The Ends of Man, Derrida & The Animal That Therefore I Am

I remember being thoroughly perplexed when I first read this work last spring when Dr. Diane Davis gifted me a copy of it. I didn’t know what was a pretense from a feigned feint, a joke from a wit, science from myth. These limits, "that is to say, indivisible threshold[s]" (133)  are still very difficult, if not impossible, to locate, but fixing them is not my main concern upon my return and re-tracing of the text.  I still am confused, but I have since ceased to view this wounded state of unknowing in a negative light. 

     In a sense the desire for self-certainty in thinking turns the home into a citadel. Does the House or Truth of Being require a Guardian? What if one “awakens and leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind him[?]. He burns his text and erases the traces of his steps. His laughter then will burst out, directed toward a return which no longer will have the form of the metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor, doubtless, “beyond” metaphysics, the form of a memorial or a guarding of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. He will dance, outside the house, the active Vergesslichkeit, the “active forgetting and the cruel (grausam) feast of which the Genealogy of Morals speaks. No doubt that Nietzsche called for an active forgetting of Being: it would not have the metaphysical form imputed to it by Heidegger” (136). This quote comes from a lecture Derrida gave in October of ’68 in New York. The lecture was later published under the title, “The Ends of Man.” In this younger Derrida one sees the beginnings and/or the ends of The Animal That Therefore I am.

     In a footnote to “The Ends of Man” Derrida writes, “The deconstruction of the end and of man takes place on the margins of philosophy: in titles and footnotes” (Note 15). The title of the essay reveals the playful possibilities of the limits and question of man. “In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper”(134).

Where to being in teasing out such a statement? I’m not sure, “naturally I am going to skip a lot, I am going to walk by skipping, we don’t have time to follow things in a continuous way” (142). Derrida puts the trace of ‘man’ under erasure.

     In the Essay “And Say the Animal Responded” Derrida reframes the question of the critique of humanism in a way that opens up new avenues for thinking ‘the animal’ and ‘the human.’ In a way it resuscitates a more ancient meaning but also breathes a new life into the meaning of ‘the animal,’ etymologically derived from the PIE *ane- "to blow, to breathe" and related to the Greek anemos meaning "wind.”

It is not just a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gifts, laughter, crying, respect, etc.-the list is necessarily without limit, and the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we live has refused the “animal” all of that). It also means asking whether what calls itself human as the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever posses the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. 

     Man has not been able to cover the tracks of its “wounded reaction not to humanity’s first trauma, the Copernican (the earth revolves around the sun), not irs third trauma, the Freudian (the decentering of consciousness under the gaze of the unconscious), but rather to its second trauma, the Darwinian” (136). Lacan was not able to cover his anthropocentric tracks, even though he roots man’s superiority over the animal as based in a lack, defect, or fault. And neither am I, but I can erase them, or should I say...

3Jane's Semiotic Straylight: Repeating Derrida's Rupture in Reading Neuromancer

Since I typically repudiate my father in my blog posts, I will set out by identifying with my current Foster Father. I will attempt to sketch out a reading of Gibson’s Neuromancer through the lens of Derrida, specifically the work “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” from Writing and Difference. Derrida’s analysis of Levi-Strauss, who was originally in the audience when Derrida presented this work, presents the concept of bricolage as “a critique of language” that “could ‘be applied almost word for word’ to criticism and especially to “literary criticism” (Derrida, 4). Bricolage is a mode of critique that affirms deploying multiple and heterogeneous instruments the bricoleur has readily available. My reading of Gibson through Derrida illustrates the way in which “if one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur” (4). The implication being, that our forms of knowledge and literary analysis are always mediated by the baggage of our tools of discursive analysis and the entirety of texts. Derrida considers the engineer of language, a critic/subject who thinks that discourse can be created ex nihilo is a “theological idea” (5). But once it becomes acknowledged that there can be no distinction between the bricoleur and the engineer, the idea of the bricoleur loses its uniqueness that it was first introduced with. Rather than being a mode of critique that one could adopt out of their own choosing, it is an always already present condition of engaging in literary criticism. 

Derrida begins with an analysis of “the whole history of the concept of structure” (1) in which he shows how the idea of the structurality of structure has been displaced, “neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (1). This history proceeds as “a series of substitutions of center for center” (1). The continuous desire to determine or fix a center to structures, thought, or metaphysics is concerned with the search for a nonexistent origin. The center represents the attempt to determine being as presence, from the idea of consciousness, God, Man, Subject etc. Hegel for examples problematizes the Deist conception of God, or the idea that God is unknowable to point to a similar contradiction Derrida brings up. Derrida writes of a centered structure as “contradictorily coherent” since it supposes the center is both inside and outside, part of and separate from the totality or that “the totality has its center elsewhere [emphasis original]” (1). I would make the conjecture, though I’m uncertain, that Hegel was sensitive to a similar sort of problematic at the heart of the debate between theology and philosophy, Hegel thought it was illogical to consider the finite, or man, as separated from the infinite, or God. The infinite by definition has to include the finite, such that God ought to be considered as immanent and the development of man or spirit as the realization of God within consciousness. Derrida would see Geist as another “transcendental signified” (2) or centered structure, Hegel’s move and method seems to embody the idea of “coherence in contradiction” (1). The center attempts to limit the free-play of a structure, but as its becomes clear that one is always already implicated within the infinite games of substitutions and permutations, an attempt is made to master anxiety by tying free-play to a grounded foundation.

