Ecce animot. Neither a species nor a gender nor an individual, it is an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals, and rather than a double clone or a portmanteau word, a sort of monstrous hybrid, a chimera waiting to be put to death by its Bellerophon.Footnote 1
Ecce cat! “A little cat … truly a little cat, this cat I am talking about, which is also a female,” is in danger of stealing Derrida’s show, weaving between the legs of his formidable, playful prose, which itself must further dog-leg, pussy-foot, through devoted, rigorous translations, before reaching clumsy Anglophone readers like myself with modest competence in French.Footnote 2
The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me – I who am (following) [suis] after it. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself – it can look at me. It has a point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other.Footnote 3
Late Derrida, it seems, may be understood as his animal turn (perhaps return), “the beginnings of what constitutes one of the major directions of his whole trajectory,” for devoted editor Marie-Louise Mallet.Footnote 4 She prefaces The Animal That Therefore I Am (2003), with playful, affectionate solemnity, acknowledging his more frequent acknowledgments of his own mortality that accompany the philosopher’s animal turn: “In 1997 he still had a little time, but for a long time already, well before 1997, and very often after, this little sentence came back to him: ‘Life will have been short.’ That future perfect encounters its ‘absolute usage.’”Footnote 5
Death is even more explicitly at the fore in the posthumously published, The Beast and the Sovereign – two volumes of his twenty-three animal seminars delivered December 2001 to March 2002 and December 2002 to March 2003.Footnote 6 Citing his “seminars on the death penalty,” Derrida confirms that the “question of the animal was also, here and elsewhere, one of our permanent concerns.”Footnote 7 So it is no idle rhetorical flourish, no hyperbole, when Derrida declares: “nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute of the neighbor or of the next (-door) than these moments when I see myself naked under the gaze of a cat.”Footnote 8 In staging such an encounter with an unnamed, apparently silent cat (this is no chatty catty), is Derrida predicting the eclipse of his entire oeuvre by this late animal turn, or is he acknowledging the animal’s presence in all he has thought and written? Where does that leave the “food for thinking” left on his step by all those formidable thinkers and interlocutors in his career, dead and living, namely Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Nancy et al.? Is this a studied insult to his male human interlocutors, or a diplomatic gesture to avoid singling out one above others? Better follow the announcement of “a little cat” as one’s messiah than a fellow man! Not “ecce homo,” but “Ecce animot,” indeed!
Certainly in literary seminars and symposia, these days, Derrida’s cat often has more pedagogical traction than a cold plunge into Of Grammatology, say, or Writing and Difference. Derrida’s neologism, “animot” may well come to eclipse “difference” or “trace” or “pharmakon” or “phallogocentrism” or “aporia,” as a kind of signature by-word of the Derridean. Yet it, and the cat, may be manifestations of (a late ruse to reignite or restate) “différance,” that is, that “which marks or traces out the problem of the relation between identity and difference,” according to Claire Colebrook, who understands “the difference between humans and non-humans” to be a fourth way of approaching difference in Derrida’s work, the first being “a poststructuralist critique of the supposedly post-metaphysical attention to meaning as generated through systems,” the second, “the post-phenomenological problem of time,” and the third, “sexual difference.”Footnote 9 Pressing from sexual difference to human–animal difference is the outcome, for Colebrook, of addressing “the extent to which the concept of man – and the impossibility of this concept – has been at the heart of Derrida’s complication of difference by différance. It is not surprising then that not only sexual difference but difference between animals and humans becomes increasingly important in Derrida’s work.”Footnote 10 For if the “being who is able to re-trieve and re-live the sameness or identity from which distinction emerges has always been man,” she observes, “it follows then that the thought of sexual difference (a difference that cannot be traced back to some unified humanity or single cultural system) might open a new thought of différance. Similarly, if there were no stable identity that comprised ‘the animal,’ then all those features of man that had guaranteed presence – the capacity to reason, to touch, to speak, to look, to remember, to archive – would be under threat.”Footnote 11
Derrida, poet as much as philosopher,Footnote 12 understands the unnamed little she-cat to be “animot,” not animal in the “general singular, separated from man by a single, indivisible limit,” in the sense of standing for all animals, or even all feline animals.Footnote 13 For “animot” poetically invites us to the scene of writing and speaking of “animaux,” the plural in French, or “animals” in English. In “animot,” Derrida first “would like to have the plural animals heard in the singular … We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures,’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.”Footnote 14 Derrida is in keeping with many other thinkers who have struggled with “where to cut,” with where or whether we distinguish between human and animal, not least Levinas, even more so Agamben.Footnote 15 His book’s title throws a spanner in the works of Enlightenment reason’s cut via the capacity for abstract thought. The reviled and discarded animal elided from Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum,”/‘I think therefore I am,” is perhaps restored in L’animal que donc je suis / “the animal that therefore I am/follow [je suis].” Yet, why not “The ‘L’animot que donc je suis’”? Such a performative turn, more so than the chosen title’s corrective to the Cartesian (exposing the animal that is also “I”), requires the reader’s active engagement with the book itself, and the world, before “mal” may become “mot.” In what world could “animot” and not “animal” become axiomatic?
Second, the “suffix mot … should bring us back to the word, namely to the word named a noun,” to the “stakes involved in always seeking to draw the limit, the unique and indivisible limit held to separate human from animal, namely, the word, the nominal language of the word, the voice that names the thing as such, such as it appears in its being … The animal would in the last instance be deprived of the word, of the word that one names a noun or name.”Footnote 16 The self-referring singularity of the “I” of the Cartesian cogito is not available to “the animal.” Yet it “would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals” is Derrida’s third observation on “Ecce animot”: “but perhaps acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation.”Footnote 17 The animal’s radical alterity, untouched apparently by words, remains, then, intact but respected, even in spite of the observation that “Whoever says ‘I’ or apprehends or poses herself as an ‘I’ is a living animal.”Footnote 18
Derrida invites and performs dissection (or bisection), then, not of “animal” but “animot.” Our eyes turn to “mot” as a “suffix,” while nevertheless glimpsing a specter of the discarded “mal.” But “mot” also makes us all too aware of the word’s front end. Etymologically the stem of animal is “anima” (suffix “-al”), more properly cutting open this word at “anim,” yielding its main philosophical meaning: “[t]he animating principle in living things, the soul; some part or aspect of the soul, esp. the irrational part of the soul as distinguished from the rational mind.”Footnote 19 But under Derrida’s poetic scalpel, cutting at the third letter, we now find somewhat rudely exposed the Latin “ani,” multiple excreting orifices that precede, or make possible, either the “mal” or the “mot.” Animals arrive arse(s) first on philosophy’s pantomime stage, but “animot” opens its behind to the possibility of language. Or is there a critique here of patriarchy’s asinine disavowal of its own animality, a disavowal forged in tandem with the dispossession and subordination of women?
Thus “L’animot” is a kind of admonitory emblem for the utterers of what Derrida identifies as an ill-functioning “asinanity [bêtise]”:
each time a philosopher, or anyone else, says “The Animal” in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human (man as rational animal, man as political animal, speaking animal, zōon logon echon, man who says “I” and takes himself to be the subject of a statement that he proffers on the subject of the said animal, etc.), well, each time the subject of that statement, this “one,” this “I,” does that he utters an asinanity [bêtise]. He avows without avowing it, he declares, just as a disease is declared by means of a symptom, he offers up for diagnosis the statement “I am uttering an asinanity.” And this “I am uttering an asinanity” should confirm not only the animality that he is disavowing but his complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species.Footnote 20
In the Beast and the Sovereign 1, Derrida waxes on the untranslatability of “bête” and “bêtise”: to “seek to translate this word is only to repeat the bêtise within, and as the other to, thought.”Footnote 21 These terms are peculiar to French: “‘improper’ to knowledge and judgement, bêtise is always, only proper to man or to the sovereign as man. Though not a modality of knowledge any more than it is a mistake in knowing, what is bête about thinking is the way in which the human thinks and, in thinking, assumes that mode, that way or approach to be proper, to make manifest sovereign reason.”Footnote 22 For Derrida, then, these translation stakes cannot be limited “to the operation of lexicologists or academic semanticians or of literary traductology: it really is the whole of the history of the Western world that is in play in these operations of translation … since the relations between beast and the sovereign are also relations between an animal, a zōon supposed to be without reason, and a zōon supposed to be rational, the sovereign being posited as human, on the divine model, and as a human who naturally has reason, responsibility, etc.”Footnote 23
Translation, furthermore, has the transporting force of metaphor and allegory. Is it possible that “a zōon supposed to be rational” can think or speak of “a zōon supposed to be without reason” as not impoverished? Or to accede to a thinking … that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation”?Footnote 24 Derrida leads us to philosophy’s dizzying and shifting precipice, differentiating between man and animal, but baulks at eliding or closing it. For Derrida, an “abyssal rupture [remains that] doesn’t describe two edges” between Human and Animal, rather it makes for a “complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.”Footnote 25
The opening of the silently pluralizing “mot” in “l’animot,” paradoxically risks serving the case against closing the elusive gap to fully embrace animal personhood/subjectivity by foregrounding that our designation of animality in the first place is peculiar to the very language (of reason) that always and already voices and marks animal difference: “it is indeed a matter of a word, only a word, the word animal [du mot “animal”].”Footnote 26 The “poematic,” his poet’s playful respect for the materiality of language, is “intimately concerned with” animality, to mirror Royle’s observation on another of Derrida’s important neologisms.Footnote 27 What needs adjustment is received human(ist) thinking that the animal’s exclusion from language, in what Agamben designates the anthropological machine, is at all “a privation.” Talk of the animal’s “privation” shifts focus back to the precipice or line marked out by Heidegger between man and animal (“the animal is poor in world”) that Derrida has in his sights to thicken and complicate, and that comes under sustained rereading in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign.
Heidegger’s famous triple thesis, distinguishing between man and animal, has become the touchstone: “1. The stone is worldless [weltlos]; 2. The animal is poor in world [weltarm]; 3. Man is world-forming [weltbildend].”Footnote 28 The “ironic apparatus” of Agamben’s “anthropological machine” installs a shifting caesura in the narrative of the historical “passage from animal to man” where or when an animal-not-yet-human births a human–animal, and where the acquisition of language is a key indicator of that passage from animality to humanity.Footnote 29 This divide, predicated on questions of animal capacity for language, literacy, creativity, rationality and reasoning, Derrida complicates (compli-cats?) but does not close. In the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, with Heidegger’s work in one hand and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in the other, he sophisticates further the edgeless rupture between human and animal by exploring, among other things, whether animals die or mourn as humans do. Animal remains aloof here, but human is leveled with animal in not after all having the capacity to die as such. Enfolded in his dazzling double reading of Defoe and Heidegger is a fascinating digression in these final seminars into the two modes of disposal of the dead – cremation or burial.
The divide, wherever it falls, replicates binary hierarchized thinking and the master/slave dialectic, which sweeps up with it not only the man/animal binary but also hierarchies and power relations based on gender, race and class. In patriarchy, I have argued, “the ‘passage from animal to man’ where or when an animal-not-yet-human births a human-animal, occurs every time a mother whelps a son!”Footnote 30 Surely temporal and sexual differences here require the critique of différance. Derrida’s asinanity (“bêtise”) applies to any disavowal of the “passage from animal to man” that both always and already severs animal/woman from man yet also joins them. But where is that “little cat … truly a little cat, this cat [Derrida was] talking about, which is also a female” when we need her?Footnote 31
Donna Haraway’s notion of humans and animals as messmates, co-shaping subjectivitiesFootnote 32 might be invoked to critique Defoe’s famous depiction of Crusoe’s asininely avowed sovereignty over animal companions: “how like a King I din’d too all alone, attended by my servants; Poll, as if he had been my Favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My Dog who was now grown very old and crazy, … sat always at my Right Hand, and two Cats, one on one Side the Table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a Bit from my Hand, as a Mark of special Favour.”Footnote 33 The dog eventually perishes, and having found “no Species to multiply his Kind upon,” is only replaced by a new mutt miraculously supplied by another shipwreck. The cats dining here are not those rescued from the first shipwreck, who are long dead and buried, “but one of them having multiply’d by I know not what Kind of Creature, these were two which I had preserv’d tame, whereas the rest run wild in the Woods, and became indeed troublesome to me at last; for they would often come into my House, and plunder me too, till at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many.”Footnote 34 Crusoe’s dining “all alone” yet with animals illustrates the “auto-affirmation of sovereignty by Robinson himself … the theater of an autobiography or an Autopresentation of the sovereign by himself,” a path of argument that will open to Derrida’s preoccupation with dying and death, of being buried alive, savaged by beasts, ingested by cannibals.Footnote 35 He couples this affirmation of (violent) sovereignty over wild and domestic creatures with Robinson’s sovereignty over his three human subjects: “My Man Friday was a Protestant, his Father was a Pagan and a Cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist.”Footnote 36 Returning to that threshold somatic scene between bathroom and bedroom where Derrida stages his naked encounter with the little she-cat, we might ponder his avowed commitment to her feline singularity in the face of his patent lack of curiosity.
