I was very far from being his best student. I might almost call myself “retarded,” in that I never wanted to go through and beyond Michel toward the subject matter, as a student of history or anthropology should do. My fascination was really with the magic intermediary, Michel himself. The manner, nuance, mental tone of voice. He made the subject matter “respirable”, breathable for me. But I am no historian. Translation let me dally where I really wanted to be – in that presence. Perhaps it was not given to me to know quite what drove his quest. I was in it for the ride. The closeness.

Or as I learned to say from my next mentor, Emmanuel Levinas, whose name I first saw in the text of an interview with Michel, “proximity.” The infinite approach to the other. Michel’s “heterologies” had already attuned me to the philosophical alterity that has preoccupied me in recent years. His protective love for so many “particularismes”, both present and historical was the best prelude to the systematization and thematization of what could be subsumed in no totality. He knew the necessary ambiguity of the trace of what passed like a thief in the night, the Absent from history, and circumscribed the ineffable in his own idiom.

For me, he was the passage between Merleau-Ponty, the object of my first intellectual admiration, and Levinas, my latest and possibly last. My mediator between a man who breathlessly witnessed the birth of meaning out of pregnant form (cf. Michel’s “La folie de la vision,” Esprit, June 1982) and the Lithuanian Jew who taught the prophets to speak Greek.

Merleau-Ponty, Michel de Certeau, Emmanuel Levinas – a non-believer, a Christian, a Jew. As an admirer shadowing their words, I have had the great good fortune to clamor to the heights with these three French thinkers, who at their best are comparable only by their superlative uniqueness.

Michael B. Smith      
Berry College, Mount Berry, GA      
January 10, 2006      

When I arrived at the University of California San Diego as a new-minted associate professor in 1976, the departures of several eminent colleagues in French literature had decimated the intellectual prominence of the group. A committee was formed to search for a new senior faculty member who could restore this luster. I chaired this committee, but I didn’t know Michel de Certeau or his books, I had hardly heard his name. Thus “Certeau” dropped into my intellectual life as an unanticipated and inconceivable aerolith—the luckiest chance I have had fall on me in forty years of career. Discovering Michel’s work in the course of our search, and during the year or two after he accepted our offer to come to UCSD, became a transformative experience. For me its echoes continue today, nearly thirty years after he came to UCSD, and twenty years after he died.

In those days the conquest of America by “French Theory” was proceeding full throttle, and nowhere more intensely than at UCSD. But the trajectory by which Michel’s work came into focus diverged from what happened with Foucault, Lacan, Althusser or Derrida. Toward the end of the Sixties many of us had become somewhat familiar with their writings. Recognition of Michel’s came slower. The reasons for this were complex, but they had to do with one of the things that made our experience of him so uncommon: the protean character of his intellectual projects. In these he was catholic with a small “c.” Then too, unlike the others from Paris who were fascinating us at the time and whose comet-like appearances in the U.S. were the objects of a cult enthrallment, Michel came to stay and to work.

Yet at first we couldn’t quite make out on what. There seemed no single system in what he had written or was writing, no “Certeau-ian” doctrine that could help us encapsulate it, to which one could yoke oneself. Michel was interrogating too many areas at once: historiography, theology and religious history, everyday life, mystical experience, contemporary cultural politics, and more. How to get a handle on that diversity? Later many of us saw in his concept of “heterology” a theme that might help us make sense of the dazzling variety of his research objects and approaches. He was interested in difference in all its forms: temporal, ideological, cultural, theological, and more. But for those of us who in effect found themselves apprenticing ourselves to him at UCSD, it took some time for this to clarify itself.

The six years that Michel spent at UCSD formed the most bracing and generous intellectual collaboration of my life. For me—and for many of the colleagues and the students we had in common—Michel became the focus of an extraordinary interlocution, a continuous conversation that led us beyond what we knew we knew, out of the defensive areas of our academic specialization into speculation concerning things we’d never thought to think about. It was a process of stretching that I found breath-taking. Yet there was never any pressure, still less any condescension, in Michel’s attitude in relation to the people—on whatever level of collaboration—with whom he worked. What he sought to teach, what he hoped others might learn (as it seems to me now), was a consummate practice of generosity—intellectually, methodologically, interpersonally: in our imagination of other ways of living; in our relations with colleagues and students; in our encounter with methodologies and theoretical systems other than the ones to which we were committed.

Two concluding points concerning Michel’s intellectual and pedagogical practice.

The first stems from the maturity of his knowledge of “theory.” In those days France and Europe had been “doing theory” for a lot longer and deeper than most people in the U.S. We were new converts. Our commitments often had a spiky rigidity to them. Michel’s own practices were more equilibrated. He helped us (or at least those of us who paid attention to his unstrenuous example) to see that a model of “theory as conflict”—allegiance to my theory, opposition to yours—was a recipe for intellectual blindness. And he gently insisted that one needed always to bring one’s theoretical position into contact with culture and history, and never remain satisfied with articulating it only as an abstract position, in a kind of methodological logomachy.

Second, a lesson about work. I have never been close to anyone who embodied the ethics of intellectual labor as Michel did. Not laboriousness—most often he seemed to be achieving what he achieved with a tranquil grace. But no easy way round, no corner-shaving. And he was most demanding of himself. If you asked him to read something you’d written, he called you the next day with his thoughts, and returned your text with copious notes. In response to anything you showed him, he always began with admiration. Yet we learned to listen for a second moment, an apparently innocent “And I think that perhaps you might…” that suddenly made the incompletion in our effort visible, and gave us a path toward overcoming it without having to feel the slightest shame that we hadn’t discovered it ourselves. No matter where anyone started, Michel acted as if he believed there was always another step forward that one could take. He helped us understand that one’s text or one’s teaching could be made better if we only made the effort to think through yet again what was really at issue in it; or if we took the time to read that book (or those dozen books) we were dreading we might have to digest; or if we didn’t allow weariness to become an unthinking excuse for complacency.

Michel was the best, most luminous and most illuminating colleague I ever had.

For me the productivity of his intellectual work and his ethical example are so resilient that this collaboration continues today,  even if Michel is no longer around to smile his gentle smile upon it.

Richard Terdiman    
Department of Literature, UC Santa Cruz    
January 14, 2006    

I have been fortunate in my career to have learnt from scholars who emphasize both the inquiry into the past, as well as into history itself. Though I never met him, I include Michel de Certeau as one of my teachers. My first encounter with him began long ago with Heterologies (University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Little did I know at the time that that would begin a continuous dialogue, he the teacher (and at times tormentor) and me, the student. My inquiries into otherness, ghosts, children, time, and history have been affected (perhaps even led) by my engagement with his writings. Sometimes it seems as if my career has always been trying to catch up with him and his writings (I even ended up at UCSD).

One of my favorite passages is at the beginning of The Writing of History (Columbia University Press, 1988) where, quoting from Alphonse Dupront, he writes, “ ‘The sole historical quest for ‘meaning’ remains indeed a quest for the Other,’ but, however contradictory it may be, this project aims at ‘understanding’ and, through ‘meaning,’ at hiding the alterity of this foreigner; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering scriptural tombs” (p.2).

This passage frames my search into pasts and history, as well as my life in a modern society filled with a certitude built upon a mythical history. It has opened up the possibility and richness of practicing history when its mechanisms are interrogated; I have looked toward the foreign, ghosts, and infancy in a quest for the relation between others and the times of history. It also teaches me that a magic and mystical element is not the past of our scientific and rational world; it is also in history itself. The “it” has the power to domesticate, hide, and calm; truly a slight of hand. But Certeau also reminds me that the dead are not past but with us today, offering us hope apart from the confines of modernity.

Stefan Tanaka,  
Dept of History, UC San Diego  
February 1, 2006