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The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 3

Posted on May 26, 2023 | Comments Off on The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 3

For a pdf of the entire book, click here.

Then there are the failures of conceptualization and the argumentative inconsistencies. Here’s one:

–Derrida’s theory of writing is incompatible with an ethics of alterity. Anyone going back to re-read Lévi-Strauss should stay on the lookout for his most characteristic move. Examples of this argumentative pattern abound, but one especially telling instance arrives early in Tristes Tropiques, when Lévi-Strauss launches his celebrated attack on travelers and travel writing. The ethnographer begins his travelogue by arguing that we require an anthropology of Western exoticism itself. Or perhaps we don’t require new knowledge; maybe it would be enough to adapt what we already know back to Germany and Britain and the US. This is to suggest that anthropology in its current form can already help us understand why some white people—and especially young white men—are drawn to the jungle and the desert. The backwoods adventure, the study-abroad program, the New Zealander’s OE—these are all tribal initiation rites, in which the European male passes into adulthood via some pointless act of disorientation, self-abuse, and pseudo-heroism. The temporary journey away from one’s society is how some people achieve status in that society, by returning home from their gap-year walkabout bearing diaries full of fabricated wisdom: “Lofty and lucrative are the ‘revelations’ which these young men draw from those enemies of Society—savages, snowbound peaks, bottomless caves, and impenetrable forests—which Society conspires to ennoble at the very moment at which it has robbed them of their power to harm.”[i] One is struck by how much Lévi-Strauss’s observations anticipate postcolonial theory in its vintage, Saidian form. Travel writing is an industry for producing transformative encounters with the non-West, routinized encounters with the Third World, manufactured sublimity that, despite promising fresh experience, nonetheless only ever discovers the same few human types and hyperborean pigeonholes. That argument about well-trodden paths is itself by now a well-trodden path, but the distinctive Lévi-Straussian touch is the idea that commercial and urban societies have never really given up on rites of passage, that expeditions in search of ceremony are themselves ceremonial; that the adventure tourist and bush-league neo-conquistador is, indeed, close to the indigenous people that he seeks out, just not in the way he thinks he’s close; that Westerners are most like tribal peoples when acting out their Orientalism. A properly structuralist account of writing, then, would have to reason in this manner, arguing perhaps that indigenous people are quicker than others to comprehend the politics of literacy, because even before they have ever seen a book, they understand the capacity of marks to confer power, whereas scholarly people who live in and around written language are more likely to be duped by its content—all that information! Indigenous people are obviously well positioned to recognize the survival of non-civilizational social forms within putatively civilizational ones, and what they might therefore say about literacy is that when young Westerners document their travels in Bolivia or the Thai hill country, they are trying to absorb indigenous life by representing it—that’s an argument that Lévi-Strauss himself really does make. Western travel writing is a species of “black magic,” and this will be easier to spot if you already know a lot about magic, if you’re an anthropologist, I mean, or if you’re Azande.

This is all to say that Lévi-Strauss, no less than Derrida, posits a continuity between the practices of non-literate and literate peoples. “These customs are very much closer to our own that they appear.”[ii] In the aggregate, structuralism’s continual rediscovery of indigenous ways among Europeans amounts to a Big Argument, which is that we never really break away from pensée sauvage, that wild thinking is a permanent part of cognition. If I say again that all peoples are semiotic peoples, then I am saying that the content of any particular system of classifications is less important than the simple fact of system itself, that it is the ability to generate conceptual distinctions—to code the world in language—that makes society possible at all. Semiosis is the ability to organize human groups around basically fictional or at least contingent distinctions. But then to the extent that all societies do this, they are all sauvage—all premised on myth and taxonomy and the classifications that analogy makes possible.

Here, then, are some key points that Derrida and Lévi-Strauss agree upon: First, that indigenous people make marks, and that some of those marks resemble script.[iii] Second, that even the people we call native live at a permanent and unbridgeable remove from nature. On the terrain of this concurrence, one question remains at issue: whether we are going to assimilate so-called civilized societies to their stateless counterparts, by arguing that even Westerners &c. have indigenous minds, or whether we are going to assimilate indigenous people to the West by arguing that even uncolonized Indians have writing. The choice between Lévi-Strauss and Derrida is thus a choice between a universalism-of-the-other and a universalism of the self. You might have taken Derrida to be arguing that “Western thought” has always been locked into a certain structure; that it is “poisoned by metaphysics”; that it might nonetheless be possible to think outside of the West if we could patiently wean ourselves off those metaphysics; that until we do so, we will tend recklessly to project Western categories upon everything we see and fatefully upon the non-West.[iv] It is precisely if you are convinced that Derrida is right about this last that you would have to reject the Derridean category of “writing,” which is more egregiously Occidentalist than “presence” or “spirit” or any other philosopheme that deconstruction raises its crowbar against. There are in the end good reasons for thinking that writing engenders non-identity, and yet the indiscriminate argument-to-écriture is the most identitarian device in all of deconstruction. Alterity is nullified when the well-read ego can envision its others only with books in their hands.

[i] Ibid., p. 42

[ii] Savage Mind, p. 209.

[iii] I should note: There’s simply no way that Lévi-Strass thinks that native Americans were altogether without writing. At one point in Tristes Tropiques, p. 246, he mentions three pre-Colombian societies, the Hopewell, the Chavin, the Olmec, and then makes the following remark: “In all three cases, we are faced with an art that is cursive, free, supple, and marked by an intellectual delight in double meanings (in Hopewell, as in Chavin, certain motifs bear one meaning when read normally, and quite another when read upside-down).”

[iv] Derrida qtd in Peeters biography, p. 180.

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The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 1

Posted on March 3, 2022 | Comments Off on The Real Universal, No. 3 – Part 1

–Deconstruction aligns itself with the history of the European empires, with a universal and impossible colonization. That’s a claim likely to be met with more than customary suspicion, so I’d like to present the clearest evidence for this without delay. What I mean to show is that deconstruction is an extrapolation from colonial history. Anyone inclined to doubt this should read out loud the following sentences, all of them from Monolingualism of the Other.

  • Most of what we say about “situations of ‘colonial’ alienation or historical servitude … also carries well beyond these determinate conditions.”
  • “It would be the exemplarity [of colonialism] … that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of a universal necessity.”
  • ”I would not like to make too easy use of the world ‘colonialism.’ All culture is originally colonial.”[i]

These three sentences—non-continuous; a motif not an instance—should suffice to establish a first point: Deconstruction would have us believe that colonialism is a ubiquitous and permanent condition or even that we have to face up to an metaphysical colonialism from which no liberation is possible: “the truth of a universal necessity.” Monolingualism was first published in 1996, and goes back to a lecture that Derrida gave in Louisiana in 1992, so it might be tempting to think of this colonial register as a novelty, an unusual feature of his late thinking, maybe even as an anomaly. One is powerfully reminded, however, of an interview that Derrida gave to a feminist interlocutor in  1981. He was arguing, on party-line anti-humanist grounds, that women were wrong to seek liberation and agency, because such pseudo-goods would merely render them metaphysical. Emancipation, that is, would simply ensconce women in the bad illusions of Western personhood, from which they would still have to seek non-identity and alterity. This is the nuance of Derrida’s argument: Liberation may not be possible, but then neither is it desirable.[ii] And so in Monolingualism, Derrida just comes out and says that “emancipation” and national “revolution” are a “trick,” the suggestion being that colonization is, well, whatever isn’t a trick: a candor, an illumination—the ethical condition, in other words, having to speak a language that is not really your own, an alien language, in a manner that renders you open to the other.[iii] It is possible, of course, to say that “liberation is a trick” and mean that the various freedom movements have mostly failed—that many achieved freedoms have been insufficiently liberating, that what passed for independence in Jamaica in 1962 or Zimbabwe in 1980 was not, in fact, the unhobbling that it promised to be. That Derrida is arguing nothing of the sort should be clear if we linger for a bit over the word “alien.” We all live in conditions of “colonial alienation”—that, too, sounds like a complaint, like an outmoded snippet of existentialist melancholy, but only until you recall that “alienation,” in Derrida, is a condition to be embraced (because a name for what binds me to the not-I). Language is colonial because my relation even to my native tongue is “asymmetrical”—that’s Derrida’s word; in language, we are “always for the other, from the other, kept by the other.”[iv] And this position of being kept is, of course, what deconstruction has to offer by way of virtue; it is the stance from which one pursues justice and perhaps already a form of justice itself. Derrida: “I always surrender to language.”[v] People who are actually colonized—let’s call them “colonized in the narrow sense”—are thus closer to a certain wisdom, provided they know how to submit to that status, how not to struggle, how to follow Derrida by surrendering. Derrida is admirably upfront about the point: The “language of the other” will sometimes be “the language of the master or colonist.”[vi] This might be “unsettling,” but deconstruction can’t help with that. Anti-imperialism is immoral to the extent that it invites a subject people to seal themselves off from a disruptive and alien force to which one would more properly submit.[vii]

