DERRIDA WITH AGAMBEN Marcus Steinweg 1. Can there be an equality of subjects who can rely on nothing but the absence of substantial guarantees? 2. What would this community of equals be? 3. Would it not be at first the community of those who participate in the incommensurable? 4. In the incommensurable which is another name of this absence or groundlessness over which the subject is held in its irreducible singularity that differentiates it from every co-subject. 5. The subject includes this ontological hovering. 6. To think the concept of equality, to give it a meaning that reaches beyond the status of a normative axiom requires short-circuiting it with the category of the subject, with the subject as the bearer of its incommensurability, likewise its primordial release from transcendent imperatives, but its emancipation also from contexts in which it is assumed too quickly, and too comfortably that they completely dominate the subject. 7. Neither does the subject read itself off its past, off its status as product, nor does it decipher itself as the effects of an anonymous texture which is in this sense already transcendent. 8. The subject includes this infinitesimal reaching beyond itself as the object of hetero-affects. 9. The concept of equality must therefore be opened up to this excess which transfers the subject to its inequality with itself as well as with the other. 10. There is equality here only on the ground of factual as well as ontological inequality, in the dimension of elementary asymmetry. 11. Equality is the assertion which no thinking that conceives of itself as emancipative can do without, for the concept of equality denotes the heart of self-rising of a subject that begins to demarcate itself from itself as an object of alien decisions — not by negating its factual object status to succumb to the temptation of idealism, but by taking away the ground from underneath the necessity of such a negation, for there is no contradiction in being an object and a subject in one. 12. Kant’s cleaving of the human subject into the dimensions of receptivity and spontaneity, which Heidegger’s determination of Dasein as cast casting follows, already brings together the object dimension with the subject dimension, or, translated into older categories, the subject’s finitude with its infinitude. 13. The idea of equality (supposing it is an idea) has its room for play precisely in this crevice between finitude and infinitude. 14. It can be assimilated neither to the order of objective facts and the laws controlling them, nor to the sphere of absolute autonomy. 15. Above all, it does not stand in any contradiction to the subject’s inequality with itself because it arises from this cleft that distances the subject originarily, i.e. by definition, from itself. 16. Distance or difference from the self is the horizon of equality that does not misconceive itself as being equal or making equal. 17. Against the horizon of equality, the subject identifies itself with the incommensurable that prevents any valid self-enclosure in any kind of positive model of egoity because the incommensurable is nothing other than the impossibility of such a self-enclosure. In contact with this impossibility, the subject experiences equality as a demand which correlates with factual inequality, the inequality that affects already its self and its ego. 18. The question concerning equality touches the phantasm of the ego that can be described as the cardinal fantasy of Western metaphysics. 19. This fantasy includes a demand on the subject that it be a unity with itself, a unity that resists the possibility and the danger of an ultimate scattering and non-equality with itself. 20. Equality in the sense of self-equality has this meaning: to build up a resistance against the dispersive self-loss of the subject in the sphere of the non-subjective that is the domain of matter, of objects, of history and also of becoming in its trans-horizontality. In this domain in which the subject is originarily embedded, to which it belongs from the start, it is threatened by the danger of a failure to address its self, the possibility of no longer knowing who is saying ‘I’ while it is saying ‘I’, and who is intended by so saying. 21. It can be seen what a precarious instance the ‘I’-saying subject is, it can be recognized especially at the moment of this demand for unity and equality with itself that is indebted already to the inkling of the impossibility of ontological closure, that is, of the impossibility of absolute knowledge. 22. Philosophy arises from this unrest of a subject whose equality with itself is anything but secure. 23. Philosophy is unrest in view of what is absolutely unsettling, which is this originary loss of the self or original auto-dispersion that the subject ultimately recognizes as its truth. 24. Philosophy exists and a subject exists only in the contact of the incommensurable with the heart of equality and identity. 25. For there to be equality, inequality must be presupposed; for there to be identity, there must be non-identity or difference. 26. The thinking of German idealism confronted this cleft in identity like no other thinking before it. 27. Hegel has been accused, not always unjustly, of defusing the split in identity into determinate negation. 28. And yet, it is precisely Hegelian thinking that is opened up to the abyss of pure negativity, to the abyss within the subject, thus to an abyss that short-circuits the subject qua subject with the incommensurable. 29. The incommensurable abyss is not what the subject can reach; on the contrary, it is what it has always already reached. 30. If we equate the incommensurable with truth, then it can be asserted that there are subjects who do not care about the truth, but that there is only truth as that which no subject forgets. 31. Hegel’s decisive lesson lies here, in insisting on the obstinate unforgettability of truth itself, and not in the lament that the individual subjects do not succeed in recalling it, in reactualizing it in a process of anamnestic reappropriation. 32. Truth does not have to be recalled or reactualized because it has never lost its actuality insofar as it is truth that does not forget us. 33. It is important to understand that truth as the incommensurable does not perdure in any beyond nor, at least directly, in reality. 34. The locus of truth is neither the propositional statement nor the heaven of ideas. 35. Truth here means the cleft in the structure of reality itself, that which cannot be assimilated to this structure, thus that which does not bend to the subject insofar as its dwells in the world, i.e. in reality. 36. For it bends the subject by articulating it with its elementary non-equality with itself, for the subject without subjectivity (the subject without a binding nature, without a reversible bio-teleological determination) is the subject of truth or the subject of the incommensurable insofar as it affirms ontological non-equality with itself as the originary opening to the dimension of self-enclosure. 37. The subject is neither in possession of truth by means of true statements, nor does it dwell in the truth of being as long as truth, as this opening-up or clearing, opens up the space of obviousness of the subject’s evidence. 38. Heidegger himself tried to think the truth of being along with the withdrawal, alétheia along with léthe, in such a way that unconcealedness could not be reduced to concealedness, nor concealedness to unconcealedness. 39. The dimension to which the concept of truth already refers here is the dimension of an undecidable between, the dimension of a continual conflict between presence and absence, being and withdrawal. 40. In all his books, Giorgio Agamben has reconstructed this zone of conflict in order simultaneously to refer to the fact that the insistence on the irreducible trace (on the arché-trace, the gramma in Derrida’s thinking) or on being as withdrawal (in Heidegger’s as well as Blanchot’s thinking) is part of the ethos of the metaphysical legacy in thinking: “From this viewpoint we can assess the acuity of Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical tradition, and also become aware of its limits. Without question, along with Derrida, we have to appraise those philosophers who, unfolding Levinas’ concept of the trace and Heidegger’s concept of difference, have brought to light most decisively the originary position assumed by the gramma and the significant in our culture. However, in this way he believed that he had opened up a path to overcome metaphysics whereas in fact he had only brought its fundamental problem to the light of day. Metaphysics, namely, is not simply the primacy of the voice over the gramma. If metaphysics is that thinking which posits the voice as origin, then it is so only because, from the outset, this voice is thought as sublated, as VOICE. To discern the horizon of metaphysics merely in the predominance of phoné and consequently to believe that it can be transcended with the aid of gramma means thinking metaphysics without the negativity that is equally part of its essence. Metaphysics is always already grammatology, and grammatology is fundamental ontology insofar as the function of the negative ontological ground can be attributed to the gramma (the VOICE).” 41. The thinking of irreducible difference (whether it be articulated as a thinking of writing in Derrida’s sense, i.e. as a thinking that inscribes in phonocentrism a resistance that cannot be integrated, or as a thinking of the abyssal ground or the grounding abyss in Heidegger’s sense) is already part of the tradition of metaphysical thinking since, for Agamben, “the term metaphysics refers to that tradition of thinking which thinks the self-grounding of being as a negative ground”. 42. Metaphysics would be the opening of the thinking subject to the unthinkable in the dynamic of self-grounding that recognizes itself as a hovering architecture. 43. The subject of this dynamic mediates itself with itself by starting to put its trust in the limit of the self; trust which has to be radical, anti-illusory practice by exchanging the illusion of pure self-grounding for itself. 44. Instead of surrendering itself to the naivety of ultimate self-control, metaphysics would be the knowledge that cannot cease knowing that knowledge is not everything. 45. Without therefore deviating into religiosity, metaphysical thinking would be a thinking of the unthinkable beyond religious self-elimination, a thinking which as thinking drives its concepts to their implicit limit, a thinking that sharpens its vocabulary on the impossible, a thinking which, as Adorno puts it, is the effort to get beyond the concept with the aid of the concept. 46. This is an effort or an exertion that inscribes difference into the concept itself instead of localizing it beyond the concept and its reductive, identifying violence. 47. The concept, thinking in concepts includes stretching for what is outside concepts, for the implicit impossibility of a conceptual grasping of being and the world. 48. The concept is bounded by the domain of the non-conceptual. 49. It exists only in the form of this touching of the limit; it exists only as excess — as excess and hyperbolism, as the exteriority of a form that opens itself to the formlessness of pre-conceptual entities. 50. The dimension of the pre-conceptual can also be designated as the order of the pre-synthetic trace, as the domain of gramma or, in Agamben’s terminology, of Voice, as the dimension of a difference or limit that is inscribed in conceptual desire as a resistance that has always already been inscribed. 51. I call this space the domain of the incommensurable where it is indispensable to insist on the fact that the incommensurable does not mean any sublime beyond, but this cleft in the concept itself that marks difference in identity — a difference which accompanies identifying thinking from its beginnings and never ceases to afflict it. 52. It is this presence of difference in the thinking of presence called metaphysics which makes a simple distinguishing of metaphysical thinking from trans-metaphysical (deconstructed, etc.) thinking, as Derrida himself would say, infinitely complicated — infinitely in the sense of the meaning of infinity evoked by Blanchot that aims at inconclusiveness and unceasingness. 53. Complicated in the sense of the impossibility of a satisfactory classification of conceptual thinking in binary models whose simplifications can be boundless. 54. The relationship between presence and absence, identity and difference, concept and non-concept will not bend to any hierarchical structure that causes the one element to be subjugated to the other through a kind of conceptual injustice for the sake of its classification. 55. On this conceptual injustice, on the injustice of the concept, Adorno and Derrida, along with many others, have said what is most necessary to say. 56. Agamben then rightly insists that so-called metaphysical thinking, instead of being simply the name of this injustice, cannot itself be sacrificed to it because it itself is more complicated and more complex than injustice wants it to be. 57. Metaphysical thinking already includes this self-extension of the concept to its dark ground which Agamben describes as the abyss of negativity. 58. Let us not forget that Derrida has described deconstruction as self-deconstruction. 59. Deconstruction is not opposed to metaphysics and its conceptual apparatuses from the outside like systematic architectures. 60. At least according to its conception of itself, deconstruction operates from the inside; it is parasitic. 61. But that means that the procedure of the deconstructive critique of metaphysics is at work at first in metaphysics itself, is already working within it against it, often without it knowing it. 62. To uncover this ignorance of metaphysics about itself makes of deconstruction an almost passive, diagnostic practice which, before it conceives of itself as a surpassing of metaphysics in its supposed unity and self-containedness, assists metaphysics in coming to a better understanding of itself by pointing it to the implicit resistances, inconsistencies, differences within it. 63. To this extent, Agamben also treats Derrida unjustly by understanding him, analogously to the injustice of the concept, as an opponent only of metaphysics, whereas Derrida did not cease to contest the possibility of such opposition under the heading of deconstruction.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:52:20 +0000
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