DERRIDA AND THE SINGULARITY OF

LITERATURE
Jonathan Culler*
In This Strange Institution Called Literature, an interview with
Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida offers an eloquent homage to literature:
Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of
metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything,
almost beyond everything, including itself. Its the most interesting
thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is
why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the
name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It
will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.1

This is a celebration of literature of a sort not much heard these

days, when advanced critical approaches treat literature as one discourse
among others, to privilege which would be an elitist mistake. In fact,
this celebration of literature is not a privileging of some distinctiveness
of literary language or of aesthetic achievementliterature, Derrida
stresses, has no definitionbut it nevertheless gives an importance to
literary discourse, its engagement with the world, on the edge of the
world, and the engagement that it calls forth in readers, which has the
possibility to transform our literary culture. In a new book The
Singularity of Literature, which is largely inspired by Derrida, Derek
Attridge writes, Derridas work over the past thirty-five years
constitutes the most significant, far-reaching, and inventive exploration
of literature for our time.2 This is unmistakably true, though it is not
widely recognized. One of the more grotesque aspects of the mediatic
reception of Derrida in the United States is the idea that somehow
Derridas work and deconstruction generally have constituted an attack
on literature. I recall a meeting of the English Institute in Cambridge
some years ago at which Alvin Kernan sought to defend literature
against what he said were Derridas attacks on it, attacks which, he
explained, involved the claim that all language was meaningless.
* Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Cornell University and the author of ON DECONSTRUCTION: THEORY AND CRITICISM AFTER
STRUCTURALISM (1982).
1 JACQUES DERRIDA, This Strange Institution Called Literature, in ACTS OF LITERATURE
33, 47 (Derek Attridge ed., 1992) [hereinafter DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE].
2 DEREK ATTRIDGE, THE SINGULARITY OF LITERATURE 139 (2004).

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Where does Derrida say that all language is meaningless? asked an

alert member of the audience during the question period. Kernan was
visibly take aback. Where? . . . Well . . . everywhere he stuttered. It
was so obvious a truth that it transcended any source.
Derridas writing on and around literature is not so well known as
his early work on philosophical texts or even so well known as later
engagements with political and ethical texts and issues, such as Specters
of Marx. This is particularly ironic, given the fact that Derrida has been
most welcomed by members of literature departments, but perhaps it is
not so strange after all, since we literary critics have a professional stake
in believing that we already know how to read literature and are eager to
learn other things from Derrida: how modes of analysis attentive to
language and to the problematic of language can engage other
discoursesof philosophy, ethics, politics, and so on. Perhaps also, the
writers on whom Derrida has spent the most timeBlanchot, Ponge,
Genet, Celanseem special cases, so that his writing about them does
not seem so easily generalizable into an approach to the novel, for
instance, or to poetry.3 His writings on these authors, like his work on
Mallarm, Shakespeare, Joyce, Baudelaire, and others, do not provide a
method of reading and certainly are not describable as a deconstruction
of hierarchical oppositions, an inversion and displacement of
oppositions, nor as a critiqueas in de Man, about which there would
be a great deal more to be saidof the illusions of the aesthetic.4
It is not easy to say what these essays arethey are as different
from one another as the elaborate pursuit of the problematic of mimesis
in La Double Sance, (on Mallarm) and the aphoristic reflection on
proper names and naming of Aphorism Countertime, (on Romeo and
Juliet).5 Nicholas Royle stresses the radical patience of these essays,
and their focus on small unitsnot on Joyce or Mallarm but on a
particular sentence.6 One might say about them that they attempt to
respond to the singularity of the texts they treat, and indeed the
singularity of the literary work is a major theme of Derridas literary
engagement. While his performances are partly consonant with the
traditional notion that the task of criticism is the celebration of the
3 For Derridas essays on Blanchot, Celan and Ponge, as well as Joyce, Kafka, Mallarm,
and Shakespeare, see DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra note 1. For his writing on Genet,
see JACQUES DERRIDA, GLAS (John P. Leavey, Jr. & Richard Rand trans., 1986); on Blanchot,
see JACQUES DERRIDA, DEMEURE: FICTION AND TESTIMONY (Elizabeth Rottenberg trans., 2000)
[hereinafter DERRIDA, DEMEURE]; and on Baudelaire, see JACQUES DERRIDA, GIVEN TIME: 1.
COUNTERFEIT MONEY (Peggy Kamuf trans., 1992) [hereinafter DERRIDA, GIVEN TIME].
4 See PAUL DE MAN, AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY (1996); see also Jonathan Culler, Resisting
Theory, 11 CARDOZO L. REV. 1565 (1990).
5 JACQUES DERRIDA, The Double Session, in DISSEMINATION 173 (Barbara Johnson trans.,
1981); and Jacques Derrida, Aphorism Countertime, in DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra
note 1, at 414.
6 NICHOLAS ROYLE, JACQUES DERRIDA 4, 25 (2003).

