Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press: 2017. First published 1967 by Éditions du Seuil).
“Force and Signification”
Derrida begins by talking about Jean-Pierre Richard. A brief refresher on who he was…
Jean-Pierre Richard (1922-2019) was a French literary critic in the Phenomenological tradition of the Geneva School. He’s not very well known in the Anglophone world. His most important works concern Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert.
(Oxford reference article on him (https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100419852)
Richard’s method in reading texts was something he called “thematics.” He believed that through careful categorizing of word pictures and images occurring in a work, a reader can identify thematic structures. These structures form the prism through which the work can be interpreted and understood. They represent the “true meaning” that the author was attempting to communicate. Richard goes on to study the body of an author’s work to identify the overarching superthreads that run through the artist’s oeuvre. (encyclopedia.com article on him (Richard, Jean-Pierre 1922-) (https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/richard-jean-pierre-1922.)
Richard and the Geneva School of literary criticism of which he was a part believed that they could not only uncover but in a sense put on the “the unique mode of consciousness pervading a given author’s works.” It’s not biographical, though: it doesn’t work from the author’s life to the true meaning of the text, but from the words of the text back to the author’s subjective experience of reality. This experience provides the key to unlocking the underlying meaning of the author’s works. It’s phenomenological: it descends from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological methods (which we will discuss in subsequent chapters). It reads what is given, what is apparent—the text itself—trusting in the power of the symbols on the page to reveal the objective message beneath them. (Oxford Reference article. N.d. (Geneva school) (https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095847775).
Structuralism is a facet of Western philosophy, and, despite what Jean-Pierre Richard (a structuralist) wrote, it is not a cataloguing of imagination or affectivity (4). It is a privileging of form over force, which is from a lack of vitality. One looks at form when you have not the Dionysian vitality to look at force. To be a (structuralist) critic you have to decide that you will be separated personally from the work in order to see the “objective” structures throughout it (4). The meaning of the work is hitched to the form. (As Derrida will point out, this puts the work in a straitjacket and misses the forest for the trees). Structuralism at its root is metaphysical: it presupposes the Western philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on Being and presence. It wants to shake texts down to get at these fundamentals (5). But opening up to the totality, as it would like us to do, hides other things (6).
In structuralism’s view, the genesis of a work is an act of pure inspiration, which the critic encounters through purifying himself via separation (his “objectivity”). Here he comes into contact with the pure book which he will detect within the actual book (8).
We should not confuse essence with language. Essence and pure speech and experience have all been confused by structuralists. Language does not represent essence—Derrida’s primary point is that written language is a bubbling cauldron of competing meanings, all fighting one against the other, with this or that one variously bubbling up to the reader (8). Inscription, or writing, is thus not able to make meaning precede writing: it is not the straight expression of the pure thought of the writer. What happens in the reader will not be a direct result of the will of the writer. Even the writer himself can be taken by surprise, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes (10).
Again, it is the same One Book distributed throughout all books that the structuralist is looking for (8).
The work itself, then, could be thought of as anterior to the ideal book that is trying to be expressed. Derrida shows that this is idealism (11). It is also theism. In order for all things to be just the secondary effect of an Original, there must be a God on which these things are based. So structuralists are not cognizant of their presuppositions (11).
Language occurs when words stop being sign-signifiers, or symbols that supposedly refer to an objective reality, and instead refer to themselves. They acquire a poetic dimension in that they can conjure all kinds of things in the mind of the reader. Meaning then is emancipated, set free to roam. Writing is not just “voice-painting,” as the Enlightenment might’ve assumed. Writing can form an infinite transmission and tradition, wherein the “play of meaning can overflow signification (signalization) which is always enveloped within the regional limits of nature, life and the soul” (12).
Structuralists try to skirt this danger, of positing some Idea or Form of the book that all books imitate. Even when they say that formal constants are simply reinvented by each artist, in practice the search for the timeless masterpiece within the accidents of the real books of the world continues. They say they want to safeguard their critical work from devolving into psychologism or biographism, but they end up ignoring the very subjective origins of the work (12). Structure becomes their sole focus (14). Earlier works become prefigurements of the later, which are purer (17).
Works do not have a space, i.e., there is no way in which they are fully present at any one moment. They do not occupy a meaning-filled moment that can be accessed by all alike. Their values and meanings are reconstituted at each historical moment, in a type of “internal geneticism” (12).
Structuralists define structuralism as the union of formal structure and intention (16). But they get caught up in the metaphors they use to describe form. Metaphors aren’t innocent, though; they always “orient research and fix results” (17). Like Leibniz, they imagine lines of intention and form and design throughout the structures they detect. But Leibniz was talking about God’s mathematical design of the universe, not the words of mortal man (19). Art is more than these rational structures (20). And in fact, many elements of the work are lost in a structural analysis if they don’t fit the tidy metaphorical frameworks (20). These are “genetic accidents” (25).
In all this Derrida doesn’t want to propose just one more dialectic, in this case only privileging the opposite side from the one traditionally preferred by Western metaphysics. However, he admits to not being above drawing attention to the neglected side and favoring it in order to expose the system’s biases and blind spots (19). An example is the neutralization of duration and force with the unexamined idea that time is atemporal, at its essence—that the ultimate truth is not irreversible succession, but simultaneity. And this presupposes the Christian God, though many structuralists would deny it (24). The hidden bias for simultaneity births the myth of the “total reading or description,” which ignores historical moment altogether (24). The richness of volume and duration are quashed. This is because the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier is not part of the structuralist system. It undercuts its foundations (24). Structuralists think they don’t also adhere to teleology, but they do. How can an organized, final totality be identified without an end? Totalities have ends (26). And this opening to telos, this finalization, stifles becoming, or force (26). Force gives way to eidos, the same as it ever was since Plato (27).
Structuralists don’t realize how much of this “structure” they detect is of their own making (21). Preformationism, references, circularity, recurrence, symmetries—they are all detected by the structuralist critic and assigned to the will of the author (22).
Mallarme thought there was The Book, but that you couldn’t totally describe it—you could only skirt its edges, approach it, but never encapsulate it (25).
Force can avoid the dialectics of Western metaphysics—it isn’t the darkness, or the opposite of meaning. It is outside this system (27). We can’t be emancipated from this system, but we should try to resist it. Only by renouncing metaphysics and embracing force—choosing Dionysus over Apollonius—can writing be what it is (28). History is by its nature Dionysian, which means it is difference, not sameness. It is our friend in resisting metaphysics (28). And its conflicts will reveal the depth of things (29), much as Foucault has taught us.
“Cogito and the History of Madness”
Derrida studied under Foucault (31), and in this essay he critiques Foucault’s analysis of Descartes’s treatment of madness in the run-up to the famous cogito: I think, therefore I am.
Foucault believes that Descartes inaugurates the shutting away of madness in his Meditations when he dismisses madness out of hand as a possibility for distrusting the senses.
Foucault sets out a lofty goal in his History of Madness: to write the history of madness itself, and not the history of what reason and its manifestation, psychiatry, have said about madness (33). Derrida points out the audacity of this: it’s perhaps the maddest aspect of the task, considering that anyone describing madness, even if doing so in opposition to reason, necessarily uses the language, tools, and concepts of reason from the moment he begins to speak (34). It’s not enough to silence the psychiatrist, to set him aside and disregard how he has muzzled madness—the psychiatrist is just the “delegate” reason. Denouncing the enemy of madness—order—can only be done with, well, order (35). There is no other way to communicate. You can only protest from within a system of meaning and order (36). Even to write a “history”: the very concept is rational, ordering, metaphysical (36).
Foucault is in need of what Derrida calls a “necessity and impossibility”: a language without the syntax of reason (37). And saying it’s a difficulty, as Foucault does, is not enough to erase the impossibility of it (37). His project itself is part of the historical process of how, again, reason has defined unreason. He’s part of the process he’s cataloguing. He’s on a “classical” foundation (38).
Derrida’s other main critique is that Foucault misplaces the origin of the “decision,” or the point in history at which it was decided madness was thus and such (38). Derrida says logos, or reason, or western history and philosophy itself, have exiled madness since the beginning. Whatever happened with Descartes is just a mutation of this, not a new cleavage (39). Socrates and his line had already exiled the contrary of reason, had already created a dialectic in logos. And this is assuming there was some pure logos prior to him that was “elementary, primordial, and undivided” (40).
This difference within logos, this exclusion of madness and unreason, is “essential to the entirety of the history of philosophy and of reason” (40). “Classical reason, and medieval reason before it, bore a relation to Greek reason” (41). “It can be proposed that the classical crisis developed from and within itself and says all determined contradictions” (42). Excluding “the free subjectivity of madness” is “the origin of history” (42). Logos itself. Madness, on the other hand is, as Foucault admits, the “’absence of work’” (43).
To try to “write” madness is actually a more ambitious use of reason than even Hegel attempted, as Derrida casually points out (43).
Foucault thinks Descartes makes dreams and illusions surmountable “within the structure of truth” while “madness is inadmissible for the doubting subject” (47). Derrida differs, saying that madness is, for all intents and purposes, treated no different than dreaming (50). In fact, it could be argued he puts dreamers further from truth than madmen (51).
Again, discourse is by its nature inimical to madness. This is not something new to the classical (Enlightenment) era. It “belongs to the meaning of meaning” (53). EVEN IF that discourse denounces the act of force by which discourse does this (53).
Madness is silence, stifled speech, and it “plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge” (54). It is “the work’s limit and profound resource” (54).
Foucault then falls prey to his own target: he indicts “the reason of yesterday” but not “the possibility of meaning in general” (55).
But Derrida brings up that, actually, the cogito is not violent in itself to madness. Even the madman thinks, and therefore is. What he thinks may be completely scrambled, but the cogito per se makes no comment on that (55). It merely demonstrates existence through the experience of conscious thought. Mad or not, “Cogito, sum” (56).
Every philosophy of meaning is related to “the nonfoundation of nonmeaning.” (57 FN 26). It has to be—nonmeaning circumscribes and provides the void against which the letters of meaning are skylined. Without it, there is, again the unity which is unintelligible and therefore outside the totality of meaning, of logos.
In Descartes, everything can be reduced, as Foucault does, to the exigencies of historical archaeological processes except the Cogito, which Derrida calls the hyperbolical project (57). The internment of madness that Foucault seeks occurs after that, when Descartes invokes God to dispel the specter of madness from his project of attaining sure knowledge (58). And this is convenient because as Derrida points out, all philosophies of meaning require God. How so? Well, otherwise they, like Descartes, have no protection against the evil genius. All they think or see or feel could be an elaborate hoax played on them by an omnipotent demon. But of course that can’t be the case—why? Because God. God is good and would never allow that. So we see here the assumed premise, of a good God, who wouldn’t want that to happen. Derrida shows that it’s the biggest lie for the Enlightenment project to pretend its musings rest upon any other foundation. But how convenient they did pretend it, for this allowed them to forget that it is by VIOLENCE that unreason (or what is regarded as unreason) is excluded from discourse, RATHER THAN the nature of reason itself, or “the facts” themselves (58, FN 28). Logos, reason, itself, is metaphysical, and metaphysics require God. This is postmodernism par excellence: “admit your biases and come clean, modernism.”
The cogito commits this Foucauldian exile of madness from the moment it begins to “proffer itself in an organized philosophical discourse” (58). In offering itself to the other as an other, this process is already complete. And a host of unexamined axioms follow (59). He extracts the hyperbolical moment, the cogito, only by way of axioms exempt from hyperbolical doubt (59). In other words, he doesn’t find a way out of madness by the very nature of the thing: he instead forces his way out through an arbitrary imposition (60). It’s an imposing of the will on it. The history of philosophy is the history of this transition and dialogue between the hyperbole and the finite structure, and is likewise a series of impositions (60).
Philosophy is the paradox wherein philosophers try to communicate the totality, the hyperbole, while realizing that the circumscription inherent in such an act is to already fail (62).
“Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book”
Derrida examines specifically the Jewish experience, and he draws interesting comparisons between it and the situation of poets and writers. The poet unleashes words in writing that he can no longer control, and these words paint infinitely multiplying different pictures in the minds of his readers. Words become “interested” “in his books,” almost as if he is trying to attract and “catch” meanings with his poetry (65).
The words of the poet, the words of any writer, form their meaning from the voids surrounding them. This defines them. Freedom, in like manner, becomes what it is based on a relationship “with that which restrains it.” Its character is derived from this context. Its “site” is defining. For poets and for the Jew, the site of their work is “always elsewhere.” Permanent exile is their condition (66). This relates to Derrida’s idea of the deferring of meaning—meaning is constituted based on its deferral across other meanings, which are similarly dependent on still others. Thus the “site” is actually not anywhere. Exile then is the base reality. The Jew and poet are indigenous only to speech and writing (66).
Commentary haunts the Jew and the poet. The original sacred text is stalked by these. The Jewish rabbi mourns this, because commentary means the original speech has been lost, and man must now apply his best guess at what the original “really was.” The poet, on the other hand, celebrates this fact as the birth of a nation of meanings. He is father of a multitude (67 and FN).
The broken tables of the Law on Sinai are the beginning of history because this is when commentary entered in. The rabbi wept at this, but the poet rejoiced. Rupture within God started history. Writing was born, eternally secondary to the presence of speech (67). The stifling of the voice of God, the “dissimulation of his Face,” is thus our freedom, the beginning of anything interesting at all. The Question is skylined against being thusly, making distinction and therefore history, reason (67). The Enlightenment God was not like this; he is inadequate to explain history (68).
“Writing is the moment of the desert as the moment of Separation” (68). God has been interrupted, and so our interpreting begins. God’s questioning of himself, and our freedom. Writing is the exile of the poet’s words from himself. It is “the broken line between lost and promised speech” (68). The desert book is made of sand, which is infinite, never-ending.
