Regarding the Dead

Author(s): Michelle Ballif

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric , Vol. 47, No. 4, EXTRAHUMAN RHETORICAL RELATIONS:
Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine (2014), pp. 455-471
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.47.4.0455

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 Regarding the Dead

Michelle Ballif

a b s t r ac t

Arguing that the foundational relation that constitutes the (rhetorical) address
is that between the living and the dead, this article calls on rhetorical studies to
­reconceive rhetoric as a (non)visual relation between the “invisible” (specter) and
the “visible” (living). I then complicate this relation—and the easy distinction
between the two—and argue that regarding the dead, guarding them, mourning
them, is the ethical relation that makes any rhetorical address possible.

k e y w o rd s: dead, extrahuman, address, specter, mourning, Jacques Derrida

I mourn therefore I am.

Derrida, Points

I live my death in writing.

Derrida, Learning to Live Finally

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida hails a new “scholar”—a scholar to

come, a scholar of the future—who addresses the dead (1994, 13). This new
scholar would stand in stark contrast to the “traditional” scholar, who has
never been “capable” of “addressing himself . . . to ghosts” precisely because
the “traditional” scholar insists on the “the sharp distinction between the
real and the unreal . . . , the living and the non-living” and hence does not
believe in “the virtual space of spectrality” (12). The specter—as an incorpo-
real phantom—challenges such “sharp distinctions”: if the specter doesn’t
exist, how can it be?1 How can the nonliving be living, and how can the
impossible be possible? To suggest that there is no easy ­distinction between

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 michelle ballif

the living and the dead, between the (living) human and the (dead) specter,
would engender—Derrida notes—“snickers from all [those] . . . who never
believe anything, of course, because they are so sure that they see what is
seen, everything that is seen, only what is seen” (187). And how can one
believe in ghosts if they are unseen, invisible?2
This is also the case with the “traditional” rhetorical scholar, who
believes in the sharp distinction between the living and the dead, insofar
as the discipline theorizes rhetoric as a practice unique to living humans
(a tautology, as I’ll explain), as an art or a faculty of living humans address-
ing other living humans. To suggest otherwise, for example, to approach a
publishing company with a proposal for a textbook on rhetorical strate-
gies for addressing the dead would engender snickers from the editors and
external reviewers and could very well amount to professional suicide for
the author of the proposal.
The scholar to come, in contrast, welcomes the specter and the aporetic
space that it opens and hence would “[think] the possibility of the specter,
the specter as possibility,” “beyond the opposition between presence and
non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life” (13). Further, this
new scholar to come “would know how to address himself to spirits” (13);
therefore, a new rhetorician (not to be confused with the so-called New
Rhetorics) would undertake the risk of commun(icat)ing with the spectral
other with earnestness because she would “know that such an address is
not only already possible, but”—and this is the vital point regarding the dead
other—“that it will have at all times conditioned, as such, address in general”
(13; emphasis mine).3
This, then, will have been this article’s argument: that the address to,
with, from the dead other is always already the very condition of possi-
bility for the address and that mourning, the impossible work of mourn-
ing, haunts the possibility of the address, constituting the ethical relation
between the self and the other, the otherness of the self, and the otherness
of the other. That is, we are always already subject to a state of “originary
mourning,” a “mourning that is always already there, before anything else
has begun, either living or dying” (Miller 2009, 316)—a mourning “pre-
originary” even, born of an “irreducible gap between me and the other . . .
and between me and myself ” (Miller 2009, 316). Hence, mourning is symp-
tomatic of the condition that, in Derrida’s formulation, “tout autre est tout
autre”—that every other is wholly other, wholly other from every other
other, including from one’s self (2008, 82–88).4

