No More Learning

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Descartes seeks the principles of those former beliefs, and finds that relying on the senses produces deception, and argues that nothing that once produced deception ought to be trusted again to furnish anything other than deception in the future. And yet, sometimes the senses fur- nish a certain indubitability, as when the narrator relays the following famous scene: "there is the fact that leads Descartes to say, I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters"(145/27). Let me call attention to the fact that the "I" is "here," "ici," because this term in this sentence is a deictic one, and it is a shifter, pointing to a "here" that could be any here, but that seems to be the term that helps to anchor the spatial co- ordinates of the scene and so to ground, at least, the spatial ground of its indubitability. When Descartes writes "here," he appears to refer to the place where he is, but this is a term that could refer to any "here" and so fails to anchor Descartes to his place in the way that we might expect it to. What does the writing of his place do to the indubitable referentiality of that "here"? Clearly, it is not here; the "here" works as an indexical that refers only by remaining indifferent to its occasion. Thus the word, precisely because it can refer promiscuously, intro- duces an equivocalness and, indeed, a dubitability that makes it quite impossible to say whether or not his being "here" is a fact as he claims that it is. Indeed, the very use of such an equivocal term makes it seem possibly untrue.
What I seek to underscore "here," as it were, is that Descartes's very language exceeds the perspective it seeks to affirm, permitting a narra- tion of himself and a reflexive referentiality that distances the one who narrates from the "I" who is narrated by that one. The emergence of a narrative "I" in The Meditations has consequences for the philosophi- cal argument Descartes seeks to make. The written status of the "I" splits the narrator from the very self he seeks to know and not to doubt. The "I" has, as it were, gotten out of his control by virtue of be- coming written. Philosophically, we are asked to accept an "I" who is not the same as the history of its opinions, who can "undo" and "de- stroy" such opinions and still remain intact. Narratively, we have an "I" that is a textual phenomenon, exceeding the place and time in which it seeks to ground itself, whose very written character depends on this transposability from context to context.
But things have already become strange, for we were to have start- ed, as Descartes maintains in the "preface," with reasons, ones that persuade, and that give us a clear and distinct idea of what cannot be
doubted. We were about to distrust the senses, but instead we are drawn into the certainties that they provide, the fact that I sit here, am clothed, hold the paper that I do by the fire that is also here.
From this scene in which indubitability is asserted and withdrawn at once emerges the question of the body. Descartes asks, "how could I deny that these hands and this body here belong to me? " (F:27). Consider the very way in which he poses the question, the way in which the question becomes posable within language. The question takes, I believe, a strange grammar, one that affirms the separability of what it seeks to establish as necessarily joined. If one can pose the question whether one's hands and one's body are not one's own, then what has happened such that the question has become posable? In other words, how is it that my hands and my body became something other than me, or at least appeared to be other than me, such that the question could even be posed whether or not they belong to me? What is the status of the question, such that it can postulate a distinction be- tween the I who asks and the bodily me, as it were, that it interrogates, and so performs grammatically precisely what it seeks to show cannot be performed?
Indeed, Descartes begins to ask a set of questions that perform what they claim cannot be performed: "how can I deny that these hands and this body are mine? " is one of them, and it is a strange, paraliptical question because he does give us the graphic contours of such a doubt, and so shows that such a doubt is possible. This is, of course, not to say that the doubt is finally sustainable, or that no indubitability emerges to put an end to such doubt. For Descartes to claim that the body is the basis of indubitability, as he does, is a strange consequence, if only because it appears to appeal to an empiricism that sustains an uneasy compatibility with the theological project at hand. These ex- amples also seem to relate to the problem of clothing, knowing that one is clothed, for he claims to be sure that he was clothed in his night- gown next to the fire.
The surety of this claim is followed by a series of speculations, how- ever, ones that he imagines others might make, but that, in his imagin- ing, he himself makes: indeed, the writing becomes the occasion to posit and adopt narrative perspectives on himself that he claims not to be his own, but that, in adopting, are his own in the very mode of their projection and displacement. The other who appears is thus the "I" who, in paranoia, is circuited and deflected through alterity: what of those who think they are clothed in purple, but are really without
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covering, those others who are like me who think they are clothed, but whose thinking turns out to be an ungrounded imagining. Descartes, after all, is the one who is actively imagining others as nude, implying but not pursuing the implication that they might well think of him as nude as well. But why? Of course, he wants to get beneath the layers that cover the body, but this very occasion of radical exposure toward which The Meditations move is precisely what threatens him with a hallucinatory loss of self-certainty.
Indeed, it appears that the certainty he seeks of the body leads him into a proliferation of doubts. He is sure that he sits there clothed: his perspective, as sense perception and not pure intellection, is in that sense clothed or cloaked; thus this certainty depends on a certain dis- simulation. The nudity he attributes to the hallucinatory certainty of others constantly threatens to return to him, to become his own hallu- cinatory certainty. Indeed, precisely as a sign of radical certainty, that nudity undermines his certainty. If he is clothed, he is certain of what is true, but if he is not, then the truth has been exposed, the body without dissimulation, which leads to the paradoxical conclusion that only if he is deluded about being clothed can his own utterances be taken as indubitable, in which case hallucination and certainty are no longer radically distinguishable from one another.
