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Ducey, Ph.D. (Continued)   More of the Same We can follow Derrida's basic mistake--the inability to distinguish between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-- through some other parts of his oeuvre. This should be reassuring, because even if our arguments are sound, it is still somewhat daunting to throw out the whole body of thought of some one who the President of France referred to as "the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century." Zeynep Direk cites Derrida as follows: "Given that the opening of the form of presence to the ideality implies the possibility of the infinite repetition of this form, a repetitive relation with infinity -- a return ad infinitum -- must already inhabit the finitude of retention. Therefore, repetition and re-presentation must belong to the very essence of experience." [Direk's version of D] However, this is not correct. The basis of knowledge is not some "opening of a form". It is an act of grasping. If you stop calling the central moment "present" and call it "insight", this is clearer. So it is clear that in the above passage that Derrida is using an abstract concept to label the founding act of knowledge, and so he is led astray. The return ad infinitum does not "inhabit" presence. It is merely attached to it as a necessary consequence. Any knower performs this act over and over again. That is, the knower repeatedly performs the whole act in all its simplicity. ("I got it!") So, repetition and re-presentation are necessary attributes of the self-same simple act, due to the fact that it is performed in time by an embodied entity. Thus they are not "inside" presence; they are outside it. The only way they could possibly be construed to be "inside" presence is by looking at the idea of presence and the idea of repetition rather than re-enacting their actual occurrence. This is a classic map vs. territory error. The map is completely lacking in the sensory details of the territory. The map does not show the underbrush, the pot holes, the heat and dust and wind on the journey. In order to include the materiality of phenomenological presence when studying it, one has to be in one's body. One has to have intimate access to all one's sensory apparatus. And, if one does not have that access, then one is dissociated. One retreats into one's head, and mistakes the map for the territory. For, what does "belong to" mean? It just means a relationship of necessity. Something necessarily associated with an entity can be either "inside" it or "outside" it. I can see how the idea of repetition could be seen as being inside the abstract idea of presence. But, repetition itself is an act. Repetition in actuality is the occurrence all over again at a different time of the whole original event. So, a single, simple original event does not at all lose its identity by occurring again. It still is only what it is: "the presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition". It is "the whole thing" that occurs over and over. Furthermore, when Derrida says, that "the opening of the form of presence to the ideality implies the possibility of the infinite repetition of this form in general", this is only true of the idea of this "opening". The event of "getting it" itself does not imply anything. It simply is what it is. It is only its occurrence in time that provides an empirical foundation for its being repeated. Perhaps in logical systems an "implication" can be an "a priori condition". But in the physical world, an "implication" is never "part of the essence" of anything. An implication is an extrinsic consequence of an essence. First you have to have an essence, what the thing is in itself. And then you have consequences of that essence. Consider the truism, "Where there's smoke there's fire." Fire is certainly an implication of smoke; smoke necessarily implies the existence of fire. One might even say that fire is an a priori condition of smoke. For smoke, you have to have fire. But that still does not mean that fire "belongs to the very essence of" smoke, or that smoke "belongs to the very essence of" fire. Each entity remains absolutely what it is in itself. Smoke is only smoke and fire is only fire. But each one, in its materiality, has a necessary connection to the other. Derrida by-passes the materiality of "the presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition". He does not notice it. He is out of his body. He is dissociated. Zeynep Direk cites Derrida as follows: The identity of presence, in order to remain secure, must exclude any distance, alterity, difference, division. To justify the claim that in soliloquy communication is impossible, he [i.e., Husserl] makes use of the distinction between "real presence" and "presence in representation" and that calls for, according to Derrida, a deconstruction. Right. The identity of presence must indeed exclude any distance, alterity, etc. But the act of repetition does not interfere with the identity of insight. Derrida's extended remarks use the term delay in place of "repetition". Here delay is the philosophical absolute, because the beginning of methodic reflection can only consist in the consciousness of the implication of another previous, possible, and absolute origin in general. Since this alterity of the absolute origin structurally appears in my Living Present and since it can appear and be recognized only in the primordiality of something like my Living Present, this very fact signifies the authenticity of phenomenological delay and limitation. In the lackluster guise of a technique, the Reduction is only pure thought as that delay, pure thought investigating the sense of itself as delay within philosophy.   [Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, by Jacques Derrida, translated, with a preface and afterword by John. P. Leavey, Jr. (University of Nebraska Press, 1989.), 152-153.] But this is of course wrong. This alterity does not appear in my Living Presence, it rather appears along with it. Even alongside it. The Reduction is indeed pure thought investigating the sense of itself, but not "as delay", but as occurring with delay. "My Living Presence" is still merely and simply the grasp of being. And it occurs over and over again. D's translator provides a helpful gloss on the question: Pure thought is always delay. Consciousness of this delay, Derrida says, is consciousness of Difference: consciousness of the impossibility of remaining in the simple now of the Living Present as well as the "inability to live enclosed in" a simple undivided Absolute. .