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Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of Deconstruction in
Technics
*Ben Roberts <16.1bios.html#roberts.bio> *
/ University of Bradford/
b.l.roberts@bradford.ac.uk
© <#copyright>2005 Ben Roberts.
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Between Derrida and Stiegler
1. In his massive multi-volume work, Technics and Time, Bernard
Stiegler explores a history of technics as epiphylogenesis--the
preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience.
Epiphylogenesis marks for Stiegler a break with genetic evolution
(which cannot preserve the lessons of experience), a break which
also constitutes the "invention" of the human. As Stiegler puts it
in the general introduction to Technics and Time, "as a 'process
of exteriorization,' technics is the pursuit of life by means
other than life" (17).
2. Since the "human" is constituted through its exteriorization in
tools, its origin is neither biological (a particular arrangement
of cells) nor transcendental (to be found in something like
consciousness). The origin of the human as the prosthesis of the
living is therefore fundamentally /aporetic/: one should speak,
for Stiegler, of a non-origin or default of origin.[1 <#foot1>]
Stiegler develops these arguments through a reading of Rousseau
and Leroi-Gourhan, showing on the one hand how the empirical
approach of the paleo-anthropologist cannot avoid the
transcendental question of origin and, on the other, how
Rousseau's transcendental account of the question of origin
inscribes inside its account, despite itself, the thought of the
human as contingent or accidental (Technics 82-133).
3. I will not expand on Stiegler's reading of Leroi-Gourhan and
Rousseau here. What I intend to discuss is rather the relationship
between Stiegler's work and that of Jacques Derrida. In particular
I will examine Stiegler's discussion of Derrida in the latter half
of the first volume of Technics and Time and then move on to
discuss the interviews between the two men gathered in the
Echographies collection. I will demonstrate significant
differences in their respective theoretical approaches and show
how these arise in part from problems in Stiegler's reading of
Derrida.
4. The context of Stiegler's disagreement with Derrida in the first
volume of Technics and Time is the discussion in chapter 3 of the
paleo-anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan and the "invention of the
human." At the opening of the chapter Stiegler argues:
We are considering a passage: a passage to what is called the
human. Its "birth," if there is one . . . . To ask the
question of the birth of the human is to pose the question of
the "birth of death" or of the relation to death. But at stake
here will be the attempt to think, instead of the birth of the
human /qua/ entity relating to its end, rather its invention
or even its embryonic fabrication or conception, and to
attempt this independently of all anthropologism. (135)
Here then is the place of Leroi-Gourhan in Stiegler: the chance to
understand the emergence of the human in a non-"anthropologistic"
manner. The key to this approach is the role Leroi-Gourhan assigns
to technics in the evolution of the human. For Leroi-Gourhan, the
evolution of the human--unlike that of animals--is not only a
question of the evolution of a biological entity but also,
crucially for Stiegler, the evolution of technical objects (or
"organized inorganic matter" as Stiegler has it). Thus
Leroi-Gourhan opens up the possibility of an understanding of the
human as no longer simply either a biological entity /or/ a
biological entity with some transcendental quality (consciousness,
free will, etc.) added to it. Unfortunately, for Stiegler,
Leroi-Gourhan cannot quite deliver on the promise of a
non-anthropologistic or non-anthropocentric account of the human.
For although Leroi-Gourhan has an account of the process of
hominization as the exteriorization of the human in its tools, he
still requires what Stiegler calls the "artifice of a second
origin" in order to account for the passage from "technical" to
"creative" consciousness.
5. What lies behind this failure is an inability to understand the
origin of the human not merely as obscure but as fundamentally
/aporetic./ For the exteriorization of the human into
technics--writing, tools and so on--raises a fundamental /aporia/
of origin: "The paradox is to have to speak of an exteriorization
without a preceding interior: the interior is constituted in
exteriorization" (Technics 141). It is at this point, in order to
elucidate this aporetic structure, that Stiegler calls on
Derridean /différance/:
The ambiguity of the invention of the human, that which holds
together the /who/ and the /what/, binding them while keeping
them apart, is différance . . . Différance is neither the
/who/ nor the /what/, but their co-possibility, the movement
of their mutual coming-to-be, of their coming into convention.
The /who/ is nothing without the /what/ and conversely.
Différance is below and beyond the /who/ and the /what/; it
poses them together, a composition engendering the illusion of
an opposition. The passage is a mirage: the passage of the
cortex into flint, like a mirror proto-stage. (141)
For Stiegler only /différance/ as a structure of differing and
deferral /without/ origin can describe this aporetic relationship
between interior and exterior that is the "human." /Différance/,
here the co-possibility of the /who/ and the /what/, is what makes
possible the /who/ and the /what/, "below and beyond" them as
Stiegler puts it, and as such is what make possible the non-origin
or what he calls here the "proto-mirage" of the human. However,
the status of this passage is problematic, and it is what is at
stake in Stiegler's dispute with Derrida. On the one hand, this
emergence or passage is a "mirage," "aporetic" or "paradoxical."
The tool, the "work in flint," is no more an effect or product of
the human being than the human is an effect or product of the
appearance of flint tools. On the other hand, something, however
"aporetic" it may be, /happens/, "is accomplished" or /commences/,
and is this "beginning of 'exteriorization.'" Put otherwise: what
happens, what is suspended inside these quotation marks may remain
paradoxical or aporetic, but /that/ it happens, that there /is/ a
"passage" is not in question. For Stiegler this passage is crucial
because it marks the emergence of what he calls from the beginning
of Technics and Time "organized inorganic matter," "the prosthesis
of the human" or what he will later call, in relation to the
discussion of Husserl, "tertiary memory." It is precisely this
passage that, for Stiegler, is "remaining to be thought" in
Derrida's work.
6. This point seems to be demonstrated most clearly for Stiegler in
Derrida's own reading of Leroi-Gourhan in the chapter of Of
Grammatology entitled "Of Grammatology as a Positive Science," and
in particular in the following passage, which, since it seems to
mark such a crucial point of distinction between Stiegler and
Derrida, I quote at length:
Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity of man and the
human adventure thus by the simple possibility of the
/graphie/ in general; rather as a stage or an articulation in
the history of life--of what I have called /différance/--as
the history of the /grammè/. Instead of having recourse to the
concepts that habitually serve to distinguish man from other
living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence
of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.), the notion of
/program/ is invoked. It must of course be understood in the
cybernetic sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible only
in terms of a history of the possibilities of the trace as the
unity of a double movement of protention and retention. This
movement goes far beyond the possibilities of the "intentional
consciousness." It is an emergence that makes the /grammè/
appear /as such/ (that is to say according to a new structure
of nonpresence) and undoubtably makes possible the emergence
of systems of writing in the narrow sense. Since "genetic
inscription" and the "short programmatic chains" regulating
the behaviour of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage
beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a
certain /homo sapiens/, the possibility of the /grammè/
structures the movement of its history according to rigorously
original levels, types and rhythms. But one cannot think them
without the most general concept of the /grammè/. That is
irreducible and impregnable. If the expression ventured by
Leroi-Gourhan is accepted, one could speak of a "liberation of
memory," of an exteriorization always already begun but always
larger than the trace which, beginning from the elementary
programs of so-called "instinctive" behaviour up to the
constitution of electronic card-indexes and reading machines,
enlarges différance and the possibility of putting in reserve:
it at once and in the same movement constitutes and effaces
so-called conscious subjectivity, its logos, and its
theoretical attributes. (84)
Now, from Stiegler's point of view, the important point here in
Derrida's reading of Leroi-Gourhan is that the exteriorization of
the human into tools or graphical marks is only a stage in
/différance/ as the "history of life" in general. Thus Derrida
emphasizes the continuity of the "notion of /program/" from
"genetic inscription" up to and beyond alphabetic writing. The
possibility of the /gramme/ as program is prior to any particular
type of program, be it genetic or nongenetic, and even if one must
pay attention in the history of the /gramme/ to "rigorously
original levels, types and rhythms," Derrida insists that "one
cannot think them without the most general concept of the
/gramme/. That is irreducible and impregnable."
