‘Périmer d’avance’: Blanchot, Derrida and Influence

Abstract

What is the influence of deconstruction? We can begin to answer this question by highlighting this double genitive’s second meaning: beyond whatever influence deconstruction might or might not have had on wider narratives of the period, we can interrogate the particular model of influence at work within deconstructive thought. Given the latter’s attention to Heidegger’s notion of overcoming metaphysics — and the general prevalence of vanguardist rhetoric in the 1960s — we might initially identify the influence of deconstruction as an overturning or rejection of the past and its influence on us. On closer analysis, however, an alternative narrative emerges according to which deconstruction is not an act of destruction, but rather an ongoing process of suspension, ironization and mise-en-abyme. This means that the very notion of rejecting influence must itself be rejected (and so on — the circumlocutions and suspensions of Derrida’s writing explore this point ad infinitum). We can see this when, picking up an episode in Freud bearing striking similarities to the Oedipal model of the relationship to previous models of authority, Jean-Luc Nancy writes:

Dans Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi, Freud met en scène le premier récitant, le premier mythologue qui raconte à sa horde qu’il a tué le père: récit de l’impossible, puisque le père n’advient que par ce meurtre, lequel par conséquent n’aura jamais tué que l’animal prépaternel.