowable “what was”
and the subjunctive and invisible “what is to come.” We have no memory of the
future. So if we don’t want to be condemned to thinking of the future as no more
than the mechanical and predetermined prolongation of what already is, it would
seem there would have to be some concept of a “break” or “leap” (230) in the
continuist flow of time that would allow the future to “become itself” in its differ-
ence from the present. Otherwise it could only remain indentured—bedingt—to
the “now,” and could not produce anything authentically “new.”23 This Derridean
conceptualization contests the continuous, deterministic—and supposedly teleo-
logical—vision of history that derives (or is said to derive) from Hegel, as Derrida
implies in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (120). Nietzsche is the progenitor of this
view, and Heidegger one of its most powerful theorists.24
However, Derrida’s thought of the “event” pays a cost for freeing the future
through such a conceptualization of it. In relation to what I claimed earlier was
the most pertinent intertext for Derrida’s argument here—Kant’s “What is Enlight-
enment?”—Derrida’s formulation seems irreconcilable with Kant’s projection of
discourse in the public space as a fundamental means of fostering transformations
in the given state of things. This is not because in Derrida’s conception the public
space is closed to discourse—of course the contrary is true—but because under his
construction of the event there is no cognizable path that could lead from discourse
in this space to the coming of, say, the university without condition. But such a con-
nection was Kant’s whole point in arguing for reason’s liberation. While taking on
board Kant’s resonant theses about the liberation of thought, Derrida depoliticizes
them by excising precisely the portion of Kant’s—and the Enlightenment’s—analysis
that conceived how such an objective might be made real.
A related aspect of the paradigmatic disadvantage of Derrida’s construc-
tion of the “event” and the “à-venir” concerns the polarization between the two
situations of choice (or pseudo-choice) his theory projects: between “what I (al-
ready) know” (a situation that can lead to no authentic “decision” on my part)
and “the (unforeseeable) event” (which allows us no explanation whatever of
what happens). One would have to ask whether Derrida’s first category, the class
of methodologically predetermined, regulated decisions, the realm of rational
calculation (see Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 133), really corresponds to any
significant proportion of the real choices people make. Everyone knows how rare
it is for most or all of the “data” we need for a decision (the register of Aristotelian
phronesis or Kantian practical judgment) to be present at the moment we make
our choice. As “decisions,” such rare cases—like stopping at a red light—may be
trivial. Conversely we would have to ask whether the absolutely unprecedented
really ever occurs—given that human beings are creatures of memory, of language,
of shared communication, of pattern, and of structure.25
Nonetheless Derrida’s stakes in this idea of the evenemential rupture
are high. The problem is conceiving of the “new” in history or in thought. Some
would call this the most characteristic and consequential enigma of modernity
in its contrast with the supposed continuist flow of undifferentiated, repetitive
continuity and stability in earlier periods. If the “new” is really new, if its differ-
ence is absolutely undetermined, then it looks like the aerolith, the stone dropped
from nowhere, the Coke bottle that, in Jamie Uys’s 1980 film The Gods Must Be
Crazy, falls inexplicably from the sky. How could we understand something for
which we have no language, which has no analogon in what we already know?
How, as Derrida himself asks, could we even recognize it? And in a problem at
least as daunting as initial recognition or cognition of the previously unknown,
how could we come to comprehend that which at first we were paradigmatically
unable to understand?26
The unnamed antagonist of this modality of conceiving change is clearly
Hegelian dialectic. Yet a case can be made, despite the influential critique of
Hegelianism in the work of Bataille and others, that the notion of unidirectional
sublation (Aufhebung) in Hegel avoids the purely deductive, derivative, continuist
consequences often attributed to it. What is at stake is the fundamental question
of whether history, the succession of “what comes,” is rationalizable and cogni-
zable—particularly whether it is thinkable, deducible, prior to the coming itself.
Obviously if you can already see “what’s coming,” in a sense it doesn’t come at all,
it is not “new” or in Derrida’s sense an “event.” Only what cannot be “thought”
before it happens is an “event.” Despite regular and insistent efforts by Derrida and
a number of others to criticize Hegel for his continuist teleologism, I believe that
this is a truncated and reductionist view of Hegel’s mature thinking about history
and about the determination of human beings and doings.27
To begin with the simplest point, Hegel doesn’t believe that we can “know”
history before it happens. Whatever “Reason” is, its power doesn’t penetrate that
far. This is the meaning of his famous evocation of Minerva’s owl, of the irreduc-
ible posteriority of knowledge in relation to “what happens” that his mythological
image projects.28 For Hegel, philosophy, understanding, always come post festum,
after the fact—after the “event,” as Derrida might say. The Aufhebung so influen-
tially criticized by Bataille and others is sometimes taken to undo this prior unra-
tionalizability of the event.29 This critique understands Hegel as allowing for some
version of integral deducibility of the future from the givens of the present or the
past. Bataille’s point is that there is always an unrationalizable excess, reserve or
remainder that escapes reason. But in Hegel’s mature thought, Hegel doesn’t really
diverge from this argument, and he anticipates his own successors and antagonists
on this point. It is in that sense that the important “negative dialectic” of Adorno
never thinks it is “breaking” with Hegel in the way that Bataille does and, follow-
ing him, both Foucault and Derrida.30
We could understand the theoretical crux this way: if history flows “uninter-
ruptedly” along, then nothing “new” can happen—only modifications in amplitude,
in quantity, even in “date,” never qualitative changes. But we have an intuition that
the “new” does occur—in revolutions, in unprecedented technological changes,
in the foundation of “new” modes of thinking, among other sites or “events.”
Then we face the problem of a seemingly irreducible gap between undecidability
and decision that raises the question about whether Derrida believes that these
new, unanticipatable “events” (the objects of our “decisions”) can be rationally
“understood.” They are indeterminable and undecidable in the obvious sense that
we have no tools to grasp them (see Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 90–91). If
we seek to pull them back into the paradigms of “the same,” then we forfeit the
critical bite their “newness” entails. On the other hand, if we assert their absolute
rupture, then we may be condemned never to understand them. It’s a seemingly
unforgiving set of options.
Derrida’s response, theoretically in “Force of Law” and practically in
his analysis in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, is a nuanced one that avoids the
reductionisms of each of the polar positions: the new is “absolute”; or, there is no
“new” at all. Its fundamental aspect is his assertion that “a strategy of rupture is
never pure . . . , there is never a pure opposition.”31 But however well motivated,
this nuance is not made effective in Derrida’s notion of the “event.” As I hope
the passages I have already quoted make clear, the Derridean “event” remains an
epistemological black hole.
So the achievement of thought’s liberation that “The University Without
Condition” solicits leaves Derrida—and us—with an objective, but without a
mechanism. Achieving the “unconditional” maroons us without any cognizable
or actionable mediation to move toward it. The logic of freeing the world for the
unexpected thus unexpectedly models a world in which we might experience a
miracle, but—because no exercise of practical reason or action can avail against
the opacity of the “à-venir”—we can do nothing but hope that it will come.
This dilemma recurs in other guises and places in Derrida’s thinking in the
final period of his work. In “To Arrive—At the Ends of the State,” the second essay
in Rogues, Derrida considers incalculable decision: “According to a transaction
that is each time novel, each time without precedent, reason goes through and goes
between, on the one side, the reasoned exigency of calculation or conditionality
and, on the other, the intransigent, nonnegotiable exigency of unconditional in-
calculability” (150). We cannot know in advance, he argues, whether rationality
will give us the answers we seek. He calls the choice an “impossible transaction
between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the incalculable”
(150). There is no rule that will help us. He then concludes his reflection on this
point as follows: “An always perilous transaction must thus invent, each time, in
a singular situation, its own law and norm, that is, a maxim that welcomes each
time the event to come. There can be responsibility and decision, if there are any,
only at this price [à ce prix]” (151).32
As in his projection of a university unconstrained by political servitudes
and ideological dependencies, in this passage Derrida is trying to free thought,
language, conduct, and politics from the pre-scriptings of conditions and deter-
minations. In this sense, as I suggested earlier, his work represents a stirring and
powerful contemporary attempt to think liberation through and create the room it
needs.33 The unconditioned character of the Derridean “event,” and beyond it the
absolutism of the “unconditioned” itself, are the most evident signs of Derrida’s
radicalism on this point.
Yet his own reasoning here leads him to a paradox, perhaps even into
an impasse. I’ve already suggested why I believe Derrida comes to the counterin-
tuitive position concerning decisions and events that produces this deadlock. He
wants an account of human beings and doings that will foster the realization of
freedom. And he wants to emphasize the degree to which no decision or event
can ever be fully anticipated by its antecedents or absolutely determined by prior
intentionalities. These intentions are admirable. Derrida believes that by the very
fact of the constraints it introduces in human action and activity, any entailment
will undermine the achievement of such liberation. So in order to preserve the
future’s ability to become what no present can entirely prescribe, he finds himself
in a position of radical antideterminism. That is a more contestable conclusion.
Some thinkers might argue that our job is to know, first of all, what is the case.
They might maintain that in our sublunar world, in which miracles are excluded
and the sui generis is an empty set, no state to come can be conceived as wholly
evading the states that already are. And they might insist that in human activity,
the ideal of unqualified exemption from pre-scripting diverges considerably and
consequentially from quotidian experience.34
Here as earlier, I want my perspective to be clear. My critique bears on the
implication of Derrida’s conceptual stance, not upon his intention. The first thing
we need to ask about any theoretical position is pragmatic: does it work? does it
help us make sense? does it give a capable account of the phenomenon it seeks to
elucidate? But Derrida’s conception of how we should think about “decisions”
and “events” forecloses any such judgments because on principal and to remain
consistent with the absolutism of his idea, he declines to give any account of these
matters. However, this position entails its own contradictions and limitations.
The metaphor of cost or price [prix] to which Derrida unexpectedly comes
at the conclusion of the passage from Rogues that I quoted above undermines or
undoes the unconditional in-calculability that for him sustains the modality of the
“event” and the “unconditional” itself. Derrida pulls these concepts back into the
most familiar and banal sign of the calculable, the price tag. This slippage is diag-
nostic. It suggests that we cannot think liberation in terms that sustain the radical
absoluteness through which Derrida wants to conceive it—to begin with, because
liberation is a process, not a state. By their nature processes cannot participate in
the radical unconditionality that Derrida frames, if only because they cohere as
processes as a consequence of the internal determinants that make them what they
are, not simply chaotic aggregates of disconnected and stochastic particulars. Process
cannot not be significantly determinate. The fall into the quotidian at the end of
the passage marks the degree to which Derrida’s thinking has become unanchored
from the realia of social existence, and cannot conceive a reference to the modulated
negotiations that such an existence entails as other than a derogation or a fall.
The concept of “price” is not a casual signifier in Derrida’s lexicon, it oc-
cupies a particularly sensitive place. Several times in his work, Derrida refers to the
antinomy in Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals between “market
price” [Marktpreis] and “dignity” [Würdigkeit].35 Things, Kant says, have either
a market price, or they have dignity. Dignity, in other words, has no price. At
issue in Kant’s discussion is the foundational opposition between quantity and
quality. But Derrida’s projection of incalculability as the “unconditional”—the
unbedingt—withdraws that modality from reason in a way very different from,
and more troubling than what Kant understood in his quantity/quality distinction,
or Hegel following him, with his well-known argument that quantity relates to
quality through dialectical sublation.36
Derrida’s notion of the unconditional as he defines it in relation to “rea-
son” thus seems disquieting. It appears to produce aporias that risk paralyzing the
effort to achieve the very freedom which is Derrida’s objective. This objective is
salutary. But the price of thinking its achievement in this mode may simply be too
high. The university without condition may be thinkable only if we think deeply
about its conditions and determinations to begin with.
NOTES
1. Derrida’s essay was originally delivered as a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University in 1998.
Its title was “The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Hu-
manities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow).” This version can be found in Jacques Derrida and the
Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 24–57. A
slightly altered version, recast as an essay, appeared as “The University Without Condition” in Jacques
Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 202–37. The French
original is L’université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001). I cite Derrida’s text from the essay version
in Without Alibi.
2. For the notion of “ghosting” and the associated technics of the spectral and of hauntology, see
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International
(New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. xviii, 7, 10, 156. For a provocative account of the relationship be-
tween thought in the two periods of concern in this essay, see Richard Rorty, “The Continuity Between
the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism,’” in What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question,
ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 19–36.
3. Cf. “Rousseau says it without wishing to say it.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967),
2nd ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 200; see
also 239, 251, 313. Cf. also 158, where Derrida says his reading practice seeks a reading that could
uncover “a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he controls [commande] and
what he does not control of the patterns of the language that he uses” (translation modified).
4. See Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 119.
5. He uses a similar, even more extended, list of the Enlightenment’s names in “Discours,” in
Jacques Derrida: Doctor Honoris Causa Universitatis Silensius, ed. Tadeusz Rachwał (Katowice,
Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersitetu Sla̧skiego, 1997), 124; and another in Philosophy in a Time of
Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 2003), 116.
6. I don’t mean to suggest that Derrida has never previously availed himself of the Enlightenment
conceptual complex. Of course the contrary is true. See the preceding note for examples of parallel ap-
peals. Beyond this, Derrida’s institutional work in defense of philosophy also invokes ideas echoing those
here. See esp. Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2002). In “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” Derrida speaks
affirmatively about the ideals of the Enlightenment; in Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 228–98: “Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory
ideal” (258; cf. 259ff. and 297). What I am claiming is that a tension exists between these ideas and
those most frequently identified with Derridean deconstruction; that this tension is formative of and
reflected in the conceptual structure of Derrida’s essay on the university; and that the tension cannot
be resorbed or resolved simply through Derrida’s rhetoric concerning it. Borradori considers Derrida’s
relation to the Enlightenment in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 140, 162.
7. On Derrida’s widely-known critique of “Western metaphysics,” see Of Grammatology, 13, 46.

See also Gayatri Spivak’s “Translator’s Preface,” xxi.
8. See the article “Despotisme” in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie
de Diderot et d’Alembert, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. CD-ROM ed.
(Paris: REDON, 2002). I cite the Encyclopédie from this source because of its wide availability.
9. For the notion of “counter-discourse,” see Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The

Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1985).
10. For “strategic essentialism,” see Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” in Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. For “coquetting” with other thinkers, see Karl Marx, “Postface to
the Second Edition,” Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 103. In Marx’s
case the intertext was Hegel.
11. The full title of Kant’s short essay from 1784 is “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlighten-
ment?” I quote from the translation by James Schmidt, in What is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century
Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1996), 58–64. Schmidt’s volume provides a helpful context for Kant’s and others’ contributions to
discussion of a question originally posed in 1783 by J. K. W. Möhsen; see Schmidt’s introduction.
12. At Königsberg Kant never rose above the rank of Privatdozent, and the repeated rejection of his
candidacy for a professorship there might be taken as a telling example of the university’s tendency to
resist the principle of its own freedom.
13. Ibid. Derrida’s essay reminds us that Kant projected withdrawing the philosophy faculty from
“any outside power, notably from state power, and guarantee[d] this faculty an unconditional freedom
to say what is true and to conclude concerning the subject of truth . . .” (219). This privilege only for-
malized the immunities that the university already possessed and which were guaranteed to it in theory.
The existence, importance, and operation of the university’s immunities and privileges are discussed
in greater depth in the Encyclopédie article “Conservateur apostolique [ou des privilèges apostoliques
des universités]” by Boucher d’Argis, which provides considerable detail about their history, the man-
ner of their functioning, the conflicts over them and the ensuing legislative resolution of these issues.
Encyclopédie, s.v. “Conservateur apostolique.” The “conservateurs” were the officials designated to
protect the university’s privileges. The article’s historical account of the royal privilege goes back to an
edict of 18 March 1366 by the French king Charles V.
14. Derrida provides an extended analysis of cosmopolitanism in his dialogue with Giovanna Bor-
radori. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 123, 130–31.
15. On the notion of such critique and the way it intends to honor the position it interrogates, see
Terdiman, Body and Story: The Practice and Ethics of Theoretical Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 2005), 231.
16. See Terdiman, Body and Story, 55. The unattributed Encyclopédie article “Censeurs de livres,”
mostly concerned with a factual account of the mechanism of eighteenth-century censorship, concluded
with one sarcastic and scandalous sentence: “Sometimes because of the large number of books they
must examine, or for other reasons, [the censors] are forced to the unfortunate position of reducing the
authors or publishers awaiting their decision to the state of the poor souls wandering on the banks of
the Styx and pleading with Charon to ferry them across.” See Encyclopédie, s.v. “Censeurs de livres.”
As if in ironic demonstration of the article’s point, its appearance in the second volume of the Encyclo-
pédie (which also contained the Abbé de Prades’s heretical article “Certitude”) led to withdrawal of the
royal privilege to publish, and thus to the suspension of the Encyclopédie project. See Roger Chartier,
The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
1991), 42. Derrida had his own alarming experience of the arbitrary exercise of state power when in
1981, following a clandestine seminar organized by the Jan Hus Association which he had cofounded
and whose purpose was to defend the rights of dissident Czech writers, he was arrested in Prague and
falsely charged with “production and trafficking of drugs”—which, with an irony that requires no
further comment, Derrida claimed had been planted on him while he was visiting Kafka’s grave. He
spent two days in custody before an intervention by French President François Mitterand obtained his
release. By contrast, Diderot’s imprisonment in Vincennes Prison under a lettre de cachet following the
publication of his Letter on the Blind extended from 24 July until 3 November 1749; see Arthur M.
Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 104–16. While Diderot’s incarceration lasted
only slightly more than three months, Condorcet and Rousseau both believed that it might have gone
on for years, and Rousseau claimed that anxiety for his then friend—they later famously broke off
relations—had nearly driven him out of his mind; see P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1992), 48–53. Voltaire’s experience with absolutist repression was worse. He was
exiled to Sully-sur-Loire for five months in 1716, to England from 1726 to 1729. He spent a full year
in the Bastille in 1717–18, and was imprisoned there again prior to his exile to England in 1726. Life
was manifestly more difficult for thinkers under the ancien régime.
17. To take a local example, at my own university in April 2005, the U.S. Army’s largest counter-
espionage unit, the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, forwarded to the Defense Department and the
FBI information concerning student opposition to the presence of military recruiters on the UC Santa
Cruz campus. This information was destined for the Pentagon “Threat and Local Observation Notice”
(TALON) database, designed to protect the nation against terrorist attacks. When this was discovered
through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, the campus chancellor joined with California’s two
senators to demand the withdrawal of the information from the database, and it was withdrawn. See
Demian Bulwa, “Terror Database Tracks UC Protests; U.S. Agent Reported on ’05 Rallies Against
Military Recruitment,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 2006; http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.
cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/19/BAGT6K1K621.DTL&hw=Santa+Cruz&sn=003&sc=416. The eighteenth
century lacked a Freedom of Information Act.
18. On the pragmatist criteria for judging the aptness of a given theoretical discourse for the task it
sets itself, see Terdiman, Body and Story, 232–33.
19. See Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 115–17, 77–79.
20. See Rogues, 126, 137, 148. For Derrida’s careful account of one portion of the philosophical
inheritance of “unconditionality,” which however omits reference to Hegel, see Rogues, 134. In “The
University Without Condition” the explicit notion of determination (in this case, of “the human”)
comes up only in the first of Derrida’s seven theses at the end of the essay (231).
21. Reflection on Derrida’s relation to Hegel has been frequent. For one synthesis of the problem, see
Jérôme Lèbre, “La lecture de Derrida,” in Hegel à l’épreuve de la philosophie contemporaine: Deleuze,
Lyotard, Derrida (Paris: Ellipses, 2002), 65–92.
22. Another analogue for this mode of projecting an objective without specifying a means is uto-
pianism. The issue comes up just once in “The University Without Condition” (236), in a discussion
without much relevance to my point here. But in the etymology of utopia resides the mystery of how
something that doesn’t exist can subsequently materialize out of nowhere. This is precisely the conun-
drum of the “event” as Derrida construes it.
23. Similarly, our own “decision” can only be a decision if it is not already predetermined by some
set of rules. A choice made under the latter conditions could do no more than actualize a structure of
past constraints. In such a situation, Derrida argues, we do not act, we are acted upon. Such situations
can never entail an authentic choice or the assumption of authentic responsibility, because such choices
and such responsibility can never be entailed to begin with. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 118.
24. For a thoughtful reflection on Heidegger’s relation to Enlightenment thought, see Hans Sluga,
“Heidegger and the Critique of Reason,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment?, 50–70.
25. Thus (as Derrida says about the “event” of 9/11 in Philosophy in a Time of Terror), there were
multiple registers of foreknowledge, precedent (notably the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade
Center), intelligence, warning, and anticipation—despite the common tendency to talk about the attack
as if it “came out of nowhere.” Derrida’s accrediting of the “leap” (“University Without Condition,”
230) collides directly with Leibniz’s widely-quoted dictum that “nature never makes leaps” (New Es-
says on Human Understanding, 1695–1705).
26. There is an evident resemblance between this Derridean complex and Foucault’s unrationalizable
inter-epistemic breaks, or parallel formations in Bachelard and in Althusser.
27. See Terdiman, Body and Story, 174–85.
28. “As the idea of the world, philosophy appears only after objective reality completes its formative
process and has been accomplished. . . . When philosophy paints its grisaille, it has the shape of a life
grown old; and with the gray-on-gray life cannot rejuvenate, only comprehend. The owl of Minerva
begins its flight only at the coming of dusk.” G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M.
Knox (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), 13; see also Terdiman, Body and Story, 1.
29. See esp. Georges Bataille, “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” in Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 105–15.
30. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973).
31. “Force of Law,” 271–72. As I have already suggested, this is the view Foucault came to in his later
work in his abandonment of the theory of the episteme and the epistemic break. It is likewise in effect
the position that Habermas adopts in conceiving of the “ideal speech situation,” in which something
like the Lyotardian “differend” or unresolvable difference is never absolute and can be worked on in
discourse and moved toward some form of resolution or reconciliation.
32. In “Force of Law” Derrida approvingly recalls Kierkegaard’s characterization of the instant of
decision as “a madness” (255). This constitutive irrationality is fundamental in Derrida’s conceptualiza-
tion of the decision and the event it produces.
33. I analyzed the liberatory dynamic within poststructuralism in “On the Dialectics of Post-Dia-
lectical Thinking,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. James Creech (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1991), 111–20.
34. For a resume and discussion of the Hegelian and Marxian counter-position on this issue, often
identified with a notion that conceives “freedom” as the “recognition of necessity,” see Terdiman, Body
and Story, 184 n. 30.
35. To my knowledge, its first appearance in Derrida’s work was in Specters of Marx, xx. See Kant,
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), 3rd ed., trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1993), 40. Derrida analyzes the passage in Rogues, 133. On the importance of this theme in
Kant’s ethics, see also Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), 48.
36. The first main section of Hegel’s Logic (1812–16) which deals with the doctrine of Being is
divided into three subsections: Quality, Quantity, and Measure; Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1969). The overall strategy of Hegel’s argument is to show that the defini-
tional distinction between these concepts (particularly the first two) is never absolute, but points to a
common essence underlying these dialectically-related forms of appearance.
Hayes / Derrida’s Enlightenment-to-Come 443
Unconditional Translation:
Derrida’s Enlightenment-to-Come
Julie Candler Hayes
le ‘XVIIIe siècle français’ . . . si quelque chose de tel existe
De la grammatologie
la déconstruction, si quelque chose de tel existait
Voyous
It was never about the usual set of assumptions, scholarly and otherwise,
that accompany notions of the eighteenth century: Age of Reason, Age of Senti-
ment, preromanticism, Revolution, crise de conscience européenne—or the best of
times, the worst of times. Instead, Derrida pronounced the “eighteenth century”
to be the site of a combat, a disturbing new and singular awareness of “the prob-
lem of writing.” From questions of the origins of language posed by Rousseau,
Condillac, and others in De la grammatologie, to the relationship between the
Molyneux problem and the history of phenomenology in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Derrida’s long engagement with eighteenth-century figures continues to
provoke new readings and reflections on their work. If I were writing a history of
the past quarter century of eighteenth-century studies, I would want to dissect the
striking confluence in the late 1960s and early 70s of widely differing projects by
Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Barthes—to name the most obvious—that fore-
grounded figures such as Rousseau, Leibniz, Condillac, the Encyclopedists, and
Sade, or recast “the eighteenth century” with respect to the classical episteme. I
Julie Candler Hayes is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Languages,
Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is currently com-
pleting a book project titled Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England,
1600–1800.

would also consider the extraordinary outpouring of scholarship on early modern

language theory and on the eighteenth century’s constructions of meaning, both
literary and theoretical, that emerged in the wake of the theoretical work. Like an
earlier generation of modernist composers, both philosophers and scholars found
in their own “return to the eighteenth century” a powerful resource for question-
ing the totalizing frameworks—narrative, philosophical, and aesthetic—inherited
from the nineteenth century.1
My present task is more circumscribed: to look not at Derrida’s relation
to the world of texts produced between 1700 and 1799, but rather at his formula-
tions and reformulations of a concept both rooted in and extending beyond the
eighteenth century: Enlightenment. I initially thought that a comment on Derrida’s
late essay, “Le ‘Monde’ des Lumières à venir (Exception, calcul et souveraineté)”
from Voyous, would be a relatively simple matter, if only for the brief, relatively
self-contained format of the essay, and because I intended to focus on the single
question of explicating the phrase “Enlightenment-to-come.” It is hardly a “single
question,” however. The Lumières à venir—I hesitate between the English singular
expression and the French plural—have a widely ramified genealogy that extends
back at least to seminars in the late 1980s that would see print in Spectres de Marx
(1993) and Politiques de l’amitié (1994), and other texts in which Derrida’s engage-
ment with both classical and contemporary political theory became increasingly
explicit. I propose, first, to outline that genealogy in Derrida’s works of the 1990s,
then to look more closely at the place of Enlightenment in Voyous. In conclusion,
I will consider Enlightenment’s relationship with another longstanding theme in
Derrida’s work, translation.
The reference to Enlightenment arises in Spectres de Marx in the context
of Derrida’s distinction between two forms of Marxism, on the one hand as a “pré-
tendue totalité systématique, métaphysique ou ontologique” [supposed systemic,
metaphysical, or ontological totality], and on the other as “en principe et d’abord
une critique radicale, à savoir une démarche prête à son autocritique” [in principle
and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-
critique] that represents the legacy of “un esprit des Lumières auquel il ne faut
pas renoncer” [a spirit of the Enlightenment which must not be renounced].2 The
Enlightenment echo is all the stronger inasmuch as this distinction closely parallels
that of the eighteenth century between a dogmatic esprit de système and an open-
ended, critical esprit systématique. A few pages later, the idea of “interminable
self-critique” takes on the ambitious shape of “the new International,” not yet
fully constituted, a call to resist dogmatism “au nom de nouvelles Lumières pour
le siècle à venir” [in the name of a new Enlightenment for the century to come].3
Similarly, a short piece from the late 90s will call for “nouvelles Lumières” and “une
résistance à jamais irrédentiste aux pouvoirs d’appropriation économique, média-
tique, politique, aux dogmatismes de toute sorte” [a forever irredentist resistance
to the powers of economic, media, and political appropriation, to dogmatism of
every kind].4 Politiques de l’amitié ends with an invocation of “des Lumières d’une
certaine Aufklärung” [the Enlightenment of a certain Aufklärung]; an Enlighten-
ment that seeks not to “found” its claims, but rather to open itself to the future,
l’avenir, or more precisely to the viens, the gesture of hospitality and, ultimately, of
a promise.5 In both these works, the references are to Enlightenment as the “new
International” or “new Enlightenment”; the expression Lumières à venir has not

yet emerged. The futurity implied in the references to le siècle à venir and even
venir, however, prepares the way.
Some references to les Lumières are clearly historical or indicate the dual
use of “Enlightenment” as historical and as conceptual. In a 1997 talk on “Le
Livre à venir” given at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Derrida reflects on the “desa-
cralization” of the book as part of an “interminable histoire des Lumières ou de la
Raison (avant et au-delà de l’Aufklärung)” [interminable history of Enlightenment
or Reason (before and beyond the Aufklärung)].6 In L’Université sans condition
(2001), where “nothing is sheltered from questioning,” the “New Humanities”
are described as coming in a direct line of descent from a historically located age
of Enlightenment, invoked in multiple languages—“Aufklärung, Enlightenment,
Illuminismo, Ilustración, Iluminismo”—as fundamental to humanity.7 Lumières
continues to be associated throughout with self-critique, not only as a legacy from
a specific past moment, but also and increasingly as an injunction for the future.
Nearly all the references to Enlightenment, whether historical or not, are closely
associated with one of the most pregnant phrases of Derrida’s writings since
the late 80s, the “democracy-to-come.” Derrida’s writing on democracy and on
democracy-to-come in particular have been the subject of much commentary in
recent years—in particular at the 2002 Cerisy conference on “La Démocratie à
venir (autour de Jacques Derrida)” at which the first of the two essays in Voyous,
“La Raison du plus fort (Y a-t-il des Etats voyous?)” [The Reason of the Strongest
(Are There Rogue States?)], was originally presented.
It thus seems clear that in the decade following the publication of Spectres,
the “democracy-to-come” exercised a gravitational pull on the “New Enlighten-
ment,” shifting the focus from the historical, however idealized Enlightenment,
that might be renewed or continue to inspire action in the present, to an ahistorical
Enlightenment situated in the never-fully-present à-venir, even as it continues to
bear the trace of the historical moment. In the conclusion to Politiques de l’amitié,
Derrida speaks of “opening democracy to the future,” ouvrir à l’avenir, then modu-
lates the expression by insisting on its relation to viens, “come,” expressed as an
invitation: “au ‘viens’ d’une certaine démocratie” (339). He goes on to say that
la démocratie reste à venir, c’est là son essence en tant qu’elle reste: non
seulement elle restera indéfiniment perfectible, donc toujours insuf-
fisante & future mais, appartenant au temps de la promesse, elle restera
toujours, en chacun de ses temps futurs, à venir: même quand il y a la
démocratie, celle-ci n’existe jamais, elle n’est jamais présente, elle reste le
thème d’un concept non présentable. (Politiques de l’amitié, 339)
For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains:

not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient
and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always re-
main, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy,
it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-present-
able concept. (Politics of Friendship, 306)
In a recent article, Alex Thompson glosses the phrase “democracy to come” as