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 regarding the dead

The address to the spectral other says, “Yes, yes” to the wholly other,
to the radical alterity that precedes and exceeds any representative order,
that never appears as such. Such an affirmative gesture—learning from,
speaking to, listening to the dead other—is as Nicholas Royle notes like
a “ouija board,” whose etymological origin, he points out, is the combina-
tion of the French word for “yes” (“oui”) and the German word for “yes”
(“ja”) (2008, 236). A double affirmation. Derrida suggests such characterizes
“pure hospitality,” acknowledging the aporia between one and the other,
acknowledging that one never resolves or absolves the absolute responsibil-
ity one has for the “wholly other.”
And regarding this responsibility, “regard” denotes looking or viewing,
but it additionally carries the significance of “guarding” as in to “watch
over.” But how does one regard the “wholly other” specter, who might be
seen as invisible and who, further, regards one from an invisible point of
vision? One regards the other by accepting the responsibility for every other
“wholly other” (including every other beyond the “living human”), and this
responsibility is hailed precisely by this look, which cannot be seen, of the
spectral other (Derrida 2008, 3). To this regard, which comes invisibly, we
respond to the responsibility, blindly.
But we are ahead of ourselves.
signification as (mourning) death
As I have suggested, the discipline of rhetorical studies begins with an
unstated but presumptive enunciation that categorically constructs “the
human” as living—or, more specifically, as not dead. This assumption is not
unique to rhetorical studies, as Vico’s etymological account reveals: the very
word “humanity” can be traced to the Latin “humare,” which means to
bury. By implication “the human” is categorically constructed in terms of
the conceptual border between the living and the dead, specifically in terms
of the disposition of the remainder, which is impossible to remainder, as I’ve
argued previously (Ballif 2013, 143–45). The assumption, of course, is that only
the human buries the dead; a further assumption is that only the human
mourns. But, according to Derrida, “Mourning as im-possible mourning
[is] moreover, ahuman, more than human, prehuman, different from the
human ‘in’ the human of humanualism” (2005, 192). J. Hillis Miller explains
Derrida’s neologism “humanualism” as referring to the Western philosophi-
cal tradition’s presumption that “having and using hands is ­distinctively
human” (2013, 15).5 Presumably, then, one needs hands to bury the dead.6

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 michelle ballif

But the point I want to stress here is that the dead is a condition of possibility
for “the human.” The dead haunts “the human” in a constitutive way.
For the sake of this argument, let’s figure death as an absence—but as a
nonpresent absence and as a nonpresent but also nonabsent remainder—as
spectral. In this figuration, we acknowledge how death haunts signification.
To rehearse what is no doubt familiar: in his essay “Différance,” Derrida
demonstrates that the impossibility of a sign to be self-present to itself is
the very condition of its possibility to signify at all (1982). As Ferdinand de
Saussure explains in the Course in General Linguistics, signs have no positive
value; they have meaning only insofar as they differ from every other sign
in a system. Hence, a sign’s meaning is a function of its nonpresent absence
(“spacing”) (Derrida 1982, 10); additionally, as Derrida further demonstrates,
this nonpresent absence never materializes as a nonabsent presence because
of an always already deferred signification ­(“temporization”) (1982, 10),
which he puts into conversation with Freud’s notion of the death instinct
(1982, 19). Hence there is a nonabsent remainder—as “deferred presence”—
but one that can never be made present. The remainder, like the dead other,
is what Derrida would call the “trace,” an “always already absent present”
(Spivak 1976, xvii), like the dead—or more to the point, the (un)dead, like
the specter, who haunts. Absence of presence (death)—the always-deferred
present—is, again, what makes signification possible. Derrida names “death”
the “master-name of the supplementary series,” of “all the metonymic
­substitutions” (1976, 183; Wortham 2008,  41). Signification, as a series of
“nonsynonymous substitutions” (Derrida 1982, 12) is haunted by death.
In addition, in “Signature Event Context,” Derrida insists that signifi-
cation is only possible insofar as it can sur-vive—live on—after the death
of the addressor as well as the addressee.7 Thus death is “inscribed in the
structure of the mark” (1988, 8):