The act of production is a loss of oneself. Writing makes possible rupture, diversity, interpretation. The thing can never be perfectly transmitted. The book is an exercise in absence—the absence of the author, the separation and exile of his meaning from himself. A book about this book shows the vanishing state of being—it retreats as soon as it is uncovered. It multiplies endlessly, like a series of mirrors. Writing creates a city in the sand out of nothing (69). The Greek nemein is the root of division, naming, and nomadism, interestingly (69). Writing then is to draw back. Naming something is to retreat from it, to wander. One’s hold is lost on it upon its release into the world (70). The author exchanges himself for the meanings his words will create in his readers. He is replaced by them (70). Derrida says that writing creates the writer, and creation creates God (71).
This slippage of meaning is not a failure, but a feature of language (71). Contrast, cutting, caesura, creates meaning (71). And language says as much by what it doesn’t say as by what it does. Absence speaks, is the breath of the letter. Signs make “the other” possible (72). Language is metaphor: it is always saying something else, not itself. Metaphor is the animality of the letter. The wandering of language is richer than strict knowledge. The signifier is “overpowerful,” as it were (72).
One can weep at the loss of original meaning, at being lost among commentaries, like the rabbi. The Jew himself is a figure for writing itself, in that he is always exiled, always looking back (73). (But perhaps, as writing must embrace the multiplication of meanings, the Jew must also embrace his evolution. Perhaps the primacy of speech is Socratic, and the primacy of the written word is Hebraic, if only the Hebrew could see it.)
Derrida says that encounter is separation. The very word is, which is where Being resides, comes to entail both the writer and the other into the source of meaning. This is because for Being to have meaning, there must be an other. And meaning requires separation, cleaving, to be able to say anything at all. Without separation, there is only the all in all, the Being before all rationality. Derrida calls it “must always already,” this exile from the kingdom of Being, which is the “conceptualization of Being.” For Being to be conceptualized, it must be separated first (74). This is all parallel to the issues Derrida identified with madness—to even speak madness means to betray it for rationality. God himself, for Derrida, only becomes apparent to us within difference, within his dissimulation—which is us (74).
Jabes captures in his poetry the tension of being a Jew—of the struggle between the desire for the original literal meaning and paradise and the actuality of exile. And this struggle is where meaning lies: “between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold kin of the concept” (75).
The book contains the book (75). This means that meaning is multiplied by writing. Trying to fix meaning through writing does the opposite: “the book multiplies the book” (76). This means the book is not a fixed artifact of the world—instead, the world comes from the book: the perception of reality is formed by interpretation, by subjectivity. The book is the threshold from which meaning is warped as it travels form the purveyor to the beholder (76).
Structuralists and modernists believe, on the other hand, that everything is measured by the book—that things stand or fall by it, that it must be approached and petitioned for meaning, and that it is first (76).
The Book, according to Derrida, is more like an epoch; it is socially conditioned. It is to grasp at straws to measure all by it, to try to fit everything into it (76). Derrida says the world is “the other of every possible manuscript,” that is, Being is ultimate incomprehensibility. Not the opposite of reason and comprehensibility, but the before it, but not chronologically. It is similar to Plato’s “beyond being” of the One. It is beyond its own name and beyond any attempt to speak it (77).
Writing can be thought of as the confusing of ontology and grammar. Stable ontology, and shifting, relative grammar. Derrida does not confuse it (78). There is no pure literature, no literature whole and entire that has emerged like a vision in our heads—that would be a dead literature (78).
“Violence and Metaphysics”
This essay is Derrida’s analysis of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. He begins by declaring that those who could be called philosophers nowadays are those questioning the very enterprise and feasibility of philosophy (a community of “the question”) (79). This question is more or less, is philosophy over, is philosophy possible, and what lies beyond philosophy? Every philosophy heretofore has basically limited the scope of the question (“enclosed” it) by being grounded in certain presuppositions, most of which have gone unnoticed (80). This makes all the difference in the world: philosophy from Socrates to Heidegger has been about events within a certain stream of thought rather than being the questioning of thought and reason itself (“the adventure of the question,” as Derrida calls it) (80).
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, for example, had profound disagreements, but shared the foundations that Socrates determined so long ago (81). They would probably deny this (especially Heidegger), but no matter. Greek philosophy is a tautology because philosophy so understood is completely Greek in its foundations and character. What we like to think of as “pure” philosophy is actually the thought of a certain civilization that took a certain direction (81 FN). In this stream ethics have been removed from metaphysics because Being is ultimately One; i.e., there is no truly “other.” This is Levinas’ problem with everything that came before him (81).
However, even the thought that we must extricate ourselves from the Greek paradigm is part of that paradigm, and our experience of distress about this is made possible by this paradigm itself (82). Heidegger wanted to return to a “Being” that was still Greek, that was still that unifying concept. This is that “knowledge and security of which we are speaking” that is “therefore not in the world: rather, they are the possibility of our language and the nexus of our world” (82).
This Greek concept can be called the Same and the One. It is the greatest oppression and violence in the world because it is “an ontological or transcendental oppression” (83). In fact, can’t we see how this categorizing and sorting impulse has led to so many violent operations and forced relocations of man by man? Whether they be actually violent, or symbolically and mentally forceful. It is this impulse of “having figured it out” and then imposing that on the world that is violence itself. It is the “concept of totality which dominates Western philosophy” (82).
However, Levinas himself is attempting a metaphysics, which is itself a Greek concept (83). However, uniquely, he makes ethics one with metaphysics. This is because for him, “Other” is experience itself, not some appendage or feature of experience. Relation is the opening to reality. This is different because it posits a kind of primordial Other, which no one before did (83).
But to reject Greek philosophy risks incoherence. Derrida says we must do this but without resigning ourselves to incoherence “systematically.” Doing so again is the violence of the dialectic (84). It’s the possibility of the impossible system that we are trying to articulate here, and this is basically Levinas’ issue he runs into (84).
All Western philosophy has been the philosophy of light: of seeing, of grasping intellectually with sight as a metaphor. This creates a fundamental relationship of objectification: I identify objects in the world. Husserl fell right in line with this by classifying Being as an object: it was the object of our field of perception (84). This could be due to how Husserl models his philosophy off the perception of extended beings, or matter (86). Levinas returns to something (still from the Western line, though) that seeks to break this simplification of being—the epekeina tes ousias, Being beyond Being. Levinas offers something called ex-cendence, which is like ascendance but not to a higher plane—because there is no God, of course. This is a “departure from being and from the categories that describe it” (85). This being beyond being for Levinas is not light, like it was for everyone else, but fecundity and generosity. The going out toward the other. However, it could be pointed out that Plato’s Good or Sun beyond being in a similar way engendered and went out from itself (85). Also for Husserl, knowledge, the theoretical glance, is supreme (86).
But Levinas neither wants to be a mystic, one searching for transcendental union or merging. So he takes the weapons of rationalism and universalism against these while rejecting “the excellence of theoretical rationality” (87). He proposed otherness and separateness to the mystics and those other critics of rationalism (which they always opposed in rationalism), but he maintains the nature of being as being relational over and against the rationalists (87).
Levinas characterizes Heidegger as seeing Being as our field of activity or solicitude, unlike Husserl who saw a world of objects to be perceived as Being (87). Historicity and temporality are of the substance of man for Heidegger (87). Heidegger to some extent broke with the tradition of light, with his taking the self-evident out as the fundamental building block of his philosophy and his emphasis on the drama of self-existence, apart from the “light” of objectification, in a way. But he still holds to the “inside-outside” schema, which is part of this “light” paradigm. Levinas wants to go before that to Being before it is divided in this way, before it is dissimulated by this infiltration of light (88).
All these prior conceptions were dominated by the “Eleatic conception of Being,” which reduced all to the One. This is a domination of unity over multiplicity that Levinas does not like (88). Non-being should not be determined by its relationship to Being; this is an unexamined favoring of Being. But then again, non-Being as dialectical opposite of Being is also playing on Being’s terms (89). So Levinas says we must understand alterity and multiplicity as the solitude of the existent (89). It is a “thought of original difference” in opposition to Parmenides’ One (90).
This is not Heidegger’s Mitsein, the “With” the other, as in standing side by side, looking at a third (Being, probably). This is a primordial face-to-face “without intermediary” (90). All this is “anterior to Platonic Light” rather than dialectically opposed to it. Levinas is contesting even the “logic of noncontradiction,” that root of all Western philosophy (91).
For support of primordial alterity, Levinas proposes that time would be nonexistent without the other: it is by something other that we mark time, is it not? Logos is solipsistic (a solitary speech to oneself) because it does not posit the primordial other. Others can therefore be illusory, and ethics is secondary, meaning that we can sort out how to treat all these “others” once we figure out what’s going on (91). Some philosophies are less violent than others, but all these solipsistic systems ultimately require imposition of force (91 FN). We cannot “possess, know, and grasp” the Other: these are the oppressions of light (91). Instead Levinas proposes “desire” for the other as other. This is not like Hegelian transgression and assimilation, which is violently grasping for unity (92). And Levinas echoes Kierkegaard in that this movement of desire is paradoxically also a kind of renunciation of desire (92). Why? Because an absolute other is also infinitely separate (95). It has to be, or else One again dominates (93). Hegel says the open, the returning, the in-progress is unhappy, unfulfilled, but Levinas says this opening is the condition for happiness because it is foundational (93). If Being is fundamentally alterity, then ethics is metaphysics and first philosophy (98).
History can be defined as the ego striving against itself, conquering and absorbing, heedless of the absoluteness of the Other. This is Hegel and the whole Greek tradition. This is what Levinas stands against (93).
Language cannot include or encompass the other as other, therefore violence always results (95). This is getting at the radical otherness of the other, and of how trapped we all are in our own selves, unable to get OUT. Alterity gets “amortized as soon as it is announced precisely because it has let itself be foreseen” (95). This is because we are incapable of grasping the Other, which cannot be bound by concepts. This is not a case of picking the opposite of what was: this is going beyond the alternatives (95). Levinas maintains that this primordial relation to other has left a trace in every aspect of our existence. I’m sure he would argue our relationality as humans is derivative of this.
Going beyond negativity is not the intuition of some other presence: it’s beyond yes and no altogether. It is the only possible nonviolence: respect for the other. Not domination, not absorption, not union. Infinite desire and infinite distance (95). “Ontology” “always brings the other back into the midst of the same and does so for the benefit of the unity of Being” (96). Metaphysics also is a type of dogmatism that inaugurates itself as such (solipsism, self-referentiality again). Reason has neutralized the other by being only what it’s given itself, by being self-referential. Phenomenology is the most subtle and modern form of this: it reduces all to the ego, and implicitly gives license to violence, just like all totalizing theories (96). Metaphysics in Levinas’ case, though, will be used to overturn this metaphysics of unity and therefore “stop” the violence. Heidegger affirmed Being over the existent. This made the subject (you) relate to the other’s Being rather than the other himself. Bingo, violence waiting to happen (97).
“The neutral thought of being neutralizes the Other as being” (97). The false neutrality of ontology, of objectivism, is violence. The philosophy of the neutral leads to “the tyranny of the state as an anonymous and inhuman universality” (97). This is evident in Boomer politics, in the myth of objective science, or of being “color-blind,” etc.; the primacy of the neutral is a violence. Levinas is trying to drag all these concepts to the witness stand and force them to confess their violence. Their “Logos which is the verb of no one” (97), rather than the neutral, impartial verb of… who?
Levinas proposes not the theoretical glance that beholds things, but the exchange of the glance… that discloses a face. Face-to-face is fundamental (98). Part of this is from how he views the eye (like Hegel) not as an organ of consumption (like the tongue). The eye suspends desire, is the limit of desire. This is the non-violence of the glance, of “appetiteless vision” (99).
However, vision can be violent, as we said with the Light ontology. It can be a “mute glance,” “the abstraction of seeing,” seeing not with respect but with curiosity (my words) (99). And so the glance must be coupled with sound, which relates to thought (as in thought occurring in language, like speech). Though Levinas distanced himself from Hegel, Hegel also recognized the “purity” of sound as an ideal medium of communicating essence (100).
So eyes and mouth, glance and uttered thought, make up the face, which does not stand in for the Other but purely IS the other (100). Unlike other parts of the body, the face cannot be separated from the person (Feuerbach said this too) (100).
With all this said, it comes as no surprise that Levinas privileges speech over writing. The original, pure expression, which can aid itself and interpret itself, versus the leftovers of writing that are alone. Writing is not an expression but a sign (101). But Derrida shows, by turning a phrase, how writing can in turn be conceived of in a way that meets Levinas’ categories. Levinas’ deprivileging of writing was arbitrary, then (101). And even in other works, Levinas seems to elevate writing (102).
Levinas is basically saying the human psyche (or psyche in general) is this relation to the absolute Other. It is not “of this world” in that it’s not an object of the ego (103).
Levinas says language comes first, because it’s communication, it’s relation. He maintains Heidegger and everyone prior believed thought came first, which made them egoists, and therefore violent (103). Derrida shows how Levinas’ concerns are unfounded: Heidegger and Husserl believe in an other that is infinitely irreducible, but that acknowledgement comes first from within the ego, from thought. Levinas’ subordinating thought to language doesn’t get around this: language presupposes thought, does it not? (103).
Levinas says the Other, the Face, exceeds the totality, which is all the objectifying, logical schema of Husserl and the Western Tradition. This is why it is the limit of desire and violence, and since it is not part of the whole, it is prior to it, which means relationality and therefore ethics are foundational, even metaphysical (104). Violence is done away with because there is an infinite distance between the ego and the Other (yet also that immediacy, paradoxically). I can only do violence to that within my power, and the Other is not. I do violence to the Totality, to the same, to my ego’s creations. The murder of the Other is an illusion, and I vainly strike out. Or at least, this is what Levinas envisions. He’s not saying that I couldn’t go out and strike another human. He’s saying that under his philosophical conception, this sort of imagining of the Other would translate into respect for actual others in the world. They could no longer be objectified and used by me, under his ethical system (104).
