YES - Derrida on Joyce

the question of the 'yes'. In my short essay on Joyce I tried to deal only with the word 'yes' as it was...performed, so to speak, in Ulysses; and I tried to show how all the paradoxes which are linked to this question of the 'yes'...this has to do with the fact that deconstruction is a 'yes', is linked, is an affirmation. When I say 'yes' - as you know, 'yes' is the last word in Ulysses - when I say 'yes' to the other in the form of a promise or an agreement or an oath, the 'yes' must be absolutely inaugural. In relation to the theme today, inauguration is a 'yes', I say 'yes' as a starting point, nothing precedes the yes, the yes is the moment of the institution, the origin; it's absolutely originary. But when you say 'yes', if you don't imply that the moment after that you will have to confirm the 'yes' by a second 'yes' - when I say 'yes', I immediately say 'yes, yes' - I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second, and tomorrow and after tomorrow and so on, which means that the 'yes' immediately duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say 'yes' without saying 'yes, yes', which implies memory in the promise; I promise to keep the memory of the first yes and when you, in a wedding for instance, in a performative, in a promise, when you say 'yes, I agree, I will' you imply, 'I will say 'I will' tomorrow and I will confirm my promise', otherwise there is no promise. Which means that the 'yes' keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning. That's the way it's a different word. If tomorrow you don't confirm that you have founded today your program you will not have any relation to it. 

Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now we will - if today there has been any inauguration; we don't know yet, we don't know, we can't today, where I am speaking... who knows? So 'yes' has to be repeated, and immediately, immediately it implies what I call 'iterability', it implies the repetition of itself. Which is a threat, which is threatening at the same time because the second yes may be simply a parody or a record or mechanical repetition; it may say 'yes, yes' like a parrot, which means that the technical reproduction of the originary 'yes' is from the beginning threatening to the living origin of the 'yes', which means that the 'yes' is hounded by its own ghost, its own mechanical ghost, from the beginning. Which means that the second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent the first one. If tomorrow you don't reinvent today's inauguration... it will have been dead. Every day the inauguration has to be reinvented. So that's one thing.