Category: Volume 29 – Number 1 – September 2018

Riccardo Baldissone is Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. He is committed to a genealogical construction of Western texts that links the process of production of the logic of identity in classical ontology with the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse and the transformations of modern naturalism, in a project to overcome the double straitjacket of entities and representations. His most recent publication is Farewell to Freedom: A Western Genealogy of Liberty (University of Westminster Press, 2018). He is completing a genealogical account of Western processes of individuation, Autós, which will be in print in 2019 from Rowman & Littlefield.

Jonathan Basile is a Ph.D. student in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. His first book, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, has been published by punctum books. His academic writing has been published in the Oxford Literary Review and Critical Inquiry and is forthcoming in Derrida Today and Variaciones Borges. His para-academic writing has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Public Books, Berfrois, Guernica, and minor literature[s].

Raoul Frauenfelder is Honorary Fellow of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno (Italy). He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Palermo (Italy), where he worked on Derrida’s relation to phenomenology. His main publication Tra le mani la carne (Mimesis, 2017) focuses on a critical reading of the metaphorical touch that sustains Merleau-Ponty’s ontology.

Catherine Malabou is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Kingston (UK) and is teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Irvine in spring 2019. Her most recent book is Morphing Intelligence, From IQ Measurements to Artificial Brains (Columbia University Press, 2019). She is working on a new project called Philosophy and Anarchism.

Arthur Holland Michel is the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute at Bard College in New York. He is the author of Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How it will Watch Us All (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). His work has appeared in Wired, Slate, Vice, The Verge, Fast Company, Motherboard, Al Jazeera America, U.S. News, Bookforum, Mashable Spotlight, and an Oxford Research Encyclopedia, among other outlets.

Erin Obodiac received her Ph.D. 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.

Michael Peterson is a Ph.D. candidate at DePaul University. His work lies at the intersection of questions of inheritance, intergenerational responsibility, environmental philosophy, and twentieth century continental thought. He is the author of “Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable” in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (2018). His forthcoming dissertation reads contemporary nuclear waste disposal policy alongside figures such as Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Derrida to discover the sense in which such policy both is and isn’t responsive to the demands of a responsibility worthy of the name.

Carolyn Shread is Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA and also teaches translation at Smith College. She has translated ten books, including five by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Most of her published articles address two principal areas of research: the implications of Malabou’s concept of plasticity for translation studies and the process of translating Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces from French into English. She has a longstanding interest in feminist translation, and recently wrote an entry on “Translating Feminist Philosophers” for the Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Philosophy (2019). In addition to being Assistant Editor for the journal translation: A journal of transdisciplinary studies, for the past six years Shread has worked closely with the Haitian based journal Legs et littérature and the publishing house LEGS EDITION.

Elina Staikou teaches Modern Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester. She is the author of Deconstruction at Home: Metaphors of Travel and Writing and of numerous articles in the field of deconstruction and medical humanities.

David Wills is Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His publications include books on film theory, and on Thomas Pynchon, as well as Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, 2005) and a three-volume analysis of the originary prostheticity of the human: Prosthesis (Stanford, 1995), Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), and Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016). His latest book is titled Killing Times: the Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Fordham U. Press, 2019). He has translated works by Derrida (Right of Inspection, Counterpath, The Gift of Death, and The Animal That Therefore I Am), and is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project.

David Wills (bio)
Brown University

A review of Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd, The New P, 2015.

Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone (published in French in 2013) provides a provocative and insightful assessment of nearly ten years of drone warfare conducted by the US since sometime after its invasion of Afghanistan. Drone warfare is now being used increasingly by other countries, but was developed by Israel, first for surveillance, and then for assassinations in Gaza. That Israeli pedigree has been analyzed convincingly by Eyal Weizman in Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, where he shows how Gaza, following the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, became “the world’s largest laboratory for airborne assassinations” (241). The evolution of the Israeli assassination program—from a first Apache helicopter attack in 2000, through the use of drones for reconnaissance, and finally for the assassinations themselves starting in 2004—nearly mirrored the development of the American program. The similarities extend into such policies as the reliance (in order to justify the practice) upon international law governing armed conflict, and the definition of a combatant as any man of combat age who happens to be in the vicinity when the attack takes place.

For Chamayou, the drone derives its theoretical logic, and its logical paradox, from the kamikaze forces deployed by Japan in the Pacific naval battles late in World War II: “Whereas the kamikaze implies a total fusion of the fighter’s body and weapon, the drone ensures their radical separation. The kamikaze: My body is a weapon. The drone: My weapon has no body. Kamikazes are those for whom death is certain. Drone pilots are those for whom death is impossible” (84). What emerges as a consequence of this logic, according to Chamayou, is “an ethico-technical economy of life and death in which technological power takes over from a form of undemandable sacrifice” (86). This new ethical framework, and its consequences for everyone from warriors, to victims, to a populace that condones or supports such warfare, is ultimately the focus of his study.

In the beginning, in 1944, an opposition played out between the Japanese ethics of heroic sacrifice and the American desire for self-preservation. But those differences did not function in competition without also forming a chiasmic relation whose vectors have now reappeared with the drone: “The antagonism between the kamikaze and remote control reappears today: suicide bombings versus phantom bombings. . . . It sets those who have nothing but their bodies with which to fight in opposition to those who possess capital and technology” (86).

Drone warfare clearly reconfigures the spatiality of conflict—intercontinentalizes it, perhaps—in a way that far exceeds the mobilizations that, Carl Schmitt already feared, displaced the front and its polemologico-political relations in World War I. But drone theory cannot be reduced to a treatment of the intercontinental expansion by means of which a foreign sovereign territory, such as Yemen or Somalia, comes to be represented on a screen in Nevada or upstate New York on the way to being bombarded. In the first place, any theory of the drone is ultimately a theory of a robotization of conflict that must take into account various technological developments, from the “unmanned” soldier to the miniature drone whose uses are only beginning to be exploited, from Amazon delivery vehicle (one presumes before too long) to offensive weapon. Second, as Chamayou makes clear, in its current virtualization of a theatre of operations reaching from Nevada to Mali, the drone conversely concentrates or miniaturizes its attack, in theory at least, on a single vehicle, a single room, and even a single body. In this sense, the drone operator is a high-tech sniper. The consequences are twofold: in the first place, the zone of fire is extended to the point where it “take[s] in the whole world” (56); in the second place, “by redefining the notion of armed conflict as a mobile place attached to the person of the enemy, one ends up, under cover of the laws of armed conflict, claiming the equivalent of a right to extrajudicial execution” (57). That calls into question in the most dramatic way certain foundations of the modern political order.

On the level of state sovereignty in the traditional, post-Westphalian sense, drone attacks constitute indefensible violations of the airspace and territory of countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. These violations take place on a regular basis, and involve constant diplomatic dispute, and complicated deniabilities, concerning whether permission was requested or granted. But beyond these particular inter-sovereign disputes, the whole globe is potentialized as a battlefield. For Chamayou, however, a much more important effect is constituted by the complicated transformations of political and ethical space referred to above, or the extent to which drone warfare modifies “the State’s relation to its own subjects” (177). In the traditional, Schmittian schema, the concept of the political relies on the always potential idea of soldiers exposing themselves to existential risk in fighting an enemy at the front on behalf of a nation that extends, and stands, behind them: our proverbial young men and women in uniform put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf. Chamayou examines the changes that take place along these vectors of exposure and vulnerability once soldiers are no longer put in harm’s way, at least not in this traditional, existential sense; in particular, he meditates on the reciprocal effect this has upon the protection the state provides its citizens in exchange for their service—particularly military service. Not only, he argues, is the concept of combat thereby redefined, but elements of the contract binding the state to its citizens are irremediably problematized.

Chamayou goes back to Hobbes, for whom a natural state of war was to be superseded by a monarchical system where the individual’s sovereign control over his own life is ceded in exchange for protection from the Sovereign (which means, in turn, that the subject offers his life to protect the Sovereign in a time of war), before considering Kant’s late-eighteenth-century philosophy of right. As he describes it, an emphasis on “citizenship” came then to replace what was, in Hobbes, effectively a “zoopolitical sovereignty” (182) whose paradigm was slavery. In Kant’s republican schema—tending toward what we now call democracy—the sovereign has a more rigorously defined duty toward his subjects; instead of giving obedience in exchange for protection, the citizens of a republic require the sovereign who exposes them to obey them, especially when exposure means they are being asked to risk their lives in a war. That would supposedly lead the sovereign to think twice about going to war.

However, once a republican or democratic state is able to wage war without exposing its subjects, its power is no longer bound by the same constraint. In Chamayou’s analysis, this overturning of Kant’s model began with the outsourcing of military operations in the British Empire of the nineteenth century, when troops were commandeered from colonial populations to fight for the English, effectively allowing a Hobbesian monarchic commonwealth to obtain abroad so that the British population could rest easy at home as Kantian citizens. In the age of the drone, a similar military outsourcing takes place thanks to the machine: “Once warfare became phantom and remote controlled, citizens, no longer risking their lives, would at the outside no longer even have a say in it” (188).

Such a crisis in, or corruption of the democratic body politic has widespread effects, but it also has the more local effect of a crisis in, or corruption of a military ethos that remains informed by Schmitt’s traditional model of the noble Spartan wrestler-warrior, founded on values of courage and sacrifice. Of course, the rise of the drone is not the first challenge to the idea that war should be waged between roughly symmetrical forces, that it be a type of duel in which combatants on both sides are exposed and at risk, and that the fighting take place on a circumscribable field of combat in some sort of real time. That Spartan ideal has been called into question at various historical moments, and between various enemies, notably as result of technological innovation—bronze, steel, musket, missile, A-bomb, etc. By the same token, however, the principle of a type of symmetricality has endured, and led to rules of war that essentially forbid the use of “a weapon that by its very nature deprive[s] the enemy of the freedom to defend himself” (159). Prohibitions concerning mustard gas or other chemical weapons are cases in point, concerning not just the risk they pose to civilians but also the extent to which they paralyze the warrior’s virility or physicality. That drone killing is another such case in point is a view shared not only by the targets of such attacks, but also by ordinary soldiers in their reactions to the armchair security, and daily return to family, of drone operators who, supposedly, never find themselves in harm’s way. Chamayou says that “initially the most virulent criticisms of drones came not from incorrigible pacifists but from Air Force pilots, in the name of the preservation of their traditional warrior values” (99).

Chamayou does not hesitate to call this transformation of polemological standards a necro-ethics. Once counterinsurgency tactics or strategies are abandoned in favor of anti-terrorist tactics, the possibility of a political treatment of a conflict is excluded, and principles of international law are “eviscerated” in favor of “a nationalism of vital self-preservation” (134). It is no longer a question of changing hearts and minds; indeed, various official and unofficial bodies, as well as sources as unsympathetic as retired General Michael Flynn, have attested to the counterproductivity of drone killings, the fact that they produce more combatants than they eradicate. Given widespread recognition of such counterproductivity, one is led to find the motivation for a drone assassination policy in a type of culling, or grass-mowing, critiqued by Chamayou in damning terms:

The strategic plan of air counterinsurgency is now clear: as soon as a head grows back, cut if off. And never mind if, in a spiraling development of attacks and reprisals that is hard to control, the perverse effect of that prophylactic measure is to attract new volunteers. . . . Never mind if the enemy ranks thicken, since it will always be possible to neutralize periodically the new recruits, as fast as they emerge. The cull [tonte] will be repeated periodically, in a pattern of infinite eradication. (71)

Yet the most radical and most fundamentally troubling consequence of such an anti-terrorist policy based on an extreme asymmetricality is to call into question the traditional distinction between killing in war and murder:

The right to kill with impunity in war [seems] based upon a tacit structural premise: if one has the right to kill without crime, it is because that right is granted mutually. If I agree to confer upon another the right to kill me or my people with impunity, that is because I count on . . . the same exemption. (161)

Chamayou is adamant that, absent such a reciprocity, “war degenerates into a putting-to-death,” to a situation of “execution or [animal] slaughter [abattage]” (162); in short, to what might be called a drone penalty.

The extra-polemological status of the drone penalty is reinforced in various ways. First, it takes place by means of the participation of non-military entities such as the CIA (whose agents thereby commit war crimes). Bush introduced this practice, allowing the CIA to function in parallel with the killing priorities of the Department of Defense; it was perpetuated, then discontinued by Obama, and then reintroduced by Trump. Second, the drone penalty raises the fraught question of how a targeted combatant is defined—according to Obama’s Defense University doctrine, the US targets only those “who pose a continuing and imminent threat,” but imminence has been interpreted with an almost millenarist license. Third, the drone penalty implies the limitless extension of the war zone in both space and time. In the final analysis, summary assassination by drone kills so-called combatants in a context where there is, in many respects and according to various definitions, no combat.

The European powers scandalized by technological transformations of their own battlefields—which led to such international agreements as the Hague Convention of 1907 (laying out principles for naval bombardment), or the Geneva Protocol of 1925 (prohibiting chemical and biological weapons)—showed much less compunction when it came to employing their technological superiority against the non-European military forces and populations they were colonizing. Chamayou gives the example of Kitchener’s slaughter of ten-thousand-odd opposing soldiers with the newly invented Maxim machine gun in the Sudan in 1898. Also in use for one of the first times in that battle was the expanding “dumdum” bullet. During a discussion of the legality of such ordinance, which took place during the 1899 Hague Conference, the British General Sir John Ardagh intervened with pertinent information relating to colonial situations, a question in which “quite a large number of nations [we]re interested.” He described colonialism’s moral and military quandary in these terms:

In civilized war a soldier penetrated by a small projectile is wounded, withdraws to the ambulance, and does not advance further. It is very different with a savage. Even though pierced two or three times, he does not cease to march forward, does not call upon the hospital attendants, but continues on, and before anyone has time to explain to him that he is flagrantly violating the decisions of the Hague Conference, he cuts off your head. (Proceedings of the Hague 343)

The reductive dehumanization of an enemy functions consistently as the justification for extreme military measures, and discourses not so very far in tone and substance from that of General Ardagh, are again mobilized in the context of today’s anti-terrorist warfare. So it was that when sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike, he was reproached by Obama’s press secretary for not having “a more responsible father.” Neocolonialist policies worthy of the nineteenth century are very much on display on the new global battlefield, and one can again trace their pedigree back to the situation that has been fundamental for the development of drone warfare, namely, Israeli pacification of the Occupied Territories, and of Gaza.

For Chamayou, at the outside limit of the necro-ethics of targeted assassinations there emerges the specter of the “drone state” (31). It is spectral to the extent that it has abdicated its responsibilities in more than one respect: it has transformed Kant’s citizen-soldiers—fulfilling their duty to the republic—into assassins, thereby betraying its side of the contract that produced the state; and, conversely, it has removed from that governmental contract the (at least potential) military obligation placed upon its subjects, allowing it to wage war without their consent or even consultation. Granted, there has always existed a tension between a state’s protection and exposure of its subjects, which led Hegel to argue for a more high-minded ambition for the state, one that would cultivate a citizenry rising above the economic and biological to seek its freedom in an authentic confrontation with death. But by introducing a sense of invulnerability, by telling its subjects that they can remain protected through a war, the drone state risks not only reducing the subject’s vitality to “the preservation of physical life at all cost”; it also, more importantly, risks introducing a security state that claims to have dispensed with the tension or contradiction between protection and exposure, thereby allowing it to “freely exercis[e] war-waging sovereignty, but within the internal political conditions of sovereign security and protection” (181). The drone state, Chamayou warns—though much of the force of his excellent study consists in acknowledging that any warning already comes too late—will be a state of compliant subjects, their contestation of military adventurism neutralized by an absence of body bags, their concept of security wholly determined by the new “democratic militarism” to whose economy they blindly ascribe (188). And that blind ascription compounds into a form of subservience, even servility, attached as those compliant citizen-subjects are to a state of security whose costs remain invisible to them. They enjoy that comfort whereas, a continent away, entire populations remain slaves to fear and violence within the kill zones to which the drone state has consigned them.

Works Cited

• Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd, The New Press, 2015.
• The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences: The Conference of 1899. Edited by James Scott Brown, Oxford UP, 1920.
• Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso, 2007.

Michael Peterson (bio)
DePaul University.

A review of Danowski, Déborah and Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of The World. Translated by Rodrigo Nunes, Polity, 2017.

“The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic – at least, of course, until it happens” (1). The opening words of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of The World clarify for the reader just what is at stake in an attempted overview of an apocalyptic discourse whose proliferation seems to accelerate in step with the irreversible damages to our planet, the availability and strength of weapons of world-ending power, and global thanophilic political posturing. How can we come to understand what is being expressed in the frequent thematization of “the end of the world” without first cataloguing its instances? And yet, how could one take the requisite step back and assemble such a catalogue when

blockbusters of the fantasy genre, History Channel docufictions, scientific popularization books of varying complexity, videogames, art and music pieces, blogs of all shades across the ideological spectrum, academic journals and specialized networks, reports and pronouncements issued by world organizations of all kinds, unerringly frustrating global climate conferences (like the COPs), theology symposia and papal pronouncements, philosophical tracts, New Age and neo-pagan ceremonies, an exponentially rising number of political manifestos – in short, texts, contexts, vehicles, speakers, and audiences of all kinds (1–2)

continue to be produced, disseminated, consumed, and commented upon day to day, week to week, month to month?

The above list of potential contributions to the contemporary apocalyptic imaginary is, in The Ends of the World, typical of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s ambitious desire to read a globalized cultural current and their simultaneous recognition that, by virtue of its structure, a complete accounting of relevant texts is impossible – after all, the apocalypse will continue to be commented upon right up until it has happened. It is to these authors’ great credit that they are able to offer wide-ranging, symptomatic readings of several forms these commentaries have taken and to identify a through line in them. Inspired by the renewal of “ties between metaphysical speculation and the mythological (Kant would say ‘dogmatic’) matrix of all thought” announced by Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro pepper The Ends of the World with references to popular figures like Thom Yorke and Caetano Veloso, and ask us to consider texts like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia alongside the requisite Heidegger, Hegel, and, importantly, “the treasure trove of ideas accrued over millennia in the cosmological speculation of the world’s indigenous people” (7). As it turns out, optimistic or pessimistic, celebratory or mournful, whether we imagine a world without us or ourselves without a world, it is precisely the status of the relation between ourselves and the world that best allows us to understand the mythopoetic posture and theoretical commitments at work in a given apocalyptic discourse. Fittingly, the original Portuguese title of this work was Há Mundo Por Vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins – literally, Is There a World to Come? An Essay on Fear and Ends.

The Ends of the World also offers its readers a suggestion as to what sort of mythopoetic end of the world account might turn out to be most adequate, borrowing (and retranslating) Bruno Latour’s language of Humans and/or Moderns in opposition to Earthlings (Latour’s rendering of the French terriens) or Terrans (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s preferred nomenclature). The opposition between Humans and Terrans here gets worked out along the lines of a given historico-cultural mythopoetics that would or would not be adequate to our times and, in that adequacy, might also allow us to imagine a “new people” rather than “a new world” (123). Roughly, Humans have gotten us into this mess and, as the readings of various all-too-human apocalyptic imaginaries demonstrate, are utterly incapable of imagining their way out of it. What is necessary, then, is a revitalization of Terran-thinking – whether that means empowering the Terrans among us today or allowing the Terran within us all to counter our Modern/Human tendencies. I suspect that this implied normative and hierarchical binary will appear problematic to many readers, and so it is worth detailing how Danowski and Viveiros de Castro get us there, before spending some time thinking about how these categories are meant to operate.

The text is divided into seven chapters and a conclusion. The short but dense first chapter introduces Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s project in the context of both the proliferation of discourses about the end of the world, and the echo of this thematic in contemporary metaphysical discourse. This latter in the sense that “from Kant to Derrida and beyond,” we have seen metaphysical attempts to undermine or even demolish “the concepts of the world elaborated by modern philosophy” (125n6). On the coincidence of this “world-ending” tendency in contemporary metaphysics with the all too apparent threat of imminent planetary disaster, the authors write that

It is true that many of these metaphysical ends-of-the-world have only an indirect motivational relationship to the physical event of planetary catastrophe; but that does not make them any less expressive of it, offering as they do an outlet for the vertiginous sensation of incompatibility – perhaps even incompossibility – between the human and the world. (3)

This symptomatic approach to reading allows Danowski and Viveiros de Castro access to the generalizable conclusion that it is precisely “the human” itself that needs to be rethought if a potential compatibility or compossibility of ourselves with the world is our goal. We are asked throughout The Ends of the World to identify the dissociation between ourselves and our world in our apocalyptic cultural production and, further, asked to identify the Terran as the people who would be, to use Latour’s descriptor, “bound to the Earth” (qtd. in Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 94).

Dissociation is at the heart of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s reading of the apocalyptic. For instance, early in the text they cite Latour’s observation that “things are moving so fast that it is hard to keep track” (qtd. In Danwoski and Viveiros de Castro 8). And, indeed, not only must contemporary scientific discourse struggle to keep up with the ever-shifting terms of multiple interlinked environmental and ecological problems, but the popular understanding of these discourses then lags in turn. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro compound such epistemological anachronisms by adding the claim that “for some time now it has been time itself, as the dimension of the manifestation of change (time as the ‘number of motion,’ as per Aristotle), that not only seems to be speeding up, but qualitatively changing all the time” (8). This state of anachronism is attested to in the very unpredictability of the future – more unpredictable than before, for now “the near future becomes unpredictable, if not indeed unimaginable outside the framework of science-fiction scenarios or messianic eschatologies” (12). Our understanding of our position, of time, of our relations and relationality, and of our situation are all out of joint or anachronistic to the extent that this crisis, this time, presents us with a sort of “perfect storm” of shattered continuity. We are without World in a – if not the – important sense.¹

The second chapter, “… Its hour come round at last …,” claims that this anachronism, the dissociative acceleration of time that had heretofore been seen merely as an “existential or psychocultural condition of Western modernity,” has now “crossed over from sociocultural to biogeophysical history in a paradoxical way” (13–14). Here referencing Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and above all Dipesh Chakrabarty, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro argue that we must understand a transformation of our species from “biological agent” to “geological force” (14). In response to this transformation, we discover the event that Stengers calls “the intrusion of Gaia” (qtd. in Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 14), a “sensation of a definitive return of a form of transcendence that we believed transcended, and which reappears in more formidable form than ever” (14). In short, the transformation of the human species into a geological force has been “paid back” with Gaia’s intrusion into the human world.

In this passage, as in many others, the authors choose language and terminology they never quite contextualize. The authors’ prefatory note to The Ends of the World acknowledges the important events and publications that have transpired since the original, Portuguese publication in 2014 and with which, therefore, this text does not engage. Among these, the most important – “from a point of view that we could call dialogical rather than critical” (xi) – is the appearance of Bruno Latour’s Face à Gaia (2015), itself a reworking of Latour’s Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, presented in Edinburgh in 2013 and since published in English under the title Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017). Danowski and Viveiros de Castro suggest that their book and Latour’s be read together, as a systematic engagement with Latour would require “writing a different book altogether” (xi). The therefore glancing references to Latour’s works at various crucial points make clear that this reading strategy is, if not necessary, at least very well recommended, and we can add that a familiarity with Stengers and Chakrabarty is only slightly less crucial.

Alongside this introduction of the language of Gaia, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro express, following Chakrabarty, a dissatisfaction with critics of the anthropo-geological concept of the “Anthropocene,” such as Jason Moore who has famously suggested that we instead refer to our era as the Capitalocene. By Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s account, Chakrabarty rightly points out that a critique of capital is, despite its apparent necessity, insufficient to explain the planetary crisis. The development of productive forces under any economic system – Soviet-style communism is Chakrabarty’s example – would or could have conceivably resulted in similar environmental destruction. Indeed, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro endorse the view that a new species-consciousness would be required to halt the devastation that we see global capitalism enabling rather than causing. As such, the anthropological commitment of The Ends of the World allows us access to the sense in which a certain understanding of “the human,” and these humans’ understanding of themselves, has explanatory power in the face of imminent global destruction.

It is with this view in mind that Danowski and Viveiros de Castro turn toward a select number of representative apocalyptic cultural reckonings in order to better understand how certain communities view their relationships to each other, to nonhuman others, and to an uncertain and ultimately terminal future. Their anthropological approach to these apocalyptic accounts is here justified philosophically in that these accounts are, importantly, “something that is necessarily thought from another a pole, a ‘we’ that includes the (syntactic or pragmatic) subject of the discourse on the end” (20). Here, then, “humankind” or “we” are defined as that entity “for whom the world is a world, or rather, whose world the world is” (20). There are as many worlds as there are human accounts of a world, then. Coming to understand who falls under the rubric of a given “we” or definition of “human” or “person” is, thereby, “a strategic task, for which empirical anthropology or ethnographic theory is much better prepared than metaphysics or philosophical anthropology, which always seem to know perfectly well what kind of entity the Anthropos is, and above all who is doing the talking when one says ‘we’” (20).

This is a passage in which a little more elaboration would have been appreciated. What sorts of metaphysical accounts of the “we” do the authors have in mind? Surely the dislocation of the subject and the difficulty of providing a definitive account of the constitution of the “we” is a major topic in recent philosophy. There is a sense that we are meant to think that such accounts would, on Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s reading, count as examples of metaphysics or philosophical anthropology, but this connection remains underdeveloped and so seems, too quickly, to rule out a complex history against which their effort sets itself.

Several modes for conceiving of the apocalyptic are presented in the middle chapters by way of a helpful schematic that may turn out to be exhaustive. Whether it be the grim survivalism of post-apocalyptic wastelands (such as those of Mad Max or The Road), the world-ending suddenness of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, or the techno-capitalist denaturing of the Breakthrough Institute or Singularitarians (a think-tank in California), what is at stake is a working out of the relative emergence or survival of either the human or the world. For instance, the thinking of an idyllic natural wilderness that predates the emergence of humanity and that therefore allows us to think the reassertion of that nature long after the eventual extinction of humanity – paradigmatically represented in Alan Weisman’s 2007 The World Without Us – conforms to the broad schematic category of a “world-without-us,” further divided into a thinking of a “world-before-us” and a “world-after-us,” respectively. That is, this way of conceiving of the relation between the world and the human is one that posits the human as a denaturing addition to the world and one that the world can, ultimately, survive. Similarly if conversely, the Singularitarian vision of a radically de-natured humankind imagines an “us-without-world,” enabled by the human being’s capacity to enact an “upwardly mobile” collapse that would culminate in a rapture wherein we ascend to the Cloud rather than to the heavens (47). Such an envisioning of a “‘worldless humans’ scheme” (46) finds its metaphysical correlate in the creative worldlessness of Heidegger’s Dasein – that is, a scheme in which technological development has become sufficient to overcome “the species’ organic or earthly condition” (46) and so would have us “literally and definitively become the world-makers dear to Heidegger” (47) find ourselves “emancipated from the world” (47). The worldless human is thereby presented as the mirror-image of the world-without-us. Importantly, whether we think a world that predates us, a world that survives us, or a humanity that survives the end of the world, the distinction between humanity and world (or life, or nature) is preserved as unbridgeable. And so we may conclude that each of these elaborations of the end times revolves around a similar conceptual commitment to human agential exceptionalism and to passivity in nature.

Here Danowski and Viveiros de Castro begin their positive contribution. For if all these strategies fail due to their commitment to a destructive binary, what is necessary would be a mode of thinking that is free from this opposition. Insofar as the modes of thinking already addressed have dealt, variously, with a conception of the world as predating the human, a conception of the world as surviving the human, and a conception of the human surviving the end of the world, we are left to think through a variant in which the human is “empirically anterior in relation to the world” (63). And it is through an engagement with Amerindian cosmological myths that such a variant finds its expression. Here, humanity is primordial, either simply given or made up of “the only substance or matter out of which the world would come to be formed” (63). Rather than repeat the distinction between human and nature, in these myths we see that “humanity or personhood is both the seed and the primordial ground, or background, of the world” (65). There is, then, a continuity between the human and the world (and all of its denizens) that is essentially absent from the other three possibilities. Indeed, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro make much of the fact that, on this account, there is a sense in which all life is “human,” thereby allowing for an anthropomorphism that is not an anthropocentrism. Life is anthropomorphic because all life – life in general – is understood as a form of humanity, but not anthropocentric in that, if everything is human, “humans” in the sense more familiar to us moderns are no longer exceptional. The continuity between a primordial humanity and a world made up of rather than by that humanity means that no nature has ever been “lost,” and there is no compulsion to be freed from nature baked into this mythos.