7. Stiegler's response seems to be as follows:
Différance is the history of life in general, in which an
articulation is produced, a stage of différance out of which
emerges the possibility of making the /gramme/ as such, that
is, "consciousness," appear. The task here will be to specify
that stage . . . . The passage from the genetic to the
nongenetic is the appearance of a new type of /gramme/ and/or
program. If the issue is no longer that of founding
/anthropos/ in the pure origin of itself, the origin of its
type must still be found. (Technics 137-38)
Thus even if Derrida is right in thinking that the notion of
program in Leroi-Gourhan challenges all the traditional
distinctions that mark the difference and origin of the human, of
/anthropos/, it is nonetheless the case that with the human we see
the emergence of a new type of program, and that new type of
program is exactly what Technics and Time, in its understanding of
technics as the prosthesis of the human, is concerned with. For
Stiegler it is crucial therefore to distinguish genetic evolution
from the non-genetic evolution which he calls epiphylogenesis and
which involves the evolution not of the biological entity which is
the human being, but of the technical supports in which the
human's epigenetic experience is preserved and accumulated.
8. For Stiegler it is the significance of epiphylogenesis, or the
fact that /Dasein/ "becomes singular in the history of the
living," that Derrida fails to think. This is not simply because
/différance/, which Stiegler establishes, on the basis of the
quote from Of Grammatology, as the "history of life in general" is
not developed far enough to have an account of the specificity of
epiphylogensis which Stiegler is outlining, but also, curiously,
because Derrida's arguments about /différance/ are for Steigler in
some sense inconsistent with themselves. After quoting at length
the passage from the essay "/Différance/" on the temporal and
spatial dimensions of the French verb /différer/, Stiegler
comments as follows:
All of this points primarily to life in general: there is time
from the moment there is life, whereas Derrida also writes,
just before the Leroi-Gourhan quotation [i.e., the passage
from Of Grammatology cited above], that "the trace is the
différance that opens appearing and the signification (which
articulates) the living onto the non-living in general, (which
is) the origin of all repetition." To articulate the living
onto the nonliving, is that not already a gesture from after
the rupture when you are already no longer in pure /phusis/?
There is something of an indecision about différance: it is
the history of life in general, but this history is (only)
given (as) (dating from) after the rupture, whereas the
rupture is, if not nothing, then at least much less than what
the classic divide between humanity and animality signifies.
The whole problem is that of the economy of life in general,
and the sense of death as the economy of life once the rupture
has taken place: life is, after the rupture, the economy of
death. The question of différance is death. (139, translation
slightly modified)
In other words, it is incoherent for /différance/ to constitute
both "the history of life in general" and the specific stage in
the history of life--which Stiegler associates with the invention
of the human and technics as epiphylogenesis--when the living is
articulated upon "the non-living in general," i.e., upon inorganic
organized matter.
9. However, one might wonder if it is not because Stiegler is
/himself/ operating from within such a rigorous distinction
between /phusis/ and /tekhne/ that he is able to convince himself
that it is only after the "rupture" of the technical that death is
the economy of life. For Stiegler it is only after such a rupture,
i.e., "the invention of the human," that the trace articulates the
living on the non-living in general. It is only at this point that
the evolution of a particular living being (the human) becomes
bound up with the evolution of something that is not living, that
is, what Stiegler calls "inorganic organized matter," in the form
of tools, writing and so on. But there is no reason to suppose
that Derrida is working with the same set of assumptions when he
talks of the possibility of the /gramme/ embracing not only
alphabetic writing but also "genetic inscription." Indeed it seems
to be clearly the case that Derrida is precisely challenging such
a classical set of distinctions (which is what they are, for the
opposition between epigenesis and epiphylogenesis only reproduces
in a different form the more traditional opposition between nature
and culture). It would seem perfectly reasonable for Derrida to
argue that genetic inscription is a species of the /gramme/
precisely because genetics /does indeed/ articulate the living
upon the non-living in general: the DNA of a biological entity
binds it to its non-living ancestors just as much as their written
or technical legacy; genetic codes preserve the legacy of the
nonliving in the living in a way that is analogous to (though
obviously not the same as) alphabetic writing. Moreover it is not
immediately obvious why genetic evolution should be regarded
simply as an "economy of life," when death and genetic
non-survival are in part the criteria of selection: genetics, it
might be argued, is equiprimordially an economy of life and an
economy of death. It is only if one thinks, like Stiegler, that
there is first an economy of life, then a rupture that coincides
with the arrival of the human, and that then, as he argues above,
"life is, after the rupture, the economy of death," that one is
forced to regard genetic inscription as in some way rigorously
distinct from all later forms of--no doubt,
"epiphylogenetic"--inscription.
10. In part the problem here is Stiegler's attachment to the category
of "organized inorganic matter" and to the assumption that the
organic/inorganic distinction maps in a straightforward,
unproblematic manner onto the distinction between living and
nonliving that Derrida invokes with respect to the trace. In fact,
Stiegler often takes inorganic (/inorganique/) and non-living
(/non-vivant/) to be simply synonymous.[2 <#foot2>] In other
words, he reads the "non-living in /general/" of the passage from
Of Grammatology as solely consisting of a very /specific/ form of
non-living he associates with inorganic matter. Having construed
Derrida's thinking of the trace in this manner, Stiegler is then
puzzled why Derrida isn't more interested in the relationship
between organic and inorganic matter (living and non-living), and
more specifically why he isn't more interested in the "rupture" of
the human which Stiegler understands, as we have seen, as the
point at which the evolution of the living becomes bound up with a
relation to the non-living in the form of tools. Stiegler
therefore makes the mistake of assuming that the trace requires
one to think of this new category of /organized/ inorganic matter
when in fact the trace challenges (without erasing) the very
categorical distinctions on which Stiegler is relying. Indeed
precisely what makes the trace, or the idea of the /gramme/ as
program, radical is that it exists on either side of Stiegler's
imagined rupture and therefore challenges both the opposition
between nature and culture and "the name of man." As Beardsworth
comments:
The risk Stiegler runs in differentiating the historical
epochs of arche-writing, and in thinking them in terms of
technical supplementarity, is precisely that of considering
technicity in the /exclusively exteriorized terms of technics
which befit the process of hominization/ . . . The major
theses in Technics and Time according to which the technical
object represents a third kind of being . . . that
hominization emerges through the technical suspension of
genetic, and that, therefore, the human lives through means
other than life . . . all such theses, while brilliantly
articulated by Stiegler in their own terms, end up having the
following somewhat ironic consequence: biological life prior
to, or in its difference from anthropogenesis is removed from
the structure of originary technicity; as a result biology is
naturalized and the differentiation of technicity /qua/
technics is only considered in its exteriorized form in
relation to processes of hominization. ("Thinking Technicity" 81)
11. It might seem that it is not so much Derrida's account of
/différance/ that is confused as Stiegler's reading of it. This
point can be illustrated by Stiegler's reading of a different
passage about /différance/, a passage this time drawn from the
essay "Différance":
Thus one could consider all the pairs of opposites on which
philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives,
not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what
indicates that each of the terms must appear as the
/différance/ of the other, as the other different and deferred
in the economy of the same (the intelligible as
differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different
and deferred; the concept as different and deferred,
differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and
deferred, differing-deferring; all the others of
/physis/-/tekhne/, /nomos/, /thesis/, society, freedom,
history, mind etc.--as /physis/ different and deferred, or as
/physis/ differing and deferring. /Physis/ in /différance/ . .
