Michael Marder

Philosophy Department, Graduate Faculty
New School University
mardm926@newschool.edu

 

Ah, how tired we are, how I would like finally to touch “veil,” the word and the thing thus named, the thing itself and the vocable! I would like not only to see them, see in them, toward them or through them, the word and the thing, but maintain a discourse about them that would, finally, touch, in short a “relevant” discourse that would say them properly, even if it no longer gives anything to be seen.

 

–Jacques Derrida, Veils

I

 

To touch the thing itself: to traverse the distance and to maintain it in spite of, or thanks to, this traversal. The I caught in the impossible conjunction of maintenance and traversal–the strange combination of the word’s tactility and the thing’s vocalization–is not content with mere visibility, with the sight of the phenomenon that gives itself to be seen, with the movement toward or even through that which presents itself in luminous but empty space. Because the thing in question is not any thing whatsoever but veil (voile), which is to say “every thing,” because of this obscure singular universality, the supplement of blind discourse, the only proper and relevant discourse that touches this thing, is indispensable. Are we able to say it properly? Can we hear its apposite resonance? Will we detect in the veil itself (not behind it) the oblique thing that will never become an object welcomed by consciousness, that will more than anything else disentangle the thing from the object, yielding the difference however imperceptible to the eye and, even, to the ear? The impossible, tiresome tenacity of the distance maintained in the measure of its traversal is the attribute of the thing, of the veil touched and caressed but not lifted, of the vocable spoken by diminution, at the same time reducing the interval and attenuating the intensity of the sound (Cixous and Derrida 23).

 

The current attempt “to disentangle the thing from the object” is necessarily preliminary and provisional in the face of the overwhelming risks of ossifying and essentializing the distinction thus outlined. If that which disentangles the one from the other is, indeed, a veil, then the act of disentangling cannot take a form of unveiling that will prompt the reader to respond to the question of difference between thinghood and objectivity with the confident and unequivocal, “Sure thing!” Here, I do not wish to claim either that this difference is fixed, all-encompassing, and absolute, or that the obfuscation of this difference has been a merely accidental representational failure. My goal is to register the remarkable porosity of boundaries between the two, allowing the thing to pass into the object and vice versa. These passages, however, portend a risk which is diametrically opposed to that of essentialization and which may result in the conflation of thinghood and objectivity–the conflation that would obscure various “encounters” with which Derrida is concerned, including the ethical, the aesthetic, and the commodity-fetishistic.

 

To be sure, objects, like things, are inconceivable without distance (or distancing), which will not be completely traversed if their objectivity is to stay intact. Before recollecting, with Derrida’s help, the specifically Husserlian ideal object, we should meditate on objectivity in general as that which is pre-sent in front of us (Derrida and Thénevin 71), that which we face in a perpetual opposition, if not a standoff, accentuated, for example, in the German Gegenstand. As something posited in opposition (Hegel would say, in “oppositional determination”) to the subject, the object appears to be secondary to what it opposes. It has only negativity, negation, and resistance to offer; hence, it is one-dimensional and unidirectional, devoid of depth or volume, ideally present through and through, completely visible, open to view in the shape of a flat screen unfolded against me and defined by this absolute unfolding. Total resistance of the kind that both produces and consumes the objectivity of the object spells out nothing but its complete surrender to the resisted “authority.”

 

Woven into the memorable economy of the supplement, this secondariness, nonetheless, turns into the origin of origin. On the one hand, the resistance proper to the object is non-reactive and mute–a distant reverberation of the impersonality marking the there is (il y à, es gibt). There is resistance; it gives resistance. On the other hand, the subject comes face-to-face, or rather face-to-surface, with the object, but this encounter is inevitably belated insofar as it supervenes upon the determination of sense on the basis of its relation with the object (Derrida, Speech 75). In terms of our analogy, sense isn’t yet sense unless it is projected onto the screen of objectivity. Conversely, my face is, in some sense, affected by the surface exposed to it and by the light reflected from this surface. Oppositional determination presupposes determinations of reflection (Reflexionsbestimmung) that always solicit, shake up the rigidity of opposition from within. In Derrida’s reading of Husserl, this solicitation finds expression in the supplementation of the first meaning of “against” (l’encontre) with tout-contre, the “‘up-against’ of proximity” (75). Owing to the latter, the distance is all but eliminated the moment the subject’s boundary touches, perpendicularly, that of the object, ostensibly defying the logic of relationality outlined thus far.

 

Cutting and pasting Husserl’s text, Derrida places the op-positional and com-positional significations of objectivity side-by-side, right up against each other, but also in a glaring antinomy that will not tolerate Hegelian Aufhebung expressed in the simultaneous cancellation and preservation of distance. Granted, we cannot resolve the antinomy by way of reiterating the tired platitudes on the irreducible “gaps” and fissures that accompany the superimposition of uneven boundaries and that render the greatest proximity still insufficiently proximate. But what if this impossible situation is the predicament of the subject par excellence? What if the “nearness of distance” in tout-contre allows us to imagine the subject as a non-oppositional object, as Gegenstand minus “Gegen-,” as the absolutely indeterminate spatial positionality of -ject only subsequently (though not in a logical or a chronological sense) subjected to opposition? To raise these questions is to veer toward the attributes of the thing which paradoxically falls on the side of this “inexistent or anexistent subjectivity” and which will come to the fore later on (Derrida, Truth 46). Let’s not forget that in the closure of metaphysics which the subject and the object now inhabit, there is a third dimension completing the first two, namely “philosophy as knowledge of the presence of the object” (Derrida, Speech 102). Curiously enough, this third dimension will undergo important modifications in the course of Derrida’s writings, so that by the time of Specters of Marx it will be a scholarly belief (croyance) in, not knowledge of, what is present “in the form of objectivity” that will subtend the whole enterprise (Derrida, Specters 11). How is it possible to integrate philosophical knowledge and scholarly belief with the structured opposition between position and opposition?

