'Another origin of the world'

As other "Theory"-literate and serious denizens of the blogosphere duly note, Specters of Marx is a book that continues to look better with each passing year.  Generous, intricate and faithful expositions of Derrida's later political thought, meanwhile, are so few and far between that a recent article by Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang (ProjectMuse) is most welcome, and also conveniently works as a rather natural continuation of our Spivak (and Europe, and technology, and democracy) discussions. 

Suffice to say that many familiar themes make an appearance.  I provide some brief excerpts and comment below the fold, as the authors are friends and were kind enough to share a copy.   (Those interested and without Muse access may I suppose ask very nicely via email.)   The excerpts are by no means generous enough, as indeed the article covers quite a lot of ground, including responsible forays into anonymous internationalism (composed of "no one" who is , nevertheless, "not just anyone" – cf. Thomas Keenan; recalling also Blanchot's communism), Spivak's (partly just) criticisms in Ghostwriting, Derrida's distinctly atheist transformation of Benjamin's 'weak messianism' and Roland Barthes' reflections on the photograph among other things.  The bold and truly excellent SUBSTANCE Magazine was once kind enough to grant us a generous "fair use" permission to quote from its "Counter-Obituaries" issue on Derrida from some time ago...so consider this too a first step, if you will, toward a more precise engagement there. 
    
From the key orienting and introductory 'graph (or rather, a bit of graft on my part, as the  framing, justifying work performed by introductions certainly is important to get right):

As admirable as [their] aims may be, Habermas and Derrida’s proclamation inevitably raises the question of their global bias.   Although their article closes by “renounc[ing] Eurocentrism,” it seems nonetheless to reassert a particular European obligation to act on behalf of the world.    American political philosopher Iris Marion Young objects to the publication’s premise in an essay for the web-based journal openDemocracy.  She asserts, “Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.”   Young points out that the anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003 were planned at a World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in January 2003 and, moreover, took place in hundreds of cities throughout the world.   Such a “coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.”   Though [Iris Marion] Young correctly calls into question their geopolitical assumptions, a closer evaluation of Derrida’s key statements makes clear that his position on Europe is distinct from the one Habermas sketches in their jointly signed text* [...]   

Contrary to his press, Derrida never made a secret of his allegiance to the European Enlightenment.    Our title, “the last European,” is meant as a tribute and a provocation, a corrective to the idée fixe that “deconstructionism” seeks to corrode Enlightenment ideals.   The allusion to Blanchot’s Le dernier homme notwithstanding, it is unlikely Derrida himself would have recognized the descriptive pertinence of the phrase or accepted its eschatological pathos.   We certainly do not wish to suggest that he clung to the Continent.   On the contrary, the globe-trotting itineraries of his teaching and lecturing – in particular his numerous visiting professorships in the US – imparted a decisively non-European competence and tonality to his numerous public stances.   The topic of European identity, he admitted, is predictably tired:  “Old Europe seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of discourse and counter-discourse about its own identification” (Other Heading 26).   And yet, paradoxically, European identity has never really been taken up in the promise that it holds for the future.   For Derrida, this at one and the same time old and young identity is a fine example of Hamlet’s famous declaration that “the time is out of joint.”   In the following, we argue that this temporal rift is precisely what compelled him to speak in the name of Europe.

  The authors proceed to engage first with Derrida-Valéry in a manner that deserves to be quoted at some length, though again I will limit myself:

Valéry’s texts figure in The Other Heading, then, as telling, modernist examples of the Eurocentric idealism that continues (in a somewhat threadbare mode) to animate the West’s cultural politics.   To Jameson’s account of Derrida’s strategic use of Valéry we would only add that Valéry does not simply function as the object of an ideology critique.   His outmoded Eurocentrism also serves, paradoxically, to advance Derrida’s deliberation on the future of Europe.  Valéry forcefully elucidates the expansive limits of a high cultural European self-understanding, and thereby, points a way out from within....

* [Sadly and rather inexcusably, the actual Habermas statement co-signed by Derrida appears to be unavailable online...or at least eluding my night's efforts.]

More substantially yet, and along lines Agamben might well appreciate:

In defending the European Spirit, Valéry does not speak in the name of Europe alone, but on behalf of humanity in general.  The rhetorical maneuver by which European man can come to stand for humanity in general (and viceversa) Derrida discerns as the paradox of exemplarity:  an inscription of “the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (Other Heading 72).  This resourceful figure serves to resolve a series of exemplary antinomies for Valéry.  The paradox explains, for example, how cosmopolitanism can go hand-in-hand with nationalism, or how the sense of being French can coincide with the feeling of universality.  Far from simply dismissing this paradox as a logical aberration that mistakenly (and arrogantly) conflates the local with the universal, Derrida insists that it belongs to the structure of any identity claim.  “No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man” (Other Heading 73).  Without this paradoxical exemplification of the universal in one’s very singularity, any individual, national, or transnational subject risks stiffening into a nonrelational self.  This is why Derrida does not oppose Valéry’s Eurocentrism by simply championing in its stead non-European and minoritarian cultures, selfidentical differences. Paradoxically, the colonizing and universalizing impetus of European culture can only be dismantled by escalating its paradoxical exemplarity, or rather, its exemplary paradoxicality.  This requires bringing the paradox past the point of its capacity to resolve contradictions, to the point, therefore, of a contradictory and double injunction.  On the one hand, the rethinking of European cultural identity must respect “differences, idioms, minorities, singularities,” and not least of all, the non-identity or difference with itself that forms the basis for any relationality, identity, and culture.  On the other hand, it is necessary to guard “the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia” (Other Heading 78)....

This last part deserves to be unpacked a little, I think...to avoid either the usual complete neglecting or conflation of one of these movements into the other (with all the glib dismissal this then permits) or for that matter the reduction to the merely banal (ditto)...What in fact Derrida is arguing (or at least, I should say, arguing in Chang and Benjamin's reading), is that the linguistic operation by which Valéry comes to substitute European man for all of humanity is, at least on a formal linguistic level, indispensable.

I am curious what people make of this.  That is, there seems to me something of an interpretive leap (namely, inspired by Agamben) at work in moving from the desciption of any claim to essence or identity, to the prescription of a "relational self."  I'm wondering if Derrida would have followed that prescription, with at least its potential echoes of a unified subject-self, that far.  Granted, I may be entirely wrong about this.  The word "paradox," for instance, would seem to imply that this tension (or more strongly, contradiction) between the singular and the universal is in fact sometimes and by bare necessity at rest (or that it oscillates in a manner subject to dialectical laws, or something like the event).  I wonder about this because if the authors are correct, then those forever taunting deconstruction as some sort of cheaply nihilist presciption for the dissolution of the self might then have even less hot air to stand upon.  And yet the thinking of the double injunction in the way Derrida sometimes construes it would seem, in its most strict moment, to almost prevent this relationality (much less "identity", or "culture").   But, moving on.

There follows what I sometimes prefer to call a brief note to aspiring neoLeninists:

When Derrida evokes the duty in his reading of Marx to “quit the terrain of philosophy as ontology” (“Marx & Sons” 213), his point-of departure is the shudder of unease that past and future provoke in the present.  In a later reflection on the premises of Specters of Marx he defines the book’s central question as follows:  “Is what has come down to us from Marx, or will yet come down to us, a political philosophy?  A political philosophy qua ontology?” (“Marx & Sons” 214).  In contrast to the urge, exemplified by certain Marxist thinkers, to read Marx ontologically, interpreting the rubrics of “class,” “the Party,” “dialectical materialism,” “use value,” and so forth, as firmly established, unshakable categories (an approach shared by those who would consign these notions to a concluded and superseded era of the past), Derrida attempts to take up Marx’s work “in conformity with the concept of inheritance,” which he defines through the lens of spectrality:  …one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. (Specters 54)  The conception of inheritance that frames Derrida’s reclamation of the legacy of Marx is not conducive merely to reproducing Marx’s ideas as a stable framework or ontological system. It is not possible, Derrida argues, to take possession of an inheritance as if it were already complete and did not need to be actively re-appropriated and transformed. ...

Most interesting (not to mention, difficult to acknowledge) of all, perhaps

If the New International calls for new forms of counter-collectivity
in this time of “wears and tears” – a radical enlightenment, an
oppositional public sphere, an alter-globalization (“altermondialisation”) – then it does so only on the condition of possibility it shares with globalization itself:  the “instantaneous” dislocations of the “living present” effected by the advent of “real time” broadcasts and virtual technologies [...]

For Derrida, spectrality is as determinate as a voice on the telephone or an image on a TV screen that insist they are “live.”  These transmissions make present here and now something taking place elsewhere. But, at the same time, they are ghostly duplications of actuality that separate the “living present” from itself, virtualizing and mediatizing it, in essence “spectralizing” it.  Though we would dispute Spivak’s casual remark that, “For [Derrida] hi-tech is all good, and only the media, albeit broadly defined,  is ‘technologically invasive,” it suggests a useful schematization of his dense comments on the subject (“Ghostwriting” 68).  On the one hand, Derrida insists on breaking down teletechnology as an instrument of capital.  Less than ever can we consider radio, television, fax, e-mail, the Internet, simply as conduits of “information” or “communication.     Rather they are crucial relays of globalization – and not just circuits for the consumption of commodities – but also machines that shape value, social relations, and our experience of time and place.  Derrida is especially incisive in describing television’s domination of the public sphere: its invisible and highly filtered construction of actuality (“artifactuality”), the linguistic and cultural homogenization of network programming (“homohegemony”), the “spontaneous[. . .] ethnocentricity” of the news, the violently restrictive and artificial conditions of televised discussion or debate.   Just as he argued against conceding to the decisionist urgency and unicity of the “day” that informs journalistic discourse, Derrida calls for intellectuals to resist the temporal constraints imposed upon their televisual interventions. Such resistance entails puncturing the inexorable rhythm of broadcast time, whether through visible and audible silence or the invention of new rhythms of response....

