We Other Greeks' Derrida2010

‘We Other Greeks’ 1
University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online
Derrida and Antiquity

Miriam Leonard
Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780199545544
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545544.001.0001

Jacques Derrida
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545544.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
This previously untranslated essay is Derrida's most extensive

discussion of his relationship to the Greeks. Derrida explores
his debt to Greek thought and argues that his approach to
antiquity has distinguished itself from that of Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Derrida sees the concept of the ‘wholly other’ as
central to his approach to the Greeks. He argues that the
Greeks are not only ‘other’ to ‘us’, they were also ‘other’ to
themselves.
Keywords: Derrida, other, us, the Greeks, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger
I have no clear recollection of the remarks I ventured many

months ago after the excellent presentations of Éric Alliez and
Francis Wolff. Those remarks were not really responses and
did not deserve to be recalled for their own sake, only for the
admiration and gratitude that inspired them. These feelings
have only grown in reading these two texts. Unable to rely,
then, on my recollection, I will nonetheless try to give the
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modest reflections that follow the pace, brevity, and rhythm

that would have been appropriate for remarks being
improvised at the end of a conference session.
To begin at the greatest and poorest level of generality, let me

admit straightaway that I have always felt my relationship to
‘the Greeks’ or to something like ‘Greece’ to be somewhat
naive or uncultured, seriously limited by my philological and
historical (p.18) incompetence. This concern has always fed
another, one that is no doubt more radical and that in the end
I would probably have difficulty distinguishing from the first. I
will speak of this later; it concerns nothing less than the
identity of a referent properly named ‘the Greek’, ‘the Greeks’,
or ‘Greece’. Each time I venture to speak of so‐called ‘Greek’
things (other things as well, of course, but especially in this
case), I tremble when I think of the readings genuine experts
might offer—experts whose names I often refer to, and in
France these are sometimes the names of friends. Of course,
this unavowable and yet avowed lack of culture is never, as we
know, alas, pure or natural, pristine or complete: it always
remains exposed to ‘culture’, that is, to conventional and
inherited representations, prevailing translations, institutional
sedimentations, to teaching, to the circulation of dominant and
dogmatic interpretations that are taken to be self‐evident. (Let
me say in passing that these dominant hermeneutic protocols
can sometimes be of a critical, even a ‘deconstructive’ type,
and I believe I have been a bit more suspicious about such
things than Alliez and Wolff claim: I am thinking obviously of
Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Freud, and precisely with regard to
the so‐called Greek thing, if there is any. With regard to these
three, I have been more suspicious or unfaithful—in a regular
and systematic fashion—than one would gather from listening
to Alliez or Wolff. But I will no doubt have occasion to return
to this.)
Now, mixed in with this (unfortunately justified) feeling of

incompetence, there is also a critical and no doubt self‐
interested concern about competence itself, about the way it is
formed, about the presuppositions, distinctions, and
disciplines that institute it. One would find signs of this
paradox (but is it a paradox?) in each of the texts I have
written in the direction of ‘the Greeks’. I neither can nor want
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to run through all of them here; but if these signs converge in

one place, or it would be better to say in a non‐place (non
lieu), in a process of dislocation, it is ‘there’ where the horizon
of the Greek thing itself is no longer assured, that which gives
rise or place (donne lieu) to it and opens it up by delimiting it:
neither as a place or system of language, nor as a politico‐
geographical place, nor as a spiritual figure (‘Husserl’) or
historial figure (‘Heidegger’). Not to mention those places
identified under the name of a corpus or system (‘Plato’ or
‘Aristotle’, for example). Each of the essays referred to by
Alliez and (p.19) Wolff shows this,2 as do others that,
understandably, could not be taken into account in this
context.3 And even more so the essays (almost all, this time)
which, without making ‘Greek’ things their main theme,
cannot avoid taking up, whether directly or not, the ‘Greek
question’. I no doubt have ‘my Greeks’ (‘To each according to
(p.20) his Greeks’, as Eric Alliez recalls by taking up the
expression of Barbara Cassin (p. 11)). I no doubt have some

difficulty freeing myself from a reading that is still too
accepted, too naive in this regard (with a naïveté that does not
have the double dignity conferred upon it by Wolff in his first
series of questions: to read the Greeks ‘without the mediation
of Nietzsche, and as if they could speak the truth…’). But the
spectre of these Greeks roams perhaps less in these texts
devoted to Plato or to Aristotle than in certain readings of
Hegel or Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, of Mallarmé,
Artaud, Joyce, Levinas (especially), or Foucault—sometimes
revolving around words or themes that are obviously Greek (a
limit that is difficult to pin down), and sometimes beyond,
therefore, the obvious; and the silhouette of this spectre, in
the very naïveté of this experience, no doubt wanders between
very mobile figures, too difficult to identify here without a
patient and micrological rereading of all the texts involved.
Having recalled these generalities (which are a bit too
programmatic, I admit, but are in keeping with the time and
space that have been accorded us here), I am going to try to
isolate somewhat arbitrarily certain points so as to situate the
place of a possible discussion.
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1. The project of putting into the same configuration

certain French philosophical works belonging more or
less to the same ‘epoch’ is surely necessary and makes
sense. And the fact that the works under consideration
share, among other things, what I would call, for lack of
a better word, a ‘relationship’ to the ‘Greek thing’, and
that in this respect some among ‘us’ might say ‘we’, ‘we
and the Greeks’, is more obvious than ever after the
very convincing demonstration that has just been made.
I am convinced, in particular, like Alliez and Wolff, that
one must never give up on analysing and explaining the
resemblances, the ‘common genre’, the analogies and
commonalities. There must indeed be reasons, I mean
causes of all kinds (and not only those in the order of
philosophical discourse, but also in what is called—and
I am intentionally using here these conventional words
—society, history, politics, the macro‐ and micro‐
economies of passions and (p.21) desires), to explain
this fact: at a particular moment, in a given country, a
certain number of philosophers belonging more or less
to the same generation, working in very similar
institutions, broadly speaking in the same one, and who
are publishing more or less at the same time, say things
that resemble each other. To explore the nature of
these resemblances, what explains them in ways that
are known or unknown to the ‘authors’, is no doubt one
of the tasks of the Enlightenment of our time, even if it
is not the most important or the most urgent; and even
if (I must say it in a rather quick and thus dogmatic
way) the methods, axioms, and categories we have
inherited in order to take up again and name these
‘configurations’ and these ‘analogies’ are radically
insufficient. This task appears to me just as imperative
as the law that also orders us to take into account the
limits of these analogies, those that forbid us from
saying ‘we’, ‘we (others) (nous autres)’, those that
fracture and anachronize the ‘we’, the ‘we and the
Greeks’. The same law orders us especially to analyse
the presuppositions that govern the principle of reason
or the etiology in this domain, and the very thing that in
fact seems to come to us from the ‘Greeks’ each time
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we explain, interpret, assimilate, root, derive, configure

