The place of the text

Here is a wonderful quote from Dissemination that recasts the logic of that infamous phrase from Of Grammatology, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is,"--in the sense of the Heideggerian es gibt--"nothing outside the text") quite clearly and quite creatively--displaying, we should note, that almost unbelievable genius of Derrida for coming up with ways to say nothing and everything at the same time:

If there is nothing outside the text, this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or an identity-to-itself... but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing.

-Dissemination, "Outwork," 36

In other words, the text "is" (one must only suppose its existence, or rather continually ask the question of whether it exists as such or not in elaborating its structure and its effects) a different placement (or displacement) of what allows for a different placement (a displacement). The "effects of opening and closing" are the effects of text: a text, on the one hand, opens up a field beyond itself of what it does not enclose or what it will soon enclose--that is, opens itself up to its referent, the "reality" or signified that "exists" outside itself--and, on the other hand, closes itself off from that referent which it opens up. In other words, the text "is," normally, what allows for a "different placement"--that is, "is" normally conceived as consistently reaffirming the opposition between difference and its opposite, identity, in its instantiation: text exhibits the effects of identity in exhibiting closure from the referent and (therefore or in contrast) allows for difference in exhibiting openness to a referent, to the outside. If text "is" for Derrida, in contrast to this normal "concept of the text in general," a "different placement of the effects of opening and closing," then it "is" not a repetition of the same opposition or binary. It "is" a repetition with a difference: in other words, a different placement of this difference, of this different ability for placement, for opening and closing the text with respect to the referent. This is why we said that text, when this concept suffers "transformation," "is" or "has its existence as" the different placement of what allows for a different placement. Indeed, the text "is" the displacement of this very ability for that very displacement of displacement to "be."

Mistakes in Class, or Herrschaft und Knechtschaft

A very wise professor today asked the class to define what Hegel means by the master and slave dialectic. I started to respond (with little attention to my words) that it is about two "subjectivities" that confront each other in a relationship where what is at stake is their self-sufficiency. She stopped me there and said, "the master-slave dialectic is not about two subjectivities. It is about the dialectic." And she's right, and not just because--as I too quickly concluded--that she is of the school that reads the section on mastery and slavery in a  Derridian way and not in a Kojevian way. I was stupid for saying "subjectivity," right off the bat. That is where she was correcting me, and this is where the Derridian way of reading it (along with Heidegger and Hyppolite, though Heidegger may take this too far in this direction) is really useful.

"Subjectivity" is a really misused word in general. I meant something like "self," but even that is not what is at stake in the master-slave dialectic. Nothing like it even appears or presents itself there throughout the whole passage. What presents itself is, as she said, the dialectic, but also and more specifically, self-consciousness. And what gets staked--that is, either lost by the master-slave relationship or relieved/superseded by it-- is life. Hegel says:

Die Darstellung seiner aber als der reinen Abstraktion des Selbstbewusstseins besteht darin, sich als reine Negation seiner gegenständlichen Weise zu zeigen, oder es zu zeigen, an kein bestimmtes Dasein geknüpft, an die allgemeine Einzelnheit des Daseins überhaupt nicht, nicht an das Leben geknüpft zu sein. Diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun; Tun des Andern, und Tun durch sich selbst. Insofern es Tun des Andern ist, geht also jeder auf den Tod des Andern. Darin aber ist auch das zweite, das Tun durch sich selbst, vorhanden; denn jenes schliesst das Daransetzen des eignen Lebens in sich.

[The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not the the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the fomrer involves the staking of its own life.]

The master-slave relationship is about dialectic because it it the form of this relationship that gets constituted and is proper to the appearance of self-consciousness (its phenomenality): this is why Hegel focuses on what is shown or presented in the confrontation: or rather this is why he says the (twofold) confrontation is itself a Darstellung (diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun). The only thing that perhaps functions like (though still does not appear similar to) a self or a subjectivity that makes its appearance here is life, and this is the reason why I wanted to say "self" and said "subjectivity"--and, I'm thinking, why this mistake is made more generally in talking about this famous passage in Hegel.