Levinas doesn’t want to be like Martin Buber, who posited the I-Thou of personalism. No, he’s not trying to posit another ego, because that seems to him too much of a “capture” of what the Other actually is. So he almost comes to a sort of “I-It” relationship in the sense of the distance between the Same and the Other (105). This could be because he wants to avoid spiritualistic “communion” (against any Christian idea), and so he maintains a sort of “face of the world” as a third party to the glance between the Same and Other (105 FN). Husserl wanted to say alter ego—Levinas says No! It’s an absolute other, total exteriority, alterity which can be not “derived, nor engendered, nor constituted on the basis of anything other than itself” (105). When you say it, almost, you’ve missed it, pretty much. Phenomenology doesn’t account for ethics, speech, and justice: these things are primordial (105).
Levinas seems to think that any leading of another is a reducing of the other, which is violence. It is not respecting the unknowability of the Other. This means knowledge is power, as Foucault says. However, he distinguishes “instruction” from this category, saying that the master’s height over the pupil is an exteriority that does not impinge the student’s freedom. [Yeah, whatever.] (106).
Finitude is what is violent for Levinas—a totality is always finite for him, and it implies categorization, measurement, cutting down to size—these ideas (106). Language is war because the very act of speaking entails these elements. Though the infinite is in some way included and excluded in all this (and by extension what we might call God), it is the attempt to define God that results in violence. Levinas here seems to be advocating a kind of “spiritual, not religious” attitude (106). “Only the play of the world permits us to think the essence of God”: logos, logic itself, language; these are the things that bring the infinite down to us but also truncate it and exclude (106).
Levinas makes much of the glance between faces, but this glance can also be unequal: fathers to children, for instance. Levinas says prior Western tradition has made the relation of God and man ontological, which would mean objectifying, or somehow trying to conceptualize it in a way that could never do it justice. That’s unlike his radical alterity and unknowableness for the other (107). He wants discourse with God, not discourse in God or on God, the twin errors of mysticism and theology (107). It all hinges on the presence-absence paradox he wants to emphasize (107). The Other is not God or man, but their resemblance. However, we have to think of this resemblance without assistance from the Same or ego because it is radically other. This is a paradox (108). As such he rejects Hegel and Kierkegaard. He wants to be for interiority in a way that opposes Hegel and for exteriority in a way that challenges Kierkegaard (108). Subjectivism and Kierkegaardian ideas he regards as “violent and premetaphysical egoisms” (109).
But Derrida points out that Levinas is not consistent. In rejecting subjectivism, he’s rejecting the foundation upon which the recognition of an Other rest upon. The Other is precisely other than my ego by being itself an ego. Otherwise it’s a thing, and we’re back to being objectivists who categorize everything as “phenomena of my consciousness” and nothing more (in effect) (110). What Levinas is trying to do, to find an opening to the beyond of philosophical discourse within language, can never succeed. It’s similar to what Derrida shows Foucault was doing (110). He’d be better off attempting this with a description or some type of art, not philosophy (110).
Levinas’ concept of ethics is different than that of Kierkegaard, who reproached it as being the moment of Hegelianism. This means that it was the moment when the radical subjectivity of religion entered the realm of law and category and lost its intimate “faith” sense. Levinas’ posits it as metaphysical, but as soon as it is codified, it begins its violent path. It is for all intents and purposes violent then, is it not? If ethics only truly exists at the moment of the infinite and irreducible alterity and absolute respect due the other, it is ruined as soon as it enters the real world of precepts and commandments (111).
Levinas cannot escape the straitjacket of logos, it seems. It’s not merely a failure of expression—this rebellion against logos from within logos always results that “he who attempts to repel it would always be overtaken” by it (111). Derrida points out how Levinas is held captive to spatial metaphors to explain his concepts, and how he must negate their very meanings to try to make them say what he wants them to. And in fact, you couldn’t “wean” language of its dependence on these metaphors if you wanted. It is, in a sense, the “son of earth and sun,” of materiality. For example, Levinas wants to say true exteriority is actually not spatial, is not a finite, conceptual statement about a relation between things (not physical, obviously, but mental and logical), which would make it not outside anything, and thus interiority. What? Derrida says these relations are not just deficiencies of the words we use—they are embedded in conceptuality itself. It’s of no use to banish philosophical discourse, spatial metaphors, etc., in an attempt to state what, Derrida says, cannot be stated (112). Derrida’s point: duplicity, difference, and equivocality: these are the prisons philosophical language (and all language) hold us in (112). Hegel even commented on how German has several words that hold this duplicity in them purposefully. They are a good example of what Derrida is saying applies to language in general (112-13).
For example, Levinas thinks there’s an infinite other. Well, the only “other” that infinity tolerates, by definition, is the finite—because it’s the in-finite. And if there’s a finite, then the Other cannot be the infinite; else there is something it doesn’t include, and so it is finite (114). The very word reveals the pattern for all language: If positive plenitude can only be designated in language negatively, we have hit upon something: that thought and language can never be 1-to-1 in meaning (114).
Henri Bergson was more consistent: he advocated the preeminence of intuition over science, over the logic of language. His task was destroying discourse within metaphysics. Levinas wants this, but wants to save discourse as well. There are just a bundle of contradictions in Levinas’ language (116). Levinas wants discourse, but by his own logic, discourse is war: the objectifying, limiting, categorizing activity of the ego. Violence is therefore inevitable, as light and logic are the very preconditions of violence. Only silence is peace. Derrida talks of then choosing the least violence possible in preventing a worse violence, and here we can see why “relativism” and the SJW phenomenon isn’t quietist, or why they don’t tolerate “intolerance.” This is the humility of a discourse that recognizes it is inextricably submerged in history and has no pretensions to an ahistorical neutrality (116). [Derrida explains why there are SJWs when, you would think, their philosophy of relativism would mean they’d need to tolerate everything. He says light and logic are the tools whereby force and violence are perpetrated: this would be like beliefs about the world that constrict freedom (like religion). The only way of absolute peace would be not to speak at all, because that would be total tolerance. But with Derrida, since there is no objective truth, the SJW must realize he is stuck in history, and has a position, and cannot be a God-like neutral figure. Therefore his task is to prevent the worst violence of discourse and language by a discourse of lesser violence (116)]. History is bigger than any totality which seeks to describe and contain it. This dovetails with Lyotard’s protest against metanarratives. It is the excess over the totality, not the totality, as Levinas conceives it. “It is transcendence itself,” uncontainable (116). Metaphysics is an economy, a useful tool for some purpose: it’s violence against other violence, not the thing above all violence (116-17).
In one sense Levinas wants to say his method comes from phenomenology. But earlier he said Husserl’s method held within it the sense of being that it would unveil, basically confirming that no method is presuppositionless (118). And too, phenomenology’s purpose was to make philosophy even more of science (the goal of philosophy since Plato): and this is something Levinas is trying to disprove by means of it! (118).
Levinas tries to separate alterity from negativity, but isn’t not-ness inherent in the very bedrock of the concept? It literally means not the same! (119). And thus he seems to be repeating Hegel while rejecting him because he’s still locked into the same concepts, though confusedly (119). Thinking a false infinity (which Levinas says is the Same, while the other is the “true” infinity) in its very stating calls to mind the true infinity. In effect, it’s already present, it’s PRESUPPOSED before false infinity ever gets off the ground (119).
And what’s more, Husserl was not as simplistic as Levinas makes him out to be. He believed in inadequation: the idea that the ego’s conception of the “things themselves” could NEVER encompass the truth of those things (120). This is the Kantian sense of the overflowing of the horizon, which can never become an object of or be equaled by the intellect (120). And is not the idea of intentionality respect itself? So Husserl does “respect” the “infinite other.” (120) And this respect of the other. Where does it come from? You have to have phenomenology to even have a concept of the experience of the other (which is a phenomenon we experience). Without that first experience, no respect would be possible. “The phenomenon of respect supposed the respect of phenomenality. And ethics, phenomenology” (120). Concepts like ethics are beholden to phenomenological evidence (120, 123). And even these concepts, which supposedly are neither subjective nor objective, are conceptualized with an objective type of knowledge: they are concepts we grasp and contain within our minds first of all (122).
“To make the other an alter ego, Levinas says frequently, is to neutralize its absolute alterity” (123). But Levinas is hoisted on his own petard. One cannot have a sense of the totally other without first a phenomenon of the totally other. The whole system of seeing an other as an other depends on the other being such for an ego! It depends upon phenomenality. An other, to be what Levinas wants, has to be an ego, which is the subject ego’s representation of an ego, an other who I cannot be. Its intentional phenomenon (123).
The fact of not being able to subsume another ego is precisely the type of separation and unassailableness that Levinas wants. The ego must analogically represent the other ego to begin this process (123). There is something always hidden in the other, like how you can only see an object from a certain vantage point and can never fully take it in (i.e., the back side will always be hidden). So therefore other egos have to be represented by analogy, representation. No one, Levinas, is saying that captures the other completely (124). Husserl then is at least consistent. He admits this total otherness and speaks of it from a place of subjectivity, of trappedness in the ego. Levinas saws this log out from under himself in his attempt to distance himself from any “boxing in” of the infinite Other by the Same (ego). Yes, Husserl’s method acquiesces to the fact of violence—the violence of the logical, categorizing gaze—but it is “an original, transcendental violence, previous to every ethical choice, even supposed by ethical nonviolence” (125). It’s “embedded in the root of meaning and logos” (125). As soon as you open your mouth, violence has been committed.
Logically Levinas’ position doesn’t hold up. If it was infinitely other, it would be the same, because infinite. Logos defeats Levinas: he’s holding on to it while trying to repudiate it (126). The other is also an other only in relation to some same. So he is similar to an I, an ego, and not absolutely other. However, a thing in the same way is less other but also less “same” than the ego (127).
Derrrida says all this to say that Levinas has reached the limit of rationality and logos. It’s not that he’s descended into irrationality: it’s that logos is not set up to handle what is beyond it and therefore could never express it. When once it is expressed it is within logos and therefore not beyond it. This origin of language is an “inscribed inscription” (127). It is the concrete condition of rationality.
The dissymmetry inherent in recognizing an other constitutes elemental violence. The violence does not derive from some certain way of doing it. Its inherent in the act itself. This is the “transcendental origin of irreducible violence,” or “preethical violence” (128). However, this violence is at the same time nonviolence since it’s the only thing that “opens up the relation to the other” (128). It’s an economy, a way of organizing the thing which is unavoidable. Discourse and violence are connatural, and Derrida emphasizes this is not the result of the wrong philosophy or form of communication. This is the essence of history. It’s transcendental history, that which lies behind all history and forms of conflict. “If writing—and, indeed, speech in general—retains within it an essential violence, this cannot be ‘demonstrated’ or ‘verified’ on the basis of ‘facts,’ whatever sphere they are borrowed from and even if the totality of the ‘facts’ in this domain were available.” This is not something we get from some set of facts, but a priori, from the nature of the thing itself (FN 129). “War…is the very emergence of speech and appearing” (129). The “infinite passage through violence is what is called history” (130). This is transcendental history. The very fact of being history creates violence, not some foreign object or philosophy foisted onto history. Discourse is violence, but it also has to be to defeat the pure non-sense of pre-discourse or non-logical madness. Levinas thinks he can abolish violence but he ends up abolishing peace as well, since this requires discourse, logic, relation, etc. When one denies this inherent violence, one returns to the pre-Kantian “infinitist dogmatism,” “which does not pose the question of responsibility for its own finite philosophical discourse” (130). That is because Kant was the first to begin to recognize the mind’s role in organizing phenomena according to the mind’s constitution, rather than according “just to how things really are,” objectively. They didn’t have this “anxiety of the infinite.” They should’ve, but their philosophies presented all as the finite totality, or at least the graspable infinity (130).
A philosophy can’t renounce “ipseity” if it wants to be responsible for its language. Ipseity means roughly himself or itself, and so it denotes the idea of egoity or self-reflective, subjective consciousness. Derrida says a philosophy of separation (like Levinas’ infinite separation) can even less denounce this because separation relies on an ego to be separated from (131).
Philosophy, according to Derrida, is where violence is used against violence in knowledge, where original finitude, or the close horizon of understanding and conceptualizing, appears, and where the other appears but is respected only from within the same or ego (131). Levinas cannot escape all this. We are trapped within the finitude/egoistic paradigm by the nature of experience itself. Nothing appears outside of my world. Philosophy can’t get a birds-eye view from this: it can only know that it can’t know. Philosophers must illuminate these dark corners rather than bemoan or ignore them. The subjective a priori is even before God. One knows subjectivism before one can know God or others. And in fact, this subjective a priori recognized by phenomenology is the only way “to check the totalitarianism of the neutral, the impersonal ‘absolute Logic’ of the Enlightenment” and modernists. Their “eschatology without dialogue.” No, none of us embody this. We are all trapped, and recognizing that is freeing (131).
We are limited by reason in another way: by living in the present. In fact, it is only the experience of the present that lets us analogously understand the past and future. We conceive of them as “other presents.” But try to think of a moment not being experienced “in the living present.” It’s impossible (132). Time, the present, is how ego experiences the other. It’s finite and limited, and therefore violent (133).
Derrida doesn’t chide Levinas for his project, even if he’s punched holes in his method. At bottom, there is no justification from within Logos for questioning logos and no way from within it to escape its clutches or confines. It is “an eschatology which dissimulates its own opening, covers this opening with its own noise as soon as the opening stands forth and is determined” (133). The attempt to turn Logos against itself is “stated only by being forgotten in the language of the Greeks; and a question which can be stated, as forgotten, only in the language of the Greeks.” In short, there is only a dialogue that results in silence (133).
