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Chance has it that as I am writing this essay I am traveling yet again to Europe on a plane with two essays by J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, the manuscripts of the essays that are published here under the heading "J." As we are approaching France and flying over Normandy, I am reminded that it is D-Day, in French Jour-J. As we are flying over the Omaha Beach pointed out to us by the pilot and officially celebrating today among other things the strategic rapprochement between France and the U.S., I cannot but think of another famous example of the kiss, this one from the film Casablanca , "when a kiss was just a kiss." The film Casablanca , historians of cinema have noted, had been shown to Roosevelt in the White House (Casablanca !) in order to convince him to open the front in France, which then lead to Jour J/D-Day, by showing him the film that would narrate an anticipated rapprochement of the U.S. and France after the U.S. would have deployed the troops on the French soil. The kiss is at the opening to the other, where love and war begin or end, the opening to the other in a risk, for better of for worse, and sometimes the worst. I would like to finish with a very emphatic proposition: I know of no other two French and American intellectuals that have done so much to contribute to the rapprochement between the French and the American cultures in the last fifty years, as did J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida ( Casablanca : "I think [theirs, Js and Js] is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!"). At a time when the contact between the two countries has been strained (as a bellicose bumper sticker has it, First Baghdad, Then Paris, Then Hollywood), the figures of J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida stand for what is best in France and the United States and offer a shining example of the true politics of friendship. They stand for the opening to each other and to each other's culture in the most welcoming and disarmed fashion with no calculation, hesitation, or limit. The only point of their own limitations, where these two opening and welcoming gestures interrupt each other's infinity, is the sight of their chiasmatic recognition of one in the other, one in the other as the other, at the site of their touch "when a kiss is just (a kiss)." And, as I am flying in the company of J and J, as I have done so many times and for twenty-five years, I cannot help but think of a future young scholar, of so many scholars to come, who will find inspiration and a jolt when reading these two essays in Critical Inquiry . And who will in turn be propelled, with the force produced by this encounter and this event, to further destinations of as yet uncharted paths. |
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