An "impossible possibility of saying": the event in philosophy and literature, according to Jacques Derrida

This paper takes account of the "impossible possibility of saying the event", a fertile notion in Derrida's last writings. The "possibility of the impossible" is an expression borrowed from Heidegger's concept of Ereignis. It is related to an aporetic ethics concerned about responsibility in facing the "inappropriability of events." In some of Derrida's most famous possible-impossible aporias - justice rebellious to rule, the "ghost of the undecidable" in every event of decision, invention that always presupposes some illegality - an ethics of alterity puts forward a critique of the unitary self, a subjectivity under the underivable interpellation coming from events. The relevance of the otherness to understanding any decision solicits "the law of the singular event", a promise of originality. However, the "incalculable uniqueness and exceptionality" of each event implies for Derrida a promise of a monolingual community, with its suspending or bracketing of dissemination acts. In the face of the "reserves of the undecidable" of fiction, that promise of uniqueness seems obviously impossible. This article aims, therefore, to estimate the deconstructive fertility of the relationship between testimony and fiction in literature, a moment in Derrida's thought in which the categories of truth break down, thus revealing literature as the "other" of philosophy.