“Indeed, Derrida closes his Truth in Painting with a series of associations that evoke fidelity, lacing, commitment, binding, and restriction–so maybe it’s all tied together.”
Maybe. But part of what I am attempting to do is resist the temptation of those literary, “maybe” moments, those moments when an authorial voice dissolves into something called polysemy or poetry, when one does not quite know what one has in mind, even as one thinks one knows that there is an ineffable something being said.
So why, exactly, does Derrida use these themes of binding and stricture, throughout the later essays of The Truth in Painting?
Well, the first, too easy, answer is that Derrida himself does not know: “How to classify all the uses of these cords, all the senses in which they take or let themselves be taken? Their supple network [filet] structure puts you to the test. But not before already having shut you into a labyrinth. So many thongs, so many leashes. Too much to say here, I give up.” “They describe in advance all the movements by which your description might attempt to grasp hold of them and get its hands on them. In vain would I try to typify, by their economy, the discourses I’m getting caught up in here, and which I’ve been getting caught up in elsewhere for a while.”
So it appears that Derrida uses the logic of threads–of pulling, attaching, driving–to evoke the impulse of desire, as well as desire’s inescapable “labyrinth”, where one cannot quite put one’s finger on what it is one wants: “caught up” “too much to say here.” Specifically, Derrida refers to that “too much to say” as the “double bind”, where the phrase “double bind” will come to represent the need to translate, even as translation remains impossible. “Attraction/repulsion of the same object. Double bind.”
But it is also true that the theme of threads comes to replace, in the later essays of The Truth in Painting, the theme of cutting that occupies the earlier essays. It is as if, as he gives up on identifying the frame that divides work from context, Derrida simultaneously moves away from focusing on the line of separation, on the cut. It is possible that Derrida’s initial attraction to the figure of the cut was due to the way that cuts represent discontinuity, a discontinuity that Derrida had privileged in his famous critique of structuralism, the essay “Structure, Sign and Play.” That essay begins: “[p]erhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structurality—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term ‘event’ anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.” Indeed, the essay hinges on the capacity of the event to rupture, an e-vent that he later refers to as the a-venir, the to-come of unpredictable change, which renders structural modes of defining and predicting human behavior useless–hence the birth of post-structuralism: “Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing, but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”
Then, throughout the essays of The Truth in Painting, Derrida begins to distrust the cut, the taille of the trait or frame, as yet another way of creating limits, of de-fining, of finding the predictable structure of an object. “And then these laces, pre-cisely [hyphen mine], these loosened bonds do not seem to me to play in a logic of the cut. Rather in the logic of stricture, in the interlacing of differance of (or as) stricture. The loosening of the laces is not absolute, it does not absolve, unbind, cut. It keeps an organized stricture. Not a more or less of stricture but a determined (structured) form of stricture: of the outside and the inside, the underneath and the top. The logic of detachment as cut leads to opposition, it is a logic or even a dialectic of opposition. I have shown elsewhere that it has the effect of sublating difference. And thus of suturing. The logic of detachment as stricture is entirely other. Deferring: it never sutures. Here it permits us to take account of this fact: that these shoes are neither attached nor detached, neither full nor empty. A double bind is here as though suspended and imposed simultaneously, a double bind which I shall not here attempt to attach strictly to another discourse on the double bind.”
So it remains key here that the bind of the stricture is not merely a repeat of structuralism. Stricture introduces a theme of tension; it is as if one found oneself at the center of a taut thread. The tension in the thread indicates that there are opposed poles, but one’s place within the thread does not give one a sense of their location. Indeed, the location is both “suspended and imposed simultaneously”, insofar as the imposed urgency of desire makes the taut poles’ presence felt, even as the tension requires that the culminating thread of one’s desire is suspended, at a distance, from poles elsewhere. The threads are pulled and one begins to spin within the knot, disoriented, unaware of where one is going. The end is not in sight; one is knotted helplessly: “[t]he loosening of the laces is not absolute”.
“Tight interlacing, but one which can always be analyzed, untied up to a certain point. Like a lace, each ‘thing,’ each mode of being of the thing, passes inside then outside the other. From right to left, from left to right. We shall articulate this strophe of the lace: in its rewinding passing and repassing through the eyelet of the thing, from outside to inside, from inside to outside, on the external surface and under the internal surface (and vice versa when this surface is turned inside out like the top of the left-hand shoe), it remains the ‘same’ right through, between right and left, shows itself and disappears (fort/da) in its regular traversing of the eyelet, it makes the thing sure of its gathering, the underneath tied up on top, the inside bound on the outside, by a law of stricture. Hard and flexible at one and the same time”.
And so the strophe, which might recall us to boustrophedonic reading, allows Derrida to play with the non-locative aspect of a lace, a lace that moves forward and backward, left and right, inside and out–all to avoid a too hasty “dialectic of opposition.” And why? Well, stricture is always ambivalent, has both values, because “[a]ny stricture is simultaneously stricturation and destricturation.” All this because to be pulled toward is to be pulled away, as a movement away is always a movement toward. It seems that binding is not simply a way of limiting, of keeping in constraint, but is rather liberating, in much the same way that a sling can give flight to its missile.
In the much later essay, Rogues, Derrida will again re-affirm the non-dialectic nature of the double bind, because “though aporia, double bind, and autoimmune process are not exactly synonyms, what they have in common, what they are all, precisely, charged with, IS, more than an internal contradiction, an indecidability, that is, an internal-external, nondialectizable antinomy that risks paralyzing and thus calls for the event of the interruptive decision”.
In the later essay, Derrida intends to say that his early analyses–of such a placid activity as writing, as occurred in Grammatology, and of the leisure class’s aesthetic production, in The Truth in Painting–were always motivated by a sense of duty towards others, perhaps all others, a political and ethical necessity. “[T]here never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been claimed, a political turn or ethical turn in ‘deconstruction,’ at least not as I experience it. The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of differance and the thinking of differance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double bind of the democratic”.
Though the later essay Rogues denies a substantial shift, or turning, in Derrida’s thought, it is fair to note that there are certain tonal and conceptual differences between Derrida’s early and later thought, even as the thinking of difference remains vital to either the deconstruction of writing or the ethical relation to the other: whether one is ethical by means of being hospitable, amicable, forgiving, democratic–or any other name that refers to when one stands at a respectful distance, aware of the other’s difference.
One way of identifying Derrida’s “ethical” shift is to analyze how the theme of binding changes in his thought: first evoking a phenomenology of desire in The Truth in Painting, then evoking the troubled existence caused by always-already opposed and simultaneous ethical injunctions, as well as the opacities of intersubjective relationships. To be fair to his claim of constancy, one must acknowledge that Derrida was aware, early in his career, of the impossibility of negotiating what are life’s always-already simultaneous injunctions. “Cogito and the History of Madness” begins with the epigraph from Kierkegaard: “The Instant of Decision is Madness”.
Similarly, the early essay, “Violence and Metaphysics”, an elaborate review of Levinas’s project of ethics, suggests that the impossibilities of understanding will always generate violence: “we only wish to foreshadow that within history–but is it meaningful elsewhere?–every philosophy of non violence can only choose the lesser violence within an economy of violence”. Importantly, Derrida’s explanation for the impossibility of non-violence does not yet use the language of binding or stricture. Instead, Derrida explains that history necessitates violence. If time, as history, is coeval with violence, then it seems that violence is another name for death, loss through time. And time makes asses of us all, makes translation impossible, so that “only in its silent origin, before Being, would language be nonviolent.” “But why history?…Because if one does not uproot the silent origin from itself violently, if one decides not to speak, then the worst violence will silently cohabit the idea of peace? Peace is made only in a certain silence, which is determined and protected by the violence of speech. Since speech says nothing other than the horizon of this silent peace by which it has itself summoned and that it is its mission to protect and to prepare, speech indefinitely remains silent.
One never escapes the economy of war. It is evident that to separate the original possibility of speech–as non-violence and gift–from the violence necessary in historical actuality is to prop up thought by means of transhistoricity. Which Levinas does explicitly, despite his initial critique of Husserlian ‘anhistoricism.’ For Levinas, the origin of meaning is nonhistory, is ‘beyond history.’ ”
It is worth noting how, in this early essay, Derrida regards language as a “gift”, a term that will come to occupy much of his later work, including The Gift of Death. Worth noting, also, is the way that Derrida attempts to use Levinas to hold onto a notion of synchronicity (perhaps we could call this the limited constancy of the trace), a continuity through time which is a sort of “transhistory” insofar as meaning is “beyond history”–even as he, with Levinas, critiques Husserlian ‘anhistoricism.’
After Levinas’s death, Derrida will continue to explore the themes that were made manifest as early as “Violence and Metaphysics”, but this re-vision becomes haunted by words pertaining to threads, knots and tangles: “Since the transcendence of discourse is not transcendence itself, this creates a tangle that is difficult to undo. Certain threads go at once further and less far than others. Just as with architectonics, an objective topology would remain powerless to sketch out the lines, surfaces, and volume, the angles and cornerstones. It would seek in vain to make out the lines of demarcation, to measure the distances….But all the threads undeniably pass through the knot of hospitality. There they are tied together”. Knotting, here, comes to represent the rejection of an “objective topology” that would attempt to “make out the lines of demarcation”. It seems, then, that the rejection of the cut that occurs in The Truth in Painting is at play in this later reading of Levinas, and one that explicitly uses the language of stricture.
Additionally, one hears an affinity between Levinas and Derrida, where both want to agree that meaning (or signification) occurs, even as both want to critique how commonly people take meaning for granted under such headings as the transcendental, a-historical, eternal, or essential–the result is a limited constancy of the trace, which creates a “transcendence of discourse [which] is not transcendence itself”.
It is in this state of mind, occupied with the death of Levinas, that Derrida defines the double-bind as the injunction to speak despite the fallibility of language, a kind of perjury: “Though Levinas never puts it in these terms, I will risk pointing out the necessity of this double bind in what follows from the axioms established or recalled by Levinas: if the face to face with the unique engages the infinite ethics of my responsibility for the other in a sort of oath before the letter, an unconditional respect or fidelity, then the ineluctable emergence of the third, and, with it, of justice, would signal an initial perjury [paryure]. Silent, passive, painful, but inevitable, such perjury is not accidental and secondary, but is as originary as the experience of the face. Justice would begin with this perjury. (Or at least justice as law; even if justice remains transcendent or heterogeneous to law, these two concepts must not be dissociated: justice demands law, and law does not wait any more than does the illeity of the third in the face. When Levinas says ‘justice,’ we are also authorized to hear ‘law,’ it seems to me. Law [droit] would begin with such a perjury; it would betray ethical uprightness [droiture].)”
Derrida has already, in the earlier Gift of Death, which perhaps foreshadows Levinas’s death and Derrida’s eventual mourning, tied singularity to the inevitability of death; if something occurs, uniquely, or secretly, then it dies. Mourning is meaningful only in relation to death, so mourning is inherently tied to unicity. In other words, the singular event that demands explanation from me imposes a “[d]uty or responsibility [which] binds me to the other, to the other as other, and ties me in my absolute singularity to the other as other.” Derrida explains that, in Levinas’s philosophy, “God is the name of the absolute other as other and as unique (the God of Abraham defined as the one and unique). As soon as I enter into a relation with the absolute other, my absolute singularity enters into relation with his on the level of obligation and duty. I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice.” Unicity demands absolute sacrifice because if each event could be wholly different from its precedent, then there is a chance that my translation is completely different from what it attempts to translate, that it thereby annihilates its intended recipient.
