autoimmunity vs allergy

F. is always surprised to see my books which are strewn with underlinings, exclamation marks and barely readable notes and comments, as if only a few sentences are not essential, rather than, the other way around, the notion that a text is being structured by only some key sentences. After rereading, today, “The Last of the Rogue States”, chapter 8 of Derrida’s Voyous, which appeared as an article in the South Atlantic Quarterly, I share his surprise. Despite my effort to summarize its main line of reasoning in the margins, I seemed to have lost myself, and lose myself again, in the details. This is all the more annoying because, as I wrote in my last post, I already have so little time to read, and the pockets of time I do try to assign for it, are too scattered to make the details blend into a larger picture. (I interviewed a sculptress last Thursday who pointed out that, when she was working on a larger piece, she needed to work on it for at least a few hours every day because otherwise she could not create a coherent work of art.) On the bright side, Monday I read an article by Simon Critchley which describes deconstruction as praxoi, as practices of reading that, when it concerns philosophical texts, includes a scholarly approach which, through the identification and articulation of parapraxiaes and blindspots, aims at a systematic interpretation from within a text—described by Derrida as a parasitism, laying critical eggs within the flesh of the host text. Another biological metaphor, like the ones I have described here before with reference to cloning and terrorism, of which we should be wary of in the wake of Alan Sokal. So in the midst of the details and asides I might just find, if I had the time, the ‘meaning’, or rather my ‘meaning’, of Derrida’s text. I put the word meaning in quotation marks because I want to forestall the implication of hermeneutical closure, but I purposefully use it because of its etymological resonance with ‘opinion’, which neatly ties in with the aforementioned interpretation—lacking, groping in the dark as I am, as yet a systematic consistency—or as Derrida would rather have it something in between interpretation and commentary. But if deconstruction is reading patiently, as Critchley has it, a habit which implies the abundance of time that I don’t have, if it means reading in the original language, in context, in knowledge of the corpus and of its reception, then I cannot be a deconstructor—if one can ever be one. Is it not so that, as a parasite, as an autoimmunity, a text deconstructs itself, much like a suicide bomber, attacking not only the US, but also, as Derrida notes in his interview with Giovanna Borradori, more radically still (and I quote here at length because I believe this is a key paragraph in the interview):

the system of interpretation, the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts, and evaluations that are supposed to allow one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like “September 11.” I am speaking here of the discourse that comes to be, in a pervasive and overwhelming fashion, accredited in the world’s public space. What is legitimated by the prevailing system (a combination of public opinion, the media, the rhetoric of politicians and the presumed authority of all those who, through various mechanisms, speak or are allowed to speak in the public space) and are thus the norms inscribed in every apparently meaningful phrase that can be constructed with the lexicon of violence, aggression, crime, war, and terrorism, state and nonstate terrorism, with respect to the sovereignty, national territory, and so on.

Does not every constructed system (be it a text, an ideology, a belief, the truth, etc.) eventually expose itself as just a construction (the weakness of a construction—this is implied by the very term autoimmunity—lies exactly in the fact that it is constructed/structured). Thus deconstruction is an undeconstructible ‘logic’, a corrective logic, aimed at a truth-to-come (Derrida calls it a democracy-to-come or a justice-to-come). This ‘earthquake’, as he has named it, is inherent in every axiomatic, every system, every formalist method, almost as a natural event (as opposed to a natural law) with the structure of a promise (it will come) and when it comes it comes from the inside (like a parasite, or autoimmunity).

But does it always come from the inside? Mitchell refers to another interview with Derrida (this time with Maurizio Ferraris) in which he likens deconstruction to planting a bomb at an enemy structure, thus granting agency to a deconstructor, and thus creating the possibility that deconstruction is something that comes from outside. F. who just walked in the room, wondering what I was working on, suggested to call this an allergy. Like an autoimmune response, an allergy suggests a running amuck of the immune system. We could say that this metaphor is pertinent in the present international relations context. It makes sense in relation to Derrida’s repeated reference to the Enlightenment which, I agree here with Foucault, does have an outside. As Nick Smith observes, there are people who are not committed to living after the Copernican turn and who make choices not on the basis of logical consistency but on authority. These radical others (be it terrorists or religious fanatics in all forms and degrees) make the Enlightenment more than just a factual account of reality. They give it its ethical dimension.

I must pursue this point, not because I have, in a bolt of lightning, overcome my reservations towards (biological) metaphors (quite the contrary), but because I believe this historico-ethical specificity of the Enlightenment is often overlooked. And because it might make me a deconstructionist after all—not that I desperately want to be one, but I want not being it to be my own conscious choice. If deconstruction is not always and only a “procedure” which is bound to take place because of the internal flaws and limitations of all ‘systems’ or ‘logics’ in themselves, consistent with Derrida’s famous but often misused catch phrase that there is nothing outside the text, but also “that which simply happens” as a result from the interaction with exactly that which is outside the text, that which in bits and fits encroaches upon the text, then my (and many others’) efforts in the odd hours—inconsistent, partial, even contradictory—might, just possibly, have some effect.

my day off

Haven’t written for some time. Way too busy. And then W. questioned the whole phenomenon of blogging. Who’s going to read all that stuff? Well it turned out that she’d read it herself… But indeed the question why, much more than who, is relevant. I thought it should work to arrest thoughts that spring up at unexpected moments -connections, short-circuits of the mind- before they sink into oblivion, eclipsed by the undertow of the normal. A sort of interim report of the development of my consciousness, as Salman Rushdie described it somewhere.

But it seems not to work for now. A man in the paper called for a reevaluation of slow time. Life today, with the unavoidable instant communication even causes my day off to be a whirlwind ride. My brother called just a few minutes ago to cancel an appointment we made weeks ago(!) because he feels he is near to a burnout (speaking about a sign of the times). Ing texts me to check whether I’m coming tomorrow, I’m desperately trying to get hold of W, I have to catch a train in less than an hour (and still have to shave and have dinner), and only just now F. mails to inform me that G. has texted him that W.’s waters have broken. If that’s not news that stops you in the midst of things, then I don’t know what is. But then again it means I don’t want to turn of my mobile, or disconnect from the internet… In the midst of this all little time remains for reflection that might transcend the day-to-day chatter that surrounds us. Allain de Botton wrote somewhere that he'd be the kind of Buddhist monk whose enlightenment comes by way of the experience of life itself as opposed to the awakeing-by-seclusion. I on the other hand could use some isolation.