Int J Semiot Law (2010) 23:283–298

DOI 10.1007/s11196-010-9154-0

Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend

Elina Staikou

Published online: 7 April 2010

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract The article attempts to think friendship in its relation to law and justice
and provides some arguments for the importance of this concept in Derrida’s eth-
ical, legal and political philosophy. It draws on early texts such as Of grammatology
and reads them in conjunction with later texts such as The animal that therefore I
am. The relation of friendship to law and justice is explored by means of Derrida’s
notion of ‘‘degenerescence’’ understood as the necessity or law of indeterminateness
that cuts across, both limiting and de-limiting, all laws, types and generic partitions,
for instance, juridical (natural and positive right), humanistic (human and animal),
anthropological (sexual difference), philosophical (physis and nomos). Drawing on
Derrida’s readings of ‘‘sexual difference’’ in Heidegger and the latter’s evocation of
‘‘the voice of the friend’’ in Being and time, the article addresses the theme of
Geschlecht and articulates the exigency to think sexual difference beyond duality
together with the exigency to rethink law and right otherwise than on the ground of
nativity and ‘‘natural fact’’ and in terms of what Derrida calls ‘‘a friendship prior to
friendships’’ at the origin of all law and socius.

Keywords Friendship
Justice
Sexual difference
Degenerescence

Justice
Heidegger
The trace

Before the law one appears or appeals only too late. One only does what one cannot
and should not do: be late before the law. What’s more, law never lets itself be
waited for: grief, protestation and contestation, endless trials, processions,
judgements, the interminable imminence of the verdict, of the truth to be unveiled.
A late protestation and appeal to the law would perhaps want to contest, challenge

E. Staikou (&)
Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: hss01es@gold.ac.uk

123
284 E. Staikou

its heritage in its most accredited concepts, especially those that tie up law to fact, to
the evidence of the thing itself, to the thing to be unveiled. Unless lateness before
the law signifies the always already of another law beyond fact and evidence, before
and beyond what is called determined law, natural or positive. This will have been
another injunction, the injunction of a hearing beyond trial and a call for a justice
before and beyond law.
Our question will be: is the call of and for a justice beyond law or rather right and
fact, the hearing of the voice of the friend? Who is this friend and what would his or
her friendship be?
Law, friendship and justice will be our themes. As signalled already, law here
carries different meanings or determinations and one needs to be attentive to which
type or genre of law one is referring or appealing to. And beyond the genres of laws,
for instance, natural law and positive law or right but also all possible
determinations and delimitations of law, for instance, the law of literature or
phenomenological law, one needs to think through and beyond delimitation the law
of genre, that is, the law of laws or law in general, in its origin or generation. What
Derrida calls ‘‘the law of genre’’ covers the motif of the law in general, that is, of the
genre of law in general cutting across and reaching beyond all types, genres, classes
and determinations, forbidding, as a law does, their rigorous or fixed demarcation,
their stabilization in the evidence or visibility of an as such. As soon as there is
genre ‘‘degenerescence’’ has begun [1, p. 231] and this is the law of law in all its
determinations.
In ‘‘The law of genre’’ Derrida speaks about the limit between the two general
types of genres, between ‘‘the two genres of genre’’, that is, what one calls ‘‘‘nature’
or phusis (for example, a biological genre, or the human genre, a genre of all that is
in general)’’ and the genre or typology that is commonly thought as ‘‘non-natural
and depending on laws or orders which were once held to be opposed to phusis
according to those values associated with techne, thesis, nomos (for example, an
artistic, poetic or literary genre)’’ [1, p. 224]. These genres of genres, Derrida says,
are neither separable nor inseparable and this is where the whole enigma springs
from: the mystical, unlocalizable and unassignable limit that at once marks and
unmarks, limits and de-limits what it is supposed to designate, regulate and make
visible as such. Degenerescence is the principle of indeterminateness that drives
determinability and constantly undoes it; it is a law of impurity at the heart and
origin of all law, that is, all determined law. Degeneresence has already begun and
we are only beginning to measure its political, juridical and ethical stakes.
A reflection upon friendship and the justice of friendship, we will show, cannot
and should not fail to appeal to this law of degenerescence, which, to be sure, apart
from genre commands all discourse on genesis, genealogy, generation and gender. It
should not fail to do so both in view of protesting against and contesting the
heritage, the givens, the judgement handed down in the standard interpretation of
friendship, that is, one that is tributary to phallogocentrism qua phratrocentrism but
also so as to give friendship another breathing space, yet another chance.
Derrida at the end of his ‘‘Foreword’’ to the Politics of friendship speaks of the
call, the apostrophe that, as rumour has it in the philosophy of friendship, Aristotle
addressed to his friends: ‘O my friends, there is no friend’. The Politics of