The present as the absolute moment, the presence of the present and the present of presence, lead to Being and time being inseparable, or presupposing each other. Derrida then shows that Husserl is presupposing an idealist conception of Being in his phenomenology. He proves this by showing that Husserl unknowingly posits “a meaning of Being not exhausted by reality.” This means that the actually existing Being could be conceived of as a deficit compared to an ideal conception of Being. In other words, what this ideal being is comes first in the mind in order to sort out the real being we see in front of us and the fictional being we make up in our heads. Husserl would object by saying that unlike Plato, he doesn’t suppose this ideal being to be an actual (spiritual?) thing. Derrida declines to take this debate further (134).
Levinas is against Heidegger too. He maintains that Heidegger’s ontology placed the being of existents over the existents themselves: knowing their Being over having a relationship with them (135). But Derrida shows why this is nonsense. Being is not some type of predicate (or subject). It is presupposed by predication in general and makes possible all predication. When you predicate something of someone, you have assumed their Being as soon as you open your mouth. Being “is beyond genre or categories, transcendental in the scholastic sense.” As the ground of all language and meaning, it certainly could be considered a truism (which Levinas said it was not) (136).
Nothing is clearer in Heidegger than that being is nothing outside the existent, and can in no way precede the existent. Being as some kind of tyrant above the existent or some foreign power is alien to his thought, despite Levinas’ protests (136). It’s beyond theory, and all hierarchies. Being according to Heidegger is not some metaphysical first cause or principle, as it may have been for prior philosophies. Levinas always wants to construct a social organization out of a philosophy, drawing out what he thinks has implications for practical affairs. But he has overplayed his hand here. For Heidegger, Being is inseparable from the existent (136). Apart from it, it is the Logos “of no one” (136).
Being, according to Derrida, “is doubtless the only thought which no anthropology, no ethics, and above all, no ethico-anthropological psychoanalysis will ever enclose” (137). And in fact, no ethics can be opened without it, contra Levinas. Heidegger says we have to “let be” the Other. This is not a “let be as object of comprehension first” or “as interlocutor afterward” as Levinas seems to think. The letting be also allows to be those aspects of the other that escape comprehension. It is thus suitably humble. It allows for respect and an ethical relation, and so without it, violence would reign (137).
Heidegger is pretty emphatic, anyway, that Being is not an excellent existent, in a Platonic sense. So any attempt to juxtapose Being and the existent in his thought by Levinas is unfounded. Levinas even acknowledges elsewhere that Heidegger does not allow a separation of the two. It’s just that language simultaneously illuminates and hides this idea. However, Being does elude every metaphor. Those who think to unmask the concept through an etymological empirical investigation fail because Being always hides behind another metaphor. It can be thought simultaneously only by metaphor and then by no metaphor. Language cannot contain it (138).
Relation to Being is not one of knowledge. Heidegger makes clear it is not really knowledge at all. Don’t confuse it with a thought of Pure Being “as undetermined generality” (139). Levinas thinks violence is a violence of the concept, but Heidegger makes it clear that Being is precisely not something like that: it is not a predicate, but authorizes all predication, and it does not subsume existents in its generality. The very question of Being comes from the preconceptual precomprehension of Being. It’s the ground for its own question (139). The same can be said for the Same. It’s not a category, but a ground of category. Combining the same and the other then (having the same “subsume the Other,” as Levinas is worried about) is nonsense: these are the machinery of thought, not manipulable elements (140 FN).
Thinking of the Other’s being does not make them a species of the genre Being. Being does not “oppress or enclose the existent and its differences” (141). The thought or questioning of Being is the only thing that can begin to get outside the structure of Logos. But then getting outside it is impossible. The metaphysics that Levinas proposes are just a form of violence that combats worse violence. Violence against an-archy which would be allied with all the old archies. [This is the rationale for the SJW again.] (141).
It seems Levinas has missed Heidegger’s point. Heidegger said every philosophy thinks Being implicitly but does not ask the question of Being. They presuppose Being but do not investigate why. They do not ask “in what manner the essence of man belongs to the truth of Being” (142). These philosophies, including atheistic humanism, posit the Other as resembling God, man as being in the image of God. From this basis they tell us alienation is evil. Heidegger and the question of Being dispute the metaphysical truth of this whole idea. It goes to the question of what this preconception of Being is which allows this schema (the Face, and resemblance to God) to be thought. It is in the preconceptual and preanalogical unit of Being that this relationship lies. Being is not the being of an infinite God here. So the question of Being is basically above and beyond what Levinas is trying to do with his metaphysical edifice: it leaves it untouched (142).
Being doesn’t exist outside the existent. But Being itself can only be thought and stated. It is like Logos then in how it captures and contains all that is. It is the ground of all (143).
So if thinking being outside the existent is to think nothing, we know that the sequence goes like this: 1. Think existent. 2. Think existent’s being. 3. (but really before 1.) acknowledge being unconsciously. Being in this sense is always “dissimulated,” obscured. It is hidden under every determination, yet without this hiding, it is nothing and has no existence. This is its “priority,” it’s foundational nature.
And so history is a history of being, and these concepts that hide being make their stand, then shuffle off the world stage. This is eschatological, which is a process, which is violent. Therefore, “war is not an accident that overcomes Being, but rather Being itself” (144). The idea of Being is therefore always moving, and has no fixed site (145).
The idea of the God in Heidegger depends on the idea of Being. To even say “God” presupposes a concept of deity, which presupposes Being (145). Transcending the particulars, the existents, and grasping mentally toward the concept of “Being,” be it nonexistent outside of existents as it is, is the very mental action which allows language in the first place. Without this concept or conceptualization, I cannot grasp the particulars, and I cannot grasp the community of Being, the community of us all being Being! So this is opposite what Levinas said: the thought of Being is the prerequisite for nonviolence (146).
However, Being is both the prerequisite for nonviolence and violence alike. Being dissimulates itself under particulars as soon as it appears, which is violence, which is the not-this and the exclusion. Without this elementary violence nothing would appear or occur at all. However, Being is the only thing that allows relation in the first place: the site of nonviolence (147). Levinas wants to strip discourse of verbs in order to stop violence. The Greeks told us all those centuries ago that this is impossible (147). There is “no phrase which does not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence appears with articulation” (147). Even silence is defined, skylined by the noise/war on either side. It is peace only in relief to violence (147).
To try to separate violence from speech is an attempt to create a transhistoricity, since history is itself Being unveiled in its different modes of discourse, which are violent. It can be argued that “this nonhistory uproots itself from history in general.” Being for Heidegger is (nonethical) violence: “dissimulation of itself in its own unveiling” or history. Language is like being: it hides its own origin even as it is unveiled under its signs. The “first violence” of Being and language is the dissimulation whereby it expresses itself in some contingent way. This is violent, but it is also the defeat of nihilistic violence [as the SJW would want to maintain]. Being is the first thing in that it is pre-thought before all thought and the last thing in that it is only reflected upon after thinking through all the existents. This “difference” between “Being” and the existents in general is the very ground of the existence of “the Other,” pace Levinas. Heidegger therefore says that on the ontic plane, the plane of existents, is where dissimulation occurs; for Levinas, Being itself is dissimulation, [which results in incomprehensibility] (148).
God is not an ontic determination but is still preconditioned on the thought of Being. God is like the “existent” of the category of the divine. But infinity (and God is infinite) bursts the limits of the existent. But thinking God like an existent presupposes the idea of Being, putting ontology before theology (149). Being is nothing in itself, but is only produced in difference (or as difference) (149).
Bottom line: Levinas is advocating a type of empiricism. Empiricism is the idea that all knowledge is from experience as opposed to, say, metaphysics, which would try to a priori deduce truths through logic and thought. Empiricism is “the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference” (151). Or basically, it undercuts the branch it sits on, as Derrida has pointed out throughout this essay. Empiricism wants to say that it never wanders into the speculative, the presupposed, and that it stays in the here and now and only speaks what it sees. It wants to break down those universal structures of thought because these are “unprovable” by scientific experiment. Yet it partakes of these very same structures the moment it opens its mouth or begins to conceive of its “discoveries” in a logical or coherent way. Levinas is saying all ethics derive from the experience of the Other, which is an empirical claim. He denies a priori structures of Being. But all a posteriori empiricism presupposes (unknowingly) a priori structures, which makes its pretensions an illusion (151).
Empiricism cannot justify itself, just like Levinas’ philosophy. It’s like Hume’s disproval of causality: it creates a world of pure chaos and random automation, with no underlying logic. In reality, Levinas’ idea of the totally Other requires the irruption of the Greek Logos in a profound way. The Greeks said long ago: “‘If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize; if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize (to say it and think it)’” (152). Greek philosophy (all philosophy) is not a neutral site, not outside or accidental to any thought, not the neutral tools we use unreflectively (152). We live in the hypocrisy of calling out this logos as we breathe it (153).
“‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology”
The phenomenological method could be thought of as proceeding this way (in its vacillation between genesis and structure): 1. Don’t turn the observation of things into a structure (leave that “open”), 2. But by thinking there’s an “open” structure, you’ve already admitted structuralism and essentialism. 3. And then this understanding of some type of structure is the beginning of philosophy. Genesis is the idea (like in Foucault) that things arise through a genealogical evolution. Structuralism is the idea that there are fundamental, eternal relations between parts of reality that order the world. Husserl thinks one can bounce between these hermeneutical lenses based on the task (155). Husserl gets to a point where he sees the structuralism of genesis: those structures inherent in reality that have shaped genesis itself. Phenomenology itself is shaped by a paradox: “it is a philosophy of essences always considered in their objectivity, their intangibility, their apriority; but, by the same token, it is a philosophy of experience, of becoming, of the temporal flux of what is lived, which is the ultimate reference… of ‘transcendental experience’” (156). So phenomenology thinks it reconciles this tension.
Derrida describes the tension as a reconciliation between the structuralist need for the totality, the thing organized according “to an internal legality” of elements arranged in relation to one another, and the genetic need for origin and foundation (157).
Husserl early on sought the origin of arithmetic in subjective perception, but he stops short of then ascribing it all to psychologism, and indeed renounces his initial leanings in that direction later on in Philosophical Investigations. He maintains the independent existence of the ideality and normativity of arithmetical meaning but is criticized by Gottlieb Frege as a sort of idealist in doing so (157). Husserl came to the conclusion that he could not explain the unity of logical concepts through the genealogical, basically psychological, method alone. He wants to “maintain simultaneously the normative autonomy of logical or mathematical ideality as concerns all factual consciousness, and its original dependence in relation to a subjectivity in general; in general, but concretely.” Therefore, he must carefully tread between “logicizing structuralism” and “psychologistic geneticism.” He wants to discover a “concrete, but nonempirical, intentionality, a ‘transcendental experience’ which would be constitutive.” It would be both active and passive in that respect: “simultaneously productive and revelatory.” To that end it would involve first a reduction with a structuralist technique to avoid psychologism and historicism. These would be understood as a type of empiricism that rests on its own fleeting observations and not anything universal. Empiricism by definition cannot speak of the universal; e.g., Hume calling into question causality and instead, in true empirical fashion, claiming everything we attribute to causality as being instead just repeated observations and the prediction that these connections between events have some deeper linkage (158). Husserl believes neglecting structure to the point of allowing this type of interpretation to flourish would destroy objectivity. Genesis and structure both, at their core, imply the question of the objective (159).
Derrida is saying that historicism cannot pretend to universal truth. Historicism locates meaning in a determined historical totality, which is finite. Ideas, in the Kantian sense, are infinite. It is this opening to the infinite which frustrates structuralism and keeps it from encompassing everything (160).
Husserl is sympathetic to Dilthey in how he seeks “understanding” instead of objectification in understanding the mind, in the unity of thought structures, and in mental structures being linked by a type of causality like “motivation” (160). However, what he offers is still a form of historicism. He’s made it more philosophically sophisticated, but it’s still an “empirical science of ‘facts’” that cannot account for their own foundation. There is an “interminable delaying of the theoretical foundation.” Weltanschauung, worldview, to Husserl, is this kind of practical, provisional morality that allows life to continue (160).
In this phenomenological method, Husserl vehemently opposes geneticist tendencies. He’s trying desperately to get at the object in general and consciousness in general in a structural way (161).
Husserl makes a distinction between exactitude and rigor. Exactitude is for a particular eidetic abstract moment: like spatiality in geometry: it’s abstracted from the rest of the eidetic image and so can be exact. A descriptive science like phenomenology, then, can be rigorous, but not exact (but still eidetic). The structures of consciousness can therefore not be of the mathematical type. Geometry is closed: its primordial ideal laws determine a finite system of possibilities by which its calculations can unfold (FN). A morphological science like phenomenology is in its essence infinitely open. There is an “irreducible incompleteness” to consciousness which permits simultaneously one to grasp the world and yet never to contain it (162).
For Husserl there is the noetic component of consciousness: the mental-act process, the act of judging for instance. Then there is the noema, the intentionally held object. Not the object as such, but as, e.g., judged, for the object as such remains infinite in some respect. There is also, analogously in noesis, morphe and hyle moments. Morphe is the idea of the thing, apprehended and constituted by us. Hyle is the stuff data feeds into us and is more like the building block of apprehension. The noema is not the “untamed object,” but the object for consciousness, and therefore has one foot in consciousness and one in the world. The noema therefore is in some sense a real window on the world. If it were given up as a nonreality, as totally subjective, we would lapse into silence. The noema opens us to the “real world” and its infinity, destroying structuralism, but it also gives access to something real, which would be the only way to find universal structures at all (162).
The hyle makes possible all intentionality: it’s the “stuff” of it. It’s the basis of any genesis, because genesis would involve growing from something simple. The themes of the other and time are irreducible and arise, respectively, from the infinite opening of the noema (to the infinite other) and from the incompleteness of the hyle, spurring genesis (and therefore time) (163). So in phenomenology’s own method, these breaks occur.
Psychology was fond of phenomenology and several figures attempted an integration, viz, with a “psychology of form” which was supposed to ground psychology in a structuralism (FN, 164) to escape psychologism. But just finding “structures” in the psyche does not necessarily clear one of the charge of naturalism/empiricism/atomism, i.e., of relativism. Derrida says there’s a “nothing” that separates this phenomenolgy of psychology and transcendental phenomenology. [I don’t get what he’s saying] (164).
Husserl explores genealogy thusly: to peel away from the logic all that “idealization and the values of objective exactitude” and the cultural sedimentation that occlude clear ideas about predication itself, or the relations between things. Second, to peel away the detritus surrounding the ego (the subject and focus of phenomenology by definition) so as to understand its constitution better. Third, he wants to show the unity of the history of ego. The eidos or essence of history, though, is totalizing and encompasses all things. It seems he’s talking about the revolutions of logos in the human mind throughout history. How can phenomenology give certainty to these upheavals, though, if they are only known from within phenomenology (the mind) itself? Where is the origin of the unity of this continuity? Is that not a metaphysical belief? (A properly basic belief that’s just assumed?) (165).
Reason is the logos produced in history. It is speech as auto-affection “hearing oneself speak.” It is totally self-reflexive, coming from and returning to itself by itself. This refers to how there is nothing outside of reason by which to interpret it. However, to make itself the history of reason, it is necessary that it be written which is a dangerous detour for it. The sign, once written, cannot be controlled (166).
Logos is nothing outside historicity and being. Phenomenology says that meaning is not real per se. However, it acknowledges that history and Being have a meaning which offers itself. In this phenomenology ultimately proves “faithful to classical metaphysics, because in criticizing it, phenomenology offers itself as the first principle (metaphysics) was looking for all along. And Husserl acknowledged this. Phenomenology would represent the final genetic stage of development for the eidos of mental historicity (166).
Husserl speaks several times of the Idea in the Kantian sense, which would be a mental operation that does not correspond to anything concretely in the world and is open-ended because of that. “Europe” is such a concept in the way that politicians talk about it. IN an idea is telos, directedness toward an end. Structurally then it is genesis itself (167).
So genesis and structure: phenomenology rests on them both, in various ways. To interrogate these concepts in relation to how they uphold the phenomenology project is to expose its circularity: “It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.” But Husserl did not question the basis of the transcendental reduction because the transcendental reduction is required to understand all else! “The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer.” It is akin to death, in that all logic breaks down and we reach the limits of our ability to know (167).
“La Parole Soufflee” (the breathtaking word)
Derrida undertakes to examine the conjunction of “madness and the work” in Antonin Artaud (169). Foucault says that the clinical and critical readings of Artaud absolutely separate but also infinitely close, and that it’s the enigma of the same which permits this. Clinicalism rationalizes the madness, which bulldogs it into the realm of the Same, Logos. But it is this very Same/Logos which identifies the madness as totally foreign to reason (indeed, it is). So it is literally a paradox. Could history show us how this rapprochement is essentially impossible? But history is disregarded by the clinicians as they seek to analyze eternal structures (170).
Clinical and critical commentary both do violence to madness or the work; however, criticism seeks to defend the work against psychological reduction but ends up making its own reduction. It reduces the work to an example, a case, of some essential structure that becomes the true point of the argument. All commentary ends up doing this (170). Psychological reduction and eidetic reduction work in the same way. Eidetic is ideas, or structures (170).
Blanchot follows the eidetic error. He takes Artaud’s work and separates it from Artaud, finding a “universal essence of thought”; the dross left over is just Artaud’s “pathetic error.”[?] Blanchot feigns to avoid shoehorning Artaud, as critics are wont to do, but his analysis ultimately boils down to the detection of a universal truth, whatever it was Artaud was getting at (171).
Blanchot wants to remain above the psychological-critic fray, but in contrasting the two positions, he makes a structuralist reduction of the psychological reduction! (172) Blanchot rhapsodizes Holderlin in the same way: as “the poet” despite himself, he achieves not his achievement but that of truth; his speech, because authentic, goes on to make him disappear, returning “to the element from whence it came” (172). Therefore, Derrida says Blanchot is actually saying that the unicity of the unique is a “conjunction” of madness and the work (172).
Jean Laplanche sneers at the idealist reduction but then reduces Holderlin to a salutary example of schizophrenia, allowing us to access its essential nature. In fact, schizophrenia is possibly the psychological prerequisite that “opens the truth of man.” This idea of exemplarity—that the unique can stand for the universal—is the equivocality that allows clinical and critical discourse their jumping off points of reducing and restoring meaning, respectively (173)
Derrida is calling out the psychologists and critics for reducing the unique writers and their works to certain pre-conceived universal structures. He’s not doing this to protect their singularity. On the contrary, he wants to break them down even more, to “deconstruct” them, in so many words, and expel the unities that have been constructed over them that hide their disparate, contingent elements. This is a historical, genealogical method which will question meaning itself, not just the structural meanings that have been mapped onto these figures (174).
Artaud is a figure against the reductionism of the foregoing because his grotesque theatrical works exploring the body and torture were not routes to anything but themselves, meant to be experienced rawly in the moment, not later as an artifact. It was a form of art that resists exegesis and protests “itself against exemplification itself.” It’s a language without trace or difference because not written, not even spoken. It rails implicitly against duality and forbids its speech to be taken from its body. That’s what a theatre of cruelty does (174).
Artaud got that speech, once spoken, acquires a life of its own, as Derrida has indicated in “Force and Signification.” Theft of meaning is therefore inherent in discourse and comprehension itself (175). To do this he “plundered the structure of theft” itself by wrecking the traditional arrangement of a screenwriter writing script for an actor, who is dispossessed of what he enacts by the very nature of enacting someone else’s script. The language of the theatre of cruelty would be gesture, expression (176).
Artaud’s concept of unpower doesn’t mean impotence, but the force of the void from me drawing my speech back, robbing the other for using it for his own ends. Artaud speaks of the “words which I have found” (176) being taken from him by something furtive. Derrida points out that this word, furtive, implies theft, and links it to the idea of signification-slip in meaning—a “subtle subterfuge” indeed, which most of us aren’t aware of. The theatre of cruelty, with its lack of dialogue and sensual content, was designed to escape this (177).
Artaud has a psychology or anthropology or a metaphysics of subjectivity, which is why this elusion of meaning from the subject is considered thievery; meaning knows not from whence it came nor where it is going. This enigma constitutes the nature of speech (178).
The speaking subject seeks a place in his discourse that is always missing—he is not revealed by his speech but actually buried beneath it because of the stealing and appropriating of meaning by his listeners. The vocabulary he speaks with is the cultural field of language. He steals from language, which is the original theft in general. Read (past tense) language punches holes in speech because the thought that inspired it cannot be predicted. The originator falls through this hole. The power “of inauguration” is thus stolen from him. It’s stolen because it’s open, never finished. This is the signifiers’ autonomy, or its historicity, its historical life. The signifier says more than I’m intending to say when I speak or write: my intention is “less than” the signifier, and is submissive, and passive in relation to it. This excess, present at every speech act, is probably the building block of the “historical potentialization of meaning,” the openness of history that allows for the growth and mutation of meaning (178). Writing allows for this excess to percolate and overflow even more than speech, and therefore could be considered the foundation of historical process (178, FN).
Artaud seeks “good inspiration,” not the bad inspiration of “loss and dispossession,” which occurs with language. Good inspiration “does not read and precedes all texts” (179). It is an inspiration of force and life rather than forms, which would be like scientific life or societal life (179).
Artaud sees dispossession and theft all around him, including in his alienation from himself. He wants to reunite mind and body in his theatre of cruelty, which will brim with “unpower” (179).
Artaud says we are dispossessed of our bodies from birth. That is when we enter into a relationship with our bodies. Since we have it, we are not it. This relation forms the pattern of our existence. Even in death, even in suicide, this alienation means there is an other who strips us of our life—because only someone who was himself, who was not separated from himself, could commit the act of self-killing (180).
If then there was a demi-urge of sorts who possessed me from birth, and haunted my every move, going there before me, etc., then death would be the only truth, the only ending of this dark alienation. It is all an allegory [?] of profound alienation and psychological projection (181).
Derrida calls this experience God, which would seem to indicate that God is either a psychological project or the unavoidable duality of enfleshed existence. He “takes hold of our innateness itself.” So Artaud says he must whip himself. The purity of his body must be restored (181).
When God steals one at birth, he substitutes false value and preempts true value from forming. Birth becomes like defecation, wherein part of the body falls away as at a theft. So birth, defecation, they depreciate and are theft, and this conception of God is the history of this stealing and alienation (181).
God is conceived of as the demi-urge who steals my very self, as is a trickster. Satan is called the artisanal being. In this schema, then, Artaud is God, God is Satan, and so (since God created Satan), Artaud has created God. “The presence of God” is construed as the forgetting of original alienation, which paradoxically is alienation, possibly because of its falseness (182).
Writing is compared to defecating because it alienates me from my work. Separation is soiling, then. To be proper is to be in full possession of oneself. Close to oneself—toilet trained, like a child who is proper. In Latin, proprius can mean both one’s own, and special/particular (close to proper). Therefore with the spread of Latin philosophy, the idea of madness as separation could gain currency as the contrast to this. Madness as a concept was solidified during this time and so partook of this ready-made dialectic within language. Artaud is working with this metaphysics and attempting to be more true to it than it is to itself through a more radical retention of oneself to oneself through preventing the theft of the work (182).
The work dies when once it leaves the creator, and the creator cannot use it to stand. Only art without works (words, explicit logos) can be life (183).
Evil comes from both the critical and the clinical objectifications/reductions. They hastily offer up the now dead work to their idol of structure because it is supine, lifeless. The theatre of cruelty will instead be a living, present flesh which cannot be appropriated. It must be live, and so theatrical, for this (183).
The turd (or penis, which it’s a figure for) stands upright, and this is taken to mean literality, the delusion of fixed meaning, dead meaning. The dead turd separated from the author thinks it is lifeless and stable. From the Greeks down to today, language has been interpreted this way: as a solid structure composed of grammar building blocks (184).
Artaud is against the “erection” of work in this way and against metaphor which is related: the theft of the idea and its presentation, inevitably unfaithfully. The alienation of written work into metaphor is part of the alienation of man into God, so Artaud says the death of God will reawaken “the divine” in the newly whole to himself, pure man. God was man’s invention which alienated the divine in him (184). Artaud wants to kill metaphor in work, which requires moving beyond even poetry. Only theatre gives him the purity he desires (185).
But he has to do away with the traditional theatre—the one where the author writes a text, and then the director has the actors carry it out. Everyone becomes the slave of the originator. None of this is pure. Artaud wants a theatre in which man “makes himself master of what does not yet exist.” This is through dance, music—sensuality (185)
Articulation and organization as problems of alienation go much deeper, however. The body itself is thought of in this way, doing immense harm in Araud’s estimation; i.e., the heart, as above me, as experiencing things itself, and not me being the whole, entire, undivided experiencer, is alienation (186).
In theatre, “the totality of existence” is summoned, and the distinction between actor and author is blurred. It is a protest against the separation that occurs between “the dead letter,” or writing, and “breath and flesh,” or the whole, self-possessed man (187). Artaud, in rebelling against the stifling nature of the written word, however, will not resign himself to mutism. No, since logos is “omnipotent,” as we have seen in previous essays, the task is more one of putting logos, speech “definition-words,” “the logic of ‘clearthinking,’” etc., in a subordinate position. To sideline them in effect if not in fact. Words will be experienced the way they are in dreams (188). Even the tattoo is not revolutionary enough compared to the theatre of cruelty: it’s still a “work,” a depository of meaning that sprouts wings and flees its creator. Down with works; write plays for illiterates, says Artaud. Vibrant, alive, primitive, it is against the entire Western heritage (188). No tattoos, but maybe stigmata: what men bear with their bodies, imprinted within them. A primal, visceral display as in his clash of civilizations in The Conquest of Mexico (185). Artaud wants a revolution, but not a simple political one: he wants one of the habits of mind: otherwise the revolution will be only skin deep (189 FN). This resonates today when intersectionality has taken centerstage.
Artaud desires illegibility. His theatrical productions, then, are at the point where sign has not been separated from force yet. In a script this has already happened. He wants energeia, active energy, rather than “the somber and objective impassivity of the ergon,” or work. Force is divided from the actor in the traditional theatre because he is borrowing the dead word, which is not his own. He’s merely mouthing it (189). To submit to this is to defer oneself, to be shuffled into an economy of reserve. Artaud, like Nietzsche, wants for us “Danger as Becoming” (189). Rejecting “the work,” writing, is to halt the multiplication of “differences between myself and myself”: alienation (190).
But in all this, does the theatre of cruelty, of immediacy, descend into anarchic incomprehensibility? Artaud denies this. But in doing so he opens the great contradiction inherent in all such ventures that Derrida has been showing us: that logos always wins in the end (190).
Artaud wants the “hieroglyphic” principle to control his theatre. Not a theatre beholden to words and phonetic speech, which is horizontal, flattened, but one that is vertical, physical, embodied. The former is a system of elusion, of alienation; the latter one of “sensuous emanation” and the body itself (191).
Artaud, seemingly paradoxically, wants to create “a system of nonphonetic writing,” a codified system of “the shout” or the action, wherein costumed actors function as a sort of 3D grammar (191). He even seems to be searching for underlying structure in oriental hieroglyphics that could undergird the deeper human processes he thinks he’s tapping into (192).
Artaud is then at base trying to cling to his creation, his creative energy, by rigidly controlling and containing all differing and deferral so that “absolute proximity” is regained. With a tightly controlled system of acts and gestures (rather than words), the “play” of meaning is not loosed to run wild, and alienation is therefore headed off. “Writing made flesh” prevents the copies produced by speech from multiplying, and discourse can finally find “permanent self-presence” in the ideating subject” (192).
