Writing Home: Eco-Choro-Spectrography
John Llewelyn
Specters of Kant
A few months ago I visited the store of a bespoke Edinburgh tailor with a view to purchasing a replacement for my somewhat threadbare winter coat. The assistant suggested I try on what she referred to as their “deconstructed” model. I laughed. Unsure whether she was joking or serious, I asked her whether she had ever heard the name “Jacques Derrida.” She had not. Curious as to why I had laughed, she explained to me what is meant in the garment industry when an item of clothing is classified (her word) as “deconstructed.” She pointed to the reinforcing patches of fabric over the shoulders and, turning the coat inside-out, drew my attention to the discontinuous layout of its lining. It’s a kind of patchwork, she said. Once again, I couldn’t believe my ears. This time, however, I resisted the temptation to ask her if she had ever heard the name “Norman Kemp Smith.” Readers of this essay and the collection of which it forms part, however, will know this name as that of the Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh who translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into English and published a commentary on it defending what is known as the “patchwork” or “multiplicity” theory of that work’s composition. This is the theory according to which Kant’s Meisterstück [masterpiece] was not composed with his usual rigor but was assembled hurriedly from passages that had not been carefully thought through and some of which were mutually contradictory. The most radical representation of this view on the Continent was advanced in Hans Vaihinger’s Die Transzendentale Deduktion, a title that betrays that the view in question is one that focuses on the part of the first Critique to which Kant gives that title. This view is distinguished from the holistic theory of the composition of the first Critique advocated by H. J. Paton of Glasgow and Oxford in an essay published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (30, no. 7 [1929–30]), the date of certain other publications that will play crucial parts in the present commentary.
The integralist interpretation was defended on the Continent by Julius Ebbinghaus and the neo-Kantian school at Marburg. Although I can testify that the strengths and weaknesses of that interpretation and its competitor were not matters under discussion at the seminar conducted by Ebbinghaus that I attended at Marburg in the 1950s, the controversy had been represented at least symbolically by the face-to-face meeting of Ebbinghaus and Kemp Smith at which I was present when I was a student at Edinburgh earlier in the same decade.
The period at Marburg during which neo-Kantism dominated was followed by one during which teachers at the university there included Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann. While still at Marburg Heidegger made use of the term “Destruktion” and some of its cognates, stressing that in his technical use it was not to be taken in the familiar sense of doing away with. It was to be understood as denoting a retrieval [Wiederholung] of the history of metaphysics focused on the tendency of proponents of classical readings of that history to limit their concern with being to the ontic being of beings, a preoccupation that led them to neglect ontological being as such.
The emphasis put on the integralist reading of Kant at Marburg was paralleled there by Bultmann’s inclination toward an integralist reading of the works of his colleague Heidegger. The emphasis put on unity in that reading of Heidegger, without doing away with the ontological difference of being and beings, is converted into an emphasis upon difference when Derrida recasts Destruktion as déconstruction. The emphasis put by the German antecedent of the latter on the unifying question of being as such in its difference from the being of beings motivates and is motivated by the importance Heidegger gives in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) to the stress Kant puts in the first edition of the first Critique on the power to con-strue [in-eins-bilden], to imagine [einbilden], to construct or form or shape a world [weltbilden], understanding world as a limiting example or Exemplar of an oikos [house, household, dwelling], the unit of all economy, with an exception made for the impossible possibility when for the unity of the oikos creeping deconstruction substitutes the degenerate disunity of chôra.1
In the first place, deconstruction has to do with contrary oppositions—except that this first place, this first oikos, may turn out to be a second place or an nth place or a place that leads to the mise en abyme of an infinite trail of reflections of reflections. We shall mention also a last place before we are finished.
If we describe a contrary opposition as an antithesis understood as a contra-diction, we should not confuse it with an opposition or antithesis understood as an unrepulsive negation arrived at by simply prefixing a “non-” or adding a “not.” To make that confusion would be to assimilate Derridean deconstruction too closely to a version of Hegelian spiritualist Aufhebung [sublimation, suspension] or its Marxian materialist inversion. It would isolate the particle “con” from its context in the word “deconstruction,” thereby overloading it with the burden of synthesis. Synthesis is what deconstruction moves on, for instance from the work of synthesis of the “and” of the Kantian imagination, the conjunction of the sensible and the intelligible from which we move on in this essay.
