Have I succeeded in making it any clearer–what is the trace, what is the aura? Well, perhaps going back, once more, to Derrida might help us to finish up. Going back to Grammatology, Derrida tells us: “the word trace must refer itself to a number of contemporary discourses whose force we intend to take into account. Not that we accept them totally[. W]e relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to the illeity [the Other person] as to the alterity [the Otherness] of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence…[T]o make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words ‘proximity,’ ‘immediacy[,]’ [and] ‘presence,’ (the proximate, the own, and the pre- of presence), is our final intention in this essay.” For Bymum “trace” is a matter of “modern theory”; for Derrida, it’s “contemporary.” And, like desire, it’s what’s not quite “proximate,” “immediate,” or “present”–what’s not quite here.

In the text to which Derrida directs us in a footnote, “The Trace of the Other,” we find Levinas exploring many of these same themes that we have discussed: the need to be sensible but transcendental, here but also absent, to partake in a particular, fragmented time. “A face is abstract. This abstractness is not, to be sure, like the brute sensible datum of the empiricists. Nor is it an instantaneous cross-section of the world in which time would cross with eternity. It is an incision made in time that does not bleed. But the abstractness of a face is a visitation and a coming. It disturbs immanence without settling into the horizons of the world…The beyond from which a face comes signifies as a trace. A face is in the trace of the utterly bygone, utterly passed absent, withdrawn into what Paul Valery calls ‘the deep yore, never long ago enough,’ which cannot be discovered in the self by an introspection.”

The claim that one is affected by a force, a beyond, “which cannot be discovered in the self by an introspection,” indicates that knowledge is trying to give space for non-knowledge. Derrida himself writes that we should be wary of the notion that one can ultimately have something present, accessible, which “seems currently to be dominant and irreducible” “in all scientific fields, notably in biology.” So, again, the philosopher is wary of biology/physiology. And, just as Levinas is wary of the field of philosophy which, in Heidegger’s hands, can support Nazism, we might also wonder if Derrida singles out biology for its use in eugenics.

Though neither Levinas nor Derrida (at least in these texts) refers to Benjamin in the use of the term trace, Derrida is influenced by the German term, Spur. As he appends to the above citation from Grammatology: “This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse.” Though Derrida does not devote space to these German Spurs within Grammatology, he does return to them in later essays.

In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which takes up Freud’s ideas about conscious/unconscious memory, we perhaps find Derrida finally taking up his self-imposed challenge of explicating the use of Spur in Freudian discourse. Here, with Freud, Spur refers to the effects/systems of memory. Freud: “A trace (Spur) is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a ‘memory-trace’ (Erinnerungsspur), and to the function related to it we give the name of ‘memory.'” At first, in his “Project for a Scientific Inquiry of Psychology,” Freud defines this system of “memory-traces” by dividing the brain into two regions: one which is permeable and registers “quality,” another which is resistant and registers “quantity.” All phenomena will seep into the first, porous area, but only intense phenomena will reach into the resistant area, making it a better entity for determining the quantities of events.

But, this model is ultimately untenable, because one cannot easily separate qualitative phenomena from quantitative ones. If I show you a picture of seven poultry and ask you how many are chickens and how many quail, you have to rely on a register-able/re-cognizable difference between chickens and quail. This simple thought-experiment conveys Derrida’s concept of differance, which is to say that we never have static objects or origins, never have anything in isolation, but always understand through a process of differentiation. Remember: “difference we ascertain progressively cannot be thought without the trace.”

Derrida’s intention in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” is to demonstrate that this, Freud’s early model of memory, persists into his later idea of a “Mystic Writing Pad,” so that both models are similarly flawed. Freud’s later model compares the brain’s system of memory to a tool, the “Mystic Writing Pad,” which has simultaneous layers of writing on it. The top layer is impermanent, and represents conscious memory; the bottom layer is more permanent, and represents unconscious memory.

As Freud describes it, “The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet, the top end of which is firmly secured to the slab while its bottom end rests upon it without being fixed to it. This transparent sheet…consists of two layers, which can be detached from each other except at their two ends. The upper layer is a transparent piece of celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent waxed paper.”

“To make use of the Mystic Pad, one writes upon the celluloid portion of the covering-sheet which rests upon the wax slab. For this purpose no pencil or chalk is necessary, since the writing does not depend on material being deposited upon the receptive surface…If one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, [thereby eliminating t]he close contact between the waxed paper and the wax slab at the places which have been scratched (upon which the visibility of the writing depended)…The Mystic Pad is now clear of writing and ready to receive fresh inscriptions.”

The fact that the layers of the wax-tablet are stacked together is also important for Freud’s metaphor. At a mid-way point between “The Project” and “The Mystic Writing Pad,” Freud describes a similar mechanism, where “our psychical mechanism has come about by a process of stratification (Aufeinanderschichtung),” such “that memory is present not once but several times over,” in “at least three and probably more” “inscriptions [Niederschriften].”

The Mystic Writing Pad therefore achieves Freud’s desire for a stratified system of traces, where an outer layer is more permeable/forgetful than an inner layer that retains traces of its previous inscriptions.

We might read Freud somewhat generously if we pair his description of the “Mystic Writing Pad” with the insights of Catherine Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity. Malabou’s work investigates how there is a “plasticity” which defines language and matter: words have an array of interpretations, poses which they can be twisted to take; so, too, matter has its limitations for how far it can be stretched and altered, particularly brain-matter, which has its own neuro-plasticity. Plasticity, as a marker of consistency over time, is here used as a metaphor for memory. The celluloid, far more plastic than the wax tablet beneath, has a shorter memory, because “[i]f one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, starting from the free lower end.”

