When the fight finally starts, the crowd goes quiet — the only noises come from the trucks outside on Chicago Avenue, shifting gears, and the smack of rubber against bare, sweaty flesh. It’s almost a relief, the quiet — a relief to know that there are some things which are so visceral, so immediate, that they do not need commentary. I watch the crowd, mostly bros in loose shorts and basketball caps; big, busty girls in tight tank-tops and jeans with rhinestones on the back. After a while the fighters tire, and circle without coming close, breathing hard and loud. “Make some noise,” someone calls in back–still they lean forward, lock-jawed, silent–”Or don’t,” he concedes.

2.

The second fight is louder and faster–two big skinny guys who practically take turns standing and punching each other in the face. When the first guy falls, a college kid, wiry and tan, the crowd hoots and cheers. I think maybe there is something honest, even therapeutic about it: it’s hard not to admire the elegance of unrestrained violence, like watching the motion of a car engine — the hidden mechanism which underlies all things and makes them run. By the end of the fight, the college kid is bleeding, and yes, it looks like paint where it has smeared his opponent’s shirt.

3.
All the fights are draws. I don’t know much about the sport (ignorance never stops a poet), but the crowd seems to think this is a crime–an inexusable failure of the will. In the front row, girls get up and throw down their towels. What strikes me is not the fight itself but the fact of watching. I see a boxer, a short, skinny girl, kiss her grandfather–I see her friend, a provider in all things, ask, “Do you want some vitamin water? Do you want some vitamin water?” I see the fighter is crying — I see but I can’t tell why. Out in the ring, I see the judge, dragging a towel with his feet, mopping up somebody’s blood.

4.

I think of Pythagoras, of his famous, forced distinction between lives — those who play in the Olympics, naked, fit, gleaming; those who stand and sweat outside the stadium, selling little trinkets that only tourists buy; and those spectators, the ones who sit and watch, the theorists. (Theory comes from the Greek theoria which comes from theorizomai which means “to watch.”) “And this kind of life is best,” I tell myself, because after all these years of reading, it feels like revelation. And yet, this is what theory looks like: sitting in a hot gym, with St. Augustine in my bag, I write and write about a sport I don’t understand.

5.

I am trying out doubts, the way some people try on shoes — for the fun, for the attention, any reason, really, except the desire to buy things. But what doubt doesn’t flow from an unbroken, undivided certainty — the secret water beneath all inquiry? I can’t even imagine what the punches feel like. Some of the fighters seem to fight for the glory, raising their gloves and strutting between rounds; some out of an inexhaustible inner aggression, hunching low, throwing their whole being into their punches without guard or reserve. And some fight for the fun of it, smiling and hugging when the inevitable draw is called.

all through this melting world

love thoughts, like cuttings,

have begun to take

I read all the poems at once, breaking only to eat and dip into St. Augustine. Then again, slower, looking up the words I don’t know — lambent, lache, scatback. “Read him slowly: study the details: every phrase is an event” warns the blurb and I want to be there rubbernecking and gossiping until my neck is sore. At some point on Saturday, I drive up to Evanston to see my friend box, and while I’m watching these young men, too trim to be feral, beating the shit out of each other, I realize: I am his, I am Kleinzahler’s. My whole world is, for this short week, moving to the rhythm of his music, “jerk[ing] and snap[ping] [its] fingers” (blurb again). He’s written all my poems, he’s left his sweat marks right on the place where I want to sit, halfway between Robert Hass and John Berryman (“Lowell’s down below, which is right where we want him.”)

So here I am, burning, briefly, in another’s light. I’ve been here before, duh, and I know the teleology of this passion: senescence. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day, I’ll go back to Baudelaire or Louise Gluck, and Kleinzahler’s music will turn on itself, like a wave between breakwaters.  “Everything has rhythm, everything dances,” says Maya Angelou in a typically trite aphorism: trite because the music of things is always broken, swelling against itself. Not even heteroglot: it’s too multiple, too incoherent.  Only these moments, these rare moments, when someone’s language rushes in, when I am a city ruined by flood: only then, rhythm takes hold and will not let go.

I  am saying–to put it plainly–that there is no solemn, steady music that lies beneath all things. No first sound, which descends from the good, and binds together our pencils and coffee cups and cash. Kleinzahler’s music is the last music on earth, the sound you hear after everything is finished, after everything has been made. It is in this sense that poetry is a kind of a metaphysics: it always comes after-making, it coordinates and orchestrates the cacophony of things-being-themselves. In one of his last essays, Richard Rorty writes:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp.

