Category: Volume 28 – Number 3 – May 2018

Eric Aldieri is a graduate student in Philosophy at DePaul University. He works primarily on poststructuralist thought and feminist theory, focusing on convalescence and relational ontology.

Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology at The University of New South Wales, Sydney. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, body/technology division, because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. She recently edited a collection of essays on new materialism, titled What if Culture was Nature All Along? (2018, Edinburgh). She is the author of Quantum Anthropologies: life at large (Duke, 2011), Judith Butler: Live Theory (Continuum, 2006), and Telling Flesh: the substance of the corporeal (Routledge, 1996).

David Maruzzella is a PhD student in philosophy at DePaul University. His research focuses on the work of Louis Althusser, French Historical Epistemology, and contemporary readings of Spinoza. His translations and articles have appeared in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy and the Oxford Literary Review. A co-translated and edited volume of selected essays by Alexandre Matheron is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

Erin Obodiac received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at UC Irvine, the University of Leeds, SUNY Albany, and Cornell University. Her writings address the conceptual antecedents of machinic subjectivity as well as the nascent technosphere that ushered in our geologic era, the anthropocene. As a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, she began the research project “Robots at Risk: Transgenic Art and Corporate Personhood,” which explored the role of automata in the genesis of cinematic animation and contemporary biomedia. As a Mellon Fellow, Obodiac developed this project as the book manuscript The Transhuman Interface, proposing that we use a lenticular lens to view cinema and the anthropocene as one emergence.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Bryant University, Rhode Island. He is the author of Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (State University of New York Press 2012) and is currently completing his second monograph, tentatively titled Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era, also to be published by SUNY Press. His work has appeared in Qui Parle, GLQ, Cultural Critique, New Formations, Theory and Event, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Most of his scholarship is available at bryant.academia.edu/TomRoach.

Astrid Schrader is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. She works at the intersections of feminist science studies, human–animal studies, new materialisms, and deconstruction. Her work explores questions of responsibility, care, agency, and temporality in scientific knowledge production; it has been published in the journals Social Studies of Science, Environmental Philosophy, differences and Catalysts: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She co-edited (with Sophia Roosth) a special issue of differences titled “Feminist Theory out of Science.”

Mauro Senatore is a British Academy Fellow at Durham University (UK). He is the author of several articles on contemporary French philosophy and of the monograph Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida (SUNY Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Henri Atlan: An Essay on the Deconstruction of Life.

Eszter Timár is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Hungary. Her work focuses on biodeconstruction and on the intersections of queer theory and deconstruction. Her essays on Derridean autoimmunity appeared in The Oxford Literary Review, InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, and Parallax.

Francesco Vitale is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno (Italy). His academic interests have focused on Derrida’s work since his PhD dissertation in philosophy on Derrida’s relation to Hegel (University Federico II of Napoli, Italy). Francesco Vitale is author of many essays on Derrida, published in Italian, English, French, and Japanese, and of two volumes published in English: Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (SUNY, 2018), The Last Fortress of metaphysics: Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of Architecture (SUNY, 2018).

Tom Roach (bio)
Bryant University

A review of Tuhkanen, Mikko. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. State U of New York P, 2018.

Early in Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire’s classic send-up of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysics (or perversions thereof), the windbag philosopher Doctor Pangloss explains the “sufficient reason” for his syphilitic condition. Responding to the naïve Candide’s inquiry, “Isn’t the devil at the root of it?” the good doctor declares: “Certainly not.… It is indispensable in this best of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting the West Indies, had not caught this disease…we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal” (30). Even as his nose rots away and his teeth blacken, the incorrigibly optimistic Pangloss clings to a belief in the pre-established harmony of this “best of all possible worlds.” In Voltaire’s rendering of a distorted Leibnizian worldview, everything—natural disasters, the Inquisition, grotesque bodily suffering, you name it—is for the best. The world has never been, and will never be, better; needing no improvement, things are, and will forever be…hopeless.

As I read Mikko Tuhkanen’s masterful survey of Leo Bersani’s oeuvre, The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani, Voltaire served as a mooring post. His critique of totalizing and totalitarian idealisms dragged me kicking and screaming back to Earth. This is a compliment to both Tuhkanen and, as if he needs it, Voltaire. Tuhkanen so convincingly traces Bersani’s philosophical roots to Leibniz that I found myself drifting into the metaphysical stratosphere, enthralled by the seamlessness and clarity of the author’s holistic vision of Bersani’s “onto-ethics/aesthetics.” Yet even in my intellectual revelry, Voltaire’s materialist ethics—grounded in labor and what we might now call sustainability (Candide‘s final words are “we must go work in the garden” (144))—nipped at me like a gadfly, prompting rude reminders of the historical atrocities informed by various speculative idealisms. In short, reading Tuhkanen’s original and virtuosic take on Bersani’s work was an intellectual high: it swept me up, it thrilled me, and I learned a great deal. At the same time, closing its covers felt like a cocaine crash; after soaring at such great heights, the rock-kicking solidity of terra firma hit hard.

“It has remained infrequently noted,” Tuhkanen writes, “that Bersani is not only a thinker of the ethical potential of solipsism and masochism—of ‘the antisocial’—but also, always, a speculative ontologist who wants us to find ways of training ourselves in other modes of being-in-the-world than self-annihilation” (164). This sentence, appearing in the final pages of The Essentialist Villain, distills Tuhkanen’s thesis: although Bersani may be best known for his contributions to queer theory—especially for the so-called antisocial thesis introduced in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and developed in Homos (1995)—he is first and foremost a philosopher, and he should be read as such. Tuhkanen’s inclusion of the word “always” is also telling. He argues that, since the publication in 1965 of Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art, Bersani has been formulating his singular onto-ethics/aesthetics. The philosopher himself more or less verifies this claim. In his 2013 preface to the second edition of Marcel Proust, Bersani writes, “all the later work is, in some ways, already included in the first study” (x-xi). Tuhkanen’s task, then, is to illuminate the often-obscured philosophical roots of Bersani’s intellectual trajectory and to track the conceptual consistency across his fifty-plus years of scholarship. Although Bersani’s scholarly interests range promiscuously from Assyrian art to astronomy to bareback porn, Tuhkanen finds a continuous thread, often hiding in plain sight, woven through Bersani’s diverse studies. That thread is Leibniz’s monadology.

Bersani, then, has worked from the get-go to flesh out what Tuhkanen describes as “homomonadology,” a speculative Leibnizian metaphysics predicated on an indivisible yet internally variegated essence. This essence is immanent and originary; it simultaneously manifests and re-manifests in the aesthetic experience. It is concretized in art, for instance, and sensualized in queer forms of sociability. In a Leibnizian-cum-Bersanian ontology, being is self-sufficient fullness. As a consequence, desire does not originate in lack, and progress does not depend on assimilating difference. “One way to describe Bersani’s entire oeuvre,” Tuhkanen notes, “is to say that it seeks other modes of our moving-in-the-world than that compelled by an originary lack” (5). According to Tuhkanen, homomonadology affords Bersani the conceptual framework to think beyond the dialectical sturm und drang of an anthropocentric psychoanalytic ethics grounded in lack. Homomonadology leaves in its wake a sadistic ethics of intersubjectivity and a masochistic ethics of self-shattering. What emerges is the Bersanian ethical subject: one that develops according to the rhythms of an impersonal, expansive narcissism, one that wants for nothing. In this onto-ethics, being moves from a centripetal retreat to a centrifugal extension to (re)connect with corresponding forms, a horizontal “drift of related forms towards each other in an immanent aesthetic field” (162). Through aesthetic encounters that diminish the power of the voracious ego (cruising, cloning, art), the subject becomes attuned to the connectedness—the “allness”—of the universe. Put succinctly, Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics rests not on the alluring enigma of difference (i.e., the Other), but rather on the appeal of an essential sameness that “tempts the subject with nothing that he does not already, in some form, have” (157).

This conceptual commitment to sameness makes Bersani anomalous in contemporary cultural studies. The philosophy of difference has dominated leftist critical thought since World War II, arguably as a response to fascist attempts to eradicate difference tout court. As a result, those invested in or working to revivify nondialectical, immanentist philosophical traditions (Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Antonio Negri) have frequently been sidelined if not skewered. Bersani’s quasi-outlier status in queer theory and cultural studies can therefore be attributed, in part, to his adherence to an “outsider,” non-Hegelian ontological tradition. Other thinkers associated with the antisocial turn in queer theory—even Lee Edelman, who champions the deadening role that queerness plays in the psychoanalytic dialectic of becoming—more often than not remain beholden to a Hegelian logic, be it Freudian, Laplanchian, Derridean, or Marxist. Bersani’s interventions thus cut deep because they refuse to invest in both difference and différance. When he declares that the goal of Homos (1995) is to “lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference” (7), Bersani is proposing not only a workaround to a divisive identity politics and an insipid multiculturalism; he is also announcing his allegiance to a nondialectical philosophical tradition that many at the time deemed fantastical, if not fascistic.

The Essentialist Villain is in the main an intellectual biography. With a refreshing emphasis on Bersani’s underexplored early scholarship, Tuhkanen works through Bersani’s oeuvre more or less chronologically to trace the philosopher’s intellectual development. Encounters with various thinkers clarify Bersani’s singular vision: Proust, Sigmund Freud (specifically, Jean LaPlanche’s reading of Freud), and, most surprisingly, Deleuze are identified as Bersani’s Holy Trinity. Although direct references to Deleuze are infrequent in Bersani’s scholarship, Tuhkanen claims that Deleuzean thought helped Bersani “locate[] in monadism the potentiality for an ontology of unrelated, singular beings” (30).

Tuhkanen is at his best when connecting the conceptual dots between Bersani and his interlocutors. With rigor and accessibility, a rare combination, he lucidly explains the key ideas of Bersani and many more. The subtitles of each chapter read in fact like a greatest hits of Continental philosophy and modernist aesthetics: Chapter One, “Homomonadology: Proust-Deleuze-Beckett-Blanchot”; Chapter Three, “Rethinking Redemption: Benjamin-Baudelaire-Nietzsche.” In each chapter, Tuhkanen reveals the sub-titular thinkers’ importance to Bersani’s philosophy. And while this setup might seem tedious—”Walter Benjamin argues x and Bersani rejects it because y“—it is a joy to behold the ease with which Tuhkanen explicates difficult theory. It is likewise a thrill to witness the fluency he demonstrates in the Western literary, artistic, and philosophical canon. Tuhkanen’s sophisticated genealogy of Bersanian queer theory is especially revelatory. He makes such a convincing case that Beckett’s ascetics and Baudelaire’s aesthetics are indispensable to Bersanian queer theory that I initially felt embarrassed that I hadn’t previously grasped this connection. In the end, I am grateful to Tuhkanen for helping me “re-categorize” my understanding; re-categorization is a crucial component of the Bersanian method, wherein thought undoes and recalibrates itself with unexpected additions. In my case, decades-old ideas about work I am quite familiar with opened onto new horizons. The Essentialist Villain not only made me long to read Bersani’s massive oeuvre from start to finish; it also ensured that I will never read him the same way again.

Which makes me, not unlike Voltaire, skeptical. As mentioned, Tuhkanen works hard to prove that the philosophical tradition Bersani is most indebted to is Leibniz’s. Although Bersani barely mentions Leibniz in his work, Tuhkanen asserts that the monad is the “crypto-concept” animating Bersani’s onto-ethics/aesthetics. Ulysse Dutoit may have been Bersani’s actual partner in writing the stunning Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998) and Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), among other books, but Leibniz, according to Tuhkanen, has been Bersani’s silent partner from the beginning. Indeed, in Tuhkanen’s hands Bersani’s oeuvre becomes almost a Leibnizian harmonious whole: each text is a monad offering a new perspective on a logical, legible universe; with each new Bersani publication, a connected totality comes into clearer focus. While some may view Bersani’s late-career re-categorizations of Freud and Proust as significant ruptures or productive discontinuities in the philosopher’s progression, Tuhkanen assures us in a somewhat Panglossian manner that everything is in its right place: recategorizations merely permit Bersani’s latent Leibnizianism to blossom (even “in his encounter with psychoanalysis, Bersani continues his conceptualization of monadism as a form of singularity” (61)). Everything Bersani touches, then, turns to monads. Put less snidely: although I wholeheartedly agree that Bersani should be celebrated and read as an important contemporary philosopher, Tuhkanen seems overinvested in tethering Bersani to Leibniz, and shaping Bersani’s oeuvre into a coherent Leibnizian whole. Almost like an auteur theorist revealing the signature stylistic features and hidden consistencies in a “genius” director’s films, Tuhkanen retroactively pins on Bersani an unconscious intentionality. As any good psychoanalyst can tell you, we always say more than we know, but at times I get the sense that Tuhkanen might be forcing Bersani to speak a language he is not wholly fluent in—or to which he is perhaps indifferent.

Granted, one task of the intellectual biographer is to situate a thinker in a scholarly context—that is, to reveal his or her dialogues with other thinkers, even if unwitting. However, Bersani’s supposedly secret, sotto voce conversations (especially with Benjamin, Deleuze, and, yes, Leibniz) sometimes seem more important to Tuhkanen than the direct engagements with the thinkers Bersani actually wrote about. For instance, although Bersani has spilled much ink over Foucault (see “The Gay Daddy” chapter in Homos, for starters), Tuhkanen claims that Deleuze is more important to Bersani’s edification. This claim makes sense only if the goal is to bind Bersani to Leibniz. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze wrote an entire book about Leibniz: The Fold is a meditation on monadology. To prove Bersani is Leibnizian at heart, Tuhkanen seems to exaggerate Deleuze’s influence and marginalize Foucault’s. Indeed, I’m not unconvinced that Tuhkanen’s fixation on the Leibniz-Deleuze-Bersani link is a Panglossian investment in ignoring material reality—literally, page upon page of Bersani’s writing on Foucault, among others—in order to make a theory stick. Further (and my Candide allusions end here), if Bersani is known for anything, it is for calling bullshit on trendy, under-interrogated theories: Judith Butler’s performativity, for one. In this sense Bersani is more like Voltaire, who has zero tolerance for sophistry, than the arguably sophistic Leibniz. Bersani’s wit—often distilled in brilliant opening salvos, such as “Rectum’s,” “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”—as well as his materialism—the fact that he grounds his onto-ethics in material practices—are likewise more Voltairean than Leibnizian. Although homomonadology is an original and rewarding interpretation of Bersani’s work, it fails to capture the Voltairean wit, skepticism, restlessness, and anti-salvationist down-to-earth-ness that are essential characteristics of Bersani’s scholarly persona.

But these are minor quibbles: Tuhkanen’s unpacking of Bersani’s influences, interlocutors, and his oeuvre itself does more than merely serve the purpose of argument. The book fills a lacuna in contemporary philosophy and opens up thrilling new possibilities for Bersanian queer theory. In the age of the neoliberal academy—when liberal arts departments are shuttered either because they are perceived as irrelevant to the accumulation of “real world” business skill sets, or because they are deemed inefficient due to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of measuring their course outcomes—at a time, moreover, when scholarly hoaxers seeking to de-legitimize queer and feminist scholarship prompt a crisis in the humanities at large,¹ a book like The Essentialist Villain is the new fuck you: its very existence is a proud middle finger to institutions, administrators, and academic con artists that work to make all knowledge production data-driven, measurable, business-friendly, sound-bitable, and “scientific.” The Essentialist Villain reminds us that solid, unorthodox, rigorous, and most importantly, speculative intellectual work is not only valuable in its own right, but is more necessary than ever.

Footnotes

1. I am referring here to Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who posed as women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS) scholars and submitted twenty fake articles to various journals in an attempt to prove that WGSS scholarship is “based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances” (qtd. in Schuessler).

Works Cited

• Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1995.
• —. Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 2010.
• —. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art. Second Edition. Oxford UP, 2013.
• Schuessler, Jennifer. “Hoaxers Slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals.” The New York Times, 4 Oct. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/arts/academic-journals-hoax.html. Accessed 11 March 2019.
• Voltaire. Candide, or Optimism. Translated by John Butt, Penguin, 1947.

David Maruzzella (bio)
DePaul University

A review of Herzogenrath, Bernd, editor. Film as Philosophy. Minnesota UP, 2017.

As its title suggests, Film as Philosophy seeks to recast the relationship between philosophy and film. Against the once-dominant psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of film, the fifteen essays in this edited volume attempt to displace the traditional hierarchy implicit in the philosophy of film in the wake of major figures such as Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Just as Engels famously urged that philosophical materialism be revised and revitalized in the wake of scientific discoveries, Herzogenrath writes in the introduction that “a new medium makes us think differently” and that thought can no longer be “said to be taking place within the confines of our skull, only” (vii). The profound transformations in thought provoked by cinema are the occasion for the essays in Film as Philosophy, all of which seek to answer the question “Is there something like cinematic thought, thinking-with-images?” (viii). The essays all elaborate and substantiate the claim that film is indeed capable of thought or thinking, and therefore of contributing to philosophical problematics in a distinctively cinematic way. Such a position was originally suggested by Stephen Mulhall, whose 2002 book On Film is quoted in the volume’s introduction:

I do not look at these films [the Alien quartet] as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. (4)

Whereas an earlier collection edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (2006), critically engages Mulhall’s notion of film as philosophy, Herzogenrath’s volume begins with and seems to presuppose film’s philosophical power. Each essay explores some aspect of this claim, either by reading individual films or by introducing the works of the major figures who have theorized the unparalleled philosophical capacity of the seventh art.

Though Herzogerath’s introduction to the volume is inspired by Deleuze, this hypothesis of film as philosophy, as distinct from the traditional philosophy of film approach, belongs both to analytic and to continental circles. Readers familiar with recent continental philosophy will recognize the elimination of the preposition “of” as the defining feature of Alain Badiou’s project of inaesthetics (treated by Alex Ling in his chapter on Badiou), which explicitly rejects being understood as yet another philosophy of art, and seeks instead to unravel the truths set to work in diverse aesthetic practices. Readers immersed in cognitivist and analytic debates in the philosophy of film will recognize the title’s explicit reference to the aforementioned debates of the early 2000s in large part sparked by Mulhall’s book as well as Paisley Livingston’s essay “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.” And yet this shift in film theory is, in some sense, an attempt to eliminate the need for film theory as such, or at least any film theory or philosophy that establishes a hierarchal relationship between the two disciplines. Indeed, it is a question of pluralizing philosophy, of bringing film and philosophy together

into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-encompassing referee to one of these disciplines. Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points. … toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—here, film—into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to ‘think’ and to assume an active role in the process of thought. (xii-xiv)

Film as Philosophy can also be seen as a kind of primer on fifteen important contemporary film theorists. However, the book’s organization tends to be a bit confusing as it both features essays by scholars about leading theorists like Rancière, Badiou, Deleuze, and Cavell, as well as texts that are seemingly “primary sources” written by film-philosophers such as Carroll and Smith where their own positions and previous work are summarized. Some of the essays give helpful introductions to lesser-known figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, Jean Epstein, and Raymonde Carrasco, while others shed new light on classic figures like André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. Other contributions feel more like traditional philosophy of film essays—Herzogenrath’s chapter interprets David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) as an instance of Deleuze’s notion of the Time-Image, and John Ó Maoilearca offers a Bergsonian reading of Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions (2003)—while some feel out of place, as in the chapter on Artaud’s scattered writings, which ultimately condemn film in a quasi-Platonic manner as “hijacking perception” (82).

Despite its stated intentions, Film as Philosophy is still divided by and structured around the debates that Mulhall’s book sparked in the early 2000s. Not all of the contributions take the necessary theoretical and rhetorical steps required to affirm the philosophical power of film, and in fact, many seem to deny it, whether implicitly or explicitly. Others fall back into more traditional readings of films as illustrations of philosophical theories without seeming to let the film itself to do the thinking.ⁱ To let film do philosophy—or at least to affirm its philosophical capacity—is certainly no easy task. Indeed, as Arthur Danto and more recently Robert Sinnerbrink have argued, the very task of philosophizing seems to necessarily presuppose the “philosophical disenfranchisement of art.”ⁱⁱ What then is the relationship of the philosophical text or the act of producing philosophical discourse to film? Is the philosophical predicated on the disenfranchisement of art, the image, and representation? In exploring the chapters that make up Film as Philosophy, it will be clear that these antinomies and antagonisms fundamentally structure philosophy’s relationship with its artistic others, and that film’s philosophical potential is still not completely evident when elaborated within the discourse of philosophy.

I want to pay particular attention in what follows to the book’s final three chapters as they best encapsulate the conflicting tendencies that currently structure the relationship between film and philosophy.

In On Film, Mulhall provocatively announces that the Alien and Mission Impossible films do not merely illustrate pre-existing philosophical theories, but rather think in the same way as philosophers.ⁱⁱⁱ Noël Carroll’s chapter on “Movie-Made Philosophy” begins by taking up Mulhall’s distinction: on the one hand, the illustrative approach argues that films illustrate philosophical theories that exist prior to and independently of the film; on the other hand, Carroll’s “movie-made philosophy” captures the possibility of film itself doing the philosophizing or philosophizing through the image. Carroll’s chapter affirms that there are at least “some cases of movie-made philosophy” (268), against the skeptical arguments forwarded elsewhere by Paisley Livingston, Murray Smith, and Bruce Russell. In his “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” Livingston claims that for a film to be considered philosophical it must not simply parrot or illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but rather the film must make a novel philosophical contribution, and that furthermore it must do so using exclusively cinematic means (i.e. non-linguistic means such as montage or technical-artistic means exclusive to film and the cinematic apparatus). Carroll renames these two components of the so-called “Bold Thesis” the “results condition” and the “means condition” (270). Yet, as Carroll shows, these two requirements or conditions lead to a self-defeating paradox wherein a film is expected to produce an original philosophical argument precisely without making an argument in the classical philosophical sense^iv, and sets an unrealistic expectation for philosophical texts: very rarely do philosophers do more than elaborate pre-existing theories, introduce subtle counter-arguments, or propose provocative thought experiments in a pre-existing discursive context. Not to mention that the conception of argument presupposed here excludes important philosophers like Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, who do not necessarily put forth traditional arguments. For Carroll, if we eliminate the unrealistically high expectations artificially imposed by the skeptics, we can easily say that a film like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) makes an original interpretative and cinematic addition to the Marxist theory of alienated labor, that experimental films such as Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970) pose ontological questions about the nature of film, and that a film like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) makes visible the phenomenological construction of temporality in human experience. Additionally, many films can be considered philosophical insofar as they can be interpreted as social criticism: Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman: 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) criticizes the alienation of the suburban housewife and her condemnation to domesticity (and explores the themes of sex work and feminine desire), implicitly staging a dialogue with Italian feminism and operaismo; Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) criticizes the casual racism of the white liberal and opens onto important themes and discussions in critical race theory (see Flory). By expanding the definition of what counts as philosophical, Carroll opens the door to the very real possibility that film might indeed produce philosophy beyond mere illustration, yet he nonetheless concludes by insisting that only rarely do films achieve the status of the philosophical (283).

In the context of this volume, Wartenberg’s chapter on Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour leans towards the skepticism that he typically criticizes (see his “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy”). The premise of Haneke’s film is simple: an elderly married couple face their finitude and mortality head-on as Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) suddenly falls ill, leaving her to the care of her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Georges promises to never commit Anne to a nursing home or send her back to the hospital, but when her condition worsens, he is forced to employ a nurse who visits their Paris apartment. In a poignant and brutal scene, Georges, seemingly unprovoked, suffocates Anne, killing her. Wartenberg sees “…Amour as making contributions to our understanding of the ethics of the process of dying,” but he argues “that it does not present a general justification for euthanasia, as some have asserted” (288). Yet we’re never told exactly who reads the film as making a general argument in favor euthanasia. For Wartenberg then, the film is a failed counterexample unable to achieve philosophical universality—the situation depicted in Amour is too specific, too particular, to be the basis of a general ethical theory. Amour, according to Wartenberg, is best understood as a realistic look at the inevitable process of aging and death, one rarely seen as a problem that a married couple must face together. Its philosophical contribution is that it shows this oft ignored aspect of marriage in excruciating detail. Unlike Cavell’s insistence on the romantic comedy of remarriage (treated in Chapter 9), Wartenberg sees Amour as exemplary in its depiction of marriage as an “ethical institution” (289).

Is Amour making a philosophical argument that, under extreme circumstances, it is morally justifiable to kill one’s spouse? That killing can be an act of love? I would contend that Amour need not be read as an attempt to make an argument that, according to Wartenberg, it ultimately fails to make. For Wartenberg, Amour‘s “argument,” which it presents cinematically, is that euthanasia is morally justified if a person’s dignity risks being lost: “When the only way to preserve the dignity of a person with a terminal illness is to kill them, then it is morally required that one do so” (302). Wartenberg suggests that we are led to interpret Georges’s action as moral because the film gives us ample visual and cinematic evidence of Anne’s loss of dignity: she is incapable of coherent speech, and is unable to wash or feed herself. In short, “we feel humiliated, as if we were somehow less valuable as human beings for being returned to an infant-like state of total dependence on others for even our most basic bodily functions” (294). Wartenberg is no doubt correct to observe that many of the film’s most difficult scenes depict Anne’s physical and mental decline in extreme detail. And Georges does seem to do his best, despite his old age and declining health, to keep Anne’s dignity intact. Furthermore, Georges is appalled by the way the healthcare professionals he employs objectify his wife, treating her mechanically and appearing indifferent to her cries of pain. They further humiliate Anne and threaten her dignity, leading him to fire a nurse who had years of experience because she aggressively brushes Anne’s hair and speaks sarcastically of making her beautiful again for Georges. Given this context, Georges’s decision to kill Anne is, for Wartenberg, the resolution of the contradiction between his inability to care for her—the most brutal scene of the film is not Anne’s death, but Georges slapping Anne as she cannot drink water from a sippy cup—and his honoring Anne’s wishes not to be put in a nursing home or be returned to the hospital. Neither he nor anybody else can care for her properly, therefore death before her dignity is completely lost is the only solution.

Suddenly, however, Wartenberg tells us that we have to do “more than interpret the film,” that “we need to assess the validity and generalizability of its claim that George’s killing of Anne was a moral act” (301). Amour provides us with sufficient context, which in turn “justifies” Georges’s passage à l’acte. But Wartenberg concludes that if the film seeks to “legitimate” (303) Georges’s actions, then it in fact fails to do so because the situation the film presents is too narrow, rare, and extreme to logically entail the generalizability of its thesis. Amour thus attempts to legitimate the position that Georges’s choice is the moral one, but fails to make a convincing case for the morality of euthanasia in general. Wartenberg writes:

So even as Amour enlarges our sympathetic understanding of what a marriage is, what sorts of obligations it imposes on its partners, and why it makes sense to view marriage as a paradigmatic ethical relationship, it does not offer a general defense of euthanasia as an ethical practice. (304)

But why force Amour to conform to this particular way of practicing philosophy? That is, why must the film be evaluated philosophically in this way? Because otherwise we would merely be interpreting it? Wartenberg then seems to repeat precisely what Carroll critiques: both a narrowing of the definition of the philosophical, and an attempt to force a film—which is not philosophical in this narrow sense (putting forward propositional truth claims and arguments to justify them)—to meet these impossible criteria. Pace Wartenberg, it could quite easily be argued that Haneke’s film, like all of his feature films, revolves around an unexplained and unjustified act of violence: the family’s sudden decision to commit suicide in The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s murder of the girl in Benny’s Video (1992), the shooting at the end of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the entirety of Funny Games (1997), Erika’s violent sexual fantasies in The Piano Teacher (2001), the anonymous videos and threatening drawings as well as Majid’s suicide in Caché (2005), the mysterious violence that plagues the village in The White Ribbon (2009), not to mention the brutal killing of animals in almost all of these films, including Haneke’s most recent film Happy End, which could be read as a loose sequel to Amour.^v Could Georges’s decision to kill his wife not fit one of Haneke’s larger thematic concerns? Wartenberg focuses on what he takes to be the centrality of human dignity because Haneke mentions the notion in a statement he made after a screening of Amour, but couldn’t one equally cite the same Haneke who said “I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity”? (Sharrett, 587). Thus by reading Amour as a failed attempt at making a cinematic argument for a universalizable ethical theory, Wartenberg is led, despite himself, to claim that Amour is in fact unphilosophical, that the philosophical is that discourse which operates at the level of universality whereas the film or work of art seems condemned to the very particularity that the philosophical brackets.

