De-Facing Derrida

Deface: 1. To mar or spoil the face or surface of; to disfigure. 2. To impair the usefulness, value, or influence of. 3. Obsolete: To obliterate; destroy.

Throughout his life and his work, Derrida always called our attention to the innumerable possibilities of defacement, as well as to the limits of memory figured in “testamentary signs, traces, hypograms, hypomnemata, signatures and epigraphs, or autobiographical ‘memoirs’” (Memoires, 29). One wonders, on occasions like these, an occasion that is already over-determined, discursively (and otherwise), if it would be better to remain silent; to keep the act of memory secret or private, perhaps even intimate; not to risk betraying the other who is “in me” or “between us” to the spectacle of a loud display; to hold in confidence and completely away from the “public” the moments (however brief and, no doubt, inconsequential) I may have shared with one who is now departed and who only exists as a shadow, a shadow of a shadow, whose presence has been consigned to memory, forgetfulness, and de-facement. And yet, on occasions like these, we know that Derrida himself never chose to remain silent, or refused the strange imperative to speak publicly “in the memory of…”—of course, not without a series of endless qualifications that quickly became a hallmark of his manner (or style) of speaking on these occasions.