Is this too complicit in the violence of Crusoe’s establishment of sovereignty? Is this too “the theater of an autobiography or an Autopresentation of the sovereign by himself”? “Somehow in all this worrying and longing, the cat was never heard from again,” observes Haraway: “Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.”Footnote 37 There is a similar lack of curiosity in Derrida about Crusoe’s monstrously proliferating, chimeric cats. He has eyes only for Poll the Parrot.
Haraway is scornful of Derrida’s pantomime insistence that his is “a real cat … It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables. There are so many of them.”Footnote 38 But he then cites several literary cats, not least Montaigne’s: “When I play with my cat [ma chatte], who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”Footnote 39 Derrida does not mention playing with or touching his puss. Elsewhere he links touching animals with appropriation and violence.Footnote 40 He does not share Montaigne’s or Haraway’s openness to the possibility of reciprocal figure-making in such play between species, preferring an asymmetry. To allegorize is a man’s province, so Derrida makes a show of respecting the cat’s radical alterity by refusing to allegorize or anthropomorphize her. Nevertheless, his utterances are open to precisely that charge.
For any inscription of the cat as metaphorical or figurative risks its “erasure,” confirming it as “absent referent,” as animal ethicist-feminist Carol Adams has it.Footnote 41 Derrida certainly insists on, to the point of comedy, the presence of a “real” cat. But surely he is not following the naïve Adams here. “Could metaphor itself be the undergarment … of oppression?” Adams asks, since through the reifying action of metaphor “the object is severed from its ontological meaning,” something that also occurs in the discourse of racism and misogyny.Footnote 42 Restoration of the “absent referent” of oppressive metaphor, witnessing its presence, would prevent its becoming the object of oppression, whether of racial violence or sexual violence or violence against animals, all three discourses of which share common metaphors.Footnote 43 But such a restoration, as the literary history of black and feminist experimental writing makes evident, is no easy matter; nor can we understand the relationship between figurative and literal (language and referent) quite so straightforwardly. Furthermore, we cannot simply abolish or censor metaphor, but it may perhaps be turned to advantage. Surely, this is what Derrida’s highly sophisticated and risky “animot” turn is doing?
Derrida immediately drops this “real” cat in order to detail in a long discursive tease the literary feline genealogy to which he insists she does not belong: not to “Kafka’s vast zoopoetics,” nor to the cats of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Rilke, Buber, Lewis Carroll, Kant.Footnote 44 He protests too much. What literary or philosophical feline provenance is withheld here? Consider this teasing disavowal: “Nor does the cat that looks at me naked, she and no other, the one I am talking about here, belong, although we are getting warmer, to Baudelaire’s family of cats” (A 7). So which literary cat, then, would be “warmer” than Baudelaire’s? I give my own views on this later. But needless to say, Ceci n’est pas une chatte.
Meanwhile, Haraway remains unimpressed by animot antics: “Even if the cat did not become a symbol of all cats, the naked man’s shame quickly became a figure for the shame of philosophy before all of the animals.”Footnote 45 Haraway sees through Derrida’s ruse to the extent that she recognizes a sharing of agency between species in the figuring that Derrida is flagrantly flaunting here. After all, what is his chimerical feline animot, if not a figure that presents itself as such? Derek Ryan, following Erica Fudge, urges a defense: “Derrida originally presented the material about his cat where he ‘asks his audience, who are fast becoming his spectators, to view him as a body, and worse, as a naked body. In discussing his embarrassment at being embarrassed Derrida embarrasses himself.’”Footnote 46 By this logic Derrida has retreated into the limelight by presenting the cat as an allegory, however affectionate, of his students. How like Crusoe’s “how like a king” he lectured “all alone with” his disciples. This reminds me of a true story concerning the late professor Philip Hobsbaum of the University of Glasgow, formidable pioneer literary theorist, critic and poet, who named his dog Roddy after one of his students, since Roddy the dog, like Roddy the student, had winning big brown eyes; and just like Roddy the student, Roddy the dog had never read Paradise Lost.
Derrida’s scene of feline figure-making haunts his later chapter probing Levinas’s “famous story of Bobby the Kantian dog,” where the bark of a stray dog in his daily greeting restores to Levinas and his fellow “Jewish prisoners of war” the subjectivity that the Nazi guards, and “the other men, called free, who had dealings with us,” have robbed them of.Footnote 47 “We were” to the oppressors, Levinas observes, “subhuman, a gang of apes.”Footnote 48 But a “wandering dog,” whom they come to call “Bobby,” “would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.”Footnote 49 The appearance and conduct of this passing, stray dog, with no fixed origin or identity, are the means by which the prisoners have their subjectivity affirmed. For Levinas, this dog “was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany.”Footnote 50 Derrida finds it “necessary to limit straightaway the scope of this hymn to Bobby,” most seriously with regard to “Levinas’s hastening to add, in the same sentence, in order to take back from this Kantian dog everything he has just so generously given him, moreover with an explicit consciousness of that generosity: ‘The last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize the maxims for drives, this dog was the descendant of the dogs of Egypt’” (Derrida’s modified translation).Footnote 51 That devastating addition in fact renders Bobby “anything but Kantian,” explains Derrida: “Reckoning only by measure of what we glimpsed in a certain unconscious of pure practical reason, namely, the cruel and merciless war that a virtual ‘fascist’ (in Adorno’s terms) Kantian idealism declares on animal life, calling Bobby a Kantian is no compliment.”Footnote 52
If Levinas “intends to speak … of a particular dog, the one that responds to the name Bobby: this one, Bobby, without allegory, fable or theology,” then, for Derrida, “the opposite occurs … this dog is but the figure of a Kantian dog, since he is lacking the essential thing that would be demanded by a Kantian morality that took into account the dignity (Würde) of a rational being capable of universalizing the maxims of his actions.”Footnote 53 The more Levinas protests – “But enough of allegories! … the dog is a dog. Literally a dog!” – the more emphatic becomes Derrida’s insistence that “despite what he says about it, Levinas’s text is at once metaphorical, allegorical, and theological, anthropotheological, hence anthropomorphic, and it remains that … at the very moment when Levinas proclaims, claims, prétend, by exclaiming the opposite.”Footnote 54 The animal restores humanity to the human in Levinas’s story of Bobby, as Ryan observes: “Levinasian ethics may come before being, but it is oriented towards humanity. By contrast, Derrida suggests that animals demand a response even as they are turned away from the human, even as they cannot be recognized as having a ‘face’ or language. Truly addressing the vast scope of cruelty to animals requires an unrecognizable ethics that responds to that which cannot speak, that which never faces toward us.”Footnote 55 Yet we might finesse this last point to underline the acknowledgment in Derrida that the “that which cannot speak, that which never faces toward us” is the “as if” of the Cartesian utterers of asinanities. It is not “sufficient,” Derrida declares, “for an ethics to recall the subject to its being-subject, host or hostage, subjected to the other, to the wholly other or to every other. More than that is required to break with the tradition of an animal without language and without response.”Footnote 56 Allegorical animals, such as in fables, only speak insofar as their allegorical status depends upon the very fact, or at least on the received asininity of consensus that “in reality,” and being “poor in world,” they cannot speak. To break with such an enduring, fixed “tradition” requires rethinking and returning “the animal” to “l’animot.”
The dining passages in Robinson Crusoe prompt Derrida’s “initial reconnoiter … around one word” in his reading of Heidegger’s famous triple thesis (cited earlier). In this very turn of attention from the stone, the animal and man to that “one word,” he most productively complicates and thickens philosophy’s shifting line between man and animal. Walten is “a recurring word that … is given too little attention in Heidegger in general.” He draws out its violent valences, its “sense of sovereign and superhuman violence”: “humans themselves are dominated, crushed under the law of this sovereign violence. Man is not its master, he is traversed by it … dominated, seized, penetrated through and through by the sovereign violence of the Walten.”Footnote 57
The Walten, Derrida makes explicit, “produces nothing less than the difference between Beings and beings; i.e. everything that is going to organize more or less indirectly in this seminar on the difference between man, between human Dasein, and the animal: the animal is unable to accede to the as such of beings, i.e. the difference between Being and being.”Footnote 58 He returns at the close of the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign to demonstrate how the as such of Dasein or the “als, the als Struktur that distinguishes man from the animal is thus indeed what the violence of Walten makes possible … All of this does not depend on a … power, on a faculty that man has at his disposal, but consists in taming and joining … forces or violences (Gewalten) that come to grip man and thanks to which beings are discovered as such.”Footnote 59 Thus man’s historicality becomes possible, “the historicality reserved to Dasein and to Being, denied to the animal and to the other forms of life.” It occurs “only where the Gewalt of this Walten irrupts to make beings as such appear, in the middle of which man is gripped by violence.”Footnote 60
Derrida presses that for Heidegger “violence characterizes not only [man’s] acts, his action, but his existence, his Da-sein, the there of his being there … he is violent in as much as he is exposed to the violence of Walten, of beings, and in as much as he is in a position to exercise this violence himself, to do violence.”Footnote 61 Derrida ominously concludes that “the idealism that then dominates Western metaphysics through and through is a determination of violence. Ideology … and idealism are not innocent, one must recognize their violence.” He asks us to consider “a single, final quotation from Heidegger … as you watch the war on television, in Iraq, but also closer to us,” and this was a war, if ever there was one, certainly predicated on a death dealing “as if” (as we all now know): “(There is only one thing against which all violence-doing, violent action, violent activity, immediately shatters). … ‘Das ist der Tod’ (it is death).”Footnote 62 Death is now, on the final page, Derrida’s dominant question: “To whom is this power given or denied? Who is capable of death, and through death, of imposing failure on the super- or hyper-sovereignty of Walten?”Footnote 63 Derrida draws on Freud to counter Heidegger’s distinction that whereas men die as such, animals merely perish.
Yet folded (invaginated, carried) into Derrida’s seminar is the possibility – “a discreet intrusion [à pas de loup]” – of a shared status of human with animal, indeed with stone.Footnote 64 He finds an opening in Heidegger where he draws out of Walten the (Freudian) sense of a birthing drive (Trieben): from “toward this Being as a whole … it is that toward which we are driven (getrieben) in our nostalgia.” Derrida concludes that therefore the world “is where we are not at home.” This justifies our saying “that we are also without this world, or poor in world, like the stone and the animal.” Does Derrida, who understands the gaze of the animal, open a world to which we can have no epistemological access waver here? Or is the isolation increased? Here Derrida intrudes a compelling but truncated reading of a poem by Paul Celan, “Grosse, Glühende Wölbung” (“Vast, Glowing Vault”) (1967), the last line of which serves as a haunting contrapuntal refrain throughout his seminar:
Or else as Celan says … “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.” [The world has gone, I must carry you] … This poem can be read as a poem of mourning or of birth (the final “ich muss dich tragen” signaling either toward the dead one that, as one mourning, I carry or must carry in me, or toward the child to be born and still carried by its mother, or even toward the poem and the poet himself who would also be called, familiarly apostrophized by the dich of “ich muss dich tragen.”Footnote 65
To sum up, from Heidegger’s Welt and Walten, Derrida, with the forceps of Celan, induces a kind of whelping:
beyond all the imports I’ve already tried to count here or there of this unheard-of double proposition, of this performative lodged like a pearl in the oyster of a constative, like a still unborn child, to be born, to be carried to term in the uterus of the origin of the world as it is, there would be today the import of a declaration of love or of peace at the moment of a declaration of war.Footnote 66
The Iraq war erupted early in 2003 when he was delivering these seminars. Derrida’s is a devastating exegesis of Die Welt ist fort, indicting “the armed word of politicians, priests and soldiers [as] more than ever incompetent, unable to measure up to the very thing it is speaking and deciding about, and that trembles in the name ‘world,’ or even in saying good-bye to the world.” He continues: “what there is to bear, as the responsibility of the other, for the other, must be borne where the world itself is going away by going into absolute disaster of this armed word that I shall not even call psittacist, so as not to insult Poll, Robinson Crusoe’s parrot (psittakos), first victim of the humanist arrogance that thought it could give itself the right to speech, and therefore to the world as such.”Footnote 67 But why is Crusoe’s parrot “first victim”? Surely that honor goes to all those proliferating cats whose culling is deemed necessary in the violent world-making, establishment of his sovereignty.
