(Berlin Traffic Lights Button 2012, photo/copyright by SKG)
Dear Readers,
I am very proud to present an
interview with Tom Cohen (Professor
for Literary and Media Studies in the
English Department at the University at Albany, SUNY, click here, and Director
of the Institute for Critical Climate
Change, more below), who is one of the deepest thinkers in the field of mnemotechnics, mnemonic interventions, deconstruction,
literary and media theory today and one of my most admired scholars. Professor
Cohen’s scholarly work as a whole belongs to the very rare category of books
and essays that have the ability to change lives and leave material inscriptions
in the minds of the readers. For me, after a very long time of carefully
studying the works of Tom Cohen, it is no exaggeration to speak of a deconstructive
landscape before and after the deep
impact of Professor Cohen’s textual interventions and complex re-mappings.
All of his books and essays beginning with his “Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock” (1994), “Ideology and Inscription. “Cultural Studies” after Benjamin, De Man and
Bakhtin”(1998), his contribution to “Material
Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory” (2001), his brilliant introduction to
“Jacques Derrida and the Humanities”
(2002), his essay “Politics of the
Pre-figural: Sula, Blackness, and the Precession of Trope” (Parallax 2002),
“Climate Change in the Aesthetic State (a
Memory (Dis)Order)” (Parallax 2004)
and “”J.”, or: the Black Holes of
Hillis le mal” (Journal for Cultural Research, 2004) up to his longest
intervention to date in his two milestone volumes “Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies 1 /2” (2005) - to name only a few - are eye- and ear-openers amidst the growing hegemony
of re-naturalizations, reappropriative neutralizations, attempted re-canonizations
and ultra-ethical pacifications of deconstruction.
His more recent works are
grouped around the problem of a complex re-mapping of the contours of
deconstruction(s) to come in relation to the “materialistic” heritage in Paul de
Man and Walter Benjamin including the problem of “matter without materiality”, the
problems of (critical) climate change, the anthropocene, global capitalism and
the menacing extinction of mankind. Of the utmost importance in this context
are the following texts by Professor Cohen “The
Geomorphic Fold: Anapocalyptics, Changing Climes, and “Late” Deconstruction”
(OLR, 2010), “Climate Change”, Deconstruction, and the
Rupture of Cultural Critique. A proleptic preamble” (Enduring Resistance, 2010), his
contribution “Toxic assets--De Man’s
remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an American fable)” to the book
“Theory and the Disappearing Future. On
de Man, On Benjamin” (2011, together with Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis
Miller) and not to forget his two contributions “Murmurations—‘Climate
Change’ and the Defacement of Theory” (2011) and “Anecographics--Climate
Change and “Late” Deconstruction” (2011) to the two volumes published under the aegide
of the Institute for Critical Climate
Change (click here) entitled “Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1”(OHP 2011, Tom Cohen ed.) and “Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2” (OHP 2011, Henry Sussman ed.) (click here).
The aforementioned Institute for Critical Climate Change (with the directors Tom Cohen, Henry Sussman,
and Mary Valentis) “promotes the re-configuration of theoretical concepts in
the era of 21st century “climate change”. If the alteration of
terrestrial systems provokes corresponding changes in epistemologies,
conceptual networks, reference systems, and the definition of “life”, what are
the conditions of emergence for these discourses?”(cit. homepage ICC).
If you are willing to choose the
appropriate lenses during the reading of Professor Cohen's writings, you will
be rewarded with the deepest possible insights in the “real” à-venir of
deconstructive machines. Perhaps (to
give this sentence a little push towards derridean destinerrance) even the artificial seed for my blog was implanted
some years ago by Cohen's brilliant formulation “Electric Zeroland Music” given in his milestone of media-theory and
deconstructive readings “Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies
Vol. 1/2”. A list of all his published essays including the most recent and scheduled essays
for 2012 (and later) you can find in his CV
(click here).
Editorial
Note:
The following
interview was realized and partly developed further via e-mail-dialogue in June-October 2012. I want to thank Professor Cohen for his generosity, his kindness, his time
and his interest in answering my questions. My deepest thanks also for sharing
his thoughts with this blog - cordial thanks for everything, Professor Cohen!
All answers are written and copyright by Professor
Tom Cohen (Albany, SUNY). The questions are all mine (SKG).
This is the interview:
[SKG] Dear Professor
Cohen, you
are a leading scholar in the field of literary studies, media theory and
deconstruction, how would you introduce yourself to the audience? How would you
describe the outlines of your philosophical project?
[Tom Cohen] I am an amateur of the forces
of semiosis, mnemonic powers, and I read these before the contemporary horizons of ecocide and the
anthropocene. That excludes nothing—yet is also very limited in ways. The
“anthropocene” is a funny, opportunistic term—but valuable, since it pretends
to name from without a material scar in bio- and geo-historialities. It is not
a binary term, it cannot be deconstructed, it is in fact wonderfully stupid.
And yet it withdraws (while accelerating) the anthropo-narcisst fold: it can
only be read after or without, an archive without human readers; and it can
simultaneously generate enthusiasm for taking “responsibility” for the whole
earth, and promoting geo-engineering feats (and global corporatocracies to do
so). The term appears, however, as the speech act that calls it forth above all
(Crutzman’s accidental blurt of the term)—since not even its “time” is agreed
upon. Nonetheless, it positions the category of an era of the “anthropos,”
however defined, as one of ecocide, mass extinction events, auto-extinction. It
requires a different reader that is not of the “anthropos.” It also requires
something else than Derridean hospitality riffs, if ecocide as a logic precedes
the pretense of the home—one of the ways that Derrida puts off the logic of the
ecocatastrophic.
[SKG] Do you remember major events that
pulled you into this thinking?
[Tom Cohen] I think you find this sort of consciousness taking
root in a variety of contexts and even uneducated milieus—that is, it is not
just an “intellectual” or critical alertness. In fact, the latter is quite resistant
to putting in question the referential machines and contracts that define (or
drive) its sense of property and power, or the need for survival by
acquisition. It is quite astonishing, really, that humans arrive at a point of
self-erasure after a mere 3 or 5 thousand years of writing and proliferations,
or a mere 500 years after colonizing the “new” world hemisphere, or a mere
hundred and fifty years after hydro-carbon exploitation.
[SKG] Recently you have started the
Critical-Climate-Change-Project with two books on OpenHumanities.Org, which I
have read with great pleasure, what is the main idea of this project and how is
it connected to the task of a more critical reception of deconstruction?
[Tom Cohen] The
premise of the project is that, given these “new” algorithms (“climate
change”), all 20th century inflected idioms undergo diverse
mutations. The project would make a platform for such to assemble themselves by
experimentation, hence “critical” climate change—the manner in which the latter
phrase as a sort of stand in rips and re-orders critical projects.
[SKG] Do
you see a future for Derrida's idea of an "technicité originaire" (and the implied
critique of Heidegger's idea of technics) in the age of the menacing total
destruction of our planet?
[Tom Cohen] Yes and no. The “trace” is a
useful non-figure to evoke and track—the central techno-weapon of Derrida’s
elaborations. The figure of trace is irreducible—and should not be thought as
exclusively Derridean. It seems all but appropriated, inversely, to the
promoters of geo-engineering to come, the “earth systems” crowd. These latter
apprehend a sort of originary technicity but literalize that under the name
anthropocene to promote a corporacratic era to come (only corporations can
accomplish these things, and now own science broadly). So there is no one way
this can be turned on its own. I do think there is a pulsion deriving from
“deconstruction” regarded as a broad cloud of interventions that is key
here—but only because it left tools to do so. I don’t identify that simply with
“Derrida,” as a name or persona, and I don’t think it will in any way “save”
the planet. We are beyond that.