This is not any nude body, but one that belongs to someone who is deluded about his own nudity, one whom others see in his nudity and his delusion. And this is not simply any "one" with some charactero- logical singularity, but a "one" who is produced precisely by the heuris- tic of doubt. This is one who calls the reality of his body into question only to suffer the hallucinatory spectrality of his act. When he sees oth- ers in such a state, nude and thinking themselves clothed, he knows them to be deluded, and so if others were to see him in such a state, they would know him to be deluded as well; thus, the exposure of his body would be the occasion for a loss of self-certainty. Thus, the insis- tence on the exposed body as an ultimate and indubitable fact in turn exposes the hallucinations of the one who is nude, nude and hallu- cinating that he or she is fully clothed. This figure of the indubitable body, one that only the mad might doubt, is made to represent the limit case of the res extensa, a body that cannot be doubted but that, com- prised of the senses, will be held to be detachable from the soul and its quest for certainty.
If one were to imagine the body instead as an earthenware head or made of glass, as Descartes puts it, one would be doubting what is
true. But notice that here the very act of doubting seems bound up with the possibility of figural substitutions, ones in which the living body is made synonomous with its artifactual simulation or, indeed, with glass, a figure for transparency itself. If the body is certain as res exten- sa, what is to distinguish the human body as res extensa from other such instances of substance? If it must, by definition, be separable from the soul, what is to guarantee its humanity? Apparently, nothing can or does.
After all, Descartes not only reports that others perform such hallu- cinations, the report constitutes the textualization of the hallucination; his writings perform them for us, through an alienation of perspective that is and is not exclusively his own. Thus, he conjures such possibili- ties precisely at the moment in which he also renounces such possibili- ties as mad, raising the question, is there a difference between the kind of conjuring that is a constitutive part of the meditative method, and those hallucinations that the method is supposed to refute? He re- marks: "I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant [si je me reglais sur leurs exemples]. " But what if he has already just ruled himself on these examples, followed these examples, asked us to follow them, in the sense that to write them is to follow them, and we are clearly following them as well in reading him as we do. The doubt he wants to overcome can only be reenacted within the treatise, which produces the textual occasion for an identification with those from whom he seeks to differentiate himself. These are his hands, no? but where are the hands that write the text itself, and is it not the case that they never actually show themselves as we read the marks that they leave? Can the text ever furnish a certain sense of the hands that write the text, or does the writing eclipse the hands that make it possible, such that the marks on the page erase the bodily ori- gins from which they apparently emerge, and to emerge as tattered and ontologically suspended remains? Is this not the predicament of all writing in relation to its bodily origins? There is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the writing that it pro- duces. Where is the trace of Descartes's body in the text? Does it not resurface precisely as the figure of its own dubitability, a writing that must, as it were, make the body strange, if not hallucinatory, whose condition is an alienation of bodily perspective in a textual circuitry from which it cannot be delivered or returned? After all, the text quite literally leaves the authorial body behind, and yet there one is, on the page, strange to oneself.
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At the end of Meditation I, he resolves to suppose that God is not good nor the fountain of truth, but some evil genius, that external things are illusions and dreams and, accordingly, he writes, "I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things. " It would seem, then, that the task of the Meditation is to overcome this doubt in his own body, but it is that doubt that he also seeks to radicalize. After all, it is Descartes's ultimate project to understand himself as a soul, as a res cogitans and not as a body; in this way, he seeks to establish the ulti- mate dubitability of the body and so to ally himself with those who dream and hallucinate when they take the body to be the basis of cer- tain knowledge. Thus, his effort to establish radical self-certainty as a rational being leads within the text to an identification with the irra- tional. Indeed, such dreams and hallucinations must be illimitable if he is to understand that certainty of himself as a thinking being will never be furnished by the body.
He writes that "the knowledge of myself does not depend on things not yet known to me. " And it does not depend on "things that are feigned or imagined by my imagination [celles qui sont feintes et inven- te? es par l'imagination]" (42). 3 The Latin term--effingo--can mean, ambiguously, "to form an image," but also, "to make a fact," which means that the knowledge of himself does not depend on forming an image or making a fact. Inadvertently, Descartes introduces an equivo- cation between an imagining of what is not a fact and an imagining or making of what is a fact. Has the same imagining wandered across the divide between delusion and reality such that it is at once what Descartes must exclude as the basis of self-knowledge and what he also must accommodate?
If knowledge does not depend on things that are feigned or imag- ined or facts that are made, then on what does it depend? And does his dismissal of imagining, invention, and factual making not undermine the very procedure of doubt that he uses to gauge the falsifiability of his theses? Indeed, at another moment in the text, he insists that imagi- nation, even invention, serves a cognitive function, and that it can be used as the basis for making inferences about the indubitability of sub- stance itself: "I would invent, in effect, when I am imagining some- thing, since imagining is nothing other than contemplating the figure or image of a corporeal thing. "4
The imagination is nothing other than the contemplation of the fig- ure or image of a corporeal thing. The proposition foreshadows the
claims that Husserl will make about the intentionality of the act of imagining, suggesting that objects appear to the imagination in some specific modality of their essence. If this is so, then the imagination does not merely invent bodies, but its inventiveness is also a form of referentiality, that is, of contemplating the figure or image of bodies in their essential possibility. The sense in which the imagination is inven- tive is not that it produces bodies where there were none. Just as refer- ential suggestion of the term effingo complicates the problem, tying imagining to fact making, so Descartes's notion of the image as relay- ing the object in some specific way ties imagining to objects of percep- tion, but in both cases the link is made not conceptually, but through a semantic equivocation. Indeed, if the method of doubt involves sup- posing or positing as true a set of conditions that he then seeks to doubt, it involves conjecturing what is counterintuitive, and so central- ly engages the imagination.
