"vers l'incalculable d'une autre pensée de la vie"

Category: Biodeconstruction

Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, & the Thinking of the Beginning

Joanny Moulin

“Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, and the Thinking of the Beginning”

Malices, The Journal of Literatures and Cultures in the Digital Era
13|2022 : Derrida 2021 – Biopolitique et déconstruction
eds. Francesca Manzari & Stéphane Lojkine

 

Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction

Francesco Vitale
Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences
translated by Mauro Senatore
Albany (NY), SUNY Press, 2018
Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 256 p.

Biodeconstruction, by Francesco Vitale, professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy, is a commentary on Derrida’s 1975-1976 lecture for the agrégation of philosophy at the ENS Ulm, Life Death, written at a time when the original text La vie la mort was as yet unpublished and untranslated. Therefore, this book review is trebly outdated, but this deferral is precisely the case in point, very much as the book is a commentary in Derrida’s style, an iteration. Vitale’s extremely perceptive exegesis of Life Death is an archaeology of Derrida’s thinking on life, tracing its emergence and development in previous works to demonstrate how this amounts to “another thought of life” (p. 36) that surmounts so-called Lebensphilosophie, or philosophy of life, shifting it away from the metaphysics of presence always presupposing an aboriginal living present. The crucial idea is manifest already in the unpunctuated title of La vie la mort, Life Death, indicating a getaway from the conceiving of life and death as a pair of opposites: a decisive departure that Vitale sums up by saying that “différance is the most general condition of possibility of life” (p. 17), rephrasing a point Derrida had made as early as 1968, by speaking of “the history of life—of what I have called différance—as the history of grammè” (Of Grammatology, p. 125)­—“l’histoire de la vie — de ce que nous appelons ici la différance —comme histoire du gramme” (De la Grammatologie, p. 125). Life is writing, down to the earlier cellular engram of memory in matter as arche-writing: this not an analogy, not a metaphor. Although in Life Death Derrida approaches the question successively from the angle of biology with Jacob, of psychoanalysis with Freud, and of philosophy with Nietzsche, Vitale foregrounds the importance of Freud and especially the notion of Bahnung (frayage, breaching) already in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, which “allows Derrida to think the genesis of the retentional trace as the resistance offered to the impression” (p. 12), and the “binding” function described by Freud among primary and secondary processes as “the genesis of the living from which consciousness emerges” (p. 153).  Hence Derrida’s criticism of Jacob’s biologism inspired by Wiener’s cybernetics, on the ground that their description of the living is based on the programme supposedly ruling genetic reproduction, which presupposes an immutable essence, and does not allow for mutation to be occasioned by lived experience. Here Vitale hypothesizes that “this is perhaps one of the reasons why the seminar was not published”: because “at the time”, “Derrida’s position would have been liquidated as an ingenuous Lamarckism”. Once more a return to Freud enlightens the point of Biodeconstruction: Derrida’s commentaries on Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Life Death (partly published in The Postcard)make it clear that life and death are no more to be understood dialectically than the pleasure principle and the reality principle, insofar as the former “submits itself, provisionally and to a certain extent, to its own lieutenant” (p. 131), so that they exist in a “structure with one-two-three terms”: “two principles plus or minus différance—are but one, the same divided”, which Derrida calls “la liaison, stricture, la Bindung” (The Post Card p. 284, La vie la mort p. 357). In Vitale even more neatly than in Derrida there is a constant to-and-fro movement of the thought that operates indeed a breaching or a stricture of psychic life with biological life, of secondary and primary processes, well in keeping with the conviction that there is no solution of continuity there. Thus, by yet another recirculation, much as on the issue of Derrida’s “Larmackism” and his criticism of Jacob on the supposedly a-sexual reproduction of certain bacteria, Vitale underline that some recent research in biology, respectively Richard C. Francis’s on epigenetics and Hema Prasad Narra and Howard Ochman’s on unicellular organisms proved Derrida’s intuition right some forty years after the event. In like manner, Jean-Claude Ameisen’s researches on apoptosis or cellular suicide are brought to contribution to show that for modern biology as well as for the philosophy of deconstruction, “life does not let itself be separated from death”, “it is inhabited by death” (p. 182). From then on, the penultimate chapter concentrates on the notion of autoimmunity, understood as the necessity for the living to “protect itself from a too-rigid immunitarian system, that is, from a too-strong identity”, “that is, from death which it bears within itself” (p. 183), a principle that Vitale extends rapidly from cells to living organisms and finally to “our cultural body”. The book ends with a meditation on the handwritten text read on the occasion of Jacques Derrida’s funeral: “Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…” that resonates with Shelley’s Triumph of Life — “la différance, arrêt de mort ou triomphe de la vie” (“Living on” p. 136) ­— one of the texts that haunts Biodeconstruction as also Nietzsche’s vitalism does the “drive to power” (“la pulsion de pouvoir”, La Carte postale p. 432) and the seances of La vie la mort in which Vitale is less interested, because he chose to concentrate more specifically on Derrida and the life sciences. Biodeconstruction is a dense book, and a seminal example of these “other resources” that “a new problematic of the biographical in general and of the biography of philosophers in particular must mobilize” (La vie la mort p. 48-9). Francesco Vitale’s Biodeconstruction is a clear and concise work, providing rich food for thought: a must-read for Derridaean studies, biography theory, and la philosophie du vivant.

Pr Joanny Moulin
Institut Universitaire de France

Derrida 2021: biopolitics & deconstruction

15-18 December 2021
Aix-Marseille Université
Campus Schuman, Pôle multimédia
https://derrida.sciencesconf.org

Sponsors

Keynotes
Danielle Cohen-Lévinas (Paris-Sorbonne)
Joanny Moulin (Aix-Marseille)
Alexis Nuselovici (Aix-Marseille)
Charles Ramond (Paris 8)
Avital Ronell (NYU)
Francesco Vitale (Salerno)
Naomi Waltham-Smith (Warwick)

Conveners
Francesca Manzari & Stéphane Lojkine

Call for papers:
When the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign came out in 2008, it drew the attention the of the community of Derrida specialists to the famous seance of 20 March 2002, in which the philosopher looked closely into the theses propounded by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (1995), on the recent advent of biopolitics. This is related to a certain heritage of Michel Foucault, and the themes developed since 1977 in his lectures at the Collège de France. The indirect, postponed dialogue this inaugurates between Derrida and Agamben offers a criticism of this inheritance: whereas Foucault described a gradual transformation of the techniques of government since the 18th century, Agamben notes a recent rupture, signalled by the camps and the experience of totalitarianism. Derrida disagrees with Agamben on the reading of Aristotle’s Politics: the distinction between bios, or life in the city, and zoe, or naked life, says Derrida, does not exist as such, literally, in Aristotle’s original text. Hence, the present undifferentiation of the two notions would not at all be an event, or an epistemological threshold from which to think a modern mutation of the political. If bio-power is undergoing unheard-of developments and transformations today, this bio-power, for Derrida, will always already have been there.

Derrida proposes to read-write Agamben reading Foucault. The textual machine of the seminar is here complexified by this double reading-commentary movement that makes us read Foucault in the light of the interpretations his own works have enabled. On the one hand, Foucault’s reflection on biopolitics as a distinctive mark of contemporary political exercise and systems never alludes to Heidegger, from whose work it nevertheless derives. On the other hand, and most importantly, Derrida does not validate the apocalyptical announcement of the biopolitical, as if coterminous with Fukuyama’s Gospel of the end of history, which he had denounced in Specters of Marx.

Twenty years later, as a pandemic strikes the bodies worldwide, as the climatic emergency threatens the survival of species, as borders open up and close down according to more and more fluctuating contingencies, the time has come to reopen the debate of biopolitics.

  • How should we understand Foucault’s biopolitics? Can this new construction of the political be deconstructed? Can it be said to result in a perhaps insurmountable disagreement between the two philosophers?
  • The point is to work on the comparison between Derrida and Agamben. Notwithstanding the frontal opposition that manifests itself in The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida and Agamben are nevertheless the two main intellectual heirs of Heidegger’s thought in continental philosophy.
  • How does Derrida work on the bios of life, from the bio-logical to the bio-graphical, in La vie la mort (1975) until the time of the seminar on The Death Penalty (1999)?
  • Another angle of reflection will be the question of life and the political, from the age-old stakes of sacrifice, hospitality, and forgiveness. How should we understand this apparent reserve respecting the political upheavals of globalization?
  • Particular attention will be paid to the place of literature in Derrida’s writing, convoking La Fontaine and Rousseau in The Beast and the Sovereign, Baudelaire in The Gift of Death, Shakespeare in Specters of Marx and The Death Penalty, Ponge in Signéponge, Joyce in Ulysses gramophone, etc.?
  • In twenty years’ time, thinking on the biopolitical has undergone considerable developments, and new theoretical models have appeared. What has it got to do with deconstruction?`

Paper and panel proposals to be sent to Francesca Manzari et à Stéphane Lojkine before 30 Septemb 31 2021 : abstract (350 words) bio-biblio (200 words : university, postal address, e-mail, mobile phone). Panels consist of 3 papers of 20 minutes delivery and 10 minutes discussion time each: submit overall panel presentation (350 words), 3 individual abstracts and 3 personal bios as above.

Life as Writing in Derrida’s La vie la mort

Joanny Moulin
Life as Writing in Derrida’s La vie la mort
Malice, the Journal of Literatures and Cultures of the Digital Era
n°10 (juillet 2020)

In any case, already from its biological level, the living is textual, and life is writing: as bios (βίος), and already in its less specific, infra-human form as zoe (ζωὴ), life is a form of writing, a graph (γράφειν) — “it is always a gram (engram or program)”. Around the fifth seance of La vie la mort Derrida is working on this edge, so to speak, between zoe and bios, on this threshold on which, for the ancient Greeks, says Agamben, the slave stands: “And if, for the Greeks, the human defines itself by a dialectic between physis and nomos, zoe and bios, then the slave, like the naked life, stands on the threshold which separates and conjugates them”.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén