Archiving the messianic: Derrida, Benjamin and the politics of memory

There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of reptition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. (Derrida, Archive Fever, 11)

For most of us, the archive represents a practical space of investigation, with its contents sitting in darkness, waiting to be reassessed and rediscovered. What's perhaps less obvious about the archive is its construction, an analogue to the scholar's privileged cultural position and, along with it, the hermeneutical agenda she brings to her research. Since Derrida's Archive Fever, the archive has become a important concept in questions of cultural theory and historical methodology. Of course, Derrida wasn't the first to question the archive's authority or the ways that history is produced by it. Not simply a site for the preservation of cultural artifacts or a repository of a past authenticity, the archive also names a basic procedure of inclusion and exclusion, a simultaneous remembering and forgetting that proceeds from any attempt to archive. Derrida's work invites us to consider several crucial outcomes of this process: first and foremost, that a dialectic exists between what gains historical legitimacy through its preservation, and what is condemned to oblivion by being ignored or repressed. The archive always entails some kind of exteriority and for this reason opens up the discussion to theology (the messianic) and psychoanalysis (repression). Secondly, while most discussions of the archive have been driven by questions surrounding the organization of the past, Derrida's work considers how these ongoing modes of organization orient us toward the future.

The possibility of forgetfulness, without which a properly "archival" desire could not function, is not only limited to repression: it is one of several names given to the forgetting that is always precedes the work of memory. In Derrida's treatment archive paradoxically collects and orders that which we desire to preserve for the future by removing it from present circulation. Put another way, the archive safeguards its contents in the name of access by making them inaccessible. The process of archiving thus mirrors a process of forgetting and repression that can also be described as eco-nomic: “it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law” (7). Appropriate, then, that "archive" derives from arkheion: "a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded" (2). The ability to preserve and organize, in other words, also entails the authority to interpret.

It all sounds quite abstract, but Derrida makes clear that the question of the archive is not “the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive” (36). In other words, a concept of the archive already presumes some degree of distance from its operation. Thus Derrida finds it useful to speak of the archive as aporetic repetition: “The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out to the future” (68). Rather than a straightforward concept, the archive names a cultural procedure that remains bound up with a fetish for a singularity not unlike Walter Benjamin's description of the "aura." As Derrida writes,

With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction. (90)

This is the seemingly impossible task of the archive: to remain open and accessible, to allow for reproduction and repetition without doing violence to its contents, all the while resisting the idols of presence and authenticity. Not an easy task but an unavoidable reality, particularly within an institution like the university.

Perhaps this is why the ability of the archive to “call into question the coming of the future” hinges upon the messianic, an arrival that is not predicated by any conditions or defined by any knowable content (33). Derrida argues that the injunction of memory to preservation and repetition, “even when it summons memory or the safeguard of the archive, turns incontestably toward the future to come” because such repetition is always, “in the same stroke,” the “anarchive” of the death drive, the violence of forgetting, and thus “the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition” (79). So, on the one hand, Derrida provides us with a way of understanding the archive as an aporetic structure that is always already active in every impression (which is always accompanied by a suppression or repression, a spectral presence haunting the archive, etc.); on the other hand, the very repetition of this process is an opening to the “future to come,” to which he gives the name the “messianic.”

As Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, the term “messianic” is a repurposed term from another Jewish critic. And, indeed, Derrida isn't alone in his retrieval of Benjamin (See Agamben, Critchley, etc.). Although the messianic serves a somewhat different function in Benjamin’s work (particularly within his "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), it is also related to his own mal d’archive. In “recollection,” Benjamin writes in his Arcades Project, “we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, just as we are not allowed to write it in immediately theological concepts” (N8, 1). This statement points to a necessarily negative theology that governs Benjamin’s thought. “Were Benjamin to use theological concepts openly,” explains Susan Buck-Morrs, “he would be giving Judaic expression to the goals of universal history; by eschewing them, he gives universal-historical expression to the goals of Judaism” (244). According to Derrida, the difference of the messianic from Benjamin's messianism is a formal one. Preference is given to "messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion" (Specters, 211). At the same time, however, both figures understand the term not simply as a future event, but as a negation permeating every historical moment. Yet the political overtones of this are quite different for Benjamin. By his understanding, messianism entails the redemption of what history proper fails to represent: political opportunities lost, individual and collective voices silenced. As Benjamin writes, “Some things pass down to posterity by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them” (Reflections 302). Benjamin is not so much after an alternative history, a secret narrative that runs beneath the history of the powerful; rather, suggests Terry Eagleton, he directs his attention to “a series of spasms or crises within class history itself, a particular set of articulations of that history” (48). Rather than charting out an alternate course, in other words, Benjamin draws such crises into a complex “constellation” produced by the historical necessities of the present (in his case, Fascism). Eagleton summarizes, “If fascism eradicates history by rewriting it in its own image, historical materialism rewrites the past in order to redeem it in its revolutionary validity. . . . Materialism must insist on the irreducibility of the real to discourse; it must also remind historical idealism that if the past itself—by definition—no longer exists, its effects certainly do” (51).

Even if we follow Derrida and refuse to accept the political theology inherent to Benjamin’s messianism, we can still appreciate its dialectical function within his philosophy. To put it enigmatically, theology's disappearance is the condition of possibility for its rescue: just as the evacuation of theology revolutionized Baroque allegory, so utopian desire marked by its disappearance can and must be trusted as the motivation of political action “because it teaches us that the present course of events does not exhaust reality’s potential . . . [and] because revolution is understood as a Messianic break from history’s course and not its culmination” (Buck-Morss 243).

But this relationship between theology and politics can also be conceived of the other way round. Following Fredric Jameson, Alberto Toscano suggests that the resurgence of the concept of the messianic in critical theory is "symptomatic of the complex predicament of a thinking that wants to preserve the assertion of a politics of radical transformation while navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of an untenable philosophy of history, on the one hand, and a resignation to the present, on the other" (240). Toscano's concern here has to do with the displacement of responsibility and struggle that a return to the messianic supposedly engenders. For all Derrida's cautioning and theoretical restlessness, the messianic remains a limit-concept: what he would characterize as "an experience of the impossible" that arrives independent of preparation or expectation. For Toscano, it reflects a larger sense of powerlessness on the left and with it, a genuine fear of any kind of prescriptive or ontological program. Toscano's is not a particularly profound critique, but it does guide us back to the domain of history and political strategy, repositioning Derrida's treatment of the messianic within a broader ideological context and, in this way, suggests the production of another kind of archive, perhaps with more concrete implications.


Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

---. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

---. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

---. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.

Toscano, Alberto. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso, 2010.

Loose ends

• Former Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, discusses his new book, How Music Works, with The Quietus.
• Simon Reynolds attacks the popular dismissal of genius and originality, summed up by Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything is a Remix." 
• A good friend of mine, Jeff Diamanti, shares some of his recent work on contemporary architecture and critical theory at  The Analogous City.
• Jacob Mikanowski helps us sort out what's going on in P.T. Anderson's latest film, The Master.
• Biblioklept sketches several readings of Melville's classic short story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and includes images of his own annotations.
• Terry Eagleton, a frequent critic of postmodernism (and its attendant school of French theory), changes his tune and sings the praises of Derrida in his review of a recent biography.
• Stereogum tackles the issue of Christian pop music and, like most of us who've recognized its redundancy, holds up Sufjan Stevens as a Christian artist who actually uses the category to his advantage.
• Adam Kotsko offers his advice on "How to Read Zizek."
• Nicholas Dames sizes up some of my favourite contemporary American novelists and considers how their writing has been shaped through the Ivy League love affair with high-minded literary theory.
• Theologian and activist Mary Jo Leddy offers a poignant sermon on human suffering and the role of the church over at Catholic Commons.

