JD: While in Australia, you buried a number of gifts sent to you by people around the world. Objects and accompanying texts would be entombed in a time capsule to be unearthed at a future date. You describe this event as 'a homage to individual things, a work of friendship, and a gift to the unforeseeable future'. In what sense is it a 'work' of friendship for you, and what is the sense of homage to 'individual things'? The major theme of your work is perhaps a negotiation with the most difficult-and perhaps impossible-thing (or no-thing) there is, namely, time? Perhaps the burial is also a homage to time and time's passing?

DW: In fact, we did do this yesterday, so it's no longer what it was for a long time, which is this little fantasy, an imaginary event that I hoped would happen-it now has happened, although the happening is now going to continue through the editing of the film, and the various conversations that I had with people, not just in this formal context, about what happened, what it meant, and so on. Part of what is so interesting about an event like this is that it is something that happens intensely at a particular time: we dug a hole, about five feat deep, and we got sweaty. We photographed every object that went in and wrapped it all in cellophane and sealed it all and glued it and buried it. And then the rain came down. So there was all this local time involved in the actual event-but there are so many other ripples and ways in which the imagination is being provoked and stimulated. There will be a lot of things happening as a result of this, not the least of which I would try and modify this whole idea of burial and do something similar in other parts of the world.
But you asked me about in what sense it was a work of friendship. I did send invitations to participate in this to a bunch of friends. Now what's interesting is that... this is not, as it were, the 'great friendship', the one-one friendship, the great love affair to the great relationship to the other. It's a relationship to a multiplicity of friends, some of whom know each other, most of whom don't. There's already a strange relationship in which these people are being brought together, as they might at a party, who don't necessarily know each other. But this party is a kind of virtual party, because most of them weren't there: they were mostly there thought the objects which they decided to send to this event, and which they had partly conceptualized in advance…
I am trying to produce things, to make thinks, to try and bring about change, and of course this will bring about change in the relationships between some of these people who will eventually get back a record of all the objects that were sent, and will in a sense become part of this weird indirect community. If they then decide that they will contribute to a future event, something will start to happen: these people will decide that they've had enough of this, it doesn't make any sense, or they'll think, 'wait, this is intriguing', we want to do more, to be involved. There is a weird sense that something like a virtual community, at least in a temporary way, is being created in this fashion.
I think that one of the things that has always intrigued me about friendship and friendships and the varying degrees of friendship and acquaintanceship is that you often loss friends. You don't see them for a long time, you stop communicating with them, and there's a reason for that, which is that you don't have any on-going connection. And yet distance is increasingly less significant in principle as a blockage to a relationship. So the idea of sending objects over thousands and thousands of miles, which is what happened in almost every case here, to a completely distant part of the world, where most of these people have never been, and actually will probably will never go, in order to continue or even in some cases re-establish or establish a relationship of friendship, is an odd way of cutting into this question of the ebb and flow of friendship through contact.
Jut to take another spin on it. There's a discussion in Nietzsche about the friend being the person who points towards the Overman. He gestures toward this possibility. And that's what we should be to our friends. He doesn't want dependency relations, he wants relations of creative encouragement. This work is meant to be like that. In that sense, it's a gift on my part to my friends who pay me back by sending me something. But it's not payback time, there isn't a closed economy here, it's not really an exchange, stuff happens a consequence, it's a very open ended thing. Part of what we are doing here is opening up a space of imagination, which doesn't have an obvious end to it. What fascinated me was that with luck, or by chance, forever there will be this chest buried deep in Australia that all of these contributors will know is there, and whether they still own these objects that they put there is completely... who knows... who knows who owns that anymore? So all sorts of weird things have happened as a consequence of this act. There is, I suppose, the other aspect about this, about friendship and time.

JD: I was thinking of what Blanchot says about the time of friendship: friendship as something that takes a long time, friends mature together...

