Rupturing Causality; Anti-Oedipus, Conclusion

"When a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can cause a hurricane in another part of the world." Why do some people get off on this shit?

There has been one consistent theme throughout Anti-Oedipus, and that's been the extrication of the personality which can synonymously be understood as ideology. The incessant criticisms of psychoanalysis have been instinctively grounded in the idea that there are people who want you to be you, without tracing the phenomena of the personality to places like Platonic substantiality, and places much prior to that in the filiative structures of primitive civilization which D&G elaborate on in chapter three of Anti-Oedipus. Schizoanalysis as an attack on psychoanalysis can be summed up as criticizing the goal of analysis: to find your place within the social structure (Oedipus). Time and time again, D&G will state that psychoanalysis will make itself into its own truth without recognizing its own development and own metaphysics (even to the point of not recognizing who "Freud" really was, or wrote). To make it even more plain, analysis is really ignorant. Schizoanalysis will form itself by knocking out psychoanalysis as a truth unto itself. D&G's insistence on the disjunctive molecular aspects to vital life are directly opposed to the molar aggregate that sums things up, that sums up the body as a you. In psychoanalysis this "molar-gesture" is the process of "finding yourself." When taken to a phenomenological level, which D&G do without recognizing it (it's somewhat obvious that D&G have never really read the primary texts of phenomenology, and that their language would gain a clarity with this type of reading), they find causality as the sort of metaphysical operation that causes the personality as goal. This is an important step because it doesn't simply trace the aims of psychoanalysis to Plato, aggrandized mythology, or even surplus-value, but to a much more fundamental level of being in causality. With that being said, I think it's time to move onto anti-correlationist theory in my own reading with Speculative Realism. After this text, I will be taking on Brassier's Nihil Unbound to become acquainted with this thought. D&G get to this at the end of Anti-Oedipus but only after their focal interest is put in place (Schizoanalysis instead of psychoanalysis). This isn't because of a "lack" on their part (Deleuze wrote Difference and Repetition before his works with Guattari), but because of a "sociological move" in their thought and writing, the sociological move that Husserl implicitly warned against for philosophy in his Crises. In the end, Anti-Oedipus is one book that was influenced by sociology (Guatarri) as much as philosophy (Deleuze). It's an important book because sometimes theory without any examples in the socius is very difficult to understand. But make no mistake, Anti-Oedipus is proclaiming a way of being that is better off for being, in other words, it's being sociological. We can have fun with this book in its criticism of modern modes of being, but it's always important to realize that things will always phenomenally happen on their own regardless of a persons critique of anything. It's here where I stand faithful to phenomenology regardless of how powerful a book Anti-Oedipus was. The pure observation of the phenomenologist still stands as the most faithful to experience as is, even if it's obviously figurative in it's mode of expressing experience as is. Nonetheless, we can certainly learn much for ourselves as living beings living now with Anti-Oedipus. This book can help us avoid some pretty nasty traps while we have to live. For this, I respect this text and would easily recommend it. Lets move onto D&G finding their way into causality as the metaphysical grounds for personal interests and the personality in general.

"On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." Something to understand right off the bat is the synonymous nature between "preconscious investment" and personal interest. The preconscious is a Freudian term signifying an archive of things that we can remember. It may be something that is in the back of our minds that we aren't consciously thinking of right now. One can take a personal interest into something, forget about it, but it still remains in their mind somewhere. This place where it remains and where it can be recalled is refereed to as the preconscious level. For D&G, when one invests themselves with a personal interest, they are concealing their natural desire. When one gives oneself a goal, something to specifically be interested in (in differentiation from others), this is opposed to the unconscious desire that has no interest, but simply has intensities. This irrationality becomes repressed under personality interests; things that you would like to see yourself doing. You have reason to believe that this is the proper course of action to take. You have means for achieving your goals. There are certain events that have caused you to have aims. For example, I had a dream (an "epiphany") of someone playing guitar. I think to myself that this must mean something. This epiphany causes me to aim towards being this epiphany. This sign showed the way. This sign signified my existence. This interest that I invested in myself by the cause of a random "meaning sequence" (please recognize the irony) can rationalize the unconscious intensity that happens to my body and this is easy to understand. Instead of seeing my body as going through a process of neuro-physiological intensity in the moment where things happened because of spontaneous breaks within a flow, I break with the break and stop the flow. I invest interest in that break where I stop to see what's going on. I don't break and continue on flowing. I like the break. I settle in the break. I am the break. I invest in the break and aggrandize the break. The break becomes an interest. I see it as something. At this point, the unconscious desire (desiring-machines) moves into preconscious desire. I remember the break because it satisfied me. It had value. I will add more value to it (surplus-value) by making a memory of the break. Again, I am the break. I will be the ideology of this break. The preconscious is a memory attached to the personality during a process of unconscious desire. Actually the personality happens because of this attachment. How the process of this attachment happens is a question put towards phenomenology. This new ideology, this new socius will continue to "subordinate the entire production of desire." Desire will be subordinated to ideology and revolutionary interests. Now, "revolutionary interests" does not simply have to have Marxian connotations. To be sure it can, but "revolutionary interests" can simply be taken as any preconscious interest at all, in other words, ideology. Anything that I take to be me and I solidify as me is a "revolutionary interest" in the sense that the unconscious break had enough power to create a personality. This is revolutionary on a purely physiological level; essentially the creation of the personality. On the other hand, we can take "revolutionary interests" literally and have it mean a personal ideology that wants to create a sociological revolution where the person thinks it would be "liberating the masses" for X,Y,Z, etc reasons (you fill in the blank of all the boring reasons that there could possibly be). Either way and in each case, we have something called "interested parties." Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time would strikingly understand this under the category of "looking around for something to do." We dive deeper into the foundations of the subordination of desire though when we understand the "revolution" in the first instance where what happens unconsciously becomes ideology in the most general sense. This will need to be addressed later on in other texts (again, phenomenology does this figuratively). This preconscious investment that manifests "interested parties," "subordinates the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality." The higher interest of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality. What does this mean? Again, the interest of the revolution is just that, an interest, not a desire. It's something that somebody thinks that they have to do, not what they love to do (eros). The break happened, the flow stopped, and revolution became idealized. Now what are the "inevitable sequences of causality?" These inevitable sequences of causality are everything that happens after desire becomes idealized into an interest. Desire becomes this. Because I think this way, I have to do this. Because I had this epiphany about this, I have to do these things. Because I see people earning a lesser wage than they're entitled to whom I never met, I have to protest on behalf of their struggle that I never experienced for myself. My life is devoted to a cause because its my sole interest in life. I am coded. I believe in this, so therefore I do this (I believe therefore I am: Ideology). After I do this, I do something else to further the cause. When I become ideology, pure causality follows in things that have to happen because of my personality. I'm coded to do things because I clinged onto a break in pure desire. D&G ask us, the preconsciously invested, to do something different. They ask us to "discover the necessity for a different sort of investment." They ask us to "perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in question of aims and interests." When we are preconsciously invested, we have shown that we are "interested parties." We are ideologies. We are personalities. But when we recognize this, we can discover a new way of investment. This investment is rupturing causality. What does this mean? This precisely means to break the break that has caused us to break and go back into the flow. Instead of finding "what to do next" after we are in a break that we somehow become satisfied in (value), we don't find what this ideology causes in is. Instead, we break with the ideology and let no cause happen to us in the name of the ideology that has broken us. We defer back to unconscious desire. What we do here is preconsciously invest into unconscious desire itself so we enter back into unconscious desire, in other words; enter back into the flow instead of breaking at the break. D&G aren't saying that one can't take a break. D&G aren't saying that the unconscious doesn't break in the flow. It's quite the opposite for D&G. There are breaks in the break-flow of unconscious desire. All of Anti-Oedipus has been grounded in the theory of the schizophrenic break-flow, but it must be noted that they have been using the flow against the breaks for obvious reasons. The breaks become satisfied (ideology is like taking a vacation from the unconscious). The flows keep moving while the breaks stop moving. When the breaks become anthropomorphized, it's here where being needs to invest back into itself, back into its unconscious desire. "This cannot be achieved except at the cost of, and by means of a rupture with, causality. Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other." D&G refer back to the subject-group in distinction to the subjugated-group (which we discussed in the last post) where the subjugated-group is defined by "an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relations that determined the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty." This is in distinction to the subject-group who "have as their sole cause a rupture with causality." Certainly, this subject-group will have its own "objective factors" that can be traced in a causal series where we can find out how the rupture of causality was possible in the first place, but this account is for the "reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place." In other words, the "memory-traces" being done by the schizophrenic subject-group will be the task of finding out where and how intensities happen to the body. It won't investigate how a personality is formed. It will recognize where the body trembled. It won't idealize this trembling, but will simply mark it out as something that happened and move on. The subject group will find where desire has happened to itself. It will see where it happened and when it happened. It will constantly discover the intensity of unconscious desires and move onto other places. This "constant discovering" will be the breaks in the subject group. Discovering is breaking. When not discovering, it will be flowing. Being will be the unconscious desire of the schizophrenic break-flow in the subject-group. This is what Schizoanalysis would "look like." It will find things that are happening to "itself" and forget about them as quickly as them came. It won't ask "what do we do next with this?" There is nothing next to do. Something happened, and that's it. It would be an amnesiatic "work." For the unconscious doesn't have a memory. It simply reacts to an environment outside of itself...all together as a body without organs.