He’s right–hard as it is to say–he’s right. Poetry doesn’t tell us anything new–it gives us the world again and again, bound together by some derivative music. Which is enough, right? Let philosophers make the world comfortably comprehensible, systematic; what I want is the wild, unintelligible music of things, orchestrated just so by some higher hand.

2.

Last night at dinner, with my mother, my grandfather, and Nancy Breckel–an old friend of the family, shriveled and hoarse from years of smoking–we talked about poetry for a while. How I have my book, here and there; how poems are in the end irretrievable, fretted with the quiet circumstances of the poet’s life; how my grandfather, when he was younger loved and lived in ee cummings. He had a bit of butter on his shirt; his voice was small in the noisy restaurant, and a bit sad. How he read cummings to his wife and her cousin, one day over a game of bridge: there is so much more he wants to say, I can tell, so much he wants to convey by the mere force of his admiration. It’s like pulling grass: he breaks the stem and leaves the roots. I sense the force of his feeling but I do not feel it.

It’s not his fault: what could he say to make me read cummings with his wonder and admiration? When I look at cummings’ poems they seem like bad soup: too easy, too weak, too watery. “When he died,” he says facetiously at dinner, “I died too”–and we laugh a long time at the hyperbole of his feeling (comical because unintelligible.) I want to know, I want to sympathize with his passion, but ecstasy doesn’t travel well. Not like Chilean oranges: even in language, it doesn’t keep. When his passion reaches me, it’s already mushy and brown, ready to slide out of its skin. This is the trouble with poetry: its ecstasy is so private as to be almost unintelligible, outside the economy of thought and feeling. (I remember my friend begging me in high school to tell him how to read, how to enjoy poetry. What could I say?) And yet, I know, I feel that a common music must be possible — I feel it and I cannot say why. Kleinzahler:

when what has become dormant

meager or hardened

passes through the electric

of you, the fugitive scattered pieces

are called back to their nature–

I have not known him well; now in these last fading years of his life, I want to sit in his thought and his pleasure: call me back to my nature, sew up my scattered pieces, keep me safe and whole in some shared music!

http://www.mediafire.com/?zmoegu1konn

Enjoy!

“I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and at the same time, I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since they were now holding it for the first time.”

(Plato, Republic 1 327a; Bloom, trans.)

It’s hard to know, really, where to start with this sentence. It is, of course, one of the most famous in all of philosophy, a fact made all the more odd by its apparent inconsequence, its effortlessness. And yet, first year philosophy seminars regularly devote their first class period to discussing this particular piece of ink (in translation, none the less!); yet, in antiquity, it was rumored that Plato kept ten different versions under his pillow. Of course, this story is about as credible as the one which claims Plato invented peanut butter, but hey, this is the internet–all bets are off. The point is, with a little patience for the mundane you can find some quiet miracles here. And the point is, with enough stomach to strip the bark from the sapling, well, you can see all the silvery wood underneath, which is almost worth the pain you cause the tree. Today, in this post, I want to examine just one of those moments.

In much the same way that there’s a difference between a name and the thing named, serious study, theory, philosophy is marked by a constant, necessary, and perhaps pernicious distinction between the act of study and the thing studied. I say ‘necessary’ because there seems to be something about the scientific subjectivity which demands distance to perform its work. (I am using science here not in its limited twentieth century sense of ‘experimental laboratory science’ but rather in its primordial, seventeenth century sense of ‘serious systematic inquiry into man and nature.’) In other words, as any child knows, we cannot look ourselves in the face; the rigor, the exactness of inquiry cannot be performed in the rush and confusion of life. Scholarship is born in a kind of elementary stepping back from the everyday. (Indeed the root of ‘scholar’ and ‘scholarship’ reveals this, albeit in somewhat of an unflattering manner–’skole’ means ‘leisure.’) Hence the colloquial distinction between theory and practice–a point on which theory is indicted at every turn. (This, it seems to me, is a bit like indicting a dog for sitting, after asking it to sit, but whatever.)