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 285

friendship, he writes, could come down to hearing or simply letting this call be
heard ‘‘providing the appellation of the call be drawn out, to call it in turn, well
before any destination is set down in its possibility, in the direction of familiar
sentences, sentences bound by two locutions: to appeal and to take one’s mark [faire
appel, prendre appel]’’ [2, p. xi]. These two locutions, he explains, regard a decision
and an impetus. A decision to re-examine and protest against a long established
tradition of thinking friendship and the politics that are implicated in it and an
impetus that gathers a stooping body [un corps fle´chi] in preparatory reflection
‘‘before the leap, without a horizon, beyond any form of trial’’, in preparation and in
waiting, we add, for the call or verdict. This apostrophe (‘O my friends, there is no
friend’) that appears to be addressing friends in the plural only to say that there is no
friend in the singular, marks and is carried through this intellectual tradition in its
most remarkable moments. It is iterated in Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Blanchot
among many others. It is with this vocative that Derrida opened every session in his
seminar on the ‘Politics of friendship’ in 1988–89, a vocative recurrently addressed
and made to resound in multiple ways through the book.
To whom is this call addressed, if there is no friend? How is such a call possible
and how is it related to law and justice? In what way is friendship implicated not
simply with justice—for friendship and justice have always been thought together—
but with law and, moreover, with the very possibility of law? Friendship has been
often considered something that does not need or is even above the law [2, p. 183].
Friendship though is not exempted from the law of degenerescence when it comes to
types and determinations of friendship or, as we shall see, with regard to gender.
The law of degenerescence—and we shall come to this later—is the law of what
Derrida calls ‘‘a friendship prior to friendships’’ [2, p. 236], prior to all determined
experiences and notions of friendship. Law, friendship and justice perhaps share a
condition of possibility (and impossibility) in degenerescence, in another law of
being-together, what Derrida calls ‘‘being-together in allocution’’ [2, p. 249], and
perhaps this is what needs to be recalled to each and one another.
Our concern here will not be so much with the apostrophe mentioned above, but
with another call, not in the mode of apostrophe or address this time, not with a call
to the friend but the call of the friend. This call is not even a proper call but an
elusive reference to the ‘‘voice of the friend’’ in Martin Heidegger’s Being and time
§34. This strange, even silent voice that Heidegger says ‘‘every Dasein carries with
it’’ could perhaps show to be, perhaps beyond Heidegger’s intentions, the possibility
of friendship, of friendship prior to friendships or what could be called the singular
spacing of the law.
Before reaching or lending an ear to ‘‘the voice of the friend’’ and Derrida’s
hearing of it in the Politics of friendship and especially in ‘‘Heidegger’s Ear,
Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’’, before ‘‘taking the mark’’ in preparation for the
call, we are going to appeal to what Derrida calls ‘‘the heritage of [a] troubling
necessity’’. Which necessity? A necessity that is productive of or consolidated by the
canonical notion of friendship and one which, despite appearances to the contrary, in
the history of metaphysics has assumed the naturalness of a bond between phusis and
nomos, which lies at the origins of the most accredited concepts of right—for

123
286 E. Staikou

instance, the right to citizenship—and politics. Phusis here refers to the natural tie,
that is, to the natural fact of birth and to the evidence or spectacle of the what is and
what necessarily ensues from it. One of the questions that Derrida asks in the
Foreword to the Politics of friendship is ‘‘who founds the law as a right to life’’? [2,
p. xi] Who—man, God, friend or enemy—or even what founds law as the right over
life and death, assuming that one knows what or who life is, and on the grounds of the
physio-ontology of what is in nature. What is taken as a natural fact—but nothing is
less certain—revealing or unveiling itself at birth is at the origin of every notion and
discourse of generation, genealogy, filiation, genre and gender and of the laws,
natural or positive, that are determined by it. Derrida broaches these questions in
relation to Plato’s Menexenus, in which Socrates iterates Aspasia’s funeral oration
and eulogy for the autochthony of Athenians. What is taken as the self-evidence of a
natural attachment at the moment and place of birth, as the simple reality of birth that
nurtures bonds of kinship through nativity, the ties of soil and blood, is immediately
translated into a political and nomological situation:
But we and our citizens are brethren, the children all of one mother (mias metros
pantes adelphoi phuntes), and do not think it right to be one another’s masters or
servants, but the natural equality (kata phusin) of birth compels us to seek for
legal equality (isonomian anagkazei zetein kata nomon), and to recognize no
superiority except in the reputation of virtue and wisdom [2, pp. 95–96].
Equality at birth (isogonia), that is, natural equality (kata phusin) becomes the
grounds for legal equality (isonomia). This relation, this passage from phusis to nomos
is necessitated (anagkazei), demanded by nature: ‘‘Nature commands law; equality of
birth founds in necessity legal equality’’ [2, p. 93]. To the extent then that law is
commanded by nature, prescribed by the natural bond, the relation between them is in
turn natural. But this foundation of law in nature and in necessity is not necessarily a
just foundation either according to nature or according to law. The justification for
such foundation, its ‘‘nomological justification’’ is founded axiomatically on what is
seen as ‘‘the physio-ontological ground of what is in nature, revealing itself in truth at
birth’’ [2, p. 99]. The opposition between phusis and nomos, nature and law or
convention stands firm insofar as it is regulated on the physio-ontological ground, as
long as some core of naturalness remains intact. The naturalness of birth, however, of
generation, filiation and genealogy cannot remain intact since it lets itself be implanted
with an ‘‘it is necessary’’. Derrida speaks of a ‘‘synthetic a priori necessity’’ that brings
together two ‘‘structurally heterogeneous ties’’ in a way that will always remain
‘‘obscure’’ and ‘‘mystical’’: what is and what must be.
It requires thus the synthesis of a bond that is taken as natural, as natural attachment
and a testimonial bond, the bond of an allegiance or obligation. If nature commands
law, nature becomes obligation through an act of testimony. Law affirms itself insofar
as it testifies, asserts, commits to and remains faithful to a natural necessity. In the
language of speech act theory, to which Derrida constantly resorts, the synthesis is
between the constative, theoretical, ontological report concerning the natural fact and
what is or what becomes evident at the spectacle of birth and the performative
commitment to this fact that by testifying to the what is obligates to a what must be:

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 287

This bond between the two ties—this synthetic a priori necessity, if we can
speak of it thus—ties what is to what must be, it obliges, it connects the
obligation to the tie of birth which we call natural; it is the obligatory process
of a natural law [le devenir obligatoire d’une loi naturelle], the embedding of
an ‘it is necessary’ in the filiation of what is, of what is born and what dies [2,
p. 99].
Necessity is at the origin of phusis and nomos: more than the necessity of the
co-implication of two structurally heterogeneous ties, it is perhaps this ‘‘it is
necessary’’, this il faut which engenders and sustains the metaphysical opposition
between nature and law even when or precisely because it prescribes their
co-implication, that is, nature’s irreducible contamination by law. Necessity then,
the order of an il faut at the origin of law, the law above laws, inspires desire for the
intact kernel, for the virginal, natural core, while and insofar as there has never been
such thing. The law of this Necessity, which Derrida capitalizes in the Ear of the
other, is something, he says, ‘‘that no one can do anything about and that is not a law
instituted by any subject’’ [3, p. 116]. We need to outline here the law of two
necessities and their relation. Menexenus appeals to a necessity that obliges
(anagkazei), that ‘‘connects the obligation to the tie of birth’’, to ‘‘the filiation of
what is, what is born and what dies’’. This necessity, what founds, in other words,
law as the right over life and death, and, furthermore, subjects the latter to the onto-
phenomenological law of the as such, is the obscure reduction of the capitalized
Necessity, which precisely forbids the purity and simplicity of the as such.
Degenerescence is another name for the law of this Necessity. The impossibility of a
rigorous generic separation or demarcation between phusis and nomos cuts the
ground from under the foundation of law. What Derrida calls the mystical bond of
the two heterogeneous ties, that is, natural attachment and alliance by oath and their
irreducible co-implication, is none other than the law of the Necessity that exceeds
the opposition between founded and unfounded at every instituting act. It is what he
calls the ‘‘mystical foundation of authority’’ in ‘‘Force of Law’’ and law’s very
deconstructiblity [4, pp. 242–243].
The law of Necessity is, paradoxically, a law of excess, that is, what displaces the
limit between phusis and nomos, between the unfounded and the founded, between
justice and law and makes each exceed itself in the direction of the other. Each
typology, each genre or theoretical limit would have to recall in its history and
genealogy this ‘‘mystical limit’’ in the act of its institution. This task of recalling is, for
Derrida, not merely a responsibility ‘‘in face of a heritage’’, the conceptual oppositions
and delimitations of which continue to define law, morality, politics and the discourse
of legal rights, including human rights, but also ‘‘the heritage of an imperative’’, the
injunction of a ‘‘just call for justice’’, for a justice that would look to move beyond the
axiomatic partitions that dominate and confine both right and justice as right in their
subject and jurisdiction, that is, what Derrida calls the ‘‘metaphysico-anthropocentric’’
and ‘‘carno-phallogocentric’’ axiomatic [4, pp. 244–248].
The injunction of a ‘‘just call for justice’’—and we will soon begin to think this
call together with ‘‘the voice of the friend’’—is the recalling to the law of genre, to
the law of partition, the counter-law of degenerescence, or else, the imperative for

123
288 E. Staikou

the deconstruction and de-limitation of the limit, starting with the one between
nature and convention:
Deconstruction is justice. It is perhaps because law (which I will therefore
consistently distinguish from justice) is constructible, in a sense that goes
beyond the opposition between convention and nature; it is perhaps insofar as
it goes beyond this opposition that it is constructible –and so deconstructible
and better yet, that it makes deconstruction possible, or at least the exercise of
a deconstruction that, fundamentally, always proceeds to questions of law and
to the subject of law [4, p. 243].
The law is constructible in a sense that goes beyond and insofar as it goes beyond
the opposition between nature and convention to the extent that law is neither
founded nor unfounded, that is, to the extent that it cannot draw and assert its
legitimacy either from nature—at least not without having first implanted itself in
it—or from what is customarily thought as the arbitrariness or immotivation of
convention. The law’s authority and force is released from and nurtured by the
mystical and unlocalizable limit that we have been talking about. The call for a
justice beyond law –and Derrida insists that this will have been a justice that passes
through law as the law’s own deconstructibility—is a call to rethink, displace and
renegotiate asserted limits, genres and determinations, given and accredited
concepts and oppositions, starting with the most obvious and uncontested facts,
the so called natural facts, those which are revealed at birth (genre, genus or species,
family, filiation, generation, lineage, sex, sexual difference, race, stock, what
gathers under the German word Geschlecht, life and the living in general) and what
by necessity follows from and is regulated by them. The political, ethical, juridical
implications of this are vast, incalculable and under way. They are under way in
every symptom of depoliticization, deterritorialization, medialization, in every
discourse and practice that is severed from nativity, every mutation in and challenge
to the dominant juridico-political system, in the demand for transformation in its
most fundamental premises and mostly in everything that calls for the deconstruc-
tion of the subject, of the ethical, political, juridical, human subject and the schemas
that command it, that is, the virile, fraternal, adult, carnivorous, sacrificial figure at
the centre of its determination [5, pp. 280–281].
Derrida in Politics of friendship and ‘‘Force of law’’ draws out the political,
ethical and legal implications of the deconstruction of the opposition between phusis
and its others, that is, nomos, thesis, techne, culture, convention, etc., pivotal to his
thought since his early work. In Of grammatology this is broached in relation to the
metaphysical opposition between speech and writing, and what Derrida has called
logocentrism. Derrida there begins to replace semiotics with a grammatology, a
graphematic drift passing from the arbitrariness of the Saussurian sign to the
immotivation of the trace or rather the trace’s own indefinite becoming-unmotivated
[6, p. 47]. The arbitrariness of the sign in Saussurian semiotics, Derrida explains,
concerns only specific signifiers and signifieds, that is, the ‘‘totality of determined
signs, spoken, and a fortiori written, as unmotivated institutions’’ [6, p. 44] and not
the relationship between voice and sense in general. The bond of sound is

