The Trauma of Thought

With apologies for having neglected this blog for a while I'd like to restart it with some preliminary reflections on Derrida: A Biography which I've been reading for the past few days. First of all I'd like to say how profoundly moving this book is. It gives insight into the work of Derrida in a way that enables the life of which they were a part to be seen as reflected in them without merely relativistically demoting his works to local episodes. This is quite an achievement given how easily biographies can produce a reductive treatment of thought. The second point about the book concerns the impossibility of what it attempts and the way this impossibility is understood within the work as part of what enables it to function. The impossibility is that of presenting for the reader a picture of Derrida the man and his life, the relation of this "life" to the "works" that have his name assigned to them, and the relation of both these to a largely 20th century history that is already receding from us. It is naturally impossible to do "justice" to all three of these registers and so Peeters has to emphasize at different points either one or the other of these three axes but he does so in ways that keep reminding one of the other two.

The third point that emerged for me from reading the book, however, even though it is never made an explicit theme within it, concerns the way that the book reveals a relationship Derrida constantly had with trauma and that this relationship structures the nature of his thinking. This topic is not thematised as such within the biography, not least because the literary genre of biography would make such thematisation very difficult. The point of biography in one sense is the presentation of a life in terms of a continuous linear story even though this narration necessarily is, in key senses, fictive. A biography that left such an approach entirely behind would, after all, cease to belong to the genre of "biography" as this is recognised. But it remains the case that following a linear account of a life will prevent some matters from being centred as the passage from one set of events to another will tend to impose itself as the "natural" order.

Despite this problem and clearly having no wish to give a psychoanalytic reading of Derrida the book does, all the same, provide a large amount of evidence for seeing the development of the man and the work as related to an "experience" that can be said to be one of repeated trauma. There are numerous signs of this and in this posting I will simply point to some of the most manifest in order to leave possible room, on some other future occasion, for subtler analyses to be presented.

The epigraph for Peeters' work is taken from "Circumfession" where Derrida refers to the "secret" from which he writes and the inability of anyone to "know" it. As is known the theme of "secrecy" is itself one that Derrida made an object of attention in some of his late works. Alongside this attention to "secrecy" is a passionate engagement with memory and the archive which is revealed in Derrida's reluctance to throw anything away and a kind of sense of each moment of the past as something to be treasured. The oddity of this last point when related to the "secret" is that the preservation of such an archive clearly allows for the publicity of the life that is subsequently given in the publication of a work like that of Peeters. 

The next theme that connects to the question of the kinds of "passion" that inhabited Derrida would be the relation to his "origin" in the sense of the genetic place of his birth and its displacement. The birth was within Algeria as part of a group (Sephardic Jews) who had been granted French citizenship during the lifetime of Derrida's grandparents. Derrida was the third child of his parents but the second died aged only 3 months old less than a year before Jacques' birth. The sense of this element of "wound" is manifested for Derrida himself as he spoke, in "Circumfession" of himself as an "intruder" and one who was loved "in place of another". This first sense of displacement is seconded when Derrida's cousin is run over by a car and killed shortly after Jacques enters school, something made worse by the news being wrongly conveyed to him as the death instead of his older still living brother. This double presence of "death" early in his life is one of the first ways that a theme that is central to his thought emerges. Alongside them is a displacement that is later marked in terms of how institutions operate. The exclusion from school that occurs to Derrida under the auspices of the Vichy authorities in 1942 is the occasion for this next violence. 

One of the effects of the exclusion from school is the response of the Jewish community to create its own schools from which, however, Jacques was alienated from the beginning, an alienation that indicates his refusal to accept a placing within a communal organisation that defensively has to mime the exclusionary operation of the authorities. Derrida's alienation from this logic ensures, in its turn, a sense of a displacement not just brought about by the Vichy regime but also from the response to it, despite the latter's obvious necessity. 

These early traumas, real as they doubtless were, might be thought to be ones that could be located within a definable chronology as is the purport of respectable biography. However Peeters' tale places them in a wider perspective. Let's accumulate the signs. In 1949, aged only 19, Derrida travels to France in order to attempt to enter the Normale Superior. Not only does this repeat displacement but the experience of this attempt is both one of delay (it took three attempts to pass the exam allowing entrance) but also of physical rebellion against the pressures of the occasion manifested in illnesses bordering on, as Peeters states, "nervous collapse". Relations with Algeria itself, intermittent and distracted, also become refracted through a sense of the provincial character of the life there which creates a further displacement. Put together we discern the beginning of a pattern: one of anxiety.

