Each Time Unique, the End of the World

“Everything we say tends only to veil the single affirmation: that everything must disappear and that we can remain faithful only by watching over this disappearing movement, to which that something within us which rejects all memory already belongs.”

There is no better philosopher for a funeral than Jacques Derrida. The words he devoted to many of his deceased fellow philosophers—his travelling companions, as he liked to call them—go beyond homage, attending to the anything-but-sacred geometry between absence, remembrance and writing. His words were the body of what the Romans called gravitas. They incline towards the reference, difference, différance, of what is unarticulated, unwritten and absent. In other words, Derrida had gravitas: a deconstructed gravitas, open to uncertainty before the unknown. A contingency of sense that stretches towards it, unable not to, without intending to. It happens in the body, in listening and in writing alike.

To take account of death—in other words, to faint, to fail—allows us to continue the dialogue with the dead. Every rhetoric of mourning lays words down, inclines them, just as our bodies yield before the mirror of the inert body. The one who no longer moves moves us, lays us down. We lie down and begin to become ourselves.

“There it is, as if waiting, that movement as intention by which written words give themselves over to being uttered by another; in inclination the body offers itself to the other, the body surrenders, gives way, bends before the word in writing and, in doing so, gives its back.”¹

The last words

“On 14 January of this year Martin Heidegger granted me a long conversation. He then asked me to say a few words at his grave. This is why I venture to speak here. [Heidegger] sought to understand his own word as a response to a sign to which he continually lent his ear.”²

To speak here, like this, is a trembling. Tears do not merely fall: they weigh, speak, question the other, reach them in their silence. To speak in mourning is to let oneself be traversed by absence, by the spectrality of difference, inviting the other to resonate within us without appropriating their voice, but rather in a voice of our own—if such a thing is possible.

Mourning is not the recovery of the absent person but the sustaining of their loss, making room for it within our own openness, within the wound itself. To speak in mourning is no longer to possess the voice but to let alterity resonate within it. It is not to return speech to the dead, but to listen to what remains irreducible in them: their distance, their silence.

The voice is never presence alone. It always exceeds, becomes dislocated, is inscribed in a writing that overflows it. The Greek phoné, understood as pure proximity, as transparency of meaning, is the illusion of a subject who believes itself whole, who hears itself speak as though it possessed itself. Yet the voice is always outside itself, in the echo, in the other.

Sense is never closure but opening. To think the voice is to think alterity: timbre, resonance, what vibrates and escapes. In mourning, the voice does not affirm; it trembles. And in that trembling, the other remains, as silence.

Thus, when words become tears, they exceed themselves and fall into the complicit silence of the listener, as weeping enters vision. There is no gaze that does not weep, no body that does not incline, every time or at least once, on every night of the world.