 

The subject-object relation crystallizes in the opposition between the subject’s horizontal position of a substratum (“between beneath and above” [Derrida and Thévenin 71]) and the object’s vertical opposition (face-to-face, face-to-surface) to the subject.¹ In keeping with the geometrical delineation of this structure, knowledge and belief will stand for the diagonal linkage of the subject and the object marking the distance between the two and completing a metaphysical “right angle” triangulation. In a certain Foucaultian mode, one could define this triangulation as “the microstructure of modernity.” The point where the two dimensions initially come up against each other and touch, the point of proximity to the opposition, is too much for the subject to bear. Its unbearable weight pressing on the internal infirmity of the underlying subjective thesis (Stand) already anticipates the philosophical/scholarly prosthesis that will support and fortify the dimension facing such stern opposition.² Moreover, the prosthesis itself needs to be fortified with credence and belief supplanting knowledge or, better yet, denoting its spare prosthetic devices, the prostheses of the prosthesis.

 

But the closure so formed is certainly not static. Although the one-dimensional object may be an arrested effect of something else, of something Derrida, in the wake of Artaud, calls “subjectile,” it embodies an arrested effect itself set in motion. Its “against-ness” will not abide unless “self-consciousness appears . . . in its relation to an object, whose presence it can keep and repeat” (Derrida, Speech 15). Should we perhaps follow Derridian graphic analysis of the ob-ject and transcribe self-consciousness in the manner of “self-con-sciousness,” the split identity complicit with (con) what is set against it? In other words, the opposition that yields the conditions of possibility for the sense-determining object is itself wholly dependent upon the idealization of the object in infinite repeatability, upon the acts of self-consciousness and, specifically, the vocal mediation allowing one to hear oneself speak (53).

 

It is not by a pure coincidence that the famous Husserlian example of the inner voice, “You’ve gone wrong . . . ,” cited by Derrida, is above all a protest, a remonstration, an objection the subject raises against itself as the object of reproach (Speech 70). Here, in the doubling of presence, the subject is set against itself (l’encontre) with/in itself (tout-contre), projected unto itself, opening the avenue for a relation with other ob-jects. Repetition elliptically refers to the repetition of objectivity and objection, as though I did not hear myself speak the first time, as though my discourse was useless and irrelevant, as though it did not crisscross the inner space of difference and touch, to paraphrase Derrida, “the thing that I am.” Husserl’s subjectivity (hearing one’s own speech) is virtually deaf and ineducable; it must feign these qualities to keep itself and “things” or, strictly speaking, “athings” going. Suppose, on the other hand, that some object is given or pronounced once, eventfully and uniquely facilitating iterability without iteration.³ Without the detached complicity of self-consciousness, the event of the object will run the risk of passing into a thing.⁴ Or, at the very least, the swerve of its non-idealized remainder will point in the direction of thinghood.

 

II

 

Given the oppositional pivot of objectivity, what are the consequences of its “de-saturation”? First, in an early commentary on Levinasian philosophy, Derrida says, “I could not possibly speak of the other, make of the other a theme, pronounce the other as object, in the accusative” and, thereby, gives us a hint apropos of the difference between the objective opposition and the absolute separation (“Violence” 103). Conjunctions and disjunctions no longer make sense. When I am in a face-to-face situation with the other, I do not stand against the other (in either sense of the term), but in non-oppositional proximity to her, across the infinite distance maintained despite my adventurous traversal of it. Neither counter nor even adjacent to the other. According to Derrida’s engagement with Levinas, the injunction of the face is to respect the other “beyond grasp and contact” (“Violence” 99). This injunction has been misinterpreted as an extreme version of the multiculturalist sentiment allegedly governing contemporary thought in France.⁵ Even though, to my knowledge, Levinas does not use this particular word chosen by Derrida, more is at stake in the idea of “respect” than a mere adulteration of absolute alterity or, on the contrary, a reverence for and admiration of the foreign and the unknown. In a subtle way, it allows the difference between objectivity and thinghood to enter the ethical situation through the backdoor to the extent that I can attempt to return the look or “pay” respect to a thing (res), but not to an object blindly facing me in a predetermined frame of opposition. Hence, we could say that respect is an ontological and, more precisely, a hauntological fact more basic than a psychological attitude. Because it transcends the proprietorship characteristic of grasp and contact, this fact arising on the groundless ground of separation foils the fixedness of and fixation on that to which it is “paid.” As such, respect is one of the overtly affirmative, albeit largely ignored, features of the deconstructive approach that, as a rule, is highly attuned to the minute motions of the texts with which it works and that regards them as things rather than ideal objects calling for analysis.