"Je supposerai"--I suppose, I will suppose, I would suppose--this is the strange way that Descartes renders his doubt in language, where the term supposer carries the referential ambiguity that plagues his dis- cussion. After all, supposer means to take for granted, to accept as a premise, but also to postulate or posit, to make or to produce. If the "I" is not a corporeal thing, then it cannot be imagined.
When he writes "I suppose," he offers appositions that suggest its interchangeability with the following formulations: I persuade myself, I posit, I think, I believe. Then the object of that supposing and think- ing takes the form of a different fiction than the one he has just per- formed: what he supposes or believes is "that body, figure, extension . . . are nothing but fictions of my own spirit. " Here there appears to be a doubling of the fictional going on, for he is supposing that the body, among other things, is a fiction of his own mind, but is that supposing not itself a fictionalizing of sorts? If so, is he then producing a fiction in which his body is the creation of a fiction? Does the method not allego- rize the very problem of fictive making that he seeks to understand and dispute, and can he understand this fictive making if he continues to ask the question within the terms of the fiction from which he also seeks to escape?
Supposing, self-persuasion, thinking, believing, work by way of posit- ing or, indeed, fabulating, but what is it that is fabulated? If the body is a fiction of one's own spirit, then this suggests that it is made or com- posed of one's own spirit. Thus, to posit is not merely to conjecture a false world or to make one up, but to invent and refer at the same
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moment, thus confounding the possibility of a strict distinction be- tween the two. In this way, "the fictions of the spirit" for Descartes are not in opposition to the acts of thinking or persuasion, but the very means by which they operate. "Positing" is a fiction of the spirit which is not for that reason false or without referentiality. To deny the fictive aspect of positing or supposing is to posit the denial, and in that sense to reiterate the way that the fictive is implicated in the very act of posit- ing. The very means by which Descartes seeks to falsify false belief in- volves a positing or fictionalizing that, homeopathically, recontracts the very illness it seeks to cure. If the falsification of the untrue must take place through a counterfactual positing, which is itself a form of fiction, then falsification reintroduces fiction at the very moment in which it seeks to refute it. Of course, if we could establish that what is fictional in supposing is not the same as what is fictional in what is being supposed, then we would avoid this contradiction, but Descartes does not offer us any way of doing precisely that.
I hope that I have begun to show that, in imagining the body, Des- cartes is at once referring to the body through an image or figure--his words--and conjuring or inventing that body at the same time, and that the terms he uses to describe this act of supposing or imagining carry that important double meaning. Hence, for Descartes, the lan- guage in which the body is conjectured does not quite imply that the body is nothing other than an effect of language; it means that conjec- turing and supposing have to be understood as fictional exercises that are nevertheless not devoid of referentiality.
When we consider Descartes's efforts to think the mind apart from the body, we see that he cannot help but use certain bodily figures in describing that mind. The effort to excise the body fails because the body returns, spectrally, as a figural dimension of the text. For in- stance, Descartes refers to God as one who inscribes or engraves on his soul, when he writes, for instance, that he will never forget to refrain from judgment of what he does not clearly and distinctly understand "simply by [God's] engraving deeply in my memory the resolution never to form a judgment on" such matters. Descartes's mind is here figured as a slate or a blank page of sorts, and God is figured as an en- graver. "God deeply engrave(s) [grave? ] a resolution in memory not to judge. "
Similarly, Descartes appears to imprint a thought on his memory in the same way that God engraves a resolution on the will: he refers to his own human and frail capacity to "forcibly impress [imprimer]" a
thought on his memory, and so help in the process of building up a new memory where the old one had been destroyed. 5 Meditation now appears as a particular kind of action, one that, he claims, must be re- peated, and that has as its goal the forcible imprinting (imprimer) of this same thought on the memory, an imprinting that is as apparently forceful as God's engraving is profound: indeed, both convey a certain formative violence, a rupture of surface, as the effect of writing.
Indeed, "the engraving" is thus the means by which God's will is transferred to Descartes, a peculiar form of transitivity that the trope of writing helps to effect. His memory becomes the object in which God engraves a resolution, as if Descartes's memory were a page, a surface, an extended substance. But this is clearly a problem, since the mind is supposed to be, as we know, res cogitans rather than res exten- sa, but is figured here precisely as an extended surface and substance. Hence, the memory in some ways becomes figured as a kind of body, extended substance and surface, and we might well read here the resur- facing of the lost and repudiated body within the text of Descartes, one on which God now so profoundly engraves a resolution; indeed, the metaphorical stage is now set for Kafka's "In the Penal Colony. "
Indeed, it makes sense to ask whether the writing of The Meditations is precisely what guarantees this soldering of the memory to the will. The extended writing of The Meditations acts to imprint a new knowl- edge on his memory. To the extent that the page substitutes for memo- ry, or becomes the figure through which memory is understood, then does that figure have philosophical consequences, namely, that intro- spection as method succeeds only to the extent that it is performed in writing on the page? Is writing not precisely the effort to solder a new memory to the will, and if so, then does it not require the very material surface and, indeed, the materiality of language itself that are hardly compatible with what Descartes seeks to separate from the introspec- tive act of the mind? And does this writing not implicitly require the hand of the one who engraves and the body as surface on which to write, dispersing bodily figures throughout the explanation of the soul?
