Proximities

In the first part of SEC, Derrida gives an immanent critique of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s conception of writing. Condillac here constitutes one ‘example’ of such a

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conception, yet at the same time Derrida indicates Condillac’s exemplarity when he states: ‘I do not believe that a single counterexample could be found in the entire history of philosophy as such’ (LI 3/21). Derrida’s critique focusses on the notion that writing, as one species of communication among others, serves to represent ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas.’ Functioning as it does by means of signs, writing is thus marked by a form of absence proper to all communication: that of the ‘thing itself’ that is communicated. Indeed, as Derrida puts it, for Condillac the sign ‘comes into being at the same time as imagination and memory, the moment it is necessitated by the absence of the object from present perception’ (LI 6/25). The absence in question here is therefore the absence of an original presence; the sign, as a form of representation, transports an original presence that in itself has no need of such mediation in order to be what it is.36

As a particular form of communication, writing is further distinguished by its own form of absence: it can be used to communicate between those who either are not or cannot be physically present to one another. It serves both to ‘perpetuate’ thoughts over time and thereby to ‘mak[e] them known to persons who are absent.’37 This absence makes writing differ in degree but not in kind from other forms of communication: though the receiver may be absent, the written message still transports the thought intended by the sender, but over greater spatio-temporal distances than would be possible by means of oral communication. Writing constitutes a ‘continuous modification and progressive extenuation of presence’ across a ‘homogeneous field,’ without altering the ‘ideal content’ of this presence (LI 5/24). As Derrida states, ‘writing will never have

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In Grammatology, Derrida writes that the ‘very idea of the sign […] implies a distinction between a signifier on the one hand, and a signified on the other that is able to ‘”take place” in its intelligibility, before its “fall,” before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below’ (G 13/25).

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the slightest effect on either the structure or the contents of the meaning (the ideas) that it is supposed to transmit [véhiculer]’ (LI 4/22). It is thus conceived as a merely ‘technical’ supplement to speech. In this way, Derrida shows that for Condillac there is a continuous path from ‘simple sensation and present perception to the complex edifice of representation’ (LI 6/25).

Derrida undermines Condillac’s account solely by putting pressure on its internal assumptions. He thus considers the ramifications of the absence ‘proper’ to writing, namely, that the written mark can continue to function beyond the presence of the ‘sender’ to the mark and the presence of the sender and receiver to one another. What has traditionally made it possible to distinguish written from oral communication, he notes, is that a written sign is ‘a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it’ (LI 9/30). Derrida thus notes that the written mark must then still be capable of ‘functioning’ when this absence is pushed to an ‘absolute’ degree, that is, in the case of the disappearance or demise of both the sender and ‘any receiver, determined in general’ (LI 7/27).

If this is the case, however, then writing can no longer be conceived as a simple extension of the bounds of (oral) communication or as ‘an (ontological) modification of presence’ (LI 7/27). For it shows that the written ‘message’ is not essentially and wholly governed by the sender’s intention (vouloir-dire) and the hermeneutic context which links him or her to the receiver. Writing can therefore no longer be thought as simply one form of the transportation or ‘communication of consciousnesses or of presences’ (LI 8/29). Furthermore, the possibility of the sign’s being repeated in contexts other than those in which the sender intended it to function opens it to an essential ‘drift’ [dérive] in

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meaning, such that its alteration would not be a mere accident but a necessary possibility.

Now Derrida explains the iterability of the written mark through a ‘graphics,’ of identity and difference which closely resembles Hegel’s logic of identity and difference. On the one hand, the continued functioning of the mark beyond the sender’s or (any particular) receiver’s intentions implies that it is constituted according to a certain ‘code’ (LI 7/28) or, as Derrida slightly later puts it, must have ‘a certain self-identity’ (LI 10/31). This allows the mark to break from a given context and maintain itself in another. On the other hand, this identity does not precede difference. Firstly any sign or mark only emerges as a distinct element—only acquires what we might call a ‘minimal determinacy’—through the difference or spacing [espacement] which separates it from other marks in the syntagmatic chain (LI 10/31). Its capacity to break from any context is co-dependent on this spacing. Secondly, this identity or ‘unity,’ Derrida writes, ‘only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability’ (LI 10/32). We might then say that this identity, like Hegelian identity, is nothing other than the mark’s capacity to include within itself or to ‘take account of’ its differences from other marks across various contexts. But this means that this identity is from the outset permeated by difference, since the sense of the mark, not simply preceding other marks, will depend on which marks it comes to be distinguished from in these different contexts. It will depend, in other words, on which others it includes as excluded. As we shall see, this opens up the possibility of a potentially radical drift in its meaning and a potential rupture of its identity.

Now the significance of Derrida’s analysis would be limited if it were only valid for writing in the narrow sense—that is, if it did not indicate that the difference by which writing is permeated is generalisable. If Derrida’s conclusions were only applicable to writing, then

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writing might be unsuited to ‘representing’ the presence or immediacy that it transports, or would be an imperfect means of ‘accessing’ it, but the possibility of such an immediacy would itself remain unchallenged. Derrida claims, however, that the traits by which writing are characterised ‘are valid not only for all orders of “signs” and for all languages in general but moreover, beyond semio-linguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience, even the experience of being: the above- mentioned “presence”’ (LI 9/29-30).

In order to demonstrate this in the case of oral communication, Derrida does not present a new ‘argument,’ but rather sets out the ‘essential predicates in a minimal determination of the classical concept of writing’ (LI 9/30) and (rhetorically) asks: why should these not also be applicable to oral communication? Insofar as any ‘element’ of spoken language both possesses a ‘certain self-identity’ that permits it to break from any given context and to be recognised in others,38 and is distinguished from other elements through spacing, it too will be iterable and thus susceptible to the same drift as written communication.39 As Derrida states, ‘This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified […] seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general; which is to say […] the nonpresent remainder [restance] of a differential mark cut off from its putative “production” or origin’ (LI 10/32). The mark cannot then be conceived as the ‘representation’ of this ‘origin,’ but at most, as its

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Indeed, it is at this point that Derrida substitutes the notion of ‘identity’ for that of ‘code’ (LI 10/31).

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This does not mean that it is thereby equally susceptible to such drift. Here Derrida is only concerned to show that the structural conditions of speech do not differ in kind from those of writing (though they do differ in kind from the conditions of speech as it has historically been opposed to writing). Here Derrida’s later remark that the ‘relative purity’ of performatives does not ‘emerge in oppositionto

citationality or iterability, but in opposition to other kinds of iteration within a general iterability’ could equally be applied to the ‘purity’ of speech (LI 18/45).

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trace—a trace which differs from itself as soon as it appears insofar as it is already projected toward new contexts. As Derrida remarks in the ‘Differance’ lecture: ‘Always differing and deferring, the trace is never as it is in the presentation of itself. It erases itself in presenting itself’ (M 23/24).

Furthermore, Derrida proposes extending this ‘law’ to ‘all “experience” in general if it is conceded [s’il est acquis] that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks’ (LI 10/32). This is clearly an extension of Derrida’s central point in SEC and might be parsed as follows: insofar as any experience ‘of’ something must first of all isolate that ‘object’ of experience from the other elements in the context in which it appears, this object too will be constituted in its ‘identity’ through spacing and will therefore also be iterable. The mark is therefore not, in truth, a trace of an original presence, but rather the trace of that which is itself a trace.

It is at this point that Derrida’s analysis arrives at its point of greatest proximity with Hegel’s conception of essence as reflection. As we have seen, Derrida, like Hegel, calls into question the notion of simple immediacy or ‘presence.’ For Derrida, as for Hegel, the ‘essence’ that the mark ‘represents’ and seems to refer back to is itself always already a process of seeming, insofar as it too does not precede its mediation by the other terms from it is differentiated. To this extent it therefore does not precede its ‘representation.’ For Derrida, as for Hegel, this implies the Nachträglichkeit of that which the mark or the trace seems to refer back to, in that the latter is, to borrow a phrase from Derrida’s discussion of Freud and Levinas in the ‘Differance’ lecture, a ‘past that has never been present.’ (M 21/22). The trace is therefore a 'remainder’ of this ‘past,’ but like the remainder of Hegelian essence, it is the remainder of that which never was simply present. In the following section we shall explore this proximity between Derrida and Hegel further with regard to the concepts of identity and difference. Nevertheless, we

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shall also see that what we might call ‘Derridean seeming’ is not a seeming of ‘essence’

within itself, but rather a seeming that prevents the closure of reflection on itself.