In the book’s final chapter, “Experience and Explanation in the Cinema,” Murray Smith summarizes and attempts to legitimize the cognitivist turn in film theory that he has long defended. Taking up Carroll’s earlier treatment of “the power of cinema” in his article by the same name, Smith argues that only a robust philosophical and scientific naturalism can explain “the distinctive experience it [film] creates” (308). Following Quine and Sellars, Smith’s analysis of film seeks to be continuous with the findings of the natural sciences. Naturalism entails a “substantive commitment to the study of all phenomena, including human behavior, as a part of the physically constituted, biologically evolved world, and a methodological commitment to the methods and standards of the natural sciences” (310). Smith goes on to summarize different aspects of the perceptual behavior of an audience member, arguing that the typical viewer moves from low-level perceptual experiences to more theoretical and hermeneutical processes of interpretation and analysis. Most of what goes on when we watch a film belongs to what Smith calls the “cognitive unconscious”: rapid and unintentional perceptual processes that help us experience films as meaningful and coherent. In other moments, our perceptual and cognitive predispositions explain why we often overlook or fail to see certain things on screen (315-316). A whole host of these impersonal and unconscious mechanisms structure and condition our experience: “seeing depth, seeing motion, failing to see edits and camera movement, and last, recognizing characters and attributing emotions to them. Each one of these can be illuminated and explained by considering the subpersonal mechanisms that make them possible” (317). In many ways, Smith suggests, our perceptual system fails and often misleads us. He explains that this is why so many viewers are “tricked” by a film like The Sixth Sense (1999); we unconsciously select what we see, and films often play with our capacity to catch these subtle editing tricks. Smith, following Carroll, suggests that these features are “generic,” that is, they can be found in any audience member (317). Yet on the basis of these generic features, we can also move to higher-level cognitive activities required for the interpretation and analysis of individual films.

Taking the science fiction film District 9 (2009) as his example, Smith argues that human audience members will be naturally led to recognize a kind of humanity and individuality in the film’s alien creatures. We are even able to make some sense of the alien’s emotional states through what Smith calls “situational understanding,” a process whereby we can attribute thoughts, emotions, and mental states to individuals or agents by gathering contextual information. Though humans are equipped to decipher the mental and emotional states of other humans, District 9 anthropomorphizes the alien creatures, allowing the audience to sympathize and identify with their struggles. Again, at a very low level of cognition, a typical audience member (this notion is never developed) can individuate characters, attribute states of mind and traits to these characters, and identify and respond emotionally to them. And yet human spectators are not simply immersed and enthralled by the film as the old psychoanalytic theories claimed; we are also capable of theorizing and thinking about it. Smith argues that situational cognition, joint attention, and our facial perception capacity “bridge” our lower level unconscious perceptual apparatus and lead to our higher-level abstract theorization and understanding of particular films (325). At these higher cognitive levels, we are able to take all of this information and make sense of the film, recalling our prior stock of knowledge about the social issues the film addresses (apartheid, racism, etc.). The central problem for cognitivist film theory is how to explain the uniquely human experience of film—our ability not only to process the images, but to make sense of them, to understand them—that is, to link our generic perceptual capacities to our higher-level theoretical acts:

We need a naturalistic account not only of our ability to see depth and motion on movie screens but also of our ability to investigate and theorize perception, to invent the technology of cinema, and to reflect on the nature of animal agency, personhood, and the kinds of society that humans create. (324)

Indeed, the cognitivist turn seems to be after nothing less than a cognitive theory of everything! And it is only by taking this route that we can arrive at what Smith calls (after Clifford Geertz) “thick explanations – explanations that seek to be as complete, multileveled, and unified as possible” (326). But just like Wartenberg’s essay, Smith’s contribution, at every point, shuts the door on the thesis of film as philosophy. Unwittingly reproducing a rather unsophisticated positivism, Smith denies film all philosophical power and originality. Philosophy, sutured to the natural sciences, simply summarizes and synthesizes the available scientific knowledge in an attempt to explain away our experience of the cinema as nothing but the result of neurons firing in our brain. As Carroll had already argued in his “The Power of Movies,” mainstream films are in some sense nothing other than those works of mass art best suited to the current state of the evolution of human perception and cognition, hence their widespread appeal to audiences all over the globe. The cognitivist approach is thus a better and more empirically reliable theory of the unconscious experience of film than the now tired psychoanalytic theories.^vi For Smith, film clearly does not philosophize; rather, philosophers do the philosophizing, but only when they take a back seat to cognitive science. Films are simply the object of the philosophy of film, which is in turn grounded in cognitive science.

Between Carroll, Wartenberg, and Smith, a whole set of contradictions, tensions, and conflicts arises. Even in Film as Philosophy, the contributors clearly do not share a common understanding of this turn of phrase that supposedly unites them all. Rather than uniformity, we see a constantly shifting set of positions that appear around this on-going attempt to eliminate the hierarchy wherein cinema remains an object for philosophy. Carroll, whose 1985 “The Power of Movies” is invoked by Smith (the arch-cognitivist in the volume), appears in this context to have the most robust conception of film as philosophy, while Wartenberg and Smith uncritically reproduce classical philosophical claims and positions, all the while believing themselves to be defending the philosophical power of film. The power dynamic between philosophy and film, if not between philosophy and the non-philosophical, clearly cannot be resolved in one fell swoop and is no doubt a debate still underway. Nothing less than the transformation of philosophy is at stake, but it will require the arduous philosophical re-enfranchisement of art, or perhaps its philosophical self-empowerment.

Footnotes

i. On this point, Wartenberg’s article “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy” provides some resources for avoiding the charge that a film is not truly philosophical if it merely illustrates a pre-existing theory.

ii. See Arthur Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art and Robert Sinnerbrink’s essay “Disenfranchising Film? On the Cognitivist Turn in Film Theory.”

iii. Mulhall’s claim is not unlike Cavell’s almost scandalous reading of It Happened One Night (1934) alongside Kant and Hume in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cavell’s thought is treated by Elisabeth Bronfen in her contribution to Film as Philosophy.

iv. As Smith and Wartenberg write in the introduction to their edited volume, Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, “If the purportedly distinctive contribution to philosophy made by a film can be paraphrased, then it is not unique; if it cannot be, then how could it be a contribution to the discursive discipline of philosophy?” (3) In other words, the film cannot make its philosophical argument in language nor be susceptible to being paraphrased in language after the fact since this would mean the contribution was linguistic and not exclusively cinematic. But Livingston worries that if the argument is not linguistic, than doubt arises as to whether it truly exists.

v. H. Peter Steeves’s “The Doubling of Death in the Films of Michael Haneke.” It would be worth investigating the relationship between Amour and Haneke’s latest film, Happy End, which does draw a loose connection to Amour. At one point the Georges character in Happy End tells his granddaughter that he was once led to make a decision that resulted in him killing his sickly wife, but that he does not regret it. This wouldn’t necessarily contradict my reading of Amour; in fact, Georges’s character in Happy End encapsulates, in particular his final actions, quite nicely the inexplicable violence in all of Haneke’s work, as does the granddaughter.

vi. And indeed this was the original intention of the famous volume Post-Theory, which sought to replace psychoanalytic film theory with cognitive theory on the grounds that only the latter is scientific.

Works Cited

• Carroll, Noël. “The Power of Movies.” Daedalus, vol. 114, no. 4, Fall 1985, pp. 79-103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20025011.
• —, and David Bordwell, editors. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. U of Wisconsin P, 1996.
• Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard UP, 1984.
• Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia UP, 1986.
• Flory, Dan. “Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 67-80.
• Livingston, Paisley. “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 11-18.
• Mulhall, Stephen. On Film. 2^nd ed., Routledge, 2008.
• Sharrett, Christopher. “The World That is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke.” A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann. Blackwell Publishing, 2010, pp. 580-90.
• Smith, Murray and Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Introduction.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 1-9.
• Steeves, H. Peter. Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding: Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art. State U of New York P, 2017.
• Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 19-32.

Eric Aldieri (bio)
DePaul University

A review of Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia UP, 2017.

The term queer theory is usually attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, who used it at a 1990 conference on gay and sexuality studies at UC Santa Cruz. Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner and others took up this theoretical torch and constituted an original nexus of queer theory, working out of Foucauldian and Lacanian traditions among others. Texts from Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) to Warner’s The Trouble with Normal (1999) were published in quick succession, endowing queer theory with an official seat in academia that has definitively outlived the 1990s. Since this initial renaissance in theory, however, scholars and critics have pronounced queer theory “dead” multiple times – so often, in fact, that it has become harder and harder to take each successive eulogy seriously. While the original interest in and shock factor associated with early iterations of queer theory has arguably died down, a new nexus of scholars has emerged, working at the crossroads of affect theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and decolonial theory, and infusing the original interests and methodologies of queer theory with newfound focuses on everyday life, sovereignty, pleasure, temporality, affect, and – perhaps above all – negativity. Mari Ruti takes these recent developments in queer theory as the starting point for her 2017 The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Her book serves at once as an exegetical introduction to contemporary debates in queer theory, a polemical critique of the assumptions that underpin the discipline and its rhetorical flare, and an original contribution to Lacanian scholarship. Praising, critiquing, and working with her many interlocutors – including Lee Edelman, Jasbir Puar, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Lynne Huffer, and Judith Butler – Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out serves as a pointed and honest introduction to the contemporary state of queer theory and its psychoanalytic cousins.

Ruti introduces her book by quoting Heather Love: “Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the vulnerable, the least presentable, and all the dead” (1). She situates this call to “resist gay normalization” on the side of queer theorists and activists who, in contrast to “mainstream lgbtq activists,” insist that normalization – particularly through institutions of Western liberal democracy – has promoted the erasure of queer lives and histories. In Ruti’s words, “queer theory’s stance of negativity offers a resounding No!” to neoliberal cultural tropes of positivity, inclusion, and domestication, “essentially rebelling against the sugarcoating and depoliticization of life, including queer life, in contemporary American society” (3). Ruti is largely aligned with queer theory’s general refusal of neoliberal capitalism’s invitation, but part of her critical impetus in The Ethics of Opting Out is to contextualize this No! – to show that it is a No! in response to particular biopolitical regimes of violence, exploitation, and alienation, and not a refusal of life itself. Thus, while Ruti operates under the assumption that most (if not all) contemporary queer theory advocates for some form of negativity, her exegetical task in The Ethics of Opting Out is to delineate precisely what forms of negativity are at work in the field, how they differ, and what stakes are involved in each form. Each chapter traces a series of ongoing debates in the field: relationality versus antirelationality, Lacan versus Foucault, white gay men versus “the rest of us,” constitutive lack versus circumstantial lack, and more. While Ruti insists that these differences provide an introductory map of queer theory texts since 2000, she is also clear that they are only meant to be used as guides. The topology of queer theory remains more complex than each differentiation initially implies – and perhaps one of the main takeaways from The Ethics of Opting Out is that these supposed binaries (which are broadly accepted by many scholars in the field, at least schematically) are far more delicate than one might initially assume. Each chapter contains exegetical, polemical, and original work, and Ruti maneuvers fluidly from one task to another. This makes her book readily accessible for first-time readers of queer theory, because the material is made immediately relevant and contextualized in an undecided, ongoing field of discourse. In chapter three, for example, she gives an overview of queer temporalities and utopianisms by restaging the debate between Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz, which took place through and after the publications of No Future (2004) and Cruising Utopia (2009) respectively. While Edelman finds that all utopianism falls into the liberal traps of patience, hope, and political investment, Muñoz insists on the future-oriented ideality of queerness. Rather than playing the role of disinterested moderator in this restaged debate, Ruti sides with Muñoz, claiming that “‘the future’ has never been the province of all children,” as Edelman’s critique of the Child seems to imply (91). Queer utopianism demands that queer and racialized children have a claim on and access to a future of their own. In short, only those who have a future are able to reject it as emphatically as Edelman does.

Ruti follows a similar pattern in chapter four, where Edelman again serves a primary role – this time in the debate between himself and Lauren Berlant in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013). Ruti traces the role of lack in queer theory by using this little book as a microcosm for larger disagreements between “white gay men” and “the rest of us.” If antirelational Lacanians like Edelman “tend to emphasize the constitutive role of negativity in human life” shaped by one’s originary alienation from the mother/from the real, then “those on the social side of the debate tend to focus on more circumstantial and context-specific forms of negativity, wounding, decentering, and suffering,” as Berlant does in Cruel Optimism (131). As a Lacanian scholar herself, Ruti appreciates Edelman’s emphasis on constitutive lack. Nonetheless, she is refreshingly frank in siding ultimately with Berlant, noting that “there is a willful blindness to Berlant’s basic point, namely, that there is a difference between life ‘not working’ in the ontological-existential (constitutive) sense and life ‘not working’ in the circumstantial (context-specific) sense” (137). Simply put, there is no reason why queer theorists (or anyone) should feel compelled to delegitimize one form of lack at the cost of the other. Both constitutive and circumstantial lack, universal and context-specific wounding play crucial roles in the everyday life of particular political subjects, and the two “are intimately related in the sense that it is often through circumstantial experiences of wounding that we are brought face to face with our constitutive wounding” (131).

While these examples offer the best exegetical-critical moments in The Ethics of Opting Out, Ruti’s accompanying polemics can rely on reductive versions of her interlocutors. If the rhetorical flare of queer theory is a critical target for Ruti throughout the text, it also seems as though she slips into a similar performative-imperative at certain moments. While deeply critical of Edelman throughout the book, Ruti remains generous and delicate in her representation of his work (perhaps because they share a Lacanian background). The same cannot be said in relation to her treatment of Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, and Jack Halberstam. In chapter one, Ruti portrays Puar as the Deleuzian representative in queer theory. This characterization is not too far off; Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages explicitly works within a generally Deleuzian framework of affect and assemblage. However, Ruti takes Puar’s analysis of the terrorist body in Terrorist Assemblages to “elevate the suicide bomber… to an icon” of queerness (32). While Puar does recognize the fact that suicide bombing “is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern” (218) – which, I think, is an almost inarguable characterization – she by no means idealizes this method of communication. And while the terrorist body is constructed and represented as queer due to neo-colonial and orientalist modes of discourse that have gained new life with the advent of homonationalism, I do not take Puar to claim that the terrorist body should represent a queer ideal of resistance. In other words, I believe perspectivalism is at work in Puar’s book, and Ruti fails to consider that in her polemic (at least in print). Instead, she interprets descriptive moments prescriptively, hindering a robust understanding of Puar’s stakes and framework and causing her critique of Puar to remain on the surface level. While Ruti’s polemical critique of Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure is more precise, similar concerns arise in relation to what should be read prescriptively, and what should be read descriptively. Perhaps this ambiguity is more Halberstam’s failure than Ruti’s, but polemical style nonetheless comes at the cost of intellectual generosity in this section.

Ruti’s treatment of Judith Butler in chapter two is similarly lacking. While many thinkers have reasonably critiqued Butler for what they see as an over-emphasis on relationality, Ruti goes so far as to claim that Butler maintains a “rejection of everything that even hints at agency” (55), and “pathologizes opting out of relationality even in cases when it is the least pathological course of action,” such as when one finds oneself in an abusive relationship (82). Both of these characterizations tend to reduce Butler’s performative and ethical theories to caricatures, and neither seriously contends with the thought of a vastly influential figure in queer theory. The other polemical critiques in the book are humble, precise, and refreshing. Slowing down the momentum of posthumanist influences on queer theory, Ruti questions some of the inherited tropes of the discipline – do we really want to abolish the subject completely? Are rights and enlightenment reason all bad for queer people? Is our “neoliberal” moment “uniquely traumatizing”? And can’t we think of alternative potentialities for a new universal ethics? Ruti doesn’t disagree with most of the critiques of rights discourse, reason, or universality. She gives fair attention to the maladies wrought by these systemic norms. But she also illustrates how these institutions have helped queer people in the recent past, and makes a case for preserving certain aspects of them. Once again, the takeaway is that the No! of queer theory, even when axiomatic, still needs to be justified every now and then – or else we risk making antinormativity into a new norm. Pressing this node, Ruti’s main critical intervention proves both timely and important.

Finally, nestled within the exegetical and polemical moments of The Ethics of Opting Out is a clear, provocative, and well-timed contribution to Lacanian theory. With Edelman as her foil throughout, Ruti looks to a number of less-read seminars to develop a Lacan of creativity and relationality (particularly seminary VII on the ethics of psychoanalysis, to which the book’s title may allude). While queer theory is most familiar with Edelman’s Lacan, Ruti seeks to provide an alternative reading that nicely complements readings by other “relational” theorists, such as the field’s Foucauldians. (She eventually argues that the Lacanian real is similar to Foucault’s notion of an archaic self, and thus, that the separation between queer theory’s Lacanians and Foucauldians is largely counterproductive.) She begins by taking Edelman to task for his reading of Antigone’s “act” as a purely selfish act of suicidal jouissance. Instead, Ruti notes that Antigone “defies Creon not for her own sake but for the sake of her dead brother Polyneces” (55), beginning to bridge the gap between Butler’s Levinasian ethics and Edelman’s solipsistic anti-ethics. Ruti then highlights the gifts that alienation grants us by (dis)placing beings into the symbolic order. Of course, we become detached from the primal Thing, and can only fully reunite with it through a suicidal act of transgression, but we also gain from this separation: the creative power of language, subjective identification, the dynamics of joy and frustration inherent to desire, and more. Ruti looks toward Lacan’s later seminars in order to suggest that he “no longer sees language and jouissance as mutually exclusive” at this stage in his thought, and instead suggests “that the signifier transmits jouissance to the extent that it carries traces of the real” (117). Our constitutive lack prompts signification, and thus prompts us to carry traces of the real into the symbolic order in the form of “modified” or sustainable jouissance. If Edelman’s Lacan insists on a pursuit of jouissance through a celebration of the death drive, then Ruti raises the possibility of a “modified jouissance” implied by desire, language, art, and the mundane objects that each pursues (74). In other words, if Edelman’s Lacan insists on a complete reunification with the primal Thing, Ruti counters this insistence by looking toward “object echoes” of the Thing – bits of jouissance that prove less intense but far more sustainable through the trenches of intelligible, everyday life. For Ruti, “Edelman’s attempt to purge Lacanian theory of its relational elements leads to an overvalorization,” and eventual masculinization, “of the subject’s solipsistic jouissance” at the expense of these modified yet sustainable attachments (81).

Later, Ruti brings the psychoanalytic thought of Herbert Marcuse into conversation with Lacan in order to explicate the (always potentially) critical aspects of desire. While Edelman dismisses desire as catering to the demands of capitalism (consume and never be satisfied!), Ruti notes that “one could just as easily say that desire takes a critical attitude toward the world precisely by wanting ‘something more,’ by refusing to be satisfied with the status quo of the here and now” (101). In these terms, the trick of Lacanian analysis would be to free desire from its capitalist prison, and allow it to pursue the object-echoes made possible by relationality, which constitutes part of Lacan’s goal in formulating an ethics of psychoanalysis. Amidst the specifics of Lacanian theory, Ruti clearly defines terms for readers unfamiliar with Lacan’s vocabulary, including concepts such as “sinthome,” “subjective destitution,” and “quilting points.” The Ethics of Opting Out is suited both for veterans and for newcomers to the fields of queer theory and psychoanalysis.

While The Ethics of Opting Out includes some reductive representations and unwarrantedly polemical critiques, it also serves admirably as both a general introduction and a significant, original contribution to a field of study. Ruti’s clarity, frankness, and humor shine through, and should make The Ethics of Opting Out recommended reading on any queer theory syllabus.

Works Cited

• Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007.

Mauro Senatore (bio)
Durham University

Abstract

This article tests the hypothesis that the history of life can be told only by assuming the ultra-transcendental conception of life as leaving a trace in the world. It draws together two moments in the work of Jacques Derrida that are chronologically distant and yet develop that hypothesis and its consequences: the deconstruction of the phenomenological concept of consciousness, and the deconstruction of the Cartesian narrative of life. The article demonstrates that the first moment allows us to elaborate the ultra-transcendental conception of life presupposed by phenomenological consciousness, which offers new ways to analyze biological questions of the origin and evolution of life, and ethico-political questions of responsibility.

There [in the trace] we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined as “non-living” up to “consciousness,” passing through all levels of animal organization.–Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

I

In the passage from Of Grammatology (1967) chosen as the epigraph of this essay, Jacques Derrida draws a decisive implication from his formalization of the concept of the trace. The trace, as the most general possibility of repetition and thus as the common root of passive retention and active recollection, calls into question the distinction, if not the abyss, conjured up by metaphysics between the living, qua consciousness, and the non-living, qua animals and machines, or animal-machines. This implication opens up the history of life, as leaving a trace in the world, and the history of its evolution, from the most elementary forms of living to consciousness. Therefore, Derrida argues, the deconstruction of metaphysics through the formula of the trace allows us to liberate the history of life: we can tell this history only by starting from the trace.

In the pages that follow, I put this argument to the test and point to its repercussions—for example, for ethico-political questions of responsibility—by focusing on two key moments in Derrida’s work: the deconstruction of the phenomenological concept of voice and the deconstruction of the so-called Cartesian conception of human auto-relation (autodeictic autotelicity). These moments are chronologically thirty years apart and yet, as we will see, are interwoven by Derrida himself in the act of sketching his intellectual autobiography.¹ As my reading develops, we understand that the liberation of the history of life is a consequence of the deconstruction of the metaphysical project at stake in phenomenology, which consists in dissimulating the entanglement of consciousness and the trace. From this deconstruction, it follows that we can only think of consciousness as an effect of the trace and that we must reinscribe within the liberated history of life metaphysical distinctions such as those between reaction and response, or between automation and freedom, which in turn hinge on the metaphysical concept of consciousness.

II

Let us start by examining how, since his first deconstructive work, Voice and Phenomenon (1967; hereafter VP), Derrida allows himself to tell the history of life as leaving a trace in the world through the deconstruction of the phenomenological concept of voice.² This work engages a deconstructive reading of chapter one of Logical Investigations 1, in which Husserl elaborates the phenomenological concept of sign. Derrida takes this text as a privileged example for showing that the phenomenological critique of metaphysics constitutes the historical achievement of the originary metaphysical project.³ As he suggests, we can identify the central motif of this critique as the denunciation of metaphysical perversions in the understanding of the authentic mode of ideality. For Husserl, ideality consists in the form in which the presence of the object can be repeated indefinitely as identical to itself. By definition, this form does not exist (it is non-real, unreal, etc.) to the extent that it does not depend on an empirical or worldly existence.⁴ Now, Derrida goes on, the possibility of the ideal form and thus of the indefinite repetition of the presence of the object as identical to itself can be secured only in the presence of the living present or the self-presence of transcendental life. Therefore, for Husserl, the latter constitutes the ultimate form of ideality. Derrida summarizes this convergence of ideality, the living present, and transcendental life as follows:

So that the possibility of this repetition can be open idealiter to infinity, it is necessary that one ideal form secures this unity of the indefinitely and the idealiter: this is the present, or rather the presence of the living present. The ultimate form of ideality, the one in which in the last analysis we can anticipate or recall all repetition, the ideality of ideality is the living present, the self-presence of transcendental life. (VP 5-6)

The phenomenological concept of consciousness is structurally linked to the claim for an authentic mode of ideality. As the ideal form grants the presence of the object to consciousness, consciousness is determined by the very possibility of ideality and, ultimately, by the presence of the living present.⁵ Difficulties arise when Husserl allows that the ideal object is the historical product of a constitutive act of language and that consciousness consists in the possibility of this act. Does it follow from this that the element of consciousness and the element of language are indiscernible, and thus that the presence of transcendental life is originarily divided by the worldly and empirical synthesis of language? In Derrida’s words, “is it not the case that their indiscernibility will introduce non-presence and difference (mediacy, the sign, referral, etc.) right into the heart of self-presence?” (VP 13). Derrida argues that Husserl addresses this difficulty by appealing to the concept of voice (voix). However, he explains, this difficulty does not represent a weakness immanent to the Husserlian system. Rather, although Husserl shares the appeal to voice with the whole history of metaphysics, his concept of phenomenological voice brings this history to its most refined achievement. Phenomenological voice, in fact, does not seem to require a worldly synthesis and thus would protect transcendental life from the threat of non-presence and difference implicit in the indiscernibility of language and consciousness. Derrida formalizes the Husserlian solution to metaphysical difficulty par excellence as follows: “Husserl will not recognize an originative affinity with the logos in general in the sonorous substance or in the physical voice, or in the body of the voice in the world; rather the originative affinity will be recognized in the phenomenological voice, in the voice in its transcendental flesh” (VP 14).

Derrida draws this concept of phenomenological voice from Husserl’s well-known distinction between Anzeichen, the so-called index/indication, the sign that does not express anything because it does not convey meaning (Bedeutung), and Ausdruck, or expression.⁶ Voice designates the phenomenological situation in which this distinction is accomplished and expression is no longer entangled with indication. Given the irreducibility of this entanglement in worldly or empirical communication—for reasons that will appear evident in a moment—this situation can only be found “in a language without communication, in a monological discourse, in the absolutely lowest register of the voice of the ‘solitary life of the soul‘” (VP 19). Derrida explains that the condition for this situation is a certain relation to the ideal object, “the relation to the object, the aim of an objective ideality, over and against the intention of meaning [vouloir-dire], over and against the Bedeutungsintention” (VP 19). This relation constitutes the phenomenological project in its essence—that is, the phenomenological idea of transcendental idealism.⁷ Disentangled and pure expression secures the exteriorization—still within consciousness and not in the world—of this relation to the object. There, as Derrida puts it, the voice animated by intention expresses the intended object.⁸

Derrida offers a close reading of the progressive reductions of indication by means of which Husserl delimits the access to pure expression. As these reductions develop, he points out that indication designates the fact that the animating intention present to itself in transcendental life (namely, psychē or spirit) goes out of itself and thus relates to non-presence, difference, and, ultimately, death. But this relation to death accounts for the very process of signification and, more precisely, of writing, the latter being the sign that works beyond and thanks to the absence of its animating intention. By reducing indication and thus, as we anticipated, by appealing to pure expression and phenomenological voice, Husserl wishes, according to Derrida, to dissimulate the relation to death that is at work in signs—namely, the originary and irreducible possibility of writing that Derrida designates as archi-writing. I quote this long passage as it constitutes a key moment in the deconstructive reading of the phenomenological concept of sign:

Pure expressivity will be the pure active intention (spirit, psyche, life, will) of a bedeuten that is animating a discourse whose content (Bedeutung) will be present. It is present not in nature, since indication alone takes place in nature and in space, but in consciousness. Therefore it is present to an “internal” intuition or to an “internal” perception. But we just understood why it is present to an intuition that is not that of the other in a case of communication. Therefore this is self-present in the life of a present that has still not exited from itself into the world, into space, into nature. With all of these “exitings” exiling this life of self-presence into indication, we can be sure that indication, which covers so far nearly the entire surface of language, is the process of death at work in the signs. (VP 34)⁹

At this point, we wonder how phenomenological voice is supposed to respond to the difficulty of metaphysics—that is, to the threat of death implicit in the process of signification and thus in idealization. To what extent, as Derrida puts it, “between idealization and the voice, the complicity is here unfailing” (VP 64)? A medium is required to preserve the two features of authentic ideality: “the presence of the object in front of the intuition and the presence to oneself, the absolute proximity of the acts to themselves” (VP 65). This medium would be an exteriorization of transcendental life in which voice does not go out of itself and, therefore, does not undergo the work of death. But that seems to be precisely phenomenological voice in the way its phenomenon is given, in its proximity to the speaking subject in the present moment of enunciation.¹⁰ Phenomenological voice thus seems to account for a kind of auto-relation (for-itself, or subjectivity), that of the “I” hearing itself speak, which preserves the self-presence of transcendental life and for which Derrida takes recourse to the concept of auto-affection. “Why is the phoneme the most ‘ideal’ of signs?” (VP 66), Derrida asks. Because the being in the present of the phonic signifier retains the latter close to the animating intention, thus seeming to prevent it from going out of itself and relating to its death. Derrida writes:

The signifier that is animated by my breath and by the intention of signification (in Husserlian language the expression animated by the Bedeutungsintention) is absolutely close to to me. The living act, the act that gives life, the Lebendigkeit that animates the body of the signifier and transforms it into an expression that wants to say, the soul of language, seems not to separate itself from itself, from its presence to itself. The soul of language does not risk death in the body of a signifier abandoned to the world and to the visibility of space.(VP 66-67)¹¹

Therefore, phenomenological voice aims to respond to the difficulty represented by the indistinguishability of consciousness and language. The pure auto-affection of the I’s hearing itself speak displays the very meaning of the term “con-sciousness”—that is, the possibility of the indefinite repetition of the object as identical to itself and, ultimately, the self-presence of transcendental life. “The voice is being close to itself in the form of universality, as consciousness. The voice is consciousness” (VP 68), Derrida argues. Pure auto-affection describes a non-real communication in which I hear the other speak as if it were me. “To speak to someone [in what is understood as the phenomenological speech or voice],” he goes on, “is to make the other repeat immediately in himself the hearing-oneself-speak in the very form in which I have produced it” (VP 68). Finally, we come to the reading of the phenomenological concept of consciousness as pure auto-affection. This concept—evoked by Derrida in the epigraph of this essay—grounds the metaphysical distinction between the living and the non-living and thus opens up the abyss between consciousness and the other forms of life, foreclosing the history of life. In the subsequent pages of his book, Derrida deconstructs this concept by demonstrating that we must think auto-affection from the trace—that is, from the most general possibility of signification. Idealization cannot be dissociated from the process of death at work in signs and thus from the originary and no longer reducible possibility of writing, or archi-writing.¹²

Phenomenological voice is the most ideal of signs, but it is still a sign—that is, a worldly synthesis, which carries non-presence and difference within pure auto-affection. “Auto-affection as the operation of the voice,” Derrida writes, “assumed that a pure difference came to divide self-presence” (VP 70). Here we discover the movement of “différance” that inhabits the living present. This movement opens up transcendental life onto what is supposed to be suspended by transcendental reduction and thus onto the relation to death and originary writing.¹³ It thus consists in the self’s relation to itself as different or other than itself.¹⁴ Later, we see that this understanding of auto-affection and auto-relation as différance, as the originary possibility of writing, or as the trace, refers the transcendental subject back to the most general definition of life as leaving a trace in the world, at the same time as it accounts for life’s evolution. In other words, we find in différance the point of departure for telling the history of life.¹⁵

At this point, the deconstruction of phenomenological voice and thus of consciousness requires one last step. If the privileging of voice over the other media of signification seems to be linked to its purely temporal structure—the fact that it is given in the present—then the movement of différance must have already been at work within the “temporal fabric” of voice (71).¹⁶ To demonstrate this claim, Derrida recalls a passage from the lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time in which Husserl describes the movement of temporalization as pure auto-affection—namely, genesis spontanea.¹⁷ I cannot engage with Derrida’s analyses of this immense philosophical problem here, and limit myself to highlighting his argument and its effects on the problem of the history of life. Derrida suggests that what Husserl calls genesis spontanea is the process by which the now constitutes itself by making itself into a retention or a retentional trace. He describes this process as follows: “the living now, producing itself by spontaneous generation, must, in order to be a now, be retained in another now, must affect itself, without empirical recourse, with a new originary actuality in which it will become a non-now as a past now” (VP 72-73). Ultimately, the movement of temporalization as pure auto-affection would have already been the movement of différance or of the originary possibility of writing—here designated as archi-writing:

The living present arises on the basis of its non-self-identity, and on the basis of the retentional trace. It is always already a trace. This trace is unthinkable if we start from the simplicity of a present whose life would be interior to itself. The self of the living present is originarily a trace. The trace is not an attribute about which we could say that the self of the living present “is originarily” the trace. It is necessary to think originary-being from the trace and not the trace from originary-being. This archi-writing is at work in the origin of sense.(VP 73)

Not only can the living present not be dissociated from the trace; above all, the living present turns out to be reinscribed within the history of life as leaving a trace in the world. First, as Derrida points out, the movement of temporalization described above calls into question the privileging of phenomenological voice as a merely temporal structure.¹⁸ Secondly—and this is what matters to us more—the trace, qua the originary possibility of repetition that allows us to think auto-affection or auto-relation in general, accounts for the history in which the becoming conscious of life is possible. I refer to the text in which, although in passing, Derrida highlights the link between the history of life and the trace: “without concealing that the problem of their relations [between retention and re-presentation] is nothing other than the history of ‘life’ and of life’s becoming-conscious, we must be able to say a priori that their common root, the possibility of re-petition in its most general form, the trace” (VP 58; italics mine).