And yet after all this, Artaud is forced to tip the hat to Logos after all: he must write his plays down, fixing and rigorously controlling their content, to get across his meaning. In the end, he is author of a body of works, which is ironic because he wanted to end these alienations. His works still lay outside him, almost perplexing him years hence (193 & FN).
Artaud has hit on the essence of madness here: “the reduction of the work and of difference.” This is the rebellion against logos, which animates and makes possible these things. Madness is their opposite: incomprehensibility. But since Artaud has offered something comprehensible, rational—if not very orthodox—he has not really gone as far as he desires. This “madness” is supposedly in alienation and historical indifference. But in this schema it’s merely the flip side of the “madness found within the work and history, a madness that welcomes difference rather than trying to eradicate it by eradicating speech.” These two themselves are still metaphysical—they are still within logo’s domain (193).
Difference, understood by Derrida, is the furtive power which envelops all speech—it bares forth, it conceals, but it itself shows nothing. It is the interstitial framework of all things, skylining them for comprehension. This helps us understand this Derridean insight: what is not there is just as important as what is (194).
But as we have seen, Artaud’s project is inconsistent: he wants to destroy metaphysics by strengthening it. In attempting to do away with difference and alienation, he’s paradoxically furthering that original Western goal of the One: unity, self-possession, self-identity. Yet his affirmation of cruelty (necessity, or his search for ironclad rules by which to construct his un-alienating theatre) is an explicit deployment of difference within logos. Artaud therefore locks himself inside a logos box as he attempts to break us all out of ours. This is a “fatal complicity” according to Derrida. Criticizing difference starts to feel the same as the metaphysical difference being criticized. Destructing discourses “must inhabit the structures they demolish.” Thought, whatever its revolutionary or destructive intention, always pays tribute to metaphysics (194).
“Freud and the Scene of Writing”
Derrida says his idea for the destruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy. This involves a repression of writing rather than a Freudian forgetting (196). This repression has been unsuccessful, though, which is why we now realize it. Writing “threatens presence” and so its repression “masters absence.” This is the onto-theological, metaphysical obsession (197).
But logo-phonocentrism is not some error within western philosophy: it is western philosophy, it is the possibility of symbolism and history as difference in general. It is the precondition. Freudianism is part of this logocentric tradition which exiles the written trace as “a dialectic and technical metaphor, as servile matter or excrement.” Logocentric repression explains Freudian repression, and not vice versa. All of the metaphysical preconceptions in Freudianism must be deconstructed (198). Derrida will first attempt to examine what elements of Freudianism are uneasily contained within logocentrism (198).
Freud doesn’t use nonphonetic writing as a metaphor to illustrate something else, as traditional Western philosophy has done (e.g., as the “memory” of perception). Freud instead takes what we know as writing and makes it enigmatic. The content of the mind will be represented by an “irreducibly graphic” writing. The mind will be represented by a writing machine. The question arises: what is the psyche if it can be represented by a text? (199).
Derrida recounts Freud’s development in his theory for how memory works, which gradually took on the concept of writing as a fitting metaphor. He decided on there being two types of neurons: perceptive and memory cells. The perceptive ones offer no resistance and therefore retain no trace, thus not being memory cells. The others put up barriers that had to be breached, opening up a path. Thus it was by their resistance that they weren’t altered and left with an imprint: memory (200).
Resistance does not simply explain breaching and therefore memory, however. Without difference, no memory occurs: the trace is the “ingraspable and invisible difference between breaches.” It thus comes down to “the difference within exertion of forces.” This is like in the previous essay: difference, void, defines and skylines meaning. But how, then, are the discrete repetitions and the force with which they are impressed related? It would seem the first refers to the quantity and the second to quality. How do the voids of breaching add up to a stronger memory? Memory seems not to be explainable by these physical metaphors (201).
Derrida then says that the trace is produced by deferral. He links this to Freud saying our memories are deferrals of a dangerous fixation on an idea like death. Memories create a reserve, a mental cushion against death. We create an economy of death where death is managed (202).
As breaching involves force and pain, pain becomes for Freud a source of memory: however, like death, it must be deferred. The mind must create facilitations to make these deferrals possible (202).
So life protects itself through “repetition, trace, différance (deferral).” But don’t think there’s a pure “life” which these things get added to. No, these things are life. Only when life is defined as Being, essence, presence, substance, etc., do these things become extraneous to life. When it’s not them, we can say in a way that life is death, by the same token. This primariness of différance and delay explodes the idea of the primary altogether. Don’t think of differing as delaying or pushing back from a present: there is no original ground, but something more like a beginningless borrowing (203).
Nachträglichkeit (belatedness) and verspätung (delaying) are at work in much of Freud’s thought. He projects these psychological mechanisms across human history even (203). Too, breaching can be argued to be writing in Mystic Writing Pad (204). Differences in response to breaching Freud wants to chalk up to differences in location. The relativity of inside and outside is fluid for these locations (of the neurones). However, what about qualitative differences between neurones? Ones that cannot be explained by more or less like the difference between sight and smell. Freud posits that these must arise from a third sensation-type neurone, which slips (204). What allows this difference of relation based on slipping rather than breaching? Time. They don’t register the repeated malformations arising from breaching and resulting in memory: they measure the “period of the excitation” but are not permanently altered. Breaches also have a period, but it is a monotonous, or standard, one. Freud will try to explain the psyche using the ideas of spacing and a “topography of traces, a map of breaches” (205).
For Freud, memory results from a laying down of traces, or signs that are imprinted several times over. This is mutually exclusive to consciousness, with different neurones in different places being involved (206).
Freud believes dreams follow old facilitations, the paths that deferrals create. So basically dreams are a window into the writing process of the psyche. He believes dream image can be decoded (207).
Interestingly, the Egyptians justified their system of oneirocriticism, or dream interpreting, as having its basis in their representational hieroglyphics system. That system was believed to have been handed down from the gods, and so unquestionable. So here we see an example of writing being looked to to explain the processes of the mind (207).
Freud goes so far as to say that actual writing is based off psychical writing. However, its lexicon and syntax are invented by the mind in the case of dreams. Freud here is concerned too much with content and not enough with relations and differences. He wants to avoid what he feels is the naïve position of believing there’s a fixed code out there somewhere (207).
In this case the psyche creates its own signifiers—not out of whole cloth, but by assigning them their “status-as-meaningful.” However, if there is no permanent code or key, translation is not really possible: there is no foundation or permanent meaning to translate to. The “originary writing” must produce everything, signifier and the signified, and is thus locked in its own system of meaning (209).
Freud translates all the time, though. But he does provide the caveat that this is not an ironclad rule: it just so happens that many symbols carry the same meaning for different people (210).
One limitation on translation is the materiality of the word: its audible sound. This is by definition discarded in translation when what it’s “signified” is understood, a foreign word is slammed over top of it. Therefore is what is translated really the same thing? And even in the mind itself: the process of getting a dream from the unconscious (subconscience) to the preconscious, and finally to the conscious mind, involve many translations and incommensurabilities (210).
We must avoid this idea that a thought forms in the unconscious and then moves, topographically and temporally, to the conscious. There is no little “thought nugget” which gets wrapped into rational language and time sequence and gets placed into the subconscious. Thought is “a weave of pure traces,” “always already” there, coming from nowhere, coming into being moreso, but yet already being there. That’s the way something that’s made up of deferrals and delays exists: that’s the only way it could exist. This privileging of deferral and absence and interstice should reshape how we understand the presence. If the present is composed of absences, is it really primary? Is its priority in our systems of thought justified? This thought has far-reaching consequences. It is literally an invitation to see the world inside-out (211).
Since the transition from conscious to unconscious is not a simple transcription, that derived-ness or secondariness makes it original: it is something else than the original (212). Freud doesn’t like spatial metaphors for this process and describes it as energy being extended to or withdrawn from mental groupings. Here he falls in line with the logocentric metaphysics of presence: meaning is derived from a concentration of presence on some mental “text.” He assigns this to the preconscious mind, but in truth that’s his only innovation, says Derrida (212).
Derrida asks us to focus not on the memory itself: this gets us caught up in the metaphysics of presence. Rather, think of memory’s cause, repetition: it is as linked to absence and death as it is to presence and positive life. For repetition is only such by being simultaneously positive and negative, back and forth, again and again. The withdrawal forms it just as much as the advance (213).
Pathbreaking as metaphor for memory is inextricably tied up with meaning constituted by deferral: consider the mole’s path through the dirt as an image. The path is not perceived in the present (like, say, the mole is at the moment you encounter him digging). Yet it is this tunnel, this trace, that provides the contours of what the present must inhabit. Time, anticipation, deferral all figure heavily in the functioning of the psyche (especially in sexuality) and the prejudice that the unconscious is timeless is certainly based on classical conceptions of time (214).
Freud has not abandoned the spatial metaphor by moving to the image of energy over topography, and partly this is due to the fact that it’s impossible to conceive of it in any other way. He says thoughts occur between rather than in the parts of consciousness, and are like rays of light refracted through a telescope. He says the analogy holds, even if in actuality there are no localizations like there are in the telescope, as long as there can be shown to be a temporal process in psychical comprehension. For memory, though, how does the system retain modifications (memories) yet remain fresh and open to new ones? Freud believes dreams hold the key (215).
Derrida breaks to explain the fundamental property of writing: spacing: “diastem and time becoming space.” Logical deduction both represses and brings out this quality, for it depends on spacing and absence to have any meaning at all (imagine a sentence with no spaces), yet it also obscures it in its focus on the present, the substantial (217).
In dreams, phonetic speech is subordinated to “the polycentrism of dream representation” (217). Freud imagines there are dream-thoughts which are represented by dream-content. You learn the laws for the individual and are then able to understand the dream, as if the dream-content were hieroglyphics. Words work in dreams the same way these dream-pictures do, and therefore they exist there in their materiality and their “inscription or scenic capacity.” This materiality of each word is forgotten in “living, vigilant speech, by consciousness, logic, the history of language, etc.” In that type of speech, difference and spacing are forgotten in their essential role. These correspond to space and time themselves, which are basically constituted by difference. Difference is the articulation of these things. Both writing and dreams produce meaning through gaps and simultaneity. When things are shown at the same time in a dream it means they’re linked, while two letters written together (side by side) means they are pronounced as one syllable (219).
Derrida brings this home to symbolic meaning itself: signs, whether in hieroglyphics, dreams, or writing, can be used in all sorts of “configurations and functions which are never prescribed by [their] ‘essence(s),’ but emerge from a play of differences.” This is the ultimate in nominalism: meaning is a slippery by-product of the relations of difference between words and concepts (219).
Writing surfaces in the real world though do not directly correspond with memory. If they provide indefinite preservation of a thought, then they soon run out of space, and if they allow erasure and therefore never run out of space, then they no longer preserve thoughts indefinitely. Memory, however, does both these things (221). Therefore, Freud casts memory as more like a “mystic writing pad” (223). This device consists of a sheet of celluloid, over a sheet of wax paper, over a wax slab. This device receives impressions with a stylus (analogous to stimuli), which the perceptual apparatus records on to the wax slab. Once the sheets are lifted, however, the impressions fade from the slab, but not entirely. Freud thinks this is an excellent metaphor for the relations between the perceptual apparatus recording things that it forgets but are yet preserved in the unconscious memory as traces, which can still affect future mental operations (224). The fadedness of it stands in for the “flickering-up” and “passing-away” “of consciousness in the process of perception” (224).
Freud also aims to explain time with it. The duration of impression is part of the process. The impression relates to the “cathetic” excitability of the nerves that produces consciousness as they’re being stimulated. The extension and withdrawal of this process creates the erratic rhythm that creates our sense of time. In other words, time results from interruption. “Time is the economy of a system of writing.” Therefore, against Logos, time is just as much a product of a lack of presence as it is that of presence (225).
The mystic pad is a temporal machine that must be operated with two hands. This corresponds to our non-simple structure as perceivers and manuscribers of thought. The Freudian idea of repression in fact relies on this partite conception of the psyche. The solitary subject or author does not exist: he is a “system of relations between strata.” The “war” inside the psyche because of this stratified structure clouds the conception of who writes and where the work comes from (226).
The analogy has limits though. The psyche is self-sustaining; the mystic pad is dead without someone to operate it. The psyche can call forth “a present truth outside of time,” while writing ultimately fades from the pad. The pad is stuck in Cartesian space and time (227).
Derrida says that death is representation. By this he means that, like the machine, representation is a copy of something living that itself is not living. It is a dead image. But perhaps, as the machine resembles memory, memory in turn resembles the machine. Perhaps the intrapsychical “writing” process bears within itself representation, and thus death. Writing is always this bridge, life on one side animating, death on the other resulting as the dead letter. The question of writing, of meaning in general (because writing, which results in the death of the subject, provides space for the flight and transformation of the subject’s meaning), is here before us, which is bigger than psychology. Psychoanalysis, with its interpretive bent, may be a bigger part of this than Freud knew (229).
Ultimately, Freud thinks it all boils back down to repressed sexual urges, and that writing stands in for these; usually the male act of copulation (229).
Derrida wants to extricate the revolutionary aspects of Freud’s thought pertaining to the trace and absence and writing out of the overall metaphysics of presence they’re ensconced in (229).
The trace erases the self and presence. It doesn’t let presence just BE in all its Platonic eternality. If a trace were not erasable, it would be “a son of God”: logos incarnate. The trace shouldn’t be thought of as the opposite of presence, concealing it: it is the horizon in which “presence” exists. Derrida postulates that this inverting of traditional ideas of presence and absence could be useful to many fields. Included among these is literature, and subsequent history bears out that his call was heeded (230). Many fields could be shaken up by a fundamental questioning of the question of writing, presence, and alienation as they relate to these topics (231).
“The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation”
Artaud has the idea of the alienation inherent in being embodied (i.e., having a body rather than being one), which he says begins from birth (233). He relates this to Western theatre, which has been dead/alienated since birth as well. This goes back to the idea of the multiplication of meaning that occurs with speech (script) which theatre has been based on. The “theatre of cruelty” which Artaud proposes, seeks to reverse this (233). It seeks to lift this stifling focus on man—which is not the equal of “life” but only “the humanist limit” of life—and embody “liberated life” which “sweeps away human individuality.” Derrida is probably interested in this because Artaud’s project stands to free theatre from a kind of narrow, logocentric focus on human concerns and perspectives. The old way was mimesis, art imitating life, which was Aristotelean in its metaphysics. Many directors claim to be Artaud’s heirs, but what would this even look like? (234)
One thing is that it’s by nature non-theological. By this is meant a logos, speech, which is above and beyond the theatrical state “and governs it from a distance.” The first ingredient is an author-creator, spinning representations from afar to be represented on stage by slave actors. When you think about it, this would be the prime theatrical mode of a metaphysics which similarly would spin a totalizing and universalizing yarn from afar, to be imposed on all indiscriminately. The second factor is a passive, voyeuristic public, saved from an experience of depth or volume—more like looking at dead words on a page. This too is logocentric in that we are to “read” a representation that doesn’t involve us, and to see something removed from its reality by many layers of representation. No theatrical innovations, no matter their radicality, have ever disrupted this basic structure (235).
The stage itself is merely secondary in this traditional conception, merely a setting for a text. Artaud wants “to reconstitute the stage.” He thinks classical theatre is a perversion, a betrayal of what he considers true theatre, beholden as it is to the author-god and his text. This theatre will be freed from representation. It will not be merely the unnecessary, derived re-presentation of a present that existed prior and elsewhere: the window onto the presence of God which we do not share. It also doesn’t represent a spectacle for spectators. It permeates them (at the least involving them). A multi-dimensional theatre space that incorporates all volume and depth, even, so to speak, its “undersides” (226).
Artaud’s theatre is a “closed space,” meaning it is produced from inside itself and not from some blueprint from without. It is a representation in a way, but not in the way traditional theatre is a slavish re-presenting of the master’s text. It’s “the representation of pure visibility, and even pure sensibility” (238). The mise en scène, the arrangement of the stage, must stop serving text, being merely adjunct to it, and must reclaim center stage. Poetry itself must become theatre to escape Western verbal obsession (238).
Derrida says “cruelty” for Artaud means more “rigor, necessity—inescapability” rather than sadism or horror. It does entail a murder, though—that of the God-father-author, “abusive wielder of logos” who subjugates all to the power of the text (238).
Will the theatre of cruelty be mute, then? No. Speech will be “delimited.” There will still be a text that governs (it won’t be sheer spontaneity or caprice). There will no longer be dictation from the author to the director and actor. Theatre will not be an exercise in reading orders anymore (239).
Speech will now be gesture, and the logical commands issued by text to make the body see-through—to explain the body and therefore reduce the power and voice of its movements. Now the text delimits and hides the body by stealing it, absconding with it into official meaning. Undoing this priority could actually enflesh the word, restore its dynamism and force. It would free up the particularities of gesture and shout what the generalizing tendencies of logic and concept suppress. It is the eve of the creation of language, when signified and signifier have not yet separated, and the game of logos has not yet begun. Tellingly Derrida calls the word “the cadaver of psychic speech.” It is the remains. Therefore speech before words must be found, before the logic of representation separated them (240).
In Artaud’s new theatrical writing, a new language will be written with bodies, sounds, spaces: a new hieroglyphics. A raw, intuitive form of representation (240). It is like language in dreams or even comic strips, where it’s just one element of representation among others. Artaud views this as opening up the possibility for language rather than restricting it (since he doesn’t perform “written plays,” so to speak) (241).
But Artaud doesn’t get too caught up in the analogy with dreams. He dispels any idea that his theatre will be based on the subconscious, and certainly not the subconscious as interpreted by the psychoanalyst. There will be no secret meanings to be interpreted. Psychoanalysis for him is part of the old speech-based structure; they steal life through the process of authoritative translation and interpretation (242). Also, this theatre is not a vicarious form of wish fulfillment, as a Freudian might consider dreams (243).
The theatre of cruelty will not be a sterile, “desacralized” zone. It will evict “God” and the theological machinery that governed Western theatre. God is conceived of as that remote dictating paradigm that creates the dead letter. Man is understood as the creator of this paradigm, so Artaud speaks of this as the man-god (243).
Derrida says there are many types of theatre which are not faithful to this vision of Artaud. They include: non-sacred (something like psychoanalytic) theatre, theatre that privileges speech even if it’s self-destructive or nihilistic speech (like the theatre of the absurd), abstract theatre which doesn’t fully engage the senses with the totality of art, and alienating theatre that preserves the distance between the spectacle and the spectator (he instead prescribes the festival, which immerses the audience and surrounds them) (244).
Also nonpolitical theatre, which means that it’s theatre which holds forth a vision of communal life which is nonrepresentative, in the sense that representation is not needed because the people represent themselves. Their festivals as well would be participatory rather than spectacular (245).
Finally, any theatre that is didactic and communicative of some message: “political, religious, psychological, metaphysical, etc.”) that would spell out a meaning for listeners (who are presupposed to be present in its creation. In this is hit upon one of Artaud’s main points: the ending of repetition in general. “Repetition separates force, presence, and life from themselves.” This is based in the theology of Logos, which is that power from beyond which inaugurates a non-present meaning. It is a deferred meaning, a non-present meaning that presents itself as absolute presence. This presence or “life” actually menaces life, because it hides it, covers over it, makes life untrue to itself in forcing life to serve it instead as life. God’s death to Artaud is that “difference and repetition in life” that menaces life. Repetition or representation smothers the present. God “dies” in that he dies and is reborn at every moment in which true life is smothered by the logos dictation. Being is the sign for life in this scheme that obscures real, living life: an oppressive abstraction that creates the idea of a (nonexistent) platonic ideal subsuming life. Then, dialectics is “the economy of repetition,” whereby the “past present” is gathered as truth and ideality, as repeatable encapsulations which corral and control reality. But dialectics always contains all and preempts us—it predicts our rejection by gathering all alternatives under two choices. That is, by rejecting dialectics we create another dialectic and fall into it. Saying we’re done with the metaphysics of presence, saying we stand for absolute, un-represented life, can also lead back into a desire to maintain the memory of this life, to codify it. It would seem the only way out is a type of Nietzschean Dionysian self-forgetting ecstasy—that is, madness, as Derrida has shown elsewhere (Cogito, etc.) (246).
Theatre is the only art of life though, the only art which corresponds to these feelings. It is literally unrepeatable—its gestures vanish as soon as they are performed, leaving no trace, no authoritative, alienating work. Plato thought writing was a body, a hollow shell housing the spirit of meaning: Artaud thinks writing is the erasure of the body, the smothering of its uniqueness and unrepeatability (247).
Derrida finally admits that a theatre truly loyal to Artaud’s program is impossible because it is paradoxical: it seeks full presence in what can only ever be representation. All appearing is a re-presentation in at least some way: namely, in how the actor is himself alienated from himself, how he appears even as a representation to himself. There is no timeless present in this world, no presence which is unrepeated (and unrepeatable) that can be unadulterated life (247).
Dialectics are inherent in life itself. They are “the indefinite movement of finitude.” They are how life and death unite in us, and how we are estranged from our own selves. This alienation which Artaud explores at length is the origin of tragedy. No conflict, no drama is possible in the midst of true simplicity. Simplistic origin is the idea of Plato and the Christians. Artaud and Derrida are saying that each human is not even simple, much less the ultimate reality. So, ironically, this non-simplicity, this alienation at the center of mankind and all existence, is what makes his theatrical concept possible (248).
Representation is in essence a murdering of the father in that the son, the copy, takes the original’s place. The problem is, as stated above, that this state of affairs is impossible to avoid by the nature of presence itself in humans: we represent ourselves to ourselves, not just others. Therefore, there’s no way to stop this murder before it happens. Derrida shows that basically all Artaud can hope to do is to get as close to this moment as possible and repeat it only once. This would be the difference between a speech made by an actor reading from a script (which is pure, unadulterated representation, copying) and an actor in the theatre of cruelty speaking with his body, with sounds, with the set, with symbols, in an immersive way. They are both representation at the end of the day, even if the second is closer to its origin and less repeatable. The purity of presence and originality he desired is impossible not only in theatre, but in life generally (249).
Representation therefore has always already begun. But it is yet closed, and circular. The unity of necessity and chance, in an endless dance, produce the play that causes the shifting meanings of representation. Presence is continually both born and swallowed up by difference and deferral. It has a “gratuitous and base necessity” (250). Here we see Derrida echoing Heraclitus (250, FN).
“From Restricted to General Economy”
Derrida talks about Georges Bataille, who considered himself Nietzschean (and therefore believes he’s gone beyond Hegel). Yet Nietzsche can also be shown to have only a “vulgar” understanding or familiarity with Hegel. Derrida is getting at that Hegel basically consummated the Enlightenment project, brought logos to its consummation, and that all further attempts to build theories in this mode are already comprehended by Hegelianism. Except “for a certain ‘laughter,’” which Derrida will give us (251).
This laughter is a technique wherein one must understand all of the philosopher’s methods, yet still betray him and laugh. But not as the opposite of what the philosopher does because then you’ve fallen into one of his traps: the dialectic. Laughter is the key because it is impossible to beat him at his own game. But Derrida says we must understand this game (252).
Bataille, in his engagement with Hegel, is Hegelian. It’s not that he’s for or against him, or that he’s gotten him wrong: he can’t escape him (253).
In his discussion, “lordship” refers to mastery, or control through a grasp of the thing, while sovereignty refers to power or violence over a thing (254, FN). Lordship consists in “putting at stake,” or risking one’s life. Lordship involves looking at death squarely and facing it down, with all the risk that entails. The servant is the opposite, seeking only to conserve, to reserve his power, to bide his time. Yet Hegel points out that mastery (lordship) in its essence is servile. The lord is only risking himself to conserve himself, ultimately accruing to himself something or some part of himself. Before, behind, and after the daring feat of mastery, there is calculation, fear, respect, deferring of pleasure—all the conniving of the slave (255). This is also the experience of philosophy and history as well (255).
But this is not natural life but a type of logos life. This latter life is not to be exceeded: it sets limits; it constitutes self-consciousness and reason. In this sense it is limited to circulation and self-reproduction with its finite resources. The renunciation and risking of death, then, is sovereignty, which can be conceived of as laughter. Laughter in the face of death and a true devil-may-care attitude. It is the absurdity that exceeds the system of reason, is outside it. Bataille “withdraws it from the horizon of meaning and knowledge.” Hegel does not account for this, actually: his aim is knowledge, which laughter laughs at. No, for Hegel there must always be the possibility of deferred enjoyment, meaning, seriousness, and truth as the result of the lordly and noble “putting to the stake.” This sovereignty is a dangerous destroyer of all that (255).
It is a comicalness that keeps the sacrifice from being an investment, a hedging of bets. The laughter of sovereignty is “the heedless sacrifice of presence and meaning” in which all bets are off. There is no place for this type of absurdity in phenomenology. Bataille grapples with this when he talks about the fact that death is basically wasted in that one cannot be aware of it: when you die consciousness ceases.
Hegel’s handling of these questions is basically the constant tradition of philosophical man: it is to take up negativity, death, as part of his dialectic, part of a process, the “underside” of positivity, still part of the “fabric of meaning. Sovereignty, negativity without reserve, without hope of recouping losses, is represented by the gay anguish, the anguished gayety, of the laugh. It doesn’t take the negative seriously, unlike Hegel, for whom “negativity is a resource, a calculated expenditure. What Bataille speaks of is an “absolute rending” that no longer allows itself to collaborate with the dialectical “continuous linking-up of meaning, concept, time and truth in discourse.” It’s nonproductive for the system of logos, outside it. And Hegel’s blindness to this also ignores that meaning and work are part of the play of play and chance, that meaning results (as Derrida has shown us elsewhere) from the slip and slide of shifting plates of references and concepts and the spaces between them (257).
Since logic occurs within play, it is governed by interpretation: it is a relative creature, in other words. Sovereignty effectively provides the boundaries of lordship; or, meaninglessness bounds, defines, meaning. The absence of meaning provides the relief against which meaning stands by which alone it can even be understood as something distinct from no-thing or all-thing. The irruption of sovereignty is an opening to “the limit of discourse and the beyond of absolute knowledge” (260).
Bataille seems to have wanted to make sovereignty another discourse that is somehow not significative (that is, signifying something, logical, discursive). But Derrida points out, this is impossible: there is only one discourse, Hegel’s. Poetry, art, can be domesticated by playing by the rules, by not renouncing theme or meaning (261). Discourse comes from servility, this sulking resignation before the behemoth of logos. Bataille struggled to enunciate this absence of meaning and still somewhat subordinated it to meaning (as Derrida says Foucault does) (262).
The nature of things makes this so: how are you supposed to say sovereign non-servile things in the language of servility? When you speak of the absence of meaning, you give that absence meaning. We give meaning to everything: it’s built into our language and thinking (262).