While I have here applied the theme of unicity to the contents of one’s message, unicity applies, also, to one’s audience–i.e. one must pick one, and only one, addressee: “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], everyone else is completely or wholly other. The simple concepts of alterity and of singularity constitute the concept of duty as much as that of responsibility. As a result, the concepts of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia”.
As he explores the theme of (double-)binding, which he has already begun to call an aporia, Derrida’s later tone is much more anxious, more guilt-ridden (indeed, he even calls it apocalyptic): “As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.” A guilt that perhaps originates in the experience of mourning: “Levinas indeed speaks of the survivor’s guilt, but it is a guilt without fault and without debt; it is, in truth, an entrusted responsibility, entrusted in a moment of unparalleled emotion, at the moment when death remains the absolute ex-ception”.
The unicity which applies to the singularity of one’s message, or to the solitude of one’s addressee, may also be applied to the limitation of oneself as the Other‘s audience. That one, alone, perceives the Other may evoke the kind of guilt one feels when one loves an under-appreciated hero: I hear Derrida, called to testify in memory of Levinas, burdened with the knowledge that, out of those in his audience, “[e]very gesture of [the living Levinas] was a sign addressed to [him],” to him alone.
“Someone who expresses himself in his nakedness–the face–is in fact one to the extent that he calls upon me, to the extent that he places himself under my responsibility: I must already answer for him, be responsible for him. Every gesture of the Other was a sign addressed to me. To return to the classification sketched out above: to show oneself, to express oneself, to associate oneself, to be entrusted to me. The Other who expresses himself is entrusted to me…The Other individuates me in my responsibility for him. The death of the Other affects me in my very identity as a responsible I … made up of unspeakable responsibility. This is how I am affected by the death of the Other, this is my relation to his death. It is, in my relation, my deference toward someone who no longer responds, already a guilt of the survivor”.
We may therefore identify Derrida as, during this period, feeling an utmost faith that something of great value was being produced in the private communications between philosophers, even as he felt a need to make those communications accessible to other people who would encounter them after they had already taken place, even as he felt inadequately capable of making them receivable to those beyond his milieu. And, as a result, there is a marked difference in his mode of address, a more autobiographical tone replete with worldly events, a style of address that is perhaps induced by a greater desire to be accessible, to reach a wider range of others.
“By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speaking here in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for the so-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space), thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, everyone being sacrificed to everyone else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.”
In this tracing, tracing specifically the theme of binding as it pertains to ethics, I am trying to suggest that there is a kind of iterative loss that occurs in Derrida’s work. This iterative loss is likely caused by Derrida’s lack of conscious self-gathering; he is opaque even to himself: “Too much to say here, I give up.” Everyone loses the plot, but the use of deconstruction, as I see it, is to try to combat this self-loss. The theme of binding in The Truth in Painting arises, first, from a desire to think of visual stimuli, the way eyes move to generate these stimuli, and the way that, in this movement, they separate meaningful stimuli from extraneous ones. The later use of binding, as a buzzword for describing impossible tasks, allows Derrida to use the language of aporia, of placelessness, in a way that forgets or omits his original visual interest.
And I want to further suggest that there is a way that the knot is an inevitable metaphor for anyone who wants to discuss the difficulties of visual tracing, particularly when two-dimensional reticulations–boustrophedons or labyrinths–have grown tiresome, and one wants a three-dimensional metaphor. As three-dimensional entities, knots can represent the way that even a flat object (because a string is an at least relatively flat object) can form complexities in another dimension; and so knots are therefore useful for describing a temporal experience, and/or an experience of language, where one’s capacities for consciousness, the thread, are of a smaller dimension than one’s being in the world, the knot. The knot is a temporal puzzle as much as it is spatial: one keeps turning the knot around to make sense of it, but one only ever sees a single cross-section at a time, and the vast majority of us fail to keep an idea of the whole in mind.
And we might further see the possible uses of knots as metaphor, when we compare Derrida’s use of knots to Levinas’s. In Levinas’s philosophy, one finds that a supposedly proper relationship to knots comes to represent the arduous task of simultaneously acknowledging complexity and reducing it. But how exactly does Levinas use these themes of threads, knots, tangles?
Well, for him, the visual aspect of these tangles is inseparable from their ethical valence: “the experience of morality does not proceed from this vision–it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision…” So one has to see something, without ever seeing all of something. The way that one can see a ball of yarn without ever really being able to see all of its topological composition would therefore be a useful analogue. And, indeed, Levinas spins a yarn, describes the way that truth is something woven.
Levinas asks: “Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very movement in which the bonds with truth are woven?” [L’appréhension d’un objet, équivaut-elle à la trame même où se tissent les liens avec la vérité?] Then, he answers no, and explains that the fact that apprehension is not equivalent to truth “means, first of all, that peace does not take place in the objective history disclosed by war, as the end of that war or as the end of history.”
Morality is a kind of memory, of tracing and re-tracing: “To philosophize is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary. Knowledge as a critique, as a tracing back to what precedes freedom, can arise only in a being that has an origin prior to its origin–that is created.” “[Knowledge’s] prerogative consists in being able to put itself in question, in penetrating beneath its own condition.” “I cannot disentangle myself from society with the Other…”…”[so this tangled] knot of subjectivity consists in going to the other without concerning oneself with his movement toward me”. “[The self] is bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others.”
War is a state of pure, imposed presence, an “objective history” that shrinks temporal horizons and therefore suspends proper morality, which is mindful, memorious, of others: “The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives…Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete.” “[The State] does not untie knots, but cuts them.”
The moment of de-cision, of knowledge’s assertion, is therefore–for both Derrida and Levinas–a cut. And this cut is a violence. It is reductionist; much less than the proper, integrated whole. But, I want to suggest, this approach to conceptual clarity is problematic. If you first see a knot, then, when I present you with the formerly tangled thread, now a single line, you are free to argue that I must have done something to it, that I simply cut the thread. The very knottiness of the knot, its non-visualizable topology, means that you cannot determine or estimate the length of the thread from first sight. It therefore remains a possibility that the philosopher, here given the name Derrida or Levinas, will make the work of untying interminable, because he requests the untangled thread even as he will accept only a knot.
In other words, I am addressing here the persistence of the psychological double-bind, as defined by Gregory Bateson, into the institutions of power that pervade humanities and philosophy departments, or master/student relationships more generally. Bateson argued that mental illness is, or can be, begotten by environments, that people can be made crazy by their tormentors. Among my small milieu of counselors, we do not use the term “crazy” to describe people or behaviors, but we do use the term “crazy-making” to describe torturous experiences, to validate why someone might feel confused or helpless within a specific scenario.
What we call “crazy-making”, Bateson defined, more academically, as a “double-bind”. In the “double-bind” scenario, people become unable to understand their worlds because they try to meet the requests of a loved or feared person, and are continuously told that, despite all reason, their attempts were failures. Put into a more worldly example, the double-bind may be imposed when I ask you to bring me a cake, and additionally request that you taste it first so that you know it is a good one; then, when you bring me a cake, with a slice removed, I will say it is unacceptable, for you have brought me a partial cake. You were never in a position to meet both of my demands; I will never directly state or address the impossibility, which is often less obvious than in my chosen example.
The “double-bind” is like “gaslighting” in that it may be regarded as emotionally abusive, leaving victims to distrust their judgments and their perceptions. As is the case for gaslighting, intention is not required for behavior to be abusive, for the person to create a double-bind. It may simply be that abusers do not know what they want to the point that they are continually dissatisfied, and their dissatisfaction never arises as enough of a cognitive problem for them to address it on their own.
Victims of the “double-bind” have to deny their own perceptions and judgments in order to believe in the possibility of successfully appeasing others. This denial serves a function in survival: it is a means to retain a sense of agency while remaining attached to the abusive loved object; or, the very power structures involved may make the feared tormentor inescapable, which makes the Sisyphean task of pleasing the tormentor necessary. This latter fear may become love, insofar as we feel greater freedom, greater autonomy, when pained by love than by fear. In Bateson’s case, the double-bind was influenced by the postwar crisis of schizophrenia among veterans, who were continuously ordered to do the impossible. The similarities between the “double-bind” and the “Catch-22” are therefore historically and institutionally relevant.
So, to bring this discussion of double-binds back to philosophers of absence and the problem of knottiness, it may be possible that the philosopher does not want to want what he wants, and does not want what he wants to be immanently knowable, and therefore rejects anything that is proposed as insufficient. There is at hand a certain amount of refusal to name one’s desire, such that one is free to create a double-bind without acknowledging it. The untangled thread may always be a cut strip of the real knot. The power imbalance of the university makes it such that the evaluator may forever reject the student’s propositions, at least within the work of humanities and theory, while students lack any external criteria with which to verify the value of their efforts. So, it becomes contingent on the student to name what the master wants, even if the master does not know. To become or remain a devoted student is therefore to doom oneself in the expectation that the Other’s unspoken greatness will be revealed.
Although, to give Derrida and Levinas a little bit of credit–where are the people who know what they want? Where, even, are the people who know what they know? Anyone who risks venturing for the ineffable thing called beauty, justice or truth may therefore risk falling for an institutional double-bind, even as we would want to retain hope that the search for such ineffable valuables–a search which is stuck making use of this troublesome thing called language–would be worth supporting.
Despite how far we have come, thinking of the knot in these terms addresses only some facets of its power as metaphor. To find others, we can look to Levinas’s claim that “[t]he interpretations of the discourse found again and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like the knots in a thread tied again, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity.” I can imagine, as Levinas seems to, a person tying knots, lost in thought, absent-mindedly braiding, with only the number of knots as proof of the passage of time. These knots, while they serve as a measure of time’s passing, cannot offer the weaver any capacity to return to lost thought, thereby forming “the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present”. But how exactly does such a process relate to the “immanence of the said”?
One possibility is that the passage refers to Jewish ritual practice. Perhaps Levinas believed that Talmudic exegesis is a form of entering relation with divinity, such that, when actively confronting and interpreting holy texts, one achieved a meaningful “immanence of the said”, particularly as a yeshiva makes use of the spoken performance of a text. This meaning is destined to fade, leaving behind only the text, “the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity.” If the knots that Levinas has in mind are the tzitzit, the customary braids on the corners of a prayer shawl, a tallith, then it might be easier to bridge the process of knot-making and a prayerful “immanence of the said”. Assuming, of course, that for Levinas the handling of the tallith is a prayerful, meditative activity.
At the same time, I fear that I am pigeonholing Levinas, in my assumption that this passage from Totality and Infinity owes a particular relationship to Judaism, or at least his Judaism. (And there are historical reasons to suspect that Levinas’s idea of Judaism is idiosyncratic; we might further wonder if any idea of any religion–or supposedly contained system of thought–would be more idiosyncratic than one realizes.) I know neither whether the production of the tallith is a prayerful activity, nor if Levinas imagines that the production of the tallith could be prayerful. But, to some extent, I am not reliant on these facts being the case, because I am not presenting this reading to you as an accurate reading; rather, I want you to be able to use this reading of the knot as tzitzit as an example of what is entailed in the process of reading, how worldly analogues are crafted in even the most metaphysical propositions, and it is up to us, as interpreters and recipients of metaphysical propositions, to turn them back into worldly analogues.
Writers may be drawn to analogues or metaphors for reasons that far exceed their conscious awareness, and this is why I am cautious “to resist the temptation of those literary, ‘maybe’ moments, those moments when an authorial voice dissolves into something called polysemy or poetry, when one does not quite know what one has in mind, even as one thinks one knows that there is an ineffable something being said.” At the same time, the impossibility of ever knowing what Levinas means in this statement may be taken as exemplary for how philosophical discourse often imposes a double-bind, and it may be possible–through more careful and conscientious prose–to avoid doing so.