It is worth recalling that Derrida develops this link between the deconstruction of consciousness and the opening of the history of life in a footnote to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962). This note sheds light on the premises of the argument that we have taken as the point of departure for our reading.¹⁹ In the Introduction, Derrida explains that, for Husserl, the living present constitutes the ultimate form of ideality to the extent that it secures the indefinite reactivation of meaning as identical to itself in the individual consciousness. On the margins of this explanation, he adds a deconstructive note in which he argues that Husserl cannot question the transition from the passive retention of meaning to its active recollection, as this transition constitutes the very axiom of phenomenology—the principle of the self-presence of transcendental life and of the auto-donation of consciousness. Derrida unfolds the consequences that follow from taking account of this transition and thus of the most general possibility of repetition (what he designates later as the trace) that is the common root of passive retention and active recollection and that allows for the transition between them. As he suggests, we would liberate the history of life as leaving a trace in the world and thus would retrace phenomenology back to a thinking that takes into account the becoming conscious of life. Derrida’s note reads:

These processes are abundantly described in The Phenomenology of Internal-Time Consciousness, Ideas I, and in FTL. The passage from passive retention to memory or to the activity of recollection, a passage which “produces” ideality and pure Objectivity as such and makes other absolute origins appear as such, is always described by Husserl as an already given essential possibility, as a structural ability whose source is not made a problem. Perhaps this source is not questioned by phenomenology because it is confused with the possibility of phenomenology itself. In its “factuality,” this passage is also that of the lower forms of Nature and conscious life. It can also be the thematic site of what today is called an “overcoming.” Here phenomenology would be “overcome” or completed in an interpretative philosophy.(Edwin Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 86)

The note then refers to the project of overcoming phenomenology through a dialectic of real movement as it is elaborated by the French-Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao in his Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). “Thus Trân-Dúc-Tháo,” Derrida writes, “after a remarkable interpretation of phenomenology, exposes the ‘Dialectic of Real Movement,’ starting from the concepts of retention and reproduction and from difficulties attached to them in phenomenology, which alone, however, can give them a rigorous sense” (An Introduction 86). Derrida’s concept of the becoming-conscious-of-life can be read as a rewriting of Thao’s concept of the becoming-conscious-of-nature. Thao marks the transition from phenomenology to dialectic in the concluding pages of the first part of his work. He grounds the possibility of telling the history of life and of its evolution in the real movement of the constituting subjectivity that, according to him, results from transcendental reduction and yet is not just consciousness:

We end with dialectical materialism as the truth of transcendental idealism. Since the naive attitude has been definitively suppressed by the reduction, the practice of the description of pure lived experience is necessarily absorbed within a dialectical materialism that suppresses it in its properly phenomenological sense in order to preserve it in its resultant form and to elevate it to a superior level. We maintain the authentic demands of the Weltkonstitution by getting rid of its idealistic illusions. It is, indeed, a matter of “bracketing” the world of constituted appearances, which the fetishism of naive consciousness takes for realities in themselves, and of returning to true being through the constituting subjectivity. But the latter is not the Heraclitean flux of pure consciousness: it is the real movement by which nature becomes conscious of itself in biological evolution and human history. (129)²⁰

Now, the movement that has taken us from the phenomenological concept of consciousness to the thinking of life as leaving a trace in the world leaves a question open. If we admit with Derrida that the general structure of the trace is another name for life, we may ask how this structure has been—and is yet to be—articulated across the history of life and evolution. Derrida addresses this question in a passage from Of Grammatology (1967), where he suggests that we need to take up again the indiscernibility of the elements of idealization and consciousness from différance and the trace. From this perspective, we understand the articulations of life as related to the degree of mastery that the living has over its own possibility, or power, of repeating the ideal object. Derrida thus explains:

This possibility—another name for “life”—is a general structure articulated by the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical operations. Auto-affection, the as-for-itself or for-itself—subjectivity—gains in power and in its mastery of the other to the extent that its power of repetition idealizes itself. Here idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition, to what thenceforward appears to me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less. (Of Grammatology 165-166)

III

In what follows, I focus on Derrida’s deconstruction of the Cartesian foundations of the modern narrative of life, as he develops it in the essays published in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006; hereafter AIA). My aim is to demonstrate that this deconstruction does not just hinge on the deconstruction of the phenomenological concept of consciousness that we have examined above. Instead, Derrida develops his conception of life as leaving a trace in the world by highlighting its implications for the modern distinction between animal and human auto-relation (namely, between auto-affection and autotelicity) and, consequently, for the concept of responsibility and its ethico-political elaborations.

In the concluding pages of the first essay included in the collection, Derrida focuses on two distinctions that characterize the modern narrative of life: the distinction between the organic and the inorganic and between the animal and the human. This narrative places the question of the difference between the animal and the human within the broader demarcation of the physico-chemical domain of the inorganic and the life of the living (namely, animality).²¹ Derrida reproduces this demarcation by having recourse to auto-affection (auto-relation, auto-mobility, autobiography, tracing, etc.) which specifies the living being or the animal in general and thus seems to be shared with the human (identified as the ego cogito or the “I think”). At this point, another demarcation—more properly, an abyss—has been conjured up within the domain of life and animality, between the animal and the human, and between auto-affection and “I think” (in the lexicon of Descartes, ego cogito), which is constituted by the power of transforming its traces into speech and thus of elaborating discursive responses. This narrative reads as follows:

Animality, the life of the living, at least when one claims to be able to distinguish it from the inorganic, from the purely inert or cadaverous physico-chemical, is generally defined as sensibility, irritability, and auto-motricity, a spontaneity that is capable of movement, of organizing itself and affecting itself, marking, tracing, and affecting itself with traces of its self. This auto-motricity as auto-affection and relation to itself is the characteristic recognized as that of the living and of animality in general, even before one comes to consider the discursive thematic of an utterance or of an ego cogito, more so of a cogito ergo sum. But between this relation to the self (this Self, this ipseity) and the I of the “I think,” there is, it would seem, an abyss … No one has ever denied the animal this capacity to track itself, to trace itself or retrace a path of itself. Indeed, the most difficult problem lies in the fact that it has been refused the power to transform those traces into verbal language, to call to itself by means of discursive questions and responses, denied the power to efface its traces. (AIA 49-50)²²

In Derrida’s reproduction of the modern narrative on animal and human auto-relation, the “I think” seems to share with the phenomenological concept of consciousness the feature of the self-presence of the living present in the element of speech. This narrative also seems to associate a certain ability to respond, or responsibility, to the human self that is present to itself and hears itself speak. As it is suggested in the aforementioned passage (see the reference to the cogito), Derrida finds in the Cartesian conception of the human self as “I think” the very presupposition of this narrative.²³ Therefore, in the second essay of the collection, he traces this Cartesian legacy through the close reading of two passages from the second Meditation (1641) and the letter to Henricus Reneri for Alphonse Pollot (1638), respectively.

First, Derrida analyses Descartes’s elaboration of the axiom of the modern history of life, that is, the traits of that special kind of auto-relation that Descartes ascribes to the human by dissociating it from animal auto-relation (auto-affection). To this end, he follows the text of the second Meditation as it demarcates the human self, the “I am,” from everything that can be detached from it. The passage under scrutiny begins with the following question: “What then did I formerly think I was? A man. But what is a man?” (Meditations 17). Descartes responds to this question by starting from what immediately comes to his mind: first, “the whole mechanical structure [toute cette machine] of limbs”; secondly, the fact that “I was nourished, that I moved about, and that I engaged in sense-perception, and thinking.”²⁴ Interestingly, Descartes attributes these “actions” to a “soul” that he imagines “to be something tenuous, like a wind or fire or ether” (Meditations 17). According to Derrida, these traits associated with a physical soul identify what Descartes understands by life or animality. “Each time that … he has to evoke these signs of life or animation—therefore of animality—constituted by auto-affection or auto-motion,” Derrida points out, “he relates them to a living soul that … can only be a body” (AIA 72). As the reductions follow one another, Descartes comes to the point of determining the pure “I am” as a thinking thing. He writes: “Thinking? At last I have discovered it—thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking” (Meditations 18). One cannot help interweaving this final reduction of animality and thus this determination of the human self together with what Derrida designates in Voice and Phenomenon as the metaphysical project itself, that is, the understanding of the ultimate form of ideality as the presence of the living present. Indeed, Derrida reads Descartes’s passage as an affirmation of that project: “The presence to itself of the present of thinking, the presence that presents itself to itself in the present, that is what excludes everything detachable constituted by life, the living body, animal life” (AIA 72). Therefore, on Derrida’s reading, Descartes places at the basis of his narrative of life the metaphysical conception of the “I am” (as a self-present thinking thing). This conception constitutes the kind of auto-relation that specifies the human self and opens up the abyss from animality.

Secondly, Derrida examines the passage from the aforementioned letter to Reneri (for Pollot), in which Descartes establishes the limit of animality in the light of the metaphysical determination of the pure “I am.” In this passage, Descartes develops the point on responsibility that Derrida had evoked at the moment of recounting the modern narrative of life. Descartes invites the reader to distrust the judgement that animals have a soul as it amounts to an opinion rashly acquired in childhood. In support of his thesis, he sets up the following scene:

Suppose that a man had been brought up all his life in some place where he had never seen any animals except men; and suppose that he was very devoted to the study of mechanics, and had made, or helped to make, various automatons shaped like a man, a horse, a dog, a bird, and so on, which walked and ate, and breathed, and so far as possible imitated all the other actions of the animals they resembled, including the signs we use to express our passions, like crying when struck and running away when subjected to a loud noise. Suppose that sometimes he found it impossible to tell the difference between the real men and those which had only the shape of men, and had learnt by experience that there are only the two ways of telling: … first, that such automatons never answer in word or sign, except by chance, to questions put to them; and secondly, correspond that though their movements are often more regular and certain than those of the wisest men, yet in many things which they would have to do to imitate us, they fail more disastrously than the greatest fools. (The Philosophical Writings 99-100)

From this fiction, according to Descartes, we should be able to reconsider our judgment before real animals.²⁵ We should understand that “the resemblance between some exterior actions of animals and our own … is not at all a sufficient basis to prove that there is any resemblance between the corresponding interior actions” (The Philosophical Writings 100). Derrida draws attention to the fact that Descartes’s argument hinges on the presupposition of a limit or a threshold for the animal, that is, the ability to not react to a programmable question, like an automaton, but “to [freely] respond to true questioning” (AIA 82-83).²⁶ The metaphysical determination of the human self as a self-present thinking thing secures this ability and thus marks the limit between animal and human auto-relation. As anticipated, Derrida formalizes this divide/abyss between animality and the human as the divide/abyss between two kinds of auto-relation, between auto-affection and “I think.” On the one hand, we have the way the living relates to itself by demarcating itself from the physico-chemical domain of the inorganic (auto-affection, automotion, etc.). On the other hand, we have the self-present thinking thing that Derrida designates as auto-deictic and auto-monstrative auto-telicity (autotélie). He has the following formulation of these new concepts of “auto-telicity” and “auto-deicticity”:

Every living creature, and thus every animal to the extent that it is living, has recognized in it this power to move spontaneously, to feel itself and to relate to itself. However problematic it be, that is even the characteristic of what lives, as traditionally conceived in opposition to the inorganic inertia of the purely physico-chemical … But what is in dispute … is the power to make reference to the self in deictic or autodeictic terms, the capability at least virtually to turn a finger toward oneself in order to say “this is I” … It is what says “I am speaking of me”; the one who says “I” shows himself in the present of his utterance, or at least of its manifestation. Because it is held to be incapable of this autodeictic or auto-referential self-distancing [autotélie] and deprived of the “I,” the animal will lack any “I think,” as well as understanding and reason, response and responsibility. (AIA 94)²⁷

Here Derrida makes explicit that human auto-relation, that is, the Cartesian presupposition of the modern narrative of life, consists in the metaphysical axiom of the coincidence of voice and consciousness that grants the self-presence and self-proximity of transcendental life. As we know, this axiom presupposes the dissimulation of the process of death and signification that has always been at work in voice and consciousness. For Derrida, it is precisely the deconstruction of this axiom that liberates the history of life and allows us to tell this history. Therefore, he sketches a “critical reelaboration” of the modern narrative of life that hinges on the deconstruction he had initiated many years earlier in Voice and Phenomenon. This re-elaboration does not limit itself to pointing to examples of autodeictic autotelicity in animal life—such as in genetic systems as well as in social phenomena of narcissistic exhibition.²⁸ Above all, it is a matter of calling into question the metaphysical axiom in itself, “the axiom that permits one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived of” (AIA 95).²⁹ From this re-elaboration, it follows that the Cartesian distinction between human and animal auto-relation, between “I think” and auto-affection, and thus the very principle of the modern narrative of life, are reinscribed within the ultra-transcendental conception of life as leaving a trace in the world. Derrida writes:

If autoposition, the automonstrative autotely of the “I,” even in the human, implies the “I” to be an other that must welcome within itself some irreducible hetero-affection (as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere), then this autonomy of the “I” can be neither pure nor rigorous; it would not be able to form the basis for a simple and linear differentiation of the human from the animal. (AIA 95)³⁰

Derrida seems to conceive of autodeictic autotelicity (whether it is animal or human) as an effect of the trace qua the possibility of repetition in general, that is, as the self’s relation to the trace of the other. In so doing, he evokes another narrative of life that accounts for the history and evolution of the living.³¹ Moreover, the deconstruction of the Cartesian axiom of human autotelicity propagates its effects on the concept of responsibility and its ethico-political developments. As we know, the ability to respond to a true questioning is structurally linked to human auto-relation (“I think”) and autotelicity (“this is I”) and thus relapses into the Cartesian legacy at work in the modern narrative of life. From the deconstruction of this legacy and, consequently, from the reinscription of the distinction between animal and human auto-relation within another narrative of life, it follows that responsibility too is deconstructed and that the distinction between reaction and response is reinscribed. Here we can only point to this theoretical programme, which Derrida formulates in session six of the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign I (2001-2002, published after his death in 2008):

And so the point would be to reinscribe this différance of reaction and response and thereby this historicity of ethical, juridical, or political responsibility into another thinking of life, living beings, into another relation of the living to their ipseity, and thereby to their supposed sovereignty, their autos, their own autokinesis and reactional automaticity, to death, technique, or to the machinic. (120)

Footnotes

This article is published thanks to the support received from The British Academy. Partial versions of it were presented at the conference Derrida Político (Santiago de Chile, 2017) and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (December 2017). I thank Andrea Potestà and Facundo Vega for their hospitality and all the attendants for their generous comments. Above all, I thank Erin Obodiac for reading and commenting on my manuscript.

1. In the collection of essays entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am, which was published after Derrida’s death, and which I take up in section III, Derrida writes: “Let me note very quickly in passing, concerning intellectual autobiography, that … [the] very first substitution of the concept of trace or mark for those of speech, sign, or signifier was destined in advance, and quite deliberately, to cross the frontiers of anthropocentrism, the limits of a language confined to human words and discourse. Mark, gramma, trace, and différance refer differentially to all living things, all the relations between living and nonliving” (102). This concluding sentence can be read as an echo of the epigraph extracted from Grammatology.

2. On the consideration that Derrida has for this text within the trajectory of his work, see Positions: “In a classical philosophical architecture, Voice and Phenomenon would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics, and metaphysics in its most modern, critical, and vigilant form: Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology” (5). For close readings of VP, see Marrati-Guénoun, Genesis and Trace, Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, and Kates, Essential History, to which I refer as my writing unfolds. To my knowledge, there are no readings of VP that develop the link between the deconstruction of consciousness and the opening of the history of life.

3. See VP: “What would be at issue will be to begin to verify that the resource of the phenomenological critique is the metaphysical project itself, in its historical completion and in the purity of its origin albeit restored” (5). On this point, see Lawlor 168-169.

4. Derrida writes: “One would be able to bring to light the single and permanent motive for all the mistakes and all the perversions that Husserl denounces in ‘degenerate’ metaphysics, across a multiplicity of domains, themes, and arguments: it is always a blindness in the face of the authentic mode of ideality, of that which is, which can be repeated indefinitely in the identity of its presence because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not reell, is irreell” (VP 5).

5. See VP: “The value of presence … modifies itself, without its being lost, every time what is at issue is the presence of any object whatsoever to consciousness in the clear evidence of a fulfilled intuition or when what is at issue is self-presence in consciousness—’consciousness’ meaning nothing other than the possibility of the self-presence of the present in the living present” (8).

6. For Derrida’s reformulation of this distinction, see VP 15. See also VP 16, where he explains his translation of Bedeutung by meaning or wanting-to-say (vouloir-dire). On Bedeutung, see Kates 134.

7. Derrida interprets this phenomenological situation as the intentional relation to the object that Husserl formalizes later as the noetic-noematic sphere of intentional consciousness. On this point, see VP: “transcendental phenomenological idealism responds to the necessity to describe the objectivity of the object (Gegenstand) and the presence of the present (Gegen-wart)—and the objectivity in presence—on the basis of an ‘interiority,’ or rather on the basis of a self-proximity, an ownness (Eigenheit), which is not a simple inside, but the intimate possibility of the relation to an over-there and to an outside in general. That is why the essence of intentional consciousness will be revealed (for example, in Ideas I, § 49) only in the reduction of the totality of the existing world in general” (19); and VP: “Later, after the discovery of the transcendental reduction, he will describe the solitary life of the soul as the noetic-noematic sphere of consciousness” (27). On pure expressivity as the very possibility of phenomenology, see Marrati 64-65 and 68-69.

8. Cf. VP: “In expression the intention is absolutely on purpose because it animates a voice which can remain wholly internal and because the expressed is a Bedeutung, that is, an ideality that does not ‘exist’ in the world” (28).

9. Making explicit why the phenomenological concept of sign constitutes a privileged example for his reading of phenomenology, Derrida writes: “The determination and erasure of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation of this relation to death, which nevertheless was producing signification” (VP 53). For a definition of writing as the writer’s relation to death, see VP: “writing—the common name for signs that function despite the total absence of the subject, by means of (and beyond) his death” (79-80).

10. On the phenomenality of the phenomenological voice, see VP 66. Derrida also describes this phenomenality as the signifier’s self-effacement (or self-reduction) that is simultaneous with its production: “The phenomenological ‘body’ of the signifier seems to erase itself in the very moment it is produced. From this point on, it seems already to belong to the element of ideality. It reduces itself phenomenologically and transforms the mundane opacity of its body into pure diaphaneity. This erasure of the sensible body and of its exteriority is for consciousness the very form of the immediate presence of the signified” (VP 66). On the complicity between idealization and voice, see Marrati 74-75 and Lawlor 190-194.

11. Here Derrida refers to Hegel’s semiology as the most accomplished analysis of the complicity between idealization and voice. He offers a close reading of this analysis in the essay “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology” (first published in 1971 and then included in Margins of Philosophy, 1972).

12. From the opening pages of VP, Derrida draws attention to what seems to be implied from the phenomenological account of ideality: the relation of “an existing in general”—not merely consciousness—to its own death. “Is this to say,” he asks, “that what opens the repetition to the infinite or what is opened in repetition when the movement of idealization is secured, is a certain relation of an ‘existent’ to his death? Is this to say that ‘transcendental life’ is the scene of this relation?” (8).

13. See VP: “The possibility of everything that we believe we are able to exclude from auto-affection is enrooted in this pure difference: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon as we admit that auto-affection is the condition of self-presence, no pure transcendental reduction is possible” (70-71).

14. Derrida continues: “This movement of différance does not supervene upon a transcendental subject. The movement of différance produces the transcendental subject. Auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself (autos). Auto-affection produces the same as the self-relation in the difference with itself, the same as the non-identical” (VP 71). On this passage, see the excellent remarks in Kates 153-157.

15. I suggest that this understanding of auto-relation (as différance) accounts for “the concept of ultra-transcendental life” (VP 13) that Derrida formulates in the introductory chapter of VP, a life that is the common root of transcendental and empirical life. Lawlor (174-175) and Kates (138-140) draw attention to this link but do not develop its implications for the question of the history of life.

16. Cf. Marrati 75-77.

17. For Husserl’s text, see VP: “The originary impression is the absolute beginning of this production, the originary source, that starting from which all the rest is continuously produced. But it itself is not produced. It is not born as something produced, but by genesis spontanea, it is originary generation” (71-72).

18. Derrida writes: “We see that the theme of a pure interiority of speech or of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ is radically contradicted by ‘time’ itself” (VP 74).

19. On the first part of this note, see Vitale, “The Text and the Living,” which suggests finding here Derrida’s decisive step beyond phenomenology towards archi-writing. In what follows, I reread the whole note in light of my interpretation of Voice and Phenomenon and I highlight the intersection between Derrida’s argument contra phenomenology and the dialectical materialism of Tran Duc Thao.

20. On Derrida’s relation to Thao across his early work on Husserl, see Giovannangeli, “Husserl entre Derrida and Tran Duc Thao.”

21. For Derrida’s protocols on the difference of the human and the use of the term “animal,” see Derrida, AIA 47 and 53-54, respectively.

22. As a premise of an alternative narrative of life, let me recall those pages from “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)” (1998), where Derrida marks a noteworthy difference between dating mineral and plant sediments to the timeless time in which no living being signaled its presence on earth and taking account of the singular event of two midges immobilized in amber while making love. This event, he argues, still happens today as its trace is consigned to us. See also Without Alibi 130-131.

23. On the founding role of the Cartesian thought of animality, see Derrida, AIA 54. For an excellent development of Derrida’s reading of Descartes, see Wills, Inanimation. The analysis that I develop here differs from Wills’s in that it aims to cast light on the link that interweaves the deconstruction of the modern thought of animality and the deconstruction of phenomenological consciousness. In other words, I reread the deconstruction of the modern thought of animality in the wake of Derrida’s concept of ultra-transcendental life.

24. Descartes writes: “the whole mechanical structure [toute cette machine] of limbs which can be seen in a corpse, and which I called the body” (Meditations 17). Here we can find the metaphysical determination of animality as non-living or mechanical that we find evoked by Derrida in the epigraph of our text.

25. On this scene, Derrida remarks: “The scene and logic of the argument seem to me more strange than has been most often noted. Here we have a character, a man, and this man is a man who, having learned, fictitiously, to manufacture impeccable automatons, would conclude in reality, by means of a judgment, that the animals are in truth, for their part, automatons, automatons of flesh and blood. And why is this so? Because they resemble automatons that resemble humans. And this conclusion, let us never forget, follows from a judgment” (83).

26. Derrida describes responsibility as the ability to give a non-programmed response to a non-programmed questioning: “The question of the response is thus that of the question, of the response as response to a question that, at one and the same time, would remain unprogrammable and leave to the other alone the freedom to respond, presuming that were possible (a technohistorical field with a bright future, even though the programmation of question and response seems to foreclose the future). The Cartesian animal, like its descendants (once again I’ll try to recognize there Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, which also means so many others), would remain incapable of responding to true questioning” (AIA 84).

27. Derrida has recourse to the concept of autotelicity for the first time in “To Speculate – On ‘Freud’” (included in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond). In this text, he highlights the deconstruction of autotelicity, understood as the movement of teleological auto-institution, by focusing on the process of the tele– (différance, the originary possibility of writing/posting, tele-communication, etc.) that is at work in that movement. For this reason, Derrida’s “autotelicity” has already meant “self-distancing,” as the English translator seems to suggest with his choice. As for the concept of the autodeictic, I suggest that here Derrida refers to the kind of monstration that takes place in the phenomenological situation of pure expression in the solitary life of the soul—that is, voice. On this kind of monstration (Hinzeigen), which is not an indication, I refer to the beautiful remarks that Derrida makes in VP 64. For an adventurous reading of autotelicity in the wake of a preoriginary rhetoricity, see Davis, “Autozoography.”

28. For these examples, see AIA 95.

29. On Derrida’s concern for the philosophical argument rather than the scientific falsification of the modern thought of animality, see the important observations in Naas 16-17. Pushing these observations further, I argue that here Derrida is interested in reinscribing the thought of animality back to the thinking of life as leaving a trace in the world that he has been elaborating throughout his work and that, on his view, allows us to tell the history of life.

30. Here it is worth recalling the increasing attention to Husserl’s work on animality in current philosophical debates. In particular, I refer to Di Martino, “Husserl and the Question of Animality,” as representative of this line of research. Drawing on Di Martino’s close reading of the analyses developed in volume 15 of the Husserliana, it seems that Husserl subscribes to the Cartesian legacy as it is displayed by Derrida in AIA. As Di Martino points out, Husserl identifies the correlative of “the historical-cultural world” specifically inhabited by the human with “the personal self,” that is, “the self-conscious and free self, necessarily implicated in the unfolding of the historical-cultural world” (61). Furthermore, this personal self is placed within a community that is jointly empathic and linguistic (Di Martino 65-66). In other words, the Husserlian conception of the human being seems to presuppose the autodeictic autotelicity evoked by Derrida in his reading of Descartes. From this perspective, it undergoes Derrida’s critical elaboration of the modern narrative of life.