This is the instant when one is tempted to start blabbing the established facts of Derrida’s personal history: that he was pied noir; that he threw his lot in with the French when Algerian independence came; that he served in the French military, in Algeria, during the Algerian War; that he wrote a nineteen-page letter to Pierre Nora defending the accomplishments of French settler society.[viii] (Derrida was thirty-one when he wrote that letter, in case you’re wondering whether the letter in question counts as juvenilia.) By themselves, though, such biographical data won’t tell us much; it’s not clear what they are supposed to disclose about his published writing. We don’t have to supply Derrida’s missing biography for him, however—we don’t have to excavate the life behind the writing—since there is a lot we can say about how Derrida stages his life in that writing. Deconstruction is at its most revealing when it comes closest to autobiography. Sometimes, not often, the philosopher speaks about his own childhood and in doing so improvises for deconstruction the kind of sociological account that Marxists and others would otherwise feel compelled to cart in from the outside: This is where deconstruction came from; these are the historical and political circumstances that gave rise to my thinking.

In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida wants to account for himself and his philosophy in openly national-ethnic terms. It might be easiest at this point just to reach for a question: What nationality is Derrida? French, one replies without needing to think about it, having spent many decades now talking about “French philosophers” and “French intellectuals” and “French theory.” But then how would Derrida himself answer that question? That’s harder to answer; not “French,” at any rate, at least not always and not without provisos. In Monolingualism, he assigns himself three different ethnicities, which then get superimposed on one another in complicated ways. This will take some explaining:

First, he calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi.”[ix] This jumps out because it’s a term that usually refers to North Africans living in France and so suggests that Derrida, in an unexpected moment of solidarity with the banlieues, is actively identifying with immigrants and their kin. It’s the sort of formulation that would make a beur of any French-born deconstructionist.[x] As such, it calls to mind those rare passages in the early Derrida where he not only inveighs against “Western metaphysics,” but also points to non-Western alternatives. There is something big right at the beginning of Grammatology that doesn’t usually feature in presentations of Derrida’s core arguments. As of 1968, one of the categories that most interested Derrida—that, indeed, consistently roused his ire—was “phonocentric writing,” writing that wanted to be close to speech, which mostly meant “alphabetic writing” or any script that mimicked phonemes.[xi] This was the particular (and non-Heideggerian) way in which the younger Derrida thought the Greeks had ruined everything: Western writing was infected with self-loathing by its very alphabet. Mere spelling submits writing to the authority of speech. His attention thus turned, though only fitfully, to non-alphabetic writing systems, to the point where he was briefly claiming to prefer Chinese characters or the mixed writing systems of the ancient world.[xii] When Derrida calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi,” then, we have to hear him as fessing up that he is not comfortably or wholly French, nor even comfortably European. Deconstruction maintains a still operative allegiance to something outside the West.

If it is nonetheless unclear whether or not to call this solidarity, then this is because Derrida, in Louisiana in 1992, called himself “the only Franco-Maghrebian here” and, indeed, teasingly pulled rank on the people who otherwise fit that description: North African Arabs with strong ties to France and French culture. To one such person he said: My friend, I am more Franco-Maghrebian than you.[xiii] His meaning becomes clear over the next few pages: Derrida is more Franco-Maghrebian because he is neither one nor the other, because his friend is really Moroccan, whereas he is not really Algerian. At that moment, something unusual about Derrida’s formulation slides into view, which is that he wants the two-term ethnicities that have become common in immigrant societies to be able to indicate neither-nor instead of both-and, which is how they are usually glossed. In fact, he seems determined to reserve the hyphenate construction for the negative case, requiring us silently to revise any number of common usages. To anyone speaking Derridean, “Mexican-American” would henceforth mean “not Mexican, but not American either.” I am Mexican-American … I am an un-Mexican-un-American. The hyphen furnishes not the fullness of a dual identity, of belonging more than one place, but the liberating severity of non-identity, of belonging nowhere, of feeling beholden to no formation.