Summer reading projects, briefly noted

The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida

My encounter with Derrida's meditation on the Western secret of friendship and the limits of fraternity was short-lived. Our study group only met a couple times, and only managed to get through the first four chapters; but those chapters provided much to talk about and did a perfect job of articulating one of the fundamental tensions running through the third chapter of my thesis. I managed to work the insight into one of my footnotes. It takes up Derrida's aphorism, "The friends of the perhaps are the friends of truth": 

Derrida’s reference to the “friends of truth” is taken from Nietzsche’s projections of a future audience in Beyond Good and Evil. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida reads Nietzsche’s faith in the “coming philosophers” in terms of the German philosopher’s qualifying “perhaps,” and explores the conditions of impossibility that Nietzsche identifies with the “common good.” Following England’s Restoration, Milton may have shared some Nietzsche’s sentiments, at least with respect to his audience. Derrida’s attempt to engage Nietzsche on friendship (which, for the philosopher depends on the “I” and, occasionally, a “we”—what amounts to a contradictory community of solitudes) is an attempt to “honour (faire droit) what appears impossible” in Nietzsche’s anticipations (36). This chapter addresses a similar impossibility in the audience of readers anticipated by Milton’s 1671 poems.

What's going on here, in other words, is a revaluation of the Western tradition of friendship, an attempt to demarcate the limits of this tradition, and the conditions that define friendship for philosophers like Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, and the aforementioned Nietzsche. While the politics of friendship might suggest otherwise (and this "otherwise" is what Derrida is trying to get at by emphasizing "perhaps" of friendship: it's openness to the impossible, to who or what is "to come"), our idea of friendship emerges from an old boys club, a collection of citations from men who are singled out by the philosophical tradition, and at best resembles an oligarchy. 


Middlemarch by George Eliot

I'm two thirds of the way through what many consider to be the quintessential Victorian novel and I'm actually enjoying most of it. I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty of allusions to Milton in the figure of Casauban, the sterile scholar and clergyman whose intellectual pursuit of the "highest things" has lured the young Dorothea into a miserable marriage. Eliot's prose is full of wit and insight. It's not odd for me to laugh out loud while I'm reading on my daily bus ride to campus. Dorothea, the first of our protagonists, begins by treating every inconsistency or hindrance with joyful acceptance and even compares her supportive relation to her dry-as-dust-husband, Casauban, to that of Milton's daughters to their father, reading aloud texts they don't understand solely for benefit of the blind poet. Luckily, the irony that Dorothea lacks in her own life is provided by the narrator, whose constant refrain "poor, poor Dorthea" is enough to keep the reader mindful of her naive brand of saintliness. Of course, Dorothea doesn't suffer in isolation. As one would expect, Middlemarch boasts a typically large cast of characters, but the novel weaves through their various threads at a pretty manageable pace. (In other words, I'm much less confused that I thought I'd be.) In Eliot's hands, they're all brilliantly flawed, from the vain artist (Will Ladislaw) and the amoral doctor (Lydgate) to the pathetic student (Fred Vincy), who finds it nearly impossible to do anything on his own. I'll probably follow up on this one when I'm finally finished all 800 of its pages.


Marxist Feminism (reading group)

Orchestrated under the auspices of the Edmonton Free School, this group has been at work reading through texts that can be loosely grouped by their approach to the topic of gender and sexual relations more broadly. We began with Engels' Origin of the Family, and moved to some more recent interventions, such as Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, and, most recently, a pair of essays from the 2011 anthology Communization and its Discontents (Ed. Benjamin Noys). Each text marks an attempt to engage sexual relations, not as a stable arrangement or simple binary, but from the vantage point of historical materialism; that is, as a site of social and economic reproduction. The theme of reproduction is obviously central to any understanding of sex and economics, and is reflected in the double sense of the term: as a biological effect--to reproduce the labouring class--and as the social function of the domestic realm--to sustain/care for such workers, such that they can continue to labour. For Della Costa and James, class exploitation is built upon the exploitation of women and their respective emancipation must therefore be thought together--thus, the famous call of "wages for housework" is, as Federici argues, a demand that must be made so that it can be rejected along with the role of the housewife.

