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Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques
Derrida
Michael Marder
New School University
mardm926@newschool.edu
(c) 2005 Michael Marder.
All rights reserved.
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Ah, how tired we are, how I would like finally to touch
"veil," the word and the thing thus named, the thing itself
and the vocable! I would like not only to see them, see in
them, toward them or through them, the word and the thing, but
maintain a discourse about them that would, finally, touch, in
short a "relevant" discourse that would say them properly,
even if it no longer gives anything to be seen.
--Jacques Derrida, Veils
I
1. To touch the thing itself: to traverse the distance and to
maintain it in spite of, or thanks to, this traversal. The I
caught in the impossible conjunction of maintenance and
traversal--the strange combination of the word's tactility and the
thing's vocalization--is not content with mere visibility, with
the sight of the phenomenon that gives itself to be seen, with the
movement toward or even through that which presents itself in
luminous but empty space. Because the thing in question is not any
thing whatsoever but veil (/voile/), which is to say "every
thing," because of this obscure singular universality, the
supplement of blind discourse, the only proper and relevant
discourse that touches this thing, is indispensable. Are we able
to say it properly? Can we hear its apposite resonance? Will we
detect in the veil itself (not behind it) the oblique thing that
will never become an object welcomed by consciousness, that will
more than anything else disentangle the thing from the object,
yielding the difference however imperceptible to the eye and,
even, to the ear? The impossible, tiresome tenacity of the
distance maintained in the measure of its traversal is the
attribute of the thing, of the veil touched and caressed but not
lifted, of the vocable spoken by diminution, at the same time
reducing the interval and attenuating the intensity of the sound
(Cixous and Derrida 23).
2. The current attempt "to disentangle the thing from the object" is
/necessarily/ preliminary and provisional in the face of the
overwhelming risks of ossifying and essentializing the distinction
thus outlined. If that which disentangles the one from the other
is, indeed, a veil, then the act of disentangling cannot take a
form of unveiling that will prompt the reader to respond to the
question of difference between thinghood and objectivity with the
confident and unequivocal, "Sure thing!" Here, I do not wish to
claim either that this difference is fixed, all-encompassing, and
absolute, or that the obfuscation of this difference has been a
merely accidental representational failure. My goal is to register
the remarkable porosity of boundaries between the two, allowing
the thing to pass into the object and vice versa. These passages,
however, portend a risk which is diametrically opposed to that of
essentialization and which may result in the conflation of
thinghood and objectivity--the conflation that would obscure
various "encounters" with which Derrida is concerned, including
the ethical, the aesthetic, and the commodity-fetishistic.
3. To be sure, objects, like things, are inconceivable without
distance (or distancing), which will not be /completely/ traversed
if their objectivity is to stay intact. Before recollecting, with
Derrida's help, the specifically Husserlian ideal object, we
should meditate on objectivity in general as that which is
pre-sent in front of us (Derrida and Thénevin 71), that which we
face in a perpetual opposition, if not a standoff, accentuated,
for example, in the German /Gegenstand/. As something posited in
opposition (Hegel would say, in "oppositional determination") to
the subject, the object appears to be secondary to what it
opposes. It has only negativity, negation, and resistance to
offer; hence, it is one-dimensional and unidirectional, devoid of
depth or volume, ideally present through and through, completely
visible, open to view in the shape of a flat screen unfolded
against me and defined by this absolute unfolding. Total
resistance of the kind that both produces and consumes the
objectivity of the object spells out nothing but its complete
surrender to the resisted "authority."
4. Woven into the memorable economy of the supplement, this
secondariness, nonetheless, turns into the origin of origin. On
the one hand, the resistance proper to the object is non-reactive
and mute--a distant reverberation of the impersonality marking the
/there is/ (/il y à, es gibt/). There is resistance; it gives
resistance. On the other hand, the subject comes face-to-face, or
rather face-to-surface, with the object, but this encounter is
inevitably belated insofar as it supervenes upon the determination
of sense on the basis of its relation with the object (Derrida,
Speech 75). In terms of our analogy, sense isn't yet sense unless
it is projected onto the screen of objectivity. Conversely, my
face is, in some sense, affected by the surface exposed to it and
by the light reflected from this surface. Oppositional
determination presupposes determinations of reflection
(/Reflexionsbestimmung/) that always solicit, shake up the
rigidity of opposition from within. In Derrida's reading of
Husserl, this solicitation finds expression in the supplementation
of the first meaning of "against" (/l'encontre/) with
/tout-contre/, the "'up-against' of proximity" (75). Owing to the
latter, the distance is all but eliminated the moment the
subject's boundary touches, perpendicularly, that of the object,
ostensibly defying the logic of relationality outlined thus far.
5. Cutting and pasting Husserl's text, Derrida places the
op-positional and com-positional significations of objectivity
side-by-side, right up against each other, but also in a glaring
antinomy that will not tolerate Hegelian /Aufhebung/ expressed in
the simultaneous cancellation and preservation of distance.
Granted, we cannot resolve the antinomy by way of reiterating the
tired platitudes on the irreducible "gaps" and fissures that
accompany the superimposition of uneven boundaries and that render
the greatest proximity still insufficiently proximate. But what if
this impossible situation is the predicament of the subject /par
excellence/? What if the "nearness of distance" in /tout-contre/
allows us to imagine the subject as a non-oppositional object, as
/Gegenstand/ minus "/Gegen/-," as the absolutely indeterminate
spatial positionality of -ject only subsequently (though not in a
logical or a chronological sense) subjected to opposition? To
raise these questions is to veer toward the attributes of the
thing which paradoxically falls on the side of this "inexistent or
anexistent subjectivity" and which will come to the fore later on
(Derrida, Truth 46). Let's not forget that in the closure of
metaphysics which the subject and the object now inhabit, there is
a third dimension completing the first two, namely "philosophy as
knowledge of the presence of the object" (Derrida, Speech 102).
