Derrida and Rousseau

The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value. They indicate neither identities nor causes. It would be frivolous to think that ‘Descartes,’ ‘Leibniz,’ ‘Rousseau,’ ‘Hegel,’ etc. are names of authors, of the authors of movements or displacements that we thus designate. The indicative value that I attribute to them is first the name of a problem ... I think all concepts hitherto proposed in order to think the articulation of a discourse and of an historical totality are caught within the metaphysical closure that I question here, as we do not know of any other concepts and cannot produce any others, and indeed shall not produce so long as this closure limits our discourse; as the primordial and indispensable phase, in fact and principle, of the development of this problematic, consists in questioning the internal structure of these texts as symptoms; as that is the only condition for determining these symptoms themselves in the totality of their metaphysical appurtenance; I draw my account from them in order to isolate Rousseau, and, in Rousseauism, the theory of writing.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

I recently re-read Of Grammatology--after giving up a third of the way through the first time around--and I was surprised by what I found. My initial reaction was to assume that Derrida was beating up on poor Rousseau, just like he beat up on poor Lévi-Strauss. Nietzsche, after all, had made a sport of showing up "the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge" (Twilight of the Idols). There is no reason not to mock him--like his contemporaries, his successors are so invested in their modernity, even when they pretend not to be, that Rousseau's rejection of everything they stand for is like a slap in the face. Derrida, though, doesn't do that; he tries to resist the temptation to turn Rousseau's body of work into a pharmakos. Why is that?

I think the answer must hinge on Derrida's own understanding of this particular author-function. A few months ago, I thought I had seen through Rousseau: his use of constant and fundamental self-contradiction, I thought, functioned as an indictment of discourse itself. But now, I'm not so sure. What do we get when we attempt to move beyond Rousseau as a "problem"--when we move back to the moment when the problem is posed? When the supplement emerges in Rousseau's work, though its problematic nature is unacknowledged, it is always still Rousseau who poses the problem.

What Derrida seems to realize about Rousseau is that Rousseau is not really under the illusion that he can capture true presence, true authenticity, truly unmediated natural speech, with the tools of philosophical and historical investigation. The First Discourse already denies the simple relationship between the study of the thing and the thing studied: when the Romans began to study virtue, they stopped practicing it. So, given that he's not a naif, what does he think he's doing? Surely the result of whatever investigation into authenticity he can produce can only be a result that does violence to authenticity itself.

What his work offers is an attempt to think the unthinkable, to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of virtue by pursuing it whereever it can be found. Any lesser man, given Rousseau's premises, would have given up, or sworn off writing and philosophy completely. Knowing his quest is quixotic, Rousseau pursues it anyway--and fails, of course. But what we are left with are the findings of a completed archeology of presence, its broken bones and shards.

Thus, in a sense, Rousseau's daring is what makes Derrida possible. By bringing forward the question of presence without obscuring it or hiding from it, Rousseau reveals it in its emptiness. After his failure, Derrida doesn't have much left to do--point it out, develop explicitly what Rousseau must have known by instinct. If Derrida makes of Rousseau only a problem, not a living author, it is because he knows that Rousseau was as aware of it as he is.

The Craftsman and the Problem of Interpretation

The Freedom of our Constitution, and the true Interest of this Nation, are Points so obvious and intelligible, that a Man of the plainest Understanding may make Himself a tolerable Master of them, with a little Application and an honest Disposition ; yet what exorbitant Merit have some Men arrogated to Themselves from a little superficial Knowledge of these Affairs ; and what infinite Mischief have They sometimes brought upon their Country, by a dogmatical Adherence to their own narrow System ? — From a Want of true Knowledge, and Sagacity to discover real Dangers, They are continually alarming the Publick with fictitious, or imaginary ones ; and, like Moon-blind Horses, are apt to startle at every Object, which appears a little odd, or uncommon. This Spirit of political Pedantry hath been carried to an extravagant Height in former Reigns ; and, to speak very moderately, seems to have lost no Ground amongst us, of late. One Instance, at least, to what a Pitch of Absurdity it can lead even sober and experienced Persons, in private Life, may be seen in the following Letter...
- Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Craftsman #319

The letter that follows this introduction is well worth reading in full. It describes a scene which superficially seems to have little political meaning: in a conversation about opera, a recent newspaper notice by the husband of a famous diva is brought up, and a man interjects by developing an outlandishly convoluted and conspiratorial interpretation of it ("P.O." is supposed to refer to the opposition Whig William Pulteney/Poulteney), finally accusing the writer of being the Pretender, if not the Devil himself (almost the same thing in the 1730s). The letter then roundly mocks the exegete for his "strange way of forcing Constructions."