. ). (Margins 17)
Having cited a section of this passage, Stiegler comments: "Now
phusis as life was already /différance/. There is an indecision, a
passage remaining to be thought" (Technics 139). What he seems to
mean is that /différance/ cannot be simultaneously "the history of
life in general" (the definition from Of Grammatology which
Stiegler is taking here to be synonymous with "the history of
/phusis/ in general")[3 <#foot3>] /and/ the differing-deferring of
/phusis/ and /tekhne/ which Stiegler assumes can only be the case
after the "rupture" of the technical. But it is clear from this
passage that Derrida sees the thought of /différance/ as that
which first of all challenges the philosophical opposition between
/phusis/ and /tekhne/, establishing them as "different and
deferred in the economy of the same." It is not surprising
therefore that Derrida does not have an account of the invention
of the human as a "rupture" in /différance/, because this rupture
would seem to risk affirming on a different level the very
philosophical oppositions that such a /différance/ disrupts. For,
to reiterate, it is difficult not to see in Stiegler's opposition
of phylogenesis and epiphylogenesis a reproduction of a most
classical opposition between nature and culture, where the
"nature" of phylogenetic evolution, which can never preserve the
experience of the individual entity, is opposed to the "culture"
of /epi/phylogenetic evolution which would preserve such
epigenetic experience in its exteriorized prostheses (tools,
writing and so on).[4 <#foot4>] On this reading, Stiegler would
add to this traditional division the twist that such a culture
would no longer be understood as the /product/ of the human but as
that which /invents/ the human in an exteriorization of the
organic living being into inorganic technical objects.
12. Of course, Stiegler would not agree with the suggestion that the
phylogenesis/epiphylogenesis divide or "rupture" simply reproduces
the opposition between nature and culture; such a resistance would
probably center around his linking the idea of epiphylogenesis to
/différance/. The role that /différance/ plays in Stiegler's
theoretical setup--especially in the first volume of Technics and
Time--is to show that as soon as there is anything like
epiphylogenesis--i.e., culture--there is a /différance/, that is,
a differing deferral without origin. It is exactly on this point,
after all, that Stiegler sees himself as deviating from Rousseau
and Leroi-Gourhan, who must both ultimately rely on the artifice
of a second origin or coup in order to explain the deviation from
nature (Rousseau) or the arrival of "symbolic consciousness"
(Leroi-Gourhan). Epiphylogenesis as /différance/, on the other
hand, allows for a new non-anthropocentric concept of the human
and of "culture." Such a concept would displace the question of
the origin of the human and of culture, whether that question is
framed in transcendental or biological terms. Indeed this seems to
be exactly how Stiegler understands Derrida's own reading of
Leroi-Gourhan, as is evident from this (as we shall see, rather
imprecise) précis of the passage from Of Grammatology previously
cited:
In other words, Leroi-Gourhan's anthropology can be thought
from within an essentially non-anthropocentric concept that
does not take for granted the usual divides between animality
and humanity. Derrida bases his own thought of différance as a
general history of life, that is, as a general history of the
/gramme/, on the concept of program insofar as it can be found
on both sides of such divides. Since the /gramme/ is older
than the specifically human written forms, and because the
letter is nothing without it, the conceptual unity that
différance is contests the opposition animal/human and, in the
same move, the opposition nature/culture. "Intentional
consciousness" finds the origin of its possibility before the
human; it is nothing but "the emergence that has the /gramme/
appearing /as such/." /We are left with the question of
determining what the conditions of such an emergence of the
"gramme as such" are, and the consequences as to the general
history of life and/or of the gramme. This will be our
question/. (137, emphasis original)
13. For many readers of Derrida, this must seem like a rather strange
way of understanding /différance/. For it is not easy to
understand how a Derridean understanding of /différance/ would
allow one to oppose a "non-anthropocentric concept of the human"
to an anthropocentric one, or to contest the opposition of
concepts such as nature and culture by referring them to the
"conceptual unity" of /différance/. Derrida says, both in the
essay "/différance/" and elsewhere, that /différance/ is /not/ a
concept, "neither a word nor a concept," a point that is repeated
several times in the essay "Différance."[5 <#foot5>] Moreover,
such remarks are not mere qualifications, caveats, or platitudes
which Derrida attaches to an otherwise orthodox semantic
exposition of what /différance/ /is/: they are rather at the heart
of his argument. /Différance/ is not a concept because it is "the
possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system
in general," and "as what makes possible the presentation of the
being-present, it is never presented as such" (Margins 6,11).
Deconstruction can therefore never proceed by opposing
/différance/ as a new concept to a series of old metaphysical
concepts, for example, by opposing a "non-anthropocentric" concept
of the human to an anthropocentric one. It is also for this
reason, as Derrida also makes abundantly clear, that one can never
simply think /différance/ as naming some kind of conceptual unity
which would be prior to all conceptual oppositions. Since that
which makes conceptuality possible can never in itself be made
present as a concept, it is in principle "unnameable" (and this is
the sense of "/différance/" being "neither a word nor a concept):
indeed the choice of the term /différance/ is, as Derrida points
out, only a strategic or provisional one, which, as he also points
out, does not mean that a better term (for example, "technics," or
"epiphylogenesis"),[6 <#foot6>] or a real name, is waiting in the
wings.[7 <#foot7>] Far from a conceptual or nominal unity,
Derrida's choice of the neographism "/différance/" is motivated
not by a desire to unite the two meanings of the verb /différer/
but by that of maintaining it as being "immediately and
irreducibly polesemic" (8).
14. The problem then with Stiegler's argument is, as Geoff Bennington
has argued, Stiegler's desire to think technics in both
quasi-transcendental and positivistic terms.[8 <#foot8>] There is
a question about the relationship between historical or
theoretical understanding of technics and the argument that
Stiegler also wants to advance about technics as a
quasi-transcendental structure (what Bennington calls "originary
technicity"). This problem concerning the relationship between
positive knowledge about technology and the quasi-transcendental
understanding of technics also arises in the series of interviews
between Stiegler and Derrida presented in Echographies:
The origin of sense makes no sense. This is not a negative or
nihilistic statement. That which bears intelligibility, that
which increases intelligibility, is not intelligible--by
definition, by virtue of its topological structure. From this
standpoint, technics is not intelligible. This does not mean
that it is a source of irrationality, that it is irrational or
that it is obscure. It means that it does not belong, by
definition, by virtue of its situation, to the field of that
which it makes possible. Hence a machine is, in essence, not
intelligible. (108)
It is difficult not to read this as a direct challenge to the
logic of Technics and Time. For what is Stiegler's project if it
is not to make technics visible and intelligible?
15. Stiegler responds to Derrida at this point: "It [technics]
constitutes sense if it participates in its construction" (109),
to which Derrida responds, reiterating:
Yes, but that which constitutes sense is senseless. This is a
general structure. The origin of reason and of the history of
reason is not rational. (109)
In his own reading of this interview--an interview which he admits
he finds "disappointing" since "Derrida's responses to
[Stiegler's] questions and interventions remain too much within
the ambit and terms of his own philosophy"--Richard Beardsworth
formulates the following reading of this exchange between Stiegler
and Derrida:
Derrida's comments are, to say the least, odd in response to
Stiegler's concerns, both at a juncture of the interview when
the two men are acquainted with each other's preoccupations
and, more importantly, at a moment in cultural history when
the terms of philosophical reflection upon the real are
shifting. As we have seen, Stiegler's interest lies,
precisely, in the historical differentiation of this "other"
of reason and meaning together with the political implications
of the articulation of this "other." To respond by reiterating
a series of propositions that are well-known from within and
around the thought of deconstruction and post-structuralism,
but that do not engage as such with the explicit wish on
Stiegler's part to genealogize, after the last twenty years
thinking, what lies prior to the opposition between reason and
unreason, meaning and unmeaning is intellectually and
culturally dissatisfying. ("Towards" 138)
But it is surely not Derrida who fails to engage with Stiegler but
vice versa: as we have seen above, Stiegler fails to respond to
the basic problem being outlined here, however many ways Derrida
formulates it, which one might formulate again and put as follows:
"How is theoretical and historical knowledge of "technics"
possible, given that, as you yourself argue, technics is first of
all what makes theory and history possible?" Stiegler never really
responds to this question, neither in Echographies nor in the two
first volumes of La technique et le temps. In his general
introduction to the multi-volume work, he doesn't even offer the
genealogical explanation that Richard Beardsworth provides for him
in his reading of Echographies. Moreover this response, i.e. to
assert the possibility of a genealogy of technics, couldn't be
more problematic. One can provide a genealogy of a concept,
showing how that concept is inherited through a determinate
history. /But we are concerned here with the genealogy of that
which makes conceptualization possible./ Moreover--and here, in a
sense, is the very strangest aspect of the deployment of the term
"genealogy" here--as Stiegler has already shown us, technics as
epiphylogenesis or tertiary memory is the condition of inheritance
itself. A genealogy of technics would be /a genealogy of genealogy
itself/, an exercise that would seem rendered impossible by the
"topological" structure that Derrida mentions in relation to
intelligibility.
