Insight Editions · No. 102
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida · Translated by Alan Bass
Jacques Derrida reads phenomenology, structuralism, psychoanalysis, literature, and ethics, showing how meaning and presence depend on difference, repetition, and trace.
A study guide to Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Structure forgets force. Structuralist criticism grasps the form of a work by neutralizing its force, its duration and value; reading must attend to what the schema flattens (Rousset, ch1).
- Reason is founded on madness it cannot simply exclude. Descartes's hyperbolic doubt includes madness; Foucault's history of madness still speaks the language of reason (ch2).
- Discourse is originally violent. Against Levinas's nonviolent ethics of the face, Derrida argues for an economy of the least violence: "violence against violence" (ch4).
- Phenomenology cannot close. Husserl's structures are opened by genesis, the Idea in the Kantian sense, and writing that can always "empty" itself (ch5).
- Speech is always stolen. Artaud's theater of cruelty tries to abolish repetition and representation, and so reveals that they cannot be abolished, only thought in their closure (ch6, ch8).
- The psyche is a writing machine. Freud's models, from breaching to the Mystic Writing Pad, show memory as trace, delay and supplement: "the delay is in the beginning" (ch7).
- Hegel can be exceeded only from inside. Bataille's sovereignty and general economy are Hegelian concepts made to slide toward expenditure without reserve (ch9).
- Decentering yields two interpretations of interpretation. Lévi-Strauss shows the center as a function; we must think both Rousseau's nostalgia and Nietzsche's affirmation of play (ch10, ch11).
The book's argument: each essay finds the same opening of presence by difference in a different field.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| F | Translator's Introduction (Alan Bass) | How the essays interlock with Of Grammatology; read them "basted", not bound |
| 1 | Force and Signification | Structuralism grasps form by neutralizing force; Rousset's geometric Corneille |
| 2 | Cogito and the History of Madness | Foucault cannot write madness's silence; Descartes's doubt includes madness |
| 3 | Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book | The poet and the rabbi; writing as exile and as question |
| 4 | Violence and Metaphysics | Levinas's nonviolent ethics needs the Greek logos; discourse is originally violent |
| 5 | "Genesis and Structure" and Phenomenology | Husserl's structures stay open; the Telos is genesis itself |
| 6 | La Parole Soufflée | Artaud's stolen speech; destructive discourse must inhabit what it destroys |
| 7 | Freud and the Scene of Writing | Breaching, deferred action and the Mystic Pad: the psyche as writing |
| 8 | The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation | Representation has no end, only a closure in which it continues |
| 9 | From Restricted to General Economy | Bataille's sovereignty: Hegel's concepts made to slide toward loss |
| 10 | Structure, Sign and Play | The center is a function; two interpretations of interpretation |
| 11 | Ellipsis | Repetition opens the closed book; the center was the name of a hole |
About this book
Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida, 1978. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Translator's Introduction (Alan Bass)
Order and chronology
L'écriture et la différence collects essays written 1959-1967, arranged in order of first publication, so the earliest, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" (1959), stands near the middle. 1967 also saw La voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena) on Husserl's theory of the sign and De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), mainly on Rousseau. In the interview "Implications" (with Henri Ronse, 1967; collected in Positions, 1972), Derrida says the books can be inserted into one another.
Derrida's own account of how Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference interlock.
Of Grammatology is bipartite: insert WD into its middle and the first half (the system regulating the sign from antiquity) becomes WD's preface, while the Rousseau half becomes its twelfth essay. Inversely, the first six WD essays preceded "de facto and de jure" the long Critique essay (December 1965, January 1966) that became OG Part I, and the last five are engaged in "the grammatological opening" (Positions, p. 12).
What "deconstruction" means here
That opening is the deconstruction of philosophy: examining "in the most faithful, rigorous way" the structured genealogy of its concepts to find what the history of philosophy has hidden, forbidden or repressed. The first step is Heidegger's examination of presence as "the destiny of philosophy"; readers new to Heidegger may be puzzled that presence is the constant target. The grammatological move studies philosophy's treatment of writing as "a particularly revelatory symptom" (Positions, p. 15): from Plato to Heidegger, writing is excluded from the definition of the sign in the name of presence, the sign being supposedly most present in speech.
The grammatological opening as Bass reconstructs it from Positions.
Bass proposes a second division, between the fifth and sixth essays. In a "classical philosophical architecture" Speech and Phenomena would come first, as the decisive analysis of voice in "Husserl's transcendental phenomenology", the most vigilant form of metaphysics; it could be attached to either book as a long note. Its counterpart, the 1962 Introduction to The Origin of Geometry, already binds writing to différer (to differ and to defer). A 1959 passage in "Genesis and Structure" states it: logos "differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself", and "in the moment of writing, the sign can always 'empty' itself".
Two ways to divide the volume.
Without knowing (1) the Husserl reading begun in 1959, which always reaches an irreducible difference that both threatens and enables truth, and (2) the constant reference to Heidegger on presence, the first five essays "might be incomprehensible". Bass urges attention to how traditional the most "modern" concepts are, as in the Kant and Leibniz references in "Force and Signification".
Basting, not binding
The 1966 note at the end of the French edition is untranslatable without commentary: to bind (relier) and reread (relire) are anagrams; the system could be sketched only après-coup (nachträglich, see the Freud essay); only isolated points (le pointillé) appear, with the blank spaces (blancs) "without which no text is proposed as such". If text means cloth (textus, texere, to weave), the essays have defined sewing as basting (faufilure, from fors, outside): sewing on the outside that does not bind tightly.
Translation as transformation
Nearly every key passage needs commentary; Derrida refers to his own works without saying so and uses classical terminology without explanation. Bass chose "English as we know it" over compromise English, breaking up some very long sentences, since there is no sentence "that is not perfectly comprehensible in French, with patience". The deeper problem is the sign: metaphysics has always sought a "transcendental signified", a concept independent of language, often modelled on God.
Positions, p. 31: why no translation transfers a pure meaning.
The opposition is not simply abandoned: "That this opposition or difference cannot be radical and absolute does not prevent it from functioning ... no translation would be possible without it." Since the difference is never pure, for translation "we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another" (Positions, p. 31). The translator is like the analyst who must speak the manifest language well; the latent content is what Derrida calls "the unconscious of philosophical opposition".
The terms a reader needs
| Term | Source | Sense in this book |
|---|---|---|
| Différance | Derrida (lecture 1968) | To differ and to defer at once; neither active nor passive; an aporia making space and time possible |
| Solicitation | Latin sollicitare | To shake the whole; every totality rests on what it excludes |
| Archia | Greek archē | Founding principle and rule by one principle |
| Ousia, parousia | Greek | Being as presence; reappropriated presence (second coming) |
| Epekeina tes ousias | Plato | The beyond of being |
| Being / beings | Heidegger (Sein, Seiendes) | Bass uses "being(s)", not "entity"; "existent" only in Lingis citations |
| Onto-theology | Identity and Difference | Being as most general attribute and as God |
| Auto-affection | Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics | Time as self-produced chain of presents |
| Epoché, noema | Husserl, Ideas | Bracketing the natural attitude; immanent meaning |
| Aufhebung | Hegel | Conserving and negating at once |
Sens means both sense and direction, so losing meaning is being lost in a labyrinth; vouloir dire carries "the will to say". Hegel's unhappy consciousness, divided like Abraham's between God and nature, runs through the book, from the Greek/Hebrew epigraph of "Violence and Metaphysics" to the Jabès essays, which close with the imaginary rabbis Rida and Derissa, a rebus on Derrida's name.
Bass\'s map of the volume
Alan Bass\'s 1977 translator\'s introduction is itself a reading. He orders the essays by a logic that should be held against their dates of composition: the book is bastings, not a bound system. "Deconstruction" here still names a work on the architecture of concepts (presence, logos, book, structure), closer to Heidegger\'s Destruktion and to Husserlian dismantling than to later media slogans. Bass stresses that translation is transformation: French wordplay (différance, soufflée, relève for Aufhebung) cannot pass into "English as we know it" without loss, so notes carry what the prose smooths. Readers need a small lexicon early: trace, différance, supplement, economy, closure, solicitation.
How Bass frames the English Writing and Difference.
What the foreword underplays
Bass routes the book through Positions and the Heidegger lineage. That suits the first Anglophone reception and underplays Levinas, Bataille and psychoanalysis as sources with their own force inside the volume. The Violence essay, La Parole / Freud pair, and the Bataille essay are not applications of a Heideggerian method; they are where the book invents its economies of violence, theft and expenditure. Keeping Bass\'s glossary while restoring those centers is the job of the chapters that follow.
Force and Signification
The structuralist invasion
Should the structuralist invasion recede, the historian who treats it as an object would miss that it is "an adventure of vision", a new way of questioning any object, the literary object included. Thought everywhere receives "a formidable impulse from an anxiety about language", which can only be an anxiety of language from within. To reduce the question of the sign to a sign of the times "is to dream of violence". Structuralism is "an astonishment ... by language as the origin of history".
Yet an irreducible region of irreflection in it deserves the historian, as does its method's "infallibility ... formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind". Structuralism may one day be read as a relaxation of the attention given to force. That is why "literary criticism is structuralist in every age": it knows itself separated from force and sometimes avenges itself by proving that separation is the condition of the work.
Why criticism is "structuralist in every age".
Hence "the low note, the melancholy pathos" behind the triumphs of technical ingenuity. Like Gide's melancholy, structural analyses come "only after a certain defeat of force". Structural consciousness reflects "the accomplished, the constituted, the constructed. Historical, eschatological, and crepuscular by its very situation."
The uninhabited city and solicitation
Structure is not only form; it is also a concrete totality, and the structural perspective is, in Jean-Pierre Richard's phrase, "interrogative and totalitarian". Meaning is "rethought as form", and structure is the formal unity of form and meaning.
The design of structures shows best when content, "the living energy of meaning", is neutralized, "somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe", yet haunted by meaning. The structuralist consciousness is therefore catastrophic, "simultaneously destroyed and destructive, destructuring".
From menace to solicitation (sollus, "the whole"; citare, "to put in motion").
Structure appears "through the incidence of menace", when danger concentrates our vision on the keystone that holds both the possibility and fragility of an institution. It can be threatened methodically to reveal "that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability". This is soliciting: shaking in a way related to the whole. Made methodical, structuralist solicitation only reproduces a solicitation of Being, a "historico-metaphysical threatening of foundations"; it flourishes in epochs of dislocation, as in the baroque's "burst structure".
Imagination and the book about nothing
Rousset's book is a solitary attempt despite its kinships (Bachelard, Poulet, Raymond, Picon, Starobinski, Richard). Its premises (language is one with meaning; form belongs to content; "the work is not expression but creation") win acceptance only through an equivocal notion of form. The same goes for imagination, the obscure common root of meaning and literality.
Kant's imagination, the operative concept of Rousset's criticism.
For Kant imagination was already "an art", a "hidden art" whose aesthetic idea is "an inexponible representation", creating "a second nature"; "in what we call beautiful, intelligence is at the service of the imagination", whose freedom "schematizes without a concept". For critics this remains a naively used operative concept, and Rousset tries to make it thematic. To approach creative imagination one must turn toward "the invisible interior of poetic freedom", separated from oneself; words like "separation" and "exile" only indicate this through metaphor.
The work is "a universe to be added to the universe" (Focillon), articulating "the essential nothing" on which everything can appear; Blanchot insists this excess is the possibility of writing. "Only pure absence ... can inspire." The pure book is Flaubert's "book about nothing". The critic's object is the way this nothing "is determined by disappearing": the origin "is possible and conceivable only in disguise", as Artaud said of his books about the "endemic absence of any idea".
Angustia: the anguish of writing
The consciousness of having something to say as the consciousness of nothing is "the most oppressed of consciousnesses". The anguish of writing is no empirical state but "the responsibility of angustia: the necessarily restricted passageway of speech" where meanings push and provoke each other. "Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much." Writing is "the anguish of the Hebraic ruah", Jeremiah taking dictation and Baruch transcribing: the moment of deciding whether engraving preserves or betrays speech.
Theodicy versus the anguish of writing.
Leibniz's God knew no anguish of choice; there is "no tragedy of the book. There is only one Book", as in the Theodicy's palace of the fates. Mallarmé named the limit, "the Book, for I am convinced that there is only One". To write is to know "the Book does not exist and that forever there are books", and to lose "the theological certainty of seeing every page bind itself into the unique text of the truth". The absence and haunting of the divine sign regulate all modern criticism and aesthetics.
Merleau-Ponty: "the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself". Chrysostom wished for hearts inscribed by the Spirit instead of books, and settled for "the second best course". The idea of an "interior design" prior to the work is a prejudice of idealist criticism, a theology that flowered in the Renaissance. Writing is inaugural "because of a certain absolute freedom of speech", whose only horizon is "Being has always already begun". Inscription alone has the power of poetry, emancipating meaning from its contingent situation; writing is never mere "voice-painting" (Voltaire).
The attempt-to-write cannot be understood through voluntarism; it reawakens "the willful sense of the will: freedom". Yet "to write would be to attempt to forget difference: to forget writing in the presence of so-called living and pure speech". Rousset defends the specificity of beauty and the work as "an independent, absolute organism", but treats form "as if it had no origin", risking conventional Platonism and missing "the history of the meaning of the work itself": its impossibility of ever being present.
Ultrastructuralism: geometry instead of force
In Rousset's practice structure becomes the very being of the work, "an ultrastructuralism", and is taken literally as space. "Structure" first meant the architecture of a building (Scarron's pyramids), extended only metaphorically to rhetoric. Unless that metaphor is interrogated, one risks "confusing meaning with its geometric, morphological, or ... cinematic model". Rousset privileges lines and forms; time becomes a dimension along which a curve unfolds.
Rousset's Corneille: a line drawn toward its destination.
The essay "Polyeucte, or the Ring and the Helix" promises geometry subordinated to passion but delivers only geometry, plus a teleology of Corneille's progress toward Polyeucte. Earlier plays are read "in the style of preformationism" as prefigurations: La galerie du palais traces "a crossed ring"; in Le Cid the ring gains height, "an ascending spiral", values mounting "scalewise". The structure waits "like a girl in love" for its meaning. "If Le Cid is beautiful, it is so by virtue of that within it which surpasses schemes and understanding."
Rousset is also Leibnizian, trusting one can always find a line through every point, as in the Discourse on Metaphysics' geomancy example. Derrida does not oppose duration to space or force to form; he seeks "an economy escaping this system of metaphysical oppositions".
Three tendencies that make up Rousset's method.
| Author read by Rousset | Structural schema | Derrida's objection |
|---|---|---|
| Corneille | Ring, crossed ring, ascending helix | Force and the sublime reduced to lines; teleology toward Polyeucte |
| Marivaux | "Double register" of narration and look at the narration | A traditional burlesque device cannot "correspond" to an author's consciousness |
| Proust | Circular novel whose end engenders its beginning | Fits Proust's own aesthetic; preformationism made method |
| Claudel | "Structural monotony"; absolute simultaneity | Translates a theology of time into general method |
Preformationism, teleologism, reduction of force, value and duration are "as one with geometrism". In Marivaux, everything not announcing the "double register" becomes "youthful exercises". In Proust and Claudel preformationism "triumphs", most convincingly because their aesthetics match Rousset's: Proust wrote the last chapter right after the first; Claudel: "A poet does hardly anything but develop a preestablished plan." The term is meant literally: the biological doctrine of the adult encased in the germ, logos spermatikos, which stops making us smile once consciousness is the begetter.
The myth of simultaneity
This aesthetic "neutralizes duration and force as the difference between the acorn and the oak" and translates a metaphysics: Proust's "time in its pure state" is the eternal; for Claudel time is the epidermis of absolute simultaneity. Every structuralist reading "presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book". Rousset asks the reader to transform the book "into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relationships: it is then that surprises emerge". Derrida: simultaneity rather neutralizes the surprises of nonsimultaneity; "structural simultaneity itself serves to reassure".
Why simultaneity is a regulatory myth.
What structuralism cannot tolerate is "the richness implied by the volume": the meaning of meaning is "infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier", a pure equivocality that "gives signified meaning no respite". Except in Mallarmé's unrealized Book, "the same and other", "that which is written is never identical to itself". Rousset must call independent episodes "genetic accidents", a method that contradicts structuralism's best intention: respecting the completion of each totality and refusing to treat the pathological as mere absence of structure.
Structuralism "lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice": no organized totality is perceived without anticipating its end. That opening frees time and genesis but risks "stifling force under form". "To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it." The meaning of meaning is Apollonian.
Light, force and the dance of the pen
Hegel showed that explaining a phenomenon by a force is a tautology, but this reflects language's inability to articulate its origin: "Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is." The founding metaphor of Western philosophy is light and darkness: philosophy is "a photology", and metaphor in general, the analogical displacement of Being, "anchors discourse in metaphysics". In this heliocentric metaphysics, force cedes its place to eidos, the form visible to the metaphorical eye.
Why force cannot be thought in the language of form.
Structuralism's dependence on phenomenology ties it to the most traditional stream, leading Husserl back to Plato. "One would seek in vain a concept in phenomenology which would permit the conceptualization of intensity or force": diaphanousness and univocity are supreme values, so crises become accidents or "sedimentation". Emancipation from this language is impossible; one can only dream of it and offer resistance, rejecting "the worst exhilaration of the most nuanced structural formalism".
The debate is interminable. The difference "between Dionysus and Apollo, between ardor and structure, cannot be erased in history, for it is not in history"; it is "the opening of history, historicity itself", and "Dionysus is worked by difference". Flaubert sighs "not enough forms", a religion of form; Nietzsche mocks his "one can only think and write sitting down" and urges a dance of the pen. Derrida's last word is Zarathustra's descent: writing is "the descent of meaning outside itself within itself", metaphor for others, the "original Valley of the other within Being".
