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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Still to omphalos: always to omphalos, which is not unimplicated in the phallus (sonically, anyway). I don’t always follow you here — but I think the bulk of the work is done on (this section of) the paper: what’s left now is going back, expanding, putting flesh on the bones of this argument. Not too much flesh, but a bit more. Just to help the reader. This is, as Kant says, the fun part of the project; a project for companions. I wish I could give you more re: this, but my mind is not right with me now, tired as I am. I would say more about mothers/fathers, if I were you: this part of the work is still much unclear to me. Esp. dead/living dichotomy. Onwards, kid!
Comment by letmeseethecolts April 5, 2009 @ 8:04 pm