Believe it or not, in its own quiet way, the piece of Plato before us insists on just this point. Before the great, lengthy theoretical discussions of the Republic (a necessary, but terrible translation: the real title is Politeia which means something closer to ‘Constitution of the State’), before Thrasymachus’ outrageous position is repudiated in book 1, and then adopted again in book 5, before the famous cave analogy, Socrates has to make a trip to the fair, and he has to watch the festival. The word that Plato uses to describe this crucial act, this watching is key: theasasthai–the aorist (middle) infinitive of theomai ‘to gaze at’ or ‘to behold’.  Bloom translates it as ‘observe’ which is about as good you’re going to get in English, but still even this doesn’t quite capture the resonance the word holds in Greek. The word–in case you hadn’t noticed in the awkward haze of translation–is a homonym with both Greek and English words for ‘theory,’ and indeed, the root of both. In other words, etymologically in both Greek and English ‘theory’ is an act of watching; etymologically, theory carries with it a sense of seperation, a sense of observing something, but not necessarily taking part in it. Part of the art, part of the elegance of this first sentence, then, is that it recapitulates the very nature of theory: it insists on the moment of seperation, the moment of observing everyday practices as a necessary prelude to the actual act of philosophy.

I might add–and this is the last thing, I swear–that there is something really right about the way Plato handles this, something which is uniquely Platonic, something which philosophy has lost and would do well to regain. For, the most obvious fact about books of philosophy is their utter abstraction from the kind of everyday habits that undoubtably gave birth to them (as anyone who has read Kant must know…no one but a man who took a walk so regular the neighbors set their clocks by his comings and goings could write something like the First Critique.) But simply because it is not fashionable to show a philosopher in the moment before he does his philosophizing does not mean that something essential to philosophy (in general) and his philosophy (in particular) isn’t happening. Plato’s genius lies in refusing to bracket life out of philosophy (which is as visible on his insistence on using fairly colloquial Greek when he can), in showing us (quietly) the moment of observation which must proceed the great debate.

The question which we must follow next: why is it precisely that there is such a gap between study and the thing studied? And whence?

I’m writing this now–admittedly, somewhat after the fact–because of a dream I had. I have these kinds of dreams a lot, dreams where old friends have suffered serious injuries, and survived–leaving us, in the moments after, to learn how to live with the difference. I realize this sounds kind of awful (and I haven’t even told you the dream yet)–but, let me assure you, I harbor no homicidal rage against my friends. Quite to the contrary–what these dreams make present, in a typically hyperbolic, surreal fashion, is a natural consequence of growing-up: friends of mine, we are a diaspora, pin-heads scattered across the time zones; when we gather, as gather we must, for rushed reunions and awkward coffees what is most marked–even, and indeed, especially, because we cannot name it–is the fact of our change, the fact that we are not who we once were. And, since you can’t stop the water (no, really, you can’t), we have little recourse left but to live with these changes we do not understand. And, we have no recourse but to add them, as best we can, to the pictures we have of the people we love; no choice but to mar those pictures with awkward bits of glue and masking tape. Injury is just a palpable, physical sign of this kind of thing, this kind of drifting apart.

As for the dream, well, I’d gone to visit my friend Eli Schmitt. It was winter, gray mostly, and cold. He was living in a little apartment somewhere in New York, I think, with a sort of bohemian, amateur gymnastic troop. Whatever–it was a dream. Anyway, they convinced him to perform a particulariy risky stunt, the centerpiece of their winter pageant, and it hadn’t gone well. Indeed, it had gone quite badly: at the critical moment, a hand had slipped, too sweaty, too little chalk, and Eli had fallen, fracturing his neck. The doctors saved him in one of those moments best described as a “miracle of modern medicine,” though we can quibble about just what constitutes a miracle. The point is: in rebuilding in his neck, they had been forced to use beeswax, so that the whole of his neck was beeswax, yellow, a bit soft and hard to bend. We sat and talked a while, drank a few beers, and mostly tried not to say anything about honey, or honeycomb or honeybees–which, like  most things, are easy subjects to avoid until you try to avoid them. And that was it. I woke up. It was winter, I was still at Swarthmore. I had a lot of months to wait before I could go home.

2.

It’s been a year, maybe more since I spoke to Eli–and so, yeah, I think injury is a good way to measure the distance between us, and a good way to mark, in metaphor, the differences that spring up between all people who live together, share a life, and then pass on into other things. It’s hard to know, really, how to treat these kinds of differences: which neck is the real neck? The miraculous beeswax? or the forgotten flesh? The answer, of course, is both–simply being flesh is not enough to lend something reality; and, more importantly, simply being a miracle, simply being beeswax, is not enough to render something unreal. Here is the point, really: we are constantly called to give an account of one another’s lives, to measure each others’ characters, to reckon the worth of someone’s accomplishments, and it’s hard to do.  It’s hard to do because people keep changing, and it’s hard to do because people do lots of ugly things, things we’d rather ignore.

