Jacob's Ladder: On names, language, and writing

Jacob's Ladder

Despite telling myself I'd stay away from theory this semester, I have been sucked back in, reading Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life and Helene Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing in the space of a couple weeks as well as pieces of David Farell Krell's newest text on Derrida's Beast and the Sovereign Lectures. In this latter piece, Krell connects the future of thinking to our attentiveness to language(s). Krell writes,

"I will only add the remark that if apophantic discourse seems inadequate to the task, it means that students who pursue this line of inquiry will have to develop their gifts for language. It may not be a matter of inventing a new language, even if Zarathustra com- mands us to 'fashion a new lyre' Yet it will surely be a matter of resist- ing that overwhelming trend in our own world, including the world of higher education, to diminish the importance of language and lan- guage teaching, to flatten and banalize our powers of expression, to accept as though it were an inevitability the waxing illiteracy of our time."

For those readers unfamiliar with the term "apophantic," is a term in Aristotle that refers to a particular judgment, a judgment of what is true and what is false. In Heidegger it refers to the possibility of the "as such." Derrida, especially in Aporias, has challenged the possibility of a true "as such." Thus, if Heidegger argues that the difference between humans and animals (as he has in his 29-30 text) is that human beings understand beings as beings, in their "truth," but we deny the possibility of apophantic discourse, this form of the distinction no longer holds fast. In fact, Krell suggests in his text that there is a certain non-apophantic strain of Heidegger in Being and Time. I also argued that Heidegger's fixation on the "as such" in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics was a shift from Being and Time here and wonder why he seems so intent on keeping this concept in those lectures.

This may all seem besides the point, but its really not, because if we cannot say the truth in the way that Heidegger believes humans beings are capable of, then we must rely on the interminable and (im)possible process of translation and uniqueness of each material signifier; Heidegger ignores the fact of writing at his own peril. That is, we need to be able to be attentive to the language, and how that language is marked by the author, of a given philosophical or literary text (or any text!). If as Greg Ulmer advises we are to write the "choral word," that is, write with every meaning of the word, creating a kind of field that a word brings forth, then we also need to be able to think in different languages and in the specific idiom of a given thinker in these languages. The very possibility of thought turns on resisting the flattening and banalization of our "powers of expression," as Krell puts it. The same word refers to many things and means differently because of the contingent ways its been inscribed in texts throughout human history.

If students, especially graduate students in literature, cease to learn these languages, then they will become less attentive to this unconscious slippage of language and be content with reducing texts to "positions" or "stances." Places from which one stands and defends rather than conceiving the text as a weave of meaning and nonmeaning. We can already see this in the paucity of metaphors used by our politicians. Everything is conceived in terms of "war." A "war on women," a "war on christmas," a "war on Christianity" a "war on Freedom." I'm reminded of the Wilco song, "War on War." I don't want to declare a "war on war," because this defeats the point. Why must we see everything as an agon? Could we ever learn to see in terms of illynx (vertiginous play?). Positions, stances -- we speak from these places, isolated on islands of solitude. Even Michel de Certeau's metaphors are drawn from military terminology: strategies and tactics, but at the very least tactics are described as in-sin-uation. An implying, a suggestion, a slithering. It's to suggest to the powers that be: why don't you take a bite from the apple -- become mortal, limited, fragile, and capable of death. Respect what this wonderful place is offering rather than the Strategic Law from on high.

It's this specificity and idiomatic nature of texts, that of course is never confined to that single text (reaching out to other uses of the word in the entire archive) that we lose when we turn words into data or when we are satisfied with a meta-discursive, philosophical language that does not pay attention to the trace-structure of language. In academia we see a turn away from the "lingustic" turn toward the material world, affect, the "great outdoors," mathematical reality, etc. and philosophers have developed languages that they more less think correspond to (as well as participate in) the reality "out there." Many of them write in English and do not let the word reach out to its other manifestations, to allow it the freedom to mutate its meaning based on ALL of its uses and even the possible words buried in the terms morphemes. Many of them also seem to ignore the insights of psychoanalysis into the materiality of the signifier and its almost magic powers, signifiers that gather our lives around a (w)hole. We choose and do not choose these signifiers.

I am not explaining myself well here. . . Let me try and get at it another way.

In an insightful recent post on "Traumas of the [Erasure] of the Real" Levi Bryant reflects on why he is dissatisfied with thinking "everything is a text." He writes,

 Naturally the humanities academic sees everything as a text because a) when you deal with texts day in and day out you tend to see texts (signs/signifiers) everywhere (in Uexkull’s terms we could call text the umwelt of the academic), and b) because it’s narcissistically gratifying for the humanities academic to think that the entire world is composed of texts.  If that’s true, if the world is composed of texts, signs, signifiers, beliefs, concepts, and norms, then we are the most important people in the world because we’re the ones that hold the skeleton key to the truth about “reality” (which, in this context, signifies the human umwelt.)

I'm not convinced that every Humanities academic does see everything as a text, but that there is something to be said for an attentiveness to the ways in which language has been inscribed in textual instances. This is because depending on which texts we are familiar with and how we respond to certain words, words mean different things for observers. Proper names, for instance, can invoke a mood or style of thought for those familiar with the name and the texts that name recalls. I say Derrida and all sorts of words come to mind. We all have our own Derrida based on the texts we can remember and recall when the name pops up. This is an effect of the trace structure of even proper names and how they come to signify and mean for us in a multitude of ways. But even more than proper names there are words such as "trace." When I hear the word "trace" I think of so many different ways its used and how I've heard it; for me, it is a powerful word with real rhetorical effects on my psyche. For others, for instance, my students, having not undergone the text of Derrida, it may mean very little. Or the French verb, "rechercher" -- for someone of a literary cast of mind, the word may recall Proust and everything associated with Proust. For an English speaker, we may never think of Proust (if we have never read Proust's title in French!). These works and the lines within them leave traces, mark, burn, and etch a new meaning, a new association into the language. This is reading the "unconscious" of the text in some ways, but not its "political" unconscious, but the unconsciousness of the signifier. 

This why reviving words like "substance" or "object" can be incredibly difficult tasks because of the ways in which these words have been used in the past, both in philosophical treatises and "ordinary" language. The point I was trying to make above is that a truly universal "ordinary" language is impossible. Of course the everyday usage of the term haunts a specialized disciplines use of the term and this is important. For instance, to say that the human is an "object among other objects" could be both estranging and profound, but because of the way in which we speak of "objectifying" people, and the horrible history of such objectifications, this haunts such philosophical recovery projects. "Subject," for instance, has throughout its usage been set off against object, one which has "agency" the other without agency, but we our also "subject to" and "subjects of." The verbal form of the word haunts its nominative. 

For philosophers, words like Idea (especially if capitalized), recalls Plato and a subsequent history of "idealism." The word for idea, eidos, is an ordinary Greek word meaning "shape" until Plato elevated that notion to a philosophical concept. Perhaps this phenomenon is what Michel de Certeau means when he writes: 

Michel de Certeau

"We are subject to, but not identified with, ordinary language [. . .] In order to constitute themselves, scientific methods allow themselves to forget this fact and philosophers think they dominate it so that they can authorize themselves to deal with it" (Practice 11)

We are subject to the ordinary way words are used, but we can also make something mean differently. To borrow a Spinozist phrase, "we do not yet know what [words/language] can do" (and are not words another type of 'body' or at the very least always touch the body?). 



But what we cannot do, in either philosophy or science, is to pretend that language can become a pure object of study "outside" of what language can say.

This why the attention to what language can say in multiple languages and other improper border crossings is so important to think a text at the textual level and within the rules (and transgressions of those rules) that occur in a given language. Even de Certeau's own analyses cannot be outside of ordinar (and non-ordinary langauge) for that matter. For instance, I kept noting that a key verb in de Certeau's text (at least according to the translation) is insinuate. Apart from the more popular distinctions usually gleaned from de Certeau's text such as "strategies" and "tactics" I could not help but notice the repetition of this signifer-- how crucial it was to describe the relation between phenomena in de Certeau's text. To "insinuate" in English means "to imply something" or to "worm your way in: to introduce yourself gradually and cunningly into a position, especially a place of confidence of favor." This verb then links (in)directly to de Certeau's description of "tactics" against "strategies." In fact, the verb is used in its definition: "a tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking over it entirely without being able to keep it at a distance" (xix). In fact, a tactic is this transgression and border crossing -- a way in which one subtly insinuates or "implies" a meaning through the use of a word in a particular context. It is to suggest a meaning (and I use suggest here to insinuate a hint of hypnosis).