Curiously enough, this third dimension will undergo important
modifications in the course of Derrida's writings, so that by the
time of Specters of Marx it will be a scholarly belief
(/croyance/) in, not knowledge of, what is present "in the form of
objectivity" that will subtend the whole enterprise (Derrida,
Specters 11). How is it possible to integrate philosophical
knowledge and scholarly belief with the structured opposition
between position and opposition?
6. The subject-object relation crystallizes in the opposition between
the /sub/ject's horizontal position of a substratum ("between
/beneath/ and /above/" [Derrida and Thévenin 71]) and the object's
vertical opposition (face-to-face, face-to-surface) to the
subject.[1 <#foot1>] In keeping with the geometrical delineation
of this structure, knowledge and belief will stand for the
diagonal linkage of the subject and the object marking the
distance between the two and completing a metaphysical "right
angle" /triangulation./ In a certain Foucaultian mode, one could
define this triangulation as "the microstructure of modernity."
The point where the two dimensions initially come up against each
other and touch, the point of proximity to the opposition, is too
much for the subject to bear. Its unbearable weight pressing on
the internal infirmity of the underlying subjective thesis
(/Stand/) already anticipates the philosophical/scholarly
prosthesis that will support and fortify the dimension facing such
stern opposition.[2 <#foot2>] Moreover, the prosthesis itself
needs to be fortified with credence and belief supplanting
knowledge or, better yet, denoting its spare prosthetic devices,
the prostheses of the prosthesis.
7. But the closure so formed is certainly not static. Although the
one-dimensional object may be an arrested effect of something
else, of something Derrida, in the wake of Artaud, calls
"subjectile," it embodies an arrested effect itself set in motion.
Its "against-ness" will not abide unless "self-consciousness
appears . . . in its relation to an object, whose presence it can
keep and repeat" (Derrida, Speech 15). Should we perhaps follow
Derridian graphic analysis of the ob-ject and transcribe
self-consciousness in the manner of "self-con-sciousness," the
split identity complicit with (/con/) what is set against it? In
other words, the opposition that yields the conditions of
possibility for the sense-determining object is itself wholly
dependent upon the idealization of the object in infinite
repeatability, upon the acts of self-consciousness and,
specifically, the vocal mediation allowing one to hear oneself
speak (53).
8. It is not by a pure coincidence that the famous Husserlian example
of the inner voice, "You've gone wrong . . . ," cited by Derrida,
is above all a protest, a remonstration, an objection the subject
raises against itself as the object of reproach (Speech 70). Here,
in the doubling of presence, the subject is set against itself
(/l'encontre/) with/in itself (/tout-contre/), projected unto
itself, opening the avenue for a relation with other ob-jects.
Repetition elliptically refers to the repetition of objectivity
and objection, /as though/ I did not hear myself speak the first
time, /as though/ my discourse was useless and irrelevant, /as
though/ it did not crisscross the inner space of difference and
touch, to paraphrase Derrida, "the thing that I am." Husserl's
subjectivity (hearing one's own speech) is virtually deaf and
ineducable; it must feign these qualities to keep itself and
"things" or, strictly speaking, "athings" going. Suppose, on the
other hand, that some object is given or pronounced once,
eventfully and uniquely facilitating iterability without
iteration.[3 <#foot3>] Without the detached complicity of
self-consciousness, the event of the object will run the risk of
passing into a thing.[4 <#foot4>] Or, at the very least, the
swerve of its non-idealized remainder will point in the direction
of thinghood.
II
9. Given the oppositional pivot of objectivity, what are the
consequences of its "de-saturation"? First, in an early commentary
on Levinasian philosophy, Derrida says, "I could not possibly
speak of the other, make of the other a theme, pronounce the other
as object, in the accusative" and, thereby, gives us a hint
apropos of the difference between the objective opposition and the
absolute separation ("Violence" 103). Conjunctions and
disjunctions no longer make sense. When I am in a face-to-face
situation with the other, I do not stand against the other (in
either sense of the term), but in non-oppositional proximity to
her, across the infinite distance maintained despite my
adventurous traversal of it. Neither counter nor even adjacent to
the other. According to Derrida's engagement with Levinas, the
injunction of the face is to respect the other "beyond grasp and
contact" ("Violence" 99). This injunction has been misinterpreted
as an extreme version of the multiculturalist sentiment allegedly
governing contemporary thought in France.[5 <#foot5>] Even though,
to my knowledge, Levinas does not use this particular word chosen
by Derrida, more is at stake in the idea of "respect" than a mere
adulteration of absolute alterity or, on the contrary, a reverence
for and admiration of the foreign and the unknown. In a subtle
way, it allows the difference between objectivity and thinghood to
enter the ethical situation through the backdoor to the extent
that I can attempt to return the look or "pay" respect to a thing
(/res/), but not to an object blindly facing me in a predetermined
frame of opposition. Hence, we could say that respect is an
ontological and, more precisely, a hauntological fact more basic
than a psychological attitude. Because it transcends the
proprietorship characteristic of grasp and contact, this fact
arising on the groundless ground of separation foils the fixedness
of and fixation on that to which it is "paid." As such, respect is
one of the overtly affirmative, albeit largely ignored, features
of the deconstructive approach that, as a rule, is highly attuned
to the minute motions of the texts with which it works and that
regards them as things rather than ideal objects calling for
analysis.
