“Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a discipline—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.”
Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”
Yesterday I had the good fortune of talking through my upcoming conference paper with a fascinating guy. His wife is an academic at the uni. He has a PhD, but is employed in an administrative role. He is not a specialist in my discipline, far from it. But he is a specialist in performance – useful when considering how to deliver a paper.
It restores your hope in dialogue when you can discuss in depth, with someone who is not well read in your discipline, the results of your research. Good listening skills, good questions (what is your point? Why is it important? Why is it more than just ‘interesting’?) provide good conversation. It’s intense. My interlocutor had no interest in my paper, other than that he had offered to help grad students with their presentation skills. And yet, by forcing me to articulate forcefully (rather than timidly) why I thought what I did was important, he shed light for me on the necessity of making one’s point with vigour, not pulling away from criticism, from the possibility of being wrong. And if someone tells you are wrong, well then, at least they’ve told you.
Now, part of this could simply be my own character and issues coming through, of not stepping on people’s toes, and so on. But hey, it’s also built into the student or child’s experience, as Derrida (and Hegel. And Plato.) shows so eloquently.
The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.
I’m on… and confused.
The Aussie dollar at the moment is on rather good terms with the UK pound and the US$, so I’ve splashed out for quite a few books. Recently arrived are Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times, and Matthias Fritsch’s The Promise of Memory. Now, if only I can find time amidst a new baby, a research & conference trip to the States, and Annual reviews to read them all…
From the blurb of Promise of Memory:
This is one of the very few works that has taken Marx seriously as an interlocutor for both Benjamin and Derrida, and which has attempted, in considerable detail, to bind the former’s philosophy of history to the messianic politics elaborated by the latter two thinkers.
Happy times.
History is a science of ghosts—just ask Michelet. Or Hegel, for that matter. But the problem with adopting the vocabulary of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (for example, like Ethan Kleinberg does) is that one feels like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, seeing ghosts all the time. Not untrue, but unsatisfying. It took very little time for the signature line of the movie, “I see dead people”, to become the subject of mockery and spoofs. But the example of Specters, and other texts like Archive Fever, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, are important because in certain respects, Derrida looks like an intellectual historian. Certainly, an unconventional one, but one nevertheless. This is why Dominick LaCapra, Allan Megill, John Toews, Joan Wallach Scott, Carolyn Steedman and others identify his work as not only possessing ‘relevance’, but in certain ways possessing some kind of kinship to their own.
But for many historians, Derrida was, or is, simply a name that elicits the fears that we mentioned above; incursion, invasion, contamination, a fear that marks itself as an obsession with disciplinary boundaries and distinctions between history and literature, truth and fiction, and so on. In a very real sense, therefore, this essay addresses the community of historians. A community, according to Augustine, is defined by its common objects of love; in this case, rubrics of evidence and inference, the significance of the past in total, and as discrete events, the experience of archival work, past historians held in esteem, and so on.[1] To the degree that Derrida is an object of love—and hate—for historians, Derrida’s name therefore possesses a ‘portability’, that sees the citations of his work move around the discipline, lumped from debate to debate, as it marks out the boundaries of acceptable history.
Derrida’s name travels, therefore from an initial rapprochement with intellectual history, (which remains the closest trajectory with Derrida’s work in the disciplinary imagination), through sporadic engagements with feminist historiography. Despite a constant common perception of Derrida’s association with debates over the nature of historiographic narratives – here the supposed literary sense of Derrida’s work threw many into confusion – this substantial issue for historiography produced little material for engagement with Derrida until it lighted upon questions of the ethical and political significance of Derrida’s work.
[1] Cf. The introductory section of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ and Derrida’s description of philosophy as a community ‘of the question’, a community both interested in the status of questioning, marked by the task of questioning, and thus a community that loves the question to the point of it putting itself under question, Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1978)., 79-81.
Speaking on the link between the work of Derrida and identity, Peggy Kamuf, a trusted translator of Derrida’s work, glossed his work thus:
In practically everything Derrida has written over the last thirty years, this figure of circular appropriation of the self to itself without difference [she means the concept of identity] is shown to submit to the implacable work of deconstruction, by which is meant a transforming historical inscription that allows us to indicate with the term of identity only a relatively stabilized and never thoroughly stable state of being.[1]
I want to focus on the words “transforming historical inscription”. Deconstruction, or “everything Derrida has written over the last thirty years” is what is being described here, and this object performs an inscription in history, or with the words of history. There is, according to Kamuf, a kind of historical revision at work, a kind of historical work that consists in a transformation, in deconstruction.
