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Words, Silence, Experiences: Derrida’s Unheimlich

Responsibility

Charles E. Scott
Vanderbilt University
charles.e.scott@vanderbilt.edu

Abstract

In its engagement with Derrida’s unheimlich responsibility elaborated in The Beast and
the Sovereign, Volume One, this essay is about death, words, silence, and lives of people
and animals. It is also about experiences that to varying degrees bring lives to words
and words to lives. Its guiding hypotheses are that death, words, silence, and lives in
their happenings exceed the laws that function to identify them and that none of their
happenings is sovereign in relation to the others. The essay culminates with Derrida’s
engagement with ungrounded time when completion and beginning are simultane-
ous. That simultaneity constitutes a threshold in which people must respond. For
Derrida the threshold is shadowed by his own approaching death.

Keywords

Derrida – Cixous – Lopez – responsibility – silence – Heidegger – threshold – wolves

Whatever is profound loves masks.

nietzsche

…
“Hingebung” is “devotion” or “devotedness,” literally a “giving-over” to
the matter under consideration. The problem, of course, is that “giving-
over” should not be mindless; critical intelligence must accompany
magnification. How do the “critical distance” we prize and an intense

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341354

20 Scott

devotion to the subject under discussion work together? Does not “giv-
ing-over” close the distance? Can criticism survive such a closing of the
distance? Must devotion therefore be mindless? I present my ideas on
those questions and offer the most helpful examples of creative criti-
cism I can think of, but I do not try to defend my ideas. Perhaps there is
something about our creative and scholarly practices at their very best
that defy defense?
David Krell Heidegger-Ecstasy-Tragedy: From Being and Time to the Black
Notebooks

∵
Prologue 1: Speaking of the Unspeakable

Death is the narrator in Brian Percival’s film, The Book Thief.1 It hovers in its
soft, gentle, indifferent voice, a voice after suffering, pain, trauma, or final
sleep. Not a voice of dying. The voice of death. It says, “in the end there are no
words. Only peace.” The timbre of Death’s voice as the Narrator allows silence
all around. It blends with silence, fusing with it, enfolding it without sover-
eignty or subjection, without compassion or challenge or connection in the
midst of the horrific calamities during the Second World War. Death speaks
through its narrational words in unspeakable silence. Supreme silence that
“orders . . . as silence” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “My Stillest Hour”).
The film is about death, life, and words. Words can take the life away from
the things they signify and can function as well in the form of classifications
and nominal categories, but they can also speak of death, set it in parenthe-
ses and momentarily suspend it, oddly losing it by giving it verbal life. Max,
a friend of Liesel—Liesel is the book thief (she is a young teenager)—says,
“Words are life, Liesel! All those [blank pages in the new diary] are for you to
fill.” When Max and Liesel are talking, he says, “If your eyes could speak, what
would they say?” He is telling her to let her body and her experiences come to
word, to feel the words, to let her experiences live in the words. “Do not lose
touch with the experiences, the feel, when you speak and write. Give your-
self to be in your words.” Words and physical lives are able to infuse, impore,

1  The film is based on Markus Zusak’s book with the same title (New York: Knopf, 2007).

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Words, Silence, Experiences 21

happen beyond their meanings and rules and with degrees of enlivening, expe-
rienced silence and sound.
In her diary she writes of her experience with her long dead brother. The
words enacting together hold death at bay: “There was once a ghost of a boy
who liked to live in the shadows, so he wouldn’t frighten people. His job was to
wait for his sister, who was still alive. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, because she
knew that’s where her bother was. At night, when darkness came to her room,
she would tell her brother about the day. She would remind him how the sun
felt on his skin, and what the air felt like to breath, or how snow felt on his
tongue. And that reminded her that she was still alive.”
The book thief (Liesel) stalks death’s silence with her words, brings that
silence into mortal life, haunts death in the very space of its haunting non-
presence, and allows us to experience, almost, like a trace, its silence. I repeat:
The book thief’s words, written in her experience of her dead brother, animated
her and him—her living words come into death’s realm and haunt death.
This paper will be an engagement with Derrida and unheimlich responsibil-
ity, and it will be about, of course, death, words, silence, and lives.2 It will also
be about experiences that to varying degrees bring lives to words and words to
lives. My guiding hypotheses are that death, words, silence, and lives in their
happenings exceed the laws that function with them and that none of their
happenings is sovereign.3

2  Unheimlich is a word that Derrida uses in the Tenth and Eleventh Sessions of The Beast and
the Sovereign, Volume One. It can connote sinister, unfriendly, antagonistic and dangerous. I,
however, intend its other meanings of uncanny (not to be known), strange, unfamiliar, and
unsettling. In some contexts, such as one of conformist morality or one of unquestioned
clarity about what is true and what is false, unheimlich responsibility might well seem to be
dangerous or irritatingly mystical. See Derrida, J. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). Hereafter BS1 followed by
marginal page number.
3  I understand “sovereign” to mean, on the one hand, when it is used adjectivally, uncondi-
tioned, unlimited, absolute, unrestricted. On the other hand, it can mean dominant, a princi-
pal force. I will allow the context in which the word is used to indicate whether it is referring
to something unconditioned and unlimited, such as God or a monarch with absolute power,
or to something that dominates a particular region, such as a conqueror or a defining power.
If it is used as a noun I will follow Derrida’s phrasing in his discussion of Aristotle’s Politics:
“The sovereign is one who has his end in himself or is the end of everything” BS1 458.