The close of the essay: no final choice between ardor and structure.
Solicitation, Mallarmé, and the book about nothing
Solicitation (solus, the whole; citare, to put in motion) is how Derrida names criticism that shakes a totality without replacing it by another closed form. Structuralism's "uninhabited city" of relations is useful only if force is not evacuated from signification. Rousset's attention is praised; his method is pressed until it shows the structuralist temptation: to prefer geometry to the work's temporal force. Against that temptation Derrida lines up writers for whom the book is not a synopsis. Mallarmé's book about nothing, Flaubert's dream of a book that would hold by its style alone, and Valéry's notes on form all mark a writing that risks emptiness rather than fill a spatial grid. Imagination here is not a faculty that paints pictures; it is the anguish (angustia) of a passage that has no guaranteed width.
Why the essay refuses ultrastructuralism.
Myth of simultaneity and the tasks of criticism
There is no space of the work if by space one means presence and synopsis. Literary history, even when renewed by Marxism or Freudianism, is only a restraint on internal criticism; the structuralist moment of that criticism is the counterpart restraint on an internal geneticism in which value and meaning are reconstituted in their proper historicity and temporality. Those latter "can no longer be objects without becoming absurdities", and their structure must escape classical categories. Rousset avowedly plans to avoid the stasis of form; Derrida shows how the plan still dreams simultaneity, an instantaneous overview that would cancel the time of reading and writing. Ultrastructuralism names that dream when it becomes method: geometry instead of force. The critic's task is not to choose genetics against structure, but to keep the work's force from being translated into a simultaneous table.
How Force and Signification redraws critical tasks.
Light, Nietzsche, and the dance of the pen
Light remains the essay's master metaphor and its danger: to see the work as illuminated form is already to take a side in the ancient privilege of theoria. Nietzsche appears not as a slogan of life-philosophy but as a pressure against that privilege: force is not a substance behind the text; it is what signification cannot spatialize without remainder. The "dance of the pen" is Derrida's figure for writing that is neither pure spontaneity nor pure structure. What is best in Rousset (quality of attention) must be separated from the method that would make every work a coherent spatial organism. The demand for "new concepts and new models" is announced here as a program the later essays of the volume begin to supply under other names: difference, trace, economy, play.
Forme et signification and the Corneille line
Rousset\'s Forme et signification (1962) is a solitary attempt among Geneva-school kinships (Poulet, Raymond, Starobinski, Richard). Premises that language is one with meaning and that the work is creation rather than expression win assent only through an equivocal notion of form. In practice Rousset draws Corneille as a line toward a destination: La galerie as crossed ring, Le Cid as ring plus elevation, an ascending spiral, Polyeucte as "impeccable". Teleology makes all else a sketch. He is also Leibnizian: a line through every point, confidence proper to divine creation misapplied to finite works. Derrida does not oppose duration to space; he seeks "an economy escaping this system of metaphysical oppositions". Force is not the other of form as a second substance; it is what signification loses when criticism becomes synopsis.
Force and Signification's path through Rousset.
Cogito and the History of Madness
The disciple's unhappy consciousness
Derrida writes as "an admiring and grateful disciple", whose consciousness is an unhappy consciousness: answering back, he feels "caught in the act", like the infans who cannot speak, challenged in advance by the master's voice within him. "The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror ... And start to speak." The epigraphs set the tone: Kierkegaard's "The Instant of Decision is Madness" and Joyce on Ulysses, separated from madness by "a transparent sheet".
In a 673-page book, Foucault devotes three pages, in a prologue to his second chapter, to a passage of the first Meditation where madness seems excluded from philosophical dignity "by Descartes, this last tribunal of a Cogito that, by its essence, could not possibly be mad". Derrida claims the sense of Foucault's entire project can be pinpointed in these pages, and asks two series of questions.
The two series of questions.
First, is Foucault's interpretation of Descartes justified? That means (a) understanding the sign itself, since one passing from a manifest to a latent language "must first be rigorously sure of the obvious meaning", as "the analyst ... must first speak the same language as the patient"; and (b) asking whether it has the historical meaning assigned to it, and whether its meaning is exhausted by its historicity. Second, a rereading of the Cogito, "the most classical, banal reading", may question the philosophical presuppositions of a history of madness.
An archaeology of silence
Foucault's greatest merit, and "the very infeasibility of his book", is to write a history of madness itself, letting madness speak "before being captured by knowledge", and not psychiatry's language on madness. He would avoid the trap of writing that history in the very language of classical reason, "the restrained and restraining language of reason". This is the most audacious aspect of the venture and "the maddest aspect of his project".
"The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness, could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language but, rather, the archaeology of that silence." Derrida's questions follow: is there a history of silence, and is not an archaeology "a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work"? It risks being "the most efficacious and subtle restoration ... of the act perpetrated against madness". And all its documents are borrowed "from the juridical province of interdiction".
Why an archaeology of silence turns against itself.
All European languages are the "immense delegation" of the capture of madness; such a trial may be impossible, since "the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime". "Order is then denounced within order." There are only two exits: say nothing of silence, or "follow the madman down the road of his exile". The misfortune of the mad is that "their best spokesmen are those who betray them best".
Foucault knows this: madness's freedom "can be understood only from high in the fortress that holds madness prisoner"; his discourse keeps to "a relativity without recourse" and "a language without support". The resolution "is practiced rather than formulated", made present by pathos: "a new and radical praise of folly", although praise (éloge) always belongs to logos. Who, then, enunciates the difficulty? Only someone for whom the confrontation of reason and madness is meaningful, which presupposes that a certain liberation of madness has begun and that psychiatry has opened itself.
The Decision and the Greek logos
Behind the archaeology lies a second, more ambitious project. The silence is a discourse arrested by command, so one must reach the point where the dialogue broke into two soliloquies: what Foucault calls the Decision, at once a fiat and a caesura. Derrida prefers "dissension", "a self-dividing action ... interior to logos in general", along the lines of Hegelian Entzweiung: "The exterior (is) the interior." Its common root is a logos, much older than the medieval "free trade" of the mad.
Derrida's dilemma for Foucault on the Greeks.
Foucault says "the Greek Logos had no contrary", yet calls Socrates' dialectic "reassuring". Either (a) Socrates belongs to that logos, so his dialectic cannot be reassuring and the Nietzschean-Heideggerian fascination with the pre-Socratics carries "a share of mystification"; or (b) the victory over Callicles' hybris already marks an exile of logos from itself, and the structure of exclusion runs through the whole history of philosophy, so "the classical age could have neither specificity nor privilege". Foucault "cannot simultaneously save" both claims.
Writing the history of the division risks construing it as an event subsequent to an original unity, "thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation". Derrida also asks in the name of what invariable meaning Foucault links madness and hybris, a serious problem of translation, and notes that "madness" is never thematized: it becomes "a popular and equivocal notion", overlapping "everything that can be put under the rubric of negativity".
If the decision that excludes madness is "the possibility of history", then the classical exclusion is "an example as sample and not as model", and writing its history means writing the history of historicity, a hysteron proteron. "To say madness itself" is self-contradictory, since madness is, in Foucault's profound phrase, "the absence of a work". Derrida also asks what the great internment of the mid-seventeenth century is: sign, symptom or cause? A structuralism may renounce one style of causality but not all etiological demands, and Foucault never says why Descartes alone is the example.
Rereading the first Meditation
Descartes, seeking firm foundations, ruins the senses: they sometimes deceive, so "it is wiser not to trust entirely". Then comes "sed forte" ("but yet perhaps"), which the Duc de Luynes left untranslated: perhaps some sensory things are beyond doubt, these hands, this body, "were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense", who think they are kings or have earthenware heads or are made of glass. "But they are mad, sed amentes sunt isti, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant." Next, "Praeclare sane": the hypothesis of dreams.
For Foucault there is "a fundamental imbalance" in the economy of doubt: dreams and error are surmounted within the structure of truth, but "madness is inadmissible for the doubting subject"; it is excluded by decree, an "impossibility of being mad that is essential not to the object of thought, but to the thinking subject". He is the first to isolate madness from dreams in this text, and calls the gesture "the advent of a ratio", in solidarity with the great internment and impossible for the haunted Montaigne.
Descartes' natural doubt: dreams radicalize madness rather than escape it.
Derrida's rereading makes two points. (1) Descartes never circumvents sensory error or dreams: the dream hypothesis is the hyperbolic radicalization of sensory doubt, since "in dreams, the totality of sensory images is illusory". What survives is not a sensory nucleus but the simple and intelligible: like the real colours of painters who invent sirens and satyrs, there are "objects yet more simple and more universal", extension, figure, number, so that "whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five". The transition is a discontinuity, and all sensory ideas are excluded from truth "for the same reason as madness".
(2) So madness receives no privileged treatment. The sed forte paragraph voices "the astonishment and objections of the nonphilosopher", a feigned objection that Descartes accepts in order to unsettle it with a more common experience, sleep. "The sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman." Madness is a poor instrument of doubt because the madman "is not wrong often enough, is never mad enough", and because the novice will not follow a philosopher who admits he might be mad.
| Step in the first Meditation | Foucault's reading | Derrida's reading |
|---|---|---|
| "But they are mad" | Madness excluded by decree from the thinking subject | A feigned objection of the nonphilosopher |
| Dream hypothesis | Dreams surmounted within truth | Hyperbole of sensory doubt; dreamer madder than madman |
| Painters and colours | Not discussed | Analogy for an intelligible core beyond sense |
| Evil genius | Not the focus | Total madness admitted into thought itself |
| Cogito | "I who think, I cannot be mad" | Valid even if I am mad: a zero point before reason and unreason |
| Appeal to God | Reason protected | Here the internment really happens |
Foucault could reply that reducing madness to a corporeal fault expels it "to the outer shadows of the Cogito", and that treating it as error makes it, one step later, a sin. Both truths hold only for the natural phase of doubt. The second "nevertheless" (verumtamen) brings the evil genius, "a total derangement" that subverts "pure thought and ... its purely intelligible objects": no hands, no eyes, and perhaps error "every time that I add two and three". What was set aside as insanity "is now welcomed into the most essential interiority of thought".
Discourse must carry normality
Beneath this lies an essential truth: if discourse is to have meaning, it must "carry normality within" itself. This is no Cartesian weakness but "an essential and universal necessity from which no discourse can escape, for it belongs to the meaning of meaning", including the discourse that denounces an act of force. The point is "strictly Foucauldian": since madness is the absence of a work and the work begins with the first syntactical usage of an "as such", "by its essence, the sentence is normal".
Why Foucault's own book reappropriates negativity.
Madness is thus "silence, stifled speech, within a caesura and a wound that open up life as historicity in general", not a determined silence imposed at one moment. Silence is "the work's limit and profound resource". A philosopher can evoke madness from within thought only "in the language of fiction or the fiction of language", keeping the distance needed to speak and live. Language makes a cleaner break with madness the closer it gets to it, separated only by Joyce's transparent sheet. Hence: "I would be tempted to consider Foucault's book a powerful gesture of protection and internment. A Cartesian gesture for the twentieth century."
The demonic hyperbole of the Cogito
Descartes "never interns madness", neither in natural nor metaphysical doubt; he only claims to exclude it during the non-hyperbolic moment. The Cogito escapes madness not because "I who think, I cannot be mad", but because "at its own moment ... it is valid even if I am mad". As the Discourse on Method says, it resists "all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics". "Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum."
The hyperbolic Cogito at its inaugural moment.
This is a zero point where determined meaning and nonmeaning share their origin, the point from which Foucault's own narration becomes possible. It exceeds the totality "in the direction of infinity or nothingness": even if the world does not exist and nonmeaning invades my thoughts, "I still think, I am while I think". The project "is mad, and acknowledges madness as its liberty"; it is "metaphysical and demonic", waking in its war with the evil genius. "Nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment."
Like Socrates' dialectic overflowing beings toward the sun epekeina tes ousias, it draws Glaucon's cry, "what demonic hyperbole" (daimonias hyperboles). That hyperbole goes further than hybris, which "keeps itself within the world" and exceeds "only within the space opened by the demonic hyperbole". To enclose it within a historical structure is to do it violence "of a totalitarian and historicist style": "I use 'totalitarian' in the structuralist sense of the word, but I am not sure that the two meanings do not beckon each other historically." The compelle intrare, forcing hyperbole back into the world, "is the origin and very meaning of what is called violence".
Where the internment really happens
As soon as Descartes reflects and communicates the Cogito, he reassures himself through God, temporalizing an intuition valid only at "the sharpest point, of the instant". With God and memory begins "the hurried repatriation of all mad and hyperbolical wanderings", now method and "resolute" progress across a terra firma given by God. "God alone protects me against the madness to which the Cogito, left to its own authority, could only open itself up in the most hospitable way." Here Foucault's reading becomes powerful: from the moment the Cogito must enter organized discourse.
The real point of internment in Descartes.
To be mad is "not to be able to reflect and to say the Cogito ... for an other; an other who may be myself". Like Anselm's insipiens, who cannot think what he says, the madman "could rebuff the evil genius" but "could not tell himself so". Descartes assumes that thinking and saying the clear and distinct are the same, and determines natural light through dogmatic axioms (causality; fraud proceeds from defect). "Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness." One could do for Husserl what Foucault did for Descartes: the reduction and the living present are "the profound reassurance of the certainty of meaning".
Economy, crisis and confession
"From its very first breath, speech ... is able to open the space for discourse only by emprisoning madness." Philosophy keeps itself "just close enough to say violence ... and just far enough to live and live as speech". Crisis is "the destiny of speaking philosophy", which would die by a worse violence "if a new speech did not at every instant liberate previous madness while enclosing within itself ... the madman of the day". Reason, madness and death form "an economy, a structure of deferral"; the attempt-to-say-the-hyperbole "keeps within itself the trace of a violence", and its economy is "the différance of the absolute excess".
The rhythm of crisis and reawakening.
"I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad." The crisis in which "reason is madder than madness ... and madness is more rational than reason" has always begun and is interminable, classical "in the sense of eternal and essential classicism". The concept of crisis gathers three senses in Foucault's book: Husserl's danger of objectivism and forgotten origins; krinein, Parmenides' division between the way of logos and the labyrinth of non-Being; and "crises of reason in strange complicity with what the world calls crises of madness".
Hyperbole, natural doubt, and the evil genius
Descartes's path is not a single gesture. There is already a hyperbole inside doubt founded on natural reasons (sleep and dream: "Now let us assume that we are asleep..."), beyond which mathematical truths remain ("whether I am awake or asleep"). Those truths capitulate only to the artificial and metaphysical assault of the evil genius. Foucault reads an imbalance: madness is treated alongside dreams and sensory error yet refused the same treatment in the "economy of doubt". Derrida's counter-reading: the exclusion of the mad as serious interlocutors is a feigned objection within the Meditation's rhetoric, not the founding internment of madness. The Cogito that survives the evil genius is valid even if I am mad; what philosophy cannot abide is the hyperbolic moment that would leave it without a language of reason.
Two layers of Cartesian doubt as Derrida sorts them.
Internment, crisis, and confession
Where does the internment of madness really happen? Not, for Derrida, in the three pages Foucault cites as decisive, but in the structure by which every discourse must "carry normality" in order to mean. The history of madness as archaeology of silence is therefore always already threatened by the language that recounts it. Crisis names the moment when reason and unreason are not yet sorted into institutional roles; confession (including Descartes's own rhetorical confessions of doubt) is how philosophy reabsorbs the hyperbolic risk. Derrida's lecture, delivered with Foucault present, is itself an act inside that economy: the disciple's unhappy consciousness that must speak the master's language in order to contest it.
['Crisis reabsorbed', 'as confession']
Economy of the least philosophical violence
The essay does not crown Descartes against Foucault. It argues that Foucault's project, to the extent that it is a discourse, cannot leave the circle it denounces. Philosophy lives "only by emprisoning madness", yet that imprisonment is not a contingent cruelty; it is the price of a language that can say anything at all about madness. The practical upshot is an economy: not the abolition of reason's violence, but vigilance about which violence a history of madness will practice when it speaks.
Decision, Greek logos, and the silence of madness
The lecture\'s early movement names a Decision: the Greek logos determining itself against madness, producing the possibility of a history of reason that will later intern its other. Foucault\'s archaeology of the silence of madness wants to let madness speak; Derrida asks in what language that silence could be written without already translating it into the logos of the book. The disciple\'s unhappy consciousness (Hegel\'s figure, used for the student who must master and contest the teacher) structures the occasion: Foucault present, Derrida reading three pages until they bear the weight of the whole project. Whether that synecdoche is fair is the quarrel\'s hinge; whether any history of madness can avoid it is the essay\'s lasting claim.
Why three pages can test a whole archaeology.
Demens, amens, and the juridical residue
Foucault\'s later reply stresses that Latin demens and amens are juridical terms Descartes chose with care, not casual synonyms for dream. Derrida\'s 1963 text already treats the "but they are mad" passage as a rhetorical moment inside the Meditation rather than a historical decree of confinement. Both sides agree that something decisive happens between Renaissance and classical age; they disagree on whether Descartes\'s sentence is that event or its philosophical symptom.
| Claim | Foucault (1961 / 1972) | Derrida (1963) |
|---|---|---|
| Site of exclusion | Practices; Descartes as symptom | Structure of discourse; Cogito\'s hyperbole |
| Madness in Meditations | Refused equal treatment with dream | Feigned objection; Cogito holds if mad |
| Method | Archaeology of silence / practices | Reading that tests the whole by the part |
| Risk | Madness spoken only as reason\'s other | History of madness still a work of reason |
Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book
The Jew and writing
In Le livre des questions the accent is graver than in Jabès's early verse: "roots speak, ... words want to grow, and ... poetic discourse takes root in a wound". The subject is "the passion of writing, the love and endurance of the letter itself whose subject is not decidably the Jew or the Letter". A "race born of the book" is grafted onto "the radical origin of meaning as literality, that is, onto historicity itself", for "there could be no history without the gravity and labor of literality". "And this fold, this furrow, is the Jew."