31. On the deconstructive conception of autodeicticity, permit me to refer to my forthcoming reading of Derrida’s engagement with the autobiographical question in Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Works Cited

• Davis, Diane. “Autozoography: Notes toward a Rhetoricity of the Living.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 47, no. 4, 2014, pp. 533-553. JSTOR, doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.4.0533.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). Translated by David Wills, Fordham UP, 2008.
• —. The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I (2001-2002). Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, U of Chicago P, 2009.
• —. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translated by John P. Leavy, U of Nebraska P, 1989.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1982.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern UP, 2011.
• —. Without Alibi. Edited by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford UP, 2002.
• Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by John Cottingham, Cambridge UP, 1986.
• —. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence. Translated by Anthony Kenny, Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Di Martino, Carmine. “Husserl and the Question of Animality.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 44, 2014, pp. 50-75. Brill, doi:10.1163/15691640-12341275.
• Giovannangeli, Daniel. “Husserl entre Derrida and Tran Duc Thao.” L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao: Phénoménologie et transfert culturel / Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique, edited by Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne. Paris: Armand Colin / Recherches, 2013, pp. 133-160.
• Kates, Joshua. Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction. Northwestern UP, 2005.
• Lawlor, Leonard. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Indiana UP, 2002.
• Marrati-Guénoun, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford UP, 2005.
• Naas, Michael. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Derrida’s Final Seminar. Fordham UP, 2015.
• Tran Duc Thao. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Translated by Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano, D. Reidel Publishing, 1986.
• Vitale, Francesco. “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1986, pp. 95-114. Edinburgh UP, doi:10.3366/olr.2014.0089.
• Wills, David. Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Erin Obodiac (bio)
University of California, Irvine

Abstract

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida shows that a certain arche-writing of the trace is not only in play with any mode of language—spoken, written, or graphic—but is also a principle of “life”—whether human, non-human, cybernetic, or genetic. Catherine Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine. According to the logic of the supplement, however, is not the trace always already a “plastic inscription”?

We might have to throw a very loose lasso with the term “script” when considering the genetic code as one of those “scripts that preceded the alphabet” (Grammatology 129), a writing before the letter, yet the Derrida of 1967 did not hesitate to bring cybernetics and genetics into the encircling ring of the grammè and the animating movement of the trace. Although books like Judith Roof’s The Poetics of DNA alert us to the pitfalls of understanding the genome by way of a “linguistic” model, Of Grammatology preemptively points us to “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; as arche-writing, the trace is an originary technics that subtends all conditions of mediality, prior to and post “book.” Even if the genetic might already be or always was outmoded as linguistic “code,” it nevertheless belongs to the trace, rendering “the history of life—of what we here call differance—as the history of the grammè” (84). And although John Johnston’s The Allure of Machinic Life argues that new theories of life are initiated or mediated by emergent technologies, pointing in particular to molecular biology’s “complete dependence on information technology or bioinformatics” (5) and suggesting there is “a ‘better image of the genetic program’—as a parallel distributed regulatory network” (6), Of Grammatology lets us know that a general concept of technology cannot elucidate the manner in which the trace is a technics; instead, the trace, as originary technics, points to the way in which all other technologies can be understood. But if the genome is a grammatechnics of inscription,¹ the question remains whether the age of grammatology has come to an end, as Catherine Malabou suggests with her concept of plasticity, and whether the ends of grammatology have met their match, not incidentally, in our post-genomic era.

Since the 1950s, likening the sequencing of DNA to a language has become a commonplace of bioinformatic and genomic discourses. Employing the rhetoric of language itself—DNA is information encoded in genetic material; this information is translated into protein by living cells; protein-coding genes are transcribed as messenger RNA; codon sequences are read in reading frames; spelling mistakes in the canonical genetic code or cipher can generate disease, and so on—this biosemiotic paradigm suggests that life is regulated by “linguistic” principles and that DNA can be understood as a bioarchive or a mnemotechnics of inscription.² Biotechnologies—and even more so, experimental bioart³ and biomedia—deploy this genetic language in chimerical fashion: gene-splicing and CRISPR technologies edit snippets of genomic text engendering transgenic creatures and green fluorescent bunnies; synthetic biologists encode lines from James Joyce in bacterial form; and dangerous genetic markers appear deletable with the stroke of a biocomputational button. The ubiquity of digital computers and media in our cybernetic era makes the genetic program second nature to us. Yet contemporary biotech might also be performing a kind of deconstruction of the Program beyond deconstruction. For instance, Johnston notes that technology counters biologist François Jacob’s insistence on the immutability of the genetic code, and that “the invention of gene-splicing suspended this very axiom … recent research … has challenged this orthodoxy, both in terms of the ‘invariance’ of the genome and the way in which the genome works as a ‘program’ … the genome itself is a complex adaptive system” (Allure 5, 6). The linguistic paradigm reigns in genetics and biotechnology even as bioart, synthetic biology, and transgenic art point to new modalities of bio-plasticity. To use a term popularized by Eugene Thacker,⁴ biomedia deploy genetic code in their productions, yet seek to depart from textuality and embrace media forms that purport not to be modeled on the book, including digital network media and analogue, indexical, or transductive media that are interactive, emergent, and adaptive. Molecular biology’s linguistic paradigm is an essential life support system and theoretical umbilical cord for much bioart and transgenic art, but most contemporary media theories adopt a Deleuzian distaste for the text. At stake in these differences between technics, media, and languages are questions of plasticity, and the most plastic thing of all: the living being. Some will argue that genetic code is a kind of blueprint or tool used in the production of the plastic artwork, but not the artwork itself. Similarly, the human genome is neither a human being nor even an embryo: these are plastic formations. Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from the programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine. Epigenetics, for instance—the study of modifications of gene expression—suggests that the genome is not so much a fixed code as a plastic form. Malabou believes we can no longer rely on deconstruction to point to these new understandings of life, because deconstruction is limited by its own techno-determinism.⁵ For Malabou, even Derrida’s concept of the trace (which launched a critique of code and other logocentrisms) is no longer plastic enough, despite the fact that “plastic inscriptions” might be a fortuitous term for living beings in our era of genomics and bioinformatics—and in every era before ours, given that life has always already been a technical graft or arche-writing, according to the logic of the supplement: “genetic writing as the determinant of life” (Grammatology lxxix).

Whether the trace provides a model for understanding the genome as a genetic code appears to be a question technologically determined by its own conditions of mediality: the era of textuality. Although Friedrich Kittler claims that technology determines the situation, and that media technologies in particular are epistemic tools that provide the models or metaphors for what things are and how they work, Derrida claims that the trace is not just one technics among others. Although it might speak of the equipmentality of the track (in French) or the silhouette (in English), and even though it tends to be misunderstood within the mediality of print and writing in the narrow sense, the trace might still have critical force as a non-empirical and non-transcendental operation, especially in this time of new materialisms. The trace is not a mark left behind by a presence, but the condition of (im)possibility of such a mark. The trace concerns différance, the deferring and spacing of difference.⁶ In Of Grammatology‘s first sections, Derrida writes that the trace is an “originary” technics (originary always in the sense of supplementary):

Technics in the service of language: I am not invoking a general essence of technics which would be already familiar to us and would help us in understanding the narrow and historically determined concept of writing as an example. I believe on the contrary that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics. That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing. (8)

Derrida’s insistence that technics cannot tell us anything about the trace—rather, that the structure of the trace constitutes each and every technics—includes not only human technics, but also those that belong to living beings in their constitution as well as their activity. He relates the genetic program to the cybernetic program in general in order to reposition both within the larger sweep of arche-writing, something Gayatri Spivak underscores in the Afterword to Of Grammatology‘s 2016 edition:

The general argument is most pertinent to our time: that although the cybernetic and informatics revolution, using linguistics as a scientific model, is putting emphasis on writing—all that which used to assemble itself under the name of language now assembles itself under the name of writing—in fact, the “revolutionaries” are using not a new discourse to fix these new inventions, but versions of the millennial ethnocentric and Europocentric ideology of the thinking of Europe. The young Derrida writes in the hope that cybernetics and informatics will join hands with a philosophy defeating itself. (345)

Spivak reminds us that, along with phonocentrism, logocentrism, and eurocentrism, arche-writing deracinates the self-same origin of any programmatic-ism, including the cybernetic and genetic ones: the trace, the supplement of the origin, and differance (un)ground their possibility. When Malabou questions the reduction of life to DNA or genetic code and asserts that plasticity rather than inscription is essential to a critical understanding of life and living beings, when she suggests that epigenetics—the plastic expression of the genetic—aspires to replace the concept of the genetic program, does this mean that the old discourse of arche-writing is no longer “operative”?

Malabou observes that contemporary biology puts pressures on contemporary philosophy, and suggests that deconstruction falls short in its understanding of “life” and living beings in this new scientific context. From Of Grammatology‘s outset, Derrida speculates on the day when deconstruction’s “own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed” (9): does the concept of plasticity achieve this task of exposure? In his foreword to Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Clayton Crocket notes the filial and supplemental relation between the concepts of arche-writing and plasticity: “Plasticity replaces Derridean writing as a motor scheme by which to think and do philosophy” (xvi).⁷ He argues that the stakes of this substitution are not only philosophical but theological, insisting that we understand “the end of deconstruction as the deconstruction of Christianity” (xvii). Leaving aside the theological question, if “genetic writing … is the determinant of life” (lxxix), and if plasticity now takes the place of writing, more than philosophy undergoes a tectonic shift.

Although Of Grammatology primarily discusses human language, Derrida’s central claim about the phonocentric exclusion of writing (graphic and spatial specificities in particular⁸)—and the way in which writing or arche-writing provides the general structure of language—also opens up the manner in which a kind of writing is always already in play with living beings in general. In “Program,” the first section of the book, Derrida begins to extend the narrow understanding of writing to include media, plastic and performative arts, and human techniques in general: “inscription in general … cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’” (9). Derrida subsumes (all?) human activities to writing, not in the sense of writing about these activities, but of these activities as writing:

One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. (9)

All arts and technics are arts and technics of writing, not only for the human being, but also for all life forms, whether natural or artificial: “It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and of pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing” (9). Artificial intelligence as well as human intelligence, artificial life as well as natural life, cybernetic program as well as genetic program: all proceed as modes of writing. Derrida employs anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s work to situate grammatology and writing in relation to all life—machinic⁹ and genetic—and not just in relation to “man.” Embedded in a critique of the ethnocentric conception of writing, arche-writing belongs not only to all people, but also to all living beings:

it is not enough to denounce ethnocentrism and to define anthropological unity by way of the disposition of writing. Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity of man and the human adventure thus by the simple possibility of the graphie in general; rather as a stage or an articulation in the history of life—of what I have called differance—as the history of the grammè. Instead of having recourse to the concepts that habitually serve to distinguish man from other living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.), the notion of program is invoked. It must of course be understood in the cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention. (84)

Derrida invokes Husserl’s terms protention and retention, anticipation and memory, to speak of the temporal synthesis that is founded by differance, the deferring of the trace: “this movement goes far beyond the possibilities of the ‘intentional consciousness.’ It is an emergence that makes the grammè appear as such” (84). Whether social, governmental, cognitive, or biological, all programs, plans, controls depend on the trace:

Since ‘genetic inscription’ and the ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens, the possibility of the grammè structures the movement of its history according to rigorously original levels, types, and rhythms. But one cannot think them without the most general concept of the grammè.(84)

Grammatology therefore exceeds the anthropos itself, and Derrida suggests a continuum between all strata of the trace, whether animate or inanimate, natural or technological:

one could speak of a ‘liberation of memory,’ of an exteriorization always already begun but always larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary programs of so-called ‘instinctive’ behavior up to the constitution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines, enlarges differance and the possibility of putting in reserve; it at once and in the same movement constitutes and effaces so-called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its theological attributes. (84)

We see here in what manner the grammè constitutes life—natural as well as artificial, human as well as artificial intelligence—in a sweeping genetic, epiphylogenetic,¹⁰ and cybernetic program. We have a new sense of what is at stake with the grammè; in addition to being equivalent to the history of life, “this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (70). This other includes not only death, the inanimate, and the technological, but also the epigenetic, i.e. the genetic trace’s “exteriority.”

Malabou’s forays into neurobiology and epigenetics have led her to question the division between the material medium and the symbolic—formulating instead a concept of plasticity whereby life is understood as that which brings together biology and the symbolic, calling the plasticity of the brain neuro-plasticity and the plasticity of the genetic code epigenetics; yet she also objects to understanding inscription as a model for life.¹¹ Malabou argues that plasticity goes beyond the grammatological conception of life, but whatever plasticity might be, is it not also subject to differance and the logic of the trace? Epigenetics and plasticity suggest that the genome is not a totalizing unity, therefore not a book but “evolving,” therefore subject to différance, i.e. a text, and it was Derrida who substituted text or writing (dissemination) for book (unity, totality), especially the book of life. Furthermore, in substituting plasticity for inscription and epigenetics for the genome, Malabou passes over the fact that Of Grammatology is also to a certain extent a critique of the epigenetic, not only in regard to language but life as well. The critique of the epigenetist concept of writing—the epigenetism that permits Lévi-Strauss “above all to consider the passage from speech to writing as a leap” (150)—follows from the position that writing does not appear ex nihilo, out of nowhere, as an appendage of speech. Derrida questions this pairing of structure and chance, originary structure and contingency: writing is not an epigenesis of speech, not an exteriority, secondary and derived. Arche-writing “precedes” the so-called historical development of writing and is constitutive not only of speech, but of all language in general. As differance, trace, originary supplement, and originary prosthesis, arche-writing brings that which is at the margins to the center—to the epicenter, so to speak. This is why, although Derrida launches a critique of the epigenetist concept of language, arche-writing is nevertheless always already epigenetic in the sense that the operation of the trace and the logic of the supplement put into question genesis or origin: “differance defers-differs” (68). Epigenesis (traced back to William Harvey, 1650, and earlier to Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption) is a theory of (embryonic) development according to which the living being is unformed at the start and is formed over time and is distinct from preformationism, the doctrine that the living being is already predetermined from the start. For contemporary genomics, epigenesis suggests a plasticity to the fixity and innateness of the genetic code and forms in general. Epigenetics (the term was coined by Conrad Waddington in 1940) is a principle of differentiation from the genetic—for instance, in the differentiation from the genotype to phenotype, and in the differentiation of types of cells in a genetically uniform organism. Is not différance a kind of (non-transcendental) condition of possibility even for this mode of difference? Or are epigenesis and epigenetics fertile fields for an emergent philosophy that fosters cultivars of plasticity, weeding out the old grammatological paradigm? Malabou’s recent book Avant Demain: Épigénese et Rationalité maps genetics/epigenetics onto the old schema preformation/epigenesis, deploying plasticity as a way to address the problematic of Kant’s “epigenesis of pure reason.” Without invoking the logic of the supplement or the trace, she attends to a kind of plasticity of the transcendental whereby the accord between the a prioiri and objects of experience is understood as an epigenesis, a developmental differentiation rather than a preformationism. Foreclosed as well is the idea that this epigenesis is merely the exposure of the transcendental to materiality and experiential time and space, because the possibility of the accord between concepts and objects is, for Kant, originarily given.

This double foreclosure—neither preformationism nor a posteriori—would appear to lend itself to what Derrida calls the “supplément d’origine.” Derrida is discussing Rousseau, and only tentatively alludes to questions of the transcendental in Part I, but states in Of Grammatology‘s final section:

The question is of an originary supplement, if this absurd expression may be risked, totally unacceptable as it is within classical logic. Rather the supplement of origin: which supplements the failing origin and which is yet not derived; this supplement is, as one says of a spare part [une pièce], of the original make [d’origine]. (313)

In this context we can state the relation between genetics and epigenetics not as a relation between an interiority and its environment (the epigenetic is not an environmental principle, it does not come from the outside), but according to the logic of the “supplément d’origine.” Recent research on epigenetics suggests that the epigenetic belongs to the “deep structure” of the genetic; it comes not from the outside, like a pernicious exposure to the environment, but rises to the surface from interior layers of the genetic code. The epigenetic is “part” of the latency of the code in the manner of a spare part, something that adds to and subtracts from the whole. The temporal dimension remains obscure (there is no sequential unfolding, yet there is no fixity: there is deferral, differing, differance): the supplement is and is not present at the origin; there is, as Derrida states, no derivation. This is not a situation of production or growth—neither techne nor poiesis—but rather a more “originary” event. In this sense, epigenetics might be a kind of originary supplement.

Derrida targets epigenesis and the “‘epigenetist’ concept of writing” in Chapter 1 of Part II, The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau. What Derrida objects to most famously throughout Of Grammatology is the separating and exteriorizing of writing from language; instead, a kind of arche-writing is the condition of possibility of both spoken and written language conventionally understood. He critiques the notion that writing is a mere modality of “language appending to itself its graphic ‘representation’ as an accessory signifier” to a “fully oral language, pure of all writing” (120). In Part I, Derrida extensively demonstrates in what manner writing is not a marginal accessory or appendage to spoken language, but is the condition of possibility of language “in general.” Likewise, we could argue that epigenetics is not an exterior, plastic expression of the genome, as Malabou might say, but rather that the plastic expression, supposedly secondary and accessory, is the condition of possibility of the genome: the supposedly programmatic genetic code is always already a plastic inscription, a trace. It is not a question of expression and molding; the trace makes plasticity (im)possible. These two epigenetic threads intersect precisely with the question of the origin of languages: Derrida insists that language is not a merely accidental or chance leap from the living being—language is not an epigenesis of life—but that the structure of the trace is already constitutive of the living being. He objects, for instance, to Lévi-Strauss’s statement that “on the scale of animal life, language could only have been born suddenly. Things could not have begun to signify progressively” (qtd. 121). For Derrida, life has always already been signifying, and no haphazard axe ruptures life and language. At the same time, he points out that “the appearance of certain systems of writing three or four thousand years ago was an extraordinary leap in the history of life. All the more extraordinary because a prodigious expansion of the power of differance was not accompanied, at least during these millennia, by any notable transformation of the organism” (131). The birth of writing (in the narrow sense) made little difference to the organism because life was always already inhabited by a kind of arche-writing.

How then does “the operation of the trace” (101) bear on the question of epigenetics? Rather than being reassured by the familiarity of the textual model in genetics, we find that the trace complicates the concepts of transmission, genealogy, and inheritance. There is, writes Derrida, an equivocation between genealogy and writing in the narrow sense, one that prioritizes the temporal and genetic line: “a people who accede to the genealogical pattern accede also to writing” (125); “the birth of writing (in the colloquial sense) was nearly everywhere and most often linked to genealogical anxiety. The memory and oral tradition of generations, which sometimes goes back very far with peoples supposedly ‘without writing’” (124). Genealogy speaks to a mnemotechnics that installs “the line” as a temporal sequence, which has a limit for so-called oral transmission. Here genealogy and genetics, writing and arche-writing conjoin: “The genealogical relation and social classification are the stitched seam of arche-writing; condition of the (so-called oral) language, and of writing in the colloquial sense” (125). A dehiscence irrupts from this “stitched seam”: the ethnocentric and phonocentric conception of language issues from the limit of the genealogical line. However, buried within arche-writing lies genetic writing, the genealogic code that is a technics and an archive of the hereditary, the genomic. Keeping “track” of biological inheritance and parentage—which belongs to anxieties about incest, or is perhaps at their origin—aligns the mnemotechnics of writing with family genealogy plus their concomitants (incest and parricide). This is why Derrida warns that “the metaphor that would describe the genealogy of a text correctly is still forbidden” (101). Genealogy structures itself around a prohibition not only because the question of the parent involves the incest taboo, but also because arche-writing signifies both the possibility and impossibility of genesis and genealogy. Cloning, transgenics, and genetic technologies in general are all suspect with regard to this taboo, which explains in part why contemporary bioart and biomedia are uncanny and transgressive. Malabou’s silence over Derrida’s discourse on epigenesis might concern filiation, the anxiety of influence, and parricide, yet The Violence of the Letter suggests that the issue is deeper: “if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touching the soil, so to speak. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical essence, but not the necessity of their racinating function” (101).

Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss underscores the point that structural anthropology declares writing to be a technical and evil supplement that comes from the outside. As derivative and “outside” the innate structure of language, writing is taken to be a kind of mutation or excrescence, a pernicious epigenesis of speech. Derrida places arche-writing “inside,” yet without making it an innate principle or a transcendental a priori. There is no “without writing,” so Malabou’s critique of genetic inscription and preference for epigenetics—with its evocations of a full and present plasticity—appears to perform an inadvertent “exclusion of writing,” one that both disavows the lessons of deconstruction and reissues them in another guise. Derrida considers Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology and structural linguistics as forms of phonocentrism, which makes writing a prosthetic and derivative staff. By separating epigenetics from the genetic, Malabou too maps the epigenetic onto the derivative staff and the genetic onto essential language, reinstituting a phonologism or phonocentrism in the realm of biology. We must hesitate here, though, because the genetic and the linguistic model she resists is not that of the trace, but of code. In a sense, Malabou’s championing of epigenetics and plasticity is a critique of structural linguistics, yet she does not name the trace as an operation that is always already epigenetic or plastic. Malabou wants to raise epigenetics above genetics and epigenesis above genesis, as Derrida has already done by calling origin, essence, and authenticity into question and bringing to the center that which is derived and at the margins: genesis and the genetic program are always already opened up by the trace, always already written and inscribed in a manner that operates by differance, differing and deferral. Derrida shows us in a thousand ways that there is always a writing before the letter, but he does not subscribe to a preformationism or an innatism of writing. Even though the trace is always the condition of possibility—and impossibility—of this or that, its priority is not temporal. The trace opens the condition of (im)possibility of temporality; its priority “stands before” the temporal.

Derrida’s critique of the “‘epigenetist’ concept of writing” (120) keeps the “priority” of the trace in mind by targeting an “epigenesis” operating in Lévi-Strauss’s origin story of the evolution of language, which runs: “If writing first made its appearance between the fourth and third millennium before our era, we must see it not, in any degree, as a conditioning factor in the Neolithic revolution, but rather as an already distant and doubtless indirect result of that revolution” (292). Although Lévi-Strauss asserts that writing is a derivative development issuing from the birth of agriculture and the domestication of animals, Derrida suggests that these practices can already be likened to a mode of genetic writing: a technical and mnemotechnical fashioning of organic life, retained and transmitted in the blood lines and the botanical archive. Plant and animal genomes are already a mode of genetic inscription, a “writing before the letter,” and a plastic one at that. Whether or not Derrida borrows “epigenesis” or “epigenetist” from Kant, when applied to Lévi-Strauss, the terms designate a spontaneous leap or chance emergence, a break or rupture in the genealogical line: “Such a leap would prove that the possibility of writing does not inhabit speech, but the outside of speech … From what does Lévi-Strauss arrive at this epigenetism that is indispensible if one wishes to safeguard the exteriority of writing to speech?” (126-27). If writing and the genealogical line belong together, the origin of writing is a paradoxical break with this pattern; in other words, the condition of possibility of genealogy is nothing genealogical. Rather than putting genesis into question, epigenesis here serves to safeguard it by way of an absolute rupture. Derrida also points to the ethico-political implications of epigenesis, because the epigenetist concept of writing allows Lévi-Strauss

to consider the passage from speech to writing as a leap, as the instantaneous crossing of a line of discontinuity: passage from a fully oral language, pure of all writing—pure, innocent—to a language appending to itself its graphic ‘representation’ as an accessory signifier of a new type, opening a technique of oppression. Lévi-Strauss needed this ‘epigenetist’ concept of writing in order that the theme of evil and of exploitation suddenly coming about with the graphie could indeed be the theme of a surprise and an accident affecting the purity of an innocent language from without. (120)

Derrida’s objection to Lévi-Strauss’s epigenetist concept of the origin of writing includes a rejection of its Western ethnocentrism and racism; those supposedly “without writing” are separated out as innocent according to an ideology that gives authenticity and plenitude to the spoken word and disavows the arche-writing at the heart of all language. Derrida observes that the separation of writing from speech “supports an ethico-political accusation: man’s exploitation by man is the fact of writing cultures of the Western type. Communities of innocent and unoppressive speech are free from this accusation” (121).

We might wonder if Malabou’s account of epigenesis likewise rejects innateness and essentialism but inadvertently reinstates them. In the context of her discussion of Kant and epigenesis, it might first appear that the objection to innateness or preformationism also rejects ethnocentric essentialism, reserving the opening of anthropological differences for epigenesis. Yet this hierarchical separation, like the separation of writing from speech, would reduplicate the ethico-political accusation, inadvertently shielding the transcendental subject from certain anthropological “incursions.” If, in Malabou’s analysis, epigenesis signifies a liberation, an emancipation, from the fixed program—something that we all might desire—this utopian preference for chance and change and the leap runs the risk of safeguarding the isolationism and fixity of the program: the epigenetic rupture is a moat that protects the fortress. And for Derrida, the fortress of language as spoken word is accompanied by a reactionary metaphysics of pure presence, essentialism, authenticity, phallogocentrism, and self-same identity. When Lévi-Strauss attempts in the essay “The Writing Lesson” to narrate a kind of colonial importation of writing, or a colonial occupation by writing, Derrida asserts that this parable does not describe the origin of writing but merely its imitation: the gesture of writing is mimicked, according to Lévi-Strauss, without understanding the signifying discourse. Yet this parroting nevertheless grasps the performative force of writing and its instituting power. Derrida objects that Lévi-Strauss separates the cognitive or constative dimension of writing from its performative force and its inscriptional violence, and suggests that the anthropologist wants to safeguard the theoretical and scientific dimensions of language from its political dimensions. We could take this as a cue to read Malabou’s advocating on behalf of epigenesis as a political declaration. Just as Derrida suspects that Lévi-Strauss’s epigeneticism—by which language is separated from biological life with an axe, and writing is separated from language with the same axe—ends up being a Western ethnocentrism in the guise of an anti-ethnocentrism (131), we might share similar conjectures about Malabou’s work on epigenetics, especially her book Avant Demain: Epigenese et Rationalité.

If Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite us to move away from the programmatic readings of inscription that turn life into a cybernetic code or machine, what do they invite us to move toward? In Avant Demain: Épigenèse et Rationalité, the move from a genetic paradigm to an epigenetic paradigm concerns genetics, but also “mind,” because Kant uses the term epigenesis to describe the development of categories of pure reason. Malabou does not deploy the “logic” of the supplement as a way to address the problematic of Kant’s “epigenesis of pure reason,” and it appears that—like Rousseau—she “would like to separate originarity from supplementarity” (Grammatology 243) when she separates inscription from plasticity and genetics from epigenetics. The conceptual antagonism between genesis and epigenesis can be heard in an abstract for the talk “Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics,” which Malabou delivered on April 22, 2015 at UC Irvine:

In paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes use of the expression ‘system of the epigenesis of pure reason.’ This biological analogy is meant to affirm that the categories of our understanding are not innate or preformed, but develop themselves just like an embryo, that is, through self-differentiation and addition of new parts. To what extent is this idea of self-formation of the transcendental prefiguring the current definition of epigenetics, the science which studies the wide range of non-genetic modifications of the living being? It seems that the raging debate that opposed epigeneticism to preformationism in Kant’s time finds its current version in the contrasted relationship of genetics and epigenetics. Far from concerning only the biological field, these confrontations also have a central hermeneutical meaning, as it appears in Paul Ricoeur’s thinking: interpretation, he claims, has to do with the epigenesis, not the genesis, of a text. Are we facing the emergence of an epigenetic paradigm in culture?

Leaving Derrida entirely out of the picture, Malabou mentions Paul Ricoeur and claims in Avant Demain (271) that he was, in his 1965/69 books on interpretation, the only thinker to discuss the thematic difference between genesis and epigenesis.¹²

The silence regarding Derrida is curious, given that Malabou returns to Kant’s discussion of epigenesis and preformationism and of the way they figure in the accord between a priori concepts and objects of experience. She does so in order to ask what contemporary developments in epigenetics mean for philosophy, and in what respect contemporary biology points to the limits of some philosophical discourses. Kant deploys the concept of epigenesis to give a sense of how the accord between a priori concepts and phenomena is neither innate nor derived from experience; rather, the accord is “the epigenesis of pure reason.” Malabou explores Kant’s formulation as well as its analogue in contemporary genetics—that is, epigenetics is to genetics what epigenesis is to preformationism—in order to dislodge philosophy from the constraints of the cybernetic and genetic program that informs contemporary conceptions of life; she wants to detach our understanding of life from the program of the symbolic and lead it toward plasticity. In her essay “The Future of Derrida: Time Between Epigenesis and Epigenetics” (an essay that, despite its title, does not discuss Derrida’s discourses on epigenesis), Malabou reminds us that Kant objects to the doctrine of preformationism and adopts epigenesis instead. For pure reason, knowledge is not derived from experience, but neither is it innate or preformed. For Kant, the accord that moves from a priori concepts to objects of experience (not the other way around) happens by “as it were, a system of the epigenesis of pure reason,” and not by “a kind of preformation-system of pure reason” (Pure Reason 265). Like a living being, pure reason appears to have a formative force: it is autopoietic. This assertion is compatible with Kant’s vitalist tendencies and his dissent from Blumenbach’s view that lifeless matter has as much of a formative force as animate matter (Before Tomorrow 107). Paragraph 65 in the Critique of Judgment confirms that, for Kant, formative force (Bildungstrieb) sets the living organism apart from the machine.

If living beings have an autopoietic formative force, the epigenesis of pure reason would, on this analogy, be an auto-epigenesis. Malabou relates epigenesis to the autoaffection of the transcendental subject, because the phrase “epigenesis of pure reason” suggests that there is a formative force, a plasticity, to the transcendental. This bears on the question of an a priori autopoiesis or “auto-organization” (Before Tomorrow 160), an epigenesis from the inside that is not a preformation but a transcendental feedback loop that has no interface with the environment or the outside, yet provides a basis for the one-directional accord between the a priori and the a posteriori. Inflected with concepts of freedom and “improvisation” (56), the “system of epigenesis” is somehow neither a spontaneous ex nihilo genesis nor a preformationism. For Kant, autopoietic systems are limited to life systems, and to such an extent that we can, says Malabou, equate epigenesis with life force (Lebenskraft) (166). Yet the notion of “system” was first applied to the arrangement of ideas and principles and only later applied to the organization of living bodies. When Malabou likens epigenesis to an interpretation of a text (169), it is surprising that there is no turn to the analysis of the epigenetist concept of writing in Of Grammatology. Malabou tells us that in contemporary biology (152), reading epigenetics as the interpretation of the genetic text is the reigning paradigm—and is, in essence, a hermeneutics (Before Tomorrow 91).¹³ Making use of the notion that epigenesis is a kind of expression or interpretation of a genetic text, she suggests that biological epigenesis and the epigenesis of pure reason are analogues of each other in their respective realms. Malabou clarifies that the “epi” in epigenesis means “au-dessous” and “sur,” and that we need not too quickly transpose this into an “après” (Before Tomorrow 59). She suggests that we should also understand “epi” in the geologic sense, as that which concerns the rising to the surface, or the location à propos the surface:¹⁴ the “epi” is the surface, the skin (as in epidermis). But doesn’t this surface/depth hermeneutics run the risk of reinstating epigenesis as a derivative of an authentic genesis? Alternately, we might think this “epi” as Derridean supplement or prosthesis: the accord between a priori concepts and objects of experience could therefore be an originary supplement, an originary technicity.

Another difficulty: although Malabou acknowledges that neutralizing the stance that the a priori is neither innate nor empirical would foreclose the specificity of Kant, and that the a priori can be established neither through positivism nor logic, she nevertheless considers reading the a priori as a mode of (genetic) inheritance and evolution (Darwin). This line of thinking leads to the idea that reason is a biological feature of the brain, and epigenesis therefore a kind of development of the brain. Stressing that Kant’s deployment of the phrase “epigenesis of pure reason” is not “simply a rhetorical artifice” (xiv), Malabou perhaps takes this figure too literally, imagining that the biological sense of “epigenesis” could unlock the meaning and straighten out the aberrations of reference here (287). In fact, the question of the accord between a priori categories and objects of experience is the primal scene of the referential function. Going so far as to admit that there is no argument if Kant’s use of the term epigenesis is merely one figure among others (313), Malabou makes a tautology (rather than an analogy) between life and thought (310), the brain and mind, claiming that Kant’s use of epigenesis is necessary: the epigenesis of pure reason essentially coincides with the plasticity of the brain (Before Tomorrow 312, 194). Malabou may over-stress the necessity that thought concern not only the transcendental subject but also the living being—”d’un sujet transcendantal et d’un être vivant” (Avant Demain 300)—when, in effect, Kant retains an affinity with Descartes before him and Heidegger after in his position that thinking is detached from, or, minimally, is prosthetically attached to the living being. For Kant, the transcendental subject is clearly not equated with the brain. Bernard Stiegler likewise observes that Malabou bypasses the inorganic-grammatological principle of inscription necessary for any reading, interpretation, or thinking (though he does so in a materialist register). In equating the epigenesis of pure reason with the plasticity of the brain, Malabou bypasses language entirely and shifts to describing solely the apparatus—whether mind or brain—that, as it were, reads and writes texts.

Consequently, Malabou does not consider transindividual thought or neuronal activity as networked activity that could be connected to all sorts of prostheses and environments and ontological strata. Nor does she discuss the epiphylogenetic offshoring of memory (texts, art, archives, media), an especially important aspect of transindividual thinking and a technical heritage for oneself and others (“tertiary retentions”). Although Malabou rejects “the abyss between the logical and biological origin of thinking” (1), she nevertheless adopts the idea that the brain is the substrate of thought rather than understanding the brain as one of the elements in a networked infrastructure of thinking and memory. Concepts like ecology of mind, extended mind, and epiphylogenetics indicate that human thought essentially relies upon technics and the prosthetic offshoring of memory onto the environment and symbolic systems. In addition, Malabou bypasses the intentional structure of thinking, i.e. the idea that thinking is always thinking about something (in literary parlance, the referential function). It goes without saying that she also forecloses the possibility that artificial intelligence is a mode of thinking, which need not have an organic brain or any other organic material as its substrate. Malabou persists in attaching thought to the zoon rather than understanding thought as essentially technical. She remains in the vitalist camp.

While Malabou need not mention Stiegler’s extensive Technics and Time project, there appears to be a major clash between epigenesis and epiphylogenesis, an epi-deconstructive clash between Malabou and Stiegler in the post-Derrida scene. This clash might be political—an antagonism between self-emergent autopoietic self-determination; a kind of utopian ex nihilo self-determination; and a causal, class, and institutional programmatic determinism—yet Malabou evades political and historical questions to focus instead on epigenesis as a process of temporalization and on the distinction between originary temporality and derived temporality (304). It makes sense to understand the epigenesis of pure reason as temporality, given that the inner sense (autoaffection) and temporality are one and the same for Kant, but Derrida’s deconstruction of the autoaffection of thought/temporality (especially in Husserl) already points to the way in which the trace is the condition of (im)possibility of temporality. Epigenesis is perhaps inadvertently substituting for trace in Malabou’s text. While Derrida asserts repeatedly that the trace is not a transcendental principle, the assertion that the trace is “prior” to temporality bears on the reading of Kant’s idea that time and space are the a priori conditions of possibility of appearance as such. Of Grammatology tells us: “The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance … is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace” (65). For Derrida, the epigenesis of pure reason would concern, avant la lettre, the priority of the trace. Appearing to complicate her argument about epigenesis, Malabou writes: “the earth always appears as a collection of traces. … For Kant, it is not possible to date the past of the earth, which he calls its history, without using the archaeological calendar … for Kant the arche-fossil is always an architrace. And the architrace is always a trace of life” (Before 178). Aporetically caught between an ex nihilo autopoiesis and the heritage of the always-already-there (Quentin Meillassoux’s question concerning time prior to human consciousness, human life, and life in general), Malabou states that “l’épigenèse est à la théorie de la generation ce que la production des categories est à la philosophie transcendentale” [epigenesis is to the theory of generation what the production of categories is to transcendental philosophy] (Avant Demain 314). For Kant, the categories of understanding are neither innate nor empirically determined: the accord between categories and objects of sensation is “originally given” in the manner of an epigenesis. To elaborate the question of the categories, Malabou turns to Kant’s discussion of schematic and symbolic hypotyposes (paragraph 59), which present concepts and ideas in terms of sense. Without embroiling ourselves in the differences between schematic and symbolic (or direct and analogic presentation), we note that schemata are a kind of image or graph or diagram or inscription, at most, neuronal traces in a particular configuration, and not the living brain itself. To patch up the chasm between brain and schemata, Malabou reads schemata as cellular or neural automata. She claims that the schemata of reason are, in effect, autopoietic machines: “sans auteur, automatiquement produit par le concept ou l’idée dont il es l’image. L’hypotypose n’est pas de l’ordre de la creation ni de l’invention subjectives” [without author, automatically produced by the concept or idea of which it is the image. The hypotypose is not of the order of subjective creation or invention] (315). Void of subject, the mechanistic morphogenesis that produces the schemata of reason sounds much like an iteration machine that Platonically prints out the image of the idea. Is this plasticity or is this inscription?

In section XI. of her earlier book, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, “The Ontological Economy, Or Absolute Controvertibility,” Malabou puts all her chips on form and plasticity. She insists that this championing of plastic form is not a regression into an arch-metaphysics, and seeks to come up with a different conception of form that concerns transformation and a kind of immanent economy of change.¹⁵ In doing so, she disregards Derrida’s point that the trace is the condition of possibility of form, and claims that differance excludes change or transformation. According to her reading, although differance speaks of difference and deferral, it forgets another meaning of difference: that something can become different, can change. She sees this as Derrida’s forgetting of Heidegger’s underscoring of Aristotelian change as alteration instead of as movement. Of the trace, Malabou writes: “only the vocabulary of displacement and migration, the metastatic lexicon, without its metamorphic corollary, was required, … in other words, all that is needed is a purely graphic lexicon” (Plasticity 48-49). One wonders where the cineplastic would be situated. In any case, differance (un)grounds change, whether alteration, movement, plastic modulation, or immanent transduction. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida insists that color as well as design concern differance and trace: “color, too, which is thought to be extraneous to the trait, as if chromatic difference didn’t count” (11). In the world of computer language, discrete and non-discrete languages are non-continuous and continuous respectively (digital and analogue), and although we are not in the habit of thinking trace in the context of energetic flows and fields, this does not mean that the trace (un)grounds only discrete, non-continuous languages. Malabou, then, reintroduces a clear distinction between form and trace, disregarding the manner in which arche-writing informs every and any form, and is not an accessory supplement from the outside. While the assertion that the trace does not have a form in the empirical or transcendental sense would be consistent with Derrida’s discourse, Malabou confuses the trace with the narrow, graphical conception of writing that Derrida deconstructs when she writes that the trace is the “line with no form. Indeed, if the trace had an image, it would be the image of slicing or deleting, never a rhythm, never a figure, never a contour” (49). In a certain alliance with Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure (which she mentions on 54-56)—one that requires a separate analysis—Malabou decrees that “Writing will never abolish form. The trace will never pierce the figure” (Plasticity 49). Although Derrida does say that the trace does not have a form, he does so in order to reject form as eidos and logos and form as spatialized scribble or graphical mark in the empirical sense.

Finally, Malabou speaks of writing’s historical circumscription (counter to Of Grammatology‘s argument) by stating that

The constitution of writing as a motor scheme was the result of a gradual movement that began with structuralism and found its mooring in linguistics, genetics, and cybernetics. A pure linguistic image, the image of the gap or difference, gradually established itself as the scheme of an ontological organization. (Plasticity 57-58)

In Of Grammatology, the so-called moorings are deeper than structuralism, even if we only consider the case of Rousseau. Nor is the trace linguistic or imagistic: arche-writing (un)grounds linguistics, genetics, cybernetics, distancing itself from any kind of status as a motor scheme, launching instead a critique of ontology and logocentrism. Malabou perhaps misidentifies the target with the explanation:

[François Jacob’s] The Logic of Life confirmed the existence of this linguistic structure of being by privileging the role of writing within it. In effect, the genetic code then became a true ontological motif. The “standard” meaning of writing was thus in the process of “widening.” Jacob’s book bears witness to the extension of the graphic scheme beyond genetic boundaries. DNA is the biological translation of a general ontology of the graph. “Any material structure can … be compared to a message,” Jacob declares. The concepts of genetic coding or writing witness the fact that the graph was in the process of establishing itself as the privileged hermeneutic image and instrument of an era. (Plasticity 58)

Although Malabou goes on to say that the trace is at the origin of image, she disregards the Derridean stakes in distinguishing trace from code, linguistics, language, image, and graph in “the narrow sense.” Even Rousseau has a discourse on the grapheme (as does Lévi-Strauss), yet Derrida elaborates a different kind of understanding of graph, of supplement, and difference. Derrida references François Jacob’s The Logic of Life to note that a linguistic paradigm reigns in biology, but he does so to differentiate arche-writing from writing in the narrow sense. Arche-writing is not code but something like the (non-empirical, non-transcendental) condition of possibility of code, whether human or genetic. Logos is neither “present” in human language nor in genetic language; it is entirely Derrida’s point to put into question the logocentrism of any and every “language,” whether human, genetic, or cybernetic.

Stating that the concept of program is the motor scheme of thought (although Derrida discusses the program not as a historical development that brings writing to the fore but as one that is (un)grounded by arche-writing), Malabou announces its end:

Derrida describes here the semantic enlargement of the concept of writing, not as an arbitrary philosophical decision but as an event, the appearance of a new order, starting from the pregnancy of the motifs of program, information, or code. It is only on the basis of this programmatic organization of the real as it is liable to come to an awareness of an era that writing was able to constitute itself as a philosophical motor scheme.

Yet today we must acknowledge that the power of the linguistic-graphic scheme is diminishing and that it has entered a twilight for some time already. It now seems that plasticity is slowly but surely establishing itself as the paradigmatic figure of organization in general. (Plasticity 59)

One would wonder what the nature of this “figure” might be; as a figure in Malabou’s text, it is surely figurative. Although Malabou earlier announced a new reading method called “plastic reading” (51), we might have to pass over deconstructive readings of the rhetorical kind to try to understand this plasticity. Let us first note that Malabou does not proceed to make the argument about plasticity in genetics, but shifts to neurobiology. Plasticity in this context refers to “the capacity of synapses to modify their transmission effectiveness” (60). A synapse is a transducer, a structure that allows the transmission of a signal (chemical or electrical) from one neuron to another. This description, like any other, is technologically determined by the condition of its historical mediality, but the “rhetoric” of signal is notable in this discussion of plasticity. That the synapse is modified or self-modifies seems to describe a modification of both the apparatus and the signal, yet Malabou collapses the synaptic apparatus with signal, disregarding any distinction between structure and operation. (Stiegler has likewise observed that Malabou disregards the moments of representation, grammatization, mnemotechnics, and exteriorization in her discussions of neurobiology, rendering thinking and brain as equivalents.) Citing a neurobiologist who states that “we [now] have physical traces of the accessing of meaning,” Malabou disregards the term trace and insists that theses traces are “in fact first and foremost images and forms” (Plasticity 60). Even if this is so, is it really the case that the operation of the trace (in the Derridean sense) is not in play here?

Again, even though the medical imaging technology that “codes” the behavior of nerve connections and the transmission of signals “is called the graph” (60), Malabou disavows the rhetoric and insists that “this graph is not a writing; this trace does not proceed by printing or facilitation. Hence, the metaphor used to describe it is not a graphic metaphor” (60). She asserts this because the “graph” is said to be a graph of an assembly or network of neurons, suggesting that an assembly or network is not a diagrammatic writing—as if assemblies and networks, as systems of relations, were not paradigmatically graphs. She appears to assert that if something is in configuration or takes “shape,” it has nothing to do with either graphein or the spacing opened up by the trace. Malabou circles back to the question of genetic code that she left behind by saying that it “is striking to note that neuronal plasticity—in other words, the ability of synapses to modify their effectiveness as a result of experience—is a part of genetic indetermination. We can therefore make the claim that plasticity forms where DNA no longer writes” (60). Even though the rhetoric of graph and trace is used in neurological research, Malabou informs us that “the substitution of plasticity for imprint or trace in the current scientific description of the nervous system is an interesting and fundamental path to follow in order to understand the current becoming-obsolete of ‘trace’ or ‘writing’” (78-79). She ambivalently hedges on this claim and adds that neuronal traces, though traces, are not really traces: “The brain’s plasticity presents a model of organization that can still be described in terms of an imprint economy, but neuronal traces don’t proceed as writing traces: they do not leave a trace; they occur as changes of form” (79). Even if these traces don’t leave a trace—something problematic for psychoanalysis and memory studies in general—it was the Derridean trace that was always already under erasure, sous-rature, and retroactively “constituted”: a neurobiologist would be hard-pressed to track down the self-same identity of one of these constantly deferring, differing traces and rub them out without remainder. And even if neuronal traces do not proceed as “writing traces,” the arche-writing trace and its attendant deconstruction of the metaphysics of change and form might still have something to say about “changes of form” in an “imprint economy”: perhaps the neuronal trace is something like a plastic inscription. Likewise with the genetic trace: does epigenetics tell us that it is a plastic inscription? For the moment, many scientists are describing epigenetics as a surface scratching or marking of the genome, and as such is another kind of code. Chemical “marks” attach to genes and can, for a few generations, be transmitted or inherited along with their host DNA. The sequence of the DNA is not affected, but an additional layer (“epi”) or shell of information is recorded, stored, transmitted. As one biologist puts it: epigenetic modulations “scratch different kinds of code on the genome … There’s an epigenetic code, just like there’s a genetic code.” And in the lecture “Epigenetics: Its Redefinition, Molecular Mechanisms and Phenotypical Associations,” John Greally insists we shouldn’t even be using the term epigenetics anymore, but “regulative transcription.” Our understanding of the genome will no doubt find new figurations. When Derrida writes that “the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (Of Grammatology 75), he speaks of a differential materiality plastic enough to span the “epigenetic landscape” (Conrad Waddington’s original 1940 formulation for the genome’s relation to environment), Catherine Malabou’s latest “change of form,” and the many biodeconstructions to come.

Footnotes

1. Instead of grammatology, “the science of writing” (Of Grammatology 4), I will use my term grammatechnics, the technics of writing, arche-writing as ur-technics. Bioarchives such as genetic codes lend themselves to grammatechnical methodologies—i.e. reading according to the materiality of inscription and the letter—because these codes are free from principles of teleology, intentionality, and consciousness: in short, the “natural” signs that constitute genetic codes could be read as purely material positings. Literary theory that has focused on the materiality of language may already be ahead of the game: biological life—human or otherwise—is a technics of inscription.

2. DNA has even been used as an information storage device: < https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram>.

3. For some interesting examples, see the work of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Eduardo Kacs, and Paul Vanouse.

4. See especially Biomedia and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.

5. A description of a talk that Malabou gave in Stockholm on January 26, 2015 reads: “Plasticity versus Inscription: A Change of Paradigm”: “The notions of trace, writing and inscription have been predominant in both philosophy and art since the turn of the 1970s. Claiming that all presence always consists in its own erasure, Jacques Derrida has shown that the movement of difference, or “différance,” is what always already displaces the metaphysical understanding of subjectivity, stability, and totality. However, the most recent discoveries in cellular biology, genetics, epigenetics, and neurobiology are challenging the hermeneutical importance of this paradigm of inscription. Neural networks, stem cells, genomes, are said to operate plastically, without leaving a trace but creating a form. A new vocabulary is thus emerging: firing, assemblies, populations. In her presentation, Catherine Malabou will evaluate the impact of such discoveries on the philosophical and artistic fields. Starting with Hegel, moving through Derrida, and ending with contemporary biology, Malabou will analyze three structures—totality, dissemination and regeneration—and will discuss them using three figures: that of the phoenix, the spider, and the salamander. Each time, images and concepts will be put into dialogue.”

6. In Of Grammatology, the trace is approached through different principles–the sign under erasure, retroactive constitution (Nachträglichkeit), deferral as well as difference–and although the arche-trace (61) is a strategy to avoid the “empirical mark … if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace” (61). Derrida situates the term trace in relation to “contemporary discourses” and notes that “in all scientific fields, notably biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible” (70). He cautions, however, that it also belongs to “the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence” (70).

7. Malabou makes this assertion herself: “Plastic reading aspires to the metamorphosis of deconstructive reading” (Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing 52).

8. In a gesture that hints at different materialities and media forms for arche-writing, Derrida does not prioritize the grapheme: “This arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of nongraphic expression” (60). Derrida nevertheless retains the term writing.

9. The machinic, following Deleuze, is the name for any assemblage or synthesis, including living beings, inanimate machines, geological formations, and temporality itself. That grammè and the machinic share an affinity can be discerned when Derrida explicates grammè as synthesis, as arche-synthesis: “An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general” (10).

10. Bernard Stiegler picks up on the gramme’s role in corticization as the exteriorization of memory and time by technics. Consciousness is an interplay of exteriorization (epiphylogenetics) and engramming by tertiary retentions.

11. Although Derrida appears to embrace a grammatological conception of life (what I prefer to call a grammatechnics of life), it must be understood on the principle of the trace, and not some other paradigm like symbol, semiotics, or structuralist linguistics. What Derrida means by arche-writing disrupts conventional paradigms of life that deploy linguistic models.

12. The English translation, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, reads, “The only thinker to make thematic use of the difference between genesis and epigenesis is Paul Ricoeur” (158).

13. “The metaphor of textual hermeneutics or musical interpretation is the figure that epigenetics explicitly foregrounds” (91).

14. Malabou asserts that “the transcendental is a surface structure,” a kind of “founding at the point of contact” (Before Tomorrow 36) by noting that the “epi” in epigenesis refers to a manifestation above or on the surface. Her concept of plasticity need not replace inscription here, and contemporary genetics in fact describes epigenetics as a kind of “scratching” on the surface of genetic code. Malabou herself says that “contemporary epigenetics actually studies the transformation mechanisms at work on the surface of DNA molecules during transcription” (36), and epigenetics works “on the surface (epi) of the molecule” (79).

15. Although onboard for a materialist reassessment of the transcendental, Malabou is suspicious of, for instance, Quentin Meillassoux’s arguments for radical contingency in After Finitude—she asserts that radical contingency turns into a new kind of transcendental—but still hopes for the freedom and creativity of a happy kind of contingency. Her desire for plasticity—that things can change, that change is possible—is one that many might share: we like the idea of neuro-plasticity and a plasticity of the genome. Who wants to be locked into the pre-determinism and preformationism of a fixed and programmatic brain and genetic code? Alternately, who wants to be subject to the infinite precariousness of radical chance? And politically, who embraces absolute totalitarianism or absolute nihilism? For Malabou, life itself is the plasticity that she desires. This outlook belongs to a long line of (vitalist) philosophers who make the living being an exception, Kant included: life falls eternally outside the grasp of biological science and philosophical analysis.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. (1967) Translated by G. C. Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Jacob, François. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Trans. Betty E. Spillmann, Pantheon Books, 1973.
• Johnston, John. The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI. A Bradford Book, 2010.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, 1987.
• —. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “A Writing Lesson.” Tristes tropiques, New York, Criterion, 1961.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon, U of Minnesota P, 2010.
• Malabou, Catherine. Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité. Presses Universitaires de France, 2014.
• —. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity, 2016.
• —. “The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity.” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, Vol. 12, 2007, p. 431–441.
• —. “Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics.” Lecture, April 22, 2015 at UC Irvine, Irvine, California, USA.
• —. “The Future of Derrida: Time Between Epigenesis and Epigenetics.” The Future of Continental Religion of Philosophy, edited by Crockett, Putt, Robins, Indiana UP, 2014.
• —. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2009.
• Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. Translated by Ray Brassier, Bloomsbury, 2010.
• Roof, Judith. The Poetics of DNA. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
• Thacker, Eugene. Biomedia. U of Minnesota P, 2004.
• —. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. MIT P, 2006.

Francesco Vitale (bio)
University of Salerno

Abstract

In the unpublished seminar La vie la mort (Life-Death) (1975-76), Derrida reads The Logic of Life by the biologist François Jacob. The seminar is oriented to answer a question already advanced in Of Grammatology: what are the deconstructive effects—if any—provoked by grafting the theory of information onto biological research, and in particular by the use of notions such as “programme” and “writing”? This essay shows how Derrida deconstructs the biological notion of “programme,” reading its definition in light of the dynamics of différance.

In the seminar La vie la mort, Derrida’s reading of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is explicitly oriented to verify the following hypothesis, advanced in Of Grammatology (1967):

It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic programme will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. (9)

Throughout La vie la mort Derrida explicitly recalls this hypothesis, as well as the reasons for critical vigilance about it, and thus he also offers a verification:

Some ten years ago, in Of Grammatology, a chapter close to the beginning, entitled (just a coincidence, one would say, an almost subjectless prescience or teleology) The Programme, recalled that, I quote, “today the biologist speaks of writing and programme in relation to the most elementary processes of the information in the living cell.” But this was not to reinvest in the notion or word of programme the entire conceptual machine of logos and of its semantics, but to try to show that the appeal to a non-phonetic writing in genetics had, would have, to imply and provoke an entire deconstruction of the logocentric machine rather than call for a return to Aristotle. (1.22)¹

Therefore, the recourse to a theory of information and in particular to notions such as “programme” and “writing” grants by itself neither the emancipation of biology from philosophy (the rigorous scientificity of biology, as Jacob believes) nor the deconstructive impact of biological discourse. Conversely, these notions can easily work at the service of the “logocentric machine” and thus of the metaphysical conceptuality that structures the Western philosophical tradition. It would be possible to interpret the debt of genetic biology to cybernetics within the framework of the tradition of the “philosophy of life” that finds its roots in Aristotle and has developed through Hegelian synthesis, a tradition taken up unconsciously by genetic heredity, it being at the same time a repetition and a progress, a sort of evolutionary variation. This is precisely what Canguilhem argues in “The Concept of Life,” which Derrida recalls in this context:

When we say that biological heredity is the communication of a certain kind of information, we hark back in a way to the Aristotelian philosophy with which we began … To say that heredity is the communication of information means somehow to acknowledge that there is a logos inscribed, preserved and transmitted in living things. Life has always done—without writing, long before writing even existed—what humans have sought to do with engraving, writing and printing, namely, to transmit messages. The science of life no longer resembles a portrait of life, as it could when it consisted in the description and classification of species; and it no longer resembles architecture and mechanics, as it could when it was simply anatomy and macroscopic physiology. But it does resemble grammar, semantics and the theory of syntax. If we are to understand life, its message must be decoded before it can be read. (Canguilhem 316)

Derrida mentions this passage at the end of the first session of the seminar, after introducing his reading of Canguilhem’s essay as an interpretation of contemporary biology in light of the tradition of the “philosophy of life”:

Philosophy of life, these are the last words of Canguilhem at the end of the article. They are not taken at his disfavor, and if the entire article is oriented towards the demonstration that contemporary biology is still profoundly Aristotelian and Hegelian this is not taken against him, the opposite is true. (Derrida, La vie 1.20)

Yet, it is important to point out what follows: 1) Derrida considers it necessary to verify the hypothesis advanced at the time of Of Grammatology, that is, that recourse to the theory of information (in particular to the notions of “programme” and “writing”) does not necessarily entail by itself deconstructive effects but, on the contrary, can also consolidate metaphysical sediments within the scientific discourse; 2) this programme of verification must concern in particular the notions of “programme” and “writing.” What is at stake here is establishing the basis upon which the importation of these notions from cybernetics to biology and their specific use in biology can be justified. Respecting the programme of deconstruction, I shall start with “programme.”² In fact, Jacob ascribes to this notion a decisive role in the revolution that takes place in biology. It is only thanks to the incorporation of the theory of information into the life sciences that it was possible to understand the role of the DNA in the cell and, thus, finally, to describe the genesis and structure of genetic heredity on scientific bases:

Heredity is described today in terms of information, messages and code. The reproduction of an organism has become that of its constituent molecules. This is not because each chemical species has the ability to produce copies of itself, but because the structure of macromolecules is determined down to the last detail by sequences of four chemical radicals contained in the genetic heritage. What are transmitted from generation to generation are the “instructions” specifying the molecular structures: the architectural plans of the future organism. (Jacob 1)

In particular, for Jacob, the notion of programme imposed itself on the field of biology as it provides an account of the two traits of the living that he considers immediately evident to common sense:

The concept of programme blends two notions which had always been intuitively associated with living beings: memory and design. By “memory” is implied the traits of the parents, which heredity brings out in the child. By “design” is implied the plan which controls the formation of an organism down to the last detail. Much controversy has surrounded these two themes. (2)