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22 Scott

Prologue 2: Speaking with Experiences

Like you, I believe, I love many experiences in their uncanny, living, porous
outreach beyond now, and in their capacity for continuous transformation.
They reach so far, as far as language stretches, far beyond the domain of reflec-
tive consciousness, into the shades and shadows of lineages that haunt the
mores I live in, in the dark abnormalities that nourish and infuse my most
acceptable conduct, in environments—living spaces—with uncountable
things—animals, plants, weathers, the sun . . .—in their occurrences experi-
ences reach vastly beyond the grasp of my language, attunements, and aware-
ness. Unspeakable, broken images with unidentified feelings like dreams in
the night flow in and through my experiences. I—this particular conscious,
livingdying event—am in the fluency—the in-fluence—of a vast sea of lives
and practices, many past but living simultaneously now, all strangely, weirdly,
indifferently affective in my own experiences. ‘Own’? Ithey happen together,
not by the force of some melding or rational logic but in their multiple differ-
ences in their locations—in their spaces and places of living. Ithey happen
with their lineages, due to happenstances or to modes of preservation such as
grammars, rituals and enforced rules, happening together without an overall,
sovereign, guiding purpose. They, the lives and practices, are as they are, and I
in my eventuation am of them. They are not identical, often not even like each
other but nonetheless infusing now, always beyond now, always beyond I and
in the eventuating of porous, fluid, conscious, always choosing I. Loving many
experiences, I love many parts of the world (inclusive of wolves).
The world is filled with horrors, with barbarity, survival by preying, atrocity,
mere urges, decay, terror, suffering. You know the horrific processes, events,
and stories. And in the world happen calmness, peace, nurturance, compas-
sion, joy, and abhorrence before horror. As Death says in The Book Thief, “In
my job, I’m always seeing humans at their worst. I see their ugliness, and their
beauty. And I wonder how the same thing can be both.” Such ambiguity, I
believe, suffuses the entire world and hence pervades my experiences.
I speak of such intensities in the reflective distance from them that is the
hallmark of my trade. The limiting effects and distances of reflection (and
grammar) are wonderful. They allow us to play in thoughts and words, to devi-
ate, invent, and create, to shift meanings and valences, to overcome the bar-
riers of senses and rules, to move beyond the inertia that is installed by those
limiting effects. We are loyal to the limits, senses, rules, meanings, valences,
and barriers in our play (and who is a better player than Derrida?). We are
answerable to them, indebted to them as we violate their settings and stabili-
ties in our delinquencies.

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Words, Silence, Experiences 23

The last five sentences are a gloss on Hélène Cixous’s words:

Still this is the law and the language.

Feminist question:
Imagine a “corrected” language. I am against it.
The grammatical effects are precious. Indeed they allow us to play.
We would not play anymore.
We would not shift things anymore.
The fact that language resists me, hampers me, is a good thing.
There is profit. And what to do with the word philosopher? How to
correct it?
I could no longer play at the moon and the other.4

Things and immediacies ‘come out’ in our worlds and show themselves in our
experiences that the chosen words in their proper interconnections cannot
say directly. (The words of books Liesel stole or borrowed during the Nazi Zeit
gave Max, a hidden Jew, a renewed sense of life in The Book Thief, gave him far
more than they or he could say. Her dialogues with her dead brother vivified
her experiences with him as she brought sensuous experiences to mind that
opened, not to other words, but to other experiences). But that distance also
can be closer to deathly narration than I want. Such distance can also define
canonical myths and fables. The distance from living immediacies and events
of reflection and narration can be altered by play, deconstruction, or changes
in context and attitude. As I engage Derrida I shall try to remember the imme-
diacies of living events, to speak when I can with experiences, and to notice
when possible Derrida’s gift of silence—that immediacy that is so alive in his
writing.5

4  Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Live Writing, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (New York: Routledge, 1997).
5  This engagement with Derrida and the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign is so lim-
ited, so incomplete. I find the Sessions and their thousands of words indescribably rich. As
a result I have picked and pruned the lines and themes that I address. I do not do the text
justice. I hope to make evident a few things in that text that go beyond the question of justice
and to the heart of Derrida’s responsibility in this volume. For an excellent and comprehen-
sive account of both of Derrida’s last two seminars in the context of a significant portion
of his life’s work, see Michael Naas’s The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments,
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

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24 Scott

1 Shifting Contexts of “Wolves” with Wolves

First, an epigraphical statement by Henry Beston in The Outermost House:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of

animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated arti-
fice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his
knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in
distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic
fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and
greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older
and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by
voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings;
they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,
fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

I cannot claim expertise in approaching stealthily. But I do want to start on

this short journey, in the midst of the vast territory of the first of Derrida’s last
two seminars, by at least taking a step toward plowing another plot of lan-
guage and thought as I engage him. That desire, finding new areas for plowing,
is in accord with one of his goals. We will share that goal, but not quite the
same field. How could we? How could I be answerable to our differences if I
remained in the context of his words—in the field where he is breaking up
the ground—and gave in all seriousness an exacting ex-position of them? If I
did not join him in playing, experience his silences, howl in the moonlight, or
dance at the edge of his world? I will plow and play on only a small plot with
questions of law, wildness, ethos, words, death, silence, and responsibility that
I find in some of Volume One’s fantasies and reasonable connections. I speak
in admiration of that dimension of his language that is “always on the verge of
silence and often on the verge of song.”6
“The beast is not exactly the animal” (BS1 23) Indeed, “beast” is living testi-
mony to human efforts of sovereignty, of conquest, and the ‘real’ wolf is left out
when ‘beast’ is used to identify it. In the use of this word, beast, a regrettable
logic operates, the power of establishing by words likenesses that are ‘known’
to exist among different things. ‘This woman acts like a beast.’ ‘That dictator is a
beast.’ ‘The wolf is a beast.’ Derrida emphasizes that the animal, the “real wolf,”

6  The quoted phrase is from Ursula Le Guin in Dancing on the Edge of the World: Thoughts on
Words, Women, Place, (New York: Grove Press, 1981), 150.