 

What “things share here with others,” Derrida writes, “is that something within them too is always hidden, and is indicated only by anticipation, analogy, and appresentation” (“Violence” 124). This is not to say that the other is reducible to a thing, let alone to a transcendent Thing. The other is both a thing and not a thing: “the other as res is simultaneously less other (not absolutely other) and less ‘the same’ than I” (127). From a strictly phenomenological perspective, the quality common to others and to things is that, unlike objects, they do not–indeed, cannot–expose themselves to us in their entirety. The volume of the thing conceals a considerable portion of its surface from our view and necessitates a completion of the given “by anticipation, analogy, and appresentation” of the yet invisible outlines. Similarly, regardless of the exposure of his denuded face, the interiority of the other is inaccessible to us from the unique standpoint available to this interiority alone. But whereas we can turn the thing around or change our spatial position in relation to it in order to inspect some (though not all) of its temporarily hidden dimensions, the other’s interiority defies all provisional visibility. In the aftermath of the metaphysical closure articulated in the subject-object-knowledge triad, Derrida and Levinas put forth a different, non-oppositional, ethical constellation of other-thing-respect.

 

Second, the Kantian aesthetic sphere is a place where pure and, therefore, “inexistent” subjectivity flourishes in pleasing without enjoyment. “This pleasure is purely subjective: in the aesthetic judgment it does not designate [bezeichnet] anything about the object” (Derrida, “Truth” 46). Purely subjective pleasure is two-fold. Not only does it manage to do away with the designations of objectivity–that is, opposition–but it also rids itself of complacent self-interest (47) and of the desire to cling to existence at any price. Though it imputes beauty to objects, a judgment on the beautiful declares its autonomy vis-à-vis beautiful objects, the external screens onto which the subject’s attitude is projected. Derrida, however, takes a further step in the direction opened up by Kant and argues that hiding the object, changing its locus of existence, displacing the opposition into another “world,” passing from knowledge- to belief-structures–that none of these machinations is adequate to strike “the sans of the pure cut” (83). Instead, the beautiful boasts an indeterminate position not coordinated by the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal signposts and tensions of the subject-object-knowledge triad.

 

If the tenets of representative relationality are no longer relevant to the aesthetic sphere, if the reference to the object is superfluous, if nothing guarantees the existence of the subject, then in Artaud’s “pure painting” the means are the only things that will be expressed. The opposition between the painter-subject and her object dissipates when the painter’s hand, the canvas, and, say, the sky enter a work of art on the same footing with the movement of expression (Derrida and Thévenin 97). The projection falls into the same series as the projected, the projectile, and the screen–each transforming itself into the passage for the other and bringing the edgy standoff to a culmination. From art in general congealed into an object replete with inner meaning, one and naked (Derrida, “Truth” 22), we pass into a wealth of means without ends, the means irreducible to objects, the non-totalizable multiplicity of passages or media we call “things.” The surface is right on the face, and the face right on the surface–Artaud traverses the distance, but does he maintain it? So long as the subtraction of Gegen– from Gegenstand is not satisfied with the lingering undifferentiation of positionality that nostalgically mirrors the one, naked, and absent unity of the object, we will have to respond in the affirmative. The serialization of the means already goes a long way toward internally spacing and re-membering this space. Thus, in the eccentric company of Kant and Artaud, in the shadow of Heidegger, and not without sensing a major aporia, Derrida holds onto a modalized and dispersed trajectory of the jetée (forcing one to hurl oneself into the experience of throwing [Derrida and Thévenin 75]) that desaturates opposition in indifferent pleasure. I am tempted to think that in this double bind Derrida revamped and radicalized the old procedure of phenomenological reduction (epoché) whose energy he re-channeled toward peeling off layers upon layers of the subject-object opposition, knowledge, and belief. And what he found under the veneer of the objective “against” was not a pacification of various struggles and tensions in some sort of nihilist indifference, but the previously tamed and abused pure force barely perceptible in the unreduced Gegenstand.

 

Thought together, ethical and aesthetic implications of the object’s desaturation that places a renewed emphasis on the thing seem to have much in common. Some of the obvious commonalities include the recession of knowledge and representation to the background of my engagement with the other and with artistic media, as well as the emergence of different modes of relationality involving respect and the jetée. But a more interesting question is whether disinterested pleasure without enjoyment of the beautiful pursues a trajectory parallel to the Levinasian shift “beyond essence” and beyond the corollary desire to persist in essence.⁶ If this is so, then in the context of the ethical and the aesthetic disinterestedness, Hegelian synthetic actuality (Wirklichkeit) will be attacked on two fronts simultaneously: the existence of the subjects and objects of beauty will become irrelevant to the production of the beautiful, while the essence of the ethical will be transformed into a contradiction in terms.

