The Word Yawn Insinuates Both Boredom and An Untraversable Territory
After reading about half of Derrida’s Writing and Difference (to be precise, the essays up to and including “Violence and Metaphysics”), I find myself somewhat stranded. The text is dense, deliberately playful, deliberately reflexive and designed to open space for thought rather than close it off (I take one of Derrida’s central concerns to be a critique of structuralism based on the myth of a perfectly closed system—particularly with respect to systems of meaning, language in particular). So Derrida can be added to those who seek to demonstrate as well as describe their theses, a poet-philosopher, which makes him (like Nietzsche, like Baudrillard) mesmerising to read and at the same time extremely challenging from the perspective (mine) of wanting to systematise, categorise, exploit (for the purposes of my thesis). More mundane limitations on my effective grappling with the text are the fact that the tradition he is criticising is the continental tradition, taking in Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Hegel and others who I haven’t read (Nietzsche is the only continental philosopher with whom I’d presume even an elementary understanding); and the even more mundane (but no less crucial) fact that all this involves translations into English from already-difficult German and French texts. And so on.
What are you supposed to think when you read that Heideggers complete works are still in the process of translation some 20 years after the project started, that it is looking like they are going to run out into more than 70 volumes? That these are in German? That translators and critics have been from the start arguing over the accuracy of the selection, over the acuity of the editing? That something like 5,000 or more books and papers have been published on his work since 1945? What are the benefits of reading it all? Can you assess them in advance? Where to turn to decide how to assess them? Where to stand as you shake your foundations (in Neurath’s boat, says the echo of tradition—otherwise you drown). Recalling, from an essay I read several years ago:
“To read a work is to think as a utopian. The utopian ideal of the Enlightenment was that each book should represent the rational-aesthetic design of the universe in the mind, and that all books together would create an even greater model. The closet utopian is the one who believes if she or he can only read enough of the best works, he or she will know the truth, and understand it” [Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, “Notes on Mutopia”, Postmodern Culture, Volume 8, Number 1 (September 1997)]
This style of thinking reaching a kind of apex in the Bible, taken to be the self-sufficient, self-revealing source of total truth. And as such, the seductiveness apparent. And yet Bible-based religions proliferate. And if every decision is necessarily incompletely informed (“The instant of Decision is Madness” [Kierkegaard]), then where to start is the question; as Derrida says (he’s referring to Foucault; it may as well be me referring to Derrida, anyone referring to any influence):
“I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. Starting to enter into dialogue in the world, that is, starting to answer back, he always feels “caught in the act,” like the “infant” who, by definition and as his name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. And when, as is the case here, the dialogue is in danger of being taken—incorrectly—as a challenge, the disciple knows that he alone finds himself already challenged by the master’s voice within him that precedes his own. He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. This interminable unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that the master, like real life, may always be absent. The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.” [Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness” in Alan Bass (Trans.) Writing and Difference, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 36-76 (here pp. 36-37)]
Yes but—what to say? The question of creativity. The question of originality. The question of sameness and difference, of identity and difference, Derrida’s questions par excellence. Because the function (a function) of the way Derrida writes is that it provokes, in its ambiguity (for me) a succession of interpretations, a process where I stretch for the definitive meaning of the work (even if only for me) even as Derrida seeks to undermine such a notion. That tension runs all the way through his work—the tension whereby he wishes to say that there is nothing under or over language to grasp apart from the language itself, and yet he is expressing this from within the self-same language. Language is power, violence (difference, rupture, et cetera). It wants you to concur, not to resist. Do any languages have a pronoun referring to the text qua text, so that an author may really let the text speak on its own terms without inserting themselves in the always-misleading I? Has a novel been written in the first-person reflective without using the word I? Without a sense of narration?
A Derrida-influenced cascade of reflections. Thought circulates like an economy (this thought, too). Thoughts are born, mutate, die. Each thought existing in opposition to every other, leading some to demand an answer to the question of where they came from, some to ignore the problem, some to dissolve it (but is not each of these questions yet one more thought, or moment of thought?); some thoughts driving to unity and others to division, each thought presupposing another, yet none going any deeper than any of the others, an economy without depth, only opposition and circulation, creating the illusion of depth (or is it just?, other thoughts persistently plea). A finite-dimensional system creating a dialogue of the possibilities of a yet higher dimension, and yet how is this possible from within the system? Any high-dimensional system can be reduced to a more complex lower-dimensional system (or can it), and the possibility must run in the other direction also, and so which way should thoughts run? A terminal unifying thought, a thought that runs up against the question of the zero-dimensional system, the infinitely dimensional system. Cellular automata and string theory chasing each others’ tail. The limits of meaning: a persistant thought wanting to take the others and compress them to zero, or else stretch them to infinity. God cannot listen to the interior of a thought, only to the edge where it crumbles at the touch of His ear. In order to act, these questions must stop, but then these questions are an act, and in fact the very ability to ask a question presupposes an answer of some sort, but not, of course, the answer to the question asked, and an answer that may remain forever opaque to the ear that hears the question, or the voice that frames it. Is there an original question, a primary question, do some of these questions move upwards or downwards, and what would this motion mean? On what basis can a thought trust another thought? (Even further: Can the thought that there are other thoughts trust itself?)
A well known truism: to live well is to live in the present; like all truisms, patently false in any number of respects, but of most interest here the peculiar effect whereby absorbing the truism requires a distancing from what it expresses, from the present, an abstract considering, a detachment from the lived experience of the instant and a reflection over the very idea of past, present, and future, in order to evaluate the truism, a process whereby even considering, even understanding what the truism purports to state, renders it false.
Let us imagine explorers setting out to get to the heart of the earth by walking around it. But what would it mean for them to be setting out to get to the heart of the earth, here? How would our explorers understand their quest? Let us instead imagine explorers setting out to find the centre of their territory. Each starts out from the same point, and traversing at the same rate, they undertake to measure their progress to the edge and then return to exchange the result. Supposing the territory to be the surface of a sphere, each will end at the opposite point simultanesouly, and confronting each other the question will be, were we moving outwards or inwards? Have we arrived at the centre or did we leave from it? (Some perhaps suggest their journey was more interesting than the others’.) The answer being of course either there is no centre or every point is the centre (here again the drive to zero or infinity), the problem being the notion of centre, the problem here being the notion of space altogether. Would the explorers posit a higher dimension to explain the result? Could they? Need they? What here is captured in the analogy with thought, since we are supposing the explorers are themselves thinking and speaking, understanding. Isn’t the problem that of justifying the thought that suggests thought can get outside of itself? Justifying the utopian thought? Realism a triumph of utopian thinking? The thought of a thinker, a triumph of utopian thinking?
The thought of philosophical problems as diseases. Philosophy as therapy. Wittgenstein wanted to say look, this is what you end up with when you run language up against its limits: opaque nonsense, pseudo-problems. Which is just a dissolving thought. Scepticism and nihilism seem to just recur throughout philosophy—Deleuze committed suicide, Nietzsche went mad, Heidegger was sympathetic to Nazism…
Let us imagine our explorers setting off to find a centre while a community waits behind in anticipation. Let us imagine the territory is not spherical. Not wrapped around a third dimension. Let us imgaine that there are neverthelss limits through which they pass irrecoverably, one-way passages that unfold as inevitabilities, openings through which they pass never to return. A question for the community: send out more explorers?