10. What "things share here with others," Derrida writes, "is that
something within them too is always hidden, and is indicated only
by anticipation, analogy, and appresentation" ("Violence" 124).
This is not to say that the other is reducible to a thing, let
alone to a transcendent Thing. The other is both a thing and not a
thing: "the other as /res/ is simultaneously less other (not
absolutely other) and less 'the same' than I" (127). From a
strictly phenomenological perspective, the quality common to
others and to things is that, unlike objects, they do not--indeed,
cannot--expose themselves to us in their entirety. The volume of
the thing conceals a considerable portion of its surface from our
view and necessitates a completion of the given "by anticipation,
analogy, and appresentation" of the yet invisible outlines.
Similarly, regardless of the exposure of his denuded face, the
interiority of the other is inaccessible to us from the unique
standpoint available to this interiority alone. But whereas we can
turn the thing around or change our spatial position in relation
to it in order to inspect some (though not all) of its temporarily
hidden dimensions, the other's interiority defies all provisional
visibility. In the aftermath of the metaphysical closure
articulated in the subject-object-knowledge triad, Derrida and
Levinas put forth a different, non-oppositional, ethical
constellation of other-thing-respect.
11. Second, the Kantian aesthetic sphere is a place where pure and,
therefore, "inexistent" subjectivity flourishes in pleasing
without enjoyment. "This pleasure is purely subjective: in the
aesthetic judgment it does not designate [/bezeichnet/] anything
about the object" (Derrida, "Truth" 46). Purely subjective
pleasure is two-fold. Not only does it manage to do away with the
designations of objectivity--that is, opposition--but it also rids
itself of complacent self-interest (47) and of the desire to cling
to existence at any price. Though it imputes beauty to objects, a
judgment on the beautiful declares its autonomy vis-à-vis
beautiful objects, the external screens onto which the subject's
attitude is projected. Derrida, however, takes a further step in
the direction opened up by Kant and argues that hiding the object,
changing its locus of existence, displacing the opposition into
another "world," passing from knowledge- to
belief-structures--that none of these machinations is adequate to
strike "the /sans/ of the pure cut" (83). Instead, the beautiful
boasts an indeterminate position not coordinated by the
horizontal, vertical, or diagonal signposts and tensions of the
subject-object-knowledge triad.
12. If the tenets of representative relationality are no longer
relevant to the aesthetic sphere, if the reference to the object
is superfluous, if nothing guarantees the existence of the
subject, then in Artaud's "pure painting" the means are the only
/things/ that will be expressed. The opposition between the
painter-subject and her object dissipates when the painter's hand,
the canvas, and, say, the sky enter a work of art on the same
footing with the movement of expression (Derrida and Thévenin 97).
The projection falls into the same series as the projected, the
projectile, and the screen--each transforming itself into the
passage for the other and bringing the edgy standoff to a
culmination. From art in general congealed into an object replete
with inner meaning, one and naked (Derrida, "Truth" 22), we pass
into a wealth of means without ends, the means irreducible to
objects, the non-totalizable multiplicity of passages or media we
call "things." The surface is right on the face, and the face
right on the surface--Artaud traverses the distance, but does he
maintain it? So long as the subtraction of /Gegen/- from
/Gegenstand/ is not satisfied with the lingering undifferentiation
of positionality that nostalgically mirrors the one, naked, and
absent unity of the object, we will have to respond in the
affirmative. The serialization of the means already goes a long
way toward internally spacing and re-membering this space. Thus,
in the eccentric company of Kant and Artaud, in the shadow of
Heidegger, and not without sensing a major /aporia/, Derrida holds
onto a modalized and dispersed trajectory of the /jetée/ (forcing
one to hurl oneself into the experience of throwing [Derrida and
Thévenin 75]) that desaturates opposition in indifferent pleasure.
I am tempted to think that in this double bind Derrida revamped
and radicalized the old procedure of phenomenological reduction
(/epoché/) whose energy he re-channeled toward peeling off layers
upon layers of the subject-object opposition, knowledge, and
belief. And what he found under the veneer of the objective
"against" was not a pacification of various struggles and tensions
in some sort of nihilist indifference, but the previously tamed
and abused pure force barely perceptible in the unreduced
/Gegenstand/.
13. Thought together, ethical and aesthetic implications of the
object's desaturation that places a renewed emphasis on the thing
seem to have much in common. Some of the obvious commonalities
include the recession of knowledge and representation to the
background of my engagement with the other and with artistic
media, as well as the emergence of different modes of
relationality involving respect and the /jetée/. But a more
interesting question is whether disinterested pleasure without
enjoyment of the beautiful pursues a trajectory parallel to the
Levinasian shift "beyond essence" and beyond the corollary desire
to persist in essence.[6 <#foot6>] If this is so, then in the
context of the ethical and the aesthetic disinterestedness,
Hegelian synthetic actuality (/Wirklichkeit/) will be attacked on
two fronts simultaneously: the existence of the subjects and
objects of beauty will become irrelevant to the production of the
beautiful, while the essence of the ethical will be transformed
into a contradiction in terms.
III
14. In the concluding pages of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida writes,
"contrary to what phenomenology--which is always phenomenology of
perception--has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our
desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself
always escapes" (Speech 104). Surprisingly enough and despite
phenomenological maxims, the thing itself does not fit into the
Husserlian noetic-noematic constitution. We could add that the
reason for this elusiveness is that, in contrast to the object,
the thing does not survive in opposition to the subject, nor does
it occupy a determinate position in marked space. To be a thing,
something needs to be both unmarked and de-posited, deranged,
deprived of substantial identity with itself, "at once set aside
and beside itself [/à la fois rangée et dérangée/]" like the
famous table from Marx's /Capital/ (Derrida, Specters 149). The
thing opposes nothing because its ecstatic composition, which is
also its decomposition, bars it from mustering the force it
harbors and from gathering itself up to face a single direction.