But, if Freud intends to say that the bottom of the wax tablet will always preserve memory, then this is problematic. Surely, information is always-already being lost or replaced in each moment? As Derrida says, this kind of metaphor, “the metaphorical concept of translation (Ubersetzung) or transcription (Umschrift) is not dangerous because it refers to writing, but because it presupposes a text which would be already there, immobile: the serene presence of a statue, of a written stone or archive whose signified content might be transported without harm into the element of a different language, that of the preconscious or the conscious.”

No, Derrida is not against writing. He is against the idea that the wax tablet, beneath the celluloid, can be always “already there, immobile.” His point is that the unconscious, too, forgets. Moreover, the system of writing, the system generated by human perception/experience always exceeds our capacities for modeling it. As Freud notes, there may indeed be varying strata, simultaneous systems, of memory; Malabou’s notion of plasticity may even aid us in imagining such a memory. But, this exhausts neither the functioning of the mind nor of time.

At the beginning, Derrida states that the issue is not whether “a writing apparatus–for example, the one described in the ‘Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’–is a good metaphor for representing the working of the psyche.” Instead, one should ask “what apparatus we must create in order to represent psychical writing, and what the imitation, projected and liberated in a machine, of something like psychical writing might mean.” Ultimately, both physical writing and semiotics exist in a trace, which means that “if there is neither machine nor text without psychical origin, there is no psyche without text.”

It seems that denying the existence of a sufficient metaphor for “the working of the psyche” may serve the purpose of instilling awe in those who realize how a psyche is at work in constantly creating meaning beyond our capacity to understand meaning. All this because “psychical writing, for example the kind we find in dreams” “cannot be read in terms of any code,” even though “it works with a mass of elements which have been coded in the course of an individual or collective history,” because each “dreamer invents his [sic] own grammar.” Like a language concatenating letters, the dream works through the repetition of certain images: “‘repetition’ alone, institutes translatability, makes possible what we call ‘language,’ transforms an absolute idiom into a limit which is always already transgressed: a pure idiom is not language; it becomes so only through repetition.”

At work in Derrida’s critique of Freud is the desire to make something beyond our immediate understanding for the sake of evoking greater significance. A similar phenomenon is at hand in Derrida’s reading of Levinas. As Derrida puts it, “we relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to the illeity [the Other person] as to the alterity [the Otherness] of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence.” In Levinas’s work, the total loss of the past has a particular relation to the Other person in the sense of an obligation, a responsibility, towards one’s predecessors and ancestors. There is required a kind of respect where the other person cannot be known, a respect which makes knowing another person at all deeply significant. (In Politics of Friendship, Derrida explores the idea that if one fully understands another person, then one may again grow lonely, because full understanding would make supposed “others” into nothing more than an extension of oneself.) Here, in Derrida’s discourse on Freud, the total loss of memory, “the alterity of a past that never was,” generates a greater appreciation for the fact that language, the interpretation of dreams, occurs at all. Again, knowledge is trying to save room for non-knowledge, for the sake of surprise.

We might find these same themes–of desire, of dreams, of protective membranes, the physical inscription of writing/memory–repeated in the last of our German Spurs, in Derrida’s writing on Nietzsche. This time, Spur has changed its valence from being a way of understanding memory to an understanding of desire: Derrida substitutes for Spur the word eperon, which is French for “style.” He explains the etymology whereby the “eperon which is translated sporo in Frankish or High German, spor in Gaelic, is pronounced spur in English. In Les Mots Anglais Mallarme relates it to the verb to spurn, that is, to disdain, to rebuff, to reject scornfully. Although this may not be a particularly fascinating homonym, there is still a necessary historic and semantic operation from one language to the other evident in that the English spur, the eperon, is the ‘same word’ as the German Spur: or, in other words, trace, wake, indication, mark.”

We might notice that, in addition to the play between the English spur and the German Spur, we are getting a potential play between the French eperon and the Greek apeiron, which is the absence (a-) of a definition/limit (peiron). So while the trace/Spur originally referred to the thing that is left over, that is present, which indicates the shape of what is absent, Derrida’s eperon is closer to total formlessness, an indefinite apeiron. Shifting from one language to another is itself exemplary for his attempt to convey a sense of movement. Derrida is not trying to convey the static mark itself, but rather the movement which produces this mark: desire.

In this essay on eperon or “style,” style has its own set of associations: it may refer either to the stylus, the instrument of writing, or to a more enigmatic “style,” as in a fashion, a modality, a way of writing. The first “style” is often represented as a masculine principle of reasoning, of figuring things out; whereas, the second “style” is often represented as a feminine principle of seduction/desire, which obfuscates the clear image. Here, Derrida is writing in a way that attempts to represent the effects of desire, that attempts to be feminine.

We find the first version of style as stylus in the way that “the style would seem to advance in the manner of a spur of sorts (eperon)…like the prow…the projection of the ship that surges ahead…Or yet again, and still in nautical terminology, the style might be compared to that rocky point, also called an eperon, on which the waves break at the harbor’s entrance.” In both metaphors, the style is acting as a stylus, that which narrows, which points, within a larger field, a sea.