Life in Hegel is an interesting thing: it is thought about constantly in his earlier writings in a similar way to how he thinks, later on, about Geist. Life in the Phenomenology, however, seems a little more bare: it becomes something like bare life, the functioning of Spirit at a natural level. It is what must be superseded, essentially, because it is the most basic thing that challenges self-consciousness in the other: that is, his bare existence as foreign to self-consciousness, to consciousness' being-for-itself. But notice that this bare existence is not itself something foreign to self-consciousness in general. It itself is an appearance or a mode of manifestation of a self-consciousness: in other words, life is not something with some significance outside of remaining just another way that self-consciousness appears here to a self-consciousness (whether it be one's own or the other's). What I'm getting at is that life just another form of the dialectic operating as a form of or within (for lask of better words) self-consciousness, and we mistake it for something else, something more vague, if we think of it apart from its dialectical structure--that is, by what we normally might mean by it.

Thus, though her ultimate reason might be more Derridian, my professor was absolutely right: that is, she was right not even because the dialectic, as Derrida shows in "From Restricted to General Economy," is what gets arbitrarily (and yet also, for other reasons, necessarily) preserved by Hegel throughout his rendering of the master-slave relationship--in other words, not because the dialectic is what is at stake for Hegel--but also because what is being talked about in it is only the dialectic, not something external to it or itself other than it that we designate by life or self-sufficiency. This is the hard part about thinking about Hegel: getting outside of his own verbiage to explain him--as I tried to do--inevitably makes one betray the phenomenon (in Hegel's sense, the self-showing of Spirit) that one seeks to convey: it takes one also outside the form of spirit (in this case, self-consciousness) that one is discussing or bringing to language.

So, in the master-slave dialectic, what is at stake is the ability of the dialectic to appear or show itself as a Darstellung, and in doing so, risk something about that Darstellung that structures and is structured by this ability: life. In other words, the self-sufficiency of self-consciousness is what is challenged by the life of the other, which must leads one to stake one's own life (or rather, present one's life) to him in mortal combat. This is the better way to put it. Because the other exists, because their phenomenality appears (a redundant way to put this, but I'm just trying to be clear), I am threatened as anything that must be more than just living, more than bare life--namely, self-consciousness. Thus, I must present myself against them in a fight.

Some remarks on Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, and Derrida

Derrida's quite formulaic comments in On Touching--Jean Luc Nancy on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would add something to current general readings of Merleau-Ponty here in the US. These can be represented generally (and only generally) by Hubert Dreyfus' work on Merleau-Ponty and skill acquisition (which are summed up quite nicely in a paper he gives here). Dreyfus makes much about the anti-representationalist or bodily nature of perception that Merleau-Ponty employs as an alternative to the more "representationalist" theories of the mind--especially found in computational models. These representationalist theories of mind would require a perception to be registered not necessarily consciously, but by the system or network of input/output relations that constitute the functional mind. Merleau-Ponty places the impression a perception makes beyond our outside these sites of registration, as Dreyfus quotes Merleau-Ponty as saying:

An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression. Nor has it the power to arouse others. It does so only provided that it is already understood in the light of the past experience in which it co-existed with those which we are concerned to arouse.