All writing, therefore, in order to be what it is [“communicable,

transmittable, decipherable” (1988, 8)], must be able to function
in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee
in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification
of presence; it is a break in presence, “death,” or the possibility
of the “death” of the addressee, inscribed in the structure of the
mark. . . . What holds for the addressee holds also, for the same
reason, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a
mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn pro-
ductive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent

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 regarding the dead

from ­functioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading
and rewriting. When I say “my future disappearance,” [which he
elsewhere equates with “my death” (1973, 54)] I do so to make this
proposition more immediately acceptable. I must be able simply
to say my disappearance, my nonpresence in general, for example
the nonpresence of my meaning, of my intention-to-signify, of my
wanting-to-communicate-this, from the emission or production of
the mark. For the written to be the written, it must continue to
“act” and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writ-
ing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems
to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead.
(1988, 8)

To belabor the point, even after Derrida has explained it so well: significa-
tion is possible (as iterable) only because of death. Death is the condition of
the address.
Of course, there are numerous examples of so-called conversations
with the dead, including the “curse tablets,” popular in classical Sicily and
Athens, which were letters pleading with the dead to inflict harm to effect
vengeance, for example.8 The spiritualist movement of the n ­ineteenth
­century provides examples of communications with the dead, messages
channeled through a medium (perhaps via dictation) or through the
­“talking board.”9  Although such scenarios challenge the rhetorical com-
monplace of living humans speaking to living humans, they also merely
reinscribe the traditional positions of addressor/addressee, living and dead.
Derrida’s claim, alternately, necessitates seeing the address to/with/from the
dead as preoriginary to any addressor or addressee; indeed, the address—the
­possibility of the address to/with/from the dead—is what constitutes any
addressor or addressee. And this “ongoing conversation with the dead” is
“the very structure of mourning” (Kirkby 2006, 467).
As oft noted, for Sigmund Freud, mourning is a normal process of griev-
ing, in contrast to melancholia, which is a pathological condition in which
one refuses to let the dead be recognized as dead, that insists that the dead
remain undead, alive, living, present (1957). Whereas the normal mourner
eventually substitutes the lost object with a newly cathected object, the
pathological mourner—the melancholic—is never able to make this sub-
stitution and keeps the dead alive, forever, within him or her. Derrida takes
issue with the notion that keeping the dead other alive is fundamentally
a pathological move (although to be fair to Freud, he himself ultimately

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 michelle ballif

questioned this easy distinction, even spending a good deal of time f­ ocusing
on the similarities between the two in “Mourning and Melancholia”). That
implies, I suppose, that I have no other option except to submit to my
own death, insofar as it is precisely the dead other—and my relation to the
other’s death—that constitutes me as such.
As Derrida argues, a friendship acknowledges (most likely uncon-
sciously) that one of the pair will die before the other; this unspoken, unne-
gotiable, preoriginary “fact” precedes and structures the relation between
the two: “The other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his death or
at least in the anticipated possibility of death, since death constitutes and
makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor some-
thing that is greater and other than them” (1989, 34). One is always already,
then, mourning the loss of the other—acknowledging its inevitability but
not knowing for sure when it will arrive or if, indeed, if it will arrive before
“my death,” which I am always already also mourning. Hence, a preorigi-
nary mourning structures our relations, both to ourselves and to all others.
One thus carries within oneself, in a constitutive way, the “mortal other”
(Derrida 1995b, 321). According to Derrida,

This carrying of the mortal other “in me outside me” instructs or

institutes my “self ” and my relation to “myself ” already before the
death of the other.  .  .  . Even before the death of the other, the
inscription in me of her or his mortality constitutes me. I mourn
therefore I am, I am—dead with the death of the other, my rela-
tion to myself is first of all plunged into mourning. (1995b, 321)

