Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, almost concluded

Continued, once more, from last time:

“We are talking here about drawing, not painting,” Derrida says in Memoirs of the Blind (cited as MB, p 44). Are we to understand this as a signal of a turn away from Merleau-Ponty, even though we have not yet developed fully what painting is for him and whether it has a relationship to drawing? In some sense, we must answer this in the affirmative. For the sense in which Merleau-Ponty is developing his idea of depth already forecloses any interpretation of drawing that would not already appropriate it to the sphere of painting. This is because we can already tell that it must interpret the line not as something that functions as a sort of division of space that would outline or give boundaries, remaining in itself something flat and without thickness. We know that it must itself be depth, or have a thickness that would indicate some sort of volume is constituted in its simple and slight mark. In short, the line cannot be a surface, since what is fleshly has no surfaces: as we saw, it only sets up arrangements of presences that do not collapse into anything that one could call a representation on a “flat canvas.” The line, therefore, would have to be itself one of these presences, even though we might think that it is itself the only thing that would be able to organize or arrange them. And this is what Merleau-Ponty indeed says in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” his great tribute to the artist published just after the Phenomenology of Perception:

It is Cézanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception (in Sense and Non-Sense, 9-25).

“To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth:” this remarkable sentence betrays the fact that for Merleau-Ponty, drawing, as he says quite explicitly in “Eye and Mind,” is merely a “mode of expression” of painting, a derivative or privative status of a richer phenomenon: “one drawing, even a line, can embrace all its”—that is, painting’s—“bold potential” (“EM,” 172). That is, when the line is conceived properly within the element of the flesh, it is a mark that opens up into the depth that painting figures: it suggests not only the edge of an apple when seen straight-on or in only two-dimensions, but extends or “recedes” into the canvas to suggest that it continues to wrap itself around the apple as its edge in space—the fleshy space of the visible. When it is conceived as an outline, however, it is precisely like conceiving the depth of the pool as the mathematical distance between the surface and the bottom: depth qua flesh is sacrificed.
If Derrida considers drawings in Memoirs of the Blind, then, we understand him to be trying to rethink the phenomenon of the surface and the outline—that is, if he is not talking about the line in the terms that Merleau-Ponty uses. We must ask, then, whether his drawings are appropriated within the sphere of painting or whether they remain independent from it. Or, perhaps a better question: is the self-portrait, in Derrida’s eyes, a painting? This question might lead us to more answers since the self-portrait is that object that Derrida continually studies throughout Memoirs of the Blind, claiming that, in fact, all self-portraits are drawings of the blind (MB, 2, 45 and passim). He says this for one simple reason, which constitutes merely the other side of this claim: drawing itself is blind, in the sense that at the point at which a trace is put down upon the sheet of paper, the point itself which makes the trace cannot be seen by the draftsman (“the drawing is blind,” MB, 2).

Obviously these two claims mean that Derrida considers the drawing, insofar as it is visible, somewhat differently than we might expect. Is not the drawing, completed and there before us in a gallery, visible? How could it still be blind—even if we do grant that the point where the lines that make it up remains unseen to the draftsman (the “aperspective of the graphic act,” as Derrida calls it; MB, 44-45)? Derrida shows us that these marks or traits we claim to see before us disappear when we look a little more closely:

What is to be thought now of the trait once traced? That is, not of its pathbreaking course, not of the inaugural path of the trace, but of that which remains of it? A tracing, an outline, cannot be seen. One should in fact not see it (let’s not say however: “One must not see it”) insofar as all the colored thickness that it retains tends to wear itself out so as to mark the single edge of a contour: between the inside and the outside of a figure. Once this limit is reached, there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, the line itself: which is thus no longer what it is, because from then on it never relates to itself without dividing itself just as soon… This limit is never presently reached, but drawing always signals towards this inaccessibility, toward the threshold where only the surroundings of the trait appear—that which the trait spaces by delimiting and which thus does not belong to the trait. Nothing belongs to the trait, and thus, to drawing… not even its own “trace” (MB, 53-4).

