Jacques Derrida, as Nicholas Royle notes, was “a great talker as well as a great writer” (Jacques Derrida 155), and his work can often appear more accessible when encountered within an interview, dialogue or question-and-answer session. Called upon to respond adequately to unpredictable questions, to simplify, summarise and improvise, to put his own words in other words and to philosophise on the spot, Derrida’s quasi-spontaneous reflections often read like exercises in the impossible, a challenge that he nonetheless consistently welcomes and excels in, as if it were possible. The interviews therefore constitute an invaluable source for Derrida scholars.
The form of the interview reflects also on the various unsettling forms that Derrida’s writing takes in, for example, The Post Card (1987) or “Circumfession” (1993), where voices can appear as if addressed to the other, as if male or female, as if literary or philosophical, as if personal. Recalling a conference in 1997, Kas Saghafi notes that “one of the members of the audience commented that the media tend to efface the question of the body, and that in discussions of the media more attention needed to be paid to our ‘physical presence’ and ‘bodies.’ Derrida noted, gesturing toward her, that at the very moment he was speaking, he was much less sure of ‘presence’ and ‘the body itself’” (Apparitions--Of Derrida's Other 179n25). What can take place in an interview or dialogue when the interlocutors are there only “as if” in person?
Elsewhere, Derrida links the “as if” to the thinking of the event that would remain “perhaps—to come” and he suggests “this small word, the ‘as’ of the ‘as if’ as well as the ‘as’ of the ‘as such’ might well be the name of the true problem, not to say the target, of deconstruction” (Without Alibi 213, 234). This panel is interested in what is at stake in this strange practice called the interview as well as, more broadly, in the place of the interview in theoretical, visual, and literary texts, and how that place is unsettled by a thinking of the “as if.”