Just to clarify, you asked me the stupidly broad question of whether or not there is a "commonality between the attitudes of say Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida when it comes to truth, dialectic, universality and transcendence?". Moreover, I affirmed that they are probably as many commonalities as there are differences in their respective "attitudes", which is just the banal answer that that banal question deserves. Further, my 'ignorant and unstudied comment' was directed at anyone who thinks there is a "general consensus among the postmoderns when it comes to the issues of truth and universality", and did not refer to the question of 'defining commonalities'.

With those little truths of of the way, I should point out just how much bad faith your OP bathes in. It wants to assert that, on the one hand, there are "defining commonalities of thought" between 'postmodern thinkers' (all three of them apparently! Because lets discount the humongous amount of other literature that comes out of the same tradition), and that on the other hand, it's not all that easy to pin down what their saying anyway. As for any actual examples of thesis statements regarding 'truth, meaning, universality, transcendence and metaphysics', of course there's nothing. OP is a joke whose only purpose is to invite further mystification and bad blood.

There probably are commonalities, no less than they are differences. But this is of course to say literally nothing at all. That's what happens when you pose bullshit psychology questions in place of analysis.

And in any case, why just those three? Why not Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver, Dorothea Olkowski, Vicki Kirby, Ernesto Laclau, Elizabeth Grosz? These are authors who, coming out of a very similar tradition, have written much on the above questions, with many places of agreement and disagreement between them. Why not Kaja Silverman, or Julia Kristeva, or Francois Lyotard, or John Sallis, or Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Paul Ricoeur, or Sara Ahmed? Or are all these names interchangeable to you? Is the complete and utter dumbness of your question concerning 'attitudes' coming through right now?

there is general consensus among the postmoderns when it comes to the issues of truth and universality; if it wasn't for that they could not rightly be referred to as 'postmoderns'. — John

Yes - which is why "they" are wrongly referred to as postmoderns, except by the ignorant and the unstudied.

What discourse of postmodernity? Who said it? Whose theory of truth? Which take on universality? Despite, or better, in spite of your total ignorance on these matters, there isn't some manifesto which thinkers you consider postmodern agree with and espouse in the same voice. If you've got a text or a thinker in mind, or even an argument which you'd like to engage with, please present it. I have no interest in your caricatures and bad faith proselytizing. If anything, your posts themselves are a kind of performative indictment as to the banality and violence of thrusting universality upon disparity. And in any case, please take it outside this thread, where you can tout your agenda without disrupting a reading group.

Then they can pose their claims, their account of those claims, and then one can debate over those accounts and how they coordinate with various presuppositions and so on, like people have done from time immemorial. I mean sorry but this is a really dumb line of questioning.

Riley isn't a phenomenologist (or at least she doesn't claim to be), she's just someone who's writing I find helps bring out many aspects of the 'inner voice'.

Eh, I feel differently, but then, there's no argument here.

What I like about Riley's description(s) is it's attention to the different valences of the 'inner voice'. The inner voice not as one 'kind' of speech, but a variety: sometimes a 'polyphonic brigade', sometimes a explicit dialogue, sometimes fragments and half-finished lines, sometimes phrases 'stuck in the head', sometimes just a intensity of 'wanting-to-say' and so on. Taken together, they paint a picture of a voice that is always in some manner impersonal, never fully under our control, a voice with a life of it's own, even while it belongs to us. I think this accords quite nicely with my experience(s), which are not univocal, don't follow some pretdetermined image of what 'inner speech' ought to be.

I just feel that you've some idea of what it 'ought' to be, and tend to judge everything by that light. The kind of authenticity and REALLY ME sort of thing you ascribe to the inner voice just seem odd to me. Folk, as you say, but precisely in a pejorative way.

Phenomenologically, my favorite writing on the topic actually comes from Denise Riley, a philosopher/poet whose essay "A voice without a mouth: inner speech" is indispensable reading for this stuff. She brings out, very nicely, the impersonality of the 'inner voice', which, I think if one really attends to it, becomes quite obvious. Some choice cites (sorry for the length but the essay is too good):

"As to how I inhabit my own inner speech, I am probably more accurately described as talking with myself rather than to myself. A great deal of what goes on in the head consists of an agitated running self-interrogation; ‘What did I just come into this room to get? Oh, I know, I probably left my cup of coffee in here, it’ll be cold by now. No, no, I had to telephone someone, but who was it?’ That is, there is an internal dialogue, but in these exchanges I appear to occupy both sides of it, and there is no one heavily weighted side to my garrulous split self.

...Still, perhaps at times a sense of dialogue can spring up in me, and I may feel that I’m talking both to and with myself when I notice that I have become my inner companion. Then I can silently calm myself, debate with myself. More censoriously, as my knowing superego I can berate myself, upbraid myself, goad myself along. But very often I do not actually address myself at all, and there is simply talking inside me. There is a voice. Questioned as to its origin, I would be in no doubt that it’s my own voice, but its habitual presence in me resembles a rapid low-grade commentary without authorship, rather than any Socratic exchange between several loquacious and attentive inner selves. Better Beckett’s accurate assertion: ‘whose voice, no-one’s’.

... We might say that inner speech itself lives as a state of ventriloquy, in that there is talking within us as if we are spoken from elsewhere; but this state just is our main mode of speaking. It’s present in the ordinary experience of overhearing myself speaking inwardly in a well-formed voice, whether as an outcome of switching my attention onto my inner speech or of feeling it to have risen and swum forward to claim my attention. Ventriloquy makes this daily inner speech: the state of sensing that words are running through me, across me. There is a kind of ‘it is speaking in me’ which is not exactly ‘it is speaking me’, but is an unwilled busiedness which I catch and may try to inhibit in myself.