The lines we claim that we see in a drawing we do not see. And yet, it seems that this is because they precisely do not do what Merleau-Ponty says—that is, disappear into a structure of presences, into a painting. Rather, Derrida says they disappear before us because the two-dimensional representations that the line gives a contour to encroach upon it and blot it out (this is the “withdrawal or the eclipse, the differential inappearance of the trait;” MB, 53). If we look hard for just a line in any drawing, we miss it. And because these representations are precisely not the presences of a painting, the fullness of depths and colors, but merely the empty white space of a page—because of this all presence is obliterated by the representation that effaces itself, and we must conclude that the self-portrait that Derrida gives us cannot be a painting in Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the word.
But something more is happening here: we claimed that we saw the drawing, that it was precisely that object that was visible, when it turned out that exactly in the lines that supposedly made it up, it disappeared before us. Radical changes to our conception of the visible result from this, because this does not suggest that what is visible is merely what is unseen. Rather, the marks disappeared or withdrew when we tried to look at them more closely. What is crucial about this fact is that we must understand that the act of looking again in effect redraws the line, according to Derrida: the looking closer or lending a narrative to the trait such that we can isolate it from the figures that overtake it therefore turns us into something of a draftsman (this is the “rhetoric of the trait;” MB, 56). Looking past this fact that the drawing thus has truly become a self-portrait for us (we will come back to it soon enough), what is important about this is that what is visible, for Derrida, always prompts us to redraw what is seen: it is therefore not just that the line is not visible for us, that the visible is the unseen.
But does this mean, then, that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty?

(To be continued...)

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, continued (even further)

Continued (even further) from last time. I had just remarked that "The interval between the vision and the visible, precisely as a relation of material space, is a positive thickness like the water—and this thickness is flesh, the way this space continually becomes part of the vision. And, as Merleau-Ponty continues to say, 'this internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth' as well:"

...With this last statement, we understand how we might be coming closer to grasping how the painter “lends his body to the visible”—that is, the opposite phenomenon of how vision, via its participation in the flesh, turns into the visible. The painter simply figures precisely what the eye actually accomplishes in its vision: the turning of the visible into what itself is seeing. In other words, he lends the vision of his body to the bodily nature of the visible—the flesh in which the body itself, as also visible, participates in. And though this “lending” is also what happens in normal perception, in painting we get figured this becoming-vision of the visible as such. This is the only difference, and Merleau-Ponty expresses it in even more concrete terms:

it can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, inside the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth (167-8).

In other words, the newborn is the visible become capable of vision as well as become more visible to us as an independent body (that is, not of its mother’s body). In short, this amounts to saying that it has just become more fleshly. This is all the vision of the artist does—and indeed it is only what it properly does, though continually. We understand now that if there were to be a painting of the pool, then, its depth would be precisely a revealing of the fleshly nature of the thickness of the water which our vision normally perceives: depth, then, is one particular aspect of painting that nicely brings out for us how things like perspective and volume and thickness (that is, the things that we say make up depth within the sphere of painting) are only abstractions that originate in this more primordial phenomenon of the flesh which is actually out there in the world of our vision. Because there is a livable space for the body and for vision figured in depth (I can jump in the water), the same is true of the depth in the painting—and this goes for all aspects of painting more generally. Thus a painting is not so much a series of techniques—depth is not a trick of perspective or math—so much as that becoming-vision (or becoming-more-fleshly, the coming-to-itself of the visible qua flesh) of the arrangement of things in the visible:

It cannot be merely a question of an unmysterious interval, as seen from an airplane [i.e. the interval or space of physics], between these trees nearby and those farther away. Nor is it a matter of the way things are conjured away, one by another, as we see happen so vividly in a perspective drawing. These two views are very explicit and raise no problems. The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is between them. The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy (“EM,” 179-80).

