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The Death of a Friend: Some Themes in Jacques

Derrida’s The Work of Mourning

Gary Peters

In Memory of Deborah Nye

In Derrida’s recent work the theme of death has emerged as

central. This is particularly evident in The Work of Mourning and The Giftof Death, but as his former work testifies this has, in reality, long been an

important aspect of his work, albeit one overlooked. The work under

discussion here, The Work of Mourning , is a collection of pieces writtenon the occasion of the death of Derrida’s contemporaries.

1 They are all, to

a greater or lesser degree, well-known and influential thinkers, writers and

teachers ranging from Barthes to Foucault, Althusser to Deleuze, Lyotard

to Levinas. But, more importantly, they were all his friends which

accounts for the peculiar poignancy of these texts and the fascinating way

in which he both reads death back into that aspect of their lives that he

shared with them, and reads life forward into their death in his descriptionof the complex way he still carries his departed friends within him.

The following reflections will concentrate on two inter-related

themes. Firstly; the finely-balanced dialectic of speech and silence when

speaking (or not speaking) of the dead and the intricate way in which

Derrida refuses silence in order to speak another silence that exists

between friends through life and death. One that the occasion of death

brings, often painfully, to the surface.

Secondly; the particularly engaging way in which Derrida speaks

of carrying the lost friend within himself will allow me to revisit from a

different direction some of Asa Kasher’s thoughts in “Life in the Heart”.2

In particular, it is the detailed but fragmentary memories that Derrida

introduces into, what often turns into a re-reading of the friend’s work that

offers considerable insight into the experience of loss. Insight that, I believe, shows the real force and resonance of philosophy. To turn to

Derrida:

The friend can no longer be but in us, and whatever we

may believe about the afterlife, about living-on,

according to all the possible forms of faith, it is in us

that these movements might appear, this being-in-us



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72

reveals a truth to and at death, at the moment of death,and even before death, by everything in us that prepares

itself for and awaits death, that is, in the undeniable

anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship.3

To speak philosophically of death from out of the experience of

friendship and loss is something all too rare within the literature ofWestern philosophy, in Death: An Essay in Finitude, for example,

Francoise Dastur begins her study by surveying what she sees as thisevasion of the philosophers.

From Aristotle to Hegel this absolute negativity, thisradical caesura, this purely and simply unthinkable thing

death, sees itself converted into “relative non-being”,

and “determinate negativity”, into a “sublatable”

caesura and a simple limit of the thinkable. This testifies

ultimately to the inability of metaphysics really to face

up to death.4

In light of this, it is interesting and, perhaps, telling that it is the

most notoriously ironic of thinkers who does it best, a thought that will

also form part of what follows, particularly as regards the place of whatwill be called the cliché in the articulation of grief and loss.

This is the last of three essays written in the proximity of death,the death of a close friend from cancer, the death of a woman in her forties

leaving a husband and two teenage children. Every word of these three

pieces contains the “real” experience of this tragedy but, as I have seen so

often, philosophical words are too often considered to be empty

abstractions, devoid of existential content and thus resented as an intrusion

into the “unspeakable” spirituality of death. I speak, I write, but the

language I use, the only one available to me, does not register with those

who might listen: who would listen? Certainly not philosophers in spite of

my “philosophical” language, I have already tried that, with dismal results.

Notwithstanding its virile self-image, philosophy is afraid of death and,

even more, afraid of the fear of death, afraid of fear. I have sat in a roomfull of “professional” phenomenologists and heard them agree that, in the

face of death, philosophy must be put to one side. As one of this number

(who shall remain nameless) stated, “when it comes to death, I turn to my

religion, in silence”. No more words, no more noise, a silent vigil

pulsating with the reassuring substance of religiosity!

When my friend eventually died last summer, after ten years ofstruggle, I was in France and unable to return for her funeral in England.



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73

Instead, I decided to compose a piece of music for her that my wife took back to the funeral. It was played at the funeral and accompanied by a

short text which begins as follows:

This piece of music, short and unfinished like Deborah's

life, was written for her as a small token of our mutual

love of a certain type of music. I was never able tospeak directly to Deborah of my profound sadness in the

face of her singular predicament and struggle, but anumber of pieces of music I have written and recorded

over recent years contain this regret, and they are pieces

that Deborah knew and appreciated. This, for me, wasan unspoken acknowledgement of an understanding that

did not require any other articulation .

