Part I of Notes on Derrida's _Dissemination_

So to round out my block of reading Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus, I decided to pick up Derrida’s incredibly elucidating 1981 text _Dissemination_ since here JD engages with Plato’s infamous condemnation of writing in _Pheadrus_. In short, Plato idealizes speech as the only authentic manifestation of truth, in a turn of logic that assumes there is no gap between signified and signifier. This is the beginning of the idealization of the logos, which will come to belong only to “God.” Derrida builds his engagement with Plato’s text(s) on the paradox that this claim can only be made through the medium of writing, which it must pretend doesn’t exist. Language is always already constituted by the difference it seeks to overcome: a familiar jumping -off point for those of us familiar with the early thrust of JD’s writing. The reading of this ambiguity Derrida sees woven throughout the “Platonic text” (in scare quotes, because later we shall see Derrida demonstrates how one such unified or closed text that can be designated as the text of “Plato” is impossible) hinges on the translation of the word pharmakon, which in the Greek is used to delineate the antipodal terms of both “remedy” and “poison.” Here we come to the internal and external problematics of this term: firstly, the word in and of itself is not in and of ONE self--it literally means two oppositional things; and secondly this highlights the problem of translation inherent in the transmission of any text. For any attempt at translation must operate under the logic of binary oppositions in choosing one or the other meaning, thus effacing the difference built into the “original.” It is not that translation “adds” difference to the master text, but that the difference is already there; only now what is entirely undecidable (i.e., is pharmakon properly a remedy or a poison—note that Derrida will later use lateral associations to connect this term to an entire diverse web of meanings) now becomes “decided.” We should observe that the fact that such meaning, or truth, even needs to be decided—that is it not self-evident—points to the impossibly of the existence of any original, unified text.


To truly appreciate the meticulous attention Derrida gives the texts he is engaging with, it is worthwhile to look closer at the twists and turns of his readings here.

1. Working out the “Outwork”
From the gate, we know Derrida is saying to us, “whatever you expect this preface to be, dear reader, you will not be getting.” I said from the gate, but –and this question underlies the entire inquiry that will be this “preface”—where exactly is the gate? Is it the title, which is actually a series of titles: “ Hors Livre,” “Outwork,” “Hours D’Oeuvere,” “Extratext,” “Foreplay,” Bookend,” “Facing,” “Prefacing.” These terms do not mean quite the same thing, are not of the same “language” (French/English), and they are a mix of nouns and verbs—of name and movement. From the very outset (ha!) of “Outwork” our sense of textual origin is dismembered.

JD’s first sentence: “ This (therefore) will not have been a book” (3). There is no present (tense) in this statement: there is the past (been), and future (will not), both disguised as the present. There is no “moment” in this sentence, no manifestation of present temporality, but it is the space of the drawing together of past and future. This masquerading of a present manifestation of truth that comes to be only through the tension of a collision of past and future—this—is the problem of Western metaphysics that Derrida will spend the rest of this text (rather all of his texts) highlighting for us.

If we’ve read our Hegel (and our Marx!) we know the vexed relationship that occurs between preface and philosophical master text. Here Derrida’s preface at once prefaces and deconstructs its own logic, in what JD will term the text’s “systematic double mark.” This is a repetition without an identity, a mark that is both inside and outside the system of which it is related. This is NOT what some have termed a nihilistic negation of meaning (something like stating “there is no preface”) or some reckless “free play” that makes all terms up for grabs. It is quite the opposite-- it is true bricolage, questioning the system from within. What the double mark of this preface shows us, in its simultaneous act of prefacing and dismantling of that same logic, is that there is no real “outside” of this text that follows; no transcendental text- proper. Like a true “supplement” it is outside this so-called master text only to enhance/prepare/complete what should be able to stand on its own.


