Mais ni Descartes ni Hegel ne se sont battus avec le problème de l’écriture. Le lieu de ce combat et de cette crise. c’est ce qu’on appelle le XVIIIe siècle. [But neither Descrates nor Hegel grappled with the problem of writing. The place of this combat and this crisis is what is called the eighteenth century.]
. . . le ‘XVIIIe siècle français’ par exemple et si quelque chose de tel existe . . . [ . . . the French eighteenth century’, for example and if any such thing exists.]
Un texte a toujours plusieurs âges, la lecture doit en prendre son parti. [A text always has several ages and reading must take account of that fact.]
(Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie)
‘Ce qu’on appelle . . . .’ ‘What we call,’ ‘what one calls,’ ‘what is called’ – the Eighteenth Century.1
These brief remarks bear the same title as the volume as a whole, with, however, this very slight difference: that the words ‘Eighteenth Century’ are now enclosed in quotation marks. So not ‘Derrida’s Eighteenth Century’, but ‘Derrida’s “Eighteenth Century”’. These quotation marks are supposed to function as ‘scare-quotes’, first, suspending a potentially problematic term or concept, ‘mentioning’ it rather than ‘using’ it, not quite wanting to subscribe to it, but they also function as ‘real’ quotation marks, because I am quoting Jacques Derrida’s use of the words ‘Eighteenth Century’ (or at least « XVIIIe siècle »).2 And then they have to be doubled up quotation marks, double and single, because I am especially quoting his use of those words already in quotation marks, more than once, several times, probably more often than not, in fact, in more than one text, the words « XVIIIe siècle » enclosed in what seem to be scare-quotes, and more explicitly still suspended in Derrida’s reference to ‘what we call’ or ‘what one calls’ the Eighteenth Century, ‘if any such thing exists.’ My real point here will be to insist on those quotation marks and to wonder what they might do to the object of our study. What, for example, would it mean if the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies were to place quotation marks round the ‘Eighteenth-Century’ in its title?
So: what he calls ‘what we call’ the Eighteenth Century.
Now Derrida might reasonably be thought to have a certain affection for what he calls ‘what we call’ or ‘what one calls’ the Eighteenth Century. Among the very many centuries across which his work ranges, the eighteenth might not be the one most insistently discussed, but it could certainly be thought at least to hold its own. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps most obviously, is given (for reasons we shall probably see in due course) a very central role in Derrida’s ‘early’ developments around the problem of writing – developments that are arguably absolutely crucial to his thinking in general; Kant, too, occupies an important place in Derrida’s understanding of deconstruction, if perhaps somewhat negatively, both in that one of the things that deconstruction must most saliently be compared to and distinguished from – in other words one of the things it might most obviously be, and has been, mistaken for – is critique,3 and in that the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ (usually, though not always, filtered through Husserl’s idea of Kant’s Idea) is also something I believe to be a real crux of Derrida’s thinking from the very first to the very last. In addition, Derrida famously asserts an interest in and affection for the so-called ‘mechanical’ materialists when interviewed by a pair of Parisian dialectical materialists in 1972,4 and also writes directly and one might say enthusiastically about figures such as Condillac or Warburton.