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 289

considered as ‘‘the only natural, the only true bond’’ and is never called into
question by Saussure, whose semiotics continues to keep to the classical discourse
of the phusis and nomos opposition. The relationship between a determined signifier
and a determined signified has regularity but it is not a ‘‘natural attachment’’.
Consequently, there are natural and arbitrary or instituted attachments, whose
opposition is taken for granted.
For Derrida, the rupture of the ‘‘natural attachment’’ with the advent of the
arbitrary sign or institution puts into question ‘‘the idea of naturalness rather than
that of the attachment’’ [6, p. 46]. The notion of the trace that Derrida substitutes for
that of sign—which still carries too much metaphysical weight—moves beyond the
opposition of phusis and its others as it is ‘‘no more natural (it is not the mark, the
natural sign, or the index in the Husserlian sense) than cultural, not more physical
than psychic, biological than spiritual’’ [6, pp. 47–48]. The trace is a referential
structure, the openness to exteriority, to otherness and ‘‘where the relationship with
the other is marked’’ [6, p. 47]; its immotivation does not refer back to nature, to an
entity or to a presence from which or to which it has been detached or
conventionally attached. The trace announces the other as such, that is to say, it
announces the other without reducing it to an as such, without giving it the fixed
contours of an entity or the value of a presence. The announcement of the other as
such that can only happen in the structure of the trace and through the trace’s
movement, for the trace is nothing fixed or definite, only occurs in and as the
dissimulation of itself, of its as such. This dissimulation, which Derrida also calls
the trace’s necessary ‘‘self-occultation’’ [6, p. 47], produces determined moments
within the general structure of the trace, for instance, that of the symbol, which for
Saussure still has the naturalness of an attachment to the signified within reality, and
that of the immotivated or arbitrary sign, which is the province of semiotics, of the
arbitrary attachment of a determined signified to a determined signifier within what
is taken as the natural bond of voice and sense.
Insofar as the trace, according to Derrida, must be thought before the entity and
thus before the moments or stages first of the symbol and then of the sign, insofar as
it neither refers back to a naturalness, nor breaks with it, the trace is ‘‘indefinitely its
own becoming-immotivated’’ [6, p. 47], a becoming without origin or telos. The
trace itself does not exist, it is beyond the opposition between presence and absence,
living and nonliving, spirit and body—it has a phantasmatic structure and it also
gives rise to the desire and fear of phantasms, that is, of the as such—and yet covers
the entire field of the entity, which—
before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the
diverse possibilities—genetic and structural—of the trace. The presentation of
the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation of its ‘as such’, has always
already begun and no structure of the entity escapes it [6, p. 47].
The determination of the entity belongs to the very movement of the
dissimulation, occultation, or erasure of the trace of the other as such, which
amounts to its presentation as such within the field of presence. It also amounts to the
reduction of the multiplicity and diversity of the possibilities—genetic or

123
290 E. Staikou

structural—of the trace and of its differential forces to oppositional difference.

Nature and law, symbol and sign will have been symptoms of this reduction or
determination. The passage to the symbolic order and to the mastery of the sign
signals the passage to the human order of the subject, which establishes itself as
superior to the animal. It is by virtue of this limit between the human and the animal
as the living in general that law is founded as a right over life and death. Law is then a
symptom (social, historical, political, juridical, etc.) of the reduction or erasure of the
multiple potentiality of the trace, a symptom that inaugurates the human order as
superior and sacrificial. When we speak today about crimes against humanity and
when we champion, as indeed we must, human rights, we need also to bear in mind
that which, in their continuous and endless enrichment, definition and refinement,
may be still maintaining, abiding by, drawing and nurturing itself from within this
limit, feeding and generating it at the same time. Derrida in The animal that therefore
I am calls this limitrophy [7, p. 29]. Yet feeding the limit for him also signifies
augmenting, multiplying and complicating it, respecting the as such of otherness
without reducing it to the as such of presence. Limitrophy along with the fact that
one must eat and ‘‘eat well’’, as Derrida explains in ‘‘Eating well’’, ‘‘does not
mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat,
learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat’’ [5, p. 282]. So the issue would not be to remove or
efface the conceptual limit between ‘‘those who say ‘we men’, ‘I, a human’’’ and
what is called an animal but to let it increase, grow and multiply, that is, to recall and
be attentive to the differences, the ruptures, and heterogeneities that traverse and
divide what was assumed and drawn as an indivisible and continuous limit [7, p. 30].
Degenerescence does not entail the erasure of the limit but precisely its
divisibility and multiplication, which is a completely different operation. To even
think the erasure of such limit as possible, which for Derrida ‘‘would simply be too
asinine [beˆte]’’, is to repeat a stupidity or beˆtise that is proper to, perhaps
constitutive of man, of man who thinks that he is capable and, moreover, the only
entity capable of erasing its traces, of mastering erasure and of the signifiers that it
receives and emits. What Derrida calls the dissimulation or self-occultation of the
trace in Of grammatology signifies that the trace can never be erased without leaving
a trace of its own erasure, which it thus bears in its very structure and which remains
impossible to master. The passage to the order of the law and its anthropo-carno-
phallogocentric foundation is the symptom or trace of this erasure. That the trace is
not absolutely removable or erasable does not mean that its erasure does not spell
death and destruction. On the contrary, the trace of the other is more vulnerable and
more exposed in its ineffaceability precisely because the power of effacement is
never assured of itself:
Traces erase (themselves), like everything else, but the structure of the trace is
such that it cannot be in anyone’s power to erase it and especially not to
‘‘judge’’ its erasure, even less so by means of a constitutive power assured of
being able to erase, performatively, what erases itself [7, p. 136].
Derrida expounds this in the third chapter of The animal that therefore I am,
which bears the title ‘‘And say the animal responded?’’ and is addressed to Jacques