As Michael Naas explains, “Mourning is more originary than the cogito,

more original than thinking, more originary than being for death and being
toward death” (2008, 5).
In contrast to Derrida’s figuration of the bereaved self as constituted
by a preoriginary relation to death and hence by a nonpresent absence with
remainders, rendering the self non-self-identical to itself and/or to the
other, Freud presents the grieving self as a “traditionally unified subject”
(Clewell 2004, 47). Hence, in Freud’s model, according to Tammy Clewell,
“restoring the subject to itself [after the loss] thus depended on a rather
straightforward process of abandoning emotional ties, repudiating the
lost other, and assimilating the loss to a consoling substitute,” effectively
­concluding the work of mourning (2004, 47–48). Derrida finds this work of
“successful” mourning whereby the lost object (the dead other) is replaced

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 regarding the dead

impossible precisely because the dead other is irreducibly irreplaceable

(1989, 166), again, precisely because the wholly other is wholly other and
remains always already a “nonsynonymous substitution” (1982, 12).
Derrida’s reference to the “carrying of the self ” within one is his
response to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s (1986) retheorization of
Freud’s model of mourning that posits introjection, wherein the mourner
assimilates aspects of the other and makes them part of the mourner, as the
more “normal” result of grieving, and incorporation—especially as exempli-
fied by Freud’s notorious patient the Wolf Man—as the more, shall we say,
troubled response to mourning. Elissa Marder lucidly explains the distinc-
tion as proffered by Abraham and Torok and specifically as it differs from
the distinction Freud makes:

Mourning always entails taking the lost object into the self in one
way or another. For them, however, in successful mourning, the
process they call “introjection,” the departed object is successfully
consumed: it is fully “ingested,” “digested” and “metabolized” until
it ultimately becomes assimilated into the self. The lost object is
successfully mourned when it becomes an integral part of the
“me” who mourns. To this healthy form of psychic cannibalism,
they oppose the notion of “incorporation,” in which the mourner
refuses, as they put it, to swallow the reality of the loss and so
swallows the person instead. The departed other, neither living nor
dead, disappears, as if by magic, into the hidden crypt which the
self secretly builds for it within itself. (2008, 185)

Derrida, in his “Fors,” the introduction to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf
Man’s Magic Word, characterizes the process of introjection as a pro-
cess that “expands the self. It [the self ] does not retreat; it advances,
propagates itself, assimilates, takes over” (1986, xvi). The mourner who
refuses to mourn (1986,  xvi), who is unable to assimilate the other, on
the other hand, “incorporates” the dead other: “I pretend to keep the
dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but it is only in order to refuse,
in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me,
dead save in me” (Derrida 1986, xvi; emphases his). Just as Derrida ques-
tions Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, Derrida
here questions whether introjection and incorporation can be so eas-
ily disentangled, arguing that “everything is played out on the bor-
derline that divides and opposes the two terms. From one safe, the

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 michelle ballif

other; from one inside, the other; one within the other, and the same
outside the other” (1986, xvi).
We are ahead of ourselves, but what is at stake is how to mourn the
other—as other. The process of introjection appears to violate the otherness
of the other by its press to assimilate the other into the self; the process of
incorporation appears to show more fidelity to that otherness by allowing
it to remain, as ever, other, within the self, encrypted. But Derrida argues,
not surprisingly, that the distinction is not so simple:

By resisting introjection, it prevents the loving, appropriating

assimilation of the other, and thus seems to preserve the other as
other (foreign), but it also does the opposite. It is not the other that
the process of incorporation preserves, but a certain topography
it keeps safe, intact, untouched by the very relationship with the
other to which, paradoxically enough, introjection is more open.
(1984, xxii)