The metonymy at the heart of Le livre des questions.
Freedom must belong to the earth: "You think that it is the bird who is free. You are deceived; it is the flower." But the Site is not a ghetto or territory; "this land, calling to us from beyond memory, is always elsewhere", "tradition as adventure", separated from freedom by "the Desert of the Promise. That is, by the Poem." The poet and the Jew are "autochthons only of speech and writing, of Law". Yet "poetry is to prophecy what the idol is to truth", so the book is also a self-justification to a community living under heteronomy: "Poetic autonomy ... presupposes broken Tables."
Two interpretations of interpretation
"Between the fragments of the broken Tables the poem grows and the right to speech takes root." The text is "weed, as outlaw" far from "the fatherland of the Jews", a "sacred text surrounded by commentaries". "The necessity of commentary, like poetic necessity, is the very form of exiled speech. In the beginning is hermeneutics."
One interpretive imperative, interpreted twice (WD 67).
This right is absolute because "the breaking of the Tables articulates, first of all, a rupture within God as the origin of history". God "separated himself from himself in order to let us speak", by keeping still and letting silence interrupt his voice; in Exodus he repented twice, between speech and writing and between origin and repetition. Writing is "originally hermetic and secondary", already His. "God is an interrogation of God." With Kafka ("We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God"), there can be no simplicity of God, only "the virtue of the lie", for "there is no writing without a lie and writing is the way of God".
Desert, separation and absence
The way through is the Desert, "the moment of Separation". The Pharisees, "those misunderstood men of literality", were "separated ones". "God no longer speaks to us; he has interrupted himself: we must take words upon ourselves." "The garden is speech, the desert writing. In each grain of sand a sign surprises." The difference between speech and writing is sin, lost immediacy. The Jewish consciousness is the unhappy consciousness, and the book is its poem, beyond Hegel's phenomenology, "without eschatological provision".
From the rupture in God to the absence that lets letters signify.
Absence takes several forms. Absence of place: the poem keeps to "the vague estate, in the non-place, between city and desert", Cairo from which Jabès had his own flight from Egypt; the Greek nemein joins division, naming and nomadism. "A white sheet of paper is full of ways." Absence of the writer: to write is "to draw back ... from one's writing itself", to let speech "make its way alone and unarmed", "everything and nothing. Like God", humble as "the fly buzzing in the pane". Yet "things come into existence and lose existence by being named", and the exchange is imposed on God too: "Thus God is the child of his name."
The letter is "the separation and limit in which meaning is liberated". To claim one reduces its discontinuity by narration or deduction "is to misconstrue that language is the rupture with totality itself. The fragment is neither a determined style nor a failure, but the form of that which is written." Without interruption "no signification could be awakened"; since nature refuses the leap, "Scripture will never be Nature. It proceeds by leaps alone. ... Death strolls between letters." The animality of the letter ("an alphabet of squirrels") is "the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life".
More and less Jewish than the Jew
Thematically nothing is new: negativity in God, exile as writing, the life of the letter are in Böhme, Romanticism, Hegel, and "all already in the Cabala". But "traditionality is not orthodoxy". For Jabès "the Jew is but the suffering allegory: 'You are all Jews, even the antisemites'". His blood brothers reproach him: "You are not Jewish. You do not come to the synagogue." He is "more and less Jewish than the Jew", because "the Jew's identification with himself does not exist", split between allegory and literality. "Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning."
Everything outside the book is produced within it.
"Where is the book found? In the book." "Writing that culminates in itself is only a manifestation of spite"; writing must be "a tearing of the self toward the other". The writer is a ferryman: "My place is on the threshold." For Jabès "the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book": "If God is, it is because He is in the book." All anxieties are welcomed into the question, but perhaps upon "the peaceful and silent basis of a nonquestion": the certainty "that Being is a Grammar", the world a cryptogram, the book original.
The Book as an epoch of Being
"But what if the Book was only ... an epoch of Being", ending amid "books about the dead book"? What if Being were "radically outside the book", revealing itself "only in illegibility", the world not "the manuscript of another" (Jaspers) but "the other of every possible manuscript"? Original illegibility is not irrationality; it is "the very possibility of the book" and of the later opposition of rationalism and irrationalism.
From the closure of the book to a writing older than the book.
Jabès cannot be faulted for not stating this: such questions "can only sleep within the literary act". "Writing would die of the pure vigilance of the question, as it would of the simple erasure of the question." Literature transfigures its tortures into "ruses of life": life "differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance". The "interrogation of God" will never belong to a book unless it forgets itself. The essay closes with Reb Rida: "There is the book of God in which God questions himself, and there is the book of man which is proportionate to that of God."
Book, desert, and the rabbi\'s letter
Jabès\'s Livre des questions stages writing after the Holocaust as a desert of questions without a guaranteed Book of answers. Derrida reads the rabbi figures not as local color but as the form of a speech that is already commentary, already secondary, already Jewish in the sense the Violence essay will later pair with Greek. The question of the book is the question whether literature can still bind a people, a God, or a meaning when the Temple and the library have burned. Absence is not a theme illustrated by Jabès; it is the condition of every letter that arrives as citation of a missing origin.
Why Edmond Jabès belongs beside Violence and Ellipsis.
Question, commentary, and the burned library
For Jabès the book is already a question addressed to God, to the Jew, to the blank page. Derrida hears in that form the same structure Violence will name as discourse with God without participation in God: speech that is vocation and commentary, never first possession of meaning. After catastrophe the library is burned and writing continues as citation of absence. Ellipsis will close the volume in a related figure; Jabès supplies the mid-book instance where literature and Jewish commentary share one desert.
Jabès between Force and Violence.
| Motif | In Jabès | Echo elsewhere in the volume |
|---|---|---|
| Desert | Space of the question | Jewgreek difference (ch4) |
| Book | Always already secondary | Mallarmé\'s One Book (ch1); Ellipsis |
| Commentary | Rabbi figures | Levinas: discourse with God |
Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas
A community of the question
Whether philosophy died with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger, or has always lived "knowing itself to be dying", these "are unanswerable questions", yet they alone can found "a community of the question": a fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for "the hypocrisy of an answer" to begin. The impossible has already occurred: "there is a history of the question", which gives an injunction: "the question must be maintained. As a question." This commandment authorizes every ethical law, since every law is addressed to a freedom of speech.
Since Hegel, the two voices calling us to a total repetition of tradition are Husserl and Heidegger. Despite their differences they share three motifs: (1) philosophy is conceived from its Greek source, not as occidentalism but because its founding concepts are Greek; (2) a reduction or transgression of metaphysics; (3) ethics is subordinated to a more radical function. These would predetermine "the totality of the logos" now taking over humanity. "It is at this level that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble."
The three motifs Levinas puts in question.
In Greek, "in a language rich with all the alluvia of its history", Levinas summons us to "a dislocation of the Greek logos", toward a prophetic speech older than Plato, to free thought from "the Greek domination of the Same and the One", an ontological oppression that is "the origin or alibi of all oppression in the world". He calls this metaphysics, restored against Aristotle's tradition, grounded in "the ethical relationship ... a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other". It never rests on Hebraic texts but on experience itself, "the opening of opening". Derrida will be faithful first, then ask questions that are "the questions put to us by Levinas".
I. The violence of light
The departure from Greece was premeditated in Levinas's 1930 Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, the first major French work on Husserl. "The imperialism of theoria already bothered Levinas": phenomenology, "in the wake of Plato, was to be struck with light", and could not reduce "the naïveté of the glance", so it predetermined Being as object. The accusation was still timid: one cannot easily argue against light; Husserl gave absolute existence only to pure consciousness; Levinas still relies on Plato's sun epekeina tes ousias; and he admits nontheoretical acts such as valuing.
How Levinas's critique moves from Husserl to Heidegger.
Excendence (1947) is "a departure from being", placing metaphysics as metatheology and metaontology, under "the Platonic formulation placing the Good beyond Being"; what lies beyond is "not essentially light but fecundity or generosity", fatherhood. Derrida's parenthesis: Plato's sun already engendered, and "the heart of light is black". In 1930 Levinas turned to Heidegger against Husserl (world as field of solicitude, historicity as substance); the reproach then turned against Heidegger: care is "already determined by the structure 'inside-outside' that characterizes light".
Levinas exhorts "a second parricide": to "break with Parmenides" toward "a pluralism which does not fuse into unity". But "will a non-Greek ever succeed in doing what a Greek in this case could not do, except by disguising himself as a Greek"? The other must be understood as "the absolute solitude of the existent in its existence", against the anonymous "there is". Against a "heliopolitics" of fusion and the collective "us" of Mitsein, Levinas aims at "the face-to-face", "without intermediary and without communion". His writing moves along the cracks of philosophy by "neither this ... nor that".
Without thinking the other, phenomenology and ontology have no time, since the alterity of each instant "comes into time through the Other", and so no history. Worse, "solipsism is ... the very structure of reason": they become "philosophies of violence", making common cause with "the totalitarianism of the same" and "the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession". "To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power." Borges is right: "Perhaps universal history is but the history of several metaphors", and light is the master example. "How ... will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light?"
II. Phenomenology, ontology, metaphysics
In Totality and Infinity the movement beyond the possession of the other is called metaphysics or ethics, and "metaphysical transcendence is desire". This desire is "as anti-Hegelian as it can possibly be": not negation and assimilation, but "respect and knowledge of the other as other". Hegelian desire would be only need; metaphysical desire, as in Fear and Trembling, is what it is only as the renunciation of desire. "Desire is equal only to excess." It is not unhappy: unlike Abraham's provisional unhappiness in Hegel's Odyssey, "here there is no return".
Levinas's anti-Hegelian concept of desire.
The infinitely other is the invisible and "the most high", "higher than height", which "tears apart ... the spatial literality of the metaphor"; but "what necessity compels this inscription of language in space at the very moment when it exceeds space?" The ego is the Same; its inner alterity is only "a play of the Same" (body, home, possession, economy, work), so history becomes "a blinding to the other". Derrida asks "whether history itself does not begin with this relationship to the other which Levinas places beyond history".
If one is not convinced that the ego equals the Same and that things offer no real resistance, "one never will be". The encounter with the absolutely other cannot be conceptualized: "a horizon is always a horizon of the same". It is "encounter as separation", the only pure future, "present at the heart of experience ... not as a total presence but as a trace". Being-together as separation "precedes or exceeds society"; Levinas calls it religion. It opens language "where neither no nor yes is the first word" but a supplication addressed to a freedom.
The encounter is described in the grammar of language itself. The concept, "material of language", is always given to the other and so cannot include the other: "The dative or vocative dimension which opens the original direction of language, cannot lend itself to inclusion in and modification by the accusative or attributive dimension of the object without violence." Language therefore cannot totalize itself or contain its own origin and end. The encounter is "the only adventuring outside oneself toward the unforeseeably-other. Without hope of return." In La trace de l'autre Levinas speaks of "an eschatology without hope for the self or without liberation in my time", and in his ethics "the principal, central prohibition is that of contact". Derrida admits the strain: "To attempt to think the opposite is stifling", because we "still cannot not believe" the truisms of horizon and anticipation that Levinas asks us to give up.
Ontology always "brings the other back into the midst of the same"; theoretical freedom is "an economic freedom". Even Heidegger's ontology would be "egology": "Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power" (TI 46), of the neutral, "the tyranny of the state as an anonymous and inhuman universality", communicating with "a philosophy of the site, of rootedness, of pagan violence". Levinas, uncomfortably between Husserl and Heidegger, "always criticizes the one in a style ... borrowed from the other". "Ontology presupposes metaphysics": "Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy."
From the epekeina tes ousias to the face.
The infinite, "thought of as more than I can think", emerged first in Plato, then in Descartes's idea of infinity; neither saw that "the expression of this infinity is the face". The face "is also that which sees ... that which exchanges its glance". Here Levinas is "very close to Hegel, much closer than he admits": for Hegel, too, the soul concentrates in the eye, sight is "appetiteless", and hearing is more ideal. For Levinas this neutralization of desire is "the first violence", so he places sound above light: "Thought is language and is thought in an element analogous to sound."
The face "does not signify"; "Absolutely present, in his face, the Other, without any metaphor, faces me." It is presence, ousia, kath'auto. To express oneself is "to be behind the sign", to assist one's speech as in the Phaedrus against Theuth: "The written and the work are not expressions but signs for Levinas." Derrida asks whether all this could be inverted: writing has time and freedom, the writer "absents himself better", and "the limit between violence and nonviolence is perhaps not between speech and writing but within each of them". Blanchot disagrees with this preeminence of "tranquil humanist and socratic speech".
One cannot speak of the Other, only to the Other, in the vocative; the face "is not 'of this world'. It is the origin of the world", secret "like Gyges". Murder "always misses" the face: "The Other is the only being who I may wish to kill", yet he orders "thou shalt commit no murders", by "ethical resistance". The word autrui resists grammar: neither common noun nor proper name. The face-to-face is first that of "the man with bent neck and eyes raised toward the God on high"; "the Other resembles God", and "Discourse is discourse with God". But "and if God was an effect of the trace?" Levinas's thought "is maintained between these two postulations". Would he accept Jabès's "All faces are His; this is why HE has no face"?
III. Of the original polemic
All the questions are questions of language, and already belong to Levinas's own dialogue. (A) Earlier works rejected the categories of Same and Other; Totality and Infinity restores them, with the Ego equated to the Same as a silent axiom. This lets Levinas condemn both Greek and modern philosophies of subjectivity, protesting against the concept and the state "not ... in the name of subjective existence, but against it", against Hegel and Kierkegaard together. But Kierkegaard pleaded for subjective existence in general, and the other "is an Ego, as Levinas must suppose". An "Ethics of Ethics" beyond laws may be "the Law of laws".
Derrida's anchor is a single sentence from Levinas: "It is not I who do not accept the system, as Kierkegaard thought, it is the other." He wagers that Kierkegaard would have been deaf to this distinction, since "the name of a philosophical subject, when he says I, is always, in a certain way, a pseudonym". Kierkegaard pleaded not for Søren Kierkegaard's salvation but for subjective existence in general, which is why his discourse is philosophical; and respect for the other presupposes exactly that essence of subjective existence. To reject it Levinas would have to drop even the notions of an essence and a truth of the ego, which he "does not do so, and cannot do so, without renouncing philosophical discourse". Derrida grants Kierkegaard his own sense of the totally-other "in the direction of a certain Abraham", and suggests that Feuerbach, not Kierkegaard, is Levinas's real neighbour on the themes of height, face and trace: "convergences, and not ... influences".
The deeper issue is not incoherence but "the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it". Either this necessity touches only an instrument, an "expression" one could put in quotation marks, or it reveals "some indestructible and unforeseeable resource of the Greek logos", an "unlimited power of envelopment, by which he who attempts to repel it would always already be overtaken". An opening beyond philosophy by means of philosophy can succeed only by posing the question of closure formally, "in a kind of unheard of graphics, within which philosophical conceptuality would be no more than a function". This is the program the rest of the book carries out.
Why the infinitely other can only be stated negatively.
(B) Earlier, Levinas rejected exteriority as spatial; Totality and Infinity is subtitled "Essay on Exteriority" and must say that "true exteriority is not spatial, that is, is not exteriority". One must "inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition's shreds and the devil's patches". Before being a rhetorical device, "metaphor would be the emergence of language itself". "One would attempt in vain ... to forget the words 'inside,' 'outside' ... for language in its entirety already has awakened as a fall into light." Language is "son of earth and sun: writing".
If the infinite alterity of the other can be said only as non-exteriority, "perhaps the meaning of this alterity is finite". "Infinitely other" signifies "that which does not come to an end", the indefinite apeiron, so negativity and labor cannot be expelled from transcendence; positive Infinity "cannot be infinitely Other". The face is a body, mortal; "infinite alterity as death cannot be reconciled with infinite alterity as positivity and presence (God)". God "is named, within the difference between All and Nothing, Life and Death ... as Difference itself. This difference is what is called History."
Why Levinas cannot use the classical escapes.
Negative theology spoke "in a speech that knew itself failed"; Bergson destroyed discourse in favor of silent intuition. Levinas cannot: for him "thought consists of speaking" and metaphysics is speech with God. If discourse essentially retains space and the Same, "does this not mean that discourse is originally violent?" Then "nonviolence would be the telos, and not the essence of discourse".
This vigilance is "a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously". "Speech is doubtless the first defeat of violence, but paradoxically, violence did not exist before the possibility of speech." The avowal of war in discourse is "the opposite of bellicosity", whose best accomplice, as Hegel showed, is irenics. "History is not the totality transcended by eschatology ... It is transcendence itself."
Of transcendental violence
Levinas's metaphysics always supposes a phenomenology. (A) He keeps its method, yet once held, after Heidegger, that method cannot be separated from ontology, and phenomenology's method expresses philosophy's decision since Plato to be theory. (B) He keeps intentionality, but charges Husserl with adequation and with constituting infinity as an object. Derrida: the "false infinity" (Hegel's term) haunts these charges; "as soon as he speaks against Hegel, Levinas can only confirm Hegel".
Derrida's defence of Husserl against the charge of adequation.