Furthermore, closing his final seminar, and his exquisite reading of the ethics at stake in the translational, vehicular impetus of Celan’s “I must carry you,” Derrida, quite startlingly, resorts to a Kantian “as if” in presenting the stark choice between the only “two things” that Celan’s imperative can be. The first option is that we must “carry the other out of the world, where we share at least this knowledge without phantasm that there is no longer a world, a common world: I carry you then in the void.”Footnote 68 His second hypothesis steps out and back in a long incantatory sentence occupying a superbly paced paragraph in its lyrically iterative, accretive clauses, beginning with a hypothetical “world” and ending with a self-erasable “trace”:
Or else, second hypothesis, that where there is no world, where the world is not here or there, but fort, infinitely distant over there, that what I must do, with you and carrying you, is make it that there be precisely a world, just a world, if not a just world, or to do things so as to make as if there were just a world, and to make the world come to the world, to make as if – for you, to give it to you, to bear it toward you, destined for you, to address it to you – I made the world come into the world [“poetically” Derrida adds in the session], as though there ought to be a world where presently there is none, to make a gift or present of this as if come up poetically, which is the only thing that – during the finite time of such an impossible voyage between two non-shores where nothing happens – the only thing that can make it possible that I can live and have to let you live, enjoy or have or let you enjoy, to carry you for a few moments without anything happening and leaving a trace in the world, that belongs to the world, without a trace left or retained in the world that is going away, that will go away – which, before even going to go away, is going going away, leaving no trace, a world that has forever been going to leave and has just left, going away with no trace, the trace becoming trace only by being able to erase itself.Footnote 69
This “conditional as if” inaugurating this fictive – poetic – worlding is Kantian, even if “Kant said some terribly seismic things about the ‘als ob.’ The als ob (as if) is the essential modality in which is presented the regulative idea of the world, the world as regulative idea of reason. The world is a regulative idea of reason and it hangs by a mere als ob.”Footnote 70 Yet let’s say Derrida says an introductory performative Kantian “as if” in his saying “Let’s say, as I did in Rogues, that I’m sometimes tempted to act ‘as if’ I had no objection to Kant’s ‘as if’s.’”Footnote 71 But where is that “cat that looks at me naked, she and no other” who does not “belong, although we are getting warmer, to Baudelaire’s family of cats”?Footnote 72 Let’s say that I am tempted to read Derrida with his tempting Kantian “as if,” as if that little she-cat were a fictive figure after all, one capable of transporting us to the very place and text and interlocutor that, in his third chapter of The Animal That Therefore I Am, “And Say the Animal Responded?/to Jacques Lacan,” he makes as if he has no intention of “reopening.” This is their notorious “debate concerning ‘The Purloined Letter’” by Edgar Allan Poe: “But an animal does not pretend to pretend … Nor does an animal cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the subject of the signifier” (Derrida’s italics).Footnote 73 Yet Derrida is hiding this ancient but unchanged debate with Lacan in plain sight.Footnote 74 His devastating exposure of Lacan’s purloining of Poe is so pertinent, whereby Poe’s story is shoehorned into serving Lacan’s closed allegory (“the displacement of the signifier is analyzed as a signified, as the recounted object in a short story”).Footnote 75 The “wolf is named where you don’t yet see it coming; it is still absent save, for its name,” I must warn you: “It is looming, an object of apprehension; it is named, referred to, even called by its name; one imagines a figure, a myth, a fable, a fantasy, but always by reference to someone who, advancing a pas de loup, is not there, not yet there, someone who is not yet present or represented; you can’t even see its tail; as another proverb says: ‘When you speak of the wolf, you see its tail.’”Footnote 76
Derrida’s late animal turn is a resourceful companion for my work in progress, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.Footnote 77 I am reading her canine novel, Flush: A Biography (1933), in one hand and Derrida’s chapter on Lacan in the other, but with a finger too in the earlier chapter where he seems to stage his mirror scene with a little cat, precisely in order to reopen (did it ever close?) “the Purloined Letter Debate”:
The same question then becomes whether I should show myself but in the process see myself naked (that is reflect myself in the mirror) when, concerning me, looking at me, is this living creature, this cat that can find itself caught in the same mirror? Is there animal narcissism? But cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my primary mirror?Footnote 78
Following Derrida with a canine calling on Woolf, I also trace a genealogy of his little cat via Baudelaire’s translations of Poe, and via Poe’s own play with the lynx-eyed characters in “The Purloined Letter,” which silently linked, or touch the mortuary “lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb [who] came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face”Footnote 79 in Poe’s “Silence – A Fable.” Derrida glancingly mentions Poe with regard to burial and animality in the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, but the uncompromising gaze of Poe’s fabled lynx is surely figuring in his staging and turning back to a certain asymmetry a more reciprocal opening available in Woolf’s much pored (pawed) over, and even more challenging mirror scene in Flush.Footnote 80
Nevertheless, Derrida’s animot, a figuration of his heroic dedication to complicating, thickening, enfolding the “as if” of the human–animal caesura, intervenes in my reading of the sentences where Woolf explicitly addresses the caesura between mute dog and speaking woman: “Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.”Footnote 81 The full stop dividing brief monosyllabic utterances (“She spoke. He was dumb.”) suggests an unyielding linguistic boundary. The woman speaks, but the dog cannot speak. Yet the semi-colon dividing but also uniting the human and canine clausal zones of the next sentence (“She was woman; he was dog.”) performs the paradoxical concept of the reciprocal gaze between species that understands woman and dog, simultaneously “closely united” and “immensely divided.” If the dog’s presence before the mirror serves the woman, as women in patriarchy serve men “as looking-glasses” magically capable of “reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size,”Footnote 82 does the dog remain subordinate? Or does the dog too lay claim to a “universal” subjectivity only recently claimed by or extended to human beings such as this woman poet? “Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is ‘oneself’? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is?”Footnote 83 When the poet-philosopher Derrida, naked and “all alone” in the presence of his cat, cries “animot,” it is Woolf’s tail I glimpse.
Striking a conciliatory note in her long-standing debate with David Damrosch over the pedagogical and scholarly project of world literature, Gayatri Spivak writes: “For me, the best reason for walking with David Damrosch is his plea for collectivity.”Footnote 1 Spivak makes clear at the same time, however, that the best reason not to walk with Damrosch is his pluralistic concept of collectivity, which, as she has observed, “lets us all be self-interested and provide for identitarian enclaves.”Footnote 2 The question of collectivity, I suggest, is at once the core theoretical problem and stake of world literature from a deconstructive perspective. This becomes clear in the objections that Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, two of the most prominent practitioners of a deconstructive approach to world literature, raise to Damrosch’s project and their attempts to formulate an alternative.
The vision of world literature Damrosch presents in What Is World Literature? and more recent texts is aligned with the basic principles of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Bernheimer Report of 1993, which urged an updating of the discipline to reflect a multicultural, globalized world.Footnote 3 By facilitating access to non-Western texts through initiatives such as his multivolume Longman Anthology of World Literature, Damrosch has sought to correct comparative literature’s Eurocentric bias and to promote a canon that offers more “windows on the world.”Footnote 4 Alongside greater exposure for underrepresented cultures, Damrosch advocates a heightened focus on global connectedness, proposing that the study of world literature track the transnational circulation of texts and rewrite the histories of national literary traditions in light of the mobility of influence.
While few would deny the importance of dismantling European and American exceptionalism, both Spivak and Apter take issue with the limitations of a multiculturalist approach to the problem. Apter identifies two distinct tendencies at work, either “toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”Footnote 5 The first of these disregards difference, hitching the claim of equality to that of an essential sameness. As Roland Barthes observed of the liberal humanist affirmation of a “Great Family of Man”: “[W]e are kept at the surface of an identity, prevented by sentimentality itself from penetrating into that deeper zone of human conduct, where historical alienation introduces those ‘differences’ which we shall here call quite simply ‘injustices.’”Footnote 6 Likewise, positing a “Great Family of Literature” on the basis of cross-cultural commonalities of literary form has the ideological effect of obscuring historical relations of domination and uneven development. Moreover, as Barthes notes, it tends to reaffirm the static nature of the existing order; and, indeed, the premise of a universal literariness typically reproduces the aesthetic values of the hegemonic culture, whereby non-Western texts are judged worthy of inclusion in the canon based on their similarity to Western “great works.”
Diametrically opposed to the first tendency Apter mentions, the second emphasizes difference as such. This can take either the form of a culinary enjoyment of diversity, or a more politicized form that draws attention to the politics of location in order to attack the universal status attributed to hegemonic values. In the latter case, non-Western traditions reveal the canonical construction of literature to be an ideological expression of Western hegemony by pointing to the very fact of their difference and their exclusion from supposedly universal categories.
While the unmasking of false universals is indispensable to any critical concept of collectivity, the problem with a multiculturalist approach is that it allies the politics of location with identity politics and, consequently, grounds its resistance in a particularism that relativizes all universals into a system of competing particularities and special interests. The effect, ultimately, is a ghettoization of knowledge on the basis of the essentializing assumption that one both necessarily represents and can only represent the part of the world from which one comes; as Spivak puts it, “we the ‘others’ are caught within our politics of identity and can only offer as a substitute [to the Western canon] something coming from our own neck of the woods.”Footnote 7
Dispossessive Collectivism
For Apter and Spivak, world literature’s unfulfilled promise lies ultimately in its capacity to imagine a globalized world beyond capitalism and its conceptual framework of possessive individualism, which, they argue, is possible only to the extent that world literature takes its distance from identity politics. The relationship between identity and property is deeply entrenched. Historically developed in tandem with the concept of the bourgeois legal subject, identity is grounded in a person’s possessions and is itself viewed as a form of personal property. This is evident in the foundational documents of bourgeois liberal democracy, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. More surprisingly, the idea of self-ownership also undergirds Marx’s radical critique of this society, notably in the theory of alienation that presents human essence – “species-being” – as the rightful and originary property of which humanity is dispossessed under conditions of capitalism. Therefore, while a world literature oriented around what Apter calls dispossessive collectivism is naturally sympathetic to the Marxist tradition, it cannot adopt a Marxist framework without rethinking its reliance on the concept of identity.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay “The Inoperative Community” sought to tackle this very problem. In response to the implosion of the left in France after May 1968, Nancy called for a radical revision of the communist project and, in particular, its central concept of community. Drawing from Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on the désoeuvrement or “unworking” of the artwork, Nancy focuses his critique on the Marxist–humanist definition of self-actualization and community as forms of work. As Nancy puts it, the idea of human beings “as producers … of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work” lays the foundation for the concept of collectivity as “a community of beings producing … this essence as community.”Footnote 8 The problem with the idea of a self-producing collective subject is that it presupposes a relation of immanence or transparency between beings. In other words, like the individualism it ostensibly opposes, Marxist collectivity begins from the assumption of originary identity rather than difference. Where individualism posits the self-contained, atomized subject as originary, communism simply reproduces this individualist logic on a larger scale when it imagines unalienated social relations as “a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We.”Footnote 9 In order to break with the logic of individualism, then, communism must reconceive of the common in terms not of recognizing oneself in the other, but of seeing difference as constitutive of oneself. Nancy thus defines community not as a condition of having something substantial in common, such as reason or humanity, but of “being-in-common,” or shared exposure to alterity.
