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ANOTHER POSSIBILITY
by
CATHERINE MALABOU
Universit de Paris X-Nanterre

ABSTRACT
We try to explore here the Derridean concept of possibility. Such a concept has no
contraries. It does not oppose eectivity or necessity, or even impossibility, but stays
what it is in any case: possible. Trying to negate it or to contradict it only leads to
denial. To Derrida, this strange status of possibility is addressed as the question of faith
as such, as it appears in Faith and Knowledge. Every belief is always, at its foundation, belief in the possibility of a completely dierent history altogether, in what Derrida
calls the utterly other chance. Is deconstruction the legible form of this otherness?

There is another possibility. It is in this way, very simply, that I would

resume the ultimate teaching of Jacques Derrida. This phrase, there
is another possibility, can be conjugated in all tenses. In a sense, it
is time itself, a sort of transcendental schematism that secretly governs
the categories of deconstruction.
There is another possibility. In the present tense, this signies: there
is always something else than what is. There is always something to
prefer. Let us not forget it: Derridas last words were an injunction of
preference: always prefer life and constantly arm survival.1 Survival
is the other possibility of presence.
There is another possibility. In the future, it signies: another order
of things may come, even if one cant see it coming. The other
possibility is the absolute arrival. Derrida also gives the name promise
to this arrival.
There is another possibility. In the past it signies: that which has
been, all of our history, could have happened otherwise. A wholly
other possibility could have guided time. Other events could have
occurred that would have constituted another tradition. This concept
of possibility is not that of the possible, which is connected to necessity
or actuality in the history of philosophy. The wholly other possibility
Research in Phenomenology, 36
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2006

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would be that which no other category could correspond to, neither

the necessary nor the actual nor even the impossible.
Derrida tells us we can only believe in the other possibility. What
are the modalities of such a belief? Here we would like to try to
address this question.
To begin, we would like to examine the motifs of the possible and of
belief, of faith and the promise, present in Derridas later texts. Though
it is evidently illegitimate to distinguish between periods in his work,
nevertheless one must recognize dierences in emphasis. One remarks
that the vast problematic of the messianic that precisely commands
those of possibility and belief returns in the latest texts in a pressing
way, highlighting in a new fashion the problematic of the trace. Works
like Circonfession,2 Spectres de Marx,3 Khra,4 and Foi et savoir,5 Une certaine possibilit impossible de dire lvnement,6 Marx & Sons,7 to cite
only these, are the most eloquent witnesses of the privilege accorded
to the vocabulary of the believed.8
One of the most remarkable traits of these texts is the relationship
that Derrida establishes between the other possibility, belief, and denegation.
Let us begin by clarifying the link that immediately draws belief and
denegation closer together. Believing in something always comes back
to holding that something as undeniable. On the other hand, the
armation of the undeniable always precludes an act of faith. The
undeniable and the believed have a connection to the possible. Believing
is believing that it is possible. So what does it mean to say that a
possibility is undeniable? In Foi et savoir, Derrida responds: One
cannot deny it, which means that one can at best deny it.9 This at
the same time always signies that one can only deny it. All armation
of the undeniable, because in order to be said it supposes a form of
negationone cannot deny itis always itself a denegation: to say that
a possibility is undeniable is another way of saying that one cannot
avoid denying it: one can only deny it.10 Or again: There can only
be denegation for this undeniable.11 Can we believe in the other
possibility? Can we avoid believing in it? In a certain sense these two
questions come back to the same thing.
This unavoidable logic of denegation is of course valid for any
specied belief, for such and such act of faith, for religious faith
in particular. But each case proceeds from a condition that could be
called transcendental: arming the undeniable character of a possibility,
whatever it may be, believing in it, necessarily means postulating