“a pledge of faith in something attested to in democracy, in both the history of
the concept and in the democracies of the contemporary world.”8 As he notes, its
appearance beginning in the late 1980s suggests that it also arose in response to
“the demand for deconstruction’s political secret.” Clearly, though, the “to-come”
bespeaks an effort to walk between the lines of historical locatedness and idealizing
abstraction. Derrida further underscores democracy’s “promise” in an interview
given in 2000, observing that democracy’s simultaneous “historicity” and “infi-
nite (and essentially aporetic) perfectibility” and its originary link to “a promise”
make of it “une chose à-venir.”9 The openness suggested by the invitation “viens”
is further borne out by the link between democracy-to-come and what is called
“public space” in the published English version (or, in what might be a more apt
translation, “public sphere,” l’espace public being the usual French translation
of Habermas’s Öffentlichkeit). In the “unconditional university,” l’espace public
provides the link between the “new Humanities” and the historical Enlightenment,
l’époque des Lumières.10
Readers need not hunt unaided for the trail of the democracy-to-come in
Derrida’s earlier work, however, because he offers his own genealogy and extensive
elaboration of the expression in Voyous. He tells us that he used the expression
for the first time in Du droit à la philosophie (1990) and goes on to trace its usage
through the works of the succeeding decade.11 This is far from the only recapitula-
tory moment in Voyous. Beginning with a passage in the preface in which he retraces
the concept of Khôra through his works from the 1990s,12 a series of renvois,
clarifications, and even settling of accounts, often carried out in the footnotes, gives
both essays in the volume what can only seem now a certain valedictory tone. Take,
for example, a “passing” comment in the midst of the explication of démocratie
à venir that there was simply no such thing as a “political turn” or “ethical turn”
(both expressions appear in English in the French text) in deconstruction in the
1980s and 90s. Instead, Derrida insists on reinscribing democracy to come in some
of the earliest terminology associated with his work:
Si tout renvoi est différantiel, et si la trace est un synonyme pour ce ren-

voi, alors il y a toujours de la trace de démocratie, toute trace est trace de
démocratie. De démocratie il ne saurait y avoir que trace. C’est dans cette
direction que plus tard je tenterai une relecture du syntagme “démocratie
à venir.” (Voyous, 64)
If every send-off is differantial, and if the trace is a synonym for this

send-off, then there is always some trace of democracy; indeed every
trace is a trace of democracy. Of democracy there could only be but a
trace. It is in this sense that I will later attempt a rereading of the syn-
tagma “democracy to come.” (Rogues, 39)
While “trace,” “differance,” and “à-venir” have in common a reference to the

fugitive linguistic flickering between now and then, presence and absence, as ex-
plored in Derrida’s early work, certainly the renvoi now restages that early work
in the light of later preoccupations. The logic is both referential and differential:
“democracy” and “trace” cannot be assumed under a single identity—both terms
question and open up the notion of identity—but the act of re-reading allows them
to resonate together across time.
A renvoi is not only a performative “send-off,” as Derrida’s translators
have it, but also a simple scholarly reference or cross-reference. As such, it under-
scores a very specific sort of self-referential thread in Voyous: in addition to the

self-consciousness that usually is taken to be a hallmark of his style, the writing
is “referential” in the most classical scholarly sense, with passages offering the
philosopher’s personal bibliography of when and where he developed certain
topics or used certain terms. If “tout renvoi est différantiel,” then Derrida’s own
retrospective survey, like any other, has the effect of changing the objects within
its purview, setting them in new relationships to one another, bringing out features
not previously recognized.
In a rather startlingly defensive note near the end of the second essay,
Derrida responds witheringly to the unnamed author of a piece in a “pathetic
Parisian tabloid” [affligeant tabloïd parisien], who had pronounced the notion
of “unconditional hospitality” to be “absurd.” He goes on to give an extensive
bibliography of his discussions of the subject, complete with page numbers, and
enjoins his hapless critic to “read everything!”—“tout lire et au besoin relire!”13
One page later, another long footnote undertakes “quelques précisions” regard-
ing the relationship between deconstruction and the concept of reason, through
a series of numbered points, concluding on the affinity of deconstruction and cri-
tique: “La déconstruction ne cherche pas à discréditer la critique, elle en relégitime
sans cesse la nécessité et l’héritage, mais elle ne renonce jamais à la généalogie de
l’idée critique, non plus qu’à l’histoire de la question et du privilège supposé de la
pensée interrogative” [Deconstruction does not seek to discredit critique; it in fact
constantly relegitimates its necessity and heritage, even though it never renounces
either a genealogy of the critical idea or a history of the question and of the supposed
privilege of interrogative thought].14 Here, the only reference to a specific work is
to De la grammatologie, though as Derrida notes all his points have been the object
of “numerous publications over the course of the last four decades.” While both
essays in Voyous contain multiple references to a wide range of Derrida’s previ-
ous works in the main text, these extended self-referential footnotes in the second
essay—particularly those that comment on “the last four decades”—resemble a
sort of settling of accounts.
The settling of the past takes place alongside the unsettling of the future.
A-venir, entangled as it is with venir, devenir, the invitation “viens,” the singularity
of the “event” and the alterity inscribed in “invention,” extends beyond futurity
or any form of predictability. As Derrida explains in the first of the two essays, the
à venir of democracy-to-come “not only points to the promise but suggests that
democracy will never exist, in the sense of present existence: not because it will be
deferred, but because it will always remain aporetic in its structure.”15 We are told
that à venir (or even the “à” of à venir) hesitates between “imperative injunction”
and the “patient perhaps” of a nonperformative messianicity.16 As I have suggested,
much of the conceptual work of democracy-to-come shifts, in the second of the
two essays in Voyous, to Enlightenment-to-come. Let us turn to Voyous.
“Le ‘Monde’ des Lumières à venir” follows “La Raison du plus fort (Y
a-t-il des Etats voyous?).” In the first piece, given at Cerisy in the summer of 2002
(which, of the two, has received the most critical attention so far), Derrida entwines
an extended explication of the expression démocratie à venir with an elaboration of
what might appear to be democracy’s others: on the one hand suicidal democracy,
turning on itself, autoimmune, and on the other the “rogue states” denounced by
recent American administrations. Through the French translation of the English

expression, états voyous, however, the subversive figure of the voyou comes to
complicate the grand designs of “les plus forts” and to fissure the classical notion
of unconditional sovereignty in the name of the democracy to come. Derrida’s
one-word title reminds us of the hidden complexity in translation. Starting from
an English expression literally translated into French (in what translators call a
calque), the nuance created by the French term makes back translation—a trans-
lation of a translation—into English difficult. The English word “rogue,” with
a history reaching back to the sixteenth century, connotations ranging from the
abusive to the affectionate, and usages extending to botany and animal behavior,
lacks the etymological and historical specificity of voyou. The French term is a
nineteenth-century coinage stemming from voie, “public street,” and quickly calls
to mind the Parisian underclass, youth violence, and popular uprisings. Though
it bespeaks roughly the same historical and sociological phenomena as the word
gamin (remember Victor Hugo’s Gavroche), its connotations are pejorative, even
menacing.17
The second essay, “Le ‘Monde’ des Lumières à venir (Exception, calcul et
souveraineté)” [The “World” of the Enlightenment-to-Come (Exception, Calcula-
tion, Sovereignty)], reworks the notion of Lumières that emerged in the course of
Derrida’s work in the 1990s. Many of the questions from the first part of Voyous
recur in various forms in the second, which was given a few weeks later at the
conference of the Association des sociétés de philosophie de langue française [As-
sociation of Societies for Philosophy in French] meeting in Nice in summer 2002.
The maritime location, the mixed cultural heritage of the Mediterranean city (“une
ville française au nom grec transi de guerre,” 168), and, especially, the focus on
“philosophy in French” are all brought to bear on the effort to, in Kant’s phrase,
“save the honor of reason.”
In a sense, the structure of the essay is contained in the terms of its title.
The “world” of the Enlightenment to come is the “world” construed as Kantian
regulatory Idea: systematic, unified, and unifying; it is also the monde of mondi-
alisation—globalization as well as worlding, a world-in-progress whose trajectory
cannot be neatly contained by any regulatory idea.18 Examining the tensions be-
tween various classical accounts of rationality (architectonics, teleology, paradigm,
episteme) and the absolutely other, singular “event” that they seek to exclude,
Derrida questions the totalizing mastery of the architectonic “world” in the name
of multiple, heterogeneous “rationalities” (Voyous, 171; Rogues, 121). He recasts
reason’s “grounding” as “running aground” both accidentally and on purpose,
échouement and échouage (Voyous, 172–73; Rogues, 121–22), the former bespeak-
ing the unplanned, uncalculated event and the latter, the deliberate choice to lose
oneself (but save one’s honor) through self-destruction, autoimmunity. “World” thus
expresses two very different concepts: both the architectonic forces that neutralize
the event, and the arrival of the event that destabilizes the system. How are the
“great transcendental and teleological rationalisms” able to “expose themselves”
to make a place for “the event of what comes” (Voyous, 188; Rogues, 135)? The
problem becomes how to align (accorder) the unforeseen unconditionality of the
event with a form of reason unlike any described so far, whether classical reason,
regulatory Idea, or unconditional sovereignty.
The second part of the essay seeks to save the honor of reason by disso-
ciating sovereignty and unconditionality, or by deconstructing sovereignty “in the
name of the Enlightenment to come” (Voyous, 196–97; Rogues, 142). Echoing his
introductory citation of the words of the late philosopher Dominique Janicaud,
“Saisir l’incalculable dans le règne du calcul” [To grasp the Incalculable within the
general order of calculation] (Voyous, 165; Rogues, 117), Derrida considers ways
in which the calculations of scientific reason and law are constantly exceeded by
their own ethic: just as the drive for unconditional knowledge, il faut le savoir, is
fundamentally in tension with any and all imperatives, including “il faut” (Voyous,
199; Rogues, 145), so too the call for unconditional justice exceeds law (Voyous,
205; Rogues, 149). The heterogeneity of justice and law—and the ongoing need of
one for the other—enables us to conceive other forms of unconditionality without
sovereignty that occupied much of Derrida’s late work, such as “unconditional
hospitality,” the gift, and pardon, and opens a space for “the incalculable singularity
of the other” (Voyous, 207; Rogues, 150) and “the unconditionality of the excep-
tion,” an “exception” being no longer determined by the “sovereign” (Voyous, 212;
Rogues, 154). While seeking to delimit the claims of state sovereignty by calling
on it to take the incalculable—here cast as the unconscious—into account, Derrida
stakes out a middle way between the raison d’état of unconditional sovereignty
and its equally unconditional—and “unreasonable”—opposition.
This middle ground is the Enlightenment-to-come. As I noted earlier, the
expression Lumières à venir appears to take over from démocratie à venir in this
second of the “two essays on reason” constituting Voyous. In addition to numer-
ous invocations of the term throughout, near the essay’s end Derrida identifies the
Enlightenment-to-come with the democracy-to-come, and indeed with his critique
of unconditional sovereignty and the entire deconstructive project:
Car la déconstruction, si quelque chose de tel existait, cela resterait à mes

yeux, avant tout, un rationalisme inconditionnel qui ne renonce jamais,
précisément au nom des Lumières à venir, dans l’espace à ouvrir d’une
démocratie à venir, à suspendre de façon argumentée, discutée, ratio-
nnelle, toutes les conditions, les hypothèses, les conventions et les présup-
positions, à critiquer inconditionnellement toutes les conditionalités, y
compris celles qui fondent encore l’idée critique. (Voyous, 197)
For deconstruction, if something of the sort exists, would remain above

all, in my view, an unconditional rationalism that never renounces—and
precisely in the name of the Enlightenment to come, in the space to be
opened up of a democracy to come—the possibility of suspending in an
argued, deliberated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conven-
tions, and presuppositions, and criticizing unconditionally all condition-
alities, including those that still found the critical idea. (Rogues, 142)
Although it seems unlikely to have been a deliberate allusion, the echo from De
la grammatologie (“le ‘XVIIIe siècle français’ . . . si quelque chose de tel existait”)
reminds us that, like “the eighteenth century,” “deconstruction” also is construed
from a range of assumptions and changing points of view: hence the need for
careful definitions and a renewed commitment to “unconditional rationalism.”
Derrida’s embrace of Enlightenment stands in contrast to Husserl’s avoidance of
it in his 1935 warning of the “crisis of European thought.” In criticizing the forces
of “irrationalism,” Husserl sought to distance himself from “a certain rationalism,

a certain Enlightenment,” a fetishized Enlightenment that he disparaged as the
Aufklärerei—“ce must des Lumières,” as Derrida puts it. Husserl would rather
avoid rehabilitating (saving the honor of) this “Aufklärung de bon marché” (Voy-
ous, 181; Rogues, 129) and is thus caught in the ambiguous position of critiquing
both rationalism and irrationalism. The present-day “crisis,” Derrida suggests,
requires a new approach.
As we have seen in Derrida’s references to the historical Enlightenment or
to the “new Enlightenment,” he shows no such ambivalence and no such willingness
to identify Enlightenment with either totalizing or fetishizing forms of reason. As
early as Spectres de Marx, the Enlightenment tradition is evoked as self-reflexive
critique. But what distinguishes the Enlightenment-to-come, Lumières à venir,
from either historical or “new” Enlightenment? Part of the answer lies in the shift
elsewhere in Derrida’s terminology when the “new International” in Spectres is
superseded by “democracy-to-come,” which pulls the other in its wake. If Enlight-
enment-to-come is to Enlightenment as democracy-to-come is to democracy, then,
as Marie-Louise Mallet says of democracy-to-come,
pas plus que le droit n’est adéquat à la justice, aucune soi-disant démo-
cratie de fait, aucune figure déterminée de la démocratie n’est adéquate à
une certaine “idée” de la démocratie. . . . Cependant, malgré cette faillite
ou cette inadéquation irréductible, il faut sans doute tenter de garder vi-
vante la tradition ou l’héritage de ces noms, “démocratie,” “justice,” etc.
not any more than law is adequate to justice, no so-called democracy in

existence, no specific figure of democracy is adequate to a certain “idea”
of democracy. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of that failure or irreducible in-
adequation, one must without a doubt attempt to keep alive the tradition
or legacy of these words “democracy,” “justice,” and so on.19
So too the “tradition or legacy” of the historical Enlightenment remains before us,
its promise unfulfilled. As John Caputo puts it, à venir implies by definition that
which does not come, as in certain rabbinic traditions in which the Messiah does
not come, but remains forever expected, imminent, and incomplete; such is “la
structure même de l’attente et de temps historique, de l’espérance et de la promesse,
de la foi et du futur” [the very structure of expectation and of historical time, of
hope and of promise, of faith and of the future].20 Caputo goes on to ask whether,
indeed, all the various forms of the à venir—not only democracy-to-come, but also
hospitality-to-come, the gift-to-come—are ultimately the same? Do they converge
at some future point? And yet the to-come is neither an idealizing abstraction nor
a “datable future,” but rather “a demand, an expectation, a hope, a desire.”21 To
remain forever “to come,” à venir, is to remain an “event”: singular, incalculable,
ready to interrupt and transform the present. For all its eventual singularity, how-
ever, I would argue that each figure of the à venir remains recognizable, attached
to a real exigency, a real practice or a historical moment. Enlightenment propels
Enlightenment-to-come.
One of the distinguishing features of this particular figure of the à venir
is its concern with language. Derrida refers more than once to the occasion of his
lecture, the meeting of the Association of Societies for Philosophy in French, won-
dering, as he often has in the past,22 just what it means to be doing philosophy in
French—and suggesting that his effort to “save the honor of reason” is not simply
“in the French language,” but “in the name of the French language” (Voyous, 168;
Rogues, 119). Part of what is at stake for Derrida as he lectures in Nice, on the
edge of the Mediterranean contact zone, is to reflect on the crossroads of languages
in the philosophical tradition, particularly French/Latin, Greek, and German. For
example, observing that the Latin roots of French make visible the affiliations
among event, venir, devenir, etc., he acknowledges the difficulty of translating
the semantic network (Voyous, 197; Rogues, 143), and elsewhere the resonances
among languages and philosophical traditions point toward the potential for con-
ceptual confusion. Having shown the problems attendant on the idea—variously
expressed by philosophers as different as Husserl and Descartes—that reason, like
the sun shining on the earth, is “the one reason” (Voyous, 194; Rogues, 140)—he
must now find a way for heterogeneous rationalities to speak to one another. Is
translation ultimately possible?
Everything hinges on this question, as Derrida makes quite clear at the
outset of the lecture. Commenting on his own use of French, a Romance language
“déjà surchargée de traductions” [already burdened with translations] he hints
that the “experience of translation” will be shown to be key to “tout le destin de
la raison, c’est-à-dire l’universalité mondiale à venir” [the entire destiny of reason,
that is of the global universality to come] (Voyous, 168; Rogues, 119). Or a few
pages later, a juxtaposition of German and Latin discourses on reason suggests not
“transparent equivalency” but rather the “hypothetical and problematic univer-
sal translatability that is one of the fundamental stakes of reason” (Voyous, 172;
Rogues, 122). In other words, the series of supposedly (but not entirely) congruent
terms from different philosophical traditions reminds us both of the unarticulated
assumption that such terms are completely reversible onto one another, and—by
virtue of the juxtaposition—of their different semantic weight and the different
conceptual schemes in which they arise. The “hypothesis” of universal translat-
ability is no less necessary for being shown to be problematic. Translation is further
thematized through the conscientious naming of the translators whose work Derrida
cites23 and through further juxtapositions of terms in French, English, German,
Greek, and Latin. The semantic slipperiness of different linguistic and philosophi-
cal traditions is salutary: it aids our understanding by preventing us from fixing
on individual terms, thereby proposing a “pedagogy” for thought (Voyous, 203;
Rogues, 148).
Ultimately, this “essay on reason” offers us a rationality that should be
“reasoned with” in order to become “reasonable.” The final question is one of
translation:
Il reste à savoir, pour sauver l’honneur de la raison, comment traduire.

Par exemple le mot “raisonnable.” Et comment saluer, au-delà de sa
latinité, dans plus d’une langue, la différence fragile entre le rationnel et
le raisonnable. (Voyous, 217)
It remains to be known, so as to save the honor of reason, how to trans-

late. For example, the word “reasonable.” And how to pay one’s respects
to, how to salute or greet [saluer], beyond its latinity, and in more than
one language, the fragile difference between the rational and the reason-
able. (Rogues, 159)
Reason reasons, and this is the source of its identity, its sovereign self-sameness—but
to make reason see reason, it must be “reasoned with”: questioned, subjected to
ongoing critique, engaged in an ongoing dialogue with that which comes from
without. “Une raison doit se laisser raisonner” [A reason must let itself be reasoned
with].24 Such is the imperative of the Enlightenment-to-come.
How to translate? Reading backwards from “The ‘World’ of the Enlighten-
ment to Come,” with its foregrounding of translation as one of reason’s fundamental
stakes, sets us on a different and much longer path from that which we followed in
search of the antecedents of references to Enlightenment and democracy. To retrace
the many steps of Derrida’s reflections on translation would take us to the early
comments on the topic in Positions, the extended footnote-to-the-translator in the
essay “Living On/ Borderlines,” the debates in L’oreille de l’autre, the analysis of
Benjamin in “Des Tours de Babel,” the meditation on language and (non)belonging
in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, recent reflections on hospitality, on “welcoming
the other in his or her language”25—and to many other texts besides. The 1982
roundtable discussion on translation in L’Oreille de l’autre, in which a panel of
critics engages Derrida on the relevance to translation of much of his work from
the 1970s, is a strong reminder of the significance of Derrida’s writing prior to “Des
Tours de Babel” for translation theory.26 Other texts analyze entire discourses in
terms of their own inherent structures of “translation”: psychoanalysis in “Moi—la
psychanalyse” and philosophy in Du droit à la philosophie.27
Leitmotivic references to translation occur throughout Le Toucher, Jean-
Luc Nancy, with a series of questions concerning the French “translation” (literally
and conceptually) of Husserl. As Derrida puts it, these are “problèmes de traduction
qui ne sont pas seulement des ‘problèmes-de-traduction’” [translation problems that
are not merely “translation-problems”].28 In one of the final chapters, “translation”
opens the door to all kinds of relations and passages-between: from questions of
“transition et de transitivité, de transfert figural” to “le passage comme la Passion,
l’Incarnation, la Transsubstantiation, le hoc est enim corpus meum,” and ultimately
a reflection on and rewriting of Lévinas’s concept of “substitution.”29 Speculating
about the profound differences between languages in which “touch” functions as
a sign for all the senses, and those in which it does not, Derrida concludes, “Le
toucher: l’intraduisible.”30 “Touch” is untranslatable on the one hand because of
its dissimilar semantic fields in various languages, and on the other because, as
Derrida’s painstaking explication of Nancy and the entire phenomenological tra-
dition makes clear, “touch” both is and is not contact, carrying-over, union—it is
also restraint, contiguity, separateness. As are words that call out to one another
from different languages.
And yet translation occurs, constantly, even as “l’intraduisible demeure,”
in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre: while translation can never make restitution of
the “singular event of the original,” taking its place so entirely that it is forgotten,
it reminds us of our alienation from the language which we inhabit the most inti-
mately.31 Translating into the language of Voyous, we might say that, just as justice
exceeds law, so the unconditional exigency of translation exceeds the impossibility
of translation. Translation thus reflects the same “aporetic structure” as democracy-
to-come, as Enlightenment-to-come. If language itself is likened to a “promise” in

Le Monolinguisme de l’autre,32 so is translation in “Des Tours de Babel.” Reflecting
on Benjamin’s notion of translation as a gesture towards the ultimate “reconcilia-
tion” of languages, Derrida observes that the reconciliation remains to some degree
“untouchable” inasmuch as it is only promised—but concludes nevertheless that
“une promesse n’est pas rien” [a promise is not nothing].33
Derrida’s major statement on translation in the 1980s, “Des Tours de
Babel,” offers another possible brief, glancing contact—“tangent” in the language
of Le Toucher—between translation, on the one hand, and democracy and Enlight-
enment, on the other. Commenting on Benjamin’s discussion of texts that contain
their translation, whether or not it is ever realized, Derrida speaks of the à-traduire
of a text. Though rendered as “to-be-translated” by Joseph Graham,34 the echo of
Derrida’s later writing reveals the phrase as a figure or foreshadowing of the à venir.
The à-traduire is one of Derrida’s renderings of Benjamin’s Überleben, sur-vie, living
on or “afterlife” in Harry Zohn’s translation of “The Task of the Translator.” As
he observes, Benjamin conceives that afterlife as both problematic—the translator
capable of the task may never appear—and apodictic: absolutely necessary, a priori
demonstrable, a structural desire for the other, a translator, that is intrinsic to origi-
nal.35 This relationship of the finitude of “life” to the exigency of “afterlife” will
recur, as we have seen, with a shift in emphasis from the apodictic to the aporetic,
in the relationship of justice to law, in the Enlightenment-to-come.
The promise implied in both à-traduire and à-venir is one of survival and
future hope. As Derrida wrote (and James Hulbert translated) in his 1977 essay
“Living On/ Borderlines,”
Übersetzung and “translation” overcome, equivocally, in the course of

an equivocal combat, the loss of an object. A text lives only if it lives on
[sur-vit], and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslat-
able. . . . Totally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body
of language [langue]. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed
to be one language, it dies immediately. The triumphant translation is
neither the life nor the death of the text, only or already its living on, its
life after life, its life after death.36
Derrida turned again to Benjamin in his last interview for Le Monde in August 2004,
with further thoughts about Überleben, surviving a death, and Fortleben, living on,
noting that, while the terms might take on a particular coloration for him at that
moment, all of his work had been criss-crossed by both senses of “survival” in its
structural dimension, independent of both life and death. Survival, he emphasizes,
is not concerned with death or the past, but with life and with the future: “tout le
temps, la déconstruction est du côté du oui, de l’affirmation de la vie” [at all times,
deconstruction is on the side of Yes, of the affirmation of life].37
Where does all this leave us, as we live on and continue to reflect on
Enlightenment past and Enlightenment-to-come? What does it mean, “to learn to
translate” in the context of unconditional critique? Translation seems so obviously
“conditioned,” both by the existence of a prior text and by the world in which it
circulates and to whose expectations it responds. Yet even that conditioning stems
from what Derek Attridge calls “the inventive singularity” of the source text,
which opens itself anew to each successive reader and incites new responses.38 Un-
conditional translation takes place in the open-ended conversation between texts,

beginning now, extending indefinitely. It is an offer of hospitality, allowing our
language to be permeated with the discourse of another. The à-traduire—or as we
might call it today, the translation-to-come—is a call for dialogue between our own
language (which we never possess) and an “indefinitely perfectible” understanding,
or reconciliation, in the future.
Notes
I am grateful to Del McWhorter for her judicious comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. See Edward W. Said’s posthumous essay on the “eighteenth-century” operas of Britten, Weill,
Stravinsky, and Strauss, “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” in On Late Style: Music and Literature
Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 25–47.
2. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 145; Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 88.
3. Spectres, 149; Specters, 90.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Mes ‘humanités’ de dimanche,” in Papier machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 330;
“My Sunday ‘Humanities,’” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2005), 107.
5. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 339; Politics of Friendship, trans.
George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 306.
6. Jacques Derrida, “Le Livre à venir,” in Papier machine, 24; “The Book to Come,” in Paper
Machine, 12.
7. Jacques Derrida, L’Université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 12; “The University without
Condition,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 203.
8. Alex Thompson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?” Postmodern Culture 15.3 (2005)
sec.19.
9. Jacques Derrida, “Autrui est secret parce qu’il est autre,” Papier machine, 371; “Others are
secret because they are Other,” Paper machine, 139. See also in the same volume “Non pas l’utopie,
l’im-possible,” 359–60; “Not Utopia, the Im-possible,” 129–30.
10. L’Université sans condition, 16; “The University without Condition,” 205.
11. Jacques Derrida, Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 120; Rogues: Two
Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005),
81–82.
12. Voyous, 14; Rogues, 163, n.8.
13. Voyous, 204–5n.; Rogues, 173, n.12.
14. Voyous, 207n.; Rogues, 174–75, n.14.
15. Voyous, 126; Rogues, 86.
16. Voyous, 132; Rogues, 91. Derrida’s notion of a messianism “without content and without
identifiable messiah” goes back to Spectres, 56; Specters, 28.
17. Noting the continuities between nineteenth-century usage and contemporary urban realities—re-
alities more visible in the world’s eyes than ever, since the events in the Parisian suburbs in the fall of
2005—Derrida observes, “Aujourd’hui, le voyou traîne parfois sur les voies et sur les voiries en voiture,
quand il ne les vole pas ou ne les brûle pas, lesdites voitures.” Voyous, 97.
18. As Derrida notes elsewhere: “Je garde le mot français de ‘mondialisation’ pour ‘globalization’
ou ‘Globalisierung’ afin de maintenir la référence à un ‘monde’ (world, Welt, mundus) qui n’est ni le
globe, ni le cosmos, ni l’univers.” L’Université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 12–13.
19. Marie-Louise Mallet, “Avant-propos,” La Démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris:
Galilée, 2004), 9. My translation.
20. John D. Caputo, “L’Idée même de l’à venir,” in Mallet, ed., La Démocratie à venir, 300–301.
21. Caputo, 304. My translation.
22. As in Derrida’s 1984 Toronto lectures on Descartes and “philosophy in its natural language,”
published as “Transfert ex cathedra: le langage et les institutions philosophiques,” in Du droit à la
philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990, 281–394; “Transfer ex cathedra: Institutions of Philosophy,” in Eyes
of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004),
1–80.
23. While Derrida’s first reference to a translator is maintained, presumably because he refers to the
translator as a friend (Voyous, 182; Rogues, 130), his reference to the French translator of Plato whom
he cites (Voyous, 192) is elided in the English version.
24. Voyous, 217; Rogues, 159.
25. Jacques Derrida, “De l’hospitalité” (interview), in Sur parole: Instantanés philosophiques (Paris:
Editions de l’aube, 2005), 73. My translation.
26. That relevance continues to be apparent in a recent discussion of deconstruction and transla-
tion that gives as much space to the notion of différance as to “Des Tours de Babel.” Edwin Gentzler,
Contemporary Translation Theories, 2nd ed. (Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 157–67.
See also Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome Publishing,
2001).
27. Jacques Derrida, “Moi—la psychanalyse,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987),
145–58; Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 48–53. In the latter, the discussion of
the need for intralinguistic “translation” falls in the subchapter on “La Démocratie à venir,” indicating
an early connection between the two.
28. Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 204n.; On Touching—Jean-
Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 350, n.13.
29. Le Toucher, 290–93; On Touching, 260–62
30. Le Toucher, 69; On Touching, 55.
31. Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 100ff; The Monolingualism
of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).
32. “Chaque fois que j’ouvre la bouche, chaque fois que je parle ou écris, je promets. . . . Le performatif
de cette promesse n’est pas un speech act parmi d’autres. Il est impliqué par tout autre performatif; et
cette promesse annonce l’unicité d’une langue à venir. C’est le ‘il faut qu’il y ait une langue’ [qui sous-
entend nécessairement: ‘car elle n’existe pas,’ ou ‘puisqu’elle fait défaut’], ‘je promets une langue,’ ‘une
langue est promise’ qui à la fois précède toute langue, appelle toute parole et appartient déjà à chaque
langue comme à toute parole” (Monolinguisme, 126–27).
33. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 235; “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph Graham, in Difference in Transla-
tion, 191. (The essay later appeared in Psyché, 203–33.)
34. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours” [French version], 224; “Des Tours” [English version], 180.
35. “Des Tours” [French], 225; “Des Tours” [English], 181.
36. Jacques Derrida, “Living On/ Borderlines,” trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., De-
construction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 102–103n. (The date 1977 is that given at
the beginning of Derrida’s extended “footnote,” with a dedication to Jacques Ehrmann in recollection
of Derrida’s first visit to Yale.)
37. Jacques Derrida, “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même,” interview by Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde,
August 19, 2004.
38. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 74.
Aravamudan / Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues 457
Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues
Srinivas Aravamudan
La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure

Nous l’allons montrer tout à l’heure.
La Fontaine, Le Loup et L’Agneau
Veni!
Echo to Narcissus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses
In one of his last works, Voyous (Rogues), Jacques Derrida delivers a

meditation on “reason” and “sovereignty,” the twin conceptual legacies of the
Enlightenment that have spawned a host of material cultures and social institu-
tions in their wake. By bringing deconstructive techniques to political philosophy,
a theoretical discourse of rationality and self-control is forced to come to terms
with the metaphorical, catachrestical, and fabulistic materials buried within it.
These hidden aspects of political philosophy are pried open in order to exploit
new opportunities for planetary survival in the face of the suicidal structures of
auto-immunity characteristic of sovereignty.1
Reason and sovereignty are revealed as mutually intertwined as well as self-
undermining in a context in which the sovereignty of reason has been put forward
as typifying intellectual attitudes in this period, from Hobbes and Spinoza to Kant
and Hegel. Additionally, the development of Enlightenment political philosophy
Srinivas Aravamudan is Professor of English at Duke University and the author of Tropico-
politans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Duke Univ. Press, 1999) and Guru English:
South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006); and editor of
William Earle’s Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (Broadview, 2005). He is finishing
books on the oriental tale and sovereignty theory.