Derrida looks to Hegel’s disqualification of his own Preface in the _Phenomenology_and questions the relationship of this prefatory material to the body of the text: “ Isn’t the preface both negated and internalized in the presentation of philosophy by itself, in the self-production and self-determination of the concept” (11). What JD is calling for here is a reinterpretation of this relationship between the two texts, and an understanding why—if the philosophical inquiry is “truth” and should be able to stand on its own—does Hegel NEED to use his Preface. It’s not just that Hegel “negates” his pretext, but that it becomes both “folded in” to the text that follows and made useless by Hegel’s own simultaneous condemnation of it. It is the supplement, in both senses of Derrida’s use of this term, that which adds to as it replaces. In an interesting move, Derrida shows how the _Phenomenology_ and the _Science of Logic_ are in dialectic( “Shall it be said—this is the traditional problem—that the entire _Phenomenology of Spirt_ is in fact a preface for the _Logic_?”), and the “endless circle” (13) Derrida sees these texts engaged in demonstrates the non-distinction of any kind of “closed” master text. What is perhaps the most salient facet of this reading is Derrida’s explanation that we cannot understand the relationship between pre-text and text according to the logic of binary oppositions : “ If one sets out from the oppositions form/content, signifier/signified, sensible/intelligible, one cannot comprehend the writing of a preface” (16). Yes, Hegel’s preface is a critique of formalism that mobilizes the formal property of the prefatory apparatus at the same time. Yes, this is a paradox. But it is only a paradox if we view these texts as representative of opposition binary categories, only if we look at it through the lens of the formalist. If instead we see this as a relationship that cannot be subsumed under binary logic, then “the contradiction is rather the very movement of speculative dialectics in its discursive progression” (20). The temporality of the preface—both prescriptive and an after-effect (remember our first sentence of this preface)--is thus not a manifestation of linear time. In enacts the dialectic itself. Therefore it is both inside the text proper but always outside; it is already a moment of the text. [On a side note, I’d like to point out this textual site as a rebuttal to critics and readers who think JD is interested in simply dismantling binary oppositions and leaving things in a state of chaos or free play, where anything goes. What we see here in the treatment of Hegel’s preface is the exact opposite (for lack of a better term) because what JD makes us attentive to is that awareness of the incommensurability of binary thinking forces us to note the structure of this thinking; to appreciate the relationship between the two texts as they are constituted by the constructs of the system of language. I would argue that rather than some willy-nilly nihilism divorced from responsibility, we are made more attuned to the structure from which we read and encouraged to reinterpret it, not destroy it.]





This process which Derrida has been enacting/performing is “dissemination,” that which “interrupts the circulation that transforms into origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning” (21). Dissemination exposes the double mark and points up its dual place as both inside and outside the system. Like différance, it “opens up a snag in writing that cannot longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down the trace” (26).

I used the word “performing” just above to categorize the way of reading/writing that JD provides us with here, and to that effect, I want to point out another textual apparatus that seems to fit both in/outside the “master text” that Derrida does not engage with here: the foot note. Just as he is describing the exteriority of the “postface”, the word is footnoted, drawing the reader to a two-and a half page explication of the term, where the word is defined as “adding an extra text” or an “appendix”(27). By the time the reader finally returns to the larger text –at- hand she returns to the words “ recapitulation and recurrent anticipation” (27-8), which seems to me to be the description of the process of reading the footnote that has just occurred, and the phrase simultaneously has a different function in the sentence from the “master text” to which we return. This brief slice of text seems to operate on two different registers at once. What then is the function of the footnote, another textual appendage both inside (literally, sits just below) and outside (additional information that is only placed below but yet does not fit into the trajectory of the text proper)? If he text -proper were self-sufficient, why would one need the supplement of the footnote? Derrida does not mention this as such, but I would argue here he performs again for us the same problem of constructing a binary opposition between pre-text and text, another level at which every text is thus fractured, and an example of how the structure of supplementarity he describes pervades all textual components and all writing in general.

Why is there no outside of the text ( a question begged by scholars, usually in reference to this infamous claim of Derrida’s used in his explication of Rousseau in _Grammatology_)? Because there is no inside either. Or rather, no inside that is closed off from its outside. Derrida:


“ To allege that there is no absolute outside of the text is not to postulate some ideal immanence, the incessant reconstitution of writing’s relation to itself…the text affirms the outside…if there is nothing outside the text this implies, with the transformation of the concept of text in general, that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an interiority or identity-to-itself…but rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing” (36-7)


Perhaps, this sounds to some like a sort of trifling meticulousness, a sort of sly reversal of words that gives us a more “liberal” way of looking at texts. Perhaps. Until we remember that the other reason “there is nothing outside the text” is because reality is constituted by language—reality IS text: “This is the protocol indispensible to any elaboration of the problem of ‘ideology’, of the specific inscription of each text, within the fields commonly referred to as fields of ‘real’ causality (history, economics, politics, sexuality, etc)” (43). Materialism, gender studies, right or left wing politics—none of these areas are opposed to linguistics or philosophy, none offers a “cause” of ideological explanation that is not already coded by language. They are all constituted by the same system. Language is already and always political.