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 291

Lacan. The erasure of the trace, the covering of one’s marks, or else the capacity to
dissimulate, lure, seduce, pretend and lie, which Lacan reserves only to humans,
signals the passage to the symbolic order, the human order, law and justice. The
passage from the imaginary to the symbolic and the constitution of subjecthood as
mastery of the signifier and by the same token as superiority over the animal and the
living in general, is effectuated paradoxically by virtue of a defect or lack that is
proper to man, says Lacan, a lack that calls for the supplementarity of speech and
law. The subject in order to become master has first to subject itself to the signifier
by way of which it supplements its defect; it becomes itself a subject, it accedes to
the immediacy of the self-relation of an autodeictic and self-pronouncing I, it
returns to itself only by first going out of itself. Subjectification then marks or rather
is the passage to the law, a passage called for, necessitated by the defective nature of
man, who without appropriation or mastery of signs would be the most vulnerable of
all animals. The anthropo-carno-phallogocentric constitution of the human subject
still largely defines, for Derrida, the discourse and fundamental concepts of what is
called human rights.
How is the law of genre implicated in this operation? Is not this self, this I that
posits and shows itself by giving itself the law, by entering into the order of the law
and symbolic generation, is it not already generically determined and, moreover,
determined by all that which in the passage from nature to law, nature still
commands? What of the law of degenerescence when it comes to the genre, to the
Geschlecht of the I and its determinability?
The Geschlecht of man, of the only being capable of the I, erects itself, makes
itself visible as such only by means of dissimulation and erasure of the traces of
differences and their reduction to conceptual opposition. Geschlecht also means
sexual difference and, as will be argued, more than a determinate distinction, or an
ontic or ‘‘factual concretion’’ as Martin Heidegger views it and to whom we shall
come shortly, signals the entering into the order of the law and arising of the human,
the very process of hominization. Dissimulation here refers to the movement of the
reduction of the trace of diffe´rance, of the as such of otherness and singularity into
the binarity of sexes and thus the passage to the sign, to the index of difference, to
the monstration and visibility of the distinct and determined sex. The dissimulation
of sexual difference is a moment in the becoming-unmotivated of the trace. It marks
the entrance to the order of the law, it pertains to the law’s foundation, which in its
determined form is inseparable from the order of the sign, of the truth to be
unveiled. Dissimulation is also the veiling of sexual difference both in the sense of
its reduction to polarity and in the sense of the modesty, the shame and the covering
up that the visibility of sex entails.
Dissimulation, however, modesty, the ruse of pretence, the manipulation of the
sign, the technology of veiling, on the whole, the right to law, is not a property of the
Geschlecht human. Degenerescence has begun and the trace of erasure, like a
phantom, is always capable of returning. One would have to maintain against all
evidence to the contrary that the experience of seduction, monstration, simulation,
shame, guilt, and everything tied to the possibility of modesty and the law pertain
solely to what is called human. Derrida speaks of the mirror effect and the uncertainty
around its origination. The mirror effect, the self-reflective stage in the self-

123
292 E. Staikou

identificatory process, for Derrida, extends ‘‘beyond the field of the properly visual
image’’ onto the ‘‘hetero-narcissism’’ of the identification of one’s fellow of the same
species, especially when it comes to reproduction by means of sexual coupling:
once the specularity of one’s fellow is understood to begin with sexual
difference, on the eve of, but already involved in the technical stage of
mirroring, of narcissistic or echographical mirroring [for this identification can
occur through the sound of voice and song], account has to be taken of the
seductive pursuit without which there is no sexual experience, and no desire or
choice of partner in general [7, p. 60].
The ‘‘technical stage of mirroring’’ is therefore lodged in the most ‘‘natural’’ of
relations and fellowships and it is inseparable from some form of dissimulation,
seduction, modesty and thus some technology of veiling. It would thus be
impossible to situate the breaking point between phusis and techne. If dissimulation,
pretence, shame and modesty are not capacities or experiences proper to humans
alone then, for Derrida, the distinguishing trait of the human from other mammals—
insofar as the field of the question of modesty is provisionally limited to sexed
animals and sexual difference—is what he calls a ‘‘metonymic difference’’, the
concentration and the arresting of modesty on the exposure of the genital organs.
This distinctive trait that is an effect of metonymy—thus underwritten by
substitution or what Derrida calls re-markability—is inseparable, he says, from
‘‘the experience of holding oneself upright, of uprightness [droiture] as erection in
general in the process of hominization’’ [7, p. 61]. Sexual erection then would still
need to be distinguished from being-standing within the general phenomenon of
erection, and within sexual erection—another metonymy—one would still need to
distinguish between differences in desire (erection and detumescence), the
dissimulation of which arrests and concentrates the metonymy of modesty on the
phallic zone [7, p. 61].
The phallus enters the play of veiling and unveiling, a series of metonymies and
substitutions, for which it also becomes a powerful and privileged signifier. The
signifier is essentially a representative and substitutive structure, which always posits
and presupposes a truth to be unveiled or revealed, the awaiting of a verdict, the
appearing, the phainesthai of the thing as such. The thing to be revealed, however,
and if we venture into the values associated with the phallus in Derrida’s ‘‘Faith and
knowledge’’, the sacro-sanctity of life and what by the same token must remain
unscathed, intact, and hidden, only emerges as what Derrida calls a phallic effect [8,
p. 83]. The distinctive trait of the human genre, which by virtue of metonymy
associates modesty, law and technics with the veiling of the genitals and thus entails
the privilege and centrality of the phallus in the process of hominization and the
conceptual partitions and limitations that go hand in hand with it—this is what is
called phallogocentrism—is not necessarily the property of man. Derrida speaks not
so much of the phallus but of the phallic effect, to wit, not so much of an identifying
trait or property, not of a trait of belonging but of the trait qua mark [1, p. 229].
The trait is always a priori remarkable, that is, iterable and alterable, able to cut
across and participate in an infinite number of genres. This operation of the trait qua