As such, the Derridian thing which is "all over the place,"
scattered, and disseminated tacitly counteracts Heidegger's thing
that "things" and that names "manifold-simple gathering"
(Heidegger, "The Thing" 171). Nevertheless, in the case of a
commodity-thing to which we shall return, this derangement and
dissemination befall a marked thing, one that is branded with the
signs of value, forgets its materiality, and poses as a pure number.
15. "At once set aside and beside itself," the thing dispersed into a
multiplicity of pluri-dimensional surfaces is forgotten (Heidegger
would write, "neglected"), such that its end is deposited
somewhere--both posited and abandoned. Hence, thinghood is
infinite, even though infinity is not necessarily tied to the
thing. And again, the example of the commodity-thing will be
inadequate to illustrate this deposition since in the circulation
of Capital the end of the commodity is simply transposed from
material use onto what was previously conceived as mere means in
exchange (abstract, symbolic value). Where investment is an
operation one performs on objects in the hope that they will yield
interest in the circulation of their symbolic equivalents,
idealizations, or indefinite repetitions, deposit (/consigne/) is
proper to things consigned to oblivion. The thing and the gift,
the given thing and the thing /as/ giving, are annulled in "simple
recognition" since "it [recognition] gives back, in the place, let
us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent" (Derrida,
Given Time 13). Grasping nothing other than objects of exchange,
recognition claims the place occupied by the thing itself--the
fictitious, delimited place in which the symbolic equivalent
resides. Yet, the act of recognition extended to an object forgets
the thing itself, forgets radical forgetting and, in the same
breath, institutes the memory of exchange.
16. This economy of forgetting obtains for the infinite chains of
signification aiming, in each case, at the unattainable hypostasis
of the thing in the present where the manifold would be gathered:
"The sign is usually said to be put in place of the thing itself,
the present thing, 'thing' here standing equally for meaning or
referent" (Derrida, "Différance" 9). But if a single and
determinate place of the thing is nothing but a piece of
theoretical fiction, then every sign is bound to miss its mark in
a self-effacing search for "a reassuring end to the reference from
sign to sign" (Derrida, Of Grammatology 49). Further, it is by
falling short of its declared goal that this movement unexpectedly
reaches success. Inasmuch as it leaps from sign to sign,
signification remarks and retraces the contours of the deranged
non-identity of thinghood, echoes the dispersed effects of this
non-identity, seeks to put an end to indeterminacy, and thereby
engrosses itself ever deeper in deposition and unrest.
Signification is thingification. The thicker the cloth or the veil
of "relevant" discourse, the greater the work of weaving that
still lies ahead. Or, in Levinas's concise formulation of infinite
ethical responsibility: "duties become greater in the measure that
they are accomplished" (Totality and Infinity 244).
17. /Différance/ lies not far beyond the horizon here. Recall the
subject-object configuration comprising the opposition between
position and opposition. The object is more than it is because it
exceeds oppositional identity and encompasses its overarching
relationship with the subject. Likewise, the thing is more than it
is because it "contains" /différance/, or as Derrida puts it,
"differance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself" (Given
Time 40). In this sense, there are no things "themselves" equal,
identical, or reducible to some inner kernel around which they are
constituted. While these terms are reserved exclusively for the
object, every thing is at least twice removed from itself if one
conceives it in terms of a resemblance of its own prosthesis
(Derrida, Specters 153), which is to say, in terms of the
interplay of simulacra and supplements. The bracketed interiority
(in) of its bracketed being (is) testifies to the thing's
incessant turning inside out, passing from the interiority of
thinghood to the exteriority of signification. In the thing,
/différance/ comes to pass.
18. Derrida's point is that this passage to the outside is not
locatable outside of the thing itself, but "is" in the excess of
the thing over its being. Would it be enough to say that things
and signs partake in the movement of /différance/, in the same
disquietude of non-adequation and non-identity that magically
guarantees adequation and non-arbitrary character of the sign by
way of retracing the dispersion of the thing and rejoicing in a
more sophisticated version of the vulgar "correspondence theory of
truth"? Neither a perfectly symmetrical correlation of signs and
things, nor a secondary derivation (Derrida, "Différance" 9) of
the former from the latter avoids the betrayal of /différance/. On
the contrary, in a certain primary secondariness or secondary
primariness, signs take the place of things that have no place of
their own. (Still, it would be inaccurate to equate the thing with
pure distance and /différance/ outside of the mediations provided
by the bracketing of interiority and of the copula. Interpreting
Nietzsche, Derrida muses that "perhaps woman is not some thing
which announces itself from a distance, at a distance from some
other thing . . . Perhaps a woman--a non-identity, a non-figure, a
simulacrum--is distance's very chasm, the out-distancing of
distance" (Spurs 49). It is not that the thing is too figural or
too (self-) identical to stimulate the opening of a chasm; rather,
the chasm opened by the thing, between things, contains an
ineluctable reference to measurable distances in space suspended
inside the brackets.)