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uniqueness of each literary work, he notes that singularity is necessarily

divided: it takes part in the generality of meaning, without which it
could not be read, and so is not closed in on itself, ponctuelle, but
iterable. The singularity of a work is what enables it to be repeated over
and over in events that are never exactly the same. Stressing this aspect
of singularity, as opposed to a traditional notion of uniqueness, Derrida
never claims to offer a reading of a text as an organic or self-contained
whole but instead to write a text which, in the face of the event of
anothers text, tries to respond or to countersign.7 But his response
to singularity opens onto the most general questions of meaning and the
conditions of experience. The singularity of a work is related to its
enlisting of chance, of the contingencies of language, which, for
example, in Derridas text Demeure, on Blanchots LInstant de ma
mort (The Instant of My Death), structure the word demeure (remains
but also abode, and abidece qui met en demeureby which one
must abide, and what remains abidingly demeure). Demeure, in
Blanchot and elsewhere, also communicates with the word meurt, [he
dies, so d-meure = un-die], as well as with archaic forms that Derrida
recalls, demourance (abidance, final resting place). Demeure carries a
questioning of stability to the heart of memory, of what remains.8
The possibility of establishing of such connections is part of what
makes a text singular and an event, in language, of language, and of
thought. And such possibilities are a provocation to reading.
Reading, Derrida writes,
must give itself up to the uniqueness [of the work], take it on board,
keep it in mind, take account of it. But for that, for this rendering,
you have to sign in your turn, write something else which responds
or corresponds in an equally singular, which is to say irreducible,
irreplaceable, new way: neither imitation, nor reproduction, nor
metalanguage.9

This writing on and in response to literature impinges on literary

and critical culture in that it makes the goal of ones writing on
literature not, as various hermeneutics of suspicion and historicisms
may seem to have taught us, one of mastery, in which the critic tries to
demystify other contextualizations and outflank all other commentators,
scrutinizing their assumptions. Rather, one should try to respond with
writing that is rich enough and singular enough to provoke responses in
its turnnot an easy matter, of course. Good literary criticism, writes
Derrida, the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signature
or countersignature, an inventive experience of language, in language,

7
8
9

DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra note 1, at 62, 68.

DERRIDA, DEMEURE, supra note 3, at 16, 28, 34, 77-79.
DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra note 1, at 69-70.

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an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read.10
Thinking the literary text as singularity, a singularity that
challenges the generality of truth that it nevertheless makes possible,
goes along with thinking of it as an event; this might be considered the
second dimension of Derridas inflection of literary culture. Once
again, this is scarcely without precedent, but Derridas notion of
iterability gives him a conception of the work as a temporal event, to be
identified not with the experience of a reader, nor with the act of a
historical author, but with a linguistic event whose nature is to repeat.
The concept of iterability, which is crucial to Derridas account of
the performative, gives us a notion of literature as performative
perhaps the aspect of Derridas thinking of literature that has become
best known, in that his theorization of the performative through
iterability has resonated well beyond the realm of literary criticism.11
Derridas account of the performativity of literature speaks of an
experience of writing that he calls
subject to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to
invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer
consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to
give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to
that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which
do not only change language or which, in changing language, change
more than language.12

Another way to think of this would be that since literature, as

fiction, does not presume a reality already given and to be represented
but instead posits its own truth, it inscribes its own context, institutes its
own scene, and gives us to experience that instituting. The opening of
Moby Dick, Call me Ismael, is only a dramatic version of that
performative instituting, whereby readers simultaneously participate in
and observe the instituting of the literary scene. What is said is the
saying itself. Not only are characters and events brought into being by
language but this performative instituting is foregrounded, as event, an
event dependent upon fiction and thus a performance of linguistic
power. Whereas we treat much language instrumentally and may
experience it as an event, in literary reading we experience not just the
event itself but its happening as linguistic event, in a show of linguistic
power.
A crucial dimension of Derridas thinking of this performative
instituting is the dependence of what we call real events on the structure
of fictionality illustrated in such literary events. In Demeure, Derrida
writes, the possibility of fiction has structuredbut with a fracture
10
11
12

Id. at 52.
See, most notably, JUDITH BUTLER, BODIES THAT MATTER 10, 226-27 (1993).
DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra note 1, at 55.

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what is called real experience. This constituting structure is a

destructuring experience. It is the condition that is common to literature
and non-literature . . . .13 Literature displays the borders and folds that
maintain a scene, that open a space, that institute the possibilities then
enacted in the non-literary events of our lives. Speaking of this
spectral necessity which overflows the opposition between reality and
fiction, Derrida argues that there is no testimony which does not
structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, dissimulation,
simulacra, lie and perjurythat is to say the possibility of literature, of
the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all
of these distinctions.14 Literature, which narrates or cites, is the name
for a neutrality before decision, conceptuality, prior to the oppositions
between actual and virtual, serious and non-serious, real and fictional,
but a priority which we can think of as a suspension of reference.
This helps to explain the formulation with which I began.
Literature can be the most interesting thing in the world, more
interesting than the world15 because it exceeds the actual but contains
its possibilities, as their condition of possibility.
This exceeding is in play in Derridas celebrated reflections, in
Passions, an Oblique Offering, on literature and democracyanother
unexpected intervention in literary culture.
No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.
One can always want neither one nor the other, and there is no
shortage of doing without them under all regimes; it is quite possible
to consider neither of them to be unconditional goods and
indispensable rights. But in no case can one dissociate one from the
other. No analysis would be equal to it. And each time that a
literary work is censured, democracy is in danger, as everyone
agrees. The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society
gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that
goes togetherpoliticallywith unlimited right to ask any question,
to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze any presupposition, even those
of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.16

