Trace, Dissemination, Survivre: Derridas Biology and the Socius

Colm J. Kelly, St. Thomas University, New Brunswick, CANADA

Abstract: There is no explicit philosophy of biology or evolution in Derrida, but many of his terms imply a sustained engage-
ment with biological and evolutionary issues. For example, dissemination implies a rethinking of the concepts of repro-
duction and even of organism. Dissemination is the scattering of the seed, rather than its maturation and recuperation into
itself. Self-dissemination instead of self-reproduction would be the slogan of Derridas biology. The notion of survivre
(survival or living on) implies a re-evaluation of life and death and the relationship between them, where life and death are
no longer thought to be completely separable states of being and non-being. Once the biological resonances of central terms
of Derrida have been elucidated, his entire body of work can then be interpreted, following the lead of Christopher Johnson,
as an intervention in the history of life, where logocentric metaphysics and the cultures which inherit it are themselves a
major aspect of the hominization of the animal, and where deconstruction is a mutation in this evolution. Finally, it will
be shown that the problematic of biology implied in Derridas work can also be linked to an implied problematic of the
social in the same work, potentially leading to a radical re-thinking of what we mean by society.
Keywords: Derrida, Philosophy, Problematic of Biology, Problematic of the Social
Approaching Derrida, Approaching the
Social
T
HE PRESENT WORK is part of a larger
attempt to re-read Derridas work in light of
a theme which Derrida himself only touched
on in passing: the question of the nature of
society or the social. The terms Derrida favoured
when he did directly address such matters were the
social bond or the socius, the latter being the Latin
word which is a precursor to our word society.
Before addressing the topics referred to in my title,
it is necessary to address two preliminary issues:
ways of approaching the work of Derrida in general;
and ways of approaching the question of the social
in relation to Derridas work.
In approaching Derridas work in general I make
several assumptions, most of which are shared by
the best commentators on, and interpreters, of Der-
rida.
1
Derridas work is not nihilistic, relativistic or
skeptical. Rather it is aiming for universality of scope
and is systematic in nature; however it is operating
at the limits of the very Western metaphysics within
which, for reasons which are both historical and ne-
cessary, the concepts and values of the universal and
the system have constituted themselves. In striving
for universality and systematicity at the very limits
of the system within which these same values are
defned, Derridas work necessarily produces para-
doxical results. It will produce a universality of
very little, almost nothing (Critchley),
2
and a
system beyond being (Gasche, Tain), or a system
without system. These paradoxes are in turn tied into
the complicated, varied, and often diffcult nature of
Derridas styles of writing, arguing and composing
his works. Derridas writings are normally very close
commentaries on texts of the Western philosophical
and literary tradition, to the extent that these com-
mentaries subtly intervene into the texts of that tradi-
tion, acting like a parasite or a virus, which sends its
host on a diversion, or in a slightly new direction.
These writings never present themselves as a thesis
or argument, which could be fnally and fully collec-
ted together in the form of presence, and delivered
into the presence of the readers. This is the famed
diffculty of Derridas style, which however, is intim-
ately connected, indeed central, to the deconstruction
of the Western metaphysics of presence.
The result of the foregoing is that the present
commentary must also strive to discover the universal
and the systematic in Derrida, while at the same time
allowing for chance, singularity, the idiom, the event,
the aubobiographical, and so on, those very entities
which challenge the logic of universality and system-
1
There are many fne commentaries on Derrida. In this context, I will mention only the two that have infuenced and helped me the most:
Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, and Bennington, Jacques Derrida.
2
This phrase, the title of Critchleys book, is borrowed from Derridas early essay on Levinas, Violence and Metaphysics, from which
I quote (80): Acommunity of the question, therefore () Acommunity of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened
community in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the
community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question. This is very little - almost nothing but within it, today, is
sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision.
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aticity, to enter into and even disturb the comment-
ary. Thus there must be a certain risk involved as
one develops a commentary on Derrida, a risk that
ones writing and presentation will be disturbed and
extended beyond itself, and one must welcome, in-
deed cultivate, that risk. For the present paper, this
means that the terms in my title do not form a gener-
ative matrix from which all my ideas would be de-
rived. Rather they would form something more like
a trail or a network of traces which I would try to
track and follow, with the possibility always being
there that a new direction, to cite the overall theme
of our conference and community, could be a diver-
sion or a going astray, and that this possibility or risk
of diversion is integral to the possibillity of any new
direction.
