On the Trace of Organic Chauvinism with Derrida and DeLanda
In the posthumously published The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006), philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that the long history of Western philosophy has been dominated by the ‘recurrence of a schema that is in truth invariable’.1 This schema, he continues, is one in which everything deemed the exclusive property of ‘Man’ derives from an originary fault or lack, ‘and from the imperative necessity that finds in it its development and resilience’.2 This schematic default, in other words, bestows upon the human animal its exceptional ontological status, ring-fencing everything from technology, language and time to society, politics and law for humanity alone. Hence, this dominant schema is also a schematic domination, continuing to ensure the human’s ‘subjugating superiority over the animal’.3 While existing only insofar as it comes after death, this late work continues Derrida’s projected deconstruction of the human–animal dichotomy, the beginnings of which can be found as far back as his first major work, Of Grammatology (1967), wherein he introduces the structure of the trace as the constitutive condition of all living beings.
This is itself reason enough for any rigorous thinking with animals to continually return to the ‘quasi-concept’ of the trace. However, it is just such a rigorous engagement with this ‘quasi-concept’ that compels us to ask a further question: Is it possible that Derrida himself remains blind to, and thus complicit with, an even more basic philosophical schema – that which philosopher Manuel DeLanda terms ‘organic chauvinism’?4 Such a schema, in other words, is that of a dominant zoo-centrism that bestows exceptional ontological status upon the living.
Our question, then, concerns Derrida’s desire to place secure limits on ‘the living’ through the reiterated construction of an abyssal border separating ‘living beings’ from ‘non-living things’. A question, then, that moves Derrida’s thought beyond his own examples of amoeba and annelid to beings that are not quite things and things that are not quite beings – entities such as viruses, Martian microbes, quanta and silicate crystals – and, further, to every material existent, past, present and future. Perhaps, then, it is not by chance that, in his final seminar, Derrida finds himself haunted by the figure of the zombie, that fearful thing-being hesitating between life and death. More importantly, it is only by refusing to impose contingent limits upon ‘life’ that a materialist and posthumanist praxis becomes possible, one that affirms the potential of ‘bodyings’ that are truly radical.
In its starkest formulation, for Derrida there is no being as such without a living being. From the first, Derrida installs an abyss between the living and the non-living when, in Of Grammatology, he posits the ‘emergence’ of the trace – as the ‘new’ logical structure of non-presence that is the unity of the double movement of protention and retention – as synonymous with the emergence of life.5 This, for Derrida, is the denaturalizing movement of life, the originary technicity of living being, its structural unity accounting for the ‘originary synthesis’ that is ‘the becoming-time of space or the becoming-space of time’.6 Put as simply as possible, these paired definitions describe the impossibility of an indivisible presence, that is, of an entity fully present in and of itself. Rather, Derrida argues, for some entity to appear on what is the scene of presence, it must necessarily both keep within itself ‘the mark of the past element’ and let itself ‘be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element’.7 In other words, in order for an entity to be, that is, to endure in time and thus appear as present, this very appearing necessarily recalls both the trace of the past element (retentions) and the trace of the future element (protentions). Given this, the constitution of the so-called present thus depends a priori upon its relation ‘to what it absolutely is not’, in that an interval or spacing ‘must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself’.8
Furthermore, this unity of protention and retention accounts for the originary synthesis described by Derrida as the becoming-time of space or the becoming-space of time. Here, Martin Hägglund’s analysis helps to clarify this complex relation. Insofar as the instant of the now, of the present, can only appear by disappearing (given its a priori relation to what it absolutely is not), it therefore must, writes Hägglund, be inscribed as a trace simply in order to ‘be’.9 This, he continues, is the becoming-space of time insofar as every trace is necessarily spatial, since ‘spatiality is characterized by the ability to remain in spite of temporal succession’.10 For an entity to endure, in other words, it must be spatial, that is, it must take place. Spatiality, however, can never be ‘pure simultaneity’, as simultaneity as such is ‘unthinkable without a temporalization that relates one spatial juncture to another’.11 Space is thus at once a becoming-time, without which there could be no trace in the first place.
While I have neither the space nor the time to further elucidate the structure of the trace, what is important for us here is that the trace, by definition, is the constitutive condition of everything temporal, that is, of anything and everything that endures upon the scene of presence. Indeed, with admirable brevity and clarity Hägglund makes just this point in a recent paper: ‘Everything that is subjected to succession’, he writes, ‘is subjected to the trace, whether it is alive or not’.12 Why, then, does Derrida equate the trace with ‘life in general’ while innumerable finite entities continue to endure without the ‘genetic description’ supposedly regulative of life? Why, in other words, does he set limits on the trace when, in so doing, he simultaneously imposes limits on the living? While apparently simple, to state that the trace is the structural condition of everything that endures, and thus is, nonetheless opens the door to a radical and far-reaching critique – an opening from which Derrida, and Hägglund after him, unfortunately turn away.
THE STICKY QUESTION OF CREATION
Returning to the schematic domination of Western philosophy, irrespective of whether they concern human hubris or organic chauvinism, the questions such schema are constructed to counter are basically the same. Today’s humanist descendants of Darwin, for example, lacking the fallback position of a divine Creator, must nonetheless be able to account for the emergence of the human as both coming from the animal and yet no longer being animal. Perhaps surprisingly, Derrida’s organic chauvinism is staged to counter this very same problem, albeit with an essentially superficial shifting of terms. It is, as is so often the case, a problem of delimitation, that is, it concerns the foundation, construction and maintenance of borders. Thus, Derrida, similarly lacking a divine fallback position, must also be able to account for the emergence of the living as both emerging from the inanimate and yet no longer being inanimate. He must, in other words, address the precise historical moment in which the living presumably ‘emerges’ from the non-living. This problem, for the secular humanist as for the organic chauvinist, is, in short, that of creation ex nihilo. Ultimately, such dominant – nearly but not quite invariable – historical schema are not constructed to solve but rather to dissolve such problems, that is, to obviate the question.
Derrida, as we have seen, refers to the movement of the trace as ‘an emergence’ – but an emergence from what, exactly? And so we find ourselves back to the question of fence-building and of creation ex nihilo. Presumably, the trace – as a ‘new structure of non-presence’ synonymous with ‘life’ – could only emerge from a world composed entirely of inorganic, inanimate objects. This, however, not only contradicts its own logic but also opens deconstruction to the pejorative charge of ‘correlationism’ as defined by philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006).
Let us take the issue of logical contradiction first. Given that the trace is, as Derrida maintains throughout, the constitutive condition of existence itself, then how can the double movement of the trace emerge from out of anything? Rather, only the nothingness of the endless void could possibly precede its ‘emergence’ insofar as its apparently ‘new structure of non-presence’ at the same time constitutes the condition for the appearing or enduring of any entity whatsoever. Hence, ‘life’ as synonymous with the trace ultimately results in a return to the theological, demanding as it does creation ex nihilo.
Turning now to correlationism, Meillassoux defines as correlationist any philosophical position that depends upon an a priori co-relation of world and consciousness in the form of ‘givenness’.13 As such, all correlationist philosophies – and for Meillassoux at least this means everything from Kant onwards – are incapable of accounting for the existence of the world prior to the existence of conscious life forms as a result.14 It is because of this, he continues, that the problem of correlationism can be seen at its clearest when considering ‘ancestral statements’, that is, statements made about reality anterior to the emergence of ‘life’. Such statements, writes Meillassoux, are impossible for the correlationist philosopher for whom being is co-extensive with manifestation, in that the past events to which ancestral statements refer could not, by definition, be manifest to anyone. As such, ‘what is preceded in time the manifestation of what is’,15 meaning that manifestation is not the givenness of a world but is instead an intra-worldly occurrence that can in fact be dated. In other words, to make the emergence of life synonymous with the ‘worlding’ of world is to evoke the emergence of manifestation amidst a world that pre-existed it. Hence, insofar as Derrida makes the emergence of the trace synonymous with the emergence of living beings, deconstruction too has no answer to the challenge the ancestral poses to correlationism: namely, how to conceive of a time in which the given as such passes from non-being into being? This challenge concerns not the empirical problem of the birth of living organisms but the ontological problem of the coming into being of givenness as such. It is a problem, however, only insofar as we accept the unacceptable limits Derrida imposes upon the trace – limits that, as we know, presuppose an abyssal living/non-living distinction.