We want and have to say that we are all housewives, we are all prostitutes and we are all gay, because until we recognise our slavery we cannot recognise our struggle against it, because as long as we think we are something better, something different than a housewife, we accept the logic of the master, which is a logic of division, and for us the logic of slavery. We are all housewives because no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us, more fear on our side to put forward our demands, and less pressure on them for money, since hopefully our minds are directed elsewhere, to that man in our present or our future who will “take care of us” (from "Wages Against Housework").

revisiting Marx's critique of religion

While I continue to appreciate the theological reflections that have grown out of the Marxist tradition, much of what I appreciate about Marx's writings on religion has to do with his dismissal of it as a subject thought to be worthy of critique. More compelling are the connections he draws between the abstract value of capital and the way its accumulation assumes a theology of its own. As is well-known, Marx's critique of religion in The German Ideology made a radical break with the sort of idealism that dominated critiques of religion in his own time. Derrida's Specters of Marx does a particularly good job of complicating this supposed break with the ghosts of religion, before proceeding to name Derrida's own debt to an unconditional and impossible justice, a hope which he models after Benjamin's weak messianism. The late French philosopher is one of many radical theorists (see Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, etc.) to return to theological sources and ideas in order to better understand and criticize the various "secular" guises of neo-liberalism.

I spent the holidays reading through most of Alberto Toscano's Fanaticism, a recent attempt to reconfigure the debate surrounding the so-called “return of religion” and the various arguments put forward by “post-secular” critics like those mentioned above. In it, he traces the critical history of  the concept of fanaticism. His expressed purpose is that of reconstituting a political vocabulary which is capable of accommodating both “enthusiasm” and “abstraction” (an overabundance of each is a consistent mark of the "fanatic," according to the Western liberal tradition). But for Toscano, the fanatic isn't simply the dark side of some secular ideal. As he writes, “Contemporary approaches to questions of politics and religion continue to rely, perhaps inevitably, on philosophies of history articulated in some sense around notions of secularization – whether they’re analyzing a supposed ‘return’ of a religiosity that history had doomed to obsolescence, or viewing unconditional political commitments or ‘fanaticisms’ as atavistic resurgences, in secular garb, of affective structures of a fundamentally religious kind.” For this reason Marxism is written off as a utopian program analogous to religion (so Alastair MacIntyre argues in Marxism and Christianity). Rather than invoking structures of experience or conceptual analogies between Marxism and Christianity, Toscano follows Fredric Jameson in arguing that the goal of political criticism should be to historicize the very comparison between these two systems of thought. 

Toscano centres his study of fanaticism on a rereading of Marx’s critique of religion in The German Ideology, emphasizing that we cannot begin to conceive of a space outside of religion—that is, a secular space—without first participating in real emancipation from capitalist modes of production and a radical restructuring of social relations. Amid the flurry of arguments for and against religion by popular scientists, journalists and Christian apologists, Marx’s simple but profound point—that the proliferation of ideology is intimately related to material practices and social conditions—is routinely forgotten. As Toscano puts it, “Atheistic criticism overestimates the centrality of Christianity to the state and treat’s the state’s secularization as an end in itself.” Rather, we should understand that Marx meant his criticism of religion to be a starting point, a critique “in embryo” for a restructuring of the economic base. To effectively dissuade people of their religious illusions about their condition “is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” Whether this is in fact possible, or desirable is another question.

Milton, Derrida, and the site of hospitality

  

In his seminars on hospitality, Jacques Derrida sets out to distinguish conditional hospitality (which follows the ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian customs of hospitality toward to the stranger or foreigner as a legal obligation) from unconditional hospitality (which says “yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before identification, whether or not it has to do with . . . a human, animal, or divine creature,” (77)). Unconditional hospitality is transgressive, lawless, and absolutely heterogeneous to conditional hospitality; but it also depends on the limit of the law in order to break it. The scene of hospitality is therefore necessarily bound up with the religious and the emancipatory:

It is as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys. This is always the situation of the foreigner, in politics too, that of coming as a legislator to lay down the  law and liberate the people or the nation by coming from outside, by entering into the nation or the house, into the home that lets him enter after having appealed to him. . . . as if, then, the stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host. (Derrida 123)