Like Nancy, Spivak’s theory of collectivity foregrounds exposure to otherness. In her view, world literature should seek to reimagine the world through the ways in which this exposure interrupts and destabilizes identity; Spivak calls this alternative vision of the world “planetarity.” Unlike the globe, which is mappable in a way that “allows us to think we can control it,” she writes, the planet “belong[s] to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.”Footnote 10 To think in terms of the planet is to consider the “world” of world literature from the perspective of or “in the species of alterity.”Footnote 11 In more recent writings, Spivak has added to the metaphor of a world on loan a second figure of othering as dispossession, namely, “wasteful spending,” which is her translation of bajey khoroch, a term Rabindranath Tagore used to describe comparative literature. She proposes the potlatch as a figure for the stakes of world literatureFootnote 12 because “the uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is ‘wasteful.’”Footnote 13 World literature’s promise lies in staging experiences of othering that can only truly take place without reserve. World literature initiates us into the perspective of planetarity when, for example, it interrogates European periodizations, genres, and other categories used to bolster Europe’s claim on modernity and relegate other parts of the world to “tradition,” a euphemism for premodernity or ahistoricity.Footnote 14 Spivak scathingly contrasts world literature’s Bataillan general economy or will to dispossession with the “tax deductible write-offs of purchased virtue” embodied by the emergence of an industry of world literature anthologies, compiled by North American academics and distributed by for-profit textbook publishers.Footnote 15
Apter’s discussion of originary dispossession in Against World Literature spells out the relation between non-identitarian collectivity and Spivak’s figures of expenditure without return and dwelling granted on loan. “One reason why literary studies falls short as anti-capitalist critique,” Apter writes, “is because it insufficiently questions what it means to ‘have’ a literature or to lay claim to aesthetic property.”Footnote 16 Approaching literature from the perspective of translation, for Apter, disrupts the possessive and individualistic concept of identity that shapes the way we conventionally construct the literary work as an object of knowledge. She argues that the translated work, which is neither fully the property of the author nor the translator, presents “a model of deowned literature.”Footnote 17 Translation here plays the role of a Derridean supplement to the original, in the sense that it disrupts the very concept of originality. By privileging translation, Apter reimagines the literary work as a site of collaborative labor and “collective, terrestrial property” dissociated from the individual author, the nation, and other identitarian structures.Footnote 18
Spivak and Apter both acknowledge their debt to Derrida’s analysis of linguistic identity and national community in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin.Footnote 19 Neatly summarizing the main claims of his book, Derrida’s title presents two apparent paradoxes: one’s “own” language as a locus of otherness and the origin as addendum. Taking a rare autobiographical approach, Derrida explores the impossibility of identity through his relationship to French, the language that constitutes his sense of cultural belonging and that, therefore, he might be inclined to consider in some way his language. He discovers, however, that the relation of belonging is not reversible; while humanity may be said to belong to language, language does not belong to humanity. In terms resonant with Spivak’s planetarity, Derrida describes his relationship to French as one of dwelling: “My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me.”Footnote 20 The French language, for him, is an “absolute habitat [milieu absolu]” in the sense that it conditions his very subjectivity: “I would not be myself outside of it” – nor, indeed, would anything else in the world be itself: “it dictates even the ipseity of all things to me.”Footnote 21 Everything Derrida is and knows arises from “his” language. “Yet,” he continues, “it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak.”Footnote 22 As Spivak writes of the planet, language is given only “on loan.” Language resists assimilation onto the order of identity and, by the same token, resists possession. Thus, in a refrain that punctuates the book, Derrida concludes: “I only have one language, yet it is not mine.”Footnote 23
It was, Derrida relates, his childhood experience in colonial Algeria that brought him initially to see monolingualism “in the species of alterity,” to use Spivak’s expression. He found himself in a heteronomous relationship both to French and the non-French languages of Algeria; both were equally languages of the other. He describes, on one hand, the “organized marginalization” of Arabic and Berber in everyday life, most notably at his lycée, where Latin and French were compulsory, while Arabic was, along with English, Spanish, and German, an optional “foreign” language and Berber was not acknowledged at all.Footnote 24 On the other hand, French monolingualism (and national identity) were simultaneously imposed and withheld: French was imposed insofar as it was supposed to be his native language, yet withheld since its “source norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”Footnote 25 The identitarian structures of mother tongue and motherland shape the conditions of Derrida’s existence and yet are never fully habitable. At once overbearing and strangely absent, their presence is ghostly. Indeed, Derrida suggests that his ambivalent relationship to national identity was a key reference for the motif that has figured so prominently in his thought: “Deep down, I wonder whether one of my first and most imposing figures of spectrality, of spectrality itself, was not France.”Footnote 26
Opposing a traditional ontology that posits full, undivided presence as originary and opposes to it absence, multiplicity, and difference as derivative, Derrida’s “hauntology” takes the specter, with its undecidable play of presence and absence, as the point of departure. This idea emerges clearly in his critique of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s account of his relation to the “mother tongue.” Taking issue with Khatibi’s phrase “my mother tongue has lost me,”Footnote 27 Derrida suggests that the loss Khatibi laments does not modify a prior wholeness and that the claim of natural possession underlying the concept of the mother tongue (“my mother tongue”) is illusory. The originary dispossession of language is, for Derrida, an “‘alienation’ without alienation, without any property that is forever lost or to be ever reappropriated.”Footnote 28 By the same token, no appropriative measures can undo this “inalienable alienation”; it is an ontological condition.Footnote 29
Spectrality thus troubles the concept of linguistic identity in the two ways indicated by the book’s twin titles: Monolingualism of the Other and The Prosthesis of Origin. The othering of monolingualism refers to the disruption of a national and linguistic identity that the conventional metaphor of kinship (motherland, mother tongue) presents as natural. Conversely, the play of presence and absence disrupts the relation of immanence presumed to be the default or native state; it views the idea of the pure, unitary origin as itself non-originary, an artifice conjured up after the fact. These two gestures have distinct political implications. By denaturalizing linguistic identity, the first reveals the power relations this identity expresses and reproduces. For Derrida, to accept the concept of a “mother tongue” is, following Rousseau’s naturalizing formula for reconciling freedom with obedience, to identify with the Law (both “the language of the Law” and “the Law as Language”) “as if I was giving it to myself.”Footnote 30 Derrida emphasizes the “as if,” however, since this autonomy is achieved only in the imagination. The relation to the Law “remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law.”Footnote 31
Whereas this first set of implications exposes the heteronomous nature of identity, the second highlights the conditions of resistance to heteronomy. Derrida describes his relationship to his French identity and monolingualism as a “solipsism” that precedes the self – that “is myself before me”Footnote 32 – and the condition of being held hostage “à demeure,” or with a permanence associated with dwelling. These metaphors figure a heteronomy that underlies the order of the same in its most primordial and hermetic forms. Rejecting the fantasy of recovering a lost wholeness is, for Derrida, the first step toward a viable politics. Avoiding the “symbolics of appropriation”Footnote 33 shared by nationalist and Marxist discourses alike is crucial to ensuring that resistance efforts do not inadvertently reproduce the logic of the system they oppose, or as Spivak puts it, to preventing “failed revolutions.”Footnote 34
Asserting a universal condition of dispossession and heteronomy, however, runs the risk of occulting the reality of global inequality. While Derrida acknowledges the danger of neglecting “determinate expropriations against which a war can be waged on quite different fronts,” he discusses neither the specifics of such a war, nor what role deconstruction might play in it.Footnote 35 The task that remains, then, is to link up the ontology of dispossession with a politics that addresses determinate acts of dispossession. Transposed to the discourse of world literature, this means theorizing the connection between conceiving of “world” in terms of planetarity on one hand, and continuing to address the politics of location on the other. The goal of this exercise is, in Judith Butler’s formulation, to construct “ethical and political ways of objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization of possessive individualism” – in short, to articulate a politics of location that goes beyond identity politics, or what Derrida might call a hauntopological politics of location.Footnote 36
Situatedness and Exemplarity
Derrida’s cursory treatment of actual struggles in Monolingualism of the Other is perhaps all the more curious since he introduces his argument with an account of a historical act of expropriation. Early on in the book, Derrida relates a formative childhood event: when he was ten years old, in October 1940, the Vichy regime stripped Jews living in Algeria of their French citizenship for a period of three years. It was a moment of collective anamnesis according to Derrida, recalling Algerian Jews to the disturbingly recent origins of their recognition by the French state under the Crémieux decree of 1870. Far from a natural and inalienable property of their existence, French identity was revealed to be something that “had been lent to them as if only the day before.”Footnote 37 The general claims about language and identity Derrida advances are thus self-consciously traced back to an unquestionably uncommon experience. To bolster what might seem to be a tenuous form of evidence, Derrida elaborates a theory of exemplarity that stands as an alternative to the logic of representation and indicates how to connect the politics of location with non-identitarian political ontology.
Derrida presents himself – or, rather, a first-person narrator with “only a vague resemblance to myself” – as “the exemplary Franco-Maghrebian.”Footnote 38 This caricatural self-staging enables him at once to bear witness, as a Franco-Maghrebian, to a certain experience of dispossession, while recalling us to the fictionality of all autobiography. Virginia Woolf famously deploys the same strategy in A Room of One’s Own, writing of the first-person narrator: “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.”Footnote 39 For Woolf as for Nietzsche, “I” is merely a grammatical fiction. The testimonial voice in Woolf’s text belongs to somebody whose lack of discrete identity is expressed by the absence of a proper name or, rather, by the casual proliferation of them: “[C]all me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael,” she invites us, “or by any name you please.”Footnote 40
Woolf justifies her curious narrative technique by explaining that, in regard to a highly contested topic such as gender, “one cannot hope to tell the truth.”Footnote 41 In other words, there are no personally disinterested positions in such a debate; everybody necessarily speaks from a certain position in relation to power. As Spivak has argued, this is likewise the case for empire, one of the more problematic potential subtexts of the “world” of world literature. There is no Archimedean point from which to judge the imperialist or anti-imperialist valence of world literature: “Discourses of worldliness are autobiographical in genre and confessional in institution, even when their interest in exactly not so.”Footnote 42 Any claim to universal truth in describing the world is immediately undercut by the particularity of the speaker’s position, hence Spivak’s canny substitution of viewing the world sub specie alteritatis for Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis.
Woolf does not surrender the claim to a form of universal truth, however. She finds another way in. Since “one cannot hope to tell the truth” using the language of truth, one must tell the truth using the language of lies. Instead of sublimating the narrator’s particularity through an apparently neutral, scientific discourse, Woolf calls attention to it by adopting the form of testimony and, moreover, of fictionalized testimony. Woolf turns the particularity of a single person’s experience into a vehicle for truth – while, at the same time, holding it up for critical scrutiny. She gives the following explanation of her strategy:
when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.Footnote 43
The form of the autobiographical essay allows Woolf to expose the relationship between the ideas presented in the book and contingencies that shaped them – the contingencies, that is, of everyday, embodied existence, as structured by a particular social and economic context. At the same time, by laying claim to the status of fiction, Woolf eschews the positivistic discourse of identitarian authenticity that conventionally undergirds the authority of testimony. Similarly, Derrida’s distanced voicing of autobiographical experiences highlights the locatedness of his theoretical approach, while rejecting the essentialist assumptions of what, in Specters of Marx, he calls “ontopology” – that is, “an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.”Footnote 44 He seeks instead to elaborate the hauntopology of an identity dislocated from its geographical and ethnic coordinates and, indeed, to do this from the particular, yet exemplary, perspective of someone too Maghrebian to be properly French and too French to be properly Maghrebian.
Woolf’s proposition that fiction may contain more truth than fact translates, then, to a claim about the relation of singularity to the universal. This relation, as Derrida (and others, notably Giorgio Agamben) have observed, is that of the example. Exemplarity refers not to “an example in a series,” Derrida writes, but rather to a singularity “that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of a universal necessity.”Footnote 45 The singularity or example is not isolated by its particularity but instead functions to render a universal condition newly legible, which is the promise of the world literature and, indeed, of literature in general. World literature does not consist, then, merely of new additions to the canon, conceived as an expanding aggregate of particular perspectives; it does not add examples “in a series.” Instead, the world literary text would, ideally, allow us to perceive “in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner” the universal condition of literature. Attunement to the historical, geopolitical particularity of the text would illuminate the differences between the “worlds” of literary traditions. At the same time, the perspective of planetarity would work to de-ontologize cultural and national difference. At stake is an alternative concept of difference from that of an identity politics that polarizes on the basis of special interests, on one hand, and, on the other, a liberal multiculturalism that views inclusiveness and tolerance as end goals.
Disidentification and the Politics of Location
Like postcolonial criticism, a deconstructive approach to world literature begins with rereading the Western tradition from the perspective of the other, that is, in taking the other as the first term in a comparison. Contrary to a traditional postcolonial approach, however, the principal objective is not to analyze how hegemony consolidates its power through techniques of representation – the sort of program, for example, that Edward Said pursued in Orientalism. Instead, a deconstructive approach ultimately aims to destabilize identitarian formations in hegemonic and non-hegemonic cultures alike, in order to make possible new concepts of global collectivity. What risks falling outside of the purview of the latter approach, however, is a specific analysis of power.
The opposition I have just sketched out between deconstruction and a conventional strain of postcolonial criticism recapitulates the tension between the two conceptions of world literature outlined at the beginning of this chapter. According to one vision, world literature strives to expand the canon in order to extend some degree of self-representation, within hegemonic culture, to non-hegemonic global populations. According to another, it does the opposite of what this representative logic promotes; it deconstructs the identitarian logic by which texts are designated representatives of nationalities or ethnicities. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Reference Nguyen2015 novel The Sympathizer attempts to reconcile these two approaches by elaborating a politics of location untethered from the politics of identity. Its twinned critique of American neoimperialism in Vietnam and the Vietnamese struggle for independence, moreover, presents this hauntopology in the context of Derrida’s warning against the “symbolics of appropriation” in nationalist resistance to territorial dispossession.Footnote 46
The Sympathizer opens in Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War, when its protagonists, along with hundreds of thousands of other South Vietnamese, are preparing to flee. In the 1950s, America had committed increasing amounts of financial and military resources to propping up, first, the failing French colonial administration and then, following the withdrawal of the French, an unpopular South Vietnamese government under President Diem. In 1963, a military coup carried out with America’s approval escalated the civil war, which made South Vietnam even more dependent on support from the Americans. Several years later, however, in response to domestic pressures, the American government withdrew its troops and eventually stopped funding the South Vietnamese regime. Faced with dwindling supplies of gas, ammunition, and other necessities against the swift advance of the Viet Cong, “the General,” one of The Sympathizer’s many unnamed protagonists, laments of his erstwhile American benefactors: “We were foolish enough to think they would keep their word. Now there’s nowhere to go but America.”Footnote 47 The General and his cohort are drawn to America, in other words, not by the promise of freedom and opportunity, but by a broken promise of protection. The Sympathizer thus begins by framing relocation to the center of empire in terms of imperialism’s tendency to make the periphery uninhabitable. By refashioning the immigrant narrative – and the myth of American exceptionalism it supports – from the perspective of a population instrumentalized and betrayed by American interventionism, The Sympathizer makes the case for the disruptive potential of expanding the canon. Exposure to such perspectives does not give rise to an ethics of tolerant inclusivity or cosmopolitan appreciation of cultural diversity, but instead interrogates the position of institutional power from which one includes or appreciates.
The narrator explicitly claims an oppositional positionality when he observes that April 1975 was “a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world.”Footnote 48 And yet, while invoking an “us” shaped by the shared experience of geopolitical marginality (“our small part of the world”), he nonetheless rejects the concept of a national identity centered, as is often the case in independence movements, around reappropriating a territory, language, and culture conceived as naturally belonging to a homogenous population. Recalling Derrida’s account of his own unstable national identity, The Sympathizer interrupts this nativist narrative by enfolding layer upon layer of hybridity in the character of the unnamed narrator. A North Vietnamese mole embedded with the South Vietnamese military command, the narrator is “a man of two faces” and “a man of two minds … able to see any issue from both sides.”Footnote 49 Divided between political allegiances, his double consciousness forks again along lines of ethnicity and power. The narrator is Eurasian, the illegitimate offspring of a French missionary and his thirteen-year-old Vietnamese maid, and consequently rejected by French and Vietnamese communities alike. His experience of exile introduces yet more shades of dislocation. In America, he does “not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined” but also “in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past.”Footnote 50 Like Derrida’s Hamlet, who having survived “what one does not survive” becomes himself a ghostly figure, the narrator is condemned to live in a time out of joint.Footnote 51 The uncanny temporality of his existence is compounded by the circular structure of his itinerary; the novel ends with him once again fleeing Vietnam. Resonant with Derrida’s remarks on the anamnestic effects of France’s withdrawal of citizenship from Algerian Jews, this circularity points up the sense of repetition in refugee, replacing the concept of refuge, a place to flee back to, with that of recurrent flight and, as the narrator’s “muddled heritage” suggests, originary exile.Footnote 52
Whereas America’s betrayal of the South Vietnamese was the reason for the narrator’s initial flight, betrayal by his “own” side in the conflict, the triumphant Vietnamese communists precipitate the second. Upon returning to Vietnam, the narrator is imprisoned by his longtime employer and subjected to a brutal program of reeducation. In a parody of the fantasy of homecoming as disalienation, the narrator’s return is marked by the impossible imperative to recover an identity that had always been denied him. His captor announces that he will be released only when he has been “transformed from an American into a Vietnamese once more.”Footnote 53 The novel takes the form of the confession he is forced to rewrite until it demonstrates this transformation. On successive drafts, the narrator is criticized for referring to the South Vietnamese with whom he was embedded as “we,” rather than “they”Footnote 54 and for having been “contaminated by the West”Footnote 55; the commandant of the prison camp notes disapprovingly his preference for “foreign intellectuals and culture over our native traditions,”Footnote 56 as demonstrated by his tendency to quote Marx and the Beatles instead of “Uncle Ho” and communist poet To Huu.
The narrative’s symmetrical structure bears out Derrida’s statement that nativist revolutions reproduce the logic of the imperialist regimes they depose. As I noted earlier, this observation leads Derrida to view the premise of originary dispossession as the founding condition of real politics: it “permits one at once to analyze the historical phenomena of appropriation and to treat them politically by avoiding, above all, the reconstitution of what these phantasms managed to motivate: ‘nationalist’ aggressions (which are always more or less ‘naturalist’) or monoculturalist homo-hegemony.”Footnote 57 While Derrida’s definition of politics is clearly reflected in Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of communism and Apter’s and Spivak’s approaches to world literature, it is Jacques Rancière’s theory of political subjectivation that offers its most robust articulation, especially as it relates to The Sympathizer. By rethinking of solidarity in terms of disidentification, Rancière indicates how to conceive of collective agency without positing a collective identity, to resist historical acts of dispossession without recourse to identitarian claims of originary entitlement.
According to Nguyen’s narrator, it is his lack of a stable, legitimate identity that makes him a good spy and the (communist) sympathizer of the book’s title. If to sympathize, as the narrator explains, is to blur “the lines between us and them,”Footnote 58 then to be a sympathizer means to occupy a liminal position between “us” and “them” – or, more precisely, between disidentification from an “us” and impossible identification with a “them.” What the narrator calls sympathy constitutes, for Rancière, the process of political subjectivation. Rancière notes that the militants of his generation became politicized through impossible identifications, as expressed in the famous slogan of May 1968, “We are all German Jews.” Regarding similar expressions of solidarity with the unarmed Algerian protestors massacred by riot police in Paris in October 1961, Rancière writes: “We could not identify with these Algerians, but we could question our identification with the ‘French people’ in whose name they had been killed. Thus, we became capable of acting as political subjects in the interval or gap between two identities, neither of which we could adopt.”Footnote 59
Toward the end of The Sympathizer, the motif of disidentification takes a curious turn that completes the novel’s delineation of what I have called the hauntopological politics of location. The narrator is subjected to a program of extended sleep deprivation designed to help him recall a key event missing from his confession. Paraphrasing the dynamic of ontic proximity and ontological distance in the analytic of Dasein, the doctor in charge explains that the narrator can only access the repressed memory if he observes himself from the outside: “[W]e are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves … if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.”Footnote 60 The ploy works. The narrator enters a psychotic state of desubjectivation: in one chapter, the narrative voice shifts from the first to the third person; in another, the dialogue is presented in the form of a play, where the narrator is just one character among others. His madness permits him finally to access the memory of the communist agent he failed to save. He recounts how she had refused to inform on her contact, who happens to be the commissar now in charge of the narrator’s reeducation, and had been punished. Afraid of blowing his own cover, the narrator had stood by and watched (in an interrogation room converted from a movie theater, no less) while three South Vietnamese officers raped her.
Here, the novel’s circular structure reveals a deeper symmetry. As I mentioned earlier, The Sympathizer begins with the narrator positioning himself and his compatriots against the world’s general indifference to the plight of the Vietnamese; April 1975 was “a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world.”Footnote 61 It concludes by destabilizing the opposition that undergirds this positionality. Having uncovered the fate of the forgotten agent, the narrator’s torturers confront him with his own complicity in the failure of solidarity he denounces: “The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that – they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception.”Footnote 62 The agent’s defiant retort when asked her name, “My surname is Viet and my given name is Nam,” secures the parallel.Footnote 63 Having repeatedly protested his imprisonment by exclaiming, “I have done nothing!” the narrator realizes that his declaration of innocence is at the same time an admission of guilt: “I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing.”Footnote 64 This final confession marks the conclusion of the narrator’s reeducation.
Within the framework of Rancière’s theory of political subjectivation, the gap introduced between the narrator and his fellow operative – that is, between the narrator and the Vietnam of sans-part or subalterns he has been fighting for – highlights Derrida’s reminder that all identifications are impossible identifications. Rancière’s important contribution to the deconstruction of identity, however, is to articulate the impossibility of identification explicitly in terms of asymmetries of power. The Sympathizer reflects this politicized approach insofar as it reveals the dependence of narrator’s identification with his compatriots and his cause on the erasure of the third-world subaltern woman, one at whose expense, moreover, both the narrator and his torturer survive. Ironically dubbed “the agent,” her agency and subjectivity cannot be represented within the framework of the narrator’s self-understanding, which is why he becomes able to consider himself from her perspective only once his identity has been destroyed. From the completion of his reeducation until the novel’s conclusion, the narrator proceeds to refer to himself in the first person plural, transforming the assertion of collective identity from the beginning of the novel into an acknowledgment of internal difference.
The unraveling of identity, even ostensibly oppositional forms of identity, and the forms of understanding this unraveling makes possible, are the effects I imagine Spivak has in mind when she speaks of seeing the world in “the species of alterity.”Footnote 65 At the most basic level, the political stakes of the debate over world literature boil down to the question of what we want the dismantling of Eurocentrism to look like and how far we want it to go. Spivak clearly rejects a cosmopolitan program of broadening horizons, of multiplying “windows on the world,” that imagines a non-Eurocentric world principally as an expanded, diversified array of cultural riches.Footnote 66 Against this accumulative economy, Spivak has repeatedly insisted on the experience of loss. Reading world literature in a way that decenters the world involves, inescapably, the unflattering process of confronting one’s own implication in geopolitical relations of domination and resistance, taking stock of how one profits from misery in some ways and is exploited in others. It involves looking for whatever has been suppressed in order to secure identitarian narratives about the world and one’s place in it. In order to gain a new world, Spivak reminds us, we must surrender our old attachments: “In this space of learning, you play to lose.”Footnote 67
On the penultimate page of Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes a “fault” (faute) repeated in the Occidental tradition that “comes at a great price – for humanity,” and this fault is the failure to begin where one ought to have “been able to begin,” namely with haunting.Footnote 1 He adds: “In order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible price to pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to be begun again.”Footnote 2 The last paragraphs of Specters of Marx conclude with the quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that plays a crucial role throughout the book: “Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? ‘Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio. Question it.’”Footnote 3 Derrida explains:
The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.Footnote 4
As the book’s title makes clear, Derrida sets out not to repeat the mistake or fault of Marx, Freud, Heidegger and other predecessors, whose work, nonetheless, as he underlines time and again, is indispensable for his own scholarly path. After dedicating the book to Chris Hani, the popular hero of the resistance against South Africa’s apartheid who had been assassinated twelve days before the original version of Specters of Marx was given as a lecture at a conference in Riverside,Footnote 5 Derrida writes in his “exordium”: “If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice.” “No ethics” and “no politics” are “possible and thinkable and just” without the recognition of “those others who are no longer” or those “who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.”Footnote 6 Among those others, Derrida enumerates “victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.”Footnote 7 To “live otherwise …, not better, but more justly,” will be possible only “with them”: “to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts … No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”Footnote 8 Justice and any concept of a tomorrow are inextricably linked to “this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present”:
To be just: beyond the living present in general – and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time, not that one: “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost” (Hamlet).Footnote 9
“To be just” and to address oneself to the other require both, and categorically, if this adverb can be used for a deconstructionist approach, the invitation of ghosts. The reason why Shakespeare’s Hamlet plays a decisive role in Derrida’s book is that the play not only begins with the ghost, but Horatio and Hamlet (both “scholars”) are exhorted to speak with the ghost and, what is more, invite the ghost to speak. Otherwise put, they offer to listen to a voice not “presently living.”
According to Derrida, no justice will have any chance to occur if we do not learn from the ghost how to address him or her. There is no pursuit of justice without beginning “everything again” under the auspices of haunting. If, as Derrida asserted in 1989, “deconstruction is justice,”Footnote 10 and “justice” is the only concept that cannot be deconstructed,Footnote 11 then deconstruction can be described as the practice, the discipline of transposing ontology, ever so slightly, but ever so radically, into a hauntology: the practice and discipline of learning how to address oneself to ghosts, the discipline of learning how to invite ghosts to speak. This is the main reason why, I contend, Derrida defined deconstruction as a “coming-to-terms with literature.”Footnote 12
If philosophy and other scholarly discourses are bound in the Western tradition by modalities of time related to “being” and presence, and if they are bound to the coherence of non-contradictory discourse, literature does not know of these limitations: the temporal continuum can be broken, and language may be required to “get out of the way.”Footnote 13 And whereas philosophy and other scholarly discourses are obliged to engage in generalization, analysis and explication, literature has the potential of highest historical, political, linguistic, psychological (to name just these) condensation and singularity. Derrida writes:
A text by Joyce is simultaneously the condensation of a scarcely delimitable history. But this condensation of history, of language … remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture – that’s really what interests me. I am not the only one to be interested by this economic power … The “economy” of literature sometimes seems to me more powerful than that of other types of discourse: such as, for example, historical or philosophical discourse. Sometimes: it depends on singularities and contexts. Literature would be potentially more potent.Footnote 14
The potency of literature is linked to its ability to offer a “condensation of history” that is not subject to being “docile to time, at least to what we call time.” Moreover, this “strange institution called literature” is “in the West … linked to an authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.”Footnote 15 Literature, then, is inseparable from the promise of justice, and of a democracy to come. This is so, because it calls justice to contest, in singularity, each time, every time, one by one, one story, one poem, one novel at a time and the law of the land to respond to the claims of justice (always “impossible” in Derrida’s sense, explained later), each time, every time, one by one, one story, one poem, one novel at a time.
As Derek Attridge and others have noted, “there has always been an ethico-political dimension to Derrida’s writing,”Footnote 16 which, however, has nothing to do with a moralizing agenda:
Derrida’s writing on literary texts arises from a strong response to them which is also a strong sense of his responsibility toward them, the registering of a demand which they and their signatories make, of a call that seems to come from somewhere outside the orbit within which we comfortably go about our intellectual business – but an outside which cannot simply be classified as exterior … Responsibility for Derrida is not something we simply “take”: we find ourselves summoned, confronted by an undecidability which is also always an opportunity and a demand, a chance and a risk. Highlighted in Derrida’s readings of literary texts are those aspects which make most demands on us, which are most difficult to write about in the conventional discourse of criticism because they shake the foundations of that discourse.Footnote 17
Literary texts that “make most demands on us” because they “shake the foundation” of discourse within the academy but also possibly in the society in which they intervene can be works like James Joyce’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s, that is texts that resist, stage and suspend concepts such as “mimesis, reference, form, content, genre, origin, intention, … showing them to be other than the self-consistent, controlling categories they are usually taken to be.”Footnote 18 According to Attridge, those are the literary texts that attracted Derrida’s interest first and foremost. But there are literary texts whose “demands” on the reader and language (both the discourse of criticism, but also language in general) are differently pressing. Fiction writing, to use a felicitous formulation by George Lipsitz, functions “as a social force, as a repository of memories that are too brutal, too debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives.”Footnote 19 It is this “demand” and this upheaval of “foundations” on which I focus here; here, like perhaps nowhere else, ghosts are invited to speak.