At this point, then, we can begin to see what is at stake in the distinction between ‘Humans” or “Moderns” and “Terrans,” those who have never been modern. If a disjuncture or anachronism is characteristic of the global planetary crisis we are experiencing, it is equally and antecedently characteristic of those humans that have set us on this trajectory culminating in an end. If the end of the world is being increasingly thematized, it is because, qua Human, our understandings testify to a world already lost – a world irretrievably and irreconcilably lost. And if there is to be hope, it is to be found in those for whom the world is not in opposition to the self. As such, the war between Humans and Terrans, as much as the “Gaia War” itself, is, properly speaking, a “war of the worlds” (91). It would be a mistake to think that opposing parties here are conflicted about what form our present or future could take, as though there were a common body of facts that one could reason about and so reason toward. Insofar as the scientific community finds itself in a position of general consensus regarding the fact that climate change is anthropocentric in origin, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro insist that what is at stake in this war is precisely not matters of fact, but rather matters of concern. The Gaia War, then, is understood to take as its fundamental stake “what world we want to live in” (92). In this sense, Terrans can be defined not only as a community possessing a certain type of common cultural mythos, but, additionally, as the name for a “common cause, which concerns all of the planet’s collectives, but which can only properly come together if future ex-Moderns make their anxiously anticipated vow of humility and open up a space for cosmopolitical dialogue” (93).

It remains unclear to what extent introducing or elaborating a binary, especially a participatory binary like “Humans” and “Terrans” that even “virtually” picks out living members of a population, is a helpful or desirable strategy for overcoming an unequivocally destructive binary like “Human” and “Nature.” Or, to raise the underlying opposition that I have argued is structuring this text, both in the initial pair ‘human-nature’ and in Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s appeal to the pair ‘Human-Terran,’ a thinking of disjunction and contiguity with the world. The lack of a more thorough engagement with twentieth- and twenty-first-century deconstructive thinking seems like a missed opportunity here, not only because thinkers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida articulate the theme of the end of the world, but also because these thinkers and their commentators have worked to demonstrate, in many places, that any articulated self, be it an “I,” a “we,” or a “them,” will be disjointed as a condition for its impossible contiguity. Suggestions that such a reading are compatible with Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s project can be found in the text – in moments like the thought that Europeans were, after all, the first Terrans to be invaded (108), or in the insistence that the different scales of the apocalypse necessitate a thinking of the end of the world as a “fractal” event (105). But if the Terran is a form of life that needs to be recovered and empowered in each of us and in each instance, the project takes on a pedagogic structure that itself seems inadequate to the urgency of our current crisis.

In their dual philosophical/anthropological perspective on apocalyptic thematics – Bruno Latour describes the authors as “an anthropologist with philosophical leanings” and “a philosopher with an ecological bent,” in his short foreword to the text (vii) – Danowski and Viveiros de Castro ask us to take these tales of the end of the world seriously and in so doing, to understand them as “efforts, though not necessarily intentional ones, to invent a mythology adequate to our times” (6). In this regard, the authors are undoubtedly successful. The text offers a number of up-to-the-minute philosophical, anthropological, cinematic, and literary apocalypse-flavored interventions wide-ranging enough that any interested reader is likely not only to find a foothold in their particular contextual starting point, but also to discover previously unknown theoretical resources. I expect many English readers will, like me, be particularly appreciative of the careful presentation of a number of South American Amerindian perspectives on the end of the world (a multiplicity of perspectives united in thinking an end of world that has taken place prior to “our” historical present) typically lacking from Western, Eurocentric educations.

Footnotes

1. “Intriguingly enough, everything takes place as if, of the three great transcendental ideas identified by Kant – God, Soul, and World, respectively the objects of theology, psychology, and cosmology – we were now watching the downfall of the last” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 9).

Works Cited

• Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 32, 2009, pp. 197–222.
• Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of The World. Translated by Rodrigo Nunes, Polity, 2017.
• Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, 2017.
• Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingence. Translated by Ray Brassier, Bloomsbury, 2009.
• Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffery, Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015.
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish, Univocal, 2014.

Arthur Holland Michel (bio)
Centre for the Study of the Drone at Bard College

A review of Jaffer, Jameel, editor. The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law. The New Press, 2016.

For those seeking to understand targeted killing policy under the Obama administration, The Drone Memos (2017), a collection of ten key legal documents, memoranda, and measured speeches by senior Obama administration officials, is a crucial resource. Much ink has been spilled over the drone campaign, including a number of very fine books, but The Drone Memos creates new meaning by collecting, for the first time in a single volume, this core body of primary source material, much of which was at one point highly classified, on the official thinking undergirding what was unquestionably Obama’s most controversial policy.

The volume is edited by Jameel Jaffer, a renowned human rights lawyer now serving as the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In some senses, Jaffer, who leads the documents with a hard-hitting but level-headed 60-page introduction, is closer to the drone campaign and has had a greater influence upon it than anybody who has not served in government. A vocal critic of drone strikes, he spent the full span of the Obama presidency at the ACLU, where he worked on a range of high-profile lawsuits that sought the disclosure of classified documents and information on strikes and, in some cases, directly challenged the legal basis for the targeted killing program. Operating in what the judge who presided over one of the suits describes as “the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the [government] to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for its conclusion secret,” Jaffer’s aim was to erode the government’s “overbroad secrecy” and bring to light evidence of illegal actions in the conduct of the War on Terror (29).

This thicket of laws and precedents was a harrowing space. Jaffer and his colleagues faced an obstinate opponent. For the first three years of Obama’s presidency, no public official would formally acknowledge the government’s drone strikes outside of hot war zones, even though, thanks to a stream of presumably orchestrated leaks to journalists, everyone already knew that they were real and regular occurrences. Jaffer calls the Administration’s position a “fiction of secrecy” of “absurd proportions” (27) wherein success was, and remains, far rarer than failure. In one suit, filed in 2010, Jaffer represented Nasser al-Aulaqi, the father of U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi who, in an unprecedented move, had been selected for lethal targeting by the U.S. administration. The suit was ultimately unsuccessful, and nine months after a federal district court judge ruled against Nasser, Anwar was killed in a drone strike in Yemen (Jaffer 4, 5), the first intentional killing of a U.S. citizen outside of a war zone in modern times.

Nevertheless, Jaffer had some victories. Indeed, several of the documents in the book were released as a result of suits brought forward by Jaffer’s community. These efforts pushed the government from a position of outright denial to one of relative openness. More importantly, they shifted policy. In the first four years of the Obama presidency, the drone war was particularly bloody and unrestrained. But in a speech in 2013, the president acknowledged the questions that Jaffer and others had been asking, without success, since 2009, “about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality” (265). This wasn’t just an exercise in lip service. The previous day, the president had issued the Presidential Policy Guidance, a lengthy classified document that deals with those questions by imposing an array of limits and strict procedures on drone strikes outside of war zones. Thanks to a lawsuit brought forward by the ACLU, the full “Playbook,” as it is known informally, was released in 2016 and is included in this volume (225).

With their veils of secrecy drawn open, the documents assembled in the book reveal remarkable details about what Jaffer describes as the government’s “bureaucratic infrastructure” for targeted killings (4). Taken together, they bring to light patterns and themes that do not necessarily stand out in any single document when considered in isolation (all of the documents are available for free on the ACLU website). For example, the administration’s rehashing of certain phrases and arguments with an almost robotic repetitiveness: both Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director John Brennan, for example, speak of “the false choice between our values and our security” (164, 193). What is most striking about this body of material, particularly when viewed within the framing provided by Jaffer’s effective introduction, is the extent to which the drone war turns the conduct, laws, and language of war on their heads. Of course, it is by now well established that the drone as a tool of war marks a radical departure from traditional notions of warfighting. But equally radical is the way in which this bureaucratic machinery enables a war that is conducted in secret, sometimes against U.S. citizens, on the basis of classified evidence, beyond declared war zones, and without the direct approval of the public or congress. Jaffer argues that it is a war that has “eras[ed] rule-of-law strictures that were taken for granted only a generation ago” (2).

Jaffer calls the administration’s successful effort to justify drone strikes “a remarkable feat of legal alchemy” (39), and reading all of the documents together, it certainly feels as though the central arguments on which the drone war was built could all be argued in the opposite direction with equal cogency: that at the bottom of it all, there is no fundamental truth in this debate, no hard line of truth. Just one generation ago, it was generally understood that assassinations were illegal (they had been banned under the Ford administration). Killing a senior terrorist leader outside of a war may seem to fit the common definition of an assassination, but the U.S. government doesn’t see it that way. In an address from 2012, one of the six speeches included in the book, Holder explains that targeted killings are not assassinations, because “assassinations are unlawful killings” (194). This sounds like a spurious defense, like saying, “When I killed that person, it wasn’t murder because murders are illegal.” It suggests that illegality is merely a matter of the government’s opinion. In this war, that may just be the case.

According to the administration’s reasoning, strikes are lawful because they are carried out in self-defense—unlike assassinations, which are unprovoked acts of aggression (97). For a strike to count as self-defence, the target of the strike must present “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” (another oft-repeated phrase) (255). Of course, a middling al-Qaida operative in Pakistan would not, by most definitions, qualify as an imminent threat to U.S. persons unless, perhaps, he is literally holding a gun to an American’s head. Killing him while he sips tea with a drone operated from an air base in Nevada, likewise, would not by most people’s definition qualify as an act of outright self-defense in the traditional sense of the word. And besides, as Jaffer asks (as others have before), “What kind of threat could be both ‘imminent’ and ‘continuing’?” (22).

As Jaffer’s introduction and the documents that follow it demonstrate, in this war words don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. In one speech, Brennan—who elsewhere refers to the targets of strikes as “the cancerous tumor known as an al-Qa’ida terrorist” (208)—admits that “a more flexible understanding of ‘imminence’ may be appropriate when dealing with terrorist groups (165). In other words: the only terrorist attacks that are successful are the ones that the U.S. and its allies did not know about prior to the fact. All successful terrorist attacks, then, come as a surprise, and so, by definition, it is impossible to prepare for a successful terrorist attack. As such, a terrorist group like Al-Qaeda, which could—in theory at least—attack anywhere and at any time without warning, presents an imminent threat to the U.S. and its interests by mere virtue of its existence. (To be sure, terrorist groups have proven themselves able to attack the U.S. and U.S. allies with nearly the same range as the U.S. and its drone operations.) In short, as the authors of a DoJ White Paper from 2011 explain, just because the U.S. government “may not be aware of all al-Qa’ida plots as they are developing,” it “cannot be confident that none is about to occur” (178). If the U.S. were to adhere to the common definition of imminence, the authors of the White Paper explain, , it would not have enough time to prevent a future attack. As such, they write, labelling a target as an “‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future” [emphasis added] (176). “Imminent,” then, appears to actually refer to the opposite of imminence: “sometime.” And though the government later clarifies in the 2013 Playbook that “it is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” (255), the determination as to whether a terrorist poses an imminent threat is, of course, based on classified information that the government is under no obligation to disclose, making such decisions impossible to audit.

Many commentators, including Jaffer, have focused on arguments about “imminence,” because while they are both crucial and dubious, the legal justification for drone strikes on U.S. citizens, in particular, also hinges on the equally dubitable notion of “public authority.” Here, too, the drone war reveals itself as a thoroughly postmodern enterprise. “Public authority” refers to the legal concept that certain actions—in this case, killing U.S. persons without first giving them a trial—are exempt from the usual legal scrutiny if they are carried out by public officials in their best judgement and in the service of advancing a national interest. In a 2010 memo outlining the legal basis for a strike against Anwar al-Aulaki, the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel explains that just as it would be absurd to give a speeding fine to a policeman rushing to the scene of a crime—or, to use an analogue that is preferred within the government, to charge with murder a policeman who shoots an aggressive armed suspect—the law banning the murder of U.S. persons abroad does not apply to national security officials who carry out drone strikes against known terrorists who are U.S. citizens (80).

This reading of public authority rests on a somewhat chaotic logic. In this memo and others, the government argues that public authority exempts national security officials from a law known as Section 1119 that bans the killing of U.S. citizens abroad. Alongside the ban on assassinations, this law comes the closest to rendering such strikes illegal. But the authors of the law never made any mention targeted killing, nor did they include any language to suggest their intention was to prevent public officials from exercising their duties by killing terrorists (82). This is because Section 1119 stems from a 1991 bill that was intended to close a loophole that prevented federal authorities from prosecuting a U.S. national accused of murdering a colleague in South Korea (82), a bill that had nothing to do with war, intelligence, or counter-terrorism, and which was passed at a time when striking targets on foreign soil using unmanned aircraft would have seemed like a distant fiction (106, 109 and 139). In effect, the administration’s argument is based on what is omitted from the law rather than on what is included. This is not an uncommon legal tactic. But elsewhere, the administration used what is included in unrelated legal precedent: in particular, a case known as the VISA Fraud Investigation, which found that public officials could legally issue unlawful visas as part of a legitimate undercover operation (108).

This is not the only example of the administration drawing on scant historical precedent to justify a war that has no strong analogues in history. As the authors of the 2010 memo point out, “There is little judicial or other authoritative precedent” for a remote war against a non-state group in a country that is not party to that war. Their sole historical example of a legal targeted killing is the targeting of Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese general behind the Pearl Harbor attack in 1943, nearly three decades prior to the ban on assassinations. The administration admits that they must therefore base their justification for that war on legal decisions that were never made with such a war in mind (94). In his introduction, which touches on these points about imminence, self-defence, public authority, and the Yamamoto killing, Jaffer calls the unrelated laws that govern the targeted killing program “imprecise and elastic.” “They are cherry picked,” he continues, “from different legal regimes; the government regards some of them to be discretionary rather than binding; and even the rules the government concedes to be binding cannot, in the government’s view, be enforced in any court” (7).

Even the definition of “civilian,” a legal term with heavy implications in the laws of armed conflict, appears to be up for debate. While the government maintained, effusively, that it did not deem all military-aged males in the vicinity of a strike to be legally targetable combatants (294), Jaffer and others assert that the CIA’s criteria for distinguishing fighters from civilians appeared to have been used losely at certain points in the campaign. Even the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, Cameron Munter, conceded that when it comes to distinguishing civilians from fighters, “One man’s combatant is another man’s—well, a chump who went to a meeting” (12). Here, again, the determination as to whether a person is a legitimate target or merely a chump is based on intelligence that is invariably classified. A judge tells Jaffer that public officials must be trusted (47). But that is not in Jaffer’s nature. “If this is law,” he writes, “it is law without limits—without constraints” (7).

In such a war where precedent is thin and laws and words are malleable, searching for a fundamental answer to the question “Are drone strikes legal?” may therefore be a fool’s errand. As several of the judges who presided over Jaffer’s unsuccessful legal challenges acknowledge, the fact that a policy is found to be legal does not, by default, have anything to do with whether or not it is good policy. In the suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of al-Aulaki’s father, the judge dismissed the case, noting that the question of whether it is lawful for the U.S. to kill a U.S. citizen considered to be an enemy of the state was a “political question” that ought to be put to congress and the White House rather than to the courts (46). The debate seems to come down to whether or not one can stomach President Obama’s dictum, quoted by his legal adviser Harold Koh in one of the book’s six speeches, that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” (121). For their part, the “political” figures that do have a say in drone strike policy are very much convinced that strikes are the best option (or, as one military official involved in the UK’s targeting program put it to me recently, the “least bad option”). These people don’t lie awake in bed every night tormented by their actions. Nor would most Americans—who largely support drone strikes (“Public Continues to Back U.S. Drone Attacks”)—or Congress, which hasn’t passed a single piece of legislation that directly restricts drone strikes. But in their place, it is fairly clear that Jaffer wouldn’t sleep a wink.

If the first rule of the drone war is that nothing is necessarily as it seems, the second rule is that things which are as they seem may not necessarily be so for very long. If Jaffer believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, he likely assumed that the documents he has assembled would remain in standing until at least 2020 or even 2024. But under the Trump administration, the drone war is evolving. On January 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, the President visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. Trump, who had asserted multiple times during the election campaign that he wished to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” was reportedly impressed when he stopped at the department where the Agency manages its drone strikes. Trump made it clear that he did not approve of how the agency seemed to be very much limited by rules imposed by the Obama White House in “The Playbook.” According to officials who spoke to NBC News, he instructed incoming CIA director Mike Pompeo “to take a more aggressive posture” (Dilanian and Kube).

Shortly thereafter, a number of the limitations placed on strikes under the Obama administration—which, at least in Pakistan, had an almost instantaneous effect on the number of strikes and civilian casualties (Ackerman)—appear to have been stripped. Breaking from the guidelines set forth by the previous administration, the White House granted the CIA greater autonomy to conduct strikes with “less micromanaging” in places like Yemen, according to NBC. A few months later, the White House implemented new, more lenient rules to supersede the Playbook (Hartig)—which the ACLU has obviously sued for. Since then, independent groups have noted a startling uptick in drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, in particular (“Drone Wars: The Full Data”).

Even so, The Drone Memos remains a highly relevant read. In addition to establishing, as a historical text, the legal contours of a war that broke with all precedents, it also represents the legal, ethical, and political baseline upon which Trump will have built his own counter-terrorism policy. As such, the book will serve not only as a record of the Obama administration’s lasting legacy in this space, but also as a useful mark of contrast against which to evaluate the current administration’s policies, assuming they are ever fully disclosed.

More broadly, the book is significant because it represents a very workable model for how to represent, interrogate, and challenge the kind of war that may soon be the norm: confounding and “saturated,” as Jaffer puts it, “with the language of law” (7). It is becoming all too clear that under the new administration, The Drone Memos will need a sequel that replicates the formula. It would be a good thing if Jaffer were involved.

Works Cited

• Ackerman, Spencer. “Fewer deaths from drone strikes in 2013 after Obama policy change.” The Guardian, 31 Dec. 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/31/deaths-drone-strikes-obama-policy-change. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.
• Dilanian, Ken and Courtney Kube. “Trump Administration Wants to Increase CIA Drone Strikes.” NBC News, 18 Sept. 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/trump-admin-wants-increase-cia-drone-strikes-n802311. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.
• “Donald Trump on ISIS: I would take away the oil.” Anderson Cooper 360, CNN, 7 Sept. 2015, http://www.edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/07/09/donald-trump-on-isis-cooper-sot-ac.cnn/video/playlists/ac360-donald-trump/. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.
• “Drone Wars: The Full Data.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 1 Jan. 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-01/drone-wars-the-full-data. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.
• Hartig, Luke, “Trump’s New Drone Strike Policy: What’s Any Different? Why It Matters,” Just Security, 22 Sept. 2017, https://www.justsecurity.org/45227/trumps-drone-strike-policy-different-matters/. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.
• “Public Continues to Back U.S. Drone Attacks.” Pew Research Center, 28 May 2015, www.people-press.org/2015/05/28/public-continues-to-back-u-s-drone-attacks/. Accessed 6 Jul. 2019.

Catherine Malabou (bio)
Translated by Carolyn Shread (bio)

I am honored by and grateful for Eyal Amiran’s invitation to respond to the articles included in this fine double issue of Postmodern Culture, “Of Biodeconstruction.” While it is not possible for me to address each article individually, since several offer direct critiques of my work, I decided to present the position in regard to Jacques Derrida’s commentary on the living that I developed in “Déconstruire la résistance philosophique à la biologie,” most of which is translated here into English for the first time, as well as referring to some work on Derrida and Heidegger in my recent Morphing Intelligence.¹ I thank the authors of these articles, therefore, for the occasion to consider again and reiterate my views on this matter. Contrary to what the authors here argue, I do still believe that if there is such a thing as “biodeconstruction,” it was never undertaken by Derrida himself. Biodeconstruction thus awaits its articulation, and this will require that a challenge be mounted to several assumptions within deconstruction. For instance, as I explain, the distrust Derrida shares with Heidegger in regard to Aristotle’s proposed definition of Man as “zoo-political” (Derrida, The Beast 349), in which Man is defined as a rational and political “animal.”

I adopt this approach because the articles in “Of Biodeconstruction” refer to texts Derrida wrote in the 1960s introducing a relation of solidarity between trace, writing, and program. As I have already presented a critical analysis of the texts from the sixties on several occasions, in the present context I opt to discuss later texts that take up the question of the animal and the relation to Heidegger, reexamining notions of writing and difference through “my” plasticity.² Several articles in this issue are, in fact, critiques of plasticity’s critique, which I saw no point in repeating. I refer to it briefly, but I have developed my response elsewhere. Rather than diminishing the stakes of the dialogue undertaken here, I believe this approach allows me to alter the perspective of our exchange in productive ways.

1. Technoscience, Humanity, and Animality

Let me begin with a couple of reminders. According to Heidegger, the relational structure that connects the development of modern science to technological progress —a relationship revealed in the neologism technoscience —is determined by two significant metaphysical decisions, both of which grant a central role to life. The first, which emerges at the dawn of the philosophical tradition with Aristotle and governs it continually, is the definition of Man as animal rationale, in other words, as animal first and foremost. Heidegger characterizes this definition of Man as “zoopolitical” (Derrida, Beast 349). At the dawn of philosophy a biological and zoological concept of human “life” was thus established. Heidegger asks:

Are we really on the right track toward the essence of the human being as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts, and God? … But we must be clear on this point, that when we do this we abandon the human being to the essential realm of animalitas even if we do not equate him with beasts and attribute a specific difference to him … Metaphysics thinks of the human being on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas.” (“Letter” 246–47)

Clearly, Heidegger considers the biological and zoological definition of Man implicated in metaphysics to be ontologically impure, dissimulating, as it does, the essential difference between life and existence, from which, alone, the essence of Dasein is conceivable. Right from the start, the originary complicity of metaphysics and life, its alliance with what must be called the biological even before such is the case, condemns the biological to being nothing but an instance of concealing what is essential.

The second decision concerns the subsequent biological characterization of life that results directly from the first metaphysical definition, which defines life as a program. In “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought,” the lecture Heidegger gave in Athens in 1967, he claims that in our epoch, which is that of the “universality of a global civilization,” the “scientific world” is ruled by calculability and thus obeys the blueprint in which we find “the thoroughgoing calculability of everything, [which is] susceptible to experimentation and controllable by it.” Now in this “blueprint for a world,” “the activity of the individual sciences remains subordinated” (122). This subordination is especially visible in the field of biology.

Calculability finds its full expression in the notion of the genetic program, which is also associated, in Heidegger’s definition, with the cybernetic program. The cybernetic representation of the world “abolishes the difference between automatic machines and living beings” (“The Provenance of Art” 123). Cybernetics and biology engage in a circular relation. On the one hand, “the cybernetic blueprint of the world, the ‘victory of method over science,’ makes possible a completely homogenous – and in this sense universal – calculability, that is, the absolute controllability of both the animate and the inanimate world” (123). Yet, on the other hand, biology is the field in which “the prospect of universal calculability . . . can be fulfilled experimentally in the most certain manner possible.” Heidegger goes on to explain:

according to the method’s precepts, the defining idea of life in human life is the germ cell. This is no longer considered the miniature version of the fully developed living being. Biochemistry has discovered the scheme of life in the genes of the germ cell. This scheme, inscribed and stored as prescription inside the genes, is the programme of evolution. Science already knows the alphabet of this prescription. We speak of “an archive of genetic information.” On its knowledge is founded the firm expectation that one day we shall be able to master the scientific-technological production and breeding of the human being. The penetration of the genetic structure of the human germ cell by biochemistry and the splitting of the atom by nuclear physics belong on the same track, that of the victory of method over science.(124)

From animal rationale to life program there is but a single logic of subordination and mechanical and political instrumentalization of life, marked by the omnipotence of genetics and, once again, inseparable from the constituting of a “stock” or “heritage” whose goal, in Heidegger’s view, ultimately can only be a eugenicist principle.

Apparently there is never any consideration given to the possibility that this genetic omnipotence might one day be shaken by biological research. From the Greek origin of the zoological definition of Man to contemporary genetic manipulations, a single process unfolds. Biology has but one meaning, which is to obscure, if not to ruin, meaning. The “life” that biology grasps is a threat to “existence,” which is precisely that which never allows itself to be “programmed” or instrumentalized.

2. Derrida, and Heidegger’s Immunity

In Of Grammatology, Derrida highlights the importance of the notion of the genetic program, with reference to François Jacob. He comments on the fact that the cybernetic conception of program determines Jacob’s genetic definition, but he does not draw the same conclusions from this as Heidegger. Indeed, for Derrida, in Of Grammatology, the genetic program appears primarily as writing: “the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing … 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.” Writing is understood as a characteristic of “all that gives rise to an inscription in general” (9). Citing passages where Jacob compares the living to a text, Derrida demonstrates his complicity in the gesture that substitutes, for the essentiality of life, the economy of inscription and trace that is the “logic of life.”

Years later in “Faith and Knowledge,” an important text that offers a comparative study of religion and scientific reason, Derrida returns to the question of the relation of life to genetic program. But the project and tone have changed. In 1967, the program designates the unmotivated trace, the feature of writing that precedes the constituted identity of all individuals, an open necessity of some sort. In “Faith and Knowledge,” the program, which is inseparable from the machine in both its concept and functioning, is now characterized less as a mode of writing, less as a signature, and more as a certain implementing of time, a relation to the future as anticipation and calculation. A program consists of a series of operations that determine and orient the future, thereby averting in advance the surprising and disruptive character of events. The genetic program appears as a particular case of the undertaking of programming that typifies the overall “performativity” of “techné, of technoscience, of teletechnoscience” (“Faith” 46). In this framework, biology itself becomes “telebiotechnological,” a set of technical procedures that operate on life from a distance (“tele”) by working on its abstraction, virtualization, and uprooting (58).

Thus, Derrida does not question the term “technoscience” any more than he expresses real concern about the equating of biology with a mode of calculation. Even if he critically examines some of the assumptions of Heideggerian thought about science, he does not appear to break with the fundamental principle of this thought: from genetic program to technoscientific programming, the unity between the march of capitalism —with its imperatives of productivity, profitability, mastery, and control —and the fulfillment of metaphysics occurs in a continuous, univocal manner. In “Faith and Knowledge” we find this irrevocable claim, with its clear Heideggerian influence: “teletechnoscience … is always high-performance and performative by essence” (66). It is clear then that biology, subordinated to this performative logic, can only be viewed as a handmaid to techno-scientific sovereignty.

How should we understand what must be acknowledged as Derrida’s fidelity to Heidegger? This question immediately prompts another: doesn’t this fidelity cause him to leave the Heideggerian critique of the “zoological definition” of Man intact, undeconstructed?

It is precisely this critique, and the fidelity to this critique, that I seek to interrogate. Why didn’t Derrida ever ask himself whether the zoological definition of Man was, in fact, best, if only considered from the point of view of the future? Whether, right from the origin of philosophy, it actually contained the possibility of deontologizing life? Indeed, read retrospectively in the light of contemporary biology, the Aristotelian definition of Man as rational and political animal makes it possible to resist the privilege accorded to Dasein over all other living beings, which is precisely what Derrida sought to do elsewhere.

I return for a moment to the Heideggerian critique of the concept of program. It is true that on this particular point, Derrida appears to distinguish his thought from Heidegger’s, thereby opening the way to a possible dissidence. In fact, in “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida presents a serious challenge to the possibility of tracing a clear dividing line between life and machine, and on first glance this would appear to unsettle the Heideggerian critique of the program, cybernetics, and genetics. In effect, Derrida says, the effort to protect life from the machine is immediately caught up in the mechanics of this same gesture, which repeats itself like an automaton. The critique of the program does not, itself, escape the program; it becomes a contradicting machine. As we know, Derrida named this excessive logic, situated at the limits of biology and politics, with a term borrowed from the field of biology: the autoimmune process.

In the same way that a living being with an autoimmune disease eventually attacks its own defenses, thought cannot claim to protect life from the machine without using the resources of the machine, without putting into operation a kind of mechanism that turns against it. Thus, it is not possible to immunize life against the machine without calling on the machine, without having recourse, in other words, to the resources of machinic repetition. Derrida writes: “We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity. It is this terrifying but fatal logic of the auto-immunity of the unscathed…” (Faith 79–80). When defenses attack what they claim to defend, we have autoimmunity (82).

Therefore, there is no “life” on one side and “machine” threat on the other, “living being” and “program.” Their dissensual unity is originary and this is what reveals their shared source as “double.” Since any reaction, any reactivity is immediate and quasi-automatic, it seems that everything one imagines one is defending is, for this very reason, mechanically attacked and poorly defended. Autoimmunity is this potentially pathological mechanism inscribed in living beings, a biological anomaly that becomes a philosophical aporia. Autoimmunity is the program turned against itself —with this turning-against appearing virtually as its fulfillment. Gene against antigen, self against non-self, machine attacking itself. The anomaly that Derrida sees as contained in any program reveals its political meaning: autoimmunity is the infernal logic deployed as soon as one begins the process of identifying the enemy.³

Now one might expect that, having exposed this logic, Derrida would return to Heidegger in the last part of “Faith and Knowledge” to show how he mechanically becomes his own enemy. One might expect that the triggering of the play of autoimmunity would shake the foundations of the Heideggerian analysis of technoscience profoundly and enduringly. Once again, if any position of rejection is bound to mechanically attack itself, the reactive critique of science, along with its supporting ontology, should, strictly speaking, self-deconstruct. The equating of genetics with a mode of calculation should turn against itself, thereby already implicitly announcing the significance of epigenetics. The rejection of the biological definition of Man should also, at the same moment, reject itself. Loaning two of its categories —immunity and autoimmunity —to deconstruction, biology should simultaneously see itself invested with a new philosophical and critical role, finally leaving the ontological and technoscientific enclave in which it is constantly quartered by Heidegger.