led to the elaboration of sovereignty theory in a number of guises. Democracy in

various forms has been further reinvented since the eighteenth century, as the rea-
sonable—yet elusive—supplement that justifies sovereignty’s force. Presenting the
self-sustaining project of sovereignty as fatally autoimmune and at the same time
open to fulfillment through a promissory note from the outside, Derrida reveals
the auto-foundational circularity of Enlightenment political philosophy as being
inflected with a self-destructive spin. Holding on to the pregnant possibility of an
elusive democracy that is yet to arrive, Derrida abandons present problems for a
future-oriented outcome.
In the preface to Voyous, Derrida relies economically on two fables, one
folkloric and the other mythological, to make his opening salvo. Both the above
epigraphs cite the contradictions that rise to the surface when the logic of sov-
ereignty, democracy, and revolution—the master-project of the Enlightenment,
and that ur-fable of modernity—is analyzed. What better way to approach the
self-important and self-aggrandizing narrative of sovereignty and reason than
through myths and fables? The masterly indirection at work in fabulation exposes
hidden truths about reason and sovereignty, truths that are not revealed so easily
when the claims of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism are confronted
directly. Derrida’s reflections suggest that the Enlightenment is a prime instance of
the fabulation of “roguery.” Paradoxically, the project of sovereignty that is the
Enlightenment sought doggedly to domesticate and sideline rogues, even while it
proved itself to be the biggest rogue of all.
As demonstrated by the fable from which Derrida’s epigraph for Voyous
is taken, La Fontaine’s “Le Loup et L’Agneau,” there is a dangerous and indeed
unresolved confusion of reason and force at the heart of any argument about which
of the two takes precedence. In the fable, the lamb appears to represent enlightened
reason even as the wolf represents brute force. Three times the lamb counters the
wolf’s specious reasoning: the lamb is drinking from the water downstream from
the wolf, and therefore cannot soil his water as he initially alleges; the lamb could
not have insulted him last year as the wolf suggests, as he was not yet born then;
and the lamb does not have a brother even though the wolf charges him with as-
suming the guilt of his brother having insulted him earlier. However, the wolf’s
fourth charge is equivalent to a capital sentence: the lamb is deemed guilty by as-
sociation because the lamb’s friends—shepherds and sheepdogs—are necessarily
the wolf’s sworn enemies. The lamb’s reasonings employed to get him out of a
sticky situation in which he does not bear personal responsibility are insufficient,
and tragically so, as the wolf drags him into the woods and devours him before he
can even respond to the charge of guilt by virtue of group identity.
On its surface, this fable demonstrates, with considerable irony, that might
is right. The wolf’s self-legitimating reason always manages to trump the lamb’s
defensive legalisms that create alibis. But these alibis cannot adequately preserve
the lamb. The wolf makes law according to his strength, and is creating new norms
with every utterance in a manner that forces the lamb onto the defensive. In ret-
rospect, we have to acknowledge that the lamb is already dead meat even before
he speaks. While the wolf toys with him in desultory dialogue (perhaps acting
more feline than lupine in this regard?), the outcome is already assured no matter
what the lamb can say. At the same time, the wolf’s capacity to put the lamb on
a kind of show trial indicates at least partially his non-wolfishness, seeking spuri-
ous justifications before actually devouring his victim. No real wolf would need
to do that. Yet, the ironic cast of the fable produces a sympathetic supplement in
favor of the lamb: the reader can adopt the cynical position of recognizing that the
world is one in which wolves generally have their way over lambs, even though
the fable also generates a sneaking sympathy for those innocent lambs that fall
prey to the wolves. Derrida cites Pascal’s famous reflection regarding the double
bind of justice and force, whereby one has to improve the other given that justice
without force is ineffectual and force without justice is tyrannical. What is to be
done when brute force prevails over fairness, as is often the case in the world of
international diplomacy as well as that of the beast-fable? Pascal’s conclusion is
on the side of making what is strong just because of the inability to make what is
just strong [Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste fût fort, on a fait que ce
qui est fort fût juste].2
If this late seventeenth-century fable and the Pascalian conundrum along-
side it are chosen by Derrida to showcase the self-aggrandizing super-sovereignty
of a country (such as the United States since 9/11) that echoes the Hobbesian world
of the state of nature within which man is a wolf to fellow man (Homo homini
lupus), the same metaphor can be extended, with a somewhat different twist, via
Michel Foucault to the topic of governmentality. “Governmentality” speaks of
a world of sheep protected by the pastoralism of the shepherd-monarch, replete
with the protection of sheepdogs. In this world, the roguery of wolves on the run
can be kept at bay, even if the lone wolf can occasionally catch the defenseless
stray lamb. In the essay entitled, “La Bête et Le Souverain,” Derrida suggests the
ominous future of governmentality through his meditation on the complicity, and
indeed the uncanny resemblance, among the figures of the beast, the criminal, and
the sovereign.3 The leaders of men are as pastors to their flocks, but these pastors
keep their animals in order to eat them voraciously at a moment of their choosing.
For Derrida, the wolf’s gait is an expression in French [pas de loup] that suggests
the silent stalking of prey, and a true history of sovereignty might involve tracing
this wolf’s gait through a lycology from Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, to the myth
regarding the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus who were suckled by a
she-wolf. A full-scale genealogy of the lupine topoi of sovereignty from Plautus,
Rabelais, Montaigne, and Bacon up to Hobbes might reveal the wolf-sovereign as
a liminal figure, a kind of werewolf who is on the edge of society and community
and who is between the status of man and beast. Giorgio Agamben has partly at-
tempted to show this connection as well. This is not just a European genealogy but
an Indo-European one, including the devouring wolf of the Rig-Veda and the deep
structural implication of devoration with vociferation, or “the carnivorous sacrifice
[that] is essential to the structure of subjectivity.”4 As Foucault makes a related
point in a different context, “our societies have proved to be really demonic since
they happen to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-
flock game—in what we call modern states.” The question of sovereignty always
has to be supplemented by an analysis of the art of governmentality.5 The figure of
the lone wolf, the Leviathan, or the sovereign legislator at the origin of the state is
recited and reiterated by narratives of political philosophy in a manner that intro-
duces a differential contamination of founding violence and preserving violence—or
rechtsetzende Gewalt and rechtserhaltende Gewalt. In his reading of Benjamin’s

seminal “Critique of Violence,” Derrida suggests that founding and preserving
violence cannot be kept apart, as their iterability collapses into their originarity.
The police function of the state emerges as spectral in ways that demonstrate the
police as increasingly without face or figure, formless, but everywhere in a manner
that plays out their involvement in a “mystical foundation of authority.”
Derrida’s questioning of sovereignty in these late texts can be considered
alongside the history of roguery. The term “rogue” was coined around the 1560s
by Thomas Harman, and frequently referred to atheists, villains, scoundrels, va-
grants, Mercuries, confidence tricksters, “grand deceivers,” seducers, libertines,
and vagabonds. Thomas Dekker speaks of “rogues” as a separate “people,” and
there arise various canting dictionaries purporting to represent the lingo of a
new English “rogue nation.” As Dekker says, “no estate, trade, occupation nor
mystery but lives by [cozenage].”6 In the manner of the nineteenth-century French
term, “voyou,” “rogue” is an ambivalent term of endearment. The mobility of
rogues—and various perceptions regarding newly acquired physical as well as class
mobility—connects the figure of the rogue with the vast Renaissance literature of
the picaresque in Spain, Italy, and France, a phenomenon that precedes this Eng-
lish coinage. A rich English Renaissance literature of coney-catching pamphlets
continues this vein of textuality: rogue pamphlets and manuals are early conduct
books even as they are also descriptions of various rogueries. Do rogues reveal a
deeper history of masterless men and social movement in their time, or are rogues
ideological representations of dangers that are coalesced under a particular image?
Obviously, choosing one of the two definitions would mean choosing between his-
tory and literature, when our sensibility is composed of elements drawn from both.
The important thing to mention about rogues—a factor which is more marginal
to Derrida’s discussion than it ought to be—is that the fraudulence of economic
exchange is very much part of the structure of political domination. What we wit-
ness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the rise of something like rogue
capitalism, the daily swindling and conniving that takes place in multiple creative
ways alongside notions of political domination and subjection through force or
fraud. For every rogue and swindler there are a hundred gulls and dupes. The even
more profound topos of roguery in this period concerns the situation in which
the ordinary rogue reaches through to the grand criminal—in the manner of the
self-styled thief-catcher Jonathan Wild. Like the beast and the sovereign, the grand
criminal also is outside the law, a figure that continues to fascinate the people, as
suggested by Walter Benjamin as “die Gestalt des ‘grossen’ Verbrechers.”7 As many
studies of eighteenth-century crime and criminality have shown, the apprehension
and execution of the grand criminal also reaches across to medieval beliefs regard-
ing martyrology and the sanctifying aspects of the executed body once it is taken
down from the gallows. When we go on to the nineteenth century, the sense of the
rogue as an exceptional or singular prodigy is cited when Charles Darwin talks
about rogue plants or animals as specimens that defy the species norms.8
However, can there be a genuine history of the rogue? One might well
ask of Derrida an analogous question to the one he puts to Foucault’s Histoire de
la folie in “Cogito and the History of Madness.” While roguery is not the same
as madness, it inhabits both the inside and outside of social life and reason, as do
certain forms of insanity. While it could also be argued that roguery is often im-
moral or amoral but entirely rational, there are also those versions of roguery that
go beyond the picaresque and approach a form of inspired delirium and exponen-
tial transgression that indeed approaches madness. Rogues cannot be reproduced
through normal means, even if they are always around. However, it is also worth
asking why Derrida is obsessed with an ipsocentric political theology of the roguish
figure of sovereignty as representing pure indivisibility, oneness, and suspension of
time and history (Bodin identified this as merum imperium).9 The rogue state ends
up being indiscernible from the super-state and the absolute state.
The rich cultural history of roguery as Enlightenment—to the extent that
such a history is indeed possible—can be exemplified by three foundational figures
who also lead toward three related fictional and nonfictional genres. The first is
Thomas Hobbes, and the genre of modern political philosophy and its reflection on
sovereignty that he inaugurates and instantiates; the second is Daniel Defoe, and
the vast literature of criminality, roguery, and piracy that he takes forward from
Renaissance forebears and crafts into the genre of the early novel; and the third
is Montesquieu, who continues to investigate sovereignty even as he bifurcates
the topic into the doubles of the good ruler and the bestial despot, the latter turn-
ing into the most enduring topos within the genre of the oriental tale. Therefore,
Hobbes, Defoe, and Montesquieu—or alternatively, political philosophy, criminal
novels, and orientalist fables—become key figures as well as founders of genres of
roguery that are themselves generative of subjectivity, sovereignty, and criminal-
ity. Hobbes’s image of the state as Leviathan, as “Mortall God” and “Artificiall
Animal,” borrows attributes from human, beast, divinity, and machine. Indeed,
as Derrida suggests, this Hobbesian image represents the prosthetic state or the
state as prosthesis (prothétatique), a formation that gathers random elements into
its orbit and guarantees coherence under the sign of power. Defoe’s pirates, high-
waymen, and colonists—whether Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Jonathan
Wild, or Will Atkins—are typical instances of mini-sovereigns, making law through
a founding violence.10 Montesquieu’s oriental despots, criticized in both Lettres
persanes (1721) and De l’esprit des loix (1748), are both god and beast in their
ravaging power.
Why is it that the tight fit between these forms of rationalization, nation-
alism, and xenophobia has not been adequately investigated until now? To some
degree, this is a connection that appears after the fact rather than at the time. New
forms of nationalist justification take hold retroactively of these insurgent texts
and genres. The radical materialism of Hobbes, in his time anathema to Royalist
and Dissenter alike, is taken up by cultural and political conservatives of a much
later age, as a working model toward implementing fear as a political idea. The
lumpen subcultures that were the target of criminal biographies end up consolidat-
ing the bourgeois novel teleologically, even if most of the early modern members
of these groups were largely inassimilable to the forms of upward mobility and
subjective interiority that the novels end up celebrating, and that were sociologically
instituted as norms somewhat later. Montesquieu’s satirical portrayals of Turkish
and Islamic potentates were literary barbs aimed at his French contemporaries,
but survived to initiate a host of similar devaluations that accumulated into the
discursive structure of orientalism.
Yet, Hobbes also holds out the possibility of the democratic representation
that the Leviathan makes possible through the faint resistance of the loyal subject
who has signed up to the overlordship of the sovereign; Defoe’s masterless men are
frequently up-ended by yet others who then eventually force themselves voluntarily
into sociality; and alongside the myth of the oriental despot, Montesquieu builds
upon the Polybian versions of polyarchy or mixed sovereignty as the Enlightenment
alternative that manages to propose an escape from the Bodinian-Hobbesian line of
the presumed indivisibility of sovereignty. Montesquieu’s role as liberal proponent
of the separation of powers that was implicitly critical of French absolutist rule
is famously taken up not in his own country, but by his followers in the British
colonies in North America.
Usurpation and self-surpassing is part of the story of sovereignty: Hobbes
qualifies the Leviathan as a “Mortall God,” hence acknowledging the inevitable
entropy and finitude at the heart of any established sovereign power. This ought
to be true of the performative aspects of sovereignty theory itself as a linguistic
structure. In other words, there are many fault-lines within Enlightenment dreams of
sovereignty that suggest their own textual and deconstructive unraveling in addition
to their inevitable wind-down. The deconstruction of sovereignty is more than a
mere application or reading of an Enlightenment text: it is the operation or experi-
ence of the text and what the text does to itself when attended to closely. Derrida
calls this auto-hetero-deconstruction, a process that perhaps speeds up a tendency
already prevalent but unacknowledged and hidden in relation to sovereignty’s desire
for self-prolongation. The agency of the reader versus that of the text comes into
view here as it did with respect to Derrida’s and De Man’s battling readings of
Rousseau, with Derrida holding out for the specific role of the critic’s intervention,
whereas De Man wishes to accord Rousseau the starring role.
If the La Fontaine fable suggests a certain cynical despair, Derrida’s citation
of the single word from Ovid inflects the proceedings with the faint glimmer of
hope. (The overtitle that actually precedes the La Fontaine epigraph is the book’s
“Preface,” citing Echo calling out, “Veni!” to Narcissus before we come across a
snippet documenting the sad outcome of La Fontaine’s beast-fable.) “Echo” sug-
gests the promissory note of democracy differentiating itself from sovereignty’s
narcissism. Echo, of course, never really appears to initiate anything directly,
always reflecting and yet distorting fragments of Narcissus’ words back to him.
She is a voice that breaks Narcissus’ self-indulgent reverie and suggests that he get
away from the reflecting pool and seek her out in the rocks and woods. Narcissus
is looking for her as an embodied alterity, but Echo reveals herself as an audible
but invisible difference within Narcissus’ own self-interrogation that opens up to
the beckoning of the future.
In this potent myth, we step away from the fabled roguery of the wolf’s
violence over the lamb into the realm of a sorrowful love story; Narcissus cannot
separate his auto-affection from his hetero-affection for Echo, even as in every
instance of the interaction, Echo reveals her alterity as a difference that is both
incredibly proximate and yet a fatal and unbridgeable separation. In the love story
between narcissistic sovereignty and its democratic echo, democracy is always called
and within call, but does not arrive. The structure of the interaction between the
two reveals that democracy is à venir, the pun in French that designates the future
as avenir, or whatever is yet to come. If the fable about the wolf and the lamb
was ultimately an account of the violent triumph of sovereignty over a defenseless
victim and descriptive of an act of war declared by a rogue who invents reasons to
dispatch his victim, the myth about Narcissus and Echo is about a failed love story,
wherein the lover Narcissus always eludes unification with Echo despite, or indeed
structurally because of, the echo-effect that constitutes her difference.
Sovereignty is a story about the triumph of power over good, or might
over right. Force’s self-legitimation through specious reasoning exposes the naked
emperor attempting to get himself clothed. Democracy, on the other hand, is a story
about the elusive justice yet to arrive, and a promise deferred. (Yet “democracy”
itself is a potentially contradictory coupling of the collectivity—demos—with
rule—cracy): a justice of majoritarian proportions but involving a rule that could
ride roughshod over the minority. A paradox that needs further reflection concerns
that of the weak messianicity (without messianism) purportedly part of a democ-
racy-to-come that is the promise of the Enlightenment. According to Derrida, such a
potentiality is not a secularization of religious eschatology, but a constitutive aspect
of a catachronistic echo from the future that puts time out of joint. A renunciation
by sovereignty (kurios) is necessary for the weak pre-cratic force of a democracy-
to-come, and this can only happen through an ethical understanding of hospitality
taken to the limit. The gift must indeed be kept secret in order to remain a gift.
Is this Enlightenment logic, or a romantic one tinged with religious con-
notations? The fable of the wolf and the lamb suggests an atavism or archaism
(but not essentialism) that demonstrates the wolfishness occupying (and also at-
tacking) the soft underbelly of the Enlightenment. Animality suggests beings rather
than Being, and also poses the problem of sovereignty as agency rather than its
opposite. The story of Echo suggests a supplementary logic that is anti-, ante-, or
post-Enlightenment, an escape route from the Enlightenment to the future that
cannot be projected from the present. But before hastily and mistakenly conclud-
ing that Derrida is “postmodern” and therefore “against” the Enlightenment, it is
important to attend to the vertiginous antinomies these fables create in relation to
the logical framework of Enlightenment rationality. By counterposing democracy
against sovereignty, Derrida converts their continuous logic in classic Enlighten-
ment theory into an antinomy. Not so much a Kantian antinomy, however, as in
Derrida’s case it is one of reason with an extra-rational partner who is not fully
irrational, natural, or supernatural, but promiscuously contaminated in the manner
of an infra-rational beast, specter, remainder, or indeed echo of the very process
that is not able to complete itself and achieve autonomy.
However, what might be the cost of such an evacuation of the multiplicity
of the actually existing demos for the promise of an abstract arrival that bears a
close resemblance to divine visitation? A Levinasian ethical turn, it appears, is tak-
ing the place of a promissory note following the failed politics of Enlightenment.
Is this a certainty, a sop, or a chimera? If the vocabulary of the roguish nature of
sovereignty is suffused with political theology following Carl Schmitt’s insight,
Derrida’s alternative does not escape the Abrahamic religious connotations he
favors. Democracy-to-come is a weak force, an event that intervenes faintly in
the form of an echo (“Veni!”), suspending the self-sustaining chain of ipsocentric
sovereignty. The immediate disappointment of unfulfilled political categories is
replaced by ethical promises. The deconstructible nature of present sovereignty is

supplemented by undeconstructible qualities of democracy-to-come. While law is
inadequate, justice still beckons; where politics fails, ethics still promises; and if
citizenship cannot fulfill, hospitality tantalizingly promises to make up the differ-
ence. Perhaps if sovereignty was always shown to be anachronistic in its desire for
mastery and control, the conditional and yet thoroughly unprogrammed nature of a
democracy-to-come is catachronistic. History, that great obsession of the Romantics,
is put to rest here, and in its place is summoned a vision of the future that is in an
important sense beyond known history. Democracy-to-come is an event that inter-
rupts history, resembling the eschaton in medieval theology, something that comes
even as the empty time of the nation comes to a stop and the full time of religion
returns again, without content but in an evacuated form. This is not the teleological
flavor of the end of history trumpeted not so long ago by neoconservatist apologists
such as Francis Fukuyama.11 Rather, this is the catachronistic arrival of the future
in terms of the present, an unpredictable opening on to the incommensurability
of an event that is always imminent, and yet radically unprogrammed in relation
to all that went before. The auto-immunity of sovereignty signals the coming of
the democratic event as a novel supplement. Fiat democratia! Democracy as the
translatio studii follows sovereignty as the translatio imperii.
Such outcomes, it is argued, are not soteriology, teleology, or eschatology,
but a heterogeneous result that is linked to the notion of khôra: the notion of local-
ity, or spacing, taken from Plato’s Timaeus. Such a thought treats the prospect of a
detranscendentalized and ungrounded beginning as neither foundation nor ground,
but as a presubjective, pre-cratic and already differentialized gap: something that
gives rise to the wholly new, without contamination, and pregnant with all kinds
of potentiality.
However, by this point, the antinomy of (Enlightenment) sovereignty and
(messianic) democracy can really be appreciated: it would do great damage to the
amplitude of Derrida’s thought and impoverish eighteenth-century studies if his con-
tribution were appreciated only in terms of his important readings of philosophers
such as Rousseau, Condillac, Kant, and to a lesser extent, Hobbes. That would
make “Derrida’s eighteenth century” a pick-and-choose affair, where recognizable
“figures” are assessed after his assessment, and the tenor of his thought that touches
on other (non-eighteenth-century) figures is left entirely to others. Many of Derrida’s
concepts that are derived from other figures and periods nonetheless have a deep
relevance to issues that are central to eighteenth-century studies: the emergence
of modernity, the conservation of tradition, the role of religion, the construction
of democracy, the rationale of the state, the question of hospitality, the nature of
language, the status of the animal, and the freedom of the individual. However, the
concepts that allow us to gain new insights about the above themes are sometimes
fashioned from eighteenth-century materials (as is the supplement in Rousseau or
the parergon in Kant), and yet others such as khôra, the gift, or différance do not
seem to be especially eighteenth-century concepts but not necessarily less relevant.
Periodization as a phenomenon that allows us to think of a clearly demarcated
geographical and temporal unit is inhabited but also challenged by such thinking.
The thought is not always convenient to the narrower eighteenth-century program,
but the inconvenience it causes nonetheless deepens the channels and provides the
supplementation that indexicalizes and renders relevant the eighteenth century to all
those other areas of knowledge outside and beyond it. And this could be described
as letting loose an auto-immunitary process, not very dissimilar from that which
Derrida identifies within sovereignty in the first place.
Perhaps Derrida in relation to hardcore eighteenth-century studies is
something like the lamb in relation to the wolf. He doesn’t really belong there;
his credentials are suspect; and even if his theories connect tangentially with
some eighteenth-century scholars somewhere, all of this does not really add up to
sovereign immunity, a passport, or a laisser-aller with respect to being allowed to
operate without let or hindrance within eighteenth-century studies as a whole. At
the moment of the interrogation of the lamb, the wolf is indeed not just the rogue
among the animals, but the sovereign arrogating the place of the shepherd, and
thoroughly imperiously at that. Let us assume (and this is indeed more than likely
in institutional terms) that Derrida will be swallowed (and digested) by eighteenth-
century studies rather than the inverse. However, imagine the scenario of the Der-
ridean lamb reemerging as specter, now on the other bank of the stream, opposite
the site where the wolf is looking at his own narcissistic reflection.
“Veni!” echoes the lamb.
Would the wolf dare to follow?
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays On Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
2. The Complete Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Norman B. Spector (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 1988); Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976), 298.
3. Jacques Derrida, “La Bête et Le Souverain,” in La Démocratie à Venir, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet
(Paris: Galilée, 2004).
4. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge,
2002), 247.
5. Michel Foucault, “Politics and Reason,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other
Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 71.
6. Jeffrey Knapp, “Rogue Nationalism,” in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, ed. Robert D. New-
man (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996).
7. Walter Benjamin, “Critique Of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical

Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 277–300.
8. According to Darwin, rogues are the plants “that deviate from the common standard.” Charles
Darwin, Origin of Species (London, 1859), 1:32.
9. See Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed.
Julian H. Franklin (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), xxiv.
10. See, for instance, novels such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Farther Adventures of Robinson Cru-
soe (1719), Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720), “The history of the lives and actions of Jonathan
Wild” (1725), and Colonel Jack (1721).
11. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Balfour / Derrida and the Origins of the Eighteenth Century 467
The Gift of Example: Derrida and the

Origins of the Eighteenth Century
Ian Balfour
What’s in an example? Jacques Derrida’s work may be the most rigorous

elaboration of what is at stake in the example, an example being that which is
always supposed to be something other and more than merely singular, an example
of something beyond or larger than itself. And yet when it comes to textual ex-
amples, does not our experience suggest that not just any one will do? The example
retains, stubbornly or not, its singularity or quasi-singularity. More often than not,
it cannot simply be substituted by some other text or passage without some loss,
and thus the chosen example—even and especially the “good” example—is always
also counter-exemplary. This tension has conceptual, rhetorical, and pedagogical
consequences, and nothing teaches this better than teaching.
The charged and vexed status of the example might help us consider
Derrida’s uneasy but—I would contend—indispensable place in eighteenth-century
studies. Derrida never confined himself to anything like a period, ranging in his stud-
ies from ancient Greek thought and the Hebrew scriptures—however mediated—to
the most contemporary of philosophy, literature, and art. Yet his engagements with
the eighteenth century (Rousseau, Kant, Condillac, and Warburton, to name the
most prominent points of reference) and especially his reading of Rousseau have
at least a faintly exemplary status within his oeuvre. Of Grammatology, with its
bravura reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages as its centerpiece,
may be the most ground-breaking and influential of Derrida’s writings. It certainly
constituted a timely intervention into the debates within and beyond structuralism
about language and the relations of culture to nature, crystallized in the polemical
Ian Balfour teaches English and Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the
author of The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. He has recently co-edited, with Atom Egoyan,
Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film and with Eduardo Cadava, And Justice for All? The
Claims of Human Rights.

readings of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. Especially in this latter issue—relations of

nature and culture—we encounter arguably the most dominant preoccupation of
eighteenth-century thought, for the rise of a then-new historicism required a new
sorting out of what was natural and what was cultural, as well as new narratives in
which to make sense of the passage(s) from nature to culture. Lévi-Strauss wrote as
an avowed disciple of Rousseau, crediting his eighteenth-century predecessor with
being nothing less than the founder of anthropology and the source of numerous
enabling insights. Derrida frames his reading under the heading “From Lévi-Strauss
to Rousseau,” with its notable reversal of chronology, motivated not least by the
fact that the contemporary structuralist thinker will be seen to have regressed from
his more complex predecessor in the eighteenth century.
Of Grammatology features Derrida’s most intense and sustained reading of
any of his chosen texts—Rousseau’s—and it is hard to think of many more intensive,
protracted readings of any eighteenth-century texts by specialists or nonspecialists.
Virtually every passage in Rousseau’s longish essay is commented on, sometimes
more than once. In this tenacious probing of the text, there emerges a simultane-
ous sense of the—often bizarre—specificity of Rousseau’s eccentric observations,
at one level, and their eerily resonant, allegorical character at some other level,
that of a more abstract generality. As understood by Derrida, Rousseau’s texts
figure as a key moment in the trajectory of logocentrism from Plato to Hegel, a
moment of simultaneous blindness and insight, to say the least. Rousseau hardly
stands as one writer among others, thus exemplary and counter-exemplary at the
same time. He is a thinker of vast influence in several domains, from literature to
politics, and a writer who never restricted himself to a given genre, indeed one
who sometimes broke “the law of genres,” by mixing things that are normally or
maybe even best not mixed.
Derrida chose as his focus a conspicuously marginal text in Rousseau’s
oeuvre, the Essay on the Origin of Languages, not something on the order of Emile,
Julie, or The Social Contract, but rather an essay not even published in Rousseau’s
lifetime, typical of Derrida’s penchant to seize on, as a point of departure, something
minor or out-of-the-way: a footnote, a figure of speech, a seemingly stray phrase,
a “minor” text by a major or minor writer. Yet he is able to weave and unweave
strands of Rousseau’s text to reveal stories and structures of Western thought com-
plicit in or folded into a vast network of problematic and characteristic thinking
about language, consciousness, and much more.
If the dominant mode in literary and cultural studies nowadays is a certain
historicism, Derrida’s readings, seen in relation to this mode, can often look less
and other than historical. Their texture, even just at the level of dates, names, and
footnotes, appears rather different from most academic period studies in philosophi-
cal, literary, or historical historiography. They could seem to veer from close—even
too close—readings of this or that text to grand generalizations about certain ep-
ochs, about “Western metaphysics,” or even the whole of the Western and not just
Western tradition—or traditions. But any genuinely close reading—any genuine
reading, period—entails attention not just to what is said in a text but to what is
performed in and by the text. Attention to the relation between the saying and the
said, the written and the writing—a relation that is often fraught—will of necessity
reveal something historical, something of what has happened and of what happens.
The text is a peculiar kind of event, and one of the tasks of reading is to recognize
just this character of the text as event. If historical understanding is interested in
the recognition of difference—is this not the very stuff of historical specificity?—it
would do well to recognize better these moments or constellations of difference
in the event that is the text rather than too quickly resolving things into larger or
grander configurations of “the same” (whether of period, class, race, gender, etc.),
however much undertaken in the name of a certain historical specificity. I am sug-
gesting, then, that Derrida’s sense of history is not so far from that of a Benjamin
or an Adorno, even if the texture of their writings is somewhat different.
An awful lot in Of Grammatology turns on the example of Rousseau.
Derrida’s analysis of Essay on the Origin of Languages is elaborated under the
rubric of “Nature, Culture, Writing,” and he prefaces that section by a brief
introduction to the “epoch” of Rousseau. The term “epoch” is framed by quota-
tion marks, or “scare quotes,” which are “scary” because we have to think of the
term in question otherwise than in the ways to which we have been accustomed.
“Epoch,” in Derrida’s rendering, is multiply suspended: there is an epoche of the
“epoch,” so to speak, for an age turns out to be not the homogenous entity one
thinks of as, say, in the congealed concepts of Enlightenment, Romanticism, or the
Age of Sensibility, much less the “French eighteenth century.”1 The recognition of
the clunky and Procrustean character of these terms is hardly original to Derrida,
but he goes further than many in complicating matters in the interest of a more nu-
anced and even historically accurate account. In one of his more radical assertions,
Derrida maintains: “Un texte a toujours plusieurs âges, la lecture doit en prendre
son parti” [A text always has several epochs and we must resign ourselves to that
fact].2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s rendition of the phrase “doit en prendre son
parti” as “must resign ourselves to this fact” perhaps does not quite capture the
more positive imperative of reading that is announced by Derrida: the obligation
for reading to take account of the complex temporality and historicity of a text.
Derrida is not expansive in glossing this somewhat enigmatic pronouncement about
the multiple “epochs” of a text, but it seems clear that for him any text worthy of
the name cannot be limited or delimited, in its temporality and historicity, to its
moment of production or its immediate context, even if we could know exactly
what those were. One cannot, Derrida seems to imply, limit the text to any one of
the given (but are they even “given”?) moments of its conception, genesis, comple-
tion, publication, reception, circulation, reading or re-reading, to say nothing of
what Benjamin describes as the belated coming-into-legibility of the text or work
of art. Moreover, the text is itself a peculiar kind of event, one that in some sense
is always repeating itself, with and without a difference, with and without differ-
ences. Something happens in the text—and not just “in” the text—and reading has
to take account of this event, these events.
And so it is partly in the name of a differentiated historical account that
the reading of the “epoch” of Rousseau unfolds: it is a history against a certain
historicism. In this, he seems allied with his friend and colleague Althusser, who
long ago argued that Marxism—and the sort of Marxism he advocated—was not
a historicism, or with Walter Benjamin who railed against what he called histori-
cism in his “Theses Upon the Philosophy of History” and the texts surrounding
them. This history—though it is not only a history—entails revising any number of
received ideas and narratives: so, for example, in reading the “epoch of Rousseau,”
“Rousseau”—who is not simply a proper name, not simply an individual—turns
out to be, vis à vis Lévi-Strauss, something of a poststructuralist avant la lettre. In
Derrida’s hands, texts are wrested from the simple container of what is too quickly
determined as the moment of their production or context, and in doing so they
gain, rather than lose, a certain historical bearing and a force, a mobility, and a
resonance in no way consigned to the dustbin of history.
For the original occasion of several ASECS panels devoted to Derrida and
the eighteenth century, of which this issue is an outgrowth, participants were in-
vited to reflect on how Derrida was important for their own work in the eighteenth
century. When I finish writing an interminable book on the sublime, my next major
project will engage what we could call “the language of origins”: readings in the
matter of origins in philosophy, proto-linguistics, and fiction from Locke to the
Shelleys, with attention in between to the likes of Defoe, Condillac, Diderot, Herder,
Hamann, and others. I hope to mediate between—to use shorthand—“Derrida”
and “Aarsleff”: that is, between more or less classic “deconstruction” and more
or less classic “history of ideas,” engaging numerous examples not broached by
Derrida or treated at length by Hans Aarsleff and attempting closer readings of
them than is the norm in history of ideas. To account for things (ideas, institutions,
social and political configurations) in terms of their origins became virtually the
signature mode of thinking in the long eighteenth century: Locke, Vico, Rousseau,
and Herder, to name only a few, take accounting for origins as something like
their default mode of reasoning. One can take as tremendous points of departure
Derrida’s variously paradigmatic insights on matters of origins in Rousseau,3 War-
burton,4 and Condillac,5 which I might brutally summarize and cast in axiomatic
form here, even if their full force always has to be read in this or that given text,
in the “example”:
1) At the origin there is violence, structural and/or otherwise.