The trace structure, however, refers to neither the site of ontological division nor a property a priori reserved for an exclusive subsection of beings but rather describes a general structure of being. The structural logic of the trace, in other words, is the condition of possibility of beings in general and, as such, inscribes chance as a necessary component of all forms of being. As the condition of possibility of formal structure – of being-form and being-formed – being is no longer co-extensive with givenness, no longer always already having been given to someone irrespective of whether that ‘one’ is judged human, conscious, living or whatever.
Why, then, might Derrida have sought to put an end to all life, an end he named the trace? Returning once again to the key passage in Of Grammatology, we find Derrida pointing to the ‘essential impossibility’ of avoiding ‘mechanist, technicist and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the technè, of orientation in general’.16 Remembering that this is his first major work, I think that, above all else, Derrida here signals his desire to avoid exactly those accusations: namely, that underneath it all, he is in fact positing a rigid, mechanistic universe. To this end, however, he only succeeds in offering a late form of vitalism in its place. This notion of a ‘late-stage’ vitalism comes from DeLanda’s analysis of what he deems a ‘troubling aspect’ of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, namely the fact that he ‘embraced a late form of “vitalism” which rigidly separated the worlds of organic life and human consciousness, where innovation was possible, from the realm of the merely material, where repetition of the same was the rule’.17 As should be clear, this same ‘late form’ of vitalism equally troubles Derrida’s philosophy, and we too should manage to rid it ‘of its troubling aspects’.
Furthermore, Derrida may well have imposed these restrictions upon the trace as a result of concerns related to any would-be ‘retrieval of the origin’ – not in this case the ‘origin of Man’, of course, but rather the ‘origin of life itself’ – concerns which may be reflected in the fact that Derrida here offers nothing whatsoever in regard to what is the utterly extraordinary but still presumably historical event of the trace’s emergence. What is important to us, here, is the fact that the structure of the trace, in accordance with its own logic, could quite simply never have been ‘new’.18 This obscure ‘locating’ of the origin of ‘life in general’ is both odd and paradoxical. While we do well to wonder at Derrida’s lifelong refusal to engage with the more radical implications of his own theoretical position, the incongruity of such a refusal is intensified by the fact that these same implications are perfectly consistent with contemporary accounts from within fields as diverse as philosophical Darwinism and synthetic biology regarding the processes by which nonlife is thought to ‘invent’ life and the inorganic to ‘create’ the organic. Moreover, I will argue, what these same contemporary interpretations collectively lack is the requisite philosophical background provided by the discourse of deconstruction in general, and by the indissociable ‘quasi-concepts’ of iterability and trace in particular.
Here, we begin to circle back, albeit indirectly, to Hägglund, who singles out the work of Daniel Dennett as providing an easily accessible account of current, post-Darwinian understandings of evolution. Along the way, Hägglund underscores an absolutely central point in this regard: ‘Rather than vitalizing matter, philosophical Darwinism devitalizes life’.19 In so doing, moreover, it burrows its way through every abyssal distinction aimed at separating life from non-life, sending across its caesura a vast, web-like network of contact that renders null and void every simplistic division of the organic from the inorganic.
Hence, taking Hägglund’s advice, we find that Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995) does indeed offer a clear account of evolution that, as ‘a system of replication with variation’, adheres to the fundamental Darwinian principle.20 Dennett also notes that, while Darwinism is without doubt a mechanistic materialism, it is nonetheless the only philosophical theory currently on offer that doesn’t get bogged down with inevitable questions of purpose and design, and thus theology and teleology. Instead, the very mechanicity of its materialism serves to open up what for so long has been the secure boundary erected between the disciplines of physics and biology.
While I do not have the space to recount Dennett’s exposition in full, it will nonetheless suffice for us here to note a few fundamental points along the way. First, long before the appearance of bacteria, there existed ‘much simpler, quasi-living things, like viruses’,21 but also unlike viruses insofar as they as yet had no host upon which to exist parasitically. Viewed by a chemist rather than a biologist, however, these entities are instead simply large, complex crystals, albeit with the added bonus that they self-replicate. Moreover, these ancient crystalline ‘viruses’ depend for their very survival upon an ongoing reiteration of repetition with variation – a reiteration that, if successful, brings about accelerating feedback loops and, if not, results in the decomposition of the ‘virus’ in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.
In order to understand this notion of accelerating feedback loops, it remains to briefly introduce Manuel DeLanda’s notion of non-linearity. While Derrida insists that without life there can be neither affect nor event,22 DeLanda argues that affect and event are part of the space of the structure of possibilities of every entity. The being of a given entity, he argues, can never be separated from its future possibilities and thus must be considered in terms of its properties, capacities and tendencies. Taking ‘knife’ as an example, its properties – such as sharpness and solidity – exist independently of its relation with other entities. Capacities, meanwhile, consist of an entity’s potential affect; the knife, for example, has the capacity to cut, a capacity that is always double insofar as it requires a relation, that is, requires other entities capable of being affected in their turn. Thus, a knife’s capacity ‘to cut’ is always the mark of a relation: to-cut–to-be-cut. Moreover, capacities are potentially infinite insofar as they depend on affective combinations with other entities, combinations that are theoretically without limit. Finally, every entity possesses certain tendencies understood as possible states of stability towards which it tends. Hence, while our knife tends to be solid, given different conditions it could equally tend to be liquid or even gaseous, with every such transition being actualized as an event.
As such, potential affective combinations characterize the being of every entity – an affectivity that ensures the non-linearity of history understood in its broadest sense. For DeLanda, innovation, and thus non-linearity, occurs in any system ‘in which there are strong mutual interactions (or feedback) between components’.23 As such, what might be respectively termed ‘pre-cellular’ and ‘post-cellular’ evolution must therefore both be understood as non-linear, described by DeLanda as that ‘in which there are strong mutual interactions (or feedback) between components’.24 Moreover, writes DeLanda, when it comes to the non-linear, it is entirely irrelevant whether ‘the system in question is composed of molecules or of living creatures’ since both ‘will exhibit endogenously generated stable states, as well as sharp transitions between states, as long as there is feedback and an intense flow of energy coursing through the system’.25
Such dynamic, non-linear phenomena irredeemably fracture Darwin’s original conception of evolution as a strict linear teleology with only the one possible historical outcome, namely, the perfect manifestation of a single optimal design. Instead, non-linearity presupposes only what DeLanda in his later work Philosophy and Simulation terms ‘gradients of fitness’, wherein a gradient functions only so long as differences of fitness remain so as to ‘fuel a process of selection’ that favours the replication (with variation) of one kind over another.26 Here, DeLanda once again draws our attention to the crucial point that such gradients can be applied as much to ‘molecular replicators and their different capacities to produce copies of themselves’ as it can to ‘the differential reproductive success of embodied organisms’.27
What should be noted here is the fact that both non-linearity and contemporary Darwinism presuppose with every replication the structural logic of what Derrida terms iterability and, as such, the double movement of the trace. For Derrida, we recall, iterability is the very possibility of repetition. Iterability, he writes, is the structural characteristic that permits any mark to function ritualistically as language. At the same time, however, iterability determines that every production of such a text is necessarily subject to variation or mutation – what Derrida calls dissemination or ‘destinerrance’ – insofar as repetition (replication or reproduction) inevitably divides the apparently indivisible presence of the text by way of the double movement of protention and retention, that is, by the structural logic of the trace. It is right here that deconstruction must shed its ‘late-stage vitalism’ in order to reconstitute itself as a fully materialist practice – indeed, as a mechanistic materialism, albeit one that refuses the linear notion of a fully deterministic universe, putting in its stead a structural modality of non-linear indeterminism. To this end, it is far from incidental that we find Derrida in full agreement with DeLanda as to the central importance of history in just this regard, describing iterability as ‘historical through and through’ insofar as it allows both contextual elements of great stability and the possibility of transformation, ‘which is to say history, for better or for worse’.28
Reconsidering iterability in light of our key thesis – that the trace continues to function irrespective of whether there is life or not – has, I would argue, the potential to radically transform the theoretical practice of deconstruction. Indeed, it is all too easy to perceive the enormous impact that, far beyond the work already done by Derrida, a rigorous deconstruction of living/non-living division would have upon such simplistic normative pairings as animal–human, instinct–intelligence and reaction–response.
Such a claim, however, requires the following important proviso: simply to make this point regarding the functioning of the trace beyond the limits of life is, in and of itself, by no means a guarantee of any such productive mutation. Hence, in returning to Martin Hägglund, we soon discover that, irrespective of how important his ‘radical atheist’ critique of Derrida’s equating of différance with life undoubtedly is, its radical potential is nonetheless quickly muffled insofar as he almost immediately re-employs that critique as the justification for reinstating what is arguably the most traditional and pervasively normative of all metaphysical binaries.
Hägglund begins this process by first making explicit ‘a continuity between the living and the nonliving in terms of the structure of the trace’.29 Here, he uses Meillassoux’s example of the radioactive isotope, describing the latter as ‘surviving – since it remains and disintegrates over time – but it is not alive’.30 This disintegration or decay of matter, continues Hägglund, answers to both the becoming-time of space insofar as its successive stages of decay can never be simultaneous and to the becoming-space of time insofar as such disintegration could not take place without a spatialized material support. Survival, then, characterizes every finite entity – every entity, in other words – who or which endures in time-space.
Survival is, in short, synonymous with being. All well and good, you might say, except that Hägglund immediately follows this demonstration with a rhetorical question: ‘What difference is at stake, then, in the difference between the living and the non-living?’31 This is, as we have seen, a profoundly important question, and the answers cannot simply serve to obviate the question. Hägglund, however, does just this. The difference, he writes (somewhat tautologically), is that a non-living being is ‘indifferent to its own survival, since it is not alive’, whereas ‘only a living being cares about maintaining itself across an interval of time’.32 For Hägglund, then, to be alive is to be concerned with one’s ongoing survival – it is, in short, the constitutive condition of ‘being-alive’. Here, however, such an ontologically definitive ‘concern’ inevitably implies some form of minimal consciousness or, at the very least, a degree of intentionality. As such, a host of beings must once again join the (very long) queue for judgment: Are ants, for example, concerned with survival? What of microbes? Of extremophiles like the Martian hyperthermophiles who, having crash-landed on this planet billions of years ago, still exist today? What of nanobots – are they concerned and thus alive? And antibodies? Artificial Intelligence? What of viruses? Indeed, what of urine? Its production certainly takes place within the bodies of a huge range of ‘living’ beings, all of whom, should this production cease, would very quickly become ‘non-living’. Is urine a ‘living’ or a ‘non-living’ material? Is it, in other words, concerned or unconcerned about survival?33
Here, then, by once again redefining the living over and against the non-living, Hägglund not only neutralizes his crucial point concerning the trace but also in fact reintroduces the well-worn metaphysical opposition between ‘the living’ as willing, intentional and conscious beings and the ‘non-living’ as mere reactive mechanisms. A distinction, in short, between the mindful (i.e. concerned with survival) and the mindless (and thus unconcerned about anything). The problem here centres largely on Hägglund’s notion of the living as an open and closed (autopoietic) system, but with no explanation as to why entities deemed non-living do not also constitute an open–closed system that is in some sense concerned with survival understood as enduring, especially given that the latter accords far better with Hägglund’s understanding of the trace structure, an understanding backed up by the findings of molecular biology. Indeed, in the context of a discussion concerning stable states and their critical phase transitions, Derrida himself says that both the trace and iterability ensure that nothing can remain absolutely stable. No system, he writes, can be absolutely closed, as this would imply full presence, that is to say, ‘sub-stance, stasis, stance’.34 Ultimately, Hägglund ends up turning full circle, ultimately reducing innumerable unspecified entities to both the state and status of mindless Cartesian machines. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the most radical deconstruction of the limits imposed upon life by Derrida should itself end up reiterating the very opposition between response and reaction that Derrida himself spent a lifetime breaking down.
