Abstract

This article attempts to lean against the suffocating trend towards mourning, theological exegesis and close-circuit canonisation that has characterised Derrida studies in the wake of his death. On Touching is particularly brutal towards Nancy's presumption of a ‘post-deconstructive’ haptics in a manner that extends to a general discipleship (glossing Derrida's remark, ‘I am not of the family’). Summarising the entire course of Derridean ‘deconstruction’ (departing from phenomenology, recycling early studies), On Touching may be his most political monograph. Yet in cutting off Nancy, Derrida at once cuts off ‘future’ extensions while turning aside from any projection of what lies beyond this then closed history except for complex references to memory machines. This essay then asks what teletechnic media already knows of the prosthetic hand and eye by turning to Hitchcock's Spellbound, where a propping-up of the senses by technics is allowed to exceed, or virtually suicide, itself. In refusing to address any ‘beyond’ of a metaphysical haptics while cutting off his own future extenders (readers, progeny), Derrida raises (yet turns from) the question of what exceeds this closed history entering 21st-century horizons