Jacob alludes to the controversy about “acquired characters” and in particular about the possibility that the external environment influences and modifies the genetic programme of a single individual by generating mutations that will be transmitted to successive generations. For Jacob, this is a common illusion, a very old one, due to the ingenuous, intuitive, and non-scientific use of the analogy between “genetic and mental” memory (brain, mind, or psyche) (2). The analogy is justified, but if it is used naively, it can engender a dangerous confusion that leads us to identify genetic memory, the heredity that structures the living organism, with nervous or cerebral memory, which specifies the behavior of the individual with respect to the environment. If we attribute to genetic memory the structural traits of nervous memory—acquisition, conservation, and transmission of the data that derive from the environment—then it will appear legitimate to suppose that we can intervene from outside to modify genetic memory, that is, the genetic programme. According to Jacob, the introduction of the notion of programme allows us to establish the correct use (the effective, operative, and scientific use of the analogy between genetic memory and nervous memory), as it maintains the common characters and, at the same time, it avoids the identification of the two systems of memory so long as they correspond to two different and specific stages of the evolution of the living:

For modern biology, the special character of living beings resides in their ability to retain and transmit past experience. The two turning-points [points de rupture] in evolution—first the emergence of life, later the emergence of thought and language—each corresponds to the appearance of a mechanism of memory, that of heredity and that of the mind [cerveau]. There are certain analogies between the two systems: both were selected for accumulating and transmitting past experience, and in both, the recorded information is maintained only as far as it is reproduced at each generation. However, the two systems differ with respect to their nature and to the logic of their performance. The flexibility of mental memory makes it particularly apt for the transmission of acquired characters. The rigidity of genetic memory prevents such transmission. (Jacob 2)

Beyond the Analogy, the Difference

Derrida draws attention to the analogy examined by Jacob and more generally to the very concept of analogy here evoked. Firstly, for Derrida, Jacob imports a philosophical concept, such as “analogy,” into biological discourse by attributing to it a decisive, operatory value without considering its accuracy or its critical role with regards to the consequences that such value entails for the stability and consistence of a discourse that wishes to be rigorously scientific. The notion of analogy, of Platonic provenance, is in strict solidarity with the structure of hierarchized oppositions that characterize metaphysics (intelligible/sensible, signified/sign, proper/figured, concept/metaphor, and so forth); therefore, it works within this structure and, once adopted without critical vigilance, cannot but confirm the whole system:

As for the analogy in question, Jacob does not ask where it leads with its implications and with the very choice of its name. He determines that analogy as a similarity between two systems (in both cases, accumulation of a “past experience” and, in both cases, transmission of this experience). But one can only analyze the text to go further in the necessity and problematicity of this word analogy. Firstly, analogy is here between two systems and two logics, a system of relations of proportionality between multiple terms with variables. Just as nervous memory (that is, cerebral memory, thought and language in the traditional sense) accumulates and transmits information, so does genetic memory. This relation, this relation of relations (among four terms) was called by the Greeks a logos and an analogy. Here the analogy between the two relations, between the two logoi, is a relation between a memory that involves language or logos in the current sense (nervous or cerebral memory corresponding to the second emergence) and a memory without language in the current sense (genetic memory). Analogy in the logos of the modern geneticist (in his metalanguage or supposed metalanguage), between a logos in the so-called proper sense and an a-logos. (Derrida, La vie 1.15)

For the deconstruction of the metaphysical presuppositions implicit in the notion of analogy, Derrida explicitly refers to his essay “White Mythology.”³ In the seminar, he focuses on the consequences that the importation of the analogy carries into biological discourse. If what grants a properly scientific and non-metaphorical use of analogy is the discovery, realized by grafting cybernetics onto biology, that genetic memory works as a cerebral memory and thus as a language, that is, according to the structure and laws of logos, and, therefore, if logos is the guarantee of the rational structure—of the logic—of the living, then Canguilhem is right when affirming that through cybernetics, modern biology has unconsciously inherited the Aristotelian legacy of the philosophy of life and, thus, the metaphysical conceptuality on which this philosophy of life is grounded and from which Jacob wants to be free:

But this general analogy has been only possible when (today) we got to know, with a scientific knowledge, that the a-logos was also a logos in the broad sense, that genetic memory operated like a language, with code, message, possible translation of message, and that it operated also by means of analogies, that is, putting relations into relations [mises en rapport de rapports], and more precisely by means of four radical elements. (Derrida, La vie 1.15)

Once the relationship between genetic memory and cerebral memory has been subordinated to the order of logos and thus to the traditional conception of language that derives from it and that still governs the function of the key features of the theory of information (programme, code, message, transmission), there is a risk of importing into biological discourse, in its decisive articulation, the logocentric structure that characterizes the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel up to Saussure and beyond, as it is demonstrated in Of Grammatology. In particular, the logocentric structure carries with itself the determination of the sign as the simple means of the external transmission of a signified constituted by itself, that is, produced within a certain ipseity (soul, subject, consciousness, brain) and, thus, autonomous and independent from the material exteriority of the signifier in charge of its transmission:

Once this analogy is accepted without interrogating what is logos, a message and a code determined on the basis of their semiotic code, it is possible to ask if this is enough to make the subject disappear, what Jacob calls “the intention of a psyche,” a formula that caricatures all traditional theological providences, in order to escape what the values of message, translation, design, end import from the system of logos, of traditional logocentrism. (Derrida, La vie 1.16)

One of the issues at stake in Derrida’s reading consists precisely in the possibility of liberating biological discourse from the bonds that tie it to the order of metaphysical discourse in order to highlight the latter’s deconstructive implications. Derrida deepens his analysis of the analogy between genetic memory and nervous memory to show that the latter’s precariousness and absence of rigor are the symptoms of the removal of an interpretative possibility that the adoption of the analogy itself prevents us from seeing for irreducibly structural reasons. The analogy, as Jacob formulates it, according to Derrida, is misconstructed: in order to establish an analogy between two or more terms—entities or relations between entities—it is necessary that each term be constructed by itself and determined independently from the other. It is necessary that between the terms of the analogy we recognize a qualitative and essential distinction, a difference of nature, as Jacob argues with respect to the difference between genetic memory and nervous memory. However, the first determination of the analogy proposed by Jacob is quantitative and not qualitative: the two systems of memory differ from each other because of a greater or lesser flexibility or rigidity, and not because of their nature or essence. The consequence that Derrida draws from this is important and goes far beyond Jacob’s intentions: “We are no longer dealing with two rigorously discontinuous types but with two relays of the same economy. … therefore, the analogy is no longer an analogy between two different terms, but a similarity within the element of homogeneity” (La vie 1.17). If between genetic memory and cerebral memory there is a distinction that is only economical or quantitative, then not only is the analogy ungrounded but it is necessary to recognize that the two different articulations are within the same order: that of general memory, understood as the system of acquisition, conservation, and transmission that structures the genesis and evolution of the life of the living. If they are phenomena of the same order, not only is it necessary to exclude their qualitative opposition, their difference in nature or essence, but it is also legitimate to hypothesize that between the two memories there is a relationship implied in their very determination and thus the two systems are not the one outside of the other; they are not determined the one independently from the other, but there is between them an evolutionary relationship and thus the one—nervous memory—is a specific emergence in the course of the evolution of the living that is structured according to the conditions of the other—genetic memory. This leads to the hypothesis that memory as an individual psychic structure is an evolutionary product of the genetic memory, of the programme that presides over the logic of the living, and, ultimately, that between nature (genetic memory) and culture (cerebral memory) there is a continuity and not a rupture, as the analogy established by Jacob supposes.

Here I do not want to credit a rigidly deterministic biologism according to which any cultural phenomenon should be brought back to the biological-evolutionary conditions that structure the life of human beings and in particular their brains. For Derrida, it is possible to think of a differential relation between genetic memory and nervous memory, and thus to articulate the dynamic of différance as the general condition of the life of the living and of its evolutionary history:

For my part, I would see no more than a progress in this suppression of a limit that has often served humanist or spiritualist ideologies or, generally speaking, the most obscurantist metaphysics. I would see no more than a progress here if the question of the logos of the analogy were elucidated in a critical fashion in order to avoid the return in force, merely legalizing a clandestine metaphysics, everything that has been attached to the value of logos and analogy across the tradition. To anticipate and to speak a little algebraically: I would be in favor of a de-limitation that destroys limits and oppositions (for instance, the two types of programme in which one would recognize on one side the pure genetic and on the other side the great emergence of the cerebral, from the being-erected to the zoon logon ekon and all that follows from it), destroying that opposition, then, not to give rise to something homogenous, but rather to a heterogeneity or a differentiality: for, as I was suggesting from the beginning, the functioning of the opposition has always had the effect of effacing differentiality. What interests me under the heading of the au-delà and of the pas au-delà, is precisely this limit without opposition of opposition and difference.(Derrida, la vie 1.17)

Derrida seems to adopt an evolutionary perspective that is very close to that of Leroi-Gourhan, to whom he is indebted for what concerns the elaboration of the notion of “arche-writing” in the framework of an evolutionary description of the genesis of the devices of memorization—from the genetic programme to writing, through memory as the individual psychic structure.⁴ However, since for Derrida différance regulates the history of life, the evolution should be thought as a differential/differing process in which each stage of the process of differentiation corresponds to a specific, relatively independent emergence that consists in both an articulation and an effect of differential iteration with respect to the conditions of the process itself. Therefore, for Derrida, evolution is not a linear and continuous process (whether teleological or not) and does not require leaps and irreducible ruptures. The hypothesis adopted here is neither “deterministic” nor “reductionist,” not even metaphysico-humanist and logocentric: between the genetic and the symbolic, between nature and culture, there is neither identity nor opposition but différance.⁵

In other works I trace this “differential” thesis in the seminar and beyond in order to verify its sustainability and implications within a deconstructive perspective. Here, I will go on with the analysis of the notion of programme and the deconstruction of the analogy between genetic memory and cerebral memory.

Derrida takes into consideration another distinctive trait, of a qualitative nature, that seems to be more rigorous and thus able to legitimate the opposition between the two systems of memory and the very possibility of establishing a relation of analogy. For Jacob, genetic memory and cerebral memory differ in their relation to the outside: while cerebral memory is open to the outside and is subject to its modifications, genetic memory is impermeable to external action: “The genetic programme, indeed, is made up of a combination of essentially invariant elements. By its very structure, the message of heredity does not allow the slightest concerted intervention from without” (3). If we look more closely, this is not the case: affirming that genetic memory is impermeable to the action of environment would mean denying the possibility of selection, which is essential to evolution. For Jacob the two systems are not opposed because of their opening or closure to the environment; they both open onto the outside. Their opposition concerns the relation that they entertain with the environment: cerebral memory interacts in a direct, conscious, and intentional way, with deliberate aims, and thus can modify its behavior, while the modifications that genetic memory undergoes—the so called mutations on which natural selection and thus the environment intervene ex post facto—are of the order of contingency, accidental and deprived of a direct cause and effect relationship:

Whether chemical or mechanical, all the phenomena which contribute to variation in organisms and populations occur without any reference to their effects; they are unconnected with the organism’s need to adapt. … Each individual programme is the result of a cascade of contingent events. The very nature of the genetic code prevents any deliberate change in programme whether through its own action or as an effect of its environment. It prohibits any influence on the message by the products of its expression. The programme does not learn from experience. (Jacob 3)

However, Jacob is forced to admit at another point in the text that, even if indirectly, the genetic programme does “learn from experience.” The mutations of the programme, due to contingent events, must always undergo natural selection, which favors those mutations that better adapt to the environmental conditions that influence their possibility of reproduction:

The very concept of selection is inherent in the nature of living organisms, in the fact that they exist only to the extent they reproduce. Each new individual which by mutation, recombination and addition becomes the carrier of a new programme is immediately put to the test of reproduction. If this organism is unable to reproduce, it disappears. If it is able to reproduce better and faster than its congeners, this advantage, however minor, immediately favours its multiplication and hence the propagation of this particular programme. If in the long run the nucleic-acid text seems to be moulded by environment, if the lessons of past experience are eventually written into it, this occurs in a roundabout way through success in reproduction. (Jacob 292)

For Derrida this opposition is again not rigorous enough: as psychoanalysis and modern structural sciences such as linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology have demonstrated, it is possible to extend to cerebral memory and thus to the sphere of language what Jacob maintains as an exclusive, distinctive trait of genetic memory. Cerebral memory, the individual psyche, is strongly bound to codes and programmes (linguistico-semiotic, social, religious, politico-institutional, economical, and so forth). With regard to these codes and programmes, the margin of the intentional and deliberate intervention is very tight and aleatory: the programme remains far beyond the threshold of individual consciousness and thus beyond its possibility of action and deliberation. Consciousness is indeed an effect rather than a cause. Such is the case of Jacob himself, who, in order to define the genetic programme, must resort against his own conscious intentiontraditional philosophical tools, from which he had believed himself emancipated:

The heterogeneity of causes and effects, the non-deliberate character of changes in programme, in a word, all that places the subjects within the system in a situation of unconscious effects of causality, all that produces effects of contingency between the action coming from the outside and the internal transformations of the system, all of that characterizes the non-genetic programme as much as the genetic one. Where does Jacob get the idea that outside of the genetic system and programme the change of programme is deliberate, essentially deliberate? Where, if not in a metaphysico-ideological opposition that determines the superior and symbolical programmes (with humanity at the highest level) on the basis of sense, consciousness, freedom, knowledge, the limit between the inside and the outside, objectivity and non-objectivity, etc.? Now, if something has been achieved by the so-called structural sciences today, it is the possibility of affirming that the systems related to language, the symbolic, cerebral memory, etc. also have an internal functioning, with an internal regulation that escapes deliberation and consciousness and makes the effects come from the outside be perceived as contingencies, heterogeneous forces, which are necessary to interpret, translate, assimilate into the internal code, attempting to master them in that code, or failing to do so to the point that “mutations” are produced that can take on all sorts of forms but which always signal a violent intrusion from the outside, forcing a general restructuration. (Derrida, La vie 1.19)

Derrida seems to defend an ultra-deterministic thesis by attributing to symbolical programmes the very rigidity of the genetic programme claimed by Jacob. However, the opposite is true, as the apparently paradoxical conclusions of the argument prove: the two programmes—the genetic programme and the symbolic one—function on the basis of different principles of internal regulation in view of their reproduction. This rigidity does not exclude their opening onto the outside; rather, it implies for both systems the necessity of being influenced and modified by what comes from outside and thus the necessity of interpreting what comes from outside with respect to the exigencies of the reproduction of the system. What comes from outside can simply be rejected from the programme if it is interpreted as dangerous, or it can be assimilated, conserved, and thus also transmitted if it is interpreted as useful to the survival of the system; it can induce corrections in the mechanisms in charge of the execution of the programme; ultimately, it can induce modifications of programme and thus true mutations, and this works for the symbolic programmes as well as for the genetic programme with effects that both systems cannot easily control, as they are relatively aleatory (to the extent that they are opened onto the outside and called to interpret its contingency). But it is noteworthy that the thesis implicit in Derrida—for whom there is a genetico/differential relation between genetic memory and nervous memory, which results from différance as the common condition of their emergence and the specific articulation through different levels of development—contradicts one of the fundamental principles of the biology of the time, formulated by Jacob in the aforementioned passage: “The programme does not learn from experience” (3), that is, genetic mutations cannot be caused by the environment where an individual lives.

From Deconstruction to Epigenetics

At the time of its elaboration, Derrida’s position would have been liquidated as an ingenuous Lamarckism, and this is perhaps one of the reasons the seminar has not been published. But the state of the art in biology is much different today; in particular, research has been carried out that is considered of revolutionary relevance and is congruent with Derrida’s thesis insofar as the latter could be read as anticipating and legitimating this research from a theoretical point of view. I allude to recent research conducted in the field of epigenetics, a science that studies the interaction between genes and environment, whether it is internal (the cellular environment) or external (what we ordinarily understand as environment). This research has provoked a radical mutation of the order of biological discourse and thus of the interpretation of the logic of the living and of its evolution. In particular, the role of the genetic programme in the construction of the architecture of the individual today appears less deterministic and, ultimately, not exclusive. The architecture of the individual is no longer considered the exclusive result of the rigid execution of the genetic programme in its cells; rather, it hinges on the interactions between genes and the cellular environment in which the genes are inscribed and on which they depend for the expression of their function. In particular, this expression undergoes a series of epigenetic regulations (methylation, RNA interference, histone modifications, genomic imprinting) that in some cases may depend on environmental factors external to the individual, such as pollution or exposure to a shortage or excess of food, but also on factors of psychological stress of a social or cultural order, such as the lack of a genitor’s care or war trauma. Some epigenetic regulations can even provoke a reassembling of the genetic programme of the individual (“reprogramming”), a reassembling that in some cases can be transmitted to the following generations and thus become hereditary. This feature is obviously decisive, not only because it allows us to affirm, against Jacob and with Derrida, that “the programme learns from experience,” but also because, from a more general perspective, it legitimates the hypothesis that these epigenetic regulations are essential factors of evolution, that is, of those genetic mutations that until now have been generically attributed to selection, which, as we saw above, affect populations and not the individual. In other words, this feature legitimates the hypothesis that those genetic mutations registered on the scale of populations are not only and exclusively due to mistakes in the transcription of the genetic programme, which are independent from the environmental factors that intervene only in the selection of more adaptive mutations. Indeed, these mutations may be epigenetic adaptations in singular individuals exposed to specific external or internal environmental factors.

To strengthen my argument and to grasp a deeper understanding of the relevance of this research, it may be useful to quote from the beautiful synthesis provided by Richard C. Francis in Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. In particular, Francis focuses on the change of perspective induced by epigenetics with respect to the rigidly deterministic conception of the genetic programme, which had been endorsed for a long time precisely after the studies carried out by Monod and Jacob. He shows that, however important, the genetic programme is only one element of the cellular interactions that determine cellular differentiation and the organization of the living. Not only does the programme no longer represent the exclusive principle that regulates the rigid architecture of the living, but it is also liable to mutations due to the internal and external environment:

Some epigenetic alterations of gene behavior have effects that extend beyond an individual lifetime. The effect of these transgenerational epigenetic alterations may be direct or indirect. Direct transgenerational effects occur when the epigenetic mark is transmitted directly from parent to offspring, through sperm or egg. This is what I call “true epigenetic inheritance.” True epigenetic inheritance is not common in mammals like us, but it does occur. Indirect transgenerational effects are much more common … Much more indirect are the transgenerational effects observed in the maternal behavior and stress response. Here, the epigenetic alterations that influence these behaviors are recreated through the social interactions that they both influence and are influenced by. This transgenerational effect is a positive feedback loop involving gene action and social interaction. Whether direct or indirect, these transgenerational epigenetic effects should expand our notion of inheritance. (Francis 159)

What has been put forth seems to me to be enough to undermine Catherine Malabou’s thesis that Derrida’s notion of “writing” is closely bound to the concept of “programme,” elaborated by cybernetics and implemented by biology, and thus that this idea of writing can no longer be retained today, as it has become obsolete.⁶ However, traces of the deconstruction of the programme, and in particular of its deterministic features, can already be found in published texts such as Dissemination:

As the heterogeneity and absolute exteriority of the seed, seminal différance does constitute itself into a programme, but it is a programme that cannot be formalized. For reasons that can be formalized. The infinity of its code, its rift, then, does not take a form saturated with self-presence in the encyclopedic circle. It is attached, so to speak, to the incessant falling of a supplement to the code [d’un supplément de code]. (Derrida 52)

At this point the aim of Derrida’s analysis is clear: the definition of the notion of programme, as it is formulated by Jacob, imported by cybernetics, and transplanted at the heart of the living, is unconsciously overdetermined by the programme of metaphysics, with its fundamental logocentric and humanistic legacy:

Here too, you can see, the opposition between the two programmes cannot be rigorous, and this seems to me to depend upon the fact that, for want of a without reelaboration of the general notion of programme and the value of analogy, they remain marked by a logocentric teleology and by a humanist semantics, by what I would call a philosophy of life. (Derrida, La Vie 1.20).

Footnotes

This text reworks material from my book Biodeconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, published by SUNY Press in 2018. It is based on the reading of the partially unpublished seminar given by Derrida in 1975 at the École Normale in Paris titled La vie la mort. Traces of this work are disseminated in other essays I have recently published. See Vitale, “Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida between Testimony and Literature,” “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction,” and “The Text and the Living.”

1. Citations of the seminar indicate the number of the session and the page, according to the original draft. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I thank Mme Marguerite Derrida for allowing me to quote Jacques Derrida’s unedited seminar La vie la mort. The seminar consists of fourteen sessions. In the first session, Derrida introduces the seminar and begins to read François Jacob’s The Logic of Life (1970). The second session is dedicated to Nietzsche, to the relation between the philosopher’s life and his oeuvre as developed in his writings, in particular Ecce Homo. What is at stake is the problem of auto-bio-thanato-graphy that Derrida treats extensively in his published works. I will limit myself to observing only that this problem comes out of the intersection between life, as the object of discourse (mythical, religious, philosophical, scientific, psychoanalytic, literary, and so forth), and the life of the subject of the discourse itself. This session has been published in full, with a few interpolations and the addition of footnotes, in Otobiographies (3-35). The first part of the third session also concerns Nietzsche, his theory of the physiological origin of the metaphor and, in more detail, the recourse to phenomena borrowed from biological life as a metaphorical resource to describe the state of degeneration of German academic institutions in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. The second part addresses the metaphor/concept opposition within scientific discourse and, in particular, in relation to Jacob’s The Logic of Life and Canguilhem’s “The Concept of Life.” In sessions four through six, Derrida goes back to the analysis of The Logic of Life. His reading focuses on biology and, in particular, on the relationship between cybernetics and biology, taking as its point of departure the (at the time) recent discovery of the essential role DNA plays in the reproduction of the cell, that is, in the elementary unity of the life of the living. Thanks to this discovery, biology could elaborate the logic that regulates the life of the living, namely, the logic of self-reproduction, within the framework of the theory of evolution.

2. Here I open a path toward “writing” in Vitale, “The Text and the Living.”

3. For an accurate analysis of the deconstruction of analogy see Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, 293-318. In particular: “As Derrida has demonstrated in Plato’s Pharmacy, a certain dominating and decisive hierarchization takes place between the terms of the relations that enter into correspondence in a relation of analogy. This hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy comes from the fact that one term within the relation of relations comes to name the relation itself. Consequently, all the elements that make up the relations find themselves comprised by the structure that names the relation of analogy as a whole. That name, ultimately, is that of the logos” (304).

4. On this debt see Vitale, “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction.” See also Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech.

5. On the other hand, the hypothesis advanced should not surprise a careful reader of Derrida. It has to do with the programme elaborated in the essay “Différance”: “Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as, the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring; all the others of physis—tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc.—as physis different and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in difference)” (18).

6. See Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction: “The Logic of Life confirmed the existence of this linguistic structure of being by privileging the role of writing within it … In this graph ontology, the origin—whatever meaning is attributed to this word—can only be thought in terms of a trace, that is, a difference to the self. Generally, it is the concept of program—which is obviously also a concept in the field of cybernetics—that culminates and completes the constitution of the graphic scheme as the motor scheme of thought. Derrida alone recognized the full importance of this fulfillment and culmination … Derrida describes here [at the opening of Of Grammatology] the semantic enlargement of the concept of writing, not as an arbitrary philosophical decision but as an event, the appearance of a new order, starting from the pregnancy of the motifs of program, information or code. It is only on the basis of this programmatic organization of the real as it is liable to come to the awareness of an era that writing was able to constitute itself as a philosophical motor scheme” (57-59). See also Malabou, “The End of Writing. Grammatology and Plasticity.”

Works Cited

• Canguilhem, George. “The Concept of Life.” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from George Canguilhem, edited by François Delaporte, Zone Books, 1994, pp. 303-320.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1982, pp. 1-28.
• —. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. La vie la mort. Unpublished seminar, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, DRR, 1975.
• —. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. John Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. “Otobiographies.” The Ear of the Other, translated by Avital Ronell, Schocken Books, 1985, pp. 1-38.
• —. The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1987.
• Francis, Richard C. Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W.W. Norton, 2011.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Harvard UP, 1986.
• Jacob, François. The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. Translated by Betty E. Spillmann, Pantheon Books, 1973.
• Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger, MIT P, 1993.
• Malabou, Catherine. “The End of Writing. Grammatology and Plasticity.” The European Legacy, vol. 12, no. 4, 2007, pp. 431-441. ResearchGate, doi:10.1080/10848770701396254.
• —. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2010.
• Vitale, Francesco. Bideconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by Mauro Senatore, SUNY P, 2018.
• —. “Conjuring Time: Jacques Derrida between Testimony and Literature.” Conjurations, special issue of Parallax, vol. 17, no. 1, 2011, pp. 54-64. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/13534645.2011.531179.
• —. “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida, Between Biology and Deconstruction.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2014, pp. 95-114. Edinburgh UP, doi:10.3366/olr.2014.0089.
• —. “Via rupta: vers la biodeconstruction.” Appels de Jacques Derrida, edited by Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Ginette Michaud, Hermann, 2014.

Vicki Kirby (bio)
Astrid Schrader (bio)
Eszter Timár (bio)

Abstract

The word biodeconstruction asks us to consider what is appropriate to deconstruction as a practice and to reflect on the relationship between the discourse of biology and that practice. Within literary, philosophical, and cultural debate, deconstruction appears as a recognisable mode or style of analysis. However, what happens if we interrogate the radical interiority of textuality in terms of biology’s rhetorical structures and logics or through scientific evidence and methodologies? If biology is routinely equated with origins, prescriptions, and first causes, can this classical narrative of temporal unfolding be shifted? Can biodeconstruction refigure the relation between the empirical and the conceptual?

Our conversation began at the ACLA’s first biodeconstruction event in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in July 2017. We agreed that our collective contribution should take the form of a series of questions and answers about how biodeconstruction speaks to our respective practices. We jointly formulated a set of questions to which each of us would respond. Our aim was to highlight how different perspectives might illustrate the term’s inherent pluralization as well as its compatibility with our feminist commitments. What emerged in that process, in which initial questions were reformulated, is a mixture of individual statements and a conversation that seeks to clarify the relevance of different trajectories and relations to Derrida’s idea of deconstruction and the life sciences. Our hope is that these different perspectives might be suggestive of the sorts of interventions and concerns that the term biodeconstruction can enable.

Question: How does deconstruction relate to our work, and how and to what extent have we engaged with the sciences and biology in particular?

Astrid Schrader:

As a feminist science studies scholar and ex-physicist, an engagement with the sciences has always been my bread and butter. I turned to deconstruction through my interest in time and its relation to notions of justice in feminist theory. While poststructuralist feminists seemed to have “only paradoxes to offer” (Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes and Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights” were particularly influential for me), Derrida’s articulations of the aporia of time suggested an answer or two: experiences without traversals. Without origin or telos, but through originary traces (memories), justice became conceivable (again) with the structure of a promise. As a student of Donna Haraway, I grew up with naturecultures (one word!) and the desire for better accounts of scientific knowledge production. With my other teacher, Karen Barad, and her notion of agential realism, it became clear that spacetimematterings required alternative articulations of time: intra-activities could not be articulated in ordinary or “vulgar” notions of time (Heidegger’s term), concatenations of present nows. In my dissertation, Dinos & Demons: The Politics of Temporality and Responsibility in Science, I read Barad’s agential realism and Derrida’s deconstruction together or through each other–diffractively, to use Barad’s term–in order to develop a reading of science that pays attention to nonhuman agencies and intra-active temporalizations. Once I began looking, I found haunting everywhere in science. Haunting and indeterminacy became crucial to my readings of science. Moving from physics into marine microbiology (and sometimes back), I feel that I have always been engaged in biodeconstruction, if that means reading biology (as a text or writing in Derrida’s expanded sense) deconstructively. Each of us may have a slightly different understanding of biodeconstruction and what that could mean. If “deconstruction is justice” (Derrida, “Force”), could biodeconstruction be aligned with (scientific) responsibility? What interests me here in particular is what the move from the “name of truth” to the “name of justice” could mean for the life sciences and scientific knowledge production.