19. What the thing's turning inside out implies for phenomenological
research is an inversion of that "fundamental property of
consciousness" which Husserl calls "intentionality." The sole aim
of the meaning-intention is an object or, in Derrida's words,
"meaning [/bedeuten/] intends an outside which is that of an ideal
ob-ject" (Speech 32). But in our relation with things, the
direction of "aiming at" changes. The Thing, suddenly capitalized
in spectrality, aims at us, looks at, and concerns us ("/Cette
Chose nous regarde/" [Specters 6/26][7 <#foot7>]) without offering
itself to our gaze. The "visor effect" (/l'effet de visière/), the
sheath for the skull behind which the inapparent Thing appears and
which Derrida borrows from Shakespeare, is etymologically
associated with the French /viser/--to aim at, or to intend. The
inversion of Husserlian intentionality traverses the history of
twentieth-century phenomenology that grounds the Derridian
approach. If the face (/visage/) of the other in Levinas is read
in the context of this phenomenological heritage, then both the
visor and the visage of the Thing and of the other translate
intentionality into haunting, first, when "we" become its intended
target--the destination or the horizon of its look--and, second,
if the location from which it is launched remains indeterminate.
Likewise, in Merleau-Ponty's /Phenomenology of Perception/ things
not only "display themselves" to me but also "see" and guarantee
the permanence of those dimensions of other things that are hidden
from my view (79). Besides inverting the structure of
intentionality, what these approaches have in common is the
implicit deconstruction of the distinction between the categorial
and the existential analytics developed in Being and Time. Unlike
Heideggerian "entities [that] are present-at-hand within the
world" but are "/worldless/ in themselves" (Being 81), Derrida's
thing occurs "within" the world and, at the same time, has a world
of its own. This will be articulated most clearly in /Of Spirit/
where the Heideggerian distinction crumbles in light of the
ambiguous location of the "living thing," or the animal (48-54).
20. There are no fulfilled intuitions evidentially supported by the
presence of objects to consciousness here, in this space inundated
with impossible possibilities and flash-like breakthroughs of
exteriority that "comes to us from the region of transcendence and
death," as young Levinas likes to put it. Undeniably, the thing
and, first of all, the jug is nothing to be filled or fulfilled.
An inverted intention bypassing intuition, it is already full of
itself in itself and beside itself. Full to the point of
indifferent, unenjoyable pleasure. Full without measure, "at the
bottom without bottom" of an abyss (Derrida and Thévenin 138).
From the pages of a different work, another voice of Derrida
anachronistically retorts, "Write, if possible, finally, without
/with/, not /without/ but without /with/, finally, /not even
oneself/" ("Truth" 17). The writing of "without with" is the
writing of a broken articulation, the writing of the hinge
(Derrida, Of Grammatology 65-73). Refusing to admit any elements
of relationality or, even, to be negatively defined by this
refusal, the abyssal thing stands, perhaps, for sheer
non-oppositionality, a radicalized subject, and a plentitude that
departs from the objective "with /without/" (I now translate Gegen
as toward-against to accommodate both renditions of the German
word) and from oneself. Derrida has never been closer to and
farther apart from Heidegger, who concludes that the non-objective
thing "stands on its own as self-supporting" ("The Thing" 165).
What the quality of self-supporting ultimately aims at is the pure
/without/, the negation of the oppositional-negative dependence
embodied in the object, and, correlatively, the affirmation of the
thing's autochthonous position. Conversely, without /with/ denotes
that which "stands on its own" only inasmuch as it is supported by
the other, "without /with . . .// not even oneself/." Both
Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing's release from the confines
of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to
reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the
latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing
on the abyss.
21. It is in this faint light that I want to read the opening line of
the "Parergon" section of Truth in Painting--"it's enough to say:
abyss and satire of the abyss"--the line that hints at the satire
of satire, the satisfaction of satire (without) with the
bottomless bottom of the thing amidst patient and obstinate
suffering that bears things in silence (Derrida and Thévenin 137).
"It's enough to say" this cryptic expression once and anew each
time. Suffice it to say that this will be an event of saying:
unrepeatable, non-idealizable, unobjected, yet touching the abyss,
immediately relevant to the word and the thing thus named. That is
why the first line of "Parergon" hangs on the outer edge of the
first internal frame of the text, immodestly enclosing the empty
space drawn from the abyss.
IV
22. Metaleptically and in a paraphrase, it's enough to say: the thing
and satire of the thing. For the thing contains, without
containing anything in its bracketed interiority, the force of
animation, transformation, and decomposition. The thing works, and
the animated work becomes (another) thing. Inhabiting without
residing (Derrida, Specters 18/42), effacing itself in the
apparition, it spatializes its habitation, our habitation, in a
way that is foreign to the one-dimensional object that merely
resides, without inhabiting, in opposition to us. Does the thing
give space without taking any for its multiple surfaces and
dimensions that are more unobtrusive and inconspicuous than the
flatness of the objective screen?
23. In addition to giving space, the thing also temporalizes, gives
time: "The thing gives, demands, or takes time" (Derrida, Given
Time 41).[8 <#foot8>] To continue accounting for the "properties"
of the thing and of the object, I suggest that the latter, at
least in its ideal form, is driven by a frustrated and /a priori/
thwarted urge to withhold time and to maintain the fantasy of
eternal presence in the indefiniteness of repetition. One of the
most compelling, properly satirical elements underlying this
difference is that the mute resistance of the object is indebted
to the thing, which gives time and, therefore, gives (objects,
among other "things"). Evidently, the thinghood of the thing that,
as something "un-conditioned (/un-bedingtes/) . . . conditions the
thing as thing" in Heidegger ("What" 9), may explain the
unconditionality of the gift, of forgiveness, of hospitality in
Derrida. (For the latter, however, the conditioned "thing" is made
possible only in the mode of impossibility: the impossible gift,
forgiveness, and so forth.) In turn, the object acquires its
potency, its force of resistance by proxy, from a proximate
distance to the non-oppositional animation of the thing and the
positional situation of the subject. The objective "against"
stands for "against-toward."