16. Following the "topological" logic that Derrida outlines, if
technics is the condition of memory it can't possibly be made
present, rendered intelligible, dissected, theorized, historicized
and, in general, /remembered/ or made present to consciousness.
Stiegler assumes that technics is not only the condition of
knowledge, but is in itself knowable. However, as soon as
prosthesis or technicity in general is the condition of knowledge,
of what is sayable or thinkable, what can be positively known or
said about the prosthesis /qua/ prosthesis is necessarily limited.
To not recognize this limit is to risk confusing insights into the
/empirical/ history of technology as prosthesis with arguments
concerning technics as a /transcendental/ condition of knowledge.
At a later point in the interview Derrida reformulates this idea
in the terms of Specters of Marx on inheritance. Derrida comments
on the necessary dissymmetry which inhabits this relation to the
spectral quality of the technical object:
One has a tendency to treat what we've been talking about here
under the names of image, teletechnology, television screen,
archive, as if all these things were on display: a collection
of objects, things we see, spectacles in front of us, devices
we might use, much as we might use a "teleprompter" we had
ourselves written or prescribed. But wherever there are these
specters, we are being watched, we sense or think we are being
watched. This dissymmetry complicates everything. The law, the
injunction, the order, the performative wins out over the
theoretical, the constative, knowledge, calculation and the
programmable. (Derrida and Steigler 122)
For both Stiegler and Derrida the question of technics is closely
linked to the question of inheritance: for Stiegler, as we have
seen, it is because the technical object is the condition of my
access to the "past I have not lived" that technics is
constitutive of temporality; for Derrida, "to be is to inherit,"
that is, to be is to be inhabited by a certain spectral
inheritance. However, for Derrida what is crucial about the
structure of inheritance is what he calls in Specters of Marx the
"visor effect"[9 <#foot9>]--the reference being to the suit of
armour worn by Hamlet's ghost--which means that we cannot see the
specter, even as "we sense or think we are being watched." As
Derrida reaffirms in Echographies: "The specter is not simply the
visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or
concerns me without any possible reciprocity, and who therefore
makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation" (121). Thus
even if "to be is to inherit," there is a certain impossibility
about knowing the terms of that inheritance. What this means in
the context of Derrida's discussion with Stiegler, and this is the
sense of the passage we have just cited, is that if technicity is
the condition of inheritance, such a technicity can't in itself
become the object of theoretical knowledge. The dissymmetry which
Derrida remarks here is clearly linked to the topological
structure we have seen him bring out in relation to
intelligibility: that which bears the inheritance can't in itself
become visible within that inheritance. Thus whereas in Technics
and Time Stiegler could be seen constructing a (highly cogent)
/theory/ of inheritance as epiphylogenesis, for Derrida the
structure of inheritance exceeds and makes possible theoretical
knowledge, without itself becoming the object of a theoretical
knowledge. It is in this sense that "the law, the injunction, the
order, the performative wins out over the theoretical, the
constative, knowledge, calculation and the programmable."
17. The question of the dissymmetry of this topological structure
differentiates Stiegler's theoretical account of technics from the
thought of arche-writing in Of Grammatology. Technics and Time
never explicitly asks how the theory of technics or a history of
the supplement is possible, or, put differently, how, given a
general structure in which everyone has forgotten Epimetheus, it
is possible for Stiegler to remember him. Stiegler inclines toward
a simpler and more traditional type of theoretical work in which
one imagines that what can supersede philosophy in its repression
of technics (or even Heideggerian thinking) is just a "better"
theory,[10 <#foot10>] one that in this case makes possible a new
thinking about the political or what Stiegler calls a "politics of
memory," as he outlines toward the end of the first volume of
Technics and Time:
The irreducible relation of the /who/ to the /what/ is nothing
but the expression of retentional finitude (that of its
/memory./ Today memory is the object of an industrial
exploitation that is also a war of speed: from the computer to
program industries in general, via the cognitive sciences, the
technics of virtual reality and telepresence together with the
biotechnologies . . . There is therefore a pressing need for a
politics of memory. This politics would be nothing but a
thinking of technics . . . ) (Technics 276)
18. It might well seem therefore that Stiegler's desire in the first
volume of Technics and Time to think technics on the basis of
/différance/ (and therefore to resist the various pitfalls which
he finds in Leroi-Gourhan and in Simondon) is at odds both with
the specifics of Derrida's own account of /différance/--this much
is clear from the reading in The Fault of Epimetheus--and with
deconstruction in general to the extent that Stiegler in Technics
and Time is concerned with the construction of a new /theoretical/
account of technics that is capable of displacing philosophical
and, to a certain extent, traditional scientific accounts. At the
stage of the "Fault of Epimetheus" Stiegler tends toward a theory
of what one might call, using Richard Beardsworth's terminology,
"technics as time."[11 <#foot11>] This theory would draw on
deconstruction in a straightforward way as a continuation of the
arguments that Derrida opens up in the chapter entitled "Of
Grammatology as a Positive Science" in Of Grammatology--while
correcting, for example, Derrida's failure to understand the
significance of the emergence of the human (which we addressed
above).
19. In later work,[12 <#foot12>] Stiegler seems to advance a subtle
distinction between his work and that of Derrida. Whereas Derrida
is primarily concerned (in Of Grammatology) with a "logic" of the
supplement, Stiegler is concerned with the "history" of the
supplement. This distinction can be observed in the paper
"Discrétiser le temps," where Stiegler argues for a history of the
supplement "of which . . . Derrida has unfortunately never really
explored the conditions."[13 <#foot13>] Even if Stiegler believes,
as he states in the introduction to volume two of La technique et
le temps ("La désorientation"), that the logic of the supplement
is "always already" the history of the supplement, it is clear
that he believes that Derrida has in some sense neglected this
history of the supplement or failed to recognize its importance.
This question is explicitly raised in La technique et le temps in
the discussion of phonetic writing in the chapter in volume 2
entitled "L'époque orthographique":
The stakes here concern the /specificity/ of /linear/ writing
in the history of arche-writing, ortho-graphic writing which
is also /phono-logic/, always understood from the beginning as
such, and of which Derrida often seems to blur, if not deny
the specificity of in the history of the trace.[14 <#foot14>]
20. Here Stiegler insists on the term "orthographic" writing in
preference to "phonetic" or "phonologic" writing. Stiegler argues,
via a reading of Jean Bottero, that what is distinctively
different about such writing is not that it is closer to the
sounds of speech, but rather that it is capable of breaking with
the context of its inscription in a way that "pictographic" signs
are not:
"Proper writing" (l'écriture proprement dite) is what is
readable as a result of us having at our disposal the
recording "code." It is orthothetic recording. Pictographic
tables remain unreadable for us even when we have the code at
our disposal: one must also have knowledge of the /context./
Without this, the signification escapes. In order to accede
fully to the signification of a pictographic inscription, one
must /have lived/ the event of which it holds the record.[15
<#foot15>]
21. Therefore for Stiegler the specificity of orthographic writing is
not that it is closer to speech but that it represents a different
type of "recording" (/enregistrement/). Derrida's own account of
"phonologocentrism" seeks to show that (i) the philosophical
account of language always prefers speech to writing ; (ii) it
therefore prefers phonetic writing to any other kind since, being
closest to speech, it is something like the "least worse" form of
writing. The deconstruction of such phonologocentrism involves
showing, on the one hand, how the characteristics that philosophy
ascribes to writing are always already at work in language in
general (including speech). To this extent Stiegler is quite happy
to go along with Derrida's account. He finds a problem when, on
the other hand, Derrida argues that as soon as one removes the
phonetic privilege, an axiomatic distinction between phonetic or
orthographic writing and non-phonetic writing becomes impossible
to sustain. Stiegler finds it problematic that Derrida can on the
one hand argue in the opening Exergue of Of Grammatology that the
phoneticization of writing is "the historical origin and
structural possibility of philosophy as of science" and yet on the
other hand write in a later chapter, "Of Grammatology as a
Positive Science" that "phoneticization . . . has always already
begun" and that "[the] cuneiform, for example, is at the same time
ideogrammatic and phonetic" (4, 89). Stiegler comments:
Grammatology elaborates a /logic of the supplement/ where the
accidentality of the supplementary is originary. It is
concerned with taking the /history/ of the supplement /as/
accidental history from which would result a becoming
essential of the accident--but one must therefore /also/ talk
of a becoming accidental of the essence. By most often
blurring the specificity of phonologic writing, by suggesting
for the most part that /nearly/ all that develops therein was
already there before, by therefore not making this specificity
a central question (and doesn't all grammatology come in a
certain manner necessarily to /relegate/ such a question?)