What we are understanding, then, is that depth in paintings does not merely resemble the depth that we might say we perceive in the thickness of something like the water or the arrangement of trees in the landscape before us, but that it actually is in a sense this very same depth (qua depth—it is actually a totally different piece of space) showing itself as such to us—that is, showing itself as flesh. We now know that the painting itself plays upon those “the double meaning of the word” vision that Merleau-Ponty so loves: “the painters vision” that is a continued birth is precisely this because it is both this vision of the body of the painter lent to the visible as well as the artwork which is the creation or concentration or figuring of this very vision. When it comes to painting something like depth, then,

obviously it is not a matter of adding one more dimension to those of the flat canvas, of organizing an illusion or an objectless perception whose perfection consists in simulating an empirical vision to the maximum degree. Pictorial depth (as well as painted height and width) comes “I know not whence” to alight upon, and take root in, the sustaining support. The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely “physical-optical” relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible (“EM,” 181).

We begin to see, then, the immense implications of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis for any theory of representation: representation disappears simply into the fleshly presence constituted by vision and the visible. But we still do not wholly understand the particular “intertwining” of vision and movement—the flipping or reversing of the visible into vision and back again—that makes this presence into the body and the fleshly itself. Indeed, in a sense we have skipped over precisely that crucial phenomenon of how the painter “lends” his body to the visible in understanding the new role of painting in Merleau-Ponty. That is, we have only described the painter, already from the standpoint of a visible thing, turning the visible back into vision. The real question is: how does he get to be a vision in the midst of the visible in the first place? For this, we have to return to that confusing passage where Merleau-Ponty says the particular type of vision that things participate in as visible is like “myself seen from without, such as another would see me.” And it is here that the invisible, as well as Derrida, will intervene.

Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sex, part 1

For a couple weeks now I have been thinking or circling about a certain passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and its relation to a certain motif, a certain problematic, that stretches itself through Derrida's entire corpus, indeed announcing itself (quite literally: you can find it there in the text), if not always, then with surprising frequency.
It itself was largely the subject of a series of seminars on philosophical nationalism Derrida held in the late 80's. Hopefully these will all eventually be published. But the motif or problematic I am talking about is not just confined to the issues it involved and which these seminars (and the articles and works explicitly published around them or with reference to them, which included Of Spirit and The Politics of Friendship)--that is, sex or all the words centering around Geschlecht, including sex, gender, race or breeding, nation--so much as an issue revolving around Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the problem of reproduction and biology and/or technology which extends much further than the apparent (that is, explicit) reach even of (this subject of) Geschlecht.
(In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida says the following, which approximates--and yet I wonder whether we might ever get an abstracted, pure formulation of this, outside of any text, any project like The Politics of Friendship--the problem or motif I am trying to get at, but as a particular conceptualization and/or question of politics:

The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family., without what we will call a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation... This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.
-The Politics of Friendship, viii.)
First, the passage. Derrida is talking about how the issue of whether and how an animal could see itself (and perhaps see itself naked, i.e. feel shame) within a mirror, whether it can apprehend its own reflection--how this issue is not found discussed in any discourse of a philosophical type (with the exception of Lacan, who ends up saying that the animal actually does not "see"). He suggests that this is because these discourses would have to "know for certain" the following:

Where do the mirror and the reflecting image begin, which also refers to the identification of one's fellow being? Can one not speak of an experience that is already specular as soon as a cat recognizes a cat and begins to know, if not in the end to say, that "a cat is a cat?" Does not the mirror effect also begin wherever a living creature, whatever it be, identifies another living creature of its own species as its neighbor [prochain, also "its next"] or fellow [semblable, also "its likeness"]? And therefore at least wherever there is sexuality properly speaking, wherever reproduction relies on sexual coupling?
-The Animal That Therefore I Am, 59.

It is this last sentence which made me think. It brought me around to that motif which I began to think about seriously when writing a paper on The Gift of Death--if only because it seemed like I had always thought along the lines of the necessity that the motif indicates, it captures and thematizes so very well the general experience that one has (and I certainly had) while reading Heidegger's Nietzsche. Indeed, in The Gift of Death, one finds a refrain of sorts that goes as follows: "that would be more Nietzschian than Heideggerian." So one finds, while Derrida is discussing a claim of Patocka's:

Heidegger would never have said that metaphysical determinations of being or the history of the dissimulation of being in the figures or modes of the entity developed as myths or fictions. Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian.
-The Gift of Death (Second Edition), 39.

The refrain is important in this text for two reasons: 1) Derrida rarely economizes in this way by referring not even to the proper name but to the type or kind of discourse that is generally assumed to be that of a particular proper name--though The Gift of Death is indeed a rare text, full of many other rare instances of economizing, precisely--and 2) Nietzsche, as my friend Sand said to a class that included me several months ago, plays a crucial part in this book, if it all in fact does not wholly stand or fall with its take on Nietzsche.
But the importance is not just local: reading it, I remembered a phrase all the way back in Of Grammatology which seemed to bear upon this very refrain.

Radicalizing the concepts of interpretation, perspective, evaluation, difference, and all the "empiricist" or nonphilosophical motifs that have constantly tormented philosophy throughout the history of the West, and besides, have had nothing but the inevitable weakness of being produced in the field of philosophy, Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos and the related concept of truth or the primary signified, in whatever sense that is understood. Reading, and therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche "originary" operations... with regard to a sense that they do not first have to transcribe or discover, which would not therefore be a truth signified in the original element and presence of the logos, as topos noetos, divine understanding, or the structure of a priori necessity. To save Nietzsche from a reading of the Heideggerian type [my italics], it seems that we must above all not attempt to restore or make explicit a less naive "ontology," composed of profound ontological intuitions acceding to some originary truth, an entire fundamentality hidden under the appearance of an empiricist or metaphysical text... Therefore, rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely [my italics again], underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness...
-Of Grammatology (Corrected Edition), 19.

If we ignore the Saussurian language regarding "the liberation of the signifier"--this has been too much commented upon, in my opinion--we find that there is a proposal for rebelling against the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, and in a unique way (that annuls itself or self-destructs as rebellion--we will return to this later): that is, much of what will become Spurs. But before turning to that text--another in the motif we are establishing--we must ask, Why does Derrida propose (to take back) this rebellion? Why should we protect Nietzsche from Heidegger in the first place?
It is not that Heidegger's reading of Neitzsche itself fails to give due credit to certain crucial aspects of Nietzsche, namely those "nonphilosophical" ones Derrida speaks of--essentially his engagement with positivism (psychology) and his appropriations of Darwin. This would be, fundamentally, Deleuze's objection to the Heideggerian reading, along, perhaps, with Foucault. It is not, then, the oft noted fact that Heidegger takes the "late" Nietzsche, the most rigidly philosophical or schematic Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Will to Power, as the useful Nietzsche (indeed, if one wanted to really make this argument, one would encounter much opposition from the fact that Heidegger does interpret much early Nietzsche, if not so much in his two volumes on him then in other texts, where he usually brings in most of the corpus--the early writings and even some early fragments, not to mention much of Zarathustra). This despite the unbelievable extent of the prejudice against these aspects of Nietzsche that Heidegger expresses so often in his later work and so (there is no other word for it--though "hastily," "unthinkingly," "inappropriately," "misleadingly," "slanderously" all come to mind, and I use this one precisely to call up or recall what Heidegger himself said of his affiliation with the National Socialists--and I would argue this is just something basic about Heidegger, to be reviled and unceasingly argued against rather than mocked or dismissed, because it is right beside the brilliance of his interpretations) stupidly in remarks like the following: Nietzsche's philosophy, he says,

rests on strange foundations. These foundations indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically highly questionable "psychology." Yet Nietzsche can afford that.
-The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, (Heidegger's winter 1929/30 seminar), 74.

No, Derrida does not reject this regarding Heidegger's Nietzsche. Nor does Derrida here directly reject what this move of Heidegger's is affiliated with--a suspicion about representation in general, and about die Zeit des Weltbildes--which Derrida often critiques (cf. "Envois" in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I for an amazing extended discussion of "The Age of the World-Picture"). It is more complicated here than the particular characterization of Nietzsche as a thinker of being as will, as calculable representation, that Heidegger will often lament in his sketches and essays on the history of being.
The rejection is at once more simple and infinitely more profound--this is why it will have to be taken up again in Spurs, as well as--indeed--the rest of the Derridian corpus: it is too much to the side of the main theses of Of Grammatology to be examined with the attention it deserves (and indeed this is why it can here be so directly). Derrida dismisses the idea that things in the world must, for Nietzsche, have their sense in being--and this is precisely what Heidegger concludes must be the case. In other words, things in the world (I have to use this awkward phrase because to use "what exists" or "beings" is already to submit to a Heideggerian interpretation) do not admit of looking any deeper behind them for what their residence in the world is grounded within (even if this ground is an ungroundedness, an abyss, an Abgrund). And this "looking deeper" for a ground is precisely what Heidegger always does with whatever Nietzsche asserts about the world (again, precisely by conceiving of its ground as ungrounded: to assert that Derrida is wrong because he misses this aspect of Heidegger--which I have seen happen often, especially on the part of Heideggerians--is to willfully misinterpret what Derrida is saying). For Heidegger, the things in the world from Nietzsche's perspective are indecidable with respect to their sense, their meaning--and this, however, is precisely their meaning: whatever is there, even if it is only an upsurge of becoming, has being, in the sense that it is not nothing. In the end, Heidegger thinks that if what becomes is not nothing, it must have being for Nietzsche on some level. That is, until Heidegger starts to entertain certain thoughts even beyond enowning (Ereignis) seriously. But we will (have to) come to this later.
Now, again, we are not circling around an exact interpretation of what "becoming" means in Nietzsche--and if it sounds as if this is the case, it is due to my lack of mastery over what I want to say here. But this term (becoming--and, indeed, how it relates to being) is not the point of the contestation (I outlined Heidegger's view of this with more precision--that is, with respect to eternal return and will to power--in a post last summer). If it were, then it would be an issue of either of the two objections we already specified (Deleuze and Foucault's, for example, and another Derrida's). Rather, in this passage of Of Grammatology, and throughout the sort of debate running through Derrida's corpus that I would here like to trace, there is an issue over the precise way things mean or have sense in Nietzsche's view and how we ourselves should interpret it--in short, it's much more basic than any debate over meaning, precisely because its about the most basic sense of meaning (if that means anything). What is at issue is an approach to Nietzsche, and whether it does not admit of another--a wholly other--way of approach. It comes down to this difference: if we were to take Heidegger's standpoint, we would suspect that whatever becomes, at some basic level (perhaps the level of attunements, which are not conscious), would still exist rather than not. What Derrida is advocating for, on the other hand, is the interpretation of becoming (that is, the things in the world) as a suspension of this being or meaning, even at this most basic level that Heidegger would be looking at. The indeterminacy with respect to meaning then would not be something that could be grounded even in what is ungrounded. It would be both indeterminate with respect to whether it is or meant, and indeterminate with respect to whether it was not (i.e. did not exist), or was not meaningful.
The entire discourse of Nietzsche, then--i.e. whatever he said about anything--would have been indeterminate. (This, by the way, is the fundamental thesis of Spurs, to which we will return).
This makes it more than clear that the stakes in this similarly naive-sounding "Such terms would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerian" are actually very high.
But before getting into this more, we must first ask about this detour I took with Derrida into Nietzsche and Heidegger--at bottom a detour towards a proposal for a saving (or not saving) of Nietzsche from (and by) Heidegger--and why I was reminded of it by a sentence on a discourse on animals. I say that there is a relation between the passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am and this this proposal. I will specify this relation--as well as develop this motif (by looking at remarks in both Spurs and Of Spirit, as well as the "Geschlecht" series of essays) in three or four more posts.