 

III

 

In the concluding pages of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida writes, “contrary to what phenomenology–which is always phenomenology of perception–has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes” (Speech 104). Surprisingly enough and despite phenomenological maxims, the thing itself does not fit into the Husserlian noetic-noematic constitution. We could add that the reason for this elusiveness is that, in contrast to the object, the thing does not survive in opposition to the subject, nor does it occupy a determinate position in marked space. To be a thing, something needs to be both unmarked and de-posited, deranged, deprived of substantial identity with itself, “at once set aside and beside itself [à la fois rangée et dérangée]” like the famous table from Marx’s Capital (Derrida, Specters 149). The thing opposes nothing because its ecstatic composition, which is also its decomposition, bars it from mustering the force it harbors and from gathering itself up to face a single direction. As such, the Derridian thing which is “all over the place,” scattered, and disseminated tacitly counteracts Heidegger’s thing that “things” and that names “manifold-simple gathering” (Heidegger, “The Thing” 171). Nevertheless, in the case of a commodity-thing to which we shall return, this derangement and dissemination befall a marked thing, one that is branded with the signs of value, forgets its materiality, and poses as a pure number.

 

“At once set aside and beside itself,” the thing dispersed into a multiplicity of pluri-dimensional surfaces is forgotten (Heidegger would write, “neglected”), such that its end is deposited somewhere–both posited and abandoned. Hence, thinghood is infinite, even though infinity is not necessarily tied to the thing. And again, the example of the commodity-thing will be inadequate to illustrate this deposition since in the circulation of Capital the end of the commodity is simply transposed from material use onto what was previously conceived as mere means in exchange (abstract, symbolic value). Where investment is an operation one performs on objects in the hope that they will yield interest in the circulation of their symbolic equivalents, idealizations, or indefinite repetitions, deposit (consigne) is proper to things consigned to oblivion. The thing and the gift, the given thing and the thing as giving, are annulled in “simple recognition” since “it [recognition] gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent” (Derrida, Given Time 13). Grasping nothing other than objects of exchange, recognition claims the place occupied by the thing itself–the fictitious, delimited place in which the symbolic equivalent resides. Yet, the act of recognition extended to an object forgets the thing itself, forgets radical forgetting and, in the same breath, institutes the memory of exchange.

 

This economy of forgetting obtains for the infinite chains of signification aiming, in each case, at the unattainable hypostasis of the thing in the present where the manifold would be gathered: “The sign is usually said to be put in place of the thing itself, the present thing, ‘thing’ here standing equally for meaning or referent” (Derrida, “Différance” 9). But if a single and determinate place of the thing is nothing but a piece of theoretical fiction, then every sign is bound to miss its mark in a self-effacing search for “a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 49). Further, it is by falling short of its declared goal that this movement unexpectedly reaches success. Inasmuch as it leaps from sign to sign, signification remarks and retraces the contours of the deranged non-identity of thinghood, echoes the dispersed effects of this non-identity, seeks to put an end to indeterminacy, and thereby engrosses itself ever deeper in deposition and unrest. Signification is thingification. The thicker the cloth or the veil of “relevant” discourse, the greater the work of weaving that still lies ahead. Or, in Levinas’s concise formulation of infinite ethical responsibility: “duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished” (Totality and Infinity 244).

 

Différance lies not far beyond the horizon here. Recall the subject-object configuration comprising the opposition between position and opposition. The object is more than it is because it exceeds oppositional identity and encompasses its overarching relationship with the subject. Likewise, the thing is more than it is because it “contains” différance, or as Derrida puts it, “differance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself” (Given Time 40). In this sense, there are no things “themselves” equal, identical, or reducible to some inner kernel around which they are constituted. While these terms are reserved exclusively for the object, every thing is at least twice removed from itself if one conceives it in terms of a resemblance of its own prosthesis (Derrida, Specters 153), which is to say, in terms of the interplay of simulacra and supplements. The bracketed interiority (in) of its bracketed being (is) testifies to the thing’s incessant turning inside out, passing from the interiority of thinghood to the exteriority of signification. In the thing, différance comes to pass.

 

Derrida’s point is that this passage to the outside is not locatable outside of the thing itself, but “is” in the excess of the thing over its being. Would it be enough to say that things and signs partake in the movement of différance, in the same disquietude of non-adequation and non-identity that magically guarantees adequation and non-arbitrary character of the sign by way of retracing the dispersion of the thing and rejoicing in a more sophisticated version of the vulgar “correspondence theory of truth”? Neither a perfectly symmetrical correlation of signs and things, nor a secondary derivation (Derrida, “Différance” 9) of the former from the latter avoids the betrayal of différance. On the contrary, in a certain primary secondariness or secondary primariness, signs take the place of things that have no place of their own. (Still, it would be inaccurate to equate the thing with pure distance and différance outside of the mediations provided by the bracketing of interiority and of the copula. Interpreting Nietzsche, Derrida muses that “perhaps woman is not some thing which announces itself from a distance, at a distance from some other thing . . . Perhaps a woman–a non-identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum–is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance” (Spurs 49). It is not that the thing is too figural or too(self-) identical to stimulate the opening of a chasm; rather, the chasm opened by the thing, between things, contains an ineluctable reference to measurable distances in space suspended inside the brackets.)