With these images, Derrida is playing with the Freudian idea that a stylus is a penis, a specifically masculine principle. “If style [as in the stylus] were a man (much as the penis, according to Freud is the ‘normal prototype of fetishes’), then writing [as ecriture] would be a woman.” The translation is difficult here, but the “style” [le style] in French refers to the point of a stylus, while the notion of “writing” [ecriture] in French conveys a person’s hand-writing. The association might be intended to mean that the medium of language is too often overlooked in favor of pure “ideas,” and that this medium has a particular relation to femininity, like the woman who puts great effort into having delicate penmanship. We might render this concept by saying that the stylus is that which “points,” the writing is that which “flows.”

In the image of rocks and shores, something similar is being conveyed here as in Finnegan’s Wake, where “the earthy phallus creates structures and civilizations, spaces, which are washed over by the feminine river, time, causing them to erode, to decay, to heal, to transform.” But the familiar thematic binarism of Finnegan’s Wake might be subverted, if, hidden within that reference to the prow of a ship, which often features a woman as its masthead, we can find traces of the idea that women might be capable of the first, typically masculine, idea of “style.”

By making enigmatic the concepts of “proximity,” “immediacy,” and “presence,” Derrida is allying himself with what he considers to be the feminine way of life, which is fashion/style. Writing in a poetic way, a way that conveys a sense of “style[,] thereby protects the presence, the content, the thing itself, meaning, truth—on the condition at least that [truth] should not already be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of the difference.” At work is an idea of whores and beauties, pornography and eroticism, where men have a pornographic tendency to seize the thing itself, while women are better able to be seductive, not too quickly deflowered and unveiled, closing their legs so as not to reveal their “gaping chasm.”

In a similar vein, Derrida cites Nietzsche’s claim that “the world is so overfull of beautiful things, but it is nevertheless poor, very poor, in beautiful things. But perhaps, this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a golden-embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting, modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!” To have too much beauty, to be utterly naked, is ultimately to have no beauty at all. Therefore, one must veil “lovely potentialities,” which have the power to promise, resist, mock–to seduce or spurn.

Throughout the essay, women are associated with non-knowledge, as the unrepresentable. “That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth—feminine.” “[T]he idea withdraws, becomes transcendent, inaccessible, seductive. It beckons from afar. Its veils float in the distance. The dream of death begins. It is woman.” “There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself.”

Derrida, in a strange, proto-feminist dream-sequence, argues that we need this non-knowledge for the sake of knowledge. “What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an-archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather, the Umdrehung [turning/reversal] must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself.” “The reversal [Umdrehung], if it is not accompanied by a discrete parody, a strategy of writing, or difference or deviation in quills, if there is no style, no grand style, this is finally the same thing, nothing more than a clamorous declaration of the antithesis…Parody supposes a loss of consciousness, for were it to be absolutely calculated, it would become a confession or a law table.”

It is notable that the instinct to not merely invert the hierarchy arises in Derrida when discussing women; we might therefore speculate whether Derrida’s writing is motivated by a fear that women will suddenly be considered superior to men. Perhaps the impulse involved is a reticent desire to say that some women can succeed in some ways better than men can, or that men should adopt some feminine principles. In refusing to give a clear structure, Derrida may therefore limit the extent to which he offers feminist challenges to masculine authority, including his own.

In preferring parodies to reversals as more meritorious modes of making “hierarchy,” Derrida is ultimately making a claim that parodies offer a route to something like justice/beauty/truth: some positive criterion by which the “transformation” can be deemed an improvement. Which begs the question: What is a parody? Well, a parody is a repetition of characters/themes/symbols in a system that differs from the original in order to poke fun at it. Parody, as an unconscious repetition–for, indeed, “parody supposes a loss of consciousness”–therefore shares elements with what Derrida has said previously about dream-work, as the development of a new idiom through repetition. Derrida is repeating images without a clear structure, and doing so intentionally, in the hopes that this form of association might generate new ways of thinking.

The themes of resistance, penetration, veiling, femininity, masculinity are therefore presented without Derrida’s foreknowledge of how they all fit together. Derrida is attempting to parody/match Nietzsche’s style insofar as Nietzsche, as Derrida puts it, “might well be a little lost in the web of his text, lost much as a spider who finds he is unequal to the web he has spun.” Importantly, spiders/weaving/webs are linked in Greek mythology with femininity, because spiders are the descendants of Arachne, who was punished by Athena after losing/winning (different storytellers have different endings) a weaving contest. (Similarly, looming and un-looming is Penelope’s reproductive homework.) Webs also represent a field/network, as opposed to a straight line, so Derrida is again privileging (feminine) breadth, vagueness, over (masculine) narrowness, a clear point.

Derrida himself confesses, or at least asks the reader to “suppose,” that “in some way the totality which I (so to speak) have presented is also an erratic, even parodying, graft.” Derrida adds that even if he admits that his writing is  “really cryptic and parodying,” and he tells us “that it is so through and through,” this admission “won’t be of any help,” because “still the text will remain indefinitely, open cryptic and parodying.” We might conclude that Derrida is using the claim that every “text will remain indefinitely, open cryptic and parodying,” as a way to minimize his own responsibilities to be clear and concise in his thought, or in the presentation of his thought.

At the end, Derrida even confesses that his essay was motivated by what he took to be a challenge, when he overheard his fellow scholars say that editors should not have published the fragment of Nietzsche’s writing: “I have forgot my umbrella.” To prove his contemporaries wrong, Derrida tries to make value of this fragment, of even Nietzsche’s daily life, his forgetting an umbrella. He tries to say that this fragment demonstrates the fallibility of our authorities, demonstrates that “there is no ‘totality to Nietzsche’s text,’ not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one,” such that “[t]here is evidence here to expose one, roofless and unprotected.”