Keeping in mind that imagination takes hold of sensibility by one hand (the left?) and of intelligibility by its other hand (the right?), one may suspect that the specter of Kant haunts the transition from a bias toward unification to an emphasis on dissolution of an indefinitely increasing multiplicity of seemingly antithetical oppositions, for example (as case) or for Example (as Exemplar or paradigm), sensibility or-and intelligibility, the polar terms of which get used by philosophers to found what appear to be mutually competing metaphysical doctrines based on oppositions such as the one just mentioned or used: mention-use, example-Exemplar, matter-form, interior-exterior, marginal-central, signifier-signified, nature-culture, body-mind–mind, sensation-reason, presence-absence, speaking-writing.
The first of these just listed pairs of supposedly antagonistic polar opposites could be read as an invitation to take sides in a debate between materialism of one kind or another and one kind or other of rationalism or idealism—for instance, one kind or other of conceptualist or-and Realist Platonism or Christianism. The last pair in that list could serve to draw attention to what has become the classical paradigm of deconstruction. So paradigmatically classical has it become that, because deconstruction is wary (but not condemnatory) of classicism, by its own criteria it is itself due for self-deconstruction. Déconstruction in Derrida’s construal of it as doubly hyphenated de-con-struction and as the deposition of opposition is cognate with his se déconstruire parsed as middle-voiced rather than as simply passive or reflexive, notwithstanding the historical fact that these latter forms replace the medial form at certain stages of the development of ancient Greek and Sanskrit. This historiological coincidence is perhaps a symptom of a grammatological coincidence of the active and passive voices expressing itself as, let us say provisionally, the voice of a triton genos, the voice of a third kind, allowance made for the vagaries and-or rigors of this word “kind” and of the concept of concept commonly assumed in our understanding of that word—and of classification. This is a concept of concept that is assumed in all the metaphysical pairings in our list. We should therefore add it explicitly as a component of, say, the couple “concept-intuition,” so still under the watchful gaze of one of the specters of Kant.
Specters of Heidegger
The concept of concept just put in question is one whose use in the given pairings undergoes self-deconstruction in the writings of both Derrida and Heidegger, whether the unword “deconstruction” is spelled in the former’s French or in the latter’s German with a k on loan from Destruktion. Self-deconstruction calls into question the metaphysical opposition between the total presence attributed to hearing oneself speak and the detotalizing absence typical of writing. This is the opposition that deconstructs itself as early as Derrida’s publications of 1962–72. Already in these places self-deconstruction deconstructs itself on the curious condition that if self-deconstruction deconstructs itself, self-deconstruction survives. In disappearing, apparently, it appears, and in appearing it appears to disappear.
Self-deconstruction takes place in the chiasm of what I follow Derrida in calling “something like the middle voice,” meaning minimally by this what escapes the either-or of the active-passive but without becoming a neutral synthesis or a formal or dialectical contradiction (MP 9/9). Deconstruction is not simply the performance of an individual’s act of free or constrained will. It happens. Es geschieht. It is arriving in the continuous tense heard in the final syllable of the neologism “deconstructance” (Dekonstruktanz?). It is arriving, but, like the Messiah, according to some believers, without yet having arrived and without having been actually present. It is always on its way, immer unterwegs, but without quite reaching its destination, assuming it has one. Hence if Novalis is right in holding that philosophy seeks to be at home everywhere, homesickness is philosophy’s spur,2 and philosophy as deconstruction is à lieu. Deconstruction takes place and takes place away. It does this, however, partly on account of forces over which one has only limited control, a limited agency something like that which Kant is said to have in at least some parts of his first Critique, according to proponents of the patchwork theory of its composition, and something like what Heidegger calls lassen as this verb operates in the expressions Gelassenheit, allowance or letting, and Seinlassen, letting be, but with acknowledgment of the reservations Heidegger comes to have over the fundamentality he had once attributed to the ontology implied by the first syllable of the word Seinlassen.
The limited passivity, passion, and patience of the force carried by the notion of self-deconstruction are also something like, yet something extremely unlike the modality of the movement of consciousness (Bewusst-sein) of which Hegel says in the Phenomenology of Spirit that all the phenomenologizing philosopher needs do is watch and describe that movement. It is as though es denkt in mir, “it thinks in me,” and ich denke in es, “I think in it,” allowance being made this time for the need to say more about this es and this Es, as Heidegger acknowledges, followed by Derrida, when this impersonal particle recurs in Heidegger’s uses of the phrases es gibt, “it gives,” “there is,” and es ereignet, “it takes place.”