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that this possibility could occur, without necessarily being realized, or

could at least mark an event ( faire vnement). Believing is always believing
in the future; such is the foundation of all messianisms. That the wholly
other can arrive, nally or once again, arrive: this is the undeniable.
Wholly other, signifying other than what is, other than what has already
happened, other than that which we could expect.
The wholly other has to do not only with the future of waiting but
also with the possibility of a wholly other beginning. Belieffor such is
the transcendental horizon of faithalways contains faith in another
source: that everything could have been otherwise, that history could
have happened otherwise. Possibility of another tradition. Possibility of
what Derrida, in Demeure, Athnes, entitles the other opportunity
[chance]. In this text, the philosopher evokes the death of Socrates,
the way in which this poor Socrates between the verdict and the
sighting of the sails past Cape Sounion, believed, by not saving himself,
that he would save himself, and philosophy at the same time . . .,
whereas I continue to believe [said Derrida], that philosophy could
have had another opportunity.12
I persist in believing philosophy could have had another opportunity: such is the paradigmatic example of an armation of the undeniable, such is the typical example of a wording (un nonc) of belief.
Socrates could have escaped; we can believe it; it is undeniable. And
that even if Socrates arms the contrary, even if in the Phaedo he
declares that there is no other possibility than to conform to the principle
of the best by remaining in prison. Despite his words, it is still and
always possible to believe that philosophy could have had another
opportunity or another destiny. One can believe it; one can only believe
it. One can (not/only) deny it [On ne peut (que) le dnier].
Denegation is born in this strange place where the very concept of
birth ickers, in the faltering caused by the vertiginous question, which
cannot fail to haunt all of tradition, all of history, all genesis, all
sequence of facts. This question is the following: and if something else
had taken place, something wholly other, something incredible, absolutely dierent from
everything that has occurred? A question that at the same time opens itself
up to the future: and what if something else, the wholly other, the other opportunity
(chance), the other possibility was susceptible to occur? We cannot know it. We
cannot say what could have been or what could be the other opportunity (chance) for philosophy, for example. But neither can we avoid
questioning this opportunity, whether such a questioning uses it as a
starting point or as an aim. One must always prefer this opportunity.

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Denegation is there, taken away and given at the same time, in the
manner in which this question inevitably resounds, like an irreducible
solicitation of thought by itself, in the manner in which this question
resounds without being able to be asked. The question of the absolute
(tout) other origin is a question that insists, digs, goes beyond the actual
event (vnement eectif ), gives it a surplus of the possible, insists by
repeating it, by repeating to itself that it cannot be asked. Inevitable
as a question, impossible as a question, necessary as a question. Denegation would name this yes and this no in question within the question.
The other opportunity is undeniable. It is for this reason that we
can, that we must, give it credit. Perhaps this opportunity could be
the impossibility to go beyond, further than denegation, to saturate it
or to suture the origin by a pressure that, while rendering it possible,
would not concede to it; it could perhaps be this impossibility of return
to the origin that would liberate, negatively, the trust in the wholly other
origin, in which we cannot but believe. The secret of the other opportunity seals the indissoluble alliance between faith and denegation.
The new orientation of Derridas interrogation logically leads him
in his nal texts to pursue his explanation with what is now called
negative theology. This motif of denegation, does it not lead one to
elaborate from a new form of apophatic discourse? If it is thus clear
that deconstruction seems to return to this rhetoric of negative determination in an insistent and regular fashion, endlessly multiplying the
cautionary apophatic warnings: this, which is called X (for example,
the text, the writing, the trace, the dirance, the hymen, the supplement,
the pharmakon, the paragon, etc.), it is neither this nor that, neither
sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither within
nor without, neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive,
neither present nor absent, not even neutral.13 it is necessary that
Derrida explains this new proximity with negative theology which, to
avoid being merely apparent, must nonetheless be denounced in so far
as it is the mask of an irreducible gap.
The thinker recognizes well the necessity of a certain recourse to
the apophatic, i.e., to a modality of the negative, to speak of faith . . .
and to speak plainly, if it is true that every act of speech is only possible starting from an advantage (un crdit), an alliance which unites
the speaker to the listener. But far from accusing the shortcomings
of discourse in relation to what it designates (the essence or the
hyper-essentiality of God), this modality of the negative (it is not this,

