In light of the Derrida discussions I’ve been left feeling paranoid, wondering whether I’ve gotten everything entirely wrong and have just failed to understand the big-D. This wouldn’t be a surprise, given the difficulty of his work and the fact that I haven’t engaged with it deeply for nearly a decade. At any rate, I’ve gone back to Lee Braver’s wonderful A Thing of This World to determine whether my reading is off the mark. There, Braver cites the following passage from Of Grammatology:
Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language [my emphasis], that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general. That is why the methodological considerations that we risk applying here to an example are closely dependent on general propositions that we have elaborated above; as regards the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified [my emphasis]. There is nothing outside the text. And that is neither because Jean-JJacques’ life, or the existence of Mamma or Therese themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called ‘real’ existence [my emphasis] only in the text and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation. All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons: What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the ‘dangerous supplement,’ is that in what one calls the real life of these existences ‘of flesh and bone,’ beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau’s text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. [my emphasis]. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like ‘real mother’ name, have always already escaped, have never existed [my emphasis]; that what opens meaning and language is writing as disappearance of natural presence [my emphasis]. (OG, 158 – 159)
Declarations such as this can be found all over the place in Derrida’s works. So a couple of questions here: First, how is this not the claim that language is a primary modeling system for all human relations to everything else? I find it notable that in all the Derrida discussions so far there’s been no reference to the idea of a transcendental signified in the form of a referent. Derrida is exceptionally clear in this passage. Language is a primary modeling system rendering any access to beings apart from language impossible. As Circling Squares has so nicely put it (here and here), the thesis is that signifiers only ever refer to signifiers without ever being able to touch a signified. To be sure, trace and differance “open” language, but the fact remains that the thesis is that our relation to being is always only restricted to the framework of language or signs (it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference) as a primary modeling system.
Second, how are those defending Derrida against the charge of correlationism understanding “correlationism”? Between the Kant discussions that took place a year or so ago and the Derrida debates, I get the sense that defenders of anti-realism understand the charge of correlationism to be the accusation of Berkeleyian idealism. Hell, in the Kant discussions I even got people telling me Kant is a realist because he advocates the existence of things-in-themselves (i.e., being(s)(?) apart from humans and correlation). I was derided for suggesting that Kant is a Berkeleyian idealist. But I’ve never suggested such a thing. The charge of correlation is not the charge of Berkeleyian idealism or the thesis that perception, mind, language, etc., “makes” being. Correlationists can very well advocate the existence of some sort of being apart from the human or language. Rather, correlationism is the thesis that being can only ever be articulated in terms of the correlation such that we can have no knowledge of a) whether the beings making up the field of phenomena (the “for-us”) exist independent of us as they appear to exist for us (Brian Cantwell Smith, for example, argues that being-in-itself is pure flux that is then carved up by discourse and perception), or b) such that we can never know whether the objects we experience as phenomena resemble beings-in-themselves. This is exactly what Derrida is saying in the passage above. Because language is a primary modeling system, we can have no knowledge of whether being itself is anything like it appears to be to us through our linguistically/semiotically mediated frames. That’s correlationism.
Larval Subjects . 
August 18, 2010 at 3:17 pm
I will admit that your reading of the passage is one possible reading, which many others have put forward. This is especially the case with the initial reception of Derrida in literary studies, where the use of his work to generate a method of literary interpretation was obviously their first priority.
At the same time, I view this very passage as indicating a kind of “general ontology” of trace, differance, arche-writing, etc. It can be read as analogous to Kant — Kant says we can’t get at things themselves without the a priori structures of human experience, and Derrida specifies that those structures are fundamentally linguistic in nature. How I understand it, however, is that he’s saying that what we thought of as “real things” just don’t exist. There’s no such thing as a self-consistent thing existing independently of other things, just as (in his critique of phenomenology) there’s no such thing as pure self-presence or autoaffection.
