Themes and figures

On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy is one of my favorite books by Derrida. I haven't seen it commented upon as much as I would have expected. I think that once they registered Derrida's death (which happened just when On Touching came out in English), people in America turned quite quickly to The Animal That Therefore I Am (which came out soon after, even though the text dates to 1997). Perhaps this was because the latter book represented something like a newer theme for Derrida--or the making-explicit of a theme that goes back all the way to Grammatology at least, where one can find some comments upon animals if I remember right. Or it was because animality was becoming the fashionable issue it is today--though I don't like to be so cynical about this, since theory works via fashion and styling (you'd have thought people would have come to accept this by now, annoying as it sometimes is, and really revived its utopian potential). Regardless of the reason, I mean to imply that there might have been something old-fashioned about this work for some people. Its main issues are phenomenological, even though we get forays into issues in religion (and even though this--as Martin Hägglund is right to point out--has become an almost too-popular way into Derrida in recent years), and certainly into the body. We're concerned here with Husserl and his issues, at the end of the day--and of course with Aristotle, who is never quite too far from a phenomenologist's mind. More than anything, it's this extended consideration of these thinkers which Derrida really focused upon early in his work that makes the long, interesting look at Merleau-Ponty here seem belated--even though he already produced a reading of The Visible and the Invisible in 1993.

I don't mean to imply that the work is only a return to origins, after a long career (though I don't quite have the problem others do of imputing to Derrida an action like this that would completely contradict his "philosophy"). Indeed, besides the fact that Derrida engages phenomenology continually, or basically brings the tradition of phenomenology to bear upon every problem he encounters, these thinkers are here because it is Nancy who engages with them and has them in his mind--and the book is above all else a fascinating meditation on and tribute to the latter's work (which I don't myself like much, but whatever). Nevertheless, it's this feeling of a return to explicit phenomenological figures--if not themes (and I'll come to the distinction in a moment)--that makes me really like this book.

That, and its general sloppiness. The book is all over the place--it rounds off thoughts in weird places, repeats itself without much difference all the time, and suffers from that frankness, that real drive to just get it out there that comes from a less crafted effort. I don't mean to say it isn't unbelievably wrought, or baroque in the ways characteristic of Derrida's other texts. Indeed it plays with certain phrases to a higher degree than usual (though it comes nowhere near Rogues), since it takes up an extremely dense semantic area, as we'll see. But it just isn't as minimalist as his other work (and Derrida's work in general can be thought of as something like philosophic minimalism, as much as people are fond of talking about it as jazz). This is probably because he didn't have enough time--but I like Derrida when he is sloppy or rushed, mostly because it is here that he is the most creative, and the least literary. The Gift of Death is another great example of this: we have something like a Derrida that can't go back and revise, a Derrida that is up-front and open, even frank--and despite how enigmatic and deep the constructions of that text in particular can be.

One passage in particular I enjoyed rereading today, because it was quite frank about something which was essential to Derrida's popularity in literature departments. Derrida is talking about a particular question of touch that he claims is put to Nancy (and by turns him, considering Nancy), and its inseparability from a question about Christianity--in short, whether the question of touch is a specifically Christian issue (keep in mind the becoming-flesh or de/en-spiritualizing of Christ), and what it would then mean that the question of touch is still an open question. He then says:

I knew, I thought I had known for a long time that if there is a work of thinking today that measures up to this, to this question, and actually measures itself against it as the incommensurable, in acts of language and reflection, then it is Nancy's work, even when it doesn't acknowledge all the references that I have just evoked, beginning with Aristotle and the Gospels. I thought I had known this for a long time (266).

This is perhaps less hyperbolic than it comes off, since we have that uncertain, unsure pause over knowing and thinking one knows. But even if it is I don't quite care too much--it is a tribute by a friend after all (and to a friend who had just had surgery on his heart). Regardless, Derrida then seems to qualify this unsure thought (that still was so sure Nancy referred to the question, even if he didn't acknowledge certain references) with a very sure or certain thought regarding how reference itself works:

To be sure, a search (which may have been too hasty) through a number of Nancy's early works--roughly until the middle of the 1980's, and strangely including, therefore, The Experience of Freedom--had shown us that neither the theme nor the figure of touch lays siege to his discourse, invests in it, or above all else invades it, as will be the case--we can establish it today--in all his recent publications (266).

We can be sure that even an acknowledgment of certain themes or figures would not necessarily establish that reference. But this in turn can only proceed if we know something about the distinction between a theme and the figure:

Let me insist that this is an issue of the theme and the figure--and this is more than just one difficulty among others. Because if there is "the" sense of touch [Nancy himself says "there is no 'the' sense of touch"], which is to say this motif of which Nancy speaks and that he now thematizes increasingly, while saying "there is no 'the' sense of touch" there are also--before or beyond this object of thought of discourse, beyond what is called touch, which is is henceforth dealing with--all these figural and apparently nonthematic operators with which he is continually playing (as I am doing here), through which and thanks to which Nancy has long since put touching into words, and said it and touched it (266).