Derrida was drawn to literature because like no other textual genre its very institution (and literature is an “institution”) is inspired by what could be called a practice of the impossible: to testify to the uniquely singular in necessarily generalizable language (in Attridge’s formulation, the “structural interconnectedness of the absolutely singular and the absolutely general”Footnote 20), to defend the openness and fragility of a “living together” over and against an understanding of community as a symbiotic (naturality, birth, blood, soil, nation) or conventional (state, juridical) cohesiveness or totality,Footnote 21 and precisely for that reason, to invite the voiceless, the ghosts, to speak, while also, at the same time, insisting on justice for the (presently) living, that is, performing the labor of a democracy-to-come. This concrete “labor” is underlined by Derrida throughout his oeuvre and throughout his political stances: “justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait. It is that which must not wait.”Footnote 22
Justice, in the name of which one deconstructs the law, is not deconstructible. So you have two heterogeneous concepts, if you want, two heterogeneous ends, the law and justice. Yet, despite this absolute radical heterogeneity between the two, they are indissociable. And, in different contexts, I reformalise: the relationship between two terms, the two poles of this structure, which are absolutely, radically heterogeneous and nevertheless indissociable. Why? Because if you want to be just, you have to improve the law.Footnote 23
To “improve the law,” it will be necessary to get to work. While, as Christoph Menke writes, the “deconstructive unfolding of the tension between justice and law” occurs “in the name of an experience that no political stance can capture,” such an unfolding “nevertheless affects any politics as its border, and therefore as its interruption.”Footnote 24
Derrida was drawn to literature, because it materializes an “unfolding of the tension between law and justice.” Like no other discursive practice, insisting on justice for the living and their ghosts, literature can welcome what Derrida describes as “the law of the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for that very reason the most demanding.”Footnote 25
Like no other discursive practice, literature gives voice to the “most effaced and most effaceable” memory, even though and because it is the “most demanding,” even “commanding.” This may also explain why one “striking feature” of Derrida’s responses to literary texts, as Attridge observes, is “their predominantly affirmative mode: they affirm what they take the texts to be doing in their most challenging operations, they bring this quality or movement out into the open (as far as it is possible to do so), they celebrate it, they put it to work, they invite a further response to it. By contrast, the mode of his writing on philosophical texts may seem neutral or even antagonistic.”Footnote 26
In contemporary American literature the “potency” and “economy of literature” understood along Derridean lines is at play and at stake with breath-taking strength and equally powerful tenderness in Toni Morrison’s novels. Even though to my knowledge, Derrida never published a text on Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, her writing, as I show in what follows, corresponds in a singularly germane way to a number of traits that Derrida reflects on in his thinking on “literature.” In Morrison’s novels, “the most effaced and the most effaceable” memory, the multilayered and suppressed memory of slavery, returns as the “most commanding” and “demanding.” A conversation between Derrida’s reflection on literature and Morrison’s writing is thus productive and promising, as, for example, Jeffrey Weinstock has shown.Footnote 27
Morrison states categorically that a certain “living together” and a direct address guide the entirety of her writing:
If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything, I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams – which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted … It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.Footnote 28
If the “best art is political” and is “about you,” it is, by definition, concerned with the community, with the question of how to live together well. That means that far from being an idle pastime, literature, fiction, a novel has work to do. According to Morrison, a novel “should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe.”Footnote 29 It is neither a sociological study nor a philosophical or moral treatise. It is able to disrupt the present and presence and their (chrono)logical discourse. Morrison’s fiction ventures into such disruption in order to confront the aforementioned “terrible price” and in order to invent other modes of “living together” from which the “needy dead”Footnote 30 would not be banished. The immense challenge is to confront a past so violent that it is “deliberately” suppressed, while also, at the same time (again, one might say, an “impossible” task), “inviting” not only the readers but the author herself.
In her “Foreword” to Beloved, Morrison explains:
The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts … The figure most central to the story would have to be her, the murdered, not the murderer, the one who lost everything and had no say in any of it. She could not linger outside; she would have to enter the house. A real house, not a cabin. One with an address, one where former slaves lived on their own. There would be no lobby into this house, and there would be no “introduction” into it or into the novel. I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population – just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense.Footnote 31
The encounter with the ghost: an impossible undertaking that fiction can nonetheless create in the aporia (a figure Derrida explored over and over again), elsewhere impossible, of an invitation to a kidnapping. Morrison elaborates with the help of further aporias: “In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way.”Footnote 32
Language must get out of the way to create the language ferociously committed “not to lie” about slavery: “I consider that my single gravest responsibility … is not to lie.”Footnote 33 At the same time, “language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”Footnote 34
Before returning to the “reach toward the ineffable,” let us consider Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). In her foreword to a 2007 edition of the book, Morrison captures in nuce the aporetic tension between singularity and generality. The novel, Morrison writes, explores “a unique situation, not a representative one.”Footnote 35 To explore such uniqueness, however, a language is needed that on one hand answers to and bears responsibility for the unique, the singular, while at the same time being recognizable, which in the end is necessarily in some ways generalizable: “Singular” as the main character Pecola’s life was, Morrison writes, “I believed some aspects of her woundability were lodged in all young girls.”Footnote 36 The singular, unique situation does not preclude relating to it. The devastating woundability of a black girl living in the “unique situation” of utter neglect, poverty and, to paraphrase Kafka, a condemnation that precedes all guilt, this unique woundability of which the text bears witness, has traits that are “lodged in all young girls.” The task of the literary text is to endure the aporetic tension between uniqueness and relatability and to bring it to expression in such a way that the reader is not “touched,” but “moved.” This is one of the “impossible” demands the literary text addresses to the reader.
Morrison cautions that “centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying” the violated girl “rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.”Footnote 37 She considers her solution of this problem in The Bluest Eye (“break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader”) a failure: “it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”Footnote 38 Again, the notion appears that a novel has work to do. The task, the work of the novel, is not just to “touch” the readers, but “move” them, which, along the lines of Morrison’s argument that the best art is political, would include moving them to a different commitment for the community in which they live.
What is at stake is to move readers, which is similar to Gayatri Spivak’s description of what “education in the Humanities attempts to be,” namely “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.”Footnote 39 Such a rearrangement is all but guaranteed. It is more improbable than likely. It is “impossible” in the sense Derrida uses this word: highly questionable, impracticable, unpredictable, incalculable. Seen from what already “is” and what is considered “possible,” it is not. Literature, however, is a privileged place for the impossible to happen because its labor lies in conjuring a “rearranged” desire into occurrence through the invention of language. For Derrida, the promise of literature lies in the fact that in the process of allowing language to “get out of the way,” it may not only change language, but also, “in changing language, change more than language”:
Even if that isn’t a moral or political duty (but it can also become one), this experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing language, change more than language … In his or her experience of writing as such, if not in a research activity, a writer cannot not be concerned, interested, anxious about the past, that of literature, history, or philosophy, of culture in general. S/he cannot not take account of it in some way and not consider her- or himself a responsible heir, inscribed in a genealogy, whatever the ruptures or denials on this subject may be.Footnote 40
Literature, then, is the form of discourse that performs something “impossible”: to provoke an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” through “kidnapping” the reader into extremely “inhospitable terrain” such as the vast “terrain” of slavery and its legacy.
Derrida’s “hauntology” has potentially far-reaching consequences for a political theory and practice. His reflection on the “final solution” can be justly invoked for the immense question of what Avery Gordon has called the “lingering inheritance of racial slavery,” in Jeffrey Weinstock’s words, a “social trauma that lives on in American culture”Footnote 41:
I ask myself whether a community that assembles or gathers itself together in order to think what there is to be thought and gathered of this nameless thing that has been called the “final solution” [and one could justly invoke here “slavery” or “the Middle Passage”] does not have to show, first of all, its readiness to welcome the law of the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for that very reason the most demanding.Footnote 42
Morrison’s fiction makes “demands” on the reader by “kidnapping” him and her, throwing him or her “ruthlessly into an alien environment” that is hospitable to the “chaos of the needy dead,”Footnote 43 and thus to the ghosts that haunt our present, but also the ghosts that haunt the ghost herself.
“Beloved” is, in Morrison’s novel, the name on the tombstone of a dead girl, of whom the reader never learns the living name. As Caroline Rody succinctly writes, the term “expresses at once the greatest anonymity and the dearest specificity”Footnote 44 (a feature Derrida explores repeatedly in his reflections on the proper name). The violence of Beloved’s death and the brutality of slavery that caused it make her haunt the lives of her mother, her brothers, and of all their relations. It is of her, the returned and disappeared ghost, but also of the ghost that haunts the ghost, that Morrison writes: “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?”Footnote 45
Beloved’s memory is, indeed, “the most effaced and effaceable,” and, as Morrison’s book powerfully shows, “the most demanding.” So unbearably demanding that, in the end, her apparition is chased back into invisibility: “It was not a story to pass on.”Footnote 46 The challenge that Derrida’s thought and Morrison’s fiction address to us is to realize the need to “learn,” from the other, from the nameless, from the phantom, how to address ourselves to her; how to learn her name with the keen awareness that looking for that name and learning it bears in itself the risk of “losing,” forgetting, betraying it in its singularity.
As Avery Gordon and others have shown, in the novel Beloved, “Beloved the ghost’s double voice speaks not only of Sethe’s dead child but also of an unnamed African girl lost at sea, not yet become an African-American. (The book’s memorial dedication reads simply ‘Sixty Million and more.’) However, neither Sethe nor the others can perceive that the ghost that is haunting them is haunted herself.”Footnote 47
Jeffrey Weinstock succinctly summarizes the task, linking it to Derrida’s Specters of Marx:
The question that Derrida raises here – and that Beloved forcefully engages – is the question of how to live with these spirits, victims of brutal violence, victims of the Middle Passage. How does one live with a history or an inheritance that is too painful or shameful to be remembered – one that an individual or a community or an entire culture desperately wishes to forget – and yet which is too important to be forgotten? How can one do justice to the dead and, if this is the task that is required to live justly, or to learn to live at all, is learning to live even possible? For Derrida, the opening of the future as something other than a repetition of the present is dependent precisely upon the work of mourning, and, importantly, on mourning that never succeeds fully in working through or domesticating the trauma of loss, mourning that fails in “introjecting” the absent loved one. The absence of the other remains and this absence, this loss, can never be filled with words, can never itself be articulated completely.Footnote 48
There is absence, and there is the ineffable, there is silence. But for Morrison, the writer’s responsibility is to “shape a silence while breaking it.”Footnote 49 There is silence by the millions – as Beloved reminds the reader even before the first page, “sixty million and more” – one by one. For them, the destruction is absolute. To a certain degree, the “shaping” of such silence is a betrayal of the victim, because it runs the risk of soothing and thus undermining the absoluteness of the destruction. Literature, then, witnesses to that betrayal too. There is no room here for the “comfort of pity.” But the silence stemming from Pecola’s “psychological murder” whose damage is “total”Footnote 50 is shaped in order not to lose them and her to utter oblivion.
While The Bluest Eye chronicles Pecola’s “journey to destruction” (“Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.”) and stepping “into madness,” leaving her at the end of the novel “searching the garbage,”Footnote 51 Beloved starts after the sealed destruction, the murder of a child, chronicling the surviving of “memories that are too brutal, too debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives,” in both senses of who or what survives and who or what is survived.
The novel, again, has some work to do. As Beloved shows with powerful and heart-breaking tenderness, to use a formulation by Derrida, “even if one wanted to, one could not let the dead bury the dead.”Footnote 52 Beloved cannot bury herself as the murder victim, and she cannot bury the dead by whom she herself is haunted: the nameless and uncounted “sixty million and more.”