I read Derrida in a much more Hegelian way than a Kantian way, then — it isn’t that we’re trapped in language, which always necessarily impedes, postpones, etc., our access to the real. What we experience as contingent obstacles are inherent to the real. Nothing is simply and directly “itself” — it is determined by relationality (what Derrida calls, using the terminology of structuralism, referentiality).
The “Kantian” reading does have support in Derrida’s text, but I think that Derrida’s own most prominent and creative followers — Nancy, Malabou, Hagglund — are taking him in what I’m calling the “Hegelian” direction.
Further: the two readings aren’t mutually exclusive. If the “Hegelian” reading is true, the “Kantian” stuff will remain in place as a special case (i.e., the specific human relationship to the “outside” or whatever you want to call it) of the more generalized ontological fact Derrida is uncovering. You might object that this seems to privilege human-object relations and that such a privilege can’t possibly be right — but by the same token, if object-relations in general can be characterized according to a “deconstructive” ontology, then wouldn’t human-object relations also be like that?
August 18, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Adam,
I don’t think I object to this. The question then would be whether Derrida is a “weak” or “strong” correlationist (Kantian or Hegelian). I think OOO and Derrida would be at loggerheads either way, as one of the central claims of my position is that objects are detachable from their relations. I’m happy to see trace at work within objects as the manner in which previous phases of an object are preserved, but also maintain the possibility of objects breaking with any and all contexts. Here I go back and forth on Derrida. In arguing that context never fixes any object, Derrida seems to come very close to OOO. However, he seems to come back to the idea that objects always fall back into some sort of context. In other words, he seems to deny the possibility of a context-less object. OOO doesn’t suggest that we have access to such objects, but treats such context-lessness as an entirely real possibility of objects metaphysically, regardless of whether we know anything about them. Here, of course, it’s also important to recall that such objects would not be pure presences because objects are withdrawn not only from other objects, but from themselves (hence what I see possible in Hagglund’s discussion of the trace).
August 18, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Adam Kotsko: “How I understand it, however, is that he’s saying that what we thought of as ‘real things’ just don’t exist. There’s no such thing as a self-consistent thing existing independently of other things…”
Right. That’s Derrida. And it’s the *exact opposite* of what OOO says about objects.
August 18, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I’m not concerned with whether Derrida is a correlationist or a realist in the OOO sense. I’m just concerned with whether the Kantian or Hegelian reading, as I’m calling them, is more adequate.
August 18, 2010 at 3:50 pm
[…] Wednesday, August 18, 2010 — Adam Kotsko Our dear colleague Levi Bryant continues to grapple with Derrida, as the push-back he’s received has made him wonder if his reading might be wrong after all. […]
August 18, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Adam,
That difference in what we’re talking about probably accounts for much of our talking past one another. On my end, the discussion was not a question of how to interpret Derrida, but a philosophical dispute between the claims of a thinker like Derrida and OOO. Whether D. turns out to be more adequately read as a Hegelian or a Kantian (in your sense) does not make a whole lot of difference in that debate. I don’t really see Hagglund as proposing a Hegelianization of Derrida in the sense you seem to be proposing because for him the key issue is time, not language, and the logic of trace would be operative regardless of whether language or humans existed (and maybe I’m just misunderstanding what you mean by “Hegelianizing Derrida” here… When I read that I immediately think “identity of substance and subject”). Martin and I have been writing back and forth a bit so I’ll ask him about it next time I get the chance.
August 18, 2010 at 4:03 pm
My AUFS post expanding upon the Kant/Hegel scheme may answer some of your objections. Specifically, I think it will reveal the distinction you’re drawing between time and language being the key category to be something of a red herring.
August 18, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Adam,
Yes, I see your argument. By the same token, I’m unsure how this can be squared with all Derrida’s critiques of transcendental signifieds. I think significant work needs to be done reworking what Derrida’s doing to get to what you’re talking about, though I think doing so is a very worthwhile project.
August 18, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Can you explain what you see as the conflict between my reading and Derrida’s critiques of transcendental signifieds? I’m not sure I follow.
