Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

For a pdf of the entire book, click here.

2)
That was one inconsistency. Here’s another:

-Derrida’s theory of violence is an instance of the violence it theorizes. Derrida thinks that we can call all indigenous societies “violent,” and that we can do this on philosophical grounds, without having to check, on the simple grounds that they all possess language. He thinks, further, that we can call all language “violent” because sounds and marks begin functioning as words only when they refuse to discriminate among the multiple objects they designate. Language simply will not permit us to fix our regard on some particular thing; it is a hard-wired invitation to inattention, the inevitable thoughtlessness of thought, an inability to cherish, the ongoing obliteration of specificity. It would be enough at this point to restate Derrida’s claim that all culture is colonial: “Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations.” Colonized people are as violent as the people who have colonized them because they give things names. If you want to stay close to Derrida’s reasoning, you have to be able to amplify these points with a certain ferocity, declaiming your view that every word is a red-hot cattle-brand, every noun a cauterant; that we speakers of language are the victims of an irreparable ontological wrenching, an abduction, after which we will never again be where we each most wanted to be, never simply and placidly there, as language yanks our head, over and over again, away from whatever we looked at last and towards that thing’s many substitutes and remote doubles. Of course, it is enough to paraphrase Derrida in this het up fashion to realize that his rhetoric of violence is, in fact, wholly optional. All language is general, sure enough, but one is hardly obliged to make that point in a manner that recalls angry severity or physical force, which last Derrida is stuck referring to as “empirical violence.” Other words would also serve: Maybe language is “alienating” or “etiolating“ or “schematic.” Language compels inattention, so maybe it’s just “rude.” To use the word “violence” to name all neglect of specificity is to discount the possibility that there is something specific about violence. Equally, it is to block the judgments that we are otherwise called upon to make about types and degrees of violence—judgments, in other words, about which kinds of violence we might wish to oppose in the first instance, today, before going home. Not that Derrida doesn’t himself sometimes distinguish between forms of violence, instructing us, indeed, which types to prefer. In Specters of Marx, Derrida says that people attached to their localities are “archaic” and “primitive” and then greets the possibility that modern, quintessentially American media—radio, film, telephones, television, what he calls “tele-technics”—will roust and scatter such people, subjecting to “the process of dislocation” anyone who still thinks he possesses a “native soil.”

3)

So much for the second incoherence. Here’s a third:

-Derrida’s universalism is not really universal. So a Derridean might want to reply at this point that aboriginal people are never aboriginal, which is to say that they are always already displaced and dispossessed. The colonizers don’t have any ontological privilege or historical mandate. If everyone is already dispossessed, then metaphysically speaking, there’s nothing for a land-hungry settler to do. This is where Derrida is, in fact, closest to Lacan (or to Lacan/Žižek), offering his own theory of the barred subject, universal alienation, and our fundamental inability to reunite with the world, which in Lacan is simply Oedipus or the lost mother, hence the course of individuation or, worse, of failed individuation. But there are nonetheless questions of an Aristotelian/Hegelian kind about the relation between the particular and the universal—about, in other words, the realization of the universal in this or that particular. And here Derrida is perfectly willing to distinguish between people (and practices and institutions) who actualize this universal dispossession to greater and lesser degrees. It will be important at this moment to consult the passage in Of Grammatology where he concedes that the invention of “writing in the narrow sense” was an event of epochal significance because it involved “a prodigious expansion of the power of differance.” Speech is already mediation, already the active and productive coding of the world, but writing makes this truth overt and unignorable and potent. This means, in turn, that people with “writing in the narrow sense” are imbued with “the power of differance” in ways that non-literate peoples are not. What had been writing in nuce becomes writing in elaborated fact. More: Derrida thinks that some people can convince themselves that they are rooted or non-alienated and that it would be better if they were rendered fugitive. “Dislocation” is primal in Derrida, coeval with the fantasy of a settled community, and yet techno-media are granted the special power to effect that dislocation in some actualized and real-world form. And the word “dislocation,” of course, introduces as relevant context a rather striking set of historical referents. To insinuate that people would be better off having their land taken from them because it would correct their metaphysics is to offer  philosophical apology for dispossession.

I began with some questions: How can we tell the difference between deconstruction and the other philosophies of non-identity, notably negative dialectics? Who are deconstruction’s real enemies? Can just anyone be a Derridean? Answers should now be forthcoming: Derrida is unlike Adorno because he universalizes the civilizational technology of writing; because his inflated concept of violence refuses to distinguish between a Native American clearing a path through a forest and a European clearing a path through Native Americans; because his entire program is pitched against the non-literate, which could mean the badly educated, but mostly means the indigenous, who are not the philosopher’s Levinasian others, but rather his chosen adversaries, the unwelcome. If there is a politics to deconstruction, Derrida says, it is a “politics of exodus, of the émigré. As such, it can of course serve as a political ferment or anxiety, a subversion of fixed assumptions and a privileging of disorder.” Underlying this subversion—this bringing of disorder to the natives—we find a fixed assumption in turn, which arrives in the form of an analogy or even a sort of allegory: that emigrants are people in the condition of writing, no longer tied to a single place, spread out, propagated, published, a kind of human écriture. Human societies are just only when they approximate the condition of literature. Linguists, of course, have felt free all along to ignore deconstruction, preferring to stand pat on the idea that writing-in-the-narrow-sense is secondary to language-in-general. Linguists will tell you that the minds of children are set up to develop language, to absorb it from the vibrating air, whereas writing has to be in a different sense learned, which is to say taught, broken down into steps and lessons and drillable techniques. They will also tell you that most languages have never been written down, including the great majority of historically vanished ones. From that perspective, there is nothing more telling in Derrida than his dismissal of oral societies. His entire argument is designed to dislodge people without writing from historical and global primacy, or even to deny their existence. A linguist will hear this and think it all a bit dotty, since the numerical preeminence of oral societies is as well established a fact as any in the human sciences. But all of early deconstruction is an effort to set the terms such that these propositions become in some special sense plausible, and if we know that, we will be in a position, at last, to spot the biggest misunderstanding in all of critical theory. Deconstruction is not a critique of Western metaphysics; it is a defense of Western metaphysics from critique. When Derrida first published Of Grammatology, he mailed a copy to Roland Barthes, who was then serving out a stint at Johns Hopkins, and Barthes wrote back to thank him. In Baltimore, Barthes said, Derrida’s writing was “like a book by Galileo in the land of the Inquisition, or more simply a civilized book in Barbary.” And what we learn from the civilized book of deconstruction is that it is a mistake to think that one could ever be non-Western, that in Maryland no less than in North Africa, there is nothing outside the West. Il n’y a pas de hors-ouest.

Pownal, Vt • January 2024

• 4.2

If the term “post-structuralism” has ever referred to any titles in particular—if post-structuralism, that is, has had not just canonical texts, but name-generating ones—then surely it refers to the attacks that Derrida launched against Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1966 and 1967. “Structure, Sign, and Play” goes after “structural or structuralist thought” in its very first sentence; its opening claim is that “structure” is as old as the West, an encumbrance, therefore, an unthinking conceptual reflex, one more bad habit picked up in childhood, the philosophical equivalent of chewing your nails. This “would be easy enough to show,” we read in the lecture, which formulation is Derrida’s preferred way of not showing something.[i] It’s not clear, anyway, that Derrida is right about this. An etymological dictionary will tell you that the word “structure” is Latin, from struere “to build,” and so not, in fact, ur-Western—old, sure, but not Aegean-old. It will also tell you that “structure” goes back to the Indo-European root stere-, meaning “to spread or stretch out,” which also gives us Greek stronymi or “strew,” in which case we would have to conclude that the word “structure” has “strewing” as one of its closer cousins. Structure and dissemination are thus not the antitheses that deconstruction takes them to be, but in fact variants of one another, two different ways of naming a collection of scattered points. Anyone wanting to toss out the one on the grounds of its metaphysical antiquity would, to be consistent, have to discard the other, as well.