3
It is now time briefy to discuss the question of
how to address the idea of the social based on
Derridas work. The social could be the last best
name
4
for what Derrida is drawn to, and feels the
necessity of, to go quickly and to use a troubled
word, deconstructing. The social would, then, be
one of the latest names for the metaphysical themat-
ics and topoi, which Derrida has been pursuing for
so long. mile Durkheim, probably the most sociolo-
gical of thinkers from the era when sociology was
consolidating and stabilizing itself, in a famous pas-
sage from 1912, elevates society to the status of an
all-encompassing totality: Since the universe exists
only in so far as it is thought of, and since it is
thought of in its totality only by society, it takes its
place within society; it becomes an element of soci-
etys inner life, and thus society is itself the total
genus (le genre total) outside of which nothing ex-
ists (Forms 443 Formes 630).
5
This conception of society as a totality, which
encompasses and explains everything, seems an easy
and obvious target for deconstruction. Perhaps it is
too obvious a target. Is it a philosopheme, which
programmes the text of Durkheim and the history of
sociology, or is it a disguise, and a lure to lead us
astray? In reading the apparent philosophemes in the
history of sociology one must be attuned and re-at-
tuned carefully to where they lead, so as not to fall
into the trap of all too easily deconstructing them.
6
So, if one follows this path towards the social,
caution is in order. One might have to withdraw, to
retreat, and to try again, on a different route. One
such route might be to re-infect the words and con-
cepts society and the social in a new direction.
Here a clue might be found in Derridas treatment
of Platos khora as a general place or total recept-
acle (109) which itself does not take place or present
itself. Could the social serve as a temporary nick-
name for this general place or total receptacle?
But this is just a clue. More generally, we could take
a lead from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and work
on re-inventing and re-using an already well-accepted
word, for example, the word community. This
word, in Nancys work, without losing a connection
to what we thought it had always meant, becomes
re-invented, through repeated workings over. We
see something there in community that was never
there before, but that must also always have left a
track or mark in the old concept (Inoperative). An
analogous effort could be made with society and
the social
The larger work, of which this paper is a part,
seems to be allowing itself to be led down a different
path. If we imagine, following what Rodolphe
Gasch (Tain) taught us, that Derridas work is
characterized by a non-fnite ensemble of quasi-
transcendental infrastructural concepts (here Gasch
was referring to such quasi-concepts as the trace,
arche-writing, the mark, etc.); or if we imagine, as I
do, that we could characterize Derridas more recent
work as proposing a non-fnite ensemble of quasi-
phenomenological analyses, which through retaining
a quasi-transcendental trait, mark the essential limits
of such experiences as forgiving, lying, singularity,
the event, the signature, mourning, etc.; or if we
imagine again, as I do, that Derridas works are
events, interventions, tracks, traces, grafts, or viruses,
which occur in the history of his life and his culture,
in the history of metaphysics, in the history of liter-
ature, in the history of theory, in the history of our
times, in the history of the West, in the history of
3
This paper was frst delivered at a confrerence entitled New Directions in the Humanities, American University of Paris, June 2007,
hence my reference to a newdirection, here and elsewhere. I wrote about the theme of diversion over twenty years ago, in a paper that became
my frst publication, and which was written for Derrida in a course I had been pursuing with himin Toronto (Homecomings). (I deliberately
use the frst person singular here and on occasion throughout the paper, as the chance of an intersection between two singularities, or two
autobiographies, mine and Derridas, something which happened empirically and actually on only two brief occasions, is a sub-theme of
this paper and of the larger work of which it is a part.)
4
In coining this phrase I am suggesting that the metaphysics of presence infuences many different discourses, each one at the time be-
lieving it has solved the fundamental problem, for example, of knowledge or morality. A new last best name will always arrive after or
during the decline of the previous one. Cf. Derridas distinction between closure and end. We have reached the closure of Western meta-
physics, but its end could be deferred indefnitely (Writing).
5
I have on occasion, as here, slightly modifed a translation from French. In all such cases, references to the French text are supplied.
6
Rodolphe Gasch (Deconstruction) was one of the frst to warn about turning what already and all too hastily been called deconstruction
into a shallow, mechanical operation. He must have helped many graduate students and others to rigorously articulate their own misgivings
about what was transpiring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least in North America. At least this is what his work helped me to do.
For my own reading of Durkheim, which I believe learned the methodological lesson Gasch intended, see Kelly, If the Child
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 5 192
the world, in the history of our species, in the history
of history, in the history of life; then it is possible to
imagine that oneself, with ones history, biography,
education, singularity, and so on, could, however
humbly, countersign this immense work, this still
living-dying, viral, machinal, death-bearing, life-af-
frming, sometimes beautiful and usually disturbing,
event which is Derridas work and signature. This
latter approach, without excluding the frst two, is
the one, however audacious or humble, that I fnd
myself taking.
The Trace and the Non-origin
Derridas work throughout his career, but more espe-
cially in the 1960s, was concerned to delineate the
limits of a systematic chain of concepts and a dis-
course, which constituted Western metaphysics, and
which had characterized a whole epoch of the history
of the west, and thus of the world. This attempt to
identify and delineate the limits of this entire concep-
tual-philosophical systemof course came to be called
deconstruction, a term which hardly does justice to
what Derrida was engaged in. In delimiting this
system there is no question of relativizing it or sub-
jecting it to a sociological or historical materialist
sociology of knowledge explanation. These resources
are themselves internal to the system being decon-
structed.
Instead Derrida takes the most rigorous philosoph-
ical formulations of this system and identifes their
internal limits and incoherencies. An attempt is then
made to account for these through a more powerful
logic or system, a logic or system which exceeds lo-
gic or system, a system beyong being, to paraphrase
Rodolphe Gasche (Tain), whose work has helped me
here and for many years. But this formalization of,
and accounting for, the limits of a system of thought
is not itself purely formal. Derrida makes powerful
claims about the structure and nature of reality, life,
history and so on, because the history of Western
metaphysics is part of the history of the West, of the
world and even of life.
One of Derridas principal targets is the notion of
origin: a simple frst point or moment, which gives
rise to, or generates, or causes what follows. In place
of the origin, pure and simple, and an origin would
always be pure and simple, Derrida proposes the
notion of trace. A trace is, of course, a trace left by
something else. A trace points to what originated,
gave rise to or left behind the trace, to the origin of
the trace, in other words. Derrida (Grammatology
61) proposes, instead of the origin of the trace, the
notion of an originary trace, the arche-trace, or the
trace of a trace:
This trace is in fact contradictory and not accept-
able within the logic of identity. The trace is
not only the disappearance of origin. Within the
discourse that we sustain and according to the
path that we follow it means that the origin did
not even disappear, that it was never constituted
except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace,
which thus becomes the origin of the origin.
Fromthen on, to wrench the concept of the trace
from the classical scheme, which would derive
it from a presence or from an originary non-
trace and which would make of it an empirical
mark, one must indeed speak of an originary
trace or arche-trace.
Then discussing both Husserl and some of the
prominent linguists of the post World War II period,
from Saussure to Hjelmslev, Derrida asks how the
phonic element assume its form, that is, its imprinted
form, its form that can be iterated or repeated as the
same? Through differences from other terms, as we
know from Saussure.
On the one hand, the phonic element, the term,
the plenitude that is called sensible, would not
appear as such without the difference or oppos-
ition which gives them form () Here the ap-
pearing and functioning of difference presup-
poses an originary synthesis not preceded by
any absolute simplicity. Such would be the ori-
ginary trace. Without a retention in the minimal
unit of temporal experience, without a trace re-
taining the other as other in the same, no differ-
ence would do its work and no meaning would
appear (Grammatology 62).
Drawing together rather rapidly some inferences
from these quotations, the trace, the arche-trace, or
the trace of the trace, which never appears as such,
inscribes or puts in play an alterity, or otherness,
which is irreducible and which cannot be recuperated
or domesticated by the self-same or the identical,
even though this reference to the other, as Derrida
indicates in the quote above, is constitutive of the
self-same or the identical. Rodolphe Gasche (Tain
190, 191-192) explains as follows:
The arche-trace is a minimal structure of gener-
alized reference, whereby reference must be
understood in the broadest sense of referring,
as alluding or pointing to something other. The
arche-trace is a minimal structure of referral to
the extent that it constitutes difference between
terms or entities. Indeed what it describes is that
all reference to self takes place by way of a de-
tour through an Other and thus presupposes an
originary self-effacement. The arche-trace
unites the double movement of reference (to
self or Other) and of self-diversion.
193 COLM J. KELLY
Note here that the alterity being here referred to is
primarily the other of the concept and of identity,
and that a concept or an identity must make reference
to what it is not in order to constitute itself as itself.
Note also that this otherness or alterity never presents
itself as such. It withdraws in doing its work; it is
thus the other of the other, or the alterity of the other.
Note also that the work being done here seems to
be primarily conceptual, not referring to living others
or human others. But this reference to the other of
the concept is not irrelevant to life, to living beings
or to living others. Derrida hints at a remodelling of
life along the lines of what the trace, and related
concepts, the supplement, iterability, the remark, etc.
imply, and he also hints at remodelling concept,
trace, sign, language, etc. along the lines of what the
notion of life implies: an economizing and protective
relation to self by reference to the other; and the
dissemination or dispersal of this self in relation to
the other. Atrace is always effaceable; the generative
germ or gene is always mortal.
Science, Life, Dissemination
Derridas approach to the conceptual and discursive
structures of Western philosophy and culture resonate
with a problematic of biology and of life, which are
also developed in his work, and also with a positive
or supportive attitude to science and technology, al-
though the latter is only hinted at. Derridas brief
references to the practice of natural science have
nearly always been positive. In Of Grammotology,
published in 1967, which is based partly on review
essays published two years earlier, Derrida makes
discreet references to biology, mathematics, inform-
ation science and cybernetics, arguing that the expan-
ded concept of writing that he is proposing has its
equivalent in all these felds. For example, relating
his concept of the trace to Levinas, Heidegger, Niet-
zsche and Freud, he adds: And fnally, in all scientif-
ic felds, notably in biology, this notion seems cur-
rently to be dominant and irreducible (Grammato-
logy 70). Or in relation to the concept of writing, he
says: the contemporary biologist speaks of writ-
ing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary
processes of information within the living cell
(Grammatology 9). Derrida also makes several ref-
erences to mathematics and to the use of mathematics
in the sciences, especially with respect to how
mathematical notation challenges or exceeds phono-
centrism, that is the dominance of the phonetic as-
pects of, and the phonetic model of, speech and
writing. The place of mathematics in cultures of
phonetic writing is the place where the practice of
scientifc language challenges intrinsically and with
increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing
and all its implicit metaphysics (metaphysics itself)
(Grammatology 10). The concept of science, how-
ever, still remains frmly lodged within metaphysics,
and indeed, as a concept, may be inseparable from
it, in the form of theory and of the epistm, that is
in the form of the theory of knowledge. It is because
of this metaphysical appurtenance of the concept of
science, and not because of any opposition to the
practice of science (on the contrary), that Derrida
suggests that grammatology will never become a
positive science. The trace, the gramme, arche-writ-
ing and so on, will never take on the formof presence
which has always been required of the scientifc ob-
ject as metaphysically construed in the concept of,
and in the philosophy of, and in the name of, sci-
ence.
7
Thus, in Derrida there is an openess to the prac-
tices of the sciences, and not just to the pure sciences,
but also to applied sciences and technologies. Think
here of Derridas repeated use of the motif of the
graft in his earlier work, and of the motif of the
prosthesis in his more recent work (e.g., Monolingual-
ism). This is part of his re-thinking of the concept of
technology as it has traditionally been opposed to
nature (the physis/techne couple). If there is no ori-
ginary nature, as Derrida shows, in Grammatology;
if there is no nature that has not always been supple-
mented with something additional to nature, then
there can be no in-principle opposition to new tech-
nologies, even ones that seem to interfere with what
we take to be life in general and human life in partic-
ular. Everything to do with the treatment of the sup-
plement undermines the idea of nature as a pure un-
sullied state prior to any artifcial or cultural interven-
tion. For example, with respect to Rousseau, Derrida
writes: for we have to read, in the text, that the
absolute present, Nature, that which words like real
mother, etc., name, have always already escaped,
have never existed; that what opens meaning and
language is writing as the disappearance of natural
presence (Grammatology 159, Grammatologie 228.
The translator omitted etc.).
This is not to say that Derrida is proposing a
philosophy of evolution, or of the gene. On the con-
trary, for Derrida there is no self-reproducing gene
as such. Of course genes are copied and survive all
the time. But the possibility of error, drift, deviation
and mutation are inherent to the very possibility of
the gene and its suvival, the possibility of its being
copied and living on. The germ is always mortal.