As is evident, when it came to the moment of death, I too failed to

articulate philosophically my fears for her and her family in the face of

this trauma, fears that I had spent so long turning over and over in my“cold” and “inhuman” philosophical mind. I too turned away from

philosophy towards what is for me the most spiritual of all spiritualities:

music, trusting in its incomparable, but incomprehensible communicative

power. So maybe that is my vocation, composer/musician, purveyor of acertain kind of silence that, as Nietzsche expresses it, is “too silent for

mere silence”, sotto voce, a silence beneath or within the sound or thevoice that holds the silence in its proper place, not allowing it to dissolve

into a dumb muteness articulating nothing or nothing of importance.

Perhaps then, the music should take the place of the current text?

But would you, or could you hear this silence between my friend and I, a

silence prior to friendship one that wordlessly affirms the other person,

beneath all differences and disagreements the “yes” that over time or

sometimes instantly transforms being-with the other into being- for the

other?

When friendship begins before friendship, it touches

upon death, indeed, it is born in mourning. But it is alsodoubly affirmed, twice sealed.

5

Well, maybe you would hear this because, like me and my friend,

you will, no doubt be familiar with what might be called here a particular

musical rhetoric that inevitably comes into play the moment specific and

recognisable types of expression and communication are intended. In theface of, or on the occasion of death particular musical structures, phrases,




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harmonies and timbres, sedimented in a whole history of mourning,remembrance and loss, impose themselves upon the composer with the

full force of the collective will. To resist or deny this history, and the

structures that articulate it, in grimly determined acts of jollity and

celebration is as evasive as is the silent vigil that resents the rhetorical

“inauthenticity” of all communicative strategies. Both are every bit as

rhetorical as the rhetoric they seek to deny: no happiness is ever onlyhappy, no silence is ever pure.

It is for this reason, above all, that I felt compelled to drawattention, in my accompanying statement, to, what I refer to as, the

musical “cliches” mobilised throughout the short piece mentioned. To

quote myself again:

In this piece I have deliberately brought together a

number of, what might be described as, musical clichés

taken from a certain music, loved by both of us. In spite

of the fact that clichés border on the sentimental, they

contain within them both a life and, indeed, a history of joy and regret that has no other voice---this is the

incomparable beauty of music that I have seen reduce

Deborah to tears.

It might be useful to embark for a moment on a short detour

through a fragment of the work of the novelist Thomas Mann who, morethan anyone, is alive to the interpenetration of intense emotional substance

and the inheritance and utilization of rhetorical figuration, what might be

called in the present context, the irony of grief. Particularly pertinent is his

conception of Jacob’s ritualistic mourning of Joseph’s apparent death, as

described in Joseph and His Brothers, as the mobilization of what Mann

calls “mythic clichés”. In the following passage Mann demonstrates in the

most poignant way imaginable the crucial role of clichés in the expression

of even the most intense personal affliction.

“Crimson and swollen,” he said, his voice trembling,

“is my countenance weeping. For deep-bowed in myaffliction I sit down to weep, and my face is wet with

the tears that flow down it.” The words, as one could

tell, were not original with him. For Noah, according to

the legend, was supposed to have said some such thing,

and Jacob made it his own. And indeed it is good, it is

convenient and consoling, that from the suffering of ourancestors we inherit right and suitable words in which to



Gary Peters

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clothe our own, which then fit it as though they weremade for it…Certainly, Jacob could do his grief no

greater honour than to set it on a level with the great

flood and apply to it words which were coined for that

catastrophe. At all events, he spoke and lamented much

in his despair, in words already coined or only half-

coined. And over and over again came the wailing cry:“Joseph is rent, is rent in pieces”—which may easily

have been already in existence, but lost nothing of theimpressiveness by the fact. No, that they had, however

much they had been used before.6

The cliché, for Mann, brings the whole weight of collective grief

to bear on Jacob’s private anguish, pluralizing the singular event through

the importation of another’s words, other events and a figuration of

suffering and lamentation that allows singularity and universality to

interpenetrate and thereby attain a level of intensity far beyond subjective

pain. The solitary self alone with their loss is here empowered byidentifying and submitting to given figures of meaning that are precisely inexcess of subjective experience and singular articulation

Cliché’s, it is true, have a bad reputation, being too often aligned

with sentimentality, sterility, familiarity, and the formulaic; nevertheless,one should not lose sight of the fact that in spite of everything, there is

something almost uniquely compelling about the manner in which greatswathes of barely articulated human existence are compacted into such

discredited, devalued and discarded forms. Clichés could not become

clichés unless they at some time articulated the most profound concerns of

human subjects in forms that achieve an extraordinary degree of

universality, usually, it has to be said, on an empathetic level that

ultimately obscures or undermines the integrity of this much-derided form:

perhaps a serious hermeneutics of the cliché would be a way forward.