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Words, Silence, Experiences 25

the “natural wolf,” is other to the figures of “the wolf” that “belongs to cultures,
native languages, myths, fables, fantasies, histories” (BS1 23, 29). “The wolf and
its step are named in absentia, as it were, the wolf is named where you don’t
see or hear it coming; it is still absent, save for its name” (BS1 23–4). So Derrida’s
phrase, “stealthy as a wolf,” “signifies the absence, the literal non-presentation
of the wolf . . .” (BS1 25).7 The real wolf is silent as Derrida deals with “silent
speech” in a wolf-like manner that is “secret, clandestine, an entrance that goes
all but unnoticed . . .” (BS1 25) Yet Derrida is fully attuned to the silence. He
proceeds as if to surprise his prey “inaudibly and imperceptibly,” in the midst
of his many words, with the silence of what is lost by analogies and, I would
say, inexperience. Derrida stealthily qualifies from the beginning the force of
analogies and of the logics of gathering and holding together, puts them in
question as he holds us at bay while words and concepts tumble from his lips
and pages as though they could put a bright light on what he knows he can
neither say nor write directly.
And yet, I repeat (what Derrida fully knew), regardless of his “stealthy as
a wolf” as one of his leading metaphors, in all the genealogies he gives, all
the political passion that pervades his seminars, in all of his encounters with
philosophers, poets, and commentators, experiences or reference to experi-
ences with the “real wolf” are missing, the worldly wolf, the wolf that you fear
should you, alone, have occasion to meet her in a forest staring at you through
low undergrowth, one paw raised, her head lowered, her teeth showing, a low
growl in her chest, or in the shadows of your camp fire, or between you and
your house 30 feet away. (I note, and not for your comfort, that wolves can run
up to thirty miles an hour.) Nonetheless, “the question of the animal is one of
our permanent concerns” (BS1 20).
Many people who have experiences with wolves speak of their vulnerabil-
ity to humans, mostly men, who slaughtered tens of thousands of them and
annihilated several types of wolves, or “beasts.” The survival of wolves in North
America required protecting them as an endangered species. They became as
vulnerable as the buffalo. They were trapped, poisoned, and shot. ‘Outside the
law’ as beasts means in this case, in “reality,” victims in the ways similar to
South American Indians when they became victims with the arrival of Spanish
conquerors in the sixteenth century. When we deal with the fables and myths
of wolves as beasts, when we follow the words, concepts, and images for wolves
we engage a loss of the “real” wolves’ vulnerability in the world as well as in the
word, we lose a sense of them as the prey of homo sapiens, dead objects when

7  You might wish to come back to this statement when the image of threshold comes to play in
the last third of this paper.

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26 Scott

cameras proudly recorded their dead bodies hung on hooks or in burning in

piles of wood as testament to men’s total subjection of them. In the seminar
we encounter, as Derrida says, a fantastic world that for all its imaginative
art in its stories of the bestial wolves constitutes an alienation of the silent,
uncanny way of vulnerable wolves. We will see some of the consequences of
this abstraction and distortion.
I note in passing that the humorist James Thurber’s 1930s version of Little
Red Riding Hood indirectly expressed the absurdity of that fairy tale. She
shoots the wolf with a pistol that she hid in her basket. The moral of the story,
according to Thurber: “It’s not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used
to be.”8 On this account I suppose we could say that Little Red Riding Hood
gained sovereignty by reason of a gun. We will have reason to return to this
kind of reason, not with the image of guns but with the reasons of words.
The reality, if I may put it this way, of Derrida’s use of “the wolf” happens
as, as it were, différance, that is indicated so often in subjunctive moods and as
an ungovernable, differentiating silence in the midst of speech and thought.
We are interrupted by silence, interrupted as we set or bespeak “oppositional
limits between what is called nature and culture, nature/law, φύσις/νόμος,
God/ man, and animal concerning what is ‘proper to man’ [no more to rely
on commonly accredited oppositional limits] than to muddle everything and
rush by analogism toward resemblances and identities. Every time one puts an
oppositional limit in question, far from concluding that there is identity, we
must on the contrary multiply [attend] to differences, refine the analysis in a
restructured field” (BS1 36). I understand this statement to put in question the
differences between fable and real, to encourage us to plow a new field, not
to look for answers, but to attend to differences and to see where they lead us
(BS1 35). We have to see if we, in a new field of words and concepts, lose touch
with experiences of processes and lives in the world, whether we lose a sense
of experienced reality in our speech. Do analogies not spawn new word groups
and categories? Are little girls not so easy to fool nowadays as it used to be? Is
différance not happening? Really?
Let’s turn to “real” wolves for a moment, knowing that words can engen-
der degrees of experience. We can hardly experience wolves in many fables.
But we can be brought to a much greater approximation of them in the words
of some careful naturalists. Both fabular distance and the words of natural-
ists who have been close to the lives of wolves are experiences that make dif-
ferences in how we hear and project “wolves” and, as we shall see, “beasts.”

8  Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), 264. I will put page numbers
from this book in parentheses as WM.

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Words, Silence, Experiences 27

My hope is to increase by a few degrees of awareness our attunement to the

lives of wolves as we deal with textual “wolves” in Derrida’s early Sessions of
his next to last seminar. I want to bring within our imaginative sight how alien-
ated from the wildness and majesty of so called natural lives we are in the texts
about beasts, to suggest, in solidarity with Derrida, caution in the application
of “beast,” to “wolf,” a caution based, however, on words that bring with them
familiarity with “real” wolves. I want to emphasize the artificiality of bestial
analogies and the importance of attunement to a major dimension in our lives,
a dimension vaguely called “the natural environment.” The question of sover-
eignty will come to the fore in a later section.
The wolf’s mouth is clearly made for preying. “Its forty-two teeth are adapted
to seize (the long canines), to shear and tear (the premolars). The incisors nib-
ble and strip the shreds of meat from bone” (WM 25–6). The animal’s jaws have
more than twice the crushing power in comparison with German Shepherds.
A report from a naturalist in Alaska: “Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A
moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the
grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches, and he rears up and
pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is penned between his forepaws. Eaten. The
wolf drifts on” (WM 10).
But wolves also have pack ethea. The naturalist continues:

Toward dusk he is standing by a creek, lapping the cool water, when a

wolf howls—a long wail that quickly reaches pitch and then tapers, with
several harmonics, long moments of tremolo. He recognizes his sister.
He waits a few moments, then, his head back and closing his eyes, he
howls. The howl is shorter and it changes pitch twice in the beginning,
very quickly. There is no answer.
The female is a mile away and she trots off obliquely through the trees.
The other wolf stands listening, laps water again, then he too departs,
moving quickly, quietly through the trees, away from the trail he had
been on. In a few minutes the two wolves meet. They approach each
other briskly, almost formally, tails erect and moving somewhat as deer
move. When they come together they make high squeaking noise, encir-
cle each other, rubbing and pushing, poking their noses into each other’s
neck fur, backing away to stretch, chasing each other for a few steps, then
standing quietly together, one putting a head over the other’s back. And
then they are gone, down a vague trail, the female first. After a few hun-
dred yards they begin, simultaneously, to way their tails.
In the following days they will meet another wolf from the pack, a sec-
ond female, younger by a year, and the three of them will kill a caribou.
(WM 20)

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28 Scott

I am repeating the reports of people who are speaking about particular wolves.
Where is the reality? As I speak of words and wolves I want to step aside of a
sharp division between reality and non-reality and to speak, as I did a moment
ago, of degrees of differentiation (from alienation to up close and personal),
degrees of experience, and degrees of awareness. I would like at the begin-
ning of this engagement to emphasize experiences with wolves, if only to tell
their stories. I want to bring us closer to their lives and to hold in mind that
degrees of forgetting the lives of things comes with varying intensities of the
consequences of installed alienation that affect the ways we live in the world
together with each other and the things of our environments. The reality of
fantasies about wolves and the reality of engagements with them are really dif-
ferent realities. We can experience the differences if we are attuned to them.
Are there political consequences to forgetting that difference? What difference
does it make if all references to wolves are in the boundaries of stories, books,
and treatises, in the midst of civilized societies, and are at a far remove from
the wildness that is the environment of wolves, far removed from their packs,
their ethos? What difference does detachment from what we vaguely call
nature make? I suspect such detachment creates a circle of references, likely a
vicious one, in which readers and writers feed on the carrion of texts that along
with the nourishment they provide do not encourage and allow experiences of
the immediacies that come to us in the raw, as it were.
Derrida, on the other hand, maintains the silence of the wolf, and this silence,
as we shall see, is at the core of his sense of responsibility. Wild or tamed, the
wolf does not appear in his writing. Although several of the sources he quotes
have reference to grammatically and reasonably tamed wolves, in his own writ-
ing the wolf is silent, stealthy. It “looms.” “You cannot even see its tail” (BS1 24).
When he mentions the wolf, it is absent, almost frightfully so, certainly frus-
tratingly so. I think of the child in Nietzsche’s “Three Metamorphoses” in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra. In this account of geistige transformations, the camel, as it
bears in the solitude of the desert the heavy burdens that it carries in its soul
and slowly frees itself from its subjection, transforms into the lion. The lion fig-
ures aggressive resistance, destruction, and deconstruction. It embodies a free
spirited NO to whatever subjects or oppresses. The lion is the sovereign of its
domain. But it does not create. That power rests with the waiting, silent child,
the third transformation. In its love of creating, its innocence of resentment
and of a predisposition to punish and hurt, the child eventuates at a distance
beyond sovereign preying and, in the other’s un-subjected silence, smiles.
The child’s Geist becomes possible for Nietzsche, if only for moments, when
he finds Life in the immediacy of creative events, in their uprising and before
they can stabilize into acceptable and categorizable doctrines and truths (see

