Derrida, Myth, and The Impossibility of Philosophy

DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory Series Editor: Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, USA The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today. Derrida, Literature and War, Sean Gaston Foucaults Philosophy of Art, Joseph J. Tanke The Literary Agamben, William Watkin Philosophy and the Book, Daniel Selcer

ANAIS N. SPITZER
Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Anais N. Spitzer, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN 978-1-4411-0315-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spitzer, Anais. Derrida, myth, and the impossibility of philosophy / Anais Spitzer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN: 978-1-4411-1710-6 ISBN: 978-1-4411-0020-7 1. Myth. 2. Philosophy. 3. Derrida, Jacques. 4. Taylor, Mark C., 1945 I. Title. B2430.D484S65 2010 194dc22 2010040688
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in India
For Eugene and Susan Spitzer
There is no unity or absolute source of myth. The focus or the source of the myth is always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and non-existent in the first place. Everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship. The discourse on the acentric structure that myth itself is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. It must avoid the violence that consists in centering a language which describes an acentric structure if it is not to shortchange the form and movement of myth. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Beginning Otherwise Chapter 1 What, after all, of the remain(s) . . . Chapter 2 Soliciting Philosophys Tears Chapter 3 Rend(er)ing the Pharmakon: A Wound without a Cure Chapter 4 Secreting Myth: Thinking Sa Otherwise Chapter 5 Myth and the Gift, If There is Any Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
viii xi xvi 1 24 46 92 121 150 151 181 189
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like any meaningful work, this book is the result of a long journey that catapulted me into it before I even knew it was beginning, revealing landscapes unanticipated and extraordinary. Along the way, I have been the fortunate beneficiary of immeasurable guidance, support and inspiration from mentors, colleagues, family, students and friends, whose invaluable contributions have not only made this book possible, but also immensely enriched it. Their contributions continue to stir and enliven my thinking. Any shortcomings that persist (in addition to the inevitable and unintended remains) are entirely my own. I am grateful to many colleagues at Hollins University, who welcomed me into their vibrant community. First and foremost I remain indebted to Darla Schumm, who enthusiastically continues to support all of my efforts. I also want to thank in particular T. J. Anderson, Jan Fuller, Pauline Kaldas, Marilyn Moriarty, and Alison Ridley for their generous, unwavering friendship and rousing support of my work as a scholar, teacher and colleague, which made my time at Hollins so remarkable. In addition, I remain appreciative of the faculty research and development grant that I received from Hollins University, which directly supported this books progress. I remain beholden to my students, whose passions, hard work, curiosity and support of each other continue to enrich and inspire my teaching, thinking and way of being in the world. I want to thank the library staff at the College of Santa Fe, most especially Peg Birmingham and Val Nye for their untiring assistance and friendship. I owe my development as a scholar to a host of outstanding teachers. Most notable among them is David L. Miller, who for more than
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a decade has ceaselessly provoked, inspired, and deranged, guiding me to unimagined habitations of thought. Ever-directing me to new sources and ancient ones, ever-questioning the sources and courses of every path, his exacting feedback on early drafts of the manuscript was invaluable. My thanks also to Laura Grillo and Richard Kearney for their comments on early versions. I am grateful to both Betty Sue Flowers and the late Walt Whitman Rostow for igniting a spark early in my student career by providing me with unique opportunities to hone my skills as a researcher and writer. It is impossible to express the enormity of my debt to Ed Casey, whose generosity, erudition and wise counsel remain unparalleled. Were it not for his rigorous reading, his bottomless well of recommendations and encouragement, and his refusal to allow any intimation of a fundamental project, this endeavour could not have materialized or reached publication. He believed in my work even when I doubted it. Openhandedly and unflaggingly giving of himself as mentor, colleague and friend, his presence in my life has been an extraordinary gift, offered with no expectation of return, continuing its unaccountable bounty beyond all anticipation and intention. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to Hugh Silverman for his unhesitatingly enthusiastic interest and engagement in this project, and most of all, for his indefatigable, ever-curious, open spirit. I would also like to thank Steve Lavoie for commenting on the final draft. In addition, I would be remiss if I failed to express my abiding appreciation to David Avital at Continuum for his steadfast responsiveness, his commitment to this enterprise and his legendary patience, and to Sarah Campell for finally bringing it to print. The ceaseless demands of teaching, writing and research, as invigorating as they may be, invariably create an unintended absence in the lives of those closest to us. These absences were most acutely felt (and good-naturedly endured) by my partner, Patrick, who has shared in my quotidian joys, doubts, disappointments and accomplishments. I remain ever-grateful for his unconditional love and unflagging belief in me, which have sustained and nourished me throughout, and continue to do so. Thank you also to my many friends who have lent much-needed respite and recharge from the rigorous demands of work. Although my journey as a scholar, teacher and colleague is still just beginning, its first steps were in the home of my parents, Eugene and Susan Spitzer, my inaugural teachers, from whom I continue to
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learn and find inspiration. When I was still quite young, they awakened me to the vibrancy of intellectual life. They set aglow a passion for questioning and exploration, discouraged me from ever foreclosing on inquiry, and emboldened me instead to follow my ideas wherever they led me, even when such pathways and destinations were unfashionable or difficult to endure. They have freely, generously and inexhaustibly given me their love and support, along with their attentiveness, insights and suggestions. This book is dedicated most of all to them, with inexpressible love and gratitude. Their incalculable presence remains within and beyond the contours, the possibilities and the impossibilities of my life. A. N. S. August 2009 Santa Fe, New Mexico
ABBREVIATIONS
Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). AAR Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ambiguity and reversal: on the enigmatic structure of Oedipus Rex, New Literary History 9.3 (1978), 475501. AG Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). APN Maurice Blanchot, Affirmation and the passion of negative thought (1969), in Bataille: A Critical Reader, eds Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 4158. APT Michel Foucault, A preface to transgression (1977), trans. Robert Hurley, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, Volume II, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1999), 6987. AR Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). ATVM Jacques Derrida, At this very moment in this work here I am (1980), in Re-Reading Levinas, eds Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, trans. Ruben Berezdivin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1148. B Simon Critchley, Bois Derridas final word on Levinas, in Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 16289. BL John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
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ABBREVIATIONS
CG
D DI DO
DP DR
EI
EO
FL
FR
GP GT
Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Nonnos, Dionysiaca, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940). Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction and the other, in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, by Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Horace Liveright, 1927). Jacques Derrida, Response to Francis Guibals The otherness of the other otherwise: tracing Jacques Derrida, Parallax 10.4 (2004), 327. Maurice Blanchot, LEntretien infini [The Infinite Conversation], trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Jacques Derrida, Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xixlviii. Jacques Derrida, Force of law: the mystical foundation of authority, trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11.56 (1990), 9201045. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). Jacques Derrida, Glas (1974), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1974). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Glas-piece: a compte rendu, Diacritics 7.3 (1977), 2243. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1991), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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ABBREVIATIONS
H HA
HP
HTW
I IA IAD ID IE INS
IS
K LE
M MB
Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Jacques Derrida, How to avoid speaking: denials (1987), in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, eds Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, trans. Ken Frieden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 370. Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology (1996), trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Jacques Derrida, Proverb: He that would pun . . . Foreword, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, Glassary, by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1720. Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007). Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (1957), trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998). Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). Hugh J. Silverman, Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997). Mark C. Taylor, Introduction: system . . . structure . . . difference . . . other, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 134. Ned Lukacher, K(Ch)ronosology, Sub-Stance 8.4 (1979), 5573. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence (1953), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). William Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000). Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1990), trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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ABBREVIATIONS
MC MP MPA N O OG
ON
OTG
P PH PM PS PSI
PT
PTS
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1972), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Lawrence Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1990). Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Francis Guibal, The otherness of the other otherwise: tracing Jacques Derrida, Parallax 10.4 (2004), 1741. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Jacques Derrida, On the Name (1993), ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr. and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Jacques Derrida, On the gift: a discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5478. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Stephen Scully (Newburyport, MA: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003). Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, trans. Gerard Naddaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Jacques Derrida, The pocket-size interview with Jacques Derrida, By Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi, trans. Tupac Cruz, Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007), 36288. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Jacques Derrida, Points . . . . (1992), ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Mark C. Taylor, Skinscapes, in Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos (New York: The Drawing Center, 1995), 2945.
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ABBREVIATIONS
SGM SL SM
SP
T TH TM TS
TSN
U VP WD
Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003). G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic (1812), trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969). Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964). Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (1967), trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968). Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Jacques Derrida, I have a taste for the secret (1997), in A Taste for the Secret, eds Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 192. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond (1973), trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), trans. David Mclintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
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I have never had a fundamental project. And deconstructions, which I prefer to say in the plural, has doubtless never named a project, method, or system. Especially not a philosophical system. In contexts that are always very determined, it is one of the possible names for designating, by metonymy in sum, what happens or doesnt happen to happen, namely, a certain dislocation that in fact is regularly repeated and wherever there is something rather than nothing: in what are called the texts of classical philosophy, of course and for example, but also in every text in the general sense that I try to justify for this word, that is, in experience period, in social, historical, economic, technical, military, etc., reality. . . . These violent deconstructions are under way, it is happening, it doesnt wait for someone to complete the philosophico-theoretical analysis of everything I have just evoked in a word: this analysis is necessary but infinite and the reading that these cracks make possible will never dominate the event; that reading only intervenes there, it is inscribed there. Jacques Derrida, Points . . .1 Philosophy begins, or so it initially appears, with the dismissal of myth. The birth of metaphysics of philosophy as logos emerges at the expense of mythos. As metaphysics grows in power and prestige, mythos is starved into diminution. A logobesity ensues. Plato labours to distinguish logos from mythos, although his assessment does not settle the issue. In his determination, mythos is inferior because it is unfalsifiable, which is not to say, however, that it is true. Whereas logos is truth (its status can be conclusively ascertained by the faculties of the intellect), mythos, in contrast, is neither true nor false, and
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therefore has no such definitive nature. Mythos ambiguity is highly problematic for philosophy. Since the status of mythos (as either truth or fiction) cannot be discerned through the powers of reason, it therefore can be used to persuade, not by logical argumentation, but instead by appealing to the lesser faculties of the senses. In this way, mythos is opposed both to philosophy and to logos, and is subordinate to both of them. This antiquated privileging of logos has, for the most part, remained unquestioned by both philosophy (a discipline replete with conceptions of logos) and religion (a discipline that can never fully avoid myth as an intrinsic dynamic of religion). Whether myth is viewed as a transcendent reality (Mircea Eliade), as relational patterns revealing an underlying logic of structure (Claude Lvi-Strauss), or as a site of hermeneutic disclosure (Paul Ricoeur), the theorizing and philosophizing of myth has presupposed a dominant, logocentric source or configuration. Postmodern discourse is rightfully suspicious of unifying master narratives (grands rcits, as Jean-Franois Lyotard calls them). Religion scholars tend to eschew myth as the healthy person might try to avoid an infectious retrovirus that insidiously installs itself and transforms all bodily cells from within. Hence the erroneous conclusion that mythos is itself a master narrative that represses differences in order to champion a hegemonic, ideological identity. This line of thinking shares many similarities with philosophys dismissal of mythos as irrational and therefore inferior. Much of philosophy has left mythos out of thinking entirely by attempting to suppress it, or has attempted to integrate it (and thereby attenuate it) into an expanded reason through a dialectical synthesis in which, as a penultimate stage in the realization of the purest and highest logos, mythos still remains secondary to logos. Similarly, those who stubbornly insist on essentialist accounts of myth, without regard for the seminal lessons of postmodern, deconstructive insights, are equally at fault. The New Age reclamation of myth is itself logocentric, and fundamentally misses not only the disseminative indecidability of mythos, but also the vital relationship between mythos and logos. This relation is neither a synthetic unity that subsumes mythos into logos, nor a binary pairing that values one over the other. Rather, as we will see, mythos and logos form a non-totalizing network. The founding determination of philosophy, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, must be questioned. An other beginning is always already inscribed within the original beginning, disrupting the founding
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presuppositions of the first beginning. One of Derridas key deconstructive realizations is that all structures (whether philosophical, religious, political, literary, etc.) inevitably construct and fortify themselves through acts of exclusion, but such exclusions also unavoidably witness what Sigmund Freud calls the return of the repressed. In other words, the excluded elements resurface within the system to destabilize its very foundations. Every system unwittingly harbours remains (scraps or leftovers that it cannot quite account for, but that nevertheless are basic to it, even though they threaten it). This other beginning, that haunts the first, continues to be relatively unexplored in regard to mythos. Mythos is prematurely banished from logos only to return as a ghost. It cannot adequately be rethought in a logos-dominated framework, however. Such inquiry fails to grasp sufficiently the nature of mythos and the complexity of its relationship to logos. Mythos does not simply gather and collect. It also disseminates and deconstructs. In this way, it renders philosophy as strictly logos impossible. Yet, at the same time, without mythos, philosophy itself would be impossible. Mythos forever shadows thinking, demanding that we attend to it in its irreducible indecidability (that is, to its oscillation between truth and fiction, never reducible to one of these categories).2 The disseminative properties of mythos have been denied and overlooked for far too long. Myth, apart from its logocentric manifestations, is conspicuously absent from discourse, and even its evident form, and its undeniable relation to logos, have not been amply queried. To date, no one has rethought mythos in terms of deconstructive revelations. Given the wealth of insights that deconstructive readings have yielded in a range of disciplines, and the tremendous influence that these readings have had on various fields in the humanities, from literary theory, to philosophy, to religion, the absence of a deconstructive reading of mythos has left an opening and an invitation, to which this work directly responds. This gateway beckons us to attend to mythos not as it has been logocentrically co-opted as a hegemonic meta-narrative (even when such co-option fails to be recognized as such), but as a mythos that is inherently ambiguous and forever open. As such, it escapes all attempts to confine or foreclose it into a synthetic discourse. Mythos eludes the categorization that thinking as purely logos demands. Derridas deconstructions have shown that thinking does not just spring from a possible, thinkable ground (and thereby returns to it), but in fact, arises from that which it cannot
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quite grasp. This recognition destabilizes the very foundation of philosophy as logos, and reveals that mythos is, in some way, basic to philosophic discourse. Although focused primarily on Derridas texts that allow for a reframing of the relation of mythos and logos, we shall also consider the relevant contributions of Mark C. Taylor, one of the most influential post-Derrida deconstructive thinkers with respect to the study of religion. Taylor investigates the relevance of complexity studies to philosophical inquiry. Complexity studies explore the nature of the interconnections and the previously insufficiently acknowledged organizational dynamics at work in entities from the immune system to financial markets to ecosystems, revealing them to be neither static nor chaotic, but generative, adaptive systems, lacking top-down hierarchies. Derridas deconstructions and Taylors philosophical readings of complexity studies provide opportunities for rethinking structures and systems (including mythos and logos) in ways that subvert traditional conceptions, while opening new routes to understanding, more attuned to the lessons of the increasingly networked era that we inescapably inhabit. For the most part (although there are a few exceptions, which we shall take up at length), both Derrida and Taylor forbear a sustained engagement with mythos. However, we will see how the ghost of mythos forever shadows thinking, haunting their texts even when they decline to confront it directly. Taylors writings, along with Derridas, provide rich resources for tracing the disseminative operations of mythos and rethinking it deconstructively, as well as in terms of current emerging moments of complexity. Although Taylors scholarship has exerted a profound influence on the study of religion, few have concerned themselves with his later work that interweaves Derridean deconstructions with complexity studies in order to re-envision notions of structure and system and, therefore, remap our understanding of the contemporary world of endless virtual networks and information streams. We shall investigate previously unexamined aspects of Derridas and Taylors writings with respect to the question of myth. In effect, the lack of recognition of its disruptive presence in philosophical and religious deconstructive discourse will be a key theme here. This first requires, however, that we understand the effective nature of myth as it oscillates ceaselessly between truth and non-truth. It will also lead us to reconsider the relation between mythos and logos in terms of Taylors non-totalizing network and Derridas notion of the impossible gift.
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What emerges is something quite other than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels conception of merging difference within identity. This will allow us to see the way in which mythos is foundational to logos, but not synthesized into it. We will examine mythos as it both figures and disfigures logos, and as it is dangerously misconstrued and misused when such understanding is lacking. In an age bombarded with dominating logocentric master narratives that terrorize and repress, it has become increasingly clear that such ideologies are not only flawed, but destructive, and even deadly. Far from revealing the disfiguring ambiguity at the very root of mythos, these master narratives, supposedly in the name of myth, deny uncertainty, the multifacets and the very disfigurations that are an essential dynamic of mythos. Flipping the polarities in order to champion mythos over logos is just as short-sighted as philosophys franchising of logos. It is just as unacceptable to claim that mythos is superior to or more important than logos as it is to insist that logos reigns supreme. Both positions ignore the vital, complex dynamic between mythos and logos, and the insights that an understanding of their actual relation makes possible. We must think otherwise, without recourse to an unshakeable, over-arching foundation, without synthesizing mythos to logos and without privileging mythos over logos, or vice versa. For this reason, our explorations proceed from the openings articulated by Derridas deconstructions and Taylors timely reframings of its lessons. This task requires what Mark C. Taylor describes as a different reading a reading that is neither philosophical nor literary. This neither/nor makes all philosophers edgy.3 Philosophy as logos must be put on edge in order to move beyond its limited and outmoded confines. Doing so entails a different reading that is attuned to the breaks or fissures in it. These places of interruption expose, as we shall see, an irreducibly indecidable mythos that both constructs and deconstructs philosophy as logos. However, we must be careful not to approach these gaps in terms of a metaphysics of presence. These ruptures call into question the very foundation of logos, and by extension, of philosophy as logos, which is wedded to presence as its prime directive.4 Such unsettling tremors point to the necessity of a deconstructively attuned theory of mythos to recast our understanding and assumptions about it and its interplay with logos. By employing these approaches, we will see how the stabilizing forces of logos are impossible apart from the destabilizing forces of mythos.
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Any such study of mythos must resist the temptation to impregnate mythos with an overriding presence of logos. It is imperative to acknowledge the logocentrism that such thinking privileges. The reader is advised, likewise, to keep such cautions in mind. Our inquiry cannot be confined to the limits or assumptions of traditional philosophy. The thinking that we are undertaking is already inscribed, and limited, by internal fissures or gaps that prevent it from ever fully arriving at that which it attempts to grasp, or from fulfilling the task of thinking by making the entirety of the unknown known. Any attempt to articulate or to understand a deconstructive theory of mythos must take pains not to seek to reconcile or still the oscillation of indecidability, nor attempt to master or control the disseminative operations at play. Nor will it herald play as an end in itself. Instead, in attempting to adumbrate the complex contours that thought cannot fully think, our deconstructive inquiry must vigilantly resist foreclosure, however uncomfortable such an imperative proves to be. Such figurations unavoidably disfigure. Understanding, Taylor reminds us, presupposes that which it cannot contain, express, grasp, or domesticate (T, 184). Logos reach always, unavoidably, exceeds its grasp. As an ungraspable, disruptive excess, mythos summons us, not as an invitation, but as an inescapability, an unacknowledged imperative, demanding that we finally address its unending, intrinsic symbiosis with thinkable, graspable logos. We can do so only from the places of interruption within philosophy as logos. As much as it (re)figures mythos, this inquiry is also unavoidably disfigured from within by the inherent deconstructions that are always already underway, whether intended or not. Recognizing the impossibility of pure logos, this reading intervenes and inscribes itself upon other readings, without recourse to any final, dominating discourse. Having surrendered foundational prerequisites, we begin with the scraps and leftovers of philosophic systems (what Derrida calls the text of metaphysics), with that which falls outside of philosophys categories and cannot quite be integrated into thought. Reflecting the classicist Luc Brissons argument, that mythos is neither verifiable nor non-verifiable discourse, through a deconstructive lens, Chapter 1 affirms mythos as a term of irreducible indecidability that forever oscillates between truth and falsehood. Due to this inherent ambiguity, mythos stands in stark contrast to rational, argumentative discourse with its rigid logic that presides over its
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organization and development. Since Hegel plays such an important role in the thinking of both Derrida and Taylor, and in twentiethand twenty-first-century philosophy at large, this chapter summarizes the Hegelian notion of otherness in order to show how, in the final analysis, the Hegelian other is not truly other, but merely the totalizing synthesis of the identity of identity-and-difference. Hegels other is then contrasted with Derridas diffrance. We then turn a critical eye to Bruce Lincolns Theorizing Myth (1999), a muchheralded study (with respect to religion) of myth, as an example by which to demonstrate how recontextualizing the relation of mythos and logos requires that we understand that their relationship is not limited to an oppositional or binary one. Lincolns study shows how, historically, the terms mythos and logos have switched places. In other words, mythos was once used to designate the speech of the preeminent, and was of high authority, having the capacity to advance powerful truth claims.5 Logos, on the other hand, denoted not rational argumentation but rather shady speech acts (TM, x). However, Lincoln still equates myth with narrative ideology, thereby ignoring its inherent ambiguity that prevents such simple equations from being adequate. Lincolns reduction of mythos to ideology makes visible that such an understanding is (perhaps unintentionally) logosdominated, at its core, because it is focused solely on the constructive dynamic of mythos, ignoring its deconstructive propensities. In probing the fissures from which philosophy as logos issues, and with which it is inscribed, neither Derrida nor Taylor turn the same blind eye that Lincoln does to the inherently double movement of discourse. This is perhaps most clearly witnessed in their consideration of the homophonic meanings of the word tears, which allude to both lachrymal secretions of the eye, and also refers to ruptures. When there are tears in the eye, vision is veiled. When there are tears in discourse, logos is disfigured. Through an examination of the double movement of tearing, Chapter 2 sets the methodological stage for thinking beyond the limits of philosophy as logos, namely, for thinking in terms of its inherent disruptions. Necessary to this task is an understanding of how deconstructive discourse works as both discourse (that, in its engaged critique of a text, intentionally develops an argument) and dis-course (that always unintentionally strays from the intended course, opening up other readings, meanings and possibilities). Derridas second essay on Emmanuel Levinas, At this very moment in this work here I am (1980), along with Memoirs of
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the Blind (1990) introduces us to his conceptualization of tears. Appropriately and characteristically, Derridas text works in a double movement. This movement makes visible an other (beyond all intentionality and synthesis) that always remains in the text, disrupting its logocentric (and authoritative) functions. The tears that always already remain in philosophy, thought and language (logos) are not simply assimilated and thereby mended by them. Rather, they operate as a crypt. We shall investigate how Derridas crypt both preserves and suppresses what it encrypts, which, in this case, are the remains of philosophy as logos. If these unaccountable others are incorporated into the system (of philosophy, language and logos) as a crypt, then it becomes possible to understand how mythos, like the remaining tears, is within logos, as that which logos both preserves (and requires) and, in an effort to deny it, constrains. This constrained preservation recalls the pharmakon, upon which much of Platos championing of logos in the Phaedrus rests. Derrida (in his landmark essay Platos pharmacy, included in Dissemination (1974)) opens a space for a deconstructive reading and engagement of structures and systems with respect to speech and writing. Chapter 3 extends beyond the perimeters of Derridas argument by establishing an analogy between pharmakon and mythos, and by examining significant dislocations of logocentric exigencies in Platos Phaedrus that Derrida does not touch upon. These dislocations call into question Platos supposed subordination of mythos, which has subsequently been used to justify philosophys exclusion of it. Both mythos and the pharmakon operate as disruptive indecidables in Platos text, revealing the extent to which logos depends upon that which it cannot control, domesticate or make fully present. Significantly, a myth is used in the Phaedrus in order to render a pharmakon so as to argue that speech (logos) is superior to writing. In this case, the myth itself serves as a pharmakon, but that myth also introduces a pharmakon in recounting the story of Thoth. However, as indecidables, mythos and the pharmakon cannot so easily be encompassed into philosophic discourse. Platos Phaedrus cannot avoid employing mythos in order to create and fortify its argument. In this way, mythos is demonstrated to be basic to logos, setting the discourse of philosophy into motion. At the same time, however, it unavoidably deconstructs logos, disrupting philosophy. Even though its focus is elsewhere, Derridas Glas (1974) demonstrates the crucial dynamic relation of mythos and logos. Reading it
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in consideration of strange loops, a term coined by neuroscientist and complexity theorist Douglas Hofstatder to describe anomalous, unanticipatable, open-ended configurations, reveals a previously undiscovered networking of mythos and logos. Focusing on Glas and Derridas use of the myth of Saturn in the text (in which he associates the god Saturn, written as Sa, with Hegels savoir absolu, also transcribed as Sa), Chapter 4 exposes the disseminative operations of mythos and examines how it both figures and disfigures philosophy as logos. Glas consists of strange loops that are not closed, but open. These loops keep the text in an ever-differentiating oscillation between possible meanings. The strange loops that are generated by and emerge from within the wounded, tattooed and breached columns of Glas prevent savoir absolu from returning to itself. This brings our attention to a curious structural event in the text. Tattooed within the Sa-Saturn-Saturnalia-Dionysus column in Glas is one that asks, What would it mean not to comprehend (Hegel) the text of Sa?6 Chapter 4 shows how, by inscribing a philosophical question within the column of Sa, Derrida, in effect, reveals disseminative mythos. This question, although philosophical, cannot be answered by philosophy. Instead, the response is played out in the differentiating polysemia of mythos. Chapter 5 takes up the resulting challenge of understanding the relationship of mythos and logos as one that is neither binary nor dialectical. Taylors concept of network, which is an interweave of deconstruction and complexity studies, offers a new way for us to understand that not all systems totalize. Networks, for example, are nontotalizing structure[s] that nonetheless ac[t] as a whole.7 This chapter also recasts the relation of mythos and logos in terms of Derridas gift (in Given Time (1991)), which is aneconomic, exceeding the economic, specular economy that it nevertheless generates. The gift that interests Derrida is not the one that inscribes itself as a debt as a present to be received, noted and therefore reciprocated. Rather, he focuses on a gift that surpasses every attempt to locate and define it, that escapes any counterchange, and which occurs only by way of absolute forgetting. We will come to see how such a gift, that is not (a) present, is a (dis)figure of the impossible, but not itself impossible. This requires an examination of the strange relation of the impossible to the possible, which mirrors that of mythos to logos. The impossible gives rise to the possible, but the possible nonetheless opens out into the impossible. In this way, they maintain a relation
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without relation (as do mythos and logos) in which the impossibility of the possible is affirmed non-affirmatively, as we will see. Just as the impossible shadows the possible, mythos shadows logos. Mythos brings forth logos by invoking the able-to-be-thought, and logos provides mythos a vehicle by which to find expression. The impossible sets the possible into motion. So too, the impossibility of philosophy that this work articulates (to the extent that such articulation is possible) is intimately tied to the possibilities inherent in philosophys pre-existing structures and dynamics. The impossibility of philosophy (as pure logos) is not to be feared or suppressed, however. Rather, its inescapability summons us as the impossible gift that can never properly be given, received or even recognized. The impossible sets our thinking aglow and impassions our thought, rather than impoverishing it. Mythos makes logos possible, while simultaneously (dis)figuring it. In this way, it is an impossible inclusion within philosophy, which we ought not to deny any longer. Far from dooming us to just criticism, deconstructions reveal new, fruitful openings that afford rich possibilities. Such re-examinations of age-old assumptions and responses to the invitation to rethink them anew are perhaps perilously overdue. In todays world, in which a proliferation of foreclosed, ideological, competing meta-narratives vie to instantiate their own one-sided vision to the exclusion of all others, exploring the new avenues of inquiry that issue from a deconstructive understanding of myth becomes increasingly important. These partisan perspectives that try to deny the inescapable uncertainty that underlies mythos destabilize and threaten our world in the most insidious ways. Although instability has the potential to be productive, allowing for the emergence of creativity, many of todays logocentric master narratives, in their fruitless attempts to avoid the uncertainty and plurality of todays world and to control that which is, by its very nature, uncontrollable, are unavoidably destructive. In attempting to escape the uncertainty and polysemia of todays world, and to control that which cannot ultimately be controlled, they have foreclosed on the future, excluding all possibilities except the one that they champion, but nevertheless cannot, in the end, guarantee. To think the impossibility of philosophy (as pure logos) is simultaneously to think its very possibility, and to affirm the fecund, groundless ground at the heart of all inquiry, where the ceaseless rhythms of figuring and disfiguring give to all thinking its opaque resplendence.
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CHAPTER 1
WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . . (G, 1)
TEARING REMAINS, REMAINING TEARS
As the title of this chapter signals, we are proceeding from the scraps and leftovers of philosophy, from that which philosophy has ignored as non-philosophical. We begin with what remains to be thought, with philosophys other, mythos. Even though philosophy as logos declines to take them seriously, these remains are significant. In illuminating how systems and structures inevitably construct and fortify themselves through acts of exclusion, Jacques Derrida has highlighted the importance of these remains, of that which falls outside of philosophy, even though basic to it. As a result of this dynamic, many foundations assumed to be unassailable are called into question. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that logos is no exception to this. Logos, and therefore philosophy as logos, has secured itself through marginalizing that which is not, strictly speaking, logical.1 One of these others that it has shunned is mythos, its bastard sibling. Mainstream discourse in a broad range of disciplines has either avoided mythos or relegated it to an inferior, inessential position.2 Philosophy, in its concern with logos, and religion often struggle with unwelcome and ubiquitous intrusions of myth. We shall attend to the ever-present deconstructive propensities of mythos, and its disruptive interplay with logos. Such an endeavour, by its nature, must move beyond the limitations of philosophy as logos, of most contemporary theories of myth and of logos itself. It must begin with that which has been cast out, excluded, suppressed and attenuated. Remaining with these remains does not unveil a supreme logos dominating mythos. Something other (i.e. irreducibly different) manifests. This other dismantles the very foundation of philosophy as logos.
1
Derrida opens Glas, his most sustained critique of Hegels philosophic system, by addressing the scraps and leftovers of that system. what, after all, of the remain(s) . . . (G, 1), he asks. By doing so, Derrida not only turns attention to the remains themselves, which have often been overlooked or suppressed by philosophy, but he also underscores how remains of any system or structure operate. His examination, in this complexly woven enterprise written in multiple columns of discordant text, proceeds from the scraps that are left in the wake of philosophys death knell, as the title of his volume suggests.3 Derrida is concerned with what happens after the closure of systematic thought, with what remains to be thought and written at the end-limit of philosophy. What, he asks, (of the) remains of absolute knowledge? He suspects that the remains are no mere castaways, but rather the very (un)grounding of philosophy as logos. Derridas works, of which Glas is no exception, are concerned with a philosophic system that has purportedly reached its completion and attained its goal, its telos. However, this death knell is not a traditional ending, in that it founds the very beginning of Glas. In posing the inevitability of remains at the outset, Derrida indicates that, despite initial appearances, rather than constituting a closure, they open out into a gaping wound or tear. Instead of coming full circle to completion, thinking is disrupted from within by these unincludable scraps. Philosophys end, or death knell, subverts traditional conceptions of genesis and closure as well as the circular path of logos. In other words, something begins at the completion of absolute knowledge. Something still remains to be thought. Unlike mathematical remainders, that are still quantifiable leftovers of an equation, remains are scraps that have escaped the accountability of philosophy as logos; they cannot be accounted for by any traditional means.4 As such, they must be thought and approached in a way other than that by which philosophy as logos conceives them. Derrida emphasizes this in an interview: I try to think about the rest in a different way, precisely not as a simple residue that falls and has no effects, that falls at the end of an operation, a scrap, a residue that will not be taken into account from now on. I think that the rest or the remains have to be taken into account, but not in the form of a substance.5 The remains lack substance, presence or permanence (PSI, 381), and therefore cannot be approached or thought within the limits of traditional philosophy. Nonetheless, their disruptive dynamic can no longer be ignored. Beginning his work with them, Derrida shows that these
2
WHAT, AFTER ALL, OF THE REMAIN(S) . . .
unthought leftovers are foundational to thinking, logos and philosophy, and therefore a fundamental part of them, even though they are not conceptual presences (and as such, non-foundational).6 Since they are not conceptual, they cannot be incorporated into philosophy as logos. Yet, they are not outside of philosophy, external and extraneous to it. Beginning at the end, with the discarded remnants of philosophys foundation, the very notion of a fixed foundation (with its recognizable foundational components and without unapprisable non-foundational elements) and a superior logos (dependant on that fixed foundation) is rendered questionable. One begins to recognize that such a foundation is irreparably faulted. Hence Derrida elaborates: As for what begins then beyond absolute knowledge unheard-of thoughts are required, sought for across the memory of old signs. . . . In the openness of this question we no longer know. This does not mean that we know nothing but that we are beyond absolute knowledge (and its ethical, aesthetic, or religious system), approaching that on the basis of which its closure is announced and decided. Such a question will legitimately be understood as meaning nothing, as no longer belonging to the system of meaning.7 That which begins beyond philosophys completion cannot be apprehended or understood strictly within philosophy as logos, because it already exceeds the limitations of such a mode of inquiry. The required unheard-of thoughts are not of the system proper because as mute, excluded, non-present cast-offs, they are not rightfully at home within it and cannot be conceived systematically. Logos is impotent to translate these unheard-of-thoughts. Although excluded, they form not only the very basis of Derridas inquiry, but also of philosophy as logos. These unheard and unthought remains elude the order of presence and, therefore, cannot be apprehended strictly by logos. Attending to the demands of these remains requires one to listen in a different way, attuning oneself not to the logic of meaning, but rather to that which has been dismissed as meaningless and alogical: mythos. Such an act is subversive.8 It must necessarily transgress the limitations of logos. Is it possible to transgress the limitations of logos in a way that does not simply affirm logos? If the relationship between transgression and
3
limit were simply dialectical, then transgression would negate the limit, putting an end to limits by showing how the limit is limited.9 In other words, such transgression is attenuated transgression, and so would indeed affirm the limits limitations. This kind of logos-aligned transgression affirms the limitations of the limit, demonstrating that nothing is beyond bounds, and that everything is attainable and, specifically, thinkable. It introduces the crossing of the limit into every thought.10 This type of transgression is not truly transgressive, because it affirms that logos has no limits. Instead, it would be the penultimate stage in a synthetic unity. Although transgression is impossible apart from the limit that determines it, and the limit is meaningless apart from transgression, their relationship is neither a dualistic binarism nor a synthetic dialectic. As Michel Foucault observes, the relation between transgression and limit is more complex than it may at first appear. Limit and transgression simultaneously affirm and reject each other: The limit and transgression depend on each other . . . a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. . . . [The limit] serves as a glorification of what it excludes: the limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude that invades it to the core of its being.11 At the same moment that the limit acclaims what it bars, the limit itself is overturned by its own unwitting glorification of the alien, foreign, unmasterable plenitude that invades the system and the limit to the core of its being (TVM, 73). This alien plenitude is a kind of origin, since it gives rise to the very system that attempts to exclude it on the basis of its foreign nature.12 In Foucaults view, transgressive transgression opens the limit to an exorbitant expanse that it is powerless to delimit or define. In this way, transgression is excessive. It escapes all definitions and categories: Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it achieve its purpose through mockery or by upsetting the solidity of foundations; it does not transform the other side of the mirror, beyond an invisible and uncrossable line, into a
4
glittering expanse. Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and, exactly for this reason, its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. But, correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it.13 (APT, 74) The movement of transgression exceeds the operations of a dialectical economy. In such an economy, transgression would transform the other side into a glittering expanse through Hegelian negation, exalting it as achievable, knowable and thinkable, and therefore within (and not ultimately beyond) the limits of logos. However, transgression is not violence, either the act of opposing itself to one thing, and remaining divided from it as in a binary framework. Nor is it a victory over limits (a dialectical relation), which would negate and put an end to the limit, thereby effectively annulling the transgressiveness of the transgression.14 Foucault situates transgression as something outside the limit and beyond the system that is nonetheless also within it. When understood in terms of Derridas remains and Foucaults non-dialectical breach, transgression opens the limit (and by extension logos) to the excessive remains, to the scraps and unthought cast-offs of philosophy. By revealing the excluded, disruptive otherness within, transgression affirms in a manner that is neither positive nor negative the limitlessness that forever exceeds philosophy as logos. However, as Foucault carefully avers, this affirmation contains nothing positive nor negative. Foucaults affirmation slips between these two modes, escaping the limits of each. That slippage is the means by which it transgresses the limitations of logos without affirming it. Transgressions affirmation is not a coming-to-presence or a conceptualizing of the exorbitant. If it were, then it would not be excessive, since it could ultimately be grasped and conceived purely within the limits of language, thought (logos) and philosophy proper. Hence, our affirmation of mythos and its transgression of logos is non-affirmative, that is, neither positive nor negative. Traditional affirmation necessarily limits itself by inscribing that which it affirms,
5
and therefore attempts to grasp, within the constraints of presence and pure knowability. As Foucault illustrates, transgression is not bound by the limits of the thinkable and knowable, and as a result, it cannot be affirmed in any traditional manner. Similarly, Derrida recognizes the remains of philosophical systems as transgressive and excessive. Viewed through Foucaults elaboration, these remains transgress the limits of philosophy as logos in a way that is not logofiable, exposing philosophys very limitations. Since philosophy cannot account for the remains, it attempts to avoid, repress or domesticate them. Nevertheless, despite philosophys efforts to exclude them, the remains remain. In a non-teleological way, they give rise to the system itself in their inseparable relation to it.15 As unmasterable transgressions, the remains call into question the very foundation of philosophy as logos,16 even as they are inextricable aspects of it.17 These remains reveal that logos foundation (the genesis of philosophy) is faulted by an unassimilable plenitude. Philosophys end in absolute knowledge is an opening that confounds the possibility of closure. The inherent tears in logos point to the foundational nature of this unthought other, mythos.18 This unaccountable, exorbitant fissure within the system does not happen despite the system, as some sort of error or mistake that is to be avoided, repressed or mended. Rather, non-knowledge (that which cannot be grasped by logos) is endemic to knowledge (logos), as Georges Bataille has expressed. The unknowable is unknowable not on account of the insufficiency of reason, but by its nature.19 Reason contains an inherently unreasonable aspect, and logos contains an inherently illogical dynamic. Hence, reason is transgressed from within by that which cannot be reasoned. Since illogical, indecidable mythos cannot be incorporated into and conceived of in terms of presence by philosophy, it disfigures and disrupts all logocentric operations. Not present, though not merely absent, the other remains inside as an exteriority interrupting all immediacy and dislocating every identity (T, 68). As just such an other, mythos operates in a manner similar to Maurice Blanchots nonabsent absence. Blanchots phrase is used to describe, among other things, the way in which writing is non-writing. Nonwriting is not productive and fails to achieve a specific effect. For Blanchot, every book, which supposes itself to be a singular entity delivering an intended message from the author, also contains, to use a term of Derridas, an aneconomic aspect that escapes authorial intent
6
and is not entirely present to logocentric discourse. The uselessness of (non-)writing is specifically its usefulness, but this usefulness is useless, because it does not work toward a philosophical telos. This kind of writing that escapes logos is the non-absent absence from out of which the Book, having absented itself from this absence . . . makes itself legible and comments upon itself . . .20 Such writing remains foreign to legibility; illegible then . . . (EI, 431). Blanchot concludes that this writing is therefore (pure) exteriority, strange to every relation of presence (EI, 431). The illegible exteriority of this nonwriting, although absent from the book, nonetheless stands in a relationship of alterity with it (EI, 431). Neither present to intelligibility or readability, nor absent in that which is readable and intelligible, it is a non-absent absence. In a similar way, mythos is an exteriority that is foreign to logos apprehendable logic, while at the same time basic to logos. Logos limits (or what Bataille refers to as insufficiency) reveal the extent to which logos always already presupposes mythos, but not in a mere dialectical or binary relation. As we will see, logos is constituted and simultaneously discomposed by mythos. Mythos gives rise to logos, and in turn, logos makes it possible for mythos to emerge into thought and speech. Mythos and logos are interwoven in a relationship that is neither merely binary nor completely dialectical.
THE DESTABILIZING INDECIDABILITY OF MYTHOS
Western philosophic discourse has a long history of dichotomizing mythos and logos, as if their relation were reducible simply to a binary or dialectical one. The age-old distinction between mythos and logos continues unquestioned. This habitual blindness to mythos is significant, since, as the prior discussion illustrates, that which has been neglected nonetheless remains to destabilize philosophys foundation. Conventional thinking has proceeded along the lines traced out by a customary reading of Plato and a circumscribed, unambiguous vision of philosophy.21 The relationship of mythos and logos has been inadequately addressed or avoided, keeping logos at the centre and relegating mythos and logos to their separate roles. Philosophy and the subsequent welcoming of the dawn of reason were born of this evasion. Insisting that philosophy had been freed from mythos and its ambiguity allowed for the inauguration of a logos that is unconditioned by and absolved of the inconsistencies of mythos.
7
Classicist Luc Brisson points out that the conflict between myth and philosophy reaches its apex with Plato.22 Plato defines and distinguishes these two terms, setting them in opposition to one another. As Brisson explains, the m[y]thos/logos dichotomy [in Plato] can be interpreted not only as the opposition between falsifiable discourse and unfalsifiable discourse . . . but also as the opposition between narrative discourse or, more simply, a story and argumentative discourse (HP, 112). In one sense, according to Brisson, myth is unfalsifiable discourse, since its referent is situated at a level of reality inaccessible both to the intellect and to the senses.23 In other words, the referent is not susceptible of [to] any precise description (PM, 102). Just as the remains of the philosophic system are not presences, and therefore elude conceptualization, mythos referent is equally absent, rendering mythos just as ungraspable by both the senses and the intellect. With neither a sensible nor intelligible ground, mythos stands in stark contrast to the purportedly intelligible foundation of logos. Importantly, the difference between falsifiable and unfalsifiable is unavoidably and disturbingly ambiguous. If myth is unfalsifiable, it cannot be either proven or disproven.24 As neither truth nor fiction, it oscillates between these two poles. It is neither true nor false. Logos contains no such ambiguity: it establishes itself as truth. Its status can be unmistakably ascertained. It does not slip and slide between opposing categories; its identity is definitive. When understood in this way, it becomes obvious that mythos is irreducibly indecidable, since it vacillates between truth and falsehood. As neither true nor false, mythos cannot be transformed into a tool of logical, argumentative discourse (to which Plato opposes it) with a rational internal order that presides over its organization and development.25 Any attempt to categorize mythos one way or the other, as singularly true or false, is stymied by the disseminating ambiguity of its indecidability that renders it at once as neither true nor false.26 Employing the laws of reason, it is impossible to prove it either true or false. For philosophy, this is problematic because mythos can wrongly be used to persuade, not through the powers of reason, but by appealing to the lesser faculties of the emotions and senses. In this view, humankind in general, and philosophy in particular, must be unbound from the irrational, ambiguous grip of mythos. Mythos is therefore relegated to its association with stories, which are not required to adhere to the rules of logic, and defy empirical and objective validation.
8
Accordingly, logos takes on the opposite connotations of mythos. It literally means speech, and becomes associated with reason, falsifiable philosophic discourse, and hence, truth. At its most basic level, logos is verifiable discourse. As such, its claims are truth claims. Whereas mythos status is neither verifiable nor unverifiable its relation to fact is impossible to determine logos either validates or invalidates fact. For this reason, logos is objective truth. Its root, leg, means to gather and collect. Logos means at once reason, discourse, relation, and account, observes Derrida.27 Specifically, logos designates argumentative discourse that is verifiable. Unlike mythos, which does not stand in relation to either truth or falsity (its identity is indecidable), logos identifies itself as truth. Mythos, however, has an unknown etymology (HP, 1920). Its constantly shifting changes in meaning (between Homer and Plato) is due, argues Brisson, to the increasingly important place of logos (HP, 1920). Therefore, logos is heir to . . . mythos (HP, 20). From this traditional perspective, logos triumphs over the inferior, ambiguous, and errant mythos. Plato sits on the fault line of two different modes of consciousness. His writing signals the shift from orality to literacy. Since myth is often associated with orality, the move to logos is also, in effect, an attempt to inaugurate and cement the age of literacy.28 Before continuing further, a few more important qualifications must be made in considering the subversion of logos by mythos. In a deconstructive reading, subversion is not merely inversion, as the above discussion of transgression and the limit reveals. Mark C. Taylor goes so far as to suggest that the subversive thinker must think what the tradition has left unthought by writing (on) the margin of neither / nor (T, 242). If one follows Hegelian logic, the subversive that which opposes itself to unity, identity, sameness, and so forth becomes part of the norm through dialectical movement. In the final analysis, it is merely the penultimate stage to an integrated unity.29 A deconstructive reading will show, however, that every foundation includes a non-foundational aspect that destabilizes it from within. Therefore, every apparent closure lays bare a gateway from which the formerly repressed emerges to destabilize foundations and unveil new modes of thinking. Mythos subverts logos. As an indecidable, it escapes the mode of presence and truth, faulting logos from within. In keeping with mythos indecidable oscillation between neither simple truth nor simple falsehood, one must resist the temptation to name or to identify mythos as a category of presence, as something logofiable.
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As an indecidable remains, mythos cannot be accounted for by philosophy as logos. To begin to think mythos is not to think toward a traditional end. Rather, it is to open thinking to a gaping abyss from which it proceeds to an unaccounted for, unthought remains and to an ever-differentiating mythos that calls forth logos. This approach attends to the endless tolling between neither/nor, not seeking to translate such rhythms into a discourse of presence that would render mythos either as truth or falsehood, thereby denying its restless movement between these two. Such disseminative oscillation cannot be stilled or resolved, even though philosophy has a long history of attempting to do so. If the repressed always returns to upset every foundation, then philosophys endeavours ultimately fail. Neither philosophical nor non-philosophical, our reading of mythos operates between these two poles. Mythos, with its shape-shifting indecidability, eludes the hold of logos. Hence the link with various other indecidables that Derrida has articulated: for instance, mythos and pharmakon, mythos and the impossible, mythos and the gift. These are meant as analogies of relation, not attribution,30 as Thomas Carlson describes them. Since mythos and pharmakon, for example, function as indecidables, forever oscillating in the margins of neither/nor, as neither just one thing nor another (e.g. remedy or poison, falsifiable or unfalsifiable), and therefore not singularly cemented as unambiguous things in the realm of presence, it is impossible to treat them as apparent, unitary entities to be analogized. Analogies of attribution cannot be drawn. Their attributes escape all attribution. In his study comparing Heidegger and Eckhart, John D. Caputo points out that an analogy of relation concerns a similarity of structures, not of content. It is not what is related but the how which is comparable.31 Nonetheless, this focus on structure is not strictly structural. Just as deconstruction presupposes the structuralism that it ultimately undermines, structuralism similarly includes, as a condition of its possibility, that which exceeds structure. This does not mean that deconstruction is, in effect, structuralism, and that structuralism is ultimately deconstruction.32 In his own study, in which he proposes such an analogy, Thomas Carlson asserts that he is prohibited by the very terms of the analogy, not only from identifying those terms but also from distinguishing them for the terms themselves cannot be given determinate, identifiable content; indeed, lacking
10
the determinacy or identity of any what, the terms indicate that which would remain, in and of itself, unknown and unknowable. (I, 17) For instance, mythos and pharmakon cannot be categorized within the strictures of logos. As indecidables, they are by their very nature indeterminate. Thus, a determinate identity of what is certainly impossible, as is any attempt to draw an analogy of attribution. The degree to which the how of any relation can be made is the extent to which this study develops an analogy of relation. Its use of analogy is not meant to ground (or structuralize), but rather to destabilize that which can never be properly grounded.