[SKG] In
your latest book "Theory and the
Disappearing Future" (together with Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis
Miller) you have written an intense essay about Paul de Man. What is the decisive
point in this essay and the (late) work of Paul de Man for you? Would you see
in de Man's reception of Walter Benjamin a possible corrective for a new form/modulation
of deconstruction?
[Tom Cohen] De Man is interesting as an
event and anomaly—an algorithm rather than a set of precise idioms or
pre-occupations. Hence, my interest in re-reading his “abjection” from academic
theory as a symptom of the latter. De Man was the one who was most resolute in
pursuing the “irreversible” implications of thinking the erratic production of
humanist ideology through what he called language (and ourselves, perhaps
technics, media in a certain sense, mnemonic inscriptions). More so that
Derrida, who can seem, today, regressive. In this, de Man was on the same page
with the Benjamin of the Theses—where
the latter virtually recalls geological time as the index of the human
parenthesis. Compared to this, Derrida’s recycling of “weak messianism,”
however hedged as a messianism without the messianic (easy to say), is
regressive.
Since Benjamin is
more rooted in the popular intellectual consciousness, and de Man produces a
Benjamin we are closer to today—well, that is also useful. The point now is,
what constitutes an “irreversible” position in relation to thinking the
anthropocene, and de Man gives a foretaste. That is different that pretending
one wants to recycle some “new” deconstruction along such lines. The word
itself is entirely depleted and useless at present, since it always had a
tentative afterlife anyway. To curdle it into some academic tribe clutching the
cultural capital of a name is delusory on a certain level—and has proven
counter-productive even to legacy-mongers in the academy given the fortunes of
the term in what debates there are today.
In any case, it is
interesting to see what Derrida comes to occlude, banish, or disenframe from
his address—that would be a certain “materiality” outside of concepts, the
machinal as bound to memory, “climate change” in its diverse extensions (which
would suspend the premise of “deconstruction” as a transformation from within
of a cultural destiny wired to reading and writing), but also, I have realized,
cinema. The last absorbs the preceding in a curious way. And, of course, where
he comes to occlude “de Man” in the end as well. One must read from and with
these occlusions in mind today to find what in Derrida returns power to the
current scene. And (I should stress) it is not necessary in itself. The
question today is what in Derrida gives us tools in the 21st century
and what does not, for a variety of reasons. There is no one “Derrida,” and
what has not been grasped by some is that the “war with himself” he claims is
for real.
[SKG] Could
not this perhaps final phrase by Jacques Derrida (“Je suis en guerre contre moi-même”) be seen under the perspective of
Derrida’s concept of “auto-immunity”?
[Tom Cohen] We allude to his “final” interview (changed in title in English—and you
can see the group of legacy shapers dumbing it down—into “Learning to Live,
Finally,” evoking the pathos of a dying philosopher so as not to take in that
war). This is also the interview in which he says something very scandalous
toward his followers. Basically, he disowns them. I think Derrida splits in
this final,fortuitous (but clearly thought out in advance) interview. What does
a certain Derrida split with—that he is at “war” with himself? Why is this
title deleted from the “last” interview in the final English version,
ameliorating and curtailing this war, since it is so threatening to some,
notably “Derrideans,” for this stock of characters who have turned
“deconstruction™” into a family franchise have been amusing—becoming everything
deconstruction angled against, in order to preserve and capitalize the name
“Derrida” (as a Vatican run orthodoxy of policing extenders wired to some patronage
system). Very amusing. So Derrida had to go, on the way out, with this—a sort
of vomiting, and tearing the contract with the “late Derrida” he had fabricated
so as better to insert that into the academic mainstream. Part of that strategy
was to cultivate a more and more submissive circle of friends, acolytes,
entrepreneurs, carriers (this is what Peter Sloterdijk calls them)—in short,
getting ready for the Derrideanism without deconstruction one sees today,
sadly. So Derrida had to say, on the way out, no.
The same way he says on the way out that he is not for
“marriage”—avoiding the hurt feelings. Similarly, in this interview Derrida
denies having heirs, or even contemporary readers, and puts off that prospect
to “later on,” should it open up. He expects his work to disappear within weeks
of his death—this despite (or because of) the archival machine of submissive
legatees that emerged in the third generation of Derridean allies. So, here
there is another Derrida turned against the persona he’d fabricated and
cultivated as an assurance against disappearance. But to recover the Derrida at
war with this other is to turn toward the reading of the anthropocene itself,
not by but of “deconstruction,” which avoided it (Derrida occludes addressing,
as said, ecocatastrophics). That is a more interesting prospect; such a project
voids the direction of “derrideanism” as a preservative reading; and it
selectively accepts or dismisses, rewrites and pursues threads from the
Derridean corpus it chooses to activate. It edits.
[SKG] I would like to come back to a short remark you made
in your answer to the fourth question, where you stated that "the premise of “deconstruction” as a
transformation from within of a cultural destiny wired to reading and writing"
should be suspended? Your readers will already know, that you have already
written a lot about this topic, especially in your two volumes on “Hitchcock’s
Cryptonymies”, but can you tell us a little more about your considerations?
[Tom Cohen] Well, the word deconstruction is elusive, accidental, and later on
manipulated —say, by Derrida, as a third person entity (like “psychoanalysis”
for Freud), that nonetheless was indexed to himself and his signature. Even de
Man disavowed it in taking up the term. So, one could say that “deconstruction”
in its appearance was, as Derrida insists, a gamble or wager—and that wager was
that something which impedes the Western culture in its structuration could be
displaced, dismantled, read otherwise and from an alterity that did not link
back to a consciousness. And its wager was, to a degree, that interrupting this
machine, of metaphysics or logocentrism, so called, opened to an alternate
premise of translation—of which names would come trickling out, promoting (or
rewriting) itself as a certain mode of “justice.” The wager nonetheless is that
alternative modes of reading, modes that refused to concretize meaning regimes,
would alter the production of the real.
[SKG] What
role is played by the formula of "a materiality
without matter" coined by Derrida in his last lecture on Paul de
Man ("matérialité sans
matière" Derrida, Le ruban, p. 134) in your thinking? How would you
see this interpretation of de Man, if you would add Derrida's own ideas of a
"matérialisme de la khôra", "matérialisme
sans substance" in
(Spectres de Marx, p. 267) with its obvious (quasi-)messianic subtones? Should
one differentiate between de Man and the interpretative lecture of de Man given
by Derrida, and why?
[Tom Cohen] I think when Derrida uses his
“X without X” formula he is cheating—playing to the audience a bit, since the
term “X” gets to linger nonetheless, and tends to return to its original
affiliations. That is a hook for readers who need that term perhaps but
compromises the deconstructive. “Late Derrida.” Compare this to the sous rature of yore. So when he applies
this to de Man’s “materiality of inscription” it seems to me a strategy of disappropriation,
and if anything, de Man’s phrase might rather be transposed as a matter without
“materiality.” (De Man’s term tropes Benjamin’s “materialistic historiography,”
to begin with, where the latter parries and voids the term “materialism” as he
does that of the “historical,” as in historical materialism). So this parrying
comes already with a history, and the “materiality” sought has a sort of matter
in marks, scripts, traces, mnemonic formations of neural paths and marked
public spaces (including screens). Derrida, of all people, comes closer to
enphantoming the old sense of “materiality” he was loathe to engage as sheer
metaphysics, the worst of the worst, by banishing it from his work mostly
(except, as you say, around khora,
otherwise). Derrida, who inhabited paradoxical networks of time he could always
suspend, had difficulty accessing what would have been natural to that
position—allowing for different types of trace; encountering differential time
formations and agencies that were irreconcilable, marking a machinal operation
he could not, so to speak, deconstruct. That lack is felt today. To some
degree, the formulation of the “to come” was a lure and trap as a tool.