24. What does Derrida mean when he writes that "if things run as
though on wheels, this is perhaps because things aren't going so
well, by reason of an internal infirmity" ("Truth" 78)?[9
<#foot9>] Does he not imply that this thingly "hastiness" is an
upshot of an accelerated temporalization whereby the thing gives,
demands, and takes less time, or almost no time at all? Will the
things so sped up give us an impression that they happen in the
/Augenblick/, the blink of an eye that transfigures them into
ideal objects, into the prostheses sustaining their "internal
infirmity"? If the things run along in haste, this is not because
they are able to somehow "cover" and open up more space in a
shorter stretch of time, but because they betray their own demand
for temporalization and refuse to give. The more animated they
are, the faster they work--the closer they come to being
unworkable "by reason of an internal infirmity" which, as we know,
is constitutively open to exteriority in things that are always
beside themselves /in/ themselves. The thing's infirmity
un-sublated in any prosthetic device is attached to the inner
frame posited and deposited by the work that seeks to
counteract--and that just succeeds in aggravating--this infirmity.
25. When "things run as though on wheels," they reveal their deranged
(/dérangée/) verve or madness. And the margins of Derrida's (but
not only Derrida's) texts augment this derangement. At several
crucial junctures in Specters of Marx, the textual voice addresses
itself directly to the reader. "Let us accelerate things
[/Accélérons/]," says Derrida before outlining the madness of the
new "ten plagues" that haunt contemporaneity (80). "As we must
hasten the conclusion, let us schematize things [/schématisons/],"
he implores toward the end of the book (169). We must not rush to
decide on what is consequential here; what is a "mere" accessory
to the argument; what is an idle, colloquial, and highly idiomatic
turn of phrase; what is an imprecision in the translation of the
pleas "/accélérons/" and "/schématisons/" lacking any specific
/objects/ of acceleration and schematization; and what belongs to
the "core" of the exposition. For the prospects of the text
feeding on the increased tempo and rhythm of the thing are not
definitively excluded.
26. Consider, for example, Marx's tried and tested solution to the
problem of conjuration: "to close out his accounts . . . he counts
things up" (Derrida, Specters 142). And Derrida? Does he not
"accelerate" things by counting down the new plagues and arriving
at the same number (ten) as Marx? Of course, Derrida does not
simply force things into a new tempo of giving less, but discovers
the acceleration immanent to the things he counts in the
decontextual context of globalization and commodification.
Significantly, the commodity-thing (the object-thing) does not
admit any other treatment. Materiality-/cum/-number, "sensuous
non-sensuous," "a 'thing' without phenomenon, a thing in flight"
(150), it contracts and reduces the circle to a point, gives
expression to circulation time striving to zero (as Marx observes
in the second volume of Capital), demands less time for
production, is instantaneously destroyed in consumption, dreams up
its /Augenblick/ in the evanescence of purely financial
transactions carried out in the global communication networks, all
the while becoming madly unworkable and masking its internal
infirmity, i.e. the relatively non-commodified production of the
labor force. At the summit of madness, this "thing" demands term
and temporalization, gift /and/ restitution (Derrida, Given Time
40), that is, surplus value /and/ fair remuneration, but also
forecloses the term it demands, erases the trace of /différance/
that orders it, and lapses into the routines of objective ideality
desiring the eternal present of capitalization. Commodity
fetishism is the capitalist style, its very stylus whose dual
function it is to imprint and to scratch out the trace of justice,
protecting "the thing itself" only on the condition that its
thinghood should be forgotten: "on the condition at least that it
should not /already/ be that gaping chasm which has been
deflowered in the unveiling of the difference" (Derrida, Spurs 39).
27. Counting things is a strategy justified by the historical
incarnation and self-effacement of the thing in the commodity
form, but the satire of the thing makes inaccuracy unavoidable.
Like no one else, Derrida knows that the thing is more than one
and, more precisely, that there are always "/three things of the
thing/ [/trois choses de la chose/]"that haunt the haunting
(Specters 9/29).[10 <#foot10>] So, the ten plagues and the ten
manifestations of ideology are actually thirty--at least
thirty--if we are willing to correct the forgetful calculus that
counts the thing as one and naked /object/, to correct it,
precisely, through the explication of (a) mourning, (b) productive
or generative historicity ("generations of skulls or spirits"),
and (c) work in each of the plagues and in each of the
manifestations. One may rightly object that the improved
re-accounting protocols are as useless as their simple-minded
counterpart, if, to paraphrase Derrida, everything in the thing
impels the number and the annulment of the number. With this
improvement, we have not yet gauged the axiom of the non-numerical
infinity of the gift, postulating that "the direct 'object' [what
is the nature of direct oppositionality suspended in the
indirection of quotation marks?] of the act of 'giving', . . . the
given of the giving alter[s] radically the meaning of the act each
time" (Derrida, Given Time 49). In this case, the most attentive
and scrupulous of accountants will find herself faced with the
dilemma of Carroll's Alice, who, after desperately trying to sum
up the sequence of "one and one and one and . . . " proposed by
the White Queen, had no other choice but to respond, "I don't
know. I lost count." She loses count on account of the complexity
hidden in the linear-sequential "and one" which means the exact
opposite ("and not one"): the more than one in one, the
non-identity of the one, the absolute separation between the one
and the other (one), and so forth. In other words, the thing is
never "just this one," as it is for Heidegger.
