No More Learning

Derrida, an Egyptian
On the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid
PETER SLOTERDI]K
TRANSLATED BY WIELAND HOBAN
polity
First published in French as Derrida, un Egyptien (C) Maren Sell Editeurs, Paris, 2006. Translated from the original German text.
This English edition (C) Polity Press, 2009
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? Contents
Acknowledgements Preliminary Note
1 Luhmann and Derrida
2 Sigmund Freud and Derrida
3 Thomas Mann and Derrida
4 Franz Borkenau and Derrida
5 Regis Debray and Derrida
6 Hegel and Derrida
7 Boris Groys and Derrida
Index
vii viii
1 11 19 29 41 51 65
v
75
Acknowledgements
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Daniel Bougnoux, who told me during an encounter in Villeneuve-Ies-Avignons about the event 'A Day of Derrida', which was planned for 21 November 2005 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
He later suggested to me that I too should thank Derrida by commemorating him. It was this invi- tation that led me to write the present text.
vii
Preliminary Note
Nothing seems more natural than for the living to forget the dead, and nothing is as obvious as the fact that the dead haunt the living. Of all the things said by Derrida with reference to his approaching death in the summer of 2004, the statement that occurs to me most often is the one in which he professed to harbour two utterly contradictory convictions relating to his posthumous 'existence' : he was certain that he would be forgotten as soon as he died, yet at the same time that something of his work would survive in the cultural memory. These two certainties, he explained, both existed within him in an almost unrelated fashion. Each was accompanied by the feeling of complete self- evidence, and each was conclusive in its own way without having to take the opposing claim into account.
viii
In the following, I would like to attempt to approach the figure of Derrida in the light of this declaration. It seems to me that this statement shows us more than simply a person in his fortu- itously contradictory nature. Rather, through its unreconciled positing of two alternately valid observations, it has an expressive dimension that reveals something of Derrida's 'fundamental posi- tion' [Grundstellung] - if I might be allowed to apply that Heideggerian expression ad hominem just this once. Derrida's words amount to a self- description that almost has the character of a metaphysical statement. He thus concedes that in 'the real', whatever that might mean, there are oppositions that are incapable of synthesis, and coexist despite being mutually exclusive. Because these oppositions form part of the speaker's own thoughts and experience and determine him, this concession at once leads us to an observation about the philosopher: that he experienced him- self as a place in which the non-unifying encounter between mutually incompatible evi- dences occurred. One could probably take this
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Preliminary Note
? Preliminary Note
observation as a point of departure, and ask whether the tireless insistence on the ambiguity and polyvalence of signs and statements that is inseparably associated with the physiognomy of this author could perhaps have indicated that he experienced himself as th? vessel or collection point of oppositions that refused to join and form a simple identity.
This comment could already provide the main outline for a philosophical portrait of Derrida: his path was defined by a constantly alert concern not to be pinned down to one particular identity - a concern that was no less profound than the author's conviction that his place could only be at the forefront of intellectual visibility. One of the most admirable achievements of this philosoph- ical life is the fact that it was able to maintain the simultaneity of the utmost visibility and a resolute non-identity with any specific image of itself - in a shimmering parabola extending over four decades of his existence as a public character.
There are essentially only two ways to do justice to a thinker. The first is to open his works and
x
encounter him in the movements of his sentences, the flow of his arguments and the architecture of his chapters - one could refer to this as a singu- larizing form of reading in which justice is inter- preted as an assimilation to the unique. It would be an especially natural choice in the case of such an author as Derrida, who never wanted to be anything other than a radically attentive reader of the major and minor texts whose sum total con- stitutes the occidental archive - assuming one gives the word 'reader' a sufficiently explosive meaning. The other way is to move from the text to the context and locate the author in relation to metapersonal horizons that reveal something about his true meaning - at the risk that his own text may be assigned less importance than the larger context in which his words echo. This approach amounts to a desingularizing reading in which one understands justice as a feeling for con- stellations. Derrida himself clearly preferred the first approach and did not expect many favourable results from the second, as he knew very well that it was especially attractive for those who wanted
xi
Preliminary Note
Preliminary Note
to make him all too easy to deal with . Hence , when the occasion arose, he defended himself politely and clearly against Jurgen Habermas's attempt to declare him a Jewish mystic. In answer to this uncomfortable identification he remarked, with subtle irony: 'so I am not demanding that one should read me as if my texts could transport anyone into a state of intuitive ecstasy, but I do demand that one should be more careful about mediations and more critical towards translations and diversions via contexts that are often very far from my own'
If I have chosen, keeping this warning in mind, to take the second path in the following, there are two very different reasons for this. The first is that there is already no lack of ecstatic and literal, not to say hagiographic readings of Derrida to be found everywhere; the second is that I cannot shake off the impression that, with all the justified admiration for this author, it is rare to find a sufficiently
In Florian R6tzer, Franzosische Philosophen im Gespriich [French Philosophers in Conversation] (Munich: K. Boer Verlag, 1987), p. 74.
xii
distanced assessment of his position in the field of contemporary theory. lbis call for distance is an ex- pression of esteem; for if one can also understand it as an antidote to the dangers of a cultic recep- tion, it is all the more necessary in order to develop an image of the mountain range from which la mon- tagne Derrida rises up as one of the highest peaks. In the following I shall sketch seven vignettes ex- amining this thinker in relation to authors from re- cent tradition and the present day: Niklas Luhmann, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Franz Borkenau, Regis Debray, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Boris Groys.
Preliminary Note
xiii
1 I Luhmann and Derrida
Of all the constellations in which Derrida's work could be placed, the one involving Luhmann's ceuvre is the most outlandish - but also the most revealing. Each of the two thinkers has been hon- oured with the highest and most problematic praise that can be bestowed upon an author in the field of theory: that he was the Begel of the twen- tieth century. Titles of this kind may be attractive for superficial reflection and useful for public rela- tions, but they can hardly accompany any serious interest. None the less, they possess a certain char- acterizing power in the case of both these emi- nent figures, in so far as 'Begel' is not simply a proper name, but also refers to a programme or a position in an educational process. To mention Begel is to speak of culmination, the non plus ultra and exhaustion; at the same time, the name
1
Luhmann and Derrida
stands for synthetic and encyclopedic energies that can only appear in the calm after the storm- or, as Kojeve and Queneau might have put it, on the Sunday after history. These names mark a con- fluence of imperial and archival ambitions.
It would obviously be completely pointless to examine Derrida and Luhmann in terms of their respectively unique Hegelianism. Nor were the two men Sunday thinkers, but rather the opposite: tireless workers who made Sunday a working day - literally and for fundamental reasons - and fur- thermore held the conviction that on holidays, one either takes care of private correspondence or remains silent. What can be said is that both thinkers were concerned with completion and, while conveying the appearance of innovation, were perfecting and retouching the finished image of a tradition that could not be extended any fur- ther. There is a certain irony in the fact that, as we can see today, all those who thought that decon- struction and systems theory - constructs that emerged with a distinct profile from the 1970s on
had ushered in a new age of thought that
2
Luhmann and Derrida
opened up unlimited horizons for theoretical work were mistaken. In reality, both conceptual approaches were the finished result of logical processes that had shaped the thought of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries. In the case of Der- rida, this involved the conclusion of the linguistic or semiological turn according to which the twen- tieth century had belonged to the philosophies of language and writing; in the case of Luhmann, on the other hand, it was the completion of the aban- donment of philosophy called for by Wittgenstein, achieved through a resolute withdrawal of thought from the tradition of philosophies of the spirit and language in order to reposition themselves in the field of metabiology, the general logic of differ- ences between system and environment. What both effects have in common with the case of Hegel is that they use the final possibilities of a given grammar to the full, and thus give their suc- cessors the initially euphoric feeling of starting at a high point. This subsequently gives way to the alarming realization that if one starts at the peak, the only way to continue is downwards.