Words race across me in polyphonic brigades, constantly swollen by the forces of more inrushing voices, and I can put up only a rear-guard censoring action. But this impression is no fully blown hallucination, for again there is no disowning and projecting of my inner voice, only my feeling of becoming a vehicle for words from elsewhere, much as a ventriloquist’s dummy or doll is made to speak vicariously. The real speaker’s, the ventriloquist’s voice, is thrown as if to issue from the passive doll, seemingly animating it. But the person who is the terrain of imperative inner speech, whether of love or hate or some other force, herself becomes the theatre for the performer and the puppet alike. The performer here is the arch-ventriloquist, language.

... Inner speech is no limpid stream of consciousness, crystalline from its uncontaminated source in Mind, but a sludgy thing, thickened with reiterated quotation, choked with the rubble of the overheard, the strenuously sifted and hoarded, the periodically dusted down then crammed with slogans and jingles, with mutterings of remembered accusations, irrepressible puns, insistent spirits of ancient exchanges, monotonous citation, the embarrassing detritus of advertising, archaic injunctions from hymns, and the pastel snatches of old song lyrics."

Out of curiosity, do you believe this? — The Great Whatever

Yes, with qualification. At this point in his writing, thought remains a matter of 'words' for M-P (i.e. the first line you didn't quote: "Thought is nothing “inner,” nor does it exist outside the world and outside of words). But as M-P would realize (and this is where Derrida more or less 'begins'), 'words' are a case of a more general phenomenon of what he calls 'expression' (employed in a very different way than in Husserl). Expression is perhaps the the most interesting concept in all of MP, and it designates a paradox in which what is expressed does not pre-exist it's expression, but is engendered along with it. For MP, expression will become the manner in which pretty much every phenomenon is subject to, and comes about from (from perception to language, art and ontology).

So I would shift the emphasis on 'language' and 'words' in the passage, to expression tout court. Although already couched in the language of expression, at this point, language remains the model of expression in MP. But if - in a manner analogous to Derrida - expression becomes a model unto itself as it were, one that applies to all phenomena indiscriminately, then thought is just as much a matter of say, gesture, as it is words (gesture being another theme that is incredibly important in MP). One can literally think in gestures, in movement: thought as affect. So there's something more to 'inner thought' than the mere recollection of expressed language or expressed speech. Insofar as language itself is - as far as I'm concerned - a species of affect, what is 'silently recalled' is more or less a complex of affects, sometimes couched in the form of language, sometimes not.

To try and bring this back a little to Derrida, the point of convergence is that just as M-P generalizes 'expression' (initially a feature of language, now a feature of things more generally), so too does Derrida generalize the 'structure of repetition' as no longer belonging solely to the sign, but as 'contaminating' any and all 'presence'. In both cases, what is attacked is any kind of 'simple' from which everything else flows: inner speech, presence, etc. In both cases it's always a matter of attending to the reality of expression itself, of bestowing existential weight, as it were, the process of unfolding, rather than treating expression (in MP's sense) as immaterial scaffolding. They are both 'anti-reductionist' imperatives, where things can't be 'reduced' to other things without remainder. So it's not a matter of siding with an 'outside' against an 'inside', so much as refusing any attempt to isolate any 'region' whatsoever as being somehow primary, with everything else derivitive.

This is why Derrida will end up talking about 'originitive supplements' at the end of VP, where supplementarity (derivation) is mapped right into the 'original' itself. But we'll get there soon enough.

I've always liked Merleau-Ponty's take on this, who provides an account of the transcendental illusion (or what he calls the 'trick') involved in thinking that thought is 'inner': "Thought is nothing “inner,” nor does it exist outside the world and outside of words. What tricks us here, what makes us believe in a thought that could exist for itself prior to expression, are the already constituted and already expressed thoughts that we can silently recall to ourselves and by which we give ourselves the illusion of an inner life. But in fact, this supposed silence is buzzing with words – this inner life is an inner language. “Pure” thought is reduced to a certain emptiness of consciousness and to an instantaneous desire. The new meaningful intention only knows itself by donning already available significations, which are the results of previous acts of expression" (PoP, p. 188-189, Donald Landes trans.)

*M-P uses the term 'expression' here in a different way than the technical sense we've been discussing here; he means it in the more colloquial sense of 'to express an inner thought' - although this is just what he will challenge.

There are some incredible resonances between Merleau-Ponty's and Derrida's work on language, although in truth, I much prefer reading M-P than Derrida. There's just something... elating about M-P's use of language, where Derrida comes off as just trying to be a bit too clever alot of the time.

Please come back when you're done mixing up categories.

Literally none of the quotes you

p44: "In this way, against Husserl's express intention - we come to make Vorstellung in general and, as such, depend on the possibility of repetition..."

p45: "But this ideality, which is only the name of the permanence of the same, and the possibility of repetition, does not exist in the world, and does not come from another world"

p45: "Absolute ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition. We can therefore say that being is determined by Husserl as ideality, that is, as repetition".

Clearly, on p45, the ideality referred to is absolute ideality, and this ideality is taken to be the possibility of repetition, and the name of that ideality is "the sign", — Metaphysician Undercover

Literally none of these quotes even use the word 'sign', and your quip about 'the name of that ideality is sign' simply begs the question. Again, there's zero textual support for your line of reasoning.

As for your discussion of imagination, as you said, you simply don't understand the vocabulary here, and very little of what you say makes any sense whatsoever within the context of either Derrida nor Husserl's discussions.

But the issue goes deeper than the sign, which is the possibility of repetition, to the possibility of ideality itself. Expression, for Husserl seems to be an absolute ideality, an indefinite possibility. When Derrida defines this absolute ideality as "the sign", or "the possibility of repetition", he thereby limits possibility, by means of this definition, such that we are no longer referring to an indefinite possibility. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry Meta but this is a total garble. Not only is there no textual evidence for any of this (can you cite, exactly - page number and quote - where 1) Derrida 'defines absolute ideality as the sign', and 2) where Husserl defines expression in terms of "indefinite possibility"?), but you're not going to find any because you're completely confusing categories that simply have nothing to do with each other.

First of all, it literally would make no sense to "define ideality as the sign". At best, one can say that Derrida claims that ideality partakes of the structure of sign, but to say that ideality = sign is simply to utter an absurdity, a meaningless string.

Second, it similarly makes zero sense (it is literally non-sense) to refer to expression as "indefinite possibility". Neither Husserl nor Derrida ever make this claim. Insofar as the phrase is employed, it is with respect to the sign and its "indefinite possibility" of repetition, but to speak of "indefinite possibility" simpliciter, especially in relation to expression (which is in no way some kind of modal category), is just word-salad. Please try to at least get the vocabulary right if you're going to try and advance a critique.

But that whole critique is muddled! Necessity qualifies possibility - that is, for a sign to be a sign, the possibility of it's repetition is necessary; it is necessarily repeatable, on pain of no longer being a sign. A sign for which it would not be necessary to be repeat would be something like God's Word: it would im-mediate and durationless, not unlike the manner in which Augustine writes of it in the Confessions:

"But how didst Thou [God -SX] speak? In the way that the voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son? For that voice passed by and passed away, began and ended; the syllables sounded and passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, and silence after the last. Whence it is abundantly clear and plain that the motion of a creature expressed it, itself temporal, serving Thy eternal will. ... Thou callest us then to understand the Word, God, with Thee God, Which is spoken eternally, and by It are all things spoken eternally. For what was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing concluded that the next might be spoken, but all things together and eternally. Else have we time and change; and not a true eternity nor true immortality." (Confessions, Book XI).

Basically, Derrida will affirm, against Augustine, upon the necessity of this 'passing away of syllables', of what he will refer to as 'spacing' and 'periodicity', of the necessity of spatialization and temporalization against the eternal: "temporization is also temporalization and spacing, the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time" ("Differance", in Margins); In VP itself, although time will be taken up as an explicit theme (especially in the next chapter), space makes quite a few, albeit understated appearances, some of which we've come across already, in the chapter 3 especially: "indication alone takes place in nature and in space ... [while presence]... has still not exited from itself into the world, into space, into nature." (p. 34). And: "Visibility as such and spatiality as such could only lose the self-presence of the will and of the spiritual animation which opens up discourse. They are literally the death of that self presence." (p.29).

With respect to the question of 'finitude' then, Derrida is perhaps more properly spoken of as a philosopher of mortality: if the possibility of death is a necessity (Again: necessity qualifies possibility), then immortality is impossible; the immortal is always haunted by the possibility of His death, necessarily - rendering Him mortal. 'Time and change' (spacing and timing) against 'eternity and immortality', in Augustine's terms.

This thread is too funny. The OP makes an offhand remark about 'postmodernism' and people lose their shit. It's like one of those Manchurian candidate activation words, where just its mere mention is enough to get people fomaing at the mouth. It used to bother me, but now I just feel sorry for anyone with that reaction.

In some way I think you have to agree with Heidegger -- at least to a certain degree -- about the history of metaphysics to make sense of Derrida. I remember reading Heidegger was the sort of "lynch pin" that helped me to begin to see what was going on years ago (or, at least, gave my mind handholds) — Moliere

Ya the usual story goes that Derrida took a Heidegger's conception of the history of metaphysics ('ontotheology' in Heidgger) and transformed it into the 'metaphysics of presence', and similarly took Heidegger's notion of the 'Destruktion' of metaphysics and transformed it into the 'deconstruction' of metaphysics. And Derrida, ever the radical, ends up locating Heidegger in that tradition as well, even though he notes that Heidegger was exemplary in trying to escape it.

Interestingly, Derrida never claims to escape what he calls the 'closure of metaphysics' either. As with the double bind of (im)possibility, his reading of that history aims to show the points in it by which it renders itself both possible and impossible. This is why Derrida is always at pains to specify his own position of enunciation, the 'place' from which he makes his judgements. He is neither inside nor outside the tradition but in some indiscernible place on it's edge (or 'margin' - as he would title one of his more well known books 'Margins of Philosophy'): he always says "we", he includes himself in the tradition even as he deconstructs it, and generally never from a point 'outside' of it.

Yeah, I can see that. There's definitely a kind of repetitious formalism that's at work everywhere in Derrida, and part of his stylistic and thematic extravagance always struck me as a kind of hysteric reaction to a deadlock in the Real, in the psychoanalytic sense, a proliferation in the face of what would otherwise be a kind of theoretical monotony. On the other hand, it's one of those things - for me at least - that, 'once you see it, you can't unsee it'. Once you understand the limits that deconstuction places on philosophy, you have to be very careful to work within those limits, or at least, address them head on to explain why they don't apply to you. It's kind of Copernican for me: once you pass though that ring, there's no going back; you can no longer think in terms of pure presence without being either profoundly naive, willfully insincere, OR, you rethink entirely what it would mean to think in terms of presence.

Derrida always functions as a kind of bulwark for me: if you're going to 'do' philosohpy, how do you do it in the face of deconstruction? What kind of vigilance will you need to exercise? Derrida always insists that there's no going beyond the 'closure of metaphysics', but I think that's exactly the challenge that needs to be met, without, for all that, simply falling back into the positions that Derrida everywhere (rightly) critiques. There's no going 'beyond' Derrida, imo, but there are side-steps or side-shuffles that one can make that that escape the very problematic he poses. In truth I hardly read Derrida these days because I feel I've 'absorbed' what I need from him - there are more interesting things to read. But the question always haunts: would Derrida's general critique apply to this, and if not, why not?

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Heh, yeah, I'm familiar with that Levi-Strauss quote, and given the time period I think he would have been referring too, I always think he's referring to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, who both pretty much write all their books exactly in that manner.

Yeah, exactly. Full presence and total absence are basically the same thing for Derrida, and the whole point of Derrida is to conceive of the space (and time!) 'in between' both as it were. In Of Grammatology, he's very clear about this: "pure presence itself, if such a thing were possible, would be only another name for death." In contrast, Derrida will attempt to think a 'time of survival', of 'living on'. If you're interested, check out Derrida's last interview he ever gave before his death, were he's asked whether or not he has 'learnt how to live'. It's a beautiful, moving discussion, and his answer is worth quoting:

"So to answer your question, without further delay: no, I never learned-to-live. Absolutely not! Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome, or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. I believe in this truth without giving myself over to it. Less and less in fact. I have not learned to accept death. We are all survivors on deferral ...

The question of survival or deferral ... has always haunted me, literally, every moment of my life, tangibly, unrelentingly ... I have always been interested in the subject of survival, the meaning of which is not supplemental to life or death. It is originary: life is survival. Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death. All the ideas that have helped me in my work, notably those regarding the trace or the spectral, were related to the idea of "survival" as a basic dimension. It does not derive from either to live or to die. No more than what I call "originary mourning." It is something that does not wait for so-called "actual" death."

You can find the interview here: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~dclark/documents/rememberingJD/Derrida.I%20am%20at%20war%20with%20myself2.pdf . There's also Derrida's article, Living On (which can be found with a google search), but that's no where near as fun to read.

Will have post something else about trauma.

I'm not really comfortable with the appeal to counterfactuality, because I think it will explode the thesis into triviality: talk of what could be repeated obscures important points about what it takes, empirically, for a sign to be part of a sign-system, and we could say for instance that a cloud could be a letter, and so on. — The Great Whatever

I think I'd be careful in framing this talk of possibility in terms of counterfactuality. At issue is not the choice between two different possibilities, x and y, but simply the possibility or not of repetition. As such, the possibility at stake is transcendental, in the Kantian usage of the term: is it a matter of the "conditions of the possibility of the sign": to be repeatable (qua capacity) is the condition of possibility of a sign. Although Derrida at this point will not phrase things this way he will soon begin to in later works, and it's worth putting things in these terms even here, because they clarify things quite nicely (I think anyway).

So - what is crucial to note (and this is Derrida's modification of, and contribution to, the transcendental tradition of thought), is that this condition of possibility (repetition) also doubles as what Derrida will later also refer to as the condition of impossibility of the sign. That is: if a sign is to be a sign, it must be open to the possibility of repetition. This is it's condition of possibility. However, because no one instance of the sign will 'exhaust' the ideality of the sign, because the presence of the sign will always be infinitely deferred, this condition (repetition) simultaneously functions as it's condition of impossibility (impossibility of 'full instantiation' at any one 'moment').

None of this is covered in VP, but again, I think it helps to frame things in this way as it shows how the moves made in VP can be articulated in a wider context regarding the transcendental. In fact, if one could summarize the thrust of all of Derrida's work, it's this: that these conditions of (im)possibility, once thought specific to the sign, are the conditions of (im)possibility of anything whatsoever.

Re: Saussure, this is how he will read Saussure's work too: because Saussure conceived of language as a differential system, where the value of each term was only ever determined by it's position in a system of language, the immediate question is: what defines the limit of this system? Saussure never quite got around to answering this question (or rather, he struggled with it his entire life), and Derrida more or less grasps the nettle and says something like: the limit is the world in it's entirety (although Derrida will probably have no tuck with the notion of 'world' or the notion of 'entirety'). This is why I highlighted, in my summary, the strange remark about how the impossibility of distinguishing between representation and reality just is language.

If I see food missing from the pantry, it might indicate the local rat has been about again; but to everyone else, not knowing about the existence of this rat, this is no such indication at all. Within this limited scope, then, the sign is idiosyncratic.

...If we were to move into only expressive or linguistic signs, then we might think about empirical phenomena that sit uncomfortably with both the analytic and continental pictures, including twin languages, self-directed speech, child nonsense words, studies involving experimental subjects who learn on language fragments containing nonce-words, ephemeral names like 'Mr. I Don't Know What Time It Is,' which only require one tokening to be understood, and may never be used in a speaker's life again afterward, and so on. — The Great Whatever

I think these examples betray a misunderstanding. Idiosyncratic does not mean 'used only once'. The notion of idiosyncrasy at stake turns not upon matter of facts, but a matters of principle: is this sign, in principle, repeatable, even if it is, in fact, only ever used the one time? That is, if I notice the food missing from the pantry, then any one, in principle, could do the same. It is a matter for the capacity or the ability for repetition. Alphonso Lingis, whose wrote a stunning book on these matters (one that is easily as good, if not far better than VP), makes this clear in one of his passages, where he speaks of ideality in the Husserlian sense:

"The objects of the theoretical attitude are ever ideal objectives. An idea is an ideal object, a structure of factors or elements which cohere necessarily such that if anyone of them is there, all are there; ... It is an identity. If ever it should recur, it will recur with the same identity. If ever it could recur even once ... it could recur at any time, anywhere. This repeatability is not a property that follows from its ideal essence, but constitutes it; for Husserl, who is not a Platonic substantialist, ideal being insists not in intemporal subsistence but in unrestricted recurrability. The form of infinity - the ad infinitum - enters into the constitution of every idea." (Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity, my emphasis).

Derrida himself is not exactly equivocal on this point either. Note the insistence on possibility in the following passage: "We come to make Vorstellung in general and, as such, depend on the possibility of repetition, and the most simple Vorstellung, presentation, depend on the possibility of re-presentation ... This ideality, which is only the name of the permanence of the same and the possibility of its repetition, does not exist in the world and it does not come from another world. It depends entirely on the possibility of acts of repetition. It is constituted by the possibility of acts of repetition. Its “being” is proportionate to the power of repetition. Absolute ideality is the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition." (p. 44-45). Everywhere it is a question of possibility. So long as that possibility exists, or rather, so long as that possibility insists, in principle, then the sign contaminates all presence.

Another passage, in the same chapter, for substantiation: "It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, as the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relation to death. The determination and the erasure of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation of this relation to death which nevertheless was producing signification. If the possibility of my disappearance in general must be in a certain way experientially lived so that a relation to presence in general can be instituted, we can no longer say that the experience of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (of my death) comes to affect me, supervenes over an I am and modifies a subject." To put it as programmatically as possible: signs, to the degree that they are repeatable in principle (even if there is no 'actual' sign), are not - or rather cannot be - idiosyncratic.

That all said, I think you're entirely right to note the profound similarity between Derrida and Wittgenstein on these matters. I've always considered Derrida's arguments regarding repetition to be another - superior - way to pose the 'private language argument' that Wittgenstein advances in the PI. Henry Staten wrote a nice little comparative study (endorsed by Derrida in fact!), the imaginatively titled Wittgenstein and Derrida that addresses some of these proximities.

--

I also wonder whether anyone would be interested in talking a little bit about the background involving Saussure. He was overtly mentioned last chapter, but this one seems to me to be where his influence is most obvious and crucial for getting at what's going on.

I'll see If I can conjure something up on this at some point if I can.

What's the point of your contribution to this thread other than to be a prat?

I guess the question is: how could an idiosyncratic sign be a sign? That is, if a sign is in principle unrepeatable (and when I think about it, the only paradigm I know of this is divine revelation), in what way can it be properly called a sign? Or better, what kind of a thing would a sign be if it were in principle unrepeatable? And what would it not be? (what theory of the sign would be at work?).

Blockchain tech was and is actually the basis of bitcoin, and was in use as such before the accounting boffins got a hold of it. Since they did though, there's been heaps of money poured into making it the basis of commercial accounting systems, and it'll be interesting to see if it does end up revolutionizing that industry.

Preempting a little, this 'digging deeper' is exactly what Husserl does in the Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, which Derrida will shortly turn to. The example of music is an apt one, because music (or rather melody) is precisely the basis upon which Husserl will consider the notion of time. I don't remember if Derrida does talk about melody (a quick search says no), but it's good to keep in mind as you read on.

On to some thematics:

Originality of the Sign

Part of what's at stake in Derrida's reading here is to affirm what he refers to as the 'originality of the sign'. As he notes, traditionally, the sign is often treated as derivitive with respect to 'presence', where in this case, presence refers to the presence of 'actual communication' on the one hand, or expressivity on the other. Derrida will have alot to say about presence in the upcoming chapter, but to prempt a little, one can correlate the distinction between presence and sign with the distinction between voice and writing. The voice being a kind of immaterial purity of sense, and writing being a kind of derivative material inscription of that purity.

Anyway, in making the sign derivative, Derrida claims that Husserl is basically following an ancient trope that has been in operation since the advent of philosophy itself: "The philosophy and history of the West ... has in this wayconstituted and established the very concept of the sign, this concept, at
the moment of its origin and in the heart of its sense, is marked by this will to derivation and erasure. Consequently, to restore the originality and the non-derivative character of the sign against classical metaphysics is also, by means of an apparent paradox, to erase the concept of the sign whose entire history and entire sense belong to the adventure of the metaphysics of presence."

One must be careful however, not to treat the notion of the orginality of the sign as a mere "reversal", where the sign itself takes on the status of presence. Part of what is at stake in Derrida's work is to divest the very notion of 'originality', and by reading the sign as origniality, the point is to cast suspicion upon all notions of orignality tout court. Derrida will begin to clarify this in the chapters that follow, but it's pretty important to keep this in mind, least we consider Derrida simply swapping out one notion of presence for another. In the last chapter, Derrida will make this point by referring to sign as a paradoxical 'originary supplement'.

Life/Death/Presence

Following the discussion of the presence of the sign, Derrida will further thematize what's at issue by mapping presence and sign onto life and death, respectively. As he writes, "It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, as the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relation to death." In so doing, Derrida also brings to the fore the theme of mortality which underlies much of this work. For Derrida, there is no such thing as a life without a relation to death: all life - all presence - is marked by it's constitutive relation to death. Hence: "I am means therefore originarily I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition."

An interesting resonance with the theological tradition comes out here in the next line, when Derrida concludes that therefore, “I am the one who is” is the confession of a mortal. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, I'm almost entirely sure this is an allusion to God's declaration to Moses in Exodus that "I am who I am". I wonder if this allusion might be made clearer in the original French, which might accord better with the biblical line itself. In any case, if one were to extrapolate, the inference here is that not even a God could be immortal. If anyone's interested, Martin Hagglund more or less reads Derrida explicitly along these lines in his Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, which is one of the single best resources in coming to grips with Derrida in general.

Imagination/Fiction

Finally, Derrida turns to the notions of the imagination and to fiction to round out his thematization of these issues. As with Husserl's supposed continuity with the metaphysical tradition in treating the sign as a derivation from presence, so too does Derrida claim that Husserl's treatment of the imaginary also follows the same path. While acknowledging that Husserl "profoundly renews the problematic of imagination", and that there is much that is novel is Husserl's conception of the imagination, for Derrida, we must 'notice the inheritance' (of the tradition) at work in Husserl. Like the sign, imagination is derivative of presence "A reproduction of a presence", and "keeps within itself the primary reference to an originary presentation."

