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What binds “Choreographies,” “Otobiographies” and “The Time of the King” together is what Derrida calls “aporetic structure.” They all confront the aporia at the heart of the thought of sexual difference, of signature and authorial legacy (and pedagogy, too), and, of the gift. Of the three, “Choreographies” is foundational. There, Derrida confronts the question of truth as living feminine, and the underlying question of sexual difference: How is it that we come to think “sexual difference” at all?
Derrida begins by establishing that “sexual difference” has comm0nly been thought as a subset of an overarching “human” problem (a problem that we will see figured again and against as a slippery neuter, since the “neutral term” always seems to conceal a phallocentric assumption). This human problem is the ontological difference. Derrida asserts that we are not to treat sexual difference as a regional difference of the ontological. He reasserts this later in the essay when he confronts Christie McDonald on the question of topologies: she is interested in the woman’s “place”–that is, how to get women out from the kitchen–but Derrida is interested in something else entirely. He proposes, for feminism, the notion of atope– an anarchic dancing without place, which allows for productive confrontation with past tradition.
Changes in language
When McDonald asks Derrida a predicable–indeed, necessary, question about “…the complicated relationship of a practical politics to the kinds of analysis that we have been considering (specifically the \’deconstructive\’ analysis implicit in your discussion)” Derrida turns to language for the future of feminism. He asserts that some sorts of feminism have taken up the cry of a neutralization of sexual difference as a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung–the final countenancing of the asymmetry of sexual difference. However, Derrida argues that this Aufhebung of neutralization erases sexual difference in an alarming way. Neutralization of the vocabulary of sexual difference is not at all neutral: ”One insures phallocentric mastery under the cover of neutralization every time…and such phallocentrism adorns itself now and then, here and there, with an appendix: a certain kind of feminism” (175).
Thus, the danger out of which feminism must wrestle its saving power is a linguistic danger–a danger of terms, a danger of too careful desire to protect against bad dissimulation. By denying the terms of sexual difference their dissimulation, feminism also prevents that necessary first step of différance, in which the marginalized terms can be taken up against the dominant, sedimented terms. The second step of différance is the production of new terms. Derrida is vehement about one thing: this second step does not look like a Hegelian synthesis–it is no negation. The problem with the synthesis/neutralization of sexual difference model is that it holds itself to the purificatory power of the single word–the monolithic word on sexual difference, on the success of feminism, that binds one to thinking of a place for sexual difference.
Derrida gives two models of a “neutralization” of sexual difference that each do violence against the promises of feminism in different ways. The first account belongs to Emmanuel Levinas. According to Derrida’s Levinas, the question of sexual difference invites a thinking that has two strata. The first is the the level of humanity as the initial space of ethical obligation, not asexual but nondifferentiated. This neutral strata, paradoxically, receives the male marking. Second order is the space of sexual difference. As Derrida clarifies in his footnote, Derrida develops Levinas’s idea of the secondariness of sexual difference even more in his Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas. Here, we get Levinas’s story of Ish/Isha, the first man and woman in Genesis. For Levinas, “the female Isha begins with Ish: not that the feminine originates in the masculine, but rather the division into masculine and feminine–the dichotomy–starts with what is human [...]” (177). Thus, it is not “woman who is secondary,” but rather the “relationship with woman as woman, and that does not belong to the primordial level of the human element” (177).
Heidegger, by contrast, is silent on the matter of sexual difference, yet “…the pauses coming from his silence on these questions punctuate or create the spacing out of a powerful discourse” (179). Derrida seems to praise Heidegger, in some ways, for risking so much with his bare discourse of silence. “Dasein is neither the human being (a thought recalled earlier by Levinas) nor the subject, neither consciousness nor the self [le moi] (whether conscious or unconsious). These are all determinations that are dervied from and occur after the Dasein” (179). In lectures later, Heidegger disrupts this silence to say that Dasein is definitively neuter: “…Dasein is neither of the two sexes. But this a-sexuality is not the indifference of empty invalidity, the annuling negativity of an indifferent ontic nothingness…” (179). Heidegger’s conception of the neuter at first appears to treat sexual difference as secondary two and derivative from ontological difference. In fact, sexuality is one of the may “anthropological” characteristics that is bracketed out by the determination of Dasein (“Geschlect I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” 11). However, Heidegger later establishes that this neutrality is not a negation: in other words, the neutral Dasein is not (precisely) neuter in terms of being a-sexual, without sexuality. Rather, Heidegger calls the sexual neutrality of Dasein a “positive charged power”–it is the power of the origins. What is derivative or secondary to this “positivity” [Positivität] and “potency” [Mächtigkeit] of Dasein as origin is instead sexual duality itself–precisely that which is produced by the language of sexual binarism. In “Geschlect I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” another examination of Heidegger’s treatment of the “dissemination” of original Dasein into sexed being, Derrida argues that neutral Dasein is a certain sexual “something else”: Dasein is the promise of multiplicity (19).