But yet there is the ability of some words to “slide” within the play of words or concepts and disrupt discourse. In doing so they serve and betray both meaning and non-meaning, for instance. An example is silence, which betrays meaning by signifying in its absence nonmeaning but still meaning to say something (262). With this in mind Bataille advocates finding “[words] which reintroduce—at a point—the sovereign silence which interrupts language.” This is found by looking at the continuum, the experience of words and concepts that attempt to transgress “the limit of discursive difference,” which might be illustrated by how two people attempting to communicate must bring themselves to the limit of nothingness, putting themselves at stake, to succeed. Why? Because two beings totally full, totally present, would be incapable of assimilating anything. So the approach of absolute difference and the shadow of nonmeaning lurk around the edges of every meaning, in effect. This instant of approach to nothingness, however, is not a “point” of full presence (within the airtight Hegelian system) however, but a simultaneously there and not-there elusion. It is present but not seen. It is stolen eternally yet just right there. This furtive moment happens, moreover, at times that we can identify in language, subversive times (263). Bataille wants to rigorously, scientifically find the relation between sovereign silence and the syntax and words of our language. But his object escapes him before he begins. Sovereignty governs nothing, orders nothing, means nothing: else it is not sovereignty. So how can science, which requires order and relatedness, be organized around it? (264)
Sovereignty gets subsumed into dialectics when it desires victory or recognition. This plays into the hands of logos. Lordship can become like sovereignty if it ceases to fear failure. Both set out to fail, they risk it all: lordship fails by losing this failure and being coopted by servility. Sovereignty fails unreservedly and thus escapes servility altogether, paradoxically becoming virtuous; but never consciously. Sovereignty must “practice forgetting.” In writing, sovereignty forbids that which seeks to make the trace maintain itself within it. Its true form of writing is the trace that irremediably eludes (265).
Sovereign writing is the sacrifice of meaning and the desire for recognition in writing. It isn’t gibberish so much as it is writing that exploits slide, play, absence and difference to subvert meaning (266). But Derrida points out, once again, that these operations still exist within the world of predication, the world of “saying something about something.” But what Bataille achieves is a way of exceeding logos by pointing to the “tissue of differences.” Words and concepts will be dislodged and subverted, “folded” so that they point to unknowing, nonmeaning, beyond themselves. The concepts become “unthinkable,” though using the machinery of thought, of philosophy. This discomfits the philosopher, though, because the rules of concepts and security are scandalously cast aside (267). It would require a kind of sovereign epoche, an opening of “the epoch of meaning.” Not an access to a nonmeaning (which would then be a meaning), but a kind of peeling away of meaning, of exposing blind spots (268).
The science or writing that attempts this, again, though, defeats its aim before it begins. Therefore it must be “the absolute excess of every episteme,” of every form of knowing. This would seem to require a “double position,” neither science nor mysticism, a paradox, a contradiction (268).
Sovereignty is not a principle or foundation for a type of writing. It is heedless of any preliminary or principle by definition. Sovereignty first understands history and meaning in order to turn around and transgress and exceed them. It is superhistorical because the meaning of history is inextricable from meaning (269).
Bataille concedes that this form of writing (what he calls general writing, relating as it does to his concept of general economy, which, like how political economy deals with the circulation and amount of money, deals with the energy of meaning and concepts and their utilization. Excessive energy is lost without meaning, which is sovereignty. This form of writing is not sovereignty itself. Since to be sovereignty is to literally not be, or to be the loss of the grasp, general writing instead is a science that relates things to the loss of meaning, to unknowing. It points to a place that cannot be reached (270).
This general writing skylines and contextualizes the circular logos (all knowledge) and removes its basis in stable, eternal, “superessential essence” and relates it to “the nonbasis of expenditure,” “the indefinite destruction of value.” If Derrida has taught us anything, it’s that meaning comes not from a Platonic form, but from the relations among words and concepts and the spaces between them that define them. Not an indestructible meaning.
If this is general economy, then phenomenology must be restricted economy: it’s restricted to the established value of things, their circular worth, within the system. It’s consumption that’s reproductive; it is recycled back into the closed, airtight system. Everything is rationalized to the plan. General economy allows this limit of knowledge to be exceeded and for meaning to be transcended. The concepts of general writing are lifted from a restricted economy (all words and concepts are), but they are put to an excessive, subversive, non-symmetrical use. The concept of nonmeaning refers, yes, to the dialectical opposite of meaning (this all still being within restricted economy), but it also hints at the beyond of the opposition between value and nonvalue, and beyond the concept of value (271).
Bataille’s sovereignty stratagems would not consist in taking these moments of slide and syntax displacement, and differences to be keys to another system of meaning or structure. This would close discourse again and fall back into restricted economy. Also, assuming the meanings of these subversive words is already to be enslaved by a hidden culture in the background. All of these things erase excess and fix meaning within a closed system (272).
Sovereignty “enounces” nothing: it says merely “neither this nor that. It relates the known to the unknown” (273). But sovereignty is not neutrality either. Neutrality exists as a pole in the dialectical system. Instead, it is a “potlatch of signs that burns, consumes, and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death”; it is almost more of a “comic operation” (274).
Yet even in transgressing rather than just neutralizing, doesn’t the transgressor always “conserve” or confirm that which it exceeds? Otherwise it is not affirmed as transgression and therefore might not be. Bataille says not to worry about this: it corresponds to the German concept of Aufheben: “to surpass while maintaining” (274).
But the Aufhebung is produced within discourse, and is the way dialectics works itself into a new synthesis. It never exceeds the closure of absolute knowledge. This is the world, which in this conception is really just a “prohibition not perceived as such”: it is unaware of its arbitrary nature. It’s the passage from one prohibition to another, the circulation of prohibition.”
And yet Bataille is more revolutionary than he knows. For by taking the logocentric “speculative concept par excellence” and using it to transgress this system, he makes all of philosophy the equivalent of vulgar, servile knowledge, which can only find the truth of itself by being absorbed and transcended—by death. By nonmeaning. And this is what Derrida means when he says the basis of meaning is nonmeaning. That meaning rests on a bed of play. Because if meaning shifts, if it’s relative, then by definition its basis is just flux. Between vulgar and absolute knowledge there is no difference. They are the same from the standpoint of transgressing them (275).
Still, there’s no escaping the trappedness of our vision. It doesn’t matter how we read the eternally circular jumble of meaning: it can be read in a leftwing or rightwing way. Transgressing this and every other dialectic result eventually in falling back into it again, for such is the necessary condition of any knowledge whatsoever (276).
“Structure, Sign, and Play…”
Derrida here wants to analyze “events” and how they relate to structuralism. He begins by talking about the center, which of course is the thing around which every structure is built (278). And while the non-center elements of a structure are often in play, in flux, the center is imagined to be above these shifts. It’s almost conceived of as outside the structure. Structures then are incoherent: how does the center govern and determine the structure if it is insulated from the forces shaping the structure, if it is not even really inside the structure? Obviously some stable, eternal, full presence is being posited: an origin or a telos (goal) that controls from above and without, like God (279).
The center is what Western metaphysics have been chasing after these long millennia. It has named it eidos, arche, telos, ousia, Alethia (truth), consciousness, God, man (279).
Derrida is drawing attention to when this pattern was ruptured: it started with Nietzsche: the structurality of structure began to be thought. It was realized that this center has never “been itself,” or what we thought it was: as soon as we could see it, it was exiled by a substitute (which in turn wasn’t there either). In fact, at every center, we noticed not a fixed site, but a function: a swirling flurry of sign-substitutes. A discourse, basically, as the laws of language invaded our philosophy and showed it to never have been what we thought it was. No absolute presence outside our changing structures remained.
Freud also contributed, showing how we really weren’t even fully present to ourselves. Heidegger deconstructed Being as presence. Yet in all this we must still use the language of logos and presence, for that is all that exists (see chapter on Artaud) (280).
For example, Levi-Strauss and Derrida have used the concept of the sign to start at deconstructing the priority given to presence. Yet the very concept is dependent on this metaphysics of presence: after all a sign points to a signified, and is a sign precisely because it is set in opposition to an absolute, non-sign, original presence. So we encounter the paradox again of relying on a metaphysics that we intend to deconstruct. Because this necessity lies at every turn and around every corner, different deconstructions collide within it in different ways. This multiplicity of approaches and resulting compromises accounts for why each condemns the other as unduly beholden to the old metaphysics (280).
Ethnology is a good example. Only the destruction of ethnocentrism could’ve prepared the way for it (or, the decentering of European culture). Yet it is equipped with tools wholly arising out of its European origins. It pulls the house down around it with pieces of that house. But as we’ve said, this is inescapable. Therefore, it must be acknowledged. And the more rigorously, the better. It is a problem then of economy and strategy of how we go about this introspective process (cf. checking one’s privilege) (282).
An example of this is the work of Claude Levi-Strauss: he takes the traditional opposition between nature/nurture, natural/cultural, and uses that as a basis for saying that, unlike other elements of human society he has observed, which fit neatly in this dichotomy (nature being whatever is spontaneous and universal and culture being whatever is rule based and particular), the incest taboo fits both of these categories. It seems a scandal, but Derrida points out this is only from within the traditional physis/nomos dialectic. In this case, it would seem to be that this strange exception is actually probably the condition of possibility for the dialectic, preceding and conditioning them. In like manner, philosophy as a whole is designed to be unable to process or at least hide that basis upon which it rests, that which is the condition of its possibility (283).
To get at critique, then, one follows one of two methods: either do a genealogy, like Foucault, and trace the haphazard and relative origins of a discourse, stepping outside philosophy, basically (which is harder than it seems). Or, as Levi-Strauss does, to use the elements of a discourse self-consciously, exploiting their relative efficacy but denouncing their limits when necessary and undermining their imagined objective significations where required (284). This could be called bricolage: using methods by trial and error with no respect for their metaphysical pretensions, mixing and matching them at will (285).
Yet the bricoleur is only such when compared to the engineer, who supposedly doesn’t borrow and creates his discourse “out of whole cloth.” But as Derrida points out, this would literally be to create a language, to create the verb, which is impossible. It’s a myth the bricoleur creates to be able to conceptualize himself. So in the end, bricolage is what everyone is doing (285).
Decentered-ness is thus the rule. Levi-Strauss points out that there is no primary or founding myth that forms the pure prototype from which other versions spring. The sources melt away under further investigation. To try to locate the “center” of a mythological tradition or story is to try to violently size and fit an amorphous thing into a “synthetic” mold. Synthetic because any origin or form imposed is a result more of the neurotic organizing principle of the mind than the actual existence of any such thing. Myth traditions and their themes form a web of interdependent relations, slipping and sliding. There’s no objective kernel or source to tease out. We project the unity we desire to find in it (286).
The next conclusion would be that the necessity of a center is “a historical illusion.” But would this then mean that all discourses are equivalent? Whatever the case, the question must be posed. The ignorant not posing of the question is what’s behind empiricism, that hubristic discourse that believes itself objective science. And even those who propose a type of structuralist presupposition, like Levi-Strauss with his mythological frameworks, purport to base them on empiricism, on groupings of discrete data points. The data is never total, never complete, though (because this would be impossible—there’s just too much of it). This logistical impossibility is what the classical theorist focuses on. But Derrida shows that perhaps total empirical evidence isn’t possible because of the infiniteness of the play that is possible with the finite data. With no center, the meanings will eternally slip and slide. And perhaps meaning is multiplied by the supplement that occurs with each substitution: something knew emerges, or floats to the top. This is in part because signifiers often mean more than their signified. Endless, multiplying associations bubbling forth, running away from the intention of the speaker (287). The signifiers always overflow and supplement the signified: this excess is what provides the raw material for slippage and play (290).
Play is in tension with history. How so? Originally, history was opposed to logos, the metaphysics of absolute presence, because history implied gradual evolution rather than simultaneous, poof-like finished presence. Yet history itself assumes this metaphysics implicitly by positing a beginning and an end toward which things must progress: i.e., an original purity from which, or a fully developed perfection to which (“the unity of becoming”). However the danger remains of falling into the worst sort of ahistorical presence metaphysics by disregarding history as well: that belief in original, eternal, or primordial structures outside of history that classical metaphysics has ever clung to. This type of thinking leads to positing absolute ruptures: the new structure is not a modification of an old one, but a new thing, a creation of chance. This thinking allows the situation of structures in their historical context, but attributes them almost to spontaneous generation in order to set off limits around each structure to allow categorization (290).
Play also disrupts presence. Play precedes presence and absence conceptually but is play of both presence and absence. Levi-Strauss understood play but maintained a sadness about it because he kept alive the idea of the pure origin. Nietzsche introduced the joyous attitude toward play—it is not the loss of center but the joyous affirmation in the lack of one. One seeks the origin as an exile, the other embraces play and the unending challenge of interpretation (292).
Both these attributes shape the social sciences. The second path, though “joyful,” will be accompanied by serious birth pangs and we may not recognize the resulting offspring (293).
“Ellipsis”
Writing is “adventure, expenditure without reserve.” It transgresses the finished book, but can only understand itself by the book, even as it exceeds it (refer to earlier chapters) (294). Every book must be repeated. Yet repetition, which attempts a return to the original book, always contains an imperceptible difference: the pure, uncontaminated repetition is impossible. This elision, this slide, spawns new meaning. And in truth, the original presence that was sought was never absolutely present in the first place: it is a function and a locus within a system, nothing more (295).
It’s like a circle (repetition) that doubles back to its point of beginning, yet is off slightly. This leaves an opening where there should’ve been closure. The origin, the return, or both have slipped. “Pure repetition… carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.” Writing produces this. The self-presence of the so-called living speech disappears in writing (296).
Signs refer to signs which refer to still more signs. There is no “there,” there, in the classical sense. No natural center to stake down and hold meaning fast. In this conception, then, the center is death: if life is all play, a staid center is death (297).
The center is a hole, masquerading as something solid, into which we plunge on a mad quest for the solid. But what we find is infinite redoubling (298). What we find is also neither within the center or outside it: this is the slip of meaning: did it come from the center or from the returning repetition, which has been sojourning in the world? (298).
Death is the third term in another sense (rather than the center). It is the elusive shadow that is produced between the original and repetition, the element in which the agreement between the origin and the repetition dies off (299). It is not past present, present, or future present, as classical metaphysics would tell us: it is never present but also never absent: always just outside our grasp (300).