3
? Luhmann and Derrida
In all other respects, the differences between the two Hegels of the twentieth century could hardly be greater. A certain superiority on Derrida's part is most evident in the fact that - like no other thinker except Heidegger - he always operated at the outermost edges of tradition, and thus kept tra- dition, however fractured, on his side. This ex- plains the incredible effect of his work in the academic world, where deconstruction proved to be the last chance of a theory that achieves inte- gration through disintegration? by breaking through the boundaries of the archive , it offered a possibility of holding it together. Luhmann, by contrast, left the philosophical archive behind, contenting himself with the ostensibly modest ti- tle of a sociologist of world society. To him, the only significance the philosophical library of the Old Europe still had was as a reservoir of verbal figures with which the priests and intellectuals of former times attempted to grasp the whole. From the perspective of general systems theory, philos- ophy as a whole is an exhausted, totalizing lan- guage game whose instruments corresponded to
4
Luhmann and Derrida
the semantic horizon of historical societies, but can no longer do justice to the primary fact of moder- nity, namely the progressive differentiation of the social system.
It is regrettable that the two Hegels of the twen- tieth century did not respond extensively and reciprocally to each other; thus we have no com- prehensive minutes of the virtual logical summit conference of postmodern thought. It would have been immeasurably exciting for the intellectual community to experience the two eminent intelli- gences of our epoch interacting in a situation of elaborated dialogue. As both Derrida and Luh- mann were of an extremely polite nature, each would naturally have resisted the temptation to treat the other's work reductively, let alone canni- balistically, as is normally the case among rivals for the highest position in the field of intellectual observation. None the less, each would have had to attempt assimilating though not absorptive translations of the other into his own terms - which, with two such masters of scepticism towards the very concept of the own, would have
5
Luhmann and Derrida
proved a stimulating exercise, and the observers of these translations would have had the privilege of being able to observe the reciprocal observa- tions of the most conceptually powerful observers. Luhmann certainly paid close attention to Der- rida's work, though nothing is known about Derrida returning the observation - it would seem that he never explicitly acknowledged the work of the scholar from Bielefeld.
Luhmann saw Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition as an undertaking closely related to his own intentions, in the sense that he saw the same post-ontological energies at work in it that drove his own systemic theory project. He openly admitted that deconstruction was and would remain a relevant option: that it indeed did precisely 'what we can do now' 1 This means that deconstruction is a strictly dated form of theoreti- cal behaviour - dated in the sense that it could
1 Niklas Luhmann, 'Dekonstruktion als Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung' [ Deconstruction as Second-Order Observation], in Aujsiitze und Reden [Essays and Speeches], ed. OliverJahraus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), p. 286.
6
2 Ibid. , p. 286.
Luhmann and Demda
only appear on the scene after the conclusion of conventional theory's historical formation, and thus consistently remains connected to a 'situa- tion' to which Luhmann assigns five attributes: post-metaphysical, post-ontological, post-conven- tional, postmodern and post-catastrophic. 2 Deconstruction, according to Luhmann, presup- poses the 'catastrophe of modernity' which should be thought of as a shift from the form of stability existing in traditional hierarchical-central- ist society to the form of stability found in our modern, differentiated, multifocal society. Once multifocality is taken as a point of departure, all theory moves to the level of second-order obser- vation: one no longer attempts a direct descrip- tion of the world, but rather re-describes - and thus deconstructs - existing descriptions of the world. One could say that Luhmann honoured Derrida by crediting him with the achievement of finding a solution to the fundamental logical task of the postmodern situation: switching from
7
Luhmann and Derrida
stability through cenfring and solid foundations to stability through greater flexibility and decen- tring. With a sure feeling for the latent pathos of deconstruction, Luhmann adds the following to his concluding acknowledgement: 'Thus under- stood, deconstruction will survive its own decon- struction as the most relevant description of modern society's self-description. '3
The decisive element here is the seemingly harmless verb 'survive' In using it, Luhmann may have touched on the motivational core of the other Hegel's work. One could indeed think that Derrida devoted his ambition to the development of a form of theory that would always have a future and the potential to become a tradition; this would be achieved by permitting and even demanding an application to itself, in the certainty that it would always emerge from such a test in a regenerated and re-consolidated state. This trick could only be pulled off by a theory that was always already lying in its own grave, so to speak,
3 Ibid. p. 291.
8
Luhmann and Derrida
rising from it only for repeated burials. Could it be that the core impulse of deconstruction was to pursue a project of construction with the aim of creating an undeconstructible survival machine?
2 I Sigmund Freud and Derrida
Such questions, which are really suggestions, put one in a dreamlike frame of mind. In its inner drift one finds the motifs of classical metaphysics re-establishing themselves as if under an associa- tive compulsion. For me, a reverie of this kind involuntarily calls up memories of Sigmund Freud's late works. I am thinking in particular of the text Moses and Monotheism, which was written by the psychologist on the threshold of death and has remained a constant bone of con- tention since the publication of the first version in 1937 and the revised book form in 1939 - irksome to Jews, foolish to Europeans. As is well known, the first part under the heading 'Moses, an Egyptian' - shows Freud developing the 'mon- strous notion' that the 'man Moses, the liberator of his people, who gave them their religion and
11
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
their laws'! was in reality an Egyptian by culture and nationality. In the second section, with the hovering title 'If Moses Was an Egyptian Freud develops the theory, carefully considered and bold at the same time, that the distinguished Egyptian Moses must then have been a follower of the solar-monotheistic Aten religion, introduced by Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC, who, after the reactions of the priests of Amon, saw no possibility of propagating the unpopular new faith in his homeland and among his own people. Sub- sequently he joined the captive Jewish people to lead them out of Egypt - with the intention of resuming the monotheistic experiment in a new location with other people. Thus he taught the
Jews the Egyptian custom of circumcision, the conventions of religious arrogance and also the strictness towards oneself that a strictly mono- latrous religion must demand of its followers - or rather its test subjects. The ability to be
1 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 3.
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Sigmund Freud and Demda
strict towards oneself is the source of the mental transformations summarized by Freud in the for- mula 'progress in spiritualization'
In the context of a reverie there is a certain jus- tification for bringing up this 'monstrous' revision of Jewish history by the Jew Freud, as it consti- tutes a manner of prelude to what will later be referred to with Derrida's key term difef rance. In Freud's interpretation, this 'shift' or distortion first of all concerns the real recasting of roles in the monotheistic game - but equally the redaction of accounts of this, which are always subject to the tendentious requirement of making what happened as unidentifiable as possible. Freud writes:
The distortion of a text is similar to that of a murder. The difficulty lies not in carrying out the deed, but rather in removing its traces. One is inclined to give the word 'distortion' the double meaning to which it is entitled, though it makes no use of it today. It should not only mean to change something in its
13
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
appearance, but also: to take it to a different place, to shift it elsewhere. 2. 3
Then differance, viewed in the context of Freud's comment, refers not only - and not primarily - to the break with a full present (as a temporal mode), but rather first of all - and primarily - to spatial displacement and redisposition in the casting of roles for a theological stage play. According to Freud, the true Egyptian drama is never played in the presence of true Egyptians from that point on. From the Mosaic intervention onwards, Egypt itself takes 'place' in a different location - while the literal Egypt, from the per- spective of the emigrants, is no more than a dead shell that serves exclusively to indicate the neces- sary starting point of the escape to their own oth- erness. To be a monotheistic neo-Egyptian in the true Akhenatenic sense, one had in future to take
2 Ibid.
3 [Translator's note: this passage can only be understood with ref-
erence to the original word for 'distortion', Entstellung (verb: entstellen). The noun Stelle means 'place', and its combination with the negational prefix ent- indicates a displacement. ]
14
4 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, loco cit.