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 293

mark, that is, remarkability—and this is how a certain technics underwrites and
upsets the metaphysical distinction between phusis and techne—is perhaps another
name for what Derrida calls ‘‘generalized fetishism’’. The phallus/fetish presupposes
conceptual opposition—‘‘the phallus is the concept’’, writes Derrida [9, p. 351]—
between the thing itself, the signified truth, the nonsubstitute and the substitutive
signifier. The thing itself to be unveiled, which is at once the condition and
destruction of the fetish, the nonsubstitutive thing implies in turn or rather it is
constructed on the decidable opposition of the fetish to the nonfetish. What Derrida
proposes in Glas is an analysis of what is called fetishism ‘‘in a completely different
place’’, a place and a concept of the fetish that ‘‘no longer lets itself be contained
in the space of truth’’, that ‘‘determines itself outside opposition’’ and is ‘‘an
undecidable concept’’, if such a thing were possible [10, p. 209]. The phallus/fetish
concept beyond oppositionality and the decidability of value, even or precisely
beyond the opposition of use value to exchange value, that is, generalized fetishism
or the remarkability of the phallic effect at once arouses desire for and renders
impotent the thing itself.1 Desire for the thing as such, the metaphysical longing for
the intact kernel, is a phantasm, says Derrida in The ear of the other [3, p. 115]. The
signifier phallus then, the sign or visibility of generic or sexual difference, will have
been inscribed as phallic effect in ‘‘a certain phantasmatic organization’’ [10, p. 209].
The issue would perhaps be to substitute semiotics with a general phantasmatics.
How late is it and can it only be late before the law, before all these laws and
partitions that we have been talking about? And would another thinking of the law
need to have finished with its history, indeed, with the history of the self, this self that
says ‘‘here-I-am’’, ‘‘ecce homo’’? Such thinking would be perhaps ventured in the
name of another history and another law, the law of the other, of heteronomy, that
would come to disrupt the heritage of anthropocentrism qua phallogocentrism and
avow other ‘‘repressed human possibilities’’, ‘‘other powers of reason’’ [7, p. 105].
A thinking that would respond to, that would show faith in another Necessity.
A decisive and irreversible step in the history of philosophy in that direction,
even if it still leaves intact, according to Derrida, the ‘‘profoundest metaphysical
humanism’’ [11, p. 12],2 was taken by Martin Heidegger. The project of a new
‘‘fundamental anthropology’’ by way of the privative interpretation of the a priori,
the onto-phenomenological ground of what is called human, that is, the existential
analytic of Dasein in its bare relation to Being, presupposed the bracketing or
neutralisation of all anthropological traits associated with what Heidegger called
‘‘factual concretions’’ and determinations [12, p. 69]. Derrida’s question in
1
The erection and the opposition of the two columns (Hegel and Genet’s) in Derrida’s Glas lay down
and at the same time submit to the law or logic of generalised fetishism. The opposed columns mirror one
another in their hetero-narcissism, seduce, dissimulate, veil and unveil, brush against one another and
erect their own orders both by asserting and by stealing the ground from underneath each other. Two
concepts, two brothers, ‘‘two phalli, erected one against the other’’ [10, p. 175], the opposition of the same
to itself, the destruction of oppositionality; fratricide will have been one of its symptoms as well as the
condition of the concept.
2
In Of spirit, Heidegger and the question Derrida argues that despite the critique of Cartesian-Hegelian
subjectivity and the distance he wants to take from biologism and even from all philosophy of life,
Heidegger remains faithful to metaphysics and cannot avoid even a ‘‘humanist teleology’’ to the extent
that he maintains an ‘‘absolute limit between the living creature and the human Dasein’’ [11, pp. 54-55].

123
294 E. Staikou

‘‘Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference’’ is whether sexual determi-

nation or difference by being the first anthropological trait to be neutralized does not
hold a privileged place in Heidegger’s understanding of the structure of Dasein, and,
whether this does not entail that the latter already bears sexual marks in its being-
there. Sexual difference in the sense of the binarity of the sexes would be an
anthropological concretion, a determination that comes after, affecting Dasein’s
body with sexual division.
This, however, does not mean that Dasein is originally asexual or that the
existential analytic gives a negative meaning to the neutralisation of sexual
difference, that it reduces it to a ‘‘neither-nor’’. Dasein in its bare, a priori structure is
neither a man nor a woman—Heidegger limits sexual determination to this couple-
since it is not even, not yet in any case, a human being. The a-sexuality of Dasein is
described by Heidegger not in terms of abstraction or indifference but as ‘‘originary
positivity (ursprüngliche Positivität)’’ and ‘‘power of essence (Mächtigkeit des
Wesens)’’ [12, p. 72]. This Derrida interprets as a sexuality ‘‘more originary than the
dyad,’’ as ‘‘the positive and powerful source of every possible ‘sexuality’’’ [12,
p. 72]. This originary positivity is the source and the internal possibility of ‘‘factual
dispersion or dissemination’’ [12, p. 75], a sheaf of differences that are later reduced,
negated and dissimulated in sexual division. The actualization of diverse and
multiple possibilities in Dasein’s factual existence and determination has its origin in
what Heidegger names ‘‘transcendental dispersion’’ [12, p. 78]. Transcendental
dispersion, Derrida explains, is ‘‘the possibility of every dissociation and parcelling
out (Zersplitterung, Zerspaltung) into factual existence’’ [12, p. 78]. It affects Dasein
with the body, ‘‘with’’ meaning here also ‘‘at the same time’’; it is Dasein’s own
coming to existence and to the body, which is then sexually determined:
Every proper body of one’s own [corps propre] is sexed, and there is no
Dasein without its own body. But the chaining together proposed by
Heidegger seems quite clear: the dispersing multiplicity is not primarily due to
the sexuality of one’s own body; it is its own body itself, the flesh, the
Leiblichkeit, that draws Dasein originally into the dispersion and in due course
[par suite] into sexual difference [12, p. 75].
Dispersion before and beyond duality, even beyond biological determination and
anatomical evidence perhaps reserves the inscription of another sex, another
Geschlecht. Sexual difference, says Derrida in ‘‘Fourmis’’, should be interpreted as
something readable and not visible, not as a sign given at the spectacle of birth,
reducible to objective criteria of sexual identification [13, p. 96]. To recall this, to
resist subjection to the law and logic of objectivity and partition would open a way
for the ‘‘re-sexualization’’ [3, p. 181] of juridico-political discourses and for another
sexual difference, one that would affirm difference in its singular irreducibility and
heterogeneity.
Perhaps the call for another sexual difference before the law of genre or gender
would require or recall a stooping and not an erected body this time, ‘‘before the leap,
without a horizon, beyond any form of trial’’. A stooping body that would carry the
figure of another metonymy, the ‘‘metonymic figure’’ of the voice of the friend.

