'We began with a tear. And as tear folds, so we will end with a tear. When Derrida eulogizes his friend the philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, he tells us about a tear that nourishes. Offered in the little of the sad homage “The Taste of Tears” is a drinkable wetness, a shared experience between the thinkers, a salty exchange. As an epigraph to his text, Derrida gives way to the worlds of the now departed other: Benoist’s account in The Geometry of the Metaphysical Poets of the strangeness of its taste compared to one’s own. Derrida’s answer cannot answer these words of the dead but repeats them. His ethics of friendship is on display in The Work of Mourning, a collection of eulogies for fellow theorists and philosophers; it takes its title from Freud’s notion of the Trauerarbeit and takes the work of mourning as the practice of witnessing. In each of the pieces in that collection, Derrida writes of the other in the self and the promise of philia―the vow to go before the other and to remain and write in the wake of that going. This logic of interiorization does not, in Derrida, produce catharsis: it is in-terminable, in-complete, im-possible, and yet required.
The promise of friendship is a debt for the future payment of witnessing the other’s absence, a debt Derrida made good on his tributes. “To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire hm in friendship,” he writes, “is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die.” The promise of friendship is to open up the world to the existence of the other, an opening that will not fail to confront the pains of finitude on either side of its rend. “That is the blurred and transparent testimony borne by this tear, this small, infinitely small, tear, which the mourning of friends passes though and endures even before death.” But it is not the tasting―even less the wondering as its difference―of which Benoist and Derrida write. The latter on the former, instead, suggests, “He does not teach us that we must not cry over oneself. . . . One should not develop a taste for mourning, and yet mourn we must.” Thus, one must not taste the tear and return with a newly poignant love of the self; rather, every grieving tear must remain from and for the other. The taste of the tear is a sensory displacement, a tingle of the chemosenses making gustatory Levina’s ethics of encountering visually the face of the other. One must always cry, and always cry not for the self but for the other; one must find a way to drink tears without tasting them, like a practiced ageusia.'
Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects, publisher: Duke University Press