What (Bio)deconstruction Is

Not

Francesco Vitale
Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy

AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF B I O D E C O N S T R U C T I O N (V I T A L E 2018), I WAS A

little surprised to see my work inscribed in the horizon of the so-called “New
Materialism.” At the time, I confess, my knowledge of this “new” horizon came
down to what I heard at the conference “New Materialisms and Economies of
Excess,” held in 2016 in Atlanta, where I presented a paper titled “Living
Matter: Teleology between Philosophy and the Life Sciences.” Even recogniz-
ing a familiar atmosphere in the attention paid to scientific discourses, I was
having trouble articulating it in the perspective of deconstruction (or of what
I think deconstruction implies): first, and more generally, because the preten-
tion of a “new -ism” always presupposes a linear, progressive conception of
history that Derrida has questioned from the beginning (see Derrida 1990). As
is well known, he contests not only the teleological presuppositions in Hus-
serl’s discourse on “historicity,” but also the notion of historical “rupture” or

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2019, pp. 1–12. ISSN 1532-687X.
© 2019 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

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2  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

“threshold” in Foucault and the one of “epoch” in Heidegger. Overall, because

a purpose of a materialism, in the context of a deconstructive approach,
would have to require, first of all, a deconstruction of the tradition in which
the signifier “matter” is articulate, to free it―if it is possible―from its
solidarity in the oppositional structure of metaphysics, as Derrida himself
says very clearly in Positions:

If I have not very often used the word “matter,” it is not, as you know, because
of some idealist or spiritualist kind of reservation. It is that in the logic of the
phase of overturning this concept has been too often reinvested with “logo-
centric” values, values associated with those of thing, reality, presence in
general, sensible presence, for example, substantial plenitude, content, refer-
ent, etc. Realism or sensualism—“empiricism”—are modifications of logocen-
trism. (I have often insisted on the fact that “writing” or the “text” are not
reducible either to the sensible or visible presence of the graphic or the “lit-
eral.”) In short, the signifier “matter” appears to me problematical only at the
moment when its reinscription cannot avoid the making of it a new funda-
mental principle which, by means of theoretical regression, would be recon-
stituted into a “transcendental signified.” It is not only idealism in the narrow
sense that falls back upon the transcendental signified. It can always come to
reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent
according to the c1assical logic implied by the value of referent, or it becomes
an “objective reality” absolutely “anterior” to any work of the mark, the seman-
tic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in
general from the outside. (Derrida 1981, 64–65)

Most recently, having to write an essay for a Parallax issue devoted to the
“body,” I tried to give more details about my perplexities concerning such
approaches in the horizon of the “New Materialism” (Vitale 2019). Reading
some work, in particular, by Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, I appreciated, once
again, many interesting suggestions concerning possible and necessary de-
constructive readings of the scientific discourse, but, at the same time, I also
recognized the attempt, more or less explicit, or at the least the risk, to use
deconstruction to build a new ontology, a new metaphysics of nature.
 Francesco Vitale  3

Obviously, nothing forbids it, but, I think that such attempts would have at
least to justify that use by confronting it with what Derrida says about or
against an ontological reading of his work. In the end, at least for the moment,
I subscribe to what Geoffrey Bennington, interviewed by Alberto Moreiras,
says about this atmosphere:

Now, my feeling is that today, when of course ontology is all the rage again—
the word, and the concept, and the project of ontology are back in many forms
and on many sides, as though there were something very desirable about
ontology, as though it were an object of philosophical desire to formulate
an ontology, as though the very word “ontology” were irresistibly seduc-
tive—my feeling is that those attempts have not registered the force of
Derrida’s arguments, nor thereby of Heidegger’s, if we accept that Derrida
is radicalizing Heidegger in this respect. So these new ontologies, new
realisms, object-oriented, whatever they want to call it, speculative real-
isms, I don’t think those movements of thought have registered the force of
Derrida’s account of the trace structure, différance, dissemination, decon-
struction. (Moreiras 2017, 41)

However, what astonished me after the publication of Biodeconstruction, is

the conclusion of the generous and profound review of it by Hans-Jörg Rhei-
nberger, appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Derrida uses Jacob’s text to highlight the movement of différance as an onto-

logical movement, as it were, a movement that he sees at work in the inner-
most core of the living and that he follows from there through the structure of
the psychic apparatus as developed in Freud’s reflections in Beyond the Plea-
sure Principle, to the act of literary writing, including his own. Seen through
Vitale’s lens, Derrida conceives of his own work, on the one hand, as a thor-
ough deconstruction of the occidental metaphysics of presence with its clas-
sical oppositions—presence-absence, life-death, identity-contradiction, to
name but a few—and as an all-encompassing critique, not from without, but
from within. On the other hand, Vitale understands Derrida’s work not as an
epistemology, but rather as something like a metaphysics of evolution
4  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

extending from the elementary features of the most rudimentary forms of the
living right through the human psyche to the cultural achievements of human-
kind, be it the sciences, the arts, economics, politics, you name it. (Rheinberger
2018)