Who was more determined than Husserl to show that vision is "inadequation of interiority and exteriority"? The Idea in the Kantian sense designates a horizon that "never can become an object itself ... Even by God's intuition". "In phenomenology there is never a constitution of horizons, but horizons of constitution." "Is not intentionality respect itself? ... The phenomenon of respect supposes the respect of phenomenality. And ethics, phenomenology." (C) Ethical meaning must be thought for any discourse on ethics to mean anything; "It suffices that ethical meaning be thought in order for Husserl to be right." "I have regard for the face itself."
(D) The decisive disagreement is over the Other. For Levinas, making the other an alter ego by analogical appresentation (Fifth Cartesian Meditation) neutralizes it. Derrida: Husserl insists the other "can never be given to me in an original way", only by appresentation, which "confirms and respects separation". If I reached the other immediately, "the other would cease to be the other". Things too have hidden sides, but the other adds "the radical impossibility of going around to see things from the other side".
The quarrel over the alter ego.
"The other as alter ego signifies the other as other, irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego." Its egoity lets him say "ego" as I do: "this is why he is face, can speak to me". "Dissymmetry itself would be impossible without this symmetry", an economy that "would probably be intolerable to Levinas". Without knowing myself to be the other's other, violence would have no victim and no author. Parmenides would smile: "infinitely other" cannot be stated and thought at once. "The other is absolutely other only if he is an ego." Derrida confesses "total deafness" to "Being occurs as multiple, and as divided into Same and Other".
Derrida then lets Parmenides speak, "the great and fearful white shadow which spoke to the young Socrates". (1) The infinitely other can be what it is only if it is other, that is, other than; other than must mean other than myself, so it is no longer absolved of a relation to an ego, and no longer absolutely other. If it were absolved, it would not be the other either, but the Same. (2) The infinitely other is what it is only by being absolutely not the same, which includes being other than itself; being other than itself, it is not what it is. This is "not just verbiage, or dialectical virtuosity": it means that "infinitely other" cannot be stated and thought simultaneously, and so the Same is not a closed totality. "How could there be a 'play of the Same' if alterity itself was not already in the Same?"
The Stranger in Plato's Sophist, who like Levinas seems to break with Eleatism in the name of alterity, already knew that alterity "can be thought only as negativity" and is always said pros heteron, relative to something. Levinas would refuse to assimilate the Other to this heteron, but "how can the 'Other' be thought or said without reference ... to the alterity of the eteron in general?" Derrida's point is that the heteron belongs to a zone more original than the philosophy of subjectivity still at work in Levinas's notion of the Other. Treating alter ego as if alter were an accidental epithet of an empirical subject misreads the transcendental syntax of the expression.
Hence a transcendental, preethical violence: the necessity of reaching the other through its appearing for me "is violence itself, or rather the transcendental origin of an irreducible violence", which is "at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other. It is an economy." Husserl names the irreducible egoity of experience "archi-factuality" (Urtatsache): "I must stand firm before the primordial fact"; even "God too, is for me what he is by my own conscious production", which is no blasphemy but "the problem", and the only check on "the totalitarianism of the neutral".
Why presence itself is originally violent.
The question repeats at the level of the living present: "There is no experience which can be lived other than in the present." If violence is the necessity that the other appear only in and for the same, "then time is violence". "The living present is originally marked by death. Presence as violence is the meaning of finitude, the meaning of meaning as history." Yet the question of finitude as violence escapes phenomenology: it is "an interpellation of the Greek by the non-Greek at the heart of a silence", statable only in Greek, and forgotten in being stated.
Of ontological violence
Speaking of the present already supposes an understanding of Being as time, which Husserl never unfolded. Levinas attacks "Heideggerean ontology": to affirm "the priority of Being over the existent is ... to subordinate the relation with someone ... to a relation with the Being of the existent" (TI 45). Derrida answers that the thought of Being is no truism and no concept: Being is "not simply a predicate of the existent", "transcategorical", and "nothing outside the existent", so it can have no priority, no power, no archia.
Derrida's defence of Heidegger against "ontological violence".
By treating the ontico-ontological difference as a ruse of war and calling intra-ontic transcendence "metaphysics", Levinas "confirms Heidegger", for whom metaphysics forgets that difference and is tied to humanism and onto-theology. Levinas proposes both, and grounds man's substantiality in his resemblance to God: "'The Other resembles God.' Is this not the original metaphor?" Being "begins by hiding itself beneath its determination"; "Every epoch of world history is an epoch of erring." The Heideggerean Site is "not an empirical Here but always an Illic", like the Jew's promised Land; to call it Barrèsism expresses "an allergy ... to the 'climate' of Heidegger's philosophy".
Why a language without violence would say nothing.
The ahistoricity of meaning separates Levinas from Heidegger: for Heidegger Being is history and "the first dissimulated"; for Levinas Being as concept is "the first dissimulating". Yet both eschatologies repeat and question Platonism, "in the form of a question to Hegel". Perhaps the thought of infinity (God) is what opens the ontico-ontological difference, as for Duns Scotus and Malebranche, and as in Nicholas of Cusa's Idiota: "of God there can be no proper question, because the answer coincides with it".
| Levinas's claim | Derrida's response |
|---|---|
| The face is expressed "without any metaphor" | "The Other resembles God" is the original metaphor |
| True exteriority is not spatial | It can be said only through the inside-outside structure of language |
| The other is infinitely, positively other | Infinite alterity is the indefinite; positive infinity cannot be other |
| Alter ego reduces the other to the same | The other is other only as an ego; symmetry enables asymmetry |
| Ontology is a philosophy of power | The thought of Being is no concept and no archia; it lets the other be |
| Nonviolent language is possible | Pure nonviolence is contradictory; only an economy of least violence |
| Meaning originates beyond history | History is transcendence itself |
Empiricism, Jewgreek
Resigned to betraying his intentions in philosophical discourse, Levinas embraces a renunciation of the concept whose "true name" is empiricism, which "has ever committed but one fault: the fault of presenting itself as a philosophy". Empiricism is "the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference", a dream that "must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens". Levinas renews empiricism "and inverses it by revealing it to itself as metaphysics", speaking of "the radical empiricism confident in the instruction of exteriority". But "has not the concept of experience always been determined by the metaphysics of presence?"
The close of the essay.
If this experience of the infinitely other is called Judaism ("only a hypothesis for us"), it must still occur as logos, to avoid "the worst violence ... in the night". "It was a Greek who said, 'If one has to philosophize, one has to philosophize; if one does not have to philosophize, one still has to philosophize.'" Levinas himself grants that Greek logos is "the true grounds of all understanding". Greece is no neutral territory: by saying epekeina tes ousias and recognizing in the Sophist that alterity circulates at the origin of meaning, Greek thought "forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation".
Messianic hollow and the opening of opening
Before the questions of Part III, Derrida names the space his reading will occupy. Levinas draws inspiration from messianic eschatology, yet never develops it as theology, Jewish mysticism, dogmatics, religion or morality, and never rests it on Hebraic theses. The eschatology is "never mentioned literally": it designates "a space or a hollow within naked experience" where such speech can resonate. That hollow is not one opening among others; it is "opening itself, the opening of opening", what no category or totality can enclose. The essay's fidelity is therefore double: to Levinas's themes and audacities, and to the history of a thought that "grows old" toward Totality and Infinity.
Two origins and two historical speeches (Greek philosophy and prophetic speech) explicate and surpass each other. Derrida asks whether a "strange community" begins without returning to Alexandrian promiscuity. Heidegger, too, seeks a former speech that carries philosophy to its outer or inner reaches; the question is what another speech and another passageway mean here. The reading is "very partial", "faintly and from afar", first in the style of commentary, with parentheses that enclose perplexity.
What Derrida takes as the space of the essay.
Face, Feuerbach, and discourse with God
The face is given "in person" and without allegory. Derrida recalls Feuerbach, who linked height, substance and face: that which is highest in space is also "the highest part of man", and "If I see a man's head, it is the man himself who I see; but if I only see his torso, I see no more than his torso." The passage lets Levinas communicate with a pre-phenomenological anthropology of the visage without becoming Feuerbachian. Via resemblance, "man's speech can be lifted up toward God", an "almost unheard of analogy": "Discourse is discourse with God", and "Metaphysics is the essence of this language with God." Discourse with God, not participation in God; discourse with God, not theology of attributes. The "curvature of inter-subjective space" signifies the divine intention. Derrida's counter-pressure stays: and if God were "an effect of the trace"?
How the face opens the theological analogy.
War, Gyges, and ethical resistance
Totality for Levinas is always a finite totality: a silent axiom. "God alone keeps Levinas's world from being a world of the pure and worst violence." Full respect for the face would abolish war; absence of face would abolish the cause of war. "War supposes and excludes God", and "the play of the world precedes God". The face is "not 'of this world'"; it is "the origin of the world", secret "like Gyges". Murder "always misses" the face: the Other is "the only being who I may wish to kill", yet he orders "thou shalt commit no murders" by ethical resistance. That resistance is not unreal; what escapes the concept as power is not existence in general but the existence of the Other. There is, "despite all appearances, no concept of the Other". The word Autrui must be handled "in an artisan-like way" where philosophy and philology constrain each other.
Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and lodging in tradition
The protest against concept, state and totality is made "against subjective existence", against Hegel and Kierkegaard together. Levinas: "It is not I who do not accept the system, as Kierkegaard thought, it is the other." Derrida wagers Kierkegaard would have been deaf to the distinction: the name of a philosophical subject, when he says I, is always in a certain way "a pseudonym". Kierkegaard pleaded for subjective existence in general, which is why his discourse is philosophical; respect for the other presupposes that essence. To refuse it Levinas would have to drop even the notions of an essence and a truth of the ego, which he cannot do without "renouncing philosophical discourse". Feuerbach, not Kierkegaard, is the nearer neighbour on height, face and trace: convergences, not influences.
The necessity is "lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it". Either the lodging is only instrumental (quotation marks around expression), or it reveals an "indestructible and unforeseeable resource of the Greek logos", an unlimited power of envelopment by which "he who attempts to repel it would always already be overtaken". Opening beyond philosophy by means of philosophy succeeds only by posing closure formally, "in a kind of unheard of graphics" in which philosophical conceptuality would be only a function. That program is the book's own.
From Levinas's protest to Derrida's program.
Husserl's Ideal and the breathing letter
Against the charge that Husserl reduces Being to adequate objects, Derrida cites the Ideal: "Manifestly every attempt to reinterpret the Being of the ideal as a possible Being of the real must fail... In the real world, one finds as few possibilities as one does numbers in general, or triangles in general." Ideality is unreal, yet is as object or as thought. Without a presupposed access to a meaning of Being not exhausted by reality, the theory of ideality and transcendental phenomenology would collapse. Husserl still distinguishes this from the Being-thought of the fictional or absurd. The point is not that Husserl posed the question of Being; it is that phenomenology carries that question whenever it treats temporalization and the alter ego, while remaining dominated by a metaphysics of presence.
On respiration and Being, Derrida juxtaposes Descartes's March 1638 letter: "I breathe, therefore I am concludes nothing" unless one implies I think that I breathe. The meaning of respiration is always a dependent determination of thought and existence, and a fortiori of Being. Even if the word "Being" derived from a word meaning respiration, no etymology or philology as such can account for the thought for which respiration becomes one determination of Being among others. Genealogy of the unheard-of meaning of Being needs other roads, or another reading of Nietzsche.
Two supports for the thought of Being against empiricist reduction.
Greek miracle and Jewgreek close
Levinas grants Greek logos as "the true grounds of all understanding". Derrida refuses to treat Greece as a neutral guest-house where Jew and Christian meet while the Greek absents himself. "The Greek miracle is not this or that astonishing success; it is the impossibility for any thought ever to treat its sages as 'sages of the outside'" (Saint John Chrysostom). Having proffered the epekeina tes ousias, and having recognized in the Sophist that alterity circulates at the origin of meaning, Greek thought of Being "forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation".
The essay's last movement.
| Figure / text | Role in the argument | Derrida\'s pressure |
|---|---|---|
| Messianic hollow | Opening of opening in experience | Space of reading, not a doctrine |
| Feuerbach on the head | Height and face before phenomenology | Convergence, not influence |
| Gyges / ethical resistance | Face secret; murder misses it | No concept of the Other |
| Descartes 1638 letter | Respiration under thought | Blocks etymological founding of Being |
| Chrysostom / Sophist | No "sages of the outside" | Greek already welcomed alterity |
| Joyce | Jewgreek / greekjew | History as that difference |
Enjoyment, work, and the labor of the Same
Before metaphysical desire, Levinas describes enjoyment (jouissance): the ego\'s living from..., its happiness in elemental goods, its home and possession. Enjoyment is only deferred in work; Hegelian desire, read as need, would miss this. Derrida notes that a closer reading of certitude and the truth of desire in the Phenomenology would complicate the contrast. Still, Levinas\'s point stands for the essay: the Same\'s economy (body, dwelling, labor, possession) can look like alterity while remaining "a play of the Same". Work that never truly meets the other provides itself with its own resistance. One may then ask whether history can be history when negativity stays enclosed in that circle. Derrida\'s pressure returns: perhaps history begins with the relation to the other that Levinas places beyond history.
Two economies inside Totality and Infinity.
Excendence, fecundity, and the second parricide
Excendence (1947) names departure from being toward the Other, not toward a neutral Good. What is epekeina tes ousias is "not essentially light but fecundity or generosity": creation as paternity, father-son relations that escape the logic of genre. The "second parricide" (break with Parmenides) aims at a pluralism that does not fuse into unity. Derrida\'s Greek trap remains: will a non-Greek succeed where the Greek failed, except by disguising himself as a Greek? Fecundity and the face-to-face against Mitsein are the positive program; the essay\'s later parts test whether that program can be said without the logos it flees.
Levinas's early program under Derrida's question.
Letting-be, Site, and the allergy charge
On Heidegger, Derrida insists letting-be (Seinlassen) lets the other be in its alterity, even as interlocutor; no ethics opens without the thought of Being. The Heideggerean Site is "not an empirical Here but always an Illic", likened to the Jew\'s promised Land. To call that Site a Barrèsism or pagan rootedness expresses, for Derrida writing in 1964, an "allergy ... to the \'climate\' of Heidegger\'s philosophy". The A closer look below notes how that dismissal ages after the Black Notebooks. Within the essay\'s own logic, the charge still serves to separate ontological violence (Levinas\'s accusation) from a thought Derrida claims is "radically foreign to ethics" and to power as archia.
"Genesis and Structure" and Phenomenology
A precaution and a confession
Approaching a philosophy with a ready-made pair of concepts ("structure and genesis") and an antagonism built in risks "an abusive investigation which introduces beforehand what it seeks to find": it "begins with an aggression and an infidelity. We must not forget this." Husserl disliked debate, dilemma and aporia; the phenomenologist is "the true positivist" who returns to the things themselves. Asked "structure or genesis", he would have answered that it depends what one is describing: some givens call for the language of structure, others for that of genesis.
His itinerary shows this fidelity. The move from the genetic Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) to the Logical Investigations has an "explicative continuity" (forty years later he called the early book "a research deriving from constitutive phenomenology"). The move from the static analyses of Ideas I (1913) to later genetic constitution "implies no 'surpassing' ... and especially not a repentance": a work of excavation that brings to light the "structural a prioris" of genesis itself.
Derrida's two confessions about Husserl.
Derrida confesses two aims: first, that beneath the serene use of these concepts "is to be found a debate that regulates and gives its rhythm to the progression of the description", whose incompleteness "makes new reductions and explications indefinitely necessary"; second, that this debate forces Husserl beyond pure description "toward a metaphysics of history in which the solid structure of a Telos would permit him to reappropriate ... an untamed genesis". He follows the debate inside Husserl and on two flanks: the polemics against Diltheyism and Gestaltism.
Against psychologism and logicism
Husserl tries to reconcile the structuralist demand (a totality whose elements mean only in their correlation) with the genetic demand (the origin and foundation of structure). The Philosophie der Arithmetik already refuses a psychological deduction of number: its meaning is "independence from any factual consciousness", and Husserl will accept Frege's criticisms: "the essence of the number derives from psychology to the same extent as does the existence of the North Sea." Neither unity nor zero can be built from psychic acts.
But he equally rejects the logicizing conclusion. He holds together "the normative autonomy of logical or mathematical ideality" and "its original dependence in relation to a subjectivity in general; in general, but concretely", passing between "logicizing structuralism and psychologistic genetism". The result is "a concrete, but nonempirical, intentionality, a 'transcendental experience'", productive and revelatory at once. The common root of activity and passivity becomes "the common root of structure and genesis".
Husserl's double refusal.
The early phase is structuralist only because it wants to stay clear of psychologism and historicism. What is disqualified is genetic description borrowed from naturalism and causalism, a "science of facts" that leads to relativism and skepticism. Even the most naïve use of structure or genesis in the sciences presupposes that regions of objectivity have been circumscribed, which only phenomenological critique can do: "what is the physical thing, what is the psychological thing, what is the historical thing".
Dilthey: structure as historicism
Husserl attacks the first philosophies of structure exactly as he attacked genetism. The Weltanschauungsphilosophie of Dilthey is a historicism: it confuses truths of fact and truths of reason by explaining truth from within "a factual totality, a finite totality". But truth demands "an absolute, infinite omni-temporality and universality"; it is "an Idea in the Kantian sense". "On the basis of the structural description of a vision of the world one can account for everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy."
Husserl is hospitable to Dilthey's understanding (re-living, close to Einfühlung and to Reaktivierung), to cultural totalities with internal meaning, and to the distinction of causality from motivation. But this renewal "only intensifies the historicist menace". The Weltanschauung belongs to wisdom, not knowledge: life demands a practical answer before science can finish, "an interminable delaying [différance] of the theoretical foundation", a "provisional morality". The word différance appears here early, in a modest sense.
