Abstract
Nuclear war, so Derrida tells us, and we see no reason, not quite yet, to dispute it, though if we were to live underground in Nevada, Mururoa, or a handful of other warm places on the globe, then we might be persuaded otherwise; nuclear war ‘has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it … some might call it a fable, then, a pure invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions’.1 So we begin with our own nuclear fable, or, you might say, our limited nuclear engagement.
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Notes
J. Derrida, ‘No apocalypse, not now: full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives’, Diacritics, 14, 2 (1984), pp. 20–31. This quote p. 23. Henceforth ‘NA’, with page number given in parentheses in the text.
J.-L. Nancy and P. Lacoue-Labarthe (eds), Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: Colloque de Cerisy 23 juillet — 2 août 1980 (Paris: Galilée, 1981). Gravity’s Rainbow (New York/London: Viking Press/Cape, 1973).
J. Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy’, trans. J. P. Leavey, Semeia, 23 (1982), pp. 63–97. Henceforth ‘AT’ with further page references given in parentheses in the text. The translation appears reprinted and modified in Oxford Literary Review, 6, 2 (1984), pp. 3–37. The Semeia version translates the paper as it was delivered at Cerisy (in Les Fins de l’homme, pp. 445–79); the OLR version takes account of the book form, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983).
This egregious pun is a travesty of a much more important, identical, pun made by Derrida. See ‘Pas’ in his Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), pp. 19–116.
Both of these are to be found in J. Derrida, The Post Card, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
This reading of the final page is so common in Pynchon criticism that it almost passes without notice, as an authoritative reading. See, for a most explicit example, E. Mendelson, ‘Gravity’s encyclopedia’, in G. Levine and D. Leverenz (eds), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), pp. 161–95 — especially pages 194–5. The other, less frequent, alternative is the much safer one of refusing a definite and positive thesis. Molly Hite, for example, takes the latter track, quoting the rocket as ‘poised above the heads of “us”’. See M. Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 97.
Derrida’s use of this word, taken from the recurring invocation of The Apocalypse of St John (and also from Blanchot) relies more on resonance than precision, as the following discussion shows. It is an invitation to, or promise of an event without the sense of closure which the event implies. Thus for Derrida it works as a type of impossible philosopheme, similar to the coup de don of Spurs or Heidegger’s gift of being. See J. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 108–19. In relation to Blanchot, see J. Derrida, ‘Living on / borderlines’, trans. J. Hulbert, in H. Bloom et al. (eds), Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 75–175; and ‘Pas’ referred to in note 4 above.
J. Mehlman, ‘Writing and deference: the politics of literary adulation’, Representations, 15 (1986), pp. 1–14. This quote, pp. 1–2. Gregory Ulmer, on the other hand, reads the term ‘deconstruction’ as covering only a small part of a larger Derridean territory and cites Derrida to the effect that he used or uses the word ‘for the sake of rapid convenience, though it is a word I have never liked and one whose fortune has disagreeably surprised me’. Accordingly, Ulmer prefers to pit the term ‘grammatology’ (as ‘Writing’) somewhat against and/or in complementary relation to ‘deconstruction’. This is refreshing and accurate after such influential writers as Culler have used the latter term almost synonymously with everything ‘after structuralism’. Derrida has taken a number of opportunities to distance himself from the word but a recently published article concerning the translation of the word into Japanese has him explaining the complexity of its sense in very explicit terms. See J. Derrida, ‘Lettre à un ami japonais’, in Pysché (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 387–93; C. V. McDonald (ed.), The Ear of the Other (New York: Schocken Books, 1985); G. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. x; J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). The Derrida quote is from ‘The time of a thesis’, in A. Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 44.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Fall out. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_9
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