August 18, 2010 at 4:37 pm
As I see it, a big part of D’s critique of the transcendental signified lies in undermining the idea that beings can function as fixed signified’s with respect to language, thereby halting the play of the signifier through a meaning that just would be transparently itself. It seems to me that this critique strongly supports what you’re calling the “Kantian reading”. I’ll add that OOO finds itself in an awkward position here as it doesn’t claim a) that we can have access to objects, nor b) that objects are fully self-present, i.e., there’s a lot of overlap between D and OOO. The difference would be that this is true of object-object relations and not simply language-object relations (i.e., it would approach your Hegelianism). What we would then get would be a narcissism of minor differences, where OOO theorists wonder why we don’t just bite the bullet and start talking about inter-object relations that don’t involve the human or language in any way.
August 18, 2010 at 4:43 pm
My “Hegelian” reading of Derrida is saying precisely that the same thing is true of object-object relations as of human-object relations. And if you’re endorsing my claim that all objects are split/self-inconsistent/determined-by-relation, then it would appear that you’re contradicting what Prof. Harman is saying above.
August 18, 2010 at 4:46 pm
I think where I get hung up with the reading you’re suggesting is that it seems to me that trace, arche-writing, and differing/deferral strike me as properties of language and language strikes me as deeply tied to the human. I get that Derrida also critiques the subject (this is what I was getting at in the last thread with my points about D’s anti-humanism). However, his critique of the subject seems premised on how the subject relates to itself through language and therefore is never present to itself (thus ruining the Husserlian project). But it’s still language that does this. Like Heidegger and his thesis that “language speaks” (not us), Derrida seems to advocate a sort of hegemony of the signifier that prevents presence to either objects or the subject. I’m all for that non-present, but D. seems to arrive at it through the thesis of language as a primary modeling system (which I can’t accept… Withdrawal is a matter of the objects themselves, not objects in relation to something else). When I critique these versions of anti-humanism, I keep coming back to the point that language wouldn’t exist if humans or some other type of life-form existed. As a consequence, what we get is not an ontology but a regional ontology discussing how one domain relates to another.
August 18, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Harman’s point would be that objects aren’t determined-by-relation. The split part would be a point of agreement.
August 18, 2010 at 4:55 pm
But humans are also in the universe — if the universe is structured around split objects determined by relation, etc., then why wouldn’t the distinctively human way of relating to objects (language) also be structured like that? Why don’t you expect to find the same structure in human experience and general ontology if human experience isn’t privileged or special? If anything human-based is disallowed from the start, that just seems to me to turn the privileging of the human upside down and denigrate it, but leave the basic structure that you call “correlationism” in place.
As for the claim that “objects withdraw,” that there are self-consistent objects behind their relations, it seems to me to be precisely that: a claim. What’s more, it seems to be an empty claim with no consequences whatsoever — if it’s true, then it literally affects nothing, because effects are a relation.
August 18, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Adam,
You write:
No disagreement here, I just don’t think this is a move that Derrida makes. It’s a move that Whitehead makes (and OOO with it’s claim that there’s only a difference in degree, not kind, between object-object relations and human-object relations) but I don’t see any move like this in Derrida. Rather, I see Derrida trumping all other relations with the language-object relation.
First, OOO does not claim that objects are “self-consistent” behind their withdrawal. The thesis is not that objects are fully self-present and just withdrawn from their relations. Rather, objects are withdrawn from themselves as well. This is why OOO’s conception of objects is not one based on objects as characterized by presence. I do have arguments as to why objects must be thought in this way (it’s not just a claim), but I won’t repeat them here as I’ve already made the arguments on a number of occasions. Finally, I believe that a number of consequences follow from this thesis. For example, if it is true then it follows that objects cannot be seen as constituted by their relations or as determined by their relations. Objects enter into relations, to be sure. Those relations also produce local manifestations. Yet because objects are always in excess of any relations, because they are always more than any of their relations, they always harbor hidden potentials that contain the power to overturn any local network of relations. At the practical level, this entails that the analysis of relations is never enough, but that we must engage in practices that place objects in different relations discovering what new local manifestations might be produced.