Inside phenomenology: two openings in Ideas I
Within phenomenology the problem returns as one of closure or opening. (1) The essences of consciousness are rigorous but "anexact": exactness comes from idealization and passage to the limit, as in geometry, so "a 'mathematics of phenomena' is impossible". A mathematical multiplicity is defined by "the possibility of closure" (Derrida notes the strain this concept faced after Gödel). Hence "the principled ... impossibility of closing a structural phenomenology": the infinite opening of experience, "the irruption of the infinite into consciousness".
The two openings inside Husserl's archi-structure of intentionality.
(2) Intentionality is an Ur-Struktur with four poles and two correlations, noesis-noema and morphe-hyle. The noema is "neither of the world nor of consciousness, but it is the world or something of the world for consciousness"; this "anarchy of the noema is the root and very possibility of objectivity and of meaning", which no regional structure can describe. "The transcendentality of the opening is simultaneously the origin and the undoing ... of every structure and of every systematic structuralism." The hyle, real but not intentional, is "primarily temporal matter. It is the possibility of genesis itself."
These two openings require a genetic constitution and a "new transcendental aesthetic", "announced unceasingly but deferred always", where the Other and Time would show their complicity. Their constitution puts in question the "principle of principles", which Derrida calls "its metaphysical principle: the original self-evidence and presence of the thing itself in person". The transition from structure to genesis is "nothing less than the necessity of a break or a conversion".
Gestalt and the nothing of parallelism
A structural psychology influenced by phenomenology and Gestalt might seem immune to psychologism, especially as Husserl himself prescribed a phenomenological psychology "strictly parallel to transcendental phenomenology". But "to avoid 'naturalism' it does not suffice to escape atomism". What separates the parallels is "the nothing which prevents them from coming together", and "this nothing is what permits the transcendental reduction", where the origin of meaning appears: in Fink's phrase, "the origin of the world".
Three genetic routes, one Telos
Genetic phenomenology after Ideas runs along three lines. (A) The logical route (Experience and Judgment, Formal and Transcendental Logic) reduces scientific idealizations and Lebenswelt sedimentation to "reactivate" predication from "untamed precultural life". (B) The egological route returns to the ego "continuously constituting [itself] as existing", with limits Husserl calls provisional. (C) The historico-teleological route, "a teleological reason [runs] throughout all historicity", cannot be one route among others: "the eidetics of history ... embraces the totality of beings".
| Route | Texts | What it reduces or seeks | Limit Derrida notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logical | Experience and Judgment; Formal and Transcendental Logic | Undo idealizations, reactivate predication | Reads acts only through noematic results |
| Egological | Cartesian Meditations | Genesis of the ego itself | Passivity; limits called provisional |
| Historico-teleological | Crisis; Origin of Geometry | Eidos of historicity as telos of reason | Becomes a metaphysical assertion |
Three lines of genetic description, one of which absorbs the others.
Reason's irruption is announced "in confusion and in the dark", even in animality and nature. Can such an affirmation be certain within phenomenology, or is it already "a metaphysics which articulates itself in a phenomenological discourse"? Reason is logos produced in history, "speech as auto-affection: hearing oneself speak", which constitutes itself as history "through the detour of writing". Thus "it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself". The Origin of Geometry shows writing is necessary to truth yet dangerous: the sign can "'empty' itself ... and may remain forever closed and mute".
How the Telos reconciles structure and genesis.
This is not speculative metaphysics: logos "is nothing outside history and Being", it is "infinite discursiveness and not an actual infinity". Yet "in criticizing classical metaphysics, phenomenology accomplishes the most profound project of metaphysics", as Husserl himself claims: it "excludes every naïve metaphysics ... but does not exclude metaphysics as such". The Telos appears whenever Husserl speaks of the Idea in the Kantian sense, perhaps "the very project of phenomenology". Since it is "totally open, is opening itself", it is "structurally genesis itself, as origin and as becoming".
Genesis versus structure in Husserl
The essay tracks Husserl\'s oscillation between a genetic account of meaning\'s becoming and a structural account of essential relations. Derrida\'s claim is not that one side wins. It is that phenomenology cannot choose without remainder: the origin it seeks is already marked by the structural possibility of repetition, and the structure it describes is already a genesis of idealities. That double bind prepares the later vocabulary of trace and supplement without yet naming grammatology. Against a simple story that Derrida "rejects Husserl", the essay shows how deeply he remains inside phenomenological problems while loosening their closure.
Husserl's oscillation as Derrida maps it.
Ideality, repetition, and the hinge to grammatology
Husserl needs ideality: the same meaning repeatable across acts and times. Repetition, though, is already a threat to pure presence; the ideal object lives only by being re-enactable, which is a kind of writing before paper. Derrida\'s essay stays inside phenomenology\'s vocabulary while showing that genesis and structure contaminate each other. Readers who jump from this chapter to Of Grammatology will recognize the hinge: the trace is how repetition inhabits the origin.
Why Genesis and Structure matters for later Derrida.
The question of the possibility of the reduction "is the question of the possibility of the question", the gap from which the transcendental I, which Husserl was tempted to call "eternal" (meaning neither infinite nor ahistorical), asks itself about everything, including "the unformed and naked factuality of the nonmeaning ... for example, of its own death".
La Parole Soufflée
The case and the example
Two discourses meet in Artaud: the clinical and the critical. Blanchot, Foucault and Laplanche have questioned their unity; Foucault concludes that the two are "profoundly incompatible" yet "infinitely close". Derrida finds a deeper complicity: when criticism protects a work from psychomedical reduction, "it comes to the same result ... through the opposite path: it creates an example. That is to say, a case." The psychological reduction and the eidetic reduction "function in the same way".
Blanchot reads Artaud's "unpower" as "essential to thought": Artaud's "pathetic error" is his own history, left to the doctors, while the critic keeps "a universal essence of thought". Blanchot warns against generalizing ("What is Artaud's is his alone") but then returns to essence. In his reading of Hölderlin, "the unique is hailed in vain". Laplanche reproaches Blanchot's "idealist interpretation" and proposes a unitary theory in which Hölderlin gives exemplary access to "the essence of schizophrenia in general". "Exemplarity only apparently contradicts unicity."
Two opposed readings that make the same case.
Derrida does not call these readings wrong: "They are legitimate, fruitful, true." His regret has the opposite motive: "we believe in the necessity of reducing the unique", shattering it further, and no commentary escapes defeat "unless it destroys itself as commentary" by exhuming the unity beneath the differences of madness and work, psyche and text. Artaud resists exegesis by "the very protest itself against exemplification". He promises "a speech that is a body, of a body that is a theater, of a theater that is a text because it is no longer enslaved to a writing more ancient than itself".
Soufflé: stolen and inspired
The title turns on the double sense of soufflé. Speech is spirited away, stolen "by a possible commentator who would acknowledge speech in order to place it in an order". "All speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding ... immediately becomes stolen speech", a signification I do not possess "because it is a signification". "Theft is always the theft of speech or text, of a trace", and "the theft of speech is not a theft among others; it is confused with the very possibility of theft".
| French | Sense | Role in the essay |
|---|---|---|
| soufflé | spirited away, stolen | Speech taken by the commentator, the reader, God |
| soufflé | inspired, prompted | Speech dictated by another voice reading an older text |
| souffleur | prompter | The hidden reader of the classical stage |
| souffle | breath, spirit | The good inspiration of life Artaud wants back |
| essoufflé | breathless | Discourse made into a sarcophagus of the flesh |
Speech is also inspired "by an other voice that itself reads a text older than the text of my body". Inspiration is "the drama, with several characters, of theft": the classical theater, where the invisible prompter "ensures the indispensable différance and intermittence between a text already written by another hand and an interpreter already dispossessed". Artaud wanted "the machinery of the prompter spirited away", to "plunder the structure of theft", destroying poetic inspiration, the economy of classical theater and the metaphysics behind them, to restore Danger.
Furtiveness: how speech is stolen at its origin.
Unpower and furtiveness
Artaud's unpower (in the letters to Jacques Rivière) is not sterility; "it is inspiration itself: the force of a void, the cyclonic breath of a prompter who draws his breath in". "Consciousness of speech ... is not knowing who speaks at the moment when ... I proffer my speech" ("In my unconsciousness it is others whom I hear"). Artaud locates it in "a central collapse of the mind", "a something furtive which takes away from me the words which I have found".
Furtive in Latin is the manner of the thief, who must "invisibly slip into the nothing that separates me from my words". As soon as I speak, my words "are originally repeated": "to speak is to hear oneself", and the I who hears takes speech from the I who speaks. This difference "is nothing, is furtiveness itself: it is the structure of instantaneous and original elusion without which no speech could ever catch its breath". The speaking subject "discovers his irreducible secondarity", drawing words and syntax from a cultural field. "The letter ... is always stolen. Always stolen because it is always open." This is "the autonomy of the signifier".
God the thief, the work as excrement
For Artaud the difference between force and form, life and "life ... from its surface of fact", runs through the flesh: "if my speech is not my breath, if my letter is not my speech, this is so because my spirit was already no longer my body". The thief has a proper name: God. He entered by effraction through the orifices of birth and defecation, slipping into my place "inside my mother's belly". "Death is an articulated form of our relationship to the Other. I die only of the other"; "No one was ever born alone. / Nor has anyone died alone."
Artaud's scato-theology of the stolen body.
"God is thus the proper name of that which deprives us of our own nature"; "He is the difference which insinuates itself between myself and myself as my death". Hence true suicide: to die away from my death and be reborn "immortal". Dispossession is also pollution: the stolen value is "the work, excrement, dross". "Do you know anything more outrageously fecal / than the history of God". God-the-Demiurge is the counterfeiter, the artisan: Satan. The presence of God "is but the forgetting of this nothing, the eluding of elusion".
To keep himself, Artaud must retain the work so the Thief cannot come between, for "writing is all trash" ("What you took to be my works were only my waste matter"). Proper and clean go together: "I have a proper name when I am proper", and the concept of madness as alienation solidified "only during the era of the metaphysics of a proper subjectivity". The work, like excrement, "always falls", so "uprightness will be possible only in an art without works": "I have therefore said 'cruelty' as I might have said 'life'." Disease exists "only because dance / and consequently theater / have not yet begun to exist".
Hölderlin and Nietzsche ("dance with the pen") invite a genealogy of mad poets, but for them "standing upright and the dance remain metaphorical". Artaud wants to destroy metaphor itself, "our superstitious valuation of texts". "The death of God will ensure our salvation because the death of God alone can reawaken the Divine"; "God is thus a sin against the divine". "Artaud is not the son of Nietzsche. And even less so of Hölderlin."
Against the organ and the text
The theater of cruelty saves first "by summarily reducing the organ". The classical stage is "a theater of words, thus a theater of interpretation", ruled by "a God-Author who is the sole wielder of the primal word", with directors and actors as slaves and "recording organs". But organic differentiation "had already raged within the body": "articulation is the structure of my body, and structure is always a structure of expropriation". "The body is the body, it is alone / and has no need of organs ... organisms are the enemies of bodies." "No mouth, / no tongue ... I will reconstruct the man that I am."
Artaud's three refusals.
Artaud first dreamed of an incarnated letter, "a bloody tattoo", but the tattoo "paralyzes gesture and silences the voice". Later he does not hand the theater to mutism: speech must "keep to its place", no longer "a language of words, of terms 'in a single defined sense'"; onomatopoeia, intonation, intensity return; words get "approximately the importance they have in dreams". "No more masterpieces." "I am writing for illiterates." The theater of cruelty intends "the effective, active, and nontheoretical destruction of Western civilization", substituting stigmata for the text, as in the planned Conquest of Mexico.
To let speech be prompted is "the urphenomenon of the reserve": accumulation, deferral, "economy". "The theater of the prompter thus constructs the system of fear." Artaud, like Nietzsche, wants to return us to "Danger as Becoming". The stage of cruelty returns me to the autarchic immediacy of birth: "I, Antonin Artaud, am my son / my father, my mother / and myself."
The turn to a rigorous writing
Will the liberated theater collapse into improvisation? To prevent "this danger, which inwardly threatens danger itself", Artaud writes the language of cruelty in "the most rigorous, authoritarian, regulated, and mathematical, the most formal form of writing". "My plans have nothing to do with Copeau's improvisations." The models are non-European: Balinese theater, hieroglyphics, "a system of signs no longer controlled by the institution of the voice"; An Affective Athleticism seeks laws of breath in the Cabbala; masks "can be labeled and catalogued". This may be the unconscious writing of Freud's Mystic Writing Pad.
How Artaud's mathematical writing tries to close différance.
By prohibiting chance this code "sutures all the gaps, all the openings, all the differences. Their origin and active movement, differing, deferral, are enclosed." "Furtive différance could not have insinuated itself with the aid of writing but, rather, slipped in between two forms of writing." But the identification is "magic", even "the very essence of magic", and unfindable: Artaud concedes the grammar "is still to be found", and reintroduces works "rigorously composed and fixed once and for all before being played".
The duplicity Derrida reads at Artaud's limit.
Artaud "keeps himself at the limit". One side of his discourse destroys a tradition that lives in difference without seeing its necessity, by recalling it to self-presence, unity, the proper; in this sense his "metaphysics" "fulfills the most profound and permanent ambition of Western metaphysics". The other side "affirms the cruel (that is to say ... necessary) law of difference". Derrida names the general law: all destructive discourses "must inhabit the structures they demolish, and within them they must shelter an indestructible desire for full presence". "The transgression of metaphysics ... always risks returning to metaphysics."
Clinical, critical, and the common horizon
The essay opens by demanding a dialogue between critical discourse and clinical discourse that would reach beyond both toward their common origin and horizon. Blanchot, Foucault and Laplanche have already questioned the unity of discourses that speak of madness and the work "with a single and simple characteristic". Derrida grants the priority of their questions, then notes that in fact the two discourses have never been confused in any text. Foucault, reading Laplanche's Hölderlin et la question du père, describes "extraordinarily rapid oscillations" that produce the illusion of unity between poetic forms and psychological structures. The risk for Artaud is the same: to become an example for medicine or for literary commentary. Derrida's move is to refuse that example while still writing about Artaud, which is why the A closer look later names the essay's own exposure.
Why the essay refuses both ready-made frames.
Organized field, theft, and the hole
The speaking subject is no longer the person alone who speaks. He discovers "irreducible secondarity", an origin always already eluded, because speech is drawn from an organized field: cultural (words and syntax), historical (what one must read by writing on it). "The structure of theft already lodges (itself in) the relation of speech to language." Speech is stolen from language and thus from itself, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative. Reading perforates speaking or writing; through that hole "I escape myself". The form of the hole, which a certain existentialism and a certain psychoanalysis mobilize around "poor M. Antonin Artaud", communicates with Artaud's scatotheological thematic. Speech and writing are always unavowably taken from a reading: that is the most archaic elusion, hiding me and purloining my powers of inauguration. "The letter, inscribed or propounded speech, is always stolen. Always stolen because it is always open."
Artaud's structure of theft as Derrida reconstructs it.
Excrement, Demiurge, and stolen value
Original value, the ur-value I should have retained as myself, is stolen as soon as I fall far from the Orifice, and stolen again each time a part of me falls far from myself. That is the work: "excrement, dross, the value that is annulled because it has not been retained", which can become a persecuting arm turned against myself. Defecation, Freud's "daily separation with the feces, precious parts of the body", is, as birth, the initial theft that depreciates and soils. Hence "the history of God as a genealogy of stolen value is recounted as the history of defecation": "Do you know anything more outrageously fecal / than the history of God..." God manqué as Demiurge is metonym of the thief and metaphorical name of myself: "the metaphor of myself is my dispossession within language." God-the-Demiurge does not create and is not life; he is the subject of œuvres and maneuvers, "the thief, the trickster, the counterfeiter... the opposite of the creative artist": Satan. "I am God and God is Satan"; God is of my own creation, my double who slipped into the difference.
Tattoo, voice, and Balinese hieroglyphics
Against a graphism that would begin without deviation, Artaud dreams an incarnation of the letter, a "bloody tattoo": words entering "like knives in lasting carnation". But the tattoo paralyzes gesture and silences the voice that also belongs to the flesh; it represses the shout and the chance of a still unorganized voice. When Artaud later withdraws theater from text, prompter (souffleur), and the omnipotence of a primary logos, he does not simply hand theater to mutism. He resituates and subordinates speech: the until now "enormous, pervasive, ubiquitous, bloated speech" must keep to its place, modify its function, cease to be words "in a single defined sense" that put an end to thought and life. Within the silence of definition-words "we could listen more closely to life". Onomatopoeia, the gesture dormant in classical speech, will be reawakened with sonority, intonation, intensity. Syntax will no longer be a grammar of predication or "clear thinking".
Themes and models are sought outside Europe: Balinese theater, ancient Mexican, Hindu, Iranian, Egyptian cosmogonies. Writing will no longer be transcription of speech; it will be writing of the body, produced in theatrical movement according to hieroglyphics, signs no longer controlled by the institution of the voice. "The overlapping of images and movements will culminate... in a genuine physical language with signs, not words, as its root." Words become physical signs for "shape and... sensuous emanations", reinstating the "volume" of theatrical space and utilizing it "in its undersides (dans ses dessous)". Artaud says hieroglyphics rather than ideograms, thinking the principle of that writing (which historically did not set aside all phoneticism). The voice will no longer give orders; it will let itself be governed by another language and another form of writing.
Two moments of Artaud's writing of the body.
| Motif | What is stolen / lost | Artaud\'s counter-move |
|---|---|---|
| Souffle | Inspiration and breath as property | Expose the prompter; refuse pure spontaneity |
| Organ | Body parceled into usable parts | Against the organ and the text as organs |
| Excrement / work | Value that falls and becomes dross | Name God as Demiurge-thief |
| Tattoo | Letter that freezes gesture | Pass to theatrical hieroglyphics |
| Voice | Bloated speech flattening space | Resituate speech inside volume |
Stigmata, Conquest of Mexico, and art without works
Beside the tattoo that freezes, Artaud dreams stigmata in place of text: marks of a theater that would wound rather than represent. The planned spectacle of the Conquest of Mexico is Derrida\'s exhibit for that ambition: history staged as physical language, not as illustrated chronicle. Because the work always falls like excrement, "uprightness will be possible only in an art without works": "I have therefore said \'cruelty\' as I might have said \'life\'." Disease exists "only because dance / and consequently theater / have not yet begun to exist". The essay\'s severity is to show that even this program must borrow the language of proper name, alienation, and metaphysics of subjectivity it wants to burn.
Artaud's limit as Derrida draws it.
Freud and the Scene of Writing
Framing: not a psychoanalysis of philosophy
The lecture's lost first part is summarized in headings. (1) "The deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy", even though it analyzes a historical repression of writing since Plato, which "constitutes the origin of philosophy as episteme, and of truth as the unity of logos and phone". It is repression, not forgetting, and "an unsuccessful repression": "Repressions that have failed will of course have more claim on our interest" (Freud). The return of the repressed is "the metaphor of writing which haunts European discourse".
Logophonocentrism "is not a philosophical or historical error ... but is rather a necessary, and necessarily finite, movement and structure": the history of symbolism in general, "history as différance". (2) Freudian concepts appear only "in quotation marks": all of them "belong to the history of metaphysics". Logocentric repression is not explained by Freud's concept of repression; rather the reverse. Freud's caution and "nominalism" with concepts deserve credit, "but Freud never reflected upon the historical and theoretical sense of these precautions".
The theses that frame the reading of Freud.
Différance is "the pre-opening of the ontic-ontological difference" and of the differences that furrow Freud's thought, such as pleasure and reality, which is "not uniquely, nor primarily, a distinction ... but rather the original possibility, within life, of the detour, of deferral (Aufschub)". The concepts of trace and différance must be withdrawn from all classical oppositions, and the archia of archi-trace erased while staying legible.
Freud's metaphors make writing strange
Freud's models at decisive moments come "not from spoken language ... nor even from phonetic writing, but from a script which is never subject to ... the spoken word". He is not using metaphor didactically, making the known an allusion to the unknown; "through the insistence of his metaphoric investment he makes what we believe we know under the name of writing enigmatic". The questions become: "not if the psyche is indeed a kind of text, but: what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text?"
Breaching and difference (1895)
The Project for a Scientific Psychology wanted "a psychology that shall be a natural science". Memory requires that neurones be "both influenced and also unaltered": permanent traces and a virgin receiving surface. Freud posits contact-barriers and breaching (Bahnung, pathbreaking), which "presupposes a certain violence and a certain resistance to effraction". There are permeable φ-neurones and impermeable ψ-neurones, which retain traces.
How the Project explains memory through breaching.
"Memory ... is represented by the differences between the facilitations of the ψ-neurones." "There is no pure breaching without difference." Repetition "adds no quantity of present force ... yet it has the power of breaching", so memory cannot be derived from the opposition of quantity and quality and "escapes the grasp of 'naturalism' as well as of 'phenomenology'". All this is "the effort of life to protect itself by deferring a dangerous cathexis, that is, by constituting a reserve (Vorrat)": already the Aufschub of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
The concepts of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) and Verspätung (delay) "govern the whole of Freud's thought" and are already in the Project: "The irreducibility of the 'effect of deferral', such, no doubt, is Freud's discovery", extended to culture in Moses and Monotheism. Differences of place matter too: a "difference in essence" between neurones is replaced by "a difference in the environment to which they are destined", pure differences of situation and connection. "The thinking of difference can neither dispense with topography nor accept the current models of spacing."
Consciousness gives qualities, which are pure differences and cannot be located in the world of quantities or in memory. Freud "summon[s] up courage" to slip a third system, ω-neurones, between φ and ψ, foreshadowing the Mystic Pad's interpolated sheet. Since they receive no quantity, they "appropriate the period of the excitation": "pure temporalization in its conjunction with spacing". "Trace will become gramme; and the region of breaching a ciphered spacing."
Thirty years of Freud's models of the psychical apparatus.
The print and the original supplement
A few weeks after the Project, everything "seemed to be a machine which in a moment would run of itself": "In a moment: in thirty years. By itself: almost." In letter 52 to Fliess (1896) "the trace starts to become writing": memory is "present not once but several times over", laid down in kinds of signs (Zeichen), with registration (Niederschrift) and transcription (Umschrift). From the Traumdeutung on, the metaphor of writing takes over both "the psychic apparatus in its structure" and "the psychic text in its fabric", though the two series of metaphors "do not come on stage at the same time".
Dreams that "follow old facilitations" lead back to "a lithography before words: metaphonetic, nonlinguistic, alogical". Freud rejects the popular decoding method and the dream-book with fixed keys (letter means spite, burial means engagement). Bishop Warburton had shown that Egyptian dream interpretation drew on the hieroglyphic code, treated as a gift of the gods. "It is here that the Freudian break occurs": psychical writing is so originary that visible script "would only be the metaphor of psychical writing".
With no exhaustive code, "the difference between signifier and signified is never radical", and translation is "in principle and by definition limited". Translation needs a permanent code that keeps the same signified across signifiers; "originary writing, if there is one, must produce the space and the materiality of the sheet itself." Freud translates all the time and proposes codes, but limits this twice. First, the materiality of words in dreams "cannot be translated": "To relinquish materiality: such is the driving force of translation. And when that materiality is reinstated, translation becomes poetry." Dreams are untranslatable in this sense.
Second, transcription is a dangerous metaphor because it presupposes "a text which would be already there, immobile". Freud warns against picturing a thought moving to a new locality "like a transcription (Umschrift) which continues to exist alongside the original". So "there is no unconscious truth to be rediscovered by virtue of having been written elsewhere". "The unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces ... a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction."
Why the unconscious is not a hidden original text.
Meaning is "reconstituted by deferral, nachträglich, belatedly, supplementarily". The supplement both adds and compensates for a lack (Littré's suppléer). Nachtrag also means "appendix, codicil, postscript": "Before the recurrence, the present is only the call for a footnote." "That there is no purity of the living present, such is the theme, formidable for metaphysics, which Freud, in a conceptual scheme unequal to the thing itself, would have us pursue."
Freud replaces a topographical picture with a dynamic one (cathexis attached or withdrawn): "Here energy cannot be reduced; it does not limit meaning, but rather produces it." The distinction of force and meaning is "derivative in relation to an archi-trace" (an echo of Force and Signification). "Force produces meaning (and space) through the power of 'repetition' alone, which inhabits it originarily as its death": "a pure idiom is not language; it becomes so only through repetition." The postscript "produces the present past", as in the Wolf-Man, whose primal scene at age one and a half is understood only later; "the unconscious is no doubt timeless only from the standpoint of a certain vulgar conception of time".
Dioptrics and hieroglyphics
In the Traumdeutung the apparatus is still "an optical machine": ideas are localized "between" organic elements, virtual like a telescope's image; censorship is like refraction. "The psychical system is not psychical." Order can be temporal rather than spatial. But one system cannot both "retain modifications of its elements and yet remain perpetually open to the reception of fresh occasions", so two systems are needed, which an optical device represents only "imperfectly".
How dreams stage a writing that puts speech in its place.
Writing is defined as spacing: "diastem and time becoming space", allowing concatenations that escape "the linearity of logical time". Dreams cannot represent "if", "because", "either-or" in words; their mise en scène is like "the writing within speech". "In dreams we see but we do not hear." Speech is not absent but subordinated, like captions in comic strips or labels in ancient paintings. A dream is a rebus (Bilderrätsel), and earlier interpreters erred by "treating the rebus as a pictorial composition". Words "tend to become things pure and simple", though pure words and pure things are "theoretical fictions".
"Difference is the articulation of space and time." The phonic chain is "always already distended by that minimum of essential spacing" on which the dream-work operates. Dreams express logical connection by simultaneity, like the School of Athens, or like "ab" versus "a b" in our script. In 1913 Freud urges that psychoanalysts work like philologists: "It seems to us more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with language", like Egyptian hieroglyphics with their "determinatives". Psychoanalysis is destined to collaborate with "a graphematics still to come, rather than with a linguistics dominated by an ancient phonologism".
Freud's piece of wax: three analogies
The six-page "Note on the Mystic Writing Pad" (1925) gives three analogies of increasing rigor. First, writing as an aid to memory, a "materialized portion" of the mnemic apparatus, hypomnesis in Plato's sense. Paper preserves but saturates; a slate receives but loses: "an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive". The Mystic Pad, a wax slab under a double sheet of waxed paper and celluloid, offers both.
"Writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself"; "the 'perceived' may be read only in the past".
The Mystic Pad as a model of perception and memory.
Third analogy: the Pad has a time, Kant's three modes of permanence, succession, simultaneity. Writing vanishes whenever contact is broken, as consciousness fades when cathexis is periodically withdrawn, like feelers the unconscious extends and retracts; Freud locates "the origin of our concept of time" here. "Time is the economy of a system of writing." The Note ends with two hands: one writes while the other raises the sheet. "Traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their erasure."
"We must be several in order to write, and even to 'perceive'." "Writing is unthinkable without repression": neither permanent contact nor absolute break between strata. "The 'subject' of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world." The sociology of literature "is blind to the war and the ruses perpetrated by the author who reads and by the first reader who dictates".
The machine is death
From the Mystic Pad to writing as the stage of history.
"The machine, and, consequently, representation, is death and finitude within the psyche." Writing is "techne as the relation between life and death, between present and representation"; it opens "the question of technics". "In this sense writing is the stage of history and the play of the world", and psychoanalysis is "not simply psychology, nor simply psychoanalysis". Freud "performed for us the scene of writing. Like all those who write." The hidden epigraph: machines in dreams "stand for the genitals", and writing, "making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper", can be inhibited as copulation.
Research fields Derrida proposes at the end of the lecture.
The radicalized trace "escapes binarism and makes binarism possible on the basis of nothing". It would open: (1) a psychopathology of everyday life attentive to the lapsus calami (Freud thought slips of the pen offered "nothing new"); (2) a history of writing; (3) "a becoming-literary of the literal", a psychoanalysis of literature "respectful of the originality of the literary signifier", which "has not yet begun"; (4) a psychoanalytic graphology, where Melanie Klein opens the way with good and bad objects: "writing as sweet nourishment or as excrement", linking Artaud's excremental writing to the scroll "sweet as honey" in Ezekiel.
Nachträglichkeit, Moses, and latency
The concepts of Nachträglichkeit and Verspätung, which govern the whole of Freud's thought, are already present and named in the 1895 Project. The irreducibility of the "effect of deferral" is, for Derrida, Freud's discovery. Freud exploits it beyond individual psychoanalysis: in Moses and Monotheism (1937) the efficacy of delay and of action subsequent to the event works over large historical intervals. The problem of latency there contacts the problem of oral and written tradition. Although "breaching" is not named writing in the Project, the contradictory requirements the Mystic Writing Pad will fulfill are already formulated in identical terms: "an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces" (SE XIX, 227). Differences in breaching concern not only forces but locations; Freud already wants to think force and place simultaneously, while admitting that the distinction between categories of neurones "has no recognized foundation" in histology. It is the index of a topographical description that familiar external space cannot supply.
Deferral from the Project to cultural history.
Artemidorus, Warburton, and the Traumbuch
Freud borrows from Artemidorus of Daldis (second century), author of a treatise on dream interpretation. Derrida recalls that in the eighteenth century the English theologian Warburton, known to Freud, invoked Artemidorus with a comparable intention. Warburton describes hieroglyphics and discerns structures (strictly hieroglyphic or symbolical; each curiological or tropological) that ought to be confronted with dream-work mechanisms: condensation, displacement, overdetermination. Against Father Kircher, Warburton argues for "the high antiquity of Egyptian learning" by choosing an Egyptian science that draws all its resources from hieroglyphic writing: Traumdeutung, oneirocriticism. Interpreters, like dreams themselves, drew upon a curiological or tropological storehouse; the hieroglyphic code served as a Traumbuch. An alleged gift of God, in fact constructed historically, became the common source of oneiric discourse: the setting and text of the dream's mise en scène. Since dreams are constructed like writing, their science was a science of writing in priestly hands. Derrida's point is not Egyptological accuracy; it is that Freud's appeal to hieroglyphics inherits a long writing of dreams that already treats interpretation as reading a script.
The lineage Derrida inserts under Freud's metaphors.
Polycentrism and the conjunctions of dream
Interpretation spells out elements; it still must account for the synthesis that stages the whole. The resources of the mise en scène (Darstellungsmittel) must be questioned. A certain polycentrism of dream representation is irreconcilable with the apparently linear unfolding of pure verbal representations. The logical structure of conscious speech must submit to the dream system and become subordinate to it, like a part of its machinery. Dream-thoughts stand in manifold logical relations: foreground and background, digressions and illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. When the mass is brought under the pressure of the dream-work, "turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together - almost like pack-ice", the question is what happens to "if", "because", "just as", "although", "either-or", and all the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences. That mise en scène may be compared to forms of expression that are like writing within speech: painting or sculpture of signifying relations rather than a tableau of impassive signs. Synopsis, not stasis: scene, not tableau. The laconic quality of dreams is not petrified presence.
Why dream staging exceeds verbal logic.
Machine, death, and the scene of writing
The Mystic Writing Pad models a machine that receives and retains, yet Freud's machine is never simply technical. Derrida presses the point that the machine is death: a representation of the apparatus that already implies the possibility of the apparatus working without the living hand, which is to say the possibility of death in the structure of the trace. Writing is not a metaphor imported into psychology; psychology's models secretly depend on a scene of writing that philosophy has treated as secondary. The three analogies of the wax (reception, permanence, and the two-layered pad) culminate in a machine that can be destroyed, wiped, or left to function as a dead archive. That is why the essay's title names a scene: not a mental interior illuminated for inspection, but a staging in which force, place, delay and death are already at work.
| Freud text / figure | Writing motif | Derrida\'s claim |
|---|---|---|
| Project (1895) | Bahnung, force and place | Deferral already named; histology cannot ground it |
| Mystic Writing Pad | Receive and retain | Two layers = the contradictory demand |
| Artemidorus / Warburton | Hieroglyphic Traumbuch | Dream science as science of writing |
| Dream-work | Polycentrism, pack-ice | Conjunctions staged, not spoken linearly |
| Moses and Monotheism | Latency, oral/written | Historical Nachträglichkeit |
| Machine / Pad | Archive without hand | Machine is death in the trace |
Dioptrics, rebus, and the weave never present
Freud\'s optical models (camera, telescope, mystic pad) and his appeal to hieroglyphics and rebuses are not decorative. They show that the unconscious is not a hidden original text waiting to be copied into consciousness. Meaning is reconstituted belatedly, supplementarily; before the recurrence, "the present is only the call for a footnote." The thinking of difference can neither dispense with topography nor accept current models of spacing. That is why "scene of writing" is more exact than "mental representation": a staging of traces that were never fully present. Lacan\'s signifier is a neighbouring claim; Derrida\'s later quarrel with him ("Le facteur de la vérité") is outside this essay\'s frame but already latent in the privilege given to metaphor and machine over a linguistic unconscious stated as code.
Freud's models against the hidden-book fantasy.
The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation
Affirmation not yet begun
Artaud writes late that "Dance / and consequently the theater / have not yet begun to exist", and defines the theater of cruelty as "the affirmation / of a terrible / and, moreover, implacable necessity". He does not call for destruction or "a new manifestation of negativity": "the theater of cruelty / is not the symbol of an absent void". It affirms, but this affirmation is "still to be born", and can be born "only by being reborn to itself", through a re-education of the organs toward "a life before birth and after death", which separates it from romantic negativity (Lichtenberger's "I was dead before I was born").
Western theater, like Artaud's body, was dispossessed "from the origin on". "The theater is born in its own disappearance, and the offspring of this movement has a name: man." The theater of cruelty must separate death from birth and "erase the name of man". Since so much theatrical audacity now claims Artaud, the question is historic in an absolute sense: "It announces the limit of representation."
The argument of the essay.
"The theater of cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable." "I have therefore said 'cruelty' as I might have said 'life'." This life "is not primarily the life of man"; man "is only a representation of life", the humanist limit of classical theater. Since representation structures the whole culture, the question "far exceeds the bounds of theatrical technology".
The theological stage
"The theater of cruelty expulses God from the stage." Not by staging atheism, but by producing "a nontheological space". "The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance." Its elements: an author-creator, absent, armed with a text, who lets representation represent him through representatives, directors and actors who are "interpreting slaves"; and a passive, seated public of "enjoyers" offered a level production to "voyeuristic scrutiny".
Artaud's diagnosis of the classical Western stage.
This structure "has never been modified. All revolutions have maintained it intact." Its hidden centre is the phonetic text, "eventually transmitted by the prompter whose hole is the hidden but indispensable center of representative structure". Pictorial, musical and gestural forms only "illustrate, accompany, serve, or decorate ... a logos which is said in the beginning". Simply giving the director more power while keeping the structure is not fidelity. "The Occident ... has worked only for the erasure of the stage." Classical theater is not mere forgetting but "perversion": "a mark of cancellation that lets what it covers be read".
Representation in another sense
Freed from text and author-god, mise en scène regains "its creative and founding freedom". Does Artaud refuse the word representation? No, if we play on the German words it translates. The stage will not illustrate a text written elsewhere, will not "re-present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it", "the living present of God", nor be a spectacle displayed for spectators. "Cruel representation must permeate me." "Nonrepresentation is, thus, original representation", if representation also means "the unfolding of a volume, a multidimensional milieu, an experience which produces its own space."