What Derrida is essentially saying is that the thematizing of touch that Nancy is doing in his more recent work can be--or actually has to be--related to those moments even in his non-touch-centered work by way of Nancy's recourse to various operators, various used-up metaphors and tropes--figures. Figures like what? Derrida turns to a recent work, where we can see this working precisely in spite of the increasing thematization itself: Corpus. Nancy is talking about sacrifice--but I won't try and reconstitute or paraphrase all that, it's not important for my point--and Derrida quotes him:

There then follow, in the next sentence, two instances of the word "touch." They deserve an infinite analysis, on the scale of that upon which they touch, namely, precisely, a process of infinitization, the very same one that was questioned in the previous chapter: "To touch upon this denial, or, to put it succinctly, this manipulation, is to touch upon this simultaneity; it is to be obliged to wonder whether dialectical negativity washed away the blood, or whether the blood must, on the contrary, inevitably hemorrhage from it. In order to prevent the dialectical process from remaining a comedy, Bataille wants the blood to flow" (my emphases--J.D.) (268).

All well and good. Then Derrida gets frank:

In this case, one may easily say that it is a question of a manner of speaking, of some kind of trope. Just try and find someone who has ever literally "touched" a denial [which is what Nancy says, above]. At times Nancy seems to be drawing on the fund of an old rhetoric that says "to touch" for "to concern," "to aim," "to think," "to refer to," "to speak of," "to take as its object," "to thematize," precisely, in a precisely pertinent fashion, and so forth. But because, in the same sentence, one sees first the hands of "manipulation" (another figure but more strictly determinate), next the "blood" rise up or take shape, the literality of "touch" thereby becomes more sensitive, nearer, less conventional. One begins to ask oneself: whence comes and what comes as the authorizing instance of this figure of "touch?"? Why does one say "to touch" for "to speak of," "to concern," "to aim," "to refer to" in general, and so forth? Is it because touch, as Aristotle said, is not a "unique sense?" More and more, Nancy plays this game--the most serious game there is--which consists in using, as if there were not the slightest problem, this common and ancestral figure of tactile language in order to draw our attention to "'the' sense of touch" itself--which there is not. He invests this very invasion that, little by little, prevents us from distinguishing between thematic sense and operating function... (268).

The point is one that is familiar to readers of Derrida (maybe one that is old, tired). But you can also see the emergence of and collapsing of that distinction between theme and figure, and feel how it is essential to the point.

But what is that distinction? It was--as I hinted above--one that literary critics not only knew but also, in the 60s and 70s, were ready to appreciate. Literary criticism was getting bogged down with what we still call "thematic" readings: readings that trace a particular set of features through a text and supply some sort of organizing logic that would tie them all together. We don't have to go back to some previous "school" of vague psychoanalytic readings based on the presence or absence of various phallic symbols to get some sense of what this was like (and even these are less thematic--even much more allegorical--than some will claim), because indeed most readings of texts even in our age will still tend to be thematic in nature. It's not that thematic reading is bad or unskilled: though some would argue this, I would just say it's one of our our semi-natural attitudes towards making the text mean as a whole, on a somewhat more formal level (I notice several instances of "death," or "death-related imagery," and try to make sense of its "recurrence"). Indeed, amateurism wasn't even able to be the case as far as the literary critics who appreciated Derrida were concerned, since it was not the unskilled but the tendencies of the professional literary critic (psychoanalytic or not) that they were engaged with. No, the problem is that in these readings, one can't quite specify in what the themes inhere: they are just there, able to be organized, sometimes backed up with reference to style.

De Man in particular was ready to launch an attack on thematic readings as a whole by grounding this search for the logic of the text in the level of the figure. Figures (schemes and tropes) are actually parts of the text, though organizing them is somewhat more difficult. Regardless, they offer a viable alternative and moreover something like an even more traditional one. De Man would make much of this, grounding the professionalism of the literary critic in his ability to notice and handle such figures (which, again, I don't think is wholly legitimate), and distinguishing literary language itself from all other language (while claiming it to be superior) in terms of its essential figurality (which I think is even more suspect). Nevertheless, the original anti-thematic impetus is important (and being clear about it is really the best thing de Man did--and we should preserve that), and it is this that one can find, indeed, in Derrida. In fact, Derrida's use of the figure hit upon something even more crucial--which allowed all those power-grabs by de Man but which isn't necessarily bound up with them--which was that privileging the figural over the thematic actually requires that we reconceive our object of study itself. De Man interpreted this by asserting that as long as a thematic approach remains dominant, even references to figures will remain thematic in nature: it is the logic of the theme that will serve to make these figures significant. So what is needed is some sort of grounding of a reading in figures that is in turn unthematizable--and indeed this is what Derrida precisely offered.

But you'll notice in the above that Derrida doesn't make this distinction to preserve it: he collapses it as well. This is why the distinction is a textual one for Derrida (occurring somewhere between thinking and the work) and a linguistic or rhetorical one for de Man: Derrida reads texts, de Man reads rhetoric. And I'll just end things here by noticing what Derrida says about rhetoric itself, as he expands upon his remark above on why we need to insist upon the figure/theme distinction:

Let me just insist that this is an issue of the theme and the figure. [...] But insisting is not nothing. Even if it did nothing but bring to the light of day what was sleeping in the shadow, even if it exhibited literally and as such (thus painfully baring its body) what had until then been a used-up metaphor, a familar trope we use without paying much attention to it--well, this intensification of insistence is no longer a simple rhetorical movement. It comes down to thinking and to the thinking body of thought (266).