Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004

‘But a reading here should no longer be carried out as a simple table of concepts or words, as a static or statistical sort of punctuation. One must reconstitute a chain in motion, the effects of a network and the play of a syntax.’
[Jacques Derrida on reading Mallarme, ‘The First Session’ in Acts of Literature, p. 144]

‘His being is a being-at-the-telephone. He is hooked up to a multiplicity of voices and answering machines. His being-there is a being-at-the-telephone, a being for the telephone, in the way that Heidegger speaks of the being for death of Dasein.’
[Jacques Derrida on Leopold Bloom, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ in Acts of Literature, p. 273]

‘In any encounter, whether I destroy or be destroyed, there takes place a combination of relations that is, as such, good.’
[Gilles Deleuze, ‘Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza’, p. 249]



[1] I would like to offer my impressions of Derrida’s work. My engagement has been limited and I apologise if my use of concepts and terms is in fact inappropriate at any point. In order to distinguish this short piece from the obituaries offered by the English newspapers, and their ‘descriptions’ of Derrida, I shall begin with a particular concept. Then I will work from it in an attempt to show the power and radicalism of his thought to the best of my abilities. This concept is text or ‘textuality.’ Derrida was concerned with writing and its creative displacement of categories dominant in philosophy. We therefore will begin from a basic notion that is opposed to presence and is a terrain for thought (it is difficult to say general things about it since it displaces categories we might use to describe it and it is in its immanent ‘play’ that it is best seen). This of course meant that Derrida was accused, especially by Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, of destroying the distinction between fiction and reality. He is said to neglect common sense and to be obscure for no good reason. Of course Derrida must live for us by being precisely what the analytic tradition is not. He works with literature because it does not look at things from outside in order to critique them. Instead it takes hold of them and plays with them. The text-world distinction is thus displaced, as is that of outside-inside. The difficulty is to conceive of thinking without a solid and clear starting point, which would suggest that the text wasn’t already in operation. Literature cannot be limited and philosophy cannot tell it what it is. Anything can therefore become literature because there is no such thing as literature. To define it would be to practice metaphysics, to subordinate it to ontology.

[2] A further key concept is repeatability (Signature, Event, Context, 1991, p. 90). This is the structural possibility of a written mark being severed from its alleged origin or production. A chain of differential marks thus replaces pure presence. Rather than these leading to any origin they are differential in the sense of expressing an irreducible absence of any intention, context, ordinary language, presence and so on. This is something akin to Deleuze’s notion of the creative destruction, which is non-dialectical because it does not preserve the essence of anything but destroys everything. In this way a ground for complete creativity is cleared and difference is affirmed. This casting adrift of the written mark does not lead to a relativism in which different opinions are equally valid (leading to the utterly horrific notion of a ‘supermarket trolley’ approach to knowledge). The play of the text displaces categories such as the subject which relativism has at its centre. This is instead the immanent re-thinking of everything and the openness onto possibilities without limit. The potential endlessness of repeatability allows for the text to be compared to a textile or veil where there is no centre or transcendence (Dissemination, 1981, p. 240). This element spreads out and in its immanent play or activity there is only text. Text is a dynamic, not a substance because this would be to limit what it can be, to define it in relation to an outside or other. Communication becomes a movement rather than a phenomenon of meaning or signification. Only in this way is it productive through itself. It is movement concerned only with its own play and not with realising or attaining anything outside this proliferation of difference. ‘Displacement’ is textual movement that denies all fixed essences through the self-sufficiency and radical effects of this dynamic. Rather than the literature being open to the different interpretations of human beings it is instead the case that we are open to interpretation by the processes of the text.

[3] For Derrida, the autonomy of the text implies circularity and this affirms the notion of fabric or veil. No restrictions are imposed upon the text because of its self-sufficiency (it has no outside but this does not mean it has a sufficient reason, which for Derrida would be to limit it). Therefore, without dependence on any outside, circularity can be expressive of difference without limitation. Alternative possibilities flow from the freedom of the text, from the creativity of art liberated from mimesis. For example, mime in Mallarme doesn’t do anything, there is no act, no acting agent and nothing ‘is.’ In fact, Derrida writes, the word ‘is’ does not appear because ‘play’ eclipses ‘being’ (‘The First Session’ in Acts of Literature, p. 169).