In fact, in Biodeconstruction I insist on the fact that for Derrida the deconstructive
notion of text imposes itself in the reading of Jacob’s The Logic of Life as a heuristic
model and not as an ontological structure of the living, that is, because of its
capability to account for essential aspects of living phenomena highlighted by
Jacob himself, better than the writing model, imported from cybernetics and
adopted by Jacob. In the seminar La vie la mort, Derrida is very explicit:

Why, then, should we speak of text? Well, I believe that this necessity obviously
has nothing absolute about it, nothing that is not bound and motivated by a
certain historico-theoretical situation and to the politico-scientific strategy
related to this situation. By referring the living to the structure of a text, we
evidently make conceptual progress in bio-genetics, a progress in knowledge,
in the knowledge of the living, if you like, it being understood that this progress
of knowledge is at the same time a transformation of the status of knowledge
that, as I said last week, has no longer to do with some meta-textual real but
with the text and thus consists in writing text on text. It is not the recourse to
the textual “model” that has made progress possible, but just as much the
opposite: a certain transformation of knowledge imposed what we call the model
of the text. Conversely, what we call model allows for new hypotheses, new
constructions, and is in turn determined by that of which it is the model: we
understand otherwise a text, what a text is, when the function called model is
at work. This is when, whatever the inadequation of the concept and the word
“model,” we become aware of the necessity of this theoretico-political strategy
I was speaking about a moment ago . . . .There is not the living and the text. Not
only there are typical structures of the living and typical structures of text but,
even if one is not content with the empiricist positing of this multiplicity, there
are several ways of defining the textuality and structure of the living. It is
obvious that if we determine textuality this time on the basis of a model of text
(for example, the phonetico-logocentric text, oriented by a present meaning,
 Francesco Vitale  5

etc., etc.), we are immediately involved in a system of interpretation of the

living that is different, or even, opposite to the one that would subordinate this
type of text to another (non-phonocentric, non-teleological, etc., etc.). The
question of the model is then displaced and becomes: which type of text will
serve as model for the science of general textuality. Is there a model text for
general textuality? (Derrida 1975-76, 6.6; emphasis mine)1

In particular, the deconstructive text allows us to recognize the necessary

opening of the genetic program to significant interactions, first with the
cellular environment, and also with the ecological one, as attested today in the
field of epigenetics and until now strictly refused by the deterministic “DNA
dogma” that Jacob contributed to impose in the field of genetic biology.2 Then,
the deconstructive notion of text is not the ontological structure of the living
but a conceptual instrument to interpret living phenomena, their genesis and
structure, and it imposes itself because of the generality of “différance” that
conditions the reference to the otherness in general, and consequently the
way in which we constitute phenomena, or phenomena appear for us:

It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if

each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of pres-
ence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the
mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its
relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called
the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the
present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not,
not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the
present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval
that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and
of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought
on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being,
and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself
dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space
of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitu-
tion of the present, as an “originary” and irreducibly nonsimple (and therefore,
6  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

stricto sensu nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and

protentions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological
and transcendental language that soon will reveal itself to be inadequate), that
I propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance. (Derrida 1982, 13)

Derrida underlines “difference,” “temporization,” and “strictu sensu”; other

instances of emphasis are mine, and they serve to highlight the phenomeno-
logical horizon in which Derrida inscribes the economy of différance, just to
recall that “a thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental
phenomenology than be reduced to it” (Derrida 1976, 62). In Biodeconstruc-
tion, I try to trace the path that leads Derrida to critically revise the phenom-
enological language, pursuing the recognized necessity of its transcendental
approach until the point it reveals its inadequacy, that is, until the point in
which intentional consciousness has to be considered not as the foundation
of the constitution of all phenomena but as an emergence of the natural
genesis of the psychic apparatus, whose conditions of constitution Derrida de-
scribe throughout “archi-writing.” It is at this level—common to human beings
and animals—that we have to recognize the conditions of our relationship to
otherness in general, that is, the conditions of the constitution of what appears
“on the scene of presence.” On this path, Derrida abandons Husserl and phenom-
enology in favor of Freud and in particular of its “metapsychology.”3
Here, it is necessary to make clear that, on this path, différance can’t be
considered as an ontological or metaphysical principle, precisely because it is
the irreducible condition that allows us to think the distinction between
beings (onta) and the Being of beings, between the essence and the existence,
and also between the transcendental and the empirical, improving, at the
same time, the impossibility of their respective full separation and determi-
nation (ruining, by the way, also the phenomenological pretention to a full
transcendental foundation):

