Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death. (130).
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might have
desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive Defoe, and
the character called Robinson Crusoe. . . Now this survival, thanks to which the book
bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught,
saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this
survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed with any trace, in the sense I give
this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this
machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each
wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left
behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or
other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the
opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The
book lives its beautiful death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude,
this alliance of the dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance.
Survivance in the sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense
that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that
is not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or
fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself
to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer the middle
voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive” or the
substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-“ is without superiority,
without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty. It does
not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something from it, any more than it
cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor and its necessity, what one
could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you
will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is something other than life death, but a
groundless ground from which our detached, identified, and opposed what we thing we
can identify under the name of death or dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly socalled as opposed to life properly so-called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is
where there is some other that has me at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless.
That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The
other, the others, that is the very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and
that I call the other inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my
survivor, not my survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-dead
machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns, drowned in
the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a
breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time
an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it, like . . . a body, a
spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Leib and not Koerper), a body proper animated,
activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality. (131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at
work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living experience
is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living experience,” but
“tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors and derails “tissue”
skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like death in life or life in
death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more originary existence, a life or a
body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked under this this clothing. For, on the
contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance, comprehended, they live and die, they live
to death as the very inextricability of this weave. It is against the groundless ground of
this quasi-transcendentality of living to death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one
hand, one can say that “Robinson Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the
book, were, according to a first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and
desire attested to by this book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or
metonymy, [were all] buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can
and one must, one must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and
like the experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psychoanthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like ours, I
mean . . the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the family and/or
State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132
Derrida then proceeds to outline what he takes to be the two options for the disposal of
corpses now available: inhumation and cremation. (132-33). He then returns to Robinson
Crusoe to discuss Crusoe’s fear of being buried alive. At p. 143 Derrida then returns to
inhumation and cremation and finishes the Fifth Session with that topic (146). Derrida
returns to the topic in pp. 162-71 of the Sixth Session.