Like many others essays of this week’s blogging, mine has the same questions. What is gender and what is sexuality. To be more precise could we find another body binary that we could deconstruct? If there is this binary sexuality-gender, could we talk about other constructed binaries within our body? like respiration-x, or circulation-x. What other relations can a body create? Could we deconstruct the body in its wholeness? This would probably take us back to Deleuze concept the “body without organs”. In the Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick talks about Roland Barthes liberation from from the binary prison. Once this achieved a state of infinite expansion is possible. In other words the world itself is not a structure anymore, but rather a set of arbitrarinesses. So Deleuze starts to make a lot more sense when he talks about a body without organs where the mouth could very well serve as any other orifice. The question is how much can we deconstruct and why stop at a certain point. Sedgwick attempts an answer and clearly states that he disagrees with Barthes, but to me his answer is a circular one. He says that the deconstructive contestations occur “ only in the context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions”; doesn’t this idea draws us back to where we started off with. Foucault as well as Buttler think that culture itself instituted these binaries that denied the right to choose of everyone, that it is the culture which constructed these concepts. I hope things will clarify when we will have a deeper look in today’s session.

The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine

The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminin is a psychoanalitical aproach on gender binaries. Irrigaray argument in this book is that there is a gendered bias in language. Her philosophy originates in Freud’s Phallocentric system that supposes many binary oppositions. In this system she sees the superiority of male centered discourse and she argues that the philosophic discourse is a male-dominated thinking where women can only copy masculine language. In other words she can not express or function in a male centered framework and as long as she borrows ideas from a masculine logocentric discourse she will remain a derivation and consequently she does not see any common ground between the theoretical male system and the feminine style of writing. A first phase in the feminine constructed profile is that of mimesis. But mimesis means here a way to appropriate a different discourse where the woman would transgress from the realm of subordination to the one of affirmation. Her discourse wants to break masculine language by opposing material and physical allusions to masculine abstract speculation. This way of writing creates the allusion to an incomprehensible rest that’s to be understood as the invisible of her own readers (mostly female). In the freudian phallogocentric model the privileged sexuality is based on the visible where the woman is seen as the result of a castration and the woman desire to act and think according to a masculine paradigm is a form of castration denial and this makes her neurotic. Irrigaray argues the freudian approach and talks about female pleasure as the place of a new construction the “ek-stasy in the transcendental”. If there is difference between female desire and female pleasure, this is something that should not be looked for in the visible, where female desire is the image of a lack nor within the discourse where she is seen as a deficient masculine or a negative image of the subject, but rather in a newly constructed language where style would be able to form a disjunction. In this style what maters is a new opposition visible/tactile.

Hegel. Dialectics

Hegel’s philosophy seems to be mainly a method for thinking. The question regarding knowledge has an enormous tradition. For Aquinas for instance the only method of knowledge was analogy. From the analogy of Being of Aquinas, which states that we can only know, God for example,through a system of comparables, or through proportions in Kant’s philosophy, we pass towards Hegel’ dialects which generally speaking does not imply anymore a system of oppositions, but rather one of inclusion where the universal includes the particular. In other words, in Hegel’s view he negation itself contains the positive that has been negated. For him there isn’t contrariety, there is one and the multiple, there isn’t universal and particular, but rather the universal of the particular. Between the two concepts there is a relation, a mediation. There is positive in the negative, because for instance, the non a contains already a. We can no longer talk about an opposition, the finite is not the opposite of the infinite (the finite is already a reference system for the infinite right because the finite is contained in the word infinite). Consequently the relation between the two concepts is rather a transition, which can no longer be finite or infinite, it is rather the very movement between them. In the case of the double negation : the finite is not nonfinite, what surfaces is the positive, because copula to be is transitive. In other words “is” does not have a meaning in itself, it is right the transitivity between finite and infinite. But if what surfaces is the positive (the negation of a negation) we could say that the finite is the infinite, or that the argument is an infinite with a finite in itself. But this transition is not a backwards perspective, it is rather the synthesis of those two positions. The two concepts become circular and the result obtained is an elevated one. So if the infinite has already the finite in itself and if the first one is preserved in the second one in its very negation what we obtain is a third, elevated term : the finite is the infinite. This synthesis, this third element was missing in Aquinas analogy or in Kant’s proportion. For example the goodness of God could be problematized only as the relation between two terms, human goodness and God’s goodness. In Heidegger’s view the infinite is already present in the finite right because it made it (and here apparently all ontological difference seems to be abolished) and in that respect Hegel’s dialectics could be considered pure immanentism. But that not what Hegel says. The distance ontic-ontological is only a formal one, because two concepts does not exist in themselves, what exists is the mediation between them. For Heidegger being is its negation, but that means it is the very Being because it contains it. Or in other words the being is the phenomenalisation of the Being. So the consciousness goes through different reductions and it gets to the last reduction which is the ethics of the spirit, but when it gets to the very limit of the consciousness that very limit is the Sipirit in its manifestation or phenomenalisation. Consequently if we analyze the dialectic method to the consciousness and we infer that consciousness is its negation what we get to is one more time a third element, elevated, the synthesis : consciousness is the Spirit. This sounds pretty cool to me. So what is beyond consciousness, its negation can not be still consciousness but the very Spirit. Or to use Kant’s terminology we move from the sensibil aperceptiv through the aperceptiv to the pure consciousness, or the transcendental ego, which is similar with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. In Marx philosophy this Spirit becomes the spirit of classes, something that is above individual consciousness. But in order to be accepted as a philosophical reduction that spirit of the classes should be indeterminate, and in that respect Marx is later going to be criticized by Agamben.