Still, it remains possible to analyze how a metaphor is effective, even when we do not understand, definitively, a person’s internal or historical experience. It is possible to turn what is either Levinas’s personal qualia or a specific cultural milieu’s understanding back into a worldly analogue. The knot remains, so we could extend this analysis of “knots” that retain “the trace of a diachrony” beyond specifically Jewish ritual practice, and think about how rosaries or prayer-beads in various spiritual traditions deploy knots as a means of grasping time. Or we could generalize, from knots as knots rather than just as objects of prayer, to discover that knotting is at play in any effort of conservation, which is why knots are so nautical–we need something to keep our ships at harbor. And it is this diachrony–this diachrony that refuses simultaneity, this knot that refuses to be undone–which gives one access to transcendence, by means of a continuity, a trace.
Although, even as I disregard my reading of the knot as tzitzit as possibly or probably inaccurate, there are remarkable parallels between Levinas’s presentation of ethical life in Totality and Infinity, as explained above, and his earlier essay on “Being Jewish”. It may even be that Levinas regards the tzitzit as an indecipherable practice, but a necessary practice nonetheless; one that establishes Jewishness as a diachrony that cannot ultimately be spoken, that cannot but remain “the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity”; the very requirement to have such knots publicly displayed for Jewish prayer means that non-knowledge becomes a point of focus for Jewish spiritual practice. Indeed, in “Being Jewish”, Levinas uses knots to represent a Jewish temporality.
“[E]veryday life is essentially a present: to have to deal with the immediate, to introduce oneself into time not by moving through the entire line of the past but all at once, to ignore history. And if the immediate is related to a past, this past in its turn takes on air of the present. Always limited, it is arbitrarily detached from a more distant past. To be in the present is to treat the world, to treat ourselves, as we treat the people around us whose biographies we do not know, who, torn from their family, from their social circle, from their interior, are all ‘of an unknown father,’ abstract in some way, but who for precisely this reason, are given immediately. Hence, the relation with being in everyday life is action. It is like Alexander’s sword, which does not unknot knots, which does not redo the knotting motions in reverse, but which slices. Or it is vision–instantaneous relation–the fact of cutting out a piece within reality; of describing the limits of the horizon; ignorance of the rest, disinterest in the whole.”
The importance here is that Levinas’s engagement with the myth of Alexander and the Gordian knot comes to represent, in Totality and Infinity, the unethical relationship par excellence: “Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete.” “[The State] does not untie knots, but cuts them.” The Jewish son, as opposed to Alexander the Impatient, diligently remembers his history, and therefore works to untie it: “Jewish existence refers to a privileged instant of the past and the Jew’s absolute position within being is guaranteed him by his filiality”.
There then arises a complicity between this metaphor of the knot and Levinas’s concept of the face, where both are immanently accessible, even as they evoke a transcendence, a past that cannot be seen: “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. For a face is the unique openness in which the signifyingness of the transcendent does not nullify the transcendence and make it enter into an immanent order; here on the contrary transcendence refuses immanence precisely as the ever bygone transcendence of the transcendent.” If we remember that this is the passage that Derrida cites when, in Of Grammatology, he defines the “trace”, then we might understand the knot as playing a role in both Derrida’s and Levinas’s philosophies as an analogue for a visual experience that is simultaneously present and absent, immanent and transcendent.
However, to end here would mean cutting the knot short. While the knot could mean the complexity of the object that is visually perceived, the knot is also used to refer to the complexity of the subject position itself, where subject and object are knotted together. In Totality and Infinity, we have already seen that Levinas expresses the subject position in an implicated way: “I cannot disentangle myself from society with the Other…”…”[so this tangled] knot of subjectivity consists in going to the other without concerning oneself with his movement toward me”. “[The self] is bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others.” These same themes resurface in Levinas’s later series of essays Difficult Freedom, which bears as its subtitle: Essays on Judaism. So, clearly, throughout Levinas’s thought, this effortful searching for one’s origins is a central part of being Jewish, and of being a free, ethical being.
Difficult Freedom leads us to further consideration for the metaphor of the knot, particularly the essay “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” where the “us” may be taken to be, or what Levinas imagines to be, a Jewish readership. There, Levinas tries to identify and separate himself from the position of Heidegger’s later writings, those on aletheia (often translated as “unconcealedness”) and against technology; writings which often place a strange emphasis on agrarian life, particularly that of a German peasant. According to Levinas, Heidegger and the Heideggerians are overly fearful of technology, because they place a heavy value on the human being’s attachment to a place and its organic production; they suppose that technology alienates one from one’s natural setting. Levinas then suggests that the Jewish perspective is inherently against such an overvaluation of “Place”, such an overemphasis on rootedness; the Biblical emphasis on the Exile from Eden means that the Jewish attitude is always ready and able “[t]o destroy the sacred groves.”
Levinas therefore uses Yuri Gagarin’s majestic flight, as the first man into space, as an example for a shared, human condition of exploration and exile: “What is admirable about Gagarin’s feat is certainly not his magnificent performance at Luna Park which impresses the crowds; it is not the sporting achievement of having gone further than the others and broken the world records for height and speed.” It is not merely speed, because patience is a virtue: the faith in technology’s capacity to liberate humanity “is not placed in the facilities that machines and the new sources of energy offer the childish instinct for speed”. What matters in Gagarin’s rocket is the endurance, the collaboration and sacrifice, required to achieve the feat of an escape velocity: “[w]hat counts more is the probable opening up of new forms of knowledge and new technological possibilities, Gagarin’s personal courage and virtues, the science that made the feat possible, and everything which that in turn assumes in the way of abnegation and sacrifice.”
And then Levinas places particular emphasis on the kind of human being who could exist while foregoing comfortable tethers, in a kind of solitude, the difficult contemplation, the pure abstraction of a plan: “a geometrical space” an absolutely “homogeneous space”. “[W]hat perhaps counts most of all is that [Gagarin] left the Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon – everything around him was sky or, more exactly, everything was geometrical space. A man existed in the absolute of homogeneous space.”
Hannah Arendt, another Jewish student of Heidegger’s, but one who differs from Levinas in her response to Heidegger, reacts to Gagarin much differently. Arendt repeatedly refers–in Between Past and Future as well as The Human Condition–to the space race as an attempt to reach an impossible Archimedean point, a point from which human beings could reach final and total assessments on nature or life itself.
“All events were considered to be subject to a universally valid law in the fullest sense of the word, which means, among other things, valid beyond the reach of human sense experience (even of the sense experiences made with the help of the finest instruments), valid beyond the reach of human memory and the appearance of mankind on earth, valid even beyond the coming into existence of organic life and the earth herself. All laws of the new astrophysical science are formulated from the Archimedean point, and this point probably lies much farther away from the earth and exerts much more power over her than Archimedes or Galileo ever dared to think.”
“[T]he conquest of space, the search for a point outside the earth from which it would be possible to move, to unhinge, as it were, the planet itself, is no accidental result of the modern age’s science. This was from its very beginnings not a ‘natural’ but a universal science, it was not a physics but an astrophysics which looked upon the earth from a point in the universe. In terms of this development, the attempt to conquer space means that man hopes he will be able to journey to the Archimedean point which he anticipated by sheer force of abstraction and imagination. However, in doing so, he will necessarily lose his advantage. All he can find is the Archimedean point with respect to the earth, but once arrived there and having acquired this absolute power over his earthly habitat, he would need a new Archimedean point, and so ad infinitum. In other words, man can only get lost in the immensity of the universe, for the only true Archimedean point would be the absolute void behind the universe.”
Arendt describes modernization as a process of becoming increasingly disillusioned with reaching such a point; she quotes from Kafka, whose characters often achieve the impossible precisely at their moment of dissolution: “He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only on this condition.” Modern human beings (and physicists after relativity are central to Arendt’s argument) realize that their results are so deeply dependent on their own actions, on the methods of their own search, such that “[t]he modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.” A human being lost in space becomes a metaphor, in Arendt’s writing, for a sense of alienation and isolation that one undergoes as a result of living with uncertainty, an uncertainty that cannot be avoided in the modern age.
And Arendt’s analysis, in detecting that science or objectivity always desires or requires a distance between subject and object, would bring us to the other use of knots in contemporary theoretical discourse: “[i]t is in the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles [emphasis mine] himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him.” Whether termed “post-structuralism”, “post-modernism”, or “post-foundationalism”, contemporary epistemology often rejects positivism, on the basis that there is an inevitable “entanglement” between subject and object. In other words, positivism becomes impossible once one acknowledges how deeply tied one’s thoughts are with one’s experience, dependent on contingency as well as on one’s peers and environment. According to one “post-foundationalist” commentator, Anya Topolski, both Levinas and Arendt are taken to be exemplars for entanglement, which she gives the name “relationality”.
Even as Arendt’s analysis is entirely opposed to the optimism in Levinas’s evaluation of Gagarin, Arendt’s metaphor of the Archimedean point is remarkably parallel to Levinas’s claim that “[the self] is bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others.” In discussing Arendt’s similarities to, and divergences from, Levinas, it is perhaps worth making an additional note on the relationship between knots and “filiality”, given how Levinas places emphasis on this latter concept. While Levinas’s “Being Jewish” demonstrates his clear skepticism of Christian and existential writings, Arendt seems to more easily embrace them; she began her theoretical career with a doctoral dissertation on Augustine of Hippo, and did not distance herself from Heidegger in the same way that Levinas did. Instead, she supports an existential attitude where human beings create their own worlds, and bases this attitude on the fact of natality, specifically the Christian source Augustine: “that a beginning be made, man was created.”
It is precisely this notion of birth that Levinas distrusts in the Christian or existential discourse. In contrast to the “Jewish” attitude that values filiality, the Christian, particularly one in a “Kierkegaardian atmosphere” values birth in an abstract way: “salvation is wholly interior, is not realized with the very entry into being, with birth. It is to be found in the power of a new birth promised at each instant, in conversion, in the contact with grace.”
Levinas’s rhetoric seems to suggest that Christian attitudes are inadequately attentive to the actual event of birth–“the very entry into being”–in privileging the potential for change. But Arendt’s rhetoric of natality focuses precisely on this “entry into being”. In other words, Levinas’s idea of a real “birth” might connote an umbilical attachment between people of shared ancestry, whereas Arendt’s Christian/existential notion of natality emphasizes parturition, demarcates a separation, a novelty. The interesting (and this word is not accidental, for to be inter–ested is to be among others) thing is that both connection and dissipation occur simultaneously.
And I want here to draw our attention to the way that the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott expresses this relationship between separation and union–with both cultural and parental connotations–in Playing and Reality. Winnicott believes that cultural production arises from play, which is a transitional phenomenon between reality and imagination, “without being certain that [he] can define the word ‘culture’.” Winnicott explains that “[i]n using the word culture[, he is] thinking of the inherited tradition”, “thinking of something that is in the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find.”
And I want to do my own, careful reading here. I do not take Winnicott’s phrase “common pool of humanity” to represent the claim that all cultural production is homogeneous. I, at least, am not interested in a universal culture, so much as I am persuaded by the claim that human beings universally create culture as a means of coping with the world. His caveat, which he has chosen to emphasize, does not claim that there are some groups who are outside of a universal and superior canon and therefore do not have or produce true culture. It is important to note his context, often working with abused, neglected or traumatized children. His point is that children who never received adequate love and care, who go without a “good enough mother [sic]”, such that they cannot share their play or production with others, who are without “somewhere” to put their discoveries in order to draw someone else’s attention, will become unable to produce cultural artifacts.
While the last emphasis might seem puzzling, Winnicott likely means to emphasize that acquiring language (or other artifacts used in cultural production) is not a passive process, anymore than one can passively acquire creativity; those drawing from the tradition play an active role in generating something with that tradition. As a result, “[t]here is a dependence here on some kind of recording method.” Winnicott explains that by “recording” he does not explicitly mean writing so much as he means a shared, and thereby remembered, performance. Even as there can be “no doubt [that] a very great deal was lost of the early civilizations,” there still remains “the myths that were a product of oral tradition” so that “history through myth persists”. The second half of Winnicott’s sentence pivots, illustrating that this performance is invented, is fictional, so that the “history through myth persists to the present time in spite of the efforts of historians to be objective, which they can never be, though they must try”. Indeed, his whole argument is that magic/play/culture lies in a liminal space between reality and imagination that can never fully be eliminated.
Winnicott then introduces an idea that he has not fully fleshed out, because it is still “a side issue” for him. He explains that “in any cultural field it is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition. [emphasis his]” If we link creativity with originality, then Winnicott might be referring to something like what Harold Bloom has called an Anxiety of Influence, where those who produce cultural artifacts inherently do so in a mode of antagonism with their predecessors. But there seems to be more than an Oedipal conflict between generations at play; Winnicott’s following remarks are useful as a historiography lesson: “no one in the line of cultural contributors repeats except as a deliberate quotation, and the unforgivable sin in the cultural field is plagiarism.” The irony is that the writer who attempts to be wholly independent, who does not read, who does not have enough precursors and influences, thereby risks becoming nothing more than a repetition of another semi-literate rebel who thinks he [for it is often a “he” that displays this hubris] has re-invented the world; such a person becomes–accidentally, because the quotation is not deliberate–a plagiarist.
Winnicott explains that he is interested in this “side issue” because it furthers his wider theme of “the interplay between separateness and union”: “[t]he interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to me to be just one more example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between separateness and union.” Winnicott then explores this interplay in another analysis, as he lingers on a story of a child who plays with a piece of string.
As a necessary context of this analysis, it is worth keeping in mind that Winnicott often met children who struggled to be without their primary caregiver’s presence (often the female parent). He noted how children would often adopt a soft toy or stuffed animal as a “transitional object”: something that they would carry with them as a parental substitute, and which would offer them sufficient comfort. He therefore watches the boy, Edmund, play in order to see to what extent he is dependent on his mother.
“Edmund seemed here to be concerned with the one end of the string that was exposed, the rest of the string being in a tangle. Sometimes he would make a gesture which was as if he ‘plugged in’ with the end of the string like an electric flex to his mother’s thigh. One had to observe that although he ‘brooked no substitute’ [meaning both that infant Edmund refused bottle-feeding in place of breast-feeding, and that Edmund had difficulty replacing his mother in play] he was using the string as a symbol of union with his mother.” Winnicott is pointing out that the symbol, the union, was demanded by the very fact of distance, of being separated from his mother, a separation that demanded some symbolic communication between parent and child, such that “[i]t was clear that the string was simultaneously a symbol of separateness and of union through communication.”
And I introduce this psychoanalytic theory of union and separation because it evokes the themes of memory, filiality, and language that seem so central to Levinas’s language. So we might better understand Winnicott’s puzzling claim that separation and union are inseparable if we return to Levinas’s writings on Gagarin. Levinas explains that technology is not so bad as the Heideggerians fear, because it “does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative. It is not a question of returning to the nomadism that is as incapable as sedentary existence of leaving behind a landscape and a climate”. One might think it strange that, if Levinas is merely against the fetishization of the Place, then why is it necessary for technology to get rid of, not merely “enrootedness”, “the related sense of exile”?
If Levinas is in favor of a life in exile, then it makes sense that he would critique an overly “sedentary existence”; but what is wrong with “nomadism”? Perhaps his point is not merely that the Jewish people are nomads, who supposedly flee from their homes; rather, he seems to be saying something about how the Jewish people always carry themselves with them, as they carry the bones of their ancestors or their holy texts. There is, I detect, a subtle acceptance of Heidegger here, of the need for an internal dwelling, some way that one may gather oneself–even as he critiques an ideological obsession with Place.
This kind of capacity to carry is not merely mobility; it is not a dissipating or childish speed, but a portability. Something transcendental is involved, something that is not lost through space or time, so that one is able, as apparently one should, to “leav[e] behind a landscape and a climate.” And if portability is the value at hand, then it certainly remains possible that technology can be of great assistance–even as it sometimes also risks dissipation. If we take Levinas to value portability, then we might also understand why enrootedness is devalued, as well as why it is attached to the “related sense of exile” in his discourse. Indeed, the exile may be locked away, kept in a far off tower, and the distance between the exile and home might not be generated by a continuous travel, a travel further from home, but by the very lack of travel that makes those exiled unable to reach the expected or promised home.
Or, to use the language of Winnicott, there is a valued kind of separateness which prevents fixity, even as there is another, devalued kind of separateness which causes dissolution and forgetfulness; a valued union which is able to maintain itself enough to withstand travel, and a devalued union which prevents movement, mourning, moving on. What is valued is a precise relationship between union and fixity.
We might also see an example of this union in Heidegger’s language. Levinas derides, for good reason, anyone who would follow Heidegger’s later philosophy, which “means to follow a path that winds its way through fields, to feel the unity created by the bridge that links the two river banks and by the architecture of buildings, the presence of the tree, the chiaroscuro of the forests, the mystery of things, of a jug, of the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl, the gleam from a carafe of wine sitting on a white tablecloth.” We might agree with Levinas that Heidegger’s choice of values is far-fetched, rather arbitrary: “a jug” and “the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl” are particularly strange. But the first part, valuing a kind of truth or aletheia that is able “to follow a path” and thereby “feel the unity created by the bridge that links”–doesn’t this achieve the proper relationship between union and separation, connection and distance? Isn’t the careful following of a path exactly what Levinas values in the careful tracing of a knot?
It is worth noting how frequently Levinas will speak indirectly, and how this indirect speech serves a psychological function for him. In the case of the writing on Gagarin, the indirectness allows him to avoid assenting directly to (any part of) Heidegger’s position. Additionally, in referring to a vague kind of “nomadism”, Levinas might be critiquing a stereotype of non-Western cultures, and might continue to perpetuate the notion that non-Western cultures are primitive. (And the supposed flaws of the primitive are often tied to the supposed flaws of the youthful: Levinas continuously abrogates a certain lack of development, such as “the childish instinct for speed”; he even regards Judaism as a developed maturity, “a religion for adults”.) This kind of indirect speech allows Levinas to support an idea of Judaism that is neither the barbarity of Western culture, nor the barbarity of non-Western culture, but is always Judaism. In other words, Levinas’s inability to process his fear of Western and non-Western cultures, to thereby take stock of what they are, grants him the room to imagine that the vague entity he imagines to be Jewishness is a cohesive one, and that it is wholly different from the identities he detests.
At first, Levinas puts forth an idea of what it means to be Jewish, which he seems to equate with being ethical; then, in Totality and Infinity, he proposes a model of what it means to be ethical, while leaving the explicit Jewishness of this model unspoken, though containing unexplained references that complement his idea of being Jewish as being knotted. But if the proper relationship to knots is something that only Jewish people can achieve, then why present it to an audience as philosophy, something that aims to be understood by anyone who reads it? Relatedly, if conversion is something that can occur only in Christianity, then what is the purpose of making these statements that would require conversion to a Jewish mindset to be understood? Isn’t the whole act of conversion foregone in this idea that Jewishness is a principle of “filiality”? And to what extent, therefore, does conversation depend on conversion?
To be clear, I am not trying to say that Levinas was consciously trying to be obtuse (though it remains possible that Levinas’s obscurity was intentional). Moreover, it is not my sole intention to suggest that Levinas should have more carefully explained the motif of knots in Totality and Infinity, using his prior writings, so as to make it more legible. I want to suggest that the inability to think a Jewishness that is both filial and convertible results in a discourse that fails to be either particular or universal. Not particular, in that the proposals are not Jewish, do not require a specific Jewish history to be accepted or understood. Not universal, despite Levinas’s faulty claims of understanding and thereby indicting non-Jewish behaviors.
Perhaps what I am trying to ask is, if nobody has ever succeeded in being a human being, then how is one to be Jewish? Please note that I am not saying that the successful human being is Jewish, nor that the person who succeeds in being Jewish succeeds in being human. I am saying that we need to strive for self-understanding before we could ever achieve anything like a collective understanding, an assessment of what humanity or culture entails, even as self-understanding requires understanding one’s humanity and one’s culture. The entanglement is at work. So, within this entanglement, any hard-won statement that begins with “I am” and achieves anything like accuracy will serve as descriptive not only for the I who speaks, but for the universal human and particular culture.
Perhaps what I am expressing here, in expressing my frustration with Levinas, is a frustration with a politics that has as its mission the hygienic separation of one culture from another for either conservative or supposedly progressive aims. I find that I am often told, when I mean to speak only for myself, that I am too ambitiously speaking for others, that I am speaking only for my specific culture; at the same time, I find that, others, who claim to be speaking only for their culture, are often speaking for me. To speak is never to speak for oneself, nor to speak for oneself alone, though one tries to make it so.
Indeed, it is this inability to speak for oneself which problematizes the claim that knottiness comprises a superior ethical position, whereby one is better connected to the Other; rather, such knottiness risks imposing an institutional double-bind where one does not know what one wants and punishes others for being unable to provide it. In counseling parlance, this form of knottiness is a harmful “enmeshment”. In other words, we need a critical position that allows for separation and detachment in an ethical, rather than merely callous or cruel, way.
And I think that Derrida’s own critique of Heidegger’s later writings–where Derrida simultaneously approves of Heidegger’s critique of the notion of truth, even as he detaches this insight from Heidegger’s risibly strange pro-peasant ideology–may therefore be helpful in handling Levinas’s ambivalence towards unity and separation. Derrida explains that he chose to write the essay “Restitutions” on Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, because “[w]hat interested [him] was finally to see explained from a certain angle why [he] had always found this passage of Heidegger’s on Van Gogh[‘s painting of ‘peasant shoes’] ridiculous and lamentable.” In “Restitutions”, Derrida decides, after trying to defend Heidegger over dozens of pages of close reading, that Meyer Schapiro–an art historian and critic of Heidegger–was right, that Heidegger’s description of Van Gogh’s painting “really was the naivete of what Schapiro rightly calls a ‘projection.'”
There appears a kind of emotional release, an aggression directed towards Heidegger, as soon as Derrida has chosen to let go of him: “One is not only disappointed when [Heidegger’s] academic high seriousness, his severity and rigor of tone give way to this ‘illustration’ (bildliche Darstellung). One is not only disappointed by the consumer-like hurry toward the content of a representation, by the heaviness of the pathos, by the coded triviality of this description, which is both overloaded and impoverished, and one never knows if it’s busying itself around a picture, ‘real’ shoes, or shoes that are imaginary but outside painting; not only disappointed by the crudeness of the framing, the arbitrary and barbaric nature of the cutting-out, the massive self-assurance of the identification: ‘a pair of peasants’ shoes,’ just like that! Where did he get that from? Where does he explain himself on this matter? So one is not only disappointed, one sniggers. The fall in tension is too great.” The knot tying him to Heidegger loosens, there is a “fall in tension”. He laughs. He laughs at Heidegger.
And then Derrida even demonstrates an example of laughing at Heidegger. Derrida makes up the following story/metaphor to satirize him: “One follows step by step the moves of a ‘great thinker,’ as he returns to the origin of the work of art and of truth, traversing the whole history of the West and then suddenly, at a bend in a corridor, here we are on a guided tour, as schoolchildren or tourists. Someone’s gone to fetch the guide from the neighboring farm. Full of goodwill. He loves the earth and a certain type of painting when he can find himself in it [quand il s ‘y retrouve]. Giving up his usual activity he goes off to get his key while the visitors wait, slowly getting out of the coach. (There is a Japanese tourist among them, who in a moment will ask a few questions of the guide, in a stage whisper.) Then the tour begins. With his local (Swabian) accent, he tries to get the visitors going (he sometimes manages it and each time this happens he also trembles regularly, in time), he piles up the associations and immediate projections. From time to time he points out of the window to the fields and nobody notices that he’s no longer talking about painting. All right. And one says to oneself that the scene, the choice of the example, the procedure of the treatment, nothing in all this is fortuitous. This casual guide is the very person who, before and after this incredible tirade, carries on with his discourse on the origin of the work of art and on truth. It’s the same discourse, it has never been interrupted by the slightest digression (what all these professorial procedures with regard to the shoes are lacking in, moreover, is the sense of digression: the shoes have to make a pair and walk on the road, forwards or backwards, in a circle if pushed, but with no digressions or sidesteps allowed; now there is a link between the detachability of the step and the possibility of the digressive). I see that you are shocked, in your deference, by the scene which I have, how shall I put it
–projected.”
It is remarkably fitting that the same term Schapiro uses to undermine Heidegger is used by Derrida to undermine his own critique, merely a ‘projection.’ If we linger on what is implied, visually, in the psychoanalytic concept of “projection” we might further understand the tension between unity and separation. When Heidegger projects his pro-peasant ideology on the shoes, some internal reality leaves him and manifests itself on the surface of these shoes; there is necessarily a distance for the projector to disperse its image across the screen. Schapiro’s point may therefore be taken as similar to Arendt’s claim that “modern man encounters only himself”, insofar as Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting says much more about Heidegger than it does about Van Gogh; Derrida expresses this by saying that Heidegger seems to love a painting only when he can “find himself in it.” The shoes do not touch him.
In taking distance from Heidegger, in making him up as a character, then Derrida, too, risks ‘projection’ without fully encountering Heidegger’s thought. As a result, Derrida does not trust his capacity to distance himself from Heidegger, and instead intersperses his own critique of Heidegger with the apology that “professional procedures” are lacking in “digression”, while digression is the whole purpose of shoes and steps. Even as Derrida values a “step-by-step” close reading, he questions himself for holding this value. Isn’t there something to these shoes, even if Heidegger admittedly made some mistakes, got distracted, like a tour guide who begins remarking on what is going on outside the window?
So Derrida might be saying that even as there remains the suspicion that Heidegger’s thoughts are tainted by his Nazism and love of soil (“It’s the same discourse, it has never been interrupted by the slightest digression”), there remains work to be done to make some of his ideas detachable from others, like the “detachability of the step.” Can I choose where to step, to follow certain procedures and not others, to go only so far? Otherwise, won’t some force continuously hold me back, like a dog on a leash, moving “in a circle if pushed”?
So Derrida begins to provide us with a model for how to take a nuanced approach to the relationship to the other, one that accepts pieces, rejects others. And I find that I have to apply this same nuance to Derrida himself. For, lingering, like a whisper, is Derrida’s reference to the Japanese tourist; is this a friendly gesture towards the way that there can be–tentatively, in a mere whisper–a discourse across cultures? Or is this yet another gesture of cultural supremacy, as the European castigates the non-European stranger for not getting it, for persistently asking questions? Personally, I think the matter could be handled with a little more friendliness, but I am not yet sure about what that word “friend” means.
Arendt, Levinas, and Derrida each decide–after reading philosophers like Aristotle and Kant–that friendship has to do with a certain kind of respect. Since we might translate respect–with the reflexive prefix “re” attached to the word, spectare, to see–as a moment of seeing each other, then respect certainly has much to do with this matter of entanglement, of unity and separation. Arendt emphasizes the amicable distance that friends are supposed to maintain: “Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us…”
Levinas emphasizes how our reputations are at stake, how we don’t want our friends to “lose face”; and, just as Arendt emphasizes how friendship proscribes “intimacy” and “closeness”, Levinas seems to place emphasis on how we therefore keep certain veils and discretions between friends: “disrespect presupposes the face. Elements and things remain outside of respect and disrespect. It is necessary that the face have been apperceived for nudity to be able to acquire the non-signifyingness of the lustful…Love accordingly does not represent a particular case of friendship.” It seems that Levinas, too, is saying that a certain kind of physicality, of love, prescribes the understanding generated at a distance, among friends.
But then Levinas, despite first valuing the distance of respect, of seeing the other’s face, seems to change his mind; it may very well be that he starts to think of the respectful, mutually visualizing relationship between friends as a kind of visual immanence that fails to evoke temporal transcendence. Upon this turn, he values a kind of love or intimacy, one that does not seduce or objectify the other in “the non-signifyingness of the lustful”, but still achieves greater proximity than friendship. In this proximity, loving partners make plans (and he has in mind the specific plans of child-bearing), seek the future with another, in a way that friendship–perhaps as acquaintances or peers who supposedly already share knowledge, are happy with the present–fails to achieve: “Love and friendship are not only felt differently…friendship goes unto the Other, love seeks what does not have the structure of an existent, the infinitely future, what is to be engendered.”
Derrida makes different use of this idea of distance, of respect, in his own Politics of Friendship: “Let us first note in passing that these two words, respect and responsibility, which come together and provoke each other relentlessly, seem to refer, in the case of the former, to languages of the Latin family, to distance, to space, to the gaze; and in the case of the latter, to time, to the voice and to listening. There is no respect, as its name connotes, without the vision and distance of a spacing. No responsibility without response, without what speaking and hearing invisibly say to the ear, and which takes time. The co-implication of responsibility and respect can be felt at the heart of friendship, one of the enigmas of which would stem from this distance, this concern in what concerns the other: a respectful separation seems to distinguish friendship from love.”
We have already seen how Levinas can use love in multiple ways within the same text, and how the notions of love and respect might differ significantly between Arendt and Levinas. So, given that the tension between distance and proximity might be universal, Derrida problematizes how individuals handle that tension in their own terms, notes that individuals often invent the terms by which they handle this tension without being able to express their reasons: “Why, in sum, is Kant so suspicious of tenderness and gentleness, teneritas amicitiae?”
Indeed, the investigation into what precisely each thinker has in mind when they deploy such concepts as love and friendship can be found by interrogating this knot: “This paradoxical movement must be correctly understood, for it sheds indirect light on the Kantian concept of love and, above all, introduces a catastrophic complication into the natural law of attraction/repulsion which none the less organizes this friendly ‘doctrine of virtue’.” One should note that the formula of simultaneous attraction/repulsion is precisely how Derrida defined the double bind in The Truth in Painting. Indeed, he repeats the definition here: “Following this logic, the most paradoxical consequences are unleashed or, on the contrary, never fail to become rigorously bound, to the point of strangulation, in a double bind: the natural law of attraction/repulsion is perverted into a principle of absolute disorder.”
Derrida begins with a case that seems parallel to Levinas’s discussion of Love and Eros in Totality and Infinity: “Let us first of all say it succinctly: an excess of tenderness tends towards reciprocal possession and fusion (excessive attraction) and – following this, or as a consequence! – this measureless gentleness inevitably leads to interruption – indeed, to rupture.” A difficult sentence, with many digressions; but, Derrida seems to be saying that lovers who inadequately create boundaries between each other will grow fused, will believe that they own each other in a “reciprocal possession.” The best lovers, aware of this, will already be prepared with a great, “measureless gentleness” that places an interruption between them, like Levinas’s lover who remains open to the possibility of what the other will want or plan next. Those who fail to achieve such “measureless gentleness” provide “a case (the tenderness of reciprocal possession) where attraction leads to rupture, where attraction becomes the quasi-synonym of repulsion”, where the overdosing of love and proximity leads to a divorce because “[t]oo much love separates, interrupts, threatens the social bond.”
Derrida then proposes an alternate “situation in which the principle of repulsion would have to be compensated not by attraction, which would lead to a worse repulsion, an interruption or a rupture, but by repulsion itself (repulsion against repulsion: painful respect).” A repulsion that is attracted to its own repulsion might be something like loathing, a loathing that risks becoming arrogance, an isolating self-confidence; in loathing the other, I love how dislike him I am. It seems that Derrida must love himself enough to not risk becoming an arrogant exile, and must therefore loathe his own loathing, be repulsed by how much others repulse him; I am a human, I consider nothing human to be foreign to me. This struggling to stay in the proximity of others is perhaps what Derrida calls a “painful respect”; and one might wonder whether Derrida’s reluctance to fully distance himself from Heidegger, fearful that he would merely be ‘projecting’, could be an example of such painful respect.
The person who loathes loathing provides a situation parallel to what we have earlier seen of the lovers with “measureless gentleness” because in such a case “the principle of attraction would have to be compensated not by repulsion, which would lead to rupture, but by attraction itself (attraction against attraction: a slightly but not too tender friendship).” We might gloss this as the difference between attraction and admiration, where one who feels attraction is attracted to the other person, whereas one who feels admiration is attracted to the distance between one and the other person. Any sustained relationship seems to rely on a certain amount of admiration.
Because these ethical relationships require an admixture of distance and proximity, one finds that “[t]he enemy – the enemy of morality, in any case – is love.” And Derrida clarifies that this is not the case because love is inherently bad: “[n]ot because love is the enemy, but because, in the excessive attraction unleashed by love, enmity and war are allowed to take place.” And here it becomes unclear if love is culpable because it generates spats between lovers, or whether the lover becomes jealous over the person being loved, and this jealousy generates combat between suitors; it’s hard not to imagine that Derrida does have have jealousy in mind when mentioning war, given the role that Helen at Troy and Odysseus at Ithaca play in the Western literary tradition.
Nonetheless, Derrida continues by saying that “[l]ove harbors hate within itself. Reciprocal possession and fusion towards which the tender one risks tending is nothing else but a principle of (non-natural) perversion at the heart of the natural law of attraction and repulsion.” If Derrida’s position regarding the balance of attraction and repulsion bears a close similarity to Winnicott’s treatment of union and separation, this should not be a surprise, given how both are influenced by Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis. The relation of Klein’s psychoanalysis to Derrida’s discourse on love is made even more relevant if we consider that Jacques’s wife, Marguerite Derrida, was the principal translator of Klein’s work into French.
In Klein’s work, the entanglement of the subject reaches an even greater extent, because Klein focuses on the metaphoric power of a baby fed at his [Klein exclusively privileges the male child in her choice of pronoun] mother’s breast, on the way that parent/child love dissolves physical boundaries. The effect of Klein’s poetics, and I think that her language is most valuable as a kind of poetics, is to demonstrate how others constitute the self in the way that the child feeds off the mother’s body. We have already seen how Derrida is influenced by Klein’s object relations theory in The Truth in Painting, where he continuously refers to mourning as a cannibalistic kind of eating dead shit; so, it’s worth exploring the metaphor in greater detail.