doesn't one weaken in advance the grammatological project?[16
<#foot16>]
22. One has to understand this move in the context of Stiegler's
overall project in Technics and Time. The deconstruction of speech
and writing is crucial to Stiegler's argument because it appears
to show that the technical supplement (writing), far from being an
exterior accident that befalls an originally full speech, is
actually at the heart of language proper. It therefore
deconstructs the opposition between the contingent, "accidental"
exteriority of the technical supplement and language as essence or
necessity. But for Stiegler this move is, as it were, only a first
step. One must go beyond what he sees as a mere logic of the
supplement--the deconstructive move that locates the contingent
accidentality of the supplement within and not outside the essence
of language--to what he wants to think of as the "history of the
supplement." The point is that Derrida's deconstructive move here
ought to lead him not only to the deconstruction of the
relationship between the accidental and the essential but also to
be more interested in the "accidental" in itself, in the history
of the technical supplement, i.e. technics. It ought to lead him
to thinking, as Stiegler puts it here, the "becoming accidental of
the essence," which involves rethinking the essence of the human
as technical accidentality--essentially Stiegler's project in
Technics and Time. One ought to be less interested in the written
supplement in general as an avenue for the deconstruction of the
metaphysics of presence and more interested in the "specificity"
of given written supplements.
Beardsworth's Two "Derrideanisms"
23. In the conclusion to his influential book, Derrida and the
Political, Richard Beardsworth develops a "loose speculation"
about "two possible futures of Derrida's philosophy":
The first would be what one may call within classical concepts
of the political a "left-wing Derrideanism." It would
foreground Derrida's analysis of originary technicity,
"avoiding" the risk of freezing quasi-transcendental logic by
developing the trace in terms of the mediations between human
and the technical (the very process of hominization). In order
to think future "spectralization" and establish a dialogue
between philosophy, the human sciences, the arts and the
technosciences, this future of Derrida's philosophy would
return to the earlier texts of Derrida which read metaphysical
logic in terms of the disavowal of /techne./
The second could be called, similarly, a "right-wing
Derrideanism." It would pursue Derrida's untying of the aporia
of time from both logic and technics, maintaining that even if
there is only access to time through technics, what must be
thought, articulated and witnessed is the passage of time. To
do so, this Derrideanism would mobilize religious discourse
and prioritize, for example, the radically "passive" nature of
the arts, following up on more recent work of Derrida on the
absolute originarity of the promise and of his reorganization
of religious discourse to think and describe it. (156)
24. Even if immediately after this passage Beardsworth makes clear
that there is in fact "/no answer/ and /no choice/" between these
opposed "futures" of what he calls here "Derrideanism,"[17
<#foot17>] it is clear from the rest of this concluding chapter to
Derrida and the Political that the speculative choice he presents
here responds to or formulates what seems to be for Beardsworth a
real duality in Derrida's thought. Even if Beardsworth retreats
rather quickly from the reality of this choice, the terms in which
he formulates it already demand at least two questions, or sets of
questions: firstly about the possibility of making a distinction
between, on the one hand, a thinking of deconstruction in terms of
technics (which Beardsworth associates here, as elsewhere, with
the work of Stiegler) and, on the other, a sort of literary or
"religious" deconstruction; secondly, about the legitimacy of
ascribing to these two "schools" a right- or a left-wing political
orientation. Moreover, while Beardsworth seems to retreat from the
"choice" at the end of Derrida and the Political, his later
article "Thinking Technicity" offers a similar analysis of "good"
and "bad" deconstruction. In this essay the first (good) form of
deconstruction is to be tied to Derrida's early work and is again
concerned with thinking, via the analysis of arche-writing, an
originary technicity as the "radical exteriority of any
interiority" ("Thinking Technicity" 77). The second form of
deconstruction is to be found, for Beardsworth, in Derrida's work
around "Levinasian ethics, negative theology and the Platonic
conception of the khôra and is formulated here as thinking 'an
excess' that precedes and conditions all determinations" (77).
Beardsworth comments as follows:
For Derrida, arche-writing and this excess of determination
are necessarily the same, even though each reveals a series of
singular traits particular to the context from which they are
thought. I would nevertheless argue at this juncture that,
despite their sameness they necessarily have different
effects. These effects reveal that there is a tension between
them, one which concerns the kind of work that they bring
about on metaphysical thinking, and its limits. The one (that
of excess) has arrested within the culture of contemporary
philosophy /further/ articulation of what lies behind the
institution of metaphysical thought, while the other, if
situated beyond the immediate question of language and
writing, can be considered to invite further differentiations.
The one has given rise to the "theological" turn to
deconstruction in the 1980s (together with the sense of its
apolitical nature) while the other, if articulated /through/
its differentiations, allows us to continue thinking the past
and future of metaphysics in terms of technical
supplementarity, one that allows us to advance all the more
interestingly the political dimension of contemporary thought.
("Thinking Technicity" 78)
25. These two forms of deconstruction don't seem in principle very
different from the "left-wing" and "right-wing" Derrideanisms that
Beardsworth has talked of earlier, and here the "choice" between
them is not immediately withdrawn but rather confidently affirmed.
Indeed the opposition between thinking technical supplementarity
and thinking the "excess" beyond all determination therefore
refigures here the two forms of alterity that Beardsworth outlines
in the conclusion of Derrida and the Political--the two forms of
radical alterity:
There are . . . "two" instances of "radical alterity" here
which need articulation and whose relation demands to be
developed: the radical alterity of the promise and the radical
alterity of the other prior to the ego of which one modality
(and increasingly so in the coming years) is the technical
other. (155)
26. Beardsworth goes on to argue that Derrida has hitherto /failed/ to
"articulate" these two forms of alterity; his failure to do so is
explicitly tied to his avoidance of the question of technicity in
Derrida's reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit. Derrida's failure to
articulate these two forms of alterity leads Beardsworth to
imagine the two future forms of Derrideanism we have just mentioned.
27. At this point it is worth explicating further these two forms of
alterity. The first form of alterity--what I will call "technical
alterity"--is formulated by Beardsworth in terms of a relation to
the "nonhumanity" of matter. Beardsworth ties this alterity to
Derrida's early thinking about arche-writing and the question of
originary technicity. This technical alterity or originary
technicity is then developed, as we have seen, by Stiegler into a
theory of technics. Technics understands originary technicity as
an "Epimethean" prosthesis of the human, where the human is
figured through the "default of origin," constituted only in its
prosthesis. It is not clear that Stiegler's thinking of technics
as the prosthesis of the human is entirely consistent with a
thought of technical alterity or originary technicity. Indeed
although in Derrida and the Political and in "From a Genealogy of
Matter to a Politics of Memory" Beardsworth seems fairly clear
that Stiegler's technics is consistent with the idea of
articulating the relation of matter to the "nonhuman" (or
technical alterity), in his later article Beardsworth distances
himself from Stiegler:
The risk Stiegler runs in differentiating the historical
epochs of arche-writing, and in thinking them in terms of
technical supplementarity, is precisely that of considering
technicity in the /exclusively exteriorized terms of technics
which befit the process of hominization./ In other words, the
wish to differentiate further what lies behind metaphysics in
terms of technics, if the model of technics remains that of
the "technical object," always runs the risk of
re-anthropologizing the very thing that one wishes to
dehumanise. The major theses in Technics and Time . . . while
brilliantly articulated by Stiegler in their own terms, end up
having the following somewhat ironic consequence: biological
life prior to, or in its difference from anthropogenesis is
removed from the structure of originary technicity; as a
result biology is naturalized and the differentiation of
technicity /qua/ technics is only considered in its
exteriorized form in relation to the process of hominization.