The work also deals with the question of a ‘rupture,’ a ‘disruption’ or ‘event.’ Derrida’s event is not something new but a repetition of a process that’s already occurred. Levi-Strauss has already done much of the work  When the structurality of structure begins to be thought it became necessary “to begin to think there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being present” (2) that the center was “a non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (2). Language has replaced God or man or whatever was before it as the transcendental signified; but language is different in the sense that language is perpetually immersed in itself. It makes no sense to think of language as outside of the totality, such as the structuralist distinction between language and speech, or the sign and the signifier. Derrida writes “If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept” (2). Rather than reducing the sign to thought, it is by holding open the opposition between “the sensible and the intelligible” (2) that “puts into question the entire system in which the preceding reduction functioned” (2). This line of thought occurs not just in philosophy or science but is “political, economic, technical and so forth” (3). The decentering of culture and metaphysics and its concepts occurred in the moment that the processes quit considering themselves in terms of reference. Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger wagered a “multiplicity of destructive discourses” against metaphysics, yet they could not escape the terms they sought to oppose. The moment one proclaims one is somehow outside of or against metaphysics their thought has “already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (3). One necessarily makes a metaphysical claim simply be invoking the idea at all. I’m uncertain at this point, but I believe Derrida is making the argument that metaphysics as an idea doesn’t exist at all unless it exists either including or because of the concept of the “sign.” If these great destroyers of metaphysics wish to destroy any notion of a transcendental signified than they ought to extend their refusal to the “concept and to the word sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done” (2). It cannot be done because these destructive discourses rely on the concept of the sign to leverage their assaults.

 Derrida traces a movement within Levi-Strauss’ work to show how the fact that “the language of the human sciences criticizes itself” (4) is a part of the nature of this event or rupture. The earlier discussion of bricolage shows the ways in which Levi-Strauss was more than willing to substitute one means of engaging criticism for another quite readily, and that his reliance on empiricism was one of relative efficacy not an absolute methodology. These changes in approach to ethnology are symptoms of the larger linguistic disruption. Derrida analyzes the ways in which the Levi-Strauss’ analysis of myths had to be mythomorphic themselves. The analysis of the reflexivity of mythic discourse seems indebted to Adorno and Horkheimers The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they demonstrate the ways in which rationality and myth are entangled. Enlightenment is mythopoetic just as much as myths embody the spirit of critique. It further seems to rely on the notion that thought must become adequate to its object. Perhaps Derrida is saying that thought will always already slip into the form or logic of its object, mythic analysis being a myth in itself, but also that the acknowledgment of this aspect should be affirmed. Gibson’s Rastas are both premodern and postmodern in a sense, they believe in a form of Christianity yet they reject all forms of systemization of human life and rigid identity categories. They believe in religion but not under its modern constraints. The mythic nature of Rasta beliefs and their fragmented sayings pay testament to this entanglement. They see their relationship to religion that informs their relationship to technology and objects partly as their saving grace.

I view this line as indicating that Derrida is giving me permission to play, “And what I am saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on “structure”” (3). When the Finn is showing Case around the Villa Straylight, its structure itself speaks to him, giving a sort of meta-commentary about its own coding. Finn explains that it was an essay of 3Jane’s about semiotics that she wrote when she was twelve but never totally finished.  The Straylight,

Is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves… (172)

Could we not interpret this coding of cyberspace as the creation of a sort of substructure of a totality that defines itself by its difference in terms of relating to the other possible codes. If we take each space to mean each sign we could interpret the “secret” as the irreducible tension between the sign and the signified. The movement through passages represents the signifying chain itself. Molly often would go linearly always forward Case struggling to identify exactly which route she will take, which associative trajectory she will follow. We see here the breakdown between the written code and the creation of real spatial experiences. The structural aspects of the code that seem fixed spatially give birth to a new series of relations when experienced temporally as Case lives through Molly.

The essay continues to say “The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room” (172). Freeside is centered structure that attempts to conceal that the center exists outside of itself, that it wants to hide how it has limited free-play via some grounded or guiding principle. Whereas,

In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage (172).