Vicki Kirby:

I’d describe myself as a feminist with an interdisciplinary background in literature and then the social sciences. But I’ve always been fascinated by what counts as “nature”–the given, or what is difficult to change. My interest was especially piqued when, studying feminism in the early 80s with Moira Gatens and Liz Grosz, I came to appreciate that the analytical terms of the nature/culture division explained a lot of entrenched political discriminations even as they made little sense. The focus of feminist concerns at that time was Cartesianism, with its implicit denigration of the body (the feminine) as mere support for the mind (the masculine)–the proper site of self. I’d always been exercised by the riddle of origins as well as the question of language and how it is identified and circumscribed as a system among others (because it seemed to me that it wasn’t). For these reasons I’d risk calling myself an intuitive deconstructionist. When I read Of Grammatology it was such a relief, especially as my institutional setting at the time was largely positivist and I wanted a more complex appreciation of matter and the empirical. I didn’t see “language” as a second-order re-presentation of reality that could be defined against what wasn’t language. And I didn’t regard nature as an inaccessible “before,” a concept put under erasure because human culture is hermetically enclosed against what preceded it. It was precisely this spatial and temporal narrative of an evolving progress that I wanted to problematize. For this reason I felt as if I had a mate and a guide in Derrida, someone who could help me think origin questions and their political implications more rigorously.

Regarding the relevance of science and biology to my work, the body I was studying in philosophy was for me always a biological body. As my research was in anthropology, and the nature/culture question is especially germane to that discipline, I was aware that the biological body in different cultural contexts is capable of “performing” very differently: sympathetic magic that allowed Kwaio men to lactate, hook-hanging among Mandan Native Americans, or crucifixion ceremonies in the Philippines resulting in little bleeding and no scarring that demonstrate the variation in pain thresholds across histories and cultures. Placebo and nocebo effects also intrigued me, especially as a particular, measurable response was equated with no response because it was regarded as a psychological cause that was, by definition, not biological, not real and material–just a belief. I always thought that this segregation of responses into real and imagined was strangely unscientific, and yet only recently has science begun to acknowledge its oversight in this regard.¹

Freud’s recognition that the hysterical symptoms of his female patients “made sense” in terms of the stories they told about their lives was taken up by feminist scholars. It became clear that symptoms such as blindness, autographic skin, hysterical paralyses, and aphonia had political significance, functioning as signs whose theatrical disruption to normative social expectations told of personal injury and unconscious resistance. And yet almost all of this work failed to mention that biology was agential, writing its condition into legible signs. It seemed that the question, “How does biology do that?” was not on the agenda.² The need to remove biology from the discussion segregates culture from nature as the necessary default line of inquiry. If we concede that biology is inherently cultural in this example, then the temporal and spatial separation that secures their difference makes little sense. Indeed, we are left to wonder about the specific nature of biology if we have nothing to measure its difference against.

Derrida’s “originary différance” helps me to complicate the easy appeal to what purportedly comes first as an orienting reference point. Of Grammatology, for example, doesn’t confine its engagement with the question of nature to a diagnosis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ethnocentrism, Ferdinand de Saussure’s phonocentrism, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s pedagogical prejudices. Grammatology isn’t just a pernickety analysis of cultural politics that offers a corrective. When Derrida argues that “writing in general” is also genetics and cybernetics, he opens the very identity and exceptional capacities of anthropos to serious interrogation, and this seems especially pertinent as we consider anthropocentrism and questions about political culpability and the anthropocene.

Eszter Timár:

In my early postgraduate years, I studied what were then called feminist theories of embodiment (the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens, and Vicki’s work as well) and I was fascinated with the tensions between some of that work and Judith Butler’s queer theory of gendered embodiment. So I think because of this early familiarity with the vexed question of the meaning of biology for feminist theory, I was primed to develop this interest in what we have now started to call biodeconstruction. I was also interested in deconstruction and queer figurations in political discourse. Modern figures of queerness, such as the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century figure of the male homosexual, always index nature and embodiment (both homosexuality, thought of as the “riddle of nature,” and the idea of “inversion” refer to a fundamental crisis of the sexed body), so I see a link between what are my apparently political and scientific interests. And, importantly for developing an interest in immunology, I got my PhD in Comparative Literature at Emory, in a department that is very interested in deconstruction, and I was there at the time when Derrida’s interview with Giovanna Borradori came out after the events of September 11 (Borradori and Derrida, “Autoimmunity”), which led to conversations about the Derridean use of autoimmunity.

It seems to me that biodeconstruction is not one thing: the name can indicate texts in which Derrida discusses biology and texts in which Derrida’s discussion of biology is further interrogated and re-read. I think some of Francesco Vitale’s works engage biodeconstruction this way. But other essays in this collection read the philosophy of life with the help of the Derridean oeuvre as a whole. I think our papers tend to practice biodeconstruction in a way that includes the readings of biological or biomedical texts with Derrida in mind, so what may qualify as such remains an interesting question.

Question: What does biodeconstruction mean for our work? How have we practiced it?

Eszter Timár:

My work with biodeconstruction has so far consisted of different readings of immunology in light of Derrida’s introductory footnote in “Faith and Knowledge.” In this footnote, Derrida traces the etymology of the Latin immunis as a political-religious term before he offers the following passage:

It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the “indemnity” of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization, which interests us particularly here, it consists for a living organism, as is well known and in short, of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system. As the phenomenon of these antibodies is extended to a broader zone of pathology and as one resorts increasingly to the positive virtues of immuno-depressants destined to limit the mechanisms of rejection and to facilitate the tolerance of certain organ transplants, we feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of auto-immunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general. (80)

This footnote has fascinated me for years.³ On the one hand, Derrida’s use of autoimmunity is the opposite of the most conventional biomedical use of the term (in which the immune system attacks the organism) to the point that his use may be considered erroneous. On the other hand, however, it seems to anticipate recent immunological findings that deconstruct the metaphysics of presence in the very domain of biology (I think this is true for biology in general and physics, too, as attested by Karen Barad’s commitment to deconstruction). Importantly, immunity is one of our buzzwords today as a biopolitical incitement to protective violence, communicated through biomedical language that posits itself as the very stuff of biology and as the knowledge of “organic life itself.” Derrida’s footnote is priceless in underlining that it was always a political term–in other words, that the political use of immunity is not a derivation from the biological use. By dint of positing biology as the science of life prior to the emergence of the human, immunity appears untouched by the actual history of the human, and this in turn affirms a certain performative erasure, or separation, of the living etymology of the term from its pre-biomedical meaning. I find it politically interesting that immunology, the very natural science that is organized around this political phenomenon, keeps yielding results that undermine the legitimacy of political arguments that justify the maximization of protective violence. It’s not that the metaphysics of presence suddenly crumbles on eroding scaffolds, but I think that what Derrida says about the “domain of biology” is accurate: biology (what we can also dub, following Derrida, the “science of survival”) can yield a lexicon that renders the vocabulary of immunity less secure in its commitment to violence.

This is important because, as I mentioned before, immunity is a powerful buzzword today and it resonates quite a bit in contemporary biopolitics and feminist theory. In my reading, the affinity between the Derridean usage of autoimmunity and immunology challenges any sense that immunology is completely inscribed within the interests of what, after Donna Haraway’s influential text on immunology, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,” we can call the “chilling fantasy” of “the fully defended, ‘victorious’ self” (224). On the one hand, immunology is not perfectly immune to its own deconstruction, and on the other hand, neither is its political vocabulary particular to biopower.

For instance, in an article on the immunobiology of sperm (Timár, “Squirm”), I connect the tendency in recent immunology to undermine its own rootedness in a vocabulary of modern biopower’s commitment to protective violence with queer readings of masculinity in antiquity, relying on David Halperin’s work on democratic embodiment in his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality And Other Essays on Greek Love, especially the chapter, “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Classical Athens.” I do this to suggest that via a sort of queering of the figure of the sperm (as in this example), recent immunological developments can undermine some of the most robust rhetorical figurations of dignified and violently protective masculinity in the West with the help of the same political vocabulary.

I’m concerned, though, that this affinity might motivate readers to exclaim that Derrida is, after all, right about biology—this would prove that the tendency to find Derrida obsolete or simply irrelevant when it comes to discussing matter or “real bodies” is erroneous. In my most recent work (Timár, “Derrida’s Error”) I argue that it is quite possible to read Derrida and some parts of immunology to argue that Derrida’s remarks in “Faith and Knowledge” anticipate an immunology that deconstructs the philosopheme of ipseity that is expressed in the lexicon of immunity. However, and this is important for assessing the stakes of biodeconstruction, the consistent commitment in the Derridean oeuvre to disrespect a consensus that would posit biological reference as primary and political reference as derivative, metaphorical, abstracted, and secondary when it comes to the lexicon of life, as well as the insistence that the lexicon of life is one that includes death through and through (instead of positing death as marking the end of life, as if it takes place outside the limit of life proper), serves to caution us about the risk of reaffirming the organicist construction of biology in finding Derrida right about it. In the essay I discuss two developments in the history of immunology: one recent and one a little more than a hundred years old. Without the older reference, we could see that recent developments justify Derrida even if we concede that his usage of the term autoimmunity is wrong (although it is not simply wrong). However, the older reference shows that it is not so much that now immunology catches up with Derrida, but that immunology as logos has a tendency to yield developments of a deconstructive drift.

Astrid Schrader:

When I read the term biodeconstruction in Francesco Vitale’s 2014 article “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction,” I thought, yeah, what a great term, that is exactly what I thought I was doing all along: reading biological texts deconstructively. While Vitale meant the term to collect the Derridean texts that engage biology and analyse the notion of life with the help of the life sciences, I thought of it as a practice. I’d associate this practice with a branch of feminist science studies that has been informed by Derridean deconstruction and includes scholars such as Vicki Kirby, Elizabeth A. Wilson, and also (perhaps uniquely, most importantly, and slightly differently) Donna Haraway, as well as more recently Karen Barad. For me, if I may include my own work (Schrader, “Haunted Measurements”; Schrader, “Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida“; Schrader, “Microbial Suicide”) in this branch of feminist science studies, biology has always been a “text” in Derrida’s expanded sense, or as Haraway put it in 1988, a material-semiotic “apparatus of bodily production” (595). Biological texts or readings and writings as a “material-semiotic apparatus of bodily production”⁴ can of course not be reduced to linguistic or “cultural” productions. While naming is always risky and can lead to misunderstandings, I was delighted that our practice has received a name.

Approaching the question of biodeconstruction from “the other side,” if you will (as if there were two sides), as coming from within the sciences, I would (or could) not suppose a “consensus that would posit biological references as primary,” as Eszter puts it above. On the contrary, my paper on microbial suicide (apoptosis) tries to show, among other things, that the life sciences can make conceptual contributions to the notion of life. This is something Martin Heidegger had denied the so-called empirical sciences. For him, the scientific exploration of particular ways of living and dying would require a preconceived ontology of life and death. It is well known that Derrida (“Aporias” and “Of Spirit”) thoroughly deconstructed Heidegger’s claim that “the existential Interpretation of death takes precedence over any biology and ontology of life…it is also the foundation of any investigation of death” (Heidegger, Being and Time 291). My point in “Microbial Suicide: Towards a Less Anthropocentric Ontology of Life and Death” is that such a deconstruction is also possible from within the sciences. This has been one of my long-term concerns, as suggested by the title of a special issue in the journal differences, “Feminist Theory Out of Science” (2010), which I co-edited with Sophia Roosth.

In “Microbial Suicide,” I argue that research on marine microbes supports Derrida’s claim that empirical events and findings are inseparable from foundational conditions. I suggest that Derrida’s insistence that “one must…inscribe death in the concept of life” (“Beast” 110) can be read as both condition and result of research on microbial suicide, collapsing temporal boundaries and reconfiguring the concept of death from an uncertain limit of life towards a certain indeterminacy within life. I have suggested that “the scientific rendering of apoptosis in microbes presents what Francesco Vitale (2014) calls a ‘biodeconstruction,’ changing ‘the scene of writing’ from within; the scene of writing in this case constituted by scientific practice (see Kirby, 2009)” (Schrader, “Microbial Suicide” 53). Borrowing from Vicki here, I associate bio-deconstruction with a scientific practice: not something Derrida does or the critical reader of science performs but a performance that can be attributed to the scientific investigation. But perhaps only if it is read in a particular way: not all readings are deconstructive. We may disagree on this point. I am no longer sure why I introduced a hyphen between “bio” and “deconstruction” in my paper–perhaps in order to mark a difference from Francesco’s usage. In the context of that paper (“Microbial Suicide”), I take bio-deconstruction to involve the transformation of a normative practice with profound consequences for the meaning of life. Not only does microbiology support Derrida’s moves in suggesting alternative relationships between life and death, but in doing so it changes the role of science in the naturecultural business of meaning-makings, as scientists are changing what gets called “objective” or “vulgar” time (to use Heidegger’s term) from within.

Vicki Kirby:

Perhaps by returning to the building blocks of my own intellectual trajectory I can better explain why the term biodeconstruction remains a non-concept for me, one whose riddles are comprehensive because they’re not content specific. Let’s return to the nature/culture division and the political agendas that are leveraged and justified in terms of its logic. We are presented with two systems whose presumed difference from each other installs a spatial segregation and a temporal distancing, an evolution whose narrative order moves from what comes first to what comes second, from the more primitive and primeval towards a more complex and calculating sophistication. The alignment of nature with the body–the “before reason and calculation,” the intuitive, instinctual, affective and prescribed, the less than, the given or inherited–defines the pinnacle of culture in terms of enlightenment, masculinity, whiteness, intention, and creativity, reference points against which difference appears as deficiency and incapacity. A grab bag of associated “others” become the comparative failures against which this ideal is identified, much as a figure is identified against a ground, where the ground is read as the absence, the negative (no-thing) of the figure’s self-definition. We see in Eszter’s and Astrid’s comments above how this political algorithm works to close and prescribe.

Although the valuations of this political economy might seem like a simplistic cartoon with no real analytical purchase, or at least, an error whose denigrating and spurious assumptions could easily be corrected, this metaphysics remains ubiquitous and enduring. Even the appeal of the correction reaffirms it–we overturn an error and thereby separate truth from a mistake. Or perhaps we endeavour to counter or refuse this logic by reversing its valuations: nature is good and should be valued more than culture because it returns us to our Edenic roots; language and technology overlay our affective and more authentic selves; women are closer to nature and therefore more caring; animals are not capriciously violent and have no responsibility for climate change, or indeed, for anything. The list of moral and political adjudications that rest on authenticity and the trumping of error and failure are ubiquitous, and this persistence deserves further scrutiny. To my mind, to engage the workings of this logic, which is by no means straightforward, is not to hope for escape but rather to find within its sticky involvements and confounding of terms and concepts a different set of possibilities and provocations that are not as definitionally predictable and prohibitive. But more than this–and this is especially relevant for how we contextualize and understand the implications of biodeconstruction–it requires us to consider that a concept or idea is not a second order re-presentation of “something” that it isn’t. All of my work, even my first book, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (1997), tries to mire and derange this logical two-step in order to explore its counter-intuitive implications. Importantly, as I read deconstruction, or here, biodeconstruction, it isn’t about anything! If we think of biodeconstruction as the practice of life, then, to couple Astrid’s earlier comments with Eszter’s (and maybe to reshape them), biodeconstruction can’t be read as something that isn’t also the practice of death. If we grant this, then suddenly all those things we assume are dead, inert, passive–not alive–become strangely animated.

Eszter Timár:

So far, we have discussed biodeconstruction as something that is not one thing: as something that is both Derrida’s reading of biology and our readings of biological texts with Derrida in mind and as a non-concept because it is not content-specific. It may be worth mentioning that these different meanings share affinities or resonate in deconstruction; the term biodeconstruction invites engagement with “bio-logy” but resists attempts to fit it neatly into either term of the nature/culture distinction.

Astrid Schrader:

I think we can all agree on these points. However, how we judge the ubiquity and endurance of the metaphysics of a foundational “nature” separated from “culture” depends on our networks, communities, and audiences. As history seems to be turning in circles, I think we should sometimes be allowed to move on, at least those of us who went to graduate school after the “science wars”⁵. Derrida was never a social constructivist, and language was never a “property” of humans, not even an ability or capability restricted to homo sapiens. Having said this, it is undeniable that the relationship between feminist theory and biology has never been easy. However, it is always a source of amazement when I see a theorist or philosopher begin to read science and appear surprised to find that not all scientific inquiry can be categorized as some blunt or naive (genetic or otherwise) reductionism. This amazement turns into frustration when the struggles of an entire discipline (now called feminist science studies) are simply ignored. As Haraway pointed out in 1988, “The only people who end up actually believing and, goddess forbid, acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific objectivity–enshrined in elementary textbooks and technoscience booster literature–are nonscientists, including a few very trusting philosophers” (“Situated Knowledges” 576). Neither the centrality of genetics nor deconstruction is challenged by the science of epigenetics. How many ‘epi’s’ do we want to add to the phenomenon before we realize, as Susan Oyama did, that the entire structure needs an overhaul rather than just some fine-tuning (Oyama 2003)? If the entire structure that separates nature and nurture or body and environment needs an overhaul, then it raises the question of what tool might be most appropriate. In her contribution to Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, developmental biologist Oyama refers to the hammer: “when you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail,” noting that her “particular hammer [is] a preoccupation with the nature-nurture problem” (169).

Proposing a different frame, “one that does not rest on traditional dualities, but instead incorporates the full range of organisms’ developmental and behavioral relations with their surroundings” (169), Oyama may have deconstructed Catherine Malabou’s arguments about plasticity before they were made. The point here is about the assumed exteriority of certain discourses to each other. What if we considered biodeconstruction a practice in which science has always already been engaged? However, even if nature scribbles, as Vicki says, and all effects of texts are textual themselves, there are differences in language between scientists and the critical readers of science that cannot be denied. (I just learned from one of my students that even fish have different dialects or accents upstream and downstream.) The problem is how to articulate “our roles” in relation to the scientific text, while simultaneously accepting that there are only “readings” all the way down, and that these readings are also always already re-writings.

Vicki Kirby:

Yes, the move to bring deconstruction into conversation with biological evidence can certainly be tricky, as we see in Catherine Malabou’s work. Given the general awareness that epigenetics and neuronal plasticity have destabilized the appeal to biology as a fixed foundation upon which culture plays, her intervention is salutary. However, I think Malabou loses a significant opportunity when she reads deconstruction as a specific method or model of analysis–ironically, as the play of culture. Accordingly, she deems Derrida’s “general writing” to be dated because the metaphor of the grapheme no longer captures the current understandings of our contemporary moment. As Malabou explains in “The End of Writing?: Grammatology and Plasticity,” “We are witnessing a decline or a disinvestment of the graphic sign and graphism in general. Plastic images tend to substitute themselves for graphic images. Thus appears the necessity of constructing a new motor scheme, precisely that of plasticity” (438). Malabou’s need to substitute grammatology’s graphism with the preferred “double aptitude” of her own term, “plastology,” presumes that grammatology is a model whose application or relevance has now faded.

As I see it, there are two problems here. First, Malabou’s deferral to the neurological sciences as the touchstone of biological truth deserves further interrogation. Indeed, Eszter has reminded me that the science of neurology is a broad church whose focus is dispersed: it is not confined to the cerebrum, for it includes the cognitive structures in the stomach and large intestines. And there are scientists who also work in this field (Guillaume Dumas, Monica Galliano, Asaf Bachrach) whose research contests the difference between nature and culture as we conventionally understand it. This complicates the Cartesianism that sets mind (brain) apart from what is not mind, and muddles the what and where of the subject, such that we are left to wonder why the site of self is not regarded as thoroughly corporeal. Although the sciences can provoke these questions, feminist interventions as well as grammatological readings also anticipate the complications in these findings. I suppose my question to Malabou would be, “What comes first?” If, for example, the whole of the body is cognizing, then the science of neurology isn’t too far from the claims of certain corporeal feminisms. I’m interested in how the model and the object it purports to re-present can collapse into each other, because in this instance the body is as much object as subject.

As I see it, the second problem concerns Derrida’s understanding of the graphematic structure, because it was never one of representational accuracy. In “For the Love of Lacan,” Derrida notes the analyst’s reliance on the phonological, and yet he has no desire to diagnose Lacan’s choice of analytical term by replacing the phonological with the graphematic, as if a reliance on speech is the mistake that “writing” corrects. Indeed, regarding the appeal of terminological correctives, Derrida is quite impatient:

[The sudden substitution of the graphematic for the phonological] interests me here only as a symptomatic sign in what used to be called the history of ideas, and not in itself, for what I have proposed to call the trace, gramme, différance, etc., is no more graphic than phonological, spatial than temporal–but let’s leave that, this is not the place to deal with this serious and tenacious misunderstanding. (720)

Given this need to turn Derrida into a cultural constructionist, despite his many protestations, my own intervention is not to eschew culture in preference for nature, but to suggest that, as the logic of the supplement–one plus one–is grammatologically confounded, let’s begin and end with what counts as originary. Originary différance as originary technicity assumes very different implications if we insist that “there is no outside nature.”⁶

Question: How do we negotiate the status of scientific evidence and scientific methodologies in our approach to biodeconstruction? What is the difference between reading science and reading literary texts? What kind of expertise is required?

Vicki Kirby:

Following my responses to the previous questions I probably don’t need to underline that my interest in biological or scientific evidence or my research into psychosomatic riddles, for example, is strategic. In the main, my aim is to break open the complacency that has come to equate “cultural constructionism” with “no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158), as if the relevance and reach of Derrida’s contribution explains the solipsism of human representational systems. Of course, a grammatological practice doesn’t aim to supplement the language of culture with new or additional information from outside culture–namely, from nature–as the term biodeconstruction might seem to suggest. But this is where things get difficult and we need to move slowly.

My paper “Autoimmunity: The Political State of Nature” (2017) addresses autoimmunity by blurring the difference between what counts as cultural and political discussion and what counts as biological evidence. However, my aim is not to show that a grammatological reading is also pertinent in biology, as if deconstruction might prove a useful model in other contexts. Rather, I want to argue that there is no “both,” that there are no separate, autonomous systems (biology plus politics, or nature plus culture) whose differences can nevertheless relate or communicate with other, quite alien systems. As an aside here, I’ve always wondered why this notion that the world is an aggregation of different systems that are “somehow” capable of communicating with each other isn’t more rigorously considered: what translative operation (différance?) within any specific system can already read, digest, and respond to systems that, by conventional accounts, it has yet to encounter? What language do these exchanges use to understand a difference that is radically alien? Let’s remember that in Positions and elsewhere, Derrida insists that deconstruction is not a third term, not something that mediates or works in the space between entities that pre-exist relationality (42-43). A corollary of this qualification is that deconstruction is not a method or model of anything, and for this reason biodeconstruction remains under erasure as a specific method that might appear more receptive or inflected by scientific protocols and contents. This is because the purported gap that secures and separates the analytical instrument from the subject who uses it and the object scrutinised becomes implicated in deconstruction, whether we are talking about literature or science. Derrida dilates on this question of the method or model in an interview with Richard Kearney:

Deconstruction is not a philosophy or a method, it is not a phase, a period or a moment. It is something which is constantly at work and was at work before what we call “deconstruction” started, so I cannot periodize. For me there is no “after” deconstruction–not that I think that deconstruction is immortal–but for what I understand under the name deconstruction, there is no end, no beginning, and no after. (Kearney 65)

Importantly, deconstruction is not a model of the world because, in a very real sense, it is always already of the world that it seeks to understand. Perhaps we can think of the world as subject to its own interrogations, its own refracted re-presentations of itself, a sort of self-reflexivity with the world as subject/object, such that all of life embodies and enacts these involvements. We see the resonance here between Derrida’s différance and Karen Barad’s sense of diffraction, and implicitly we are given a way to think biology through physics, and physics through language, and so on.

Eszter Timár:

When I say I read biological or biomedical texts, I mean that I read several kinds of texts. The first consists of summary articles that report on biological findings or results. In this regard, I’m gladly entertaining the idea that biodeconstruction is a development within the scientific proliferation of biopower (as a textual cyst of sorts). I see something like a boom in the popularization of the natural sciences and I can subscribe to multiple Facebook feeds, for instance, that inform me about significant or “intriguing” scientific findings. These usually lead to texts that explicitly show some sort of scientific authentication. I became interested in these “science bites”⁷ after becoming fascinated with Derrida’s usage of “autoimmunity,” first in the texts he wrote about September 11 and then after I read Elizabeth A. Wilson’s Psychosomatic (2004), which also draws on Derrida. Wilson engages neuroscientific debates about competing conceptualizations of the enteric nervous system, responsible for much of digestion (31-49). And she reads the political tropes of scientific debate: for instance, should we imagine the enteric nervous system (the gut) as a “rogue” character, circumventing the authority of the central nervous system (the brain)? This work had great affinity with the footnote in “Faith and Knowledge,” where Derrida discusses biology as something like a lexical space for developing political philosophy—and this was clearly the case in the texts Wilson read. From that point on, I’ve been reading the never ebbing flow of “breaking” discoveries as political fictions, or as modern developments of a general epic tropology permeated by figures of sexual difference. It’s not that this was new; it’s basically the same as Emily Martin’s work on the egg and the sperm some twenty-five years ago, in which she discussed fairytale-like motives in modern biology.

As I grew fascinated by my sense that recent immunology provides “results” that seem to justify Derrida’s usage, I also started to read other kinds of texts: texts on theoretical immunology (for example the work of Thomas Pradeu) and theoretical texts reading the history of immunology (Michelle Jamieson), although these are not always neatly separated (Alfred Tauber’s work belongs to both). As for the necessary expertise, yes, I had to develop a competence in immunological terminology; however, I don’t really think this is different from understanding the terms of a given literary text. Reading immunology, precisely because of the palpably political vocabulary, always felt like immersing myself in fantasy (which I never did, so I apologize if this sounds fundamentally wrong to readers of fantasy). I have to learn a lot of information relevant mostly for what I need to understand in a given text in order to navigate through its world. Microbes and immune cells figure as intriguingly uncanny and as very social and political creatures, and understanding their relationship is a challenge for our political vocabulary. What this means is that I cannot judge if a biological text is “right” about biology: when I read Thomas Pradeu on immunology I place my faith in the institutional academic protocols asserted in his citation of biological studies. But when he reads the theory of immunology and shows a dogmatic allegiance to an idea of the self that is based on a vague sense of autochthony, he is not really discussing experiments and his methods of conducting them; instead, he is discussing the way the results of experiments are narrated in terms of a legacy of thinking about organic life. So on the one hand, I have to stick to texts that have gone through some authenticating process in the research of biology. On the other hand, if I don’t have to judge the scientific accuracy, I can read these texts not as bound absolutely to their disciplinary knowledge base but as reservoirs of political figuration and rhetoric.

Astrid Schrader:

Vicki, you have mentioned the notion of “system.” I’ve been wondering why many of us committed to relational ontologies have been able to let go of pre-existing bounded entities such as “discrete objects,” but the notion of system seems to stick. While it seems almost common sense by now to say that “the root error,” as philosopher Joe Rouse puts it in conversation with Karen Barad’s work, “is the presumption that the world somehow already comes naturally composed of discrete objects” (313), “systems” seem to prevail both within and outside of the sciences. Although scientific objects do not have to exist in the metaphysics of presence, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger reminds us—or in other words, they can be “absent in their experimental presence” (Rheinberger, Towards a History 28)—scientists don’t seem to be able to think without the notion of a system. More often than not, a hierarchical systems view in biology presupposes specific boundaries between inside and outside and makes assumptions about the location of the source of activity. Nevertheless, Rheinberger’s experimental systems must be capable of transformations leading to “unprecedented events” (134).

As feminist legal scholar Drucilla Cornell (“The Relevance of Time”) has convincingly shown, it is difficult to align any systems theory–Cornell is particularly interested in Niklas Luhmann’s system theory–that relies on a metaphysics of presence with Derridean deconstruction, or what she calls the “philosophy of the limit.” In addition to radically diverging conceptions of time, a major difference lies in their incompatible figurations of borders, boundaries and limits (Schrader, “Marine Microbiopolitics”).

Now, Oyama’s theory mentioned above is also a “systems theory” in some sense, but her developmental systems do boundaries quite differently from the paradoxical boundary establishment that Cary Wolfe finds in self-referential autopoietic systems in What Is Posthumanism? (xxi). Wolfe describes the latter in terms of “openness from closure”: they are more like Rheinberger’s experimental system in that they cannot be pinpointed in space and time. As I see it, however, developmental systems do not coincide with the boundaries of an organism but include changing environmental circumstances that render spatial or topological boundaries permanently insecure in order to stabilize a (repeatable, inheritable) process, namely development. The difference is always a difference concerning time. Indeed, Oyama reminds us of the undecidability between a first time and a recurrence in development when she writes, “transmission, whether of genes or culture is supposed to produce developmental regularity, but…it actually presupposes such regularity.…Something is judged to have been transmitted when it reappears” (Evolution’s Eye 195). Oyama’s comment implies the Derridean structure of iterability, that is, that any assumption of a unit presumes its repeatability in its very definition.