Not really Algerian…. Second, then, Derrida makes a point of letting his audience know that his family was Jewish. He talks about being stripped of his citizenship during World War II and of being expelled from his French-colonial school as a pre-teen. He even links that near-calamity to his philosophical preoccupation with non-identity.[xiv] This matter is especially complicated, however, since it would have been easy for Derrida at this point to claim a Jewish identity. Plenty of scholars do this on his behalf.[xv] He was neither French nor Algerian because he was Jewish; one writes that sentence and Judaism takes up its accustomed place (or non-place) as the non-national and stateless term, the stranger, the third, the identity-that-is-not-one. It is all the more conspicuous, then, that Derrida refuses to make this claim. Plainly, the term “Franco-Maghrebi” is already in the way, occupying the spots in all the formulations where one might have expected to find the word “Jewish”; it, and not its Abrahamic rival, is doing the work of non-identity. “To be a Franco-Maghrebian, one ‘like myself,’ is not … a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray—a disorder of identity.”[xvi] From this perspective, a man calls himself “Franco-Maghrebi” in order not to call himself “Jewish,” presumably because this latter would too readily be perceived as a preformed category.

Not really Algerian, then, but not really Jewish, either. Third, and in order to explain this last, Derrida offers that it was his absorption into French settler society that kept him from being in any emphatic way Jewish: No-one he knew spoke Hebrew or Ladino; the Algerian Jews trimmed the penises of infant boys, but called this “baptism”; he grew up in “a disintegrated ‘community’ … cut off … from Jewish memory.”[xvii] Derrida way of putting this is to remark that he was socially and culturally a pied noir. This, at least, is an identification he reaches for without fuss: “I have never ceased learning, especially when teaching, to speak softly, a difficult task for a ‘pied noir’….”[xviii] Judaism moves in to block his identification with Algerians, and French settler society moves in to block his identification with Jews, but nothing arises in turn to block that last identification. The role of pied noir is the limbic of non-identity within which the other two are suspended, since it was under the umbrella of French colonial institutions that Algerian Jews and assimilated Arabs and the mutant French all met. The term “Franco-Maghrebi” thus ends up suggesting not North African Arab in France but displaced pied noir: the homeless Acadian or expropriated Rhodesian. A term that you might have thought was functioning like “Haitian-American” or “Asian-American” turns out to sport the old imperial hyphen after all, in the manner of “Anglo-Indian” or “Anglo-Irish,” while the qualities that a radical ethics has sometimes associated with Judaism get assigned to white colonials instead.

What we’ll want to see at this point is that Derrida goes out of his way to narrow the distance between the Algerian Jews and the pied noirs—or, indeed, between the pied noirs and favored Arabs. He refuses, in other words, to distinguish between varied and unequal social positions in colonial Algeria, or is interested in those situations where these really were least distinct. Crucial here is a longish passage where Derrida describes his early education: “For all the pupils of the French school in Algeria, whether they were of Algerian origin, ‘French Nationals,’ ‘French citizens of Algeria,’ or born in that environment of the Jewish people of Algeria who were at once or successively the one and the other… –for all these groups, French was a language supposed to be maternal, but one whose source, norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”[xix] Two points need to be made about this passage:

First, it is Derrida’s habit to fuse the positions of the colonizer and the colonized, and to associate both indifferently with the alterity for which Judaism has long served as shorthand. “For all the pupils … For all these groups…” This bit of improvised sociology is a historically concrete version of that argument he has already made in the abstract, via the philosophy of language: that none of us are the masters of language, not even of our native tongues, that we are all colonized by language. A person reading Monolingualism of the Other for the first time might think that the historical situation of the young Derrida was simply too peculiar to furnish any generalizable insight. Perhaps all Derrida can do, when thinking back to his childhood in the colony, is testify, to draft what at times reads like anti-fascist testimonio. But writing as a philosopher, Derrida says he has no interest in mere witnessing of this kind. Quite the contrary: He wants to consider the ways in which the seemingly anomalous settler-Jew, the not-quite-pied-noir, discloses something “structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological.” Here’s the single most Kantian sentence in the entire oeuvre: “What holds for me, irreplaceably, also applies to all. … Everyone can say the same thing for themselves and of themselves.”[xx] So everyone is a not-quite-pied-noir, and deconstruction asks us now to conclude that no–one is native. No-one is native—you can’t be a good Derridean and flinch from the realization that this line of reasoning simply shuts out indigenous people, by declaring them non-existent. You might, of course, think that Derrida is right about this—that the people who call themselves indigenous are dismally self-deluding—though hopefully you’ll concede even so that this is going to come as news to the Quechua and kanaka maoli. The Algerian Jews, at any rate, “could not properly identify themselves,” but then neither could the French-speaking Arabs or the white-settler kids; they were all equally “deprived of easily accessible models of identification.”[xxi] Non-identity thrives in the colony, which is to that extent to be preferred to non-colonial formations—either to decolonized institutions or to the putatively uncolonized metropolis.