At this point, one might well object that Derrida has in fact dealt with the living/non-living binary on any number of occasions – finitude, and thus death and dying, being of central concern. This is indeed the case. However, Derrida only ever considers the living/dead binary, that is, the division between the living and the no-longer living. What he does not consider, by contrast, is the division between the living and the not-yet or never living. This is not to say, however, that Derrida’s deconstruction of the living/dead binary has no relevance here. Taking death as the subject of his very last seminar, Derrida begins by declaring that, even today, neither science nor philosophy is in fact capable of ascertaining with any certainty the difference between a living body and a corpse. Later, he engages with the trace directly, arguing that any ‘presentation’ of the trace in general necessarily ‘leaves in the world an artifact that speaks all alone … without the author himself needing to do anything else, not even be alive’.35 In other words, the trace – which for Derrida, as we know, is only ever the trace of a living being, this despite the previously stated impossibility of ascertaining any rigorous distinction between life and death – is already a dead-but-living artefact. Such, he writes, is finitude, is survivance: the trace entrusted ‘to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence’.36 Every artefactual trace, he continues, is rather a dead body buried in material institutions and yet resuscitated each time anew by ‘a breath of living reading’.37 For Derrida, then, finitude – as the archive as survivance at work – is the active, radical dissemination that constitutes the originary forcing of ‘life in general’.
Given, however, that the trace functions whether there is life or not, and given the acknowledged impossibility of distinguishing absolutely between the living and the dead – an impossibility that is in fact a consequence of the continued functioning of the trace, that is, of the material enduring of the corpse – it thus becomes necessary to rewrite this notion of finitude upon a much broader scale. Finitude, as the archive as survivance at work, thus becomes the active, radical dissemination that constitutes the originary forcing of everything that exists and thus endures, however, whenever and wherever this may be.
Until we recognize as fully as possible that all beings in the world are finite and thus subject to the logical structure of the trace, we inevitably find ourselves marooned not on Crusoe’s island, but on Derrida’s.38 Access to the latter, as is well known, has been decreed by Derrida to depend solely upon a single, apparently simple and seemingly uncontentious criterion: that of the capacity to suffer (or, put another way, to share in common the suffering of an incapacity). Following Jeremy Bentham, then, ‘to-suffer or not-to-suffer?’ becomes for Derrida the question and the foundation upon which an inclusive and posthumanist ethics should stand. Such a foundation and others like them, however, can never stand up against everything that remains to come. To limit the world to the human, Derrida argues, is to forever remain with Robinson Crusoe upon his island, helpless but to interpret everything ‘in proportion to the insularity of his interest or his need’.39 Such limits placed upon the world, he continues, are ‘the very thing that one must try to cross in order to think’.40 If, then, we are to follow Derrida in a way that remains faithful to his thought, we are obliged first and foremost to cross those very limits that Derrida himself imposes upon the world, insofar as such limits inevitably make over the world as an island once again. In this case, Derrida populates his island solely with such entities as are securely classified as organic living beings and, as such, deemed proper members of the set of those whose capacity for suffering can be readily identified in accordance with an institutional context.41 Our question, then, is whose island is this exactly, that is, what interests and needs might support its interpretive schema?
