The Visual Theater of Creulty; Anti-Oedipus, Part 7

All eyes on deck. There's a judgment brewin'

Before we get to the elaborated theory of Schizoanalysis that is present to us in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus, there are more than a couple themes along the way that will give a more direct sense to the later theory. One will be the structure and gap that happens in-between Barbarian civilization and capitalism (Feudalism) and the phenomena of desire in the cultural happening. This will be addressed in the next post. This post though will deal with savage formation which D&G separate from Barbarian civilization and capitalism. More specifically, this post will deal with the beginnings of the categorical structure of social-being in its savage state. We will see parallels between any form of socius and one that others would like to think operated in some purity against later formations of socius that are easily criticized today (Every socius is easily critiqued when protected under "1st amendment" laws). D&G being thorough analysts/ethnologists won't aggressively attack modern forms of structural government over and against contemporary modes government in a Rousseauian fashion that contemporary critics find so easy to do. D&G for better have maturity on their side when writing a theoretical account of political and psychological structures; I.E. they approach the subject as rigorous Ethnologists. We will see in the post that savage formations were graphic, oral, and visual. The visual character of the savage serves as the mediation between the graphic and oral gestures of savage-being. And when I say that they serve as a mediation, I mean to say that they are a certain and very different mode of operation in the world from the word and it's graphme. We will see just how large of a complex is created in being when the visual category manifests. What this entails we will go into next.

"Savage formations are oral, are vocal, but not because they lack a graphic system: a dance on the earth, a drawing on a wall, a mark on the body are a graphic system, a geo-graphism, a geography. These formations are oral precisely because they possess a graphic system that's independent of the voice, a system that is not aligned on the voices and not subordiante to it, but connected to it, co-ordinated 'in an organization as it were,' and multidimensional." The first key to this statement is the insistence that vocal culture and graphic culture aren't separated. There isn't speech at one time that is separated from a graphic system. But when D&G include "a dance on earth" they mean to expand the concept of inscription to a character far more expansive than the physical writing. The graphic system and inscription are analogous. Not only is the graphic system (inscription) a "drawing of a wall" or a "mark on a body," but a "dance on the earth." Basically, anything that happens to the naked earth (the body without organs) by being is a writing (inscription) on this body without organs. D&G are very aware of making their concepts clear no matter how difficult they seem to be on first glance. Right after they mention these inscriptions, they connotate these inscriptions by calling them a "ge0-graphism," eluding to our point of anything happening to the earth (body without organs) as being an "inscription" to it; and addition to it (or negation. Addition and negation are philosophical concepts that can be applied to these types of phenomena depending on the context of the writing). They spell out clearly that it's a "geography" being good materialists that they are (consistent, which is the most we can ask for from something nominalized as "philosophy"). These modes of being are "oral because they contain a graphic system independent of the voice," showing how the oral isn't necessarily condemned to the mouth. They are connected with the voice instead. There is not the word and then writing. There is already the word and inscription. If we were to look at this metaphysically, we understand that there is already expression and input to the earth. Expression is the writing to the body with organs. The dance that happens spontaneously is a inscription the earth as much as it's an oral expression "on it's own." "On it's own" gets quoted here because it's tied to inscription. Oral expression is inscription. It's already a writing (inscription) to the earth, to the body without organs. Inscription isn't subordinated to the voice, the word, it's the coordination with it that at one and the same time expressed and inscribes, an affectation that effects. No correlation is place between affectation and effect. Instead, they are coordinated in the same space a-temporally. They form their own organization that isn't seen as being vertical but horizontal since they are not correlative, but rise together and inscription and expression. To be brief, something happens to the body without organs by a being that does things. Understanding this abstractly as possible goes far to disengage a correlationist order between the two. But in the inscription and the voice, there exists a third element. There is not only the "dance on the earth" and it's inscription onto something that was never danced on before. There is the eye that perceives everything that's happening. There is the eye as the third party that is neither a "pure" affectation by oral-being, nor a "pure" inscription brought to earth along with the expression of affectation. There is the eye that sees all this happening, and not just the eye physiologically, but the eye as a third form of being that completes the complex of being. "Isn't it necessary to add a third element of the sign: eye-pain, in addition to voice-audition and hand-graphics? In the rituals of affliction the patient does not speak, but receives the spoken word. He does not act, but is passive under the graphic action: he receives the stamp of the sign. And what is his pain if not a pleasure for the eye that regards it, the collective or divine eye that is not motivated by any idea of revenge but is alone capable of grasping the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask. Between these two elements of the code, pain is like the surplus value that the eye extracts taking hold of the effect of active speech on the body, but also of the reaction of the body insofar as it is acted upon." The nuance of this statement is incredible. We will see why as we move through this incredible passage that surmises an ethological description. The voice speaks and inscribes. Inscription is an inscriptive voice. But within this phenomena, there is the phenomena of the eye, the visual aspect that Merleau-Ponty calls the sense, the sense that experiences in the most intense way. D&G go right at the eye as eye-pain, as the eye that sees pain, as the eye that supplements experience by adding pain to it which will form the creditor-debtor relationship described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals. What does the eye do that sees the coordination of inscription and the voice? In the savage rituals of affliction (E.G. a part of the body being held to fire in order to "absolve" oneself from from an injunction. From this we see how the credit-debit/guilt phenomena starts to manifest), there is a third. Not only a third person, but a third person who has eyes. The "patient" (or in this case, the savage trying to absolve themselves from an injunction by experience of an immediate affliction) does not speak, but receives the spoken word. The "patient" has already spoken, and not they will receive the spoken work for haven spoken. The "patient" stands (or sits there) while being graphicized (think of a cow being brandished). This patient receives a sign that may stay with them forever, and that's the point. The mark of the world, the inscription of the world as expression, inscribes itself to the body without organs through being. But what is the pain of the patient? We don't know the "pain" of the patient without the third party, without the eye. The eye watches in horror at the ostensible cruelty being applied to the "patient." But is this horror really being experienced as cruelty? Or is there a subtle pleasure in the "pain" administered to the patient. As I stated in a post on wedolists.com, "If you’re around someone who noticeably enjoys themselves when you are (pridefully) talking about your shortcomings, you can be sure they are just as prideful as you talking about your shortcomings," I.E. pain is experienced as pleasure, by the eye. Who sees this "ritual of affliction?" The collective and divine eye. We can interpret this as the people in a savage group who circle the event of the ritual, and watch with their eyes at the spectacle. It would be easy for us to say here that the third-person eye gains pleasure out of this event of a sense of vengeance and/or a sense of this ritual not happening to them. But it's not so simple for D&G much to there appreciation of a complex event. The eye grasps "the subtle relationship between the sign engraved in the body and the voice issuing from a face - between the mark and the mask." The eye isn't Oedipalized in savage-being. It doesn't have a sense that "nothing goes right for me" or that the "world is against me." The eye in savage-being is in "the real," to whatever extent we can conceptualize "the real." But yet, in this "real," the eye extracts a surplus-value of pleasure from the ritual event. It doesn't extract pleasure from the fact that someone else is being tortured or that someone else is being afflicted and not them. Rather, the eye is acting on it's own when establishing the relationship between inscription and the voice, between the body and the inscription. In "the real" an affliction is applied to the body which the eye sees, and then the eye sees the reaction of the body coming from the face (simply put, we can think of a scream or some sort of vocal squirm). The eye sees inscription and it's reaction my the word. And what happens with the eye when it sees this? It extract pleasure not from the above stated examples that apply to a relative oedipalized modernity, but from a pure reaction of the eye in the real. The inscription happens in "the real," the word-reaction happens in "the real," and the perceptive-eye happens in "the real," which extracts more out of the previous two "reals" than was happening in them alone. This "pure extraction" as a surplus to the event is a pleasure. The eye sees what's happening between the mark and the mask and something comes out of the eye, an unconscious interpretation of sorts. "These are the three sides of a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and retention, a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye." What happens in this event, this spectacle, is resonance and retention. The hand (inscription) applied to the body (the voice) where an eye watches this application resonates with the eye and is retained by the eye. The eye retains what happens. It sees the bodies reaction. It sees the squirms. It realizes the relationship between the hand that applies the "afflictive ritual" to the body and the body that receives this affliction. Not only does this event resonate for the third party eye, but the intensity of the event creates a memory for the eye. The eye remembers intensity (as we understand perfectly from Nietzsche in that man forms memory for himself by afflicting himself with intense pain). History is born out of intensity. History is born out of subjective pain. History is born out of a set of important wars whose importance depends not just on the quantity of dead lives, but the quality in which these deaths took place. Memory and (H)istory is formed from intensity to the subject. It's not just the intensity though. It's the tripartite matrix of inscription, the voice, and the eye; where the eye perceives whatever is happening as intensity. It perceives for the first time the theater of cruelty in savage-being and the relationship between the other two characters in the matrix.

The eye in a strong sense is the gap between save-being and barbarian-being which we will elaborate on in the next post. The eye serves as the memory of what an intensity is. It sees and remembers. When it remembers, the event "made an impression" on it. When this impression is made, a memory is made. This memory has an intensity at its disposal, a disposal it may not want to partake in. While D&G have given a commendable analysis of this phenomena by characterizing the event as a relationship between the tripartite matrix that enveloped the phenomena in, it's also easy to understand that this intensity that the eye perceives becomes much more than a relationship. It becomes fear literally in the eye of the beholder. In other words, it becomes oedipalized. The flow of the event is no longer the flow of the event. The event is memorized as something to fear. The fear of intensity. Of course, D&G understand this when they affirm that the eye extracts a surplus-value out of the event but we should be more specific now. This surplus-value that is extracted out of the event we can call "fear." This "fear" though is not to be understood as something that the eye purposely tries to avoid, on the contrary; the eye is enamored with the fear it sees in the event (Why else could you explain why "scary movies" are so popular?). But there are two different ways in which the eye sees the event for us and D&G. For now, we see the event through the eyes of savage-being as a set of relationships. After, in oedipalization, we see the event through the eyes of a surplus-socius, as a desire to see "fear" as something not happening to oneself (as an outside spectator). This personality (or cult, or fetish) of fear is limited to ones own understanding of the relationship of primordial acts. When the memory has become so ingrained (by memories), the question of the relationship between component parts doesn't happen at first, but becomes historicized as an auto-response to an event. This auto-response is oedipus. It knows to fear. It likes to fear. But this knowing and liking never formed the relationship that constituted the event of savage-being that would eventually go on to establish oedipus-man.

The Origin of Repression; Part 5 of The Scene of Writing

If Writing is the origin of memory and all it's machinery (apparatuses), the writing that writes onto the Mystic Pad, or the psyche, then there is also a place of non-writing. We can speak of this space of non-writing phenomenologically as a happening between point A and point B where a "subject" is doing something without any regard for the points or awareness of their "natural inclination". Still even without consciousness, writing finds a way to write something onto what is called "consciousness", essentially in it's passive nature, that is still active. According to Husserl, an "Active Passivity". With this being said, as we learned earlier, there are gaps in-between periods, in-between periodicity that form the trace. The whole structure of gaps and periods within something called the psych, Derrida will refer to as the arche-trace, but he signifies that the concept of the arche-trace is not a concept because it isn't simply the static phenomenology of gaps and periods within the "memory", but the process of gaping and memory, and within this present participle, the concept always eludes itself beyond the fact of an "imaginative variation" of a linerar sequence of it happening. One lesson learned from Husserlian phenomenology though is the idea that there are somethings entering into consciousness that aren't perfected, in other words, are not idealized into "objectivities". From the last post though we saw that writing was always and already writing perception before being acted on. That writing is always writing it's own history, it's own empirical-historical history, it's own scientific history of perception, does not mean however that the writing mechanism inside something called a "subject" can be not writing at times, and is this not exactly what the gap in-between periods is? If we are to find an analogy for this theoretical attitude in something more understandable by the guidance of the praxis of empiricism, it can be found in the psychoanalytical idea of repression. And make no doubt about it, it's influence it's extreme; more specifically, Freud's influence has been extreme. "Thus perhaps argued, in the Freudian breakthrough, a beyond and a beneath of the closure we might term "Platonic". In that moment of world history 'subsumed' by the name Freud, by means of an unbelievable mythology...a relationship to itself of the historico-transcendental stage of writing was spoken without being said, thought without being though..it was represented". The mythology of psychoanalysis had an abrupt strike in the stage of transcendental history as a breakthrough and difference from classical metaphysics. That breakthrough we went into as writing as a metaphor of psychical writing, the more primary writing that couldn't be read in terms of a simple code (refer to dream interpretation essay). The influence of Freud through his concept of repression has lead man to unequivocally privileged whatever is called "the unconscious" as the code to ones soul, much like Plato, except the breakthrough that analysis could be done in regards to this unconscious repression, unlike Platonism which saw the "unconscious" as already written, not in a state of tabula rasa. With the simple idea of repression, that we all know and that we all use to criticize others when they are appearably "not acting honest", there is a grounds to it that dives beyond the idea of some concept of "free will" being able to awaken this repression, to be free from it's state of at one time being repressed. By grounding repression in somewhat transcendental terms, the fate of repression is sealed as something that is always and already the situation. "This erasure is death itself, and it is within its horizon that we must conceive not only the 'present', but also what Freud doubtless believed to be the indelibility of certain traces in the unconscious, where 'nothing ends', nothing happens, nothing is forgotten'". Here is where an analogy between Husserl and Freud can be posed, or rather a simple similarity in their theoretical/hypothetical conceptions of the psyche. Very simply, the idea that Writing is not catching anything in a process, and for Husserl, the idea that consciousness has it's times of respites where it's not catching anything that would be exterior to it, usually called a "perception". The erasure is the metaphor of not-catching. Certain traces within the unconscious don't end, which mean they don't become idealized as objectivities in Husserlian terms, and in this sense nothing happens to us even though in the unconscious something happens. If it doesn't fully catch an idealized intention of the unconscious, nothing happens to me. Here at least is further proof for how ambiguous the nature of the unconscious is and a further repudiation of simple dream-coding. Because nothing ends and nothing happens, nothing is forgotten. I can't forget something that at first didn't come to me. I need to have what is called an "object" or concept or notion first to be able to forget that idealized objectivity. If I don't the possibility of it being forgotten is impossible. That being said, Freud still attributes an indelible trace to this process. Not just a trace, but an indelible trace: Something that happens to us that can't be erased but we will never have any idea of. Husserl explained this perfectly in his Analysis concerning Passive and Active Synthesis as "perceptions" not becoming "perfected". Hypothetically, it's still the case that the trace or memory has made an impression on me, it's just also the fact that at the same time I have no idea on it, and would have to erase the concept of an impression being made upon "me" in this case. To put it simply, this indelible trace is erased from unconsciousness because it hypothetically never gets to consciousness. "This erasure of the trace is not only an accident that can occur here or there, nor is it even the necessary structure of a determined censorship threatening a given presence; it is the very structure which makes possible, as movement of temporalization and pure auto-affection, something that can be called repression in general, the original synthesis of original repression and secondary repression, repression 'itself'". There are a ton of keys to this quote. Erasing in general is not censorship. Erasing is not something to be censored itself as being a threat to something that is "present" and the logos of some intention. Erasure instead, makes repression possible. Erasure in the abstract, meaning the fact that an indelible trace can sometimes never be realized in consciousness because of it never being thrown into or "intended" into consciousness creates the possibility for repression before any empirical fact of ones existence would be able to define their own repression, their ownership of their repression, their subtle delight in the things that they are "not Ok with". It's always the case that traces are being written to consciousness, or the Mystic Pad, but it's also the case that these traces (that are nonetheless "indelible") are where nothing happens and where nothing is forgotten. This original repression of not fullfillying what writing wants to fulfill, by writing itself into the historico-transcendental stage, firstly grounds the idea of repression in general before it's modern weight it gains in empiricism, and more noticeably, in ones existentiality (basically repression as a product of an individual ego). To further solidify this idea, Derrida defers an authority to phenomenology by explaining the operation of repression as a "movement of temporalization and pure auto-affection". This is what repression is in general. The movement of temporalization: the idea that a trace needs to happen under a certain amount of time, it has to be temporalized, a trace can't be repressed unless it's given the space of time to sink into nothingness, where certainly, it could have been much more than nothingness, according to Derridean verbiage, it could have developed into the death of itself as representation. After this basic phenomenology of temporality, it is also because of "pure" auto-affection that repression can happen. I can't repress something unless I write it to myself, no matter how much a trace according to Freud can have characteristics to it that resemble nothing; "where nothing ends, nothing happens and nothing is forgotten". By the space of time and the automatic affectation of the pysche, I write down something that is outside of myself. I write it down to my psyche slab, my Mystic Pad. So I'm always writing within the psyche, writing something that is outside of myself, and sometimes what I'm writing down becomes remembered, and sometimes it doesn't even exist except for postulating the hypothesis of traces that never become perfected, but are still indelible in the sense that they are absolutely happening; They are just not happening to "me" because "me" here is being equated with consciousness and unconsciousness is being equated with absence, or nothingness. An indelible mark within nothingness: A definition for the unconscious? "Such a radicalization of the thought of the trace (a thought because it escapes binarism and makes binarism possible on the basis of nothing)". Once thought gets laid out, for example, the thought of consciousness, it finds it's binary opposition in unconsciousness. But the radicalization of this thought of the trace, essentially as one that is completely empty, is nothing, in the sense that nothing can be said about it except by positing it hypothetically, grounds binarism, and in this sense grounds the classical psychoanalytical and existential concept of repression. For classical pyschology, dogmatic pyschology if you will, one is always being analyzed into a place where what needs to be "brought up from the depths of your unconsciousness" is something wholly opposite to what you're speaking about; "to let out your inner demons". To speak badly about your mother, means you really have an infatuation with your father. To speak badly about your father, means you really have a strong affection about them. Both the figures of the paternal figures and the concept of "speaking badly" refer to their binary oppositions of the opposite paternal figure and affection respectively. But the origins of repression don't happen from "experience", if "experience" means a person who enters into the world with a blank-slate consciousness who then experiences things they dislike and then subsumes them into their unconsciousness. On the contrary, the origins of repression start from the fact that one has the capacity for indelible traces where nothing happens and nothing is forgotten. Essentially, the psyche writing it's own history and erasing a part of that history before it even enters into your though process (consciousness). Already at work is a psychical apparatus that is distinguishing, sublimating, and repressing traces. That some of these traces are realized in consciousness is the case. That these realized traces (memories) are realized and then repressed is just a function of a much more fundamental operation of the psyche to want to erase things in general for unknown reasons because they operate from nowhere. The operation of repression is always the case. The existential neurosis for "solving" repression is a misplaced "task" of modern psychology because of 1. not being able to see that when one thing is "awakened" in a repression more will pop up because of the fundamental work of the psyche to write things it may want to erase in the first place and 2. not being able to see this ground work of the psyche as operating in a process of Freud's Mystic Writing Machine where at the same time something is written, something is erased with some marks on it that can be recognized. Without a theoretical attitude towards the psyche, psychology can operate under a really misguided teleology of "solving peoples problems". That classical and modern psychology would need to operate under the idea of the trace (or memory) whose structure allows for something to be repressed in the first place would give new grounds to psychology. First and foremost, to not think that the patient is some sort of static identity where all the analyst would have to do is "solve their problem" by bringing out a repression as if other repressions wouldn't manifest once this one repression was "brought up". A change in thinking would have to occur, and that change would be the indefinite repressions with the human psyche. Would this be of consolation to "the patient"? Maybe not in the moment. Would it make them think afterwards about the indefinite state of imbalance that envelops their existence? Maybe so. Either way, psychology without a theoretical foundation of how memory works is strange, strange not just because it's lacking in explanation, but strange because of how popularized the science has become without really needing to know anything about itself.
As a final note to this text on Derrida, I wanted to elaborate on the fields that Derrida sees that could be opened up by psychoanalysis that haven't been opened up yet.
1. A pyschopathology of everyday life. Not simply interpreting lapsus calami (The Freudian Slip, or more literally, The Slip of the Pen) in it's specific encounter, but how it's possible for a slip to happen. If the traces of memory are able to be nothing which constitute a primal repression, then a slip perhaps has a theoretical space in the unconsciousness; perhaps where traces are being allowed into the consciousness not by some empirical-existential slip, but by a slip where what was once an "indelible trace of nothing" slipped into "becoming something". Beyond this, Freud doesn't address responsibility for the slip. In an existential sense, when the slip happens, what is the responsibility of the one who makes the slip, and what is even the responsibility of the receiver of this slip? It must be said though, that Freud, as a person, was probably not the person to concern himself with these ethical issues between "others" where slips manifested into issues of guilt and responsibility.
2. A history of writing: A history of writing that is not empirical, that is not of the speculation of Rousseau works on what possibly was natural man, in his romantic sense of it, and one senses, his thoughts on it that were manifested from an opulent surrounding. Only the most opulent surroundings produce thinkers who "champion nature in it's purity", and the same would go for writing. The history of writing not as some innocuous process that was at once "pure", but maybe always sedimented by a non-altruistic motivation which Derrida takes to task with Claude Levi-Strauss later on in Writing and Difference in the text "Structure, Sign, and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". A history of writing that follow the unconscious factors in the reading would be the task.
3. A becoming literary of the literal: The task of psychoanalysis to not focus so much on the signified concept as the transcendental object for thinking, but the play of signifiers which constitute the signified itself. In Zizek's terms, "the fictions that create reality". A focus on the literary signifier, the signs that point towards something, where whatever was being pointed to, the intentional object was being bracketed out itself. While Husserl would bracket out his existentiality to find a pure intentionality leading to something called an "objectivity", this objectivity (the intentional object) would be braketed out for how signifiers operate independent of their ostensible teleology to the direct object, or the signified, or the intended substance. As Derrida states "the history of literary forms was destined precisely to authorize this disdain of the signifier".
4. Finally, a psychoanalysis of the "forms of gestures, movements, letters, lines, points, the elements of the writing apparatus (instrument, surface, substance, ect.)" For example, The Role of the School in the Libindinal Development of the Child where analysis would happen not just by analyzing "adult disorders", but would follow how school brings about force to a child. What is education doing for a child that allow them to be themselves or not be themselves, essentially as libindinal beings, as beings with drives, often insatiable drives that an educator would either curtail or accentuate in the school. Also, Strachey's Some Unconscious Factors in Reading. What is happening in reading? What are parts that are being forgotten and remembered and why? Why at a very early stage are certain things of no interest to a reader and others are? When reading, what does the writing of the unconscious want to grab onto? And how does it influence the entire interpretation of the text that leads to all the multivariant interpretations of texts in general? By laying out these unconscious factors, it would certain ground ambiguity in some possibly invariant structures of how reading happens in general. Psychoanalytically, what is that man wants from reading? In Numbers, with the parched woman drinking the inky dust of the law, what is the motivation for the drinking of the law, and how does this communicate with the writing of the law as an excrement of writing? Writing being excreted as law to be swallowed by a woman who feels parched...by not having a law in their life.
Psychoanalysis has an enormous amount of avenues it can traverse to not only flesh out its own theory, but to flesh out the ontological state of being in general.

Rethinking Originality; Part 2 of Freud and the Scene of Writing

In the last post, thoughts were conveyed about the meaning of a text in general regarding where and how it operates. At the end of it, there was some conclusion in the idea of it being a place of waiting for inscription. As Derrida moves on through the works, and thought of Freud in this text, he comes up against the problem of genesis, specifically the genesis of a text. Some preliminary remarks though before we approach the problem of genesis through Derrida and Freud as the genesis of a text. There's always a difficulty in reading Derrida, not just because literally reading him is the mental equivalent on chopping down trees for 18 hours a day. The difficulty lies in him requiring us to have read all the texts he has read in order for us to fully participate in his reading. I can't emphasize this full participation enough. Derrida doesn't say that you have to read the texts he has read to understand him, but it sure would help. He has been criticized for this, but it was never Derrida's intention to be considered a "serious philosopher" by some "philosophical community". At least I don't think that could have been his intention if he was going to require the reader to have read everything he has read before from entering into his text. Nonetheless, his popularity has come from a faithfulness in style that I think that was borne out of readings of Husserl. The idea of accounting for consciousness precisely is a style that I think severely influenced Derrida. Without going into the biographical notes on why this would be the case (E.G. studying at the Husserl archives for as long as he did) I think it carried over into the way he thought. For Derrida, how could he think about an author and his text if he had not read everything by that author? How could he account for all the proper names he wanted to use without reading everything by that author? Certainly he was interested in the way others thought, but he didn't think he could write on it in any "official" way without knowing the whole text(s) of an author. Eventually, I think Derrida came to see the impossibility of ever knowing the entire corpus of an author, and ever fully understanding it which led to his public polemics against the stabilization of authors by biographies and his insistence on the "genuine" thinker being one who "rigorously" extracted as much out of a small portion of a text rather than someone who could name drop. If this was his idea of "narcissistic reappropration then I think the idea succeeded in a very tremendous way for readers of Derrida. I think anyone who reads Derrida more than once, and keeps coming back to him, is addicted to the fact of never having a "pure" authority of what they are speaking on. Eventually though, when one has read enough of Derrida I think they are reading a sort of working encyclopedia of philosophy. "Working" because he approaches philosophers in a very different way than a "Story of Western Philosophy" that was always going to be the tendency of an anglo-saxon writer and one finds this most obvious in Bertrand Russel; A beginning and end to philosophy which listed authors in historical order, explained their ideas, and judged their ideas. Derrida was the last person who would ever attempt this. Instead, an author was given his due by detail examinations of their texts and quotes, a close read if you will. Really close read.

Derrida works with authors, in authors. He does his best to assume their mindset, and after a certain amount of time reading Derrida, a reader can easily come to trust his interpretations. Still though, there's never a full trust. When he interprets, and we haven't read what he interprets, we have an instinct to want to go to the texts he's referencing not simply to "fact-check" Derrida, but to understand the text on its own terms before going onto Derrida's interpretation. There's really two options here. One can read everything Derrida read before reading Derrida (which I think is almost impossible) or one will have to take Derrida at his word during an explanation of a text and then maybe go back afterwords to that text. I know I have that impulse when reading this specific text on Freud. I haven't read Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology but now feel that I'm going to have to, along with every other text that Freud hasn't written. If anything, when one reads Derrida, they are overcome by how much more reading that have to do. One either accepts this somewhat begrudgingly, or criticizes him for subtly asking this of us. If Derrida's interpretations didn't seem so precise (in the way that Searle didn't find his interpretation of J.L. Austin's How to do Things with Words as being "correct") then one would probably have a feeling of "skipping" Derrida after a certain amount of texts. I for one don't find this at all. Personally my trust in Derrida was confirmed with his reading of Husserl. After reading Husserl for a good 2 years of my life, I didn't think there was a way to go deeper into his thought, and this wasn't simply confirmed by the amount of time and energy I put into Husserl because of the love I had for Phenomenological thought, but because of the weakness of the secondary texts I had read on Husserl, especially those "Introductions to Phenomenology" that were really bad. They were just too simple and had a focus towards perceptive phenomenology rather than a phenomenology that didn't operate soley under the guise of vision. If Phenomenology was Merleau-Ponty, then I probably wouldn't have so much of a problem with these introductions. It was with this in mind that my skepticism towards interpretations of Husserl beyond Husserl's own thought was laid to rest by Derrida, and why I will continue to read him, still begrudgingly though because of how much more reading is ahead of me if I want to be faithful to others when in use for my own thought. So it's something to bear in mind before approaching Derrida. You have to let him have the authors the way he sees them because he's earned it. With this in mind, I think I have exercised some of my anxiety with Derrida's reading of others, to understand Derrida. I simply accept it.

But the title of this post is "Rethinking Originality" and before the anxiety of trusting an author came flying through my consciousness, I stated how the text moves onto the problem of genesis, specifically the problem of genesis of a text, in general. Obviously, "Originality" and "Text" have are related in some way. How does this happen through "Freud and the Scene of Writing"? "It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic. What we are advancing here does not seem to contradict what Freud will say further on: 'Facilitation is probably the result of a single passage of a large quantity'". What is enigmatic about a first time as originality, as genesis? "For repetition does not happen to an initial impression; its possibility is already there, in the resistance offered the first time by psychical neurons". The idea of a primal impression, this phenomenological idea, is not something that just arrives to a "consciousness". The process isn't streamlined in one swoop. An initial impression can already happen again even before it's "initiality". I can experience something for the first time, but wasn't it already the case that I was going to experience whatever it was that I experienced for the first time? Every time "experience happens", isn't it already the case that "experience is going to happen"? How does this happen? Freud, the early Freud that of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, who operated under making the science of psychology anatomical and physiological refers to "psychical neurons" which offer resistance to life itself. Let's explain this concept a little further. An impression, any impression can hit me but it doesn't "do anything" without a neuronal function that can "do something with it". This "doing something with it" is a resistance to an impression that never was "not going to do anything with it". Freud's psychical neurons don't allow that to happen, unlike the failures of perception that Husserl discuss that never become idealized. Derrida states "Resistance itself is possibly only if the opposition of forces lasts and is repeated at the beginning" and this is where a first time becomes "enigmatic". Firstly, the forces that are in opposition are an impression and the mind, but not just the mind as cogito, not the self-subsistent Cartesian thinking essence, but memory. Consciousness and memory are equivalents here. Memory is the force in which an impression becomes just that, without which the idea of an impression doesn't exist and doesn't happen. Anything can only happen because of memory, because of "the production of the trace as moments of deferring". The trace, as the process of going backwards for seeing a place in which there would be a gap, afterwords where there would be another place. Repetition begins when life and memory contact each other, when memory offers itself to "life" as a resistance. Memory will resist life in it's "purity" by allowing itself to be impressed. Impressionality; the periodicity of the trace, the deferral of life. "Life is already threatened by the origin of the memory which constitutes it, the effraction which it can contain only by repeating it". While life is threatened by memory, the idea of "pure life", it also constitutes it as something to be sought after. When Derrida makes this statement he's implying a teleology not only for metaphysics and philosophy, but for ontology, for Being. Memory, this break with "life", can only be a break if it happens more than once. Memory can only break with the "purity" of what would be a "real-time-life" by repeating itself over and over, by resisting the fact that I can always and already be experiencing something wholly different from myself. Memory breaks "life" by repetition. At the same time, memory constitutes life by repetition. How? Because it enables the "wholly other", the idea of "purity", the "transcendental signified", the ultimate concepts that brings experience into non-differentiation (the religious sublime) . That which is impossible for memory, for Being (Consciousness is memory. Consciousness is the Being of beings. Memory is the Being of beings) is wholly other. The idea of a "present life" can't be established without difference, the difference that pushes one along to think "What about a place with no difference"? Derrida finds it important to mark out where Freud finds a "large passage of quantities" that will be "great breaching happenings" that constitute memory. Freud finds this in pain. "Pain leaves behind it particularly rich breaches". Pain is a great neuronal implication of memory. Freud symbolizes psychological neurons in his early work by symbols that I can't represent here because they aren't on my keyboard. One of these neurons though (to be sure, a symbolic neuron in 1895) is guided by intensity. The neuron capturing an impression as painful has an extra amount of intensity to it making it more of a "facilitation" for the happening of memory. "But beyond a certain quantity, pain, the threatening origin of psyche, must be deferred, like death, for it can ruin psychical organization". Only a certain quantity of pain is allowed into neuronal resistance, enough pain before memory flees away from the scene, remembering why it fled. If memory allowed all the pain in the world without fleeing, it would die. There would be no memory if I had no neuronal impulse to flee if someone was spraying me with a flame sprayer. Remember that old warning sign? "Don't touch to stove!" And if you did, you would remember not to touch it again by the quantity of pain that was endured. What happens though if you keep your hand on the stove? You ruin your "psychical organization". You're no longer being as memory. You are a different being. You are one whose psychical organization doesn't operate by the intensity of a neuron in contact with an impression. B(being) without mind, without neurons, without a sympathetic nervous system. But for Freud, this is not the nervous system. This wouldn't be being as "facilitation's serving the primary function". In other words, Being wouldn't be a function, an operation for itself "under the compulsion of the exigencies of life". How to facilitate these exigencies of life? This "we" don't have to know because our neurons always and already do the work for us. Psychology as Science for Freud was understanding how the primary operation of the mind is to find facilitation's in the face of exigencies. (As a side note; by way of the metaphor of science, was Freud not under the same teleological presuppositions of Rousseau?)

What does this mean for the idea of "Rethinking Originality"? It's to deffer "originality" whenever the concept comes up. It's to deffer the idea of "purity" sought after by western metaphysics and philosophy, not simply as something that is going to be postponed, one fine day (Derrida verbiage), but to see difference as what is "the original happening", thereby making what is "original" enveloped by difference. By the mark of my mind, by the mark of my memory, I trace back periods eternally. The purity of life that I seek, this original "primal impression" that would mark originality is only after a difference whereby I can speculate about what it is to be wholly other than myself, and if this difference always and already wasn't the case, there still wouldn't be originality because there wouldn't be the difference that was necessary to signify something that was "wholly other". My memory constitutes originality. It makes it possible by making it an impossible idea. An idea, as the difference of what a "primal impression" would be without being an idea, without being itself, without being itself as a difference in the semblance of an origin, a genesis. I can only think of an origin. An origin can't happen by itself. An origin is the mind's way of differentiating itself away from itself as difference. It's the very gift of repetition, the very boredom that repetition brings about that makes the memory (those scrupulous neurons firing in the face of repetition) that constitutes what is called "originality". And to be sure, just in case I ever really never wanted to be bored, my neurons would stop this instinct by only allowing a certain quantity of intensity into my psychical organization. My psychical organization that likes to think about "originality", that loves speculating on this fact of the "wholly other" is only allowed by not being in it, by being exactly the difference of it, by constituting it as an idea. The idea, as the difference and the constitution of originality. Who I am, my memory, will always repeat what's happening without myself even knowing that this is happening, and the "originality" that I seek in the coming-to-consciousness of repetition, is nothing other than the difference of myself, the myself that is solely makes "originality" possible...as an idea...as a difference, because of the gift of repetition.

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.