DW: I don't think that this particular work addresses that sense of the deep long interconnectedness of true friends. It's more generalized, more to do with opening up the whole variety of connectedness when people come to have to one another when they have common project, even if that project is completely open-ended, indeterminate, and ambiguous, and yet fascinating. And a work of art. It is art at least in this sense. I take that art is one of the most powerful ways of producing resistance to forces of normalization and habituation. Philosophy is another one. But the sheer peculiarity of doing what we did and the way in which that event and its repercussions will, as it were keep on rising to the surface precisely as the object doesn't, is a kind of mark, an attempt at marking this resistance. Curiously, you can say that this burial is a kind of mark of resistance to burial, The normal thing that happens is that the past gets buried, that burial and the killing off of every moment is the norm. So what we have done with burial, in a very curious way, is to very slowly mark the burial of the past with something that will not have been buried. Because it will be annotated, carefully documented, and it could indeed have a future, in which those very objects intact-much more intact that if they had been allowed to just live and survive in the ordinary way-will re-emerge...

JD: Like what Derrida calls a 'hauntology'...

DW: It's constructing a haunting regime. It actually more pays homage to the possibilities of re-birth and transformation rather than that of the connection between death and burial. One of the ways that that works is through the way in which sacrifice generates significance. It generates meaning. We put every one of these things in there, we were thinking that we are not seeing these things again, we're giving this up to a future which is not ours. In doing this, these things became valuable in the very process of letting them go, and this is a very exciting thing to happen. We stuck lots of documentation in there, about the presidential election, for example, which is not concluded, that thing does not know, as it were, what has happened. And there is also a ticking clock in there, everything is inert, except that there is a clock in there which has the right time, and which will tick for as long as the battery will last, which could be a long, long time.

JD: So is there an exhumation date?

DW: It's not going to be exhumed.

JD: So it's just there to be found?

DW: Absolutely. It's set way back, about fifteen feet up on some sand-dunes, and these sand-dunes are vegetatively stabilized, so it is possible that some Tsunami could come and rip apart this whole landscape. Otherwise, I don't see it coming up. The structure of this burial is quite complex. There is a deep hole, and then there is there is a huge rock on top of the deep whole, and then there is a 'fake' chamber with less interesting things in it, and then there is lots of sand on top of that.

JD: It's almost Pharonic...

DW: Yes. So there's no exhumation date, quite the opposite.

JD: I didn't know that you would document the objects that would go in there, as if perhaps the collection itself would only be known to you, like a secret.

DW: No, copies will be sent back to the donors. And they will get-and indeed, I hope that this will be made public-a photograph of the precise site of the open hole, and indeed the closed hole, and a photograph of the entire landscape where that site is not marked. So there will be no way of locating this. The most interesting and intriguing thing is to see the photograph of this burial where the viewer cannot tell where on this landscape it is buried. And I hope that is going to create huge frustration, and I hope that this frustration can get converted...in the way that negativity can be productive.

JD: Your work is often marked by an uneasy relationship with Derrida, which you pose under the title and the problem of 'following Derrida'. This title asks, 'what is it to follow Derrida, how far can we follow Derrida', and also states, perhaps, that we do follow Derrida, have little choice in the matter, for just as Heidegger defines the horizon of a philosophy for Derrida's generation, Derrida does so for us. What is your rapport to Derrida's work today? It is also to ask more generally, do you see an irreducible tension in taking up a space in the wake of another's thinking, a tension that is perhaps there for all of us?

DW: I met Derrida in 1968, and I heard him lecture in Oxford before I had even read anything of his, in fact, pretty much before he had even written much: he had written three essays, and then he'd written right at the end of '67 three books. And I fell for him straight away...

JD: Love?

DW: I don't know if it was love-it was certainly friendship. It was certainly an extraordinary sense of meeting someone who embodied a lot of what I aspired to be and was looking for in a philosopher and an intellectual, and he had an incredible philosophical creativity. I thought he had a really generous and transformative relation to the tradition. He read everyone, talked about everyone, he cared about what they were saying, and he wanted to do something unusual with them. I'm really interested, and I have been interested in, for some long time now, in how we follow other philosophers, in how we read them. I'm particularly interested in those people who thematize that very question of reading: not just because there is a kind of logical paradox there, but it strikes me that those are some of the most interesting philosophers: who actually think about what it is that they are doing in relation to their predecessors. I tried to articulate this particularly in relation to Derrida, and to Heidegger. The book that I'm working on now, Thinking After Heidegger, precisely deals with this question, how we deal with the legacy of Heidegger's thinking. There I stand shoulder to shoulder with Derrida, looking at Heidegger, thinking 'how the hell are we going to respond to him'. I see us still in Heidegger's wake, and we haven't yet simply gone in Derrida's wake. Now the 'after', in the sense of 'after Heidegger', has a sort of art-historical use, as in 'after Picasso', meaning 'in the style of', but it's also 'after' as in 'running after'. So I'm already as it were playing with the temporal, and the sense of after, making it a thicker concept-thinking after is like running after or 'chasing after'. It's also thinking in the wake of... or in the light of...
In both the cases of Heidegger and Derrida, what is so fascinating, and fascinating in a reflective way, is trying to figure out the level at which you respond to someone, because the paradox that arises is that if the level at which if take the advice that Nietzsche gives-he doesn't want any followers, followers he says are 'zeros', 'naughts', nothings. The question then is, supposing you say, 'Yes, Nietzsche is right', we don't want to be following Nietzsche, but we are obeying him in not being a follower. So you think, 'well how do you respond'? I have followed and admired Derrida's readings of Heidegger, not because there is some strong consistent case that Derrida is making, but because Heidegger constantly returns, keeps fighting back, not just because there are new books being published all the time that Derrida hadn't read when he wrote his earlier comments, but Derrida keeps realizing that actually he's constructing a Heidegger which he can oppose to some extent, but that Heidegger has already constructed the dialogue within which Derrida is opposing him. Derrida comes to realize that later. The dialogue between Derrida and Heidegger is an absolutely fascinating record of what it is to think with and against another philosopher. Thinking after Derrida is in some sense thinking after Derrida's dialogue with Heidegger. That is something which really has influenced me.
But what is my relation to Derrida's work today? The interesting thing for me, which is I guess not the case for graduate students now, is that I met Derrida when I was a young graduate student, and when he was just starting. I've been reading Derrida for thirty-three years, while he's been writing, so it's not as if there is this corpus that I just look at. I've been watching the twists and turns. I think initially what I tried to do-I had a lot of colleagues and friends (and enemies) who thought that Derrida was a charlatan, something that had horns growing out of the top. Most of those were people who had no time for Continental Philosophy in the first place. Some of them were serious Phenomenologists who thought that Derrida was destroying the tradition, the very tradition that we were all supposed to share. I had been trained as an undergraduate quite as much in the analytic tradition as the continental one, and I felt the obligation to try to show, especially to friends, that Derrida was thinking in ways that one could not not respond to. In other words, I wanted to put them in the position of having to recognize that Derrida was saying something that demanded a response, and was quite intelligent. So that was my job... to do that, to start with. And I think I was quite successful. The weird thing about that is to make somebody intelligible is that you reduce this person to what others already understand, and so there is another game, another issue, which is actually weaning people off their whole basis of understanding. I don't know if I've been as successful at doing at, but other people have been much more effective, and actually Derrida himself (obviously), at getting people to let go off a kind of economy of thought that would effectively have a philosophy as a kind of non-productive repetition, and I think that the key to Derrida is a 'productive repetition'...

JD: An economy of invention...

DW: Invention, where production doesn't mean production to some interminable end, but precisely a constant opening up, not just possibilities in and for the future, but possibilities that were already there, that we didn't see, that we didn't look at, that we glossed over. I think that is, I think, what Derrida still does for us today. Curiously, I think it's tied with Derrida being... there is so often, quite often, really tedious, and boring, in that he will spend three hours, working laboriously, in public, on topics which you think that you got the point quite early on, but actually, the sheer labour of working these things over, and showing that this approach of undoing are obvious ways into a topic really does pay off, or really does create problems that we hadn't noticed, I think is a really powerful intervention. I guess just I assume-I don't just assume, I know it's true-the most powerful tendencies, not just philosophers, theorists of all sort, artists of all sorts, and humans of all sort, have to face, are the tendencies toward death in life, toward repetition, habituation, loss of the capacity to create and invent and see new things, and I think it's a particularly interesting thing to recognize, having as Derrida did, having read Heidegger on technology, and recognizing that much of repetition we are faced with, and are, and are becoming, is tied up with the role of repetition in consumer production. You look around this room... I came into this apartment... almost everything-in fact, everything I could see in this apartment had been made in a factory, and was an example of something that could be bought somewhere else. It's extraordinary. You think, I come into this apartment, I'm not like that, 'I'm an original', or 'I'm a human'. But actually, in our most horrifying moments, we wonder whether aren't much too close to the sofa, the table, the television. This is one of the historical pressures that we face. It's not just to say no to technology. We can't say no-if we say no, we miss it, we misunderstand it, we don't relate to it, we don't engage with it in its own terms. The question is how you engage that repetition with its own productivity in a way that acknowledges it and none the less doesn't just repeat it. And I think in that sense Derrida is much more helpful that Heidegger.

JD: Yet repetition remains such a divided concept. Because as you say, it's habituation, a kind of death, nothing happens. But it's also that thing that allows you to fashion an identity: it's there in the idea of 'becoming who you are'.

DW: Absolutely, and it's in a sense our necessary investment in that that's the source of the seduction in which that takes over. In fact, It's important that you put it the way you did, that we are not talking about something which is in-itself negative. What we're talking about is something that becomes negative and destructive when it takes on a hegemonic power. And this is true of most of the things that concern us. When they take over that they become destructive dimensions and powers. Most things, if they haven't taken over...the question is, can thinking, can philosophizing, or inventing, fashion for itself a way of proceeding, an economy of negotiation with these forces that both gives them their due and holds in abeyance their tendency to some sort of totalizing hegemony. That's where it's really at philosophically. That's why I think there are real limits to Heidegger's position. I think in the end he doesn't want to negotiate. He wants to set up camp somewhere else. He wants there to be quite a distinct 'mode' of activity, whether we call it thinking or waiting, or arriving at new Gods. I think in the end that risks a separation which ends up being incredibly vulnerable to the very things it's trying to defend or oppose.

JD: In your reading of Derrida, you raise the issue how we may identify 'quasi-transcendental' or 'infra-structural' traits (différance, for example). But this is certainly already an issue for Derrida, as not only an examination of the possibility of certain conditions and structures, but how and why they take place, how they unfold, how and why we cannot do without them. It also seeks to avoid repeating certain of the historical forms that have not pursued the questions far enough, or have at some point evaded something crucial. It opens up to a more general question-that where language is a system of differences, how do we, from what we call the 'trace', think the place of meaning and sense, identify and order experience, think our decisions and responsibilities, texts, and language?

DW: There are two sorts of shapes of thought in your question here. One is, if you like, the question of how we each as individuals, or what we used to call subjects, or singular beings, are placed in or confined to a place in a world of history which we so easily describe in terms that don't involve individuals-like a sea of traces, a network of differences. There's the problem of the insertion of something singular in this network. And there's the question of how we can articulate, on the one hand, the language of the trace, and on the other, the language of meaning and identity. As I understand it, the whole point of the word, the original introduction of the word 'trace' is twofold. First of all, you can find this word 'trace' as it happens in a number of thinkers before you get to Derrida-in Freud, in Hegel, one or two others...

JD: And Levinas, and Heidegger, the Züsage.