This is obviously a massive leap that D&G want us to take in Anti-Oedipus. They don't ask us to accomplish the Schizoanalytical task all in one time. It's obvious that they wouldn't ask this of the reader becomes it's not a task to be accomplished but a preconscious investment that will happen all the time. If it could be classified as a "task," it would be eternal much like phenomenology. As phenomenology never ends as a descriptive science of phenomena, schizoanalysis would never end as an understanding of momentary breaks within a flow. The key movement in schizoanalysis that is somewhat of a "radical" gesture is this modification of "preconscious investment." Instead of remembering something and storing phenomena for recall, the preconscious would invest into not remembering anything at all, except forgetting something that it may remember. It would literally invest into forgetting. Implied in forgetfulness is a motive to forget, meaning something was remembered. Something in phenomena happened to a body at a certain intense degree that had enough of an impact to be invested into a preconscious. In schizoanalysis though, the subject realizes this impact, opens itself up to it in its entirety, and then forgets it flowing back into phenomena. Schizoanalysis then could be understood as a different attempt at negating repression. While psychoanalysis tends to harbor on a "repressed feeling" by continually following the chain of this "repressed feeling" to a father-mother complex or an archaic mythology, schizoanalysis wouldn't harbor the "repression" or even call it a "repression." Instead it would say that an intensity happened to the body and would open itself up to that intensity. That intensity somehow was invested into the preconscious, but in schizoanalysis, the preconscious is programmed to forget the intensity to move on in the flow, instead of breaking in the break, which would define you as you. There is no "a-ha" moment in schizoanalysis. There is no "so this is what that meant!" in schizoanalysis. There is something that happened to a body which the body realizes and soon forgets once it's enlightened by this realization. It breaks, then flows, then breaks again, and flows again...on and on. As a final note, the last passage of Anti-Oedipus will fully clarify the "task" for D&G and schizoanalysis.
"The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these - in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repressing of desire. Completing this process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed."

Getting Well; Anti-Oedipus, Part 5

Far right is where you want to be

In the previous post on Anti-Oedipus we noticed invariable characteristics in the schizophrenic. Most specifically, we saw it's adaptations of sexual roles independent of a primary sexuality. This post will deal with somewhat of the same theme as the last. While the last post was a description of the schizophrenic, this post will do more to distinguish the schizo from the neurotic (oedipal-man). At the end of this post, the distinction will be even more clear. We will not only get help from direct expressions of each, but an understanding of the work of the primordial "biological egg;" more specifically, the distinction between induction and structure. The later will carry a symbolic and imaginative description while the former will carry no symbolic description at all serving as the space of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic will find it's home in the inductors of stimuli that insight the biological egg. We will see where and how induction becomes symbolized in a mask that we know as structure, and more specifically, identity. Identity will be just about analogous to Oedipus. Identity will be the symbol for something that always and already happens. We may even sound like Plato in this post. We sound like Plato in this post but in a vastly different context; 20th century man and not Greek antiquity. And if we sound like Plato, it won't be a Plato that has been oddly solidified as the identity of Plato, but the dialects that ensued in the dialogues, without recognition for the winner. As a reader, I can stand in place for Thrasymachus in The Republic as I can stand in place for Aristophanes in the Symposium. At the end of the dialogue, I am not sure of what Plato is besides people being people. I am winner and loser, dialogue and a Greek bath; Whatever was in that text is up for connection...to be left as quickly as it was connected.