On one level, Derrida’s writing serves as a critique of Nietzsche, disproves his authority as a genius author who was always self -present and -aware. It therefore counters Nietzsche’s claim at the beginning of the genealogy of morals that “If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears, I do not think the fault necessarily lies with me. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do, that people have first read my earlier works without sparing themselves some effort: because they really are not easy to approach.”

But, by lingering on the passage, “I forgot my umbrella,” Derrida is also saying that even the most minute details, even the most nebulous dreams of Nietzsche are worth our study. Even those moments where Nietzsche himself is not sure, where he is forgetting himself, just as he forgets his umbrella, are worth our study. And by being vague, and by taking his peers’ comments as a challenge, we might take Derrida to be demonstrating an aristocratic narcissism, where he constructs Nietzsche as an object of necessary study as well as himself, because even those times where Nietzsche or Derrida is being “erratic” and “cryptic” are somehow worth our investigation.

There are several moves present within deconstruction that support (they do not necessitate) this kind of narcissism. Arguing that the original doesn’t exist can give one license to say that “it’s what I say it is.” Arguing that the original cannot be transported without deformity can give one license to say brusquely, without explanation, “go to the original.” Arguing that everything is always-already moving, that nothing is stable, can give one license to be unstable or unstructured. And arguing that nobody succeeds in “seeing” the movement, the trace, can serve to generate a paranoia where one feels the need to write voraciously in order to somehow see the movement of difference. To explain this latter point, we can look at Derrida’s voluminous flow of writing as a way of saying that he has given up on stability, or we can look at it as an exaggerated way of having to create stability, where Derrida asks himself “what apparatus we must [emphasis mine] create in order to represent psychical writing.”

And psychical writing brings us back to Freud. The promised link between Nietzsche’s Spur and what we have seen of Freud comes in Derrida’s declaration about the forgotten umbrella, that “[t]he umbrella, though, is not just a symbolic object for Freud. The metaphor of a metapsychological concept, like the famous Reischutz of the perception-consciousness system, it is in fact itself almost a concept.” The umbrella functions by allowing Derrida to note that no object just means what it is, and hence the umbrella can be a “symbolic object” [perhaps a phallus], while also noting that protective membranes–and an umbrella is a protective membrane between person and environment–are a metapsychological concept. We have already seen this concept in Freud’s notion of psychical writing, i.e. psychical writing is composed of a meeting between a medium’s resistance and an inscriptive force.

This merging of resistance and inscription is perhaps seen in Derrida’s request to “let us leave the elytron [elytre] to float between the masculine and the feminine.” The elytron might refer to the Greek word for sheath, élutron, which is a sword insofar as it has a sword’s penile shape, and which is a hole insofar as it receives a sword. [Vagina is latin for sheath.] Or, the elytron might also refer to the forewing of a beetle, which is both shell-like and wing-like. These fore-wings are more flexible than the exoskeleton, but their membranes are more stiff than the hind-wings that they protect. Somewhere between stasis and flight, this reading of elytron as a forewing might explain why it “floats between the masculine and the feminine.” If femininity is the flexible flight, and masculinity the static shield; if femininity is resistant, and masculinity inscriptive; then these part-wing and part-shell objects cannot reliably be allocated to either gender.

If we read this elytron generously, we might find Derrida making the claim that resistance is part of the writing process. We might therefore wonder how much of Jacques Derrida’s comments about femininity owe to the influence and resistance of his wife, Marguerite Derrida. What was Derrida unable to say about women, as a result of his experience of women; in what ways did they resist his pen, thereby shaping his thought, dictating the form of his writing?

In the end, perhaps the most important line in Derrida’s lecture on Nietzsche is the note: “[this discourse on the relation between impression/impressed, style, and woman] is not the woman’s figure. It is not the figure of the woman precisely because we shall bear witness here to her abduction [la voir s’enlever], because the question of the figure is at once opened and closed by what is called woman…” Here we see that Derrida privileges an enigmatic field to a clear point, prefers a web that extends beyond one’s horizons to the visible contours of a bounded polygon: a figure. He is saying that women cannot be examined nor understood, and we might wonder whether the function here is to say that Derrida’s attraction to women (woman?) is something that cannot be examined nor understood. But, ultimately, as human beings with a physiology and therefore a need for medicine, for care, for flesh–women can be examined, understood. What does removing the physicality of woman do to the success of feminism?

N.B.: I do not want to appear as a T.E.R.F. in stating this question. Rather, I mean to stress how we have at work the philosopher’s resistance to biology. And this resistance appears, at times, in more recent work–still inspired by Derrida–on what constitutes gender. I do not want to say that all people with uteruses must be referred to with a specific set of names. But there is an extent to which the medical work of curing cervical cancer is part of feminism. As well as the event whereby certain figures are proscribed from the activity of writing, or are subjected to violence and interrogation as a result of their figure.

If Derrida were to address woman as a figure, as a figure to which he is attracted, then he might risk reducing himself to a repetitive, biological machine. He might then become merely physiological. As he said with Nietzsche, the world would become “so overfull of beautiful things.” He needs to save room for not understanding his own desire, in order that his desire might be the more mystical, the more appealing to him. But it is worth questioning why this desire is so important. How many philosophers would resist getting a routine medical exam? How many philosophers would seek to find an enigmatic experience in taste itself, in the digestive process, rather than in the sexual one? In other words, some hunger is mechanized, while another is left to be mystical, and here it is taken for granted that the mystical hunger should be romantic love.