I would like to say there is an ethics to this kind of thing, a necessity to render each part of a person’s life–each unflattering misgiving, each step in the wrong direction–accurately, and add it to the whole. But, c’mon, if this blog is in love with its own commitment to phenomenology (and lord knows it is!), then let’s get serious. No one does this. Every thing that is is the work of forgetfulness–and forgetfulness is nothing if not selective. Just as sculptors make their images by chipping away the stone, so too do we make each other by chipping away the parts we’d prefer not remember, or at least the parts that seem to damn silly to really hold in one’s mind. So what it comes down to, really, is a matter of disposition. And what it comes down to is a matter of choice–will we choose to see the good in each other, or will we choose to see the ill?

[This is, of course, a problem which has preoccupied playwrights for quite a long time--the former is called comedy, the latter tragedy. (There's some other stuff about time in there, but, hey, whatever). These are just names, about as descriptive as any other name, so take them for what you will. But I think quite a lot can be said for using them as heuristics to measure the characters of a nation, or a school, or a person...because that's what I'm about to do.]

3.

The death of an icon, an international celebrity like Michael Jackson, provides a rather profound opportunity for people to do this kind of thing, to judge and dissect a persons life, to measure its worth–and, in so doing, to label their own character. And this, I think, often involves a kind of collective decision to ignore substantial parts of a person’s life. Now if Michael Jackson is any figure, Michael Jackson is Oedipus. Really, it’s plain as day: the stunning, intuitive genius (take that, Sphinx!), the rise to kingship, the prolonged and repressed desire to return to childhood, the crimes (alleged or not) against which even the gods, even nature, has risen up in revulsion [why is Oedipus such a constant theme for this blog?], and the fall, the hideous blindness. You get it. My point is that Michael Jackson’s story is an archetype, and an ancient one at that, of tragedy. His story is one of unmitigated suffering, of the empty comfort of wealth and riches. It’s bleak, it’s depressing, and frankly I don’t see one goddamn piece of redemption in the whole thing. I mean the man died of an overdoes of sleep medicine, for god’s sake.

Or, at least, I don’t see much redemption in Michael Jackson himself. But tragedy is not only about unmitigated suffering, and Oedipus, bleak as it is, does not end without a certain kind of comfort, a certain kind of reassurance. That reassurance comes of the sense that, though people have suffered greatly, and died even, for their own folly, justice itself remains, justice has been served. And even if we suffer, and even if we die for nothing, at least we can know that our suffering is part of that justice. Perhaps you do not find this particularly reassuring (I assure you, I am not reassured). There is something particularly Greek about this, this penchant to find comfort in the mysterious, and ultimately unknowable movements of the universe. And there is something particularly American about finding this cold comfort. Because if we, as a people, are about anything (and believe me, I am more than willing to hear arguments that we are about nothing at all) we are about the individual, about growth and success on the heels of hard work and determination. In American English “self-made” is practically a synonym for “redeemed.” And, indeed all our fables of redemption, all our narratives arc to this single point–sure Johnny Cash, or Ray Charles struggled mightily with addictions. But they did not die. No. They triumphed, they turned the corner. And then they went on to have the biggest hits of their lives, get married, something about a sunset–what redemption there is comes from them, and them alone. We share in their triumph, and we are bound to them, we are reassured. In short, we, we Americans, have no taste for tragedy; the archetype we so crave is a comedic archetype, through and through.

The thing about Michael Jackson, though, is that he died. He didn’t turn the corner, he didn’t have another hit, he gives us no triumph to taste and share. And it’s hard to sell a comedy without a marriage pageant, or a feast, or a dance at the end. It is a measure of our character in regard to these things, our neurotic dependence on comedy, that no one (that I’ve read) has had the balls to tell it like it is, to label Michael Jackson’s life an unredeemed tragedy, a senseless waste of genius which briefly blessed us. Part of this is good manners, of course, but part of it is, I think an unwillingness to look the matter in the eye. For, when you read his obituaries, there is a common chord struck on all their pages: again and again we are urged to focus on the music, to forget his painful public presence over the past ten or fifteen years, to see him redeemed in his music, in his genius, since his death offers so little. Now certainly we should celebrate Michael Jackson’s music–I mean for god’s sake, the music was made for celebration–but I think we should not be so quick to forget his dissolution, to render his perversion, his hubris, to a footnote. We risk, I think, closing ourselves to certain kinds of narratives, tragic narratives–without which, well, comedy tends to loose its force. The point is: of course we can choose how we wish to see Michael Jackson, and of course, we must choose to forget  some things, but we should insist that such a choice remain a choice, rather than a knee-jerk cultural politeness. [Also: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31336.]

All for now, folks!

1. Of a state, institution, etc.: The right of self-government, of making its own laws and administering its own affairs.     b. Liberty to follow one’s will, personal freedom.   c. Metaph. Freedom (of the will); the Kantian doctrine of the Will giving itself its own law, apart from any object willed; opposed to heteronomy. 2. Biol. Autonomous condition: a. The condition of being controlled only by its own laws, and not subject to any higher one. b. Organic independence.     3. A self-governing community (cf. a monarchy).

Not without a glimmer of laughter, that old OED — of course metaphysics comes third, following both the state and the individual: the biggest names in metaphysics (i.e. metaphysics itself), as Nietzsche suggests, are precisely those watched over and working within the state. This is no minor holiday, I think. If the definitions above suggest anything about the thing we hold in our mouths when we say ‘autonomy,’ they suggest that we conceive of personal freedom on analogy to the freedom of states. Personal freedom is self-determination — determination in the sense of laws, laws that frame and fix, laws that tell us what is fair and safe.

Of course states don’t spring from the earth (however many teeth we plant): they’re born of other states, with all the violence and anguish of birth (not all nations are Canada, sir). The right to make laws over one’s citizens is a right which is earned through struggle; autonomy demands a prior subjection; the autonomous man is one who has been freed. And freedom, in this sense, is nothing if not a splitting, a splitting from some original mother flesh.

This is what we find in our mouths then (as if words were some piece of stale bread!) when we speak of autonomy: this is how the word is spoken. We speak of a split, of a having-been enslaved — and, in part, we speak of that slavery too, insofar as we speak of personal autonomy on analogy with the autonomy of states. Of course, analogies do not come to us free — both terms in an analogy are tainted with their previous commitments.

If personal autonomy is the power to make laws for oneself, then, we may say that autonomy is a desire to take the state into oneself — as it were, to take the place of the state. As long as we speak autonomy as a desire to give laws, we can’t help but hear a hint of tyranny in the word ‘autonomy’ — not a desire to do without states, but a desire to take the state into oneself, to make oneself the state. Personal autonomy (I had almost said tyranny as a kind of sloppy metonym) is no freedom from the notion of state, but rather a reconstitution of it, viral as it is — indeed it is precisely this that we mean when speak of ‘self-government.’

Sure, you may say. But does this imply slavery to the state? Can’t the structure of laws that one applies to oneself differ fundamentally from the structures used by the state? Wouldn’t autonomy consist precisely in reconstituting the entire system of law-giving and law-taking for oneself? This is the question I have been trying to ask all along, the question that I cannot ask, since it is not mine (as though the self were some shaft to be plumbed and mined) to ask. (The very notion of a question of mine presupposes the autonomy it wishes to critique). So. We have come to our question, by (deconstructing) the words of others (among which others we include ourselves). It would be foolish, having come to this footing, to let it slip away, to presume that, though we lack the right to question, we possess the right to answer. No: we must turn again to the words of others.

I say words, because “autonomy” is really two words, in a language we don’t speak anymore (though it speaks all over our living languages): auto and nomoi. The second is a masculine plural nominative noun; it means ‘laws.’ The first is a neuter masc accusative pronoun; it can mean ‘itself.’ It can be attributive : “the same [thing].” Auto-nomoi means, in its primordial signification, either “the laws themselves” or “the same laws.” In what follows, we must be careful not to bracket away this doubleness (though we’ve bracketed off these Greek meaning(s) for quite some time now — a rhetorical trick, which can and should engender suspicion): the meaning of the word is twofold. That can’t be ignored.

Government of the self: both the laws themselves and the same laws. In the first, we see the myths of pure presence — the laws we give ourselves are the first laws, the primordial laws, from which all other laws descend. In this sense, then, the state would exist on analogy with the state (quite the opposite of what we saw above). In the second, we see … that is, we can see almost anything wish: what are these laws the same as? We have no means to make this determination; we must admit that the laws could be the same as almost anything we think. Autonomy is the same set of laws as chicken, the international space station, hunger.

Thus, the pure laws, the first laws are the same laws as … : they are the same as an absence of signification so dire that almost anything can fill it. You might comment that I have supplied the ‘as’ — but this is precisely my point: we cannot make sense of the same laws without an ‘as’, but once we’ve supplied that ‘as’ we find ourselves without further recourse, except, to that over-determination of sense which is absurdity. Autonomy is coded with two, mutually destructing demands. It demands, at once, primordiality and specificity, which specificity it leaves us with no recourse to supply.