“Outwork” is rich with perhaps some of the most lucid and practical demonstrations of Derrida's method of reading/writing I have come across in the whole corpus of his work. And the text becomes even more valuable when we examine it in relationship to the so-called (but no longer able to be called) “master text” in the first section of the book “Plato’s Pharmacy, ” which I will dive into in my next post.

“Of inward selves make outward free ” : Hegel’s Beautiful Soul and Christ’s Non-Action in _Paradise Regained_

Since its first publication in 1671, critics have debated what exactly happens in Milton’s brief epic Paradise Regained. Scholars have especially found the poem’s climactic “pinnacle scene” problematic, in which Jesus refuses Satan’s temptation to prove his divine nature by risking his earthly body. At stake is the ambiguous relation between Jesus’ knowledge of his divinity and whether or not the hero’s action at the pinnacle reveals a truly human example of piety, or whether Jesus’ decision is informed by and guided by supernatural powers . Equally troubling for readers is the hero’s apparent non-action. That is, Jesus’ decision not to act throughout the poem has lead critics such as Northrop Frye to categorize Milton’s character as “a pusillanimous quietest in the temptation of Parthia, an inhuman snob in the temptation of Rome, a peevish obscuranist in the temptation of Athens.” Much critical attention lately has focused on offering possible solutions to this ambiguity of Milton’s treatment of Jesus as Theanthropos (“God-man”). Recent critical work has offered explanations of Jesus’ non-action in relation to Milton’s historical ties to the enthusiastic religious movements of the seventeenth century; his vexed affiliation with the defeated radicals after the collapse of the Good Old Cause; and Milton’s specific theological beliefs as evinced in religious tracts such as De Doctrine Christina. While these specific historical and theological relationships are of course important to bear in mind in any reading of Milton’s poetry, I would like to propose an alternate reading of Milton’s character of Jesus that situates the hero of Paradise Regained as a literary manifestation of Hegel’s concept of the “beautiful soul.”

Hegel introduces the concept of the “beautiful soul” in the final section of the “Morality” subheading in the Phenomenology’s description of “Spirit.” As a moment of the coming into existence of Absolute Spirit, the beautiful soul is a manifestation of the antithesis between thought and being, between immediate self-knowledge and external reality, and between pure internalized moral contemplation and its reciprocal actualization in the realm of finite human action. It is a form of moral consciousness that has absorbed a transcendental sense of duty into itself and it becomes a static and empty form of consciousness that refuses to commit to action. I read the conflict between internalized divinity and external action of Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained as one literary articulation of this phase of the emergence of Absolute Spirit. Such a reading is beneficial in both proposing a concrete articulation of Hegel’s concept the beautiful soul as he presents it in the Phenomenology , and in offering an original contribution to the ongoing conversation surrounding Jesus’ non-action in Milton’s ambiguous brief epic.

The beautiful soul is an articulation of “pure duty” that “retreats into itself, and is aware that being is its own self, in which what is actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty…and knows its immediate individuality to become pure knowing” (§632). In Hegel’s conceptualization, this is a “consciousness which thinks of duty and reality as contradictory” (§637). This “pure duty” is a wholly internal and solipsistic detachment from action in the world of external finite action. Hegel anthropomorphizes the beautiful soul as one who thinks, “ I act morally when I am conscious of performing only pure duty and nothing else than that; this means, in fact, when I do not act” (§ 637). As an “empty abstraction of pure thought” (§637),
“Its consciousness finds its truth in “the immediate certainity of itself” (§637), the beautiful soul divorces pure thought from being; or objective reality from subjective experience. As external reality and subjective relation to this finite world remain fissured, the “self does not attain to an actual existence. It lacks the power to make itself a Thing and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor or its inner being by action and an existence…it flees from contact with the actual world” (§658).