Derrida says little of this directly. But it is implied
in many of his central concepts, perhaps the most
7
Of arche-writing, Derrida (Grammatology 57 Grammatologie 83) writes that it cannot and can never be recognized as the object of a
science. It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced to the form of presence. The latter orders all objectivity of the object and all
relation to knowledge (toute relation de savoir)
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 5 194
obvious being dissemination. Dissemination is the
dispersal of meaning, the always present possibility
of internal drift and deviation in any message or
meaning. More specifcally, it is a dispersal of
meaning that cannot be recuperated into a theme or
a unity or a totality (e.g. a monograph, a book or an
encyclopaedia). It also refers more properly, although
metaphorically, to the spreading of ideas, and literally
or etymologically to the dispersal of seeds by a plant
or tree. This notion is deployed by Derrida to coun-
teract the paternalistic logocentric philosophy of
Western metaphysics, where meaning, or the idea,
is always recuperated into itself without loss or re-
mainder, as a sort of self-fulflling seed or self-repro-
ducing father (Dissemination).
Christopher Johnson (System150ff.) confrms and
demonstrates that this and other terms are meant to
resonate with amongst other things a problematic
of biology. In terms of its biological resonance, we
can think of dissemination as implying a rethinking
of the concepts of reproduction, descent, inheritance
and genealogy. Dissemination is the scattering of the
seed, rather than its maturation and recuperation into
itself. Genetically, one can think of oneself as a
transfer, or gathering and dispersal, point, from
which, spread out in front and behind of one, is a
scattering of genes in a geometric progression. Self-
dissemination instead of self-reproduction would be
the slogan of Derridas biology, if we can put it so
crudely for a moment. More precisely, there would
never be self-reproduction, as such; rather there
would be a mutually re-inforcing and mutually un-
dermining intertwinement of self-reproduction and
self-dissemination.
The biological resonances of Derridas work res-
onate in turn with his many meditations on life and
on death or rather with his sustained, nuanced and
varied deconstruction of the life/death opposition.
Here, given constraints of space, we can do no better
than to turn to Lanimal que donc je suis [The animal
which therefore I am (I follow)], where he says,
concerning the question of the living and of the
living animal, that for me that will always have
been the most decisive question (Animal 402).
Opening a qualifcation in a paragraph in which he
takes issue with the supposition that there is a single
line opposing the human animal to all other animals,
Derrida writes:
Beyond the edge of the so-called human
rather than the Animal or Animal Life, there
is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the
living, or more precisely (since to say the liv-
ing is already to say too much or not enough)
a multiplicity of organizations of relations
between living and dead, relations of organiza-
tion or lack of organization among realms that
are more and more diffcult to dissociate by
means of the fgures of the organic and inorgan-
ic, of life and/or death (Animal 399).
For Derrida, then, life is implicated in death and vice-
versa. But this co- implication is such that it cannot
be recuperated in any way, whether dialectically, or
theologically, or in terms of a pantheistic or pan-vi-
talist cycle of life and death. Our deaths are carried
in our genes and in sexual reproduction. Our deaths
are already announced more generally in what we
could call the trace-structure of experience in general.
The traces we leave behind might perhaps survive
us, and so they anticipate our deaths. The names we
are given carry beyond our lives and so carry our
deaths within them. Every relation to the other carries
within it our own mortality and fnitude, where as
Derrida (Work 117) says, we are only ever ourselves
from that place within us where the other, the mortal
other resonates. Every religious or political ideal
values human life itself, but always human life as
more than mere life, as a survivre, an above-life, or
a more-than-life, for which life may have to be sac-
rifced. Referring to this double postulate of respect
for life, and a sort of ritualized, mechanized sacrif-
cing of life, Derrida (Faith 50) writes: What are the
mechanics of this double postulation (respect of life
and sacrifciality)? I refer to it as mechanics because
it reproduces, with the regularity of a technique, the
instance of the non-living of, if you prefer, of the
dead in the living () It was the marionnette, the
dead machine yet more than living, the spectral
fantasy of the dead as the principal of life and of sur-
vival (sur-vie). This mechanical principle is appar-
ently very simple: life has absolute value only if it
is worth more than life. More generally, every soci-
ety, and every institution and every social bond, is
marked by the deaths of those who have gone before,
and the wish to carry on beyond the presently living.