("Thinking Technicity" 81)
28. This argument underlines the problematic nature of Stiegler's
reading of Derrida. For Stiegler, as we have seen, it is only with
the human that life is pursued by means other than life. Hence the
human marks a break in the history of différance as the history of
life. The origin of technics as organized inorganic matter
therefore constitutes the aporetic non-origin of the human. But as
Beardsworth points out here, this leaves the relationship between
organic life and inorganic life undisturbed and ends up
reaffirming the singularity of the human (as that which is
invented through the emergence of technics). Stiegler's thinking
of technics therefore risks undermining an originary technicity
that is not tied to the specific emergence of the human, which is
what Derrida seems to be thinking under the rubric of the trace
and of /différance/ as the "history of life in general."[18
<#foot18>] Stiegler's "technical alterity," on this reading, ends
up losing the alterity of the nonhuman which we have seen espoused
in Derrida and the Political.
29. The second form of "radical alterity" that Beardsworth outlines in
Derrida and the Political is the "alterity of the promise." In the
conclusion to Derrida and the Political, Beardsworth shows this
Derridean thought of the promise at work in Specters of Marx.
Beardsworth quotes the following passage:
Even beyond the regulating idea in its classic form,[19
<#foot19>] the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy
to come, its "idea" as event of a pledged injunction that
orders one to summon the very thing that will never present
itself in the form of full presence, is the opening of this
gap between an infinite promise . . . and the determined,
necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has
to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the
effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that
of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it
must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its
heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event
/and/ of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be
anticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting
what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality
without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to
the absolute surprise of the /arrivant/ from whom or from
which one will not ask anything in return . . . /just/ opening
which renounces any right to property, any right in general,
messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event
that cannot be awaited /as such/, or recognized in advance.
(Specters of Marx 65)
As is made clear here, Derrida is situating the political, in the
form of the democratic or communist promise, in terms of a
"messianic" structure of the event which Beardsworth calls the
"absolute future that informs all political organizations"
(Derrida and the Political 146). The thought of the political
requires that one hold on to the idea of an indeterminate future,
or an unanticipatable event. If the future were either in
principle or practice entirely knowable, then the political would
become superfluous. The political must therefore welcome the event
in its absolute alterity, awaiting it without horizon of
anticipation (/attente sans attente/)--for to anticipate the event
would already be in some sense to determine it, to know something
about it, to anticipate the unanticipatable.
30. This /messianic/ structure around the event is to be distinguished
by Derrida from any determinate /messianism/ of a biblical kind:
31.
Ascesis strips the messianic hope of all biblical forms, and
even all determinable figures of the wait or expectation . . .
. One may always take the quasi-atheistic dryness of the
messianic to be the condition of the religions of the Book, a
desert that was not even theirs (but the earth is always
borrowed, on loan from God, it is never possessed by the
occupier, says precisely [/justement/] the Old Testament whose
injunction one would also have to hear); one may always
recognize there the arid soil in which grew, and passed away,
the living figures of all the messiahs, whether they were
announced, recognized, or still awaited. (Specters of Marx 168)
However, this "dry" messianic structure of the event is not simply
a structure that would underpin any determinate messianism as it
would underpin any determinate politics. Nor is it a limit that,
as Derrida puts it in "Force of Law," "defines either an infinite
progress or a waiting and awaiting" (Acts of Religion 255),
because the political relationship to the "absolute future" also
requires that one act, that one make political decisions. Derrida
formulates this argument in relation to justice in "Force of Law":
justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait. It
is that which must not wait. To be direct, simple and brief,
let us say this: a just decision is always required
/immediately/, right away, as quickly as possible. It cannot
provide itself with the infinite information and the unlimited
knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives
that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its
disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time
and all the necessary knowledge about the matter, well then,
the moment of /decision as such/, what must be just, /must/
[/il faut/] always remain a finite moment of urgency and
precipitation; it must [/doit/] not be the consequence or the
effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this
reflection or this deliberation, since the decision always
marks the interruption of the juridico-, ethico-, or
politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must
[/doit/] precede it. (Acts of Religion 255)
32. This messianic structure which Beardsworth associates with the
promise and thinks of as Derrida's second form of alterity is
therefore marked by what Derrida calls later in Specters of Marx
an "irreducible paradox" (168). For it is both a "waiting without
horizon of expectation" and also "urgency, imminence" (168). One
can never therefore be entirely happy with the division that
Beardsworth makes at the end of Derrida and the Political when he
associates this second form of alterity straightforwardly as "a
reorganization of religious discourse" (156). It is never simply
the case, for Derrida, that "what must be thought, articulated and
witnessed is the passage of time" (156). That is only one step,
one side, or one hand and, as Beardsworth reminds us elsewhere,
with Derrida "it is always a question of hands" ("Deconstruction
and Tradition" 287). For this reorganization of religious
discourse is always also--via the thinking of urgency, imminence
or the necessity of decision--a rethinking of political or
juridical discourse. Nowhere could this point be clearer than in
Specters of Marx, where Derrida very precisely associates the
urgency or imminence of this messianic structure with Marxism. As
Derrida puts it there: "No differ/a/nce without alterity, no
alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now"
(31). The linking of differance to the singularity of the here-now
is an indication that what is being thought around the political
injunction is not completely new in Derrida's thinking. Indeed in
an earlier interview about Marx, Derrida explicitly links the
singularity of the political injunction to the theme of
iterability developed in "Signature Event Context" ("Politics of
Friendship" 228). This argument around iterability will help us to
show that Derrida in fact from his earliest writing thinks
Beardsworth's two forms of alterity together.
33. As Derrida reminds us in "Signature Event Context":
My "written communication" must, if you will, remain legible
despite the absolute disappearance of every determined
addressee in general for it to function as writing, that is,
for it to be legible. It must be repeatable--iterable--in the
absolute absence of the addressee or the empirically
determinable set of addresses. This iterability (iter, once
again, comes from /itara, other/ in Sanskrit, and everything
that follows may be read as the exploitation of the logic
which links repetition to alterity), structures the mark of
writing itself, and does so moreover for no matter what type
of writing (pictographic, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic,
alphabetic, to use the old categories). (Margins of Philosophy
315)
So the iterability of the written mark constitutes a "logic which
links repetition to alterity." In On Being With Others, Simon
Glendinning gives a particularly clear account of this moment in
Derrida:
Paradoxical as it may seem, what has to be acknowledged here
is that Derrida's appeal here to the concept of iterability is
made not only because of its connection with the idea of
sameness and identity but also because of its (improbable,
etymological) connection with alterity, otherness and
difference. Roughly, what Derrida aims to show is that
alterity and difference--i.e., what is traditionally conceived
as bearing on features which are essentially "accidental" or
"external" to "ideal identities"--are, in fact and in
principle, a necessary and universal feature of all
idealisation as such. Thus, Derrida will argue that the
recognisability of the "same word" is, in fact and in
principle, possible only "/in, through/, and even /in view/ of
its alteration." (112, citing Derrida, Limited Inc 53)
34. In other words, what guarantees the sign in its identity, that is,
its iterability, is already constituted through a relationship
with alterity. Here this alterity is not simply that of original
technicity, relation to exteriority, or the alterity of the
"nonhuman." It is always already /also/ a relation to temporal
alterity and alterity in general. Now this is clearly a very
significant point in relation to Stiegler's attempt to develop the
thought of originary technicity in Derrida's early work on
arche-writing into a general theory of technics. For Stiegler's
argument is, as we have seen, that the technical object in general
constitutes the relationship to time, the condition of access to
the undetermined future (and the privileged example of this is
what he calls orthographic writing, what Derrida calls "phonetic"
writing). Yet the argument around iterability makes it clear that
for Derrida the "orthographic" mark is already /itself/
constituted by a relation to alterity--the repeatable identity of
the mark is only constituted through a relation to its temporal
alteration and to alterity in general. There are in effect two
sides to the argument around the trace. On the one hand,
"articulating the living on the non-living in general," the trace
is a moment of exteriorization, binding idealization indissolubly
to the mark (Of Grammatology 65). On the other hand ("it is always
a question of hand/s/"), the mark is never simply material: it is
only constituted as the mark that it is through a relation with
alterity. Iterability can never mean simply "possibility of
repetition" because in that case what guaranteed the identity of
the mark would have to be constituted as a possibility prior to
the actual repetitions it made possible--this structure of an
ideal form and its real copies would then reconstitute a
logocentric and idealist understanding of language. The trace
therefore can never simply constitute the technical /possibility/
of a relationship to alterity, which it is already constituted
itself through a relationship with alterity. The technical
organization of time is always already the /temporal organization
of technics./
35. The necessary relationship between technicity and alterity in
relation to the sign is underlined in Derrida's later work on the
commodity. For Derrida, the spectral quality that Marx locates in
exchange-value--that is, that an exterior thing be the bearer of
an idealized value--is already at work in /use-value./ For the
use-value of the ordinary useful thing is never simply a material
property, or constituted simply through an imminent relation of a
human subject to the thing, but is always constituted through "the
possibility of being used /by the other/ or being used /another
time/ . . . . in its originary iterability, a use-value is in
advance promised, promised to exchange and beyond exchange"
(Specters of Marx 162). What this makes clear once again is that
for Derrida iterability, the identity of the technical object, or
what Stiegler wants to think of as the /organization/ of
"organised inorganic matter" can't simply be thought of as
constitutive /of/ temporalization because it is first of all
constituted by and through a relation to an alterity that is both
spatial and temporal (here figured precisely in terms of the
promise that Beardsworth would like to oppose to it). On the one
hand this problematises the whole project of Technics and Time in
as much at it wants to relate the history of the
supplement--thought of as the history of organized inorganic
matter or technics--as the prosthesis that invents the human in
its relationship to time. For the relationship to time cannot be
simply derived from the technical object if, as Derrida's argument
around iterability makes clear; the technical object is already
constituted in part by that relationship with time. On the other
hand it also renders extremely problematic the division
Beardsworth is trying to demonstrate in his conclusion to Derrida
and the Political between two forms of alterity. To recall the
terms of Beardsworth's argument:
in the context of the theme of originary technicity of man . .