Noting Husserl's 'fascination' with Hume (the allusion here being to Hume's problem of induction, wherein it is imagination which ties together cause and effect), Derrida finally turns toward the idea of fiction, such that fiction itself becomes something 'originary', rather than derivitive: "If we admit, as we have tried to show, that every sign in general consists in an originarily repetitive structure, the general distinction between fictional usage and actual usage of a sign is threatened. The sign is originarily worked over by fiction". Note again the purposeful conflation of categories: 'original fiction' - again, this will later become 'originative supplement'.

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Derrida will also begin here to thematize things in terms of consciousness, proximity and experience, but these ideas are picked up with greater detail in what's to come, so I wont' say too much about them other than to note their presence at the end of the chapter.

Once the Derrida reading group is over - in a couple of weeks - would anyone be up for a Monadology and/or Discourse on Metaphysics reading group? (The two books can be purchased as one). Together they run up just under a hundred pages, and even smaller separately (obviously).

*The Monadology is 13 pages give or take actually!

Righty-o, fourth chapter, where things get interesting. Derrida decidedly shifts from commentary to critique, and there's finally some payoff after the meticulous distinction-drawing of the first three chapters. A note of orientation to begin with: this chapter largely deals with questions of 'communication', which, as outlined by the previous chapter, belongs to the sphere of 'indication'. Derrida here follows Husserl in distinguishing - within the category of indication - two types of communication: actual communication and represented communication, or reality and representation. At stake in this chapter however, will be the breakdown of this distinction, and the consequences of this breakdown for 'internal discourse'.

So, this chapter begins with Derrida recalling that for Husserl, there is, strictly speaking, no communication in the 'solitary life of the soul'. Husserl: "In internal discourse, I communicate nothing to myself. I indicate nothing to myself." At best, I represent myself communicating to myself, I imagine that I do so. Putting this in the terms above: there is only 'represented communication', and not 'actual communication' in 'internal discourse'. Before we come back to this, it is important to emphasize that for Husserl, there is no necessary connection between actual and represented communication. That is, "representation is only an [exterior] accident added contingently onto the practice of discourse."

It is precisely at this point that Derrida will stage his intervention, asking whether or not this attribution of exteriority can really be sustained. In fact, this chapter will proceed by explicitly arguing that it cannot be: "there are grounds for thinking that in language representation and reality are not added together here and there, for the simple reason that it is impossible in principle to distinguish them rigorously." Derrida's argument will turn on the necessity of repetition as belonging inherently to any possible employment of the sign. That is, for a sign to be a sign, it must have an ideal, formal identity that persists throughout any one instance of it's employment. Derrida argumentation on this point is pretty clear, imo, so I'll just remark here that this necessity is why Derrida speaks of a 'structure of repetition'; and because it applies to any sign, Derrida will also specify that his argument applies 'prior' to the distinction between signs employed for communicative processes and those not.

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Before continuing, I want to expand upon a seemingly tangential remark that Derrida makes, which I think is easy to overlook, but vitally important for understanding his philosophy as a whole. It's this one, at the end of the second last paragraph on p. 42: "And no doubt we must not say that that impossibility [of distinguishing between reality and representaiton] is produced in language. Language in general is that impossibility — by means of itself alone." This is an incredibly curious statement insofar as it puts into question exactly what is meant by 'language' here. By defining language in terms of this 'formal' structure - whereby reality and representation cannot be properly discriminated between - Derrida throws open, in an incredibly wide manner - what it is we understand by language.

I mean, really think about it: if the impossibility of distinguishing between reality and representation just is language (rather than being a particular quirk of language), then what exactly is the scope of language? It's not 'just' representation, as classically understood (although it is not 'beyond' representation either). It is limited to the words that we exchange and the books that we read? Or is there, just as much, a language of gesture, a language of flowers, a language of... Where does language end and reality begin (which is not to say, as reductive, banal readings of Derrida will have it, that 'everything is language')? Is this an appropriate question? This is the germ of the distinction that Derrida will later make between 'writing' in it's 'restricted' and it's 'general' sense, where 'writing' doesn't at all refer just to empirical instances of marks of a page, but a general structure, no less than language is here a kind of 'mechanism independent' structure of it's own'.

I won't say much more about this because it's not strictly pursued in VP itself, but understanding this argument (or at least where it comes from) is vital to anyone looking to follow up on Derrida's other works, and just thinking a bit more deeply about what 'language' is in general.

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Anyway, back to it: if, on account of the necessity of repetition in ideality, we cannot rigorously distinguish between 'actual' and 'representative' discourse, then the very distinction between indication and expression is also threatened. Note the twisted topology here: although actual and representative discourse belong to the sphere of indication, by undoing a distinction internal to indication, this will have repercussions on the distinction ('external' to indication) between indication and expression. Basically, if 'actual communication' partakes of the order of ideality (which requires repetition), then to the degree that expression also partakes of this order, then expression must also be subject to the repetitions of the sign, and thus language (understood here in it's general sense mentioned above)

I'm skipping ahead a bit, but it's on p. 48 where all this is stated categorically: "Therefore, whether we are dealing with indicative communication or expression, there is no sure criterion by means of which to distinguish between an external language and an internal language, and even if we grant the hypothesis of an internal language, there is no sure criterion for distinguishing between an actual language and a fictional language. Such a distinction, however, is indispensable for Husserl in order to prove that indication is external to expression, and for all that this distinction governs."

I'm stopping here for now, but I'm not done with the summary just yet. In this post I mostly want to grasp the 'topology', the twists of inside and outside, that mark the argument here, as I think it's the best way to get a full picture of what's going on. I think if we can understand that, alot falls into place quite easily. The specific discussions - about imagination, fiction, death, presence, etc, will be dealt with in another post.

Damn fine clarification regarding the ireell. I'll be keen for summerizing 4 - it's where things start to get real interesting :D

Yeah, evolutionary psychology and it's twin cousin, sociobiology, and incredibly suspect 'sciences', and I think you're entirely right to find them so.