But, though this remains unsaid in the text, such an accusation poses a problem. The Craftsman--and all the other political periodicals of the period--depended on circumlocution, insinuations, allegories, and allusions to carry their message. This served two purposes: it protected them from liability for libel and defamation and allowed creative rein to their otherwise often dry and simplistic message. For instance, a story might be told, as it was in Craftsman #167, about how English bulldogs are being chained up as draft animals instead of running free like the "true-bred" bulldogs of old.

But much I fear that few of that Race are now surviving; for the Tyrants before-mentioned could not have chained them tamely to their servile Vehicles. When their Freedom was invaded, They would doubtless have shewn a generous Resentment, by their angry Snarlings; and, if urged by Violence to receive the Yoke, would certainly have turned all their Rage and Strength upon those arbitrary Men, who endeavoured, with Bits, Reins and Whips, to lord it over them. It must therefore be a mongrel Race of Dogs who submit to this vile Servitude.

This story has an obvious political content: English liberties are being crushed by a tyrant (presumably Robert Walpole) and the people do not resist. But it is also artful and creative, and allows the author plausible deniability. This style also be very funny and effective: attached to that issue was a list of "uncommon animals" including "two hundred fine talking Parrots" who "say Yes or No, as their Master bids them, upon the least Nod or Wink of the Eye; and some of them will harangue for an Hour together, upon any Subject, without Hesitation."

In #319, this sophisticated form of interpretation--which was necessary to engage with the British public sphere at all--is maligned as "Political Pedantry." Of course, it is simply a matter of degree: a less "forced" construction would not have incurred ridicule. Then the question becomes: where to properly arrest the interpretive process? But the only possible responses to this question already have a political commitment. To interpret a given message as referring subtextually to Walpole and his ministers, but not to the King, already implies a certain concept of the boundaries of political discourse. A Court Whig, reading the Craftsman, would read an anti-royal or anti-state message into it; a Country Whig, being in agreement with the message, would interpret it more narrowly.

In an article called "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," Gordon Wood points out that the colonists' world was pervaded by shadowy conceptions of behind-the-curtain plots and conspiracies. In the context of a public sphere that had no unpolitical boundaries for interpretation, this is unsurprising. The reason the "paranoid style" is so easily recognizable as crazy today is that we are accustomed to taking political writings more or less at face value, and anyone that violates this interpretive consensus is subjected to Craftsman 319-style ridicule. But in a world where deceit was necessary to speak, words could never guarantee their own trustworthiness. Politics stepped in to fill the gap.

The Late Brassens

Des idé's réclamant le fameux sacrifice,
Les sectes de tout poil en offrent des séquelles,
Et la question se pose aux victimes novices:
Mourir pour des idé's, c'est bien beau, mais lesquelles?
Et comme toutes sont entre elles ressemblantes,
Quand il les voit venir, avec leur gros drapeau,
Le sage, en hésitant, tourne autour du tombeau.
Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente,
D'accord, mais de mort lente.

Encor s'il suffisait de quelques hécatombes
Pour qu'enfin tout changeât, qu'enfin tout s'arrangeât!
Depuis tant de "grand soirs" que tant de têtes tombent,
Au paradis sur terre on y serait déjà.
Mais l'âge d'or sans cesse est remis aux calendes,
Les dieux ont toujours soif, n'en ont jamais assez,
Et c'est la mort, la mort toujours recommencé'...
Mourons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente,
D'accord, mais de mort lente.
- Georges Brassens, "Mourir pour des idées" (1972)

The Brassens of Mourir pour des idées, despite the superficial resemblance, is no longer the Brassens of "La mauvaise réputation." In 1953, he had embraced his outcast persona with a joyful and Cynical scorn for the judgment of the multitude; although his songs, as always, portrayed the inevitability of disappointment and of the iconoclast's eventual failure, they did so with a happy, major-key shrug. The Brassens of 1953 is validated by his rejection of society--I failed, but I did not sell out. He is almost a Good Soldier Schweik. Occasionally he even finds redemption in another outsider, like the unnamed Auvergnat.

By 1972 all the spirit has gone out of him. What had been happy-go-lucky in him has soured; "La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part," for instance, is nothing if not vicious--he has no sympathy for the provincial hicks, the "happy imbeciles," who "crawl out of their holes to die in battle," even if he does parenthetically mention his home town of Sète. "Stances à un cambrioleur" is perhaps closest in its grim humor to his old songs, but what it expresses--the inability to bridge the distance between himself and the burglar, the impossibility of the "solidarité sainte de l'artisanat" he cites with such heavy irony--is hardly the same thing as letting apple-thieves run away and getting hung for it. The late Brassens is still an outsider, still unable to accept the hypocrisy of the "gens bien intentionnés," but he no longer sees any happiness or freedom in the excluded and the irrational.