Derrida is not alone in treating women this way. If we turn back to Levinas, to the chapter “phenomenology and Eros” within Totality and Infinity, we find these same themes. By avoiding the specific outline of the feminine, just as he nowhere tries to define the specific shape of the “face,” Levinas uses women to explain the simultaneity of immanence and transcendence: “[The erotic/profane is n]ot nothingness—but what is not yet…[T]he simultaneity of the clandestine and the exposed precisely defines profanation. It appears in equivocation…The simultaneity or the equivocation of fragility and this weight of non-signifi[c]ance, heavier than the formless real, we shall term femininity.”

In Levinas’s explanation, the feminine always equivocates, meaning it says two things: one literal [exposed], one more than literal [clandestine]. Again, we have a complicated form of presence/absence, where an object is not fully present (“yet”), nor is it completely absent as “nothingness.” If this presence/absence can be explained through futurity then we might understand equivocation/profanation as the kind of statement which we regard as meaning something, even if we cannot yet say what that something is. We saw an example of equivocation in the common adage that “you don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone,” which leaves as ineffable or enigmatic or unspoken the “it” which is “got.”

Throughout this passage on eros, Levinas uses the terms feebleness [faiblesse], fragility [fragilité], and vulnerability [vulnérabilité]. While an overhasty translation might render feebleness and fragility as synonymous, as “frailty,” I think that there is an important distinction: In Levinas’s treatment of the terms, feebleness seems to be an abstract concept that is part of what it means to be a human being, while fragility seems to be the specific, physical characteristic of women. The relationship of the strong man to the fragile woman, the woman whom the man loves, reveals to the man his abstract feebleness, his inability to act or understand. He is feeble with respect to woman, because he cannot harm her. And in being unable to seize her, he encounters her as an independent being, capable of surprising him, totally Other.

Levinas describes this relationship by stating that “[t]he movement of the lover before this frailty [faiblesse] of femininity, neither pure compassion nor impassiveness, indulges in compassion, is absorbed in the complacence of the caress.” I take the phrase “neither pure compassion nor impassiveness” to mean that the man is not fully acting on the woman according to his own whims, nor is he totally ignoring her, nor totally receiving her whims. I then take it as evident that the man is feeble instead of fragile, that this “l’amant devant cette faiblesse de femininité [lover before that feebleness of femininity]” represents also the feebleness of the lover before the feminine. In being so feeble, in being so tender, we might imagine the man as extending a kind of rubbery appendage, bending and touching but unable to apply force, an appendage which presses against the fragile glass that it is unable to break.

The glass does not break, and we therefore find mutuality in the touch: com-passion or com-placence, which we might gloss as co-feeling or co-pleasure. Consent in the sexual relationship, like the distinction between pornography and eroticism in Derrida’s writing, is intended to represent an abstract concept of feminine seduction, a complex mixture of presence/absence. But there remains the problematic trend where women (and men) are denied the specificity of form as human beings, which, here, manifests itself through the idea that men are always inherently stronger than women.

Levinas elaborates on this touch, which he describes as tenderness, a caress: “The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible. It is not that it would feel beyond the felt, further than the senses, that it would seize upon a sublime food while maintaining, within its relation with this ultimate felt, an intention of hunger that goes unto the food promised, and given to, and deepening this hunger, as though the caress would be fed by its own hunger. The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it.”

In the distinction between the caress and hunger, we might sense Levinas’s desire to separate the romantic/spiritual from the biological/physiological, to make romantic love a “sublime food” as opposed to a too-worldly one. And to some extent, I can understand what that separation could look like, how the caress, as contact, might be sensible while still it “transcends the sensible.” As I already said, “I cannot seem to understand how it is that I might say: ‘It has been so long since your little finger traced [emphasis mine] the line from my forehead to chin, so long, in fact–that the absence of such delicacy has turned my stomach into a rigidly churning pit–that I hunger for touch.'” To put it differently: one can more easily prove that someone has died from starvation than from lack of caress.

Although, the caress is not as obvious a need as hunger, Levinas does seem to claim that the caress is necessary; we might imagine the person who loses the will to live if such a life precludes love. Something similar occurs in Kafka’s parable “The Hunger Artist,” where people come to witness this titular hunger artist, who performs his inability to eat before others. We gain insight into this story if we realize that Kafka was at the time institutionalized for major depressive disorder (to translate his illness into the most recent clinical terms), and that one of his greatest symptoms was the inability to eat. And, we can take this starvation to be caused by lack of caress, if we read Kafka’s contemporaneous Letters to Milena, which show a man yearning for love. And Kafka, like his hunger artist, performs his pain before others–albeit through writing rather than a stage performance.

Yet, there is an extent to which I can read Kafka and Levinas against the grain. I can remember the claim that “some hunger is mechanized, while another is left to be mystical, and here it is taken for granted that the mystical hunger should be romantic love.” While Kafka’s hunger artist might be a metaphor for lack of love, its literal content represents what happens when there is a lack of flavor, when the digestive system is the culprit, not the reproductive. The hunger artist undercuts the romantic reading when he admits that his fasting is not admirable, because, as the hunger artist puts it: “I [just] couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”

In the end, Levinas’s notion of the “caress” seems boring and heteronormative to me, in its overvaluation of the importance of sex, and of male/female sex in particular. The contact between lovers becomes voluptuosity, and this “voluptuosity isolates the lovers, as though they were alone in the world.” In other words, because the caress causes com-placence, joy in each other, it becomes possible for fulfillment to be found in this dyad. (Yay! Monogamy!) The only reason why people come to care about ethics/politics, instead of blissfully humping each other’s brains out, is because “in this unparalleled conjuncture of identification, in this trans-substantiation, the same and the other are not united but precisely—beyond every possible project, beyond every meaningful and intelligent power—engender the child.” Oops! Now we have kids to look after!