A Thousand Plateaus

I rather know Deleuze through his book Difference and Repetition, where he states that repetition is a vertical axis. One is determined vertically, meaning that any manifestation is different in its actualisation. In A Thousand Plateaus, the very interpretation of the beginning gives us a certain view on Deleuze and Guattari philosophy. They state it very clearly : “We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” This relation established between the two authors acts as an image, as model for the text problematisation. The two authors are not different entities, but rather the passage between them. If they are no longer subjects, the text itself does no longer have subject, or object. Consequently, the text becomes rather an emanation, a relation of mediation. In this respect he talks about text as a rhizomatic structure. This structure means umpredictability. The rhizomatic text is for Deleuze and Guattary, an antianalogy (it does not have an end or a determinable origin), an antigenealogy (the text does not have a genetic structure, one can not pin down an origin, because the Origin does not belong to our understanding). For example Goethe always saw the text as the origin of something that needs to be found. On the contrary for Deleuze, the book is rather like a fascicular root, it does not have unity, because unity supposes an origin. All we have is fragments. But Deleuze fragments are different. Their fragmentarily structure is cohesive. In that respect the concept of the body without organs would be a more clear image. The body without organs is an intensity. In other words behind the visible body there is an other one, the original one that is invisible. But since that origin of the body can not be grasped, the body becomes a structure of intensities without subject or object. The body without organs is not Lacan’s “corps morcele”, it is rather an absolute dis-centralized body, cohesive in its fragmentation. The concept of plateau explains the text itself and states that the text is a multiplicity that operates through a few principles. On the one hand they talk about the principle of connection. Each text presupposes different coding (political, economical, social etc.) which has an infinite power of reproducibility. According to the principle of heterogeneity, a text is incapable of mixing their elements. The text is not homogenous. Also a text is not the multiple of something, it is only diversity. They do not talk about a unity in diversity, the text remains only diversity. Traditionally speaking, the sens of the subject was in its object, which presupposed a relation, but that relation means defining an origin, or if the origin is always invisible we can no longer talk about a commun ground of the subjects, but rather about a division. These assumptions trace back to Heidegger for whom the text was not an unity, because we don’t have access to it. All we have are fragments of that unity. In Derrida’s view, the fragment presupposes the whole. It is not Deleuze and Guattari’s case. For them the world is an absolute decentralization. The asignified rupture states the idea that we do not function according to various determinations, but rather on correlations. This is a post-Hegelian idea present in Benjamin’s philosophy as well. The plateau is rather an in between. Every plateau can be grasped or departed from different directions. The critic that I bring to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is that the very doctrine that there is no doctrine at all, is already a doctrine. It is also a myth.