To quote Beloved’s narrator, “somebody had to be saved, but unless Denver [Beloved’s surviving teenage sister] got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve.”Footnote 53 Something, then, needs to be done. In the case of Beloved, most importantly two things need to be done, as Avery Gordon elaborates:
First the ghost that haunts 124 Bluestone Road in 1873 will have to be evicted so that home can be moved finally from Sweet Home to 124. The ghost is not living in the spirit world. It is living, and not too graciously at that, in the real world of day jobs, burnt toast, sibling rivalry, sought-after love and companionship, adjudging neighbors, and something will have to be done about that … The second task involves confronting the trauma of the Middle Passage, confronting what reaches down deep beneath the waters or beneath the symbolics of emancipation, free labor, free citizen. This trauma links the origin of Slavery with a capital S to the origin of modern American freedom, to the paradigmatic and value-laden operations of the capitalist market. This is a market whose exchange relations continue to transform the living into the dead, a system of social relations that fundamentally objectifies and dominates in a putatively free society. The Middle Passage is the decisive episode that establishes the amnesiac conditions of American freedom: emancipation as enslavement. In order to manage this “remembering which seems unwise,” it will be necessary to broach carefully and cautiously the desires of the ghost itself. The ghost’s desires? Yes, because the ghost is not just the return of the past or the dead. The ghostly matter is that always “waiting for you,” and its motivations, desires, and interventions are remarkable only for being current.Footnote 54
In Morrison’s book, it is the community of women who exorcises the ghost. It remains open how successful the exorcism may be for Sethe, her lover Paul D and her daughter Denver. As Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, exorcism would need to occur “not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome – without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice.”Footnote 55
US history post-Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century shows blatantly that the exorcism as described by Derrida has not yet successfully occurred in American society and politics. Again, Gordon’s succinct analysis is helpful:
The ghost is not other or alterity as such, ever. It is (like Beloved) pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had. The ghost always also figures this utopian dimension of haunting, encapsulated in the very first lines of Jacques Derrida’s book on specters: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally.”Footnote 56
What Gordon calls the “utopian dimension of haunting” and Derrida the desire to “learn to live finally” materialize as “our responsibility to recognize just where we are in this story, even if we do not want to be there.”Footnote 57 When Beloved’s narrator identifies the legacy of slavery not as “the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place,” but “the jungle whitefolks planted in them,” when the “secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks’ jungle” is described as “hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124,”Footnote 58 she challenges the reader to recognize the “secret, that whites have already been touched and invaded as if from the outside by a world of their own making,” and that they are in this story, that “we are in this story, even now.”Footnote 59 Even now: the “untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary”Footnote 60 are blatant now, without doubt, today. At the condition of such “reckoning” and recognition, the revenant, as Derrida writes, “may already mark the return of the specter of a promised living [le retour du spectre d’un vivant promis].”Footnote 61 A promised living and a promised living-together – Toni Morrison’s fiction is the medium for the specter of a future.
In what follows I discuss five points, defining what Derrida would have called a “theoretical matrix.” First of all, I outline the deep conceptual meaning of grammatology as well as the opposition between Searle’s and Derrida’s views of speech acts – which is fundamental to understand the true nature of social ontology. Second, I focus on the technological revolution brought about by the Web (I call it “documediality”), which confirms Derrida’s stance on grammatology. Third, I look at the structure of social reality as it is revealed by the recent technological change: I call it “documentality” to underline the constitutive role played by documents in social reality. As a fourth point, in the light of the first three, I defend the importance of thinking of technology as a philosophically fundamental issue concerning as much ontology and epistemology, and then claim that what we are witnessing is a denial not of metaphysics but of technology. Finally, focusing on the notion of exemplarity, I try to outline the program of the “archives of the future,” that is, an active capable of documentality through exemplarity in order to implement a true human nature, a nature that is not given but in constant becoming.
Grammatology
The price Derrida paid for his postmodernism is the famously controversial thesis that “there is nothing besides the text,” a thesis that almost suggests that the whole world is socially constructed. However, the exaggerations of a brilliant man often hide an element of truth. If we change Derrida’s sentence to the weaker claim “there is nothing social outside the text,” we will get the best and most powerful understanding of social ontology ever formulated. The underestimating the importance of recordings, of the fixation of acts, is what Derrida had seenFootnote 1 as the weakness of the theory of speech acts. No speech act can take place without a ritualized form, just like no language can exist without a code. For Derrida, this dependence on recording and iteration does not only refer to the “source” – the formulation of the act – but also to the final outcome: if an act is to continue to be valid (that is, if a social object is to last) it has to be supported by something, even if it is just people’s memory. Hence the importance of bureaucracy and documents in the social world. Indeed, in his response to Derrida,Footnote 2 Searle much underestimates the role of recording and fails to understand the role of iteration in Derrida’s view of speech acts, which he takes as a simple misconception. Derrida’s rejoinder didn’t help to make things clearer and this misapprehension is still a problem in social ontology, twenty years after Searle’s polemic with Derrida.
Searle’s social ontology can be summed up in the rule “X counts as Y in C”Footnote 3: the natural object X (e.g. a human body or a piece of paper, provided that the latter is a natural object and not an artifact) counts as the social object Y (a professor or a banknote) in a context C. This, in fact, is a reformulation of the theory of speech acts, in which social reality is indeed the outcome of a construction operated by a magical property called “collective intentionality.” Apart from technical problems (what is the physical object X corresponding to negative entities like debts?), this perspective reformulates Rousseau’s social contract: people gather and decide to create social objects. This is the postulation of what I propose we call a “Pentecostal meaning,” that is, something heaven-sent, already formed, manifested through the enigmatic collective intentionality. An alternative solution, which can be found by drawing on Derrida’s reflections on speech acts and extending their scope to social ontology, is the following. Social objects require to be fixated in documents, which ensure the lasting duration of objects and the reactivation of intentionality. In most cases, the process is not based on construction but on emergence: i.e. the progressive manifestation of rites, customs, and habits that then produces an intentionality, be it individual or shared. No one ever contemplated a sexual partner and thought “I shall institute marriage”: rather, given the existence of marriage, people can think “why don’t my partner and I get married, like X, Y, and Z did?”
Thus far, I have looked at an exemplary theoretical controversy of the past century. Another extremely important element is that Derrida, back in 1967 – when personal computers and the Internet were still far away – made a very strong claim in his Grammatology: maybe books as an organic and complete totality à la Hegelian encyclopedia will come to an end, but what is about to begin is the boom of writing. He made this claim when McLuhan was prophesizing the end of writing, which – as we can easily see today – was far from the truth. Think of our everyday lives, with our smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart watches. This boom, for reasons I will now clarify, can be best described as a “documedialrevolution”: the medium called to creating documents and, through them, social reality is writing, which is now revealing its full power, bringing to light characteristics of society, technology, and human nature that had so far remained hidden.
Documediality
Everybody thinks that the Web was a revolution, but the real question is what it is about and what consequences this entails. In order to understand this, the concept of “documediality” suggests that one should understand the technological revolution as a socio-anthropological revelation. The changes brought about by the Web are many, and they have been widely analyzed over the past few decades. Its greatest merit is to reveal the deep structures of social reality, which were there long before the Web itself. Understanding the Web, therefore, means much more than analyzing our tools of communication. Suffice it to say that globalization does not depend on jets, but on writing – a technique that is older than the pyramids and yet is the only means to transfer not only physical objects but also social ones like money, laws, policies, and identities. And there’s more: writing, as well as recording in general, performs the miracle of constructing social objects (verba volant, scripta manent). Through the Web we can understand the true nature of action and social reality, not by overestimating the gnoseological potential of big data (as often happens), but rather by understanding that society cannot do without inscriptions and recordings, archives and documents, and the arche-technique of writing.
The boom of writing prophesied by Derrida and realized by documediality suggests that the sphere of documents – from economics to war, from bureaucracy to epidemiology – is where Foucault’s “governmentality” lies. It wouldn’t be the first time that a contingent construct reveals the necessary structures of social ontology. Think of capital as it was theorized by Marx, who recognized in an instance of technology (the factory) the fundamental structure of the social dynamic, and then more general aspects of it independent of social contingencies. What the Web does better than capital (which is merely an economic-social phenomenon limited to a part of the world) is to reveal its globalized dimension, which offers resources for a much wider, deeper, and fully postcolonial knowledge that goes way beyond the dimension of homo faber. After all, the revolution proposed by documediality is different from Kant’s Copernican revolution. The latter, in fact, was rather Ptolemaic, as it placed man in the center of the universe. From the perspective of documediality, instead, the answer to the question “what is man?” is to be sought in the question “what is society?” – as many philosophers have noted. Both questions then find their answer in another, fundamental question: “what is techne?” (which is less obvious). If you want to know the human soul you must look at the society man lives in, but if you want to understand the society man lives in you have to look at what technology he can use (even though very often it is technology that uses him). What the Web reveals is not the posthuman, but human essence.
The documedial revolution rests on the following axioms: 1. The Web is mainly recording, not only communication. It doesn’t work only as a TV, a newspaper, or a radio, but also as an archive. 2. The Web is mainly action, not only information. It doesn’t merely archive knowledge, but it defines a space for social acts (promises, commitments, orders). 3. The Web is mainly production, not only transmission. It doesn’t merely transmit what already exists; it constructs new social objects (documents, institutions, transactions). 4. The Web is mainly real, not only virtual. It doesn’t merely provide a virtual extension to social reality; it progressively turns into the general backbone of social reality (marginalizing traditional political and economic institutions). 5. The Web is mainly mobilization, not only emancipation. It doesn’t merely give its users new informative and expressive possibilities; it has turned into the tool to transmit orders and responsibilizations aimed at the performing of actions. 6. The Web is mainly emergence, not only construction. It doesn’t merely realize the technical intentions of its programmers and the collective intentionality of the community it arises in; it develops based on its own autonomous finality that has to be understood. 7. The Web is mainly opacity, not only transparency. It doesn’t merely reveal the structures of social reality; precisely because it reveals them (acting as a transcendental, that is, a condition of possibility) it escapes immediate knowledge.
Documentality
According to this axiomatic, documediality tries to outline the way in which new technologies reveal the deep structure of humans and society and its institutions. This approachFootnote 4 is articulated in three levels: the definition of the structure of social reality as documentality; the recognition of the specific nature of social reality as mobilization; and the analysis of the genesis of society and intentionality as emergence. Documentality, mobilization, and emergence thus constitute the first theoretical elements at the basis of documediality.
Documents as the foundation of social reality.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the thesis underlying the theory of documentality is that what keeps society together must be sought in the sphere of the fixation of actions and the construction of social objects. In the perspective of documentality these insights are systematized by the constitutive law of social objects Object = Recorded ActFootnote 5: a social object is the result of a social act that takes place between at least two people, or between a person and a delegated machine, and that has the characteristic of being recorded on some surface, including the minds of the social agents. This constitutive law is articulated in four levels.
1. Recording is what allows for social objects – things like promises, bets, assignments, money, which require acts of communication, but must set themselves as recordings, otherwise they would remain empty words. A stock exchange session without price lists, a marriage without registers, a sale without a contract, a trial without a sentence would all be nothing but frivolous exercises, and I doubt you would have bothered reading this chapter if you knew you’d forget everything you read. Indeed, the acts we produce acquire meaning only if inscribed, and once inscribed they are extremely powerful: think of signatures deciding for war or peace, or typos causing stock market crashes. This is why documents are so crucial; this is why we queue to get them and are desperate if we lose them – this is why documentality is an important ingredient of society.
2. There is another sense in which people’s deep motivations and initiatives depend on texts. The role of documentality in the constitution of intentionality also concerns – in the most obvious and elementary sense – the benefits coming from sharing plans in the management of collective intentionality. Acting on the basis of written documents is the secret of military effectiveness, but more extensively it is the foundation of social action, as demonstrated by the importance of bureaucracy in the formation and management of power.
3. More decisively, documentality is the condition for the genesis of individual intentionality. It is not true that first we have intentions that then can be fixated in documents. The opposite is true: the human being becomes such through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, and attitudes – i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation of conscience and moral responsibility.
4. This becomes particularly evident in highly mediatized societies, as evidenced by the documedial revolution, which is the best observatory to grasp the dynamics of documentality. Behaviors and feelings (consider the role of literature, films, and songs in the definition of love) are strongly oriented by documentality.
Man as a mobilized animal.
The result of this omnipresence of documents, and above all of their active value, is the fact that the fundamental nature of humanity is not understanding, but action and mobilization. Imagine we are in the middle of the night from Saturday to Sunday, a night traditionally devoted to rest. In the dead of night, I wake up. I want to see what time it is and I obviously check my cell phone, which tells me that it is three o’clock. At the same time, I notice that someone has sent me an email. I cannot resist the curiosity, or better the anxiety (the mail concerns an issue at work), and that’s it: I read it and reply. I am suddenly working on Saturday night, no matter where I am.
If there is one thing that the documedial revolution has revealed better than any historical event or technical apparatus, it is that we are mobilized animals, submissive and willing to act on command, without understanding why. For us action is the fundamental value (what else, other than a need for action and recognition, might lead us to post contents on social media for free?). This isn’t alienation – the transformation from rational animal into mobilized animal – but a revelation: we thought that in the beginning was thought, but the truth is that in the beginning was action. Pragmatism has understood the nature of the human being as a mobilized animal and the derivation of intentionality from action. James said that one is sad because one is crying and not vice versa. However, beyond pragmatism, the point is to focus on the technological implications of this mobilization of intentionality, and on the crucial role played by recording and archives.