De Man and
Benjamin’s turn on this point already appealed to a ghost term outside of
binaries, not susceptible of being deconstructed, a different type of
non-word—of which there are some in circulation. That is why, today, the
anthropocene authorizes a certain deflation of some of Derrida’s rhetorical
maneuvers and strategies (some forget that is, essentially, what his text leaves
us—no positions). So some of Derrida’s gestures have to go for the moment: one
can take some things, without entire folios of script. The tendency of
Derrideans has been appalling in this regard from the point of view of
instinct, strategy or anything else: just do more exegesis on Derrida, read him
according to his text, try to get it “right,” and in the process never quite,
shore up the name, memorialize the persona, etc. Disastrous. Derrideanism
without “deconstruction.” And first, one must be able to criticize certain
“Derridas? (there are enough to spare) from the point of view of deconstruction
itself, now in the name of the anthropocene logics that are current. Derrida
chose to ignore these, and died as they were becoming fully media aware—changing
the referentials of all, including
“archive.”
So: no more
“messianisms without the messianic,” or democracies to come, or the pathos of
undecidabilities in a faux ethics of the “other,” and so on. What remains—well,
khora, humanualism, much else. But I would recommend to those choosing these
paths to ignore for now the name “Derrida” or be busy transcribing his
texts—just go to work with what you have imbibed, and write to these new
horizons. That is what I call a melancholic
deconstruction without “deconstruction”—since it is no longer about “survival”
(as Derrida pretends), least of all of the proper name. Freud linked mourning
to melancholia but only the first has been fetishized, including by Derrida,
for the wrong reasons—and even Derrida has to plug this receding rhetorical
move at a point (mourning for absolute mourning, and so on). This said, Derrida
seemed to know this and in his last interview turns against the “late Derrida.”
He says he is at war with himself there, that in fact the reading of him has
not begun, that he has no heirs perhaps, that such a reading might begin “later
on”—that it will all disappear within weeks of his actual death, all of it.
This “later on” indexes generations beyond the present and, implicitly, the
anthropocene. So a certain Derrida allies with this reading against the person
of “Derrida” he had, strategically, crafted. He is “at war against (contre) ‘himself’.” Or, J.D. versus
“Derrida.”
[SKG] If I
may, I would like to come back to what you spoke of as “What remains—well, khora, humanualism, much else”in the answer to my
last question - could you be so kind to let us know a little more about this
complex field?
[Tom Cohen] My suggestion is that Derrida
was the greatest of rhetorical thinkers—rather Shakespeare like in his powers,
if one understands the term rhetoric in a certain way—and that any variety of
Derridean interventions are rhetorical innovations that do or do not maintain
their traction today. The ones that played to the “persona” that was being
managed and built and defended against, as the glue to an imaginary community
(there are no “deconstructors” by virtue, simply, of miming Derridean styles or
invoking difference—this deadend is palpable), recede as irrelevant. What tools
have import are the ones more remote from the attempts of Derrideans to codify
things like an “ethical” deconstruction, and so on, as if the “late” Derrida
represents the telos and apex of some cryptic teaching. In fact, much of it is
spinning; there are many surprising relapses adapted to occasion, there is much
cunning, there are performed “Derrida’s” and manipulations of what certain
readerships think they want from him. . . . He had to manage a corporate
enterprise by then after all; keep a gang of servicers happy and available; and
fight off the auto-immune zones that were concretizing already about him.
Something was wrong in this picture—and the guy should have exiled himself for
several months on an island to scribble what occurred to him outside that
juggling act. One really has to conclude that Derrida bred second-level,
dutiful followers to program for the necessarily job of consignation and
academic memorialization—the price of archival survival, and the faux premise
of controlling his afterlife despite knowing better. This corruption then is
indexed by the “war” with myself, where another Derrida, with a certain nausea
no doubt, and despair, turned against that artifice, always partial, almost
self-contaminating.
His entire choice
of the rhetorics of alterity (Levinasian in dna) or the X without X formula
were expressions of rhetorical compromises and traps in certain ways—he’d
always assumed, being “Derrida,” these would be implicitly doubled, ironized,
but at the same time, he was consciously bidding to construct a “hospitable”
Derrida, to Trojan horse the mainstream in his afterlife: serious conflict
here, and the inertness of “deconstruction” today is its lifeless residue for
the moment. There was something weakened in the late Derrida, despairing, and
he seemed to draw and enjoy the comfort of acolytes to excess—or as a practical
calculus. These strains: humanualism—which does not direct us to thinking
things like “the” animal but emanating historial effects by the hand’s
artefaction; khora—where we are invited (and not) to speculate on the
conditions and non-site out of which memory programs are generated (that is,
the necessary non-site for any real intervention, should that be hyperbolized).
Let the anthropocene logic read “Derrida” and select what it finds important….
[SKG] To
pick up the thread again with “khôra” - what were the reasons for your decision
to alter Derrida’s formula “materiality without matter” in your formulation
“matter without materiality” to open the possibility for a different
“materialism of khôra” Derrida spoke of in his book “Spectres de Marx”(1994)?
[Tom Cohen] I reversed Derrida’s
“materiality without matter” because he contrives, in adapting “de Man,” to
evade the latter’s implications and keep a “materiality” concept in play with
little effort. Sleight of hand. But in de Man the term “material inscription,”
neither is really a word or concept at all. By saying “matter without materiality,” as a concept at all, I
wanted to point to the fact that, indeed, it is that which is the matter, that
other “materiality” (not a word, nor a trope) is, in fact, entirely of the
orders of the ex-anthropic—down to the forms of carbon that underwrite the
mythographies of writing and digitalized writing systems. But when Derrida
speaks of the “materialism of khora”
he is drifting back toward what de Man implies—or Benjamin, when he uses the
term “materialistische” (materialistic historiography). From this perspective,
Derrida uses the word archive as the manageable double opposite the pre-articulable
violence implied by naming Khora—as
Derrida brilliantly does. It is the (a)patriarchal term opposite the
(a)matriarchal non-space, a faux gendered split, enemy doubles.
I consider the khora essay itself Derrida’s singular
interrogation of de Man (though he is never mentioned), and not any of the
essays written “on” de Man, but this to the side. It isn’t about de Man, or
Derrida, or Benjamin, proper names all, or the histories of the concept
“materiality” except insofar as that dissolves to disclose yet another set of
ex-anthropic matrices. Today, when the historial and global culture is captured
by mediacratic circuits (including the academy, which seems unable to stage
anything new for the moment), and this appears to be an auto-extinction mode (“climate
change” or its implications), what is called khora would be the key, last, impossible, “site” for any
deconstructive project—a sort of suicide shot of the capsule into the solar
pre-origins of an inscriptive universe (or mal
d’archive). When I close a piece, recently, with the phrase, “Occupy
Deconstruction™,” I gesture to how this ganglia of reading strategies has been,
we all know, slumberingly academicized in the most silly ways, secured around
the humanists need to identify with a persona, Jacques, or naturalize. Yet
there is no reason the import of this “legacy” (a noxious term, since it cannot
not fetishize and familialize) is not of key relevance today—and one sees
traces of this in Stiegler’s endless pushes to accelerate or ride the thinking
of radical technics into a mutating epistemo-ethical attack on con-temporaneities.
[SKG] You
already commented on Derrida’s strategical use of the formula “x sans x” and
his love for ellipses. Could you add a little more about this topic? Don't you
think that Derrida sometimes also sleeps all too well on his quite comfortable
palaeonymic cushion?