 

What the thing’s turning inside out implies for phenomenological research is an inversion of that “fundamental property of consciousness” which Husserl calls “intentionality.” The sole aim of the meaning-intention is an object or, in Derrida’s words, “meaning [bedeuten] intends an outside which is that of an ideal ob-ject” (Speech 32). But in our relation with things, the direction of “aiming at” changes. The Thing, suddenly capitalized in spectrality, aims at us, looks at, and concerns us (“Cette Chose nous regarde” [Specters 6/26]⁷) without offering itself to our gaze. The “visor effect” (l’effet de visière), the sheath for the skull behind which the inapparent Thing appears and which Derrida borrows from Shakespeare, is etymologically associated with the French viser–to aim at, or to intend. The inversion of Husserlian intentionality traverses the history of twentieth-century phenomenology that grounds the Derridian approach. If the face (visage) of the other in Levinas is read in the context of this phenomenological heritage, then both the visor and the visage of the Thing and of the other translate intentionality into haunting, first, when “we” become its intended target–the destination or the horizon of its look–and, second, if the location from which it is launched remains indeterminate. Likewise, in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception things not only “display themselves” to me but also “see” and guarantee the permanence of those dimensions of other things that are hidden from my view (79). Besides inverting the structure of intentionality, what these approaches have in common is the implicit deconstruction of the distinction between the categorial and the existential analytics developed in Being and Time. Unlike Heideggerian “entities [that] are present-at-hand within the world” but are “worldless in themselves” (Being 81), Derrida’s thing occurs “within” the world and, at the same time, has a world of its own. This will be articulated most clearly in Of Spirit where the Heideggerian distinction crumbles in light of the ambiguous location of the “living thing,” or the animal (48-54).

 

There are no fulfilled intuitions evidentially supported by the presence of objects to consciousness here, in this space inundated with impossible possibilities and flash-like breakthroughs of exteriority that “comes to us from the region of transcendence and death,” as young Levinas likes to put it. Undeniably, the thing and, first of all, the jug is nothing to be filled or fulfilled. An inverted intention bypassing intuition, it is already full of itself in itself and beside itself. Full to the point of indifferent, unenjoyable pleasure. Full without measure, “at the bottom without bottom” of an abyss (Derrida and Thévenin 138). From the pages of a different work, another voice of Derrida anachronistically retorts, “Write, if possible, finally, without with, not without but without with, finally, not even oneself” (“Truth” 17). The writing of “without with” is the writing of a broken articulation, the writing of the hinge (Derrida, Of Grammatology 65-73). Refusing to admit any elements of relationality or, even, to be negatively defined by this refusal, the abyssal thing stands, perhaps, for sheer non-oppositionality, a radicalized subject, and a plentitude that departs from the objective “with without” (I now translate Gegen as toward-against to accommodate both renditions of the German word) and from oneself. Derrida has never been closer to and farther apart from Heidegger, who concludes that the non-objective thing “stands on its own as self-supporting” (“The Thing” 165). What the quality of self-supporting ultimately aims at is the pure without, the negation of the oppositional-negative dependence embodied in the object, and, correlatively, the affirmation of the thing’s autochthonous position. Conversely, without with denotes that which “stands on its own” only inasmuch as it is supported by the other, “without with . . . not even oneself.” Both Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing’s release from the confines of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing on the abyss.

 

It is in this faint light that I want to read the opening line of the “Parergon” section of Truth in Painting–“it’s enough to say: abyss and satire of the abyss”–the line that hints at the satire of satire, the satisfaction of satire (without) with the bottomless bottom of the thing amidst patient and obstinate suffering that bears things in silence (Derrida and Thévenin 137). “It’s enough to say” this cryptic expression once and anew each time. Suffice it to say that this will be an event of saying: unrepeatable, non-idealizable, unobjected, yet touching the abyss, immediately relevant to the word and the thing thus named. That is why the first line of “Parergon” hangs on the outer edge of the first internal frame of the text, immodestly enclosing the empty space drawn from the abyss.

 

IV

 

Metaleptically and in a paraphrase, it’s enough to say: the thing and satire of the thing. For the thing contains, without containing anything in its bracketed interiority, the force of animation, transformation, and decomposition. The thing works, and the animated work becomes (another) thing. Inhabiting without residing (Derrida, Specters 18/42), effacing itself in the apparition, it spatializes its habitation, our habitation, in a way that is foreign to the one-dimensional object that merely resides, without inhabiting, in opposition to us. Does the thing give space without taking any for its multiple surfaces and dimensions that are more unobtrusive and inconspicuous than the flatness of the objective screen?

 

In addition to giving space, the thing also temporalizes, gives time: “The thing gives, demands, or takes time” (Derrida, Given Time 41).⁸ To continue accounting for the “properties” of the thing and of the object, I suggest that the latter, at least in its ideal form, is driven by a frustrated and a priori thwarted urge to withhold time and to maintain the fantasy of eternal presence in the indefiniteness of repetition. One of the most compelling, properly satirical elements underlying this difference is that the mute resistance of the object is indebted to the thing, which gives time and, therefore, gives (objects, among other “things”). Evidently, the thinghood of the thing that, as something “un-conditioned (un-bedingtes) . . . conditions the thing as thing” in Heidegger (“What” 9), may explain the unconditionality of the gift, of forgiveness, of hospitality in Derrida. (For the latter, however, the conditioned “thing” is made possible only in the mode of impossibility: the impossible gift, forgiveness, and so forth.) In turn, the object acquires its potency, its force of resistance by proxy, from a proximate distance to the non-oppositional animation of the thing and the positional situation of the subject. The objective “against” stands for “against-toward.”