Spectacle should act "not as reflection, but as force". Poetry "can escape Western 'illness' only by becoming theater". Cruelty means "rigor, implacable intention and decision", "submission to necessity", not necessarily "sadism", "horror", "bloodshed"; some bloody productions "inscribed under Artaud's name ... are not, for all that, cruel". "Nevertheless, there is always a murder at the origin of cruelty ... And, first of all, a parricide": "the hand lifted against the abusive wielder of the logos, against the father".
Speech, glossopoeia, hieroglyph
Speech will not vanish; it "will cease to govern the stage, but will be present upon it", in "a rigorously delimited place". The performances "had to be painstakingly determined in advance"; no improvisation, no "Surrealist empiricism", no commedia dell'arte. Speech is erased only as dictation, "at once citations or recitations and orders": "we shall renounce the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer", and the diction that made theater an exercise of reading.
What becomes of speech on the stage of cruelty.
Words "once more become gestures", laying bare "the flesh of the word, ... sonority, intonation, intensity, the shout". Glossopoeia, "neither an imitative language nor a creation of names", returns us to the moment "when articulation is no longer a shout but not yet discourse, when repetition is almost impossible", "the eve of the origin of languages". "It is less a question of constructing a mute stage than of constructing a stage whose clamor has not yet been pacified into words." "The word is the cadaver of psychic speech." The new writing is hieroglyphic, coordinating phonetic with visual and plastic elements.
Dreams, but cruel dreams
On Freud's dream stage speech has the same status: word-presentations are "taken back to the thing-presentations", governed by representability (Darstellbarkeit); the dream-content is "a pictographic script". Artaud describes speech on the stage of cruelty "according to Freud's very terms". But the theater of cruelty is "a theater of dreams, but of cruel dreams, that is to say, absolutely necessary and determined dreams", not "our empiricism of imagery".
| Freud's dream stage | Artaud's stage of cruelty |
|---|---|
| Words treated as things | Speech used "like a solid object" |
| Representability governs the dream | "Visual and plastic materialization of speech" |
| A pictographic script, a rebus | "Veritable hieroglyphs" of characters and objects |
| Unconscious, substitutive fulfillment | "No cruelty without consciousness" |
| Analyst as interpreter | No "secret commentary"; no psychoanalytic theater |
| Desacralizing analysis | A hieratic, sacred theater |
So Artaud rejects the psychoanalyst as interpreter and "would have rejected a psychoanalytic theater with as much rigor as he condemned psychological theater": "Too bad for analysts, students of the soul and surrealists." The analyst belongs to the classical stage. "Cruelty is consciousness, is exposed lucidity": "life is always someone's death." The theater of cruelty is hieratic: "through the hieroglyph of a breath I am able to recover an idea of the sacred theater". "The divine has been ruined by God", so divine cruelty "must traverse the murder of God, that is to say, primarily the murder of the man-God".
Six infidelities
Rather than ask how a theater could be faithful to Artaud, Derrida names what is "surely unfaithful". Foreign to the theater of cruelty are: (1) all non-sacred theater; (2) all theater of words, even self-destructive speech, "what is still called the theater of the absurd", which is not an affirmation; (3) all abstract theater that excludes any resource of sense, though merely piling up the arts for a "total man" is "artificial and exterior mimicry"; patient "sobriety in the work of destruction" beats "turbulence or improvised agitation under the mocking and tranquil eyes of the police".
Derrida's six themes of infidelity.
(4) All theater of alienation: Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt consecrates the spectators' nonparticipation. In the theater of cruelty "the spectator is in the center and the spectacle surrounds him"; "There is no longer spectator or spectacle, but festival." The limits of classical theater were "ethicometaphysical prohibitions ... the symptoms of fear before the dangers of the festival". The happening is to the theater of cruelty "what the carnival of Nice might be to the mysteries of Eleusis". (5) All nonpolitical theater: the festival must be a political act, recalling Rousseau's public festival with "nothing to see" ("make them actors themselves"). (6) All ideological, communicative theater delivering a message that "could be repeated without" the stage.
Repetition: God, Being, Dialectics
Here lies "the profound essence of Artaud's project": "Artaud wanted to erase repetition in general." Repetition "separates force, presence, and life from themselves", the calculating gesture "of that which defers itself in order to maintain itself". It has three names. God: "God is Death"; "As soon as there is repetition, God is there." Being: no sign "is not constituted by the possibility of repeating itself"; ideality "is but the assured power of repetition", so Being is "the victory of God and of Death over life" ("There is no greater enemy of the human body than being"). Dialectics: "the economy of repetition. The economy of truth."
Why a theater without repetition is impossible.
The closure of representation
From Artaud's limit to the closure of representation.
The murder of the father "that Artaud ... wants to repeat ... but only a single time, this murder is endless and is repeated indefinitely"; "it suffices that there be a sign, that is to say, a repetition". Wanting pure presence (or, the same thing, pure difference), Artaud "also desired the impossibility of the theater". He knew it: "I am the enemy / of theater. / I have always been. / As much as I love the theater, / I am, for this very reason, equally its enemy." "This transfer cannot be reproduced twice", so the Balinese recording of gestures is impious.
Cruelty, closure of representation, and the mise en scène
The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation continues La Parole Soufflée: Artaud\'s cruelty is not blood for its own sake but the demand that theater cease to be the illustration of a prior text. Representation\'s closure is the Western stage\'s long submission to speech, author, and repeated meaning. Derrida neither simply celebrates Artaud nor domesticates him. He shows how the dream of a pure presence of flesh and gesture still speaks the metaphysical desire for an origin before the sign, even as Artaud\'s practice (hieroglyphic staging, Balinese models, volume of space) invents another writing of the body. Cruelty is thus ambivalent: rupture of representation and repetition of presence-metaphysics in a new style.
Theater of Cruelty inside and against metaphysics.
Masterpieces refused, affectivity, and the Pad
"No more masterpieces." Artaud writes for "illiterates". The theater of cruelty intends "the effective, active, and nontheoretical destruction of Western civilization", substituting stigmata for the text (as in the planned Conquest of Mexico). To keep liberation from collapsing into Copeau-style improvisation, cruelty must be written in "the most rigorous, authoritarian, regulated and mathematical" form. An Affective Athleticism seeks laws of breath in the Cabbala; masks "can be labeled and catalogued". Derrida links this regulated writing to the unconscious scene of Freud\'s Mystic Writing Pad: reception and retention, force and place, without a single governing voice. Closure of representation is thus not an exit into chaos; it is another discipline of signs.
Cruelty as discipline, not spontaneity.
From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve
Bearing the self-evidence of Hegel
"Often Hegel seems to me self-evident, but the self-evident is a heavy burden" (Bataille). Many of Bataille's admirers bear it too lightly, invoking Nietzsche or Marx and shrugging off Hegel; "misconstrued, treated lightly, Hegelianism only extends its historical domination". Bataille knew Nietzsche had only "the usual vulgarization" of Hegel and that the master-slave dialectic's "lucidity is blinding". To awaken one must have "spent the night with reason", because philosophy in completing itself "could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond ... except, perhaps, for a certain laughter".
To laugh at Hegelianism "calls for an entire 'discipline'", one that knows the philosopher's ruses and then, "quickly, furtively ... drily, laughter bursts out". The impossible task: "how, after having exhausted the discourse of philosophy, can one inscribe in the lexicon and syntax of a language, our language, which was also the language of philosophy, that which nevertheless exceeds the oppositions of concepts governed by this communal logic?" Bataille offers "a complicity without reserve" with Hegel, "without an objection in philosophical form", while laughter "exceeds it and destroys its sense".
The difference between lordship and sovereignty.
"Hegel's thoughts are interdependent to the point of it being impossible to grasp their meaning, if not in the necessity of the movement." Bataille had only indirect access to the texts (largely through Kojève), yet reached the decisive point. "Taken one by one and immobilized outside their syntax, all of Bataille's concepts are Hegelian." Miss the "trembling" he submits them to, and one will wrongly call him Hegelian, anti-Hegelian, or confused.
Lordship and sovereignty
Sovereignty seems to translate Hegel's lordship (Herrschaft): the lord puts "the entirety of one's own life" at stake (mettre en jeu), while the servant wants to be conserved (servus). But the difference between them "is the difference of sense, the unique interval which separates meaning from a certain non-meaning". Lordship has a meaning, a stage in self-consciousness. The master must stay alive to enjoy his victory, and "the truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman". The slave works, inhibits desire, delays the thing's disappearance: "to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes", the servile condition of mastery.
Why Hegel's lordship collapses into comedy for Bataille.
Hegel calls death pure and simple abstract negativity, opposed to "the negation characteristic of consciousness, which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated". "Burst of laughter from Bataille. Through a ruse of life, that is, of reason, life has thus stayed alive." This economy of life "restricts itself to conservation"; "everything covered by the name lordship collapses into comedy". "Laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician: it bursts out only on the basis of an absolute renunciation of meaning", a laughter that "never appears, because it exceeds phenomenality in general".
Sovereignty is "simultaneously more and less a lordship than lordship ... totally other", withdrawn "from the horizon of meaning and knowledge". It also needs life, so it must simulate the absolute risk and laugh at the simulacrum. "In the 'system' poetry, laughter, ecstasy are nothing. Hegel hastily gets rid of them ... his immense fatigue is linked to his horror of the blind spot." "What is laughable is the submission to the self-evidence of meaning"; the Aufhebung is laughable because it "amortizes absolute expenditure" and "gives meaning to death".
Sacrifice, simulacrum, gaiety
In sacrifice, "the sacrificer identifies with the animal struck by death. Thus he dies while watching himself die ... But this is a comedy!" Death "reveals nothing", so man must "live with the impression of truly dying". "This difficulty foreshadows the necessity of spectacle, or generally of representation." Bataille's example of gaiety: the Irish and Welsh wake, the subject of Finnegans Wake, where friends dance before an upright open coffin. This gaiety is not denial of death: "gay anguish, anguished gaiety present me with 'absolute rending'".
To go to the end of "absolute rending" is not to pursue logic to the Aufhebung, but "convulsively to tear apart the negative side", exhibiting "that which can no longer be called negative" because it "has no reserved underside". Hegel's text "is not made of a piece": "In interpreting negativity as labor, in betting for discourse, meaning, history, etc., Hegel has bet against play, against chance." But "meaning is a function of play". So Bataille's reinterpretation is "a simulated repetition of Hegelian discourse", in which "a trembling spreads out which then makes the entire old shell crack".
Sovereignty neither escapes nor obeys dialectics.
Sovereignty "does not escape dialectics": cut off, it would become abstract negation. It "provides the economy of reason with its element, its milieu, its unlimiting boundaries of non-sense", and must "sacrifice lordship and, thus, the presentation of the meaning of death". Bataille sometimes opposes sacred, poetic speech to "significative discourse", but "there is only one discourse, it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel". The poetic is "that in every discourse which can open itself up to the absolute loss of its sense". Poetry needs "the commentary on its absence of meaning", or laughter and eroticism remain "minor sovereigns", "inserted into a sphere, like children in a house".
The two forms of writing
The continuum and communication Bataille invokes are not "the plenitude of meaning or of presence": they are "the experience of absolute difference", not Hegel's "difference in the service of presence". "The difference between Hegel and Bataille is the difference between these two differences." "Communication cannot take place from one full and intact being to another." The instant "slides and eludes us between two presences": "The instant is the furtive." What matters is "the point", where an old word starts "to slide and to make the entire discourse slide".
From sovereignty to the two forms of writing.
Sovereignty "does not govern itself. And does not govern in general"; "whatever is authentically sovereign is not concerned with this". Master and sovereign both fail, "the one by giving it meaning through subjugation ... and the other by failing absolutely". Sovereignty must "lose all memory of itself", practice Nietzsche's active forgetting, and "no longer seek to be recognized". This renunciation "simultaneously prescribes and prohibits writing". Minor writing projects the trace so the will can be recognized in it ("The survival of that which is written is the survival of the mummy"). Major writing "produces the trace as trace", a trace "only if presence is irremediably eluded in it": "An unerasable trace is not a trace." "I write in order to annihilate the play of subordinate operations within myself."
| Restricted economy | General economy | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Political economy; Hegel's phenomenology | Bataille's science of expenditure |
| Excess energy | Reinvested, circulated | "Lost without the slightest aim" |
| Negativity | Work of the negative, a resource | Expenditure without reserve, not negative |
| Direction of knowing | Unknown to known | Known to unknown |
| Writing | Minor: seeks recognition | Major: trace as trace, sliding concepts |
| Aufhebung | Circulation of prohibitions | Empty form for transgression |
All attributes of sovereignty "are borrowed from the (Hegelian) logic of 'lordship'", and a whole zone of Bataille stays inside "a classical philosophy of the subject" and voluntarism. Since there is "no nucleus of meaning, no conceptual atom", the difference must be inscribed in "a form of writing". To read Bataille "from within 'significative discourse' is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but it is assuredly not to read it"; his major writing "does not tolerate the distinction of form and content". "I introduce untenable concepts." For the philosopher his text is "a scandal". Sovereign transgression is "an epoche of the epoch of meaning", "not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning".
Writing and general economy
The writing of sovereignty relates discourse to "an absolute unknowledge", a "double position" belonging "neither to 'scientism' nor 'mysticism'". Sovereignty is no principle or foundation, no archia; it "must be ungrateful": "My sovereignty ... gives me no thanks for my work." Since Hegel showed the unity of method and history, sovereignty exceeds "not only the 'subject' ... but history itself", not by returning to the ahistorical but by "simulating" absolute knowledge "in play", "putting it back in its place as such".
"There is no sovereignty itself"; sovereignty "is 'this loss'". General writing "is not the loss of meaning, but ... the 'relation to this loss of meaning'"; it describes only "the effect of unknowledge". It reverses the order of science: "it relates the known to the unknown". The phenomenology of the mind is not overturned but "comprehended" within general economy: it is a restricted economy, dominating only "the circuit of reproductive consumption". Bataille's atheology is "also an a-teleology and an aneschatology", not negative theology, which may still reserve "a 'superessentiality'".
How the concepts of general writing must be read.
The terms of general writing must be "deported" outside their symmetrical alternatives. "Bataille above all is not a new mystic." Interior experience "is not an experience, because it is related to no presence", and "above all is not interior": it is "completely exposed, to torture, naked ... profoundly superficial". Its concepts differ from classical ones not by new predicates but by "differences of force, height", "the major and the minor". Reading must pass two straits: not isolating notions as self-evident, and not submitting them to a system promising "absolute formal mastery". "Interior experience breaks with mediation" but is not Hegel's immediate either; it suspends both.
The neutral and the displaced Aufhebung
Is sovereign writing neutral, like Blanchot's "neither this, nor that"? No: "it is not the sovereign operation, but discursive knowledge that is neutral." Neutrality "has a negative essence (ne-uter)". The destruction of discourse "multiplies words ... a kind of potlatch of signs that burns, consumes, and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death". Bataille renames the operation (interior experience, extremity of the possible, meditation; "comic operation would be less deceptive"): "We have not stopped at any word; the chain rests on nothing."
Derrida reads Bataille against Bataille on the Aufhebung.
Transgression "dispels the prohibition without suppressing it", and Bataille notes: "It is useless to insist upon the Hegelian character of this operation", the Aufheben. Derrida protests: "we must interpret Bataille against Bataille." The Hegelian Aufhebung "is produced entirely from within discourse", "never exceeds its closure", and belongs to "the world of work", "the circulation of prohibitions". Bataille can use only its "empty form", analogically, to name the link of meaning to nonmeaning: "In which Bataille is even less Hegelian than he thinks."
This displacement makes philosophy look like natural consciousness: the "we" of the Phenomenology "remains natural and vulgar", so absolute knowledge remains a determination of "natural, servile and vulgar consciousness. Self-consciousness is servile." "Between extreme knowledge and vulgar knowledge ... the difference is nil." If Hegel's discourse is "the slave(s) language", it can be read "from left to right or from right to left, as a reactionary movement or as a revolutionary movement", yet one must still regulate this nonpertinence and not hand it "into any hands: the right or the left". The essay ends: "the condition in which I would see would be to die", "a minor writing and a major illumination".
Lordship, putting life at stake, and sovereignty
At first glance sovereignty seems to translate Hegel's lordship (Herrschaft). Lordship shows that consciousness "is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence" and "is not tied up with life". The Tun of the master-slave chapter, often translated as "operation", is Bataille's privileged word for the act of sovereignty: to risk, to put at stake (mettre en jeu, wagen, daransetzen) the entirety of one's life. The servant is the one who does not put life at stake. Derrida's wedge: Bataille's sovereignty is not lordship retained. Lordship still belongs to the restricted economy of recognition, work, and the return of meaning through the slave. Sovereignty is the slide by which the same Hegelian terms are written so that expenditure no longer returns to the subject's profit.
How sovereignty exceeds Herrschaft.
Sacrifice, simulacrum, laughter, and major writing
Sacrifice in Bataille is not a useful loss that buys a higher gain; it approaches a simulacrum of expenditure whose gaiety (laughter) interrupts the seriousness of the dialectic. Laughter is not a psychological ornament; it is the index that meaning has failed to close. Derrida distinguishes writings that remain inside Hegel's Aufhebung from a major writing that lets concepts slide without replacing them by a new first principle. Every one of Bataille's concepts remains Hegelian; what changes is the graph that displaces Aufhebung without announcing a pure outside. The "neutral" is one name for that displacement: not indifference, but a writing that refuses both speculative reconciliation and simple negation.