"If there is one problem that does not exist in schizophrenia, it is the problem of identifications. And if getting well amounts to getting oedipalized, we can easily understand the outbursts of the patient 'who does not want to be cured,' and who treats the analyst as one of the family, then as an ally of the police." This is a funny phrase here by D&G. The schizophrenic who has all the problems that needs to be solved doesn't have one problem, and that's the problem of identity. The schizophrenic doesn't ask themselves "Who am I?" The schizophrenic doesn't frantically run around doing things in order to establish an identity. The schizophrenic isn't even unaware of these actions making them go through a dreaded "existential crisis." It always and already knows that there's an oedipal place that it doesn't want to go in. The schizo goes into outburst mode when trying to be sat down. It doesn't want to stay in one place, it doesn't want to be told what has to be the case (you can open up possibilities to it though), it doesn't want you looking at it with a satisfied look. This look the analyst gives the problem of schizophrenia in which "everything is going to be ok;" this paternal look of consolation where consolation was never sought out, where paternal looks were never the case. For a second the schizo may see the analyst as a father, like I see a computer screen right now, in other words, as something that exists outside and that's it. It may traverse space to find the analyst as an ally of the police which in turn creates an outburst from the non-conscious sense of having to be sat down. It will be anything in one moment and something else the next moment, and any suggestions of staying put raises the anxiety level of the schizo to combustion. The schizo will break out of it's current "identity" not because it doesn't feel at home in the identity at the moment, but because it will get the sneaky suspicion that it can never leave. The analyst will reward the schizo for passing into oedipalization the second the schizo finds a home in an oedipal state. Reward though for the schizo is not part of their consciousness. It can only pass onto something else. As the patient, as the slave in the master-slave dialectic that is euphemized into pyschotherapy; is this schizo "lacking" something? If it's with the analyst, it's lacking oedipus. I am with the analyst as a patient because I am sick. I'm not there to just hang out with the analyst even though the session may be structured that way. I am sick and the analyst is there to cure me. But without oedipus, am I as a schizo sick? Is it not oedipus that makes me sick because I can't bear oedipalization? Because I can't bare knowing I have to stay in the same place for the rest of my life? Because I have to be the same "person" for the rest of my time? The schizo universe doesn't get well. It moves beyond an identity that would be in a state of illness. If I stay here, there are degrees in which I'm personally here. I may not be here at all and may be trying to find my way back to here, and this is where I'm sick. Instead of throwing off the shackles of the personality that I so coveted, and moving onto something I have never been through, I need to find my way back to myself. Always in this body is a sense of self; that glorified term that keeps me at a distance from others, but not too far to the point where I am not distinguishable; the identity/difference logic of Oedipus. You are not this, but you will be. You are not your father, but will be one day. You are not a teacher, but want to teach people about your experiences. The schizo is incensed by this logic. The schizo is one thing and one thing only, and fully, and then something else and something else only, and fully; an inclusive disjunction of eternal flows that break off just right when the identity "feels" expended. D&G compare the schizo to the "biological egg" where "stimuli are not organizers, but mere inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of indifference." Inductions gets things on its way. Where it goes? Nobody knows. Stimulus is not teleological. It happens as quickly as I strike this keyboard, whereby I could have hit the wrong key making someone behind me laugh at my mistake, making me meet them, and then talking to them about what I'm writing about. This was not an organized process. This was a chaotic flow, Heraclitus's flow (Plato is just as much Heraclitus as he was Parmenides). What D&G say next is of crucial importance. "It was the beginnings of the development that favored the illusion: the simplicity of the beginning-consisting, for example, of cellular divisions-could lead one to believe in some sort of adequation between the inductor and what is induced. But we are well aware that, when considered in terms of its beginnings, a thing is always poorly judged because in order to become apparent, it is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks." This strikes many chords. First is the speculative realist/empiricist anti-correlationism. The inductor doesn't know where the stimulus goes. What is induced from the inductor is not known. When something is divided, why is it the case that the division had to happen because of a presupposition? Why does a cell have to have consciousness? Why does it's division refer back to something that did the division, and not rather, the possibility that division didn't have to happen? We can't speak for the cell. We can't speak for the gap, but we do within our thinking, our correlationist thinking. I would go a step further than D&G (as would a speculative realist) in saying that not only is the beginning poorly judged, but can't be judged at all. But we would be correct in saying that we judged something. For something to appear, it has to take on a structural state that becomes the metaphor for something that was never a symbol, that was never a metaphor, but a pure induction, not pure reason, but pure non-identity. What happens at this level is not reason. The beginning is not a reason, just as much as it's new unknown beginning is unaware of something called "the place in which you came from." As a more direct analogy, if I happen to live another life after this one, "I" don't know that this one proceeded it. The mask that appears as the reason of the beginning is just that; our reasonable Kantian representation of something that always and already will happen. Of course, as we learned in prior posts, Kant was well aware of the always and already function of applying our own concepts to non-conceptual experience, so defining the proper name of "Kant" here is as tenuous as the proper name of "Plato" (It's all name-dropping as the desire of history. Infinite symbolization. This is for another day though). As was concluded with phenomenology (and this could be applied to Kant as the certain precursor to Phenomenology), we can have a hypothetical understanding of beginnings, and we can even have fun with it at the limits of philosophy, but it will always be just that; a hypothetical understanding. Whether this hypothesis should be called a mask with all the connotations attached to the word "mask" is another question. Personally, I think this classically understood Platonic verbiage of shadows and masks masks a mask. It gives comfort to some actual reality where the ego feels like they're in the know. The ego isn't hidden in the shadows, but in the light where it needs to admit freely that it's not in the shadows. This is what D&G will call a surplus-code. In this instance, it's the necessity of defining oneself as being in the know, implicitly serving the ego's own purpose of distinguishing itself from others exclusively. (On a side note, if Philosophy should understand it's own desire for understanding beginnings, it should realize the work of Kant and Husserl as hypothetical, not as trying to "unmask" something that was "masked" in reality. The cell can't be known. The beginning before differentiation and division can't be "known," but it can be hypothesized. The concept of the metaphor and hypothesis will serve as the death for the ego's love of unmasking things.) The schizo is aware of none of this. It leaves and enters bodies as quickly as Artaud would fill up notebooks of straight lines. As a final analogy to the nature of schizo, D&G de-oedipalize Oedipus by saying that "parental figures are in no way organizers, but rather inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import that trigger processes of an entierly different nature, processes that are endowed with what amounts to an indifference with regard to the stimulus." This goes back to our example of how we have relationships to the outside world which include parental figures, but the parental figures don't have total and absolute domination over the body. The body goes through it's own intensities and flows like the example of knocking into a toy truck and getting hurt by it. No parent was involved. Nothing was "involved." Something happened to be in the way of the path of a walker in which the walker moved into it. This is descriptive science, not teleological science (as if metaphysics could ever be called a "science.)" Later on we will learn of a distinction made by D&G between the Ethnologist and the Psychoanalyst that covers the distinction between finding the happening of something, and the meaning of something, but for now we see that the parental figures figure as much into the body as much as all other "stimuli of varying, vague import." Relationships will always be formed, but intensities and flows will always happen regardless of structure. The schizophrenic will always be intense in it's current flow regardless of how much it's being forced into oedipalization.

