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“It’s a joke, I do not accept”: Derrida’s Demanding Call and Other Dead Voices

This paper explores the notions of indebtedness in the work of Derrida and the complex series of negotiations he employs in dealing with the work of Heidegger, Blanchot and Beckett, principally in the works The Post Card, “Living On: Border Lines”, The Work of Mourning and “Aphorism Countertime”. What does the obligation to read the work of Derrida entail? The ethical demand of history and the political is strewn with ghosts and phantoms; all the dead voices of a ruined Beckettian world that haunts the survivors with hoax calls from beyond the grave. Yet through this “hauntology” Derrida insists on the power of the future, the “to come”, as an event held open and irreducible to thought. The apparent stasis of this position—precisely its apparition—entails the obligation to “go on” beyond the affectation of mourning and engage most properly, that is on our own, with notions of the promise, legacy, survival and remains. The paper will trace through some questions posed by David Wood in “Following Derrida” concerning reverse charge phone calls and who pays or is asked to collect. The very foundations of community and responsibility are funded by the desire to accept the call of all the dead voices (to commodify them), but also on a certain refusal, or reaffirmation by those who live on: to not accept, and in doing so to respond to friendship, the time of the other and tomorrow.