Difference matters

In the last week’s column we concluded with Pott’s observation that ‘every signifier is inherently different from what it signifies, and we should uphold this difference, not seek to erase it in a misguided quest for presence. By the same token every signifier defers recognition of what it signifies, and we must embrace this also.’

Potts points out that Derrida’s argument in this particular juncture of this thesis is quite contradictory. It is obvious that the cardinal logic is nothing but self-contradictory.

Derrida argues, “Above all, the profound differences distinguishing all these treatments of the same metaphor must not be ignored. In the history of this treatment, the most decisive separation appears at the moment when, at the same time as the science of nature, the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity. It is the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century. From then on, the condemnation of fallen and finite writing will take another form, within which we still live: it is non-self-presence that will be denounced. Thus the exemplariness of the ‘Rousseauist’ moment, which we shall deal with later, begins to be explained. Rousseau repeats the Platonic gesture by referring to another model of presence: self-presence in the senses, in the sensible cogito, which simultaneously carries in itself the inscription of divine law.

Jacques Derrida

On the one hand, representative, fallen, secondary, instituted writing, writing in the literal and strict sense, is condemned in The Essay on the Origin of Languages (it “enervates” speech; to “judge genius” from books is like “paint-ing a man’s portrait from his corpse,” ). Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life. On the other hand, on the other face of the same proposition, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine, and living writing, is venerated; it is equal in dignity to the origin of value, to the voice of conscience as divine law, to the heart, to sentiment, and so forth.

The Bible is the most sublime of all books, . . . but it is after all a book... . It is not at all in a

few sparse pages that one should look for God’s law, but in the human heart where His hand deigned to write (Lettre à Vernes) . *

Natural law

If the natural law had been written only in the human reason, it would be little capable of directing most of our actions. But it is also engraved in the heart of man in ineffacable characters. . . . There it cries to him.

Natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological. It is hieratic, very close to the interior holy voice of the Profession of Faith, to the voice one hears upon retreating into oneself: full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense: ‘The more I retreat into myself, the more I consult myself, the more plainly do I read these words written in my soul: be just and you will be happy. . . . I do not derive these rules from the principles äf the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart writ-ten by nature in characters which nothing can efface.’

There is much to say about the fact that the native unity of the voice and writing is prescriptive. Arche-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment.

There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body.

Platonic diagram

A modification well within the Platonic diagram: writing of the soul and of the body, writing of the interior and of the exterior, writing of conscience and of the passions, as there is a voice of the soul and a voice of the body. “Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body”. One must constantly go back toward the “voice of nature,” the “holy voice of nature,” that merges with the divine inscription and prescription; one must encounter oneself within it, enter into a dialogue within its signs, speak and respond to oneself in its pages.It was as if nature had spread out all her magnificence in front of our eyes to offer its text for our consideration. . . . I have therefore closed all the books. Only one is open to all eyes. It is the book of Nature. In this great and sublime book I learn to serve and adore its author.

The good writing has therefore always been comprehended. Comprehended as that which had to be comprehended: within a nature or a natural law, created or not, but first thought within an eternal presence. Comprehended, therefore, within a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality.

The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary.” Potts observes, “So there is no logos, no truth, no ground.

These and all the other basic concepts of “logocentrism” are illusions of a dying epoch. Can there be a new epoch that successfully discards them and embraces writing and “differance”? Derrida hedges about this. Such a prospect must appear to us “as a sort of monstrosity”. For now we are still locked in the current epoch. We must use existing concepts but at the same time erase them, make them visible but cross them out to show that we recognize their inescapable embeddedness in logocentrism. But it is to be hoped that, with enough deconstruction, logocentrism may eventually be transcended altogether.”