[Tom Cohen] It strikes me “late” Derrida had a lot to manage, and used certain
rhetorical short-cuts—assuming his readers would connect the wires into his
other writings (or not). He did not want to be caricatured to extinction, as he
risked in his early career, and did not want to be erased. One way to do this
was to modify the point at which cherished cultural terms are or are not
violated—disrupted by Derridean non-word innovations or letters,
“deconstructed,” or placed sous rature.
So, no more sous rature, less
neo-logism, “hospitality” instead—or seeming so, inhabiting mainstream
discourse unthreateningly (a Derridean “ethics” or stance on “religion”),
reconciling for the camera with Habermas, and so on. Today, I find this
incredibly misplaced as a temperamental strategy and it has weakened, rather
than preserved, his afterlife—as is quite visible today.
The X without X
formula is such a short cut whose benefits detiorate. Derrida experimented with
rhetorical strategies—that’s what he was, perhaps the greatest rhetorical
thinker produced by the West—but there are hits and misses in such a project,
and it fought of its own contaminants more and more. Its benefit would be:
readers of the first term, those invested in it, will be hooked, can hang onto
their familiar term still, kind of—while having its semantic investments voided
(and doing so in such a way that “X without X” can be abstracted as a maneuver.
Its limited half-life cannot control its own trajectory or regress. Hence the
regression of a “messianism without the messianic” from Benjamin’s (or de
Man’s) reading. Benjamin used the formulation to keep the Gerschomite reader in
play while hollowing it out—that is, there is no “weak” messianism at all, the
term contradicts the messianic. Derrida massively revives the trope for a while
as useful to sling as a paradoxical X without X, a welcome impossibility. I
would add: rhetorically. In fact, it is an index of Derrida’s promiscuity in
trusting his own moves and appropriations, shed of the para-words and letteral
deformations of his early interventions.
Derrida wanted to go elsewhere, and like Benjamin’s
dubious “angel of history”—who turned back to the masses of the undead (readers
essentially), who wanted to be made whole, and “wants” to do so but cannot,
before he is swept away by a storm
(climactic trope). It is a comic, cartoon text, not the icon of historical
pathos it was pawed over as. This angel has got to go. Weak messianism in this sense correlates to, say, green ecology or
driving a hybrid. Derrida was tempted to dangle encouraging puzzles to his
increasingly academic circuit of dedicated followers and translators (mostly Anglo). He bred archivists to tend to
his work after death—and was bored by it, contaminated by the short-circuiting.
And he relinquishes all that, I think, in the “I am at war with myself” meme,
where he also disavows any heirs, any readers, asserts most “sincerely” that
his work will disappear with his death (what an affront to an army of imagined
followers), says perhaps that real reading of him will come “later.”
(One would like to add that that famous “angel” of
Benjamin is perhaps the most misread figure in his text, typically, since the
modernist readings (which Derrida manages to half reproduce at times) all try
to prop up this figure, give it pathos, personify or identify with it—as if
angelicism were to be propped up for their discursive purposes and repetitions.
Usually bound to the two edifices—Marxist materialism and theology—trashed in
the opening thesis, almost doubling the darker enemy called (and I love this)
historicism, by which the allegorist means and includes mimeticism and rote
memory programs broadly. In fact, the key word of that text is climactic—the
word Storm, subject of the final
three sentences. The storm obliterates this phoney angel, without power,
without message, and duplicitously looking back to the undead who want him to
make them “whole,” and we read that he wants to do so, knowing it is
fraudulent, to keep the contract. The undead are also Benjamin’s
readers—including the iconic ones of Scholem and Adorno, the split supplicants
pulling for him to go orthodox with them, at odds with each. Latour points out
that this angel is the agent of the destruction, not its witness, and that that
includes the ecocide of the planet in the time of man. So Benjamin’s text is
all about obliterating this angelism and passing to the other side of the representational
from, the site without sovereignty, the storm, tied to the abridge metric of
“organic life on earth” indexed in Thesis
XVIII as a temporal contraction preceding human forms. Derrida hesitates,
like the angel, playing it half-half in turning back to the undead readership
and half-giving what they half-want to hear performatively (deconstruction “is”
justice, weak messianism). This makes Derrida’s use of weak messianism a
retro-appropriation since, as de Man observes, there is simply no messianism
whatsoever in Benjamin in fact, weak, strong, or otherwise, and a “materialistische” reading of him today,
not a modernist one, is aware of that. What is also interesting here is the
word storm. It is not just a climactic figure outside of any trope of sovereignty.
In fact, the “angel” that the Thesis gives us is not Klee’s image—Benjamin says
we can project an “angel of history” onto that figure (which is the “new
angel”). The latter is glossed very differently in the Karl Krauss essay and elsewhere—not as the retro-glancing human
look alike who want to give a narrative to help the undead (but can’t). He is
not human looking at all (as with Klee’s image in fact). He is the Unmensch, the material order of “life”
outside of human perception or ordering; he is a monster, destroyer, predatory,
“cannibalistic”; he stands beyond man, defacing “him” (preferring to take him
than give something to him); and he replaces and is said to virtually terrorize
his apparent competitor, the Uebermensch,
who is a romanticization for keeping man in play otherwise and literalizing the
inversion of Plato that is one stage prop. What is not noted is that this first
“angel” splits in the later text. It splits off its human face (the Angel of
Historicism really) from the storm. The word storm is in fact the “new angel”
or his index, where personification is dissolved. In fact, the word storm
accelerates the complex Werner Hamacher reads in the word cloud (Wolke), which
performs as a transit station for preletter memes, traces of “pure language.”
In the word storm we have a figure where the nanographemetic dissolves not into
the Derridean archive (as human script), but the processes of techno-animation,
abiosemiotics. In short, Benjamin’s text affirmed the obliteration of this
“angel” that the readership clings to precisely to keep the faux hermeneutic
loop that said angel’s attitude is stuck in circulation (his wanting to say,
knowing otherwise, what the readers expect in a contract of pretended
restitution). Derrida chooses to keep this angelicism rhetorically intact, and
pays a price I believe. The storm absorbs not only clouds, but fog—such as that indexed to the origins
of photography and, more relevant, an arche-cinematic trace. One may call this
angel the cinematic angel in a way. It is a doomed hologram painted over its
obverse—Klee’s wire-framed techno-agent. The “angel,” we now see, encompasses
the entire hermeneutic default program which produces the fables of
subjectivity and memoration which a certain we feeds on, is caught in, and is
propelled into a decimation or non-future by.)
I would say that this reading is by and from the
anthropocene—which as a principle supplements (and sometimes dismisses) these
textual interventions. Reads them from outside the humanist bubble and the need
for faux tropes like the “to come,” the fetishization of “mourning,” pretending
to adapt Levinas’ “other,” the too sophisticated political ventures in which he
entered various rhetorical traps, etc. Remember, Derrida almost never wrote without
a text or a topos, he grafted his writing into what was there—he is not
independent of that mnemonic infrastructure and how it assembles itself. And
when it alters, as it does today, the confluence reads differently. But there
is now no deconstruction, just a sewing circle of Derrida fetishists looking
for a creed and secure praxis to refine or repeat or somehow get right. What
must be remembered is that “deconstruction” initially occurred as a promise of
intervention in the mnemonic orders that alter the real—a Benjaminian project.
It lost that. So, the question is what is of “use” to this new
circumstances—the anthropocene.
But the era of proper names is over, or at best
Disneyfied (and hence worse). There is no exigency that this archive “survive” in the way it had been supposed. The
stakes are different, and there never was any “metaphysics” to begin with, it
is now apparent. Something else at work. Just like there never was any
“capitalism” in the abstract mode it is historicized as, as something for which
there is an alternative system—it is tantamount to the emergence of thought,
power, exchange, language. Hence, it seems, like Nessus’ coat on Hercules. One
might begin here by removing Derrida’s prioritizing of survival as prone to misreading—including by Derrida. One might begin
instead with the obvious index that “we” are in a phase of accelerating
auto-extinction, and that is readable. Derrida’s manipulation of “time” got in
the way at the end, the manipulation of futures banned from discussion (in fact
not).
In a dinner exchange once I asked Derrida what he
thought of the “future”—he said succinctly he didn’t care about it, that he
sought to experience the past again and again. It struck me as a tad literalist
in a Nietzschean mode (who, after all, could not stop hailing projected
“futures”). We now know its no big deal, speculating on “futures,” since their
non-existence is not structurally different than pasts with traces—and today these
phantoms appear to enter the present more succinctly, more knowably, and more
finally than the endless narrativization of cultural histories. But then, even
the market is driven solely by the calculation of futures—which it then
creates, as derivatives, to muffle or casino. Today, the catastrophes that are
calculably in advance of us—say, without doubt, glacial meltoff and
inundations, and the whole caboodle frankly—these are more palpable (indeed,
wars are planned around them) than the traces of “histories” claimed or ironed
out or fetishized. We can, in any afternoon, be closer to old Rome (which the
West of course never fully left) than the 18th century—but that can
flip by evening, go prehistorial, or contract to the time bubble that the
tele-socius lives in today: the kleptomediacracy’s various trances.
[SKG] Why
can one observe a strange and uncanny "duplication" of / in
deconstruction, which seems to cross-out the "ethical" implications
of deconstruction? For example Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida? Why did Derrida
write "Memoires" in defense of Paul de Man and accepted the politico-ethical
ruin of his own project for years in the same movement? Was this happening on
purpose? If this happened on purpose, why did Derrida want to be seen as a good
humanist european later on, when he decided to publicly reconcile himself with
Habermas?
[Tom Cohen] This is a difficult cluster of
questions since the term “ethical” jumps around—from the doxa of the ethical (how the world perceives, judges, scapegoats)
to something else. So each question is really about the politics of presenting
oneself (JD), or one’s brand (as you say, as “a good humanist European”). To
the extent Derrida angled toward the latter to counter the trap set for him by
(necessarily) defending de Man, he was in another trap—as you imply. Thus the
binary Derrida and de Man that you sketch, the good deconstructor versus the
ethically bad one, is unreliable, and that would have been Derrida’s initial
aim to demonstrate vis a vis de Man. But the storm there was too decisive
publicly, and his own discourse was compromised in trying to play both sides
initially. The reversal that is interesting to me, however, is where this form
of the “ethical” is mere doxa, and
that from the anthropocene perspective, it may be “de Man” who was the
“ethical” one, Derrida the mutating strategist caught in his own public
adjustments. Today, it is not the “ethical” or “religious” or “political”
Derrida this is interesting, after all. The strategy evaporated with the
residues of 90’s critical culture he was trying to outmaneuver while playing
to.
[SKG] You
have worked intensively in the field of literary theory, how would you see the
subversive potential of literature in comparison to the almost lost and
forgotten subversive potential of philosophy/thinking? How should a subversive
thinking and writing look like today, is it perhaps neither literature nor
philosophy?
[Tom Cohen] I don’t think there is a
“subversive” practice that is apparent today. I think we have entered a zone of
totalization—from kleptomediacracies to the occlusion of ecocide broadly to
academic retrenchments. Things are poised at once before a manifest reset of
various systems (economic, political, resource related) and in a somewhat
zombie posture. The critical project of transformation that transformed thought
and technics in the 20th century (to use an arbitrary market) is in
default broadly before the disclosure of climate change realities. They had not
thought that relation to the biosphere and the limit of resources, or runaway
global heating, and so on. Time is no longer “out of joint” merely, we have
competing different times, diverse spells and formalizations thereof,
accelerated telemarketing and anesthesia. So the “left” concepts of
revolutionary justice are hollowed to a great extent now, and the scramble for
the next last phase of resource extraction unleashed. This promises to be a
very difficult “century,” and what survives at the other end should bear no
comparisons to the present—which is, for the moment, still “peak” everything.
[SKG] As a leading
scholar in the field of deconstruction, I want to ask you now a few questions
about deconstruction, the first one is, is there really an à-venir for
deconstruction, or will there only remain a future (presence) for
deconstruction? Is deconstruction maybe only so successful, because it simply
feels comfortable to be a deconstructionist—that is, there is no risk to it and
it does not have to “engage”? But what would the heritage of deconstruction
then be?
[Tom Cohen]
Again, a tangle of assumptions make these questions provocative but
cross-circuited in ways. To begin with, I do not pretend authority on this
question for several reasons. “Deconstruction” was a third person effect that
Derrida posited—with many mutations, public pretenses, and secret histories.
When Derrida said “if it exists” he wasn’t being rhetorical, and often it does
not. It certainly could not have any credibility if it made someone feel “good
and comfortable” being one (but who decides if one is “one”?). And to the
extent that had, given the personalities involved, become a sort of
embarrassing club of academics defining a crony order by association with
Derrida the individual (who was never, quite, the one that signed his texts),
it has been disastrous—except in fulfilling its primary purpose for Derrida,
which was to manage the archive of his writings after death, and to prepare
readers for some possible future reading when this meme (deconstruction) might
return credibly.
So “deconstruction”
today has no active credit or credibility, which is too bad. I am not worried
about the “heritage” of deconstruction—and think JD erred in calculating it to
the point where it entered his rhetorical strategies. It is irrelevant to me if
it survives or not, since that will occur by itself (or be prevented). I am not
speaking of university institutions and their players, where much of this
occurs against a sad backdrop of collapsing cultural contracts (education) and
denial (by humanists). I think all should be thought against an assumption of
extinction—short term or long—and thought backward from it: such would braid
the traditions it needed. What does get lost with a part of what you call
“deconstruction” is active access to the pre-inscriptive sites of memory
formation, and that is key, together with the cognitive ticks of reconstitution
(or relapse, as de Man called it). This took root around the thinking of
literariness in general, and “history” as a fabrication in particular. Today it
may take other forms.
The key, whatever
you call “it,” is kick starting or cultivating a thinking more ruthlessly
auto-critical than has been the case (least of all today), to create new sites.
This cannot be indexed to a “politics” in the old sense—before “occupy” has its
moment, crude infra-generational war will likely emerge. The question, today,
is to prepare for a thinking outside of the Potemkin systems, including the
academic ones, which includes all schools predicated on 20th century
masters and currently in place. “Deconstruction” would perhaps re-animate when
its “destructive” import returns to it (rather than the preservative one at
present, and even in the “late Derrida”), but then it will not need the name as
such. I don’t see that word retaining any value except as a museum piece. That
is not to say the resource of Derridean writing or “deconstructive” thought
goes away—it is endless.
[SKG] It's
very interesting to read, that you see the amplifying of the
"hyper-critical strategies" in Derrida as a (inherently destructive)
de-canonizing tool. For me it seems to be sad, that this tool became almost
like a pistol made out of soap like in the first Woody Allen movie "Take
the money and run", where Woody Allen’s escape from jail was not possible,
because the rain set in at the last prison gate and destroyed his soap-pistol. If
you like - it would be really great - to read a little more about these
interesting fields and strategies. Would you see your concept of
"destructive" also in line with Walter Benjamin‘s "Über den
destruktiven Charakter" and the "Thesen zur Geschichte" or would
you deduct it from other traditions. Which ones? Wittgenstein's note on
philosophy "I destroy, I destroy, I destroy" ? Heidegger's "Nicht
auf das Biegen, auf das Brechen kommt es an" - it's the breaking that
counts and not the bending? Where do you see destructive tendencies of
hypercritics already at work in non-domesticated spots of Derrida? I think, that
to reach these spots – the reading strategies/traditions had to be radically
altered? How would you define your tool of “auto-criticism” - would you see it
in relation to Derrida’s idea of “hypercritique”?