As for evolution qua 'metaphysical aspect of the world', I think I'd prefer to speak about it more guardedly as simply continuous with the natural processes of ontogenesis with otherwise constitute the 'world' as such, albeit specific to the biological realm. This specificity itself is an interesting question, insofar as the issue of exactly what constitutes the 'unit' of evolution - the gene, the species, an ecology? - is one that's very much open. My intuition is that alot of what we can say in fact comes down to our methodological presuppositions, rather than any ability to 'carve the world at it's natural joints' as it were.

Because of this, I've been wondering how much evolutionary science can hope to explain in biological systems. — darthbarracuda

You're entirely right that natural selection functions as a restraint, but it's important to remember that natural selection is one of a myriad of evolutionary mechanisms, that, only when taken together, properly define what evolution is. In simple terms: evolution <> natural selection, although natural selection is part of evolution.

Thus to properly speak about evolution, one must also take into account other mechanisms, such as niche construction (when a species adapts it's environment over time to be better suited to it), symbiogenesis (when two species co-evolve to the point that they become one species, or even 'part' of a species), co-adaptation (think flower and bee), genetic drift (variations in gene frequency), genetic mutations (changes in the DNA 'code'), sexual selection, as well as a bunch of other epigenetic factors. Evolution is complex because most of the time, it's a case of many of these mechanisms acting in concert, along with parameters like energetic constrains (especially important for abiogensis - the beginning of life), ecological carrying capacities (the capacity for an environment to sustain a population), and inter and intra species competition. Also important are questions of ecological robustness and network complexity, which help explain the 'arrival of the fittest' (or the 'evolution of evolvability'), rather than just the 'survival of the fittest'.

So one must be very clear about what is being talked about when someone 'explains something on the basis of evolution'. This doesn't mean 'to explain something on the basis of natural selection'. Evolution is an extraordinarily complicated and multi-faceted theory, and for any one living 'function', it is important to specify - at a level more precise than 'evolution' - what mechanisms are involved in 'explaining' it. If you take all this into account, it's important to recognize that what you refer to as 'pockets of freedom' can in fact be 'built-in' to evolution itself. Niche-construction, for example, is pretty much just is what you call the ability to change the environment - but this is not 'extra-evolutionary', but part and parcel of evolutionary theory itself.

It may be worthwhile to consider here, the non-phonetic language of mathematics, and all of those mathematical symbols which are principally written but usually have a corresponding spoken word. To a limited extent, we can do mathematics in our heads, but to sit with a pencil and paper greatly facilitates this. And in extension, we now have calculators and computers which we can make to do our math for us. These mathematical expressions, when I sit with my pencil and paper, are generally very personal, and are not meant for communication at all. — Metaphysician Undercover

Mathematics is an interesting case, and is in fact one of the sources of Derrida's reflections here. Apart from his uni dissertation on Husserl, his earliest published work was in fact an 'Introduction' to Husserl's 'The Origin of Geometry', where Derrida first began to think about the problems between expression and indicaiton, although not in those terms. The problem outlined there is basically this: to the degree that mathematical truths are meant to be "eternal", how does the necessity of the empirical transmission of those truths bear upon that supposed eternity of mathematical truth? You can see, in VP, where these reflections eventually led Derrida.

Rather, that it doesn't include discourse essentially, not that it excludes it essentially, since communication is both indicative/discursive and expressive simultaneously. — The Great Whatever

Ya, good point.

perhaps Derrida's mind was more solidly on the subject because of his Saussurean influence, since for Saussure the signifier is a sound-image, — The Great Whatever

I think this is right, which perhaps also explains in part the sudden appearance of Saussure at the end of the chapter (other than helping - to those familiar anyway - to clarify by similarity, the notion of imagination and the 'iireal'). The discussion in Of Grammatology re: Chinese script itself is largely carried out in a context of a critique of Saussure as well.

As far as Husserl is concerned, I don't see how it makes a difference even in writing, since the crux is on communication and not any particular sensory vehicle that accomplishes it, so logograms do not get us 'closer' to pure expressivity in that sense. — The Great Whatever

Yeah, I think this is the case too. If I have time, I'll try go back to OG to see how and where the point about non-phonetic scripts is explicitly made (again I think it's in conversation with Saussure), to see how Derrida gets to his 'excited' conclusion (the whole of OG is a rather 'excited' book as a whole, to be fair).

Its perhaps worth noting that the above line of thought is something Derrida will pursue in his Of Grammatology, published in the same year as VP. Here's a snippet:

"What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life. It menaces at once the breath, the spirit, and history as the spirit's relation­ ship with itself. It is their end, their finitude, their paralysis. Cutting breath short, sterilizing or immobilizing spiritual creation in the repetition of the letter, in the commentary or the exegesis, confined in a narrow space, reserved for a minority, it is the principle of death and of difference in the becoming of being. It is to speech what China is to Europe"

Note that in this chapter of VP which we are discussing, Derrida already refers to indication as a 'relation to death', 'the process of death at work' (p. 34) and to 'visibility and spatiality' as 'the death of that self-presence' (p. 29). Note also that this reference to death is not (just) a grand rhetorical flourish, but a term motivated by Husserl's own phenomenological emphasis on 'Life' as with the 'Living Present'. Anyway, in Of Grammatology, Derrida also discusses Leibniz's remarks on how Chinese script would serve as a prototype to Leibniz's own imagined universal discourse:

"What Leibniz is eager to borrow from Chinese writing is its arbitrariness and therefore its independence with regard to history. This arbitrariness has an essential link with the non­ phonetic essence which Leibniz believes he can attribute to Chinese writing. The latter seems to have been "invented by a deaf man" ... Leibniz [promises] a script for which the Chinese would be only a blueprint [quoting Leibniz]:

'This sort of plan would at the same time yield a sort of universal script, which would have the advantages of the Chinese script, for each person would under­ stand it in his own language, but which would infinitely surpass the Chinese, in that it would be teachable in a few weeks, having characters perfectly linked according to the order and connection of things, whereas, since Chinese script has an infinite number of characters according to the variety of things, it takes the Chinese a lifetime to learn their script adequately' [end Leibniz quote]

[Derrida continues]: The concept of Chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination. This implied nothing fortuitous: this functioning obeyed a rigorous necessity." Figured this is an interesting supplement (!) to the reading we're doing.

There is a footnote on writing by Derrida on p. 23, at the beginning of chapter 2, though honestly I haven't quite figured out what's going on in it yet, and some of the vocabulary is opaque to me. — The Great Whatever

I didn't think much of this footnote when I read it, but now that you highlighted it, here's a crack at it: I think that Derrida is alluding - he doesn't quite spell out an argument, and in fact he says quite explicitly that he won't 'stress the problem' - to the fact that if Husserl had considered 'non-phonetic' writing in a bit more depth, he might have saved himself alot of trouble (the kind of trouble Derrida will stir up in this essay). The distinction between phonetic and non-phonetic is the distinction between languages whose spelling will tell you how to pronounce the word (English, French, etc), and languages whose form will tell you nothing about it's pronunciation (Chinese). The character "ren" (人), for example, taken on it's own as a graphic inscription, will tell you nothing about how to pronounce it.

Intuitively, one can see, I think, how there is 'more indication' in phonetic languages than there is in non-phonetic languages: that is, there is more that is 'communicated' in phonetic language (the pronunciation), than in non-phonetic languages (where the pronunciation is not indicated). Hence non-phonetic languages tend to coincide more with a kind of 'sheer expression' than phonetic languages. Thus the line: "non-phonetic discourse would substitute for that which unites expressive discourse immediately to the meaning" - the 'mediation' of 'indication' plays a smaller part.

Of course to the extent that non-phonetic language is still language - that is, to the extent that it communicates at all - this would make it 'indicative' in Husserl's sense to begin with. What I think Derrida is trying to get at is that you can see a kind of scrambling or 'disorganization of essential distinctions' at work here, one that takes place within the grapheme itself, and not even yet at the level of communication/non-communication. Hence the employment of what should be a strange syntagm, given everything that's been discussed so far: "expressive discourse" (isn't the whole point that expression is precisely non-discursive?).

I'm not sure if this retroactive reconstruction of Derrida's would-be argument 'works', but I think that's the general thrust of it. In any case, it serves to flag the more sustained line of questioning that will make up the rest of the book. If I have time I'd like to deal with the big-ass footnote later on too.

James Williams - Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide
Henry Somers-Hall - Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition

Building up to enter again the breach that is D&R, something I've been doing for a while now - I'll get alot more out of it this time, I hope.

I sort of want to read all of Lewis' stuff, if only to see how one so sensible could have gone so mad. — The Great Whatever

I sometimes wish I had the willpower to read stuff this that I know I will vehemently disagree with. I can't bring myself to, when there's just so much more 'constructive' (philosophy-building, rather than philosophy-'tearing down') things I feel I might be able to do.

What's interesting though is that the approach of Husserl and Derrida to their work is in some manner reflected in their various philosophies themselves. Husserl was after foundations, he appreciated the Cartesian drive for certainty, sought after essences and the guarantee of truths against the various 'crises' of European philosophy. In turn, Derrida's own playfulness is itself valorized in the 'play' that he affirmed at work in all philosophy, that play that will both unsettle and establish any philosophical system subject to the 'metaphysics of presence'. In other words, if Husserl's is a kind of principled seriousness, Derrida's is no less a kind of principled play.

I remember reading somewhere (I can't remember where) that Derrida was told by his teacher Jean Hyppolite (one of the major progenitors of French post-war philosophy) that Derrida would need to put out some more 'serious', studied work before he could practice the kind of playful, wandering writing that would characterize his later work. Voice and Phenomenon was, apparently, one of the fruits of that advice.

Note also that VP is not Derrida's only work on Husserl. Pretty much the entirety of 'early Derrida' is marked by an engagement with Husserl, from his doctoral dissertation (The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy in Husserl) to the two other essays which are commonly cited ("Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction" and "‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology" (in Writing and Difference). Some further secondary reading would be:

Leonard Lawlor - Derrida and Husserl
Paola Marrati - Genesis and Trace: Reading Husserl and Heidegger
Joshua Kates - Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction

Re: Evans, he and Lawlor have been arguing about how to interpret VP for ages. There's an interesting exchange in the Philosophy Today journal between them, with Lawlor defending Derrida from Evans, although their exchange has taken place outside that journal as well. I read the exchange a long time ago so I don't quite remember the meat of it, but I can provide... things to anyone interested in the exchange.

What I don't understand is why Derrida thinks this would be ruinous for the phenomenological project. — The Great Whatever

I get what you mean, though I think this is (partly) an issue with the book's structure. The first part of the book is given over to explicating 'the problem of the sign' (note that this is the subtitle of VP itself), while the second half (chpts 4 onwards) shows how this problem comes to bear on the phenomenology of internal time consciousness, and then consequently the phenomenological project as a whole. I think you're right that at this point in the book, Derrida is making claims he's not yet really entitled to, but I think he will begin to remedy this as the book goes on.

The problem that Derrida will go on to tease out however - and this is more indicated in the first chapter than this one - is that Husserl will go on to isolate a mode in which there is expression that explicitly excludes any kind of indication whatsoever. Hence the discussion (in the first chapter) about expression not being a species of the genera indication, which Husserl will go on to affirm.