OTHER DIS-COURSES Hegels Other
Thinking mythos not as a Hegelian other, but as an other that cannot be synthesized and that does not return to identity, requires that we first briefly explore Hegels concept of otherness. We can then examine Derridas and Taylors rereadings of Hegels notion of difference. Jean-Luc Nancy dubs Hegel the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world.33 In a 1971 interview, Derrida affirmed the importance of returning to Hegels texts: We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect, I believe that Hegels text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder of writing, whose strange relationship to the philosophical content of Hegels text must be reexamined, that is, the movement by means of which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its self-identity.34 The re-examination of Hegel is central to Derridas task. Furthermore, he suggests that Hegels text is fissured. That is, tears emerge from within it. These tears are caused, in part, by the operation of
11
writing that unwittingly creates a remainder. These remains are elusive, unmasterable excesses that disrupt the philosophic system of Hegels text from within, derailing its self-identity and self-presentation. Reading the inherent fissures and disruptions within Hegels text reveals not circular closure, the return of thinking to itself (which would culminate in absolute knowledge), but rather the impossibility of closure, self-presence and absolute knowledge. This calls into question the very possibility of a superior, pure and dominant logos. Taylor is equally preoccupied with rereading Hegel. Like Derrida, he is attentive to the irreparable ruptures that surface in the Hegelian text.35 [T]hose who write after the end of philosophy cannot avoid Hegel,36 insists Taylor, because [o]n the one hand, Hegels system is the culmination of the modern philosophy of the subject that brings the closure of the metaphysics of presence; on the other hand, Hegelian reason is fascinated by difference and is irresistibly drawn to the vertiginous question of the other. (IS, 4) This echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who declared two decades earlier that all the great philosophical ideas of the past century . . . had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason, which remains the task of our century.37 Both Taylor and Merleau-Ponty call attention to Hegels undeniable fascination with otherness, with the irrational. In fact, Hegels fixation on otherness leaves him unsatisfied with earlier and contemporaneous attempts to account for it, such as those of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. The other drives Hegel and gives rise to his philosophic system. It is precisely his interest in the vertiginous other that causes him, simultaneously and unwittingly, to preserve it through attenuation and constraint. Hegels obsession with otherness, and his attempt to account for it and synthesize it into identity and thinking, provides a point of entry for post-Hegelian thinkers to read Hegel otherwise. That is, for them to read his work in terms of its inherent disruptions. Both Derrida and Taylor focus on Hegels concomitant affirmation and rejection of otherness. They rightly suspect that, despite Hegels attempts to domesticate the other in the name of logos and identity, some unmasterable excess remains, fissuring his philosophic
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system from within and rendering it incomplete. Instead of preserving otherness as the unmasterable excess that it is, Hegels philosophic system attempts to attenuate and rationalize it by subsuming it under the fully present and knowable self-identity of the system. However, as Derrida avers in the Positions interview above, rereading Hegels text reveals that it exceeds its meaning, that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation, and that ultimately, it unwittingly operates outside its self-identity (P, 778). In order to see how it does this, despite Hegels efforts to the contrary, it is necessary to elaborate what Derrida and Taylor mean by difference and otherness, and how this contrasts to Hegels notion of them. At its most basic level, Hegels dialectic operates in three stages: from identity (union) to difference (loss, separation and exile) to the identity of identity-and-difference (reunion, reconciliation and synthesis).38 The conversion of identity and difference into each other is of concern here. The initial identity of the first stage is pure self-sameness uncorrupted by difference. In order to have an identity, identity must affirm itself. It does this by placing itself in contradistinction to difference or otherness. In other words, identity affirms itself through the act of negation. Hegel declares in the Phenomenology that knowing is this seeming inactivity which merely contemplates how what is differentiated spontaneously moves in its own self and returns into its unity.39 Identity seeks itself and determines itself by relating to difference, or to an other. The discovery that its own identity can only be constituted in and through this other, that it cannot exist apart from this other, entails a self-negation. However, such negation is not final, as Hegel assesses it. The negation is negated when identity (or self) recognizes that difference (or the other) is not, in the final analysis, essentially and externally other. An influential scholar of Hegel and teacher of Derridas, Jean Hyppolite, encapsulates this movement with his usual erudition: For Hegel, identity is being which posits itself, which reflects itself in itself, therefore, which contradicts itself and alienates itself, in order to posit itself in its self-alienation.40 Such contradiction is internal, and therefore not ultimately different. Difference is merely a stage in the movement of logic and in identitys affirmation of itself. Within this framework, difference is not truly different. It is not entirely other. Taylor highlights this crucial aspect of Hegels logic by explaining that in this dialectical interplay, difference, the other of
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identity, is identitys own other. Such ownership of difference is essential to identity.41 In Hegels system, identity owns and therefore presides over difference. Difference merges with identity, forming a singular unit: the identity of identity-and-difference. Otherness, although fundamental to identitys self-recognition (recall here that identity in the first stage is incomplete without its other, because it has not yet comprehended itself, and therefore must lose itself in order to find itself), is nonetheless unified and domesticated within identity. It appears in the order of presence and thereby becomes fully known. Identity subsumes otherness under the banner of itself. Identity ingests and integrates the other, uniting difference with identity as the identity of identity-and-difference. From Hegels perspective, nothing unaccounted for is left over. He denies the possibility of remains. Relation to other , emphasizes Taylor, turns out to be self-relation (A, 16). Likewise difference, too, becomes its own opposite. Hegel elaborates: Difference in itself is self-related difference; as such, it is the negativity of itself, the difference not of an other, but of itself from itself; it is not itself but its other. But that which is different from difference is identity. Difference, therefore, is itself and identity. Both together constitute difference; it is the whole, and its moment.42 Difference is not only domesticated by identity, but it also domesticates itself in its relation to itself. Identity and difference each house their own opposites. Each is therefore contradictory in nature. However, Hegelian inner contradiction is not radical, because each is mediated with itself by its other and contains it. . . . it is mediated with itself by the non-being of its other; hence it is a unity existing on its own account and it excludes the other from itself (SL, 431).43 Difference is internal, secondary and reconcilable. In the final analysis, it is not wholly different, since otherness is negated, opposites are reconciled, and ultimately, difference is wedded to identity and thereby attenuated. For Hegel, difference and identity unite within the economy of presence and pure knowability. As pointed out earlier, Taylor and Merleau-Ponty credit Hegel with introducing otherness into identity, reason and thinking, and with recognizing that difference is inherent within identity. The philosophical tradition prior to Hegel had focused predominantly on
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identity as that which is identical to itself and not intimately related to difference. Hegel turns philosophys attention to the inherently self-contradictory nature of identity. He insists that identity is different, that it includes its other. This inclusion, however, is exclusive. Identity will only welcome an other that has undergone a dialectical transformation. That is, difference and otherness are taken up into the house of identity only after they have been domesticated and mastered. There is nothing excessive or truly different about Hegels other. The opposition between identity and difference is, says Hegel, illusory, since in grasping and expressing the one, the other also is immediately grasped and expressed (SL, 6). Hegels other can be conceived and is, in fact, grasped by its other, identity. Taylor sums up the Hegelian operation of dialectical synthesis: By reuniting opposites, the negation of negation returns difference to identity and rejoins other to the same (A, 18).
An Irreducible Other
It becomes clear to Derrida that, despite Hegels insistence that difference return to identity, there is in fact an irreducible, disruptive difference that remains.44 Such an other cannot be thought or grasped through the metaphysics of presence and identity, as Hegel attempts to do. In order to think this difference as difference that is, to think difference as neither its identity nor its opposite (i.e. difference) Derrida coins the term, diffrance. Diffrance is neither a word nor a concept.45 The a of diffrance cannot be heard. . . . It cannot be apprehended in speech . . . it also bypasses the order of apprehension in general (MP, 34). This disruptive, silent a cannot be grasped or accounted for by logos. The tacit monument (MP, 4) of the a of diffrance is an unmasterable excess. Diffrance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological ontotheological reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology philosophy produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return (MP, 6), explains Derrida. Diffrance is irreducible to identity. Additionally, Derrida avers that it is basic to that which cannot think, grasp, domesticate or include it. This diffrance falls outside of Hegels dialectical economy, since it cannot be accounted for or reappropriated by identity or logos. Diffrer is drawn from the Latin, differre and carries the double meaning of to space and to temporize. In the former it is to be not
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identical but, to be other . . . [A]n interval, a distance, a spacing . . . between the elements other (MP, 8). In the latter sense it means to temporize, to take recourse consciously or unconsciously, in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of desire or will, and equally effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect. (MP, 8) The operation of diffrance is renegade. Instead of returning, full circle, to identity, it takes a detour (sans retour) and in so doing makes the completion and fulfillment of Hegels route impossible. Hegel describes the movement of thought as circular, as the circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end (PS, 488). Diffrance, however, subverts this closure and rends the system from within. It is not subsumed under identity like Hegelian difference. Diffrance does not unify, but rather, disbands. It cannot be corralled or accounted for by logos. Diffrance is irreducibly polysemic (MP, 8), and as such is not limited to the mode of presence that structures language and thought. In fact, it disrupts these through a process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences (MP, 9) as opposed to identities. It does not unify, but rather, cuts. Since it exceeds logos, diffrance is not a concept. It is radically other, and as such, destabilizes the very ground of logos, of philosophy. By acknowledging diffrance not as representing presence, but as subversively different one puts into question the authority of presence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, absence or lack. Thus one questions the limit which has always constrained us, which still constrains us as inhabitants of a language and a system of thought to formulate the meaning of Being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness (ousia). (MP, 10) Diffrance calls the entire system of logos into question. Because it cannot be categorized (it is irreducibly polysemic) and therefore grasped, it is not even a concept. It is not present, nor is it absent. Diffrances polysemic irreducibility oscillates between these two modes. As an other that does not return to identity, it transgresses
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logos (language, thought, speech). With this A, observes Taylor, Derrida attempts to write that which spells the end of every philosophical system based upon the principle of the ONE, which is otherwise known as Identity, Unity, Being, and Presence (T, 25). Derridas A reveals an other that disrupts, dismantles and destroys the reign of synthetic unity. Diffrance tears the seam of sy that joins together (in a synthesis) the symmetrical system of sameness and difference. This difference cannot be grasped in terms of identity. It is, by its very (non-)nature, diffrance, an other that cannot be accounted for by the logical operations of thought. Furthermore, this other is not simply outside the structure that it disrupts, but rather is within, as an originary causality that simultaneously inscribes and exceeds it. It is more fundamental and more originary than any unity or identity. The unheard a rends every binary opposition and dialectical synthesis.
Logos Other
As we have seen, otherness is basic to identity, even if it cannot be properly identified or synthesized into it. Likewise, logos other, mythos, is fundamental to it, but neither as a Hegelian other that returns difference to identity, nor as a binary one that marks two separate, distinct parts. Insofar as mythos is such an irreducible, unlogofiable other, it operates by way of diffrance. Its unending oscillation between possible meanings creates an unbridgeable gap in logos. This is why tracing the movement of diffrance within the philosophic system within logos is essential to understanding the deconstructive dynamic of mythos and the relation of logos and mythos. Like diffrance, which is an originary causality, mythos acts in a similar fashion, founding and disorganizing logos from within. Deconstruction allows us to understand mythos as an irreducible, disruptive other that does not, in the end, return to identity or to logos. Both Derrida and Taylor insist on an unsettling diffrance within systems and structures that destabilizes their foundations. To acknowledge mythos as irreducibly indecidable, and not attempt to collapse it into ideology or to ignore it as philosophy has done, yields new possibilities for understanding the very nature of thinking and of philosophy. Unfortunately, the deconstructive propensities of mythos have been overlooked. As cases in point from two different disciplines,
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philosopher Lawrence Hatabs Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths and historian of religion Bruce Lincolns Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship are insufficient precisely because they do not maintain the essential, irreducible indecidability of mythos. Despite their disparate starting points, like other theorists of myth, both view mythos through the monochromatic lens of logos. They (perhaps unwittingly) fall into the logocentric temptation to treat mythos as a definite thing, and as a definable category of presence. Mythos has ostensibly been domesticated by logos in these works, even when the authors continue to maintain that they are not dismissive of myth. This reminds us of Hegels insistence that since the final stage of identity includes difference, it is therefore difference-saturated. However, as we have seen, this is not entirely accurate, since the difference he supposes it to contain is not an irreducible difference. Likewise, mythos irreducible indecidability is not recognized by these authors, and therefore, its relation to logos is not sweepingly reconsidered, as it needs to be. In Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, Hatab argues that myth and philosophy are two different (but not mutually exclusive) modes of presentation. In characterizing myth as a mode of presentation, he retains a logocentric insistence. Following Heideggers phenomenology, Hatab proposes to unconceal a pluralistic understanding of truth that includes mythos.46 Unfortunately, Hatabs plurality does not acknowledge mythos indecidability. Furthermore, he is unable to relinquish philosophys valuation of truth. By upholding this philosophic standard in his work on myth, he subjects myth to logos limited parameters. In other words, he still insistently views mythos from the perspective of logos. This is evident in his statement that if language is the key to meaning [a Heideggerian insistence that he maintains], we must listen to the language of a mythical age to gather its meaning . . . (MPA, 12). It is clear that Hatab is making several assumptions that automatically implicate logos, whether he recognizes it or not. In insisting that language (logos) is the key to meaning, he unavoidably places mythos within the realm of speech (which, we shall not forget, is also literally logos), and therefore, of presence. Hatabs study privileges presence, just as philosophy as logos does. It assumes that mythos is restricted to that, or to any purely receivable mode. This denies the inherent indecidability of mythos, which eschews every mode, a term that denotes something inherently singular and categorizable. Hatab argues that mythos,
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therefore, gives itself over to meaning and complete interpretation. However, as irreducibly indecidable, mythos does not present itself to these ends. It slips and slides between possible meanings, and thus is withdrawn from the sphere of pure knowability. In other words, something always remains to be translated or comprehended. Hatab overlooks this non-present, but not entirely absent, dynamic of mythos. To give definitive meaning and interpretation to myth is always already to engage it as it relates to logos, and therefore to locate it within logocentric discourse. Whereas Hatab is concerned with language and interpretation (modes of presence), the point here is that these are not viable routes to mythos. Instead, the deconstructive operation of mythos and its resultant relation to logos are crucial to understanding. Hatab misses the disseminative nature of mythos that, like Derridas gift (see a discussion of this in Chapter 5), does not give itself over to presence, to language or to logos. Bruce Lincolns widely acclaimed Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship illustrates a similar limitation. Lincolns study is both historical and theoretical. His objective is to transform a simple, linear plot of development and progress (from mythos to logos) into one that recognizes the importance of multiple actors, perspectives, and positions. None of these are dismissible, none are pure, and none hold a monopoly on truth. Indeed, the protestations of the principals not withstanding, the central issue with which they grapple is not truth per se but discursive authority. (TM, 43) Lincolns purpose seems promising, since he appears to be attuned to the fallacies of logocentric historicizing that marginalizes the other in favour of a unified discourse. Unlike Hatab, his primary concern (at least as it initially appears) is not truth, since he admits that no single position has a monopoly on truth. He shows that the two poles of mythos and logos have switched places over the course of history. Regardless of their positions, however, the weaker, charming and alluring speech of dissimulation whether in the form of logos prior to Plato or mythos thereafter is always spoken by women, the young, shrewd and weak (TM, 10). For the early Greeks, specifically Homer and Hesiod, mythos is associated with truth and all that is today considered the realm of logos, while logos is aligned with
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lies, masquerade, and dissimulation (TM, 4). Lincoln underscores the importance of his historical insight: These are not words with fixed meanings (indeed, no such words exist), nor did their meanings change glacially over time, as the result of impersonal processes. Rather, these words, along with many others, were the sites of pointed and highly consequential semantic skirmishes fought between rival regimes of truth. (TM, 18) Lincolns point is that the magnetic poles of mythos and logos have flipped. This, he concludes, leaves the balance of power between them unresolved (TM, 18). This historical analysis of their usage does not go far enough. Even when mythos is flipped to the other pole, Lincoln leaves its ambiguous roots unexamined. He does not address the ramifications of mythos indecidability, and its resulting effect on logos and thinking. For him, the relationship of mythos and logos remains oppositional and confrontational. In literalizing the polarities, as he does, he fails to apprise accurately how they relate to each other. He posits a relation between them, but its complex, nonoppositional essence eludes him.47 Lincolns message ultimately reflects the dominance of the kind of thinking that he himself employs. Although he claims that none of the multiple actors, perspectives, and positions at stake in his study hold a monopoly on truth (TM, 43), he nonetheless champions a specific discursive authority above all others. For him, the central issue with which mythos and logos wrestle is discursive authority (TM, 43).48 However, Lincoln overlooks the double meaning of discursive, unintentionally undermining his own discursive authority. Like mythos, the ambiguity of discursive authority proves unwieldy. One meaning of discursive is to move coherently, using reasoning. In this sense it acts visibly and intelligibly, subsuming parts into a unified whole. This is the usage that Lincoln employs in discussing the discourse of dissimulation, which, as he shows, at certain times in history is referred to as mythos, and at others, as logos. Dissimulative discourse, Lincoln points out, is often ideological and has the propensity (as history has demonstrated) to be hegemonic. This is why myth has often received a bad rap, and why Lincoln urges us to treat it as potentially dangerous. Focusing on simply the intelligible aspect of mythos and the logocentric function of the discursive misses
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a crucial issue. As we have seen, irreducibly indecidable mythos is not reducible to reason, to logos. Oscillating between the poles of neither falsifiable nor unfalsifiable discourse, mythos slips through the confines of any singular definition or way of understanding it. Any discourse that attempts to harness one of these meanings to the exclusion of the other, will only find itself undermined by mythos disseminative, double movement. Discursive also means digressing, rambling and moving irregularly from one topic to the next in a disorderly fashion. In this sense, the discursive operates by way of detour (sans retour), like Derridas diffrance. Taking both of its meanings into account, we see that the discursive functions in a double movement of gathering and of dispersing.49 Lincoln ignores (or perhaps attempts to suppress) this latter operation of the discursive, focusing instead on its coherent, unifying function. When dispersing, the discursive does not present itself (or its object) to thinking, language or discourse. This disseminating aspect of the discursive ruptures every attempt at reasoned synthesis. Since the discursive, by its nature, continually oscillates between gathering and dispersing, it becomes impossible to render discursive authority with any certainty. Therefore, it is not just a matter of logos and mythos flipping poles. The very relation of these poles the means by which one attempts to promote itself over the other by discursive authority must be questioned. This is not a problem that Lincoln undertakes. He leaves untouched time-honoured lines in the sand. Such furrows are as ancient as Plato. The contents may switch, but the polemical distinctions remain. Changing positions, in other words, does nothing to re-engage the antipodal structure, or the traditions that stubbornly conceive of structures only in terms of the both/and or either/or of the dialectical and the binary. Lincolns satisfaction with the polarity of A and B is further witnessed in his analysis of Plato. He rightfully acknowledges Platos distrust of mythoi, which Plato categorizes as a form of logos that possesses less truth than others [narratives], being false on the whole, but still having some truth in it (TM, 39). Lincoln proves this contention by referring to Socrates first speech in Phaedrus, wherein Socrates invokes mythos in order to aid him in creating an argument. However, Socrates later admits that Phaedrus drugged him and thus offers another logoi [speech] in order to demonstrate how the latter is superior to the earlier argument.50 While mythoi are not entirely
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useless, they are definitely subordinate to logoi, through which the philosopher-kings reign supreme. There are a few points of interest here. The first is that Lincolns reading, unlike Derridas (analyzed in Chapter 3), tends to overlook the unsettling dynamic of Platos text. Plato does use mythoi here and elsewhere, such as in the myth of Er at the end of The Republic, to do logos bidding, if only to show mythos inferiority. Even in The Republic, however, as John Sallis points out, such usage suggests that mythos is not, in fact, inferior: we know that this mythos is not merely a story told at the end of the dialogue, that it does not merely conclude the Republic as something added on at the end.51 Such an ending opens out onto an entirely different beginning, not only of Platos dialogue, but more important, of philosophy, of logos. This opening tells a different story about mythos, suggestively pointing out that it does not simply conclude logos. Instead, it acts as an excessive leftover. It remains to destabilize the very foundations of philosophy as logos. Lincoln overlooks this strange nature of the Phaedrus and the suggestive indication that mythos is, in some way, basic to logos. Platos turning to mythos in order to conceive logos testifies to this. Since mythos is an excessive indecidable, what it gives to logos always overruns what logos can control and grasp. Before Derridas deconstruction, F. M. Cornford observed that [t]he mythical form of this whole cosmology is not a poetical dress, in which Plato arbitrarily chooses to clothe a perfectly definite and rational scheme, such as modern students set themselves to discover in it. If Plato could have stated it as a logos, he would have done so, only too gladly; but he cannot.52 There is some aspect of philosophy and of thought itself that eludes logos. Mythos remains to subvert Platos rational scheme, while simultaneously revealing the extent to which the establishment of logos depends upon it. Platos use of mythos as a means by which to ground and elevate logos is not incidental, but pivotal. Platos intended discursive authority, with which Lincoln is concerned, is undermined by another discursiveness. As both Sallis and Cornford indicate, the discursive authority that puts mythos into play does not simply yield the superiority of logos. Since, as we have noted, the discursive operates in a double movement of unification and dispersal, discursive authority is unavoidably errant, disrupting
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every synthetic discourse. The discursive undermines authority and intention.53 It is innately incapable of being authoritative. Although Lincoln aims for a synthetic (and authoritative) discourse, the double, transgressive movement of the discursive makes that impossible to achieve. Lincoln ignores the excessive ambiguity of Platos own methodology. His reading of Plato tries to account for Platos project as something fully rational and complete. However, as Derridas deconstructive readings show us, all works whether Hegels, Platos or Lincolns are incomplete, because they always already contain more than they themselves can account for. Lincolns attention to discursive authority, like his emphasis of myth as ideology, privileges the constructive nature of both the discursive and of mythos, turning a blind eye to the deconstructive aspects of them both.54 Both Lincoln and Hatab, like generations of theorists of myth, overlook the irreducible indecidability of mythos that causes it not just to construct, but also simultaneously to deconstruct. As we have seen, there are always remains. Although inside philosophy, these leftovers exceed the economy of presence and traditional modes of representation and reception, and are therefore unassimilable outsides. Already at table setting, these leftovers become hors doeuvres, which literally means outside-of-the-work, since they are not synthesized within it.55 They are appetizing, tantalizing scraps that inherently both follow and precede every possible entre. These remains reveal a disruptive other of philosophy that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs logos, calling its rational supremacy into question. This other is mythos. Its disseminative propensities fault logos stabilizing structure, while simultaneously making this structure possible. Neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable, mythos forever oscillates between these two. Its unsettling slippages foil every undertaking to limit, categorize and control it. Mythos resists every attempt to use it exclusively in the service of rational discourse; it can be counted upon, instead, to stray as dis-course. Forever sliding between truth and fiction, the ceaseless movement of mythos simultaneously figures and disfigures the foundation of philosophy, grounding philosophys impossibility.
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CHAPTER 2
SOLICITING PHILOSOPHYS TEARS
As we have seen, mythos is neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable discourse, and is therefore irreducibly indecidable. Its slippage between these two modes reveals a rupture in the seemingly unambiguous, rational grounding that philosophy as logos insists upon. Instead of laying a solid underpinning upon which to establish logos, the indecidable dynamic of mythos destabilizes, exposing foundational tears in what would otherwise seem sound and inviolable. It is these tears within the heart of philosophy to which we now turn in order to understand how they disruptively inhabit its very structure. A deconstructive reading must acknowledge the double, homophonic meaning of tears. The term tears has a dual implication. It is important not to still its resonances by attempting to exclude or privilege one of its connotations. Tears are simultaneously ruptures, as in a tear in a piece of fabric, and briny pools shed from the eye in times of joy and sorrow. In reading (and soliciting) philosophys irreducible tears we are able to see how another reading intervenes, interrupting the discourse of logos. Before moving into an analysis of mythos deconstructive propensities (as we do in the chapters that follow), we must first understand and establish this method of reading otherwise and soliciting philosophys tears. Philosophys tears are not secondary, external scars marking the sites of now-healed wounds. Like remains, they persist. They are inextricably basic to philosophy, even though they compromise its integrity by unsettling its ground, just as a tear in fabric risks causing an entire piece of clothing to unravel. These tears cannot be repaired. They expose an inherent instability and incompleteness that points to a non-foundational aspect of philosophys foundation. Tears also
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reveal something important about the very nature of structures. Foundations presuppose tears, even while these tears render the completion of foundations impossible. To solicit philosophys tears, therefore, is to address our presuppositions about structure in order to understand how tears are an inescapable dynamic of philosophys foundation. Understanding the deconstructive aspect of every construction is simultaneously to affirm the constructive (i.e. meaningful) possibilities of the deconstructive. Thinking mythos in a way other than philosophy proper has conceived of it requires soliciting philosophys tears. Doing so discloses a transformative reveilation: there is a non-philosophic a non-logofiable element within philosophy that is not merely external to it, but rather a very condition of its possibility. At first glance, the use of the verb solicit might appear to be an odd choice. Although its common usage, to urge or to entreat, has a relatively neutral valence, it can also take on the more nefarious connotation of enticement into a transgression of some sort. It derives from the Latin root, solliciter, which means to disturb. What therefore, does it mean to solicit philosophys tears? And by extension, why must a reconsideration of mythos and its relation to logos necessarily solicit philosophys tears? Derrida provides an explanation in his essay Force and Signification. Significantly, he addresses the very essence of structure, whether philosophical or otherwise: Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports, but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin the whole, and from citare, to put in motion).1 To solicit is to shake the very foundation of, in this case, philosophy. Soliciting is radical: it interrogate[s] every foundational assumption through convulsive agitation.2 These agitations are always already at work, even though philosophy as logos has avoided considering these inner interruptions.3 Once in motion, this shaking cannot be stilled or controlled, not even by the agitator. In this way, to solicit philosophys tears is also to solicit the tears inherent in any solicitation.4 Soliciting exposes a structures lability, its internal instability.
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Lability carries other important resonances. It derives from the Latin, labi, which means to slip. In this sense, to slip is to lose traction, to disengage or to detach from mooring.5 It is significant that this disengagement from stability, which lability implies, is a transformative moment. Lability is not merely instability, but importantly, it is also a continual, unending transformation.6 To be labile is to be openended in such a way that change is not just possible, but inevitable. In turn, this change yields even more change. Transience is the norm, and not just a passing stage in a process of stabilization. This unending change is not to be feared or suppressed. Not only is it undeniably inherent to every structure, but it also offers creative possibilities for opening the ways that we think about and live in the world. More precisely, soliciting and recognizing the lability of philosophy as logos provides new, fecund pathways for rethinking mythos and its relation to logos. Deconstruction solicits. Importantly, however, the deconstructive act of soliciting exposes neither construction nor ruin but lability. In other words, the result of its operation neither erects a new foundation of its own, nor simply dismantles the one in place. The deconstructive act of soliciting is situated between these two poles. Neither simply critical nor affirmative, it instead discloses the secret place of lability within all structures, unveiling the transformative open-endedness of every structure that had once appeared determined and unchanging. As Derrida shows, structure cannot be fully understood apart from its destructuring. Therefore, any effort to comprehend structure that does not solicit, or radically unsettle, its foundations in order to discover its inherent lability, which offers new possibilities for thinking and understanding, is insufficient. The act of soliciting exposes that which both gives rise to the structure and that which also shakes the whole in its entirety, causing the foundations to tremble.7 Like the remains, soliciting reveals a part of the system that the system itself cannot account for or think. The very nature of soliciting is intimately and irrevocably bound to the unheard-of thoughts and the unthought remains: it shows their forces of influence within the system. Therefore, in soliciting philosophys tears, what follows seeks to reveal and reveil an implicit non-site or lability at the core of philosophy as strictly logos. Soliciting philosophys tears both reveals and reveils the trace of mythos. Such reveilations, however, are not without their own inherent tears.
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THE PAS DE DEUX OF TEARS
Philosophys tears operate in a double movement in a pas de deux that simultaneously reveals and reveils (i.e. covers over or conceals).8 In the first chapter we came to understand how the discursive operates in two ways at once. It both gathers together and disperses or disseminates. In just the same manner, tears both cut apart and adhere together that with which they come into contact. Taylor offers this reading in his book Tears, which invokes the homophone, signalling that tears must be read both plaintively and violently as tears (in a fabric) and lachrymal tears. In recalling Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art, Taylor observes that tearing alternates between two rhythms (T, 113). It both joins and separates. He relates tearing to cleaving, which means both to separate, divide, or split, and to adhere, cling, or stick (T, 113). Tearing, like cleaving, operates in a double movement. Reading and thinking it always requires simultaneous attention to both meanings. In soliciting philosophys tears, the tears entreated are not just those rending and joining tears, but also those shed from the eye in times of sorrow and joy. There is something primal about tears. Leaving the womb at birth, infants enter the world with tears. All healthy newborns cry. Dismayed by metaphysics attempts to think Being as presence, Heidegger probes the primal nature of tears in order to reveal a foundational tearing at work in thinking, language and Being. As Heidegger argues in Identity and Difference, for Hegel, thinking is Being with respect to beings having been thought in absolute thinking, and as absolute thinking.9 Whereas for Heidegger, the matter of thinking is the difference as difference (IAD, 47). This difference, for Heidegger, is unavoidable and inextricably connected to thinking, even if it has not been rigorously pursued: this thing that is called difference, we encounter it everywhere and always in the matter of thinking, in beings as such encounter it so unquestioningly that we do not even notice this encounter itself (IAD, 63). Heidegger sets out to question this previously unthought foundation by thinking in a more originary, nonrepresentational fashion, thereby directing thinking to the realm which the key words of metaphysics Being and beings, the ground and what is grounded are no longer adequate to utter. . . . The origin of the difference can no longer be thought of within the scope of metaphysics. (IAD, 71)
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Since he recognizes the necessity to think beyond the limits of metaphysics, Heidegger pursues this difference or rupture by examining the origin of the work of art, which he sees as a recapitulation of an original tearing. Taylor extends Heideggers analysis, observing that the site of the origin of the work of art is the temple (A, 49). Probing its etymological roots, Taylor notes that temple comes from the Latin templum, which has to do with time, and the Greek temnos, which means cut and designates that which is cut off (T, 112). The templum itself indicates consecrated ground that is cut off from the non-sacred space around it (T, 112). Taylor points out that [w]hile the locus of the origin of the work of art is the temple, the site of the temple . . . is a cleft or cleavage. This cleavage is a tear (Riss, whence zerissen and Zerissenheit) that fissures what had seemed to be a solid foundation. (T, 112) The very foundation of the origin of the work of art is a tear.10 In other words, the tear is original (T, 113). Taylor ties this observation back to art by stating that art works by opening this opening. . . . This opening marks the boundary or limen where revealing and reveiling repeatedly intersect (T, 113). Such an opening is also a site of lability that remains open to repeated openings. Although the origin and nature of art are not at stake here, Taylors edgy reading of Heidegger assists us in understanding that this tear is internal and original, and therefore not external or secondary, and that tearing operates in a double rhythm that both joins and separates (T, 113). He rereads the essential strife of Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art as a Derridean play of differences (T, 113) that is originary, but not in an absolute or predetermined way. Derridas diffrance does not return to identity, nor is it identitys opposite, difference. It is irreducible, and therefore disruptive. Primal tears cannot be reduced to identity through Hegelian negation. Tears, in other words, cannot be mended. Nor are they secondary to an original unity. The opening itself is a tear that stages the play of diffrance. In the beginning is not, as Hegel believed, being as sheer immediacy, but rather, the opacity and haunting specter of strife: in the beginning are tears, and these tears operate in a pas de deux.11 In soliciting tears, however, one risks reducing their otherness to sameness by bringing them into language and philosophic discourse. The question remains: how to solicit philosophys tears without
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subjecting them to the foundational principle of philosophy as logos, which is oneness and unity? Tears insist upon remaining torn and open to further tearing; they resist repair. Confronting this dilemma in Altarity, Taylor attempts to write otherwise, and in so doing, write the fissure itself by inscribing the remain(s) that Hegels oeuvre shows while concealing (A, 267).12 This kind of writing is devised to write what philosophy has not said and cannot say in language that is nonetheless philosophical (A, 268). To write and think in this way is to relate to the other as irreducibly other without attempting to domesticate it. Writing otherwise is characterized by Derrida as the more difficult, more unheard-of, more questioning gesture, the one for which we are least prepared, only permits itself to be sketched, announcing itself in certain calculated fissures of the metaphysical text (MP, 65). To write what philosophy is incapable of saying is to write and think in such a way that does not limit mythos voice strictly to the economy of presence, for as we have seen, mythos irreducible indecidability slips through these constraints. Mythos announces itself through tears. Hence, to solicit these tears is to listen, but not in any traditional manner, to the unheard, non-absent absence of mythos. Soliciting this other requires attuning oneself to two texts, two hands, two visions, two ways of listening. Together simultaneously and separately (MP, 65). This is not a dialectical conjoining, but a simultaneity and a separateness. Derrida explains: The relationship between the two texts, between presence in general (Anwesenheit) and that which exceeds it . . . such a relationship can never offer itself in order to be read in the form of presence, supposing that anything ever can offer itself in order to be read in such a form. And yet, that which gives us to think beyond the closure cannot be simply absent. Absent, either it would give us nothing to think or it still would be a negative mode of presence. Therefore the sign of this excess must be absolutely excessive as concerns all possible presence-absence, all possible production or disappearance or beings in general, and yet, in some manner it must still signify, in a manner unthinkable by metaphysics as such. In order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal not in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence, but in the direction of an entirely other text. Such a trace cannot be thought more metaphysico. No philosopheme is
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prepared to master it. And it (is) that which must elude mastery. Only presence is mastered. . . . presence, then, is the trace of the trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace. . . . Only on this condition can metaphysics and our language signal in the direction of their own transgression. (MP, 656) Writing with two hands at once allows the unheard-of and unthought to be written, read and thought as the excesses that they are. This excessiveness is not limited to the either/or of absence and presence, because even absence contains its opposite presence just as Hegels notion of difference contains sameness. Rather, it overflows metaphysical identification and limitation; it escapes every philosopheme. Like the remains, this excess cannot be accounted for within the system of metaphysics, yet is nonetheless a (non-)foundational part of it, since all foundations are essentially and irreparably ruptured, and therefore are non-foundational. The excessive trace (the excess and remains can only ever be traces, since they are neither properly present nor absent) that is unthinkable by metaphysics as such signal[s] an other other that is itself prodigious, elusive and unmasterable by any philosopheme. That is, this other cannot be subjugated or corralled by logos. Thus, language and metaphysics (philosophy as logos) signal in the direction of their own transgression. They gesture to that which opens the limit in an act of tearing, to that which exposes the system to the unthinkable excessive remains. This transgression marks and simultaneously rends the limit of metaphysics and the philosophical system. Without that which exceeds presence, presence cannot even present itself.
Tears: On the One Hand
Although all of Derridas work can be read as soliciting tears, his most explicit writing on them occurs in an essay dedicated to reading Emmanuel Levinas, entitled At this very moment in this work here I am.13 Derrida wants to honour the Levinasian other as other, even if Levinass own text sometimes unintentionally departs from a rigorous analysis of other as other. In order to retain the otherness inherent within the text, Derrida cautions that the reader of Levinas must, in ingratitude, betray authorial intent and thus maintain the alterity of the text itself. Derridas deconstructive reading operates doubly:
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first by following or repeating the intentions of a text, in the manner of a commentary, and second, within and through this repetition, leaving the order of commentary and opening up the blind spots or ellipses within the texts intentionality. It is not for a double reading to decide between these paths of reading, these two motifs, but rather, to render such choice undecidable.14 The two texts that result in Derridas deconstructive reading remain irreducibly indecidable. On the one hand, the text is read in the manner of the commentary, joining the reading with the textual intention as fully as possible. On the other hand, it strays from logocentric commentary and open[s] up the blind spots within the texts intentionality. It attends to the otherness within without trying to suppress or domesticate it. These two readings are both simultaneous and separate. Like tears, they gather and cut. Derridas la double sance rend(er)s the meaning of Levinass text (and by extension, all texts) indecidable and exposes it to the excessive, unmasterable play of diffrance.15 Derrida recognizes that every text, his own included, contains another text. That is, there are always at least two texts: one that operates as a commentary and another that, in operating within and through the repetition of commentary, diverges from it and opens up the text to its internal aporias. Therefore, he both reads and writes doubly. As Simon Critchley observes, Derridas text is not monological.16 Derrida emphasizes the repetitions within Levinass work in order to expose an otherness within. Levinass (and even Derridas) repetition of at this very moment has wholly other consequences (B, 175). Is it through the act of repetition, poses Critchley, whose question also provides an answer, that one gains access to the wholly other? (B, 187). Repetition does not yield sameness, but difference. One reading echoes the texts intentions and, observes Critchley, is performed by the voice of the Same (a masculine reader) and as such engages in a repetition of the Levinasian text, where the reader produces a commentary which says the same as Levinas and shows how his work works (B, 171). The other reading strays from this path and opens up the blind spots, soliciting an other. This reading, performed by the voice of the Other (a woman reader), of the Levinasian text, interrupts the intentions and shows how his work does not work (B, 1712).17 Derridas texting operates between these two moments of joining and separating, repetition
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and interruption, Sameness and Otherness (B, 172). The relation between these two is not oppositional or binary. Otherness is not returned to sameness, nor does it remain as a distinct rival. The reader is forced to continue to oscillate between these two. That vibration cannot be stilled or resolved. Irreducibility and indecidability are maintained throughout Derridas essay. Synthesis and identity that result from dialectical movement are never achieved. They are continuously disrupted and deferred. At this very moment is possessed of a dehiscence that allows it to resonate with an alterity which must not be reduced to the logic of the proper (B, 171). At this very moment is indeed at least two moments. It works by opening the opening, by tearing. In tracing the intentions of Levinass text, Derrida solicits tears, the traces of an other within, which produces an entirely different reading. He demonstrates that in order to move toward understanding, these tears must be attended to. They must not be repressed or avoided. As a result, [o]ne must therefore negotiate, deal with, transact with marginal effects (les effets de bord). One must even negotiate what is nonnegotiable and which overflows all context.18 Remains remain. They must be dealt with and thought through. It is not possible to do this by translating them into a sheer immediacy or by subjugating them. These remains are nonnegotiable within the limited confines of metaphysics, because they cannot be thought, written or said properly, and therefore always overflo[w] authorial intentionality. The excessive marginal effects haunt the text, disrupting and destabilizing any reading, thereby effectively preventing any exclusive reading or meaning to prevail. This other reading interrupts the former. These breaches stymie all attempts at synthesis by interrupting the weaving of our language and then by weaving together the interruptions themselves, another language comes to disturb the first one. It doesnt inhabit it, but haunts it. Another text, the text of the other, arrives in silence with a more or less regular cadence, without ever appearing in its original language, to dislodge the language of translation, converting the version, and refolding it while folding it upon the very thing it pretended to import. It disassimilates it. (ATVM, 18) There is always more than one text. In this way, every reading is at least double. One text comes to disturb the work of the other,
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unsettling and haunting it. This silent disruption disassimilates and cannot be subsumed under a unifying identity. Like the a of diffrance, and no less unsettling, this disruption is neither absent nor present. As a result, it rends and transforms the text. It tears the weave. Incorporating it back into the fabric by creating sameness amid difference or conjoining differences is impossible. In weaving together the disparate interruptions, the text is not mended or unified. Instead, the tears are maintained. However, this does not mean that they are domesticated. Rather, the text is forever dislocated and haunted by an other that it cannot incorporate. No seam can mend or reinforce the tattered edges of this tearing, because that other continues to unravel the threads, even as they are resewn.19 For Derrida, the transgression that solicits the other is not a transcendent step beyond (in a metaphysical sense) language or logos. It is, instead, an inner disruption that still carries within itself the very limits that it dislocates. Derrida illustrates this by stating that [l]ogos remains as indispensable (ATVM, 20). In other words, deconstruction is not the jettisoning of metaphysics and logos. Indeed, that would be both impossible and undesirable. Rather, deconstructive soliciting issues forth from within them, exposing through its grafting, folding and tearing a (non-negotiable) other within that disrupts and discomposes them. Playing off Levinass pivotal phrase, at this very moment, Derrida solicits the lability of Levinass text: at this very moment would constitute the enveloping form or web of a text resuming without end all its tears within itself (ATVM, 21). The resumption without end of the tears within stages the uncontrollable play of diffrance, thereby foiling every attempt (whether authorial or otherwise) to return difference to identity: The same at this very moment seems to repeat itself only to be dis-lodged without return. The same very (le m eme du mme)20 of the at this very moment has remarked upon its own alteration, one which will have ever since opened it up to the other. The first one, which formed the element of reappropriation in the continuum, will have been obligated by the second, the other one, the one of interruption, even before being produced, and in order to be produced. It will have constituted a text and context with the other, but only within a series where the text coheres with its own (if this may still be said) tear. The at this very moment only coheres with itself by means of an immeasurable anachrony
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incommensurable with itself. The singular textuality of this series does not enclose the Other but on the contrary opens itself up to it from out of irreducible difference . . . before any present moment, before anything we think we understand when we say at this very moment. (ATVM, 22) Within this moment (of at this very moment), there is an other moment that is not overtly present, yet neither is it absent. It haunts the first moment as a non-absent absence, forever fissuring and shadowing the present moment, thereby revealing that such a presence is impossible apart from another moment that is not properly present. By repeating at this very moment throughout his text, Levinas creates a repetition with diffrance that dislocates and prevents reappropriation or the return of the same. The same is never the same, but forever estranged from itself. The movement, therefore, is not circular like Hegels model, but errant. The tears are exposed: no mending can sew them together and join them as the same. In fact, the first is obligated to the errant, transgressive second. The two moments are out of joint. Any seeming coherence is in fact an incommensurable anachrony. A fissure remains, which separates and displaces what was once held together in alignment, and now sets their incongruous parts next to each other in disjunction. Such incommensurable anachrony is a wound that never heals. This repetition is a violent tearing that does not and cannot enclose the other, but rather opens the text to an Other that exceeds categorization and appropriation, much as indecidable mythos does. These two moments simultaneously join and separate in a pas de deux. However, how this double movement will unfold is not controllable or anticipatable. It opens out into irreducible difference and otherness that are excessive outcasts of the logocentric system of presence and unity. As Derrida writes to E.L., acknowledging the disseminative operation within what he himself writes, dislocation will have taken place, there is nothing you can do about it, and unwittingly you will have read what will have made only possible, from out of the Other, what is happening at this very moment (ATVM, 25).21 Dislocating tears are always already within the text, and by extension, within thinking, language, philosophy and logos. They are basic to logos even if they escape every philosophemes attempt to comprehend and master them. By definition, this disturbance, avers
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Derrida, is not a controllable disturbance, it is not readable within the inside of logic (ATVM, 25). Such a disruption is outside of intentionality and the order of presence that is also the order of absence. As uncontrollable, it cannot even be read, thought, heard or written by logos. This disturbance must be read otherwise than from within the inside of logic. To read otherwise is to invoke unlogofiable mythos.22 Soliciting philosophys tears exposes the uncertain limits of philosophy as logos, opening them up to a foreign plenitude of an other (of philosophy), mythos. This other gives rise to the former, but not in a teleological way: The first moment gave its form or its temporal place, its presence, to a thought, a language, a dialectic sovereign in regard to that Relation. So what will have happened probably, perhaps is this: the second moment will have forced the first toward its own condition of possibility, toward its essence . . . It will have in advance but after the fact within the serial rhetoric torn the envelope. But that very tear would not have been possible without a certain hooking back (chancrure) of the second moment and a sort of analogical contamination between the two, a relation between two incommensurables . . . (ATVM, 26) The excessive and errant moment (that is not properly present) gives to the present moment its condition of possibility, while at the same time rendering its self-contained, unadulterated unity and presence impossible. This series of events is not linear or chronological. The second disrupts the first, but in advance. The transgressive tear (torn envelope) is neither the result nor the beginning. Like the remains that remain at the end but are also always already present at the beginning, this tear contaminates the system from within always already.23 Furthermore, although not exactly joined in unison, the two moments are not entirely separate either. Rather, each contaminates the other. They continuously disrupt and dislocate each other, maintaining a relation that is neither binary nor dialectic. Instead, this relation is incommensurable.24 One must solicit philosophys tears with (at least) two hands and in (at least) two ways at once. This moment is neither here nor there, neither this nor that, neither simply present nor absent. It is always already at least two, rupturing the monolithic foundation upon which logos rests.
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Double movement tears the envelope, as Derrida indicates. An envelope can be, in addition to a set of limits or parameters, an enclosing covering (like a membrane), or a wrapping. Tears not only compromise that membrane, they also contaminate the inside by rupturing the outer covering, exposing the protected contents to a foreign outside. Each moment spills onto the other; each intervenes by disrupting the operation of the other. Neither moment remains absolutely singular nor pure. The threads of these interruptions must be re-examined, since one begins to suspect that weaving them together (as Derrida suggests in the quote above) cannot entail mending in any traditional sense. According to Critchley, the retied threads do not mend the text or close the gaps. Instead they create knots, or aporias, in the weave: [T]he interruptions of discourse, although retied into the thread, are preserved as knots in the thread . . . Thus the two heterogeneous instances of the en ce moment mme, linked together through a dislocating act of repetition, are related and tied together through the metaphor of the retied thread. (B, 175) The relation to which Critchley refers is not a traditional relation that presupposes presence. This relation is more like a relation without relation, since the terms of comparison remain beyond the sphere of absolute knowability.25 Indeed, the fabric of the text is both bound and unbound, it both rends and mends (B, 177). In retying the thread, the fabric is not mended. Instead the knots create a supplement. [W]ithin the knot, which is itself an interruption or an atexture, there persists an irreducible supplement to the knot which is the very interruption of interruption (B, 177). The two incommensurable moments constitute an accretion contaminated by unceasing tearing and retearing. The knots that populate the fabric of the text become nodal point[s] of supplementarity (B, 177). Each supplement marks a lack. Yet, it is simultaneously an absence and a surplus. [T]he supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence (OG, 144), explains Derrida. At the same time, however, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness (OG, 145). This emptiness is not the opposite of presence. The supplement
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is neither presence nor absence (OG, 154). In this way, it cannot be categorized or comprehended by logos. Each moment (of at this very moment) both adds to and disrupts the other moment(s). Diffrance is already at work from the very first. The weave of these two is constituted as such: [W]hat is unbound, nonthematizable and wholly other to ontology and logocentrism can only be articulated through a certain repetition of ontological or logocentric language, a repetition that interrupts that language (B, 178). When we apply this understanding to the relation of mythos and logos, we begin to realize that they do not and cannot exist apart from one another. Mythos is articulated through logos, through a repetition of logocentric language. Nonetheless, logos articulation of unbound, nonthematizable mythos occurs through a repetition that does not merely repeat and witness the return of the same. Rather, this repetition cuts, destabilizes and interrupts logos. The act of soliciting takes place from within, divulging the unsuturable tears that simultaneously construct and deconstruct logos. This weave is not fabricated with uninterrupted threads that neatly interlock between warp and woof. Instead, it consists of broken threads (torn by the transgressions within and the tension between two incommensurables) that in being retied, create impenetrable, disruptive knots or aporias. The threads both bind and unbind, rend and mend. Although the aporetic knots are tied together, the interruptions remain (ATVM, 28). This enchainment is not logocentric. Rather, the enchained discontinuities are out of joint. It is never a matter of picking up where one left off. Continual interruption makes doing so impossible. In the resumption of tears, the texts breaches are not restored, nor are they appropriated into a unity. [R]esumption, explains Derrida, is not any more logical than the interruption (ATVM, 27). It does not close the gap. Therefore it is not the continuation of the same, nor is it a synthesis between once disparate parts. Tears cannot be mastered or anticipated. In soliciting tears, one has no control over what they will reveal and reveil in their errant operations. Any attempt to patch these tears inadvertently divulges the ruptures. Therefore, The tear must be saved, for which one must play off seam against seam (emphasis added, ATVM, 26), cautions Derrida. Applying this to our focus here suggests that, although philosophy as logos may desire to master the tears by sewing them together into a seamless whole, any mending that attempts to interlace
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both texture and atexture fails to unite. Every undertaking to tie up the loose threads by incorporating untamable heterogeneity into the unity of the fabric inadvertently exposes the gap that it is trying to cover. When we extend Derridas texting to our analysis of mythos, we see that the irreducible indecidability of mythos remains as aporetic knots in the fabric of logos. These interruptions not only disrupt logos, but also simultaneously give to logos its possibility. To play off seam against seam, therefore, is to read, write and think with two hands at once in a pas de deux, and to open these openings to diffrance. This play is inseparably bound to the tears that are maintained as part of the very fabric itself.26
Tears: On the Other Hand
Tears have a cryptic quality that relates to the disseminating a of diffrance. This a in place of e is purely graphic. Although present graphically, it is absent phonetically, and therefore is neither simply present nor simply absent. For this reason it cannot be fully grasped by logos. The a of diffrance remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oiksis (MP, 4).27 Tombs, therefore, contain a disruptive component. By linking the silent a of diffrance to a tomb, Derrida suggests that tombs encrypt, that is, obscure. As monuments marking absences with their presence, crypts entreat another kind of tears, those shed for the dead. Tombs fall [tomber] between two kinds of ground. They commemorate and preserve (and thereby consecrate), while simultaneously housing remains, forever constraining and locking them away from the senses and the light of the outside world. When serving as monuments that memorialize the entombed, tombs join the observer with the deceased. They function doubly, since at the same time they also increase the separation between the observer and the remains of the absent other by making this absence more palpable, serving as painful reminders that the departed is no longer among the living. Crypts bring tears to the eyes for those whose absence is acutely felt in the presence of the crypt that houses their remains, disrupting and thus transmuting vision. These tears transform the eye, causing one to see otherwise, just as the a of diffrance causes one to write and think otherwise: Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this
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experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of mans eye . . . Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. . . . only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir], because only he knows how to weep. . . . Only man knows how to see this [voir a] that tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. . . . Contrary to what one believes one knows, the best point of view (and the point of view will have been our theme) is a source-point and a watering hole, a water-point which thus comes down to tears.28 Whereas the Western philosophic tradition has privileged presence and sight, the eyes tears disclose an other vision at work, one not simply of knowing [savoir]. It is a vision in which tears not sight are the very essence of the eye/I. They bestow vision by distorting it. Veiling works by unveiling what is proper (presence), revealing an other way of seeing. Such seeing goes beyond simply knowing (savoir). It is not an apprehension of presence or a knowing within the limits of metaphysics, but the ability to see (through tears) the purely graphic and silent mark of diffrance that is disruptive. Seeing otherwise is to see (voir) without knowing (savoir). It is to see through a veil of tears with a vision that does not have (avoir), and cannot have, mastery of the mute trace of diffrance. This seeing (voir) is without knowing (sans savoir); it is literally not aligned with savoir absolu (Sa).29 Tears see otherwise by attuning themselves to the blind spots, or knots in the weave, and to the unheard-of thoughts. Lachyrmal tears, like the Heideggerian rupture, or Riss, are the site of an opening. When understood in this way, the veil of tears creates a visionary blindness: [T]he blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. . . . the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. (MB, 1267) Blindness is not aloofness, nor is it a celebration of ignorance. Rather, it is indifferent. Its goal is neither to see, nor to not see. Blindness has no stake in the outcome of vision. The gaze veiled by tears oscillates
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between making visible and occluding in a restive double movement. Losing ones sight is not literally losing ones eyes. Rather, it is the discovery of the very essence of ones eyes. Sight blurred by tears is attuned to the fissures inherent in thinking, knowing and seeing. Only then does man begin to think the eyes (MB, 128). However, this thinking is no longer thinking within the order of presence, within the limits of logos. In Derridas formulation, eyes blinded by tears attempt to see the remains that logos has left out. John Caputo characterizes this blindness (in his book devoted to the prayers and tears of Derrida) as a structural non-knowing, designating that which is structurally heterogeneous to knowledge.30 To this, he adds, Our eyes are always, structurally, veiled, and above all veiled with tears (PT, 313). Tears are always already there. Blindness (and voir sans savoir) is inescapable. As Andrew Marvell poses in a poem fittingly entitled Eyes and Tears: These weeping eyes, those seeing tears (qtd in MB, 129). The seeing of those seeing tears is not, however, associated with the senses. It is like the inaudible, silent a of diffrance that can only be read, not registered by the ear. One must think the eyes, but this thinking is not tied to intelligibility. The point of view offered by Derrida is one in which the difference marked in the differ( )nce between the e and the a eludes both vision and hearing . . . But neither can it belong to intelligibility (MP, 5).31 This silent monument exceeds the traditional limitations of sensibility and intelligibility. Therefore, it must be approached otherwise. Those seeing tears do not see through the spectacles of logos and metaphysics that would insist on sensibility and intelligibility as presences to be mastered. Rather, those seeing tears see by blinding.