Binarism and Doubleness
Here, we have a move that we do not see in the rest of our Derrida essays–doubleness is something that is supplementary, is secondary; or at least this is how we find the terms that point out the doubleness. The doubleness of Nietzsche’s signature (comprised of the patronym of the dead father, and the promise of the living feminine) or the doubleness required by a University student, are more difficult to spot. This is because they dissemble under the mark of a single sign–under one signature which looks both forwards and backwards; under a single date which marks both the limited biology of the author and the immorality of his biography.
How is it then, that we are to avoid the dissemination of the neutral Dasein, of originary ontological difference, into the marked binary of sexual difference? Derrida argues that we must learn a different way of speaking of sexuality—a sort of polysemy of multiple signatures that will bring about a radical polysexuality: “it has always seemed to me that the voice itself had to be divided in order to say that which is given to thought or speech…” (183). This polysemous discourse itself becomes a kind of guarantor of the multiple disseminations of sexual difference, and preserves the wild, choreographic dance of the living feminine: …I have felt the necessity for a chorus, for a choreographic text with polysexual signatures. I felt this every time that a legitimacy of the neuter, the apparently least suspect sexual neutrality of \’phallocentric or gynocentric\’ mastery, threatened to immobilize (in silence), colonize, stop or unilateralize in a subtle or sublime manner what remaisn no doubt irreducibly dissymmetrical” (183). This is in keeping with the dream that we may push beyond binarism into a life and expression of sexual difference that is “no longer discriminating,” but is instead “sexual otherwise, beyond the binary difference that goerns the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond bisexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality…” (184). Derrida’s dream does not just mark a hope for a different perception of sexually marked bodies. Rather, his dream is a dream for the break-up of a compensatory binarism in the way that we speak about sexuality. His dream is a dream of movement, in which multiple sexualities blend and divide, and “multiply the body of each individual’” (184). In short: “I would like to believe in sexually marked voices” (184).
Strangely, Derrida shuts this hope down by the last paragraphs of “Choreographies”—he says that this dream of the innumerable is only a dream. These last utterances deserve a special sort of close reading:
But where would the “dream” of the innumerable come from, if it is indeed a dream? Does the dream itself not prove that what is dreamt of must be there in order for it to prove the dream? Then, too, I ask you, what kind of a dance would there be, r would there be one at all, if the sexes were not exchanged according to rhythms that vary considerably? In a quite rigorous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however, because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would remain (185).
A number of things are happening here: Derrida asks how it is possible that we could “dream” of radical polysemy, of an infinite multiplicity of sexually marked voices, against the fear of a “merciless closure” that locks us back in the binary and asks us instead to learn to “love instead of dreaming the innumerable” (185)? Derrida argues that this may be because there is something of the dream already present–how else could we dream it? Derrida’s final question, then, is one of the possibility of the system of “rhythms that vary considerably” making up this dance of sexual multiplicity. He thinks that they must come through a sort of exchange–the multiplicity of rhythms, the dissemination of multiple-voiced sexuality and multiple-sexed bodies seems to rely on an exchange of rhythms. Derrida’s fear, at this juncture, is that this system of exchange begins to look, once more, much like a Hegelian Aufhebung–a synthesis of one sexual rhythm into the next–instead of a multiplication.
What is it, then, that makes possible the dream of the choreographic? Derrida argues that “exchange alone could not suffice…because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would remain…” (185). Derrida’s dream, at the very least–a dream which he is willing to countenance–is of a sexual multiplicity that keeps on giving, like the dream of the inexhaustible gift. This sexual multiplicity, this atopical, non-regional choreography, marks its behavior with erratic leaps. It cannot be circumscribed into an economy of exchange; it is too lithe for combinatory logic.
Derrida does not solve the problem of the origins of our dream of multiplicity in “Choreographies.” But, if we turn to “The Time of the King,” we are faced with a startlingly similar problem: how is it that we can dream of the absolute gift (and its correlates–time, Being, the es Gibt of presence), despite said gift’s being already implicated in a perverse economy of exchange? Before we head into “King,” I want to make a brief remark towards the naming of a war: these two structures appear to be fundamentally at odds in the Derrida essays we have read. How might the anarchy of the dance, the exceptional status of the living feminine, of sexual multiplicity, of the gift, be reconciled with the perpetual stasis of the circle of economy, of exchange? In spite of the circular economy’s pervasiveness, Derrida argues (in “King”) that we can still think the aporetic–we can dream (and speak) about the placeness, endless progress of th dance that leaps in the blinks, or can speak of the impossible gift which requires a double-forgetting to even be thought. How is it, though, that the thought of the gift can escape from the circle? How does this impossibility work?
III. “The Time of the King”
“If [time] shares this aporetic paralysis with the gift, if neither the gift nor time exist as such, then the gift that there can be cannot in any case give time, since it is nothing. If there is something that can in no cas be given, it is time, since it is nothing and since in any case it does not properly belong to anyone; if certain persons or certain social classes have more time than others–and this is finally the most serious stake of political economy–it is certainly not time itself that they possess” (28).
“Perhaps there is nomination, language, thought, desire or intention, only there where there is this movement still for thinking, desiring, naming that which gives itself neither to be known, experienced, nor lived–in the sense in which presence, existence, determination regulate the economy of knowing, experiencing, and living. In this sense one can think, desire, and say only the impossible, according to the measureless measure of the impossible” (29).
In this section of the essay, Derrida grows terribly confusing. He seems to insinuate two things: first, that the phenomenon of gift is impossible. As he reminds us earlier in the essay, the gift annuls itself–if the donor “recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift” (13). This constitutes what Derrida calls a “problematic displacement”–where is the site of the gift; and what is it that makes it possible our constant speaking and desiring of a pure form of gift giving? Why can Madame de Maintenant express her desire to give all her time–time which she does not anyway have, time which she cannot anyway give–to Saint-Cyr–when it would take a certain sort of double-forgetting beyond even repression (“absolute forgetting–a forgetting that also absolves, that unbinds absolutely and infinitely more, therefore, than excuse, forgetting, or acquittal”) to even make the gift not appear to itself?
(Even so, Derrida tells us that this absolute forgetting is not even pure. There is alsways some sort of preservation involved in forgetting. We must remember that a repression of the idea of the gift is not enough: even this puts the thought of the gift “in reserve, by keeping or saving up what is forgotten, repressed, or censured” (16). This repression is rather a “systematic or topological move” which “keeps” the meaning of the gift in the unconscious, and thus effects its annulment in language.
What is this dream of absolute forgetting? Derrida tells us that this dream of absolute forgetting is itself as impossible as the dream of pure gift, since this forgetting must happen “in an instant, in an instant that no double does not belong to the economy of time, in a time without time, in such a way that forgetting forgets, that it forgets itself, but also in such a way that this forgetting, without being something present, presentable, determinable, sensible or meaningful, is not nothing” (17). Derrida reminds us that the space of this absolute forgetting is not any of the normally thinkable categories of philosophy or psychology. Rather, gift and absolute forgetting are bound up in one another: “the gift would also be the condition of forgetting” (17). Moreover, the possible impossibility of these two co-related terms comes from the fact that we can speak the word gift: “it is on basis of what takes shape in the name gift that one could hope thus to think forgetting” (17). Our problem then–both with the gift and, as we saw earlier, in “Choreographies,”–is a problem of language.
And it turns out that language is also a problem for Being. This is because Being is also a spectral effect of language, which “gives itself to be thought on the condition of being nothing (no present-being, no being-present)–and of time which, even in what is called its ‘vulgar’ determination, from Aristotle to Heidegger, is always defined in the paradoxia or rather the aporia of what is without being, of what is never present or what is only scarcely and dimly” (27).
Derrida seems to be making room for the possibility of the dream–the possibility that an impossible hope might want to be spoken, and might cut across the limitations of presence just enough to spur us to move presence into some other form, to press it against its limits. These are the many dreams of Derrida: the dreams of a more careful and full realm of interpretation, the dream of a doubled and disseminated signature, the dream of the dual risk and responsibility of the author who makes his signature and at the same time wills all dissimulation, all intention and all perversion in its many returns, who wills his own death and his own continuing life in a changed form–who wills his life, as Nietzsche did, to the masks of posterity, to the Nazis, to Derrida, to the multiple body of the living feminine. This is the dream that we might will affirmation. So too does Derrida hold the dream of the impossible multiplication of sexually marked voices: this is the dream of a radical polysemy that can slip the yoke and spoil the joke of combinatory logic; this is the dream of a wanting-to-say, of a speaking of the gift and of time, as Madame de Maintenant did, that circumvents the impossibility as it articulates it. This is Zarathustra’s dream of the great noon, which he must affirm at the same time as he acknowledges that he has never grasped it, that he slept through it, that it is his to own and claim only insofar as he is man enough to affirm that it was never his, that claiming is merely a willingness to dream, the strength to dream, the audacity to own up to hope, to wanting-to-say.
Thus it is that Derrida can say: “For, finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or in its phenomenon. The gift itself–we dare not say the gift in itelf–will never be confused with the presence of its phenomenon” (29).
Thinking–the desire to speak–is the will to the impossible. This will does not demand presencing of the impossible, but is rather accepting of the possibility of play: “One can desire, name, think, in the proper sense of these words, only to the immeasuring extent that one desires, names, thinks still or already, that one still lets announce itself what nevertheless cannot present itself as such to experience, to knowing: in short, here a gift that cannot make itself (a) present” (29).
There is a gap between gift and economy, between what can be desired, thought, and spoken and what can be known and presented: “This gap between, on the one hand, thought, language, and desire and, on the other hand, knowledge, philosophy, science and the order of presence is also a gap between gift and economy. This gap is not present anywhere; it resembles an empty word or a transcendental illusion. But it also gives to this structure or to this logic a form analogous to Kant’s transcendental dialectic, as relation between thinking and knowing, the noumenal and phenomenal…” (30).
Derrida then sets the course for what the rest of Given Time will do–it will seek to engage this gap, this aporetic structure, the impossibility of speaking of gift and time which we nonetheless are always already doing. Derrida will do this not from within a theory of the gift, but rather from within something like an anticipatory resoluteness to wrestle with and sit in the difficulty of the gap, without trying to resolve it. In other words, Derrida’s rigor is not one of reduction, but one of submitting oneself wholly to the game. In other words, “one must promise and swear” (30).
We must, in short, think all kinds of things in order to let ourselves go in the project that Derrida proposes–which is a response to the invocation of the gift that is both faithful and rigorous (30). We must continue to overturn the victories of what we think we know–we must learn to know still, in spite of, and along with. This is a multiplicity of knowledges that escapes combinatory logic: “Know still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance” (30).
The gift, like the dream of presence, like the dream of time and Being, like the name of the self-present self, like the dream of sexual multiplicity, is both exterior to the annuling economies in which it is already embroiled, and motivates that contract (31). One question then remains: how to reconcile the exemplary and the economic, the exterior and the circuitous? “…how does [the gift] contract itself into a circular contract? And from what place? Since when? From whom?” (31).
I don’t know exactly what this means, but I am trying to lay out what I do know before you. I am aware that the limitations in my knowledge will show–and aware moreso that these limitations, perhaps like, perhaps unlike your own, are also important for the magical boundaries of Derrida’s project. I am always responsible to speak: as Derrida reminds, “even if the gift were never anything but simulacrum, one must still render an account of the possibility of this simulacrum and of the desire that impls towards simulacrum. And one must also render an account of the desire to render an account” (31).
So what does it mean that I am writing this paper? More the remarks that I have sometimes made this weekend–that Derrida demands the proper form, that one cannot write a “standard” philosophy paper (whatever that might mean) “about” Jacques Derrida, since his content is in the obligations and new laws placed upon form. Yet one must still write. Derrida asks us whence this law–this law that demands multifaceted response in the face of problematic calculations, that compels me “to answer still for a gift that calls one beyond all responsibility” (31)?
Perhaps this law is something like the living feminine–the hope that hope rests in the risks of dissimulation, of getting it wrong and being gotten wrong; and the only careful, protected alternative is the grave–the strong patronymic, the locked tomb of meaning.
It is strange that at the height of this call to responsibility–this question of rigor and of play, and of the origins of the law of responsibility to exegesis that forbids forgiveness to those who refuse to enter into a certain sort of hermeneutic play–we should then turn to fiction. The Baudelaire story at the end of Derrida’s essay perhaps might turn us to an instantiation of the sort of responsibility with which the rest of the essay leaves us: a responsibility to craft good fiction–fiction which resonates as true, which desires-to-speak that which is not present, that which has the structure of the aporia, and might nonetheless inscribe a hopeful sort of possibility over the impossible.
But, there is still a bit more avenir…
JLRH
language, impossibility of the gift
what does it matter that we can think and speak the gift, even if the structure of gift and forgetting aren’t phenomenologically possible
does this impossible speaking have anything to do with hope
what this might have to do with the future of feminism, with the signature–
Cinders.
GIFT–desire to escape the circle of the economy
Filed under: Ideas: Concepts | Tags: biology/biography, chloroplasts, cinders, conifers, decision, dissimulation, double origin, double reading, dynamis, Gehorsamkeit, how to read books, how to read people, intention, machine of doubleness, markings of genre, my cat sawr me naked this one time, omphalos, pedagogy, pedagogy of ambiguity, region, right knowledge/right action, risk, the dead father, the living feminine, the remainder, the State, the University
The thrust of Derrida’s “Otobiographies”–a reading of reading, a reading of the always-double and always proliferating legacies of the signatures of Nietzsche–rests in the space between two opposing fragments. As Derrida tears (lovingly, I think) from Nietzsche, so too must I tear from both of them, and find in this new opposition a stucture that I’m going to call the same, and which is also going to be a bit different. The first is a fragment from Ecce Homo that Derrida holds “on reserve” until the end of his essay; the second is an admonition from Derrida himself:
“I find it necessary to wash my hands…”
“The future of the Nietzsche text is not closed…” (31).
With full knowledge that it may well be a “reductionist” account to single out these two moments in “Otobiographies” as a critical juncture for examining some of the important moves that Derrida is showing (more often then telling) us how to make, I’ll proceed to argue two things: first, that the quote from Nietzsche is ironizing. Even so, it represents a fundamental–human? readerly?–desire: the desire to roll the stone in front of the tomb, to have one’s meaning limned and bound, to close it finally. To control meaning is to wash one’s hands.
By Nietzsche’s figuration, this hand-washing becomes a kind of obsessive symptom–the “it is necessary” is a drive that nonetheless recognizes the possibility that it could be thought otherwise. It is as if by figuring it as such–this hunger to have one’s hands clean of readings that diverge from intention, this admission of the impossibility and idiocy of the dream of a single, self-present intentionality–Nietzsche opens up the impossibility of the dream.
…
Derrida’s statement stands in less sharp contrast than it appears to: he warns, in a characteristic move, that the significations of any signature cannot be locked down. The date, the anniversary, cannot account for all of the other possible anniversaries on which it will be resuccitated. The signature, Derrida seems to say, makes a pact with the living feminine on the strength of the name. It allows the living author to send out countless birthday invitations that he won’t ever be able to attend–not, that is, precisely in the form that he (may think he) is in the moment of the signature. This is because the signature stands between the biology and the biography, between the dead language of the father and the “living feminine” who will always already bury her authorial son; this is because the name delivers up a return, but not a return that the author, as living author, as being both and between, can ever cash in on.
The author perishes. Nietzsche’s body has, irrevocably, broken down. And meaning, in dissemination, dissimulates. But there is still a deliver of this “both and between,” this space between the life of the author and his word, that must be considered. “Otobiographies” argues that it is the reader that is delivered over into the space, and who is charged with this reckoning.
The interesting turn in “Otobiographies”–interesting, if baffling, is that it isn’t just the reader alone. There is also something called the State–the institutions and pedagogical methods designed to keep us on this way of this sort of complicated interpretation, or, in some cases, to hold us to a more simplified reading. As Derrida says at the beginning of the essay, “Otobiographies” is a struggle with three questions: (1) academic freedom, (2) the ear, and then, last of all, (3) autobiography. As of yet, we haven’t seen the state play a significant role in the debates. Why is it, then, that we must speak about academic freedom, about the institutions that deal with the politics of reading and pedagogy? Why can’t we just assume that “states” and universities are comprised of readers–unmanaged ears–just as much as any reader picking up a volume of Nietzsche or Derrida from the streets?
Derrida argues that this is because the structure of the Signature is one of Eternal Return. It is a willing of impossibility. It is a willing of everything that has come in futural affirmation, which also invited everything that may yet come. Nietzsche’s signature is, in effect, a declaration of risk–a contract sworn against himself–that offers forward infinitely responsibility–including the responsibility to and for said signature’s perversion.
The difficulty with Eternal Return is that it effaces itself. It does not show up as a part of the metaphysics of presence. I can’t tell, from Nietzsche’s “I find it necessary to wash my hands,” that he is also making the bold affirmative that understands that one can never fully wash one’s hands. Derrida calls this structure of Eternal Return the “annulus”–it annuls itself by coming into the light, and as such, does not even appear as trace. The “annulus” of Eternal Return is the structure and law of the Signature, of autobiography and authorship, just as much as the “aporetic structure” of the impossible gift is the force “outside” the circle of economics that nonetheless closes the circular economy. Eternal Return cannot be thematized. It is thus that it needs an institution.
It’s unclear why this is. Institutions arise to tell people how to read, in the hopes that people learn to read better. But it’s clear to Derrida that institutions cannot get it right by also thematizing Eternal Return or the annulus of the signature; rather, institutions can themselves embody the structure of the annulus. By providing “closed” pedagogies of reading that mine the (literary, historical, philosophic, &c.) past for the ‘secrets’ of their forms, the institutions of the University guarantee a certain necessary kind of paying attention to the structure of the Signature. However, Derrida argues, there is something more basic that Institutions forget.
This is that the structure of the Signature–not just its interpretation–is also doubled. On the flyleaf after the preface in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche signs his name against the already-absent dead patronymn, and in sight of the living feminine–that body of language who guarantees the return of the name, and who must be “taken care of” in signature. Institutions, Derrida says, forget this–they attempt to turn themselves to the dead tongue of the father instead of to the living language. Institutions demand “right knowing,” but they should really be demanding “right action.”
Derrida draws up a number of protocols of reading to try to push Institutions as workhorses of the future:
1. Posthumous order: we must consider, in reading any text, that the text may have been written (and especially, published) against the author’s intention.
2. Ghostly demarcations: We must also pay attention to the markings of genre; to the moments in which intent ironizes itself and shows its contradictions, the vital gap between its possible limits and its impossible desires.
The bigger question, then, us what we should do with a text. What is it that we should do when we read? How is it that revitalization–not only of the Signature itself, as “dead patronymic,” but of culture, of the “living feminine”–the masks to which the name returns the inheritance of the (now-dead) author, can come through pedagogy? Not incidentally, Derrida selects the Nazi’s reading and appropriation of Nietzsche for a case-study. What are we to make of the fact that Nietzsche can be read both ways? That he is irrevocably double, in ways he couldn’t have intended, but in ways, also, which he strangely and prophetically seemed to intend? Is Nietzsche off the hook merely for having written the thing–in short, for having been a bad writer, for having left too much of his work open too the future, for not taking seriously enough the strong authorial ethics demanding that he batten down the hatches, fix all the side nails on that flapping tent of his corpus? Or are the Nazis to blame, for having found in the select idiomatic vocabulary of Nietzsche’s works an entirely other, (unintended?) set of meanings–in short, for having been bad readers, too uncareful of the powerful limitations on dissemination embedded in the corpus they took up?
Derrida’s example is intractable–it binds us in our attempt to make these determinations; importantly, it slips away. Just as the corpus that is biology cannot be fixed–its molecules only temporarily holding the shape that they can, only temporarily pumped through with the microbes and fixtures to ward off the body’s transformation into dirt, water, rust–neither can the corpus that is biography, signature, bolt the door on the particles that make up its configuration. Every signature, every corpus, is always doubled– Nietzsche is both dead and alive, his words both towards the freedom of the state and towards the awful destining of the Führer, open to the winds of unbounded reappropriation and wishing to wash the hands.
To be taken back up again, forever: the condition of the body, of the body that becomes author, of the body that desires to give itself to itself by the only pact that even resembles that–by giving itself up not to itself, but to the logic of the dead father, to the moving body of the living feminine. Logic of the death knell: a doubleness that cannot be overcome by sublimation, and must be overcome another ay.
This brings us to a strange passage in “Otobiographies,” which I will recapitulate in full. Derrida begins by asking a rather simple question, which I intimated above–how is it that the Nazis could end up with the exact same words the Nietzsche used (Gehorsamkeit/obedience; Führer), and yet mean something so radically contradictory with what (we think) Nietzsche intended? Derrida says that “…it still remains to be explained how reactive degeneration could still exploit the same language, the same words, the same utterances, the same rallying cries as the active forces to which it stands opposed…” (29). He says, too, that Nietzsche anticipated this question:
“The question that poses itself for us might take this form: Must there not be some powerful utterance-producing machine that programs the movements of the two opposing forces at once, and which couples, conjugates, or marries them in a given set, as life (does) death? (Here, all the difficulty comes down to the determination of such a set, which can be neither simply linguistic, nor simply historic-political, economic, ideological, psycho-phantasmatic, and so on. That is, no regional agency or tribunal has the power to arrest or set the limits on the set, not even that of the ‘last resort’ belonging to philosophy or theory, which remain subsets of this set.) Neither of the two antagonistic forces can break with this powerful programming machine: it is their destination; they draw their points of origin and their resources from it; in it, they exchange utterances that are allowed to pass through the machine and into each other, carried along by family resemblances, however incompatible they may sometimes appear…
The “programming machine” that interests me here does not call only for decipherment but also for transformation–that is, a practical rewriting according to a theory-practice relationship which, if possible, would no longer be part of the program. It is not enough just to say this. Such a transformative rewriting of a vast program–if it were possible–would not be produced in books (I won’t go back over what has so often been said elsewhere about general writing) or through readings, courses, or lectures on Nietzsche’s ritings, or those of Hitler and the Nazi ideologues of prewar times today. Beyond all regional considerations, (historial, politco-economic, ideological, et ctera), Europe and not only Europe, this century and not only this century are at stake. And the stakes include the “present” in which we are, up to a certain point, and in which we take a position or take sides.
All variety of interesting things are happening here, but in deference to the selective logic of my vigor, I’m going to talk about what happens at the end: notably, Derrida tells us the places where the demands of this weird-ass “doubled” machine are not going to be worked out. He tells us that we are at stake–this present, as well as “not only” the present, or this Europe (we are not Europeans!). He modifies the extent to which we are present (or European)–as he will do much more profoundly in “The Time of the King.” More importantly, he tells us that wherever that place is, it is there that we “take up a position or take sides” (30).
The rub?: there is no place that Derrida describes. Or, rather, in the formalized mode of the structural logic of the aporia, the circle without the center, Derrida describes no place. It is not incidental that the word that appears here, when he turns our eyes away from the State and the University as the source of this transformation in readership that might be able to brook doubleness, to think doubleness without resolution, is region. This is the same word that haunts “Choreographies”–there isn’t a place for women. It isn’t so much that asking about the woman’s “place,” as Derrida’s haphazard interviewer does, is the wrong question–it’s just that there’s so much wrong in the form of the question that limits the usefulness of what the answer could get right. In that essay, as we will explore momentarily, Derrida says that the place of the woman, like the place of the gift, and of this sort of hearing that sees double, is atopoi: no place.
I’ll return in a bit to what this might mean–we’ll need to explore the place of the ear (which ear cannot be shut, as Sigmund-via-Jacques reminds), the continued presence of the State in this essay, and, importantly, how to choose and practice the difference between “listening with small, finely tuned ears” and becoming “all ears for this phonograph dog” of the State (35).
But, before we part, it’s important to come back to something I’ve (already! always) forgotten, that Derrida brings back home (thanks, Bob) on pp. 35: we are, after all, asking questions of ears. Of listening, of hearing, of interpretation. (cf. a book I just received via Interlibrary Loan). And “the ear does not answer.”
That looks like closure–fini, the band falls silent. But it’s not enough. We’ve still got some contending to do. In other words:
We've still got to get to omphalos.
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First Whore: I would like to give my time to the King.
Second Whore: I have already thought this. It cannot be done.
FW: But what is it about my time that so resists the giving? Is my time fixed in its particular activities? That is, when I sew up the sleeve of a coat, or take out the weave of yarn across this silk, is this coat-sleeve time, this yarn-taking time, a time unto itself? Is there no general economy of time, across which I might make reallocations? This portion of time, unwoven from its incidents, or that–could I not take this substratum, this ultimately malleable thing, and make of it a gift for our bright kind?
SW: You are a git, Louisa. Time does not exist as such–not, at least, as you have thought it. Not, at least, in any way that you could think. Time is displaced. It exists in an aporetic paralysis. You may look across to the future in relation to the “now,” or to the past billowing back from it, but this “now” itself–the nun of old metaphysics–is the worst sort of illusion: an illusion that is necessary for us to think, to speak.
FW: You tell me that this time which I so long to give the king is not only not mine to give, but that it is not? Whence, then, this desire of mine to give? Whence, then, myself, standing firmly in what very much does seem like a now–the metaphysician’s nun of dreams–even if if I am sure of it only in speaking it?
SW: This is precisely it, Louisa. Do you remember how old Zarathustra, having made yet another return up his high mountain, slept all through his great noon? The time of the great noon was the time of the dream, the time of the blink of an eye. In that blink, Zarathustra remembered the before of the dream and the after–he woke in the instant of its beginning, which some strange certainty of its content, its having-happened. But Zarathustra himself slept through the eye of his noon–he did not see it. So too can we never stand so firmly on the pedestal of the now. Your time is not yours to give.
FW: What may I then give, to this king who has so awed me with his glories?
SW: You may not give. But, since you have asked it–since you are already shot through with this illicit desire for giving–you may as well begin again. But be careful to avoid economies.
FW: Economies? Do not economies imply some give, some taken? A gift given and some counter-gift returned? No hortus conclusus but rather a sort of endless zag across time, like the march of the mercantile ships across the spice seas? This is not what I want. I want–my time, transferred from me to the king. I want to remain open to this debt. I want to feel the time that has left me–to live in the space of the having given.
SW: So you too want a gift. There is no simple giving, Louisa. One can only have a gift if the gift defies all economies–if the gift really does travel from one place to some other without looking back, without signaling back useful scribblings of its long journeys as indices that might prove more fruitful to those back at home. A gift must turn away from collaterals of loss.
FW: So I will give to the king, and think no more of it.
SW: No–thinking it is enough. Thinking it, speaking it, even desiring it as such is enough to bind you back into the circular economy. There is really no escaping it.
FW: So how might I then give freely?
SW: By not thinking it. By forgetting your act of giving.
FW: So I must not only not think my gift, but forget that I have given.
SW: And you must forget this, too.
FW: So. There is a double forgetting.
SW: It is only this double forgetting that guarantees that giving will really fall of the shelf of conscious awareness–that it will disappear entirely. Then, giving becomes a shut eye. Then, it would be safe to give. Safe from all economies.
FW: Where do I find this impossible gift?
SW: Not the impossible gift–to give, impossibly.
FW: It seems, then, that I can make no gift unto the king.
SW: No gift, unless we enter into further economics.
FW: But you have just said that the structure of the economy is denied by the gift–that the gift is the violent interruption of the circular rotation of the economic, of its blind return to itself. You have told me, in some other words, that the gift is that which shows the circularity of economy and all its relentless logic to itself. Why do we look back to economics? Why can we not just make gifts–gifts, regardless of what they disrupt or displace?
SW: You speak from a strange desire, Louisa. And this desire will be important for what we are trying to reach. “Why desire the gift, and why desire to interrupt the circulation of the circle? Why wish to get out of it? Why wish to get through it” (8)?
FW: You are, I take it, asking for my personal psychological account.
SW: In some ways, yes.
FW: I suppose I wish to flee it because it seems crude–and because I would like to step back from it, the endless giving-taking, to see whether anything might be really given. I would like to believe in a gift without returns.
SW: It is you, Louisa, who returns to yourself in the time of the gift.
FW: What is it that you mean? How is it that I could come back to myself, in giving my time to the king?
SW: Because your gift to the king is your confirmation of yourself as giver. The return and the sending come in the same instant and issue from the same thunderclap. You are always rewarding yourself under the table. The moment that you think it–the moment that you desire, gift, you turn yourself over and turn yourself in to desire for your own self-homecoming.
FW: You paint me as selfish.
SW: No more selfish than any who give. And certainly no more selfish than those who do not–those who live and exchange freely in the marketplace of trade, who know no tune other than “my bread for your rope,” “my fish for your horse.” You are not alone in your guilt–your indebtedness. We stand with all of Phoenicia.
FW: But is it right to admit that? It seems that what I must do is continue to protest: I am not like them. I am no Phoenician, no self-conniving trader. My time to the king. If I give myself back to myself in the process, this is no worry of mine–neither worry nor intention.
SW: We are all Phoenicians. And you should not run from that place. Try not running. “One must, in a certain way, of course, inhabit the circle, turn around in it, live there a feast of thinking, and the gift, the gift of thinking, would be no stranger there” (9).
FW: But you have told me two disparate things: that the gift stands outside the economy, and that the gift, being impossible, cannot help but inhabit the economy, as if indistinguishable from normal economic dealings. Tell me now: is or is not the gift exceptional? Does it stand outside the circle? Or is it implicated in it?
SW: We must remember what Heidegger reminds us–that the gift may exist as a peculiar sort of nodal, a “coiling up or interlacing,” on that outer delimitation of the circle. This, he calls Geflect. We must also be reminded that Geflect, as interruption, is an interruption of the temporal sort.
FW: What do you mean?
SW: Only that, when the gift appears, it is out of time.
FW: You are saying that there is not enough time for the gift?
SW: On the contrary–that the instant of the gift is itself paradoxical, itself structured like Zarathustra’s great dream: it sits in the no-seat of the blink of the eye. There is no “now” for the gift. It denies its instant.
FW: But how is it that I may still say “I am giving…”?
SW: This is a strange incident, is it not? What is another word for the gift?
FW: Why, cadeau. In English, also, present. To give a present.
