Abstract

This article looks at Derrida’s reading of the laws of the interview within his interviews, as he uses the interview to establish the interview’s inadequacies, and thereby find the excess within its limits. It then proposes that a certain contamination by those laws occurred in Derrida’s later works, resulting in a mode of exposure and confession that can be termed autoimmune. The autoimmune subject guards and exposes itself, protects and endangers itself, preserves and compromises all and a part. Autoimmunity is an inter-view, a critical look, a self-deconstruction, a view inside that undoes what it sees, Medusa turned on herself. Autoimmunity means that the entity turns on itself, and ‘must then come to resemble [its] enemies, to corrupt itself and threaten itself in order to protect itself against their threats’. As the later Derrida began to demarcate his legacy with increasing precision and exactitude, he began to cause deconstruction to turn on itself and step towards a certain antithetical immunity.