With that in mind, at this point I am simply going to continue to let the authors speak for themselves, as it makes for superb reading (of which frankly, those unaffiliated with any institution should not readily be deprived; if there are any complaints, I will gladly and promptly reconsider.)

Derrida depicts the spectral encounter with the recorded image of the other in a remarkable recollection of his own experience appearing in a scene of the film Ghostdance with the actress Pascale Ogier. In the scene, he asks her, “Do you believe in ghosts?” and she replies, “Yes, now I do, yes.” Three years after he acted out this scene with her, Pascale Ogier had died, and he watched the film again:  “Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead woman’s face, come onto the screen.  She answered my question: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Practically looking me in the eye, she said it to me again, on the big screen: ‘Yes, now I do, yes’” (Derrida and Stiegler 120).  Derrida discerns the pathos of this
situation in every confrontation with the recorded image.  The technological capture of the “living present” reveals the living dead at its heart.  On television, the temporal disjunction is all the more fundamental for being instantaneously erased.  As with Derrida’s “face-to-face” encounter with the ghost of Pascale Ogier, the supposed spectacular relation produced by televisual technology is reversed: the viewer is transfixed by the “visored” gaze of the ghostly image, watched instead of watching.

Our blindness as “spectators” is a situation of heteronomy parallel to the situation of inheritance as a relation to an anterior other.  According to Derrida, the spectral gaze of recorded images can greet us with the force of law.  In order to explain more fully this injunctive power, he augments Roland Barthes  conception of the “reality effect” of the photographic image.  For Barthes, the affective power of the photograph lies in its indexical capture of the living thing. Through the inscription of light, every photograph preserves an “emanation” of its object.  Derrida goes a step further:   If the “reality effect” is ineluctable, it is not simply because there is something real that is undecomposable, or not synthesizable, some “thing” that was there. It is because there is something other that watches or concerns me. . . . I have an even greater sense of the “real” when what is photographed is a face or a gaze, although in some ways a mountain can be at least as “real.”  The “reality effect” stems here from the irreducible alterity of another origin of the world.  It is another origin of the world. (Derrida and Stiegler 123)

This notion of “another origin of the world” underscores the democratic possibilities of virtual technologies.  Unlike some dystopic media theorists, Derrida does not associate the heteronomy of the teletechnological “gaze” solely with its menacing surveillance potential, though he recognizes this as an inherent threat.  For him, the scopic dissymmetry, the “visor effect” of spectral images, demands due regard for the absent and the dead.  The structure of anachronistic surveillance does not disable our ethico-political vigilance, but rather enables it: “my freedom springs from the condition of this responsibility which is born of heteronomy in the eyes of the other, in the other’s sight.  This gaze is spectrality itself” (Derrida and Stiegler 122).

The sense that freedom might emerge from being caught in an invisible gaze, from being blind before “another origin of the world,” played a significant role in Derrida’s search for an “other heading” of Europe.  Certainly, he placed himself “in the eyes of the other” when he turned to Marx as an untimely means of breaking with the new world order.  Derrida was convinced that, in the age of telematic spectrality, the unaccomplished inheritance of Europe calls for a responsibility before a world that Europe cannot fully “see” or apprehend.

-Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

 

I wonder if anyone else has had this particular experience, one this thought of the gaze as spectrality calls to my mind.  One stands transfixed before an especially charismatic speaker, say.  Usually, in my experience, he is wearing sunglasses (in response to which I always tend to fixate on the mouth; so much so that I am paralyzed nearly speechless).  Or, as David Foster Wallace once iconically described something very similar, as a child held hostage by the ghost of the unblinking eye of a suddenly blackened television screen, its momentary residual trace of light and threat from vague corneal memory lingering ever-so-briefly and sinisterly on the darkened screen.  A primal scene, of sorts.  What was that phrase, again? 

"Stiffening...into a nonrelational self."

It detracts little from Derrida's analysis of the spectral image to point out that the ghost of Hamlet's father actually wears his visor up, as Horatio at first insists and Hamlet later himself  recognizes (indeed, Derrida himself recognizes this explicitly, on page eight of the English translation).  If what was once a close-reading sometimes becomes a somewhat indulgent metaphor, well then metaphors are after all–though it pains conservatives everywhere to admit as much–often no less "real", that is to say present for being metaphors.