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nor that, etc.) constitutes, on the contrary, the unsurpassable horizon

of the discursive in the perspective of which only the messianic can
announce itself.
We should then of course look at Freud to understand the logic
proper to denegation and the new use which Derrida makes of it. In
the text from 1925, entitled Verneinung, Freud gives a specic signicance
to this term. Denegation is the act by which a subject refuses to
recognize as his own desire, a feeling or an object that he has repressed.
The Vocabulaire de psychanalyse species that it has to do with a process
in which the subject, while formulating one of his desires, thoughts,
feelings, until then repressed, continues to defend himself denying that
it belongs to him.14 The individual says no but this no means
yes.
Thus so, in one sense to deny (dnier) means the impossibility of
denying (nier), as Freuds famous example shows us. After recounting
the dream, the patient said to the analyst: You ask who could that
person be in the dream. My mother, [but] it is not her.15 Explanation
that the psychoanalyst inevitably interprets immediately as its my
mother, being certain that the more vehement are the patients oppositions to his interpretation, the more they actually betray an admission
or an armation.
The method, which rests on a logical quirkto transform the negation into an armationis very handy, says Freud. We ask [the
patient]: what can you hold to be the most improbable of all, in this
situation? What, in your opinion, was furthest then from you? If the
patient falls into the trap and names that which he could least believe,
he has thus, almost always, admitted that which is true.16 The interpretation consists then in systematically arming (soutenir) the opposite
of what the patient says.
Nevertheless, denegation is not a simple contradicted armation
(armation contrarie). If it dealt simply with that, the analytic cure
would be something quick and easy. Certainly, denegation is an
armation turned upside down, but it also says something else. Thus
it persists like a negation despite its obvious dimension of an admittance. The subject who denies is found out through analysis, yet he
continues to deny it, does not recognize what is evident. The proof
then ceases to be a piece of evidence, and we are faced here with a
wall of resistance that does not concede to any test of truth or of reality.
For even if the analyst makes the denied object return, the mother in

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this caseits your motherhe cannot manage to make her present to the subject; he makes her come back denied, in other words
as a pure possibility. Its your mother, says the analyst, but since
the patient does not admit it, the mother does not become actual, but
she remains probable. It is possible, the patient retorts, but you are
the one who said it. Neither present, nor absent. Simply possible
negatively possible. She saves herself indenitely. Besides, the possible
would be exactly thatthat which, simply suggested by the other, keeps
itself on the ontological reserve, without the statute of being there.
That which remains on the threshold of being Freud calls the repressed.
Thus the denied object is not reduced to the statute of nonbeing
but quite thrown out of being. It is excluded from the register of
beings. The repressed, the denied, is rejected from presence. It remains
endlessly possible.
Such a possible is not a negation of the eective, neither is it an
armation of the impossible. Without being reduced to armation,
the negative possible is not the expression of any lack or decit. It is
witness to a power or to an aptitude of the negative that neither arms
itself nor subtracts itself (ni ne se manque). This strange possibility is thus
dened by Freud as the state of that which must not be made present. The
possible corresponds to an interdiction of presence.
Derrida takes up this understanding of the possible, made clear by
the problematic of denegation, and clearly connects it with the
philosophical question to which it is irreducibly connected: the question
of the absolute other origin. Denegation, whose meanderings and modalities
are multiple, would be governed by the fundamental motif of the other
possibility.
Derridas oeuvre in its entirety can be read as the most scrupulous,
the most audacious attempt to legitimize the question of the wholly
other opportunity: the right of this question resides in its undeniable
character. This theme is clearly present in the very rst texts, to which
the commentary on the thought of Levinas, developed in Violence et
mtaphysique, attests in particular. Derrida recognizes as undeniable the
Levinasian dream of a dispossession, of a de-motivation of the philosophical tradition in the name of the other in Greek, of the other of
the Greek source and of its German reappropriation. Violence et mtaphysique characterizes this other as the ultra-logical aect of speech:
Interpolation of Greek by the non-Greek from the depth of a silence,
of an ultra-logical aect of speech, of a question which can only be