(to put it all too quickly: logos, analogia, phusis, thesis,
nomos, aitia, arkhê, riza, mimêsis, and so on: I leave
ousia and alêtheia for later).
One might have got the more or less confused
impression that a configuration imposed itself, that a
series or set of works tended to say ‘we’ and ‘the
same’ (and this is thought more often abroad than in
France, and from a certain distance: the truth of a
homology or of an analogy is often best imposed
through, or I mean by going through, little differences
or little concurrences that blur one's vision). The fact
remains that this ‘same’ often has the figure of a
chiasm that programmes or releases strange
permutations, as Wolff too suggests. Moreover, within
the apparent unity of an epoch, abyssal dissynchronies
or anachronies can silently fissure the configuration of
the contemporary, promise completely other filiations,
reveal contracts, affinities, or complicities that have
nothing to do with the sharing of a time or a language.
To signal this in just a word or by means of just one
glaring sign (there would be many others), the fact
that, unlike Foucault and Deleuze, I constantly had to
thematize an explication vis‐à‐vis Heidegger (and from
the beginning a deconstructive explication—interior
and exterior, and (p.22) thus always folded‐onto itself
(sur‐pliée))—having to do in particular with his
‘epochal’ framing of the history of philosophy and of the
history of being, his interpretation of Nietzsche,4 of
Aristotle,5 his way of situating the Greek and the Greek
language,6 theos and theion,7 the principle of reason,8
mimêsis (and thus also truth,9 and, most especially,
khôra),10 that is what indicates at least potentially
certain reservations or deviations that would be
difficult to integrate into a configuration. I'm not saying
‘unintegratable’, but it would be necessary to elaborate
differently the schema of this supposed configuration
(neither an ‘epoch’, in the Heideggerian sense, which,
as I said, I never considered legitimate, nor a paradigm,
nor an epistêmê, nor themata11). Other protocols of
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reading and writing (p.23) would be necessary to give

some breathing room to all the quasi‐idioms,
differences, and differends. Even more so when we
consider that the supposed configuration is obviously
gathered, as has often been noted—which does not, of
course, mean it is false—under the sign of difference,
and of a difference, like a simulacrum, that is non‐
dialectizable. Alliez recalls quite rightly (214 f.) this
resistance, I would almost say this allergy, but not this
opposition, this obstinate response (differential, non‐
dialectical) to dialectic. This is common not only to
Deleuze and me, as Alliez notes, but also to Foucault,
Lyotard, and others. This was won, one might even say
wrested away—and always without end—from an
inherited dialectism. What it displaced or deformed,
rather than reversed, was not only the Hegelian, neo‐
Hegelian, or Marxist dialectic but first of all the
dialecticity of Platonic origin—and in the end all the
former on the basis of this latter. What these ‘thoughts
of difference’, as they have been called, paradoxically
have in common is thus also that which resists, like
difference, the analogy of a certain community or
contemporaneity: whatever in the configuration cannot
be configured, or whatever lends to the configuration
the figure or face of the mask or of the simulacrum, one
might even say of the lure (leurre). And this figure is
perhaps no longer simply Greek or non‐Greek. What
Alliez rightly says (p. 214) about the simulacrum and
the mask will endlessly cause doubt, in any case the
(p.24) vigilance of a certain skepsis or epokhê before
all identification, analogy, continuity, filiation.
2. I have absolutely no objection to what Éric Alliez has
written, no reservation to register, and he is no doubt
right to talk of a ‘Nietzschean doubling’ and of so many
other shared differences, if I may say this, between
Deleuze and myself. But he well knows that if in
‘Différance’ (18 /17) I cite Nietzsche and Philosophy
with regard to a differential of force, the modest
reading of Nietzsche that I have attempted here and
there, as well as my debt toward Nietzsche, and in
particular on the subject of debt, remains very
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heterogeneous to that of Deleuze. It differs in its style,

its translations, in the treatment of the text and of
language, because of an insistent passage through
Heidegger, and through ‘critical’ questions posed to
Heidegger, to Heidegger's ‘Nietzsche’—in Of
Grammatology, as Alliez rightly notes (p. 218 n. 17),
but elsewhere as well, and more and more so—and to
the ‘Greeks’ of Heidegger. Moreover, among all the
possible guiding threads for the analysis of the
differences that traverse these phenomena of
configuration, it would be necessary to follow the role,
form, meaning, and time of the reference to Heidegger
in all these so‐called ‘thoughts of difference’. One
would perhaps be better able to formalize the play of
differences: beyond the disagreements that are in the
end, to my mind, not very interesting, it seems to me
that the most fortunate differences are perhaps those
that are without end or basis (sans fond), more
insurmountable than those that separate each of these
thoughts from the others. This could be shown in detail,
but I neither can nor wish to impose such a task here.
In the end, Alliez himself situates, as if there were
nothing to it, the limit of what he calls a common ‘vein’,
namely—and nothing less than, nothing else but!—
ontology, this thing, which could not be more Greek,
called ontology. I have nothing against ontology, but I
have never had toward that which presents itself under
this name anything but questions, reservations, very
conditional hypotheses, interminable parentheses. Now
Alliez himself rightly emphasizes, without however
noting the serious difference I myself would want to
retain, the ‘profoundly ontological response of Deleuze
to a question’ that I had once formulated (p. 217). He is
quite right to speak elsewhere of a ‘Deleuzian
ontology’ (p. 217 n. 13). What one might call, to speak
quickly, this difference of ontology leads to so many
others! And who (p.25) would believe that this does not
say something, perhaps even something essential,
about the relation each of us has to ‘his Greeks’? It is
no doubt a question of the manner of determining the
‘other of language’ (p. 222) and the simulacrum, but
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also infinite alterity. I must limit myself here to just a

suggestion: it would no doubt be enlightening to pursue
the analysis of this problematic configuration (thanks to
what has been initiated so well by Alliez and Wolff, and
well beyond what I can improvise in the course of these
short remarks) by granting a certain privilege to the
epekeina tês ousias (whether that of Plato or of
Plotinus), to which I believe I must always return, to its
strange tradition and to what within it uproots at the
same time every possible tradition, and in particular
that of ontology and metaphysics. What destiny, what
interpretation does one reserve for it? Who speaks of it
(like Heidegger, very early on, or Levinas, for example,
and in their wake, whether one ‘follows’ them or not)?
Who never speaks of it?
I would wager that the most significant differences
would become more apparent. This question also
intersects that of the remainder, the remaining
(restance) of the remainder, the relationships between
being, beings, and the remainder, and a certain
irreducibility, it seems to me, of what I have called the
remaining of the remainder of all ‘ontology’. This
heterogeneity and the law of contamination between
the wholly other of this heterogeneity and its regular
reappropriation (inclusion/exclusion, economic
redialectization, and so on) is no doubt what has most
constantly concerned me in my readings, notably my
reading of the ‘Greeks’ (Plato and Aristotle, for
example). But it is also what has prevented this reading
from identifying or determining a self‐identity, a self‐
immanence of the Greek, as well as, in fact, any other
linguistic, discursive, systemic, or textual corpus. It is
not only the non‐Greek that attracted me in/to (chez)
the Greek (it's a question of knowing in short what chez
means), not only the other of the Greek (the Egyptian,
the Barbarian, or whoever is determined by the Greek
as his other, and so is excluded‐included, posed as
opposable), but the wholly other of the Greek, of his
language and his logos, this figure of a wholly other
that is unfigurable by him. This wholly other haunts
every one of the essays I have devoted to ‘Greek’ things
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and it often irrupts within them: under different names,