We could plumb her gloss further, but what I want to bring your attention to is the fact that, in the eyes of a trusted translator and commentator of Derrida’s work, something historical is going on. I could multiply the list for you.
However, what is interesting is that when one considers the thoughts of those who work “in history” when they address Derrida’s work, they seem adamant that there is nothing historical going on.
But perhaps this is to be expected. Historians largely are too busy sorting through archives, political, economic, social and cultural data to waste the time needed to understand Derrida’s work. Although it has softened in recent decades, the antagonism between history and theory is well known. Nothing new there.[2]
So, in search of some explanation of the “historical” element of Derrida we turn to the historiographical theory journals, like History and Theory, or any of the numerous historiography primers. And yet, the primers are disappointing, and History and Theory’s archive possesses very little; despite many offhand references and confused denunciations, only one book of Derrida’s – in a career of over forty years, and dozens of publications in translation – is reviewed within its pages. No interpretive essay outlining his view of history, or empiricism, or the archive even, is forthcoming.[3]
Ok, so this is a draft intro for my paper at the upcoming United States Intellectual History conference in New York. I wonder if I’m being a little condescending towards historians here?
[1] Kamuf, “Violence, Self-Determination and the Question of Justice: on Specters of Marx”, 1997, 271.
[2] Often characterised as an antagonism between “empiricism” and philosophy. But the reasons for the antagonism are neither obvious, nor simple. For an account of empiricism in Derrida’s work, see Hobson, “Deconstruction, Empiricism, and the Postal Services, (1982).
[3] Francois Cusset describes the discipline of history in America – and philosophy, too, incidently – as a site of “resistance” to “French Theory”. Compare the unusual example of Carolyn Steedman on Archive Fever, “Something she called a fever”, AHR 2001. Also, note Kleinberg’s recent essay for History and Theory on Derrida’s “ghostly” reception (2007).
In about a month, I’ll be trialling a few of my ideas at the United States Intellectual History conference in New York. It’ll be a great forum to trot out my work on the reception of Derrida for a few reasons: 1. Intellectual historians were the only subset of US historians who moved towards taking Derrida’s work seriously for history, 2. This is what most historians would recognise my work as, and 3. within history, generally, the so-called linguistic turn is now very much passe, ie. ideal for an historical audience, that is, it can be viewed from a comfortable distance.
The strange thing, and one of the things I wish to address, is the fact that the precise thing that I wish to do (read certain parts of Derrida’s reception within the US), is in many ways, what I read Derrida as doing. Now, before you object to this, I hasten to add that I am not necessarily practising a reception as it is perhaps done in literary studies. Then again, maybe I am. If this is your thing, I’d love to hear from you.
If Derrida read texts in order to see what was at work within them, to understand the necessary development of their work, and what exceeded that work, in order to listen, to transform and translate, in order to bring about another tomorrow, then, in an obscure way, and with many qualifications around the notion of ‘history’, then he was practising a kind of history – but one that was largely not recognised as such by those who work under that name.
This puts us in the very strange position of using Derrida’s own work to interrogate his work and its reception, the hospitality extended to him, furnishing us with the concepts and approaches that might help us to understand why his work was or wasn’t received in the ways that it was.
A suggestion by one of my supervisors sent me back to Derrida’s little essay on cosmopolitanism (an address delivered in 1996 to the International Parliament of Writers). In it Derrida, briefly, schematically, but very lucidly, draws out his thinking on hospitality with respect to the European tradition of cosmopolitanism.
I happened to have a copy of Alex Thomson’s Deconstruction and Democracy lying around at home, which has a chapter on hospitality and cosmoplitanism, so read that too. Revisiting Derrida’s essay was such a good idea (my supervisor knew what she was doing, telling me to read it) – such a brilliant example of Derrida’s thinking at work in concrete political situations, with concrete (conditional) inscriptions of what Derrida calls unconditional laws. But Thomson’s chapter, too, was excellent. In particular, its way of drawing together other texts of Derrida’s to show patterns that I had not otherwise noticed. In particular, it made sense of sections of Specters of Marx – the 10 ‘plagues’, and the discussions of the institutionalisation of Marx-as-philosopher – that connected these to wider analyses.
Matthias Fritsch, author of a very interesting book that deals with Specters, The Promise of Memory, has a review of Thomson’s book here. (I love the NDPR.) He makes some interesting criticisms of Thomson’s book, which, not having read all of, I cannot claim to comment on. However, he also makes some interesting general comments about the process of reception, inheritance and reading – the situation we find ourselves in with respect to Derrida.
Derrida scholarship finds it hard to get beyond the disjunction between critical yet unfaithful and faithful but not (yet) sufficiently critical and probing responses. While the former, as reactions to his death about a year ago amply demonstrated once more, is often too impatient to avoid setting up a straw man to criticize, the latter, while clearly to be preferred, tends to be so close to Derrida so as to content itself with explicating his arguments rather than also questioning their basic assumptions and effects. [...]
[A]nalytical persistence and acuity, however, remains a promise of work on Derrida that is, by and large, still caught between the poles of faithful exegesis and impatient criticism. Since we can progress toward critical yet faithful discussion only by way of the former route, Thomson’s book is a welcome event.
These two comments operate basically as parentheses of the entire review. Mid review, while considering Thomson’s description of deconstruction as a form of hospitality, Fritsch observes:
Thomson remains exegetical even when he confronts Derrida … his guiding assumption always is that Derrida is right … even in cases where his book lacks the space to give others a fair hearing. … This might be disturbing given Thomson’s suggestion as to the hospitable openness inherent in Derrida’s own reading practice. … Thomson is here not interested in treating thinkers other than Derrida with the same principle of charity
The bind and division which one finds in hospitality, the cosmopolitan, or the host of other concepts that Derrida analyses, is also present here in the choices made about reading. For Fritsch points out that the very helpfulness of Thomson’s book consists in the point that
[G]iven how much we still have to learn about Derrida’s incisive contributions to political philosophy, Thomson’s faithful approach is helpful in part for the very reason of this neglect.
In reading, commentary and criticism there are pragmatic constraints. There are concrete rules which one must abide by in order to say something that will successfully communicate the point. There is a need to privilege the writer, concept, topic under consideration. One must select this author and not that as significant. One must make assumptions that allow one construct an argument and make a point, even when those assumptions make that point tremble. Which is to say, there is an economy of violence at work.
These are basic points, of course. (Still worth formulating however – especially for a PhD student!) But where does this leave us in the position that Fritsch locates us as inheritors of Derrida’s work? ‘Persistent and faithful criticism’ - this sounds to me rather like Derrida’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, all pursued in the establishing of a strategy that he later applied to particular political problems.
It strikes me that what is required is patience. Reading, commentary, criticism takes a lot of time. This is precisely Fritsch’s point. Time in which the student musters the courage to speak to the master (Derrida says something like this to Foucault at the beginning of his ‘Cogito’.) Youth has time, while in his later years Derrida remarked that he was conscious of there being less and less time. Hence his increasingly urgent political engagements.
Thus there is a rhythm and history to scholarship that one cannot set aside. One mourns all the more when it is interrupted (eg. Merleau-Ponty). And it is developed across many ‘books’. Hopefully the demands of the university, intent on marketing itself and its products, does not distract either Fritsch or Thomson from producing more work in this. In the mean time, I hope to read (note to self: patiently!) their first instalments.
The distinction between critical and speculative philosophy of history (by Walsh) sent me to the dictionary, tracing the history of the word speculative. Via French from Latin, the word is – obviously enough – etymologically tied to sight. Just like theory. Speculari, to spy out, specula, a look out, a watch tower. In the 17th C. a theory is also a sight, a spectacle, an event. Both come to mean contemplation, reflection, inward sight, or mental viewing.
And so, the word transitions neatly into the very act of not seeing. To speculate is to see not according to experience, and eventually, the very image of a blind groping, unreliable, insubstantial, the very opposite of knowing. The very word speculative is speculative, it observes the dialectic at work within itself, the sight that is not sight, while still illustrating the very truth of the speculative.
Now, we finished the last post off with the geometrical object acquiring a “living linguistic body”, and with this being the manner in which it became there for everybody. Now we need to have a closer look at this process.
Husserl not only lists the objects of science as ideal bodies, but, interestingly, the “constructions of fine literature”, (what should we make of that?! This is a point that astonishes Derrida, too). These objects aren’t simply repeatable in so many examples. They are actually the same object, repeated over. Regardless of translation. The same object is accessible and graspable by all. How so?
The first geometer?
Husserl sidesteps the problem of the origin of language here, and begins with remarks on the relationship between language as a function of human civilisation, and the world as the horizon of existence.
We are, by virtue of being “awake” in the world, conscious of it as the horizon of our experience. Even when we are not fully aware of it, it is just there. Standing out against this horizon are our fellow men and women. They are the “others” whom I recognise as “my” others. They are my neighbours. I relate to them, I empathise, I can understand them and communicate with them. Thus common language belongs to this horizon. “One is conscious of civilisation from the start as an immediate and mediate linguistic community.” And through this, the horizon is an “open” and “endless” one. Within consciousness “mature normal civilisation” is privileged, and it is here objectivity functions. The objective world is what is there for everybody. It can be pointed to, and talked about. Objectivity therefore presupposes humans and common language.
All of this being presupposed, the Geometer can therefore express his internal structure. But again, how does it become more than psychic. I can express my psychic states and have them understood by others without them becoming “ideal”. How does the geomtric structure “arrive at an intersubjective being of its own” which is anything but a real psychic object?
The answer is repetition. Intrapersonally, psychically, the original self-evidence of the geometric object had no persisting existence. It was there, for a while was retained, and then faded. But it did not become nothing! It could be reawakened. Recollection can live-through the past experience once more, with greater and greater clarity. If it can relive the original self-evidence, then there is (get this for an oxymoron) an original coincidence. A concurrent actual production, that produces the self evidence of identity. Which is to say that the geometer remembers something he did not know, and in the process comes to know that he does know it, but that the acquisition of this knowledge occured in the past, before he came to know it. Mind boggling.
This internal repetition establishes the capacity for repetition at will, along with the self evidence of identity. Thanks to expression, empathy, and language, this can then be understood by the geometers fellow men and women. The one structure has become common to many.
But persisting existence is still lacking. What is needed is the continuing-to-be of the geometric object, even if nobody in particular happens to have realised it in self-evidence lately. It needs to be self sufficient, it can’t be relying on the fickle minds of humans now, can it?
Enter writing. Writing effects a transformation in the ideal object. It lifts “human communalisation” to a new level. In the ability to reawaken significations, the written sign gives a passive signification. This is like the process of association in memory – association can prompt recollections of otherwise forgotten activities that are given passively. Ie. They are not sought activiely in memory and recalled at will. It arises as a clear and passive memory. This power belongs to every human being, and so to, does the ability to therefore reawaken and experience passively – or actively – the geometric object. The object has become sedimented in writing.
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Now, I remember halfway through last year Rough Theory and Praxis were giving Specters of Marx a thorough wringing, and one of the points that came up was Derrida’s way of reading repetition. I can’t find the links after a little searching, but in any case, I think here in Husserl we’re starting to see the roots of it. Perhaps, though, they won’t thank me for bringing it up again!
Before we get on to Derrida’s commentary on the Origin, lets take a look at Husserl’s text.
The opening reference to Galileo puts us within the thinking of The Crisis. The specific question of the piece, ‘the origin of geometry’ is an unexpectedly historical one’. Husserl has no interest in the ‘historical’ first geometers, even if they could be determined (which is highly unlikely). What Husserl is interested in is the genesis of the idea, the original sense of geometry – the point at which it ceased to be a psychic object – in the head of one ‘inventor’, and became an ‘ideal object’, accessible for everyone, at any time, in any place or language, and the manner in which it did so. What are the conditions of such a genesis, and what might have been lost in the process?
Now, there are a range of moves which Husserl needs to assure, in order to justify his investigation, and provide it with a sure footing, and it’s fascinating to watch Husserl’s mind at work – so rigorous, methodical and careful. Geometry takes on an exemplary role in this investigation: through this investigation Husserl is hoping to “take possession of the meaning, method, and beginning of philosophy, the one philosophy to which our life seeks to be and ought to be devoted.” Not only does the origin of geometry reveal problems of meaning, science, history of science, and universal history in general (as if these weren’t enough!), but it also merges with the problem of the securing of the unity and meaning of philosophy itself.
Firstly, Husserl must establish the manner in which he might “reawaken” such origins. He proceeds through the function of traditions and their horizon of human civilisation. For geometry, as for all sciences, their beginnings are contained, “submerged” within their traditions. From their first “acquisition” onwards, all acquisitions of a science contain their validity as part of a continuous synthesis, sedimenting previous acquisitions beneath the most recent. Thus, geometry, though ideal, must have had an historical beginning.
But within its meaning as science, geometry includes its progression from acquisition to acquisition. Therefore, at the first acquisition, geometry was not present in its full meaning as science. Which is to say, the inventor of geometry would not be aware of geometry as a science, while the first inheritors of geometry as science had already received it from the past, already existing.
Even the successful realisation of geometrical self evidence within the head of the inventor does not count as ideal objectivity. Psychic objectivity is not ideal objectivity. Rather, it is through language – and therefore within the context of an intersubjective and linguistic community, that the geometrical object receives its “linguistic living body”.