If it seems that Descartes's text cannot but figure the body, that it does not reduce the body to its figuration, and if that figuration turns out to be referential, that does not mean that the referent can somehow be extracted from its figuration. The act by which the body is supposed is precisely the act that posits and suspends the ontological status of the body, an act that does not create or form that body unilaterally (and thereby not an act in the service of linguisticism or linguistic monism),
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but one that posits and figures, one for which positing and figuring are not finally distinguishable.
If there is no act of positing that does not become implicated in figu- ration, then it follows that the heuristic of doubt not only entails figura- tion, but works fundamentally through the figures that compromise its own epistemological aspirations. But this conclusion is immediately impaired by another, namely, that the figuration of the body meets its necessary limit in a materiality that cannot finally be captured by the figure. Here is where proceeding by way of both grammar and figura- tion falters, though it is a telling faltering. If the body is not reducible to its figuration or, indeed, its conceptualization, and it cannot be said to be a mere effect of discourse, then what finally is it? The question stands, but just because there is a grammar of the question in which the ontological status of the body is posed does not mean that the an- swer, if there is one, can be accommodated within the grammatical terms that await that answer. In this case, the posability of the question does not imply its answerability within the terms in which it is posed. The body escapes the terms of the question by which it is approached. And even to make such a formulaic claim, relying on "The body" as the subject-noun of the sentence, domesticates precisely what it seeks to unleash. Indeed, the grammar itself exposes the limits of its own mimetic conceit, asserting a reality that is of necessity distorted through the terms of the assertion, a reality that can only appear, as it were, through distortion. 6
Descartes makes this point perhaps unwittingly as he proceeds to dismember his own body in the course of his written meditation. We might rush in to say that this "dismemberment" is merely figural, but perhaps, Paul de Man suggests, it marks the very limits of figuration-- its uncanny limits. Indeed, de Man makes his point in reference to Kant, centering on the problem that emerges in his third Critique, where the need for a bridge between conceptual and empirical dis- courses arises. He argues in favor of a "materiality" that eludes both kinds, and that also marks the conditions and limits of figuration itself.
The aesthetic is introduced as a "phenomenalized, empirically mani- fest principle of cognition on whose existence the possibility of such an articulation depends" (79). But, de Man notes, this articulation "de- pends on a linguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitive system) that is not itself accessible to the powers of transcen- dental philosophy. "
Although he has earlier insisted that the relationship between the
transcendental and the empirical depends on a widening notion of language as both tropological and performative, he makes clear that what he is approaching is that which cannot be accounted for by ei- ther the performative or the tropological dimensions of language, and that this linguistic structure which is supposed to bridge the gap be- tween the conceptual and empirical discourses will be instead a mode of disarticulation.
Isolating what is prior to figuration and cognition, de Man concen- trates on the use of the apparent figure of the Augenschein, which is the eye itself, or rather, pure vision or ocularity. We broach here that which is, strictly speaking, neither figurable nor cognizable. It cannot be called literal, he tells us (99), for that would imply its possible con- version into figuration or symbolization. Materiality will be precisely that which is convertible into neither figuration nor cognition. This materiality characterizes an aesthetic vision in its irreducibility. The "eye," he writes, is here its own agent, and not the specular echo of the sun. The trope of the "sea," he writes, functions similarly; although Kant calls it "a mirror," it reflects nothing. And it seems that, for de Man, at this textual instance, the failure of these figures to reflect or to act mimetically disqualifies them as figures. This is no doubt a strange requirement to set upon figures, and I doubt that it is one that he has consistently applied. At any rate, in both cases, the effect of these fig- ures is that they fail to perform their figural function and thus relapse into the material condition of figuration, one that is itself, strictly speaking, not convertible into any figure and not understood by its op- posite, the literal, and not, strictly speaking, even a condition, since this materiality does not support figuration, but exercises a corrosive effect on all figuration. Whereas the phenomenality of the aesthetic rests on an adequate representation, the materiality of aesthetic vision is a pure materiality that makes no reference to adequate representation.