The attack on Lévi-Strauss then continues in Of Grammatology, where the anthropologist serves as Derrida’s one great example of a living, breathing gramophobe—all the evidence he has, really, for the claim that a writer could still in the late twentieth century rise to prominence by systematically dishonoring his own medium, that someone trained as a philosopher could take to print in ink-loathing praise of peuples sans écriture. Lévi-Strauss had reported seeing an indigenous man in Brazil, living far from white settlement, wielding fake writing as a weapon against his fellows, trying to bolster his authority over them by pretending to read wordless scratchings on a page. Reflecting on that scene some days later, he had concluded that this incident revealed something important about all writing: namely, that some of its political effects depended not at all on what it said, but merely on the performance of the saying; that writing communicated the power of the writer before it communicated anything else. You can tell that the power of the writing is independent of its words because it seems to operate even when there aren’t any words.[ii] Such is the argument that Derrida was out to defeat. And to the extent that Lévi-Strauss was uniformly regarded as structuralism’s standard-bearer, that defeat would do more than any other event in recent French philosophy to bring into view the possibility of what we might call thought after Lévi-Strauss and what we have called post-structuralism, which is the name we give to sundry radical French philosophers when assimilating them to Derrida.

But then if you’re going to call deconstruction and the rest “post-structuralist,” you also have to let “structuralism” suffice as a descriptor for Lévi-Strauss’s work. This means, in turn, that if you emphasize other features of Lévi-Strauss’s system—or if you simply recognize other keys to Lévi-Strauss’s renown in the mid-1960s; other features, I mean, of his public profile—then our conception of deconstruction will shift accordingly, and maybe our conception of post-structuralism, as well, should it be shown to have been surpassing other things, too, in the process of outstripping la structure.

Anyone with enough time can confirm through a course of reading the broad outlines of Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical project. The trick to reading Lévi-Strauss is to realize that he was, despite himself, a big-historical thinker. Structuralism, officially anti-historical, houses within itself a whopping-great story about What Has Happened to the World Over Time, and it is these disavowed historical claims that underwrite its rejection of history in favor of myth. Those claims are by now pretty familiar. Lévi-Strauss begins with the anti-humanist theory of (European) man that we associate above all with Heidegger and the Frankfurt School: of Promethean man, in other words, an Ahabian humanity driven to master the world, all-conquering, determined to murder the very ocean, self-subordinating, too, constructing the technologies and institutions that “destroy innumerable living forms,” and then capturing itself in its own disastrous machinery.[iii] Many have come to the conclusion that there is a basic ambiguity in Lévi-Strauss’s arguments or that he wants to have it both ways. No French writer of his generation wrote as ardently against ethnocentrism or against the late Victorian habit of ranking the world’s peoples, and if we take Lévi-Strauss at his word, then we shouldn’t be able to rank the West any more than we can rank the Bantu or the Inuit. Or rather, we shouldn’t be able to demote the West. European civilization should settle in as just one more culture among others, with conventions of its own, cognitive customs (called “science”), narrative customs (called “history”), and so on. But there is, of course, a second sense in which Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism takes European culture to be unique, after all—uniquely diseased, uniquely alienated, estranged from the fundamental ways of relating to others and to the non-human world that are preserved by tribal thought. Structuralism was thus energized by a remarkable combination of features: a Frankfurt-style critique of instrumental reason—or a Heideggerian critique of productivism—grafted upon an anthropologist’s regard for indigenous ethics, though it’s not hard, of course, to see how these would go together: the comprehensive rejection of European thought sponsors a rigorous survey of the non-European kind.

The subtle point about structuralism, then, is that it meant not only to report on the thinking of pre-literate societies, but also to replicate that very thought for the people of Europe and North America—to teach someone who would otherwise be reading Salinger and Nabokov to think again like an indigenous person. It’s not just that Lévi-Strauss was an eco-thinker in the ordinary sense, though he could usefully be revisited under that rubric, given that he was trying to spell out a conservationist approach to thinking itself, an approach to thought modeled on the conduct of people who live amidst scarcity, on the recycler’s approach to objects, therefore, in which thought can be reconditioned and repurposed and so does not require endless innovation or concept-production, where you sift through the intellect, take what you need, combining one fistful of concepts and images with scraps of other such, cinching together out of the leavings of former reflections a not-exactly-new thought-object better suited to the task at hand. The idea, at least, is that such tinkering is what thought actually does, only we don’t know this because we chronically overestimate the mind’s novelty and independence. But then equally it is what thought should do—adapt, sort through its already existing riches—rather than engineer a single intellectual innovation determined to drive all others from the field. Structuralism, which is another name for pensée sauvage, offers itself as the very model of extensive and non-hierarchical cognition, the thinking of concrete possibilities, permutations within generous limits, social and cultural variety, solutions other than the one we opted for.

All I mean to say is that it is important to recall just what Derrida, in 1967, was attacking by attacking Lévi-Strauss. A person, of course, would have to have read deeply in Lévi-Strauss to put a résumé together.[iv] But it is enough to thumb through his UNESCO writings—among the most widely read anti-racist tracts to come out of Europe after the war—to find sentences like this: “There is no justification for asserting that any one race is intellectually superior or inferior to another.” Or this: “The original sin of anthropology … consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense, … with the sociological and psychological productions of human civilizations.” Or this: “In actual fact, there are no peoples still in their childhood; all are adult, even those who have not kept a diary of their childhood and adolescence.”  Or again this: “We may note that acceptance of the Western way of life, or certain aspects of it, [by non-Westerners], is by no means as spontaneous as Westerners would like to believe.”[v] Alternately, a person reading Tristes Tropiques in the 1950s might have remarked that in its opening chapters Lévi-Strauss violates his own chronology in order to let the reader know that he was friends with André Breton, with whom he was in exile in New York, the two men having met unexpectedly on the anti-fascist refugee ship that carried them both from Marseilles to Martinique.[vi] This early French reader, moreover, would likely have known something that a belated Anglo reader could easily miss—that the Surrealists were themselves ardent anti-colonialists; that anti-colonialism, more than a rather generic united-front communism, was the distinguishing drift of Surrealist politics—which means, in turn, that when Lévi-Strauss drew attention to the Breton circle as one of Tristes Tropiques’s more relevant contexts, he was requesting that his readers see that book as an extension of the French avant-garde’s repudiation of high Europe. Structuralism asks to be seen as a restaging of a Surrealist action from 1925, in which Breton and his friends disrupted a Parisian literary banquet by sneaking into the hall and tucking into each place-setting a flyer that began: “We profoundly hope that … colonial insurrections will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend. … We take this opportunity to dissociate ourselves publicly from all that is French.” Read in this context, Lévi-Strauss’s output looks like a multi-volume companion piece to the exhibition that the Surrealists mounted in 1931, called “The Truth about the Colonies”—totally direct that exhibition was, no poetry needed, not Surrealist, but realist. One could go on. A ‘60s-era reader of Tristes Tropiques—Derrida, say, when preparing the Grammatology—might have recalled the much discussed Manifesto of the 121, co-written by a young Surrealist and revised by Breton himself, calling for organized resistance to the French government in Algeria and aid for the independence movement there.[vii] One detail in particular stands out: It was on that journey across the Atlantic, alongside Lévi-Strauss, that André Breton first made the acquaintance of Aimé Césaire, who became Surrealism’s most important exponent outside of Europe and who was already publishing a journal called Tropiques, which then furnished Lévi-Strauss with half his title: Tristes Tropiques, Troubled Tropics, Tropics of Woe, Despairing Equator.