2) The origin tends to be less pure than discourses would like to main-
tain.6
3) The origin often emerges as multiple even when the discourse insists
nonetheless on its singularity: the origin is not “one.”
4) The origin tends to be beset by what appears to be merely supplemen-
tary to it (the sign, say, or language; writing in relation to speech,7
woman in relation to man, etc.). The supplement is, as it were, origi-
nal.
5) The supplement tends not to be singular but to come in a “chain
of supplements” (in Rousseau, say, language, masturbation, incest,
“Mama”).
6) These supplements tend to follow a certain “logic of the supplement.”
7) Discourse tends to be blind to this supplementary character.
8) Such discourse tends to render the passage from nature to culture as
itself “natural.”
It is hard to overestimate how much is at stake in these stories of origins, stories

that give lives and histories direction, shape, and meaning. These stories come in-
formed by and attached with certain values accompanying the schematic accounts
of progress or catastrophe or both. In our putatively postmodern era we may seem
to have outgrown them, but it is not as if these stories simply disappeared in the
eighteenth century—think Darwin—or are simply going away now.
For my own project on the “language of origins,” I shall investigate not just
theories of the origins of language but also discourses about the origins of society,
political institutions, man and woman, and more. Many of the figures who wrote
on or in the “language of origins” also were writers of fiction: Rousseau, Diderot,
and Defoe, most prominently. Attention to the traffic between or overlap of fic-
tion and nonfiction will be one of my constant foci. (Even John Cleland wrote, in
addition to his famous pornographic novels, an essay on Sanskrit. I’ll resist, how-
ever, making much of a link between the two.) This shuttling between fiction and
nonfiction—often fiction with a strong truth-claim and nonfiction that patently or
self-consciously draws on strategies of fiction (say, Dugald Stewart’s “conjectural
history”)—emerges in an “epoch” beginning in the late seventeenth century when
Christian Europe’s faith in the Bible’s account of the origins of language, human-
ity, and society as a literal account almost all of a sudden faltered.8 Thus, intel-
lectuals were faced broadly with two possibilities: either to provide an allegorical
interpretation of the Bible’s story of origins or to come up with some altogether
alternative account. Yet this latter group had little or no empirical basis for telling
such stories. The double bind of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of
telling the story of origins tended to produce not histories but allegories, allegories
in the guise of histories, allegories in which a whole lot is at stake, including the
very definition of the human.
In this configuration, which is nothing if not historical, there are some
interesting counter-examples to the main lines of Derrida’s account, as, say, in
Diderot’s resistance to the genetic model of story-telling in his Letter on the Deaf
and the Dumb (which, instead, imagines and then dismantles a statue resembling a
human to see how language works in relation to the senses); or in Defoe’s striking
promotion, in his Essay upon Literature of 1726, of writing over speech, authorized
by no less than God, whom he glosses as “the first Writing Master,” a phrase with
a peculiarly apt resonance throughout the pages of Robinson Crusoe, whose titular
hero gains control of himself by writing, the prelude to him becoming a “master”
in more ways than one. Such counter-examples hardly trouble Derrida’s main thesis
about the centrality and pervasiveness of logocentrism and phonocentrism, as well
as its consequences and concomitant forces (auto-affection, self-presence) for phi-
losophy and related discourses. Still, I hope my account might prove a somewhat
original supplement to Derrida’s charting of the territory and to the numerous
existing studies, by Aarsleff and others. In all of this undertaking I will be guided
by the provocative and inexhaustible example of Derrida’s writing, early and late,
even if the lesson of difference suggests that there will be some differences.
NOTES
1. On Derrida’s complication of this notion, see the contribution to this volume by Geoff Bennington
and the introduction by Jody Greene.
2. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1966), 150. Of Grammatology, trans.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 102. I’m grateful
to Geoff Bennington for underscoring, in our ASECS panel, the force of Derrida’s original phrasing.
3. In addition to the famous reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, readers might also want to
consult Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’)” in Material Events: Paul
de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), 277–360. The essay engages Rousseau’s Confessions in itself and as
read by de Man. It contains a substantial reflection on the relations between “the machine” and “the
event” in Rousseau and beyond.
4. Derrida’s essay on Warburton seems to have been largely overlooked, perhaps partly because it was
never reprinted in a book. It originally served as a kind of preface to a French translation of Warburton.
It was reprinted in nearly full form in Yale French Studies, 58 (1979): 116–47. The original, longer
French version, “Scribble,” precedes the introduction to a French translation of Warburton’s analysis
of hieroglyphs in The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated (1742). The original French translation
appeared in 1744 and was issued as Essai sur les hieroglyphs des Egyptiens (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne,
1977). Among other things, Derrida’s essay seems to be an oblique polemic against Foucault or, more
likely, Foucauldeans. Derrida insists, for example, on the character of “powers, knowledges” as distinct
from the Foucauldean couple “power-knowledge.”
5. In addition to the remarks on Condillac in Of Grammatology, one should also consult Derrida’s
Archéologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1990). An English version is available as Archeology of the
Frivolous, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1987).
6. A good many texts determine the origin as single and as pure. What, after all, is an origin if it
is not the origin? And yet Derrida is able to show how Rousseau, against all or at least some odds,
multiplies his scenes of origin, such that one scandal of the text is that languages are said to originate
differently, in the north and the south, even if it seems as if language would first originate in the south
and then only later take shape in the north.
7. Some of the silly critiques of Derrida that protested that speech had to come before writing had
not even bothered to notice that Derrida nowhere claims the historical priority of (literal) writing to
(literal) speech (how exactly would that be proved in an empirically verifiable way?), but that speech, as
we understand, it turns out, upon scrutiny, to have many of the characteristics so often associated with
writing (iterability, spacing, difference or différance) such that one, in effect, has to posit a category prior
to and encompassing both literal speech and literal writing. Derrida calls this “writing” in an expanded
sense or arche-writing when it pertains to this (non-literal, not necessarily literal) writing in its mode as
conceptually prior to either speech or writing, literally construed. In a slightly less silly critique, even
Rene Wellek could write: “Derrida can say ‘there is nothing outside the text,’ a statement that denies
the whole perceptual life of humanity. It is explained and defended by the theory that there is nothing
but writing (écriture) and that writing precedes speaking. Any child before his years of school and any
of the hundreds of civilizations that have no written literature refute this. The paradox can only be
defended by a verbal trick. ‘Écriture’ means, in Derrida, not just writing but any system of signs, any
institution, any sense of orientation (even the distinction between left and right) that thus precedes
speech and what all others call and recognize as writing.” See Wellek’s “The New Nihilism in Literary
Studies,” http://the-rathouse.com/WellekNewNihilism.html. Thus one sees how the misunderstand-
ing of Derrida on speech and writing is of a piece with the related widespread misunderstanding of
Derrida’s perhaps most notorious pronouncement, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” taken as a proclamation
or logocentrism or text-o-centrism, when the book in which that phrase appears is an argument against
that very thing from the opening page. It is because Derrida is referring to text in the expanded sense,
much as he invokes writing in an expended sense, that his claim is perfectly sensible and thus not the
patently absurd claim that there is literally nothing outside the (literal) text.
8. On this epoch-making shift, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven and
London: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), especially the introduction and first chapter. I try to follow some of the
consequences of this in the chapters on eighteenth-century hermeneutics in The Rhetoric of Romantic
Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002).
Reviews 473
Reviews
Edited by Alessa Johns
Ruth P. Dawson, University of Hawaii
Life Writing, Letter Writing, and Two Elite Women
Joachim Berger, Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807):

Denk- und Handlungsräume einer “aufgeklärten” Herzogin (Heidelberg: Uni-
versitätsverlag Winter, 2003). Pp. 680. e65.00.
Douglas Smith, ed. and trans., Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of
Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2004). Pp. liv + 421. $40.00.
A welcome companion to recent renewed interest in court studies has

been the fresh attention to royal and noble women. These two radically different
studies, one devoted to the short-term regent of a miniscule German principality
and the other to the long-term usurper of the largest eighteenth-century empire,
suggest how rewarding such attention can be.
In his study of Anna Amalia, Joachim Berger has attempted a distinctive
new type of biographical study, one that reduces as much as possible the projec-
tion of the late-twentieth-century psychological norms into the account and that
especially avoids attributing excessive teleology or meaning to the subject’s devel-
opment and behavior. Convinced that the usual narrative structure contributes to
a kind of psychologized biography that saturates every act with purpose, Berger
sets about devising a form that disrupts these tendencies and that more effectively
captures the uncertainties, dead ends, and ordinary failures of lived reality. Draw-
ing on new social science critiques of life writing, he employs a thematic approach
in which he systematically examines Anna Amalia’s life according to a series of
roles she was expected to play. He first describes her activities for each role, and
then analyzes and evaluates those activities to demonstrate her “room for action”
and the gendered constraints that were placed on her. With this formal structure
of investigation, Berger writes a new account of the princess who is renowned for

having gathered into her small dominion three of the most important German
men of literature of her period and several other influential thinkers as well. When
Anna Amalia died, two Weimar privy counselors, Goethe and Voigt, composed
a famous tribute to her; Berger also sets himself the task of evaluating the highly
laudatory claims about the princess made in the eulogy, especially the assertion that
Anna Amalia presided over a Musenhof, a court of the muses. In the end, Berger’s
judgment on that oft-repeated claim is that only if the meaning of this concept
is limited to the sponsorship of art-loving sociability could it be an appropriate
designation (504–07).
Anna Amalia was born the fifth child of the ruler of Braunschweig-
Wolfenbüttel. Her mother was a sister of Friedrich the Great. While most of the
boys in the family, like other princes in the small territories around Prussia, joined
the Prussian army, all the sisters but one were married off. Anna Amalia’s young
husband was an orphaned prince who was about to come of age and take control
of his own minor principality. He was nineteen, and she sixteen. She very quickly
became pregnant, gave birth to a son, Carl August, and promptly became pregnant
again. But before the birth of her second son, her husband sickened and died. The
marriage had lasted twenty-six months. As soon as an early official declaration
was obtained proclaiming Anna Amalia no longer a minor, she became the regent
(1759). Her realm consisted of fragments that included the towns of Weimar, where
the court resided, Eisenach, famous for its connections with Martin Luther, and
Jena, home to a small university. Anna Amalia ruled as regent until 1775 when
she was almost thirty-six; at that point her son Carl August was given a slightly
early certification that he was of age, and he eagerly began his reign. For the next
thirty-two years, his mother was the dowager duchess, living first in Weimar, close
to the central court, and later, after 1781, based for much of the year at her small
country seat, Tiefurt. She died in 1807.
Berger’s thematic sections are organized around specific social roles that
Anna Amalia played: daughter and sister, wife and mother, Landesmutter (“mother
of the country”), dilettante, patron and center of sociability, and, lastly, traveler.
A final chapter identifies some of the ways in which the separate roles overlapped
and interacted. The volume concludes with a chronology, an index of personal
names, and a superb bibliography.
The duchess’s struggles with her son’s head tutor, the daunting issues
she faced around the decision of whether to subject her children to small-pox
inoculation, her painful relation with the necessarily redundant second son, the
disheartening record of that son’s socially unacceptable love affairs, the impact
of Weimar’s finances on Anna Amalia’s art patronage, the lapses into boredom at
Tiefurt—these are a small sample of the fascinating topics the book traces, which
frequently require revision of previous scholarship. One remarkable instance is
Berger’s careful analysis of the watercolor by Kraus that supposedly depicts the
learned “Friday Society” but in fact, as he argues, shows quite the opposite, a party
of dilettantes making no claim on learning (494–501). Berger argues that Kraus
created an idealized image by techniques such as using bits and pieces of various
gatherings rather than any particular meeting, moving all the individuals physi-
cally closer together than would actually have been acceptable to the duchess, and
omitting the ever-present card-playing. Thus, in Berger’s reading, the painting does
not document the Musenhof.
Berger’s strongly thematic organization entails repeatedly restarting the
chronological representation of the duchess’s life, but it also allows a thorough
Reviews 475
account of each particular area of activity—including acknowledgment of miss-

ing information and materials. Berger was able to locate some new details about
Anna Amalia’s childhood, for example; but that record is still sparse, especially
when compared to the massive documentation available for later periods and other
roles. At the other end of the book, in the chapter on travel, a lack of documenta-
tion is especially noticeable. In 1788 Anna Amalia, then forty-nine, had decided
to visit Italy, the land that many eighteenth-century German travelers, especially
Goethe, had found revivifying and restorative. The duchess spent much of her
time in Rome and especially Naples and was gone almost two years. Her first visit
to Naples included an episode that Berger is careful not to label a love affair, but
that definitely comprised six weeks of intensive friendship with the Italian prince-
archbishop of Taranto, Giuseppe Capecelatro. After returning to Rome for a few
months, Anna Amalia was disappointed to learn that in her absence Capecelatro
had been pressured to leave Naples and return to work. He and the duchess man-
aged to meet once more, when they spent five days together in the seclusion of a
monastery. Anna Amalia kept the knowledge of this meeting out of the Weimar
gossip mill and mostly out of innumerable accounts of classical Weimar ever since,
but she called it the happiest period of her life. Berger’s account, in keeping with
the detachment required by his scholarly commitments, records only the informa-
tion he has located and refrains from his own speculations.
Details and a good bit of speculation about an indisputable extramarital
(and later probably marital) relationship of enormous emotional importance to a
famous princess are exactly what Douglas Smith offers in his book of the personal
correspondence between Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin. This
volume draws on the work of a Russian scholar, Viacheslav Lopatin, who spent a
decade searching Russian archives for the letters and notes exchanged by the empress
and the man who was initially her lover, then her first minister, and eventually a
kind of co-ruler, with almost supreme power over the vast new southern regions
of her empire. Smith’s gracefully written introduction briefly surveys the history of
Catherine and Potemkin and also tells the riveting story of the century-and-a-half
long tussles between historians who wanted to publish the letters and the first tsar-
ist and later soviet operatives who wanted the correspondence suppressed. Smith
also discusses the politics and logistics of how Catherine and Potemkin exchanged
the letters, especially when Potemkin was far away, and even the politics of who
personally handed Potemkin’s letters to Catherine. Smith explains his choices in
translating the distinctive language of the letters into English. Catherine and Po-
temkin wrote, often hastily, in a mix of two languages, mostly Russian but partly
French; when short French passages exist in an overall Russian letter, the French
originals are retained, with translations offered in notes at the end of each letter.
Indeed, the letters are well annotated, and the reader is further assisted with a fine
selection of illustrations, three maps, a chronology of events, a table of ranks for
sorting out implications of various Russian titles (from Purveyor-of-the-Bedchamber
to Admiral-General), a bibliography, and an index of names.
Not surprisingly, Smith’s organizational principle is chronology, and to
follow this principle he has necessarily made a number of conjectures, since many
of the items, especially the notes of one or two sentences in length, are undated.
Each phase of the correspondence has its own introduction, helping to put the
letters into a much larger perspective, especially of wars and politics. Smith rarely
hesitates to speculate about the feelings and emotional states of the two parties.
Whereas Berger explicitly rejected psychological and psychoanalytical guesswork
about his subject, Smith is not so restrained; he suggests, for example, that Potemkin
displayed symptoms that we would today label as manic-depressive (15).
Different though the two books are in their analytical methodology, they
share a common weakness, a too limited understanding of gender. Berger cites
important recent scholarship on gender in eighteenth-century Germany, and each
chapter has a section inquiring about how the terms of both gender and Enlight-
enment affected the room for action (which he calls variously Handlungsräume
and Handlungsspielräume) as well as the imagined possibilities for action (those
expressed in writing—which he calls Denkräume) of the duchess. His analysis,
however, focuses too narrowly on registering specific moments when men and
women were explicitly treated differently. He suggests several potentially useful
comparisons of Anna Amalia with other similarly placed women, but he fails to
see how gender impacts the relations of women with each other (as of men among
themselves). In this connection, Anna Amalia’s decades-long role of mother-in-law
is missing from Berger’s discussion. (Since her husband’s parents were dead at the
time of her marriage, she never performed the role of daughter-in-law.) Of course
there are references to Anna Amalia’s troubled relation with Carl August’s wife
Luisa, but they are thin and not illuminating. Because Berger does not recognize
gender as fundamentally a system for the distribution of power, he is unable to
factor it into his analysis of why and how the duchess struggled in particular ways
with this role and others.
Smith also, on one level of course, acknowledges the importance of gen-
der for the relation of Catherine and Potemkin. He provides an excellent short
examination of the role of favorites at European courts in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, beginning with Cardinal Richelieu. Smith includes a fine ac-
count of the system of favorites that Catherine as Grand Duchess observed in the
household and court of her predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth, and of the ways
that Catherine continued that system as empress. But what Smith fails to note is
the disorienting and destabilizing effect of a woman on the throne, an effect radi-
cally different from that produced when the ruler was a man, whether his favorites
were “first ministers” (and thus men) or lovers (and thus usually women). When
Potemkin is quoted as saying he felt like a kept woman, what is important is not
just the uncertainties, insecurities, and humiliations that being kept meant, but also
the specific loss in entitlement, status, and power of being a woman and what that
meant for the masculinity of a man.
Perhaps the lack of gender analysis is not a weakness but an opportunity.
These two fine books contain a wealth of information, clearly presented, meticu-
lously documented. Now is the time to figure out more thoroughly what it all
means.
Helen Thompson, Northwestern University
Family Matters
Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Litera-

ture and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Pp. x, 466. $36.00.
Different though the two books are in their analytical methodology, they
share a common weakness, a too limited understanding of gender. Berger cites
important recent scholarship on gender in eighteenth-century Germany, and each
chapter has a section inquiring about how the terms of both gender and Enlight-
enment affected the room for action (which he calls variously Handlungsräume
and Handlungsspielräume) as well as the imagined possibilities for action (those
expressed in writing—which he calls Denkräume) of the duchess. His analysis,
however, focuses too narrowly on registering specific moments when men and
women were explicitly treated differently. He suggests several potentially useful
comparisons of Anna Amalia with other similarly placed women, but he fails to
see how gender impacts the relations of women with each other (as of men among
themselves). In this connection, Anna Amalia’s decades-long role of mother-in-law
is missing from Berger’s discussion. (Since her husband’s parents were dead at the
time of her marriage, she never performed the role of daughter-in-law.) Of course
there are references to Anna Amalia’s troubled relation with Carl August’s wife
Luisa, but they are thin and not illuminating. Because Berger does not recognize
gender as fundamentally a system for the distribution of power, he is unable to
factor it into his analysis of why and how the duchess struggled in particular ways
with this role and others.
Smith also, on one level of course, acknowledges the importance of gen-
der for the relation of Catherine and Potemkin. He provides an excellent short
examination of the role of favorites at European courts in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, beginning with Cardinal Richelieu. Smith includes a fine ac-
count of the system of favorites that Catherine as Grand Duchess observed in the
household and court of her predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth, and of the ways
that Catherine continued that system as empress. But what Smith fails to note is
the disorienting and destabilizing effect of a woman on the throne, an effect radi-
cally different from that produced when the ruler was a man, whether his favorites
were “first ministers” (and thus men) or lovers (and thus usually women). When
Potemkin is quoted as saying he felt like a kept woman, what is important is not
just the uncertainties, insecurities, and humiliations that being kept meant, but also
the specific loss in entitlement, status, and power of being a woman and what that
meant for the masculinity of a man.
Perhaps the lack of gender analysis is not a weakness but an opportunity.
These two fine books contain a wealth of information, clearly presented, meticu-
lously documented. Now is the time to figure out more thoroughly what it all
means.
Helen Thompson, Northwestern University
Family Matters
Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Litera-

ture and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Pp. x, 466. $36.00.
Reviews 477
Jill Shefrin, Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch—Royal

Governess & the Children of George III (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press,
2003). Pp. xvi, 168. $45.00.
Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: House-

hold, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Pp. x, 312. $60.00.
Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural

Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Pp.
xii, 287. $39.30.
To anticipate the new understandings of the eighteenth-century family

advanced by the books under review here, I begin with Naomi Tadmor’s Family
and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England, which contains a graph of the people
to whom Thomas Turner, a mercer who set up shop in Sussex in 1750 and mar-
ried in 1753, refers in his diary as “my family.” This vividly instructive image of
what Tadmor designates Turner’s household-family underscores both that family’s
inclusivity and, over a period of nine years, its remarkable contingency. When
Turner calls his wife, brother, mother-in-law, nephew, servants, and apprentices
his family, he does so not by virtue of blood ties but because they live under the
same roof. By isolating “co-residence and submission to the authority of the head
of the household” (27) as the criteria that justify this aggregation of not necessarily
related persons, Tadmor undoes the oppositions with which we tend to define the
eighteenth-century family (and, at one remove, the ideology transmitted by repre-
sentations of that family): the opposition of contractuality, or “instrumentality,”
and sentiment; the opposition of the “domestic” and the “occupational”; the op-
position of “change and continuity” (27–31); and the opposition of “individualism
and close familial cooperation” (177). But the revision that Tadmor’s graph most
fundamentally effects is its undoing of the distinction between nuclear and extended
family. Tadmor, Perry, Whyman, and Shefrin replace this distinction with the finely
historicized processes by which late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century families
form, contract, reproduce, and become fluid. In so doing, they not only expose, as
Perry puts it, our own “conjugal bias” (192) but also show how this bias is itself
a product of history and literary history.
Tadmor reads diaries, conduct books, legal commentary, and novels to
reconstruct their highly reticulated and variable networks of kin, servants, in-laws,
step-relations, political connections, customers, patrons, and friends. By “pursu-
ing keywords and phrases in texts, and analysing them as much as possible within
full textual contexts and identifiable social contexts” (11), Tadmor argues for the
simultaneous “inclusiveness and opacity” (129) that lend flexibility to terms like
“relation,” “kindred,” “acquaintance,” “connexion,” and “friend” and “served
to submerge the nuclear family in broader kinship relationships” (132). Because
eighteenth-century in-laws and half- and step-relations were not flagged as such,
these keywords precipitate fascinating indistinctions, begetting multiple mothers
and fathers, brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles, all of which affirm Tadmor’s
claim that one’s denomination of one’s kin demanded active qualification (by words
like “near,” “next,” “natural,” or “lawful”), or that “the claiming of a kinship was
a speech act” (144). Tadmor’s stress upon the indeterminacy of kinship terminology,
which extends all the way down to the nuclear family, illuminates a speech act like
Clarissa Harlowe’s lament to James Harlowe, Jr., that “I have in you a brother,
but not a friend”; the concurrence of “friend” and “brother” signals the gravity
of Clarissa’s indictment of a brother who fails to be both.
Although Tadmor demonstrates that “if we do not understand the historical
meanings of words such as ‘friend’ and ‘friendship,’ we are bound to read this novel
[Clarissa] in an anachronistic . . . manner” (269), her study remains surprisingly
neutral on the topic of sexual difference. In her close, nearly quantitative focus
upon family-making keywords, Tadmor does not acknowledge that their meaning
might be inflected by other words; that is, she does not broach the possibility that
a novel like Clarissa stresses the contingency of family to place a denaturing strain
upon one of this study’s revised criteria for kinship, “submission to the authority
of the head of the household.” Tadmor’s attention to the “recurring components”
(95) that produce kin does not compel her to reflect upon how novels, among
other texts, might do more than simply repeat them—so while Tadmor “note[s]
the formulaic presentation of the social profile” (97) of the suitor Trueworth in
Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, that profile is isolated from the prospect of
diachronic linguistic change effected either by the genre in which it appears (in this
case, the sexually incontinent Trueworth is not quite as worthy as his profile would
indicate) or by ambient transformations in the structure of domestic authority in
this long period. Whereas Tadmor offers an enriched vantage upon such highly
charged words as “master”—as she notes of Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade
Mecum, the task of studying one’s master’s temper “seems to suggest a similarity
between the master-apprentice relationship and the relationship between husband
and wife” (59)—she does not pursue the stakes of that overlap as they have been
iterated by critics of conjugal tyranny like Mary Astell or Daniel Defoe. Despite her
study’s reticence on the topic of men’s domestic power, however, Tadmor’s argu-
ment for the anachronism of our presumption of the eighteenth-century family’s
“conjugal core” (39), and her insistence that the “performative” (11) effecting of
family mattered as much as blood, mark a revision of our understanding of eigh-
teenth-century domesticity whose magnitude equals the promise of its repercussions
for further work in the field.
According to Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations, Richardson’s Clarissa can be
read as nothing other than a novel about power and its dispossession, an “economic
morality play” (65) that “recapitulates the changing position of daughters within a
family structure undergoing the transition to capitalistic modes of accumulation”
(68). The effects of this transition are pithily synopsized by Jane Austen in Sense
and Sensibility—in particular, by Mrs. John Dashwood’s infamous observation,
made when her husband ponders how he might provide for half-sisters whose
economic betterment is rather precariously poised upon his exertion of good will,
that “people always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them.”
Perry’s study claims this “locus classicus of sister-wife conflict” (141) as the fallout
of determinants that mark England’s development into a class- and market-based
economy: the “capitalizing of agriculture” (25); the increase of waged labor and
accompanying decline in the age of marriage; the restriction of kin liability for en-
trepreneurial ventures of other kin; in the cottager class, enclosure, which reduced
women’s contribution to the family economy by precluding activities like dairying,
fuel gathering, and gleaning; and, in the wealthier classes, the invention of the strict
settlement, which, by consolidating family wealth through primogeniture, reduced
the value of daughters to their families of birth and amplified their “instrumental
value” (50) to the families into which they married. When, by the end of Sense and
Sensibility’s second chapter, Mrs. John Dashwood restricts her husband’s perceived
obligation to his sisters to “such kind of neighbourly acts as his own wife pointed
Reviews 479
out,” she dramatizes as the corollary of England’s economic modernity the “move-
ment from an axis of kinship based on consanguineal ties or blood lineage to an
axis based on conjugal and affinal ties of the married couple” (2).
Novel Relations urges our momentous transfer of focus from a literary
history dedicated to the figure of the deracinated individual to a history of the novel
in which “being cast out of a family or taken into a family is the adventure” (8).
With Tadmor, Perry redresses the anachronism entailed “by our own diminished
kin configurations” (192) and perpetuated, most notably, by Lawrence Stone,
whose endorsement of companionate marriage obfuscates the fact that weakened
consanguineal ties, not the inevitability of “matrimonial bliss” (196), rendered wives
“more dependent than ever before upon the goodwill of their husbands” (195).
The largest question posed by Perry’s study concerns how the novel participates in
this transformation of family, especially insofar as its repercussions are registered
by the literal and “psychological” (3) dispossession of women. For the most part,
for Perry, the novel assists in cementing, and rendering palatable, “reality” (7): the
novel “confirmed the new conjugal paradigm of kinship” (51) by mourning lost
consanguineal bonds; the novel projects “compensatory” (90) fantasies of ampli-
fied filial affect; the novel celebrates obligation now divested of legal or economic
incentive as the sine qua non of disinterested feeling; the novel assists in augmenting
women’s “personal significance” at the expense of their “social power” (340); or
the novel, as Perry shows in a chapter dedicated to the fiction writer and architect
of enclosure Arthur Young, coordinates the radical decrease in the amount of land
owned by small farmers (by 1785, this was one third as much as it was in the previ-
ous century [294]) with idealized representations of subsistence agriculture.
Perry cogently refers to the ascendance of the conjugal family as “the
movement from father patriarchy to husband patriarchy” (34). Her two chapters
on “privatized” and “sexualized” marriage elaborate the changed nature of a
patriarchy now itself enclosed, so to speak, within the husband-wife unit. With
husband patriarchy’s “alchemical effect of transforming [women] into property”
(197), Perry documents the diffusion and internalization of sex; rather than a dis-
crete event that, prior to the Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753, might be extrinsic
to or even determine marriage, Perry argues, sex in the latter half of the century
facilitates privatized marriage in the capacity of “a central and all-defining subjec-
tive state” (271), either chastely confined to the conjugal bed or a holistic indicator
of whoredom.
According to Perry, Pride and Prejudice gives “no hint whatsoever that
[Charlotte Lucas] feels sexual disgust” (255) in the face of her own alchemical
transformation into the property of an irrefutably repulsive husband. Perhaps I
am a more squeamish reader than Perry, but her suggestion conveys the produc-
tive difficulties entailed by the claim that novels mobilize disgust because women
“had to be trained to feel repugnance for physical relations with” (254) men to
whom they were not wed. Yet one can find eighteenth-century plots in which
sexual revulsion, rather than a disciplinary expedient, exposes the arbitrary basis
of wives’ status as sexual property. Clarissa’s intimation of reflexive disgust, be-
cause it cannot be sublimated into virtue, might lend visceral, if not legitimizing,
force to her inability to marry on command; the eighteenth-century novel might
register critical ambivalence about women’s reconstitution as wives (rather than,
say, sisters, daughters, or dairy farmers). With the exception of Perry’s marvelous
chapter on aunts—aunt-ish women like Charlotte Lennox’s Countess in The Female
Quixote, who supplement the conjugal family to “stand for the return of what was
being repressed in the evolving English sex-gender system” (366)—the novel, for
Perry, facilitates a conjugal order sharply differentiated from the consanguinity it

