The Stakes of Technicity

One of the major concerns of philosophical and cultural analysis in recent years has been the need to reflect upon the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalisation. Such a reduction radically reorganises classical and modern understandings of time and space, having effects in previously divergent, but now ever converging domains of experience. The recent return, for example, of religious faith and organisation is to be situated within these processes of technicization, the search for ‘identity’ and the desire for the ‘pure’ being predicated upon an uprooting movement of de-localisation and de-temporalization that is inextricably linked to present technico-economic invention. If this movement also accounts for the present upsurge in nationalist and ethnic-based politics, it calls at the same time for a re-elaboration of national and international law and political symbolisation (particularly the concept of citizenship) that would progressively articulate nternationalisation beyond present predominantly neo-liberal affirmations of ‘globalization’. How can philosophy help us in these re-inventions? Without grounding a particular political programme, how can philosophical reflection assist future orientation in and, ultimately, beyond this world?

To give a sense of direction to these two questions from out of the preceding comments, I wish to stress first:

• • that time and space are today explicitly political issues. Since this has always been the case (from the Athenian polis to the First International, politics has always been a matter of organising time and space), the contemporary technicization of the world is significant because it has brought time and space out of their ideological formations within the domain of the political. It locates them, instead, as the very question of the political;

• • that as contemporary processes of technicization (most evidently the teletechnologies) are radically affecting our experience of time and space, they are revealing more than any other technical processes within history that there is an essential, inextricable relation between time and space as such and technics as such-,

The Wolf Man's drama remains incomplete for its hero. But once set in motion, its action cannot be stopped; it must proceed in us inevitably to its final outcome. And here our dissatisfaction, spurred on by a providential deus ex machina, expounds, imagines, dreams. An irresistible force pulls us: to save the analysis of the Wolf-Man, to save ourselves. With time the fourth act opens within us, stretches before us, and in us comes to fulfillment, bringing salvation.

1. An Impromptu Walk Through a Verbarium: Cryptonyms and What They Hide

The authors arrived at this very juncture in the process of their writing, and planned to take up Freud's text again with their point of view - incorporation - in mind, when it occurred to them to consult a Russian dictionary. This gesture, performed out of conscientiousness, brought an extra load of unforeseen work, but also a host of altogether unexpected insights. First, it enabled the authors to refine their hypotheses about the genesis and working of incorporation in general and about the specific incorporation of which the Wolf Man was both actor and victim. But even more, it brought home the fact that someone could be driven to take on the same attitude toward words as toward things, namely, objects of love, and that such word-objects could upset a topography to the point where incorporation would seem a self-therapeutic measure.

Initially, the authors had wanted to be certain there was no hidden ambiguity behind the repeated retraction of the number that first appeared in the principal dream. The original number given is six, immediately corrected to seven, whereas on the well-known drawing the number is reduced to five. Six in Russian, SHIEST, also means perch, mast, and probably genitals, at least symbolically.

For a long time, for a very long time, I’ve feared having to say adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. I knew that my voice would tremble at the moment of saying it, and especially saying it aloud, right here, before him, so close to him pronouncing this word of adieu, this word ‘d-Dieu,’ which in a certain sense I get from him, a word that he will have taught me to think or to pronounce otherwise. By meditating upon what Emmanuel Levinas wrote about the French word ‘adieu’ - which I will recall in a few moments - I hope to find a sort of encouragement to speak here. And I would like to do so with unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as my sorrow.

Yet whom would one be addressing at such a moment? And in whose name would one allow oneself to do so? Oftentimes, those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one deep down inside to the dead friend or master, those who can be heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond; with tears in their voice, they sometimes speak familiarly [tutoient] to the other who keeps silent, calling upon him without detour or mediation, apostrophizing him, greeting him even or confiding in him. This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of the rhetoric of oration.

Philosophy tells itself stories. One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the memory that ensures its identity and its continued existence as something to be inherited, lived and passed on, consists in the novel repetition of certain basic narratives. And there is one story in particular that philosophy likes to tell, which allows philosophers to reanimate, theatrically and sometimes in front of their students, the passion that founds their profession and which, it seems, must be retold in order for philosophy to be capable of inheritance. It concerns, of course, Greece - or rather, as General de Gaulle might have said, a certain idea of Greece - and the passion of a dying Socrates.

Philosophy as de-traditionalization

Socrates, the philosopher, dies. The significance of this story is that, with it, we can see how philosophy constitutes itself as a tradition, affects itself with narrative, memory and the chance of a future, by repeating a scene of radical de-traditionalization. For Hegel and Nietzsche, to choose two examples of philosophers who affect themselves with a tradition - although from seemingly opposed perspectives - the historical emergence of philosophy, the emergence of philosophy into history, that is to say, the decisive break with mythic, religious or aesthetic world-views, occurs with Socrates’ death.

Jacques, I would like to ask you a question. Or rather, I would like to address a question to you.

It is an old and an obscure question. Old, because it near enough dates from the time when I happened to read what was, I think, the first text of yours to be published (it was ‘Force and Signification’, in Critique). Obscure because it is not, at the outset, a truly philosophical question. However, it is indeed a question, but I do not know how to define - even if I feel it with an inexplicable precision - what it touches upon: perhaps it has to do with the idiosyncratic or idiomatic part of what you write, a certain climate, a strange aura, a style or a tone-, also perhaps, but I say this without confidence (it is an impression, nothing more), it has to do with matters of profound, deep choices, tastes, a habitus or an ethos that are your own, let us say ‘proper’, but which one senses that you do not really master or calculate, that they are themselves brought about by carrying you along, that they inscribe you and write you when you write - or, which is the same thing, when you speak.

Today, I would like to attempt to elucidate this question. What settles it for me is, first of all, that I obstinately, that is to say passionately, believe in elucidation. I do not make myself clear, but I hear myself say, constantly: clarity is necessary. This must not - and cannot - simply be agreed.

1. Deconstruction is not what you think.

[…]

1.3. Deconstruction is not what you think. If what you think is a content, present to mind, in ‘the mind's presence-room’ (Locke). But that you think might already be Deconstruction.

2. Deconstruction is not (what you think if you think it is) essentially to do with language.

2.1. Nothing more common than to hear Deconstruction described as depending on ‘an extension of the linguistic paradigm’. ‘There is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida): proves it, obviously.

2.1.1. Everybody also knows this is not quite right. ‘Text’ is not quite an extension of a familiar concept, but a displacement or reinscription of it. Text in general is any system of marks, traces, referrals (don't say reference, have a little more sense than that). Perception is a text.

2.2. Think of recognition. Two requirements: that the object of recognition be in principle repeatable as the same object in a different context; that in the given context it be identifiable as different from the other elements of that context. (If it helps, think of the first as a temporal requirement, the second as spatial: but space and time do not determine the text, they are made possible by it.)

2.2.1. Presence would be that there be no difference, nor referral, no trace. Which is impossible. So presence would not be were there no difference, or referral, or trace. Presence is made possible by the trace, which makes pure presence impossible: each present moment is essentially constituted by its retention of a trace of a past moment. This is just as true of the ‘first’ present moment as of any other, which thereby has a relation with a past that never was present: absolute past.

The task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice. For a cause, however effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it bears on moral issues. The sphere of these issues is defined by the concepts of law and justice. With regard to the first of these, it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means, and, further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends. These observations provide a critique of violence with more - and certainly different - premises than perhaps appears. For if violence is a means, a criterion for criticizing it might seem immediately available. It imposes itself in the question whether violence, in a given case, is a means to a just or an unjust end. A critique of it would then be implied in a system of just ends. This, however, is not so. For what such a system, assuming it to be secure against all doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a principle, but, rather, the criterion for cases of its use. The question would remain open whether violence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends. To resolve this question a more exact criterion is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve.

HARASYM What political interventional force could or does deconstruction have in the political rewriting of the ethico-political, socio-historical text and its destination?

SPIVAK Deconstruction cannot found a political program of any kind. Deconstruction points out that in constructing any kind of an argument we must move from implied premises, that must necessarily obliterate or finesse certain possibilities that question the availability of these premises in an absolutely justifiable way. Deconstruction teaches us to look at these limits and questions. It is a corrective and a critical movement. It seems to me, also, that because of this, deconstruction suggests that there is no absolute justification of any position. Now, this is not the final say about the position. Deconstruction, also insistently claims that there cannot be a fully practicing deconstructor. For, the subject is always centered as a subject. You cannot decide to be decentered and inaugurate a politically correct deconstructive politics. What deconstruction looks at is the limits of this centering, and points at the fact that these boundaries of the centering of the subject are indeterminate and that the subject (being always centered) is obliged to describe them as determinate. Politically, all this does is not allow for fundamentalisms and totalitarianisms of various kinds, however seemingly benevolent. But it cannot be foundational. If one wanted to found a political project on deconstruction, it would be something like wishy-washy pluralism on the one hand, or a kind of irresponsible hedonism on the other. That's what would happen if you changed that morphology into a narrative. Yet in its suggestion that masterwords like ‘the worker’, or ‘the woman’ have no literal referents deconstruction is again a political safeguard.

To hear Ernest Jones tell it:

By all reports Freud was more fortunate than Fouis XIV, who lost large chunks of the roof of his mouth through bad dentistry and expelled as much food through his nose as he swallowed in the last years of his life. ‘We are astonished to learn of the objectionable smell which emanated from the Roi Soled,’ Freud wrote. He was lucky to have the advantage of a prosthesis, even if it had to be replaced many times after the diagnosis of and first major surgery for throat cancer in 1923, about the time of The Ego and the Id (SE XIX). He returned to Berlin for yet another replacement in 1929, after finishing Civilization and Its Discontents

Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things, and it proceeds by finding better and better explanations of the visible. Eventually, by way of microbiological accounts of the mental, and through causal accounts of the mechanisms of language, we shall be able to see the physicists’ accumulation of truths about the world as itself a transaction between these invisible things.

Here is another way of looking at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But, of course, it never is, any more than the true meaning of Coriolanus or the Dunciad or the Phenomenology of Spirit, or the Philosophical Investigations. What makes them physicists is that their writings are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature, not that they all are somehow ‘talking about the same thing,’ the invisibilia Dei sive naturae toward which their inquiries steadily converge.

Here is a way of thinking about right and wrong: the common moral consciousness contains certain intuitions concerning equality, fairness, human dignity, and the like, which need to be made explicit through the formulation of principles - principles of the sort which can be used to write legislation.

Today Is Tomorrow

Does Derrida's work constitute a line of demarcation running through the development of Western thought in a manner analogous to Kantianism, which separated dogmatic from critical philosophy? Are we once again at the end of a naivety, an unsuspected dogmatism that slumbered in the depths of what we took to be the critical spirit? We may well ask ourselves that question. The Idea, as the end of a series that begins in intuition but is unable to reach its end within it - the Idea ‘in the Kantian sense of the term’ as it is called - is, according to Derrida, operative at the heart of intuition itself. A transcendental semblance, engendering a metaphysics, produces an illusion at the heart of presence itself, which is incessantly lacking to itself. Is this a new break in the history of philosophy? It would also show its continuity. The history of philosophy is probably nothing but a growing awareness of the difficulty of thinking.

In the meantime, we tread a no-man's land, an in-between that is uncertain even of the uncertainties that flicker everywhere. Suspension of truths! Unusual times! We all feel this as we write, perhaps to the degree that we catch ourselves using familiar ideas with excessive caution, while the new critique would question both the sense of risk and the virtue of prudence. We become aware of a new style of thought as we read these exceptionally precise, yet very strange texts.

In the interview with Derek Attridge published in Acts of Literature (1992), Derrida talks about his time at school, in the 1940s, and his bewilderment when ‘beginning to discover this strange institution called literature’ (TSICL, 36). He states:

Bewilderment, then, faced with this institution or type of object which allows one to say everything. What is it? What ‘remains’ when desire has just inscribed something which ‘remains’ there, like an object at the disposal of others, one that can be repeated? What does ‘remaining’ mean? (TSICL, 36-7)

All of Derrida’s work can be read as an attempt to respond to this question of ‘remains’ - especially, but not only, to the question of ‘remains as a written thing’ (TSICL, 37). This is evident from the consistent deployment of a number of terms across his oeuvre, including the trace, remainder frestance], remains (reste), cinders (cendre), ruins and ghosts. While these terms remain singular and heterogeneous, to the extent that they arise in different contexts and pertain to different expositions, they all serve to highlight Derrida’s more general argument that remains are never simple and indeed that the notion of remains calls to be thought in terms of what was never present. Thus the challenge of Derrida’s work as a whole comprises the difficulty of thinking remains other than on the basis of what was once present. The trace, for example, is not the remains of something that was once present and might be rendered present once again: rather it is that which prevents any present, and any experience of presence, from being completely itself, from ever coinciding with itself.

In collections of essays on topics of current theoretical interest it's becoming quite common, if not yet a fully established part of the genre, to start off the piece with a little story about the final stages of its genesis. Such a story typically mentions the last-minute influence of a suggestion or critique by someone whose position, in terms of gender or race or sexual orientation, might give their opinion a legitimacy of a kind that the writer, by his or her own position, might be thought to lack. ‘I was discussing this article over breakfast with a lesbian friend, and she said …,’ writes someone who will thereby be identifying herself or himself as either a man, or straight, or both.

This type of gesture serves a number of functions. It seems to apologize for writers’ disqualifications to speak about what they are going to speak about, marking an awareness that what they say will be open to modification. And it also does the opposite, making up for the disqualifications through the medium of the qualified friend who puts things right, and supplying the text with a provisional certificate of political, or even general, correctness: with an input from every possible position, the chances are that you can add up all the elements into a complete account.

A third element is the setting of the little story, which is regularly given a context of domestic intimacy: this is the sort of friend I have breakfast with. This aspect contributes to the legitimation effect (‘some of my best friends…’), but it also provides a bit of human interest and narrative enigma, by hinting, through the provision of the homely detail, at the possibility of a personal story.