As the quotation I used as my first epigraph makes clear, this interest in the eighteenth century (or at least what Derrida calls more saliently in the Grammatology the ‘époque de Rousseau’ (p. 145)) has its initial reason in that that age or era is the one in which a certain set of problems about writing comes to the fore in an original way. In the section from which I take that epigraph, Derrida draws a very broad and quite dense picture of the history of metaphysics as the metaphysics of presence or as logocentrism. He suggests one major point of articulation in that history around Descartes, at which point presence takes on the form of self-presence, internalising possibilities of repetition and mastery already given by the ancient forms of ousia and eidos, and reinforces them into an unassailable power of auto-affective ideality, which power can be called ‘God’ without in principle compromising the integrity of consciousness, and this inaugurates a subsequent period (defined as that in which ‘God’s infinite understanding is the other name for the logos as self-presence’ (De la grammatologie, p. 146) – a subsequent period that stretches from Descartes to Hegel. That period identifies consciousness with voice (necessarily according to Derrida), or more precisely with hearing-oneself-speak, as the only possibility whereby this idealising mechanism of auto-affection can seem to function without the need to compromise itself with alterity or mundanity. With its inherent phonocentrism, this Descartes-to-Hegel period has within it a new articulation, defined as the moment when writing is confronted and dealt with as such in these terms of self-presence. The story of that articulation, which Derrida wants to concentrate on Rousseau, is a story whereby the apparently inevitable tendency of the self-presence of consciousness to experience itself via voice and ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ finds itself needing to expel writing from its central concerns; and needing to do so explicitly and vigorously in the wake of an event Derrida describes as follows: ‘attempts of the Leibnizian type had opened a breach in logo-centric security’ (De la grammatologie, p. 147) operated by projects for a universal characteristic. Rather than centre his story on Leibniz say (or, one might think, Wilkins, or even the earlier exchanges between Mersenne and Descartes on the possibility of an essentially written Universal Language, which Derrida does discuss to some extent in the Grammatology and again at greater length in seminars some fifteen years later),5 he here chooses the slightly earlier moment at which the logocentric closure (in its ‘modern’ or post-Cartesian form, then) is being repaired or reinforced in reaction to such a potential breach, and that repair or reinforcement must take the form of a reassertion of the foundational values of consciousness (or sentiment, adds Derrida perhaps a little rapidly, remembering that Rousseau is going to be his man here), and that repair (given the claimed centrality of the experience of hearing-oneself-speak to the new form taken by metaphysics in the whole Descartes–Hegel tranche of its history) must then take the form of an explicit grappling with and reduction of writing. This configuration would then organise the ‘age of Rousseau’, and Rousseau would be the central figure or hero of that age just because he happened, or so Derrida claims, to be the one who most obviously stepped up to the breach, as it were, and tried to repair it. Rousseau would then seem to define or sum up ‘Derrida’s Eighteenth Century’ because he is the one who most clearly or at least most energetically takes on this task of fighting off the threat that a certain kind of thinking about writing poses to the closure of metaphysics as defined in this its Descartes-to-Hegel period.
On this reading then, ‘Derrida’s Eighteenth Century’ is defined not so much as an ‘age of Enlightenment’ or ‘age of Reason’, but as the age in which a certain unfolding story of metaphysics as presence and then self-presence has its specific crisis as a moment of recovering the foundational privilege of voice from the threat of writing. And this privilege is asserted more forcibly still elsewhere in the Grammatology, when in the chapter dealing with grammatology ‘as a positive science’ Derrida writes:
The extent to which the eighteenth century, here marking a break, attempted to allow for these two exigencies [i.e. that investigation of writing allow a theory to guide a history], is too often ignored or underestimated. If, for profound and systematic reasons, the nineteenth century has left us a heavy heritage of illusions or misunderstandings, all that concerns the theory of the written sign at the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth centuries has suffered primarily. (p. 111)
All of which might reasonably lead us to suppose that ‘Derrida’s Eighteenth Century’ is almost simply ‘Derrida’s Century’, the one that he would be the most inclined to celebrate and investigate, and those of us who have kept at least part-time day jobs as ‘dix-huitièmistes’ might feel inclined to be pleased about that.
