A LETTER TO THE OTHER FATHER

"[T]here is in each case a sort of Letter to the Father before the event [avant la lettre] before that by Kafka signed by a son who publishes pseudonymously", 1 thus writes Derrida in the concluding chapter of The Gift of Death concerning KierkegaardJohannes de Silentiowho invents himself in another name, which is not his father's name, when he comes to speak about the father's sacrifice and the father's silence in his Fear and Trembling. Kafka, in his turn, "addresses to himself fictively, more fictively than ever, the letter that he thinks his father would have wanted to, would have had to, or in any case would have been able to address to him in response. ( ... ) By writing to him, by writing to himself by means of the fictive pen of his father, Franz Kafka no more sees this spectral father ( ... ) ", 2 Derrida insists and he asks: "What does this spectral father say to Franz Kafka, to this son who makes him speak like this, as a ventriloquist, at the end of his Letter to the Father, lending him his voice or allowing him to speak but at the same time dictating what he says, making him write a letter to his son in response to his own, as a sort of fiction within the fiction? "3 More than twenty years before The Gift of Death, Derrida wrote two letters addressed to two fathers, letters which as a result of their many points of encounter, at this highly charged juncture of speech and silence, or of the preliminary consolidation of what would become Derrida's hauntological or spectral perspective, seem to constitute one single, continuous letter, though Derrida's father was never unique. A letter to Foucault and a letter to Levinas follow one another in Writing and Difference (1987) in order to question, each differently, the figure of the fatherthe father's father (Descartes in Foucault's case, Husserl and Descartes in Levinas' case), as he appears in their work at that moment: Madness and Civilization (1973) and Totality and Infinity (1969), respectively. In a polemical reading of Derrida's words, one can sense his early