. there is indeed a shift which Derrida has not expounded. In
Of Grammatology the trace was said to "connect with the same
possibility . . . the structure of relationship to the other,
the movement of temporalization, and language as writing" . .
. In "The violence of the letter: from Lévi-Strauss to
Rousseau" Derrida maintained that "arche-writing" was the
origin of morality as of immorality. The non-ethical opening
of ethics. A violent opening." This opening is rewritten as
the promise in Specters of Marx. And yet, if time is from the
first technically organized, if access to the experience of
time is only possible through technics, then the "promise"
must be /more originary/ than "originary technicity." Even if
they are inseparable--and what else is the law of
contamination but this inextricability?--they are not on the
same "ontological" level. There are, consequently, "two"
instances of "radical alterity" here which need articulation
and whose relation demands to be developed: the radical
alterity of the promise and the radical alterity of the other
prior to the ego of which one modality (and increasingly so in
the coming years) is the technical other. (Derrida and the
Political 155)
36. In our context it becomes clear what Beardsworth's problem here
is. He wants to regard Derrida's early work as concerned with an
originary technicity in the form of the trace that would be
constitutive of both temporalization /and/ the relationship to the
other, and therefore constitute the "nonethical opening of
ethics." The priority would be not to think alterity but rather to
think that which is constitutive of alterity, i.e., the "technical
other," exteriority, and the relation to the nonhuman--in short,
"technics." But with the thinking of the "promise" in Specters of
Marx the alterity that appeared to be constituted by technics in
the early work is seen to be more originary than technics. The
relation to temporal alterity in the form of the event would have
to be thought /prior/ to the technical "organization" of time.
This leads Beardsworth to conclude that there must indeed be two
forms of alterity at work in Derrida, "which need articulation and
whose relation demands to be developed."
37. But the analysis we have just made makes it clear that for Derrida
the "technicity" of the sign, i.e. iterability, is already
constituted through a relation to the other. It is not a question
of simply constituting or making possible a relation to temporal
alterity. The problem here is Beardsworth's assumption in the
phrase "And yet, if time is from the first technically organized .
. . ." For that implies that technical organization is to be
thought prior to the temporalization to which it gives access.
(Indeed this sounds much more like Stiegler than like Derrida.) As
Derrida puts it in Of Grammatology, the very text from which
Beardsworth is quoting:
The "unmotivatedness" of the sign requires a synthesis in
which the absolutely other is announced as such--without any
simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or
continuity--within what is not it . . . . The trace, /where
the relationship with the other is marked/, articulates its
possibility in the entire field of the entity [/étant/]. (47;
translation modified, emphasis added)
The relation to the other is not constituted by some, technical,
for example, "synthesis" that precedes it: alterity is rather
already inscribed within the synthesis that constitutes the trace.
Originary technicity in the form of the trace is here quite
clearly the opening to alterity, to the "event," to the "promise"
which Beardsworth thinks must come along later and therefore
constitute "a shift which Derrida has not expounded." But there is
no shift in /Derrida/ here that has not been expounded. If there
is a shift to be "expounded" it is between Derrida's understanding
of originary technicity in the trace and Stiegler's thinking of
technics as the technical organization or determination of time.
/ Media Studies
University of Bradford
b.l.roberts@bradford.ac.uk /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. On the /aporia/ of the origin of the human in relation
to the work of Leroi-Gourhan, see particularly /Technics and Time/
141-12. Stiegler develops the argument around the "default of
origin" (/défaut d'origine/) through a reading of the "fault" of
Epimetheus in Plato's /Protagoras/, concluding that "[humans] only
occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in
disappearing" (Technics and Time 188). See also Bennington and
Beardsworth's exposition of this argument in Stiegler,
"Emergencies" 180-81; "From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of
Memory" 95n16.
2 <#ref2>. This can be seen in the following definition of the
organized inorganic from Stiegler's article "Leroi-Gourhan:
/l'inorganique organisé/": "Leroi-Gourhan fournit les concepts
fondamentaux, et à partir desquels il est possible de faire
apparaître un /troisième/ Règne, à côté des deux règnes reconnus
depuis longtemps des êtres inertes et des êtres organiques. Ce
nouveau règne, qui a été ignoré aussi bien par la philosophie que
par les sciences, c'est le règne de ce que j'appelle les /êtres
inorganiques/ (non-vivants) /organisés/ (instrumentaux)" (188-89).
3 <#ref3>. See Bennington's comments on the problematic nature of
this equation of /phusis/ and "life" (189).
4 <#ref4>. This clean separation between phylogenetic and
epiphylogenetic evolution is challenged for Stiegler by modern
technology in the form of genetic manipulation: "Dès lors que la
biologie molèculaire rend possible une manipulation du /germen/
par l'intervention de la main, le programme reçoit une leçon de
l'expérience. La loi même de la vie s'en trouve purement et
simplement suspendue." ("Quand faire c'est dire" 272). See also La
technique et le temps II 173-87.
5 <#ref5>."/Différance/ is literally neither a word nor a
concept"; "/différance is neither a word nor a concept/";
"/différance/, which is not a concept" (Margins 3, 7, 11).
6 <#ref6>. Bennington criticizes Stiegler for his "confident
identification of 'technics' as /the/ name for a problem which he
/also/ recognizes goes far beyond any traditional determination of
that concept" (190).
7 <#ref7>."'Older' than Being itself, such a différance has no
name in our language. But we 'already know' that if it is
unnameable, it is not provisionally so, not because our language
has not yet found or received this /name/, or because we would
have to seek it in another language, outside the finite system of
our own. It is rather because there is no /name/ for it at all,
not even the name of essence or of Being, not even that of
"/différance/," which is not a name, which is not a pure nominal
unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing
and deferring substitutions" (Derrida, Margins 26).