 I remember being struck and finally understanding why Freud's honing in on the "magic word" of the Rat man ("rat") and the associations he made between "rat" and other similar (but not visually the absolute same) words in the German language actually works. In German, one might associate "rat" with another word that contains the same morpheme and this may be an unconscious, poetic work done by the mind. I am trying to think of a good English example, but I can't at the moment. However, I know that I have felt myself speaking certain words, almost involuntarily, because of a text that was working on my mind. What I recall is a function of the texts that insinuate themselves into my lexicon (did you catch it?).

Helene Cixous

Where the power of the signifier really gets interesting is when we begin to deconstruct at the level of the word. Helene Cixous, in her three lectures Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing, suggests that aside from the School of the Dead and the School of Dreams, there is the school of roots. "Roots" here mean many things, but Cixous suggests that roots signifies both plant roots into the earth (because in order to get to the 'truth' you have to do the difficult work of descending the ladder rather than ascending) but also it seems the "roots" of words. I might add also, although she doesn't play on this as much, the "routes" we take when we tra-verse borders (of languages, of particular marks, of meanings, of oral and literate modes of understanding). We have to "go" to these schools, but, as she writes, the power of the text is that we are trans-ported immediately into the text, without a passport, just as we slip into dreams.

In the "third" school, we learn how to, among other things, invent from our own proper name. Jean Genet and Claire Lispector (the latter of which plays a significant role throughout the entire text) are both taken as exemplars. Cixous' own discourse, with its metaphors of light and night reflects Lispector's own text. Indeed, Cixous' brilliance is partly to use the language of the text she reads, subtly suggesting, insinuating, whispering possible ways of understanding (but even "understanding" is still too coated with conscious thought). Rather than focus on the "natural light" of the understanding of Descartes, Cixous appropriates and transforms the image of the light reflecting off an axe, an axe that could potentially fall on any one of us.

I do not have this text with me at this very moment, so I cannot read with the kind of exactness that Cixous does with the texts she dearly loves. One thing I note about the lectures/seminars of both Cixous and Derrida is their willingness to read and to read again and again the same passages -- sometimes reading a latter passage first and then going back and reading the beginning of the passage. When I say this, I do not mean reading as an abstract activity that Frederic Jameson has argued is a mystification in the texts of Paul de Man, but I mean simply reading the damn text aloud. Reading for the way the language insinuates itself into our minds. There is no substitute for reading the text in these lectures. We can interpret and paraphrase and we can in-corp-orate (incarnate) the other's language into our own reading of it, but to read the text itself, aloud, to repeat it, is like hypnosis -- it makes the suggestions and implications we make in our interpretation (or better, our "reading with") more forceful and probable. Some may say this is a bad way to read, an "improper" way to read, a reading that is not an argument, a lazy reading in the place of a true interpretation, but I defy you to deny the power of Cixous reading-with Claire Lispector or Jean Genet. The drive to interpret dreams is what Cixous can't stand in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. She says she used to "read it with pleasure," but finally decided that it was better if dreams were not "interpreted." At first I was taken aback by this, but in some ways, Cixous may be suggesting here that its when Freud interprets in order to cure -- as if there was a cure for the special kind of wound a dream makes -- that he makes a mistake. Cixous seems to argue that the dream should be let-be (with a Heideggerian inflection).

Genet's name suggests Genet, which is in biology, "a colony of plants, fungi, or bacteria that come from a single genetic source" (wikipedia). Flowers are for Genet one of the most important signifiers, and he plays with both his name and words for flowers in some of his passages. Cixous reads these moments brilliantly and I only wish I had the text here with me to (re)cite.

But in lieu of that possibility, I have decided to invent from my own name. In her text, Cixous notes the importance not only of human beings, but the animal, the vegetable, and the supernatural. Animals prevalent are "dogs," which Cixous said are terrifying to us because we cannot bear their pure love, since human beings are always a mixture of love and hate. The vegetable is represented by flowers and the supernatural is present in angels, hell, and the dead (ancestors) that haunt us. I decided to try and figure out if I could use my name as a heuretic for understanding myself. Name is not destiny, but perhaps through playing with my name I may glean some wisdom about myself in the same way that horoscope or Tarot might show us something we may not have thought. The fact is that this process is a construction -- not fate, but a chance association that might allow me to gather parts of my life, to interpret signifiers that could be close to me, to help me make meaning via trope and image rather than a coherent narrative. My name gathers together all varieties of beings in its spoken and written form.

But first, the "origin" of my name, Jacob.

Like many of us in the Judeo-Christian world, my name derives from the Hebrew Bible.

Jacob means the “supplanter,” which recalls to me both “planter” and “supplement” as well as its major meaning of “taking the place of” or “being in the place of.”  Jacob came out of the womb grasping at Esau’s heel, as if trying to pull him back into the womb, so he could be the firstborn, foreshadowing the destiny of his trickery that led to his receiving of the blessing.  

When I was young and found out about the story of Jacob and Esau, I was a bit furious that my namesake was such a deceiver! But perhaps there is a reason I am obsessed with "supplementary logic" of Derrida and the French thinkers. I am "in the place of" -- in the place of what or who? By association,I am an essential supplement.

So many are named Jacob, we wrestlers of Angels, we "god contended," we supplanters, we deceivers, we sophists, we rhetoricians, we blessed, but not everyone is named Jacob Riley (although of course there are many of these as well).

"Riley." I've always disliked my last name for some odd reason. It's so scottish. I've also tried my hand how it combines with many of the names of the girls I've loved and it frequently sounds odd, too trite, and silly. An ex of mine: Sadie. Sadie Riley -- ugh, what disgusting assonance! Not even sing songy, just too much.

But despite the oral unpleasantness to Riley, there is an unexpected connection between my first name as "supplanter" and one blessed by God and my last name, Riley. "Living the life of Riley" is a phrase, turned radio show turned tv show, that suggests "an ideal contented life, possibly living on someone else's time, money, work or work" but rather than suggesting a freeloader, "it implies that someone is kept or advantaged" (wikipedia).

I indeed am living on someone else's money (the state's, the university's) and I do not feel like a lazy freeloader, but that I am blessed or kept. I live a "charmed life" I've said to many a friend and colleague.

"This is stupid, self-indulgent, narcissistic, and selfish" I hear you readers cry -- and indeed, maybe it is, but so is reading and writing itself. Reading and writing is associated with leisure and indeed is impossible without leisure. Reading and writing blurs the boundary between work and play. Writing, as a kind of dying to oneself, is jouissance, le petit mort.

Before getting to the inter-species potential of my name, I want to mention my middle name, Thomas. It was in college I think that I came up with a significance to my middle known unbeknownst consciously to my mother and father: My name contains the doubt of "doubting" Thomas who asked to put his hand in the wound of Christ and the belief of Thomas Aquinas, that wonderful synthesizer of Aristotle and Christianity. Between Thomas Aquinas and Thomas the doubter, lies Jacob Riley.

 Jacob in Pieces

Ja! -- Yes! (auf Deutsch). I like when people call me ya-cub, my name pronounced in German. The first morpheme of my proper name in German, which is part of my ethnic background, is affirmation! Perhaps this is what unconsciously touches me so much to that last word in Ulyssses: Yes. Perhaps this is why I am entranced by Derrida's reading of double affirmation, the "yes, yes." A call of my name harbors inside it already an affirmation -- my name already replies and turns toward the other when called before I even acknowledge them. Hearing my name is already to take responsibility for a turning toward the other.

yay -- A Spanish woman I know who meant a great deal to me used to pronounce my name "yake," because a "j" in Spanish sounds like a 'y' and so I could not help but think that within the German Ja! is also the English expression of joy, "yay!" "YAY!" "yay" is an expression of excitement which probably derives from "yeah," or some other affirmation. The first part of my name is filled with joy and affirmation. How lucky I am to be blessed with it.



Jay -- Blue Jay -- Returning to the sound of my name in English, we hear "jay." This is the animal perched on the left side of my name. The blue jay is named for its "noisy, garrulous nature." I love noise and sound -- give me feedback any day. I am also somewhat of a "jaybird" which is a slang term for "a talkative person, a chatterer" or "a fop or dandy." I would like to believe that I avoid idle chatter whenever possible, but perhaps what is significant thought for me comes off as idle chatter to the next person. I do not know, perhaps this animal does not suit me. Perhaps this is the limit of improper invention




Cob -- (corn?) -- My vegetative nomen is cob (although the name is pronounced "cub" it is written "cob," here we have another improper crossing between pronunciation and written signifier). A Cob is also an adult male swan, and a small horse (our names contain so many animal companions). The cob of a piece of corn can be hollowed out to make a smoking pipe. Although my pipes are made of briar, I'm gonna go ahead an make this connection (why not?).

My nickname is "jake." I've always liked this nickname because of its association with the shitter--a shitter without any plumbing. I love the grotesque, the unclean, and the scatological. Swift, Rabelais, Voltaire -- the more potty humor the better! To debase is to also raise up. Bakhtin's work on carnival and the grotesque will always stay close to my nether regions (rather than my heart).