I use the word “place” in this gloss of es ereignet as a cue for a further comment on what we have dubbed the “classic example and Exemplar” of deconstruction. I make the plausible assumption that “place” implies space of some sort, but I grant that plausibility is one of the things that is at stake here, along with a certain “perhaps,” the peut-être that is not the expression of the possible existence of a thing but the expression of the condition “if there is any,” s’il y en a, of the haunting of a specter, a ghost, like the one whose spirit is mentioned in the title of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
Plato argues in his Phaedrus that language as spoken is closer to reality than language as written because the former is not dependent as the latter is on spacing. If to translate Plato’s word “chôrismos,” “spacing,” we use Derrida’s word “espacement,” we see without hearing the vocalic difference between that French word and the French word written as “espacement.” This difference, without being some thing, an entity, a being, an existent, is something like the difference that obtains between différence and différance. Both forms with the letter a in the final syllable make visible “something like the middle voice,” and this is something like the verb-nominality of the German word “Sein” and the English word “Being.”
Hints of the inheritance from Heidegger drawn on in the notion of deconstruction are evident at several places in the comments Derrida makes in the second volume of The Beast & the Sovereign on Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, one of the factors that made the years 1929–30 such good ones in the field of publication in philosophy.3 (Another such factor was Heidegger’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg, “What Is Metaphysics?”).4 The subtitle of The Fundamental Concepts is World, Finitude, Solitude, but when the book was first delivered as a course of lectures it was announced as “World, Finitude, Individual,” though with the original term “solitude” unerased. The first and at this point most relevant comment needing to be made about what we have been saying about the directionality, if there is any, of deconstruction is that the topic of the first part of the book proper is what Heidegger calls “profound boredom.”
Die tiefe Langeweile [profound boredom] is a “fundamental attunement,” a Grundstimmung. In the context of the course and the book of 1929–30 a Stimmung is a mood, something one finds oneself in, a sich befinden or Befindlichkeit. A mood comes over us. It imposes itself on us. It is not something one imposes on something else or on oneself. It is not a concept. So although the discussion of fundamental attunement takes place in the first part of The Fundamental Concepts, our understanding of that discussion is helped by looking ahead to section 70 of the final chapter. There, possibly for the last time in his writings, Heidegger touches on a certain topic that he has raised briefly elsewhere: the topic of formale Anzeige [formal indication].
Heidegger’s “formal indication” corresponds with Kant’s forms of sensibility in contrast to conceptuality and with Kant’s notion of exhibition as contrasted with deduction. It is germane to what we have been saying about deconstruction. One is therefore surprised that, unless I have not read Derrida carefully enough (who has?), no explicit mention of it by him is made, at least in his comments on The Fundamental Concepts.
One thing the author of that book says in it is that some of the fundamental concepts referred to there are, strictly speaking, not concepts. It will be recalled—and cited by some readers as evidence for the patchwork theory of the composition of the first Critique—that Kant sometimes refers to space and time as concepts, though in the same book he distinguishes space and time from concepts specifically so called [Begriffe], arguing that space and time are originally forms of intuition. They are therefore not conditions of the possibility of concepts or principles, but rather conditions of the possibility of indication. When Kant treats space and time as concepts he is thinking of space and time as objects of a science such as geometry or kinematics. Given that Heidegger had been working on his Kantbuch while preparing The Fundamental Concepts,5 it is not surprising that he too makes a double use of the concept of concept in the section in which he considers formal indication. When he wants to distinguish the proper concept of concept he describes it as a scientific concept, where “scientific” stands for the broader term “wissenschaftlich.”
It is arguable that to indicate is “anzeichen” and that Heidegger’s word “Anzeige” would be more accurately translated by “ostension” or “pointing.” Thus translated, the word would be the one used by Husserl to designate what he maintains his method of phenomenology can in principle dispense with. Hence it would be the word Derrida uses in his deconstructive reading of Husserl to call into question the latter’s antithetical opposition of indication and expressive meaning (ausdrückliche Bedeutung) and his downgrading of the former. Husserl sometimes uses the one, sometimes the other, according to how he sees his phenomenology as the description of a theoretically ideal world or as the description of the world ici-bas to which that ideal applies in practice. But this is another of the apparent oppositions that Derridean deconstruction questions, simultaneously betraying a readiness to allow that Husserl himself questions it too, creating the impression that each of these philosophers is brought back to life in order that each may ventriloquize the voice of the other. Thus when Derrida writes that he is going to give as “internal” a reading as he is able to of, say, a Kantian, Husserlian, Heideggerian—or Derridean!—text, he expects to discover that the economy of the homely internality of the chez soi [at home] of the economy of the oikos is set aquaking by the visitation of some external, diseconomic, unsaving, sublime, unheimlich [uncanny], ungeheuer [unusual, extraordinary, monstrous] unthing of which it can be said in the sinister left-handed script of chôra not that it exists, but, partitatively, that il y en a: there is some of it about, as one says of influenza, whose name may go some way to explaining why the notion of influence causes Derrida dis-ease.