Differance

What puzzled me in the presentation of the deconstruction was the often improper use of terms. The text defines the Post-Structuralism as a theory that “ departed so radically from the core assumptions of Structuralism.” That is true but if fails to tell us in which way. Things became more complicated for me when I realized I hardly can translate all these invented terms in Derrida’s theory and then in Heidegger’s philosophy. So what I had to do a lot of dictionary reading. So here are a few thoughts on what I understand is deconstruction. If the Structuralism works with binary oppositions, the Post- Structuralism operates with differences. At a first glance this does not seem such a radically different point of view. We have to keep in mind though that Structuralism exists inside the language only. Any opposition is something that always traces back to language. The Saussurian a non a approach is arguable only through its rapport to other language binaries. What makes the enormous step forward in the Post- Structuralist theory is the heideggerian late assumptions on language in Time and Being and also in Identity and Difference. This rapport a non a seems to be inexistent in Heidegger’s late thinking. For him what is different is what derives from a vertical actualization. Derrida’s differance would be, I think, in heideggerian terms the Being or precisely that concept that remains alway un- actualised or in other words the non-textual source of a text. Or this is exactly that something that can never be deconstructed. This non-textual source is what produces text. So the critique deconstruction brings upon Structuralism is the very origin of originality. How can we produce new texts, new ideas? Originality can not be produce still within language. It needs to originate in something different than itself, or in Humboldt terminology, this would be what generates difference. For Heidegger that is the Being, for Wittgenstein is Silence and for Derrida seems to be that something that can not be exposed. In that respect I really liked his graphic argumentation on the opposition difference/differance. So I assume the equivalent of Being or Silence, would be here differance : “ Already we have note tat differance is not, does not exist, and is not any sort of being-present (on) [...] It belongs to no category of being present or absent.” ( p. 282) But Derrida states very clearly that his differance is not onto- theological, it only somehow follows the same pattern of reasoning.

A rather double death

What triggered my curiosity in the pile of readings of the past week was the revolution of the hermeneutics through phenomenology, and I am not talking here about a science of phenomenas, but rather about phenomenalisation. In that respect words don’t matter for what they express immediately, but rather for the differences they state in their actualisation. Probably Aristotel was the first to say that the Logos offers meanings right because it separates concepts. In my opinion Barthes Death of the author would not have been possible beyond these phenomenological assumptions. I find this gloomy, rhetorical death pretty cool though. This death of the author has its origin in the idea that the text is nothing but a “gramme”, or in other words a trace of what was almost about to be actualized by the author. These traces do not aim to point towards an origin, but rather they talked about the passage itself towards the Origin or the non textual source of the text itself. In other words once a text written, its author becomes automatically its reader, and interpreter. The separation between the author and his text is univocal and automatic precisely because the unique character of the writing act. This author can only once write a text, everything that follows is interpretation. We perceive then a distinction between the author and his thinking. His only merit is that he was the first to think his thinking. The great privilege of the author is only the fact that he was his first interpreter. But in that respect, I wonder, couldn’t we very well also speak about a possible death of the reader? I find myself so many times disappointed in front of a text that once I stroke my emotions and I try to revitalize that grammme, that trace that seemed to grasp the Origin and I am unable to repeat the experience.

Probably a pertinent question at the beginning of this class would be why utilize a method when reading a text, why know various technical approaches when a text should require simply a free style reading that trigers what Barthes calls “le plaisir du texte”. The answer to this question seems natural in Trubetkoi work (Phonology Today), which states that we do not deal only with conscious linguistic processes, but also with the unconscious ones. Or these unconscious linguistic phenomenas predetermines author and lecturer in the same time. For a long time, literature has been considered a message without a code. Gerard Genette, points out that the structuralist method defines the moment where its message is found in the code, which is visible in the analysis of the textual structures. This represents already an opposition. The text is not analyzed through exterior constraints, but through its immanent structures. If the historical method uses social paradigms, genetical forms and a certain sense in the evolution of thinking, the structural method focuses exclusively on form. The origin of structuralism is in general the linguistic model proposed by Saussure. He makes a distinction between language and speech. Language is a system of signs where what matters is sound and sense differences; in language there are only differences, says Saussure. Also, for him, the link between sign and sense is arbitrary in the same way the unconscious is an arbitrary construction. This is an idea that forced Lacan later to say that the unconscious itself is structured as language. Troubetkoi influenced Levi-Strauss through this authentic existence established at the unconscious level of the spirit. But this approach is rather helpful when we deal with language itself. Although the structuralist method remains the most valid, there are also limits linked to it. These limits are considered by Paul Ricoeur in his book, The Conflict of interpretations. Ricoeur analyses the work of Levi-Strauss (La pensee sauvage) and sees a problem when structuralism shifts from its status of structuralist science to the status of structuralist philosophy. The structuralism is pertinent when the analysis deal with a fix object, which is the written text. When it extrapolates to cultural phenomenas or discursive structures such as for example the oral tradition (a system taken into consideration by Gadamer), the structural method can not be productive anymore, simply because, says Ricoeur, it is not able to play out all its meanings.

welcome to my blog

Education: MA French, UBC, 2013
Contact Information
Email: simida.sumandea@ubc.ca