This pre-representational precomprehension would structure experience beyond any computational model and even (or, as Merleau-Ponty constantly reminds us in his Phenomenology of Perception) beyond any Kantian transcendental structure, situating it in a network of relations that are lived spatially and temporally in the purity of a gap or space between the world and the mind or self that lives. This space (and time) is the body, and it is only on the basis of this body, this pre-understanding of the possibility of a perceptual impression to mean or to have value (we are speaking loosely and too quickly here) that we then can have an impression at all and associate it with another--that is, come forth or be represented and related explicitly with the other--as the computational or representationalist model of the mind would have it. The gap in between the "source" of the perception (the world) and "destination" that receives it as an impression (the mind--again, speaking very loosely) is the space and time in which there would exist a contingent (thus not transcendental or ideal or Kantian) comportment that structures the possibility of these two, and in fact is possibility itself: the unique fabric or intertwining of the world and the self that juts into time and space as an intention. It is here that we must look for phenomena like skill-acquisition, learning, decision, etc. etc.--and Dreyfus outlines quite clearly all the possibilities of this.

Now, Derrida considers this space and time itself divided or dispersed--that is, this gap across which stretches an intention is itself a gap, a space and time, and so on and so on. But not because the body or the intentional network that structures our experience just has at its center an irreducible gap, that every intention is itself never fully able to be bridged and grasp (Dreyfus looks closely at grasping) what it wants to get at or accomplish itself except arbitrarily (by fantasy) or by starting over (compulsion): rather, it is because for there to be an intention, for this intentional space prior to representation to be contingent and not ideal, to be fully worldly, that is, indeterminate and yet (as intention) finite, there would have to exist infinite contingency, the possibility of complete indetermination. In other words, the pre-representational body of intention (my prior worldly understanding that juts through space and time and accomplishes) only accomplishes what it does because at its heart, it is completely the carrying out of what, outside this intention, is capable of being represented fully. In other words, the computational model is what is at the heart of this pre-computational intention: it has to be able to be represented by this model to such an extent that it is, in its accomplishing of the intention, exactly indistinguishable from it. The space of intentional precomprehension is, therefore, precisely in its contingency, absolutely ideal.

So the tendency to grasp, for example. This is often used as the expression of the preunderstanding or comprehension of a bodily subjectivity that makes possible and comprehensible any subjectivity, any decision that comes to mind consciously: it is only on the basis of a tendency to grasp that one can grasp and also think to themselves that they want to grasp whatever they grasp. How would Derrida look at this? Well, the body, as the intentional structure that really is the locus where the grasping is made possible, is itself rent apart as a space of intention. So my grasping would not be able to be traced as taking place there, in the bodily subjectivity. At the same time, it would still not be in the mind as represented. The tendency, in other words, would give us nothing to look at: there is no ground or basis on which one could represent to oneself the possibility of grasping--where in Merleau-Ponty (that is, Dreyfus' Merleau-Ponty, mainly) it is only on this basis that there is this representation. The tendency is empty: it is itself totally other than a tendency, a consistency, a structure of itself prior to what is structured. Rather, the tendency to grasp would be "caused" or based only on the possibility that it could be the action of someone who could say to themselves "I want to grasp this" and thereby carry it out. The carrying out of the tendency to grasp would be only possible if it is impossible as a tendency, if it were, as a tendency, already completely other to itself in its non-being, in its functioning. In fact, it would have to be precisely this representation, this saying, in order to be a tendency: in short, the intentional must be the computational or representational in order to be intentional.

This isn't some basic playing with concepts: in fact, every act would be structured and actually accomplished this way, for Derrida. In the space of the lived body, there is already division that makes it determined by the possibility of what it makes possible (representation)--thus making it impossible: this is how every intention finds its fulfillment--that is, impossibly. This means that it is always radically contingent to the extent that it looks like it could merely be calculated by a computer, merely associated. This constitutes his whole objection to the reading of Husserl that Merleau-Ponty engages in: where Merleau-Ponty is quick to see a gap where the body would play or function, Derrida sees total play, unreserved play, total functioning, to the extent that it breaks with this functioning. To put it in the language of the quote of Dreyfus: it is only on the basis of the fact that every impression is associated with every other that there could be a space prior to this which, as the understanding that makes them possible, brings them about and in so doing brings nothing about or renders itself impossible. I'll post more on this later, but hopefully these sketches will do some good.