Deconstruction, we can now say, came into the world as an attack on anti-colonial anthropology. Not that Derrida was the first person to disagree with Lévi-Strauss—hardly. His method had already faced a strong challenge from the Left, where it was said that structuralism was a device for downplaying conflict, for minimizing the fractures and struggles that agitate and occasionally transform even non-literate and stateless societies. Many readers on the Left have always felt that structuralism was guilty of overstating the ability of culture, art, or myth to produce stability in a society by imaginatively reconciling its real antagonisms.[viii] But then Lévi-Strauss had also faced a challenge from the Right, which accused him of being a self-loathing Westerner driven by anti-civilizational prejudice, a temperamental and aestheticized primitivism that would say anything, opportunistically and unaccountably, in order to make tribal people look better than the Belgians or the Lyonnais.[ix]

It is this second line of argument that Derrida took up in 1967. What we’ll want to note first is that indigenous peoples are never not at issue in Of Grammatology, from beginning to end, albeit in ways that can be a little hard to spot. Indians don’t appear by name until the chapter on Lévi-Strauss, but they hang silently over the entire book, since they can’t help but be Derrida’s test case, over and over again, for his signature claim that there have never existed societies without writing. Take the following sentence: “Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter…, the concept of the graphie [the unit of a possible graphic system] implies the framework of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification.”[x] The word to pay attention to is before: Even before the letter, before writing in the ordinary sense. Derrida has to grant that there have existed oral societies even in the process of negating that claim. The same holds true for the the prefix arche- in the term arche-writing; it, too, points to indios and islanders. In some contexts, of course, arche- just means “very ancient” or the “first,” and if that were true here, arche-writing would refer to “the rudiments of writing” or “ur-script,” hence maybe to Babylonian accounting methods, except Derrida exploits a permanent ambiguity in perceptions of the primal, which ambiguity follows on from the simple observation that the prototype of a given thing is often unlike that thing’s common form, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability. The earliest version of x both is and isn’t x. What Derrida also calls “originary writing” thus carries its own negation inside itself: writing-before-writing, which is also writing-that-is-not-writing, which is also indigenous writing or the writing-of-people-who-don’t-read. If you were to substitute “Indian” for “arche-“ every time you saw it, it would become rather easier to reconstruct Derrida’s historical claims: arche-writing, Indian writing, un-writing.

The first of Derrida’s complaints is thus easy to guess: Lévi-Strauss is to be rebuked for stupidly believing that the Nambikwara didn’t know about writing until he showed up with his notepad. If you’ve read any Derrida at all you will have seen this thesis coming, though even in that case, the “Violence of the Letter” will give you a chance to confirm your hunch that Derrida can make his signature argument only by proclaiming all marks to be writing: vegetable-dye tattoos, zigzags on squashes, wolves urinating on rocks. The idea is that the precolonial Nambikwara could have gained insight into writing by watching a jaguar claw significance into tree bark.[xi]

It is, however, Derrida’s second argument, the one about violence, that you might not have seen coming. Lévi-Strauss, after all, had wanted to specify the forms of oppression that Europeans have inflicted on the non-European world, and to point out that this oppression was not just material, but cultural and cognitive, as well. And to this Derrida replies that the violence at issue was not Europe’s fault, that colonized people were already oppressed before their conquerors arrived, overcome from the start by “the originary violence of language which consists in … classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute”—the direct address—and so using words to subsume the world in generalities.[xii] Here, at the very latest, we are forced to conclude that Derrida has fundamentally reversed tack on radical philosophy’s usual wildcat genealogies of “metaphysics” or “Western thought.” For if deconstruction is right, the problem with “Western thought” is not its addiction to theoretical, philosophical, or scientific knowledge (which has its home in writing &c); nor are we meant to contemplate the ways in which writing everywhere produces new forms of hierarchy: scribal elites, ranked degrees of literacy, preferred positions for the hyper-literate, &. The most serious problem with “Western thought” is that it encourages one to believe that there is also something other than “Western thought.” The polemical thrust of early deconstruction in its struggle with anthropology boils down to the idea that there is no position outside of the violence perpetrated by meaning-making people from which one might in good conscience struggle against London or Paris.

This is not an argument that will withstand even basic modes of scrutiny. One can, of course, indict Lévi-Strauss on charges of a generic Rousseauvianism. If you’ve already decided that Rousseau was a chump and Alp-climbing hippie, or if you think that anyone who prefers indigenous people on any grounds is indulging in so much noble savagery, or if you think that smart and convivial Indians are only ever stock characters, then nothing Lévi-Strauss says is going to change your mind. But the details of Derrida’s objections won’t hold up. Nor is this a subtle point. It’s enough to go and read Tristes Tropiqes to see that Derrida is wrong about Lévi-Strauss. The big point should be apparent, in fact, to anyone who knows anything about structuralism, even second-hand. Lévi-Strauss, after all, is not dreaming of a paradisical spoken language in which words were still full, directly attached to the world’s furniture, capable of presence. Quite the contrary: He accepted Saussure’s position, which Derrida also misrepresents on this point. The most basic move of structuralist anthropology was simply to extend the Saussurean account of language to tribal societies, precisely in order to defeat the idea that language worked differently for indigenous people—to show that tribal people, too, existed in culture and not nature, that they were semiotic peoples, all peoples being semiotic, intensely and intricately coding the world in language via differences that were not positivities. When Derrida attributes to Lévi-Strauss the opposite position, he is simply inventing things that his rival does not say.

It’s even worse on the matter of violence, because the evidence could not be clearer. Derrida says repeatedly that Lévi-Strauss is pushing some stupid myth in which native Americans are fundamentally peaceful, which then allows the anti-colonial anthropologist to claim that white people introduced violence to the Americas. And again, this simply isn’t what Lévi-Strauss is claiming. In the chapters immediately surrounding “The Writing Lesson,” Lévi-Strauss describes an orphan trampled at a dance; “children often hitting out at their mothers”; a little girl who says: “When I’m big I shall kill all the wild pigs and all the monkeys”; hunters who think they will be reincarnated as predatory cats; and those same hunters’ belief that any woman who pries into the secret rites of men “should be struck down at once.” He also notes “the speed with which [the Indians] pass from cordiality to hostility.” He recounts the making of poison. He even describes how the Nambikwara, by their own admission, “murdered” some Protestant American missionaries. It’s just that Lévi-Strauss asks us not to judge them for this, construing that killing as a spontaneously anti-colonial act, and so shrugging good riddance to this Presbyterianism-on-the-march, even though he is pretty sure at one point that his hosts are about to kill him, too.[xiii] That last episode, where Lévi-Strauss anticipates his death at Indian hands, appears in “The Writing Lesson” itself. Nor does Lévi-Strauss then turn around and incongruously describe his hosts as pacifists. He doesn’t say much more than that he liked them—that they were “charming,” that they goofed around a lot, that they seemed to enjoy each other’s company.[xiv] Post-structuralism’s founding arguments rest on errors of the most elementary kind.

[i] See “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1967), in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (1978), (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 351-370, quotations at p. 351.

[ii] See “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques (1955), translated by John Russell (New York: Criterion, 1961), pp. 286-297.

[iii] Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, III, L’Origine des Manières de Table (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 22.

[iv] In addition to Tristes Tropiques, a person would need to have read The Savage Mind (1962), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and the late talks on Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken Book, 1979). It would also help to read David Pace’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (London: Routledge, 1983) and the biography by Patrick Wilcken (New York: Penguin, 2010).

[v] Levi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), p. 5 (quotations #1 and #2), p. 19, p. 31.

[vi]  Lévi-Strauss describes his meeting André Breton in Tristes Tropiques, p. 26.

[vii] On the politics of Surrealism, see Mark Polizzotti’s Revolution of the Mind (New York: Farrar Straus, 1995), pp. 235-240 and p. 601; also Jody Blake’s “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art indigène in Service of the Revolution” in Oxford Art Journal 25:1 (2002), pp. 35-58.

[viii] See for instance Maurice Godelier’s “Myth in History” in New Left Review 1.69 (1971), pp. 93-112.

[ix] See esp. Roger Caillois’s two-part essay “Illusions à rebours,” in La nouvelle nouvelle revue française, December 1954, pp. 1010-1024 and January 1955, pp. 58-70.