How do I know that I'm Well? I know it because someone else thinks they're well and want to resemble this wellness. And if I don't resemble this wellness? Well, I'm not well. Then I go into the analyst (or take drugs) to find out why I'm not well. I go into the analyst to find out about my sickness, to possibly find other sicknesses forming an oedipal dependence of the analyst which we went into in a post before this. I never say to myself though, "Maybe these people who appear well aren't well. Maybe "wellness" is a state that I just happen to pass through which does feel nice, but isn't always going to be the case." I can't always be "well." Sometimes I may be. Sometimes me and the analyst have something in common. Sometimes I can go out into the world and have a beer with an insurance agent. We talk about football. We have something in common. He is well and I am well. Then I tell him what I do and he realizes that I don't own a house yet, and then I am not well. Maybe he's not well either? Maybe he realizes that he doesn't like the fact that he's been stuck in the same place for the past 10 years. We both become sick. I am not him and he is not me. We can't be everything at all times. I can't be the insurance agent and the graduate student. I can be the graduate student and the lover of Giants football though. He can be the insurance agent and a lover of Giants football also. See? All is not so bad. We certainly are different, but not so different that we want to exclude each other into sickness and abnormality. I'm telling ya, disjunctive synthesis finds its experience best in competitive sports. Here's to the Giants and a road victory in Houston this Sunday. The sack attack; everyone gets sacks at different angles and different positions.

Anti-Oedipus; Introduction (Desiring-Machines)

Where Psychoanalysis gets psychoanalyzed by non-psychoanalytical methods.

The start of a school year; whereby one desires new things, different things or one desires the same things. The intensities of one's experience will sway the organized body regardless of the organized body desiring to see itself a certain way. Here we offer an introduction to these intensities that function in desire-spaces with Deleuze and Guatarri's Anti-Oedipus. Whether one is studying comparative literate, philosophy, or even physical art, these authors will find a way to show up on one's thinking screen. They don't just show up either, they command your attention for reasons you're not quite sure of because you haven't read anything from them. You have general ideas in your head of what "Anti-Oedipus" is trying to convey. At first glance you think to yourself that it's a book about a child not wanting to kill his father to confiscate his mothers love, and if this is your first thought about the book, you would be pretty much right on with the theme. To be more specific, this book starts a movement of sorts that tries to dissemble the Oedipus-complex of psychoanalysis; the Oedpus-complex that would like to understand everyone in terms of their rapport with their parents. And it's not just parents either, it's the paternal image seen in the geometrical "triangulation" of the psyche, a triangulation we will see that won't hold the ground it once had (Father-Mother-Child/Father-Son-Holy Ghost). The hierarchicization that psychoanalysis operates on stems from the emphasis given by Freud to parental complexes in the subject. Of course Freud needs to be distinguished as an author from his different periods like many authors. We will see that Deleuze and Guattari operate off the idea of random intensities much in the same way Freud spoke of intensities in his Project for a Scientific Psychology that we referenced before in the analysis of Derrida's work on Freud. Rather than trying to sum-up the entirety of this text while it's currently being read, we will continue to not be pithy by giving multi-part essays on the text in order to give due diligence to the author. Besides respect though, insights are really enjoyable, almost too enjoyable? The deeper one enters into this text, any text for that matter, the more insights will come to the forefront. It will be interesting to analyze the desire-for-insights within Deleuze and Guarttari's framework that sees desiring-machines as machines that are everywhere that attach to each other and most importantly, attach to something called a body-without-organs. To start off though, every post from now on pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari will be nominalized as "D&G." While respecting the idea of depth and length, it's also important to respect brevity in the form of acronyms for simplicity's sake on these posts, and future posts. Without name-dropping all the references that one will find when reading this text and finding analogies with previous or current authors (maybe even future authors), lets dive into the text, and find ourselves in D&G's world of organisms with drives that are much more complicated and spontaneous than the structure of Oedipus.