Yet, strangely, at the end of “Faith and Knowledge” we witness an interruption in the autoimmunity mechanism. It must be admitted that ultimately the text produces no fatal malfunction in the Heideggerian defense. So what is it, then, in Heidegger that is secretly immunized by deconstruction? What is it? The zoological definition! This immunization of Heidegger is, to my mind, the greatest obstacle to the constitution of autoimmunity as Derrida thinks it, as an instrument of bio-deconstruction.

3. Derrida Reads Foucault and Agamben

Even if Derrida, in The Beast and the Sovereign, does question certain dichotomies again —between the living and machine, or dying and perishing —and even if he draws attention to Heidegger’s resounding silence when it comes to the animal, its subordination, and its suffering, he does not, for all that, displace the derivative character of the biological and the zoological in Heidegger’s work. Thus he leaves in the dark what he claims to elucidate, namely, the meaning of these very categories.

Derrida first returns to the claims Heidegger developed on the subject of the animal rationale in Introduction to Metaphysics. He writes:

Heidegger [asserts] the secondary character, the fundamentally derived, late-on-the-scene, and (from the ontological point of view) fundamentally very unsatisfactory character of a definition of Man as animal rationale or as zōon logon ekhon. Incidentally, he interestingly and unassailably calls this definition “zoological,” not only but also in the same sense that it links the logos to the zōon, and claims to render account and reason … of the essence of Man by saying of him that he is first of all a “living thing,” an “animal.” But the zōon of this zoology remains in many respects questionable (fragwürdig). In other words, so long as one has not questioned ontologically the essence of being alive, the essence of life, it remains problematic and obscure to define Man as zōon logon ekhon. Now, it is on this unquestioned basis, this problematical basis of an unelucidated ontological question of life that the whole story of the West, says Heidegger, has constructed its psychology, its ethics, its theory of knowledge, and its anthropology. (263–64)

Does Derrida, in turn, interrogate the whole “unquestioned basis” that shackles the Heideggerian analysis of the zoological definition of Man? Certainly, it is necessary to deconstruct the traditional zoological definition of Man put forward by Aristotle. But again, what does it mean to deconstruct? To intensify Heideggerian doubts? Or is it, rather, to attack these very doubts and to see in the Aristotelian definition the beginning of a self-deconstructive process at work, a sort of time bomb, which, rather than fixing something like an essence of Man for eternity, announces the possible birth of an animal-human subject? Derrida opts for the first of these two choices.

Indeed, one of the central themes of The Beast and the Sovereign is the critique of the Foucauldian concept of bio-politics and its reinterpretation by Giorgio Agamben. In order to level this critique, Derrida believes that he needs the doubts Heidegger brings to the zoological definition of Man. For Derrida it is a matter of countering the analysis of modern sovereignty as the emergence of the biopolitical (Foucault) and the ensuing lack of distinction between bios and zōē (Agamben). What counts for Derrida is showing that the Heideggerian distrust of the zoological definition of Man is the first critical analysis of biopolitics and that in this sense Foucault invents nothing new. Heidegger would thus have understood long before Agamben that the zoological definition of Man already undermined necessarily the categories of bios and zōē, biology and zoology.

If they had read Heidegger as they should have, Derrida asserts, Foucault and Agamben would have understood that there was nothing new in “modernity,” that the definition of Man as animal rationale and zōon politikon already initiated the program of biopolitics. Derrida writes: “I am not saying … that there is no ‘new bio-power,’ I am suggesting that ‘bio-power’ itself is not new. There are incredible novelties in bio-power, but bio-power or zoo-power are not new” (The Beast 330). Elsewhere he explains: “The zooanthropological, rather than the bio-political, is our problematic horizon” (65).

Derrida’s challenge, therefore, does not at all lie in attacking the way Heidegger himself attacks the notion of animal rationale, but rather in entering into a polemic with Foucault and Agamben that glosses over the fundamental importance of this Heideggerian gesture far too quickly, even though it prefigured their own critique in so many respects.

Attacking the Heideggerian attack instead of justifying it would have meant leaving aside this polemic in order to effectively emphasize all the metaphysics still bound up in Heidegger’s rejection of the zoological and the biological. It would have meant, firstly, raising doubts about the very term zoology, an appellation upon whose outdated use, even already in Heidegger’s time, Derrida does not once comment. For a long time now there has no longer been any zoology, but rather a biology of organisms. “Zoology” has radically renewed itself by integrating the contributions of phylogenetics, biochemistry, population genetics, animal physiology (which develops from biochemistry and cellular biology into comparative anatomy via histology), ethology, and ecology, which studies the interactions between living beings and their environment and which is as interested in animals as in plants, fungi, and abiotic elements. Attacking the Heideggerian attack would have meant attempting to state the extent to which these disciplines have largely enabled a destabilization of traditional concepts of the animal, the relation between Man and animal, and the relation between Man and the non-animal living … by perhaps offering a new meaning for “political animal.”

Can’t we claim, in fact, that there is a non-“zoological” animal and hence a non-metaphysical definition of Man? That in the Aristotelian definition there is perhaps something that contains an extra-metaphysical meaning of biology – one that would therefore announce a philosophical revolution?

Contemporary developments in “zoology” are indeed mentioned in Derrida’s seminar, but they are immediately reduced to being no more than actors in the general program of instrumentalizing the living and subordinating the animal that is implemented by “teletechno-biology.” Derrida writes of “the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological and genetic forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of intervention into their object … the living animal” (The Animal 25). These techniques include “farming,” “regimentalization,” “genetic experimentation,” “industrialization,” “artificial insemination on a massive scale,” “more and more audacious manipulations of the genome,”

the reduction of the animal not only to production and overactive reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, etc.) of meat for consumption, but also of all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of Man. (25)

Biological “knowledge” —and here again, of course, we run into the phobia of everything genetic —thus leads straight to catastrophe. As Derrida reminds us, “the order of knowledge is never a stranger to that of power” (The Beast 279). Like power, biological knowledge has the right to life or death over its object.

As an example of this power, Derrida comments on the dissection of a large elephant from the Jardin des Plantes in 1681 (Ellenberger qtd. in The Beast 275). This is, in fact, the only example he offers in the seminar on “zoological knowledge.” In this example the link between zoological knowledge and sovereign power appears in full force, revealing “mastery, both political and scientific, indissociably political and scientific, over an animal that has become an object of knowledge – knowledge of death, anatomical knowledge above all – for the sovereign, the king or the people” (The Beast 273). Later in the text, Derrida reasserts the strength of this connection:

Knowledge is sovereign; it is of its essence to want to be free and all-powerful, to be sure of power and to have it, to have possession and mastery of its object. And this is why, as you had understood, I began and ended last time with a dead body, an immense dead body … I’m speaking, then, of the picture of the dissection of an elephant under the orders and under the gaze of the greatest of kings, His Majesty Louis le Grand. The beast and the sovereign is here the beast as dead ob-ject, an enormous, heavy body under the gaze and at the disposal of the absolute knowledge of an absolute monarch.” (280)

The meaning of zoology is thus fixed once and for all with this example, which extends from animal anatomy to zoo science.

It is now crystal clear that Derrida interrogates zoology and biology neither to provoke a rejection of the Heideggerian rejection, nor to examine the ways that contemporary definitions of the animal in particular, and of the living in general, might destabilize not only political sovereignty but also what must be recognized as ontological sovereignty. As we have seen, even without any examination, the question is already settled. Biological “knowledge” upsets nothing, and in any case, it’s not what’s at stake. What counts is not attacking Heidegger, but rather protecting him against those who do not read him, or who do so poorly, even as they claim to know something about the Greek meaning of bios and zōē. First and foremost, it is a matter of salvaging the primacy of the Heideggerian analysis, marking it as a logical and chronological antecedent of subsequent thought on biopolitics.

“Neither the one nor the other [i.e., Foucault and Agamben] refers, as I believe it would have been honest and indispensable to do, to the Heidegger … [of] Introduction to Metaphysics,” the text in which Heidegger shows that the logos was originarily a “zoology,” “uniting in one and the same body, or one and the same concept, logos and the life of the living, logos and zōē” (Derrida, The Beast 317, 321). This “zoo-logy or … logo-zōēy … will, according to Heidegger, have imposed its authority, even its sovereignty, its hegemonic predominance both over the originary interpretation of the Greek logos and over the Aristotelian definition of Man as logon zōon ekhon, the animal that has the logos” (321). As Derrida also writes, Genesis already said this: “[the logos] was life (zōē)” (313). From that point then, if a biopolitics exists, it is indeed because “there seems to be some ontological affinity between life, zōē, and logos” (314).

Derrida continues:

it goes without saying that when Heidegger on the one hand condemns biologism (and clearly modern biologism), and on the other hand denounces as metaphysical and insufficiently questioning the zoologism of a definition of Man as zōon logon ekhon or, a fortiori, as zōon politikon, he is going exactly in the direction of this whole supposedly new configuration that Agamben credits Foucault with having inaugurated. (324)

Focusing on this point, we thus discover that (1) at the explicit level of analysis it is impossible to make a clear separation between bios and zōē, thus invalidating Agamben’s analysis, and consequently also Foucault’s, for there is nothing “new” in biopower; (2) it is therefore impossible to deconstruct the Heideggerian rejection of the bio-zoological and the ontological background that supports it.

To conclude, there is no question that Derrida is fully aware of a transformation of biology. In the question of the animal he sees a new approach to life appearing, and this necessarily disturbs the weighty apparatus of the question of being and its consequent thinking of time and of history. Moreover, through its insistence, the animal question shakes up the ontological arrangement of the “always already” and threatens the Heideggerian rejection of the bio-zoological definition of Man. With the two instances of autoimmunity and animal, Derrida has a powerful machine (an autoimmune mechanism) with which to deontologize life (and to grasp the unprecedented political stakes of a redefinition of the political subject as a living subject).

And yet, as we have seen, this operation of mechanical deontologization —or self-deconstruction —does not occur. It remains stopped at its threshold. Although Derrida would not recognize it in these terms, I believe that the problem is indeed that of a loss of meaning, a threat of desymbolization, as represented by the idea of a deconstructive power within biology. The notion that the symbolic might elude difference, that it might start living. And that it might become animal, and thereby cease being what it is. Therein lies the problem.

How can it be thought? This question invites further deconstruction. Or perhaps something other than deconstruction. I hope to see this discussion develop in the years to come. Indeed, the stakes in contemporary biology concern not only the living, but also nature as a whole—in other words, everything constituted within contemporary ecological concerns. It is urgent that we continue to free biology from the hefty accusations of biologism that still burden it, in order to finally initiate the interrogation that the survival of Earth demands with utmost urgency.

Footnotes

1. See my “Déconstruire la résistance philosophique à la biologie” in Rivista Quadranti, the short excerpt from the essay translated into English as “Deconstructing the Philosophical Resistance to Biology” in Brooklyn Rail, and Morphing Intelligence (49–51).

2. See Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing; Changing Difference: The Feminine in Philosophy; and “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.”

3. “… the origin of repetition . . . is . . . the division of the same” (Derrida, “Faith” 71).

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and translated by David Wills, Fordham UP, 2008.
• ———. The Beast and the Sovereign, Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, vol. 1, The U of Chicago P, 2009.
• ———. “Faith and Knowledge.” Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar, Routledge, 2002, pp. 42–101.
• ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins P, 1974.
• Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on ‘Humanism.’” Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 239–276.
• ———. “The Provenance of Art and the Destination of Thought.” Translated by Dimitrios Latsis and Ullrich Haase, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 44, no. 2, 2013, pp. 119–128.
• Malabou, Catherine. Changing Difference: The Feminine in Philosophy. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Polity Books, 2011.
• ———. “Deconstructing the Philosophical Resistance to Biology.” The Brooklyn Rail, Sept. 1, 2016. https://brooklynrail.org/2016/09/criticspage/deconstructing-the-philosophical-resistance-to-biology.
• ———. “Deconstruire la resistance philosophique a la biologie.” Rivista Quadranti – Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia Contemporanea, vol. II, no. 2, 2014. https://www.rivistaquadranti.eu/#blog.
• ———. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2019.
• ———. “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance.” Translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, vol. 42, no. 3, 2016, pp. 429–438. The U of Chicago P Journals, doi: 10.1086/685601.
• ———. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Columbia UP, 2009.

Riccardo Baldissone (bio)
University of Westminster, London

Buried for decades in a deep and stony prison, the high priest Tzinacàn at last deciphers the message hidden by his god on the living skin of his jaguar companion. Yet, he is no longer interested in deploying the power of his discovery to rescue himself. This bitter moment in Borges’s La escritura del dios (“The writing of the god”) presents a narrative deconstruction of metaphysical ideas that may well apply to their modern revival in the language of science, as the quest for simple universal rules and the construction of fur patterns as cellular automata are not too far from the cabbalistic concerns of the Mayan prisoner. Even the autopoietic construction of the living risks contributing to the modern process of recasting ontotheology as physiology.

All significant concepts of modern biology are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of nature, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent natural causality—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. Mutation in biology is analogous to miracle in theology.¹ Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas on the nature of the living developed in the last centuries.

Disquieting Continuities

In 1922, Carl Schmitt writes the original version² of the above epigraph in order to expose the continuity between medieval juridico-political thought, which he characterizes as political theology, and modern theories of the state. Schmitt’s notion of secularization, which expresses the genetic derivation of the modern juridico-political constructions of the state, is no doubt controversial; yet, Schmitt has the merit of challenging the presumed theoretical autonomy of modern legal and political thought by showing the theological roots of modern juridico-political concepts and structures.

By replacing “theory of the state” with “biology” in the epigraph, I displaced Schmitt’s model of structural filiation from its intended field to suggest that an analogous relation of derivation may be construed between theological speculation and modern scientific theories.³ Following this logic, the relation would need to be defined according to the specific paths of the various scientific disciplines. For example, while narratives of modern physical enquiries make their Galilean foundation coincide with the rejection of the Aristotelian theoretical framework as endorsed by Scholastic theologians, the study of the living has long carried Aristotelian and Scholastic themes through modernities.

However, even a sketch of the modern development of ideas on the nature of the living would obviously require much more than a single essay. In order to show the theological and, more generally, metaphysical presuppositions within modern discourses on the living, I will have to replace the proper path of genealogical constructions with the powerful shortcut of another kind of narration. In the Schmittian marauding spirit of my previous misquotation, I will shamelessly plunder a short story written in the late 1940s by Jorge Luis Borges: La escritura del dios, “The writing of the god.”⁴

“The writing of the god” brilliantly conjoins brevity and polysemic abundance. Despite its Mesoamerican setting, references to Buddhism proliferate in the accounts of its numerous interpreters. Borges himself recalls a more personal source, namely, his memories of delirium and pain in a hospital bed. The narration may appear to distil this experience of suffering and despair into a superior spiritual achievement: nevertheless, the final outcome may be read in a completely different, and indeed, opposite way. In order to explore this alternative reading, I will inflict upon the prose of Borges, which already consists of only that which is essential, the violence of a summary.

“The writing of the god”

After the Spanish invasion of the Yucatán, the Mayan high priest Tzinacán lies helplessly in the darkness on the floor of a huge prison of stone, which he has been sharing with a jaguar for many years.⁵ A high wall separates the two prisoners, but once a day, when their jailer lifts a manhole on the ceiling to lower their meal, they can see each other through a gated window.⁶ Tzinacán fills days and years with his memories: “thus—he tells us—I was taking possession of what was already my own” (596).⁷ He then slowly comes to recall a religious prophecy: on the day of creation, Qaholom, the god of his pyramid, writes a magical sentence, which would give its chosen decipherer unlimited power to face and repel the evils to come at the end of time. At that point, the motionless prisoner sets off on a quest for the written spell.

In his inner journey, the Mayan priest seems to retrace the path of ancient Greek sages, who look for ontological stability in cosmological features and their material components. He is also struck by the same Platonic and Aristotelian insight that the only persistence in a world of becoming is in the incessant repetition of the cycle of life.⁸ From there, Tzinacán has only to recall that the jaguar is one of the attributes of the god, so that he may at last focus on the fur of the beast as the constantly renewed palimpsest of the divine writing: “I imagined that network of tigers, that hot labyrinth of tigers, spreading horror through meadows and herds in order to preserve a drawing” (597).⁹

Though the search of Tzinacán now has a narrower focus, it is no less demanding, as the prisoner himself dryly recounts: “I devoted many years to learning the order and the configuration of the fur spots” (597).¹⁰ He also speculates at length on the form of the divine communication, and considering that any human proposition already entails the entire universe,¹¹ he comes to the conclusion that the god needs no more than a single word to deliver his message.

One day—or one night, he cannot say—Tzinacán gets frightened by a dream in which his only escape from suffocation is to wake up within another analogous dream, and so on, in an endless series. When the arrival of the jailer brings him back to the reality of the prison, Tzinacán wholeheartedly embraces his condition as prisoner; in that very moment, he experiences union with the deity.¹²

While cautioning that his experience is neither forgettable nor communicable, Tzinacán depicts his sudden vision of the Whole as “a most high Wheel” (598),¹³ which includes “all things which will be, which are and which have been” (599).¹⁴ As a consequence, he also understands at once the writing of the god: “It is a formula of fourteen casual words (which seem casual),—Tzinacán explains—and it would be enough for me to say it out aloud for being almighty” (599).¹⁵

The prisoner’s reaction to the epiphany is even more extraordinary than his discovery and his decipherment of the divine code: he does nothing, and he explains that whoever has seen the designs of the universe—as he did—is no longer interested in any specific issue or entity, even if the entity at stake is himself. As he now identifies himself with the universe, he no longer cares about the man Tzinacán, who just has been himself, and who is no longer himself, but another.¹⁶

Absolutes Exposed

The conclusion of the story may be understood as an expression of mysticism on the part of Borges: nevertheless, two important motivations militate against such a reading. On the one hand, the identification of a literary character with its author is risky, even reckless in the case of Borges. On the other hand, we may consider this story within a series of Borgesian parables on the absolute and its attributes: Borges shows Tzinacán’s power, Menard’s repetition, Funes’s memory, and Cartaphilus’s immortality as features of the absolute that are useless or even humanly unbearable.¹⁷

In other words, Borges provides us with a scorching treatment of absolute ideas, which are exposed through his narrative reductio ad absurdum. This rhetorical technique operates first by accepting the point to be disproved, and then by showing that the consequences of the accepted point are untenable. The method cannot be directly applied to transcendent notions, which by definition exceed their immanent actualization. Yet, Borges bypasses this impossibility by producing the narrative actualization of core concepts of Western metaphysics, from immortality to infinity, and from unlimited knowledge to unlimited memory.

Once actualized in the fictional world of the story, absolute notions produce consequences that are at odds with any possible expectation grounded in experience. This is why Borges shows the disinvestment of the enlightened Mayan prisoner in his human embodiment: the prisoner’s very enlightened condition, that is, his new identification with that which “the poor and ambitious human words” name as “all, world, universe,”¹⁸ is no longer compatible with his previous human identification as Tzinacán. By showing this irreversible bifurcation to his readers, Borges sets up a deictic (or ostensive)¹⁹ rather than demonstrative argument about the incompatibility between absoluteness and humanity: the absolute dimension, in its various facets, here appears as properly inhuman. If this holds true, absoluteness is probably also laid bare in Borges’s narration of Tzinacán’s belief—which Plato and Aristotle also share—that living entities partake of the everlasting by reproducing themselves.²⁰

Permanence and Repetition

In the Western world, Aristotelian participation in an eternal iteration later becomes sidelined by the concern with individual self-preservation: a concern that is raised by the Stoics and that is later embraced by medieval and modern thinkers, from Aquinas to Hobbes and beyond. However, the postulate of the immutability of species remains nearly undisturbed until 1859 (ninety years before the publication of Borges’s story), when it is shaken by another narration: Darwin gets straight to the point by titling his work On the Origins of Species. Once Darwin establishes the evolution of species, it is no longer possible to imagine that they populate the very “first morning of time,”²¹ or that they are conceived as ideas in the mind of the creator.²²

Yet, because absoluteness—or objectivity—lies in the eye of the beholder, nowadays we still need to “watch out for amateur and amateurish philosophers trying to stuff archetypes into the genome” (Ghiselin 260). Worse than that, a more subtle longing for permanence seems to renew Aristotle’s attempt to rescue mutable entities as proper objects of knowledge by highlighting their belonging to iterating cycles.

Aristotle recovers permanence in the supposedly endless iteration of the reproductive cycle, on which he thus bestows the ontological stability of being: moreover, the biological reproductive cycle is possibly the model for the Aristotelian notion of ousia,²³ which the Scholastics translate as “substance,” and which can be rendered as “being-something.”²⁴ In contrast, after Darwin, the cycles of reproduction in the realm of the living instead either go helicing²⁵ or are erratically punctuated.²⁶ According to these interpretations of Darwinian evolution, the cycle of reproduction is modified (perhaps but not necessarily continuously) by variations, and it is even occasionally disrupted by the absolute singularity of mutations. Hence it is no longer the result of uninterrupted iteration, but iterability itself and its conditions of possibility that now lay their claim to permanency.

In other words, after Darwin, jaguars can no longer be examined as a source of timeless revelations,²⁷ as supposed by both Aristotle and Tzinacán (albeit for different motivations²⁸): nowadays, our visibly beautiful felines are instead searched for the invisible beauty of their biological functions.²⁹ These hidden functions can resurface as the mechanisms that supposedly order an immediately visible feature, such as animal fur patterns.

Mathematical Decipherments

It is in the second half of the twentieth century that the mechanisms of biological pigmentation patterns are first construed by mathematical means. This construction takes two different paths. In his 1950 paper (published in 1952), “Random Processes and Transformations,” Stanislaw Ulam mentions a theory of automata, namely, a mathematical tessellation³⁰ model, whose elements are governed by the same general rules (274). In the paper, Ulam cites as a source John von Neumann and the lectures he gave in 1949 (the year of publication of Borges’s story). Von Neumann considers cellular automata as simplified simulations of self-reproductive biological systems; Stephen Wolfram (A New Kind 876) recalls that von Neumann seems to attempt to compensate for the structural simplicity of his 1952 cellular automaton by endowing the model with a remarkable (200,000) number of cells, each of which is also attributed twenty-nine possible states.

In the same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, Alan Turing proposes a chemical interpretation of morphogenesis, which he supports with a mathematical model of differential equations: in particular, according to Turing, the diffusion of chemicals in the embryo might also account for fur colour patterns. In the 1970s, John Murray recovers Turing’s patterns in order to claim that the single mechanism of diffusion is responsible for the geometry of animal coat design (144).

Around this time, Edward Fredkin proposes to generalize cellular automata as representations of space and time, both of which he constructs as discrete rather than continuous. Richard Feynman, too, begins to consider “the idea that space perhaps is a simple lattice and everything is discrete … and that time jumps discontinuously” (468). However, in the 1980s, when Wolfram redefines cellular automata,³¹ he adds to discretization a new understanding of the relation between simplicity and complexity.

Wolfram shows that cellular automata operating by very simple rules display complex behaviour, and he suggests that biological pigmentation patterns, like patterns produced by cellular automata, are “generated by processes whose basic rules are extremely simple” (A New Kind 423).

Outside-text-ness

In light of scientific research, we may reconsider Tzinacán’s painstaking effort to decipher the message left by his god on the jaguar’s skin. The solitary endeavour of the Mayan prisoner translates into the field of natural sciences the concerns that Abrahamic interpreters direct to the more literal writing of their god(s).³² Within these religious traditions, however, the text of the book of nature is hardly granted equal standing to that of sacred books. A notable early exception is Eriugena, who, in the ninth century, properly sets nature and scripture on equal footing as biforme calceamentum, that is, the two-form shoe of Jesus (307).

However, like Jewish, Christian, and Islamic enquiries on the supposedly literal writing of god, Tzinacán’s zoological observations are oriented, as Derrida would put it, by an outside-text beacon.³³ While the outside-text-ness of monotheist and Mayan gods is immediately revealed by their claim to transcendence, Derrida points out that outside-textness is also presupposed by apparently more modest decipherments, such as, for example, the (Rousseauan and Saussurean) analysis of language and the (Lévi-Straussian) search for anthropological structures. The very notion of grammatology as a traditional scientific discipline has to be discarded because it partakes of these “metaphysical presuppositions” (Positions 36).

If this holds true, we may compare Tzinacán’s fictional endeavour with another contemporary enquiry, which is recalled by Lévi-Strauss. In sixteenth-century Puerto Rico, some of the mysterious newcomers (Spanish colonial invaders) are kept underwater for weeks, in order to determine whether their corpses would rot like those of ordinary living beings. Lévi-Strauss matches the Amerindian experiments on Spanish bodies with the contemporary Spanish theological search for Amerindian souls, and he famously quips: “The whites invoked the social sciences, whilst the Indians were rather more confident with the natural sciences” (81).³⁴

Apparently, unlike his Puerto Rican fellows, the Mayan priest only deploys the observation method of the natural sciences in order to achieve his supernatural task. His faith in the presence of the hidden message of the god is not too far from modern science’s belief in the laws of nature, even if these laws are understood as regularities that underlie a variety of natural phenomena.

Of course, one may observe that the script of the Mayan god is an intentional communication by a personal entity.³⁵ However, even in the nineteenth century, non-Darwinian researchers in the newly defined science of biology,³⁶ such as Agassiz and Owen, relate the notion of species to a similar personal entity, and it would not be difficult to argue that the mind of god has currency as a metaphor (and often also literally) for many of our contemporary physicists and biologists.

More than that, the belief in an objective natural settlement (albeit transient) cuts across the boundary between transcendence and immanence: this belief may also survive the reframing of the biological order as a dynamical set of emergent properties. Even the commendable attempt to correlate such order to the intervention of the researcher may end up recasting the previous objective order of things as the result of subjective operations.³⁷

Autopoiesis

We may consider Humberto Maturana’s parable of the house builders, in which he compares the cognitive behaviour of two teams of workers (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis 53).³⁸ One of the members of the first group is appointed leader, and he is also granted a detailed building plan by a providential architect (who would have surely pleased a long list of thinkers, from Aristotle to Descartes to Marx). The second group somewhat embodies Jakob von Uexküll’s “reflex republic” (76) as each member is given, like a sea urchin’s quill,³⁹ the same “neighbourhood instructions”⁴⁰ (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis 53): even more impressive is the similarity between the working conditions of the members of the second team and the operating conditions of the elements of a cellular automaton.⁴¹

According to Maturana, while both teams end up building a house, only the first house building process is isomorphic to a description from the perspective of an external observer; in contrast, there is no isomorphism between this external description and the second process, which “corresponds to the way that the genome and nervous system constitute codes for the organism and for behaviour” (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis 54).

We may certainly welcome Maturana’s acknowledgement that the perspective of the external observer imposes on the biological material the teleological convergence of the plan (the house project with architectural sketches⁴²) as the result of the observer’s post festum cognition of the realized house. Maturana is also ready to admit that this very house is not the object of knowledge of the observer, because, in general, “there is no object of knowledge. To know is to be able to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (Maturana and Varela, Autopoesis 53).

Maturana and Varela themselves operate as theorists by constructing “the living being as a self-referential system of circular organization”⁴³—better known as autopoiesis⁴⁴—that frees the living from its subordination to the teleological plan. Nevertheless, their construction de facto also internalizes within the living individual the cyclical logic of reproduction that defines the unity and the closure of the species. This inner reproduction is understood as both the process of structural change (the ontogenesis) and the unchanging inner organization that grants the survival of the individual.

We may compare the autopoietic organism with Plutarch’s account of Theseus’s ship, which was rebuilt piece by piece over time, causing one to wonder whether it was still the same boat:⁴⁵ the growth and the decay of the living add to the ship’s structural replacements structural transformations too. According to Maturana and Varela, these structural transformations must take place in a manner determined by and subordinated to the organization of the living individual: moreover, for them, the organizational closure of self-reproduction—autopoiesis—is the very defining character of the living in general.

Maturana and Varela do not immediately identify biological systems and their descriptions. It is the gesture of the observer that enacts a distinction between the background and the autopoietic entity, which is thus constituted as separated and one. Here, the eternal closure of the Aristotelian species is replaced by the time-bound closure of individual biological organization, and this very temporary closure results from the subjective operation of distinction. Following Spencer-Brown’s idea that “a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart” (Spencer-Brown v), Maturana and Varela even affirm that distinction is the generative operation of any universe.

We may observe mutatis mutandis that the Aristotelian knot that ties unity and identity together⁴⁶ still structures the language of being, which modern science inherits from the Classics through the historical mediation of theology. Of course, the principle of unity no longer resides in the immutable species’ teleological plan, which is to be realized as the ontogenetic potentiality of the individual living entity. On the contrary, according to Maturana and Varela, the relations that determine the dynamics of interactions and transformations of the living entity constitute its organization, which defines it as a unity. Moreover, after the Kantian critical gesture, which salvages metaphysical objectivity by relocating it from the outer world to the inner transcendental conditions of possibility of human knowledge, this organization can no longer be construed as a mere objective feature of the living. Yet, by declaring that “[t]he description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific inquiry” (Autopoiesis 73), Maturana and Varela seem to recast Aristotelian unity under the shape of the subjective operation of distinction.

Otherwise than Closure

These considerations take us very far from the Mexican jail and its prisoner, but Tzinacán too is caught between mutually exclusive alternatives: he can identify with either the stubborn autopoiesis of his strained human body or the whole universe (which, as we saw in his sudden epiphany, he perceives as a gigantic and all-encompassing wheel). In other words, his embracing of the totality requires him to renounce the distinction that produces the numerical unity of his individual body.

As a proud member of a priestly cast in a literate society, the Mayan Tzinacán can rightly claim to have long ago left behind prehistory and its primitive mentality. Hence, at least according to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,⁴⁷ he has to endure the burden of civilization, which no longer allows him to participate in the identity of more than one entity.

Nevertheless, pace Lévy-Bruhl, inasmuch as we begin to identify the burden of civilization as another avatar of Platonic narrations, we need not to follow Tzinacán’s bifurcating path. We may question the unity (and the operational closure) of both the individual and the whole, and we may even detect a will to closure⁴⁸ still at work in the repeated attempt to define concepts—such as, for example, the living. And what if we at last abandon the endeavour of defining the living and rather focus on the living as part of the cultural processes that recast—and are still recasting—ontotheology as physiology?⁴⁹

Footnotes

1. Mutations do not alter causality, but they are exceptions to ordered replication. Consider Malebranche’s discussion of how volontez particulieres (god’s particular volitions) occasionally modify the general laws of nature, the volontez generales (god’s general volitions) (32), in order to produce miracles.

2. Here is George Schwab’s translation of Schmitt’s original text: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Schmitt 36).

3. In the same essay Schmitt himself detects Malebranche’s emphasis on volontez generales, the laws of nature that express the general wills of god, as the horizon of the scientific study of nature as a self-sufficient mechanism.

4. The story was first published on February 1949 in the Argentinian magazine Sur, and was then reprinted in the collection El Aleph. Translations of Borges and other texts are mine unless otherwise noted.

5. Borges may have been familiar with Popol Vuh, which is the most relevant among the Mayan texts that survived the colonial holocaust. In the book, the third trial that the main characters face in the underworld is entering b’alami ja, jaguar house, which is “crowded with jaguars” (line 4019).

6. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin recalls a visit to a Shaivite sadhu in his Indian den, and he adds an Edenic version of the Borgesian regular exchange of eye views: “Below the hermitage there was a leopard cave. On moonlit nights the leopard would come into the garden, and he and the sadhu would look at each other” (257).

7. “[A]sí fui entrando en posesión de lo que ya era mío.”

8. “La montaña y la estrella son individuos, y los individuos caducan. Busqué algo más tenaz, más invulnerable. Pensé en las generaciones de los cereales, de los pastos, de los pájaros, de los hombres” (597). “The mountain and the star are individuals, and individuals die out. I looked for something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought about the generations of cereals, of pastures, of birds, of men.”

9. “Imaginé esa red de tigres, ese caliente laberinto de tigres, dando horror a los prados y a los rebaños para conservar un dibujo.”

10. “Dediqué largos años a aprender el orden y la configuración de las manchas.”

11. “Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero” (598). “I considered that also in human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe.”

12. “Ocurrió la unión con la divinidad, con el universo (no sé si estas palabras difieren)” (598). “It occurred the union with the deity, with the universe (I don’t know if these words differ).” We cannot ignore that Tzinacán’s epiphany of the totality overlaps with his blessing espousal of the here and now, inasmuch as alternative (however awful) to the intolerable dimension of dream: “Del incansable laberinto de sueños yo regresé como a mi casa a la dura prisión. Bendije su humedad, bendije su tigre, bendije el agujero de luz, bendije mi viejo cuerpo doliente, bendije la tiniebla y la piedra” (598). “From the indefatigable labyrinth of dreams, I returned as if to my home to the harsh prison. I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed the crevice of light, I blessed my painful old body, I blessed the darkness and the stone.”

13. “[U]na Rueda altísima.” A most appropriate objective correlative to the Whole as a recurring cycle.

14. “[T]odas las cosas que serán, que son y que fueron.”

15. “Es una fórmula de catorce palabras casuales (que parecen casuales), y me bastaría decirla en voz alta para ser todopoderoso.”

16. “Quien ha entrevisto el universo, quien ha entrevisto los ardientes designios del universo, no puede pensar en un hombre, en sus triviales dichas o desventuras, aunque ese hombre sea él. Ese hombre ha sido él y ahora no le importa. Qué le importa la suerte de aquel otro, qué le importa la nación de aquel otro, si él, ahora es nadie.” “Whoever glimpsed the universe, whoever glimpsed the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think about a man, about his trivial sayings or misfortunes, even if that man is himself. That man has been him and now he does no longer care. What is the fate of that other to him, what is the nation of that other to him, if now he is nobody.” There is an uncanny similarity between this and the epilogue of Dino Buzzati’s short story L’uomo che volle guarire (“The Man who Wanted to Heal”), first published on July 29, 1952 in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

17. See Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (440–450); Funes el memorioso (485–490); El inmortal (533–544) in Borges, Obras Completas.

18. “[L]as ambiciosas y pobres voces humanas, todo, mundo, universo” (598).

19. The two terms relate to the verbs δείκνυμι [deiknymi] and ostendere respectively, which both use to express the sense of “displaying,” long before this sense is hijacked by Plato and the geometers under the notion of demonstration as a compelling vision (the Platonic gesture includes the shift of sense of the derived term παράδειγμα [paradeigma] from “model as an example” to “model as a prototype”). We are still hostages to this gesture, and to its repetition by Hobbes and his fellow seventeenth-century natural philosophers.

20. “[L]os jaguares, que se amarían y se engendrarían sin fin” (597). “The jaguars, who would endlessly copulate and reproduce themselves.”

21. Tzinacán tells: “Imaginé la primera mañana del tiempo” (597). “I imagined the first morning of time.”

22. Nineteenth-century naturalists such as Agassiz and Owen still held species as ideas in the mind of god, a notion that may possibly be traced to Philo of Alexandria: “in tracing it [a natural system] the human mind is only translating into human language the Divine thoughts expressed in nature in living realities” (Agassiz 136).

23. Aristotle knows well that οὐσία [ousia] is said in many ways, which include the numerical identity of the individual being (for instance, in Generation of Animals). However, Aristotle also insists that there is a primary sense of the word ousia: in the Categories (3b12) it defines that which is neither part nor predicate of something else, and it is always ἄτομον … καὶ ἓν ἀριθμῷ [atomon … kai hen arithmō], “individual … and one in number”; in the book Zeta of Metaphysics (1043a6), Aristotle defines ousia as τὸ ἀνάλογον ἐν ἑκάστῳ [to analogon en hekastō], “the proportion in each being.”

24. The term ousia is derived from οὖσα [ousa], feminine present participle of the verb εἶναι [einai], to be, that is, being. The Scholastics follow Boethius’s (main) Latin rendering of ousia as substantia, substance: more recently, Düring suggests “existence” as an alternative translation, which is probably reasonable but confusing on the horizon of previous interpretations. Considering that what is at stake is not only the isness of things (rendered by Heidegger as Seiendenheit, “beingness,” and by Sachs as “thinghood”), but also any singular instance of this isness, I would prefer to use the term “being-something.” I deal at length with the notion of ousia in my forthcoming book Autós.

25. I made up this verbal form from the noun “helix” on the model of “spiral” and “spiralling,” as a visual rendering of the continuous variation of species in Neo-Darwinist accounts.

26. “Speciation is a rare and difficult event that punctuates a system in homeostatic equilibrium” (Eldredge and Gould 115).

27. According to Darwin’s theory of descent with modification, “not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity” (489).

28. In Borges’s narration (as well as in Popol Vuh, line 19, where the name K’ajolom identifies the god who has begotten sons), Qaholom is a personal entity, unlike Aristotle’s θεός [theos], the divine, which only becomes personalized in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish adaptations of Aristotelian thought.

29. This kind of beauty is first explicitly acknowledged by Aristotle in Parts of Animals 645a6: οὕτω καὶ πρὸς τὴν ζήτησιν περὶ ἑκάστου τῶν ζῴων προσιέναι δεῖ μὴ δυσωπούμενον ὡς ἐν ἅπασιν ὄντος τινὸς φυσικοῦ καὶ καλοῦ [houtō kai pros tēn zētēsin peri hekastou tōn zōōn prosienai dei mē dysōpoumenon hōs en hapasin ontos tinos physikou kai kalou], “so we should approach the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.”

30. Ulam mentions “an infinite lattice or graph of points,” that is, a regular spatial distribution of discrete elements (274).

31. “Cellular automata are simple mathematical idealizations of natural systems. They consist of a lattice of discrete identical sites, each site taking on a finite set of, say, integer values. The values of the sites evolve in discrete time steps according to deterministic rules that specify the value of each site in terms of the values of neighboring sites. Cellular automata may thus be considered as discrete idealizations of the partial differential equations often used to describe natural systems (“Cellular Automata” 2).”

32. We may construct the birth of modern sciences as a shift of focus from the Christian god’s book of revelation to his book of nature. In Il Saggiatore Galileo explicitly claims the latter image in order to underline another shift, from the language of letters to that of mathematical symbols and figures (25).

33. In De la grammatologie, Derrida famously writes, “[I]l n’y a pas de hors-texte (there is no outside-text) (227).” We may forgive the peremptoriness with which Derrida annihilates the outside-text: thanks to his bold gesture we can now see that the outside-text always comes at a cost, as Latour says of identities, equivalences, and universality in The Pasteurization of France (162). Arguably, the gesture of mere negation is reconsidered by Derrida himself at least under the rubric of the undecidability of the pharmakon, which “is neither the inside nor the outside, … that is, simultaneously either or” (Positions 43).

34. “[L]es blancs invoquaient les sciences sociales alors que les Indiens avaient plutôt confiance dans les sciences naturelles.”

35. “[I]maginé a mi dios confiando el mensaje a la piel viva de los jaguares” (597). “I imagined my god entrusting the message to the living skin of the jaguars.”

36. The word “biology” first appeared in print in its German version, Biologie, in Theodor Georg August Roose’s 1797 Grundzüge der Lehre von der Lebenskraft.

37. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant set this rhetorical trick as the general model for the modernities to come: universal forms and categories of thought, inasmuch as shared human abilities, shape human knowledge and grant its objectivity.

38. First published in Maturana, Biology of Cognition. I suspect an unwitting resurgence of numerology here, as Maturana unnecessarily specifies that each team is composed of thirteen workers.

39. “Like porcupines, sea urchins have a great number of quills, which are, however, developed into autonomous reflex persons … In the reflex republic of the sea urchin, which has no hierarchically superior center, civil peace … occurs through the presence of a substance called autodermin. Undiluted autodermin blocks the receptors of the reflex persons” (von Uexküll 76–77).

40. As the activity of each worker far exceeds in complexity the quill’s simple reflex, the analogy is limited to the aspect of locality.

41. In their 1974 article “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model,” Varela, Maturana, and Uribe make use of a cellular automaton.

42. We may notice that the word παραδείγματα [paradeigmata], or “examples,” and, after Plato, “prototypes,” first appears in Herodotus to define three-dimensional models (2.86) and—in the singular—an architectural sketch (5.62) respectively. We cannot exactly date Sophocles’s roughly contemporary play Ichneutae, where paradeigmata (line 72) qualify three-dimensional objects too.

43. “[S]er vivo como sistema de organización circular.” (De Máquinas y Seres Vivos 16).

44. Maturana recalls that his coin “autopoiesis” took shape “while talking with a friend (José Bulnes) about an essay of his on Don Quixote de la Mancha, in which he analyzed Don Quixote’s dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production)” (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis xvii). Of course, Bulnes’s reading of Cervantes partially recovers the Aristotelian tripartition of human activities into theoria (contemplation), praxis (nonproductive activity), and poiesis (productive activity). See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.

45. Plutarch, Theseus 23.1.

46. See especially the book Iota of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

47. Lévy-Bruhl asserts that primitive mentality implies a “mystical participation” (80), that is, the ability to be “at once themselves and something other than themselves” (76).

48. “Distinction is perfect continence” (Spencer-Brown 1), original italics. I discuss an alternative construction that emphasizes in-between-ness and through-ness in my book Farewell to Freedom.

49. I have suggested elsewhere the term “onto-theo-physio-logy,” as an alternative to Heidegger’s dehistoricized construction of Western thought as the bipolar disorder of ontotheology. The notion of ontotheophysiology genealogically summarizes the classical, medieval, and modern path of metaphysics as a (Derridean) series of substitutions of center for center: being, god, and nature, that is, φύσις [physis].

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• ———. De Máquinas y Seres Vivos. Editorial Universitaria, 1972.
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• Spencer-Brown, George. Laws of Form. Allen and Unwin, 1969.
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• ———. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram. www.wolframscience.com/nks/. Accessed 10 November 2017.

Jonathan Basile (bio)
Emory University

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet relinquishing this trait leaves life indistinguishable from its many inorganic and technical others. Biodeconstruction treats organism, organ, and parasite (part and whole, self and other) as undecidable. Finally, it critiques as metaphysical humanism Bernard Stiegler’s attempt to define a negentropy specific to humanity.

As though this discourse were a living thing, its members animated by a common purpose, an end present here at the beginning that realizes itself throughout. This vitality is other than figural—there can be no life without this relation-to-self and relation-to-alterity of generalized textuality. The phenomenology of life is and requires the life of phenomenology; only the Sache toward which we direct ourselves—that essence which is never or rarely the words themselves but rather what they ask us to see—could be the animating principle of this discourse, the theme and the engine of our investigation, yet it is never present as such; it can only leave its trace here. Life, then, governs nothing. It can only expropriate itself or be arrogated, summoning the other who can read into or out of it any duplicity or heteronomy, treating its members as organs of the other or as so many parasites.

Asking after life threatens the self-certainty of the biological and philosophical discourses that seek it. Inevitably, the question draws to itself the most fundamental terms of philosophical thinking. Life implies a certain relationship to time, not of repetition but of invention; it is thought to orient, understand, even create the future. This necessary reference to what is beyond the present, beyond immediate perception, implies an internality constructed by the relationship to self, something already resembling consciousness.¹ But where is this temporality, interiority, and conscious quality of life? Who would feel comfortable pointing to some aspect of their world or their thinking and saying, “there it is: not a vital effect, but life itself”? What could life feel like if it were the ground of all feeling? How can we think life if it is the very form of self-relation that undergirds consciousness? Is it any easier to locate it in ourselves than in the other? We understand life both as a self-contained, self-regulating, and self-reproducing whole, and as a ceaseless self-transcendence or transgression, an openness on the outside. Without the life of the other, the shock of arrival or heteronomous invention, there would be no life of the same, no life at all. This undecidability will be what develops itself through this discourse, what preserves itself through difference and historical upheaval—do we live, or does the other live through us?

We have learned to be wary of the form of the question “What is?” Being is not a being, time is nothing temporal; the presumption that we are searching for an essence when we ask after them is unjustified. Similarly, life is nothing vital, not a living thing. It cannot be any of its accomplished forms because it exists only as an ability to preserve yet transcend the given. Nonetheless, natura naturans is sometimes imagined as a great metabolic process, a vital force that realizes itself and its ends through the constant upheaval of inorganic and organic matter, perhaps even through the instability of space, the transformation of nothingness into subatomic particles, and the unfolding of cosmic time. Once we suspend our confidence in the direction of time and call into question the empirico-scientific status of the new, of invention and creativity, then we can understand life as a name for différance and dissemination, a fragmentation that can only be regathered or cathected into an organic unity by a fundamental violence. My attempt here will be to show that this dis-organic force destabilizes attempts by theorists and scientists to make life the stable object of an empirico-positivistic discourse—that life is deconstruction.

New Materialist studies such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter represent life as a positivistic phenomenon, an empirically available substance. The field of New Materialism is defined by opposing the purported tendencies of past thinkers to grant agency, activity, and self-possession to cultural, linguistic, or human actors while understanding matter as passive and inert. Yet merely reversing these binaries risks transferring the most oppressive and logocentric notion of the sovereignty of the autonomous subject onto a new agent. Jane Bennett goes as far as possible in this direction in her Vibrant Matter, the fundamental premise of which is that all matter, organic and inorganic, is living, inventive, and free.² By declaring all matter to be living, the very possibility of recognizing life differentially disappears in Bennett’s work; nonetheless, she claims that science can offer empirical verification of its existence:

The machine model of nature, with its figure of inert matter, is no longer even scientific. It has been challenged by systems theory, complexity theory, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, as well as by the many earlier biophilosophies of flow that Michel Serres has chronicled in The Birth of Physics. . . . Yet the popular image of materialism as mechanistic endures, perhaps because the scientific community tends to emphasize how human ingenuity can result in greater control over nature more than the element of freedom in matter. (91)

This appeal to chaos theory (to prove that all matter is contingent and therefore free, creative, and living) misrepresents its fundamental discoveries.³ The study of chaotic systems could never prove that they are contingent in themselves; mathematicians of chaos have shown that completely unpredictable behavior can emerge from purely deterministic interactions, and that what is completely predictable for us can nonetheless result from stochastic processes. Chaos is a science of the undecidability of necessity and contingency, a reminder that the laws we ascribe to nature are never the laws of nature itself—we will never know if a violation of any such law is a miracle or our mistake. If we accept the undecidability of contingency and problematize its relationship to freedom and life, we can no longer look out at the world and “see” life as a simple phenomenal occurrence. The subjection of inorganic matter to the deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics and the tendency toward indifference of thermodynamics allow for the appearance of life as a challenge to those constraints. Declaring all matter to be free does not place it in the immediate, phenomenal light of vitality, but rather destroys the ground from which anything resembling life could have emerged.⁴ While I agree with Bennett that matter cannot be reduced to necessity and determinism, the reversal she attempts by equating it with contingency and freedom is untenable. Rather, matter is undecidably necessitated or contingent, free or constrained, heteronomous or autonomous—and life is one of the names for this self-contradiction.

It is both necessary and impossible to think life as identity and life as difference—a paradox we can investigate by turning to Erwin Schrödinger’s foundational attempt to articulate the differential view. Schrödinger is not a straightforward interlocutor for New Materialism; he espouses some notions that New Materialists would consider conservative (such as the necessary legislation of the gene), while anticipating other New Materialist ideas (such as the indeterminacy of matter and a certain value placed on novelty). He is neither a precursor to nor a target of New Materialist critique, but I juxtapose him with Bennett’s project to allow these ideas to communicate, and to arrive at a better understanding of life’s aporias. Schrödinger’s attempt to treat life differentially does not make it any easier to answer the what-question. His 1943 lectures, What is Life?, take life to be a local violation of the second law of thermodynamics, a differential reduction of entropy. That is, the living thing is a pocket in which the world becomes more ordered rather than more disordered. He names this tendency negative entropy or negentropy.

The deconstructability of Schrödinger’s premises can help us to understand a broad range of attempts scientists have since made to create mathematico-quantitative approaches to the question of life. Often, these hypotheses come from theoretical physicists or chemists, as they necessarily equate the organism with the mechanical operations of its chemical substrate. These approaches include mathematical descriptions of life as a complex system, structuralist descriptions of organic form, and the chemical description of life as an out-of-equilibrium dissipative system. These representations necessarily eliminate from our conception of life any reference to final causality or purposiveness, its traditional essence. If these formulae defined life, we would be mistaken every time we related to a living thing, including ourselves, as though it had a will or desire (a capacity for ends). This lack of teleology remains true even in the case of the sciences of complexity or chaos, where it has become commonplace to speak of the “self-organization” of the described elements. While it may be accurate that chemicals aggregate to form highly structured patterns (say, the designs on certain seashells) without the need for a blueprint residing in some master molecule, this merely gives expression to a necessity of mechanistic thought; it is always the case, in mechanism, that the principle of motion and the mind that intuits it are external to the interaction being described or known—consciousness of the law is not represented as causal, and so an impetus of scientific inquiry is satisfied, in that we are describing an interaction as if it took place whether we know it or not. If, for example, the spots of a cow are drawn according to a genetic blueprint (the reductionist, as opposed to the emergent, self-organizing view of a reaction-diffusion system), this still does not mean that the gene is conscious of the pattern it brings about.⁵ And it is not the case that eliminating the blueprint brings about anything like a self-originating causality, let alone a consciousness or purposiveness, but merely suggests that the other who elicits this behavior from the subject is another like itself (e.g. activator and inhibitor chemicals). Though scientists and theorists often speak as though consciousness and life will ultimately be explained by emergence—as if teleology were itself the telos of a mechanism without end—it is rather the case that they form a fundamental logical and phenomenological contradiction.

We can understand the failures of these approaches to arrive at a coherent concept of life by examining the contradictions of Schrödinger’s attempt to quantify vitality. Despite offering a differential definition of life, he devotes the bulk of his What is Life? lectures to identifying the material substrate of life. In addition to the contradiction inherent in this method (if difference is the essence of life, it cannot reside in a stable and self-identical substance), it defers the question of essence. Most of Schrödinger’s work is focused on the question of how—imagining a physico-chemical basis that could ground what are assumed to be the manifestations of life (whose whatness is presupposed). The first half of his lectures, which describe why “the material carrier of life” must be an “aperiodic crystal” (5), take for granted that life is a relative stability or permanence, and that it is a substance. This procedure simply adopts a commonsense or pseudo-scientific idea of the properties of life and transfers them to its assumed material basis. What is it that makes these properties be, and makes them the properties of life? As long as self-determination and self-organization define the organism, life must be a force outside any and all of its material instantiations. Schrödinger’s theory is no exception to this rule, and his presuppositions about knowledge share this prejudice toward permanence and stability. He begins by describing the Brownian motion of atoms or small molecules, tossed about unpredictably by their collisions. From this he derives the necessity that the brain and the living thing must be larger than this frame of reference: “what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness” (9). This desire for adequation perhaps defines the scientist: the idea that if thought is orderly unto itself, and life and matter are orderly unto themselves, then the two will comprehend each other perfectly. On the other hand, imagine an impassive God for whom 1,000 of our years are but a day. Imagine this god says to itself, “Those humans, their minuscule interactions are so unpredictable, but they always tend toward mutual destruction. Think of the chaos if one were to witness existence from their perspective. Surely consciousness and thought of any kind, at least any stable kind, is impossible for them.” We should not conclude from this that particles are conscious, but only that their consciousness is no more impossible than our own. At the very least, we should recognize that relative stability is insufficient to produce the manifestations of life, among them the self-relation of consciousness, even if such relativity is our only access to the phenomenon.

Of course, any scientist will tell us that entropy—the disorder in a system—is rigorously quantifiable. Even if it is impossible to declare a framework (for instance, motion of particles or motion in the human world) ordered or disordered in absolute terms, Schrödinger is at least mathematically justified in describing the living being as a local violation of the principle that entropy always increases.⁶ This second law of thermodynamics is true only outside the organism, in the world into which it expels its waste—or, as Schrödinger puts it, expels disorder.

After taking for granted the nature of the living thing and deriving the properties of its material substrate from its assumed characteristics, he finally poses the question, “What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive?” (69). He answers: “When it goes on ‘doing something’, moving, exchanging material with its environment . . . for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances” (69). Even granting that Schrödinger uses an admirably accessible, everyday language throughout these lectures, we cannot accept this definition as thorough enough. The recourse to relativism here is not grounded in an observable quantity (such as entropy) but in our expectations (who, “we?”). His plain speaking effaces the difference between mechanical and final causality, which is still at the foundation of the epistemology of life. What we observe is an effect of life only when we posit its end as its origin, which is fundamentally different from a mere endurance of something according to mechanical causes. According to the definition Schrödinger puts forward, we would have to grant life to the atomic dance, a growing stalactite (a “periodic solid”), a river, weather patterns, and to the motion of the planets, as well as to all technology. Faced with this need to refine his definition, Schrödinger would likely invoke something like a difference between heteronomy and autonomy, outer and inner. In our examples, an external energy such as gravity acts on matter that offers nothing but its inertia and momentum, so we think. On the other hand, the living thing turns this external energy into its “own,” to be used for its own purposes (finality). Ultimately, I do not think one can rigorously identify the phenomenon of life without eventually invoking qualitative difference, internality, and futurity, even if this positivity stands in a relationship of contradiction or aporia with our merely differential access to life. The emphasis on difference is honest in one sense: life never appears as such. But difference alone can never answer the question why or respond to the claim that there are living things at all—what gives life?

Crystal formations and other solids pose a problem for Schrödinger’s theory, because they are highly ordered but not, by most accounts, living. To differentiate life and matter, he invokes the concept essential to Bennett’s theory, the concept of novelty. There are two ways, he says, of building large associations of molecules:

One is the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure. . . . The other way is that of building up a more and more extended aggregate without the dull device of repetition. That is the case of the more and more complicated organic molecule in which every atom, and every group of atoms, plays an individual role. (60)

The former describes the “periodic,” the latter the “aperiodic” solid. The emphasis on division of labor and individuality is a classic topos of vitality, the part dependent on the whole and working to its benefit. It illustrates perfectly what Derrida would tell us about iterability: that repetition depends on difference and vice versa. Too much repetition and one feels that the sort of self-guided activity thought to govern the living is absent. Nevertheless, the “individuality” Schrödinger praises only functions as a ground for life if its operations return to a central identity, a repetition of the living. Too much difference would be entropic dissemination. Because there is no essential separability of difference and repetition, life and its others, Schrödinger must lash out at the one, attacking “dull” repetition to feign the purity of what nonetheless depends on it. In a less guarded passage, he describes the abyssal difference thus:

The difference in structure [between periodic and aperiodic crystals] is of the same kind as that between an ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master. (5)

This is not the only place where Schrödinger’s discourse is “less becoming of a scientist than a poet” (79). Here the recourse to the self-gathering of consciousness is most explicit—what is composed of diversity can only be woven together by the intentions of a “great master,” a figure whose spiritual connotations (and the link thus formed with vitalism) should not be overlooked.

Why could a great mind not realize its will through mechanism and “dull” repetition? Why is contingency or novelty a sign of agency, consciousness, the return to the same of the voluntaristic subject? Bennett makes the same assumption when she identifies vitality with contingency. The necessary relation of difference and repetition, that life must transcend itself to return to itself, is a structure Derrida calls ex-appropriation. We find the need for repetition in Schrödinger’s insistence that life be orderly, stable, and permanent, that it have a stable, material substrate—a gene—“unperturbed . . . for centuries” (47). In fact, his confidence that the chromosome is both “law-code and executive power,” “architect’s plan and builder’s craft” (22), that it is “fateful,” determining the development of an individual with Laplacean necessity, shows the full extent of his desire for a repetition of the same. It is “the code-script determining all future developments of the organism” (61). We cannot chastise him, in 1943, for failing to foresee the discoveries of epigenetics,⁷ but we should at least remind ourselves that what it means to have the “same” gene is no more certain than the identification of the “same” phenotype.⁸ And what exactly counts as a “development” here? It is not trivial to point out that the future of the organism depends on nutrition, damage, and death—the living thing is only a certain relationship with its outside.⁹ To acknowledge fully the relationship of the living to its others would undo our certainty of anything like organic unity, as well as its agency or activity.

Schrödinger shows us, if nothing else, that life as difference is no less aporetic than life as identity. As with Saussure’s structuralism, a scientist who attempts to isolate synchronic stability by means of a differential definition of his subject will be forced to suppress the onto-phenomenological question of genesis. One finds the same deconstructible tension between Schrödinger’s acknowledgment that life is a differential form (not a substance), and his insistence that it be identified with a certain material substrate (as language was tied to the phonic substance by Saussure). It is not enough to offer a differential definition while clinging to received notions of essence. One must see life not as what differs phenomenally from the inorganic, but as what differs from itself, in a manner that could be called internal only to the extent that it is never manifest as life, as itself, as such. The living thing must be capable of difference-from-self in space and time, drawing together multiform types and arrangements of matter and metamorphosing throughout its lifespan. This fragmentary foundation guarantees that it will never be simply identifiable with matter, phenomenality, or quality—nor will consciousness provide a ground or any supposed internality or unity, which could only express itself as life by means of the intrusion of alterity. That is to say, the origin of the living thing or life in general, which we imagine as a unity, is always already differentiated.

