A beautifully presented, vulnerable treatise on the philosophy of loss, mourning, and honoring the dead. I’m a better person for having read this one.

wasn't feeling so good at the time...

horrifying incredible ! beautiful & a candidate for my top three of JD

Woefully, dolorously horrifying—both for its intrinsic properties and for the extrinsic circumstances of my reading of it—this is a collection of Derrida’s eulogies for his writer friends, put together not too long before his own decease.

The introduction begins with the premise that Derrida has a ‘politics of mourning,’ which is tied specifically to his ‘politics of friendship’—quoting the lines that “philia begins with the possibility of survival. Surviving—that is the other name of mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited” (3). This arises out of the ‘law of friendship’: “one friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first” (id.). Even when the deaths are simultaneous, “their friendship will have been structured from the very beginning by the possibility that one of the two would see the other die, and so, surviving, would be left to bury, to commemorate, and to mourn” (id.). The writings collected here arise out of these principles. In some ways, the first eulogy, on Barthes, sets the tone for all of them:

Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand, not to say anything that comes back to oneself, to one’s own voice, to remain silent […] But this excess of fidelity would end up saying and exchanging nothing. It returns to death. It points to death, sending death back to death. On the other hand, by avoiding all quotation, all identification, all rapprochement even, so that what is addressed to or spoken of Roland Barthes truly comes from the other, from the living friend, one risks making him disappear again, as if one could add more death to death and thus indecently pluralize it. We are left with having to do and not do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity with the other. (45)

For Foucault, he writes that “one does not carry on a stormy discussion after the other has departed” (81), instead believing that “The only recourse left us in the solitude of questioning, to imagine the principle of the reply” (89). Death as the crafting of a monologic space.

On the occasion of Loreau’s decease – “I have already lost too many friends and I lack the strength to speak publicly and to recall each time another end of the world” (95). It has given him “Coeur a l’intime farouche” – “a heart timid to intimacy” (103), the opposite of Woolf.

Althusser is “at once too absent and too close” (114); he is a “multiplicity” for whom “it is incumbent upon us not to totalize or simplify” (116).

In recalling Riddel, he remembers fondly “that unbelieving hope that haunts our most intense friendships: the promise that we would see each other more often later on, that in the end we speak without end and be together, interminably” (127). It is “a strange familiarity” that is “never contradicted between us by distance” (131).

To Lyotard, who said once that “there shall be no mourning” (217)—in order to protect the interest of the deceased: “for wouldn’t the institution of mourning run the risk of securing the forgetting? Of protecting against memory instead of keeping it?” (218). Or by contrast “the work of mourning seeks neither to save from death nor deny it, but to save from a ‘worse than death’” (230), with spectres of Adorno and Levinas (and thus Agamben) on Auschwitz.

Most heartbreakingly, for Deleuze, without whom he must “wander all alone in that long discussion that we should have had together” (195), an empty spectre of Milton's "hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way."

Plenty more: De Man, Levinas, others. Much of philosophical interest worked over in the individual eulogies. But my interest is much more intensely personal; some things are like death, conjuring the irretrievable loss of a necessary person--and in mourning them, one might find insight in these meditations.

Amazing...wonderful look at the loss of loss.

there is no friendship without the possibility that one friend will die before the other

This revealed itself as untimely, a book of memorials and eulogies, one read over a week of sadness, a mourning both personal and local as well as one historical and global.

The mixture of condolences and intellectual rumination was satisfying, if not masterful. The figures remembered were famous (Foucault, Barthes) and some not so well known. Such distinctions didn’t matter to Derrida as they were all known to him. Grief is imminently personal and perhaps ontologically impossible. Derrida’s gift of transcribing loss and memory is yet another of his invaluable contributions.

Da rileggere interamente

Beautiful book

This volume is a compendium of obituaries by Jacques Derrida on several key figures of continental philosophy who have since passed in recent years. The book, gathered as a whole, essentially marks the end of an important era in the history of Western philosophy, it was the era of existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist theory, and deconstruction.

Derrida writes elegant and respectful essays about literary theorist Roland Barthes, Paul DeMan, philosopher Michel Foucault, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabes, Joseph Riddel, Michel Serviere, Louis Marin, feminist Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Although this text is far from a major work of philosophy on behalf of Derrida, I am positive it will be an important resource for future students, and an elegant work of preservation for a by-gone era.

I dove into this book expecting to find a book about death. Instead, i found this wonderful —equally sad and invigorating— meditation on friendship which has nothing to envy of Montaigne's or Nietzsche's.

This is a book I'd like to read again. "The Work of Mourning" is a book of passionate eulogies, sprinkled with philosophical digressions here and there, depending on Derrida's subject. I ordered the book specifically for the chapter on Sarah Kofman, but found myself captivated by the intensity of Derrida's grief for these people.

Two chapters remain prominent in my mind: the last words on Lyotard, and the entirety of the eulogy for Kofman, which is particularly moving for Derrida's avowed difficulty putting words to Kofman's death, of his desire to "catch up to her...trying to keep her alive" (170). He follows that with an interesting commentary on Kofman's last work. This tension between the personal and the public eulogy characterizes - endearingly - the book as a whole.