This is something I find perplexing in Derrida. He seems to be arguing something similar, arguing that context never determines or fixes anything, yet then appears to argue that everything is a field of differential traces or relations. In my view, you can’t have it both ways. You either grant the autonomy of substances and that however a substance appears is but a local manifestation within a network of relations that can be otherwise or you argue that context is fully determinative of the being of objects.
August 18, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Okay, so you are saying that for change to be possible, there has to be substance in excess of relations. I can see how you get there. I suppose that my argument would then get to my general problems with the concept of substance — if you want to keep that concept, it seems like one is inexorably led to Spinozism, where God is the only substance and where God’s infinity is what allows for the endless number of combinations, etc. If you have individual (and therefore presumably finite?) substances, though, I see no reason why they couldn’t in principle be exhaustively discovered over time, even if in fact that rarely or never happens.
August 18, 2010 at 5:27 pm
I think Spinoza ends up in a similar place vis a vis the possibility of change and that therefore substances have to be finite. I have a post somewhere on the blog from last year deconstructing Spinoza’s move to infinite substance. In my view, substances can’t be exhaustively discovered because a) new substances come into existence, and because b) the local manifestations of substances are general creations that take place in the world as a consequence of entering into new relations and not merely hidden properties waiting to be uncovered. I have a splitting headache at the moment so I won’t get into all the arguments for these claims here, though I’ve talked about them in the past.
August 18, 2010 at 5:31 pm
It still seems to me that keeping the category of substance is unnecessary and perhaps ultimately self-undermining if the possibility of change is the goal — because what is substance in your scheme but a kind of repository of potential relations? In my view, it’s more elegant to say that change is possible precisely because there’s “nothing underneath” relations, meaning that any given relation can be negated at any time, opening up new and unforeseen possibilities.
August 18, 2010 at 5:39 pm
That is, you don’t need an object to withdraw — you just need the withdrawal itself.
August 18, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Splitting headache here, as I said, but I see substance as the possibility of breaking with any relation and the ruin of any holism or relational internalism. Substance is what allows all entities to be mobile, shifting, and disruptive. For me the key point is not to confuse substances with their local manifestations in a network or field of exo-relations; and that means treating substances as withdrawn from both other substances and themselves. In my view, a number of social and political questions change when we no longer treat relations as internal. I wrote about this a bit earlier this morning. Also, I think the resurrection of substance serves the strategic function of leading us to focus less obsessively on the meaning of cultural artifacts, beliefs, propositional attitudes, signifiers, the symbolic, etc (not that we, by any means ignore these things) so that we attend more to the role played by nonhuman actors in social collectives and the role they play in leading social organizations to be organized as they are. In my view, current social and political theory places too much faith in the idea that change will be produced in the domain of meaning and through critique.
August 18, 2010 at 5:57 pm
I’m writing about this very passage right now. As a lit crit guy you would expect me to have a militancy about the supposed universality of Derrida’s claim. But actually, respect to Adam, as a liot crit guy I always read this passage as much LESS than that.
Remember how D loves to cleave close to the text he’s analyzing–why he appeals to lit crit close readers in the first place. I (and apparently Spivak, who offers a very different translation of the sentence in question) always thought (ie BEFORE converting to OOO) that D was ONLY saying, “Given the kind of closed system textuality that Rousseau prescribes, there is NO OUTSIDE-TEXT.”
That is, *Rousseau can’t go around making claims about nature, not because there is nothing out there, but because the way he models thinking, he sets textuality up as a black hole.
It’s PRECISELY the kind of generalization about reality that D’s fans (and critics) think he’s making that is at issue. This kind of sweeping statement is what becomes a black hole.
In fact then, D is claiming that texts are OBJECTS. They can only have *vicarious relations with non-texts.
When I’m feeling charitable towards D I imagine he thinks that by imploding this sort of generalization he is leaving non-textual objects intact.
Which is why I argue in EwN that there are coral reefs and bunnies, but NO NATURE.
(Then I am accused of being a nihilist by the eco beautiful souls, and receive threats of having bacon fat poured over my head, literally. Wash rinse repeat.)
When I formulated this interpretation
1) 9.9 out of 10 Derrideans thought exactly what Levi is arguing.
2) I was writing a Deleuzian diss. on food and for sure held that food was REAL.
August 18, 2010 at 6:27 pm
…in other words, Derrida’s formula is unit operational, not systematic.
August 18, 2010 at 6:40 pm
PS: due to sloppy blogographics on my part I messed up some paragraphing. This para:
When I’m feeling charitable towards D I imagine he thinks that by imploding this sort of generalization he is leaving non-textual objects intact.
Should have come BEFORE the one on texts as objects.
August 18, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Addendum: notice the rather rigorous difference between my argument and what some have claimed here, that D is OOO avant la lettre. Nothing could be further from the truth.
D ABSTAINED from ontology for the simple reason that he thought it tainted by the generalization-disease I note above. Unfortunately this defaults to various forms of antirealism, as noted by Levi.
For me, Derrida’s is a sin of OMISSION.
August 18, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Graham (3) I think most everyone agreed that Derrida and OOO differed on that point about the constituents of reality. It was the correlationist charge where people disagreed.
Levi, the other way to read this is as a Peircean conception of unlimited semiosis. There’s no direct unmediated reference. Everything is always mediated infinitely. The advantage of this reading is that it’s not denying reference but merely arguing it’s more complex than had previously been thought – especially by Husserl. The defense for this reading is that Derrida elsewhere (such as in the interview for Limited Inc) claims he doesn’t deny reference. (See the quotes here)
Once again I’m not saying yours isn’t a defensible reading. Clearly it is. Certainly though Derrida when he talks about interpretation and experience is talking about human experience. However I think what he says about the trace is simply much broader than that.
I think what Adam is calling the Hegelian reading is very close to the Peircean reading.
My sense is that you keep wanting to read trace and difference in terms of language whereas I keep wanting to read them in terms of signs of which language is just the most common example. Yet (and this is where my Peirce comes in) we can think of semiosis independent of humans and language. When we do I think most of Derrida’s analysis carries over without any problem.
Perhaps you’re right and I’m just reading Derrida through a Pericean lens. (Interestingly though I came to Peirce after I’d been reading Derrida for a while)
August 18, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Clark,
Your points about Peirce and reference are well taken. I’m all for understanding reference as more complicated than we expected. If you read The Democracy of Objects you’ll discover, in chapter 4, that I’m very much on the same page here. However, OOO is not an epistemological thesis (a thesis about what we can know), but an ontological thesis, or a thesis about what objects are. In my view, the sorts of remarks you’re making run these two issues together. The issue of how we, or any other entity, refers to an entity and whether we can represent an entity as it is (I don’t think we or anything else can) is quite different than the issue of the being of beings. In this respect, these sort of Derridean and Peircian considerations would belong to the domain of epistemology, not ontology. OOO would argue that we can say a great deal about the being of beings independent of all relations even if we can never know these entities as they are in themselves. In this respect, OOO is able to integrate the findings of epistemological anti-realisms while also proposing an ontology of objects independent of their relations (referential or others) to humans or any other object.
August 18, 2010 at 10:02 pm
The problem with Derrida is that early on he was engaged in debates on semiotics and it makes it look like he’s only talking about language. As his work goes on he moves away from such concerns and does begin to talk about issues in a way that makes it clear he is not concerned with language only but rather the structuration of the world both human and non-human. Of Grammatology would look much different–much more along the lines Levi proposes–if those later books had never come along. None of this may have been exactly clear when Of Grammatology was first making its way around but reading it back through the later work it certainly looks plausible that even in that book Derrida was talking beyond language–i.e. about he trace in the world of beings. Lit crit did of course take Derrida away from himself and in new directions of which he didn’t approve and that is also a huge determinate in how D has been understood.
August 18, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I’m looking forward to your book – especially in terms of distinguishing it from Graham’s view of OOP. BTW – I found your old post on correlationism that I’d missed. That helped tremendously in understanding some of your critiques of the past couple of weeks. If you ever do a post on your view of relations (or a link to one if you have a good tutorial on it) it’d be most appreciated. I think that’s the big hangup for me right now in terms of understanding OOP.
The old scholastics had several kinds of relations they admitted and kept clear but I find myself seeing them muddled in OOP. (Undoubtedly due to my own misreadings and misunderstandings)
I take, btw, Peirce’s semiotics as something ontological. This is especially true with his near neoPlatonism in his early more Kantian period. But I think it just as true in his more mature period. The classic paper on this is Kelly Parker’s “The Ascent of the Soul to Nous: C. S. Peirce as NeoPlatonist”. (The paper used to be available in full online but Parker unfortunately took it down) There are a couple of key places where Parker goes beyond the evidence but overall it’s a pretty compelling argument. (His The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought is in my opinion the best overview of Peirce in that it gets the place of continuity in Peirce’s ontology right.
In anyway I don’t think Peirce’s concerns relates to epistemology. I don’t think Derrida’s do either. Derrida doesn’t write well on epistemology (IMO) but the degree to which he does seems very close to Peirce. Peirce’s epistemology is more that of the selection of greater forces via secondness. He rejects doubt as being volitional and says that we reach points of stability in belief. So to him he transfers the question into whether one is inquirying and what survives inquiry. If you go to that link of quotes from Derrida you’ll see Derrida makes the same point, only referring to Nietzsche.
I think Peirce does raise logical issues and to him semiotics is logic. But it has a certain metaphysical and phenomenological aspect as well. I think it fair to critique both Peirce and Derrida as doing a kind of logic rather than ontology. I’d probably disagree. But I think that a very defensible reading.
BTW – as I noted to Graham back in February I think the Peircean approach to Kant’s “in itself” is quite interesting. He does think we can know things in themselves.
August 18, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Captain Furious, that’s how I read Derrida as well. Once interpretation and signs were no longer in the subject then it seems to me one can talk about them purely in the realm of beings independent of any subject. So the debate becomes somewhat similar to the realist debate relative to Heidegger and his famous statement in B&T “only as long as Dasein is ‘is there’ being.” The downside is that there aren’t the nice sections on deworlding in Derrida like there is in Heidegger to be quite as clear.
The debate then becomes whether Derrida is really following Heidegger more closely (i.e. talking about being) or if he’s doing something quite different (i.e. talking about something more primordial than being in the objects themselves) I favor the latter but I can completely understand those who don’t.
August 19, 2010 at 1:48 am
Yes, I agree that the issue does become whether Derrida is talking about being or something, as you say, more primordial. I’m not sure I would use the word primordial as it to me implies something originary and against the an-archic that comes across in the later works of Derrida as they connect to the atemporal futurity at work in relation to the democracy to come. At least, it’s a way of rethinking time and its structuration through the trace. This is primordial in a sense but not an originary one (I guess is what I’m getting at).
Of course as someone says elsewhere in comments the trace is no-thing, a thing beyond our notions of thingness and is thus, at least for Derrida, primordial.
I do think Derrida is talking about being, both human and non-human, in his later work but not in a purely ontological sense. This doesn’t mean one cannot think Derrida ontologically or read him that way.
To me the big problem with Derrida’s expositors is that most of their essays take the form of “this is what Derrida really means” through a close reading. I find the Hagglund intriguing because it reportedly does not do this. Can’t wait to read it.
July 29, 2011 at 1:59 am
[…] I’ve not done anything on OOO in over a year. I’ve just been too ridiculously busy. I have a bunch of Graham Harman’s books sitting here beside me on my nightstand waiting to be returned to. I’m hoping I can get back into them next week. However I was reading something by Levi today which sounded ridiculously how I think of objects and how I read Derrida. I know this is not at all how Levi reads Derrida. […]