for it perhaps has no proper name.x
(p.26) 3. With regard to the ‘other of language’, an
expression that can be taken in very different
directions, I am particularly grateful to Alliez for
emphasizing that ‘non‐discursive forces’ were from the
beginning, and in a determining fashion, taken into
account or taken seriously by a deconstruction of
logocentrism that is never more misunderstood than
when it is seen as a theory of language, of writing, or of
the text in the narrow and strictly conventional sense of
these terms. If I recall this rather massive fact, it is
because it anticipates one of Wolff's questions to which
I will return; but also because it gestures again,
already, toward the ‘Greek’ thing that concerns us:
nothing less than logos—and its Heideggerian
interpretation which always inclines it in the direction
of gathering (Versammlung), toward the One and the
Same. Alliez rightly specifies that ‘the general strategy
of deconstruction is tirelessly to repeat the text while
altering it, by “adding” to it, to the point of producing
the genealogy of the conflictual and subordinating
structure of opposition’ (p. 215). To be sure, but this is
not done only by favouring, as Alliez again puts it, ‘the
irruptive emergence of nomadic concepts or
undecidable concepts’. If these latter ‘correspond to
whatever has always resisted the former organization
of forces, which has always constituted the remainder
and is irreducible to the dominant force that organized
the hierarchy’ (p. 215), it is because this non‐discursive
remainder exceeds at once the simulacrum (whose
possibility retains, to be sure, the trace but to which it
is not a question of simply opposing being or the truth),
pure and simple conceptual undecidability, as well as
language and the text in the ordinary sense of these
terms. Alliez notes precisely this (p. 225). Consider, for
example, the resistance of the pharmakon and its
semantic oscillation. It is not only that of the
simulacrum or of the phantasm—whose repetition
would come to disorganize dialectic (a problem I tried
to address not so much in ‘Plato's Pharmacy’ as in texts
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such as ‘The Double Session’, ‘White Mythology’, or

‘Economimesis’, where the formidable question of
mimêsis is taken up). This resistance interested me in
particular at the point where it limits the possibility of
the system or of the corpus, of the complete,
controllable, and formalizable self‐identity of a set or a
whole, be it that of a system, of Plato's oeuvre (which
would be governed by a unifiable meaning‐to‐say), of
the Greek language, of Greek society (and very
concretely it is also a matter of the (p.27) place—
exclusion included, so to speak—of the pharmakos in
it), thus of the identity of the Greek in general. It is
with this example that one feels, for essential reasons,
originarily dispossessed of the Greek, of the Greeks, of
‘one's Greeks’. And this dispossession must have also
happened to them as well, already from the origin, that
is to say, before and outside the originarity that some
(sometimes Nietzsche or Heidegger) dream about in
relationship to them, even before the latecomers who
we are can even seek—though always in vain—to
reappropriate them for ourselves. If we are still or
already Greeks, we ourselves, we others (nous autres),
we also inherit that which made them already other
than themselves, and more or less than they themselves
believed. ‘Themselves?’ Who, ‘they’? (Wolff says ‘they’,
and I will say in a moment why I have trouble
understanding what this means.)
Perhaps we must resolutely resist this pure and simple
alternative: either we are, ‘we ourselves’, ‘we others’,
still Greeks, governed, whether we want it or not, by
the law of inheritance (the origin of philosophy would
be Greek through and through, the founding concepts
would speak Greek in us, before us, and the history of
metaphysics itself would be but the unfolding of this
origin which it would be necessary to reactivate right
up to its very eve or inception) or we are, ‘we
ourselves’, ‘we others’, wholly other than the Greeks,
having broken with this origin, this language, this law,
and so on. Who can take this alternative seriously? By
insisting regularly upon the fact that the unity of the
history of metaphysics itself was but a domestic
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representation or economic reappropriation,12 and thus

impossible, immediately contradicted by the fact,
pragmatically expropriated and so subject to
denegation; by insisting upon the deconstruction at
work in the ‘origin’ and already from the ‘origin’ itself,
upon the deconstruction of the origin, I tried to suggest
that this alternative was in fact borne by another
‘history’ (for which the name ‘history’ is no longer self‐
evident), a ‘history’ much more impure, with a play that
is more unstable and more destabilizing of the tradition
and of rupture, of memory, mourning, and
incorporation: we are still Greeks, certainly, but
perhaps other Greeks, we (p.28) were not born from
just that Greek send‐off; we are certainly still other
Greeks, with the memory of events that are irreducible
to the Greek genealogy, but other enough to have not
only, also, altered the Greek in us, but to bear within us
something wholly other than the Greek.
II
In the course of a patient and friendly discussion, Wolff poses
me a series of daunting questions. Without at all claiming to
measure up to them in a few lines, I will only indicate the
direction of a possible work or possible discourse.
First series of questions. It is perhaps best to cite here in

extenso: ‘Can't one read the Greeks naively? Naively in two
senses: without the mediation of Nietzsche, and as if they
could speak the truth in the sense they claimed. What prevents
them from speaking the truth for us? What allows us to speak
the truth about them? With what concept is one's suspicion
[mine—J.D.] armed—if it is not with the Will to Power, for
example?’ (Wolff's emphasis).
This sequence of questions seems to be stretched between two

propositions. Are they compatible? On the one hand, Wolff
maintains that Greece would be for us, for me, as for Foucault
and Deleuze, ‘constituted by texts’ (as opposed to ‘political or
social institutions’, ‘aesthetic productions’, or ‘history’), and
more precisely, ‘constituted’ by ‘texts that aim at declaring
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truths.’ On the other hand, I am being asked if it is not

possible (contrary, we are to hear, to what I do or to what
Wolff thinks I do) to read the Greeks ‘naively’ ‘as if they could
speak the truth in the sense they claimed’: ‘What prevents
them from speaking the truth for us?’ (Indeed, nothing at all.
Which is why I never said that the Greeks did not speak the
truth. I even insisted on the contrary, all the while indicating—
and this is probably what Wolff regrets—that this was not my
question or my main concern. I ask rather under what
conditions they are not prevented from speaking the truth in
the (p.29) sense they claimed, and what this truth of truth
signifies, how it is produced, and at what cost.)
How are we to reconcile Wolff's two propositions? Of course,