CRYPTIC REMAINS
It is significant that Derrida uses the Greek word oiksis, which means residence, when he describes the a of diffrance as secret and discreet as a tomb: oiksis. Oikos is a house, and the word economy is derived from the same root.32 Derrida describes the site of this oiksis as the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is produced, by diffrance, the economy of death. This stone provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant (MP, 4). The economy of death is the hidden underside the remains of the economy proper; it is
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improper and taboo. Soliciting causes the foundations to tremble, exposing a hidden crypt that harbours the economy of death. This crypt remains cryptic. It cannot be grasped or even apprehended by the metaphysics of presence, because it is neither sensible nor intelligible. Yet, it is nonetheless a familial residence. Although within and familial, it also falls outside of the economy because it cannot be deciphered by it. This house housed within requires one to think and see otherwise. Within the halls of logos, this crypt is indecipherable and unavoidably mysterious. Furthermore, these cryptic remains are not far from announcing the death of the tyrant, logos. Since the remains cannot be read, thought or apprehended by philosophemes (that is, by logos), the supremacy of philosophy as logos is questionable. The remains threaten to blind the panoptic eye of the philosopher who claims to see all in savoir absolu.33 Perhaps the sovereign philosopher is the tyrant whose death, Derrida warns us, is at hand.
Philosophys No-Place
As we have seen, crypts remain cryptic because they are inaccessible to traditional modes of reception. Derrida affirms that [n]o crypt presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds.34 Crypts elude the simple opposition between presence and absence (much like the trace) since they mask a presence while at the same time saving and preserving it. The place of the crypt is not a traditional space. It is an inner chamber, an enclosure, an enclave that is isolated from general space by partitions (F, xiv). As a space within a space, comprehended within another but rigorously separate from it (F, xiv), the crypt is hidden and not readily accessible. It is not an extension of our natural habitat. Like the remains that are not present and cannot be apprehended as such, the crypt is part of the very system that seeks to exclude it on the grounds that it cannot be accessed or accounted for. With the crypt, however, it is not simply that it cannot be accounted for, but more importantly, that its whole purpose is to hide something that one cannot confront or prefers not to have to acknowledge. Within the forum of the crypt, explains Derrida, is yet another more inward forum like a closed rostrum or speakers box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it,
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external to the interior (F, xiv). This forum within a forum is (a) safe, an outcast outside inside the inside (F, xiv). As an outside that is inside, it is neither external, nor internal. The cryptic enclav[e] serves to isolate, to protect, to shelter from any penetration, from anything that can filter in from outside along with air, light, or sounds, along with the eye or the ear, the gesture or the spoken word (F, xiv). The inner, cryptic safe remains obscure. Nothing can penetrate it. It remains untouched by light (such as logos, the light of reason), by the philosophers eagle eye (which cannot see inside), and by the ear of the philosopher (which is deaf to the unheard muteness deep within).35 Logos cannot decrypt the inner safe. It is important to understand that the inner safe is not synthesized into the outer, more public space as a seamless aspect of it. Encryption does not entail the swallowing or digestion of difference by identity.36 Derrida carefully distinguishes two kinds of entombing: introjection and incorporation. Introjection is Hegelian assimilation in which the other is taken into the self for the purposes of enlarging the self and attaining absolute, undifferentiated self-consciousness that eventually results in absolute knowledge. In introjection, difference is returned to identity by merging the other with the same. By contrast, in incorporation, a term Derrida borrows from Freuds Mourning and melancholy, the foreign cannot be assimilated. Difference does not return to identity. Incorporation involves the double movement of protecting and inhibiting. That which is placed in safekeeping and maintained is, at the same time, pushed away, restrained and suppressed. On the one hand, the object of incorporation is cherished to such an extent that it is safeguarded. On the other hand, the object is held in check and access to it is restricted. The other is preserved as foreign. For this reason, the system attempts to exclude it and shut it off from itself, just as white blood cells engorge and isolate an invading virus. In this scenario, the foreign body is simultaneously excluded and preserved as foreign (F, xvii). Philosophy as logos nonetheless attempts to attenuate the crypt:37 What speculative dialectics means (to say) is that the crypt can still be incorporated into the system. The transcendental or the repressed, the unthought or the excluded must be assimilated by the corpus, interiorized as moments, idealized in the very negativity of their labor. (G, 166)
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Incorporation, however, exposes the failure of speculative dialectics to assimilate the other into itself. Instead, deep within the internal chambers of the system, irreducible otherness is preserved. These silent, cryptic others are the tears within that rend every attempt at identity and unification, and foil every panoptical gaze. Like the a of diffrance, the crypt disrupts and dislocates, leading logos astray, preventing the eternal return of the same. The crypt destabilizes the system precisely because it is an outside that is inside and an inside that is outside. This foreign outside within is included, but cannot be comprehended. It derails every attempt at synthesis, unification and identification. Forever restricted and veiled, the cryptic enclave eludes the panoptic gaze of the philosopher. Every system unwittingly includes an undialecticizable kernel (crypt) that both figures and disfigures it from within. Just as remains proved to be basic to the system that attempts to exclude them, and just as tears are always already, the crypt is the scar that marks the impossibility of savoir absolu and of philosophy proper. Cryptic remains cannot be assimilated or digested. Despite efforts to cut off this unnaturalized foreigner by locking it away in a safe hidden deep inside, the threat it poses to logos reign cannot be ameliorated. The system includes, as the very condition of its possibility, that which escapes systematization. As a result, the crypt is an impossible inclusion.38 It is impossible to decrypt or to incorporate, and yet the system cannot exist without it. As such, it is a destabilizing excess that is a condition of the systems stabilizing structure. Derrida explains that [t]he topography of the crypt follows the line of a fracture that goes from this no-place, or this beyond-place, toward the other place (F, xxi). This no-place or non-place is the locus of a fracture, and of veiled vision. One can imagine the blinded eye as a no-place, since it can no longer perceive presence and therefore provide a proper point of view. This no-place is also a source point of tears. These tears occlude the vision of philosophy as logos. In avoiding these blind spots, philosophy unwittingly reinforces them. Soliciting philosophys tears exposes the crypt within philosophy that both constructs and deconstructs it. This is not to go beyond philosophy. Nor is it to accept philosophy as it represents itself externally. Rather, philosophys aporias must be seen through blinding tears. Unlike Hegelian difference, which is strictly internal and therefore contains identity within it (as an inner contradiction), logos other
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is irreducible, and in this sense external, even though it is within. As an outside within, and an inside without, this irreducible other requires us to reconsider, as Derrida does, the very nature of deconstructions relation to metaphysics, and to the point at hand, the relation of philosophys other (mythos) to philosophy as logos. Derrida explains this in an interview aptly titled Deconstruction and the other: [T]he logical rapport between inside and outside is no longer simple. Accordingly, we cannot really say that we are locked into or condemned to metaphysics, for we are strictly speaking, neither inside nor outside. . . . It is simply that our belonging to, and inherence in, the language of metaphysics is something that can only be rigorously and adequately thought about from another topos or space where our problematic rapport with the boundary of metaphysics can be seen in a more radical light. Hence my attempt, to discover the nonplace or non-lieu which would be the other of philosophy. This is the task of deconstruction.39 Mythos is such an other of philosophy. Neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable, neither outside philosophy nor within it, the echoes of its irreducible ambiguity continually interrupt and disfigure logos. As philosophys other, mythos constitutes philosophy as logos while nonetheless destabilizing it. Mythos can only be approached by soliciting philosophys tears. This soliciting exposes an incorporated crypt that cannot be assimilated, and that therefore remains obscure. We will see in Chapter 3 how mythos in Platos Phaedrus is such a crypt. As an unlogofiable other, mythos is neither subordinated to nor synthesized with logos. This non-philosophic other is what philosophy as logos has largely avoided. Nevertheless, this avoiding inescapably say[s] without saying, haunting logos with the cryptic trace of an other. The undead dead calls out from within, contaminating the space of the living. As such a non-absent absence, mythos disturbs philosophy.40 The crypt remains cryptic. It hides what it holds. Perhaps these remains have something to do with a familial residence, as Derrida suggests. But whose body is housed within the crypt? Who or what is it that the philosopher-king attempts to repress? If one knows how to decipher the stones inscription, one might be able to hear the mute remarks within that are not far from announcing the death of the
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tyrant. Certainly such decryption cannot be carried out strictly by means of logos alone. To solicit philosophys tears and thereby read, write and think otherwise, is to begin to see through a veil of tears by entreating (in an improper manner that is neither philosophical nor non-philosophical) an irreducible other whose interruptions disfigure our notions of philosophy.
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CHAPTER 3
REND(ER)ING THE PHARMAKON: A WOUND WITHOUT A CURE
It is only a step further to the mystical trance . . . in which thought is swallowed up in the beatific vision of the absolute One, above being and above knowledge, ineffable, unthinkable, no longer even a Reason, but beyond Reason . . . the escape of the alone to the alone. In this ecstasy, Thought denies itself; and Philosophy folds her wings and drops into the darkness whence she arose the gloomy Erebus of theurgy and magic. FR, 263 (emphasis added) Myth is not only characterized by its polysemy and by the interlocking of its many different codes. In the unfolding of its narrative and the selection of the semantic fields it uses, it brings into play shifts, slides, tensions and oscillations between the very terms that are distinguished or opposed in its categorical framework; it is as if, while being mutually exclusive these terms at the same time in some way imply one another. Thus myth brings into operation a form of logic which we may describe, in contrast to the logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers, as a logic of the ambiguous, the equivocal, a logic of polarity. How is one to formulate, even formalise, the balancing operations which can turn one term into its contrary while yet, from other points of view, keeping the two far apart? Ultimately the mythologist has to admit to a certain inadequacy as he is forced to turn to the linguists, logicians and mathematicians in the hope that they may provide him with the tool that he lacks, namely the structural model of another kind of logic: not the binary logic of yes or no but a logic different from that of the logos.1
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REPLAYING PLATO
Deconstruction recognizes that every text exceeds its intended meaning. Every text is at least two texts, as we have seen. One reading functions as a commentary, repeating the authors intentions. The other reading, attentive to the internal tears and aporias, interrupts and disturbs the first reading. These two readings are not synthetic. In fact, they remain irreducibly indecidable. In this chapter we will look at Derridas commentary on Platos Phaedrus, which concerns itself with reading Plato otherwise, revealing the internal gaps in Platos text. However, in considering Derridas commentary on Platos Phaedrus, we will also depart from it, pursuing some aporias inherent in his text, all the while inviting the reader to engage the aporias in my own. It is significant that, although the disruptive trace of mythos emerges throughout Derridas critique, the relation of mythos and logos is incidental to his analysis of speech and writing. In order to understand the significance of mythos in Platos Phaedrus as well as in Derridas commentary on Plato, we must first gain a grasp of Derridas analysis. Our reading proceeds doubly. On the one hand, it is a commentary on Derridas comentary, so that we can see how Derrida unsettles Platos text and opens it up to another reading. On the other hand, our reading will diverge from this commentary and follow the inherent aporias and fissures within both Platos text and Derridas. Reading in this way will expose the ways in which mythos is a foundation of logos. As discussed in the first chapter, Plato extols logos as the preeminent form of discourse. He dismisses mythos as inferior because it appeals not to the intellect, as logos does, but to the baser, untrustworthy senses. In Platos view, in order to make way for reason, mythos must be confined to fanciful narratives. However, if as Derrida suggests, every text unavoidably exceeds its intended meaning, then Platos is no exception. Another text disturbs the first. This other disrupts logos from within, revealing a disseminative polysemy where there at first appeared to be a single unity. Reading Platos Phaedrus otherwise unmasks a fissure in the foundation of philosophy as logos. This other, ambiguous logic (to which Vernant refers in the quote above) is not the logic of logos. Rather, it is the illogical logic of mythos. Mythos, Vernant reminds us, brings into play (a play that is not within the order of presence, or therefore, of logos), shifts, slides and oscillations that disrupt and discompose not just the text, but
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more importantly, logos itself. Derrida initiates an other reading of Platos Phaedrus (in his seminal essay, Platos Pharmacy), which we will extend to explore its crucial implications for mythos. By reading otherwise, Derrida discloses a once-silent voice of an other whose speech (logos) is not that of the logos of philosophy proper. Even though Derrida opens doors for rereading and rethinking Plato, he is interested foremost in the opposition between speech (which Plato privileges) and writing. In his analysis he does aver that this meshing of the mythological and the philosophical points to some more deeply buried necessity (D, 86). It is this necessity to which we will turn in order to develop it even further, picking up what Derrida pointed to, but did not engage. The tantalizing possibilities for rethinking the relation of mythos and logos created by the doors he opens are pursued in what follows. In reading Plato otherwise, an other logic surfaces that makes logos possible, while simultaneously rendering its hegemony impossible. This other is the trace of mythos, which, strikingly, is used both to introduce the pharmakon and, as we shall see, is itself a pharmakon. As a trace, mythos operates as a nonabsent absence that eludes conceptualization, and therefore effaces itself. Our first concern in this chapter is how to read Platos text (and in turn, Derridas) otherwise. Only then can we turn our attention to the association between pharmakon and mythos, and thence to their operations within both the text and logos itself.2 As indecidables, mythos and pharmakon destabilize the very foundation of philosophy as logos, demonstrating that logos has not, in fact, freed itself from mythos, which both grounds and ungrounds the discourse of logos. The implications of thinking within this realization are the focus of this chapter. Derrida is certainly not the first, nor the last, to query the inherent ambiguity of Platos texts.3 In 1912 F. M. Cornfords study, From Religion to Philosophy, sought to delineate the unreasoned intuitions of mythology (FR, v) inherent and repressed within the tradition of philosophy. Cornford argues that in striving to be a pure science, philosophy takes flight from its mythico-religious roots. He concludes by suggesting that there is an other reading of Plato that destabilizes the primacy of logos. As discussed in Chapter 1, Cornford observes that logos alone is not up to the task of articulating the Platonic constellation of knowledge.4 No matter how single-mindedly Platos intended text (and its reader-commentators, eager to follow the logocentric thread) wants to rely solely on logos an approach honoured
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as both flawless and superior it is incapable of doing so. In calling upon mythos, logos inadvertently discloses its own incompleteness and its reliance upon (and unintended alliance with) mythos. Cornford points out that Plato must draw upon mythos to make his argument and fortify logos. In order to iterate and construct logos, Plato relies on and introduces mythos, which having slipped into the text, disruptively exceeds its intended use. Despite his logocentric efforts to control and solely constitute his text in terms of logos, and to silence any other reading, this other reading nonetheless surfaces within the first, interrupting it and illustrating how mythos is basic to logos, and thus to philosophy. John Sallis is equally interested in opening the play of questioning5 presented in Platos texts. His readings, which are attuned to an unheard-of-Platonism, an exorbitant Platonism (VP, 108), reveal an inherent ambiguity and excessive remains within Platos writings. He seeks to free the reader from the presumptuous ways in which Platos dialogues have been studied, and to open them to a reading that is rigorously attuned to their inherent displacements and ambiguities to the very aspects that are supposedly non-philosophical. In doing so, he shows that logos itself becomes problematic: The unity running through these diverse types [of logoi], that is, the determination of logos in that specific form which we vaguely indicate (but also decisively conceal) when we speak of rational discourse, is not something that is clear in advance but rather is initially a problem. (BL, 15) The unity and superiority of logos, from the outset, is questionable. Although Platos Phaedrus seems to set specific limits regarding speech (logos), at the same time it introduces that which inescapably transgresses those limits (mythos). Sallis observes that, in Plato, mythos is not simply in binary opposition to logos, nor is it taken up into it by a dialectical synthesis. It is not a subordinated stage of logos to be perfected later by a dialectical reversal.6 Sallis underscores the importance of reading mythos not with Platonic blinders, but otherwise: [W]hat is of utmost importance initially is that mythos not be taken, in advance, as merely an inferior kind of logos, as a meager substitute for something else intrinsically more desireable, as a mere compromise between knowledge and the logos appropriate
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to it, on the one hand, and sheer ignorance and its inevitable silence on the other hand. The contrast between logos and mythos is not a contrast between a perfected and an imperfect discourse. (BL, 16) The foundational distinction between mythos and logos, on which philosophy has depended and constituted its own discourse, is called into question and ruptured by its own ambiguous genesis. Mythos is not imperfect discourse, inferior to logos. Sallis intimates that the two have a commonality that mythos is, in some way, basic to logos, and yet not itself logofiable. Derridas reading of Platos Phaedrus plays along with its dramatic turns, irony and mythic speech in order to give voice to an other logic at work within that stages the play of diffrance. To take this path, one must depart from metaphysics and logos by straying from the texts intended commentary and opening up the text to its inherent tears and displacements. Doing this entails reading two texts at once, without desiring to master or synthesize those readings. In undertaking this, one must simply (yet rigorously) play as if nothing (within the domain of presence, i.e. logos, philosophy and thinking) is at stake. Thus, this other (often hidden) path cannot be undertaken within the traditional space of philosophy. Rather, the errant possibility emerges only within the aporias and tears that scar the core of philosophy.
Alogos
Play is vital, not merely incidental, to reading Plato and to understanding the fundamentally deconstructive nature of mythos and pharmakon. Derrida shows that a text (his and Platos, and by extension, all texts) is, in fact, some sort of game. This game has something to do with the interplay of presence/absence, secret/disclosure: A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception. (D, 63) All texts are, to some extent, forever imperceptible, that is, cryptic. However, equally important is the fact that there is no code for
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decryption. The cryptic remains cryptic. [T]he law of its composition and the rules of its game are hidden from the text itself as well as from the reader. This is not because the text safeguards them as a secret to be deciphered. Rather, it is because these rules and laws do not occur within the domain of presence. They exceed authorial intentionality. They are, therefore, not graspable, perceivable or accountable (as one might record an expense on an accounting ledger) by the logocentric reader or philosopher. Neither present nor absent, they are of another order. How is one to play such a game when the rules cannot be fully apprehended because they do not occur within the domain of presence? Derrida provides an answer: There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at a text without touching it, without laying a hand on the object, without risking which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught the addition of some new thread. (D, 63) As Derrida indicates, his reading does not purport to master the game, that is, to read only in terms of that which is present (all the threads at once). The only possibility of entering in requires risking the addition of some new undisclosed (other) threads. One is always already within the complex, cryptic interplay of the text(s). Everything is risked in the disseminative game of textual play. This game does not involve confirming mastery, calculation or presence. Nor is it about guaranteeing non-mastery, the incalculable or absence. Rather, it engages that which exceeds the simple oppositions of all of these. Derrida underscores the unanticipatable aspect of play by proclaiming, I know very well that, once you enter this game, one can never be sure of not confirming mastery.7 In other words, one cannot be certain about the game or its outcome, about whether the result is masterable or unmasterable. The outcome cannot be rigged or anticipated in advance. The games conclusion, and the reading of two texts at once, is irreducibly indecidable. Such an enterprise is risky precisely because the effect is always otherwise than one might foresee or wager. The game, which is to say, the reading, overflows all expectation and mastery. Fingers will be caught and bets will be lost. There will be expenditure without return.8 One must follow . . . the
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hidden thread (D, 63), rather than just the threads present that lead to synthesis and unity. One must ge[t] a few fingers caught in the complex weave of the text. Such an operation is an altogether different kind of reading. Reading in this way requires a double movement that both joins and separates, exposing (as faulty) the successfully mended and reinforced seams philosophers have sewn to integrate writing with speech and, for present purposes, mythos with logos. In other words, reading doubly, by paying attention to the aporias within the text, exposes these neatly mended seams for the fictions that they are. It involves a hidden thread that has slipped by the calculating eyes of the philosopher unseen. The seams holding together, in dialectical relation, speech and writing, and logos and mythos must rip apart (D, 64), and necessarily rip apart, whether such an outcome is desired or not. When the philosopher declares, always to the detriment of mythos, that logos is truth, the is that weds logos to truth constitutes such a reinforced seam. Derridas point from the outset is that the relationship between speech and writing, and as a consequence, between logos and mythos, is not merely one of opposition, nor one of sameness, either. Their identities, and therefore their relationship, are fissured and called into question. It is helpful, in our attempt to grasp the vital role of mythos in Platos Phaedrus, to extend Derridas insight to recognize not just writing, but more importantly, mythos, as a supplement. These supplements refigure all oppositional relations. A supplement simultaneously represents an excess and an emptiness, a plenitude and a shortage. It is neither presence nor absence (OG, 145). Oppositional relationships, such as that of speech and writing, and mythos and logos, occur within the mode of presence. Presence, however, is incapable of taking into account the supplement, which oscillates between presence and absence without inhabiting either one. How, therefore, is one to read these supplements? Derrida provides an answer to this by suggesting that they must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play (D, 64), rather than by the logic of logos. In this game, as we have seen, all bets are off. It is impossible to anticipate from the outset how things will play out. Thus, reading doubly and thinking doubly must occur within the logic of play a logic that also marks the supplement that, in turn, disfigures and refigures the relationship between mythos and logos. This play that follows the hidden thread, and which can only be located through a veil of tears,
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engages the simultaneous rhythms of joining and separating that never result in synthesis, in seams that hold or align perfectly. This double movement must be played out in order to uncover (to the extent that it is possible) the operation of the pharmakon and the unsettling tears (which mark the incompleteness of thought and the impossibility of pure presence) that reveal themselves in logos. Therefore, one must read Plato not as philosophy as logos has read him, but with this double movement. His text must be comprehended through the (illogical) logic of the pharmakon and the (illogical) logic of play. This logic is other. As other, it escapes the eagle eye of the philosopher because it is neither properly present, nor simply absent. When put into play, this other reveals a rupture deep within logos and the economy of presence. Derridas groundbreaking essay Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences radically rereads the notion of play. He demonstrates how play fissures logocentric discourse, since the rules of the game intrinsically exceed those of logos and presence. Whereas other theorists of play are concerned with presence and tend to view play economically that is, as undertaken toward a specific determinable (and anticipatable) end Derrida recasts play as the disruption of presence. . . . Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence (emphasis added, WD, 292).9 As Taylor points out, the play Derrida refers to announces a rupture within the entire economy of presence and representation (T, 136). Read in terms of Derridas notion of play, therefore, the other logic at work in Platos text is neither present nor absent, but in fact comes before (as a strange origin) the very alternative of presence and absence. Within this other logic, presence becomes impossible. If presence is impossible, then play is nothing (and not even the opposite of something) in terms of philosophy as logos. For Derrida, play is not determinable. Play is errant. It is alogos. Derrida explains: Either play is nothing (and that is its only chance); either it can give place to no activity, to no discourse worthy of the name that is, one charged with truth or at least with meaning and then it is alogos or atopos. Or else play begins to be something and its very presence lays it open to some sort of dialectical confiscation. (D, 156)
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If play occurs in order to arrive at meaning, then it becomes dialectical or hermeneutical. Its telos is logos, meaning and presence. Alogos, in contrast, carries the silent, disseminating mark of the a of diffrance. Presence is impossible within this chiasmic order of play. Non-originary play, like the tear, opens an opening through which the diverting operations of the texts other logic are revealed. This other logic destabilizes and questions Platos text and the entire philosophical project because it disrupts presence and closure, rendering them impossible. It is precisely this other logic (or other reading) that is allied with the pharmakon and, more importantly, with mythos. Both of these indecidables operate (as will be elaborated) through an other logic that stages the play of diffrance, thereby disrupting logos. Even though Platos Phaedrus appears to relegate and send off myths, mythos is by necessity included. Derrida uncovers a kinship of writing and myth, since both appear to distinguish themselves from logos and dialectics (D, 75). Platos discourse is concerned with the pursuit of knowledge that is, with the path of logos so he begins by giving myths, in the words of Derrida, a send-off: a salute,10 a vacation, a dismissal (D, 68) in order to prepare an uncontaminated venue for the preeminent form of rational discourse, logos. Derrida underscores Platos use of the word khairein, which, according to Sallis, means not only to send off but also to welcome (VP, 88). The vibrations of khaireins double meaning disruptively oscillate in the pages of Platos text. On the one hand, this farewell to mythos occurs in the name of truth: that is, in the name of knowledge (D, 69). On the other hand, the dismissal is also a welcoming, since Plato will, more than once, take up mythos in order to espouse logos. Mythos is often placed in service to self-knowledge (VP, 89), where it nonetheless remains by its very nature as an undialecticizable otherness that ruptures logos from within. While Plato vanquishes mythos, he greets it anew via the speech of Socrates, who calls upon myth to do his bidding in the name of logos. Importantly, myths come back from vacation at the time and in the name of writing (D, 69), Derrida notes. Even as Plato deprecates writing in favour of speech, thus aligning it with logos inferior, mythos, he is unable to elevate logos without the aid of mythos. This observation echoes Cornfords, calling attention to the fact that Platos philosophic discourse requires mythos. Philosophy must have recourse to mythos, which, once introduced, cannot be controlled, domesticated, suppressed or entirely expelled by philosophys
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preferred, superior tool, logos. Plato must write the dialogues to fortify superior speech (logos). Logos contains that which, on the one hand, constructs it, and on the other hand, deconstructs it. Already an association between these demeaned others writing, myth and pharmakon begins to surface. Derridas assessment of the pharmakon and its alignment with writing allows us to extend this analysis even further in order to see how mythos functions as a pharmakon in Platos text, forging a kinship between these two. It becomes obvious that, notwithstanding attempts to the contrary, Platos logos emerges from mythos. Instead of being free from its subordinate other, logos is in fact inescapably inhabited by it.
Re-Covering Play
Before turning to Platos text, it is necessary to revisit Derridas essay on play, delivered at a conference focused on the interplay between structuralism and post-structuralism, in order to explore his insights into their relationship. How are they related, if not linearly or dialectically? The same question applies to the relationship of logos and mythos. In order to approach this question otherwise, Derrida begins with this key realization: Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural or structuralist thought to reduce or to suspect. Let us speak of an event, nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and a redoubling. (WD, 278) Throughout this book we have been probing just these event[s], these rupture[s] and redoubling[s]. The event that Derrida cautiously characterizes in order to protect it from being appropriated by structure, meaning and presence refers to the event of play discussed above. This event of play is neither present nor absent. It is nothing. As a dynamic of alogos, it is without synthesis. This rupture is an origin that is fundamental to structure itself, but not in any systematic or dialectical way. In other words, structure presupposes this disfiguring event, and presence or logos presupposes structure. This is, indeed, a strange, other sort of relationship and organization.
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As Derrida suggests, we cannot even conceive of or speak of the event in any proper way, because it escapes these very methods of thought and logos (speech). Furthermore, the structure to which Derrida refers is, as we have noted, no ordinary structure. The structurality of structure, as Derrida calls it, is in fact not configured in any traditional structuralist way, although it is always under assault by that process. It is, in itself, astructural. This structurality of structure has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. (emphasis added, WD, 2789) This structurality of structure is a non-structure, and not reducible to a structuralist understanding. It is improper, which is to say, unthinkable by philosophy as logos and unspeakable through logos.11 From the perspective of structuralism or philosophy as logos, an organizing principle must be imposed that would order the system from the top down. In essence, the rules stemming from the fixed origin would predictably govern the entire system. This structuralist model stands in stark contrast to a centreless, unorganized structure. As Derrida indicates, such an astructure is inconceivable and therefore unacceptable to philosophy as logos. A coherent system tries to limit play. It cannot remain playful. There is a lot at stake in this insistence. As noted earlier, if play is nothing, then wagers will be lost. Therefore, from the perspective of philosophy as logos (or of structuralism), there can be nothing at stake. In other words, bets must be hedged. Rather than governing and thereby limiting play, the structurality of structure is instead put into play by an event that disrupts structure and organization. Derridas last sentence pinpoints the way in which thought presupposes structure, and since structure presupposes this radical event, thought necessarily includes
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the unthinkable event as a condition of its possibility. To recast this in terms of this study: logos includes as a condition of its possibility that which eludes it that which is alogos, mythos. Thus, the centre is paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. . . . The center is not the center (WD, 279). There is no centre as such. The disruptive event that makes structure possible is therefore effectively disorganizing and astructural. This eventful operation stems from a rupture, from a groundless, disseminating non-locus that is a play of nothingness. Extending the significance of Derridas insight to the relation of mythos and logos allows us to recognize and reframe their dynamic as that which is neither binary nor dialectic. In Derridas (non-)structure, the parts are neither dialectically related, nor posited as binaries. His point is not that one can jettison structuralism. On the contrary, the event can only be approached through structure. However, that approach is limited because the event that calls forth structure cannot be properly represented by the structure itself. This is precisely the logic governing the relation of mythos and logos. Mythos functions as a disfiguring event, rupturing logos. In this way logos necessarily presupposes mythos. Yet, at the same time, without logos there can be no presence, as such, and no possibility of re-covering mythos, the event.12 Event calls forth structure, and structure calls forth event. Mythos calls forth logos (in order to presence itself) and logos calls forth mythos (in order to be, as the DNA of its existence). Each implicates the other; they mutually emerge within and affect each other. However, this interplay (which is Derridean play, and as such, inescapable) is neither merely binary, nor dialectical. This astructure of mythos and logos (structuralism and poststructuralism, speech and writing, etc.) is emergent. Emergence is a component of complex adaptive systems. In contrast to linear systems, whose causes and effects are teleological, and can therefore be calculated in advance, emergence in complex systems is unpredictable, unanticipatable and internally self-governing. Order is not imposed from without, but rather emerges from within through the eventful operation of play.13 As Taylor points out, structures are not eternal or permanent but are emergent. The eventuality of structure entails a strange temporality that dislocates every present and disrupts all presence (AG, 304). Emergent structures are labile. They are inherently open and constantly transforming. By merging insights
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from the field of complexity studies with Derridas critique of structure and play in this way, Taylor effectively opens up Derridas ideas into fresh territory. This new framework of emergence is invaluable to re-examining and articulating the relation of mythos and logos. It becomes possible, for example, to look at Derridas events, which are governed by the logic of play and are therefore unanticipatable and uncontrollable, in terms of biologist John H. Hollands notion that emergence . . . occurs only when the activities of the parts do not simply sum to give the activity of the whole.14 In other words, not only are such events (the parts) unforeseeable, but they are also excessive. This eventual emergency, Taylor double entendres, is the incomprehensible excess that decenters structures by repeatedly displacing originary presence (AG, 304). The emergence of these events, of this excess, creates a crisis in traditional thinking, repeatedly displacing origins and the illusion that they are fixed in presence. This insight destabilizes philosophy as logos. Remains (i.e. mythos) always inhabit the system. They are necessary to its constitution, and yet at the same time, they are impossible inclusions. As an excess that decentres, mythos is not incomplete and imperfect logos awaiting transformation. Just as the relation between mythos and logos is not merely dialectical, neither is the relation between system and excess (i.e. remains). Taylor thinks these otherwise by recasting them through the logic of complex adaptive systems: [S]ystem and excess are not opposites but are codependent: there can no more be a structure apart from the supplementary excess that disrupts it than there can be an event of disruption without the stabilizing structures it dislocates. This excess is never present as such but emerges by withdrawing at the precise moment the system of structures seems to achieve closure. Recovery is always a re-covering and, therefore, inevitably remains incomplete. In this way, closure dis-closes without revealing the openness of every foundational base. (AG, 304) The remains are not secondary, but primary and, significantly, codependent. Extending Taylors insight about the codependent relationship of system and excess to logos and mythos, we can see how
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logos can no more exist apart from mythos, an excess that disrupts it, than mythos (the event of disruption) can exist without logos, the stabilizing structure[e] it dislocates. Mythos is, therefore, not a primitive form of imperfect logos, but an event that calls forth logos, just as logos calls forth mythos in order to represent itself. Mythos and logos are unavoidably codependent. The emergent complexity of system and excess simultaneously stabilizes and destabilizes Platos dialogue. Recovery, as Taylor points out, can only ever be re-covering, resurfacing rather than returning as Hegel was wont, to an original form. The supposed closure of the system dis-close[s] by attempting to cover over the openings that are the events of mythos. Such closure discloses the tears that forever remain, faulting logos. Let us imagine Plato at the edge of the abyss of this eventual emergence. He is standing at a chasm he cannot see, at the crossroads of two traditions: the oral and the written. Is it any wonder that he attempts to tighten down the hub at the centre of the wheel of structure, anxious to ensure against any unpredictable play, to secure an unmoving centre so that philosophy will proceed on the firm ground of undislodgable presence? On the one hand, Plato enlists logos in an attempt to ensure certitude beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered (WD, 279). Plato tries to recover (and produce) a history of presence and of philosophy that never properly existed. The desire to accomplish this drives the text. While at the same time, because that desire springs from an inherent insufficiency (and anxiety) rather than from the certainty that it hopes to express, this lack must be suppressed, lest it reveal that genesis. On the other hand, Plato also invariably seeks recourse in mythos. In spite of itself, philosophic discourse cannot exclude it. The dialogue uses the disruptive playfulness of mythos in its recovery, creating an emergency. Within the emergent network of Platos text, two readings surface: one, desirous of a fixed structure, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play (WD, 292). The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play (WD, 292). The text denies play in order to affirm it, and affirms it in order to deny it.15 It is not a matter of choosing between these two texts. The choice is impossible; the two are always already at play. The reader is inevitably caught in the midst of an emergency, situated within this eventful opening between two texts and two Platos.
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WITH/IN THE PHARMACYS ABYSS Atopos
Platos Phaedrus begins with an encounter outside of the city between Phaedrus and Socrates. It is a remarkable beginning, since Socrates rarely if ever travels beyond the limits of the polis. Initially, the setting is nonspecific: under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus. The scene occurs beyond the regulated and known parameters of the city. After listening to speeches (logoi) all morning, Phaedrus, whose name means bright, beaming and radiant (BL, 106), which suggests presence and aligns him with logos, takes a walk outside the city as a respite from his fatiguing immersion in logos. It is here that he encounters Socrates, who rightly suspects that Phaedrus has actually left the city in order to practice the logoi that he learned within it. Socrates opens the dialogue by asking Phaedrus to identify whence come you, and whither are you going . . .16 Phaedrus explains that he was listening to Lysias deliver a feast of discourse (DP, 227b) near the temple of Zeus.17 Unknown to Socrates, Phaedrus has brought along written speeches that he has concealed underneath his cloak. Thus, the dialogue begins outside of the city limits and with an act of concealment. It is significant that the dialogue opens out into the aporetic space of mythos. Socrates and Phaedrus station themselves in a mythical spot along the Ilissus. Phaedrus identifies it as near the place where Boreas (the north wind) kidnapped Orithyia, and asks Socrates to confirm this. Never one to give a straight answer, and ever-deferring the question, Socrates replies that the actual place where Boreas carried off Orithyia is further down the bank. The exact location and details remain hidden.18 This mythic foundation serves to open and disrupt what follows. It is also worth noting, as Sallis points out, that however little Socrates is acquainted with the country outside the walls, he does seem rather well-informed about those features that have some connection with the kind of things told in myths (BL, 114). Insofar as Phaedrus is associated with the logoi delivered within the confines of the city, Socrates is an outsider and, up to this point, is aligned with the occult and ambiguous nature of mythos. The myth of Orithyia serves in Platos text as a mythic hors duvre, which Derrida playfully describes as something served before a meal (before a feast of discourse), and as that which is outside the text (the entre) as a sort of remains that is nevertheless
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within as a part of the meal. It functions as a little stitch or mesh (macula) woven into the back of the canvas (D, 70). Macula also means a dark or blind spot. Read in this way, this mythic stitch is the blind spot of Platos text (and to a certain extent, that of Derridas) that simultaneously founds and unfounds his discourse. By using mythos as a foundation and in introducing the pharmakon, Plato puts mythos and the pharmakon into play simultaneously. They open the dialogue together. While playing with Pharmacia, Orithyia is caught by Boreas and thrown into the abyss, where she is then carried off by Boreas.19 Derrida observes that, [t]hrough her games, Pharmacia has dragged down to death a virginal purity and unpenetrated interior (emphasis added, D, 70). The abduction (or seduction) occurs within the context of play. Summoning play disrupts discourse, presence and logos, simultaneously marking and erasing the unlogofiable origin from which the dialogue proceeds. The myth discloses the dubious genesis of logos, instead of elucidating and clarifying the pure origin of logos, as intended. Through her play, Orithyia (the unpenetrated interior) is thrown into an abyss or aporia. The unpenetrated becomes, therefore, impenetrable. In other words, the myth does not explain, but rather renders, the discourse cryptic. From the perspective of philosophy, logos is an unpenetrated interior, in its purity, unviolated and inviolable. Inescapably, however, logos is contaminated from the beginning. Its contaminant is the pharmakon that is introduced both in terms of the myth itself (since the myth does not simply serve as a remedy to cure logos of ambiguity) and also in the figure of Pharmacia, Orithyias mischievous playmate. Pharmacia, Derrida observes, is also a common noun signifying the administration of the pharmakon, the drug: the medicine and/or poison (D, 70).20 In opening the dialogue with mythos, and in particular, with Pharmacia, Plato constructs his discourse on the foundations of mythos and the pharmakon. The pharmakon is an unstable, unlogofiable basis, since it serves as both poison and remedy. It is inherently duplicitous. Like mythos, it is irreducibly indecidable, and as such, eludes the order of presence, of logos. The pharmakon remains itself withdrawn from the sphere that is taken to define Platonism (VP, 94), while nevertheless giving rise to Platos matrix and that of philosophy as logos. This opening opens, revealing that philosophys ground is not, in fact, a bedrock of logos, as one may have assumed. Mythos and pharmakon appear on the scene together from the very beginning, staging an incalculable,
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uncontrollable and disruptive play that continues throughout Platos Phaedrus. Logos-aligned (or perhaps maligned) Phaedrus wants to hear what Socrates thinks of such a myth: could it in fact be true?21 Socrates response is as duplicitous as the myth itself: If I disbelieved, as the wise men do, I would not be out of place; then I might contrive and say that while the maiden was at play with Pharmacia a blast of Boreas pushed her off the neighboring rocks and that when she had died in this manner she was said to have been carried off by Boreas. (qtd in BL, 114) Sallis calls attention to the use of the word contrived in Greek, and its double meaning of both devis[ing], as for example, skillfully composing an explanation, deceiv[ing] and play[ing] subtle tricks (BL, 114). It also shares the same root as wise men (BL, 114). The wise men conceal the real import of this myth. First, they transform natural things into mythical things. The wind becomes Boreas. Then they hide the true meaning of the myth, which has to do with love.22 According to some versions, Boreas loved Orithyia. When her father rejected him, Boreas swept her away and married her. Together they bore children. The wise mens myth conceals, as it were, whatever love may have had to do with her fate. It might be said that the only result which the wise men can see in Oreithyias being loved by a god and playing with things like sorcery (which is not unrelated to madness) is a descent into death; they suppress the alternative of which the myth speaks, that the outcome might be an ascent into the company of the gods. (BL, 115) It would appear that Socrates is contriving to contrive (i.e. explain and conceal) precisely what the wise men contrive to contrive, and that mythos is the tricky medium through which this takes place. In this context, mythos disclosure is also its dis-closure. Its immediate alignment with the administration of a pharmakon suggests that a remedy (to fortify logos) may also very well be a poison, and vice versa. Even Socrates explanation must be questioned. If revealing conceals and concealing reveals, then something other than the intended message (whether intended by the wise men, Socrates or even Plato) is
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being delivered. The maddening ambiguity, duplicity and trickery are already present at the very beginning of the dialogue, luring not only Socrates, but also the reader, beyond the walled city of reason. This evidences that not even reason can begin from within the fortress of logos. It proceeds instead from a cleft marking the errant operations of mythos and the pharmakon. Reasons genesis is that of sorcery and play. This beginning faults logos from within, threatening its very framework and supremacy. Socrates response to Phaedrus inquiry regarding the truth of the myth further reveals logos affinity with mythos, despite the fact that such an intimacy has been concealed by philosophy as logos. Although Derrida overlooks this part of Platos Phaedrus, it provides us with another crucial insight into the way in which logos is unsettled by the trace of mythos. Initially, as Socrates defines his own relation to mythos, it seems as though he is speaking from the position of logos. However, in so doing, he actually speaks in terms of and identifies himself with mythos, but not for the purpose of demonstrating its inadequacy. Rather, his purpose is to show its inescapable primacy. He invokes the Delphic Oracle, insisting that he cannot speak of mythical things unless he first knows himself.23 It is at this point that he summons the many-headed monster, Typhon: For me, the question is whether I happen to be some sort of beast even more complex in form and more tumultuous than the hundred-headed Typhon, or whether I am something simpler and gentler, having a share by nature of the divine and the unTyphonic.24 This occurrence plays a pivotal role, even though Derrida does not mention it in his analysis. Socrates self-knowing (which is essential to logos) potentially has something to do with Typhon, the most frightful offspring of the earth, a monster with a hundred heads who rose up against the gods, who was, as a result, killed by Zeuss thunderbolt, and whose defeat marked the securing of the reign of Zeus (BL, 116). As head of the Olympic hierarchy, Zeus represents order. He is also aligned with the panoptic, eagle eye of the philosopher. Typhon is Zeus enemy. In an attempt to overthrow Zeus, Typhon stole Zeuss thunderbolts, stripping him of his very power and identity of that which makes him Zeus. Through trickery, the mortal prince Cadmus charms Typhon with song, allowing Zeus to reclaim
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his sinews (which Typhon had savagely ripped from the slain Zeus) and defeat Typhon.25 Typhon is no ordinary monster, but the most monstrous of monsters.26 He is a prodigious other, whose many-headed complexity threatens the unifying reign of all-seeing Zeus. As such, he shakes the very foundations of logos and philosophy as logos, undermining them. However, even Typhon harbours a strange ambiguity and indecidability. Although clearly monstrous, some of Typhons heads appeared otherwise. But while some of his voices cried like savage animals, explains Richard Kearney, others were so wonderful to hear (thauma akouein) that they were immediately understood by the gods and seduced both mortals and immortals alike.27 Certainly Socrates is seduced. The many-headed Typhon is a figure of the indecidable: god or monster? He is both at once. Typhon cannot be reduced to a single identity. He illustrates how monstrosity is also hybridity. Forever oscillating between categories, a monster is neither simply one thing, nor another, and thus inhabits the liminal margin of neither/nor. In his chapter on monstrosity in the theory of narrative, Andrew Gibson posits that monstrosity transgresses the metaphysics underlying symbolic boundaries, the boundaries that determine all those categories and classifications that separate kinds of being off from one another.28 By looking to Typhon to know himself, Socrates intimates that to know oneself is inescapably to encounter the indecidable. To know oneself is therefore to open knowledge and thinking to an unmasterable, excessive polysemy that escapes reasons categorizations. Socrates invokes Typhon in order to question whether he himself is monstrous and as such, an uncanny transgressor of the laws of logos or rather, if he is un-Typhon-like, and therefore a proponent of the reign of logos and philosopher-kings.29 It is as if either nature depends upon and includes the other, but not in a dialectical relation to be reconciled and synthesized under the Hegelian identity of identity-and-difference. The otherness of Typhon remains within knowledge, philosophy and logos. Kearney points out that even after Zeus exiled the Titans from heaven, Typhon stayed on as a reminder of our wild terrestrial origins (SGM, 13). As a reminder, Typhon is an undialecticizable remains. He memorializes the fact that philosophys source is an experience of alterity in terms of wonderment (thaumazein) and terror (deinon) (SGM, 13).30 In fact, by thus linking the origin of philosophizing to a certain pathos of wonder and awe
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(thaumazein/deinon), Plato appears to acknowledge that if Reason is predicated upon the expulsion of its monstrous Other, it is never wholly rid of it (SGM, 14). Socrates summoning of Typhon reveals an alterity that remains within the dialogue, speech and logos, destabilizing (and monstrosizing) them. Instead of returning to itself, self-knowledge is barred from that celebratory homecoming. Self-knowledge becomes a stranger to itself. Typhon remains as a reminder to the logic of the Same that it always carries traces of its spectral origin and that this origin can never be fully purged or controlled. In short, Socrates can never step entirely out of his shadow (SGM, 14). Nor can Plato. Typhon is not merely a shadow, but a monstrous enigma within, forever pointing to an untamable other that inhabits self-knowledge and logos. Typhon, the unwieldy multitudinous transgressor, marks the impossibility of synthesis, and in so doing inscribes logos with a hundred-headed excessiveness that forever prevents its closure and self-recognition. Self-knowledge does not return to itself, but always opens out onto an irreducible other. The Delphic imperative, therefore, points to a rogue, complex monstrosity, not to a dialectical movement of truth that unites difference and identity under the banner of logos. Typhon elides Platos logos, revealing an undomesticated excess playing just beneath the surface of the text. The whole affair is monstrous.31 The dialogue begins by introducing yet another concealment, an additional pharmakon, in the written texts that are literally hidden underneath Phaedrus cloak. The hidden logoi that Phaedrus carries are identified by Socrates as a drug a pharmakon when he chides Phaedrus, you seem to have discovered a drug [pharmakon] to entice me into walking outside the city (PH, 230e). This pharmakon seduces Socrates into straying beyond his customary track, carrying him further beyond the city walls. Derrida points out that a full and present speech (logos) which is ultimately impossible, just as presence has been rendered impossible by Derridean play would not have had the same effect on Socrates: If a speech could be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth, without the detours of a signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred logos were possible, it would not seduce anyone. It would not draw Socrates, as if under the effects of a pharmakon, out of his way. (D, 71)
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There is already something foreign and non-present in speech itself, despite appearances to the contrary. It is precisely this non-absent absence that tempts Socrates, like a drug, causing him to wander, and to wonder about the very nature of logos. The pharmakon has the power to lure him away from the customary track of thinking and logos, and leads Socrates astray, causing him to exceed his usual path within the security of the city that is the domain of the philosophers, of logos. It draws Socrates outside of himself (like a drug) in such a way that he is no longer certain who or what he is. As irreducibly indecidable, the pharmakon is not a substance, and cannot be conceived of or grasped in such terms. Derrida elaborates on the nature and powers of this dynamic seducer: This pharmakon, this medicine, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be alternately or simultaneously beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy if we didnt have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it. (D, 70) The pharmakon is irreducibly indecidable, and therefore rather tricky: it can be remedy or poison, harmful or beneficial, in turns or at the same time. As such, it thwarts philosophys attempts to limit and define it one way or another. It is cryptic and refus[es] any attempts to submit its ambivalent depths to analysis. Therefore, it is dangerous to introduce the pharmakon into the heart of discourse. The precarious pharmakon shuns any singular identity; it cannot be controlled. Since it resists any philosopheme, it will not simply do logos bidding. Oftentimes it disruptively works against logos. As antisubstance it is not properly present and, as such, is alogos. The pharmakon, as a non-philosopheme and an infinite absence, is outside (as a non-synthetic inside) of any tradition or category. It founds philosophy, but not in the way philosophy as logos assumes.
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That is, it does not work only in the way in which it is intended. Neither present nor absent, and simultaneously excess and lack, this foundation is non-foundational. As such, the unwieldy pharmakon, by figuring philosophy with an excessive nothingness (an infinite absence) simultaneously disfigures philosophy and logos. Although it is irreducibly indecidable, in Platos Phaedrus the pharmakon marks the passage into philosophy,32 into logos. Its duplicitous meaning and effect are as unwieldy as Typhons many heads, and cannot be mastered by any language or concept. Only through skewing, indetermination, or overdetermination (D, 71) is the pharmakon translated (logoscribed) as remedy, recipe, poison, drug, philter, and so forth. In choosing to translate it one way (i.e. as either remedy or poison), one is suppressing its other, simultaneous meaning. Not only does the disseminating multitude of possible translations point to the strange, other logic of the pharmakon, but it also demonstrates how philosophy as logos has concealed, masked, obliterated, and rendered (D, 72) this unconceptualizable other. Philosophy is founded on the violent difficulty in the transference of a nonphilosopheme into a philosopheme (D, 72). This violent difficulty is not merely a problem of language, but the very root problem of a philosophical tradition that desires to locate presence, instead of looking through a veil of tears (voir sans savoir), and sees instead with an eagle eye attuned only to savoir (absolu). Nonphilosophemes (like monsters), though, cannot be domesticated and transformed into philosophemes by dialectical operations. They reside within philosophy, as part of its foundation. Whatever the attempt, the disruptive alogical always remains. In many ways, the tradition of philosophy as logos has been one of translation. It has defined itself in terms of the promise of presence and the masterability that translation provides.33 Translatability is, in this way, an origin of philosophy. In this scenario, meaning has the commanding role, and consequently one must be able to fix its univocality or, in any case, to master its plurivocality (EO, 120). The assumption, therefore, is that it is always possible to put everything into words. There would be no philosophy without translation. When confronted with mastering the indecidable pharmakon, however, philosophical discourse is impotent. Thus, any translation is always an essential loss. . . . marking the limit of philosophy as translation (EO, 120). This limit is unavoidably transgressed the moment that Plato introduces the pharmakon and mythos into the bedrock of discourse.
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Importantly, the pharmakon is utilized in order to reveal logos and its pre-eminence. Yet, ironically, the very same pharmakon and, by extension, mythos reveal instead the limitations of logos. Their plurivocality cannot be excreted or contained; they are inexorably indeterminable and disruptive. As opposed to philosophical discourse, which seeks dialectical recourse in mythos and the pharmakon, they are, on the one hand, an inexhaustible adversity that funds philosophys and logos identity. Yet, on the other hand, they are an infinite absence of what founds it [philosophy] because they embody a primal and supplementary insufficiency, an emptiness (nothingness) that can never be comprehended or fulfilled by logos or the philosophy of presence. Even though the pharmakon is withdrawn from Platonism (because its irreducible indecidability is not a presence in the traditional sense), it is nonetheless inescapably a foundation of Platonism, of the entire project of metaphysics. Proceeding from this abyss, philosophy is inscribed by these tears from the very beginning. Its origin, the ground of its possibility, is as a result, linked to its own impossibility.
Dngation and the Palinode
Another significant rupture in Platos Phaedrus (that Derrida fails to note) occurs within, and as a violation of the purported structure of the text. The dialogue concerns itself with love. Although a discussion of love is not germane to the task at hand, the structural or rather, astructural implications of the speeches (logoi) about love are. Plato declares through Socrates that every speech like a living creature should be put together with its own body so that it is not without a head or without a foot but has a middle and extremities, written in such a way that its parts fit together and form a whole. (PH, 264c) Hence, Platos Phaedrus consists of three main parts that, according to Socrates proclamation, must form a coherent whole and culminate in a synthetic unity.34 The middle section of the text before the detour to Thoth, which is dealt with shortly consists of an unusual form of discourse, a palinode.35 A palinode is, as the name suggests, an ode of retraction, recantation or disavowal of what was previously written. The palinodes origin is credited to Stesichorus (StandingChorus), who was struck blind by the gods for slandering Helen in
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a poem in which he blamed her for the Trojan War.36 Stesichorus regained his sight when he recanted by means of the palinode.37 Importantly, a palinode is always written using poetic language. Significantly, this distinguishes it from the usual rational speech that philosophic discourse demands, and that characterizes the rest of Platos dialogue. Its inclusion prevents the text from strictly following the internal logic required of logos, of philosophic discourse, as Plato himself enumerates it. It is as if the middle of the living body of his speech was a chimeras torso instead of a humans. Socrates uses the palinode in order to recant his first speech, which served as a false speech about love and slandered Eros, the god of love. After the untruthful speech, Socrates proclaims: I am ashamed . . . and in fear of Eros himself. I wish to wash away such bitter and brackish speech with sweet, fresh words (PH, 243d). Socrates aspires to negate his former speech by utilizing the fresh words of the palinode. Plato writes the palinode in order to recant the lie that he told through the mouth of Socrates. From Platos perspective, the antidote to the poisoned, bitter and brackish speech is to negate it dialectically by employing the palinode, which will in effect wash away Socrates slander. Thus, the palinode is used not only in the service of truth, but also to achieve synthesis dialectically by negating what came before. Therefore, the palinode is essential to the structure of the text. It holds the beginning and ending parts of the dialogue together, while also performing a necessary negation. Its inclusion, however, disrupts the closure of Platos text. While Plato introduces the palinode to enact a dialectical reversal by negating the previous speech and thus bringing closure to his text, this intended result is not achieved. As noted earlier, Taylor insists that system and excess are codependent, and that a system or structure cannot exist apart from the supplementary excess that disrupts it (AG, 304). By the same token, disruption (by the excess) is impossible without the stabilizing structures it dislocates. As soon as it appears that the system might effectively achieve closure, a strange, untamable excess emerges, rupturing the structure and preventing synthesis. Platos palinode is that excess. Instead of enacting the closure it was called forth to produce, it leaves a gaping, supplementary excess in the centre of the text, decentring the dialogue and preventing it from having the symmetry that Socrates insists upon, and that logos requires. As a negation that does not properly negate, and therefore fails to complete the dialectical movement, the palinode functions as a dngation.
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Dngation is a term that Derrida uses, in his essay Comment ne pas parler, in responding to a question concerning deconstruction and negative theology.38 It is drawn from Freuds term Verneinung, which refers to a simultaneous operation of repression and affirmation.39 Taylor points out that the etymology of Verneinung conveys removal, loss, stoppage, reversal, opposite, using up, expenditure, continuation to the end, alteration, thus portraying both the presence and absence of negation . . . (N, 36). Dngation (like the pharmakon) cannot be adequately translated, since it oscillates between two poles. Its meaning is double. In it, affirmation and negation are conjoined without being united or synthesized (N, 36). Far from fulfilling its summoned role as antidote, as simple negation, the palinode affirms not merely writing (which the dialogue itself denounces), but also mythos and poeisis two other inferiors that Plato has already execrated. The palinode affirms as it denies, and denies as it affirms. Instead of uniting the two parts of the dialogue, the palinode tears them apart while simultaneously holding them together in a non-synthetic synthesis. To close the palinode, Plato includes a prayer to the god Eros. This plea to an other who is not present as such, and who will not respond in kind to Socrates logos, fails, therefore, to ensure the success of the recantation. It has the opposite effect, destabilizing and unravelling the text from within. The astructural palinode renders completion of the dialectic impossible by affirming, via a prayer, a structure and force that make closure impossible. Whereas the palinode is employed to point to and to mirror the origin of philosophy, in which love gives way to true philosophy, it instead marks an excessive gaping aporia at the very core of Platos philosophical discourse. As a poetic plea to a god, the palinode is an undialecticizable kernel faulting the system of logos from within. Something cryptic still remains at the close of the palinodes prayer. Outside of the city there is an other logic at work, one that operates duplicitously, like the pharmakon. Summoned as remedy, the palinode instead contaminates from within, exposing a rupture where the system of logos does not close, rather than the wholeness anticipated and pursued.
Putting the Joker into Play
The myth of Thoth that Socrates tells in order to show how the origin of writing is dubious, in contrast to that of speech, also unwittingly
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operates as a pharmakon in Platos text. Although comprising only a small section in the Phaedrus (2745), this piece is of pivotal importance. As a scrap, it remains to rend(er) Platos text and logos otherwise. Derrida is focused on the employment of the pharmakon in this myth, but what he does not point out is that because the myth is used as a remedy, to fortify speech (logos), the myth recounting the story of the pharmakon is itself a pharmakon. In other words, in this context, Plato employs myth as a remedy, which points to the necessity for myth. Mythos is used to strengthen logos, and ironically, logos case against writing, which like mythos, is a bastard discourse. However, since both mythos and pharmakon are indecidables, they contaminate the text doubly. Furthermore, the various significations of this particular myth itself have unintended consequences, as Derrida points out, causing even further disruptions. Astoundingly, notes Derrida, Plato introduces a foreign mythology, in the figure of the Egyptian god of writing and of the dice game. Thoths function is to work at the subversive dislocation of identity (D, 86). It is precisely his role as the god of disruptive, unpredictable and incalculable play that makes him the perfect figure to open onto the general problematic of the relations between the mythemes and the philosophemes that lie at the origin of western logos. That is to say, of a history or rather, of History which has been produced in its entirety in the philosophical difference between mythos and logos, blindly sinking down into that difference as the natural obviousness of its own element. (D, 86) Thoths presence in the text as, among other things, the god of play refigures and disfigures the relation of mythos and logos. His otherness is so disruptive that it unsettles the presupposed relationship of mythemes to philosophemes, and mythos to logos, calling for a new understanding that recognizes the suppressed affinity between them. The foreign mythology of Thoth becomes a foundation for Platos own speech (logos) on writing. This outside (foreign mythology) that is inside the text disturbs logos from within. In this way, Thoths presence in the text calls into question the very relation of mythos and logos, and consequentially, that of mythos and philosophy. At first glance it may appear that Thoth has a lot in common with reason and philosophy as logos because his father is the all-seeing sun god, Ammon-Ra. However, Thoth is subordinate to his father, and
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therefore is not simply aligned with logos or hegemony.40 Thoth is a messenger, but the message that he carries is often cryptic.41 As a result, he is the medium through which communication fails to communicate. Derrida describes him as the author of difference (D, 89), who introduces difference into language and it is to him that the origin and plurality of languages is attributed (D, 88). As the god of the creative word, who is second in command to his all-powerful father, his establishment of language occurs not in the usual manner, but instead by violent subversion (D, 89). In this way, Thoth disrupts presence, and supplants his sun-father, Ammon-Ra. Thoth is in league with magic, medicine, science and death.42 He is marked by this unstable ambivalence. . . . He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden texts (D, 93). Neither simply sorcerer nor scientist, Thoths identity is irreducibly indecidable. He wields the pharmakon, the remedy and poison. He is, as Derrida concludes, its god (D, 94). Thoths unsettling presence tears the text. The myth of Thoth (who is himself a pharmakon) introduced in Platos text functions as a pharmakon. This is because Thoth cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. (D, 93) Just as the pharmakon is neither simply remedy nor poison, but even both at once, and just as its double movement cannot be arrested and held in place by logos, Thoth escapes simple equivocation and always seems to slip by the calculative eyes of logos. He is irreducibly indecidable. By putting play into play, he disrupts the relation between opposites, and in mimicking dialectical movement through the operation of play (with diffrance), he foils it. Derrida elaborates on Thoths disruptive maneuvers: Thoth is opposed to its other (father, sun, life, speech, origin or orient, etc.), but as that which at once supplements and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly
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a god of the absolute passage between opposites. . . . he is precisely the god of nonidentity . . . In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. (D, 923) As a disruptive supplement, he adds to the thing he imitates while inscribing his own (improper) excessive emptiness and otherness onto that very thing, faulting what he supplements and therefore supplants. He enacts a repetition with and of diffrance, which bars the return of the same, and therefore the self-completion of logos. He is simultaneously other than and the same as, although this sameness is what Derrida describes as a nonidentity. Like a pharmakon that is also an odorless perfume base into which a scent is infused, Thoth takes shape through the very thing that he mimics.43 This is not traditional mimicry within the order of presence, however. Thoths doubling is altogether differ(a)nt. He usurps from the inside as a foreigner within, yet he does not do so through the dialectical movement of opposition.44 Rather, he steals into the thing that he both resists and substitutes for, assuming its identity in order to supplemen[t] and supplan[t] it. He has neither a proper place nor a proper name (D, 93). As irreducibly indecidable, his floating indetermination and unstable ambivalence (D, 93) stages Derridean play. To invoke Thoth, as Plato does, in the name of logos in the name of philosophy proper is to conceal, while attempting to repress, and thereby unwittingly to reveal the disseminative force of his irreducible indecidability. In unintentionally unsettling his text with mythos and pharmakon, Plato unknowingly puts the uncontrollable, undermining powers of the indecidables of mythos and pharmakon into play. As indecidables, they cannot be mastered. They rupture philosophy as logos by exposing a prodigious alterity from which it arises. Indeterminate and slippery, Thoth cannot be properly conceived. Instead of securing Platos philosophical project, Thoths inclusion faults it. Thoth would be the mediating movement of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely preventing it, through this ironic doubling, from reaching some final fulfilment or eschatological reappropriation. Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person (emphasis added, D, 93). Neither present in the text (he does not make an appearance), nor absent (since he exerts an influence as if he were in fact there),
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Thoth cannot be comprehended by the system of presence that he nonetheless constitutes and deconstructs. Philosophy as logos in Platos text is dependent upon mythos, pharmakon and Thoth. Its reliance on these irreducible indecidables unsettles philosophys foundation, revealing it to be other than it presents itself. Philosophy as logos has not in actuality cured itself of ambiguous mythos. In fact, philosophy as logos arises from within the cryptic abyss of the pharmacy whose medicine is simultaneously remedy and poison at the hand of the mythic Thoth, who is neither present nor absent. Along with Thoth, mythos and pharmakon are simultaneously preserved and suppressed. Like the crypt that safeguards what the system itself prohibits access to, this conservation is not dialectical, because that which is unwittingly preserved (indecidable mythos) remains unaccountable, threatening the very agent of its suppression (logos). Thus, from the beginning, mythos and pharmakon are incorporated into the system of philosophy and logos as a crypt. This crypt, Derrida reminds us, announces the death of a tyrant.45 The tyrant is not Thoth, but philosophy as logos, which had enlisted the indecidables of Thoth, pharmakon and mythos as trump cards to establish logos. Once these cards (mythos, Thoth and pharmakon) have been played, even if they turn out to be jokers, they cannot be withdrawn. Plato cannot opt out of the game that these indecidables put into play. In rendering pharmakon one way (as either remedy or poison) and refusing to tolerate such passages between opposing senses of the same word oppositions that are something quite different from simple confusion, alternation, or the dialectic of opposites its translation by philosophy (whether by Plato or someone else) is thus as violent as it is impotent: it destroys the pharmakon but at the same time forbids itself access to it, leaving it untouched in its reserve (D, 99), as a crypt. This untouched reserve is a remains of philosophy as logos that unsettles philosophys foundations by revealing irreducibly indecidable mythos as a foundation of logos. Such an unsuspected affinity dismantles our assumptions about the very nature of philosophy.
Bastard Dis-Courses
Thoth is summoned in Platos Phaedrus by Socrates, who recounts the story in order to say something about logos (to give an account) that logos alone cannot say. In Socrates story, Thoth comes to show
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King Thamus of Egypt his inventions, which Thoth believes will benefit society.46 He offers a pharmakon that is, writing as a gift to the king.47 The king rejects the gift on the grounds that it is mischievous (in other words, indecidable) and useless. He is suspicious of writing not only because it is alien and comes from afar, and not simply because it is opposed (or so the king believes) to logos, which is immediate and therefore living, unlike writing, but more importantly because it is a pharmakon, that is, a remedy that is really a poison. King Thamus accuses Thoth of concealing the truth about writing and professing the opposite of what it really does. From the kings perspective, writing produces forgetfulness which is anathema to living logos and Thoth has produced not a remedy for memory, but for reminding.48 Writing is an unnecessary crutch that distorts the truth instead of supporting it. Therefore, the king denounces it as treachery. However, the kings statement assumes the inherent ambiguity of the pharmakon. He denies the pharmakon because it is the opposite of how it appears. Thoth presents it as a remedy, but the king perceives it as a poison. Derrida notes the striking (unintended) irony: It is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance (D, 103). When Plato (through the speech of the king) equates the pharmakon with poison, he suppresses an alternative translation: that the pharmakon is also a remedy. The duplicitous pharmakon cannot be wrangled into a singular category, because it is irreducibly indecidable. Once its ambiguity has been introduced, the pharmakon cannot be domesticated by Plato, philosophy or the king. Its outcome cannot be controlled. Plato acknowledges this ambiguity, but only insofar as it furthers the project of logos, insofar as it works towards an employable end. The problem is that once it is introduced, and thereby unleashed, the pharmakon resists every attempt to be identified or harnessed, as Plato intended, in one specific way. As an indecidable, it fissures logos from within, foiling its operations, however much Plato wills it to further logos effectiveness. Strikingly, when King Thamus accuses Thoth of ambiguous deception, Thoth does not say a word. He is silent. It is easy to imagine that Thoth would be inclined to speak in order to defend his creation. Yet he is mute. Plato assumes that speech (logos) is pre-eminent, in part because it is fully present and is able to explain and defend itself,
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and therefore immune to misuse. This scene reveals just the opposite: Here is a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act. Walled up, walled up within, because silence is not exterior to language.49 King Thamus accusation is just such a founding act that serves to ground and constitute Platos discourse and the reign of logos. Silence is inside language, and by extension, speech (logos). It is not a secondary exteriority, but basic to logos. This absence of speech speaks volumes. The presence (or more precisely, non-absent absence) of this hiatus is disruptive. It does just the opposite of what Plato intends. He seeks to put an end to mythos (and writing), to subordinate them to logos establishment. However, through Thoths silence Plato unwittingly contaminates his logocentric intentions. This muteness faults all speech (logos): the silence encrypted in language hollows it out as if from within, thereby rendering language unavoidably cryptic. Forever doubled by an other it cannot express, language is irreducibly duplicitous. In speaking, one inevitably speaks not, or speaks the not that allows one to speak. Language, therefore, indirectly witnesses altarity, which it never knows. (N, 901)50 King Thamus words to Thoth summon this not by speaking, and therefore inevitably open themselves to an undomesticated altarity that cannot be known directly. This other represented by Thoth does not speak. Its response, rather than being in the realm of presence, is the absence of speech. Thoths silence rends logos from within. Plato privileges speech and logos because, unlike mythos and writing, logos is immune to abuse by women, Sophists and children. According to Plato, the father of speech is always present to utter it, whereas the father of writing is absent. Writing, therefore, is connected to the lack of a father, to the absence of logos (D, 77). This makes writing dangerous because it can be whirled about every which way, picked up as well by those who understand as by those who have no business reading it (PH, 275e). As we have seen, from Platos perspective, mythos shares in this weakness because it can be used to persuade, not by the powers of reason and intellect, but by the seductive powers of the senses, the lesser faculties. Furthermore, that mythos can be neither proven nor disproven adds to its untrustworthiness. The contrast between mythos and logos becomes undeniably clear in this formulation: logos is conclusive, whereas
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mythos is insistently inconclusive. For this reason, logos is decisively superior. Just as Derrida declares that, from Platos perspective, writing is an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant (D, 143), mythos likewise possesses the same impropriety, forever oscillating between falsifiable and non-falsifiable discourse. In the Platonic formulation, both writing and mythos are bastard dis-courses, forever straying from identifiable truth. Let us not forget that from the very beginning of the Phaedrus, it is Plato who, through the mouth of Socrates, accuses mythos of being unable to defend itself and, as a result, is subjected to the abuses of the Sophists, who conceal and whirl about its true meaning. From Platos point of view, mythos is an orphan (in other words, fatherless, logos-less) and therefore an errant, illegitimate dis-course, which threatens to undo the paternalistic power of logos. Mythos is not fit to share the throne with logos. As an outlaw, it is forever barred from philosophy as logos, a tradition that insists on purity and legitimate paternity, despite that, as we have seen, it requires mythos in order to establish itself. As mythos and the pharmakon expose, the kingship of logos depends upon the very thing that undermines its reign. Philosophy attempts to exclude its own bastard beginnings: that it arises out of mythos and must secure its supremacy through mythos and the pharmakon. Mythos and the pharmakon rend(er) the presence of the paternal line impossible. For Plato, the antidote to the pharmakon and mythos is dialectics, which allow for the medicinal triumph of reason and logos. However, the unstable pharmakon cannot be controlled. Its remedy is poison and its poison is remedy. In playing with the pharmakon, Plato is playing with matches. In this game, wagers will be lost. Derrida elaborates: This philosophical, dialectical mastery of the pharmaka that should be handed down from legitimate father to well-born son is constantly put in question by a family scene that constitutes and undermines at once the passage between the pharmacy and the house. Platonism is both the general rehearsal of this family scene and the most powerful effort to master it, to prevent anyones ever hearing of it, to conceal it by drawing the curtains over the dawning of the West. (D, 167) Writing is an opening that opens, a tear from which dialectics constructs itself as remedy. This violent opening fissures the speculative
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economy of philosophy as logos. The movement between the pharmacy and the house does not yield synthesis; the pharmakon is not mastered. Instead of elevating logos, this foiled passage rehearses the continual displacement of it. In order to conceal his sleight-of-hand, in which Plato employs the magic of the pharmakon in order to transform mythos to work in the service of logos, he draw[s] the curtains to cover the prodigious abyss that is the foundation of philosophy. Beginning with the pharmakon hidden beneath Phaedrus cloak, Platonism attempts to conceal this other dis-course throughout the dialogues. However, closure is impossible, since undertaking it always unwittingly dis-closes. A dynamic disrupts the abode of logos. This disrupter appears to be that which the royal house has attempted to prohibit: irreducibly indecidable mythos.
MYTHOS AS NON-FOUNDATIONAL FOUNDATION OF LOGOS Forces of Resistance
By drawing the curtains, philosophys founding act is one of resistance. As we have seen, it attempts to suppress and control the ambiguous indecidables from which it emerges. Given this, it is possible for us to recognize that philosophy as logos actively resists that upon which it nonetheless depends. What exactly is Plato resisting? Francis Guibal, incorporating Derrida, suggests an answer: In Plato, desire for truth accompanies the anxiety facing a world that has broken with and is subject to the vertiginous prospects of erring. The ideal is that of living and full presence, of a memory with no sign, [t]hat is with no supplement, which escapes all duplication, simulation, and possible deceit. Turned towards this lost origin, the Platonic logos deploys all its strategic skill to exclude and thwart the threats of exteriority left to itself, thus trying to facilitate the return to the Good-Sun-Father.51 Situated at an historic threshold at an interface Plato resists the vertiginous prospects of erring that threaten his world and, through dialectics and repression, attempts to overcome the tears that fault logos and threaten to undermine the ideal of living and full presence. Philosophic discourse (logos) musters its forces of resistance in order to suppress the anxiety-stirring alternative. It deploys a militant
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Logic of the Same against the menacing Other (O, 23). However, this strategy necessarily fails, because it depends upon the invention of the truth of absolute reappropriation.52 As we have already witnessed, absolute reappropriation is impossible. There are always remains (such as mythos in Platos Phaedrus) that cannot be accounted for by logos. Despite efforts to expel or reconcile them, these irreducible others remain inassimilable by the system. Thus, philosophy as logos is revealed to be the myth of absolute reappropriation, of selfpresence absolutely absolved and recentered (G, 221). In Derridas quote, myth denotes a falsehood or illusion. Logos invents its truth, that there is complete reappropriation, in order to secure itself. However, notes Guibal, such a myth, dream or illusion is constantly, unwillingly, thwarted by the forces of resistance that can never be completely sublated, and which work and displace this alleged mastery of the logos surreptitiously (O, 23). These other forces of resistance that counteract philosophys efforts at absolute reappropriation are the remains, that is, they are mythos and the pharmakon, which linger as ambivalent scraps that cannot be synthesized into the system that they simultaneously constitute and destabilize. These forces of resistance, of mythos itself, rend(er) the fable of absolute reappropriation otherwise. Resistance is more complex than it may initially appear because it is not just the rejection of something. Extending this insight allows us to understand how, in resisting indecidable mythos, philosophy as logos affirms it. First we must recall how Hegels dialectic assimilates difference, uniting it with identity. From this point of view, resistance is ultimately pointless, since difference (resistance) is merely a passing stage that is eventually negated. When negation is negated, resistance becomes affirmation. However, from an alternative vantage point, the dialectic is a response to resistance. In order to mitigate uncertainty and otherness, it is designed to reconcile and domesticate these upsetting others in order to welcome them, not as contraventions, but as part of a whole. As we have seen, however, the dialectical movement is incomplete. Its efforts at reconciliation can never completely disarm these opposites in order to remedy the unsettling tears within itself. These others cannot be synthesized and attenuated in the name of logos or identity. As much as they do not belong to the system, they are integral to it, and are therefore preserved by it. Yet, in remaining, they also threaten the system from within. This explains the need to constrain them, to keep them at bay, even while they defy
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such restriction. In a chapter aptly titled, Not just resistance, Taylor explores this dilemma: From one point of view, the No of resistance is a negation or an avoidance of affirmation two gestures that are not the same. But resistance is not merely negative; nor does it simply avoid affirmation. To resist is also to affirm even when it is not clear what is being affirmed. A certain affirmation . . . inhabits the negation of resistance as an anteriority that can never be escaped or erased . . . Resistance, after all, is secondary and, as such, is a response to that which it follows. . . . As the re- of resistance implies, resistance reinscribes what it resists. Thus, resistance involves an unavoidable duplicity: it affirms what it seems to deny, and denies what it seems to affirm. Resistance needs, and, therefore, inevitably repeats, what it nonetheless cannot sanction. Though resistance remains exterior to what it resists, there is (impossibly) nothing outside resistance. (N, 73) If resistance were a merely negative exteriority it would affirm that which it denies. It would not, therefore, truly resist.53 Derrida understands this, and marshals the internal contradictions of the Hegelian system as resistances that are already in place and not, therefore, simply external.54 More important, however, is Taylors observation that a certain affirmation . . . inhabits the negation of resistance as an anteriority that can never be escaped or erased. In order to say no to something, the something must first be acknowledged or affirmed. In other words, resistance unintentionally, but unavoidably, affirms that which it resists. Therefore, resistance is never primary, but always secondary and, as Taylor observes, re-inscribes that which it resists. In the current context, in order to resist mythos, philosophy as logos must unwittingly affirm and reinscribe it. This is precisely what Platos Phaedrus does. In marshalling his forces of resistance (by attempting to employ the pharmakon as remedy or poison, to the exclusion of its other meaning) in order to cure his discourse and logos of mythos, Plato unavoidably affirms ambiguous mythos. In doing so he unintentionally, but inescapably, poisons the logocentric intentions of the discourse he aspires to protect. Logos resistance (to mythos) both affirms and denies mythos as that which it cannot, at all costs, confront, lest the resisted undermine the resister. This is, of
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course, exactly what happens. Harboured within logos resistance to mythos is an unintended affirmation a preservation of mythos. In an effort to uphold the myth of absolute reappropriation, philosophy resists that which it does not deem proper, mythos. In so doing, it inevitably affirms an indecidable other that it attempts to deny. This is the duplicitous operation of resistance that Taylor illuminates. Elements set against each other owe their identities, in part, to their mutual opposition. In holding the line against and attempting to deny that which it opposes, resistance reinscribes what it resists, and thereby needs and inevitably repeats, what it nonetheless cannot sanction. This prescribes the relation of logos and mythos in Platos Phaedrus. Philosophys attempt to resist and deny mythos preserves it instead. This preservation both conserves and undermines from within. Philosophys efforts to ring the death knell of mythos unavoidably both reaffirm mythos vital dynamic and keep alive an agent of logos own undoing and instability. Although resistance remains exterior to what it resists, there is (impossibly) nothing outside resistance, as Taylor points out. As we will recall, from a Hegelian perspective, nothing escapes sublation: everything can be accounted for, swallowed up and converted into the Absolute. However, as we have also seen, there are scraps and leftovers that remain unaccounted for, that are not simply transformed through negation. Given this, it is precisely the inside the interiority of resistance that contests and thereby fissures the Absolute. What resistance reinscribes is always already inside, as an irreducible other that it futilely disputes. This outside within philosophy as logos is mythos. Resistance presupposes a multitude of forces. The s of forces marks their disseminating plurality. We have come to understand that diffrance is never unitary, but always plural. In differing and deferring from itself, it never returns to itself, and thus continually multiplies and errs. Building on this idea, Taylor observes that there can never be merely one force; for there to be one force, there must always already be at least two forces. Force presupposes resistance, which is not simply the other of force but is another force (N, 84). Force and resistance do not comprise a synthetic unity, however. Resistance always posits the existence of another force. Furthermore, resistance is not simply forces other. If it were, then it would be masterable and always on the way to being tamed by the dominance of
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force. In the end, resistance would succumb, as a result. It could not persist in its defiance. However, explains Taylor, force inevitably resists and resistance is unavoidably forceful. Since there can never be only one force, duplicity or multiplicity is not secondary to an original unity (N, 84). Excessive polysemy, as Typhons presence demonstrates, is always already on the scene. Although metaphysics is constructed to draw the curtains over the founding fissure of multiplicity, unity inescapably presupposes duplicity. In the beginning are tears. The duplicity of force inevitably resists and resistance is unavoidably forceful. This relation between force and resistance is neither binary nor dialectical. Resistance presupposes force, and force presupposes resistance. They co-emerge, just as logos and mythos in Platos Phaedrus. Wounds cannot be cured and tears cannot be mended. The disseminative ambiguity of mythos is not secondary to logos synthetic unity. It is basic to it. Resistance presupposes and reinscribes radical alterity, as Taylor suggests. Both pharmakon and mythos demonstrate that philosophy proper depends upon,and has constructed its own identity on,the exclusion of this alterity. Philosophy as logos relies on this suppression. However, at the same time, this act of exclusion is an (impossible) inclusion of what cannot be included (N, 86). In the Phaedrus, mythos summons logos. Logos, in turn, requires mythos and the pharmakon in order to construct and fortify itself. For this reason, logos also tries to protect itself and the philosophical project against contamination by these indecidable others by dominating them. However, as indecidable forces, mythos and pharmakon unsettle logos. In all of their ambiguity, they cannot possibly be dominated or even accounted for, and thus cannot be contained within the domain of presence, that is, within the domain of logos. Yet, they have already been introduced into the heart of discourse as necessary inclusions, even though they cannot be included. In this way, mythos serves as a non-foundational foundation of logos.55 As inescapably basic to logos, it is the ground from which philosophy as logos arises, and is, therefore, foundational to it. Yet mythos is effectively not foundational. Not only is it incomplete, but because it is irreducibly indecidable (neither verifiable nor non-verifiable), it cannot be entirely present either. No traditional system can be constructed upon it, because its non-foundational dynamic resists attempts to structure or govern it. Just as Derrida marks off event with quotes in his discussion of play in order to prevent reappropriating it into
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traditional, structural, anticipatable play, so too must foundation be set off to mark it as a non-foundation that does not comply with the principals of philosophy as logos, which would attempt to systematize this unsystematic foundation. Such a non-foundational foundation simultaneously decomposes as it composes, and deconstructs as it constructs. In resisting mythos as ambiguous and inferior, philosophy as logos refuses to confront its own foundation. Importantly, this resistance is not. That is, it is not simply a dialectical negative that harbours presence, affirmation and mastery. This resistance is abyssal. It exposes logos to its inherent aporetic fissures, tearing it open to the irreducible indecidability of mythos that is necessarily included in logos identity, just as the multi-headed, irreducible other, Typhon, is included in Socrates identity. It could even be said that philosophy as logos perpetuates its own myth (i.e. a falsely constructed account) of absolute reappropriation. As we have seen in exploring mythos, pharmakon, Typhon and the palinode in Platos Phaedrus, logos is incomplete, and therefore cannot possibly encompass this fabled absolute reappropriation, even if it would like for us to believe otherwise. In attempting to conceal mythos as a non-foundational foundation, logos nevertheless discloses it as such. Resistance, therefore, in the words of Taylor, is not just resistance. There is no escaping indecidable mythos (or pharmakon). Exclusion is impossible inclusion. Denial is affirmation.
Terminal Displacement
As we have seen, as indecidable forces, mythos and pharmakon construct and constitute Platos philosophic discourse while simultaneously disrupting and deconstructing it. These irreducible others give rise to the system that is powerless to control or synthesize them. In this way, mythos and pharmakon are a grounding that is, at the same time, not the least bit grounded. It is just this aspect of mythos and pharmakon that Platos text also attempts to dominate and banish. The counterspell, the exorcism, the antidote, is dialectics (D, 121). Yet, as Derrida shows, once the pharmakon is introduced, its ambivalent powers play out beyond control. What was remedy may become poison, and what was poison may become cure. The element of the pharmakon, states Derrida, is the combat zone between philosophy and its other. An element that is in itself, if one
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can still say so, undecideable (D, 138). Although inside the system, indecidables function as outsiders that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics (P, 43). The philosophical system seeks to dominate them because it cannot account for their unending oscillation and deferral between significations. They are neither simply one thing, nor another, slipping between all possible categories. Nonetheless, these indecidables are at the core of the system, giving rise to it even as they rupture it. Plato cannot control the indecidability of the pharmakon. Unable to know for sure whether he is encountering remedy or poison, and unaware that these two are inextricable, Plato administers the pharmakon to develop and fortify logos. He fails, however, despite his best efforts, to send off mythos and to contain its ambiguity from spilling over into his philosophical discourse because sperm, water, ink, paint, perfumed dye: the pharmakon always penetrates like a liquid, it is absorbed, drunk, introduced into the inside . . . soon to invade it and inundate it with its medicine, its brew, its drink, its potion, its poison (D, 152). The ambivalent powers of the pharmakon permeate the text. Its indeterminate excess contaminates logos, foiling all attempts at domination and synthesis. Even though Plato tries to cure the textual pharmakons by administering salubrious pharmakons (such as the myth of Thoth), the defiling, oscillating excess (of possible meanings) cannot be arrested or banished. Through the figure of the king, Plato attempts to dispense his cure, to engineer the ambiguity of the pharmakon. Such a cure might be effective if the pharmakon were simply exterior. If it were, it would pose not a terminal threat, but a temporary one that could ultimately be remedied. However, the pharmakon (which is specifically, in this context, the myth of Thoth that Plato has Socrates tell) is not external, but internal. It is a groundless ground, an unmasterable cryptic core, from which the entire dialogue emerges. Recognizing that mythos gives rise to logos, just as the pharmakon gives rise to the entire dialogue, dramatically alters our conception of logos and philosophic discourse, as Derrida suggests: [I]f one got to thinking that something like the pharmakon or writing far from being governed by these oppositions, opens up
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their very possibility without letting itself be comprehended by them; if one got to thinking that it can only be out of something like writing or the pharmakon that the strange difference between inside and outside can spring; if, consequently, one got to thinking that writing as a pharmakon cannot simply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot be subsumed under concepts whose contours it draws, leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it one would then have to bend [plier] into strange contortions what could no longer even simply be called logic or discourse. (D, 103) Just as Derrida describes, the pharmakon, and by extension mythos, form the matrix from which these logically constituted opposites derive, without themselves being governed by the logic of opposition.56 They are withdrawn from the very sphere that they themselves nevertheless give rise to. As a dis-course that is a non-foundational foundation of logos, mythos sets logos and discourse into motion. Plato tries to transform mythos into logos to make mythos work in the service of logos but his attempt to control and arrest this indecidable is foiled by its excessive oscillation between possible meanings. Mythos and pharmakon slip and slide, deceive and sunder, refusing any singular identification or translation. Their disturbing presence undoes every foundation that logos attempts to establish. By opening up the possibility of opposition while nonetheless eluding engagement in it, mythos and pharmakon simultaneously participat[e] in participation and non-participation (TS, 5). Such participation in no case allows itself to be reappropriated by participation, and thus by a philosophical system (TS, 6). The neitherthis-nor-that and this-and-that of mythos and the pharmakon designate their absolute heterogeneity, which resists all integration, participation and system, thus designating the place where the system does not close. It is, at the same time, the place where the system constitutes itself, and where this constitution is threatened by the heterogeneous, and by a fiction no longer at the service of truth. (TS, 5) Mythos and the pharmakons non-participatory participation, which resists all integration, marks the rupture where the system does not close.57 This is, at the same time, the place where the system
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constitutes itself and is threatened all the while by the absolute heterogeneity of mythos and the pharmakon. This non-participatory heterogeneity, in the (dis)figure of mythos and the pharmakon, is the groundless ground of Platos discourse. The heterogeneous is not external. Nor is it secondary. Rather, it is at the core of the philosophic system as an inassimilable remains or undialecticizable kernel, constructing and deconstructing logos from within. Although mythos and the pharmakon constitute logos, they simultaneously threaten it with their non-synthetic indecidability. The perpetual oscillation between remedy/poison and, in the case of mythos, neither truth/nor falsehood, stages the play of participation and non-participation. As absolute heterogeneity, mythos and pharmakon do not participate in a logocentric circuit. Ambiguous and indeterminate, they are not and cannot be properly present. Their participation and nonparticipation is that of unbridled play. As such, it inscribes both the philosophic systems void and excess, marking the impossibility of completion, and disclosing the aporias that remain to fissure philosophy as logos. Philosophys own myth (i.e. falsehood) of absolute reappropriation is inescapably undermined by inappropriate mythos. The pharmakon (the myth of Thoth), introduced as remedy, likewise disrupts and transmutes the dialectic. Foreign to the system, and yet nonetheless within it, the myth of Thoth as pharmakon gives rise to the system. Platos text employs the pharmakon as antidote and counterspell, using it to exorcis[e] the indecidability, ambiguity, and aleatory play inherent in mythos and the pharmakon. In other words, Plato administers the pharmakon, in the form of a myth, which is yet another slippery indecidable, in order to treat the indecidability of the pharmakon. Such a move is playing with jokers, since one can never anticipate the results with any certainty. Sly and slippery, the foreign pharmakon as dialectical antidote discloses the non-dialecticizable aspects of the text. Thus, that which constitutes the dialectic is also that which forbids its completion: Precisely that which, not being dialectical, makes dialectic impossible is necessarily retaken by the dialectic that it relaunches. . . . What we have then, is a concept of the dialectic that is no longer the conventional one of synthesis, conciliation, reconciliation, totalization, identification with itself; now, on the contrary, we
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have a negative or infinite dialectic that is the movement of synthesizing without synthesis. (emphasis added, TS, 323) This refiguration (and disfiguration) of the dialectic subverts and transforms the philosophical project. The pharmakon, which does not let itself be dialecticized, makes the dialectic impossible while, at the same time, relaunch[ing] it. In just this way, mythos and the pharmakon synthesize without synthesis. They confound the dialectic and yet activate it. They remain as unintegrated outsiders that cannot properly be thought dialectically, but without which the dialectic would be impossible. This undialecticizable aspect of the dialectic that does not result in synthesis, conciliation, reconciliation, totalization, identification with itself, and yet generates an open-ended dialectic without synthesis, cannot be properly categorized as dialectic because its movement is that of synthesizing without synthesis. A synthesizing without synthesis is, likewise, at the heart of Taylors open-ended non-foundational foundation. Taylor extends and rewrites Derridas pharmacological matrix into what he calls a non-foundational foundation. Discussing the way in which information is processed by the brain, Taylor reveals that the relationship between mind and matter is not binary or dialectical, as it has been traditionally conceptualized. Rather, it is an open structure that would create the possibility of nonreductive explanation, which would leave space for aleatory events.58 He designates such a structure a nonfoundational foundation. Simply put, Taylor understands that structural relationships are, in fact, governed by a kind of logic that is not reductive or calculable. Instead, relations (including, we should add, those of mythos and logos) are superintended by uncertainty, indecidability, unmasterability and chance. Taylor recognizes the extent to which the dialectics success depends upon its failure. It includes that which it attempts to exclude, and cannot logically include. For Taylor, operating within the non-foundational foundation is exactly what Derrida describes as a dialectic without synthesis, of which the mechanism of action is displacement rather than replacement, and the result of which is a non-synthetic third that bends back on itself to inscribe the margin of difference between term A and term B. Each term (i.e. mythos and logos) is co-originary (CG, 322, 111). In this framework, nothing is either simple or
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self-identical because everything is parasitic upon something other than itself. . . . Identity, therefore, is always differential; to affirm one is always already to affirm an other (CG, 323). This describes what we have already discovered about the relation of mythos and logos. Logos depends upon the same ambiguity that it also seeks to exclude through mastery. By introducing this unmasterable indecidability into the foundation of discourse, logos unwittingly affirms mythos, and their inescapable co-identity and co-dependence. Logos identity presupposes an other mythos that it cannot fathom, account for, or properly communicate, and on which it depends, even as mythos surreptitiously disfigures and refigures logos from within, subverting that very identity. By the same token, mythos requires logos in order to structure and present itself, to the extent that it is representable. The limits of logos constrict (and in a certain sense, disfigure) that presentation, even as it makes any presentation possible. Mythos and logos are inescapably co-originary and codependent, although their parasitism is not synthetic. From the perspective of philosophy as logos, mythos is inferior. As we recall, Plato denounces it because, in his view, it appeals to the senses, and not to the intellect. Therefore it contradicts the purpose of philosophical discourse. It is considered a primitive stage before formalized logic. In this scenario, the mytheme will have been only a prephilosopheme offered and promised to a dialectical Aufhebung.59 Dialectics is the antidote prescribed to non-logical, ambiguous mythos in order to rid it of its impurities and subsume it under the banner of perfected, rational, truthful, philosophical logic. That is, philosophy becomes serious only after having abandoned, or let us rather say sublated, its mythic form: after Plato, with Plato wherein philosophical logic comes to its senses when the concept wakes up from its mythological slumber (ON, 100). Yet, as we now understand, logos can never independently awaken; it never fully shakes this slumber. Mythemes do not simply transform into philosophemes. Rather, they are succubi, emerging from the dream world to haunt the waking world, bringing the netherworld of mythos into the clear-eyed realm of logos. The dream of reappropriation is conceived by a philosophy that has yet to awaken to a mythos that, as a non-cognizable non-philosopheme, always already infiltrates the interior of philosophy as logos. Such a mythos cannot simply be negated, or reasoned through in the daylight of presence, nor can it be exorcised or cured by speculative dialectics. Neither Plato nor his
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text can control, via logos, this mythos that lacks both form and presence. Mythos is interior and foundational. The aporetic fissures of mythos in Platos Phaedrus expose these scraps and leftovers as the very possibility and ground of the philosophic system, and mark the impossibility of logos reappropriation of itself, of its ever achieving closure. Thus, the philosophical locus is also, at the same time, the locus of philosophys impotence, inscribing both its possibility and impossibility in one forceful act. On the one hand, the inclusion of mythos makes the purity and supremacy of logos impossible, because that which is undialecticizable and unassimilable is, nonetheless, included within the system as a condition of its possibility. On the other hand, this impossible inclusion enables the very possibility of discourse, even as its inclusion simultaneously renders dis-course. Therefore, it is impossible to forego mythos or to operate without it. Philosophy proceeds from a rupture beyond the walled city of reason. This procession is improper, errant and bastardly. Sallis calls attention to the fact that in Athenian usage a bastard was the child of a citizen father and an alien mother:60 an outside that is inside. This bastard is mythos an ambiguous, foreign strangeness that cannot be entirely governed or assimilated by the father-son-king-logos. Mythos simultaneously founds and unfounds philosophy as logos.
Prayers and Tears
Platos Phaedrus begins with mythos in order to overcome it. However, as we have seen, the dialogue is unable to free itself from mythos. Instead, Plato unwittingly discloses the foundational nature of mythos, despite his efforts to execrate it from philosophy altogether. In making logos possible, mythos also makes (pure) logos impossible. From its inception, Platos text is contaminated by mythos. The play enacted at the outset (literally by the myth of playful Pharmacia, which serves to align mythos and pharmakon) defers and disfigures, even as it simultaneously figures. This undermines the supreme authority of the rational, logocentric discourse that follows. The inclusion of mythos (with the pharmakon and, as with the myth of Thoth, as pharmakon) causes Platos dialogue to stray from its path as exclusively logos. Socrates alignment with the excessive Typhon reveals a radical alterity inhabiting identity that, to a certain extent, unintentionally foreshadows the way in which irreducible mythos comes to overrun logos. Mythos serves to construct not just the
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opening of the dialogue, but also its ending. It has the first words and the last. The dialogue ends with Socrates recitation of a prayer to the mythic god Pan. When read otherwise, it becomes clear that this ending interrupts and disfigures Platos philosophic discourse, instead of concluding and allowing for logos to return full circle. Socrates prays to beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place to grant him beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one (DP, 279c). Why break with the conventions of the rest of the dialogue by ending with a prayer? Furthermore, if philosophy and reason mark the end of the mythic age of the gods, why address this prayer to Pan? Examining Socrates supplication at face value shows that he is asking an outside force to ensure that his inward self (his soul) is in accord with his outward identity. However, when read in terms of the disruptive interplay of mythos, it becomes apparent that this is an impossible request. The many heads of Typhon that lurk beneath the surface of Socrates identity belie any such resolution. Despite its multiple attempts at synthesis, the text is littered with pluralities, whether they are the oscillating meanings of pharmakon and mythos, or the hundred-headed Typhon. As we have seen, logos and, by extension, philosophic discourse, contain something that they cannot account for or synthesize. Like Socrates, they contain an inside that cannot be reconciled with their outside persona. Socrates questioning of his own identity reveals an excessive, heterogeneous alterity that inhabits self-knowledge. In this way, Socrates acknowledges that his identity is not in accord or unified. If it were otherwise, he would not need a prayer to grant him oneness, because he would already possess it. Socrates uses prayer to summon what he does not inherently have. His identity contains something other that he cannot constellate or reconcile. It is not one (the logic of the Same), but always already opened out onto an irreducible other that is, in this case, a many-headed monster. When he endeavours to know himself, he is therefore forced to confront diffrance to come to terms with an alterity that he cannot assimilate. Socrates identity crisis presupposes multi-sided complexity. His prayer to counteract diffrance seeks the unattainable unification of that multiplicity, and for this reason, is inherently unfulfilable. Arising out of that very impossibility, his entreaty cannot, as a result, be realized. What he beseeches is unachievable. No wonder he enlists divine power to accomplish it!
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That prayer at the end of the text further exposes an otherness within. The rest of the text is a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus. Each is present to the other, and each receives the speech of the other and then returns it in the form of another speech.61 Unlike Phaedrus, Pan does not respond to Socrates. In other words, Socrates addresses his words to an other who is not present. Prayer is not ordinary dialogue. In a provocative reading of Anselms Proslogion, which begins as a prayer to God, Taylor argues that in prayer, to address this Other is always already to be addressed by the Other, and that this discourse of the Other eludes the very linguistic structures . . . it nonetheless makes possible (N, 23). A prayer presupposes its receipt by the other to whom it is addressed. Importantly, this other is neither present (Pan does not make a literal appearance) nor entirely absent (since this other is invoked through prayer he is present in the prayer itself). In this way, it eludes the simple distinctions between the two, and escapes the order of presence, which is the domain of speech (logos).62 Prayer is forever haunted by an Other that language can neither include nor exclude (N, 23). In addressing itself to this other, language opens itself to an unassimilable other that is not merely without, but more importantly, as Socrates discovers, within. The words of prayer, avers Taylor, point toward (without referring to) an exteriority that is within language itself (N, 23). Just as Platonic logos (speech) is never fully present to itself and, for this reason, lures Socrates to stray beyond the city, the final words of the dialogue are also inhabited by an external other that is nevertheless interior, and which eludes presence and synthesis. The ending prayer to Pan affirms the exteriority that haunts the text and logos. This prayer, which also evokes mythos in addressing itself to the mythic god Pan, exposes the incurable wound of diffrance. Two texts both at once, yet separately, play beyond the limits of philosophy as logos. These two are nonetheless a simultaneity, a fractured one without synthesis, without relation, and without progeny. Each already affirms an other that is not oppositional. Poison or remedy, remedy or poison, the antidote itself is impossibly cryptic. These forces (of resistance) elude mastery or control. Instead of curing philosophy of mythos, they contaminate it from within. The unsuspected affinity between logos and mythos tolls the death knell of philosophy as pure logos.
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CHAPTER 4
SECRETING MYTH: THINKING SA OTHERWISE
TOLLING GLAS AND (DE)CONSTRUCTING NONUMENTS
In the previous chapter, we saw how logos is haunted by an exteriority that disrupts it from within. This unlogofiable outside is mythos, which gives rise to logos.1 We have come to recognize that mythos is inescapably basic to logos, and so, in that sense, is foundational to it. Yet, its co-emergence (with logos), as well as its unlogofiable nature, render it non-foundational. We have therefore described it as a nonfoundational foundation that simultaneously figures and disfigures logos. Yet, if mythos eludes logos, and therefore philosophic discourse, which is to say, the category of presence, then how are we to apprehend it? Certainly our acceptance of the (non-)presence of indeterminate mythos cannot and should not proceed by blind faith. Embedded within this question lies another one: how can mythos and logos co-emerge in a non-foundational dynamic? Chapter 3 demonstrates that they do, and that mythos is a foundation of logos. Nonetheless, it may, at this juncture, be difficult to imagine how that might play out beyond Plato. Furthermore, it may be equally hard to envision how we are to read, write and think without foundations. If every foundation has a non-foundational aspect intrinsic to it, then understanding the non-foundational nature of thinking becomes a pressing issue, extending well beyond the parameters of mythos and logos. Furthermore, if knowledge is always faulted by non-knowledge, logos disfigured by mythos, and thinking ruptured by the unthinkable, then, as Derrida has repeatedly pointed out, meaning as savoir absolu (complete self-consciousness anchored within presence) is impossible. Therefore, philosophy as logos,
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divorced from mythos, is equally impossible. Derridas masterful, but often neglected, Glas tolls the death of philosophy as logos while simultaneously ringing in the birth of a new beginning. When read in a manner that oscillates between the philosophical and nonphilosophical, without privileging either, Glas provides an opportunity to witness how mythos and logos are mutually implicated, and can be apprehended, in an ever-emergent network of complexity.
Distyles
With its strange textual configurations, Glas eludes mastery as well as conventional reading and thinking even more than most texts. Therefore, how is one to approach it? It presents a quagmire for many philosophers, even those attuned to deconstruction. As a case in point, the philosopher Rodolphe Gasch, who is customarily a proponent of Derridas work, dismisses Glas as literarily playful and therefore not philosophically discursive.2 This rejection echoes Platos denigration of myths as inferior and imperfect forms of logos. The implication is that, in the eyes of philosophy, play for its own sake that does not purposefully align itself with philosophy as logos (and play that discourse cannot readily control) is as inconsequential as mythos. However, as we have seen, Platos dismissal of mythos also inescapably marks his preservation of it. He simply cannot do without it. It grounds while simultaneously ungrounding his Phaedrus. Given this, one begins to recognize that Gaschs privileging of Derridas philosophically discursive texts is his vane attempt to preserve some semblance of philosophy as logos, and to cut off some degree of deconstructions errant discursivity. Despite an ever-growing fissure that deforms the self-reflexivity of absolute knowledge and faults the project of philosophy as logos, Gasch still strives to safeguard an attenuated form of deconstruction that clings to logocentric imperatives. Glas is Derridas attempt to read, write and think otherwise, rather than in the way that philosophy as logos traditionally does. It necessarily fails to achieve the absolute knowledge promised by Hegelian dialectics. Glas is not just a fancifully playful literary text. It is an event that warrants rigorous consideration. As Gaschs dismissal illustrates, philosophy as logos does not even consider this event (of play) meaningful.3 Nonetheless, as we have seen, play is in fact a
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serious game, even if its dynamic cannot be fully comprehended or its end anticipated. Glas is neither philosophical nor nonphilosophical (A, 268). It oscillates between these two (entre-deux) in the fissured columns that comprise the text. Written in multiple columns, one of the poet, playwright and novelist Jean Genet,4 and another of Hegel, Derrida works doubly: If I write two texts at once, you will not be able to castrate me. If I delinearize, I erect. But at the same time I divide my act and my desire. I mark(s) the division, and always escaping you, I simulate unmyself I remain(s) myself thus and I play at coming [je joue jouir]. (G, 65) Glas is at least two texts at once, and often even more than two. It plays without an eye toward a proper philosophical end. The textual erections (this is a double entendre since the columns of text appear phallic) play at coming, but as Derrida shows us, they can never arrive at an all-encompassing meaning.5 Furthermore, the columns of Genet and Hegel are inscribed and tattooed with(in) other columns, other texts and other tongues. [O]ne is never enclosed in the column of one single tongue. If there is a system of the tongue, that system never has the form of this cylindric closure.6 Absolute translation is impossible since the system of Glass tongues remains open. Embedded within the columns are phrases in other languages, such as German and French, which remain untouched by the translators pen, as untranslatable aporias. This does not mean that Glas belongs, in its so-called original version, to the element of the French tongue (HTW, 17). On the contrary, not confined to a single language, translation devours Glas, which exhibits in a way a passion for the foreign tongue (HTW, 17).7 This passion for the foreign tongue is also a passionate solicitation of the other an other that cannot be read, thought or spoken in any traditional language or manner. Glas opens out into another space that recalls the foundational ground of mythos in Platos Phaedrus. In the preface to the English translation, Derrida describes his work not only as a construction, but also as a simultaneous deconstruction: Now this book presents itself as a volume of cylindric columns, writes on pierced, incrusted, breached, tattooed cylindric columns, on them then, but also around them, against them, between them
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that are, through and through, tongue and text. Kulindros always names a round body, a conveyor roller for displacing stones, for example in the construction of monuments, pyramids, or obelisks, of other columns . . . Kulindros is also occasionally a rolled manuscript, a parchment scroll. (HTW, 17) Entre-deux, on, around, tattooed, Glass columns are, as kulindros, the conveyor that displaces stones used in the erection of monuments, pyramids, or obelisks. Instead of building monuments to philosopher-kings to commemorate the superiority of logos, Derrida is playing with the remains the rubble and marginalia that dot the landscape, marking the impossibility of unity and synthesis. Glas begins with remains, with the inassimilable leftovers of the philosophic system: what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel? (G, 1). Derrida acknowledges their crucial role, the incalculable has to be part of the game (PTS, 17). As discussed in the first chapter, these remains construct, while simultaneously deconstructing, the very system that cannot synthesize them, and which therefore attempts to exclude or domesticate them. They are unlogofiable remnants of philosophy as logos. Although they cannot be accounted for by it, they nevertheless remain as disruptive resources that give rise to it. Like mythos in Plato, they are marginalized effects that strangely generate, while deconstructing, philosophic discourse. In Glas, one cannot ignore the other column to the right that is in interplay with the left one: what remained of a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole is divided in two. As the remain(s) [reste] (G, 1). Even the remains are remains of remains, torn into morsels. The remains are presented as two distyles, each scrapbooks of waste of excrement stuck together to form fissured columns. They are the garbage that the system attempts to repress and to hide. Yet, they resurface in the bowels of Glas to subvert the texts of Hegel, Derrida and Genet, as well as the goal of philosophy as logos. These remains find no reception whatsoever, and escape from the criteria of receivability (PTS, 17). They cannot be read, spoken or thought by philosophy as logos because they fall outside of all of the logocentric requirements of these acts. In this way, they cannot be properly received. In the distyle of the columns, if and when language speaks, it does so against the grain of, any intended communication . . .8
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These columns of distyles are, in effect, nothing. Such a nothing exceeds the alternatives of presence and absence. It is not the opposite of something: The column is nothing, has no meaning in itself. A hollow phallus, cut off from itself, decapitated . . . it guarantees the innumerable passages of dissemination and the playful displacement of the margins (D, 342). The columns have lost their heads; they are without reason.9 Instead of sowing the seeds of logos, they disseminate. Whereas most columns serve as stable, foundational supports, Derridas destabilize: the column is wounded, otherwise it would not be a column. It is truncated, marked, covered with scars and legends (G, 239). These wounds cannot be healed either by the reader or by the antidote of dialectics. Glas is not a legend to be utilized by logicians. Its legend is that of another. Efforts (on behalf of the reader-philosopher) notwithstanding, gl remain(s) gl (G, 119). Gl is not a word in the French or English lexicon. It is not proper discourse. Instead it is a mute or mad sound, a kind of mechanical automaton that triggers and operates itself without meaning (to say) anything (G, 910).10 The unintelligible, meaningless sound sticks in the back of the throat. Gl is not speech, nor is it a sound preceding speech. It is incomprehensible. Encrypted within the wounded distyles, it cannot be decrypted. How, therefore, are the columns to be apprehended? In the left column, Derrida poses a possible response to this question: Two unequal columns, they say distyle [dissent-ils], each of which envelop(e)(s) or sheath(es), incalculably reverses, turns inside out, replaces, remarks, overlaps [recoupe] the other. The incalculable of what remained calculates itself, elaborates all the coups [strokes, blows, etc.], twists or scaffolds them in silence, you would wear yourself out even faster by counting them. Each little square is delimited, each column rises with an impassive self-sufficiency, and yet the element of contagion, the infinite circulation of general equivalence relates each sentence, each stump of writing (for example, je mc . . . ) to each other, within each column and from one column to the other of what remained infinitely calculable. Almost. Of the remain(s), after all, there are, always, overlapping each other, two functions.
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The first assures, guards, assimilates, interiorizes, idealizes, relieves the fall [chute] into the monument. There the fall maintains, embalms, and mummifies itself, monumemorizes and names itself falls (to the tomb(stone)) [tombe]. Therefore, but as a fall, it erects itself there. The other lets the remain(s) fall. Running the risk of coming down to the same. (G, 12) Unequal, each column incalculably reverses, turns inside out the other, almost relating the stumps of writing from one column to those in the next. Almost. The interplay of the columns creates an indecidable, contaminating excess. It is difficult to read either one separately, but there is no simple transference between the two, either. The silent scaffolding of the echoes of homophones resonates throughout the text. Je nais, Genet or gent (a Spanish horse or a flower)? It is all of these simultaneously.11 In this way, the term is irreducibly indecidable. The operation of columnal remains is double. On the one hand, there is an attempt at dialectical preservation: the fall is relieved and erect[ed] in the name of something, toward an end; the fall is penultimate. In this context, each loss is turned into a gain.12 Hence, the fall is relieved and reversed, and ultimately erected.13 On the other hand, the remains fall, they do not work toward any end. Instead, they tumble to no avail. They lack purpose. At the moment in which they appear to run the greatest risk of coming down to the same (i.e. of synthesis and closure), they stay as inassimilable remains, diverting and disrupting. Glas works in a double movement. The columns both join and separate. This action of uniting and dividing staged within the text must also be performed by the reader. Words are often broken up mid-sentence only to continue several pages later amid the rubble of marginalia. Passages are often inserted suddenly, sometimes without identifying the sources of their citation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recounts the pas de deux that must be executed by the reader of Glas: Having coped with the break, the reader must perform a joining, go back to the cut, put the word back together, and continue the sentence.14 The double movement of cutting and agglutinating disrupts logos and the scene of the Hegelian seam. Glass motion does not follow the prescribed path of Hegelian logos in which thinking always returns to itself. The incompleteness and indecidability that
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remain always already within the system are staged in the goingand-returning from one column to the other (round trip without circularity and without perfect specularity) (HTW, 20). Inasmuch as Glas is a cut, a rending and a death knell, it is also a gluing and adherence. This text, explains Derrida, induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing [en accolant et en dcollant] rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric (G, 75). Glass operation is renegade and improper. Instead of following the necessity of a discursive rhetoric, it proceeds via the alogos of discursivitys etymological root, which stipulates both gathering and joining, and dispersing and scattering. Glass fissured columns turn inside into outside and outside into inside in such a way that it is hopeless to determine which is which. This continual reversal and displacement make Glas an indecidable text. It short circuits any attempt to follow a singular path, or to arrive at a point. This excess of possibilities continually confronts the reader. One column intervenes in another column. The complexity is maddening. Such slips, breaks and agglutinations disrupt logos. In this disseminative dynamic, savoir absolu is dragged onto the stage, into the play of forces where it no longer holds the power to decide, where no one ever holds that power, where the undecidable forces one to release ones hold, where one cant even hold onto it the undecidable. (PTS, 23) The play of forces resists decidability, like the pharmakon, which forever oscillates between remedy and poison, or mythos, which resonates between falsifiable and non-falsifiable discourse. Emergent, aleatory play disrupts logocentric thought from within. The heterogeneous columns deceive and play (G, 224) like the joker Thoth. There is no simple relation between them. Derrida introduces heterogeneous forces into Glas by way of remains, marginalia, citations and the cutting and joining of columns into the text (of Hegel, of Genet, of Derrida) in order to show how one cannot resist these forces, or rather one resists them, but in such a way that the resistance creates a symptom and is set to work on the body, transforming, deforming it and the corpus from head to toe (PTS, 1617). The corpus is sick, beyond cure even with a pharmakon, contaminated with indecidable, aleatory (and parasitic) forces. Through displacements,
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grafts, parodies, and multiplications, Glas exposes a certain declinging of the dual or dialectical unity . . . the relation without relation of the two columns (emphasis added, PTS, 17). The two columns (although there are always more than two) are not in dialectical relation. In other words, the Hegel column is not the sublation of Genet/Je nais, nor is it unconnected to it, either, since there is an interplay between the two. Therefore, the columns exist in a relation without relation.15 The without indicates that Glass distyles lack propriety and presence. They do not lend themselves to any economy of relation. The contra-rhythm of joining and separating that allows aleatory alogic to emerge is the movement of Glas that disrupts Hegels logic and the speculative work of logos. Glas both sews and tears, revealing that tears join and sewing ruptures. It works at the limits of a different kind of seam: For seams [coutures], this must be stressed, do not hold at any price. They must not be, here, for example, of a foolproof solidity. . . . Sewing [couture] then betrays, exhibits what it should hide, dissimulacras what it signals (G, 209). Taylor suggests that the double writing of Glas is duplicitous, but he doesnt fully substantiate his use of this term (A, 268). It is possible to read Taylors duplicitous otherwise, in terms of tears that sew and sewing that tears. Duplicitous writing is not only double, but also unwittingly deceptive, rather like a crypt that hides what it holds while simultaneously revealing it. In this case, tears prompt the reader to try to sew the text together. However, this joining undertaken by the reader discloses what the seam has been constructed to conceal. Instead of mending, these seams rend. Like a carefully guarded secret that slips out by virtue of its very secrecy (by admitting that one has a secret, the secret is no longer fully concealed), sewing divulges the unsuturable tears in logos, exposing mythos. Glas cannot but recall the bell that tolls it. Just as the clapper of a bell moves between the two sides of a chamber, Glas strikes between the two (G, 71). It is written neither one way nor the other (G, 71). Neither philosophical nor non-philosophical, it oscillates between the two, just as the reader must reverberate like the clapper of a bell between the columns of the text. This oscillation (between neither/ nor, philosophy/non-philosophy, logos/mythos) is unwieldy, disruptive, and unmasterable. According to Taylor, oscillum, originally designated a mask of Bacchus, hung from a tree in a vineyard that swung in the wind (A, xxx).16 Glas vibrates uncontrollably, disfiguring and refiguring Hegels Bacchanalian revel in which no member is
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not drunk (PS, 27), generating an other reading, one that is irreducibly indecidable.17 It makes impossible closure of the Hegelian circle of thought and of the dialectic. Just at the moment that it appears that the circle might (and where it insistently must) close, it is disrupted and dislocated, suspended entre-deux. Taylor warns against misreading Glas with one Cyclopean eye toward decidability or unity: A duplicitous text written with (at least) two hands at once cannot be approached single-mindedly (A, 274). One must oscillate entre-deux, and read with ones ear and tear-ful(l) eye attentive to a non-synthesizable other. The continual flux between the columns erects while it simultaneously deconstructs meaning, forbidding foreclosure. Such an irresolution slips and slides, plays at coming (to a point, perhaps a pyramidal point), but never arrives. It conceals as it reveals, and reveals as it conceals. Instead of monuments, as Derrida shows, there is only debris.
Sas Strange Loops
The oscillation between the wounded columns of Glas cannot achieve closure. As a result, the operation of savoir absolu is foiled. As we saw in Chapter 1, in speculative dialectics, logos must attempt to think the unthought, and identity must approach difference. Its rules necessitate this. Hegelian dialectics must confront these others in order to assimilate them and arrive at its promised synthesis. To do so, however, it transforms these others by forcing them to work in the service of the concept. Speculative philosophy attempts to render the unconscious conscious, the unthought thought, mythos as logos, difference as the identity of identity-and-difference. It insists that the circle must close, the promise must be fulfilled and consciousness must return to itself. What if, however, at the very moment when the system is poised to complete itself and secure its closure, it is disrupted from within by the remains that it has attempted, unsuccessfully, to repress and exclude? Rather than circularity, the system would generate instead strange loops that are self-reflexive circuits, which, though appearing to be circular, remain paradoxically open (MC, 75). These strange loops haunt the logic of savoir absolu, and create in Glas complex, self-organizing systems whose structure does not conform to the intrinsically stable systems that have governed thought and guided practice for more than three centuries (MC, 78). Instead of foreclosing, strange loops remain open. The very unanticipatability
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and indecidability of the strange loops of complex, emergent systems (such as the text of Glas) constantly displace the accountability of speculative dialectics. At first glance it might appear that Glas is a self-reflexive, closed loop since it both begins with the remains in its first fragmented sentence and ends with them in its last. However, when understood in terms of complexity theorys strange loops, it is obvious that this is not the case. Rather, a caesura or hiatus prevents what in effect resembles such a band or strip from turning back on itself (PTS, 51).18 A gap opens up that averts the eternal return of the same. Although the end would appear to resemble the fragmentary remains of the beginning, an aporia or abyss disfigures the circle, preventing the beginning from figuring the end and the end from fulfilling the beginning. The loop is not circular, but strangely deformed. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter uses the example of the familiar Mortons Salt box, which contains an image of a girl with an open umbrella in her right hand and a blue box of Mortons Salt in her left hand, to explain the deceptive uncanniness of strange loops. Hofstadter elaborates: You may think you smell infinite regress once again, but if so, you are fooling yourself! The girls arm is covering up the critical spot where the regress would occur. If you were to ask the girl to (please) hand you her salt box so that you could actually see the infinite regress on its label, you would wind up disappointed, for the label on that box would show her holding yet a smaller box with her arm once again blocking that regress.19 Just where the loop appears to close and reappropriate and repeat the image, there is an aporia that renders closure and the return of the same, or the infinite regress that Hofstadter is concerned with, impossible. The circle does not close, because the abyss, or gap, prevents it from doing so. The image of the image on the Mortons Salt box is a blind spot, and not, as is commonly inferred, a mirror displaying infinite repetition.20 Hofstadters familiar example illustrates strange loops at work, loops that are sometimes mistakenly considered closed and therefore not strange.21 These strange loops are generated by and emerge within the wounded, tattooed and breached distyles of Glas.
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SOUNDING SA On the Other Side
The odd logic of strange loops haunts the concept of savoir absolu, which Derrida recasts in the siglum of Sa. In the first line tattooed on the Hegel column in Glas, Derrida transcribes savoir absolu in an unusual equation: Sa from now on will be the siglum of savoir absolu (G, 1). There is more to this interplay than meets the eye. Hegel considered his encyclopedic book, Phenomenology of Spirit (cited throughout Glas), to be a tome of absolute knowledge. As such, in Derridas words, all finite books would become opuscules modeled after the great divine opus . . . so many tiny mirrors catching a single grand image. . . . a book of absolute knowledge that digested, recited, and substantially ordered all books (D, 46). Savoir absolu/Sa is the culmination of this enterprise and the fulfilment of philosophy. However, since this task is carried out in writing, it is always open to being read and understood not as Hegel intended, but otherwise.22 Therefore, it is impossible to declare savoir absolu/Sa unequivocally. Sa is also, at the same time, the Saussurian signified (signification absolue), sa the singular, feminine possessive pronoun, as well as a homophone of a, the Freudian id. John P. Leavey points out that Derridas tachygraphy begins its own disruption of the tachygraphic.23 That is, Derridas shorthand launches disturbances and disruptions of transcription. Sa plays, generating strange loops of indecidability. The term carries this multiplicity of significations within it simultaneously. Its polysemia renders its meaning indecidable, since no one translation can capture all of its resonances. In reverberating it with the other side, that of a of the Freudian unconscious, and therefore disrupting the sense certainty of the here and now with which Hegel begins his encyclopedia, Derrida writes, it (a) does not accentuate itself here now but will already have been put to the test on the other side (G, 1).24 a is not contained within the self-consciousness of Sa/ savoir absolu, but is necessarily involved in Sa, which cannot be conceived without it. However, unlike Hegels savoir absolu, which thinks the other and merges it with identity, this Sa/a cannot be properly apprehended, since in its ever-deferring multiplicity and indecidability, it is never present as such. The unthought remains of Hegel are inscribed into the Genet column, but that column ne gnre pas Sa. Far from presenting Sa in thought, nothing is generated within the
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strange loops of the two columns, one of which encloses the column inscribed as Sa. Sas operation mimics that of the oscillation between the columns of Glas. It works in a double movement. Instead of tolling the closure of philosophy, it opens out into a space that is neither philosophical nor non-philosophical. Derrida explains the a of Glas and Sa in the following way: The detached remain(s) collared thereby, by the glue of differance, by the a. The a of gl agglutinates the detached differentiae. The scaffold of the A is gluing (G, 167). Sa is the double movement of cutting and adhering. The scaffold of the A of Sa (and Glas) glues, while the S of Sa simultaneously disseminates. The S, after all, is the the disseminating letter par excellence (P, 96). Sa adheres and cuts as it gathers and tears. Whereas the a of Glas and of Sa agglutinates, causing the remains to stick together in a heap of detached differentiae, the s disseminates, scatters, cuts, and errs. The fallen s also [c]over[s] the space between [lentre-deux] the lips or displaced letters in (the) pyramidal nonument [monumanque pyramidale] (G, 34). Like a sheath, the fallen s is a strange nonument between the alternatives of presence and absence. It is an abyss (like the one between the lips) that cannot be thought or spoken by philosophy as logos. Sa has yet another resonance. Derrida introduces the myth of Saturn into the text, associating Sa (with all of its significations) with the god Saturn, whom he also demarks as Sa. In the Hegel column, Derrida recounts part of the story of Sa-Saturn-Kronos. With the help of his mother-queen, Gaia (earth), Saturn castrates his father, Uranus (sky), to become king. Yet, his kingship is as ill-fated as his fathers, doomed to end violently (in not quite a repetition, but rather in more like a strange loop). Warned that one of his children would depose him, Sa swallows each of them at birth.25 However, Gaia hides the baby Zeus when he is born, and presents Sa with a rock dressed as a baby instead, which he mistakes for Zeus and ingests. By tricking him into entombing this supplement in his bowels, Gaia induces Sa to take a pharmakon that forced him to vomit all the children he had eaten (G, 232). By means of this pharmakon, Sa is then deposed and castrated, like his father, Uranus. Derridas association of Sa (savoir absolu) and the myth of SaSaturn-Kronos incorporates other resonances. In Hesiods account, Uranus refusal to allow Gaia to give birth precipitates her creation
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of the sickle that Saturn/Kronos uses to castrate his father (TH, lines 161 and 175).26 The sickle, a farming tool that Gaia crafts for Saturn, links him to agriculture.27 In addition, Saturn enters the Roman pantheon through an identification with the obscure Sicilian god, Saturnus, about whom little more is known than that he was also a harvest deity.28 Kronos identity is distinguished by a marked internal contradiction or ambivalence (SM, 134). He is described simultaneously as of crooked counsel and as the benevolent god of agriculture (SM, 134). The equation of the Greek Kronos with the Roman Saturn arrested this ambiguity by emphasizing the positive traits and adding attributes such as guardian of wealth, overseer of a system of counting by weight and measure and inventor of coin-minting (SM, 135).29 However, Klibansky et al. quote Abu Masar as saying that Saturn, who oversees a system of counting, also presides over blindness. The blind spot is built into Sas system! Sa, the panoptical eye that can account for everything, is simultaneously connected with blindness, and thus accounts for nothing. In this way, seeing is a not-seeing or seeing through a veil of tears. Historically, Saturn/Kronos evokes multiple associations, evidence of the open-ended indecidability of mythos itself. In both The Statesman and The Laws, Plato recalls the Golden Age of Kronos as a utopian era of plenitude, when people were provided with everything in abundance and without any effort on their part (Laws 713a).30 Plotinus then elevates Kronos by associating him with Intellect (), while Zeus, on the other hand, symbolized Soul. Therefore, the myth of Saturn devouring his children could be interpreted so as to mean that the intellect, until it brings forth the soul, retains its offspring within itself (SM, 153). Lukacher points out that Socratic wordplay and Platonic irony in the Cratylus are responsible for the neo-Platonists interpretation. This understanding, however, is then transferred from Athens to Rome as the Nous went from Kronous to Satur-nous (abundant intellect) (K, 59). Lukacher also observes that Augustine ridicules this formulation, dismissing it as pagans equating the deity with time (i.e. of Saturn with time: Father Time becomes father of the gods; K, 59). Even though scholars such as Taylor have suggested that the etymology of Saturn is linked with time, chronology, chronicle, and so forth, Lukachers examination of historical usage reveals that this is a false and misplaced origin (K, 589).31
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Freud cannot resist the lure of Saturn, either. In The Interpretation of Dreams, a and Sa-Saturn unintentionally interweave and tangle together when he retells part of the myth: Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar devours the sows litter; while Zeus emasculated his father and made himself ruler in his place.32 It is notable that Freud recounts the myth erroneously, portraying Saturn as castrated, but not as a castrator.33 Lukacher views Freuds analysis of castration as an illusory reconciliation of opposites . . . The sliding signification of terms into which contradictory positions and their illusory synthesis are the conditions which determine the structure of Freuds discourse on castration (K, 69). Lukacher rewrites this strange (non-)structure as K(Ch)ronosology, which deconstructs a texts decidedness and reconstructs the conditions of its indecidability (K, 69). He further explains: What K(Ch)ronosology suggests is that writing always contains an excess, a difference, in which castration and non-castration are enmeshed in interminable indecidability (K, 69).34 This focus on the indecidable structure of castration castration as a prescriptive operation rather than a descriptive one reveals yet another strange loop within the texts significations and meanings. Lukachers reading may itself be reread to reveal Saturn as a non-synthetic synthesis. Sa does not reconcile opposites. It instead brings together what it holds apart, and holds apart what it brings together. Cutting (such as the cutting involved in castration) is sewing (sowing and seminating), and sowing is cutting. Semination automatically calls forth dissemination, and dissemination seminates strange loops that are not the least bit seminal. Mythically, this is played out when Uranus spilled blood spawns monsters and uncanny improper others (the Erinnyes) who are outside of the accepted hierarchical order, and excluded from ruling atop Olympus. In addition to the ceaseless play of Sa that calls forth the everdeferring significations of Sa, Derrida sets up an interplay between Sa-Saturn and Dionysus. The node of this connecting tendril is agriculture: So Saturn would be a deposed father whose Latin reign had nevertheless left the memory of a mythic golden age. He had become the god of agriculture and more precisely, armed with a sickle and a billhook, he used to preside at the pruning of the vine. Like Dionysus-Bacchus, he was intimately bound up with wine. He would also be considered the god of the underworld. (G, 232)
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Although their shared relationship to the vine, and thus to agriculture, is apparent, what is their underworld connection? Derridas association unknowingly echoes a myth recorded in Nonnos multivolume fifth-century text, Dionysiaca. As Nonnos recounts it, Demeter hides Persephone in a cave to prevent her from marrying any of the gods. Upon discovering her, Zeus transforms himself into a dragon, and seduces Persephone. The result is the birth of Zagreus, who is later reborn as Dionysus. The precocious infant climbed upon the heavenly throne of Zeus and brandished lightning in his little hand . . . But he did not hold the throne of Zeus for long.35 Bent on destroying the upstart, Hera and the resentful Titans disguised themselves by smearing their faces with chalk. While the baby Zagreus-Dionysus is enraptured by his own image in a mirror given to him as a toy, they cut him to pieces (sparagmos). Playing excessively for the sake of play, and distracted by his reflection in the mirrors dis-play, Dionysus fails to recognize the disguised Titans. In Vernants account, this duplication which removes him from himself is the occasion for the Titans to cut him in pieces . . . fragmenting unity.36 This cutting, rebirth and transformation spawn a multitude of identities for Zagreus-Dionysus. One of these is as ancient Cronos (DI, 6.171). The baby Zagreus-Dionysus, who whimsically usurped the throne of Zeus (temporarily displacing Zeuss panoptic eagle eye, and ushering in aleatory play in its stead), regenerates himself after his dismemberment into the form of Kronos/ Saturn. Hence the association of Sa-Saturn-Dionysus. The interplay is maddening, but it is not the self-negating revelry of Hegels preface. This festivity is otherwise.
Disseminating Festivities
Transgressive rituals known as Saturnalias, which were often akin to Bacchanalias, were held to commemorate Saturn/Sa. James G. Frazer discusses the Roman Saturnalia as an event popularly supposed to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing and of husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and beneficent king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on the mountains together, taught them to till the ground, gave them laws, and ruled in peace.37
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Frazers description reveals the Saturnalia as a uniting harvest festival to a righteous and beneficent king, aligned with peace and order and the agricultural rhythm of the sown and sprouting seed. This is quite a divergence from the despot who castrated his father and ate his children, sowing disorder, and wastefully scattering (disseminating) seed that drips from the ploughshare he scythed from his father. In its weave, Glas figures and disfigures the thread of the Saturnalia, attentive to the multi-faceted complexity of Saturn: So saturnalia corresponded with a rhythm of season, a word that comes no doubt, like Saturn, from sata, the fruits of the earth and seeds, from serere, to sow, or from satus, son. Sowing time [semaison] is a season [saison]; serere would have the same semantic origin as semen, seminare. . . . During saturnalia, order was overturned; the law transgressed itself: time of debauchery, of licentiousness, of drunkenness, spasmodic revolution in the course of which, says an anachronistic treatise of mythology, the social classes were topsy-turvy, slaves of their slaves that they then serve at table. The bad turn of seasons coming to put the history of spirit out of order, Sas saturnalia would then be intimately bound up with a disordering [drglement] of the seminarium. To play with the four seasons: this play, this evil of Sa, opens this play with a gap that no longer assures it of being able to reappropriate itself in the Trinitarian circle. This season disorder [mal de saison] neither destroys nor paralyzes absolutely the infinite concept. If it formed only the negative of this concept, it would yet confirm that concept dialectically. Rather, it puts that concept out of order, stops it, jams [grippe] it inconceivably. (G, 2323) Although related to agriculture and to sowing seeds operations that attempt to ensure a return on ones investment the Saturnalia is a wasteful expenditure without return. This description stands in stark contrast to Frazers tame soire. In Glass Saturnalia, seeds are filched, order overturned, the law transgressed itself. This debauchery and drunkenness are not ultimately stilled and subsumed in Hegels transparent repose. The Saturnalia is not the inversion of Hegels master-slave dialectic that would have the master prevail in the end, to return home to an ordered house of repose. Instead, the Saturnalia of Sa is a bad turn of seasons coming to put the history
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of spirit out of order. It disorders and disseminates (drglement du seminarium). Sa does not play to a specific, dialectical end. If Sas festive play were negative, or if the effects of this play were merely negative, then Sa would affirm savoir absolu and assure logos closure. As we have seen, such disavowal in the speculative economy only works to affirm that economy. Negation is negated and turned into a positive. Through a dialectical confirmation of the concept, losses are turned into gains. Instead however, Sa opens this play with a gap, barring reappropriation. Sa and its saturnalia are a mal de saison whose aporetic fissures prevent closure or a return to prefestival order. Neither simple avowal nor simple disavowal of the concept, Sas saturnalia puts that concept out of order, stops it, jams [grippe] it inconceivably. In this way, Sa announces the impossibility of such conception: The triangle or the circle can remain open when Sa arrives at the text. The text then will be what Sa cannot always give itself, what happens [arrive] to Sa, rather than Sa arriving there itself (G, 229). The course is not circular and closed, but loopy, open and strange. Unable to reappropriate itself, to return to itself foritself, and so complete itself in savoir absolu, to which its fulfilment is bound, logos and the dialectic are put out of order by a gap, unwittingly self-imposed. This dysfunctional state is not the repose of which Hegel spoke, but a transgression and sickness. It is a wound without a cure that discomposes and unavoidably disfigures philosophy as logos. In these disseminative festivities, the pharmakon returns once again, in yet another guise, as a pharmakos, which is a scapegoat or a contaminated criminal who must be expelled from the Greek city-state in order to cleanse the polis. In his study of Oedipus Rex, Jean-Pierre Vernant discusses Oedipus as a hero-king, who is also simultaneously a pharmakos. Vernants insights further disfigure and refigure Sa-Saturn-Dionysus. Citing research by other classicists, Vernant points out that in many Greek cities, and Athens in particular, there was an annual rite involving the pharmakos. Its aim was to expe[l] the contamination accumulated in the course of the past year.38 One female and one male pharmakos were paraded through the city, where they were struck on the genitals with squill bulbs, figs, and other wild plants, then they were expelled (AAR, 487). Motifs of wild (not domesticated or agricultural) vegetation and the striking of the genitals of the pharmakoi by the inhabitants of the city echo the themes of castration, sowing and disseminating.39 Additionally, as
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jailbirds designated by their misdeed, their physical ugliness, their base condition, their vile and repugnant occupation, as inferior beings, degraded, phauloi, the rejects of society, the pharmakoi represent what Vernant designates as the dregs of the population (AAR, 487). As dregs, they are the cast-off remains of the polis. However, these remains are elevated as saviors, since their transgressions are redeemed through the act of their expulsion as pharmakoi. These insiders are tossed out to assure the citys health, to keep the inside pure. As we have seen, affirmation and negation are inextricably bound together. Therefore the expulsion of the pharmakos also unwittingly preserves some element that the polis, at the same time, disavows. The elevation of the pharmakos is also simultaneously its suppression, and the base nature of the pharmakos is precisely that which elevates it and renders it salvific. Vernant also notes that sometimes, as in the case of Oedipus, the king is the disease plaguing the polis. As a result, he must be ritually sacrificed. In these situations, a member of the community is selected as a doppelgnger to stand in for the king. Vernant explains: Such is the pharmakos: double of the king, but in reverse, like those sovereigns at carnival crowned at holiday time, when order is set upside down, social hierarchies reversed: sexual prohibitions are lifted, theft becomes legal, the slaves take their masters place, the women trade their clothes with men; then the throne must be occupied by the basest, ugliest, most ridiculous, most criminal of men. But, the holiday once ended, the counter-king is expelled or put to death, dragging with him all the disorder which he incarnates and of which the community is purged at one blow. (emphasis added, AAR, 48990) Akin to the Saturnalia, the rite of the pharmakos like the pharmakos himself is transgressive, wasteful and mad. By turning the natural order inside out, the pharmakos creates a revelry of dis-ease. Reason loses its head. This is not Hegelian inversion, however. Like Sas Saturnalia, the rite of the pharmakos is the riotous interplay of multiple seeds of dissemination. The play of these significations imposes a gap. It puts the concept [savoir absolu] out of order, stops it, jams it inconceivably. This revelry cannot be tamed or retired the day after the festivities. Despite elaborate prescribed rituals created to get rid of them, these transgressive outsiders within can never be completely expelled to the outside. Not only does the inside rely on
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the transgressive pharmakoi for its purity for its supposed reappropriation of order and well-being but significantly these inassimilable outsiders must come from within. They are part of the very polis that cannot quite do with them or without them. Like the crypt, they are necessarily both preserved and suppressed. The pharmakos ceremony involves simultaneous affirmation and denial. These forces of resistance as marginalia, citations, remains, pharmakoi create a symptom in the corpus (of the text, of the polis, of the philosopherking) that deform and transform it. This symptom of dis-ease requires the pharmakon or pharmakos to cure it, but the pharmakon/pharmakos needed to heal and purify it also comprises the very poison that it is employed to cure. The polysemia of Glas, as that of the pharmakon/pharmakos and Sa/a-Saturn-Dionysus, is irreducibly indecidable. There is no awakening from this madness, no transparent repose to be found. Instead, there is a constant tolling and unending deferral oscillating (like the clapper of a bell) entre-deux: preserving while suppressing, keeping while expelling, affirming while denying, outside while inside. Resounding ceaselessly, the sound of philosophys death knell also rings in a beginning that opens out like a cut or tear from the already broken promise of savoir absolu. This gaping fissure opens out into the complex network of mythos and logos.
Incorporating the Pharmakon
Just as the polis relies on the pharmakos to ensure its health, even while expelling it, the pharmakon (the stone) that Gaia cunningly convinces Saturn to swallow is not incorporated either. Instead of digesting and assimilating the pharmakon, Saturn vomits it, along with all of his children that he had devoured. The pharmakon is that which is neither-swallowed-nor-rejected, that which remains stuck in the throat as other, neither-received-nor-expulsed (PTS, 43). Ingesting the pharmakon is not a case of assimilating difference, where what was other and previously foreign becomes integrated. This recalls the distinction between introjection and incorporation elaborated in Chapter 2. Introjection mimics the Hegelian dialectic, where difference is merged with identity as the identity of identity-and-difference. Incorporation, on the other hand, is not assimilation. Rather, the other is preserved as other, but is at the same time prohibited, much like the pharmakos. Glass pharmakon also recalls the crypt that is incorporated into the system.40 As an outside that is inside, the crypt
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simultaneously suppresses that which the system cannot account for or confront, while at the same time, unwittingly preserving and guarding it. Conservation and rejection work in a double movement, oscillating between disavowal and avowal. As we have seen, attempts to reject Hegelian savoir absolu unwittingly affirm it. In the Hegelian system, negation affirms, and affirmation necessarily negates. Derrida, therefore, must incorporate Hegel and Hegels system into Glas. If he rejects it outright then Glass unlogofiable aspects will only have been a momentary detour on the path to logos. In other words, Glas would work to affirm philosophy as logos. However, this is not what it does. Glass operation (as a written text to be read, but confounding any customary or familiar route of doing so) incorporates Hegels system by engorging and then disgorging it: The text of Aufhebung is properly read by aufheb-ing it, destroying it to preserve it. . . . Derrida will come (almost) to eat Hegel as Saturn (almost) ate Jupiter [Zeus] and thus try to change Hegels Seminar (a seed-plot, a school for turning the son into a father) into a Saturnalia, where master and slave exchange places provisionally. By a stroke of his autobiographical D, he would change semination into dis-semination, sowing into scattering. Paradoxically, to eat Father thus is not merely to scatter but in-corporate. (GP, 23) Derrida almost digests Hegel, just as Saturn almost ate Zeus . . . almost. This is not the action of introjection, but rather of incorporation. Unlike introjection, which synthesizes, incorporation disfigures, but only after adding the other to itself as irreducibly other. In showing how the Hegelian dialectic works, Derrida is also pointing out precisely how it does not work as promised. Although savoir absolu attempts to swallow the other (to introject the other) in its dialectical movement of Aufhebung, something indigestible remains. These remains are the vomit of the system that prevents complete unification, or introjection. Instead, there is in-corporation of the pharmakon that is simultaneously both remedy and poison. These remains impose a gap, and prevent closure, thereby disfiguring savoir absolu. As Derrida underscores, in the form of a question: Isnt there always an element excluded from the system that assures the systems space of possibility? (G, 162). The vomit of the system is
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not intrinsic to the system (G, 162), but it is unavoidable. Its existence reveals that through the act of incorporation, the system of Sa depends upon something that it cannot include, but that nevertheless assures the system of its possibility. This inclusion is nonetheless impossible since this other within as an outsider is unaccountable and unlogofiable. By its unavoidable and necessary inclusion, this outside deconstructs the system from within. Yet it cannot be excluded, since this other gives rise to the system. There can be no system without it. The pharmakon, like mythos, is an inescapable necessity that contaminates savoir absolu.41 It gives Saturn a bellyache, and induces vomiting. In Glas, the taste for and the handling of poison are declared throughout the text. The text is nourished by them. . . . glas is a kind of poisoned milk (G, 15). Poisoned milk, as Derrida so aptly delineates it, is a pharmakon. Mothers milk, the primordial source of nourishment, growth and health, carries poison that undermines, even as it fortifies. Although Sa cannot incorporate this foreign element into itself, it unwittingly preserves it as a crypt that is too cryptic for logos to decipher and assimilate by means of speculative dialectics or logocentric discourse. In Glas, Sa announces the impossibility of fully realizable thought, of closure. When thought ceases to return to itself, the glas of Sa (as savoir absolu) is sounded as an indecidable excess inscribed within the columns of Glas. Glas announces a tolling that opens out.42 It is an oscillation of nothing that nevertheless disrupts. Even Glas is barred from closing on itself, from synthesis, since each text encounters the other text as inassimilable, just as philosophy or Sa finds the pharmakon indigestible. This poisoned milk (that can also be salubrious) may indeed come from the (m)other, from mythos. As Derrida suggests, to read Hegel, or follow after him, is to do so otherwise through simultaneous negation and affirmation. Glas attempts to probe the fissures that rupture Sa. In incorporating Hegel, but failing, inevitably, to digest him completely, these tears are exposed. Glas alternates between affirmation and denial, and sounds this strange loop: But the operation is not negative, it affirms with a limitless yes, immense, prodigious, inaudible. And the operation constructs, a kind of solid transverse, in order to suspend the bell between two towers (G, 228). The affirmation is as inaudible as the a of diffrance, yet it nevertheless resounds with a limitless yes.43 Unable to be conventionally heard, it is not present, yet undeniably, neither is it absent.Glas harbours an inherent indecidability that can
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never be resolved. To ingest Hegel, mythos and the pharmakon is to deny them, and to attempt to transform them to work in the service of philosophy as logos. Incorporating them, as Derrida does Hegel, and Platos Phaedrus does mythos and pharmakon, affirms their inescapable importance, even if these authors do not digest them fully. As philosophy as logos denies and denigrates mythos, it affirms its essential role. Glas, through Sa, demonstrates this crucial dynamic relation of mythos and logos, even though its focus is elsewhere.
SECRETING MYTHOS Encrypting
Having examined the column dedicated to Sa-Saturn-SaturnaliaDionysus, it is necessary to explore the other column curiously in interplay with this one. Tattooed within the larger Sa-SaturnSaturnalia-Dionysus column is another that begins (although one gets the sense that this beginning is a continuation of something that never ended) by posing a question: what is it not to read Hegel or to read him badly, or rather the text Sa? Is this negativity comprehended, included, and at work in the text Sa? (G, 231).44 This query is followed by yet another: What would it mean not to comprehend (Hegel) the text Sa? (G, 231). Inscribing this question in bold print within the Sa-Saturn-Dionysus column suggests that this inscription is primary, and not secondary. In other words, the column of SaSaturn-Dionysus is introduced as if to answer the questions engraved within it, while at the same time, it looks as if it was always already there, even before the questions were asked. It appears that this inquiry falls directly in the domain of philosophy. Only philosophy as logos can address this conundrum about the comprehension of Sa. However, by inscribing these philosophical questions within the column of Sa-Saturn-Dionysus, Derrida is in effect saying: this inquiry, although philosophical, cannot be solved or responded to by philosophy as logos. The fact that these questions are tattooed on the Sa-SaturnDionysus column is equally significant. The transgressive art of tattooing slips between structural polarities such as inside/outside and differentiation/unification.45 Taylor explains that by repeatedly alternating between unreconcilable opposites, tattooing (dis)figures a
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boundary that cannot be fixed. Forever superficial, even when its wounds are deep, the tattooed body is the incarnation of a cut that never heals and a seam that never mends (S, 39). The encrypted column (tattoo) is neither simply inside nor outside; it slips between. Derridas tattooed question forever (dis)figures the boundary between logos and mythos. The tattooed (dis)corpus is a wound that continually afflicts philosophy as logos. The response played out in the other column, that of Sa-Saturn-Dionysus, is by way of something non-philosophical. Specifically, the answer to this question of and to logos is mythos. The configuration of Derridas page visualizes logos arising from mythos, from an incomprehensibility that forever faults it, opening it to that which it cannot grasp. This failure inscribes logos with the impossible that cannot be broached philosophically, that is, by means of logos. As a (dis)figure of the impossible, mythos figures logos while simultaneously disfiguring it from within.46 Such questions force logos to transgress its limits, exposing it to that which gives to it its contours, but remains, nonetheless, nonlogofiable. Therefore, not to comprehend and to comprehend Hegel and savoir absolu is always already to approach Sa, in all of its indecidable deferrals. It is to approach mythos. Derrida explores the text of Sa, which is both the excessive Sa played out in the other column, and the a of non-knowing, in order to discover whether the disruptive dissemination of Sa is merely the result of an anticipated detour that is ultimately corrected by Sa itself. He asks: What recourse would the text Sa have, and before what authority [instance] could it lead this nonreading or this bad preliminary reading, or all the seductions, drifts, perversions, neither real nor fictive, neither true nor false, that would entrain the text Sa outside itself, without subjecting themselves to its [sa] jurisdiction? (G, 231) In other words, is a bad reading or nonreading possible? According to the logic of the dialectic, savoir absolu always has recourse to the last word. The negative is foreseen, sublated, taken up into the movement of the Aufhebung, transformed and synthesized into it. If savoir absolu is truly an absolute synthesis, then the text of Sa would always be fully comprehended. Any failure to do so would only be momentary, finite, already anticipated. This finite failure would be
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in advance included, comprehended in the text (G, 232). However, Derrida is seeking that which would entrain Sa outside itself without subjecting the erring, and that which causes the wandering, to Sa as savoir absolu. Philosophy as logos cannot answer this question, because it is already caught within Sa, within the economy of presence, always toiling to that end. It constructs discourse at the expense of dis-course. It always works toward Sas end, where thinking comes to a point, to an apex, presencing itself and taking account of all of its movements, presenting itself as a unity, as One. Philosophic discourse is the discourse of logos. Philosophy as logos must say and think something: there cannot be an absolutely negative discourse: a logos necessarily speaks about something; it is impossible for it to refer to nothing.47 Hence, philosophic discourse is always oriented toward making this something present, knowable and graspable. Even the negative is rendered speakable and thinkable. In the dialectic it is transformed into something.48 Therefore, when Derrida poses this question, he cannot answer it strictly by means of logos or Sa as savoir absolu. Instead, he must invoke an other Sa, one whose disseminative operations are outside of, yet simultaneously within, logos-Sa. Derrida must let his hypothesis of a bad reading (which is a hypothesis made within philosophic discourse, which assumes a singular, correct reading) fall [tomber], in the margin or epigraph, as a remain(s) about which one does not know if it works, in view or in the service of whom or what (G, 232). It is a philosophical question put to philosophy that philosophy cannot answer. The hypothesis remains unprovable as a result. Therefore, one must let it fall or drop, as a remain(s). Since the remains are not governed by the economy that they nevertheless form, they cannot be judged by it, because they are ultimately unaccountable. They are not to be counted on or accounted for by philosophy as logos. The fragmentary ending of Glas signals its own undocumentable operations: But it runs to its ruin [perte], for it counted without [sans] (G, 262). Counting is an operation that assumes an underlying binary structure that is added to in a quantifiable way. Counting without counting sans counting is, therefore, not counting in a quantifiable way. The unaccountable is unaccountable. Philosophy must let the question and hypothesis fall. Nonetheless, the question itself, and what remains of it, are disruptive. The tattooed column is itself inscribed with a curious citation. After inconclusively concluding that the hypothesis of a bad reading
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must fall as remains, and be allowed to play to no end, only for the sake of play, Derrida cuts and pastes the following into his text: like such a note at the bottom of the page of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (emphasis added, G, 232). Derrida lets his reading fall, along with Kierkegaards. The two tangle together. Kierkegaards work also ruminates on the margins and remains of Hegels philosophic system, and on the means by which such fragments upset knowledge and the appearance of truth. Writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard employs indirect communication in order to expose the gaps in Hegels system. He, like Derrida over a century later, recognizes that the question of philosophy of savoir absolu cannot be approached directly. Doing so only reinscribes the system that one seeks to subvert. Derrida quotes Kierkegaard as follows: It is presumably the witchery of this ever continuing process which has inspired the misunderstanding that one must be a devil of a fellow in philosophy in order to emancipate himself from Hegel. But this is by no means the case. All that is needed is sound common sense, a fund of humor, and a little Greek ataraxy.49 Outside the Logic, and partly also within the same, because of a certain ambiguous light which Hegel has not cared to exclude, Hegel and Hegelianism constitute an essay in the comical. (cited in G, 232) By using this lengthy citation from Kierkegaard, Derrida hints at the impossibility of a philosophical response to the question that he himself poses about Sa. One possible response is humour. Laughter is an excess of the system, a remains.50 Within the system, laughter is, in the words of Bataille, nothing (IE, 111). Discarded as unserious and therefore unphilosophical, the comic is improper. Unlike knowledge, which as Bataille says, works, laughter is dsoeuvrement, that is, it unworks (IE, 111). Kierkegaard encourages the reader to oscillate between reading straight (working and philosophizing) and reading crooked (unworking and laughing). The certain ambiguous light that Hegel has not cared to exclude, and which, we have seen, is included by virtue of all effort to exclude it, both constructs and deconstructs the Hegelian system. This is the fissure in savoir absolu that Derrida recasts as Sa-Saturn-Dionysus by telling a story, a myth. If Hegelianism is an essay in the comical, then a philosophical response is ridiculous and improper. Logos cannot fully account for
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itself, even if it tries to do so. Such an act is laughable. In other words, it is not to be taken seriously. The other column of Glas must answer Sas question by refiguring it through the ever-deferring, indecidable Sa of Glas. Derrida responds by invoking mythos, by telling a story. What philosophy as logos cannot think is approached by way of mythos. Taylor is also instinctively drawn to mythos when he faces the nonspace, or locus of the religious imagination, despite his disinterest in the significance of mythos. He begins Chapter 6 of Tears by soliciting the abysmal silence of the crypt that open[s] a radically altered nonspace (T, 73). Taylor continues, To approach this space, which disallows every arrival, I begin (again) with a story a story about an event or nonevent that might have taken place a terribly long time ago . . . Once upon a time . . . (T, 73). Like Derrida he then proceeds to (re)tell the story of Saturn and the Titans, which he later connects to Derridas retelling in Glas, in order to establish an anachronism (that he falsely links to Kronos) of the nonspace of which he speaks. This non-space, which disallows every arrival, is reminiscent of the opening site of Platos Phaedrus, which begins with mythos and as a consequence, prevents logos from returning full circle to itself. Taylors storytelling is telling. Like Plato, he is compelled to turn to story, to mythos, in order to approach a locus of logos. There is no other avenue. The impossibility of Sas completion, its muteness in the face of the gap imposed upon it by that part of it which is non-knowing, is attested to and broached only by mythos, which simultaneously figures and disfigures thinking. Even if the wellspring of thought is unthinkable, it/id lends at least a contour to the ableto-be-thought (PTS, 52). These contours are adumbrated, but never fully conceptualized, by mythos. As Taylor points out, the story he recounts took place outside of time proper. It is therefore anachronistic, out of joint and beyond the boundaries. As a result, while it calls forth logos and structure, it is itself not fully encompassed within these. Logos as a structure is not complete. It is incapable of fully answering on its own the question of philosophy as logos: how is Sa to be comprehended, to be read? The response, it would seem (and here, perhaps, a burst of laughter breaks out) is that savoir absolu, and by extension, philosophy as logos, can only be understood through an unending oscillation with mythos. As a non-foundational foundation, mythos calls forth logos, and logos gives mythos a form in which it can begin to contour the able-to-be-thought (logos).
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However, the existence of either one mythos or logos uncontaminated by the other, is impossible and inexpressible.
Secretions
Mythos can never be fully present. It recalls a time not properly present, a once upon a time that is always past. In addition, due to its irreducibly indecidable nature, it unavoidably disrupts and disseminates. The myth of Saturn, and Derridas use of it, illustrates this. The story at once summons resonances that, although not completely present, are not absent either. These echoes appear to come from the other side of sense certainty, from a, the underworld and the fruits rooted in the dark womb of the earth, from Dionysus, and from the pharmakon. As mythos gathers these in, it also disseminates them, forever opening out into an excess of possibilities, reverberating between meanings and significations. Mythos both gathers and disperses. Many scholars of myth have missed the profound significance of mythos being neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable discourse. As discussed in the first chapter, Brisson establishes the definition of mythos as discourse that is neither true nor false. It is on this basis that philosophy as logos views it as inferior, even irrelevant. Since its status cannot be determined, it is discounted by philosophy. As we have established, however, looking through the eyes of deconstruction instead, we see that it cannot be devalued or excluded. Mythos gives rise to logos, even as it also breaches, tears and deconstructs logos. It is precisely these aporias that make logos both possible and impossible. These questions that philosophy as logos cannot answer can only be approached by means of mythos, whether this mythos is the pharmacological playground from which the Phaedrus proceeds and to which the text repeatedly returns, or the Sa played out in the other column of Glas. As we have seen, Glas blurs the distinction between inside and outside. One cannot tell which column is within, and which one is without. Furthermore, the questions of philosophy tattooed on the Sa-Saturn-Dionysus column further displace the boundaries. There is no demarcation or discrepancy between an outside that is inside and an inside that is outside. The oscillation between these seemingly incompatible positions is the very point: both are always already simultaneously and continuously in play. In Glas, there is a strange
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co-emergence of these columns and interplay between them. Similarly, mythos in relation to logos is both an outside within, and an inside that is outside. Secretions, Taylor observes, are always entre-deux. While a secret is an outside that is inside, a secretion is an inside that is outside (T, 190). By attempting to exclude, repress and conceal mythos, philosophy as logos unwittingly both preserves and reveals it. The excluded core (indecidable mythos) is encrypted within logos, and returns by that route to destabilize the very structure (philosophy as logos) that attempted to prohibit it and that secretes it as unwanted extraneous contamination. The diseased corpus (of Glas, of philosophy proper, of the philosopher-king), secretes the sickness that prevents the closure of savoir absolu, hoping to expel it, to engorge the destabilizing contaminant with antibodies to constrain it, in order to close the gap and heal the wound. However, the cure (pharmakon) cannot be counted on. It is duplicitous, simultaneously remedy and poison. Dialectics cannot remedy this indecidability. Logos is never entirely free from mythos, and is therefore not pure. It unwittingly secretes mythos, not as a by-product left after savoir absolu, but as an inescapable non-foundational foundation that gives rise to philosophy as logos. Similarly, mythos also begins to be lost as pure mythos (as Sa/a) when it appears in the form of this strange unbidden secretion. Its play must be arrested, to some extent, in order for it to be recognized, because it must avail itself of the language of logos in order to appear at all. Yet mythos is not entirely present, because the language of logos is inadequate to express it fully. Mythos can never be fully present precisely because it is, by nature, an excessive, inexpressible oscillation of multiplicities. Language and thought (logos), which are always oriented toward unity and presence, and therefore limited to expressing the determinate, cannot capture such heterogeneity. Thus mythos, like a secret, only appears in beginning to be lost.51 This elusive secretion warrants closer examination. William Doty explains that the Indo-European root, ma, which imitates a childs cry for the breast, associating it with mother, is similar to the ProtoIndo-European root, mu, from which mythos is derived.52 Ma and mu are homonyms, pronounced the same, and homologous, corresponding in value and function (M, 6). Ma (to coin a siglum that refers to both mythos and mama or [m]other) is always on the scene as a non-absent absence and engendering origin, unsettling Sa
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from within. Ma is the remains that the system, in its self-generating and self-sustaining coupling of father-king-son, attempts to exclude and repress as inconsequential and untrustworthy. As remains [t]he mother is behind. . . . As she follows absolutely, she always survives a future that will never have been presentable what she will have engendered, attending, impassive, fascinating and provoking; she survives the interring of the one whose death she has foreseen. (G, 11617) The mother always survives, she remains to rend and fissure Sa. And to remain, or to leave last, when no one will have any more time. What can a mother do better? (G, 117). Ma is a (m)other, attending, impassive, fascinating and provoking, that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs the logic of Sa. The mother (whatever forename of pronoun she may be given), explains Derrida, stands beyond the sexual opposition. This above all is not a woman. She only lets herself, detached, be represented by the sex (G, 134). Ma is an unsettling presence that is not a woman, since it is beyond sexual dynamics. Just as the pharmakon seduces Socrates to stray outside of the walled city of reason, Ma draws Sa beyond its customary course, forever displacing it. Ma interrupts Sas intentionality. It foils Sas homecoming. Ma fails to work (to an employable end). It is the laughter of the system, its dsoeuvrement. Ma remains: already. To think Sa otherwise is to toll the glas that simultaneously rings in a beginning that illustrates how mythos is basic to logos. We strain. It is difficult to hear this clearly, and to see mythos secreted through philosophys tears. These tears open the eyes by blinding and blind by opening. However, these tears do not arrive simply in response to philosophys death knell. They emerge from mythos, which appears only in beginning to be lost, but which nonetheless brings to our thinking its contours, depth and complexity.
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CHAPTER 5
MYTH AND THE GIFT, IF THERE IS ANY
. . . it must be understood that possibility is not the sole dimension of our existence, and that it is perhaps given to us to live each of the events that is ours by way of a double relation. We live it one time as something we comprehend, grasp, bear and master (even if we do so painfully and with difficulty) by relating it to some good or to some value, that is to say, finally, by relating it to Unity; we live it another time as something that escapes our very capacity to undergo it, but whose trial we cannot escape. Yes, as though impossibility, that by which we are no longer able to be able, were waiting for us behind all that we live, think and say if only we have been once at the end of this waiting, without ever falling short of what this surplus of emptiness, of negativity, demanded of us and that is in us the infinite heart of the passion of thought.1
IMPOSSIBLE INCLUSIONS
The preceding chapters have unwaveringly responded to the avoidance of mythos by both philosophy and religion. Since philosophy as logos views mythos as un-philosophical, and therefore as inferior, it denies and ignores mythos, refusing to give it any serious consideration, denigrating it, or omitting it altogether from discourse. The works of Taylor and Derrida serve as valuable resources and provide sufficiently radical and nuanced methodologies for thinking mythos as a non-foundational foundation of logos. However, neither of these thinkers actually undertakes a sustained examination of mythos and its relationship to logos. Derrida confines himself to alluding to mythos indirectly, although these intimations are themselves fruitful,
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as we have seen. For the most part, Taylor avoids mythos. When he does address it, he does so with the same preconceptions that have plagued both religion and philosophy. These assumptions stem from a key misconception that mythos simply constructs. What is overlooked is that it also disseminates and deconstructs. This latter dynamic is ignored by proponents of mythos who idealize its constructive functions. This study has been borne along by the urgency of re-engaging traditions that would prefer not to speak of mythos or, if they must, to do so from the privileged position of a logos that remains blind to its intimate, inescapable relation to mythos, as if that were possible. These avoidances perpetuate the belief that mythos exists in an inferior dialectical relation to logos. Restricting mythos in this way makes it possible, and even preferable, to deal only with logos to the exclusion of mythos. The two are understood as separate or dialectical, rather than as co-emergent. In this limited view, only logos is fit for reasoned, philosophical discourse, and mythos must be cured of its mythicity, of its ambiguity. To this end, a philosophical antidote is administered to usher in the light of reason by removing all of the shadows of mythos. Even when philosophy recognizes that the identity of mythos is tied to logos, it only acknowledges mythos as an inferior. Logos is unity and identity; the result of the dialectic is One. Difference is subsumed under the banner of identity, just as mythos is relegated to logos. As we have witnessed, the work of Derrida calls this logic into question by rigorously re-examining Hegel and Plato. In doing so, Derrida, and Taylor in his wake, reveal the tears inherent within the dialectic and logos. In approaching a limit that it cannot think or account for, the system nonetheless includes this limit within it as an outside that is inside. This incommensurable outside within ruptures savoir absolu. Instead of the eternal return of the same (i.e. consciousness returning to itself and therefore becoming fully conscious of itself in the self-presencing of itself to itself), there are strange loops that never quite close, continually disrupting every logical operation. The excessive remains that the system attempts to exclude forever fault it from within. These exterior interiors generate the system that nonetheless cannot synthesize them. An other other, and a different difference remain. Identity is not simply the identity of identity-anddifference. Rather, identity always contains and, in fact, is generated by a non-identity, synthesis by a non-synthesis, foundation by a nonfoundation. While these non-entities are not exactly present, neither are they absent. These non-absent absences and non-present presences
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are themselves impossible inclusions.2 They simultaneously construct and deconstruct logos. Derridas recognition of the impossible inclusion that gives rise to the Hegelian system was undoubtedly influenced by the observation of his teacher, Jean Hyppolite, that the logical conclusion of Hegels system is not the comprehensible unity of savoir absolu, but rather, an aporetic fissure in which savoir absolu disrupts and subverts itself. What makes Hegel simultaneously the greatest irrationalist and the greatest rationalist who has ever existed is, according to Hyppolite, that logos must thin[k] the non-thought. It thinks sense in its relation to non-sense, to the opaque being of nature (LE, 102). Logos unavoidably summons non-sense and non-thought, and must relate to them. They are necessary to the systems dialectical progression toward savoir absolu. Logos reflects this opacity into its contradiction. It raises thought, which would be only thought, over itself by obliging it to contradict itself; it turns this contradiction into the speculative means by which to reflect the Absolute itself (LE, 102). Logos, and by extension, the Absolute, then necessarily contain opacity integrally, but not merely as an inner contradiction, a sublated other. The opaque always remains to rend thought and logos. Thought can only reflect the Absolute itself when it contradicts itself. For Hegel, this contradiction is the speculative means by which logos reflects the Absolute.3 Hyppolite calls attention to the fact that, in approaching that which it cannot think, account for or contain, the dialectic necessarily includes, as a condition of its own possibility, that which fissures, disrupts and disseminates savoir absolu. Savoir absolu, therefore, cannot be an all-encompassing absolute. Rather, it exists in a strange, non-totalizing relation to that which remains unthinkable and unknowable.4 Despite what Plato and Hegel may wish to say about the capabilities of logos, it depends upon the unlogofiable, unthinkable and nonsensical. In approaching these other others, and attempting to include them through sublation, logos unwittingly and inescapably incorporates that which it cannot account for or think. As we have seen, the foundation of logos is inextricably built upon this foundation, and is, as a result, not foundational. The ground is unexpectedly groundless. The excessive nonsense of sense-certainty tears every seam, including the one attempting to sew together the identity of identity-and-difference and the logos of logos-and-mythos. In the wake of differential remains, where every relation is a nonrelation, the symbiotic dynamic of thought to unthought, knowledge
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to non-knowledge, and most importantly for our purposes, logos to mythos must be understood otherwise. To frame this as Blanchot does in the epigraph that opens this chapter, the relation between the two incommensurables, which are nonetheless intimately connected to one another, is a double relation. Blanchot poses this in terms of life, but it is equally applicable to thought and logos, both undeniable aspects of life itself. As Blanchot insists, possibility is not the sole dimension of our existence.5 Unquestionably, possibility is part of our existence as the aspect of it that seeks to comprehend, grasp, bear and master by relating it to Unity. However, it is not the only aspect. There is another simultaneous dynamic. The task of relating to unity, mastering, gathering and grasping is clearly the work of logos in its progression toward savoir absolu. This aligns with logos etymological root, to gather. Nonetheless, the possible only occurs in relation to another aspect. This other is the nonsensical, ungraspable and unknowable dimension that is not present as such, and can only appear as something that escapes our very capacity to undergo it, but whose trial we cannot escape. It is the impossible because it is not fully present, and therefore cannot be thought, experienced, grasped or apprehended in any singular, comprehendible form. An unthought summons and shapes thought, non-knowledge invokes knowledge, and mythos gives rise to logos. Both Derridas idea of gift and Taylors understanding of network provide resources for thinking the relation of mythos and logos other than in a traditional dialectical or binary fashion. Conceptualized in terms of Taylors network and Derridas gift, the relation of mythos and logos can be better understood as a non-relation, and as a nontotalizing structure that nevertheless acts as a whole.6
WEBBING TEARS AND TEARING WEBS Poly-Seamy Webs
Kierkegaards spider, confronting his web in Either/Or, offers an apt starting point from which to consider networks and worldwide webs: What portends? What will the future bring? I do not know, I have no presentiment. When a spider hurls itself down from some fixed
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point, consistently with its nature, it always sees before it only an empty space wherein it can find no foothold however much it sprawls.7 Instead of a solid foothold and foundation (the possible), the spider is confronted with empty space and a lack of ground (the impossible). Its supposed foundation (as fixed point) reveals the lack of foundation before it, where no foothold can be found, and where no assurances can be granted. The spider spins its web within the groundlessness of empty space. In this way, its web is a nonfoundational foundation. As the environment and surroundings change, so too will the spiders web, ever adapting to the flux and flow of the space it inhabits. Unlike the construction of a building, which is fixed in the landscape (sometimes imposingly so), the spiders web emerges and evolves in relation with and response to its ever-changing environment. Where a degree of permanence and inflexibility underlies much human architecture, the spiders web is defined by its adaptability. The network of the World Wide Web is analogous to the nonfoundational foundation that characterizes the spiders web. It is easy to identify some initial resemblances. Jacked-in as we are to a world where images are images of images and signs are signs of signs, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a foothold, and to identify the vital from the peripheral or the real from the virtual. As interesting as the culture of simulacra or the desert of the real may be, our focus is on reframing this postmodern spiders web in terms of a network. Such a network is the current milieu. This network milieu provides a fecund environment in which to re-examine the relationship of mythos to logos. These ever-expanding webs, spun by this implied spider constitute what Taylor terms network culture.8 The network has become a defining paradigm of the emerging moment of complexity in which we live. What distinguishes the moment of complexity is not change as such but rather the acceleration of the change (MC, 3). This moment is betwixt and between a period that seemed more stable and secure (MC, 3). In the irreducible and inescapable (MC, 3) moment of complexity, the structure and logic of the network is not closed, sequential or linear. It is instead open, distributed and constantly in unanticipatable flux. In his book Hiding (itself an interfacing of text and image circuitry that forms
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networks within networks), Taylor describes the non-foundational foundation of the network in the age of complexity: Neither totalizing structures that repress differences nor oppositional differences that exclude commonality are adequate in the plurality of worlds that constitute the postmodern condition. To think what poststructuralism leaves unthought is to think a nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole. Such a structure would be neither a universal grid organizing opposites nor a dialectical system synthesizing opposites but a seamy web in which what comes together is held apart and what is held apart comes together. . . . In the postmodern culture of simulacra, we are gradually coming to realize that complex communication webs and information networks, which function holistically but not totalistically, are the milieu in which everything arises and passes away. These webs and networks are characterized by a distinctive logic that distinguishes them from classical structures and dialectical systems. (emphasis added, H, 325) As Taylor makes plain, the network is the inescapable milieu in which we find ourselves. He observes that the non-totalizing network is something like an unthought remains of post-structuralism. In the wake of post-structuralism, the seamy web that remains to be thought stages a double movement that simultaneously gathers and disperses, seminates and disseminates, in which, as Taylor puts it, what comes together is held apart and what is held apart comes together. The relation in such a system is neither binary (a universal grid organizing opposites) nor the synthesizing of opposites into a unity. The non-totalizing network slips and slides between these two. Such a system operates holistically, but not totalistically. There are always remains that are integral to constituting the system (and are therefore foundational) that nevertheless elude being accounted for fully by it (and are therefore non-foundational). Taylor forcefully argues, first in Hiding, then in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (a wide-lens exploration of the field of complexity studies), and most recently in After God, that not all systems and structures necessarily totalize and inevitably repress (MC, 65). The distinctive logic that governs the network reveals that the network is a nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole. According to Taylor, such structures have yet to be seriously
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considered by philosophy and religion, which still operate, for the most part, according to outmoded conceptions of systems and structures, and are, therefore, constantly struggling with the limited alternatives of repressive identity and oppositional difference.
Tayloring Myth and Network
The current milieu of the non-totalizing network that acts as a whole, but nevertheless does not totalize, urges a re-examination of our assumptions about systems and structures. It is crucial to reframe the relation of mythos and logos in this context. The neglect and denigration of mythos that stem from an outdated understanding of systems and structures is unacceptable. Instead, the relation of mythos and logos can be more fully understood in terms of the dynamics of open, adaptive systems (of the sort Taylor is concerned with) that continually figure and disfigure everything from biology to economic markets. Unfortunately, while Taylors insights into such dynamics are cogent to this task, his own brief discussion of myth still bears the marks of dated structuralist presuppositions. Taylor contributes a vital realignment by revealing the prescriptive (rather than simply descriptive) nature of complex, adaptive, self-organizing networks, and by including myth in his discussion. Nonetheless, he falls back into upholding traditional prejudices against myth, failing to conceive it with the prescriptive logic of non-foundational, complex, adaptive systems that he insists upon.9 In this failing, he privileges logos, reinscribing age-old (and, as we have seen, erroneous) assumptions about myth. His traditionalist presuppositions about mythos remain as an untouched crypt at the core of his thinking. Such remains continually disfigure his creative, alternative figurations. As noted, Taylor seeks to think what post-structuralism has left unthought. His nuanced revisioning of complexity studies through a Derridean lens is pivotal to twenty-first-century thought. This project shares, to some extent, Taylors objective. However, he stipulates that deconstructive criticism is not enough it is also necessary to articulate alternative structures that can inform creative cultural production and effective sociopolitical transformation (AG, 11). Taylor considers deconstructive analysis insufficient precisely because it is impossible for poststructuralists to move beyond the moment of criticism to fashion new structures that promote creativity (AG, 12).10
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As the discussion of Derridas gift later in this chapter will elucidate, this study does not share Taylors assessment of deconstruction as only criticism that, by its nature, disallows the emergence of new dynamics of thought. Taylor is equally critical of structuralism and recognizes its failures. Structuralisms adherence to fixed forms leaves it unable to explain how these structures emerge and change over time (AG, 12). Therefore, from his perspective, it is requisite that any new theory, whether of religion, politics, economics or, in this case, myth, must avoid falling victim to the same shortcomings that have plagued both structuralism and, to some extent, post-structuralism. In response to this imperative, Taylor reconceives religion as a complex, adaptive system that does not necessarily totalize and repress, the figuration of which includes, as a condition of its possibility, disfiguration. This purposeful re-evaluation is seminal to the twentyfirst century study of all structures, whether of religion, philosophy, thought and so forth. The study of myth is no exception. This project is driven by a similar insistence: unbiased by historical habituation, we are called to re-evaluate the relation of mythos and logos in order to understand it otherwise. The logic of open, non-totalizing structures, such as Derridas gift and Taylors network, are important tools for reconstellating our understanding of mythos and its relationship to logos. Taylor astutely observes that the complexity of the network is inescapable. In other words, this nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole is the means by which human beings experience the world and process that experience (or, in Taylors terms, screen information). In introducing myth, he enforces this inescapability: While there are many ways to weave meaning from the multiple strands of experience, two are particularly important: theory and myth (MC, 210). He continues by asserting that myth (along with theory) is comprised of networks of networks of symbols (MC, 210). Furthermore, just as networks of symbols comprise myths, so different myths form networks . . . Constituting a structure bordering on the fractal, myths are networks of networks made up of nodes within nodes (MC, 212). Importantly, Taylor recognizes that myths are networks of networks. Since Taylor demonstrates that networks are nontotalizing structures, then it follows that myth, as a non-totalizing network, both figures and disfigures, as all networks do. However, this is not what Taylor concludes. He presents his
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distinctive logic in order to underscore his arguments critical line of thought, but he fails to extend it to myth.11 Taylor insists in both The Moment of Complexity and After God that myths are networks of symbols. Yet, by neglecting the network dynamic of myth, and equating myth with symbol, he instead upholds the traditional Platonic distinctions between mythos and logos, reinscribing outmoded assumptions about their relation. This effectively favours logos and ignores the indecidability of mythos. As we have seen, however, mythos is inherently neither verifiable nor non-verifiable, forever oscillating between the two. Additionally, it is not simply contained within logos and united with it in synthesis, nor is it entirely separate from it either, as a binary opposite. This is why myth, as understood within the parameters laid out in the previous chapters, cannot simply be aligned with or explained by symbols. As its etymology implies, a symbol throws things together.12 Its action is to gather and unite. Such an activity mirrors the operation of logos as it moves toward savoir absolu. In contrast, we have seen that mythos, while also gathering, works in a double movement simultaneously dispersing, even as it collects. Many theorists of myth have ignored these disseminative aspects. Mythos both constructs and deconstructs, just as the text of Glas, for example, both cuts and pastes. While mythos shares with symbol the task of gathering elements together, it also irrepresibly disseminates and disrupts those very elements. Unlike symbols, which only configure, mythos intrinsically both figures and disfigures. It resists every attempt to reduce it to symbol, to the sole act of uniting, as we have seen in our exploration of Platos Phaedrus and Derridas Glas. Taylor, like generations of theorists before him, glances at mythos through a logocentric lens, ignoring its disseminative aspects. Consequently, he considers mythos only in terms of the singular act of figuring, turning a blind eye to the disfiguring that is also inescapably in play. Restricting mythos in this manner allows it to be infused with dangerous ideologies that construct and reinforce repressive neo-foundationalisms.13 When Taylor corresponds myth to symbol in just this way, it is clear that the mythos he refers to is one that has been, in his own vernacular, screened through logos. Taylor defines screening as follows: A screen, then, is more like a permeable membrane than an impenetrable wall; it does not simply divide but also joins by
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simultaneously keeping out and letting through. As such, a screen is something like a mesh or net forming the site of passage through which elusive differences slip and slide by crossing and crisscrossing. . . . The duplicity of the screen is captured in the verb: to screen means both to conceal and to show. (MC, 199200) Filtered (screened) through logos, mythos is represented in language as decidable and unitary, concealing the ever-differentiating and disseminating dynamic of mythos. Logos has no option but to keep mythos out, while simultaneously and inescapably letting it through. Allowing mythos through does not merge it with logos into a totality. Mythos retains its elusive differences. Taylor does not extend his use of screen to his consideration of myth. As a result, mythos, as he views it, has been arrested. He does not acknowledge it as the indecidable excess that it inescapably is.14 He attends only to its ability to integrate and synthesize, ignoring its deconstructive propensities altogether. His configuration fails, therefore, to encompass the complexity and inescapability of a much more originary, radically unknowable and indeterminable mythos that constructs and deconstructs logos. It is noteworthy that Taylor, who demands rigor in thinking the complex, disseminative non-foundational foundation of the network, does not apply similar rigor to thinking myth. This is all the more surprising since he recognizes myth as a network. Perhaps this is just a slip in The Moment of Complexity, a faux pas? However, since Taylors After God exhibits the same fault, it is clear that a skewered integration of his own insight is at work. In After God, just as in The Moment of Complexity, he seems intent on cementing the possibility of myth to the exclusion and outright denial of its impossibility. While Taylor typically pursues (unlike many who work hard to deny) the underbelly of thought and the tears in thinking, he uncharacteristically avoids re-examining myth through the lens that he has painstakingly crafted. Instead, he falls back into the age-old philosophic presupposition that views myth only in terms of logos. That is, only in terms of its capacity to gather and synthesize toward a specific (and sometimes ideological) end. Such an attenuated mythos shares similarities (and limitations) with Hegels attenuated difference that has been subsumed within identity. Taylors discussion of myth in the figuring operation of schemata offers another window into his logocentric blind spots in viewing mythos. Early in After God he declares that:
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Religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure. (AG, 12) At first glance, it appears that Taylor is insisting on a simultaneous double movement of figuring and disfiguring without privileging either aspect (i.e. figuration or disfiguration). Furthermore, it seems that he attributes this double movement not only to religion, but also to myth (along with symbol and ritual). However, despite his ambiguous use of the plural verb (figure), it becomes abundantly clear a few pages later that he is not referring to myth in terms of disfiguring. In addition, he decidedly privileges, at times, the constructive (as opposed to deconstructive) aspects of schemata, including his schema of religion. Taylor desires to schematize the operations of complex, adaptive systems. To this end, he provides an actual figure of a symbolic/cognitive network (AG, 19), and neatly positions myth inside it. This is used to illustrate that myth is not just explained by the symbolic and cognitive, but is also located within it. Just a few pages earlier (amid another set of diagrams), he prefaces the symbolic/ cognitive diagram by pointing out that myths and symbols function as schemata (AG, 16). Taylor places myths at the highest level of schematization because they integrate sense experience, information, and knowledge into patterns that provide meaning and purpose (AG, 19). This inadequate conclusion inadvertently provides several important clues, exposing his single-lensed, scotomic view of mythos. According to Taylor, myths integrate and provide meaning and purpose. In other words, their sole function is to collect and synthesize. Any consideration of their inherent deconstructive propensities is overlooked. Once again, Taylor equates myth and symbol. His one-sided perspective disregards the vital disfiguring aspect of mythos and its irreducible indecidability, like so many thinkers before him. Although Taylor insists upon the need to consider the inherent deconstructive potentialities of religion (while giving lip service to the disfiguring aspects of schemata), his blinders render him unable to recognize that the same disruptive dynamic inhabits mythos. He continues to envision myth as a master narrative that gathers, synthesizes and constructs, and rightly recognizes that myth defined by such a limited function often instates just the sorts of constrictive
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ideologies and neo-foundationalisms he exposes in the pages of his analysis. What he fails to recognize, however, is that such a vision of mythos is seriously flawed in just the ways he himself is quick to spot and insist upon elsewhere. Construction is only part of mythos dynamic; it simultaneously deconstructs. As noted previously, Taylors schematization is not the work of mythos as mythos, but is rather that of mythos as screened through and in relation to logos. Such a view is logocentric because it grants logos the ultimate authority over mythos, repressing and ignoring the inescapable indecidability of mythos, along with its disseminative action, which continually undermines every formulation and foundation. Schemata are models used to make useful predictions (AG, 13), and as such, are descriptive. This descriptive model arises from the desire to attain savoir absolu, to calculate, generalize and make a systematic map. Furthermore, it assumes that it is possible to represent every aspect that comprises it. This limits its contents only to those things that are recognizably present and fully expressible in language. Therefore, the nature of such schemata depends upon the assumption that all information is already made accessible through logos. Taylor reinvokes and reifies what he had subverted in Hiding by assuming that mythos only integrates and synthesizes to achieve meaning and purpose, and thus he fails to acknowledge the meaninglessness and purposelessness that, in shaping both meaning and purpose, nevertheless remain to rend and fissure any attempt simply to integrate and schematize. Such endeavours neglect to recognize the inherent impossibility of every figuration. The gathering of logos is always, to some extent, foiled by the disseminating action of mythos that gives rise to logos, faulting it from within as a non-absent absence. In After God, Taylor oscillates between the prescriptive and descriptive. However, he elevates the descriptive in his efforts to delineate a schema of religion, which he nonetheless insists operates prescriptively. In Taylors words, descriptive representations provide models of the world that serve as models for activity in the world (AG, 17). He also asserts that his work is prescriptive, declaring in The Moment of Complexity that we are, in effect, incarnations of worldwide webs and global networks (MC, 17) and, in After God, that religion is network, and that you cannot understand the world today if you do not understand religion (AG, 1).15 Yet he fails to extend that analysis to myths as networks. His engagement with myth
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is strictly and restrictively descriptive. Instead of positing that myths are networks, his descriptive framework claims that it is as if myths are networks. As Taylor demonstrates, despite his oversight, networks can only be properly understood prescriptively, not descriptively. Mythos is network, and network is the current milieu. Taylor clearly underscores, in The Moment of Complexity, that he is not just providing a metaphor or model for understanding when he adamantly declares that we are . . . incarnations of complex, adaptive networks (MC, 17). However, as if in an attempt to disrupt his own descriptive line of analysis, After Gods schemata return to an impossible impasse that they nonetheless attempt to surmount in the subsequent pages. Descriptive figures, schemata, models and maps are imperfect and insufficient.16 Taylor explains: Insofar as every figure presupposes the process of figuring, it includes as a condition of its own possibility something that cannot be figured. That is to say, figures include but do not incorporate something that can be neither represented nor comprehended. Figures, therefore, are always disfigured as if from within. (AG, 20) When Taylor writes as if, he collapses his prescriptive imperative into a descriptive one. Therefore, the statement should be rewritten in order to express what we have come to see about the relation of figuring and disfiguring: figures are always disfigured from within (omitting the conditional, descriptive as if). Just as thought presupposes what it cannot think, every figure prefigures the impossibility of figuring. Arising from within them, even though not properly present, are always already elements that cannot be mapped, schematized, represented or incorporated. Taylor sometimes appears to get lost in his models. His understanding of myth and its exclusive connection to meaning arrives through logos and the possible, the schema, and not through the impossible and the ever-oscillating indecidability of mythos. Mythos and logos are intimately tied to the possibility and the impossibility of which Blanchot speaks.17 Thought arises out of and exists in an inescapable relation to that which is unable to be thought. The unable to be thought is the very condition of thought; it summons it. Nonetheless, thought does not eradicate what it cannot conjure. An unable-to-be-thought always remains. To probe that which underlies thought and provides its contours is not to sketch out a schema, but to trace the very impossibility by which
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thinking and experiencing is possible. Such an action is disfiguring, not scheming. The result, therefore, is not a schema or a map, but rather a network, replete with aporetic fissures, that resists schematization and disfigures every attempt to figure it. For this reason, the relation of mythos and logos can much more accurately be conceptualized in terms of a network as network (and not as schemata), and as a gift that is, as I suggest below, a (dis)figure of the impossible. In a relation understood in this way, mythos both figures the impossible and, in so doing, impossibly disfigures.
THE GIFT, IF THERE IS A GIFT Without a Present
Within the emerging moment of complexity, the relation of mythos and logos must be thought otherwise. Mythos and logos are not in a binary or dialectical relationship, but instead, exist in a double relation, a relation that is, in effect, a relation without relation. Mythos and logos form a network, a nontotalizing structure that nonetheless acts as a whole, as we have established. Such a structure is impossible to figure, at least in any conventional manner. Network, as Taylor portrays it, and gift, as Derrida represents it, are figures of the impossible, and disfigurations of the possible. They provide, therefore, a means by which to (dis)figure the relation of mythos and logos. The gift, as Derrida would have it, exists in relationship to the economy. Even though the gift, as will become clear, is aneconomic, it is by definition always already inextricable from the economy. This relation is not dialectical or binary. Like that of mythos to logos, it is otherwise. In the beginning of his analysis of gift, Derrida notes the etymological root of economy, which connects it to law (nomos) and home (oikos).18 The economic is also specular, or mirror-like. Such a motif of circulation can lead one to think that the law of economy is the circular return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home (GT, 7). The circularity of Hegels system re-emerges, for similarly, that motif leads one to think that thought always \returns full circle to itself. It becomes present to itself, finally achieving savoir absolu. Derrida designates such structures odyssean: Oikonomia would always follow the path of Ulysses (GT, 7) who returns home after his long journey. As encountered previously, the unity of savoir absolu can only be achieved by leaving home.
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Identity must seek itself elsewhere in difference in order to find itself and return home matured into its full identity, completed now by carrying difference within it. That is, oikonomia always seeks a homecoming, a return to itself. Its journey is but a provisional exile longing for reappropriation (emphasis added, GT, 7). The economic gift shares that circular economy because in giving a gift, one accrues a debt for which a counter-gift or repayment is expected. By fulfilling that obligation, the gift giver and receiver return to their original starting point, each enriched by appropriating the others contribution. This dynamic mimics the operation of the dialectic in its movement toward savoir absolu, as it assimilates difference. However, as we now understand, complete reappropriation and return (savoir absolu) is not ultimately achievable. The gift is an aspect of this economic circulation that is not economical, and yet nonetheless puts the economy into motion. It is this gift that interests Derrida, the one that would no doubt be related to economy, but also that which interrupts economy (GT, 7). Such a gift, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange and tears open the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry . . . so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return (GT, 7). Yet, this gift cannot properly be deemed a gift, since it eludes exchange. It is not present, and therefore cannot be intentionally given (or withheld). A gift such as this must not come back to the giving . . . It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged (GT, 7). [T]here must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt. . . . whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or difference (GT, 12).19 A gift such as the one Derrida refers to is not limited by economy, because it is not exchanged per se, and therefore is not given with the expectation of reciprocation. In other words, it is aneconomic (GT, 7). As aneconomic, the gift remains foreign to the circle (GT, 7). Nonetheless, it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness (emphasis added, GT, 7). There is, therefore, a relation, albeit an improper one, between economy and the non-economic gift. In keeping a relation of foreignness, it is outside the circular economy, and not properly related to it. This exteriority sets the circle going, it is the exteriority that puts the economy in motion. It is this exteriority that engages in the circle and makes it turn (GT, 30). Therefore, the circle depends upon this exteriority that nonetheless disrupts
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circularity, relation, reciprocity and reappropriation. Just as thought includes and is in fact summoned by that which it cannot think, the circle and the economy are founded on and engendered by that which is foreign to the circle and thus resists economy. The gift maintains a relation without relation to the economy that cannot account for it. This relation without relation is not that of the identity of identity-and-difference, precisely because the aneconomic gift is not (a) present, it does not offer itself up for comparison. For just this reason, Derrida speaks of the gift hypothetically with the condition, if there is a gift. To do so otherwise (to posit the gift as given, which is impossible since it is not present as such) would annul the gift, reinscribing it within the limits of a speculative economy. The present of the gift, is no longer thinkable as a now, that is, as a present bound up in the temporal synthesis (GT, 9).20 Lacking presence, it cannot be received (as a gift). Neither present nor absent, it ruptures every economy of presence and circular exchange. Therefore, the gift can never be given (for what could be given if nothing presents itself), nor received, nor given back in return. If there is any simultaneously maintains, as we shall see, the impossible of the gift (the means by which it is possible), and that which prevents the gift from ever being (a) present.
(Dis)figures of the Impossible
Since the gift is not (a) present, its giving cannot be apprehended. Therefore, it is a (dis)figure of the impossible. For there to be gift, says Derrida, it is necessary that the gift not even appear, that it not be perceived or received as gift (GT, 16). This requires that both the donor and recipient not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away [ linstant] and moreover this forgetting must be so radical that it exceeds even the psychoanalytic categoriality of forgetting. (GT, 16) There is no gift, as Derrida speaks of it, without absolute forgetting. As absolute, this forgetting unbinds absolutely (GT, 16) and loosens
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the gift from memory, consciousness and even thinking. Nonetheless, absolute forgetting is not a void either, as Derrida explains: Even though it must leave nothing behind it, even though it must efface everything, including the traces of repression, this forgetting, this forgetting of the gift cannot be a simple non-experience, a simple non-appearance, a self-effacement that is carried off with what it effaces. (GT, 17) Such forgetting is not an either/or, but a neither/nor: neither experience nor non-experience. It oscillates entre deux. Absolute forgetting is not nothing, which, as the opposite of something, is itself a category, a something. Nor is this forgetting something that can be remembered, that the mind can illuminate and bring into the clear light of conscious memory. As neither/nor, the gift event is improper and out of joint because, as Derrida elucidates, it comes about, it happens in an instant, in an instant that no doubt does not belong to the economy of time, in a time without time, in such a way that the forgetting forgets, that is it forgets itself, but also in such a way that this forgetting, without being something present, presentable, determinable sensible or meaningful, is not nothing. (emphasis added, GT, 17) Neither nothing nor a presentable something, the gift event operates between the simple alternatives of presence and absence. The gift of this forgetting (which, of course, cannot be recognized as a gift) is that it give[s] us to think . . . something other than a philosophical . . . category (GT, 17). In opening up philosophy to something other than the philosophical to that which philosophy cannot receive, give or think the gift, which is foreign to philosophy, simultaneously makes philosophy possible. The impossible gives rise to the possible, but the possible, nonetheless, opens out into the impossible. There is a curious double movement between these two. Although a (dis)figure of the impossible, the gift is not impossible. Le don, sil y en a is not (possibly) (a) present. But it exists nonetheless. Even though the gift event is anachronistic, aneconomic and not fully present, a trace of it nonetheless remains within the economy
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and logos. This remaining, however, is not recollectable or presentable. Instead, it remains as a non-absent absence, which is not to say as a memory of forgetting, which would be a forgetting that remembers. As Derrida suggests: [A]t stake in this forgetting that carries beyond any present is the gift as remaining [restance] without memory, without permanence, without consistency, without substance or subsistence; at stake is this rest that is without being (it), beyond Being, epekeina tes ousias. The secret of that about which one cannot speak, but which one can no longer silence. (emphasis added, GT, 147) There is a crucial distinction here between the impossible and impossible. The gift is a (dis)figure of the impossible, but it is not impossible. In other words, it does exist, but does not have Being. Derrida explains this often misunderstood point: I never said that there is no gift. No. I said exactly the opposite.21 If the gift were impossible, it could never come about in any fashion. It could not exist. Derrida underscores sil y en a. He is not after a revelation or unveiling or adequation (OTG, 72); he is not seeking an ontological category. Rather, the impossible of the gift, which is not impossible, is precisely that it escapes these categories (i.e. economy and presence) that make it abundantly possible to language, thought, and philosophy as logos. Importantly, the impossible is not simply an impossible experience (OTG, 72), which, as it suggests, occurs (or does not occur) within the categories of possibility. The underlying assumption behind an impossible experience is that such an experience is ultimately possible. The gift eludes all such categoriality. Thomas Carlson draws out this important subtlety in his study of the phenomenology of the gift in Jean-Luc Marion and Derrida. Carlson observes that there is a notable difference between that about which one cannot speak and that which one can no longer silence (I, 226). On the one hand, it is impossible to speak of the gift, since it does not present itself to thought and speech. Yet, on the other hand, the silence enshrouding the gift becomes deafening. It is, therefore, impossible not to speak of it. In fact, the gift event gives rise to thought and speech. As Carlson explains, the impossible articulates this double bind: it engenders thought, speech, and desire that remain oriented around what,
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precisely, thought, speech, and desire can never attain. Indeed, the impossible might well engender thought, speech, and desire to the very extent that it announces itself and yet remains inaccessible. (I, 226) Mythos is both what logos cannot speak about, and what logos can no longer silence. It is the impossible, like the gift, that engender[s] thought, speech, and desire to the very extent that it announces itself and yet remains inaccessible. In this way, the gift maintains a simultaneous relation (albeit, of no conventional sort) to both the impossible and the possible. It moves between these two. Just as the impossible might well engender logos while nonetheless remaining inaccessible to it, mythos (as an event) gives rise to logos, even while remaining inaccessible (in other words, unlogofiable) to it. Logos and mythos are co-emergent. We must be careful not to oversimplify their relation by attempting to delineate it in terms of the founder (mythos) and the founded (logos). There cannot be one without the other. As we saw in regard to the emergence of the event of play in Chapter 3, the emergence of logos from mythos is not a linear process paradigm. Mythos and logos, like the impossible and the possible of the gift, are always already in relation. Since this relation is not an ordinary relation in the economy of presence, it is a relation without relation. The without marks the impossibility of presence and serves as a reminder of the fact that the gift is not (a) present.
Relations
As we have seen, the purpose of deconstruction is not to escape or transcend structure or philosophy. It maintains an intimate, but non-dialectical and non-binary, relation to structure. As Taylor expresses it: the codependence of figuring and disfiguring shows why neither structuralism nor poststructuralism (i.e. deconstruction) taken by itself is adequate (AG, 308).22 The nontotalizing network of mythos and logos demonstrates just that. Such a non-totalizing structure always maintains a relation to traditional structure, even though it is not limited to it, just as mythos always preserves a relation to logos, and logos to mythos. In regard to the gift, escaping or transcending circularity or economy is impossible. Such a desire is an unfulfilable, errant fantasy. Derrida affirms this in speaking of the gift:
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One should not necessarily flee or condemn circularity as one would a bad repetition, a vicious circle, a regressive or sterile process. One must, in a certain way of course, inhabit the circle, turn around in it, live there a feast of thinking, and the gift, the gift of thinking would be no stranger there. (GT, 9) Even though the gift is the impossible and, as such, does not present itself to thought or speech, or occur in an apprehendable time, it nonetheless makes the presentable actions of thought and speech possible, thus inhabiting them without being limited and defined by them. The kinship between the impossible and the possible can only occur as a relation without relation, which escapes all attribution, and cannot be related to the possible in any traditional way. This relation without relation lacks a definable identity that would allow one to draw a simple analogy, for example. Therefore the without signals that intangible dynamic that prohibits collapsing the relation of the impossible and the possible, or mythos and logos, into a straightforward kinship. Yet, the impossible and the possible, like mythos and logos, nonetheless stand in vital relation to each other. Carlson elucidates the nature of this relation without relation: [T]he impossible is not simply cut off from and opposed to the possible (which might be realized in knowledge or experience). Rather, the possible circles around the impossible. The impossible sets the circle of the possible moving, and thus stands with it in a relation without relation. (I, 227) The impossible, which cannot be entirely grasped or conceptualized, engenders the possible that which we think, experience, grasp and know. The impossible sets the possible into motion, even while remaining itself withdrawn from the sphere of the possible. However, this does not imply that the impossible is sensu stricto impossible. As Carlson explains it: If the gift were simply impossible, rather than the impossible, it could not maintain the relation that it does with possible thought, language, and desire. It remains, after all, possible to think of, speak about, and desire the impossible. But such possible thought, language, and desire occur as such only in relation to the impossible that feeds them; their fulfillment or actualization their
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conversion into philosophy, science and the order of presence would be their annulment. It is precisely the impossible that remains to be thought, spoken, or desired; it remains in what is not yet thought, spoken, or desired, in what might still remain possible for thought, language, and desire. (I, 227) The impossible always remains, but these remains are not present. It calls forth the possible and is always within it, giving to the possible its contours and depth. To convert the impossible into that which can be spoken, thought and actualized is to annul it by turning it into the possible. However, as with difference that always remains despite dialectical synthesis, in spite of attempts to annul the impossible, the impossible still always remains. This is true on two counts. First, there is always that which has not yet been thought or spoken, and so therefore remains. Second, there is the extent to which the impossible forever remains as the impossible because there is that which cannot be said, thought, actualized or given over to presence or receivability. Not even savoir absolu has recourse to the impossible remains. The impossible (gift), therefore, simultaneously figures and disfigures the possible. Mythos functions as the impossible gift event, figuring and disfiguring logos. It gives, no thanks to giving. Its involuntary giving is improper and without purposeful intentionality. The economy of logos is set into motion by the mythos-gift event that always already exceeds the economy it engenders, even as it participates in it. Just as there can be no gift without the economy that it transgresses, and no economy without the gift-event that exceeds it and puts it into play (even as the gift-event simultaneously undermines the circular, economic path), there can be no logos apart from the unforeseeable irruption and interruption of mythos. Reciprocally, mythos cannot be made visible (to the extent that it can be expressed) without logos. As we have seen, mythos gives rise to logos, and logos, in turn, makes some presence of mythos possible. Nonetheless, this presencing still exceeds the limitations of representation. Once mythos makes itself present necessarily and inescapably by means of logos it is no longer purely mythos. In other words, it has been screened through logos, and is inextricably bound to it. The mythos-gift event calls forth structure, discourse and relation (logos), even while it destabilizes these very elements.23 In this dynamic, when mythos is actualized and made present (to the extent that it can be) through logos, it is no
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longer merely a (dis)figure of the impossible, but also a figuration of the possible that nonetheless perpetually disfigures and disrupts. Mythos and the gift point to the impossibility (of which Blanchot speaks) that underscores all possibility. They elude the capacity of philosophy to properly conceptualize them. Therefore, they are not philosophical; they are what Derrida refers to as nonphilosophemes. However, just as mythos gives rise to logos, that which is the impossible for philosophy is also that which makes philosophic thought possible. Without mythos, philosophy would be impossible. At the same time, with mythos, philosophy as pure logos is impossible, that is, untenable. Mythos contaminates philosophys expression with unacceptable components, such as indecidability. Understanding mythos as the impossible gift again elucidates in another way how mythos always already inhabits the possible, or logos, from within, as an outside that is inside, simultaneously figuring and disfiguring logos and the possible. If, like the gift, mythos is the impossible, it is not impossible. On the contrary, mythos is behind (but not in any linear fashion) thought, speech and experience. It sets these into motion, giving life and thought the very fathomless contours that drive and impassion it. Just as the impossible gift is spoken of, desired and thought only in relation to the possible, mythos can be approached only in its relation to logos. Mythos and logos co-emerge and shape each other. Mythos gives rise to logos, and in turn, logos gives expression to mythos, enabling some of its aspects to be realized. The gift, says Derrida, is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or in its phenomenon. (GT, 29) Just as the impossible always shadows the possible, mythos always shadows logos.24 Although its full phenomenon cannot be apprehended, it is present nonetheless as an absence that cannot be erased. As we have seen, this presence and absence both slip between the traditional modes of presence and absence. It is impossible to extricate logos from mythos or mythos from logos. They co-emerge and exist in a relation without relation. Thus, the gift event is mythos-logos. Each always already summons the other. Our thinking is impassioned
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and set aglow by that which it cannot quite think. The impossible always remains and gives, no thanks to giving, to the possible its richness, engendering its very possibility. The gift, like mythos, does not give in a traditional sense. It does not give anything. How, therefore, is one to affirm the gift of mythos? Although mythos inescapably shadows thinking and logos, it is not explicitly apprehendable. That is, it is not rationally thinkable. Its irreducible indecidability makes it too elusive for us to grasp fully within the limitations of logos. This gives mythos an irreconcilably ambiguous quality. Therefore, to affirm mythos in all of its excessive irreducible indecidability is to acknowledge it in a way that takes this elusiveness into account. It requires an unusual affirmation that is, at its core, non-affirmative. This affirmation is not the customary affirmation of something. Rather, non-affirmative affirmation consists not in affirming, upholding and withstanding what is because it does not answer to ontology any more than to the dialectic (APN, 48). It affirms only by an excess of affirmation and, in this surplus, affirming without anything being affirmed finally affirming nothing. An affirmation by way of which everything escapes and that, itself escaping, escapes unity (APN, 49). To affirm mythos in this manner (that does not assert a thing or a totality), is thus to disfigure logos by acknowledging that which both escapes and engenders it. Far too often we see myth affirmed and theorized without this acknowledgment. Such strict one-sidedness either heralds or demonizes it. All too easily we slip into this temptation, much as Plato did in ignoring the simultaneous multiple meanings of pharmakon. When sought within the order of presence and metaphysics, the nonaffirmative affirmation always runs the risk in placing itself in the service of force, of . . . becoming an instrument of his domination, going so far as appearing to grant to an I who thinks it has attained it the arrogant right to call itself henceforth the great Affirmer. (APN, 49) Historically mythos has been misidentified as a great Affirmer, transformed into a surrogate for reason, ideology and logos. In this guise it has been misused, and continues to be misused as a mandate for conflicts and religious wars waged in the name of truth, or as support for ideologies, like the master race of Nazism, for example.
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These errant viewpoints, supposing themselves to be upheld by mythos (as The One truth), fail to recognize that, despite efforts to control it and impose logocentric structures on it, neither falsifiable nor non-falsifiable mythos disrupts and disseminates, undoing every structural imposition from within. Left unexamined (as it continues to be by much of philosophy and religious studies), the non-totalizing network of mythos will persist in being mistaken as a fixed structure that only constructs. Depending upon ones perspective, such construction is either salvific or apocalyptic. Content will continue to dictate relationship, figuring every system. In this mode of thinking, disfiguring is just a route towards figuring (after the model of bringing difference into the fold toward savoir absolu). This way of thinking is not tenable. Instead, as we have seen, disfiguring is impossibly included (neither excluded nor absorbed) in figuring, which nonetheless cannot delineate these disfigurations. Although we have focused our attention on philosophys denigration of mythos, we are equally concerned with the error and perils of the reverse, upholding mythos over logos. The assumption underlying either perspective is that mythos is a singular, solely constructive entity. Such thinking turns a blind eye to an irreducibly indecidable mythos that simultaneously figures and disfigures the complex network of mythoslogos. The indecidability of mythos prevents successful co-option and closure, however determined the proponents of either side are to deny that. Affirming and thinking through mythos involves accepting that doing so is incompatible with traditional pathways of thought. It requires thinking without any expectation of arriving somewhere certain. In this respect, being non-affirmative, it retains an inherent emptiness. It takes into account the unaccountable, maintaining a relation to the non-logofiable, the indecidable, and the non-dialectical components of thought. In contrast, comprehensive thinking (beyond being impossible since comprehension always harbours the incomprehensible) is unaware of its own unlogofiable aspects, its blind spots. It strives to synthesize and unify each aspect of thinking into a seamless whole. This stark difference perhaps explains how mythos often comes to be equated with ideology. When mythos is comprehended as ideology, or even as symbol (as Taylor constructs it), it is co-opted by logocentric exigencies. Such understanding fails to acknowledge the network that brings mythos and logos together as a non-synthetic and non-totalizing whole, while also holding
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them apart. When mythos is understood solely in terms of its constructive aspect, it functions as a way of seeing. In this view, mythos is not the eye that blinds (with tears), but the eye that imagines it sees with absolute certainty. In this way, many espousers and proponents of myth are, in effect, aligned with logos-insistent philosophers, even though they might like to imagine themselves as profoundly different. Both fail to acknowledge the indecidability of mythos and its deconstructive actions. They erroneously assume that traditional, structuralist models can sufficiently represent mythos and its relation to logos. Each sides limited perspective affirms one over and against the other: either mythos (although not in its full indecidable essence) over logos, or logos over mythos.25 These perspectives miss the essence of mythos that both constructs and deconstructs logos, co-emerging with it to form a non-synthetic network.
NO THANKS TO GIVING
It is impossible to speak of mythos except in (and through) logos, and it is precisely the gift-network that not only makes the mythos-logos dynamic visible, but also allows access to mythos, as it is already summoned by logos. As demonstrated earlier, there can be no economy without gift, and no gift without economy. Therefore, gift and economy come together (as a gift and not a present). In the same way, mythos and logos figure and disfigure one another. They co-emerge always already in a relation without relation. The gift-network gives, no thanks to giving. If it comes about with the express intention of giving or of receiving thanks, it would no longer be the gift that engenders the passion of thought and a feast of thinking. The event and the gift, the event as gift, the gift as event must be irruptive, unmotivated for example, disinterested (GT, 123), confirms Derrida. Otherwise, such a gift would be economic, intentional a present, and not a true gift at all. The economic present acts not as an enrichment, but more as a poison, because its presentation with the expectation of a counter-gift imposes an indebtedness. Mythos calling forth of logos is disinterested to the extent that it bears no intended message to be communicated. This event (i.e. mythos engendering logos) happens. It is neithor a teleological necessity nor something that can be anticipated in advance. Tellingly, Derridas reflections on the gift are summoned by a narrative, Charles Baudelaires short story Counterfeit Money (La fausse monnaie).