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 295

In §34 of Being and time, which bears the title ‘‘Being-there and discourse.
Language’’ and within the context of an analysis of Dasein’s capability of ‘‘hearing
and keeping silent’’ [14, p. 204], Heidegger ‘‘evocatively’’, as if in passing,
mentions the friend or rather the voice of the friend—hence a metonymic part of the
friend—that every Dasein carries with it:
Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is
open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being—as in hearing the voice of the
friend that every Dasein carries with it [als Hören der Stimme des Freundes,
den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt]. Dasein hears, because it understands. As a
Being-in-the-world with Others, a Being which understands, Dasein is ‘in
thrall’ to Dasein-with and to itself; and in this thraldom it ‘belongs’ to these.
Being-with develops in listening to one another [Aufeinander-hören], which
can be done in several possible ways: following, going along with, and the
privative modes of not-hearing, resisting, defying, and turning away [14,
pp. 206–207, my italics, translation modified].3
Hearing, Heidegger says, is not merely ‘‘an acoustic perception’’; it is constitutive
for discourse [Rede]. Dasein hears because it understands and not the other way
around. Hearing is situated within the analysis of Being-with and Dasein-with, which
belong to Dasein’s existential structure and are not merely factual connections, and
constitutes the ‘‘primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being’’. Then comes the enigmatic example of the voice of the
friend, ‘‘as in hearing’’. Every Dasein carries the voice of the friend with it, ‘‘bei
sich’’, with itself, close by itself. Derrida is very attentive to this strange topology or
rather spacing of the ‘‘bei sich’’ which is neither inside, nor outside Dasein; it neither
belongs to an interiority nor to a transcendent exteriority, it is thus beyond the
alternative between proximity and distance. This peculiar spatiality recalls the
analysis of the uncanny character of the call [Ruf] of care [Sorge] that summons
Dasein to conscience and through which ‘‘in conscience Dasein calls itself’’ [14, §57,
p. 320]. The voice of conscience is ‘‘an alien power by which Dasein is dominated’’:
‘‘the call’’, Heidegger writes, ‘‘comes from me and yet from beyond me’’ [14, p. 320].
The analysis of the existentiality of hearing does not concern itself with the
factual determination of the caller or the content of the call but with the ‘‘who’’ of
the caller in its primordiality, that is, as part of Dasein’s existential constitution,
Dasein in its uncanniness and unfamiliarity to ‘‘the everyday they-self (alltäglichen
Man-selbst)’’ [14, p. 321]. The question then for Derrida, for whom the analysis of
Ruf ‘‘must no doubt be brought into contact with the little phrase on the voice of
the friend’’ [15, p. 168], becomes precisely why Heidegger uses the example of the
friend and not of another figure. ‘‘Why not the enemy? The lover? The father, the
mother, the brother or the sister, the son or the daughter or so many other figures
still, all also ‘speaking’?’’ What is the ‘‘exemplarity of this example’’? [15, p. 175]
Evidently, all those figures mentioned by Derrida would still be too anthropological
3
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation does not do justice to the ‘strict grammaticality’ of
the phrase ‘‘as in hearing the voice of the friend that…’’ by rendering den in ‘‘den jedes Dasein…’’ as
‘‘who’’ rather than ‘‘that’’. The original text by virtue of den leaves open the possibility that Dasein carries
the hearing, the voice and the friend.

123
296 E. Staikou

for Heidegger’s privative interpretation of Dasein. But this only makes the question
more forceful. Why the friend?
Even if its voice is evoked, the friend, says Derrida, keeps silent. The friend
neither says anything determinable, nor does it have any ‘‘subjective, personal,
sexual status; one cannot even decide if the friend is living or dead’’ [15, p. 165]. It
is neither the concept ‘‘friend’’ nor the friend in general. What seems to be required,
for Derrida, is that the friend remains singular, that is, a ‘‘kind of oneness that does
not exclude plurality’’ [15, p. 165]. The friend is only evoked in the privileged
metonymy of the voice and it is the evocation of the call and its exemplarity that
manifest Dasein’s existential vocation.
What interests us in Heidegger’s ‘‘little phrase’’ and Derrida’s extensive and rich
analysis of it, which we cannot follow here, is the privileged place that it reserves
for the ‘‘figureless’’ figure of the friend as the ‘‘exemplary, then at once singular and
general, configuration of every possible other, of every possible figure, or rather
every possible voice of the other’’ [15, pp. 175–176]. Perhaps this preference is not
unrelated to Heidegger’s understanding or rather hearing of philein in its Greek,
Heraclitean, pre-Platonico-Aristotelian, pre-philosophical meaning, that is, as a
force of gathering that joins up Being and beings in their difference and which does
not exclude struggle, adversity or polemos.
Why insist so much here on ‘‘the voice of the friend’’ and what is the friend’s
relation to law and genre? For at least four reasons: 1. The hearing of the voice of
the friend could be said to be a privileged example in the analysis of Dasein’s
existential structures of Being-with, Mitsein and Mitdasein. The friend then has only
an existential definiteness or facticity and has not yet received any factual or
anthropological determination. The hearing of the voice of the friend is at once
Dasein’s openness to the other and its coming to itself. It is in a way the
‘‘transcendental dispersion’’, the singular heterogeneity that makes all determina-
tions and typologies of the friend and friendship possible, for instance, the one that
Aristotle puts forward in Eudemian ethics, book VII. The indefiniteness around the
gender of the friend and the neutralization of sexual difference in its binary sense—
the only one there to be neutralized, according to Heidegger—perhaps is a sign of
disavowal of a long philosophical tradition that since Plato has excluded woman
from friendship.4 2. Despite this, Heidegger in a characteristic gesture reintroduces a
limit in his discourse. It is precisely the limit of discourse, hearing, speech and
understanding and what underwrites the existential analytic of Dasein with what
Derrida has called ‘‘profound humanism’’. Only Dasein, only an entity capable of
discourse, speech, understanding and thus hearing can have a friend. The voice of
the friend can never be that of an animal. In this perspective, Derrida points out,
Heidegger would remain close to Aristotle, who thought that friendship in its
primary sense was only possible between humans, not between gods and men,
animal and man, or between animals. 3. That Dasein alone is capable of hearing the
voice of the friend, who can only be another Dasein, carries the limitation of
4
One of the most persistent questions in Politics of friendship is that of sexual difference and what
Derrida has called the ‘‘double exclusion of the feminine’’ from the canonical, phratrocentric schema of
friendship. According to its dominant interpretation, friendship between women or between man and
woman could never reach the dignity, virtue or perfection, which men only are capable of.