The internal condition of pure duty’s truth is an unmediated relationship to this mental law. As such, the beautiful soul’s attachment to pure duty is a “pure self-identical knowing…the absolute universal” (§639). As an abstract universal, the beautiful soul’s enslavement to pure duty is an articulation of its internal unity with a transcendent God: “The ‘beautiful soul’ is its own knowledge of itself in its pure, transparent unity—the self-consciousness that knows this pure knowledge as pure inwardness of Spirit. It is not only the intuition of the Divine but the Divine’s intuition of itself” (§795). However, the beautiful soul’s unmediated relationship with the Divine lacks the necessary antitheses attained through mutual recognition with another external to this self-consciousness. “Being-for-another”, or acting in the finite world of human action, would allow the beautiful soul to move out of the sphere of mere abstract universality by engaging with the human world of action (§640). Hegel writes that this moral consciousness requires a “moment of enduring reality, the moment of being recognized and acknowledged by others” (§ 640). For Hegel in the Phenomenology up to and including this section, we have seen that the dialectic of the emergence of self-consciousness moves from universal and unmediated identity, to a relation to and recognition in/of an external Other, followed by a return to that initial universality that now contains the previous moment of opposition and recognition in the Other. In the case of the moment of the beautiful soul, the infinite Divine has to recognize and be recognized by the finite world of human action in order to return to its universality in an experience that is no longer solipsistic and abstract.

This mediation between the finite sphere of human action and the beautiful soul’s abstract, immediate identification with the Divine is necessary in order for pure duty to actualize itself in reality. In order to complete the dialectic and move forward to a manifestation of Absolute Spirit, this moral consciousness must synthesize abstract dogma with practical moral action through the recognition of itself in the wholly Other. Yet the moment of the beautiful soul remains static:
Here, then, we see self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, of which all externality as such, has vanished—withdrawn into the contemplation of the I = I, in which this ‘I’ is the whole of the essentiality and existence…what it is for itself, and what is for it intrinsic and what is for its existence, have evaporated into abstractions…consciousness exists in its poorest form, and the poverty which constitutes its sole possession is itself a vanishing. (§657)

For Hegel, the beautiful soul’s unwillingness to taint the purity of its immediate identification with the Divine leaves this manifestation of consciousness in a precarious position of possible total loss of self: “In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called ‘beautiful soul,’ its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air” (§658). Thus, in its refusal to tarry with external reality, the beautiful soul loses its being in- itself in its inability to enter into the fallen human realm of sin.






We see this moment of the beautiful soul in Paradise Regained, as Milton recounts the Biblically inspired story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan during his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. The nature of Satan’s temptations continuously draw upon human weakness and natural impulses, especially the biological drive of hunger. However, Satan’s preoccupation with Jesus’ human needs and desires is in direct conflict with the hero’s habitual recourse to moral duty and an internalized direct relationship with Divine law. While Satan attempts to engage Jesus’ weakness as a human being, the real conflict remains in the realm of pure thought. From the initial invocation of Book I of the brief epic, Milton alerts his reader that the previous battle against evil manifest in his earlier Paradise Lost (1667), has now made a marked turn inward, shifting from the earthly world of Eden to “tell of deeds/ Above heroic” (I. 15-16). Jesus’ battle with Satan is not like the previous epic conflict of Paradise Lost, and the whole of the struggle is focused on the hero’s subjectivity, as in the real wilderness of the setting in Jesus’ conscience: “Into himself he descended” (II. 112).

The disparity between Jesus’ human and divine natures is continuously questioned by the infernal tempter. In Book I, Satan struggles to comprehend the dual nature of Jesus: “ Who is this we must learn, for man he seems/ In all his linaments, though in his face/ The glimpses of his Father’s glory shine” (91-93). In the poem’s final Book, Satan again skeptically questions the possibility that Jesus is singular in existing simultaneously as both man and God when he asks, “In what degree or meaning thou art call’d/ Son of God, which bears no single sense;/ The Son of God I also am or was” (IV. 316-318).