And yet the tranquillity (as Derrida might have said) with which these characterisations are made – forgetting the ‘ce qu’on appelle’, and those persistent quotation marks around the words ‘XVIIIe siècle’ – that tranquillity is one we might do well to question, before settling back more or less comfortably in the dix-huitièmiste armchairs of our supposed specialty. We would hardly be reading Derrida seriously if we thought it appropriate, or even really possible, to assume the reality and consistency of anything like an ‘eighteenth century’ as a referent about which he might have said certain specific things (as opposed to other things he might have said about the sixteenth or nineteenth or fifth BC or any other ‘century’ at all). A little later I’ll be suggesting that the mere fact and act of reading (its very possibility) is itself already sufficient to undo the largely unquestioned historicism that still, I fear, affects most work in the humanities and that haunts any periodising effort. But in any case, the very passage I have been looking at in the Grammatology, on the ‘age of Rousseau’ itself, immediately proceeds to put some preliminary questions to the kind of thing that is at stake in making such assumptions.
The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value. They indicate neither identities nor causes. It would be frivolous to think that ‘Descartes,’ ‘Leibniz,’ ‘Rousseau,’ ‘Hegel,’ etc., are names of authors, or the names of authors of movements or displacements that we thus designate. The indicative value that we attribute to them is first of all the name of a problem. If we provisionally allow ourselves to treat this historical structure by fixing our attention on philosophical or literary texts, it is not for the sake of recognizing in them the origin, cause, or equilibrium of the structure. But as we also do not think that these texts are the simple effects of structure, in any sense of the word; as we think that all the concepts hitherto proposed in order to think the articulation of a discourse and a historical totality are caught within the metaphysical closure that we are questioning here, as we do not know of any other concepts and cannot produce any others, and indeed shall not produce any so long as this closure limits our discourse; as the primordial and indispensable phase, in fact and in principle, of the development of this problematic consists in questioning the internal structure of these texts as symptoms; as that is the only condition for determining these symptoms themselves in the totality of their metaphysical belonging, we find in this an argument to isolate Rousseau, and, in Rousseauism, the theory of writing. This abstraction is, moreover, partial and it remains, in our view, provisional. (pp. 147–8)
So here we have Derrida arguing that: (1) the only concepts we have available at present for formulating the relationship between a discourse and ‘its’ historical structure or totality are caught up in the very metaphysics under discussion; (2) we can only hope to begin to get some distance from that metaphysics by first reading the ‘internal structure’ of texts as symptoms. At which point (or so a historian might suggest), Derrida happily gets into just that ‘internal’ type of reading (typically, on the evidence of the Grammatology at least, in a ratio of several hundred pages as compared to two or three on the history bit) and never really re-emerges again.
The historian, of course, will in general be suspicious of what can only seem to be a somewhat homogenising tendency (so that the history of metaphysics seems to be kind of all the same thing, or, even allowing the major articulation around Descartes, is still pretty much the same kind of thing, or, if we allow the identification of an ‘age of Rousseau’ along the lines I’ve just rehearsed, still not really so very different), whereby metaphysics will always say something like ‘it all really comes down to presence, innit?,’ and deconstruction will reply, ‘in fact it’s all really text and trace, innit?’). This tendency seems to be confirmed in a passing remark in the course of the essay ‘La mythologie blanche’,6 which clearly enough has Foucault in its sights, although Foucault is not explicitly named here.
As goes without saying, no claim is being made here as to some homogenous continuum ceaselessly relating tradition back to itself, the tradition of metaphysics or the tradition of rhetoric. Nevertheless, if we did not begin by attending to some of the more durable constraints which have been exercised on the basis of a very long systematic chain, and if we did not take the trouble to delimit the general functioning and effective limits of this chain, we would run the risk of taking the most derived effects for the original characteristics of a historical subset, a hastily identified configuration, an imaginary or marginal mutation. By an empiricist and impressionistic rush toward supposed differences, in fact toward periodisations that are in principle linear and chronological, we would go from discovery to discovery. A break beneath every step! For example, we would present as the physiognomy proper to ‘eighteenth century’ rhetoric a set of characteristics (such as the privilege of the noun), inherited, although not in a straight line, and with all kinds of gaps and uneven transformations, from Aristotle or the Middle Ages. Here, we are brought back to the program, still entirely to be elaborated, of a new delimitation of corpuses and a new problematic of the signature. (Marges, pp. 274–5; cf. too Marges, p. 82)
Derrida’s manner here (and this seems to be consistent throughout his work) is to try to combine two gestures: the one will insist on the secular or millennial, quasi- but never quite permanent features of what he calls, for shorthand, ‘metaphysics’. Any ‘century’ (or age or epoch or era) will tend in this perspective to lose specificity as it is placed in the extreme long view that doesn’t even begin with Plato. On the other hand, specific texts will be read with that famously minute attention to detail and, more importantly, to their internal coherence, economy or ‘syntax’ (as Derrida sometimes calls it). This moment corresponds to the ‘primordial and indispensable phase’ we saw mentioned earlier in the Grammatology, which ‘consists in interrogating the internal structure of these texts as symptoms’.