The attempt to determine being through presence here is anxious. Gibson writes “the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull” (173). Here we see the point Derrida made about the ways an idea is loaded or impregnated with the various transformations of the idea or the conditions under which it emerged. To speak of any of metaphysics is always already caught within this game of associations. The system of Freeside was a displacement of the original Freeside to a certain degree, but it also contained something of the other systems within itself. Is the “denial of the bright void beyond the hull” (173) similar to what Derrida indicates we need to avoid “that violence which consists in centering a language which is describing an acentric structure” (5)? Or is the void beyond the hull space of free-play beyond the determinations of presence?

Community Is Not A Choice

The web reveals the exteriority of ourselves, the way we exist in and through others, not just in a game of shadows and mirrors but also materially for our subsistence. The way that such a seemingly abstracted and virtual assemblage can be so real exposes us to the finitude of the self and the irreducibility of the other. In a radical gesture of nay-saying to the suspicious scapegoating devices of demystification, Brown’s deconstructive approach to viral Texts opens up spaces of imagining otherwise.

The frustration of reading the article and what a ‘Post-Hermeneutic’ represents is intrinsic to the subject matter itself. The fact that it is difficult to conceive of what community looks like in Brown’s sense evinces the need to problematize the concept itself. Community is “something that happens to us,” not an ideology one chooses to accept or not, it exists as the condition rather than a coherent entity. Brown points to the way in which virtual encounters can be traumatic, uncanny and decentering. Viral texts often occur as a working on the limits, thresholds and aporias of our knowledge. We are unaware of the potential each packet of information sent contains, where are our virtual messages in a bottle will end up, and to whom our creations will impact. We are also forced to confront and come face-to-face, or stand side-by-side, with alterity. Browns writes; “The internet culture forces people to recognize the alien and other forms of culture which make up the planetary culture, the interconnectedness that informs their contemporary beings.”

Brown diagnoses two seemingly disparate yet interrelated symptoms of the hermeneutic impulse. In juxtaposing Poster’s limited tolerance with Asadullah’s fundamentalism Brown is able to show the naïveté of essentialist conceptions of community. The critique of Poster is more complex than at first glance. For Brown “it is not a matter of creating community without exclusion” for that would be the easy option. All one would have to do is tweak Poster’s position slightly to say it accepted fundamentalisms as well. Rather, “it is a matter of recognizing that no created community is universal.” Thus Brown is not making a specifically prescriptive claim about the need to tolerate the intolerant and always accept the other, rather it is a recognition of the traumatic kernel that is pricked in our fleeting moments of contact with the other.

Brown writes, “If we expand our definition of community beyond one of willing contributors and unified goals, we might be able to better formulate a road to peace.” The question is, who will build this road to peace? How will it be produced? What transforms its ideational formulation into a material entity? Perhaps I’m being rather reductive, but does ‘exposedness’ not become either some abstract property everyone possesses, almost akin to a universal human right, or just another floating-signifier without pragmatic import for programmatic politics? Arguably there may be an implicit assumption about the indefinite process of referentiality and the mediation of knowledge through texts; but is there not a danger in abandoning the idea of community founded on “unified goals?” Even if one grants the fact that a universalist conception of community is ultimately fictitious, is there not a very tangible way in which believing in the fantasy foments solidarity?

Brown problematizes the us/them dichotomy; demonstrating how Bert Laden represents the contradictions inherent to cyberculture. I think a point that should be pressed is whether that moment is always “instantaneously lost in the move to interpret the image and massage the trauma.” Why is creating a theoretical apparatus concerned with the idea of “being-in-community” any less totalizing than one centered around class conflict or sexuality? Does Brown not create a normative yardstick to measure his critique of normativity against? Does he not mirror his own critique of Poster by polemically positioning himself as in possession of a superior theoretical world view? Is Brown only open to concepts of community as long as they are the proper rethinking? Only open to hermeneutic approaches as long as they are Post-x, y, z form of instrumentality? To me this exposes what Davis says is the challenge to “compare without completely effacing the incomparableness of the ‘we’”(2005: 208). But what can this comparison entail? How do we know if we have transgressed the prohibition against effacement? Is this not what Mas’ud Zavarzadeh speaks to in his critique of postality when he writes “To be so totally opposed to totalizing is, of course, itself a totalization. But totalizing in opposing totalization does not seem to bother…anti-totalizing pedagogues because the issue, ultimately, is really not epistemological ("totalizing") but economic (class). In contemporary pedagogy "totalizing" is an epistemological cover for the class cleansing of pedagogy.”

On the one hand, Egyptian protesters don’t seem to be appealing to abstracted concepts such as alterity or differance in their resistance, but on the on the other the looming atmosphere of anxiety surrounding the future trajectory of the movement seems to stem from the inability to derive certainty about social or religious issues which constantly exceed ideological demystification. While one can always become more orthodox or materialist to the point of absolute determination, the more important question to be raised is why have the programmatic politics of the left failed in many respects? Is it simply a question of aligning oneself with necessity, or has our thought not yet become adequate to its object of inquiry?