[x] Of Grammatology, p. 46.

[xi] See also Points, p. 84.

[xii] Of Grammatology, pp. 111-2.

[xiii] Tristes Tropiques, p. 274; p. 276; p. 281; p. 282-3; p. 284-5; p. 290.

[xiv] ibid., p. 285.

I found the photograph at the top in National Geographic. 

• DECONSTRUCTION IS AMERICA 3.3 

–Deconstruction aligns itself with market society, with a universal and impossible commerce. Derrida is never more appealingly stringent than when trying to devise an action wholly outside the exchange relation, which would require as its occasion an object beyond the commodity form. An act for which you get nothing in return: giving is what we call that, except let’s take it seriously for once. “Nothing in return” means we can’t be exchanging gifts, not even on a delay, so Christmas presents won’t count, and neither will birthday packages, since the buttercup yellow stand mixer I present to you in February will come back to me as a vintage tweed overcoat seven months later. If I am really giving something, I can’t expect a counter-gift as recompense, but then I can’t expect anything else either: neither gratitude, certainly, nor a favor, nor the admiration of onlookers. Better, then, that I give the gift anonymously, since anonymity will make me hard to repay, though there remains the risk that I might, in my role as secret giver, bask in the diffuse wonder and room-searching thankfulness of the one opening the parcel, so better still that I not be there for the giving, even incognito (because the other’s confused smile will feel to me like compensation, and if there’s compensation, then—no gift). Even in this last scenario, of course, I might tickle myself by imagining the delight felt by the beneficiary of my shrouded largesse, so better if that person doesn’t even know it to be a gift. It is only by disguising the gift as something other than what it is that I cease to impose the obligation of gratitude. A gift stops being a gift when it can be named as such. Only the non-gift is a gift. But then the last remaining problem is that I will know it to be a gift even so, and this is a problem because I am bound to congratulate myself for having pulled off this feat of generosity. The satisfaction I take in my ethical handiwork will be my last remaining compensation, and once again, the gift will vanish. It is not enough, therefore, that the other not know the gift to be a gift. I can’t know it either. That’s a gift, the only gift: an object given by someone who doesn’t know herself to be a donor to someone who doesn’t know himself to be a recipient.^[i]

It’s a remarkable argument and all the prompt one needs to recall the several passages across his corpus where Derrida seems to lead deconstruction outside of the marketplace. One thinks of the splendid, stinging attack on copyright at the beginning of Limited Inc—an attack, that is, on writing as personal possession and saleable article, for which Derrida means to substitute a theory of collective authorship and the text as commons. In the same vein, there’s this, from Monolingualism of the Other: “But who exactly possesses [language]? And whom does it possess? Is language in possession, ever a possessing or possessed possession … like a piece of personal property?”^[ii] Language resists all efforts to treat it as one’s own. It can’t be in the least surprising, then, that literature is Derrida’s one plausible candidate for the impossible and utopian gift, perhaps its only real-world incarnation. Ecriture “surpasses the phantasm of return and marks the death of the signatory or the non-return of the legacy, the non-benefit, therefore a certain condition of the gift—in the writing itself.”^[iii]

The only plausible candidate? Maybe that isn’t so clear. Empirically, this claim is perhaps a bit silly. The rigorism that otherwise characterizes Derrida’s argument about the gift—the moral severity that allows him to say that no gift is really a gift—has now disappeared, since nearly all writers (all writers?) do expect and get a return for their writing: payment, status, teaching jobs, tenure, praise, fans, although perhaps we can make Derrida’s argument more specific: When the text gets disseminated, some of the encounters it generates will have the character of the impossible—will be gifts, maybe the only gifts—via the people who read me that I don’t know and didn’t even foresee and who conversely know nothing about me, who never reimburse or even talk back to me. With any luck, they will read a copy of my book without dust jacket or title page, meaning: They won’t even be able to praise me by name, to cite me approvingly or raise my reputation with third parties.

Such is at least one way of filling in Derrida’s argument. The problem with this, however, is that by the time I imagine someone finding my book without my name on it, I am no longer conceiving of myself as engaged in a repeatable practice. I am headed back, rather, to the impossible and the utopian—not real literature as the realization of the impossible gift, but an improbably anonymous literature as the non-realization of the impossible gift. At the very least, Derrida has to abstract these fleeting and hypothetical encounters from out of an otherwise mundane culture of print, publishing, and literacy that has compensation and exchange built into it at multiple levels. But then perhaps the problem is equally that he has not done nearly enough to abstract writing-as-gift from ordinary print culture. I just wrote that the text can begin to function as a gift only once disseminated, and the primary vector of such dissemination in any society that we have known is the print marketplace. Anyone wanting to think concretely about deconstruction will need experimentally to excise the word “dissemination” every time that it appears in Derrida’s writing and silently substitute the word “distribution,” which is its unexcitingly commercial equivalent. Even the gift arrives mostly via warehousing middlemen and trans-Pacific shipping containers.

It is from out of materials like these last that Derrida builds one of the screwiest arguments in the annals of critical theory, which is nothing less than an Adornian defense of global capitalism. Here’s how that works. We’ll need first to hold in mind the point just made. Derrida’s account of dissemination has always worked best within the literary marketplace, though it does not strictly presuppose it, since the mere technology of writing is enough to ensure the unpredictable survival and circulation of texts. All the same, dissemination kicks into high gear—is realized to some higher degree—in the marketplace. Consider almost any book now sitting on your desk and you’ll be forced to conclude that it was the marketplace that did most of the work disseminating it. The book-as-commodity almost certainly traveled further than it did in its aftermarket existence as possession or shared good. To that extent, dissemination always works best as an argument about the print commodity. And yet Derrida sometimes takes himself to be talking about gifts, objects that are beyond exchange, which gives us the following puzzle: If the text is a paradigm for the gift, and the disseminated text is also paradigmatically a commodity, then gift and commodity have collapsed back into each other. Derrida’s perfect gift-and-non-commodity comes to us in the form of its opposite.

At the end of Given Time, the first of his two gift books, Derrida steps forward to argue this point without camouflage. People like Aristotle want to regulate trade in the name of householding, but Derrida isn’t having it, and this on the anti-domestic grounds that we often associate with queer militancy: because the home is a closed space and hearth-warmed penitentiary and to that extent immoral. The home is the very paradigm of identity-thought—you can find Adorno and sundry others arguing the same case. The ethics of deconstruction therefore requires that we not have homes or at least that we leave our homes unguarded, and if we are to do this, then we will have to promise not to pursue Athenian oeconomy, which supports an old and paternalist fantasy about well-governed homesteads. Here’s Derrida: “Nothing … can happen in the family … in the sealed enclosure, which is moreover unimaginable, of the restricted, absolutely restricted economy.”^[iv] So we need an alternative, an open house, one name for which is hospitality.

Its other name, according to Derrida, is accumulation. The way to bid the world welcome—to practice non-identity or what used to be called the freedom of the house—is to reject Aristotle’s preferred option (thrift, careful expenditure, housewifery for men) and embrace the alternative he has discarded, which is the aggressive pursuit of wealth, Greek chresmatics or getting rich, which will transform your hitherto tedious dwelling into one more permeable node in the planetary circulation of goods. Derrida, this is all to say, concludes one of his major books by arguing that receptivity to the other requires global trade. “As soon as there is monetary sign … the oikos is opened…. This is at the same time its orginary ruin and the chance for any kind of hospitality. … the chance for the gift itself.”^[v] Derrida’s chief candidate for the role of non-commodity is thus a certain type of commodity, the kind from Brazil or Vietnam, circulating anonymously, untethered from its origins—just like text, which for deconstruction has paradigmatically been commercialized text anyway. Firm judgments, national economies, and many types of interpretation are closed, hence malign. Open are 1) aporia or the skeptical suspension of judgment; 2) global markets; and 3) poetry and poetic principles of literary interpretation, of a kind that can be brought to bear even upon narrative.

At this point, there lights up a long sequence of passages, from across three decades of writing, in which Derrida aligns deconstruction with markets or money or the commodity. I’ll point to three of them briefly. A fourth demands closer consideration.

1. Platonists often argue that there need to be wise people who can make judgments concerning good and bad, benefit and harm—people, that is, who can discern the ethical implications and political effects of proposed innovations. That’s an argument that Derrida unsurprisingly rejects, though what is nonetheless easy to overlook is Derrida’s active recasting of Plato’s position into an anachronistically commercial language: “it is the King who will give [writing] its value, who will set the price of what, in the act of receiving, he constitutes or institutes.”^[vi] That sentence, it has to be said, is rather strange, because there is very little to suggest an economic reading in the passage from Plato to which Derrida is responding. In other words, Derrida has had to introduce the economic register, which arrives in the form of an accusation: The king is the one who, believing himself possessed of moral insight, makes ethico-political judgments, which are akin to price-fixing. And having framed his complaint in pecuniary terms, Derrida has given himself no choice but to produce an alternative that will also work in such terms, a policy that is at once textual and economic. The emancipated and mobile writing that he theorizes in “Plato’s Pharmacy” is thus a textuality that has slipped loose from commercial controls, a liberalized écriture around which buyers and sellers will without supervision set the terms for what is good and bad. Or rather: Literature is itself the low-tariff marketplace of language, in which language circulates freely, without monopolies or trade restrictions.

2. The ghost is the textbook Derridean term, the present absence, the spirit in quasi-corporeal form, the body-spirit, outside of categories, outside the regime of knowledge or discourse—something we cannot claim in the usual fashion to name or know: “One does not know [the ghost]: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. … this Thing that is not a thing.”^[vii] Very early in Specters of Marx, during one of that book’s first bits of free association, Derrida makes clear that the commodity is, if we follow Marx, ghost-like in just this sense: a non-sensuous sensuous thing. And Derrida is right about Marx; Capital, Volume One famously speaks of “the phantomlike objectivity of the commodity.”^[viii] But then if Derrida is sticking up for the ghost as the disruptive and redemptively unclassifiable term, if, that is, we are to prefer spectral versions of things to their mundanely tangible and daylit forms, and if commodities are apparitional in the relevant sense, then Derrida has got to be sticking up for the latter, too—for commodities—and deconstruction’s putative reconciliation with Marxism shows itself, not for the last time, to be happier inside markets than outside of them.

3. In the great lecture on “Differance,” Derrida says he finds it striking that the word difference, in French, never actually means “deferral” (even though the underlying verb can mean “defer”). Nor does difference mean polemos, as in “difference of opinion,” an English formulation that doesn’t come readily to French speakers. That is the situation that Derrida means to remedy by proposing that we swap in an -a- for that second -e-. Differance will mean all three at once: dissimilarity, postponement, and conflict. Later in the lecture, he revisits the second on the list, noting that the economic meaning of “deferral” is especially important to him. Language has the structure of an economic delay: delayed satisfaction, the deferred realization of profit on an investment, and so on. Deconstruction, one is startled to realize, is a cousin to the Marshmallow Test. We should pause here to note that deferral-as-economic-delay is a usage he might have come across in French anthropology. The verb “defer” shows up with this meaning in Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, whom we know Derrida read closely and who in turn had borrowed it from an important monograph on pre-modern Chinese kinship. Lévi-Strauss had been eager to distinguish between different types of exchange, and especially between:

-first, one-off trades, two-term swaps that have at least some of the characteristics of bartering, and…

-second, the kind of extended chains and complicated, interlacing transactions common to market societies and many societies of the gift.

The first Lévi-Strauss and the sinologist called chassé-croisé, which means “crossover” or “back-and-forth,” though it also a move in French country-dancing, which tempts one to translate it as “do-si-do.” The second he called échanges differés.^[ix] Or rather, that’s what Ganet, Lévi-Strauss’s source, had called it: “deferred exchange.” Lévi-Strauss preferred to call it “generalized” as opposed to “restricted” exchange. And this brings us back, via a different route, to the final pages of Given Time. Differance absorbs as one of its meanings the unrestricted economy, the trade that only ever opens up onto another trade—exchange without end.

4. The paper of Derrida’s that most often gets misread is probably “White Mythology.” Again and again, one comes across experts claiming that the main argument of that essay is that philosophy cannot cleanse itself of metaphor. It is hard to pin this misunderstanding on Derrida, who is clearer than usual about what he’s arguing: He begins the essay by saying that this notion—no non-metaphorical philosophy!—is the point that everyone knows already and then spends the remainder of his time making the opposite case, which is that the entire language of metaphor is metaphysical, that by talking about metaphor rather than about concepts one is not leaving philosophy behind. In other words, the essay’s takeaway is that the literary types should stop gloating, that their preferred (putatively non-philosophical) approach to language does not exempt them from the European intellect’s contaminating legacies. Pensée sauvage—mind in the wild, thinking outside the philosophical West—is what’s at stake in that essay, only not in the way that a first-time reader might think. It’s precisely the position that Derrida is out to defeat, though his named targets are not so much anthropologists as the historical philologists who thought you could peel away all the vernacular and philosophical abstractions in language until you reached the original, indigenous names for things—the first terms and positivities. He is claiming that this can’t be done—that there is no logic of the concrete to be accessed by tracing abstractions back to the metaphors, flinty and palpable, from which these were originally derived; that thinking tangibly has never been an option; that there has only ever been abstraction and this from word one.

Granted, before readers can get to this argument, they will have to make it through a confetti-spray of puns and mad troping. The essay’s very first post-titular word is “Exergue,” appearing above the first paragraph, as a chapter heading, and meaning several things at once.^[x] It’s a French word dating to the seventeenth century, a bit of concocted pseudo-Greek approximating the phrase hors d’oeuvre, “outside the work,” which means that we can take it, if we like, as meaning “preface” or even “starter.” This isn’t the word’s definition of record, however. A big English dictionary will tell you that “exergue” is a term from numismatics, in which capacity, as a piece of hobbyists’ jargon, it means the small text printed caption-like on a coin—“inscription,” then—except among English coin-collectors the meaning shifted early on to mean not the inscription itself but the space, beneath the liberty torch or emperor’s head, into which the inscription got stamped. “Exergue” thus means either words on coins or the coin itself understood as a space for writing.

There are now two arguments we have to be able to hold together: first, that language is never concrete, not even when pre-philosophical, if that word is even allowed; and second, that we can usefully think about writing in the context of money or perhaps that we would do well to think of writing as money-like. Words cannot be concrete because they have to be able to circulate; they have to be usable in multiple contexts—this is the sense in which they are like coins. Observations that Derrida makes first about florins and guilders he therefore invites us to transfer over to language: Old coins were vulnerable to wear-and-tear; we should be thinking about the slow effacement, through regular handling, of design and motto, their gradual reduction back to metal, bare and un-signifying. Derrida’s point is that you can’t profit from a circulating something—a common noun or Mercury dime—if you’re not prepared to risk a degree of abstraction, and not just a one-time abstraction, but an ongoing slide into higher abstraction. Rather than trying to recover the concrete terms that supposedly lie sedimented behind our philosophical concepts, we should commit ourselves to this course of de-specification, which is the fate of all much-handled things. This is perhaps the baldest instance of Derrida’s characteristic resolve to solve philosophical problems by shifting thought to higher levels of generality. It’s just that the image he produces to telegraph that solution is especially striking here: Thinking does not begin in concretion and lapse into empty form. It begins in abstraction and becomes even more abstract, and the paradigm for this process, once completed, is a ground-away coin, a denarius whose symbols and national designations have been effaced—a kind of global hyper-currency, in other words, not backed by any metropolitan treasury, ministerially unsigned, undenominated—an impossible coin, you might say, because no transnational currency currently exists, until you realize that all that Derrida is describing is raw specie, undifferentiated bullion—an ingot.^[xi]

It’s important to be clear about this: For Derrida, such un-differentiation is the utopian condition of both money and language, because, at least as a thought experiment, it would allow for maximal and frictionless circulation, maximal delocalization, without borders or translators or currency-exchange kiosks. The philologists think that they can trace the word nous back to something that a goatherd once witnessed in the northern Peloponnesus, and Derrida’s response is to claim that language has never been aboriginal in this way—that it is, indeed, better for us that it never be aboriginal, localized, non-commercial. This last idea should help us understand why Derrida calls the essay “White Mythology.” A century ago, Anatole France, arguing in the indigenist-philological mode that Derrida rejects, asked his readers to think of philosophy as mythos alienated from itself, a system of thought with mythic origins that, however, did not know itself to be mythical, burying its underlying concretion in layer upon layer of false ideation. In a sense, that notion is a way of denouncing philosophy, and yet it also posits a mostly unrecognized continuity between myth and school-wisdom, suggesting, indeed, that something telluric remains intact even in the loftiest of modern thought-systems. A talented philologist should be able to pick up Fichte or Malebranche and make him speak myth again, by tracing the philosopher’s attenuated concepts back to their primeval and non-philosophical roots. If, having done this, we then return to the Treatise on Ethics as written, it will look to us not like great philosophy, but rather like “anemic mythology”—that’s how France put it.^[xii] Hence Derrida’s title: It is Anatole France’s philosophy-as-blood-sick-folklore that the essay renames “white mythology,” and it is that latter concept that Derrida means to vindicate, because blankness is deconstruction’s path to redemption. This cannot be said often enough. The essay “White Mythology” was written in defense of its eponym, though even here what matters to Derrida is not so much the “mythology,” which is the word he took over from Anatole France, as the “white,” which is the word he introduced of his own volition. Onwards, says the Derridean … no going back …  forwards … into the whiteness. Mush.

[i] Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (1991), translated by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992).

[ii] Derrida, Limited Inc, translated by Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 29-31; Monolingualism of the Other, p. 17.

[iii] Given Time, p. 100.

[iv] ibid., p. 159.

[v] ibid., p. 158.

[vi] “Plato’s Pharmacy,” p. 78.

[vii] “Specters,” p. 6.

[viii] Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (1867), translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 128.

[ix] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), translated by James Bell and John con Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 312.

[x] “White Mythology,” p. 209.

[xi] ibid, p. 210.

[xii] Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, translated by Alfred Allinson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923), p. 214. Derrida quotes—or misquotes—France at p. 213.

• DECONSTRUCTION IS AMERICA  3.2. 

–Deconstruction aligns itself with writing, with a universal and impossible language. That writing is emancipatory is the only one of these three claims that shouldn’t be in the least bit surprising; it is the argument, in fact, with which deconstruction is most often associated. If the point is nonetheless worth restating now, this is in order to give each of us the chance to consider afresh whether we actually believe in the redemptive ubiquity of écriture, whether we are convinced that there spills constantly from our mouths and out our fingertips the force of non-identity and therapeutic instability. Writing in “Plato’s Pharmacy” is the straying, playful, patricidal, atheistic, radically democratic outlaw and anarchist—the Bonnot Gang in twenty-six letters and five diacritics. The words I write and speak will always betray-which-is-to-say-save me, cheerfully undermining my declamatory pretense, shielding me from my own authoritarianism, rescuing me by preventing my expert self from functioning successfully as dogmatist or despot. Deconstruction invites us to set up camp in “the place where discourses can no longer dominate,” though if you read around in Derrida at all, you’ll realize before long that this place is everywhere, that language never actually wields power over us, however prone we are to invest words with a specious authority that we could just as soon withhold.^[i]

This view might be right, but what we’ll want to see is that the Derridean can come to this position only by setting aside an equally compelling body of scholarship, viz. the historical sociology that finds in writing a force for standardization, stabilization, and new types of hierarchy. It seems at least plausible that it was writing that carried some once localized god into new regions, demanding uniform reverence for the book-god at the expense of sundry resident sylphs and godkins. We have some good reasons, indeed, for believing that textual religion, like textual law, goes in for authorized versions, exact copies, and the sanctity (or binding quality) of the fixed word, making possible enforceable orthodoxies, shackling the present to the quotable past, with the written document serving as bulwark against eclecticism and improvisation. In Anglo-Saxon England, meanwhile, fields that counted as private property, having owners in something like the modern sense, under the permanent control of a named person who could transfer them at will, were called “bookland.” In order to declare deconstruction correct, we have to be able to say, implausibly, that a world with scripts—canons, for a start, and legal codes and catechisms—is if anything even more miscellaneous than a world without them.^[ii]

Sometimes, it’s true, the Weberian account of writing obtrudes into Derrida’s argument as a goad or quellable doubt. At one point, he says that he wants to write with a “multiplicity of levels or tones” even though “the ‘dominant’ demand always requires, or so people want to make us believe, more linearity, cursivity, flattening.”^[iii] What jumps out in that statement are its two hesitations or qualifications: the scare quotes around “dominant”,  plus “the demand” that might actually just be a trick perpetrated by das Man. Is homogenization happening or not? Derrida doesn’t seem to know. Something, it’s true, seems to be pushing towards a flat and uniform world, though how far this process has advanced it is impossible to say. Uniformity might only be a demand—unfulfilled, unheeded. And even that demand might be a fiction, a misread signal, an order we thought we heard but that no-one actually gave. It is vexing to find Derrida so noncommittal on this issue, since the status of deconstruction changes drastically depending on which of these positions you adopt. For if language has become standardized—or is itself an agent of standardization—then deconstruction steps forward as a militant project to reverse an entrenched historical process, in a manner that would align it with Marxism, anarchism, the critique of bureaucracy, and so on. But if language, per contra, has not been standardized—if it is, indeed, incapable of standardization—then it becomes hard to see why deconstruction would have any urgency or what exactly it takes itself to be doing, since you needn’t attempt a multiplicity of levels and tones if you think this is the organic character of all language anyway. “Attempting” simply wouldn’t enter it. “A message,” Derrida says elsewhere, “never remains intact,” and what that means is: There is no standardization.^[iv] An utterance always refracts. A world united (i.e., not really united) around a single book—the New Testament, say—would be difficult to distinguish from a many-scriptured and partially bookless world. The world was no less varied after Christian colonization and the nineteenth-century missionary movements than it was before it. If language cannot be standardized, if its multifariousness is guaranteed, then deconstruction ceases to be a project and so shrinks down to the status of mere demonstration, the pedagogical performance of a known and unchangeable truth, an old chemistry experiment performed every year in front of high-school juniors.

[i] Points, p. 86.

[ii] For the Weberian account of writing, see, among others, Jack Goody’s Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The classic essay on bookland is Frederic William Maitland’s “Book-land” and Folk-land,” in Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), pp. 244-258.

[iii] Points, p. 130.

[iv] ibid., p. 125.

• 3.1

We can keep the questions rolling. To ask what it is that Derrideans mean to build is to inquire about the status of deconstruction in the world. Can deconstruction without betraying itself appear in the guise of its antithesis, which is construction? Derrida never tired of saying that deconstruction was not a negative philosophy, that it was fundamentally affirmative, cultivating in its readers a capacity to greet the future (rather than to fear it) and to welcome whatever or whoever seems on first appearance outlandish and inimical: “Deconstruction always presupposes affirmation”;  “I would even say that it never proceeds without love.”^[i] But let us wonder: Does the one-who-affirms also make something?—something at least semi-enduring, something that other people could also grab hold of and put to their purposes or perhaps to our now shared purposes of mutual affirmation? Which, indeed, are the practices and institutions that can foster in me what Derrida calls an “openness to the other”?^[ii] And is there anything that can help me act on that aperture? Who or what are the agents and instruments of deconstruction?