DW: The point of finding this word in other thinkers is in a sense is to show that a certain kind of relation, or a certain kind of grasp, of origin, of connectedness, is already available, is already present in the history of thought. What the whole idea of the trace is trying to do-and this is the reason that Derrida brings it into his thinking-is to replace, displace, subvert, a kind of tracing to an origin, a grounding to a connectedness that would give to an origin the right, the legitimacy, to confer meaning and sense onto that which is derived from it. The point of the whole thinking about the trace is to radically defer that process, which changes the nature of thought itself, changes the economy of explanation, discussion, interpretation, and so on. What I take it that all this adds up to, in terms of your question-how do we, from what we call the trace think the place of meaning and sense, think our decisions and responsibilities-I take that what all this adds up to is, number one, we recognize, that this 'we', this each of us 'I', marks the complex way in which we are involved in different kinds of overlapping communities. There are different ways in which we are both I and We. This is tied with our limited but expandable capacity to think our ourselves as the product of certain kinds of historical forces and contingencies and situations and so on. One of the values of education in general and philosophy in particular is actually coming to grasp how it is that we have come to be the kinds of beings as we are. And here, I think frankly, Derrida needs Foucault at his arm, with a bag of genealogical advice. I don't see the thought of the trace and genealogical thinking to be that far apart.
What's interesting here is that someone like Foucault would say that there can be quite dramatic transformations in history, new structures, new ways of organizing language. But these are not the products of necessity: they are the products of forces coming together at particular time to produce a certain configuration. We can come to see how that happened. But we don't find a necessary origin, we find constellations of forces. And I think that's consistent with what Derrida is saying about the trace. What it does is to give our thinking about ourselves and our sense of what the possibilities are for intervention, for resistance, for creativity, for production, for transformation, for intervention in the world, it gives us a certain capacity to mobilize our self-understanding, our relationships to the world, our sense of our own limits and possibilities. In a sense it sacrifices, I would say, the idea of there being a right answer to all this for the much more interesting thought that there aren't right answers to 'what are my responsibilities', but that there are some pretty lousy kinds of responses to that questions. There are a whole more valuable, interesting, serious responses. I take it that the thought of the trace, in terms of ethics and responsibility, is a kind of dramatic opening up of our capacity to think both our relation to that which has formed us, and also our capacity to imagine how we might transform what come after us. And the limits of power-it's not as if we are these little Gods with powers that we can just turn on-but we recognize in fact the very idea of action or transformation is tied up with limits, with relating to conditions that may not yet appear, for opening up possibilities for which the conditions may never appear or may not yet have arisen.

JD: The trace is, if we can say 'is', is a place of the 'already': but at the same time, any action, such as 'writing', produces the trace. We talk of 'instituting' the trace.

DW: Well, that's an interesting issue. Although that's true, that's quite true, you want to say yes, but don't we need to say something more? And this is perhaps where references to decisions and responsibilities in the immediate sense become important. We want to ask about different kinds of trace. If everything we do is productive of a trace, what about the difference between active and reactive responses to a situation? They both produce traces. But something which is active produces a different, oblique response. Valuations come into it about the kind of trace that's being produced, and whether, for example, the traces that we produce are themselves productive, or whether they kill off possibilities. It's as if the language of the trace inherits transcendental discourse, and it inherits it as a way of preventing it from happening, it's a kind of negative transcendental discourse. But we need another response which talks about the kinds of logics of tracing and productivity that we are taking part in.

JD: Before asking in regard to the philosophical questions of time that your work centres upon, perhaps I may ask what it is about the question and problem of time that you find most compelling. What is at issue, personally, for you, in thinking and writing about time? And was the question of time your inspiration to pursue philosophy?

DW: Well, obviously this is a really central question, the central issue. For me, I think what I concluded is vital, is the productive tension between time as event and time as some sort of structural constitution. So time as event of opening and intensity on the one hand, and time as structurally constituted on the other. This maybe a conclusion which informs a lot of things, rather than what you are already asking for, which is 'where did all this come from?-what's the grit in the Oyster?' The curious thing is that in trying to answer that question, I have to try to think and figure this out, because I honestly didn't begin thinking this out. I have to remember or imagine remembering what comes first, what drives, what experiences and so on. But something in me has allowed me to remember-there may be a bunch of other stuff I'm not allowed to remember. Here are some suggestions for 'formative experience': and I put it like this because I really do think that we formed not just by choices but by things that happen to us. As a child I was really deeply moved by... every summer-so there is a rhythm to this to-being confronted by the pulsing rhythm of waves breaking on the beach. I spent hours and hours, days and days, year after year, walking on the beach, standing on the rocks, watching the waves break. So this to me is a primitive experience of the rhythm of the cosmos. I think even then I had the thought that in this rhythm, the cosmos was saying that that pulsing, the rhythm, the breathing, that you are, that is your life, is n