SW: Is this not strange? That at precisely the juncture when Zarathustra is sleeping–the impossible now–we get the word, also, for taking space, for setting out in time: the present? We have a word for that. The word is what makes the impossible gift thinkable.
FW: How is it that we can hold this word?
linguistic logic and structure of the gift
annulment
linguistic possibility of the gift
“There is gift, if there is any, only in what interrupts the system as well as the symbol, in a partition without return and without division, without being-with-self of the gift-counter-gift” (13).
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Truth as feminine
Sexual difference as \”regional difference\” of the ontological
Topologies: problem with the question of women\’s \”place\”
Atope: \”to dance otherwise\”; to challenge the place of past traditions
Politics of \”Negotiation\”: how to bring the \”dance\” in line with the steps of the revolution?
\”…the complicated relationship of a practical politics to the kinds of analysis that we have been considering (specifically the \’deconstructive\’ analysis implicit in your discussion).\”
Sexual difference as Aufhebung or \”Neutralization\”: oppositional schemes of sexual difference set out to erase sexual difference–
\”One insures phallocentric mastery under the cover of neutralization every time…and such phallocentrism adorns itself now and then, here and there, with an appendix: a certain kind of feminism\” (175).
Some views of neutrality and sexual difference:
(1) Levinas: two strata–level of humanity as the initial space of ethical obligation, not asexual but nondifferentiated. This neutral strata, paradoxically, receives the male marking. Second order is the space of sexual difference.
(2) Heidegger: silent on the matter of sexual difference, yet \”…the pauses coming from his silence on these questions punctuate or create the spacing out of a powerful discourse\” (179). Derrida seems to praise Heidegger, in some ways, for risking so much with his bare discourse of silence. \”Dasein is neither the human being (a thought recalled earlier by Levinas) nor the subject, neither consciousness nor the self [le moi] (whether conscious or unconsious). These are all determinations that are dervied from and occur after the Dasein\” (179). In lectures later, Heidegger disrupts this silence to say that Dasein is definitively neuter: \”…Dasein is neither of the to sexes. But this a-sexuality is not the indifference of empty invalidity, the annuling negativity of an indifferent ontic nothingness…\”
Polysexuality, Polysemy and Multiple signatures: \”…it has always seemed to me that the voice itself had to be divided in order to say that which is given to thought or speech…\” (183). …I have felt the necessity for a chorus, for a choreographic text with polysexual signatures. I felt this every time that a legitimacy of the neuter, the apparently least suspect sexual neutrality of \’phallocentric or gynocentric\’ mastery, threatened to immobilize (in silence), colonize, stop or unilateralize in a subtle or sublime manner what remaisn no doubt irreducibly dissymetrical.
The \”Sexual Otherwise\”/ double dissymetry: \”I would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices\” (184).
Exchange/escape; Economy/exception: \”In a quite rigorous sense, the exchange alone could not suffice either, however, because the desire to escape the combinatory itself, to invent incalculable choreographies, would remain\” (185).
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Body/biologism
Signature: proper names/homonymic marks -vs.- the labyrinthine of the era
Autobiography as a gift to oneself, as gratitude:
“Well, you can see what an impossible protocol this implies for reading, and especially for teaching…” (14)
Signature as date: Topos, anniversary
Dead father/living mother: “the mother who is living on, and who will moreover outsive me long enough to bury me” (16).
“Double origin”: biology, Rätelsform– (1) double; (2) netural
“Logic of the death knell”
“Double provenance”/ second sight
Lebendig als Lebendig: “act correctly rather than know correctly” (22); to treat the living as living; to treat the living feminine as not-a-male
The Future of Our Educational Institution: how to read it? not to neutralize it or clear it? “Indecency is de rigeur in this place”
Protocols of reading:
(1) Not posthumous; interrupted (24)
(Other) “One must allow for all the ways intent ironizes or demarcates itself demarcating the text by leaving on it the mark of genre” (25): reading slowly? taking time? context of the invited lectures on academia to an academia context is an “infraction of the laws of genre and academism” (26).
Destruction: “To forget and destroy the text, but to forget and destroy it through action.” One must prepare the degenerate for rebirth–this is the site of self-overcoming.
Double loss in degeneration?: “All degeneration dessignates botht he loss of vital and genetic or generous forces, and the loss of … (?)…: the Entartung.”
“Nietzsche corporation”/the State: the sign; the dead father; attempts to pass itself off as the living mother
Listening, danger of hearing: “listening with small, finely-tuned ears–your ear which is also the ear of the other…”
The (dissimulating?) umbilical: “Dream this umbilicus: it has you by the ear, umbilical cord instead to the dead father distancing of mouth from ear, all reading and hearing, transcribing…”
Hermeneutics/politics: reading not as hermeneutics but as political intervention–”the ear is uncanny” (33), it cannot be closed.
Reappropriation of Nietzsche: Nazi reception, “if one no longer considers only intent” (30), questions of Nietzsche’s politics:
“We are now, I believe, bound to decide. An interpretive decision does not have to draw the line between two intents or political contexts…” (32)
Debt/economies
“And if life returns, it will return to the name, but not to the living…” (9).
Dissimulation: “Ich bin der und der…” — system of the philosophical signature (11).