['General economy of', 'expenditure']
Kojève, left and right, and political judgment
Derrida admits Bataille had "only a restricted and indirect access" to Hegel, chiefly Kojève's anthropological lectures, which foreground death and the master-slave struggle. The "Hegel" sovereignty exceeds may therefore be partly Kojève's. The essay's closing vigilance about left and right readings of Bataille anticipates later charges (Habermas and others) that general economy abandons standards for political judgment. Derrida does not answer by restoring a restricted measure; he keeps the warning inside the reading: a writing without reserve is not yet a politics, and mistaking sovereignty for a program is another return of lordship.
| Term | Restricted sense (Hegel / Kojève) | Bataille / Derrida slide |
|---|---|---|
| Lordship | Risk of life for recognition | Still economic; returns as mastery |
| Sovereignty | Seems to translate Herrschaft | Expenditure without reserve |
| Aufhebung | Speculative recovery | Displaced, not replaced |
| Laughter | Beside the concept | Marks failure of closure |
| Writing | Vehicle of meaning | Major writing: slide of concepts |
Restricted economy named
Restricted economy is the system in which loss is calculated for return: work, recognition, speculative recovery, useful sacrifice. General economy, following Bataille\'s La part maudite, thinks expenditure, waste, and non-knowledge without that return. Derrida\'s twist is literary: the distinction is enacted in how Hegelian words are written, not by inventing a non-Hegelian lexicon. A left reading that makes sovereignty a revolutionary program, or a right reading that makes it aesthetic aristocratism, both restore restricted calculation. The essay\'s discipline is to stay with the slide.
The economic distinction the title names.
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
The center that is not the center
Something has happened to the concept of structure that "could be called an 'event'", in quotation marks, since structuralism suspects events. Its form is "a rupture and a redoubling". Structure is as old as the episteme, but "the structurality of structure ... has always been neutralized or reduced ... by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin". The center organizes the system and "above all" limits "the play of the structure". "Even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself."
The center opens play and closes it: at the center "the permutation or the transformation of elements ... is forbidden". So classical thought said the center is "within the structure and outside it": "the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center." The concept of centered structure is "contradictorily coherent", and "coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire": a play grounded in "a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude", by which anxiety is mastered.
From the centered structure to the decentering "event".
Whether called origin or end, arche or telos, the center makes every substitution part of "a history of meaning" reawakened or anticipated "in the form of presence"; "any archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction". The history of the concept of structure is "a series of substitutions of center for center", and "the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies". Its matrix is "the determination of Being as presence": "eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia ... aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth".
Decentering: everything becomes discourse
The rupture came "when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated". "Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center ... that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play." "This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic ... everything became discourse", a system in which "the central signified ... is never absolutely present outside a system of differences". "The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely."
Three destructive discourses and their shared circle.
No single author made this happen, but three names indicate it: Nietzsche's critique of Being and truth, replaced by "play, interpretation, and sign (sign without present truth)"; Freud's critique of self-presence; and "more radically" Heidegger's destruction of onto-theology. All are "trapped in a kind of circle". "There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language, no syntax and no lexicon, which is foreign to this history."
Because concepts "are not elements or atoms" but come from a syntax, "every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics". "This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally", as Heidegger made Nietzsche "the last 'Platonist'", "with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith". "And today no exercise is more widespread."
Ethnology and Lévi-Strauss
Among the human sciences ethnology is privileged: it "could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about", when European culture was "forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference", a moment also "political, economic, technical". The critique of ethnocentrism is "contemporaneous with the destruction of the history of metaphysics". Yet the ethnologist "accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them". This is irreducible, but "the quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relation ... is thought".
Lévi-Strauss's scandal at the start of the Elementary Structures.
The guiding thread is the opposition of nature and culture, "at least as old as the Sophists". In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss defines nature as universal and spontaneous, culture as norm-dependent and variable, then meets "a scandal": the incest prohibition, a rule "which, alone among all the social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character". "There is no scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits the difference." The prohibition "escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them, probably as the condition of their possibility".
Critique can take two paths. One systematically questions the history of the founding concepts, "probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy", harder than those think "who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease". The other, closer to Lévi-Strauss, keeps the old concepts as tools, "no longer is any truth value attributed to them", using them "to destroy the old machinery to which they belong". Lévi-Strauss thinks he can "separate method from truth": the nature/culture distinction, "while of no acceptable historical significance, does contain a logic". In The Savage Mind it is "of primarily methodological importance".
Bricolage and the engineer
Lévi-Strauss calls this method bricolage: the bricoleur uses "the means at hand", tools not designed for the job, adapted by trial and error. Genette suggested it applies "almost word for word" to literary criticism. "Every discourse is bricoleur." The engineer, who would construct "the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon" "out of nothing", would be "the creator of the verb, the verb itself": "the notion of the engineer ... is therefore a theological idea", "the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur". Once we admit this, "the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down".
From bricolage to Lévi-Strauss's decentered mythologicals.
In The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss abandons "all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin". (1) The Bororo "reference myth" deserves no privilege: it is "simply a transformation" of others, interesting "because of its irregular position". (2) There is "no unity or absolute source of the myth"; "everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship". So mythological discourse "must itself be mythomorphic". Myth analysis has "no real end"; its unity is "tendential and projective"; the science is "anaclastic", studying rays "whose only source is hypothetical". "It follows that this book on myths is itself a kind of myth." "Myths are anonymous", like music, with no fixed center.
This makes "the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion". But the risks are real: "If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent?" Until the relation between philosopheme and mytheme is posed explicitly, "the alleged transgression of philosophy" becomes "an unnoticed fault" within philosophy, and empiricism "would be the genus of which these faults would always be the species". "The passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way."
Totalization, supplementarity, mana
Structuralism claims to criticize empiricism, yet every Lévi-Strauss book is "an empirical essay" open to revision. He answers critics who want an exhaustive inventory of South American myths: a linguist can derive a grammar from few sentences. "Totalization, therefore, is sometimes defined as useless, and sometimes as impossible." The classical reason is finitude before too much material. The other reason is play: "the nature of the field, that is, language and a finite language, excludes totalization", "a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite", because "there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions".
Two ways to think the limit of totalization.
Play against history and presence
Play is in tension, first, with history. Lévi-Strauss rightly suspects a concept of history complicit with teleology and presence: "History has always been conceived as ... a detour between two presences." But reducing it without stating the problem risks "an ahistoricism of a classical type". Structural description must bracket history, so a new structure arises "by a rupture with its past"; language "could only have been born in one fell swoop". Like Rousseau and Husserl, he must "set aside all the facts", conceiving the origin of a structure "on the model of catastrophe".
Second, with presence. "Play is the disruption of presence." "Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around." Yet Lévi-Strauss shows "a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence", even "remorse", as the motive of ethnology.
| First interpretation (Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss) | Second interpretation (Nietzsche) | |
|---|---|---|
| Aim | Decipher a truth or origin beyond play | Affirm play; no turn toward origin |
| Mood | "Saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty" | "Joyous affirmation of the play of the world" |
| Noncenter | Experienced as loss of the center | Determined "otherwise than as loss" |
| Interpretation | Lived "as an exile" | "Active interpretation" of signs without truth |
| Man | Seeks "a new humanism" | Tries "to pass beyond man and humanism" |
Two interpretations of interpretation.
"There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play." One "dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play ... and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile". The other "affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who ... has dreamed of full presence". They are "absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously", and together "share the field which we call ... the social sciences".
Center, play, and the two interpretations
Structure, Sign, and Play (1966 Johns Hopkins) is the volume\'s best-known essay in the Anglophone world. Lévi-Strauss\'s structuralism still wants a center that would limit the play of signs even when the center is denied as a being. Derrida distinguishes two interpretations of interpretation: one seeks a truth or origin that escapes play; the other affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism. He does not "choose" Nietzsche against Rousseau in a simple vote; he describes the irreducible difference between those styles of reading as the field in which we speak. Bricolage, the supplementarity of the mythological / engineering opposition, and the event of a rupture in the history of the concept of structure are the essay\'s working parts.
The 1966 argument in one view.
Event of rupture and Lévi-Strauss\'s center
The concept of structure is as old as the eidos, but something like an event ruptures its history when the structurality of structure begins to be thought. The center then appears as what limits play while escaping play; it is the point where substitution of contents is forbidden. Lévi-Strauss\'s mythologiques still orient a field by a virtual center (reference myths, engineer / bricoleur asymmetry). Derrida\'s reading does not accuse him of simple contradiction; it shows how the discourse that announces the end of centered structure continues to need a functional center. Play is not chaos; it is the field of infinite substitutions once the center is no longer a being but a function. The affirmative interpretation of interpretation (Nietzschean style) and the nostalgic one (Rousseauist style) remain incommensurable; living in their difference is the essay\'s ethics of reading.
['Live in their', 'difference']
Ellipsis
Closure of the book, opening of the text
Between God and God, Book and Book, writing keeps its vigil: "My life, from the book on, will have been a vigil of writing in the interval of limits." Repetition "does not reissue the book but describes its origin from the vantage of a writing which does not yet belong to it", and "this repetition is the first writing". "To write is to have the passion of the origin." But what moves it is not the origin but "a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun". The book lived on the lure that passion "could in the end be appeased by the return" of its object: "Lure of the origin, the end, the line, the ring, the volume, the center."
How repetition lets one leave the closure of the book.
The elliptical return
The return "announces the form of the eternal return": "Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion." What disappears is "the self-identity of the origin, the self-presence of so-called living speech. That is the center." The first, mythic book believed its center "sheltered from play ... a kind of invariable first name that could be invoked, but not repeated". Once written, "when one can read a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a center in the center, it is the abyss". "As soon as a sign emerges, it begins by repeating itself."
"Just as there is a negative theology, there is a negative atheology", which "still pronounces the absence of a center, when it is play that should be affirmed". Yet "is not the desire for a center, as a function of play itself, the indestructible itself?" "The hesitation between writing as decentering and writing as an affirmation of play is infinite", a "who knows?" "without subject or knowledge". "The center was the name of a hole; and the name of man, like the name of God, pronounces the force of that which has been raised up in the hole in order to operate as a work in the form of a book." The book's anxious desire slips into the hole "in the fashion of a serpent or a fish", "a marine monster, a polyp".
The ternary figure of The Book of Questions.
The labyrinth and the number three
"A hole, it was only a hole, / the chance for a book." The return is serene: "rendered hopeless by repetition, and yet joyous for having affirmed the abyss". "The book is the labyrinth. You think you have left it, you are plunged into it." The Book of Questions is "fulfilled as it should be, by remaining open", "an eye in an eye", a labyrinth "which includes its own exits ... closes itself by thinking its own opening".
Its figure is three ("I am the first book in the second"), not a Hegelian synthesis: Midnight's pact is "another name for the death affirmed since Dawn". "Death is at the dawn because everything has begun with repetition." When the origin redoubles itself, the double "divided it and supplemented it. There was immediately a double origin plus its repetition. Three is the first figure of repetition." The second book, like Yukel, is "the indispensable and useless articulator", "liana and lierne in the book, before being expelled from it".
The time of writing after the closure of the book.
Ellipsis as method of the collection
The short closing text Ellipsis is not an afterthought. It figures reading as a path that returns without coinciding, a writing that marks what it cannot say by a gap. After Force, Cogito, Jabès, Violence, Husserl, Artaud, Freud, Bataille and Lévi-Strauss, Ellipsis refuses a final synthesis that would bind the bastings into a system.
Why the book ends by refusing a last word.
Return without coincidence
An ellipsis in rhetoric omits what the reader must supply; Derrida\'s Ellipsis makes that omission the figure of reading the whole collection. To return to a text is not to coincide with a first meaning; the return writes a difference. That is why the book can be basted rather than bound: each essay is a pass that leaves a gap the next pass cannot fill. Study editions that end with a neat list of "key takeaways" risk undoing Ellipsis; the synthesis that follows should be used as a map, then set aside for another reading of the French or Bass text.
Ellipsis as the volume's last instruction.
Main Points
Main Points
- Structure is grasped by neutralizing force. A structuralist reading sees the form of a work best when "the living energy of meaning" is neutralized; duration, value and the work's emergence escape the schema (ch1).
- Discourse is originally violent, so the task is the least violence. Against Levinas, pure nonviolence is contradictory; philosophy can only practice "violence against violence" (ch4).
- The delay is in the beginning. In Freud, memory is breaching and deferred action; there is no life present at first that later defers itself (ch7).
- The center is a function, not a place. Once structurality is thought, the center becomes "a sort of nonlocus" where sign-substitutions play, and "everything became discourse" (ch10).
- No one can shake metaphysics without its concepts. Every destructive discourse "must inhabit the structures" it demolishes; the question is how rigorously it does so (ch7, ch10).
- Representation has no end, only a closure. Artaud's attempt to abolish repetition shows that "it is fatal that, in its closure, representation continues" (ch8).
- Madness is inside reason's founding act. Descartes's hyperbolic doubt includes the possibility of madness, and Foucault's history of silence must still speak reason's language (ch2).
- The poet and the rabbi read the same text twice. Jabès shows one interpretive imperative split between commentary that restores a law and writing in exile from the origin (ch3, ch11).
- Ethics presupposes the thought of Being. Levinas's face must be "let be" as other, so ethical transcendence presupposes ontological transcendence (ch4).
- The other is other only as an ego. Husserl's alter ego does not reduce the other; the symmetry of two egos makes asymmetry and respect possible (ch4).
- Phenomenology stays open by structure. The noema, the hyle and the Idea in the Kantian sense make a closed structural phenomenology impossible; the Telos is "structurally genesis itself" (ch5).
- Writing can always empty itself. The Origin of Geometry needs inscription for ideal truth, yet the written sign can fall silent and stop being reactivated (ch5).
- Speech is stolen at its origin. To speak is to hear oneself, so the speaker's words are "originally repeated" and drawn from a language not his own (ch6).
- The unconscious is not a hidden original text. It is "a weave of pure traces", "archives which are always already transcriptions": "everything begins with reproduction" (ch7).
- We must be several in order to write. The Mystic Pad needs two hands, and the subject of writing is "a system of relations between strata" (ch7).
- The machine is death, and it founds memory. Mechanical supplements are finitude within the psyche, not an external accident (ch7).
- The theater of cruelty is theater without a God-author. Cruelty expels the dictating text, subordinates speech to gesture and hieroglyph, and makes fidelity to Artaud impossible (ch8).
- Sovereignty is not lordship. Hegel's master risks life to keep it and earn meaning; Bataille's sovereign laughs at that economy and loses without return (ch9).
- Restricted economy reinvests; general economy spends. Hegel's Aufhebung circulates negativity as labor; general economy relates meaning to "useless, senseless loss" (ch9).
- Concepts change by sliding, not by new definitions. Bataille's "untenable concepts" keep tradition's names but are displaced toward loss of meaning (ch9).
- Every discourse is bricolage. The engineer who builds his language from nothing is "a theological idea", a myth produced by the bricoleur (ch10).
- Totalization fails because something is missing. The field of language is finite and lacks a center, so the supplement "floats", like mana (ch10).
- There are two interpretations of interpretation. Rousseau's nostalgia for lost origin and Nietzsche's affirmation of play are irreconcilable, and Derrida refuses to choose yet (ch10).
- The center was the name of a hole. Repetition of the book opens an invisible lack: "Something is missing that would make the circle perfect" (ch11).
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Force and signification | Form is visible only when force is neutralized | A model of a work or system claims to capture it whole |
| Economy of violence | Choose the least violence; pure nonviolence is incoherent | An ethics claims to escape all force |
| Structurality of structure | The center limits play and is itself a function | A system's founding term seems beyond question |
| Supplement | What is added also makes up for a lack | An "extra" turns out to be necessary |
| Deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) | Meaning is constituted later, belatedly | An origin is understood only after the fact |
| Closure, not end | A limit inside which repetition continues indefinitely | Someone announces the end of a tradition |
| Restricted and general economy | Reinvestment versus expenditure without return | Every loss is being converted into a gain |
| Bricolage | All discourse borrows inherited tools | A method claims to start from zero |
| Two interpretations of interpretation | Decipher an origin, or affirm play | A reading must declare its stance toward meaning |
| Inhabit to deconstruct | Critique uses the concepts it questions | Judging the rigor of any radical critique |
The Derrida cluster
Through-lines after the deepen pass
Three economies organize the volume once the essays are read together. Economy of violence (Violence and Metaphysics; Cogito): no pure nonviolence in discourse; least violence and vigilance. Economy of theft and breath (La Parole; Theater of Cruelty): speech always already stolen; theater tries to resituate the bloated voice. Economy of expenditure (Bataille): sovereignty as non-return against Hegelian reserve. Across all three, writing is not a secondary technique; it is the name for difference, delay, machine and play that phonocentric models treat as fall. The Jewgreek question, the mad within reason, and the center that limits play are one problem in several dialects.
- Structure is grasped by neutralizing force. A structuralist reading sees the form of a work best when "the living energy of meaning" is neutralized; duration, value and the work's emergence escape the schema (ch1).
- Discourse is originally violent, so the task is the least violence. Against Levinas, pure nonviolence is contradictory; philosophy can only practice "violence against violence" (ch4).
- The delay is in the beginning. In Freud, memory is breaching and deferred action; there is no life present at first that later defers itself (ch7).
- The center is a function, not a place. Once structurality is thought, the center becomes "a sort of nonlocus" where sign-substitutions play, and "everything became discourse" (ch10).
- No one can shake metaphysics without its concepts. Every destructive discourse "must inhabit the structures" it demolishes; the question is how rigorously it does so (ch7, ch10).
- Representation has no end, only a closure. Artaud's attempt to abolish repetition shows that "it is fatal that, in its closure, representation continues" (ch8).