Klein explains that her “writings contain the account of a phase of sadism at its zenith, through which children pass during the first year of life.” This “phase of sadism” begins “[i]n the very first months of the baby’s existence” because infants “ha[ve] sadistic impulses directed, not only against [their] mother’s breast, but also against the inside of her body: scooping it out, devouring the contents, destroying it by every means which sadism can suggest.” From this literal event of the mother constituting the child by means of feeding, Klein generalizes such that “[t]he development of the infant is governed by the mechanisms of introjection and projection”, where introjection is the assumption of an external quality within oneself, and projection is the removal of an internal quality to the outside. Infants use others, particularly mothers, as a way of generating a concept of self, such that “[f]rom the beginning the ego introjects objects ‘good’ and ‘bad’, for both of which its mother’s breast is the prototype—for good objects when the child obtains it and for bad when it fails him.”
The relationship between this theory and mourning becomes clear when Klein cites the theory that, “[a]ccording to Freud and Abraham [Karl, not Nicolas], the fundamental process in melancholia is the loss of the loved object.” In a later essay, Klein explains that “[t]he object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and security.” So Klein might be saying that the infant comes to learn separation as a result of being unable to access the caregiver at will; the resulting insecurity is a cause for mourning. But she pushes in a different direction: security is “felt by the baby to be lost,” lost not merely by the caregiver’s absence, but “lost as a result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies against his mother’s breasts.” This later explanation justifies Klein’s early claim that “[t]he real loss of a real object,” as in the disappearance of the caregiver, “or some similar situation having the same significance,” as in the merely momentary disappearance of the caregiver, “results in the object becoming installed within the ego.” Infants desire to retain within themselves the power that the caregiver seems to represent, a desire that is futile, because, “[o]wing, however, to an excess of cannibalistic impulses in the subject, this introjection miscarries and the consequence is illness.” It is worth noting how pervasively Klein deploys a kind of poetics of the body, and of the maternal body in particular, as the infant’s failure to achieve independence is represented as a pathological miscarriage.
In particular, the infant’s introjection generates the illness of “[p]aranoid anxiety lest the objects sadistically destroyed should themselves be a source of poison and danger inside the subject’s body”. This anxiety “causes him, in spite of the vehemence of his oral-sadistic onslaughts, at the same time to be profoundly mistrustful of them while yet incorporating them.” It remains unclear in Klein’s language whether one’s self is really such a bad place, or if the fear of one’s self is pathological. It seems pathological when the infant “finds himself constantly impelled to repeat the incorporation of a good object, partly because he dreads that he has forfeited it by his cannibalism—i.e. the repetition of the act is designed to test the reality of his fears and disprove them—and partly because he fears internalized persecutors against whom he requires a good object to help him.” Fear of one’s self seems to generate a kind of loneliness, particularly in infancy, such that “[i]n this stage the ego is more than ever driven both by love and by need to introject the object.”
It is unclear whether Klein has another age, perhaps adolescence or adulthood in mind, when she adds that “[a]nother stimulus for an increase of introjection is the phantasy that the loved object may be preserved in safety inside oneself.” Is this a case where adults imagine that they can mourn others successfully, that others remain with oneself in memory, in some interior spiritual locus, because one feels responsible for protecting the other from an unsafe and dispersing world? Or is this a case where children presume to be more powerful than they are, think that they can protect adults from the suffering of the world?
If Klein has children in mind, who may risk bothering more than they can protect, then it would make sense that “[i]n this case the dangers of the inside are projected on to the external world.” While, in this case, the dangers are really from oneself and projected externally, Klein had also described a pathological case where one distrusts oneself as being overly harmful, internalizes the harmful external reality in a way that mirrors how many people feel guilty for harms that they did not cause. Here, as elsewhere, Klein doesn’t make ultimate determinations on where the self and other lie, or where the good and bad are coming from–as a result, it becomes easy to see a connection between her rhetoric and Derrida’s idea of a knot, a double-bind of attraction/repulsion.
A final separation of the two forces–inside/outside or good/bad–seems impossible, because, even as “[i]t is true that, now that good and bad objects are more clearly differentiated, the subject’s hate is directed rather against the latter, while his love and his attempts at reparation are more focussed on the former”, “the excess of his sadism and anxiety acts as a check to this advance in his mental development.”
While Klein’s language may seem to describe a specific pathology in “[a] little child wh[o] believes, when [her] mother disappears, that [she] has eaten her up and destroyed her”, Klein has already said that this is the case of any little person’s cannibalism. And if every little person is a cannibal, then everyone will become “tormented by anxiety both for her and for the good mother wh[om she] has absorbed into [her]self.” And “this anxiety is also responsible for the doubt of the goodness of the loved object.” The infant put through such stress “is thus made to realize that the loved object is at the same time the hated one, and in addition to this that the real objects and the imaginary figures, both external and internal, are bound up [emphasis mine] with each other.” Klein seems to prescribe, like Derrida, an attitude of uncertainty, because “[a]s Freud has pointed out, doubt is in reality a doubt of one’s own love and ‘a man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing’.” And, indeed, Klein has already said that love and hate are co-implicated, perhaps because both are represented by the gesture of eating, an eating that represents both nourishment and harm. Or, as Derrida summarizes: “[l]ove harbours hate within itself.”
I hope it is clear that I am not suggesting that these phenomena of attraction and repulsion are intrinsically related to breast-feeding as Klein’s language would suggest. Rather, I am trying to point out how boundaries between self and other are constantly being negotiated, and how there is a great deal of anxiety involved in this negotiation process: one may become anxious of harming the other with one’s presence, or of being harmed by the other’s presence, or even of being harmed by isolation with one’s torturous body that needs more than we want it to–or perhaps one even fears harming others in making oneself distant from them.
The anxiety of being inadequate on one’s own seems to press on Levinas, who feels the need to be responsible, to remain tethered to others, such that even those as far away as the stars are all bound together in a homogenous space. The anxiety of devouring the other seems prevalent in Arendt’s description of isolation or world-alienation where one mottles all that one touches so that can only encounter oneself; or, again, in her description of a proper friendship that accepts the distance between oneself and others. The narrative risks simplification, one might generalize how Levinas’s anxieties privilege a fear of loss, of being too far away from others; in contrast, Arendt’s anxieties privilege a totalitarian condition where one gets swallowed up in some vast sea of uniformity. A conjoined filiality and a separated natality would therefore be appealing for different reasons. But these are simplified narratives, as Levinas still displays a need to be uniquely Jewish, and to be separate from Heidegger, while Arendt’s existential humanism seems to express a desire for assimilation.
My point is not to suggest that we should apply Kleinian psychoanalysis to diagnose these philosophers, or that Kleinian psychoanalysis should occupy a privileged space that can be universally applied. If anything, my point is that Klein’s poetics of indigestion, of a psyche as knotted as one’s stomach, display yet another way of thinking about the force that “entanglement” has in theoretical discourse. A further point may be taken that Klein’s language is heavily influenced by the modes of expression of the children with whom she worked, so that if there remains an inchoate or unclear aspect to her language, which avoids worldly examples, then this language matches the condition of young human beings. We might say that Klein is being more than just “childish”, if we think of the reality that Winnicott described, where humans are continuously in the process of generating a culture with which to deal with the forces of union and separation. And I claim that this process of generating a cultural tradition with which we separate selves from others requires us to turn to the worldly analogues–the things that are either too fearsome or too unknown to say directly–that inform our language. And I make this claim with the caveat that we do not have the language with which to create full biographies of any person.
If we turn to Derrida as another example, the anxieties generated by indissociability seem to provide a worldly background that can explain why Derrida places great emphasis on the capacity to separate oneself from others, in a spatial and temporal register, through respect and responsibility. But it should be strange that Derrida privileges these aspects of separation in a discourse that so often questions easy demarcations. Indeed, the assignation of space to the optic field through respect, and time to the sonic field through responsibility, seems rather arbitrary and problematic.
Take an example from long ago: our analysis of Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience, which suggests that any experience must be generated by a kind of contact between subject and object, such that differences in visual and tactile experience are difficult to maintain on close analysis.
“Ankersmit himself seems to miss what is on the surface of Benjamin’s definition of aura as ‘a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.’ Space and time. Space: the ‘appearance or semblance,’ occurring in a single moment. Time: the movement across ‘distance, no matter how close the object may be.’ Sight requires distance, duality; but, as Ankersmit and Aristotle have noted, touch requires a monistic form. The spontaneity of sight and touch therefore requires a simultaneous dualism/monism, occurs whenever moments concatenate themselves into a single image, just as one’s eyes unconsciously shuttle across the pixels of a picture, like a loom generating a textile, such that there is a ‘weave of space and time.'”
So we have already problematized the idea that sight occurs at a distance, while other senses more immediately invade the body. Moreover, we have already seen how the audible field provides modes of representing the temporal field that are less easily produced with visual analogies.
“When one looks onto the horizon, there is a flat canvas of already given data. But when one receives auditory data, there are much greater distortions in space: though you lean in to deliver your secrets, I cannot hear your whispers over the restaurant’s loud music; in an instant, my body can resound with a thunderclap that strikes a tree far in the distance. In other words, the audible field complicates the notion of what is present in ways that the visual field would regard as obvious. As I cower in fear in the face of love, it may be that I am still resounding with the faraway thunderclap of a former and ferocious lover, that I cannot yet hear the plaintive cry of a closer intimate, a more ‘present’ and tender-hearted companion.”
Indeed, Derrida’s Speech and Phenomenon, in examining why Husserl argues that one is more meaningfully present to oneself when speaking, and why writing has in general been marginalized by the history of philosophy, tries to understand the phenomenological difference between the visible and audible fields, and how these fields relate to temporality. “What, then, about speech [voix] and time? If showing is the unity of gesture and perception in signs, if signification is assigned to the pointing finger and the eye, and if this assignation is prescribed for every sign, whether indicative or expressive, discursive or nondiscursive, what can be said about speech and time? And why is Husserl bent upon separating indication from expression? Does uttering or hearing signs reduce the indicating spatiality or mediation?”
Derrida explains that, according to Husserl, “[t]he [speaking] subject does not have to pass forth beyond himself to be immediately affected by his expressive activity. My words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible distance; not to cease to belong to me, to be at my disposition ‘without further props.’ In any event, the phenomenon of speech, the phenomenological voice, gives itself out in this manner.” There is a way that, in making the body speak, I evoke my power to make the body; and this process of making registers as, or generates, my feeling of selfhood as autonomy.
But Derrida then proffers “[t]he objection” “that this interiority belongs to the phenomenological and ideal aspect of every signifier.” When I write with my hand, why is it that I do not feel this autonomy of making the body move? In other words, all perception that registers as such, as a signifier, must in some way be immediate such that “[t]he ideal form of a written signifier, for example, is not in the world, and the distinction between the grapheme and the empirical body of the corresponding graphic sign separates an inside from an outside, phenomenological consciousness from the world.” If there is always a shift from perception to perception of, then “this is true for every visual or spatial signifier.”
“And yet” Derrida seems to sustain Husserl’s position regarding speech against this objection, because “every nonphonic signifier involves a spatial reference in its very ‘phenomenon,’ in the phenomenological (nonworldly) sphere of experience in which it is given.” In other words there is an ineradicable sensation of distance in my perception of my own hand writing, such that “[t]he sense of being ‘outside,’ ‘in the world,’ is an essential component of its [the graphic or visual signifier’s] phenomenon.” The sensation of distance is unique to visual perception, “there is nothing like this in the phenomenon of speech”, so that ” [in] phenomenological interiority, hearing oneself and seeing oneself are two radically different orders of self-relation.” Key here is Derrida’s claim that seeing oneself and hearing oneself are both modes of “self-relation”, such that both involve a kind of spatio-temporal distance, a sustained divergence or dyad in the self that could thereby witness oneself; but, even as he disagrees that speech is more immediate, he does agree that speech inherently feels less distant, that speech and writing occur at “two radically different orders of self-relation.”
There is thus a kind of ambivalence that Derrida maintains towards the real and supposed difference between speech and writing. He will try to put in “question the phenomenological value of the voice, its transcendent dignity with regard to every other signifying substance.” And he will discover this difference, even as he “will think, and will try to show, that this transcendence is only apparent.” This discovered difference cannot merely be given the derogatory title of “appearance,” because “this ‘appearance’ is the very essence of consciousness and its history, and it determines an epoch characterized by the philosophical idea of truth and the opposition between truth and appearance, as this opposition still functions in phenomenology. It can therefore not be called ‘appearance’ or be named within the sphere of metaphysical conceptuality. One cannot attempt to deconstruct this transcendence without descending, across the inherited concepts, toward the unnamable.”
Derrida explains that the “immediate presence [of speech] results from the fact that the phenomenological ‘body’ of the signifier seems to fade away at the very moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to the element of ideality.” The gap between intention and action, thought and perception becomes incredibly thin, so that the speaker/speech “phenomenologically reduces itself, transforming the worldly opacity of its body into pure diaphaneity.” It remains unclear whether the gap is temporal or spatial; all that Derrida accepts is that speech generates an “effacement of the sensible body and its exteriority”, which “is for consciousness the very form of the immediate presence of the signified.”
He then clarifies that this thin difference is temporal: “When I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m’entende] at the same time that I speak.” But I have trouble accepting this phenomenologically: is sight really slower than hearing, so that I hear myself speak sooner than I see myself write? Or is it that I can look away from where I am writing, while I supposedly cannot be deaf, or momentarily deafened, to avoid hearing myself speak? While I have trouble maintaining this explanation, Derrida provides another, claiming that the gap is also spatial: “[t]he signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention (in Husserl’s language, the expression animated by the Bedeutungsintention), is in absolute proximity to me.”
Derrida then attempts to define that sensation of absolute proximity, whereby “[t]he operation of ‘hearing oneself speak’ is an auto-affection of a unique kind. On the one hand, it operates within the medium of universality; what appears as signified therein must be idealities that are idealiter indefinitely repeatable or transmissible as the same.” In other words, the fact that I can generate speech with such ease (and is this really a universal ‘I’ that speaks so easily?), assures me that the referent that I generate with my speech, the ideas that the words intend to signify, is just as reproducible. “On the other hand, the subject can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces, without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not ‘his own.’ Every other form of auto-affection must either pass through what is outside the sphere of ‘ownness’ or forego any claim to universality.” It is precisely the ownership of oneself that is universally shared, and which therefore assures the coexistence of reason, such that one can generate through speech ideas that would be universally recognizable; if nobody owns oneself, then it becomes impossible for any self-evident self to be available for the other.
“When I see myself, either because I gaze upon a limited region of my body or because it is reflected in a mirror, what is outside the sphere of ‘my own’ has already entered the field of this auto-affection, with the result that it is no longer pure.” And this is perhaps a more convincing explanation for why vision of self and hearing of self differ spatially. That I can only partially see myself seems evident, and the fact that my looking at my body will always have to display some part that is contiguous with an unseen whole might explain why I distrust the concreteness or purity of my sight of myself. The only alternative, for achieving a full sight of myself, would be through a mirror, and even if that were to be a perfect mirror, with no visible frame or speck, I imagine that it would still feel a partial sight, one-sided: it does not show me my back.
Derrida then extends this argument beyond sight, seems to argue that touch will seemingly register as being partial, only part of one’s body, or merely a one-sided contact with something alien: “In the experience of touching and being touched, the same thing happens. In both cases, the surface of my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in the world.”
“But, we could ask, are there not forms of pure auto-affection in the inwardness of one’s own body which do not require the intervention of any surface displayed in the world and yet are not of the order of the voice?” Derrida does not answer this question in the negative; he does not say that there are no modes of feeling one’s body that are similarly as direct as the feeling of one’s speech. His point is not to contest that there is an experience of self-evident fullness in one’s corpuscular sense. Instead, he undermines this experience, because it is not participating in communication; I, alone observe them, so “these forms remain purely empirical, for they could not belong to a medium of universal signification.” “Purely empirical”, because only I observe them.
Moreover, unlike the flexing of a muscle that is located in a specific part of my body, my voice seems somehow more full, seems to more commandingly fill the space that surrounds me: “[a]s pure auto-affection, the operation of hearing oneself speak seems to reduce even the inward surface of one’s own body; in its phenomenal being it seems capable of dispensing with this exteriority within interiority, this interior space in which our experience or image of our own body is spread forth.”
This is not to say that voice does not occur in a specific location, or a specific part of the body; rather, the location is not explicitly felt, so that “[r]equiring the intervention of no determinate [emphasis mine] surface in the world, being produced in the world as pure autoaffection, [speech/voice] is a signifying substance absolutely at our disposition.” It’s a kind of fullness that, by its plenitude, does not require a center; whereas vision seems to automatically generate the eyes from which one sees, “the voice meets no obstacle to its emission in the world precisely because it is produced as pure auto-affection.” But Derrida seems to generalize from this making-the-body-speak a wider experience of agency by making-the-body, such that “[t]his auto-affection is no doubt the possibility for what is called subjectivity or the for-itself, but, without it, no world as such would appear.”
The capacity to make or generate one’s body is the ultimate foundation beyond which nothing further could be deconstructed, for “[a]s soon as it is admitted that auto-affection is the condition for self-presence, no pure transcendental reduction is possible.” Importantly, this auto-affection is not a stable base, but an act of making; in other words, “it was necessary to pass through the transcendental reduction in order to grasp this difference in what is closest to it—which cannot mean grasping it in its identity, its purity, or its origin, for it has none.” The activity present within making-the-body is described as “the movement of differance. [emphasis mine]”
Creativity thus precludes observation: “[t]his movement of differance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it produces a subject.” Derrida then seems to shift from what was the spatial explanation of speech as a feeling of fullness to an explanation that relies on temporal ordering: “[w]hat constitutes the originality of speech, what distinguishes it from every other element of signification, is that its substance seems to be purely temporal.” Again, it is unclear if speech is more temporal than other sensible acts or fields, so much as it seems to be purely temporal: “And this temporality does not unfold a sense that would itself be nontemporal; even before being expressed, [all] sense is through and through temporal.”
Derrida then provides a prelude, a disclaimer for his attempt to introduce a new way of understanding into philosophical discourse: he is just providing “metaphors”. “We speak metaphorically as soon as we introduce a determinate being into the description of this ‘movement’; we talk about ‘movement’ in the very terms that movement makes possible.” This seems to suggest that the body must be able to learn to generate new movements as part of its creation of new metaphors, of new descriptions.
“But we have been always already adrift in ontic metaphor; temporalization here is the root of a metaphor that can only be primordial. The word ‘time’ itself, as it has always been understood in the history of metaphysics, is a metaphor which at the same time both indicates and dissimulates the ‘movement’ of this auto-affection.” Metaphysical language moves the body, even as it claims to be unmoved, or beyond the body. So “[a]ll the concepts of metaphysics—in particular those of activity and passivity, will and nonwill, and therefore those of affection or auto-affection, purity and impurity, etc.—cover up the strange ‘movement’ of this difference.” And if other metaphors, other movements, “cover up” the more primordial ‘movement’ of differance, then it seems that Derrida is not claiming to offer stasis, a transcendental subject, so much as he is cultivating the body’s potentiality to generate movements in smaller pocks of time, within the larger, oblivious frame that has historically smothered these smaller movements.
And when describing the capacity for the body to move carefully, slowly, in small increments, Derrida returns to the label of the “trace”: “The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. This trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace. The trace is not an attribute; we cannot say that the self of the living present ‘primordially is’ it. Being-primordial must be thought on the basis of the trace, and not the reverse. This protowriting is at work at the origin of sense. Sense, being temporal in nature, as Husserl recognized, is never simply present; it is always already engaged in the ‘movement’ of the trace, that is, in the order of ‘signification.’…the temporalization of sense is, from the outset, a ‘spacing.'” And this capacity for careful temporal distension, which makes the dyad of speaker and listener accessible in auto-affection, is precisely akin to the movement of reading, the eye’s tracing a word or letter, which must retain and hold together the various points of the image.
Derrida seems to agree in this essay that speech is tied up with time, and sight with space, so that he can ultimately change the privileging order, with space over time, sight over hearing, writing over speech: “Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world within speech. Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater stage.” And, though perhaps Derrida has already been discussing performance in his analysis of the body and its movements, the sudden intrusion of theater into the interiority of the phenomenological reduction is puzzling.
Importantly, the theatrical aspect is a visual one, a scene. In other words, Derrida seems to be saying that what appears in auto-affection as univocity is always-already a plurivocity, a multitude of voices, a cast of characters. There is no static “I”, so there can be no singular speaker. Of course, setting the voices on stage makes the matter appear easier than it really is. Part of the appeal of the stage is that the multiplicity of voices becomes separate and thereby identifiable–identifiable, as spectacle, through visual means.
So the distancing of speakers therefore achieves the desired state of union and separation that the respectful or responsible relationship is meant to achieve. Nobody is speaking over me, so it becomes clear who the supposed ‘I’ am. Moreover, I wait until called to speak, and am willing to wait to hear the other’s response.
But Derrida’s rhetoric of responsibility is not always so orderly, so neatly organized in space or time. Indeed, Derrida and Levinas often refer to the fact that I am called, compelled to speak, that I am obliged in my responsibility, held hostage by it. And this rhetoric undercuts the auto-affection of the speaking subject. Indeed, many other post-war French thinkers will use the fact that the disciplinary state may call one to speak, may make one legally accountable, as a kind of persistent oppression, an interpellation or exogenous determination of one’s subjectivity. In thinking of how the speaking voice may remain entangled with the other, I am reminded of Judith Butler’s remark, when asked to defend the relevance of the humanities to today’s world, that she was left to “wonder whether [she] was not in the middle of the humanities quandary itself, the one in which no one knows who is speaking and in what voice, and with what intent.”
So I would suggest that differentiating one’s voice from others serves a meaningful function, even as one rarely achieves the kind of neat temporal and spatial separation that Derrida’s description of respect and responsibility seems to describe. Moreover, I want to note moments where Derrida seems to take for granted the spatiality of speech or hearing, in his description of auto-affection. Thinking of how the other’s call inhabits my body, how it determines my speech, I might be reminded of the story of Echo and Narcissus, how Echo learns to speak by repeating the words generated by Narcissus. Therefore, there is an extent to which my language is an iterative repetition of the other’s previous statements, how the response can be a kind of echo, the feeling of being called can be an echo, a being shaken from an unknown location, by another time. I am thinking both of Winnicott’s description of a child acquiring culture and of my example where “As I cower in fear in the face of love, it may be that I am still resounding with the faraway thunderclap of a former and ferocious lover, that I cannot yet hear the plaintive cry of a closer intimate, a more ‘present’ and tender-hearted companion.” The separation of my voice from the rest of the world and from its predecessors is therefore more difficult than even Derrida describes.
Let’s take an example. After writing that speech appears more transcendent than writing, because speech appears more proximate than writing, Derrida claims that “[o]ne cannot attempt to deconstruct this transcendence without descending, across the inherited concepts, toward the unnamable.” It is unclear if Derrida is trying to say that a further kind of analysis is always ineffable, or that it is merely not-yet accessible to him, a-not-yet-nameable. Because he gives up trying to understand why the voice feels so proximate, why it seems that the fullness of the voice requires no “determinate” location, it seems that there is still–implicitly–a bodily center, whether it be one’s head or one’s mouth; it is proximity to this supposed center to one’s experience that guarantees speech’s status as auto-affection, and one must wonder: is the head always the center to one’s experience?
Answering this question might generate a number of hypotheses. Neuron density is greatest in the brain, and that is why sensations proximate to the head, such as the reverberations of one’s throat and one’s jaw bones, feel so “proximate” to one’s self. Similarly, when regarding why hearing recordings of one’s voice often feels uncanny, some psychologists have postulated that one often hears one’s voice differently because of the way that it is mediated through one’s jaw bones, and so hearing the recording makes one feel as if one’s voice has been altered. Or perhaps it’s because the fluids in our ears are used for balancing, and so we feel most centered in our heads.
Then why is the heart the center of the self in some cultures? Or is there some central chakra in one’s gut, closer to one’s center of gravity? I have a feeling that there is an extent to which many people may feel centered in their heads, but that there remain possible changes in worldly experience that could dislocate this center. Indeed, I find it strange how readily Derrida accepts that speech occurs with ease, and thereby sidelines an opportunity to inquire into disability discourse. In other words, there is an extent to which being blind, deaf or mute might significantly alter the perception of space as Derrida seems to describe it in Voice and Phenomenon. In other words, I find it worth questioning what are the worldly analogues, what are the bodily processes and movements that generate a sense of self, even as Derrida fails to question these processes under the defense that “”[o]ne cannot attempt to deconstruct this transcendence without descending, across the inherited concepts, toward the unnamable.”
Returning back to Playing and Reality, Winnicott handles this head/oral fixation in a way that parallels Derrida’s auto-affection while providing new avenues for thought. Winnicott begins his essay on “Transitional Phenomena” with the common observation “that infants as soon as they are born tend to use fist, fingers, thumbs in stimulation of the oral erotogenic zone, in satisfaction of the instincts at that zone, and also in quiet union.” But even within this banal description there is an aspect that remains, to me, somewhat surprising: Winnicott details the way that the child’s exploration is not soft and supple, is much more forceful–we start with “fist.”
In thinking of how the child forcefully distends his cheeks, I am reminded of an art installation whose name I cannot remember: it featured an artist placing a fist in his mouth, with concepts such as rebellion, sexuality, speech and freedom in its description. And this performance piece evokes the themes of freedom and speaking the subject, collates them with an oral auto-eroticism. There is an undecidability in the image of the fist, which might represent an oppression, or a liberation; an inability to speak, or a refusal to. The inside/outside barrier is troubled. And pain, too, becomes confusing, as it is unclear if the stretching skin is a painful distortion, or a liberating, expanded and pleasurable way of making one’s body.
In any case, Winnicott explains, regarding the auto-erotic behavior: “[i]t is clear that something is important here other than oral excitement and satisfaction, although this may be the basis of everything else. Many other important things can be studied, and they include: 1. The nature of the object. 2. The infant’s capacity to recognize the object as ‘not-me’. 3. The place of the object – outside, inside, at the border. 4. The infant’s capacity to create, think up, devise, originate, produce an object. 5. The initiation of an affectionate type of object relationship.” Hopefully, the reader can notice continued patterns between Winnicott’s undecidable borders and Derrida’s, as well as the infant’s emerging sense of self through separation as evoked by Klein. But Winnicott’s analysis is more worldly than Klein’s poetics. When I press the inside of my cheek with my thumb, is this understood as the “outside” to my thumb’s contact, or is the “outside” understood as the feeling of distension on the outside of my cheek? Am I the pressing, or the pressed, or both? Ooh, I have pressed too hard–that hurts; I must be careful.
Winnicott even notes that this exploration of bodily sensation through the mouth makes use of what Derrida would call the voice’s auto-affection or what Kristeva would call the semiotic: “an infant’s babbling and the way in which an older child goes over a repertory of songs and tunes while preparing for sleep”.
Additionally relevant is “the use made of objects that are not part of the infant’s body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality.” These objects in “common experience” come to “complicat[e]” an auto-erotic experience such as thumb-sucking”, when, for example, “with the other hand the baby takes an external object, say a part of a sheet or blanket, into the mouth along with the fingers”. In other words, what Derrida referred to as speech’s “transforming the worldly opacity of its body into pure diaphaneity” might first be made possible through the infant’s efforts to thicken this boundary that feels diaphanous. In Winnicott’s account, it seems that the thinness and flexibility of the oral membrane, as well as its ease of reach, is responsible for the infant’s choice to use it as a locus of sensate exploration.
Too much of experience in the infant world may be perceived as the self acting on the self, so that in noticing that while I can act on the blanket in a way that I can feel, and while the blanket can act on me in the way that I feel it, the motion of feeling myself with the blanket comes to represent that gap between subject and object, between action and feeling, a gap that grows in thickness as the infant accepts the ‘not-me’ phenomenon. From this view, Derrida’s work is an extension of the adult’s attempts at understanding how much of experience is generated by the ‘not-me’, and therefore is a continued part of separating one’s self from the other.
So, Winnicott’s analysis provides one hypothesis for why one’s experience of selfhood might have a particular role to one’s head. But there remain others.
The idea that speech feels more proximate than writing, because one’s self, one’s center, is located in one’s head, with the subsequent struggle to deconstruct this transcendence of speech, seems to be at work in Derrida’s later claim that the purpose of deconstruction, through dissemination, is: “[t]o lose one’s head, no longer to know where one’s head is…” Sarah Hammerschlag interprets this loss of one’s head, in Broken Tablets, as Derrida’s anti-patriarchal and pro-democratic politics, a monarchic or aristocratic decapitation: “[a]s soon as talk begins about losing one’s head and politics, we are not far from the French Revolution.” And so it might be worth interpreting the specific political-rhetorical circumstances which make one associate heads with leadership, with sovereignty.
One way of tracing this relationship would make use of the Christian concept of corpus mysticum, as defined by Henri De Lubac and Ernst Kantorowicz. De Lubac argues that there were a series of linguistic shifts whereby the theologically resonant metaphors surrounding the Body of Christ, evoked by the phrase “corpus mysticum”, came to be misunderstood, and this misunderstanding led to a hierarchical concept of the body, with the head being in charge. Meanwhile, Ernst Kantorowicz makes use of the metaphor of the Body of Christ in a way that seems to suggest that the head is always superior than the rest of the body.
De Lubac notes that the “Body of Christ” could be used to refer to the rite of Melchizedek, Christ’s offering of himself at the Last Supper, the crucifixion, the Eucharist, the Church, and the welcoming of the holy at the time of Revelation, and that Church Fathers such as Augustine had interpreted the flesh of Christ as representing the unity of the Church. The term flesh might be more relevant than body, because flesh connotes a kind of undifferentiated sensate material, whereas body tends to evoke a person’s totality. De Lubac argues that exegetes originally emphasized the fleshly character of the body of Christ, whereby the Church and Christ formed an inseparable entity, whereby the members of the Church were dependent on one another, just as nutrients, breath and blood flow through the entire body. However, a series of linguistic shifts made it possible to emphasize a hierarchical, rather than interconnected, relationship.
First, the adjective mysticum referred to an event’s status as a figural mystery, which, in a hermeneutic key, is an evocative event, revealing itself as significant, even as its significance is not yet revealed. As an example of such a mystery, de Lubac cites the metonym of a red thread in a purple robe, i.e. an object whose existence is simultaneously hidden and highlighted by its context. Subsequently, the derivative phrase corpus mysticum arose, during debates over the substantiality of the Eucharist, as a means of parsing the various figural contents of the body of Christ, as a way of referring specifically to the Eucharist. These debates over the symbolic or substantial nature of the Eucharist led to a linguistic shift where mysticum began to be used in an adverbial tense, such that “mystically” referred to the signification process itself. Any of the figural contents of the body of Christ could then be “mystically” the body, so that various aspects of the metaphor were used interchangeably; then, theologians, depending on their relevant debate, began to speak of the body of Christ either as the historical body and the Church, or the historical body and the Eucharist, rather than as a multiplicity that comprised these three figural contents in addition to others.
De Lubac argues that ecclesiastical debates over papal authority benefitted from the separation of these figural contents. A similar separation occurred between Christ as head and Church as body, when Boniface VIII argued that the pope was to the Church as Christ to his members, as the head to the body. Kantorowicz does not use or even reference De Lubac’s patristic exegesis of interdependence; instead, he refers to late Medieval rhetoric which argues that the leader is to his [the patriarchy is intentional] polity as the head is to the body: soldiers must sacrifice themselves for their king, just as one uses one’s hands to protect one’s head.
De Lubac’s insight was to more highly value the Christian notion of communion, whereby the sustenance of being around others in liturgy, in worship, in public service—the sustenance of being witnessed as one accepted the body of Christ, the sustenance of receiving that body of Christ as bread—was considered as vital as the nutrients which course through one’s flesh. But even De Lubac’s insight does not exhaust the potential of the Body of Christ as a metaphor. While I have no evidence to prove that the notion of Christ as head was interpreted in this way—perhaps, this interpretation, like others, has merely been forgotten—one could just as easily read the body of Christ in a natal, temporal key, insofar as the head comes first in parturition.
I am hoping that this final reference to birth–when this theme has so often appeared in discourses pertaining to the child’s separation from and union with others–might make it clear what I have in mind by introducing de Lubac and Kantorowicz, in the middle of an already complicated discourse. There is a certain way that the meaning of metaphors might seem to be obvious–“oh, a body–so a head’s in charge!”–while it remains possible to carefully think what is involved with the worldly analogue that the metaphor deploys. And the worldly analogue seems obvious because one feels that one has one’s head; in other words, if one had available a wider array of possibilities of experiencing embodiment, beyond a self located in one’s head, then this array would challenge or complicate the ways that a metaphor could signify, by changing one’s experience of the worldly analogue. Indeed, it is possible that feeling one’s self as proximate to one’s head is itself a result of the history of rhetoric, the tradition of cultural artifacts–a history that is carefully examined by de Lubac, and taken for granted by Kantorowicz.
The careful analysis of metaphor remains important because of how easily metaphors can cause forgetting and misunderstanding, as de Lubac’s intellectual history seems to illustrate. As an example of misunderstanding, in the citations above, Derrida, Arendt, and Levinas have each made very different uses of the event of birth as a metaphor. As an example of forgetting, there is a way that Derrida uses the “double-bind” in ways that are entirely unrelated, if not opposed; and so, too, does Levinas use the rhetoric of knotting in a convoluted if not contradictory way. The authors see shared names for what are really divergent experiences and imagine that they understand the named experiences better than the confused others. So, too, the writer misunderstands himself, because either writer, noting the continuous appearance of themes, may feel himself to be writing continuously or cohesively, without the feared digression or forgetfulness.
All this to stress the persistence, despite disagreements and divergences in the use of terms, of the problem of knottiness; to stress, as well, how we might want to regard the problem of knottiness as a problem, rather than an ethical enmeshment with the other. While I have stressed how it is difficult work to separate oneself in a meaningful way, I do not want it to be taken that this difficulty means that the separation is not useful or desirable. Moreover, the persistence of the poetics of entanglement in these discourses suggests the possibility of an anthropological position, a position which attempts to identify how metaphors gain semantic valence according to worldly relationships, a position which may remain meaningful so long as these worldly relationships are shared among human bodies–even as those bodies become stretched in various cultural directions.