Derrida’s island is an exclusive place, and poor in world indeed, based upon a qualifying criterion that is both utilitarian and anthropocentric insofar as the very notion of ‘capacity to suffer’ relies upon the extrapolation of human experience and, as such, thus seems to make any claim for ethical citizenship dependent upon the possession or otherwise of a central nervous system comparable to that of the human. At this point, it is highly instructive to return briefly to the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign (2009) and, in particular, to what Derrida has to say about what he describes as the ‘principle of ethics or more radically of justice’. Any such principle, he writes, ‘is perhaps the obligation that engages my responsibility with respect to the most dissimilar, the entirely other, precisely, the monstrously other, the unrecognizable other’.42 Indeed, he continues, while it is a fact that we feel more obligations towards those who are closest to us, ‘this fact will never have founded a right, an ethics, or a politics’.43
At issue here is not the living and the non-living, however, but rather the necessary consequences of the trace as the unity of protention and retention – one such consequence being that the living/non-living opposition must be broken down and a differential relation installed in its place. As such, once arbitrary criteria are abolished, tables as much as tigers become living/non-living entities insofar as the coherence and persistence of both depend upon energy and differential gradients. In other words, if ‘life’ consists of varying combinations of forces, then a table is alive: stable yet finite and subject to abrupt phase transitions as a result of its being subject to the structural logic of the trace. Similarly, if a single RNA microbe is not qualified as ‘living’, then neither is a tiger, whose finite existence too is composed of stable combinations of forces whilst remaining subject to critical phase transitions.
NEITHER VITAL NOR MECHANICAL: SPECTRAL
None of this, however, implies some variant of vitalism. As we have seen, the post-Darwinian universe is nothing if not mechanistic and material. Nonetheless, our final step must necessarily engage with the issue of vitalism and mechanism in relation to an expanded notion of the trace, as only then will it become possible to conceive of a mechanistic materialism that in no way presupposes a reductionist view of ‘life’. And, once again, it is Derrida who provides the necessary theoretical tool: in this case, the important notion of spectrality.
According to Derrida, the originary technicity that is the iterability of the trace ensures that every being – that is, every living being for Derrida – is ‘a dead body buried in material institutions’, one that awaits resuscitation, we recall, by way of the ‘breath of a living reading’.44 Once again, and despite the somewhat anachronistic resuscitation of the notion of breath, of pneuma, we are compelled to ask whether, prior to its pneumatic reincarnation, this ‘dead body’ is living or non-living, neither or both, or in-between. Derrida’s only response is to note that the ‘gestural, verbal, written, or other trace’ is entrusted ‘to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence’.45 The domain in which this opposition loses pertinence is, unsurprisingly, that of the spectre, and of spectrality in general. Furthermore, it is just this figure of the spectre – this being for whom life or death is neither here nor there, for whom the question of living or non-living is without relevance – who/which ensures that deconstruction can never be reduced to a reductionist view of ‘life’. Spectrality, then, not only annuls the opposition between life and non-life, but it also renders the issue a non-issue. ‘“I don’t know”’, writes Derrida, is ‘the very modality of the experience of the spectral, and moreover of the surviving trace in general’.46
Following our argument here, then, the fact that the spectral is the modality of the trace in general also means that the ‘redemptive’ possibility of the spectre or the phantasm – which Derrida describes as the braiding of the intolerable, the unthinkable, and the ‘as if’ – must therefore be extended to all beings. As a consequence of the logical structure of the trace, in other words, the spectral modality of ‘I don’t know’ presupposes a position between the two extremes of complete mechanistic determinism on one side and on the other, complete indeterminism in which causality and historical contingency play no role whatsoever – what DeLanda calls an ‘intermediate determinism’.47 Furthermore, this spectral modality of ‘I don’t know’ is thus the modality of existence itself, that is, of everything that endures – from the Martian hyperthermophile to the image it evokes, and from the compression of volcanic rock over the eons of geological time to the blinding flash of sunlight off chrome.