In needing to make sex a vehicle for “trans-substantiation,” or in needing to separate the caress from hunger, we might sense how Levinas is afraid of medical/physiological knowledge. We might further see Levinas’s fear of sex, of biology, of being too worldly/fleshly, in his description of laughter. Laughter, he says, is closer to nudity, immodesty, lasciviousness, than to sublime seduction. Because he fears his desire, he then fears women, calls them senseless “witches” who remove his capacity for “seriousness,” induce in him an “irresponsible animality.”

“Here lies the very lasciviousness of erotic nudity—the laughter that deflagrates in Shakespearean witches’ sessions full of innuendos, beyond the decency of words, as the absence of all seriousness, of all possibility for speech, the laughter of ‘ambiguous tales’ where the mechanism of laughter is not only ascribable to the formal conditions of the comic such as Bergson, for example, has defined them in his book Laughter–there is in addition a content which brings us to an order where seriousness is totally lacking. The beloved is opposed to me not as a will struggling with my own or subject to my own, but on the contrary as an irresponsible animality which does not speak true words.”

I don’t necessarily buy Levinas’s claim that laughter is a “mechanism” “only ascribable to the formal conditions of the comic,” while the proper, orgasmic caress is somehow both sensible and transcendent. But I do think it utile to note how willfully philosophers will try to avoid knowing or understanding their desire, want their pleasures to remain mysterious. We might also understand this desire as a sociological phenomenon, as the intrinsic resistance of the humanities to the sciences, especially biology.

Moreover, the way that philosophy wills ignorance can be somewhat intrinsic to philosophy’s very form, particularly to philosophy as Derrida practices it. Derrida himself asks whether his themes/symbols/neologisms are “selected for reasons whose history and code I alone know? What if even I fail to see the transparent reason of such a history and code?” From the beginning of his work as a philosopher, in his obscenely long intro to Husserl, Derrida has taken issue with the notion of “intentionality.” So it should be no surprise that Derrida asks “What if even I fail to see the transparent reason of such a history and code?”, because he doubts whether people ever know sufficiently the reasons for their actions.

So let me try to read Derrida contra Derrida, as a way of suggesting that maybe Derrida has an obligation to (at least attempt to) know what he means, to have specific intentions in his speech. Let’s return to Freud, in Archive Fever, where Derrida asks himself “Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?” In a footnote that addresses this question, Derrida further explains: “I have, for my part, notably in Force de loi and Specters of Marx, tried to situate justice, the justice which exceeds but also requires the law, on the side of the act of memory, of resistance to forgetting, whether this be of the injunction in general or of its place of assignation: other people, living or dead.”

In that Force of Law mentioned by Derrida, he explains this “justice which exceeds but also requires the law”: “Law (droit) is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.” We might therefore say that Derrida is privileging consciousness, questioning, over unconsciousness, forgetting: the process of questioning, of interpreting, is what insures that the application of law to praxis is a just one, rather than a merely mechanical, or technical or even unconscious one.

I think of Derrida as fighting desperately to preserve or enhance consciousness; for, after all, hasn’t he already demonstrated how consciousness is a miraculous thing, how one can never successfully explain how the unconscious/preconscious is translated to consciousness? I think of Derrida, when he says that forgetting is the antonym of justice, as having the dream: To become so heavy you are flying, because you can be moved by no other; gravity is not a matter too much, but is a matter pulled by another. It is as if Derrida were trying to strengthen the means by which he resists some external force, some external force which tries to move him, to make him think too quickly, to forget what he should have said. In order for the event to become inscribed on my consciousness, I must resist it; if I were to be pushed by its force, were to travel with it, then there would be no inscription, or at least an only partial inscription.

I think of Derrida in such moments as a practitioner of Zen, attempting to still the troubled waters of thought; he reaches, through careful readings, through a deep meditative concentration, a moment where every thought is available to him: in the next moment, he could think anything. And in precisely such a moment he hears a voice: someone is calling him. To be capable of any thing and yet reduced to one thing–is this not the condition that allows supreme consciousness, the full awareness of the other?

But, doesn’t this metaphor betray Derrida’s other values? Surely, in the language of responsibility, one is often called by the other, is supposed to be moved by the other. It seems, then, that meditative reflection can preclude meaningful questioning, will lose the capacity for one to be open to others. It remains unclear to me whether such a stasis impoverishes or enriches thought. What does staying still do to one’s capacity to witness the motion inherent to the trace of life? We are dealing, here, with the tension between trace as mark and trace as movement, a tension that exists throughout Derrida’s oeuvre.

Importantly, I do no think that the contemporary industry of Derrida studies adequately considers this dilemma. In Leonard Lawlor’s introduction to Derrida, he writes that “in the very moment, when silently I speak to myself, it must be the case that there is a minuscule hiatus differentiating me into the speaker and into the hearer. There must be a hiatus that differentiates me from myself, a hiatus or gap without which I would not be a hearer as well as a speaker. This hiatus also defines the trace, a minimal repeatability.” I do not understand Lawlor’s claim, particularly insofar as repeatability seems to indicate mitosis: two separate yet mirrored forms. Given how we have already seen that the trace is a kind of arche-writing, a continuous line, surely there is something problematic with the claim that the trace is “repeatability” however minimal. If trace is stasis, then it can be repetition; if movement, then it is change.