When trying to understand Oedipus's sway on classical psychoanalysis, we first have to uncover desire, more specifically ourselves as desiring-machines. Desiring-machines; pure operations of want. D&G state "the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset...From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialetical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object." For D&G it is inappropriate to see desire as a lack. When one desires something, the traditional logic of this desire is that the desire wants something that it doesn't have. Not so for D&G and not so either for Kant who states "the faculty of being, through its representations, the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations" is the function of desire. In other words, desire is not a want, but a production. A production of desire. If lack is part of the logic of desire, it's because desire produces a lack. First and foremost, desire is a productive machine that afterwords happens to produce a lack in being. The Platonic logic of desire that "forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition" is wrong. This choice doesn't cover the whole of the logic of desire. How then does desire operate for D&G? "If desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an 'essence of lack' that produces the fantasized object." When we desire, we are desiring something that we don't have, but why is it that we feel we want this thing that we don't have in the first place? Any object, the fantasized object (meaning the object that we want but don't currently have so we fantasize about it) can be sought after because of something called an "essence of lack." More simply put, we can think of this "essence of lack" as a feeling that we aren't getting what we want either in a specific or general way. The nature of desire as lack depends firstly on the production of something we don't have. "The production of something we don't have" though is not simply some "real object" like a rock for instance, but the flow and force of desiring-machines creating (producing) an affect of something outside itself to obtain. This is juxtaposed to the body-without-organs whereby there is no smell, taste, or touch; in other words, a juxtaposition to nothing. At some point though, the body-without-organs becomes something. It becomes attached to desiring-machines where it "breaths, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks." These functions Freud would call the id, the representation of which D&G would call a "mistake" on the grounds that the representation of whatever is classified as the id didn't need to be represented (or it's representation by Freud and philosophy in general is grossly outside something called "the real" or what's called a priori experience). It's important here to clarify that desiring-machines for our purposes can be seen as human-beings. We at first will have to relate to ourselves as human beings much in the way that one has to understand Heidegger's concept of Dasein as Human-Being when the sense of the statement is meant to convey being-there, meaning being in a place where something happens which Heidegger would go on to describe. D&G will see the Human-Being as desiring- machines and they will make sure the reader sees this not as a metaphor but as an actuality which will create a distance between the subject seeing himself through the text of Anti-Oedipus and rather reading into themselves a pure production of desire ignorant of whatever would be classified in the classical personality traits of Freud's tripartite Oedipus-schemata. So for right now, we are reading into the text that something is desiring and by desiring, "we" mean a production of a lack that is first and foremost a production. And the lack that is the production is a production itself. In other words, it's a production of a production. Desire is then understood as production and at the lowest level, this means that "the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a 'dreamed-of object behind every real object.'" The "real object," whatever that is, is extrinsic. You can call it "natural," or "social." Whatever it is, it conceptually exists outside. Nothing can be said of it because it's not represented. This comes up against Husserl's problem in trying to understand the original motivations of the "first geometers" independent of language. It lies in a place that D&G call a "body-without-organs" meaning a non-represented being. Desiring-machines though operating under the production of desire produces "imaginary objects" that function as a double of whatever was this "extrinsic space." Desire functions not like the body-without-organs. Instead it looks for something else beyond what is already given. What this beyond is, is the "dreamed-of object behind every real object." This flips the Platonic ideal. Instead of seeing beyond representation into truth ("the real"), "we" as desiring-machines see beyond what's "real" into representation as truth. Truth for us is not whatever is called "the real," but the representation of it that is behind everything that's called the "real." This makes sense. Everything is in front of me, and then I (phenomenologically) look into it to find something else, for example, what's it's called, and when I find out what this "real" is called I mark it down on what D&G call the recording surface. Desire produces this reproduction. "If desire produces, its product is real." Desire produces our reality, our truth, and here we must distinguish what we just called "the real" from what the real is now being understood of as "the truth." D&G will regard the real here as something for us, the desiring-machines. The real (truth for us) happens after we are in "passive syntheses" (phenomenological) that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. Partial objects are likened to ruptures for example, and this means intensities independent of any truth value, meaning independent of the de facto situation of being able to represent it. These intensities are units of production. This all happens "as autoproduction of the unconscious." For example, I can have a nervous reaction to anything without anything "about me" influencing this. Desire will always happen. The body-without-organs will be attached to an organic body with desire. In these passive syntheses, "desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression." In passive syntheses, in this productive desire, nothing is in lack in the original "real." Ruptures and flows "happen" without regard to an object being grasped. Desire as a machine of production though is a machine that D&G call a "subject," and like how production had to produce something (for D&G, desire), desire finds its own production in the fixed subject. The "residuum" of this producing and the product creates a detachment called "the subject." There is no fixed subject without repression though. This is the residuum of passive experience (passive syntheses), repression. In other words, in a process of passive syntheses, intensities happen to bodies and flows, and "something becomes detached" meaning a difference is setup. A difference from bodies and flows "happens" into something called the "subject" by way of a repression of these intensities that happen to bodies and flow (what D&G call "partial objects"). The detachment from the original "real" is the repression of intensity, and it's in these repressions of intensities that D&G will situate their concept of the neurotic. The neurotic: "the subject" who is always running away from "the real." The subject loses its desire "at the same time that it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions." When desire differentiates into a "subject," the subject sees itself as a difference from the passive syntheses that setup it's own detachment in the subject. The "subject" is the "countereffect" of the process of desire. Desire feels objective existence in all its intensity but just like how it's a machine of pure production (a machine of a machine), it differentiates itself from desire as a "space for intensity" into its next form of production ("the subject") where the form loses its "desire of intensity" and instead produces (desires) needs. In every aspect of this movement, from production, to desire, and finally to the subject, something is common, and that's pure production, in other words, something is made out of something else and differentiated from that previous form (The question of temporality in using the word "previous" is something that won't be addressed here but always stands as an open question). Desire then is not a lack, but a production of a need. One feels that desire is (Platonically) a lack, but this isn't the case. Desire sets out to withdraw itself into a subject that creates for D&G, surplus-needs which is distinguished from the needs of the penury or the dispossessed who "know they are close to grass." The dispossessed who don't feel the need of leftovers, but to live in the real, that they feel has somehow been taken away from them in the socius. The question of Anti-Oedipus then will revolve around the difference between desire that has very few needs (the need to live objectively) and the desire of leftovers (surplus-desire). In this distinction, we will find an absolute parallel between the psychoanalytically regarded "psychotic" and "neurotic" respectively. One can already tell that D&G will try to save the "psychotic" from its marginalized place in the socius by pointing to a more "pure desire" with few needs (which nonetheless are needs) and not a "lack" that classical psychoanalysis would like to find in its subject (Like thinking a psychotic lacks love and getting a hardy laugh from them afterwords). How the phenomena of over-abundant needs "happens," and how psychoanalysis addresses this psychosis as a lack in the subject (wrongly understood as a lack) is what will be the subject of Anti-Oedipus. We will gain further clarifications on the structure of Oedipus as it pertains to not just psychoanalysis but the socius as a whole, and how much psychoanalysis defines the categories of belongingness and distance from a privileged "normalized" center. All these concepts will need to be elaborated on. The fun thing about desire as a theme is that it can be seen everywhere. It is everywhere. Desiring-machines are everywhere. We will be able to go into themes on sexuality, capital, religion, and thought in general because of the all-encompassing nature of desire. We will be able to see it at work subtly and hopefully try to make these subtleties not so subtle.

This introduction then served mostly on a theoretical level defining D&G's understanding of how a pure process happens to a subject as a desire and how that desire changes into desiring more than just a few things. All of this is a production that happens to a production ad infinitum. This introduction can be understood as a general phenomenology of desire, if we are to understand desire purely at a distance from the existential connotations that it will end up taking as the text develops. This general overview of course can be expanded on phenomenologically. The idea of passive syntheses can of course be elaborated on independent of the idea of desiring-machines. A phenomenology of pure intentionality and a psychoanalysis of desire using non-psychoanalytical methods are of course two different approaches. Simply put, one can either read Husserl or D&G. If one isn't satisfied with the way D&G use "passive syntheses" then they can go into the depths of Husserl, but if they are satisfied in the concept of "passive syntheses" then they can move into the insights provided by D&G regarding the phenomena of desire and how it pertains to everything as desiring-machines and how classical psychoanalysis has made an incorrect model in trying to understand desire as a lack, and ultimately classifying certain types of desiring-machines as lacking something that is a "normalized center" for them. These next posts though will develop the themes of Anti-Oedipus. We will stray from the depths of phenomenology and enter into the human-being as desiring-machines. I have a feeling that the next posts will be more interesting for everybody. People would rather see themselves as desiring-beings rather than pure-intentionalities. What makes one interested into reading desire into things instead of intentionality? It's an open question that I think will become more evident as the text develops.

What is a Text?; Part 1 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

Every line I read from Derrida always comes across as some type of treasure, writing from a mind that operated with the benefit of knowing all of western philosophy in the deepest way imaginable. Basically, there couldn't have been Derrida without the history of western philosophy, not the history of western philosophy as history, but the style in which it has happened. If style should mean anything specific here I would refer to his concept of the trace meaning not a centered-meaning of what a text (any text; literal, metaphorical, or of le monde) "signifies", but the way in which the author thinks they can write what they write with a sense of stability. And Derrida's intentions are not critical per se, but wanting to open up the style and mode of the author. One would be tempted to say that he operates in trying to understand the author psychologically through his writing which opens up the writing of the author himself, but the history of psychology, like the history of metaphysics, is one with it's own style, and is why he repudiates the fact in this specific text that he's doing a "psychoanalysis of philosophy". Instead, he opens up the author from a point of no authority, which allows his comments on authors to be without judgment. Comments, not judgments. It's with this in mind that I allowed him to interpret Husserl, and why I have continue with this work on Freud.
Now, we have this title from Writing and Difference, called "Freud and the Scene of Writing". Before we dive into the text, what can we think about when just limited to the name of the text itself? For one, Freud is given his proper name. This will be a text on Freud, not about Freud, but on Freud. Then we have the conjunction to the clause "the Scene of Writing". The Scene of Writing. What is a "Scene of Writing". What can we say before we open for ourselves before we open up to the text? There is a scene of writing? Can we picture watching a movie and there then being a scene where writing happens? What would this look like? Would we be in a "primitive" culture where we watch (as observers) a tribe starting to make pictures either in stone or sand? Would this constitute a scene of writing? Is this clause supposed to signify an inception of writing for an anytime, anywhere? Should we even assume that writing is graphic writing as in Egyptian hieroglyphics? And what of Freud? What is Freud doing in the ostensible scene where a writing happens? I offer these preliminary remarks as an opening to an opening. To the possibility that writing doesn't have to be signified as being graphic, meaning an actual symbol, and that Freud has thoughts on this inception that doesn't necessarily operate as an originality, but something that just happens, independent of a conception of time. With this in mind, lets move into where Derrida moves with Freud. Movers and Shakers of writing!
"Freud has recourse to metaphorical models...not subject to a phonetic writing, but from a script which is never subject to, never exterior or posterior to, the spoken word". Metaphor takes on a wild meaning here. It takes on a meaning of metaphor that is not spoken nor written. It's a representation of something independent of typical modes of expression, but nonetheless is a representation of something, that is working on representing something. "Freud invokes signs which do not transcribe living, full speech, master of itself and self-present. In fact, and this will be our problem, Freud does not simply use the metaphor of nonphonetic writing; he does not deem it expedient to manipulate scriptural metaphors for didactic ends...Freud, no doubt, is not manipulating metaphors, if to manipulate a metaphor means to make of the known an allusion to the unknown". So we have an idea in our head of Freud certainly using graphic symbols that do not refer to traditional speech that signifies a specific concept in the moment. For example, I say in the traditional active voice, "This is a book". I'm relegating a happening to a presence. I'm giving someone a presence in this declarative statement. I'm not using the graphic symbols of the writing and/or spoken word here to refer to something other than the idea that I'm presenting you with a state of affairs (this idea is crucial in differentiating between the early and later thought in Wittgenstein). The state of affairs is presence. Freud is not using his non-present metaphor(s) to signify a presence, and Derrida adds that this manipulation is not of traditional metaphysics and phenomenology which is concerned with passive experience and a priori modes of existence. There is no reference to something that could possibly be unknown. No. Freud will use his non-present metaphor(s) without the intention of it signifying a passive experience, an unconscious experience, and most importantly, a past time. Derrida further references the historical fact that "From Plato and Aristotle on, scriptural images have regularly been used to illustrate the relationship between reason and experience, perception and memory. But a certain confidence has never stopped taking its assurance from the meaning of the well-known and familiar term: writing". Philosophy for Derrida, western philosophy, has always been concerned with reason and experience. An extension of this is perception and memory. What is it to perceive something and then recollect it? This is German Idealism into Phenomenology. Reason and Experience travels the Grecian road through the Danube to German idealism and phenomenology. Where has this confidence of explaining absence in terms of a presence come from? Derrida marks it out as writing; this style of (B)being which operates as a sort of never-ending-presence. How is it a never-ending-presence? Lets try to elaborate on this for a moment, in the style of phenomenology. If something happens to me, it can't happen to me again. What happens to me is irreducibly present, and so can't be signified as present. But, I can write down what happened to me. If I was wearing a hat and it flew off my head from heavy winds, I can go to any paper, journal, tablet, and write down "A hat flew off my head". I can forever go back to this piece of writing, read the writing and recall this happening as if it just happened, and this is exactly what I do. I don't read "A hat flew off my head", and then say to myself, "Well, the only reason why I can ascribe to the fact that 'a hat flew off my head' is because I have been giving the technique of writing which allows me to revisit a present that actually isn't present right now, but I think it's present in the presence (moment) of my reading it". I don't have to describe a "history of metaphysics" for me to unconsciously privilege an event as happening the same time in writing as it actually happened to myself. Writing allows for the present to be never-ending without ever having to elaborate on it's algorithm or axioms. This confidence has been given to me not because myself, or Plato, Aristotle, Freud, or Derrida have been "confident people". It's because we didn't know the operation of writing itself, the way in which writing works, and how it means. But Freud breaches the history of western philosophy that "interrupts that assurance and opens up a new kind of question about metaphor, writing and spacing in general". This interruption of the confidence of writing in being able to suppose a presence, by realizing it's function in being able to realize a never-ending-presence is an eruption, a breaching in the history of western philosophy. This is a new "investment" into the metaphor. The Text is becoming something entirely different through Freud. "The structure of the psychical apparatus will be represented by a writing machine". This psychical apparatus that philosophy has tried to understand by applying categories of reason to it, by trying to talk about it in real time, will be given the metaphor of a "writing machine" by Freud. Seems like a simple categorical explanation, an application of a Kantian category upon a priori reason. But with everything said above in regards to this metaphor not representing anything that's absent or passive, this will be a different metaphor for the a "psychical apparatus" that can't be stated in the present, in the sense of a declarative statement. The tone of saying "writing machine" takes on an absolute otherness a traditional way of saying or writing a "writing machine". It's something that's not present to itself. It's a new metaphor not referring to something to you or I could not be enlightened by...right now. "We shall not have to ask if a writing apparatus-for example, the one described in the "Note on the Mystic Writing Pad" is a good metaphor for representing the working of the psyche, but rather what apparatus we must create in order to represent psychical writing; and we shall have to ask what the imitating, projected and liberated in a machine, of something like psychical writing might mean. And not if the psyche is indeed a kind of text, but: what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text?" The Mystic Writing Pad; the possibility of being transcribed from one place to another, anywhere to anywhere. The Writing Machine that is the Mystic Writing Pad, mystic because it's not yet an expression of graphic or spoken writing, but something that happens to a psyche that we cannot know about except by a metaphor to some writing machine that will forever be an operation of transcription, a taking of something and transcribing it to something else. To simplify with an example; to take "experience" and transcribe it to a concept. We must create this apparatus for our desire to understand this psychical writing. The analogy between psychical writing and Husserl's transcendental logic, to his pure sense is obvious, but the differences in styles are immense (for one reason; Husserl's repudiation of "pure sense" ever being a matter of psychology). A distinction needs to be made now. I stated just above, "We must create this apparatus". Derrida though states that this apparatus "liberates" whatever is other to the psyche. Within the metaphor of "the writing machine", does it have to happen? Is it a matter of it happening or not? Is the writing machine the "liberation" of the psyche in general? These are questions that can't be answered now. What is the psychical writing though? It's a text. But what is a text? If we don't know what a text is, we can't know what one form of it is in the margins of "psychical writing". The metaphor of "the writing machine" is the apparatus we ascribe to a psychical writing that is already a text, already a writing, of its own without yet being transcribed by a writing machine. Derrida asks of us that if we are going to ascribe a metaphor to a psyche that operates on it's own, in it's own specific Freudian manner of writing, of psychical writing, I have to know what writing is. I have to know what a text is. It's something that is eventually going to be described by an apparatus, by a metaphor. That is the apparatus. That is the "Writing Machine". It is the metaphor. It's the transcription of "something" from one place to another. And writing? So far, it's a place in waiting...to be transcribed, as if it has no other operation than to wait.

Re-establishing "History"; Part 3 of Derrida's interpretation of Husserl

In Husserl's last published work, The Crises of the European Sciences, we find Husserl taking his first leap into the idea of history itself. That this would become a theme for Husserl isn't something that could have been predicted as something that would happen or wouldn't happen in his thought. Certainly, with the honesty of Husserl's work, you could think of him "letting the life-world" into his thought. That being said, no one before or after in western philosophy had so rigorously distanced himself from any sort of existentialiality, even one that would be considered abstract (except for Wittgenstein writing at the same time of Husserl. Refer to Wittgenstein's 'problem' with Karl Popper on Ethics and Philosophy). Husserl though who had thoroughly elaborated Phenomenology from everything that could be studied (Time, Activity, Passivity, Logic, ect.) entered into the problem of history, and in doing so entered into the problem of language (which will be discussed in a post after this).

Derrida is more than aware of this shift in Husserl's thinking and elaborates on the appropriate and not so paradoxically vacuous conception of history in his thinking. We learn immediately from Derrida that, "The historicity of ideal objects obeys different rules, which are neither the factual interconnections of empirical history, nor an ideal and a historic adding on". Where does that leave us then for history if it's neither an archiving of "facts", nor conciliatory gestures of Platonism? Something that is neither real nor unreal. As Zizek continually elaborates on the "reality of the virtual", Derrida and Husserl elaborate on neither being the case for history. This of course opens up a new conception of history that Husserl tried to explain that very few could grasp until they were rigorously interpreted (Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Farber). This attempt at an infinite trace "extended down to a precultural and prehistoric stratum of lived experience". So then, history without culture or history? While not being able to elaborate at all on something that never "was", nonetheless, Husserl can say with certainty that this infinite possibility alone "assures the possibility of historicity". You can't have something without nothing (Heidegger would find Phenomenology more appropriately grounded in Ontology because of this 'axiom/maxim'). "Materially determined ontologies are subordinates to formal ontology, which treats pure rules of Objectivity in general". What does this mean? It means to throw out the fact that any of the geological sciences can teach you anything about the this new version of history. Material conditions and teleological thoughts are not the history that broached into Husserl's Phenomenology. Knowledge and history were dependent on a "naivete of a priori self-evidence that keeps every normal geometrical project in motion". So far, this is nothing new except a reestablishing of Kant's transcendentalism within the context of Husserl's mind.

To further establish the privileging of the "naivete of a priori self-evidence", Husserl gives due time to the fact that Galileo never found it relevant to understand the "how" of origins which Husserl would nominate as "Universal Knowledge". Seeing how knowledge developed was not the problem for Husserl (epistemology) but how knowledge can originally appear. Derrida makes an important footnote in the text describing the fact that Husserl uses the word "origin" with the sense of "first" that is an undetermined primacy and at the same time an original sense; an undetermined origin which surely influenced Derrida's infinite conception of 'the trace"; an undetermined origin which paradoxically Husserl felt could be elaborated on like elaborating on anything.

Not to ever be confused, Husserl goes great lengths to distinguish this "history" from a sociological one, one that would consider what the first theoretical act was of man who found geometry or anything in general for that matter that could be considered ideal. At this point, you're really dealing with nothing when dealing with this new version of history. Here, the line between nothing and purity (a word that Husserl used through all his texts) is extremely thin. While this sociological adventure would "flatter our historical curiosity", "it would still leave us blind about the first sense of such a founding: a sense that is necessary and compared to which these facts have at best only an exemplary signification". Without sense, nothing can be elaborated on. So how is it possible to approach sense without expressible objectivity?

Asking about the sense of history can't be possible without first asking about anything in general. The possibility of the question itself comes second to the sense that Husserl wants to grasp and is there (abstract space) irreducible. He can only derive an answer from a non-answer; he can't "find" an "undetermined answer". Derrida's insightful contributions to this comes by way of stating that "I must already have a naive knowledge of geometry (facts in general) and must not begin at its origins" and this transcendental motif is "concealed each time by the very gesture that uncovers it". In other words, every time Husserl tries to elaborate on the sense of a historical origin, he's concealing that sense by linguistically stating it (more on language in a later post). To understand Husserl's conception of history would require allowing him the luxury of being able to say things without really meaning them, and accomplishing this methodology that attempts to grasp the sense of an origins. By right of the spectre of Kant; "to know something a priori, you have to attribute to things nothing but what necessarily followed from what you had put there yourself in accordance with your concept". For Kant, the space is always open for reducing geometry to an ideal history. It's not as if there is a no-space and no-time where a being is able to operate out of non-conceptuality. Spontaneous reduction is always and already done without giving sense it's due, and without even respecting it, or even being able to respect it because you have no chance at it. You have no way of elaborating on something that happened before elaboration, or the de facto. You can elaborate on it as an operation, but not a founding, because the moment that geometry, or any science, or any thinking is established, the possibility of going back to a non-explicative sense that constituted it is impossible. It's already revealed, and in this sense, already ideal. It's not a matter for subjectivity of what a priori "prescribed" for objectivity. It's beyond the fact that it's not a matter. You can't even say that it doesn't matter because nothing can be said of a sense independent of expression.

How will Husserl answer for establishing sense independent of expression in order to establish a pure logic of history? How will Derrida further approach Husserl's attempts?

Soon...to come, always on the way to a place that will there be on it's way, Soon...to come.

Derrida's interpretation of Husserl's "Origins of Geometry" PT.1

Instead of loading this post with a preface to what it's about, I will defer to Derrida's suggestion that a rigorous reading of any text is one with extracts a certain amount out of a small portion of a text, rather than a reading that knows the whole story (Derrida's criticism of autobiography in general as constituting the essence of any reading). This criticism is reflective of Hegel's preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit where he paradoxically criticizes prefaces in general. You can think of it as a Preface that criticizes itself in wanting to briefly and systematically describe what is ahead. For Hegel, as for Derrida, the text has rhythm and the reader should always be aware of a certain ethic of reading; that being to read the whole text and to enter into the flow of the text, the flow of the author for that matter, even though both Derrida and Hegel would repudiate the possibility of ever "purely" entering into an others context...So much for a preface.

Husserl in his Crises of the European Sciences takes aim at the lack of responsibility in which Science since Newton has taken place. Derrida takes this vision up in his interpretation of his Origins of Geometry which is considered an addendum to the previous text. Into the text then...

"Science's truth "in itself" is not any less truth-of the subjective-relative world, in which it has its bases. No doubt there exists a naively superficial baselessness: that of the rationalists and the traditional scientific investigators who move unconstrained in the atmosphere of the logical and objective apriori and do not relate them to their historical ground in the life-world. They neither worry about their own responsibility nor ask themselves: what am I in the process of doing? Nor:from where does that come? But there is another naivete just as serious but with a more modern style: naivete of profundity or depth and not of superficiality, it consists in re-descending toward the prescientific perception without making problematic the surpassing of the life-world's truth toward the world of truths "in themselves." (Derrida; Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, 1989, Bison Book printing)

Derrida continues explaining Husserl's criticism of science as essentially losing it's philosophical grounding from the likes of Leibniz and and Descartes by referencing Husserl as calling this post industrial science one that is "intellectually hypertrophic".

To start off then with Derrida's interpretation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry, it's good to start off simple; in a place where criticism is evident rather than the internal and posthumous inter-locution between the two that will be written about in a later post.

The obvious question is raised, simply put: Does Science have a responsibility towards Philosophy? And if it has lost that responsibility, if it is in a state of "crisis", how can phenomenology (which for Husserl was always going to take the place of philosophy, not just semantically, but syntactically!) "rescue" science from itself? These are questions which will again be addressed later. For now, the above quote is what imposed as being extracted.

The first part of the quote goes without saying. Husserl according to Derrida thinks that Science should be concerned with the "truth-of-the-subjective" which has always been Husserl's project even as he repudiated pyschologism as the grounds for Truth (Capitol 'T') in his prolegomena to his Logical Investigations. The truth of the subjective then is ironically purely logical; the purely logical subjective. Husserl terms this the "transcendental ego" which is insurmountable for dasein being. Something curious pops up though in Husserl's criticism though. As Husserl criticizes that fact, generally speaking, that scientists don't ask themselves how they are coming to developments, and where the developments are coming from, they essentially take for granted the apriori structure of their method. What's curious about this, is this is exactly what Husserl was trying to prove; that at any point a geometer (for example) can work out a proof without requiring the knowledge of how Euclid's first axioms were found. That 3 sides of a triangle equal 180 degrees doesn't require a geometer to relive the experience or understand how their own mind can come up with such a categorical judgment. Does this not prove the "omni-temporality" of the sciences? Basically, that anyone can think it at anytime.
This curiosity I thought should be noted.

Regardless of the fact of whether Husserl's criticism actually supports the omni-temporality of logic, Husserl still feels an irresponsibility to the scientist who is essentially not a phenemenologist; basically a scientist who investigates how it was first possible to understand a geometrical axiom for example. This is serious for Husserl, but there is something even more serious for Husserl according to Derrida.

This next problem for Husserl is a criticism not of the "naive scientist", but of a "naive scientist-philosopher" who ventures into the groundings of history and the study of primitive cultures; essentially an ethnologist in the vain of Claude Levi-Strauss (for example. Husserl in his usual abstract form never gives names). If one realizes the need for science to rediscover it's foundations, how can it just skip by the fact that there is a sense to it's reduction, to it's "surpassing" from Life-World truths to the "world of truths". Essentially, what is the logic of reduction? Derrida vigorous aims at Levi-Strauss exactly on these grounds in De la grammatologie which has served as a wonderful introduction to Derrida in a small book called "The Scene of Writing". The case of Derrida and Levi-Strauss aside, the logic of reduction is need of being explained (I'm anglo-saxon so I defer a usage of the word "explicated". If someone would like to tell me the difference between the two, I'm open ears).

These two questions will be addressed eventually in Derrida's interpretation of Husserl's Origins of Geometry which will be in future posts. For now though, not only science, but philosophy itself is at stake. Nothing can truly be said with an ever fulfilling accuracy without first telling the whole story of sense so to speak. For anyone who considers themselves a scholar of Derrida, they understand how much of an impulse Derrida obtained from Husserl in the Phenomenological gesture of seemingly never ending questions. Derrida would take this to a social level (something Husserl would rather die than ever do) by exploring the nature of archiving and the reader in general. This would lead to the fact that there is never really "an ending to reading Plato". In a further post, I will go into Derrida's impulse but in different terms. To me, what Derrida gained from Husserl in his sociological explanations of 20th century man was his over-self-satisfaction with himself. Derrida mimicked Husserl's critical gestures towards science and brought it to the level of the everyday reader. No reading was a reading unless it was a textual analysis. If this sounds overly rigorous, I would suggest that the radicalness of the gesture is in order to check an overly self-satisfied readership, not just a readership of books, but a readership in general, of thinking. This will be addressed later on.
For now though, we will continue to explore Derrida's new methodological analysis of Husserl's text, an analysis that would not just be reserved to Husserl but would be used on texts throughout the Western Philosophical Tradition, from Plato to Rousseau, from Hegel to Foucault.