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
part in the religious experiment ofJudaism as con- ceived by the man Moses. Consistently enough this people, enlisted for a travesty, had to deal from the days of the exodus onwards with the problem of its uncertain territorialization, or - to use an expression Derrida especially favoured - it was chronically 'haunted' by this problem. The original content of his hantologie, namely the sci- ence of haunting by unresolved matters from the past Chauntology), thus becomes obvious Cone finds this ingenious play on words in Spectres of Marx, probably Derrida's most significant political study, with a double allusion to both ontologie and Lacan's pun hontologie): it can only consist in the obsessive traces of Jewish-Egyptian ambiva- lence. Their origins had to be sought in the fact that Moses wanted 'to lead the Jews out of the country', as Freud says, and through circumcision impose a custom 'that virtually made Egyptians of them' 4 With his analysis of hauntings, Derrida for- malizes the idea, elaborated by Freud, that one
15
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
cannot be a Jew without, in a certain sense, embodying Egypt - or a ghost thereof.
This late work by Freud is not only notable for its development of the concept of 'distortion'; it is even more impressive through the inexorable con- sistency with which it 'deconstructs' the myth of the exodus. Read in the context of Freud's specu- lations, the term 'exodus' now no longer refers to the secession of Judaism from foreign rule by the Egyptians, but to the realization of the most rad- ical Egypticism by Jewish means. From that point on, the history of ideas takes the form of a mas- sive game of displacement in which motifs from Egyptian universalism are acted out by non- Egyptian protagonists.
What might be especially conspicuous to a psy- chologist here is that, in his final study, Freud barely referred to the concept of the unconscious in its established definition any longer - as if it had been rendered superfluous by the introduc- tion of 'distortion' One can view Moses and Monotheism to an extent as the self-correction of psychoanalysis at the last minute. The message of
16
? Sigmund Freud and Demda
Freud's late works would then be: ultimately it is not the unconscious that decides the fate of humans; what truly counts is the incognito that conceals the origin of the dominant ideas . Because distortion goes far beyond active concealment, it protects the Egyptian incognito in a way that is much more secure than the directorate of a con- spiracy could ever achieve. Naturally the figure of Moses had to be the first to be affected by the dis- tortion. Once it had done its work, the leader of Judaism was himself no longer able to say with certainty whence he truly came. In such a situa- tion, projects become more important than origins. Now any consideration for descent takes a back seat to the prospect of the Promised Land.
If one pursues Freud's reflections on the cryptic fabrication of Jewish identity to their logical con- clusion, the irreversible effect of the exodus becomes palpable: the departure from Egypt, according to Freud, spawned the Mosaic Jews as a hetero-Egyptian people that could not under any circumstances have returned to a previous sense of the own, even if it had desired to. The trace of
17
Sigmund Freud and Demda
the other had imprinted itself indelibly within the innermost part of the own, no matter how it might be disguised and covered up by new pro- grammes. This imprint was so deep that even the symbol for the most intimate aspect of the own had been taken from the strangers: if circumcision truly indicated chosenness , as Freud tirelessly claimed, this symbol was borrowed from those from whom the Jews, as an emigrant people, would in future seek to set themselves apart at all costs .
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3 I Thomas Mann and Derrida
At this point I am reminded of Derrida's insistence that one should be careful with translations and diversions via contexts that are often very far from his own. This insistence contains a distant echo of Nietzsche's well-known admonition: 'Above all, do not mistake me for someone else! ' I admit that these indications will become particularly relevant in the following, where we shall venture a con- textualization that exceeds the frame of Derrida's own statements about himself and yet, as extreme as the defamiliarization may be, will pos- sibly bring us very close to the nucleus of his most momentous operations.
I will take the liberty of imagining in the fol- lowing that the dizzying career of the Algerian- born thinker beginning in France, then continuing in the USA and finally in the rest of the
19
Tbomas Mann and Derrida
world - was prophesied in an indirect, but per- sonally apt manner by one of the greatest novel- ists of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that this does not apply to Derrida as an individual, but rather to the general type of the Jewish outsider who, coming from the edges of the empire, attains an eminent position in the log- ical power centre through dangerous and excep- tional achievements. I am not unaware that a thinker such as Derrida, for whom respect for the singular meant a great deal, would have been pro- foundly suspicious towards attempts to under- stand the individual in terms of typical forms - none the less, I believe that on this occasion a journey in the sedan chair of the general type can also take us to our goal (or at least closer to the critical zone) without doing an injustice to the interests of the unique.
Thomas Mann became aware of the current rel- evance of Old Testament subject matter at a notably similar time to the aged Freud, and from the late 1920s on - as he later said in a well- known statement - he had set himself the task of
20
Thomas Mann and Derrida
wresting myth from the hands of intellectual fas- cism and remoulding it in a humanist form. One can assign his novel tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, written between 1933 and 1943, a key position in the history of literature and ideas in the twentieth century - first because it constitutes the secret main text of modern theology, whose public emergence took place outside of theolog- ical faculties; and secondly as a grand parallel project to Freud's explorations in which Mann probed the immeasurable implications of a psy- choanalytical and novelistic subversion of the exodus narrative. If the departure of the Jews from Egypt was genuinely a continuation of Egyptian culture by other means - and, in his own way, Thomas Mann reached similar conclusions to Freud - it could only be a matter of time before it would occur to the Jewish hetero-Egyptians to examine their connections to the homO-Egyptians, if one can call them that.
Thomas Mann found the pivotal point between the exodus from Egypt and the immigration there in the tale of young Joseph. As we know, he was
21
Thomas Mann and Derrida
the youngest son of]acob, and his favourite - for which he was hated by his brothers; as a result, they ambushed him one day and sold him to Mid- ianite slave traders in order to be rid of him. As the narrator shows, there is a profound ambiguity to this crime. It is not only suited to representing the secret of the injustice that is inseparable from pref- erential love and contributes to the birth of jeal- ousy; it also provides an excellent opportunity to examine the problem of a revision of the ]ewish relationship with Egypt, which was initially only conceivable as blasphemy. For the reader who is prepared to take the hint, Thomas Mann's irony supplies a hidden clue that, for a talented son of the progenitor ]acob, the best thing that could happen in his whole life was in fact to be sold to Egypt. Though this same ]oseph could have become a respected shepherd at the fountains of Israel if his brothers had left him alone, or an olive farmer listening in pious serenity to the growing of the trees, there were other career options for him in Egypt - assuming the newcomer were able to turn his involuntary immigration to his advantage.
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? Thomas Mann and Derrida
Thomas Mann's tale provides the most expansive commentary on the topos of a blessing in disguise. A sharp-witted hetero-Egyptian brought into Egypt through a second distortion could indeed have the ability to understand the homo-Egyptians better than they understood themselves. This hermeneu- tical superiority would be a gift bestowed by his specific marginality - and would in fact transpire to be the key to Joseph's successes in Egypt. Suf- fice it to say here that Thomas Mann's depiction, through a subtle parody of psychoanalysis, of the interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams by the young hermeneutician, who would soon become indis- pensable, is one of the most sonorous scenes in modern world literature. 1
My suggestion that the novelist Thomas Mann may have succeeded in offering an involuntary prediction of the phenomenon of Derrida relates
1 As I am developing a purely typological argument here, it is not necessary to take into account the fact that the chronology of the situation contradicts my interpretation. As the biblical story of
)oseph takes place in the period before the exodus, the schema of 'back to Egypt' is not yet as applicable to the firstJoseph as to the later protagonists in his position.
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Thomas Mann and Derrida
to the wondrous figure of ]oseph - or rather the ]osephian position as such, whose key character- istic must be revealed as that of being damned to success in Egypt. Having arrived empty-handed, the new arrival achieves his Egyptian successes, as we know, by a hair's breadth: purely through the art of reading signs that are unintelligible to the Egyptians - including, where necessary, the interpretation of dreams. What Thomas Mann had in mind was the career of Sigmund Freud, who, by suggesting a science of dream analysis, had succeeded in making the late feudal society of the Habsburg Austro-Egyptians dependent on his interpretations. Freud had made the ]osephian position current once again in his own way, thus leaving his numerous successors a clue that the younger ones should not ignore. Naturally these authors no longer had to take the roads of the slave trade for their journeys back to Egypt; through the diaspora, the exodus became a partial change of direction for many. Even in modern times, however, one could only penetrate the log- ical and psychological citadel of Egyptian culture
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Thomas Mann and Demda
by no less demanding means than in ]oseph's day: through the science of signs. Hence the interpre- tation of dreams is not only the royal road to the psyche; it is also the tightrope on which the hetero-Egyptian semiologist has to balance on his way into the inner sanctums of the pharaonic insti- tutions. In doing so, he will realize from the outset that he can only try his luck by subjecting the sym- bolic fabrications of the powerful to an analysis that is sufficiently fascinating for them.
This is the right point to mention that Marxist readings of messianism such as those of Ernst Bloch and WaIter Benjamin, only a generation after Freud, attempted the timely task of devel- oping a second, non-Freudian interpretation of dreams. This did not so much revolve around the dreams of the rulers (and their wives) - these authors were rather concerned with realizing a mass interpretation of dreams in whose course the proletarian and traditional dreams of a better life would be elevated to a political productive force. The core of the second interpretation of dreams was the interpretation of signs and traces with
25
Thomas Mann and Derrida
which, according to the messianic reading, humanity had anticipated communism since anti- quity. What was notable was the fact that the ther- apeutic restriction to nocturnal dreams was now laid aside, so that mainly daydreams and con- scious utopian constructs were now to be inte- grated into the business of the new hermeneutics. Admittedly the case of Benjamin also shows how a ]osephian career can fail against such a back- ground. From Ernst Bloch, however, we can learn that the interpreter of dreams, if he has a suffi- ciently intense prophetic fire, is ultimately indif- ferent to whether the masses are interested in the politico-theological interpretation of their dreams.
Having presented these contexts, it is self-evi- dent why Derrida's deconstruction must be under- stood as a third wave of dream interpretation from the ]osephian perspective. For deconstruction it was clear a priori that it could only succeed if it went sufficiently far beyond the models of psy- choanalysis and messianic hermeneutics . In keeping with the current state of affairs, this had to occur in the form of a radical semiology that
26
Thomas Mann and Derrida
would show how the signs of being never pro- vide the wealth of meaning they promise - in other words: being is not a true sender, and the subject cannot be a place of complete collection. Derrida interpreted the Josephian chance by showing how death dreams in us - or, to put it differently: how Egypt works in us. 'Egyptian' is the term for all constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction - except for the pyramid, that most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse.
27
4 I Franz Borkenau and Derrida
Returning from this typifying framing of Derrida's approach, I would like to suggest a further con- textualization of his a:uvre that brings us closer to the philosopher's text once more. This time we are dealing with a great tale of the responses of civi- lizations to death as detailed by the brilliant cul- tural historian Franz Borkenau (1900-57), a thinker with a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, in his posthumously published historico-philo- sophical magnum opus End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origin of the West. 1 The confession by Derrida quoted at the start, namely that he held two completely oppos- ing convictions as to his continued presence as an
1 Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origin of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
29
Franz Borkenau and Derrida
author simultaneously or alternately, reminds me directly of the fundamental theses of Borkenau's historical speculation. Born in Vienna and of half- Jewish descent, Borkenau had turned to commu- nism early on after a strict Catholic upbringing; he was intermittently a functionary of the Western European office of the Comintern, then a fellow at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. After his abandonment of communism he became one of the earliest critics of what he called 'totalitari- anism' - his work The Totalitarian Enemy was published in London in 1940, more than a decade before Hannah Arendt put her stamp on the sub- ject with the political best-seller The Origins ofTo- talitarianism. In his cultural philosophy he deals with the opposing stances of cultures towards death. While one type of culture rejects death and reacts to it with a doctrine of immortality, the other type accepts the fact of death and develops a culture of committed worldliness on the basis of this. Borkenau referred to these bipolar options as the antinomy of death. It represents the cultural formulation of the dual stance towards death
30
Franz Borkenau and Derrida
found with more or less clear outlines in every in- dividual: that one's own death is certain, but as such remains incomprehensible. Borkenau's am- bition as a macro-historian was to use his doctrine of the opposing yet interconnected attitudes of cul- tures towards death to disprove the historico- philosophical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, who argued that every culture arises like a windowless monad from its own unmistakable 'primal experi- ence' - today we would call it a primary irritation - flourishing and declining in an exclusively en- dogenously determined life cycle , without any real communication between cultures. In reality, Borkenau posits, cultures join to form a chain whose individual links are connected according to the principle of opposition to the respectively pre- ceding link. This is the meaning of his references to cultural generations.
It is not surprising that Borkenau was unable to expand these ambitious concepts into a general cultural history. At most, he was able to give a rea- sonably convincing account of a single chain of cul- tural generations - not just any chain, however, but
31
Franz Borkenau and Derrida
rather the sequence in which the main protagonists of the occidental cultural drama are involved. The series inevitably begins with the Egyptians, whose construction of pyramids, mummifications and ex- tensive cartographies of the hereafter form a last- ing and impressive monument to their obsession with immortality. The antithesis of Egypticism was developed by the subsequent cultures of death ac- ceptance that we refer to as antiquity - including the Greeks andJews, and in the second rank also the Romans. Among these peoples, enormous men- tal energies that had been bound through the work of immortalization under the Egyptian regime (and the Indus Valley Civilizations were freed up for 'alternative tasks' These could consequently be used to shape political life in finite time - this may be one of the reasons why the invention of the po- litical can be viewed as the joint achievement of an- cient Mediterranean cultures of mortality. It is quite revealing that in this respect there is no real dif- ference between the poles of Athens and Jerusalem, which are normally played off against each other. Both function according to the tenet that public life
32
Franz Borkenau and Derrida
in morally substantial communities or among pro- ductively co-operating citizens' assemblies can only come about if the people are not constantly thinking about the survival of their bodies or souls in the hereafter, but rather have their minds and hands free for the tasks of the polis and the empirical communio.
The excessive grip of political citizens' assem- blies on the lives of mortals inevitably resulted, ac- cording to Borkenau, in a new immortalist reaction - it led, with the mediation of a barbaric interlude, to the start of the Christian era in Western Europe. On account of its new emphasis on immortality, 'Christian culture' (though there is some uncer- tainty as to the aptness of the cultural concept) quite obviously constituted the grandchild of Egyp- ticism, though it now made the immortality of the soul its focus - the Catholic cult of relics alone forms an indirect continuation of the Egyptian concern for the eternal body. But Christian im- mortalism, according to Borkenau's schema, in turn provoked its own antithesis through its ex- cesses : the Modern Age , beginning with the
33
Franz Borkenau and Derrida
Renaissance, was once again a culture of death ac- ceptance, and again led to the investment of hu- man energies in political projects. (One of these, in keeping with the fundamental technical char- acter of modernity, was the alliance of empower- ment and facilitation of life, which would ultimately lead to the consumer society of today. ) In the chain of cultural filiations, modernity would therefore be the grandchild of antiquity (hence eo ipso the great-grandchild of Egypt). Their common choice to accept death would then supply the deeper reason for the oft-noted resonance be- tween them.
Rather, through its unreconciled positing of two alternately valid observations, it has an expressive dimension that reveals something of Derrida's 'fundamental posi- tion' [Grundstellung] - if I might be allowed to apply that Heideggerian expression ad hominem just this once. Derrida's words amount to a self- description that almost has the character of a metaphysical statement. He thus concedes that in 'the real', whatever that might mean, there are oppositions that are incapable of synthesis, and coexist despite being mutually exclusive. Because these oppositions form part of the speaker's own thoughts and experience and determine him, this concession at once leads us to an observation about the philosopher: that he experienced him- self as a place in which the non-unifying encounter between mutually incompatible evi- dences occurred. One could probably take this
ix
Preliminary Note
? Preliminary Note
observation as a point of departure, and ask whether the tireless insistence on the ambiguity and polyvalence of signs and statements that is inseparably associated with the physiognomy of this author could perhaps have indicated that he experienced himself as th? vessel or collection point of oppositions that refused to join and form a simple identity.
This comment could already provide the main outline for a philosophical portrait of Derrida: his path was defined by a constantly alert concern not to be pinned down to one particular identity - a concern that was no less profound than the author's conviction that his place could only be at the forefront of intellectual visibility. One of the most admirable achievements of this philosoph- ical life is the fact that it was able to maintain the simultaneity of the utmost visibility and a resolute non-identity with any specific image of itself - in a shimmering parabola extending over four decades of his existence as a public character.
There are essentially only two ways to do justice to a thinker. The first is to open his works and
x
encounter him in the movements of his sentences, the flow of his arguments and the architecture of his chapters - one could refer to this as a singu- larizing form of reading in which justice is inter- preted as an assimilation to the unique. It would be an especially natural choice in the case of such an author as Derrida, who never wanted to be anything other than a radically attentive reader of the major and minor texts whose sum total con- stitutes the occidental archive - assuming one gives the word 'reader' a sufficiently explosive meaning. The other way is to move from the text to the context and locate the author in relation to metapersonal horizons that reveal something about his true meaning - at the risk that his own text may be assigned less importance than the larger context in which his words echo. This approach amounts to a desingularizing reading in which one understands justice as a feeling for con- stellations. Derrida himself clearly preferred the first approach and did not expect many favourable results from the second, as he knew very well that it was especially attractive for those who wanted
xi
Preliminary Note
Preliminary Note
to make him all too easy to deal with . Hence , when the occasion arose, he defended himself politely and clearly against Jurgen Habermas's attempt to declare him a Jewish mystic. In answer to this uncomfortable identification he remarked, with subtle irony: 'so I am not demanding that one should read me as if my texts could transport anyone into a state of intuitive ecstasy, but I do demand that one should be more careful about mediations and more critical towards translations and diversions via contexts that are often very far from my own'
If I have chosen, keeping this warning in mind, to take the second path in the following, there are two very different reasons for this. The first is that there is already no lack of ecstatic and literal, not to say hagiographic readings of Derrida to be found everywhere; the second is that I cannot shake off the impression that, with all the justified admiration for this author, it is rare to find a sufficiently
In Florian R6tzer, Franzosische Philosophen im Gespriich [French Philosophers in Conversation] (Munich: K. Boer Verlag, 1987), p. 74.
xii
distanced assessment of his position in the field of contemporary theory. lbis call for distance is an ex- pression of esteem; for if one can also understand it as an antidote to the dangers of a cultic recep- tion, it is all the more necessary in order to develop an image of the mountain range from which la mon- tagne Derrida rises up as one of the highest peaks. In the following I shall sketch seven vignettes ex- amining this thinker in relation to authors from re- cent tradition and the present day: Niklas Luhmann, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Franz Borkenau, Regis Debray, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Boris Groys.
Preliminary Note
xiii
1 I Luhmann and Derrida
Of all the constellations in which Derrida's work could be placed, the one involving Luhmann's ceuvre is the most outlandish - but also the most revealing. Each of the two thinkers has been hon- oured with the highest and most problematic praise that can be bestowed upon an author in the field of theory: that he was the Begel of the twen- tieth century. Titles of this kind may be attractive for superficial reflection and useful for public rela- tions, but they can hardly accompany any serious interest. None the less, they possess a certain char- acterizing power in the case of both these emi- nent figures, in so far as 'Begel' is not simply a proper name, but also refers to a programme or a position in an educational process. To mention Begel is to speak of culmination, the non plus ultra and exhaustion; at the same time, the name
1
Luhmann and Derrida
stands for synthetic and encyclopedic energies that can only appear in the calm after the storm- or, as Kojeve and Queneau might have put it, on the Sunday after history. These names mark a con- fluence of imperial and archival ambitions.
It would obviously be completely pointless to examine Derrida and Luhmann in terms of their respectively unique Hegelianism. Nor were the two men Sunday thinkers, but rather the opposite: tireless workers who made Sunday a working day - literally and for fundamental reasons - and fur- thermore held the conviction that on holidays, one either takes care of private correspondence or remains silent. What can be said is that both thinkers were concerned with completion and, while conveying the appearance of innovation, were perfecting and retouching the finished image of a tradition that could not be extended any fur- ther. There is a certain irony in the fact that, as we can see today, all those who thought that decon- struction and systems theory - constructs that emerged with a distinct profile from the 1970s on
had ushered in a new age of thought that
2
Luhmann and Derrida
opened up unlimited horizons for theoretical work were mistaken. In reality, both conceptual approaches were the finished result of logical processes that had shaped the thought of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries. In the case of Der- rida, this involved the conclusion of the linguistic or semiological turn according to which the twen- tieth century had belonged to the philosophies of language and writing; in the case of Luhmann, on the other hand, it was the completion of the aban- donment of philosophy called for by Wittgenstein, achieved through a resolute withdrawal of thought from the tradition of philosophies of the spirit and language in order to reposition themselves in the field of metabiology, the general logic of differ- ences between system and environment. What both effects have in common with the case of Hegel is that they use the final possibilities of a given grammar to the full, and thus give their suc- cessors the initially euphoric feeling of starting at a high point. This subsequently gives way to the alarming realization that if one starts at the peak, the only way to continue is downwards.
3
? Luhmann and Derrida
In all other respects, the differences between the two Hegels of the twentieth century could hardly be greater. A certain superiority on Derrida's part is most evident in the fact that - like no other thinker except Heidegger - he always operated at the outermost edges of tradition, and thus kept tra- dition, however fractured, on his side. This ex- plains the incredible effect of his work in the academic world, where deconstruction proved to be the last chance of a theory that achieves inte- gration through disintegration? by breaking through the boundaries of the archive , it offered a possibility of holding it together. Luhmann, by contrast, left the philosophical archive behind, contenting himself with the ostensibly modest ti- tle of a sociologist of world society. To him, the only significance the philosophical library of the Old Europe still had was as a reservoir of verbal figures with which the priests and intellectuals of former times attempted to grasp the whole. From the perspective of general systems theory, philos- ophy as a whole is an exhausted, totalizing lan- guage game whose instruments corresponded to
4
Luhmann and Derrida
the semantic horizon of historical societies, but can no longer do justice to the primary fact of moder- nity, namely the progressive differentiation of the social system.
It is regrettable that the two Hegels of the twen- tieth century did not respond extensively and reciprocally to each other; thus we have no com- prehensive minutes of the virtual logical summit conference of postmodern thought. It would have been immeasurably exciting for the intellectual community to experience the two eminent intelli- gences of our epoch interacting in a situation of elaborated dialogue. As both Derrida and Luh- mann were of an extremely polite nature, each would naturally have resisted the temptation to treat the other's work reductively, let alone canni- balistically, as is normally the case among rivals for the highest position in the field of intellectual observation. None the less, each would have had to attempt assimilating though not absorptive translations of the other into his own terms - which, with two such masters of scepticism towards the very concept of the own, would have
5
Luhmann and Derrida
proved a stimulating exercise, and the observers of these translations would have had the privilege of being able to observe the reciprocal observa- tions of the most conceptually powerful observers. Luhmann certainly paid close attention to Der- rida's work, though nothing is known about Derrida returning the observation - it would seem that he never explicitly acknowledged the work of the scholar from Bielefeld.
Luhmann saw Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition as an undertaking closely related to his own intentions, in the sense that he saw the same post-ontological energies at work in it that drove his own systemic theory project. He openly admitted that deconstruction was and would remain a relevant option: that it indeed did precisely 'what we can do now' 1 This means that deconstruction is a strictly dated form of theoreti- cal behaviour - dated in the sense that it could
1 Niklas Luhmann, 'Dekonstruktion als Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung' [ Deconstruction as Second-Order Observation], in Aujsiitze und Reden [Essays and Speeches], ed. OliverJahraus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), p. 286.
6
2 Ibid. , p. 286.
Luhmann and Demda
only appear on the scene after the conclusion of conventional theory's historical formation, and thus consistently remains connected to a 'situa- tion' to which Luhmann assigns five attributes: post-metaphysical, post-ontological, post-conven- tional, postmodern and post-catastrophic. 2 Deconstruction, according to Luhmann, presup- poses the 'catastrophe of modernity' which should be thought of as a shift from the form of stability existing in traditional hierarchical-central- ist society to the form of stability found in our modern, differentiated, multifocal society. Once multifocality is taken as a point of departure, all theory moves to the level of second-order obser- vation: one no longer attempts a direct descrip- tion of the world, but rather re-describes - and thus deconstructs - existing descriptions of the world. One could say that Luhmann honoured Derrida by crediting him with the achievement of finding a solution to the fundamental logical task of the postmodern situation: switching from
7
Luhmann and Derrida
stability through cenfring and solid foundations to stability through greater flexibility and decen- tring. With a sure feeling for the latent pathos of deconstruction, Luhmann adds the following to his concluding acknowledgement: 'Thus under- stood, deconstruction will survive its own decon- struction as the most relevant description of modern society's self-description. '3
The decisive element here is the seemingly harmless verb 'survive' In using it, Luhmann may have touched on the motivational core of the other Hegel's work. One could indeed think that Derrida devoted his ambition to the development of a form of theory that would always have a future and the potential to become a tradition; this would be achieved by permitting and even demanding an application to itself, in the certainty that it would always emerge from such a test in a regenerated and re-consolidated state. This trick could only be pulled off by a theory that was always already lying in its own grave, so to speak,
3 Ibid. p. 291.
8
Luhmann and Derrida
rising from it only for repeated burials. Could it be that the core impulse of deconstruction was to pursue a project of construction with the aim of creating an undeconstructible survival machine?
2 I Sigmund Freud and Derrida
Such questions, which are really suggestions, put one in a dreamlike frame of mind. In its inner drift one finds the motifs of classical metaphysics re-establishing themselves as if under an associa- tive compulsion. For me, a reverie of this kind involuntarily calls up memories of Sigmund Freud's late works. I am thinking in particular of the text Moses and Monotheism, which was written by the psychologist on the threshold of death and has remained a constant bone of con- tention since the publication of the first version in 1937 and the revised book form in 1939 - irksome to Jews, foolish to Europeans. As is well known, the first part under the heading 'Moses, an Egyptian' - shows Freud developing the 'mon- strous notion' that the 'man Moses, the liberator of his people, who gave them their religion and
11
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
their laws'! was in reality an Egyptian by culture and nationality. In the second section, with the hovering title 'If Moses Was an Egyptian Freud develops the theory, carefully considered and bold at the same time, that the distinguished Egyptian Moses must then have been a follower of the solar-monotheistic Aten religion, introduced by Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC, who, after the reactions of the priests of Amon, saw no possibility of propagating the unpopular new faith in his homeland and among his own people. Sub- sequently he joined the captive Jewish people to lead them out of Egypt - with the intention of resuming the monotheistic experiment in a new location with other people. Thus he taught the
Jews the Egyptian custom of circumcision, the conventions of religious arrogance and also the strictness towards oneself that a strictly mono- latrous religion must demand of its followers - or rather its test subjects. The ability to be
1 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 3.
12
Sigmund Freud and Demda
strict towards oneself is the source of the mental transformations summarized by Freud in the for- mula 'progress in spiritualization'
In the context of a reverie there is a certain jus- tification for bringing up this 'monstrous' revision of Jewish history by the Jew Freud, as it consti- tutes a manner of prelude to what will later be referred to with Derrida's key term difef rance. In Freud's interpretation, this 'shift' or distortion first of all concerns the real recasting of roles in the monotheistic game - but equally the redaction of accounts of this, which are always subject to the tendentious requirement of making what happened as unidentifiable as possible. Freud writes:
The distortion of a text is similar to that of a murder. The difficulty lies not in carrying out the deed, but rather in removing its traces. One is inclined to give the word 'distortion' the double meaning to which it is entitled, though it makes no use of it today. It should not only mean to change something in its
13
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
appearance, but also: to take it to a different place, to shift it elsewhere. 2. 3
Then differance, viewed in the context of Freud's comment, refers not only - and not primarily - to the break with a full present (as a temporal mode), but rather first of all - and primarily - to spatial displacement and redisposition in the casting of roles for a theological stage play. According to Freud, the true Egyptian drama is never played in the presence of true Egyptians from that point on. From the Mosaic intervention onwards, Egypt itself takes 'place' in a different location - while the literal Egypt, from the per- spective of the emigrants, is no more than a dead shell that serves exclusively to indicate the neces- sary starting point of the escape to their own oth- erness. To be a monotheistic neo-Egyptian in the true Akhenatenic sense, one had in future to take
2 Ibid.
3 [Translator's note: this passage can only be understood with ref-
erence to the original word for 'distortion', Entstellung (verb: entstellen). The noun Stelle means 'place', and its combination with the negational prefix ent- indicates a displacement. ]
14
4 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, loco cit.
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
part in the religious experiment ofJudaism as con- ceived by the man Moses. Consistently enough this people, enlisted for a travesty, had to deal from the days of the exodus onwards with the problem of its uncertain territorialization, or - to use an expression Derrida especially favoured - it was chronically 'haunted' by this problem. The original content of his hantologie, namely the sci- ence of haunting by unresolved matters from the past Chauntology), thus becomes obvious Cone finds this ingenious play on words in Spectres of Marx, probably Derrida's most significant political study, with a double allusion to both ontologie and Lacan's pun hontologie): it can only consist in the obsessive traces of Jewish-Egyptian ambiva- lence. Their origins had to be sought in the fact that Moses wanted 'to lead the Jews out of the country', as Freud says, and through circumcision impose a custom 'that virtually made Egyptians of them' 4 With his analysis of hauntings, Derrida for- malizes the idea, elaborated by Freud, that one
15
Sigmund Freud and Derrida
cannot be a Jew without, in a certain sense, embodying Egypt - or a ghost thereof.
This late work by Freud is not only notable for its development of the concept of 'distortion'; it is even more impressive through the inexorable con- sistency with which it 'deconstructs' the myth of the exodus. Read in the context of Freud's specu- lations, the term 'exodus' now no longer refers to the secession of Judaism from foreign rule by the Egyptians, but to the realization of the most rad- ical Egypticism by Jewish means. From that point on, the history of ideas takes the form of a mas- sive game of displacement in which motifs from Egyptian universalism are acted out by non- Egyptian protagonists.
What might be especially conspicuous to a psy- chologist here is that, in his final study, Freud barely referred to the concept of the unconscious in its established definition any longer - as if it had been rendered superfluous by the introduc- tion of 'distortion' One can view Moses and Monotheism to an extent as the self-correction of psychoanalysis at the last minute. The message of
16
? Sigmund Freud and Demda
Freud's late works would then be: ultimately it is not the unconscious that decides the fate of humans; what truly counts is the incognito that conceals the origin of the dominant ideas . Because distortion goes far beyond active concealment, it protects the Egyptian incognito in a way that is much more secure than the directorate of a con- spiracy could ever achieve. Naturally the figure of Moses had to be the first to be affected by the dis- tortion. Once it had done its work, the leader of Judaism was himself no longer able to say with certainty whence he truly came. In such a situa- tion, projects become more important than origins. Now any consideration for descent takes a back seat to the prospect of the Promised Land.
If one pursues Freud's reflections on the cryptic fabrication of Jewish identity to their logical con- clusion, the irreversible effect of the exodus becomes palpable: the departure from Egypt, according to Freud, spawned the Mosaic Jews as a hetero-Egyptian people that could not under any circumstances have returned to a previous sense of the own, even if it had desired to. The trace of
17
Sigmund Freud and Demda
the other had imprinted itself indelibly within the innermost part of the own, no matter how it might be disguised and covered up by new pro- grammes. This imprint was so deep that even the symbol for the most intimate aspect of the own had been taken from the strangers: if circumcision truly indicated chosenness , as Freud tirelessly claimed, this symbol was borrowed from those from whom the Jews, as an emigrant people, would in future seek to set themselves apart at all costs .
18
3 I Thomas Mann and Derrida
At this point I am reminded of Derrida's insistence that one should be careful with translations and diversions via contexts that are often very far from his own. This insistence contains a distant echo of Nietzsche's well-known admonition: 'Above all, do not mistake me for someone else! ' I admit that these indications will become particularly relevant in the following, where we shall venture a con- textualization that exceeds the frame of Derrida's own statements about himself and yet, as extreme as the defamiliarization may be, will pos- sibly bring us very close to the nucleus of his most momentous operations.
I will take the liberty of imagining in the fol- lowing that the dizzying career of the Algerian- born thinker beginning in France, then continuing in the USA and finally in the rest of the
19
Tbomas Mann and Derrida
world - was prophesied in an indirect, but per- sonally apt manner by one of the greatest novel- ists of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that this does not apply to Derrida as an individual, but rather to the general type of the Jewish outsider who, coming from the edges of the empire, attains an eminent position in the log- ical power centre through dangerous and excep- tional achievements. I am not unaware that a thinker such as Derrida, for whom respect for the singular meant a great deal, would have been pro- foundly suspicious towards attempts to under- stand the individual in terms of typical forms - none the less, I believe that on this occasion a journey in the sedan chair of the general type can also take us to our goal (or at least closer to the critical zone) without doing an injustice to the interests of the unique.
Thomas Mann became aware of the current rel- evance of Old Testament subject matter at a notably similar time to the aged Freud, and from the late 1920s on - as he later said in a well- known statement - he had set himself the task of
20
Thomas Mann and Derrida
wresting myth from the hands of intellectual fas- cism and remoulding it in a humanist form. One can assign his novel tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, written between 1933 and 1943, a key position in the history of literature and ideas in the twentieth century - first because it constitutes the secret main text of modern theology, whose public emergence took place outside of theolog- ical faculties; and secondly as a grand parallel project to Freud's explorations in which Mann probed the immeasurable implications of a psy- choanalytical and novelistic subversion of the exodus narrative. If the departure of the Jews from Egypt was genuinely a continuation of Egyptian culture by other means - and, in his own way, Thomas Mann reached similar conclusions to Freud - it could only be a matter of time before it would occur to the Jewish hetero-Egyptians to examine their connections to the homO-Egyptians, if one can call them that.
Thomas Mann found the pivotal point between the exodus from Egypt and the immigration there in the tale of young Joseph. As we know, he was
21
Thomas Mann and Derrida
the youngest son of]acob, and his favourite - for which he was hated by his brothers; as a result, they ambushed him one day and sold him to Mid- ianite slave traders in order to be rid of him. As the narrator shows, there is a profound ambiguity to this crime. It is not only suited to representing the secret of the injustice that is inseparable from pref- erential love and contributes to the birth of jeal- ousy; it also provides an excellent opportunity to examine the problem of a revision of the ]ewish relationship with Egypt, which was initially only conceivable as blasphemy. For the reader who is prepared to take the hint, Thomas Mann's irony supplies a hidden clue that, for a talented son of the progenitor ]acob, the best thing that could happen in his whole life was in fact to be sold to Egypt. Though this same ]oseph could have become a respected shepherd at the fountains of Israel if his brothers had left him alone, or an olive farmer listening in pious serenity to the growing of the trees, there were other career options for him in Egypt - assuming the newcomer were able to turn his involuntary immigration to his advantage.
22
? Thomas Mann and Derrida
Thomas Mann's tale provides the most expansive commentary on the topos of a blessing in disguise. A sharp-witted hetero-Egyptian brought into Egypt through a second distortion could indeed have the ability to understand the homo-Egyptians better than they understood themselves. This hermeneu- tical superiority would be a gift bestowed by his specific marginality - and would in fact transpire to be the key to Joseph's successes in Egypt. Suf- fice it to say here that Thomas Mann's depiction, through a subtle parody of psychoanalysis, of the interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams by the young hermeneutician, who would soon become indis- pensable, is one of the most sonorous scenes in modern world literature. 1
My suggestion that the novelist Thomas Mann may have succeeded in offering an involuntary prediction of the phenomenon of Derrida relates
1 As I am developing a purely typological argument here, it is not necessary to take into account the fact that the chronology of the situation contradicts my interpretation. As the biblical story of
)oseph takes place in the period before the exodus, the schema of 'back to Egypt' is not yet as applicable to the firstJoseph as to the later protagonists in his position.
23
Thomas Mann and Derrida
to the wondrous figure of ]oseph - or rather the ]osephian position as such, whose key character- istic must be revealed as that of being damned to success in Egypt. Having arrived empty-handed, the new arrival achieves his Egyptian successes, as we know, by a hair's breadth: purely through the art of reading signs that are unintelligible to the Egyptians - including, where necessary, the interpretation of dreams. What Thomas Mann had in mind was the career of Sigmund Freud, who, by suggesting a science of dream analysis, had succeeded in making the late feudal society of the Habsburg Austro-Egyptians dependent on his interpretations. Freud had made the ]osephian position current once again in his own way, thus leaving his numerous successors a clue that the younger ones should not ignore. Naturally these authors no longer had to take the roads of the slave trade for their journeys back to Egypt; through the diaspora, the exodus became a partial change of direction for many. Even in modern times, however, one could only penetrate the log- ical and psychological citadel of Egyptian culture
24
Thomas Mann and Demda
by no less demanding means than in ]oseph's day: through the science of signs. Hence the interpre- tation of dreams is not only the royal road to the psyche; it is also the tightrope on which the hetero-Egyptian semiologist has to balance on his way into the inner sanctums of the pharaonic insti- tutions. In doing so, he will realize from the outset that he can only try his luck by subjecting the sym- bolic fabrications of the powerful to an analysis that is sufficiently fascinating for them.
This is the right point to mention that Marxist readings of messianism such as those of Ernst Bloch and WaIter Benjamin, only a generation after Freud, attempted the timely task of devel- oping a second, non-Freudian interpretation of dreams. This did not so much revolve around the dreams of the rulers (and their wives) - these authors were rather concerned with realizing a mass interpretation of dreams in whose course the proletarian and traditional dreams of a better life would be elevated to a political productive force. The core of the second interpretation of dreams was the interpretation of signs and traces with
25
Thomas Mann and Derrida
which, according to the messianic reading, humanity had anticipated communism since anti- quity. What was notable was the fact that the ther- apeutic restriction to nocturnal dreams was now laid aside, so that mainly daydreams and con- scious utopian constructs were now to be inte- grated into the business of the new hermeneutics. Admittedly the case of Benjamin also shows how a ]osephian career can fail against such a back- ground. From Ernst Bloch, however, we can learn that the interpreter of dreams, if he has a suffi- ciently intense prophetic fire, is ultimately indif- ferent to whether the masses are interested in the politico-theological interpretation of their dreams.
Having presented these contexts, it is self-evi- dent why Derrida's deconstruction must be under- stood as a third wave of dream interpretation from the ]osephian perspective. For deconstruction it was clear a priori that it could only succeed if it went sufficiently far beyond the models of psy- choanalysis and messianic hermeneutics . In keeping with the current state of affairs, this had to occur in the form of a radical semiology that
26
Thomas Mann and Derrida
would show how the signs of being never pro- vide the wealth of meaning they promise - in other words: being is not a true sender, and the subject cannot be a place of complete collection. Derrida interpreted the Josephian chance by showing how death dreams in us - or, to put it differently: how Egypt works in us. 'Egyptian' is the term for all constructs that can be subjected to deconstruction - except for the pyramid, that most Egyptian of edifices. It stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse.
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4 I Franz Borkenau and Derrida
Returning from this typifying framing of Derrida's approach, I would like to suggest a further con- textualization of his a:uvre that brings us closer to the philosopher's text once more. This time we are dealing with a great tale of the responses of civi- lizations to death as detailed by the brilliant cul- tural historian Franz Borkenau (1900-57), a thinker with a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, in his posthumously published historico-philo- sophical magnum opus End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origin of the West. 1 The confession by Derrida quoted at the start, namely that he held two completely oppos- ing convictions as to his continued presence as an
1 Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origin of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
author simultaneously or alternately, reminds me directly of the fundamental theses of Borkenau's historical speculation. Born in Vienna and of half- Jewish descent, Borkenau had turned to commu- nism early on after a strict Catholic upbringing; he was intermittently a functionary of the Western European office of the Comintern, then a fellow at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. After his abandonment of communism he became one of the earliest critics of what he called 'totalitari- anism' - his work The Totalitarian Enemy was published in London in 1940, more than a decade before Hannah Arendt put her stamp on the sub- ject with the political best-seller The Origins ofTo- talitarianism. In his cultural philosophy he deals with the opposing stances of cultures towards death. While one type of culture rejects death and reacts to it with a doctrine of immortality, the other type accepts the fact of death and develops a culture of committed worldliness on the basis of this. Borkenau referred to these bipolar options as the antinomy of death. It represents the cultural formulation of the dual stance towards death
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
found with more or less clear outlines in every in- dividual: that one's own death is certain, but as such remains incomprehensible. Borkenau's am- bition as a macro-historian was to use his doctrine of the opposing yet interconnected attitudes of cul- tures towards death to disprove the historico- philosophical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, who argued that every culture arises like a windowless monad from its own unmistakable 'primal experi- ence' - today we would call it a primary irritation - flourishing and declining in an exclusively en- dogenously determined life cycle , without any real communication between cultures. In reality, Borkenau posits, cultures join to form a chain whose individual links are connected according to the principle of opposition to the respectively pre- ceding link. This is the meaning of his references to cultural generations.
It is not surprising that Borkenau was unable to expand these ambitious concepts into a general cultural history. At most, he was able to give a rea- sonably convincing account of a single chain of cul- tural generations - not just any chain, however, but
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
rather the sequence in which the main protagonists of the occidental cultural drama are involved. The series inevitably begins with the Egyptians, whose construction of pyramids, mummifications and ex- tensive cartographies of the hereafter form a last- ing and impressive monument to their obsession with immortality. The antithesis of Egypticism was developed by the subsequent cultures of death ac- ceptance that we refer to as antiquity - including the Greeks andJews, and in the second rank also the Romans. Among these peoples, enormous men- tal energies that had been bound through the work of immortalization under the Egyptian regime (and the Indus Valley Civilizations were freed up for 'alternative tasks' These could consequently be used to shape political life in finite time - this may be one of the reasons why the invention of the po- litical can be viewed as the joint achievement of an- cient Mediterranean cultures of mortality. It is quite revealing that in this respect there is no real dif- ference between the poles of Athens and Jerusalem, which are normally played off against each other. Both function according to the tenet that public life
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
in morally substantial communities or among pro- ductively co-operating citizens' assemblies can only come about if the people are not constantly thinking about the survival of their bodies or souls in the hereafter, but rather have their minds and hands free for the tasks of the polis and the empirical communio.
The excessive grip of political citizens' assem- blies on the lives of mortals inevitably resulted, ac- cording to Borkenau, in a new immortalist reaction - it led, with the mediation of a barbaric interlude, to the start of the Christian era in Western Europe. On account of its new emphasis on immortality, 'Christian culture' (though there is some uncer- tainty as to the aptness of the cultural concept) quite obviously constituted the grandchild of Egyp- ticism, though it now made the immortality of the soul its focus - the Catholic cult of relics alone forms an indirect continuation of the Egyptian concern for the eternal body. But Christian im- mortalism, according to Borkenau's schema, in turn provoked its own antithesis through its ex- cesses : the Modern Age , beginning with the
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
Renaissance, was once again a culture of death ac- ceptance, and again led to the investment of hu- man energies in political projects. (One of these, in keeping with the fundamental technical char- acter of modernity, was the alliance of empower- ment and facilitation of life, which would ultimately lead to the consumer society of today. ) In the chain of cultural filiations, modernity would therefore be the grandchild of antiquity (hence eo ipso the great-grandchild of Egypt). Their common choice to accept death would then supply the deeper reason for the oft-noted resonance be- tween them. It is in this choice that one would find the motifs that made a paradigmatic author of modernity such as Freud feel so conspicuously at home in the company of ancient philosophers - Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics alike.
The appeal of Borkenau's model obviously lies not so much in its capacity for historical explana- tion, which clearly remains precarious; nor would his aim of supplying an alternative to Spengler still be considered an attractive one today. What makes these speculative reflections on the
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
antinomy of death current and fruitful is the fact that they do not present the transition from a metaphysical to a post-metaphysical semantics as a form of evolutionary progress or a deepening of logic. Instead they declare it the effect of an inevitable epochal fluctuation based on an objec- tively irresolvable antinomy, or an inescapable and irreducible double truth. Derrida's position within this fluctuation initially seems the same as Freud's, which positions itself clearly on the side of the modern extreme (and the ancient, Jewish and Hellenic cultures allied with it). What the philosopher calls deconstruction is initially no more than an act of the most thorough semantic secularization - semiological materialism in action. One could describe the deconstructionist method as a guide to returning the churches and castles of the metaphysical-immortalist Ancien Regime to the mortal citizens.
The strange thing about the approach, however, is that Derrida - to continue the architectural imagery does not believe in the power of modernity's exponents to create authentic new
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
buildings. (As his conversations with Peter Eisenman and the Viennese architectural group Coop Himmelblau show fairly unambiguously, he always remained distant from the world of modern architecture, and used such terms as con- structing/deconstructing purely metaphorically, without ever developing a material connection to the practice of building truly contemporary, i. e. demystified edifices free of historical baggage. ) He apparently had the same tendency, symbolically speaking, as people who are condemned always to live in old houses - or even haunted castles, even if they think they are residing in the neutral buildings of the present. For him it is clear that, even in the quarters of modern people, the undead from the otherworldly era walk in and out, just as the one God from Egypt never stopped casting his shadow across the huts of the post- Mosaic Jews.
In my view, one of the virtues of Borkenau's model lies in the fact that it helps to understand the complexity of Derrida's position a little more clearly. For, although Derrida paid tribute to the
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
mortalist choice in the modus operandi of his analyses, the choice that is so characteristic of the Judaeo-Greek culture and its modern grandchild, he always retained a connection to Egyptian immortalism, and to a much lesser extent also the Christian form. This connection did not revolve purely around enlightenment or exorcism, how- ever. Derrida did not simply want to drive away the ghosts of the immortalist past; he was rather concerned with revealing the profound ambiva- lence resulting from the realization that both choices are equally possible and equally powerful. Hence the pathos of his confessions, according to which one could never fully leave the realm of metaphysics. Essentially, however, Derrida always insists on his right always to retain his metaphys- ical incognito; he does not want an entry in his passport under 'unchangeable features' reading Jewish denier of immortality' - let alone 'crypto-
Egyptian follower of overcoming of death'
One can, in a certain sense, therefore regard Derrida as a philosopher of freedom, though cer- tainly not in the tradition of Old European idealisms.
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Franz Borkenau and Derrida
His discreet idea of freedom is inseparable from the effort to withdraw constantly from the initially inevitable identifications and pinnings-down as- sociated with the use of certain idioms - which, in- cidentally, is why some readers seek to label him a neo-sceptic who, like the members of that school, declared a state of suspension between different opinions the highest intellectual virtue. If scepticism initially expresses no more than a reluctance to choose between the dogmatic teaching systems of antiquity (the Platonic, the Aristotelian, the Stoic and the Epicurean), then Derrida is more than a mere sceptic.