123
Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend 297

belonging to a community and to a people. However, Derrida writes, ‘‘it is not

entirely excluded nor is it certain that belonging to the same community or to the
same people, the experience of the same tongue, or the participation in the same
struggle is the requisite condition for a voice of the friend to be carried bei sich by
Dasein’’ [15, p. 178]. Nothing excludes, therefore, that the friend not be a stranger.
Even though the friend must belong to a community and a people, the friend can
also be a stranger. The openness of hearing to the voice of the stranger along with
the neutralization of sexual difference—and the chance that this gives to a
re-sexualisation of juridico-political discourse—also opens the way to a thinking of
friendship beyond its dominant, phratrocentric schema. 4. Finally, the openness to
the voice of the friend as part of Dasein’s existential make-up is absolutely originary
and absolutely singular. It is not the call of friends or a call to friendship, not an
address by or to a friend that perhaps does not exist (‘O my friends, there is no
friend’). In its existential facticity and definitess the call has occurred. It has the
undeniability of the event, ‘‘the other as friend being there already’’ [15, p. 174].
Derrida speaks of the ‘‘singular spacing of the call’’ [15, p. 167], to which we could
add the ‘‘singular spacing of the law’’, for the call comes ‘‘as if it dictated a kind of
law’’, a law prior to laws, just like the ‘‘friendship prior to friendships’’ that Derrida
speaks of in Politics of friendship and a kind of ‘‘originary socius’’ [15, p. 174] prior
to all organized socius. The singular spacing of the law signifies the always already
of the law of singularity, of the singular other as origination and opening onto law in
general, that is, heteronomy prior and before all law, in Kafka’s sense, Derrida
points out, ‘‘before the law’’. And he continues
Let’s get this right: prior to all determined law, qua natural law or positive
law, but not prior to law in general. For the heteronomic and dissymmetrical
curving of a law of originary sociability is also a law, perhaps the very essence
of law. What is unfolding itself at this instant—and we are finding it a
somewhat disturbing experience—is perhaps only the silent deployment of
that strange violence that has always insinuated itself into the origin of the
most innocent experiences of friendship or justice [2, p. 231].
The silent deployment of a strange violence at the origin of friendship and
justice, sociability and law perhaps resounds in its silence the voice of the friend. It
is perhaps the sealing of a friendship ‘‘before all contracts’’ [2, p. 236] and the
unawowable being-together in allocution without any determined conditions and
traits of belonging, especially when these are established, constructed and regulated
on the grounds of what is taken as a natural and definite given. It is perhaps the
curved and stooping figure of this heteronomy and dissymmetry at the origin of
sociability and law that needs, that must (il faut) be recalled even in the most
innocent experiences of friendship and justice.
It is perhaps too late. A decision and an impetus, or else, a protestation that must
be inseparable from an injunction: a protestation against the law that always comes
later to subject singularity to partition and determined criteria of objectivity and an
injunction not, of course, to the destruction or outright rejection of the law, but to
another hearing of and before the law, another calling and recalling of the law to its

123
298 E. Staikou

unassignable and undeniable origin, that is, the always already, the too late of
otherness. Perhaps a just voice that reminds us that is never too late for the perhaps.

References

1. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The law of genre. In Acts of literature, ed. Derek Attridge (trans: Ronell, A.).
New York and London: Routledge.
2. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of friendship (trans: Collins, G.). London and New York: Verso.
3. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. The ear of the other, otobiography, transference, translation (trans: Kamuf, P.),
ed. Christie McDonald. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
4. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority’ (trans: Quaintance, M.).
In Acts of religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York and London: Routledge.
5. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject (trans: Connor, P., and
Ronell, A.). In Points…interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford California: Stanford
University Press.
6. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of grammatology (trans: Spivak, G.C.). Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
7. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The animal that therefore I am (trans: Wills, D.) ed. Marie-Louise Mallet.
New York: Fordham University Press.
8. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Faith and knowledge: The two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of reason
alone (trans: Weber, S.). In Acts of religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York and London: Routledge.
9. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. A silkworm of one’s own (points of view stitched on the other veil) (trans:
Bennington, G.) In Acts of religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York and London: Routledge.
10. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Glas (trans: Leavy, J.P. Jr., and Rand, R.). Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
11. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Of spirit: Heidegger and the question (trans: Bennington, G. and Bowlby,
R.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
12. Derrida, Jacques. 1983. Geschlecht: Sexual difference, ontological difference (trans: Bevezdivin, R.).
Research in Phenomenology 13:65–83.
13. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Fourmis. In Lectures de la diffe´rence sexuelle, Paris: des femmes, Antoinette
Fouque.
14. Heidegger, Martin. 2005. Being and time (trans: Macquarrie, J., and Robinson, E.). Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing.
15. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Heidegger’s ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV) (trans: Leavy, J.P., Jr.).
In Reading Heidegger, commemorations, ed John Sallis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.

123