At bottom, Derrida argues, an “undecidable irresolution” maintains that

neither introjection nor incorporation can be identified as normal or not,
that the dead other sets up the conditions for the impossibility of mourning.
Precisely because, as we have already maintained, the dead other is always
already with/in the self in a preoriginary way.
Derrida insists that the work of mourning—“the attempt  .  .  . to
incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize the other in me”—is
impossible, “always doomed to fail” and “thus a constitutive failure”
(1995b, 321): “This is always what I call ex-appropriation, appropria-
tion caught in a double bind: I must and I must not take the other into
myself; mourning is an unfaithful fidelity if it succeeds in interiorizing
the other ideally in me, that is, in not respecting his or her infinite exteri-
ority” (1995b, 321). The double bind: to accomplish a successful mourning,
one must introject the other, effectively rendering the other the selfsame
as the self. Yet to do so would be an “unfaithful fidelity” in that it would
effectively obliterate the otherness of the other. To interiorize the other
is to violate its radical alterity—that which could not be interiorized and
still remain other. Nevertheless, both—simultaneously—must be done
for the living to sur-vive—hence the demand for an “unfaithful fidelity”
to the dead other.10
But if we knock at the crypt, perhaps the other will respond.

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 regarding the dead

the invisible visible specter

The “traditional” scholar does not believe in the specter, as we noted at the
beginning, because he believes only in the visible (or that which can be ren-
dered “visible,” through microscopes or mathematical demonstrations)—in
that which can be known. As Martin Jay (1993) has carefully shown, our
Western tradition has valued the ocular, privileging the “eye” (whether lit-
eral or metaphorical) as the primary mode of coming to know.11 (In the first
paragraph of his introduction, by way of example and emphasis, Jay employs
twenty-one visual metaphors, including “keeping an eye out,” “outlook,”
and “point of view” [1993, 1].) We can see this privilege manifesting itself in
the theories of the early Greek philosophers, including Plato, of course, and
running all through our history. Inheriting the Cartesian move that “marks
[self-reflection as] the human being’s rise to the rank of a subject . . . [with]
its center in itself, a self-consciousness certain of itself ” (Gasché 1986, 14),
the seventeenth century, as Richard Rorty (1979) demonstrates, ushered in
what came to be a prevailing comparison of the mind to a mirror: accurate
reflections constitute knowledge.12 The eye, then, is the privileged organ of
perception and the visual the privileged epistemological field.
The specter, however, is imperceptible and unknowable (Derrida
1994, 5)—it is thus invisible, unable to be apprehended as such, unable to be
located in any ocular or specular epistemological field.13 And this is precisely
why the specter’s address hails an ethical relation. Derrida, notes that the
so-called “‘proper’ feature of specters is that they are deprived of a specular
image, of the true, right specular image” (1994, 195). “But who is not so
deprived?” (195):

We are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a “self ” is

never in itself or identical to itself. This specular reflection never
closes on itself; it does not appear before this possibility of mourn-
ing, before and outside this structure of allegory and prosopopoeia,
which constitutes in advance all “being-in-us,” “in-me,” between us,
or between ourselves. . . . And everything that we inscribe in the liv-
ing present of our relation to others already carries, always, the sig-
nature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave. (1989, 28; ­emphases his)

In Specters of Marx, Derrida discusses the “visor effect” that the specter
has on us. The specter, as “supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality,”

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 michelle ballif

manifests itself as “the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible”