 

What does Derrida mean when he writes that “if things run as though on wheels, this is perhaps because things aren’t going so well, by reason of an internal infirmity” (“Truth” 78)?⁹ Does he not imply that this thingly “hastiness” is an upshot of an accelerated temporalization whereby the thing gives, demands, and takes less time, or almost no time at all? Will the things so sped up give us an impression that they happen in the Augenblick, the blink of an eye that transfigures them into ideal objects, into the prostheses sustaining their “internal infirmity”? If the things run along in haste, this is not because they are able to somehow “cover” and open up more space in a shorter stretch of time, but because they betray their own demand for temporalization and refuse to give. The more animated they are, the faster they work–the closer they come to being unworkable “by reason of an internal infirmity” which, as we know, is constitutively open to exteriority in things that are always beside themselves in themselves. The thing’s infirmity un-sublated in any prosthetic device is attached to the inner frame posited and deposited by the work that seeks to counteract–and that just succeeds in aggravating–this infirmity.

 

When “things run as though on wheels,” they reveal their deranged (dérangée) verve or madness. And the margins of Derrida’s (but not only Derrida’s) texts augment this derangement. At several crucial junctures in Specters of Marx, the textual voice addresses itself directly to the reader. “Let us accelerate things [Accélérons],” says Derrida before outlining the madness of the new “ten plagues” that haunt contemporaneity (80). “As we must hasten the conclusion, let us schematize things [schématisons],” he implores toward the end of the book (169). We must not rush to decide on what is consequential here; what is a “mere” accessory to the argument; what is an idle, colloquial, and highly idiomatic turn of phrase; what is an imprecision in the translation of the pleas “accélérons” and “schématisons” lacking any specific objects of acceleration and schematization; and what belongs to the “core” of the exposition. For the prospects of the text feeding on the increased tempo and rhythm of the thing are not definitively excluded.

 

Consider, for example, Marx’s tried and tested solution to the problem of conjuration: “to close out his accounts . . . he counts things up” (Derrida, Specters 142). And Derrida? Does he not “accelerate” things by counting down the new plagues and arriving at the same number (ten) as Marx? Of course, Derrida does not simply force things into a new tempo of giving less, but discovers the acceleration immanent to the things he counts in the decontextual context of globalization and commodification. Significantly, the commodity-thing (the object-thing) does not admit any other treatment. Materiality-cum-number, “sensuous non-sensuous,” “a ‘thing’ without phenomenon, a thing in flight” (150), it contracts and reduces the circle to a point, gives expression to circulation time striving to zero (as Marx observes in the second volume of Capital), demands less time for production, is instantaneously destroyed in consumption, dreams up its Augenblick in the evanescence of purely financial transactions carried out in the global communication networks, all the while becoming madly unworkable and masking its internal infirmity, i.e. the relatively non-commodified production of the labor force. At the summit of madness, this “thing” demands term and temporalization, gift and restitution (Derrida, Given Time 40), that is, surplus value and fair remuneration, but also forecloses the term it demands, erases the trace of différance that orders it, and lapses into the routines of objective ideality desiring the eternal present of capitalization. Commodity fetishism is the capitalist style, its very stylus whose dual function it is to imprint and to scratch out the trace of justice, protecting “the thing itself” only on the condition that its thinghood should be forgotten: “on the condition at least that it should not already be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of the difference” (Derrida, Spurs 39).

 

Counting things is a strategy justified by the historical incarnation and self-effacement of the thing in the commodity form, but the satire of the thing makes inaccuracy unavoidable. Like no one else, Derrida knows that the thing is more than one and, more precisely, that there are always “three things of the thing [trois choses de la chose]”that haunt the haunting (Specters 9/29).¹⁰ So, the ten plagues and the ten manifestations of ideology are actually thirty–at least thirty–if we are willing to correct the forgetful calculus that counts the thing as one and naked object, to correct it, precisely, through the explication of (a) mourning, (b) productive or generative historicity (“generations of skulls or spirits”), and (c) work in each of the plagues and in each of the manifestations. One may rightly object that the improved re-accounting protocols are as useless as their simple-minded counterpart, if, to paraphrase Derrida, everything in the thing impels the number and the annulment of the number. With this improvement, we have not yet gauged the axiom of the non-numerical infinity of the gift, postulating that “the direct ‘object’ [what is the nature of direct oppositionality suspended in the indirection of quotation marks?] of the act of ‘giving’, . . . the given of the giving alter[s] radically the meaning of the act each time” (Derrida, Given Time 49). In this case, the most attentive and scrupulous of accountants will find herself faced with the dilemma of Carroll’s Alice, who, after desperately trying to sum up the sequence of “one and one and one and . . . ” proposed by the White Queen, had no other choice but to respond, “I don’t know. I lost count.” She loses count on account of the complexity hidden in the linear-sequential “and one” which means the exact opposite (“and not one”): the more than one in one, the non-identity of the one, the absolute separation between the one and the other (one), and so forth. In other words, the thing is never “just this one,” as it is for Heidegger.

