And Sarah died

Yvonne Sherwood

pp. 261-292

in: Yvonne Sherwood (ed), Derrida's Bible, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

An "and" is a curious little thing. At its most minimal, it's merely a mark of spacing, punctuation, respiration—something negligible like a German filler-word such as mal, doch, aber, halt., denn, or scbon, or a mere comma or a pause for breath. At its most good-natured or "tender" it functions as a "grammatical magnet," (Derrida 2000, 291), a mark of communitarian gathering. And/But an "and" can also have more of a "but" about it: it can mark objection, opposition, qualification, incompatibility, privation, a "to the exclusion of," "against," or "for want of," a sense that one needs the extra "and" (and maybe more than one) to supplement an inadequacy, lack, or un- or partial truth in what has preceded it. Logically the conjunction is always haunted by disjunction and vice versa: whether one is talking about something eemingly straightforwardly copulative (Abraham and Sarah, for example) ¹ or about a conjunction strained to the point of seeming dissolution (Derrida and the Bible, perhaps), formal logic and the rules of grammar insist that the "and" always borders on the "but. ²" And (or "what's more," or "finally") should this overworked, overstretched little "and" need some respite, it can be relieved, depending on the circumstances, by conjunctions ("but," "then," "for," et cetera) or adverbs ("therefore," "finally," "what's more") or link-words that double as adverb or conjunction, such as also or thus.

Cited authors

Derrida Jacques