And yet—second point—the metropolis retains its position of priority even here, just when it seems to have been sidelined. The colony, as the scene of generalized liminality, is where deconstruction is best actualized, and yet it can only achieve its truth in relation to Paris. Without colonialism, no liminality; and without the metropolis, no colony. A few sentences bear the claim out. French literature, Derrida says…

…was the only thing … that I enjoyed receiving. The discovery of French literature, the access to this so unique mode of writing that is called ‘French-literature’ was the experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one in which we lived, with almost nothing in common with our natural or social landscape.[xxii]

We’ll need to pause to absorb the force of these key Derridean claims: The French language was situated elsewhere. French literature had nothing in common with ordinary experience. It’s not hard to see that Derrida has maneuvered the high bourgeois culture of the imperial center into what deconstruction takes to be the redemptive position, the position of Autrui. Racine and Voltaire are this short book’s one specified instance of “language … coming from the other,” language as “the coming of the other.”[xxiii] The idiom of alterity has always been wholly formal anyway and to that extent self-defeating, unable to distinguish among the world’s many different candidates for the title of other, consigning them all in one go to the heap labeled “anything-that-isn’t-me” and thereby abolishing the very distinctions that the concept was commissioned to safeguard. More to the point, the concept of “the other” is reversible; I possess a boundless obligation to the other, but then so does the other, who to that extent ceases to be altogether unlike me. Radical ethics thus establishes the identity of moi and Autrui in the very act of making our dissimilarity morally relevant. As concepts, non-identity and alterity are vacant, incapable of caring about which historical content you summon to fill them out. Politically, otherness becomes a non-starter as soon as you realize that one can easily plug the imperial metropolis into the alterity slot—and not only that one can, but that Derrida does. For our purposes, the important point to carry forward is that when Derrida speaks of language in these (messianic) terms—as “the coming of the other”—he is making a universal point about the colonial status of all language while also talking in historically specified ways about the projection outside of Europe of Parisian French: “an available monolanguage—for example, French.”[xxiv] In deconstruction, the other is a Gaul. “I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.” Or almost two decades before that, in Of Grammatology: “What is going to be called enslavement can equally legitimately be called liberation.”[xxv]

[i] Monolingualism, p. 23, p. 26, p. 39.

[ii] See “Choreographies” in Points, pp. 91-2: “To credit [the ordinary left-wing conception] of progress and entrust everything to it would be to surrender to a sinister mystification: everything would collapse, flow, founder in this same homogenized, sterilized river of the history of mankind…. This history carries with it the age-old dream of reappropriation, ‘liberation,’ autonomy, in short the cortège of metaphysics and the techné.”

[iii] The claim is, for Derrida, startlingly direct: The idea of French national culture is “the first trick.” “Liberation, emancipation, and revolution will necessarily be the second trick.” Monolingualism, p. 40.

[iv] Monolingualism, p. 40.

[v] ibid., p. 47.

[vi] Ibid., p. 62.

[vii] See also Monolingualism, p. 40: “we cannot and must no lose sight of this obscure common power, this colonial impulse which will have begun by insinuating itself into … ‘the relationship to the other’ or ‘openness to the other.’”

[viii] For more on that letter, see Edward Baring’s “Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida,” in Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010), pp. 239-261. As of February 2021, the Wikipedia entry on Derrida states that “[d]uring the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers’ children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.” In fact, Derrida was drafted in 1957; underwent military training outside of Algiers; and in addition to teaching schoolchildren, produced translations for the French colonial administration while it conducted war against the Algerians. See Benoit Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, pp. 91-94.

 

[ix] Monolingualism, p. 12.

[x] “Maghrebi-French” is also common in the English-language scholarship, often as a more formal synonym for beur. For a general discussion, see Paul Silverstein’s Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, Nation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004).

[xi] In Of Grammatology, Derrida lays into “the phoneticization of writing” as early as p. 4.

[xii] He aligns écriture with China on pp. 25-26 and again on p. 76.

[xiii] “You see, dear Abdelkebir”—the Francophone Moroccan critic and writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, eight years Derrida’s junior—“between the two of us, I consider myself to be the most Franco-Maghrebian, and perhaps even the only Franco-Maghrebian here.” Monolingualism, p. 12.

[xiv] Monolingualism, p. 15-17.

[xv] See especially Sarah Hammerschlag’s Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar France Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

[xvi] ibid., p. 14.

[xvii] ibid., p. 55.

[xviii] ibid., p. 47.

[xix] ibid. p. 41.

[xx] ibid. p. 20.

[xxi] ibid., p. 52.

[xxii] ibid. p. 45.

[xxiii] ibid., p. 68.

[xxiv] ibid., p. 67.

[xxv] Monolingualism, p. 73; Of Grammatology, p. 131.

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The Deconstructive Universal 1

Posted on January 4, 2022 | Comments Off on The Deconstructive Universal 1

  • 2. The Deconstructive Universal

 

  • 2.1

Whether or not you take to deconstruction has always had a lot to do with how you feel about universals in any of that word’s related senses: how you feel, for one, about metaphysical universals, abstract characteristics shared by individual objects or persons; but also how you feel about universals in some distinctively Hegelian sense, master categories and higher abstractions, as opposed to secondary categories and lesser abstractions, the order rather than the genus; and then, too, how you feel about ethical and political universalism, which asks that our institutions give priority to characteristics that all people (in all times and all places) might be thought to have in common. Your views on such matters are germane because Derrida’s single most famous argument is, in fact, universal in scope, pullulatingly so. If you’re going to be a Derridean, the first argument that you’re going to have to take on board is that there is no philosophically defensible distinction to be drawn between writing and speech, that all language is writing, and that all people (and peoples) must be thought of as possessing écriture. That’s the universalism: Writing is everywhere; everyone has it. Derrida, of course, offers reasons for thinking this. His proposition is that we typically (and incorrectly) think of writing as more mediated than speech. I might, for instance, worry that if spoken words represent things, and writing represents spoken words, then all written documents, even original ones, are going to have the smudgy, deteriorating quality of second-generation photocopies. Speech removes me from the object; and writing removes me further still. A Derridean counters this anxiety simply by honing in on the phrases I’ve just written—that “spoken words represent things” or that “speech removes me from the object”—in order to make the point that speech is already mediation, already the arbitrary coding of the world, already constructed out of a network of differences, gaps, or non-positivities. Words emerging from a mouth aren’t any more tethered to their objects than words emerging from an ink cartridge, which means that we will have to give up the fantasy that one type of language can keep us close to things while the other will cost us the world.

Similarly, you might think of writing as uniquely decontextualizing. Once recorded, words strung together in one place and time can be encountered in any other place or (subsequent) time. But then spoken language isn’t nearly as place-bound as we unthinkingly take it to be, since people often remember speech they’ve heard and go about their lives and move around and eventually re-speak it. Writing travels, true enough, but so does quoted speech; there is no world without recording devices. Or again, you might think that spoken language keeps listeners closer to a speaker’s intentions or private understandings, if only because they can interrupt him when he’s being unclear and ask him what he was trying to say. But there aren’t any grounds for thinking that spoken language is less in need of interpretation than the written kind, and if consulted, a living, yakking, disambiguating speaker-in-the-room can only produce more speech, equidistant from his intentions and requiring interpretation in turn.

What we’ll want to notice now is that nothing in this explanation strictly requires Derrida to claim that all language is writing. In fact, the argument would probably be more perspicuous without that provocation, without, I mean, your always having mentally to substitute for the word écriture the notion that all language displays some-but-not-all of the features conventionally associated with writing. Eventually some philosopher is likely to want to reform deconstruction along these lines, by insisting on perspicacity, stripping away as gratuitous the doctrine of universal writing and then seeing what’s left or what else has to change in the absence of an ecumenicized écriture. But anyone wanting to account for the peculiarity of really existing Derrideanism doesn’t have that option. Far from seeming expendable, the needless apotheosis of écriture—that drive to say it’s-all-writing and actually mean something a little different or to say it’s-all-writing even when your argument doesn’t strictly demand it—can easily seem like one of deconstruction’s most salient features.

Writing, this is all to say, is at the center of deconstruction’s bid for universalism, and yet its status as a universal is open to question. Even within the framework generated by Derrida himself, one has to wonder whether writing hasn’t been trickishly generalized. At the very least, we’ll want to describe Derrida’s procedure here, which is to extract a particularized term from the semantic stratum where we are used to encountering it and insert it instead into the place of the universal. At the formal level, to claim that all language is writing is akin to claiming that all vehicles are pushcarts or all buildings are pyramids. That this procedure introduces problems that Derrida cannot solve should be apparent as soon as you notice that writing, even having been promoted to the status of universal, sometimes persists in his arguments as particular all the same—as writing-writing, book-and-document writing; “writing in the narrow sense,” he calls it—at which moments écriture is called upon to function as a subset of itself. In deconstruction, we have an encompassing term, writing-which-means-the-sum-of-all-language, under which we can class a second term, which is … writing. All vehicles are pushcarts, and then some of them are also pushcarts.

The consequences of this will be hard to reckon if we don’t pause first to consider the several different ways that one could deal with writing or language as a universal term—or, indeed, the different ways one could deal with universals of any kind. It will be easier, that is, to say what Derrida is up to if we know which nearby philosophical options he is refusing.

It might help, for instance, to clear up a few misconceptions about the status of universals in Hegelian philosophy. Hegel, after all, is not quite the aloof, god’s-eye philosopher of Geist and Weltgeschichte that casually hostile readers take him to be. He is in various senses a universalist, to be sure, but this point is easy to overstate, since one of the concerns that most obviously fuels dialectical thinking is a discomfort over the ways in which non-dialectical philosophers get universals wrong, mostly by approaching them too abruptly. Among the core tenets of dialectical philosophy is the notion that universals cannot manifest themselves directly in the world. You can phrase this point in illuminatingly trivial terms—that no entity can be a bird, immediately and nakedly avian, without also being, say, a goose—as long as you realize that the payoff for this claim is above all ethical and political: that no-one can be human without specification, that no-one can instantiate mind or spirit except by pursuing some particular practice, that no-one is the abstract and Vitruvian bearer of rights and freedoms, &c.[i]

From out of dialectics, therefore, even in its classical form, it is not hard to extract some moderately anti-universalist positions, the second of which would state that individuals cannot be directly linked to their universals, but are better understood as passing through an always extendable set of intermediate categories. I am standing in western Ireland in December, looking at a creature with wings and feathers, fairly big for such an alate thing, with a white face atop a long black neck, and a variously grey, elongated body. For almost no purposes will it be enough to say that this x is an “animal” or a “bird.” It probably won’t even be enough to say that it is a “goose,” once one realizes just how high a floor in the taxonomical edifice that designation actually occupies. We might loosely think of geese as forming a species, but they don’t; there are species of goose, but no species “goose.” Nor are geese properly thought of as a genus, one story up, but rather as what zoologists call a tribe or even a subfamily. An informed person, in this context, is one who can introduce additional determinations, who will know that this x is not just a bird but a goose, and not just a goose but a barnacle goose; she might even know that the latter is itself a kind of black goose. One way to appreciate what Hegel is after here is to keep alive in yourself a sense of surprise that even the word “goose” is more abstract than you probably thought and is best approached patiently and stepwise. About écriture, then, a Hegelian would have to say that there can be no writing as such, without instantiation, and further, that no collection of words can be grasped as writing without passing through a set of intermediate terms, which in this case would let the mind loose in the encyclopedia of textual genres: birthday card, saint’s life, personal ad, ransom note, presidential signing statement, silver fork novel, and so on.

Perhaps the least appreciated point about dialectics is that it is at heart an anti-reductionism, a way of combating the mind’s tendency to seek explanations at one degree of abstraction at the expense of other explanations involving other degrees of abstraction. Let’s say, to consider a Marxist offshoot of this Hegelian program, that I am sitting down to write a book about the English Revolution. And let’s say further that I want to show how Atlantic merchants—English men trading with the Caribbean and the east coast of North America—played a central and hitherto underappreciated role in the upheavals that overtook England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1640s. I won’t be able to make that case if I can’t tell you about those merchants in individuated detail, if I don’t know their biographies, if I can’t account for the choices they made month for month, some of which choices included rising against their king and disestablishing the national church. I have to be able to tell you about Maurice Thomson and Matthew Craddock and Samuel Vassall. At the same, though, I won’t be able to understand what these men were after if I don’t understand the groups into which they formed or the institutions that housed their projects—the corporations (set off against rival enterprises), the dissenting sects (each set off against the others and all of them set off against the Church of England), the often unformalized political factions. Similarly, I’m going to need a robust account of the new colonial-capitalist economy in the Atlantic in which all of these men operated, and to which all English, Scottish, and Irish people were increasingly connected, though at meaningfully different removes—and what I will need to show about this economy is that it introduced imperatives and constraints of its own that none of the actors in the 1640s, whether grasped as individuals or as groups, could simply defy. Just as important, I will need to make clear how each of these explanatory modes requires the other two, how each, if you like, houses the others within itself. Maurice Thomson and Matthew Craddock don’t come to me as mere data or as singletons, not as “individuals,” but as individuated within various groups—within the Providence Island Company, perhaps, or English Baptistry—as also within the Atlantic economy as a whole. But those same groups, meanwhile, are plainly made up of these individuals, while also taking on individuated profiles of their own when positioned across from one another within the Atlantic economy at large. This economy at large, meanwhile, is from some perspective nothing but the networked aggregate of those individuals arranged in those groups.