This post is an exercise for an upcoming paper: a preliminary attempt to explore Derrida's aporia of hospitality through the meeting of spirit and matter, divine guest and human host, in Milton's epic poem. Book V of Paradise Lost illustrates Milton’s attempt at an original, prelapsarian rule of hospitality, which inevitably involves the creation of domestic space. Adam and Eve are allowed to play host to Raphael. However, it is not humanity that first prepares for the arrival of a divine creature, but a gendered earth, who is depicted “Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, / Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss” (V.295-297). To call the earth “wanton” is to identify its essential excess, which is at once unnecessary (or gratuitous) and sexually suggestive: earth warms her “inmost womb” and it proves to be “more warmth than Adam needs” (V.302). Although female in type, the earth is constantly overstepping its domestic bounds. Perhaps this requires a rethinking of prelapsarian domesticity. In other words, the earth’s generous (potentially transgressive) hospitality prefigures, conditions Adam and Eve’s opening to the stranger from heaven. Indeed, says Adam, nature’s “fertile growth . . . instructs us not to spare” (V.319-320).

Roles are quickly established: this is one condition of hospitality. Adam is first host, while Eve is relegated to the food preparation. Adam’s directions to Eve are made in haste, for the occasion demands nothing less than their finest show of hospitality: “. . . go with speed, / And what thy stores contain, bring forth and pour / Abundance, fit to honor and receive / Our Heav’nly stranger” (V.313-316). As Derrida points out, in the act of hospitality, “Desire is waiting for what does not wait” (123). But the host’s desire also involves a certain expectation in which the host’s boundaries are breached: that “[c]rossing the threshold is entering and not only approaching or coming” and so the invited guest becomes the one who invites, “the guest becomes the host of the host” (123). Eve at once suggests that she and Adam are partly motivated by their own earthly pride. In their presentation of their home, Adam and Eve are suggesting to their superior guest that “. . . on Earth / God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heav’n” (V.329-330). In this way, their subjective importance to God lies hostage to the  potential validation of their heavenly visitor.

Milton’s description of Eve’s preparation emphasizes the place of labour in the domestic sphere. This scene of food preparation and composition is “a trope for poetry,” which orders and maintains the sensuous into rhyme and verse (333-336n). Meanwhile, Adam greets their guest, “bowing low” and praising Raphael, while attempting to articulate humanity’s giftedness, its favor in God’s eyes. That Adam and Eve “by sov’reign gift possess / This spacious ground” already puts them in receptive and submissive roles, thereby making their hospitality entirely conditional upon their status.

Raphael is a kind and hospitable guest; so hospitable in fact, that he condescends to eat earthly produce. But would Raphael have eaten earth’s harvest had Adam not invoked their mutual submission to God the father? By eating with them, Raphael fulfills the pretentious wishes of Adam and Eve. He admits, “God hath here / Varied his bounty so with new delights, / As may compare with Heaven” (V.430-433). But unlike humans, Raphael’s digestive process involves transubstantiation and secretes the food that is not absorbed by his spiritual body through his pores. Thus spiritual food differs from material food “in degree”; “. . .what God for you saw good,” says Raphael, “I refuse not, but convert, as you, to proper substance” (V.490-493). It is thus Raphael’s display of hospitality to the human pair which more closely resembles the unconditional hospitality of which Derrida speaks. Indeed, it allows for the story of Satan’s fall from heaven, it makes good on the human curiosity which later becomes transgressive, and temporarily disrupts the order of creation. Perhaps something similar takes place when Eve encounters and speaks (!) to the serpent.

Defourmantelle, Anne and Jacques Derrida. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

"Maintaining now the specters of Marx"

After a (long) month of reading Derrida, Specters of Marx emerges as an easy (but actually quite difficult) favourite. It may have something to do with the timeliness of my reading (Halloween is just around the corner), but much my admiration for this text comes form the way in which Derrida uses the opening scenes of Hamlet as entry point for his discussion of ghosts and specters. However, it is in the final chapter (after Derrida has discussed the heterogeneity of Marx's voice and has offered a ruthless critique of Francis Fukuyama), that Derrida stages his critique of Marx.

At a basic level Derrida reads Marx in the same way that Marx reads the German philosopher Max Stirner in The German Ideology: as haunted (and obsessed) by the ghosts of Hegelian-Christian idealism. In their preoccupation with specters, both Marx and Stirner follow what Derrida calls the “[s]pecular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit” (175). Here, as Derrida notes, we can see that hospitality and exclusion belong to the same impulse: the specter of communism that Marx would welcome is bound up with the ghosts that Marx would like to exterminate.

