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.

History as an undefinable implication; Part 5 of Derrida's interpretation of Husserl

Revisiting the problem of History that Husserl addresses in The Crises, we will move away from his specific example of hallucination as a signifier for omni-temporal objectivity. Back to this new version of history that that is one and the same time non-Platonic and not empirically sedimented. As always, the question is, what can be said of this history, this hidden history? What Husserl wants to say is that there is something prior to history and this had to have been the case for history to have started. That being said, this "priorness" before History is a history unto itself that Derrida noted was a "hidden history" for Husserl. Explaining this hidden history though is something absolutely different from explaining traditional history, traditional history being the idea of a building up into things where an origins inevitably becomes forgotten, and never in need of being revisited. This hidden history is not something that can be explained by traditional subjective modes, in other words, without regard to history's temporality, the fact that it has a past, present, and future which guide it's idea. With this a-temporality in mind, we can go into the hidden history that is somehow not flowing or static (static in the sense that it's understood by everyone at all times as moving ahead). This hidden history without time them is explained in other ways, by the way implications.

"Husserl affirms that a sense-production must have first presented itself as evidence in the personal consciousness of the inventor, and when he asks the questions of its subsequent objectification, he elicits a kind of fiction destined to make the characteristics of ideal Objectivity problematic and to show that they are not a matter of course" - Derrida

Husserl then first allows the hidden history of the a priori to be defined by a "sense-production". It "must" have presented itself to someone. Interestingly, Derrida calls it a "kind of fiction" that makes ideal Objectivity a problem. This is the first time in Derrida's interpretation that he slips in the idea of fiction as being characteristic of explaining a priori history, and for good reason. What can't be explained because of being prior to language has to be explained by fiction. But it's not a fiction as if what Husserl was defining by an a priori sense production is "non-real". Rather, it's a fiction in the sense that what's trying to be explained doesn't have the rights to language for being explained, except by rights of the implication, the reference to the fact that something had to happen before, in this case "sense-production". Primitive formations of sense "were before" the project of geometry. It appeared for the first time in the evidence in successful actualization. Primitive formations and sense-production here are analogous.
Derrida affirms the fact that "Husserl did not invent such a possibility; it was simply disclosed as what implicitly has always conditioned the existence of the ideal objects of pure science and thus of a pure tradition, and consequently of a pure historicity, the model of history in general". An apriori and eidetic reading and discourse should be possible. It was never invented by anyone because it's always happening. Again, as was said in the previous post, this is simply in line with Hegel's explanation of History realizing itself (disclosing). This recognition is an implication that there was something happening before the realization of itself, whether this be called language, history, or successful ideal objectivity. But, as we will see in the next post, this recognition is nothing other than language. Before getting into the post of when this hidden history becomes established as a problem of language, it's crucial to read Derrida's interpretation further here.

"'Before' and 'After' must be neutralized in their factuality and used in quotation marks. But can we simply replace them with the timeless 'if' and 'provided that' of the condition of possibility"?

When this hidden history is operating in an a-temporal "zone", the words "before" and "after" can't be used because of this a-temporal history. If we talk about a Before or After in this hidden history, it will be in a way for us to understand, but it's not the case that the way we understand is the way it actually "was". With this in mind, it's important to note how tied man is to thinking historically, as in a mindfulness of historicity. Derrida insightfully brings up the fact that we can continually use "if" and "provided that" to explain a history that is a-temporal and always an implication. This makes sense because an implication is always guided by a "provided that". For example, History is possible 'if' it's 'provided with' X, where X signifies an indefinable proposition. So this hidden a priori history then is explained by undefinable implications. In this sense, it's certainly a fiction, but a fiction that is not "novel" meaning it didn't happen for a first time as if some creator created the novel, but was always happening regardless of any writing or reading. History implies this fiction, but at the same time doesn't allow for it's explanation because of it's in-extractable ties with language. History gives and takes at the same time as an implication.
Derrida though asks a decisive question of this "Historical undefinable implication". He asks "Does this not return us to a classic transcendental regression?And is not the interconnecting of transcendental necessities, even if narrated according to how it develops, at bottom the static, structural, and normative scheme for the condition of a history rather than history itself?"
Even where Husserl gives himself the liberties of explaining an a-temporal history by way of Kantian transcendental implications, does this not act like traditional history where something is being told (narrated) according to a development, meaning a teleology? The hidden history of the a priori then is not able to escape eschatological and teleological suppositions that are implicit in traditional history. Certainly, Husserl wants to find the implicit possibilities that could make anything possible, in this case history, but this wanting to find takes away his rights to the hidden history that wanted to operate under non-teleological and in turn, infinite grounds. Husserl is looking to see what the implications of how history developed and not history itself. Originally Husserl was interested the sense of history which is analogous to "history itself", not it's development, because development implies teleology, and not pure sense that is a-temporal and literally, factually, and metaphorically, going nowhere.
Derrida though in his absolutely precise analysis of Husserl states the fact that this was never Husserl's intention. In one of the most insightful parts of Derrida's interpretation of the Origins, he states, "And the annoyed letdown of those who would expect Husserl to tell them what really happened, to tell them a story, can be sharp and easily imaginable: however, this disappointment is illegitimate. Husserl only wished to decipher in advance the text hidden under every empirical story about which we could be curious".
The crucial point Derrida makes here is that Husserl's a-temporal and implicative history was never a story that was to be told as if something started and ended, in other words a novel, but random "zig-zag" fragments of things that could possibly be the case based on pure intentionality, meaning independent of conscious subjectivity. In this sense, Husserl project is incredibly fictive, albeit one that is a-temporal, which is obviously strange. One suspects that Husserl's project would work incredibly well in the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, rather than by way of a traditional philosophical text. Reductive implications grounds history, and not a system of development. There is what is always and already there, that was never "developed" as if it could be told as a historical story (The way in which Carl Sagan and Daniel Dennett for example explain how the cosmos and mental phenomena "happened" respectively). Here is where Husserl finds his history, as randomized and undefinable, yet with implied references to an original history...not some originality itself (again, Derrida's concept of the trace becomes enormously helpful here), just to the finite history within the infinite.

These undefinable implications for us will require the supplement of Language; Language that history revealed in order to reveal the idea of the non-historical. In the next post, we will have to always be aware of the fact these implications require language, but yet are "nothing but the possibilities of the appearance of history as such, outside which there is nothing". We will have to give ourselves the liberties and rights of language, before finding history as undefinable implications using this Language.

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.