nostalgically enshrines.
Perry’s biggest culprit is sentiment, which, “as a literary device, occurs when
the culture no longer really takes something seriously as a matter of sentiment.
. . . This cloying, hyperemotional attitude make[s] one suspect that whatever is
being sentimentalized is in actuality governed by rational, calculating motivation”
(209; emphasis Perry’s). This characterization of “sentimentality” runs counter to
the profundity of the eighteenth century’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic
investments in passion’s communicability and its truth; rather than a preexisting
expedient, sentiment might claim a more dynamic and indeed vexed relation to
the erosion of consanguineal ties than its deployment solely as a “device” would
allow. An “interdisciplinary” (5) study that compels us to recognize the conjugal
family as a historical artifact, Perry’s Novel Relations does not always grant the
same contingency to the affective forms it surveys.
Perry offers us an eighteenth-century novel centrally about the consan-
guineal as opposed to the conjugal family, a novel in which “one kind of family
dissolv[es] into another” (45) and a novel which “can thus be read symbolically as
[a contest] between different kinds of family formations” (132). Susan Whyman’s
Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys,
1660–1720 turns our attention to the different kind of blending practiced by the
“social hybrid” (62) and “cultural amphibian” (83–84) Sir John Verney. A merchant
and an officer in the Levant and Royal African companies, from the Restoration
to the early eighteenth century Sir John traverses the “journey from younger son
to city merchant and back to Tory squire” (83). Whyman reads 12,000 personal
papers amassed by the Verney family to argue that during the advent of a com-
mercial society in which interchanges of gifts and benefits were “crucial to the
restoration of both monarchy and family power after the Civil War” (28), “the city
and the country were never opposites” (5). By scrutinizing Sir John’s mercantile
and landed practices of exchange for “shaded spaces of overlap, like those in the
middle of a Venn diagram” (13), Whyman offers a finely resolved corrective to a
historiography focused, she argues, too exclusively upon the “country house” as the
defining location of “England’s bourgeois aristocrats” (83). Rather than “a simple
dichotomy between rural and urban culture” (18), Whyman charts the Verneys’
flexible, portable, and syncretic ties to show the reproduction of Sir John’s Buck-
inghamshire networks in a cluster of kin and connections located around Covent
Garden, including a “large extended family, not a nuclear one” as well as “patrons,
creditors, marriage brokers, pallbearers, and godparents” (69).
Whyman’s wonderfully concrete examples of the Verneys’ practices of
sociability include the distribution of pieces of venison by Sir Ralph, John’s father;
“privileged food that could only come from elite or royal deer parks” (23), venison’s
“ethnographic significance” (29) inhered in the ranking of its recipients according
to which part they received. In London, Whyman charts “the growth of a civil so-
ciety” (88) as a function, in part, of practices like visiting, whose vehicle conserved
gradations of power: “like the sections of [John’s] venison, the coach had its own
hierarchy of spatial positions” (100). A coach in which “kin jockeyed for space”
(100) might augment “Habermas’s public sphere” (108), Whyman suggests, with a
less abstract medium of sociability. Whyman’s densely detailed chapters about the
Verneys’ participation in the marriage market and electoral politics document the
transformation of the former into “a giant laboratory for integrating monied and
commercial interests” (124), tracing the Verney marriage settlements to show the
“raw commerciality of the marriage and its continuously rising portions” (133); on
Reviews 481
the quantitative urgency of marriage for love, that sentiment is mentioned “only 57
times” in a total of 656 letters about matchmaking (112, 110). Politics, likewise,
changed from an early-sixteenth-century community ritual, into a “commercial . . .
electoral process” (155), into a scene of party politics whose widely expanded fran-
chise required forms of organized campaigning supervised, prior to John Verney’s
1713 Tory victory, by his “worldly London” (171) wife, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s political activities belong, Whyman argues, to the “world of
fluid complexities regarding both men and women” (140) opened by the Verney
archive, a world in which “women exercised power as mothers, kinswomen, con-
sumers, arbiters of gossip, and gatekeepers of sociability” (140). Whyman’s study
meticulously and persuasively sustains its claims for the “fluid complexities” ex-
emplified by the Verneys; but the reader might wish for more citations from their
letters. One of the “most profound debates” of the post-Civil War and Restoration
period “concerned the future of the patriarchal family” (124); Whyman’s inclusion
of remarks by Thomas Cave, John’s country squire son-in-law, that “matrimony
does not relish like hunting” (113), or by a correspondent asking Sir John if he
is “in the loving trade” (126), suggests that she could have lent this debate more
lively epistolary substance. Yet Whyman’s careful extraction of historical and his-
toriographical meaning from her archive constitutes a formidable argument for
the mixed forms of sociability and power that sustained the Verney family through
the Restoration, financial revolution, and Whig ascendancy.
Whyman’s study nears its close by announcing the exchange of “the ritual
of election” for “the ritual of the hunt as the locus of power” (176). Jill Shefrin’s
Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch—Royal Governess & the
Children of George III begins with a vision of power stably ensconced in the royal
household. Allan Ramsay’s portrait of Queen Charlotte with the toddler George
and his younger brother Frederick (c. 1764) stages domesticity as the privileged site
of sovereignty’s perpetuation: the queen sits before a spinet with her younger son
on her lap, while George stands at her feet holding a toy bow; placed on the spinet
are a toy drum and John Locke’s treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
the legibility of whose title affirms its role as a cynosure in this carefully posed
confluence of the domestic and the royal. Shefrin’s study focuses upon the cut up,
or dissected, maps with which George III’s children played while under the care
of their governess Lady Charlotte Finch (who held the post from 1762 to 1793),
claiming these maps as a crucial example of the strategies of “progressive” (4) edu-
cation or “educational play” (xi) promoted by Locke. Such Constant Affectionate
Care—which contains plates of dissected maps of Europe, Asia, Africa, North and
South America, and Palestine, among other maps, games, and paintings—offers
lavish testimony to the material practices of “rational” or “enlightened domestic-
ity” (48–9) promoted in the king’s household by Lady Charlotte, as well as to the
transmission to a broader market of children’s geographical games. Shefrin shows
the central role of women—both Lady Charlotte and the Queen—in the practice
of a “moral education” (9), which included not only “English, French, writing,
geography, dancing, and music” as well as history and botany (55) but also, as
Queen Charlotte writes of a lesson plan for her two eldest daughters, “un petit
cours de l’electriciti & de pneumatique” (13). Shefrin documents Lady Charlotte’s
biography, her entrance into the royal household, her relationship with her charges
(they cite having had her as a governess among the “mercies of Heaven,” [44]),
and her circle, which included such prominent intellectuals as Elizabeth Carter,
Mary Wortley Montagu, and Elizabeth Montagu.
Although Shefrin documents the centrality of Lockean pedagogical phi-

losophy (which she rather reductively glosses by remarking that it “taught children
to think for themselves” [84]) to the educational milieu she so vitally reconstructs,
she leaves her reader to ponder how dissected maps in particular might emblema-
tize an educational regime that is, in theory and—as her study shows—in practice,
simultaneously “progressive” and conservative. Locke’s “educational play,” after
all, implicates not just such things as alphabetic dice but also the perpetuation of
virtues whose easy and unforced acquisition would naturalize the status of their
performers. Dissected maps, promoted by their inventor Jean Palairet as a means
to both “geographical knowledge” and “virtue” (24), mark an especially topical
instance of the attainment of natural or unaffected mastery envisioned by Locke;
notably, Shefrin includes in an appendix prologues to the royal children’s perfor-
mance of a scene from John Dryden’s play The Indian Emperor; or, The Conquest
of Mexico. One of these prologues, penned by John Conduit, Master of the Mint,
speaks for royal children who “Indian like, dispise the shining Ore, / Baubles &
trinkets wee, like them adore. / But happier farr, in this bright Circle here; / Wee
worship not, as Indians do; for Fear” (130). Shefrin captures the material life of
a royal nursery in which conquest, as well as spelling, is play. Her study opens a
remarkable vantage upon this nursery’s confusion of domesticity and empire, dis-
sected maps and imperial possessions, and family and extended family.
Glenn A. Moots, Northwood University
Locke Ascending
Greg Forster, John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005). Pp. xi, 317. $75.00.
John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. viii, 767. $110.00.
Kim Ian Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2004). Pp. xi, 201. $65.00.
John W. Yolton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and
Spirits in the Essay (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). Pp. ix, 180.
$36.50.
In his cardinal work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke

asserts that it is one thing to show a man that he is in error, but another to put him
in possession of the truth. Scholars studying Locke have never been reluctant to
argue over each other’s errors. The great challenge seems to lie in demonstrating
the truth. This is particularly the case with Locke’s religious content, which is both
emphatic and reticent. That enigmatic quality brought him both admiration and
scorn from his contemporaries. Modern scholars, no less than Locke’s friends and
Although Shefrin documents the centrality of Lockean pedagogical phi-

losophy (which she rather reductively glosses by remarking that it “taught children
to think for themselves” [84]) to the educational milieu she so vitally reconstructs,
she leaves her reader to ponder how dissected maps in particular might emblema-
tize an educational regime that is, in theory and—as her study shows—in practice,
simultaneously “progressive” and conservative. Locke’s “educational play,” after
all, implicates not just such things as alphabetic dice but also the perpetuation of
virtues whose easy and unforced acquisition would naturalize the status of their
performers. Dissected maps, promoted by their inventor Jean Palairet as a means
to both “geographical knowledge” and “virtue” (24), mark an especially topical
instance of the attainment of natural or unaffected mastery envisioned by Locke;
notably, Shefrin includes in an appendix prologues to the royal children’s perfor-
mance of a scene from John Dryden’s play The Indian Emperor; or, The Conquest
of Mexico. One of these prologues, penned by John Conduit, Master of the Mint,
speaks for royal children who “Indian like, dispise the shining Ore, / Baubles &
trinkets wee, like them adore. / But happier farr, in this bright Circle here; / Wee
worship not, as Indians do; for Fear” (130). Shefrin captures the material life of
a royal nursery in which conquest, as well as spelling, is play. Her study opens a
remarkable vantage upon this nursery’s confusion of domesticity and empire, dis-
sected maps and imperial possessions, and family and extended family.
Glenn A. Moots, Northwood University
Locke Ascending
Greg Forster, John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005). Pp. xi, 317. $75.00.
John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. viii, 767. $110.00.
Kim Ian Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2004). Pp. xi, 201. $65.00.
John W. Yolton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and
Spirits in the Essay (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). Pp. ix, 180.
$36.50.
In his cardinal work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke

asserts that it is one thing to show a man that he is in error, but another to put him
in possession of the truth. Scholars studying Locke have never been reluctant to
argue over each other’s errors. The great challenge seems to lie in demonstrating
the truth. This is particularly the case with Locke’s religious content, which is both
emphatic and reticent. That enigmatic quality brought him both admiration and
scorn from his contemporaries. Modern scholars, no less than Locke’s friends and
Reviews 483
foes, find the place of religion in Locke’s corpus to be a source of inexhaustible

interpretation and controversy.
These four recent monographs represent significant contributions to the
debate. Marshall details the factions and arguments of the toleration debates, dem-
onstrating how many of Locke’s arguments were informed by those controversies.
Yolton catalogs the often overlooked intersection of spiritual and physical worlds
in Locke’s aforementioned Essay. Parker discerns in Locke the roots of modern
Biblical criticism and reexamines his use of Scripture in the Two Treatises. Forster,
using an integrated study of Locke’s major texts, ascribes to him a theistic liberal
vision that addresses some of our contemporary social challenges. Composed by
specialists in history, philosophy, religious studies, and political science respectively,
these monographs demonstrate the importance of an interdisciplinary approach
to Locke’s corpus.
Marshall’s new text on the toleration debates should become a standard
overview of the broad historical background of Locke’s writing—both the tolera-
tion debates and the rise of the “republic of letters.” But this new book is really
not so much about Locke as it is a broader narrative of the period’s ideological
and religious conflicts. Locke scholars hoping for something akin to Marshall’s
1994 landmark book, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, which
focused more directly on Locke, will be disappointed. (The focus of the new text is
perhaps on Bayle or Jurieu, for example, as much as Locke.) But this is a testimony
to Marshall’s 1994 text, rather than a complaint against this most recent work.
Novices will gain a firm orientation to debates of the period. Scholars will find de-
parture points for further research. That research especially includes, among other
things, the role of sex and libertinism in debates that were otherwise about religion
and politics. This is a particularly provocative facet of Marshall’s history.
It is a massive undertaking to outline the early Enlightenment, and Mar-
shall readily admits that the scope of earlier manuscripts got away from him. But
the final approach is prudent. Marshall subdivides his subjects in a way that will
appeal to students of the period, and he often leaves the narrative to serve as its
own analysis. We learn of both the arguments for and against toleration. The
organizing principle of the narrative is usually geographical and denominational.
Almost every church and religious movement was united in arguing for some kind
of intolerance; every European government wrestled with the question as well.
Even advocates for toleration were selectively intolerant. What divided them were
the details of the persecution—who, when, and why. We also learn of unity and
diversity in arguments for toleration.
One of the clear lessons from Marshall’s work is that this period was not a
contest between religion and radical secularity. Many of the arguments for toleration
were articulated on religious grounds. Many early tolerationists, including Locke,
were not simply prescribing a particular intersection of religion and politics, but
were prescribing a particular interpretation of Christianity. Many tolerationists saw
themselves as proponents of a revived “primitive” and pre-Augustinian Christianity.
Its minimal creed, not surprisingly, could accommodate Arminians and Socinians
within its broad definition of orthodoxy. The new interpretation also undermined
eschatological and Hebraic tendencies. The result is, in many ways, a reinvention
of how Christianity now understands itself. That, perhaps more than the debate
over state policy on religion, is the most important result of the toleration debates,
and Locke’s role is very important in enabling that shift.
Marshall’s exploration of the historic roots of intolerance is somewhat

disappointing insofar as he offers only sparse citation of primary sources from
Augustine or the early Reformers, for example. But perhaps it is not as important
to cite primary sources as it is to know how they were interpreted by parties to
the debate over toleration. It would be equally enlightening to discover how argu-
ments for toleration were translated into actual political and ecclesiastical policy,
ultimately changing the implicit zeitgeist in a relatively short span of time. That
would be a study less concentrated on the celebrities of the early Enlightenment.
But given the overwhelming scope of the task at hand, Marshall cannot be faulted.
We are again thankful for his contribution to our understanding of the long eigh-
teenth century.
Yolton’s text seeks to discern the significance of Locke’s repeated refer-
ence to spirits in the Essay, and the intersection of this spiritual world with the
physical world. It is a subject not often explored by scholars. Yolton demonstrates
that Locke’s world of spiritual beings is worth exploring in its own right because
of its essential connection to his metaphysics and epistemology. But perhaps more
important than this, the spiritual world helps us to understand ourselves, our hap-
piness, and God. Thus, paying close attention to Locke’s “other” world provides
insight into his philosophical anthropology, ethics, and theology. Yolton asserts
that there is no other philosopher of the seventeenth or eighteenth century that used
the chain of being, angels and spirits, so readily as Locke to illustrate and explain
accounts of knowledge, perception, and reality.
That distinction, coming from a scholar of Yolton’s stature, will surely
stir existing controversies about how much Locke owes to medieval philosophy or
revealed religion. But Yolton’s exploration should discourage too much scholarly
bravado. It is not so much that Locke offers us a template of ideas to trace within
the history of philosophy or theology. Rather, he tried to demonstrate the simplic-
ity of things by presenting them apart from standing dogmas and orthodoxies; the
humility of this approach makes him appear enigmatic to us. Locke’s way of seeing
the world in an inclusive and integrated way confuses rather than accommodates
academic taxonomies and the hunt for ideational or textual smoking guns. Locke
was surely steeped in many standing and past traditions. He was not locked away
in an intellectual world of his own making. It is his entrepreneurial utilization, as-
similation, and rearticulating of standing ideas, not a slavish conformity to them,
that marks his brilliance.
This bold innovation of Locke is especially evident in his use of theology,
in avoiding both lazy minimalism and strident dogma. In Yolton’s reading, theology
frames Locke’s arguments on many things, particularly ontology, and epistemology,
and human happiness. But it is a theology that sees no fundamental conflict between
what is learned by reason and what is learned by revelation. His solution to standing
theological problems such as the resurrection, or to philosophical problems such as
free will or the mind-body problem, can be termed both a philosophical theology
and a theological philosophy. The choice of emphasis is what makes Locke capable
of being all things to all scholars.
This point raises a host of puzzles that Yolton catalogs more than resolves,
but his great familiarity with Locke’s work is of great service to us. It gives him a
keen eye for inventorying a host of distinctions and difficulties that would otherwise
escape novice readers or those distracted by more general inquiries. The minimal
historical context provided by Yolton further sustains rather than diminishes
Locke’s reputation for innovation. The clear originality and rich texture of Locke’s
Reviews 485
thought emerge from Yolton’s text, and it should become a standard reference for
those studying Locke and his age, particularly when examining the integration of
epistemology and ethics in his arguments. Yolton provides a most succinct challenge
for those who would either oversimplify or overcomplicate Locke’s work.
Parker’s work sustains the thesis that Locke’s religious ideas are sincerely
articulated and stand at the heart of his work. Locke’s politics are Biblical, Parker
argues, but that must be seen against the background of his role in a larger move-
ment to redefine what the Bible is saying. Though Parker’s tone and rhetoric are
always measured and moderate, it is clear that he is waging a defensive campaign
here. His intent is to rehabilitate the thesis that Locke’s reading of the Bible is nei-
ther inconsequential nor a stalking horse for a radically secular project. According
to Parker, Locke’s humble reading of the Bible is essential not only to his political
project in the Two Treatises, but to Locke’s later writing as well.
Parker’s Locke is someone who wants to provide a sincere and pious
reading of the Biblical text in order to answer the fundamental anthropological
questions of politics. But as in Marshall and Yolton, this reading of the Biblical text
goes against the grain of past orthodoxy. Locke, like many of his contemporaries
and allies, did not want to take Christianity as it had been handed to him. He
wanted instead to articulate a Christianity that could withstand the challenges of
the future. Locke’s reaction is not to re-entrench standing interpretations, but to
become a kind of hyper-Protestant—making sense of things for himself but always
sticking close to the Biblical text. This is illustrated in his rejection of the orthodox
view of the Fall, which is neither a call to turn away from the Biblical sources nor
toward optimism about human nature. Rather, Locke remains committed to both
the Biblical text and political realism.
What may be more interesting still is that Parker’s Locke seems intent not
simply to invite a Biblical justification of liberalism, but also perhaps a liberal jus-
tification of the Bible. If Locke is correct, then the Bible is not just something that
can be accommodated to liberal politics, but it is best understood, at least politically,
through the lens of liberalism. By this Parker does not mean an esoteric project to
promote capitalism or natural rights while undermining orthodox Christianity—a
project scorned and celebrated by modern scholars. Locke does not presuppose
that Christianity and liberalism are at odds. For him, a virtuous liberalism and
Christianity are symbiotic—beginning with the narrative of Adam.
If that is indeed the case, then Locke is subverting some reigning ortho-
doxies of his own day, as well as some of our own—particularly presuppositions
about the Bible’s incompatibility with modernity. According to Parker’s reading,
Locke may be just entrepreneurial enough to pull that off successfully. This thesis
is worth sustaining well beyond the Two Treatises, however, and one hopes to see
that argument continued by Parker in the future. Of interest to all scholars of the
eighteenth century is Locke’s role in the development of modern historical/critical
Biblical scholarship. On this question, Parker, a professor of religious studies, is
fully able to deliver, but more historical context is necessary for that thesis to be
sustained in this monograph. One hopes that Parker will provide more on that
score in the future. Regardless, this recent text serves as a good introduction to
Locke’s lifelong, and often complicated, interest in the Bible.
Forster’s presentation of Locke’s political philosophy is perhaps even
more radical than Parker’s. Forster, like Parker, argues that Locke is constructing
an essentially theistic liberalism. For Forster, moreover, only this theistic founda-
tion has the ability to bolster liberalism’s moral self-confidence and restore the
proper intersection of religion and politics—defying both the militant atheist and
the religious enthusiast. According to Forster’s Locke, both reason and faith lead
to the premises of an “ecumenical religious philosophy of liberalism” (27). This
view makes Forster’s text the most ambitious of the four, as it takes on a great
number of standing controversies not only about Locke’s use of religion but also
about liberalism itself.
Forster will find himself in a position of having to defend not only that
an essentially theistic liberalism can adequately defend itself against its critics, but
also that Locke is putting this liberalism at the heart of his later works. To defend
the thesis, Forster’s monograph is no less ambitious. It deftly and methodically
tours Locke’s most famous publications, seeking to establish not simply a self-
consciously coherent philosophical corpus, but also a coherent and relevant social
prescription. Forster is rarely, if ever, distracted from his main argument. Locke,
he argues, strives to articulate the moral premises necessary to our beliefs about
morality and responsibility in a liberal polity. The holy grail of liberalism is the
original position of humanity, and Forster argues that Locke’s humble epistemology
and theistic morality enable the most authoritative original position.
This may or may not be the reinvention of liberalism. But is it the rein-
vention of Christianity? This question gets to the heart of so many controversies
about Locke and modernity itself. The point here is to return to the basis of why
Locke appears enigmatic, both emphatic and reticent on religious matters. All of
our authors would assert that Locke is emphatic about a particular kind of ratio-
nal theology. The fact that he is reticent about particular controversial doctrines,
such as the Trinity, is not necessarily any reason to think that Locke wanted to
reinvent the ecclesiastical order, undermine revealed religion, or promote a kind of
hyper-rationalism or materialism. Rather, if Forster is correct, this is attributable to
Locke’s ambitious social philosophy. Controversial dogmas not essential to moral
consensus would have no place in such a social philosophy.
If all of Locke’s major works are centered largely on the agenda of a so-
cial and ethical philosophy, then we should not expect to learn much from them
about Locke’s own opinions. Nor, Locke would argue, should we care about his
own opinions. Each person is responsible for discerning his own positions. Eternal
happiness depends on it, and Locke was emphatic about the possibility of eternal
happiness. If the Essay is to be interpreted (as both Forster and Yolton argue) as a
work that is as much concerned with ethics as with epistemology, then this moral
discovery process must take theology into account. Hence Locke’s theological
philosophy. But reason did not enable Locke to prescribe to others those things
not discoverable by philosophy. Hence Locke’s philosophical theology.
What emerges from all of this is a thinker far more coherent and thoughtful
than past scholarship has perhaps given Locke credit for. He is more than the leader
of an empiricist movement, a natural theologian, or a liberal political philosopher.
Still less is he the echo of Hobbes or a product of historical circumstances. Though
modern interpreters of Locke present him offering complicated answers to many
questions, his stated goal was just the contrary—to reveal what he thought to be
the plain sense of the matter, while steering a course around both unnecessary
complexity and received wisdom.
Reviews 487
Wayne C. Ripley, Winona State University
“Take it and eat it up”: The Bible, Culture, and Taste
Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005). Pp. xii, 241. $37.00.
Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, and

Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Pp. xvi, 273. $37.95.
Jonathan Sheehan’s excellent The Enlightenment Bible explores how

“the authority of the Bible was reconstituted as a piece of heritage of the West”
(xi) between the Reformation and the nineteenth century in both Germany and
England. Sheehan has written a book about the Bible that is both learned and
accessible, making The Enlightenment Bible a worthy sequel to the classic works
of Hans Frei, Stephen Pricket, and David Norton, and historical surveys by Chris-
topher Hill and Brian Moynahan of the Bible and its influence on particular eras.
Sheehan’s argument also complements and complicates the idea of a conservative
clerical Enlightenment offered by historians such as J. G. A. Pocock, Jonathan
Clark, and Brian Young. Like them, Sheehan rejects the traditional association of
the Enlightenment and secularization, which he understands to be more about the
“transformation and reconstruction” of religion than its “disappearance” (xi).
Rather than constituting a single, sacred object like the Reformation Bible, the
Enlightenment Bible becomes an ongoing intellectual “project” (91) designed to
demonstrate the Bible’s continued relevancy to evolving modernity. The Bible in
the eighteenth century gained a range of new authorities grounded in the modern
“disciplinary domains” of philology, pedagogy, history, and poetry (91).
Sheehan’s first section is devoted to the Reformation Bible and its problem-
atic relation to translation. Vernacular translations initially raised unsettling chal-
lenges to traditional conceptions of biblical, ecclesiastical, and political authority.
Whereas religious fervor and scholarship worked in conjunction between the Luther
translation (1522) and the King James Version (1611), the Reformation ended by
the early seventeenth century as Protestant orthodoxies became entrenched, and
translations were no longer revised by new scholarship. The new vernacular canon
was closed, “texts were fixed, liturgies solidified, [and] catechisms hardened into
rigid forms” (4). The Luther Bible and King James Bible quickly gained a status akin
to their divinely inspired originals. Even though Luther had doubted the canonic-
ity of some biblical books, by 1530 he was repeatedly depicted with iconography
formerly associated with Jerome, the inspired translator of the Vulgate, and con-
sidered popularly as the thirteenth apostle (5–11). In England, the establishment
of one supreme translation took longer because of the political turmoil created
by the Restoration. William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale had worked outside
the royal authority of Henry VIII, and the most popular English Bible before the
King James Version was the Geneva Bible, which was composed by Marian exiles
(1557–60). Both James I and Archbishop Laud saw this version, heavily laden with
commentary, as critical of royal power (22), but they pushed for a new translation
through arguments of piety. The last Geneva Bible was published in 1645, suc-
cumbing to the Authorized Version even as the English Civil War was speeding to
a head. Although Christopher Hill has noted that some religious Dissenters would
continue to use the Geneva Bible through the early part of the eighteenth century,
for most of England the Authorized Version was a text that promoted national
and ecclesiastical unity after 1660 and 1688.
Thus, the Enlightenment Bible began when scholarship and translation
parted ways. Continued scholarship in philology and textual criticism had the
potential to destabilize the new cultural weight of the vernacular Bibles, but as
Sheehan emphasizes, with very few exceptions these critical endeavors evolved out
of efforts to strengthen biblical authority. While there were new attempts at transla-
tions, they consistently lacked the political support or aesthetic success to supplant
the accepted vernacular version. Biblical scholarship continued unabated, however.
By 1707 the Englishman John Mill had identified over 30,000 textual variations in
the New Testament alone. Whereas Deists like Anthony Collins used these textual
variants to challenge biblical authority, Mill believed that the textual work he was
doing would lay the foundation for a new translation of the Bible purged of textual
inaccuracies. This translation would lift the veil of human error from the holy word
and effect a second Reformation upon which “‘the souls of millions’” depended
(49). Like Mill, the Boyle lecturer Richard Bentley insisted that no biblical scholar-
ship could “ever subvert true religion” (47). His friend William Whiston was of a
similar mindset, but Whiston was less fearful of turning over the cart of Anglican
orthodoxy. After discovering the apocryphal Apostolic Constitutions, which he
believed to be the genuine writings of the apostles, Whiston proudly proclaimed
that Arianism (the denial of Christ’s divinity) was the true Christian doctrine (34).
Although John Milton, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke leaned in
this direction, Whiston was alone in publishing his views. In 1710 he lost his seat
in Mathematics at Cambridge University and faced the Anglican Convocation, but
he continued in his scholarly work, offering a biblical translation in 1745 that had
been purged of the pernicious doctrine of the trinity. In Germany, textual scholar-
ship was not as developed, and the desire for the true Scripture created a strange
new union of Pietism, mysticism, and philology. Disciples of Jacob Boehme, such as
Johann Kayser and Jakob Junckherott, invoked Paul’s notion that the truth of the
Bible was to be found in the spirit rather than the letter and created unintelligible
translations that replicated in German the syntax and (lack of) punctuation of the
Hebrew and Greek originals. These efforts echo similar projects in England by
the Ranter Thomas Tany during the Interregnum and by the mystic High Church
Hutchinsonians later in the eighteenth century (182–83).
In both Germany and England, many attempted to wring Christian truth
from fallen and corrupted Jewish texts. Johann Lorenz Schmidt’s translation, The
Divine Scriptures from before the Times of Jesus (1735), set the Bible in a naturalistic
world that went well beyond the acceptable norms of physico-theology, and, like
Anthony Collins, he rejected as spurious typological readings of the Old Testament.
For Schmidt, the Hebrew idiom and testament were a kind of “shit” that had to
be removed from the main street of people’s religious lives (129). While Schmidt’s
Socian heterodoxy was largely rejected in Germany, poets and critics in Germany
and England followed the same urge to salvage Christian truths from the obscu-
rity of the Old Testament’s Jewish origins. They saw poetry as a way to capture a
sense of inspiration lost in out-of-date forms (like Hebrew forms of worship) and
poor translations, which “stood as a barrier between modern man and the truth
of the Bible” (129). Popular paraphrases of the Psalms by Isaac Watts and Johann
Andreas Cramner sought to reveal the new theological reality of the Christian era,
freely translating Hebrew types into their Christian anti-types.
Reviews 489
Other poets and critics, however, saw the necessity of uncovering how the
ancient Hebrews conceived of poetry and art. John Dennis, Richard Blackmore,
and Edward Young saw in the literary forms of the Old Testament an originality
that ancient and modern writers had yet to surpass, and this originality could be
understood only through mastery of Hebrew cultural and literary traditions. Schol-
arship and poetry were seen as inseparable, and like many biblical paraphrases,
Young’s popular Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (1721) also included notes
on Hebrew arts, cultural practices, and conceptions of nature. For Sheehan, such
projects formed the backdrop to Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry
of the Hebrews, which was delivered in Latin in 1741 and translated into English
in 1787, and to his translation of Isaiah. Sheehan considers Lowth’s wide-ranging
influence in both England and Germany, where he had a tremendous impact on
the development of High Criticism. Sheehan’s discussion of Lowth leads him to
consider the popular eighteenth-century vogue for the Book of Job, a literary and
religious text that “offered translators what seemed the best chance of bridging
the chasm between Hebrew and modern” idioms (162). While his emphasis on
Lowth in popularizing the link between poetry and prophecy among the educated
is surely correct, it should be noted that Sheehan gives no attention to enthusias-
tic, Methodist, or lower-class writers. Lowth may have “insisted that poetry and
prophecy were identical” (162), but one could reply in a Blakean vein that Lowth
hardly believed it.
The Enlightenment Bible culminates for Sheehan in Johann David Michae-
lis’s translation (1769–90), which “synthesized the universe of information that
scholars had about biblical languages, customs, people, landscape, and natural
history” (186). Michaelis had sat at Lowth’s 1741 lectures, though he grew frus-
trated with other, more timorous English scholars, like Benjamin Endicott, who
never used their scholarship to launch a renewed campaign of translation (184).
The massive notes to Michaelis’s translation show the wide scope of the Enlight-
enment mind, which by the later eighteenth century understood ancient philology
as a small piece in the wider significance and meaning of the Bible and its cultural
milieu. This “archival Bible” depended upon the unification of various disciplines
and cutting-edge research. As part of his translation project, Michaelis designed the
ambitious Niebuhr expedition into the heart of Arabia, which sought manuscripts,
cultural mores, the names of flora and fauna, and any other information that could
impart understanding of the Bible. The expedition set the new standard for scholarly
journeys, and Michaelis specifically excluded missionaries or spiritual men whose
visions would interfere with the work of scholars (198). Michaelis’s notes offer a
compendium of what he could gather about the biblical world through the Arab
culture, following the paradigm of Orientalism, which sought “less to understand a
living culture systematically, than to use this living culture as an archive of materials
preserved since the most ancient of times” (210). Orientalism and biblical studies
went hand-in-hand since, in Michaelis’s words, the Old Testament “forces us to
delve into both the whole of natural history and the mores of the Orientals” (189).
But Michaelis’s emphasis on scholarship also brought an end to the Reformation
Bible. As he wrote, he wanted “to introduce into the Bible no religious system at
all” (213, Sheehan’s emphasis). In short, Michaelis had invented the cultural Bible,
a document of peoples existing at a certain place and time.
In Germany, the new understanding of culture transformed the Luther
Bible from a translation into a seminal piece of German literature. Goethe, Jakob
Grimm, and Herder agreed that Luther’s book had created the German people
and its culture (224–5). Yet, out of the cultural Bible was born the theology of
culture (231). For Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Bible became a “mausoleum” of

