Throughout the essays of
Derrida that we have read, his writing seeks to free the verb from all the
other forms of conceptualizing language that restrict it (cf. Foucault 1989:
104 et passim). In that the creative force of being itself will always move faster
than the signs with which we try to catch and categorize it, Derrida sees
written representation as always at variance with the thing that it represents.
Even the verb “to be” enacts the
strangulation of life outside of language each time we voice it. However, unlike
Foucault, Derrida unequivocally views the reconciliation of being and language as
neither possible nor desirable. For him,
we only move toward the evocatively defined “invisible interior of poetic freedom”
(1978: 7) by throwing ourselves beyond the origin of language. While he agrees with Nietzsche that language reduces
life to language in the translation of drawing breath into the verb “to be” he does
not want us to see this movement as the origin of either metaphor or language (383 ad 7). Rather,
from within the confines of representation, Derrida urges us to find freedom in
the irreducibility of life to language and the infinite play of signs that
emerge from the space between the two.
Given
that this critique of representation relies on discrediting the fixed relation
between signifier and signified, it is no surprise that “Structure, Sign, and
Play” begins with an abusive appropriation of an author, Montaigne, and text, “On
Experience,” with which he engages throughout but nowhere else names. With his
attribution of the proclamation “we need to interpret interpretations more than
to interpret things” to Montaigne, Derrida not only inserts a period that the
original does not contain so as conceal the fact that he has taken it out of context,
he entirely reverses the meaning of the original. Whereas Derrida would have us
believe that Montaigne wants us to engage with representation as the only medium through which thing can be known, the original tells us to the contrary that “there is more trouble in interpreting
interpretations than in interpreting the things themselves, and there are more
books on books than on any other subject” (1993: 349). Yet, this in no way
diminishes the argument that Derrida will make and more to the point puts into practice the form of
destructive reading that he offers us. If Claude Levi Strauss’ primary
failure resides in the fact that he will always “preserve as an instrument
something whose truth value he criticizes” (1978: 359), then we can read Derrida as critiquing
the instrumentalization of truth as value by casting it out.
With this form of
reading, Derrida evokes the tradition of western thought apophatically and at a variance so as to resist the call of truth value towards which critique risks reverting. Derrida makes this danger clear when he writes that one cannot simply expel the sign from metaphysics because the concepts of metaphysics are not "atoms" but systems . If we borrow from it in order to overturn it, we must be aware that each one its elements "brings along with it the whole of metaphysics." For Derrida, the sign that the philosopher sought to do away with will now reaper as the dark center of her new system. It is for this reason that we must take the whole of the preceding system into account and discover where it has failed to reduce sign to thought: in the case of metaphysics the sensible to the intelligible (355). We can see this at play in the founding moment of metaphysics in which the transcendent Forms (eidoi) that Aristotle rejects in Plato suddenly become his shadowy notion of substance (ousia) which predicates (arche kai aitia) being (to on) in the process of becoming (to gignesthai). For Derrida, the crisis that metaphysics constantly suffers repeats the fact that Aristotle's attempt to bring Plato's distant intelligible forms back into the sensible world ultimately displaces them into the very fiber of sensible experience. This process cycles throughout the history of thought and accounts for Husserl's return to Plato through phenomenology and Heidegger's critique of him through the pre-socratics (32).
This then leads us into a second trap at the base of western philosophy, the history of thought itself or the structure of thought as its self-knowledge. As soon as thought takes itself as its object in relation to nature and the various signs that represent culture, its history becomes that of the struggle between the two poles of that relation: we can think of Latour's recent argument that nature and culture are one object-one which just so happens to look a lot like western culture. Before Plato, Gorgias had already called language "a powerful drug" which forces us to believe in notions that have no basis in reality but never-the-less determine our thoughts and actions (vid. Encomium of Helen). Derrida's evocation of the sophists here not only causes us to realize that they had problematized the forms of knowledge (technai) that would make Plato's system possible in advance of it, but that paradoxically Plato's system could not exist without their critique and the need for a beyond writing that it generated.
Derrida's paradoxical view of relationship of thought to structure implies that the spontaneous aporia which arise within western philosophy are neither generated by one nor the other, but are endemic to the writing in which they are conveyed. In so far as we have never unearthed the dark passage of history at which life became metaphor, the origin of history (419), writing has always taken as its object "emptiness as the situation of literature" (8). Yet, this emptiness is not sterile. Derrida tells us that "writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning outside itself within itself" and the sole definition of knowledge (34). Like Zarathustra's Untergang (down-going; destruction, 35) into life and the pure force of Dionysian inspiration "tears out its eyes" at the emergence of its Apollonian double (representation), Derrida would have us write compulsively with the knowledge of our failure presupposed. Contrary to this form of writing, Derrida offers us the structuralist Rousset who understood "theatrical or novelistic movement as Aristotle understood movement in general," reducible to a teleological structure (24).
We can return now to Montaigne and the passage that Derrida abused... like Derrida he argues that metaphysic's failure to see its own ground or lack there of has caused its systems to swirl around their inane (or kenos) as an "infinity of atoms" whose dissonance forces us towards a new form of writing that "looks upon itself" (1993: 349), the essay....
LACUNA, ARGUMENT, THINGS.
Provocatively, Foucault uses the same Montaigne passage with which Derrida begins "Structure, Sign, and Play" in order to advance his idea that in the 16th century knowledge "consisted in relating one form of language to another form of language; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak" (1989: 44).
More on what Foucault is doing.
I argue that Foucault and Derrida both see radical potential in Montaigne's moment of epistemic disorientation into which Descartes will insert the Cogito. However, both see within Montaigne the impasse of a scandalous modern subjectivity as an "enslaved sovereign" (1989: 340) pinioned to a notion of a progressive history of ideas that paradoxically affirms and denies its agency (cf. 361). ...
LACUNA, ARGUMENT, THINGS.
TBC
This then leads us into a second trap at the base of western philosophy, the history of thought itself or the structure of thought as its self-knowledge. As soon as thought takes itself as its object in relation to nature and the various signs that represent culture, its history becomes that of the struggle between the two poles of that relation: we can think of Latour's recent argument that nature and culture are one object-one which just so happens to look a lot like western culture. Before Plato, Gorgias had already called language "a powerful drug" which forces us to believe in notions that have no basis in reality but never-the-less determine our thoughts and actions (vid. Encomium of Helen). Derrida's evocation of the sophists here not only causes us to realize that they had problematized the forms of knowledge (technai) that would make Plato's system possible in advance of it, but that paradoxically Plato's system could not exist without their critique and the need for a beyond writing that it generated.
Derrida's paradoxical view of relationship of thought to structure implies that the spontaneous aporia which arise within western philosophy are neither generated by one nor the other, but are endemic to the writing in which they are conveyed. In so far as we have never unearthed the dark passage of history at which life became metaphor, the origin of history (419), writing has always taken as its object "emptiness as the situation of literature" (8). Yet, this emptiness is not sterile. Derrida tells us that "writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning outside itself within itself" and the sole definition of knowledge (34). Like Zarathustra's Untergang (down-going; destruction, 35) into life and the pure force of Dionysian inspiration "tears out its eyes" at the emergence of its Apollonian double (representation), Derrida would have us write compulsively with the knowledge of our failure presupposed. Contrary to this form of writing, Derrida offers us the structuralist Rousset who understood "theatrical or novelistic movement as Aristotle understood movement in general," reducible to a teleological structure (24).
We can return now to Montaigne and the passage that Derrida abused... like Derrida he argues that metaphysic's failure to see its own ground or lack there of has caused its systems to swirl around their inane (or kenos) as an "infinity of atoms" whose dissonance forces us towards a new form of writing that "looks upon itself" (1993: 349), the essay....
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the human state vain and ridiculous, never appeared in public except with a mocking and ribald expression. Heraclitus, on the other hand, felt pity and compassion for this state of ours, so his expression was always melancholy and his eyes full of tears.Alter/ ridebat, quoties a limine moverat unum/ protuleratque pedem; flebat contrarius alter
I prefer the first humour, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and is more condemnatory of us than the other. I do not think we can ever be despised as much as we deserve. Wailing and commiseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at we consider worthless. There is, in my opinion, not so much misery in us as emptiness, not so much malice as folly (132-3).
LACUNA, ARGUMENT, THINGS.
Provocatively, Foucault uses the same Montaigne passage with which Derrida begins "Structure, Sign, and Play" in order to advance his idea that in the 16th century knowledge "consisted in relating one form of language to another form of language; in restoring the great, unbroken plain of words and things; in making everything speak" (1989: 44).
More on what Foucault is doing.
I argue that Foucault and Derrida both see radical potential in Montaigne's moment of epistemic disorientation into which Descartes will insert the Cogito. However, both see within Montaigne the impasse of a scandalous modern subjectivity as an "enslaved sovereign" (1989: 340) pinioned to a notion of a progressive history of ideas that paradoxically affirms and denies its agency (cf. 361). ...
LACUNA, ARGUMENT, THINGS.
TBC
What's the 1993 text you're quoting?
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