symploke

Sans Nom

In 1976 Emmanuel Lévinas published Noms propres, a short collection of essays devoted to individual philosophers and writers, including Buber, Celan, Derrida, and Proust. In Noms propres, there are fifteen essays, each with a proper name in the title, but there is also a sixteenth and final essay in this book of meetings and duels, which is entitled “Nameless” (Sans nom). It is with those who do not choose to be without name that Lévinas ends his work.¹ He is concerned with a war without end, and the countless, nameless victims: “Since the end of the war, bloodshed has not ceased. Racism, imperialism and exploitation remain ruthless. Nations and individuals expose one another to hatred and contempt, fearing destitution and destruction” (1996, 119). “Sans nom” confronts us with anonymity as catastrophe, as deprivation, as the loss of the singularity of the name, of names upon names erased without end (Derrida 2002c, 296).

There is an echo of this injunction to resist and to protest against the worst anonymity, the state’s violent imposition of namelessness, in Jacques Derrida’s 1996 intervention in support of the sans-papiers, the undocumented aliens in France, “Dereliction of the Right to Justice (But what are the ‘sans-papiers’ lacking?).” Derrida was responding to the introduction of a law in France to permit “the prosecution, and even the imprisonment, of those who take in and help foreigners whose status is held to be illegal.” Any hospitality towards the sans-papiers is a crime, a breaking of the law (2002b, 133). What, Derrida asks, are these so-called sans-papiers lacking? The without (sans) of anonymity has been claimed by the state and ostensibly put to work: sans papers, these foreigners are without rights and, ultimately, without the rights of human dignity (135). For Derrida, this prompts a question: “one must ask oneself what [End Page 107] happens to society when it ascribes the source of all its ills . . . to the ‘without’ of others” (139–40).

In supporting the sans-papiers, Derrida reiterates that this does not mean speaking “for them.” Those whom the state has defined as sans-papiers, as sans nom, as being without a name that has been recognized and processed by the state, “have spoken”: “They have spoken and they speak for themselves, we hear them, along with their representatives or advocates, their poets, and their songsters” (134). The anonymous, those without a state-name, those who have had the anonymity of an unrecorded and unrecordable name imposed upon them, are speaking. But how does one hear, or how does one stop hearing the nameless speak, the political and philosophical reverberation of the without name?

Today, one might expect that celebrity (the name known by everyone) would be the opposite of anonymity (the name known by no one). But celebrity can be characterized as a kind of anonymity, as a not knowing someone that everybody knows, and, as Derrida said of the secret, anonymity needs witnesses and relies on someone knowing that the proper name is being hidden or held in reserve (1987, 46–47). If such a thing is possible, the profound desperation or the radical liberation of the without name would be known by no one, as if it is only no one who can know no one. Celebrity and anonymity are predicated on the assumption of meeting or not meeting, of two absolutes, of an all public and all private, that mirror and sustain each other. A globally diffused media access and a legal cordon sanitaire or institutional conceit of impartially are equally haunted by an economy of perpetual insufficiency: the public is never public enough, the private is never private enough.

While the word “anonymity” apparently was coined in the early nineteenth century, according to the OED, the word “anonymous” belongs to the late Elizabethan period. That indefatigable translator of the age, Philemon Holland, noted in his translation of Pliny’s Natural History (1601) that when something was found to have “no name to be called by, [it] got thereupon the name anonymos” (274). In other words, the birth of the “anonymos” in English does not...