All that is left, then, is to die a slow death for one's ideas. But the ideas are all the same, and the gods are always thirsty--why does it matter? It doesn't. Brassens no longer believes in his own ideals. He hates the haranguing Chrysostoms who push theirs, and he has pity for those without the luxury of dying for their own. But the living attitude towards existence which had animated his anarchist humanism, the terms of the structural opposition between the hypocrites and the free men, can no longer provide answers to the fundamental questions. Would the Brassens of 1953 have died for his ideas? Perhaps not--but evidently he thought being hung was a tolerable side effect of his bad reputation.

Yet despite all this emotional impoverishment--in existentialist terms a falling-away from authenticity and resoluteness--I still prefer the late Brassens. He had the courage, when his ethical resources failed him, not to renounce them or replace them with self-satisfied abstractions (the kind one sees in the gueules of the soixante-huitards) that in themselves constitute absolution from all responsibility. Brassens does not veer off his "autre route qu'eux," and that makes him an object of admiration for me.

And "Les passantes" might be the most beautiful song I've ever heard in French. (Although he didn't write the lyrics.)

Correspondence: A Journal of Letters

Late last year a group of my friends and I decided to create a small press to provide a home for like-minded writers, poets, and assorted riffraff. Uncharacteristically, we followed through, eventually settling on the name The Corresponding Society (loosely after the 1790s British revolutionary organization).

Today, we officially release the first issue of our journal--Correspondence: A Journal of Letters. You may buy it by emailing one of us, coming to tonight's reading (Tuesday, July 15, at the KGB Bar on 4th and Bowery), or somehow finding us and demanding a copy in person. Whichever you do, it costs $8 (we don't make money off of this, all the proceeds go to pay off our creditors and fund the next issue). It includes work by 20 contributors--poems, stories, unclassifiable pieces, essays, and drama. There is also an essay by yours truly entitled "Revolution, Revelation, and the Task of Critique."

A worthwhile investment!

Habermas and Amor Fati

Nietzsche designates the time of the return of the Anti-Christ as "the bell-stroke of noon" -- in a remarkable agreement with the aesthetic time-consciousness of Baudelaire. In the hour of Pan the day holds its breath, time stands still--the transitory moment is wed to eternity.

... [For Heidegger,] now it is Being that has withdrawn itself from beings and that announces its indeterminate arrival by an absence made palpable and by the mounting pain of deprival ...As for reason itself, it can only be exercised in the baleful activity of forgetting and expelling. Even memory lacks the power to promote the return of what has been exiled. As a result, Being can only come about as a fateful dispensation: those who are in need can at most hold themselves open and prepared for it. Heidegger's critique of reason ends in the distancing radicality of a change in orientation that is all-pervasive but empty of content--away from autonomy and toward a self-surrender to Being, which supposedly leaves behind the opposition between autonomy and heteronomy.
- Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Lecture IV

For me, as someone who has only recently begun to break the surface of Heidegger's thought, Habermas' utter Destruktion of his work in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity was a bit of a shock. With his other opponents, Habermas is genteel, even admiring; with his old teacher, he pulls no punches, dishing out choice phrases like "Heidegger's critical judgments on "das Man," on the dictatorship of the public realm and the impotence of the private sphere, on technocracy and mass civilization, are without any originality whatsoever, because they belong to a repertoire of opinions typical of a certain generation of German mandarins." The result is a devastating and comprehensive critique of Heidegger's life as well as his philosophical project. (On some level, I suspect Habermas' use of Offentlichkeit as the touchstone of his most famous book was a deliberate raspberry in Heidegger's direction, given the charged and highly negative connotations of that word in B&T).

I am still unqualified to judge whether this assault fully achieves its end. Certainly I find a lot to like in Division II of Being and Time, and I'm not convinced Heidegger's judgments on technocracy were any more po-faced, derivative, and snobbish than were those of Adorno (with his jazz musician who "syncopates involuntarily"). On the other hand, Dasein as it appeared in Being and Time was so obviously a thin mask for a quasi-Cartesian subject that it could provide strong support to Sartre, probably Descartes' most direct heir. Furthermore, I agree with Habermas that the real problem with Heidegger's conversion to Naziism was not the standard moral objection (still used, with even less reason, to discredit Nietzsche) but rather the cowardice involved in radically changing his thought to attempt to negate the error post factum.

All that aside, however, I think it is worthwhile to look at a particular error Habermas makes in his interpretation of Nietzsche--which also infects his view of Heidegger. For Habermas, Nietzsche seems to be nothing but an Oscar Wilde writ large: an aesthete who, while remaining uncommited to political emancipation, sees in art a locus of individual freedom, and who draws on the figure of an absent Dionysus as a kind of ultimate aestheticizing grandstand. This is, to say the least, a distorted view. For what Habermas does not even try to develop in his analysis is the Eternal Return and its analogue--Amor Fati, the ethical imperative to "become what you are."

What Habermas seems to have done is taken the stakes presented in The Birth of Tragedy as the last word on Nietzsche's ethics. Yet nothing can be further from the truth: when the Eternal Return first appears in The Gay Science, art (relatively speaking) falls by the wayside as an ethical imperative. Nietzsche is revealed as a pragmatist for whom the love of life at all costs is the only source of justification. The game of genealogies, in contrast, is only an expendable side-show.

Heidegger understood this about Nietzsche--in fact, as far as Heidegger was concerned, what made Superman Superman was precisely his experience of the Eternal Return. Thus, although Heidegger assimilated this experience (along with the doors of perception Nietzsche saw open in tragedy) to the more general encounter with Being, the movement from freedom to willing and ecstatic submission was familiar and fundamental to him. So the change in the role of Being after Heidegger's break, far from being arbitrary and contentless, should have been a surprise to no one--it followed the Nietzschean pattern.

This pattern forms one of the strongest objections to Habermas' critique. Amor Fati, and more generally the ethics of ecstatic submission (which reappears, likewise misunderstood by Habermas, as Foucault's sado-masochistic ethical practice), is not merely a Fascist version of the old "other of Reason." It is instead an alternative to the entire problematic posed by Hegel's Humpty Dumpty experience of the fragmented wholeness. Amor Fati refuses any engagement with the significance or potential of reason, because it rejects the possibility of intervention (rational or otherwise). But it can also imply--though in Heidegger it seems not to--that because one's only duty is to life, and man cannot serve two masters, any allegiance to metaphysical (or political!) abstractions can only be temporary. It is, I think, a better solution than Habermas eventually gets around to proposing.

Darwinism on the Frontier

"The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the change, that man’s sense of what is due to himself will be at no time rudely shocked; our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches; nor will there ever be such a clashing of desires between man and the machines as will lead to an encounter between them. Among themselves the machines will war eternally, but they will still require man as the being through whose agency the struggle will be principally conducted. In point of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to ourselves?

With those who can argue in this way I have nothing in common. I shrink with as much horror from believing that my race can ever be superseded or surpassed, as I should do from believing that even at the remotest period my ancestors were other than human beings. Could I believe that ten hundred thousand years ago a single one of my ancestors was another kind of being to myself, I should lose all self-respect, and take no further pleasure or interest in life."
- The Book of the Machines, Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)

In relation to its most obvious and illustrious ancestor, Gulliver's Travels (and, more remotely, the New Atlantis), Samuel Butler's Erewhon is a consummately nineteenth-century document. Where Swift and Bacon represented two sides of the seventeenth century's most fundamental debate--rationalism, science, and technology versus faith and a humanism more broadly defined--Butler is already too disenchanted to fight that battle. Religion and philosophy are to him nothing more than sets of vague and hypocritical platitudes, yet he presents their objections to science with rather more charity than Swift had for his own academicians. Butler's nineteenth century is the age of progress, but it is also the dawn of the hermenauts of suspicion; with Henry Adams, he senses things coming loose from their moorings, the obsolescence of the traditional answers. And Butler, like Adams, sees a green light at the end of the dock: the promise of Darwinism.

Erewhonian Darwinism (if I may for a moment take it with the naivety it deserves) is a beast more redolent of Hegel's owl-perch than of Darwin's riverbank. It is not so much a theory of natural selection as it is an all-encompassing vision of physical and sociohistorical development. The "Book of the Machines" incorporates even the artificial into the evolutionary framework, while his unnamed philosopher (is this supposed to be Schopenhauer?) extends the Rights of Man even unto the vegetables. In Erewhon, evolution crushes and transcends all methodological boundaries--transforming society in the process.

Of course the book is satire, even if it's not particularly biting or funny. But what is Butler really satirizing? Is it really this process of conceptual colonization and unification? As far as I can figure out (a difficult thing indeed, looking at it from our modern vantage point of Terminator paranoia), the answer is no. What Butler is attacking is the morality that is supposed to accompany it. So what if man and machine--man and vegetable--man and personal God--are fundamentally the same thing? Don't fret, don't try to impose your old parameters on the problem; accept it, and trust in common sense.

It is this attitude, I think, that clears the path for a Deleuze. For what it entails is a comfort with becoming-other, with renouncing the familiar privileges of the unique status of the human being, lonely and paranoiac at the top of the ladder of creation. Before Darwinism's intellectual possibilities were crudely appropriated by the racists and the evolutionary psychologists, it had already begun a powerful and important project for the humanities: the undermining of the barriers between us and the other creatures that surround us. Butler, with his hard-bitten fin-de-siècle cynicism, could already see this. For us, science holds no such promise--but might it?