And yet, are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determina-
tion of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought
within the horizon of the question of being, still intrametaphisical effects of
différance? The unfolding of différance is perhaps not solely the truth of Being,
 Francesco Vitale  7

or of epochality of Being. Perhaps we must attempt to think this unheard-of

thought, this silent tracing: that the history of Being, whose thought engages
the Greco-Western logos such as it is produced via the ontological difference,
is but an epoch of the diapherein. Henceforth one could no longer even call this
an “epoch,” the concept of epochality belonging to what is within history as the
history of Being. Since Being has never had a “meaning,” has never be thought
or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in beings, then différance, in a
certain and very strange way, (is) “older” than the ontological difference or
than the truth of Being. When it has this age, it can be called the play of the
trace. The play of a trace which no longer belongs to the horizon of Being, but
whose play transports and encloses the meaning of Being: the play of the trace,
or the différance, which has no meaning and is not. (Derrida 1982, 22)

Différance is older than the ontico-ontological difference that opens the

history of metaphysics because with this neologism, Derrida refers not to a
supposed historical event but to the irreducible conditions of possibility of
our relationship with the otherness in general and consequently of the con-
stitution of what, in phenomenological terms that will have to be critically
revised, we call phenomena. Ultimately, différance, as Derrida explicitly says
in the essay Differance, as already pointed out by Rodolphe Gasché, is not an
entity, something present somewhere (idealiter or realiter), but an economic
notion that allows us to account for the structural complexity of these
conditions: It allows us to think of difference as distinction/opposition
and difference as deferral in their structural and irreducible correlation,
which necessarily forbids the full determination of the terms involved and
constituted in this play, without repressing or removing it, that is, repress-
ing and removing what makes it possible, as it happens with the ontico-
ontological difference that opens the history of metaphysics:

More strikingly, différance knots together the different meanings of the word
difference with the entirely different significations of the verb to defer (différer),
from whose participle the noun différance was derived; yet there is no etymo-
logical justification for doing so. Only by means of quasicatachrestic violence
can the neologism différance be made to refer to the semantic field of the word
8  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

difference. The sort of linguistic abuse at the stake here is required by

the necessity of good economic “formalization,” which the infrastructure
différance is intended to achieve. The lack of harmony between such different
things as deferment and difference, instead of being a misfortune for the
intended coherence, is precisely what the term différance serves to account
for. (Gasché 1986, 195)

In sum, différance, accounting for the irreducible conditions of the reference to

otherness, shows what allowed the thought of the ontico-onological difference
and the opening of metaphysics, but, at the same time, which makes impossible
the fulfillment of its establishment, ruining even the legitimacy of such an under-
taking. Then, if ontology and metaphysics are possible only by repressing or
removing what deconstruction wants to account for, it is impossible to attribute
to it a metaphysical aspiration without eluding its undertaking. Obviously, Der-
rida was fully aware that it is impossible to avoid such kind of elusion, precisely
because of what différance accounts for, that is, because of the possibility to isolate
it from the play in which it is involved and to hypostatize it as a principle through-
out the privilege that the metaphysical conception of the language attributes to
the name. He can’t avoid exposing himself to such a risk each time he uses the
“word” différance without recalling each time its economic functioning, as, in
some way, he recognizes at the end of the essay Différance:

For us, différance remains a metaphysical name, and all the names that it
receives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical. And this is particu-
larly the case when these names state the determination of différance as the
difference between presence and the present (Anwesen/Anwesend), and above
all, and is already the case when they state the determination of différance as
the difference of Being and beings.
“Older” than Being itself, such a différance has no name in our lan-
guage. But we “already know” that if it is unnameable, it is not provisionally
so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or
because we would have to seek it in another language, outside the finite
system of our own. It is rather because there is no name for it at all, not even
the name of essence or of Being, not even that of “différance,” which is not
 Francesco Vitale  9

a name, which is not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself
in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.
“There is no name for it”: a proposition to be read in its platitude. This un-
nameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for
example. This unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the
relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of
substitution of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself
enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed, just as a false entry or a false exit is still part of
the game, a function of the system. (Derrida 1982, 26)

Saying that différance describes the irreducible conditions of the refer-

ence to otherness in general does not mean claiming that the existence of
otherness depends on these conditions, as Quentin Meillassoux mali-
ciously pretends in After Finitude, reducing all the post-Kantian tradition
to the simplistic definition of “correlationism” (Meillassoux 2008). It
means that the way in which we refer—we experience, understand and knowl-
edge—to otherness, in general and in particular, depends on our physical
constitution as living beings, and in particular on the constitution of our
psychic apparatus, that works as a system of interpretation, as recognized by
scientists—and Meillassoux grants to sciences an ultimate authority to sus-
tain his arguments4—like, for instance, Jean Pierre Changeux and Eric R.
Kandel, to whom the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2000 for his research on the
neural structure of memory in human beings and animals. Changeux writes:
In other words, our interpretation of the external world and our responses
to it depend on the internal organization of this “machine.” The very simple
nervous system of a mollusc does not analyze signals from the environ-
ment as profoundly as the nervous system of a monkey or a man, nor does
it produce such a wide range of responses. The critical mechanisms lie in
the central nervous system, where information is transmitted through a
code, analyzed and then processed. (Changeux 1997, 97)

In addition, Kandel writes:

With modern imaging and cell-biological studies of brain, we are now
beginning to understand aspects of both our public actions and our private
10  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

thoughts: we are beginning to understand how we perceive, act, feel, learn,

and remember. And the insights we so far have obtained are truly remark-
able! For example, these studies show that the brain does not simply
perceive the external world by replicating it, like a three-dimensional
photograph. Rather, the brain reconstructs reality only after first analyzing
it into component parts. In scanning a visual scene, for example, the brain
analyzes the form of objects separately from their movement, and both
separately from the color of the objects, all before reconstituting the full
image again, according to the brain’s own rules. Thus, the belief that our
perceptions are precise and direct is an illusion. We re-create in our brain
the external world in which we live. (Kandel 2005, 380)

Différance works precisely in this perspective: it allows us to describe the

conditions of the interpretation’s system in terms of “archi-writing,” and its elab-
orations in terms of “general textuality.” That’s all, as Derrida himself says:

I wanted to recall that the concept of text I propose is limited neither to the
graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic,
representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere. What I call “text” implies
all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio–institutional, in
short: all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that “there is
nothing outside the text.” That does not mean that all referents are suspended,
denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naive enough
to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent,
allrealityhasthestructureofadifferentialtrace,andthatonecannotrefertothis“real”
except in an interpretive experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it
except in a movement of differential referring. That’s all. (Derrida 1988, 148).

NOTES

1. I treat this essential point extensively in Vitale 2018, 103–126.

2. See Vitale 2018, 70–71, 205–206.
3. See Vitale 2018, 7–27.
 Francesco Vitale  11

4. From this point of view, I recall that many physicists today consider very dubious the notion of
“time,” to which Meillassoux attributes a decisive role in his book. Many of them claim that
“time” does not exist as a physical entity, that it is only the effect of our perception of changes,
ultimately, depending on our relationship with the world. See, for instance, Rovelli 2018.

REFERENCES

Changeux, Jean Pierre. 1997. The Neuronal Man. The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1975-76. La vie la mort, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, DRR 173.
. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
. 1981. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
. 1982. “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago
University Press 1982.
. 1988. Limited Inc., trans. S. Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
. 1990. “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologism, Newisms, Postisms, and Other
Small Seismisms.” In The States of ‘Theory.’ Art and Critical Discourse, ed. D. Carroll, 63–
94. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror. Jacques Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kandel, Eric R. 2005. Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind, London: American
Psychiatric Publishing.
Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray
Brassier, London: Continuum.
Moreiras, Alberto. 2017. “On Scatter, the Trace Structure and the Opening of the Politics: An
Interview with Geoffrey Bennington.” Diacritics 45:2.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2018. “Review of F. Vitale, Biodeconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the
Life Sciences.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 7:16.
Rovelli, Carlo. 2018. The Order of Time, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. London: Penguin.
Vitale, Francesco. 2018. Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro
Senatore. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
. 2019. “Microphysics of Sex. Sexual Differences between Biology and Deconstruction.”
Parallax 25:1.

X X X
FRANCESCO VITALE is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of
Salerno (Italy). His academic interests have focused on Derrida’s work since
his PhD dissertation in philosophy on Derrida’s relation to Hegel (University
12  What (Bio)deconstruction Is Not

Federico II of Napoli, Italy). Francesco Vitale is author of many essays on

Derrida, published in Italian, English, French, and Japanese. His main
publications devoted to Jacques Derrida are Biodeconstruction: Jacques
Derrida and Life Sciences (SUNY University Press, 2018) and The Last Fortress
of Metaphysics: Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of Architecture (SUNY
University Press, 2018).