Wolff is quite right to recall—and to say the contrary would go
against common sense—that, like Foucault and Deleuze, I
grant an enormous privilege to what are commonly called
‘texts’, and even so‐called philosophical texts ‘that aim at
declaring truths’. By no means did I want or was I able to do
the work of a historian, anthropologist, socio‐politologist, or,
of course, that of an expert on Athenian society. But Wolff will
grant me that I constantly problematize this concept of text,
its closure or its reduction to the dimension of writing or even
discourse, and especially the limit between what is called the
philosophical text and others. But isn't it this problematic, this
de‐limitation of the concept of text or of writing, though also of
the ‘philosophical’ as such, that is constantly at issue in (for
example) ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, ‘Ousia and Grammê’, ‘White
Mythology’, or ‘Khôra’? What Alliez recalled with regard to my
insistence upon the ‘field of non‐discursive forces’ gives the
principle of the answer I would develop, if space permitted, to
Wolff's first question. Of course, and I again grant him this, it
is not enough to mark the opening in principle of the text and
of the philosophical onto ‘the social and political institutions’
of Greece; once these preliminaries or these essential
principles are readable (but when? have they ever become so?
—it's doubtful), all the work is done elsewhere or remains to
be done. But the manner in which these preliminaries or these
principles are elaborated can also, and this has always been
my hope, not remain external to what is called ‘positive’ work
but can have certain repercussions on it, and require
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restructurations of knowledge and of the discipline. Moreover,

even beyond what explicitly links the problematics of writing,
in ‘Plato's Pharmacy’ (though also elsewhere), to the problem
of power, democracy, and democratization,13 this essay is from
start to finish, and this can be seen on every page, at every
step, a political text on Greek politics and institutions, as well
as on the political in general. I would want to claim that this is
(p.30) also true of ‘Khôra’, which can be read as a text on the
politeia (see, for example, 77–8 [117–18], 103 [149], et passim)
on the state and on war (103–4 n. 8 [149 n. 8]), on the
possibility or difficulty of ‘speak[ing] at last of philosophy and
politics’ (85 [121]), according to Socrates' more or less ironic
request, where the entire frame is at once fictive, political,
philosophical, and so on.
To go straight to the letter of Wolff's ‘first series of questions’,

I believe that I read the Greeks naively, I already said this, but
no doubt in another way than the one he seems to want.
Because, on the other hand, I do not believe one can read
them with absolute naïveté, or, as Wolff says, ‘in two senses’:
first without mediation (one never reads anything without
mediation; as for the mediation of Nietzsche, I could easily
demonstrate, I think, though I cannot do it here, that this
mediation is not decisive and certainly not constant in ‘my’
reading of the ‘Greeks’. For this reading is carried out
sometimes without him, sometimes against him, sometimes
through a sort of dialogue or irony that is too difficult to
analyse in the style of these remarks.14 And then ‘as if they
could speak the truth in the sense they claimed’. ‘What
prevents them from speaking the truth for us? What allows us
to speak the truth about them?’ Unable to answer these
questions here, because they are too difficult, I will simply say
that these questions are the very ones that preoccupy all the
readings I have attempted, and in particular of the Greeks.
These questions, which are questions of truth, of course, and
of the truth of truth, are the most and the least naive of all.
They strip us of all assurance regarding what ‘naive’ means, in
one, two, or more than two senses. If I thought that something
prevented the Greeks (or whomever) from speaking the truth
for us, I would not be interested in them for one second. As for
saying ‘what allows us to speak the truth about them’, I do not
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have a single set answer. What we have here is a form of

question that I would like to question in turn: ‘truth’ (but of
what sort? what is it exactly?) ‘about’ (on the subject of this
object, the Greeks, which we would not be, or no longer be,
and about whom we (p.31) would speak from some
metalinguistic vantage point—possibilities that no one can
seriously believe in) ‘them’ (who, ‘them’? as for identifying
them, see above: them without ‘us’, in opposition to us, to ‘we
ourselves’, ‘we others’?). Since all the questions (and the
question of the question) that have interested me, in all these
texts, are precisely those of truth, identity, and so on, since
the formation of these questions is essentially indebted to the
‘Greeks’, the enigmatic fact that, in a certain way, ‘they’
indeed speak ‘the truth for us’, that nothing can ‘prevent’
them from doing so, and that not only can I do nothing about it
but it fascinates me, intrigues me, and pushes me to ask
questions, the fact also, and as a result, that they also allow us
to ‘speak the truth about them’ only deepens, makes tremble,
or places in abyme (one can choose the metaphor one wants)
the status of the truth of truth implied here. Questions of
ontology, we said earlier, questions of the truth of truth now,
though these are perhaps not exactly the same thing. The
question of the question (addressed in Of Spirit to Heidegger,
between Heidegger and the Greeks). It is in this fragile ‘of’, in
this unstable genitive, this obscure or oblique genealogy, that
we (‘we’ others) deliberate and struggle ((nous) débattons). If
the legacy of the thought (of truth, of being) in which we are
inscribed is not only, not fundamentally, not originarily Greek,
it is no doubt because of other convergent and heterogeneous
filiations, other languages, other identities that are not simply
added on like secondary attributes (the Jew, the Arab, the
Christian, the Roman, the German, and so on); it is no doubt
because European history has not simply unfolded what was
handed down to it by the Greek; it is especially because the
Greek himself never gathered himself or identified with
himself: the discourses whose archives we have on this subject
(statements such as: we are exemplary Greeks, we know what
the true Greek or the true Athenian is, and those are the
others, the Barbarians, the Egyptians, and so on) are but a
supplementary testimony to this worry and this non‐self‐
identity. It would be necessary to embark here on a long
Page 14 of 28
discourse on hospitality, war, the excluded of the city—and the

place of the Stranger in philosophy. As for the ‘truth’ of the
Greeks, the one that they would be speaking ‘for us’, that we
would say ‘about them’, I wonder whether one can ask such
questions in philosophy (ontology, logic, phenomenology,
ethics, physics, and even politics), in the history of philosophy,
or even in the human sciences (p.32)
(anthropology, history, and so on) as such. And I wonder if the

approaches most urgently required by this ‘truth’, under the
guise of this or that institutional discipline, this or that genre
of knowledge, have not of necessity already crossed over these
boundaries.
For my part, I believe myself to be on this point very disarmed:

since so many weapons and so many stratagems have been
used up or are out of use, I do not have the impression in any
case of being, to take up Wolff's words, ‘armed’ with any
‘suspicion’, with any ‘concept’, especially not some new one,
especially not the Will to Power. Why? Unless one translates
into ‘suspicion’ all possible modalities of the question, of
‘seeking to know’ or ‘giving an account’, of reading in a
vigilant, critical, or active way, I don't see why one would
privilege here the reference to suspicion. I have never done
so, and I have always found confusing the way in which, in the
1960s, the press grouped together into the same discourse of
suspicion all thought referring to Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud.
Outside of my teaching and unpublished works, I don't believe
I have ever referred to Marx in relationship to the Greeks. I
did refer to Freud in a very critical way in The Post Card. And
as for Nietzsche, I am more or less certain that I never cited
him in any of the works we are discussing (‘Plato's Pharmacy’,
‘Ousia and Grammê’, ‘Khôra’, ‘The Supplement of Copula’,
‘The Double Session’). One might then say: that does not prove
that his inspiration was not decisive, indeed it might just prove
the contrary. And yet I believe this, I believe that the gestures
made in these texts owe nothing decisive or very specific to
Nietzsche, especially not to the Nietzsche of the Will to
Power.15 Contrary to what one might believe in going too fast
or in looking at my texts in a (p.33) macroscopic way, my
readings of Nietzsche are often not only very ‘suspicious’ with
regard to him, to take up a word that is not mine, but ironic,
Page 15 of 28
critical, or ‘deconstructive’.16 This is just as true for my

readings of Heidegger. In any case, without being able to
enter here into the question in all its complexity, it is never a
matter of borrowing from X some conceptual arm to be turned
against Y who is suspected of doing Z. Before each of the
entities named by these letters and these words, I feel myself
very disarmed.
In the texts we are speaking of, I especially sought to read

‘Greek’ words (it was already rather difficult, indeed
impossible, to read and to translate, and this impossibility
cannot but leave one restless), that is to say, words working in
sentences, in scenes of discourse and writing, in works that,
for this very reason, could not be closed upon themselves
(neither in the Greeks, nor in philosophy, nor in the book, nor
in a system, and especially not in language) and thus had
already been marked by the irruption of the other (the non‐
discursive real, the non‐Greek, etc.). The ‘words’, more or less
than words, with which we have been invested rather than
‘armed’, without power and without knowledge (words given
or assigned as a legacy before any initiative on the part of the
one receiving them), these words which I could not use insofar
as they are unstable and cannot be appropriated, are often,
most often, Greek words (or perhaps the simulacra of words):
pharmakon, pharmakos, or pharmakeus, but also hymen, as
well as parergon, which we haven't discussed.17 There is
perhaps (p.34) something significant about the fact that
undecidability or a certain discourse on undecidability found
its privileged examples in these ‘Greek’ words, in philosophy,
on its borders, that is, beyond its confines. (This has been the
case, at least, for me, since one does not need to be too
terribly learned to know that there is no shortage of such
possibilities in other languages. There is too much to say here,
for example about undecidability—the condition and necessary
passage for the decision—but let's leave that aside.)
Before moving on to Wolff's second question, one clarification.

It is indeed true that, like Foucault and Deleuze, I have
‘privileged in many ways’ the Platonic corpus, and for reasons
that Wolff explains very well. Nevertheless, without returning
to what I recalled earlier regarding the non‐identity or the
Page 16 of 28
non‐self‐closure of this corpus, and still less of this system,

and without claiming to go beyond the very modest limits of
the texts I have oriented toward all these authors, I believe
that a reference to Aristotle will have played for me (in ‘Ousia
and Grammê’, ‘The Supplement of Copula’, ‘White Mythology’,
and even ‘Khôra’) a role that is just as indispensable (or let's
say symptomatic, to use Wolff's word). And, despite the
paucity of explicit references to them in my work, and the
incompetence which I admitted at the outset, a few discreet
signs suggest how much the Greek ‘materialists’ or Plotinus
(whom Heidegger almost never cites18) matter to me.
Especially—since I subscribe up to a certain point to what
Wolff emphasizes with regard to history and narrative (p. 235)
—what I attempt to show in ‘Khôra’ is a structure utterly
resistant to historical narrative, not eternal or ahistorical like
an intelligible idea, but radically foreign to all oppositions and
to all dialectics that make history or narrative possible, and
heterogeneous even to that beyond of being or to a certain
interpretation of the epekeina tês ousias (that of the Republic
or of a certain hypothesis from the Parmenides
concerning the One that does not participate in (p.35) any
way in being [oudamôs ara to hen ousias metekhei, 141e], of
the Plotinian or Neoplatonic tradition) which gives rise to
histories, narratives, or myths, and opens a reference to the
Good, to God, to some event. I am alluding here to so many
different types, which must certainly be rigorously
distinguished, but which all appeal to a certain beyond of
being: certain discourses about revelations (Jewish or
Christian), apophatic theologies or mysticisms (at least insofar
as they are essentially articulated, as is almost always the
case, upon the Scripture whose language they speak),
metaphysics or ethics (beyond ontology), in the sense given to
these by Levinas, the theology projected by Heidegger (where
the word ‘being’, as he says, would not appear) or his
discourse on being under erasure as crossed out (kreuzweise
Durchstreichung), or else what Marion calls God without
being (one).19 I have tried (in ‘How to Avoid Speaking:
Denials’) to interpret, between that which is situated or
projected epekeina tês ousias and khôra, a slight difference or
fragile limit, sometimes barely perceptible, which would
separate a certain event from the non‐event, and would
Page 17 of 28
distinguish, on the one hand, all the types of narratives I just

named in a much too elliptical way without however
assimilating them all to one another, and, on the other hand, a
place or a taking‐place that is an‐ontological and an‐anthropo‐
theological. This limit is also the limit of the self‐interpretation
of the Platonic discourse and of all the interpretative schemas
it has engendered.20
How can Wolff reconcile what he says in the first place (p.
235), namely, that for Deleuze, Foucault, and myself
‘Platonism has come to an end (either so as to take note of this
end or to contribute to it)’, something I believe I have never
thought or said, whether in this form or in another, and what
he recalls in the second place (p. 244), namely, as I wrote one
day in a certain mode, we are ‘today on the eve of Platonism’?
21
In speaking then of the ‘eve of Platonism’ ‘today’, I (p.36)
had to have been implying a historical figure that is more

complicated than one that would simply be stretched between
two points: the beginning and the end. It's here that I would
most hesitate to follow Wolff, particularly when he attributes
to me, as well as to Foucault, to whom I would be, according
to him, closer than to Deleuze, the theme of an ‘end of
metaphysics’. Not only do I not believe in such a thing, but I
often insisted on the difference, which is to my eyes decisive,
between end and closure,22 on the non‐self‐identity of
something like metaphysics itself (la métaphysique).23 To
speak, as I did, of a ‘dominant structure’ in the history of
metaphysics is already to suggest that this history is a
process, and thus an unstable play of forces whose very
conflictuality prohibits it from relating in a serene and
straightforward way to its identity. (The ‘one differing from
itself’, the hen diapheron heautôi of Heraclitus—that, perhaps,
is the Greek heritage to which I am the most faithfully
amenable and the one that I try to ‘think’ in its affinity—which
is surprising, I concede, and at first glance so improbable—
with a certain interpretation of the uninterpretable khôra.) It
is a question of the very (même) event of the same (même), of
the itself (soi‐même), of the relation to self, and it is under this
sign that I had once tried to speak of a différance that is not
the ontological difference in which it nevertheless can leave its
trace.24 That is one of the points where (p.37) my relation to
Page 18 of 28
Heidegger is most obviously (an obviousness often denied, it is

true, for reasons that are sometimes clear and sometimes
obscure, if not obscurantist) extremely complicated, unstable,
and hardly orthodox, to say the least; I will return to this in a
moment. In any case, it is enough to say (I am perhaps
responding here to Wolff's second question) that, on this point
as on so many others, ‘deconstruction doesn't make a big to‐do
of it (n'en fait pas un drame)’ (assuming I understand the
connotations or the modality of this expression). I even tried to
describe in a somewhat formalized and ironic way all the
programmes of these discourses on the end and on (the) death
(of metaphysics among other things) in ‘On a Newly Arisen
Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. Now, there are perhaps many
ways to make or not make ‘a big to‐do’, and more than one
twist to this expression. We would have to pursue this
conversation in order to understand each other better on this
subject. If by ‘making a big to‐do’ what is meant is taking
seriously (just as I am taking Wolff's questions seriously here)
that which is happening today, in a singular, acute,
irreplaceable way, in philosophy, for example, between the
closure and the end, and which does not consist in continually
unfolding, in developing, the history initiated by certain
Greeks under the name of philosophy (or of logic, ontology,
phenomenology, ethics, politics, and so on) then, yes, I believe
that this (not me) ‘is making a big to‐do’, and it needs no one,
especially not a discourse on deconstruction, to make more of
them.
Finally, I don't think I can respond in a few words, or even

begin to respond, to the final series of questions concerning
the ‘Heideggerian mediation of Greek texts’ (p. 239 n. 21). It's
simply too difficult. The reading of Heidegger has given me to
think, and will never cease to do so, I am certain, in the most
abyssal and unforeseeable way. Having often acknowledged
this, I prefer venturing just a few remarks (very insufficient
and too preliminary, to be sure) on what concerns us here.
Most of my questions, reservations, perplexities, criticisms
before Heidegger's text, at one moment or another, concern in
the end the Greek thing. Whether it is a question of
epochalization, of science and technology, of animality and of
the hand, of sexuality and life, of the question as the originary
Page 19 of 28
form or ultimate dignity of thought, of the reading of

Nietzsche, of the principle of reason, of the interpretation of
the Khôra, of the relationship to language (German/Greek), of
the (p.38) ontological difference, of logos as gathering
(Versammlung), and so on, the ‘Heideggerian mediation’, as
Wolff calls it, seemed to me more than problematic, and I have
noted this in an explicit fashion for a very long time now.25 I
have never trusted it, but it is also true that I always do my
utmost not to avoid it or ignore it.
I am hastening things a bit at the end of a non‐response that is

at once too short and too long. One question in order to give
the impression of ending, therefore, and in order to confide a
few things as naively as possible, as in the beginning, more
naively even than Francis Wolff seemed to want—in the most
naive and sincere way possible. Here is the question. How
would one answer someone who says to you, for example:
1. ‘You know, I am (there is someone in me who feels)

fascinated by the “Greeks”, amorous, demanding,
indebted, overwhelmed, exasperated, awaiting always
more from their reserve, hanging on the enigma of
their word.’
2. ‘And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, I am
(there is in me someone who feels) foreign, radically
insensible or impervious to the “Greeks”,
uncomprehending, stunned, deaf before their word,
incompetent, incapable of understanding them or of
translating them, as if they figured for me the wholly
other.’
3. ‘And at the same time, or perhaps precisely because
of this, I am (there is in me someone who feels) allergic
to the “Greeks”, allergic to this little people so sure of
itself and so domineering, as General de Gaulle once
said, if I remember correctly. At once unable and
unwilling to bear witness for them, and still less to call
them to bear (p.39) witness, to hold them for the
ultimate witnesses, I always feel within me a tendency
to contest them, I would almost say to detest them.’
Page 20 of 28
This question perhaps goes in the direction of what Wolff will

have said so much better in his concluding pages. But how to
respond to it? And ‘who’ would be able to respond? Certainly
not me.
As incompatible as they may appear, these three movements—

which, I am persuaded, leave detectable ‘symptoms’ in
everything I write or have just said—intersect and intertwine
in ‘me’. But they do not presuppose any other assured identity
(the Jew, the Christian, the African, the non‐Greek in general).
They are to be taken seriously, and they dramatically traverse
(even if one must not ‘make a big to‐do of it’, as Wolff would
say) every experience of identification: to oneself, one's
language, one's culture, one's provenance. They are serious
enough to make the quotation marks around the ‘Greeks’,
around ‘me’, around ‘we others’ (around every ‘auto‐definition’
or ‘auto‐position’, every autos, every hen) something other
still, something other than a playful coquettishness or the
simulacrum of a signature. (p.40)
Notes:
Derrida's essay ‘Nous autres Grecs’ appears here for the first
time in an English translation which has been specially
commissioned for this volume. The essay has its origins as an
oral response given at a conference in 1991 organized by
Barbara Cassin which was later published in an edited book
entitled Nos Grecs et leurs modernes. Derrida is responding to
two contributions by Éric Alliez and Francis Wolff who
addressed the question of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault's
relationship to Greece. The essay constitutes, in part, a
specific engagement with the themes they raise but can also
be read as one of Derrida's most extensive and explicit
reflections on the role of antiquity in his work. Footnotes have
been kept in their original format.
(1) The original French title, ‘Nous autres Grecs’—with

quotation marks—can be heard in at least three ways: (1) as a
common, idiomatic way to say simply, ‘we Greeks, we who are
Greek’; (2) as a way of affirming one's belonging to the
category of Greeks, ‘we Greeks, we too are Greeks’; (3) as a
way of claiming a difference within the category of Greeks,
‘we Greeks of another kind, we other Greeks’.
Page 21 of 28
(2) I am alluding not only to the other Egyptian, to whom I

frequently refer in what I believe to be certain necessary
places in these texts, but more generally to an intrusion of the
other, of the wholly other, who forces the limits of
identification and the relationship of language, the corpus, or
the system to itself. It is thus a question of locating the traces
of this intrusion (traumatism, inclusion of the excluded,
introjection, incorporation, mourning, and so on) rather than
defining some essence or self‐identity of the ‘Greek’, the
originary truth of a language, corpus, or system. See, for
example, ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in La Dissémination
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 146–53 and passim
[‘Plato's Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 128–34 and
passim], ‘Khôra’ (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), 69–70, 83–4,
92–104 [‘Khôra’, trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 114, 120, 125–7]. As
for ‘Khôra’, and on the subject of Khôra, allow me to refer also
to ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’, in Psyché: inventions
de l'autre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), 562 ff. [‘How to Avoid
Speaking: Denials’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume
ii, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2008), 167 ff.]. What is at stake in
all these attempts, in a word, is the question of knowing if, in
what sense, and to what extent pharmakon and khōra, for
example, are (1) ‘in’ (2) ‘Plato’ (3) ‘Greek words’ (4) that
designate ‘Greek things’ (significations or realities).
(3) One should not read into this the slightest regret and even
less a reproach. Alliez and Wolff have offered such attentive
and generous readings of the texts they have cited that I
wouldn't dream of criticizing them, defending myself, or
objecting. But, out of gratitude and because I take seriously
the discussion with which they have honoured my work,
because the polite response that would consist in not referring
to oneself or explaining oneself might serve as an excuse for a
kind of haughty detachment, I would rather venture here and
there, in the limits of this space, to return to what I have
written, to offer some clarifications or displace somewhat the
place of the analysis. For example by recalling certain of my
essays left out of their presentations (perhaps because in
Page 22 of 28
these essays Plato was not central and because Alliez and
Wolff, or at least this is my hypothesis, have themselves
privileged Plato). These essays are more concerned with
Aristotle, or else the ‘Greek materialists’ (‘Ousia et Grammê:
note sur une note de Sein und Zeit’, ‘Le Supplément de copule:
la philosophie devant la linguistique’, ‘La Mythologie blanche:
la métaphore dans le texte philosophique’, in Marges de la
philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972) [‘Ousia and
Grammê: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, ‘The
Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’, ‘White
Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982)], and ‘Mes Chances: au rendez‐vous de quelques
stéréophonies épicuriennes’, in Confrontation, 19 (1988), 19–
45 [‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some
Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other,
volume i, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 344–76].
(4) At least since De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de

Minuit, 1967), 31 ff. [Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), 18 ff.], Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche (1972)
(Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 67 ff. [Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles,
trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1979), 83 ff.], and no doubt elsewhere—and often.
(5) Marges de la philosophie, 58–9 and 70 ff. [Margins of

Philosophy, 51–2 and 60–1 ff.].
(6) See in particular De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question

(Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), especially 110 ff. [Of Spirit:
Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
especially 69 ff.].
(7) ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’, in Psyché:

inventions de l'autre, 584 ff. [‘How to Avoid Speaking:
Denials’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ii. 186 ff.]. A
quasi‐‘autobiographical’ note (562 [309 n. 13]) responds
Page 23 of 28
perhaps in its own way to the question of ‘to each his own
Greeks’.
(8) See in particular ‘Les Pupilles de l'Université: le principe

de raison et l'idée de l'université’, in Du droit à la philosophie
(Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991), 461–98, especially 476 [‘The
Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, in
Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug
et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 129–55,
especially 139].
(9) This can be seen in ‘La Double Séance’, in La

Dissémination, 199–318 [‘The Double Session’, in
Dissemination, 173–285], most explicitly on p. 294 [262].
Everywhere it is marked, which is to say more or less
everywhere (the references would be too numerous to list
here), the margin between polysemy and dissemination can be
interpreted, and this would hardly be a stretch, as an
‘objection’ both to Aristotle and to Heidegger. See also ‘La
Mythologie Blanche’, in Marges de la philosophie [‘White
Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy] (especially 295 ff., 317
[247–8 ff., 265–6]).
(10) ‘Khôra’, 58–9, 82–3, 101–2 [‘Khôra’, in On the Name, 109,

120, 147–8]. On all the points I have just mentioned, and on
the relationship of the ‘French philosophical scene’ (in
particular Foucault and Deleuze) to Heidegger, see
‘Désistance’, in Psyché, 613 [‘Désistance’, in Psyche, ii. 210,
317 n. 8].
(11) ‘Epokhê’ (Heidegger), ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn),

‘epistêmê’ (Foucault), ‘themata’ (Holton): why, in this century,
has one regularly chosen Greek words to name these
‘historical’ ‘formations’ (there where the word ‘history’ itself
becomes problematic and where it is a question of a ‘history’
that also engages thought, knowledge, and language)? Why,
especially, has one often chosen to keep the original form of
these Greek words in order to name these enigmatic or
improbable groupings, totalities, or configurations, in order to
nickname (surnommer) them, in truth, there where the
nameable is less assured than ever in its identity, limits,
meaning, truth, and its very historicity? Like the Latin word in
Page 24 of 28
Kant, the Greek word provides more than one form of

legitimization. It indicates several powers at once: (1) the
invention of the new, namely, a concept that is irreducible to
those circulating in everyday language; (2) the supposed
invention of the new as archeological rediscovery: restoration,
reactivation, or liberation of an occluded or even a forbidden
memory; (3) finally, the authority attached to the use of rare
words or of ancient languages considered to be learned
languages.
Now, if the presumed unity of the concept that has been

named in this way shows itself to be lacking, and a fortiori the
very thing being referred to by it, all these powers would be
but simulacra. But let us not forget that simulacra can produce
events, even if they do not always do so; they can be
interesting, useful, fertile—and can provoke thought, even if
they do not always do so. Whence, sometimes, the power.
(12) Rather than multiply here the references to this leitmotif,

I will just refer to Marges de la philosophie, for example,
‘Tympan’, i–xxv, and 274 [Margins of Philosophy, ‘Tympan’, ix–
xxix, and 230].
(13) De la grammatologie, 59 or 73 (on Plato), 128 and passim

[Of Grammatology, 39 or 50 (on Plato), 86 and passim], ‘La
Pharmacie de Platon’, 165 and passim [‘Plato's Pharmacy’, 143
and passim].
(14) Allow me to refer again to ‘La Mythologie blanche’, 313

[‘White Mythology’, 262–3] and La Carte postale [The Post
Card] (which, I don't know exactly where, speaks very
ironically of Nietzsche's Socrates, as well as of the Greeks and
particularly the Plato of Freud, this other ‘master of
suspicion’, as one used to say.)
(15) First of all, I have always preferred to speak of force, and

thus of a difference of force, of differential force, rather than
of a will to power. There are many reasons for this, which I
present here schematically: (1) so as not to give in to some
voluntaristic metaphysics, (2) because the theme of force (on
the subject of which, moreover, I often expressed some
worries) is inseparable from the theme of the differential; (3)
Page 25 of 28
because, as a result, it is more open to the paradoxes and

aporias that transform the greatest force into the most
disarmed of weaknesses, even into non‐violence. (See, for
example, ‘Force et signification’, ‘Violence et métaphysique’,
and ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’, in L'Écriture et la différence
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) [‘Force and Signification’,
‘Violence and Metaphysics’, and ‘Cogito and the History of
Madness’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)]. With regard to
these texts, I wonder whether the question of the ‘Greek’ is
not addressed more directly in a certain reading of Levinas
than in texts on Plato and Aristotle. The same could be said for
the debate with Foucault over a Greek hubris or logos that
would have ‘no contrary’ (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’,
in Writing and Difference). On force, power, and potentiality,
see also La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 430, 432,
436 [The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 403, 405, 408] and Limited Inc (Paris:
Éditions Galilée, 1990), 275 ff. [Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), 149 ff.]. The limit of
violence is there also discussed.
(16) See especially Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche [Spurs:

Nietzsche's Styles] and Otobiographies: L'Enseignement de
Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 1984) [‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche
and the Politics of the Proper Name’, trans. Avital Ronell in
The Ear of the Other (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 1–
38].
(17) See especially La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion,

1978) [The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]. It is
not simply a question of words (and to this list one would have
to add the long procession of words whose connections are
taken into account in ‘White Mythology’), but of syntax and of
sentences, that is, of reférance and différance, of a ‘signifying
apparatus’ (‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, 112 [‘Plato's Pharmacy’,
99]). And since Wolff often evokes suspicion and symptoms,
one must not forget to make reference to the discourse of
Epicurus, for example, on the fall, the clinamen and the
Page 26 of 28
symptômata (cf. ‘Mes Chances…’, 22 ff. [‘My Chances/Mes

Chances’, 348 ff.]).
(18) ‘Mes Chances…’, 26 [‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, 352–

53].
(19) ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’, 584 ff. [‘How to

Avoid Speaking: Denials’, 186 ff.]
(20) Khôra, 23 ff. [‘Khôra’, 93].
(21) ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, 122–3 [‘Plato's Pharmacy’, 107–

8]. It is impossible to reconstitute here the context, premisses,
or folds of this assertion in the form of a light provocation.
Allow me at least to reconstitute here the immediate setting
for it: ‘In many ways, and from a viewpoint that does not cover
the entire field, we are today on the eve of Platonism. Which
can also, naturally, be thought of as the morning after
Hegelianism. At that specific point, the philosophia, the
epistêmê are not “overturned”, “rejected”, “reined in”, etc., in
the name of something like writing…’
(22) Among the many places, see De la grammatologie, 14 and

passim [Of Grammatology, 4 and passim] and D'un ton
apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 1983) [‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in
Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Raising the Tone of
Philosophy, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 117–71].
(23) For example, Marges de la philosophie, pp. xx ff., 274 and

passim [Margins of Philosophy, pp. xxiv ff., 230 and passim].
(24) ‘Perhaps this is why the Heraclitean play of the hen

diapheron heautôi, of the one differing from itself, the one in
difference with itself, already is lost like a trace in the
determination of the diapherein as ontological
difference’ (Marges de la philosophie, 23 [Margins of
Philosophy, 22]). Such references to the hen diapheron heautôi
are numerous. A certain difference between différance and the
ontological difference of which Heidegger speaks is
emphasized in many places. Among the most recent, see
Page 27 of 28
Mémoires, pour Paul de Man (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1988),

particularly with regard to technology, science, and literature,
110 ff., 135 ff. [Memoires for Paul de Man (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 109 ff., 139 ff.].
(25) These themes are gathered together and these references

connected to one another in De l'esprit, 24 ff. [Derrida
(1989b), 9 ff.] and in the two essays devoted to Heidegger in
Psyche (‘Geschlecht I: différence sexuelle, différence
ontologique’) [‘Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological
Difference’, in Psyche, ii. 8–26] and ‘La Main de Heidegger
(Geschlecht II)’ [‘Heidegger's Hand (Geschlecht II)’, Psyche, ii.
28–62]) or in Heidegger et la Question (Paris: Flammarion,
1990). I don't have much to say about the triad and the
Oedipal schema with which Wolff concludes. Let me simply
refer yet again to the ‘difference’ I tried to situate between
castration and an Oedipal dialectics, on the one hand, and
dissemination, on the other, between the three and the four,
and so on. (See Dissemination or Glas [Glas, trans. John P.
Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986)].
Page 28 of 28

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‘We Other Greeks’ 1

University Press Scholarship Online

Derrida and Antiquity

Print publication date: 2010

‘We Other Greeks’ 1

Abstract and Keywords

This previously untranslated essay is Derrida's most extensive

Keywords: Derrida, other, us, the Greeks, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger

I have no clear recollection of the remarks I ventured many

modest reflections that follow the pace, brevity, and rhythm

To begin at the greatest and poorest level of generality, let me

Now, mixed in with this (unfortunately justified) feeling of

to run through all of them here; but if these signs converge in

expression of Barbara Cassin (p. 11)). I no doubt have some

1. The project of putting into the same configuration

we explain, interpret, assimilate, root, derive, configure

reading and writing (p.23) would be necessary to give

heterogeneous to that of Deleuze. It differs in its style,

also infinite alterity. I must limit myself here to just a

and it often irrupts within them: under different names,

such as ‘The Double Session’, ‘White Mythology’, or

representation or economic reappropriation,12 and thus

First series of questions. It is perhaps best to cite here in

This sequence of questions seems to be stretched between two

truths.’ On the other hand, I am being asked if it is not

How are we to reconcile Wolff's two propositions? Of course,

restructurations of knowledge and of the discipline. Moreover,

To go straight to the letter of Wolff's ‘first series of questions’,

have a single set answer. What we have here is a form of

discourse on hospitality, war, the excluded of the city—and the

(anthropology, history, and so on) as such. And I wonder if the

For my part, I believe myself to be on this point very disarmed:

critical, or ‘deconstructive’.16 This is just as true for my

In the texts we are speaking of, I especially sought to read

Before moving on to Wolff's second question, one clarification.

non‐self‐closure of this corpus, and still less of this system,

distinguish, on the one hand, all the types of narratives I just

had to have been implying a historical figure that is more

Heidegger is most obviously (an obviousness often denied, it is

Finally, I don't think I can respond in a few words, or even

form or ultimate dignity of thought, of the reading of

I am hastening things a bit at the end of a non‐response that is

1. ‘You know, I am (there is someone in me who feels)

This question perhaps goes in the direction of what Wolff will

As incompatible as they may appear, these three movements—

(1) The original French title, ‘Nous autres Grecs’—with

(2) I am alluding not only to the other Egyptian, to whom I

(4) At least since De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de

(5) Marges de la philosophie, 58–9 and 70 ff. [Margins of

(6) See in particular De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question

(7) ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’, in Psyché:

(8) See in particular ‘Les Pupilles de l'Université: le principe

(9) This can be seen in ‘La Double Séance’, in La

(10) ‘Khôra’, 58–9, 82–3, 101–2 [‘Khôra’, in On the Name, 109,

(11) ‘Epokhê’ (Heidegger), ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn),

Kant, the Greek word provides more than one form of

Now, if the presumed unity of the concept that has been

(12) Rather than multiply here the references to this leitmotif,

(13) De la grammatologie, 59 or 73 (on Plato), 128 and passim

(14) Allow me to refer again to ‘La Mythologie blanche’, 313

(15) First of all, I have always preferred to speak of force, and

because, as a result, it is more open to the paradoxes and

(16) See especially Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche [Spurs: