UPDATE: Graham has a follow-up to this post here. There Graham reiterates the claim that Derrida is not a realist. I agree, Derrida is as little a realist as is Heidegger or Husserl. I am make the claim that the concept of differance can be deployed (with modification) in a realist fashion (for me what’s important is the concept of objects as blooming and withdrawing temporal structures). This sort of appropriation of concepts from anti-realist thinkers for realist aims is a move I commonly make. I make a similar move with Luhmann and the autopoietic theorists, Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and likely some other thinkers I’m forgetting at the moment. In chapter two of The Democracy of Objects, I follow Zizek’s Wagnerian route of claiming that “we are healed by the spear that smote us”. The anti-realist error was to believe that it had demolished realism, rather than seeing that the very structures it described are e structure of withdrawn objects. In other words, the mistake lay, as Graham notes in his response, in conflating being with presence. In my view, there is much in the anti-realist legacy that it is absolutely vital to preserve (namely the critique of presence and onto-theology). Not only are the two ontologically untenable, but they have, as I outline in this post, extremely destructive political and ethical consequences (Graham articulates this very nicely when he remarks that onto-theology treats some beings as more beings than others; (hence my ire towards theistic theologies as well, i.e., the great chain of being that ranks and measures beings). For me I feel that there’s a lot worth preserving in Derrida and, especially, in the work of those who have been deeply influenced by Derrida. Given that the challenge for me becomes one of determining how it’s possible to appropriate certain moments and operations of Derridean thought within a realist, object-oriented framework. It’s a similar sort of challenge that I encounter with Lacan, Luhmann, and Adorno.
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Graham has a post up outlining his thoughts on Derrida. Referring to a post I wrote recently on differance, he writes,
I also don’t agree with LEVI’S RECENT IDENTIFICATION of objects with différance. Quite the contrary. The object is precisely that which is deeper than any differing from anything else, precisely because it is non-relational through and through.
I was a little surprised by this post as Graham knows that I don’t hold that the being of objects does not consist in differing from other objects. I probably should have been clearer about this in my original post, but what interests me in my original post is, in particular, the dimension of deferral in Derrida’s non-concept of differance. I read Derrida’s differance as deferral as another name for withdrawal and Heideggarian aletheia. This dynamic is not a difference from or to other objects, but a process within an object itself. The idea is that for any local manifestion an object undergoes, its substantiality nonetheless withdraws. The important point here is that there could be a universe in which no other objects exist, in which there is only one existing object, and differance as I’m describing it here would or could still take place. In other words, differance is not difference between objects and the being of objects cannot be defined by the relations an object has to other objects. Based on remarks Derrida makes about grafting and subtraction in “Signature Event Context”, I have reason to believe that he doesn’t define the being of objects in terms of their relations to other objects either. For Derrida, it seems, any object can be severed from its relations to other objects. An article of mine entitled “The Time of the Object” should be published soon.
I personally share Derrida’s and (Lacan’s, not to ention Adorno’s) political critique of ontotheology and philosophies of presence. I believe these forms of thought contribute to truly horrific social systems that are deeply destructive to the planet, of others, and that are psychologically devastating for the person himself. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes, social systems based on the idea that there is a transcendent essence to the community like blood and soil ultimately will death. First, they inevitably produce an “other”, a remainder or residue, that must be destroyed for the community to attain self-identity with itself. This is the meaning, I believe, of Lacan’s analysis of masculine sexuality in the graphs of sexuation (which I take as a structural depiction of ontologies of presence and transcendence) and of Lacan’s discourse of the master. Second, they will the death of the individual member of the community as his difference must be erased, destroyed, to merge with the essence of the community. No sacrifice is too great. I can’t outline all of the noxious consequences that are entailed by ontotheology and philosophies of presence right now as I am with family in Ohio for my sister’s wedding, but it is worth noting that the identity folks like Derrida, Lacan, and Adorno critique is not the identity of individual entities, but rather general essences grouping individuals under a kind or shared features that erase the singularity of original entities. These essences then function teleologically as measuring sticks, evaluating the truth of an individual by virtue of how closely it resembles the essence and are then used to defend certain forms of oppression. For example, the writers of the American Constitution said that African-Americans are only 2/3rds human and that therefore slave owners were doing them a favor by taking on the role of a benign father directi the lives of these “childlike” people who, they said, cannot govern themselves because they lack reason. Another example would be a student in one of my classes who remarked, the other day, that homosexuality is deviant because we are just naturally heterosexual (as he put it, “keys go in a lock”). “Nature” here is a name for essence as those features shared in common by a plurality of entities. Here it became a measuring rod for certain sexed bodies. Only the essence, in this frame of thought, is fully self-present and abiding because they are eternal and always identical to themselves, but individual entities that come-to-be and pass-away can more or less approximate or resemble these essences and therefore have higher degrees of presence. Ergo we get justification for eradicating that which doesn’t conform to the essence or seeking to make it accord to the essence (the treatment of people with disabilities under the Nazis, for example, premised on the idea of an essence of what humans should be). This style of argument, which we witness again with every racism, sexism, every project of eugenics with the disabled, is based on the presence of essences as defining what is common to a plurality of individuals and that then measures how closely those individuals approximate the essence. The very reason I find OOO attractive is that it avoids this logic. With that said, however, political and ethical arguments are not sufficient for judging ontologies. If we wish to show that an ontology is inadequate, we require ontological arguments. I believe OOO provides exactly these sorts of ontological arguments.
November 13, 2011 at 5:14 pm
For us with less than perfect Derrida-savvy, could we describe “differing” as the relativity of the relation, the relating of relations? I’m channeling Kierkegaard here; relating is prior to any specific relation. Hence, relating withdraws from relation. Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this.
November 13, 2011 at 5:23 pm
Are you asking about differing or deferral? I’m talking about the latter.
November 13, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Not sure about Adorno, but both Lacan and Derrida (as well as Nietzsche) most certainly do critique the identity of individual entities. It’s been a while since I’ve read either, so I’m not equipped to cite examples of this, but my understanding of Derrida is that identities, as conceived by the tradition, *are* general essences. Whereas OOO and even Deleuze attempt to provide a concept of identity without recourse to absolute criteria, I’m not certain Derrida ever does and this lack of a constructive project is one reason I honestly find him a bit boring. I think this is what Harman means by withdrawal does not equal differance, as the latter defines identity through relations of difference that never cash out in any non-relational identity and thus have no means of meaningful comparison. What I like about most strains of SR is that they allow multiple overlapping relationally determined identities to make truth claims, but also posit some mechanism by which these claims can be put into dialog with one another.
November 13, 2011 at 10:15 pm
[…] Levi are up with posts on Derrida. Since I’ve spending of the day reading Levi’s recent […]
November 13, 2011 at 10:17 pm
The former, I believe, for if if I recall rightly, deferral is a notion in phenomenological semiotics, etc., whereas I’m speaking ontology. Harman used the word “differing” in your quotation.
One can understanding differing as differing from oneself, i.e., “being” is “being different” or “not-self-same,” and not just differing from another; the former is a notion of ontological genesis whereas the latter is ontic comparison. It is one way to get out of a substance metaphysics.
To put it in OOO speak, does the object withdraw from itself?
Again, I defer to your expertise, for I only know enough about the subject to ask thoughtful questions.
November 13, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Jason,
Deferral is one half of Derrida’s non-concept of differance. Yes, I argue in both TDO and in my Speculative Turn piece (“The Ontic Turn”) that beings are withdrawn even from themselves, ie, that no being is fully self-present to itself.
November 13, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Zach,
That’s right. What I meant was that their critiques are largely directed at essences understood as general types (Graham’s account of essence as the singular structure of beings drawn from Zubiri is quite different from what they’re critiquing, ie, general kinds). But it is true that they all seek to deny the unity or identity of individuals. I certainly don’t follow them in this.
November 14, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Levi,
So, “general” should be understood in the onto-logical sense as opposed to “universal”? For example, Locke’s example of the dog is a general idea, of a genera of all the particular ideas of dogs we may have. This is in contrast to a universal, i.e., whiteness (many phenomenal qualities are understood to be universals in realist phenomenologies). So, a “general essence” would be a genera and not a universal, in which case the concrete ideas is always generated and not univocal. Is this the track?
November 14, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Hi Jason,
I’m using general and universal as synonyms in this context, though I certainly wouldn’t object to your more precise rendering. I only chose to use “general” because I’ve found that people are often confused by what universals are in philosophy (i.e., they confuse universals with being something everyone shares or knows, rather than understanding them as those features common to all entities of a particular natural kind). “Realist phenomenology” sounds like an oxymoron to me. All the phenomenologists I’ve ever encountered claim that the debate between realism and idealism is a “pseudo-problem”. In my view (following Rorty), this means that realism always loses and one is really advocating a variant of idealism or correlationism. At any rate, when I speak of universals or general terms in this context, I’m not referring to ideas or contents of mind, but to ontologies that treat them as genuinely existing entities. To treat them as ideas is already to lean in the direction, I think, of nominalism that holds that they aren’t real entities (a good move in my view).
November 14, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Levi,
It’s not an oxymoron in process metaphysics and phenomenology, although I would accept that I equivocate on what “realist” means when used in that context. It’s not what analytic means by realist, etc. This might be one of the sticking points between OOO and process-relational SR, since the latter is usually realist (cf Whitehead eternal objects).
I take all metaphysics that I do to be a kind of abduction, so the distinction between “ideas” and “genuinely existing entities” is not the point of tension for me. However, I’m still fighting nominalism, again, as much of PR-SR is.
November 14, 2011 at 8:22 pm
Jason,
As we use the term, to qualify as realist an entity must be capable of existing even were all human and sentient beings destroyed. It’s an ontological, not epistemological category. Ergo “realist phenomenology” is an oxymoron insofar as it is about the intentional relation between a subject and object(or body and object, or dasein and object), not about the entity itself.
November 14, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Levi,
I am, of course, familiar with that definition. We inheritors of scholastic realism affirm the reality of universals. It’s an ontological, not epistemic category. Ergo, “realist phenomenology” is not an oxymoron, because the relationship is not as you describe, e.g.,an intentional relationship between a subject and object. The relationship is between a potency and its actuating conditions, which need not necessitate “human” conditions. Strictly speaking, although it twists the terms a bit much, a “realist phenomenology” of this sort need not even require consciousness.
I mention this because it might aid in understanding what the Whiteheadian PR-SR folks are up to when they say apparently strange things. Part of the motivation for this, other than thinking time as a fundamental metaphysical concept, is to dodge the Cartesian legacy that you are also trying to avoid.
November 14, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Jason,
You must be using the term “phenomenology” in a way with which I am not familiar. I am referring to the phenomenological tradition (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, etc). In other words, I take you to be referring to intentionality or some form of intentional relation. Insofar as the intentional relation is necessarily a relation between a subject and object, it falls directly under the criticism of correlationism that various SR theorists, including myself, have developed in detail. In neither of your posts here have you explained what you mean by the term of why it should be taken as a form of realism. As for your reference to Whitehead, what reasons do you have for admitting eternal objects into your ontology. In other words, can you present an argument for the existence of eternal objects or explain what problem you see this concept resolving? I see Whitehead’s account of eternal objects and God as the most ad hoc and least attractive features of his ontology. For example, rather than treating green as an eternal object that “ingresses” into leaves, why not simply treat green as a product of choryphyl, light, particular types of brain structures able to experience the world in these terms, etc. Why multiply entities needlessly by positing the existence of such an eternal object?
November 15, 2011 at 10:11 am
[…] on between Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy (henceforth OOO) and Levi Bryant over at Larval Subjects (henceforth LS) about whether Derrida’s work is serviceable for realism. OOO is emphatic: not […]