28. The satire of the Thing irritates its proper-improper name. Why
"the Thing"? The first clue to this capitalization ties together
the sanctioned multiplicity of contradictory translations--the
multiplicity "internal" to the Thing--and "the signature of the
Thing 'Shakespeare': to authorize each one of the translations"
(Derrida, Specters 22). By the same token, though steering toward
the impropriety of the proper name, the thing's inability to
procure and to secure a proper name, Derrida refers to "some
'Thing'" that "will have frightened and continues to frighten in
the equivocation of this event," the event of Marxism (104). The
signature of the Thing "Marx," however, refuses to authorize the
legacies and bastardized political translations that call
themselves Marxist and that break the name and the Thing thus
named into an array of one-dimensional objects. (As Derrida will
not fail to note upon reading Blanchot, there are always three
"voices" of Marx. Lest each of the voices is heard, Marxism is
bound to linger in one of the three -isms of economic determinism,
detached scientism, or political nominalism. And, therefore, the
rules of multiplying this Thing, like any other, by three
necessarily apply here as elsewhere.)
29. The feigned signatures, the only possible signatures, of the Thing
proliferate to such an extent that its inscription in quotation
marks is supplemented with a more radical strategy of equating it
with the exact opposite, the Athing: "Nominalism, conceptualism,
realism: all of this is routed by the Thing /or the Athing/ [/la
Chose ou l'Achose/: the difference between the two is, again,
entirely graphic] called ghost" (138, emphasis added). But both in
the oral and in the conceptual registers, this opposition does not
subsist as an opposition, for, if it did, it would have
immediately transformed the thing into another object. Which means
that, all the more imperceptibly, the thing indistinguishable from
its opposite loses itself (its thinghood) in objectivity. It is
only graphically that the non-identity of the Thing "itself" is
exposed, but the price paid for this exposure is a ghostly
incarnation of the name in the nameless (the routing of
nominalism) and, again, of the thing in the object. Cited
directly, without detours, head-on, the indeterminate spatiality
of thinghood passes into the most rigid and determinate opposition
of objectivity.
V
30. The passage of the thing into the object unbrackets the
interiority of the thing, unhinges its (unhinged) deposition
beside itself, and reverses the process in which it turns inside
out. Derrida's word for this reversal is "invagination"--not a
total incorporation of the remainder inside something which is no
longer a thing, but "the inward refolding of /la gaine/ [the
sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to
the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket"
("Living On" 97). The object does not internalize the thing, for,
should it do so, it will have instantaneously lost its flat
objectivity in the volume obtained by proxy from that which it
will have swallowed up. Inversely, turning the thing "outside in"
without decisively crossing the border, without reducing
non-identical excess, the object will resemble more and more a
crumpled screen, an uneven surface that hampers direct reflection
and interrupts the monotony of negativity. The subject is then
faced with abstruse, non-idealizable objectivity which "makes
sense" exclusively in the modality of not-giving something it will
never contain.
31. The satirical trappings of the thing overlaid with its
invagination in the object yield what appear to be slippages in
Derrida's texts--the rare moments when rigorous differentiation
between the two collapses, when one is mentioned right after the
other in uncomplicated chains of equivalence and substitution. On
the surface of it, one of the slippages takes place where it
matters least, that is, where Derrida puts the object and the
thing to one side, /in opposition to/ something else that annuls
the gift, as in the first chapter of Given Time. He writes, "it
suffices that the other perceive and /keep/, not even the object
of the gift, the object given, the thing, but . . . its
intentional meaning, for the gift to be annulled" (14). Need we
say that to place the thing along with the object in opposition to
. . . is to objectify the former straight away? Moreover, we have
already established that intentionality, "intentional meaning,"
differs according to the object and the thing to which it attaches
itself. To put it crudely, whilst the thing and the other aim at
me, I aim at the object. How, then, is the opposition between the
thing and the object on one hand and "intentional meaning" on the
other possible?
32. And what about the other who is the subject of this sentence? In
line with the logic of "Violence and Metaphysics" buttressed with
the haunto-logic of Specters of Marx, the intentionality of the
other is allied with that of the thing in the relation without
relation of haunting, in the conspiracy of conjuration, and in the
apparition of the inapparent. No intentionality, including this
one, can aim at something, at someone, at me who (that) is
altogether present and who (that) is, therefore, /kept/ in
presence in the form of a repeatedly given ideal object, intuited
in the fullness of presence. "It belongs to the original structure
of expression to be able to dispense with the full presence of the
object aimed at by intuition . . . . The absence of the object
aimed at does not compromise the meaning" (Derrida, Speech 90).
The absence of the object here does not automatically entail the
absence of the thing; in fact, shortly thereafter, Derrida
explicitly distinguishes one from the other ("Two identical
expressions . . . may mean the same thing, and yet have different
objects" [91].) It follows that when the present-absent thing
aimed at is "the I" whom the other perceives, the gift of the
thing is not annulled if the other regards the thing of the gift
from the other side of his visor, in non-reciprocal reciprocity,
/qua/ other (the uniquely given, each time for the first time),
not /qua/ another given (object) of the giving.
