Reading machines in Derrida

A paper I am working on, that I read last week:

I want to complicate an assumption that we often have while reading: that reading is, on some level, a struggle to be responsible to a text. To do this, I’ll consider a passage—in particular one sentence—from Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort, or The Gift of Death.
The remark appears in the third section of the book—originally a lecture given in a 1990 conference on Derrida’s work and the gift—right in the middle of a harrowing meditation on how Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible continues even today. According to Derrida, the event was not just an occurrence long ago on a mountain (or mountain range) named Moriah, as recounted in Genesis. To show this, he notes how he is perhaps fulfilling his duty as a professional philosopher at the moment he speaks in the conference—indeed at the very moment he is reading this passage in the Bible—but how, by making this a priority, he is also probably neglecting to help others. He concludes that he, then and there, in reading, is no different than Abraham, in that his act of neglect is a sacrifice of a son, of someone to whom he has an obligation, a responsibility. Then and there, he says, he too is in “the land of Moriah,” as is everyone to which he speaks—“the land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.”
To say we all are at this famous place of sacrifice when we read might just seem like an abuse of language (not to mention of conscience): it would lend credence to the charges of hyperbole that are often leveled against Derrida. But Derrida counters with the following—the passage with the sentence I’d like to look at:

This is not just a figure of style or an effect of rhetoric. According to 2 Chronicles, chapters 3 and 8, the place where the sacrifice… is said to have occurred, this place where death is given, is the place where Solomon decided to build the House of the Lord in Jerusalem, as well as the place where God appeared to Solomon’s father, David. However, it is also the place of the grand Mosque of Jerusalem, the place called the Dome of the Rock near the grand mosque of El Aksa where the sacrifice of Ibrahim is supposed to have taken place, and from where Mahomet was transported on horseback towards paradise after his death. It is just above the destroyed temple of Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall, not far from the Way of the Cross. It is therefore a holy place but also a place that is in dispute (radically, rabidly), fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other. These three monotheisms fight over it, it is useless to deny it by means of some wide-eyed ecumenism; they make war with fire and blood, have always done so and more fiercely today, each claiming its particular perspective on this place and claiming an original historical and political interpretation of Messianism and of the sacrifice of Isaac. The reading, interpretation, and tradition of the sacrifice of Issac are themselves sites [or places, lieux] of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice. Isaac’s sacrifice continues every day. Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front.
-The Gift of Death, 2nd Edition, 70/Donner la mort 99-100.

The passage makes a claim to take us beyond rhetoric—that is, to demonstrate in some way the real ubiquity of Mount Moriah or the lack of distance between every act of reading and this place of sacrifice. What allows this, here, is what ties the sacrifice of Isaac to the history of conflict in the Holy Land and its continuance today. As Derrida says, “the reading, interpretation, and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves places of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice:” sacrifice also takes place now, in this place where the Bible is so avidly read.
Now, in some sense it would be problematic enough for our notion of reading as a struggle to be responsible if I focused on this claim and merely asserted that the passage does take us beyond rhetoric; that it says interpretation, the handing down of the tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac was indeed capable of sacrifice or murder, or was indeed similar to certain actions in the Holy Land. It would be enough to say that reading simply had, sometimes, that force when it occurred in this place. For what would be in question, then, would be a matter of the extent to which, sometimes, we have to be responsible for reading. The responsibility in reading would be thrown into question as to how far it can really remain possible in certain conditions, in certain places, because of the limitations imposed on a stance that we take towards the text. In other words, we would be concluding that in some places, in some conditions, a responsible stance towards a text is not able to be taken up: where war made with fire and blood is going on, that peaceful stance, that comportment towards a book that brings with it collegial discussion over the meanings or consequences of what is written and, ultimately, a disinterested respect for the text—this stance is not possible. And so, when there is reading in this place, only death and sacrifice results: the interpretation of texts leads to war, leads to violence over the meaning of a phrase, leads even directly, in schools or other institutions, to the death of others. In short, what would be in question would be where and how reading can or cannot be like killing.