More than this though, Satan’s temptations and Jesus’ responses of non-action based on internalized moral duty evince this contradiction between the human and Divine. Capitalizing on his estimation of Jesus’ human hunger pains, Satan tempts Jesus, “ But if thou be the Son of God, Command/ That out of these hard stones be made thee bread” (I. 342-343). Jesus response negates his relationship to the fallen human world of biological instinct, and insists instead on a strict sense of duty to God’s law: “ Think’st thou such force in Bread? Is it not written/ …Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word/ Proceeding from the mouth of God” (I. 348-350). Similarly in Book II, Satan calls upon Jesus’ as a human subject “unknown, unfriended, low of birth,/ A Carpenter thy Father known, thy self/ Bred up in poverty/… Lost in a Desert here and hunger-bit” (413-416). After Satan tempts Jesus with wealth here, Jesus’ response again eschews the common human drive to garner riches--“ Extol not Riches then, the toyl of Fools” (II. 544)—and insists rather on a kingdom within, in congruence with his internalized and immediate faithfulness to moral duty:

…He who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King…
But to guide the nations in the way of truth
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know, and knowing worship God aright,
Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That the other only ov’r the body reigns… II. 468-469, 674-679 [emphasis mine]

Here, and in other moments throughout the poem, Jesus evinces a direct, unmediated relationship with Divine law and a commitment to moral duty. He combats Satan’s temptations, “ The Law of God I read” (I. 207); consults only his own “ inward Oracle” in making his decisions (I. 463); completely abandons any human temptation of hunger when presented by Satan with a bounteous feast, because his “heart is set on high demands” (II.409); and decries the temptation of human knowledge as an “empty cloud” (IV. 321), because he has a immediate relation to the divine light of God’s knowledge, which transcends this fallen form of learning offered by the tempter.

Not only do Satan’s temptations highlight the disparity between Jesus’ as a human agent and his immediate sense of duty to himself as Divine, but the series of temptations leading up to the final enticement to prove his divinity through the sacrifice of his human body in the pinnacle scene are explicitly coded as temptations for Jesus to act. Whereas Jesus is continually represented as favoring passivity, temperance, and patience, Satan’s resolutions in the poem are specifically categorized by his decisive desire to act quickly and steadfastly. He advises his infernal counsel in Book I, “ And now too soon for us the circiling hours/ This dreaded time have compast, wherein we/ Must bide the stroke of that long threatn’d wound” (58-59). In Book II, he instructs (in marked contrast to the long debate with the fallen angels of PL Book II) that the fiendish angels have time for “no long debate” (95) and must act immediately, because “no time was then/For long indulgence to their fears or grief” (109-110).

Opposed to Satan’s repeated refusal of delay, Jesus’ responses to his tempter’s enticements highlight the hero’s refusal to act. Toward the climax of the poem, Satan questions Jesus’ repeated passivity and his refusal to be involved in the sphere of earthly action:

…thy Kingdom though foretold
By prophet or by Angel, unless thou
Endeavor, as thy Father David did,
Thou never shall obtain; prediction still
In all things, and all men, supposes means,
Without means us’d, what it predicts revokes. III.351-356 [emphasis mine]

Exasperated by the failure of each of his temptations, Satan grows more impatient as the poem reaches its close, and before his final attempt to force Jesus to act, demands proof that Jesus is the Theanthropos. He asserts that this final temptation will allow him, “Therefore to know what more thou art the man,/ Worth naming Son of God by voice of Heav’n” (IV. 539-540), and Satan’s conflation of “man” and “Son of God” here reinforces the ambiguity that runs throughout the poem and that will culminate in the climax to follow. His final enticement is for Jesus to prove that he is in fact the divine incarnation of God within an earthly body by destroying this human vessel, saving himself with his transcendent powers: “ Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God” (IV. 555-556). Milton describes Jesus immediate response: “ to whom thus Jesus: also it is written,/Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (IV. 561-562). Jesus replies by quoting the written word of God in his reiteration of one the Ten Commandments given to God’s chosen people. This response indicates his sense of duty and adherence to the strict letter of the law. But this seemingly external law, given to Moses in the Old Testament, I argue is evidence rather of his immediate Divine intuition, because when Jesus asserts, “Tempt not the Lord thy God,” it is unclear whether or not he refers to “God” as his father who has decreed this duty or to himself as the incarnation of the Divine in flesh. Like Hegel’s beautiful soul, Jesus refuses to enter the earthly realm of sin and will not act. He preserves his immediate relation to the Divine by refusing to taint his perfection through action in the fallen world. In the poem’s great paradox that has troubled critics for four hundred years, Jesus stands upon the pinnacle unmoved, and his ambiguous response does not prove either his humanity or divinity, because he refuses to engage with the Other in Satan. There is no mutual recognition or dialectic between the finite fallen world and the divine. Jesus remains unmoved and in strict opposition to Satan, who “smitten with amazement fell/…Throttl’d at length in the Air, expir’d and fell” (IV. 563,569).

In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s beautiful soul actualizes its purely internalized sense of duty through mutual recognition of its Other in external reality and the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. After this engagement with the Other through action in the finite world, the immediately divine returns to itself:

It returns from its external actual existence back into itself as essential being, and therein the universal consciousness thus recognizes itself. The forgiveness which it extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being which it put on a level with that other which was real action…Through this externalization, this knowledge which in its existence is self-discordant, returns to the unity of the self. It is the actual ‘I’, the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-itself, is itself completely universal. (§670-671)

This “self-sundering or stepping- forth into existence” (§796) is the necessary step the beautiful soul must take in order to actualize what had previous remained merely abstract duty. Only in this way it “remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself; it is God manifest in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge” (§671) [emphasis mine]. Yet, in Paradise Regained this “self-sundering” does not yet occur. In the poem, Jesus remains static in the moment of moral consciousness Hegel calls the beautiful soul. This ultimate moment of God’s manifestation on earth in the Divine’s recognition of the fallen world of sin and the reconciliation of the two will only be possible in Jesus’ death on the cross which awaits. This is the crucifixion of Jesus foretold by the Father in Paradise Lost, Book XII as the culmination of synthesis between the transcendent and earthly that “Shall bruise the head of Satan”(430). It is only through the mutual recognition of the finite world of the flesh in Jesus’ death and his infinite divinity revealed through his resurrection that makes possible the ultimate act of forgiveness that Hegel describes as the appearance of Absolute Spirit.

However, for Hegel, all stages in the coming-to-be of Absolute Spirit are necessary, and I argue we can read this manifestation as Christ as “beautiful soul” as such a necessary moment that initiates the actual engagement with humanity that will culminate in the crucifixion and resurrection to come. After the fall of Satan from the pinnacle, Milton describes the subsequent actions of Jesus in specifically human terms. He descends to a bounteous feast which satisfies the hunger and thirst Satan attempted to exploit throughout the poem. Then, the celestial choir sings of Jesus’ humanity and his destiny to soon be fulfilled: “ Hail Son of the most High, heir of both worlds,/ Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work/ Now enter, and begin to save mankind” (IV. 633-635) [emphasis mine].

Thus even though the character of Jesus manifests an articulation of Hegel’s beautiful soul that remains static in its immediate unity with the divine and strict adherence to internalized duty in the action of the poem, Milton foreshadows the reconciliation of pure Divine thought and being that will occur in the reconciliation of mankind’s sins in the crucifixion. As a necessary phase in the emergence of God in Absolute Spirit, in the poem’s final lines Milton provides evidence that Jesus will exceed this static articulation of moral consciousness as he leaves the pinnacle to begin his work that will allow him to engage with the fallen world—not trough his divine intuition of abstract duty-- but trough his explicit humanity: “ hee unobserv’d/ Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” (IV. 638-639).