The Law of Originary Sociality
Let us now discuss some of the principal references
in Derrida to the social, the socius. References to
the social are very sparing in the frst half of Der-
ridas career, but I will make a few indicative refer-
ences. In Freud and the Scene of Writing (226-227)
Derrida makes the following comment:
The subject of writing does not exist if we mean
by that some sovereign solitude of the author.
The subject of writing is a system of relations
between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, so-
ciety, the world. Within that scene, on that
stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical
subject is not to be found. In order to describe
the structure, it is not enough to recall that one
always writes for someone; and the opositions
sender-receiver, code-message, etc., remain
195 COLM J. KELLY
extremely coarse instruments. We would search
the public in vain for the frst reader: i.e., the
frst author of a work. And the sociology of lit-
erature is blind to the war and ruses perpetrated
by the author who reads and by the frst reader
who dictates, for at stake here is the origin of
the work itself. The sociality of writing as
drama requires an entirely different discipline.
Here there is a deconstruction of the classical
autonomous subject, which Derria divides between
the unconscious, the psyche, society and the world.
But there is no recourse to a classical sociology,
which, as in Durkheim, would make society itself a
capital S Subject. Instead there is the ruse of refer-
ence, decoy and diversion, which leaves none of the
dichotomies between self and world, individual and
society, in place. These ruses, this sociality, would
require an entirely different discipline (une toute
autre discipline a totally other discipline) (Freud
et la scne de lcriture 334). Here there are hints
that there is some kind of originary sociality behind
what sociology normally captures.
In the context of commenting on Lvi-Strauss in
Of Grammatology (130-131, Derrida writes:
It has long been known that the power of writ-
ing in the hands of a small number, caste, or
class, is always contemporaneous with hierarch-
ization, let us say with political difference; it is
a the same time distinction into groups, classes,
and levels of economico-politico-technical
power, and delegation of authority, and power
deferred and abandoned to an organ of capital-
ization. This phenomenon is produced fromthe
very onset of sedentarization; with the constitu-
tion of stocks at the origin of agricultural soci-
eties.
And Derrida continues:
This entire structure appears as soon as a society
begins to live as a society, that is to say from
the origin of life in general, when, at very het-
erogenous levels of organization and complex-
ity, it is possible to defer presence, that is to say
expense or consumption, and to organize pro-
duction, that is to say, reserve in general. This
is produced well before the appearance of
writing in the narrow sense, but it is true, and
one cannot ignore it, that the appearance of
certain systems of writing three or four thousand
years ago was an extraordinary leap in the his-
tory of life.
The frst comment, as Derrida acknowledges, con-
tains nothing new. But the second comment implies
an originary or arche-sociality, which precedes what
we ordinarily think of as society, and which refers
instead to the beginning of what we might call organ-
ization. The organization of relations amongst the
components of living beings, however simple, would
already contain the reference to some other, or the
trace of something different, and this would be an
originary sociality. It, however, would be a very
little, almost nothing, which would make possible
all more complex forms of social organization, while
also preventing them from solidfying into the form
of fully present, fully existing entities. Here, as
throughout, these remain hints or traces, which I will
pursue more relentlessly in a later work.
Let us now move forward rather abruptly to the
second half of Derridas career, where, as is well
known, reference to social and political matters is
more explicit. Let us focus in particular on the fol-
lowing passages, drawing on Levinas, where Derrida
makes his most explicit, clearest and longest ever
statement on the social. Derrida has been quoting
and commenting extensively on a phrase attributed
to Aristotle, which in turn has been quoted and re-
quoted repeatedly in the history of Western philo-
sophy and literature. Derrida asks, what is happening
when one bases ones discourse on a quote? The
words are those of another, and yet one must take
responsibility for them. This, argues Derrida (Politics
230-231, Politiques 258-259), points to what we
might call a general structure of experience:
[E]ven before the question of responsibility was
posed, the question of speaking in ones own
name, countersigning such and such an affrm-
ation, etc. we are caught up, one and another,
in a sort of heteronomic and dissymetrical
curvature (courbure) of social space more
precisely a curvature (courbure) of the relation
to the other: prior to all organized socius, prior
to all polteia, all determined government,
before all law.
The relation to the other is one of Derridas central
and obsessive concerns. By making social space
a near synonym for the relation to the other, the
former term can acquire a signifcance, depth and
scope, which cannot be under-estimated. But it will
not become a master-term. It will take its place in an
indefnitely long and ever-changing chain of concepts
in Derridas work, all of which bear family-resemb-
lances to each other but none of which can be directly
substituted for the others. The heteronomy and dissy-
metry of the social space, in particular, prevents the
social from taking on the quality of an actual entity,
while the reference to the relation to the other inserts
the social space in a network of references precisely
to the question of the reference to the other and the
trace of the trace, as articulated above by Gasche.
Derrida continues, with respect to this curvature of
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 5 196
social space, prior to all organized society, politics
or law:
Prior to or before it, in the sense of Kafkas
before the Law. Lets get this right: prior to any
determined law, as either natural lawor positive
law, but not prior to any lawin general, because
this heteronomical and asymmetrical curvature
of a sort of originary sociality is a law, perhaps
the very essence of the law.
After the Kafka reference, which we must pass over
for reasons of time and space, Derrida gives further
prominence to the notion of the social, using the term
originary sociality, and implying that it lies behind
or before all established institutions of law, politics
and government. This is the most powerful and direct
statement Derrida has ever made about the social.
However, as noted above, we should be careful not
to take it and erect it into a master-term, which would
be completely anti-thetical to what Derrida is attempt-
ing. He continues, slightly changing tack, in the vein
of what I call a quasi-phenomenology of experience:
What is taking place at this moment, the dis-
quieting experience we are having, is perhaps
just the silent unfolding of that strange violence
which has for so long, forever, insinuated itself
into the origin of the most innocent experiences
of friendship or of justice.
Here Derrida is referring to his previous analysis of
the strangeness of what is happening when he begins,
and bases, his address to his audience on the afore-
mentioned quote attributed to Aristotle, rather than
directly on his Derridas own words. The strange
violence, in short, would be the violence of the re-
lation to the other, or more generally the violence
that consigns everything to the trace which will re-
main of it in the future. Elaborating on this strange
violence of responsibility, Derrida continues:
We have begun to respond. We are already
caught, we are already surprised, in a certain
responsibility, and the most ineluctable of re-
sponsibilities - as if it were possible to think of
a responsibility without freedom. We are inves-
ted with an undeniable responsibility at the
moment we begin to signify something. But
where does that begin? Does it ever begin? This
responsibility assigns us our freedom without
leaving it with us, if one can put it that way, and
we see it coming from the other. It is assigned
to us by the other, from the other, even before
any hope of reappropriation permits us to as-
sume this responsibility in the space of what
could be called autonomy.
Here Derrida is again re-thinking the classical sub-
ject, by arguing counter-intuitively, that heteronomy
must come before autonomy. The other gives us the
law, and it is only from within this already instituted
heteronomy that we can begin to take responsibility
to be hetero-autonomous, we might say. Thus
again, Derridas orginary sociality leaves its mark.
We should also note that Derridas question when
does signifying begin? does it ever begin? - signals
towards questioning the absolute purity of the distinc-
tion between response, as in responsibility, and reac-
tion, as in something more ancient, more powerful
and less human than responsibility.
8
With respect
to this experience of fnding ourselves having begun
to respond, Derrida continues:
In the course of this experience, the other ap-
pears as such that is to say, the other appears
as a being whose appearance appears without
appearing, without being submitted to the phe-
nomenological lawof the originary and intuitive
given that governs all other appearances, all
other phenomenality as such. The wholly other
(le tout autre), and every other is totally other/is
every other (et tout autre est tout autre), comes
here to upset the order of phenomenology. And
good sense. That which comes before autonomy
must also exceed it, that is succeed it, survive
(survivre) it and indefnitely overrun (dborder)
it.
What comes before autonomy is heteronomy - the
relation to the other. This relation to the other also
survives autonomy; it survives the selfs relation to
the self. It survives life, we could say. Survival in
the sense Derrida has developed it means: survivre,
a living on after life; the traces left of this life, which
also come before it to hollow it out and haunt it; a
living on through inscribing a more than life, an
above (sur) life at the heart of life, something more
valuable than life at the heart of life, a sacrifcial
principle, a more than life, something to die for. This
would be survival as more than life, and less than
life, a living on that carries death folded into it and
is also a dying.