In Capital, Marx sets out to conjure away the “representative consciousness of a subject." In his attempt to think otherwise than Plato, not to mention Hegel, Marx privileges that which “survives outside the head.” Stirner has set out to annihilate his “phantomatic projections” of Christian Europe but in so doing, Marx argues, Stirner merely replaces these phantasms with a second ghost of corporeality: the “egological body." Stirner has not touched upon the “actual relations” that constitute the “fatherland." For Marx the phantasm is a product of material conditions; Stirner fails because he believes such ghosts can be defeated on their own terms. But as Marx points out, the ghosts will only finally disappear when social and economic conditions are transformed. Derrida suggests that, in this ontological tradition, Marx is doing precisely what he diagnoses as a “quid pro quo” in Stirner (an exchanging of one thing—one self-presenced origin—for another).

Though disguised as a rhetorical maneuver, Derrida consistently deploys the familiar binary of “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” in this critique. He has done this elsewhere, but in the context of this critique, the figure of the hand at once suggests labour and use-value: an immediate relation between the human subject and its object. But the hand can also be an instrument of deception. In this way, Derrida endeavors to show that within Marx’s writing there is a “sleight of hand” at work, which occurs in the relationship between the “head” (Stirner) and the “hands” (Marx). Both, of course, are still connected to the body.  Derrida’s trope of the hands mirrors Marx’s trope of the head (in his critique of Stirner), thereby disrupting Marx’s privileging of praxis over thought as the means to a world without ghosts. But such a world is pure phantasm.

As Derrida demonstrates throughout Specters of Marx, haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. Therefore, "if he loves justice at least, the 'scholar' of the future, the 'intellectual' of tomorrow should learn it from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning how to make conversation withthe ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech . . . they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet" (221).

Jacques Derrida’s “The University without Condition”

 

"Take your time but be quick about it, because you do not know what awaits you."

Let’s begin with a question of marginal importance: Why, in this address, does Derrida insist on mentioning that he's short on time and why is he afraid of “wasting” it? Late in his discussion, Derrida points out that the “clock sometimes represents the attribute of the humanist – the same clock that I am obliged to watch and that keeps a strict watch over the lay worker that I am here” (228). Time is a fictional construct ordered by hourly units, it is part of what maintains the structure of the university and the work that is done, both inside and outside the university. In other words, time operates as part of the architecture that defines and delimits the university. But what sort of work does such time permit?

The university that we have inherited (the university that engages us, the university in which we are engaged) operates within a framework based on Kantian ideals. For Derrida, the Humanities belong to Kant’s dream of a system of knowledge without work; as such, they appear to correspond to Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason (though here Derrida confines himself to the discussion of art and nature from the Critique of Pure Judgment). Kantian categories, which form the basis of knowledge, are purely constative: they “must prepare without prescribing: they would propose forms of knowledge that remain merely preliminary” (219). Kant’s Humanities are proposed to be scientific, neutral and universal. Even for the professor, whose work of professing is an activity, the Kantian university imagines a space free from the production of oeuvres. Derrida works to show how Kant’s privileging of the Humanities (his dream of sovereign knowledge) rests on basic, but no less generative, distinctions within the university, which constitute “the powerful juridical performatives that have given shape to the modern history of this humanity of man” (231). By taking Kant to task, Derrida reveals how Kant’s traditional conception undermines its own claims to interiority and sovereignty: Kant “withdraw[s] the faculty of philosophy from any outside power . . . and guarantees this faculty an unconditional freedom to say what is true and to conclude concerning the subject of truth” (219). Here, Derrida’s work is to reveal the horizon (which is both a limit and opening) of the Humanities.

At the same time, the Western tradition divides the activity of work from its concept of the “world.” Derrida’s decision to use the French “mondialisation” (instead of globalization) keeps our focus on this “notion of world that is charged with a great deal of semantic history, notably a Christian history” (224). In other words, mondialisation is a product of the Humanities, an attempt to think its outside through a lateral, universalizing process. Can we understand the sovereignty of Kant’s Humanities as a way to think our way out of death, perhaps as a further expression of interiority? Does Derrida’s rhetorical anxiety, mentioned at the beginning of this response, reflect the impending arrival of death?

différance revisited

My first of fourteen graduate seminars on the ethical and political thought of Jacques Derrida begins with an effort to situate our upcoming readings in the context of post-structuralism. Today we made recourse to "Différance," that seminal lecture given before La Société française de philosophie in 1968, as a taste of Derrida's engagement with the philosophical tradition. Our next (introductory) class will focus another pair of major essays, each of which highlight a crucial move in Derrida's thought: performativity in "Signature Event Context," and textual analysis in "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy."

At the outset, I'm relieved that we have an agenda, and that we can be up front about it; that is, we are reading Derrida after the so-called "ethical turn" in cultural theory with the assumption that Derrida has always been in engaged in questions of an ethical and political nature; furthermore, that we are doing theory in the academy, a context in which Derrida's ideas (and guiding "concepts") are simultaneously muted and omnipresent, most often presented as ahistorical givens. In other words, Derrida is an emblem for many impulses and there's no getting around it.

Many such impulses can be located in Derrida's essay on différance. I first read this essay in an undergraduate course on postmodern philosophy and I'm glad to have this chance to reread it four years later. Indeed, one of the best things about reading Derrida is the fact that his texts are so multivalent, so thick, that one always sees something new and exciting upon a rereading. In the course of this exercise, a number of significant moves (many of which were highlighted in our class) emerged that had previously eluded me (perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I was in my second year, and was only beginning to "get it"). The rest of this post is an attempt to highlight several of these instances.

In this essay, each of Derrida's interlocutors acts as a precursor to differance; in their respective work philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas have anticipated Derrida's argument. Derrida is effectively picking up on certain ruptures in the Western tradition in order to justify his own tendencies, to make good on their promises, to carry forward what has already begun. For example, Derrida draws on Nietzche's indifference to difference (exemplified in the eternal recurrence of the same) and Freud's language of the unconscious refers to deferral and delay (a temporality invoked by differance); differance also picks up on Heidegger's distinctions between Being (Dasein) and being and between presence and the present, as well as Levinas' interest in radical alterity and Saussure's construal of language as a differential system of negatively related terms.

But within this towering tradition of serious (and intimidating) intellectual work, Derrida is quick to point out the importance of "play." Misreadings of Derrida tend to emphasize the anarchy implicit in this concept, but it is far more multivalent than often gets suggested: it is a performance, it is imaginative, joyful, but it also suggests the movement, the shakiness, the potential for disturbance, that one finds in a loose bolt.

Those familiar with Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and logocentrism will recognise that the graphic importance of the "a" in differance demonstrates that signification (whether in speech or in writing) is never present to itself. Indeed, one sees this worked out through many of Derrida's writings. It is the nature of writing (and the nature of the academic institution) to make differance present; or, to put it slightly differently, it is always an outcome of our scholarly context that differance is turned into a concept, a method, or a potential application (however, one sees this most often with regard to deconstruction). Thus, part of Derrida's strategy throughout his career is to continuously displace differance with new terms (such as pharmakos, spectrality, etc.) to frustrate this constant sedimentation.

Another somewhat obvious (but no less crucial) element in "Differance" is Derrida's occasional gesture towards a negative politics. Differance

governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of differance, but differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. (Margins of Philosophy, 22)

In much the same way Derrida describes the "a" of differance as an Egyptian Pyramid: "This stone -- provided that no one knows how to decipher its inscription -- is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant" (4). This abdication of mastery is offset by a closing affirmation ("in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance"), but the politics of differance are clearly premised on a certain kind of violence done from inside the text, and from the inside of Derrida's inherited tradition. As we move further into Derrida's more overtly political work, I'm expecting that questions of violence and responsibility will be at the forefront of our engagement.

canons, texts and contexts

My first full week in Edmonton ends with uneasy anticipation of the next: the beginning of classes. There have been plenty of distractions. As usual, my apartment continues to evolve with occasional additions from the alley, and last night I watched the brilliant but uneven Harry Brown, which stars Michael Caine as a recent widower (and former marine) whose burnout London housing estate is becoming overrun with violence and drug-trafficking. A familiar story (very similar to that of Gran Torino) but told in the most uncomfortable, effective way. The direction achieves the level of estrangement necessary to make Harry Brown feel important and timely without resorting to race, poverty or any of the other usual outlets for easy moralizing (unsurprisingly, the only thing American film critics could appreciate about this film was Michael Caine's performance).