Bhabha's "subaltern agent" and Derrida's "Before the Law"

In my ever-engaged effort to resist readings of the early Derrida as "apolitical" or "nihilistic," I had some thoughts about the resonances I hear echoing through (and sometimes being stifled) in Homi Bhabha's work (I must note that my reading if Bhabha comes from a very isolated selection below--primarily Chapter 9 of The Location of Culture ). Even with the intellectual backlash something called "deconstruction" has suffered in the last twenty years, I have become interested in the ways in which theorists with definite political agendas have extrapolated ideas offered in Derrida’s writings about language to serve their interest, though often without making the connection explicit anywhere in their own language. Bhabha’s post-colonialism in The Location of Culture (1994) implicitly draws upon Derridan thought. While Bhabha never positions his argument this way, it will become evident below how we can trace a similar continuity of intellectual thought from Derrida’s early writings on language and specific foundational concepts proffered by Bhabha. But because he has a political motive he must necessarily make Derrida’s (non)concepts prescriptive, rather than descriptive, and in the process his program must distort the terms of the very practice he borrows from Derrida. Drawing upon Derrida’s discussion of the structure of language, Bhabha’s project is engaged in an effort to de-center the origin of identity, through a re-interpretation of time that makes temporality a series of contingencies, rather than linear sequence of causal relations. From these procedures he is able to present an interpretation of identity that is not static or fixed, but rather a relationship of differences, that can be read as an expression of Derridean différance. However, Bhabha is extrapolating from Derrida’s discussion of language, he needs to introduce terms that are never a part of Derrida’s reading: for Bhabha it is “freedom,” and as agency is necessarily an influential aspect in any political program, he must grapple with the issue of “identity” in a way that Derrida does not.

We can see specific ways in which Bhabha’s post-colonial project is engaged in a similar project that implicitly draws upon and distorts certain ideas suggested by Derrida’s description of the structural functions of language, while in this chapter of Location he never overtly cites their appropriation of Derridan thought. Because Bhabha’s motive is the potentiality for political action, his appropriation of these terms necessitates an elaboration of agency, therefore he attempts to use the (non)concepts of Derrida’s non-causal temporality and différance as a prescriptive method, when for Derrida both time and différance are merely effects of being in the world.

While Bhabha’s “time lag” draws on the Derridan emphasis on time as contingent and the potential for self-consciousness that is imbedded in experiences of indeterminacy, Bhabha conflates the experience of indeterminacy with “freedom”, in a way that remains abstract and thus requires no active engagement with the present moment—the antithesis of Derrida’s way of reading. In the epigraph that heads his chapter, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” Bhabha cites Derrida: “For some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable” (245). Yet, Derrida does not de-center binary oppositions in order to re-inscribe new ones, and in his thinking “indeterminism” is not opposed to “determinism” in the way in which Bhabha posits the former as a weapon against the later. Rather than positing indeterminate time as the occasion through with self-consciousness emerges (as Derrida does), Bhabha suggests a “subaltern agency” that acquires agency by maintaining a state of indeterminacy. The agency afforded to the subaltern in this schematic is defined by this subversion of reason/determinism in favor of un-reason/indeterminacy as well as a “rebel consciousness,” a self-consciousness is self-affirming in the complete negation of the Other and enables the subaltern subject to remain in a state of absolute alterity and unintelligibility.

For Derrida, self-consciousness involves the play of differences between the two states, emphasizing the relationality of one to the other as the condition through which self-consciousness is possible. Bhabha misconstrues this notion in his citation of Derrida, because he uses indeterminacy as a tool to negate determinacy, and in privileging indeterminacy. He equates the experience with “freedom,” where for Derrida not only is “freedom” not likened to a political project as Bhabha expropriates the term, but also exists as a potentiality in the experience of the relationality of the terms, which is the exact opposite of the antagonistic dichotomy Bhabha sets up between the terms within the essay. For Derrida, self-consciousness necessarily involves a period of unintelligibility that lags behind the determinacy, because time is a part of human experience.

While Bhabha presumes to use these deconstructionist principles to abolish binary oppositions (in the case the opposition between the dominant and subjugated, or master/slave hierarchy inherited from the Western tradition)—“the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary” (277). But, because at this point in his argument agency has become synonymous with indeterminacy, as time has become an instrument rather than just a condition of experience, Bhabha ends up re-inscribing the same binary opposition he attempted to dismantle, and he puts the subaltern agent back into the position of subjugated in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