Toward the end of the essay, de Man turns to the chapter titled "The Architectonics of Pure Reason" in the third Critique in which he refers to the organic unity of systems, and this unity is conceived through "the recurring metaphor of the body, as a totality of limbs and parts. " Because the aesthetic will involve the suspension of all refer- ence to organic purposiveness, Kant admonishes that "we must not re- gard as the determining grounds of our judgment the concepts of the purposes which all our limbs serve . . . and we must not allow this unity of purpose to influence our aesthetic judgment. "
If aesthetic judgment is to be separated from the understanding of
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natural unities of purpose, and there is an aesthetic judgment of the body, then it will be precisely of the limbs as severed from the unity of purposes (natural) that the body is. Assuming that this unity of pur- pose is expressed by the notion of substance, and that substance is understood as torso, it would appear that the aesthetic vision of the body would be one of dismemberment wherein the limbs are separated from the torso or the substance of the body. Thus, de Man writes, "we must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body . . . : "we must consider the limbs . . . severed from any purpose or use. "
He writes not only in the imperative, but identifies disarticulation with mutilation, and offers mutilate itself as a transitive verb--we must mutilate--although the following sentence amplifies this meaning by claiming that we must only "consider" the limbs as severed. Inter- estingly, the very formulation that gives us what is prior to figuration and cognition and, indeed, the performative, is one that figures our own "seeing" as a mutilating activity that works on the body. Indeed, de Man makes his pedagogical point by likening this dismembered body to the dismemberment of language. He writes: "To the dismem- berment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sen- tences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters" (113). The use of "corresponds," however, in this last sentence seems to recall the very model of adequa- tion from which materiality as dismemberment is supposed to differ. Here de Man is seeking to trace the relapse of a trope into the materi- ality of the letter, a materiality that grounds and exceeds the trope and that is never exhaustively convertible into the trope itself: the condi- tion of the trope, but also the destiny of its disarticulation.
But why is this point about language introduced through a compari- son or, indeed, a correspondence with the body? And what is the rela- tion between materiality understood as bodily dismemberment and the fragmentation of words into letters and the so-called materiality of aes- thetic vision? In what sense does the dismemberment of the body, which is one that takes place in or for vision, not precisely a figurative operation? If seeing effects this dismemberment, then seeing is figured as a performative, and both the figural and performative dimensions of language remain at work in the description of this materiality, a de- scription that may well have to be fully catachrestic to make any sense at all. Indeed, if the body in pieces is neither figurative nor literal, but material, then it would still follow that the only way to convey that
materiality is precisely through catachresis, as de Man actually does, and so through a figure.
If the body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very ex- ample that is said to illustrate that nonconvertibility. A figure can func- tion as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself: indeed, this is perhaps where Benjamin on allegory would, if he could, if I would let him, make his eery return. Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, or one whose terms can be related through means of adequation. So is this body figurable or not? It depends, I would suggest, on how one ap- proaches the question of figurality. If Descartes's body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it still dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very example that is said to illustrate that non- convertibility. The body does not, then, imply the destruction of figu- rality if only because a figure can function as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself. 7 Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, and a fig- ure need not be mimetic to sustain its status as figural.
Clearly, though, the final question here must be to consider this strange separation of the limbs from the body, this repeated scene of castration, the one that Descartes enacts through the grammar that conditions the question he poses of his body in which he is already sepa- rated from that which he calls into question, a separation at the level of grammar that prepares the philosophical question itself, in which the hand that writes the doubt and the hand that is doubted--is it mine? -- is at once the hand that is left behind as the writing emerges in, we might say, its dismembering effect. 8
There is no doubt a hand that writes Descartes's text, and a hand figured within that text as appearing at a distance from the one who looks upon it and asks after its reality. The hand is reflexively spectral- ized in the course of the writing it performs. It undoes its reality pre- cisely at the moment in which it acts or, rather, becomes undone pre- cisely by the traces of the act of writing it performs. If the body is what inaugurates the process of its own spectralization through writing, then it is and is not determined by the discourse it produces. If there is a materiality of the body that escapes from the figures it conditions and
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by which it is corroded and haunted, then this body is neither a surface nor a substance, but the linguistic occasion of the body's separation from itself, one that eludes its capture by the figure it compels.
NOTES
This essay was first presented as an invited lecture at the American Philosophical Association Meetings in December 1987 in Philadelphia. It was re-presented in revised version for the "Culture and Materiality" conference at the University of California at Davis in April 1998, and appeared in Qui Parle 11: 1 (1997).
1. Excellent work reconsidering the relationship of language and materiality in sexual difference is currently being done by Charles Shephardson, Debra Keates, and Katherine Rudolph.
2. "Il me fallait entreprendre se? rieusement une fois en ma vie de me de? faire de toutes les opinions que j'avais rec? ues . . . me de? faire de toutes les opinions. " The text was originally published in Latin in 1641 in France, although Descartes was living in Holland at the time. Descartes apparently had reasons to fear the Dutch ministers reading the text, and so he had a friend oversee its publication in France. It did, however, appear the following year, 1642, in Amsterdam, and the second edition includes the objections and replies. This second edition is usually referred to as the Adam and Tannery version, and it was the basis for the French translations. One of those took place that same year by the Duc de Luynes, and Descartes ap- proved the translation, which is to say that he subjected it to various corrections and revisions. It appeared in revised form in 1647. Hence, we can to some degree think of the French text as one that Descartes approved, and in some instances, wrote, but nevertheless one to which he was willing to attach a signature.
Almost every English version of Descartes will be a translation of the second version of The Meditations. Two French translations were offered to Descartes for approval, one by the Duc de Luynes and another by Clerselier; he chose the one by the Duc de Luynes for The Meditations themselves, and the "objections and replies" translation by Clerselier.
In 1661, Clerselier republished his translation, making corrections, and aban- doning the translation by the Duc de Luynes that Descartes had approved. Many scholarly editions take this to be a more exact and literal translation and have used it as the primary text. Some have complained that the Duc de Luynes's version was too liberal a translation, lacking Descartes's exactitude. And they have made ex- cuses for why Descartes might have accepted the translation--politesse, politics, and the like.
The French that I follow here is that provided by the Duc de Luynes. The English is from The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
3. In the French, he refers to what is "feintes et invente? es par l'imagination," and this notion of "invented" is translated from the Latin: effingo. Knowledge of oneself does not depend on what is feigned or invented, but the Latin term casts doubt on the very denial that Descartes performs.
4. "Je feindrais en effet, si j'imaginais e^tre quelque chose, puisque imaginer n'est autre chose que contempler la figure ou l'image d'une chose corporelle. "
5. Descartes writes, "he has at least left within my power this resolution . . . for although I notice a certain weakness in my nature in that I cannot continually concentrate my mind on one single thought [je ne puis pas attacher continuellement mon esprit a` une me^me pense? e, I cannot continually attach my spirit to the same thought], I can yet, by attentive and frequent meditation, impress [imprimer] it so forcibly on my memory that I shall never fail to recollect it whenever I have need of it, and thus acquire the habit of never going astray" (178).
6. This view corresponds to Lacan's view of the mirror stage as that which per- mits a specular version of the body on the condition of distortion. The subsequent references to Paul de Man's essays are from Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
7. One might usefully consult Walter Benjamin on the status of allegory for precisely such an approach to the figure.
8. See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Ren- aissance (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990).
How Can I Deny . . . ? 273
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V. Materiality without Matter
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Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ("within such limits")
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Peggy Kamuf
Will this become possible? Will we one day be able, and in a single ges- ture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine)?
Will we be able in the future (and there will be no future except on this condition) to think both the event and the machine as two com- patible or even indissociable concepts, although today they appear to us to be antinomic? Antinomic because we think that what happens ought to keep, so we think, some nonprogrammable and therefore in- calculable singularity. We think that an event worthy of the name ought not, so we think, to give in or be reduced to repetition. An event ought above all to happen to someone, to some living being who is thus affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. It is difficult, however, to conceive of a living being to whom or through whom something happens without an affection getting inscribed in a sensible, aesthetic manner right on some body or some organic matter.
Notice I say organic. No thinking of the event, therefore, without an aesthetic and some presumption of living organicity.
The machine, on the contrary, is thought to repeat impassively, im- perceptibly received commands. In a state of anesthesia, it obeys or commands a calculable program without affect or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton. Its functioning, if not its production, does not need anyone. And it is difficult to conceive of a machine-like appa- ratus without inorganic matter.
Notice I say inorganic. Inorganic, that is, nonliving, sometimes dead
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but always, in principle, unfeeling and inanimate, without desire, with- out intention, without spontaneity. The automaticity of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life.
This is at least how the event and the machine are generally con- ceived. Among all the incompatible traits that I have just briefly re- called, so as to suggest how difficult it is to think them together as the same "thing," I have underscored these two predicates that are most often attributed without hesitation to matter or to the material body: the organic and the inorganic.
These two commonly used words carry an obvious reference, either positive or negative, to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing, to a total form of, precisely, organization, whether or not it be a beautiful form, an aesthetic form, this time in the sense of the fine arts. This organicity is thought to be lacking from so- called inorganic matter. If one day, with one and the same concept, these two incompatible concepts, the event and the machine, were to be thought together, you can bet that not only (and I insist on not only) will one have produced a new logic, an unheard-of conceptual form; against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster (even more disturbing than what we see on the poster for our colloquium, which represents, I sup- pose, Shelley's "Chariot of Life"). Moreover, it is already necessary to correct this formulation: the new figure of an event-machine would no longer be even a figure and it would not resemble, it would resemble nothing, not even what we call, in a still-familiar way, a monster. But it would therefore be, by virtue of this very novelty, an event, the only and the first possible event, because im-possible. That is why I ven- tured to say that this thinking could belong only to the future--and even that it makes the future possible. An event does not come about unless its irruption interrupts the course of the possible, and, as the im- possible itself, surprises any foreseeability. But such a supermonster of eventness would be, this time, for the first time, also produced by the machine.
Not only, I said. The thinking of this new concept will have changed the very essence and the very name of what we today call "thought," the "concept," "thinking thought," "thinking the thinkable," or "thinking the concept. " Perhaps another thinking is heralded here. Perhaps it is heralded without announcing itself, without horizon of expectation, by means of this old word thought, this homonym or paleonym that has sheltered for such a long time the name still to come of a thinking
that has not yet thought what it must think, namely, thought, namely, what is given to be thought with the name "thought," beyond knowl- edge, theory, philosophy, literature, the fine arts--and even technics.
As a still preliminary exercise, somewhat like musicians who listen to their instruments and tune them before beginning to play, we could try out another version of the same aporia. Such an aporia would not block or paralyze, but on the contrary would condition any event of thought that resembles somewhat the unrecognizable monster that has just passed in front of our eyes. What would this aporia be? One may say of a machine that it is productive, active, efficient, or as one says in French, performante. But a machine as such, however performante it may be, could never, according to the strict Austinian orthodoxy of speech acts, produce an event of the performative type. Performativity will never be reduced to technical performance. Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only, in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplace- able. Performativity, therefore, excludes in principle, in its own mo- ment, any machine-like [machinale] technicity. It is even the name given to this intentional exclusion. This foreclosure of the machine an- swers to the intentionality of intention itself. It is intentionality. If, then, some machinality (repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body) intervenes in a performative event, it is always as an acciden- tal, extrinsic, and parasitical element, in truth a pathological, mutilat- ing, or even mortal element. Here again, to think both the machine and the performative event together remains a monstrosity to come, an im- possible event, and therefore the only possible event. But it would be an event that, this time, no longer happens without the machine. Rather, it would happen by the machine. To give up neither the event nor the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, never to re- duce one to the other: this is perhaps a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of "us" working for the last few decades. But who is this "us"? Who would be this "us" whom I dare to speak of so carelessly? Perhaps it designates at bottom, and first of all, those who find themselves in the improbable place or in the uninhabitable habitat of this monster.
Having begun in this manner, as you can very well hear, I already owe you an excuse, many excuses, an incalculable number of excuses. I should apologize, as you say in English, endlessly. In a very limited space and time, "within such limits," I will no doubt fail, by my own
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fault, to negotiate among several necessary compromises and to honor several commitments that are sometimes difficult to reconcile.
There are at least three or four of these. The announced title for my contribution, "'Materiality'"--in quotation marks--"Archival Inter- vention, Virtual Futures," was not one I myself chose, as you might have supposed. Quite a while ago, Tom Cohen and I no doubt evoked this series of themes, but simply as abstract possibilities. Upon receiv- ing the poster for the colloquium, I for the first time saw unfurl before my eyes this intimidating banner that I would never have dared to wave myself: "'Materiality'"--in quotation marks, and yes, I myself would certainly have wanted to add those quotation marks--"Archival Intervention, Virtual Futures. " I nevertheless promised, promised my- self, right away, to do everything to honor as best I could the impos- sible task that had thus been assigned to me. I will therefore attempt to approach in my own way all these formidable questions, even if I pre- fer to withdraw and beat a retreat toward the final title that I myself chose, namely: "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ("within such lim- its"). This is the first compromise.
I owe you an apology for a second compromise. So as to save some time and energy at a moment when I have little of either to spare, I had to reorient in the direction of this colloquium certain sessions of the seminar that I am giving this year in Paris and at UC Irvine on par- don and perjury. By analyzing the filiations of these concepts (on the one hand, the Abrahamic inheritance--that is, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim--and the Greek inheritance, on the other), by formalizing the aporetic logic that torments this history, these concepts, this experi- ence, their present-day mutation on a geo-juridico-political scale in a world where scenes of public repentance happen more and more fre- quently, I insist in this seminar on a certain irreducibility of the work, that is, l'oeuvre. As a possible legacy from what is above all an event, l'oeuvre has a virtual future only by surviving or cutting itself off from its presumed responsible signatory. It thereby supposes that a logic of the machine is in accordance, however improbable that may seem, with a logic of the event. Hence, there will remain some traces, dare I say visible archives, of this ongoing seminar and of its own context. This will not escape you and I do not wish to hide it. In a certain way, I will be speaking solely about pardon, forgiveness, excuse, betrayal, and perjury. You noticed that I began to do so already in order to at- tempt to excuse myself. But my speaking of forgiveness and so forth will not necessarily betray the general contract of our colloquium. And
I will speak neither of myself, nor of my texts on the scene of writing or archive fever, on the signature, event, context, nor on the spirit, the virtual revenants and other specters of Marx, nor even directly of my seminar on forgiveness and perjury. I will speak only of Paul de Man apropos of one or another of his works, for example, apropos of Rousseau and apropos of the announced themes for this colloquium.
These first two compromises were no doubt excessive and inexcus- able. They became also unavoidable from the moment the title, pro- gram, or even the protocol of this colloquium defined implacable im- peratives. To save time, I ought not to undertake to read in its entirety this title, which I hold to be a masterpiece. Nevertheless, I reread it in extenso, for one must register everything about it, including its play with quotation marks--the word Materiality having been freed from quotation marks whereas, in the subtitle, care was taken to put the word materialist in the expression "'materialist' thought" (rather than materialist philosophy or theory) under the strict surveillance of quota- tion marks. I underscore this fact now because, much later, I will won- der apropos of de Man, what might be a thinking of machinistic mate- riality without materialism and even perhaps without matter. The generalization of quotation marks that then becomes necessary would in that case no longer mean in the least that one is citing an ulterior au- thor or text; rather, and quite on the contrary, it would mean that one is performatively instituting a new concept and a new contract with the word. One is thus inaugurating another word, in sum, a homonym that must be put forward cautiously between quotation marks. Another word-concept is thus staged whose event one causes to come about. The quotation marks signal in this case that one is citing only oneself at the moment of this invention or this convention in a gesture that is as inaugural as it is arbitrary. I now reread, as promised, the complete title: "Culture and Materiality: A post-millenarian conference--a` propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--to consider trajectories for 'ma- terialist' thought in the afterlife of theory, cultural studies, and Marxist critique. " This is an impressive series of transactions that called for an equally impressive number of rhetorical performances or theoretical exploits: between culture and materiality, between a corpus or a prop- er name, Paul de Man, more precisely a very particular place of the posthumous corpus, Aesthetic Ideology ("--a` propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--"). Here, then, is an inheritance that is also a post- humous work of Paul de Man's to which we are invited to refer, be- tween dashes, in the mode of an "a`-propos" that set me to wondering.
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I wondered about this French idiom, which seems untranslatable and overdetermined enough that, I suppose, it was left like the foreign body it remains in your language. Moreover, and apropos, I had for a moment dreamed of entitling my lecture: "Apropos of apropos, apro- pos of all the meanings and all the uses of a` propos and of the a`-propos in French (a` propos, as you know, can be an adverb, a` propos, or a noun, the a` propos). I had thus dreamed, but perhaps I will do it silent- ly, of examining the modalities and figures of reference that are cross- ing in the inimitable and untranslatable expression a` propos--which allies chance to necessity, contingency to obligation, machine-like as- sociation to the internal, intentional, organic link. When one says "a` propos," "a` propos de . . . ," there is from a pragmatic point of view always a mark of reference, a reference to . . . , but it is sometimes a di- rect reference, sometimes indirect, furtive, passing, oblique, accidental, machine-like, also in the mode of the quasi avoidance of the unavoid- able, of repression, or of the lapsus, and so forth. When one says "a` propos," it is because one is at least pretending to leap at the oppor- tunity to speak, metonymically, of something else altogether, to change the subject without changing the subject, or else to underscore that be- tween what is being talked about and what someone wants to talk about there is either a link of organic, internal, and essential necessity, or else, inversely, an insignificant and superficial association, a purely mechanical and metonymic association, the arbitrary or fortuitous comparison--"by accident"--of two signifiers. And yet it is clear that, at that very moment, one touches on the essential or the place of deci- sion. That is where the thing happens, that is where it comes about. When Rousseau, after having stolen the ribbon, accuses Marion so as to excuse himself (and we will come back to this when we follow de Man's magisterial reading), it is because he denounced, he said, "the first object that presented itself [le premier objet qui s'offrit]. "1 Marion herself, or the name of Marion, being there by chance, by accident, it is as if he leaped on the opportunity and said with a`-propos: "Apropos, it's Marion who gave it to me, I didn't steal it. " The "esprit d'a`-propos," in French, is the art, the genius, but also the technique that consists of knowing how to grab an opportunity, to make the best of it, the best economy of contingency, and to make of the Khairos or the Chaos a significant, archivable, necessary, or even ineffaceable event.
So many other things still remained enormous and enigmatic for me in the "a`-propos" of this title--which says everything in advance, be- ginning with "post-millenarian" and "'materialist' thought" ("materi-
alist" in quotation marks), not to mention everything that is put under the "umbrella" of some "afterlife" ("theory, cultural studies, and Marx- ist critique"). When I read this protocol, I asked myself which theoreti- cal animal or which animal-machine of the third millennium could measure up to this inhuman program. If anyone could ever treat the subject in question, it will not be me, I said as I commanded myself to retreat: withdraw toward your own compromise on the subject of these untenable promises, but make every possible effort not to be too unworthy of the square you've landed on in this jeu de l'oie (a French board game that is something like a cross between Chinese checkers and Monopoly). On the poster, I said to myself, you find yourself for- tunately immobilized in the company of Carla Freccero and Hillis Miller. Each time I look at this poster, it makes me think of a jeu de l'oie for a Californian science fiction. A throw of the dice that is incal- culably well calculated has assigned all three of us, Carla Freccero, Hillis Miller, and me, three immigrants from Yale, the burden, and the word is well chosen, of "material events. "
So I pray you to excuse me, but I will not treat the subject. In his ar- ticle "Excuses (Confessions)," apropos of Rousseau, de Man refers in a note to Austin's "A Plea for Excuses. " But he pays no attention to the fact that this text by Austin itself begins by presenting an excuse. It is thereby altogether enveloped, comprehended, included in the event of this first performative. Everything that Austin is going to say on the subject of the excuse will be at once comprehended and signed by the first gesture of the first sentence, by the performative event that is put to work, precisely, by the first words of "A Plea for Excuses. " With the excuse that they implicitly present, these words of introduction make of this text an event, une oeuvre, something other than a purely theo- retical treatise: "The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits. "2 Everything happens as if the title, "A Plea for Excuses," designated first of all and solely Austin's performative gesture that itself presents excuses and alleges limits (time, urgency, situation, context, etc. : "within such lim- its," he says). The title, "A Plea for Excuses," would thus be the name or the description of this lecturer's gesture rather than and before being the announced subject, a theme or a problem to be treated in a theo- retical, philosophical, constative, or metalinguistic mode, namely, the concept or the usage of the word excuses. This text constitutes a "Plea for Excuses," and it even does so in an exemplary fashion. So Austin excuses himself for not treating the excuse in a serious enough fashion.
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He excuses himself for remaining or for leaving his audience in igno- rance on the subject of what is meant by "to excuse oneself. " And this at the moment when (performative contradiction or not), having begun by excusing himself, by pretending to do so, or rather by pretending to pretend to do so, he undertakes to excuse himself for not treating the subject of the excuse. He must, nevertheless, know enough about it, he must presuppose enough on the subject of what his audience knows and understands about it in advance, in so-called ordinary language (which is, moreover, the real subject of this essay), to declare that he will not treat it--even as he introduces it.