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Words, Silence, Experiences 29

section 296 of Beyond Good and Evil, “Alas, what are you after all my written and
painted thoughts! . . .). So goes the path of the absent wolf in Derrida’s seminar.
That trace is beyond truth, beyond restriction, beyond resentment, beyond the
lion’s NO to all thou shalts, beyond good and evil. It is silent, yet in that silence,
hauntingly alive in Derrida’s words. One doesn’t know where it goes. It hovers
beyond a shadowed threshold, like the dark obscurity of a trace disappearing
in a distant forest or in a fog at dusk. Unreachable. Unspeakable. How much
wilder can you get?
Yet, in the seminar the path is the trace of the wolf without the benefit of
experiencing the “real” wolf in the wild or even close contact with those who
have such experiences. The experience is one of absence and silence. No howl-
ing. Not even growling, much less nuzzling or dying. Simply a space of absence
and silence like the silence in a still night just before or after a sound. Perhaps
the absent wolf at least has moments of sovereign domination. But if it does, its
identification as an archetypal beast definitely misses the point of even those
moments. Noisy, heavy handed, leonine sovereignty that is above the laws that
it enforces and has the regal power of taking lives loses the pacificity of the
dove that Derrida invokes and of the silence of the absent wolf. Wild. Figured.
They—wild/figured—in their differences are something like the difference
between a creative event and its crystallization into stabilized doctrines and
truths. Derrida does not know real wolves, but I believe he knows the silence of
their absence. He’s not out to trap real wolves in figurations.
We move with fables and philosophers, technical, poetic, and colloquial
speech in the first of Derrida’s last two seminars, fables and language that are
forcefully organized by analogies that couple “beast” with people, countries,
policies, that make “beast” political and powerful, powerful enough to express
and arouse to high pitches of intensity such emotions as fear, hatred, love, and
loyalty. The use of “beast,” in its simplifications, can inspire or justify beastly
conduct in opposition to “beasts” in all political quarters—among the critics
of capitalism and among foresworn capitalists, among victimized people and
victimizers, among the good and the bad. The indifference of “beast,” its avail-
ability to all who want it, is definitive in its life. There are many images in its
history, fabulous images. But few if any experiences with the creatures have
gained such notoriety. Yet, fables, rhetoric, and expressed thoughts are shot
through with silence, the silence of the analogized animals and the silence
of the complex, self-contradictory people who live within the word’s fabulous
power and its effects. And there is Derrida’s silence in the midst of his thou-
sands of flowing words, no matter his perspectives and values. The now dead
Jacque Derrida, for many of his readers, haunts his words as they find their
paths that, like Holzwege, come occasionally to clearings, often to extremely

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30 Scott

dense undergrowth, and maintain throughout a silence that suspends any

sound of a teleology that calls from a future’s distance. As he said, on the trail
we do not see even the wolf’s tail. But in reading these seminars his absence
seems palpable to me, a living event of différance, if I may put it that way. If we
do not attend to his silence, now, at this moment, and in his words as we read
them we will likely turn him into something stabilized, established, fabular,
perhaps a philosophical fable that we like, a part of a good narrative, but one
that loses about all we have left of the “real” Derrida, his silence with his words.
A double haunting happens: silence haunts his words, and in his lively words
J. D. haunts the silence. As David Wood said to me in a conversation, “How can
he be dead?!”

2 Silence on the Threshold of Responsibility

The words Derrida wrote have so much life in them! They flow, I have said.
Streams and rivers—at times, floods—of words. They can be mischievous,
playful, and humorous, and yet at the same time profoundly serious. Passionate
commitment moves those words with all the “courage, sense, and subtlety” that
Nietzsche wanted for “the great hunt.”9 They, stealthily, uncover covert mean-
ings and associations. They pry, hunt, and attack. I’m not sure that Nietzsche’s
phrase, “that vaulting heaven of bright, malicious spirituality,” entirely applies,
but Nietzschean maliciousness does play a subtle role as Derrida’s words take
apart large growths of truths and good sense in fields ordered by stark, con-
fident oppositions, polarities, and subjects wanting to be sovereigns.10 They
disclose and expose. And Derrida’s words can always apply to themselves. They
are written and formed together with a reflexive application. In their forma-
tions Derrida’s words revert to themselves: they are never completely free of
the destructive burdens they carry, never free of imminent death, never free,
I believe, of an unsettling anxiety. Perhaps logocentric ontotheology that is
coming to its end will never quite end in his words and concepts. In his decon-
structive writings his words and concepts expose themselves, and that means
that they are always in dangerous territory, the territory of their own lives. They
do not present themselves as sovereigns. Or as beasts. They are on paths of
authoritative knowledge and established usage of words and signs. His words
and concepts are on word trails, absent the wolf. They proceed to expose the

9  Beyond Good and Evil, Section 45.

10  Ibid.

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Words, Silence, Experiences 31

hidden or unnoticed words and concepts that operate in many beliefs and ways
of thinking, and to make the beliefs and ways of thinking available to questions
and to the consequences of their status. In their deconstructions and recon-
structions Derrida’s words and concepts are in a strange way answerable to the
paths they follow. They are always, it seems, on paths whose directions are not
clear and at thresholds, never at final destinations. In that situation they are
seriously, if at times playfully, responsible to the on-going, still-empty paths
and to the thresholds before which they stand. I will say more about this in a
moment.
Here is an especially important report by Derrida in the Twelfth Session of
the first of his two last seminars:

The end is near: I mean the end of this year’s seminar. Hoping to continue
it further next year, I can see clearly, you can see clearly that we are still
on the threshold.
Yes, the threshold: what is a threshold? . . . . .
The threshold, then, crossable or not—what is it? Basically, it could be
shown that all our seminars that have, for more than ten years now—all
of them—been bearing on the meaning of responsibility, bearing, then,
on the meaning and structure of certain limits, on what one must or must
not do, that to which one must and must not respond—that they all
stood, still stand, on the threshold. . . .
The question of responsibility is a question of the threshold, and in
particular, as we again verified this year, a threshold at the origin of
responsibility, the threshold from which one passes from reaction to
response, and therefore to responsibility, a threshold which, according to
the humanist and anthropocentric, in truth logocentric tradition that we
are deconstructing here—and we are going to talk at length about the
logos today—[a threshold that] marks, that is supposed to mark, the indi-
visible limen, the indivisible limit between animal and man. And we
recalled last time that this limit, this threshold of responsibility is the
same as that of liberty, without which there is no responsibility and
therefore no sovereignty. Responsibility, like liberty, implies something of
that indivisible sovereignty accorded to what is proper to man and denied
the beast. (BS1 411)