While Hegel’s account of this dialectical relationship necessitates a much more exhaustive explication, for the sake of brevity, I will briefly outline the process to demonstrate how Bhabha’s distortion of Derridean “indeterminacy” undermines the motive of his political program. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel contends that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (111). That is the emergence of self-consciousness is a process which is predicated on an encounter with another, in which each agent desires to become “in and for itself” initially through the domination of the other. They “mutually recognize themselves as recognizing one another” and since each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other,” its own being “in and for itself” still has not truth (112-113). In this indeterminacy of self, each desires to be the subject and so “each seeks the death of the other” (113). Yet, in this process another awareness arises when the subject risking his life, realizes that his highest expression of freedom is the risking of his own life, because only he has agency over this action. This is the realization that “there is nothing present in it [life] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment , that is only pure being-in-itself”( 114). In the case of the master and slave, mastery is self-defeating because the master recognizes the slave as the truth of his identity, since it is his dominant relation to the slave upon which his conscious identity depends. While the master’s identity is dependent on the recognition of the slave, the slave’s realization of self is independent of the master since he does not require domination over the master to be in-himself. In this process, the slave inhabits a “consciousness forced back into itself” which withdraws back into itself and become “transformed into a truly independent consciousness” (117). Thus, the slave is truly the one who experiences the possibility of true liberation. While he first sees the overthrow of the master as truth, he has experienced the fear of death and “absolute negativity” and “pure-being-for-itself” (117). He realizes “through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail” (117), because he realizes that he has power over nature by virtue of his own labor, while the master only has power over nature through his dependence on the slave’s labor. It is through his active engagement in his own labor that the slave can become liberated in a consciousness that is for-itself, but often he eschews this labor for the continuation of the abstract desire to replace the master. This state of indeterminacy and abstract relationality rather than active agency in one’s own work keeps the slave a slave, and this is the position in which the subaltern agent is left at the end of Bhabha’s essay.

While Bhabha’s subaltern agent is left in a perpetual state of indeterminacy, like the slave of Hegel’s dialectic, Derrida calls for a subjective agency that is in a constant relation between self and other in a form of decision making that cannot abandon responsibility to the real world in “Before the Law (1992).” In his reading of Kafka’s parable in The Trial, Derrida explores the problem of the man from the country who comes before the door of the “Law”: the petitioner comes before the gatekeeper with the assumption that the law should be universal, and in his attempt to enter into the law, he forgets his own particularity. This is because “there is a singularity about the relationship to the law, a law of singularity which must come into contact with the general or universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so” (187). This is the same problem faced by Bhabha’s subaltern agent. According to Derrida, the petitioner’s failure is that when he comes to this space of indeterminacy, the tension between his singularity and the laws supposed universality, he abandons his particularity and abdicates his engagement in his own life. Kafka writes, “ During these many years [that the man attempts entrance into the law] the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper…He becomes childish…At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him” (184). In forgetting himself, he loses his rationality and his humanity fades, until he has abdicated his place in history, much like Hegel’s slave who fails to achieve self-consciousness through his work in the world.

Rather than remaining static in this state of indeterminacy, Derrida advocates an experience that is attentive to each successive moment in time; a call for continued engagement through thought in the face off that which we misconstrue.. As he asks “what is the law?” and “what is literature?” in the essay, Derrida contends that no answer emerges, but the posing of the question only reveals “an essential structure of referentiality” (213). That is, the experience of the petitioner, of the singular agent engaging with law, and in the reader who interprets a text, “answers” or “meaning” do not emerge, but only “movements of framing and referentiality” that makes the subject keenly aware of context. Rather than abdicating his own particularity before the law, the petitioner should have maintained a relationality with the universal: “ one cannot reach the law, and in order to have a rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with it, one must interpret the relation” (203-204) [emphasis in original]. If the petitioner had interpreted the structure of referentiality linking himself and the law, he would have realized that is his own exercise of agency that excludes his passage into the law—“he must forbid himself from entering” (203)—and this realization of his own autonomous particularity in relation to the indeterminate would have been freedom. He would then realize that “he is both subject of the law and an outlaw” (204).Thus the potentiality for self-determination and agency—the “freedom” that Bhabha misconstrues as indeterminacy—is the constant re-interpretation between the un-readable and the readable as always in relation, and never oppositional. True agency exists in a space not limited by such binary oppositions, and is an authority that recognizes the necessary relationship between self (the petitioner) and other (the doorkeeper/the Law).