8 <#ref8>."[Stiegler's] compelling, and at times brilliant account
of originary /technicity/ is presented in tandem with a set of
claims about /technics/ and even /techno-science/ as though all
these claims happened at the same level. This mechanism makes of
Stiegler's book perhaps the most refined example to date of the
confusion of the /quasi-transcendental/ (originary technicity) and
/transcendental contraband/ (technics)" ("Emergencies" 190).
9 <#ref9>."To feel ourselves seen by a look that it will always be
impossible to cross, that is the /visor effect/ on the basis of
which we inherit from the law" (Derrida, Specters 7).
10 <#ref10>. This is essentially the argument Bennington makes in
his reading of Stiegler: "'Technics' is a philosophical concept,
and to that extent can never provide the means to /criticise/
philosophy. Failing to register this point (which is now very
familiar as the principle of all of Derrida's analyses of the
human sciences in Writing and Difference and Margins) condemns one
to a certain positivism, itself grounded in the mechanism of
transcendental contraband whereby the term supposed to do the
critical work on philosophy (here /tekhn/) is simply elevated into
a transcendental explanatory position whence it is supposed to
criticise philosophy, while all the time exploiting without
knowing it a philosophical structure /par excellence/" (184).
11 <#ref11>. I am drawing here on Richard Beardsworth's account of
Stiegler's work: "/La technique et le temps/ therefore thinks
technics firstly /within/ time (in terms of its own historical
dynamic), secondly /with/ time (in terms of the impossibility of
the origin), and thirdly /as/ time (as the impure, retrospective
constitution of the apophantic 'as such,' or consciousness)"
("From a Genealogy" 96).
12 <#ref12>. For example in Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology."
13 <#ref13>. "Histoire [du supplément] dont je pense que Derrida
n'a malheureusement jamais réellement exploré les conditions"
("Discrétiser le temps" 117n6).
14 <#ref14>. "L'enjeu porte sur la /spécificité/ de l'écriture
linéaire dans l'histoire de l'archi-écriture, écriture
ortho-graphique qui est aussi phono-logique, toujours comprise
d'abord comme telle, et dont Derrida parâit souvent éstomper,
sinon dénier, la spécificité dans l'histoire de la trace" (La
technique II 41).
15 <#ref15>. "L'écriture proprement dite est ce qui /nous/ est
lisible pourvu que nous disposions du code d'enregistrement. C'est
l'enregistrement orthothétique. Les tablettes pictographiques nous
restent illisibles même lorsque nous disposons du code: il faut
avoir aussi conaissance du /contexte./ Sans lui, la signification
échappe. Pour accéder pleinement à la signification d'une
inscripiton pictographique, il faut avoir vécu l'évenement dont
elle tient registre" (La technique II 68-9).
16 <#ref16>. "La grammatologie élabore une /logique du supplément/
où l'accidentalité supplémentaire est originaire. Il s'agit de
prendre l'/histoire/ du supplément en considération
/comme/histoire accidentelle gauche dont résulterait un
devenir-essential de l'accident--mais il faudrait alors parler
/aussi/ d'un devenir accidentelle de l'essence. En estompant le
plus souvent la spécificité de l'écriture phonologique, en
suggérant que la plupart du temps /presque/ tout ce qui s'y
développe était déjà là avant, en ne faisant donc pas de cette
spécificité une question centrale (et toute la grammatologie n'en
vient-elle pas d'une certaine manière nécessairement à /reléguer/
une telle question?), n'affaiblit-on pas par avance le projet
grammatologique?" (La technique II 43).
17 <#ref17>. Bennington cites this passage from Beardsworth and
then comments: "Beardsworth's gesture in proposing this scenario
only immediately to refuse it really might be described by the
operator of disavowal" ("Emergencies" 214n47). Bennington is
alluding here to Beardsworth's frequent usage of the term
disavowal to describe gestures of philosophical exclusion. (To
take a few examples from an extremely rich field: in Chapter 2,
"[in] Hegelian logic, the very logic /of/ contradiction ends up
/also/ disavowing time" (Derrida and the Political 91); in Chapter
3, "Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle with respect to an
opposition between vulgar and primordial time is Iitself a
disavowal of time" (109); in the conclusion, "does Derrida's
thinking of the 'there' in terms of the promise disavow in turn
the originary relation between the human and the nonhuman?" (152).
In general in Beardsworth one either "articulates" or
"negotiates," on the one hand, or "disavows" on the other.)
Bennington comments on this "operator of disavowal" in
Beardsworth's book: "Beardsworth's understanding is that Derrida
takes 'metaphysics' to do with a 'disavowal' of time . . . he uses
the term within mild scare-quotes at first, but soon stops and
never thinks through the difficult implications there may be in
relying on a psychoanalytically determined concept to describe
this situation" ("Emergencies" 197). It should be pointed out,
however, that Beardsworth does offer the following (albeit short)
justification in a footnote to his introduction: "[I use]
'Disavows' in the Freudian sense, that is in the sense of a
refusal to perceive a fact which impinges from the outside.
Freud's example in his use of the term is the denial of a woman's
absence of penis . . . The term is, however, appropriate for the
way in which the tradition of philosophy has 'denied' finitude.
The concept will be used frequently in my argument" (Derrida and
the Political 158n2).
18 <#ref18>. The argument that Beardsworth makes here is similar
to the one made by Bennington in his earlier essay "Emergencies,"
which may well have influenced Beardsworth's thinking. Bennington
argues: "Stiegler wants to force the whole philosophical
argumentation of Derrida through the 'passage' of the emergence of
mankind: the fact that he /then/ goes on to characterise that
'passage' in terms of an originary technicity which is very close
to Derrida's own thinking does not alter the fact that his first
gesture commits him to a certain positivism /about/ difference,
and this leads to his confident identification of 'technics' as
/the/ name for a problem which he /also/ recognises goes far
beyond any traditional determination of that concept" (190).
19 <#ref19>. In a remarkable conversation between Beardsworth and
Derrida entitled "Nietzsche and the Machine," Derrida provides the
following extended analysis of why the "idea" of "democracy to
come" is different from the Kantian Idea: "Where the Idea in the
Kantian sense leaves me dissatisfied is precisely around its
principle of infinity: firstly, it refers to an infinite in the
very place what I call /différance/ implies the here and now,
implies urgency and imminence . . . secondly, the Kantian Idea
refers to an infinity which constitutes a horizon. The horizon is,
as the Greek word says, a limit forming a backdrop against which
one can know, against which one can see what's coming. The Idea
has already anticipated the future before it arrives. So the idea
is both too futural, in the sense that it is unable to think the
deferral of difference in terms of 'now', and it is not 'futural'
enough, in the sense that it already knows what tomorrow should
be" (49-50).
Works Cited
Beardsworth, Richard. "From a Genealogy of Matter to a Politics of
Memory: Stiegler's Thinking of Technics." Tekhnema: Journal of
Philosophy and Technology 2 (1995): 85-115.
---. "Thinking Technicity." Cultural Values 2 (1998): 70-86.
---. "Towards a Critical Culture of the Image." Tekhnema: Journal
of Philosophy and Technology 4 (1998): 114-41.
Bennington, Geoffrey. "Emergencies." The Oxford Literary Review 18
(1996): 175-216.
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
---. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1982.
---. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. New York: John
Hopkins UP, 1976.
---. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of
Television. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Glendinning, Simon. On Being With Others. London: Routledge, 1998.
Stiegler, Bernard. "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits
of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith." Jacques Derrida
and the Humanities: a Critical Reader. Ed. Tom Cohen. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001. 238-70.
---. "Discrétiser le temps." Les Cahiers de médiologie (2000):
115-21.
---. "Leroi-Gourhan: /l'inorganique organisé/." Les Cahiers de
médiologie (1998): 187-94.
---. "Quand faire c'est dire: de la technique comme différance de
toute frontière." Le passage des frontières: autour du travail de
Jacques Derrida. Paris: Galilée, 1994. 271-83.
---. Technics and Time. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George
Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
---. "Technics of Decision: An Interview." Interview with Peter
Hallward. Trans. Sean Gaston. Angelaki 8 (2003): 151-68.
---. La technique et le temps. Vol. 2. La désorientation. Paris:
Galilée, 1996.
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