Technology as emergence.
The thesis underlying the hypothesis of emergence is that society derives from technology much more than it is constructed by social actors. The Web (as well as capital, power, etc.) is not something that is constructed, perhaps by some big brother: it emerges, as always happens with technology, following no specific plan or design. Once again, documediality proposes a Copernican revolution in which technology isn’t an extension of man, but rather man is an extension of technology. This is in line with an interpretation that has been widely supported in the twentieth century, even though the perspective of documediality is characterized by a markedly positive view of this determination. For documediality, this is no alienation of human nature but rather a revelation of its innermost truth.
Let’s start from a trivial consideration, namely the fact that technological devices seem to develop in directions that in many cases are not those provided by their inventors. The inventor of gunpowder had fireworks in mind, that of the phone was looking for something like a radio and that of the radio was looking for a phone; and yet, regardless of their inventors, the devices have been following their own logic, which therefore, rather than being programmed and planned, has emerged. Like technology in general, the Web is not an alienation of human nature – something that leads man astray from his supposed true self – but rather a revelation of what a human being really is: a weak and dependent being that is structurally in need of technology to be what it is. So, technology is both what makes up for our failings and what reveals the characteristics of human nature. Technological emergence is thus an anthropological revelation, in the sense that what emerges from technology is a specific feature of the human being. Nobody expected the developments of the wheel, fire, writing, or the Web, but each of these techniques has helped culture to answer the question: what is man? Similarly, those who designed the first personal computers did not foresee in any way that it would transform the life of humanity, and whoever introduced text writing into mobile phones would never have thought that most telephone traffic would take place as writing.
Of course you can always argue that technology and documents alone do not speak; you need humans to make them talk. The documedial perspective answers: humans alone do not speak either, you need other humans to activate the module of language, and for this to happen there has to be a code, which is ultimately a document (the language must be a public language, which retains its meaning and is shared). The same holds for education, taste, will, and intentionality: the humanization of humanity passes through processes of training, imitation, and motivation that are essentially document-like. The great lesson to be learned in this respect from “deconstruction” consists in the need to recognize immediacy – starting from intentionality and self-consciousness – as an effect and the result of a mediation, rather than a cause.
Documents and mobilizations in turn stem from technology. No transformation could take place without a recording, i.e. without the establishment of a social memory. At first the latter is sedimented in rituales – external media needed to fixate memory in a society without writing. However, something like writing comes to be very soon: for example, take technical acquisitions like flint-working, i.e. a reification of memory in artifacts. With the development of writing, sociality evolves much more rapidly, and the document’s role is strengthened. In fact, as we have seen, they both fixate the actions, taking a prescriptive role, and coordinate them.
Technology
With rare exceptions, technology has generally been underestimated by philosophy, which has merely conceived of it either as a simple vehicle of alienation or as an autonomous power antithetical to the spirit. Technology, though, is what connects ontology (what there is) with epistemology (what we know). It is therefore not technical, but metaphysical. Derrida knew this, not because he had had the time to see mobile phones and the power of emails (which he refused to use), but rather because, ever since his very first steps in phenomenology, he had developed a reflection on technology as what overcomes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, natural and artificial, technology and anthropology.
Technology and anthropology.
The first act of the naked monkey is not the creation of values or norms, but rather the construction of technical apparatuses, as its most pressing need is to eat, protect itself, and keep warm. The first norms, as derived from technology, will appear much later. The Web is not one of the many alleged alienations leading astray our (almost) perfect humanity: it is the revelation of our true nature, in need of technology, dependent, much less free, and far more subdued than we are willing to admit. And this awareness has taught us to respond, with political action or moral choice, to the imperatives of technology – which are mandatory only for those who think they are (usually for lack of culture). We turn out to be animals in need of technology, all too ready to exchange our imaginary freedom for real security and comfort.
The human dependence on technology, therefore, is not a specific trait of our age as is often claimed. Most of all, the idea that humankind risks being replaced by machines seems meaningless, because the notion of machine can only have a meaning in relation to humankind. Indeed, to what extent can human subjectivity be understood prescinding from technical apparatuses, as suggested by the theories of the extended mind – and as implied by the classical descriptions of the link between identity and memory? Conversely, to formulate an adequate theory of identity and society, one has to think of those not only in relation to humankind, but also by accounting for the technological and documedial system as an integral part of a social ontology and of an individual psychology.
Ontology, epistemology, technology.
It has been rightly noted that technological skill is what allows for the jump from apes to human beings, which therefore doesn’t happen with Homo sapiens (the rational animal) but with Homo abilis (the technological animal) – as genetic research has confirmed. This, though, is not just about the remote origins of man, but also about his highest intellectual achievements, like mathematical reasoning. Euler claimed that the full power of his mathematics was concentrated in the pencil with which he did his calculations.
The denial of the role of technology seems to be the root of all denials, starting from that of the body in relation to the mind – if you think about the importance of pen and paper to the development of thought, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of, say, gender differences. Without technology, there is no human nature. Thus, technology is not the antithesis of the spirit, but its first manifestation: the spirit itself is technology. There is nothing in the brain to justify our difference from nonhuman animals. Instead, there is much outside of the brain. In particular, technology seems to be an excellent candidate to link ontology (what is in the world) and epistemology (our knowledge of the world). In line with an argument that can be found pragmatism, phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, technology plays an essential role, and documediality aims at providing a complete theory of it.
Technology as competence without understanding.
The third important aspect is that the true nature of technology is competence (action, know-how) without understanding. This circumstance, far from placing it in a subordinate position, makes of technology an essential heuristic device: we act before thinking, and so we end up finding new truths. Instead, understanding is related to analytical reasoning within the sphere of established knowledge. In other words, technology looks like the real presupposition of a priori synthetic judgments, which Kant only formulated analytically precisely because he did not take technology into account. Culture is deferred nature, nature is different culture, and the link between them is given by technology (this is the great lesson to be learned from pragmatism). What has been said against “instrumental rationality” seems to forget that reason as such is a tool. Technology can achieve a superior and surprising synthesis – a synthetic synthesis, rather than an analytic one. As unreflected competence, it is what underlies both the emergence of the fundamental structures of social ontology and the human psyche, and the development of knowledge.
In the beginning was technology: action comes before understanding, and inscription comes before intention. In the theory of expression we find forms of inscription (marks, drawings, traces) that take an expressive value then associated with a meaning. In the theory of man, first of all we encounter techniques revealing otherwise unexpressed human characteristics – from the will to power to the love of theory. In the theory of society, we encounter organizational forms rooted in our animal past, which are then formalized and perfected into customs, rules, and documents – which later give rise to collective intentionality. This may seem an abstract theoretical statement, but it gets supporting evidence from the investigations promoted by “documediality”: observing the technological revolution – according to the reasoning that consists in going from the empirical condition to the transcendental structures that determine it – we can reach the a priori forms of human nature and social reality.
Exemplarity
There is still one question to be answered: to what extent can archives (that seem intrinsically related to the past) address the future? To put it differently, how can the expression “archives of the future” not be taken as an oxymoron? The fundamental concept to answer this question is that of exemplarity, to be understood as the principle of a transformation that, through a single case, allows for the formation of a virtual class, a series of new possibilities – which is the basis of the concept of “archive of the future.” This, in an emergent perspective, means: without free actions there would be no freedom, without imprinted letters there would be no spirit, without repetition there would be no creativity. Culture – the archives of the future – is indeed the sphere in which this exemplarity programmatically unfolds, benefiting greatly from the boom of writing and the documedial revolution.
Exemplarity is not a return to the old canons, but the creation of something new that perhaps is not yet understood, and that will become exemplary. So the point is to ask ourselves questions such as: what are the good examples (exemplary actions, good practices) that can guide the formulation of a practical reason for the Web, that is, a not purely passive reception of what emerges from technology? In something dominated by the public dimension like the Web, in which (especially in social networks) seeing and being seen are fundamental actions, a concrete, accessible normativity, made of concrete examples, is certainly more dominant if compared to a system of general and abstract principles. Good examples, exemplary actions, the stories of exemplary individuals (who are still individuals, like us and like everyone else) are paradigms because they show a model (be it ethical, juridical, or otherwise). This leads to three considerations.
Memory and technology.
The first concerns the link between memory and technology. Every technology, as we have seen, is a form of memory (iteration); and each iteration, even if taking place in an organic space (such as thinking, speaking, or normed acting) results in a form of memory. This link between memory and technology is what explains the Copernican revolution of documediality, which consists in overturning the traditional view and understanding intentionality (the spirit, the mind, the will, and purpose) as derived rather than founding, compared to the forms of fixation (the letter, the expression, the rule).
The thesis that documents alone do not speak but need people to make them talk is a variation of “the automaton alone cannot act; it needs a soul.” Now, if there is a distinctive feature of the automaton, for example the thermostat, it is that it takes action automatically, that is, without external intervention. If we insist that acting automatically is different from acting autonomously, I would note that it is highly doubtful that humans act autonomously – Kant himself assumed this presupposition as a hypothesis rather than a demonstrable fact. Anyhow, humans alone do not act either: at most they react to stimuli, just like a photometer or a thermometer. Therefore, the question that often arises before the specter of some artificial intelligence, “will the machines control our destiny?” is an absurd and rhetorical question, though often asked in good faith. Indeed, has humankind ever, in any place and any time, controlled its own destiny?
The finality that we perceive actually emerges from documentality. Freud’s grandson used to play with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it: he would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen (Fort!), before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a cheerful “Da!” Freud attributed the whole thing to compulsion and the bond between the drive to repetition and death. But let us not forget that one could also see this game as the Schillerian emblem of freedom: the boy is playing; no one is forcing him to. In playing, he manifests the technical mastery of a repetitive practice, Fort / Da, and this gives him pleasure. No one forces him to act as he does, unless one chooses to invoke the profound ancestral grounds that Freud refers to. Why should one see the game as the submission to a drive rather than an alteration by which from the drive one achieves freedom? And why not recognize the deep complicity that unites technology to liberty and justice, the letter to the spirit, the automaton to the soul? As in Pascal’s wager, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Gesture and mimesis.
The second point concerns the relationship between gesture and imitation. As a tool, the document always recalls the function of the gesture. We have seen how technology consists of competence without understanding, that is, an expert action that does not know the principles, and often not even the reasons, of its own operation. These features are typically those of the gesture: driving a car, whisking eggs, standing up without falling, that is, respecting the laws of physics, are gestures that exemplify the idea of competence without understanding. Some of these are more or less innate (standing up) but others – including language, morality, conscience, politics – are learned. This learning doesn’t take place by some transfer of meaning, but through imitation. As we know, imitation is an essential characteristic of the human being, one that Derrida has focused on ever since his early work.
This doesn’t make intentionality, responsibility, and freedom any less authentic: it simply acknowledges their origin in technology, recording, and mediation. Consider a passage that was very important to the later Derrida, Hamlet’s “time is out of joint”: injustice manifests itself as a technical flaw. And justice, the remedy that Hamlet is called upon to bring, also appears as a technical operation, a repair (“to set it right”). One could say that it was just a figure of speech, that righting a wrong is not the same as fixing a broken chair, but how can we know? When presuming that the spiritual soul is opposed to the inert mechanism, isn’t one biased by the prejudice of authenticity versus inauthenticity and immediacy versus mediation?
The given and the trace.
The third element regards the distinction between the given, as an inert element, and the trace, as that which is not merely deposited, but produces a horizon. Here too you have to overturn the view that, in the twentieth century, has solidified in the criticism of the “myth of the given.” The argument that data as such are never given, because they are determined by theories, must be overturned: data are there, regardless of our theories. Some of these, with a random development dominated by contingency (which is characteristic of an emergentist philosophy) may give rise to science and art, thus shaping themselves (again to resume an enigmatic expression dear to Derrida) as the traces of the future.
Precisely because there is no human in-itself, but only an interaction between humanity and technology, the humanities are not the opposite of the latter, but its most eminent realization. The human comes into being through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, attitudes, i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation of conscience and moral responsibility. The spontaneity and creativity that we feel within us, the fact that we have mental contents and ideas, and refer to something in the world, do not contradict in any way the fact that the origin of all this is to be found in recordings and inscriptions.
There is a single thread that from recording leads to responsibility and then to teleology, or purpose. There hasn’t been a single time in history when human beings sat at a table and created a social world. Rather, there has been a very slow process begun with animal sociality; think of termites, who didn’t use to be social animals but have become so through evolutionarily successful genetic modifications, ending up by creating superorganisms (extremely cohesive societies). Humans, like some other animals (few, according to zoologists) have developed a form of eu-sociality, that is, of social cooperation. However, human cooperation is not even remotely as cohesive as that of termites, which indeed seem to have a collective intentionality. And yet it appears meaningless to speak of intentionality in this case. So, if shared intentionality is not the reason, what explains the copresence of social cooperation and conflict, and the evolution from elementary sociality to complex social realities like ours? The answer, as always, lies in archives, which for this very reason are the archives of the future.