No recourse, that is, unless we supply something from the outside, something to complement the ‘as.’ In order to sensibly say the word autonomy, we must conceive of it on analogy to something; analogy is the only thing that gives it sense. The only pure laws are those conceived in terms of other laws; the only true autonomy is the autonomy which is taken from, constituted by, thought in accordance with something from the outside. Autonomy, as the reconstitution of law-giving, is possible on the basis of, in reference to, other systems of law-giving.

And here, I think it becomes plainer why a rather abstruse grammatical demonstration may be presented in this, a piece of prose which has (ironically at least) marked itself as rigorous. I won’t tie the web too tight, though; much should be left unsaid. One final move, before I leave you with my threads (how far we’ve traveled from that first field!): autonomy is that impossible thing (those teeth!) that laws wish to be — we must wonder, then, why we so constantly think towards it, setting it as personal goal, and a societal goal: is it something about autonomy? or is it something about political life? or is it something about impossibility itself? (All those ‘or’s’ are as much oars).

Also: do not forget the temporality of differance. When I look up Idaho in the atlas, perhaps Falcon is associated with Idaho, sure, but not because of anything in the atlas: I can associate the two only because I have previously experienced the two together in the past, because I re-call something which is not-present (in both senses) in the atlas. Pure presence is possible only in the pure now: as soon as Derrida proves such a thing is impossible, as soon as he proves that the now is wrapped up in the past and the future, in things that are not present (in both senses, again). When we talk about the metaphysics of presence, we should remember that we are speaking about both the present and the present — things that are here in front of us, and the atomic moment that they are so present.

I think of Kant in reference to this passage–specifically his insistence that we cannot experience anything unless it affects us, unless it is such a thing as to appear to us, to touch us, to hurt us, to smell bad to us, etc. This idea proves central to Kant’s epistemology; he uses it to derive transcendental idealism, the separation between things-in-themselves and things as they appear, and the distinction between sensible and intellectual faculties. Those of us steeped in Simone Weil, or even negative theology, are, I think, somewhat congenitally disposed to find this kind of epistemology suspicious: Kant seems to argue that we cannot be affected by nothing, that we can only be affected by things that are, things that presence themselves for our sensible faculties. And yet, we are consistently effected by absence, by things that we do not see or touch or taste, by things that we could not see, touch, or taste–for Weil, this is precisely what our experience of God is, an experience of something which is entirely beyond our capacity to experience, that is, an experience of a profound lack. We cannot, as Hume (and Kant too) suggest, come to experience or understand this absence by combining the superlative forms of things we already know; we cannot form an accurate image of God by stretching our notions of ‘sovereignty’ or ‘wisdom’ or ‘beardness’ to their extereme forms. For Weil, God is the superlative form of the void, into which we can project nothing but unintelligibility, unexperience, unaffect.

Perhaps Kant would agree with this characterization of God; it is certainly not un-Kantian. But he would likely treat it as an exception to the rule; he would insist that presence is only constituted by presence, not non-presence. Husserl takes up this charge; working within Kant’s imperative, he argues that we can only experience something insofar as it has ‘form’–which Derrida says is “presence itself” (SP, 108). In other words, presence is the form of transcendental (i.e. phenomenologically reduced) experience; we can only experience things insofar as they are present, as they appear to us, as they affect us. Regardless whether we are speaking of a puppy, a squid, or Justice, for Husserl, we cannot even imagine these things, let alone speak and think about them, unless they’re the sort of thing that appears to us, that has presence (and one suspects, substance to–that is, to steal some Heidegger, presence-at-hand). This insistence on presence is, in a certain way, part of phenomenology’s triumph; by reducing metaphysics precisely to the sphere of things that we do experience, it cuts much of the otherworldy fat from Kant, Descartes, Plato(nism), etc. But, Husserl’s insistence on the supremacy of form is also indicative of his profound investement in the metaphysics of presence. As is often the case with Derrida’s work on Husserl, it is precisely in Husserl’s most profound triumphs that Derrida wants to push him forward. Derrida wants to insist that the things that are present are as much constituted by non-presence (by differance) as they are by presence, and that further this non-presence cannot be accounted for in terms of presence. It is not the privative form of presence, but rather something entirely different, and altogether more complicated; something interimbricated in all presences. (Derrida thus one-ups Simone Weil–she comments merely that we can experience nothing; he insists that non-presence is constitutive for all presence). Derrida proposes to show this, to show the necessity of non-presence for Husserl’s phenomoneology of presence through language, that is, by insisting that signs, which are precisely not the things they call to mind (signs are irreducibly different; their use entails engagement with non-presence) are necessary for Husserl’s phenomenologically reduced monad.

