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4. Literary Chance 149 A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Jacques Derrida and the Necessity of Chance Christoforos Diakoulakis DPHIL University of Sussex September 2011 iii University of Sussex Christoforos Diakoulakis Dphil English Literature Jacques Derrida and the Necessity of Chance Summary Chance, in the sense of the incalculable, the indeterminable, names the limit of every estimation of the truth. Whereas traditional philosophical discourses aspire to transcend this limit, deconstruction affirms on the contrary its necessity; not as a higher principle that relativizes truth and renders all our calculations futile, as is commonly suggested by flippant appropriations of Derrida’s work, but as a structural property within every event and every concept, every mark. Rather than a mere impediment to the pursuit of truth then, the incalculable forms a necessary correlative of the pursuit itself. Deconstruction effectively attests to and exemplifies the dependence of every philosophical discourse on its irreducible, inherent limitation. With reference to numerous commentaries on Derrida’s work, Chapter 1 shows that the unconditional indeterminability of a deconstructive, methodological identity is indissociable from deconstruction’s critical import. And as Chapter 2 verifies in turn, focusing now primarily on Derrida’s lecture ‘My Chances/Mes Chances’ and the performative aspects of his writing, deconstruction’s appeal to the accidental and the idiomatic is not a call to irresponsibility and a turning away from theory; it is what ensures its remarkable theoretical consistency. Through close readings of Aristotle, Freud, Richard Rorty and William James, Chapter 3 demonstrates that any attempt to regulate chance cannot help but put chance to work instead. Not even fiction can arrest its contaminating force. Reading Derrida alongside Edgar Allan Poe, Chapter 4 posits that the commonsensical conception of chance as a deviation from the truth is bound up with an uncritical notion of literary writing as sheer untruthfulness, and hence as the site of pure chance. The constitutive pervasiveness of chance bears out, in the first place and above all, the instability of the limit that separates fiction from non-fiction, truth from non-truth. iv Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VI INTRODUCTION 1 1. READING CHANCE 6 1.1. Un-introducible 6 1.2. Double bind 11 1.3. Too literary 19 1.4. Success itself 28 2. WRITING CHANCE 37 2.1. The obvious 37 2.2. Pas de chance 42 2.3. Interface 47 2.4. Only chance 52 2.5. Déjà vu 58 2.6. Amnesiac 62 2.7. Improvisation 67 2.8. Synchronicity 75 3. BELIEF IN CHANCE 81 3.1. A coincidence 81 3.2. In context 85 3.3. Pragmatic circumspection 95 3.4. Freudian slip 111 v 3.5. Aristotle and the end of reason 121 3.6. William James: starting over 132 4. LITERARY CHANCE 149 4.1. Definition 149 4.2. Presentiment 153 4.3. The truth of the lure 159 4.4. Metalanguage 166 4.5. Testimony 173 4.6. Singularity 178 4.7. Solution 185 CONCLUSION 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY 201 vi Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the people who helped me during my doctoral study in the University of Sussex. I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Nicholas Royle. It has definitely been a great privilege to work under the supervision of such a renowned expert in my field of interest. As I look back at my first few drafts, it is more than clear to me that this thesis would not have been possible without his advice and direction. And as I bring to mind all the stress and emotional turmoil that has inevitably accompanied this yearlong project, I have no doubt whatsoever that without his encouragement and his generous support I would have been lost. I am indebted to all my friends; to Alex Pestell and David Tucker, with whom I was fortunate to share the same hopes and worries these last few years, and who assisted me in many ways in the later stages of this thesis, to Tatiana Kontou for all her advice and her literally constant, because telepathic, support, to Danai Dima for her unconditional friendship and that one telephone call, and to my amazing friends, Petros Kalogirou, Ioannis Manios, Costas Stergiou and Manolis Galenianos, for always being there for me. A most special thanks goes to my parents and brother, who never stopped caring for me and encouraging me. I would also like to acknowledge the AHRC for its financial support. Finally, I am extremely grateful to Lena Mutschler for keeping me safe and sane these last couple of years. I will never be able to thank her enough for all that she has done for me. It is to her that I dedicate this thesis. 1 Introduction In a sense, a study on chance is a contradiction in terms. Any study that adheres to reason is constituted in opposition to chance, out of the desire to withhold its effects. The indeterminable, the unpredictable, the incalculable, denotes a problem that needs to be solved, a limit that, in the name and with the aid of reason, one aspires to transcend. The fortuitous, the accidental, what happens to happen, for no apparent reason, has no bearing on truth and knowledge. Its parasitical import is thus precisely what a philosophical investigation must contain and, if possible, completely eliminate. One wants to arrive at a safe conclusion, provide a positive answer and produce a measurable result in place of an uncertain ‘perhaps’. A study that concedes chance in advance would be a study destined to err; impossible. At the same time, however, and by the same token, chance also carries a positive or, more precisely, a non-negative significance. It denotes an opportunity, it signals an opening, that is also the opening of reason, the very possibility of truth and knowledge. Indeed, every study on any subject becomes possible on account of that which resists comprehension; a singular ‘perhaps’ will have always been its point of departure. The ‘possible’ is not only what we have failed to fully grasp but also what we have yet to investigate. The indeterminable is what calls for the response to the other, what leaves room for the response of the other. Chance gives reason to reason; necessary. It appears, as a consequence, that chance carries within itself two directly opposite meanings. On the one hand, it signifies what stands in the way of our calculations and, on the other, what paves the way for our calculations. It is what a study needs to fend off at all cost and what it needs to embrace first and foremost. A concept at odds with itself, a threat and an opportunity at once, chance constitutes both 2 the condition of impossibility and the condition of possibility of the pursuit of truth as such. Traditional philosophical discourses tend to privilege the first, more troublesome and less favourable, definition of chance and to repress the second. Naturally, an unconditional commitment to the ideal of perfect knowledge and absolute truth entails a categorical hostility towards the effects of chance. The haphazard is to be controlled, the indeterminable to be determined, the accidental ignored and the irregular accounted for. But what would become of philosophy itself if it were to successfully eliminate chance, once and for all? And what of the philosopher? What would remain of the future if nothing were left surprise us, if everything were rather predictable? As Jacques Derrida will affirm in a short essay entitled ‘As If It Were Possible, “Within Such Limits”…’, insofar as the pursuit of truth aims toward the effacement of what instigates it, then what ensures its survival can only be the irreducible possibility of its inadequacy. inadequation must always remain possible for interpretation in general, and the response in turn, to be possible. This is an example of the law that binds the possible to the impossible. An interpretation that was without flaw, a self-comprehension that was completely adequate would not only mark the end of a history exhausted by its very transparency. By prohibiting the future, it would make everything impossible, both the event and the coming of the other, the coming to the other.1 Derrida invites us thus to consider the two seemingly opposite definitions of chance as inextricably intertwined, to imagine, in other words, the lexical ambiguity of chance as a necessity. It is because there is chance, Derrida posits, because the chance of chance persists despite our best efforts to determine and evade its force, that our studies become 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘As If It Were Possible: “Within Such Limits”…’ in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 360. 3 possible in the first place, that they stand a chance. Appealing to what he calls in the same essay ‘a new thinking of the possible’,2 Derrida proposes thereon to conceive of the limit of reason as its indispensable, structural condition, the impossible as what comes to pass. Are we destined to err, then? And who will decide our fate? Reductive and unsophisticated readings of Derrida’s work often tend to misconstrue this affirmation of the necessity of chance as a sterile veneration of indeterminacy that simply signals the futility of traditional philosophical aspirations and the hollowness of philosophical rigor.
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