The structuralist resonances of Schrödinger’s project are anything but idiosyncratic. Michel Morange, historian and philosopher of science and a cell biologist who worked under François Jacob, displays a similar pattern throughout Life Explained, his 2003 investigation of the essence of life. He draws on recent biological research to problematize the traditional predicates of life; what was thought to be a property of an individual living organism proves to be interdependent on adventitious contributions from sources that may or may not qualify as themselves organismic.¹⁰ In a chapter entitled “Life as a Living System,” Morange considers endosymbiosis, lateral gene transfer, and programmed cell death among monocellular organisms as evidence that life is not a property of an autonomous individual but a product of the interaction of components that problematize our notion of the self-related organism. He concludes,

Nor are the interactions between organisms merely the product of preexisting life forms; they are part of the very possibility that these organisms should be alive at all. This dialectical relation between autonomy and totality is therefore a key characteristic of life, for life was a system from the moment of its inception. (109; emphasis added)

In this proclamation we can hear the echoes of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist assertion that “language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually” (59). All of the consequences that follow for structural linguistics will then appear in the field of vital phenomena: a) no individual thing can be considered the substantial representative of life, but life will emerge from their differences; b) the relations of life’s traditional representatives are no more its exclusive domain than the relations of molecular structures, information, or technology; c) the question of genesis is foreclosed—there is no more place for a speaker’s intentions in linguistic structure than there is for the purpose or purposiveness of an individual in the life-system; d) despite being sutured to these living signifiers, life exists only in the spectral doubling of their differences by a similarly differential system of signified concepts, in this case those grounding a biological taxonomy; e) a truly scientific understanding of the life-system would define these taxonomic concepts without reference to any particular synchronic tranche of the life-system; and f) these ideal interrelationships can only be permuted to form any particular life-system—the structural system of idealities is itself total from its inception; no more and no less life can come to be, no novelty and no invention. The field of structuralist biology moves in the direction indicated by these premises.¹¹ We can expect that problems akin to those Derrida uncovered in Saussure’s structuralist linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology will reappear in any structuralist biology (and in Schrödinger’s approach).

If it is not possible, by such means, to define the essence of life, it will be no more possible to deploy a theory of negentropy to capture what is proper to humanity, nor to deliver us unto our salvation, which would be our proper end. Bernard Stiegler has taken up Schrödinger’s theory in service of such a goal, by suturing it to a messianic discourse befitting the new newisms. Stiegler claims to identify a form of negentropy unique to human beings, which he terms a “neganthropology.” He distinguishes humanity from animals on the classic but long defunct theory that we are the only tool-using animal: “It is not only the biological structure of humankind that, as is the case for all living beings, is negentropic. Cultural structures are too, in principle” (“To Love” 43). He explains in a note that this is a departure from Schrödinger: “human time exceeds the process of negative entropy by which Schrödinger and Brillouin characterized the living, by inscribing negentropy outside of this living” (“To Love” 85, n. 10). It would be enough to point to ants, bees, and beavers (among other orderers of the external world) to dismiss Stiegler’s anthropocentric exceptionalism. But a more essential criticism would problematize his ideas of inside and outside, which are fundamental to any theory of the living, as we have seen. Stiegler’s attempt to place negentropy outside the living is in one sense a departure from Schrödinger, who creates a definition of life capacious enough to include all technology, even if this could have proven problematic for his theses. From Schrödinger’s perspective, we might be forced to say not that humans (and all other tool-using, nest- or warren-building, etc. animals) create order outside themselves (i.e., outside the living), but that they create technological life. In fact, precisely because Schrödinger’s differential definition effaces the question of origins, it also effaces any difference between technology and nature, technē and phusis (the latter being that which supposedly has its origin in itself).¹² So the living being would create life wherever it placed things in relative order, and individuation would occur wherever a border with disorder was manifest (which would mean, of course, that life was relativistic—that from one perspective an organism is a living unit, and from another its vital brain is surrounded by a dead disarray of tissues, its living nuclei by relatively disordered, unliving cytoplasm, and so on). Furthermore, life only comes to be by allowing for passage across this border. There is no sense in saying that only one animal operates on its outside. We may find differences of degree (a human city creates a greater quantity of negentropy than an ant colony, for example), but life exists as life only when it is open onto and can transform its exterior. It lives by making its exterior interior, that is, by bringing it to life.

This is far from the only vestige of metaphysical humanism in Stiegler’s neganthropology. In Automatic Society, The Neganthropocene, “Escaping the Anthropocene,” and “The Anthropocene and Neganthropology,” he reserves an entire chain of classical predicates for the anthropos (including art, language, and freedom), grounded in its assumed self-consciousness, and made the basis of a messianic, soteriological promise. The technological capacity that Stiegler identifies uniquely with humanity creates a hyperbolic form of both entropy and negentropy. In “Escaping the Anthropocene,” he has to play a bit fast and loose with the risk posed by the “anthropocene” to make it fit this framework—the “consumption of fossil fuels” threatens life on earth with a different sort of heat death than the one that refers to a maximization of entropy (3). Regardless, he seems more concerned with the ideal side of the equation: whether our work produces or obliterates knowledge. That other classical bulwark of humanism, the hand, plays an important in this one-sided account of manual labor:

Manual work that produces negentropy and knowledge . . . was replaced in the nineteenth century by . . . machinery that was entropic not just because of its consumption of fossil fuels, but because of its standardization of operating sequences and the resultant loss of knowledge on the side of the employee. (3)

Obviously, manual work also uses energy, and machine labor also creates order; one could circumscribe Stiegler’s whole discourse by pointing out that he treats differences of degree as though they were differences in kind.¹³ He then affirms that “technical life is an amplified and hyperbolic form of negentropy” (10): that where the danger is, there grows the saving power also. It is worth pointing out, if we hope that our production of negative entropy will be our salvation, that more contemporary thermodynamic understandings of life represent life as a dissipative system, which creates local order only to speed the ultimate dissolution of an energy gradient into maximum entropy.

According to Stiegler, technology creates entropy and ignorance, but human consciousness and freedom can place it in the service of salvific negentropy. Perhaps he has in mind the theory of information entropy when he invokes an entropy of knowledge, though he never makes this clear or develops it.¹⁴ Regardless, he posits that our current economy threatens to make entropic exhaustion an ineluctable fate that excludes any possibility of a future or promise. That future is replaced by a calculable (machinic) becoming of repetition in which we lose our humanity in ignorance and mere life (he uses the phrase “purely organic” (10)). The alternative lies in a self-conscious decision; “Freedom is here a question of knowledge” (5), and even if all work creates both entropy and negentropy regardless of its degree of technicity, he makes saving humanity seem as simple as knowing the difference between the two. Our work is “pharmacological,” by which he means undecidable, but seems to be easily sorted out by self-consciousness: “[the organological dimension] requires continual arbitration —negotiations that are operations of knowledge as therapies and therapeutics” (8). The messianic anthropos can bring about its own salvation if its “arts,” “works,” and “science” “project an infinite protention of a promise always yet to come” (11; emphasis added), and if a consciousness of our negentropic production “will allow us, in a literal sense, to save time” (12). Our salvation depends on the same force that has oriented metaphysico-humanist messianisms from Aristotle to Marx, the “noetic work” (16), oriented to a good beyond pleasure and creating value through its labor because it exists in the logos, or in the head of the architect before it is constructed. If the opposite of fateful ignorance for information entropy is salvific knowledge, what is the opposite of heat death in physical entropy? As always, Stiegler correctly addresses undecidability before taking refuge in a one-sided solution. He acknowledges that “life in general . . . as negentropy is always produced from entropy, and invariably leads back there: it is a detour” (10). The condition he identifies as uniquely neganthropological—the artificial manipulation of negentropy—actually holds for life in general. Nonetheless, if we are to prove to be “unlike purely organic beings,”¹⁵ how could this come to pass unless we truly “infinitize” ourselves (10–11)? If we follow this thread to the conclusion he doesn’t dare utter, but which fits with every metaphysical turn of his discourse, then we would no longer be a mere detour between two disorders but could achieve an unending order, an infinite and eternal life. Otherwise, what’s the difference?

Given that Stiegler’s discourse posits an undecidability (for example, all life produces both entropy and negentropy) followed by its one-sided overcoming (self-conscious human life can cultivate negentropy alone), it seems worthwhile to examine his strange appropriation of Derridean terminology. He offers a curious derivation for the “pharmacological”: “the organological dimension (that is, the technical and artificial dimension) of the negentropy characteristic of anthropos” means that the human being is “pharmacological, that is, both entropic and negentropic” (8). Strangely, though he has already acknowledged this neg/entropy as the condition of all life, he derives its human form from our metaphysical essence as the unique artificers. Of course, for Derrida, no aspect of undecidability or deconstructibility depends on human consciousness, as though things were straightforwardly self-identical in themselves and became undecidable once a thinking substance attempted to grasp their self-sufficiency. Rather, consciousness and unconsciousness, matter and idea, human and nonhuman are themselves subject to the sway of undecidability and are produced out of a différance they cannot reappropriate. The dream of seizing control of the archē leads Stiegler to create this strange origin story for “pharmacology.” Once undecidability depends on human thinking, that thinking can easily dispose of it; Stiegler speaks of a “pharmacological knowledge constituting a neganthropology in the service of the Neganthropocene” and of “passing from anthropization to neganthropization by cultivating a positive pharmacology” (13; emphasis added). Perhaps he has in mind Derrida’s reference to an affirmative deconstruction when he names a “positive pharmacology.” But Derrida refers to the possibilities opened by the deconstruction of traditional binaries and a thought that moves otherwise, not to the one-sided, positional reinstatement of those same binaries. Stiegler’s dalliance with undecidability, and with Derrida, is always comfortably superseded by an enduring metaphysics of presence.

Différance appears in a similarly de- or perhaps re-familiarized role in Stiegler’s text: And if it is also true that différance is an arrangement of retentions and protentions, as Derrida indicates in Of Grammatology, and if it is true that for those beings we call human, that is, technical and noetic beings, arrangements of retentions and protentions are trans-formed by tertiary retentions, then we should be able, on the basis of this concept of différance, to redefine economy and desire. (10)

There is no such a definition of différance (“arrangement of retentions and protentions”) in Of Grammatology. Instead, a passage that discusses différance along with Husserlian time consciousness reads: “And deconstructing the simplicity of presence does not amount only to accounting for the horizons of potential presence, indeed of a ‘dialectic’ of protention and retention that one would install in the heart of the present instead of surrounding it with it [l’en entourer]” (67). If we allow for the deconstruction of the self-presence of the present, then we would lose the ground that distinguishes what Stiegler calls primary retentions (perceptions), secondary (living memory), and tertiary (which he refers to recording technology, and which Plato would call hupomnesis). Similarly, if we recognize prosthesis at the origin, we lose our specific difference as “technical” beings, as well as the self-containedness of our “noetic” existence. Thus, the idea that our ability to manipulate time digitally allows us to control différance and all its traces is untenable. As with “pharmacology,” différance is here subordinated to a form of self-presence in order to claim that we—as uniquely self-conscious beings—have dominion over it.

Stiegler addresses his inheritance of Derrida in a footnote attached to a reference to Whitehead’s and Simondon’s concept of process: “It is this issue that the chorus of monkeys and parrots sung by little Derrideans ten years after the death of Jacques Derrida ignores, in the belief they can simply accuse me of having lost sight of différance within an anthropocentric perspective” (13 n. 13).¹⁶ The thrust of this passage is not counterargument but name-calling—though it is not, for all that, ad hominem.¹⁷ Rather, the “little Derrideans” are compared to animal-machines: the two animals known best for their mimicry, exemplifying the twin faults of animality and repetition.¹⁸ While other thinkers are derided for repetition, Stiegler is careful to herald the dubious originality of his own work. He claims that “philosophy since its inception has consisted in repressing the neganthropological dimension of the noetic soul . . . namely, the passage from the organic to the organological” (16), despite the fact that the conceptual framework of his thought can be found in Aristotle and in every philosopher since. Ultimately, the aim of his work is to capture the fetishistic value of novelty, which orients the chain of conceptuality that ties negentropy to our technological and noetic freedom. For example, he heralds “a new state of law that recognizes this pharmacological situation and that prescribes therapies and therapeutics so as to form a new age of knowledge” (16; emphasis added). Again consciousness conquers undecidability, and the telos of this action is revealed as the production of novelty.

Perhaps the value granted to novelty is the ground that Bennett, Schrödinger, and Stiegler share despite their many differences. Creativity, invention, the ability to break with a program or law, is imagined to be the surest sign of life. Yet deconstruction would remind us that the only true invention is the invention of the impossible, which also renders impossible the return to the same—the agency and activity of some matter, subject, or substrate—by an iterability that makes repetition depend on difference, and difference on repetition. I would suggest that the theoretical value placed on novelty is complicit with the self-assured novelty and the academic and market value secured by theorists for themselves when they declare the advent of a “new” theory, for example a New Materialism. This field has been opened by the violent refusal of the past, by the dogmatic assertion that one can place the subject or the human on one side of history, and matter (and oneself) on the other. Deconstruction problematizes not only such simple binary distinctions, but also any attempt to articulate and delineate historical progress on their basis. The dogmatism of positivistic, inventive life shares an essence with the dogmatism of violently positional theory, which suppresses undecidability to herald its own novelty. It is by no means limited to Bennett or Stiegler. Elizabeth Grosz, in The Nick of Time, invokes the contemporaneity of her subject as a diffuse state of emergency requiring urgent thought (2).¹⁹ Her teleological, unified definition of time as “a single relentless movement forward” (5) drives or is driven by inventive life:

Matter is organized differently in its inorganic and organic forms; this organization is dependent on the degree of indeterminacy, the degree of freedom, that life exhibits relative to the inertia of matter, the capacity that all forms of life, in varying degrees, have to introduce something new. (167)

In What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Catherine Malabou pushes this messianic tone to its limits: “Brain plasticity constitutes a possible margin of improvisation with regard to genetic necessity. . . . We are living at the hour of neuronal liberation, and we do not know it” (8).

Is it not another relationship to time that we have been approaching through the practice of biodeconstruction, another relationship within time, of time to itself, or of time to its other? We, the living, can we live time differently, without surety of its forward direction or our own, and certainly without being the agent or active force of its advance (which we should recast as its difference-from-self)? These discourses attempt to live the life of the self, claiming to have put the past to death in order to bring forward their own present, their own self-identity in and with the present. The life of the other, would it not be at the same time both less violent than this life that lives on sacrifice, and the greatest violence possible? Rather than facing forward, as a unity positing the end its members would confirm by reaching, it would turn its head, finding another vantage from which another play of forces uses it as a body, suggesting a point of origin that could only be differentiated in turn, riven by so many perspectives of force. Not a future born of the sacrifice of the past, but an impossible simultaneity, in which we are lived by what is always already not yet there. In this interiority we would find an outside or other (whether or not we found symbiosis, this outside would be symbiosis’s precondition), leaving us with the question in whose interior we are operating as an organ, doing violence as a parasite, or are being digested or incorporated. No quantity of novelty is sufficient to guarantee its presence; no quantity of repetition confirms its absence. It has no quality, a specter just as ready to haunt sloth-like solidity as frenetic dissemination. Its lack of consciousness is not a sign of a primitive stage of development, not a circumstantial failing to be corrected by evolution, but the condition of and for anything like time or novelty coming to be, while rendering them always insecure.

The greatest violence—Death. The borders that life shares are not only those shifting frames of reference within the world, the teeming activity within us or the expanses beyond. As Heidegger reminds us, death is not a dead thing here in our world, just as life was never a living thing present before us. Death crosses the border of no more borders; it is the point or line from which life draws back as does an animal from danger, by a motion we represent to ourselves as instinctual. A line that does not appear, for a line does not appear without being crossed and crossable. But if it curved, by a force unidentifiable as our own attraction or a push from beyond, to embrace itself as a membrane? What passes then? Passes to life or for life, passes as life? Could we the living be an organ of death? Would we survive such a thought? No concept or purpose could orient our telos, as it would lie beyond representation. No parts could ever be in reciprocity with a whole; self-maintenance and self-repair would be self-destruction. Damage to the members would not be damage to the dis-organism; only by suffering, by damage done to the parts, would they become the whole. And they would become its parts only by doing violence to the whole, transgressing its pure outside. Our body there, where and when we are not.

Listen.

Such life as this, is it mute? Can it make of silence a voice or writing? It would be unable, as we so often do, to stifle the voice of the other to claim or declaim its own. Voices, scripts, like so many alien grafts and parasitic nurslings, found in the other or on the self, nurtured in or on the body proper.

Footnotes

1. The exclusion of final causes allows Descartes to deny any consciousness or interiority of animals, which excludes life as well as time from the animal-machine.

2. This positivistic, self-identical representation of life asserts itself even in those New Materialist discourses that most seem to emphasize and celebrate difference. For example, in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, the claim that relations precede relata stands in direct tension with the desire to celebrate the agency of matter in a one-sided fashion; her text alternates between formulations that emphasize the material over the discursive, and precautions that matter itself is ‘material-discursive.’ So she grants life as agency to all matter—“The physical phenomenon of diffraction makes manifest the extraordinary liveliness of the world” (91) and “It takes a radical rethinking of agency to appreciate how lively even ‘dead matter’ can be” (419 n. 27)—yet the deadly vitality of alterity does not receive a comparable emphasis.

3. One can critique Bennett’s conclusion from other perspectives as well. The connection between contingency and freedom overlooks a long tradition, including Spinoza and German idealism, which ties freedom to necessity. The relationship of freedom to necessity and contingency is undecidable.

4. Bennett’s thesis is true to life to the extent that life ought to be something positive, a purposive relationship to self rather than to the other. As we will see when we turn to Schrödinger, it is incoherent to treat life as a differential phenomenon without a ground or genesis in some positive essence. But she errs in attempting to make this positivity accessible to an immediate, empirical gaze. Life is found wherever a whole surmounts its internal divisions and acquires a relationship-to-self that is an object of faith rather than science. We do not know our own life, what ends have been posited by or have emerged from the organism we already are, let alone those of a different species of animal or more obscurely of plants and Prokaryotes.

5. This is a classic example of the application of non-linear modeling to an organic structure. The reaction-diffusion model, described by Alan Turing in his 1952 paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” represents complicated patterns emerging from nothing more than the diffusion and reaction of one or more chemicals. It remains an open question whether such systems describe the underlying forces in biological pattern formation, but the patterns produced by these models resemble those seen, for example, in many animal coats. Theoretically speaking, the opposite model would be one that posited the resulting pattern as emerging from a pre-encoded blueprint such as might reside in a gene. One speaks of “self-organization” in the case of reaction-diffusion systems because patterns are represented as emerging without the necessity of any such blueprint.

6. More contemporary understandings of life’s thermodynamics describe the living as a dissipative system, that is, a formation that, while relatively ordered itself (like a tornado or whirlpool), is actually a more efficient means of dissipating an energy gradient. Far from contradicting the second law of thermodynamics, life as a whole, in this view, is only speeding our progress toward entropic indifference. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, 42–50.

7. For a summary of these developments, see Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene. M. F. Perutz, in “Schrödinger’s What is Life? and Molecular Biology,” claims that Schrödinger should have known better even in 1943, because enzymes were already known to be the executive power. However, he grounds this accusation in the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, which still maintains the creation of those enzymes by the genetic code. He finds little of original merit in Schrödinger, tracing the idea of negentropy (regardless of its untenability) to Boltzmann and the idea of the genetic carrier as an aperiodic solid to Delbrück. Furthermore, flaws with his theory of negentropy were quickly pointed out to Schrödinger, who added an incomprehensible footnote to later editions of his text, admitting that he should have discussed the concept of free energy rather than negentropy (74–5), though he left the body of the text unrevised. See Perutz’s On this footnote, see Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction, 220–222 (notes 20 and 25 to Ch. 4).

8. This stability is posited despite Schrödinger’s acknowledgement that when identifying a gene as the material substrate of a phenotype, “Difference of property, to my view, is really the fundamental concept rather than property itself, notwithstanding the apparent linguistic and logical contradiction” (29). Thus the gene, understood as the material ground of phenotypic difference, is no easier to identify than the living thing itself—it is only another differential relation that defers the search for identity or stability.

9. The search for a governing principle of life, whether it looks for a genetico-material substrate or a psychic, conscious one, must ignore that life is only a certain openness to its outside. No mind or matter will ever possess the sort of undivided sovereignty imagined by Schrödinger (“legislator and executive power”), but can only configure itself as another form of self-otherness and internal diversity.

10. In light of Morange’s nuanced problematizing of life’s traditional predicates, his own conclusion that life is defined by the “three pillars” of complex molecular structure, metabolism, and reproduction appears dogmatic. I introduce him here because he offers a glimpse of the structuralist account of life, not because I consider him a structuralist—perhaps no one is.

11. For a lucid introduction, see B. C. Goodwin’s “Structuralism in Biology.” For a more contemporary account of the influence of structuralist thinking on Evolutionary Developmental Biology see Günter Wagner’s Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation.

12. Karl Popper raises the objection to Schrödinger’s theory that all technology is negentropic in Unended Quest, pp. 157–8.

13. It is worth dwelling on this tendency of Stiegler for a moment, because it represents a formula for the avoidance of deconstruction and its suppression in favor of a dogmatic, positional discourse. Deconstruction happens wherever the border erected and enforced finds itself always already crossed. This does not take place in favor of or in order to bring about sameness or indifference; there are always differences of more or less, and one may find more order or negentropy on one side of the divide than the other. But it makes purity and the sort of advance or progress based on a pure rejection of the past impossible. Wherever someone denies contamination and heralds pure differences, a repression or denegation is taking place that harbors not only a potential deconstruction but an ideological motivation to be analyzed. In Stiegler’s case, as with the New Materialists’, a desire for novelty in the form of the sovereign invention of the self-consciousness present to itself undergirds his dissimulation of quantitative difference as qualitative.

14. On its surface, the theory of information entropy, which attempts to quantify the unpredictability of events (higher information entropy suggests more “new” information given by an event, less repetition or redundancy), can offer justification for those like Bennett and Stiegler in search of a science of novelty. Without being able to examine its intricacies here, we should note at least that information entropy can be measured only of discrete quantities within a system, such as the series of letters in a text, and is unable to account for even the most basic act of reading. In other words, information entropy is a measure of the likelihood of a given letter following another, for example whether “th” will be followed by “e” (likely, low entropy) or “u” (less likely, higher entropy), but it could never tell us how much meaning is generated by a new letter, especially considering that the possibilities of meaning are nonfinite. See, for example, James Gleick’s The Information, especially chapters 7 and 9, and Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, ch. 3.

15. There is no “purely organic” being, and one should be as skeptical of this concept as Derrida was of the “bare life” that justified a discourse of novelty in Agamben’s Homo Sacer (see The Beast and The Sovereign, Volume I, pp. 315–334). Everything in a discourse on negentropy that should tie life to difference requires us to recognize that life must relate to and be contaminated by the inorganic and the outside, that it exists in a tension with it. This is as true of the human as of the protozoan, and challenges both the philosopher’s notions of a pure, animal life devoid of consciousness, freedom, decision, culture, etc., and a pure human thinking and self-consciousness uncontaminated by its others.

16. It is worth reflecting also on the temporal marker Stiegler chooses to further disparage the “little” Derrideans. “Ten years after the death of Jacques Derrida” functions as a disparagement only if we are so immersed in the value of supposed self-presence that we imagine the time of an idea to be wedded to the lifespan of its author. Still, even according to the most traditional sense of chronology, Stiegler’s protestation ignores the fact that critiques of his work began long before the death of the master. See, for example, Geoffrey Bennington’s 1996 essay “Emergencies.”

17. He does not offer an explanation of how process theory shifts his discourse beyond either metaphysical anthropocentrism or deconstruction, and a look at the process theorists he mentions is of little help. See, for example, the metaphysical distinctions which remain in Simondon: “a crystal; rather, the physical individual . . . cannot be said to possess any genuine interiority. But the living individual does possess a genuine interiority, because individuation does indeed take place within it” (305).

18. The fear of repetition runs throughout his work. Again, though Stiegler admits that machinic work creates negentropy, he often pretends it does not: “the time saved by automatization must be invested in new capacities for dis-automatization, that is, for the production of negentropy” (Automatic Society). Machines repeat (bad), humans create the new (good), and these sides are arbitrarily associated with entropy and negentropy, respectively.

19. “Feminists, and all theorists interested in the relations between subjectivity, politics, and culture, need to have a more nuanced, intricate account of the body’s immersion and participation in the world . . . We need to understand not only how culture inscribes bodies—a preoccupation of much social and cultural theory in the past decade or more—but, more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible . . . We need to understand, with perhaps more urgency than in the past” (2).

Works Cited

• Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. “Emergencies.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 18, no. 1, July 1996, pp. 175–216. doi.org/10.3366/olr.1996.009
• Derrida, Jacques. The Beast & the Sovereign Volume 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, U of Chicago P, 2009.
• ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• Gleick, James. The Information. Pantheon Books, 2011.
• Goodwin, B. C. “Structuralism in Biology.” Science Progress, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 227–243, 1990. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43423887.
• Grosz, Elizabeth A. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Duke UP, 2004.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Harvard UP, 2009.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by Felicity Baker, Routledge, 1987.
• Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand, Fordham UP, 2008.
• Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species. Basic Books, 2002.
• Morange, Michel. Life Explained. Translated by Matthew Cobb and Malcolm Debevoise, Yale UP, 2008.
• Perutz, M. F. “Schrödinger’s What Is Life? and Molecular Biology.” Schrödinger: Centenary Celebration of a Polymath, edited by C. W. Kilmister, Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 234–251.
• Popper, Karl. Unended Quest: an Intellectual Autobiography. Routledge, 2002.
• Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? Cambridge UP, 1992.
• Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Translated by Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, Incorporations (Zone 6), eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone Books, 1992.
• Stiegler, Bernard. “The Anthropocene and Neganthropology.” Translated by Daniel Ross, Canterbury, Nov. 2014, https://www.academia.edu/12693668/.
• ———. Automatic Society. Vol. 1: The Future of Work. Translated by Daniel Ross, Polity P, 2016. EPUB.
• ———. “Escaping the Anthropocene.” Translated by Daniel Ross, Durham University, Jan. 2015, https://www.academia.edu/12692287/Bernard_Stiegler_Escaping_the_Anthropocene_2015_.
• ———. “To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21.” Acting Out, translated by David Barison et al., Stanford UP, 2009, pp. 37–82.
• Turing, A.M. “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 237, No. 641. (Aug. 14, 1952), pp. 37–72.
• Vitale, Francesco. Biodeconstruction. Translated by Mauro Senatore, SUNY Press, 2018.
• Wagner, Günter P. Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation. Princeton UP, 2014.

Raoul Frauenfelder (bio)
University of Salerno

In his courses on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty discusses the ontological implications of biology and explores the limits and peculiarities of the preformationism and epigenesis theses. He refuses both explanations, finding that they are partial and introduces a third hypothesis that describes the genesis and structure of life as the emergence of a fold in the unique being of flesh. From this position, he draws a metaphysical gesture that closes the structure of genesis and erases the condition of possibility for life. Biodeconstruction questions this predetermined carnal matrix and points out the differential relation between life and death as the general condition of life.

This paper discusses the ontological implications of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the living being and biology, particularly in the courses on the concept of nature he gave at the Collège de France in the 1950s. In his attempt to define the organism, Merleau-Ponty deals with embryology and points out the limits and the peculiarities of the preformationism and epigenesis theses. My hypothesis is that Merleau-Ponty adopts an ambiguous attitude towards epigenesis. H criticizes preformationism, according to which the future determinations of the living being are already encased, and prefers the epigenesist hypothesis to it. However, in his last course on nature (1959–60), Merleau-Ponty refuses both explanations because they are partial, and he introduces a third thesis that attempts to overcome the bifurcation represented by the alternatives of encasement and epigenesis. According to him, these alternatives are complementary, since they are two aspects of the same process in which life arises as the fold (le pli) of the unique being of flesh.

In this reading, I suggest that the attempt to close the horizon and to think the relation to the world from the inside of such a closure is precisely what drives Merleau-Ponty to elaborate the notion of flesh (chair) and of the flesh of the world (chair du monde). Nevertheless, the field he tries to circumscribe within this carnal horizon is not homogeneous and continuous; effectively, it remains a differential relation of life and death or life death that resists and pierces the presumed all-encompassing structure of a pervasive horizontality (Horizonthaftigkeit) that Merleau-Ponty defines throughout his entire œuvre. He denies this ultra-structure of life and consequently ends up reaffirming the homogeneity, closeness, and indivision of what I call here (not without risks) the metonym for the infrastructure of his philosophy, namely, the world of flesh.

In contrast to recent readings of the development of epigenetics and biological theories as the key for re-reading Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body or flesh, I suggest that the closed horizon of this carnal generality reintroduces the idea of the genesis of life as predetermination and self-explanation of the all-encompassing living and carnal being.¹ Therefore, Merleau-Ponty repeats the metaphysical gesture of preformation that closes the structure of the genesis of life and erases the condition of possibility for life.

With his close reading of Derrida’s 1975 seminar, La Vie La Mort, which was devoted to the question of life and death, Francesco Vitale inaugurates the field of biodeconstruction by considering the Derridean interest in biology and the scriptural model of life that biologists import from cybernetics in order to rethink the genesis and structure of the living (Biodeconstruction 2). The implementation of the notion of arche-writing, which Derrida had already articulated in Of Grammatology and in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” then lead to a deconstructive relation of life and death in a manner that would overcome their dichotomous opposition.²

If we consider différance as “the irreducible and structural condition of the life of the living, before the supposed opposition of life and death,” as Vitale suggests in his essay “Living On: The Absolute Performative” (133) and if life could be considered as the matrix of deconstruction, then the notion of life implied by Merleau-Ponty produces the annihilation of the differential dynamics of the trace and represents the radical attempt to preserve life and condemn it to death.

Phenomenology of Life (Sciences)

As anticipated, Merleau-Ponty refers to biology to account for how the living can be preserved from death. Even if this is not the originary aim of Merleau-Ponty’s discourse, it becomes its effect. Therefore, I suggest considering his philosophy of nature and life as an autoimmune reaction to the textual matrix of the living being. Thus my argument deals with the twofold representation that the notion of life assumes in Merleau-Ponty’s work. On the one hand, he pursues the general attitude of phenomenology, which is a philosophy of life. On the other hand, he engages with the scientific research of his epoch and primarily deals with Gestalt psychology, neurobiology, and physiology. Even if what is considered exemplary in biological investigations is very different today, it is interesting to point out the metaphysical presuppositions that still operate via Merleau-Ponty’s account of life and living.

Derrida defines phenomenology as a philosophy of life, since beginning with Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the concept of life has been depicted as immediate self-presence, namely as the “living presence” of self-consciousness. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida claims:

phenomenology, the metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality, is also a philosophy of life. It is a philosophy of life, not only because at its center death is recognized as but an empirical and extrinsic signification, a worldly accident, but because the source of sense in general is always determined as the act of living, as the act of a living being, as Lebendigkeit. But the unity of living, the focus of Lebendigkeit which diffracts its light in all the fundamental concepts of phenomenology (Leben, Erlebnis, lebendige Gegenwart, Geistigkeit, etc.), escapes the transcendental reduction and, as unity of worldly life, even opens up the way for it. (10)

The aim of connecting transcendental life and empirical life orients the philosophical trajectory of Merleau-Ponty, whose search for unity is attested to in the essay “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,”³ as well as in his 1958–59 lectures, titled “Philosophy Today.” In these lectures, Merleau-Ponty announces the need for a renewed ontology of nature in modern sciences. From this perspective, the human being would be considered not merely as consciousness, since consciousness does not transcendentally constitute the “world.” On the contrary, according to him, the human being as a living organism comprehends and grasps itself through the flesh by means of the reversibility that occurs in perception.

Merleau-Ponty questions the role of biology and theories of living organisms in the context of the foundation of an ontology of life that would be able to explain the living body (Leib or corps propre) as the conjunction of nature and reason. Therefore, in his notes on nature, Merleau-Ponty states that biology reveals something about the embodiment of consciousness, thus acquiring a fundamental ontological meaning. He concludes: “Biology, as it deals with life, necessary deals with the incarnation of consciousness, with this first Einfühlung, according to which the human body would become Leib” (Notes 38).⁴ He points out an ontology of nature that is a “universal ontology,” proceeding through a notion of teleology he borrows from Husserl. As he notes on the last page of “The Philosopher and His Shadow”: “that ‘teleology’ Husserl speaks about which is written and thought about in parentheses—that jointing and framing of Being which is being realized through man” (181).

Inscribed in this theoretical framework is Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the sciences. Beginning with his first book, The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty aimed at indicating a third way, different from mechanistic and idealistic thinking.⁵ In his investigation of the relation between consciousness and nature, he deals extensively with psychology and biology.⁶ He pursues this project of the definition of an ontology of nature, and thus of life, commenting on Husserl’s “Addendum (Beilage) XXIII of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” in which Husserl claims that biology is the science closest to transcendental phenomenology based on its methodology as well as its tasks:

Biology’s proximity to the sources of evidence (Quellen der Evidenz) grants it such a proximity to the depths of the things themselves (Tiefen der Sachen), that its access to transcendental philosophy should be the easiest and with it the access to the true a priori to which the world of living beings refers, in its greatest and most constant generalities which cannot be captured without question in their a priori nature (as unconditionally universal and necessary). (7)

Therefore, as Husserl points out in his Addendum XXIII of the Crisis, on the one hand, biology is a regional ontology as all sciences, thus determined in its objects and scopes by regional types. On the other hand, biology seems to deserve a peculiar place, because conscious biology tends towards philosophy and has an ontological scope, it does not teach us only about local region of being.⁷ In his 1958–59 lectures, Merleau-Ponty translates and comments on Husserl’s “Addendum XXIII” and it is possible to deduce that the Husserlian account of biology informs the project of Merleau-Ponty, who aims at describing the intertwinement of transcendental and biological life in the living body. In fact, Merleau-Ponty claims that because of its contact with the depth of things, biology is almost philosophy and life has a universal meaning, revealing the inner structure of Being itself.

Embryology and Behavior

Merleau-Ponty deals with the epistemological and ontological status of biology, and the problem of “life,” at the beginning of his 1957 lecture, “The Concept of Nature,” where he refers to the classic formulations of the apparently irreducible alternative of mechanism and finalism, which he intends to overcome or exceed. The presumed antithesis of mechanism and finalism has been surpassed by a chiasmatic or dialectical relation; in fact, Merleau-Ponty notes that “biology ceases to be substantialist to become dialectical. The whole problem is currently to know what the word ‘dialectical’ means” (Nature 139).

Merleau-Ponty’s reference to the conceptualization of a dialectical relation of the living being to its world and the resulting image of the chiasmic relation it inspires is confirmed or merely reinforced by his interest in the work of contemporary scientists.⁸ At first instance, his work reflects the scientific approach of the Gestalt psychologists, as well as of biologists such as G. E. Coghill, Jakob von Uexküll, and especially Kurt Goldstein, who defends a dialectical relation of the living with the Umwelt and a holistic conception of organic form against the reductive models of mechanistic biological functioning. Goldstein proposes the adequacy of the organism to its environmental conditions, namely, the circularity and dialectical nature of its relation, which can be interrupted only by pathological behaviors.⁹ According to Merleau-Ponty, any notion of life sciences has a fundamental and primordial relation to the experience of the living being:

the organism itself measures the action of things upon it and itself delimits its milieu by a circular process which is without analogy in the physical world. The relations of the organic individual and its milieu are truly dialectical relations, therefore, and this dialectic brings about the appearance of new relations which cannot be compared to those of a physical system and its entourage or even understood when the organism is reduced to the image which anatomy and the physical sciences give of it. (Structure 148–149)

Merleau-Ponty suggests a definition of the living being and body that does not mean to uphold any vitalism (even though he arrives at a theoretical position particularly close to it); instead, he argues that the mechanistic explanation of the relation of the body to the world has to be refused, because the living body is the bearer of a motor—and thus pre-reflexive—intentionality that produces “acts which are addressed to a certain milieu, present or virtual” (Merleau-Ponty, Structure 151).

In the first part of his 1957–58 course The Concept of Nature, subtitled “Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture,” Merleau-Ponty examines the work of the psychologist Arnold Gesell, among others. Merleau-Ponty insists on Gesell’s hypothesis concerning the unity of body and behavior in order to clarify his own ontology. According to Gesell, behavior is part of the body’s structure, and the body is the incarnation of and place for the concrete emergence of behaviors, hence body and behavior cannot be alienated from one another. Therefore, the omnipresent “enigma of form” in nature is the main issue for science, as Gesell suggests (Gesell and Amatruda 193).

Merleau-Ponty discusses the emergent character of behavior pointed out by Gesell, according to which it does not descend into the organism or originate from a source that resides outside of the body. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Form or totality: here is thus the character of the living being” (Nature 150). Indeed, the living being is not a body-machine that accidentally moves or passively receives some input from the world; quite the contrary, Merleau-Ponty explains the very morphological structure of the body and of embryological development, which is regularly led by the tendency to equilibrium and optimization. For that reason, any organism is the coalescence of mechanism and life, necessity and spontaneity, which may reflect Gesell’s influence on Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration of the notion of chiasm.

Merleau-Ponty intervenes in the debate between vitalism and mechanism to point out the becoming of biological conceptuality. He deals with two concrete examples: the notion of behavior and those of information and communication. Concerning cybernetics and the preservation of information, Merleau-Ponty claims that

a quantity of information has been placed in circulation; it deteriorates here and there, but on the whole it is maintained, and in any case it is not invented; the whole can, at most, be reestablished. From here, it is easy to see how cybernetics tends to become a theory of the living and of language. (Nature 160)

Afterwards, he deals with “the positive value of cybernetics,” namely the invitation to consider the living being as situated consciousness or as a field of behaviors. From this standpoint, the subject ceases to be an absolute, surveying (survolant) consciousness and discovers herself as “an apparatus of organizing perspectives,” thus as the bearer of an incarnated sense. Therefore, cybernetics

invites us to discover an animality in the subject, an apparatus of organizing perspectives. […] animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning. This is at bottom what cybernetics seeks, and this is what explains its curiosity for automata. If we are interested in automata, it is because we see there the articulation of the body and objects. We have the impression of a body that manipulates objects, of the constitution of the behavior of the body that responds to a situation. (Nature 166)

Apropos of the notion of behavior, Merleau-Ponty finds that the concept of Gestalt allows for the communication and fusion of mechanism and vitalism, as well as for the presumed antithesis of the innate and the acquired, which are no longer considered as distinct. Merleau-Ponty refers to the study of the embryologist G. E. Coghill, who, in his book Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior, describes some factual aspects of behavior that are similar to the phenomenological notion of the “I can,” which Husserl notably adopts in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy and in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.¹⁰ In his study of the axolotl lizard, Coghill finds that the axolotl manifests a process of development that is proper to its inner disposition, namely, to its potentiality as a maturing organism.¹¹

In this framework, the morphological account of the organism that Coghill proposes—and that Merleau-Ponty receives in order to overcome the idea of organism as a machine—presupposes the idea of the living being as a form or totality. At the same time, this notion of behavior reveals an “endogenous character”:

it is something that is ahead of functioning, which carries a reference to the future, which is beyond the immediate possibles and cannot immediately realize all that it already sketches out. In virtue of its endogenous initiative, the organism traces out what its future life will be; it sketches out its milieu (Umwelt); it contains a project in reference to the whole of its life. (Merleau-Ponty, Nature 151)

The question that Merleau-Ponty poses concerns the nature of this reference and the meta-temporal or spatial character of the living being. In this regard, the analysis of the axolotl reveals the ambiguities involved in Merleau-Ponty’s position concerning the difference between biological theories of preformationism and of epigenesis.

Epigenesis vs. Preformationism

Preformation or epigenesis? is the question that German biologist Oscar Hertwig poses in his 1894 book, Zeit- und Streitfragen der Biologie. Präformation oder Epigenese?, echoing the results of the scientific evidence produced by the experimental analyses of contemporary embryologists.¹² The same question resonates almost a century later in Merleau-Ponty’s work, when he refuses the traditional preformationist account, according to which the development and growth of the living being are already predetermined in the original germ.¹³ From this standpoint, becoming “living” is a mere quantitative enlargement. This thesis was first developed at the end of the seventeenth century when scientists like Swammerdam and Hartsoeker defined the presence of the whole mature form of the living in germinal cells.¹⁴ These accounts inaugurated the twofold declination of preformationism in the spermism and ovism debate.

In his Essai de Dioptrique (1694), Nicolas Hartsoeker, pursuing (and competing with) the work of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who produced the first observations of animalcules engendered in the semen, exposed a theoretical model of preformationism. Hartsoeker suggests the hypothesis of the adult living being as the mere duplication of a homunculus, or as a preformed individual, as the development of the miniature contained in the sperm head (230). In contrast, ovism proposes the continuity of development in light of the full presence of the mature form in the egg. For example, in The Book of Nature, or, the Natural History of Insects (1758), Swammerdam criticizes the epigenetic approach of William Harvey and focuses on insects, finding in insects the perfect case of encasement of the mature bodily parts in their eggs and then in the structure of the nymphs (12). Notwithstanding mutual divergences, the hypotheses of spermism and ovism ground the ontotheological conception of creation as a unique act and the conception of development as explication without becoming, namely, without rupture or intervention from the outside of the egg or the spermatozoon.¹⁵

Epigenesist theories, on the contrary, advance the hypothesis of an undifferentiated germ from which the embryo develops into its full form and becomes a mature organism. This development is the result of its relation to the environment, which produces the gradual formation of the different organs of the body. The eighteenth-century German embryologist Kaspar Friedrich Wolff observed that in both animals and plants specialization of organs arises from unspecialized tissue, consequently discrediting the hypothesis of preformation.¹⁶ Merleau-Ponty deals with biology and reflects upon the preformationist/epigenesist debate in order to define his ontology of the sensible and the life of the flesh. In relation to the abovementioned debate, he points out the intertwining of living beings and nature, questioning Cartesian dualism and any form of bifurcation within nature.

The need for a nondualistic explanation increases Merleau-Ponty’s interest in genesis, embryology, and the theory of evolution as well; however, developing his analyses on embryological studies, Merleau-Ponty adopts an ambiguous attitude. On the one hand, he denies the possibility of a pre-inscription of life’s evolution and growth in the embryo, and on the other hand, he announces an inextricable continuity of the adult form and the embryonic stage. In fact, Merleau-Ponty argues that even if the future is not contained in the original potentiality of the living being, it is not accidental that it would follow and add to the present: “The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other” (Nature 152). Commenting on Coghill’s research on the axolotl, Merleau-Ponty adds:

If we read in the first movement the act of swimming, we fall in the retrospective illusion that makes us project what is yet to come into the past, or to double the sensible world with an intellectual world without first understanding. If I suppose an entelechy with the axolotl, a perfection in the midst of becoming, we can speak of hidden qualities, of a swimming power. In any case, this vitalism is contradicted by the facts. All these ideas suppose preformation, yet modern embryology defends the thesis of epigenesis. (Nature 152; my italics)

In this regard, Merleau-Ponty seems to dismiss any residual preformationism in theories of ontogenesis, for example, in the embryological research of Gesell and Coghill, who risk adopting the legacy of preformationist theories elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I refer here to the ontotheological presuppositions that have already been recognized by Derrida’s essay “Force and Signification” in 1963, in which he claims the following:

By preformationism we indeed mean preformationism: the well-known biological doctrine, opposed to epigenesis, according to which the totality of hereditary characteristics is enveloped in the germ, and is already in action in reduced dimensions that nevertheless respect the forms and proportions of the future adult. A theory of encasement was at the center of preformationism which today makes us smile. But what are we smiling at? At the adult in miniature, doubtless, but also at the attributing of something more than finality to natural life—providence in action and art conscious of its works. (26)

In this essay, Derrida comments on French structuralism and hints at the analogy between literary and biological scripture. He comments on the biological presuppositions of literary criticism, since the latter is grounded in the idea of a structural prefiguration and invariance that is at the core of the encasement theory. The aesthetic of encasement is the translation of biological notions and a metaphysical representation of the book as “simultaneously present in all its parts”; therefore, the structuralist attitude of reading “always presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book” as a totalizing form (28).¹⁷ The book contains all its possible determinations in full presence, just as the adult living being would already be present in miniature in its germinal form.

Even if this theory produces smiles for contemporary scientists, Derrida admits that some presuppositions or remainders of preformation and its teleological structure still haunt philosophical and scientific discourses. This attitude emerges, for example, when Merleau-Ponty comments on embryology and evolutionist theories. Even if Merleau-Ponty points to the essential epigenesist regulation of the life of the living, it seems that the solution that epigenesis offers does not arrest his research. He initially contests the classic formulation of preformation:

Against the idea of preformation (fitting together of seeds) simple unfolding, for the idea of epigenesis: intervention of something in surplus which is not given in the actual (the determined) of a non-actual. But these negations are to be elaborated. Does this mean the intervention of another positive factor? Passage from the aspatial to the metaspatial? From the inactual to another activity? From the inactual to the possible as another actual? (Nature 231)

However, even if he claims that the future development of an organism is not folded as potentiality at the beginning of its organic life, Merleau-Ponty refers to “the imminence of the future” and admits the essential continuistic principle that orients the becoming of life (Nature 155).

At first glance, Merleau-Ponty argues that his aim “does not consist in transforming a mechanical preformation into a metaphysical preformation,” and he tries to think a finalism without teleology (Nature 183). In fact, commenting on Hans Driesch’s The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, Merleau-Ponty defines a philosophy of entelechy that is the negative side of potentiality and of the gap that would avoid a step back into preformationism.¹⁸ Rejecting Driesch’s finalistic theory, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the future of the organism is not folded back in potential in the beginning of its organic life, as in a nutshell in its beginning. The diverse parts of the animal are not interior to each other” (Nature 155). He simultaneously declares the need to avoid the error of establishing the entelechy of becoming and of establishing the mastery of a regulative principle. From this perspective, Merleau-Ponty equates this latency or potentiality with the condition of possibility for evolution and, consequently, with epigenesis, when he affirms: “We can say of the animal that each moment of its history is empty of what will follow, an emptiness which will be filled later. Each present moment is supported by a future larger than any future. To consider the organism in a given minute, we observe that there is the future in every present” (Nature 155).

A careful reading will confirm that the notions of epigenesis and latency that he adopts are still informed by the metaphysical hypotheses at work in preformationist theories. In this context is inscribed the following quotation:

Genesis truly understood must show a relation to the whole, that is, to conform to transcendental genesis and even to its successive form demanded by this. Keep in mind this bifurcation:

• Actualism of spatiotemporal fragmentary facts-fitting together, evolution.

• Recourse to ideality, to other possible facts, richer than the actual, conceived as another actual = epigenesis = appeal to another preformation (Ruyer, Driesch).

Define a Being of the in-between, an interbeing.(Nature 229–230)

Merleau-Ponty argues that the solution to the dichotomy of Neo-Darwinist and Idealist conceptions of life and evolution resides in the in-between of contingency and entelechy, the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Merleau-Ponty therefore attempts to merge the two dichotomous positions in an ontology that would overcome their partiality. In his comments on Driesch there emerges a conception of embryogenesis that points to this unification of perspective: “Embryology since Driesch seems to us to have been moving in this direction in refusing to opt either for preformation or epigenesis, rather taking both notions as ‘complementary’ and describing embryogenesis as a ‘flux of determination’” (Themes 126).

Merleau-Ponty faces the challenge of an ontology situated between mere chance and absolute idea, and his notion of behavior seems to respond to its aim because it allows for the expression of the intertwining of actuality and potentiality in a dialectical circularity, namely, the “the suturing of organism-milieu, organism-organism”:

Darwinism: One dimension of the actual—the rest is impossible. Idealism: Another dimension; there is the possible. Us: They are right against each other … Problem: to place something between chance and the idea, between the interior and the exterior. This something is the suturing organism-milieu, organism-organism. In this suture, something happens which is not an actual fact—a jointure which is the articulation of the vertical order on the horizontal order. The idea of Being as dimensionality, the above dimensions of which are only the realization and abstract aspects. Place the two orders in this ontological milieu. (Nature 251)

The ontological dimensionality is then thought by Merleau-Ponty as “flux” or “progressive determination,” as coupling and suture of a preformed being and a “being by epigenesis = negation of the precedent” (240). In the passage of his lecture devoted to the relation between actuality and inactuality in evolution and development, Merleau-Ponty defines the morphogenetic possibilities of living beings in terms of possible destiny or prospective potency (prospektive Potenz). Consequently, Merleau-Ponty conceives ontogenesis and phylogenesis, development and evolution, as the uninterrupted movement of self-differentiation and the emergence of forms within the sameness of the world of flesh. According to Merleau-Ponty, life is teleologically oriented toward a constitution by auto-differentiation, in which the possible modification or evolution of the living being exceeds its actual structure and “is governed by a principle of order that would have a global character” or a formal cause (Nature 182). He therefore suggests that the organization of the living and of development is oriented by an entelechy that is already inscribed in the fold of the flesh.

Carnal Predetermination

Merleau-Ponty’s biological research fluctuates between opposing positions in this argument and engenders a confusion of epigenetic and predeterminationist perspectives. He ends this confusion by appealing to the ontological and overarching dimension of the “interbeing” or being in-between (entre-deux), that is, a being of flesh. Merleau-Ponty thereby reiterates the ontotheological gesture that underlies any idea of predetermination, specifically the understanding of the genesis of the living as explication without becoming, as differentiation internal to the homogeneous and closed horizon of the flesh of the world.

The flesh is thus the ontological substructure that allows Merleau-Ponty to explain the biological determination of living beings as well as the genetic movement of science from a primordial layer of pre-objectivity. In his lectures on nature, Merleau-Ponty points out the ontological problem that underlies the question of natural being and resolves the duality into this elemental substrate, which he describes as the “pre-empirical architectonic, the preobjective, the pivots, hinges, and structures of organisms and species” (Nature 207).

This argument clearly emerges when he devotes attention to the human body, namely to the “proper subject” of his lectures, to explain the all-encompassing and pre-objective nature of flesh (208).¹⁹ In effect, the human body is the “interbeing” that manifests the point of emergence, in nature, of the fold and the place of “a kind of reflection,” that constitutes what Merleau-Ponty calls a “theory of flesh” (209). In The Visible and the Invisible he argues that “the body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born by segregation” (136).

In effect, Merleau-Ponty describes the sensible “reflection” of the human being in terms of constitutive reversibility and draws on the biological metaphor of dehiscence to illustrate the emergence of life and subjectivity from the all-encompassing intercorporeality of flesh, which extends further than any singular body. He claims that “a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things” (Visible 123).

Indeed, his notion of flesh is the result of the postulated transubstantiation of the sensing in the sensed and of its assimilation in perceptual relation. In this context, the figure of touching and touched hands is paradigmatic of the originary contact with the sensible in the very moment of its introjection by means of the living body and his hand. Merleau-Ponty discovers in the body the primordial reflection that points to its implication in a common carnal being: “this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching … between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned [enjambé] by the total being of my body, and by that of the world” (Visible 148; italics mine). The matrix of his notion of “flesh of the world” is already in this statement; it is precisely this character of enfolding, coupling, or intertwining that defines the total being of the world, which is made of flesh. In fact, in his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes the flesh of the world as

segregation, dimensionality, continuation, latency, encroachment … That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [senti] at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping. (248–249)

According to Merleau-Ponty, the flesh of the body and the world gather in the undividedness “of this sensible Being that I am and all the rest which feels itself (se sent) in me” (255). This idea of an all-encompassing and homogeneous flesh comes to light in his last published text, “Eye and Mind,” in which he appears engaged in the description of an enveloping/enveloped carnal being:

my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff as the body. (163; my italics)

Hence, perception is caught by things in the world and, accordingly in reverse, it manifests the originary “undividedness [l’indivision]” of the living being and its environment (163).²⁰ This general theory of flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to designate a relation of the living being with nature as a fundamental and radical enfoldment or overlapping. In this context, biology would question the objectivity of nature and acquire an ontological relevance, since it shows that the organism “is the macroscopic ‘envelopment-phenomenon’ that we do not engender from elements, that invests the local-instantaneity, that is not to be sought behind, but rather between the elements,” or in the “element” of flesh (Merleau-Ponty, Nature 213).

In a close reading of On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, in which Merleau-Ponty is explicitly evoked, Derrida explains that the absolute reciprocity and connection of flesh with itself becomes the genetic scheme sustaining the pure auto-affection of the world, “sentant-sensible” (Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” 163). In effect, Derrida comments on the proximity in the auto-affective relation that would cover the spacing (espacement) in a melted flesh of the world:

By making flesh ubiquitous, one runs the risk of vitalizing, psychologizing, spiritualizing, interiorizing, or even reappropriating everything, in the very places where one might still speak of the nonproperness or alterity of flesh. (On Touching 238)

In the wake of Derrida’s analysis, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s attempt at the ontological rehabilitation of the sensible leads to a carnal monism, an all-encompassing and self-affected carnal world that erases the condition of possibility of experience and life in general, thus removing the differential relation of life and death as a structural condition for perception and life.²¹

Merleau-Ponty merely translates the continuistic model of genesis, generation, and reproduction in the ontology of flesh, as the discourse grounded in the all-encompassing principle “that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings … The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being” (Visible 139). The flesh is the original dimension of con-fusion governed by chiasmatic reversibility, “which is the ultimate truth” (155).²² A reversibility of the living flesh that, in its very notion, does not contemplate death, chance, contingency, interruption, or dispersion of the postulated originary unity or of the flesh of the world. Effectively, it leads to the homogeneity, closeness, and undividedness of life and living beings, therefore to an absolute self-protection that closes life in itself.

In fact, Merleau-Ponty points out a common horizon within which there is not any space for something unexpected and casual because the horizon comprehends all possible evolution and transformation of living beings. Therefore, if not present, they are in the background, in the anonymous and latent stratum of experience, and, for this reason, they are in principle already present. He repeats the same gesture of biological ontology that he contests. Even if the living being opens to the world, it is in a circuit that remains predetermined.

As a result, Merleau-Pontian confusion differs from Derridean discourse about the differential structure of the living, which attempts to assure life in its purity and pure self-affectedness. Derrida suggests that “the reappropriation or the absolute reflection of self-presence” led to the notion of “pure life or pure death: [which] is always, infinitely, the same thing” (On Touching 291). From this standpoint, the vivification of the world through the conceptualization of the carnal being could not be considered as a mere theoretical naivety. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical gesture reveals the desire of a supposedly pure, immanent, and absolutely auto-immune life, which is exactly the negation of life as such and its condemnation to death.

Merleau-Ponty’s clarification of the idea of flesh represents the attempt to immunize life from death, the repetition of the metaphysical gesture that opposes and hierarchizes in a simple dichotomy pure life and pure death. According to his metaphysical conception of life and to the movement of a desire for the pure presence of life, phenomenological discourse in general—and Merleau-Pontian discourse in particular—would produce the infinitization of finitude, which attempts to protect and immunize life and experience. Despite this, it has the opposite effect, precisely because it is haunted by a desire for the appropriation and assimilation of the condition of possibility for life itself.

The auto-affection to which Merleau-Ponty refers is not a pure structure, since, as Derrida has clarified, the universal structure of experience, as another name for life, does not refer to uncontaminated living, but rather to a differential relation of life and death. The sign, in the discursive domain, as well as the body, in the perceptive sphere, testifies to the original dispossession of life and pure feeling (as feeling oneself feel) in relation to the supplement of death, which is the transcendental condition for the self-affection:

it had already begun to undermine and shape ‘living’ speech, exposing it to the death within the sign. But the supplementary sign does not expose to death by affecting a self-presence that is already possible. Auto-affection constitutes the same (auto) as it divides the same. Privation of presence is the condition of experience, that is to say, of presence.(Derrida, Of Grammatology 166)

In contrast to the metaphysical desire for the pure immunity of life, Derrida elaborates the definition of “autoimmunity.” In “Above All, No Journalists!,” he claims that “in it, the living organism destroys the conditions of its own protection. Such auto-immunization is a terrifying biological possibility: a body destroys its proper defenses or organizes in itself … the destructive forces that will attack its immunitary reactions” (67).²³

Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of absolute living flesh, the condition of possibility for life implies a constitutive and transcendental violence of the self against itself, namely the complication of life and death in a differential relation of life death. The perspective that biodeconstruction opens offers the resources for a vigilance against all discourses that are grounded in and feed off of the metaphysical illusion of a pure and infinite life without death. This emerges from Derrida, as highlighted in Vitale’s reading of his work:

The irreducible co-implication of life and death structures the living in such a way that the living must relate to the other in order to be itself but, in so doing, it must destroy its own immunitarian defenses, that is, it must suppress the immunitarian defenses of the organs that preside over the relation to alterity in view of the survival in the environment and of reproduction. (Vitale, Biodeconstruction 3–4) ²⁴

Footnotes

1. See for example Meacham 137–163; Meacham and Papageorgiou 65–93.

2. See also Vitale, “The Text and the Living” 98–106.

3. See Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man”: “The crisis of science in general, of the sciences of man, and of philosophy leads to an irrationalism. Reason itself appears to be the contingent product of certain external conditions. From the beginning of his career, Husserl recognized that the problem was to give a new account of how all three—philosophy, science, and the sciences of man—might be possible. It was necessary once again to think them through to their foundations [namely of their genesis]” (44).

4. Translations of Notes are mine, unless otherwise noted.

5. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature could be read in continuity with the analyses on the Gestaltpsychologie that he developed in The Structure of Behavior (completed in 1938 and published in 1942) and, still earlier, in his projects on the nature of perception in 1933 and 1934. See “Study Project on the Nature of Perception (1933)” and “The Nature of Perception (1934).” These projects anticipated some concerns extensively expressed in Phenomenology of Perception.

6. In the Introduction to The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty deals with biology and claims that “the discussions concerning mechanism and vitalism remain open”; however, a few pages later, he adds: “The object of biology is to grasp that which makes a living being a living being, that is, not—according to the realist postulate common to both mechanism and vitalism—the superposition of elementary reflexes or the intervention of a ‘vital force’, but an indecomposable structure of behavior” (46).

7. Husserl engages in the distinction of natural sciences and phenomenology in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), the Crisis (1936/1954), and Ideas, vol. 2 (1952). See also Husserl, “Addendum XXIII of The Crisis” 6–9. For Merleau-Ponty translation and comment on Husserl’s “Addendum,” see Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours 66–91 and 379–389.

8. Even if the psychology that has instructed and inspired Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection on the notion of life and the relation of the living being with its own environment is regarded critically, the metaphysical presuppositions that sustain and orient the biological approach to the issue of preformation and epigenesis remain; for that very reason this metaphysical ground has to be questioned and solicited by a biodeconstructive theory.

9. See Goldstein, Organism: “The attainment of biological knowledge we are seeking is essentially akin to this phenomenon – to the capacity of the organism to become adequate to its environmental conditions. This is a fundamental biological process by virtue of which the actualization of organisms is made possible” (307–308).

10. For Husserl’s account of the “I can,” see Ideas vol. 2, par. 38; Cartesian Meditations, par. 44.

11. Merleau-Ponty refers to the studies of the axolotl that George Coghill published in 1929. Coghill’s work describes the neuromuscular system development in the embryos of the axolotl lizard (Amblystoma punctatum). Observing the embryonic development and especially the evolution of its movement patterns, Coghill noticed that when a change in the environment occurs an axolotl in a larval stage develops into the adult form of a common salamander. Noting the similarity between his own understanding of the development of behavior and that of Gestalt theorists, Coghill proposes a definition of behavior as a complex and unitary structure, against an atomistic and mere mechanistic conception. In fact, behavior appears to Coghill as a principle that emerges as a totality and that is immanent to the living being. Commenting on Coghill’s hypothesis, Merleau-Ponty writes, “Hence the organicist idea supported by Coghill, according to which, inasmuch as we analyze the organisms piecemeal, we find opposed only physicochemical phenomena, but when we rise to the consideration of the whole of the organism, the totality is no longer describable in physiological terms; it appears as emergent. How are we to understand this relation of totality of parts as a result? What status must we give totality? Such is the philosophical question that Coghill’s experiments pose, a question which is at the center of this course on the idea of nature and maybe the whole of philosophy” (Nature 145).

12. See Hertwig The Biological Problem of Today: Preformation or Epigenesis?

13. In the background of the definition of preformationism is the work of Nicolas Malebranche. While he never used the word “encasement” (emboîtement), which marks the path of preformation, he gestures there in The Search after Truth when claims, “We may say that all plants are in a smaller form in their germs. By examining the germ of a tulip bulb with a simple magnifying glass or even with the naked eye, we discover very easily the different parts of the tulip. It does not seem unreasonable to say that there are infinite trees inside one single germ, since the germ contains not only the tree but also its seed, that is to say, another germ, and Nature only makes these little trees develop. We can also think of animals in this way. We can see in the germ of a fresh egg that has not yet been incubated a small chick that may be entirely formed … Perhaps all the bodies of men and animals born until the end of times were created at the creation of the world, which is to say that the females of the first animals may have been created containing all the animals of the same species that they have begotten and that are to be begotten in the future” (27).

14. See Hartsoeker for the first definition of spermist theory, which began with the observation of human sperm through a microscope. Well known is his drawing of a sperm cell with a little person curled up inside the sperm head, a sketch that represents one of the most clear examples of preformationism. While Hartsoeker was one of the first spermists and a leading figure in this field, he soon recognized the failure of this theory. In fact, in 1722, he admitted that the possibility of regeneration makes any preformation theory untenable: “I deemed this experiment conclusive against those who claim that in the beginning God has created all plants, trees and animals that have already been and that will be in the centuries to come, as if he had encased them one in the other” (“Lettre” 195; cf. Gasking 86). On the contrary, Swammerdam defines epigenetic ideas as the result of an imperfect reason and elaborates a theory of reproduction ex ovo (Book 18). Swammerdam rejected the metamorphosis phenomenon because he hypothesized that the adult form of a butterfly would already be present in the chrysalides, thus consequently wholly present in the egg, analogous to seeds that would contain a plant visible to the naked eye. For some ambiguity in Swammerdam’s work about a specific contamination of his preformationist standpoint and some epigenesist theses, see Pinto-Correia 314–315.

15. On the intertwining of metaphysical, biological, and theological conceptions of life, see Vitale, “Life Death and Difference: Philosophies of Life between Hegel and Derrida”: “Given that preformationism was invented to legitimate, within the life sciences, the unity of Creation in line with Christian dogma and that, ultimately, this theory rests on Aristotle’s texts, it is possible to understand the complicated relations between Christian religion, philosophy, and biology that are at stake here and which are necessary to loosen in view of a deconstruction of the notion of life” (108).

16. In his doctoral thesis, Theoria Generationis, Wolff announces the presence of tissues in the adult living being that do not have any counterpart in the embryo and develops in each embryo de novo. See Wolff, Theoria Generationis par. 168, 242.

17. Moreover, Derrida refers to the theological concept of the “book” in relation to nature in Dissemination, when he comments on the issue posed by Novalis in his Encyclopedia: “the form of the total book as written book.” The encyclopedic project would be based on the analogy between the organicist conception of the biological body and the book as a “volumen” in which any moment has always been comprehended. Therefore, Novalis establishes a total overlap between nature and the volume in a conjunction/identity that he pretends would be given in advance. On the contrary, Derrida argues that the genetic production of a text, or a living being as text, leaves out a queue or tail, namely a supplement, that precludes the saturation of self-presence as thought in the paradigm of the encyclopedic circle. See Derrida, Dissemination 50–59.

18. In The Science and Philosophy of the Organism are collected the Gifford Lectures that Hans Driesch held in 1907, in which he attempts to reformulate the question concerning the relation between epigenesis and preformationism as follows: “Is the prospective potency of each embryonic part fully given by its prospective value in a certain definite case; is it, so to say, identical with it, or does the prospective potency contain more than the prospective value of an element in a certain case reveals?” (77). Despite his early proximity to epigenesist theories, Driesch, one of Haeckel’s pupils, refused the Darwinism of his master to promote a teleological conception of the living organism that is known as “neo-vitalism.” About Merleau-Ponty’s commentary of Driesch’s hypothesis see Morris, “The Time and Place of the Organism” 70–76.

19. In particular, Merleau-Ponty comments on the phenomenological definition of the living body proposed by Husserl in the second volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy; see Merleau-Ponty, Nature 70–79.

20. See also Fóti: “Merleau-Ponty speaks rather of an ‘indivision’ (that is nondivision) between an animal and its surroundings and notes once again that the same indivision also underlies the formation of a sense organ which is no less ‘miraculous’ than mimicry. Indivision pertains, of course, to the ontological structure of flesh that he elaborates in The Visible and the Invisible; and his reflections on animal form and mimicry serve to concretize it” (84).

21. On the monism of flesh, see Haar 167–171; Moran 356; Slatman 317–318.

22. About the chiasm Merleau-Ponty writes: “the idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of” (Visible 266)

23. On this point, see the inspiring work of Michael Naas, who points out that “autoimmunity has to do with the way a living organism protects itself by attacking its own self-protection and destroying its own immune defenses, thereby making it vulnerable to what it might have otherwise resisted. This attack on or protection against one’s own mechanisms of self-protection is thus fatale—inevitable and always potentially deadly—though also, as in the case of immuno-depressants, essential to the organism’s survival, essential to its acceptance of a graft or transplanted organ that will allow it to survive or live on. Indeed, without autoimmunity, without this breach in the immunitary and self-protective systems of the organism, there would be no possibility of a supplement that might destroy or save it, bring it to an end or allow it to live on. Without autoimmunity, the organism would have, in short, no future before it” (82, my italics).

24. Vitale further develops Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity, as it has been presented in “Faith and Knowledge,” The Animal That Therefore I Am, and his seminar La Vie La Mort, since he finds in Derrida’s reading of Freud the anticipation of the very recent biological theory of apoptosis or “cellular suicide,” according to which in the process of the constitution of a living being occurs a cellular differentiation that implies cellular death. In particular, some cells of the living organism send a “suicidal message” to other cells that respond by dying. See Vitale, Biologie et Déconstruction 149–153; Biodeconstruction 175–184. For a first and deeper definition of the theory of “cellular suicide,” see Ameisen.

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Elina Staikou (bio)
University of Winchester

The essay situates the privileging of “autoimmunity” in Derrida’s late work in relation to Esposito’s philosophical paradigm of immunization. It shows that autoimmunity is prefigured by the hypotheses of absolute catastrophe and radical finitude put forward in Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)” and his thinking of the archive. The essay argues that the deconstructive thinking of life and biology, or the task of biodeconstruction, must come to terms with the radicalness of autoimmunity as both finitude and hospitality, and investigates its resonances with two biological accounts of the origin and constitution of life: Margulis’s theory of endosymbiosis and Ameisan’s generalization of the operation of apoptosis.

There is no life (“animal” or “human”) that does not suppose some aptitude for discerning, analyzing, distinguishing: between the forms of life as well as between the “living” and the “dead.” Let us begin then by applying this aptitude for discerning to life itself, in general; let us distinguish its structures and levels.–Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue

In Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Roberto Esposito claims to have found the missing term that specifies the relation between life and politics, which seems to have evaded the discourse of biopolitics: “For my part, I believe I’ve traced the interpretive key in the paradigm of ‘immunization’ that seems to have eluded Foucault” (45). He goes on to ask: “How and in what sense can immunization fill that semantic void, that interval of meaning which remains open in Foucault’s text between the constitutive poles of the concept of biopolitics, namely, biology and politics?” (45).

The category of immunization, according to Esposito, lends specificity to the relationship between biology and politics; it names and articulates “the intrinsic character that forces together the two elements that compose biopolitics” (45). These elements, bios and politics, are not superimposed, juxtaposed, or related through subjection or domination as two domains that are exterior to each other, but assume their meaning through their interrelation as components of an indivisible whole:

Not simply the relation that joins life to power, immunity is the power to preserve life. Contrary to what is presupposed in the concept of biopolitics—understood as the result of an encounter that arises at a certain moment between the two components—in this perspective no power exists external to life, just as life is never given outside of relations of power. From this angle, politics is nothing other than the possibility or the instrument for keeping life alive. (Esposito, Bíos 46)

Insofar as immunity is the power of life to preserve itself and insofar as no power exists outside life, politics is interpreted as a form or expression or even instrument of life in the service of life’s own protection, that is, as part of its own immunitary defense. The relationship between life and politics is captured in an immunitary dialectic between protection and negation, life’s recoiling in the course of its self-immunization. Biopolitics, however, does not refer to the relationship between life and power, or life and politics in general, but to the form this relationship takes in modernity and even more so in what Esposito calls “second modernity”:

In its most general formulation, biopolitics refers to the increasingly intense and direct involvement established between political dynamics and human life (understood in its strictly biological sense), beginning with a phase that we can call second modernity. (Terms 69)

Life, of course, “even in its biological sense,” has always been the “material” frame within which politics is necessarily inscribed (69). It is with the advent of modernity that the material frame of life moves into the center of politics, which becomes instrumental for its defense and preservation. The shift to biopolitics occurs in the era of the European civil war (“first modernity”) that raged in the seventeenth century and is first signalled and best captured by Thomas Hobbes as the question of life that “embeds itself in the very heart of political theory and practice” (69). It is with the second phase of European modernity (“second modernity”) at the end of the eighteenth century that the terms of the political change into the vocabulary of security and the question of life gradually overlaps more and more with the political sphere, entering into a more direct and unmediated relationship with it.

Esposito’s discovery of the immunitary paradigm as the interpretive key for unlocking the relationship between the two constitutive poles of biopolitics authorizes a genealogical account of philosophical gestures that grasps the relationship between life and power according to the logic of immunity. This genealogy has its inaugurating, even if unrecognized, moment in Hobbes’s conservatio vitae and develops later in two decisive steps. First, the dialectical contradiction and the role of the negative implied in immunitary logic assumes a more reflective mode with Hegel and begins to be seen as the “motor of the positive,” the productive impulse in human history (Bíos 47). The second step is accomplished by Nietzsche, who shifts the focus of analysis from conscience to the body as the site of a vital power that is at once protected and constrained by the immunitary form or containment that is the soul. Nietzsche’s understanding of life as “will to power” constitutes, for Esposito, one of the most radical understandings of biopolitics and the complete elaboration of the category of immunization. With this triptych of philosophical gestures, Esposito claims, “the most innovative part of twentieth-century culture begins to make implicit use of the [immunitary] paradigm” (Bíos 47). This phase in immunological reasoning, which is illustrated by the philosophical anthropology developed in Germany by Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen, is followed by the introduction of an explicitly immunological lexicon and orbit in discourses such as Niklas Luhmann’s “social immunology.” The rise of the modern science of immunology with Frank Macfarlane Burnet in the 1950s installs even more firmly the immunitary paradigm at the “neuralgic epicentre” between different traditions of thinking and at the center of modern self-representation (Bíos 50).

Far more than the elaboration of a philosophical-political genealogy of modernity that marks the gradual transition from traditional political categories to the biopolitical and immunitary paradigms, what Esposito seeks to understand through the latter is a new configuration of life and politics, named or specified as modernity, that springs forth from the very foundations of life.¹ It is life itself that “brings into being, or ‘invents’, modernity as a complex of categories capable of answering the question of the preservation of life” (Terms 70). Once life’s natural defenses—“this sort of primitive immunitary wrapping”—are rendered insufficient, or every time it finds itself exposed to new threats (civil wars, foreign invasions), life invents new defensive apparatuses for itself (for example, social contracts) and new (political and philosophical) languages to articulate its changing needs. This salvific scenario, which for Esposito is authored by life itself, becomes the script of modernity summed up in the principle of security, which later also forms the main dogma of immunology: its understanding of the immune system as self-defense against foreign assault. For Esposito, then, “the category of biopolitics must merge with that of immunisation” (84) as it is the latter that captures or reveals the lethal side or dimension of protection, the negation of life that reached its extremity with two totalitarian regimes of twentieth century Europe and their genocidal policies, Stalinism and Nazism. Nazi totalitarianism is not juxtaposed with communist totalitarianism, however, as it is in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. With Stalinism, Esposito argues, we reach an extremity that is still within the conceptual and sematic parameters of modernity and its philosophical tradition, while with Nazism we have the decomposition of the modern form and its translation into a new conceptual language. The particularity of Nazism as a totalitarian regime is that it thinks and speaks in the idiom of biology: “We’ve said that Nazism is not philosophy realized as is communism. But this is only a half truth that we should complete as follows: It is actually biology realized” (Esposito, Terms 80). This echoes Rudolf Hess’s declaration, which Esposito cites here, that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology” (Terms 80); Esposito “accepts” this claim, but then goes on to qualify it as a “specific quality of the biological, and more specifically medical, semantics deployed by the Nazis” (Terms 81). In immunological terms, the specificity of Nazi biopolitics is best described through “the figure of autoimmune disease” (Terms 84), understood as a figure of self-destruction and the crossing of the threshold from bio- to thanato-politics. The planned extermination of a part of the German population spurred the immunitary paradigm of Nazi biopolitics to “the heights of its auto-genocidal fury” (Terms 86). Autoimmunity is defined as the height or hyperbolic negativity of the immunitary dialectic that could be both resistible and reversible by virtue of the antidote of an original and reciprocal communitas and an affirmative politics of life.

In a way that is consonant with Nietzsche’s “great health” and Canguilhem’s definition of life as the “formation of forms” or “normativity,” Esposito is able to envision the possibility of a positive immunity based on symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationships modelled, for example, on the mother/fetus relationship. Far from a harmonious, symbiotic unity between mother and child, their relationship is depicted as “a fight ‘to life’” rather than death, a conflict that results in “the spark of life” and the intersection of immunity with community (Esposito, Immunitas 171). Above all, it is a philosophical thinking of life itself out of its own sources and foundations that promises the reversibility of the most deleterious symptoms of immunitary logic. For Esposito, George Canguilhem’s “philosophy of biology,” with its resolute resistance to reductive and objectivist definitions of life, opens onto such a way of thinking, one that can confront perversities, such as the Nazi “programmatic antiphilosophical biology” (Bios 189), biologism at its worst.

Catherine Malabou situates Esposito’s critique of biopolitics in the same vein as Foucault’s and Agamben’s treatment of the body and bare life, while denouncing “philosophy’s antibiological bias” and the “unquestioned splitting of the concept of life” (Malabou, “One Life” 431). Malabou refers to Esposito’s essay “Nazism and Us” in Terms of the Political and to the claim that Nazism was “actually biology realized.” One could argue, however, that rather than assimilating biology to a biologism, Esposito proposes a philosophical thinking that draws on life’s own resources and responses and understands it in a wider and more diffuse sense than the partition between the symbolic and the biological allows. For Esposito, immunity, understood as a multivalent term, becomes key. It does much more than transfer a biological determinism onto the political realm; it brings into view the way life itself, or life understood as power, configures itself in the forms and terms of the political. If, as Malabou argues, there is “but one life, one life only,” and nothing outside of a materialism within which the biological and the symbolic coincide (“One Life” 438), then it is this life, or biology, that resists any power that seeks to control or regulate it by virtue of the possibilities inscribed in the living being itself. Biological concepts and discoveries—epigenetics and cloning are privileged examples here—are “the very ones able to renew the political question” and release the potential of a biological resistance to biopolitics (Malabou, “One Life” 431).

Esposito, as we have seen, situates his own philosophical contribution within a genealogy of modernist philosophers who, by his account, reflect on the question of life according to a bio-logic of immunization. If, however, “the thought of the living must take from the living the idea of the living,” and if this happens only if “intelligence” recognizes the “originality of life” (Canguilhem xx), then we must ask, what kind of gestures do philosophers perform towards life when they place it at the center of their thought? For whether philosophy chooses to reject or adopt a biologism that ignores the originality of life and the structures of the living constantly brought to light by biology, it shares in both cases the same antibiological bias that fails to recognize its own assumptions and their political stakes.

With this in mind, we now turn to another gesture in and out of line with Esposito’s immunological genealogy: Jacques Derrida’s situating of “the question οf life and of the living-being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of his remarks” (Rogues 109) in terms of autoimmunity. In Rogues, Derrida appears to be very careful while giving his reasons for privileging something that might look like “a generalization, without any external limit, of a biological or physiological model” (109). It is not out of some excessive “biologistic or geneticist proclivity” (109) on his part, he explains, but rather because autoimmunity seemed to offer a way to reflect on the self-constitution or formation of the living being before any opposition between life and its other (spirit, culture, technics, the symbolic, death, and so on). Further, Derrida claims that it provides a means to take something of psychoanalysis and the death drive into account in the thought of the living across all its articulations, especially in political autoimmunity. If immunity in Esposito becomes the missing link of biopolitics and the interpretive key opening onto that historical configuration between life and politics called modernity, autoimmunity in Derrida is formalized and generalized from the physiological to the transcendental as the implacable law in force in all self-formation, anticipating all oppositions and the identities and differences that come to demarcate individuality.

We saw that autoimmunity for Esposito is a capitalization of the negative dimension of the immunitary dialectic that can be countered through a revival of or return to the more originary sense of community, immunity’s antonym and antidote. More generally, within what is called the immunitary paradigm in philosophy, politics, anthropology, and to a certain extent immunology itself, autoimmunity has been marginalized as an exaggerated reaction, a hyperbole or malfunction of the immune system. How are we then to understand Derrida’s gesture, through which autoimmunity takes central stage even if it is tied to the worst or to suicide or, as we will see in a moment, to the extreme hypothesis of radical finitude? And when it comes to political stakes, what is wagered between Esposito’s understanding of autoimmunity as the interpretive key that best captures the specificity of Nazism, and Derrida’s far more radical understanding of autoimmunity as a “necessity inscribed right onto democracy” (Rogues 36)? If autoimmunity is the generalized law and constitutive condition of the living being and of life in all its layers and configurations, it must be so for better and for worse. Even though, or rather precisely because, it opens onto the vocation of hospitality and democracy to come, autoimmunity seems not to leave uninfected any salvific or critical moment. It is marked by an irreducibility that no communitas could reverse; it is the condition of communitas and what perpetually puts it to the test—its “auto-co-immunity,” as Derrida writes in “Faith and Knowledge” (87).

We are slowly moving towards our hypothesis or question. It regards precisely the test of autoimmunity in its extremity, which we will broach through Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Why resort to a text that predates the systematic preoccupation with autoimmunity in Derrida’s later work? I will argue that in order to understand the specificity of Derrida’s gesture alongside those of other philosophers, such as Esposito, who bring life to the center of philosophy according to the logic of immunity, we need to approach it from its extremity and in terms of the hypothesis of absolute catastrophe and radical finitude.

One may argue that it is not the “extreme” or “radical” view of autoimmunity in Derrida that finds currency with the life sciences (we will later question this in relation to the function of apoptosis), but rather its definition as a constitutive or normative perversion. The latter seems to be in step with recent critiques of immunology. In The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity Thomas Pradeu argues that the immunological perspective can give a comprehensive account of biological identity for all forms of life. What seems to have some resonance with Derrida’s understanding of autoimmunity as general law is Pradeu’s twofold gesture: first, expanding the scope of immunology beyond the traditional field of jawed vertebrates, even to plants, and even to unicellular organisms and bacteria by claiming that all organisms have an immune system (23), and, second, broadening the concept of autoimmunity in terms of its function and reinstating the idea of normal autoimmunity as one of the components of the organism’s homeostasis. However, looking for direct correspondences or parallels between Derrida’s understanding of autoimmunity and later immunological arguments or findings or even trying to prove that Derrida’s insights were presciently accurate does not seem to be a fruitful task. As Estzer Timár argues in “Derrida’s Error and Immunology,” there is a danger in the temptation to claim that Derrida might have been right after all even by getting it wrong. Such “victorious” readings risk assimilating Derrida’s complex thinking of life to a reductionist “bioorganicism” that understands life on the whole as natural life.

The following questions are raised: does Derrida’s generalization of the law of autoimmunity and the hypothesis of radical finitude take us beyond autoimmunity as a normal homeostatic mechanism, and how far can we follow him in this? Is the thought of radical finitude that which is generalizable in autoimmunity, and how does that complicate, if it does, the thought of survivance as the perennial entanglement of life and death? Finally, although Derrida gives his reasons for privileging autoimmunity—a term with a more strictly biomedical background than the juridico-politico-medical hybrid of immunity—as the generalizable law of the living, could not other terms have served him better and perhaps not run the same risk of using a complicated biomedical condition inaccurately?

Autoimmunity, at least in late Derrida, is privileged as the category that articulates the question of life within deconstruction and it is the term that most explicitly inaugurates what is emerging at the interface between the latter and biology: biodeconstruction. Of course, Derrida’s thinking of life and preoccupation with the life sciences did not begin with autoimmunity, and the pertinence of his early work for a deconstructive thinking of and with biology is something that has already been shown by recent scholarship in this emerging field. Another example Derrida draws from biomedicine in Rogues is that of cloning. He gives his reasons:

This example, I said to myself, would force me to mobilize indirectly the philosophemes we have been questioning so as to allow them all to converge in the great question of reason and of life …. A well-chosen example on the side of life, I told myself, would allow me to tie together, in as rigorous and tight a fashion as possible, reflections of an ethical, juridical, political, and inseparably, technoscientific nature—and precisely in a place where technicity, the great question of the technical and the logic of the prosthesis, would be not accessory but essential and intrinsic to the problematic of reason.(145–146)

Discussing briefly the dilemmas and improbabilities surrounding therapeutic and reproductive cloning and the objections raised mainly against the latter in the name of the dignity and nonprogrammable and incalculable nature of the unique and irreplaceable living being, Derrida goes on to show the shared biologistic or zoologistic presuppositions and the fundamental but unacknowledged reductionism of both camps (for and against cloning). The common assumption is that of the pre-existence of a purely biological form distinct from other layers and forms of living (what is called culture, knowledge, language, and so on), whose duplication would produce an individual subservient to a calculability that is already there in the first place. For Derrida, however, this fails to perceive the duplication already present and at work “everywhere it is a question of reproduction and heritage” (147). There is and always has been reproductive cloning in all forms and organisations of life, before and across all division between nature and culture. Duplication is coextensive with the broader notion of technical prosthesis and with what Derrida calls “iterability,” of which cloning in the narrow sense becomes only an example, one that is good, however, at indicating the “true place of reason today: that of technicity, of what is proper to humanity or to the living body, of the proper in general[.] In every field” (148).

As is increasingly shown by biodeconstruction but also in the work of biologists (for example, Lynn Margulis and Jans-Jörg Rheinberger), deconstructive concepts with which the notions of sameness and alterity, promise and program, finitude and infinity, chance and risk, technical prosthesis and ipseity, life and death are always entangled (iterability, writing, trace, différance, autoimmunity) find resonances in biomedical thought and open ways for questioning biological definitions and conceptions of life, death, and individuality. So why privilege autoimmunity, which, as Vicky Kirby points out in her paper “Autoimmunity: The Political State of Nature,” compromises and puts under erasure both of the terms it is composed of while assuming them at the same time? Is it the thought of the radical finitude of the autos (also the autos of reason) that Derrida finds irresistible, or of the possibility of the absolute erasure of the trace or the necessity of the worst (a suicidal drive that could reach extremes), that which we always need to remind ourselves of?

We now turn to “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Autoimmunity is not mentioned there by name; after all, this is a lecture delivered in 1984, nine years before the term first occurred in Specters of Marx. The logic of autoimmunity, however, is exemplified there from its extremity, from the place of absolute risk faced by that which could call itself autoimmune humanity. The hypothesis is that of a nuclear, total, and remainderless destruction, which is also described as an “absolute pharmakon,” one of autoimmunity’s old names (Borradori, “Autoimmunity” 124). One may well not give any credence to the nuclear hypothesis and to whether it menaces humanity and perhaps a few more species entirely; Derrida here does not bestow to this risk the generality and formal structure of an implacable law, as he will later do with autoimmunity. What is exemplarily threatened in its entirety is the archive, and first of all the archive of literature, because of the fabulous and “performative character of its relation to the referent” (Derrida, “No Apocalypse” 28) and the impossibility of its reconstitution as such after a total destruction. This impossibility accords it a radical form of historicity by ascribing to it an essential finitude. The peculiar historicity of literature and of everything that is constituted by the very act of archivization, argues Derrida, is “contemporaneous through and through” and is “structurally indissociable” from something like a “nuclear epoch,” by which he means both crisis and nuclear criticism, from “the historical and ahistorical horizon of an absolute self-destructibility without apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge” (“No Apocalypse” 27). He clarifies:

This statement is not abstract, it does not concern general and formal structures, some equation between a literarity extended to any possible archive and a self-destructibility in general. (27)

Self-destructibility here does not extend to biological archives or to the living being in general. It concerns specific historical formations and archives that inform both the criticism and the crisis of the nuclear and that interestingly make a “sudden ‘synchronous’ appearance” (27): the principle of reason or rather its interpretation since the seventeenth century according to the order of representation, the dominance of the object/subject dichotomy, the metaphysics of the will, and modern technoscience and the project of literature in a strict sense that also dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The co-habitation of this specific interpretation—the modern era of the principle of reason and the project of literature—erupts in a crisis that threatens criticism at its core. What the principle of reason cannot but foreclose—and it even grounds itself through this foreclosure—is the radical finitude and precariousness that are essential to literature.

Employing terminology that foreshadows the autoimmune critique of reason in Rogues, Derrida considers the “homonymity” between Kantian criticism and nuclear criticism. As thoughts about finitude as the limit of experience, both cut their figure out on the (back)ground of the possibility of something exceeding the finitude of the intellect or even of life; finite rationality, Kant’s intuitivus derivativus, is only possible if it is grounded in an infinite intellect, intuitus originarius. The possibility of a finitude as radical as that embodied by literature, which is defined as “the body of texts whose existence, possibility, and significance are the most radically threatened, for the first and last time, by the nuclear catastrophe” (“No Apocalypse” 27), must be foreclosed by the principle of reason, as it would annul the basis of its constitutive opposition between finite and infinite. Such possibility would bring the limit of criticism into view in “the groundlessness of a remainderless self-destruction of the self, auto-destruction of the autos itself. Whereupon the kernel, the nucleus of criticism, itself burst apart” (“No Apocalypse” 30).

A remainderless “auto-destruction of the autos itself” is exactly what reason can never envision nor tolerate for itself, a shared condition with literature as originally archivable event. It is from a background of radical finitude and not infinity that literature cuts its figure out. This is why, for Derrida, literature and literary criticism belong to the nuclear age and speak of nothing other than nuclear catastrophe, or their own remainderless a-symbolic destruction, a destruction that could not even be assumed and worked through symbolically, an absolute reality that could not even take its place in memory or be mourned, softened, or transfigured:

The only referent that is absolutely real is thus of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity, would destroy the “movement of survival,” what I call “survivance,” at the very heart of life. This absolute referent of all possible literature is on par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, “trace du tout autre.” This is the only absolute trace—effaceable, ineffaceable. (“No Apocalypse” 28)

The irreversible destruction of the entire archive and all symbolic capacity would then be the ultimate reality of a nonarchivable event, the absolute effacement of any possible trace, that is to say, the absolutely ineffaceable trace, the entirely other. Unassimilable, a-symbolic, untraceable, absolutely not there. A catastrophe of such scope and dimension—that is, not merely the physical destruction of the archive, of all archives, but the destruction of all possibility of archivization in general—would destroy the movement of survival, of survivance, and all entanglement between life and the symbolic: life as we know it. What begins as an hypothesis about the destruction of historical and positive archives escalates or generalizes its threat to the very movement of survival, to the effacement of all trace of life/death. The hypothesis of total, remainderless destruction that threatens the very movement of survival is directly linked in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” to the risk run by the movement of the world: a “terrifying autoimmunitary logic” endangering “nothing less than the mondialisation or the worldwide movement of the world, life on earth and elsewhere, without remainder” (Borradori 98–99).

In “Autoimmune Illness as a Death-drive: An Autobiography of Defence,” Alice Andrews argues that this figure of the worst that resembles “the silence of death, of pure death uncontaminated by life” (195) amounts to a homeopathic autoimmunity, an autoimmunity that protects and maintains itself as risk, that is, that defends both life and death, life/death, the best and the worst to come. Derrida’s gesture of generalizing autoimmunity in this way would become “the means of survival of all traces, that is of the trace as life” (Andrews 194). The remainderless effacement of the trace, the hypothesis of the absolutely pure trace, “‘the pure worst’ homeopathically treats the manifestation of the worst,” which in “No Apocalypse, Not Now” is the possibility of the closure of the archive “epitomised … by Modern Literature” (Andrews 198–199). The manifestation of the worst, literature’s obsessive and ultimate referent, leaves no room but for the multiplication of strategic manoeuvers and tactics of deterrence in the attempt to make the conversation between warring parties—or, as Derrida writes at the end of “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” life itself—last longer. Does this mean that even as “the necessity of the worst,” autoimmunity constitutes the archive’s homeostasis after all? Perhaps, but it also affronts it with a radicalness that threatens to dissolve the entanglement of life/death with an irreversible, pure, a-symbolic death. It is from this place of extreme or absolute vulnerability that the hypothesis of total destruction, says Derrida, “watches over” and “guides [the] footsteps” of deconstruction (“No Apocalypse” 27).

It is plausible to argue that Derrida’s long preoccupation with the archive prefigures his formalization of autoimmunity into a general and implacable law. The destruction of the autos of reason and of everything that finds itself in precarious cohabitation with literature is rethought in Archive Fever in terms of psychoanalysis and the psychical archive. The archive here takes up the Freudian hypothesis, or rather “irresistible thesis,” of “the possibility of a radical perversion, indeed, a diabolical death drive, an aggression or a destruction drive: a drive, thus, of loss” (9). The archival drive of conservation, what institutes the archivable event and preserves the archival body, does not exist without the threat of the death drive, of an a priori forgetfulness that can expire in radical finitude: “there would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression” (19). The archive is defined as what is threatened with total destruction, with a threat that extends to the act and possibility of all archivization, to all mnemotechnical exteriority, both psychical and factual: “this threat is in-finite, it sweeps away the logic of finitude and the simple factual limits, the transcendental aesthetics, one might say, the spatio-temporal conditions of conservation” (19). Archive fever is the inflammation of an interiority with exteriority, a prosthesis of an inside that multiplies all the internal and external partitions that are supposed to constitute the subject. The condition of the archive is generalized by virtue of the sweeping away not only of factual limits but of the conditions of their constitution and preservation.

In The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar, Michael Naas contrasts Derrida’s preoccupation with the archive with the notion of the trace. Naas points out that archive and trace are not the same insofar as the former involves the organisation of the latter always under “the authority of some power of selection or interpretation” (136). This does not mean that the trace only suffers archival violence without bearing violence itself. It means, however, that to the extent that the trace is defined by its nonarchivability—the trace cannot be kept as such—it becomes the symptom of a finitude without limit. The condition of the archive extends, according to Naas, from the materiality of the archived entity to “everything from which the tissue of living experience is woven”: “If the archive preoccupies us so greatly, it is perhaps because there seems to be no outside of the archive, no hors-archive, or at least no outside of the general text and thus outside the movement of archivization” (133).

Derrida imagines a project of “general archiviology”—which he describes as “a word that does not exist but that could designate a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive. Such a discipline must in effect risk being paralysed in a preliminary aporia” (Archive Fever 34). The aporia is sketched out in topological terms, especially with regard to the peculiar place (neither inside nor outside) that psychoanalysis would hold in this discipline. It would either be included in it or, after having been integrated with it, raised above it (as a critical authority in the Kantian sense). A general, interdisciplinary archiviology would absorb and also submit itself to psychoanalysis, to its logic, concepts, topics, that is, it would give itself over to the unconscious and the death drive, to the fever that unsettles all kinds of principality, commencement, and commandment, be they physical, historical, biological, ontological, or nomological, as well as all egological ipseity or individuality. In other words, it would accept the irreversibility of its autoimmune symptomatology and condition. In Rogues the logic of autoimmunity appears to outsource one of its most privileged sources, the death drive:

What psychoanalysts call more or less complacently the unconscious remains, it seems to me, one of the privileged sources, one of the vitally mortal and mortally vital reserves or resources, for this implacable law of the self-destructive conservation of the “subject” or of egological ipseity. To put it a bit sententiously in the interest of time, without autoimmunity there would be neither psychoanalysis nor what psychoanalysis calls the “unconscious.” Not to mention, therefore, the “death drive,” the cruelty of “primary sadism and masochism”—or even what we just as complacently call “consciousness.” (55)

As both a constitutive process and an implacable law that operates in all self-formation or delimitation while sweeping away all onto-topological, biological, and nomological limits, autoimmunity follows from the hypothesis of a radical finitude and a generalized archive fever. From the archive of literature to the psyche, to the heart of the living, it inflicts all the configurations and organisations of life/death with a finitude so radical that it threatens a priori with absolute dissemination everything it allows to form. Autoimmunity watches over deconstruction; it bears the necessity of the worst in its indissociability with the possibility of the best. No criticism–Kantian or pharmacological—and no biopolitics, no matter how affirmative, will resolve or eradicate this indissociability.

We might ask how generally Autoimmunity reaches. Could something like radical finitude be conceivable in biological accounts about the origins of life, the emergence of biological individualities, and the formation of the living out of the nonliving? We will pursue this question by contrasting the metaphysical assumptions of two biological theories: first, the theory of endosymbiosis, which was brought to prominence by life scientist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, and second, Jean Claude Ameisen’s theory of apoptosis, which, according to Francisco Vitale, is a source for Derrida’s thinking of autoimmunity.

In What is Life? Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan advance the hypothesis of endosymbiosis in order to explain the emergence and evolution of complex organisms out of the first membrane-bounded cells. One of the major events or innovations in the history of life occurred some two thousand million years ago and involved the evolution from the prokaryotic to the eukaryotic cell, that is, from cells lacking a nucleus to cells containing a nucleus. The protagonists of this account are bacteria, “Earth’s tiniest life forms” (Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? 69) and its greatest innovators, and the process of their merging is called endosymbiosis. The evolution from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, from bacteria to protocists, “catapulted life to a greater level of complexity and gave it different potentials and risks. Not just by gradual mutation but suddenly through symbiotic alliance did the first eukaryotes form” (91). Symbiotic alliance came about as a result of “hunger, crowding and thirst amongst teeming bacteria” (90).

This new form of life, which is our kind of life, that of the enucleated cell, first emerges and evolves through a process that is variously described as cannibalism, long-lasting sexual encounter, infection, permanent disease, or parasitism. The symbionts are members of different species that do not just live near or on each other but inside foreign bodies. Margulis and Sagan claim that bacteria are the best endosybionts for at least four reasons:

First, because they have been entering into stable relationships with one another for several thousand of millions of years, as they are good at forming permanent relationships. Second, their tiny bodies fluidly lose and acquire genes, making them amenable to rapid genetic change. Third, bacteria have only a limited expression of individuality; no circulating antibodies guard them–an “infection,” far from being rejected as it might be in an animal with immune system, can thus become the basis for life-long association, a mutual evolution. Fourth, bacteria’s vast chemical repertoire leads to a tendency of metabolical complementarity less often seen in association between highly individualized members of plant and animal species. (97)

The symbiotic or interactive view of the history of life as a cellular phenomenon is propelled by symbioses, the physical and chemical association between organisms of different species, which results in the production of new individuals and is a major source of evolutionary novelty. Each body, as Margulis and Sagan describe, “is the charitable gift of a biochemical museum, and each bacterial cell an unplanned time capsule” that contains fragments of preliving systems and embodies the processes of early Earth (What is Life? 63).

Closer to life’s original structures, bacteria are said to be forms of a larger life, free of aging and in principle immortal:

Although, of course, like all life, bacteria can be killed by starvation, heat, salt, and desiccation, these microbes do not normally die. As long as the ambience permits, bacteria grow and divide, free of aging. Unlike the mammalian body which matures and dies, a bacterial body has no limits. A disequilibrium structure thrown up by an evolving universe, it is, in principle, immortal. (Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? 76)

Programmed death evolved much later with the emergence of multicellular organisms: “These new cells were the first protocists and their coming brought the kinds of individuality and cell organisation, the kind of sex, and even the kind of mortality (programmed death of the individual) familiar to us animals” (Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? 90). Endosymbiosis or bacteria sex came with a price: “Fatefully for the future history of life forms such as ourselves, in protocists sexuality became inextricably linked to death …. Programmed death as the final stop of a lifelong metabolism was absent at the origin of life– and for a very long time afterward” (113). Death then, according to Margulis and Sagan’s account, evolved at a later stage in evolution as “the first—and … still the most serious—sexually transmitted ‘disease’” (113). Death here refers to programmed death, what is called apoptosis or cellular suicide, and not to the possibility of dying in general. Bacteria can be killed and can suffer necrosis, but they do not naturally die. We will soon look at these different kinds of death and at the metaphysical exigencies or hypotheses that underlie them.

In Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (1986), Margulis and Sagan link their hypothesis of immortality to the hypothesis of a nuclear catastrophe: “even nuclear war would not be a total apocalypse, since the hardy bacteria underlying life on a planetary scale would doubtless survive us” (15). In their 1997 preface, reflecting on Microcosmos’s approach to life, earth, and humanity from the perspective of a “planet whose evolution has been largely a bacterial phenomenon” (18), they recognize having articulated a critique of anthropocentrism in the style of deconstruction. Margulis and Sagan directly refer to Derrida’s “dismantling of hierarchical oppositions,” including humanity/animality, according to a strategy of “reversal and displacement” (18). They acknowledge a shortcoming or naïveté in having restricted their approach only to the reversal of this hierarchy; by merely taking humanity off of the top and putting it at the bottom of “nature,” they had not ventured to dismantle the “oppositional distortions imposed by the hierarchy itself” (18). As “one among other microbial phenomena” (18–19), humanity holds no metaphysical priority, and if there is a speck or sperm or egg of immortality in it, it comes from its bacterial past, present, and future.

Radical finitude or the death drive has no place in this account of early life. Symbiosis is about the connectivity of all life, life as a network of ever renewed and evolving encounters, literally about living together and pioneering ways of doing so. It was the bacteria and not the animals that “pioneered symbiosis and the organisation of individuals from multicellular collectives” (Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? 131). The symbiotic hypothesis proposes an account of the formation of individuality prior to the categories of immunization and in ways that already anticipate and unsettle these categories. Symbiosis is characterised by an openness that undermines fixed individuality but can take many different forms, not all beneficial to all symbionts. In this way it could be considered closer to Esposito’s notion of a primordial communitas in terms of its affirmation of an originary relationship of mutual indebtedness and exchangeability but also of life as power and expansion before individual insulation and the immunitary inflection of community. It could be argued that the foreclosure of something like radical finitude in the early promise of immortality and the possibility of reversibility to such primordiality share the metaphysical hypothesis of a life that could finally be relieved of the evolutionary cost of the “disease” of death. We also come across this hypothesis in the increasing tendency to medicalize old age.

Margulis and Sagan’s theory of symbiosis offers an account of evolution that deviates from a linear Darwinism and natural selection in favor of symbiotic encounter as the resource for the engineering of evolution and expansion. It does not account for everything; it does not account for the origin of the eukaryotic cell in its entirety and it certainly does not account for the origin of life and for all evolution of its forms. As John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argue, the origins of the nucleus as well as of other structures not found in prokaryotes, including whether the eukaryotic cell evolved symbiotically, still require explanation (60). This argument claims an absence of immunity and thus also of autoimmunity (or even of the inverse of this derivation) in early life. This has been contested by more recent claims regarding evidence of immunity in bacteria and the function of apoptosis, or cellular suicide, in the early formation of life. Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg argue that CRISPR, a most versatile region in bacterial DNA whose discovery has opened the way to gene editing, is actually part of the bacterium’s adaptive defense system, which includes methods of sensing an oncoming infection and committing suicide before it progresses in order to protect the great bacterial community (50). This discovery has put single cell organisms “on an equal footing with humans” in terms of “incredibly complex cellular reactions to infections” (59). The true pioneers of gene editing are not humans but the recombinational mechanisms of the microscopic bacteria’s genome. With unforeseeable implications for the future of humanity, human technology is only beginning to discover and manipulate a technology in practice by bacteria thousands of millions of years ago.

With its enormous plasticity, gene editing seems to revive for many the dream of immortality. If this technology is related to the cell’s immunity and to the function of apoptosis and thus to the inseparability of defensive and sacrificial mechanisms, how far (back) can therapeutic imperatives—either medical or metaphysical—reach in resolving the mystery of the living?

In his book La Sculpture du Vivant, Le Suicide Cellulaire ou la Mort Créatrice, Jean-Claude Ameisen examines apoptosis as a mechanism of cellular self-destruction, and while this might initially sound perplexing, he also considers it to be at the heart of the living organism.² Before going into its complexity, it would be useful to give the standard definition of this phenomenon. Apoptosis is usually contrasted with another cause of cellular death called necrosis. As Nicole Le Douarin explains in Dictionnaire Amoureux de la Vie, some of their defining differences are: 1) in apoptosis death comes as the activation of a genetic program, as the result of an actualization of a possibility internal to the cell, while in necrosis death comes as an accident, a result of a traumatism or pathology that inflicts the cell from the exterior; 2) in the process of necrosis, cells begin to swell until they explode, releasing enzymes that alter the architecture of their neighbouring cells and initializing in them the same process. Necrosis is released in successive waves that cause inflammation and scarring. During the process of apoptosis, cells implode rather than explode as they do in necrosis, and undergo major internal modifications. While the nuclei of apoptotic cells become fragmented and their cytoplasm is split out in small parcels, the exterior membrane of the cell remains intact impeding the release of enzymes on the outside. The apoptotic bodies are very quickly absorbed by neighbouring cells, which have the capacity, all living cells do, to pick up the molecular signals emitted during apoptosis. In less than an hour all apoptotic bodies are devoured while still alive and completely disappear. And 3) in general, as apoptotic death causes no inflammation and leaves no scar or trace, it can pass totally unnoticed, and this is why biologists were not able to detect it until the 1980s. The cellular carcasses of necrosis, which is a cataclysmic process, can be easily observed with the microscope (Le Douarin 86–88).

How old is apoptosis in the evolution of life and death? Ameisen considers two scenarios: the first, Margulis and Sagan’s scenario, postulates the existence of two radically different periods in the history of the living: an initial period during which cellular societies did not yet possess the power of auto-destruction, and a subsequent period in which the potentiality of an “untimely” death had begun to spread across the universe of the living. This vision evokes the past as a “golden age” and as a primordial time when each living being still carried within itself the promise of immortality (Ameisen 312). The second scenario, the one proposed by Ameisen, does not require imagining a universe without or before “suicide.” It allows us to glance at the capacity of self-destruction at the heart of early cells, at the birth of life itself (Ameisen 312). It is widely known and established that apoptosis plays an essential role in embryogenesis—one of the most common examples of cellular suicide—during the construction of the organs; it creates the spaces between and models the parts of our body (for instance, the space between our fingers) through a process of elimination similar to the “carving of a sculpture” (40). But apoptosis is also active throughout the life and aging of the individual and is a potentiality that is present in all cells in general, a surging death that needs to be suppressed. It is necessary at every instant to suppress the onset of cellular suicide (285). Even if the cell’s death sentence still depends on the environment of the cell, the “initiation of its execution, the ultimate decision between life and death depends on the cell itself … death seems to be inscribed at the heart of the cell, as a potentiality ready to actualise” (51). Because cellular death is a phenomenon of active self-destruction—and not the result of a brutal murder or a paralysis- it is accompanied by a discourse, the emission of precise signals and messages (61). Cells are programmed to speak the language of living and the language of dying, to wit, to post molecular signals on their surfaces. All cells need to signal constantly to other cells that they are living so as to fend off scavengers. Apoptotic cells erase the signature of life even before advertising their imminent death: a moment of suspension, a “moving frontier” between the “kingdoms” of life and death (67). Although the apoptotic cell still has the capacity to suspend it, once the signal of death has been emitted or the surface receptors of surrounding cells have detected that suicide is underway, the end becomes inevitable and irreversible. The “funereal rites” that accompany this rapid and solitary death leave no lesion, inflammation, or scarring. No corpse. The surrounding living cells completely devour and fill in the space of the dead. No trace is left of the rapid and discreet work of auto-destruction (57).

Self-destruction is a potentiality carried in every cell; it is at the heart of the living and needs to be counterbalanced by its capacity for survival. But more than that, it is perhaps the same cellular tools—the executors and protectors—that control the potentiality of suicide, that fulfil functions essential to life, and that are the architects of cellular survival and duplication. Death does not come as the price of evolution. The same tools used to “sculpture the face of cellular life” also possess, perhaps from the beginning, “the potentiality to sculpture the face of death”: “The answer to the question of ‘when’, of the mystery of the birth of the tools that allow for suicide, appears to be of overwhelming simplicity: since always, at the origin of the first living cell” (Ameisen 316).

Why does this matter to us? What does it matter if death was there at the origin or if it was a late arrival, since it is certain that death will come sooner or later? Perhaps the ineradicability of the suicidal drive in the constitution of life—what Derrida (perhaps drawing on Ameisen, according to Vitale’s hypothesis) calls the general law of autoimmunity—is to be reckoned with in all ontological, biomedical, and biopolitical approaches to disease and cure. Could the irreversibility of cellular suicide, the death that leaves no trace, be another example of the radical finitude postulated in Derrida’s nuclear hypothesis? And is this radical condition not inextricably linked to a radical hospitality at the heart of the living? Is the absolute risk run by the radically finite not also the openness to the absolute trace of the other? Might not total erasure also be the giving way to what or who is to come? Always for better or for worse.

I am not proposing that the biological concept of apoptosis proves Derrida’s pronouncements about the law of autoimmunity to be right. We remain aware of the dangers of extending biological concepts and functions beyond the specificity of their field, especially those involved in the evocation of a complex operation such as apoptosis as a model for hospitality. But the complexity within the minimal structures of the living and the material entanglements and encounters that form them might offer us new insights for understanding and engaging with larger configurations and formulations of the living in our world.

Is biologically inspired critique possible? Can biology give us deconstructive strategies for a deconstructive thinking of life—a biodeconstruction? Can it help us develop an aptitude or cultivate a taste for different modes of relatedness within the living? For this to become possible it is necessary first of all to think through the different uses of the term bios and also differences between the bio- in biodeconstruction and in biopolitics, to deconstruct the bios of biopolitics and its ideological stakes and operations of normalization or, in Malabou’s words, to “deconstruct biopolitical deconstruction” (“Will Sovereignty” 37). Perhaps the ineradicable entanglement of radical finitude and hospitality, which we sketched here through the figure of apoptosis, points to nothing less than the (trans)formation of form that is life itself, a force of openness and erasure always at absolute risk. Perhaps being more in tune with the “self-transformative tendency of life” (Malabou, “Will Sovereignty” 45) could also inform our aptitude for discerning and for knowing. If, as Derrida points out, life is marked by this aptitude for discerning, that is, for marking and remarking its finitudes, the task of what is today called biodeconstruction will be to respond to and to apply new forms and levels of discernibility while at the same time taking more and more into account. This is the task intimated by Derrida in his conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco in For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue when he brings the aptitude for discerning between life and death to life itself; this is the task of biodeconstruction.

Footnotes

1. Life here refers to its Western conception but also more broadly to life as power of transgression and expression of the multiplicity of its forms beyond their particular philosophical and historical conceptualizations and manifestations. Biological critiques of deterministic attitudes and definitions of life and identity add their own questions and insights to the deconstruction of Western biopolitics. The task would then be to question the extent to which biological discourses are embedded in Western conceptualizations of life and open to non-Western ones.

2. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the French are my own.

Works Cited

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• Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, U of Chicago P, 1998.
• ———. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” 1996. Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Translated by David Webb, et al., Stanford UP, 1998, pp. 1–78.
• ———. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, 1984, pp. 20–31. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/464756.
• ———. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford UP, 2005.
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• ———. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi, Polity, 2011.
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• ———. “Will Sovereignty Ever be Deconstructed?” Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Duke UP, 2015.
• Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. U of California P, 1997.
• ———. What is Life? U of California P, 1995.
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Erin Obodiac (bio)
UC Irvine

Of Biodeconstruction (Part II) ventures through the door left open by the emergent questions, hesitations, and provocations about deconstruction, the philosophy of life, and the life sciences advanced in Of Biodeconstruction (Part I). Although Jacques Derrida’s writings on autoimmunity, pharmakon, life-death, the question of the animal, Geschlecht, cloning, living-on, the genetic program, and epigenesis suggest an engagement—from the earliest publications to the last seminars—with biology, the life sciences, and the philosophy of life, it remains a question whether or not deconstruction is already “biodeconstruction.” Yet neither a critique of the biological sciences—contemporary or arcane—nor, alternately, a conclusion concerning the historical limits of deconstruction in our postgenomic era is primarily what is at stake. Rather than taking aim at a target from the outside or foreclosing on the future, the critical force of deconstructive readings and writings tends toward implosion and preemption. And yet: a step of retreat (the pas, the “not” of the step) perhaps hinders differential materiality’s foray into biological thought. Catherine Malabou, the honored respondent for the Of Biodeconstruction double issue, interrogates this hindrance in her many books—especially Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction—and further develops for the present Postmodern Culture issue a critical clarification of what she sees as a Derridean blind spot.

In Of Biodeconstruction (Part I), the essays by Vitale, Obodiac, and Senatore, for the most part, hold fast to Derrida’s critique of self-consciousness as living presence—phenomenology’s cornerstone—and the premise that différance and the trace not only organize and constitute all life, from the amoeba to the human being, but also subtend the animate and the inanimate: counter to a logocentric conception of the genetic code, the genome as a mode of arche-writing, a texture of differential traces, allows for an openness to the outside that might be compatible with contemporary findings in epigenetics, systems theory, and research into the plasticity of the genome. In addition, the conversation by Kirby, Schrader, and Timár, which headed up Part I, demonstrates that new materialist feminism, feminist science studies, and the analysis of the political economy of nature-culture find in biodeconstruction a critical ally.

If Part I situates biodeconstruction within the current critical context and the Derridean groundwork, Part II presents focused readings of Jacques Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity; Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the living being; Jane Bennett’s new materialist and Irwin Schrödinger’s genetic determinist conceptions of life; and Jorge Luis Borges’s bio-onto-theologic story “La escritura del dios.”

Framed against the backdrop of Roberto Esposito’s thesis that biopolitics mediates biology and politics by way of the immunity paradigm, the first essay, Elina Staikou’s “Autoimmunity in Extremis: The Task of Biodeconstruction,” explores the radical dimensions of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity. Arguing that autoimmunity has made its appearance in Derrida’s work under various names—pharmakon, death-drive, the nuclear hypothesis—Staikou suggests that autoimmunity is a central principle for biodeconstruction, one that attends to both the nihilism and the affirmation that characterize life processes such as those played out in endosymbiosysis and apoptosis.

In “Biodeconstructing Merleau-Ponty,” Raoul Frauenfelder turns to the seminars on biology and philosophy Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave in the 1950s at the Collège de France. Frauenfelder identifies the development of the preformationism/epigenesis dialectic as a constitutive stumbling block for Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of the world”—the master concept of his oeuvre—suggesting that this dialectic flattens out the radically differential nature of life-death: biodeconstruction puts into question the teleological closure reasserted by the phenomenological reading of the living being.

Jonathan Basile’s essay, “How the Other Half-Lives: Life as Identity and Difference in Bennett and Schrödinger,” takes up the work of Jane Bennett, Erwin Schrödinger, Immanuel Kant, and Bernard Stiegler to demonstrate how biodeconstruction differs from new materialist, genetic determinist, and anthropocentric conceptions of life. Binaries such as animate/inanimate, vitalism/mechanism, self/other, human/animal, and especially the binary identity/difference fail to account for the living being’s differential materiality.

The final essay, Riccardo Baldissoni’s “Of Other Jaguars: Glosses to the Writing of God,” maps Carl Schmitt’s secularization thesis onto modern biology. In an extended reading of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Writing of the God,” Baldissoni identifies a continuity between ontotheology and biological science: cyberneticists or mathematicians who simulate biological systems via the theory of cellular automata are not so unlike the Mayan priest who attempts to decipher a divine message from the patterned fur of the jaguar.

These essays, as well as the contributions presented in Of Biodeconstruction (Part I), signal that biodeconstruction’s scope of interest ranges from the present critical conjuncture, the philosophical archive that haunts deconstruction, and theory’s disappearing future. They also point to the growing number of conferences, articles, and books that fall under the biodeconstruction umbrella. Some of the books published recently in this field include Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (2019), Dawne McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida’s La Vie La Mort (2019), Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences (2018), Mauro Senatore’s Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida (2018), Matthias Fritsch’s (ed.) Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (2018), Michael Naas’s Plato and the Invention of Life (2018), and David Wills’s Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (2016). It would appear that a biodeconstructive turn is afoot in what is now half-seriously called “Derrida Studies.” Yet the question remains: is biodeconstruction an excrescence of deconstruction, a latecomer, or was it already undertaken, in a fashion, in Derrida’s own writings?

In her response to Of Biodeconstruction, Catherine Malabou argues that it “n’a pas été entreprise par Derrida” and that it remains still to come. In “Derrida en Animal Rationnel: résponse à Of Biodeconstruction,” Malabou observes that Derrida symptomatically retreats from challenging Heidegger’s rejection of Aristotle’s zoological definition of the human being—the zoon logon ekhon and the zoon politikon—and that the peculiar fidelity to this rejection bears analysis. Malabou suggests that this retreat will lead us to a wellspring of presuppositions concerning deconstruction, namely, the status of animalitas with regard to the human being, the schism between life and existence, the complicity between metaphysics and the bio-/zoo-logical conception of life, and the techno-scientific project of the life sciences, especially the cybernetic-genetic program. Heidegger denounces the calculability and instrumentality of cybernetics and the genetic program, yet does not consider, according to Malabou, that the character of biological science might change in the future. She also claims that Derrida retains this foregone judgment against biology all the while mobilizing François Jacob’s “logic of life,” or “genetic writing,” for the elaboration of arche-writing and the trace in Of Grammatology. Aligning the Heideggerian critique of technoscience and the rejection of the zoological definition of man, Malabou identifies a stumbling block that is left “intacte, non-déconstruite” by Derrida. Revisiting Aristotle’s zoon logon ekhon and the zoon politikon might yield a critique of the critique and, proposes Malabou, a conception of the human being that is surprisingly up to date with contemporary biology. Although Derrida does put into question ontology and the priority of Dasein, he does not take, according to Malabou, the direct path, as the crow flies, so to speak, i.e. the explicit subscription to man as animal.

We will leave it to readers to determine if and why this might be the case. Malabou, for her part, surreptitiously invokes “autoimmunity” to account for Derrida’s circumnavigation: in “Faith and Knowledge,” suspicious of the divide between the machine and the living being—the latter of which is traversed by automatisms and machinic principles through and through—Derrida would initially appear to buttress the defences of the programmatic, technoscientific understanding of life against Heidegger’s critique of it. And yet: the spotlighting of the machine only sends the zoon further into the shadows, reinstating Heidegger’s denigration of mere life. In this account, however, readers might wonder, again, whether différance, the trace, and arche-writing interminably destabilize and make inoperative any programmatic machine, even, as the Of Biodeconstruction double issue intimates, deconstruction as an autoimmunity machine: a question concerning the zoon logon ekhon and the zoon politikon that any future biodeconstruction might follow.

The contributors to Of Biodeconstruction Parts I and II warmly thank Eyal Amiran and Annie Moore for their editorial direction and management of this double issue of Postmodern Culture.