[4] In a way, Derrida can be seen as taking further Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘universal flesh’ by retaining this notion of a continuous fabric but as a more decentred and decentring practice. The text avoids being related to the human being in the way that flesh is and this may undermine Merleau-Ponty’s concern with the body. The text bypasses intentionality since it does not attempt to realise phenomenology in a more radical way. The operations of the text can be said to concern the workings of experience and not simply language. This has to be the substance of Derrida’s greatness. He wasn’t simply using the text as a helpful tool. Instead the human being is decentred, if anything we are the tools of the text (although this implies an intentionality, and thus a duality, that has no place in the play of the text). Therefore, to decide where to begin is always to commit an act of violence. With no natural beginning, the text is not a ground but much more like a situation of ongoing movement. The movement is one of difference and thus of displacement. Circularity cuts off any grounding of textuality and any beginning. Without the categories and essences structuring experience there is the task of thinking equally to difference. This means not conceiving of sufficient reason because to do so would be to ground textuality and violate its circularity.

[5] Perhaps Derrida’s greatest achievement is to have been a ‘philosopher of language’ and actually to have thought equally to language. Like Lyotard and Wittgenstein, he is magnificently able to see, within the limits of language, the liberation of philosophy rather than its severe limitation. Instead of the death of metaphysics being a cause for reaction and retreat, as it was for Moore, Russell, Ayer and others, it was the key to thinking in radically new ways. He really asked what kind of thinking can happen in a language, how has it been limited and neglected in philosophy. This was a positive and utterly non-reactive response to a serious problem for thinkers of his generation. Indeed, for Derrida it is really any kind of thinking that happens in a language. If perhaps language philosophy is for some a negative retreat in the idea that we can only know what is human and scientific - the philosopher as narcissus or ‘bourgeois’ as Adorno would assert - it is for Derrida the overcoming of this state. The pure affirmation of language is his greatest legacy.

The context of Deleuzian concepts: Ideas, expression, the virtual and the groundless ground

Dear friends,

I offer these fragmentary observations by way of comments upon Brian’s recent piece upon coalition systems. They are not intended as definite conclusions but to be suggestions from my reading of Deleuze as to the limitations of the Maimon-Deleuze encounter. Most importantly I am concerned to question the meaning of the term ‘concept’ and any potential role it has in expressing a link between Maimon and Deleuze. I would like to offer reasons for there being limits to the Maimon-Deleuze encounter and not to comment on potential links with Badiou. These sound most interesting I don’t think I know Badiou well enough to offer any views at this stage.

[1] I would argue that the idea ‘coalition system’ sounds promising if it seeks to preserve some sense of ‘irreducible difference’ between the systems involved. Deleuze’s practice the encounter does attempt to do this. I wonder where these approaches differ. Maimon was certainly a lot more polite to Kant than Deleuze is to those he attempts to encounter. Also, Maimon’s scepticism seems to distance him from the positivity of Deleuze’s encounters. For the latter a logic of affirmation meant that his conceptions of univocity could include (i.e. affirm) multiple systems of thought. He seeks affirmation in those he writes about so that this can be traced to a common and resonating ground of non-opposition and negation. Univocity and immanence seem to hinge upon a willingness to affirm a vital and productive depth (whether Spinoza’s substance, Bergson’s duree, Nietzsche’s field of forces, etc.). This impersonal ‘life’ is what seems to accommodate ‘irreducible differences’ in the movements of Deleuze’s thought.

[2] There is therefore a real sense in which Deleuze sees the univocity and the groundless ground, which he introduces in his works through the 1960s, as establishing a new terrain for thought. (Afterall, how else could Deleuze affirm Spinoza and Kant and still be an ‘engineer of difference’?) Kantian Ideas find their place within a logic of expression elaborated from the sufficient reason of Spinoza. The activity of thinking is made up of singular instances that attempt to capture, within a particular contexts, the implications and explications of these singularities in their connection with virtual formations (Ideas, intensities) of the groundless ground. Ideas become ideal and virtual structures within the expression of a Deleuzian appropriation of the Spinozan univocal Being. Maimon is crucial to this movement and I don’t dispute the potential for encounter at a certain level. In place of Spinoza’s attributes, virtual Ideas or ideal structures, which function as problems, Ideas do indeed allow actualisation of difference. The question, as I understand it, is whether a coalition system can take the link between Deleuze and Maimon further. What do Deleuze and Maimon share beyond the creative actualisation of Ideas in differential relations (something Brian interesting terms ‘rhizomatic’ and has a lot to offer to Deleuze’s project). Deleuze moved from Nietzsche in the late 1960s to other thinkers to connect with and appropriate a fuller thinking of immanence. What I would argue is that most fundamentally he moved from Nietzsche to Spinoza, not to Maimon. This does not negate Maimon’s role but suggests the limits of the encounter.

[3] The paper titled ‘The Method of Dramatisation’ shows the productivity of Deleuze’s relation to Maimon. In the questions that followed in, Deleuze was drawn to discuss the latter’s ‘the sub-representational genesis of the transcendental imagination.’ ‘A dialectic of synthesis is developed’ - we cannot discern what we produce and what the object produces (‘Desert Islands and Other Texts’ p. 115). But Deleuze makes clear that in whilst this virtual apparatus and its attendant forms of actualisation are something he and Maimon can affirm together, he must think differently also:
‘To sum things up, I don’t have the same conception of the unconscious as Leibniz or Maimon. Freud already went down that road.’ (ibid)
[4] At paragraph 2 the point is raised that Deleuze didn’t attempt to stage an encounter with Badiou. If he had then, as Brian suggests, this would have probably not been very productive. Mathematics is for Deleuze a Plateau whose concepts may connect with intensities and in these instances create concepts (insanely). But if mathematics were used in the absence of a groundless ground, one conjectures, it would become for Deleuze sterile and lifeless because it is not connected with the impersonal and intensive life that must animate concepts. Deleuze wishes to look for the connections of every actual thing with its causes. The groundless ground must cause the actual to resonate in complete determination through the two fields being bridged by common forms (attributes in Spinoza), which are virtual Ideas or ideal structures. Deleuze is keen to distinguish the virtual from the possible because in the possible there is identity in the concept. In the virtual there is pure multiplicity in the Ideas (Difference and Repetition, p. 211-212). The virtual is qualitative and formal whilst the actual is quantitative. If concepts are seen as total, Deleuze argues, thought can become dominated by good sense and common sense. He wants to keep concepts open onto the non-conceptual in order to avoid relation of opposition and negation that would form a dialectical movement. We might argue that his interest in Kant is partly fuelled by an interest in the limits of conceptualisation. He wants to think Kant without Hegel, to discuss an affirmative triad of Being, virtual and actual without being subsumed into a conceptual dialectic.

[5] Brian writes in paragraph three that Maimon makes it possible for us to think about intuition as "an unclear ‘picture’ of a purely rational interrelation of concepts." "A consistent conceptual understanding of intuition" is suggested in paragraph four. At paragraph six there is reference to our intuition of space being seen as "a type of sketch or picture of its true rational structure." This suggests relations of resemblance. These are what Deleuze strives to escape. He makes reference to groundlessness that lacks individuation and therefore lacks all singularity. He sees this in Schelling and Schopenhauer (Difference and Repetition, p. 276). He argues that ‘their groundlessness cannot sustain difference.’ The point here is not simply that we get the movement from virtual to actual (differenciation) but also that there is movement from Being to the virtual (differentiation). This envisages that Ideas are not simply rational objects in an infinite intellect but differentiated as forms of Being (groundless ground). Otherwise, the actual cannot resonate as an expression of this groundless ground. Maimon wants to establish an infinite intellect and for it to be the sufficient reason of possible experience. The virtual-actualisation apparatus is of great interest to Deleuze since differential calculus can be affirmed by his system of expression. These seem to be the limits of the affinity. Maimon does not affirm the univocity needed at work in Deleuze. This is of course unless he has this ability and I have not recognised it. One possibility was if he had overcome his scepticism at some point and worked Spinoza into his system. Without this, I think that given the nature of Deleuze’s thought as a whole, Maimon seems to be outside its logic and its notion of Being. What if we still say that in a coalition system we can preserve the ‘irreducible difference’ between two thinkers like Maimon and Deleuze? It might be objected nevertheless that such a coalition would be too general and artificial to mean anything or affirm anything.