The task of Hegelian (and Hegelian-Marxist) thought is thus to find the individual and the particular in the universal; but also to find the individual and the universal in the particular; and then to find the particular and the universal in the individual. The idea is precisely to avoid the reduction to the universal or impetuous argument-to-system for which Hegelianism is often mistaken. At the same time, however, Hegelianism cautions against explanations that would lock in at the level of the intermediate category; if revolutions are the day’s topic, then such part-explanations would be the usual business of social history, the history not of persons but of groups and institutions, revealed here to be a reduction to the particular. And then, of course, the methodological individualism beloved of the it’s-more-complicated school of academic history-writing, which prides itself on its own version of anti-reductionism, stands indicted here as a reduction to the deinstitutionalized and un-mediated individual.[ii]

Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity, then, is best thought of not as breaking with Hegel but rather as radicalizing the anti-universalist strain that was indigenous to dialectics all along. This isn’t to say that Adorno’s revisions don’t present subtleties of their own. The trick to coming to terms with Adorno is to grasp that he is not a nominalist, a point that requires us to concede the insufficiently considered possibility of an anti-universalism that does not go back to Ockham. Negative dialectics asks us to oppose universals, in that term’s various senses, but not because these are fake or just names. The point is complicated: There is, in fact, a nominalist moment in Adorno’s thinking, which does sometimes describe concepts as herding singular objects into undifferentiated droves, asking us to fret about the penalties we pay for this most ordinary of all cognitive procedures, the heedless aggregation involved in all naming. It’s just that Adorno is also interested in the ways in which objects (and persons) really can be deprived of their singularity, in actuality and not just in thought, by mass production or by unified institutions or by standardization across increasingly vaster regions of the planet. The administered society, by flooding the world with generic objects, makes real the abstraction that had hitherto been merely verbal or conceptual. The standardized planet is the world remade in the image of language, a world in which language has at last become adequate to things, but only because the latter have become as indefinite as the perfunctory mono-terms with which we have always identified them. Universals in Adorno thus occur on two levels—both as verbal abstractions and as real ones—and it is his outlandish hunch that the universals of one level are best resisted on the other level, that one might be able to turn back the accelerating protocols of standardization—that one could prevent Body Shops from being built in Warsaw or the entry of Pizza Hut into Guangdong—if only one could disable abstraction at its cognitive source, in words and concepts. The vocation of negative dialectics is thus to terminate universals, sometimes via aesthetics, mostly via a re-jigged dialectics capable of bringing thought up against the unthought specificity of things.[iii]

Any guide to critical theory will tell you that Adorno’s is one of the great anti-universalisms in the history of philosophy. And a careful reading of Hegel should show that even orthodox dialectics produces an argued-through critique of das Allgemeine. Saying as much now should bring into view the first of the features that makes Derrida distinctive, which is that he is not an anti-universalist to nearly the same degree.

[i] See Hegel in the Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), p. 59 : “A person is a specific existence; not man in general (a term to which no real existence corresponds).” Or in the early essay on the “Positivity of Christianity,” in the Early Theological Writings, translated by TM Knox (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), p. 169: “The general concept of human nature admits of infinite modifications, and there is no need of the makeshift of calling experience to witness that modifications are necessary and that human nature has never been present in its purity. A strict proof of this is possible; all that is necessary is to settle the question: ‘What is human nature in its purity?’ This expression, ‘human nature in its purity,’ should imply no more than accordance with the general concept. But the living nature of humanity is always other than the concept of the same, and hence for the concept is a bare modification, a pure accident, a superfluity, becomes a necessity, something living, perhaps the only thing which is natural and beautiful.” Hence, too, the emphasis placed by many Hegelians on “concrete universality (i.e., the specific embodiment that the universality of modern philosophy receives in particular sociohistorical settings.” See Paul Piccone’s Italian Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 18.

[ii] Hegel’s anti-reductionism is clearest in his account of the syllogism in either of his two Logics, see, e.g., The Science of Logic, translated by George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010),  p. 588 – 624. The book I’m describing is not hypothetical. See Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (1993) (London: Verso, 2003).

[iii] This is the goal of the demontieren I was describing earlier. See Negative Dialectics, pp. 3 – 28.

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