Now, perhaps this would refine our sense of where and how reading should be conducted—a questioning that would, I think, risk extreme ethnocentrism—but, I’ll claim, there is an additional element that we find in what I’ve cited that reveals how a consideration (such as this) of how far reading and responsibility are associated is too simple—indeed, is still not really enough to call responsibility and reading into question. This element is the following, and it will eventually bring us to the sentence I really want to focus on: when Derrida says that “the reading, interpretation and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves places of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice,” he is not just saying that sacrifice is what we should call the action in the Holy Land now. That is, he is not simply saying that sacrifice is what we should call the violent actions which can (and should) be empirically registered and said to take place where there is—and we can empirically verify this too—extensive reading of the Bible. He is also claiming something more wide ranging, something that involves the fact that reading is precisely how sacrifices occur—it is the structure of their unfolding, their taking place.
In order to make this—indeed to perhaps make this structure take place a little before us—let us just begin to see if we can associate the words of the passage in a different way. Let us begin to do this—which means, also, let us begin to play with the rhetoric of the passage precisely where Derrida says “this is not just a figure of style or an effect of rhetoric.” This act—as inanely heedless of whatever Derrida is saying as it is, as if we were just deploying little tricks of reading we knew—this act might not be so unfaithful to Derrida however, because, as J. Hillis Miller has recently said (in "The Late Derrida," in Adieu Derrida), with more inventiveness and more respect for what is written, Derrida himself reads this way, by playing with rhetoric and improvising off of it, drawing inferences only from this sort of soloing. “The word play,” he says, “the exuberant hyperbole, and constantly self-topping inventiveness, like a great Charlie Parker riff or a Bach fugue, are fundamental features” of this reading.
“The reading, interpretation and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves places of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice.” This sentence, we suggested, did not simply say that there is reading in the Middle East and sacrifice in the Middle East. “The reading, interpretation and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves places of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice.” Perhaps this can mean something more general: that where someone sacrifices another, a reading has occurred. In other words, if sacrifice has occurred, there is reading. How? Someone neglects the other and thus makes their act of neglect into an application, as it were, of what happens in the story of Abraham—that is, makes the neglect into a reading of the story of Abraham, in that it is the demonstration of how the story can apply to this situation, right here. If this is so, we refine the sense in which we say sacrifice takes place now, in the Holy Land, as well as in Genesis: fundamentally, we should call what happens now sacrifice not because it looks the same, but because there is no difference between what takes place in Genesis and how reading the passage takes place or unfolds. That is, whether you use a machine gun or not, the way you sacrifice the other is by making Abraham’s actions able to be read in your neglect of another. Put another way, reading is what sacrifice repeats as: the passage in Genesis appears, again and again, and where it repeats in this way it is sacrifice.
But perhaps when Derrida says “the reading, interpretation and tradition of the sacrifice of Isaac are themselves places of bloody, holocaustic sacrifice,” he is also claiming that sacrifice occurs because in the sacrifice, there is always reading. There where someone reads, he reads only the story of sacrifice—that is, he brings about the sacrifice by reading sacrifice into his situation. What this means is that this person does not just allow the situation to be read as the same one we find in Genesis: one reads into the situation such that where there is the reading of this story, sacrifice will issue directly from this. This would happen in treating the other not as the other but as Isaac—that is, when this person sees the other not as whoever he is but as nothing better than a repetition of the son in Genesis—someone who should be sacrificed for God. In this moment this person is reading the other, and thus it is this reading that makes them forego or neglect the other qua the other as they do in sacrificing him. So reading is how sacrifices occur in a different way: they don’t take place only in that a sacrifice occurs, but in bringing about the act of sacrifice itself. Reading acts as the repeated, reiterated inability to see the other as anyone different from Isaac: that is, besides being the repetition of the sacrifice, reading could be the repetition in the sacrifice.
Now—if you haven’t followed this play, don’t worry. What is important is that by associating all these words, we have come up with two logics of how reading repeats itself. And if this is what Derrida is getting at in the passage, this means that the reading in the Holy Land is only more testimony (though this does not diminish its importance) to the fact that there is a more widespread and intense war on Moriah between the monotheisms, because all reading, everywhere, would be taking place as sacrifice. Moriah would be everywhere there is reading because, on the one hand, if the result is sacrifice, there is reading—and on the other, if you read the situation you are in, if you look at the other as Isaac, you end up sacrificing. As we noted, Derrida himself said was doing this then and there, in front of his audience at the Royaumont Abbey in 1990. And if this is all the case, the passage, I’ll claim, resists merely associating all these things, because really what it is saying is that the reason why sacrifice always takes place with every reading is because reading always takes place as a repetitive machine. That is—and I hope to show this in what follows—reading is everywhere in question as to its responsibility because it always functions as a reading machine, as something that makes it again and again bring death. To put it yet another way, we are finally brought back to that sentence I wanted to look at—the last sentence of the passage that I quoted—which, I’ll claim, merely describes this reading machine for us: “Countless machines of death wage a war without front.”
To grasp all this, though, we have to fill out this figure of the reading machine that I’ve just mentioned. I say “figure” because, as we noted, it does indeed only remain composed out of associations that the rhetoric of the passage provides. What is this reading machine, after all? Elsewhere in Derrida’s work, the reading machine does indeed appear, and so perhaps it can fill out its figure for us if we pay attention to it. We can find it in writings like Of Grammatology, “Otobiographies,” “Dissemination,” “Circumfession,” “Psyche,” or The Animal That Therefore I Am, just to name a few where it plays a relatively important role. The first thing we notice, though, upon looking at these texts, is that the reading machine does not appear as anything to do with sacrifice, but—it seems—with a different sort of threat. Looking at the 1983 essay “Geschlecht I,” for example, Derrida remarks upon the lack of any mention of sexual difference in Heidegger’s corpus. He then hesitates, however, before concluding that Heidegger ignored this issue, because perhaps the word for sexual difference—das Geschlecht—does indeed occur somewhere. He asks,

Is it imprudent to trust Heidegger’s apparent silence? Will this apparent fact later be disturbed in its nice philological assurance by some known or unpublished passage when some reading machine, while combing through the whole of Heidegger, manages to hunt out the thing and snare it?

Here the reading machine looks like a program, a computer program, which reads all by itself, which finds and registers words and establishes their relationship, reassembles and sorts them, all without the care or effort that distinguishes what we like to think of as our (human, humane—that is, careful, circumspect, skilled, rigorous) reading. This is why Derrida merely notes this and goes on with his presentation—as if there indeed were no mention of Geschlecht in Heidegger: what the reading machine does here is, it seems, merely something worthless. And yet, he does have to register the scenario that such a machine makes possible: it could spoil what he is about to say. If a computer were to come along that unceasingly searches throughout Heidegger for this word, it would indeed threaten Derrida’s claim (and in fact much of his discourse on Heidegger) because it could actually find what Derrida says is nonexistent. So Derrida recognizes that this machine here, however much its invention seems implausible, is still on some level a threat.
And, as his other remarks make clear, this reading machine is perhaps not so fanciful a device, like some supercomputer that would, one day, take all of our jobs here in the English department and across the university. In fact, this scenario would in fact be comforting, for there is nothing that precludes this machine from being at work already all about us, precisely in our (human) reading. It might indeed be working on other things than the word “Geschlecht” in Heidegger, but the machine still would be just as operative as some huge supercomputer taking up a room here in the basement. How? The program that registers and calculates in this way could already be that repetitiveness, that boringness, that rote aspect in some of our interpretation that makes it lack purpose. It could be that precision without meaning that, sometimes, makes us feel like we could just read anything and everything at any time, finding whatever we wanted to find. It could be that seeking out and pinning down that scrap of paper that, of itself, just by merely being put forth before an audience, would produce—by reducing all other statements to the level of its banal evidentiary procedure—a semi-viable interpretation. If these aspects of what we do are reading machines—and Derrida draws our attention to how they could be—we begin to see them everywhere. Reading machines are merely those human efforts so automatic that they make it seem as if this takeover by machines has already happened.
So in Derrida’s 1984 essay “Ulysses Gramophone,” delivered to the James Joyce Symposium, Derrida is precisely discussing the setting up of an international institution—a huge apparatus that produces volumes and volumes of criticism—dedicated to the reading of Joyce. How can we not listen to the following without hearing a threat announced in the figure of the reading machine?

All of you are experts and you belong to one of the most remarkable institutions. It bears the name of a man who did everything, and admitted it, to make this institution indespensible, to keep it busy for centuries, as though on some new Tower of Babel to make a name for himself again. This institution can be seen as a powerful reading machine, a signature and contersignature machine in the service of his name, of his patent.

He might not be directly accusing his hosts here of being wholly misguided in their project, but we do hear in this the following: look how close you are to becoming this machine! You run the risk of making automatic the reading of Joyce! You are doing a great service, but watch out! Certainly the program that he develops for this reading machine at the end of his essay could sound threatening to us if we didn’t hear it as so parodic: the program would seek out all the “yeses” in Ulysses and put them in a typology, along with those from Finnegans Wake. It would then find all the words or phrases that functioned effectively as “yeses.” It would then consult translations (some of them approved by Joyce, some of the not) for “yeses” there, comparing and contrasting, collecting and calculating. Then, it would compute how these “yeses” made up a schema or structure of generalized affirmation, which would then constitute the reading. The Joyce symposium could (and perhaps does) stay busy for a while with all this, we think to ourselves.
But, we also think, if they did proceed this way, the members of the Symposium would never really read Joyce, in some significant sense. Similarly, we almost want to say that to look in Heidegger just for the word “Geschlecht” would be doing everything but reading. For, we must ask, what does this reading machine actually threaten about reading, if it does indeed threaten something as we have been saying? We hinted at it above, but it is also has been articulated pretty consistently over the last forty years by almost everyone who written on Derrida—so rather than specify it ourselves, we can merely take their lead and look again throughout Derrida’s texts. In these writings, alongside the reading machine seems to be something that is much, much more than a figure: the notion of rigor, of care, of circumspection and reserve, which we can find endlessly reiterated in Derrida’s hesitations, postponements, disclaimers, prefaces, addendums. Where there is citation these reiterations are particularly visible: there Derrida usually notes how he must justify the choice of whatever he cites, and, in explaining it, inevitably fail to reconstitute its import and its possible implications. The whole of The Politics of Friendship, for example, reconstitutes only the first session in a whole set of seminars whose concern that day—and Derrida continually draws attention to this—was merely one line from Montaigne’s Essays. And yet this drive against the haste of citation and of explication, against the unfaithful paraphrase, makes it seem to many people that even the several hundred pages of this book are not enough for Derrida to do justice to what is written. Indeed this leads J. Hillis Miller, who licensed for us the short rhetorical riff we made on the passage in The Gift of Death, to say (in "Derrida and Literature" in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities), even though he focused on the most exorbitant, exuberant aspects of his stance towards text, that Derrida’s reading is just an immense “respect” for texts, one that engages in “careful citation and minute attention to linguistic detail” (DL, 75) and forces him “to concentrate microscopically on a part” of it, always abstaining from generalization that would risk violating its uniqueness (DL, 77). In other words—or rather in Miller’s words, since he uses them, as well as those of Paul de Man, Gayatri Spivak, Geoffrey Hartman, and nearly everyone who has had a significant part in writing about and introducing Derrida—in other words, Derrida is a close reader. Whatever hyperbolic, associative flights of word-play there are in his texts, consistently they have gotten reappropriated to a notion of his humane deference to what is read, characterized first and foremost by the virtue of closeness which literary criticism in particular has, since the New Critics (at least), extolled. And so we would say that, throughout Derrida’s corpus, what the reading machine threatens is close reading. It seems to us that in Derrida’s mind what is needed with Joyce or Heidegger or anyone else is a proliferation of careful, slow, minute engagements with the uniqueness of the text—something this massive apparatus like the Joyce Symposium just cannot accomplish or, at the very least, will make it less possible for others (unaffiliated as they are) to undertake.
But as of yet we are only gleaning this from a tendency we perceive in Derrida’s text to wait, to hesitate, to slowly, carefully approach what he is reading. This leads us to a conclusion that makes us engage in a significant hesitation of our own: our conception of the reading machine as opposed to rigor, circumspection, or closeness is determined, in truth, by a conception of how to regard Derrida’s reading. Once again, then, our analysis remains merely rhetorical: to the figure of the reading machine we in truth only oppose the figure of close reading. This calls all sorts of things into question: what if, in fact, this conception of the reading machine is an analysis that is precisely made to exalt merely our reading practices, to preserve it against that in Derrida which might threaten it? Could we even be setting to work the reading machine—that which was supposed to most threaten attention to the text—merely for our own benefit? All sorts of dynamics surrounding Derrida and his reception suddenly begin to be discerned. And as we begin to historicize what we have called “theory,” this questioning, I think, can’t come at a better time. For one of the first things that gets noted about its adventures and misadventures in the United States and the UK is how theory’s potentially anti-hermeneutic efforts were brought around to do hermeneutic work.
But that Derrida back in France was considered merely advocating a focus on language (as the work of François Laruelle, for example, shows—and perhaps in a negative way in the grandiosity and expansiveness of Jean Luc-Nancy’s deconstructions) or that he was even dismissed as practitioner of explication de texte (see Foucault’s pointed criticisms of him)—that this was the case in France, too, extends the problem beyond one of the distortions or self-aggrandizement in theory’s reception of him and shows that it really is something about Derrida’s reading that is the issue. This is attested by how even people like Spivak and Miller still describe the status of this reading as “close reading,” when they are some of the few that quite thoroughly grasp that Derrida was, to use a phrase of Frances Ferguson’s (in "The Critique of the Geometric Mode" in The Late Derrida), “more beyond hermeneutics than was generally thought.” There is something about close reading that is being used to try and deal with Derrida’s reading—and, as we see, this use oddly intensifies and becomes more strained as Derrida uses the figure of the reading machine. This continues to the extent that the status of close reading as nothing more than a figure to oppose this other figure comes into play. At that point, thinking of the reading machine otherwise is also rethinking the status of Derrida’s reading as well—that is, not simply as close reading.
For what if Derrida was using the phrase differently? In this simple question we find both tasks of thought that we have just outlined completely intertwined. What if, in the quotes on reading Heidegger and Joyce that I cited above, he was saying the reading machine was not opposed to close reading? What if the reading machine was, in fact, just as careful a reader as the close reader? And, finally, what if his close reading of the situation was precisely, as he claims, the deployment of a reading machine? All this is what I think is going on in the passage I first cited from The Gift of Death. For it was there that I brought up the question of the extent to which any readerly stance towards a text could be responsible, claiming that Derrida in the passage exceeded that problematic. We now see that this passage beyond this issue of extent, of the limits on the conditions of possibility of reading responsibly—this passage beyond is nothing other than a questioning of closeness as the characterization of responsibility through another logic of the reading machine.
I need a much, much more detailed analysis to prove this—one which would actually go back through The Gift of Death, particularly at the beginning of its second chapter which focuses on Jan Patocka’s characterization of the history of responsibility in a technical age—but I’ll merely sketch out how I think all that I’ve claimed here might be so.
What we concluded in reading the passage was that there is sacrifice everywhere—and because of a dual problem that repetition produces for reading. If you sacrifice, we said, you repeat the reading of the sacrifice of Isaac. And, on the other hand, if you read the situation, you end up repeating sacrificing because you treat the other as Isaac. In both situations, the reading doesn’t matter if it is close or not because it will be this repetition of sacrifice. This situation doesn’t allow any escape: sacrifice is everywhere. There is no room to say that a closer reading would prevent the slaughter of others. And because of this, there is not question of the stance that one takes towards the other—and all reading, when it appears is mechanical. In other words, beyond the conception of closeness inscribed in a logic of mechanical repetition, sacrifice becomes indistinguishable from what we consider responsibility.
That is, one hears in the last phrase (“Countless machines...”) a struggle to be responsible as such beyond any stance one might take towards the text. All one can be is more responsible. (Much more is needed to complete this, but at this point the analysis links up with the problems of The Gift of Death and responsibility as a whole. Until I develop them, here's hoping we got far enough so that perhaps you can read these things into the book and piece a more wide-ranging reading together. If I could have just demonstrated how the equivocal logic of Derrida's passage is precisely its strong point; or is precisely that which, in its resistance of a logic of similitude or identification or mimesis, allows for a thinking of responsibility and reading together... if I could perhaps have done this, well, that is enough for now.)