As a way of settling the issue, let’s return to Derrida’s explanation of deconstruction as it pertains to justice. Because justice is the interpretation, and not the rule itself, “justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible.” The statement that “justice is not deconstructible,” which is joined with the further assertion that “deconstruction is justice,” is ultimately pivotal for understanding Derrida’s position. A position, which, I must tell you up front, I don’t share.

Derrida explains that “deconstruction is not possible” without “[t]his moment of suspense, this period of epoche,” which “is always full of anxiety.” But rather an indication that the deconstructive way of acting/thinking can be a harmful one, this anxiety, according to Derrida, is an indication of deconstruction’s merit, for “who will claim to be just by economizing on anxiety?” However, a significant number of readers and audiences have disagreed, have refused the prescription of anxiety. Instead, they wonder whether this technique might, at times, be more neurotic than necessary. To find such an audience, look up the recordings of Derrida’s public lectures, particularly his later lectures on forgiveness and on archives. You will encounter a common event: a young, likely a graduate, student, expresses exasperation with Derrida, with his exhortation of uncertainty, of relentless memory and research, his definition of forgiveness as something ineffable.

As I have said previously, “Arguing that the original cannot be transported without deformity can give one license to say brusquely, without explanation, ‘go to the original.'” And such exasperated post-lecture comments make me think that I am not alone in feeling that many of Derrida’s writings/lectures function, at times, better as syllabi–as lists of possible readings–than as close examinations filled with explanations for one’s opinions.

Interestingly, the more senior professors, who invited Derrida, tend not to appear as frustrated, are more often pleased with Derrida’s statements. Is it only, therefore, that the young people do not get it–that they still need further reading and experience before they can appreciate the wonder that is Derrida? Why do these more senior intellectuals seem so appeased by the exhortation that there is the need for further memory, for further scrutiny?

We might understand this phenomenon by postulating that Derrida’s function as a critic is to always show how much is unknown, which is a joy to those professors who fear they know everything, and is a terror to those advanced students who fear that they might know nothing. We might be generous to Derrida if we say that instilling anxiety, a need for further research–in a population that has devoted themselves to constant questioning, has claimed the social function as knowledge -seekers and -possessors–is not a severe crime. But prescribing an atmosphere of uncertainty, an atmosphere which is only enhanced by Derrida’s own intentionally cryptic modes of self-presentation, can also serve the sociological function of making academics, of making philosophers, necessary.

When Derrida writes that “a thinking that knows there is no justesse, no justice, no responsibility except in exposing oneself to all risks, beyond certitude and good conscience,” I can understand him better. It recalls, to my mind, Nietzsche’s claim in The Use and Abuse of History for Life that “it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting,” because “[t]here is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.”

In other words, it does not seem feasible to suggest that “justice is undeconstructible” while maintaining that there is “no justice” “except in exposing oneself to all risks, beyond certitude and good conscience.” Justice then is deconstructible, if we take this to mean that deconstruction may interfere with justice; if deconstruction is a very careful and well-researched form of reading/questioning, and there is an inherent urgency, then one cannot always wait to act with “certitude and good conscience.” After all, doesn’t questioning the history and meaning of every term, of denying or postponing the figure of woman, interfere with medical knowledge, with biology, with healing the sick? Indeed, when Derrida writes on how forgiveness can never be justified according to reason, how the secret may have the right to remain secret, or how there are autoimmune dangers inherent to any system of immunity, it seems that Derrida prescribes forgetting, suggests that forgetting is a part of acting justly.

At times I grow easily frustrated when reading Derrida, whom I regard as having genuine insights, as being well-read, but who is perhaps arrogant in his presentation: “deconstruction [which is what Derrida calls his philosophy and his method of practicing philosophy] is justice.” I especially feel that Derrida does not adequately care for how his audience is to receive his writing. A common example: he exchanges his beginnings for endings, introduces terms before he attempts to define them. I think that this specific formal error, which is quite common in everyday interactions, but which can be corrected when one has the capacity to re-vise, to edit after the fact, is exemplary for the problems of Derrida’s far too voluminous prose.

It may be that Derrida does not edit himself in order to demonstrate fallibility, to show the specific ways that the psyche writes, the dream-work–that he does not edit himself because he believes that every mistake is worthy of analysis, every act of forgetting, including: “I have forgot my umbrella.” But it is also true that the lack of editing makes him accessible only to a few, a coterie. We see this particularly in Archive Fever, where there are competing meanings/interpretations that Derrida does not seek to denote or explain.

If we read only the title of the lecture Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, we might understand Derrida to be criticizing the fad of archives, the manic fever which allows archives to superfluously proliferate; we might also understand Derrida’s function as a critic if we remember that this lecture was delivered on the occasion of Freud’s own archive, before a bunch of Freudians. He is saying: why is this guy the authority, and how much time are we going to devote to him? The subtitle’s impression even carries with it what we have already seen in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” where all psychic writing is ultimately impressionistic, indefinite and prone to fading. In psychoanalytic terminology, the person who inadequately mourns the lost object suffers from a death drive, has to ritualistically repeat the past as a way to make sense of it. So we might take Derrida to be saying that Freudians are suffering because they can’t move on from their father-figure–because they still understand the past as a past-present that can be made present again, rather than as something truly passed.