…. More abstractly then, an Origin, an absolute Origin, must be a differant Origin -- the never-yet-always-already-there as the "beyond" or "before" that makes all sense possible. That Difference, Derrida conjectures, "is perhaps what always has been said under the concept of 'transcendental' through the enigmatic history of its displacements." So, Primordial Difference would be transcendental -- as must be, finally, historicity and reflections thereon. (OGeom, Preface, 17-18) I think by "pure thought", Leavey means primordial intuition. Well, pure thought in that sense is not delay. The case is only that "pure thought" occurs more than once, and so in this sense it occurs "with delay". When Leavey uses the phrase "the never-yet-always-already-there", my question is, "Where does the "never" come from?" It is a gratuitous throw-in. Therefore when he says that "delay is the philosophical absolute", the response is: "No. Delay is merely a philosophical instrument." It is the means by which philosophy gets access to the Origin. JD misuses the term "absolute". It undergoes slippage in his mind. The logic of the situation only permits him to say that delay is somehow necessarily involved in philosophy. Delay is "a philosophical absolute" only in the sense that it is "absolutely necessary" for doing philosophy. But, what is delayed and repeated in philosophy is the manifestly simple occurrence of the grasp of Origin, over and over again. So delay is not "of the essence" of the Living Present. It is, if you will, only an aspect of its existence. But that only means that while philosophy uses knowledge's access to timelessness, it is a use that occurs in time. Therefore, his "because" is also incorrect. He says, "because the beginning of methodic reflection can only consist in the consciousness of the implication of another previous, possible, and absolute origin in general." But what is true is that "consciousness of the implication of another origin" is very far from "the beginning of methodic reflection". It is rather a moment somewhere in the middle of that reflection. Such reflection begins with my Living Present in itself, and then goes on to notice that this very same Living Presence has occurred at other times and other places. The Argument from "Possibility" "Isn't the (apparent) fact of the sender's or receiver's presence complicated, divided, contaminated, parasited by the possibility of an absence inasmuch as this possibility is inscribed in the functioning of the mark? …… At the very moment "I" make a shopping list, I know … that it will only be a list if it implies my absence, if it already detaches itself from me in order to function beyond my "present" act and if it is utilizable at another time, in the absence of my-being-present-now…" [Limited inc a b c, 48-49] We can begin to address what is missing from this text (i.e., the seven-eighths of the iceberg beneath the waves) by reciting a little parable: Derrida arrives at his car one day to find a gendarme writing him a ticket for illegal parking. The officer says, "Sir, your car is illegally parked." To which Derrida replies, "Isn't this apparent fact of the illegal occupation of a parking space by my car not complicated, divided, contaminated, parasited by the possibility of an absence of the car inasmuch as its mobility is inscribed in the functioning of its motor and its wheels?" To which the officer replies, "Sir, here is your ticket; you have a date in court." For Derrida, these "possibilities" always creep into the very center of the actuality of acts---whether acts of utterance or acts of knowing--- If both sender and receiver were entirely present when the mark was inscribed, and they were thereby present to themselves---since, by hypothesis here, being present and being present-to-oneself are considered to be equivalent---how could they even be distinguished from one another? …… [when one writes a note to one's neighbor] the note is precisely designed to make up for the possible absences and it therefore implies them, and they leave their mark on the mark. They remark the mark in advance. Curiously, this re-mark constitutes part of the mark itself. And this remark is inseparable from the structure of iterability. [50]   …would a performative utterance be possible if a citational doubling [doublure] did not come to split and dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event? [17] …… We should first be clear on what constitutes the status of "occurrence" or the eventhood that entails in its allegedly present and singular emergence the intervention of an utterance [énoncé] that in itself can be only repetitive or citational in its structure, or rather, since those two words may lead to confusion: iterable. I return to a point that strikes me as fundamental and that now concerns the status of events in general, of events of speech or by speech, of the strange logic they entail and that often passes unnoticed. [17-18] Namely: "… general iterability constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech act. …… given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehissence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential …… this essential absence of intending the actuality of utterance, this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context. In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would have at the very least to be totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context. [18]   Différance, the irreducible absence of intention or attendance to the performative utterance, the most "event-ridden" utterance there is, is what authorizes me, taking into account of the predicates just recalled, to posit the general graphematic structure of every "communication". By no means do I draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech (as opposed to writing in the traditional sense(, that there is no performative effect, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence or of discursive event (speech act). It is simply that those effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them, term by term; on the contrary, they presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility. [18-19] [Verrry tricky. All of those elements that "are opposed to" that list of "effects" do in fact exist, but they only do so as consequences of the actual existence of any utterance. Therefore iteration does not structure an event of discourse "a priori", it only structures certain possibilities that result from its occurrence in the first place.] So we can completely grant "the graphematic structure of every communication", except that we grant it as a set of consequences of acts created by a conscious intention that is totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, a determining center [foyer] of context. What we actually have in any utterance is an intention animating the utterance that is always "through and through present to itself and to its content." The fact that the utterance is "iterable" (and we have no problem granting that entirely) has no effect on the intentionality in question, because that intentionality is of this utterance, the one occurring-at-this-moment-in-time, and not at any other moment. Any repetition of this utterance, occurring at some other moment in time, will have, as that particular event, its own proper intentionality and context. So Derrida's irreducible confusion of presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time haunts every phase of his philosophy, and it is a confusion made possible by, and giving irreducible evidence of, his dissociated state of mind. When Derrida does philosophy, he is unable to be in his body. So, Derrida misconstrues the status of implications. In a system of abstract ideas, an implication can indeed indicate an "a priori condition". But in the occurrence of material acts, implications are decidedly consequences. Real-presence-in-itself is only what it is. Implications are consequences of its essential nature. JD doesn't get this because at the last moment, he loses his grip on the act of primordial intuition, and shifts his focus to the mere concept of the activity. This substitution of abstract idea for material reality is also the key to his analysis of writing. There, delay and repetition come up as "the problem of iterability". Take for instance the case of writing a letter. Here, writing is not only intimately related to absence but, is specifically about absence, namely, the absence of the person to whom I am writing. That is to say that the letter is written precisely in the addressee's absence rather than in spite of her/his absence; I mark the absence of the addressee in the act of writing. Hence absence becomes constitutive of writing in and of itself. Not so. Absence is not constitutive of writing, it is only a possible consequence of writing. And of course the presence-absence issue with regard to writing has nothing to do with phenomenological presence. It is strictly a matter of temporal presence. Presence and absence refer to material contiguity or non-contiguity in space and time. In summary then, JD mistakes the relationships both of "delay" and "the implication of other" to the primordial intuition, because he is using the abstract ideas of "presence", "delay" and "alterity ' in his thinking. But if one notices the actuality of the primordial intuition, then "delay" and "otherness", both merely "happen to it", as Husserl says, "modifications". So, repetition and re-presentation do not belong to the "essence" of "real presence". They are only necessary consequences of the fact that it occurs in time. And time is purely and only material. If there is no matter, there is no time. The 15 billion years' history of the universe begins. It begins with "the big bang". (The mathematics of the "big bang" seems to say that it is not exactly a "bang". It does not begin as a single point. It rather emerges gradually, and so its actual beginning is, mathematically, impossible to discern.) Its course is the unfolding of matter. Sometimes we like to speak of "eternity" as the alternative to time, and the mistake is made of conceiving of eternity as "time of infinite duration." But the meaning of eternity as alternative to time is not endless duration, it is non-duration. I like the way we can put that in Latin: Aeternitas non durat. Let's review: a. Being, the Other, is timeless; b. "a full and primordial intuition" is our noetic connection with Being; c. primordial intuition is de facto repeated; it is time-bound; d. so, the primordial intuition inherently connects the temporal and the timeless. This means that there is an inconceivable experience at the root of human knowledge. [Derrida has no problem with this; drawing on Hegel and Heidegger et al., he always refers to it as "the impossible", i.e., what philosophy cannot contain.] What is incomprehensible here is the immediate connection of dasein and Sein. That is of course no reason to doubt the existence of the connection. Its existence is the foundation of this whole conversation. This incomprehensibility is only a reason to accept the limits of rational, conceptual knowledge and the form of knowledge we call "science", and acknowledge the fact of trans-rational knowledge. The activity that "comprehends" is what we call "thinking". The activity that merely grasps without being able to conceptualize, that is what we call "awareness". Since the content of experience is incomprehensible, the best way to "handle" it would be to note its existence and then shut up about it. (This is what Buddhists recommend.) But Derrida cannot do this. He has no awareness of something that is both inconceivable and real. But he is intensely aware of "the order of signs". For him, that "order" is cut off both from sense and from the transcendent Other. -- Page Four -- Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Academy Showcase Specials Philosophy Resource Center Main Page
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