(1994, 6).14 It thereby instantiates a “spectral asymmetry” that “interrupts”
“all” “specularity” (6). That is, “this spectral someone other looks at us; we feel
ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and
beyond any look on our part” (6). We sense the spectral look, but “we do not
see who looks at us” (6); the spectral is “a priori: neither present nor absent
‘in the flesh,’ neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another
whose eyes can never be met” (1995a, 84). The primoridial ethical relation:
we do not see who looks at us, but we respond to the look.15
This spectral asymmetry instantiates, as we have noted, a preoriginary
injunction and responsibility to the other (to all the wholly others, whether
“human,” “animal,” “god,” or any other other, living, dead, or not yet born
[Derrida, 1994 176]). As Kas Saghafi explains, “If the other’s manner of
presenting itself—in a relation of interruption and separation, dissociation
and disjunction—consists in not ever presenting itself, then, the relation
to alterity in general, this experience of an invisibility in the visible . . . ,
is a relation where the other ‘can only present itself as other, never pre-
senting itself as such’” (2010, 8). Derrida further states that “God looks at
me, concerns me [me regarde] and I don’t see him and it is on the basis of
this regard that regards me [ce regard qui me regarde] that my responsibility
comes into being. Thus is instituted or uncovered the ‘it concerns me’ [le ça
me regarde]: that leads me to say ‘it’s my business [c’est ma chose], my affair,
my ­responsibility’” (2008, 91). Hence, the ethical relation to the wholly
other necessitates a certain blindness.
In Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Derrida
offers us the “hypothesis of sight” in his discussion of an art exhibit, orga-
nized by himself at the Louvre in the early 1990s, which curated a variety of
drawings of and by the blind (1993).16 He posits that “the drawing is blind,
if not the draftsman or draftswoman” (1993, 2), calling this the “abocular
hypothesis,” which is rendered from “ab oculis,” meaning “not from or by
but without the eyes” (1993, 2). He doubles the hypothesis in an effort to
avoid monocular vision by positing the existence of “an eye graft, the graft-
ing of one point of view onto the other: a drawing of the blind is a drawing
of the blind” (1993, 2). John Caputo reads the double hypothesis as Derrida’s
attempt to read blindness “not as a negative defect of nature or a supernatu-
ral endowment” but as an “affirmative” way to mourn the other (1997, 311).
What the abocular hypothesis—“not from or by but without the
eyes”—offers us, then, is both the challenge and the opportunity to attend
to how one might watch over (regard) the other, the wholly other—who

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 regarding the dead

is herself invisible—from a position of blindness. How does one guard,

regard, the invisible other when one’s self is blind? Derrida’s response is to
pose a haptic eye: “Can eyes manage to touch, first of all, to press together
like lips?” (2005, 2). He answers, “Yes, yes”: “I am invisibly touched by the
other, without any reappropriation, which is what I earlier termed absolute
mourning” (2005, 305). Yet this “kiss” is like mourning, which means that
it is structured by impossibility and “spacing” as well as delay. That is, this
“kiss” is not a simple affair between “one” other and another “one” other. As
with all relations, the “kiss” is haunted (2005, 179).
Such a “kiss” is precisely a response to the ethical responsibility of, for,
and to the dead. Just as “death is the place of one’s irreplaceability,” one’s
radical singularity (Kirkby 2006, 462), one’s engagement with that irreplace-
ability is the game, as Derrida describes in The Post Card in his reading of
the infamous “fort/da” process, that attempts to negotiate the presence and
absence of the lost and present mother as a “stand in” for any subsequent
present absence or absent presence, be it a mother, a spool, or the dead. This
game manifests itself, Derrida suggests, in “an auto-bio-thanato-hetero-
graphic scene of writing” (1987, 336). Hence writing is the very scene, the
very graphic scene of mourning, of the self-life-death-other relation in and
through writing.
E. S. Burt, in her book Regard for the Other, renders the graphic
demand in terms of “autothanatography”—the writing of one’s own death
(2009, 6).17 I amend her term, with good spirits, replacing it with Derrida’s:
“auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphy” (1987, 336) to fit rhetoric more generally
and to describe the constitutive relations between death, the living, the self,
the other, and writing—to foreground that all writing is an (impossible)
mourning of the self as other and the other as other as a writing of life and/
as death. It’s certainly a mouthful, but it evokes the task of rhetoric and its
terms of exigency better than the rhetorical situation with its easily demar-
cated roles of speaker, audience, speech, and context—all “living,” to be sure.
Borrowing Derrida’s “hypothesis of sight,” we can begin to retheorize
rhetoric beginning with the condition of blindness. In Memoirs of the Blind,
Derrida posits this blindness at the “foundation” of language, whether
spoken or written. As a phonic instantiation, “the sonorous phenomenon”
remains “invisible as such. . . . [I]t is addressed not only from the blind to
the blind . . . but speaks to us . . . all the time of the blindness that con-
stitutes it. Language is spoken, it speaks to itself, which is to say, from/
of blindness” (1993, 4). Yet written language is no less blind; indeed, if one
treks with Plato, one might argue that writing is doubly blind. Derrida uses

