(3) Derrida: Writing and Difference–Violence and Metaphysics – Flashcards
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Community of the Question
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"A community of the question...A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initially, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question."
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History of the question
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"...a pure memory of the pure question which in its possibility perhaps authorizes all inheritance and all pure memory in general and as such.....and this strange certainty about an *other* origin, an other absolute decision that has secured th past of the question, liberates an incomparable instruction: the discipline of the question....the question must be maintained. As a question."
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Heidegger's founded dwelling
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"a realized tradition of the question remaining a question. If this commandment has an ethical meaning, it is not in that it belongs to the *domain* of the ethical, but in that it ultimately authorizes every ethical law in general." (Every law presupposes this space of free speech or the possibility of questioning)
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The Greek element in Philosophy
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The domination of the same, but also the transgression of metaphysics
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Ethical v metaphysical
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"the category of the ethical is not only dissociated from metaphysics but coordinated with something other than itself, a previous and more radical function. When ethics are not treated this way, when law, the power of resolution, and the relationship to the other are once more part of the *archia*, they lose their ethical specificity."
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Levinas as corrective for Greek philosophy
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"At the heart of the desert, in this growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer seeks to be a thought of Being an phenomenally, makes us dream of an inconceivable process of dismantling and dispossession....it summons us to depart from the Greek site and perhaps from every site in general, and to move toward what is not longer a source or a site (too welcoming to the gods), but toward an exaltation, toward a prophetic speech already emitted not only nearer to the source than Plato or the pre-Socratics, but inside the Greek origin, close to the other of the Greek..."
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Ethical relationship
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"a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other--as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics."
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Derrida's view on Levinas' authoritative source
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"(it can be understood as the trial of theology and mysticism)....In the last analysis it never bases its authority on Hebraic theses or texts. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself. Experience itself and that which is most irreducible within experience: the passage and departure toward the other; the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others.
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Messianic eschatology
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"Truly, messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow within naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate. This hollow space is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed within no category or totality, that is, everything within experience which can longer be described by traditional concepts, and which resists every philosopheme."
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imperialism of theoria
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philosophy as striking with light, the primacy of the subject-object correlation which requires enlightenment. The face is supposed to the epiphany of a certain non-light, but even this requires some illumination to explain. Levinas admits that there is a 'non theoretical consciousness' in Husserl
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the Good beyond Being in Levinas
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illuminates thought as the infinite, but also as the instrument of destruction for phenomenology (as neutral totality); the good beyond being isn't a neutral good or light, but a move toward the other due to fecundity and generosity of the good beyond being.
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ex-cendence
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a superior existence--with a foothold in being while departing from it
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distance
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"One foresees too, the difficulties of a progression which leads to a metaphysics o separation through a reduction of theoretism. For separation, distance or impassiveness heretofore have been the targets of the classical objections against theoretism and objectivism....The complicity of theoretical objectivity and mystical communion will be Levinas' true target. The pre metaphysical unity of one and the same violence. An alternation which always modifies the same confinement of the other."
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metaphysics of separation within Greek philosophical structure
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"One anticipates that this metaphysics will have some difficulty finding its language in the medium of a traditional logos entirely governed by the structure of 'inside-outside,' 'interior-exterior.'"
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Face-to-face encounter
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"Without intermediary and without communion, neither mediate not immediate, such is the truth of our relation to the other, the truth to which the traditional logos is forever inhospitable."
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The poetics of negation
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"[Levinas' writing's] proper route is not that of an 'either this...or that' but of a 'neither this...nor that.' The poetic force of metaphor is often the trace of this rejected alternative, this wounding of language. Though it, in its opening, experience itself is silently revealed."
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A light before neutral light, the epiphany of the Other
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"A community of non presence....Only the other, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is before the shared truth, within a certain non manifestation and a certain absence. It can said only of the other that its phenomenon is a certain non phenomenon, its presence (is) a certain absence. Not pure and simple absence, for there logic could make its claim, but a *certain* absence."
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Solipsism for Levinas
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"soliloquy or reason and solitude of light....Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence."
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eros--metaphysical transcendence
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"positive movement which takes itself beyond the disdain or disregard of the other, that is, beyond the appreciation or possession, understanding and knowledge of the other, *metaphysics* or *ethics.*"
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Levinas' eros like SK's "Fear and Trembling"
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"the movement of desire can be what it is only paradoxically, as the renunciation of desire....Desire, on the contrary, permits itself to be appealed to by the absolutely irreducible exteriority of the other to which it must remain infinitely inadequate. Desire is equal only to excess. No totality wi.l every encompass it. Thus the metaphysics of desire is a metaphysics of infinite separation."
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The infinite as invisible
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"The infinitely other is the invisible, since vision opens up only the illusory and relative exteriority of theory and of need....Inaccessible, the invisible is the most high....the most high, however, is higher than height."
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The relation without relation
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"Neither representation, nor limitation, nor conceptual relation to the same. The ego and the other do nor permit themselves to be dominated or made into totalities by a concept of relationship. And first of all because the concept (material of language), which is always *given to the other*, cannot encompass the other, cannot include the other."
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Eschatology
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"Levinas speaks of an 'eschatology without hope for the self or without liberation in my time."
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The beyond history present only as a trace in experience
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"But this future, this beyond, is not another time, a day after history. It is present at the heart of experience. Present not as a total presence but as a trace. Therefore, before all dogmas, all conversions, all articles of faith or philosophy, experience is itself eschatological at its origin and in each of its aspects."
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religion
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the being-together as separation--the ethical relation is the religiosity of the religious.
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Against BEING AND TIME
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"To affirm the priority of Being over the existent is, indeed, to decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent (the ethical relation), to a relation with the Being of the existent, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of the existent (a relation of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom..." (TI, 45)
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Heidegger's "anonymous divinity"
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the divinity without divinity--a neutrality mixed with paganism of the site.
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The rupture of logos--it inability to comprehend the Other absolutely
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"...this rupture is not the beginning of irrationalism but the wound or inspiration which opens speech and then makes possible every logos or every rationalism."
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The Face
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not only the visage, nor that which is seen because naked, but also that which sees...that which exchanges a glance.
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Hegel's desire of the eye
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Like Levinas, Hegel thought that the eye did not aim at consumption but rather suspends desire
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Violence of the glance by itself
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the solitude of a mute glance, of a face without speech, the abstraction of seeing. A glance alone does not respect the other. "Respect beyond grasp and contact, beyond touch, smell and taste, can be only as desire, and metaphysical desire does not seek to consume....This is why Levinas places sound above light [when he write of though as language]."
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The presence in the face
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"The other is not signaled by his face, he is his face: 'Absolutely present, in his face, the Other--without any metaphor--faces me.'"
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The privileging of speech over writing in Levinas
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"The written and the work are not expressions [like the face] but signs for Levinas." Derrida questions whether the writer, who makes himself other in order to address the other is perhaps enacting a metaphysical relation, or whether the thematic of the trace doesn't apply most to writing as a kind of "He"/illeity.
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God as the most direct speech, speech without defect.
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The contradiction inherent in the face as 'not of this world' like a God, is that "I can only, I must only speak to the other; that is, I must call him in the vocative, which is not a category, a case of speech, but rather the bursting forth, the very raising up of speech. Categories must be missing for the Other not to be overlooked; but for the Other not to be overlooked, He must present himself as absence, and must appear as non phenomenal."
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Body as language
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thought is not first language, but first a relation to the other--the body in the face, as speech and glance are not of this world but open a world within the totality that exceeds it.
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Ille
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"After opposing the magisterial height of the You to the intimate reciprocity of the Me-Thou, Levinas seems to move toward a philosophy of the Ille, of the He (Il), in his meditation of the Trace (that is, of the neighbor as distant stranger, according to the original ambiguity of the word translated as the 'neighbor' to be loved. A philosophy of He [who] would be the invisible transcendence of the Other."
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Non-metaphorical nudity of the face
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"'The nudity of the face is not a stylistic figure.' And it is shown, still in the form of negative theology, that this nudity is not even an opening, for an opening is relative to a 'surrounding plenitude.' The word 'nudity' thus destroys itself after serving to indicate something beyond itself.
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The Other as resemblance of God
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"The foundation of metaphysics...is to be encountered in return to things themselves, where we find the common root of humanism and theology: the resemblance between man and God, man's visage and the Face of God. 'The Other resembles God.' Via the passageway of this resemblance, man's speech can be lifted toward God, an almost unheard of analogy which is the very movement of Levinas' discourse on discourse. Analogy as dialogue with God: 'Discourse is discourse with God....Metaphysics is the essence of this language with God.'" (not discourse on God as in theology, or discourse in God as participation)
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Presence as separation--presence-absence
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"Presence as separation, presence-absence as resemblance....a resemblance which can be understood neither in terms of communion or knowledge, nor in terms of participation and incarnation. A resemblance which is neither a sign nor an effect of God....We are 'in the Trace of God.' A proposition which risks incompatibility with every allusion to the 'very presence of God.' A proposition readily convered into atheism: and if God was an effect of the trace? If the idea of divine presence (life, existence, parousia, etc.), if the name of God was but the movement of erasure of the trace of presence?"
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The Face of God
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"The face of God which commands while hiding itself is at once more and less a face than all faces....The face is neither the face of God nor the figure of man: it is their resemblance. A resemblance which , however, we must think before, or without, the assistance of the Same.
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exteriority, or alterity
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exteriority is spatial--thus Levinas moves toward the Mystery of the other, the alterity that is not spatial. (But Derrida resists this erasure of space, since it would be impossible to wean language away from the metaphors of spatiality)
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The positive infinity of God v the indefiniteness of what does not come to an end
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"The other cannot be what it is, infinitely other, except in finitude and mortality (mine and *its*). It is such as soon as it comes into language, of course, and only then, and only if the word other has a meaning, but has not Levinas taught us that there is no thought before language?
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Infinite alterity as death
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"If the face is body, it is mortal. Infinite alterity as death cannot be reconciled with infinite alterity as positivity and presence (God). Metaphysical transcendence cannot be at once transcendence toward the other as Death and transcendence tower dthe other as God. Unless God means Death....And that God is nothing (determined), is not life, because he is everything? and therefore is at once All and Nothing, Life and Death. Which means that God is or appears, is named, within the difference between All and Nothing, Life and Death. Within difference, and at bottom as Difference itself. This difference is what is called History. God is inscribed in it.
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Negative theology that leads to the silence of peace--language called outside itself by itself
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"If light is the element of iolence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse. This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously' a philosophy ware of itself as historical in each of its aspects..."
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History is violence
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"History is violence. Metaphysics is economy: violence against violence, light against light."
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False infinity in Husserl
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Levinas accuses Husserl of the false infinity, and object-infinity. And thus he links the ego with this false-infinity, a finite totality. But Derrida resists this: a finite totality is an abstraction, which has its own sense of alterity. Indeed, alterity cannot do without finitude, negation. Rather than phenomenology as adequation, phenomenology should be considered respect itself.
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Theoria
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Theoria could be the theoretical--against which Levinas maintains a protest. It could also be the maintenance of appearance, an opening of the appearance of the non-theoretical (as in phenomenology). The Other is apprehended analogically, never absolutely.
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The Stranger as another ego?
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"The stranger is infinitely other because by his essence no enrichment of his profile can give me the subjective face of his experience from his perspective, such as he has lived it....To refuse to see in it an ego in this sense is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence. If the other were not recognized as ego, its entire alterity would collapse."
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The Other
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"What 'other' means is phenomenality as disappearance
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God and the ego
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"God no more really depends upon me than does the alter-ego. But he has meaning only for an ego in general. Which means that before all atheism or all faith, before all theology, before all language about God or with God, God's divinity (the infinite alterity of the infinite other, for example) must have a meaning for an ego in general."
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Heidegger's thought of Being as having no theoretical or practical aims.
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Levinas too gestures toward what precedes the distinction or praxis v. theory.
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Heidegger's giving priority to Being over existents
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Derrida argues that this is not the case. Priority can only be given between two determined things. It is not a zero sum game when Heidegger focuses on Being. Being does not precede the existent, since it only is through the existent. Heidegger's Logos is the Logos of no one not because it is the anonymity or oppression or the impersonality of the State, or even the neutrality of the 'one says.'
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Ethics cannot be opened without Being
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Being conditions the respect for the other as what it is: other. "Therefore, the 'relation the Being of the existent' cannot possibly dominate the 'relation to the existent.'"
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Heidegger's letting-be
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"The 'letting-be- concerns all possible forms of the existent, and eve those which, by essence, cannot be transformed into 'objects of comprehension.' If it belongs to the essence of the Other first and foremost to be an 'interlocutor' and to be 'interpolated,' then the 'letting be' will let the Other be what it is, will respect is as interpellated-interlocutor. The 'letting be' does not only, or by prevalence, concern impersonal things.
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Being is the evocation of all metaphor but is irreducible to any metaphor.
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"As Hegel says somewhere, empiricism always forgets, at very least, that it employs the words to be. Empiricism is thinking by metaphor without thinking the metaphor as such." "Being is not the concept of a rather indeterminate and abstract predicate, seeking to cover the totality of existents in all its extreme universality: (1) because it is not a predicate, and authorizes all predication; (2) because it is 'older' than the concrete presence of the ens; (3) because belonging to Being does not cancel and predicative difference, but, on the contrary, permits the emergence of every possible difference. Being is therefore transcategorical, and Heidegger would say of it what Levinas says of the other: it is 'refractory to the category.'"
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Being, for Heidegger, is eschatological--and does not come to presence as a violent light.
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Being is darkened in the unconcealing of the existent. And the Site too is always a proximity in reserve--thus HDG's site is not pagan; rather it is the possibility of a relation to the God or Gods. "'The sacred, it is true, appears. But the god remains distant.' Wellspring, because this anticipation as thought of Being (of the existent God) always sees God coming, opens the possibility (the eventuality) of an encounter with God and of a dialogue with God."
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The existent as violated Being?
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"Therefore, the though tot Being, in its unveiling, is never foreign to a certain violence. That this thought always appears in difference, and that the same--thought (and) (of) Being--is never the identical means first that Being is history, that Being dissimulates itself in its occurrence, and originally does violence to itself in order to be stated and in order to appear. A Being without violence would be a Being which would occur outside the existent: nothing; non history; nonoccurrence; nonphenomenality."
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God as Being
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"Has not God always been thought of as the name of that which is not a supreme existent pre comprehended on the basis of a thought of Being? Is not God the name of that which cannot be anticipated on the basis of the dimension of the divine? Is not God the other name of Being (name because non concept), the thinking of which would open difference and the ontological horizon instead of being indicated in them only?"
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Ontology precedes theology as a bracketing on the on tic reductions of God
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"In other words, perhaps one might say that ontology precedes theology only by putting between brackets the content of the ontic determination which, in post-Hellenic philosophical thought, is called God: to wit, the positive infinity.