This last is particularly important, for Derrida is practically unique

in connecting the political significance of literature to the status we
designate with the term fiction: to its suspending or bracketing of
reference, including reference to the empirical author. The key role of
literature in democracy hinges on the fact that the
authorization to say everything [or anything: tout dire] paradoxically
makes the author an author who is not responsible to anyone, not
13
14
15
16

DERRIDA, DEMEURE, supra note 3, at 92.

Id. at 29.
DERRIDA, ACTS OF LITERATURE, supra note 1, at 47.
Jacques Derrida, Passions: An Oblique Offering, in ON THE NAME 3, 28 (1995)
[hereinafter Derrida, Passions].

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even to himself, for whatever the persons or the characters of his

work, thus of what he is supposed to have written himself, say and
do, for example . . . . This authorization to say everything (which
goes together with democracy as the apparent hyper-responsibility of
a subject) acknowledges a right to absolute non-response.17

like Bartlebys I would prefer not to.18 This is startling, but it

makes a good deal of sense. This non-response, Derrida continues,
is more original and more secret than the modalities of power and
duty because it is fundamentally heterogeneous to them. We find
there a hyperbolic condition of democracy which seems to contradict
a certain determined and historically limited concept of such a
democracy, a concept which links it to the concept of a subject that is
calculable, accountable, imputable, and responsible, a subject
having-to-respond [devant-repondre], having-to-tell [devant-dire] the
truth, having to testify according to the sworn word (the whole truth,
nothing but the truth), before the law [devant la loi], having to
reveal the secret, with the exception of certain situations that are
determinable and regulated by law (the confession, the professional
secrets of the doctor, the psychoanalyst, or the lawyer, secrets of
national defense or state secrets in general, manufacturing secrets,
etc.). This contradiction also indicated the task (task of thought, also
theoretico-political task) for any democracy to come.19

This hyperbolic democracya democracy to comeis linked to a

fictionalized literary subject rather than to the calculable, responsible
citizen-subject. And I would stress that responsibility in Derrida is thus
different from Levinasian infinite responsibility to the other.20 It is
better seen as a responsibility without limits, which means, not limited
to what you consciously intended, or to the responsibility to or for
members of the your group or nation; it can extend to animals and the
inanimate world. It is unlimited, undecided.
Related to this is the thematics of the secret. There is a powerful
and original thinking of literature and the secret, in texts such as
Passions, Given Time, and I Have A Taste for the Secret.21 Literature
depends upon the call of a secretsuch as, in Baudelaires La fausse
monnaie, the secret of what the friend is really thinking when he tells
the narrator that what he had given the beggar was a counterfeit
coin22but a secret we can never know, because there is nothing there,
behind the text, thus a secret without secret, which is nevertheless a
17
18
19
20

Id. at 28-29.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Bartleby, in BILLY BUDD AND OTHER STORIES 1, 13ff (1986).
Derrida, Passions, supra note 16, at 29.
See JACQUES DERRIDA, ADIEU TO EMMANUEL LEVINAS (Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas trans., 1999).
21 Jacques Derrida, I Have a Taste for the Secret, in JACQUES DERRIDA & MAURIZIO
FERRARIS, A TASTE FOR THE SECRET (Giacomo Donis trans., 2001).
22 DERRIDA, GIVEN TIME, supra note 3, at 147-58.

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condition of both literature and democracy (Derrida warns us to mistrust

an insistence on transparency: to be compelled to reveal secrets is a
mark of totalitarianism). The exemplary secret of literature, linked to
the fact that the poetic or fictional sentence detaches itself from the
presumed source, impassions us, Derrida writes, even though there is
no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind
the surface of a textual manifestation.23 That impassioning opens the
possibility of a reading which performs the texts engagements with
linguistic power, a reading which is a counter-signature to the singular
signature of the work.24
Derridas work on literature has been neglected in a literary culture
interested in or opposed to theory, but there are signsamong them
recent books by Derek Attridge and Nicholas Royle25that unlike the
exemplary secret of literature, this secret is becoming increasingly
known in critical circles where it may have the power to transform what
our program calls literary culture. Let us hope, then, for a second,
literary reception of Derrida.

23
24
25

Derrida, Passions, supra note 16, at 29.

ATTRIDGE, supra note 2, at 98.
ROYLE, supra note 6.