8
In relation to the above comments, I cannot resist recounting the following anecdote. I spoke to Derrida only twice, the second time at a
conference in Albany about 6 years ago. On the frst morning of the conference I was standing at the tables at the back of the seminar room,
where the coffee was, anxiously waiting to be surprised by his arrival. I turned to the table for a moment, with my back to the door. Then
I turned back, and Derrida was standing with a colleague in the doorway. It was a small conference where almost everybody knew each
other, and the look on Derridas face was unmistakeable: a momentary look of slight surprise and puzzlement at the sight of someone who
he did not know or could not place. Surprised by his unanticipated surprise, the moment was gone before it had happened.
197 COLM J. KELLY
Thus I am suggesting that Derridas brief but
powerful comments on orginary sociality can be a
basis for a re-thinking of what we mean by the social.
This new direction in the meaning of the social will
allow it at once to be extraordinarily powerful and
wide-ranging, but also to be very little, almost
nothing, that is, the minimal level of organization
and reference to the other co-terminous with life and
necessary to get life going. From there, everything
that sociology traditionally attributes to an almost
omnipotent and ubiquitous society will have to be
re-inscribed into the psychic, the sexual, the econom-
ic, the political, the ethical, etc. The social would
leave none of these domains untouched, but nor
would it govern them or the relations between them.
The social would also be overlaid with and interlaced
with the lives, deaths and societies of the other non-
human species of animals, as it would be with the
memories of the dead and the hope of survival in the
future. In short, this new model of the social would
be both more alive than previous models, and more
spectral and mournful, or more deathly.
By Way of Conclusion
The preceding comments are not intended to provide
a defnitive matrix for re-thinking the social, and this
for essential as well as contingent reasons. Rather,
they may provide clues and traces for others, and
especially myself, to follow in pursuing questions
about the social in the future: what it is or is not in
its essence or lack of an essence, and how it relates
to questions of the psyche, the economic, the politic-
al, the ethical, life-death, etc. Perhaps these and later
comments will intervene in the corpus of Derridas
work, slightly re-orienting it, sending some part of
Derrida studies, and some part of the humanities and
social sciences on a slight deviation, a diversion
which might or might not become a new direction.
References
Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: U
of Chicago Press, 1993.
Critchley, Simon Very LittleAlmost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. LAnimal que donc je suis ( suivre). LAnimal Autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida. Ed.
Marie-Louise Mallet. Paris: Galile, 1999. 251-301.
------------- The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). Tr. D. Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 2002. 369-418.
-------------- Dissemination. Tr. Barbara Johnson. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
--------------- Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of `Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone. Tr. S. Weber. Pp. 1-
78 in J. Derrida and G. Vatti.mo, eds., Religion. Stanford University Press, 1998.
---------------Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
---------------De la grammatologie. Paris: Les ditions de minuit, 1967.
------------- Freud and the Scene of Writing. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978. 196-231
------------- Freud et la scne de lcriture. Lcriture et la diffrence. Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967. 293-340.
--------------Khora. On The Name. Ed. D. Wood. Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1995. 89-127.
-------------Monolingualism of the Other 1998. Tr. P. Mensah. Stanford University Press.
------------- Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
------------- Politiques de lamiti. Paris: Galile, 1994.
------------ Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Preface by
Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
------------ Violene and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Writing and Difference. Translated
by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 79-153.
--------------- The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pasale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2001.
--------------Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Durkheim, mile. Les formes lmentaire de la vie religieuse. Paris: PUF. 1960 (1912).
--------------- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Tr. Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995.
Gasche, Rodolphe. Deconstruction as Criticism. Glyph, 6 1979. 177215.
--------------- The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Refection. Cambridge and London: Harvard U.P., 1986.
Johnson, Christopher System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge U.P. 1993.
Kelly, Colm. If I say: The child has eaten enough: Durkheims Pedagogy as Promise. Current Perspectives in Social
Theory 11 1992. 251-274.
------------- Diversions and Homecomings: Cultural Nationalismand the recent drama of Brian Friel. Studies: A Quarterly
Irish Review 76 1987 452462.
Nancy, Jean-Luc The Inoperative Community. Ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota Press. 1991.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 5 198
About the Author
Dr. Colm J. Kelly
Colm Kelly studied at Trinity College Dublin, and York University, Toronto. He is currently associate professor
of sociology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. his main interests are in certain strands of contem-
porary continental philosophy, especially Levinas, Nancy, and more centrally, Derrida. Working from this tra-
dition he attempts to re-think some of the major categories of social theory, especially the concept of the social
itself. He has published on topics in social theory, and cultural and literary theory.
199 COLM J. KELLY
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