But we already know that Derrida is not saying that we should give up on what is passed, beyond our recollection. Instead, he asks whether it is “possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?” Indeed, Derrida seems to directly address the anti-archival interpretation, seems to revoke this possible mistranslation entirely, when he explains what “Archive Fever” means in his French terms: mal d’archive. “We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute ‘en mal de,’ to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun ‘mal’ might name. It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no ‘mal-de’ can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archiv.”

If we are en mal d’archive, the issue is therefore taken to be that we do not remember enough, not that we try to remember too much; we are blamed not for enshrining authorities in stone, but for not having enough archives. Aspects of this interpretation seem both absolutely in line with Derrida’s expressed thought and also totally against values expressed elsewhere.

The lack of resolution has something to do with what we have been saying about trace as either a static mark or as a movement. Throughout this essay, I have already tried to show the problems inherent to Derrida’s privileging of a trace as movement to a trace as static entity, of a broad/cloudy field to a sharp/clear point, a privileging which may be inherent to Derrida’s reluctance to ever acknowledge “the presence of the present.” The static mark, the isolated form with bounded contours, keeps returning. When he refers, in Archive Fever, to the oneness of the one, the unicity of an event, it seems impossible to avoid a certain notion of the present as a kind of atomized, fleeting temporality: “The One as the Other. At once, at the same time, but in a same time which is out of joint, the One forgets to remember itself to itself, it keeps and erases the archive of this injustice that it is.” To retain otherness as difference or uniqueness/unicity, Derrida may become beholden to oneness; however, he attempts to resist oneness, or at least a simplified monism, by stating that “the one as the other” does not occur immediately or presently “but in a same time which is out of joint.”

Derrida describes this conflict in a footnote, “At the end of this lecture, not without irony, I imagine, with as much depth as astonishment but, as always, with an intractable lucidity, Geoffrey Bennington remarked to me that by underlining, and first by bringing into play, such an untranslatability, I risked repeating the gesture I seemed to put into question in the hands of the other, namely, the affirmation of the unique or of the idiom.” It may be that Bennington and Derrida are discussing the question of nationalism and language, the problematic nationalism of declaring that [my words] “this concept can only be read in French/German/English: my unique idiom is untranslatable.” Previous writings, especially those on Heidegger, have noted the dangers of linguistic nationalism.

However, it is also true that this debate between the idiom/unique and the translatable carries a temporal key, where if something is “untranslatable” it exists in one space and time alone, is trapped within that unique idiom. We are encountering the difficulty where the idiom is used to refer to idiomatic speech, which marks the inability of understanding of some Other group, and idiosyncratic speech, which references a specific person’s, or group’s, capacity for self-understanding across time. At times, the idiom is deployed to demonstrate diachrony; at others, synchrony.

Notably, in Derrida’s earlier lecture “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the idiom is used in the latter register, as representing a specific person’s, or group’s, capacity for self-understanding across time. As we have already seen, Derrida affirms the idiomaticity of dreams, their understanding through repetition: each “dreamer invents his [sic] own grammar,” because “‘repetition’ alone, institutes translatability, makes possible what we call ‘language,’ transforms an absolute idiom into a limit which is always already transgressed: a pure idiom is not language; it becomes so only through repetition.” In “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida takes translatability to be equivalent to the “presence of the present,” the capacity to bring any unconscious event into consciousness, any past-present into a present. For this reason, he feels the need to assure that the repetition of dreams does not make them translatable; he, perhaps nervously, defended that “[i]n spite of appearances, this does not contradict what we said earlier about untranslatability.”

In the address to Bennington, the exact opposite is at work. This time, instead of translatability, it is untranslatability that represents the “presence of the present” because it demonstrates the nationalist’s belief that his native language offers “the proximate, the own, and the pre- of presence.” There are times when Derrida supports singularity as requisite for the other person’s ability to be totally separate from me, for the past or future to be totally separate from the present; and then there are others when Derrida suspects singularity for sneaking in an identity, a transportable “kernel of truth,” which can be brought to any person in any time. (In “Me–Psychoanalysis” Derrida provides a lengthy investigation that explains his suspicions of the phrase “kernel of truth” as it pertains to psychoanalysis.) Instead of resolving this tension, Derrida leaves it as a possible “irony.”

Derrida tries to counteract a certain misinterpretation, an interpretation which perhaps he himself finds tempting. To separate the legitimate from the illegitimate readings, he knights his student, Geoffrey Bennington, as a kind of authentic reader/interpreter. He never explains the “history and code” that he “alone know[s],” and I find myself reminded of the claim that each “dreamer invents his [sic] own grammar.” Because these dreams are only explicable to an audience of analyst and analysand, public speech may proscribe meaningful communication. Perhaps we are better off interpreting only ourselves, or only a few friends. This is the problem with philosophy, including deconstruction, which advocates for the detailed analysis of a few authors’ written texts, and limits what may be deemed acceptable evidence, beyond a few authorities.

I read Derrida’s claim that Bennington made his remark “not without irony,” and am left to wonder what precisely the two mean by “irony.” This “irony” is ever more important because Derrida justifies his choice, his claim that there is a unicity/oneness without a requisite presence of the present, a unique idiom, by stating–and this is addressed directly to Bennington, “Let us say at last that I wanted to exercise, in another political gesture, my own right to irony and, exposing myself to it thus in my language, to give an example of this fatal necessity and of its risks.”

What do such men as Jeff and Jack discuss in their own private quarters?

To be continued…