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In this tale, the narrators friend (unbeknown initially to the narrator) passes off counterfeit money to a beggar on the street as an apparent gift of generosity. Admitting this sets off the narrative. Derridas discourse on the gift is founded on his insight that the event of the aneconomic gift ( which we have expressed in terms of mythos) happens unconditionally. It is not planned: The gift, like the event, as event, must remain unforeseeable, but remain so without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear chancy or in any case lived as such, apprehended as the intentional correlate of a perception that is absolutely surprised by the encounter with what it perceives, beyond its horizon of anticipation which already appears phenomenologically impossible. . . . a gift or an event that would be foreseeable, necessary, conditioned, programmed, expected, counted on would not be lived as either a gift or as an event, as required by necessity that is both semantic or phenomenological. That is why the condition common to the gift and the event is a certain unconditionality. (GT, 1223) The condition of event is unanticipatable. It happens by chance. Its condition is precisely that it is unconditional. Otherwise, it would not be lived as either a gift or an event, but rather as an unremarkable expectation. A programmed necessity (of the event or of the gift) would annul the event, and reduce the would-be gift into nothing but a present. The gift of mythos, therefore, does not come about out of some engineered necessity, insistence or intention. Instead, the gift of mythos emerges. Networks, explains Taylor, drawing upon recent developments in complexity studies, are never fixed and neither programmed nor planned (MC, 213). Likewise, in networks, new meanings are rarely planned or programmed, but rather, are emergent (MC, 214). Such a structure is open, non-totalizing, non-foundational and indeterminate. There is no centre, no master blueprint, no foreseen purpose. In this way, networks stage the play of diffrance. In this play, wagers are lost; there is expenditure without return. Mythos gives, no thanks to giving, and its giving event is always already with and to logos. As we saw earlier, mythos does not give specific, unified meaning, because it slips and slides, seminates and disseminates, disrupting any attempt to singularize it. On the one
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hand, mythos gives rise to logos as a non-foundational foundation. And yet, on the other hand, mythos makes logos, as savoir absolu, impossible. Even though the event of mythos calls forth the structure of logos, mythos tears the very fabric of logos that it nevertheless calls for. The gift and the event obey nothing, except perhaps principles of disorder, that is, principles without principles (GT, 123). Not even the coup de don can be controlled. In this network, all play is interplay, all relation interrelation. The gift-network is not accountable. It exceeds the economy that it nevertheless puts into motion. Mythos overruns logos while simultaneously calling it forth.
ABSOLUTE INTERPLAY
When all play is interplay, as it is in the network of mythos-logos, the absolu of savoir absolu and philosophy proper must be reconsidered. As we have seen, mythos and logos are always already in a relationship that is neither binary nor dialectical. Understanding this allows us to envision them in terms of the network and the gift, where the foundation is non-foundational and the structure is nontotalizing, yet holistic. The parts of this whole do not form a singular harmony. They disperse and gather, seminate and disseminate. While joining they reach out, and in reaching out, join.When system and excess are understood to be co-emergent, then the absolute of absolute knowledge, of logos, is disfigured. Such disfiguring solicits figuring anew. Absolute derives from the Middle French absolut and Latin absolutus, which is a participle of absolvere. As the similarity indicates, absolvere is the derivative of absolve, which, means to loose from or set free (i.e. acquit). The absolute, therefore, is that which is freed, separated, loosened, detached or disengaged. In a philosophical sense, it can also mean that which is unconditioned or unqualified. It is, in other words, that which is free from conditions, much like the gift-event. This latter usage is what Hegel has in mind when he sets out in pursuit of a knowledge that is knowable and ascertainable for human beings and yet, at the same time, unconditioned. Hegel resolves to solve what Kant was unable to, by laying out a method of inquiry that would lead finite beings to an unconditioned, absolute knowledge. According to Hegel, this knowledge must be grasped through the Concept, and the Concept would eventually lead to a knowledge of reality as it is in itself (that is to say, unconditioned).26
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For Hegel, savoir absolu is not affected from the outside, nor context-dependent. In this sense, it is loosed and set free from conditionality, corresponding instead to the absolute truth (to God, the One), to that which is not dependent upon the changeable and finite (for example, nature and the human). However, upon closer examination, we see that the Hegelian absolute is dependent upon (and therefore tied down to) rendering difference in terms of identity. The other must (by force, if necessary) be taken up into identity. Hegels theory postulates that, in the final analysis, the unknown and unthought is transformed and brought into the fold of thought. The underlying assumption is that nothing unthinkable or unknowable therefore remains. Hegels Concept is conditional, despite his best efforts, because it depends on that assumption, an assumption that cannot be upheld. Even the absolute bids us to think it otherwise. Taylor does just this in Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Drawing on the etymological root of absolute, Taylor fractures savoir absolu and recasts it as absolute relativity (CG, 326). If, as Taylor posits, being is relational, there is nothing that is absolute in the traditional sense of the term because there is nothing that is not relative. Relativity is what makes everything what it is and as such is absolute (CG, 3267). This absolute is a virtual matrix, which is neither precisely inside nor outside the economy (CG, 327). Nothing is not relative and yet, when absolute is placed together with relativity, a strange paradox opens up. Relativity relates and brings together, while absolute sunders and pulls apart. Together, these two operate in yet another double movement. Taylors absolute is not an infinite God, but relativity itself a relativity that is not simply relational, because it is absolute in the sense of unfettered, freed from, unconditional. His analysis must be refigured even further. If, as Taylor suggests, the network is the current milieu in which everything arises and passes away, then all relations, and specifically that of mythos and logos, must be understood in that context. The prescriptive nature of this understanding reframes our conception of savoir absolu and philosophy as logos. Savoir absolu, therefore, becomes savoir de savoir: a knowledge about ones knowing.27 This knowledge is intimately tied to non-knowledge, not in a traditional relation of presence, which would make nonknowledge into a kind of knowledge, but as we have come to understand, in a relation without relation, in which the impossible resides within and sets the possible into motion. To think the abso148
lute is to let loose, to keep alive the play that plays for plays sake, and to resist all temptations to tighten up or rigidify. As with a bicycle wheel, if there is too much play in the spokes, the wheel is useless. If the spokes are over-tightened, the wheel risks failing under its own strain. The tension on the spokes must be calibrated somewhere between too little and too much. Taylor explains that self-organizing systems emerge between order and chaos (MC, 24), and like the networks that comprise them, function at the edge, somewhere between order (fixity) and disorder (laxity). When Sa is re-envisioned in terms of absolute relativity, the gift of mythos can be affirmed and recognized as a disruption and disfiguration necessary to creation and figuration. Although not present, and therefore not entirely logofiable, mythos calls forth logos, and gives to thinking and understanding their contours without ever being fully present to these activities. Irreducibly indecidable mythos is the impossible inclusion within logos. It is the impossible that is always already in interplay with the possible, and with logos. Without mythos, therefore, philosophy would not be possible. Mythos gives to philosophy, no thanks to giving, philosophys very possibility, depth and contours. It impassions thought, calls it forth, and stirs us to think that which, inevitably to some extent, always remains veiled. The disfigurations of mythos make possible the very figurations of logos, and of lived experience. In this way, mythos is both the impossibility, and the possibility, of philosophy.
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EPILOGUE
Books are ventures into arranging, joining and extending thought, striving on occasion, even, for the con-sequential. As such they are processes, habitations of logos. Deconstructions, as Derrida would have them, however, align with no process. They arise on the sudden through dislocations and disruptions. We come upon them already happening. Furthermore, these deconstructions are necessary, but never sufficient. An epilogue attempting to characterize, summarize or conclude these interruptions of mythos unavoidably inclines toward peril. Such peril exposes the gaping wound plaguing an epilogue. Instead of the possibility of closure and synthesis, tears emerge. These ruptures expose us to the impossible, to an irreducible other that does not lend itself to discourse or disclosure. We are left, instead, with recourse to dis-course, to the errant detours that prevent us from ever returning full circle. The disfiguring operations of mythos simultaneously construct and deconstruct logos. This is the interplay that emerges, always already. These inescapable deconstructions of mythos summon us, not as an unsettling dynamic to be feared or suppressed, but as the impossible gift that can never properly be given, received or even recognized (it is not (a) present). Yet this gift, if there is any, makes possible our thought and experience, while simultaneously (dis)figuring the impossibility from which thought and experience emerge, and with which they are forever in relation. Without mythos, philosophy would be impossible. To acknowledge the impossibility of philosophy is also to affirm its very possibility, and to delight in the disfiguring rhythms that figure our thinking and experience, even as we struggle to figure these disfigurations.
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NOTES
PREFACE
1
Jacques Derrida, Points . . . , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 356. Henceforth cited as PTS. Indecidables are important concepts in deconstruction and are discussed at greater length in the following chapter. I am grateful to Hugh J. Silverman, who has pointed out that the French term indcidable is better rendered as indecidable in English, since indecidable preserves the oscillation between opposing poles. Undecidable denotes (although this is certainly not how Derrida construes it, but is rather due to linguistic associations in English) something impossible, whereas indecidable suggests an ambiguous status that defies any singular category, not something impossible. Therefore, indecidable is used throughout in place of undecidable. An indecidable (such as mythos) cannot be reduced to one meaning or the other (truth or fiction), nor is it even possible to decide the degree to which it participates in either one. Thus it is irredicibly indecidable. See for instance, Hugh J. Silverman, Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 46, where he writes: Deconstruction goes to the place of indecidables, such as communication (oral presentation/transmission of messages), criture (speaking/writing), difference (distinction/deferral), pharmakon (poison/remedy), trace (footprint/imprint), correspondence (exchanged of letters/matching of similarities), supplement (additions/replacement), and so forth. . . . the deconstruction of texts requires the elucidation and elaboration indecidables and their indecidability. Mark C. Taylor, Tears, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 100. Henceforth cited as T. See Hugh J. Silverman, The limits of logocentrism, in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 28193. Henceforth cited as INS. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), x. Henceforth cited as TM. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 231. Henceforth cited as G. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 325.
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CHAPTER 1
1
Philosophy, which substantiates itself as embodying logos, and legitimates itself in terms of logos, unavoidably shares in the attributes as well as the omissions of logos, its virtues as well as its sins. Logos is the ground of philosophy, and the ground of logos is also the ground of philosophy. Therefore, throughout this text, philosophy as logos is used on occasion in place of philosophy as a reminder of that essential equivalency. Likewise, discussions of the foundation of logos are simultaneously discussions of the foundation of philosophy. Derrida reminds us that [a]ll the metaphysical determinates of truth, even the one beyond metaphysical ontotheology . . . are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 10. Henceforth cited as OG. Increasingly, vital indecidable, unclosable paradoxes seem to lie at the heart of inquiry for a number of disciplines. It has been routine procedure in college physics labs for decades that fresh, young observers re-examine with ever-sophisticated tweaking Thomas Youngs two-hundred-year-old Double-Slit experiment exposing the essential, puzzling nature of light. Because lights indecidably dual, simultaneously particle/wave behaviour is really not unlike mythos indecidability and the resulting dilemma of how to think mythos, it is noteworthy that physics students are typically confronted with lights indecidability before exploring quantum mechanics in its more sweeping complexity. Glas is the French word for death knell or passing bell. Geoffrey Hartman notes its further significance: [Glas] is endlessly joyced by the author, to suggest that voice has no monument except in the form of a rattle in the throat covered or sublimed by the passing bell. The sound reverberates in the labyrinth of writing and, in dying, lights it up. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 56. The various sounds of Glas are explored in Chapter 4. Derrida is not the first to consider remains. In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Edmund Husserl seeks to think the remains; that is, what is excluded in cogitare. Husserl posits that consciousness has, in itself, a being of its own which in its own absolute essence, is not touched by the phenomenological exclusion. It therefore remains as the phenomenological residuum, as a region of being which is of essential necessity quite unique and which can indeed become the field of a science of a novel kind: phenomenology. Husserl, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 65. Although Husserls study begins with the remains, it nonetheless reduces them to a science and a metaphysics of presence. For this reason, his reading stays within the traditional limits of philosophy, unlike Derridas.
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Jacques Derrida, The pocket-size interview with Jacques Derrida, by Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi, trans. Tupac Cruz. Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007), 381, 36288. Henceforth cited as PSI. The field of mathematics came to accept this situation when Kurt Gdel, after Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whiteheads Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), realized that there are remains inherent to the foundation of the system of mathematics that could not be proved mathematically (i.e. by applying any of its processes, operations, or assumptions). Gdels Incompleteness Theorem argues, in essence (contra Russell and Whiteheads Principia Mathematica), that it is impossible for a system to be both consistent (i.e. free of contradictions) and complete. Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 115. Henceforth cited as CG. See also Gdel, Kurt. On formally undecidable propositions in Principia Mathematica and related systems, trans. B. Meltzer. http:// www.csee.wvu.edu/~xinl/library/papers/math/Godel.pdf. For the most part, mathematics accepted that these remains ungrounded and destabilized the whole system on which all its work was based, recognizing the limits of what could be established by its proofs. Philosophy as logos, however, has not yet caught up with mathematics. It still resists any such acceptance of the limits of what can be established by logos. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 1023. Henceforth cited as SP. As we will learn in Chapter 2, thinking the unthought does not mean bringing it into full presence and knowability. Since it eludes categories and systems of meaning, it can never be fully conceived or apprehended. Nonetheless, it remains, not in the mode of presence, but rather, as a neither-entirely-absent nor-entirely-present ghost haunting logos. Later in this chapter we will explore Hegels notion of otherness, in which identity must transgress its limits in order to recognize itself in the other. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 27. Henceforth cited as TSN. Michel Foucault, A preface to transgression, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 1984, Volume II, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1999), 73, 6987. Henceforth cited as APT. A more thorough discussion of the outside that is inside as a foreign plenitude within occurs in Chapter 2. Non-affirmative affirmation is a topic covered in Chapter 5. This connects to a Hegelian understanding of the relationship between difference and identity, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Through the course of this study it will become clear that giving rise to does not imply a continuous process paradigm. This statement does not denote a teleological process. Gives rise to must be read as that which keeps a constant relation to the inherent disruptions and transgressions.
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As a consequence of philosophys alignment with logos as a means of expression and self-identification, what faults logos consequently faults philosophy. In his essay, Foucault further states that we experience not the end of philosophy but a philosophy that regains its speech and finds itself again only in the marginal region that borders its limits (APT, 78). We will see how the marginal region that remains within philosophy, despite the fact that philosophy cannot properly think it, is that of logos other, mythos, which is inescapably disruptive and deconstructive. Foundation is set off by quotation marks in order to mark it off from a traditional foundation. Such a foundation is in fact non-foundational, as the rest of this study shows. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1954), 109. Henceforth cited as IE. Maurice Blanchot, LEntretien infini [The Infinite Conversation], trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 431. Henceforth cited as EI. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each develop mythos as a nonabsent absence. Customary readings of Plato ignore the indecidability of mythos and the role that mythos plays in his texts. Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11. Henceforth cited as HP. Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, trans. Gerard Naddaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 102. Henceforth cited as PM. Brisson does state that, at times, the truth of mythos is, in part and according to Plato, dependent on whether or not it accords with philosophical discourse on the same subject. Even in this case, logos is the supreme metric against which all else is measured. For more on Brissons argument see PM, 91111. Chapter 3 underscores Platos insistence on this internal logic for argumentation and philosophic discourse and demonstrates how elements within his Phaedrus effectively render such synthesis impossible. This argument regarding the deconstructive propensities of indecidables is further elaborated in Chapter 3, in a discussion of pharmakon and mythos. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35. Henceforth cited as GT. A discussion of this can be found in the Translators Introduction to PM, xiixxvi. The full import of this as it pertains to Hegels dialectic is the topic of the next subsection. Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 16. Henceforth cited as I. John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 144. Relation is of critical importance to us, and is dealt with throughout in many different ways. One example of a relation of structure to
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non-structure is Derridas gift that is an excessive, aneconomic structure that nonetheless exists in relation to the economy that it exceeds. With the gift, Derrida effectively demonstrates that structure and astructure presuppose one another. Like mythos and logos, structure and that which is not the least bit structural are interwoven together nonsynthetically. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 778. Henceforth cited as P. However, as Chapter 5 illustrates, Taylor departs from Derrida in crucial ways. Although Taylor agrees that deconstruction is inescapable, he ultimately believes that deconstruction changes nothing. While exposing systems and structures as incomplete and perhaps repressive, deconstruction inevitably leaves them in place. . . . Instead of showing how totalizing structures can actually be changed, deconstruction demonstrates that the tendency to totalize can never be overcome and, thus, that repressive structures are inescapable. Taylor coins this struggle Sisyphean. Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 65. Henceforth cited as MC. Although Taylors argument about the limits of deconstruction is itself arguable, we are concerned with applying Derridas and Taylors key insights to a reconsideration of the relation of mythos and logos in order to propose a new way of conceiving of mythos and its relationship to logos that will create fecund possibilities that are both theoretical and practical. Mark C. Taylor, Introduction: system . . . structure . . . difference . . . other in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4, 134. Henceforth cited as IS. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense, trans. Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63. Merleau-Ponty reiterated this importance of Hegel in his last course (196061), entitled Philosophy and non-philosophy since Hegel, translated by Hugh J. Silverman in his Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997). See also Hugh J. Silverman, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger: interpreting Hegel, in INS, 10822. I am indebted to Taylors excellent scholarship on Hegels notion of otherness in Altarity, 333, which has guided my own reading of Hegel, along with Jean Hyppolites instructive Logic and Existence. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 490. Henceforth cited as PS. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89. Henceforth cited as LE. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), emphasis added, 16. Henceforth cited as A.
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G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969), 417. Henceforth cited as SL. Radical implies something that escapes presence and synthesis, something untamed and undomesticated. What is meant by radical difference and otherness will become more evident shortly in the discussion of Derridas and Taylors conceptions of difference and otherness. Derrida is not the only thinker who is concerned with Hegels domestication of difference. Heidegger recognizes an unthought (other) in the Hegelian system that he calls the difference between Being and beings. From Heideggers perspective, this difference cannot be thought in terms of presence, as Hegel attempts to do. Others, such as Bataille, MerleauPonty, Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas, to name but a few, are equally concerned with an other (a difference) that cannot be reduced to identity. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3. Henceforth cited as MP. Lawrence Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1990), 1011. Henceforth cited as MPA. Mythos and logos remain, perhaps, in an unusual bi-polar disorder. The remaining chapters of Lincolns book focus on the return to myth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which occasioned Romanticism, nationalism and Aryan triumphalism. This return is to myth as an ideology, and therefore ignores the deconstructive dynamic of mythos that destabilizes any such totalizing structure. Taking up the banner of myth in this fashion focuses solely on the structuring aspect of myth, not on its simultaneous deconstructive aspect. Chapter 2 includes a further discussion of Derridean double movement. Importantly, Socrates is drugged with a pharmakon, which is irreducibly indecidable. This is discussed in Chapter 3. John Sallis, The Verge of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 28. Henceforth cited as VP. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), emphasis added, 2601. Henceforth cited as FR. Chapter 3 deals with these very issues. This parallels Derridas idea of play, which operates beyond and without intention. See Chapter 3. As noted earlier, ideology implies masterability. One of Lincolns points, with which few (if any) of us would argue, is that mythos can be dangerous because it can be used, adapted and fashioned into a political or ideological weapon. Lincoln points out how genocides, for example, have been justified and carried out via the abuse of mythos. However, this overlooks the fundamental, deconstructive aspect of mythos. Just as he misses mythos irreducible indecidability, he also ignores the dis of dis-course, which disseminates and resists every attempt at synthesis. This recalls Derridas playful subtitle, hors doeuvre, that begins Dissemination, thereby deconstructing the very function of a preface by inscribing that which will not have been a book (D, 3). This also brings to mind Blanchots non-absent absence of writing, which simultaneously constructs and deconstructs every book.
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Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 6. Henceforth cited as WD. Derrida first uses soliciting in Diffrance in a discussion of the privileging of presence in metaphysics: This privilege is the ether of metaphysics, the element of our thought that is caught in the language of metaphysics. One can delimit such a closure today only by soliciting the value of presence that Heidegger has shown to be the ontotheological determination of Being; and in thus soliciting the value of presence, by means of an interrogation whose status must be completely exceptional (MP, 16). Later in the essay he picks this up again: It is the domination of beings that diffrance everywhere comes to solicit, in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety (MP, 21). As Derrida reminds us, in speaking of Heideggers avoidance of Geist, which Heidegger does in order to try not to get stuck in its traditional, metaphysical limitations, all of those modalities of avoiding . . . come down to saying without saying, writing without writing, using words without using words. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2. In other words, these modalities of avoiding do not successfully avoid. Instead, through this avoidance, the avoided element reappears to subvert that which had tried to avoid it. To pay heed to the disruptions that are always already underway is to witness the ways in which philosophys avoidance of mythos has unwittingly reinscribed and re-marked mythos in logos. As mentioned in the preface, this reading is not final or totalizing either. These ideas will be explored shortly in regard to Derridas reading of Levinas. As opposed to other usages, such as to slip into bed or to slip (by stealth) into the room. For example, biology identifies constantly dividing cells as labile. Note that the use of the phrase, gives rise to parallels the usage of the phrase in regard to mythos and logos (mythos gives rise to logos). This phrase does not imply a continuous process paradigm or a teleological necessity. Rather, logos emerges through the unforeseeable event of mythos, and mythos emerges (in terms of presence) through the structures of logos. For more on this, see the discussion of emergence in Chapter 3 and the analysis of Derridas gift-event in Chapter 5. Pas de deux must also be read doubly as both two-step and not two. Not is not a negation. The pas de deux is both simultaneous and separate, as will become clear. Barbara Johnson, the translator of Dissemination, uses this term in her introduction to describe both a dance of duplicity and an erasure of binarity (xxvii). Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 47. Henceforth cited as IAD. Taylor further adds to his reading of Heidegger by commenting on the significance of the cleavage on which the temple is situated: The alternating
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strife of world and earth forms the tear (Riss) that lies in the midst of Being and beings (A, 50). Taylor takes this yet a step further by suggesting that cleaving has a double meaning (just as tearing does): it is both to divide and to adhere, simultaneously joining and separating (A, 48; T, 113). In Face of the Deep, Catherine Keller tantalizingly opens her pre/face with the following: What if beginning this beginning, any beginning, The Beginning does not lie back, like an origin, but rather opens out? To begin derives from the old Teutonic be-ginnan, to cut open, to open up, cognate with the Old English ginan, meaning to gape, to yawn, as a mouth or an abyss. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge: New York, 2003), xv. In arguing for creation ex profundis as opposed to creation ex nihilo, Keller begins with a tear that opens out. This beginning is in fact a gaping cut. A painting by Mark Tansey, suggestively entitled Doubting Thomas, prefaces Taylors book. It depicts a car that has come to a stop in the middle of a highway. The passenger door is open and not far from it, in the forefront of the painting, is a man (a postmodern version of St. Thomas, as the title suggests) kneeling over the road as if in the process of bending down in the act of prayer. His left hand is outstretched and probes the great crack that has opened across the macadam (that has perhaps originated from a rocky cleft at the margins of the roads surface, although the true origin of the fissure remains elusive), scarring and disrupting it. The chasm-like crack has dislocated the centre line of the road along with, one might infer, Thomass faith. It is also worth noting that Altarity is spelled with an a, not an e, which simultaneously resonates with Derridas a of diffrance, makes visual reference to the A of the Hegelian pyramid that houses a crypt and recalls a religious altar. Many writers refer to this essay as a piece of Festschrift. However, a Festschrift is done in gratitude. It blindly assumes that the text being read is limited to the authors intent. Derrida insists on reading Levinas not in gratitude, but in ingratitude. The title of Derridas piece comes from a phrase of Husserls, im selben Augenblick (at that very moment). Derrida considers Husserls phrase in Speech and Phenomena (see 49ff) and in this piece on Levinas picks it up again. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, Editors Introduction, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), xii, xixviii. In his consideration of ethical Saying (le Dire) in contrast to the ontological language of the Said (le Dit), Levinas is concerned with intentionality (and by extension, decidability), which implies a metaphysical presence. Simon Critchley, Bois Derridas final word on Levinas in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 171,16289. Henceforth cited as B. This double movement between masculine/Same and feminine/Other is paralleled by Sa and Ma in the analysis of Glas in Chapter 4. Jacques Derrida, At this very moment in this work here I am, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas, trans.
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Ruben Berezdivin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 12, 1148. Henceforth cited as ATVM. A seam that mends is one in which the thread is constantly returned to the place where the needle first introduced it to the fabric. This implies a circularity and return. The difference between Derridas notion of seam (to be introduced shortly) and edge is significant. In traditional constructions, an edge is the end of a plane, a border (or even the formation of a border or enclosure), the point where two planes intersect, or the cutting side of a blade. Derridas seam, on the other hand, is aporetic. In addition to the sewing or joining together of two pieces (of cloth or leather), a seam is also a scar or a weak and susceptible gap. Derridas use of seam would suggest that in most traditional philosophical constructions, edges lose their edginess because they are too easily subjected to the simple oppositions of presence and absence. Unlike a seam, an edge does not simultaneously join and separate. Its movement is not double. Edges maintain one kind of reading, thinking or writing, but not two at once. Taylors use of edge defies traditional notions of it, and is later informed by the idea of edge that emerges in complexity studies, in which edge connotes a between that is neither simply one thing nor another (i.e. between order and chaos is neither order nor chaos). Derrida inserts a circumflex over the first m of the first meme, thereby indicating a silent yet important graphic difference between these two words. Not only does this emphasize that repetition is not merely the reiteration of the same, but it also underscores the importance of this silent, unusual (since ms dont normally have a circumflex) mark that is not properly present (it cannot be detected by the ear nor spoken it can only be read). This anticipates a discussion later in this chapter of the mute a of diffrance. E.L. does not simply refer to Emmanuel Levinas. Since an examination of this alone could comprise a chapter, a few suggestive remarks here will have to suffice. In striving to maintain the non-themetizability of the subject, Levinas uses the Latin term, ille. Taylor notes that it includes the third person, singular, il. Illeity links up with Other, Infinite, and Alterity to form a metonymic chain of signifiers intended to evoke what cannot be designated. . . . illeity is irreducibly nonphenomenal and thus escapes every phenomenology (A, 2045). In Critchleys reading in his essay Bois, he refers back to the woman reader (who recall, is one of the voices in Derridas essay) in order to argue that, in Derridas essay, the woman reader replaces the pronoun Il with Elle and that therefore constitutes an act of effacement or erasure (B, 185). Thereby, ethical alterity is maintained because the fault . . . is still preserved and therefore the text is returned to Elle and not to E.L. (B, 185). We will see this carried out in the chapters that follow. Always already has precedence in Heideggers schon da and MerleauPontys toujours dj l. As discussed in Chapter 1, in Hegels dialectic, identity and difference are indeed commensurable, and eventually united as the identity of identityand-difference.
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This relates to the discussion of analogies of relation, as opposed to those of attribution, in Chapter 1. Also, for a discussion of relation without relation see Chapter 5. This is no ordinary play. See the discussion of Derridian play in Chapter 3. Oiksis is examined in the next section. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126. Henceforth cited as MB. Chapter 4 is devoted to an in-depth exploration of Sa as it appears in Derridas Glas. In the beginning of Glas, Derrida states that Sa from now on will be the siglum of savoir absolu (G, 1). This siglum refers to Hegels idea of Absolute Knowledge, which marks the completion of philosophy. Sa as savoir absolu sees and therefore knows all. Its gaze accounts for everything. Nothing remains unseen and therefore unknown. The notion of a seeing not aligned with sa is playing off of the French verbs, where to see (voir) literally lacks the sa of savoir. Such linguistic play refigures knowing and knowledge. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 312. Henceforth cited as PT. In a footnote, the translator notes that a play on words has been lost in translation . . . the difference between the e and the a of diffrence/diffrance can neither be seen nor heard. It is not a sensible that is, relating to the senses difference. But, he [Derrida] goes on to explain, neither is this an intelligible difference, for the very names by which we conceive of objective intelligibility are already in complicity with sensibility. Therein the Greek origin of theory literally means to look at, to see; and the word Derrida uses for understanding here is entendement, the noun form of entendre, to hear (MP, 5). Derridas use of language demonstrates the degree to which sensibility and intelligibility are mutually implicated. They are accomplices in their perpetuation of logocentrism, and each assumes this presence a presence that the senses are enlisted to attune themselves to, even to the exclusion of all other modes of reception as the very foundation of theoretical understanding. Chapter 5 includes a discussion of the economic circle that always returns home from whence it departed. Recall that in Hegelian thought, thinking must come back, full circle, to itself in order to achieve absolute knowledge. Diffrance, on the other hand, works by disseminating. Always errant, it forever wanders, disrupting and deferring presence, thereby preventing the return of difference to identity, and rendering all knowledge (and logos) incomplete. This other operation is not the least bit economic because losses (negations) are not always turned into gains. It leaves unaccountable remains. Economic systems (like Hegels), on the other hand, strive to transform losses into gains by negating the original negation. Their goal is to leave nothing unaccounted for by returning difference to identity. As we have seen, this operation cannot exist apart from the remains that are within the system. Therefore, the circle is always already
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breached, interrupted and incomplete. In this way, the economic contains an uneconomic aspect. The all-seeing father is also known as Zeus, who is explicitly depicted in Homer as being of broad vision, thus all-seeing (panopts). . . . [L]ike an eagle, he can spot anything that is happening on earth below him. He literally oversees the deeds of mortals: he sees everything they do, whereas they can only rarely detect his presence (for example, in the thunderbolts he throws when he is angry, like so many angry looks). . . . Zeus is in effect an enormous sky-eye; or let us say that, by his presence, the sky itself becomes a gigantic eye. Edward S. Casey, The World At A Glance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 187. As we will see in the next chapter, although Zeus is not directly invoked in Platos Phaedrus, Socrates conjuring of Typhon questions his reign. Monstrous Typhon steals Zeuss thunderbolts, threatening the dominance of panopts. Jacques Derrida, Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), emphasis added, xiv, xixlviii. Henceforth cited as F. The significance of fors will become more obvious in the course of this discussion. The translator notes that the French word is derived from the Latin foris (outside, outdoors), and is an archaic preposition meaning except for, barring, save. In addition, fors is the plural of the word for, which, in the French expression le for intrieur, designates the inner heart, the tribunal of conscience, subjective interiority. The word fors thus means both interiority and exteriority (F, xixii). Referencing Hegels derogatory statement that young Israelites cannot, unlike their Christian counterparts, obtain the lofty status of the soaring (Christian-philosopher) eagles, Taylor refers to the panoptical philosopher of Hegels system as one with an eagle eye (A, 1923). Not missing a beat, Derrida, among others, has associated Hegel with the eagle, since the French for eagle (aigle) is a homophone of Hegel. Swallowing becomes particularly suggestive in Chapter 4 where it applies to Saturns literal ingestion of his children. For now, the term designates the relationship between incorporator and incorporated. As explained in Chapter 1, in the Hegelian system, identity takes up difference into itself, domesticating and uniting difference with identity as the identity of identity-and-difference. Attenuation is domestication. Domestication has specific resonances, as Taylor points out in his discussion of Hegel in Altarity: The etymology of domesticate suggests further dimensions of the circularity of this familial economy. Domesticate derives from the Latin word domus, which means house or home. In Italian, duomo refers to the house of God. A dome is a rounded vault forming the roof of a building or chief part of it, and having a circular, elliptical, or polygonal base. Furthermore, dome can be used to designate a cathedral church. Economy and domesticity of domestication are closely related. Economy, which derives from the Greek oikonomos: oikos house + nomos, to manage, control, means management
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of a house; the art or science of managing a household. Such management is, of course, primarily concerned with expenses or, more precisely, with controlling expenditure. In contrast to the immanent trinity, which describes the internal life of the godhead, the economic trinity refers to the way in which God deals with the world and His people. Within this context, the economic trinity depicts different phases in the process of salvation. The economic relationship of the Father and Son in and through the Spirit is all-encompassing. Nothing is left out. When Son returns to Father in Spirit, the fall is overcome and no remains are left in the tomb. The resurrection of the Son is the ultimate return on the Fathers investment. This return finally closes the family circle (A, 32). Before this, Taylor points out that for Hegel, the philosopher is not nomadic. . . . To the contrary, the philosopher is the prodigal son who faithfully returns to the home of the father. Within this fathers house, the son who saves rather than the son who spends is rewarded. The father of speculative philosophy runs a profitable domestic economy in which there must be a return on every investment. With the System, profitless expenditure, senseless prodigality, and excessive loss cannot be tolerated and therefore must be excluded or repressed (A, 312). Many of these threads are picked up in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 further explores the familial circle and the relationship of Father to (well-born) Son as it is represented in Platos logos and contrasted to the bastard sibling, mythos. Chapter 5 looks at the how the specular economy is put into motion by that which is prodigal, excessive and aneconomic. Chapter 5 includes a discussion of mythos as an impossible inclusion. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction and the other, in Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 1434, 139156. Henceforth cited as DO. In the same interview, Derrida insists that [n]o matter how rigorous an analysis I bring to bear on such texts, I am always left with the impression that there is something more to be thought (DO, 145). Later he adds, identity presupposes alterity (DO, 149) and that from the very beginnings of Greek philosophy the self-identity of the Logos is already fissured and divided (DO, 148). This last statement is precisely what Chapter 3 builds on in order to illuminate how mythos is a non-foundational foundation of logos.
CHAPTER 3
1
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1980), 23940. Shortly after this chapter was completed, John Salliss Verge of Philosophy was published. Strangely echoing what this chapter sets out to do, Sallis writes, one could envisage still another discourse that would complement
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Platos Pharmacy, even if at some point it might prove to be at odds with it. This discourse, too, would be a kind of companion piece, one following still the lines of the Phaedrus but now focused on myth hence a on , literally a mythology (VP, 86). However, even a mythology, as the word suggests, is logos aligned. As I have suggested, any serious consideration of mythos must resist all logocentric imperatives. Specifically, this chapter will engage as does Derridas essay the Phaedrus. For a study that is imaginatively attuned to the ambiguities inherent within Platos dialogues, see John Salliss Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). The quote cited in the first chapter is as follows: The mythical form of this whole cosmology is not a poetical dress, in which Plato arbitrarily chooses to clothe a perfectly definite and rational scheme, such as modern students set themselves to discover in it. If Plato could have stated it as a logos, he would have done so, only too gladly; but he cannot (emphasis added, FR, 2601). John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), xiii. Henceforth cited as BL. For Hegel, sensuous myth is inferior to the purity of thought of logos: The myth is always a mode of representation which, as belonging to an earlier stage, introduces sensuous images, which are directed to imagination, not to thought; in this, however, the activity of thought is suspended, it cannot yet establish itself by its own power, and so is not yet free. The myth belongs to the pedagogic stage of the human race, since it entices and allures men to occupy themselves with the content; but as it takes away from the purity of thought through sensuous forms, it cannot express the meaning of Thought. When the Notion attains its full development, it has no more need of the myth. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume II, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1974), 20. Jacques Derrida, Response to Francis Guibals The otherness of the other otherwise: tracing Jacques Derrida, Parallax 10.4 (2004), 33,327. Henceforth cited as DR. This stands in stark contrast to Hegels dialectic wherein all loss is negated, and transformed and returned as profit. Although others, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, have theorized play at length, Derridas analysis is far more incisive and radical. As a case in point, Gadamers theory of play, unlike Derridas, is based on a fundamental ground. Derrida recognizes that play exceeds the structures that it both founds (as an unanticpatable event) and unfounds. Play, for Derrida, does not happen in the realm of presence. In contrast to Gadamers theory of play, Derridas play does not lend itself to self-reflexive hermeneutical usage. Taylor elaborates this point in Tears in his examination of Richard Rortys appropriation of Gadamerian play. Taylor also revisits Hegelian play wherein play is impossible apart from what Hegel describes as the labor of the negative and the other is not simply other but is at the same time also ones own self (T, 132), and connects it to Gadamers
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assertion that play is really limited to representing itself (qtd in T, 133). For Derrida, play does not yield self-representation. In fact, it ruptures the possibility of self-representation, revealing that this is, in fact, impossible. Derridas analysis effectively tears the very fabric of Gadamers. Although Derridas (dis)seminal insights on play may not yet be fully appreciated, Taylors erudite analysis in Tears (see 12736) does assist in illustrating the significance of Derridas work on play. Salute is used playfully by Derrida, since Platos dismissal of myth is, at the same time, an affirmation of it. Such a non-totalizing structure without a fixed centre or ground represents a network, as discussed in Chapter 5. I am indebted to Taylors wordplay that suggests that re-covery, far from regathering and re-collecting, conceals and hides. It recovers as an upholsterer would. Recovery, says Taylor, is always a re-covering and, therefore, inevitably remains incomplete. In this way, closure dis-closes without revealing the openness of every foundational base . Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3045. Henceforth cited as AG. Chapter 5 includes a more detailed analysis of Taylors understanding of complex adaptive systems (from which the concept of emergence arises) in order to demonstrate how such a framework allows for a fruitful re-examination of the relation of mythos and logos. John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 14. This previews a discussion of dngation that occurs later in this chapter. This affirmation of play is non-affirmative. That is, without any stake in the outcome. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Horace Liveright, 1927), 227a. Henceforth cited as DP. Zeus, the panoptical father of Olympus, is aligned with logos and the project of philosophy. See Chapter 2s brief discussion of Zeus and his subsequent association with Hegels savoir absolu. The topos of mythos is never present as such and is therefore impossible to identify. As we will see, mythos is in fact atopos. Orithyia, an Athenian princess, was kidnapped by Boreas, who carried her off to Thrace, where she later bore him two daughters and two sons. In Histories, Herodotus notes that this is why the Athenians invoked the foreign god, Boreas, to assist them in battle; they considered him a son-in-law. Herodotus, Histories, trans. Aubrey de Slincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 7.189. At first glance it may seem hard to fathom that a pharmakon is both simultaneously and separately remedy and poison. LSD is a ready modern-day example. Scientist Aldous Huxley and religion scholar Huston Smith testified to the way in which it opened the doors of perception to genuine religious experience. Yet many people became unhinged under its influences. Timothy Leary is proof of this. Good and bad trips, unpredictably, uncontrollably and even simultaneously resulted from its use. It can be an elixir of wonder and/or a fatal potion.
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In his translation of the Phaedrus, Stephen Scully comments that Socrates is punning on Phaedrus name and that Phaedrus is anything but a Bright-Counsel, and instead, is dim-witted and undisciplined in aesthetic or philosophical judgment. Stephen Scully, Interpretative essay, in Platos Phaedrus (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003), 78, 7399. The oppositions staged in Platos text are ironic and ambiguous. Indeed, the entire dialogue is also about love and bonds. Of course, the other logic at work in the text calls into question every perceived intimacy while simultaneously revealing unsuspected ones, such as the non-oppositional affinity between logos and mythos. For Hegel, Socrates carried out the command of the God of knowledge, Know Thyself, and made it the motto of the Greeks, calling it the law of the mind, and not interpreting it as meaning a mere acquaintanceship with the particular nature of man. Thus Socrates is the hero who established in the place of the Delphic oracle, the principle that man must look within himself to know what is Truth. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume I, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1974), 435. In Hegels analysis, the Delphic injunction urges Mind to know itself, and through a dialectical movement, come into contact with the underlying unity of the Absolute (savoir absolu). Mythos and pharmakon (along with Typhon), however, mark the impossibility of such fulfilment, as this study reveals. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Stephen Scully (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003), 230a. Henceforth cited as PH. For a thought-provoking retelling of Cadmus defeat of Typhon see Roberto Calassos The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 37789. Cadmus is responsible for introducing the Greek alphabet. This aligns him with the Egyptian god, Thoth, who figures predominantly in Platos Pharmacy and is a source of discussion later in this chapter. Cadmus, although identified as Greek, was not born in Greece. He, too, is a foreigner, although it appears that he undergoes a process of domestication that Thoth does not. When Typhon defeats Zeus, the Olympians flee to Egypt. Calasso refers to Cadmus gift of the alphabet as gifts of the mind: vowels and consonants yoked together in tiny signs, etched model of a silence that speaks the alphabet. With the alphabet the Greeks would teach themselves to experience the gods in the silence of the mind and no longer in the full and normal presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage (3901). As Calasso suggests, the invention of writing (which concerns Derrida in Platos Phaedrus) also marks the withdrawal of the gods. Their disruptive trace (which is neither absent nor present) is inscribed within the alphabet, within writing. Monster derives from the Latin monstrum which, in turn, is related to the verb monstrare, which means to show or reveal. A monstrum, therefore, is a message that comes from afar, improperly entering into the regulated order as an undomesticated stranger. Monsters disclose dis-closure.
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Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003), 13. Henceforth cited as SGM. In Theogony, Hesiod describes the hundred snake heads of Typhon as each sending forth a different voice: and inside each one of these horrible heads / there were voices / that threw out every sort of horrible sound / for sometimes / it was speech such as the gods / could understand, but at other / times, the sound of a bellowing bull, / proud-eyed and furious / beyond holding, or again like a lion / shameless in cruelty, or again it was like the barking of dogs, / a wonder to listen to, / or again he would whistle so the tall mountains re-echoed to it. Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), lines 82934. Henceforth cited as TH. Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 237. Sigmund Freuds seminal essay on das Unheimliche, or the uncanny, identifies it as that which is simultaneously das Unheimliche and das Heimliche. That is, it is both unknown and unfamiliar and familiar, intimate and homely. It is that which is familiar and concealed and kept hidden. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 132. Henceforth cited as U. The uncanny, therefore, is the frightening element . . . that has been repressed and now returns (U, 147). Something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed is now revealed and brought out into the open (U, 148). Freud sees modernism as uncanny, since it stages the return of the previously repressed primitive. The similarities between mythos and the uncanny are developed in the course of this chapter. See also Mary-Jane Rubensteins Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), which makes a similar point. She argues that philosophys genesis is thaumazein, which arises when understanding cannot master that which lies closest to it when, surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and things, the philosopher suddenly finds himself surrounded on all sides by aporia. . . . Wonder, then, comes on the scene neither as a tranquilizing force nor as a kind of will-toward-epistemological domination, but rather as a profoundly unsettling pathos. . . . the philosophers wonder marks his inability to ground himself in the ordinary as he reaches toward the extraordinary; it indicates, in fact, that the skyward reach has rendered uncanny the very ground on which the philosopher stands. . . . it leaves thinking thus ungrounded (34). The Typhonic, unnamable other is perhaps the result of the play of diffrance. This echoes Derridas final words in Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences: Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless,
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mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (WD, 293). Tellingly, Plato often refers to Socrates as a midwife. When read through Derridas notion of play, we can see that Socrates is not attending to the births of philosopher-kings (those aligned with all-seeing Zeus, with logos). He is instead superintending the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity, the other that infiltrates logos from the outset. This monstrous infant calls into question the supremacy and assumed primogeniture of logos. In releasing Typhon into the dialogue, Socrates is delivering monsters. Traditional conception is rendered impossible. For Hegel, conception is the telos of the dialectic, of philosophy. Here, though, there is only ever the (mis)conception of uncanny monsters. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 119. Henceforth cited as EO. See also D, 72. For another discussion of this issue see Heideggers Time and being in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 124. Note how the many-headed Typhon does not adhere to this schema either. See sections 243e257b. For more on the history of the palinode, see Leonard Woodburys Helen and the palinode. Phoenix 21.3 (1967): 15776. See 243ab and Scullys discussion of the conventions of the palinode in his interpretive essay, 801. Although written, the palinode is related to speech, since as Scully states, Stesichorus father is Good-Speech (Euphemos), from the Land of Desire (Himera). See Derridas How to avoid speaking: denials. Also, see Taylors argument on the mistranslation of dngation as denials in Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 36. Henceforth cited as N. See Freuds essay, Negation. As Freud concludes, we never discover a no in the unconscious and that recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a negative formula. Sigmund Freud, Negation, trans. James Strachey, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 239, 2339. For Freud, affirmation and negation and Eros and Thanatos are mutually implicated. Taylor rightly suggests that Freuds term has not been properly translated so as to portray its double meaning. See N, 36. As a sun god, Ammon-Ra is the all-knowing light of reason. Bataille notes that the eye is without any doubt the symbol of the dazzling sun, and connects the sun and eye to the eagle: the ancients attributed to the eagle as solar bird the faculty of contemplating the sun face to face. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 192739, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 74. Staring at the sun, however, is known to produce temporary blindness and was once thought to result in madness. (See also a link between staring at the sun and blindness in
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Platos Phaedo, 99d, in contrast to his discussion of beholding the sun directly in the Republic, 516b.) The associations between eye-sun-eagle suggest not merely an elevated seeing, but more importantly, reveal that this vision is really an inability to discern in terms of presence. Instead it is blindness or madness. See also Taylors compelling web of associations with Batailles blinding sun and Hegels speculative system in Altarity 11519. Furthermore, Ronna Burger indicates that Ammon is the Egyptian name for the panoptical father, Zeus. Ronna Burger, Platos Phaedrus: A Defense of a Philosophic Art of Writing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 94. This role bears a similarity to that of monstrum or monsters. For a study of the role of monsters as other-worldly messengers, see Timothy K. Beals Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002). In the underworld, Thoth is stationed opposite Osiris. Derrida points out that, although he is the god of writing, Thoth does not just record the weight of the dead souls. He engages in an economy of death, in a cryptic arithmetic that defies mere logic. Derrida explains that pharmakon is also a word for perfume. A perfume without essence, as we earlier called it a drug without substance (D, 142). Recall the discussion of Hegel in Chapter 1, for whom opposition is not really antipodal, but rather the penultimate stage in the movement to synthesis and identity. In their study, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet point out that a tyrant, (turannos) accedes to royalty via an indirect route, bypassing the legitimate line . . . his qualifications for power are his actions and exploits. He reigns by virtue not of his blood but of his own qualities; he is the son of his works and also of Tuch [chance]. The supreme power that he has succeeded in winning outside the ordinary norms places him, for better or for worse, above other men and above the law. . . . Euripides and Plato both speak of the turannos isotheos, tyranny that is the equal of a god in that it is the absolute power to do as one wishes, to do anything one wants. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 127. There are a few significant points here. The first is that tyrants are not kings by blood. If Platos project is read as an attempt to solidify the reign of philosopher-kings (displacing that of the gods), it is notable that philosophys ascendency to the throne matches that of tyrants, as described by Vernant and Vidal-Naquet. In this view, logos is illegitimate, the result of exploits. Although logos attempts to demonstrate a proper blood relation and lineage, its tyranny is achieved by an indirect route, not a rightful route of paternity, despite its claims to the contrary. If logos very reign takes place via pharmakon and mythos (which open the dialogue and make possible logical discourse), then there is nothing the least bit proper about the rule of logos. Only mythos and pharmakon could claim a proper place, but since they fall outside of the order of presence and are therefore improper, it is not even possible to designate them as heirs, unless such a lineage is one of (dis)rule.
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In his translation, Stephen Scully calls Thamus Ammon and gives the following explanation: I accept Postgates emendation of thamoun (Thamus) for theon (god). According to Herodotus (2.42), Ammon also known as the sun god Ra, is the Egyptian name for Zeus; This god-king differs from a philosopher-king in that he pronounces, more in the manner of a prophet (cf. 275c8), than of a philosopher exploring the truth of a statement (PH, 64). In GT, Derrida turns the notion of gift on its head. See Chapter 5, which analyzes Derridas notion of the gift in terms of mythos. Thoths gift to the king is not (simply) (a) present. In other words, this is no ordinary present, but one that ruptures the very economy of presence. See PH 274e275b. Although referring to the mystical foundation of law, this description encapsulates Thoths refusal to invoke logos as a response. Jacques Derrida, Force of law: the mystical foundation of authority , trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11.56 (1990), emphasis added, 943, 9201045. Henceforth cited as FL. The full import of Taylors statement and the ways in which alterity (or, as Taylor rewrites it, altarity) infects the entire dialogue are examined at the end of this chapter in an analysis of the Phaedrus closing prayer to Pan. Francis Guibal, The otherness of the other otherwise: tracing Jacques Derrida, Parallax 10.4 (2004), 22, 1741. Henceforth cited as O. For another thought-provoking consideration of Platos good, see VP, 2952. In this sense, the project of philosophy could be considered a mythology. That is, a fiction. See the discussion of Hegels inner contradiction in Chapter 1. Derrida confirms this abiding understanding in an interview, proclaiming, it was not a question of opposing a dialectic. Be it opposition to the dialectic or war against the dialectic, its a losing battle. What it really comes down to is thinking a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectical. Jacques Derrida, I have a taste for the secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, in Giacomo Donis and David Webb (eds), A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 33, 192. Henceforth cited as TS. This is what we have attempted to do throughout. In part, Taylor derives his term, nonfoundational foundation, from Derridas essay, Force of law. Derrida describes a mystical foundation that is before the law and other to it, and thus grounds and ungrounds the law itself. This foundation constructs the law that it nevertheless escapes: Its very moment of foundation or institution . . . the operation that consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying the law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretive violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate (FL, 9413). This matrix is akin to the network or gift examined in Chapter 5. In resisting structure, they also unwittingly reinscribe it, lending to a simultaneous construction and deconstruction. This is illustrative of our
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earlier discussion about the codependence of system and excess, and structuralism and post-stucturalism. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 83. Henceforth cited as AR. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr. and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1001. Henceforth cited as ON. John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Platos Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 120. Recall here as well that for Plato, speech is superior because, unlike writing, it is present. Given Derridas concern with speech and the privileging of presence in Platos Phaedrus, it is curious that he did not address the ending prayer in his analysis of the text.
CHAPTER 4
1
As mentioned earlier, gives rise to does not connote a linear process. Mythos and logos are co-emergent in the same way as event and structure, which were analyzed in the previous chapter. This is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. Rodolphe Gasch, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4. As discussed in the first chapter, discursive carries a double meaning of both gathering and dispersing. Gaschs use of the term unintentionally puts both of these meanings into play, thereby subverting his own privileging of a logocentric discursiveness. In The Moment of Complexity, Taylor suggests that the combinatorial play of networks encourages us to reconsider meaning as playful interactive events: Rather than viewing events as meaningful, meaning must be understood as an event. Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 214. Henceforth cited as MC. Genets name also echoes the homophones, je nais, meaning I generate and gent, a flower. Castration emerges as one of many themes in the text. Later in the chapter this thread is picked up in relation to Saturn. For Jacques Lacan, the threat of castration marks the entrance of the child into the symbolic order, which is also the paternal order of logos, of language. Derrida, however, refuses to submit to this genealogy. That is, he will not write or think exclusively within the domain of the father-son-(philosopher-)king. At the same time, Derrida cannot but be castrated by his text whose fissured columns of writing construct and deconstruct beyond his own intentions. This double effect of conservation and suppression is a reoccurring motif in Glas, and is examined later in the chapter. For studies on the theme of castration in Glas see Gregory Ulmer, Sounding the unconscious in
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Glassary, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Glas-piece: a compte rendu, and Ned Lukacher, K(CH)ronosology. Jacques Derrida, Proverb: He that would pun . . . trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in John P. Leavey, Jr., Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 17, 1720. Henceforth cited as HTW. Derridas own relationship to the translatability of Glas is double-edged: By betting on this untranslatability of gl, whose effects are innumerable and everywhere mediatized I have doubtless responded to a first desire: not to let this text pass into a foreign tongue. But at the same time, double bind, I have done what I could so that this desire fails and the book republishes itself [se rdite], thus is published for the first time in a foreign tongue (HTW, 20). Gregory L. Ulmer, Sounding the unconscious, in John P. Leavey, Jr., Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 25, 23129. This also brings to mind Socrates statement in the Phaedrus that discourse should, like a living creature, have its own body that is not without a head. In the Phaedrus, the implication is that mythic discourse, as opposed to philosophic discourse, is headless and therefore imperfect and inferior. See Chapter 3. Derrida is not writing a proper philosophical text, but an improper one. In the wake of philosophys death knell, such dis-course is the only re-course possible. In this tattooed distyle Derrida argues that [t]he opposition (language/ discourse) denounces itself, itself and all others without the conception of the concept, it is a dead language, writing and defunct speech, or resonance without signification. (Klang and not Sprache.) (emphasis added, G, 89). The Klanging of the bell of Glas produces, instead of conception, a mute or mad sound without meaning. It does not toll for the sake of reception. Here Derrida claims an affinity between Klang and writing. Insofar as the Klingen of Klang resists, withstands conception (G, 9), logos cannot ascertain, process or govern it. It is merely gl, an unintelligible gurgling from the back of the throat, a death-rattle. There are many homophonic sounds throughout, such as voler (meaning theft and flight), which require one to hear otherwise as well, forever oscillating between a plurality of meanings. One of these, sa/a, is discussed later in the chapter. Relieved refers to the reliever of Hegels dialectic, where difference is negated and raised up to positivity. In other words, the fall is relieved because it ensures resurrection. This echoes Hegels Christian-centric alignment of the movement of logos with Jesus Christ. Christs fall made his resurrection possible. The resurrection symbolizes the death of death and the ultimate triumph of (Absolute) Spirit. With it, death is defeated. Therefore the first death through crucifixion is not a finality, but a necessary movement to the beatific realization of Absolute Spirit, which issues in the synthesis of the divine and human, subjective and objective, material and spiritual, flesh and word. See G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975).
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Derrida translates Hegels Aufhebung a bit playfully as relve, which means both to lift up (as Hegels Aufhebung does) and to relieve (i.e. to relieve of a burden). Derridas relve is inscribed with the disseminating mark of diffrance. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Glas-piece: a compte rendu, Diacritics 7.3 (1977), 2930, 2243. Henceforth cited as GP. The relation without relation of the columns of Glas mirrors the relationship between mythos and logos. Chapter 5 includes a discussion of the relation of these two as a relation without relation. As it turns out, Saturn/Sa is associated with Dionysus. This connection is explored later in the chapter. In his preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes philosophical truth in the following way: The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose (PS, 27). Hegels preface is necessary in order to explain his large and wide-ranging work, which includes topics as seemingly diverse as the family and an academic critique of Kants categorical imperative, with styles varying from parables to philosophic discourses. In other words, without the introduction, the Phenomenology ceases to make perfect sense, to be entirely logical. Therefore, Hegel must write his preface in order to explain his work. (See Derridas critique of Hegels necessity for a preface that automatically acts as an excessive exterior within Hegels work, disrupting its intentions and preventing logics closure in Outwork, prefacing in Dissemination, 160.) Furthermore, the entire Phenomenology is itself a preface to Hegels Science of Logic. The revelry of Hegels Bacchanalia is the seemingly disjointed, chaotic moments of the dialectic that may appear to be drunk and out of control (if one focuses simply on a snapshot of one movement, such as the movement into otherness before consciousness is for-itself). However, in the final analysis (which takes into consideration the end point of the dialectical movement and therefore the movement as a whole), there is transparent and simple repose. As Hegel states immediately after what is quoted above, Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent (PS, 278). The single shapes of Spirit are necessary moments as Bacchanalian as they may be but in the end, philosophical truth recollects itself in order to repossess and return to itself as savoir absolu. The movement arrives at the identity of identityand-difference. This is the transparent and simple repose that Hegel speaks of. The road travelled to get to this point has moments that, although they may appear errant, such as the movement into difference, into otherness before consciousness returns to itself in order to exist for-itself, actually stage the return of difference to identity. They enact a homecoming to a peace of mind from the disruptive and disorderly conduct under the influence of drunken thoughtlessness. However, in recalling the wayward opening movements of Platos Phaedrus, one is
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reminded that something always remains that cannot just be assimilated, resolved or taken up into the unity of savoir absolu. Interestingly enough, in a 1977 interview, Derrida invoked the image of a Mbius strip in order to argue that Glas is not one, since the Moebius strip is a powerful figuration of the economy, of the law of reappropriation, or of a successful mourning-work that can no longer, in the writing of Glas, toll a knell [sonner un glas] which is its own (its glas) without breakage [bris] and debris (PTS, 51). Almost 30 years later, Taylor uses the Mbius strip, but in a completely different way, recasting it through the new science of complexity: What if matter/form, materiality/immateriality, substance/matter, mind/body, and so on are not opposites, which confront each other, but are mutually implicated in such a way that each folds into the other like a Mbius strip, which never quite closes on itself ? (MC, 224). A Mbius strip differs from a circle or globe in that the bounding edge must be traversed twice before returning to itself. The figure of the Mbius strip is precisely the point upon which Taylors theories and methods loop away from strictly Derridean deconstruction. Although Taylors own scholarship is strongly influenced by Derridean deconstruction, his more recent forays into complexity studies stray, ever-so-slightly, from it. Taylor expresses this in After God: [P]oststructuralism provides a necessary corrective to structuralism. But deconstruction is so preoccupied with the task of criticism that it cannot provide the constructive gesture so desperately needed to respond to todays raging neofoundationalism (AG, 309). For Taylor, this does not entail a departure from deconstruction, but a necessary refiguring of it in terms of the relationship between, for example, system and excess, and by extension, structuralism and post-structuralism. Taylor rightly maintains that these relations are not merely binary, nor dialectical, and that as such, they must be envisioned as a nontotalizing structure that nevertheless acts as a whole. Taylors imaginative interweaving of complexity theory and Derridean deconstruction provides an important resource for rethinking all systems and structures, including that of mythos and logos. Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 144. Henceforth cited as IA. Bataille is fascinated with the eyes blind spot and the operation of the blind spot in Hegels specular system. For Bataille, this non-place generates an image (or knowledge) while simultaneously inscribing it with an unknowable, unseeable aspect. Of the blind spot, Bataille writes, it is no longer the spot which loses itself in knowledge, but knowledge which loses itself in it. In this way existence closes the circle, but it couldnt do this without including the night from which it proceeds only in order to enter it again. Since it moved from the unknown to the known, it is necessary that it inverse itself at the summit and go back to the unknown. . . . Even within the closed completed circle (unceasing) non-knowledge is the end and knowledge the means. To the extent that it takes itself to be an end, it sinks into the blind spot (IE, 11011.). Unlike Hegels conception of knowledge that ends in the pure transparency of savoir absolu, Bataille
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proposes that because of the blind spot of Hegelianism, the dialectic instead culminates in the abyssal darkness of non-knowledge. As Hofstadter says, we infer that the picture is self-referential, even though our logical inference does not hold up to greater scrutiny. His point is that meaning depends upon unspoken mappings which are, in the case of the Mortons Salt girl, a case of self-reference without infinite regress (IA, 145). Hofstadter also uses the example of Eschers two hands drawing in order to illustrate a strange loop. Both hands are drawing, so negation does not play an essential role; one hand is not erasing the other. Or, as Hofstadter figures it, Not is not the source of strangeness (IA, 159). He continues: In this book, a loops strangeness comes purely from the way in which a system can seem to engulf itself through an unexpected twisting-around, rudely violating what we had taken to be an inviolable hierarchical order (IA, 159). As we saw, this is precisely Platos criticism of writing and why he considers it inferior to speech (logos). John P. Leavey Jr., Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 38. It appears that neither Derrida nor any of the translators or commentators were aware of another referent for Sa. In the Din (Navajo) creation story, S is Old Age Woman, one of the monsters that the hero twin, Monster Slayer (Naay neizghn), sets out to rid the world of. S slowly saps strength with the passing years. She devours life so gradually that from one day to the next you cannot feel yourself being consumed. Paul G. Zolbrod, Din bahane: The Navajo Creation Story (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 263. It is notable that the hero does not ultimately kill S, because he realizes that this other force is necessary for the balance and harmony (hzh) of the cosmos a balance that is not just synthetic in Din cosmology. In The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy, John R. Farella argues against a dualistic interpretation of the Navajo universe, espoused by many early ethnographers and translators, whom he argues, (often unwittingly) transcribed their own (Christian) dualistic understanding of good and evil into the Navajo cosmos. As Farella observes, On whatever basis Navajos bound an entity, it is not in terms of homogeneity. Wholes seem to be composed of two parts which are in a sense complementary and in another sense opposed. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1984), 176. Also notable is that the Navajo S is associated with devouring and consumption, which is analyzed later in this chapter in terms of Saturn (Sa) and savoir absolu (Sa). In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel divides his study of consciousness into three sections, the first of which is sense certainty, followed by perception, and then force and understanding. In sense certainty the object is given, but without any conceptualization or qualification. The object is strictly external, without any recognized relation to the subject. The mediation and reconciliation of subject and object occurs later through successive dialectical movements. From consciousness, Hegel proceeds to self-consciousness, to reason, to spirit, to religion, and finally, to absolute knowing (savoir absolu).
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Saturns swallowing of his children parallels the movement of the dialectic, where difference is ingested by identity. Note the strange similarity here between Uranus and Ra, who tried to prevent Nut from giving birth. Thoth creates an excess of days so that Nut can give birth. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 135. Henceforth cited as SM. Ned Lukacher, K(Ch)ronosology, Sub-Stance 8.4 (1979), 59, 5573. Henceforth cited as K. There are some notable similarities between Sa/Saturn and Thoth. First, there is an inherent ambiguity, an internal contradiction, associated with Kronos/Saturn that, like the translation of pharmakon, appears to be put to rest by fixing its character as if no such duplicity exists. As we have seen, however, the repressed returns. In other words, this ambiguity disrupts Sas identity, despite the fact that the Romans attempted to render it one way as opposed to another. Furthermore, in this move, the Romans associate Sa with a system of counting and money. Thoth, too, is associated with weights and measures (see Chapter 3). The connection of Saturn with money and a system of exchange and accounting cannot but bring to mind Hegels savoir absolu, which is a system par excellence, set up to account for everything. Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 713a. The section in the Statesman is 269a274d. Taylors discussion of Sa hinges on the element of time. See Tears, 745 (playing off of chronos as time, the chapter is entitled, The anachronism of a/theology) and Altarity, 2935. This false origin does not undo the relevance of Taylors argument. In fact, it works as an anachronism, causing Taylors work to stray into philosophys abyss in ways that Taylor had not envisioned or intended. Richard Kearney, citing Heideggers Saturn (which Heidegger also falsely links with time), suggests that there is a chronological character . . . captured in Kronos threefold act of devouring, substitution and castration, each of which represents a fundamental aspect of time. . . . In this reading, cyclical time which seeks to return to itself gives way to chronological time which acknowledges the ineluctability of historical transience and mortality (SGM, 170). Kearneys analysis suggests that Saturn marks the rupture of the circle, of cyclical time, and thrusts finite beings into the ruptures of mortal existence (SGM, 170). In his reading, Saturns monstrous qualities emerge. Perhaps like Typhon, Saturn inscribes the tears or fissures that make closure, whether of self-knowledge or of time, impossible. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 290. Henceforth cited as ID. See Freuds account of the myth in terms of a fourteen-year-old male patient in The Interpretation of Dreams, 6578, where he misrecollects it. Lukacher provides a thought-provoking analysis of this (Freudian) slip. Freuds error inscribes his own pathology into his theory of castration,
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35
36
37
38
39
which takes root in The Interpretation of Dreams. In his association of the myth with his patient, Freud is interested in how long-repressed memories and derivatives from them which had remained unconscious slipped into consciousness by a roundabout path in the form of apparently meaningless pictures (ID, 658). Freuds own relationship to his father, who died while he was writing The Interpretation of Dreams, is, according to Lukacher, coded into Freuds own theory. Pathos becomes theoria in this instance (or, theory is mythicized and myth theorized). Freud later realizes his mistake (of Saturn as simply castrated) and acknowledges it in the preface to the second edition. Nonetheless, as Lukacher points out, Freuds text is fraught with contradictory impulses. He would both suppress and celebrate the father as castrator (K, 67). This paradoxical suppression-celebration has a lot in common with Derridas cryptonymy discussed in Chapter 2. Immediately after this he adds, Freuds practice (rather than his theory) demonstrates that castration never succeeds in suppressing itself (K, 69). This idea of failed suppression emerges in the discussion of the pharmakon later in this chapter. Nonnos, Dionysiaca, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 6.1689. Henceforth cited as DI. Jean-Pierre Vernant, One . . . two . . . three: ers, in David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (eds), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 468, 46578. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 583. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ambiguity and reversal: on the enigmatic structure of Oedipus Rex, New Literary History 9.3 (1978), 486, 475501. Henceforth cited as AAR. Vernant also explains that this rite took place on the first day of the holiday of the Thargelia, the sixth of the month Thargelin (AAR, 486), and that the Athenian Thargelia included another aspect. After the expulsion of the pharmakoi, on the seventh day of the month they would dedicate to Apollo the first fruits of the earth in the form of the Tharglos, a cake and a pot filled with seeds of all kinds (AAR, 487). Here Apollo is linked not just to the pharmakoi, but also to agriculture and the seeds of the earth, recalling not only Saturn and the Saturnalia, but also Dionysus. While Dionysus is recognized as the opposite of Apollo, these associations suggest that he is also an aspect of Sa-Saturn. This unusual oscillation between supposed opposites and the relationship between these two (re) figures many of the strange loops of this chapter. As we have seen, opposites do not simply collapse into dialectical relation where the negative is merely negated and the positive simply affirmed. Instead they co-emerge, giving rise to one another, while each unavoidably dngates the other. Dionysus would therefore form something like the non-foundational foundation of Apollo who through the light of reason gives structure to the unbounded matrix of Dionysus, while Dionysus simultaneously disfigures
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41
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44
45
46
47
48
49
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the midday transparency [savoir absolu] of Apollo with his lurking shadows of non-knowledge. See the discussion in Chapter 2 on the crypt, incorporation and introjection. All of this resonates with the appearance of mythos in Platos Phaedrus discussed in Chapter 3. Listening to this tolling recalls Jean-Luc Nancys insight that to listen is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 14. This prodigious yes recalls Socrates alignment with Typhon in Platos Phaedrus elaborated in Chapter 3. The many-headed Typhon affirms a prodigious other within Socrates identity. As uncanny, Typhon is simultaneously das Heimliche and das Unheimliche. To further emphasize the fragmentary, partial nature of this inscription, Derrida does not capitalize the first word of the first sentence, what. Mark C. Taylor, Skinscapes, in Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos (New York: The Drawing Center, 1995), 39, 2945. Henceforth cited as S. Chapter 5 includes a discussion of the relation between disfiguring and figuring and of mythos and the gift as (dis)figures of the impossible. Jacques Derrida, How to avoid speaking: denials, trans. Ken Frieden, in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds), Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 34, 370. Henceforth cited as HA. This is a rich debate, the full scope of which exceeds the bounds of this discussion. For more on how negativity is positive (particularly in regard to apophatic or negative theology), see Derridas How to avoid speaking and Taylors Nots. Ataraxia literally means without care, and was coined by the Pyrrhonists who were extreme sceptics. The term ataratic refers to drugs (pharmakoi), namely tranquilizers, which induce non-caring. Freud views laughter as an excess of energy. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious he uses the example of a child who is learning to write and in so doing, follows the movements of his pen with his tongue stuck out. The adult finds this comic, precisely because in these associated motions we see an unnecessary expenditure of movement which we should spare ourselves if we were carrying out the same activity. The surplus of energy emerges as laughter. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960), 235. As Derrida says of the secret, it cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself: dissimulating its dissimulation (HA, 256). In order to have a secret, one must reveal the secret (at least to oneself) and so there is, therefore, no such thing as a secret secret. Thus, the secret as such, as
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secret, separates and already institutes a negativity; It is a negation that denies itself. It de-negates itself. This denegation does not happen to it by accident; it is essential and originary (HA, 25). An integral quality of both a secret and mythos is this dissimulation. Doty, William, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 56.
CHAPTER 5
1
3 4
10
Maurice Blanchot, Affirmation and the passion of negative thought, in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 47, 4158. Henceforth cited as APN. In gemmology, an inclusion is a tiny flaw or marking within the gem itself. It is a visible, interior fissure included within. I thank Ed Casey for pointing this out to me. See Chapter 1 for an analysis of inner contradiction. This anticipates a reading of absolute that occurs later in the chapter, in which the absolute is viewed in terms of its etymological roots, linking it to that which is loosed and absolved. Blanchots statement is also a critique of Heideggers existential analysis in Being and Time that views being toward death as the possible. Critical of Heideggers one-sided promotion of possibility, Blanchot and Derrida both re-envision it otherwise. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 325. Henceforth cited as H. Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Volume I, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 24. Wendy Doniger OFlaherty likens myth to an implied spider in her study The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Although she examines questions of identity and difference that plague any methodological study of myth in the postmodern era, her work does not pursue these issues with any philosophical rigor. It is not the relation of mythos and logos that interests her. She views myth solely in terms of its capacity to construct narratives, thus ignoring the indecidable, disseminative aspects of mythos. Taylor devotes a small segment of the chapter entitled Screening information in MC, 20114, to myth and summarily touches on the role of myth in terms of the network in AG, 1632. This perspective, although clearly articulated in After God, was confirmed in a conversation when Taylor insisted that, if deconstruction has any sort of essence or foundation, it would be the act of criticism of writing itself. However, it is possible to take issue with this perspective insofar as Derrida showed himself to be concerned with sociopolitical issues. Derridas later work on friendship and hospitality, for example, demonstrates that he is occupied with some practical aspects of lived experience, as well as with criticism. Certainly deconstruction does articulate alternative structures by demonstrating that no structure is as it seems, and that
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15 16
there is always another aspect to it. That core realization opens an invitation to see and to proceed otherwise. Derridas abiding generosity towards generations of students, colleagues and friends alike further suggests that his work did not comprise just negative criticism, but also practice a practice that influenced many to see beyond the limitations of a structuralist world. Taylor is one such beneficiary. Taylors own works emerge from the creative possibilities articulated by Derrida. Derridas important insights on structures and systems unquestionably promoted creativity and offered new potentialities. It is only by discovering how to disassemble a wall, by ascertaining its permeability, that it becomes conceivable to see over or beyond it. Taylors After God would have been unimaginable apart from the possibilities that came about as a result of both Derridas criticism and guidance. Inasmuch as After God may diverge in some crucial ways from Derrida, it also undeniably emerges from within the creative openings he articulated. See The Moment of Complexity, 1112, where he uses his statement from Hiding in order to anticipate the argument of The Moment of Complexity. Syn means together and ballein to throw. Symbols, therefore, throw things together. This explains why criticism born of a limited understanding of mythos suspiciously links it to master narratives, and therefore thinks that myth should be avoided at all costs. Taylors oversight is similar to translating pharmakon as either remedy or poison. He fails to acknowledge the inherent slippage and indecidability of mythos. For more on how religion is network, see After God, 1233. In Confidence Games (which falls between The Moment of Complexity and After God), Taylor is intent on maps. He asserts that [i]n this uncharted territory, maps matter (CG, 329) and in effect, as a cartographer, he draws a new network of religion and culture. Certainly the territory is uncharted. However, these maps are not always subjected to the rigor that Taylor has elsewhere prescribed. The dissimulative and deconstructive aspects of the network disfigure every map. In his book Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps Edward S. Casey examines mapmaking as an enterprise which pass[es] over places in their [maps] zeal to represent the totality of the world. He also notes that [t]he power of maps to incorporate contiguous and ever more inclusive parts of the earth in carefully delineated representations . . . is at the same time a weakness with regard to the representation of subregional localities, which are conspicuously neglected by these maps that purport to furnish a world picture. In other words, maps by their very nature totalize and thus inevitably repress particularities and complexities. For Casey, landscape paintings, as opposed to maps, are attuned to the subtle specificity of a place, and resituat[e] these spots and vistas, these discrete endroits and lieux. Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 241. When Taylor calls for maps and schemata, posing his entire project in these terms, he is undertaking
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20
21
22
23
24
25
26 27
an inherently calculative activity that works in the economy of presence toward bringing the myriad features into a unified representation. This, of course, leaves out that which does not lend itself to such representation. A discussion of the impossible and the possible occurs later in this chapter. See the discussion of economy in Chapter 2. There is an interesting resonance between gift and pharmakon. A gift that puts the other in debt (a gift that is, in Derridas vocabulary, a present and not a gift) can easily, in that way, be transformed from a blessing to a curse. This is because a gift places the recipient in debt to the giver. A countergift is now owed. As Derrida says, We know that as good, it [the economic gift] can also be bad, poisonous (Gift, gift), and that giving amounts to hurting, to doing harm (emphasis added, GT, 12). In other words, what was originally intended as a benevolent act (perhaps given with the expressed intention to heal), becomes, at the same time, a harmful one. In this way, the gift as present is both a remedy and a poison. Like the pharmakon, it slips and slides between these two; it is never simply one but always already both beneficial and harmful. In Platos Pharmacy Derrida cites Marcel Mauss, who states that Kluge and other etymologists are right in comparing the potio, Poison, series with gift and also references another article linking the etymology of gift to the Latin dosis, which means a dose of poison (qtd D, 132). See also GT, 36. Note the play on the word present and the slippage between its two meanings. Jacques Derrida, On the gift: a discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 60, 5478. Henceforth cited as OTG. See Taylors discussion of structuralism and post-structuralism in After God, 3008, and The Moment of Complexity, 479. In Given Time Derrida captures a multiplicity of resonances of logos: logos, to stay with this injunction of the Greek term, which means at once reason, discourse, relation, and account (GT, 35). In Chapter 4, the reading of Sa as a (dis)figure of mythos demonstrates the extent to which mythos always remains as a never fully accountable indecidable, as a disseminating, non-absent absence. As Bruce Lincolns historic study delineates, in ancient Greece, mythos and logos changed places. This helped to set the stage for their historic rivalry. See Chapter 1. From Hegels perspective, the Concept itself must be unconditional. I am particularly grateful to David L. Miller for his insightful comments on absolute and his remarks on the epistemological (as opposed to ontological) significance of savoir absolu.
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187
INDEX
absolute forgetting xxiv, 1367 absolute knowledge 23, 6, 12, 42, 93, 102, 147, 160n. 29, 160n. 32 absolute reappropriation 79, 81, 83, 86 absolute relativity 1489 Abu Masar 104 abyss 61, 68, 74, 78, 83, 101, 103, 158n. 11, 174n. 16, 175n. 31 affirmation 5, 1213, 70, 7981, 83, 10912, 143, 153n. 13, 164n. 10, 164n. 15, 167n. 39 see also non-affirmative affirmation agglutinating 978, 103 agriculture 1048, 176n. 39 alterity 7, 30, 32, 645, 73, 82, 89, 90, 159n. 21, 169n. 50, 162n. 40 Ammon-Ra 712, 167n. 40, 169n. 46 anachrony 334, 107, 117, 137, 175n. 31 analogy xxiii, 1011, 140 Anselm 91 antidote 6970, 77, 83, 86, 88, 91, 96, 122 Apollo 176n. 39 aporia 31, 367, 44, 47, 50, 52, 61, 70, 86, 94, 101, 118, 166n. 30 assimilation xxiii, 6, 23, 323, 424, 79, 86, 89, 90, 95, 97, 100, 110, 112, 135, 173n. 17 ataraxy 116
189
Aufhebung 86, 111, 114, 172n. 13 Augustine 104 authorial intention 6, 23, 302, 35, 47, 51, 76, 80, 158n. 13 Bacchus 99, 105 see also Dionysus bastard 1, 71, 74, 77, 162n. 37, 89 Bataille, Georges 67, 116, 154n. 19, 156n. 44, 167n. 40, 173n. 20, 178n. 1 Baudelaire, Charles 145 being 45, 13, 1617, 279, 46, 64, 123, 138, 148, 152n. 4, 156n. 44, 157n. 2, 158n. 10 bell 99, 110, 112, 152n. 3, 171n. 10 binary xvii, xxii, xxiv, 5, 7, 17, 21, 32, 35, 46, 49, 57, 82, 84, 87, 115, 124, 126, 129, 134, 139, 147, 173n. 18 Blanchot, Maurice 67, 124, 133, 142, 156n. 45, 157n. 56, 178n. 5 blind spot 31, 39, 43, 61, 101, 104, 130, 144, 173n. 20 blindness xxii, 7, 23, 3940, 434, 104, 129, 168n. 40 see also tears Boreas 602, 164n. 19 Brisson, Luc xxi, 89, 118, 154n. 22, 154n. 23 Cadmus 63, 165n. 25 Caputo, John D. 10, 40 Carlson, Thomas 10, 13840
INDEX
Casey, Edward S. 178n. 2, 179n. 16 castration 94, 1035, 1078, 170n. 5, 175n. 31, 175n. 33, 176n. 34 see also Freuds theory of cognitive 101, 131 columns xxiv, 2, 94100, 103, 112, 119, 170n. 5, 172n. 15 complex adaptive systems xix, 578, 1278, 131, 133, 134n. 13 complexity 59, 64, 90, 93, 98, 101, 107, 120, 1258, 130, 1324, 152n. 2, 173n. 18 complexity studies xix, xxiv, 58, 1267, 146, 159n. 19, 173n. 18 Cornford, F. M. 22, 489, 54 counting 104, 115, 175n. 29 Critchley, Simon 31, 36, 159n. 21 crypt Derridas definition of 403 incorporation of 423, 44 mythos as 44, 74 pharmakon as 74, 11112 deconstruction constructive possibilities of 25 and mythos 17 operation of xxi, 26, 47 in relation to metaphysics 33, 44 in relation to structure and structuralism 10, 139 Taylors critique of 1278, 155n. 36, 173n. 18, 1789n. 10 deconstructive reading 9, 236, 301, 47 Delphic Oracle 63, 165n. 23 Demeter 106 dngation 6870, 164n. 15, 167n. 38, 178n. 51 Derrida, Jacques definition of remains 12 definition of supplement 36, 52 dngation 70 diffrance 1517 discussion of blindness 3840
190
discussion of crypt 403 discussion of event and structure 557 discussion of gift 13440, 142, 1456 discussion of incorporation and introjections 423 discussion of metaphysics 44, 157n. 2 discussion of Mbius strip 173n. 18 discussion of pharmakon 668, 75, 77, 845, 110, 168n. 43 discussion of soliciting 256 discussion of Thoth 705 and Hegel 1113, 80, 11113, 169n. 54 reading of Levinas 301 Taylors divergence from 155n. 35, 173n. 18 texting 312, 38 theory of play 534, 1634n. 9 treatment of myth 478, 54, 121 descriptive 105, 127, 1323 dsoeuvrement 116, 120 dialectic as antidote 6970, 77, 83, 88, 96 Hegels 1315, 79, 99100, 11415, 163n. 8, 165n. 23, 171n. 12, 1723n. 17 non-dialectical aspect of 70, 867, 89, 111, 169n. 54 reliever of 171n. 12 dialectical See dialectic diffrance Derridas definition of 1517, 28, 38, 157n. 2, 160n. 31 operation of 1516, 81, 160n. 32 difference Derridas understanding of 1517 Hegels understanding of 1315, 18, 44 see also diffrance
INDEX
Dionysus xxiv, 1056, 108, 110, 1134, 116, 118, 172n. 16, 176n. 39 discourse xviixix, xxixxiii, 1, 710, 1921, 23, 24, 28, 36, 4750, 534, 59, 601, 6671, 768, 80, 826, 8891, 923, 956, 98, 105, 112, 115, 118, 1212, 141, 146, 150, 154n. 24, 163n. 2, 166n. 31, 168n. 45, 171n. 10, 171n. 9, 172n. 17, 180n. 23 discursive 1923, 27, 93, 98, 170n. 2 disfiguring xx, xxv, 55, 57, 99, 111, 114, 129, 131, 1334, 139, 1412, 144, 147, 150, 177n. 46 dissemination 96, 105, 107, 109, 114, 156n. 55 distyles 956, 99, 101 doppelgnger 109 Doniger OFlaherty, Wendy 178n. 8 double relation 121, 124, 134 duplicitous 612, 67, 70, 756, 81, 99100, 119 drug see pharmakon economy of death 401, 168n. 42 gift in relation to 1346, 141, 1457 Odyssean 1345 in terms of Hegels philosophy 108, 1612n. 37 uneconomic aspect of 1356, 1457, 1601n. 32 see also oiksis edge xx, 33, 59, 149, 159n. 19, 173n. 18 Eliade, Mircea xvii emergence xxv, 579, 92, 119, 128, 139, 157n. 7, 164n. 13 emptiness 36, 52, 68, 73, 121, 144
191
entre deux 945, 100, 103, 110, 119, 137 Eros 6970, 167n. 39 event xvi, xxiv, 35, 559, 82, 87, 93, 106, 117, 121, 1379, 1412, 1457, 157n. 7, 163n. 9, 170n. 1, 170n. 3 excess xxi, 46, 1213, 15, 223, 2935, 43, 49, 52, 589, 645, 67, 6970, 73, 82, 846, 8990, 978, 1056, 112, 114, 116, 1189, 1223, 130, 143, 147, 155n. 32, 162n. 37, 170n. 57, 172n. 17, 173n. 18, 175n. 26, 177n. 50 eye xxii, 23, 24, 27, 3843, 513, 63, 67, 72, 88, 100, 104, 106, 120, 1445, 161n. 33, 161n. 35, 166n. 27, 166n. 31, 167n. 40, 173n. 20 fabric, of the text 24, 27, 33, 368, 147, 159n. 19 father 62, 712, 768, 89, 1035, 107, 111, 120, 161n. 33, 162n. 37, 164n. 17, 167n. 37, 168n. 40, 170n. 5, 176n. 33 Father Time 104 festival 1078 figuring xxv, 67, 101, 12931, 133, 139, 1412, 144, 147, 177n. 46 Foucault, Michel 46, 154n. 17 foundation xixxxi, xviii, 1, 34, 610, 17, 223, 2430, 35, 41, 478, 50, 58, 601, 64, 678, 71, 74, 78, 823, 85, 879, 92, 94, 96, 11719, 1213, 1257, 12930, 132, 1467, 152n. 1, 153n. 6, 154n. 18, 160n. 31, 162n. 40, 164n. 12, 169, 255, 169n. 49, 173n. 18, 176n. 39, 178n. 10 Frazer, James G. 1067
INDEX
Freud, Sigmund a 102, 105 incorporation 42 Interpretation of Dreams, The 105 laughter 177n. 50 negation 167n. 39 theory of castration 105, 1756n. 33 theory of uncanny 166n. 29 use of the myth of Saturn 105, 1756n. 33 Verneinung 70 Gaia 1034, 110 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 163n. 9 game 503, 61, 71, 74, 77, 945, 148 Gasch, Rodolphe 93, 170n. 2 Genet, Jean 945, 979, 102 gift Derridas discussion of xxiv, 13440, 142, 1456 as the impossible 13643 and pharmakon 47, 75, 169n., 180n. 19 in relation to mythos 124, 128, 1413, 1457, 149 Glas configuration of 94100, 170n. 5 Dionysus in 99, 1056, 118 double movement of 978 Hegel in 945, 99100, 11016 as neither philosophical nor non-philosophical 99 pharmakon in 103, 11011, 113 remains in 958, 100, 102, 115 resonances of Sa 1024, 1078, 11216, 118 Saturn in 103, 107, 118 strange loops of 1001, 1023, 105, 112 tattoos of xxiv, 945, 102, 11314, 116, 171n. 10 God 91, 104, 148, 161n. 37
Hatab, Lawrence 1819, 23 Hegel, G. W. F. absolute 123, 147 Absolute Spirit 171n. 12 Aufehbung 88, 111, 11415, 172n. 13 Bacchanalian revelry 99100, 107, 1723n. 17 blind spot of 1734n. 20 circularity of thought 16, 134, 160n. 32, Derridas reading of 1113, 11112 dialectic 1315, 79, 99100, 1145, 123, 135, 163n. 8, 165n. 23, 171n. 12, 1723n. 17 discussion of myth 163n. 6 in Glas 945, 99100, 1106 Hyppolites reading of 13, 123 idea of negation 13, 79, 111, 114 on identity and difference 1315, 18, 79, 148 Kierkegaards response to 116 Phenomenology of Spirit 102, 1723 n. 17 notion of inner contradiction 1314, 123 notion of otherness 1315 reliever 171n. 12 savoir absolu xxiv, 98103, 10819, 123, 1345, 144, 1478, 1723n. 17, 1734n. 20, 174n. 24, 175n. 29 Taylors reading of 1214 Hegelianism 11617, 174n. 20 Heidegger, Martin 10, 18, 278, 39, 156n. 45, 157n. 2, 157n. 3, 158n. 9, 160n. 23, 167n. 32, 175n. 31, 178n. 5 Hera 106 Hesiod 19, 103, 166n. 27 Hofstadter, Douglas xxiv, 101, 174n. 21
192
INDEX
Holland, John H. 58 Homer 9, 19, 161n. 33 Husserl, Edmund 152n. 4, 158n. 13 hybridity 64 Hyppolite, Jean 13, 123, 155n. 38 ideology xxii, 17, 23, 1434, 156n. 48, 156n. 54 impossible, the xix, xxivxxv, 10, 114, 1235, 1334, 13643, 1489, 150, 177n. 46, 180n. 17 incorporation 423, 11012, 177n. 40 indecidables analogies between 1011 definition of 84 in Glas 978, 1024, 118, 171n. 11 mythos as 810 pharmakon as 10, 61, 66, 84 see also indecidability indecidability of light 152n. 2 of mythos 810, 1721 of pharmakon 61, 66, 75, 84, 1645n. 20 of Sa 1024, 118 intellect xvi, 8, 47, 76, 88, 104 interruptions 25, 323, 368, 45, 150 introjection 42, 11011, 177n. 40 Jesus Christ 171n. 12 Kant, Immanuel 12, 147, 172n. 17 Kearney, Richard 64, 162n. 39, 175n. 31 Kierkegaard, Sren 116, 124 king 72, 75, 84, 89, 103, 1069, 120, 168n. 45, 169n. 46, 169n. 47 King Thamus 756, 169n. 46 knot 369 see also aporia Kronos 1036, 117, 175n. 29 see also Saturn
lability 256, 28, 33, 57, 157n. 6 Lacan, Jacques 170n. 5 language xxiii, 5, 1619, 21, 2730, 323, 37, 44, 67, 69, 72, 76, 91, 945, 119, 132, 138, 1401, 157n. 2, 158n. 15, 160n. 31, 170n. 5, 171n. 10 laughter 11617, 120, 177n. 50 Leavey, John P. 102 Lvi-Strauss, Claude xvii Levinas, Emmanuel xxii, 304, 156n. 44, 157n. 4, 158n. 13, 158n. 15, 158n. 16, 159n. 21 Lincoln, Bruce 1923 linear systems 57 logocentric xviixviii, xx, xxiii, xxv, 67, 1820, 31, 34, 37, 489, 51, 53, 76, 80, 86, 89, 93, 95, 98, 112, 12930, 132, 144, 163n. 2, 170n. 2 logocentrism xxi, 37, 160n. 31 logos co-emergence with mythos 37, 579, 82, 878, 114, 118, 122, 139, 1412 definition of 7, 9 non-foundational foundation of xx, 6, 823, 856, 889, 92, 11719, 123, 1468 Platos employment of in the Phaedrus 4750, 545, 59, 767 LSD 1645n. 20 Lukacher, Ned 1045, 171n. 5, 175n. 33 Lyotard, Jean Franois xvii Marion, Jean-Luc 138 master narratives xvii, xx, xxv, 131, 179n. 13 see also grands rcits master race 143 mathematics 153n. 6
193
INDEX
medicine see pharmakon Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 14, 155n. 37, 156n. 44, 160n. 23 metaphysics xvi, xxxxi, 12, 15, 2730, 323, 3941, 44, 50, 64, 68, 82, 143, 152n. 4, 157n. 2 milk 112 Mbius Strip 173n. 18 monster 634, 67, 90, 105, 165n. 26, 167n. 31, 168n. 41, 174n. 23, 177n. 43 mother 89, 1034, 112, 11920 myth see mythos mythos association with master narratives xxv, 129, 1312, 1435, 156n. 48, 179n. 13 co-emergence with logos 37, 579, 82, 878, 114, 118, 122, 139, 1412 in contrast to symbol 12930, 1445 Derridas treatment of 478, 54 Hatabs treatment of 1719 indecidability of 810, 1721 Lincolns treatment of 1923 New Age reclamation of xvii non-absent absence of 6, 48, 132 as network 12834, 139, 1448 as nonfoundational foundation of logos xx, 6, 823, 856, 889, 92, 11719, 1468 Platos employment of 489, 545, 5962, 6778, 869 in relation to gift 1413, 149 relation to logos reconceived as network 124, 127, 128, 134, 139, 145, 148, 155n. 36 in relation to pharmakon 10, 55, 612 as remains 10, 22, 79
Taylors consideration of 117, 1212, 12733, 178n. 9, 179n. 14 Nancy, Jean-Luc 11, 177n. 42 Navajo 174n. 23 Nazism 143 negation 5, 13, 15, 28, 69, 70, 7981, 1089, 11112, 157n. 8, 160n. 32, 167n. 39, 174n. 21, 178n. 51 negative theology 70, 177n. 48 neo-foundationalisms 129, 132 New Age xvii network mythos as 12834, 139, 1448 non-totalizing structure of xxiv, 146, 164n. 11 Taylors theory of xxiv, 12533, 146 non-absent absence 6, 48, 132 non-affirmative affirmation xxv, 5, 1434, 153n. 13, 164n. 15 non-foundational foundation explanation of 9, 30, 823, 878, 92, 1267, 154n. 18, 169n. 55 mythos as xx, 6, 823, 856, 889, 92, 117119, 1234, 1468 of network 1256, 128 non-knowledge 6, 92, 124, 148, 173n. 20, 177n. 39 non-philosophical 1, 10, 45, 49, 99, 103, 114 Nonnos 106 nothing xvi, 3 Oedipus 1089 oiksis 38, 40, 160n. 27 Orithyia 602, 164n. 19 orphan 77 oscillation xviii, xxi, xxiv, 910, 17, 467, 846, 99100, 103, 112, 11719, 151n. 2, 176n. 39
194
INDEX
palinode 6870, 83, 167n. 36, 167n. 37 Pan 901, 169n. 50 pas de deux 278, 34, 38, 97, 157n. 8 Persephone 106 Phaedrus xxiii, 212, 44, 4750, 52, 54, 60, 62, 63, 678, 71, 74, 77, 7983, 89, 934, 113, 11718, 129, 154n. 25, 161n. 33, 163n. 2, 163n. 3, 165n. 21, 165n. 25, 169n. 50, 170n. 62, 171n. 9, 172n. 17, 177n. 41, 177n. 43 Pharmacia 612, 89 pharmacy xxiii, 74, 778 pharmakon definition of 10, 61, 667, 73, 1645n. 20, 168n. 43 gift as 47, 75, 169n. 47, 180n. 19 myth of Thoth as xxiii, 704, 84, 86, 89 operation of 667, 847 Platos use of 61, 67, 75, 778, 80, 84, 86 as pharmakos 108, 110 Saturns swallowing of 103, 11012 Socrates and 656 in relation to mythos 10, 55, 612 writing as 746 pharmakos 10811 philosopher-king 22, 45, 64, 95, 119, 167n. 31, 168n. 45, 169n. 46, 170n. 5 Plato distinction between mythos and logos xvixvii, 8, 4750 distinction between speech and writing 757, 170n. 61 employment of mythos 489, 545, 5962, 6778, 869 employment of palinode 6870 Lincolns reading of 213 Laws 104
Phaedrus xxiii, 212, 44, 4750, 52, 54, 60, 62, 63, 678, 71, 74, 77, 7983, 89, 934, 113, 11718, 129, 154n. 25, 161n. 33, 163n. 2, 163n. 3, 165n. 21, 165n. 25, 169n. 50, 170n. 62, 171n. 9, 172n. 17, 177n. 41, 177n. 43 play in 502, 89 prayer to Pan 901 Republic 22 Statesman 104 shift from orality to literacy 9, 59 use of pharmakon 61, 67, 75, 778, 80, 84, 86 Platonism 49, 61, 68, 778 play Derridas theory of 534, 1634n. 9 of Dionysus 106 in Glas 945, 98100, 102, 1069, 116 in Plato 502, 89 Thoth as god of 704 Plotinus 104 poeisis 70 poison see pharmakon polis 60, 10810 possible, the xxivxxv, 125, 1334, 137, 13943, 1489, 178n. 5, 180n. 17 post-structuralism 55, 1268, 173n. 18, 180n. 22 prayer 40, 70, 901, 158n. 12, 169n. 50, 170n. 62 prescriptive 105, 127, 1323, 148 Ra see Ammon Ra reading deconstructive 9, 236, 301, 47 otherwise 358, 478, 512
195
INDEX
relation without relation 36, 99, 1346, 140, 142, 145, 148, 150, 160n. 25, 172n. 15 religion xix, xviixviii, xxii, 1, 18, 48, 1212, 1278, 1312, 144, 174n. 24, 179n. 15 remains in contrast to mathematical remainders 2, 153n. 6 Derridas definition of 12 in Glas 12, 958, 100, 102, 111, 115 of Hegels texts 1112, 111 laughter as 116 mythos as 10, 22, 79 pharmakoi as 10910 Typhon as 645 remedy see pharmakon repetition 31, 34, 367, 73, 101, 103, 140, 159n. 20 repressed xviii, 6, 910, 32, 42, 48, 162n. 37, 166n. 29, 175n. 29, 176n. 33 Republic 22, 168n. 40 resistance 7883, 91, 98, 110 resurrection 162n. 37, 171n. 12 rhythm xxv, 10, 278, 53, 99, 107, 150 Ricoeur, Paul xvii Sa xxiv, 39, 1029, 11218, 120, 149, 159n. 17, 160n. 29, 172n. 16, 174n. 23, 175n. 29, 175n. 31, 176n. 39, 180n. 24 safe see crypt Sallis, John 22, 4950, 54, 60, 62, 163n. 2, 163n. 3, 89 Saturn xxiv, 1038, 11014, 11618, 161n. 36, 170n. 5, 172n. 16, 174n. 23, 175n. 25, 175n. 29, 175n. 31, 176n. 33, 176n. 39
Saturnalia xxiv, 1069, 111, 113, 176n. 39 savoir absolu xxiv, 39, 41, 43, 92, 98, 100, 1023, 10812, 11417, 119, 1224, 129, 132, 1345, 141, 144, 1478, 160n. 29, 164n. 17, 165n. 23, 172n. 17, 173n. 20, 174n. 23, 174n. 24, 175n. 29, 177n. 39, 180n. 27 schemata 1304, 179n. 16 scraps see remains seam 17, 33, 378, 523, 97, 99, 114, 123, 159n. 19 secret 256, 38, 40, 42, 501, 72, 99, 11920, 138, 169n. 54, 177n. 51 self-knowledge 54, 65, 90, 175n. 31 semination 105, 111 senses, the xvii, 8, 38, 40, 76, 88, 160n. 31 silence of a of difference 15, 3840 of Thoth 756 Socrates 21, 54, 60, 626, 6870, 74, 77, 834, 8991, 120, 156n. 50, 161n. 33, 165n. 21, 165n. 23, 167n. 31, 171n. 9, 177n. 43 soliciting 2431, 33, 35, 37, 41, 434, 117, 157n. 2 Sophists, the 767 soul 90, 104, 168n. 42 sowing 96, 1058, 111 sparagmos 106 speech xxiixxiii, 7, 9, 15, 1719, 21, 4750, 52, 547, 60, 656, 6872, 756, 91, 96, 13840, 142, 154n. 17, 158n. 13, 166n. 27, 167n. 37, 170n. 61, 170n. 62, 171n. 10, 174n. 22 see also logos spider 1245, 178n. 8 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 97
196
INDEX
strange loops xxiiixxiv, 1003, 105, 112, 122, 174n. 21, 176n. 39 structuralism 10, 557, 128, 139, 170n. 57, 173n. 18, 180n. 22 sublation 81, 99, 123 sun 712, 78, 167n. 40, 169n. 46 structure Derridas discussion of event and 557 lability of 256 of network xxiv, 146, 164n. 11 in relation to excess 589, 69 supplement 36, 52, 73, 78, 103, 151n. 2 suppression 74, 82, 109, 170n. 5, 176n. 33 symbol 1289, 131, 144, 167n. 40, 170n. 5, 171n. 12, 179n. 12 system xvi, xviiixxi, xxiii, xxiv, 16, 128, 26, 30, 345, 413, 559, 6970, 74, 7980, 826, 89, 945, 98, 1001, 104, 11112, 116, 120, 1223, 1268, 1312, 134, 144, 147, 149, 153n. 6, 153n. 8, 155n. 36, 156n. 45, 160n. 32, 161n. 35, 161n. 36, 162n. 37, 164n. 13, 168n. 40, 170n. 57, 173n. 18, 173n. 20, 174n. 21, 175n. 29, 179n. 10 tattoo xxiv, 945, 1012, 1134, 116, 171n. 10 Taylor, Mark C. consideration of myth 117, 1212, 12733, 178n. 9, 179n. 14 criticism of structuralism and poststructuralism 1278 discussion of Mbius strip 173n. 18 discussion of non-foundational foundation 878, 169n. 55 discussion of prayer 91 discussion of resistance 802
discussion of screening 12830 discussion of system and excess 58, 69 divergence from Derrida 1278, 155n. 35, 155n. 36, 173n. 18, 1789n. 10 reading of Hegel 1214 theory of absolute relativity 1489 theory of network xxiv, 12533, 146 theory of religion 128, 1302, 179n. 15 use of schemata 1303, 17980n. 16 tears double movement of 278 of the eye 3840 homophonic meaning of 24 soliciting of 2430, 35 Taylors discussion of 289 texting 31, 38 Thamus 756, 169n. 46 Thoth xxiii, 68, 706, 84, 86, 89, 98, 165n. 25, 168n. 42, 169n. 47, 169n. 49, 175n. 29 time 20, 24, 278, 54, 104, 107, 109, 1178, 120, 121, 128, 137, 140, 175n. 31 Titans 64, 106, 117 tomb 38, 40, 42, 97, 162n. 37 see also crypt tongue 945, 171n. 7, 177n. 50 trace 5, 26, 2930, 32, 39, 41, 44, 478, 63, 65, 133, 135, 137, 151n. 2 transgression 36, 9, 25, 30, 33, 37, 108, 109, 153n. 15 Typhon 635, 67, 823, 8990, 161n. 33, 165n. 23, 165n. 25, 166n. 27, 166n. 31, 166n. 34, 175n. 31, 177n. 43 tyrant 401, 45, 74, 168n. 45
197
INDEX
uncanny 64, 105, 166n. 29, 166n. 30, 167n. 31, 177n. 43 undecidable see indecidable unknowable 6, 11, 61, 1234, 130, 148, 173n. 20 unthought 3, 56, 910, 267, 30, 42, 100, 102, 123, 124, 1267, 148, 153n. 8, 156n. 44 Uranus 103, 105, 175n. 26 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 47, 106, 1089, 168n. 45, 176n. 39 vision xxii, xxv, 7, 29, 3840, 43, 46, 132, 161n. 33, 138n. 40 weaving 323, 36 web 33, 1246, 132, 168n. 40
World Wide Web 125 wound xxiv, 2, 24, 34, 82, 91, 96, 1001, 108, 114, 119, 150 writing xxiii, 67, 9, 112, 2930, 478, 52, 545, 57, 701, 757, 845, 967, 99, 102, 105, 151n. 2, 152n. 3, 157n. 3, 157n. 56, 159n. 19, 165n. 25, 168n. 42, 170n. 5, 170n. 61, 171n. 10, 174n. 22, 178n. 10 Young, Thomas 152n. 2 Zagreus 106 see also Dionysus Zeus 60, 634, 1036, 111, 161n. 33, 164n. 17, 165n. 25, 167n. 31, 168n. 40, 169n. 46
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Derrida, Myth, and The Impossibility of Philosophy

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DERRIDA, MYTH AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY