Derrida and Matthew Arnold

I think Derrida is on the side of Matthew Arnold in Arnold's following castigation of the philistine version of a morality of literalness, despite what many (if not most) think about him--namely, that his entire injunction is to take the use of words seriously, to be unimpeachable in what one says. This is precisely wrong. Derrida wants us to be responsible for "our" text--which is infinitely different than taking it seriously or trying to remain unimpeachable or politically correct. And I put this "our" in quotes because this responsibility is precisely constituted by considering this text to be always ours and yet always already, in its being ours, beyond ourselves in its effects and even in its constitution. Thus, Derrida would reply in the voice of Arnold to those who think responsibility is not precisely located in the infinite demand a text makes upon me, a reader, but rather a matter of somehow thinking the words I use are ethical only insofar as they are weighed or treated (only) literally: responding to a critic (Mr. Wright) who castigated Arnold for saying that Wright's translation of Homer "had no proper reason for existing," Arnold says that,

the phrase had, perhaps, too much vivacity; we have all of us a right to exist, we and our works; an unpopular author should be the last person to call in question this right. So I gladly withdraw the offending phrase, and I am sorry for having used it; Mr Wright, however, would perhaps be more indulgent to my vivacity, if he considered that we are none of us likely to be lively much longer. My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we all go into the drab,--the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future. Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines! and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity.

-Preface to Essays in Criticism, 1865.

This, I think, is the sentiment underlying the unbelievable (and too vicious) attack of Derrida upon the two graduate students at Columbia in Critical Inquiry in the early 90's. This is, indeed, is the spirit in which he says we wage a war on doxa in his last interview. Indeed, these are instances in which Derrida is expressing things as clumsily as Arnold's original comment. But if they offend, for Derrida they should offend through a reading of him, rather than a mere pointing out of a fault. I'm not defending Derrida or Arnold here, either: I just think they share perhaps a more similar spirit than we are used to thinking.

Nancy, Derrida, Blanchot, Work

Thinking about Derrida's "The Pit and The Pyramid" (Margins of Philosophy) together with a remark of Jean Luc-Nancy's in "A Finite Thinking" (in his amazing book of the same name) elucidated a few things for me and also made them more intriguing.

One is always tempted--and this "one" includes Derrida himself--to explain "work" (tekhné, craft, labor, art) in Blanchot's sense, primarily as he talks about it in The Space of Literature. But for necessary reasons this must be resisted, if one is to think a "work" that functions, labors, proceeds--in short, works. Nancy succumbs to this temptation while maintaining a distance from Blanchot, while Derrida does not and yet tries to make this temptation permanently possible: that is the difference between the two thinkers, and Derrida sketches it out brilliantly throughout On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy in his constant references to Nancy's

 "exactitude" (this is how I would read those seemingly offhand remarks, that is).

Both think work that works, a work that purely functions without any respect for what it works on or what it produces by virtue of its work or--and this is the real key to thinking work that works--even without regard to its own functioning or operation. That is, both think a work that might always cease to function if it is to continue functioning purely: it must do so in order for it to be a work that operates without respect to its own functioning. Work without guarantee of the continued being of the work ("without reserve," as Derrida says): only this non-work in work would make work work (see my paper on Derrida and tekhné in The Gift of Death--where I precisely describe things in Nancy's way, due to the English translation--for a more coherent explanation of this).

Nancy explains this working or non-working of the technical in the following way, however:

The "reign of technology" disassembles and disorients the infinite sealing off of a Sense. In the same way, undoubtedly, as it disconcerts and displaces, endlessly, the completion of a "work," in such a way that technization could, in all rigor, be called "un-worked," or without work [dès-œuvrée].

-"A Finite Thinking," in A Finite Thinking, 26

The last term is Blanchot's. But notice how it turns our simple "non-work" into an "un-work," a

 failure of work to work that undoes what is working in its working. At the exact point (this is an example of the exactitude) at which there is work, there the work can just as equally as working it can be un-working itself.

This is crucial. For throughout the original text of "The Pit and the Pyramid," though the English translation by Alan Bass continually suggests this phrasing, Derrida will consistently avoid collapsing his explanation of the non-working of work into an un-working. In fact, he will never explain this non-working as non-working: if it is necessary for a machine or tekhné that works not work, this not-working is never simply the opposite or the undoing of work. It is not a negative of the term "work" at the heart of its operation. Notice how Derrida always moves between the words "travail," and "fonctionnerait," "marche," and, elsewhere in the text, "œuvre," so as to always attempt to equate one with the other and thereby disrupt their synonymous relationship--that is, so that one cannot name work a work that is un-work. Notice also that he starts precisely with Nancy's formulation "at the point at, at the moment in which," etc., only to move into this greater indecisiveness that is uniquely Derrida's own:

Or le calcul, la machine, l'écriture muette appartiennent au même syatème d'équivalence et leur travail pose le même problème: au moment où le sens se perd, où la pensée s'oppose son autre, où l'esprit [Hegelian Geist] s'absente de lui-même, le rendement de l'opération est-il sûr? ... et qui, en somme, en tant que négatif, mais sans apparaître comme tel, sans se présenter, c'est-à-dire sans travailler au servie du sens, réussirait? mais réussirait, donc, en pure perte?

Tout simplement une machine, peut-être, et qui fonctionnerait. Une machine définie sans son pur fonctionnement et non dans son utilité finale, son sens, son rendement, son travail... ce que Hegel, interprète relevant de toute l'historie de la philosophie, n'a jamais pu penser, c'est une machine qui fonctionnerait... L philosophie y verrait sans doute un non-fonctionnement, un non-travail, et elle manquerait par là ce qui pourtant, dans une telle machine, marche. Tout seul. Dehors.

-"Le puits et la pyramide," Marges de la philosophie, 126

I'll elaborate on this later, perhaps. It is enough to collect the three thinkers together for now.

Joyous inquiry?

 Another title, suggested by my wonderful colleague (and accomplished translator) Sand Avidar-Walzer. I like the active nature of "inquiry," albeit it sounds still too mentalistic or intentional in the sense of subjective. But having intention at all is I think a definite step up from "knowing." This is why I enjoy the French savoir, which, though certainly remaining mentalistic or subjective carries with it a greater sense of intending or willing, which I think Nietzsche is after. Of course, the question for me is less how to stay true to the literal text as to grasp that text while also grasping the sense. If one could develop this translation of fröhliche Wissenschaft a little more, we might be getting there.

A note on a recent comment on the last discussion of this translation: someone was exactly right in saying that I shouldn't forget that Nietzsche did have in mind the Provençal scholar-singers not only in his subtitle or other title to Die fröhliche Wissenschaft  (and I should note that, as I see it, we're first and foremost translating the phrase here, not the title of the book)--and, for that matter, always had the thinker qua poet (or, more specifically, lyricist) in mind. This I think does lend a little freedom to the translator of Wissenschaft--a case I have been trying to make for a while.