In question in deconstruction is the rigor of the specific concepts in question. But in question too in the relevant section of The Fundamental Concepts are the powers of philosophical concepts quite generally. Husserl’s former student Heidegger brings this out by starting with a reminder of the reference he makes in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics to Kant’s invocation of a “dialectical illusion” that is “certain, and indeed necessary.”6 More fundamental than that, Heidegger maintains, is another illusion, the illusion from which ordinary understanding suffers of assuming that “philosophical knowledge of the essence of the world is not and never can be an awareness of something present at hand.” He questions this.7 The “something as something” that characterizes a proposition or what a proposition says something about (its referent or its sense) is a correct but superficial interpretation of a world’s Walten, its prevailing. It is also a symptom of a “natural idleness,” a natürliche Behäbigkeit, as Kant writes, reminiscent of what in Being and Time Heidegger names Verfallen, “falling.” This philosophical counterpart in both Kant and Heidegger of original sin is a laziness that levels off all knowledge to present at hand relationality. It seduces the human mind from acknowledging that a deeper understanding of the “as” is possible only if each individual person undergoes a transformation from, on the one hand, taking for granted that knowledge of worldhood is no more than awareness of the “as” as presence at hand to, on the other hand, enduring the existentiell experience of the existentials analyzed in Being and Time and the deep boredom analyzed in Fundamental Concepts. This transformation is the endurance of the duration analyzed under the name of deep boredom [long-whiling] and of “the moment of vision,” the Augenblick (to translate Kierkegaard’s word) in which each jemeinig [in each case mine] human being in its individuality faces the facticity of death. But whose death? This is a serious question.
When is a question serious? According to Condillac, as reported by Derrida in L’archéologie du frivole: Lire Condillac, serious discourse is the use of a signifier that designates a signified meaning or referent and is enabled thereby to convey information.8 For instance, the proposition “two plus two make four” is serious, whereas “two plus two make two plus two” is frivolous or, as Locke would say, trifling. It lacks archaeology. The bedrock of archaeology is an idea or an object. But in “two plus two make two plus two,” counter to the allegation, nothing is made.
It is, however, the very same John Locke whom Condillac charges with failure to acknowledge that there is no liaison between ideas unless there is liaison between signs. Derrida takes this complaint a stage further when he endorses Peirce’s teaching that a signified idea occupies the oikos of a signifier. In the guise of a signifier, what is signified gains eternally iterable new life. Endorsement of this is tantamount to recognition that the alleged antithetical opposition of the signifier and the signified de-signates itself, signs in unsigning, so se déconstruit. This slide to a deconstruction of the opposition of the serious and the frivolous is accelerated by the possibility that, in addition to the signified’s becoming a signifier, the signifier may become a signified. This complication is one reason Derrida has qualms over the opposition of mention and use and the notion of metalanguage.
Derrida does not make very explicit in his book on Condillac what he means by “deconstruction.” The word “deconstruction” occurs on only two widely separated pages of it (AC 63/55, 132/118). Specters of Marx is remarkable for a different reason. The word occurs scores of times in it, but the reader would be as hard put to track down a definition of it there as he would be to do so in L’archéologie du frivole. The reason for this is implicit in what we have said previously about concepts. Like difference, deconstruction is not a concept or a concept’s referent. Nor is it a word. It is more like (if it is like anything) a process of referring, something performed in or by a text. This does not mean that—unlike the father figure in the Phaedrus who is said to guide the listener toward presence—an interpreter of the performance and the text cannot guide the reader, if only by pointing the latter in the direction of other texts. For example, this one:
Doch im Erstarren such’ ich nicht mein Heil,
Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil;
Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteure,
Ergriffen, fühlt er tief das Ungeheure.
Yet not in torpor could I comfort find;
Awe is the finest portion of mankind;
However scarce the world may make this sense
In awe one feels profoundly the immense.9
By awe one is ergriffen, gripped. One does not grasp awe in a concept, a full-fisted Begriff.
Faust still has much to learn, however, if he believes that what he hopes to find is comfort or his personal salvation. As we shall learn soon, the fear and trembling caused by the thought of the risk that I may fall short of realizing my wholeness is infinitely less distressing than the certain knowledge that I have fallen short of my responsibility to my neighbor or enemy. As Kant learns, the awe he knows by the name of the sublime is not comfortable. It is at odds with quietude of conscience, as Heidegger also knows when he writes of the voice of conscience that it comes from within but also from over and beyond oneself. As survivors in more than one sense of that word, the specters of Levinas also have reason to think.
Specters of Levinas
Reference was made previously to the proximity of the speaker listening to himself that is Plato’s paradigm of serious discourse. This is a proximity in which the identity of the person hearing himself speak is somehow separate from the identity of the person speaking. There must be that separation if the person sending the message is in some way truly other and the discourse is serious. There must be that separation in personal identity if seriousness defined in terms of what is signified, as it is defined by Condillac, has to be supplemented by seriousness defined in terms of the signifying response that the human signifier makes to the person addressed as “you” when to the latter’s call for help she or he replies, “Here I am. Let me stand in your stead, in your place, your oikos.” This must be if what Levinas titles “humanism of the other human being” is to be otherwise than being and beyond essence, epekeina tês ousias [beyond being], meta-physical and properly ethical—which is to say im-proper insofar as what is proper to me and part of my property cannot be constitutive of my ethicality. My ethicality is constituted by being deconstituted, de-con-structed, when the interiority of the identity of myself as signifying respondent is disrupted by the exteriority announced in the subtitle (“An Essay on Exteriority”) of Totality and Infinity and this title announces a chiasmic intrusion of infinity into totality.
The out-ness of this in-ness in the dialogue of the soul with itself cannot fail to have been the soul’s own out-ness a priori, because this apriority is inseparable from an aposteriority. Its in-ness is inseparable from its out-ness. To say this is not to embrace a logical contradiction, any more than a logical contradiction was embraced when the shop assistant turned that “deconstructed” jacket inside-out and outside-in. Even her concomitant sales talk was capable of contravening the principle of contradiction only if in it there was a juxtaposition of explicit or implicit propositions. But in the case of the interiority and exteriority of the dialogue of the soul with itself, the exteriority is not merely the exteriority of one proposition to another. Any such relation as this is possible only on the supposition of a proto-relation between the person who signs and addresses a message, the destinateur, and the one or more than one person addressed, the destinataire(s). The proto-relation is personal and interpersonal. This means that although I may regard the person with whom I speak in soliloquy as my alter ego, I must be capable of regarding this alter ego as my other tout court on analogy with another person with whom I am face-to-face in public space, or could have been were it not for contingencies such as that of the other’s being spatially remote from me or deceased or not yet born. This is why we tend to think of the destinateur and the destinataire as one person writing to another. But a little reflection assisted by Derrida reveals that the situation of one person talking to another is in principle no different from the situation of soliloquy. What we ordinarily refer to as the “spoken word” shares this likeness with what we ordinarily refer to as the “written word.” Derrida marks this likeness by introducing into his and our lexicon the term “archi-écriture” [archi-writing], going as far as to say that this introduction admits a trace of materialism, perhaps one of the sorts of materialism to which reference was made toward the end of the first section in this essay and contrasted there with possibly Platonic sorts of rationalism and idealism.
Our judgment of the philosophical importance of Derrida’s neo-graphism will depend on our judgment of the importance of the doctrine it questions: Plato’s doctrine that it is in speech that language and thought are originally at home. Could it be that the alleged origin of language and thought is not originary and that speech exemplifies the same graphic features that in the Phaedrus and elsewhere Plato regards as secondary or derivative? Although his epithets “secondary” and “derivative” carry the implication of something else that by contrast is first and aboriginal, it is this implication that the notion of “archi-writing” seeks to avoid by combining the sense of the Greek archi—that is to say, the sense of commencing, commanding, and leading [führend], with the sense of inferiority carried by the notion of writing as understood in the “phenomenological” philosophies, as Derrida describes them, of Plato and the “Platonism” of Rousseau, Condillac, Hegel, Husserl, de Saussure, and so on.
The distancing between sender and recipient most commonly associated with writing as ordinarily understood and contrasted with speaking is most graphically displayed in such correspondence as is effected in the exchanges that take up most of the space of La carte postale and the Talmudesque columns of Glas.10 Derrida never tailored a more patchy patchwork than these unbookish construals of the book of the world, this world or another. But what matters philosophically more than the writing traced on the pages of these material texts is the archi-writing these writings exemplify. This is because the analogical or anagraphical pairs among those we listed previously must be supplemented not only, as we saw, by that of concept-intuition, but also by space-time. This is indicated when Derrida asks, “Différance as temporisation, différance as spacing. How are they to be joined?” (MP 9/9) and answers, by way of archi-writing. This answer raises another question: how can the positing of archi-writing as a quasi-condition of the possibility and impossibility of familiar oppositions be consistent with Derrida’s frequent warnings against programming? Isn’t Egyptio (pyramidoikol)-Greco-Romano pro-gramming synonymous with Egyptio (pyramidoikol)-Greco-Romano-archigraphy?
When Derrida evinces distrust of programming, he is thinking of justice as defined solely in terms of principles from which one calculates consequences in a world where what is given first importance is happiness or well-being, eudaimonia kept safe by a guardian angelic daimon. Derrida is listening to the voice of a specter of Immanuel Kant bidding us not to forget that hypothetical imperatives call to be subordinated to imperatives commanding autonomy. Derrida is listening also to the specter of Emmanuel Levinas bidding us not to forget imperatives commanding a heteronomy other than the heteronomy that is subordinated to autonomy by Kant.
So to the question of the contribution deconstruction makes to our thinking about questions of ecology, the answer seems to turn in part on the answer to the question of what contribution Levinas’s thinking makes to Derrida’s and our deconstrual of deconstruction. That latter contribution is minimal if we limit it to the thinking of the humanism of the other human being. In order that it be more than this minimum, a way must be found to include nonhuman beings among the others to which ethical responsibility is owed. A start on that way could be made, I have argued elsewhere,11 by assenting to what I call a “blank ecology,” meaning by that an ecology that defers consideration of the predicates of things to restrict one’s attention temporarily only to existents as such in their existence, allowing ourselves to be struck by the consideration that for any given existent its existence is a good, at least for that existent. To be thus struck is to be party to the realization that each and every existing thing has a foothold in the realm of ethical considerability in Levinas’s sense of the ethical as meta-physical, beyond being. Of course, it is we human beings who do the consideration and speak, or don’t, as advocates for whom- or whatever has no voice of its own. The responsibility is, as Goethe’s Faust says, immense, ungeheuer. As Levinas says, we are persecuted by it.
Levinas’s conception of being persecuted by our responsibility for the other resounds in Derrida’s seemingly contradictory notion of a responsibility that is both welcomed and unwelcome or “unwelcome.” But it can hardly be denied that the voice in which Derrida expresses his welcome of unwelcome responsibility takes on a tone peculiar to him when his talk of archi-writing and the archi-trace is succeeded by talk of what we could call “archi-calculation.” We are licensed to employ this appellation by his reference in The Gift of Death to “a calculation that claims to go beyond calculation, beyond the totality of the calculable as a finite totality of the same” (GD 107/145). In these words we hear a reference to the infinity of the different, the other, and the exteriority explicit or implicit in the title and subtitle of Levinas’s chef d’oeuvre.
Levinas maintains that his philosophical writings are “Greek,” meaning in part by this that they are not based on any oriental religious scripture. Derrida would maintain this regarding his own Gift of Death, notwithstanding that that book’s early chapters are triggered by the genealogy of Christianity that forms part of Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History and that the exergue borrowed from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals for his last chapter refers to “that stroke of genius called Christianity.” What’s more, that chapter proceeds to cite the Gospel according to Matthew, including the part to which Levinas takes exception because he sees it as a threat to the extremity of alterity he wishes to maintain for the dimension of ethicality. The part in question is the one requiring love of one’s neighbor and enemy “as oneself.” This, he maintains, runs the risk of sullying the love of one’s enemy by assimilating agapê and its Hebrew approximation ahava, which is dispossessive of oneself, gift, sacrifice, to erotic self-possession. But the safeguard against this cannot ignore the fact that a residual risk of this sort is presented by the needs that, even when they are another’s, are still needs of an eco-nomic kind that graft themselves on to desires—for instance, those desires analyzed in the parts of Totality and Infinity that treat not primarily of the ethical but of enjoyment, of the prudent and of the dwelling—that is to say, of the oikos treated by ecology.
Eco-Choro-Spectrography
An ecology is a theory of the oikos: the home, the house, the household, the family, the political state, and ultimately the world, this one or another. An ecology, writ large, is a cosmology—for instance, the one outlined in Plato’s Timaeus and palimpsestically written “on” by Derrida in Khōra. Anyone concerned to defend as wide, as just, and as generous as possible a conception of the electorate of a household or worldhold might object that although the blank ecology defined previously may admit of being jointed to the chorography to be de-fined later, it would still be inhospitably restricted.
To this objection it may be said that a blank ecology would be less restricted than the ecology of the human being—this human being here, the autobiographical je-meinig, dasein-ish me, or of that human being over there, the other I address as “you.” Would the existents that make up the electorate of a blank ecology include specters—for instance, those of Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Marx? In Specters of Marx Derrida asks, “What is the being-there of a specter? What is the mode of presence of a specter?” (SM 38/69). The term in italics translates Heidegger’s word Da-sein, and the response Derrida makes to these questions is a challenge to Heidegger’s ontology and the confidence with which Heidegger founds it on conceptions of presence [Anwesenheit] and absence regarded as mutually exclusive opposites. Specters, ghosts, the dead haunt those who live on. We are unable to say where their there is, where resides the being of their Da, and whether or how they exist. Instead of affirming or denying existence of them, Derrida sometimes has recourse to the conditional clause “s’il y en a,” “if there is any.” Here the verb is not “to exist” but “to be,” the singularly perchance to be of the “to be or not to be” of an ontology that has become and has always been becoming a hauntology, as hinted in the experience of mourning the death of a friend either retrospectively or prospectively. Spectrality is part of this forward and backward spection. Defined in light of its derivation from “spectrum,” it is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “image of something seen continuing when the eyes are closed or turned away.” It is the seriousness in friendship and love that, without being simply opposed to frivolity, makes them matters of life and death.
The paradigm of spection here is that of the unexpected ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose exspective eyes are hidden by his visor, though it is this through which he looks to his son to shoulder the responsibility of putting the disjointed world to right. Except that, as I argue in defense of a more generously accommodating ecology, the accusing look may come not only from another human being but from any being on account of the death or destruction of whom or of which it may be mourned. Here Derrida’s invocation of Shakespeare recalls Levinas’s remark that the whole of philosophy may be regarded as a meditation on Shakespeare.12 It recalls too Derrida’s refusal to oppose logos and philosophy antithetically to mythos and literature, as Derrida maintains John Austin does when he distinguishes speech acts uttered in the real world from those uttered on a stage. Logos-mythos is another pair that should be added to our list of suspects, a pairing to which Derrida says Plato says both “Yes” and “No” insofar as the logical and cosmological analysis conducted in the Timaeus has as its topic a story deriving from hearsay that serious philosophers might justifiably consider to be as frivolous as Kemp Smith’s scholarly colleague A. E. Taylor considered Plato’s Parmenides to be.
What is chôra? It is the unwhat that facilitates the unsynthetical-ity and unsynthethicality (sic) of the terms in each of the apparently oppositional pairs catalogued in the foregoing pages. Plato authorizes us to compare incomparable chôra with a midwife who assists at a birth. A birth is supposed to lead to another birth (“be fruitful and multiply”) or to a rebirth. Yet chôra itself is not generated or generative. It is not an itself, not a definite article or denoted by one. Yet it is a process, the one described when Derrida writes of chôra: “It ‘is’ nothing other than the sum or the process of what comes to inscribe itself ‘on’ its subject, but it is not the subject or the present support of all the interpretations, although, nevertheless, it is not reduced to these.” The words “sum or the process of what comes to inscribe itself” suggest a patchwork. Or is the process one that, getting close to a direct contradiction of the law (nomos) of noncontradiction, Derrida calls “the economy of difference” (MP 18/19)? How close to direct contradiction this phrase gets turns on how seriously we take the last syllable of its last word. It turns on what difference it makes whether the word is written as “ence” or as “ance.” Taken in the former way, “difference” could be in tension with “economy” because it leaves open the possibility that the terms of the difference relate to one and the same point in space and time that is the condition of the possibility of mutual contradiction. This condition is not met if the last syllable of the word is taken as “ance.” In being taken thus, allowance is made for temporal lapse or spatial differentiation (mouvance), and that allows in turn for the joint possibility of its being both true and false that, for example, the sun is shining. Hegel the phenomenologist would want us to add the adverbial modification “here and now” to the proposition “the sun is shining.” Kant declines to build any essential spatiotemporal condition into the law of noncontradiction on the grounds that this law has to do with propositions represented not by, say, “the sun is shining” with a tensed verb “to be,” but by the symbols “p” or “q” used timelessly. The requisite abstractness is lost if the law is taken to imply spatiotemporal conditions. Their function is taken care of according to Kant by the process of schematism of imagination. Overlying or underlying that process according to Derrida is the process of chôra in which “one is but the other different and deferred, one differing and differing the other. One is the other in différance, one is the différance of the other” (MP 18/19–20). This “of” marks perhaps a double (so-called subjective and objective) genitive that articulates the spatiotemporal ferance from one oikogrammatical architecture to another.
But we must pause to reflect on the different ways “take” is taken in the preceding paragraph. There is the (Kantian) take of our taking something so abstractly that they ignore the difference between “difference” and “différance” as seen and this pair as heard. This sensory difference is crucial. It is crucial because, in the wake of Kierkegaard, it commits us to make a decision that is mad. It renders undecidable the question of whether when we encounter “difference” on a page written by Derrida it behaves according to the seemingly safe logic of that word spelled with the ending “ence” or whether it behaves or misbehaves according to the dangerous logic of the word spelled with the ending “ance.” We do not know which ending the word has because we cannot settle whether the word is one that is written or one that is heard—that is to say, whether it is voiced, whether it is a determinate fundamental or anarchic Bestimmung. No matter how Derrida himself or his specter may spell out or shout out this word (Stimmung is tempered voice), the word’s identity remains undecidable
That is to say, chôra (s’il y en a) would seem to be the unsovereign paradigm that is so like material substance (hyle) that Aristotle equated the latter with Plato’s conception of the former. But chôra has no identity or likeness. Like incomparable Socrates, the tympanum of whose ear is receptive to whatever it is struck by, chôra is the recipient of every likeness without being a likeness itself and without being a self-identical self, without being a self, without being. So, to extend the sense and sensibility and responsibility of the metaphor, the retinal tabula of the eye of chôra (its, his, or hers, for chôra is the recipient of “feminine” recipience), like a watermarked banknote bearing a signed promise of what it will pay to the bearer, accepts acceptance as such. It therefore accepts such autobiographical remarks as those made in the first sections of this essay tracing the ungenerative and ungenerated genealogy of some of the debts Derridean deconstruction owes to Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas and now Plato and Socrates, the most recipient and finest-eared thinker of them all.
The autobiographical is always heterobiographical. It responds to the other addressed as “you” historiographically according to the contingent demands of justice. These demands are never finally decided. They never cease to stretch the ethicopolitical imagination, the faculty of the fusion of faculties that becomes the faculty of the conflict of faculties when, supplemented by the initial letter of the name of Derrida and the unname of deconstruction, it is homophonically called “imadgination” (sic) in language that Heidegger called the “house of being” but that now and at the threshold to and from that house has revealed itself to be the house also of more or less than being. So the whole of the ghost story we have been retelling—if it is a whole (s’il y en a) rather than a patchwork that detotalizes totality—is indebted not only a posteriori to the three philosophers singled out in parts of that story. That story is indebted also a priori to its readers (s’il y en a). It is indebted to everyone who took part in the symposium to which this story attempts to contribute the afterthought that, if deconstruction is chorographic in the way that, borrowing the bastard language of the Timaeus, Derrida signals it may be, the house and home and pluriverse that are ultimately the topic of ecology are, as Heidegger’s ghost goes on telling us, unhomely, uncanny, unheimlich, and as the ghosts of Goethe and Nietzsche go on telling us, not profoundly langweilig, but profoundly ungeheuer, never to be put to right, but ever fit to make us shudder and, when philosophy makes a serious study of the frivolous in its relation to the serious, fit to make us laugh.
Postscript
With Novalis’s statement that the philosopher seeks to be at home everywhere, some will agree on the grounds of their belief that home is ultimately what they call the “hereafter,” the “next world,” the “afterlife,” or the “heaven” they hope they are meant for. In the context of the simultaneously widespread belief in the threat of eternal torment, who would begrudge even Bad King John the prayer with which he ends his last will and testament: to be saved from such incessant pain? Even so, that prayer is self-centered. Furthermore, it is inconsistent with the other-centeredness that distinguishes Christianity as defined by, for example, the Gospel of Matthew cited by Derrida.
But Derrida’s chorographic deconstruction of space-time outlined previously opens to Christianity the chance of being saved from this charge of inconsistency. Departing from the predominantly chronological image of temporality adhered to by Kant, absorbing Heidegger’s Destruktion of that account, and taking to heart Levinas’s “reversal” of the priority Heidegger gives to one’s own temporality over the time of the other, Derrida’s chorographic deconstruction of place in space and time (oikos) offers something like a “formal indication” of an eco-eschatography that leads one to wonder whether heaven and hell are not antithetically opposed and whether their “where” (s’il y en a), rather than being subsequent to a prepositional “after,” is always already adverbially inscribed in a renewing retrieval of love of one’s neighbor and enemy wherever they may be and therefore jointed with the immense hellish torment of being hurt by their being hurt and by the hurt of our knowledge that we have failed to live up to the hardly imaginable exemplarity of sermons on the Mount and elsewhere, even when succeeding may mean only, as winter approaches, offering the widow, the orphan, and the stranger the warmth of one’s perhaps de-con-structed brand-new coat.
1. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993); trans. Ian McLeod as “Khōra,” in On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
2. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983); trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
3. Ibid.
4. Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976); ed. Willam McNeill as Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991); trans. Richard Taft as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., enlarged (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1968), A 61–62.
7. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 292.
8. Derrida, The Archaeology of the Frivolous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), trans. John P. Leavey Jr., from L’archéologie du frivole (Paris: Galilée, 1990).
9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, part 2, ll. 6271–75, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: Norton, 1976).
10. Cf. PC and G.
11. John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), and Llewelyn, The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Towards a Wider Suffrage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 72; Le temps et l’autre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979), 60.