Vicki Kirby:

Yes, I agree that for many theorists, “system” does retain a foundational necessity in the face of grammatology’s excavation and displacement of foundations. I certainly rely on the words “system” and “systematicity,” and not unrelatedly, I find I’m uncomfortable with those arguments that claim, too quickly for my liking, that there are no foundations–as if we already know what a foundation is and could simply reject the notion and move on. I don’t think we can resolve these difficulties by saying yes or no to a term-any term. So for this reason I don’t reject the meaning of any word as simply wrong, but I do try to reroute what might otherwise hold a traditional signification in place as the measure of what counts as good thinking. Derrida deploys the term “system,” as we see here in a sentence from Positions concerning the workings of the trace: “The interweaving results in each ‘element’–phoneme or grapheme–being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text” (387-388). Importantly, if there is no outside, no absolute limit or enclosure, then there is no straightforward inside either. Consequently, we are left with a riddle about any discernible (enclosed) unit. Whether sign, individual subject, cell, atom, or even one particular system among others, “it” will already comprehend what it is conventionally defined against. Little wonder that I find myself attracted to quantum “explanations” that confound local with/in non-local. Even when I was struggling to make sense of the Saussurean sign all those years ago I concluded that the sign is not so much an entity located in a system that surrounds it; rather, the sign is the system’s processual self-differentiation.

Astrid Schrader:

Another way I’d read “there is no outside-text” (Of Grammatology 158) pertains to the undecidability between text and context (inside and outside). In Limited Inc, Derrida writes, “nothing exists outside context” (152). This undecidability is not just an undecidability about what content falls inside a specific realm of consideration and what is constitutively excluded from it, for it concerns the very shape or form of the boundary or limit that seeks to demarcate the inside from an outside. This, for me, must involve a question about the relationship between space and time. The notion of “system” seems to hide some of the boundary problematics more evident in notions of “subject,” “individual,” “cell,” or “organism.” I am thinking here of what Derrida has called an “abyssal logic” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, which suggests a multitude of relations between space and time, a multitude of kinds of “limits” that often get reduced to one kind with the help of the systems metaphor.

This was quite a detour. Returning to the initial question, I don’t read biological texts any differently than I do philosophical or literary texts. I try to take their materiality just as seriously without extrapolating too much beyond their immediate possible meanings. The notion of evidence suggests that these texts answer to something radically exterior to their own practices; however, I don’t think that science works this way. The fact that scientific texts are often rendered in representational idioms–in other words, that they contain method sections–does not mean that they have to be read that way, as pointing beyond themselves. Published methodology sections are very selective retroactive readings of a far more complex practice required by a specific inherited tradition. I don’t find them very helpful in getting a picture of the practice. However, there’s a difference between method and practice. I think that practices can be deconstructive or not. I agree with Vicki that deconstruction is neither a method nor a concept nor a third term, but that it can be practiced, just like justice can be practiced but never achieved. In my 2010 paper on the fish-killer Pfiesteria, which deals with a scientific controversy that had not been settled (there was no scientific agreement on matters of facts), I try hard to construct my arguments independently of the veracity of the scientific findings; the necessary (partial) failure of that effort makes a case in point about my own responsibility and that is partially what that paper is about.

Question: How do we negotiate biological origin stories with “originary différance” and “originary technicity”?

Vicki Kirby:

As I mentioned above, I’ve always been exercised by the narrative that determines what constitutes biology/the body/nature/the other as a prior, more primitive, and contained system. Derrida’s non-concepts “language,” “writing,” and “textuality” question the story that understands nature as a sort of automatic writing, or program, because there is no thinking subject or author to explain what it does. If we subscribe to this description, then the comparative difference between nature’s program and human culture appears self-evident: human writing is regarded as calculated and potentially deceptive (political) because authored by a subject, whether individual or collective. In an early elaboration of this very point in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences” and its “Discussion” (1970), Derrida notes that the human is regarded as an aberration from what came before, a “mistake” that severs the human from its origins. Human exceptionalism appears unique as a consequence because it is able to mediate or re-present a world that is no longer accessible. My own interventions are primarily focused on this nature/culture interface, where the question of language is answered and given its proper place as the marker of species difference. I have always been nonplussed by definitions of language that easily determine what is or is not language. Consequently, Derrida’s aphorism “no outside-text” remains an invaluable touchstone for my research because, if we consider the implications seriously, then the various properties that identify and adjudicate human exceptionalism generate more questions than answers. Of course, there are difficulties in saying this if we assume that difference can be identified, compared, and evaluated by saying yes or no to it. In some of my work I’ve tried to initiate an intervention in human exceptionalism by working with the sort of argument that Derrida mounts in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1, where he refuses to throw out sovereignty and yet twists it into an unfamiliar shape. I evoke the non-concept “originary humanicity” in order to effect a similar twist. If we can talk of “originary writing” and think this through the ontology of the animal and even the plant (and surely for Karen Barad and Astrid we have to consider “entities” in physics in a similar way), then what happens if we think “originary humanicity” through and as the ontology of the plant or animal? I’m trying to complicate “the how” and “the what” of the human—and of life for that matter—rather than assuming that it’s a given and we don’t need to ask what it is. For this reason I do feel a certain frustration when Derrida’s radical interiority is read as “no outside culture.”

Astrid Schrader:

For me, part of biodeconstruction entails showing that there are no biological origin stories. Once we have established that biology is a text in the Derridean sense like anything else, there is no need to distinguish the practices of deconstruction from biodeconstruction. This, in fact, is one of the main arguments in “Microbial Suicide”: with the “discovery” of apoptosis in microbes there’s no longer a need to postulate an evolutionary beginning of death or life. Stories of beginnings are stories about particular conceptions of time, and stories of progressive developmental temporalities become ever more difficult to justify from within the sciences. Biodeconstruction does both: it reveals and performs the absence of origins.

Question: How do we select the scientific text of interest? Or, does it select us? Eszter Timár:

In the texts where I cite “science bites” (“Eating Autonomy”), I’ve selected scientific texts in light of Derrida’s footnote and the larger Derridean interest in the ways texts that rely on the philosopheme of ipseity (in affirming what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence) can’t help but undermine their own mission. Focusing on immunity and the microbiome, I’ve chosen texts that feature relevant findings and whose results call into question the idea that a self is an indivisible essence that can survive only by protective violence. If biology conventionally signifies the nonhuman logic of organic life, I select the authenticated results that actively undermine this significance. Examples such as learning that the microbiome that actively modulates “our” states of various kinds is us, or Astrid’s example of apoptosis in microbes, have a certain sensational value (which is what gets them published in popular media) because they provide “evidence” that our conventional assumptions about organic life are based on a certain humancentric view of life in general, a view in which beings are selfsame, bounded off, and in which life can occur in the absence of death.

Astrid Schrader:

Thinking of biodeconstruction as a practice, rather than thinking of deconstruction as applied to biology, changes that question. I don’t think that a conscious choice or a selection from a specific pool of available texts is at work here (or in my work in feminist science studies). Having said that, however, there might be a way to characterize the scientific texts (retroactively) that I’ve been working with; I think they are all texts that hold a promise to challenge specific norms or scientific ideas about their own practice. To what extent such a challenge is attributable to the science or the reading is of course debatable and ultimately undecidable. The science itself (whatever that might be) does not necessarily have to be radical within its own field; it might very well be quite mainstream and have a potential for a radical (norm challenging) reading.

Vicki Kirby:

I think a life “chooses,” or is hooked through and by a text in a specific way, maybe because it “sees itself,” albeit in some refracted sense that isn’t strictly self-present. In other words, an “entry point” isn’t determined in a causal sense, and yet it isn’t random either. I like Derrida’s comment on choice in Positions, a complexity I’ve described elsewhere as “natural selection”:

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators–beginnings, holds, levers etc.,–in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (82)

Derrida manages to conjure a sense of precision in regard to a particular site of intervention or inquiry, because he insists that this point of entry opens within a field of forces that is subject to those same forces. Here, the specific and the general are not in opposition. I find it interesting that Derrida can preserve a sense of reflexivity that does not rely on human identity as the unique and sole repository of agency, self-consciousness, and personal choice.

Question: What is the relationship between biodeconstruction and feminist new materialism?

Eszter Timár:

As I mentioned before, for me biodeconstruction includes a fascination with Derrida’s insistence on not granting the language of biology a special status. He frequently uses apparently biological terms, terms relating to nonhuman organic nature, to refer to linguistic phenomena (such as grafting). At the same time he is vigilant about this language that can be wielded in the interest of “organicist totalization,” as he calls it in “Biodegradables” (816). It is not only a gesture of critiquing the nature/culture distinction, but also a practice of writing that resists a strict sense of this distinction.

There are many other examples of this vigilance (such as his discussion of the animal as a necessarily political term invested in humancentrism, or the many discussions of life across his oeuvre, including in “Faith and Knowledge”). “Biodegradables” is relevant here because this is a text that reflects on the disaster (intellectual, ethical, and emotional) of what Derrida calls “Paul de Man’s War” (“Like the Sound”). Arguably, for those who would be relieved to cast off the burden of reading de Man, the name “Paul de Man” may represent the corner of deconstruction most opposed to life (we can think of de Man’s discussions of materiality, for instance). Instead of citing de Man’s relevant texts here, let me quote Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon” and refer in general to the volume on Paul de Man in which it first appeared, Material Events. Derrida notes: “Materiality is not the body, at least the body proper as organic totality” (354). This choice to discuss de Man together with terms of organic life suggests to me that the term biodeconstruction would also refer to an interest in interrogating the relations, resonances, and contrasts between Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s work (including a keen attention to the political figuration I mentioned earlier).

Let me add another point: deconstruction’s resistance to a simple distinction between nature and culture also makes deconstruction relevant for feminist theory. Right now we are in the thick of what we habitually refer to as feminist new materialism. It’s an enormously heterogeneous body of work that, following Samantha Frost in “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” I regard as a commitment to a rigorous rethinking of the nature/culture distinction and as an accompanying openness to the fact that the resulting complexity will not yield easy answers that would affirm prior assumptions about feminist epistemology. I think this is remarkably compatible with Derrida’s textual politics. At the same time, I think this compatibility is accompanied by an incompatibility. While the work of Derrida is certainly read by theorists associated with new materialism (we have cited several such scholars), as I briefly mentioned above, new materialism relies very heavily on the theoretical currency of biopolitical thought, especially what Timothy Campbell delineated as its negative analysis: the combination of Foucault’s and Agamben’s work in “Bios, Immunity, Life.” Understandably, Foucault’s work, especially his History of Sexuality Vol. 1, which connects sexuality to biopower, has been immensely influential in feminist and queer theory. In the last chapter of the book, Foucault offers his thoughts on the specifically modern nature of biopower. Referring to Aristotle, Foucault suggests that Western modernity marks the first time in European history when politics takes what he calls life as its primary object (143). In this gesture of separating life and power, according to which power suddenly and violently encroaches on life, we can hear the resonance of the nature/culture binary as it was sketched by Vicki at the beginning of this conversation. Derrida delivers a detailed critique of this argument (including its subsequent treatment by Agamben) in the twelfth session of The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1, questioning whether we can view modern biopower as radically different from the way the relationship between politics and life could be figured prior to modernity (305-334). My point is that there is important disagreement between Derrida and biopolitics, and this may mean that if new materialism implicitly relies on the founding gesture of biopower, then Derrida’s work will sit somewhat oddly with it. And yet, precisely because of this affinity, the oddness may well motivate renewed engagements with deconstruction in general, and provide future occasions–perhaps a habitat–for generating and elaborating various inquiries we might still call biodeconstruction.

Astrid Schrader:

In the context of feminist new materialisms I would like to ask who the actors are in biodeconstruction. If there’s anything “new” in feminist new materialisms, then I would say it is a more thorough deconstruction of agency, no longer conceivable as an attribute of a bounded actor or “self.” In general, I think of it as a rather heterogeneous theoretical movement with perhaps the impossibility of opposing vitalism and materialism as the only commonality. Perhaps Derrideans and Deleuzians, who previously did not have much to say to each other, are re-engaging under a new heading? It might be a strategic gathering of loosely related theories with common concerns. So, who are the actors in biodeconstruction? As Francesco Vitale states, “[T]he living is a text that produces texts in order to survive” (“The Text” 111).

While feminist science studies is difficult to imagine without Foucault and biopolitics, biopolitics is certainly not just one thing. As Roberto Esposito has pointed out, Foucault’s apparent indecision about biopolitics as “power over life” and “power of life,” or the insufficient theorization of the relationship between a thanatopolitics and an affirmative biopolitics, has led to quite divergent approaches to biopolitics. The incompatibility of Agamben’s focus on sovereignty in a biopolitics that requires the distinction between bios (political life) and zoe (bare life) and Esposito’s alleged de-differentiation of all forms of life in a neo-vitalist formulation of biopolitics is at the core of Cary Wolfe’s latest book, Before the Law. Wolfe’s intervention, his search for a “third way,” is perhaps the most sustained engagement with biopolitics and deconstruction. With the help of Derrida, Wolfe’s project is to bring animal studies, which according to him has focused predominantly on ethics, together with biopolitics in order to think about animals politically. In this context, Wolfe is mostly concerned with the annual killings of more than ten billion industrial farm animals (in the US), which is constitutively biopolitical. In “Marine Microbiopolitics” I argue that Wolfe’s subject “before the law” is constructed “after science”; that is, in Wolfe’s account, biology may contribute to who counts as “subject” in the future, but it cannot interrogate the kind of limit that differentiates the “who” from the “what,” a subject from a non-subject or object. In other words, the role of science here is reduced to providing the content to the philosophical form; biology cannot interrogate the kind of “limit” between human and animal, bios and zoe, subject and object. That biology cannot make metaphysical or ontological contributions is a Heideggerian point (repeated by Wolfe) that is not compatible with what Derrida calls an “abyssal logic” in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Here, Derrida asks us to think what “a limit becomes once it is abyssal” (30-31), which I argue requires a reconceptualization of time (see also Schrader, “Abyssal Intimacies”). Thus, biodeconstruction–at least my take on biodeconstruction–goes further than Wolfe’s biopolitical re-rendering of the human/animal divide as a new “who”/”what” divide before the law that eschews species boundaries: the “subject” of politics is also constructed and deconstructed within (micro)biology. Or, as Vicki put it earlier, biology is agential.

Vicki Kirby:

In What if Culture was Nature all Along? (2017), my essay, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” directly engages this important question. With reference to Mary Douglas, I argue that all the different theoretical “turns” that produce a library of new titles every few years share a need to manage “matter,” and they put it somewhere that is either privileged or marginalised. It seems that if we don’t do this, then, as Douglas argues, things don’t make good sense. I agree with Astrid and Eszter that new materialism is heterogeneous in its claims, and often contradictory, and yet I think it offers a platform that can potentially reinvigorate arguments and assumptions that have become stale over the years. However, I have to admit that I’m often as encouraged as I am disappointed. For example, Eszter mentions Samantha Frost’s “rigorous rethinking of the nature/culture distinction.” However, I do think that the degree of interrogation is pre-emptively qualified in the introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, where Frost and Diana Coole note that “our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural” (3). It’s precisely here, in this appeal to what is outside or other than culture yet important nevertheless, that a lot of new materialist work finds its terms of reference.

My hope is that we can refresh the page by acknowledging that the very words, “new” and “material,” might prove misleading. My concern has to do with the way in which many self-described new materialists seem happy to define their practice as a break from language and representation, as if we can put those misguided fascinations to bed and focus on real and important matters–all those things we were previously led to believe were inaccessible (not that I think Frost and Coole are making their argument in quite this way). Notably, Derrida never divided the world up in terms of access or aggregation, and “textuality” is not the containment of a symbolic, representational system authored by humans who are thereby cut adrift from the world’s material gravitas.

I’ve certainly found a welcoming home of sorts in publications and events that come under the banner of (feminist) new materialism–I find it a broad church with quite disparate perspectives and an abundance of curiosity. For example, I’m learning a lot as research moves into intriguing areas, such as plant cognition and the sociality of vegetal life. So, regardless of the name that an intellectual movement might acquire, I guess we can always contest and reroute those names and their logics–the linguistic turn actually enabled me to consider “meat literacy.” I also agree with Astrid that there is an opportunity here for Derrideans and Deleuzians to reconsider their differences. I think that grammatological/feminist insights can always be had in uncanny ways and in unforeseen places if we pause to reconsider what might be hidden in plain sight.

Footnotes

1. For a quick introduction to what has now become a burgeoning literature, see Elizabeth A. Wilson’s discussion of the dilemma that placebo now poses for the pharmaceutical industry’s treatments for depression (“Ingesting Placebo”).

2. For a compelling illustration and critique of feminism’s inability to acknowledge biological plasticity see Elizabeth A. Wilson’s discussion of somatic compliance in hysteria (“Introduction – Somatic Compliance”).

3. Texts that look at Derrida’s usage from the point of view of immunology include Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies; Andrews, “Autoimmune Illness”; Samir Haddad, “Derrida.” See also Elina Staikou’s contribution in Part 2 of this special issue, as well as Staikou, “Putting in the Graft” and A. Timár, “Derrida.”

4. See also Haraway, “Modest.”

5. The “science wars” refer to exchanges between supporters of scientific objectivity (in the sense of neutrality) and postmodern critics in the 1990’s, which culminated with the so-called Sokal hoax, a supposedly nonsensical publication by physicist Alan Sokal in the journal Social Text.

6. In Biodeconstruction, Francesco Vitale comes to a similar conclusion regarding Malabou’s understanding of what she terms Derrida’s “motor scheme.” Vitale notes: “This concept implies a rather relaxed recourse to the classical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible and to the classical motive of imagination as a middle term. Despite the vicissitudes of the supposed graphic paradigm, the motor schema has no hold on deconstruction, for which it is structurally unsustainable” (213).

7. See Timár, “Eating Autonomy.”

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Erin Obodiac (bio)
DePaul University

Of Biodeconstruction is an invitation to an ongoing event, one that “precedes” even Jacques Derrida’s announcement that “the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (Of Grammatology 75), and one that speculates on the day deconstruction’s “own historico-metaphysical character is … exposed” (9). The term biodeconstruction can be understood to include not only the already extensive writings about deconstruction and biopolitics, autoimmunity, nature-culture, the body, pharmakon, hospitality, death, vitalism, the question of the animal, survival, posthumanism, and the philosophy of life, but also a more recent emergence just as deconstruction is perhaps reaching its historical limits: for Catherine Malabou and others, contemporary biology brings deconstruction to these limits. This tension, if it is one, concerns in general the relation between philosophy and positivist-empirical science and in particular the critique of Derrida’s mobilization of biological discourses that deploy genetic, informatic, and cybernetic paradigms.

In the opening section of his 1967 book Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts: “today the biologist speaks of writing and of pro-gram for the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing” (9). This mobilization both supports Derrida’s signature elaboration of arche-writing and the trace as “prior” to writing in the narrow sense—a “priority” that extends beyond the human being, the living, and the animate—and at the same time draws attention to the vestigial logocentrism of genetic and cybernetic discourses:

To suppose that the theory of cybernetics can dislodge by itself all the metaphysical concepts—all the way to concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve, until its own historico-metaphysical belonging is also denounced, the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme. (9)

Cybernetics, it appears, does not overturn certain metaphysical conceptions of human and animal being, not only because it has not evaluated the way in which arche-writing and the trace are the conditions of its own (im)possibility, but also because it cannot make legible the critical difference, or better, the différance, between writing and arche-writing, code and trace. If Derrida directs us to understand “the history of life—of what we here call différance—as the history of the grammè” (91) or to see that “cybernetics is itself intelligible only in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention” (84), this directive occurs, perhaps, not so much as a zany repositioning of genetics and cybernetics within the history of deconstruction, but as the troubling dehiscence in play and at work in any reading or writing. And yet: just as we enter the postgenomic era, which puts into question the informatic paradigm in genetics, so too might we repose Derrida’s question concerning the historico-metaphysical limits of arche-writing and the trace.

Although biodeconstruction has come into its own in recent conferences, articles, and books, just as the linguistic paradigm in genetics has run its course—or, at least, has been challenged by epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome—Derrida’s engagement with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life dates back to his earliest publications. For instance, in the 1963 Critique article “Force et signification,” he discusses epigenesis and preformationism as part of his critique of structuralism: we have here, avant la lettre, a preemptive strike against reified or formalist misreadings of Derrida’s emerging concept of writing—which might include “genetic writing,” given his familiarity with François Jacob and Jacques Monod’s 1961 article, “Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins,” which likens the workings of genetic material to cybernetic controls and linguistic operations. Derrida’s early books—Speech and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference—developed his signature concepts of arche-writing, trace, and différance alongside his critique of the living presence of self-consciousness, a cornerstone of phenomenology. His work began with and continued to dislodge logocentric, phonocentric, and phallocentric assumptions in the study of nature and technics, selfhood, the body, the machine, and death.

If biodeconstruction appears to be a latecomer, it would not be as an excrescence of deconstruction, which has always been engaged with questions of living being, the philosophy of life, and differential materiality. Neither is it quite a result of external pressures from contemporary biology or philosophy (such as new materialism, which tends to harbor a positivist conception of life). Malabou, for instance, argues that Derrida and other philosophers (such as Agamben, Esposito, and Heidegger) have trapped themselves in outdated understandings of biology. Yet some of Derrida’s writings are uncannily compatible with recent findings in the life sciences, as if living beings and their life processes were themselves “deconstructive.” This is not to say that deconstruction “got it right” after all or that it could ever be validated by the sciences; there is an interminable differend here, or, more optimistically, one that is persistently generative.

One example of this generativity, which presumes a metaleptic and proleptic skewing of any authoritative genealogy, could be the texts—Dawn McCance’s Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (2019), Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (2018), and Vicky Kirby’s “Tracing Life: ‘La Vie La Mort’” (2009)—that make a touchstone of Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar La Vie La Mort (which will finally be published in 2019). The seminar itself develops in detail—and in relation to Francois Jacob’s 1970 opus on genetics, La logique du vivant—the questions concerning biology that Derrida had already opened up in Of Grammatology in 1967. The life-death and living-on of the text is a vital concern of biodeconstruction, which is not to say that its practice is confined to genetic criticism, the avant-texte, or textual history. Although, for instance, box 22, folder 16 of the Derrida Papers at UC Irvine’s Special Collections and Archives includes a repository of conference brochures, panel materials, Derrida’s introduction, and notes from the 1992 colloquium “L’Analyse du génome humain: Libertés et responsabilitiés,” we might want to curb our archival enthusiasm and question the genealogical/genetic imperative, especially with regard to the biographesis of biodeconstruction.

Despite (and because of) these qualifications, this issue of Postmodern Culture would like to give special acknowledgement to the work of Francesco Vitale, whose lectures, articles, and books—and, not incidentally, his camaraderie—provide a well-versed entrée into deconstruction’s present conjuncture. In his recent book Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, Vitale follows the Derridean premise that différance and the trace not only organize and constitute all life, from the amoeba to the human being, but also exceed the divide between life and death. Life as a texture of differential traces is explored in relation to the genome as a mode of writing; unlike François Jacob’s La logique du vivant, which presents a logocentric conception of the genetic code, differential traces allow for an openness to the outside. As demonstrated in Vitale’s analysis of Derrida’s seminar La Vie La Mort, this openness also deconstructs the opposition between life and death: life-death, autoimmunity, death-drive, and cellular suicide are not aberrations, but constitutive of all forms of life.

The essays in the present issue of Postmodern Culture navigate the conceptual analogues, and often the differend, between philosophy and biology by shoring up the critical force of deconstruction while attending to its limits. What comes into view is a differential materiality that counters the metaphysical tendencies in the philosophy of life and demonstrates that contemporary biology sometimes deconstructs its own positivism. The differential materiality outlined in this issue is partly in tandem with threads of new materialism, but counters the peculiar regressions—essentialism, transcendentalism, and positivism—that often mark that line of thought. Also undergirding the essays, perhaps symptomatically, is some ambivalence about the work of Catherine Malabou and Bernard Stiegler. Malabou’s exploration of plasticity as a philosophical and biological principle and Stiegler’s theorizing of epiphylogenetics as the dynamic at work in the history of technics exemplify two post-deconstructive ventures that take issue with Derrida’s elaboration of arche-writing and the trace. On the one hand, “plasticity” seeks to replace writing or inscription as a model, and on the other, “epiphylogentics” limits the trace to living beings, specifically the human being capable of exteriorized protentions and retentions. “Of Biodeconstruction” attempts to resist the tendency to retreat from or disavow some of the more far-reaching implications of Derrida’s statements about arche-writing and the trace. “Of Biodeconstruction” also hopes to loosen disciplinary strictures as the essays traverse terrain familiar and far-afield.

In the manner of a textual mitosis, “Of Biodeconstruction” is divided into two parts. Part I situates biodeconstruction within the current critical context and the Derridean groundwork; Part II presents targeted readings in biodeconstruction and an analytic response from Catherine Malabou.

Part I begins by asking “How do we do biodeconstruction?,” staging a conversation between Vicki Kirby, Astrid Schrader, and Eszter Timár on biodeconstruction as a practice that engages new materialist feminism, feminist science studies, the political economy of nature-culture, and biology as a social allegory. Biodeconstruction intersects with the work of collaborators/antagonists such as Lynn Margulis, Rosi Braidotti, Catherine Malabou, Jane Bennett, Judith Roof, Karen Barad, and Monika Bakke; intersectionality and the intrusion of attendant meta- or master discourses are given careful consideration.

The next essay, Francesco Vitale’s “Reading the Program: Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction of Biology,” takes up Derrida’s 1975-76 seminar La Vie La Mort to analyze heredity, memory, and genetic program in relation to the trace and différance. In contradistinction to François Jacob’s The Logic of Life—which emphasizes a fixed program in genetics—Derrida’s intervention (along with George Canguilhem’s “The Concept of Life”) demonstrates that the totalizing closure and self-same identity that characterize the impermeability of “program” to the outside are untenable. The invocation of “writing” in genetics does not by itself produce a deconstructive biology—the risk of logocentrism and metaphysics in fact persists—rather, it pushes Derrida to zoom in further on the differences between arche-writing and writing in the narrow historical sense. Instead of confirming what might already be understood by heredity, genealogy, and memory, Derrida’s discourse on the trace, différance, and the supplement opens up a critique of DNA as fixed genetic program. In the seminar La vie la mort, the analysis of the analogy between cerebral memory and genetic memory, the analysis of the use of analogy in genetics, and the analysis of genetics as analogy expose the logocentric metaphysics imported by the informatic and cybernetic paradigm in biology. Derrida argues that between cerebral and genetic memory, instead of analogy, there is a differential relation: différance and the mnemotechnics of the trace subtend the cerebral and the genetic. Vitale’s essay suggests that for biology this différance means that the “program” is always open to the outside, a suggestion compatible with recent developments in genetics that emphasize environment, such as epigenetics.

In “Grammatechnics and the Genome,” Erin Obodiac argues for an expanded reading of the trace in relation to plasticity. Revisiting Derrida’s exposition of the trace as originary technicity and originary supplement, Obodiac suggests that understanding genetic writing as “plastic inscription” returns Catherine Malabou’s discourse on epigenetics and epigenesis to what was already intimated in Derrida’s 1967 Of Grammatology.

Mauro Senatore’s “Leaving a Trace in the World (II): Deconstruction and the History of Life” outlines ways in which the trace deconstructs the metaphysics of life and consciousness. Analyzing a range of texts from Derrida’s 1967 La Voix et le Phénomène [Speech and Phenomena] to the publication of The Beast and the Sovereign (Volume I) in 2008, Senatore follows through on Derrida’s sustained critique of phenomenological and Cartesian discourses on consciousness, temporality, and animality.

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Forthcoming in “Of Biodeconstruction” Part II, Elina Staikou’s “Autoimmunity in Extremis: The Task of Biodeconstruction” explores the radical dimensions of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Raoul Frauenfelder’s “Biodeconstructing Merleau-Ponty” puts into question the teleological closure reasserted by the phenomenological reading of the living being. Jonathan Basile’s “How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger” sets biodeconstruction against new materialist, genetic determinist, and anthropocentric conceptions of life. Riccardo Baldissoni’s “Of Other Jaguars: Glosses to the Writing of God” reflects upon the continuity between ontotheology and biological science. Part II concludes with a response to “Of Biodeconstruction” from Catherine Malabou.

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The contributors to this double issue of Postmodern Culture would like to extend special thanks to Lynn Turner, who facilitated biodeconstruction panels at two separate Derrida Today conferences, and to Francesco Vitale, who convened an intensive seminar at the 2017 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, among several other biodeconstruction events.

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. (1967) Translated by G. C. Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.