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1. J'aurais dû commencer , I should have begun, even before an exergue, by wishing my translator, Peggy Kamuf, good luck, while thanking her from the bottom of my heart. Je me dis d'abord ; I say to myself first that my French J will have been lost from the first letter of the first word. I'm not talking here about my first name but about my je, my I and my jeu with je, my play with I. Je (I) will have withdrawn, effaced itself from the first letter of the first word. Je est un autre. I is another one. Nevertheless, I and I alone should answer for such an effacement. J'en suis responsable. I am responsible for it. The one who says, "je," "I" is responsible for it here, as always. Moreover, responsibility always seems to return to someone who says, "je," "I." This is how what is called law and perhaps justice work. This is how one understands the words of law, right, and justice in the culture where our tradition and language draw their breath. Everything in this culture that acts, thinks, and speaks intentionally, everything that does something, and especially with words, in the perfomative mode, must be signed, implicitly or explicitly, by a responsible je , I. Austin stresses the point: the condition of the pure performative, the temporal modality of the felicitous and serious performative, is the present . At least implicitly. But it is also the full presence to itself of a first person, thus of what is called in French a je. In other words, of what you call an I, thereby making the j of the je disappear. So many untranslatable Js, already! Je me suis si souvent demandé , I have so often asked myself, perhaps for more than thirty-five years, from the depths of my friendship and admiration for him, how one could be J. Hillis Miller. Quel est son "je" à lui? What is his own je, his I? And what taste could this je , this I have? The taste I have for him or the taste he has for others and for me, is it the same? Is it the same as the one he has for himself? One may very well doubt that it is. This doubt likewise takes on a very perceptible flavor in me, an obscurely immediate sense. We are moving here in that strange geometry where the nearest and the most distant are but one and the same. The most similar and the infinitely other return in a circle to each other. How does J. Hillis Miller himself feel when he says "je," "I" or when he has the feeling of "himself"? These borders of the I are vertiginous, but inevitable. We all rub up against them, make contact without contact, in particular as concerns our dearest friends. This is even what is astonishing about friendship, when it is somewhat alert. It is also vigilant friendship that startles us awake to this strange question: what does it mean, for an I to feel itself ? "How does he himself feel, J. Hillis Miller? J. Hillis Miller himself , the other, the wholly other that he remains for me?" This question is not necessarily a worried or painful one. At bottom, it is rather confident. It even lets itself be overtaken by the contagion of that incomparable serenity that, rightly or wrongly, I tend to attribute to J. Hillis Miller. But it is revived and renewed constantly through all that I have shared with him for so many decades. "How does J. Hillis Miller himself feel himself ?": this is a reverie that I would like to share with you today. What is it to feel oneself [se sentir]? To feel oneself, to sense oneself in the sense in which one lets oneself be affected also by a feeling or a sensation? One cannot imagine this affect without the figure of some contact with oneself, without an auto-affection of touching and, more precisely, without the kind of intimate tactile sensitivity that is enigmatically called taste . Perhaps it is a matter here of what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the great texts that J. Hillis Miller has taught me to read, called "selftaste." Selftaste constitutes all "selfbeing," all "selving," Hopkins tells us, "my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things.1" 1 Quoted in J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 271; hereafter abbreviated DG. |
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