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 michelle ballif

the example of writing in the night—when one scribbles notes to one’s

self between dreams—or when one makes notations while driving, when
one cannot—for fear of accident—attend to the actual writing, but makes
notations nonetheless. Such “lidless eyes” compose, and the “hand of the
blind” “caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and
supplementing sight” (1993, 3).
The first prong of the hypothesis serves to describe how when one is
drawing (writing) one is not focusing on what one is drawing (the lines,
the canvas) or writing (the paper, the screen); instead one is focusing on
that which is being drawn or the idea being traced. “In this model of draw-
ing, the hand rushes ahead without seeing, leaping without looking, and is
hence of the verge of disaster” (Reynolds 2004, 72). Analogously, the rhetor
writes, blindly, regarding the other. The second prong of the hypothesis is,
conversely, that when the artist looks away from the “thing” itself to focus
on the canvas, then one is then drawing or writing from memory, and “ref-
erences to memory are also problematic—the memory is not the same as
the thing being traced, but is, on the contrary, a representation and hence
subject to the processes of différance” (Reynolds 2004, 73).
In short, we’re not “eye” witnesses. Derrida observes that upon the
death of the other,

we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing

memory. . . . And the figure of this bereaved memory becomes
a sort of (possible and impossible) metonymy, where the
part stands for the whole and for more than the whole that it
exceeds. . . . It  speaks the other and makes the other speak, but
it does so in order to let the other speak, for the other will have
spoken first. It has no choice but to let the other speak, since it
cannot make the other speak without the other having already
spoken, without this trace of speech which comes from the other
and which directs us to writing as much as to rhetoric. (1989, 34,
37–38; emphases his)

How then to retheorize rhetorical practices while acknowledging the

address, the addressor, and the addressee as being essentially haunted?18 This
is the “secret,” isn’t it? This is what renders rhetoric an ethical rather than
an epistemological enterprise: the secret is “incommensurable with knowing,
with knowledge” (Derrida 2008, 92). This is why, therefore, the “traditional”
scholar doesn’t believe in ghosts (Derrida 1994, 13).

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 regarding the dead

The new rhetorical scholar, however, who does believe in ghosts—in

the preoriginary mourning that structures relations—asks, as do Abraham
and Torok, whether writing opens or closes a crypt, whether it buries or
exhumes, but provides a different response. A grave digger, as you know,
inhabits this aporetic mode: a grave digger buries a corpse, but also opens
up a crypt. He both conceals and reveals. Unavoidably. This isn’t a choice
that the grave digger, the rhetor, makes: signification, as Christine Berthin
notes, is “always ‘from the other’” (2010, 22).19 “There are residues in language
of something that is not language” (23). Uncanny residues, they “are foreign
to the message and live a life of their own within the words of the subject
who unknowingly conveys them” (23), as cryptology assumes. Language
is thus haunted with the remains of the living dead. Indeed, language is
structurally figured as the living dead, and our relation to it—as so-called
rhetorical beings—is structured as a medium, dictating or c­ hanneling the
living dead, as we mourn, eternally and impossibly, the other—whether
­living or dead.20
The ethical injunction then, as proposed by Derrida, is that the living
have to “answer for the dead, to respond to the dead. To correspond and have
it out with obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry.
Nothing is more serious . . . and nothing is more exact [juste] than this”
(1994, 136; emphases his).