(2) I will shortly turn to Derrida’s formulations, in Differance, of the implication of language in, the dependence of language on, difference (and, more importantly for the task at hand, the classical misinterpretation of language in terms of presence). But, already, I think we can see an ethics of interpretation developing, which ethics my work will try to adhere to as best as possible. If language is a form of non-presence, if words are necessary and ineluctable different from the things that they signify, then what Jessi and some other people call the hermeneutics of suspicion seems impractical and violent. It makes no sense to go digging through a text, looking for the doctrines that are present in it, demanding of words that they function as mere placeholders for the thought of another; such interpretation does violence against the nature of language, asking it to function as presence, while ignoring the very real differance that constitutes it. What does this mean for a positive hermeneutic project, for a project that seeks to be at once sensitive and critical, closely attentive and yet capable of understanding the text’s larger movements? It’s hard to say, in a final sense; in our training as interpreters more than anywhere else, we are trained in the metaphysics of presence–even in laying out a different kind of interpretation, I have at times succumbed to the myths of presence. I leave this as an open question, a heuristic to be used against my own work, and topic of essential import for the classroom. I will try as best as I can to expose differance, to drive my analysis toward questions rather than doctrines. Paradoxically, perhaps, I think this entails close attention to the text, that differance enters the text first and foremost through language (which, after all, according to Derrida is implicated in any sense, any idea). To try to accomodate this, I think I’ll constrain the bulk of my efforts to “Form and Meaning” with supplements of “Differance” which, taken together contain a lot of the key moves in Speech and Phenomena. Also: this will make matters more managable, which is always important. Having-been is constitutive of being-towards. (Oh, texts-in-translation, how you complicate things).  – I have tried to do all this, and found it very difficult; which difficulty I think is not incidental to deconstruction. Because deconstruction works within, because deconstruction inhabits other texts, other doctrines, it is hard to tell what is play and what is doctrine. And play is such a thing as to recede as soon as we offer to call it play. I have found it similarly difficult to set out the text as a series of doctrines, proceeding from a central thesis through a series of arguments; perhaps this kind of substratum exists, and I have not paid close enough attention to find it. At times I think so. But I suspect that this is also deconstruction at work; just as play recedes when we call it play, so too doctrines retreat when we call them doctrines. We are faced with a permeable, porous text, a text which resists interpretation just as much as it invites it — which is, of course, precisely its value.

(3) The Metaphysics of Presence and the Classical Account of Language: Let me give that to you one more time, a bit more rigorously. Let’s start with the classical account of language:

“We ordinarily say that a sign is put in place of the thing itself, the present thing–”thing” holding here for the sense as well as the referent. Signs represent the present in its absence; they take the place of the present. When we cannot take hold of or show the thing, let us say the present, the being-present, when the present does not present itself, then we signify, we go through the detour of signs. We take up or give signs; we make signs. The sign would thus be a deferred presence…What I am describing here is the structure of signs as classically determined, in order to define–through a commonplace characterization of its traits–signification as the differance of temporalizing. Now this classical determination presupposes that the sign (which defers presence) is conceivable only on the basis of of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate. Following this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: it is second in order after an original and lost presence, a presence from which the sign would be derived. It is provisional with respect to this final and missing presence, in view of which the sign would serve as a movement of mediation” (D, 138).

Language, in the classical view, is a matter of absence or, better, a matter of covering-up that absence; in those long moments when we are divorced from presences we rely on words to stand in their place, to serve for them as it were. If this is true, then words must be the sort of thing which can stand-in for presences — they must be presences themselves, presences derived from other presences. This business about derivation is key; in order for language to be adequate to the presences it re-places, it must be precisely correlated with it. So precisely correlated, in fact, that were the thing it re-presents present (in the present) there would be no need for a word at all. Words re-duntantly re-iterate presences; they are necessary only in the absence of those presences — and, in anticipation of those presences. In the classical view, words are ‘deferals’ — one of the key, interimbricated senses of Derrida’s differance — detours that one undertakes in the meantime, deferals which, due to the precise allegiance between word and presence do not shift the sense of the thing being represented. (Notably, Derrida’s re-reading of language in terms of differance will proceed in large part through undermining this alleigance, by making a deferal necessarily a difference).  We can see then that language in the classical view is very much implicated in temporality; words look backward to a (prelapsarian) world where the appropriate things were present (words re-present things), and yet they anticipate a future, pointing by their very emptiness, to a greater possible fullness.