All I’m trying to say is that once Derrida has helped us see that we bear the responsibility to welcome the stranger, it would also be nice to have someplace for him to sleep. It is around such questions, upon attempting to devise a deconstruction that is more than attitudinal, that Derrida’s thinking most obviously generates a series of puzzles. It is in the first instance easy enough to see why some socialists and feminists and neo-Jacobins have been drawn to deconstruction and above all to the concept of dissemination, which from one vantage is just another name for the literate multitude, die Leser aller Länder. If I start from the idea that writing always exists in many hands at once, then I am ceding the accustomed power of the philosopher (or literary scholar or Supreme Court justice) to preside over interpretation by announcing what the text really means. I am interested rather in what my unseen, inglorious fellows might be thinking or saying or arguing about that same bit of writing and trying to guess the verbal materials that might make possible the alternative practices of these many others.^[iii] At the same time, however, deconstruction means to convene a cadre of expert readers who can proleptically perform the multiple meanings that would otherwise emerge but slowly and in historical time, as a given text traveled its unpredictable circuit. And Derrida insists that such reading-with-the-multitude is difficult, arduously so, probably too difficult for you: We don’t know how to read yet … Has anyone ever really read anything? … There are perhaps a dozen good readers in the world. Deconstruction posits at one and the same time the splendidly indiscriminate mass of transnational readers—the bookish mobility—and its own class of adepts, the aristocrats of écriture who are able to encompass in themselves the vastness of possible readings, to carry and indeed preempt dissemination by dint of their own resourceful verbality.

But that’s not the end of it. Deconstruction faces one kind of paradox when it settles on a fixed set of agents and another kind when it refuses thus to settle. The problem in this second case involves some of Derrida’s most characteristic formulations, all of those sans-constructions and multifarious to-comes, since it is via such phrasing that deconstruction most obviously evades the problem of its bearers and real-world deputies. We might consider again the matter of deconstruction’s “messianism without identifiable messiah,” which one leading U.S. Derridean parses like so: “Were the Messiah ever to show up in the flesh … that would be a disaster. The effect would be to shut down the very structure of time and history, to close off the structure of hope, desire, expectation, promise, in short, of the future.”^[iv] What we’ll want to see is that the hatred for Jesus on display in these sentences—and this from a Christian theologian—is likewise a hatred of practice and of the completed emancipatory act. We are being requested to prefer the hope for justice to justice itself. Radical philosophers have hitherto done more than interpret the world; the point is not to change it. In 1988, Demi Moore starred in The Seventh Sign, a movie about the End of Days, in which Christ himself appears to urge his prophet to stop the Second Coming—to prevent God from redeeming the world—to perpetuate a world that the movie itself can’t help but depict as cruel and damaged and unfed. It’s a remarkable conceit: In The Seventh Sign, Jesus returns so as not to return, at which point the parousia slips into the position that action movies typically reserve for pandemics or alien invasions—the position, I mean, of the Big Threat. Hollywood, like deconstruction, can conceive of the redeemed society only as an extinction event: Jesus is coming! He must be stopped! Here’s Derrida: “I would like him to come, I hope that he will come, … and at the same time, I am scared. I do not want what I want, and I would like the coming of the Messiah to be infinitely postponed.”^[v]

The important point, then, as we watch Derrida’s near-Christianity tip over into this manifestly anti-Christian position, is to see how the same reversal happens over and over again in deconstruction, and always around those without-terms. The problem is succinctly explained: A rarefied messianicity in the abstract requires us to despise any particular messiah. The Derrideans can’t afford to have that slot filled. The next step is simply to extend this point to utopias. It’s easy to imagine a Derridean utopianism without utopias, which would in practice be doggedly anti-utopian, because it would have to oppose the construction of any fair and egalitarian institutions in particular. But then one would also have to oppose all “others” on similar grounds. The messiah, indeed, is sometimes referred to as the tout autre, the entirely other, and messianicity is supposed to name the possibility of a future that will be unforeseeably unlike the present—not another time, but an othertime—so I am, in fact, only reformulating the point just made, by extending it to alterity in its ordinary, non-temporal mode. If we need a messianism without messiahs, then presumably we also need an alterity without others, too, because no particular other can maintain the purity of alterity-as-empty-slot. Any identifiable other begins shedding his or her alterity in the act of identification, starting with those possessive pronouns. If I know that the alterity in question is her alterity, then I already know too much. One could make this point dialectically; I just said “identify,” after all, and Hegelian reciprocity games quickly produce the other-as-same. But one can also make the point experientially: People don’t stay radically unknown to us. In this case, the dialectical and the experiential go together rather neatly: For me to be able to name somebody as an other, he or she has to be within my field of experience, and at that point, it is going to be difficult for the person in question to remain truly alien. My commitment to alterity thus requires me to reject all concrete others as insufficiently other, at which point the doctrine of alterity becomes just one more metaphysical system—another philosophy asking me to expel others rather than welcome them—and deconstruction hangs its head before its own wagging finger.

What, after all, are Derrideans to do, while abiding in paradox and stepping up their devotion to unrealizable hyper-abstractions? Once you’ve worked your way through Glas, how do you actively deliver yourself over to the momentum of non-presence? Those questions do, in fact, have answers. Derrida, this is to say, does finally identify at least three institutions capable of carrying non-identity into the world, however imperfectly—three vehicles of differance—and simply naming this trio will be the tidiest way of distinguishing deconstruction from negative dialectics, since none of the three serves a utopian or proto-messianic function in Adorno. They are 1) writing, 2) capitalism, and 3) empire. Let’s just take them one by one.

[i] “Deconstruction and the other,” p. 167; Points, p. 83.

[ii] ibid., p. 173.

[iii] A question in that spirit: “Why should philosophy be the preserve of professional philosophers?” See Points, p. 125.

[iv] Caputo in Nutshell, p. 163.

[v] Derrida in Nutshell, p. 24.

• 2.4

That’s one way in which Derrida’s handling of universals is distinctive. The second way is this:

–Derrida is content to call his universalism “impossible” and thus to give up on the hard work of making it real in this-worldly practices and institutions. This is the big lesson of Derrida’s Marx book—that Marx was too materialist, that we have to learn to talk again about specters, spectrality, ghosts, Geist, the disembodied, the appearance of the non-material. This last might sound like a return to Hegel—less matter, more Geist—and it’s true that Derrida turns out to be in most respects a more loyal Hegelian than he ever was a Heideggerian (and certainly more of a Hegelian than a Marxist). But then if we keep reading in Specters of Marx, it will turn out that Hegel himself was too materialist for Derrida’s purposes, for the simple reason that dialectical philosophy expects concepts to actualize themselves in the world. The Hegelians are endlessly interested in the simple fact that whoever first thought up the idea of the basket also took the trouble to weave one—that baskets did not remain notional or imagined. The very first philosophers did not require us to maintain our unskilled orientation to the basket, declaring our listless fidelity to the basket-yet-to-come. But in Specters, Derrida is attacking the very idea of reality—the idea, I mean, that we should give priority to the really existing, to the real versions of things rather than to their ideational forms. He gives a couple of different reasons for this.

First, concepts names things in their perfect, utopian, and impossible forms. The democracy-to-come is an impossible democracy, and we should probably take his use of the word “impossible” at face value. We can approximate the impossible concept, but we shouldn’t expect ever to match it, and in that case, the philosopher remains the guardian of the idea in its rigor and its purity—the friend and lover of the concept that is too beautiful to live in this world. One wonders at this point how many practicing Derrideans know themselves to be neo-Platonists, which is as good a shorthand as any for philosophers who go in for otherworldly claims of this kind. Neo-Platonism, after all, lives in the to-come: democracy-to-come (which will never come), justice-to-come (which will never come, which cannot abide in this world, to which we are committed, but only as a super-egoized impossibility, a perpetual, shame-inducing summons to do what you cannot do). Reading Derrida in sequence, you get to watch his anti-philosophical, anti-Platonic writing-beyond-the-father turn into a Platonic bad conscience, and not by shedding its former self, but by learning to function as both at the same time: as anti-Oedipal superego and antinomian nomos, emptying out any given philosophical norm, but only so that it can function as sheer, maddening, exorbitant norm—pure evacuated normativity—without the content that would in fact limit it.

Second, any version of reality comes at the expense of the possible. Anything you build is the negation of the many other things you could have built but didn’t. Unlike actuality, differance and dissemination are committed to keeping the possibilities alive, letting them run riot, not establishing monopolies on the future. Once we’ve learned to reject the textual tyranny of the authoritative interpretation, we have to radicalize that program, take it outside the text (I know, I know), and reject the tyranny of actuality itself. Any institution in which you attempted to make the concept real would block out other possible instantiations of the concept. This democracy turns its back on all the other hypothetical democracies. I drain the concept in the very process of giving it body and strength. The only way to keep the concept going—to keep it mobile and flexible and vital—is to let it remain disembodied, so that it can always insinuate new possibilities. Any particular way of loving is a betrayal of all the other different ways one might have loved; it forsakes the entire set minus itself. But the concept of love, precisely because an abstraction, is always beyond the way you are currently loving. Indeed, it is beyond all the ways people currently love. It brings with it the invitation to innovate or to mutate or to leap. The concept is always the plus-one—but only to the extent that it refuses to be actualized.

Here, then, is an especially telling passage from Specters:

If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes … actuality … and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence). This logic of … actuality seems to be of limited pertinence….^[i]

I take this to mean that Hegel is doing us a disservice in forcing us to distinguish between the real and the merely theoretical, between the actualized and the un-actualized or the not-yet actualized. Hegel thinks, of course, that he is being dialectical. The concept-made-real is a fused category; it is the union of mind and the world, the mind-world. Derrida won’t accept this solution, because its dissolved binary requires that we keep a second binary intact, the antithesis of the actual vs. the merely possible. And so what Derrida is trying to imagine is an additional Aufhebung or alternatively fused term: whatever is at once actual and potential, something that doesn’t force us to choose between the actualized and the non-actualized, even something like an actualized non-actuality.

A plainer version: Derrida’s recommendation is that we learn how to build institutions (and devise practices) that don’t set out to exhaust potentiality, that don’t establish a monopoly on (or of) the real—something on the order of a building that doesn’t insist on being one way rather than another. This would be a ghost building, since the ghost is, among other things, Derrida’s term for whatever splits the difference between the real and the ideational. This is the moment where I need to say that Derrida’s anti-Marxism, if that’s what this is, isn’t glib or stupid. He thinks that genuine freedom and justice would require spectral non-institutions of this kind: virtual institutions. If we are committed to freedom then we will be committed to not making the world one way rather than another, and Derrida thinks that this last is what Marxists and Hegelians have never understood. The question of course is whether we could build such buildings. How? And could we build ghost institutions? Real-but-not-real institutions? Real-but-not-real colleges? Real-but-not-real economies? Real-but-not real governments? How do you build something without building Some Thing?

[i] Specters, pp. 78-9.

• 2.3

–Derrida’s method is to take already universalist positions and make them even more universalist. That claim might, I realize, sound perplexing and Cantorian—in Derrida, terms that already encompass everything, that are already without limit, routinely cede ground to other terms even larger than themselves—so one would do well to proceed carefully here, with the aid of an example. It is at this point that it becomes necessary to consider the religious dimensions of Derrida’s arguments. The many commentators who wish to identify a specifically Jewish Derrida have a number of places they can look. The figure of errant writing is one strong indicator: writing as the traveling, anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan term. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” the translator, when describing such writing, can’t help but use the word “wandering” six or seven times, and if on Derrida’s behalf, you find yourself talking about “wandering text,” then you have simply slotted writing into the position of medieval folklore’s most famously Jewish figure. Nor is it hard to get from “dissemination” to “diaspora.” All writing is scattered and in exile, all writing is after-the-temple, all writing is Jewish. The matter gets more complicated, though, when the scholars turn their attention to Derrida’s debts to Levinas, which such Judaizing arguments almost always do. The Levinasian Derrida is the Jewish Derrida—we will need to consider the possibility, at least, that this is exactly wrong. Derrida does, indeed, seem to have borrowed a great deal from Levinas’s account of Talmudic reading. One almost wishes to say that deconstruction circa 1975 was a matter of Levinasian reading strategies put to Adornian ends. But then Derrida’s tack was to make about all writing arguments that Levinas makes only about Jewish scripture. His vocation was to universalize the Levinasian stance, which is to say that he was always in the Christian position. His are the pages in which formerly Jewish arguments cast off their Judaism.

Derrida’s fondness for a broadly Christian idiom is hard to miss for anyone not determined to read past it. He says that he prefers a political framework that goes back to the “Jewish-Christian-Muslim, but above all Christian, tradition.” Asked about the ancient sources of his philosophy, he responds by saying that he considers his “own thought, paradoxically, as neither Greek nor Jewish”—and to this one need merely respond that such thinking is less paradoxical than it is Pauline: In deconstruction, there is neither Jew nor Gentile.^[i] It is that apostolic strain that rises to the surface in Derrida’s later thinking, after 1990, as his output re-organizes itself around four related ideas: 1) the indiscriminate love of one’s fellows; 2) the messiah; 3) the absolute gift, the other name for which is grace; and 4) antinomianism or moral life beyond the law. The first of these retains a citable Jewish precedent in the form of Levinas, while any of those others, in a polemical context, would count as Christian, each more so than the last, to the point where even the first gets pulled into the Nazarene orbit, and alterity reverts back to agape.

If it is nonetheless a mistake to categorize Derrida as a Christian thinker, then this is because he makes a point of disassociating his gospel of messianism and love-not-law from the specificities of Christian history and Christian institutions. He says, for instance, that deconstruction is a matter of “faith,” which at a religious studies conference would be enough to give his doctrine a Christian cast—and, indeed, a specifically Protestant one—but then immediately repudiates the particularizing force of that word. Deconstruction breeds faith, but faith of no definite kind—“pure faith which is neither Christian nor Jewish nor Islamic nor Buddhist etc.”^[ii] Or consider the word “messianicity,” one of Derrida’s most revealing coinages and self-evacuating in much the manner of “pure faith”: from Jesus Christ to the general category of “messiah” (all saviors or anointed ones) to the “messianic” (or messiah-like) to “messianicity” (the condition of having some messiah-like features). Derrideans do not seek a messiah; they seek only messianicity. The disciple’s particular allegiance to Haile Selassie or Sabbatai Zevi gives way to what Derrida himself calls “the universal structure” of “the messianic in general”—an ambient orientation to the future or mood of unspecified expectancy that is “without content and without identifiable messiah.”^[iii] What we’ll want to see now is that this purging of content is Derrida’s typical procedure—that deconstruction’s vaunted overcoming of binaries is mostly a search for redemptive abstractions of this kind, lifting the already aloft, refining already generalized concepts into even more recondite noumena, from which former distinctions have been irrigated. And yet this overcoming of Christianity—its de-particularizing reinvention as vacantly faithful messianicity—nonetheless preserves Christianity in two distinct ways. For even once purified, the terms retain the imprint of the religious history from which they have been abstracted. You can’t speak the words “pure faith” and not expect some people to hear sola fide. More: The universalizing operation is itself Christian, recalling as it does the Pauline church’s inaugural act, which was to devise a not-quite-Judaism for Jews and non-Jews alike. Deconstruction’s program is in this sense to perform the Christian operation upon itself, to re-universalize Christianity by evacuating it of all its particular claims, thereby making it available to Christians and non-Christians alike.

[i] Derrida, Negotiations, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 374; “Deconstruction and the Other,” p. 158. See also the end of “The Force of Law,” p. 56, where Derrida says that his thinking is neither Jewish nor Greek, but “Judaeo-Greek.”

[ii] John Caputo and Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 22.

[iii] Nutshell, p. 22; Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59, p. 28.