In Totem and Taboo, the totemic clan represents the human and its human power of speech. As in Husserl, however, truth is not simply constituted in speech, since it has to be animated by meaning (i.e., the Geist). In Freud, that is
81 Ibid., pp. 97-8.
82 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 52.
indeed the murdered primal father, in whose evoked presence the clan exists as its own condition of possibility. And, as the system goes, the meaning deposited in the disavowed body of speech (sound, the clan) is thought to be embodied for the first time in the body of writing (ink, the totemic animal). As we saw, however, the body of the totemic animal is caught up in a
paradoxical construction in which it is both completely material (life and blood) but also to a certain extent ideal insofar as it functions as a signifier. In fact, as stressed by Butler and Belau, the status-as-signifier of this body could not come to be without this material mortality, but, conversely, this bodily matter is in its turn constituted by the workings of the signifier. In the totem,
therefore, one encounters two matters, as it were: the first one a vulgar matter, whereas the second is stuck in a middle ground between pure materiality and pure ideality. The uncanny materiality of the totem animal is strikingly similar to the materiality of semiotic processes as described by Kristeva. In Kristevan terms, one could argue that the materiality of the individual totemic animals contains a semiotic potential which is harnessed for the symbolic functioning of totemic nomination and social organisation.84 This is analogous to the
functioning of poetic language:
[A] phoneme, as distinctive element of meaning, belongs to language as symbolic. But this same phoneme is involved in rhythmic, intonational
84 It is important to note, however, that within Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic dialectic there is no space for a ‘vulgar’, simple materiality. The materiality of the semiotic is always already psychically invested and characterised by the distinctiveness of rhythmic, kinetic repetitions and thus is already, precisely, semiotic. The symbolic sign attempts to ignore this semiosis and retroactively characterises it as a signifier – a category that can only have meaning within the symbolic function – thought to be merely material. Derrida’s characterisation of the signifier as never simply material can be read as close to Kristeva’s deconstruction of the symbolic function.
repetitions; it thereby tends towards autonomy from meaning so as to maintain itself in a semiotic disposition near the instinctual drives’ body; it is a sonorous distinctiveness, which therefore is no longer either a phoneme or a part of the symbolic system. […] It is poetic language that awakes our attention to this undecidable character of any so-called natural language. […] Language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother.85
It is precisely the perceived materiality of these semiotic sounds in their ‘autonomy from meaning’ which can be detected in and characterises poetic language for Kristeva. Thus, she will argue that poetic language in a way breaks the taboo that requires language to never recognise the semiotic, material source of its functioning:
If it is true that the prohibition of incest constitutes, at the same time, language as communicative code and women as exchange objects in order for a society to be established, poetic language would be for its questionable subject-in-process the equivalent of incest.86
Within poetic language, the subject-in-process
simultaneously prevents the word from becoming mere sign and the mother from becoming an object like any other—forbidden. This passage into and through the forbidden […] constitutes the sign and is correlative to the prohibition of incest. [This forbidden is] the social body’s self-defense against the discourse of incest as destroyer and generator of any language and sociality.87
If poetry as a cultural practice does not seem to threaten to destroy sociality, Kristeva’s description of the semiotic’s power to undo symbolic language resonates well with totemic taboos. Art, poetry, the festival is the exceptional site where social taboos are lifted, and in totemic societies this
85 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S Roudiez, trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 135, 136.
86 Ibid., p. 136. 87 Ibid.
manifests as the totem meal in which the taboo against killing the totem animal can and should be collectively transgressed. The taboos surrounding the totem animal do not seek merely to buy its protection: sparing the totem actively signifies not killing the primal father – hence also not challenging his monopoly of the horde’s females. In the post-crime sociality, that monopoly is translated precisely into the prohibition of incest which is secured by means of the totemic taboos.
Killing the totemic animal ‘utters incest’ because it recognises the animal as material and undoes the symbolic, linguistic system of totemic nomination which depends on its function as sign. Just as poetry dares to view words as material things, totemic murder dares to view the totem as just another animal. If the totemic animal fails to be a sign, clan nomination collapses and the lines separating licit and illicit marriages (or available and unavailable females) disappear, creating the possibility of incest. Likewise, totemic murder registers the killer’s desire to kill the primal father by himself and thus claim the clan women for himself.88 Breaking a totemic taboo thus registers as a sort of artistic challenge that plays freely with the rules of totemic language. This artistic expression is only accepted in the exceptional time of the totem meal festival when the poetic character of the totem’s
88 It should be clear, however, that killing the leader of the horde is not the same as the symbolic killing of the totemic animal within the clan. In the horde days, there was no sociality, no laws, and no prohibition of incest – the monopoly of females was secured by the primal father himself by means of brute force. Therefore, killing the totem animal is an aggression towards not only the father whose memory the brothers wish to serve but also to the clan itself as based on the agreement (or law) that no one male will claim the females (now his kinsfolk) for himself. That is why totemic murder is permitted during the meal festival since it is undertaken by the whole clan as one.
materiality is recognised, since this recognition serves to strengthen clan fraternity and sociality themselves.89
This middle ground between two kinds of totemic materiality is
precisely what Derrida attempts to get at by means of his generalised concept of writing, which would still do the transcendental work attributed to it by Husserl (making it ideal), but while still exposing truth to spatiality (thus, material). Derrida raises this point in Speech and Phenomena when discussing Husserl’s phonocentrism. He wishes to frame the Husserlian privilege of the voice (the phenomenological voice, ‘the voice that keeps silent’, as Derrida puts it) as the step that was necessary in attaining an absolutely ideal object. Or, to be precise, Derrida identifies a teleology in Husserl marked by the
determination of being as presence which will forcefully make sure that only the self-present voice is capable of securing the ideality of objects. Therefore, Derrida points out that, for Husserl, ‘the ideality of the object […] can only be expressed in an element whose phenomenality does not have worldly form. The name of this element is the voice.’90 To be sure, the Saussurean distinction
between the acoustic reality of sound and the phoneme holds here,91 so that the phenomenological voice refers to the phonic signifier, which, as we saw, while not completely ideal as the signified, is not simply material. Derrida,
89 We could say that poetic language as a contemporary practice is not punished either because it is always already undertaken in exceptional, collective situations, or because it does not in fact transgress a social taboo anymore.
90 Derrida, ‘Speech and Phenomena’, p. 76, emphasis in the original.
91 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 7.
however, makes a distinction between the ideality of the phoneme and the grapheme:
My words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible distance. […] The objection will perhaps be raised that this interiority belongs to the
phenomenological and ideal aspect of every signifier. The ideal form of a written signifier, for example, is not in the world, and the distinction between grapheme and the empirical body of the corresponding graphic sign separates an inside from an outside, phenomenological
consciousness from the world. And yet every non-phonic signifier involves a spatial reference in its very ‘phenomenon,’ in the
phenomenological (nonworldly) sphere of experience in which it is given. The sense of being ‘outside,’ ‘in the world,’ is an essential
component of its phenomenon. Apparently there is nothing like this in the phenomenon of speech.92
It is crucial for Derrida, then, to call attention to the Husserlian attempt of bracketing off any ‘body’ from the production of transcendental idealities, insofar as this exclusion of the body from the constitution of truth is revealed as the very notion of the body. Therefore, the interiority of speech (which is also the certainty of timeless and non-contingent objectivity) is secured by means of the exclusion of the body. It is well known, however, that a simple overturning of this hierarchy – prioritizing the body which was foreclosed – does not challenge the hierarchical logic and can actually serve to entrench it even deeper, as we saw with Haraway. In fact, Derrida inaugurates to a certain point his deconstructive method by indeed respecting Husserl’s
phenomenological methodology of reduction (attaining, therefore, a claim of transcendentality, thus avoiding the dangers of naïve materialism and empiricism) to its final consequences and finding there the borderline
oxymoronic transcendental spatiality which seems to break both from purely transcendental philosophy and from empiricism. Thus, he argues:
The ‘apparent transcendence’ of the voice thus results from the fact that the signified […] is immediately present in the act of expression. This immediate presence results from the fact that the phenomenological ‘body’ of the signifier seems to fade away at the very moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to the element of ideality. It phenomenologically reduces itself, transforming the worldly opacity of its body into pure diaphaneity. This effacement of the sensible body and its exteriority is for consciousness the very form of the immediate presence of the signified.93
As we saw, this apparent immediate presence of the signified to consciousness actually constitutes the interiority of said consciousness. The disavowed exteriority of the bodily aspect of the signifier is the meaning of the body itself, both in the animal and in the animal body of the human. In the experience of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ which is invoked by the priority of speech, the physical world and the worldly aspect of the phoneme seem to be subject to a complete erasure. Speech is, thus, a pure ‘phenomenon’ in the Husserlian sense of the term. More importantly for Derrida, ‘hearing oneself speak [s’entendre parler] is experienced as an absolutely pure auto-affection, occurring in a self-proximity that would in fact be the absolute reduction of space in general.’94
On the apparent contradiction with the Husserl from The Origin of Geometry, where he asserts that writing in its external spatiality is constitutive of truth, Derrida points out that the Origin represents what is in fact the
93 Ibid., p. 77. 94 Ibid., p. 80.
culmination of a thought of language as ‘a secondary stratum of experience’, confirming thus ‘the traditional phonologism of metaphysics’.95 Ultimately, the writing Husserl privileges is still phonetic writing, which ‘incarnate[s] an already prepared utterance’.96 Therefore, ‘to reactivate writing,’ that is, to confirm the transcendentality of the truth therein inscribed regardless of any one moment of inscription or reading, ‘is always to reawaken […] a word in the body of a letter, which as a symbol that may always remain empty, bears the threat of crisis itself,’ that is, of forgetting of the truth. ‘The moment of crisis is always the moment of signs’, and since in Husserl one can bracket off any status-as-a-sign of the phonic sign, writing then comes to be the sign itself.97 And in this discussion Derrida reaffirms the logic that essentially connects Husserlian thought to a thinking of bodies. Writing is only apparently privileged by Husserl, this writing is still only an artful aid to a speech always threatened by scriptural mis-inscription, because
what governs [in Husserl] is the absolute difference between body and soul. Writing is a body that expresses something only if we actually pronounce the verbal expression that animates it. […] The word is a body that means something only if an actual intention animates it and makes it pass from the state or inert sonority (Körper) to that of an animated body (Leib).98
Yet, in Husserl’s purity of phenomenological reductions, which aims to get to the innermost self-presence of the subject, Derrida encounters an irreducible, essential difference which cannot be understood in accidental terms as the signifier since it constitutes the subject. In other words, this is a
95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., p. 81. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid.
difference which, unlike all other thematics of difference such as writing and the signifier, cannot be thoroughly considered to be empirical and contingent – it is a constitutive difference, ‘before’ any constituted difference such as writing, signs, space, etc. This difference lies in the auto-affection Husserl identifies as the basis for the hearing-oneself-speak which is characterised as the
constitution of the subject, since, for Derrida, ‘auto-affection suppose[s] that a pure difference comes to divide self-presence.’99 One may say that what is able to touch or affect itself is no longer one and is thus divided by a primordial difference: that means that even respecting all of Husserl’s theses and all of his transcendental guidelines means thematising this pure difference. As Derrida puts it,
it was necessary to pass through the transcendental reduction in order to grasp this difference in what is closest to it—which cannot mean grasping it in its identity, its purity, or its origin, for it has none. We come closest to it in the movement of différance. The movement of différance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it produces a subject.100
And as Joshua Kates argues,
[Différance] is itself brought forward by means of the operation of the voice within phenomenological interiority and the unique auto-affection it implies. All of Derrida’s other ‘signature terms’ […] are […] versions of what is in effect a new, quasi- or ultra-transcendental life (life being, again, the notion to which the auto-affection that has come forward here corresponds).101
Derrida indeed became known for the quasi-transcendental aspects of his theses, especially when it comes to Of Grammatology and the introduction of arche-writing. In the Husserlian terms explored in Speech and Phenomena,
99 Ibid., p. 82.
100 Ibid., translation modified and emphases added. 101 Kates, p. 155.
writing understood in its literal, technological (or even material) sense cannot furnish any transcendental truths due to its contingency and empiricism. And ideal and transcendental for Husserl can only be the ‘voice that keeps silent’ when the subject hears himself speak, obliterating any need for actual signs. Thus, arche-writing would be the name for the ‘transcendental difference’ – if one may grant Derrida the privilege of this oxymoron – which would
transcendentally make possible specific forms of difference (such as writing) but that, at the same time, would never aspire to the complete disembodiment and self-sameness of the transcendental subject as expounded by Husserl.
This Derridean reading of Husserl (obeying and disobeying his logic at the same time, that is, deconstructing him) allows us to see that Freud’s totem, too, becomes a sort of trace or arche-writing. The totem is material and
corporeal insofar as it is a substitute for the mortal, murdered father, but can never be reduced to its corporeality since, as we saw, it has to outlive its bodily incarnation. Totemism introduces, then, what Derrida calls an essential
difference. The totem is nothing if not empirical (killable) but remains always already transcendental in that it outlives these specific, differential
incarnations, and actually makes them possible. In other words, the totem transcends any totemic animal, but this transcendental totemic species is still tied to the bodily reality of animality. This body of the species is, thus, the transcendental difference which would skirt both disembodiment and contingency. As Berger argues, the animal origin of meaning and metaphor depends on the animal’s simultaneous proximity to and distance from the human – the animal is equal to and other than the body. Berger’s theory of animal metaphor seems to
account for the same deconstructive procedures that allowed Derrida to think a ‘writing before the letter’. That would lead us to conclude that the totem allows for a thinking of an ‘animality before the animal’, or an arche-animality.