Department of English
University of Georgia

notes
1. This is not to suggest that there is a “body,” a “real” body, as opposed to the
incorporeal phantom. The corporeal is likewise haunted. See Derrida 1994, 157–58, and
2005, 179.
2. Of course, what is haunting this discussion is the perennial insistence of the phi-
losopher on distinguishing knowledge from “mere” belief.
3. Those rhetorical scholars in our midst doing work on memory, memorials, eulo-
gies, and so forth, know that this kind of address is possible, although the address is
addressed to the living.
4. See also Brault and Naas 2001.
5. Derrida introduces this neologism in his argument against Merleau-Ponty’s
claim that shaking hands is an example of, as Miller explains, “direct intersubjectivity”
(Derrida 2005, 179; Miller 2013, 15).

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 michelle ballif

6. Ethnologists argue, on the contrary, that hands are not necessary for burial.
Elephants, for example, are observed burying their dead by using their trunks to cover the
corpse with branches and twigs; see Meredith 2004. The author thanks Diane Davis for
pointing this out.
7. “Death reveals that the proper name could always lend itself to repetition in the
absence of its bearer” (Derrida 1989, 50).
8. As Sarah Johnston notes, the dead were conceived as “messengers between this
world and the next, carrying the words of the tablets to deities in the underworld” or “as
actively carrying out the curses” (1999, 72) to avenge the living and the dead. “The tech-
nai of [communicating with the dead, in an attempt to control them]” moved from an
“activity in which anyone might participate to some degree into a profession with special
techniques and aims” (102–3). This resulted in new mourning practices, of course, but curi-
ously this new group of professional mourners, the goêteia, are singled out by Plato –in the
Sophist, for example, as having the power to “bring to light ‘verbal ghosts’ . . . with their
words” (103). That is, Plato characterized the sophists as ghost whisperers. We shouldn’t
be surprised, I suppose, to have returned to the sophists—or, that is, we should be sur-
prised eternally by the return of the (un)dead sophists, whose “death” is greatly hyperbolic.
See Sutton 1994; see also Peters 1999.
9. See Weisberg 2004 for a history of spiritualism in the United States. See also
Lundberg and Gunn 2005 on the ouija board and rhetorical agency.
10. See Attridge 2013.
11. See Hawhee 2011 for her enlightening theory of “rhetorical vision.”
12. For a brilliant unpacking of this fundamental assumption of self-reflexivity,
see Davis’s article in this issue. See also Jay 1993, who offers the neologism “phallogocu-
larcentrism” to note the collusion between the visual, the phallic, and logos to neutralize
difference in order to assure and assert the primacy of man as knowing subject (493–42).
13. “Specular or reflective discourses of identity, in which words allegedly mirror
thoughts without remainder, have metaphorically forgotten the silver backing, the tain
behind every mirror image. When the tain becomes, as it were, visible, the mirror loses
its capacity to reflect; when the materiality of language is foregrounded, signifiers cannot
be taken as simple doubles of what they signify,” thereby foregrounding the remainder,
the excess, the “surplus, an invisible otherness, that necessarily disrupts their specular unity”
( Jay 1993, 504, 505; emphasis mine).
14. Cf. Derrida’s further discussion of the visible and the invisible in The Gift of Death
(2008, 88–90).
15. This all evokes a comparison with Lacan’s notion of the gaze (1978), which empha-
sizes the split nature of the subject in distinguishing between the eye (of the subject) and
the gaze (of the object that looks back). Derrida’s notion of the visor effect is likewise
constitutive but not wrapped up in a castration complex narrative.

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 regarding the dead

16. For further discussion of Memoirs of the Blind, see Baross 2011, 54–120, Caputo 1997,
308–29 and 55–120, and Krell 2000, 68–81.
17. See Derrida 1989, 22.
18. See Kamuf 2005.
19. See also Appelbaum 2009, Castricano 2001, and Fernando n.d.
20. See Ronell 1986 and Johnson 2013.

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