33. To return to the route of invagination: commodities, in Derrida's
reading of Marx, assume the character of equivocally invaginated
things. Taking the table that Marx gives as an example deposited
near the beginning of Capital, Derrida points out that "this Thing
which is no longer altogether a thing . . . unfolds
(/entwickelt/), it unfolds /itself/, it develops what it
engenders" (Specters 152). This unfolding is not the only factor
that negates the thinghood of "this Thing," the thinghood that
performs its endless routine of turning inside out, as usual. A
whole new series of operations of refolding coterminous with this
usual routine is in order. Derrida will group these operations
under the title of "automatic autonomy" (153), of the paradoxical
in-animation that commences, on the one hand, with the turning
upside down of the table, the static repositioning of the table on
its head, rendering it both useless and more stable, and, on the
other, its sudden inspiration and deposition, driving it to the
marketplace where it is ready to face other
commodity-thing-objects. "The market is a front, a front among
fronts, a confrontation" (155) inviting faceless, standoffish
objects to a surface-to-surface relationship, to a faceless facing
toward-against, but also requiring that they rush to it
themselves, crawl on the inverted table top that will never
function as a sheath for itself or for the value it is supposed to
undergird, forget the security of their position and opposition,
lose their grounding, execute a /salto mortale/, as Marx calls it,
of valuation and exchange. The commodity is an object-thing in
which the fundamental lines of demarcation between things and
objects are contaminated, while commodification understood as
invagination is a leap of the thing into the object, and back again.
34. The generative unfolding of the thing is immanent to its
constitutive multiplicity. In the course of invagination that
searches for the trace of this unfolding within the folds of the
thing itself, in the course of the "mutilating excavation of
things [/excavation mutilatrice des choses/]," one uncovers "the
stratified layers, the abyssal series of sedimentations" (Derrida
and Thévenin 125, 145). Conversely, the object accommodates
multiplicity only on the condition that it shatters into a number
of fragments or is torn to shreds and thus rendered "partial"
(Derrida, Given Time 49). The thing is both more and less than the
object. More than the object, its pluri-dimensionality has volume
and "interiority," with which it nonetheless does not coincide.
Less than the object, it does not face us as such in infinite
repeatability, but promotes "the mutilating excavation"
historically replaying and contorting singular and abyssal
sedimentations. Both more and less, the thing brings to a grinding
halt the multiplicity of types but not the non-numerical
multiplicity of "the gift," whose meaning changes with every
given. Invagination adumbrates this precarious margin, assesses
the breadth of difference, and enforces the traversed distance
between the thing and the object.
VI
35. A footnote at the end of The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud
announces our problematic, inflecting it with a tinge of
"auto-deconstruction." "Will I have been forcing things?
[/Aurai-je forcé les choses?/] Perhaps it will be thought that I
have given too much weight to this word the /subjectile /. . . But
first of all no reading, no interpretation could ever prove its
efficacy and its necessity without a certain forcing. /You have to
force things/" (156n80). Derrida proceeds to reflect on force and
its role in interpretation, but has he not already, in the very
gesture of self-criticism, forced "this word the /subjectile/"
into a word and a thing, or rather, into /things/? This is the
first possibility, but certainly not the last. For, what is it
exactly that "will have been" forced into what? To the first
possibility we might add the pernicious forcing of things into
objects, into themselves, or into the thing in the singular; the
invaginated forcing of aesthetic things (say, Artaud's notebooks)
into vocable media or words; the entwined forcing of chance into
the necessity of chance and of inefficacy proper to the inexistent
or anexistent subjectivity--into the efficacy of willful agency;
the perverse forcing of the things that aim at me into the
intentional coherence of my consciousness; the endless
referential, reiterative, cited, and translated forcing of texts
into other texts they are welcome to serve. There is also the
force immanent to the things themselves, the force buried in the
multifarious sedimentations that form them, the force awaiting
"the mutilating excavation" that will faithfully manifest, denude,
and betray the excavated "materials." /You have to force things/
only in this manner, both traversing the difference between forces
and maintaining the pathos of distance in spite of, or thanks to,
this traversal.
Philosophy Department, Graduate Faculty
New School University
mardm926@newschool.edu
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Notes
I owe a debt of gratitude to Edward S. Casey and to two anonymous
reviewers who offered constructive comments on the earlier drafts
of this article.
1 <#ref1>. I am thinking of the Hegelian enunciation of the
identity of difference and identity. And yet, the opposition
between position and opposition only formally resonates with this
enunciation. The content of this opposition refers to
irreconcilability, rather than to Hegelian reconciliation.
2 <#ref2>. Here I elaborate upon Derrida's remarks on the
"infirmity of the thesis" in The Truth in Painting; see 78.
3 <#ref3>. On "iterability without iteration," see Derrida,
Limited Inc., 48.
4 <#ref4>. In What Is a Thing? Heidegger claims that, in the
broadest sense of the term, the thing "is every affair or
transaction, something that is in this or that condition, the
things that happen in the world--occurrences, events"; see 5.
5 <#ref5>. The paradigm cases of this critique are Žižek's The
Puppet and the Dwarf and Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil, esp. Chapter II: "Does the Other Exist?"
6 <#ref6>."/Esse/ is /interesse/; essence is interest" (Levinas,
Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence 4).
7 <#ref7>. The second page number refers to the French edition of
Spectres De Marx.
8 <#ref8>. Also see Heidegger's What Is a Thing?: "The question
'What is a thing?' includes in itself the question 'What is
/Zeitraum/ (time-span)?', the puzzling unity of space and time
within which, as it seems, the basic character of things, to be
only this one, is determined" (17).
9 <#ref9>. It is worth noting that Heidegger's essay "The Thing"
(1971) begins with the acceleration immanent to
tele-techno-communications, the reduction of distances in space
and time, and the consideration of the thing as that which is near
to us.
10 <#ref10>. In contrast to the object of consciousness, things
can "belong" only to the thing, folding the genitive form inside
out: into the thing "itself" only as the multiplicity of things,
that is to say, as the difference of forces constitutive of the
thing "in" the thing.
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