Here, then, is a mechanistic materialism that nevertheless has ‘I don’t know’ as its modality – a modality that, instead of reducing life to the clockwork of complete determinism, rather ensures the emergence of a non-linear history insofar as every existence is subject to abrupt phase transitions at critical points, yet without ever requiring a transcendent factor. At last, then, we take our place within a fully populated world, a world in which the living/non-living opposition has neither purchase nor relevance.
NOTES
1Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45.
2Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 45.
3Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 45.
4Manuel DeLanda. ‘The Machinic Phylum’, TechnoMorphica 1998, no pagination, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/articles/the-machinic-phylum/.
5Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, revised edition. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 84.
6Jacques Derrida ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13.
7Derrida, ‘Différance’, 13.
8Derrida, ‘Différance’, 13.
9Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18.
10Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 18.
11Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 18.
12Martin Hägglund ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 119.
13See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 1–27.
14Of course, the attribute of ‘consciousness’ has long served as constitutive of the ontological distinction between ‘Man’ and ‘Animal’, with the result that ‘life’ here nearly always refers exclusively to ‘human life’.
15Meillassoux, After Finitude, 14.
16Derrida, Of Grammatology, 84–85.
17DeLanda, ‘The Machinic Phylum’, n.p.
18Derrida, Of Grammatology, 84.
19Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 121.
20Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1995), 152.
21Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 156.
22Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 149.
23Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), 14.
24DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 14.
25DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 14.
26Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 48.
27DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation, 48.
28Jacques Derrida ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Lit erature, Ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 63–64.
29Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 123: emphasis added.
30Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 123: emphasis in original.
31Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 123.
32Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 123.
33In Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012), George Church and Ed Regis note that work done in four areas – ‘the synthesis of urea, the investigation of mirror molecules, the investigation of polymers … and the self-reproduction of molecules’ – renders impossible any distinction between living and non-living matter (19). While this again is beyond the scope of this chapter, what is important is their insistence on the impossibility of secure distinctions both between living and non-living and between organic and inorganic. Staying with this last example of urine, urea was in fact the first ‘organic’ compound to be synthesized from an ‘inorganic’ substance (ammonium cyanate), way back in 1828.
34Jacques Derrida ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’. Trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 270.
35Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 86–87.
36Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 130.
37Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 131.
38For Derrida’s discussion of Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe’s island isolation serves as a particularly fertile figure of human exceptionalism, see The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II.
39Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 199.
40Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 198; emphasis in original.
41Whilst the setting of the scene of the possible is, as Derrida writes, the ‘always necessary context of the performative operation’, such a context is, like every convention, always already ‘an institutional context’ (‘The University without Condition’, in Without Alibi. Trans. and Ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 235–236.
42Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108.
43Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, 109.
44Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 131: emphasis added.
45Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 130.
46Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 137.
47DeLanda, ‘The Machinic Phylum’, n.p.
Church, George and Ed Regis. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
DeLanda, Manuel. ‘The Machinic Phylum’. TechnoMorphica , 1998, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/manuel-de-landa/articles/the-machinic-phylum/.
———. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions, 1997.
———. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life . London: Penguin, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Différance’. In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 1–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
———. ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. In Acts of Literature. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
———. ‘Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject’. In Points … Interviews 1974–1999. Translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, edited by Elisabeth Weber, 255–287. Stanford: Stanford University, 1995.
———. Of Grammatology. Revised edition. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
———. ‘The University without Condition’. In Without Alibi. Translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf, 202–237. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
———. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
———. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
———. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
———. ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillasoux’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, 114–129. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.
Meillasoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.