The atoms of our names contain the world and can be just one way to orient ourselves and to understand ourselves. By doing this we make our name improper and cross multiple borders. Here I can go back to Krell's initial point. It is through this play of language that we can invent so much meaning in our lives. To restrict the signifier to one language or think about a text or argument in isolation is to cut off the pleasure of the text, of writing, and of death. If the Humanities is concerned with writing and reading, then perhaps our unique place is entirely other to the sciences and the social sciences and we should stop seeking to appropriate their methodologies and their passion to discover "reality" at the expense of fiction.

Harman's "Literary Criticism"

Texts already reach outside their boundaries — they are already on the verge of breaking. Harman’s argument relies on a substance/holism of a text that just isn’t “really” there in an objective ontological sense. We can recognize an author’s “style,” yes (although, contra Harman’s assertion, Shakespeare’s “style” cannot “enable us to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic plays under his name” — debates still rage on; this also undermines (in the colloquial rather than Harman-esque sense) his claim later about the “death of the author”), but the claim that “to make a slight change in two lines of the Fool might not alter the general effect of King Lear, nor would it likely make much difference to the characterization of Regan or Kent” is really problematic. Although he thinks he is reinforcing it, Harman erases the text’s “materiality” that resists the reader. Readers can make decisions and do the work to argue that a play’s alterations (or one might even think of the various “versions”) fundamentally change the play. And yeah, I’m talking about meaning here — meaning to human readers (the horror!). Reading fundamentally contains an epistemological component that cannot be overlooked in favor of questions of a text’s ontology. Harman’s notion of a text’s “depth” that can never be reached reinscribes the notion of a text’s “truth” and it also isolates the text from all of its possible relations, which already changes its meaning and significance. Harman’s target is the “surface” readings of Derrida and Foucault — moving back into a language of “depth” is to reinscribe a hermeneutic mode of investigation that assumes a persisting unity of a text, outside its dissemination to its context as part of language. It is to revive the idea of the “Book” in its sense that Derrida gives when he talks about the Book of the World that God (or some other entity) has laid out to us to read and decipher. The simple binary of “undermining” and “overmining” does not do justice to the complexity of the issue. We can certainly “undermine” the book by saying that it is nothing but another object made up of atmospheric particles. And yet– the very form of the book has meaning for human beings — it has power and significance due to the medium’s history. We can undermine and overmine to a different degree, but literary criticism involves a human reader and a human reader’s decisions (the critic’s writing delimits the ‘context’ at least for that particular article or book). Thus, epistemological questions arise as soon as Harman says that we can change the text and show “how each text resists internal holism by attempting various modifications of these texts and seeing what happens.” We don’t have to even CHANGE the text “itself” in order for it to be modified by other texts. Indeed, the very fact that the text is composed of language already breaks the text’s boundaries as ultimately the text is a part of cultural context and an (open) system of meaning. Harman seems to have this idea that literary critics use “cultural context” to dismiss works of art — this hardly seems to be the case. My frustration with Harman is that he seems to think his ontology helps us see literature in a new way (rather than reinforcing naive assumptions about the unity/substance of a text). To show how a text “resists its internal holism” is already to assume that the text has a holistic unity unto itself; Indeed, Brooks and co. (New Critics) were constantly exploring the “tensions” within the boundaries of the texts. But literary critics have already done this without reducing a text’s particular materiality (as explored by Derrida, De Man, etc.). To be fair, he does mention that some “literary methods recommended by object-oriented criticism might already exist” so I don’t want to fault him for talking about methods already known by literary critics; what I do want to argue is that .object-oriented ontology, in its preference for a “depth” understanding over surface, is not what literary criticism should strive for, IMO

Derrida, Disaster, and Sovereignties in Question--For Celan

I can now, perhaps, address the significance of Blanchot’s dis-aster.

Disaster: “ill starred,” a calamity blamed on “an unfavorable aspect of a planet”

Constellation: “conjuncture,” “set with stars.” OED: “Originally, in astrology, of position of planets,  (“stars”), in regard to one another on a given day, usually one’s birthday, as a determination of one’s character”

Sternbild (constellation): Stern, star. “bild” –image, picture, figure from bild (verb) – “build, shape, construct,” etc. “Star-image”

In Writing of the Disaster (I am still tempted, every time I write this title, to say Writing the Disaster, omitting the genitive possessive), Blanchot writes,

Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word-why? But why not?—one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject, the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body, which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body [this is my body, take this an eat it, do this in memory of me]. This is the body animated solely by mortal desire: the desire of dying—desire that dies and does not thereby subside. (30)

Could we substitute the notion of a “subject” with the name “identity”? To take one example of the “subjectivity without subject,” the Jew does not possess any determinate characteristics; rather, according to Derrida, “Anyone or no one may be a Jew. Jew, no one’s name, the only one. No one’s circumcision” (55). Or, more concretely, “what is proper to the Jew is to have no property or essence. Jewish is not Jewish” (35). “Jew” is not an identity, a knowledge, but a secret, a crypt, and perhaps most importantly a performance of the body. The performance is the “shibboleth” that requires a certain pronunciation. So to be a Jew (to be anything) is subjectivity without the subject, without the “sovereign” subject that says I. This is related to Heidegger’s notion that Dasein is both near and far, which we may associate with Celan’s line: “it is now possible to conceive a meeting of this ‘wholly Other’ and an ‘other’ which is not far removed, which is very near” (180).

Could the disaster be understood as the ripping apart of constellations, constellations that determine and tie us to our fate as such and such a being or such and such a person? Celan offers the hypothesis: “But are we all not descended from such dates? And to which dates do we attribute ourselves?” (180). But if our dates disseminate into other dates, if our dates are not entirely “our own” this may be the disaster—the planetary drift. Astrology is useless because it pretends that these are our stars , that the stars determine our character, which is at once individuating us too much and at the same time not enough! It does not individuate beings or events enough and yet it is still singular.  That January 20^th signifies no one event unequivocally since it calls out and sends itself toward a future (or past date) than the one “intended” by its author. January 20^th, Derrida finds out, is also when Hitler and his collaborators finalized “the final solution” (113). What if Celan had included the year? Still, there might be strange, unheimlich, coincidences. Some one reader may read January 20^th and notice it is his or her birthday! Imagine being part of the constellation that would link your birth and the final solution!

 Rather than constellation of singularities, if we take astrology as constituting our identities, we become a type of person, a type of being (according to astrology). But might this not foreclose the possibility of an encounter, if the encounter is a “random occurrence, as chance, as luck or coincidence” (9)?  This random occurrence might be something like the ‘disaster.’  The disaster that does not, according to Blanchot, “acquire meaning” but “a body” (41). The disaster might be something along the lines of what I discussed above—finding oneself entwined with other events, from other years, on the same date as one’s birth. Is this “meaningful” or does it acquire body? The disaster of dates that opens us up to other events and other persons.

In this sense, the ego, the self, is like a date, which brings together a constellation: “several heterogeneous singularities [] consigned in the starry configuration of a single dated mark” (35). The date, like any mark, also risks the meaning of other dates. The date “was already a sort of fiction, reciting singularity only in the fable of conventions and generalities, of what are, in any case, iterable marks” (47). In this sense, the date is an “image,” (the reason I translated constellation into German), one might say a metonymic and ‘poetic’ “image.”

But this meaning of “image” does not seem quite appropriate for this text, as Derrida will speak of the date as “a cut, or incision that the poem bears in its body like a memory” (18). And further on claims that “there is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour” (46). The idea of the burning of the word, turning it to ashes, recalls Blanchot’s image of knowledge that burns thought: “When knowledge is no longer a knowledge of truth, it is then that knowledge starts, a knowledge that burns thought, like knowledge of infinite patience” (43). This image recalls to my mind a kind of burning of an experience into one’s retina or into one’s mind—and indelible experience. Derrida generalizes this branding: “As one might engrave a date in a tree, burning bark with ciphers of fire” (48). This, in turn, recalls a poem by Celan Derrida discusses in another essay, “onto a ram’s silicified forehead/I brand this image, between/the horns” (141).  The date is also a circumcision: “The circumcision of a word must thus be understood as an event of the body” (59). Again, the image of a cut, a burn, a brand on the body—even if it is on the body of “language.”

This incision, cut, opening, burn, on the body of language may be the tropes that Derrida uses for what he calls in the interviews an “idiom.” Derrida writes, “but it seems to me he touches the German language both by respecting the idiomatic spirit of that language and in the sense that he displaces it, in the sense that he leaves upon it a sort of scar, a mark, a wound” (100). So this is what we are able to do with language—touch it, leave a mark, a scar, maybe burn it into brains; However, one thing we can never do is appropriate it: “it is the essence of language that language does not let itself be appropriated. Language is precisely what does not let itself be possessed but, for this very reason, provokes all kinds of movements of appropriation” (101). Writing (and language—are these two synonymous?), as for Blanchot, always remains other.  Perhaps we cannot appropriate ‘dates’ either as dates are part of language, fictions that “constellate” events?

I want to shift gears here and ask a few questions about Celan’s poem “Meridian,” particularly concerning his reading of Buchner and Art. If art is that which “produces a distance from the I,” and Art is somehow “at home” with mechanism, marionette, and monkey, then art is something distinct from the human, and perhaps something distinct from “life.” I am trying to figure out how (and if) Celan is distinguishing his own conception of art from Buchner, which he calls “naturalism” (176). Celan quotes Lenz saying that there is “life in the thing that has been created” is the most important aspect of art (176). He contrasts this lifeless art (the marionette? Mechanism? Robot?) with “that which is natural. With all living creatures” (176). Buchner writes, “at times one might wish to be a Medusa’s head so as to be able to transform such a group into stone, and call out to the people” (176). So would this frozen tableau constitute art?

Celan then writes, “Here we have stepped beyond human nature, gone outward, and entered a mysterious realm, yet one turned toward that which is human, the same realm in which the monkey, the robots, and accordingly. . .alas, art seem to be at home” (177).

This is a really strange passage to me. Somehow we have stepped “beyond human nature” yet turned toward the human. But the human here is in the same realm as what we would generally consider not human: monkeys and robots. So is Celan deconstructing this idealized notion of Nature as opposed to wooden puppets? It does not seem like Celan is so much interested in naturalism or art as representation (image). He writes,

The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, or structure, of color, and also of the ‘movements’ and the ‘suggestions.’ These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices, which are continually being brought to a higher degree of perfection. No, it is a concentration which remains aware of all our dates. (182, emphasis mine)

So, an art of “representation” would try and mimic life so as to try and capture all of its movements in mechanical detail. In contrast, Celan’s poems, “take form and gather around the I who is addressing and naming it” (182). It is a movement of gathering and concentration rather than representing in some “naturalistic” detail. It is an encounter with the other, which may be construed as the reader? “But the one who has been addressed and who, by virtue of having been named, has, as it were, become a thou also brings its otherness along into the present, into this present” (182). Who is the one who is addressed and who is the one who addresses? Does the poem address the reader or the reader the poem?

I suppose that this is not a gathering toward a unity, but rather a collection—and it is not only a collection of present things but sends itself into possible future dates. Furthermore, there is always an expropriating gesture in the encounter that may constellate and concentrate, a gesture that expropriates an I. As Derrida puts it in his essay on (for) Gadamer, “To carry now no longer  has the meaning of ‘to comprise, to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself for bear oneself toward the infinite inappropriability of the other [. . .] the infinitely other in me” (161).

Here, there is no reassuring cosmos: “the cosmic reassures us, for we can identify with the measureless vibration of a sovereign order even if in this identification we venture beyond ourselves entrusting ourselves to a holy and real unity” (Blanchot 88). Nor may there be Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (162). Heidegger conceives of poetry as a way of opening up possibilities of new worlds, but for Celan,  “The world is gone, I must carry you,” but the world is not necessarily “gone” but “far” (fort as opposed to da). Derrida asks about Fort-sein as something distinct from the stone, the animal, and the human and their respective relationships to world:

But what would happen if, in our poem, the departure, the Fort-sein of the world, in its proper instance, did not answer to any of these theses or categories? What if the Fort-sein exceeded them, from a wholly other place? (163)

Derrida claims that this is one thing he would want to ask Gadamer for help—I would want to ask Derrida for help. In a way, these few words at the end of an essay point beyond anything else we have read on Heidegger’s concept of “world.” What is the Fort-sein, the far-being? To ask this another way, what if Heidegger worked on the ontology of the fortsein—does that even make sense as a question? Could the Fort-sein be an ontological project? The being that is not there—the being that is far (from itself)? Perhaps this could be a useful way to understand Derrida’s project for is not the ghost, the specter, the revenant, all “living without being,” living far-being (110)? I cannot answer these questions, but the questions intrigue me.

Derrida's "Typewriter Ribbon Limited Ink (2)

Derrida’s text sends me, machine-like, metonymically (?), to re-read and re-think previous texts of his and of others. For example, Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, writes,

For the moment, however, it is enough to signal the operative presence in DeMan’s texts of older categories [my emphasis] like ‘fiction’ or ‘irony’, which the Derridean text does not seem particularly to respect or acknowledge. Derrida’s interest (to summarize it overhastily) bears not on the fictionality of the ‘experience’ of the past that Rousseau’s account seems to presuppose but on the internal contradictions of his formulations” (226).

Jameson reads DeMan’s text, as I have mentioned in previous blog posts, as a kind of aufhebung of the primacy of the aesthetic rather than its erasure: “it is certain that DeMan’s form of deconstruction can be seen as a last-minute rescue operation and a salvaging of the aesthetic” (251). For Jameson, this is DeMan’s insistence on reading, an action that Jameson sees as a way to erase larger social, historical, and political contexts. Jameson sees “reading” as that saving gesture of the aesthetic—a seemingly outdated process (which Jameson prefers to replace with “transcoding”) that he puts in quotation marks (we are getting closer to the Derridean text). Jameson argues that DeMan covers up his politics with this “reading.”

Perhaps Jameson has refused to “read” de Man’s (and Derrida’s) text. Jameson really does not “need” DeMan’s text as much as Derrida argues that he “needed Paul de Man [. . .] in order to show [. . .] that he had no need of Rousseau in order to show and to demonstrate, himself, what he thought he ought to confide in us” (358). As Derrida points out, Rousseau is used as an example to show what de Man believes is true of writing and texts in general.

Derrida characterizes this trait as a text’s “materiality without matter” (Derrida 352). Materiality is the mechanical aspect of a text that resists being appropriated. Perhaps we could understand this “materiality” as that which makes the text both possible and impossible to read (to be read completely, to have ‘the last word’). The materiality of the Derridean text is what allows me to think each and every time I encounter another, “he discusses this in this text and this text and this text” and which poses the question: did he say it “differently” in that text? Should I go back and re-read those texts? Do I have the time?

The materiality is also that which can be mutilated or destroyed. Derrida’s notion of the text is not ideal—it is always already threatened with mutilation or a break in its integrity. Derrida points to a few places that de Man’s text is subject to a mechanical materiality. For example, de Man decides not to include two words of part of Rousseau’s text: “Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating it or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion? Why does he amputate two of its little words before the period: ‘quite old,’ déjà vieux’” (Derrida 318). Are these omissions as significant as the larger omissions of paragraphs that de Man cuts so that he may say, in a footnote, that “nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection” (de Man qtd. in Derrida 296). Derrida asks how is it that de Man can see this, if it not there? It is obviously not merely nothing. Derrida seems to use such instances as a way to read de Man like de Man is reading Rousseau; Just as de Man claims Rousseau excuses and confesses, Derrida claims de Man makes similar performative gestures. Just as de Man claims Rousseau did not include “precisely stories that narrate mutilations, or, in the metaphor of the text as body, suppressions,” which would threaten the integrity of the text, so Derrida shows that de Man’s own omissions, revealed in footnotes, asides, and mechanical and arbitrary omissions, threaten the integrity of de Man’s own argument—his own text! De Man argues—no, there is nothing in the text that can suggest this association—he closes off reading (something that de Man surely would never “want” to do—but then again, remember, this is mechanical, it is not “unconscious” and has nothing to do with desire—it is merely an event, something that happens, mechanically, arbitrarily). De Man’s insights apply to his own text and Derrida brilliantly brings this out. It is as if one were to say, “ho, wait there, there is nothing in Shelly’s Triumph of Life that could ever have anything to do with Blanchot’s Death Sentence.” But indeed, Derrida has shown that these texts can “love each other.”

But this is not a “failure” of the text—this omission, mutilation, precariousness, perhaps, dare I say, materiality of de Man’s and Derrida’s texts are what make of them textual events. Or, to use de Man’s language, textual events are like  [following Derrida’s emphasis] l’ouevre—works—works in the sense of material work and work as performance, work as act. And here we need to re-read a passage cited above (never, never can I get to the last word). Derrida writes that he “needed de Man” to show that de Man did not “need” Rousseau. But this must be tongue and cheek on Derrida’s part, right? Such would be a pure performative and not an event, not a work. But then again, perhaps we should note that there was nothing essential about Rousseau’s text. Derrida is saying that, like Rousseau with Marion, used the first object presented to him.

