Derrida, de Man, materialism

Photo by Hendrick Speck

In Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida somehow claims that de Man's assertions about the materiality of language constitute "an original materialism:"

There is a theme of "materiality," indeed an original materialism in de Man. It concerns a "matter" which does not fit the classical philosophical definitions of metaphysical materialisms any more than the sensible representations or the images of matter defined by the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Matter, a matter without presence and without substance, is what resists these oppositions. We have just placed this resistance on the side of thought, in its strange connivance with materiality.
-Memoires, 52

The last sentence, which summarizes de Man's position, is accurate. But I might claim roundly (despite various problems here: "matter" might also have resonance with Sache; "original" obviously also refers to how this "connivance" is immediately afterward said to relate to history, 53) that Derrida just can't be sure whether de Man's notion of matter "does not fit the classical philosophical definitions of metaphysical materialisms." This is not because de Man's concept of materiality is somehow redolent of a particular metaphysical materialism. Rather it is because the strange connivance with materiality is not an assured connivance in de Man. Or rather, it is only that, a connivance--which takes place only because de Man is indeed so assured about it. And this can't be overlooked merely because de Man's definition of matter, while it might not fit the classical definitions of materialisms, also does not fit "any more than" what we might call one of those definitions (but not necessarily merely one of them--Derrida is reserving the possibility for the sensible/intelligible opposition to be articulated otherwise) which it may or may not resemble. (Derrida is working too hard here to allow himself a way out from de Man's claims. We can't let that act in itself constitute what he also is doing, which is trying to inflect de Man differently, to deconstruct de Man's text.)

In short, we might say that, even if de Man's materialism isn't a materiality of the signifier, it is a materiality of the mark or the letter. And for Derrida, there should be no way that this mark is material, if we're going to be in any degree respectful of, or at least responsible for, the history of that word (which is how deconstruction proceeds--in a manner I might even call too historical for my taste, despite the old inane charge of ahistoricicity brought by the historicists).

For Derrida--just to go over some basics, and in too simple a language--the mark is empirical, and to the extent that the empirical is said to grasp the material (which is already not assured), the mark is therefore material. But any time this mark is taken up, it submits itself to a power of repetition, an iterability, which is ideal and which actually disturbs any notion of materiality or empiricity that we have attributed to it. For when the mark becomes capable of repetition--indeed in proportion to the increase in that power of repetition--it its history is marked in turn as already capable of repetition. And this double marking, this marking prior to it becoming a mark, means that it has already been a trace of itself, and has indeed been capable of repetition otherwise than how it is repeated in being taken up, in being assumed, we might say. As such, the mark remains, in its "materiality," always already participant in some ideality. And the trace itself, the marking of the mark, has itself only to be the possibility of materiality, and is as such "ideal." I put quotes around this because it is, qua ideal, also and only barely ideal, if I can say this: Gayatri Spivak uses the phrase "minimal idealization," and Judith Butler uses the word I've already employed, "ideality"--each of which I think describes this trace in this context of the material/ideal opposition quite well. That is, the trace is ideal to the extent that in this context) we respect the fact that it cannot be empirically determined, and thus is not material, unless of course we conceive empiricism differently--which means, of course, conceiving matter and materialism differently. This, by the way, is how that empiricism can indeed be "radical" in Derrida--in a sense in which I alluded to in my comments to a previous post, and which underlies what I say in another post on Derrida and science (though I critiqued this notion of "radicalism," which I think can be thought differently). Or rather this is how empiricism can knock away metaphysics (presupposing this latter concept is taken in a rough Heideggerian manner). The point is that this "ideal" aspect of the trace, this ideality, can also equally be described by Derrida as a "nonideal exteriority" (Positions, 65): it disrupts the notion of the ideal that we have. But what is important here is that while the trace is a nonideal exteriority, it is also, therefore, not at all material.

In no way then, can the trace, as what disturbs classical philosophical definitions of matter, be said itself to be material in any assured way (nor, then, can the mark--if these are marks of violence, we precisely have to think how far materiality as a concept allows us to think such violence). It has to remain, on some level, minimally ideal (such that it can always also be said to be nonideal). So this means that when we try to think a materialism differently (which, as I've tried to stress, is also is tied to the project of thinking empiricism differently--but which can also involve rethinking dialectical materialism, say, where the material is not so linked to the empirical but rather to the opposition to the ideal qua Geistlich), and come up with a notion of matter that is "without presence and without substance," this matter has ideality, because it is a trace, the possibility or impossibility, of such a matter. In de Man, however, because the trace has ideality we have to say that it is material ("the only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," 82). And in no way should we say that this constitutes a materialism: it is in fact, precisely an idealism which Derrida, by insisting on ideality (a nonideal exteriority which cannot yet be said to be material), resists.

One should also add that Derrida takes up these de Manian issues again in "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)," inflecting them through his attempt to think materiality and spectrality together--that is, to think materiality otherwise, in Specters of Marx. His remarks there (which give body precisely to what he means by "nonideal") are much more adequate and interesting. I would say though, that to pull Derrida's nonideality more in the direction of the ideal can't really be insisted upon enough in America, where the trace is too often thought of as material--given the influence of de Man. In fact, what I'd say is that everything in the following passage on "materialism" and "matter" needs to be replaced with "idealism" and the "ideal," to also understand the particular type of materiality Derrida is talking about and how it would resist a de Manian materiality:

If have not very often used the word "matter," it is not, as you know, because of some idealist or spiritualist kind of reservation. It is that the logic of the phase of overturning this concept has been too often reinvested with "logocentric" values, values associated with those of thing. [...] This is why I will not say that the concept of matter is in and of itself either metaphysical or nonmetaphysical. This depends on the work which it yields, and you know that I have unceasingly insisted, as concerns the nonideal exteriority of writing, the gram, the trace, the text, etc., upon the necessity of never separating them from work, a value itself to be rethought outside its Hegelian affiliation.
-Positions, 64-65