 

The satire of the Thing irritates its proper-improper name. Why “the Thing”? The first clue to this capitalization ties together the sanctioned multiplicity of contradictory translations–the multiplicity “internal” to the Thing–and “the signature of the Thing ‘Shakespeare’: to authorize each one of the translations” (Derrida, Specters 22). By the same token, though steering toward the impropriety of the proper name, the thing’s inability to procure and to secure a proper name, Derrida refers to “some ‘Thing'” that “will have frightened and continues to frighten in the equivocation of this event,” the event of Marxism (104). The signature of the Thing “Marx,” however, refuses to authorize the legacies and bastardized political translations that call themselves Marxist and that break the name and the Thing thus named into an array of one-dimensional objects. (As Derrida will not fail to note upon reading Blanchot, there are always three “voices” of Marx. Lest each of the voices is heard, Marxism is bound to linger in one of the three -isms of economic determinism, detached scientism, or political nominalism. And, therefore, the rules of multiplying this Thing, like any other, by three necessarily apply here as elsewhere.)

 

The feigned signatures, the only possible signatures, of the Thing proliferate to such an extent that its inscription in quotation marks is supplemented with a more radical strategy of equating it with the exact opposite, the Athing: “Nominalism, conceptualism, realism: all of this is routed by the Thing or the Athing [la Chose ou l’Achose: the difference between the two is, again, entirely graphic] called ghost” (138, emphasis added). But both in the oral and in the conceptual registers, this opposition does not subsist as an opposition, for, if it did, it would have immediately transformed the thing into another object. Which means that, all the more imperceptibly, the thing indistinguishable from its opposite loses itself (its thinghood) in objectivity. It is only graphically that the non-identity of the Thing “itself” is exposed, but the price paid for this exposure is a ghostly incarnation of the name in the nameless (the routing of nominalism) and, again, of the thing in the object. Cited directly, without detours, head-on, the indeterminate spatiality of thinghood passes into the most rigid and determinate opposition of objectivity.

 

V

 

The passage of the thing into the object unbrackets the interiority of the thing, unhinges its (unhinged) deposition beside itself, and reverses the process in which it turns inside out. Derrida’s word for this reversal is “invagination”–not a total incorporation of the remainder inside something which is no longer a thing, but “the inward refolding of la gaine [the sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket” (“Living On” 97). The object does not internalize the thing, for, should it do so, it will have instantaneously lost its flat objectivity in the volume obtained by proxy from that which it will have swallowed up. Inversely, turning the thing “outside in” without decisively crossing the border, without reducing non-identical excess, the object will resemble more and more a crumpled screen, an uneven surface that hampers direct reflection and interrupts the monotony of negativity. The subject is then faced with abstruse, non-idealizable objectivity which “makes sense” exclusively in the modality of not-giving something it will never contain.

 

The satirical trappings of the thing overlaid with its invagination in the object yield what appear to be slippages in Derrida’s texts–the rare moments when rigorous differentiation between the two collapses, when one is mentioned right after the other in uncomplicated chains of equivalence and substitution. On the surface of it, one of the slippages takes place where it matters least, that is, where Derrida puts the object and the thing to one side, in opposition to something else that annuls the gift, as in the first chapter of Given Time. He writes, “it suffices that the other perceive and keep, not even the object of the gift, the object given, the thing, but . . . its intentional meaning, for the gift to be annulled” (14). Need we say that to place the thing along with the object in opposition to . . . is to objectify the former straight away? Moreover, we have already established that intentionality, “intentional meaning,” differs according to the object and the thing to which it attaches itself. To put it crudely, whilst the thing and the other aim at me, I aim at the object. How, then, is the opposition between the thing and the object on one hand and “intentional meaning” on the other possible?

 

And what about the other who is the subject of this sentence? In line with the logic of “Violence and Metaphysics” buttressed with the haunto-logic of Specters of Marx, the intentionality of the other is allied with that of the thing in the relation without relation of haunting, in the conspiracy of conjuration, and in the apparition of the inapparent. No intentionality, including this one, can aim at something, at someone, at me who (that) is altogether present and who (that) is, therefore, kept in presence in the form of a repeatedly given ideal object, intuited in the fullness of presence. “It belongs to the original structure of expression to be able to dispense with the full presence of the object aimed at by intuition . . . . The absence of the object aimed at does not compromise the meaning” (Derrida, Speech 90). The absence of the object here does not automatically entail the absence of the thing; in fact, shortly thereafter, Derrida explicitly distinguishes one from the other (“Two identical expressions . . . may mean the same thing, and yet have different objects” [91].) It follows that when the present-absent thing aimed at is “the I” whom the other perceives, the gift of the thing is not annulled if the other regards the thing of the gift from the other side of his visor, in non-reciprocal reciprocity, qua other (the uniquely given, each time for the first time), not qua another given (object) of the giving.