In ‘La mythologie blanche’, Derrida also constantly interrogates this play between a kind of ‘internal’ articulation of concepts and a historical or genealogical attachment. The relationship between the two, as exemplified by the question of the ‘XVIIIe siècle’ is precisely our problem here.
However, the issue is not to take the function of the concept back to the etymology of the noun along a straight line. It is in order to avoid this etymologism that we have been attentive to the internal, systematic, and synchronic articulation of Aristotle’s concepts. Nevertheless, none of their names being a conventional and arbitrary X, the historical or genealogical (let us not say etymological) tie binding the signified concept to its signifier (to the language) is not a reducible contingency. (Marges, p. 302)
In recalling here the history of the signifier ‘idea,’ we are not giving in to the etymologism that we refused above. While acknowledging the specific function of a term within its system, we must not, however, take the signifier as perfectly conventional. No doubt Hegel’s Idea, for example, is not Plato’s Idea; doubtless the effects of each system are irreducible and must be read as such. But the word Idea is not an arbitrary X, and it imports a traditional charge that continues Plato’s system in Hegel’s system, and must also be interrogated as such, by means of a stratified reading; neither pure etymology nor pure origin, neither a homogenous continuum nor an absolute synchronism or the simple interiority of a system to itself. Which implies a simultaneous critique of the model of a transcendental history of philosophy and of the model of systematic structures perfectly closed onto their technical and synchronic organization (which until now has been recognized only in corpuses identified by the ‘proper name’ of a signature). (Marges, p. 304; no mention of Kant and his idea here)
And this seems to be the point of the quite complex and obscure opening section to the chapter of the Grammatology on ‘La violence de la lettre’, which opens on the question of genealogy. Here Derrida advances a number of difficult points:
1. If in a rather conventional way we here call discourse the present, living, conscious representation of a text within the experience of those who write or read it, and if the text constantly goes beyond this representation by the whole system of its resources and its own proper laws, then the question of genealogy greatly exceeds the possibilities that we are at present given for its elaboration. We know that the metaphor that would describe the genealogy of a text faultlessly is still forbidden.
2. In its syntax and its vocabulary, in its spacing, by its punctuation, its lacunae, its margins, the historical belonging of a text is never a straight line. It is neither causality by contagion, nor the simple accumulation of layers. Nor the pure juxtaposition of borrowed pieces.
3. And if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by that representation, that is by never touching the ground. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical essence, but not the necessity of their enracinating function. To say that all one ever does is to interweave roots endlessly, bending them to take root in roots, to pass through the same points again, to redouble old belongings, to circulate among their differences, to coil around themselves or to be enveloped one in the other, to say that a text is only ever a system of roots, is undoubtedly to contradict both the concept of system and the schema of what a root is. But not being purely apparent, this contradiction takes on the meaning of a contradiction, and receives its ‘illogicality,’ only by being thought within a finite configuration – the history of metaphysics – and caught within a root system that does not end there and which as yet has no name.
4. Now the text’s self-consciousness, the circumscribed discourse in which the genealogical representation is articulated (what Lévi-Strauss, for example, makes of a certain ‘eighteenth century,’ in swearing by it) without being confused with genealogy itself, plays, precisely by virtue of this divergence, an organizing role in the structure of the text. Even if one did have the right to speak of retrospective illusion, this would not be an accident or a piece of theoretical detritus; one would have to account for its necessity and its positive effects. A text always has several ages, and reading must register that fact. And this genealogical self-representation is itself already the representation of a self-representation’ what, for example, ‘the French eighteenth century,’ if such a thing exists, already constructed as its own provenance and its own presence.
(De la grammatologie, pp. 149–50)
This methodological point is also made in the famous explicit exchange with Foucault, albeit not now about the ‘eighteenth century’, but about the history in terms of which anything like an ‘eighteenth (or any other) century’ might be named. Announcing in a preliminary way the kinds of questions he will be asking of Foucault’s ‘interpretation’, Derrida defines interpretation in ‘Cogito et l’histoire de la Folie’ as ‘a certain semantic relationship proposed by Foucault between, on the one hand, what Descartes said – or what he is believed to have said or meant – and on the other hand, let us say, deliberately vaguely for the moment, a certain ‘historical structure’, as they say, a certain historical totality full of meaning, a certain total historical project that it is believed is indicated in particular through what Descartes said – or what he is believed to have said or meant’.7 This unpacks as two sub-questions: first as to ‘what-Descartes-said’, and second as to its historical significance and its significance as essentially historical. And in a slightly later reference to the first of these sub-questions, Derrida says the following, announcing some of the questions he’ll be putting to Foucault about the latter’s reading of Descartes:
I do not know to what extent Foucault would agree that the prerequisite for a response to such questions passes first of all through the internal and autonomous analysis of the philosophical content of the philosophical discourse. Only when the totality of this content will have become manifest in its meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be able to situate it in its total historical form. It is only then that its reinsertion will not do it violence, that it will be a legitimate reinsertion of this philosophical meaning itself. In particular as regards Descartes, no historical question about him – about the latent historical meaning of his discourse, about its place in a total structure – can be answered before making a rigorous and exhaustive internal analysis of his manifest intentions, of the manifest meaning of his philosophical discourse.
We will now turn to this manifest meaning, which is not legible in a passing immediacy, to this properly philosophical. (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 70)
‘Only when the totality of this content will have become manifest in its meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be able to situate it in its total historical form.’ So it looks as though we will never get to the ‘historical moment’ . . . Derrida’s reading would then tend to remain at the interminable preliminary stage of decipherment, and endlessly defer the properly ‘historical’ moment that it might seem ought to follow on. The suspicion would be that the ‘new delimitation of corpuses’ and the ‘new problematic of signatures’, announced in ‘La mythologie blanche’, simply never comes.
And yet Derrida, in spite of certain appearances, really is arguing all this in some sense in the interests of history, of the possibility of history, and is doing so in way that is already enacting (or at least beginning to enact) that new delimitation and new problematic. The burden of his argument with Foucault in this respect is that without the moment of ‘madness’ that the ‘internal’ philosophical reading finds in Descartes (i.e. that the cogito is valid whether I am mad or not), and which Derrida assimilates to a ‘mad’ philosophical endeavour to exceed any determinate totality whatsoever, then there would be no history at all. When Derrida returns to Foucault many years later, and more specifically to Foucault’s treatment of Freud, he finds some comfort for this argument in a later reference Foucault makes to the ‘Malin Génie’ (a reference which Derrida seems to have overlooked at the time of the ‘Cogito and History of Madness’ essay) in which Foucault sees the ‘Malin Génie’ posing an ongoing and indeed ‘perpetual threat’ to the security of the cogito: what kind of historical status in general can the notion of ‘perpetual threat’ have, asks Derrida:
One can imagine the effects that the category of ‘perpetual threat’ (these are Foucault’s words) can have on indications of presence, positive markings, the determinations. For in principle, all these determinations are, for the historian, either presences or absences. They exclude haunting. They allow themselves to be located by means of signs, one would almost say on a table of absences and presences. They belong to the logic of opposition, in this case, the logic of inclusion or exclusion, of the alternative between the inside and the outside, etc. The perpetual threat, that is, the shadow of haunting (and haunting is, no more than the phantom or fiction of an Evil Genius, neither presence nor absence, neither the positive nor the negative, neither the inside nor the outside), does not challenge only some thing or another; it threatens the logic that distinguishes between one thing and another, the very logic of exclusion or foreclosure, as well as the history founded upon this logic and its alternatives. What is excluded is, of course, never simply excluded, neither by the cogito nor by anything else, without this returning – that is what a certain psychoanalysis will have also helped us to understand.8
And this point is also just what the famous argument about context is establishing in ‘Signature, Event, Context’ and ‘Limited Inc’. If I can caricature a little and say that the historian will always want to put it back into its context (the tiger is out of the cage, the historian always wants it put back inside), then Derrida will always also be urging the question: ‘How did it escape in the first place?’ And the best proof that it did escape seems to be the irreducible (and somewhat mad) fact of reading. None of these questions could even arise were it not for reading, reading must by definition entail escape from context, and therefore something of the ‘madness’ that Derrida is talking about in the ‘Cogito’ text, something of the ‘haunting’ he posits in later work, and therefore something of the order of an ongoing unreadability.
Oddly enough, perhaps, this argument could also be illustrated around another pre-eminently Rousseauian theme (albeit not one that Derrida himself focuses particularly on Rousseau), that also happens to be one of the chosen themes of this panel today. Rousseau arguably offers the most coherent and economical account of sovereignty to be found in the tradition, and the account that shows up more clearly than some the inevitability of its deconstruction. Happily enough for our purposes today, the deconstruction of sovereignty is the condition of history itself (for if sovereignty ‘worked’, as it were, then its temporality would be one of absolutely self-contained instants that would have no link between them: the present would always be radically in the present with no possible link to past or future – whence a profound identity, in spite of some appearances, between a Rousseauian and a Nietzschean or Bataillean version of sovereignty. The same argument of course holds for subjectivity too). What makes sovereignty not work, never quite work, and which in Rousseau gives rise to all the strictly supplementary features of the state, without which there would be no politics (the legislator, the government, the tribunate, and so on), is what Derrida is increasingly in his later work inclined to call ‘auto-immunity’, whereby a structure’s attempts to secure itself as itself and in itself founder on an irreducible opening to an ‘outside’ which allows it to be, certainly, but to be only as finite and intrinsically (‘perpetually’) menaced by unpredictable events without the possibility of which, however, the structure in question would simply not be (or would be dead, at best in a kind of living death). In the current case, this means that if the ‘Eighteenth Century’ ever could be defined in and as itself, it would quite simply become unreadable to us, and that its continued readability and availability for discussion depends on our not quite knowing what it is and in general on its failure to be quite itself. This is also why, for example, Lévi-Strauss is still in some meaningful sense part of the ‘age of Rousseau’, and why texts have several ages.
In the general case before us, this auto-immunity is just what I call reading, as what opens texts up always beyond their historical specificity to the always possibly menacing prospect of unpredictable future reading. The link between this and madness is something that Rousseau’s work as a whole makes very plain. But just that same structure is what gives Rousseau’s texts their several ages, why reading is never completed, and why we’ll always do well to keep putting the ‘Eighteenth Century’ in quotation marks.
1. This paper was presented to a panel organised by Jodie Green under the title ‘Derrida’s Eighteenth Century’ at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference, Montreal, 2006. Previously published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (2007), pp. 381–93.
2. The relevant passages invoking the eighteenth century, or the ‘eighteenth century’, appear in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 147 and 150.
3. See my ‘Almost the End’, in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000).
4. See Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 69.
5. Cf. ‘Les romans de Descartes ou l’économie des mots’, in Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 311–41.
6. The essay appears in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
7. L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 53.
8. Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996), pp. 111–12.