Apropos of the previous reflections, is there a meaningful difference between the claims about the ‘work’ in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink” and those claimed for Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Aporias? Or what about the claim about work in “University without Condition.” Derrida writes in Aporias:

In order to welcome into thought and into history such a ‘work’, the event has to be thought otherwise. Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor to philosophy, nor to poetics. Such is perhaps the case for every work worthy of its name; there, what puts thinking into operation exceeds its own borders or what thinking itself intends to present of these borders. The work exceeds itself. (32)

Does the work of de Man “exceed” its own borders? Is this characteristic of texts “in general?”

If this is the case, how can we say, along with Jameson, that the Derridean text excludes such “old categories,” like an “old ribbon,” too old, worn out, dried up and out of ink bound to an outmoded typewriter, textual machine?

Furthermore, if the “materiality” of the de Manian (and, can we extend this to the Derridean?) text is not “matter” than what does that say about the relationship between the bugs in amber and de Man’s text in relation to the arche-fossil? What is the relationship between “realism” (QM) and “materiality” if there is any at all? 

Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude

Quentin Meilassoux (from here on out, referred to as QM), in his After Finitude, wants to rid philosophy of superstition, belief, mystery, and enigma. Following in Badiou's footsteps, he wants mathematics and Cartesian substance (without its metaphysics) to lead philosophy out of what he calls the "correlationist circle." On one hand, it is a relief to read an incredibly rigorous critique of correlationism (Kantianism, phenomenology, etc.), but on the other, it leaves little room for mystery. QM writes, "We must free ourselves of the question--but this requires not just that we resolve it, but that we formulate an answer which is necessarily disappointing, so that this disappointment becomes its instructive aspect" (73).

Gone is the poetry and the ambiguity of Heidegger or Derrida. We are not on the level of 'language' but the level of logic and mathematics. This is not to say that this is bad or wrong, but my question is how useful it is for literary/textual studies? Heideggerian hermeneutics and Derridian deconstruction kept up the use of the Text, but there is no 'text' here to be interpreted. QM defines his terms and then proceeds to derive propositions from them.

The big-picture argument comes from the last chapter, where he argues that philosophy never acknowledge the true "revolution" of Copernicus and instead, reacted against its insight in a "counter-revolution" of Ptolmey. Philosophy claims for itself a privileged position to 'explain' science at the same time as it praises science: "Ever since Kant, to think science as a philosopher has been to claim that science harbors a meaning other than the one delivered by science itself" (119). In a way, QM seems to try and say: wait a minute--philosophy is not a privileged discourse that gets at the 'originary' meaning of science or mathematics, as in the case of Heidegger: "philosophical time has sought to demote the time of science to the level of a 'vulgar', derivative, or standardized form of originary correlational temportality, being-in-the-world, or the relation to a supposedly primordial historicality" (123).

Now, Derrida critiques this "originary" temporalizing movement as well,  but through a critique of the "as such," but the as-such. In contrast,  what must be 'absolute' is what QM searches for. QM thinks correlationism's 'critique of meptahysics' actually adheres to an idea that a "reason" exists--it does not think what QM calls "the principle of unreason" far enough. Thus, it is stuck in a fideism, where truth becomes 'mere opinion' or belief: "From the perspective of the strong model [of correlationism] religious belief has every right to maintain that the world was created out of nothingness from an act of love [. . .] These discourses continue to be meaningful--in a mythological or mysical register--even though they are scientifically and logically meaningless" (QM 41). It was by denying reason access to the absolute that we have "returned to the religious."

Because of this tranformation, "the condemnation of fanaticism is carried out solely in the name of its practical (ethico-political) consequence never in the name of the ultimate falsity of its contents" (47). This could be pinned on Levinas--Ethics as first philosophy. For QM, Mathematics is first philosophy. The ethical question of the 'wholly other' is displaced by speculative thinking.

The "falsity of its contents" would be assured by a re-affirmation of the principle of non-contradiction. According to QM, Chaos actually reaffirms the principle of non-contradiction because if a contradictory entity existed, it would be necessary (see pg 67).  He does this by an interesting thinking of becoming: "such an entity could never become other than it is because there would be no alterity for it in which to become" (69). He goes on to say, "accordingly, real contradiction can in no way be identified with the thesis of universal becoming, for in becoming, things must be this, then other than this; they are, then they are not" (70).

Does this not mean that there is no room for the specter, the ghost, the hauntology of Derrida? A present-absent entity would be contradictory, would it not? For QM, this is a 'metaphysical' statement--and its a statement that cannot be true. If he is right, all of these quasi-entities, the present-absent is gone. Is the present-absent that which exists "in itself"? Is it mere poetic fancy? Surely such a being-non-being cannot be "mathematizable." Such an entity is not "contingent" because it is contradictory? I am not sure.

QM also seems to eliminate the thinking of the "witness": "the question of the witness has become irrelevant to knowledge of the event" (116). We will have to interrogate this claim. The question of the 'witness' assumes a a givenness of being. QM speaks of the "ancestral event" because it is prior to any sort of 'given-ness of being: "the ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence  givenness as such" (21). Science conceives of a time in which "the given as such passes from non-being to being" (21).

The idea of givenness, the 'gift' of being (Heidegger), of death, of life, etc. is a theme throughout Derrida's works. But this "wonder" at why there is something rather than nothing is exactly what QM wants to eliminate: "Ultimately, the fideist is someone who marvels at the fact that there is something rather than nothing because he believes there is no reason for it, and that being is a pure gift, which might never have occurred" (72).

Another interesting way in to QM's work from our perspective in the course is to look at the question of the "human" in QM's work. The book suggests that science/mathematics leads us to a concept of time, space, and substance that is  "indifferent to humans": "From its inception, the mathematization of the world bore within it the possibility of uncovering knowledge of a world more indifferent than ever to human existence [. . .] a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it" (116). In other words, that there is an "in itself," something "out there" indifferent to what our own minds conceive it as.

But interestingly enough, his argument is based on human observations of mortality. I will now cite a couple passages that I think we need to go over carefully and find what is at stake (in terms of QM's argument) if these claims cannot hold:

"The very idea of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us would never have arisen within you, had you not experience what is perhaps the possiblity of its own non-being, and thus to know itself to be mortal" (59).

"For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need to my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away. In other words, in order to refute subjective idealism, I must grant that my possible annihilation is thinkable as something that is not just the correlate of my thought of this annihilation" (57).

Ultimately, I am having a difficult time dismissing QM's critique of correlationsim and I suppose that I would have to merely add that I'm not sure how speculative realism/materialism, the question of the possible "as such" has much to do with my own work. It is the insistence that "what is mathematically conceivable is absolutely possible" that is perplexing me. Perhaps I am too ignorant of mathematics and the "possible," but I fail to see how this changes those of us who think more "poetically." QM writes that what Badiou has shown is "the idea that the most powerful conception of the incalculable and unpredicatable event provided by a thinking that continues to be mathematical---rather than one which is artistic, poetic, or religious. It is by way of mathematics that we will finally succeed in thinking that which, through its power and beauty, vanquishes quantities and sounds the end of play" (108).

The end of play? The end of play and the inauguration of the serious? What a terrifying prospect (to me--perhaps not to others). Is this not a way to say that the event will be calculable? No room of the impossible to-come?

For me, the question of whether this speculative philosophy will be useful will be what Badiou argues QM's work clears the ground for: "[QM] then goes on to draw some of the consequences of his resumption of the fundamental problem ('what can I know') toward two other problems: 'what must I do' and 'what must I hope'? It is there that what lies beyond finitude is deployed from contemporary thinkers" (VII).

My guess is that this "doing" and "hoping" might be the subject of his more complete work, where he takes on the ethical and political consequences of his work.

Jacques Derrida on Heidegger on the Animal and Being "as such"

“I have just a few notes and I’ll propose simply an outline of what I would have tried to do if I had time and if we had the time together” –Jacques Derrida (pg 141)

            I feel like the text of The Animal that Therefore I Am is really all over the place. Most of the text seems to be a close critique of Descartes, Kant, Levinas and Lacan on the question of the animal. Characteristically, Derrida does a good job at finding the point in the text where an unfounded bias toward human beings (as ontologically distinct from animals) as a privileged species. In sum, one of the most important arguments is the claim that though animals can make tracks or follow tracks, they cannot erase their tracks, which ties into the arguments about deception, “pretending to pretend,” etc. Derrida argues that it is within the structure of the trace that it can be erased. However, “the fact that a trace can always be erased, and forever, in no way means—and this is the critical difference—that someone, man or animal, I am emphasizing here, can of his own accord erase his traces” (33). One suspects that this is the reason for Derrida’s extensive recounting (as we also saw him do in Aporias) of his own “traces,” his own previous works.