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said by forgetting itself in the language of the Greeks; which in forgetting itself, can only be said in the languages of the Greeks. Strange
dialogue between speech and silence.17 And further: The question
has already begun, we know it and this strange certitude concerning
another absolute origin, another absolute decision, keeping the past of
the question in mind, liberates an incommensurable teaching: the discipline of the question.18
The later texts emphasize the importance of this discipline. And
so, a text like Foi et savoir gives the problem of the wholly other
origin a fundamental importance. It turns this problem into the
very origin of faith, as we can see in this decisive passage: The
gap between the opening of possibility (as a universal structure) and
the determined necessity of this or that religion will always remain irreducible; and sometimes within each religion, between, on the one hand,
what keeps it closest to its own pure possibility and, on the other, its
own necessities or authorities determined by history. It is thus that we
can always criticize, reject, or combat this or that form of sacredness
or belief, even of religious authority, in the name of the most originary [originaire] possibility. This one can be universal (faith or trustworthiness, good faith as a condition of testimony, of the social tie and
even of the most radical kind of questioning) or already particular, for
example the belief in some original event of revelation, of promise or
injunction, like in the reference to the Commandments, to primitive
Christianity, to some fundamental speech or writing, more archaic and
pure than the clerical or theological discourse. But it seems impossible to deny possibility in the name of which, thanks to which derived
necessity (determined authority or belief ) would nd itself put in question, suspended, rejected or criticized, even deconstructed. We cannot
[on ne peut pas] deny it, which means we can at best go so far as to
deny it. Thus the discourse that we would use to oppose this would
always cede to the gure or the logic of denegation. Such would be
the place where, before and after the enlightenments of the world,
reason, criticism, science, tele-techno science, philosophy, thought in
general keeps the same resources as religion in general.19
Let us recall the general context of the analysis: Why is the phenomenon of the return of the religious, which marks itself today by
a violent resurgence of the religious questionfanaticism, extreme
orthodoxy, fundamentalismso dicult to think, in other words, to
understand and criticize at the same time?

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It is because the question of the return, Derrida says, is never simple.

There is always more than one return in the return, all repetition
also doubles (se ddouble) or repeats itself. In this sense, to speak of the
return of the religious is to recognize that religion returns at least
twice. First, in the form of outbidding (surenchre). Second, in the form
of the critique of the outbidding. This one, as it happens, causes
another religion to return: not this or that religious dogma, this or
that determined religion, but a certain faith, precisely a faith in the wholly
other opportunity (chance) (the belief in the fact that the other of fanaticism can happen), faith only from which fanaticism can be taken into
account and denounced. It is thus always in the name of religion that
we think religion. It would be naive to think that the return of religion can be criticized in the name of reason only, as if reason could
be independent from belief, or as if knowledgeold problemwere
absolutely independent of faith. The nal part of the excerpt arms
it: thought and religion both nd their sustenance from the same place.
And it is towards this placewhat it is, how to think it?that all of
Derridas analysis directs itself.
Always more than one source, he says, reinterpreting a famous
title of Bergsons,20 recalling as well the two etymological sources
of the word religion distinguished by Benveniste (relegere and religare),
then by exploring the gap set by Kant between the simple cult
religion and reective faith in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
This reective faith, says Derrida, is not essentially dependent on any
historical revelation and so accords itself to the rationality of pure
practical reason.21 Eventually radicalizing this gap between worship,
religion, and rational faith, Derrida, in the end, explores the manner
in which Heidegger extracts the thought of the indebted being
(Schuldigsein) from the Christian root as well as from all moral preoccupations, aiming in this way towards a primary attestation more
originary than Kantian faith. The word religion, revealing here the
resources of its source, would designate at once a horizon of faith irreducible to a determined revelation, as well as particular religions born
from historical revelations.
Derrida asks: How can we think thenwithin the limits of simple
reasona religion that, without reverting to natural religion, would
be actually universal today? And that would no longer stop at the
Christian paradigm or even the Abrahamic one?22 That, in other
words, no longer stops at that which has had a historic occurrence
in the name of religion, it being understood that the Testament and
Koranic revelations are inseparable from a historicity of revelation itself ?23

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This universal religion is the other name for faith in justice and
democracy. It characterizes itself by an openness towards the arrival of
the other. This openness to the other characterizes the messianic or
messianicity (messianicit ) without messianism (messianisme). It would
be the openness to the future or to the arrival of the other as the
coming of justice, but without a horizon of expectation and without
prophetic preguration. The coming of the other cannot arise as a
singular event except where no anticipation can see coming, where the
other and deathand true evilcan surprise at any given instant.24
The messianic points to a faith without dogmas that inhabits
every act of language and every act of addressing the other, which
is postulated every time I open myself to the other and show some
trust (conance) that I have or would like to have in him, a trust (conance)
that I have or would like to have in the event of the encounter or
the future of the community. Yetand here we begin to approach
the motif of denegationthis faith is, in its possibility, more originary
than any act of confessional faith, more than any adhesion to a historically-determined religion. This faith or this act of trust (crdit) is in
some way prior to history, utterly originary (arche-originary), for it makes
a sign, beyond the historical event of revelation, towards revealability
itself. Here Derrida interrogates, in the name of this strange faith, a
surplus or supplement of origin that exceeds the logic of history that
it has nevertheless opened and to which it does not belong. This
surplus, which no determined religion can understand, would coincide
precisely with the possibility of the wholly other opportunity (la tout
autre chance).
This surplus, then, is a place, the place, that at the same time is
atopical (atopique), that is to say, without place, without possible
localization. It is the pure possibility of the place that gives rise without itself occupying a space, without taking care of its own space. A
location we can only reach by the detour of a certain via negativa. This
place without location eects thought ultra-logically by shying away,
since the wholly other origin or the wholly other opportunity did not
take place (donnent lieu) and might never take place. They give rise (lieu),
they can give rise, but they themselves do not present themselves and
will not present themselves. Thus we can only speak of them apophatically, by summoning gures of aporia. In Foi et savoir, Derrida names
four of these gures: the island, the promised land, the desert, and khora.
The text called Comment ne pas parler already insists on the desertic
character, radically ahuman and atheological, of this place.25 The
place of the wholly other possibility uproots the tradition of the place,

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whether this word is understood in the temporal sense (tradition of the taking place [avoir lieu] as an event) or in the spatial sense
(the tradition of the topic, of the place of discourse, and of the situation
that which takes place is there). Thus the desert names the place of the
abstraction of the place, the place where the place loses its proper
trace, according to the paradox that has it that the foundation of the
lawthe law of the law, the institution of the institution, the origin
of the constitution[be] a performative event that cannot belong to
the whole that it founds, inaugurates or justies. Such an event is
unjustiable in the logic of what it will have opened. It is the decision
of the other in the undecidable.26 The desert, or desert in the desert,
is thus the paradoxical site of rootingthe foundation of tradition
where the root is at the same time torn from itself, swallowed up by
the source of all radicality. Between the root and the source, the distance of absolute alterity opens itself.
This place is a place of innite resistance, impassive. Like the
khra of the Timaeus, it is an-archical and un-archivable (an-archivable),
without age and without history. Khra is nothing, Derrida says; but
this nothing does not even announce itself as beyond being (au-del
de ltre); it is not reappropriable (rappropriable), even by negative
theology, for it does not make a sign towards an essence: Nothing
arrives by it [khra] and nothing happens to it.27 Khra, he adds,
remains absolutely unmoved [impassible] and heterogeneous to all the
processes of historical revelation or of anthropo-theological experience,
which nonetheless supposes its abstraction.28 But this reserve and this
abstraction that resists as promise, as excess of possibility, are in fact
sources of faith, faith in the wholly other opportunity: the opportunity
of this desert in the desert . . . is that by uprooting the tradition that
carries it, by atheologizing it, this abstraction liberates, without denying
faith, a universal rationality and political democracy which is inseparable
from it.29
It is now possible to take into account the logic of denegation that
upholds such a discourse. The place of the wholly other possibility,
of the wholly other opportunity, is nothing, we have just seen; it
resists without being, without having the time or the history; it is from
before time, from before history, without being able to situate this
lead, whether chronologically, logically, or ontologically. It, then, is
neither a principle nor an origin nor an event. It has nothing to do
with an instance but rather reveals itself in the play of an instance
(here we can speak neither of being nor of manifestation) whose force

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would consist of this: being impossible to be denied. Insistence of

the undeniable, the undeniable insistence. The gap between the opening
of possibility and necessity for one religion or another is undeniable. We
cannot deny this possibility. That is to say one must see that this
possibility is not the possibility of something undeniable. As Freud
demonstrates, denegation has no bearing on the content of possibility
but denes possibility itself. To be possible is to be undeniable. This
can be said in another way: the possible appears like the possibility of
the pure and simple impossibility of being denied. Otherwise put,
possibility is denegation. It is nothing outside of the play of denegation;
it does not arm itself nor propose itself only to push denegation, and
consequently negation, to the limit: at most one can deny it. And even
as one denies it, which one cannot avoid doing, one continues to
believe in it, one believes in it for that very reason that one denies it.
Denegation, or the play of the undeniable, are thus more originary
than the determined forms of denegation that they render possible,
determined forms that Derrida enumerates: that which is putting in doubt
or in question, suspension, rejection, critique, deconstruction. All oensive discourse, all discourses of refusal, struggle, ght, in this case of a ght
against this or that form of religious fanaticism, proceed from the undeniable, that is to say from the very possibility of denegation. We could
attain, through struggle, only that which is determined, particular, never
the absolutely originary (originaire) place or the resource itself (resource)
of combat.
The discourse that we would oppose to that, Derrida says, would
always concede to the gure or to the logic of denegation. A rst
opposition to this discourse could consist in the following armation:
there is and there will always be only that which is; nothing other
than determined necessity. Faith in the wholly other origin betrays
a nave trust in a sort of must-be (devoir-tre) or bad innity (mauvais
inni ); it is a discourse of the beautiful soul (belle me), the fraudulent intrusion of an illusory transcendence in the course of historical
immanence. To this discourse, one could respond that as soon as one
says: there is only that which is, this statement participates in the faith
in the there is and would not be possible without the trust (crdit),
open to speech, accorded to the donation itself (there is, es gibt). But
this donation is undeniable.
A second objection could show that it is impossible to exceed the
horizon of determined religion. To talk the Derridean way is to talk
once more from Christianity and Judaism. To this, one could respond

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that in fact Derrida is always speaking from the Testamentary tradition, which he never pretended to do otherwise. The gap that he
attempts to analyze, between possibility and determined necessity, does
not situate itself beyond religion but opens itself within ( mme)
historically-determined religion. Not surprising then that we can decipher
its path, already, in this or that tradition. There is always more than
one source.30
A third objection could raise the question of knowing if what Derrida
names faith, tolerance, trust (crdit), messianic, etc., truly has a connection
with faith or with religionif it has to do with a misuse of language
or not: faith is faith and not a subtle disguise of a form of atheism or
a ruse on the part of reason, of a counterfeit of faith. To answer this
objection would be to show that one cannot delimit a domain of
authentic faith without having faith in this authenticity itself, otherwise
said: unless one has faith in faith. This duciary reexivity, this reexivity
of faith, is made possible by an originary act of belief in faith itself
that does not confuse itself completely with the object of faith. It is
this gap that is given the name of possibility, or decision of the other.
It would probably be possible to multiply the eects of denegation on
denegation, that is to say, of the undeniable. They would come up
against the implacable logic of Derridas argumentation. The undeniable
can only be denied. It is in the name of undeniable possibility that
determined or derived necessity can be deconstructed. Thus, as it has
been shown as early as Of Grammatology, in considering writing as that
which has been derived from the gaze of speech (la parole), metaphysics
had at the same time repressed the supplement, in other words, rst
and foremost the possibility of the supplement of origin and of the
wholly other possibility.
The tie that unites possibility and denegation is structural. The
possiblethat which must not come into presenceis the very indentation (echancrure) of the future. Denying always demands an act of faith,
which I would dene as faith in another possible beginning, in another
source. As soon as I deny, that is to say, as soon as I deny the evidence,
I postulate, without being able to arm it, that everything could have
been otherwise, that everything could have happened dierently.
Denegation liberates the negative possibility of another history/story
(histoire). The negative possible, the state of that which must not be
made present, is the question that cannot be asked and that, at the
same time, can only be asked. It is this too that we cannot not hold

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as being possible. That which we reject, exclude, is it not always, in

one way or another, the vertigo of the wholly other origin? What is
most secret? Is it not always that which I am not and which carries,
fantasmatically, the question of what I could have been? Forbidden
question, negatively possible, that lodges itself in the heart of all of
history, all translation, all genesis. Not that which will be, but that
which could have been. This question which Hegel despised in the
name of actuality (eectivit) and which nevertheless exists in the name
of (au titre de) denegation. The question of the wholly other origin is
a question that we too often and quickly rid ourselves of: Do not
ponder on what could have been, Look at what is, We can not
remake history, etc. And yet, do we not continue to think, in one
way or another, of the other possibility? To the other of necessity? To
this other origin that we hold as negatively possible? This fringe of
non-presence that doubles the present, this negative aureole of that
which could have been encircles actuality (eectivit)what can we make
of it since it always returns?
Negative Hypothesis. This return signies the implacable hardness of
the negative, which Freud, as we know, designates under the name
of the compulsion of repetition. That which returns is the phantom
of the possible. In recalling the scene of the trauma, we bring back
its denegation, that is to say, the possibility that nothing happened.
Any questions, whether formulated or not, explicit or not, that we
throw towards the wholly other: and what if it had not happened?
and what if something else had happened? would be a modality of
the compulsion of repetition. For this reason, negativity would only be
an automatic procedure, a machine to retell or redo.
Positive Hypothesis. The question of the other possibility, of the wholly
other version, would simply not be, or not even be at all, a sign of
being attached to the past ( passiste), of having a melancholic or pathological attitude, but the sign of the coming of another way of being.
A way of being excluded from the domain of traditional ontology. A
way of being that we could call that of an a posteriori possibility. What
we reject, what we exclude, what we deny, is a possible perpetually
pending.
With such a possible, it has to do then with the opening of the
banality (sans histoire) in the story, of what Freud calls, in Inhibition,
symptme et angoisse, that which has not happened [non advenu].31 In
a way that which has not happened; this dismissal of a charge (non
lieu), this repressed or rejected, harbors in itself the worst possibility.

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catherine malabou

Every fundamentalist attempt probably takes root there. Attempting to

actualize a presumed fantastic origin, wanting to legitimize (donner des
droits) what could have been, transforming it into what must be, is
quite the worst that can happen. Attempting to establish ( faire tre)
what reality has excluded from the beginning. One nds here the
impulse to destroy, the death wish.
At the same time, the negative possible is the least harmful. That
which does not let itself be encroached by any revelation, any proof,
any presence. That which does not lend itself to contradiction by the
test of facts. A naive absolute trust, a childs faith, the child who says
no and no, this fragile but unconditional belief without which life,
quite simply, would not be possible. Let us, rather, always prefer life.
Translated by Simone Kearney
Boston College
NOTES
1. Quoted by Michel Lisse, in Jacques Derrida, Ministre des Aaires Etrangres (Paris:
ADPF-Publications, 2005), 66.
2. Circonfession, in Georey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris:
Le Seuil, 1991).
3. Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galile, 1993).
4. Khra (Paris: Galile, 1993).
5. Foi et savoir. Les deux sources de la religion aux limites de la simple raison,
in Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, La religion (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), 986.
6. Une certaine possibilit impossible de dire lvnement, in Dire lvnement, est-ce
possible?, with Gad Soussana and Alexis Nouss (Paris: LHarmattan, 2001), 79112.
7. (Paris: Galile and Presses Universitaires de France, 2002).
8. First words of Circonfession, 7.
9. Foi et savoir, 77.
10. Comment ne pas parler, 561, in Psych: Inventions de lautre (Paris: Galile, 1987),
53595.
11. Ibid., 549.
12. Demeure, Athnes. Nous nous devons la mort, in Jean-Franois and Jacques
Derrida, Athnes lombre de lacropole, photographies de Jean-Franois Bonhomme
(Athens: Editions Olkos, 1996), 61.
13. Ibid.
14. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1967), 113.
15. Freud, La ngation (Die Verneinung), 167, in vol. 7 of uvres compltes (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 16571.
16. Ibid.
17. Violence et mtaphysique, in Lcriture et la dirence (Paris: Le Seuil, 1967), 196.
18. Ibid., 118.
19. Foi et savoir, 7677.

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another possibility
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

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This of course refers to Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion.

Foi et savoir, 19.
Ibid., 23.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 27.
Comment ne pas parler, 570.
Foi et savoir, 2829.
Comment ne pas parler, 569.
Foi et savoir, 31.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 85.
S. Freud, Inhibtion, symptme et angoisse, trans. Fr. Joel Doron and Roland Doron
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 34.