The field of rhetorical figures (of clichés) is an infinite one. The

mobilisation of the appropriate figures as an offering to the memory of a

friend and to those who would remember with you, is a reminder that

friendship itself is a form of attention, the recognition and accumulation ofsigns from the other, the patterns of choices and affirmations that draw the

friends into a silent communion, one held in place by their particular, their

unique co-respondence.

To articulate this on the occasion of a friend’s death is an

extraordinarily delicate matter that, as suggested, requires an acute

sensitivity to what can and cannot be said, a sensitivity to the demands ofrhetoric and the demands of silence. And, in particular, an obligation to




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speak with and for the dead friend, but not necessarily in their words orone’s own (if such ownership can be claimed) but in the appropriate

forms, the figures that (we hope, at least) they themselves would have

chosen…all of this requires the aforementioned attention. This brings me

back to philosophy, for me the most attentive attention of all. It also brings

me to the most attentive of philosophers: Derrida, whose words will now

move these ideas along a little further: I quote from The Work ofMourning where he wrestles with the delicacy necessary to talk of his

dead friend Roland Barthes:

Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand,

not to say anything that comes back to oneself, to one’sown voice, to remain silent or at the very least to let

oneself be accompanied or preceded in counterpoint by

the friend’s voice. Thus, out of zealous devotion or

gratitude, to be content with just quoting…to let him

speak, to efface oneself in front of and follow his

speech…But this excess of fidelity would end up sayingand exchanging nothing. It returns death to death. It

points to death, sending death back to death. On the

other hand, by avoiding all quotation, all

identification…so that what is addressed to or of RolandBarthes truly comes from the other, from the living

friend, one risks making him disappear again, as if onecould add more death to death and thus indecently

pluralize it. We are left then with having to do and not

do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity

with the other.7

Who should speak? One friend is gone, one remains; the survivor

must speak, but not for himself, rather, for the other who is absent, who is

now silent, silenced. Derrida suggest a manner of speaking that both

places the speaker into the silence of the friend and draws the silence out

of its muteness into a language that is, in turn, hollowed by what might be

called the presence of this absence. A present absence infinitely intensifiedwhen, as he does on occasions, Derrida speaks beside the body of his lost

friend. Beside the body of Louis Althusser, less than twenty four hours

after hearing of his death Derrida is already engaged in this dialectic of

speech and silence. I quote:

Forgive me for reading, and for reading not what I believe I should say – does anyone ever know what to



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say at such times? – but just enough to prevent silencefrom completely taking over, a few shreds of what I was

able to tear away from the silence within which I, like

you, no doubt, might be tempted to take refuge at the

moment….It is almost indecent to speak right now…but

silence too is unbearable. I cannot bear the thought of

silence, as if you in me could not bear the thought.8

To whom is Derrida speaking, to the assembled friends andrelatives or to Althusser himself? Or not himself but to the presence of his

absence within Derrida, within his “heart” to echo Asa Kasher’s words,

the “heart” so cruelly denied to philosophy by the professionals. He speaksto both, both to the presence of the friend in the hearts of the others and to

the presence of the friend in his own heart. But he does not speak his own

words, he speaks in a “strange tongue” that he does not “believe” in but

which allows him to resist the pull of silent oblivion and hold his friend a

little longer, suspended between the rhetorical figures and ironic structures

that allow speech to continue.In virtually every response to the death of a friend Derrida speaks

of re-reading their work, at that moment, having their work before him,

again in his “heart”. By thus directing the work of mourning through the

act of reading and re-reading he reminds us of his longstandingcommitment to the promotion of “writing” and, by implication, reading, in

the face of the hegemony of speech, an echo of his earlier notoriety.Important here is not the dubious incestuousness of one living philosopher

reading the philosophical work of his dead philosophical friend

(philosophy-for-philosophy’s-sake) but the manner in which the reading of

another’s writing is the primary form of attention that the philosopher can

give to the other. It is the subtlety, the patience and the extraordinary

(sometimes infuriating) detail of Derrida’s reading that is the mark of his

friendship. The time he devotes to the texts of his friends is the measure of

his friendship, even in death. And, of course, this time is also devoted to

writing a text, the text we now hear or read the words of the living

philosopher as he stands beside the body of his lost friend – death

produces philosophy. A philosophy that in Derrida’s case is (to useLevinas’ words) “too human for humanism” one that, as an obligation to

the otherness of the other, refuses to hark back to a human essence, now

forever lost, but instead disperses the friend into the body of writing – not

only their writing but what they read in order to write, what we write

having read and re-read them, and how this, in turn, will be read…and so

it goes.