the “theology of feeling” that was true religious experience (229). Schleiermacher’s
understanding of the Bible allowed “German culture to free itself from bondage to
Oriental and foreign texts, to become autonomous” (233). Germans, according to
Schleiermacher, become “the only ones capable, and thus also worthy, of having
the sense for holy and divine things” (233). Sheehan, to his credit, points out the
anti-Semitism that lay behind these ideas and where they would lead in twentieth-
century German thought.
Except for Alexander Geddes and Joseph Priestley, Sheehan gives very
little attention to Romantic biblical scholarship or how the poetry of the period
invoked the Bible. He emphasizes instead that Romantic and early Victorian England
remained highly suspicious of German biblical scholarship. It was only by the mid-
nineteenth century that England reengaged with the new conceptions of the cultural
Bible it had helped engender through George Eliot’s translations of David Strauss
and Ludwig Feuerbach in 1846 and 1853, respectively, and Matthew Arnold’s idea
of culture. The Bible, for Arnold, must lose its power as a talismanic fetish, and
instead culture and religion become fused in the inner workings of the heart.
If literature in the eighteenth century had one eye on the Bible, Denise
Gigante’s Taste: A Literary History suggests that the other eye was on the dining
room table. Referencing the Dissenter Edward Hardwood, who in 1768 attempted
to provide a free translation of “Jewish literary barbarisms” for a polite eighteenth-
century audience, Sheehan noted that Hardwood “aimed not at replacing the Bible
but at making its truths digestible to the sensitive stomach of the modern age”
(119). Gigante’s book explores how literary and gustatory metaphors meet in the
idea of taste between Milton and the Romantics. According to Gigante, the long
eighteenth century concerned itself with establishing a hierarchy of taste, which
begins with the chaotic contests of individual appetites found in the Civil War
and epitomized in the 1651 frontispiece for Hobbes’s Leviathan and which ends
with the regulation of class appetites found on the middle-class dining room table
of the Victorian era. Theoretically, Taste grounds itself in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
claim in A Defence of Poetry that metaphor “marks the before unapprehended
relations of things” (2), and through trenchant close readings of literary and criti-
cal discourses, Gigante uncovers how writers and critics thought of art and food
in overlapping categories. Dining, much like art, was seen as a marker of human
social life, a demarcation that divided the human from the beast and the civilized
from the savage.
Gigante uses Milton as the “foundational theorist for aesthetic taste
through his epic wrangle with the metaphor” (23). In Milton, not only is taste
associated with the sublime and the beautiful, but it also “becomes constitutive
of subjectivity” (24). Gigante cites what Byron would later write playfully in Don
Juan: “Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner” (25). Much of her initial
discussion revolves around the dinner Adam and Eve share with Raphael, a meal
that provides young humanity with the creation story and an ontological model
for the relation between heaven and earth. Much like the Fall, the Creation was
also a matter of eating and expulsion. God himself, for Milton, creates by purging
downward: “The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs” (PL 7.238). These dregs are
aligned with Hell and Chaos, being the expelled abject of God. In the Fall, Adam
and Eve align themselves with these dregs, and they are likewise purged from the
Garden (PL 11.53). Eve’s seduction by Satan in Paradise Lost serves as the arche-
typal moment when taste fails and appetite succeeds, and it is complemented by
the Son’s rejection of Satan’s more ostentatious feasts in Paradise Regained. Eve
Reviews 491
becomes the precursor of the “aesthetic virtuoso or connoisseur seeking pleasure

through the empirical [and, one may add, literal] experience of taste” (17). Eve,
however, ultimately fails in her virtuoso task, becoming like the Man of Taste in
the eighteenth century who “had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables,
seeking distinction through the exercise of discrimination” (3).
For Gigante, the Romantic era is also a consumer revolution in which the
individual must make discriminating choices of taste—whether picking food or
art. Wordsworth’s career is seen in terms of an aesthetic ecology (77). In the 1805
Prelude, the poet perceives the “mighty mind, / Of one that feeds upon infinity”
(68; 13.69–70), an image Gigante traces back to the digesting godhead of Paradise
Lost. While she relies heavily on Friedrich Schelling in explicating Wordsworth,
Gigante argues persuasively that a central theme of Wordsworth’s aesthetic vision is
the consumption and expulsion of the landscape. This theme unites Wordsworth’s
early work with his later, contradictory positions on the development of the Lake
District. Wordsworth condemned the expansion of the railway and its idle tour-
ists, even as he wrote a travel guide in 1842 for the new consumers of the land-
scape that his own poetry had popularized. At the heart of these contradictions
are changing notions of taste and consumption. Be it in poetry or travel guides,
Wordsworth desired to be “the center of an aesthetic economy of consumption
based on taste” (88).
If Wordsworth is Gigante’s food critic, Lamb, Byron, and Keats are the era’s
diners, who are more concerned with their own figural and literal consumption.
Lamb, who worked for the British East India Company, rejected the consumption
of sugar, likening it to devouring human flesh because of its dependence on and
promulgation of the slave trade. In addition, foreign delicacies damaged English
palates and sensibilities. Lamb, who often punned on his name as the victim of
slaughter, alternated his gentle persona of Elia, the “judicious epicure” (96), with
Edax, literally, “greedy.” Edax narrates Lamb’s “Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” a
guilty genealogy and defense of eating meat (90), which Gigante reads in the con-
text of Romantic vegetarianism. Lamb’s last essay was an appreciation of eating
hares, a complex symbol of melancholy and persecution (114–15). For his part,
Byron had little problems with devouring, even though he struggled with obesity
through starvation and purging and was often figured as a literary vampire. In
Gigante’s argument, Byron exploited his literary character in the cannibal scene in
Don Juan in order to show how categories of good taste relied upon the devoured
Other. The infamous scene is read as a satire of dining, manners, and mores in a
historical moment prepared by actual stories of cannibalism, which had recently
occurred in the shipwrecks of the Méduse and the Alceste. Although Byron was an
all-consuming vampire, Keats’s problem was his inability to consume the world.
Gigante reads La Belle Dame sans Merci, which was attributed in The Examiner
to “Caviare,” as Keats’s poem on taste and the fatal consumption of beauty. More
interestingly, Gigante reads Hyperion’s snuffing of metal and nausea with Keats’s
own consumption of mercury for his tuberculosis.
While the polysemous meanings of “taste” are particularly fruitful to the
eighteenth century, as often happens in books focused on Milton and the Romantics,
Gigante reduces the eighteenth century to an era of transition. As she argues, for the
eighteenth century, the Man of Taste became “the universal symbol for the self in
society” (15), a new consumer figure whose choice regarding what enters his body
becomes an emblem for the wider social body. In the Romantic period, the ideal
monarchical Man of Taste will devolve into the real gluttony and license of George
IV. As Gigante notes, George’s career coincides with a change in the meaning of
the word “snob,” “from being a member of the lower classes to being a member
of an aspirant middling class,” just as “the middle-class ideal of moderation had
given way by mid-century to a form of competitive expenditure” (176). Instead of
literary taste and moderate gustatory consumption, dining—and specifically the
middle-class dinner party—became a way to show social distinction.
Robert Travers, Cornell University
The Eighteenth Century in Indian History
Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002). Pp. 261. Rs 495.
Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Pp. 302. $60.00.
Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural

Bengal, c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Pp. 376.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ed., A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century

India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2003). Pp. xi, 412. Rs 695.
P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or

Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Pp. vi, 456. Rs 650.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers,

Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001). Pp. xii, 165, $70.00 (hardback). $56.00 (E-book).
Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp. xiii, 190, $60.00.
Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia (Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press, 2004). Pp. 200. $25.00 (paperback).
In a famous review essay first published in 1940, the Dutch scholar J. C.

van Leur challenged the relevance of the eighteenth century in Asian history. The
eighteenth century, he wrote, was a “category for the periodization of time bor-
rowed from western European and North American history,” which evoked “the
world of baroque and old fashioned classicism,” on the one hand, and the “new
bourgeois civilization,” on the other. Reacting against a tendency by Dutch histori-
ans to portray eighteenth-century Indonesia through the records of the Dutch East
India Company as a distant outpost of the European “age of enlightenment,” van
Leur urged that Asian history in the eighteenth century was still autonomous and
vital. “That century did not know any superior Occident, nor any self-isolating
Orient no longer progressing with it,” he wrote. “It knew a mighty East, a rich
the word “snob,” “from being a member of the lower classes to being a member
of an aspirant middling class,” just as “the middle-class ideal of moderation had
given way by mid-century to a form of competitive expenditure” (176). Instead of
literary taste and moderate gustatory consumption, dining—and specifically the
middle-class dinner party—became a way to show social distinction.
Robert Travers, Cornell University
The Eighteenth Century in Indian History
Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2002). Pp. 261. Rs 495.
Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). Pp. 302. $60.00.
Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural

Bengal, c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Pp. 376.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ed., A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century

India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2003). Pp. xi, 412. Rs 695.
P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or

Revolution? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Pp. vi, 456. Rs 650.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers,

Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001). Pp. xii, 165, $70.00 (hardback). $56.00 (E-book).
Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp. xiii, 190, $60.00.
Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia (Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press, 2004). Pp. 200. $25.00 (paperback).
In a famous review essay first published in 1940, the Dutch scholar J. C.

van Leur challenged the relevance of the eighteenth century in Asian history. The
eighteenth century, he wrote, was a “category for the periodization of time bor-
rowed from western European and North American history,” which evoked “the
world of baroque and old fashioned classicism,” on the one hand, and the “new
bourgeois civilization,” on the other. Reacting against a tendency by Dutch histori-
ans to portray eighteenth-century Indonesia through the records of the Dutch East
India Company as a distant outpost of the European “age of enlightenment,” van
Leur urged that Asian history in the eighteenth century was still autonomous and
vital. “That century did not know any superior Occident, nor any self-isolating
Orient no longer progressing with it,” he wrote. “It knew a mighty East, a rich
Reviews 493
fabric of a strong, broad weave with a more fragile Western warp thread inserted
into it at broad intervals” (van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society [Dortrect,
1983], 269, 289).
J. C. van Leur may have been surprised by the resilience of the eighteenth
century as a category in Indian (more often now styled South Asian) history. In
truth, van Leur’s strong aversion to the idea of an eighteenth century in Asia, which
grew mainly out of his expertise in Indonesian history, always seemed odd from a
South Asian perspective. The eighteenth century has long appeared as an obvious
historical turning point in India, marked by the dramatic collapse of the Mughal
empire at its start, and the equally dramatic expansion of the British empire at its
end. Thus, van Leur’s assertion that in eighteenth-century India “the establishment
of local, even regional power by France and England did not disturb the power of the
Mogol Empire more than fleetingly” was somewhat quixotic (van Leur, 273).
Nonetheless, recent writing on eighteenth-century India has often gone
with the grain of van Leur’s determination to attend to the autonomous dynamics
of Asian history, questioning the view that European expansion was necessarily
the decisive motor of historical change. Even though the power of the Mughal
emperors declined, new regional powers emerged, powers that could be fitted into
van Leur’s sense of the “rich fabric” of Asian history. If van Leur’s notion of an
“unbroken history in the state of Asian civilization” from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth century now seems excessively monolithic and static, his conception
of early modern Asian history as something more than the history of European
expansion was ahead of its time.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, revisionist work about the eighteenth
century formed one of the poles around which South Asian history revolved. This
work was dominated by social and economic history, strongly inflected by Marx-
ist and “Annaliste” perspectives, which sought to uncover the deep structural
transformations of Indian society from the dead weight of the political history of
empires. Writers on the eighteenth century tended to focus on processes of regional
state-formation, and especially the prominent role of Indian merchants, bankers,
and landed elites in the formation of both pre-colonial and colonial states. The
other major pole of South Asian history-writing in this period was the work of the
“Subaltern Studies” school. Subaltern Studies focused more clearly on non-elite
groups, such as peasants and industrial laborers, and the ways that they had been
occluded or disfigured in conventional historical representations.
Especially as Subaltern Studies gravitated toward the cultural and linguis-
tic turn, there was a tendency to cast the eighteenth-century revisionists and the
subalternists as opposite and rival poles of attraction. This rivalry was reinforced
by the way that some eighteenth-century revisionists sought to downplay the
transformative effects of colonial conquest in the eighteenth century, even as post-
colonial subalternists were exploring the multiple reverberations of colonialism in
the making of Indian modernity. Thus, the familiar historical culture wars of the
late twentieth century, which pitted Marx against Foucault, social history against
cultural history, and social structure against discourse, were supercharged in South
Asian history by the politics of postcolonial theory and its critics.
As the dust settles around the debates on the eighteenth century and on
Subaltern Studies, at least some of the binary oppositions thrown up by these dis-
putes may begin to lose their hard edges. After all, the objects of inquiry of these
rival groups were usually quite different in terms of time period, social groups, as
well as methodological approaches. Much of Subaltern Studies, for example, fo-
cused on the “high colonial” period of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This is not to say that there is an immediate prospect of universal historical peace,
or that contrasting historical perspectives on South Asia are reconcilable within
some broad consensus. Yet the contests thrown up by these aging debates, such as
collaboration versus resistance, “Indian agency” versus “colonial intervention,”
continuity versus change, or social history versus cultural history, will be reinter-
rogated and revised as the historiography moves onto new ground.
Meanwhile, two recent volumes of selected essays, The Eighteenth Century
in India, edited by Seema Alavi, and The Eighteenth Century in Indian History,
edited by P. J. Marshall, offer a fascinating retrospective on the last few decades
of historical debate about the eighteenth century in India. Although these volumes
are not much concerned with the broader disciplinary politics within which these
debates were situated, they succeed in demonstrating the substantial achievements
of the eighteenth-century revisionists, while at the same time suggesting the diversity
of their views, as well as the problems, loose edges, and new questions that their
work has left over for a new generation.
Edited by two leading experts in the field, one based in India and one in
Britain, these complementary volumes fall into two separate series, Debates in
Indian History and Society and Themes in Indian History, produced by Oxford
University Press in India. Both Seema Alavi and P. J. Marshall offer informative
introductions surveying a range of recent writings on eighteenth-century India,
along with very useful annotated bibliographies. They then present well-chosen
selections of landmark essays or chapters from books that represent important
developments in the historiography. Only one essay, Irfan Habib’s punchy critique
of revisionist approaches, appears in both volumes. The editors give space not only
to the revisionists who have questioned long-held verities about Mughal decline
and the colonial rupture, but also to their critics. Marshall’s volume is longer, so he
is able to include a larger group of essays and to offer broader coverage of several
regions. Alavi’s selection is more focused on northern and eastern India, though
she does include an important essay by Prasannan Parthasarathi on the south.
Taken together, these volumes give an excellent survey of a complicated
and diverse terrain of argument. Revisionist ideas about the eighteenth century
emerged from a loose conglomeration of distinct groups of scholars. An early
impulse was provided by the historical anthropologist Bernard S. Cohn, and his
attempt to explore how multiple “levels of power,” from villages and local land
controllers to big rajas, provincial governors and emperors, interacted and coex-
isted in precolonial India. Meanwhile, the growth of scholarship on the Indian
ocean pointed to the vibrancy of pre-colonial trading networks in South Asia.
(Neither Alavi’s nor Marshall’s volumes delve much into the oceanic dimensions of
eighteenth-century Indian history.) A group of mainly British historians, including
C. A. Bayly and David Washbrook, working on the local and provincial origins
of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century, started to look back into the
eighteenth century to explore the deeper social histories of the Indian elites and
middle classes who formed the leaders of later nationalist politics. This work on
“intermediary groups” intersected with scholarship on the late Mughal empire
that questioned received views that the Mughal empire collapsed in a welter of
rebellions by resentful and oppressed landlords and peasants. Instead, in the work
of scholars such as Muzaffar Alam and André Wink, the decline of centralized
Mughal power appeared as a complex process of decentralization, in which local
elites who had prospered under the Mughal hegemony began to appropriate more
of the symbols and substance of sovereignty.
Reviews 495
Although revisionist work differed markedly in its orientations and

impulses, it tended to share a number of broad affiliations. At the most general
level it questioned the blanket picture of eighteenth-century economic “decline,”
inherited from both imperialist and nationalist histories of the period. Instead,
revisionists posited considerable regional variations, with significant areas of
economic growth, evidenced by increasing monetization, as well as agricultural
and commercial expansion. Another shared preoccupation was with studying the
dynamism of regional and local polities, rather than focusing only on the decline
of the Mughal imperial center. A variety of Mughal “successor states” came more
into view, including breakaway provinces under Mughal governors and “rebel”
groups like the Marathas or Afghans. Finally, the different varieties of revisionists
tended to share an interest in the broad category of “intermediary groups,” including
landed gentry, administrative experts, and most especially bankers and merchants
who were seen to have consolidated their position in an era of competitive state-
formation. Some scholars also argued that the British constructed their own empire
by tapping into indigenous networks of trade and finance, and that early colonial
rule may not therefore have been such a sharp break with pre-colonial political
and social structures as was often assumed.
Marshall’s introductory essay presents an overarching analytical tension
between approaches that emphasize revolutionary changes associated with the
decline or rise of empires, and those that highlight a more evolutionary pattern of
change with significant continuities between late Mughal and early British India.
Marshall comes down in general on the side of evolution over revolution, but his
careful review of recent literature also suggests that there were many divergent
regional experiences of the eighteenth century. For example, some cities (like Surat
and Delhi) and regions (the Punjab) suffered severe economic dislocations follow-
ing from the decline of centralized Mughal power in the early eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, famine, war, and commercial disruptions made for a confusing and
frequently bleak picture of economic life in the later eighteenth century.
Marshall argues that the expansion of British power from the 1750s was
driven by the urge for new profits, and also by a distinctive British ideology of
sovereignty that tended to demand exclusive control over territories and peoples,
rejecting earlier forms of layered sovereignty. Yet Marshall suggests that the am-
bition of British rulers was cut across by their caution, and by the limits of their
bureaucratic and military power. Marshall follows other revisionists in suggesting
that the 1820s and 1830s marked a clearer break from the precolonial order, with
the establishment of British paramountcy over most of the subcontinent, the decline
of Indian manufactures especially in the textile sector, the growing subordination
of Indian merchants and bankers, and the maturation of colonial systems of sur-
veillance and military control.
Marshall’s account suggests how the revisionists sought to modify the
chronology of the colonial impact, rather than deny it all together. This point is
also reinforced by Seema Alavi, who divides the eighteenth-century debate into
two parts: first, the question of whether Mughal decline was marked by economic
decline or not; and second, whether the rise of the British East India Company
was a “determining disjunction” in Indian history. She also includes a brief dis-
cussion of the reception of Said’s critique of “orientalism” within South Asian
history. Alavi gives an insightful survey of Mughal historiography, showing how
revisionist writings opened up new angles of vision beyond the high politics of
the Mughal court or contradictions within the Mughal administrative structure.
She suggests how military-fiscalism, referring to processes of fiscal centralization
related to military mobilization, provides the key to theories of continuity across

the colonial divide. From this point of view, colonial rulers developed or intensified
the military-fiscal practices of precolonial rulers. At the same time, Alavi points
to new work on colonial institutions and norms that suggests that British notions
of exclusive sovereignty, legality, taxation, and military discipline were quite dif-
ferent from precolonial regimes and contained the seeds of later transformations.
Like Marshall, Alavi reminds us that there was “no one pattern of change” in the
eighteenth century (Alavi, ed., Introduction, 37).
Some of the harshest critics of the various revisionist projects emerged
from historians of Mughal India, particularly associated with Aligarh University.
M. Athar Ali’s essay, “Recent Theories of Eighteenth-Century India,” reprinted in
Marshall’s volume, insisted that the breakdown of the Mughal empire into “mutu-
ally conflicting small political units,” collectively less strong than centralized empire,
paved the way for European expansion. Collaboration with British invaders needed
to be seen in the context of “unequal power relations,” and colonialism had “blue-
blooded European ancestry” rather than indigenous origins (Marshall, ed., 95–7).
In a similar vein, Irfan Habib argued that the Mughal empire, and especially its
elaborate system of tax collection, was a major stimulant of towns and trade, so
that its breakdown must have had a deleterious effect on these (Marshall, ed., 62–3).
Responding to these critiques, C. A. Bayly detected the imprint of modern Indian
secularist nationalism in the insistence that the strength and economic buoyancy
of India depended on its political unity (Alavi, ed., 189). And it is certainly true
that older views of Mughal decline tended to ignore large and important questions
about the broader social context of Mughal decline, for example, processes of com-
mercialization, class and identity-formation, which appeared beyond the purview
of Mughal administrative sources.
At the same time, the revisionists themselves usually relied on the ad-
ministrative archives of regional states and quite often on the colonial archive,
and they emphasized how Indian entrepreneurship was closely bound up with
the fiscal expansion of militarizing regimes. Their versions of social history also
remained closely tied to regional courts and state fiscal structures. Meanwhile, if
the old picture of an eighteenth-century “dark age” was too stark, the new picture
or regional economies is still patchy, and the underlying causes and dynamics of
growth in the economy remain uncertain. We lack, and will likely continue to lack
because of the uneven nature of the source base, knowledge of fundamental issues
such as demographic change.
The issue of the colonial transition also remains highly contentious and
problematic. Much of the revisionist work on this theme was conducted at a rather
abstract and schematic pitch, as in Burton Stein’s brilliant essay, “Eighteenth-Cen-
tury India: Another View,” reproduced in Marshall’s volume. Stein’s structuralist
view posited a growing tension within Indian states between patrimonialism and
mercantilism, which generated “trajectories into colonialism” as indigenous capital
sought safeguards offered by the more capitalist-oriented institutions of the East
India Company state (Marshall, ed., 75). Some version of the thesis about the shift-
ing allegiance of crucial intermediary groups of merchants and bankers toward the
East India Company was a common feature of revisionist work. It is not hard to
see this approach as a development from the “collaborationist” arguments about
the “non-European foundations of European imperialism,” associated especially
with the work of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher.
The style of language in which these arguments have sometimes been cast,
such as the “drift” of intermediary groups, or the “sucking power” of indigenous
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political economy, or the “grafting” of colonial power onto Indian social hierarchies,
often seemed to efface the violent or coercive aspects of colonialism as conquest,
with too much emphasis on the carrot over the stick. Yet it is not simply the tone
of these arguments that provoked criticism, but also the apparent implication that
colonialism was as much an outgrowth of Indian history as the “expansion of
Europe.” Stein, for example, argued that the colonial state “grew largely from the
foundations laid by the Indian patrimonial regimes whose contradictions it resolved
and whose tendencies it brought to completion” (Marshall, ed., 81). (For passionate
polemics against revisionist emphases on “Indian agency” and “continuity,” see
Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
[Princeton], 2001, epilogue, and his more recent work, The Scandal of Empire:
India and the Creation of Imperial Britain [Cambridge, Mass., 2006]).
The apparent downgrading of the agency of the colonizers in this picture
was exaggerated by the relative lack of compelling new theories of the broader
dynamics of British imperialism in the eighteenth century. An older generation of
British historians had once been all too willing to treat modern Indian history as a
branch of British imperial history, as a procession of lordly proconsuls and generals.
Indeed, revisionist historians of India working in Britain were sometimes reacting
directly against their experience of being taught a version of Indian history that
was dominated by “the aridities of parliamentary elections and the monumental
tedium of the land revenue systems of Bengal.” (See Bayly’s “Epilogue: Historio-
graphical and Autobiographical Note,” in C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality
in India: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India [New
Delhi, 1998], 311.) British imperial historians in the postimperial era were now
understandably shy about overstepping their bounds. The lack of new work link-
ing British metropolitan politics and economics with expansion in Asia was noted
by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins, in their useful if highly schematic rendering
of the eighteenth-century empire as an outgrowth of “gentlemanly-capitalism,” a
peculiarly British alliance of landed and commercial elites (“Prospective: Aristocracy,
Finance and Empire, 1688–1850,” reprinted in Marshall, ed., 374–401). More
recently, an “imperial turn” in British history has begun to redress the imbalance
in the historiography, and to show the British conquests in Asia as more than the
working out of indigenous social history. The ideological dimensions of eighteenth-
century imperialism and their relationship to the globalization of European com-
merce and warfare are coming more clearly into view. (Some key works include: P. J.
Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century: Oxford History of the British Empire, vol.
2 [Oxford, 1998]; P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain,
India and America c. 1750–1783 [Oxford, 2005]; C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:
The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 [London, 1989]; Kathleen Wilson,
ed., The New Imperial History: Culture, History and Modernity in Britain and
the Empire, 1660–1840 [Cambridge, 2004].) A provocative article by J. M. Ward
suggested that historians of India may have exaggerated the extent to which British
colonizers relied on local resources in funding their military endeavors, which were
supported by networks of commerce and credit stretching back to an industrializing
economy in Britain (J. M. Ward, “The Industrial Revolution and British Imperial-
ism, 1750–1850,” Economic History Review, 47.1 [1994]: 44–65).
The Indianist emphasis on the local context for empire arose in part from
an understandable desire to restore historical agency to Indians and dynamism to
Indian history where older imperialist histories saw only stasis and misrule. This
emphasis is also what motivated van Leur’s “autonomous” view of Asian history
before the nineteenth century. (For a discussion situating van Leur in the broader
context of South East Asian history-writing, see Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels:
Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1: Integration on the Mainland
[Cambridge, 2003], 9–15.) One of the ironies here was that to give historical agency
to Asians, historians deployed sociological categories derived from European social
theory. For example, Bayly’s arguments about “class-formation” in his book Rul-
ers, Townsmen and Bazaars (1983) were related to models drawn from “studies
of European, Chinese and Middle Eastern landed and merchant classes which had
been undertaken by both Marxist and non-Marxist historians since the 1950s”
(“Epilogue to the Indian Edition,” reprinted in Marshall, ed.,172).
Bayly has staunchly defended the “metanarrative” of class-formation
against postmodern critiques of Eurocentrism and “foundationism” as a necessary
heuristic device designed to organize data to give it “the widest possible relevance.”
(For a critique of “foundational” histories, including Bayly’s work, see Gyan
Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from
Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31.1 [1990]:
383–408.) The word “revelance” here may give a clue to the struggles of a historian
working in the British academy to gain recognition for South Asian history, and
“non-Western” history in general, as an integral rather than a subsidiary part of
the discipline of history. Bayly also argues that historians can preserve the heuristic
tools of general arguments about class and state-formation while attending to “the
specific features of Indian social processes” (Marshall, ed.,173). It takes a historian
of Bayly’s great skill, however, to avoid rendering India as somehow “deviant”
from a dominant European or “Western” model of historical development. The
tendency of Bayly’s work, in particular, has always been to diversify potential his-
torical frameworks, showing many different yet linked regional trajectories into
the modern, rather than to fit “India” into a European-derived straightjacket.
Nonetheless, the concept of “Indian agency,” as deployed by the eighteenth-
century revisionists, was often frustratingly general, referring to broad classes of
“intermediary groups” who were seen to have found a precarious form of shelter,
at least temporarily, under the colonial state. As with all invocations of “agency,”
there was also an implicit tension between the notion of “choice” shadowing the
term, and the structural limits on the “self-determination” of particular agents.
At the same time, even while some writers foregrounded the concept of “Indian
agency,” other revisionist work appeared to challenge the distinction between
“Indian” or indigenous forces of change, and colonial or external ones. This is
particularly evident in Frank Perlin’s essay, “The Problem of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury,” reprinted in Marshall’s volume. For the later eighteenth century, he argues,
the concept of an involuted “Indian history” is effectively redundant, such was the
pace of commercialization and interregional integration. “Well before the colonial
conquests of the early nineteenth century, South Asian history, Company history,
and the history of growing international commerce have become inextricably en-
tangled, even fused.” Furthermore, it was “no longer possible by the middle of the
eighteenth century to conceive of South Asian states as functioning independently
of the effects and forces of European intervention.” In this view, the “open and
violent frontier with the Europeans” reverberated well beyond the formal boundar-
ies of European territorial control and complicated conventional barriers between
indigenous and foreign, precolonial and colonial (59).
Another possible point of critique, well represented by Ajay Skaria in Mar-
shall’s volume, is the way that emphases on apparent continuities in state practices
may overlook “the profound transformations in the semantic and conceptual fields
within which these practices occur” (“Being Jangli: the Politics of Wildness,” in
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Marshall, ed., 312). In Skaria’s view, the imagined continuity between the efforts of
precolonial and colonial states to expand the frontiers of “settled agriculture,” by
imposing their power over nomadic or forest peoples, actually conceals important
shifts in the way that the “wildness” of so-called tribal peoples was apprehended.
He argues that precolonial rulers saw nomadic forest dwellers not only as danger-
ous raiders to be attacked and disciplined, but also as essential adjuncts of power
to be respected and incorporated into the frame of sovereignty. The oppositional
aspects of precolonial relations between plain and forest peoples were cut across
by shared strategies of rule, and an understanding of mutual interdependence. The
colonial state, on the other hand, tended to cast “wild tribes” as the “Other” of
civilization, by apprehending them through a distinctive referent of evolutionary
time. Colonial officials aimed, therefore, to push back the “inner frontier” of civi-
lization by extirpating wildness. The danger here is that in foregrounding colonial
difference colonialism is too easily read as the “Other” of the precolonial. It is not
entirely clear, for example, that the “paradigm of growth” is entirely anachronistic
when applied to precolonial India, as Skaria argues, or that in eighteenth-century
India “growth did not exist” (Marshall, ed., 294–95). Mughal political language
had ways of conceptualizing “growth” through increases in trade and industry,
and most importantly through the expansion of the population and the cultivated
area. It is true that “growth” came to have distinct referents in terms of the pro-
gressive history and political economy of the nineteenth century, but it remained
fractured concept even within colonial discourse. Nonetheless, Skaria’s point about
the need to understand how precolonial practices could take on new valences and
significance in a restructured colonial context is well taken.
Despite these problems around the colonial transition, it is important to
resist simplistic views of the debate on early colonial India as framed by the simple
binaries of “continuity” or “change.” One of the great strengths and lasting con-
tributions of the work of Bayly, Washbrook, and Stein, for example, is to break
down the notion of colonialism as a monolith, and to track significant changes
within the history of colonialism. Thus, Stein argued that indigenous capital, which
initially found protection within colonial mercantilism, eventually lost out in later
stages of colonial domination, being forced down to the “most risk-full levels of
village production” and exchange (“Eighteenth-Century India: Another View,” in
Marshall, ed., 68). Bayly and Washbrook, meanwhile, suggested how the influx
of British manufactures, allied to colonial taxation regimes and the dismantling of
regional and local kingdoms, shattered older patterns of Indian political economy in
the early nineteenth century, leading to a “peasantization” and “traditionalization”
of the Indian economy (C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British
Empire, Cambridge, 1988; D. A. Washbrook, “India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces
of Colonialism,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century, Oxford History
of the British Empire vol. 3 [Oxford, 1999], 395–422).
The sense of a coherent project of revisionist approaches to the eighteenth
century, to the extent that it ever existed, has by now dissipated. This is partly
because the forms of social and economic history that animated this project tended
to give way in relation to cultural history and new forms of theoretical critique. It
followed partly also, perhaps, from a collective drawing of breath within the field,
and a perceived need to move beyond the old battle lines. Yet exciting new work has
continued to appear, which both benefits from and modifies the bold but sketchy
road maps created by the different kinds of earlier revisions, while opening up new
angles of vision, and especially new sources. The remainder of this essay does not
attempt a comprehensive survey of new work about the eighteenth century in South
Asia, but looks at a small selection of new books to suggest how some old issues
are being rethought, while some new lines of research are opening up.
The work of two historians included in Marshall’s and Alavi’s volumes
respectively, Rajat Datta and Prasannan Parthasarathi, continues the tradition
of economic history and brings a welcome depth and specificity to debates over
the colonial transition. Both authors have produced important monographs,
drawing mainly on colonial archives, each dealing with one of the epicenters of
late-eighteenth-century colonial expansion, Bengal and Madras. Both address the
proposition, which began to take shape in some older revisionist work, that the
consolidation of Indian capital within eighteenth-century states was accompanied
by new forms of control over labor. They also seek to clarify the relationship be-
tween the colonial state and Indian merchants and producers.
Datta’s book, Society, Economy and the Market, Commercialization in
Rural Bengal, 1760–1800, focuses on the grain (mainly rice) trade in rural Ben-
gal. He argues that previous historians have persistently neglected this aspect of
Bengal’s economy, instead focusing too much on Bengal’s foreign trade in cloth
and cash crops. (See also the work of Sushil Chaudhury for the suggestion that
Bengal’s intra-Asian trade actually dwarfed its trade with Europe at least until the
middle of the eighteenth century. Chaudhury has used his findings to question the
idea that Bengal merchants naturally gravitated toward the East India Company
during the mid-eighteenth-century crisis in his book From Prosperity to Decline:
Eighteenth Century Bengal [New Delhi, 1995].)
Rather than a model of “dependent commercialization” under the colonial
sway, Datta proposes that Bengal’s agriculture was already highly commercialized
by the middle of the eighteenth century, and that monetization, regional price
integration, the proliferation of markets, and agricultural expansion were driven
largely by urban and rural demand for food products within Bengal. Datta sees a
large degree of continuity in the late eighteenth century, despite the major famine
of 1769–70 and the disastrous floods of 1786–7. Indeed, the vulnerability of peas-
ants to famine is explained partly in relation to the spread of the cash-nexus, which
meant that peasants were dependent on buying and selling in the marketplace to
meet both their own subsistence needs and the demands of moneylenders and the
state. At the same time, volatile grain prices forced grain producers into the arms
of grain merchants and moneylenders, leading to an increase in rural indebtedness.
Datta’s book is not, therefore, a celebratory view of commercialization but shows
how the growth of commerce both fed off and created new forms of vulnerability
for peasants.
A feature of Datta’s work, which ties him with earlier “revisionists,” is
that the colonial state plays a less decisive role in economic change than in earlier
accounts. Nationalist economic histories often saw the colonial intervention as
disastrous for Bengal’s commercial economy, because of the contraction of the
money supply through the colonial “drain of wealth,” and because of oppressively
high taxes. Datta follows other recent historians in doubting the capacity of the
early colonial state to raise taxes dramatically on peasants, although he thinks
the colonial power’s desire to base taxes on actual measurement of lands and its
unwillingness to accept payment in kind were significant innovations. He also uses
evidence of local exchange rates to suggest that the so-called contraction in bullion
after the colonial conquest has been much exaggerated.
Datta deals with these crucial issues in rather short appendices. Given their
overriding importance in the conventional literature, it might have strengthened
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his case to give them more attention in the earlier chapters. Moreover, his work
seems to carry mixed messages about the limits or capacities of early colonial
government to enact significant change. For example, while he questions the old
notion of a taxation squeeze or a bullion crisis, and notes the impotence of the
colonial state in managing grain markets in times of crisis, he ascribes significant
agency to the colonial state in terms of its abolition of landlord tolls on the traffic
in grain, which he sees as creating favorable conditions for a further expansion of
agricultural markets in the late eighteenth century. This raises questions about the
institutional strength of the early colonial state that are not fully addressed here.
Despite these problems, however, this is a pathbreaking work on a critical and
underexplored theme, which also contains a wealth of detail about the economic
lives of the Bengal peasantry. (For two other important works, which emphasize
rather more the colonial disruption of precolonial patterns of political economy, see
Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India: Bihar
1733–1820 [Leiden, 1996], and Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India
Company and the Making of the Colonial Market Place [Philadelphia, 1998].)
Prasannan Parthasarathi’s crisply written, deeply researched, and ana-
lytically powerful study of South India, The Transition to a Colonial Economy:
Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, takes a more consciously critical
attitude to the emphasis on continuity across the precolonial/colonial divide. He
accepts the need to understand the indigenous origins of colonialism by showing
how “Indian social groups lent their support to the emerging Company and later
colonial state” (see his essay “Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism,” in Alavi,
ed., 210). Yet he argues that some Indian merchants supported British expansion
because the colonial state was actually radically different from its precursors. In one
sense, this argument is a development from Stein’s thesis about the tensions between
militarizing patrimonial “sultans” and merchants/financiers. Yet Parthasarathi lends
the argument greater precision, distinguishing between different kinds of mercantile
interests, and exploring the changing place of laborers in this process.
The crux of his argument is that the East India Company used its po-
litical power decisively to reorder relations between merchant procurers and the
artisans who manufactured cotton cloth in South India between 1760 and 1800.
Parthasarathi argues, against the grain of received views, that South Indian weav-
ers enjoyed high real incomes, which they sustained through bargaining for high
prices with merchant procurers. Bargaining strategies included weaver solidarity,
reducing cloth quality, breaking contracts with merchants if better offers came
along, and, crucially, labor mobility. Precolonial states, meanwhile, tended often to
support the customary rights of weavers in their negotiations with merchants. The
relatively strong bargaining position of laborers, in both agriculture and industry,
encouraged states and merchants to invest in capital projects and high wages as
the best means of attracting laborers.
In Parthasarathi’s view, the position of weavers rapidly declined as the
East India Company expanded its territorial power in South India after 1760.
The Company abolished older customs of contractual flexibility, using coercive
methods to force weavers to produce cloth only for its own agents. Cloth mer-
chants supported the Company because it was willing to strengthen their hand in
negotiations with weavers. As the Company’s sway expanded, weaver mobility,
or playing off merchants against each other, became less effective. Parthasarathi
measures these developments in terms of declining incomes for labor, as well as the
growing incidence of weaver protests. Thus, the decline in the position of Indian
weavers predated by some decades the advent of British manufactures in South
India. Moreover, Parthasarathi suggests that the declining position of labor in co-
lonial India was an important factor in the low levels of saving and investment in
the nineteenth century. The precolonial link between investment and command of
labor was sundered by the Company’s willingness and ability to throw its politi-
cal weight behind the propertied classes. “Therefore, the accumulation crisis in
nineteenth century India was not created by low savings, but rather by a lack of
investment demand” (Alavi, ed., 220).
Parthasarathi’s study of the colonial transition is a major intervention in
broader debates about “the great divergence” between European and Asian econo-
mies in the modern period, and it deserves a wide readership. (See also Kenneth
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern
World Economy, Princeton, 2000.) It runs counter not only to earlier emphases
on a relatively smooth “colonial transition,” but also to a revisionist tendency in
Indian economic history to play down the influence of “colonialism” as a crucial
variable. (See, for example, Tirthankar Roy, Economic History of India, 1757–1857
[New Delhi, 2000].) Company rule in South India had a rather narrow revenue
base and was often asserted through forms of “indirect rule” in association with
local powers, yet it appears to have exercised quite close controls over certain com-
munities of weavers and merchants. Parthasarathi’s work, like Datta’s, suggests
the need to rethink broad characterizations of the early colonial state as relatively
“weak,” and to consider where exactly its strength resided.
An important contribution of Parthasarathi’s book is that it makes politics
and political norms central to our understanding of social and economic change.
Parthasarathi draws a stark contrast between English political culture in the eigh-
teenth century, which he suggests generally favored state intervention in labor
markets to restrict wages, and South Indian conceptions of polity, in which rulers
were charged with protecting the customary rights of labor. While this contrast is
presented with great skill, it also raises certain problems. Apart from the problem
of privileging “norms” over institutional capacities, this argument tends to repre-
sent “British” and “Indian” political cultures as relatively static and monolithic
wholes, rather than as dynamic and contested. (On the British side, Adam Smith
was only the most famous British economist in the late eighteenth century to
espouse the benefits of a high-wage economy.) It also tends too easily to conflate
the “domestic” British state with the colonial state, without considering the lines
of transmission in much detail. Nonetheless, Parthasarathi’s questions about the
politics of labor in precolonial and colonial India should open up important lines
for further research.
Norbert Peabody directly addresses the problem of overly monolithic con-
ceptions of “British” and “Indian” political cultures in his stylish and erudite history
of the eighteenth-century Rajasthani kingdom of Kota in the eighteenth century,
Hindu Kingship and Polity in PreColonial India. His book is expressly designed in
part to modify what he sees as ahistorical characterizations of precolonial Indian
states as “internally consistent, thoroughly integrated, and largely consensual” (2).
His version of “ethno-history,” by contrast, tries to attend to fissures or contests
within the political culture of Kota, and to see these tensions as sources of signifi-
cant changes in the immediate precolonial period. At the same time, extending
a now familiar critique of post-Saidian, post-Orientalist scholarship, he uses the
case of Kota to argue that “colonial power did not impose itself monolithically
from outside, but arose much more dialogically from within the conditions that
were manifest locally, with local agents often able to redirect the potentialities of
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colonial power to serve agendas at a tangent from, if not diametrically opposite

to, the agendas of colonialism” (3).
Peabody brilliantly elaborates the complex entanglements between the
Rajput rulers of Kota and the devotional (bhakti) sect of the Vallabha Sampraday,
showing how devotionalism, patronage of particular deities, and pilgrimage created
not so much a “shared culture” of authority, but rather a space for competition
between different kinds of authority figures in the kingdom. Peaboody’s work adds
to the emerging picture of a state system characterized by multiple, overlapping,
and competing hierarchies of rule, in which sovereignty was dispersed, uneven and
plural rather than singular and neatly bounded. He also contributes to the literature
on precolonial military-fiscalism, showing how an energetic chief minister used
diverse ways to expand the central revenues of the kingdom of Kota to meet the
costs of a standing army.
The last chapter offers a nuanced reading of the colonial subordination
of Kota in the early nineteenth century and explores how the British aimed to
enforce their paramount power by imposing treaties on local kingdoms. Although
this system of indirect rule appeared to preserve the various forms of local rule, in
fact the treaties tended to redefine the scope of local politics, creating territorially
bounded forms of sovereignty and privileging some local interests over others.
Peabody shows how competing local factions strove, and sometimes succeeded,
in shaping this version of “empire by treaty.”
Although it is important to analyze how colonial power inserted itself into
the fault lines of local disputes, whether this amounted to a “dialogical” process of
state-formation (as Peabody suggests) is less clear. Presumably no polity is entirely
“monolithic,” and all authority is to some degree “negotiated,” yet the perceived
need to counter overly deterministic post-Saidian accounts of colonial dominance
may push us too far in the other direction. One plausible way of reading Peabody’s
material is to suggest that British “empire by treaty” made local elites into agents
of colonial hegemony, generating new and potentially more authoritarian forms
of sovereignty under the guise of indigenous tradition. (For a similar argument in
relation to Kashmir, see Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights
and the History of Kashmir [Princeton, 2004].) It is also worth noting that these
Rajasthani kingdoms fell outside the major zones of British strategic and economic
interest, which was why they were allowed to survive as subordinate states. There
were many forms of colonialism in South Asia, and new historical literature may
need to attend more closely to these different configurations of power.
Datta’s, Parthasarathi’s, and Peabody’s books in different ways suggest the
pressing need to learn more about the languages of politics in eighteenth-century
India and about changing understandings of the state. Older revisionist works made
bold claims about the changing political economy of precolonial India, around
the themes of layered sovereignty, military-fiscalism, and commercialization, but
they tended to be less interested in the intellectual history of politics, and in how
the conceptual framework of politics was implicated in structural change. Instead,
revisionists often suggested in very broad terms that “Mughal ideals and practises”
were often carried on and deepened within “successor states,” without really ex-
ploring the tensions and transformations involved in this process.
Revisionists have been interested, to some degree, in changing forms of
patriotism and especially in the idea of emerging “regional patriotisms” within
eighteenth-century states. (See, for example, C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in
South Asia.) Some very fine works, notably Susan Bayly’s and Kate Brittlebank’s
pathbreaking studies on South India (parts of which are reprinted in Marshall’s

edited volume), also explored the symbolic articulation of eighteenth-century king-
ship in South Asia, looking, for example, at the intersections between the self-pre-
sentation of different rulers and emerging religious and caste identities. Historians
such as Burton Stein, Nicholas Dirks, and Michael Fisher have also theorized the
ritual elements of rulership, and especially the central place of gifting in precolo-
nial political culture. Yet in recent times there has been relatively little attention
to changing conceptions of state/subject relations or to precolonial theories of
taxation, commerce, or legality. Where these themes have been explored, this has
often involved reading certain “norms” out of precolonial institutional practices,
as much as in exploring textual sources for political debate and argument.
This is a particularly striking lacuna because early British rulers commis-
sioned many texts on statecraft from Indian scholars and officials, which suggested
a diverse terrain of indigenous debates around the rights and responsibilities of
rulers and ruled. (For important recent treatments of these materials, see Kumkum
Chatterjee, “History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition
in Bengal and Bihar,” Modern Asian Studies 32 [1998], 913–48; and C. A. Bayly,
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India
1780–1870 [Cambridge, 1996].) In this context, the recent publication of Muzaffar
Alam’s marvelous book, The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia, marks
a huge step forward. Alam works on a large canvas with sweeping brushstrokes,
seeking to relate the political theory of Muslim states in South Asia, principally
the Mughal empire, to the broader sweep of medieval and early modern Islamic
thought. His book highlights the accommodative, assimilationist or “liberal”
dimensions of pre-Mughal and Mughal politics, connecting these back to earlier
traditions of accommodation and innovation born out of the interaction between
Arabic speakers and non-Arab cultures in the Persian-speaking world, and during
the period of the Mongol invasions. Alam argues that the multiple interactions
between Indo-Muslim rulers and non-Muslim peoples in India promoted a “non-
sectarian and open-ended cultural politics, with the endeavour of balancing the
conflicting claims of different communities” (168).
Alam studies Indo-Muslim languages of politics through three major the-
matic lenses. First, and most innovatively, he demonstrates the central importance
in Mughal India of the tradition of political and ethical writings known as akhlaq.
These texts, he argues, tended to redefine and broaden the concept of sharia, be-
yond the conventional framework of Islamic jurisprudence, to incorporate norms
derived from eclectic philosophical inquiries about political justice. Second, he
describes the critical role of different Sufi orders in promoting new forms of cul-
tural and religious accommodation. And third, he suggests that the emergence of
Persian as the Mughal imperial language in South Asia was related to its distinctive
capabilities for creating a climate of accommodation between rulers and ruled.
Alam’s argument is strengthened by his discussion of the contests that the politics
of accommodation sparked off in Indo-Muslim intellectual life, and the multiple
tensions and resistances within the broad trajectory of theoretical innovation. While
only the final sections of Alam’s book address the eighteenth century directly, for
example, in a fascinating discussion of late Mughal patronage of Hindavi or Urdu
literature, Alam has created a powerful framework for rethinking not only the
creation and spread of Mughal political culture but also its ramifications into the
eighteenth century and beyond.
One of the impressive features of Alam’s book is the wide range of texts that
are considered, including “Mirrors of Princes” literature, biographies, histories, legal
Reviews 505
and administrative treatises, and poetry. Alam has also, together with Seema Alavi,
edited and translated a little-known set of Persian letters written by a European
resident of late Mughal north India, the Franco-Swiss soldier and engineer, Antoine
Polier (Alavi and Alam, eds., A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The
Ijaz-i-Arsalani (Persian letters, 1773–1779) of A. H. Polier [New Delhi, 2001]).
Polier’s letters, written in the fine style cultivated by learned munshis (scholars
and scribes), suggested how the courtly manners and polite culture of the Mughal
empire exercised a powerful allure not only for a wide range of Indian participants,
but also for the growing band of European travelers, traders, and invaders moving
into the Mughal orbit. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the potenti-
alities of cultural exchange in eighteenth-century India, especially at the interface
between the cultural worlds of elite Europeans and Indians. Important recent works
by William Dalrymple and Maya Jasanoff have reemphasized the fluid cultural
frontiers of the eighteenth century, before the onset of stronger conceptions of na-
tional, civilizational, and racial hierarchies in the nineteenth century (see William
Dalrymple, White Mughals, Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India [New
York, 2003] and Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Cultures and Conquest
in the East, 1750–1850 [New York, 2005]). In the contemporary intellectual and
political context, this ground of argument offers a way both to recover an image
of Indo-Muslim cosmopolitanism to counter hardening notions of a monolithic
and hostile “Islam,” and also to suggest the distinctive meanings of “empire” in
the eighteenth century, before the term “imperialism” had yet been coined.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’ presentation of the collected letters of Claude Mar-
tin, a prince among the eighteenth century’s array of “Indo-European” adventurers,
represents an important contribution to this line of research. (Rosie Llewellyn-Jones,
A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: The Letters of Claude
Martin, 1766–1800 [New Delhi, 2003]; see also her biography of Claude Martin,
A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India [New Delhi, 1992]).
Claude Martin (1735–1800) was born the son of a vinegar maker in Lyon, entered
the military service of first the French then the English East India Companies, and
ended his career as superintendent of the Nawab of Awadh’s military arsenal in
Lucknow. The Nawabs of Awadh were major tribute payers to the British in the
late eighteenth century, and Martin was valued by both Awadhi coutiers and British
empire-builders as a useful go-between in the complex negotiations that underpinned
the growth of British power. Martin owed his lucrative position in Lucknow to
powerful contacts in the British capital of Calcutta, and he was lucky to survive a
policy of growing exclusivity within the British military and civilian services that
tended to regard “aliens,” especially the French, as unreliable allies.
Llewellyn-Jones, the editor of the letters, is a noted expert on Lucknow,
the capital of Awadh. Awadh was one of the “successor states” of the Mughal em-
pire, which became a focal point of a vibrant Indo-Islamicate culture in the era of
Claude Martin. Llewellyn-Jones has done a tremendous service in gathering together
Martin’s letters from disparate sources and presenting them with an informative
introduction and annotations. Some of the letters were written in a rather idio-
syncratic if energetic English, some were written in French (and translated by the
editor), and some, perhaps the most intriguing, were written in Persian to Martin’s
Indian servants (and were translated by Dr. S. A. Zafar, Reader in Persian at the
University of Lucknow). These Persian letters mainly concern the management of
Martin’s landed estates at Najafgarh in Awadh and consist of exhortations to deal
firmly with troublesome zamindars (local landlords and taxpayers) and to supervise
and extend the cultivation of valuable crops, notably indigo.
The editor’s introduction makes a strong case that Martin was a significant
outrider of the European Enlightenment, with a library filled with European works
on science, history, and philosophy. In keeping with his military expertise, Martin
was an inveterate builder of machines and gadgets, who had a particular fascina-
tion with electricity. He was also a noted patron of the arts, patronizing visiting
European painters drawn to the courtly honey-pots of north India, but also Indian
miniature painters, craftsmen, and builders. In pushing the “Enlightenment” theme,
Llewellyn-Jones’s introduction may underestimate the extent to which Martin’s
letters, especially the Persian ones, are also a valuable source for the composite
intellectual life of late Mughal north India. The frequent exhortations to cherish
the peasantry, for example, and to discipline their oppressors were not so much
the outgrowth of an enlightened European sensibility as they were familiar motifs
of Indo-Persian political ethics. Meanwhile, Martin’s reportage on the activities
of the Awadhi court, often composed for his British friends, offer extraordinary
insights into the politics of a Mughal successor state. Notable here is his vivid
account of a satirical play about the “Sophy of Persia,” performed in Lucknow
to a full house in 1777; according to Martin, this play revealed “the pomp and
bombast of India princes, giving orders which are not obeyed,” the immorality of
the courtiers (“natural and unnatural posture were acted”), the cruelties enacted
on the peasantry by grasping overlords, and finally the overthrow of the pathetic
ruler (23–4).
As new scholarship is just beginning to show, the challenge of writing the
intellectual history of eighteenth-century India, which would include but not be
confined to the history of “political thought,” will require attention to a new range
of sources not just in “imperial languages” like Persian and English, but also in
the vernacular languages that were undergoing development in this period. (See,
for example, the special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and
the Middle East, 24.2 [2004], on “Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South
Asia”; also, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
eds., Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 [Delhi, 2001].)
A fascinating volume of essays edited by Indrani Chatterjee,Unfamiliar Relations:
Family and History in South Asia, further demonstrates (among many other things)
how historians of social and cultural practices are bringing new kinds of sources
to light. An array of literary and historical texts in different regional languages
appear alongside the familiar staples of Persian chronicles and colonial archives,
and they are variously used to uncover the diverse and contested nature of family
in South Asia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
In her challenging introduction, Indrani Chatterjee suggests that family
history has been oddly lacking in South Asian history, and she relates this lacuna
to multiple occlusions enacted within the colonial and nationalist imaginaries in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chatterjee emphasizes the need to think
beyond the “simple conjugal family of nationalist male aspiration,” which was
even in the late nineteenth century “a historically contingent ‘site of desire’ and
not everywhere an accomplished fact” (17). Instead, Chatterjee urges historians to
consider the intersections between state-formation and family-formation, the highly
stratified nature of family relations (associated especially with slave-concubinage),
and the politics of knowledge production within and about families. Chatterjee
suggests that an implicit argument connects the “snap-shot” method of the various
essays in this volume, which is that the “boundedness of the category—‘family,’
was itself a historically produced effect,” generated in part by the policing of the
borders of the kin group as a strategy of state-formation (33). This policing of
Reviews 507
kinship animated state policy and prescriptive literature in multiple contexts, from
Rajput and Maratha kingdoms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the
colonial state in the nineteenth century.
Apart from a fascinating discussion by Satadru Sen about convict families
in the Adaman islands, the essays collected here are mainly concerned with elite
family formation, and especially with the intersections of the politics of kinship
and kingship. Family emerges in this volume as a theme that ties together everyday
cultural practices and the political economy of state-formation. Ramya Sreenivasan
and Sumit Guha show how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century states were con-
structed in part through the management of familial marriage alliances and family
feuds, and Michael Fisher argues that diverse social and political relationships were
conceived through the flexible language of kinship. As Fisher and William Dalrymple
demonstrate, British officials in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also
sought to manipulate both the affective ties implied by familial discourses and
the tensions produced within diverse family structures. Britons even entered into
mixed-race families; though in the context of an increasingly nationalistic form of
imperialism, this kind of familial tie was fraught with danger and difficulty.
A number of the essays, notably by Sylvia Vatuk, Pamela Price, and Indrani
Chatterjee, attend to the ruptures and contradictions produced within the colonial
politics of family. Not only did the colonial state eventually seek to limit forms
of mixed-race intimacy, but it introduced new definitions of family, for example,
in relation to the scope of “legitimate” affiliation, which reflected both pragmatic
needs to cut off certain circuits of exchange within Indian society, but also cultur-
ally produced differences in British and Indian conceptions of family. Chatterjee
writes that “colonial law and education” tended to privilege “uniliny, patriliny,
the sacralized marriage, primogeniture, and ties of blood over relationships estab-
lished through the bestowal of food, cloth and land” (250–51). This narrowing
of the field of “family” generated new tensions around the issue of “caste” status,
and new efforts at genealogical purification overwrote earlier patterns of family
formation.
This is a path-breaking volume that issues an important challenge to
South Asian historians to pursue the history of the early modern family as a criti-
cal node of change and contestation. A rare disappointment is that relatively few
attempts are made in this collection to relate South Asian materials to other parts
of the world. This is especially striking now, given that one of the most important
achievements of revisionist writings on the eighteenth century in India has been to
enable new points of connection between South Asian history and the wider history
of the early modern world. Rather than a persistent “medieval” period in Indian
history, eventually overcome in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century by
the colonial intrusion of modernity, revisionist histories have tended to promote
the idea of a distinctive “early modern” period in South Asian history, as the pe-
riodization of Chatterjee’s volume implicitly acknowledges. Indeed, South Asian
history is now playing a prominent role in the elaboration of early modernity as a
significant category for understanding world history.
Instead of a “third world-in-waiting” in Asia and Africa, patiently prepar-
ing for the “spread” of Western modernity, an image is taking shape of a dynamic
spectrum of connected changes in the early modern world, which would only later
be transformed, refracted or closed-down by the processes of colonial modernity.
(For a recent multicentered view of the origins of global modernity, see C. A. Bayly,
The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 [Malden, Mass., 2004].) It is useful
in this context to compare revisionist work on eighteenth-century India with the

concurrent revival of the eighteenth century in British history. These two histo-
riographies have come to share certain critical themes, notably military-fiscalism
(made famous in British history by John Brewer’s account of the “fiscal-military
state”), the emergence of new forms of patriotism (cf., for example, Linda Colley’s
“Britons” with C. A. Bayly’s “regional patriotisms”), and the rising prominence
and power of “intermediary groups” within increasingly commercialized societies
(figured in British history as the “middling sort” or “gentlemanly capitalists”).
Such coincidences may be put down to the connected fashions of contem-
porary academia as much as to apparently similar trajectories across historical
regions. They could also, however, reflect a pattern of distinctive yet connected
forms of early modernity that demand to be studied on a global scale. Victor
Lieberman, in Strange Parallels, whose pioneering work on comparative history
posited shared patterns of political, commercial, and cultural integration in early
modern South East Asia and Europe, has promoted the concept of Eurasia as a
vehicle for breaking down the assumed ontological differences between different
regional histories. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (“Connected Histories: Notes Towards
a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 [1997],
735–62), by contrast, has suggested a more thoroughly global approach, by posit-
ing the increased connectedness of the local and the supra-local, through travel,
commerce, conflict, and intellectual/cultural exchange, as a critical and widespread
feature of early modernity.
This review essay began with van Leur’s impulse to accord Asian history
its independence from Europe. Yet the desire to give Asia its own history, as dis-
tinct from the “rise of the west,” may eventually have contributed to the gradual
destabilization of the distinction between Europe and Asia so fundamental to van
Leur’s analysis and worldview. The radical separateness of these histories can no
longer be taken for granted. In this sense, at least, revisionist social history can
be seen as working in tandem with the post-Saidian, post-Orientalist attempts to
challenge the ontological binary between “east” and “west,” although their ways
of approaching this issue are quite different. Meanwhile, new histories of South
Asia, like other regional fields, will likely be more open to broader comparative
and connective perspectives as they address the persistent problems of historical
interpretation as well as new questions thrown up by a globalizing age.
Single Titles 509
Single Titles
Edited by Alessa Johns
Thomas S. Mullaney, Stanford University
Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Pp. xxxviii + 567. $55.00.
Among the many emblems of the modern age, there are few that have
been afforded as much attention as “modern science.” As a translator and a
diplomat, it has bartered enduring peace agreements between concepts that once
battled in our minds as irreconcilable opposites: the infinite and the infinitesimal,
matter and energy, application and abstraction, the line and the curve, the square
and the circle. In its less than benign manifestations, it has collaborated with the
modern state to achieve a power at once devastating and clinical, where a simple
“go code” can, through a cascade of transmissions and subdivisions of the horrific
totality, project power transoceanically and turn whole cities and their inhabitants
into dust. The modern age, it sometimes seems, was itself a by-product of the rise
of modern science.
Among the many loose ends in this narrative, there is one in particular
that deserves a nice, sharp tug: how do we reconcile modern science’s claims to
universalism with its parallel claim to European origins? How can it be both uni-
versal and occidental at the same time? Is it not curious that, without exception,
the sciences now deemed modern were coined, formalized, and professionalized
by scholars hailing from a small handful of western European countries—many of
which were emerging as global colonial powers at roughly the same time?
In his bold new work, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–
1900, Benjamin Elman sets out to reposition the classically Eurocentric account
of modern science. The author mounts a resplendently empirical argument, which
commences with a brief but engrossing analysis of late Ming modes of knowledge
formation. This is followed with a sustained exploration of a three-part process
of transmission, mediation, and incorporation that shaped China’s encounter with
European science. In each of these three stages, a complex interplay of historical
and cultural factors resulted more often than not in a checkered and turbulent

transmission of scientific information from the West to China, a choppiness that,

for Elman, partially explains the uneven development of modern science in China
as compared to Europe.
Elman’s study focuses on two groups, Jesuit advisors and Protestant
missionaries, whom he identifies as the primary transmitters of modern scientific
knowledge from Europe to China prior to 1900. Starting in the early 1600s, the
Jesuits made inroads into the imperial court by drawing upon their astronomical
and cartographic knowledge to answer the emperor’s call for a more accurate
calendrical system and more precise maps of the empire. Protestant missionaries
arrived some two centuries later, responding to the growing demand among Chi-
nese reformers for advanced industrial and military technologies—a demand that,
as Elman notes, was itself prompted by China’s defeat at the hands of the British
in the Opium War.
These three hundred years of scientific transmission exposed Chinese intel-
lectual circles to many of the key elements of Western science. Many of the most
important theories and principles, however, did not make the journey. Channels of
transmission were frequently filtered or obstructed by powerful mediating forces,
particularly the religious commitments of the Jesuits and Protestants themselves.
In deciding which scientific theories to convey and how to portray them, these
Christian missionaries sometimes delayed or prevented many of the most critical
components of the scientific revolution from ever reaching China. As committed
Aristotelians, for example, the Jesuits were remiss when it came to introducing
the principles of Newtonianism, a factor that delayed the full translation of the
Principia by over a century. Similarly, Protestant missionaries were highly selective
in their portrayal of Darwinism, shaping Chinese understanding of the theory so
that it would correspond as much as possible with their own creationist orienta-
tion. In other cases, the Jesuits and Protestants themselves had simply lost touch
with contemporaneous developments taking place back home, resulting in the
not-infrequent transmission of obsolete or disproved theories, which the Chinese
then mistook for cutting-edge Western science.
In addition to religious mediations such as these, the transmission of mod-
ern scientific knowledge from Europe to China was further filtered and obstructed
by members of the imperial court. Because the Chinese court maintained a de facto
monopoly on interactions with European visitors, any given theory or technology
first had to appeal to the court’s sense of utility before it could be incorporated
into the larger infrastructure of sanctioned knowledge. Consequently, the influx
of Western science was subject to a continual litmus test of applicability, a process
favoring those imports that could expeditiously resolve pressing problems of the
day. Areas of abstract research, such as Leibniz’s mathematical notation, received
comparatively scant attention, a factor that in this case delayed China’s apprecia-
tion and incorporation of the calculus.
As a whole, Elman’s study is a tremendous achievement in both its analyti-
cal insight and empirical depth. At the same time, however, it remains to be seen
whether it will succeed in disrupting existing historiographic frameworks. Even
when taking into account its rich and nuanced analysis of Chinese scholarship, for
example, Elman’s portrayal of China remains rather consistent with the classical
account of modern science: save for the introductory chapters, China functions
for the most part as the recipient of Western knowledge, the only questions being
how speedily such knowledge was transmitted, how faithfully it was mediated, and
how readily it was incorporated.
Single Titles 511
By outlining these issues here, the point is not to diminish Elman’s work
but simply to raise the question: is it even possible to write a non-Eurocentric
history of modern science? To explore this question, let’s consider some areas of
potential intervention and see how they might succeed or fail. One beachhead that
has been stormed repeatedly involves appeals to the past achievements of Chinese
civilization. The inhabitants of what is now called China, this intervention reads,
were among the first to undertake sustained and extensive forays into the realms of
hydrology, navigation, medicine, astronomy, mechanics, and so forth. Thus, even
though Newton, Copernicus, Leibniz and the rest were credited with the forma-
tion of what we now call modern science, the revolution they led would have been
impossible had they not stood on the shoulders of Chinese giants.
As Elman demonstrates, Qing dynasty (1644-1911) officials and scholars
attempted just such an intervention. Allergic to self-satisfied Western claims of
scientific superiority and universality, Qing officials attempted to place a check
on European arrogance by officially categorizing physics, chemistry, and other
supposed universal sciences under the rubric of “Western Learning”—a method
somewhat reminiscent of the way Westerners today use subtle taxonomic distinc-
tions to circumscribe non-Euro-American intellectual and artistic output, donning
it “Eastern Philosophy,” “World Music,” “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” and
so forth. In later years, the Qing court stepped up these efforts, commissioning
Chinese elites to comb through the ancient classics in an attempt to prove that all
the great theories of Western science were in fact merely derivative corroborations
of prior Chinese discoveries.
Despite these efforts, however, this attempt to recenter the global history
of science has failed. First of all, whereas European powers were able to broadcast
their narratives into China, the Qing court had no ability to return fire, discursively
speaking. Second, European historians and China observers were able to absorb
the impact of such arguments and even use them to build an ever more totalizing
account of the modern age. In this clever retelling, which Elman dubs the “failure
narrative,” historians in the West have killed Chinese science with kindness, heap-
ing generous praise upon the ingenuity of the ancient Chinese while portraying
their descendants as static and incapable of innovation. For a host of cultural and
political reasons, this argument proceeds, China wrested defeat from the jaws
of victory, squandering an immense lead in the great marathon of civilization
and, in the last few miles, falling behind a group of feisty, late-blooming Western
Wunderkinder. Suddenly, the very achievements cited proudly in the Qing narra-
tives were transformed into embarrassments: after all, with everything China had
accomplished in the past, how did it fail to take those last few steps—to open the
door to the modern age?
In all, Elman’s new study deserves to be read closely by anyone interested
in history of science, transnational and comparative history, late imperial and
modern Chinese history, and European colonialism. At the same time, readers
should continue to question, both of themselves and of this wonderful text: is not
our definition of modern science so firmly and uncritically tied to European intel-
lectual output that it is perhaps impossible to write anything but a Eurocentric
history thereof? The terms of the debate, however much Elman and others would
like to reconceptualize them, seem to be set out for us in advance, for better or
for worse.
Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford
Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman, eds., W. R. Owens, consulting ed., The
Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2005). Pp.1776. £450.00/$750.00.
Pickering has now brought all of Delarivier Manley’s works (with the ex-
ception of some occasional poems and her dedications) into print as scholarly edi-
tions. This five-volume Selected Works excludes only her two plays of 1696, which
appear in the first volume of a 2001 Pickering multivolume set under the general
editorship of Derek Hughes entitled Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights: The
Lost Lover and The Royal Mischief. As there, the editorial principle of taking the
earliest available edition as copy-text is applied, except in one case where it seems
likely that Manley herself was involved in the many corrections to the second edi-
tion of the first volume of the 1711 Memoirs of Europe. Hitherto, Manley’s works
have appeared in piecemeal form from different publishers. Gainesville published
a two-volume facsimile of her major novels edited by Patricia Köster in 1971,
Faber and Faber selections from her autobiographical writings edited by Fidelis
Morgan in 1986, Broadview her fictional autobiography The Adventures of Rivella
edited by Katharine Zelinsky in 1999, Ashgate a facsimile collection of some early
plays and poems edited by Stephanie Hodgson-Wright in 2006. Pickering might
legitimately claim to have set the recent ball rolling (if a relatively small and slow-
moving one) with the publication of an edition of the work with which her name
was associated in her own time, The New Atalantis (1709), edited by me in 1992,
as one in the series entitled Pickering Women’s Classics (later reprinted by Penguin
Classics). The standard of editing, extent of modernization and silent correction,
was variable between these different publications and made it difficult to acquire
a sense of a literary/political career or the distinctive “flavor” of Manley’s breath-
less, comma-crammed, prose.
In the third canto of The Rape of the Lock of 1712, the triumphant baron
who has succeeded in snipping Belinda’s lock cries out:
As long as Atalantis shall be read,

Or the small pillow grace a Lady's bed,
While visits shall be paid on solemn days,
When num'rous wax-lights in bright order blaze,
While nymphs take treats, or assignations give,
So long my honour, name, and praise shall live! (lines 165–70).
Very soon after the first appearance of the New Atalantis—and when its overt
satirical political references to the Whig grandees of Anne’s reign would have
been instantly recognizable to its readers—Pope was contributing to the tradition
that presents Manley as a writer of warm erotic scenes. The rhyme of “read”
with “bed” confirms the association of readerly and sexual pleasures that Manley
herself exploited only two years later in her autobiography Rivella. Here, the nar-
rator Lovemore leads his eager protégé, D’Aumont, in an imaginary passage from
Manley’s writings to her table, to her bed “nicely sheeted and strow’d with flowers”
and a “Pillow neatly trim’d with Lace or Muslin” (4:57–8).
The editors of the Selected Works are keen to restore the political rather
than the erotic Manley to posterity, to ensure that Atalantis be read alongside
Manley’s other works to “allow scholars to study in a comprehensive fashion Man-
Single Titles 513
ley’s development as a writer and political critic” (5:3). And this they do achieve.
The general introduction, the editorial introductions prefixed to each individual
work, and the editorial notes provide clear summaries of the political moment in
which the works were published and the political events to which they allude. A
new glossary provided at the end of the fifth volume builds on and replaces the
identificatory work undertaken by Patricia Köster in her 1971 two-volume The
Novels of Mary Delarivier Manley. The editors have used a variety of contempo-
rary, separately published keys to identify a large number of the political figures
referred to under pseudonyms in Manley’s texts. These prove especially useful in
locating a historical personage referenced in more than one text. One can trace,
for instance, Earl of Oxford Robert Harley’s appearance in Manley’s work, at
first despised as “The Cambrian” in Queen Zarah (1705), where his moderation
with the Whigs on the removal of Nottingham as Secretary of State is dismissed as
“fawn[ing] like a true C[ourt]t D[o]g” (1:134), then celebrated—although Manley
does not appear to have been in direct contact with the increasingly powerful Tory
at this point—as Don Geronimo de Haro in New Atalantis II (1709) because he
“understood the Interest of the Nation, and fearlessly proclaim’d and pursu’d it”
(2: 235). In 1710 when Harley’s return to power on the fall of the Whigs seemed
inevitable, Manley presents him as Herminius—“an Officer of State; a Man of great
Capacity, Eloquence, true Principles, Generosity, and extreme habile in Business”
(3:103), whereas by 19 July 1711, writing for the periodical organ of the Tories,
Manley celebrates the “Wisdom and great Abilities” of Agrippa in Examiner 51
(5:30). Such person-hunting is, however, slowed by the fact that, unlike Köster’s,
this glossary does not provide page references, so that the reader has to, for ex-
ample, remember where they encountered Herminius in 315 pages of episodic
text, or shuffle through the endnotes to the text to locate a reference to the name.
Is this an indication of the constraints placed on editors of even scholarly editions
by publishing budgets?
The Selected Works make a good fist of mapping Manley’s growing con-
fidence as political commentator. The editors do not see Manley’s Tory agenda as
a clear motive for publication until the publication of the first volume of Memoirs
of Europe in 1710. They suspect that her main reason for publishing The New
Atalantis in 1709—and the plays and collections of letters that appeared previous
to it—was to earn a living through her writing. Manley was never, it appears, in
a position to leave this motive behind, but the first volume of Memoirs of Europe
was, they claim, an expression of Tory confidence and the second “a celebration
of the new Tory ministry” (1:24). Where The New Atalantis was published anony-
mously, its authorship only made visible when Manley was arrested for seditious
libel, released, and the charges dropped in February 1710 (more out of fear that
the scandal was increasing interest in the book than because the case was unprov-
able), Manley registered herself in accordance with the new copyright act as the
author of the first volume of the Memoirs of Europe in the records of Stationers’
Hall on 11 May 1710. Most valuable in this edition is the inclusion of all Manley’s
contributions to the Tory vehicle, The Examiner, in 1710 and 1711, and her se-
ries of three political pamphlets of the same year in the fifth volume. Edited with
particular fineness, this volume demonstrates—if proof were needed—Manley’s
particular skills as a propagandist and political “historian.” The editors point
out her particular value to the Tory party as a writer who succeeded in bringing
together its different wings, especially those of Robert Harley and St. John in the
summer of 1711. In her first Examiner numbers, Manley extends the analogical
method she had employed in her romans-à-clef (Memoirs of Europe takes Con-
stantinople under the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V in the eighth century as

a parallel with late Stuart London). In the seventh number of the Examiner (14
September 1710), she writes in the voice of a Swedish officer at Bender, describing
King Charles XII of Sweden’s involuntary stay with the Turkish ruler Achmet III to
parallel Charles’s position with that of Anne isolated from the Tories and enslaved
by the controlling Whigs.
Other works sit less comfortably in the collection, partly due to the editors’
prioritizing of the political over literary reference of Manley’s writings. We learn
nothing new about Manley’s late collection of tales, The Power of Love in Seven
Novels (1720), which is provided in the fourth volume. It has long been known that
five of the seven novels bear similarities with novellas included in William Painter’s
Palace of Pleasure (1566–7), which were derived from Bandello and Marguerite
de Navarre. The editor of this volume, Rachel Carnell, simply records that the
sources of the second and final novella have “not been traced,” although the latter
is based on the well-known and oft-told life of a sixteenth-century Benedictine nun,
Donna Virginia Leyva. The second novel of Manley’s collection, The Physician’s
Stratagem, is a particularly unpleasant story about a doctor who drugs and rapes
an aristocrat’s daughter and then marries her to save her from “disgrace”; given
the scandalous content of so much of Manley’s work (and the fact that this story
appears to have no obvious literary source), it seems possible that it may have had
some contemporary resonance worth investigating. The decision to include the
disputed Queen Zarah (1705), but not the equally disputed Female Tatler papers,
in the Selected Works is not defended by any new findings. The only basis for the
claim to Manley’s authorship (apart from some stylistic similarities) is that the
1711 edition of Zarah refers to it as an appendix to the New Atalantis and that
the notoriously unreliable Edmund Curll attributed to it in his biography of her
lover, John Barber, Jacobite mayor of London. J. A. Downie has made a cogent
case against Manley’s authorship and in favor of Dr. Joseph Browne (“What if
Delarivier Manley did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?” Library,
series 7, 5:3 [September 2004], 247–64).
The editors are also often on more shaky ground when they refer to literary
rather than political sources, and inconsistently so. Thus in the general introduc-
tion we are told that “through an anecdote about Cary Coke that echoes the plot
of Madame de Scudery’s Le Princesse de Cleves, The New Atalantis also gestures
towards the new shorter French genre of courtly novella” (1:20–1). However, Ra-
chel Carnell in her editing of the New Atalantis in the next volume is well aware
that Marie de Lafayette rather than Madeleine de Scudery was the author of La
Princesse de Cleves (2:327).
Nevertheless, there are some shrewd and illuminating observations about
Manley’s experiments and innovations with genres of prose fiction. As well as the
contentious Queen Zarah, the first volume provides Manley’s epistolary writings,
the Letters Written by Mrs Manley (1696), The Unknown Lady’s Pacquet of Let-
ters (1707), and The Remaining Part of the Unknown Lady’s Pacquet of Letters
(1708), along with the one letter and new preface that were added to the latter
publication when the two “Pacquets” were republished in one volume under the title
Court Intrigues (1711). The general introduction astutely observes that Manley’s
“epistolary fictions are perhaps more directly relevant to the development of the
British novel than her scandal chronicles” (1:10) in their down-to-earth develop-
ment and directness of tone by comparison with the models of female letter writ-
ing that Manley was evidently familiar with, especially that of Marie-Catherine
Single Titles 515
d’Aulnoy. The 1696 Letters are a commoner’s version of d’Aulnoy’s Travels into
Spain, charting meetings with gentry folks rather than aristocrats, in a productive
deformation that Carnell and Herman parallel with Henry Fielding’s adaptation
of the epic in Tom Jones (1:10). They are less surefooted in their treatment of the
two late plays they include in their selection, Almyna, or the Arabian Vow (1707)
and Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain (1717). The general introduction
comments that the former is based on “one of the tales” in the Arabian Nights
Entertainments (the first volume of which had appeared just a year previously
in England to great enthusiasm), whereas of course it is based on the frame tale
of Scheherazade persuading a despotic king to defer a dreadful and unjust vow.
Manley’s is a creative solution to the problem of turning a narrative mode into a
dramatic one; Almyna persuades her Oriental husband to abandon his belief that
women have no souls in some punchy philosophic argument combined with the
exercise of considerable physical charm rather than subjecting him and a theater
audience to a sequence of spoken tales. The editors rightly recognize the (political)
importance of the representation of vow-breaking and accommodation to political
circumstance in Manley’s drama, but their assertion that “we are never convinced
in the plays that behind her strong Hanoverian Tory principles there did not remain
the nagging conflict between loyalty to the Stuarts and to their Catholicism” (1:37)
can hold only for these late plays, whereas the two earlier plays of the 1690s—ad-
mittedly not included in the Selected Works—reveal similar concerns well before
the Hanoverian succession of 1714.
A number of errors that should have been picked up by a good desk editor
are a minor irritant in using these volumes. Most obvious is a title page of the first
volume that lists the Lady’s “Paqcuet.” More hidden but equally elementary as
an oversight is: “My Appetite began seebly to return” (3:34). Running a program
to correct every “long f” to the modern “s” has its perils. Nevertheless, these five
volumes are an impressive achievement, synthesizing the considerable and disparate
work on Delarivier Manley (to which the editors have themselves contributed in
other publications) in the critical apparatus, and providing good copy-texts for
scholars to rely on in the continuing reevaluation of a significant, magnificently
opportunist, and underrated contributor to the paper wars of the early eighteenth
century.
Karl Menges, University of California, Davis
John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca and Lon-
don: Cornell University Press, 2006). Pp. ix + 341. $35.00.
Suspicion, paranoia, and an associated decline of human agency are the

topics of this ambitious study that starts in the late Middle Ages and extends up
to the eighteenth century, providing context to one of the most striking themes in
postmodern culture. Postmodernism, as we all know, undermines the authority
of enlightened thought on the stipulation that there is no longer a definitive point
of reference, be it religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or otherwise. As conjecture
displaces the self-certainty of the subject, existential anxiety produces theories of
Single Titles 515
d’Aulnoy. The 1696 Letters are a commoner’s version of d’Aulnoy’s Travels into
Spain, charting meetings with gentry folks rather than aristocrats, in a productive
deformation that Carnell and Herman parallel with Henry Fielding’s adaptation
of the epic in Tom Jones (1:10). They are less surefooted in their treatment of the
two late plays they include in their selection, Almyna, or the Arabian Vow (1707)
and Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain (1717). The general introduction
comments that the former is based on “one of the tales” in the Arabian Nights
Entertainments (the first volume of which had appeared just a year previously
in England to great enthusiasm), whereas of course it is based on the frame tale
of Scheherazade persuading a despotic king to defer a dreadful and unjust vow.
Manley’s is a creative solution to the problem of turning a narrative mode into a
dramatic one; Almyna persuades her Oriental husband to abandon his belief that
women have no souls in some punchy philosophic argument combined with the
exercise of considerable physical charm rather than subjecting him and a theater
audience to a sequence of spoken tales. The editors rightly recognize the (political)
importance of the representation of vow-breaking and accommodation to political
circumstance in Manley’s drama, but their assertion that “we are never convinced
in the plays that behind her strong Hanoverian Tory principles there did not remain
the nagging conflict between loyalty to the Stuarts and to their Catholicism” (1:37)
can hold only for these late plays, whereas the two earlier plays of the 1690s—ad-
mittedly not included in the Selected Works—reveal similar concerns well before
the Hanoverian succession of 1714.
A number of errors that should have been picked up by a good desk editor
are a minor irritant in using these volumes. Most obvious is a title page of the first
volume that lists the Lady’s “Paqcuet.” More hidden but equally elementary as
an oversight is: “My Appetite began seebly to return” (3:34). Running a program
to correct every “long f” to the modern “s” has its perils. Nevertheless, these five
volumes are an impressive achievement, synthesizing the considerable and disparate
work on Delarivier Manley (to which the editors have themselves contributed in
other publications) in the critical apparatus, and providing good copy-texts for
scholars to rely on in the continuing reevaluation of a significant, magnificently
opportunist, and underrated contributor to the paper wars of the early eighteenth
century.
Karl Menges, University of California, Davis
John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca and Lon-
don: Cornell University Press, 2006). Pp. ix + 341. $35.00.
Suspicion, paranoia, and an associated decline of human agency are the

topics of this ambitious study that starts in the late Middle Ages and extends up
to the eighteenth century, providing context to one of the most striking themes in
postmodern culture. Postmodernism, as we all know, undermines the authority
of enlightened thought on the stipulation that there is no longer a definitive point
of reference, be it religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or otherwise. As conjecture
displaces the self-certainty of the subject, existential anxiety produces theories of
conspiracy that tend to ground the world in some seemingly rational realm of devi-
ous plotting. It is paranoia that drives this psychology of suspicion, fueling in turn
the search for structure as a grand narrative of deceit and deception unmasked. Of
course, paranoid thought is a dominant theme already in classical modernism. But
it truly comes into its own in contemporary literature as in the work of Pynchon,
De Lillo, or Didion, to name just a few American voices. Lately, it has also been
the focal point of cross-disciplinary research linking political analysis (cf. West and
Sanders 2003) with a critique of popular culture (e.g., Marcus 1999, Melley 2000,
or Coale 2005). What unites these approaches is the experience of a progressive
“demagification” (Max Weber) of the social sphere and the accelerating loss of
autonomy in an increasingly abstract and administered world.
It is in that context that Farrell approaches the vast stretch from the six-
teenth to the eighteenth century in terms of an accelerating decline of self-determi-
nation. Conspiratorial notions overwhelm a balanced perception of reality as the
belief in the formative abilities of the modern subject wanes. In this process Don
Quixote takes center stage as the idealistic if misinformed hero who appears as
the first great paranoid adventurer. His idealism is revolutionary in that he wants
to turn back the clock and restore lost forms of chivalric demeanor, not realizing
that his quest is as grandiose as it is paranoid. Grandiosity as the symptom of the
paranoid mind complements the experiences of persecution and defeat, which
Quixote articulates by lecturing to Sancho: “wherever virtue exists in an eminent
degree, it is persecuted” (38).
From this thematic exposition the author moves to a morphology of mad-
ness and a collapse of agency with Luther as the next witness. The reformer chal-
lenges Catholicism, but not in the expected sense of holding the church to her lofty
principles. He does not repudiate her corruption, which he witnesses firsthand on
his journey to Rome in 1510/11. What he does reject is the church doctrine that
human agency is responsible for leading man to salvation or damnation on the false
notion that human action can affect the will of God. This Luther rejects categori-
cally. Man has access to God’s plan not through a corrupted church hierarchy, but
through the understanding of Scripture, which means that faith is the only remedy
in view of the sordid state of affairs. On that premise, Luther, according to Farrell,
repudiates agency as a conceited exercise that is doomed to fail, as everything is
fixed and predetermined, hence rendering all human intervention an illusion.
It is obviously not possible here to draw a complete picture of the author’s
layered historical argument regarding this alleged demise of agency. Suffice it to say
that suspicion and the devaluation of human action guide a variety of tightly argued
analyses, connecting French rationalism (Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, et
al.) with British empiricism (Bacon, Locke, Pope, Hume, et al.), and culminating
in Rousseau’s rejection of civilization at large.
Paranoia and the “denial” (6), “renunciation” (90), or “alienation of
agency” (118) are the operative words in this fascinating study. They are signi-
fiers of an idealized notion of human action butting up against the ever-unsettling
order of things. To the extent that this order resists change, the inevitable clash
between the ideal and the real triggers efforts of mental stabilization that project
the blame for failure onto a perceived agent of conspiracy and persecution. It is
here that paranoid confusion sets in, which Farrell defines as the “norm of the
Western intellect” (8). Against the indictments of Critical Theory, which diagnoses
the alienation of modern man as a result of the progress of modern technology,
Farrell argues that these developments were “deliberate achievements of the makers
Single Titles 517
of modern culture.” They supposedly “fostered a sequence of modes of thinking

that made the denial of agency into a virtue and the assertion of agency into folly
or vice” (309). From Cervantes to Rousseau, the decline of human action thus
appears as the consequence of a paranoid mindset in which denial of agency “is
the key” (311).
Whether this encompassing proposition can be sustained as a grand narra-
tive of modernity is questionable. After all, subjective agency remains the founding
principle of modern rationalism starting with Descartes’ emphasis on methodic
doubt and his related grounding of knowledge in the formative capacity of the
subject. While the author is not oblivious to that development, granting that Des-
cartes did indeed “reinstate the autonomy of human agency” (118), he objects to
Descartes’ dualism, which he sees centered in an oblique lack of practicality while
suggesting that “his [Descartes’] account of soul and body remains an ungainly
contraption, and his free and autonomous realm of thought finds itself with only
an instrumental or manipulative relation to the world in which it is embedded”
(119).
It is not quite clear what that means, as the author offers only a two-page
sketch of such Cartesian “drawbacks.” One might revisit therefore Descartes’ in-
stallation of subjective self-determination, which initiates a theoretical revolution
whose Copernican singularity defines the transcendental turn and echoes throughout
twentieth-century thought as, e.g., in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1929). In
fact, so momentous was this turn that Hegel metaphorically likened the principle
of methodic doubt to the lucky strike of an ocean vessel, finally coming upon firm
ground after having been tossed about for centuries on the seas of ignorance and
confusion. Kant, likewise, not only builds on Descartes’ epistemology by claiming
the Copernican metaphor in the second edition of his first Critique (1787); he also
bases his practical philosophy on subjective intervention as in the impassioned
plea for an enlightened public sphere with man’s necessary emancipation from
his “self-imposed immaturity.” That practical proposition resonates to this day in
Foucault’s retake of the same question (“What is Enlightenment?”) as in Habermas’s
confidence in the rationality of communicative action. Agency, then, is not really
lost to an encompassing feeling of paranoid doom about which nothing is to be
done. It rather remains at the core of contemporary philosophical discourse as it
continues to define the evolving course of modern history.
While Professor Farrell certainly deserves praise for his archeology of
suspicion, presented with great erudition and stylistic grace, the connection to a
wholesale demise of agency is more difficult to accept. Aside from compelling evi-
dence to the contrary, wouldn’t his claim have to extend to his own story in terms
of a metanarrative of modernity in which agency again prevails?
Books Received 519
Books Received*
Books Received from October through December 2006
Audrière, Sophie et al. Matérialistes français du XVIIIe siècle: La Mettrie, Helvétius,

d’Holbach (Paris: PUF, 2006). Pp. 364. e30 paper.
Audrière, Sophie, Jean-Claude Bourdin, and Colas Duflo, eds. L’Encyclopédie du

Rêve de D’Alembert de Diderot (Paris: CNRS, 2006). Pp. 423. e45 paper.
Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to Symphony in the Age of

Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Pp. 169. $29.95 cloth.
Carruth, Mary C., ed. Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies (Tuscaloosa:
The University of Alabama Press, 2006). Pp. 328. $32.95 paper. $65 cloth.
Charpont-Touzé, Michelle and Jean Souchay, eds. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert: Œu-
vres Complètes, Série I, Vol. 7: Traités et mémoires mathématiques, 1736–1756:
Précession et Nutation, 1749–1752 (Paris: CNRS, 2006). Pp. 490. e60 cloth.
Cramer, Charles. Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 (Newark: Uni-
versity of Delaware Press, 2006). Pp. 181. $59.50 cloth.
Donlan, Seán Patrick, ed. Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities (Portland: Irish Academic
Press, 2006). Pp. 274. $35 paper.
Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–
1740 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). Pp. 271. $42.50 cloth.
Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and

France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Pp. 300. $55 cloth.
Glover, Susan Paterson. Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eigh-
teenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). Pp. 231.
$49.50 cloth.
*Books for review may be sent to Alessa Johns, Reviews Editor, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dept. of English, UC-
Davis, One Shields Ave., University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616.

Hogan, Robert and Donald C. Mell, eds. The Poems of Patrick Delany (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2006). Pp. 213. $47.50 cloth.
Holaubek, Johanna and Hana Navrátilová, eds. Egypt and Austria I: Proceedings
of the Symposium (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, 2005). Pp.172. $35
paper.
Jones, David Wyn. The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006). Pp. 231. $90 cloth.
Kalter, Susan, ed. Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nation: The Trea-
ties of 1736–62 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Pp. 453. $45 cloth.
Kidd, Colin. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic
World, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 309. $27.99
paper. $75 cloth.
Klepp, Susan E., Fareley Grubb, and Anne Pfaelzer de Ortiz, eds. Souls for Sale:
Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America: The Life Stories of
John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Büttner (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 2006). Pp. 272. $25 paper. $75 cloth.
Kukla, Rebecca, ed. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 309. $75 cloth.
Little, Ann M. Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Pp. 262. $45 cloth.
Lomonaco, Fabrizio. Filosofia, diritto e storia in Gianvincenzo Gravina (Roma:

Edizioni di storia e litteratura, 2006). Pp. 306. e50 paper.
Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, ed. Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische
Koloniale Welt. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006). Pp. 408. e48.
Madden, Etta M. and Martha L. Finch, eds. Eating in Eden: Food and American
Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Pp. 291. $34.95 cloth.
Marshall, Peter and Alexandra Walsham, eds. Angels in the Early Modern World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 326. $99 cloth.
Morton, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006). Pp. 219. $24.99 paper. $80 cloth.
Newman, Donald J. and Lynn Marie Wright, eds. Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood
and The Female Spectator (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). Pp. 252.
$48.50 cloth.
Resch, John and Walter Sargent, eds. War and Society in the American Revolution:
Mobilization and Home Fronts (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
Pp. 318. $22.50 paper.
Richter, Simon. Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the Ger-
man Enlightenment (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Pp. 353. $45
cloth.
Smith, Hannah. Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 296. $85 cloth.
Books Received 521
Staves, Susan. A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 536. $150 cloth.
Taylor, Marion Ann and Heather E. Weir. Let Her Speak For Herself: Nineteenth-
Century Women Writing on Women in Genesis (Waco: Baylor University Press,
2006). Pp. 495. $44.95 paper.
Toulouse, Teresa A. The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and
Royal Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006). Pp. 225. $49.95 cloth.
White, Simon, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan, eds. Robert Bloomfield: Lyr-
ics, Class, and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006).
Pp. 315. $58.50 cloth.
Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Vir-
ginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2006). Pp. 284. $45 cloth.

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To love friendship it is not enough to know how to bear the other in

Even if it is essentially preservative, love (but also deconstruction) is nev-

—Peggy Kamuf, “Deconstruction and Love”

—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

How we mourn, how we recognize and remember the dead, according to

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 367–379.

I think that somewhere in Of Grammatology I said, or perhaps it’s at the

Derrida begins this recollection of his past writing practices by misremembering

Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection,

The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It

there even be inheritors?] (AVE 33–34). “Confiée”: entrusted, confided, perhaps

encroachments of authority, he questions Derrida’s “model,” his “mechanism,”

shows, she argues, “semantic slipperiness,” far from constituting a hindrance to

3. Jacques Derrida, “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points:

4. “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire” was first published as an introduction to a modern edition of Léonard

Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century”

Mais ni Descartes ni Hegel ne se sont battus avec le problème de

. . . le “XVIIIe siècle français” par exemple et si quelque chose de tel existe . . .

Un texte a toujours plusieurs âges, la lecture doit en prendre son parti.

Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie

“Ce qu’on appelle. . . .” “What we call,” “what one calls,” “what is

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 381–393.

underestimated. If for profound and systematic reasons, the nineteenth

Les noms d’auteurs ou de doctrines n’ont ici aucune valeur substantielle.

[The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value.

Comme il va de soi, nulle pétition ici de quelque continuum homogène

impressionniste vers de prétendues différences, en fait vers des découpa-

Il ne s’agit pourtant pas de reconduire, selon une ligne, la fonction du

En rappelant ici l’histoire du signifiant “idée”, il ne s’agit pas de céder à

1) Si, de manière un peu conventionnelle, nous appelons ici discours la

But even though it is not merely apparent, this contradiction takes on

This methodological point is also made in the famous explicit exchange

structure totale—avant une analyse interne rigoureuse et exhaustive de

On peut imaginer les effets que peut avoir la catégorie de “menace

un paradigne, dès lors que toutes ces déterminations se trouvent mena-

particularly on Rousseau), that also happens to be one of the chosen themes of

2. See my “Almost the End,” in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000).

3. See Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 69.

De la grammatologie is a monstrous work. One should say that, if pos-

Monstrous is an “errancy . . . beyond the closure of knowledge” and it is with just

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 395–404.

method of errancy is a flagrant contradiction in terms, a monstrosity that flaunts

Such a psychoanalysis [of Jean-Jacques Rousseau] would have to locate

Something “irreducibly Rousseauist” would be a “point of irreducible origi-

any such contradictions as aberrations, anomalies, monstrous. This observable

To the extent that he belongs to the metaphysics of presence, [Rousseau]

a dream, “the dream of Rousseau,” which “has consisted of forcibly introducing

3. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 63.

5. See 230 for a foregrounded use of the term découpage.

11. On the question of the empiricism of his “method,” see 232.

In his remarks on the question of method in Of Grammatology, Jacques

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007) Pp. 405–424.

for religion, its positive salvation,” insofar as deconstruction “keep[s] it open to

of religion and of logocentrism.9 Similarly, when Derrida affirms the necessity of

the interest of reason might originate in an empirical desire, feeling, or passion—a

are necessary, necessarily inseparable, and necessary but impossible to negotiate

Just as he tries to think unconditionality with and beyond Kant, so Der-

By conjuring up Hobbes as a figure whom he can address and make speak

responsibility for others and responds to the other in himself as if commanded

the ability or power to respond unconditionally to “absolute singularity,” to “in-

1) Si, de manière un peu conventionnelle, nous appelons ici discours la