I've appreciated having some time to settle in to my new place, but it's hard to contain my excitement for the coming week. Here's what I'm up against:

Milton and Print Culture

John Milton – canonized poet of the high literary tradition invented in the centuries after the seventeenth – came out fighting in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. In works like Areopagitica, Milton self-consciously located his own writing and publication within the fervid print culture of civil war London. In other words, while Milton’s literary friends and allies certainly included the likes of Virgil and Dante, his nearer neighbours in print (especially in the 1640s) included petitioning apprentices and a host of writers of cheap pamphlets.

Derrida Engaged

Derrida’s later career is often described as an emphatic turn away from idealism and abstraction and towards issues of more immediate worldly concern. However, Derrida himself questions this characterization, and one point of this seminar will be to investigate ways in which this “engaged” Derrida has always been at work—even in those less overtly politicized moments of his deconstructive program. Texts up for discussion will include Margins of Philosophy (1982), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (1994),  Of Hospitality (2000), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005), and The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008).

Empire and Travel in Literary History

This course studies the relation between English (British, European) expansion and travel and the meeting of cultures. It will discuss the relations among English (British, Europeans) and local peoples, Africans and Native Americans and will examine questions of race, gender and class as well as culture more generally. This is a focused survey of works of travel that have mainly to do with questions of politics, religion, identity and/or expansion in the context of literary representation and will show that, from the Middle Ages to the present, travel (including the motifs of pilgrimage, journey, expansion colonization) has long been a concern in English or European literature and culture.

music and medium

"You can't have art without resistance in the material."
William Morris

As a sort of sequel to my last post on "Textile and Text," I'd like to pick up some themes I discussed in relation to Mary Carruthers in order to explain my first impression of Caribou's new album, Swim, which arrives officially in mid-April. Dan Snaith (aka Caribou, formerly Manitoba) has said that he wanted to make a dance record full of “music that's liquid in the way it flows back and forth, the sounds slosh around in pitch, timbre, pan . . . Dance music that sounds like it's made out of water, rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does." Swim does just that. In fact, what first struck me about the sound of this album is how much attention it draws to its medium. Swim is an appropriate title for an album that is unapologetically thick in the way it sounds. It's dance music that is explicitely processed, affected, distorted, mixed and arranged. In short, it is richly synthetic, mediated. Of course, all recorded albums do this; but few albums are this self-conscious about it.

The album cover features something very much like an LP that is vibrantly expressive and textured, in contrast to a voided background. In this sense, Swim essentially does with music (and I'm quite aware that electronic artists have been at this sort of thing for quite some time), what poetry does with language. As Jerome McGann writes, "The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible -- literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are."

As Mary Carruthers rightly sees it, there is no such thing as knowledge (or meaning) outside of discourse. This idea is nothing new. Marshall McLuhan said it similarly when he famously pronounced that "the medium is the message" in the late 60s, and Derrida wasn't very far off when he wrote, "there is no outside the text." McGann, from whom I quoted in above paragraph, would likely agree, but he sets out to do something slightly different. In his book, The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann calls not only for an engagement with bibliographical data over and against “romantic hermeneutics,” but contends that “Literary works do not know themselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance." Because texts are always manifestations of concrete historical moments (or, in McGann’s words, “localizations of human temporalities”), no reading of a text is ever the same: “. . . every text is unique and original to itself when we consider it not as an object but as an action. . . . [it] is always a new (and changed) originality each time it is textually engaged.” Although he works against literary theories that imagine an ideal message behind the literary text and render the physicality of reading as a fall from grace, it would be wrong to call McGann’s approach reductive. Rather, it is an attempt to recognize the social possibilities and the irreducible heterogeneity of literary interpretation.