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And this returns us to the original irritation; all of this reading,writing, reading, writing, words and yet more words, and, worse still,

abstract philosophical words – abstractions, evasions, noisy intrusions into

the silence of death. But, then, why should Derrida (or myself for that

matter) be silenced by those who are not themselves prepared to, or

capable of giving due attention to the writing of the other, those who have

never taken the time to learn to read, to read properly, to listen or“hearken” to the text? When one reads Derrida, really reads him, and to

read Derrida is always to read him reading the text of a friend (this,incidentally, is the central difference between “deconstruction” and

critique), when one reads with him, the abstractions, evasions, detours, the

game-playing and innuendo are all signs of the life of the other and hisown interpenetration with that life. Friendship itself in life and death is all

of these things and more. Derrida’s texts, philosophical though they may

be, are bursting with the fragmentary details of the other’s life held in the

“heart”, both for Derrida and his lost friends in each singular play of

language. I will offer some random examples, it doesn’t matter which

friends he is referring to, and there are a few mentioned here:

These capital letters that I myself used out of

mimetism, he too played with, in order to mime and,

already, to quote.9

Suppleness…he never did without it, whether intheorization, writing strategies, or social intercourse,

and it can even be read in the graphics of his writing,

which I read as…extreme refinement…10

…what looks at us may be indifferent, loving,

dreadful, grateful, attentive, ironic, silent, bored,

reserved, fervent, or smiling, a child or already quite

old; in short, it can give us any of the innumerable

signs of life or death that we might draw from the

circumscribed reserve of his texts or our memory.11

I am rereading him right now, better no doubt than

ever before. I would like to quote everything, read or

reread everything aloud…I was thinking, for example,

that words beginning in “int”, the letters i.n.t. suit him

well, like a signature…They do indeed seem to sign

the high tension that was his, and that could be felt



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79

when you saw, heard or read him…”intense”,“intractable”, “interior”…”intransigent…

I am at present rereading all the letters from that

period…signed by his hand (his large and beautiful

black handwriting, high, angular, quick, at once

impatient and perfect).12

The above fragments witness an acute sensitivity to the manner in whichfriendship is never just the intimate presence of the other as a given human

essence but is, rather more fugitive, more indirect, forever mediated by the

plurality of texts that allow the other to emerge, to be held and also to slipaway, to change and to surprise us. It is these we struggle to remember

when they are gone.

I would like to conclude now by returning for a moment to the

death of my own friend. She was not a philosopher, she, like most people,

left no body of writings to be read and reread in the way I have described.

We rarely, if ever, spoke about philosophy, and certainly never of death,that was the unspoken dynamic of this singular friendship but having said

that, a text has many forms; it is not only words that are read and reread.

To go back to my piece of music, although an immediate and heart-felt

response to her death, a whole friendship’s worth of reading is compactedinto these few musical phrases. An attentive reading not of her writing but

of her own reading, her loves, inspirations, interests and obsessions, all ofthose different texts that pulled her in the different directions that

ultimately constituted the movement of her own singular identity. And the

particular manner (a word often used by Derrida) in which she made this

otherness her own both as a possession and an excess, the otherness that

inhabited her (and me and you) and which made her death both singular

and plural – more than itself, the death of possibility. The music was

immediate, but still a work, this work, the work of mourning continues in

these philosophical reflections as the best way for me to read and then

write out, in my “heart” and in my speech this other place and manner of

reading which is now dead and yet, at this moment thanks to these words,

so very alive. I will finish, as is fitting, with the words of an other, the philosophical words of Francoise Dastur.

Solitude, the defective mode of the actual presence of

the other, is not the contrary of being-with-others, but

the privative experience of this. And it is precisely this

privation of the other that is experienced in mourning,which is being with the other in an eminent way, since




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on account of the very fact that we have lost him or herthe dead person is more totally present to us than he or

she ever was in life.13

Notes1. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2001).2. Asa Kasher, “Life in the Heart,” in Making Sense of Dying and Death ,

ed. Andrew Fagan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 11-30.3. Derrida, p. 159.

4. Francoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude , trans. John Llewelyn

(London: Athlone, 1996), p. 38.

5. Derrida, p. 123.6. Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter

(London: Secker and Warburg, 1981), p. 426.

7. Derrida, p. 45.

8. Ibid, p. 114.

9. Ibid, p. 37.

10. Ibid., p. 41.

11. Ibid, p. 44.

12. Ibid, p. 62.

13. Dastur, p. 46.

ReferencesDastur, Francoise. Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. by John Llewelyn.London: Athlone, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning . Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2001.

Kasher, Asa. “Life in the Heart.” In Making Sense of Dying and Death ,

edited by Andrew Fagan, 11-30. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

Mann, Thomas. Joseph and his Brothers, trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter.

London: Secker and Warburg, 1981.

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