As we will see shortly (well, not so shortly), Husserl’s notion of pure transcendental experience, that experience in which we relate directly to presences without language, is an experience (of presences) in the present — the word ‘presence’ itself is etched with a peculiar now kind of temporality. Transcendental experience works without the mediating, the confusing influence of the future or the past. It should come as no surprise, then, that Derrida accomplishes a great deal of his deconstruction simply by insisting that transcendental experience is itself temporal, that it requires a relation to things that are not yet, or no longer, present — which (suprised?!) requires language.

Before we move on to a more specific exegesis of Derrida’s thoughts on Husserl, which will probably occupy me for quite a while, it’s worth noting the extent to which meta-physics is implicated in the meta-physics of presence. In its very name, meta-physics, after-making, seems to posit a world of things that exist independently of our language, which language (and philosophy, moving as it does, in language) serve to describe, to fix, but not to constitute. Metaphysics occurs after things have been made; though it may describe them incorrectly, it does not change them. Much of Derrida’s project in these essays may be summarized by simply lobbing the meta from metaphysics, making philosophy as much a matter of making as, say, pottery or, better, the creation of the solar system. I suppose it should come as no surprise that the word ‘metaphysics’ comes with metaphysical commitments.

–more throughout the day–stay tuned– 

A few things: (1) Absurdity is only possibile on the basis of sensibility — absurdity is formed when we combine two acceptable moments of thought, and judge the resulting combination logically inadequate in a certain way. This certain way, to draw on Heidegger, is both something that we construct, and something we have foisted upon ourselves: as much as our particular, dualistic (i.e. Western) way of thinking is implicated in logical commonplaces like “all unmarried men are bachelors,” it’s also true that it’s impossible (sort of) to be a married bachelor, it’s true that being itself, the world itself, by resisting, by limiting our thoughts, gives us much of the matter we think about. Absurdity, then, is not non-sense — it stands, albeit, confusedly, on the shoulders of sense, and in a world which determines that sense. Rather, absurdity is over-sense; the absurd has too much (or too many) sense(s) for us to process, or to understand (easily).

(2) I am speaking in terms of comparatives — non-sense is more sense than we can process — which are notoriously difficult to pin down. Comparatives shift: this is why we find it quite acceptable to eat nauseating quantities of french fries, or buy cars which, in addition to being quite impractical for our uses, are simply huge. We did not always eat so many french fries or buy such large cars, but our sense of scale has shifted. It follows, then, that which we mark off as ‘absurd,’ as so fraught with meaning, so over-determined as to resemble non-sense (which, as we saw above, is precisely what it is not), should be suspectible to shifts. Our measures of what constitutes more sense than we can process can and should shift. It is true that speaking of a ‘married bachelor’ is absurd, that the statement contains too many senses for us to understand; but it is also true that we have a name for ‘married bachelors’, that we encounter them all the time, that we laugh and call them philanderers.

(3) The work of logic then — specifically, the logician’s rather purient attempt to seperate sense and absurdity — is, we see, an unstable enterprise, a process of marking certain things as over-determined, despite the fact that we have pliable minds, that we can come to understand and accept the most violent contradictions as commonplaces. In other words, the law of non-contradiction is conditional; dichotomies are an exercises in ambiguity — the borders they hope to mark are constantly shifting — until, that is, we come up against the limits of what is thinkable, past which we cannot brook contradictions. This has always been the ultimate task of logic, to mark off these points past which we cannot think, and indutably there are such limits. However, we cannot think both sides of what can be thought; we can only think what we can think. So, if we are to think to the limits of what can be thought, we must do so in a world of thinking where dichotomies are ambiguous, where they are constantly breaking down in the face of the mind’s considerable plasticity.

(4) I am calling, I guess, for two logics, the first (what I will call a logic of ambiguity), concerned with the ambiguous shifting world of our own thought; the second, a logic of limits, which attempts to delimit the utmost bounds of conditionality, of ambiguity, and which is thus constituted by and in a logic of ambiguity. In other words — and I will try to make this clearer later, as I have more time to think about it — absolute dichotomies between what can be thought and what cannot be thought are only possible on the basis of an absolute (which is to say, non-absolute) ambiguity; and anyone who looks for absolutes must admit that she is always-already immersed in ambiguity, that she can find no firmer ground.