Derrida, more than any other thinker I know, is an expert at actually “reading” his own works—taking into account the history of his own traces and taking responsibility for them. In order to “authorize” his investigation into the animal, he recounts the several places throughout his whole career that critters have popped up here and there, which forces us to see his texts in a different light (see pages 36-41). As we have pointed out before, I cannot relegate this self-reference to mere narcissism, as Derrida is showing that he takes responsibility for his previous texts. Furthermore, he is performing the fact that he, as an individual man, cannot erase his past traces. By writing and signing a text in one’s name, he or she has committed to answer for these remarks. Derrida, therefore, is showing the consistency of his thought, recognizing that he is not saying anything “radically new” or different here. He is showing that he, as well as we, are merely “reading” his own works differently, with a different valence, in different language—taking the Animal (in the singular) as the subject.

Despite the richness of this entire text and his close readings of the entire philosophical tradition, it is the last, ex-tempore lecture on Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics that deserves the most attention. We can see in this seminar Heidegger really struggling with his own thought (which is something I have always admired about Heidegger’s work). He claims something and then will say “but wait!” However, this is not the ‘but no!” of Levinas, which Derrida calls a “disavowal,” but rather a suspension of decision—a “modesty,” if you will, toward a definitive conclusion. Indeed, Heidegger, like the description of the animal he holds, struggles with his own encirclement: “life is nothing but the animal’s encircling itself and struggling with its encircling ring” (257).

Derrida’s critique of Heidegger is more subtle than Descartes, Levinas, Kant, and Lacan, because Heidegger still struggles with the question of the animal. He will not content himself to condemn the animal to the mere “imaginary” (as Lacan does) or affirm (unequivocally at least), that it is “the first person that is lacking from animal life, radically depriving it of any autobiographical relation to self” (Derrida 93). Heidegger, ironically, is less subject to Adorno’s critique of idealism: “Animals would be the Jews of idealist, who would thus be nothing but virtual fascists” (Derrida 103). This is because, for Kant, the animal is not only the animal as a being, but also the animal in the self—the animal in ourselves that is “taboo” and cannot participate in a Kantian morality of universalizable maxims. This is where Levinas gets tripped up: “Reckoning only by the measure of who we glimpses in a certain unconscious of pure practical reason, namely the cruel and merciless war that a virtual ‘fascist’ Kantian idealism decleares on animal life, calling Bobby a Kantian is no compliment” (Derrida 115, my italics).

And why does not Heidegger get the same treatment from Derrida? Because Heidegger is not trying to base his distinction between animal and human on clear distinctions between rational/non-rational, language/no language, response/reaction (at least not at first). Rather, Heidegger re-interrogates the concept of “world.” As Derrida points out, this comparative analysis that he takes, contrasting man as world-forming, animal as “poor in world,” and stone as worldless is rare for Heidegger. The concept of “world” here gets shaken, solicited, and deconstructed by Heidegger’s own text so that we cannot arrive at an easy definition.

Heidegger here is clear that the animal “has” world, but the animal “has a world” in a different way than man has world. Heidegger has a hell of a time trying to figure out how the animal “has a world.” He comes up with the phrase “poor in world” not as a sense of poverty as “less” than man. Heidegger does not want to make an evaluative hierarchal judgment, placing Dasein as superior to animal. So, Heidegger uses the language he uses to describe man to describe the animal: “Rather being poor means being deprived [. . .] the way in which it is in a mood—poverty in a mood” (Heidegger). Both man and animal, then, have in common that they are always in a “mood.” Our mood, as Heidegger writes in Being in Time and reiterates in the early parts of Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics is “Being-attuned” (B&T 172). And again, “A mood makes manifest ‘how one is, and how one is faring’. In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its ‘there’” (173). So interesting enough, the animal does not lack mood, its mood, however, is one of poverty. Is man ever in a mood of poverty? In a way, is it not because we are in a mood that we are ‘limited’ in perhaps, the same way as the animal?

The way Heidegger writes about the animal’s world seems so similar to the way in which he understands the world of man: “Thus the intrinsic self-encirclement of the animal is not a kind of encapsulation. On the contrary, the encirclement is precisely drawn about the animal in such a way that it opens up a sphere” (Heidegger). Is the difference between man and animal, as he says at times, a difference of degree?

This does not seem to be the case at other moments in the text. I would argue that if the animal is “like” us in the sense that it has a mood, then there may be two ways to distinguish man from animal. The first is that the animal is always in a mood of poverty, whereas man finds himself in different moods—moods like anxiety (of course, this returns us to the question of death, the structure of care as fear-for-one’s-own-being). Alternately, can we say that Dasein  is its possibility in a way that the animal is not? That is, the animal is not “free” in some sense. That is, taking Heidegger’s phrase in all of its active connotations the animal is not world-forming à as in, it does not make its world? Heidegger may imply this when he writes,

Every animal surround itself with such an encircling ring, but it does not do so subsequently, as if the animal initially lived or ever could live without this encircling ring altogether, as if this encircling ring somehow grew up around the animal only at a later stage. (Heidegger 257)

Could it not be that Dasein, fundamentally, has the possibility of expanding his ‘encircling’ ring? Could it not be that ‘subsequently’ we can expand the ring to which we see something ‘as’ something? Is this not the power of language, the power of language as metaphor to see something “as” something else, to see something in a new way?

The other distinction we could focus on is that between ‘affect” and “gripped.” Heidegger says early in Fundamental Concepts, “the fundamental concern of philosophizing pertains to such being gripped, to awakening and planting it. All such being gripped, however, comes from and remains in an attunement” (Heidegger 7). In contrast, the animal can merely be affected: “Yet it is certainly true that the animal does announce itself as something that relates to other things and does so in a way that it is somehow affected by these other things” (Heidegger). So, perhaps man’s attunement is in “being gripped,” which allows us to form “Begriffen” –concepts, so that we are the “philosophical animal.” Indeed, Heidegger characterizes Dasein in Being and Time as “This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being” (B&T 27). Can the animal inquire into its own being, into its “meaning of being”?

On one level, Heidegger traps himself by saying that the animal is “self-absorbed” which is so close to the structure of care that Heidegger maintains is an essential existential condition of Dasein: “In this rejecting things from itself we see the animal’s self absorption” (Heidegger). So how is man’s ‘care’ or how is the ‘as’ of the as-structure different for man? Rather than focusing on Dasein as possibility, Heidegger ends up re-affirming the metaphysical priority of the present-at-hand! Heidegger, the thinker who made me think outside being as being-present-at-hand returns to this privileging in metaphysics. Heidegger, the thinker of the everyday, the ready-to-hand—the thinker of the meaning of being, the thinker who realized that the theoretical attitude (mood) of looking at a thing as a ‘thing’ is only one possibility of Dasein returns to the present-at-hand. A few passages to show this conclusion:

“If it is the case that the animal does not comport itself toward beings as such, then behavior involves no letting-be of beings as such—none at all and in no way whatsoever, not even any not letting-be” 

“But nor does this relational aspect belonging to behavior represent an attentiveness to what is present at hand within the environment”

“It does not let anything present-at-hand stand as it is”

“However, this also implies that animals do not comport themselves indifferently with respect to beings either. For such indifference would also represent a relation to beings as such”

“The behavior of the animal, contrary to how it might appear, does not and can never relate to present-at-hand things singly or collectively”

And so we see that in order to relate to beings “as such” we must understand the primary importance of being present-at-hand, which, to me, refutes the whole power of Heidegger’s analysis of the everyday existence of Dasein. If I have to give this up in order to distinguish between man and animal, I would prefer for it to remain an open question.

For then Heidegger seems to want to think assertion and the proposition as the primary mode of understanding: “We formally traced the as-structure back to the propositional statement” (Heidegger). The proposition is then somehow, in this text, more originary. Compare this passage from Being and Time: “In its function of appropriating what is understood, the ‘as’ no longer reaches out into a totality of involvements [. . .] This leveling of the primordial ‘as’ of circumspective interpretation to the ‘as’ with which presence-at-hand is given a definite character is the specialty of assertion” (Heidegger 201).

This is the problem of Heidegger moving back to Aristotle in Fundamental Concepts: “Aristotle tells us: Discourse is what it is i.e. forms a sphere of understandability, whenever  there is a ____ of a ___,  whenever a being held together occurs in which there also lies agreement” (Heidegger). This is how Heidegger describes words: “this fundamental relation of letting something come into agreement and holding it together are words” (Heidegger).

But this denies the material and specificity of writing as something that leaves traces and that can never be fixed to a particular reference. Here, Heidegger denies the history of a word, of language, and, its untranslatability. The impossibility of a true “agreement” in terms of language. This is the problem with the “as-such.” The “as-such” is somehow the propositional, the “objective,” but it is Heidegger more than any other thinker—for me at least—who put the very possibility of the ‘objective’ in question! Even Dasein can never “let beings be in their being” in a kind of indifference (an ‘objective’ indifference), for this is merely the “theoretical attitude.”

I will end by following Derrida’s conclusion—or I suppose—he is following my conclusions—who follows who?

Can one free the relation of Dasein (not to say ‘man’) to beings from every living, utilitarian, perspective-making project, from every vital design, such that man himself could ‘let the being be’? For that is the relation to the being as such, that is to say, the relation to what is inasmuch as one lets it be what it is, that is to say, that one doesn’t approach it or apprehend it from our own perspective from our own design. (160)

Liberal Arts, Politics, and Education: A Response to Rick Scott, Rick Perry and university education reform

"This university without conditions does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too well. Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity with its declared vocation, its professed essence, it should remain an ultimate place of critical resistance--and more than critical--to all powers of dogmatic and unjust appropration" --Jacques Derrida, "University without Condition"  


In class, we have been discussing endlessly the idea of "education," as understood in Richard Rodriguez's "Achievement of Desire," Paulo Freire's "Banking Concept of Education," and David Foster Wallace's "Address to Kenyon College." All three of these pieces, we could generalize, are inspired by the spirit of the liberal arts, a spirit that maintains that education is more than information or "knowledge." It involves, to use Freire's terms, a "humanization" of the world. As such, a lot of emphasis is placed on the power of the humanities. The university, although it has extended its range (particularly as a state university) has always been rooted in 'humanistic' discourses, as even the notion of "science," in the classical university hardly concerns the producing of "jobs"--which seems the primary goal of Rick Scott: "“If I'm going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I'm going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott said. “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.” Rather, the university has always been a place of discovery and invention of knowledge.



Now, I am a far cry from disagreeing that we need jobs in the state and people that are qualified for those jobs. However, is it not the case that most jobs are a function of "on the job training"? In other words, does it hurt people that  majored in English, Philosophy, Sociology, or Psychology? Is the University supposed to give anyone the practical know-how to succeed in a job right out of college? Are there not other institutions, aside from the four year State university that can prepare someone for a job better? Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, is not "humanistic" thinking conducive to innovation. I mean, is it an engineer's courses (for example) or their creative thinking that will lead to innovation? Is it not precisely the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that comes from an individual's creativity that "creates" new jobs.


I realize that I am asking several questions rather than giving answers. I guess what intrigues me about this whole "university reform" thing is how the terms of the argument keep slipping. At the beginning of the article, we have the idea that they want to eliminate Humanistic disciplines. Somehow this is linked to other changes, such as "weeding out unproductive professors and rethinking the system that offers faculty job security."


We might ask what he means by "unproductive professors." At University of Florida, we have, for example, and insanely productive faculty in terms of publications, research, and conferences. Of course, because English would be considered one of the degrees with the "least" job prospects, I suppose this makes English research irrelevant. So "unproductive faculty" seems to be a euphemism for professors who are producing "humanistic research," which, these politicians may argue, is not "research" at all.


And so we get to the other issue: Job security. Namely, that term that makes every conservative politician shutter: tenure. Tenure, people like Texas businessman Jeff Sandefer (who wrote a policy paper for Perry), argue "places too much emphasis on research. To be promoted, faculty must publish original work. As a result, they spend less time in the classroom and often delegate teaching to graduate students" ("Liberal Arts"). Agreeing with this sentiment, former Wall Street Journal Editor Naomi Riley claims, "there really needs to be a refocus on the students in front of you [. . .] They use the people at the bottom to do the teaching" ("Liberal Arts").


Ok, so, the logic is that by abolishing tenure, professors will focus less on research and more on students, which will somehow help produce jobs? But, again, I ask, are the courses that "Science and Math" students take going to help create jobs or simply qualify them for jobs that already exist? Is it not the case that abolishing research (in the sciences) will not allow such benefits of research that should eventually benefit our society?


Riley (Naomi Riley, above--not me--god I'm embarrassed that I have the same name as this person) claims that " top professors produce the kind of work that ensures job security, making tenure irrelevant" ("Liberal Arts"). But as many better and more qualified writers than me have pointed out, tenure is less about merely "job security" and more about academic freedom (see Cary Nelson) . Academic freedom allows professors to inquire and research into what they want to research in. It allows academics to research topics that may not align itself with certain ideologies or market imperatives, thus allowing the research (ideally) to be less influenced by people who, say, might threaten their livelihood if they don't produce the right results. This freedom is just as important in the sciences as it is in the humanities (think climate change research). Thus, tenure is not irrelevant, because it keeps people like Rick Scott from getting rid of departments that don't seem to be doing the right kind of research that supports a particular conception of a university's purpose.


So who is focusing on our students? Well, first off, tenured professors. In the English department, our faculty not only prolifically produce research, but most are teaching undergraduate courses in English. So the fact is, faculty, at least in the Humanistic disciplines, are focusing on undergraduates. Furthermore, it is true that a lot of our basic "survey" courses in English are taught by Ph.D. candidates. My question is, how exactly are we the ones "at the bottom" as if we were completely unprepared to handle undergraduates? Why can't we think about these people positively as those "future professors"?


If teaching in the Humanities is less about merely "transferring" knowledge--if teaching is instead about a co-creation of meaning and knowledge, about facilitating and creating conditions inside and outside the classroom for students to explore and learn, then how does a Ph.D. qualify me any more or less to teach survey courses in English, or, as I do, composition courses? A Ph.D. would qualify me as an expert in my field in research. This is why tenured faculty do research as well as teach.



Clearly, although the politicians try and justify what they do through utilitarian arguments about jobs and the functioning of society, this kind of thinking is an attack on thinking that disrupts the status quo's values. Although I am not someone who believes that my writing heralds the coming revolution or creates the possiblity for utopia, my research and thinking that I do in graduate classes produces the ideas and attitudes that I teach even in my composition class. For me, as for those like Blanchot, writing is disrupting and ambiguous. I would extend that and say that the "humanities" are ambiguous--even the status of humanistic "knowledge" is ambiguous. We deal in questions of value, questions of value that sometimes exceed immediate market gain or merely economic progress in terms of jobs. However, I would argue that it is precisely creative, innovative, and resistant thinking--in whatever discipline--that creates jobs and, ultimately, new human possibilities.By eliminating fields of knowledge,  we close down the possible and, perhaps, more importantly, the (im)possible.  As Jacques Derrida writes,


"I will speak of an event that, without necessarily coming about tomorrow, would remain perhaps--and I underscore perhaps--to come; to come through the university, to come about and to come through it, thanks to it" (Derrida 213).

Works Cited

Taking the liberal arts out of a state university education?

Derrida, Jacques and Peggy Kamuf. "The University Without Condition." Without Alibi. California: Stanford University Press, 2002. Print. 

 

Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on Virtualization of the world

In “University without Condition,” Jacques Derrida argues that place and nature of university work is disrupted by “a certain delocalizing, virtualization of the space of communication, discussion, publication, archivization” (210). More importantly, what has been most upset by this “virtualization” of the world is “the topology of the event, the experience of the singular taking place” (210). Derrida goes on to ask a crucial question: “What happens, then, when the place itself becomes virtual, freed from its territorial (and thus national) rootedness, and when it becomes subject to the modality of an ‘as if’?” (213). What happens to the event (or its (im)possibility) when place is virtualized and it is difficult to find the “real?”

Bernard Stiegler is addressing a similar issue in Technics and Time 3, except that he does not want to use the term “virtual”:

Rather than virtual space, we should more accurately speak of a new digital system of retentions affecting the intuiting of both space and time, a system no more nor less virtual than all other forms of tertiary retention. (137)

Although Derrida uses the word “virtual,” it seems that he, too, does not see this virtualization is not different in kind from the past, “for as soon as there is a trace, there is virtualization,” but the newness stems from “the acceleration of the rhythm, the extent, and the powers of capitalization of such a virtuality” (210). In Stiegler’s temporal terms, we could understand “virtualization” as another word for the “synchronization” of time (or perhaps to return to Derrida’s terms “asynchrony”). If there is greater synchronization, then societies, according to Stiegler, are not “societies of invention” but rather ‘mimetic and adaptive” (101). Synchronization happens in all societies, but in our society it has lost synchronization as a “moment of exception.” Stiegler writes,

This synchronization is the arrival through these very media of a generalized loss of individuation and a swallowing up of exceptional moments in the continuous event-ful flux the programming industries unleash on the hypermasses of consciousness. (100)

As Derrida writes, the topology of the event, which is the “experience of the singular taking place” is disrupted through what he calls “virtualization.” I think Stiegler does not want to use the term “virtualization” because it implies somehow that it is “immaterial” or has no effect on the world. In this sense, I do not find Stiegler and Derrida departing from one another on the question of the “virtual.”