 

To return to the route of invagination: commodities, in Derrida’s reading of Marx, assume the character of equivocally invaginated things. Taking the table that Marx gives as an example deposited near the beginning of Capital, Derrida points out that “this Thing which is no longer altogether a thing . . . unfolds (entwickelt), it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders” (Specters 152). This unfolding is not the only factor that negates the thinghood of “this Thing,” the thinghood that performs its endless routine of turning inside out, as usual. A whole new series of operations of refolding coterminous with this usual routine is in order. Derrida will group these operations under the title of “automatic autonomy” (153), of the paradoxical in-animation that commences, on the one hand, with the turning upside down of the table, the static repositioning of the table on its head, rendering it both useless and more stable, and, on the other, its sudden inspiration and deposition, driving it to the marketplace where it is ready to face other commodity-thing-objects. “The market is a front, a front among fronts, a confrontation” (155) inviting faceless, standoffish objects to a surface-to-surface relationship, to a faceless facing toward-against, but also requiring that they rush to it themselves, crawl on the inverted table top that will never function as a sheath for itself or for the value it is supposed to undergird, forget the security of their position and opposition, lose their grounding, execute a salto mortale, as Marx calls it, of valuation and exchange. The commodity is an object-thing in which the fundamental lines of demarcation between things and objects are contaminated, while commodification understood as invagination is a leap of the thing into the object, and back again.

 

The generative unfolding of the thing is immanent to its constitutive multiplicity. In the course of invagination that searches for the trace of this unfolding within the folds of the thing itself, in the course of the “mutilating excavation of things [excavation mutilatrice des choses],” one uncovers “the stratified layers, the abyssal series of sedimentations” (Derrida and Thévenin 125, 145). Conversely, the object accommodates multiplicity only on the condition that it shatters into a number of fragments or is torn to shreds and thus rendered “partial” (Derrida, Given Time 49). The thing is both more and less than the object. More than the object, its pluri-dimensionality has volume and “interiority,” with which it nonetheless does not coincide. Less than the object, it does not face us as such in infinite repeatability, but promotes “the mutilating excavation” historically replaying and contorting singular and abyssal sedimentations. Both more and less, the thing brings to a grinding halt the multiplicity of types but not the non-numerical multiplicity of “the gift,” whose meaning changes with every given. Invagination adumbrates this precarious margin, assesses the breadth of difference, and enforces the traversed distance between the thing and the object.

 

VI

 

A footnote at the end of The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud announces our problematic, inflecting it with a tinge of “auto-deconstruction.” “Will I have been forcing things? [Aurai-je forcé les choses?] Perhaps it will be thought that I have given too much weight to this word the subjectile . . . But first of all no reading, no interpretation could ever prove its efficacy and its necessity without a certain forcing. You have to force things” (156n80). Derrida proceeds to reflect on force and its role in interpretation, but has he not already, in the very gesture of self-criticism, forced “this word the subjectile” into a word and a thing, or rather, into things? This is the first possibility, but certainly not the last. For, what is it exactly that “will have been” forced into what? To the first possibility we might add the pernicious forcing of things into objects, into themselves, or into the thing in the singular; the invaginated forcing of aesthetic things (say, Artaud’s notebooks) into vocable media or words; the entwined forcing of chance into the necessity of chance and of inefficacy proper to the inexistent or anexistent subjectivity–into the efficacy of willful agency; the perverse forcing of the things that aim at me into the intentional coherence of my consciousness; the endless referential, reiterative, cited, and translated forcing of texts into other texts they are welcome to serve. There is also the force immanent to the things themselves, the force buried in the multifarious sedimentations that form them, the force awaiting “the mutilating excavation” that will faithfully manifest, denude, and betray the excavated “materials.” You have to force things only in this manner, both traversing the difference between forces and maintaining the pathos of distance in spite of, or thanks to, this traversal.

 

Notes

 

I owe a debt of gratitude to Edward S. Casey and to two anonymous reviewers who offered constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this article.

 

1. I am thinking of the Hegelian enunciation of the identity of difference and identity. And yet, the opposition between position and opposition only formally resonates with this enunciation. The content of this opposition refers to irreconcilability, rather than to Hegelian reconciliation.

 

2. Here I elaborate upon Derrida’s remarks on the “infirmity of the thesis” in The Truth in Painting; see 78.

 

3. On “iterability without iteration,” see Derrida, Limited Inc., 48.

 

4. In What Is a Thing? Heidegger claims that, in the broadest sense of the term, the thing “is every affair or transaction, something that is in this or that condition, the things that happen in the world–occurrences, events”; see 5.

 

5. The paradigm cases of this critique are Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf and Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, esp. Chapter II: “Does the Other Exist?”

 

6.”Esse is interesse; essence is interest” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence 4).

 

7. The second page number refers to the French edition of Spectres De Marx.

 

8. Also see Heidegger’s What Is a Thing?: “The question ‘What is a thing?’ includes in itself the question ‘What is Zeitraum (time-span)?’, the puzzling unity of space and time within which, as it seems, the basic character of things, to be only this one, is determined” (17).

 

9. It is worth noting that Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” (1971) begins with the acceleration immanent to tele-techno-communications, the reduction of distances in space and time, and the consideration of the thing as that which is near to us.

 

10. In contrast to the object of consciousness, things can “belong” only to the thing, folding the genitive form inside out: into the thing “itself” only as the multiplicity of things, that is to say, as the difference of forces constitutive of the thing “in” the thing.

 

Works Cited

 

• Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
• Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 1-27.
• —. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
• —. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
• —. “Living On: Border Lines.” Trans. James Hulbert. Deconstruction and Criticism. Eds. Harold Bloom et al. New York: Continuum, 1979.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. Of Spirit. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: U of Chicago P, 1979.
• —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962.
• —. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971. 163-86.
• —. What Is a Thing? Trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
• —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.