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Speculative Grammatology SPECULATIVE REALISM Series Editor: Graham Harman Puff GRAMMATOLOGY SPECULATIVE Puff line 1 Puff Line 2a Puff Puff line 1 SPECULATIVE Puff Line 2a Strapline GRAMMATOLOGY Body text DECONSTRUCTION AND THE NEW MATERIALISM DEBORAH GOLDGABER Cover image: Biblio details Deborah Goldgaber Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Speculative Grammatology Deconstruction and the New Materialism Deborah Goldgaber Contents Series Editor’s Preface iv Acknowledgements viii Preface: The (Un-)Timeliness of Grammatology x Introduction: To Speculate – with Derrida 1 1 Materialism and Realism in Contemporary Continental Philosophy 16 2 From Ancestral Events to Posthumous Texts: Two Critiques of Correlationism 39 3 Texts without Meanings: Deconstructing the Transcendental Signified 66 4 Rewriting the Course in General Linguistics: From Sign to Spacing 94 5 On the Generality of Writing and the Plasticity of the Trace 135 Bibliography 170 Index 179 Introduction: To Speculate – with Derrida In the space of these introductory pages, I want to reflect on the title of this book – to make explicit some of the resonances between speculation and grammatology on the one hand, and speculation and materialism on the other – in order to clarify what makes the approach of this book distinctive from other interpreta- tions of early Derrida and from other approaches to materialism in contemporary continental philosophy. To many of Derrida’s readers, a speculative approach to gram- matology will sound suspect because it entails ‘ontologising’ grammatological terms such as arche- writing, trace or text in order to speculate on grammatological nature, grammatological matter. For many, such speculation is contrary to the vigilant, critical spirit of deconstruction. Deconstruction does not propose revisions to metaphysics; it forecloses metaphysics. From this perspective, treating arche-­­writing or the trace as ‘things of this world’ – inscribing them in realist discourses – would restore the totalising, identitarian and ‘presentist’ categories that deconstruc- tion works so hard to undo. And yet Derrida, unmistakably, courts such a ‘realist’ reading. I have never ceased to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are impris- oned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above else the search for the ‘other’ and ‘the other of language’.1 Despite Derrida’s repeated affirmation – in Of Grammatology, ‘Différance’ and any number of other texts – that différance and arche-­­writing describe absolutely general relations, readers have resisted (or not known how to affirm) the ontological radicalisation 2 Speculative Grammatology of writing. Instead, as Francisco Vitale observes, Derrida’s readers have affirmed the ‘ontological radicalization ofhermeneutics ’.2 The relation between mind and world is the same as the rela- tion between reader and book. Instead of entertaining the prop- erly grammatological thought that matter writes and reads, Vicki Kirby writes, we insist, instead, that matter appears or manifests by making a certain kind of ‘sign’.3 What has made it easier to accept that ‘writing’ gives an account of how we (human knowers) are lodged in the world, and more difficult to accept that ‘writing’ describes relations between non-­­human ‘knowers’ and ‘agents’? To answer this question, we have first to make explicit a number of assumptions that work to secure the epistemic-hermeneutic interpretation of writing against the speculative- materialist one. The first we might call thecritical assumption. Writing refers to the conditions of knowing, specifically the formation of our concepts. Knowing and being do not share the same conditions. Yet materialist readings of deconstruction seem (unaccount- ably) to extend the account of concepts (and how they are struc- tured) to the extra- discursive world. This sort of leap or jump, as Claire Colebrook notes, is philosophically illicit. To those who hazard such arguments, she asks ‘is there not a sleight of hand in passing from “Deconstruction demonstrates that concepts of a stable self- present nature necessarily deconstruct themselves” to “Deconstruction is a theory of nature as instability”?’4 To be sure, there is. If writing is ‘general’ – if it accounts for knowing and being – this must be carefully elucidated. The second (related) assumption underwriting the epistemic- hermeneutic limitation of writing we can call the meta- cognition assumption. It states that while we can know about knowing, we cannot know about being. We have better access to our thinking (and how it functions) than to the extra-discursive world this thinking purports to be about. If deconstruction reveals how our concepts are organised – or ‘discursively constructed’ – this must be because the textual structure of cognition (and the nature of textual operations, such as reading and writing) are also knowable – in a way that extra- discursive reality is not. If both meta- cognition and critical are right, then deconstruction is essentially a transcen- dental discourse, even if ‘arche- writing’ designates a critique that displaces the transcendental subject. Karen Barad, however, has very persuasively argued that decon- struction should have made us more sceptical of the possibility Introduction 3 of meta- cognition than the epistemic- hermeneutic interpretation suggests. Why think that we face epistemically fair conditions with respect to meta- cognising our concepts, but epistemically poor conditions when it is a matter of non-cognitive processes?5 Indeed, wasn’t the point of Derrida’s ‘critique of presence’ to show, contra Husserl (among others), that we have no better insight into our purportedly first- personal ‘lived experience’, and into ‘the invari- able structures of consciousness’, than we have into the invariable structures of matter?6 Barad’s critique of what I call the meta-cognition assumption makes explicit that many of Derrida’s interpreters have been willing to speculate – apparently with Derrida – about concept production, about the general conditions of thought and the nature of language. These will all be the effects of différance. However, they have been unwilling to speculate – apparently against Derrida – about the nature of worldly processes and relations. But now it seems that the deconstruction of presence requires that we give up speculating about the discursive construction of our concepts for the same reasons that we had to relinquish speculating about an extra- discursive reality. While undermining the epistemic- hermeneutic interpretation of general writing, Barad’s critique does not seem to get us any closer to justifying grammatological speculations about matter. The prohibition on speculation that seems to result from Barad’s critique, however, only obtains if we read Derrida’s critique of presence as voiding phenomenological or introspective ‘evidence’ altogether. If this were the case, reflecting on consciousness or lived experience would tell us nothing about its structure. Derrida’s cri- tique, however, assumes that phenomenological reflection upon experience tells us quite a lot. Indeed, he argues that experience has a trace structure on the basis of how it is given! But how can Derrida both rely upon and impugn phenomenological evidence? This question has puzzled a number of Derrida’s most careful readers.7 Answering it requires recognising that Derrida’s critique of presence entails a strongly revisionist account of evidence. Whereas phenomenology and meta- cognition require that first- personal experience yields apodictic evidence, Derrida argues that such evidence is non- apodictic. In ‘Apodicticity of Absence’, Thomas Seebohm notes that Derrida rightly critiques the early Husserl for having an overly strenuous definition of phenomenological evidence or givenness. Derrida 4 Speculative Grammatology calls this evidentiary ideal the ideal of presence. The ideal form of givenness (or phenomenological evidence) is that of a present, self- transparent perception. Seebohm argues, however, that the mature Husserl had a much more pliable definition of apodicticity, which could easily accommodate the sort of ‘absences’ that Derrida’s analyses revealed. Apodictic evidence (or givenness) is just that which reveals ‘in its own underlying structure what is in ques- tion’.8 Thus, for example, though the immediate past, as ‘retained’ in and constitutive of present perception, is not present in the old, full- blooded sense, phenomenological reflection on experience still reveals the structure in question. Derrida refers to this structure of non- presence as ‘the trace’ or différance, but seems to derive it from the same evidentiary grounds as those from which Husserl derived his account of inner time consciousness. Indeed, where else but from the structure of inner time consciousness as it appears to consciousness could Derrida have got it? Thus, Seebohm con- cludes, Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s account of evidence remains a phenomenological critique on phenomenological grounds. Seebohm’s reading, however, misses a crucial aspect of Derrida’s critique of apodicticity or phenomenological givenness. Derrida argues that while careful phenomenological descriptions reveal the trace structure, experience does not reveal ‘in its own underlying structure what is in question’. The structure in question does not explain or give an account of itself and, therefore, experience is not apodictic in the phenomenological sense. But
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