Later, after entrance to the Ecole Normale, relations begin with Althusser and reading starts of Husserl, two elements that are not at ease with the institution he has entered. Derrida's romantic life subsequently centres on a gentile who he marries "secretly" whilst in the US. The late 1950s and early 60s include the Algerian War which wrenches Derrida's family from its original environment and entails that he loses any possible further relation to his own "origin". This is all prior to the writing and publication of any of the texts that would later become ones that we would all learn of and some of us would attempt to study. 

The beginning of Derrida's serious publication history with the translation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry and the writing of an "Introduction" to it which is much longer than the original text involves him changing his first name from the way it was given (as "Jackie") to the "official" Jacques. This further displacement would appear to be compensated by the arrival of the man in the terrain of the institution as witnessed by the positive response of Ricoeur to this work. However no sooner is this text published, in a somewhat "conventional" style, than Derrida begins publications that already mark a diversion from it, including works on Foucault and Levinas. Alongside a divergence from institutional norms comes the pressure of political alignments, first with regard to Althusser and second with regard to Tel Quel, that introduce tensions and dissonances that mark the development of Derrida's work and the relation of him to the personnel of French intellectual life.

The blossoming of Derrida's life from 1967 on with the arrival of a mature sense of his own style and the formation of the ability to decisively shape his own sense of intellectual work occur against political backdrops that were, in late sixties France, extremely difficult (as indeed was the case elsewhere but France in 68 is, after all, a by-word for the whole period). The distance Derrida himself felt towards the exigencies of these moments is recorded well by Peeters and the difference  between their tempo and that announced in Of Grammatology is evident enough. The further displacement involved in teaching at US universities begins from this period even though it was to develop more intensely later.

From this time on the proliferation of texts mounts at a pace that gets more and more frenetic for the rest of his life. It includes, however, the formation of works whose form was as avant-garde as that of Glas and The Post Card, the latter of which is later cited by Peeters as putting Derrida beyond the pale for many self-declared "philosophers" and this despite the way the defence of philosophy itself is carried out by the formation of GREPH in the seventies. Attempted alliances to extend philosophy in the educational system subsequently were not supported by others employed in teaching the subject. 

The next thematic of displacement occurs around the relationship Derrida had with the "mass media", an area that Peeters traces from the arrival of the nouveaux philosophes in the 70s through to interviews carried out right towards the end of his life. Although Derrida shifts away from initial outright hostility to the media to attempting to play his own game with it the relation is always for him marked by suspicion, not least at the simplification the media performs on thought. 

The failure of Derrida consistently to win secure institutional recognition within France is detailed convincingly in the work with recurrent snubs and refusals of different institutions to award him a role. Similarly, the success he had in the US was one that produced a significant backlash against him, particularly in departments of philosophy that consistently produced his most vicious detractors and some of whom would even attempt to intervene in the workings of French intellectual institutions. The "Cambridge affair" in the UK was also initiated and pursued by philosophers. So the problem with institutions is again and again played out as a problem with "philosophy" despite the opposite accusation, consistently hurled at Derrida from figures as diverse as Foucault and Bourdeiu, that Derrida was "too" philosophical or only really engaged with philosophy.

The recurrence of a connection with death that is striking in so many of Derrida's later works is also connected to the traumas around the deaths of so many friends and colleagues whose funerals he not only attends but at which he is often asked to provide a funeral oration (works gathered together at the end of his life though not by himself). Alongside this we should note the way that Derrida attempted to care for Althusser after the latter's breakdown culminated in the murder of his wife. 

If the connection to death is an insistent theme it is also connected to superstition, including a view of ghosts that Derrida makes thematic not only from the time of the film Ghost Dance as Peeters suggests but as early as the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry where "haunting" already appears as a motif. That death and life are interlaced and that survival is about a sense of this is one of the ways that Derrida consistently articulates a view of his own self-relation. 

Other elements of displacement: the connection to Heidegger's work always being one of vigilance and distrust even despite the way the "inheritance" of this work was part of his most lasting engagement. A further wound: the discovery of the past of Paul De Man, a discovery that complicates a relation to a friend that had been one of his closest. 

These many ways in which displacement can be traced across Derrida's life and working practice are supplemented by the way that Peeters again and again reveals anxiety, sadness and a certain distrust etched into Jacques' connection to the presence of his own life. These points multiply across the volume despite the recurrent sense also of a man who loved life and was capable of great fun. If the effect of Peeters' biography is to at least partly make it possible to see the man in and through the edifice of the work then it will have been very valuable. But it also produces a view of great work as having often a connection to a life that needn't be one that is at all "easy" to have to live. Peeters himself is a fine writer and what it seems to me he makes manifest is the trauma at the heart of Derrida's thought: a trauma that was "original" and which is nonetheless part of the "secret" of its future.

Nancy on the Soul

Before turning to the opening section of On Touching I want to veer off to some texts of Nancy's. The text I will look at in this posting is one of many that I'll have cause to examine in the course of working through On Touching and a text that is specifically mentioned right at the beginning of On Touching as well as in a note to the "exergue". This is Nancy's text "On the Soul", a title that immediately refers us to the work of Aristotle that was discussed in the "exergue" to On Touching. This text of Nancy's is included in Corpus, the work of Nancy that appears to have a particularly crucial status for On Touching.

This text of Nancy's dates  from 1994 and at the opening of it Nancy mentions how the headlines in the daily papers are full of reference to the cruelties that were, at this time, being committed in Bosnia. The point of the reference is to immediately indicate that although this text refers, in its title, to "the soul", it is going to be the burden of Nancy's argument to suggest that it is bodies that we should have in mind.

The text is one that Nancy indicates is not a "lecture" so much as an "improvisation" as he wishes to avoid producing a "body effect" in his discussion in the sense that Plato speaks of a discourse having an organic form. In place of this kind of effect he wishes to trace a sense of the body as something that is "open". However this point already produces a motif that clearly relates to the concerns of On Touching as Nancy writes: "in order for there to be an opening, something has to be closed, we have to touch upon closure. To touch on what's closed is already to open it. Perhaps there's only ever an opening by way of a touching or a touch. And to open - to touch - is not to tear, dismember, destroy." (122)

This indication that to speak of the body as that which is "open" already implies a relation, in some way, to a closure and the ability to open this closure leads Nancy to invoke the vocabulary of touching. It is by "touching" that opening takes place and such opening is not a form of "destruction". The use of the language of opening and the distancing from "destruction" suggest both a closeness to and a differentiation from Heidegger, much as one often finds in the work of Derrida himself.

Rather than immediately develop the possibilities of this relation to Heidegger however Nancy stays with the sense of what the distinction between openness and closure implies. Something completely "closed" would not even be involved in a form of self-touching he claims and so would not be a "body". This apparently negative claim clearly implies the positive conception that a principal characteristic of bodies would be this ability of self-touching. This point is doubtless one to which we will have to return.

Nancy's initial point in raising this view that complete closure would not allow us to arrive at view of the body is to state that the conventional opposition between "body" and "soul" implies a sense that each is closed off from the other. It thus conceptualises bodies in a sense as if they were strictly inorganic although even this notion partakes more of the quality of an "image" than a concept since the sense of the inorganic body implies a connection between the inorganic and the organic that is itself problematic. A sense of something completely closed in on itself should, in any case, be something that would not characterise a body but might, rather, be the way that "God" could be figured.

Such a notion of "God" would, however, articulate this notion in the form of a "mass" and would belong, Nancy suggests to a kind of thought of "substance". One of the ways "substance" has been often articulated, not mentioned here by Nancy but clearly implied by him, is as that which is "independent" of all else. Nancy refers, unsurprisingly, to Aristotle at this point though the way "substance" is articulated by Aristotle is in the Metaphysics and De Anima would thus be dependent upon it. The thought of "substance" in Aristotle would be, as Nancy states, "more complicated" than this sense of independence alone implies but it is by means of something like this that body is often presented. 

Nancy next refers past Aristotle and forward to the tradition of modern metaphysics in thinking bodily substance by means of geometrical determinations such as the sense of the point and the line. That would be involved, for example, in Descartes' claim that the essence of body is extension.

By contrast to this sense of body as extension we can contrast the mind as that which has "spirit". This would give us the contrast that determines body and mind in such a way that each appears independent of the other. However one of the points about bodies is that they appear to be plural, there are many of them. This is illuminated in the sense of bodies as "mass" rather than as "points". Mass alone, however, like the point, gives no sense of the life of body and indicates a view of them as essentially dead.

So this kind of determination of body seems not to come from the body. Bodies are that which howl and cry and the discourse of substance seems not to tell us anything at all about this. In making this point Nancy refers not to a classic philosopher like Aristotle or Descartes but, instead to Antonin Artaud, the dramatist, who thought that it was necessary to, in some way, mark the limit of the philosophical discourse on substantial embodiment.

The discourse on body appears not to speak of the corporeality of body. This would seem to be part of the way that the logic of discourse itself gets structured after the pattern of the incorporeal. The body, by contrast, viewed by Nancy as that which is open, does not fit such a picture. So body is not purely anatomy, it is not only that which is pictured by the stages of articulation of dead mass. Such discourse gives no sense to body.

So the concern with body that has led to the production of Nancy's talk is one that concerns the embodiment of body and this concern is one that seems particularly contemporary. Body, in some way, interrupts the pattern of "sense" as this has been produced in discourse.

At this point Nancy addresses the question of why his piece is called "on the soul" when he appears to be speaking about bodies and in so doing explicitly refers to Aristotle's De Anima. One of the reasons for using this title, as Nancy puts it, is that in the text after which he has named his talk, the text of Aristotle, we find also a concern with body. Why would this concern with body be marked by both Aristotle and Nancy in a way that eccentrically states it will address the soul?

Nancy's reply to this obvious question is to state that the word "soul" is the word that names a "being outside itself" (which is a way of translating Heidegger's term ex-sistence). The soul is not to be addressed as a "spiritual body" says Nancy as when, in images, an angel is presented leaving the dead body. This representation has to be put aside as we instead concentrate on a view of the soul as being "the body itself".

In other terms the soul is the body's self-relation, that which would enable it therefore to touch itself. If the soul is a term for something it would be that which enables a form of self-differentiation. So, for example, Aristotle determines the soul as the "form" of the body. But this determination could be taken to mean that the soul is still distinct from body unless we say that a body without form is that which we already discounted, namely, a pure mass.

The form of the body is thus what enables us to say we have body at all. So it's not something opposed to matter as if matter and form were exterior to each other. Rather form is the articulation of the matter that allows us to say we have a body. If body is related to itself or to another body it is by means of this articulation. Another way of speaking of form would be to say that there is "sensing" going on as a body is that which senses. So when we say that there is "aesthetics" we mean that there is body.

The body is that which senses and that which gets sensed. The matter of the body is what is sensed and the form of the body is what does the sensing. Since both take place the body senses itself and this self-sensing is the life of the body. The being-sensed of the body cannot be penetrated except in destruction so this is what it is destroy a body, to prevent its sensing from continuing to take place.

A final determination that Nancy takes from Aristotle is that the soul is the "entelechy" of the body. An "entelechy" is that which organizes the body and makes it a whole but we can see this means that the sensing-sensed unity takes place. So entelechy is the operation of the body as a particular. Bodies are articulated as particulars and in relation to each other. So each time there is a body there is occupation of a given area, a space that makes it possible to determine the limits of the given body and distinguish it from other bodies.

So if Aristotle claims that the soul is the "entelechy" of the body then this is the same claim as Heidegger's that there is ex-sistence. The way in which we find ourselves to be is in this being-beyond that is embodiment. The first way we can present this to ourselves is by means of the surface of our own body, as, for example, through skin. The body, in touching itself, touches skin. 

Nancy here refers to "classic" phenomenological analyses of body although he does not here attempt to look at them in depth but he does name both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Their analyses of body, he implies, are strange in always concerning themselves with self-touching as a kind of interiority rather than staying with the simple evidence of skin. There is a basic exposure of body to itself in the surface it has, the surface we term in general skin. 

Sensing the body involves the way that it announces itself to the one who has senses and this sensing tells us that there is something going on by means of a kind of eruption. The eruption that we sense is by means of our ability to sense and this ability is what Nancy is here terming the possession of "soul".

Soul is thus a way of speaking of how the body articulates itself by means of an exterior relation it possesses to itself. Leaving behind Aristotle Nancy next mentions Spinoza. Spinoza is the one who claims that the soul is the "idea" of the body and this means that it is the way that God relates to the body. However given that Spinoza performs the radical trick of making God and God alone that which can be named as "substance" it follows that the duality involved in the claim that the soul is the idea of the body is one determined through attributes of the one determination. This claim leads very quickly to thinking God in such a way that the name "God" appears unnecessary.

For Spinoza body and soul are thus internally related as the soul is the body's idea. When Spinoza thus speaks of the feeling of the eternal he means that the body is necessary to itself. Despite the contingency of all that takes place bodily the sense of the taking place is necessary so that the contingent becomes necessary. 

Nancy next looks at Descartes, particularly his Second Meditation. Here we have the figure of the piece of wax. When it is heated it appears to lose all its qualities so that its extension is something opposable to the idea of it. But there is a relation all the same as Descartes speaks here of the two as involved in a form of "touching" as when the sense of touch is still involved even after the burning of the wax. We can touch it even if doing so would burn.  So the extension is one we can touch, even in extremis. 

When Descartes speaks later of the "union" of body and soul he, like Aristotle, accedes to the view that "sensing one's self" is at work. When the soul senses it senses body and the body in being sensed is sensed by means of itself. The body is sensed to be that which is the experience of the "Subject" for Descartes. Essentially the basic relation the "subject" has for Descartes is to touch.

The "I" of Descartes finds its singularity in its way of touching.  This claim about Descartes is made quickly and a longer treatment would be needed but the view that there is "self-sensing" and that is experience is marked in Descartes. It is what makes Descartes' "I" resonate with Heidegger's Dasein. The question of being-there, of occupying a place, is what emerges for Dasein as something that it can question. It is a mystery for it.

But the mystery in question is not one of incarnation in the sense of that which lacks place suddenly occupying space. It is rather that Dasein finds itself as being-a-there and this being is what is inevitable for it. The body is always there and being-there is being open. This conception is different to the one that sets body against soul. Such a view continues in the way that body is spoken of as an object or presented as "objectified". The criticism of "objectification" continues the division of the body/soul duality as it implies that bodies are good or bad in presentational form. 

The body, by contrast, for Nancy, is a "self-sensing"  where such sensing is the opening of the body to that which is other to itself by means of itself. Soul is this being-outside the self. So if the body is an ex-tension it is also an in-tension, that is, a sensible unity that experiences tension as interruption and whose interruption is its way of being itself.

Bodies are being in a certain way, a way that differentiates itself. Soul is thus the way of experiencing the body and experience is only of the body. Bodies are limits that touch themselves. "But touching upon the self is the experience of touching on what is untouchable in a certain way, since 'self-touching' is not, as such, something that can be touched." (134-5) The untouchability of the basic experience of body is articulated as that which self-affects and thus self-disrupts. Bodies are exposition to the outside so that bodies have weight. 

This articulation of bodies by means of soul is what sets "On the Soul" up as a way of thinking bodies as alive. We will next look at how Nancy addresses "psyche" as his text on this will be the one which "opens" On Touching and the sense of which we will find articulated throughout On Touching as part of the way that the soul is thought in its relation to self-affection.

The Unity of Touching

In the last posting I looked at the 11th section of Book 2 of Aristotle's De Anima and in this posting I want to address the second part of the "exergue" to On Touching where Derrida's text lists some points concerning this part of De Anima and connects them to some thoughts about Jean-Luc Nancy.

The "exergue" returns to one voice when it addresses the notion that Nancy is a great thinker of "touching" and responds to the scepticism of the second voice concerning this claim by stating, in a way said to show "tact" that Nancy is the greatest thinker of this topic since Aristotle hit upon the "manifold aporia" of touch. Touch appears not to have been clear for Aristotle since he termed it adelon, that is, "obscure" or even "nocturnal". 

Now in turning to Aristotle at this point the discussion in Derrida's text articulates a view of aporias that was the explicit topic of the work Aporias. As it is put here the aporia is not necessarily "a moment that can be passed or surpassed". Aporias are, in terms of their "name", something with which one is not ever done. An aporia is not something that one can see the end of. So let's not hope to simply "step over" these ones that are listed in De Anima or On the Soul as we term it in English.

The discussion in the last posting of De Anima showed a set of questions that were raised there but here one point is picked out initially and this concerns the unity of the "sense" (if it is one and only one) of touch. Starting from this the text moves from the unity of touching "itself" to the unity of that which would be "tangible", the unity of sense which refers touch to the tangible and the question of the credit that should be given by philosophers to common opinion or doxa. 

These four aporias are next tracked back to precise points in Aristotle's text and become somewhat refined as they are so followed up. The first question of whether touch is a single sense or a "group" of them is related to the question of what the organ of touch is. In placing these points together in the citation it appears from Derrida's text that these are two sides of the same question. This means that the controversy that Aristotle sets out concerning whether or not flesh is the 'organ' of touch is viewed as part of the problem of whether touch is a single sense or many senses.

The second citation given concerns what the "single subject" (2.11.422b) [hupokeimenon] is which underlies the different qualities of touching. In listing this citation separately from the first question it appears from Derrida's text that this problem is distinct from the one concerning what the "organ" of touch is. Going back to the initial statement of four aporias this question would concern the unity of sense not of touch but instead of the tangible.

The third citation concerns how different movements are transmitted to our bodies and articulates the claim that there is something manifold in touching given we get a manifold set of qualities by means of it. This third question would concern the unity of sense between touching and the tangible.

The fourth citation asks whether the perception of all objects of sense is one that we receive in the same way with different senses or in different ways with different senses and here Aristotle mentions the doxa that suggests that touch is in an immediate relation to that which it touches. This fourth citation is related by Derrida's text to the question of the credit that should be given to common opinions or doxa. 

The four citations related to the four aporias Derrida's text has mentioned come together in a way in this questioning of the credit to be given to common opinion. Aristotle will question this common opinion, at least in a certain way. However since the questions being raised are not necessarily clear for Aristotle it is not obvious that the text will state things that are free of enigma. 

Derrida's text mentions the way the four aporias are apparently resolved within the course of the argument in terms of asserting that the "organ" of touch is interior, thus not flesh; that flesh is only the "medium" of touch; that touch concerns both the tangible and the intangible and that such propositions question, in some ways, the status of views held commonly. However after mentioning the ways the aporias are thus apparently addressed Derrida's text goes on to make the point that there are questions in the course of this treatment that are not even raised including what is meant by the notion of the "interior" of the body, what a "medium" or "intermediary" is and, most mysterious of all, how there can be a form of "intangible" touching.

The last question is one that raises, in particular, the general question of how we can touch upon that which is untouchable.  That general question, which we can see emerges from the problem of the intangible, produces something that is named here both an "obsession" that persists in the thinking of touch and one that "haunts" such thinking. The reference to the notion of "haunting" brings straight to mind the claim about spectrality mounted in Specters of Marx and appears thus to connect the questioning (dating from 1993) of Aristotle here to the earlier questioning of Marx. 

Surfaces would surely be what gets touched. This claim, which we could find also to be part of what is made at a different point in the same section of Aristotle that Derrida's text here engages with, would keep us at the sense that touch has something to do with the "limits" of bodies. But Derrida's text pursues this notion of limit by asking whether limit is itself really part of body since that which is a limit seems, in a sense precisely not to be that which is touched or to be that which cannot touch itself. (Similar here is the peculiar question raised about bodies touching in water in Aristotle's text, something not mentioned in Derrida's text but which raised the same problem.)

Having arrived at this point Derrida's text lists some distinctions that have, so far, not featured in the discussion of Aristotle's text. Included here is the distinction between actual and potential that is central to Aristotle's claims about the sense of touch and which led to the view that the senses are potentialities and thus do not sense themselves unless something from outside intervenes. This claim concerning the need for reference to the exterior infects the whole question of what is going on with "self-touching" or, as it is also called, auto-affection.

Even before we touch on touching itself this question about the status of sense arises since it is a general thesis of Aristotle's that relates to his treatment of each sense and to his view of sensation as such. Touch, however, it is suggested, is distinct from other senses as well since it does not have one proper object in the way that hearing relates to sound but rather encompasses many different types of qualities. 

This claim that touch "discriminates more than one set of different qualities" is taken to be so important that it is listed next as the "epigraph" of the "exergue". In so taking this we find thus an emphasis upon the view that qualities that are so distinct are nonetheless related, in some way, to an apparently unitary sense.

It is with this point that Derrida's text reverts again to the point with which the whole "exergue" began, namely that it will be necessary to engage in "storytelling". Having stated this we arrive again at the classic reference to the statement that there is something occurring "once upon a time". But the story in question will not be one that can be told in a linear fashion and will instead require "tangents" even if they will be ones that will be, in some way, around the topic of "the soul" or De Anima. Words of trouble are involved here: words such as "soul", "mind", "spirit", "body", "sense" and "world".

These words are ones that the text declares to be "inexact" and not to be ones that are "understood". These words lack "exact sense" and have, it is claimed, no "reliable value". In this respect these words, like "being" itself, let alone "presentation" will be ones that will focus our attention. The clear emphasis, however, on the status of what is "exact" is related now specifically to Nancy for whom, we are told, the "exact" is specifically important since Nancy will have required us to attend to it. Indeed, what Nancy understands by the "exact" is what it is the "sole ambition" of the book to "explain".

A number of things arise from looking at the second part of this "exergue" but I wish to conclude with three. Firstly, let's look at how the treatment that has been given here of Aristotle relates to the motifs that emerged in my last posting. The four questions or aporias that Derrida's text listed were all emergent in the argument as I analysed it. It was less obvious to me that the claim concerning the single sense of touch was one that should be collapsed into the question about the tangible object. The nature of what a body consists in was not specifically listed in the aporias Derrida's text stated but it came back in how he responded to the questions the text raised. The argument for viewing the "organ" of touch to be interior was not treated by Derrida but the reason why it was not became clear, namely, that the notion of the "interior" itself is one that he viewed Aristotle as having assumed a view of.

A second question concerns the way that the status of the "exact" and the "inexact" are to be tracked from now on. Derrida's text names Nancy as central to the question of how we will come to look at this although no one who has studied Husserl can fail to see that the question is one that was also decisively important for Husserl. Perhaps this question of the relation between the "exact" and the "inexact" will be one of the ways that Nancy and Husserl will be brought into relation. In any case the sense of exactitude as one that is key to the whole book is the most decisive claim in the "exergue" in terms of the clues it gives for how the rest of On Touching should be viewed.

The third point will concern precisely the status of De Anima and the reference to it for the understanding of Nancy. In a footnote Derrida refers to Nancy's own text "On the Soul", one of those collected in Corpus but which Derrida states here he only became aware of "after" writing this analysis. In the next posting the questions pursued by Nancy in "On the Soul" will be analysed prior to returning to the main text of On Touching.

On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1992 Derrida wore a first version of what was later to become the book On Touching and it was subsequently translated the following year in a special issue of the journal Paragraph devoted to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. In 2000 what had been only an article was published in a very much expanded form as a book and it was translated into English in 2005. This book is one of the very last published works of Derrida and it is one of the most significant of his career. Peggy Kamuf, in the puff she has placed on the back of the English translation, already stated this declaring its translation to be a "momentous event" as the book is "one of the greatest, most important works" in Derrida's whole oeuvre. The reason she gives for this claim concerns the relationship of the work to phenomenology pointing out that this work "undertakes nothing less than a deconstruction of the phenomenological principle of principles", in terms of the intuitionism of Husserl.

It is not without a certain trepidation that I approach the task of blogging about this book given the claims that Kamuf makes for it. In some respects it might be thought that the works on Husserl Derrida published in the 1960s, culminating in Speech and Phenomena, would have already undertaken the task she argues that On Touching has completed. The "return" to reading Husserl in On Touching would be, in any case, noteworthy given that, since the publication of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida had rarely explicitly addressed Husserl's thought despite devoting considerable time to it up and including in the writing of Speech and Phenomena. So one of the initial questions concerning the book might well be thought to be why it is that Derrida here decides to return to this questioning and what is added here to the earlier responses to Husserl.

However it might also be thought of some interest that a work which explicitly is devoted to an examination of, and response to, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, should be as engaged as Kamuf suggests in undertaking once again the "deconstruction" of phenomenology. What would it be about the task of investigating Nancy that would produce, amongst other things, such a revisiting of the "deconstruction" of phenomenology? 

In the "Foreword" to On Touching Derrida ventures a few remarks that are themselves intriguing both in what they intimate and in what they avoid. Derrida opens the brief "Foreword" by remarking again on the genesis of the work from the early essay of 1992. Peggy Kamuf translated it into English in the journal Paragraph, the same Kamuf whose remarks concerning phenomenology we have already noted. The publication of the "germ-cell" of the book in an English language journal prompts from Derrida the response that it is often the case that the "measure" of an idea is taken in countries that are "foreign" to its origination. 

After making this initial remark Derrida suggests further that he would have wished to "develop or pursue" the thought that he began stating in 1992 and that he had not, at the time of writing this "Foreword", given up on this. However, rather than  "develop" this thought he has instead stayed with the "motifs" of his first attempt. So the "development" from 1992 is not marked here in 2000 as, instead, it is the same set of concerns that are dominant here.

The "guiding thread" and the "title" are the same even though, as Derrida puts it, they "never ceased to worry me". One of the reasons why there appears to be this "worry" is due to the way that the French title Le toucher marks a kind of indecision between a noun and a verb. But this linguistic point is connected, by Derrida, to "two indissociable gestures" concerning the handling of touch (something apparently superficial) and the need to singularly address the author of such handling (thus to touch him in some way). 

In highlighting the motif of "touch" it will also seem that it is a form of "sense" that is being privileged above others, a different one perhaps to that engaged in such a work as Speech and Phenomena. Doesn't highlighting this one sense risk leaving much untouched? This would perhaps be one of the "worries" Derrida had about the way that the focus of this work had remained apparently constant.

Not only is this the case but, furthermore, Nancy's own work did not cease developing as Derrida was at work expanding the original essay from 1992 to 2000. Nancy produced more works in this period and the scope and nature of his thought appeared more and more evidently to require analyses that would have quite a few different types of range. Not only is this so but the way in which Nancy himself continued to mobilise talk about "touch" has itself developed a kind of "risk" warns Derrida in this "Foreword". The risk would be that of "venturing with this toward the unpredictable, or losing it there". Such a "risk" would itself be one that would perhaps have to be measured in some way?

Not only is there this possible problem of the "risk" of Nancy's thought but there is further the "risk" Derrida himself is taking of pursuing this thought in the way he is, a risk not just of appearing "dated" as Nancy's thought continues its own path but also of being "increasingly deficient" with regard to Nancy. A formidable "risk" indeed.

Finally, Derrida admits that the text that he is presenting a "Foreword" to is itself one that has manifold ages as it sometimes "skips several years from one sentence to the next". So it would be a text that would be particularly tricky to read since this form of "skipping" would require attention to different strata within the text, strata that would point to some of the questions here being very old, some only new born. In spite of the "shortcomings" that the text appears to have Derrida ventures to conclude by hoping that the work will not have been one he was unjustified in publishing at least if it "persuades others to read one of the immense philosophic works of our time".

This final statement appears to point readers beyond the work itself and back to the texts of Nancy to which it would be a response and, not unusually for Derrida, it will doubtless be necessary to constantly break off reading On Touching in order to relate this text back to the ones it apparently analyses. The precautions that Derrida multiplied in this "Foreword" mark the reading of it as unusually intricate, especially for such a brief text. 

In future postings on this blog I intend to work through On Touching piece by piece, breaking off as and when it appears needed in order to refer to the other texts it analyses and the other works that Derrida implicitly refers to both of his own and by others. The reading of On Touching will thus be a somewhat scattered affair but it is one that I hope the readers of this blog - whoever and wherever they may be found - will come to "enjoy".