Derrida’s words tumble across the pages in dazzling ways. In the midst of
engaging philosophers, poets, anthropologists, zoologists, politicians, the
Bible—you can name many more—and in the midst of multiple, seemingly

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spontaneous associations that spawn other associations and sidebars I find,

always, dimensions of silence in his words and beyond them, out of and into
nowhere, like moments of ever in the midst of word-filled and animated laws,
rules, and conceptual structures. I refer to the silence in questions of the
threshold that seems to clarify where we are, but doesn’t: The clarity of the
absence of clarity. I believe his tricky playfulness is responsible to this silence,
like when, in Volume One, he repeatedly arouses our curiosity about the wolf
or about the gendered nouns, la bête and le souverain, and then in the Eleventh
Session links curiosity with objectification and the loss of not only speechless
amazement but also the life of the objectified, the “what.” I find something
like a twinkle, a sparkle in such serious play, an opening out in the midst of
“our history or our fable,” (BS1 366) an amazed, attuned alertness to wordless
silence as he announces at the beginning of the Twelfth Session (I repeat his
words with added emphases): “The end is near: I mean the end of this year’s
seminar. Hoping to continue it further next year I can see clearly, you can see
clearly, that we are still on the threshold” (BS1 410–11). Thresholds—shaped
emptiness—stillness, neither one thing nor many things—thresholds happen,
always beginningending. “That’s where we are” (BS1 443). “I can see clearly. . . .”
(BS1 410)
In the last paragraph I coupled silence, tricky playfulness, and responsibility
in the midst of noting Derrida’s seriousness and responsible scholarship in his
deconstructive work. I find a dimension of his responsibility in this volume
in a different space in comparison with that of moral responsibility and the
sovereign responsibility we find in formations still caught in ontotheological
webs. He is certainly concerned—deeply, strongly, passionately concerned—
with animals, with living and dead beings, above all, in this seminar, with sov-
ereignty and subjection, with ingrained, interwoven sorts of sovereignty that
give privileges of power and domination, whether loudly or silently, to individ-
uals or types of life or, as in Heidegger’s case, as Derrida understands him (in
Sein und Zeit), to dasein as Lord of all life, the arche of historical existence, the
defining transcendence of whatever or whoever is there—of whatever or who-
ever is.11 But still, there is the question of Derrida’s responsibility in the play of
différance, in, as I find it, his delight in indeterminacy, in a . . . I am calling it a
dimension of silence, stillness that impores—in-stills—in-between the con-
nections of sounds, senses, values, mores, all forms of decency and conceptu-
alization. This responsibility in the play of différance, living on indeterminate

11  Because dasein is now accepted in English specialized philosophical vocabulary, I have
not capitalized it. Its capitalization in English brings with it too strongly a transcendental
intimation.

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paths and at thresholds affirms, undisturbed by images of grounding or protec-

tion by transcendental entities, the de-energizing and fading of what we live
and die for. This responsible affirmation of indeterminate paths and thresh-
olds requires that we begin again, find anew how to live and begin where end-
ings begin and beginnings end: a slip in time where both beast and sovereign
appear and disappear, where all things good and bad come to pass, where we
are as we find life and death in words, and where responsibility always begins
again. This responsibility provides space for people to affirm with passion dif-
ferences without reconciling unities or life-limiting analogies, space most par-
ticularly for putting in question “sovereigns” and “beasts” . . . and everything I
have said in this paper.
Derrida’s writing also has another dimension. It is a dimension of sover-
eignty found in his deployment of sovereign power. His use of deconstruction,
for example (with which I am in full sympathy), and his rare mastery of texts
exercises Herrschaft, a mastering force of reason, in his many forms of com-
munication, thought, scholarship, and interpretation.12 Derrida’s words often
deploy leonine force (BS1 425), establish their dominance (e.g. his critique of
Agamben (BS1 430–1), always, in my experience, with scholarly care, but with
the control and mastery of a conqueror. A sovereign NO is often embedded in
his deconstructions of ontotheological texts that have functioned as the bed-
rock of Western philosophical thought and for the authority of many institu-
tions. I do not criticize him for his sovereign aspect, much less condemn him.
Little Red Riding Hood’s sovereignty over the wolf in James Thurber’s version
of the fairy tale is a good thing, and so are many of Derrida’s deconstructions.
In noting his deployment of sovereign power I want, rather, to emphasize in
contrast to Derrida, that the issue of sovereignty is found in such questions as
‘which wolves?’ ‘Which text?’ ‘Which political institution or policy?’ ‘Which
law?’ The issues are not only with the political, the law, the sovereign, the ani-
mal. The issues of sovereignty and subjection arise in their specificity, not only
with their figured, categorical abstractions. And they arise with all of the ambi-
guities that make specific events in their networks and lineages so disappoint-
ing for us when we would like at least approximations of stable clarities absent
indeterminate paths and the empty space of thresholds.
Derrida is not above the laws of language, of course, as he carries out his
various delinquencies and deviations from ‘standard’ reflective practices. The
laws of language compose the base of his deviations as well as the force of

12  Derrida uses Heidegger’s word, Herrschaft, in his account of Heidegger’s critique of rea-
son, a critique that I both applaud and see as itself a type of Herrschaft, i.e. as a sovereign
force (BS1 423–4).

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34 Scott

his rationality. But I believe his writing is responsible primarily to the silence
that is indeed excessive to laws and responsible to the emptiness of the thresh-
olds that hold open and ex-pose the gappiness in however things eventuate.
Pervasive of suffering, compassion, war or peace, empty silence also pervades
the sovereignty of Derrida’s deconstructive words, words that, I find, twinkle in
their momentary animation, given to shine by nothing worded, by silence that
is no more violent than Death in The Book Thief. This attuned answerability,
I believe, keeps his words alive in part by the strange force of the always fad-
ing imagery of thresholds, the elusive force of différance. The words happen
with life as their sense comes to pass infused with J. D.’s strong commitment
to questions of justice and liberation, his delight with words and their tropes;
and, as far as I’m concerned, the lives of his words are haunted by the power
of the intense fragility of his absence.13 Silence, death, and responsibility come
together in experiences of Derrida’s lively words.

3 Unheimlich Responsibility

One of the motivating concerns in this meditation is how to conceive of indi-

vidual, conscious, human lives. I want to develop a language and manner of
speaking that is liberated from the concepts and images of a nuclear, sub-
stance-like self that gives priority to subjective consciousness. In this effort I
have used such words as uncanny, porous, attunement, continuous transforma-
tions, infused, in-still, imporing, in-fluence, permeates, Ithey, happen, occurs,
eventuate, immediacy of lives, and events. In my encounter with Derrida’s
Seminar I have emphasized experiences of “real” events, the lives of words
and wolves, for example, as distinct to a limiting preoccupation with words in
their significatory connections and inevitabilities. Above all I have attended
to the silences in the midst of the floods of Derrida’s words, attended to the
uncanny force of those silences and to the closeness of silence and death in
the lives of his words. My aim is to bring my reflective concerns together with
Derrida’s, to find as much proximity as possible with the deeply stirring lives
of his discourses, to stay attuned to the silence in and in-between our words,
and let that attunement infuse what I say and how I say it. Perhaps the strange-
ness of our differences will find at times the transformative rebirths that can
happen at thresholds where we always seem to find ourselves. Transformative

13  The last phrase is based on a line in e e cummings’s poem, “somewhere I have never trav-
eled,” E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright
Press, 1991), 367. Cummings’s words are, “. . . the power of your intense fragility. . . .”.

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rebirths—not gathering sameness or aggregation—the births of differences in

the threshold’s indifferent liminal emptiness.
Derrida’s remarkable sense and image of thresholds arises, I have said, in the
closeness—the mutual approximation—of silence and death. This closeness
permeates not only his words but human lives as well. It happens as uncanny
release from the power of everything that is familiar in the midst of that power.
The closeness of silence and death and this release allows the familiar to hap-
pen as though newly born, as I believe Liesel, in The Book Thief, discovered.
The closeness of silence, death, and release also, in its fecund liberatory force,
leaves us ungrounded in our connections with things, leaves us to respond
with them in this ever-ceasing renewing eventuation of the threshold. We.
Ithey. Porous. Answerable. Ungrounded. Unheimlich responsibility.
We now enter the final curve on our path with a few observations about
experiences of unheimlich responsibility and Derrida’s encounter with
Heidegger on the topic.
In connection with silence and responsibility in Derrida’s words, I said that
in answerability to the silence of thresholds and the indeterminacy of the paths
he is on he is answerable to an unheimlich dimension in the midst of everything
that is or can be familiar. In these concluding paragraphs I want to show that his
responsibility to the unheimlich is not that of Heidegger’s unheimlich respon-
sibility. This difference is significant for the ways the two philosophers expe-
rience whatever is strange or foreign to them (including animals, of course).
Stated concisely Derrida is predisposed to delight with strangeness, even if
anxiety accompanies his delight, and in many circumstances he welcomes it.
Heidegger is ambivalent. Derrida’s dissection of parts of Heidegger’s mostly
early work in the Eleventh Session exposes profound senses of sovereignty and
essential superiority to whatever lacks dasein’s superlative Unheimlichkeit, the
Sein of dasein. Derrida finds that authentic dasein (in Sein und Zeit) that is
affirmatively open to its being is at once open to a sense of its own superiority
to anything that is not constituted in a direct relation to being. This relation to
being means that dasein stands out from—transcends, ek-sists—all relations
with all beings. In being at home in the world, dasein is simultaneously not at
home in its home. Its defining quality, its Wesen, its living essence includes an
unheimlich dimension. To exist fully appropriately with itself dasein must live
with a primary responsibility to its unheimlich being, to its superiority over all
other beings, to its archaic site that begins historical time. On this account,
dasein exists as both of the world and the beginning of its world. It happens
both as a home-maker in the world and stands out from its home in its inher-
ent relation with being. It is da-sein. This means that dasein constitutes its
own threshold, and that is where . . . I will call it phusic sovereignty impores

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throughout dasein’s eventuation.14 And this is where Derrida’s experience of

responsibility decisively parts company with Heidegger’s.
I want to do justice to Heidegger’s subtlety. In spite of lapses in his early
work he is not slipping into a substance ontology. His thought was a leading
force away from such conceptuality. He is, for one example among many oth-
ers, giving priority to disclosure and not to subjectivity, and this priority means
that the sovereignty of dasein is always in question by virtue of the very sense
of “phenomenon”: What show itself from itself. “Dasein” names a ‘region’ of
disclosiveness in which whatever is—all beings—show themselves as distinct
to appearing primarily as objects of a perceiving subject. An implication of
this self-showing that Heidegger did not fully appreciate is that as being-in-
the-world, dasein both governs the world ontologically and is specifically
constituted by the self-showing of beings in their various forces and influ-
ences—from earthquakes to bacteria to the interplay of institutions. Derrida
is right, in my opinion, to say that in Sein und Zeit dasein begins and ends
with dasein, albeit an ecstatic temporal dasein that Derrida at times appears
not to take fully into account. But Heidegger’s account of truth as disclosure
combined with his account of being-in-the-world opens a way to dasein’s own
deconstruction. Dasein, the region of disclosiveness, is also within the self-
disclosing power of beings to change the meaning of being there, wherever
‘there’ happens.15 I believe that the uncontrolled self-disclosures of beings
allow rather more strangeness and foreignness than Heidegger would have
found proper or comfortable.
The conceptual works of Derrida and Heidegger have sovereign aspects in
their thoughts and words, although those aspects differ, and both were engaged
in deconstructing ontotheological, metaphysical traditions in the West. But
when we come to the question of animals a great divide opens up that has

14   Phusic is an adaptation of phusis, the engendering-destroying force of what we might

vaguely call the natural world. Phusic sovereignty means that dasein in its defining forms
is ruler of the processes of coming to be and passing away in its realm. Dasein composes
the formal structure of its own mortally temporal existence, and it is, as Derrida finds it,
saturated with a sense of its sovereign superiority. As I will note, this sovereignty is heav-
ily, if unintentionally qualified by other factors in dasein’s make up.
15  Heidegger would never accept this language in his early thought. This compact account
of dasein, being-in-the-world, and truth as disclosure would need considerable, text
oriented discussion to be persuasive. I want at this point to indicate the possibility that
Derrida does not account adequately some of the factors that constitute dasein when he
discusses the sovereignty of dasein. For an excellent account of worldly natural forces in
relation to dasein see David Krell’s Derrida and Our Animal Others (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013), 51–57.

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far-reaching implications for the ways we live together and understand our-
selves. For Heidegger animals play only a considerably downgraded, ontic role
in making dasein’s existence the way it is. Dasein provides the fundamentals of
world-occurrences. Heidegger sees animals (I will paraphrase Henry Beston)
as fated to have been formed so far below us. They are . . . perhaps I overstate
Heidegger’s meaning with his word weltarm when I say “poverty-stricken” in
their existence; their lives are a far cry from being. They are fundamentally
inferior to dasein and hence to human beings. They are disposable. In spite
of its silence, mysteriousness, and unspeakable logos, dasein’s being seems to
be making a lot of ontological noise in Derrida’s reading of Sein und Zeit, and,
presumably without moving, dasein sets a lot into motion with no help from
animals or anything else. Heidegger will later regret some of his early and, on
his terms, misleading language and conceptuality in Sein und Zeit, but in con-
nection with that book the validity of the observation remains: Dasein’s stand-
ing outside its familiar world is so conceived as to give it singular, self-sufficient
world-forming power. Animals are useable others, something like poor strang-
ers in their differences from people, and irrelevant for what is ontologically
most important. This position does not necessarily declare open season on all
animals. But it does degrade them in the hierarchy of the world’s beings. In
the complicated artifice (Beston’s word) of Heidegger’s thought, whatever is
animal is vulnerable to usage at the pleasure of ontologically superior beings.16
Derrida’s sense of responsibility to animals, his availability to the impor-
tance of questions concerning animal lives and deaths, his caution before
analogies with them and his caution before ontological dualisms like animal/
man: This sense of responsibility to animals arises, I have said, from another
dimension of responsibility in comparison with Heidegger’s. It arises from his
remarkable attunement and disciplined attention to unspeakable silence—
empty silence free of ontological chatter or causal force—and from his attuned
attention to the threshold that he invoked and responsibility to which I find he
performed in his words and concepts. This is an invocation and performativity
that compose his sense of responsibility to wordless silence and thresholds.
The silent thresholds keep the question of responsibility alive. Derrida takes
responsibility for the repeated generation of that question in his work. The life
of the question of responsibility provides the endingbeginning that Derrida
calls liberation, the liberation that allows both sovereignty and deconstruc-
tion. The lively question of responsibility also allows his concerned alertness

16  Although I cannot discuss the point here, Heidegger’s work becomes much more alert to
the ways humans connect with their environments than he appears to be in Sein und Zeit.
But his consideration of animals does not significantly change.

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to questions regarding animal lives and deaths, the consequences of taking

them for granted, and the consequences of silencing them by analogies with
what they are not. His question of responsibility also allows him to consider
the consequences of the often hidden and, I find, disturbing implications of
putting human lives and animals lives together by means of the Aristotelian,
often definitive hybrid, rational animal.
Does that hybrid bring together the sovereignty of reason and the bestiality
of animals? Does it bring them together in such a way as to explain and thereby
justify the highly intelligent means people use, in the names no doubt of famil-
iar, good values and reasons, to hurt, kill, and destroy each other and whatever
is strange or unpleasant in their spaces of living or control?
We have come no farther than a site of departure, a threshold before the
question of Heidegger’s, Derrida’s, and our responsibility. I end with the hope
that your experiences of what has happened for you in this discussion will
inspire a continuing lively interaction for you, an occasion to find your own
experiences of words, silence, and unheimlich responsibility.

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