[Tom Cohen]
You are asking for a book. Too much
here—so, to simplify my sense: Yes, this is surely in Benjamin, and the two
texts you mention are not in opposition on this point. Perhaps the trick is
just to see that the famed “angel of history” is actually a comic cartoon for
B., a summary and dismissal of material-theological idioms—the Marx and
Hebraisms he adapts here—and the tradition of aura, identification, proper
names, personifications and hermeneutic relapses that go with it. And said
“angel,” a messenger, without message or god or power, who looks back and is
paralyzed—“wanting” to give the hordes of the undead what they want from him,
making whole, redemption, knowing he cannot but facing them, the last human
face and personification of a disappearing trace.
And “he” is
borne off, this cartoon (it is one already in Klee’s deconstruction), by
a “Storm.” The word is repeated at the head of the last sentences, is a
climactic term yet names also a storm of marks and points that emerge again
from bounded language, run wild into untapped biosemiotic networks and
elemental laws—that is, it is not a human “archive” that is of final concern.
This is clear in Thesis XVIII (again),
when organic life on earth is summoned as a measure. That is the “time” we are
in, the anthropocene. The problem is that to so tear away and trash said angel
(which encompasses all of humanistic linguistic habits and extends, today, to
the financial systems and kleptocratic capture of geo-power, already planning
and executing geo-engineering feats and totalized bio-surveillance systems and
insect drones and so on), the other hero of the parable in the text is
compromised or ruined: the materialistic historiographer whose praxis,
Benjamin’s, is hypothetical.
It is a suicidal text, which is its condition of
posing itself as one of the anthropocene. At the same time, with Benjamin, one
is stuck with his appalling (at times) manipulation of metaphors. The
“modernist” Benjamin is of little interest today in fact, but there are others.
But back to auto-critique—no one practices this today, which was the signature
of deconstruction in its emergence (and which de Man represented a limit to,
since he dismissed “deconstruction” itself as a program). That is why the
contemporary university-theoretical culture is such a lame-seeming animal, in
which a unique generational bloom of graduate student came to take possession
of critical gossip, archival tending, sophisticated recyclings and
extensions—yet in an often descriptive mode, so that your career theorist of
today is often a discretely conservationist regardless of claims to thread new
media, techno post-humanisms, without risk or wager involved. (It may be all
the risk-takers and most fevered intelligences got into finance at the time, or
that university culture breeds coteries, dependencies, and so on, given its
psychology and training: one must never forget the current soil on which these
mushrooms sprout, reflected so abruptly in the university’s deflation of the
“humanities” systematically—without any particular resistance or
re-orientation.)
[SKG] When
I read Derrida, which I do regularly since at least 17 years, it always seemed
to me, that deconstruction is too systematic, too classical, pre-programmed and
foreseeable to remain really subversive and to-come, even if Derrida calls his
works "dissocié, séparés, distraits" (cf. i.e. Psychè, Avant-propos,
p. 9). But is Derrida really always writing on the height of his early
formalisations like in "Hors livre"? Was Derrida's work really ever
surprising for anyone outside his own innermost circle of adepts (cf. i.e.
Bennington's ultra-hagiographic and -canonic book "Jacques Derrida" with the subverting
(really?) text "Circonfession")?
[Tom Cohen]
I can only speak as a reader. I agree with the outline of your
experience—with the caveat, always interesting, that despite this larger
outline the specifics of Derrida’s sentences, wherever, can always erupt into a
counter-claim that refutes that. Depending on how you read him. For me, nothing
is less interesting than when Derrida says what he “believes.” Or where he
interprets himself, which he always claims last word on. What is there are
lines of force, tools, openings—hence the need, if there were such, to recraft
from this writing different “Derridas,” some at war with one another, and
choose which is relevant, ignoring his attempts to shape that or manage his own
auto-immune cycles (or that of his servicers). The poor guy got stuck being a
philosophic rock star, enjoyed it, but entered contracts of dependency with all
sorts of groups to do this. This is too familiar terrain to go over. So if the
question is how deconstruction became boring, it is only partly his fault.
I find the “late
Derrida” contaminated this way, but always recall that, essentially, every
occasion was the opportunity to write more, to extend his powers, hit and miss.
Hence the absurdity of ink spent on a deconstructive “ethics” that goes,
essentially, no where, casts a spell over academic minions who want so much to
be good, yet is the occasion for more writing, some very interesting. It is
interesting that you mention Bennington’s book, which did much to change
Derrida’s late phase. A brilliant series of attempts to transcribe Derrida
without citations, that should have initiated a phase of writings in which
Derrida himself could be backgrounded, and these trajectories explored without
endless reversions to exegesis “on” the master. Instead, they did the
opposite—make Derrida accessible to a next generation of Anglo academics,
launch a British “Derrida” in the wake of what could be called the American
experiment (ending in a kind of fiasco, “de Man,” an unreliable entity). That
British deconstruction would do much to access the global media of the global
lingua franca, but also created a natural cronyist-homosocial syndicate (the
old Anglo model bred in boys’ schools and the royal-imaginary, what gives us
London as the mafia center of global financial piracy today, responsible for some
of the fetishism (“Apply Derrida”?), and edgelessness of “deconstruction” in
that form. This might someday be examined wrily: the dependence of a certain
faux Derrida’s generation within this loop of Anglo-translation—a different
subordinate mentality tied, nonetheless, to the global lingua and its academic
networks. A contamination that had been as disseminative as it was costly,
since today it is precisely that fetishization—the exegesis of Derrida
according to Derridean algorythms—which coincides with the “disappearance” of
his work that Derrida, in the last interview, remarks (“sincerely,” he
insists).
[SKG] May I
go here in a more systematic direction and prolong my argument: how much is really left of Derrida’s own very
complex fundamental strategic axiomatics from the beginning of his works to
later on? Is there not an accelerated movement of a diminishing of
hyper-critical forces in Derrida observable you already spoke about in some of
your answers? Does this implosion of deconstruction occur accidentally? Or is
it the other way around - Derrida really spells out/ lays bare the very limited
axiomatics of deconstruction and this (all too systematic) spelling out leads in
the same movement (Derrida’s “I digitalize like a madman” / “Je posthume comme j’espire”-
writing with two hands - writing as crossing-out?) to his worldwide
inthronisation and to a neutralization of his “method” (implied here of course,
all his rumination, that it is no method etc) as a serious tool for an à-venir
or the easy prey of a singular philosophic school? This would mean for me:
deconstruction (as it left the hands of Derrida) would have exhausted its own
credibility (through forced omni-presence which must equal death, since pure
life for Derrida is death) on purpose as a work of a singular
person/idiom/gesture/signature. Or: now we can try to start a new unheard of
move (but maybe the all too forced “unheard of” / “inventive side” of
deconstruction is also hard to bear !!! Who could/should claim to invent
something new? ). If Derrida should have really tried to exhaust/devastate his
own invention with his almost St. Paul like fever to bring “deconstruction” to
an end of the world (his book with Malabou on travelling) - to make it “real”
(cf. Voiles) and in this move make “it” “transsubjective” and “inhuman” - I
would absolutely admire him for that! Others could then start to visit the
ruins of the ruins of deconstruction. Wipe their eyes and ask with a chapter of
Mille Plateaux: Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé? Deconstruction would be again
everywhere and nowhere - all and nothing (like he wrote in his “Letter à un
ami japonais” (1985)) - outside again - bound to nothing more that nothing? Or
again in “Entre crochets” where it is perfectly clear that deconstruction is
not limited to concepts, to discourse … etc.?
[Tom Cohen]
I am very sympathetic to this line
of question—even presuppose it. As you suggest, one should not confuse Derrida
with Derrideans, contemporary or subsequent. You ask: Does this implosion of
deconstruction occur accidentally? Derrida apparently saw this, understood the
auto-immune “deconstruction” that had settled in long in advance, and which he
danced with, sometimes contaminated, sometimes not. In the “last” interview
referenced above he seems to disavow that—the reading of him, heirs, his own
survival (his works), and so on. Thus he saw a series of “bad” readers, as
mentioned, the last of which were the people he had spawned to disseminate
loosely, i.e. keep his text archived or read. He miscalculated, or knew they
would do so formally alone. So—assuming the question is whither this project,
which is itself an odd question (does one ask that of others, or just let them
be)?
Part of the problem is that his “late” phase showed
these calculations too much, and created a persona for him that his tribe
pursued as if it was the literal efflorescence of some philosophical
program—the stuff on ethics (about which Derrida knew nothing), religion,
politics so called, etc. So alternate readers are called for, without this
proper name, as you suggest, but I am not sure the category “new” matters much
now except to carpetbaggers. The problem today is cognitive crony-capitalism
that moves the pieces on the table around the board and thrills to the facility
of doing such. The mutation that is implied doesn’t do that, is resisted, like
invested hedge funds that can’t alter a strategy because the markets went
against them and they hold indefinitely. The way to read Derrida, I tend to
think, is by threads, tranches, fragmentation—not the infernal effort of a
seriously limited coterie of translators and academics to identify an
encompassing Derridean re-formulation, as if the guy did not write enough for
himself.
Derrida bred archivists in his last phase, cultivated
hangers on and courtiers, had to promote the dumbed down and embarrassing
versions of himself—in order to assure worker bees for the afterlife, carriers (this is what Sloterdijk calls
them) to a future generation. It is highly unusual that a major authorship
should be so involved in trying to manage his afterlife, but typical of
Derrida, and knowingly futile up to a point. My sense is much in his text waits
to be hooked up anew to horizons that had nothing to do with the suffocating
pieties of the late 90’s or his exit years. And that would be the
mutation—which we lazily call the anthropocene. The regressive nature of
Derrideans, academic careerists who have hung their romantic self-images on
association with “Jacques,” and are no different from any other generation of
such in terms of conservative temperament, vanity, and political smallness in
academic terms (that is, crony culture), was a betrayal written into the
scenario. The Borg only works when it is forward moving and assimilating—not
when it circles upon itself. This is why I suggest people invested in this
tradition ignore the trap of Derridean exegesis and turn their tools at the
aporia of today—financialization and megadebt, mediacratic trances, the
problematics of carbon, extinction events, new temporal formation. Also, that
they shed Derrida’s resolute Euro-centrism.
[SKG] This
brings me to a new point, has Derrida really cha(lle)nged the old ideas of
history, and what do you think of Derrida's probably latest idea of an
"tout autre histoire" (Voyous,
p.216)?Why does he still call this "histoire"? And why is he using /
regressing (again) (to) crypto-heideggerian theorems from the period of his Ereignis-Denken
in his latest works without further in depth analysis? And why has Derrida
written nearly nothing really serious and non-simplifying about the
Heideggerian concept of "Seynsgeschicht/e" and even lesser about the
Deleuzo/Guattarian concept of an unconscious,
machinic and contingent history of desire? Should one not see this as a
real shortcoming of deconstruction? Is not his (maybe not all too serious)
formula "de platon à freud et au-délà" overused and his approach to
philosophy in the end all too simple, violent and homogenizing? Is there a
problem of "history" in Derrida and how would you formalize it?
[Tom Cohen] I am open to all these points
leading up to the final question. It can’t be answered simply since putting
“history” into question initializes Derrida’s trajectory. So one has to not go
back to that term as a measure of anything—at least as constituted. In fact, it
is one of the side issues or collateral damage of an era of climate change that
other temporalities protrude and efface our working “histories,” e.g. the
geological but not only, since today one would have to add the mediacratic, telemarketing,
and so on. I would only say of Derrida, to the degree one might, that he
required various buttressments to stage his interventions. Early on, de Man had
called him out about this—saying, yes, what you are doing is exemplary, but you
don’t need “metaphysics” of a canonical “author” to do this, which is to say,
it gets in the way. But Derrida did need such buttressments. If you listen to
him, sometimes, he is Shakespearean in inhabiting other voices or positions—to
then peel away otherwise. Who is this Derrida that writes? His persona gets in
the way, just like the hagiography. The truth is that, partly due to Derrida,
the referentials have altered in any case today, and some of these routines
read exactly as you suggest, as demur. I think we need give up the model of
“history” we think is there, along with the notion that something, originally,
could be “deconstructed” (the verb) decisively. Look around you—metaphysics
everywhere, exponentially clever, in iphones, in fast food chains. And yet,
like “capital,” it is no longeritself
or recognizable simply. We are in another plateau now. It’s very interesting,
as long as one is not sentimental.
[SKG] What could be the point Deleuze would make against
Derrida and vice versa? Are not the deleuzo-guattarian arguments on this topic
in the "Géophilosophie"-Chapter of QuPh? and in MILLE PLATEAUX far
more concise than anything Derrida has written on this topic in the late 67 and
early 80's of the last century? Derrida has only a “Géopsychanalyse” to offer?
[Tom Cohen] Derrida doesn’t invoke or hail the geo
often or in general (a difference from Nietzsche and Heidegger differently). It
is interesting to find in Circumfessions
that his mother’s name was Georgette and he allows the implications to
resonate—given where mother in Derrida leads, to the non-mother of khora. (Kind
of like the “mother” (non-mother) of Psycho.) The geological threads the
discourse from without. But part of this is his peculiar use of Europe and
Euro-centrism to anchor his project, whose archive he identifies with as
producing him. So his posture here is delimited internally (the anthropocene is
indifferent to the West’s self-privileging
confabulations, as to any other “nation” in isolation—it is speciesist).
[SKG] Is not Heidegger the only one who will have said and
insisted, that "metaphysics" won't disappear - but will remain as
"disappearing" in technology (the janus-head of technology), what you
described as the "exponentially clever" aspect of metaphysics here
and now?
[Tom Cohen] I would agree. I read a recent piece by Timothy Morton trying to portray
the import of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) through Heideggerian
platforming—as the underbelly of Dasein—and it reminded me, as did another
piece I read recently by Krystof Ziarek on the anthropocene, to what degree
Heidegger was anticipating the contemporary disclosure. Whether one can
resuscitate Heideggerian language for these purposes today is a question
(probably not), but Derrida’s use of Heidegger in this respect leaves many things
off the table. While I think it necessary to point out that whatever was called
metaphysics has not gone away (look around) but only proliferated and found
other soil—perhaps this is linked to climate change denial itself—I prefer what
I take to be the implication of de Man in this regard: that “it” never existed
to begin with, and was a prop necessary for certain auto-narrations of the West
within philosophico-critical designs.
[SKG] Has not Heidegger sufficiently shown, against the
humanist naivité of Derrida, that it is impossible (in the usual - not the
derridean sense) to deconstruct metaphysics. Consequently Derrida's attempt to
reduce Heidegger's "seynsgeschichtliches" Denken (which I would
translate as "being-stratificated"-thinking and not as
being-historical-thinking) to a banal historical and epochal (Heidegger always
writes epoche in greek letters) conception, that we all know as the
inde(con)structable) history of philosophy, burger king, the beatles, or, or -
had to fail?
[Tom Cohen] Well, I don’t know that it is a contest here. And one cannot speak of
Derrida’s humanist naivete simply if at all—though he tended to chose a humanist motif in his later
work, as if to affirm a community of, well, humans in their contemporary agons
and reading programs. He chose (mistakenly I think) to be “hospitable,” perhaps
thinking he could outwit the machines of re-appropriations (being, already,
“Derrida”). I think metaphysics is shaped by Heidegger in measure for narrative
purposes—and the disappearance he names reads a bit like Benjamin’s aura (where
was it to begin with exactly?). For the first, that arises as if an error and
the tag of time of Being (the Greeks), and thus he can pin it on Nietzsche, he
thinks, in order to execute a reversal or inversion the former seemed to claim.
Derrida does that same thing, a bit, to Heidegger, basically replacing the
latter as if before Nietzsche in some regards (though Derrida’s reading of
Nietzsche is at once virtual, troubled and deficient), that is, by almost
undoing the narrative of metaphysics at all. The word drops away from his work.
This, again, is why de Man is a tonic, who implies it was all there from the
emergence of “text,” perhaps Homer in the West. Hence, the scam of
“metaphysics” as a narrative base.
[SKG] To
prolong my last question a little, should one really follow “Derrida”/
“deconstruction(s)” in the ruins of the impossible possibility of metaphysics
into a process of endless mourning (like formalised i.e. in his Derrida's
"Fors") and melancholy? Or shouldn't we try out something else?
[Tom Cohen] My sense is Derrida overplays the “mourning” routine—what was an
intervention becomes an App, like so much in him. I think, yes, “Destruktion”
need be recovered from the banalities that the term “deconstruction” has
drifted into—but again, you are dealing today with a generation of university
graduate students who have arrived, a community inordinately sensitive to
having its limitations critiqued, or drifting off the reservation for fear of
cost-benefits. This is particularly amusing with Derrideans, who mistake
association with “Jacques” either for some secret society of initiation or
genealogical passing of the torch, resulting in the small, policing, patronage
systems such types practice by their nature. The result accords with the state
of critical discourse and the university today. So many things are about to
mutate, by forces outside of “sovereignty,” and it is not just a question of
choosing to try something else, or new. Of course that is necessary—but will
have to arrive from without.
[SKG] Professor Cohen, we are near the end of this
interview, so I would like (if I may) come back to an earlier point, the
problem of history in Derrida which I would tend to see as a residual problem
linked to the unsolvable problems of transcendental subjectivity Derrida was
left with after his early works on Husserl and Hegel. Is there so to speak a
problem with the problem of history in Derrida because of this unsolved residual?
How would you see this point?
[Tom Cohen] It is interesting to see how often, today, Derrida would seem
re-assimilated by slow nuance to Husserl—as the rubber-band snaps back to
default setting of the mainstream. The problem with history, or the point you
ask about, is that it doesn’t exist. There never was a “history,” only
narratives, mnemotechnics, cultural writing systems, more or less living or
externalized archives—all of which have been rescrambled in the last decades
(think of Chinese cities, or the internet). The anthropocene is a direct
reminder of this. Derrida knew this, but it was not useful to say as
such—Benjamin is here already, even if his rant is at “historicism.”
[SKG] Don’t you think that Derrida has simplified his own
deconstructive strategies, when you read his very simple historistic/logicistic
formalization of the double gesture of deconstruction in ("Force de loi" p.48), his almost
historical-systematic strategies in his final Seminaires on animality and sovereignity and compare it to his
earlier (pretended?) forced anti-genealogical strategies eg. in “La
Dissemination”? Why all these polemics against a pretended (never really shown)
primacy of gathering over dissemination in Heidegger which is really not there?
Derrida's blindness for the depth of Schizo-/Strato-Analysis/Rhizomatics and
Ereignis-Denken is for me the main weak spot of deconstruction. Derrida
definitely should have written a large size monograph on Deleuze (cf. the also
maybe pseudo-traces of this in his short text after Deleuze's death in
"Chaque fois unique" and in his Seminaire are far away from
interesting) and a serious one on Heidegger: "De l'esprit" /
"Donner le temps" / "Apories" / "Spectres de
Marx" are not really serious, because Derrida always tries to neutralize
the complexity of Heideggerian thoughts - with his stone-old arguments from the
late sixties - instead of writing an inthronisation for Jean-Luc Nancy in
"Le Toucher" with its infinitely boring tangents about stone-old
ideas like "auto-hetero-affection" and phenomenology.
[Tom Cohen] I have a different perspective. I am not sure what you mean by his
“forced anti-genealogical” strategies, since my sense is those were not forced
(i.e. one essence of the “deconstructive” meme) but were, on the contrary,
diverted, modified, even suspended for narrative strategies of a sort. Thus
sometimes the stone-old arguments of the ‘60’s, as you say, would at times have
been the un-played-out touchstone that would have been diverted by many latter
shifts of address. There are in a sense virtual Derridas which might have
emerged diverted by strategic choices, strategies, and effect of surrounding
himself with yes-men toward the end, short-circuiting provocation—and these
might be generated still.
When asked, for instance, to write on “materiality” a
propos de Man, what emerged was a very very long essay going back to undo de
Man’s reading of him—a matter of who won a discussion, if it was one—deferring
the topos to a few pages at the end, applying the X without X to get out of the
matter (or question of matter). A shame. It was pertinent, and he might have
chose to recover the dormant import of Benjamin’s use of the term or anticipate
where speculative materialism sees itself today, having eclipsed the issue of
language to stage itself (a familiar occlusion).
Similarly, le
Toucher seems to me not to “enthrone” Nancy but to try to eviscerate his
pretension of exceeding deconstruction, and thus regressing to a pre-critical
realism despite himself—it is very nasty on that level, but displays an
extraordinary sense of rivalry in the face of possible mutations. So, rather, a
defacement of Nancy as a performance, much as all of his memorial talks on
contemporaries invariably performed appropriations of them. As Hillis Miller
wrote, Derrida required to have the “last” word, or simulate it, in part by
outliving many.
The third generation Derrideans, the merry band of
academic fetishists and Oedipalists we know and love today, never apprehended
that not being so critiqued was not a sign of embrace and identification, but
the opposite—being beneath the radar entirely. Derrida, by the way, suppressed
inter-deconstructive critique, the usual way a field of thinking progresses,
signaling they should all attend to some vague enemy out there. The one “not”
of the family required a simulacrum family logic, muting the critical abilities
of the group, ending up in today’s irrelevant and small circuit exegesis of
him.
[SKG] This
brings me to my final question, which seems to lead us to the center of Derridean
thoughts again; do you believe, that Derrida really provides a "model"
of "une autre ouverture de l'événementalité" (Spectres de Marx,
p.125) in which events really take place without being absorbed by the
classical (onto-theo-archeo-)logic of universality vs. singularity? Is Derrida's
work really an outline for a "materialistic historiography"? Or are
Derrida's ideas of "material inscriptions" in the end still too
humanistic, idealistic, emancipatory and messianic and need a correction?
[Tom Cohen] In order of the three questions above: no, no,
and possibly. To the degree that the latter are rhetorical streams,
experiments, and inventions of the “late Derrida,” however, I think those can
be peeled back—but, at the moment, produce unproductive memes. (The whole
otherness of the other shtick, troping Levinas, or a deconstructive “ethics,”
seem to be typically interesting misfires.) One can separate these out, but
needs a fresh slate to do so. The “anthropocene” provides that. The point of
course is that this is the repository, or was, of the techniques by which
mnemo-technics broadly are called to account within the broader traditions—that
was it import, and curdled for a while under the term language (which can no
longer be used that way)—and that should be brought into the scans and
critiques others will have to launch as the era of climate change unfolds more
obviously than today.
[SKG] Cordial thanks for the interview, Professor Cohen.
