Page 94 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes forgiveness requires a radically singular confrontation between self and other, while conditional
forgiveness requires the breaching of categories such as self and other, either by a mediating
party, or simply by the recognition of the ways in which we are always already intertwined with
the other. Indeed, Derrida explicitly argues that when we know anything of the other, or even
understand their motivation in however minimal a way, this absolute forgiveness can no longer
take place. Derrida can offer no resolution in regard to the impasse that obtains between these two
notions (between possible and impossible forgiving, between an amnesty where apologies are
asked for and a more absolute forgiveness). He will only insist that an oscillation between both
sides of the aporia is necessary for responsibility.
7.7.4 Mourning
In Memoires: for Paul de Man, which was written almost immediately following de Man's death in
1983, Derrida reflects upon the political significance of his colleague's apparent Nazi affiliation in
his youth, and he also discusses the pain of losing his friend. Derrida's argument about mourning
adheres to a similarly paradoxical logic to that which has been associated with him throughout
this article. He suggests that the so-called 'successful' mourning of the deceased other actually fails
- or at least is an unfaithful fidelity - because the other person becomes a part of us, and in this
interiorisation their genuine alterity is no longer respected. On the other hand, failure to mourn
the other's death paradoxically appears to succeed, because the presence of the other person in
their exteriority is prolonged. As Derrida suggests, there is a sense in which "an aborted
interiorisation is at the same time a respect for the other as other". Hence the possibility of an
impossible bereavement, where the only possible way to mourn, is to be unable to do so. However,
even though this is how he initially presents the problem, Derrida also problematises this "success
fails, failure succeeds" formulation.
In his essay "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok", Derrida again
considers two models of the type of encroachment between self and other that is regularly associated
with mourning. Borrowing from post-Freudian theories of mourning, he posits (although later
undermines) a difference between introjection, which is love for the other in me, and incorporation,
which involves retaining the other as a pocket, or a foreign body within one's own body. For
Freud, as well as for the psychologists Abraham and Torok whose work Derrida considers,
successful mourning is primarily about the introjection of the other. The preservation of a discrete
and separate other person inside the self (psychologically speaking), as is the case in incorporation,
is considered to be where mourning ceases to be a 'normal' response and instead becomes
pathological. Typically, Derrida reverses this hierarchy by highlighting that there is a sense in
which the supposedly pathological condition of incorporation is actually more respectful of the
other person's alterity. After all, incorporation means that one has not totally assimilated the
other, as there is still a difference and a heterogeneity. On the other hand, Abraham and Torok's
so-called 'normal' mourning can be accused of interiorising the other person to such a degree that
they have become assimilated and even metaphorically cannibalised. Derrida considers this
introjection to be an infidelity to the other. However, Derrida's account is not so simple as to
unreservedly valorise the incorporation of the other person, even if he emphasises this paradigm
in an effort to refute the canonical interpretation of successful mourning. He also acknowledges
that the more the self "keeps the foreign element inside itself, the more it excludes it". If we refuse
to engage with the dead other, we also exclude their foreignness from ourselves and hence prevent
any transformative interaction with them. When fetishised in their externality in such a manner,
the dead other really is lifeless and it is significant that Derrida describes the death of de Man in
terms of the loss of exchange and of the transformational opportunities that he presented. Derrida's
point hence seems to be that in mourning, the 'otherness of the other' person resists both the
process of incorporation as well as the process of introjection. The other can neither be preserved
as a foreign entity, nor introjected fully within. Towards the end of Memoires: for Paul de Man,
Derrida suggests that responsibility towards the other is about respecting and even emphasising
this resistance.

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