For Stiegler, this synchronization, this hyperindustrial society leads us to re-think the role of technoscience. This leads him to his critique of Kant, a critique that Derrida has also leveled, namely, that for Kant, “science” is separate from techne. “Science” is a describing of ‘what-is’ rather than its creation. This presupposes the idea that science is merely “constative” rather than performative knowledge. The age of technoscience has revealed that this is not the case—that there is no pure constative: “Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology as the producer of technoscience and whose purpose is invention is in fact always performative” (203).

Thus, science and technology have a different relationship than we once thought. Science used to believe it described “the real” so that the possible (what we can “find” as scientists) is a modality of the real. But technoscience reveals that the real is always a modality of the possible. For example, the kind of experiments we have been doing with genetic codes. Thus, technology is not an “application” of science, but rather science is and application of technology! “Technoscience is not applied science, and even less explicated science; it is implicated science” (Stiegler 207).

If the real has only become a modality of the possible, then Derrida’s notion of the “event” as the impossible to-come now makes more sense: “The event belongs to a perhaps that is in keeping not with the possible but with the impossible. And its force is therefore irreducible to the force or the power of a performative, even if it gives to the performative itself, to what is called the force of the performance its chance and its effectiveness” (Derrida 235). The event is not something we (as individuals) can bring out--the event is always the decision of the other.

Does Stiegler rest in the perhaps of the event? In Technics and Time 3 Stiegler seems to be more interested in a more “Kantian” solution, using the term “criteria.” In the place of event (perhaps?), Stiegler calls for a new critique. We have to ask ourselves what would be “the principle of subjective differentiation in an age of technoscience,” which would be a “faculty capable of judging the quality of technoscientific fictions” (199). That is, the ability to judge which fictions, which possibles that technoscience reveals are worth our pursuing—it is a question of what we want to become as human beings.

I am still trying to figure out what Stiegler means by “subjective principle of differentiation” (which, by the way, we cannot “discover” but which we have to make). He implies at one point that we used to think it as the ontological difference (of Heidegger) between being and beings and all that it implied. Is Stiegler simply articulating a fact that we all know: we need to decide how far we want science to go?

Our selection, what we choose to adopt, and our principl of subjective differentiation, all seem to be tied up in what Stiegler calls “tertiary retentions,” which is everything that pre and conserves human memory outside of the life of a singular individual. All of this is related to technics. Stiegler argues that we only have access to our “already-there” (is this what Derrida calls “the Faktum” in “Faith and Knowledge”?) through these tertiary retentions. This “pre-original” understanding is only possible on the condition that we get it from our tertiary retentions. Thus, there is no pure and original “revealing of being” because the meaning of being always has a history and that history is preserved in our tertiary retentions. What does Stiegler mean when he argues that the new critique is a “thinking of selection as the very heart of the primordial question of retention, and thus through a general epistemological re-evaluation”? (156).

Indeed, this seems to be what he calls our educational institutions to do. Is this different (or can we make a difference) between this and the project Derrida outlines for the New Humanities in “University without Condition”? Is this somehow different from thinking the institutions history and the history of what is “proper” to man? Is the subjective principle of differentiation what will allow us to know “what, currently and to come, creates the distinction between best and worst” (155). is this a call for a critique that takes into account a shaky ethics (but not an ethical system) in the way that Haraway calls for in When Species Meet? In which “the crucial ethical issues now in human cloning are the biological matters [. . .] The ethics is in the whole ontological apparatus, in the thick complexity, in the naturecultures of being in technoculture that join cells and people in a dance of becoming”? (Haraway 137-38) But is Stiegler’s a question of ethics? Is not any sort of question of what ought to be done a question of ethics?

I am not able to answer these questions. I can only hope they are productive questions to ask.

Economy in Derrida and Kierkegaard

Well I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts –“Grace,” James Joyce

This is the final line from “Grace,” a story in Joyce’s Dubliners. I begin here not to embark on a long interpretation of the story, but to enter into the strange role economy plays in both Kierkegaard and Derrida.

The quotation from Grace comes from the priest, Father Purdon, who has mis-interpreted a bible verse in order to appease the wordly minds of the businessmen he is preaching addresses. The priest argues that our relationship with God can be settled and set right with God’s grace rather than our own agency. There is no sense here of Levinas and Derrida’s notion of infinite responsibility or Heidegger’s original being-guilty.

 The idea that we could ever settle our account with God remains in a circular economy and an economy of the universal—an economy based on money. Money is the universal equivalent—it is that by which everything can be measured and calculated. As Kierkeggard writes, in a money economy, everything can be “had at a bargain price” such that we are no longer sure if anyone “will make a bid” (5). In this society, everything is leveled to the universal.

What Kierkegaard calls the “religious” escapes the logic of the universal and the logic of exchange (which money makes possible). This is what happens when we pretend to “understand” and “account” for Abraham’s act with a moral that can be universally understood. Rather, Kierkeggard argues we need to keep the “anxiety” that comes with Abraham’s actions. If we do not keep this passion and anxiety, then we have tried to “mediate” Abraham’s actions through the universal. Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham’s “ordeal” (rather than ‘spiritual trial’) with a New Testament story: “What is omitted from Abraham’s story is the anxiety, because to money I have no ethical obligation [. . .] So we talk and in the process of talking interchange the two terms, Issac and the best, and everything goes fine” (28).

If for Kierkegaard, the religious is different from the ethical, Derrida will deconstruct this distinction. How does one distinguish between the ethical and the religious if we agree with Derrida that “we no longer know who is called Abraham” (Derrida 79) (also see pgs 83-84 for this in relation to Levinas)? Rather, the situation of Abraham is everyone’s situation at every moment: “As soon as I enter into a relation with the other [. . .] I know I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others” (Derrida 69). At all times, we have given every other (who is wholly other) the kiss of death. We let many others die (we sacrifice them) so that we may live. Thus, even when I take responsibility for one other, I am irresponsible with respect to every other. In this way, Derrida de-mystifies Kierkegaard’s reading so that the absolute other we respond to (by not responding) does not necessarily have to be God as the one, true, transcendent being, but rather to everyone. This understanding shakes the distinction between the religious and the ethical.

In a similar way, Derrida uses Kierkegaard’s reading of the Abraham story to deconstruct the notion that Christian faith somehow escapes all economy. It may be a different economy, but it is still an economy. Derrida argues that Kierkegaard ‘christianizes’ the Abraham story through his subtle biblical reference to Matthew. Derrida quotes the infamous passage in Matthew about turning the other cheek to show that this Christian acting is still with an economy, but one deferred: “for instead of paying back the slap on the cheek [. . .] one is to offer the other cheek. It is a matter of suspending the strict economy of exchange, of payback, of giving and getting back” (102). Thus, the Christian hopes for a reward, but a reward in heaven.

 My question is whether this Christian attitude is different from Abraham’s. Derrida writes that, “Abraham had consented to suffer death or worse, and that without calculation, without investing, beyond any perspective of reappropriation, beyond economy, without any hope of remuneration” (95). But in a way, did he not hope somehow that God may “pay him back” somehow either in heaven or even on earth? Does not Derrida talk about how God could have perhaps provided him a new Isaac to replace this one (as if he were substitutable?) To put it another way, is Abraham’s action still within the Christian economy of hoping for infinite reward, but an infinite reward suspended? If so, what does that say about the possibility of faith, belief, credit, and the gift?

Another way to ask this question might be to explore whether Derrida thinks this Christianity to come, this “proto-Christian” ethics is something desirable—the idea that we should give without calculation. But is this even possible? Furthermore, his ending on Nietzsche, who seems to argue that Christianity participates in a kind of Hegelian sublimation where “Christian justice denies itself and so conserves itself in what seems to exceed it; it remains what it cases to be, a cruel economy, a commerce, a contract involving debt and credit, sacrifice and vengeance” (115). Is the Christianity Nietzsche critiques different than this other Christianity of the gift?

 Perhaps Derrida’s attention to Christ’s teachings rather than the Pauline interpretation of Christ’s sacrifice for man is significant. The Christianity that would acknowledge that God is not a transcendent being would be an ethics without one particular messiah. We would not owe infinitely to God or to Christ. There would be no ‘salvation,’ no coming to terms with our debt to the other who is every other.

This ethics of the other then would be haunted by Judeo-Christian thought, but it would be without salvation. This ethics would be an ethics not based on calculation, where that be an earthly calculation of goods or ‘treasures’ stored in the heart or heaven. What is the use of referring to this ethics in the name of Christianity with all of its metaphysical connotations? It does seem that God is not only the other in the sense of the other person, but that we are also other to ourself and I think Derrida is close to Levinas and even Heidegger in this passage: “As soon as such a structure of conscience exists, of being-with-onself, of speaking [. . .] as soon as there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, and for me, then there is what I call God [. . .] God is in me, he is the absolute ‘me’ or ‘self’, he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard’s sense, subjectivity” (108). Would this be Christianity? Does it matter if we argue for it in its name? And should we?